Margaret Truman's Experiment in Murder (3 page)

“A witness said the driver was a blond woman.”

Her face was blank.

“He ever talk about girlfriends?”

“No, of course not. We've kept our private lives to ourselves since we separated and divorced.”

“We're told that he had some sort of government connection.”

“That's right. He had a security clearance and was a consultant to NIH, at least for a while. He also did work at GW, where he received his training.”

“He was busy.”

“Too busy. What will happen with … with his body?” She choked up, then allowed the tears to flow.

“That's up to the medical examiner, ma'am.” He handed her his card. “Again, sorry to be the bearer of bad news. We'll leave you alone now. I'll see what the plans are for disposal of and—” He forced a smile. “Call me and I'll let you know.”

She escorted them outside.

“Is that Mercedes your only car?” one asked.

“No. I have another in the garage.”

“Mind if we see it?”

“No, of course not.”

The taller of the two detectives peered through a row of small windows at the top of the garage doors and saw a white vehicle.

“Open the garage for us, please.”

“All right but … you aren't thinking that—”

“Please open the door.”

She did. The white car was another Mercedes. The detectives examined the front of the vehicle, which was perfectly intact.

“Many thanks, ma'am,” they said as they got in their car and drove away.

“Nice lady,” the driver's colleague said from the passenger seat.

“Must not be easy married to a shrink.”

“The money's good, though. Two Mercedes Benzes. Not bad.”

“My wife has a shrink friend, a psychologist. Whenever we're with her I think she's analyzing everything I say.”

“She probably is.”

“Makes me uncomfortable.”

They drove in silence until the driver said, “There's more to this guy than meets the eye, huh? They send us to deliver the news instead of a Maryland cop. A Maryland cop would have been the one if it was routine.”

“You never know about people.”

“Especially shrinks. They're all weird. You ever see one? I mean for a problem?”

“No. You?”

“Once, to help me get off cigarettes.”

“It worked. You don't smoke.”

“I don't know whether the shrink helped or not. He tried hypnosis. That mumbo-jumbo didn't work. I kicked the habit on my own, cold turkey.”

His partner nodded. “Hypnosis? Lotta mumbo-jumbo. Shrinks. They can really screw you up. Let's move, Harry. I'm taking the wife out to dinner tonight.”

 

CHAPTER

5

The following day, Nicholas Tatum sipped cold tea from a Styrofoam cup that had rested on his desk since class commenced a little less than an hour ago. The classroom was filled to capacity, which it usually was when he taught his two-hour seminar on evaluating human behavior to aspiring attorneys enrolled in the George Washington Law School. He conducted the seminar only once each semester, and it had immediately become a favorite elective. Did students flock to it because they viewed the subject as important to their legal careers, or because it was a welcome respite from classes on torts and contracts and habeas corpus? It didn't matter to Dr. Tatum, or “Nic” to his friends. The behavioral sciences was a discipline about which he was passionate, and he enjoyed imparting what he knew to these young men and women no matter to what use they put it.

“Look,” he told a student who questioned what benefit there was in knowing how hypnotizable someone was, “it doesn't have to do with hypnotizability. I'm not suggesting that you hypnotize a client to get to the truth. What I am saying is that if you pick up on the subtle clues about how that client processes life, you'll be in a better position to judge whether he or she is telling you the truth. The same holds true when questioning witnesses in a courtroom. Once you've discovered how a witness tends to react to various stimuli and then acts upon them, you know the best approach to breaking through whatever barriers he or she has put up.

“Let me go over the basic premise again. Each of us is born with a natural wired ability to be hypnotized, and it correlates directly with personality style and how we function. There are three basic types of people—Dionysians, Apollonians, and Odysseans, named after the mythical Greek gods Dionysius and Apollo, and the not so mythical Odysseus.

“Dionysus was the fun-loving god. He worshipped freely and with abandon, his approach to life based upon freeing one's natural self through madness, ecstasy, and wine.”

