“A cop brought in a John Doe one winter morning. My very first day as a practicum student on the psych unit. As far as the cop could piece together, John Doe must have hitched a ride east from Colorado with truckers along Highway 64 when he became psychotic at a truck stop. Started screaming and throwing silverware at other patrons. Stripped off his clothes and ran naked into an empty field to make snow angels. The manager called 911 and John Doe was brought to the psych ER. He was the first patient I ever treated.”
Just lucky, I guess.
“He was agitated and paranoid, not oriented to person, place, and time when he arrived. He couldn’t provide any history or tell us his name. He carried no identification. He constantly sang that Stones song, so some of the staff took to calling him Jumpin’ Jack Flash. River City State Hospital gets more than its share of transients and homeless, especially in extreme weather. He was a danger to himself and others when he arrived. Dr. Mendez admitted Jack—”
“Ah, hapless old Dr. Mendez. Wonder whatever happened to him.” He smiled as if lost in the afterglow of a happy reminiscence.
Mendez was the on-call psychiatrist the day John Doe came through the ER doors of River City. Any shrink worth his salt would have been ethically and professionally bound to admit him. He was delusional and malnourished; his body a tapestry of contusions, superficial scrapes, and old track marks. He had needle marks between his toes and under his tongue. His front teeth showed decay, most likely from poly-drug abuse, poor nutrition, and hygiene; his discolored and raised fingernails the telltale signs of chronic alcoholism.
When I started my practicum at River City, Mendez was about to retire. He was a competent doc when not on his high horse. He took his role as gatekeeper in the ER seriously—harboring a deep-seated resentment for those who feigned suicidal thoughts to hideout from the law or a gang; homeless people looking to get out of extreme weather; poor people who run out of food, money, and medication between disability checks; and the non-compliant, mentally ill who missed appointments. He considered health care a privilege and not a right, even though most of his patients had no insurance or Medicaid. I think he believed the ever shrinking amount of money our state allotted for the indigent and disabled came straight out of his own pocket.
Jorge Mendez, the reclusive little River City State Hospital shrink from Brazil who wore over-sized glasses that seemed to wrap around his entire head and magnify his eyes to fly-like proportions, had retired years ago. His wife died a year before he retired and, with their grown children scattered across the country in residency programs, he lived alone in St. Louis. A former colleague who still works for the state told me Mendez had passed away not long ago. A heart attack, at home alone.
“From the delight in your voice, I gather you already know Mendez died not long ago.”
He smirked and folded his arms. “The detective force in this city is consistent, I give them that. People say getting away with murder is hard. Is there no one to challenge me? Who out there is worthy to be my foil? Not the police. Certainly not you.”
My eyebrow rose as I said, “You’re saying Mendez didn’t die alone?”
He stared at me with what I took to be scorn or pity. “Do you remember the amount of hair that myopic old quack had? Didn’t the police wonder why a nearly bald man would use a hair dryer in the bathtub? I even left the box and receipt in the house. Like most people, Mendez was a creature of habit. He drew his bath at nine every night. All I needed to do was buy the blow dryer at a nearby Walgreen’s. They’re so darn convenient. There’s one of them on every other corner in the city, isn’t there? Anyway, he liked to leave his back door open to catch the breeze coming through the screen. I forced the screen door latch and walked into his bedroom. He drank half a bottle of Merlot with dinner every night and liked to finish it in the tub. No doubt trying to wash away past sins and shut out the demons of memory. His feeble attempts at absolution failed, he’d developed quite the drinking problem over the years. He was content to anesthetize himself to his crimes against man and God. I wasn’t about to let him forget that easily. We had a spirited discussion about Jack and his own salvation. We didn’t see eye to eye on everything.”
I’ve fallen into the hands of a multiple murderer.
“You must be very proud of yourself, Father,” I said.
He ignored my comment. “I offered him the Last Rites before I reunited him with his dead wife, but he said he no longer believed in God, and he never once begged for his life. He knew he’d misdiagnosed and mistreated Jack. He saw the light and agreed that ECT had been the wrong intervention for Jack. By the end of our consultation, the sad little man actually wanted me to toss the dryer in the water so I could reunite him with his beloved Imelda. Tub electrocution is not always a sure thing, so I brought along a box of Epsom salts for better conductivity. He had also urinated in the tub as we spoke, which upped the voltage. There was no dramatic burning skin or smoking hair like you see on television. He thrashed and jerked; he foamed at the mouth and nostrils some. His bowels emptied. The voltage may have killed him or maybe he slipped into ventricular fibrillation. He slid down into the water. Cause of death may have been by drowning. The flesh on his flank parallel to the water level appeared paler than the rest of his body and I noticed some mild blistering. No fuse blew, no circuit breaker tripped.” He paused while a look of bemusement came over him. “I fished the hair dryer out and it still worked. You wouldn’t think it would, but it did! I notice the trivia and minutiae of my craft. I turned it back on of course and tossed it in the tub.”
