Mind Games (11 page)

‘David’s a wonderful man,’ Grace said softly.

‘Judy’s no slouch either,’ Sam said. ‘Have you met my mother?’

‘Not yet. You have a brother, don’t you?’

Sam nodded. ‘Saul.’ Another smile. ‘He’s thirteen, about to be barmitzvah.’ He speared a piece of squid. ‘Now that’s an endurance test I can relate
to.’

‘You had a barmitzvah?’ Grace smiled at the notion.

‘Did I ever.’ He shook his head at the memories of Hebrew lessons and the ordeal of having to stand up in synagogue to be counted. ‘It was Judy’s idea more than
David’s, but they both took a lot of time making sure it was what I wanted, too.’

‘And you did?’

‘I wanted to be their son,’ Sam answered simply. ‘Whatever that took.’

‘Did you convert?’

‘No. David and Judy never wanted me to feel I was turning my back on my parents’ religion – they were Episcopalian – or our culture. They found this real broadminded
rabbi who understood and who was willing to teach me and let us go through the whole thing in temple, but I guess it wasn’t really kosher according to Jewish law.’ He grinned.
‘Probably still kosher enough to make me the only barmitzvahed, Friday-night-candle-lighting, Bahamian-black-Episcopalian police detective living in South Beach.’

‘Do you light candles?’ Grace asked, intrigued.

‘To be honest, hardly ever.’ His grin became a grimace. ‘And since it’s Passover, and this evening was our Seder, and I’m definitely going to be
persona non
grata
with my mother for missing out, I guess that’s another thing not to confess to her.’ Sam dropped a piece of shrimp for Harry, who promptly set up a new sentry post between
their chairs. ‘How about you, Grace?’ he asked. ‘Has your own mixed bag brought you many complications?’

‘None that have much to do with the fact that my father was a second-generation American-Italian-Catholic and my mother third-generation Swedish-American-Protestant.’ Grace shrugged.
‘Plenty that had to do with what they were like as human beings.’

Sam looked at her keenly. ‘Not an easy start?’

‘Worse for my sister than for me.’ She paused. ‘They were an ill-matched, unhappy couple, and their greatest combined gift was for spreading their own misery over
us.’

‘Does your sister live here, too?’

‘Claudia lives part-time in Fort Lauderdale, part down in the Keys. Matter of fact, I’m driving down to Islamorada on Saturday morning for the weekend.’

‘Do you like the Keys?’ Sam asked.

‘Sure, though I couldn’t spend too much time down there.’

‘Me neither,’ Sam said. ‘I like the buzz of a city around me.’

‘The mix seems to suit my sister and her family well,’ Grace went on. ‘My brother-in-law’s an architect who loves to fish, so he figured the Upper Keys were the perfect
location for them to build their own house – most of his clients tend to be in south-east Florida.’ She paused. ‘I think Claudia’s at her happiest when they’re living
on Islamorada. Probably because it’s the farthest she could get from Chicago.’

‘Chicago?’ Sam queried.

‘Where our parents live,’ Grace said.

She waited until after Sam had finished eating before asking, as she brewed some fresh coffee, what he’d wanted to talk to her about when he’d first asked if he
might call on her. The fleeting disappointment in his eyes let her know that he’d been just as relaxed, had been having just as much of a good time as she had.

‘It was something we uncovered,’ he answered, slowly, ‘that I figured, as Cathy’s psychologist, you probably ought to know.’

They already knew, he went on, that Cathy had visited Beatrice Flager as a client – she had admitted that much herself – but if there had been a file with her name on it in one of
Flager’s cabinets, it had been either removed by the therapist herself or had been stolen by person or persons unknown by the time the police had become involved.

‘Like most people these days, though, Ms Flager kept a full set of records on computer.’ Sam paused. ‘The equipment was smashed when we got to her house, but according to our
experts, unless the person doing the smashing really knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t have easily been able to destroy information on the hard disk itself.’

The coffee was ready, and Grace asked Sam if he minded moving outside on to the deck. ‘I don’t know why, but I always try to take the tricky stuff outside,’ she said as they
carried out their cups. ‘Maybe it’s something to do with the water, maybe I’m subconsciously trying to toss my troubles into it and watch them float away.’ She saw him
watching her. ‘Or maybe it’s just a pretty spot.’

‘Bit of both, I’d guess.’

