Mind Games

by Hilary Norman

  ‘Absolutely. He’s got what he wanted. Touching me or anyone else now would blow the case against her out of the water.’

  ‘So long as —’ Sam stopped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Some killers get addicted,’ he said, quietly. ‘They don’t plan on it, but it happens.’

  ‘If it’s Broderick, though,’ Grace said, holding fast to her confidence, ‘he’s highly organized, isn’t he?’ She had read a little about the basics profilers used in the hunt for multiple murderers; enough at least, to know that one of the things they did was to divide types into ‘organized’ and ‘disorganized’ categories. ‘If the accusations against Cathy are what he’s been working towards for so long, then surely he’ll probably be more than satisfied for a good long while, waiting for the grand jury to indict and then hoping for more.’ She paused. ‘Don’t you agree?’

  Sam was looking at her intently.

  ‘Now what?’ she asked him.

  ‘Truth?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I was just thinking that up until just a minute or so ago, there was nothing I wanted – as a private individual, not as a cop – quite so much as for you to be right about Broderick, so that Cathy could be proven innocent.’ He paused. ‘But suddenly I find myself almost hoping you’re wrong – that John Broderick did drown off Pensacola nine years ago.’

  A rush of emotion shot through Grace. Part of her wanted to get angry at Sam for shying away from her theories. Part of her wanted to stand up and yell that proving a fourteen-year-old girl innocent was more important than anything else. But she had seen the look in Sam Becket’s eyes as he’d considered the possibility of her being at risk. In one way, of course, it had scared her, forced her to think about dangers that had not previously occurred to her.

  Mostly, though, she had to admit silently, it thrilled her.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 1998

  Tuesday had ended on a kind of a high for Grace. Wednesday started out with the same kind of promise, but then went downhill fast.

  Sam called from Miami General just after nine a.m. ‘My father’s fever broke last night,’ he told her. ‘Looks like he’s going to make a full recovery.’

  ‘Sam, that’s wonderful news.’ Grace stopped herself from asking the question she wanted to. Judy Becket’s hostility and suspicion still troubled her, and she didn’t want Sam thinking even for a second that her only concern for David was in connection with Cathy.

  He saved her the awkwardness.

  ‘Grace, I asked Dad if he remembered what had happened.’

  ‘And does he?’ Her mouth was dry.

  ‘Not enough,’ Sam said. ‘The good news, I guess, is that he can’t ID Cathy as his attacker. The bad news is that he can’t say it wasn’t her either. It was dark, and he was asleep almost right up until the blade hit him.’ He paused. ‘Dad remembers waking up and feeling a breeze which he thinks was probably the weapon arcing down over him, but that’s all. He didn’t even see a shape.’

  ‘So he can’t even say if it was a man or woman?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Sam paused again. ‘Grace, if it makes you feel any better, he got mad as a wet hen when I told him she’d been charged with the murders. Dad doesn’t feel any differently with a hole in his chest about Cathy Robbins than he did before.’

  ‘May I tell her that when I see her?’ Grace asked.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Sam answered. ‘Though you’ll obviously be wrecking any hopes she might have had of Dad clearing her name.’

  ‘What’s the alternative? I don’t see much point in nurturing false hopes – and there’s always a chance she might hear it from someone else and figure me for a liar.’ It was an effort to sound anything other than despondent, but Grace was doing her best. ‘I’m so very glad your father’s going to make it, Sam.’

  ‘I know you are,’ he said.

  Grace was just writing up case notes after an appointment before leaving for her visit to the youth facility, when Dora Rabinovitch (the woman Grace sometimes called her ‘angel of mercy’ because she came over whenever Grace was really snowed under to take care of overdue correspondence and to let the psychologist know when she’d forgotten to pay something vaguely significant, like her power bill) stuck in her two cents’ worth.

  ‘Isn’t this girl dangerous?’ Dora asked. She was a round, warm, efficient and, on the whole, generous-hearted woman, but like many people in Miami, she’d read all about Cathy Robbins and couldn’t conceive of someone like Grace spending any more time with her than was absolutely essential.

