The Perfect Child(55)

Hannah was too big to bend over and look under the bed, so I ducked down and lay flat. Blue cowered in the far corner. She scurried away every time my hand got close to her and wouldn’t stop whimpering. I finally coaxed her forward and pulled her out. Her entire body shook like she was freezing. I went to hand her to Janie, and Blue arched her back, hissing at her.

“That’s weird,” I said, looking down. There were bright-red spots on my hands. “What is this?”

“Let me see her,” Hannah said.

I went over to Hannah, who touched her carefully. Blue was still shaking. Parts of her fur were sticky.

“She’s bleeding,” Hannah said. “Janie, what happened?”

Janie held up a safety pin. “I poked Blue.”

Hannah’s mouth dropped open. “You what?”

“I poked her. I wanted to see if she’d bleed.” Janie looked back and forth between us, gauging by our faces that she’d done something wrong.

Hannah’s face paled.

“You wanted to see if she’d bleed,” I repeated robotically.

“Yep. And she did. Red. Can I hold her now?” she asked.

I held her close to my body, afraid to give her back. “I’m having a turn.”

Hannah struggled to regain her composure. She took a seat next to her on the bed, and Janie crawled up on her lap. “You can’t hurt Blue. It hurts the kitten when you poke her. Do you understand?”

She nodded. “No poking the kitty.”

“That’s right. Don’t do that again.”





CASE #5243

INTERVIEW:

PIPER GOLDSTEIN

Ron found the story of Janie poking Blue deeply unsettling. He hadn’t shown any emotion during all the other questioning, even when we’d looked at the crime scene photos in the trailer, and they were brutal. But something about her hurting animals really got to him.

“Isn’t hurting animals a sign of a sociopath?” he asked, rearranging his face to look unbothered.

“It’s one of the signs, but other things have to be present too,” I said.

“And none of those things were present?” Luke asked. He wasn’t nearly as moved by the Blue story. He was actually starting to look bored. I couldn’t blame him. It felt like we’d been in this room for days going round and round in the same circles.

“It’s not my area of specialization, and I don’t like to comment on things outside my area of expertise,” I said just like my supervisor had instructed me to. It’s what they’d made us say to the reporters, too, when they’d asked. The police weren’t the only ones asking questions.

“But you’ve got to at least have an opinion. Everyone has an opinion. What do you think was going on with Janie?” he asked.

“She was a little girl who’d been hurt badly, and she hurt other people. It always seemed that simple to me,” I said.

Luke set down his file and peered at me from across the table. “But it wasn’t that simple, was it?”





THIRTY-THREE

CHRISTOPHER BAUER

We scheduled an emergency session with Dr. Chandler after the incident with Blue. She listened attentively as we told her the story, then asked us to wait while she stepped into her reception area. She carried papers on clipboards when she came back in the room and handed each of us a pen.

“I want you to take a minute and fill these out,” she instructed.

I settled on the floor, and Hannah tried to arrange her body on one of the huge beanbag chairs. She was so pregnant that it looked painful. I skimmed through the paperwork. There were thirty questions about Janie’s behavior. We had to read each statement and circle the number that best described her on a scale of one to five. The questionnaire was filled with statements like “my child acts cute and charms others to get what he/she wants” and “my child throws screaming fits for hours” and “my child teases, hurts, or is cruel to animals.” It was like someone had created a list of Janie’s problem areas. Hannah finished before I did. We handed them back to Dr. Chandler and waited anxiously while she went through them. She set the clipboards next to her after she finished.

“I think it’s time we started to talk about disorders that might be affecting her behavior. The questionnaire I just gave you is called the RADQ, and it’s designed to assess the symptoms for reactive attachment disorder. Are either of you familiar with it?”

I’d never heard of it. I looked to Hannah, and she was shaking her head too.

“It’s a bit of a controversial disorder in the mental health field, but I’m fairly certain Janie has reactive attachment disorder. I’ve always had my suspicions, but I was hoping her symptoms would lessen over time. Unfortunately, they seem to be increasing and getting worse.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“What’s wrong with her?” Hannah asked at the same time.

“It’s a disorder caused by a child’s inability to form attachments to a caregiver at an early age and results in difficulties forming attachments with other people. It sounds pretty straightforward and commonsense for a child who’s been abused, right? Like, of course their relationships with other people are going to be damaged. But in kids with reactive attachment disorder, it goes much deeper than that. Sometimes they’re unable to form any sort of connection with another human being. They have problems with empathy, so we see them do things like hurting other children or animals, just like you’ve been describing. At times, they don’t seem like they have a conscience. One of the most common characteristics we hear from parents whose children have reactive attachment disorder is how charming and delightful their children are in public.”