There had to be a trigger.
“You didn’t answer my question, Doctor,” Jo pressed him. “Are you aware of Mrs. Dielman ever attempting suicide?”
“I can assure you,” he said, looking her straight in the eye, “that Jenny has not attempted to take her own life since I assumed her care.”
“And before that?”
“Those records aren’t mine to share.”
Jo was getting impatient. “Which means?”
“You do realize HIPAA prevents me from releasing copies of records generated by another doctor or hospital without the patient’s signed consent?”
“I do,” Jo assured him. “But Mrs. Dielman might be in harm’s way. I need to know as much as I can, or I can’t help.”
Patil frowned. “If I tell you I don’t believe she’d do it again, would that be enough?”
“Thank you, yes.” Because it meant that Jenny Dielman’s old medical records likely contained reports of a suicide attempt, or at least an accidental OD.
“You must understand”—Patil’s gaze darted back and forth between her and Hank—“she wasn’t over Finn’s death by a long shot, and the upcoming anniversary had her reliving that night all over again. She felt responsible, even though she wasn’t home when it happened, or perhaps because of that. She said Finn spoke to her, that he came to her in her dreams, that something wasn’t right. She wanted to figure things out for herself and make sense of it.” He paused before continuing. “She believed that, if she’d been there, the accident would never have happened and her son would be alive. I asked her to forgive herself and stop asking why, but she was still seeking an answer.”
“Shouldn’t she have seen a psychiatrist?” Jo asked pointedly.
“I gave her some names, of course, urged her to seek treatment from a specialist.” Patil didn’t sound defensive. “But Jenny didn’t want to go. She felt comfortable with me, and I didn’t want to push her. It would have been worse for her to withdraw from any kind of treatment at all.”
There was that word again.
Comfortable.
Patrick Dielman had used it to describe his relationship with his wife. And it made Jo wonder if Jenny Dielman had been biding her time. But for what? Another suicide attempt?
“If I’d felt she were a danger to herself, I would have recommended hospitalization. I encouraged her to start a journal. In fact, I gave her a notebook about a month ago to help her gather her thoughts and put them in order.”
“What did it look like?”
“Just a simple composition book from the drugstore,” he said.
“Did her husband know about it?”
The doctor paused. “That would have been up to Jenny.”
Since Dielman had said nothing about a journal, she had a feeling his wife hadn’t clued him in. She thought of something Patrick Dielman had mentioned that morning. “Did Jenny tell you that she was misplacing or forgetting things?”
Patil looked at her, long and hard. “I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she was being forgetful. She had so much to deal with.”
“You don’t think she was seriously losing it?”
Patil rose from the stool, tucked the chart underneath his arm, and smoothed his lab coat with the other hand. “I don’t believe she had a full-blown psychosis.”
“You sure about that?”
The grooves around his mouth deepened. “The human mind is a tricky piece of machinery. It’s hard to anticipate what anyone might do from one day to the next, even the most rational human being, but especially those under severe psychological stress. I didn’t sense that Jenny was ready to give up, not . . .” He stopped himself, and Jo wondered if his next word would have been yet.
“I hope you find her,” he said.
“We’ll do our best,” Jo told him.
“Jenny is very vulnerable. I’d hate to think someone took advantage of that.”
“So would I.” Jo passed off her card and asked him to get in touch if he heard from Jenny or if he thought of something else that might help.
Hank didn’t say anything until they were alone in the elevator and the doors had slipped closed.
“What if this woman goes home tonight?” he asked. “What if there’s no funny business involved, and Mrs. Dielman just chucked her real life for a while?”
“I’d be happy to hear it.”
“You’d just walk away?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
The buttons pinged as they steadily descended past the fifth floor, then the fourth and third.
He lowered his head and shook it. “Aw, Jo,” he said.
Okay, now he was pissing her off. “What?”
“You’re like a dog with a bone. Once you get your teeth into something, you damned sure don’t let go.”
“I like to see things through,” she shot back. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Maybe I should’ve had the doc warn you about brain damage from banging your head against the wall.”
Jo wanted to tell him he was wrong. That someone had to listen when others wouldn’t, because not all victims could speak for themselves.
But she waited for the elevator doors to open and said nothing at all.
I have to know how it happened.
I was too numb that night at the hospital, too overcome by tears and disbelief to ask anything beyond, “Can I hold him? Can I kiss him one last time?”
K said that he’d been on the phone when Finn had gone out in the dark alone. Finn must have been climbing up to the tree house when it happened. He hit his head and broke his neck. It was an accident, K said. It was no one’s fault. Not his. Not God’s.
Why don’t I believe him?
I used the library computer to look up articles on cervical spine injuries, and I searched in books on anatomy and neurology, anything that would help paint a clearer picture.
The hospital had given me Finn’s things in a plastic bag: the shirt he’d been wearing along with his jeans and shoes. There was so little blood on his yellow shirt. I had thought there would be more.
It may be all in my head, but I feel like Finn is guiding me, desperate for me to recognize the clues. I just have to look harder to see them.