  ‘I don’t think she’s in the least bit dangerous,’ Grace told her.

  ‘But they won’t leave you alone together?’ Dora wanted to know. ‘You’ll have a guard with you.’

  ‘I hope not,’ Grace said.

  There was no guard, Grace thanked the Lord for small mercies, at least not with them in the small locked visitors’ room made available again for their session. There was just herself and a young person who had visibly declined since Grace had last seen her.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ Cathy said almost as soon as they’d sat down.

  ‘I know you didn’t. I’ve told you that before.’

  ‘Last time I saw those goldfish, they were alive and swimming around. I always hated the way they were trapped in that tank, like they were in a prison.’ She paused. ‘I guess I know now how they felt.’

  Still those damned fish, as if homicide was too great a horror to absorb. Grace’s heart sank at the deterioration in her. Cathy was now clearly not so much denying as in denial.

  ‘Is there anything special you wanted to talk to me about?’ Grace asked, putting off the evil moment when she was going to have to tell Cathy about David Becket. ‘Or shall we just spend some time together?’

  ‘I think Mr Wagner wants me to say I’m crazy,’ she said, coming right to it. ‘But I’m not crazy, am I, Grace?’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘So why does he think I am?’ Cathy’s blue eyes were antagonistic. ‘You’re the shrink – I know he talked to you. You must have said something that made Mr Wagner think that about me.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Grace said firmly. ‘I told him that I was certain you were entirely sane, and that you were also not guilty.’

  ‘So why didn’t he believe you?’ Her tone was still accusatory.

  ‘I don’t know why. I only know what I said to him, which is what I believe, and what I’m going to go on saying to anyone who’ll listen.’

  Grace reached out across the table, wanting to take Cathy’s hand, but the teenager pulled away so violently that the table rocked.

  ‘Take it easy, Cathy.’

  She flushed. ‘I’m sorry. I guess I’m getting jumpy.’

  ‘Are you sleeping okay?’ There were dark circles under her eyes.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Is your bed very uncomfortable?’

  ‘It’s awful,’ Cathy confided. ‘And it smells bad.’ She lowered her voice. ‘The whole place stinks, Grace.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I don’t want to stay here – can’t you make them let me out?’

  ‘I wish I could.’

  ‘I could come and stay with you,’ Cathy pleaded. ‘You know I didn’t do anything – you could tell them again, and maybe they’d listen to you.’

  ‘I can try.’ The sense of frustration caused by her inability to help her patient made Grace feel almost physically sick, but she fought it, aware that showing weakness was only going to make matters worse. ‘I will try, Cathy,’ she said very gently. ‘But I have to be honest with you. It’s too early for me to make any difference – no one’s going to listen to me, not just yet.’

  ‘So why did you bother to come?’

  Cathy stood up so abruptly that her chair tipped back and hit the ground with a loud bang. Behind her, through the small window in the door, Grace saw the female guard standing outside the door checking through the glass pane. She
nodded to the guard, raised her right hand, palm towards her, wanting to pass the message that there was no problem. The guard stayed outside, but went on watching through the glass.

  ‘I came because I wanted to see you,’ Grace said.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t.’

  Grace remained seated, in the hope that Cathy would calm down. ‘Why don’t you pick up the chair and come and sit down again?’

  ‘What’s the point?’ she asked, belligerently. ‘What’s the point in anything?’

  Grace had seen Cathy resentful and angry before, but never that rude or hostile. If a single week inside the youth facility could have this much of a damaging effect on her, the prospect of what was almost certain now to follow filled Grace with trepidation for her. With more time, more space, more freedom to talk to her, it was possible that Grace might have been able to get through to her, at least try to pull the poor child back on some sort of track.

  But there was too little time to achieve anything worthwhile.

  In any event, this was most definitely not, Grace now realized, the right moment to dash her hopes any further by giving her the news about David Becket.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 1998

  ‘Hey, Becket, get with it, man!’

