‘We can go out on the deck if you prefer,’ she told the teenager, ‘but this is more comfortable.’
‘This is fine,’ Cathy agreed. ‘And no bugs.’
They sat on a pair of shabby old cane chairs, made bright and welcoming by blue and white cushions, the cane itself scuffed and bowed by scores of restless young bodies and feet and all the more homely for the abuse. Harry, having investigated the new visitor and been duly ruffled and scratched between the ears, came and lay down, as usual, at his mistress’s feet.
‘He’s a cool dog,’ Cathy said.
‘Yes, he is.’
‘I’ve never had a dog.’
‘Would you have liked one?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I guess.’ She paused. ‘I can’t imagine Aunt Frances having a dog in her place.’
Grace smiled. ‘It is immaculate.’
They sat awhile. Cathy drank some juice and nibbled at a cookie. A crumb fell to the side of her chair. Harry stood up, went over and licked it up. Cathy looked to Grace for assent, then dropped the rest of the cookie. Harry-the-Hoover made short work of it, then lay down beside Cathy.
‘You’re in,’ Grace said.
‘What kind of dog is he?’ Cathy asked.
‘A West Highland Terrier.’ Grace paused. ‘So, is there something you’d like to talk about, Cathy?’ Starting out was difficult with many patients, but with children it tended to be tougher, given that none of them ever saw her for the first time entirely of their own volition.
‘I don’t know,’ Cathy said.
‘How are you feeling?’
She shrugged. ‘Oh, you know.’
‘Not really.’
‘How would you feel?’
‘I don’t know,’ Grace said.
‘If your parents were murdered, and you found their bodies,’ Cathy responded with a degree of hostility, ‘how would you feel?’
It seemed a perfectly normal reaction to Grace. She’d often felt, when she asked those first awkward questions in her effort to start the ball rolling, that she sounded too much like those news reporters who badgered people after hideous tragedies.
She decided to answer honestly. ‘I don’t get along with my parents.’
‘Oh.’ Cathy digested that. ‘Would that make it better or worse?’
Grace shook her head. ‘Hard to say.’ She paused. ‘Hope I never find out.’
‘Me, too,’ Cathy said.
They sat quietly for another minute.
‘I got on great with Mom and Arnie.’ Cathy’s voice was softer.
‘I’m glad,’ Grace said.
‘Me, too,’ Cathy said again.
Grace let her take her time. Her head was down, so it was impossible to see her eyes, but she was chewing her lower lip.
‘I can’t believe it’s happened,’ she said after a few moments. ‘I mean, I was there – I saw them.’ She stopped again and swallowed hard. ‘I keep waiting for them to come and get me from Aunt Frances’ place. I hear cars stopping outside, and I go to the window, and I keep expecting to see my mom.’ She looked up, and her eyes were bright with tears.
Grace said nothing, just pulled out a bunch of tissues from the box on the cane table between them, and gave them to her. A shrink couldn’t function without a clock and a box of Kleenex, one of her first tutors had told her. Grace had never found it easy to follow the timer on the table routine; she understood its use, but personally found it offensive and intrusive. Which didn’t mean, of course, that she didn’t keep a close eye on time when with a patient. Time control had many functions, after all, one of them being that the end of a session – and the note-making that followed it – was supposed to spell a temporary end to her own involvement in a patient’s world. Healthy and essential and undoubtedly sensible, Grace accepted, but as was the case for many of her colleagues, that ending was often an illusion for her.
‘Do you want to talk about your mother, Cathy?’
Cathy shook her head.
‘It might help,’ Grace said.
‘Might it?’ The teenager sounded doubtful.
‘It helps some people.’
‘I’m not going to forget Mom,’ Cathy said.
‘I’m sure you won’t,’
‘Or Arnie.’
‘He was your adopted father, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, he was.’ Cathy paused. ‘I called him Arnie because —’
Grace waited a moment before prompting. ‘Because?’
Cathy licked her lips. ‘Because I didn’t want to call him Dad or anything, because of my first father.’
‘Your first father died, too, didn’t he?’
