Eclipse

by Hilary Norman

  This woman seemed already broken.

  And ready to talk.

  ‘Kate developed an obsession after we settled in Hallandale,’ she told them. ‘For a while, she started writing stories which all ended with some character being blinded, usually as a punishment. Eyes and blindness were always her theme.’

  ‘Had she accepted by then that she had to wear her glasses?’ Sam asked.

  ‘When she chose to,’ Toni said. ‘When she didn’t, she was almost blind.’

  ‘Tell us about the Colt you stole from your father’s safe,’ Martinez said. ‘The gun you shot your sister with tonight.’

  ‘You want to know if it’s the gun used in the Black Hole killings.’ Toni paused. ‘Kate liked that name.’ She nodded. ‘It was the gun used in all those killings, yes.’

  And there it was already. Slam dunk.

  They all looked at her hard, trying to penetrate the calm exterior.

  Hoping for horror, Sam guessed, for shame.

  For humanity.

  Chauvin lay on his narrow bed in the ER bay, smiling.

  Being shot had been a great shock to him initially, but he thought he might not have minded a slightly more serious wound if it had resulted in Sam Becket speaking to him a little more generously than he had.

  ‘You’re a jerk.’

  That had hurt almost as much as the pain in his arm.

  Yet still, Sam had come to check on him. Chauvin had heard his voice out there a while ago beyond the curtains, and though he hadn’t been able to hear what was being said, it was enough, for now, to know that he had come.

  He knew that Sam had been mad at him even before tonight, and he guessed he understood the big detective getting pissed at him for being there during those wild moments in that ugly little house – just remembering walking in on that, seeing the madwoman with her gun trained on Sam still made him shiver – but Sam would realize eventually that Thomas Chauvin really had saved his life.

  And then they would be friends, and Grace and Cathy – or Catherine, as he had decided to call her – would love him for what he’d done.

  His arm was starting to hurt a little again, but it scarcely troubled him because he had more important things to think about. Like what he would call Grace, in his mind, now that he had met Catherine – and pronounced the French way, it was a perfect name for her . . .

  ‘Catherine,’ he whispered.

  His mind was fuzzy from medication, a pleasant kind of sensation.

  He wondered when he would see her again, wondered if perhaps, after his surgery, Sam might invite him to come and stay with them while he recuperated, and then . . .

  ‘Grace-mère’ was what he would call Catherine’s mother – almost like ‘Belle-mère’, the French for mother-in-law . . .

  ‘Catherine,’ he murmured again, smiling.

  And fell asleep.

  Kate had never stopped complaining that glasses gave her agonizing headaches and contacts hurt her.

  ‘I used to get mad at her,’ Toni said, ‘tell her she was choosing to be dependent on me, and sometimes she’d cry and rage, other times she’d be ice cold, but the bottom line was always that it was my fault, so “live with it”.’

  It was only, she went on, when Kate’s urges struck, that her sister dramatically changed.

  ‘Can you explain “urges”?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Sometimes, when we were out and Kate was wearing her glasses, she’d see a perfect stranger and become enraged. Sometimes, it was because she was very attractive or seemed very confident. Other times, it was because of the person’s job. Kate hated opticians, anyway, but if she saw a woman selling mascara, she’d resent her too. Or she’d see a stranger just looking happy, normal, with her kids or partner. Or she’d decide someone was staring at her or talking about her.’

  ‘And were they?’ Joe Duval asked.

  ‘I didn’t think so.’

  ‘Were they always women?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Usually.’

  Kate complained almost daily about someone who’d infuriated her, either on TV or in a market or mall or on the street. Which was Toni’s fault too, because if she hadn’t made Kate wear her damned glasses, she wouldn’t have seen them.

  ‘Sometimes I actually hid her glasses for a while,’ Toni said, ‘but then she’d be so helpless, I couldn’t bear it.’

  Sam waited a moment.

  ‘You referred to “urges”,’ he led her back again.

