Authors: Hilary Norman
She shared with him what David Becket had told her about the late John Broderick. That Cathy had spent the first few years of her life with a father who had, according to the
ethics committee at Lafayette Hospital, abused his wife and child with sedatives and other prescription drugs.
‘He gave them both sedatives to keep them in order,’ she told Hayman. ‘He told Marie he was giving her monthly B12 injections when he was really injecting her with progestogen,
and he gave Cathy longterm phenobarbitone for a non-existent condition.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t have the details,’ Grace said, ‘just the bare facts. Marie wanted more children, but the progestogen took care of that. It also screwed up her menstrual cycle,
increased her weight and gave her headaches and nausea.’
‘And depending on how much he was giving her, the phenobarbitone would have made Cathy sluggish or worse,’ Hayman said.
‘Exactly.’
‘But we don’t know why he did these things?’
‘Not yet.’ Grace paused. ‘We do know that Broderick never allowed his wife to consult another physician. It was only after he walked out on them and Marie went for a check-up
that a blood test showed up the progestogen.’
‘And after that, they checked on Cathy?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you’ve been wondering about MSBP.’ Hayman paused. ‘Not only in relation to the drugs, but to the killings, too.’
‘I know it’s impossible.’
‘With Broderick dead, yes, it is.’
‘What if he isn’t?’ Grace asked.
They talked for a long time, about Münchhausen’s and other factitious disorders, spilling over into various obsessional and control-related conditions that might or
might not present clues in the Broderick-Robbins-Flager case. As afternoon drifted into evening, and her host threw some crayfish and snow crab legs into a wok on his barbecue for a casual stir-fry
dinner, Grace found herself impressed by the depth of his interest. She watched the tall, slightly rumpled man focusing on his cooking, tossing in vegetables and spices, tasting as he went, and it
occurred to her briefly that if it weren’t for the undeniable fact that she was only just starting to acknowledge her attraction to Sam Becket, Grace might quite easily have found herself
drawn to Peter Hayman.
‘You know,’ he said, suddenly, ‘the more I think about what you’re suggesting Broderick might have done, the more inconceivable I find it.’
‘Because you believe he’s dead?’
‘Even leaving that tiny detail aside.’ Hayman went on tossing ingredients in the big, fire-blackened wok. ‘No, I’m talking about the bizarreness of that kind of
crime.’
‘Is it so much more bizarre than what that mother on the west coast did to her son?’ Grace asked.
‘I’d say so, yes.’ He picked up the first of two clay plates warming by the side of the barbecue and spooned stir-fry on to it. ‘The time factor and long-term planning
turns it into something much more cunning, for one thing. For all I’ve seen and heard over the years, and even considering what we know Broderick did to Marie and Cathy, I still find it
difficult to imagine any father being so cold-hearted.’
‘Or so evil,’ Grace added.
Hayman looked up from spooning fish and vegetables on to the second plate. ‘Do you regard sufferers of MSBP as evil?’ His tone was even and friendly, yet there was an implicit rebuke
in the question.
‘I have, once or twice.’ She wanted to be frank. ‘I know I should be able to exercise greater tolerance than that, but I find it difficult – given that the victims, the
real sufferers, are helpless children.’
Hayman carried the plates over to the wicker table, set them down and bade her have a seat. ‘I’d say it’s that old question rearing one of its ugliest heads – mad or bad?
Sick or evil?’
Grace sat down. The appetizing aroma rose off her plate, blending with the barbecue smoke and the orchids from the backyard.
‘If by the remotest chance,’ she said, ‘John Broderick did engineer these murders and the awful, unthinkable potential outcome for his own daughter, then I do have to say
there’s no doubt in my mind which category he comes under.’
They quit talking about death and evil and fell on their food. Hayman drank wine, but Grace stuck to water because of her drive back home – but then, just before leaving,
she called Claudia and knew right away from her voice that something was wrong.
‘Papa called,’ her sister said.