He laughed sardonically. “Mendez allowed the soft science of his chosen profession to take precedence over his Catholic faith. I restored peace and dignity to his Golden Years. I even cured his alcoholism and depression.”
What a horrific way to die. I sat dumbfounded in silence, wondering what awaited me.
“There’s a certain symmetry to their ends, wouldn’t you agree? It doesn’t restore order to the universe, but it’s a start,” he said, making certain I saw him glance at the nearby Taser on my table. My stomach did a slow barrel roll.
“So,” he said, as he rose from the desk and paced. “Let’s talk about your role in Jack’s treatment at the State Hospital.” He put a hand up to his face and stroked his square chin, reminding me of a former anatomy professor who liked to pose before grilling his class on the functions of the medulla oblongata and hypothalamus.
“You don’t have to tie me up to talk with me about Jack’s care,” I said. “Unless you’ve already judged and sentenced me, too. Dispense with the kangaroo court, already.”
“This is your trial. Defend yourself.”
“Who did you kill before you became a priest?”
He waggled his finger at me again. “Don’t change the subject. We are here to address your sins. Being an important member of the interdisciplinary treatment team, you obviously concurred with Mendez’ decision to proceed full steam ahead with a course of bilateral electroconvulsive therapy.”
He looked once again at the Taser and back to me.
“You do remember that this happened nine or ten years ago,” I said.
He nodded impatiently as if he was speaking to a child. “Continue.”
“As I recall, Mendez first treated Jack’s presenting problem with anti-psychotics. By the book. The staff provided a safe environment and did their best to get three square meals and vitamins in him as he frenetically bounced around the ward strutting like Jagger on stage, singing that song over and over again. Sometimes he enlisted other ward patients to act as his back-up singers, with varying degrees of success. Other days he was so out of control he required five-point restraints as well as chemical ones to protect himself and others. When the delusions stopped, he lapsed into a profound catatonic depression. He refused to eat and was malnourished to begin with. He remained a blank slate to us, we had no health history to work from and the only words he uttered were those damn song lyrics while he puffed out his lips like Jagger. You admitted that Jack walked away from being the Big Man on Campus years ago. Who knows what traumas and abuse he was subjected to during those lost years to become the homeless psychotic who eventually entered our ER? Everyone tried to help Jack and work with him because he was a human being in crisis who needed help. The profound depression Jack fell into didn’t respond to trials of the latest anti-depressants. There’s nothing unusual in how Mendez treated Jack. On some level you must know that.
“You weren’t there nine years ago. If you’ve carried out this vendetta relying on information coerced from Mendez or gleaned from Jack’s old chart, you are in no position to judge the people who did everything they could to help your brother. Am I getting through to you?”
His facial muscles taut, he said, “You and Mendez went to court and conned a judge into authorizing the electroshock. You made him a walking vegetable. First with the drugs, then with a ‘course’ of fifteen shock treatments, as if it’s some tasty menu item one indulges in with friends.”
His delusions were well-developed, fixed, and unshakable. His behavior was escalating. ECT can be, and often is, an effective treatment.
If he expected a new doctorate practicum student to dissuade a board certified psychiatrist with thirty years’ experience from treating his own patient with ECT after numerous medication trials had failed, talking my way out of this chair was doomed. I attended the involuntary commitment hearing as an observer. The image of Rick’s drug-addled co-worker on fire and bound to a chair while DeLuca and his goons looked on and laughed filled my thoughts.
Let’s see if I can sell swastikas to the Pope today, Tony.
“You and I share an ingrained professional prejudice against Electroconvulsive Therapy. We help others with words, not by strapping them to a table and passing enough electricity through their brains to induce a seizure. Jack’s psychosis didn’t respond to medication and he’d slipped into a severe catatonic depression that put his life at risk. ECT was not used as punishment like in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Jack needed quick symptom relief after all other treatments had failed. Mendez gave the logical next step a try. It actually snapped him out of his catatonia. As a clinician, you know this.
