Free Psychopath by Keith Ablow Page A

win the game here — were you selling drugs or not?"
    "No," Billy said.
    "Using them?" Clevenger asked.
    "You can drug-test me right now," Billy said.  "And any time you want after that."
    Clevenger looked into Billy’s eyes, to detect any duplicity there, but Billy’s gaze was as impenetrable as the space he had occupied on the Auden Prep defensive line.  "Okay," Clevenger said.  "I’ll make some phone calls tomorrow morning, and we’ll see whether Chelsea High School is an option.  That is, if you want me to."
    "I do," Billy said.  "I want to stay in school."
    "Good.  And I’ll take you up on that offer about the drug testing.  Once a week."
    "Fine," Billy said.
    Clevenger put the truck into gear, started out of the parking lot.
    "I know you’re not proud of me," Billy said.
    Those words cut through the last layer of Clevenger’s tough love to the soft stuff underneath.  He reached out and cupped his fingers around the back of Billy’s neck.  "It’s not that I’m not..."
    "You will be, though," Billy said.  "You’ll see.  Even though things look bad right now?  You will be."

f i v e
     
    Morning, February 22, 2003
    En Route to Quantico, Virginia
     
    Clevenger had put his meeting with the FBI off a day in order to settle Billy down and to visit with his friend Brian Coughlin, the superintendent of schools in Chelsea.  Now, headed to Quantico in the Crown Victoria sedan Agent Kane Warner had sent to pick him up at National Airport, he was thinking he should have canceled altogether and just stayed home.  Because all of a sudden leaving Billy alone in Chelsea felt risky.  And signing on with the FBI would mean leaving him alone a whole lot more.
    At least Coughlin had come through for them.  Clevenger had met with him the night before at Floramo’s, a steak joint near Chelsea High, and hammered out a plan for Billy to continue his education starting the fourth quarter, in April.  To keep him off the streets until then, he’d gotten him a job with Peter Fitzgerald, the owner of the shipyard down the street.  And to keep him off drugs, he’d scheduled him for drug screens twice a week at the Massachusetts General Hospital satellite clinic in Chelsea.
    He glanced at the dashboard clock of the Crown Victoria:  8:26 A.M.    Just a few more miles to Quantico.  He wondered whether Billy had dragged himself out of bed yet, wondered what the chances were he’d get himself to the first of those drug screens by nine, like they’d agreed.
    He thought of calling to make sure Billy was on his way.  But he worried that that kind of hand-holding would sap his will.
    The sedan slowed as it drove through the gates of the FBI Academy, which shared a sprawling campus with the United States Marine Corp and the Drug Enforcement Agency.
    The nerve center of the Academy was an interconnected network of nondescript buildings that looked like an overgrown corporation.  Recruits in dark blue sweat suits, with the FBI insignia emblazoned in gold across their chests, jogged along the road leading to it. Marines with high-powered rifles stood at every intersection.  Helicopter blades beat the air.  A palpable sense of mission, grandeur, and secrecy permeated the place.
    Clevenger felt two things, at odds with one another.  The first was suspicion.  He distrusted institutions, even law enforcement institutions, because their very size and structure could stifle the three things he valued most in the world:  courage, creativity, and compassion.  Those were three qualities a person needed to find inside him or herself, sometimes searching his or her soul for decades before finding them — if ever.  Being part of an organization made the search harder, not easier.  A failure of courage or creativity or compassion could be shared by the group, allowing each member to escape the full measure of guilt that ought to derive from things like cowardice or cruelty.
    But the second feeling Quantico inspired in