‘I’m going to kick off my shoes and dunk my feet in the water.’ Grace did just that, sat down on the edge and thought about the way she and Cathy had done much the same at the
side of the Robbins’ pool that afternoon.

‘Looks good,’ Sam said, and did the same. His feet, Grace noted, were compact for such a tall man. As he had indoors, Harry came right over and lay down between them. For a few
moments, they stayed quiet.

‘Want to tell me what was on the disk?’ Grace asked Sam, at last. ‘Or are you too beat? It’s pretty late.’

‘I feel great, if you’re okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I told you, I’m a late-night person. But this is such grim stuff, isn’t it? I mean, you need to take a break for a few
hours.’

‘I don’t need a break. It’s not my own grim stuff, after all.’ His eyes were fixed on the dark water. ‘Not my pain.’

Something in his tone – just a whisker of something, nothing more – and a tiny flicker in his eyes alerted Grace to the probability that Sam Becket knew all about great pain –
something perhaps even greater, she thought with a flash of insight, than what must have crushed him as a child. For the briefest of moments she let herself wonder about that, then pushed it
away.

‘So what did you find?’ She saw no point putting off the moment.

‘We found Cathy’s file. It was pretty short. She only went to see Beatrice Flager one time, and that was because Arnold Robbins made her go. Robbins told Ms Flager that he was very
concerned about his daughter.’ Sam took a sip of coffee.

‘Why was he concerned?’

‘Typical adolescent stuff. Withdrawn, sluggish, problems keeping friends. Low self-esteem, generally. Robbins seemed genuinely worried.’ He paused again. ‘He told Flager that
Cathy had been for counselling a few years back, before she and her mother had come to Miami —’

‘I thought Cathy had always lived here?’

‘Not according to the therapist’s files,’ Sam said, ‘though Arnold didn’t tell Flager where they’d relocated from.’

Grace took a moment to sort through what she could, from the confidentiality standpoint, share with him. ‘You probably noticed that there were several family photographs in Cathy’s
bedroom at the Robbins’ house, but none of her natural father. She says that she doesn’t remember him.’

‘Maybe that’s true,’ Sam said. ‘I gather he died when she was five.’ He paused. ‘I was two years older than Cathy when my family died, so I can’t really
judge.’

‘I guess not.’ Grace drank some coffee and gazed out over the water at the Bal Harbour lights. ‘So according to Beatrice Flager’s records, what happened when Cathy went
to see her?’

‘Not a great deal. Ms Flager felt that Cathy didn’t want to be there, that she resented the whole encounter. She wrote in her notes that Cathy objected to her wanting to tape their
session – is that normal, Grace? Do you tape sessions with your patients?’

‘Not usually, though some psychologists do and sometimes it’s mandatory.’ Grace paused. ‘Cathy did tell me about that, by the way. About having been to a therapist
who’d taped everything she’d said. She told me she didn’t like it.’ Grace looked more closely at Sam, wanting to be sure he understood the point she was making. ‘I
mean, Cathy was quite open with me on that score – it came up because she was checking me out, making comparisons between me and her last experience.’

‘Did she tell you what she did after the session with Beatrice Flager?’

‘No.’ Grace hesitated. ‘I thought she only saw her once?’

‘That’s right,’ Sam confirmed, ‘but Flager added some more notes to her file after Arnold Robbins called her to bring her up to speed.’ He paused. ‘Robbins
said that Cathy had a temper tantrum when she got home – and that she cut the heads off all the goldfish in Marie’s fish tank.’

‘Really?’ Grace was shaken. ‘Cathy did that?’

‘According to the notes she denied it, then flew into another rage and smashed some ornaments in her bedroom. Arnold and Marie were both sufficiently alarmed to take Cathy to the family
doctor, who ordered some blood tests.’ Sam looked up from the water and into Grace’s face. ‘The tests showed that Cathy had taken – ingested, the notes said –
cannabis.’

‘What did Cathy say?’

‘She denied that, too, but no one believed her.’ Sam shook his head. ‘In the circumstances, how could they?’

Grace stayed out on the deck for a while longer after Sam had left. Beatrice Flager’s notes about Cathy’s disturbed adolescent behaviour had dismayed her deeply,
and however sympathetic Sam Becket might seem to her plight, it wasn’t hard to see how this had to be damaging the teenager’s credibility with the rest of his department and perhaps
with the State Attorney’s office, too.

