Extract from A Predatory Mind: author: Martin Hill Ortiz
Chapter One
"She's Olivia Sorrell, two Rs, two Ls," Jeff told the university guard who punched the name on his keyboard.
"Let me take a look," the guard said.Jeff cocked the metal handle and swung open the door panel. The transport van held one occupant. Olivia, twenty years old, sat in a wheelchair, her wrists bound to the arm rests, her body contorted, her posture twisted. Her knobby knees clasped together, pointing an odd direction from her torso. Her face was drawn out, elongated in a spasm of anguish, its muscles frozen, mouth locked open in a deformed sideways oval. Her chin rested on a towel on her chest. Her lips leaked a drool. She wore a tie-on frock and green hospital pants with an elastic waist band, her rear puffed up by adult diapers.
Her eyes flitted, darting in constant alarm, leaping between Jeff and the guard and, in the distance, McAuliffe Hall. Those eyes watered over, her occasional blinks long swats.
"Just one of my vegetables," Jeff said to the guard.
"You call them that?"
"The vegetables don't mind."
"Where're you taking her?"
"Psych Building, room 105."
"Dr. Rickert's class? Figures. Yesterday it was a cage of lemurs."
The guard filled out a one-day pass to place on the dashboard and presented a handicap tag to hang from the rearview mirror. "Psych building, top of the hill. Welcome to Schuyler U."
Schuyler University was part of the "plastic" Ivy League. It radiated the feeling of a venerable institution. Set in northeast Pennsylvania, snuggled up against the Poconos, it occupied a series of nineteenth century buildings which once gave life to a mill town. Twenty years back, a corporation transformed the abandoned structures into a for-profit school, one that feigned exclusivity while admitting any student whose parents could pay. The moss remained unscrubbed from the brick walls, the dormitories were maintained underheated: all part of the atmosphere.
The wheelchair ramp carved a zig-zag scar up the face of the hill. At the far end of the pilgrimage, McAuliffe Hall, the Psych Building. Those who could took the banks of cement steps; students trudging up to class and those quickly clattering down to escape into the unnaturally warm and humid autumn day. Jeff wheeled his charge up the long crooked path. Some students glanced over at the woman in the chair. Her face a fright mask, her stringy blonde hair matted, her eyes stabbed at them.
Jeff wrestled with the lime green door to the Psych Building, wedging it open with his shoulder while backing the wheelchair inside. He panted, gulping air, trying to catch his breath. His cotton shirt budded sweat rings under his armpits. Diane Ludwick, a hefty female graduate assistant, intercepted him.
"You're late," she said.
"That's some hike."
"There's a delivery lane round back."
Jeff winced. "Of course there is."
"She seems fossilized," Diane said. "Does she move at all?"
"No."
"Does she need these restraints?"
"Only to keep her from slipping out during transport." Jeff unbuckled the wool-lined straps.
+ + +
Dr. Gordon Rickert didn't care whether his "exhibit" arrived late. A showman with enough hot air to exhale for an hour, it didn't matter if today's titillation never appeared. Thin, in his late forties, his hair maintained the same silver-gray from his days as a doctoral student, twenty years past. His eyebrows, jet-black, jumped independently, his eyes dancing when he spoke. His hands drew pictures in the air, fingers pinching then splaying in hallelujah. Even though his experiments never involved chemicals, he wore a starched lab coat.
His class, A History of the Mind, was packed full. The auditorium held sixty in a series of five elevated rows. Rickert promised himself next semester he would fill the campus theater.
His lips stretched and twisted from pursed to a devil's-horned grin. Showtime. He said, "The great battle of nineteenth century psychology raged between the somaticists, who believed all disease, including those of the mind, stemmed from physical ailments, and the moralists, who believed mental illness was the product of sin."
"Or demonic possession," a student called out.
"Or demonic possession," the professor agreed. "And the somaticists were right. Syphilis could cause dementia. And the moralists were right. Sin could cause syphilis." Someone in the crowd snickered. "Throughout this period, a minority in the medical profession believed, just maybe, the mind could have its own psychic illnesses, separate from physical or moral afflictions.
"But can we separate mind from body, body from psyche? The brain is a witch's brew of chemical reactions - nerves spark with electricity with consciousness the result. The spiritualists of the nineteenth century, those pseudo-scientific scoundrels, may have been the most correct of the lot. They believed in a dynamic force of energy produced by the human brain. Regardless of what you call it - aura, brainwaves, mind, spirit - these represent the different manifestations, different descriptions of the same phenomenon." He glanced at the partly open door where his assistant Diane looked in. He signaled for her to enter.
