Authors: Koethi Zan
“Victimological?”
“Just what it sounds like, the study of victims. To help us understand not only the recovery process but also to learn whether there are specific psychological traits that can be used to develop a victim typology for a specified crime.”
“Victim typology? As in, whether I was the ‘type’ of person to be abducted?”
“Not exactly, but you know, we can study patterns of behavior, activities, locations—that sort of thing—to develop models for characterizing those who might be ‘victim-prone,’ as they say.”
I heard her voice continue to drone on, and I saw her lips moving clearly in front of me, but my mind could no longer make out what she was saying. The phrase “victim-prone” was echoing in my brain, and I thought surely the heat I felt on my face was visible as a red rage. The image of her face swam in front of me. I was appalled, but even then, even with my entire body set against her in that moment, I tried to keep my expression neutral.
So that’s what they do here in these big universities, I thought. They sit back and figure out whether you did something unknowingly to nurture catastrophe and disaster. Of course, they aren’t
blaming
you. It’s just that, you know, you were so careless, you let the evil of the world come crashing down on your head.
She didn’t understand what I had done. What we had done. She didn’t realize the extremes to which Jennifer and I had gone to insulate ourselves from every form of vulnerability. And it had
still
happened.
Yet even as I stood there, furious, it occurred to me that if she wanted to use me in some way, there might be a way for me to use her as well. Was there more to learn from Adele after all?
She had studied with Jack Derber, working side by side with him for two years. She had already told me that she had hidden from the FBI a large part of his past with BDSM, maybe because she’d had a hand in something even more nefarious. Maybe she was
Jack’s partner in all this. Maybe that’s why nothing had seemed to faze her back then. My stomach turned at the thought that maybe none of it had been so surprising to her after all.
“I’ll think about it,” I finally managed to mutter.
“Well, let me know.” She pulled a card out of a pocket of her purse and scribbled something on the back. “Here, now you have all my numbers. Texting is good too. Let me know. I can rearrange things if you have a little time. How long are you in town?”
“I’m not sure. I want to talk to some others who knew Jack. Someone told me he was friends with another professor here on campus. A Professor Stiller?”
Adele flinched almost imperceptibly at the name but quickly regained her composure. “Yes, David Stiller. He’s here.”
“He’s in the psychology department as well?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact his office is right next to mine.” She didn’t sound very pleased about that.
“Not a friend?”
She laughed. “No, more of a rival, I’d say. We were friends long ago, but now I’d say our research is a little too similar, and our conclusions too different. I think the university rather enjoys it because it makes us the stars of the conference circuit. They like to put us on panels together to see us fight. That’s academia for you. Anyway, if you talk to him, I wouldn’t mention that you’ve been hanging out with me.”
“Okay, thanks. As you said, we probably shouldn’t be disturbing others here in the library. I’ll leave you to your work.” I held up her card. “I’m really going to give it some thought.”
She smiled and held out her hand, as if we were about to make some sort of pact. I stared at it probably a few seconds too long—her hand extended there in the air—while I frantically searched for a diversion.
“Wait, I should give you my info.” I reached into my bag and
pulled out a scrap of paper. After writing my cell number, I handed it over to her, careful to make sure our fingers didn’t touch.
I looked back at her as I left the reading room. She sat perfectly still, watching me walk out, her eyes following my progress, her face as indecipherable as ever.
CHAPTER 19
As I crossed back over the campus and passed through the heavy swinging doors of the Greek Revival psychology building, I remembered my own days in college, the days after I had escaped and was starting over, this time at NYU, this time alone.
In retrospect it seemed that I hadn’t looked up from the ground the whole time I was there. I had spent three years in virtual solitude, cramming in a degree in record time by taking extra classes at night and during the summers.
That second time through, though, I hadn’t had the same desire for a normal college experience as I’d had before. I didn’t want to go to parties. I didn’t study in the library. In fact, I didn’t even want anyone to know who I was. I never spoke to my classmates, never ate at the school cafeterias, never went to a single extracurricular event. The school was large enough to disappear in, and I tried. How I tried.
