‘You’re Broderick,’ she said, and now her head and eyes were moving back and forth between him and Cathy, and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do next. ‘You’re Parés and you’re Broderick, and you’ve done all the killing, and you’ve done this to your own daughter.’
‘Go on now, Cathy.’
He took no notice of Grace at all – she might have been invisible and mute.
Stop the bleeding.
Moving slowly, Grace took a handful of sheet and pressed it against the wound in her shoulder, knowing she had to play for time or do something.
Under the sheets, she kicked Sam with her right foot. For the second time, he gave a dull groan, but nothing else. She kicked him harder.
Parés was still focusing intently on Cathy.
‘You’re doing so well,’ he told her, ‘so well.’ His voice was honeyed now. ‘Just a little farther, not far to go. If you stop now, Cathy, you know what will happen to you, what they’ll do to you. You’ll be sent back to that place – Grace and Sam will make sure you never come out again.’
Same game, Lucca. You have to play the same game.
Grace’s eyes swivelled down to check her shoulder. The blood was oozing through the white sheet, but at least it wasn’t gushing, and although she was shaking like a jello in an earthquake, she didn’t think she was going to pass out quite yet. She looked back up at Cathy’s face, saw absence and wildness and bewilderment in her eyes, and knew that whatever mind she had left right now was trapped in some internal firestorm beyond her understanding.
‘Cathy.’ Grace tried to make her voice as soft and compelling as his, praying that the girl wasn’t too far under to respond to her. ‘I know how hard this is for you. I know you don’t want to kill me or Sam. You don’t want to hurt anyone, Cathy, and you’ve never killed anyone. I know that – Sam and I both know that – and if you put down that thing in your hand, just drop it on the floor, then everyone else will know it too, and all this pain will be over.’
Keeping her eyes trained on Cathy, Grace heard Parés move closer, heard his breathing speed up a little, then slow again, calm again, and she knew, she just knew he was getting closer to what he saw as the climax of the horror game he’d been playing.
‘Put it down, Cathy.’ Grace’s voice was shaking again – there was no way of maintaining the illusion of calm. She sounded as desperate as she felt. ‘For God’s sake, Cathy, you have to listen to me before it’s too late.’
‘It already is too late, Cathy,’ Parés said, less softly now, more commandingly, ‘if you don’t do what I tell you to do. You’ll be finished – through – unless you do it to them first. Just lift your arm again – just raise it – yes, that’s right—.’
Grace watched, horrified, as Cathy’s right arm lifted into the air.
‘It’s getting lighter, isn’t it, much lighter – and the steel in your hand is an arrow with a golden tip. It’s your passport out of here, Cathy . . .’
Grace saw Cathy’s fingers clasp more tightly around the instrument. Beside her, Sam slept on, dead to the world, and the blood was still flowing from Grace’s shoulder, and she knew she was getting weaker . . .
‘Drop the scalpel, Cathy,’ she said suddenly, loudly, with all the strength she could muster. ‘Drop the goddamned scalpel, Cathy, or all you’ll be is a murderer, the way he wants you to be – a killer.’
Cathy dropped it. Grace lurched forward, trying to get to it, but Parés was there before her, snatched it from the rug, grabbed Cathy around her waist. Grace saw her head loll, heard the reflexive, gasping intake of her breath as Parés tightened his grip around her middle.
‘Let her go,’ Grace begged him. ‘Hasn’t she been through enough?’
‘Not enough,’ he said. ‘Not yet. And don’t kid yourself that it matters if she’s the one who kills you, or if I do it myself, because I’ll be long gone when you’re found, and she’ll be the last one to die.’
Beside Grace, Sam gave another groan. Silently, she slid her right hand beneath the bedclothes and dug all her fingernails into his side. He yelped in his sleep.
‘And later, much later,’ Parés went on, ‘when they do her postmortem, they’ll find quite a cocktail in her system – all kinds of nasty stimulants and sedatives – and they’ll know it’s all stuff she probably got hooked on inside, the way so many of them do.’
