Page 109 of Psychopath

Cleo gestured to Quinn. “He already told us. We left our metals in the van.”

“Brilliant.”

Doctor Hart scribbled on his clipboard and made his way over to Quinn.

He gestured to the door. “Right, we’re in that room.”

“You okay, Harris?” Quinn asked.

“This is ten times more comfortable than those prison beds.”

Quinn snorted and followed the doctor and two of the nurses into another room. Cleo and Simon stayed with Harris and Gemma, who still eyed Harris warily.

“Here we are,” the doctor said, gesturing Quinn towards a chair in the adjacent room. There was a long desk full of monitors and other machinery. It was dark compared to the room Harris was in, full of blinking lights and noisy fans.

“You should be able to talk to Harris through that microphone,” he pointed to it, “and you’ll be able to see him on this screen once he’s in the scanner.”

Doctor Hart pressed on his own microphone. “Gemma is going to put a cannula in your arm and inject a small amount of contrast media.”

“Contrast media?” Quinn asked.

“It’s like dye. It helps us see any abnormalities in brain function.”

Quinn lifted his laptop onto the desk and opened it up, then attached a wire from his laptop to the one on the table. “I’ll be ready in a few minutes,” he told Harris.

“Take your time,” Harris replied.

There were four parts of the brain Quinn was interested in. The Amygdala, Prefrontal cortex, Paralimbic structures and the Ventral striatum. They were the areas of the brain that often set apart the ‘psychopaths’ from the norm.

Quinn nodded to Doctor Hart once he was ready to begin, then spoke into the microphone. “This will take around an hour. There are a few experiments for you to do. Image and sound based and word association.”

“Understood, Doctor Quinn.”

Quinn watched through the window as Gemma finished up, then Doctor Hart shot him a wary smile. Harris’s bed began to move into the white cylinder, and Harris whistled the Star Trek theme beneath his breath.

“I’m ready when you are,” Doctor Hart said.

Quinn took a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”

Firstly, they recorded Harris’s brain activity while he lay still, unstimulated by any outside source. Areas of his brain lit up, and immediately, Doctor Hart drew his cursor over the frontal lobes.

“What is it?” Quinn asked.

“I can already see an abnormality here. It’s active, but not as much as we’d expect. We usually see this kind of low output in patients who have had some kind of blunt force trauma.”

Quinn nodded. “Are we ready to begin the experiments?”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

Quinn pressed down on the microphone. “You good, Harris?”

“I’m good.”

“On the screen in front of you, I’m going to flash up some images. You don’t need to say anything, just watch.”

“Understood.”

Quinn clicked play on the slideshow. The images started off mundane enough but became violent, triggering. Doctor Hart frowned as he watched the brain activity. He shuddered when he glanced at Quinn’s laptop and the disturbing images that popped up one by one.

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