Mind Games (17 page)

‘It was okay,’ he told her.

‘No, it wasn’t,’ Judy said.

Sam stroked her cheek. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It wasn’t.’ He checked his wristwatch. ‘How long’s he been in the OR?’

‘For ever,’ she said.

‘He’s going to be all right, Ma.’

Judy’s mouth twisted a little.

‘From your mouth to God’s ear,’ she said.

Sam caught up with Martinez and Beth Riley in the corridor, learned that Mike Rodriguez, the Miami Police Department sergeant investigating the Coconut Grove killing, was now
taking charge of his father’s attack, because the weapon appeared to have been another scalpel-type blade.

‘Different MO, though,’ Martinez told Sam. ‘One of your dad’s partners says that the instrument cabinet was open and one of the scalpels they use for minor surgery was
missing.’

‘Timing was about the same,’ Detective Riley said. ‘The paramedics who responded after the call came in from the cleaner said he’d probably been bleeding for about an
hour, which means we’re talking around four a.m. again.’

‘We need to go talk to the Robbins girl,’ Martinez said.

Sam was still stunned by the news of a possible connection with the other cases. ‘I should be there.’

‘I know. We waited for you.’

‘We should go now,’ Riley urged gently.

‘I can’t leave yet.’ Sam looked at his watch. It was ten after ten.

‘We need to find out if the girl went out last night,’ Martinez said. ‘Not that she or her aunt are going to tell us if she did.’

Sam took another moment to make up his mind. ‘I’m not going to leave till my dad’s out of surgery. You guys get over to Coral Gables and see what you can find out.’ He
paused, remembering Cathy’s collapse during questioning less than a week ago. ‘And be gentle. It’s just routine, right?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Martinez said.

‘I mean it, Al.’ Sam looked at his sceptical expression. ‘And don’t give them one more detail than you have to.’

‘It doesn’t make sense for it to be the girl,’ Beth Riley said.

‘I know it doesn’t,’ Sam said.

‘It doesn’t need to make sense,’ Martinez said. ‘Not if she’s a wacko.’

Riley put out a hand, touched Sam’s right arm. ‘We’ll be thinking good thoughts for your dad, Sam,’ she said.

Dr Helen Brodsky – a trauma surgeon and friend of his father’s – came into the waiting room at ten forty-eight.

‘He made it through.’ She knew better than to make them wait another second. ‘He’s critical, but he’s still with us.’

‘Is he conscious?’ Judy’s voice was hoarse.

‘Not yet, but his vital signs are good.’ Brodsky nodded at Sam. ‘It was touch and go – he lost a hell of a lot of blood.’

‘I guess the old man’s tough,’ Sam said softly.

Brodsky smiled. ‘As a Sherman tank.’

The Sherman tank lay in the ICU bed tethered by tubes and wires, very white and still apart from the rise and fall of his chest. Judy was in the bathroom and Saul was on a
coffee and soda run, and so, for just a very few moments – aside from the nurses moving back and forth between patients, equipment and records – Sam was alone with his father.

He looked for old familiar details to cling on to, trying to block out the tubes and ugly, frightening paraphernalia. The half-inch long scar on the suddenly fragile cheek, a vestige of a fight
with a violent patient in an ER when David had been a young doctor, better able to fend for himself. The curved nose, one nostril slightly larger than the other. The receding grey hair. This was
the man who had done more for Samuel Lincoln Becket than any other man on earth. Who’d taken a newly-bereaved, seven-year-old black boy into his heart and home and world, who’d given
him a second chance at family, love, security, education. A future.

The monitors near the bed beeped erratically for a moment, then calmed down again, and Sam’s pulse-rate reacted almost simultaneously. He looked at his father’s hands, beautiful,
capable hands that had helped so many children back to health, and his heart tore in his chest. He bent over him, his mouth right up against his ear, and spoke to his father softly and fiercely:
private, intimate words about strength and recovery and coming back home to them all, words about finding the person who had done this to him.

A light touch fell on his left shoulder. Sam straightened up and saw his mother behind him, her face unfrozen now, but another, more unfamiliar expression in her eyes and on her mouth. Iron. The
way he’d been told she’d looked when he’d been shot.

‘Okay, son?’

‘I’m okay, Ma.’

Her eyes, usually soft, like Saul’s, were penetratingly sharp. ‘You’re going to find who did this?’

