Arsonist (16 page)

CHAPTER 30

Emma Lyon stood at the head of the classroom and watched the clock. The exam was the second of the year and it was the most difficult one she gave. On a first exam the students would be frightened enough; by the third and final exam apathy and a full semester of work would wear them down; but the second exam was the great test. They would be overconfident from the first exam, assuming they knew what was coming next, and then be thrown off by the difficult and esoteric questions. They would be unsure what was coming and the apathy of the third exam would be shaken away.

The exam was focused around entropy and Gibbs energy. The topic made her uncomfortable; she was never one to see science as a closed system and applying entropic principles to daily life was a frightening prospect. According to thermodynamics, thermal energy always flows from regions of higher temperature to regions of lower temperature. This process reduces the state of order in the initial system so, in a manner of speaking, entropy is the measure of chaos in a system. And as the second law of thermodynamics has shown, entropy only increases or stays the same; it is never reduced.

When she first learned this principle, images of empires laid to waste, of entire species gone extinct, of space stations destroyed, of planets made uninhabitable filled her mind. She saw humanity as a species that was born, reached its apex, and began its slow decline into chaos and then extinction. It was a thought that stuck with her and made the actual subject much more difficult than it needed to be.

“Time,” she said, “please put your pencils down.”

Groans of joy and frustration from the class of twenty-eight. A few mumbles came up about the pure difficulty of the exam and more than one person was certain they had failed.

“You can turn in your scan-tron sheets on my desk. I’ll see you guys next week and we’ll begin modules fourteen and fifteen so make sure to have those read.”

The class filed out and she sat down at the desk, waiting for a few stragglers as they gathered their items and placed the sheets down on the desk in front of her. When they had left, she gathered the sheets together and placed them in a folder. For just a moment, she considered throwing them away and assigning grades randomly to stress entropy’s point. It would be poignant and humorous at the same time, but she felt few of her students would find it amusing and instead she just placed the folder in her bag and walked out of the classroom.

She decided she wasn’t going to pick anything up from her office and
would instead just head home.

It was a long drive on a freeway that was congested to the point of immobility. The radio announced that
four separate accidents had occurred and officers were trying to clear them both up as quickly as possible. She rolled down her window and leaned back in the seat, trying to calm herself as wafts of exhaust came into her car. Eventually she had to roll the window back up.

Her cell phone rang. It was Steve Cutler, the dean of the college of science.

“This is Emma.”

“Emma, it’s Steve. Didn’t catch you at a bad time, did I?”

“No.”

“I need you to cover that symposium next Thursday and Friday up there in San Francisco.”

“What? Steve I told you I can’t do that. I have several labs and a research thesis that’s due for publication in just—”

“No excuses
. Just do it.”

“This is the third time you’ve sprung something like this on me. I don’t see too many other tenured professors getting that.”

“No one else can do it. Just suck it up and go. You might like San Francisco.”

“What is all this about, Steve? Is it because I told you to go home to your wife?”

“I was drunk when I did that. Pussies like yours are a dime a dozen out here. Don’t flatter yourself. Now go to that fucking symposium and quit being such a pain in the ass.”

He hung up before Emma could say anything else. She felt like throwing her cell phone out the window or punching her steering wheel. Instead, she decided she would have to go to the symposium and suck up the humiliation.
She had played with the idea of a lawsuit and now it seemed inevitable: Steve Cutler should not be supervising anyone, much less young women looking to rise up the career ladder.

By the time she got home it was already dark and the street lamps were on. She parked in her garage and went inside the house. The home was near the beach and the air always had a salty tinge to it that at first she had hated, but now had grown accustomed to.

The house was warm and she opened a couple of windows before kicking off her shoes and getting a bottle of wine out of the cupboard. She poured herself a full glass and sat down on the couch. She turned on the television and it was turned to Channel 4 News. They were running a story on a pile-up accident on the freeway, involving six cars. She was about to change the station when the next story came up; it was about the arson investigation of two homes.

She saw the reporter standing in front of a
burned-out shell that used to be a home. Police were combing the area behind her. She was speaking about the family: the Humbolts and their six children. Jon Stanton came on screen and spoke of this occurring again and the helplessness of the police. There was a photo on the screen now: a mother, father, and six children. The youngest was one and a half and she was smiling and holding a stuffed animal. Then an elderly woman came on; she was weeping uncontrollably, holding a family photo, trying to describe the last time she had seen her grandchildren. She kept repeating a phrase: “my babies, my babies.”

Emma noticed a sensation on her cheek. She thought perhaps she had an itch but felt the sensation go further down. She put her hand
to her cheek and realized she was crying.

CHAPTER 31

Dr. Jennifer Palmer sat across from her patient and wished she was anywhere but where she was right now. Most patients were manageable and even the ones with acute neurosis were able to control themselves in her presence, but this woman was something else entirely.

She was young, twenty-five, and had deep lacerations running up her forearms. She was now in the middle of describing a sexual encounter she had had last night with an unknown male she had picked up at a club. She had begged him to defecate on her chest and the man had complied.

