Last Run

by Hilary Norman

  ‘You saved our daughter’s life,’ Grace said.

  ‘Maybe I did,’ he said. ‘Maybe I needn’t have done what I did.’

  ‘Sam, please,’ Grace said, violently.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gracie,’ he said.

  And hung up again.

  For a long while after that call, Grace sat in the kitchen, thinking.

  Claudia had rung about ten minutes later, and Grace had let the machine pick up; the breakdown of communication between them was something she knew she needed to deal with soon, but not now.

  Inside her womb, the baby kicked and squirmed.

  She spoke to him calmingly, lovingly, and he settled.

  Not so Grace.

  She stood up, finally, wandered out of the kitchen into the little hallway and into her office. As she looked at Lucia’s desk, at the dainty pots of herbs on the shelf above, then back down at the letter and filing trays, and jars of pens and pencils, all neat and tidy beside the computer, Grace found that she was missing her again, felt that it might have brought a degree of comfort to have Lucia here.

  She thought about the photograph Cathy had talked about, thought she’d like to see it again, just so she could know what Kez’s balcony had looked like, because visualizing the place might help her feel less cut-off from Cathy, might perhaps even make it easier, in the longer term, to help her.

  She sat down on Lucia’s chair, idly slid open her top desk drawer in case the broken frame might have been tucked in there, found only a notepad, more pens, some sticky tape, general stationery.

  She tried the bottom drawer and found it locked.

  Which surprised her, because aside from the filing cabinets containing patients’ confidential files, nothing in her office had ever been locked to her knowledge.

  She had never regarded Lucia as the secretive type. Then again, she hadn’t ever thought of herself as nosy. Though some might say psychologists, in general, were just that.

  Maybe they were right.

  Grace had seen characters on TV open locked drawers like this easily enough.

  She got up to get the paperknife from her own desk, came back and sat down again. She knew she had no right to do this, had no real understanding of why she was trying to do it, but it wasn’t too hard at all. A little jiggling and sliding around, then just a small amount of force and – with a rush of guilt and an instant mental scramble for a suitable excuse – the drawer was open.

  The photograph was there, right at the back.

  The frame not broken, after all – or maybe it might have been fixed, there was no way of knowing, except then why would it have been put away?

  The picture was, as Grace had vaguely recalled, of Lucia, taken about ten years ago with Tina, her niece, who must, she guessed, have been around twelve or so at the time.

  Tall for her age, long-legged, fair-haired – unlike her Aunt Lucia – her smile for the camera a little strained, looking the way many youngsters do when forced to pose.

  Grace realized suddenly, guiltily, that she had never taken time to look as closely as she might have at the girl who had always, after all, been so special to her aunt.

  There was, now that she did look, something familiar about her. Which was what Cathy had said about the balcony. She looked away from Tina Busseto to the background, saw the flowers – clematis, perhaps, though flowers had never been Grace’s strong suit – and thought that they might have been standing on any balcony anywhere the sun shone.

  She looked back again at the young girl.

  And felt her heart miss a beat.

  Chapter Thirty

  September 13

  ‘It really is all over, son,’ David told Saul.

  He had been there when Saul had wok en again just after midnight, had seen agitation resurface almost immediately, had thanked God that he was able to reassure him without resorting to lies.

  Almost. No reason he could see to give him the whole ugly picture.

  ‘Cathy’s safe and sends her love, and your brother, too. And your Teté is fine, but she’s still with them in Naples, and Grace is resting, but she’s doing fine, and they’ll all be back here to see you soon as they can.’

  No reason on earth to tell his suffering boy that Kez was dead because Sam had shot her. And David had not yet been quite able to establish what part exactly Terri had played in the whole tragic fiasco, but it sounded to him as if she might have fired her weapon, too. Both out of their jurisdiction, in a public place, and it didn’t take a legal brain to know they were almost certainly in all kinds of a jam. And Sam had been suspended before, six years ago, after he’d gone down to the Keys to rescue Grace from Peter Hayman, and a man had ended up dead then. And it cut David right to his soul to think that anyone might regard his tough, brave, but fundamentally gentle and decent son as some kind of rogue cop.

