“Stop doing this,” I whispered. “Please.”
He spoke calmly. Quietly. “Daphne, I’ve learned over a long time how to operate on an intellectual level. I know I should have empathy, so I display a facsimile of it. I don’t feel it, but I make you think I do. I’d like to say I do it because of some altruistic seed deep within me, but that’s not true.” He shook his head. “I do it because of the reward I get.”
“No . . .”
“You.”
I slapped him again, then a third time, with all my strength. He took each one stoically, absorbing the force of my blows, then gently reached for my trembling hand.
“For example . . .” I followed his gaze down to our entwined fingers. “Right now I’m holding your hand not because some inner impulse deep within me is compelling me. I’m doing it because I know this is what a supportive boyfriend, a loving fiancé, is expected to do in a moment like this.”
I shook my head.
“I know it’s what you want,” he said. “And I want to give you what you want. Because then I get what I want. Which is you, by my side. If I do what I should according to the laws of society, I get us, together. Always us.”
My eyes swam with tears, and I pulled my hand out of his grasp. Dr. Cerny crossed the room to stand at one of the front windows. The rain was coming down hard now outside.
Heath spoke again. “I was born Sam O’Hearn. When I was four years old, the doctor took me from my mother. We’d been living in downtown Atlanta. A crack house, for all intents and purposes. My mother was an addict, a prostitute, and I don’t know what else. And I was a difficult child. I screamed for hours, all night sometimes. I used to bang doors, over and over, sometimes until their hinges broke. It was a wonder she could care for me, a wonder I didn’t end up in the system, but for a couple of years she was able to manage it.”
His eyes registered pain. Or they seemed to. But maybe this was just another trick of his—intellectualizing normal human emotions and passing them off as authentic.
He sighed and went on. “She came across an ad in the Personals section of the Atlanta paper. The people, a doctor and his assistant, wanted test subjects and would pay for the privilege. That was the magic word, apparently. She let them come to our apartment, where they questioned me. And her.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
“Dr. Cerny and his assistant, Cecelia Beck, were looking for children who displayed early indicators of antisocial behavior. Frequent, uncontrollable tantrums. An imperviousness to punishment. They arranged for an MRI and got their confirmation, that I had less gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. Abnormality in my white matter. How’m I doing, Doc?”
Cerny puffed out a breath at the window. “Just fine.”
“The assumption was that I would continue down the path my brain had set for me. I would grow up to become your run-of-the-mill psychopath. You know—the guy a couple of doors down who you’d prefer not to hang out with. You don’t know why exactly . . . just that something isn’t quite right about him. He’s charming, but he doesn’t connect on a deep level. Maybe he’s a jerk to his kids, maybe he cheats on his wife and at golf every Saturday at the club. Mostly, though, he’s the guy who just does whatever the hell he can to get whatever it is that he wants. Probably more of us walking around than you would ever think.”
Heath flicked a look at Cerny, who still hadn’t turned around. “Dr. Cerny and Cecelia believed I deserved a chance, that I could learn to override my genetics, learn to operate in a different way. They might not have been able to cure me—save me from who I was on a DNA level—but they were convinced I could be conditioned to rise above it. They believed they could prevent me from going off the rails later in life—from getting into trouble, at a criminal level or otherwise.”
“And they did,” I said. “Look at you. We’re getting married. You have a good job, friends.”
The doctor finally spoke. “No one really knows what exactly flips that switch that transforms a basic psychopath from someone who merely cheats on his taxes to someone who commits more serious crimes. We believed, with careful conditioning, we could discover the mechanism in order to dismantle it. So we asked Heath’s mother to let him come live with us.”
My head swiveled back to face Heath. “She signed away her parental rights?”
“She needed the money,” Heath said simply. “And they gave her a lot of it. They brought me here, up the mountain, to live with them in this house. I stayed upstairs, never leaving the grounds, under their constant surveillance. Cecelia became my mother.” He hesitated. “The doctor, my father. I believed Cecelia and the doctor were married, that they were my actual parents, and we were a real family. The doctor and Cecelia weren’t abusive, physically or in any other overt way. They simply withheld certain natural human interactions that might corrupt the research.”
“But I thought they wanted to help you.”
“We were helping him,” Cerny said. “By gathering information. Collecting data that would be used in all future research on psychopathy. We had to be very careful, very deliberate in our methods.”
Heath let out a long exhale.
“What does that mean?” I asked Cerny. “What did you do to him?”
“No one was allowed to touch me,” Heath said. “No hugs, no kisses, no gesture that could be considered affectionate in any way. My conditioning was to be strictly reward based. B. F. Skinner, all the way. Anything outside the parameters could skew the results.”
I interrupted. “And you were going to publish a paper—”
“A book,” Cerny said. “A groundbreaking work that would change the course of psychology forever.”
I couldn’t stifle my laughter. “And you actually thought the scientific community was going to accept a book like that with no objections? That they would look the other way and let you get away with what was clearly a breach of ethics and guidelines and God knows what else?”
“Scientists understand that the greatest minds must bend the rules to achieve their ends.” He pushed up his sleeves. “I was a well-regarded psychologist with my past practice. And I continued to see a few patients down in Dunfree, in order to maintain my license. I knew, though, when the mental-health community saw what Cecelia and I had accomplished, when they read about our findings with Sam, I would be named among the greats like Freud, Piaget, Pavlov.”
“But you didn’t write the book. You ended up leading couples’ retreats. What happened?”
His eyes clouded and he glanced at Heath. “A scientist can’t draw a conclusion without analyzing all the data.”
“And your data ran away before you could do that.” I turned to my fiancé. “So that’s why we came? So he could finish his book? Somehow I don’t believe that. There’s more, isn’t there? There has to be more. What about the nightmares?”
Cerny chuckled softly. “Oh, Daphne. What a perfect match you are for our boy. Tell her, Sam. Tell her the real reason you brought her to Baskens.”
Heath regarded him coolly. “She needs to see the tapes first.”
“Tapes?” I said.
“I don’t think that’s—” Cerny said.
“I want her to see,” he said. “I want her to understand everything.” He turned to me. “You’re right, Daphne. That’s part of the reason why I came back to Baskens, because the doctor wanted to find out how his experiment turned out. But also because of the nightmares. That’s why we set it up the way we did—as a couples’ retreat. I had to get you up here with me, and there didn’t seem to be any other way.”
“So what else do you need to tell me, Heath?” I asked. “What is the truth?”
“It’s on the tapes,” he replied simply.