"I promise today's demonstration will be memorable." He opened his satchel and took out five handkerchiefs sealed in plastic bags labeled A through E, each with a yellow tag reading "Crime Scene Exhibit." He spaced them out along a table. "I've asserted that the scientists, the moralists and the spiritualists are all correct." His eyes danced. "And now, I will prove it."
Murmurs became gasps as Diane wheeled the twisted figure of Olivia Sorrell on to the speaker's platform. The only part of Olivia's body that moved, her eyes, stayed tightly shut as Diane turned the chair to face the audience. Tears blossomed from beneath her lids.
Under normal circumstances, Professor Rickert never needed to fake confidence. This pained creature beside him unnerved him. He drew his lips back, gritting a smile. "The woman you see before you is Miss Olivia Sorrell. For the past nine years, since she was a child, she has existed in a state of schizophrenic catatonia. Some of you may have heard of her case. She was the lone survivor of the Knox murders."
The audience hushed. One student in the back row scooted back his chair and exited. Cell phones popped open and began recording.
Rickert continued, "A decade back, in Virginia, Terry and Emma Knox believed their newly bought home was haunted. They called in a psychic who informed them that their house was possessed by three evil ghosts. The Knoxes concluded the only way to balance out those malevolent forces involved collecting three good ghosts. To do that they invited over an innocent family to slaughter. Although they butchered her parents, eleven-year-old Olivia managed to escape into the nearby woods where she hid for three days before rescue. The police found her in the condition in which you see her now."
A single cough resounded like gunfire in the strangled silence.
Rickert swallowed the knot in his throat. "The wattage of the brain is very low. Not an insult, merely a fact of human existence. The aura which psychics claim to read is extremely faint. However, in cases of extreme emotion, such as those encountered by the survivors of acts of violence, the psychic force becomes amplified. In the case of Miss Sorrell, with whom I have not worked, and other victims of lesser trauma, who have been part of my research, their bodies become a charged receptacle, a sensitive antenna to the residual auras of violence, much the same way psychics once called themselves 'sensitives.'"
He turned to the table. "On this table, set before me, you see five handkerchiefs. Four of them are 'innocent.' One, provided by the Scranton police, was used to chloroform a young lady prior to her murder. I, myself, do not know which of these is the genuine article. Let's see if Miss Sorrell can identify the correct item."
It seemed as though the clock hands froze and the crowd stopped breathing, their thumping hearts the only measure of life. "Fucking sadist," a student muttered, loud enough to fill the hushed room.
Rickert feared losing his audience. He had never lost an audience. "Imagine the forensic applications. Let's say the police gather items from a murder suspect. They can then present that evidence to a sensitive, such as Ms. Sorrell, as part of a line-up. If the suspect is guilty and the article maintains a residuum of violence, the sensitive will react. I'm not claiming such evidence will hold up in court, only that it can direct the investigation towards the true killer."
Olivia's eyes shot open. The spectators tensed to match her paralytic figure.
Rickert waved the first handkerchief in front of his audience and then brought it to Olivia. No reaction. Rickert said, "I asked that the genuine article not be the first one. I wanted to be certain she was not merely responding to the initiation of the procedure."
Rickert flapped the second handkerchief in front of Olivia. No movement. He began to wonder if her petrified figure possessed the ability to react.
Diane leaned against the door, gripping its knob, tottering with a sudden wooziness. Although Olivia maintained the same rigid position she seemed like a cobra poised to strike.
Rickert shook the third handkerchief in front of his test subject. Nothing. Some of the students shuffled in their seats, others put down their pens, still tense, but now uncertain whether anything would happen. Rickert's forehead beaded with sweat. He wished he could use the handkerchief to mop his brow.
He brought the fourth one toward Olivia. Her arm flinched, a movement so startling it caused Rickert to step back. She slowly twisted her neck his way. Her eyes spoke of abject hatred. After a long, frozen moment, Rickert resummoned his courage and took one long stride forward.
Olivia bounded from her chair, took several stumbling steps, then pitched herself from the dais, crashing against a desk. She began clawing at its occupant, who scrambled to get free, dropping and shattering his iPad. Some students screamed, others clambered to their feet, rushing for the door.
Rickert lost any semblance of confidence. He backed up until he pressed against the chalkboard.
Olivia writhed on the floor.
"She's bleeding," a student cried out. "Someone call a doctor. Someone call a doctor."
Martin Hill Ortiz, a native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a professor of Pharmacology at the Ponce School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Ponce, Puerto Rico, where he lives with his wife and son.