‘What’s happened?’ Grace had reached Frank midweek, had learned that Ellen had come through surgery well and was doing okay. She had wavered a little during that call, had told
him that she and Claudia would certainly fly back to Chicago if Ellen wanted them to – not if
he
wanted them to, that much had not altered a damn in her heart or head – but
Frank had gotten cold and nasty, had pointed out (not inaccurately) that if they’d really wanted to come, they’d be there. Now, in the half-second no-man’s-land of waiting for her
sister to answer her question, Grace wondered how she would feel if Claudia told her that Ellen had died.
‘Nothing’s happened’ – the answer came – ‘except Papa says Mama’s weak as a kitten, and I came off the phone feeling guilty as hell, which was exactly
the way he wanted me to feel.’
‘But knowing that doesn’t make it less so,’ Grace said.
She thanked Peter Hayman for his hospitality and kindness, made a call to Teddy Lopez to ask him to pick up poor neglected Harry, then headed south-west on Route 1 instead of
north-east and was at the Brownley house before ten p.m. Daniel was up in Fort Lauderdale for the night, and the boys were tucked up in bed, and Claudia clung to Grace when she arrived in a way she
hadn’t done since they were scared, confused children in Chicago. Frank, Claudia now confessed, had said a whole lot more to her than she’d indicated on the phone. He had turned
Ellen’s cancer into a new kind of club to wield over his eldest daughter; her and her sister’s leaving home, running out on their mama, had caused her years of unhappiness, he had said,
and that was why Ellen was sick, because everyone said that now, didn’t they? – that stress caused cancer – so Frank hoped that Claudia and Grace were real pleased with
themselves.
The sisters sat up till late. They didn’t say too much, just let some Phil Collins music play softly in the background, drifting over them, blending soothingly with the night voices of
Florida Bay. Grace talked a little about her afternoon and evening with Peter Hayman, and Claudia had a few questions to ask about Grace’s feelings for Sam Becket – there wasn’t
much of consequence in her sister’s life that escaped Claudia’s attention. But ever-present now, hovering above and around them, was the cloud of confusion and guilt that Frank Lucca
had managed to plant over Claudia’s head. Grace had hated their father for most of her life. She had never despised him more than she did tonight.
Sam was in a bar about a mile from the cemetery.
He’d flown up before lunch, figuring on heading straight to the airport and catching a commuter flight back to Miami as soon as he’d finished at the graveside, but in the event
he’d stayed there longer than he’d intended to, and by the time he’d gotten up off the ground he had been aching and one of his two old gunshot wounds – the one that had
just missed shattering his left kneecap – had been growling at him, so he’d thought he might just find a bar first and have a drink.
It was a nice place, the right kind of bar for his mood. Dark and anonymous, with a ball game to watch and a consolingly extensive range of liquor lined up on the wall, and a good old bartender
who knew when to leave a man to himself. Sam didn’t especially like getting drunk and found the after-effects appalling, and he hadn’t let it happen to him for a very long time, but
today, once he’d downed the first whisky, it just seemed the right thing to do. So for what little was left of Sunday afternoon and the early part of the evening, he’d stayed in the
gentle, undemanding bosom of that bar, drinking beer with whisky chasers, and when Joe the bartender knew he’d had enough, he’d extracted exactly the right number of bills from
Sam’s wallet, noted that the untroublesome drunk was a Miami Beach cop, and asked a friend of his named Hubie to drive Sam to the Turtle Motel and check him in.
Even now, in the motel room, drunk as he was, Sam remembered exactly why he’d gotten that way, but the whisky had served as a kind of anaesthetic, dulling, if not entirely annihilating the
agony, and now the old images of a little boy lying fatally injured on the road were all jumbled up with other dark, bleak things . . . A man and woman lying in their bed, throats cut . . . a young
girl with innocent blue eyes and golden hair who might just be a monster . . . another victim, dead on a couch with a hole in her temple . . .
And then there was Dr Grace Lucca, with her own golden hair, lovely, intelligent eyes and grave manner, gentling his messed-up mind, her image more warming than any shot of whisky.
Sam knew he’d been brusque with her last time they’d spoken, and he knew why he’d acted that way – it was the same way he always got with everyone around the time of the
anniversary – but Grace hadn’t known that, and he’d heard her back off, cut the conversation short, and he regretted it now, lying here all alone on the motel bed with the world
spinning meanly around his head. But there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Not here. Not tonight.
