Mind Games

by Hilary Norman

  It was four-thirty in the morning, and David Becket was asleep on the couch in his office on West Flagler Street.

  He had spent the evening and earliest part of the morning over at Miami General seeing Margie Fitzsimmons on her final journey, and when Margie had at last passed away a little after two a.m., David had just not felt like doing what he usually most wanted to do – namely going home and slipping between the covers with Judy. His wife was still the best possible person to be with at times like these – and there had been a lot of times like these in his nearly thirty years of practice. But on this occasion, going home and telling Judy (who always woke up when he came home late) that Margie Fitzsimmons was gone, would have meant acknowledging that she had died, and David just hadn’t felt ready to do that quite yet. Maybe because Margie had been an old girlfriend – and the only woman David had slept with after meeting Judy, just a few weeks before he’d woken up to the realization that he’d now found the person with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life. Maybe because he and Margie and Judy had stayed such good friends through the years, and he didn’t want to admit yet that they’d lost her. Or maybe, David had thought, with a tired grin that was half shamefaced, half proud, because one of the last things Margie had said to him before she’d lapsed into her final unconsciousness, was that she’d never ceased getting horny whenever he was around her – and maybe that was how come she knew it was all over, because it was the very first time ever that seeing him hadn’t gotten her all stirred up down below.

  ‘That’s probably it, you old son-of-a-gun,’ he’d said out loud, wryly, at around three a.m., standing up from his desk and stretching his stiff limbs and thinking how welcome the couch looked. He’d been writing up some notes, and he’d called Judy to say he had to go on working a while longer and so she wasn’t to worry about him. ‘You’re just not up to sharing that kind of flattery.’

  That had been when he’d taken off his shoes and unbuttoned his shirt and loosened his belt and lain down on the couch for a nap.

  Which was why he was sound asleep and the office was pitch dark when the door opened at four thirty-five.

  It was the breeze that woke him. The breeze made by the arm as it came down hard through the still air on its way to his chest.

  He wasn’t awake for long.

  Sam had just checked out of the Turtle Motel and was trying to crack his hangover with a cup of black coffee at a diner a half mile down the road, when he thought about checking for messages on his cellular phone and found out what had happened to his father. He didn’t say a single prayer on the flight back to Miami – his brain was too locked down by dread, and anyway, he still hadn’t forgiven the guy upstairs for snatching Sampson from him. He wasn’t fool enough to think that if he’d been home last night instead of getting shit-faced in a bar near Sarasota, his father would have been any safer. But he was coldly, grimly aware that if David died before he got back to see him, he would never forgive himself for as long as he lived.

  David was not dead when Sam got to Miami General, but his mother’s and brother’s faces and body language when he first glimpsed them, sitting waiting for news from the OR, spelled out a bad picture. Saul was crying openly. Judy Becket looked frozen. Sam knew that look – he’d seen it in the mirror on his own face in the hours during which Sampson had been in the ER. His mother had sat with him and Althea as they had waited, had been there when David had come into the waiting room, still wearing his green scrubs, to tell them that their son had died on the table.

  Sam went to his mother, sat on the chair beside her, took both her hands in his, and looked her in the eye. ‘It’s not the same, Ma.’ His voice shook with intensity. ‘It’s not going to happen.’

  Judy looked right back at him. ‘You can’t know that, son.’

  ‘Yes, I can.’ He let go her hands and turned to Saul. ‘How you holding up, kid?’

  ‘I’m okay.’ Saul’s soft hazel eyes looked lost, terrified.

  ‘He’s going to make it, you know.’

  ‘What if he doesn’t?’

  ‘He will,’ Sam told him.

  He felt a gentle touch on his right arm, turned back to his mother.

  ‘Was it very bad for you up there?’ Judy knew where he’d been. She’d asked him a few days ago if he wanted her company, and had been utterly unoffended when he’d told her he wanted to go alone. She understood about things like that, and Sam was doubly grateful for that now, for if she had been in Sarasota with him and unable to get directly to the hospital to be with her husband, that would have been something else for Sam to have hated himself for.