Laughter erupted in the room and fingers were pointed.

Tatum waited until the merriment had ebbed before continuing. “People who are known as Dionysians tend to trust others. They're intuitive and make many decisions based upon feelings rather than cognitive thought. Apollo, on the other hand, was the god of logic, reason, and order. Apollonians tend to want to lead rather than follow. Put a Dionysian and an Apollonian in a car, and the Apollonian will want to drive while the Dionysian will be content to let him.

“Dionysians are prone to being influenced by others more readily than are Apollonians. And then there are the Odysseans. They form the middle ground between Dionysians and Apollonians. They tend to fluctuate between action and despair, between feeling and thinking. Most people are Odysseans. Now, which group do you assume is more hypnotizable?”

“The Dionysians,” three students answered in unison.

“Correct,” said Tatum. “Dionysians are more easily led than Apollonians or Odysseans, more open to suggestion. They often prefer to follow rather than to lead. Apollonians are the opposite.”

Tatum checked his watch. “We'll take a fifteen-minute break. When we come back we'll get into how you can determine which category a client or witness falls into based upon some easily visible signs and traits. See you in fifteen.”

Tatum exited the classroom and went to the faculty lounge, from which Mackensie Smith was just leaving.

“Are my best and brightest getting your message?” Smith asked, chuckling.

“Not sure, Mac, but it's easy to tell which ones are.”

“The Dionysians,” Smith said.

Tatum nodded. “Not hard to spot them. How's Annabel?”

“Fine, just fine. Available for dinner Saturday?”

“Saturday night? Sure. The weather forecast for Saturday is good so I thought I'd get in some flying time, but I should be finished by five.”

Among Tatum's many hobbies was piloting a vintage aerobatic aircraft, a Micco SP26, which he housed at Potomac Airfield in Fort Washington, Maryland.

“Seven? Annabel is suddenly in the cooking mood. She's whipping up her signature veal martini. Bring a guest.”

“Sounds great. Cindy and I had planned to get together for dinner.”

“Looking forward to seeing the two of you. Fly safe, Nic. Do you ever worry that the wings on that aerobatic plane of yours might fall off one day?”

Tatum laughed. “Every time I go up.”

“I have to run,” said Smith. “Can't be late for my tennis match with Dean Molino.”

*   *   *

Mackensie Smith had recruited Tatum to teach the law school course. Smith had been one of D.C.'s top criminal attorneys, the go-to lawyer when your life was at stake. He was a ferocious advocate in the courtroom but a gentle, accepting man outside it. It was that lighter side that had attracted Annabel Lee to him. She'd been a successful matrimonial attorney until meeting the erudite Mac Smith, whose first wife and only child, a son, had been slaughtered on the Beltway by a drunken driver. When the drunk's attorney successfully mitigated his client's culpability before a jury of his peers and got him off with a minimal sentence, Smith reconsidered the use to which he'd put his extensive legal knowledge for all those years. He folded his private practice and accepted a teaching position at GW Law. Was teaching young attorneys to defend people any less unsavory than doing it himself? He sometimes wondered. But not often.

Recently Smith had succumbed to the lure of the courtroom and the give-and-take of negotiation, and had taken on a small select number of clients, mostly friends in whom he believed and whose legal needs weren't outside his comfort zone. Annabel wasn't especially happy with his reimmersion into the world of advocacy law but understood what was driving him. While the classroom could be challenging at times, it paled in comparison with what her husband termed “the real world of the law.”

After they'd married, Annabel, too, decided that she'd had enough of representing men and women whose need for revenge against a soon-to-be-former spouse trumped their common sense, especially when it came to the welfare of their children. She'd fostered a lifelong ambition of owning an art gallery devoted to pre-Columbian art, and with Mac's encouragement she took down her shingle, found the perfect space in Georgetown, and realized her dream.

