Mind Games

by Hilary Norman

  The actual weapon, he said in strict confidence, had not yet been found, but Marie and Arnold had both been slain with a fine, acutely sharp blade that the ME had immediately suspected of being some kind of scalpel. A search of the house on Pine Tree Drive had subsequently yielded an old, hand-stitched, purpose-made leather pouch containing an equally old and quite valuable set of hallmarked solid silver surgical instruments, each in its own separate stitched narrow compartment – with one compartment empty. According to Frances Dean, the instruments were a family heirloom left to Cathy by her late father, Marie’s first husband.

  ‘Was he a surgeon?’ Grace asked.

  ‘A physician,’ Becket answered, ‘but his father was a surgeon.’

  ‘So if the missing scalpel was the weapon,’ she mused, ‘the murderer might have known about the pouch?’

  ‘It’s a possibility. The house wasn’t ransacked. We don’t feel there was anything random about the killings.’

  ‘But you said there was a break-in?’ Becket had said something earlier on the telephone about a forced window at the rear of the house.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said now.

  Grace looked across the desk, querying.

  ‘That was how it looked.’

  ‘So what’s changed?’ She saw indecision in his expression. ‘Is this information you can’t share with me?’ She gave him a second or two. ‘I do understand, detective, but you must realize that confidentiality gets a pretty high rating in my line of work, too.’

  Becket studied her for a moment before making up his mind. ‘The crime-scene people think the window may have been broken from inside the house.’

  Grace waited again. He offered nothing more, but the implication seemed perfectly clear to her.

  ‘You think someone wanted it to look as if it was broken from outside?’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ he said again. ‘Though if that was the intent, they did a poor job.’

  ‘Mightn’t it have been broken before?’ Grace asked. ‘In the past?’

  ‘It might,’ he said. ‘It might also be unconnected.’

  ‘What does the housekeeper say?’

  ‘Mrs del Fuego says she has no knowledge of the window being broken before Thursday, but she can’t be sure because it’s not a room she went into every day.’

  Grace thought about Anita del Fuego and the impact of coming suddenly upon that kind of mayhem. ‘How’s she doing?’

  ‘Coping,’ Becket said.

  ‘That’s a word I mistrust,’ Grace said. ‘I hear it all the time.’

  ‘Still, coping’s what people do, isn’t it?’ the detective asked her. ‘They cope – they get by. They survive.’

  ‘Of course.’ She gave a small grimace. ‘They also bottle up nightmares, wall themselves up.’

  ‘Storing up problems for the future,’ he said.

  They were both silent for a moment.

  ‘Cathy looks like she’s coping,’ Grace said, ‘but we both know she isn’t. She can’t be. It isn’t possible.’ She noticed suddenly that Becket was looking at her intently, and she bristled slightly. ‘Do I have a smudge on my face?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He paused. ‘It’s just the similarity.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Between you and Cathy Robbins.’ He saw her startled expression. ‘You’re really quite alike, physically, Dr Lucca.’

  ‘Are we?’ Grace said coolly. ‘I didn’t notice. Looks were not uppermost in my mind when I was talking to Cathy.’

  ‘No, I don’t imagine they were,’ Becket said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Grace had learned the tough way, as had many of her professional contemporaries, to slap down references to her appearance by colleagues, male or female. Her own blue eyes and straight blonde hair were certainly irrelevant here, yet Cathy’s fairness and fragility were clear in her mind; and with them, overriding the youthful femininity, the absence of character-defining features that had troubled Grace briefly when she’d met the teenager. She knew from photographs that her own face, even as a young child, had already testified to her personality, and it had taken her years of practice to learn to mask private feelings or reactions that were better kept within. Cathy Robbins’ face was a little like a poorly executed portrait; pretty but too blank. Grace thought it might be symptomatic of the effects of her desolation, like an empty wasteland left by a bomb strike, but it was much too soon to be sure of that.