  ‘It was okay,’ he told her.

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ Judy said.

  Sam stroked her cheek. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It wasn’t.’ He checked his wristwatch. ‘How long’s he been in the OR?’

  ‘For ever,’ she said.

  ‘He’s going to be all right, Ma.’

  Judy’s mouth twisted a little.

  ‘From your mouth to God’s ear,’ she said.

  Sam caught up with Martinez and Beth Riley in the corridor, learned that Mike Rodriguez, the Miami Police Department sergeant investigating the Coconut Grove killing, was now taking charge of his father’s attack, because the weapon appeared to have been another scalpel-type blade.

  ‘Different MO, though,’ Martinez told Sam. ‘One of your dad’s partners says that the instrument cabinet was open and one of the scalpels they use for minor surgery was missing.’

  ‘Timing was about the same,’ Detective Riley said. ‘The paramedics who responded after the call came in from the cleaner said he’d probably been bleeding for about an hour, which means we’re talking around four a.m. again.’

  ‘We need to go talk to the Robbins girl,’ Martinez said.

  Sam was still stunned by the news of a possible connection with the other cases. ‘I should be there.’

  ‘I know. We waited for you.’

  ‘We should go now,’ Riley urged gently.

  ‘I can’t leave yet.’ Sam looked at his watch. It was ten after ten.

  ‘We need to find out if the girl went out last night,’ Martinez said. ‘Not that she or her aunt are going to tell us if she did.’

  Sam took another moment to make up his mind. ‘I’m not going to leave till my dad’s out of surgery. You guys get over to Coral Gables and see what you can find out.’ He paused, remembering Cathy’s collapse during questioning less than a week ago. ‘And be gentle. It’s just routine, right?’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Martinez said.

  ‘I mean it, Al.’ Sam looked at his sceptical expression. ‘And don’t give them one more detail than you have to.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense for it to be the girl,’ Beth Riley said.

  ‘I know it doesn’t,’ Sam said.

  ‘It doesn’t need to make sense,’ Martinez said. ‘Not if she’s a wacko.’

  Riley put out a hand, touched Sam’s right arm. ‘We’ll be thinking good thoughts for your dad, Sam,’ she said.

  Dr Helen Brodsky – a trauma surgeon and friend of his father’s – came into the waiting room at ten forty-eight.

  ‘He made it through.’ She knew better than to make them wait another second. ‘He’s critical, but he’s still with us.’

  ‘Is he conscious?’ Judy’s voice was hoarse.

  ‘Not yet, but his vital signs are good.’ Brodsky nodded at Sam. ‘It was touch and go – he lost a hell of a lot of blood.’

  ‘I guess the old man’s tough,’ Sam said softly.

  Brodsky smiled. ‘As a Sherman tank.’

  The Sherman tank lay in the ICU bed tethered by tubes and wires, very white and still apart from the rise and fall of his chest. Judy was in the bathroom and Saul was on a coffee and soda run, and so, for just a very few moments – aside from the nurses moving back and forth between patients, equipment and records – Sam was alone with his father.

  He looked for old familiar details to cling on to, trying to block out
the tubes and ugly, frightening paraphernalia. The half-inch long scar on the suddenly fragile cheek, a vestige of a fight with a violent patient in an ER when David had been a young doctor, better able to fend for himself. The curved nose, one nostril slightly larger than the other. The receding grey hair. This was the man who had done more for Samuel Lincoln Becket than any other man on earth. Who’d taken a newly-bereaved, seven-year-old black boy into his heart and home and world, who’d given him a second chance at family, love, security, education. A future.

  The monitors near the bed beeped erratically for a moment, then calmed down again, and Sam’s pulse-rate reacted almost simultaneously. He looked at his father’s hands, beautiful, capable hands that had helped so many children back to health, and his heart tore in his chest. He bent over him, his mouth right up against his ear, and spoke to his father softly and fiercely: private, intimate words about strength and recovery and coming back home to them all, words about finding the person who had done this to him.

