Crime Scene

Chapter 29

The first thing I did when I got home was order Sandek a plastic sheriff’s badge and pistol. To qualify for free shipping, I also bought him a child’s ten-gallon hat and a cookbook with a hundred and one recipes for meatloaf.

It was too late to start reading the Psych Department’s internal report. Sunday I got called out on another homeless man, dead in an alley behind a machine shop on 12th Street in Oakland. This one was ID’d as “Big John” by his fellow street people. Five-three and ninety-nine malnourished pounds. By day’s end, I’d failed to make any headway on next of kin, and I left the office feeling thrashed but eager.

I sat on my couch, opened the report; turned the last page at one a.m.

My conclusion: Tatiana was right, perhaps more so than she realized. Her father had done nothing wrong.

Sandek had heard that the review committee placed partial blame on Nicholas Linstad. Truth turned out to be more interesting than rumor. More or less all the blame went on him. The experiment had been conducted in Rennert’s lab, under his auspices, but Linstad had been the doer, his advisor a remote presence.

They’d worked together on one previous paper. A lot of profs in that situation would take first authorship, but Rennert had done the ethical thing, giving Linstad credit.

For their second collaboration, Linstad took over wholesale. He devised the idea for the study and drafted the initial proposal.

The subjects, thirty-seven males between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, began by taking a memory test. For the next two months, they came into the lab on a weekly basis. Half of them played twenty minutes of a violent video game, half a nonviolent game. Following that, each group was further divided into two subgroups, one performing a neutral task, the other receiving thirty minutes of unspecified “memory training.”

Here was Edwina Triplett’s “tutoring” — useless beyond the confines of the Cal Psych Department.

At the end of eight weeks, the kids were retested. Linstad’s hypothesis was that exposure to the violent game would diminish the kids’ memories and mute the effects of the tutoring. In order: nonviolent-plus-training would do best; violent-no-training would do worst; the other two groups, somewhere in the middle.

The design sounded convoluted to me, and the committee agreed, labeling it “riddled with confounding variables.” Departmental ass-covering; no one had objected the first time around, when the proposal passed the human subjects panel.

By week five, scholarly concerns were rendered irrelevant: Julian Triplett slaughtered Donna Zhao and the experiment came to a crashing halt.

The report referred to the murder euphemistically as “the events of October 31, 1993.”

Every kid who applied for the study was required first to complete a psychological screen called the Meeks School Checklist. The committee devoted twenty pages to dissecting its strengths and weaknesses. While the test did a fair job of detecting learning disorders, it was not sensitive to other types of mental illness, certainly not early signs of psychosis.

Bearing in mind the goal of the experiment, it seemed unreasonable to fault Linstad for choosing to use the Meeks. Why would he think to be on the lookout for latent schizophrenia? But that wasn’t the real problem.

The real problem was that Linstad had personally screened Julian Triplett and rejected him, only to change his mind and allow the boy in.

The committee comprised five members. Two were psychology professors; I had taken classes with both of them, found one okay, the other an insufferable ass. In addition, there was Michael Filson, dean of the College of Letters and Science, a former cognitive psych prof. A UC regent named S. Davis Auerbach. Finally, outside legal counsel, Sussana Khoury, of Stanwick and Green, LLC.

Reviewing Triplett’s results on the Meeks, the committee noted that Linstad had only scored eleven of the twenty items.

His explanation, verbatim: Based on this individual’s responses and his behavior during the interview, I felt that he was unfit to participate in the study. I therefore discontinued the interview early.

They continued to press: What did he see that made Julian Triplett appear unfit?

Linstad gave several evasive replies before admitting that Triplett had muttered to himself throughout the interview “in an incoherent manner.”

Then how, they demanded to know, had Triplett ended up in the study anyway?

I believed he could benefit from what we were offering, educationally. It was always my intention to throw out his data.

A nice guy, wanting to help an underprivileged kid.

The committee asked Linstad to address the allegation that he had taken an inappropriate interest in Triplett; the two of them had been seen walking into the Free Speech Movement Café together.

Linstad flatly denied any such contact had ever occurred.

The man got him a burger.

Edwina had said that to me, and I’d taken her to mean Rennert. Now I wondered. Though I didn’t remember burgers on the menu at the FSM Café.

In any event, the committee abruptly dropped the line of inquiry, as though steering itself out of dangerous waters.

There was, I noted, a troubling lack of information about or concern for the victim. The committee spent more page space on video games than on Donna Zhao.

Flipping back to the title page, I read the date.

August 3, 1997. Right after the Zhaos settled their lawsuit against the university, and Walter Rennert handed in his notice.

Another CYA move, perhaps: delaying release of the report, minimizing mention of Donna, lest the Zhaos’ attorneys find something to exploit in front of a jury.

Like most committees, they were amoral.

By the report’s end, their recommendations felt inevitable.

Nicholas Linstad was suspended indefinitely from the PhD program.

A lighter touch for Professor Rennert: a scolding, for not being more aware of the actions of his staff; a suggested leave of absence, temporary and voluntary.

