“You met Libertine.” I told McKenzie the whole story.
“I knew there was something off from the start.”
“But you kept seeing her.”
“It’s a cliché, I know, but she was like a drug. I didn’t come down until she came to work in my office. I saw the way she treated people she didn’t need anything from.” He raised his hand to signal the impatient guard standing outside that he needed five more minutes. “She never asked about the second cop, if he was going to make it. I think she feels she’s getting away with everything. And I think she’s enjoying it.”
“That’s why she’s so dangerous. I just found the silver lining to my incarceration. Billie can’t get to me in here.”
“I’ve got an investigator continuing the Dogos search. And we’re hoping the injured cop will be able to give a statement soon.”
I asked him to contact the Boston detective, to tell him about the e-mails I had read in which Billie as Libertine had confessed to killing Susan Rorke.
I asked him the question that had occurred to me before: “Are e-mails admissible as evidence?”
“If you can verify who sent them.” McKenzie apologized for having to leave me here. He said he could do more for me outside.
No way I could argue with that. I could do nothing.
• • •
I could do nothing, that is, except conjure the single act that might exonerate me.
After McKenzie left, I was told I had to wait in my cell until there were enough “bodies”—that’s what they called us — to bring upstairs. There, we were handcuffed behind our backs to another prisoner and marched down the stairs to street level, where a bus to Rikers Island was idling. It was awkward to sit while shackled to someone else, and the bus’s shocks were all but gone; since we were traveling on some of the city’s worst surface roads, the ride was painful. I had only ever entered Rikers as a grad student, there to get the required credit hours for clinical training. I had the absurd impulse to pull rank, immediately squelched by the woman I was shackled to, who didn’t stop coughing. Shalonda, the transsexual I was fond of, had told me that the incidence of tuberculosis at Rikers is three times higher than in the city, and mostly drug-resistant.
We women were separated from the men and led to the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s prison. I was freed from my partner, taken to a small ward with only eight doors, and put in a cell. I didn’t know where the rest of the women were taken.
My cell had a platform with a mattress, a metal sink, an exposed toilet, and a desk of sorts, attached to a wall. I sat on the bed on full alert. All those sessions I had conducted with inmates — was the guy who couldn’t stop telling jokes still here? The guy who had exposed himself in the Metropolitan Museum? I remembered Shalonda’s last words to me: “It’s a good feeling to surprise yourself — you’ll see.”
I lay down, folding my arms behind my head since no pillow was provided. Nothing was on the filthy, long-ago-whitewashed cinder-block walls to snag my attention. No graffiti. I willed myself to envision a bedroom that was the opposite of where I was. Whose bedroom came to mind? Billie’s, the one at her grandmother’s estate. Not a bedroom so much as a wing, a gallery, I recalled. Those white-carpeted floors, the paintings displayed, blue-chip art by Motherwell and de Kooning. And in the adjoining room, the electrifying black canvas with the red shape like the letter H filled with blood. This last by Loewi. Pat’s grandfather.
My breathing changed.
I was back in Pat’s studio, her showing me the naked photos of herself, and that dog of hers, the rottweiler, throwing herself against the window. She had not been found when Pat’s body was discovered.
How had I missed this? Billie had brought a rottweiler to For Pitties’ Sake. When she and I drove up there, she had asked Alfredo how the dog she’d brought in was doing. I remembered what Billie had said to him: “I worried about that one.”
I asked a guard if I could make a phone call.
• • •
It took McKenzie no time to find out that the rottweiler was microchipped. The information the vet scanned showed Pat Loewi as the dog’s owner. Alfredo said that Billie had told him the owner had died, so he had not scanned the chip. He said he would be willing to testify that Billie brought the rottweiler in. He said it freaked him out that the dog he had been caring for was evidence in a murder investigation.
McKenzie updated Amabile’s detective cousin, Bienvenido, at the Suffolk County PD, since Pat’s case was in his jurisdiction.
Steven had already picked up my computer and turned it over to the police, whose forensic computer expert traced Libertine’s IP address to Billie.
Once the police suspected Billie, they impounded her car, and even though she’d had it detailed since that trip, they found fur that matched the Dogos.
Billie was taken into custody at her grandmother’s house. I like to think that she was put in the cell I had vacated. Carol Anders, the criminal attorney Steven and McKenzie had retained for me, got the charges against me dropped once Billie was picked up. She was charged with the murder of a police officer and the attempted murder of a second, and the murder of Pat Loewi. After another couple of days the Boston police found the hammer that had killed Susan Rorke. Billie had hidden it in the same closet at her grandmother’s house where she had kept her toys. The Tiramisu lipstick found in Billie’s glove compartment had been used by Samantha Couper — DNA proved it. The New York police turned this evidence over to the Toronto police, and the murder of Samantha Couper was added to the list of charges. Which left Bennett. Or Jimmy Gordon. The DA told me that in order to charge Billie with this murder, Jimmy’s body would need to be exhumed. I thought of what that would do to his mother. New York had eliminated the death penalty in 2007; Billie would not be getting out of prison even without a conviction for his murder.
I knew some people looked for — believed in — closure. How I loathed that false notion, that one could tie up the loose ends of mystery and grief. Did that mean one stopped being haunted day and night? Did it mean one could get on with one’s life, such as it was? I thought it was a cruel term, a grail that could never be found. But maybe some people did find it. Or convinced themselves that they did.
Whatever works.
31
As someone who had been deeply conned by not one person, but two, and not just conned, but exposed to a multiple murderer, I found myself examining both my suitability for the work I had chosen and the definition of the people I had been studying. Neither the term sociopath nor psychopath appears in the DSM-5. The closest term to sociopath is antisocial personality disorder. The criteria for diagnosis include impairments in self-esteem, self-direction, empathy, intimacy, plus the use of manipulation and deceit, and the presence of hostility, callousness, irresponsibility, impulsivity, and a lack of concern for one’s limitations: risk-taking.
• • •
The most widely used test for psychopathy is the PCL — R—Psychopathy Checklist — Revised — also known as Hare’s Checklist. The Canadian psychologist Robert Hare has pointed out that sociologists are more likely to focus on environmental or socially modifiable facets, whereas psychologists and psychiatrists include the genetic, cognitive, and emotional factors when making a diagnosis.
I did use Billie as the case study for the final chapter of my thesis. I ended with the question Should these people be forgiven?