While both were busy people, they found time to maintain relationships with a variety of Washingtonians, including some in high positions of government, a few cabinet members, the attorney general, congressmen and -women, and Senator George Mortinson, whose campaign to unseat the current president, Allan Swayze, had gained traction and placed him comfortably ahead in the latest polls. Smith had acted as counsel to a committee chaired by Mortinson, and they'd become good friends, their relationship embellished by their love of tennis. They often played when Mortinson was in the Senate and whenever Smith's bad knee wasn't acting up. Since Mortinson announced that he was running for the presidency, their tennis matches had become less frequent, although he occasionally took time out from campaigning to meet Smith on the court, much to the chagrin of his campaign staff and the Secret Service detail assigned to protect him while on the stump.

*   *   *

Tatum, in his midforties, had earned his Ph.D. in American University's behavior, cognition, and neuroscience graduate program. He'd been at the top of his class since high school and throughout college; his doctoral thesis that correlated a person's level of hypnotizability with the effectiveness of acupuncture was considered one of the best papers ever written by someone in the program, and he was recruited upon graduation by myriad universities, hospitals, and government agencies. To everyone's surprise, he opted to join the Washington MPD's small but growing Criminal Behavior Unit that had been established to better predict the actions of known criminals. Patterned after the FBI's criminal-profiling department, the CBU was soon emulated by other police departments across the country, and Nic Tatum was quickly recognized as a rising star in the division.

His resignation only three years after having joined the MPD didn't go over well with his superiors. They tried to persuade him to stay, but Tatum, whose decisions in life were carefully thought out and resolute, declined their vague promises of great things in his future and left to establish a private practice and to teach. Although he was no longer on MPD's payroll, he was often called in to help with a particularly baffling case in which his expertise in profiling criminal behavior was needed.

He sat alone in the faculty lounge and picked up that day's
Washington Post
. Dr. Mark Sedgwick's death received a surprising amount of column inches considering it had nothing to do with government or the presidential election a little more than a month away. Had Sedgwick died as a result of a vehicular accident, it wouldn't have commanded much space. But the reporter had cited an anonymous source within the MPD who'd told her that it was being considered a homicide and that the driver had, according to eyewitnesses, deliberately aimed for and struck the doctor. Being a diligent reporter, she tracked down those eyewitnesses and got their statements. The headline read: H
IT-AND
-R
UN ON
V
IRGINIA
A
VENUE A
D
ELIBERATE
K
ILLING?
The question mark had been inserted by her editor to cover for not having proof of the allegation.

Tatum dropped the paper on the table and drew a breath.

He'd known Mark Sedgwick. They weren't friends, but they had run across each other numerous times at NIH, where they were colleagues in federally funded experiments, and had sat together on various panels over the years. Tatum had always considered Sedgwick inaccessible, buttoned-up and defensive when it came to his personal life, and his professional life, too, for that matter. They'd socialized only a few times, including a dinner party at Sedgwick's home years ago. Tatum reflected on that night as he waited for his class to resume.

It had been a pleasant evening, although he'd soon tired of the conversation. The six male guests were all M.D.'s or Ph.D.'s, which limited the scope of topics, although politics did come up a few times. Based upon Sedgwick's comments, Tatum assumed that he leaned right on the political spectrum. Far right. He knew that Sedgwick had connections with the intelligence community, although he wasn't sure of the extent of them.

Deliberately run over?

He returned to the classroom, where his students had again gathered. “Okay,” he said, “I know that you're wondering how this will benefit you with clients or in a courtroom.” He proceeded to ask a series of questions of individual students, going to them and standing close while posing his questions. He also asked them to look straight at him and then to roll their eyes up as far as they could toward the top of their head. After twenty minutes of this, he resumed his place behind his desk and asked, “How many of you have ever been to a nightclub where the entertainment was a stage hypnotist?”

One hand went up.

“Stage hypnotists are very good at quickly identifying the Dionysians in the audience. Their answers to the hypnotist's questions, as simple and silly as they may sound, provide him with clues to how suggestible certain audience members are. And he watches their eyes.”