  ‘The window,’ she said abruptly, bringing herself back to the police findings. ‘Do you really think it might be an inside job?’

  ‘We have to consider it.’ Becket was careful again.

  ‘The housekeeper?’

  ‘With her mother and children until she left for work. We’re checking.’

  ‘Who else has keys to the house?’

  ‘The aunt – Mrs Dean.’

  Grace was sceptical. ‘Marie Robbins’ sister?’

  ‘She knew about the surgical instruments,’ Becket said.

  Grace thought about the bereft woman. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Becket waited a moment. ‘What about the girl?’ he asked, quietly.

  Grace’s head went up sharply. ‘What about her?’

  ‘What were your first impressions of her? Generally.’

  The surge of anger she felt startled Grace. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘No way.’

  ‘It’s another possibility,’ Becket said, remaining quiet. ‘The instruments belong to her.’

  ‘Only because they were left to her.’ Grace reminded herself that it was obvious that Cathy would need to be ruled out as a suspect, and that the detective was just doing his job. ‘If I’m any judge,’ she said, trying to stay calm, ‘Cathy’s involvement is purely as victim, nothing more sinister.’ There was a knot tightening in her stomach. ‘She’s a traumatized, grieving adolescent, Detective Becket, not a killer.’

  ‘Do you know how many killings are attributed to fourteen-year-old girls in this country these days, especially stabbings?’ Becket wasn’t scoring points. He looked the way he felt. Sad. Sick at heart.

  Anger and dismay gave way to sudden suspicion. ‘When did you learn about the window?’ Grace enquired.

  Becket understood her meaning instantly. ‘After I asked you to meet with Cathy, Dr Lucca.’

  Grace had no choice but to accept what he said, but felt compelled to go on in the teenager’s defence. ‘She’s very fragile.’

  ‘Emotionally, of course.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I noticed a number of school trophies in the house. For running.’ The detective paused. ‘Not that physical strength necessarily played a great part in these killings. Marie and Arnold Robbins both took sleeping tablets before they retired on Thursday night – they’d have been in no condition to fight.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Grace tried not to picture the possible scene.

  ‘If it’s any consolation,’ Becket told her, ‘my own instincts are with yours.’

  ‘You don’t believe Cathy did it either.’

  Becket shrugged. ‘One of my problems is I never want to suspect a young person – especially not a kid as patently vulnerable as this. But you must have come across your share of violent adolescents, doctor – you know as well as I do that kids can kill.’

  ‘Of course I know,’ Grace said, more heatedly than she meant to. ‘On the streets, with knives and guns and broken bottles and stolen cars.’ She fought to sound logical. ‘But with a scalpel? Have you ever come across a fourteen-year-old girl who’s taken a surgical instrument and sliced her parents’ throats?’ She looked across at the detective, trying to read him again, to imagine the paternal influences of David Becket, wise, kindly paediatrician, on this powerful-looking street cop. ‘What does your father say about this?’

  ‘We haven’t talked since Cathy was discharged from the hospital, but I’m sure if he were here listening, he’d be in complete agreement with you.’ Becket looked around the room, which had, for the moment, emptied out. His
face was very grim. ‘But then, the idea of the child-woman parent killer isn’t an image my father would find easy to conjure up.’

  They were both silent again for a moment. A telephone rang on another desk, then stopped.

  ‘You said you haven’t found the weapon yet?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Was there any physical evidence taken from Cathy?’

  ‘Sure. But given the circumstances, I wouldn’t expect to find anything either way. They were parents and child – prints, fibres, hairs, skin traces would have been all over each other, all over the house.’

  ‘And she must have been covered with their blood,’ Grace said quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ Becket said.

  Grace went home, fed Harry, made herself a bowl of pasta and sat in front of the TV, staring at, but not really seeing, what was on the screen.

  There was one thing she did keep on seeing, in her mind’s eye, over and over again, a small, nagging, trivial thing like a smudge of dirt on a pair of sunglasses that only went away completely when one got around to cleaning the lens.