Father James looked at his fingernails as if was unhappy with his manicure. “Don’t waste your last words trying to bond with me—”
“You read his chart, but you weren’t with us a decade ago. A paper chart crudely encapsulates a patient’s stay, it doesn’t begin to show the hard work of the staff. It can’t describe the severity and depth of Jack’s illness—how the disease stole his self from him, how it executed him before he came to us, forcing him to stand and look down at his own living corpse. Can we who haven’t felt such suffering fully comprehend this?”
“Enough! You’re postponing the inevitable. You’re about to feel what Jack felt,” he interrupted.
I ignored his threat and said, “Jack was no longer Jack before he was wheeled through those ER doors. ECT didn’t kill Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
He hit me hard on the jaw again. “His name is Jack Parks!”
I shook off the cobwebs while I scrambled to find a way not to die. To keep driving home the point that Jumping Jack Parks had ceased to be and morphed into Jumpin’ Jack Flash long before he arrived in St. Louis only stoked his rage.
Before I could think of one, two wires exploded from the Taser and imbedded in my chest. Every muscle locked up like a giant body cramp. It felt like someone beating me up and down my back with a four-by-four while someone else tightened a wire from my forehead to the base of my neck. My shoulders hunched to my ears. My toes curled, if I hadn’t been taped to a chair I would have fallen to the floor. It was the longest five seconds in my life. I lost all physical control but remained conscious.
I watched him remove the leads and set about loading another charge.
“The therapist in me can’t resist asking, ‘how did that make you feel?’” He smirked until his handsome face clouded over again. “Barbaric enough for you?”
Something he said earlier made me think. When in doubt, delve further into the past.
“Thanks for jogging my memory. Why are your last names different?”
He shrugged and said, “Parts of what I told you are true. We were left on a bench near an Iowa hospital. It was twenty degrees that morning. She gave our lives up to fate. A passerby found us. Our birth mother left a note in our basinet saying the voices in her head commanded her to kill us because we were evil. The note said our birth father wanted nothing to do with us and had left her. Her note ended with, ‘Don’t bother to look for me, because I plan to kill myself. Evil begets evil, Wanda.’
Out of the mouths of psychotics….
“Your birth mother suffered from post-partum psychosis.”
He nodded. “Probably, or schizophrenia or a psychotic depression. We’ll never know. I tracked her down, though. Her name was Wanda Fogerty. She was sixteen years old when she jumped off a roof a month later.” His face darkened. “Back to Jack. Tell me about his response to ECT, your work with him, and the day he escaped.”
There was much more to his childhood story, but could I maneuver and cajole him into returning to it? I watched him reload the Taser.
“All food intake stopped when Jack became catatonic. It was either ECT or a feeding tube but the team felt certain he’d keep yanking out his tube. Near the end of his ECT series, his mood began to lift, he ate enough food to stay alive, but didn’t say a word or sing a lyric. I tried individual therapy, group therapy, play therapy, biofeedback, introducing various stimuli into his immediate environment such as music, radio, television, art, cartoons, video games, and pictures of hundreds of subjects. A football game came on television once while he was playing solitaire. He threw the deck in the air, overturned the table, and charged the staff. It took four orderlies to keep everyone safe and him into five-point restraints. I asked him about it later but he never answered. Pictures of family scenes at times provoked similar turmoil, but he remained mute. He harbored great shame or fear over some traumatic event. You’ve obviously read my notes in his file. You already know my suspicions that Jack had repressed severe physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.”
He looked me in the eye and calmly Tasered me again, in almost the exact same spot in my chest. The pain and spasms were worse and lasted longer. I passed out briefly. When I came to, my teeth ached from grinding them together.
I felt hands grab me by the shirt. “My, you’re getting hot under the collar. I bet a nice drink of cold water would taste good about now. What do you say, Swinger?” He held a cup of water in his hand. As he brought it close to my mouth he spilled it on my chest, soaking it.
I’ve been abandoned. This must be how Kris felt. Keep your wits about you. Let the cobwebs clear before you speak. Don’t react to him. I never did get Jack to open up. Just like when I was ten with those two kids when hell and earth collided. Practice never makes perfect, but it does make a better therapist. Classroom theory only takes you so far—you have to learn by observation and doing. Armed with experience and what I know now, I could have helped those kids, but Jack was a different story.