He’d never been asked to resign. Yet he had.

That meshed with my sense of Rennert as a man crushed by guilt.

Could lead to savior fantasies.

Extending a hand to a psychotic killer. Buying a chair. Soliciting iffy prescriptions.

A relationship founded on pity and shame.

I lay in bed, my mind afire, sifting through connections, motivations, actions.

One thing was clear: this research, aimed at curbing violence, had resulted in a hell of a lot of violence.

Too amped up to sleep, I clawed my laptop toward me.

The game Linstad selected for his media stimulus was called Bloodbrick: 3D.

Some shoot-em-up dealie.

I think my son had it on Nintendo.

I guess I should count myself lucky he didn’t kill nobody.

In thirty seconds I’d found it freely available on a Korean website dedicated to preserving “classic vintage arcade nostalgic and video games.” You didn’t need a Nintendo console. You didn’t have to download anything. Some helpful, underemployed dude sitting in an internet café in Seoul had taken the time to convert the old code into Java. Now anyone could experience the two-hundred-fifty-six-color glory of Bloodbrick: 3D anywhere in the world, right from the comfort of his or her own keyboard.

I decided to see what all the fuss was about.

The game took a familiar format: first-person shooter, the player as a disembodied hand, clutching a weapon, hovering at the bottom of the screen. Dropped into an urban maze populated by a variety of baddies, you had to blast your way to safety, receiving points for every direct hit. Targeting an innocent lost you points, as I discovered when I inadvertently mowed down a woman pushing a baby carriage.

By today’s standard, the blocky graphics and crinkly sound sucked. Nevertheless I recoiled in disgust, watching mother and child shred into pixelated strips, screeching in tinny agony for a few seconds before dissolving to nothingness.

All the same, I found it hard to believe that twenty minutes, once a week, could inspire anyone to pick up a knife and kill. Kids in 1993 saw far worse stuff, far more often.

Nonpsychotic kids.

But most mentally ill people — the vast, statistical majority — weren’t violent.

I closed the laptop, stretched toward my nightstand to shut off the lamp.

I had a text from Tatiana, five minutes old.

R u up

I slid to reply. Yes

Did I wake u she wrote.

No I was up. Whats going on where are you

Her answer, slow in coming, had me scratching my head.

Protons

?

*portland she wrote fucking autocorrect

The tone, so nonchalant, taking for granted that her being in Portland was any easier for me to accept than her being inside an atom smasher.

Whats in portland I wrote.

Friends

I didn’t know you had friends there

Of course I didn’t. I didn’t know anything about her, not really.

Yup she wrote.

I’d given her an opening to explain; she’d passed. I chose not to force the issue. Ok when are you back

Don’t know

I need to tell you some things

About

I read the psych dept report I wrote. Also spoke to Vannen

Please can u just leave it alone

I started to type a reply; reconsidered and dialed her instead.

She picked up after half a ring.

“Hey,” I said.

Amid the rustle of sheets, she whispered, “Hang on.”

“First off, I wanted to say that if you’re feeling like I—”

“Hang on.”

Her voice, breathy, then the sound of a door closing. When she spoke again there was a ceramic echo; she’d gone into a bathroom or kitchen. “It can’t wait until the morning?”

“You texted me,” I said.

“I know, I — look, I recognize that it’s my fault you’re doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Digging. I provoked you, but I was being—”

“You didn’t provoke me.”

“I did. But I’m over it. I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “I can’t hear it, right now.”

I heard a man’s voice, muffled and sleep-addled: “Baby?”

A knock; a lull; a blossoming hollow-point of silence.

“Just a second,” she called.

“Who’re you talking to?” the man said.

“Nobody,” she called.

“Come back to bed.”

“In a second.”

“You know what,” I said, “we can talk later.”

“Clay—”

“Enjoy Portland.”

I hung up and shut off my phone.

I slept poorly, waking at dawn and stumbling out to my living room. Gray sun smeared the soiled carpet. I needed to call my landlord, have it steam-cleaned.

Clinging to the corner of my TV was Tatiana’s note.

She needed to get out. Clear her head. I shouldn’t wait up.

She’s what you’d call a runner.

I removed the note and crumpled it.

In the kitchen I opened the cabinet above the fridge. At the back of the highest shelf sat the plastic evidence bag containing her father’s whiskey tumbler. I fetched it down, stood turning it in my hands.

You made it sound like there was nothing left to think about.

Yes, I had.

I don’t get what you’re trying to achieve.

I started to carry the tumbler to the trash.

I thought you wanted to help me.

Everything I’d told myself, about owing a debt to the dead — it was true, too.

But there was something else at play.

Me.

No longer relegated to setting up shots.

Finding myself wide open, behind the three-point line.

I tore the bag open, took the tumbler out, went back to my living room.

I put the tumbler on the mantel, in full view of the front door.

I’d see it whenever I walked in, and I’d remember.

Not for her.

Not for them.

For me.