It was also there that I first started using my new name, a name I would never grow accustomed to. I always had to pause for a second before I signed anything, training myself to write it. I never remembered to look up when professors used it in class. I was sure they thought I was dense. Until I turned in my tests, that is, and they realized I had one gift after all.
I majored in math, taking solace in the reliability of a field that offered nothing but solutions. I loved the way the numbers lined up in neat rows, a problem sometimes taking six or seven pages of my angled script, number after number, symbol after symbol, sine after cosine.
In my room, I kept all my class notebooks within arm’s length on the shelf by my bed. If I couldn’t sleep at night, I could pull one out and pass my eyes slowly over their ordered magnificence, admiring how these problems at least yielded the same answers every time.
Staying true to Jennifer in my own way, my concentration was in statistics. I finished a master’s degree in a year. The professors had begged me to get my Ph.D., but I’d had enough of sitting in classes with other students by then. At that point, the sheer volume of people I had to interact with every day had started to wear on me. My phobias had started to mount. Even the largest lecture halls felt claustrophobic. I could hear, with penetrating clarity, every cough or whisper or pencil dropped in the room, making me jump as the sound echoed in my head.
And when classes ended, there were suddenly too many bodies in motion, bumping into one another needlessly as they put on coats and scarves. I would always sit perfectly still after everyone else left, alone in the auditorium, as I waited for the hallways to clear enough to afford me a wide berth. So my body could float through space and time, untouchable, untouched.
Pulling myself out of the past, I looked down the long corridor
of the psychology department. It was dotted with students, standing in groups or pairs, with a few lone stragglers at the margins. They looked so carefree, so alive. Some chatted, while others were wrapped up in their own heads, maybe thinking about their course work or the date they had last night. You couldn’t see behind the happiness to the traumas that must have loomed there. I knew statistically they had to exist, but you would never know it just by looking.
But there, with the sun streaming through the skylight in the renovated portion of the building, it didn’t seem as though trouble could have ever touched these students with their smooth skin and full-throated laughs. Here they were, almost at the end of the school year, preparing to go on to their internships, summer jobs, grad school. I would never know what they were getting over. Maybe no one would ever know, and maybe that was the way it should be. Maybe that’s what well-adjusted people do—they actually adjust. And that’s what it means to be young and poised for life—you put your past behind you, whatever it is, and you force yourself to be free.
I wiped a tear from my eye and walked by them all. The security guard at the front desk didn’t look up from his newspaper. I shook my head, thinking of all the dangers he could be missing, all the while grateful to be ignored. This time I noticed a small sign with neat type pointing out the direction of the faculty offices, and I followed it back to the hallway I’d been down earlier.
I passed the row of traditional oak doors, the upper half of each a panel of frosted glass marked with a name in black letters. Next to Adele’s, as she had said, was Professor David Stiller’s. His door was open just slightly, and as I pushed it gently, I could see no one was in there.
It was a large office, with tall windows facing the quad. An enormous oak desk stood in front of the window, and a bookcase
covered the wall facing it, filled up and overflowing. I fingered the volumes, mostly psychology books on various arcane topics, and a few standard statistics manuals I recognized.
Then my eye happened to catch a low shelf behind the desk on the floor. The works there looked different, unlike textbooks. I leaned over to get a closer look and read the titles quickly.
100 Days of Sodom, Juliette, Story of the Eye, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle
. This was Tracy’s territory.
Just as I pulled out my notebook to write down the names to show her, the door opened behind me.
“Excuse me? Can I help you?” came a deep voice.
I jumped, dropped my pen, and watched it clatter to the floor and roll under the heavy desk. I turned to face David Stiller. He was tall, one might even say handsome, with brown hair and eyes so black, their pupils were indistinguishable within them. It had a disconcerting effect.
He looked at me expectantly, waiting for an explanation for who I was and what I was doing. Startled, I was having trouble collecting my thoughts, so I dropped to my hands and knees and awkwardly reached for my pen under the desk.