I watched him reload again and continued. “The day of his death, Jack slipped through a door on the locked unit. I think he finally felt ready to thumb a ride back to his life on the road. Staff saw the elopement and chased him onto Sublette Avenue, where a postal service truck idled unattended, the mailman walking a package to someone’s front door. Jack stole the truck and hospital security called the cops. He made it all the way to the Poplar Street Bridge, going east into Illinois. He wouldn’t stop for the cruisers that tried to force the truck into the guardrail. Ramming into the cop cars, the taller blue and white postal truck jumped the guardrail and plunged into the Mississippi with Jack behind the wheel. It was the dead of winter; twenty degrees with ice floes drifting downstream.”
He splashed more ice water on my shirt front. Oh, shit. Keep telling the story.
“Divers searched and crews dredged the river for days, but the water level was up that winter and the current too strong. Massive amounts of driftwood and silt hindered recovery efforts. Days later and miles downstream, rescue workers fished the truck out of the water, but not Jack. Experts figured the body would eventually be found weeks later even farther south. Police at the scene estimated the truck left the bridge going ninety miles an hour and plunged the equivalent of a ten-story building before hitting the icy water. They put the odds of anyone surviving such a concussive force of impact and the freezing temperatures at ten thousand to one. Witnesses corroborated his elopement, including a visitor who was near the door to the ward. People living near the hospital saw Jack drive off in the postal truck. The hospital treated Jack’s escape as a sentinel event, one involving the death or serious injury of a patient. Independent state agencies launched a full-scale investigation. No criminal wrongdoing or negligence was found, but double doors were recommended and installed for all the locked units.”
He shook his head. “More lies. You cover for one another. The hospital bribed the visitor and neighbors to keep their accreditation. Mendez manipulated and altered Jack’s chart to cover up his incompetent care, nurses and techs added notes after the fact to clean up the record for the review board.”
“The bloated and decomposed body of a man matching Jack’s body type was pulled from the river miles downstream months later.”
He pointed a finger at me again. “You couldn’t even get my brother to talk. You weren’t there for him when he felt he had no choice but to escape your … torture chamber. You’re all accomplices to murder. You and Mendez drove him off that bridge.”
I was assessing another patient when I heard of Jack’s elopement, but he was beyond reason. My presiding judge and jury is seeing conspiracies at every turn. This decompensating psychopath entrenched in a fixed delusion will soon be my executioner. How many more Taser shots was he planning? Jack had thirteen ECT treatments. How many more could my heart take?
My hands tingled, turning numb and ashen from the tape cutting off my blood flow. “I know Kris saw you for one session during her separation. I know she stopped seeing you because you hit on her and she thought you were … spooky. Did you kill her out of revenge or fear she would expose you?”
His face registered surprise. “I’m impressed. She told you about our session?”
“No. I found records of old appointments. Like I said, it wasn’t that difficult,” I lied. I had to know. He was right, I was salivating to know the truth. “Did you kill her out of revenge?” I heard desperation in my voice.
His smile again morphed into that creepy leer. “There’s more than meets the eye. Back then I provided on-campus counseling to students and, as you know, I have a certain predilection to beautiful young women. At the end of our session, I tried to schedule a second but she declined. Years before, I learned of my brother’s commitment and murder. My Roman Catholic collar helped me gain access to his hospital file. After all, who turns down a grieving priest whose brother has been pronounced dead? That’s where I happened upon your name and that of Mendez. Imagine my surprise when your name resurfaced years later with Kristin. You had a vested interest in seeing her marriage end. How dare she reject me for you, the man who helped destroy my brother?”
We’d met by chance a year after her session with him, but I was in no position to split hairs.
“When I’m done here, I will make an anonymous call to the police,” he said. They will be shocked at what they find. Thanks to me, Swinger, you will be front page news. You will be famous—no, infamous.”
Now he says he’s acting alone. Truth or fiction? A picture was beginning to take shape.
He turned to the computer at my desk and pulled up a chair in front of it.
I took advantage of his activity to say, “Upstanding parents with strict, conservative religious and family values adopted you and Jack. Why did you go before a judge to change your last name to that of the birth mother who abandoned you and left you both for dead?”