‘You dirty son-of-a-bitch,’ Grace said as loudly as she could, and dug her nails back into Sam again, knowing she desperately needed to hurt him enough to bring him back to consciousness. ‘You used to be a doctor, for God’s sake, a real doctor.’ She clawed Sam’s stomach, and this time, she thought she felt him trying to get away from her nails, and oh, Christ, she hoped he was hurting, she hoped he was hurting enough to come back to them before it was too late—
‘Oh, yes, I was a doctor,’ Parés said. ‘A damned fine doctor, before my bitch of a wife and her tight-assed sister wrecked my career, after they and this little baby girl’ – he was still tightening his hold around Cathy’s body, and any second now Grace was terrified she was going to hear the cracking of her ribs – ‘told the powers-that-be that they didn’t want me anymore.’
‘Cathy was just a little girl when Marie got that court order,’ Grace cried out. ‘She was just an innocent little child!’ Cathy’s head was lolling a different way now, and Grace could see her eyes rolling and her lips were starting to turn blue. ‘Let her go, please – you have to let her go!’
‘I don’t have to do anything,’ Parés spat. His eyes were filled with loathing. ‘She screamed at me whenever I touched her! She hated me from the moment she came into this rotten, stinking world!’ He gulped for air, and now his expression was exhilarated. ‘So I took the power for myself, didn’t I? I knew I was smarter than they were, than any of them were, so I ducked out of the picture for as long as I needed to, and look what happened, I got even smarter.’ He was flexing his right hand now around the instrument. ‘Oh, the things I learned, Dr Dago Shrink, the things I learned.’
Beside Grace, Sam moaned, a new, different kind of a sound.
‘Sam!’ Grace turned and shook him by the shoulders, yanked at his hair. ‘Sam, you have to wake up now!’ He moaned some more, so she slapped his face, and she didn’t even have to steel herself to do it, it was just life or death, as simple as that. ‘Sam, you have to wake up!’
It was the first time Grace had taken her eyes away from Parés since he’d grabbed Cathy, and it was a second too long.
‘Grace, watch out!’
She spun around to see that Cathy had wrested herself free, and Parés was coming at them, at the bed, and the scalpel was coming down again, and this time it was coming straight for Sam—
Grace screamed again as she used the last of her strength to shove him clear, but she wasn’t fast enough, and the blade scythed into Sam’s side. With a shriek of agony, he came to and kicked out reflexively with both feet, catching Parés in the stomach and knocking him off balance. Grace tumbled off the bed and was almost beside Cathy when she saw that the girl had the scalpel again, and instantly Grace knew what she was going to do.
‘No, Cathy!’ Grace couldn’t let her do that, couldn’t let her destroy herself completely. She grabbed the first thing that came to hand – a book from her bedside table. ‘Cathy, get clear!’ she yelled. ‘Get away!’
Grace threw the book as hard as she could at Parés’ head, heard the dull, sickening, infinitely satisfying, sound of it hitting, heard him cry out, clutching his temple, watched him stagger. And then she saw that Cathy had dropped the scalpel again, and Grace dived for it – and suddenly for the first time, she was in control.
‘Grace, don’t!’
She only half heard Sam’s voice, but she wasn’t listening, and now she was raising the weapon, and it felt good in her hand, powerful – and Parés was still stumbling around, holding his head. And for one long moment it wasn’t Parés or Broderick that Grace was seeing – it was Frank Lucca, her own m
onster father, and it wasn’t Cathy he’d been half-killing, it was Claudia, and Grace didn’t think she knew anymore, or cared anymore, which father she was going to kill, so long as she finished him, finished the nightmare—
The first shot exploded past her head, crunched clear through Parés’ hand, ricocheted against the wall beside the bed, made Grace drop the scalpel and sent Cathy, shrieking in terror, crawling away while her tormentor squealed like a wounded animal.
Grace turned and saw that Sam had dragged himself off the bed and had his .38 in both his shaking hands – Grace hadn’t even seen him bring the hideous, horrific, wonderful gun into the house.
‘Grace, get down on the floor!’ Sam commanded. ‘Get down!’