  The Band-Aid on Cathy Robbins’ arm.

  It hadn’t just come back to Grace since getting home. She’d thought about it more than once during her meeting with Becket, had wanted to ask if he knew what lay beneath the sticking plaster – had wanted the assurance that it was not a cut that might have been inflicted with a scalpel. But the fact was she hadn’t dared ask.

  Which seemed to her now to indicate that she was taking sides. Which was bad news, unprofessional news under the circumstances. She was not, after all, even Cathy’s psychologist. Neither the girl nor her aunt had approached her – the introduction had been effected unofficially by a third party.

  Yet by not asking Detective Becket about that Band-Aid, Grace knew she was already withholding the seedling of a suspicion.

  Why? The answer was simple.

  Because Cathy Robbins had touched her.

  Which meant that Grace was going to have to be careful. Stand back a little.

  Becket had said that she and Cathy were physically alike. Grace wondered now if she herself had, perhaps subconsciously, noted a resemblance between the teenager and her own Nordic-rooted looks inherited from her mother. She wondered if that superficial link had perhaps evoked echoes of her own troubled childhood; wondered if all that had, somehow, impacted on her in some way, perhaps even tilting her objectivity a little.

  Surely not. She hoped not.

  But a small warning voice in her mind was already making her wish that Becket’s father had not suggested his son call her. That she had never heard of Cathy Robbins.

  Chapter Six

  MONDAY, APRIL 6, 1998

  It was past midnight when Sam got back to his South Beach home a few short blocks from the police department – the close-to-miraculous apartment he’d managed to acquire four years earlier in a deal that had raised a few eyebrows at work, but which no one had ever suggested was anything other than the kind of dumb luck any one of them might have hoped for.

  The building he lived in was a pink-and-white curvy Art Deco guest house on Collins Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Streets. Sam had passed it often enough without a second glance since joining the department, but his first close encounter had come about when an old college friend now living in New York City had taken a room there. Sam had paid a visit and gotten into conversation with the owner, a guy who’d known better times. It seemed the roof was in bad shape and the whole top floor, and the only real question was whether he was going to go under financially before the authorities closed him down. Sam had fallen in love with the place, and had made a deal whereby he had agreed to take care of the renovations and make the building passable for the inspectors, provided the whole floor – along with the roof – became his private, permanent home.

  Taking an ice-cold beer and the still-hot dish of conch-filled tamale he’d picked up on the way back, Sam headed up to the roof now. It was still not much more than a small square of concrete, cluttered by a cooling tank, satellite dish and pipes, yet it was his favourite place for hanging out and unwinding at night. Lit by glints of neon and starlight, removed from the tourist hustle that spread out nightly from Ocean Drive, it was also his number one rehearsal venue. A borderline opera fanatic, Sam possessed a rich enough baritone to get him regular leading roles with S-BOP – the South Beach Opera – a local group of more than adequately gifted enthusiasts. Any day now, the guys were going to be holding auditions for their summer production of Il Trovatore, and Sam was just itching to get his teeth into the part of the Count di Luna – always providing, of course, that the others were prepared to go on tolerating his frequent no-shows. It was a measure of their respect for his voice and his passion, he supposed, that they had put up with an unreliable black cop singing traditionally white roles for so long – that, and the weird-but-true fact that Sam knew most of the baritone roles written by Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, Wagner and even Gounod, off by heart – even weirder given that the only foreign language he actually spoke with any fluency was Spanish.

  He was taking his first bite of tamale when his phone rang. He could hear it through the open trapdoor that led from the fire stairs to the roof.

  It rang four times before his machine picked up – he already knew that it wasn’t likely to be work, because his pager was still in his pocket. A minute later it rang again, for two rings this time, then stopped. And began again.

  Ma was the only person who did that, the only person who knew that if Sam was there – even if he was dead on or off his feet, or up on the roof, or in the shower or, if he was damned lucky, in bed with a lady (when had that last happened, by the way?) – her simply coded rings would drag him to the phone sure as a hand on his collar.