  ‘Hey, Sam, you’re on!’

  ‘Hey, detective-sir, quit goofing off!’

  ‘Yo, Count di-fucking-Luna, get your black ass up on this stage and sing!’

  Sam snapped out of his fantasy and got ready to work.

  S-BOP had come through for him again, and this time they were letting an undependable – and now, it was beginning to seem to him, lovestruck – black cop play the part of a Spanish count. The plot of Il Trovatore stank – an implausible, wildly politically incorrect tale of gypsies and witches – and the Count di Luna was a vengeful son-of-a-bitch but also a doozy of a role, and the music was heaven and demanding and exactly what Sam needed to help him escape from the sickness of the real world that left its stench on his doorstep every day of the week.

  It had not been that sickness he’d been thinking about just now when he was supposed to be getting ready to burn Azucena at the stake. It hadn’t been bloodsoaked bodies or a possibly psychotic teenager. It hadn’t, for once, even been his father, now truly on the mend and already starting to hassle the doctors and nurses about letting him go home.

  It was Grace Lucca.

  When he thought about her, he thought about a smart, warm, caring, tenacious, beautiful woman. Oh, yes, she was certainly that. Willowy but strong, long-legged and golden, with blue eyes that he’d already seen spark with intensity, crease up with fatigue and frustration, warm with humour. If his mother hadn’t been so dead set against her because of Cathy Robbins, Sam was certain the two women would have gotten along. And she can even cook, he could imagine Judy saying.

  He was thinking about Grace more every day. It was the first time he’d thought about the possibility of getting involved – really involved – with a woman since Althea. He’d met a few nice women since their divorce – hell, he’d met a few great women – but there’d been no one who’d really pierced his hard shell until Grace.

  He wondered now, suddenly, as he picked up his copy of the libretto and slipped silently on sneakered feet through the semi-dark of the S-BOP theatre towards the stage, if race and religion were finally, almost for the first time in his adult life, going to raise their uglier heads.

  Black man, white woman was tough enough.

  Black Episcopalian-Jew, white Catholic-Italian woman was bound to toss up all kinds of predicaments along the way to wherever they might, or might not, be heading.

  ‘Hey, Count-di-Becket, you ready to try burning me yet?’

  Sam took the steps at the side of the stage in two strides and grinned at Linda Morrison, mezzo-soprano, whose imminent torture he was all set to start bragging about.

  ‘You bet your sweet life,’ he said.

  Grace flew back into his mind. Tanned legs, bare feet dangling in the river. And the look in her eyes the other night when she’d understood he was concerned for her safety.

  He would be concerned, all right, if John Broderick turned out to be one of the undead.

  And unlikely as that whole scenario still seemed, it was one more thing he couldn’t seem to get out of his mind.

  The other preoccupation close to Sam’s heart this week was Saul’s barmitzvah on Saturday. While David had still been in his worryingly feverish limbo state, Judy had wanted to postpone the event, but Sam had changed her mind. It had been tough for Saul, as it was for most kids, getting himself to this stage of readiness, and postponing would mean that he would either stay nerve-frayed for the foreseeable future, or go off the boil and maybe even lose the plot – it wasn’t as if they could pinpoint another date, after all.

  ‘What you’re saying,’ Judy had said to him, voice strained but low, so that Saul wouldn’t hear her, ‘is if your father doesn’t make it, Saul might never be barmitzvah?’

  ‘No, Ma,’ Sam had said, ‘that isn’t what I’m saying.’

  They’d settled on going ahead with the service, sharing a kiddush glass of wine with the rest of the congregation at temple, then a quiet lunch for the three of them.

  ‘No party till Dad can be with us,’ Sam had said, ‘but we can get the whole thing on video for when he’s better —’

  ‘Or I could maybe do it again for him,’ Saul jumped in.

  Now, of course, the whole mood had radically changed. There was every likelihood that David might talk his way into being in temple with them – even if it did mean his giving in to staying in a wheelchair and going back to Miami General afterward – and suddenly Judy was a whirlwind of activity, throwing herself body and soul into making sure that what was left of the weekend’s plans went smoothly.