  Toni nodded. ‘Urges, rages, it’s hard to describe what happened to her.’

  ‘Try,’ Jerry O’Dea said acidly.

  Toni took a breath. ‘Mostly, Kate kept herself under control. She would be seething, but keep it inside, building up until she could get home and explode in safety, without anyone noticing.’

  ‘What happened when she “exploded”?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Sometimes she’d just cry and smash things,’ Toni said. ‘Other times, she’d go to the garage . . .’ She looked at the investigators. ‘You’ve seen Kate’s “workroom” – that’s what she called it.’

  ‘We have seen it,’ Detective Gutierrez said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Martinez said.

  ‘Sometimes she’d go in there soon as we got home, and she’d take a toy or a doll – I bought them for her, because I figured it was a harmless enough outlet for her rage.’ She paused. ‘So anyway, Kate would take one and punish it.’

  ‘How?’ Sam asked quietly.

  ‘She gouged out their eyes,’ Toni said.

  The silence in the room felt thick and ugly.

  Sam broke the pause. ‘I’d like to ask you about the other dolls in Kate’s workroom.’

  Toni didn’t answer.

  ‘Are you all right to go on?’ Duval asked.

  ‘You’re talking about the special dolls. The ones that looked like the victims.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sam said. ‘Did you buy those dolls too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did you buy them?’ Sam asked. ‘At what stage?’

  ‘I always had spare dolls,’ Toni said. ‘Different kinds. For when Kate got mad.’ She paused. ‘Not for when . . .’

  Sam let that go.

  ‘What about the clothes?’ he asked. ‘For the lookalikes, I mean.’

  ‘Some I bought. Mostly I made them.’

  ‘A little sewing sideline for you,’ Martinez said.

  ‘It was what Kate wanted,’ Toni said.

  ‘But it was what you liked doing,’ O’Dea said.

  ‘I hated doing it. But I still did it, same way I did everything she wanted.’

  ‘Why?’ Sam asked. ‘If you hated it.’

  ‘You know why,’ she said. ‘Because I owed her. Because if it hadn’t been for me, her life would not have been ruined.’

  Abruptly, she covered her face with her hands.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Sam asked.

  ‘No.’ Her hands dropped to her lap. ‘I’m very tired. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Would you like to take a break?’ Duval asked.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Sam wondered how she’d be after a rest break – which would be taken in this room, no other comfort offered unless she made demands; wondered if she’d go on talking then, or if she’d invoke her rights to silence and a lawyer.

  It was a chance they had to take.

  It was almost five in the morning.

  One of the many terrible things about this endless night for Dr George Wiley was having nothing to read.

  Graffiti didn’t count, nor legal forms.

  He had invoked his Miranda rights.

  No way he was going to speak to those people like some common criminal.

  He was a doctor, after all.

  ‘I am a doctor.’

  He had told them that over and over, but they just didn’t seem to comprehend what that meant. And though Lieutenant Alvarez had treated him with a degree of respect, it had been apparent from the first that he and the red-haired sergeant already knew Dr Becket, and
were, therefore, biased.

  ‘I don’t have an attorney,’ he’d told them, because he’d never needed one, certainly not a criminal attorney, and they had told him that one could be appointed for him, that he would not necessarily need an attorney until his first court appearance, but that it was his decision.

  He was going to get out. This night of abject humiliation would end, because he was going to ‘bond out’ – he had comprehended that much, that he would be bonding out on ROR – which stood for ‘released on his recognizance’ – and here was a whole new vocabulary which he refused to learn, he who had lived to learn.

  They were talking about a charge of Simple Battery.

  He had not battered the woman, had done nothing, deliberately, to hurt her, and if she had not reacted as she had, screaming and pushing him, he would never have stumbled and his hand would never have struck her eye. He would never have caused her intentional harm.

  He was a doctor.

  The instrument had been one of his own, a lid speculum, and opportunities to examine recently operated eyes were rare and valuable, helping him to perfect his skills, and he had believed that the Becket woman would still be sufficiently relaxed by medication to be compliant, so that he could gently examine her, so that in the future . . .