He was too damned drunk to do a damned thing about anything.
It was four-thirty in the morning, and David Becket was asleep on the couch in his office on West Flagler Street.
He had spent the evening and earliest part of the morning over at Miami General seeing Margie Fitzsimmons on her final journey, and when Margie had at last passed away a little after two a.m.,
David had just not felt like doing what he usually most wanted to do – namely going home and slipping between the covers with Judy. His wife was still the best possible person to be with at
times like these – and there had been a lot of times like these in his nearly thirty years of practice. But on this occasion, going home and telling Judy (who always woke up when he came home
late) that Margie Fitzsimmons was gone, would have meant acknowledging that she had died, and David just hadn’t felt ready to do that quite yet. Maybe because Margie had been an old
girlfriend – and the
only
woman David had slept with after meeting Judy, just a few weeks before he’d woken up to the realization that he’d now found the person with whom
he wanted to spend the rest of his life. Maybe because he and Margie and Judy had stayed such good friends through the years, and he didn’t want to admit yet that they’d lost her. Or
maybe, David had thought, with a tired grin that was half shamefaced, half proud, because one of the last things Margie had said to him before she’d lapsed into her final unconsciousness, was
that she’d never ceased getting horny whenever he was around her – and maybe that was how come she knew it was all over, because it was the very first time ever that seeing him
hadn’t gotten her all stirred up down below.
‘That’s probably it, you old son-of-a-gun,’ he’d said out loud, wryly, at around three a.m., standing up from his desk and stretching his stiff limbs and thinking how
welcome the couch looked. He’d been writing up some notes, and he’d called Judy to say he had to go on working a while longer and so she wasn’t to worry about him.
‘You’re just not up to sharing that kind of flattery.’
That had been when he’d taken off his shoes and unbuttoned his shirt and loosened his belt and lain down on the couch for a nap.
Which was why he was sound asleep and the office was pitch dark when the door opened at four thirty-five.
It was the breeze that woke him. The breeze made by the arm as it came down hard through the still air on its way to his chest.
He wasn’t awake for long.
Sam had just checked out of the Turtle Motel and was trying to crack his hangover with a cup of black coffee at a diner a half mile down the road, when he thought about
checking for messages on his cellular phone and found out what had happened to his father. He didn’t say a single prayer on the flight back to Miami – his brain was too locked down by
dread, and anyway, he still hadn’t forgiven the guy upstairs for snatching Sampson from him. He wasn’t fool enough to think that if he’d been home last night instead of getting
shit-faced in a bar near Sarasota, his father would have been any safer. But he was coldly, grimly aware that if David died before he got back to see him, he would never forgive himself for as long
as he lived.
David was not dead when Sam got to Miami General, but his mother’s and brother’s faces and body language when he first glimpsed them, sitting waiting for news from
the OR, spelled out a bad picture. Saul was crying openly. Judy Becket looked frozen. Sam knew that look – he’d seen it in the mirror on his own face in the hours during which Sampson
had been in the ER. His mother had sat with him and Althea as they had waited, had been there when David had come into the waiting room, still wearing his green scrubs, to tell them that their son
had died on the table.
Sam went to his mother, sat on the chair beside her, took both her hands in his, and looked her in the eye. ‘It’s not the same, Ma.’ His voice shook with intensity.
‘It’s not going to happen.’
Judy looked right back at him. ‘You can’t know that, son.’
‘Yes, I can.’ He let go her hands and turned to Saul. ‘How you holding up, kid?’
‘I’m okay.’ Saul’s soft hazel eyes looked lost, terrified.
‘He’s going to make it, you know.’
‘What if he doesn’t?’
‘He will,’ Sam told him.
He felt a gentle touch on his right arm, turned back to his mother.
‘Was it very bad for you up there?’ Judy knew where he’d been. She’d asked him a few days ago if he wanted her company, and had been utterly unoffended when he’d
told her he wanted to go alone. She understood about things like that, and Sam was doubly grateful for that now, for if she had been in Sarasota with him and unable to get directly to the hospital
to be with her husband, that would have been something else for Sam to have hated himself for.