The white blank screen of my word processing program appeared and he began typing. He stopped, deep in thought over my question. “Away from the watchful eyes of his congregation, my Baptist minister father was a … different man. We never knew what would happen when he came home. Until late at night. Whispered voices growing louder, harsher. An insult followed by a cruel remark. No matter how softly they were spoken, we heard them all through the thin walls. We never saw the bruises; he’d hit her in places covered by her long dresses. Appearances must be maintained, he always said. When we disappointed him, we felt the switch or he forced us to kneel on marbles and jacks for hours. If we back talked, dinner was a bar of soap. Jack and I had a nickname for him that we never uttered to another soul, except once. We called him the Wrath of God. When we turned eleven, the Wrath of God began taking Jack into the basement at night. I cannot describe the alien cries, pleas, and animal grunts that rose from below. They still keep me up at night. Jack changed after that—”
“He was the sacrificial lamb—”
“SILENCE!” He raised his cocked fist, eyes wild, then lowered it to run his hands through his hair. “He rescued us. He bore God’s Wrath. Father ordained our futures—Jack was the Chosen One, destined to be the scholar-athlete at an elite college, while I was to remain home and follow in his footsteps as a minister. Things happened according to his design until the Wrath of God suffered a massive stroke, a large subdural hematoma deep in the left side of his brain. He lay helpless in his hospital bed; right side flaccid, global aphasia, and a nasal gastric feeding tube down his throat. He was fully alert and oriented after the stroke,” he said as the twisted smile returned, “but helpless as an infant in a basinet.”
“And you did what you had to do.”
“I was alone with him one night in his hospital room, listening to the monitors beep and hum and whirr. I watched his vital signs scroll across the screen. I experienced an epiphany. If he was the Wrath of God, I would become the Will of God. I woke him. I told him our secret name for him.”
“What did you do then?”
“I told him I planned to convert to Catholicism (how he detested the hypocritical Catholics!) and join the priesthood. After I made sure he was dead. Father James Fogerty was a stereotypical Irish-Catholic name. The look on his gaunt, rage-filled face clouded over with fear. I lowered the bed rail and positioned his limp body upright on the side of the mattress, aiming the left side of his head at the floor. I said, ‘I’m doing you a favor,’ and pushed. The sound of his head hitting the floor was like a bowling ball knocking down a pin. I looked down on him and waves of power rolled into me. I watch him writhe and be still. I slipped out the door and walked home. I slept the sleep of the dead and woke to the happy news.”
The longer he spoke, his taps on my keyboard became stabs and jabs.
“Your adoptive mother knew and did nothing.” It wasn’t a question.
He stopped typing, leaned back, and closed his eyes. “I hate her for that.” His eyes hardened again. “Don’t flatter yourself and think you have a prayer of talking me into releasing you. It’s not going to happen. We are on an irreversible course here.”
The idea was tops on my list. “After you killed your father, why enter any religious order, especially one that practices celibacy? Why not rebel and join Al Qaeda? You’d at least get your seventy-two virgins when it was all over.”
He chuckled to himself while he typed. “Glad you’ve still got your sense of humor.” Turning to me, he added, “You’re going to need it.”
“I aim to please.”
“A priest is in a position of trust and authority, even with the recent negative publicity. I counsel young women for a reason. I remain viewed by billions worldwide as God’s shepherd moving among His sheep.”
More like a lion in shepherd’s clothing.
His tongue poked out from between smiling lips as he pecked away on my computer. “When I heard his skull hit the floor, I was no longer His slave. I became the Will of God.”
“The feeling didn’t last, did it?” I asked.
He glared again. “I returned to his hospital room and stared at the spot, imagining the sight and sound from that night.”
“The Will of God intervened again with Mendez. You were able to make it last longer that time.”
Again with the smile. “I drank in his fear and fed on his terror for hours. Like he enjoyed dehumanizing Jack. Mendez came to welcome his death.”
“Kris didn’t. She fought back.”
The sly smile morphed into that sick leer again. “She dismissed me. For the likes of you.”
Keep him talking about himself. Something he’d just said about being a slave….
My arms stung from the restraints like they contained thousands of needles. “You had to be terrified that you were next. After all, you and your brother were twins. I bet you breathed a sigh of relief each time he took Jack downstairs instead of you.”
He abruptly stopped typing. “Nobody can understand abomination if they haven’t lived through it. To the rest of the world I’m a monster.”
Yes, you are. “People with training like you and me understand. Each woman you’ve been sexually attracted to since eventually disappoints and becomes equated with your adoptive mother who failed to protect you and Jack from God’s Wrath. The level of their punishment depends on how they rebuffed you. You’re exacting revenge on your mother with each woman who enters your world. You couldn’t have stopped Jack’s abuse. You were a little boy.”
