The Mak Collection (40 page)

Makedde had worked hard to keep a tight lid on it once she returned to Canada. She had the geographical isolation of Australia in her favour, not to mention Canadian media laws that banned the printing of victims’ names in criminal cases such as hers. But it was hard to keep such sensational news a secret for long. He had to admit she had contained it remarkably well.

Professor Gosper wanted very much to sit down with her at some point and discuss her experiences. He wanted to run some tests on her, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), the Pain Apperception Test and the Holtzman Inkblot Technique for starters. Perhaps the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) depending on what he saw.

What exactly happened? How much could she
recall? How was she coping? How much had her experience changed her and altered her perceptions of the world around her? And in what ways? What was the accuracy of her own eyewitness testimony after what she had been through? Perhaps she should examine
that
for her thesis?

Professor Gosper hoped to publish an exclusive account of her torment and his findings in the professional journals, or perhaps even in a true crime novel. He had already left a couple of notes for her to contact him, but she’d ignored them. Women like that always thought everyone wanted to get in their pants.

Makedde walked in his direction and then veered off down another aisle of seats. He wasn’t sure, but she may have spotted him.
Damn.
Now she was at least twelve rows away. He watched her struggle out of a shoulder bag and plonk a notebook and pen down on the seat. Her pants fitted her nicely and the toffee colour of her top complemented her fair hair. She was a very attractive young lady.

He noticed the young man in the next seat give Makedde a long appraisal.

“Look out for that one,” Gosper said.

The man turned to him with a friendly smile. He was a good-looking lad, probably in his late twenties. “Why’s that?” he asked.

“Ice Princess. Way too much baggage,” Gosper said. “She’s like Katharina from
The Taming of the Shrew
.” It gave him great satisfaction to say it.

The man laughed. “Nice…” he said, exaggerating the “ice” in nice.

He looked Makedde’s way again and Gosper followed his gaze. She was reaching into her bag to get something. When the man finished admiring her, he turned back and said, “I’m Roy Blake, nice to meet you.” He extended his hand and the professor shook it.

“I’m Harold Gosper, Professor of Social Psychology.”

Roy wasn’t a student at the university as far as Gosper knew, and he didn’t look like he was visiting from Simon Fraser or one of the other universities either. He was a little too clean-cut. Maybe a plain-clothes cop, Gosper decided.

“I just started with campus security,” he said, answering Gosper’s query before he even had to ask it.

“Oh really?” That was interesting.

UBC had recently beefed up security but as far as Gosper was concerned, it was little more than a political move designed to appease the public.

“There’s all that terrible business with the Walker girl, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” the man agreed. “Really put a scare into everyone. Then of course there was that poll—”

“That poll about the assaults on campus?” Gosper cut in. He was familiar with it. “They blew that story out of proportion on every bloody front page. It’s crap.” He shook his head with disapproval. “The numbers were totally exaggerated. They took the figures on sexual harassment, date rape and everything
else and rolled it into one nasty-looking package. It made it look like we were hitting girls over the head with our clubs and dragging them by the hair. This campus is as safe as any. Safer than most.” Gosper turned to find the security guard nodding absently. He was looking in Makedde’s direction.

“I’m sure it is,” the man said, “I’m sure it is.”

Sergeant Grant Wilson hated mobile phones. He’d rather wear a pager or an archaic walkie-talkie or even a satellite dish than one of those damned devices. He was convinced that the stupid things would give him a brain tumour, but his daughter, Cherrie, said he was just a Luddite and he should get over it. But he needed one now.

He was leaving McDonald’s weighed down with a foam tray supporting an English McMuffin, hash browns and a tall Coke when the pesky thing rang. “Bloody hell…” he muttered, then hurried towards his car so he could rest his breakfast on the roof and dig around in his pockets for the phone. He didn’t consider any call on his mobile to be a good sign, especially in the morning. He figured that either Amanda was having some sort of trouble, or else Mike had something dire to tell him. He caught it on the sixth ring.

“Wilson,” he answered gruffly.

“Grant…we found another one,” came the voice on the other end. It was Mike.

