Mind Games

by Hilary Norman

  ‘None of Beatrice Flager,’ Sam noticed right off.

  ‘Nor of your father,’ Hernandez added.

  The excitement pumping through Sam was heating him so high he wouldn’t have been surprised if smoke had poured out of his ears.

  ‘There’s more,’ the captain said, quietly, pointing to a purple folder on the desk on one side of the room.

  Both men were wearing surgical gloves. Sam bent to flip open the folder. His eyes widened.

  ‘Holy shit,’ he swore, softly.

  ‘Sure looks that way,’ Hernandez agreed.

  There were at least ten sheets of paper, photocopies mostly, in the purple folder. Each and every one of them on the same subject.

  The life and works of John Broderick.

  Chapter Sixty-two

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 1998

  Other than a rushed phone call to tell her that he had no time to talk to her, Grace heard nothing from Sam until he showed up on her doorstep just after seven a.m. on Wednesday.

  ‘You look like hell,’ she said.

  ‘You look wonderful.’ Sam looked at Grace, wearing a big white T-shirt, hair tied back, face and feet bare. ‘You look about sixteen. Hey, Harry, what’s new?’ He got down to greet the dog, whose tail was beating like a metronome gone crazy.

  ‘I was about to make breakfast.’ Grace shut the front door.

  ‘I could certainly use some coffee.’ Sam straightened up, wincing.

  ‘Back still lousy?’

  ‘Too much driving.’

  They walked into the kitchen.

  ‘Part of me wants to offer you a hot bath, back rub and a few hours’ sleep,’ Grace told him, ‘but that would mean I’d have to wait to hear whatever you have to tell me, so I’m going to make you pancakes instead.’

  Sam’s tired eyes perked up. ‘You have syrup?’

  ‘Of course.’ Grace opened the fridge door and took out eggs. ‘Bacon?’

  ‘Sounds like heaven.’

  ‘Why don’t you sit down before you fall down, Sam?’ She nodded at a rocker in the corner of the kitchen. ‘Take the comfy one.’

  ‘If I sit in that,’ Sam said, ‘I’ll be zeeing in three seconds.’ He lowered himself carefully on to one of the chairs at the table. ‘Need some help?’

  ‘All I need,’ Grace told him, ‘is your news.’ She glanced at him. ‘I take it you do have news?’

  ‘That I do,’ Sam said.

  It had been as much as she could manage actually to get their breakfasts cooked while listening to him talk, but once it was on the dish in front of her, Grace found she couldn’t eat a thing.

  ‘So what now?’ she asked.

  Sam’s dish – no big surprise – was clean as a whistle. ‘Now we have one big question to get answered. Who is – or was – Peter Hayman?’

  Grace’s mind was still reeling. ‘Are we assuming that he’s not John Broderick, given that he was keeping a folder of data on him?’

  ‘I’d say the good news is that I don’t think anyone’s assuming anything from here on in, but’ – Sam paused to take a mouthful of coffee – ‘it would be real strange if the guy was keeping a file on himself.’

  ‘Except that we are talking about a seriously strange man.’

  ‘Yes, we are,’ Sam agreed, ‘and the data was in a locked room. I just think that a man who’s switched identities is not likely to have kept that kind of material on his property.’

  ‘Unless he was still angry about having to leave his life as Broderick behind?’ Grace suggested. ‘Maybe he was proud of what he did to Marie and Cathy?’

  ‘You mean the way some psychopaths keep press clippings about themselves and their crimes?’ Sam shook his head. ‘This didn’t feel that way, Grace. It was really just a series of details on the subject of John Broderick. A record of his life and deeds – mistakes, too.’

  ‘So who the hell is – was – Peter Hayman?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘And do these photographs on his walls of you and Cathy, and the Robbinses and Frances Dean, mean that he still may be the killer?’ Sam’s eyes were no less tired, but his expression was alive with grim curiosity.

  ‘And doesn’t it also mean . . .?’ Grace stopped.

  ‘What?’

  She shook her head. ‘Just a selfish thought.’

