Deadline by Campbell Armstrong

Vasuu said, and took from her briefcase a loose-leaf binder with a red cover. She flicked a couple of pages. ‘She came to see you soon after the unfortunate matter of her parents, I believe.’
    â€˜Unfortunate’ was a word so timid as to be offhand, even callous, in the context of Emily Ford’s parents. ‘I’d have to check my appointment books from back then,’ I said. ‘This didn’t happen only yesterday, you know.’
    â€˜A ballpark estimate will do.’
    â€˜OK. It might have been a year after her parents were killed that she made her first appointment.’
    Carrie Vasuu said, ‘Some people have suggested that the tragedy of her parents colored her views on law enforcement to a point beyond objectivity. That her views are rooted in a desire for personal vengeance. That her life is an obsessive vendetta.’
    â€˜I’m not sure I agree with any of that.’
    â€˜No? You don’t think the experience hardened her? She goes to visit with her parents. She finds them slain. A few weeks later, the cops arrest a known addict and felon called Billy Fear for the crime. Some people say she lost all her objectivity about crime and punishment when her parents were murdered by a junkie who needed ten bucks for a quick fix. Some say that event shaped her whole philosophy.’
    Billy Fear. That name dragged me back into places I had no desire to go. I said, ‘She wasn’t exactly the soul of liberal thinking before the tragedy, was she? She was always tough on crime. Does the murder of her parents make her unworthy of the nomination?’
    â€˜It makes her judgments suspect,’ Carrie Vasuu said. ‘They’re colored, they’re not detached.’
    I remembered our sessions. I recalled how Emily Ford had described her parents’ ranch-style house and how hushed it had been that fall evening in 1994. The porch-light was burning, there was the scent of dead leaves smoking somewhere in the neighborhood, it had all seemed so ordinary. She’d entered by the front door; a desk-lamp lay upturned on the floor and sent light spilling weirdly across the carpet. And then she’d found her father, face down in the kitchen, surrounded by food that had fallen from the dog’s dish, little brown nuggets splattered with his blood. The mongrel was curled in the corner, also shot. She had walked in dazed terror through the rooms of the house until she found her mother on the second floor, shot through the back of the head, her purse open and upturned on the bed, credit cards and driver’s license spread all around, no sign of any money.
    I remembered how difficult it had been to draw this out of her, and how deeply she’d buried the whole sequence of events. I recalled her rage, the resistance of her memory to my probing, the struggle it had been for her to accept hypnosis. And I remembered the breakthrough, even if I preferred to consign it to the dead-letter office of memory.
    â€˜What kind of treatment did you give her?’ Brunton asked.
    â€˜You know better than to ask that,’ I said.
    Carrie Vasuu had the eyes of an interrogator; polar bears might have frolicked in her arctic inquisitor’s heart. ‘Drugs? Electrotherapy?’
    â€˜I taught her the best way I knew to deal with shock. I taught her some relaxation techniques. That’s all I’m prepared to say.’ I saw it clearly: Carrie Vasuu wanted to believe Emily’s mental state was still fragile. She wanted this nomination to be withdrawn and forgotten. She was protecting the President.
    â€˜Did she talk about how she behaved when Billy Fear was gunned down by some fellow junkie after he’d been acquitted on a technicality?’ Brunton asked.
    â€˜I don’t remember. I don’t want to seem rude, but are we finished?’
    â€˜Can you give us some assessment of her mental condition now?’ Carrie Vasuu said. ‘Or do your ethics