  But shit happened, didn’t it, and that was the likely outcome.

  And David would be damned if Saul was going to hear about it from him.

  Grace hardly slept.

  She called the hospital just after one a.m., heard that Saul was comfortable, thanked God for that and for Cathy’s safety, and Sam’s, and sent up a prayer for Cathy’s broken heart and strength. And then a little later she surprised Woody by clipping on his leash and taking him for a walk around the quiet island roads.

  Thinking.

  It couldn’t be, she must be wrong.

  Yet Cathy had recognized the balcony.

  And Grace thought, just thought, that she might have recognized the girl in Lucia’s photograph.

  Which had disappeared, if she ransacked her brain, at around the time Cathy had first met Kez Flanagan. Around the time when Cathy had brought Kez home to meet her.

  No Lucia that day, Grace remembered.

  It couldn’t be. What she was thinking couldn’t possibly be right.

  Phil Busseto’s niece. Tina, the apple of Lucia’s eye, the daughter she’d never had, as she had once told Grace.

  Cathy had said, hadn’t she, that Kez had told her something about an aunt?

  An aunt who used to help her.

  Kez Flanagan. Given name Kerry Flanagan.

  Tina Busseto?

  Couldn’t be.

  She struggled through the rest of the night, slept a little out of pure exhaustion, a fitful, useless kind of sleep, knowing already the call she was going to make as early as possible come Tuesday morning.

  ‘Grace, what’s up?’ Martinez asked.

  ‘A hell of a lot,’ she said, ‘as I’m sure you know.’

  ‘Own worst enemy, our Sam,’ his friend said. ‘But there’s no guy in this world I’d rather have looking out for me, and I’ll testify to that till hurricanes stop blowing.’

  ‘Thank you, Al,’ Grace said. ‘Let’s hope you don’t have to.’

  ‘Me, too.’ He surmised from her tone that nothing bad – at least nothing worse – had happened, and waited to hear what she did want from him.

  ‘I’m looking for a little help with something,’ she told him. ‘And I apologize, in advance, because I know how burdened you must be.’

  ‘True enough,’ Martinez said, ‘but if I can help, I will.’

  ‘I was hoping you might be able to run a check on someone for me.’

  His sigh was audible. ‘What kind of a check?’

  ‘Nothing complicated,’ Grace said. ‘At least, I don’t think so. The kind I might want to run on, say, a future nanny.’

  ‘OK.’ Martinez was relieved. ‘Name?’

  ‘It’s Lucia Busseto,’ Grace said.

  ‘Your Lucia?’ He sounded surprised.

  ‘I know it’s a little strange, but we never ran any checks when she first began working here because she came through Dora.’ Grace hesitated. ‘Al, I don’t want to tell you why I need this, but it would just put my mind at rest.’

  ‘And your mind can’t be getting too much of that right now,’ Martinez said. ‘No problem.’

  ‘Her niece, too,’ Grace add
ed quickly. ‘Her late husband’s niece, in fact. Tina Busseto. She’s a nurse, living in Naples, that’s about all I know. And Lucia lives in Key Biscayne.’

  ‘And you still don’t want to tell me why.’ Martinez didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Anything special I should be looking for?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. Just family stuff, I guess, anything unusual.’

  ‘Criminal records?’ The surprise came through again.

  ‘As I said, the kind of thing we’d do for a nanny.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘One more thing,’ Grace said. ‘If you talk to Sam—’

  ‘Let me guess.’ Martinez cut her short. ‘Don’t mention it to him.’

  ‘Only because he’s got too much to handle as it is, and this really is just something I need to do because I work with Lucia every day. And, of course, the most important thing is that she does not find out, because that might be really hurtful.’

  ‘How urgent is this?’

