Last Run

by Hilary Norman

  ‘You look so tired,’ Terri told David after they’d both been shooed out while Saul was given a sponge bath. ‘Why don’t you take advantage of my being here and go home, rest a while?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ David said, ‘but it isn’t me who’s just been through that whole ordeal and then driven from Naples.’ He smiled. ‘This is just sitting for me, sitting with my son, and frankly I’m thankful I can still do that.’

  ‘Same goes for me,’ Terri said.

  ‘I well believe it. But truthfully, the way you look right now, if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re going to be much better company for Saul once you’ve had some sleep.’ David smiled again. ‘He’s had the greatest present already, he’s seen for himself that you’re safe, and he’s the last person who would want you to make yourself sick, now of all times.’

  For once, Terri believed that one of Saul’s relatives actually meant what he was saying; so for once she didn’t feel the need to dig her heels in.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘You win.’

  ‘My relationship with Kez was never the same again,’ Lucia said. ‘Part of me hated her after that, for making me do such a terrible thing to Phil.’

  More than anything now, Grace wanted to leave, to stop listening, just get out and go home to sanity. Yet at the same time she knew she had to ask.

  ‘What was it you did to him?’

  ‘It was all very simple,’ Lucia answered. ‘Strange, in a way, because I started out trying to work out far more complicated ways, using my herbs and plants – quite a few of them are poisonous, you know.’

  Grace wished fervently that she hadn’t asked.

  ‘I was just about to settle on beautiful foxglove when I realized how foolish that would be, because Phil was already taking digitalis for his heart condition, which meant all that was needed was an overdose.’

  Hearing it, Grace thought, but not believing it.

  ‘His own mistake,’ Lucia went on, ‘made while he was out here – ’ she gestured at the charming setting around them – ‘without a phone, his wife out shopping. Which meant poor Phil was all alone, no one here to give him the atropine that would have stabilized him.’

  Not wanting to believe it.

  ‘And by the time I did get home,’ Lucia said, ‘it was too late.’

  Terri had not gone directly home as she’d told David she would.

  There was something she wanted to check out before she could rest.

  Matilda Street.

  There were a couple of Miami Beach PD cars and one from Collier County parked outside the white clapboard house she knew Flanagan had lived in.

  That was fine, that was good, meant the job was being done.

  Then, abruptly, one more thing – she wanted to see Grace.

  Wanted to see her reaction when faced with her own prime suspect. Not really expecting or even needing an apology, just wanting to get it over with so they could move on.

  But there was no one home, just Woody barking inside.

  Finally, ready to admit total exhaustion, Terri turned around and drove home.

  ‘Kez felt it, too,’ Lucia said. ‘The awful strain that doing something so dreadful to Phil had placed on me and on our relationship. She became much more remote after that, confided in me less often.’

  ‘Did that make it harder?’ Grace asked. ‘Or easier in some ways?’

  She was shell-shocked by the discovery that the woman she’d worked with for two years was herself a killer. Finding it hard to speak, but with a developing awareness that she needed to get into this dialogue, keep her wits about her.

  ‘Nothing made it easier,’ Lucia said.

  ‘No,’ Grace said. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I think Kez felt I was deeply ashamed of her, which was true.’ Lucia paused. ‘I think that from that time on, she both loved and hated me. Loved me for having helped her till then. Hated me for knowing her so well.’

  ‘You said she became remote,’ Grace said. ‘So did you still know what was happening in her life?’

  ‘I made it my business to know. Not everything, thankfully, and I guess it would have been easier just to shut myself off from her, but I felt responsible.’

  ‘So it went on?’ Grace felt sick again, with dread.

  ‘I hoped for a while that she’d stopped,’ Lucia said. ‘But I found she’d just learned to do a better job on her own, without me. And the more efficient she became, the harder it was for me to go on believing that she couldn’t help herself.’

  ‘I’m not sure that efficiency necessarily means that she could help herself.’