Grace got the hell down, but Sam’s hands were trembling violently, and his eyes were screwed up as if he couldn’t see properly, and Grace realized that the drugs inside him were interfering with his vision.
‘He’s got it again!’ she heard Cathy shriek.
The explosion of the second bullet grazed Parés’ left cheek.
He put a hand up to touch it, wiped away the streak of blood and laughed, a cold, harsh sound. And then he began to move back towards Grace.
The third explosion slammed clean into his chest.
Eric Parés, once known as John Broderick, fell backwards lightly on to Grace’s bedroom rug, the scalpel still in his right hand. His body hitting the floor seemed to make no sound at all, though maybe it was because the thunder of the shots was still ringing in Grace’s ears.
She stared up at Sam. He was saying something to her, but Grace couldn’t hear him. She turned around again, searching for Cathy, saw her over by the door, huddled, head down, with her arms around her knees.
Very slowly, very painfully – as Sam bent to take the weapon out of her father’s hand and then pulled the phone on to the floor to call for back-up – Grace crawled towards her.
Chapter Seventy-nine
TUESDAY, AUGUST 11, 1998
Bogeymen are tough to kill.
John Broderick had made it through surgery at Jackson Memorial into intensive care, and, according to his doctors, there was no reason to doubt that he would survive to face justice. Grace’s and Sam’s wounds had been superficial. Cathy, David Becket and his colleagues at Miami General said, was going to need careful observation for several days at least while a series of tests – physical, neurological and psychological – were run to determine that no permanent damage had been done by the long-term drug and hypnotic abuse she had suffered.
The greatest concern voiced by the teenager during the early hours had been for Harry, and nothing would convince her that he was perfectly recovered from his own drugs ordeal until David Becket talked the hospital management into letting Teddy Lopez bring the dog in for a brief visit on the second day.
‘Better now?’ Grace asked Cathy, after Teddy and Harry – bright-eyed and bouncing and no worse off for having napped his way through the ordeal – had gone back home.
‘Aren’t you?’ she said, lying back against her pillows.
Grace smiled. ‘Of course.’
‘How’s your shoulder?’ Cathy asked.
‘Not bad.’ Grace was sitting in a wheelchair, orders of the hospital.
‘What about Sam?’
‘Getting better. Complaining more about where I scratched him to try waking him up than about the cut in his side.’
Grace waited for Cathy to ask about Parés, but she didn’t, which was no real surprise. She considered playing it Cathy’s way for a while longer – acting as if he didn’t exist – but there was one crucial element that Grace felt Cathy needed to know, and to believe, as soon as possible.
‘Parés is going to make it,’ she said. ‘But he’s in a maximum security ward at Jackson Memorial.’ Grace paused, watching Cathy’s face. ‘There’s no way on earth for him to escape.’
‘Like he did before, you mean,’ Cathy said, quietly.
Neither Sam nor Grace had been certain how much she had taken in of Sunday night’s happenings – Grace hadn’t even been sure if Cathy had realized that Parés was really her father. Now she knew.
‘So you know who he really is?’ Grace said, just as softly. Cathy didn’t look at her, kept her eyes trained on a fold in the sheets on her bed. ‘I heard everything,’ she said. ‘It was all muffled and weird, like I had a blanket over my head or something, but I heard every word you and he were saying.’ She paused, still looking down. ‘Don’t ask me how I feel about it, Grace, because I don’t know.’
‘I’m not going to ask,’ Grace said. ‘Not yet.’
At last, the blue eyes turned back her way, and they were pools of confusion and disbelief. ‘Is it true?’ Cathy asked. ‘Is Dr Parés really my father?’
‘It seems that way,’ Grace answered. ‘We don’t have one hundred per cent confirmation yet, but there’s really very little doubt.’
Cathy was silent again for a few seconds.
‘So he killed my mom and Arnie,’ she said. ‘And Aunt Frances.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Beatrice Flager.’
‘It certainly looks that way.’
‘And he would have killed us, too, if . . .’
‘I think he might have.’ Grace seldom saw any good purpose in lying.