Up until now – at least to her and, she sensed, Sam Becket – Cathy had been, above all else, a victim.

Now, suddenly, they were being forced to look at her as a young person who had allegedly cut the heads off goldfish.

Grace sat on the edge of the deck again and stared down into the water, trying for a few moments to visualize Cathy doing such a thing. Briefly imagining her patients in the midst or depths of
their traumas was a thing she had trained herself to do over the years. A degree of detachment was essential, of course, to a psychologist, but absolute detachment had frankly always been
impossible for Grace, especially since most of her work involved children – how in the name of God could anyone stay unaffected by those suffering, messed up young psyches?

She gave up trying to imagine the sensitive girl who’d been so gentle with Harry mutilating living creatures, and thought instead about her taking cannabis. That, at least, was not so hard
to envisage, nor were the reasons she might have done so: a desire to escape or simply to feel better than she had at the time.

Even so, breaking a few ornaments, taking cannabis from some outside influence – and even decapitating her mother’s goldfish – were all still light years from the murders of
her parents and former therapist.

The telephone rang just as she was climbing into bed and Harry had burrowed down, as he did every night, into the base of her duvet.

‘Grace, it’s Sam.’

‘What’s happened?’ She felt a jolt of alarm.

‘Nothing. Nothing’s happened.’ He paused. ‘Ah, shit, I’ve woken you, haven’t I? I knew I should have left it till morning.’

Grace glanced at her clock and saw that it was almost three o’clock.

‘It is morning, Sam,’ she said. ‘And you only left an hour ago. Anyway, I wasn’t sleeping. Too busy thinking.’

‘Me too. About Cathy?’

‘Of course.’

‘You still don’t think she did it, do you?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Grace said.

‘Me neither,’ Sam said. ‘Though things could look better for her.’

‘I guess they could.’

‘Actually I didn’t really call to talk about Cathy – I called to thank you. For the
Cacciucco
and the hospitality.’

‘It was no trouble. The soup was made. It was a pleasure sharing it.’

‘For me, too.’

Grace smiled into the dark. ‘It’s nice of you to call.’

‘Must be my mother’s training.’

‘Must be.’

‘I’ll let you get some sleep then,’ Sam said.

‘What about you?’ She realized suddenly that he sounded anything but tired. In fact, he sounded wired. ‘It was my coffee, wasn’t it? I knew I made it too
strong.’

‘It was great. But I am wide awake, so I thought I’d spend a little quiet time trying to nail down some other connection between the Robbinses and Beatrice Flager.’

‘That would be good,’ Grace said.

‘Up until the therapist was killed, there was a fair chance that the Robbins’ deaths might have been business or money-related – maybe something heavy that Arnold Robbins got
into through his
Arnie’s
chain.’

‘But Beatrice Flager getting murdered put paid to that?’

‘I’m not ready to stop looking yet,’ Sam said.

Grace hesitated for a moment. Late as it was, there was still an unasked question gnawing away at her. ‘You mentioned, after the first killings, finding some burned fabric that might have
been Cathy’s nightgown.’ She tried to pick her words carefully. ‘Was there anything else?’

‘Such as?’

‘I don’t know. Anything the police surgeon found on her.’

Another brief silence crept between them.

‘You’re asking about the Band-Aid on her arm, aren’t you?’ he said.

Grace winced at his acuteness. ‘Yes, I am.’ Her face grew warm. She was grateful he wasn’t here to see it.

‘Cathy said she stumbled against a tree trunk the day before the killings, scraped her arm.’ Sam paused. ‘We confirmed that, Grace. It wasn’t a cut from a scalpel. Nor
anything to do with the broken window, if that’s what you were thinking.’

Grace hadn’t even considered the window.

‘If it was bothering you,’ he asked, ‘why didn’t you ask me about it before?’

‘I don’t know,’ she lied.

She knew he didn’t believe that; he realized that she had, in some confused way, been reluctant to stir up more trouble for the teenager – or that, maybe, she simply hadn’t
wanted to risk having to contemplate another possible strike against Cathy.

She also felt that – as a man rather than as a cop – he understood.

It had been an almost perfect family weekend on Islamorada until Grace had checked her messages on Easter morning and heard Frances Dean telling her that the police had taken
Cathy in for questioning, and that Sam Becket had as good as told her it was time to get her niece a lawyer. Grace didn’t know exactly when the message had been left, but when she had tried
calling back there was no answer.