Mind Games

by Hilary Norman

‘Come on, you guys!’ Kuntz was yelling at the Coast Guard officers.

  ‘You have to help him!’ Grace screamed at them. ‘He’s down there!’

  ‘Two overboard!’ Kuntz shouted. ‘One black, one white!’

  The officers on board were getting their equipment on – Grace wondered why the hell they hadn’t put it on before.

  ‘The black guy’s a cop!’ Kuntz told them. ‘Get him out first!’

  Grace looked sideways at his ugly, bald head, and wanted to kiss him, and then she looked back at the Coast Guard launch, and the divers were already sitting on the edge, backs to the water, and then they did that back flip thing that professional divers always did and were gone from sight . . .

  She didn’t know if she held her breath or simply stopped breathing.

  She thought later that if it had taken another few seconds, she might have passed out again from lack of oxygen if nothing else.

  She saw one of the divers’ heads emerge first.

  ‘Oh, dear God,’ Grace cried out and grabbed at Kuntz, dug her fingers into his right arm. ‘Where’s Sam? Where’s Sam?’

  ‘There!’ Kuntz yelled.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over there – to the right!’

  Grace whipped her head around so fast she felt dizzy enough to fall down – but there he was, looking exhausted, but there he was, and he was alive, and one of the divers had him around the chest and was towing him back to the big launch.

  ‘Is he okay?’ she shouted across the water.

  No one answered her.

  ‘Is he okay?’ she screamed.

  Sam raised a hand, gave a limp kind of a waving salute, and Grace knew it was for her and started crying again.

  ‘I don’t mean to be a killjoy, lady,’ Kuntz said, on her left, and his voice was pretty shaky, too, ‘but do you think you could get your nails out of my arm while I still have some skin left?’

  The search for Hayman went on for several hours, they told Grace, long after she, Sam and Kuntz were back on dry land, getting taken care of and answering a few preliminary questions. But they didn’t find him.

  Sam came to see Grace in her room at Mariners Hospital on Plantation Key. She was too out of it to say anything much, and she wasn’t sure that what she did manage to say made any sense. Sam didn’t say too much either. Grace could tell, just by looking at him, that he felt the same about her being alive and in one piece as she did about him. But neither of them was in the mood for celebration.

  A man was, in all likelihood, dead. Even if he was Broderick, escape-artist-supreme, there could, on this occasion, have been no escape, not with so many there on the scene, searching for him.

  So he was, almost certainly, dead.

  Because of Grace and Sam.

  If he did turn out to be John Broderick, they probably would, in the fullness of time, remember that his death, second time around, was a good thing.

  The other possibility was almost too unthinkable to endure.

  Grace asked the question first, before Sam. She thought he might not have asked it, not that night, anyway, because of the effect he feared it would have on her.

  But she did ask it. She had to.

  ‘What if it wasn’t him? What if he was just Peter Hayman?’

  Sam said nothing, just held her hand tighter, but his eyes were tortured.

  There was no answer to the question.

  Or if there was, they were much too afraid to hear it.

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  THURSDAY, MAY 21, 1998

  In the days following the capsizing of the Snowbird, nothing good had happened except, from Grace’s standpoint, for having had Claudia by her side just about morning, noon and night. Hayman’s body still had not been found; Sam was in considerable pain from having jarred his back during his rescue bid on the boat and was, additionally, in twenty-eight different kinds of trouble with the Miami Beach Police Department; and Grace had undergone every kind of test in the book – under David Becket’s supervision – to try to ascertain what had started making her feel so bad halfway through Sunday morning, but nothing had showed up.

  ‘Probably a virus,’ they’d told her at Mariners Hospital.

  ‘One of those things,’ they’d said at Miami General after running the tests. Medical tests were something Grace generally did her level best to steer clear of, but in this instance she was so desperate to have her instincts proven at least halfway sound that she was prepared to put up with almost anything.

