Split

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Authors: Tara Moss
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specials, and his Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL) was widely accepted as the diagnostic tool for psychopaths. Gosper was all too aware of those facts. And of course there was his popular book, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us . He certainly couldn’t forget that. But even so, Gosper found Hare’s apparent guru status a bit hard to take.
    In his own mind he was quite convinced that his secret animosity had nothing to do with the multiple rejection slips he had received for his own manuscript.
    Perhaps one of Dr Hare’s publishers would be attending the conference?
    With his arms folded, Gosper sat back and observed the slowly filling room. A clique of uniformed police officers filed in and eschewed the name tags offered at the entrance. They were from the local Vancouver PD, and they moved in a single pack towards the long tables of Danishes and choc-chip muffins. Upon noticing that the food was still covered with plastic wrap they went for the coffee and endedup hovering around the coffee dispensers with empty styrofoam cups in their hands. Their caffeine fix wasn’t ready yet. They would most likely have to wait until nine.
    A number of students came in, dressed in jeans and running shoes, and struck up conversations with the graduates who were working as volunteers giving out the name tags and handouts. A couple of men, who Gosper guessed were plain-clothes cops or Feds, leaned against the long row of coat racks at the back of the room and talked with animated gestures.
    As the various attendees chose their seats, an obvious pattern emerged. Eager students and friends of the speakers sat up front in small groupings, and the police and RCMP sat along the back rows in segregated camps. Psych students, with their notebooks and knapsacks, filled up the middle rows.
    A young man in casual pants and a dress shirt walked over and sat a couple of seats away from Professor Gosper. Gosper noted that he had brought his own coffee in a Starbucks’ cup.
    The big room was now about half full and people were still arriving. There were students and cops, but still no one who looked like a publisher. The speakers hadn’t arrived yet, either. Gosper kept watching.
    At around eight-fifty, a female student walked in who caught his attention. She was quite striking and tall, and a number of other males in the room took the time to glance in her direction before resuming theirconversations. She didn’t seem to notice. She wore her blonde hair straight and past the shoulders, and was dressed in black pants and boots and a turtleneck sweater the colour of English toffee. No jewellery. Something about her dress sense, or the quality of her clothes, set her apart from the typical student.
    Gosper knew her. Makedde Vanderwall. And a strange name at that, he thought. He had often wondered where someone got a Christian name like “Makedde” from. Was it Irish? Welsh? She looked Scandinavian but he didn’t know of any Scandinavian names like hers. In fact, the closest name he had ever come across was the Japanese name “Makaira”, which meant happy. Her last name—Vanderwall—was, of course, pure Dutch.
    Professor Gosper also knew that she was bright and creative; that she sometimes worked as a fashion model; that her Masters was in Forensic Psychology and that she was currently working on her PhD thesis on the subject of the variables affecting the reliability of eyewitness testimony. He knew that she had recently taken a great interest in the area of psychopathy, and he was sure she would be attending the conference today.
    Makedde had enrolled in Professor Gosper’s Psych 203 Introduction to Personality and Social Psychology course in her second year, but it was only recently that he had focused on her. Unlike some of the other people around the campus, he was not interested inher obvious physical qualities. His interest was purely professional. He had reason to believe that she would make a very

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