Chapter 38

"HE WAS IN MANY WAYS the classic victim," Beth Ann Blair said. "Incommunicative, lonely, without any of the social or intellectual or athletic skills that would have made him acceptable to his peers."

"Is that why he started hanging with Dell Grant?" I said. "I don't know. He wouldn't talk to me much. I infer from what we did talk about that he saw Dell as a protector-big football player, hung out with the tough kids from the Rocks. Jared was bullied routinely. I assume he hoped Dell would protect him."

"Did he?"

"I don't know," Beth Ann said. "I don't see these kids except in a clinical setting."

"Did he complain of it?"

"Yes, of course."

"And?" I said.

"Bullying is very difficult to prevent," Beth Ann said. "Complaining to the school authorities usually serves only to exacerbate it. I did speak to Mr. Garner on Jared's behalf, and he said he'd alert the faculty to the problem."

"Did he?"

"I'm sure he did," Beth Ann said, "but I can't speak for Mr. Garner. You'll have to ask him."

"Mr. Garner is not talking to me," I said.

Beth Ann smiled. We were in her office at the hospital, with her degrees behind her on the wall, and her lipgloss gleaming.

"He's a very resolute man," Beth Ann said. "He feels that the school, and the students in the school, which is what he cares about, are best served by putting this event behind us."

"And you?" I said.

"I'm inclined to agree. I'm not a forensic specialist, obviously, but I'm quite sure Jared is not in any legal sense insane. He may have been driven to it by loneliness and fear. He may have been victimized by bullies. He may have been corrupted by an Internet life spent in the darker corners of cyberspace. But it is hard to argue that he was not aware that what he did was wrong."

"How about an irresistible compulsion?" I said.

"No," Beth Ann said. "No, I think it was simply revenge, and however sympathetic one might be, it resulted in mass murder."

"What kind of dark corners," I said, "of the Internet."

"I'm not really sure. I know he spent a lot of time online, and the little that he would reveal to me of his inner life, he had some lurid fantasies."

"Like?"

"Violence. Dominance."

"And you feel he played those out online?"

"I know the Internet was his solace. He used to access websites that appealed to those fantasies."

"Got a name?"

"Of a website?" Beth Ann said. "No. He may have told me, but, frankly, I find them repellent."

"Porn?" I said.

"Perhaps. I did not investigate."

"How often did you see Jared?" I said.

"Not often enough, I'm afraid," Beth Ann said. "He was very reticent about getting help."

"How about Dell Grant?"

"No. I never spoke with him."

"So you don't have any theories about him."

"I can't, I'd merely be guessing."

"And what would you guess."

"No," Beth Ann said. "I won't speculate. If I had seen him enough, in a therapeutic setting, perhaps. But speculation is more about the speculator than about the, ah, patient."

"But Jared's behavior, you feel, was the result of bullying."

"Which was fed by fantasies of violent domination," Beth Ann said.

"Were the fantasies the result of the bullying?"

"I can't say. I did not have enough of him. Certainly one reinforced the other."

I nodded.

"Most of the time, there never is a clear reason," I said. "Kids do something like this. Theories are offered. None is established. Most of the time, we don't know," I said. "Do we?"

"Perhaps," Beth Ann said, "had the perpetrators spent enough time with a therapist for us to have a clear understanding of why they did it, they wouldn't have done it."

"And afterwards, there's all the clutter," I said.

"Clutter?"

"People trying to justify their behavior," I said. "People trying to deal with grief. People trying to deal with rage. People trying to cover up failures. People trying to place blame. People trying to shift blame. People eager for revenge. In effect, it's done now, and we've caught the bastards. What difference does why make?"

"One can understand that feeling. A lot of innocent people died, for no good reason."

"We don't know what the reason was," I said. "We don't know if it was a good one or a bad one."

"There is no good reason for people to be murdered."

"Maybe not," I said. "But that's the slippery slope to abstraction. I'm just trying to find out what happened here."

"Unfortunately," Beth Ann said, "we know what happened ... and I'm very much afraid that we'll never know why."

We both sat looking at the ground we'd replowed. Beth Ann was wearing a yellow flowered dress with ruffled shoulder straps and a low, square-cut bodice, which framed the ebb and fall of her bosom very nicely as she breathed.

"Did Jared do a lot of fantasy searches on the school computers?" I said.

"Oh." Beth Ann smiled. "Surely not. They are carefully restricted."

I nodded. Without doing anything, Beth Ann seemed to radiate sexual possibility. With Susan's absence, I was becoming steadily more preoccupied with sexual possibility, and neither Rita Fiore nor Beth Ann Blair was helping. I stood. Beth Ann said, "You have my card."

But what I seemed to hear was Would you like to come to my home in Lexington and have sex until the autumnal equinox?

"Yes," I said. "I have your card."