  The word ‘organized’ had come to Grace’s mind, a word criminal profilers used about some categories of killer. She thought about Sam, wondered if he had listened to her message yet, how angry he would be with her for coming here.

  ‘It’s kind of you to say that,’ Lucia said, ‘except that, you see, the younger Kez would fly into these great rages, but as she matured she seemed to find the self-control to walk away, take her time, plan her revenge, if that’s what it was.’

  ‘Is that what you think it was?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Revenge or punishment, or just paying them back.’ Lucia paused. ‘She once told me she was wiping the smiles off their faces.’

  ‘Like a child, still,’ Grace said.

  ‘A monster child,’ Lucia said.

  Mike Rowan from Broward County had been the last to arrive in Naples. He might just as easily have waited and let Cathy come to him, but the way things were, he figured it made more sense to get her account sooner rather than later, before time and grief or some other intense emotion distorted some or all of it.

  Sam had been told he could leave any time.

  ‘Not without you,’ he’d told Cathy at noon, over a sandwich.

  And right after that he’d checked his voicemail, listened to two messages, then tried and failed to reach first Grace, and then Martinez.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Cathy had seen the new tension in his face.

  ‘Nothing, sweetheart,’ Sam said. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘Something’s up with Grace, and when are you ever going to understand that I’m not a kid and I can take bad stuff?’

  ‘OK,’ Sam said. ‘One question.’

  ‘Sure,’ Cathy said.

  ‘Can you shed some light on a couple of weird messages Grace and Al left me about Lucia Busseto maybe being Kez’s aunt?’

  ‘What?’ Cathy turned ashen. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Come on.’ Sam led her to a chair, sat her down. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Cathy shook her head, trying to piece things together. ‘Sam, I don’t know, except—’

  ‘Tell me.’ Sam drew up a second chair, sat down close to her. ‘Just tell me.’

  She told him about the photograph on Lucia’s desk. And then – getting it out fast, because no one was with them for once – she told him, too, what Kez had said about an aunt who’d helped her.

  ‘Helped her,’ Sam echoed, fear mounting.

  ‘After the things she did,’ Cathy said.

  ‘After the killings,’ he said.

  Needing to be very clear now, because Grace had left her message before ten thirty, and it was past noon now, which meant that she could have been in Key Biscayne with Lucia Busseto for over an hour.

  ‘You think Grace is with her, don’t you?’ Cathy said, reading his face.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Sam said.

  ‘Then you have to go,’ she told him.

  ‘I don’t want to leave without—’

  ‘You have to go now,’ Cathy insisted. ‘You have to make sure Grace is all right, Sam, you have to.’ She took hold of his hand, held it tightly. ‘They’d let me go if I asked them, but it might take time.’ She saw him hesitating. ‘I’ve been through a lot worse than this, you know I have.’

  ‘I know, sweetheart, but—’

  ‘But none of this would be happening i
f I hadn’t met Kez, and if anything happens to Grace or the baby I’ll never forgive myself, and you know that too.’

  He did know.

  Listening to Lucia, Grace was starting to feel unwell again, a little nauseous and disoriented.

  Hardly surprising, she told herself. Tried telling herself, too, that this was what she did for a living, letting people talk about their problems, their lives.

  Not the same.

  ‘I used to wish sometimes,’ Lucia said, ‘that if Kez couldn’t stop, she would die, even kill herself. I’ve read that some people with body dysmorphic disorder – if that is what she had – do sometimes commit suicide.’

  ‘It happens,’ Grace said. ‘It’s a tragedy when it does.’

  She wondered, not for the first time, why Lucia was entrusting all this to her, and finding the answer more than a little frightening, she decided not to think about it.

  She asked herself again if Sam had listened to her message, felt he probably had, was almost certainly therefore either on the way here, or had asked Martinez or even the local police to come check on her.

  That thought comforted her, though the knowledge that she had turned her cell phone off before entering Lucia’s house was less comforting. Especially as the phone was still in her bag, which she had left in the sitting room.

