Clear and Convincing Proof (18 page)

“Where, Bernie? Where did you think you saw exhaust and taillights?”

Bernie shook her head. “Not right in front of my car. Down farther, like someone leaving the parking lot. One of the nurses maybe.” She began to move again. “Or maybe I just thought I saw something like
that. I can't be sure.” She finished taking the checker to the parking lot and positioned it. “That's as close as I could get. The nurses and Stephanie and the others took the best places.”

Barbara did not press the point. Instead, returning to her chair at the table, she asked, “If they turn the clinic over to a corporation or something, will you stay?”

“I don't know,” Bernie said, sitting down. “It would be so different. I mean, like checking people in in the morning. We don't time anyone, keep track of every minute, make sure they earn what they make. And I guess a real company would change that. It wouldn't be the same. If some of my friends here left, I'd probably leave, too. Darren would leave. We all know that. And the volunteers. Why would they do volunteer work so shareholders in New York could make more money? We've been talking about what it would have meant. But it's a dead issue. Now that David McIvey's out of the picture, we've all relaxed a little. I don't think anyone would have stayed with him in charge.”

Barbara encouraged Bernie to talk, to ramble actually, about the staff, the volunteers, whatever came to mind. What she learned was a mixed bag, she had to admit as Bernie veered from subject to subject, about people Barbara didn't know, and those she was interested in. Greg Boardman was a dear, sweet man, a wonderful doctor, but he couldn't make a decision if his life depended on it, unless it was about medicine. Naomi made the decisions in that family.
Stephanie's lover was a ceramicist who worked at home while Stephanie ran the kitchen in the clinic and moved back and forth from one to the other all day. Darren had agreed with his ex that neither of them would take Todd out of state to live, at least until he was eighteen or in college. Darren was crazy about Todd, and if he was aware that every woman he met fell for him, he never let on. And he didn't take advantage of that, either, she said emphatically. Probably he didn't notice, just took it for granted, the way he took it for granted that he was the best therapist in the West, maybe in the country. It just was. David McIvey had used Annie as a doormat or something. His own personal slave. He couldn't stand noise, loud music, anything alive.

Finally, when she hoped that all the irrelevancies had eclipsed the one point she did not want Bernie to toss into the gossip pool—the fact that she probably had seen the killer leaving the premises—Barbara looked at her watch.

“Good heavens. I had no idea it was getting so late,” she said. “And I've kept you far too long. Thanks, Bernie. You've been very helpful in filling in background for me.”

Bernie beamed and stood up. “I enjoyed talking to you. Back to the desk for me. Greg left a package for you at the desk, by the way. I would have brought it, but I forgot.”

 

Driving a few minutes later, Barbara decided she had to move, had to walk, to think. Accordingly she
turned toward the riverside park after crossing the bridge to downtown Eugene. Few people were out walking that afternoon. The sky had become overcast, the air quite cold and very still. The river looked like liquid pewter, as shiny as silver at the ripples, as dull as lead in other places. Suddenly she recalled a question she had asked Frank many years in the past: With all those rivers going into the ocean, why didn't it fill up? He had said something about evaporation, that as much water went into the air as flowed into the ocean, and without a clear idea of what that meant she had visualized a vast river out there somewhere, flowing up toward the sky in a steady stream, like a waterfall in reverse. She had added it to her wish list for when she grew up: go find the river that flowed into the sky.

She started walking at a brisk pace in order to keep warm, but after a few minutes she slowed down, and she was now considering the question Frank had posed. What would she do if she decided that one or both of her clients had collectively or singly murdered David McIvey? She had not known the answer when he asked, and she had no answer now. But her thoughts kept taking her back to the question. Before long she might have to come up with an answer. Bernie had seen someone drive away that morning, shortly after seven-thirty.

