Sinclair leaned back in the recliner, adjusted his earphones, and closed his eyes. The memory came slowly at first, bits and pieces. Then he was there.
“What do you see?” Dr. Jeanne Elliott asked.
He screeched to a stop in the middle of the street seconds after the gunshots. Rolled out of his patrol car, gun in hand. Screams, people running, smoke, the smell of burning gunpowder hanging in the air. The Sig Sauer .45 caliber pistol heavy and slippery in his sweaty hand.
“Bodies,” Sinclair replied. “Three of them. Blood.”
“Any sounds or smells?”
“People yelling: That way—he went that way. I smell the blood. And sweat—my sweat. I smell my fear.”
The words poured from Sinclair’s mouth, uncensored, as if someone else were speaking. He felt as if he were in two places at once, part of him sitting in the plush chair in the therapist’s office, the other on Telegraph Avenue twelve years earlier. The tones sounded in his ears at one-second intervals. Beep, beep, left, right, left, right. The beeps acted like a sort of audible pendulum.
“What’s happening now?” Jeanne asked.
“I’m running. People point into the theater. I run into the theater.”
Sinclair’s breathing was ragged, his heart ready to leap out of his chest.
“Slow down,” she said. “What are you feeling?”
He didn’t need to search for the words; they rolled off his tongue. “Anger. Sadness. Fear.”
“Should we stop?”
“I need to go on.”
“Okay, but slowly,” Jeanne whispered.
At the theater door, he rushes inside. It’s pitch dark. His left hand reaches for his belt, feeling for his flashlight. He touches the leather holder. Empty. He freezes.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“My flashlight . . . I left it in the car. He’s there. In the dark. Waiting. I have to get him.” Sinclair’s voice quaked as tears squeezed through his closed eyes and down his face. He tasted the salt as they rolled over his lip. “But I can’t move. I’m too scared. I’m a coward.”
“That’s enough,” Jeanne said. “I want you to return to your safe place.” She described the mountain lake, the birds singing, and the smell of pine trees.
Sinclair felt his breathing level out. The image of the dark X-rated-movie theater where the murderer had fled slowly dissolved.
“When you’re ready,” she said, “I want you to open your eyes.”
Sinclair opened his eyes and removed the headphones.
Jeanne leaned back in her chair. “You did very well today. I can tell you’re beginning to trust the process.”
The process she referred to was called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. When Sinclair had first met with her two weeks ago, she explained how patients can bring up memories of traumatic experiences and then process them through EMDR, which reduces the emotional intensity of the feelings and the lingering symptoms. For at least a year, Sinclair had suspected he had PTSD to some degree. He’d known many police officers and soldiers who’d experienced a fraction of what he had over the years who had been diagnosed with it. But much like his alcoholism, which he hadn’t dealt with until the department forced him into treatment after he crashed his unmarked police car two years ago while driving drunk, he didn’t do anything about his PTSD until it smacked him across the head.
A month ago, he’d stayed late one night to return several phone calls. The final call was to a Napa Valley phone number. The man told Sinclair that he and his wife had adopted a baby boy from Alameda County foster care after the boy’s family was murdered. Ben was to turn thirteen in January, and the family was planning his bar mitzvah celebration. The man hoped Sinclair would attend, but especially hoped he would join the family for dinner the night before. That was when his parents intended to tell Ben about his life before they adopted him. Sinclair knew the story all too well.
The boy’s parents had been pushing him down the street in a stroller when a crazy man ran out of the back door of a theater, shot both of his parents in the head, and snatched Ben out of the stroller. The man ran through the streets, cradling Ben like a football, and holed up in his small room in a transient hotel. The hostage negotiators reported the man had no grasp of reality and was going off on a tirade about having killed the devil’s disciples. Next, he had to sacrifice the devil’s child. A police sniper team had eyes on the man pressing a pistol against the infant’s head through a window, but didn’t have a clear shot.
The police incident commander ordered an immediate SWAT entry to save the infant, giving the four-man SWAT team that was stacked outside the door the green light. Sinclair was first in the stack. He stepped through the door and saw the man holding the baby in his arms and a gun in his hand. Sinclair snapped his M4 rifle up, and when the red dot of the close-combat optics was within the imaginary triangle formed by the man’s two eyes and nose, he pulled the trigger. The man collapsed in a heap to the floor as Sinclair rushed forward and caught the baby before he hit the ground. News photographers and videographers swarmed him as he stepped into the sunlight. Within twenty-four hours, his picture—a serious-looking man decked out in body armor, ballistic helmet, and goggles, holding a small infant in his arms alongside an M4 carbine—graced the front page of every newspaper in the country.
Sinclair had told Ben’s father he would call him back with his answer. He then sat at his desk with rivulets of sweat rolling down his armpits and tears welling in his eyes. His whole body shook and his breaths came fast and shallow. He hardly slept that night as memories of that day came back to him, followed by other memories—dead and injured people, times when he pulled the trigger and took lives, times when he faced death but evaded it. A few days later, he called the department’s employee-assistance program, and they referred him to Jeanne Elliott, PhD, Clinical Psychologist.
“I’d like to explore one of the last things you mentioned,” Jeanne said. “Your feelings are valid, and I don’t intend to challenge them; however, you said you were a coward because you didn’t chase a killer into a dark building without a flashlight.”
“I know that’s illogical,” Sinclair said. “But the man got away because I was afraid to pursue him, and he killed two more people.”
“And you blame yourself for that?”
Sinclair shrugged his shoulders.
“Did you ever consider that Ben is alive today because of you?”
“He’s probably traumatized, even more screwed up than I am.”
“If you decide to attend the bar mitzvah, you might learn that’s not so.”
“Maybe.”
“Do you realize that millions of people who heard the story thought you were a hero?”
“That was the media’s spin.”
“I suspect Ben’s adoptive father thinks you were responsible for his son seeing his thirteenth birthday.”
“I wish that day never happened.”
“Burying traumatic incidents might work for a while, but eventually, as you’ve experienced, they come bubbling up at the most inopportune times.”
Sinclair looked at his watch.
Jeanne continued. “How’s your medication working?”
“I’m on homicide standby this week and have to be available when the phone rings, so I haven’t been taking the trazodone at night.”
“Are you sleeping?”
“Not well.”
“I’m not a medical doctor, so I don’t want to give you medical advice. However, you know you’re not the only police officer I treat, and my experience is that trazodone will not prevent you from waking up and functioning when you need to. It’s not a sedative or depressant.”
“Okay.”
“And as I offered previously, I can work with your department and get you time off that won’t count as vacation or sick time.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Sinclair said. “People will know.”
“Your department is prohibited from taking any adverse actions against you.”
The way the city’s employee assistance was administered ensured that no one, not even the police chief, knew the names of those who used it. But the moment he hit off sick or with a so-called on-duty injury diagnosed as PTSD, the word would be out that he was mentally and emotionally incapable of handling the job, and he’d find himself at a desk.
“I’ll let you know,” he said.