Violence had always been an interesting abstraction for him: something that happened to other people; something that took place somewhere else; something for clinical studies; something that he would write academic papers about; and primarily what he talked about in courtrooms and classrooms.
“I’m sorry, Counselor, but there is no scientific way to predict future dangerousness. I can only tell you what the defendant presents psychiatrically at this moment. How he will respond to treatment and medication or confinement is unknown.”
This was Jeremy Hogan’s standard witness stand response, an answer to a question that was invariably asked in the times he’d been called upon to testify in a court of law as an expert. He could picture dozens-no, hundreds-of defendants seated at benches, watching him carefully as he rendered his opinions about what their mental state was when they did what they did that brought them to that courtroom. He remembered seeing: Anger. Rage. Deep-rooted resentment. Or, sometimes: Sadness. Shame. Despair. And the occasional I’m not here. I will never be here. I will always be somewhere else. You cannot touch me because I will always live in some place within me that is locked away from you and only I have the key.
And although he knew that maybe the person seated across from him wouldn’t even notice him droning away under cross-examination, he also knew that maybe the person seated across from him would hate him forever with a slowly building homicidal fury.
Maybe was a word he was intimate with.
He had a less formal delivery that he employed in the classroom with medical students delving into forensic psychiatry: “Look, boys and girls-we can believe that all the relevant factors exist that will keep this patient or that patient on a path of violence. Or, conversely, a path where he or she responds rapidly to what we can offer-medication, therapy-and we wonderfully defuse all those violent, dangerous impulses. But we are not equipped with a crystal ball that allows us to see the future. We make, at best, an educated guess. What works for one subject might not work for another. In forensics there is always an element of uncertainty. We may know, but we just don’t know. But never say that to a family member, a cop, or a prosecutor, and never under oath in a courtroom to a judge and jury, even though that’s the only thing-and I really mean the only thing-those folks want to learn.”
The students hated that reality.
At first, they all wanted to be in the business of psychiatric fortune-telling-a detail he often jokingly insulted them with. It was only after time spent on a few high-security wards listening to widely varying degrees of paranoia and wildly unmasked impulses that they slowly came to understand his classroom point.
Of course, you arrogant fool, you taught them about limitations but never believed you had any yourself. Jeremy Hogan wanted to laugh out loud. He liked to inwardly mock himself, to taunt and tease the younger self that lived in his memory.
You were right a bunch. You were wrong a bunch. So it goes.
He pulled out of the driveway, leaving the nursing home behind in the rearview mirror. Jeremy was very cautious driving. A patient left, right, left look as he merged onto the street. He stuck tenaciously to the speed limit. He was devoted to using his lane change blinker. He braked well in advance of stop signs and never ran a yellow light, much less a red one. His sleek, big black BMW would easily have topped 135 mph-but he rarely asked the car to do anything except meander along at a boring and leisurely pace. He sometimes wondered if the car was secretly angry with him, or frustrated deep in its automotive soul. Consequently he infrequently used the car, which still, after ten years, had a new-car sheen and extremely low mileage.
Usually he employed an old battered truck he kept beside the ramshackle barn at his farmhouse for his occasional forays out for the few groceries he needed. He drove the truck in the same elderly-gentleman manner, but because it was haphazardly dented, its red paint was faded, it rattled and creaked, and one window would go neither up nor down, this style seemed more appropriate to it. The BMW is like I once was, he thought, and the truck is like I am now.
It took him an hour to get back to his farmhouse deep in the New Jersey countryside. That New Jersey even had countryside came as astonishing news to some folks, who imagined it as a paved parking lot and twenty-hour-busy industrial park adjacent to New York City. But much of the state was less developed, acres of rolling, deer-infested green space that sported some of the finest corn and tomato crops in the world. His own place was only twenty shady minutes outside of Princeton and its famous university, set back on twelve acres that abutted miles of conservation land that a century earlier had been part of a large, working farm.
He had purchased it more than thirty years ago, when he was still teaching an hour away in Philadelphia and his wife the artist could sit on the flagstone back patio with her watercolors and fill their home and the collections of wealthy folks with gentle landscapes. Back then the house had been quiet, a respite from his work. Now it wasn’t a sensible house for an old man: too many things frequently breaking down; too narrow and steep a stairway; too many overgrown lawns and runaway gardens that constantly needed tending; old appliances and bath fixtures that barely worked; a tired heating system that was far too cold in the winter and far too hot in the summer. He’d routinely fought off the developers who wanted to buy it, tear it down, and build a half-dozen McMansions on the acreage.
But it had been a place that he’d loved once, that his wife had loved as well, where he’d spread her ashes, and the mere notion that there just might-or might not-be a psychotic killer stalking him didn’t seem like a good enough reason to leave the place, even if he couldn’t get up the stairs without his knees delivering piercing arthritic pain.
Get a cane, he told himself.
Get a gun.
He pulled into the long gravel drive that led to the front door. He sighed. Maybe this is the day I die.
Jeremy stopped and wondered how many times he had driven up to his home. It’s a perfectly reasonable place to make a last stand, he thought.
He looked around for some telltale sign of a killer’s presence-an inspection he knew was completely ludicrous. A real killer wouldn’t leave his car parked out front, adorned with a “Murder 1” license plate. He would be waiting in a shadow, concealed, knife in hand, ready to spring. Or hidden behind some wall, drawing down on him with a high-powered rifle, placing the sight squarely on his head, finger caressing a trigger.
He wondered whether he would hear the bang! before dying. A soldier would know the answer to that question, he believed, but he knew he wasn’t much of a soldier.
Jeremy Hogan breathed in deeply, and extricated himself from behind the wheel. He stood by the car, waiting. Maybe this is it, he thought.
Maybe not.
He knew he was caught up in something. Periphery or center? Start or end? He just didn’t know. He was ashamed of his frailty: What were you thinking, going to a nursing home? What good would that do you? Did you think that by accepting how old and weak you’ve become it would hide you? “Please, Mister Killer, don’t shoot me or stab me or whatever you plan to do to me because I’m too old and will probably kick the bucket any day now anyway, so no need to trouble yourself with actually killing me.” He laughed out loud at his absurdity. There’s a strong argument to make to a murderer. And anyway, what is so great about life that you need to keep living it?