‘It’s not my jurisdiction, Ma.’

‘But you’re going to make it your business.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Could he have been wrong about that girl?’

‘I don’t know, Ma.’

The eyes didn’t waver. ‘You still hope it isn’t her, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘But it’s not impossible, is it?’

Sam shook his head.

‘Nothing’s impossible, Ma.’

Al Martinez and Beth Riley sat in their car outside Frances Dean’s house while Martinez reported back to Sam Becket at Miami General.

‘Repeat performance, just like after the Flager killing. Both of them in their nightclothes, real bewildered, with the aunt saying they were both home all evening and all night and she
never got to sleep, so she can swear to that —’

‘She looked sleepy to me,’ Riley inserted.

‘Yeah, right.’ Martinez nodded and repeated to Sam what she had said. ‘And the aunt’s saying how can we be so wicked as to imagine that Cathy might want to hurt a man
who’s been so kind to her?’

Sam, talking on his cellular outside the ICU, registered the sneer in the other detective’s voice. ‘She’s not wrong, Al. She told Grace Lucca how much she liked my
father.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘You think she was lying,’ Sam said. He’d learned over the years to set great store by Al Martinez’s gut feelings.

‘Like I said in the hospital,’ Martinez answered, ‘I think she’s a certified fruitcake and her aunt’s lying to protect her.’

Inside her house, Frances Dean was standing outside Cathy’s bedroom, trying to summon up her courage.

‘Why don’t you come in, Aunt Frances?’

Cathy’s voice, through the closed door, made her jump.

She opened the door. Cathy, still wearing the oversized pink T-shirt she’d slept in, was sitting on her bed, crosslegged, the May issue of
Cosmopolitan
on the covers in front of
her.

‘I could hear you breathing out there,’ she told her aunt.

Frances went into the room. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Not really.’

‘Do you mind if I sit down?’

‘Of course not.’ Cathy picked up the magazine and dropped it on to the floor beside the bed. ‘I wasn’t reading, just staring at it.’

Frances sat down on the bed. ‘I know what you mean. I lie awake at night with a book open in front of me, but I don’t think I’ve actually read a word since . . .’

Cathy said nothing.

‘The thing is —’ Frances stopped again.

‘What?’ Cathy looked into her aunt’s face, saw the struggle in it.

‘The thing is, I told the officers that I was awake all last night.’

‘Yes.’

‘I lied to them,’ Frances said, suddenly speaking rapidly. ‘I took a sleeping pill last night directly after dinner, because I just couldn’t bear to go through another
night without rest – that’s why I took so long to hear them knocking on the door this morning.’ She came to a halt and, cheeks flushed, looked away from her niece’s
eyes.

‘What are you saying, Aunt Frances?’

‘That I need —’ She broke off.

‘What do you need?’ Cathy asked.

Frances faced her again. ‘I need for you to swear to me that none of these terrible, evil things have anything to do with you.’ Cathy stared at her, speechlessly.

‘I’m sorry, Cathy. It’s just —’

‘Just that you don’t believe me.’ Cathy got off the bed, went to the window, turned round and faced her. Her eyes were full of new horror. ‘You actually think I could
have killed these people —’ Her voice pitched higher in distress. ‘That I could have killed my
mom
? And Arnie? That I —’

‘No!’ Frances stood up, too, started to walk towards her.

‘Don’t come any closer.’ Cathy sounded strangled. ‘Don’t come
near
me!’

‘It isn’t like that!’ Frances was distraught. ‘It isn’t that I think you could have done it —’

‘What is it then?’

‘I guess I just need to hear you tell me once – just this one time – and then I’ll stand by you forever.’

‘How could you even
think
something like that?’

‘I don’t know, honey.’ Frances shook her head miserably. ‘I’m so confused, and it’s all been so terrible, and the police keep coming by and I don’t
understand
why
– I don’t understand how they can think you could have anything to do with the killings, yet they do seem to, and —’

Cathy turned away to the window. ‘Go away, Aunt Frances.’

‘Cathy, darling, please.’

‘Just go away.’ She paused. ‘If there was anyplace I could go to, I’d leave right now, but there isn’t anyplace, is there?’ Her voice was still choked, but
now it was harsh too.

‘You don’t have to go anywhere – you have a home here with me, always. You’re my sister’s little girl, and I love you.’

‘You love me so much you think I could murder my mother.’

