The Cure (2 page)

Noooo!
screamed Erin internally; a wail of anguish that wasn’t vocalized but which permeated every inch of her body and mind, threatening to tear away her sanity. Anna screamed beside her, her vocal cords not paralyzed, but the scream barely registered with her older sister. Erin felt weak and dizzy and her heart thundered in her chest. Both of her parents had been taken from her between one blink and the next. It wasn’t possible. It
couldn’t
be.

The intruder glared at Anna with such withering, dead-eyed intensity that her screaming stopped as though he had thrown a switch. He tilted his head and sniffed. “Did someone puke in here?” he said, glancing down at the floor for the first time and seeing two separate piles of semi-digested pizza and breadsticks.

“Let’s go in the other room and get away from this mess,” he said calmly, his expression not changing in the slightest.

Both girls were sobbing and whimpering uncontrollably now. The intruder pulled little Anna away from her fallen mother and locked an arm around her waist with an iron grip. Anna tried to bite his arm, but it was a halfhearted effort through hysterical sobbing and he backhanded her across the face so hard Erin thought her sister’s head might fly off. Anna screamed through her tears, her face a rictus of pain and terror.

“Don’t do that again,” said the man.

He turned his cruel, cold eyes on Erin. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go. Don’t dawdle.” When she hesitated he kicked her leg with the front of his hard shoe. The pain was so great Erin thought her leg might be broken, and she nearly lost consciousness, something part of her realized she would have welcomed.

“Let’s move,” he said again.

The man carried Anna with him into the adjoining room and Erin limped behind him. He found a dog collar and slipped it over Erin’s neck, leashing her to a desk.

“Stay here,” he ordered, moving a few yards away and clamping his large palm over Anna’s tiny mouth. “Since you both interrupted what was supposed to be a private evening, you deserve what you get,” he pointed out.

He turned to face Erin. “So here’s what I’m going to do,” he said calmly. “I’m going to see how much pain your sister can take. And then I’m going to kill her. While you watch. How does that sound?”

Erin had slumped to the floor without being aware of it and was making mindless mewling sounds. She was still conscious but paralyzed in mind and body. The horror of what she had seen, and what was happening to her and her sister, had overwhelmed her mind’s capacity to absorb shock, and her centers of reason were retreating deep within her consciousness, creating an out-of-body persona to take over and buffer the horror her mind could not have survived otherwise.

“No objections?” said the man. “Good. Remember, this is your fault. You had no business coming here after hours.” He smiled serenely. “Do you know what sex is?”

Erin continued whimpering, making no reply.

The intruder produced a scalpel from some unknown location, one with dried blood covering it from the helpless puppy he had butchered, and stabbed it into Anna’s arm. She screamed over and over again into the man’s palm and writhed against him, trying to get free, but he held her body and mouth with a force she couldn’t begin to break. He removed the scalpel from her arm and glared at Erin with his ice-cold eyes. “Answer my question or your sister gets punished.”

He paused. “So let me ask again, do you know what sex is?”

Erin fought to reply, but couldn’t. She had learned about sex in health class that year and had had a short discussion about it with her parents. It was disgusting, and it had been hard for her to believe this is how babies were really produced, but the answer to his question was
yes
. She struggled with all of her might to form this simple word, but her mouth wouldn’t cooperate.

Erin’s eyes turned to her sister, a wonderful, innocent girl she couldn’t have loved more. She was suffering horribly. And Erin couldn’t utter even a single word to save her further pain. She felt so ashamed. But she could barely breathe through her sobs, and she couldn’t find a way to speak.

The inhuman monster raised the scalpel to strike again when Erin, out of desperation, managed to move her chin up and down a single time, hoping a nod of yes in response to his question would satisfy him.

“Good,” he replied. “Now we’re communicating. Now, do you know what
anal
sex is?” he asked with a warm smile.

Anal sex? Erin had a vague idea the word
anal
might have something to do with the butt, but she had no idea what the butt could possibly have to do with sex. Once again she was unable to speak, but she was able to—barely—shake her head no.

“No?” said the man, obviously delighted by this response. “Well, I have good news for you. You’re about to find out. Your sister here may scream, but trust me, she’s going to enjoy this. I promise. And then when I’m done, I think I’ll skin her alive. Do you know what that means?”

Erin wasn’t sure but she managed to nod. Anything to get him and his dead eyes to stop talking to her, asking her questions. The man was pure, distilled evil. How could anyone be this cruel? And he was so calm. He might have been talking about the weather as he spoke of torture and murder. He had killed her parents, two wonderful people who would never hurt anyone. And he was about to do the same to Anna and her. He would destroy their bodies and end their lives with as little thought or regret as someone else might have when turning off a light.

He reached for his waist and seconds later his pants fell down around his ankles. Erin was still sobbing but had no awareness that this was the case. All the pain and horror in the world had turned into an ice pick, stabbing at her psyche, robbing her of her mind and her will to move. Her will to live.

Deep inside her consciousness a tiny voice was ashamed of her behavior. She could easily remove the collar from around her neck. She should run. Scream. Get help. Somehow attack this monster. Find a weapon and come at him.

But she couldn’t break free from the paralysis that gripped her. And even if she could, nothing she could do would change her fate. Not against pure evil of this magnitude. The man was a snake who had hypnotized its victim, his dead, soulless eyes having completely shattered her psyche, as surely as his bullets had shattered her parents’ bodies.

As the man reached for his underwear to pull them down, one hand still clamped tightly over Anna’s mouth, the door from the pharmacy burst inward and Erin’s father stumbled into the room, making an awkward path toward the intruder and his youngest daughter. His intestines were still fully exposed, and he had lost most of his blood, yet there was a look of superhuman determination in his eyes, and Erin somehow realized that only his love for his daughters could have possibly kept him alive for this long.

