Dark Rivers of the Heart

the institutionalized don't deserve adRoy slid one hand lightly, appreciatively, lovingly along the glasssmooth, radius edge of the forty-thousand-dollar desk. "Yes, I'm sure that without the lagniappe of Ackblom's art, things here would be grim indeed."
        She was silent again.
        "Tell me, Doctor, in addition to the two or three major pieces that Ackblom produces each year, as he just sort of dabbles in his art to pass his entombed days, are there perhaps sketches, pencil studies, scraps of scrawlings that aren't worth the bother for him to assign to this institution? You know what I mean: insignificant doodlings, preliminaries, worth hardly ten or twenty thousand each, which one might take home to hang on one's bathroom walls? Or even simply incinerate along with the rest of the garbage?"
        Her hatred for him was so intense that he would not have been surprised if the blush that rose in her face had been hot enough to make her cotton-white skin explode into flames, as if it were not skin at all but magicians' flashpaper.
        "I adore your watch," he said, indicating the Piaget on her slender wrist. The rim of the face was enhanced by alternating diamonds and emeralds.
        The fourth document on the desk was a transferral order that acknowledged Roy's legal authority-by direction of the Colorado Supreme Court-to receive Ackblom into his temporary custody. Roy had already signed it in the limousine. Now Dr. Palma signed it too.
        Delighted, Roy said, "Is Ackblom on any medications, any antipsychotics, that we should continue to give him?"
        She met his eyes again, and her anger was watered down with concern.
        "No antipsychotics. He doesn't need them. He isn't psychotic by any current psychological definition of the term. Mr. Cotter, I'm trying my best to make you understand this man exhibits none of the classic signs of psychosis. He is that most imprecisely defined creature-a sociopath, yes.
        But a sociopath by his actions only, by what we know him to have done, not by anything that he says or can be shown to believe.
        Administer any psychological test you want, and he comes through with flying colors, a perfectly normal guy, well adjusted, balanced, not even markedly neurotic-"
        "I understand he's been a model prisoner these sixteen years."
        "That means nothing. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Look, I'm a medical doctor and a psychiatrist. But over the years, from observation and experience, I've lost all faith in psychiatry. Freud and Jung-they were both full of shit." That crude word had shocking power, coming from a woman as elegant as she. "Their theories of how the human mind works are worthless, exercises in self-justification, philosophies devised only to excuse their own desires. No one knows how the mind works. Even when we can administer a drug and correct a mental condition, we only know that the drug is effective, not why.
        And in Ackblom's case, his behavior isn't based in a physiological problem any more than it is in a psychological problem."
        "You have no compassion for him?"
        She leaned across her desk, focusing intently on him. "I tell you, Mr.
        Cotter, there is evil in the world. Evil that exists without cause, without rationalization. Evil that doesn't arise from trauma or abuse or deprivation. Steven Ackblom is, in my judgment, a prime example of evil. He is sane, utterly sane. He clearly knows the difference between right and wrong. He chose to do monstrous things, knowing they were monstrous, and even though he felt no psychological compulsion to do them."
        "You have no compassion for your patient?" Roy asked again.
        "He isn't my patient, Mr. Cotter. He's my prisoner."
        "However you choose to look, at him, doesn't he deserve some compassion-a man who's fallen from such heights?"
        "He deserves to be shot in the head and buried in an unmarked grave," she said bluntly. She was not attractive any more. She looked like a witch, raven-haired and pale, with eyes as green as those of certain cats. "But because Mr. Ackblom entered a guilty plea, and because it was easiest to commit him to this facility, the state supported the fiction that he was a sick man."
        Of all the people Roy had met in his busy life, he had disliked few and had hated fewer still. For nearly everyone that he had ever met, he had found compassion in his heart, regardless