“What was in it?”

“Lenore’s Bible, her rosary, couple of keepsakes, and a photo of Ned, not quite four, sitting on his mother’s lap.”

“Oooh. That’s bad. She abandoned him when he was four.”

“Which is what I want to talk about. You think that’s where all his craziness comes from? Because that’s what I’m picking up on.”

“You want the long answer or the short?”

“Long. By all means.”

“There’s a subclass of kids like him. I think of them as junior psychopaths. They’re disconnected and cold and lack any semblance of humanity. Symptoms typically manifest in adolescence, which is when you start seeing aggression and antisocial acting-out. It can also show up in kids as young as three, and that’s a tougher proposition. Sometimes these kids are ADHD and sometimes not—but they’re always unemotional. They might have tantrums, but what looks like fury is pure manipulation. They have no empathy and they have no desire to please. They don’t care about punishment. They don’t care about other people’s pain and suffering. It just doesn’t interest them.”

“You think he’s one of them?”

“No question. I started following the research, or what there was of it, when I first realized what a sick puppy he is. The studies I’ve seen suggest low levels of cortisol, which affects our ability to feel fear. Without fear, they have no concept of consequences.”

“Does this run in families?”

“The jury’s still out on that one, but I’ll tell you what he told me: Frankie was cold and rejecting and she punished him for every little thing he did. If he cried or wet his pants or if he spilled his milk or made noise. She burned him. She locked him out of the house. She tried to drown him in the bathtub when he was three. She’d whip him with a stick until the backs of his legs were bloody. He tried so hard to be good, but she left him anyway.”

“I don’t want to feel sorry for him,” I said irritably.

“I’m not saying it was cause and effect. It’s one small part of the whole. Growing up, he managed to acquire a thin candy shell of charm and that’s served him well. It doesn’t address the underlying pathology, but it allows him to ‘pass’ as one of us.”

“Those are the kids who turn into criminals, right?”

“Some do, but it’s almost a side effect. I’ll give you the perfect example. When I was still in school, I worked at one of the state hospitals for six months. This was the only time I actually encountered one of these ducks. I was doing a psychiatric workup on this kid, evaluating his suitability for placement in a group home. He’d come to us by way of juvenile court because he’d pushed his little sister out a second-story window. She was two and she survived, but that didn’t seem to interest him in the least. When I asked him about the incident, his attitude was clinical. She was pestering him and he was curious what would happen if he tossed her out. He had no guilt or shame about what he’d done, so it didn’t occur to him to be secretive. Ned’s smarter than that, but I suspect his mind-set’s much the same.”