  ‘Can I guess?’ Sam’s smile was wry. ‘Doesn’t it also mean that maybe our instincts about Hayman weren’t quite as many miles off-base as we were scared they were?’

  ‘That’s about it.’

  ‘I guess that’s part of the reason Hernandez let me see it.’

  Grace stood up to dump her uneaten breakfast down the waste disposal in the sink, then picked up Sam’s empty plate. ‘More coffee?’

  ‘Why not? I’m buzzing anyway.’

  She threw away the old grounds and made a fresh pot. ‘Do I take it that we don’t have enough yet to get Cathy out of jail?’

  ‘Not enough,’ Sam said, gently. ‘But it’s a hell of a start.’

  ‘And you?’ Grace turned around to look at him. ‘Is the fact that you were at least half right about Hayman enough to get your suspension lifted?’

  ‘It doesn’t change what I did,’ he said. ‘I still broke the rules.’

  ‘Is that what Hernandez says?’

  ‘Not exactly. I asked him if I could help with the investigation. He reminded me that anything I might achieve while suspended would be inadmissible and worse than useless.’ Sam paused. ‘But Hernandez did admit that before Hayman came into the picture, our idea about Broderick’s not being dead sounded like garbage. Now, suddenly, we have two possible bad guys to look at – Broderick and/or whoever Hayman was before he came to Key Largo.’

  Grace brought the fresh pot of coffee to the table.

  ‘Do you think Hernandez might be relenting about you?’

  ‘It’s not all up to him. It’s mostly up to the chief, and Internal Affairs.’ Sam smiled. ‘Don’t worry about me so much, Grace. Think about what it might ultimately mean to Cathy.’

  ‘I think I can manage to worry about you both.’

  ‘Now you sound like my mother,’ he said.

  Chapter Sixty-three

  FRIDAY, JUNE 12, 1998

  Grace had, with Dora’s help, juggled enough appointments to make it possible for her to make the trip south on Friday morning. She hadn’t realized, until she reached the Overseas Highway, how tense she was, but passing Lake Surprise, the memories of that Sunday in May had suddenly crowded in on her with almost suffocating clarity, and her hands had gripped the wheel of the Mazda tightly as she fought to push them away.

  She made it to Dooley’s Marina by ten past ten. Philip Kuntz was there, a few yards from the closed-up hot-dog stand, holding a plastic cup of coffee, waiting for her. The sight of his bald, suntanned head and pale eyes sparked it all off again for her. She took a deep breath.

  ‘Mr Kuntz, thank you so much for agreeing to see me.’

  He shook her hand. ‘No problem.’

  Grace looked around. ‘Is there any place we could sit for a while?’

  He shrugged. ‘There’s a bench around the other side of the marina. It’s not real pretty, and I guess it smells bad, but if you don’t mind . . .’

  ‘I don’t mind at all.’

  She told him what she’d come for. She didn’t know how much Kuntz knew, how much exactly Sam had shared with him before he’d hooked him into taking him out in the Delia, or how much, if anything, the local police had told him after the event.

  Not much, as it happened.

  ‘There are all kinds of things I don’t think I’m allowed to tell you either,’ Grace said. ‘About Dr Hayman, I mean.’

  ‘They haven’t found him yet, I gather,’ Kuntz said.

  ‘Not yet, no.’ Grace paused. ‘As I told you, so much of what went on that afternoon was my fault, not Sam’s – but the way things are now, he’s been suspended. He could even lose his job.’ She waited another moment. ‘He’s a very good detective,
Mr Kuntz.’

  ‘Do me a favour,’ he said. ‘Call me Phil. I figure we got kind of close that day on the Delia, don’t you?’

  Grace smiled. ‘We certainly did.’

  Two men drove up in a pick-up, got out, nodded at Kuntz and made their way over to a small cabin boat on the far side. ‘So you reckon it was all your fault,’ he said to Grace.

  ‘A lot of it was,’ she told him. ‘The fact that I was foolish enough to get on the Snowbird in the first place. And then, that I panicked, lost my head. You were there, Phil – you know that Sam believed I was in danger when he saw what was going on.’

