Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

indicate that danger was barreling down on us, something to tell us to jump out of the way? Leon and Madison would be hearing the warning now. Rachel’s coming, Rachel’s coming, get out of the way.
    By the time I’d turned in the rental car and spent four hours in the Miami airport, waiting to board my plane, I’d changed my focus. Finding Sally, that was done. It was over. Whether Leon would be better off knowing she was alive but wouldn’t return, that wasn’t the issue for me. Madison was the issue. Saving Madison was the issue. And in order to do that, I had to see if there was any way I could help her on the assumption that she had killed Bechman. As I boarded the plane, that was my new bottom line, no longer thinking about a series of mistakes a young girl had made, now thinking about her daughter and about the issues of malice, premeditation, and deliberation.
    The detectives were trying to get the court to allow them to see the records of all the children Bechman had treated, to determine Madison’s mens rea, her guilty mind, trying to prove Madison was a bad seed, with a little help from Ms. Peach, it seemed. But even if Madison had committed the crime, it seems to me it would have been in a moment of uncontrollable frustration and rage, her doctor not understanding that the kid was already hanging on by a thread, that the droopy eyelid had polished off any remaining positive sense of self she had. The needle was filled with Botox and ready. She’d handed him the drawing. Had he merely put it down on the desk without really looking at it?
    Mens rea holds the belief that people should be punished only when they understand that their actions will cause harm, when they are morally blameworthy. Did the detectives believe that Madison had researched Botox on her computer, as I had on mine, and that she fully understood what it could do if the needle were plunged into her doctor’s heart? Acting out of control was one thing. A cold-blooded, deliberate homicide was something else entirely. To accuse Madison of murder necessitated both the act, actus reus, and intent, mens rea. But how could we know what was in the mind of a child who didn’t speak?
    What if Madison had been impaired in some way due to medication? Wouldn’t that change everything? Wasn’t that why the detectives wanted Bechman’s records, to see what, if anything, he’d given Madison and what the side effects might be, and to compare the effect of those drugs on his other patients, to see, for example, if several of the children taking dopamine blockers such as pimozide or risperidone to reduce tics suffered fits of violence?
    Leon had said Madison hadn’t been taking any drugs. Had he told the detectives that as well? Had they, in fact, given up on getting the children’s records released?
    Suppose Bechman had given Madison the drugs by injection? Madison didn’t speak. She couldn’t have gone home and told Leon. Would Bechman have bothered to call and tell him, a father who didn’t even show up with his child when she came for treatment, a father who seemed to be sleepwalking through life?
    I unzipped my bag and pulled out the envelope Ms. Peach had given Leon, the envelope Sally wanted no part of. It was sealed, and I slit it open, pulling out the folded sheets, opening them on my lap. There were all Dr. Bechman’s notations, the first visit five and a half years ago, the mother and father both there, the doctor’s perceptive note about a stressful home environment, the parents “loosely connected,” in his words, the child wearing socks that didn’t match, a button undone at the back of her dress. Notes for the next visit were on the next line, the second visit just three days after the first. There were two visits before the diagnosis, chronic motor tic disorder, and three more before Sally’s disappearance, and then a note with a box drawn around it saying that the patient now declines to speak both at home and at the office.
    The plane was finally boarding. I put away the notes, pulled out my ticket and walked to the end of the line, people queuing up even before the announcement to do so. Once seated, I took out the copy of Madison’s medical treatment again, reading the sometimes elaborate paragraphs now separated by whiteness, space to indicate the passage of time between appointments, to separate one visit from another. I checked the dates. The change in the way the notes were written happened after Ms. Peach