‘No, I
don’t
!’ Frances made another move towards her, but stopped again, knowing she wouldn’t get close. ‘I’m sorry to have asked you that. I
shouldn’t have – I can see that now. Those people got me so mixed up.’

‘Go away.’ Cathy didn’t turn around. ‘Please.’

‘Cathy, please —’

‘Go
away
!’

Wringing her hands, Frances fled.

It was mid-afternoon when Grace got home, opened her mail and then played back her messages. There were five, but Sam Becket’s and Frances Dean’s were the real
attention grabbers.

She cancelled the one remaining appointment she’d been hoping to keep – a routine update with a ten year old doing rather better than expected after her parents’ bitter breakup
– and headed directly over to Miami General.

Sam came out of the ICU when he heard she was there. He looked as Grace had expected him to look. Like hell.

‘Thanks for coming.’

They hugged. It was the first time they’d done that, first time they’d been that physically close. Grace felt his heart beating fast and hard and found that she wanted to weep for
him.

‘How is he?’ she asked softly when they drew apart.

‘Too soon to say. He’s still unconscious.’

‘But the surgery went well?’

‘That’s what they say. It’s still going to be touch and go.’

‘David’s strong, Sam,’ Grace said, though she wasn’t sure, suddenly, how strong he really was.

‘He’s going to need to be.’ Sam glanced through the window of the ICU. David’s bed, halfway into the room, was just visible. Judy Becket was sitting, very straight, her
hand on her husband’s.

‘How’s your mother doing?’ Grace asked him.

‘She’s pretty tough, too.’ Sam paused. ‘Saul’s on the move a lot of the time, getting cups of coffee, talking to nurses and staff in the commissary. It’s hard
for him, seeing Dad this way.’

‘Do you know what happened?’ Grace asked, finally getting to it.

‘We don’t know much,’ Sam answered. ‘We think he was probably catching a nap on the couch in his office – he sometimes does that if he has to work late.’

‘Someone broke in?’

‘Walked in. Dad may have left the door unlocked.’

‘Would he do that?’ Doctors’ offices were such obvious targets for robberies that most of them turned into Fort Knoxes after closing hours.

‘He might have,’ Sam admitted. ‘He’d spent half the night with a dying patient – an old friend.’ He paused. ‘Whoever walked in took a scalpel out of one
of my father’s instrument cabinets – one of his partners, Fred Delano, took inventory this morning, and there’s an instrument missing.’

‘A scalpel?’ Grace was stunned and abruptly chilled to the bone. ‘Are they sure?’

‘Afraid so.’

She forced her mind to function. ‘Anything else stolen? Drugs?’

Sam shook his head. ‘Still locked up and accounted for – though Delano thinks some prescription pads may be gone.’

‘They might still have been after drugs.’ There was a sick sensation growing in Grace’s stomach. She knew she was clutching at straws. ‘Maybe they weren’t expecting
to find David in the office – maybe they stabbed him and ran.’

‘The door was unlocked,’ Sam said. ‘They had to expect to find someone inside the office.’

She said it, finally.

‘You’re still looking at Cathy?’

His face was very sombre. ‘At her and everyplace else.’ Through the ICU window, Grace saw Judy Becket stand up for a moment, stretch her legs and arms, rub her eyes. She saw a nurse
come forward and check David Becket’s IV drip feed. She saw the bank of monitors beside the bed and the bag of blood suspended above it.

She decided now was not the time to tell Sam about her trip to Key Largo to see Dr Peter Hayman.

She returned Frances’ call from a public phone in the hospital.

Cathy answered, said her aunt was taking a bath. Grace asked her how she was coping. Cathy’s answer was too light, too airy, troubling Grace more than if she’d wept or snapped at
her. She asked if she might come out to Coral Gables.

‘Sure,’ Cathy said. ‘Why not?’

It was just gone six o’clock when Grace got to Granada Boulevard. She rang the bell and waited. Cathy opened the door. She was dressed for running, her hair tied back in a ponytail.

‘I thought we could go out again,’ she said. ‘If it’s okay with you?’

‘It’s fine with me.’ Grace was glad she’d worn a tracksuit and sneakers. ‘Do you mind if I run with you this time?’

‘Oh,’ Cathy said. ‘Okay.’

She was still standing in the doorway.

‘How’s your aunt?’ Grace asked.

‘Sleeping.’