  Lucia had just told her that she had murdered her husband, which meant she might not take kindly to Grace retrieving it.

  Forget the phone for now.

  She asked another question instead.

  ‘Cathy told me that Kez confessed some of these things to her.’ Grace paused. ‘Why do you think she did that after so long, and why to Cathy?’

  ‘Hard for me to say,’ Lucia replied.

  ‘You knew her better than anyone,’ Grace persisted.

  ‘That doesn’t mean I ever understood how her mind worked.’

  Grace said nothing, just waited.

  ‘I think, maybe,’ Lucia reflected, ‘she came to her confession, and to her end, because of Saul. Because finally one of her crimes came home to her. Because in harming Saul she also wounded Cathy, someone she cared for.’ She shrugged. ‘Because maybe until Saul, her victims weren’t “real” people to her.’

  Good answers, Grace realized. Rationally thought through.

  Frighteningly so.

  Terri was finally home, and she knew that Saul’s dad was right, that she ought to give in and go straight to bed.

  But she also knew that this was the right time – perhaps the only time she might have – to complete the work she’d set herself, the task no one had wanted her to undertake in the first place, by writing up her final report on the beach killings. And she was fairly certain that no one was ever going to want to read it, that it would probably never be used to help her career as she’d hoped it might, but the fact was she still wanted to do it for herself, and for her grandma, and for her ‘New York’s Finest’ granddad. Terri accepted now that she’d screwed up big-time career-wise, that at the very least she was going to get hauled over the coals, but . . .

  Cafecito was what she needed, a good strong hit to clear her head.

  Then the report.

  Then, finally, some rest and back to Saul.

  Sam was back on I-75 driving way too fast. They hadn’t taken his badge, yet, and if he got pulled over for speeding he’d show it to them and they’d let him go; he had no choice.

  As scared as he was for Grace, he was also extraordinarily pissed at her for heading into this situation without talking to him first. So she’d left him a message, but she had to have known when she left home that if she’d reached him, he’d have told her to stay the hell away from Lucia. And all he wanted was for her to be safe, all he wanted was to get hold of her and hug her so hard they’d be welded together – and then he’d tell her what he thought.

  If Lucia Busseto did turn out to be Flanagan’s aunt, maybe even her goddamned accomplice, then that had to mean Grace had put herself in real danger.

  Heavily pregnant, stressed to the hilt because of Saul and Cathy, and the hard time he’d given her over Terri Suarez, and right this minute – he’d bet their house and both their cars – probably trying to console and counsel this woman she’d regarded as her friend.

  If Sam could have gotten the Saab to fly, he would have.

  Confessions, Lucia had just said to Grace, came in all shapes and sizes.

  Fresh cups of tea for them both, though Grace didn’t want more tea, thought that after today, she might never drink another cup of herbal tea for as long as she lived.

  ‘I hope you know,’ Lucia went on, ‘how deeply sorry I am for everything my niece has done, most of all for what she did to Saul.’

  It was all beginning to blur just a little to Grace, the incredible horror of it still jagged as a serrated blade, but some of it becoming murkier, harder to penetrate. Her own mind did not seem to be working with its usual meticulous focus; her concentration was flagging, and she was tired.

  ‘But for my own part,’ Lucia said, ‘I’m sorriest of all about Gregory.’

  That felt like a pitcher of ice water thrown in her face.

  Grace stared in silence, reeling with new shock.

  Gregory.

  That young man had been, today at least, out of her thoughts; the vague link that had been part of her spurious suspicion of Terri virtually forgotten. Now, suddenly, she cast urgently around her memory for what she knew about his death.

  Timing.

  Greg had died on the night after Cathy and Kez had been at the meet up in West Palm Beach and Cathy had come home looking so happy –

  ‘No.’ Lucia shook her head, reading her thoughts. ‘Not Kez.’

  Grace looked at her, confused. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘My greatest personal regret,’ Lucia said. ‘After Phil.’

  She saw the look in Grace’s eyes change, saw the last remnants of friendship and compassion disintegrate and fall away.