Back when it was all so fresh, I did something I regret. I ended up in the hospital. K told me I was losing it, that I needed help he couldn’t give me. He said I was mired in grief and acting irrationally.
Maybe I was then. But am I irrational now?
Am I crazy to wonder?
Finn slept with a night-light. He cried if the bulb burned out. He would not have gone out in the dark by himself.
If I know anything for sure, it’s that.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hank had arranged to talk with a couple of students from McKinney High regarding the missing tubas, following a tip that the theft was tied to next week’s Turkey Day game between Plainfield and McKinney. The case appeared to be little more than a prank based on a budding football rivalry, a call to break into the opposing team’s band room and grab the biggest instruments they could get their hands on, which sounded a lot like the plot for a porn flick.
Jo figured her partner could handle the interview without her help, so she had him drive her back to the station. She had a little time to kill before heading into Dallas to get her head shrunk. After the appointment, she’d make a side trip to the Warehouse Club and walk around a bit, talk to the manager and feel things out. There were too many questions about Jenny Dielman running through her brain, and she wanted to silence a few of them if she could. She wasn’t sure they had a case, but Hank was right: she couldn’t let it go.
She sat at her desk and checked her voice mail for messages. There was a returned call from Lisa Barton, the Dielmans’ neighbor, saying that yes, she’d be willing to talk. Jo tried to phone her back, but ended up playing phone tag.
There was another message, too, a quickie from Adam. “Hey, babe, I’m just sitting here, signing postmortem reports and
thinking about you,” which made her smile. She was about to dial his number and thank him for the hickey—and the grief over it that Hank had doled out at lunch—but her desk phone started ringing.
“Detective Jo Larsen,” she answered.
“It’s Ronnie,” said the familiar voice, slow and smooth as molasses.
Jo winced. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Nothing much if you don’t meet me at your mother’s house on Saturday,” Ronnie told her. “You know the place is going on the market after Thanksgiving, and we’ve got to finish cleaning it out—”
“All right, all right,” Jo cut her off. She promised she’d be there unless something came up. She hoped like hell something would.
“I had my nephew move the boxes with the kitchen things into the garage,” Ronnie went on. “You still don’t want any of it?”
“Positive.”
“I’ll have him bring his truck and haul those things to Goodwill tomorrow, but you’ve got to promise to go through your mama’s personal belongings, honey, and the stuff from your old room. That I can’t do.”
I don’t want anything from Mama’s house. Do whatever you want. Toss it, burn it, let it rot. But she couldn’t flake out on Ronnie. The woman had already done more than enough for Mama, for the both of them. Jo didn’t need that guilt on top of everything else.
“I’ve put her papers in a box and left them on the kitchen counter in case you get a chance to drop by before the weekend. You’ve got her power of attorney. There are things you ought to know about.”
“I guess you’re right.”
Ronnie laughed. “I always am.”
She held the phone for a moment after hanging up, long enough to take several deep breaths and block Mama from her head. Then she got busy typing up an initial report on Jenny Dielman. She left a paper copy on her captain’s desk before picking up her coat, waving to the dispatcher, and taking off.
The afternoon air still swirled frantically, tearing leaves from trees and snatching at her clothes and hair. Once snug in the driver’s seat of her Mustang, she exhaled deeply, pushing brown waves from her face and catching sight of her dark eyes in the rearview mirror.
In the shadows, it was hard to differentiate between pupil and iris. A nearly black gaze stared back at her, serious and unblinking. Perpetual smudges of gray beneath attested to sleeping badly as a matter of routine.
Hank was right. She looked so intense. No one would ever call her perky.
A dog with a bone.
She strapped on her seat belt, deciding she’d been called a lot worse.
Jo started the car and maneuvered out of the lot, fixing her attention on the road ahead. She knew her pulse wouldn’t ease until she’d put the station far behind her, after she’d merged onto the highway that would take her south into Dallas.
She had a slight problem with separation anxiety, like leaving her desk when she had work to finish, but it was part of the process of “fixing Jo” that Terry was hell-bent on instigating. No biggie, she told herself, because a little distance could benefit a case, right? Sometimes when things were too close, they weren’t as easy to see. Not until you took a step back, far enough to make the blurred edges crisp.
Maybe she shouldn’t be so concerned about a woman who hadn’t even been missing a day. Hank liked to say, “Don’t get your heart involved,” and she tried hard not to. It worked sometimes, and other times she was swept away on a raging current—a doggedness that Mama would have labeled “obstinance.” And when that happened, there was no backing off. She didn’t know how to work any other way.
“How can you help others when you treat yourself so badly? I don’t want to see you burn out until there’s nothing left of you, Jo.”
She hadn’t even reached Terry’s office, and she could already hear her reprimand. No matter how badly she wanted to turn the car around every time, she couldn’t do it. She’d promised Terry she’d stick to this twice-a-month meeting, and she would if it killed her. It just might, seeing as how their sessions meant picking at old wounds that hadn’t healed. She’d rather have hot pokers shoved in her eyes.
Lord, but she was trying.
It was the best she could do.