Cathy looked away again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, softly.
‘What for?’
‘Because he’s my father.’
Quiet rage seethed through Grace. She leaned forward in the wheelchair. ‘You are not responsible for anything he’s done, Cathy. It’s the other way around.’ She had to swallow hard to contain her anger. ‘Don’t you ever forget that, not even for a second.’
‘He said he blamed me for everything.’ Cathy’s voice was flat again. ‘I heard him. He said that I screamed whenever he touched me. He said that I hated him.’
‘He isn’t a rational man, Cathy.’ Grace’s right hand clenched the arm of her chair. She wanted to weep for the girl. ‘I don’t know exactly why, but I’m not certain that he ever was rational.’
Cathy looked right at Grace again, and her eyes were suddenly wet. ‘I didn’t hate him, you know. Mom did – and Aunt Frances.’ She shook her head. ‘But I don’t think I ever did.’
Grace didn’t speak.
‘I do hate him now, though,’ Cathy said.
Thank God for that, at least, Grace thought, but refrained from saying.
She believed it, though, with all her heart. Hate had its place in the scheme of things, she’d often thought. She knew it wasn’t a Christian way to think – she knew that if she weren’t such a badly lapsed Catholic, she would probably have felt compelled to raise the matter in the confessional.
But Grace did believe in hate, just as she believed in evil.
It existed, all right.
If she hadn’t been sure of that before, she was now.
Chapter Eighty
MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 1998
It took some time to put together.
As soon as the man who’d called himself Eric Parés was out of the ICU and it was deemed decent to go to work on him, they took dental impressions and X-rays and had John Broderick’s dentist up in Tallahassee confirm that Parés and Broderick were one and the same. They had already ascertained that he wore brown contact lenses and dyed his hair, and they’d found fine scarring around his ears from where he’d had help from a plastic surgeon to lessen the roundness of his face. More X-rays proved that his large nose had been reduced. The scars on the insides of both wrists and on his throat had been left to nature; probably, the consensus of opinion was, Broderick had feared that asking a plastic surgeon to rid him of those might have drawn excessive attention to himself.
The day after Broderick had been brought into Jackson Memorial, officers from the City of Miami Police Department had entered the apartment that Parés had given as his address when he’d fraudulently applied for his part-time job as physician to the inmates of the Female House of Detenti
on.
The apartment was a one-bed in the Latin Quarter just off the Tamiami Trail. It was small, clean and tidy – a place for everything and everything in its place. The search was meticulous. The officers went through every piece of paper in every file in a two-drawer cabinet – only half filled – and found no trace of anything referring to either John Broderick or the Robbins family. To all intents and purposes, it was the home of Eric Parés, MD – the only true strangeness about it being that none of Parés’ papers dated back past May that same year.
‘Broderick isn’t talking,’ Sam told Grace. ‘He knows we know who he is and what he’s done, but he’s not playing ball.’ He paused. ‘Oh, yeah, and he said – and I quote – that if the “nigger Jew cop comes anywhere near him, he’ll shut up tighter than a coffin”.’
‘Nice,’ Grace said.
They were home from the hospital, had been for a few days now, though Cathy was still there, growing stronger but still being monitored for after-effects. It was evening, and they were out on Grace’s deck with Harry.
‘Not that I can talk to him anyway,’ Sam said, ‘since all he’s charged with so far is filling Cathy with drugs and wounding the two of us.’
‘They will break him down, won’t they?’
‘I’m not a betting man,’ Sam said, ‘but I’d say they will, given time. We already know a few things about Broderick. When he gets mad, he spews it out – and he likes bragging about how smart he is.’
‘But he likes power more,’ Grace pointed out quickly. ‘And so long as he’s not talking, he keeps that, doesn’t he?’
‘To a degree.’
‘What happens if he doesn’t confess and we can’t prove what he did?’
‘We will prove it.’ Sam was definite.
‘But what if we can’t? Isn’t there always going to be a chance that Cathy could still get blamed – maybe for doing the killings under hypnosis, or sleepwalking?’
Mind Games Page 39