Bernie, she reflected then, was probably the only one of that whole crew who wouldn't lie about anything. What she knew she told, period. The Boardmans, no doubt, would readily lie for each other, and
Naomi certainly would lie for Annie, the girl she had taken to heart to replace her own dead daughters. Annie had lied, and for all Barbara knew, was still lying. Kelso? He would lie to God, she thought, if he believed it would help save his holy clinic. She grinned at the thought of Stephanie stripping off her dress before an audience. She'd lie for anyone who pulled the trigger. Erica would lie for Darren, she felt certain. And Darren? She didn't know. A physical therapist who apparently believed in magic, in faith healing or something. Was he really unaware of the effect he had on the others at the clinic? The near reverence they had for him? She didn't know that, either, she realized. He was an enigma, a puzzle she could not sort out. But if he had agreed with his ex-wife not to take their son from the state, it did limit his possibilities for another job comparable to the one he had. If even Portland was too far away for him to consider, then the threat of losing his place here could have become more daunting.

A pair of geese circled over the river ahead of her. She paused to watch them, but they didn't land. They liked still water, she thought; the Willamette River might appear too treacherous for them. Then she was thinking of Dorothy Johnson, who had half expected to see the ghost of her husband shooting to frighten geese away from the koi pond. She began to move again.

Her cell phone rang as she walked; Bailey wanted to know if she would be in the office at about four-thirty. He had stuff. She headed back.

“G
ive,” Barbara said in her office. Bailey was sprawled on the sofa with a glass of Jack Daniel's barely lightened with water.

“Long or short?”

“Short.” She had a cup of coffee, more for the warmth it offered than because she wanted it. The temperature had dropped to forty and she had come in numb with cold.

“Okay. Erica Castle was involved in a shooting back in Cleveland.”

Barbara nearly choked on a sip of coffee; Bailey grinned.

“That's a gotcha,” he said. “Her old lady and her current boyfriend had a tussle. She hit him, he hit her, she hit him harder and someone pulled a hand
gun and shot a couple of times. Neighbors called the cops, and by the time they got there the boyfriend had skedaddled, Mom was nursing a black eye and didn't know what they were talking about, and Erica, age six, was hiding in a closet. End of episode. No more public notice for seven years. Then another boyfriend, another fight, more cops. Erica vamoosed to a neighbor's apartment and pretty much stayed there for the next few years. Worked her way through high school, community college, university, and began teaching. Clean as a whistle, Barbara, not even a parking ticket. Mucho credit card debt now, roof, furnace, things like that. She still owes school loans.”

He took a long drink. “When the grandmother died, her will allowed Erica's mother to use the house, and she trashed it. Probably into prostitution, known as a dopehead, cited for disorderly conduct a couple of times. That's public stuff. How much private stuff do you want?”

Discouraged, she shrugged. “Leave it alone for now. What about the ex-Mrs. McIvey?”

“Lorraine McIvey is a case,” he said. “She calls herself a publicist. A few artist clients, an actor or two. She arranges shows, gigs, whatever. A series of boyfriends over the years. The last one was Pier Longos, a two-bit artist. A couple of days after McIvey was shot, Lorraine turned up at a neighbor's house wanting to talk, which was weird, according to the neighbor, because Lorraine never had given her or any other neighbor the time of day be
fore. But she needed to talk, she said. David had wanted to get back together with her, she said. He was fed up with the trophy wife, and was going to ditch her as soon as his private snoop got proof that she was having an affair. He said he knew it was true, but he needed proof. He wanted Lorraine to help run the clinic the way it should be run, not as a money-losing hobby, but as a real business. Lorraine had decided to give it a go when, bingo, he was shot dead.”

“Right,” Barbara said derisively. “Sure he wanted to get back with her.”

“Well, she told the same story to her ex-boyfriend Pier, and McIvey took a cab up to her house one afternoon the week before he was shot. Told his office people to put patients on hold, there was an emergency, and he took off. The taxi driver waited twenty-five minutes for him and drove him back to the surgical office.”

“Not even a he said-she said,” Barbara muttered after a moment. “Just a she said.” But it explained why the police had turned the spotlight on to Annie from day one, she thought, and why they appeared determined to make Darren an accomplice one way or another, either as the shooter or the hider of evidence.

Bailey held up his glass and she nodded absently. He ambled over to the bar and poured himself another drink. “I just bring in the dope,” he said. “I don't interpret.”

“Do you know where Lorraine was the morning of the murder?”

