the person from a traumatic or intolerable memory, psychopaths don’t need it. They don’t feel guilt and fear like normal people.”
Hannah snorted. “It’s all circular, isn’t it? Label him a psychopath for what he did, then explain what he did by calling him a psychopath. Doesn’t help us understand, does it?”
“No. And I don’t think we can really understand psychopaths. They are different from us, and no amount of trying to step into their shoes can help us understand. And God knows, I’ve tried.”
“Amnesia can have different causes, though,” Sharon said, stepping into the room with her own tea. “Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing.”
He smiled up at her. “The munchkins asleep?”
“Tony’s reading in bed.”
Green glanced at his watch. Eight o’clock. It amazed him how quickly time flew by. The hours, the years … now he had a seven-year-old son who could read his own bedtime stories. How long before he was borrowing the car keys? Heading off into his own life?
Hannah was oblivious to the private detour of Green’s thoughts. She swivelled around to look at Sharon. “Like what? I know about brain damage, tumours, concussions. But none of those happened to Rosten.”
“No, but drugs and alcohol can also make you blank out. Give even a normal person enough of either, and their brain wouldn’t register the memories.”
Green weighed the idea carefully. He had met numerous men who had killed in a drunken rage, but all of them had been serious alcoholics with a long history of assaults. In all cases, they had left a trail of clues that even a rookie detective could follow. One had been found passed out in the adjacent bedroom with the kitchen knife still in his hand. Drunk or drug-addled killers didn’t think clearly enough to cover their tracks as Rosten had.
“Was he drunk, Dad?”
He paused, trying to recall the investigation. In her initial statement, Rosten’s wife had said that when he arrived home shortly after 9 p.m., she detected a faint smell of alcohol, but he was not staggering or slurring his speech. However, although she had been his strongest ally in the beginning, the defence had not called her as a witness. Green recalled the Crown crowing about her change of heart as the evidence mounted. By the time the defence began its rebuttal, she was no longer sure of his state of mind on the evening in question, nor indeed what time he had come home, because she had fallen asleep. Possibly he’d been as late as midnight. He had seemed tired, she said. Distracted and preoccupied. His eyes had been red-rimmed and he had stammered slightly. He had brushed aside her concern by saying he’d dropped by the university after the cottage to pick up some lab reports.
No one had seen him there, however.
He could have been drunk, Green acknowledged. Drunk enough to lose his inhibitions, drunk enough to make unwise advances toward a pretty co-ed, maybe even drunk enough to get angry when she refused him. But drunk enough to black out the entire episode from his memory?
“I don’t think so,” he replied. “This killer was more careful and controlled than that.”
Hannah swung on Sharon. “Is there a type of amnesia that could do that? Block out the entire thing but leave him in control? What about that multiple personality stuff? That’s not just in the movies, is it?”
Sharon shook her head. “But it’s extremely rare. The mind is capable of the most astonishing things. The more I see, the less I know for sure. Anything is possible, but usually this kind of dissociative amnesia — when the mind blocks out a traumatic memory — occurs in people with a history of chronic, severe abuse, so the forgetting becomes a mental escape hatch for them. It becomes their way of coping with the intolerable. Did James Rosten have a history of childhood trauma?”
Green dredged his memory again. In truth, unlike Green, the OPP and the Crown had not been interested in the man’s psyche. They had constructed their case on circumstantial evidence: the cut on his head, the dirt on his knees and in the treads of the car tires, Jackie’s hair in his car, the sighting of Rosten and Jackie together and later of his car near the scene, the exam note in Jackie’s backpack, Rosten’s flimsy alibi and his flirtatious behaviour with other students.
Now Green recalled that only one brother had come forward to offer character evidence for the defence. He had testified to Rosten’s intelligence, drive, and rough, blue-collar roots. As the son of a Sudbury miner with no patience for book learning, he had delivered newspapers, mowed lawns, and shovelled laneways all through school to earn the money to continue his studies. He was the first in the family to go to university, the only one to earn a graduate degree.
The Crown had had only two questions for the man during their cross-examination. “Would you say that your brother’s accomplishments and position were important to him?”
To which the unwitting man replied, “No question.”
“Important enough to fight for?”
“He fought for them every day he lived in Sudbury.”
The Crown had quietly taken her seat. Green recalled thinking that the brother had clearly not inherited the same brains.
The brother’s testimony provided no hint of childhood abuse or trauma. On the contrary, he had described a capable and focused young man who’d carved his own path. But Green knew that beneath the veil of normalcy, a family could hide horrendous secrets. Children learned to keep them private from prying eyes and to act normal as if their life depended on it. Often it did. Perhaps James’s father had expressed his contempt not just with belittling words but with his fists.
“Can a childhood of abuse be hidden behind a façade of competence?” he asked Sharon now.
“Absolutely. Sometimes even super competence. But dig deep enough, there are scars. Often anger issues. Lack of trust, trouble with intimacy.”
“Pent-up rage?”
She studied him briefly, as if recognizing the implication. “That too. But amnesia suggests more than that. Usually people who dissociate are mentally fragile. They don’t learn to handle stress, because they escape it. So they usually have pretty serious chronic psychiatric problems, like anxiety and depression. Every time there is a new stress, they are prone to crumble. Maybe even dissociate again.”
If — if — this theory were true, Green thought, the stress of a new job and a new family could have been the trigger, and the killing of Jackie Carmichael the unconscious acting out of his buried childhood rage. Farfetched, barely credible, but, as Sharon said, the human mind was an astonishing thing.
And now this loose cannon was on the loose again. Without treatment and facing perhaps the worst stresses of his life.
Chapter Six
Ignoring the laminated menu in front of him, Archie Goodfellow laced his fingers over his girth and smiled to catch the waitress’s eye. She grabbed a pot of coffee before hustling over. “Meatloaf and mashed, hon?”
He chuckled. It was the Tuesday lunch special at the diner, and in all the years he’d been coming here, he’d never missed that special. “You got it, Nancy. With extra gravy on the mashed.”
She laughed as she retrieved the menu. “No one joining you today?”
Archie did half his ministering over lunch at the diner, but today he pointed to his laptop. “Gotta catch up on my paperwork.”
Once she’d left, he moved aside his motorcycle helmet, set his laptop on the table and booted it up. It was true that there were fifty-two unopened emails in his inbox but he scrolled past all of them. Paperwork, even the electronic kind, was not his strong suit, and most people knew him well enough to send three or four reminders if they actually wanted a reply.
This time, however, he focused on a single email that had been sent to him only once. It was a forwarded message from Rosten’s new parole officer, accompanied by one sentence of explanation. Think