Jennifer kept her eyes fixated on the patient but her mind was a million miles away. She was thinking of another patient she had a few years ago. A jolly, overweight male in his fifties, he had begun to have chronic and unrelenting bouts of depression. He seemed jovial enough and Jennifer thought that the depression was a symptom of rage he was feeling at his current work and family life. Before she could get him on the appropriate medications of Xanax and Elavil, he had shot himself at four in the morning in his home. It occurred in the basement in a little corner where he kept an old rocker that he couldn’t bring himself to throw out. Of all the things she could have pondered, only one thing kept coming back to her and she didn’t know why: did he set his alarm clock for four in the morning?

The girl finished speaking and was bragging about her proficiency at oral sex when the timer on Jennifer’s phone vibrated in her pocket.

“That’s our time for today, Jessica. I would like to talk more about this next time but I did have a request for you: in the six days before you see me again, do you think you can try
to not go to any clubs or bars? Do you think you could do that for me?”

“Why?”

“Call it instinct, but I think we may have treated your drinking and partying as a symptom when in fact they may have been the cause.”

“What?”

She gave a warm smile. “No bars, no clubs for six days. Can you do it?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“Thank you. Okay, next week then.”

Jennifer walked her to the doors leading to the reception area and as she said goodbye she noticed Jonathan Stanton sitting on her couch. He appeared more casually dressed than normal; just a
T-shirt and jeans with a Calvin Klein jacket. His head was bowed low and he was gazing at the floor, unaware that she had just stepped out of her office.

“Jonathan, are you ready?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.”

“No problem. Please, come in.”

She shut the door as he sat down and she slowly walked around the office, in the opposite direction of what would have been most efficient, and poured herself a glass of water from a jug into a paper cup. She sipped a few moments and then threw the cup away. She wished she’d had enough time between patients to take a rest, maybe go for a walk or watch some television or read. Anything to empty her mind of the thoughts imposed by the previous patient.

“How have you been, Jon?”

“Fine.”

She sat down. “Tell me what’s going on in your life.”

“Nothing, really. It’s getting more difficult to see my kids, but I guess that’s expected when they’re becoming teenagers right?”

“Why would you think that?”

“They’re more involved with friends than with their families.”

“That’s true for some teenagers but from what you were telling me about your relationship to your sons that doesn’t sound like it’s a normal occurrence.”

“I think maybe my ex-wife has been speaking to them about me. They don’t look at me the same way they used to. They’re not excited to spend time with me.”

“When one parent can only spend a fifth of the time they used to with their children, the children sometimes rebel. They protect themselves by trying to cut off their emotional attachment to that parent.”

Stanton took a deep breath. “I think I may want to fight for custody. The divorce decree didn’t give her full custody; it gave us joint legal and physical. We just agreed that because of stability issues with school and friends that they would live at her house. I’m starting to regret that decision. I haven’t seen them in eight weeks. They’ve been at a camp for four of those weeks, but still. I can’t help but feel they’re avoiding me. I want to fight for them.”

“How do you think that will make your sons feel?”

“I don’t know. Hurt I guess. I’ve spoken to an attorney and he says a good way to win is to paint the other spouse as unfit. We’ll have to parade her string of boyfriends and frequent drinking into court. The kids will be there, they’ll have to hear that.”

“Have you tried just talking to her?”

“We can’t talk anymore. And unless it involves child support payments, she won’t return my calls.”

Jennifer nodded softly. “How’s your work?”

“I saw something the other day that disturbed me.”

“Disturbed you how?”

“Well it wasn’t the thing itself, but the fact that I wasn’t disturbed by it that bothered me.”

“Can you give me specifics?”

“A young girl was cut up in her bedroom in a particularly horrific way. The other detectives, even the forensics guys, could barely look at her. I heard that the responding officer had to go see the precinct counselor afterward.”

“How bad was it?” She held up her hand. “Wait, I shouldn’t have asked that, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. It was bad. You’ll probably see something about it in the news. It involved cannibalism and that always makes the news programs.”

“That sounds awful. Is there a reason you think you weren’t bothered by it?”

“No. I mean when I first walked into the bedroom and saw her remains I was a little taken back, just by the sheer gore of it, but then I was fine. Why would you think that is? That I’d be okay looking at something like that?”

“I would figure in your line of work you may grow desensitized to scenes of violence. What do you think the reason is?”

“I wish it was that.”

“Sounds like you have a pretty good grasp of what it actually is.”

“I think…when I see something like that, I can place myself into the place of the victim, but that’s not where my thoughts originally take me.”

“Where do they take you?”

“I see how she was picked, what made her special. I see…lust, for her. I felt what he probably felt when he first saw her.”

Jennifer crossed her legs but didn’t say anything. After a long while, the silence became somewhat unbearable. This was normally one of her favorite periods in a session; patients needed to fill that silence and without any forethought, they would babble. The babbling was the purest picture into their subconscious mind that Jennifer had. But Stanton didn’t respond that way. He just sat quietly and waited, to the point that it was making her uncomfortable.

Suddenly, he stood up. “I think I don’t need any more psychiatry today.”

“Jon, wait a minute. Please, sit back down. I’d like to explore this.”

“Not today.” He turned, and left.

Jennifer took a deep breath and then stood up. She went and sat at her desk and scribbled down a few notes about the session. There was something underneath Jon Stanton’s exterior that was captivating. Her gut told her it might even be dangerous.