  ‘Could have been a touch of the ’flu,’ even David Becket had been forced to admit on one of his visits, ‘probably compounded by the tension you were going through.’

  ‘You mean I was imagining it,’ she had said flatly.

  ‘Nothing imaginary about the ’flu.’

  ‘Then I was imagining being poisoned.’

  ‘I wish I could argue with you there, Grace,’ he’d said.

  She knew no other doctor in the world could have meant that more than David Becket, knowing, as she did, what his son was currently up against.

  Captain Hernandez and the chief and, worst of all, Internal Affairs had all gotten in on the act from day one, and Sam had been suspended, pending investigation, from day three. It was, according to him, hardly surprising, given the cumulative weight of his misdemeanours.

  One: abandonment of his duty in Miami and going AWOL.

  Two: use of his badge out of jurisdiction to involve a civilian, one Philip Kuntz, in a potentially dangerous situation.

  Three: failure to report the situation to the Monroe County Sheriff.

  Four: probable aggravation of an already lethally tense scenario on board the Snowbird. Result: the capsizing of the craft and, ultimately, the probable drowning of Dr Peter Hayman, a resident of Key Largo.

  ‘And there could be more,’ Sam told Grace over supper at her house on day four, the Thursday after the incident, ‘depending on how badly Phil Kuntz feels towards me as time goes by.’

  ‘Kuntz thought you were a hero,’ Grace said. ‘He told me he figured you were brave enough when you rescued me, but he thought you were borderline crazy when you went down for Hayman for the fourth time.’

  ‘He may change his mind,’ Sam said, grimly realistic. ‘I bullied him into taking his boat out in bad weather. I offered him inducements. I threatened him when he didn’t want me to use his flare gun.’

  ‘You were afraid for me,’ Grace pointed out miserably. ‘The whole fiasco was my fault, Sam. I should never have let myself get into a situation I had doubts about from the start. I’m supposed to be a trained psychologist – I’m supposed to have a brain – but all I did was underreact before I got on the Snowbird and then overreact once I was on board.’

  ‘The guy was coming at you with a hypodermic, Grace.’

  ‘I know he was.’ She shook her head. ‘I know. And you thought I was in danger – which I guess I was—’

  ‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ Sam said. ‘Given it all to do again, I have a feeling I’d do most of it the same way.’ He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t make it right in the eyes of my superiors.’

  ‘Makes it right for me,’ she said.

  That doesn’t count,’ he said.

  The really crazy part of it was that no one was doing what seemed to Grace the most obvious thing to do: searching Peter Hayman’s house. Sam shared her frustration, but understood better than she did the protocol governing the situation. Hayman’s body had not been found. Nor had any family members been located. He had, as it turned out, written two published volumes on Münchhausen’s Syndrome by proxy, and his Tampa-based publishers had cooperated fully, making Hayman’s author questionnaire available to the Monroe County Sheriff. The psychiatrist’s answers, succinctly given in black ink, indicated his single, childless status, and gave University of Washington in Seattle as his alma mater. Relatives were still being sought by the sheriff in all the accustomed ways. Everything else was, for the time being, on hold.

  Grace and Sa
m had only come into possession of those few sparse facts courtesy of Al Martinez (who’d undertaken, off the record, to run his own check on Hayman’s credentials in Seattle) and it was through Martinez also that they had received confirmation of what Sam had already anticipated: that until Hayman was officially recorded as dead or presumed dead, there was absolutely no good reason for the authorities to invade his privacy.

  ‘Forget my suspicions,’ Grace said to Sam, ‘but what about yours? You’re not just some cranky civilian – you’re a police officer.’

  ‘I’m on suspension, Grace,’ Sam answered matter-of-factly. ‘I broke the rules without a scrap of hard evidence to back me up.’

  Under the surface, he was just as frustrated as Grace was – and she hadn’t heard the words that Martinez had actually used. That the combined bullshit-rat-smellings of a neurotic head-shrinker and her screw up cop-lover were not grounds for a warrant to search a fucking paper bag, let alone an upstanding citizen’s home.

