Self-Defense by JONATHAN KELLERMAN

“Doctor, this is Audrey from Dr. Wendy Embrey’s office. Dr. Embrey said to tell you she’d like to meet with you concerning Lucretia Lowell, if you’ve got the time. Would sometime tomorrow be okay?”

“Tonight would be okay, too.”

“Dr. Embrey’s all over the place tonight—she attends at a bunch of different hospitals. How about tomorrow around lunchtime?”

“Sure. Where?”

“She’ll be over at the university all morning. If it’s convenient, she could meet you in the med school dining room at twelve-thirty.”

“That would be fine.”

“Good, I’ll tell her.”

“How’s Ms. Lowell doing?”

“I’m sure she’s doing as well as can be expected.”

I read From Hunger to Rage over breakfast. The bookseller had been right.

Trafficant’s style was crude and uncontrolled, boiling with junior-high revolutionary rhetoric and obscenities. His editor had left his faulty spelling and grammar intact, aiming, I suppose, for gritty authenticity.

In the first half, he worked two themes to the death: “Society screwed me” and “I’m getting even.” The next fifty pages were letters he’d written to various celebrities and officials. Only two had answered, the congressman from Trafficant’s home district in Oklahoma—who responded with a Dear Constituent form letter—and M. Bayard Lowell, who praised Trafficant’s “bloody poetry.”

The two men began to correspond, Trafficant ranting and Lowell commiserating. The final page was a photocopy of Trafficant’s approved parole application.

A biography and picture were on the inside back cover, the mug shot the papers had run.

Terrence Gary Trafficant, of uncertain parentage and hot blood, was born April 13, 1931, in Walahachee, Oklahoma. Beaten often and suckled by wolves, he spent his formative years in various institutions and hells-on-earth. His first major punitive adventure came at the age of ten, when he was locked up at The Oklahoma Institute for Children for stealing cigarettes. He proved an uncooperative prisoner and alternated for the next thirty years between steadily escalating violence and incarceration, much of it in solitary confinement. He brings a unique perspective to our perception of right and wrong. From Hunger to Rage has been purchased for adaptation as a major motion picture.

A psychopath making it in Hollywood—not a huge stretch. Yet Trafficant had turned his back on it.

A best-seller who admired the Däusseldorf Monster.

Steadily escalating violence. . . . The more I thought about it, the harder it was to ignore his presence that summer.

Call his publisher . . . too late to phone New York.

I let my own imagination run on: Trafficant seducing the long-haired girl. Things getting out of hand . . . or maybe she’d resisted and he’d raped, again, then killed her. And told Lowell. Lowell panicking, rushing to bury the evidence, unaware that a little girl was watching.

A little girl who wet the bed—maybe dank sheets had aroused her.

Waking and walking and witnessing.

And paying for it now.

The med school cafeteria was a mass of flatware clatter, white coats everywhere. Soon after I walked in, a pretty Asian woman in a plum-colored silk suit came up to me.

“Dr. Delaware? Wendy Embrey.”

She was young and petite with long, straight, blue-black hair and onyx eyes. A faculty picture badge clipped to her lapel showed her hair permed. W. TAKAHASHI-EMBREY, M.D., PSYCHIATRY.

“I’ve got a table over there,” she said. “Would you like to get some lunch?”

“No, I’m fine.”

She smiled. “Have you eaten here before?”

“Occasionally.”

“Are you on staff?” she said, as we walked to her table.

“Crosstown.”

“I interned crosstown. Are you in Psychiatry?”

“Pediatrics. I’m a child psychologist.”

She gave me a curious look and we sat down. On her tray were a tuna sandwich, coleslaw, red Jell-O, and milk. She unwrapped her utensils and spread her napkin on her lap. “But Lucretia was your patient?”

“Yes. Once in a while I see adults—short-term consults, usually stress-related. She was referred by the police.”

Another curious look. She couldn’t have been more than a year or two out of residency, but she’d learned her therapeutic nuances.

“I consult to the police occasionally,” I said.

“What kind of stress had she been through?”

“She was a juror on the Bogeyman trial.”

She picked up her fork. “Well, that could certainly be difficult. How long did you treat her?”

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