Cathy nodded. ‘A long time ago.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Five.’
‘Do you remember him?’
‘Not really.’
Grace watched her. ‘You mentioned flashbacks, Cathy.’
She shifted in her chair uneasily.
‘Are you uncomfortable talking about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘We don’t have to, if you don’t want to.’
‘Okay.’
‘Maybe another time.’
‘Maybe.’
Cathy picked up her glass of juice, and Harry, down by her side, sat up, poised for action if she took another cookie.
‘Can I give him some more?’ she asked.
‘So long as you have some too.’
Grace watched Cathy break up a Pepperidge Farm Brownie, eat one small fragment, then pass the rest to Harry a piece at a time. She was gentle with him, didn’t tease him with it. Grace always paid attention to the way young people were around animals.
‘Are you finding it hard to eat?’ she asked, after a while.
‘A little, I guess.’
‘It’s a normal reaction,’ Grace said, ‘though some people react to grief by eating nonstop.’
‘Aunt Frances keeps telling me I’m going to get anorexic.’ Cathy pulled a disparaging face. ‘But she’s not eating any more than I am.’
‘You should both stick to easy things. I always find sandwiches are easier than real food when I’m churned up.’
Cathy seemed about to speak, then hesitated.
‘What did you want to say?’ Grace asked.
‘You said – yesterday, when we were out walking . . . You said you had flashes, too.’ Cathy paused. ‘You said you called them snapshots.’
‘Because that’s the way they seem to me.’
Cathy was wary, feeling her way. ‘Did something bad happen to you, Grace? Is that why you get them?’
She answered steadily. ‘My childhood wasn’t easy. I’m okay now, but I guess we all carry our past around with us in different ways.’
‘I hate mine,’ Cathy said. ‘My flashes, I mean.’
Grace noted the swift clarification, made lest she thought Cathy might be referring to her own childhood. She’d mentioned yesterday that she’d suffered from them for years. That, combined with what Frances Dean had said about her past, made Grace itch to try taking her back, but she knew she was going to have to take this slowly. Cathy Robbins wanted to talk, that much she was pretty certain about, but it was going to have to be in her own time.
‘The police came to my aunt’s house again,’ she said, suddenly.
That startled Grace. ‘When?’ Becket hadn’t said anything yesterday about plans to go back.
‘This morning,’ Cathy answered.
‘What did they want?’
‘They asked us a lot of questions.’ Cathy paused. ‘Aunt Frances got real upset. She told them to leave me alone.’
‘You aunt wants to protect you.’
‘I know. Detective Becket said I could go, but I heard Aunt Frances tell him it was monstrous for them to be treating me like a suspect.’ Cathy looked down at Harry, fondled his ears. ‘I guess I shouldn’t have been listening.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ Grace told her. ‘I don’t like it when people talk about me behind
my back.’
Cathy looked back up at her again. ‘You don’t think they do suspect me, do you, Grace?’ Her voice was deceptively soft, but the plea was clear behind her eyes. ‘You don’t think anyone thinks I could do something like that, do you?’
‘I doubt it very much.’ Grace was determined to be straight.
‘I didn’t really get why my aunt was so upset,’ Cathy went on. ‘I mean, I thought Detective Becket was being nice, but she just got more and more uptight, you know?’
‘I can understand why she would.’
Silence ruled again. Grace let it go on for a while, mentally drawing a pencil line beneath that topic, before broaching the next. Their hour was ticking by. Despite her reluctance to think too much about time, Grace had learned to tell, without glancing at a watch, how much of a session was left. They still had plenty in hand, but she had in mind to finish early and maybe go out on deck with Cathy and Harry, simply to hang out for a while. She didn’t want to overtax Cathy, didn’t want to put her off coming back. Still, there was one more avenue she wanted to try opening before they stopped.
‘You told me yesterday that you went to a therapist once before.’
‘Yes.’
‘You said you didn’t trust her.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes.’
Cathy hesitated. ‘She taped everything I said.’
‘You didn’t like that.’