The police band she’d installed in the old Mustang crackled to life, and Jo switched it off, turning on the radio, set to the classical music station. She tuned into von Suppé’s “Light Cavalry,” a piece she loved. She hummed, swayed her head.
This was about as close to being at peace as she ever got.
She always had so much on her mind that she couldn’t fall asleep at night, afraid she’d missed something, hadn’t done what needed doing. Then her heart would beat so fast, she feared it might stop altogether.
Terry had suggested she was having panic attacks. “There are some good medications for that.”
Medications?
Wasn’t she allowed to feel anxious every now and then without requiring a prescription? Would medicating herself really fix anything? Or just numb what ailed her? If drugs could heal what was broken inside her, she’d be an addict. Who wouldn’t?
Sometimes life hurt, and you just had to suck it up.
It was unnerving at times to have a therapist who’d become her friend and understood her all too well. Terry had long been an advocate for abused and neglected children. They’d become acquainted when Jo had been with the Dallas PD and Terry had handled cases for family services. Jo had always admired Terry’s directness, her ability to see past rose-colored bullshit.
She respected Terry for so much else, too: for having a settled life, a happy home, and a loving mate; for raising a child in a world that grew more frightening every day. Terry and her husband had a boy named Samuel, a little prince if ever there was one.
Jo envied the kid, knowing he would grow up in the kind of environment every child deserved. He was loved and nurtured in a way that so many were not. Seeing Samuel made her crave normalcy, a family of her own. Someday, perhaps, when facing up to her past wasn’t so damned difficult.
Terry knew what had happened to Jo in Mama’s house, what had gone on until her stepfather had died, when Jo was fourteen. But even she didn’t have the answers to the questions Jo kept asking. Had Mama swallowed her suspicions with her bourbon and Coke because she’d just loved him more? Was it punishment because Jo’s birth father had abandoned them?
She would never know, not with Mama so far gone she was more a creature of pity than the fragile and complicated woman Jo had loved and hated all at once.
“Sooner or later, you have to forgive yourself, even if you can’t forgive her.”
Forgiveness was tricky.
Maybe she’d soak in the tub tonight. A bath could cure almost anything for as long as the water stayed warm.
She turned the radio up as one of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons played. The music distracted her, carried her off to somewhere distant.
Before she knew it, she was well inside the Dallas city limits. She cruised I-635 south to the Preston Road exit. Then she hung a right on Harvest Hill. Terry’s office was in a three-story building not far from where the tollway rushed by, mixed in with residential neighborhoods. It was a couple of blocks south and across a busy overpass from a shopping mall.
The minute she stepped into the waiting room, the glass reception window rolled back, and Cathy beamed at her through the hole in the wall. Her spiky red hair accentuated the roundness of her face. “Hi, Jo.”
“Hey.”
“Let me tell Terry you’re here. Just a sec, okay?”
“Sure.”
The window slid shut.
Jo slipped into a chair but didn’t bother picking up a magazine. Except for her, the room was empty. Cathy arranged Terry’s schedule to avoid clients running into one another. There was a rear exit so no one had to walk back through this anteroom. Terry always said that people with troubles on their minds didn’t need other folks eyeing them or striking up stilted conversation.
She’d barely had a
chance to check her ragged cuticles before the inner door clicked open and Terry appeared, one hand on the knob, the other beckoning. “Hi, kiddo, come inside.”
Jo gathered up her bag and went.
Terry hooked her arm through Jo’s, chattering about how Samuel had uttered his first sentence as she ushered her up the hallway to her office, settling her on the plump, burgundy sofa. Colorful pillows surrounded her, and Jo plucked one from behind to create more space to back into. She set her purse by her feet and shrugged out of her coat.
“You want some tea? It’s Earl Grey.”
“Sure.” She could use a belly warming.
A teapot and two mismatched cups and saucers had been set out on the coffee table. Shortbread cookies had been hastily arranged on a plate.
“So how’ve you been?”
“I’m fine.” Jo warmed her hands on the cup, breathing in the steam that rose from the brew.
Terry had poured herself a cup but didn’t touch it. She had one arm on the back of the sofa and the other on her knee, leaning toward Jo. Her brown hair was pulled away from her face with a headband. She wore an expression of unadulterated interest. No wonder she was so good at what she did. Talk about intensity.
“How fine is fine?” Terry asked without blinking.
Jo shrugged. “I’m okay.”
“That’s what you always say.”
“Yet you never believe me.”
“I wonder why. Because you’d tell me you were swell even if you had a knife wedged between your shoulder blades?” Terry nudged her before reaching for a cookie. “You have any trouble getting away?”
Jo swallowed some Earl Grey, careful not to burn her tongue. “Things have been pretty light until this morning.”
“Oh?”
“Guy came in and reported his wife missing.” She blew into her cup to cool it.
Terry chewed the cookie. “I’ll bet you don’t get many missing persons in Plainfield.”
“We don’t get much of anything in Plainfield,” Jo agreed.
“Who’s the woman? Is she senile? Did she wander away?”
“She’s our age.”
“Does she have kids?”
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