He looked away, but I could see his jaw muscles tense with emotion. I waited minutes, hoping he’d crack on his own.
He pointed the Taser at me and I cringed in my sopping wet shirt. Am I wet enough to be electrocuted?
“But she could have stopped it,” he said.
“Yes she could have, but instead she sacrificed Jack to the predatory Wrath of God. Both mothers, birth and adoptive, rejected you. The young women you were attracted to eventually rejected you so you stalked, demeaned, and sexually abused them. You chose the most vulnerable victims, ones susceptible to psychological manipulation. You developed sophisticated techniques to prolong the abuse. You even used drugs to manipulate some of them. Then Jenny Marcus had the courage to speak up. Once she did, the rest came forward like dominoes. This shook the order of your world, but even so your plan to discredit them might have worked. Until I came along.”
He listened intently, looking my way but at an angle so his face remained hidden. He seemed to hang on my every word. I ignored the burning pain in my arms.
“Kris rejected you years ago, but not to the point she had to experience your wrath. When she resurfaced later, romantically linked to me, the therapist you were assigned to see, you snapped. Your need for revenge overrode the need to lay low and ride out the Jenny Marcus storm. You chose the wrong victim this time. Kris was emotionally strong; she fought back. She refused to bow to your will. You took risks because you made this personal. You left evidence at the scene.”
“I did not!” he said, his voice disbelieving.
“You were very conf—”
The leads imbedded in my chest a third time. I smelled my skin burn and saw a puff of smoke rise. The cramping and the four-by-four to the back of my head feeling crushed me again. My head snapped back; I bucked in the chair. My jaw locked; the world went black.
I heard a voice from somewhere, all around, nowhere … the bottom of a well?
“You mentioned evidence,” he said, yanking the leads from my wet chest.
I rode out the pain behind closed eyes, my panting subsided. “You liked Kris, at least enough to cover her face with a towel. In your rigid belief system she had to die, but you felt remorse.”
He didn’t respond. I forged on.
“You loved your brother, but also resented him. You painted the Gemini symbol over Kris’ heart in remembrance of Jack—”
“In honor of him,” he interrupted, then lapsed back into silence.
“By destroying my reputation and killing me, you’re murdering your father again. The psychological torture was to break me down, isolate, and control me. Lining me up like you positioned your father in his hospital bed. But Kris’ murder was too impulsive. You needed a fall guy.”
I’m sure he plans to kill my other clients one by one. He’s decompensated that much.
He remained quiet, brooding, but his face looked ready to explode. Amp it down a notch.
“How’d you get my tie?”
The smirk returned. “The power of the collar strikes again. After I was told that I’d been assigned to you for therapy and I discovered you were a couple, I studied her habits. One day I positioned myself to be walking the same way when she returned from the Laundromat. I offered to carry her baskets. I let fate decide what happened next. The Will of God almost took over and forced His way into her apartment. Until I saw your tie in her living room. That gave me the idea. When her back was turned to put down the basket, I slipped it into my pocket. That it was the same one you wore on television was an added gift from God’s bounty. I followed the two of you several times. Even climbed the tree to reach her second floor patio. You were going at it in the bedroom like rabbits. What a show!”
“You’re making mistakes. You want to be caught. The high after ‘the Will of God’ never lasts long enough. Your needs are escalating beyond your control. You chose the wrong fall guy in me. I will not beg or bargain with you.”
He looked over at me and said, “You’re hardly in a position to gloat.”
“The church will never let you skate on the charges.”
“I have believable clinical responses to every allegation. Innocent until proven guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt. Jenny will be alone on the witness stand. Daddy cannot save her.”
“The church will make an example of you.”
“The church remains society’s moral compass, despite her problems. I have sympathetic friends in the highest reaches of the church. Those who believe our obligation is to show the world God’s path, to convert infidels. It’s time to return the church to its former position of dominance. Powerful brethren are pushing to abolish separation of Church and state.”
Great, he wants to return society to the Middle Ages.
“You skipped a few Commandments on the way to world domination. I didn’t get the memo that says walking God’s path includes rape and murder.”
“Don’t be naïve. He smites whenever He wills, often through us.” He moved the mouse on my computer, clicked the print button, and a crisp white sheet with my company letterhead spilled out on my desktop. “Here’s your suicide note. Hope you like it.”
“How thoughtful,” I said, as he held the paper to my face.