“Oh, hi …” I said, stalling as best I could. “I’m Caroline Morrow. I’m doing some research and wondered if you might have some time to talk to me.” I grabbed my pen quite easily in the end, so to gain time, I flicked it farther over to the wall.
“Wait,” he said, with slight irritation, I thought. “Allow me.” He walked over behind the desk, gracefully plucked the pen from the floor, and handed it to me in one swift gesture.
“You were saying?” he pressed.
“Yes, sorry.” I smoothed my shirt and pushed my hair out of my face, trying to regain some semblance of composure. “I was saying that I am Caroline Morrow.” I didn’t reach out my hand, and neither did he. “And I’m in the sociology department.” I motioned
back toward the opposite end of campus, as though he wouldn’t know its physical location. “I’m writing my dissertation on Jack Derber, and I know you were starting out as a junior professor here back when he was arrested.”
Unlike Adele’s response when I mentioned Jack Derber, David Stiller actually seemed interested. His face broke into a sardonic smile, and he sat down, pointing to the chair across from him.
“Please. Have a seat. No one wants to talk about Jack anymore around here. I’m curious to hear about your project. Kind of surprised the department would sanction that research, but I guess times change. What’s your angle?”
“Angle? I don’t know about my angle. I just think there are elements of the story that have not been thoroughly explored. And I plan to do some original research, from a purely factual perspective. That’s why I picked this topic—you know, it all happened right here.” Here I was, vamping. I was impressed with myself. He was nodding encouragingly.
“I understand he was a friend of yours.” At this, the smile instantly disappeared from his face.
“Friend? No, no, no. I don’t know where you heard that. We were colleagues, but I barely knew the guy. Our work was at opposite ends of the spectrum. We were never even on a panel together. But he was definitely a star in his own right.”
“A star?”
“Come on. Surely you know by now that that’s how it works in academia. You have to be a star to get anywhere at all. Give a lot of talks, papers, symposia, you know, really make the rounds of the conference circus—I mean, circuit. You’re signing up for a demanding life.”
“And what about Adele Hinton?”
At that, his face darkened. “Oh, her. Talk about Jack Derber.” He shook his head.
“What do you mean?” I prompted.
“Well, after that whole business went down, let’s just say her talks were jam-packed. More for her notoriety than for her academic insights, if you ask me. I think everyone was waiting for some juicy tidbit about Jack Derber. Don’t quote me, but she owes her career to that case, frankly.”
“So she got a lot of attention?”
He laughed.
“I’ll say. The
Portland Sun
even did a profile of her back then. Ridiculously fawning. I mean, she is an attractive woman after all, so it’s not that surprising the reporter wanted to spend plenty of time with her.”
He leaned in a little closer, his eyes narrowing, looking at me to make sure I fully understood what he was suggesting. Then he went on, leaning back in his chair now and swiveling slightly to the left and right, ever so slowly.
“You know, if you really want to do some original research, there’s another angle you should consider. Jack worked a lot. He did a lot of research, had a lot of studies. Traveled constantly. His office was brimming full of papers. Files, binders. And he was incredibly protective of them. Only
Adele
had access to them. I know the FBI put a lockdown on all of that work pretty fast after they hauled him off. But I’m sure she got hold of something. I
know
it.”
He turned his chair to face the window and gazed out for a minute, thinking to himself.
Finally, he spoke, more to himself, it seemed, than to me, “Well, this has never been enough for her, of course. She wants Ivy League, doesn’t she? It only makes sense. She has a lot to live up to.”
He turned back to me.
“You probably don’t know this, but her father is one of the most prominent surgeons in Seattle. Very successful.” He smirked and shook his head, shifting forward in his seat.
“But I digress. Back to your paper. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure she’s using Jack Derber’s ideas and research. She’s the one you should talk to. There have to be a few facts there that haven’t been unearthed. I’d help you with
that
research in a second, if I could. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”