  No future now.

  They hadn’t found the speculum on him because he’d disposed of it with hospital waste – and that irked him, the waste of a fine, expensive instrument, and maybe they would search for it, find it, but even if they never found it . . .

  If he could only read now, to calm himself, feel more like himself, he might have been better equipped to control the fears.

  As it was, reality was coming at him like a high-speed train.

  Court was coming.

  And with it, truth.

  Because even though this would be the word of a documented hysteric against a doctor, George Wiley was no fool. Even if the case was dropped, those people would not let him forget what had happened – he’d seen that in Dr Becket’s eyes. And he’d overheard something else tonight, that the retired doctor had a homicide detective for a son, which had to be bad news . . .

  They would investigate him. Take him apart.

  Destroy him.

  All that time. All that learning.

  All the yearning.

  To be the best he could. The only thing he’d ever wanted to be.

  A physician.

  They were going to take it away from him.

  He had seen that in Ethan Adams’s eyes, too, in that cold, unforgiving stare.

  Just before the great man had turned his back on him.

  Already finished then, at the Adams Clinic.

  And if they did begin to look more closely at him – which they would, he could see that as clearly as the ugly graffiti on the wall – then everything he had ever lived for would crumble away to nothing.

  George Wiley shivered, closed his eyes and covered his face.

  He could not bear it.

  Could not bear what had been done to him.

  Or what they would still do.

  They would say that he had transgressed, that he had violated the Oath.

  He could not bear that.

  Would not.

  While Toni Petit rested under guard at the station, Sam drove back to Hallandale General to check on Chauvin again and learned that the patient’s surgery was scheduled for eight. Minor stuff, after which he should be ready for discharge by mid-afternoon latest.

  Sam left the hospital and headed for home, feeling the need to touch base, to remind himself that his own world was clean and decent.

  Not safe. He’d dropped that illusion a long time ago.

  You just did your best, except, of course, that wasn’t nearly good enough when it came to your own family.

  He told his mind to shut the hell up, to allow himself to take a break, have a shower, see his wife without waking her.

  She’d obviously done a great job, if Felicia Delgado had felt ready to describe those two women. Though Grace would see it as just one step toward her patient’s long-term healing process.

  He wondered, as he showered in their second bathroom so as not to wake Grace, if Felicia would ever feel strong enough to ID photographs, let alone testify against Toni Petit – though the way Petit’s confession was flowing, they might not need to put the poor kid through any more.

  He considered snatching an hour’s sleep, decided it would only make him feel worse, went downstairs and made himself some toast and tea – plenty of lousy coffee to come later, back at the station.

  He was glad in a way that Grace had not woken, because she’d have questions to ask, about Chauvin getting shot, about Beatriz Delgado’s killing. And his answers, so far as he could give them, would lead to more questions, about Toni stopping Kate Petit from shooting him, then killing her own sister . . .

  Only one of those questions he had an instant answer for.

  Chauvin had implied to Martinez that he’d had some kind of intuition that he’d been in trouble, but the fact was the Frenchman had gotten himself shot because he was a moron. The rest was too damned complicated and grisly and, for the most part, unanswerable for now.

  All down to what Toni Petit was going to tell them back at the station.

  And how much of that would be the truth.

  The Oath was everything to George Wiley.

  Everything.

  He’d been born Gregory Wendell, the only child of prosperous parents in Tampa, with whom he had never gotten along because neither John nor Frances Wendell had ever made any effort to understand him.

  His life had started at age seven, after he’d broken an ankle and become mesmerized by the skills of the doctors who’d helped him heal and also to discover what he would do with his life.

  He would become a doctor.

  His industrialist father had other ideas. John Wendell loathed the medical profession, had blamed both his parents’ deaths on doctors, whom he claimed were worse than murderers and far less honest. He ignored all advice given him by physicians and mocked his son when he disclosed his ambition – and if Frances ever disagreed, she didn’t say so.