‘No.’ She paused. ‘You’re not taping me, are you, Grace?’
‘No, I’m not.’
Cathy eyed the notepad on Grace’s lap. ‘You haven’t written anything down.’
‘I don’t always. Sometimes I like to,’ Grace explained, ‘if there’s something important I’m worried I might forget. But I have a pretty good memory, on the whole. After you go, I might make some notes, and then next time – if you want to come again – you might see me taking a look at what I wrote last time.’ She paused. ‘Is that okay with you?’
‘I guess.’
She seemed to accept what Grace had said, but the uneasiness had crept back in and Grace could sense her starting to put up shutters, knew that by bringing up the subject of her former therapist, she had entered high-risk territory. She decided to veer back to safer ground before suggesting they called it a day.
‘I hope you feel you can trust me, Cathy,’ she said.
‘I hope so, too,’ she answered.
Five minutes later, Frances Dean arrived, earlier than scheduled, seeming edgy and anxious to take her niece away. Grace was frequently left after sessions feeling uncertain of a patient’s – or their parents’ or guardians’ – faith in her, unsure of whether they would, given a choice, actually return for more. It always mattered to her a great deal.
If she was honest with herself, however, she wasn’t sure if she always cared quite as much as she did about Cathy Robbins.
Chapter Nine
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 1998
Sam Becket and Detective Al Martinez stood out in the backyard of a Coconut Grove house a little after noon. It was humid and unpleasant and the air was full of small insects, but Sam was glad to be outside for a while, away from the scent of blood. He wondered, for a moment, why Beatrice Flager, the victim, a fifty-two-year-old divorced psychotherapist, had not put up a lanai or any kind of bug screening – though no amount of insect-proof mesh could have protected her from whoever had pierced her left temple with a fine, sharp weapon of some kind.
‘So what do you think?’ he asked his partner.
‘You’re the main man on this one. What do you think?’ Martinez had a round, kindly face, sharp, dark eyes and wavy hair. A slightly built man who only reached Sam’s shoulder, he was a man of strong opinions, quiet and calm until roused when, once in a while, he turned into a pitbull.
‘Too soon to tell.’
‘I’ll bet the wad it’s the same perp.’ Martinez’s accent was light, but his vocabulary tended to stray from refined to street tough.
‘I’m not a betting man,’ Sam reminded him.
The call from Elliot Sanders, the ME who’d come out to the house on Pine Tree Drive five days earlier, had surprised Sam. First, it was a pure coincidence for the same doc to have taken both cases. Second, if an ME noted a possible connection between cases in separate jurisdictions, the police investigators usually only heard about it after the weekly Dade County medical examiners’ meeting. Even then, if a potential link had been spotted, Sam would have expected to have to wait for the other police department – in this case the City of Miami PD, who policed Coconut Grove – to be ready to share any relevant information with Miami Beach. Dr Sanders, however, was a big, broad man who did his damnedest to see commonsense prevail. He’d seen the similarity to the Robbins’ killings immediately, had seen no point in not alerting the guy in charge of the Miami Beach case, and had convinced the local investigators to let Becket and one colleague drive over to take a look.
Startled and intrigued by the development, Sam and Martinez had wasted no time accepting the offer. It looked, Sanders said, as he’d hinted to Sam on the phone, like another scalpel wound.
‘Think it could be the same weapon?’ Sam asked now, as the ME came out of the house to join him and Martinez.
‘Wouldn’t like to say.’ Sanders mopped his brow with a large handkerchief and lit a cigarette. For a physician he broke way too many health rules, smoking every chance he got, carrying too much weight and drinking too much whisky, but most people who knew him agreed that for a man who spent so much of his life around cadavers, he was a whole lot of fun.
‘Time of death?’ Sam asked.
‘She’s been dead about eight hours, give or take.’ Sanders checked his watch. ‘Sometime around four a.m.’ He fanned himself with a pad of paper. ‘Air’s like soup today. Mind you, it’s not much better in there.’