  They’d been over the events of the previous Sunday more than a dozen times and it always came out the same way for both Grace and Sam. Sam’s job meant almost everything to him, but he still could not bring himself to regret having gone to help Grace out of what he’d felt certain had been a dangerous situation. Seeing her apparently struggling with a man he thought might be a killer, Sam had not felt he had any choice.

  And there, of course, was the rub.

  They didn’t know if Hayman had been a killer.

  They didn’t know if he’d been anything more or less than he had claimed to be. A psychiatrist whose only proven misdemeanour to date was that he’d spooked Grace by coming into her bedroom in the early hours of Sunday morning.

  The illness that had struck her so abruptly had passed almost as swiftly as it had come, and there was no way of accurately checking what might have been on the gauze Hayman had put on her cut, because it had been as soaked as the rest of her when Grace had taken her tumble into the ocean – and whatever might have been in the hypodermic syringe had been lost along with Hayman.

  Grace had gone back and forth, with and without Sam, trawling her memory for worthwhile clues. Sam had reminded her that Broderick had made two botched suicide attempts before the supposed drowning by slitting his wrists and throat, and she’d struggled to recall seeing any signs of scarring on Hayman’s neck or arms. She’d come to realize then that each time she’d seen him, Hayman had worn long-sleeved garments and had his neck covered, but even if that added a tad more weight to their personal suspicions of the man, as evidence it was probably less than circumstantial. In other words, unless Peter Hayman’s body washed up comparatively soon, they wouldn’t know if it bore any traces of scars that might correlate to Broderick’s.

  And Hayman – like Broderick before him – was still missing.

  That was what could happen when a man got swept overboard in the ocean. That was what all kinds of people had pointed out to Grace when she had raised the question of Broderick’s survival – and now, it seemed to her, she’d handed them their proof of that on a plate.

  Any confusion Grace had been left with immediately following the capsizing of the Snowbird had now turned into a vast sense of guilt. If she had not reacted in that hysterical, unprofessional way . . . if Sam had not seen her struggling with Hayman . . .

  All her suspicions – every one of them, it seemed to Grace now that she had time to reflect on them – had been purely circumstantial or even less. They might even have been entirely in her mind.

  And the bottom line was that an innocent man – a decent man – might be dead because of her.

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 1998

  Hayman had still not been found, dead or alive. Sam was still on suspension, able for the first time to give too damned much of his attention to S-BOP and his role in Il Trovatore.

  Cathy was still in the Female House of Detention.

  Grace had gone to see her just once. She’d found her listless and depressed, and had come away anguished at not having had one single crumb of comfort to offer her. The only fragment of halfway decent news was that David Becket had come good and had visited her twice since Sam had remembered to ask him to – and since the murder of Anna Valdez, Judy Becket had withdrawn her opposition to the visits.

  Grace wished to high heaven that anyone had said that the Valdez case strengthened Cathy’s position in any way, but they had not said that.

  She wasn’t sure if she could face seeing her again.

  With Sam unable to get to his case files and loth to ask too much of Al Martinez, he had requested his father to ask his contact at Lafayette Hospital for another photograph of John Broderick. It arrived three days later on the last Wednesday in May, and Sam brought it directly to Grace’s house together with the author photograph from the back flap of one of Peter Hayman’s books.

  Grace stared at them both for a long time.

  ‘Anything?’ Sam asked at last.

  Her eyes were sore from staring. ‘Not really.’

  ‘We know the height’s a match,’ Sam said.

  ‘But that’s all that is,’ Grace said.

  They were so utterly different. Broderick was fair-haired, blue-eyed, round-faced – overweight – with a large nose and narrow lips. Hayman was a slim-built man with brown hair and eyes and a regular kind of nose and mouth. He could, of course, as they’d already discussed, have coloured his hair and worn tinted contacts. He could have radically altered his diet and the shape of his nose, mouth and face, but chances were they would only find out if Hayman had ever undergone plastic surgery if his body washed up – and if the ocean’s greed held on to him long enough for his flesh to decompose or even fall away, the only thing the ME would be able to judge was whether or not any facial bones had been surgically interfered with.