“Yes, indeed. Driving her daughter to school. The kid was cutting first period class—math—with some regularity, and the principal and Lorraine struck a deal to avoid expulsion, or horsewhipping, or whatever they do these days. She has to take the kid to school every morning and watch her go in. She did that morning. Got there at five minutes to eight. Won't work unless she took the kid with her and made her wait in the car while she popped the guy.”

“Dead end,” she said. “Okay. I'll try to think of something over the weekend. Maybe a fishing trip, or a hike on the coast, a trip to Mexico.”

“Sounds good to me. See you Monday morning.” He emptied his glass, set it down and hauled himself upright. Then he pulled on his yak coat and Barbara shuddered. “It's going to snow again,” he said.

She did not dispute it. His batting average as a weather predictor was better than hers.

Shelley called a few minutes after Bailey left; she was in Cottage Grove, she said, excited. “Three clients today! Three, count 'em. I had to bring this woman down to the house on the hill, you know, the safe house in Cottage Grove? Martin carried her boyfriend out, literally picked him up and carried him out, and I took her to their place to pack a bag and brought her down here. It's snowing in the hills. I thought I might as well just go on home. You know how traffic is on I-5 this time of day—”

Smiling, Barbara cut in. “Go home, Shelley. Make a snowman with Alex. See you on Monday.” Alex had bought seventy acres in the Coast Range hills. It
probably was snowing up there already. She went to the window to peer out. Rain. Ah, well, she thought, and walked out to the reception room to send Maria home.

“Are you working late?” Maria asked.

“Nope. A few little things to wrap up and I'm out of here. Go boss your daughters around awhile.”

“Hah! Be bossed by Mama, is more like it,” Maria said, but she was cheerful about it. That was how life was. You bossed your kids, got bossed by your parents.

 

Half an hour later Barbara was ready to leave. She had the videos to watch, more notes to make, and she had to read Bailey's reports: homework. Her fellow tenant, Josh Mallory, was leaving at the same time, carrying a large plastic bag of trash out to the Dumpster. A CPA, he said he kept confidential stuff until Friday, when he shredded and tossed it.

“Hear the weather reports?” he asked. “Two, three inches by morning is what they're saying.”

She laughed. “I'll believe it when I see it. Unless you mean two or three inches of rain.”

“No. The white stuff that piles up and makes cars go zroom off the road,” he said happily.

She pulled her hood up and started for her car; the rain felt like ice water. Josh went on toward the Dumpster. Suddenly, at her car door, with her key out, Barbara halted, watching him with his bag of trash.

“Oh, my God,” she said under her breath. She got
in her car and sat there for several minutes waiting for the windshield to clear, for the rear defroster to fulfill its duty, thinking. Shop for dinner, buy milk. She didn't know if she was out of milk, but when in doubt, it was probably a good idea to buy some. Often she had none at all, or as many as four quarts, all out of date. Eggs. If it did snow, which she doubted, it might be nice to have some food in the apartment. She made her mental list, then drove to a supermarket and promptly forgot most of what she had decided to get. She bought large trash bags, bread and a frozen lasagna.

That night she put the first video in the cassette player and sat back to watch Darren Halvord at work. There was introductory material—doctors talking about a possible supranuclear palsy with subsequent loss of proprioception—that she watched and listened to for a very short time before she hit fast forward.

Then Darren took over.

“See, Joey, you can't tell exactly where your hands or feet are, and that makes walking, grasping, holding a bottle of beer pretty hard. That's why you lost your sense of balance.”

“Bullshit,” the patient said, slumped in a wheelchair. He was young, twenty-two, very muscular, with a crooked nose, a wide mouth and close-set eyes that regarded Darren with suspicion.

“Let me show you something,” Darren said, at ease, relaxed, unfazed by the belligerence in the young man's attitude. “Close your eyes. Tighter.
Now put your right hand out at shoulder level, straight out, sideways from your body.”

The hand shot out in a jerky motion, up, down, straight up. Darren caught it and held it. “Open your eyes and take a look,” he said. He was holding the hand where he caught it, almost in front of the patient, low down.

“Try it again,” the young man said in a harsh voice. He watched his hand and put it out to the side in a straight line with his shoulders. “See.”