  He looked at the tamale and at the beer, then tilted up his face and grabbed a swift fix of Miami night sky, determined to relax.

  Why in hell was his mother calling after midnight?

  Sam was up on his feet and down the stairs and back in his living room in about five seconds flat. He played back the last message.

  ‘It’s after midnight, Samuel Becket, so where are you?’

  Accusing, like only Judy Becket knew how to be. Her adopted son might be thirty-four years old, six foot three and a police detective, but she still figured she ought to be informed of his whereabouts after the witching hour.

  ‘This is your mother.’

  Sam grinned at the machine.

  ‘If you get home anytime before three, call me. Don’t worry about waking me because I can’t sleep, and don’t worry about waking your father because I turned off the bell in our room.’

  Dad hated her doing that in case a patient needed him.

  ‘And don’t worry – I’ll turn it on again when I go to bed.’

  Meaningful pause.

  ‘Which I won’t do till I hear from you.’

  The message ended. Newly alarmed, Sam punched out the number. Judy Becket picked up on the first ring.

  ‘Ma? What’s wrong?’

  ‘What should be wrong?’ Cool as a cucumber.

  ‘Ma, you just left a message saying—’

  ‘So you were there,’ she pounced on him.

  ‘I just got in,’ Sam defended.

  ‘Very convenient.’

  ‘Ma, what’s the matter? Telling me to call any time up till three in the morning – you almost gave me a heart attack.’ He paused. ‘Is Dad all right?’

  ‘Your father’s fine – it’s me you should be worried about.’

  ‘Why? Ma, why?’

  ‘Making me stay up half the night.’

  Sam’s worry dissipated instantly. ‘What do you want, Ma?’

  ‘I need to know about Friday.’

  ‘Friday?’ He was momentarily confused. The coming weekend was Easter, which meant they were four days from Good Friday, but liberal as his mother was, he felt sure she wasn’t referring to that. Yet in the more than fifteen years since he’d left home,
during which time he’d gotten married, become a father and gotten divorced, he couldn’t recall the Jewish Sabbath ever being a big issue with his parents.

  ‘You’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Apparently. What’s happening on Friday?’

  ‘Just a little thing like Passover,’ Judy said, ‘nothing important.’

  Sam winced. ‘Seder night.’

  ‘Bingo,’ his mother said. ‘Give the boy a prize.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can make it Friday.’ He steeled himself.

  ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’ Sardonic.

  ‘You know how it is, Ma.’

  ‘I should do by now.’ A pause. ‘And I wouldn’t be making such a fuss if it mightn’t be the last chance for us all to get together before Saul’s barmitzvah.’

  ‘Saul’s barmitzvah’s almost a month away, Ma.’

  ‘But he’s reading the Four Questions on Friday night.’

  ‘He always reads the Four Questions.’

  ‘This is different,’ Judy Becket insisted. ‘He wants you to be here to hear him, give him confidence.’

  ‘Saul has plenty of confidence.’

  ‘You haven’t seen him lately. He’s nervous, Sam.’

  ‘That’s normal, Ma. Everyone gets nervous before their barmitzvah.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘Sure I did.’

  ‘So will you come?’

  She always did that to him, let him think she’d moved away from a topic, then veered suddenly back, nailing him.

  ‘I’ll try, Ma.’

  ‘You know how important Pesach is to your father.’ Another tack.

  ‘Of course I know,’ Sam said, fighting to stay patient, ‘but I’m dealing with a double homicide right now, and a young girl’s been orphaned, and Dad knows all about her, just ask him – so chances are I may not get to you till late on Friday.’

  ‘Can’t you —?’

  It was time to hang tough, so he rode straight over her. ‘But I’ll try to make it in time for the after-dinner singing, okay?’ He paused, taking in the disapproving silence. ‘Okay, Ma?’