Grant closed his eyes and leaned heavily against the side of his cruiser, nearly tipping the big Coke over as the vehicle shifted with his weight.

“Oh, Christ.” He exhaled and the rush of air made a strange sound in the phone. “Hang on, Mike, I’m just getting in my car.”

Grant pinched the phone between his shoulder and ear while he fished around in his pockets a second time, this time for his car keys. When he had unlocked the car and got in, he asked, “Same spot?” without really wanting to know the answer.

“Well, not exactly. Close by though. Within a coupla hundred metres. It’s a woman as well.”

“A woman,” Sergeant Wilson repeated. His eyes rested for a moment on the little laminated wallet-sized photo of he and his wife, Amanda, taken a few years earlier, before she got sick. He kept it propped up on his dashboard.

“The dogs found her,” Mike was saying. “She’s only a few weeks old, they figure. So that places her before the Walker girl but well after the other Jane Doe.”

“No identification?”

“She wasn’t wearing too much in the way of clothes considering the weather. Just jeans and a T-shirt. Couldn’t find anything in the pockets. She was a real mess.”

“I see,” Grant said. Since Susan Walker, they had discovered another two bodies. How many more would there be? “We need an expert,” he mumbled.

“What?” Mike said.

“I said, we need an expert. This is going to get uglier. I can feel it.”

Makedde popped the lid on a bottle of Visine artificial tears and tossed her head back. She raised the little clear bottle over one eye—
plop
—and then the other, and her aching dry eyes accepted the liquid gratefully.

Must sleep. Must sleep.

She wanted to be alert for the conference, and she cursed herself for not being able to get some good shut-eye the night before. There was no time for napping now—it’d have to be the trusty caffeine hit once again.

“Excuse me…”

Mak looked up. Liz Sharron, one of Dr Hare’s assistants, was standing at the lectern at the front of the room, talking into the microphone. She had been in charge of some of the organisation of the conference. She was smiling, and her red corkscrew hair bounced as she spoke.

“Dr Hare and a couple of the other speakers are running a few minutes late,” she announced. “Traffic.”
Liz rolled her eyes, ever the entertainer. “ We expect them in about twenty minutes. Sorry for the delay.”

Yup, coffee break,
Makedde decided. She went to stand, but one of her black boots stuck unexpectedly to the carpet when she got up from her seat. The corners of her mouth turned down. Something tacky was wedged in the rubber treads.

What the…?

Habib, one of the graduate students sitting near her, glanced down at Mak’s feet and said, “Yuck,” when she tentatively pulled her boot up again. She gave him a playful swat as she passed him on her way to the back of the room, moving with a limp as she walked on the heel of the offending boot. She found a quiet corner at the back and crouched down to inspect the problem. Oh great—a long, gluey string of pink chewing gum.

Wacky watermelon-flavoured Hubba Bubba.

Nice choice.

The scent of artificial fruit wafted up from the pink goo as she peeled it away, and she was just attempting to flick it off her finger when someone spoke to her.

“Hi.”

She stood up, goo in hand, and found a tall, good-looking man standing in front of her. She was pretty sure he was the one who had spoken…but to her? She had noticed him sitting near Professor Gosper. It was the tall frame and handsome profile that had
drawn her eyes. She hoped he wasn’t a friend of the professor. Did Harold Gosper even have friends? Mak thought that was pretty unlikely. If he did have any friends, she couldn’t imagine they would look like this.

The man stared at the pink goo on her hand, and said, “Oh, let me get that for you…” Then, in a flash, he was gone. He jogged over to the name tag desk, said something to the girl there and came back with a piece of paper. Gratefully, Makedde scraped the gum onto it and he scrunched it up. Her fingertips still felt sticky.

The stranger was quite tall, perhaps six foot four, with curly, light-brown hair and a handsome, even-featured face. Before Mak realised what she was doing, she had recorded the essential details—clean-shaven Caucasian male, late twenties to early thirties, brown eyes, nice build, and no wedding ring.

Gulp.

“I guess they’re running late,” he said.

“Yeah.” She studied his face for a moment while he looked at the ball of paper in his hand. She didn’t allow herself to look for too long though, lest he notice. It had been nice of this stranger to help her. She considered what to do next.