  ‘That’s true enough,’ Kuntz agreed.

  ‘You said to me that afternoon that you thought Sam was crazy – I think it was when he was trying to save Hayman.’

  Kuntz nodded. ‘I thought he was a damned fool the way he kept diving.’

  Grace waited a second. ‘You also said you thought he was a hero.’

  Kuntz nodded again. ‘I’m not sure if I said he was an actual hero – he certainly showed a lot of guts.’ The pale eyes narrowed. ‘Do I have this right? You want me to tell Detective Becket’s boss that your boyfriend was a hero?’

  ‘They won’t listen to me,’ Grace said, quietly. ‘I’m the idiot-woman who got herself into trouble. You’re one of the two civilians they say he endangered. They’d have to listen to you, Phil.’

  ‘I don’t know how much danger I was in.’ Kuntz grinned. ‘I guess I could have drowned out there – but that was nothing compared to what I figured Becket might have done to me if I hadn’t agreed to help you.’

  ‘But you don’t really blame him for wanting to help me, do you?’

  Kuntz’s eyes warmed a little as he looked at her. ‘I guess I’d like to think I’d do the same if my girlfriend was in a jam.’

  Grace felt as if she was holding her breath.

  ‘Will you at least consider speaking up for him, Phil?’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.

  Chapter Sixty-four

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 1998

  A whole new investigation was underway, and though Sam was still on the sidelines, frustrated as hell, he was being informed whenever, and however, possible by Al Martinez.

  Hayman’s prints had been lifted from all over his house and been sent for checking against the millions of others stored in the massive fingerprint data base now being used States-wide. No match, to date, had leapt out from the computer, but that only meant that Hayman had not been arrested or been in the armed forces or employed in any of the occupations that required printing.

  So far as checking his prints against Broderick’s, that, too, remained an unresolved problem, since despite his troubles John Broderick had never been arrested and had been exempted from the Vietnam draft and had, therefore, never been printed either.

  The Monroe County Sheriff’s department had been conducting its own localized enquiry into the Key Largo-based alleged psychiatrist, including trying to discover if Hayman had cast-iron alibis for any of the murder dates and times. Friends and colleagues – including Betty and Miles Flanagan and the Weintraubs, the two couples Hayman had told Grace they were going to sail with that Sunday – had been asked if they could vouch for the doctor’s whereabouts on any of the murder nights. No alibis had presented themselves, and when it came down to talking about what they knew of their acquaintance, no one seemed actually to know too much. One of the things Miles Flanagan said he had liked most about Hayman, now he came to think of it, was that he never spent time bragging about himself. Regarding his roots, Hayman had told his Key Largo friends the same as he’d told his publishers: that he hailed from Seattle and had gone to the University of Washington. The FBI had now verified what Martinez had already checked, off the record, after the accident. No such student at that university.

  The most intensive and intriguing part of the fresh investigation, however, centred on another two photographs that Monroe County officers had found inside Hayman’s house towards the tail-end of the search.

  Both photographs had been taped to the underside of his bed.

  One was of a child, a boy aged about five, wearing dungarees, a red and white striped T-shirt and a gentle smile. He had brown hair and eyes, and he was, everyone agreed, too thin for his age.

  The second photograph was of a grave, recently dug and filled. Smaller than average. There was no stone yet, just a tiny marker plaque. The angle from which it had been shot made it impossible – even magnified several times over – to read the name on the marker. The closest grave with a stone and legible name was that of a woman named Agnes Brown, and three stones in the row behind all bore the name of Tully. The epitaphs on all those stones offered no clues as to their location, other than that they were written in English. What could be seen of the sky was cloudy, and the grass appeared green and well-watered. A man, some distance away, walking along a path, was wearing a dark, formal-style winter overcoat, so they knew they were probably looking at a cemetery close to, or perhaps within, a city, where they experienced some cold weather. The only trees in sight were firs. No flowers or shrubs to help pin it down. The photograph had been focused on the grave itself, which was why the white, blurry mass on the horizon, cut off by the top of the picture, was not even noticed for some time – and certainly not recognized as a mountain.