“Yep. Sure do,” Darren said, holding the hand. “Now close your eyes, tight, like before. Okay. Touch your nose.” He released the hand and again it jerked around in what appeared to be random movements until he caught it. “Enough,” Darren said. “Have a look.”

Joey looked near tears.

“What we're going to do,” Darren said, “is teach your brain where your body parts are. It had a little bump and forgot, but it can learn again. Ever wonder why a little kid can't seem to walk, but goes racing all over the place? Instinct. Pure reflex. You lift one foot and all at once you're off balance. By reflex you put it down again slightly ahead of the other one, just to catch your balance. And it's easier to do it fast than to do it slowly. Reflexes work fast or not at all, you see. That's what you're doing. When you reach for something, reflex takes over and your hand stabs, jerks, moves too fast to control. We're going to get that control back.”

Barbara watched without moving as the video
progressed and Joey undertook a series of exercises. He was holding on to a parallel bar, his knuckles white, sweat on his upper lip, on his forehead. “I can't,” he whispered.

“Wanna bet?” Darren said. “I'm going to touch your foot. No, don't look, just feel the touch. Okay. Now bend the knee. Right. Up it goes.”

Joey bent his knee without looking, grasping the bar desperately, until his leg made a right angle with his foot behind him. He held it until Darren told him to put his foot down again. Over and over.

The exercises got more complicated, harder, and throughout, Darren's voice was there, bantering, encouraging, supporting. The last segment was of them working together through the entire series without the parallel bars, Joey holding on to nothing, mimicking Darren's every movement.

Barbara watched it to the end, and then as the video rewound, she took a long breath, disturbed for a reason she could not identify. She put the second video into the machine, but did not start it immediately.

He seduced that kid, she thought suddenly, hypnotized him into believing, into doing things he thought he couldn't do. Joey had been malleable, helpless in the face of Darren's certitude; Joey had surrendered his will entirely. And it had worked. He had regained control of his limbs, his body, because Darren had insisted that he could, that he would. But it was even more complex than that, she thought. First Darren had taken control of Joey's body; Dar
ren's will, his hands, his voice had dominated it, and then he had given that control to the boy. Too much power. That was too much power for one person to exert over another.

Darren's voice was the most seductive she had ever heard, she thought, and abruptly she stood up and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. When she returned to the living room she gazed at the television for a moment, then pulled the second cassette out and turned off the box. She felt she had seen enough of Darren at work to last for a long time.

Doing this, she heard her own voice in her head saying, “He is a dangerous man.”

 

Will came home on Saturday and picked her up at six-thirty for an early dinner at The Chanterelle Restaurant. “We have extensive planning to take care of,” he said after they ordered.

“Planning? For what?”

“Our trip. It's on. Friday. I figure a week in London, a few days in Bath and Oxford, then on to Paris. What about a week in Paris. Too short?”

“Hold it,” she said. “What about your work? Aren't you planning a trip around work?”

He grinned. “I think I can stretch out the records search for about three weeks, maybe a little longer, and then I'll need at least a week of R and R. I have to be in London for a few days, a day or two in Bath and Oxford, Ravenna and Rome a couple days. That's it.”

He was smiling widely. “I looked up the weather.
It shouldn't be any colder than it is here, and probably no rainier.”

All day rain mixed with snow had fallen intermittently, with more forecast for the night and Sunday. If the temperature dropped just two degrees it would be snow, Barbara thought regretfully, but the thermometer seemed to be stuck at thirty-eight.

She sipped wine and looked away from Will. A month off, she was thinking, just fun and games for a whole month, museums, shopping, shows, sightseeing. Fine restaurants every day. Slowly she said, “I still don't know if I can leave right now.”

“Not right now. Friday.”

“That's like right now,” she said, smiling slightly. “Depends on your frame of reference. Relativity or something.”

“Put things on hold. Or let the peons carry the load for a while.”

“Maybe. I'll know in a few days, I just don't know this minute.”

“I'll make reservations,” he said after a moment. “We can cancel yours later if we have to.” Then he added, “We'd have a grand time, Barbara.”

“I know.”