“I’m Makedde,” she said and offered her hand, then quickly pulled it back before he shook it, and offered him the less sticky one instead. “Thanks for the…umm, gum trick.”

“Don’t mention it. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Makedde,” he said, taking her clean hand in his for a firm handshake.
Strong hands
, she thought. “What a beautiful and unusual name you have.”

“Oh, thank you. People get it wrong all the time.”

“How is it spelled? I notice you decided not to wear one of those name tags.”

“I notice you didn’t either. It’s spelled M-A-K-E-D-D-E. You can see the inherent problems,” she added and rolled her eyes.

“But it is a beautiful name; no doubt worth the difficulty. I’m Roy. Roy Blake.” He was smiling as he spoke. “I’m new with the campus security here. I thought it’d be a good idea to brush up on the whole criminal element thing on my day off,” he said, and laughed. “I was told the conference should be pretty good. Are you a student here?”

“Yes. My Masters is in Forensic Psychology, so this is sort of up my alley,” Mak explained.

There was some activity towards the entrance and she turned to see Dr Hare and the missing speakers walk in.

“Oh, here they are. I’d better grab some coffee while I can,” Makedde said. “And wash my hands while I’m at it.”

They exchanged grins.

“Well, nice meeting you. Enjoy the conference.”

She turned and headed across the room, for a moment regretting that they had to part. But what she
noticed next, she regretted even more—Professor Gosper was coming her way.

All she heard Gosper say was, “Makedde, I wa—” as she rushed past him and ducked into the ladies’ room.

Luckily, in her day-to-day work on her thesis she had no contact with him, but occasionally she bumped into him on campus, or rather, he spotted her and ran her over with all the subtlety of a steam train. Their contact usually consisted of him saying something along the lines of, “I want to speak with you,” and her politely putting him off. It was only fairly recently that he had become that way with her. She wasn’t sure what had changed, but she had a hunch that he had heard about the Stiletto Murder Case. She doubted his sudden interest was of a sexual nature, and it wasn’t part of his official duties as a professor to hassle students he didn’t even teach, so what else could it be? Given half a chance, she figured, he would make a lab monkey out of her—and feel proud of himself for it.

She stayed in the ladies’ room long enough to be sure that Gosper had already returned to his seat, and when she finally came out of hiding, Dr Hare was being introduced by a visiting professor she didn’t recognise. Hurriedly, she poured her coffee, threw in a splash of milk, and forgot the sugar in her rush.

“As many of you would be aware,” the man at the lectern was saying, “psychopathy has emerged as one of the single most important clinical constructs in the
criminal justice and mental health systems of our time.” The professor was short and rotund, with a head that was so completely bald it looked like it had been spit-polished especially for the conference.

“One reason for the surge in theoretical and applied interest in the personality disorder is the development and widespread adoption of reliable and valid methods for its measurement. Dr Robert Hare, in his more than thirty-five years of groundbreaking research, has created the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, thereby finally providing researchers and clinicians with a common metric for the assessment of psychopathy. His Psychopathy Checklist has been proven to predict recidivism and violence with unprecedented accuracy, and will play a major role in the understanding and prediction of crime and violence in the future.

“Dr Hare is the author of numerous books and academic texts on the subject of psychopathy, including his popular title,
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
…”

At this there was a muttering in the crowd. Makedde heard a young woman beside her say to her companion, “Have you read that? It’s amazing…”

“He consults with law enforcement organisations, including the FBI and RCMP, and is a member of the advisory panel established by the English Prison Service to develop new programs for the treatment of psychopathic offenders. His recent awards include the
1999 Silver Medal of the Queen Sofia Center in Valencia, Spain; the Canadian Psychological Association 2000 Award for Distinguished Applications of Psychology; the American Academy of Forensic Psychology 2001 Award for Distinguished Applications to the Field of Forensic Psychology; and the 2001 Isaac Ray Award presented by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law for Outstanding Contributions to Forensic Psychiatry and Psychiatric Jurisprudence. It is my pleasure to introduce the keynote speaker for this conference, Dr Robert Hare.”