‘Air-con’s busted.’ Martinez had been nosing around, trying to find out whatever was up for grabs without raising hackles. The victim, he’d learned, had been found by her next-door-neighbour after the second of her two clients for that morning had knocked on her front door to ask if she knew where Flager was. The client, a Cuban teenager, had been questioned and allowed to leave, and the neighbour, in a state of semi-hysteria, was currently back in her own house being nursed through a cup of tea by one of the patrol officers who’d been first on the scene.
‘What else do you have, doc?’ Sam asked the ME.
‘You want to take another look while I tell you?’ Sanders grinned. Sam Becket’s comparative squeamishness with messy corpses was well-known to him and his fellow examiners – though at least in this case there was less blood splashed over the place itself than there had been in the Robbins’ bedroom. There was a short trail of the stuff ending three feet from the couch where Flager’s body lay; probably the blood that had dripped from the blade before it was wiped by the killer. As yet, no trace had been found either of the weapon itself, or of whatever had been used to clean it. There was also no sign of forced entry – the back door having been wide open – and the only apparent property damage was a smashed up computer.
‘Don’t sweat it, Becket,’ Sanders told Sam, ‘we can stay out here.’ He glanced at his notes, though there was nothing in them that wasn’t still at the forefront of his mind. ‘One puncture, clean through the temporal artery.’
‘So someone had to get up real close,’ Martinez said.
‘No sign of a fight,’ Sam added,
‘She’s on the couch,’ Sanders said, ‘so she might have been sleeping.’
‘The TV wasn’t on,’ Sam commented. ‘Most people fall asleep on their couches in front of the TV.’
‘You don’t,’ Martinez pointed out. ‘You’re always zeeing up on your roof.’
‘That’s a beach lounger, not a couch,’ Sam said. ‘Anyway, I aim to fall asleep up there.’ He paused. ‘Maybe she wasn’t alone on the couch.’
‘Possible,’ Sanders agreed. ‘Snuggled up close to someone with a scalpel in thei
r pocket.’
‘If they were dressed,’ Martinez said.
‘She was dressed,’ Sam said.
‘Coulda hidden the scalpel under a cushion,’ Martinez suggested.
‘You’re sure it was a scalpel?’ Sam looked at Sanders.
‘So far as I can tell right now. Certainly a scalpel-like instrument, same as on Pine Tree.’
‘So maybe the same instrument,’ Martinez said. ‘The one that belonged to the Robbins girl.’
By three p.m. activity inside the house had begun to dwindle and Sam knew that Sergeant Rodriguez, his Miami PD counterpart, was unlikely to want him or Martinez around much longer. The technicians had finished dusting, every conceivable photograph had been taken, the body had been thoroughly checked for crucial trace evidence that might have vanished en route to the morgue, and then it had been taken away. The Miami Police team were engaged in examining the psychotherapist’s client files and calling at other houses along the Coconut Grove street – though everyone knew it was unlikely anyone would have heard or seen anything useful at four in the morning. Anyway, the hour aside, with no gunshots and no apparent fight to play with there was less than no hope of finding a witness – after all, a scalpel sliding comparatively smoothly into a possibly sleeping woman’s temple didn’t make a whole lot of noise, and the sound of a computer being smashed wasn’t likely to rouse anyone outside the house.
Martinez found Sam in Flager’s bedroom just after three-thirty. ‘They think the air-con was broken deliberately.’
‘So she’d have to keep her windows open.’ Sam shook his head.
‘Should’ve known better than to open the fuckin’ door,’ Martinez said.
‘Any prints on the air-con unit?’ Sam asked.
‘Not even a smudge.’ Martinez looked at Sam. ‘So what’s the link between the Robbinses and Flager?’
‘We don’t know yet that it’s the same weapon,’ Sam reminded him.
‘Two scalpels in a week?’ Martinez was sceptical.
‘Yeah, I know.’ Sam didn’t believe in coincidences either.
They left Sergeant Rodriguez and his squad sifting through the remnants of Beatrice Flager’s life and death, and drove over to Coral Gables to check on Frances Dean’s and her niece’s whereabouts the previous night.
Mind Games Page 5