  ‘Very,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry, Al.’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ Martinez told her. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  The bat was found by a surfer just after eight a.m.

  Something, maybe, to help Sam’s case a little. Proof, at least, that there had been a baseball bat – though none of the witnesses who had mentioned it, even the two who’d seen Kez swinging it, had felt the action had in any way justified her being shot.

  The ingrained stains were still there, though only time and testing would tell if the ocean, and Kez’s multiple cleanings, had left behind any conclusive matches with blood or DNA of any of the victims. Certainly something to compare with the fragment left in the mess of Carmelita Sanchez’s forehead.

  Not that helping prove Flanagan’s guilt was necessarily going to save Sam from losing his job or, conceivably, from a civil suit that might be brought against him by some, as yet unknown, member of Flanagan’s family, maybe her long lost mother. Or even from going to jail.

  But at least now they had the bat.

  Sam had just called – a snatched couple of moments – when Martinez phoned Grace at nine twenty-five.

  ‘No record and no skeletons,’ he said, getting right to it, ‘if that’s what you were nervous of. Husband Philip Busseto died of heart disease way back, not too long after they lost their daughter.’

  ‘Daughter?’ Grace, sitting in her office, was startled.

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Could be too hard for her to talk about,’ Martinez said. ‘Little girl named Christina, drowned in their bathtub. No suspicious circumstances. The coroner was very clear on that, no blame attached to her mom or dad. But Lucia had a breakdown afterwards. Guess you didn’t know about that either?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ Grace said, her heart already aching for Lucia.

  ‘The niece is going to take a little longer to track down,’ Martinez told her. ‘Unless you know different, I figure I’ll check out Christina Busseto, too, in case this Tina was named for the dead child.’

  ‘Sounds sensible,’ Grace said.

  Though her mind was wandering. She remembered David saying that Kez’s mother had been named Gina.

  By no means necessarily an Italian name, but. . .

  Kez in the photograph with Lucia.

  Perhaps Kez – hard to say, for sure; so young and with fair hair.

  But Grace had looked again and again, then shut her eyes, trying to pull Kez back to the forefront of her mind, remembering a sharp nose, greenish-hazel eyes and a pointed chin, and then she’d opened her eyes again and seen those features in the girl in the picture.

  Which was utterly bewildering, but seemed to say that Kez was Lucia’s niece. Daughter of Joey and Gina Flanagan. Gina perhaps then being Phil Busseto’s sister.

  ‘Grace?’ Martinez’s voice, sharper than usual, jolted her. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’

  She tried to sound normal as she thanked him – poor man, already beleaguered enough, and now being asked to take on weird-sounding nanny checks for her. But as she ended the call, Grace felt quite dizzy with confusion, struggling to make some kind of sense of it all.

  Lucia had always talked so much about Phil’s niece. Tina, the wonderful, happy young nurse in Naples. But if – if – Grace was right about this, then surely that had to mean there was no such person as Tina Busseto. That she was some kind of invention of Lucia’s, perhaps because the bereaved mother had needed a replacement for her poor drowned little girl so badly that she had made up a perfect niece.

  Or maybe the reality of her actual niece, Kez, had been too hard to cope with.

  ‘Guesswork,’ Grace said, out loud. ‘Nothing but conjecture.’

  She knew though, with sudden certainty, that what she had to do now, as Lucia’s friend, was to find her and speak to her.

  Because if by chance she was right, then poor Lucia must be desperately in need of a friend. Because if she did turn out to be the aunt who Kez said had ‘helped’ her in the past, then Lucia must have been through the most unimaginable hell on earth. And now, after all that horror, to be so brutally bereaved.

  If she even knew yet that Kez was dead.

  Terri had been suspended from duties pending further investigation into her actions, but was now free to leave Naples, and though she knew that some time down the track the possibility that she might have wrecked her precious career might break her heart, for now all she cared about was getting back to Saul.