The intruder reached for his gun with an untroubled expression, but as he was swinging it around, Ted Palmer stumbled and landed at the man’s feet.

The intruder lowered the gun and shook his head in mild amusement. “Don’t tell me you want to watch too?” he said.

Erin’s father lurched forward and stabbed at the man’s lower leg. He had concealed a small syringe filled with unknown fluid and he drove it deep into the intruder’s flesh, using the very last of his strength. Her father fell away from the man and an instant later allowed death to finally take him.

“Great,” the intruder complained to Erin. “Now I have to find out what he just injected me with.” He paused in thought. “I guess I’ll have to move up my timetable.”

With that he put both hands around Anna’s small head and yanked. Erin heard a horrible crack, like a thick tree branch snapping in two, and Anna’s head went limp and lolled to the side.

The man turned to Erin. “I guess it’s just the two of us now. I’ll find out what was in that syringe, and then you’ll get to experience the fun of anal sex for yourself. You’re in for a real treat.”

The man smiled, took one step, and then fell to the floor, his eyes glazing over. He convulsed a few times and then his heart stopped.

Whatever Ted Palmer had injected had finally taken its full effect.

A small part of Erin Palmer felt a shallow relief, but the intensity of her suffering remained crippling. She was vaguely aware of time passing, but everything was a blur. She continued sobbing softly until she finally fell into a welcome unconsciousness.

The next morning, Emily, her father’s nurse, came in to work to find a scene straight from a charnel house. An hour later, the building swarming with police and two psychologists, Erin still hadn’t moved, now curled up into a fetal position.

It was as though she had died inside, even though her body was still living. Her father had given every last ounce of his strength to save his daughters’ lives. And Erin had done nothing. Now she was totally alone in the world. Alone with her cowardice and shame. And alone after suffering a loss so great it nearly stripped her of her sanity.

A female psychologist cleaned Erin up gently and gathered the young girl in her arms, carrying her away from the grisly surroundings. Feeling a compassionate human touch helped Erin’s psyche reemerge from its hiding place for just a moment.

Why had this happened?
a voice inside her head demanded of an uncaring universe. How could that man have taken
everything
from her? How could God allow such evil to exist?

Erin tilted her head and caught the eye of the counselor.
“Why?”
she whispered hoarsely, her voice pleading.

This would be the last word Erin Palmer would speak for the next twenty-seven days.

PART ONE

SCIENTISTS DECODE PSYCHOPATHS’ BRAINS

Science Illustrated,
May/June 2012

Psychopaths suffer from an antisocial personality disorder, expressed in a marked lack of empathy, conscience, and sympathy … Psychopaths either do not feel fear or simply disregard it … Psychopaths are thought to be predisposed to commit violent crime. It has been estimated that while only 1 percent of the population are psychopaths, they make up 11 to 25 percent of all prison inmates.

… In healthy individuals, viewing morally offensive pictures activated an area in the amygdala, whereas this area was not activated at all in psychopaths. The amygdala is involved in emotional processing.

[Researchers] examined the “connecting roads” in the brains of psychopaths who had been imprisoned for murder, multiple rape convictions, strangulation … The study demonstrated that the white matter connecting the orbitofrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the vision-related centers of the brain was markedly weakened in the group of psychopaths as compared to a control group of healthy individuals.

STUDY FINDS PSYCHOPATHS HAVE DISTINCT BRAIN STRUCTURE

Chicago Tribune,
May 7, 2012

The study showed that psychopaths, who are characterized by a lack of empathy, had less gray matter in the areas of the brain important for understanding other peoples’ emotions.

Blackwood’s team used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of forty four violent adult male offenders in Britain … The crimes they had committed included murder, rape, attempted murder, and grievous bodily harm … The results showed that the psychopaths’ brains had significantly less gray matter in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles than the brains of the nonpsychopathic offenders and nonoffenders.

These areas of the brain are important for understanding other people’s emotions and intentions, and are activated when people think about moral behavior, the researchers said. Damage to these areas is linked with a lack of empathy, a poor response to fear and distress, and a lack of self-conscious emotions such as guilt or embarrassment.

1

ERIN PALMER PARKED
her fifteen-year-old Dodge Intrepid, which continued to be more reliable than it had any right to be, especially given the time it spent in the relentless desert sun, and checked herself in the rearview mirror. Her hair was pulled back into an ugly, severe bun so tightly that it looked as if she had an oversized forehead. She removed a pair of glasses from a case—glasses containing large, strangely shaped lenses set in thick, brown plastic that seemed to clash in every way possible with the contours of her face—slipped them on, and checked her makeup, which added fifteen years to her face and left the impression of wrinkles rather than a silky-smooth, flawless complexion.

She exited the car and adjusted her drab but professional outfit, which had virtually no waist and was cut in a way that made it unclear to anyone seeing her from the neck down if she was a man or a woman, covering every inch of her body more surely than a burka.

She left the car and walked past a sign that was surrounded by cacti and sagebrush, a tiny oasis of landscaping in an otherwise barren and uncared-for desert landscape. The sign read, Arizona State Prison Complex—Tucson.

Another day at her home away from home.

As she approached the entrance, the main yard came into view within the fenced-in perimeter, the coils of razor wire on top of the tall fences looking as lethal and intimidating as ever. Inmates exercised or conversed in small clusters throughout the dry, dusty yard, every last one of them wearing orange: some wearing cotton slacks and an orange T-shirt, some having chosen orange sweats in the chilly morning desert air, but all of the clothing stamped with giant black letters, ADC, which stood for Arizona Department of Corrections.