  ‘When you first saw Broderick’s picture,’ Sam reminded Grace, ‘you thought there was something familiar about him.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘But you don’t think now it was because of Hayman?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Grace felt frustrated enough to weep. ‘I don’t know.’

  Sam reached out and stroked her cheek. ‘Take it easy, Grace.’

  For a moment, she didn’t trust herself to speak.

  ‘I started wondering,’ Sam said, slowly, ‘if we could maybe show Hayman’s photograph to Cathy – but in the first place, I think it might be too heavy for her, and anyway, I don’t think there’s much point at this stage.’

  ‘She was so young,’ Grace said, ‘when she last saw her father. If I thought there was some real hope of her recognizing Hayman, I think I’d consider taking the chance, but to be honest, it would take something close to a miracle for her to link that face with one she’s done her best to forget.’

  ‘Even if she did,’ Sam said, ‘in order for it to be admissible as an ID, I guess it would have to be organized in front of witnesses acceptable to the State Attorney, and that could be a no-win situation, If Cathy didn’t recognize Hayman, she’d be back to square one, and if she did, the prosecution would claim she was just trying to save herself.’

  Sam and Grace had previously played out one game, just between themselves, with a modicum of success. Sam had brought Grace a gruesomely accurate timetable of when and where the scalpel killer had struck each time, and she had done what she could to see if what little she knew of Peter Hayman’s movements might rule him out as a suspect.

  It was, of course, much too little.

  They knew that Marie and Arnold Robbins had been murdered in the early hours of Friday, April 3, and they knew that Beatrice Flager had been killed at around four a.m. on Wednesday, April 8 – all three deaths coming before Grace’s first encounter with Hayman at the seminar at the Westin in Key Largo on Monday, April 13. They knew that Sam’s father had been stabbed at his downtown Miami office one week later on April 20 – a matter of some eight hours or so after Grace had shared dinner with Hayman at his house. Th
ey were, of course, because of the killing of Anna Valdez, no longer certain if the same person had attacked David Becket as the other victims, but there was no question that Hayman could, theoretically, have driven to Miami in time to stab the doctor.

  Frances Dean’s death had occurred early on Tuesday, April 21, and Anna Valdez had died early on Sunday, May 17.

  ‘While you were with Hayman at his house,’ Sam had reminded Grace.

  ‘But I wasn’t with him all night,’ she had pointed out. ‘I know he came into my room just after two-thirty and was there for a few minutes. After that, I heard a door close somewhere—’

  ‘But not the front door,’ Sam had said.

  ‘I don’t know – just a door.’

  ‘Did you hear a car?’

  ‘I don’t think I heard a car,’ Grace had answered, ‘but that doesn’t mean Peter stayed home the rest of the night. Next time I saw him, he was making breakfast at around nine a.m.’

  There were Cathy’s journal entries to consider, too, those which Sam had found unconvincing from the moment he’d seen them. The first two entries had been created on Cathy’s computer on March 31 and April 9 – both dates falling before Grace’s first meeting with Hayman – and the final damning entry had been logged on Saturday, April 18, one day before Hayman had called to invite Grace down to Key Largo. Once again, there was nothing to rule him out, but neither was there anything clearly supporting the notion that he might have found a way to tamper with Cathy’s computer.

  The night after Grace and Sam had tried comparing the photographs, Martinez called Sam at home.

  ‘Absolutely no record of any Peter Hayman at the University of Washington.’

  Sam fought not to raise his hopes prematurely. ‘Did you try births?’

  ‘Births and marriages and high school records,’ Martinez told him.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nada.’ Martinez paused. ‘Nothing from any hospital in Seattle either. And Angie Carlino says no one by that name and description ever worked as a shrink in St Pete or any other city on the Florida west coast.’