  Sam knew that he’d mentioned the barmitzvah to Grace the first time he’d gone to her place – the night she’d shared her Cacciucco with him and they’d both talked a little about their backgrounds. He’d thought a number of times in the past week or two about how much he would have enjoyed having her there, but with the way things had been it hadn’t seemed possible.

  And then, this morning, a package had arrived on his desk.

  He’d opened it, intrigued, found a sealed envelope addressed to Saul, and a note for himself.

  Dear Sam,

  I came upon this and thought of Saul and his big day. I hope it’s the right thing – and I hope that I’m offending no one by sending it. If you think it might cause more upset to your mother, then don’t worry about hurting my feelings.

  I’m so happy your father’s going to be there.

  Grace.

  The gift itself was packed in tissue paper. Sam opened it up carefully, found a leatherbound book on the history of the State of Israel. I came upon this, Grace had written. Sam smiled at the obvious understatement. It was a wonderful gift, painstakingly chosen and generously given. And as for the line about not upsetting his mother . . .

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  FRIDAY, MAY 1, 1998

  Jerry Wagner agreed to see Grace again just before lunch on Friday. (His lunch, not hers, since Grace knew she’d be lucky to find time to grab more than cheese and crackers until nightfall at the earliest.)

  Top of her anxieties about Cathy was the option open to the State of Florida to try the fourteen year old as an adult rather than a minor. They could do that, Grace had discovered, if the grand jury came to an indictment, because of the grievous nature of the crimes. It happened quite often, she had learned, when kids killed, and one of the worst aspects from Grace’s point-of-view was that it would mean Cathy’s being transferred to an adult prison facility for the long wait until the trial.

  ‘I need to know,’ she told Wagner, ‘if there’s anything I can do or say that might make a difference to the judge’s decision about that.’

  ‘Unfortunately, I don’t think there is.’ He shook his head. ‘In our state, in a cas
e like this – four brutal deaths – it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Cathy’s going to be bound into the adult court.’

  ‘But surely we can try and fight it?’ Grace was trying hard to keep calm again in the face of this man’s depressing response. ‘Maybe if I go before the court and tell them what I think this might do to Cathy?’

  ‘Compared to what she’s accused of doing to the victims, I’m afraid that any traumatizing effect on Cathy you could come up with just wouldn’t balance the books.’ Wagner leaned forward, his short curly hair, piercingly blue eyes and curved nose giving him the look of a Roman in a dark suit rather than a toga. ‘Dr Lucca, I know this is tough to take, but—’

  ‘What this is is guilty till proven innocent,’ Grace cut in passionately. ‘I mean, it’s so appallingly unjust.’

  ‘It does seem that way.’

  ‘It doesn’t just seem that way, Mr Wagner – it is that way. I can just about begin to contemplate the rationale that a juvenile found guilty of a terrible crime like homicide should be treated as an adult, though I find even that hard to accept – but we’re talking here about taking an innocent child and doing our best to destroy her before she’s even come to trial.’

  Wagner sat back again. ‘I didn’t say I agreed with the system, doctor,’ he said gently. ‘Don’t you think I want to help my client every step of the way? I’d like nothing more than to keep her out of the adult facility – no, that’s not true. What I’d really like is to get her out on bail and into some kind of safe, state-approved home until the trial.’

  ‘That would be wonderful.’ Grace jumped hungrily on his words.

  ‘I said that’s what I’d really like,’ Wagner pointed out, ‘but it’s wholly and absolutely out of the question.’ He paused. ‘This is a long haul case, Dr Lucca. We all need to keep clearly focused on our ultimate goals.’

  ‘My goal’s to keep Cathy sane,’ Grace said.

  ‘And mine’s to make sure she walks free when all this is over,’ Wagner added. ‘And I have no doubt that you can do a whole lot to keep Cathy sane, no matter where she has to spend the next few months.’