  ‘The first I heard about the janitor was on the news,’ she went on. ‘They called it a “bizarre slaying”, something like that – I was hardly listening – but then they said Muller had worked at Trent and I started paying attention.’ She paused. ‘And then Kez phoned.’

  Both Grace’s hands moved, almost reflexively, over her unborn child.

  ‘That poor boy,’ Lucia said, ‘must have been there on the beach doing drugs, and Kez hadn’t realized he was there until it was too late.’ She paused again ‘He was down on the sand over by some rocks, three-quarters asleep. But he woke up as Kez was killing Muller. Woke up, freaked out, took off.’ Another pause. ‘Kez’s words.’

  Gregory’s gaunt face and haunted eyes came back again to Grace, as they had so often since his death.

  ‘She hadn’t asked me for help for a long time,’ Lucia said.

  ‘So you killed him?’ Grace’s voice was hushed with disbelief.

  She remembered the woman’s apparent distress on the Monday after Greg’s death.

  ‘I had no real choice,’ Lucia said.

  ‘Of course you had a choice.’ Grace remembered David’s description of the hideousness of Greg’s dying, and revulsion and rage rose in her.

  ‘I didn’t think I had.’

  ‘My God,’ Grace said. ‘My God, Lucia.’

  ‘I mixed what I needed, waited till after dark, and took the Christina through Biscayne Bay, up through the Intracoastal into Dumfoundling Bay. I had to wait a while longer, till I could be sure which bedroom was Gregory’s, and then I left it on the deck outside, as a kind of a present.’

  ‘Present.’ Disgust exploded with the word.

  ‘There was every chance he might not have used it,’ Lucia said. ‘The wind might have come up and blown it away, or a bird might have picked it up, or he might just not have noticed it. Might even have had the strength to say no.’

  ‘You knew he wouldn’t be able to do that,’ Grace said. ‘You knew that.’

  Hold on, she told herself. />
  She was a shrink hanging on by her fingernails, fighting to remember that this woman might not be sick in the same way as her niece, but she had surely been damaged, her own brand of wickedness some kind of by-product of the horror and helplessness.

  But Lucia Busseto had killed her own husband.

  Killed an innocent teenage boy.

  Had known that Cathy was seeing Kez, falling in love with Kez, and had made no move to discourage it.

  ‘You’ve talked about protecting Kez,’ Grace said, ‘but what about the others?’

  ‘Kez was all I could manage,’ Lucia answered. ‘If I had let myself think too much about the others, I would have lost my mind.’

  ‘Don’t you think you have,’ Grace asked, ‘lost your mind?’

  ‘I lost myself,’ Lucia said, ‘a long time ago.’

  Grace wanted to get up, wanted to leave but she was feeling nauseous again and a little dizzy, and anyway she had to stay, had to be here when Sam or the local police arrived, had to make sure they understood what Lucia had been party to, what she had done. Just because Lucia had told her the truth, didn’t mean she was going to tell anyone else, so she had to stay.

  And there were questions she needed to ask.

  ‘Why did you need to kill Gregory?’ She stayed where she was, sitting in her pretty white chair, willing the dizziness away. ‘He didn’t know anything, he wouldn’t have been a threat to Kez. I’ll bet you read my notes, you must have known that.’

  ‘No threat then,’ Lucia said, ‘not yet. But your notes said that he seemed terrified. And there was the thing he kept saying: “Saw me.” Which meant he knew Kez had seen him, which had to mean he’d seen her.’

  ‘But he didn’t say a word about the killing, let alone describe the killer.’

  ‘Not that day,’ Lucia said again. ‘But there could have been all kinds of reasons for that. He might have been too scared, because of what he’d been doing. Or maybe his recall had been blotted out by the fear of what he’d seen. And I knew there was a chance that in time, maybe under hypnosis, or maybe his next time in rehab – which would have come, we both know that – he might have remembered more about Kez. And I couldn’t let that happen. However hard you find that to accept.’