  A light touch fell on his left shoulder. Sam straightened up and saw his mother behind him, her face unfrozen now, but another, more unfamiliar expression in her eyes and on her mouth. Iron. The way he’d been told she’d looked when he’d been shot.

  ‘Okay, son?’

  ‘I’m okay, Ma.’

  Her eyes, usually soft, like Saul’s, were penetratingly sharp. ‘You’re going to find who did this?’

  ‘It’s not my jurisdiction, Ma.’

  ‘But you’re going to make it your business.’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Could he have been wrong about that girl?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ma.’

  The eyes didn’t waver. ‘You still hope it isn’t her, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘But it’s not impossible, is it?’

  Sam shook his head.

  ‘Nothing’s impossible, Ma.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Al Martinez and Beth Riley sat in their car outside Frances Dean’s house while Martinez reported back to Sam Becket at Miami General.

  ‘Repeat performance, just like after the Flager killing. Both of them in their nightclothes, real bewildered, with the aunt saying they were both home all evening and all night and she never got to sleep, so she can swear to that —’

  ‘She looked sleepy to me,’ Riley inserted.

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Martinez nodded and repeated to Sam what she had said. ‘And the aunt’s saying how can we be so wicked as to imagine that Cathy might want to hurt a man who’s been so kind to her?’

  Sam, talking on his cellular outside the ICU, registered the sneer in the other detective’s voice. ‘She’s not wrong, Al. She told Grace Lucca how much she liked my father.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘You think she was lying,’ Sam said. He’d learned over the years to set great store by Al Martinez’s gut feelings.

  ‘Like I said in the hospital,’ Martinez answered, ‘I think she’s a certified fruitcake and her aunt’s lying to protect her.’

  Inside her house, Frances Dean was standing outside Cathy’s bedroom, trying to summon up her courage.

  ‘Why don’t you come in, Aunt Frances?’

  Cathy’s voice, through the closed door, made her jump.

  She opened the door. Cathy, still wearing the oversized pink T-shirt she’d slept in, was sitting on her bed, crosslegged, the May issue of Cosmopolitan on the covers in front of her.

  ‘I could hear you breathing out there,’ she told her aunt.

  Frances went into the room. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Cathy picked up the magazine and dropped it on to the floor beside the bed. ‘I wasn’t reading, just staring at it.’

  Frances sat down on the bed. ‘I know what you mean. I lie awake at night with a book open in front of me, but I don’t think I’ve actually read a word since . . .’

  Cathy said nothing.

  ‘The thing is —’ Frances stopped again.

  ‘What?’ Cathy looked into her aunt’s face, saw the struggle in it.

  ‘The thing is, I told the officers that I was awake all last night.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I lied to them,’ Frances said, suddenly speaking rapidly. ‘I took a sleeping pill last night directly after dinner, because I just couldn’t bear to go through another night without rest – that’s why I took so long to hear them knocking on the door this morning.’ She came to a halt and, cheeks flushed, looked away from her niece’s eyes.

  ‘What are you saying, Aunt Frances?’

  ‘That I need —’ She broke off.

  ‘What do you need?’ Cathy asked.

  Frances faced her again. ‘I need for you to swear to me that none of these terrible, evil things have anything to do with you.’ Cathy stared at her, speechlessly.

  ‘I’m sorry, Cathy. It’s just —’

  ‘Just that you don’t believe me.’ Cathy got off the bed, went to the window, turned round and faced her. Her eyes were full of new horror. ‘You actually think I could have killed these people —’ Her voice pitched higher in distress. ‘That I could have killed my mom? And Arnie? That I —’

  ‘No!’ Frances stood up, too, started to walk towards her.

  ‘Don’t come any closer.’ Cathy sounded strangled. ‘Don’t come near me!’

  ‘It isn’t like that!’ Frances was distraught. ‘It isn’t that I think you could have done it —’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘I guess I just need to hear you tell me once – just this one time – and then I’ll stand by you forever.’

  ‘How could you even think something like that?’

  ‘I don’t know, honey.’ Frances shook her head miserably. ‘I’m so confused, and it’s all been so terrible, and the police keep coming by and I don’t understand why – I don’t understand how they can think you could have anything to do with the killings, yet they do seem to, and —’

  Cathy turned away to the window. ‘Go away, Aunt Frances.’

