The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott Read Free Book Online

two days before she disappeared. According to Anthony, Nina thought Sean was a psychopath.
    On September 3, 2006, Nina dropped the children with Hans for the weekend and was never seen or heard from again. Hans’ father suggested she was probably hiding in Russia. Two weeks later the police found a copy of
Homicide
by David Simon in Hans’ car. 5 Simon, who also created the TV show
The Wire,
says there are two types of murder cases, the dunkers and the whodunits. The dunkers are slam-dunks, involving, say, a man covered in blood standing over a body saying, “Yeah, I killed him. He hit me first.” The dunkers are easy. The whodunits take time. You have to interview people, gather evidence. And even when you do everything right there’s all that space between the arrest and the trial, so much opportunity, so easy for the killer to get away. Simon says a suspect should never talk to the police. He also says that a murder is rarely solved without a body. Without a body you have to first prove the person is dead.
    When I arrive at the court I meet Henry Lee from the
San Francisco Chronicle.
He’s alone on a bench in the hallway trying to get reception for a tiny battery-powered transistor television. Henry’s a veteran crime reporter and his byline accompanies many of the major cases in the Bay Area. I ask what he thinks of Sean’s confession and how he thinks it will impact the case. He can’t write about Sean’s confession because of a gag order. Henry says the confession is “fantastical.” He says, “People confess to murders they didn’t commit all the time.”
    It’s just preliminary hearings. A judge has to be assigned, a jury selected. The prosecution and the defense have to argue over what evidence will be admissible.
    I watch the public attorneys in their wrinkled suits. They look just like the men and women I saw periodically in my youth introducing themselves as my guardian
ad litem.
Or filling out the forms admitting me into the mental hospital. Or picking me up from the group home I lived in deep on the South Side, driving me along Lake Shore Drive, past the giant steel mountains of downtown, and leaving me at the next group home on the North Side. They were there when my friend and protector was removed and placed in drug rehab. They were there for twice-yearly progress meetings on the West Side where I was left with an ashtray and a stack of magazines while they decided what would happen to me next. They were there when my father was found guilty of abuse and neglect, and all the other times. They always looked like they hadn’t showered or shaved or brushed their hair. Their shirts were misbuttoned, often untucked. But they always had buttons on their shirts. They always had collars. And they drove small, messy cars.
    These are the people in the court, along with the bailiffs, the judge with a face like a teddy bear, the prisoners off to one side of the room, another box for medium and maximum security prisoners, and the friends and families sitting in various shades of sweat-suit cotton on the dark wood seats. It’s crowded but orderly. People know each other. There’s a lot of smiling and nodding and shuffling of papers, while decisions are handed down, permanently altering people’s lives. When I was young, my father warned me about getting caught in the gears of the system. The system, he said, would not let go once you were inside. The machine would grind you to dust.
    But it happened anyway and I’m still alive.
    In pre-trial motions Hans waives his right to a speedy trial. His lawyer has another murder to litigate. There’s no date for seating a jury. I think about this trial, and where it’s going to go. Will it grind Hans to dust or will he emerge to complete his next file system? A computer can’t run without a file system. It wouldn’t be able to find anything. The hard drive would be like a library with a billion unshelved books and no card catalog. The county clerk, tapping a