“How can I help you, Calliope? If you’re looking for somebody to take your son, that’s not how I work.”
Calliope looked at him with wide eyes. “What? No. I-I’m not trying to give you my son. I’m asking for help. I need to know how to take care of him. How to keep him from growing up to be a monster.”
That was the thing about psychopathy. There was no real way to keep them from becoming whoever they would be. Not all psychopaths were murderers. In fact, most weren’t. But that didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous, that they were good people. Psychopaths were born weapons. Thomas just made sure those weapons were pointed at those deserving of whatever fate they received.
But he couldn’t tell any of that to her.
Thomas leaned in. “We don’t diagnose psychopathy in children.”
She thrust her jaw forward, crossing her arms over her chest. “Yet, somehow, you have a household full of child psychopaths.”
Okay, she wasn’t wrong. But he hadn’t specifically set out looking for psychopaths, just children who were showing psychopathic tendencies. “Have you had him evaluated?”
Calliope hesitated before nodding. “Yes. Like you said, they don’t diagnose children, but I know they see it. Even if they won’t say it. The last therapist he had…whatever he said to her, she refused to see him again after that. Do you know how fucked up you have to be to scare off a child therapist in our neighborhood?”
Thomas didn’t. He didn’t even know where her neighborhood might be. But he believed her. She looked like somebody who wasn’t used to feeling helpless. Her frustration was evident in the draw of her mouth, the exhaustion behind her eyes.
“Can you give me specifics?”
She shook her head in a sort of helpless motion. “He has no empathy…for anybody. No impulse control. His rage is instantaneous. When other kids piss him off, he reacts fast and with violence. A little boy stole his truck on the playground, and Dimitri shoved him off the jungle gym. The boy broke his arm in two places. I watched my son pick up his truck and begin playing again like there wasn’t a boy screaming in agony a foot to his right.”
Thomas understood the woman’s concern, but the boy was young. Kids compartmentalized. They were often selfish and possessive of toys. “Anything else?”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “He set our neighbor’s bed on fire.”
Thomas’s eyes went wide. Arson. That was a bad sign. “Tell me what happened.”
“There’s a little boy next door. Small. Shy. Really quiet. Dimitri has developed a kind of fixation on him. He’s very protective. The boy’s always got bruises on him. After what happened on the playground, I thought maybe Dimitri was hurting him.”
Thomas’s tone was grim. “Was he?”
“It was the boy’s father. Dimitri stayed over there for a sleepover after a soccer match. It was him and a few other boys. While the other boys were sleeping, he poured nail polish remover on the parents’ bed and set it on fire. They were still in it.” She stabbed her straw into the ice in her soda. “How does a five-year-old even know how to do that?” she said, giving a humorless laugh.
“And the police didn’t step in?” Thomas asked.
“The man didn’t press charges because he only had a small burn on his leg, and he obviously didn’t want the cops to get a look at the bruises on his son. I lucked out, I guess.”
Thomas sighed. “The arson is concerning, but it’s encouraging that he did it in retaliation for injuries inflicted on another person. Any abuse of animals? Bed wetting?”
Calliope just shook her head again, taking a sip of her Diet Coke before wrinkling her nose. “He’s not a bad kid. He just sometimes does bad things. But there’s just—” She gave a huge sigh. “There’s just something missing in him. I don’t want to lock him away. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. There’s no place to put him. They don’t want to help a child before they do something violent. Only after.”
“What specifically are you asking of me, Calliope?”
She looked him directly in the eye. “Help me teach my son how to be a person, a productive member of society. I can’t pay you, but I have skills that might be beneficial to you, considering what you do.”
What he did… To the rest of the world, he was just another one-percenter with a charitable foundation used as some kind of tax write-off. They were a little easier on him because of his tragic past and the fact that he’d adopted seven children, but there were whispers about that as well. He shook the thoughts away.
“Skills?” he asked.
“I’m a hacker. A good one. Hell, a great one. Possibly even the greatest ever. I’ve never met a system I couldn’t hack. I have a day job, but it’s a solitary job. Nobody watches me. I can be at your beck and call. Just help me. Please.”
Calliope clearly wasn’t somebody accustomed to asking for help. She looked like she’d rather have a root canal than beg a rich stranger to save her son, but there she was, doing it anyway.
Thomas could use somebody like her. There was no doubt about that, but how did he teach somebody to curb impulses in their child that he blatantly encouraged in his own? “And if I can’t help you?”
Calliope stared at him with dull eyes. “Then, at some point, my son is going to snap and kill somebody and the blood will be on both our hands.”
It was impolite to stare. It was something Dimitri’s mother had drilled into his head from the time he was little. Don’t stare. Don’t obsess. Don’t let people see who—no, not who, but what—you really are. Normal people didn’t like that, didn’t find his stalkerish tendencies romantic or flattering.
The thing was, Dimitri had never obsessed over anybody but Arlo, had seen nobody but Arlo from the moment he’d dragged his mat next to Dimitri’s in Mrs. Faison’s preschool class and confessed he was afraid of the dark. Dimitri had assured him that he was afraid of nothing and that had reassured Arlo enough to fall asleep.
Arlo didn’t remember that, and he didn’t remember Dimitri. After Dimitri had set Arlo’s parents’ bed on fire, his mother had moved them away, away from prying eyes and away from Arlo. But Dimitri had found his way back. The moment he’d gotten his license, he’d learned where Arlo was, what he was doing, and had found a way to make their paths meet again.
Not that Arlo knew any of that. As far as he knew, he and Dimitri were just friends due to circumstance. They both needed money, so they both worked at the campus coffee shop, which was where Dimitri now sat, taking his thirty minute break with a group of people he called friends. Well, who called him a friend. Truthfully, he wouldn’t care if a hole opened up and swallowed them up right in the middle of Hallowed Grounds.
“You’re going, right, Dimi?”
Perfectly manicured fingers appeared, snapping an inch from his face. Dimitri dragged his gaze from the boy behind the counter to stare blankly at the blonde-haired girl before him. “What?”
Mandy rolled her eyes. “You never listen to me.”
“To be fair, you never stop talking,” Jason said. “It’s hard to keep up.”