  ‘Cathy, darling, please.’

  ‘Just go away.’ She paused. ‘If there was anyplace I could go to, I’d leave right now, but there isn’t anyplace, is there?’ Her voice was still choked, but now it was harsh too.

  ‘You don’t have to go anywhere – you have a home here with me, always. You’re my sister’s little girl, and I love you.’

  ‘You love me so much you think I could murder my mother.’

  ‘No, I don’t!’ Frances made another move towards her, but stopped again, knowing she wouldn’t get close. ‘I’m sorry to have asked you that. I shouldn’t have – I can see that now. Those people got me so mixed up.’

  ‘Go away.’ Cathy didn’t turn around. ‘Please.’

  ‘Cathy, please —’

  ‘Go away!’

  Wringing her hands, Frances fled.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  It was mid-afternoon when Grace got home, opened her mail and then played back her messages. There were five, but Sam Becket’s and Frances Dean’s were the real attention grabbers.

  She cancelled the one remaining appointment she’d been hoping to keep – a routine update with a ten year old doing rather better than expected after her parents’ bitter breakup – and headed directly over to Miami General.

  Sam came out of the ICU when he heard she was there. He looked as Grace had expected him to look. Like hell.

  ‘Thanks for coming.’

  They hugged. It was the first time they’d done that, first time they’d been that physically close. Grace felt his heart beating fast and hard and found that she wanted to weep for him.

  ‘How is he?’ she asked softly when they drew apart.

  ‘Too soon to say. He’s still unconscious.’

  ‘But the surgery went well?’

  ‘That’s what they say. It’s still going to be touch and go.’

&nb
sp; ‘David’s strong, Sam,’ Grace said, though she wasn’t sure, suddenly, how strong he really was.

  ‘He’s going to need to be.’ Sam glanced through the window of the ICU. David’s bed, halfway into the room, was just visible. Judy Becket was sitting, very straight, her hand on her husband’s.

  ‘How’s your mother doing?’ Grace asked him.

  ‘She’s pretty tough, too.’ Sam paused. ‘Saul’s on the move a lot of the time, getting cups of coffee, talking to nurses and staff in the commissary. It’s hard for him, seeing Dad this way.’

  ‘Do you know what happened?’ Grace asked, finally getting to it.

  ‘We don’t know much,’ Sam answered. ‘We think he was probably catching a nap on the couch in his office – he sometimes does that if he has to work late.’

  ‘Someone broke in?’

  ‘Walked in. Dad may have left the door unlocked.’

  ‘Would he do that?’ Doctors’ offices were such obvious targets for robberies that most of them turned into Fort Knoxes after closing hours.

  ‘He might have,’ Sam admitted. ‘He’d spent half the night with a dying patient – an old friend.’ He paused. ‘Whoever walked in took a scalpel out of one of my father’s instrument cabinets – one of his partners, Fred Delano, took inventory this morning, and there’s an instrument missing.’

  ‘A scalpel?’ Grace was stunned and abruptly chilled to the bone. ‘Are they sure?’

  ‘Afraid so.’

  She forced her mind to function. ‘Anything else stolen? Drugs?’

  Sam shook his head. ‘Still locked up and accounted for – though Delano thinks some prescription pads may be gone.’

  ‘They might still have been after drugs.’ There was a sick sensation growing in Grace’s stomach. She knew she was clutching at straws. ‘Maybe they weren’t expecting to find David in the office – maybe they stabbed him and ran.’

  ‘The door was unlocked,’ Sam said. ‘They had to expect to find someone inside the office.’

  She said it, finally.

  ‘You’re still looking at Cathy?’

  His face was very sombre. ‘At her and everyplace else.’ Through the ICU window, Grace saw Judy Becket stand up for a moment, stretch her legs and arms, rub her eyes. She saw a nurse come forward and check David Becket’s IV drip feed. She saw the bank of monitors beside the bed and the bag of blood suspended above it.