  If only the summit of the mountain had been included in the photograph, they could probably have pinpointed the location of the cemetery within a day or two. But all they could say for sure was that there appeared to be snow even on its lower reaches at the time the snap had been taken.

  Both photographs were copies, so there was no chance of tracing them as there might have been if they had been original prints with telltale numbers on their backs.

  Still, at least they now had something to go on.

  And at least, as Sam said to Grace, everyone now seemed to give a shit.

  The quest was on, nationwide, to identify the boy in the picture taped to the underside of Peter Hayman’s bed. There were a few, wholly unsubstantiated, conclusions being drawn – the way that tended to happen when investigators became deeply motivated, even passionate, about a mystery – and one of them was that the boy might be, or more likely have been, a victim of Münchhausen’s Syndrome by proxy. Another possible conclusion was that he might have been a relative of Hayman’s. The grimmest of all, of course, was that the five-year-old boy might also be the occupant of that grave.

  They were busy contacting every association, organization or institution that treated or counselled sufferers or victims of MSBP, and the boy’s picture had been sent to every medical examiner’s office in every county in the United States that sported mountains as part of their landscape.

  They were also doing their damnedest to locate a cemetery in a part of the United States where it got cool enough in winter to warrant an overcoat; where there were at least a handful of fir trees; and where some people with the names of Brown and Tully were buried. And from which, even on a cloudy day, it was possible to see a mountain on the horizon.

  That narrowed the search down quite a bit.

  But it was still going to take time.

  Chapter Sixty-five

  MONDAY, JUNE 22, 1998

  Grace had never been so glad to have a jam-packed calendar. If it hadn’t been for her patients, she thought she might have exploded with impatience. As it was, she was doing the only three things she seemed able to do, work aside. One, doing whatever she could – in conjunction with Dr Parés’ relaxation therapies – to try and keep Cathy’s spirits up. Two, doing much the same for Sam, while the powers-that-be continued to hold his badge hostage. And three, making sure that Jerry Wagner – about whose whole-hearted commitment she was no longer in any doubt – was kept as thoroughly in the picture as possible so far as the investigation was concerned.

  ‘She does seem to be coping better,’ Wagner told Grace at a quick meeting in his office after one of his visits to the house of d
etention. ‘But it’s getting to be a real tightrope dance trying to keep Cathy positive without giving her false hope.’

  ‘At least there is real hope now,’ Grace pointed out.

  ‘Tell me the latest,’ Wagner urged.

  ‘Nothing on the cemetery yet,’ Grace said, reporting what she’d just happened to hear Martinez telling Sam. ‘The climate and the mountain, in particular, seemed to point to Seattle again – you know, the Olympics or maybe the Cascades – but so far everything’s drawn a blank.’

  ‘It’ll come,’ Wagner said.

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Yes, I do. One way or another. Either Hayman’s body will wash up and then they’ll have dental records and blood to help them along, or the boy’s photo’s going to stir someone’s memory.’

  Grace was getting ready to ask the $64,000 question again.

  ‘All these people are working now, all over the country, law enforcement agencies getting involved in Seattle and up in Maine and wherever – the State Attorney must know that Hayman keeping those photographs of Marie and Arnold and Frances has to mean that Cathy shouldn’t have been charged with the killings.’

  ‘It’s still all completely inconclusive, Grace,’ Wagner said.

  ‘But enough for reasonable doubt, surely? Enough at least to let her out of jail while they carry on investigating, maybe on bail?’

  ‘There was no bail at the start of all this,’ he reminded her, ‘and it’s not going to be allowed now. The judge would have to drop the charges in order for Cathy to get out.’ He paused. ‘My people and I are working on that possibility all the time, Grace.’

  ‘So you do think it’s worth pursuing?’ she persisted.

  ‘I think there’s a chance,’ he said. ‘Just don’t tell Cathy that.’

  Grace smiled at him. ‘Who’s the psychologist here?’

  ‘He really seemed to mean it,’ she told Sam that evening.

  ‘You seem surprised.’