  Nothing changed Gregory’s mind. At school, he worked hardest on math, English and the sciences. In private time he read everything he could find about the aspirations and struggles of doctors, from Cronin to Erich Segal to the memoirs of the great physician, Thomas Starzl. When he wasn’t reading, TV hospital shows sustained him; he’d been ten when ER and Chicago Hope had started, and soon Carter, Greene, Geiger and Shutt were his heroes alongside Pasteur, Fleming, Lister and Osler.

  The afternoon Gregory told his father that he had been quietly concentrating on the subjects he was going to need for a medical career, so as to be sure of getting a head start, John Wendell suffered a stroke and died.

  Frances blamed Gregory for her husband’s death, and told her son that he could become an accountant or a janitor for all she cared, but that if he ever raised the subject of medicine again, she would disinherit him.

  He chose accountancy, toed the line by day but used every cent that came his way to enable a secret education via books and, later, the Internet, setting complex passwords on his computer, encrypting texts, videos and lectures he downloaded for his real studies.

  Three years into widowhood, Frances took a barbiturate overdose and tied a plastic bag around her neck, staging it so that her son would be the one to find her. Gregory buried her and the gruesome memory and set to celebrating – until he learned that her estate had firmly bolted the doors to medicine.

  He could have waited till his twenty-fifth birthday, as stipulated, but that would have been too late because it took a decade just to get to the real starting gate, and though he’d heard tales of mature students battling through, Gregory knew that was not for him.

  But he was no quitter.

  If he’d had any real friends, they might have tried talking him out of his plans, but he’d never forged close b
onds with anyone.

  So, no living parents or other close family or friends.

  No one to stop him.

  Just after eight a.m., Toni Petit waived her rights again, and went on.

  Every now and then, she said, one of Kate’s urges would take her over so powerfully that she could not let it go.

  ‘I tried turning it into a game,’ Toni said, ‘by making a plan.’

  ‘What kind of plan?’ Sam asked.

  ‘A killing plan.’ She looked at the others, then back at Sam. ‘I won’t pretend that I had no choice in any of this, because of course I did. I let my sister control me, manipulate me into doing what she wanted.’

  ‘Your “killing” plan.’ Sam drew her back on track.

  ‘Kate loved that part. I’d come up with suggestions and she’d get excited, urge me on. It made her feel good.’

  In the beginning, they talked about general factors like location. Kate suggested luring victims to cheap motels, the kind where they could pay cash for a room. She said they could wear disguises, then just walk out when it was over and leave ‘them’ to be found.

  ‘Was this still a “game”?’ O’Dea asked.

  ‘I hoped so. It was all abstract, not real.’

  ‘Locations,’ Sam pressed.

  ‘I told Kate that it could only work in the woman’s own home.’

  ‘Was “woman” abstract too?’ Sam asked.

  Toni didn’t hesitate. ‘The first was Arlene Silver. She lived in Fairview Shores, near Orlando.’ She paused. ‘Kate and I had gone up for a few days in January to look at houses – we sometimes fantasized about relocating, and I thought it would be a fun thing to do.’

  They’d been in a drugstore when they’d heard a woman talking to a sales lady about a new brand of diet food. The woman said she was a serial dieter, said that she’d kill for the perfect figure, but she was an attractive woman with a good body, and Toni knew Kate was watching and listening, and getting mad.

  ‘That was all it took. This perfectly nice woman called Arlene Silver – we heard her give her name to the saleswoman – and Kate perceived her as having everything, including beautiful, healthy eyes, but still wanting more.’ She paused again. ‘In Kate’s mind, she needed punishing.’

  They had followed her home and waited. When the man they assumed was her husband came home, Toni had thought that was an end to it, but Kate wouldn’t let it go. They returned early next morning, the man left at seven and no one else emerged, and though Toni argued that didn’t mean no one else was inside, Kate insisted they set to work on a real plan.