  ‘Anything you need,’ Sam had told her hastily in a corridor between interviews, ‘any time.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she had told him.

  ‘I doubt anyone in Internal Affairs is going to pay any attention to anything I have to say,’ Sam had added quietly, ‘but I guarantee I’ll do my best for you.’

  ‘Somehow,’ Terri had said, ‘I can’t see your best being quite good enough.’

  Grace had accepted that she had to call Sam to share her thoughts with him, and had tried to do so before hauling herself back into the Toyota and heading west over Broad Causeway. But his phone had been switched to voicemail, which had tempted her momentarily to leave no message, anxious that if she worded it badly Sam might send in the troops – or at least the Village of Key Biscayne police – to deal with Lucia without giving her a chance to speak to Grace first.

  Sins of the niece.

  The injustice of that rankled, but then so did the risk of making Sam feel yet again that she had not trusted him. And hurting him was a far worse prospect than hurting Lucia, much as she sympathized.

  She kept the message simple. ‘I’ve gone to see Lucia,’ she told him, ‘who may just possibly turn out to be Kez Flanagan’s aunt by marriage.’ She paused, then added: ‘Ask Martinez.’

  And now, her conscience less cluttered, she was turning south on to Biscayne Boulevard on her way to Key Biscayne, trying as she drove to gauge how she really felt now about Lucia, and to work out what she planned to say when she found her.

  To reassure her, if possible, that she could not be blamed for her niece’s crimes.

  If she was right about Kez being the niece.

  Yet Grace’s instincts told her that she was right, and she’d trusted to them more often than not in the past – though they had certainly been appallingly off when it had come to mistrusting Terri.

  Play it as it comes.

  Best thing to do when she got there, look the other woman in the eye and take it from there.

  The real best thing to do might be to turn the car around and go home.

  Grace went on driving south.

  Cathy didn’t know how much more she could take.

  The questions were still going on and on, everyone being kind and polite and considerate, and she’d volunteered for it, wanted to get it all out and finished with. But each word stabbed at her, at her heart and at her psyche, her character, her pitiful lack of judgment.

  All she wanted now was to go
home, lick her wounds and be allowed a little time to grieve for Kez. But returning to Miami would mean going to see Saul, witnessing his pain again, knowing that her friend, her lover, had done that to him.

  So how could she contemplate grieving for that person?

  She really didn’t know how much more she could take.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Though Dora Rabinovitch had once told Grace that Phil Busseto had left Lucia well provided for, the dainty white waterfront house on a Harbor Drive corner plot – Lucia’s scarlet Audi coupé in the driveway as confirmation – still came as a surprise.

  It had the works – a pretty backyard, deck and mooring complete with a pale blue speedboat, all just visible through palms from the road – and it had to be worth a small fortune in today’s market. Though all the money in the world, Grace thought, could never have made up for what this woman must have – might have – gone through.

  She took her cell phone off its hands-free cradle and hesitated – she’d told Sam where he could find her, after all. She turned it off, dropped it in her bag and got out of the car, walked slowly up the path, took a breath and rang the bell.

  Three seconds later, the door opened.

  ‘Grace,’ Lucia said.

  Grace had the sense, instantly, that she had been expected.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said.

  Lucia wore a black linen trouser suit, her curly, silver-threaded hair as kempt as ever, but her face was drawn and tired, her eyes bleak.

  Grace’s heart went out to her.

  Lucia opened the door wider, stepped back to let Grace in and closed it quietly.

  ‘You know,’ she said.

  ‘I’m so very sorry, Lucia.’

  Grace put out her arms and the other woman, almost a head shorter, allowed herself to be held for a moment or two before she drew away again and moved ahead of her visitor towards the rear of the house.

  Everything was white and graceful except for the greenery, which seemed the overwhelming feature throughout. Plants everywhere of all shapes and sizes, a glasshouse visible through the doors at the back of the sitting room – and no surprise to Grace there, given Lucia’s gift for indoor and outdoor gardening.