Mind Games (2 page)

Turn on the light.

Anita backed up to the door, found the switch with her left hand.

And flicked it.

And saw that the blackness covering the bed was not a quilt after all.

It was what she had smelled.

Blood.

Spread over the three of them and over the sheets and pillows. Sprayed up over the headboard and the wall and the lampshades on both bedside tables.

Anita opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. The black, sick sensation was swamping her, suffocating her, sucking her in, like the corkscrew spiral of a tornado
drawing everything into itself. Her whole being seemed engulfed in that twisting funnel, was being sucked down, down into a black, narrow, contracting hole.
All dead
,
all dead
,
the only words, the only halfway coherent thoughts spinning down with her.

Three corpses.

The middle one stirred. Sat up.

Anita’s scream began then, and did not stop. It came from deep inside her, from within that narrow whirling bore of terror, came twisting, surging, gushing, roaring out through her mouth
into the death silence.

As Cathy Robbins, her blue eyes almost bright against her bloodsoaked cheeks and forehead, her golden hair matted and darkened, lifted both her arms towards Anita in speechless supplication.

The housekeeper stared at the girl’s mouth, saw that it, too, was red.

Still screaming, Anita del Fuego turned and ran.

He left Martinez, Riley, the ME, the Crime Scene guys and the Assistant State Attorney with the distraught Mrs del Fuego and the deceased, and took the vigil with the living
for himself. Detective Samuel Becket had been with the Person Crimes unit of the Miami Beach Police Department for six years, and had seen his share of homicides, but the sheer horror never
diminished so far as he was concerned. Sam knew that his sense of motivation for solving those violent, most inhumane crimes was as undiluted as ever, but he still – when he was in a position
to have a say in the matter – got the hell away from the grisly end of things first chance he got. Sergeant Kovac having appointed him lead investigator for this particular case, Sam was, as
it turned out, in that position today.

In Miami Beach, in his experience, death didn’t come much grislier than this. Arnold and Marie Robbins – an affluent, middle-class, middle-aged couple in the restaurant business
– dead in their kingsize Miami Beach bed with their jugulars sliced and their fourteen-year-old daughter lying snuggled up between them, alive and unharmed.

Physically unharmed, anyway. As to the rest, Cathy Robbins was now tucked up between white hospital sheets in Miami General, being taken care of by the best there was. In Sam’s book,
anyhow.

‘How’s she doing?’ he asked his father.

‘How should she be doing?’

Dr David Becket and his son both turned and looked through the glass into the private room where Cathy Robbins was lying, eyes closed and perfectly still. Her left arm, resting on top of the
covers, showed a healthy Florida tan, but her face was so white it seemed almost translucent.

As a detective, Sam knew full well that – theoretically at least – being a family member placed indisputably at the murder scene made the girl a possible suspect. He knew it, and
he’d seen in the eyes of both Sergeant Kovac and Al Martinez that they knew it, too. But ever since joining the force, Sam had developed a habit of silently, privately, splitting himself down
his emotional core, one half Sam-the-cop, the other half Sam-the-man. Right now, Sam-the-man was looking at a child-woman who had just been extracted from hell on earth, and thinking about what she
might have endured, and his heart was going out to her.

‘Has she spoken?’ he asked his father.

‘Not really,’ David Becket said. ‘A word or two, nothing to help you.’ He paused, his open, expressive face clearly revealing his dismay. At fifty-six years of age, a
paediatrician with a sideline as a volunteer general practitioner on West Flagler Street in downtown Miami, he’d seen more than his fair share of anguish, yet he had never learned to tame the
acuteness of his own imagination. His patients suffered from sickness or drug abuse or violence or depression, and David felt their suffering. It was exactly what he had been warned to guard
against all those years back in medical school, but it was probably at least part of the reason they flocked to him day after day, night after night, in the hospital and in the
‘freebie’ clinic he shared with Fred Delano and Joan Melnick. It was also part of the reason his wife Judy, still fretting after all these years, periodically asked him to give up that
practice because of its inherent physical and emotional dangers.

‘Where did Mrs Dean go?’ Sam asked. Anita del Fuego had told them that Cathy Robbins’ next-of-kin now was her mother’s sister, Frances Dean.

‘She’s resting in another room,’ David answered. ‘I gave her something to help her. She stayed with her niece for a while, but one of the nurses saw she was about to
crack and got her out of the room.’

‘Do you know if Cathy said anything to her?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘How long till we can try talking to her?’

‘Hard to say,’ David said. ‘Who’s we?’

Sam heard the caginess and understood it. ‘If the aunt agrees, probably me with a counsellor from the Child Assessment Centre.’ He saw his father’s nose wrinkle in disapproval.
‘She’s our only witness, Dad. You know we’ll be gentle.’

‘You’re investigating her parents’ murders,’ David said grimly. ‘How gentle can you be?’

Sam gave a small, weary shrug. ‘Can I sit with her? I mean just sit.’

‘I have no problem with that, so long as it’s just sitting.’

‘Can’t do much more until Mrs Dean gives the okay.’ Sam paused. ‘I know you’d like us to leave her alone, but it isn’t going to happen.’

‘I know it.’

‘I’ll wait as long as I can, Dad.’

‘It’s her you have to wait for, not me.’

Sam looked back through the glass. ‘At least she’s not catatonic.’

‘At least,’ David said wryly.

‘How long would you like me to tell the CAC counsellor to wait?’

‘I have no idea.’ It was David’s turn to shrug. ‘I never found my mother and father slaughtered in their bed.’

Close up, the girl looked even paler, even more vulnerable. Her blonde hair was still damp at the roots from washing. A tiny speck of dried blood lay, like a final testimony, a
horror freckle, at the base of her right ear lobe. Sam restrained his impulse to wipe it away. He looked at her left hand – no traces remained beneath her fingernails. If they had been
polished that, too, had been removed, either by the police surgeon or by hospital personnel. Sitting on his hard plastic chair, Sam’s mind conjured up pictures of Cathy Robbins’ shower,
of the unspeakable trauma of having her parents’ lifeblood scrubbed off her flesh, and then swiftly, urgently, he pushed the images away. His father was not the only one in their family with
a too-vivid imagination; if Sam had not been adopted, he’d have assumed it flowed through their gene pool.

‘Hi.’

Sam jolted in his chair. Cathy Robbins had opened her eyes and was looking at him. Her eyes were very blue, their pupils dilated, perhaps from the sedative she had been given soon after
she’d been found.

‘Hello, Cathy.’ He didn’t ask her how she was feeling, knew it would be both cruel and pointless. ‘I’m Detective Sam Becket from the Miami Beach Police
Department.’

‘Two Beckets,’ she said softly.

Nothing too fuzzy there. ‘Dr Becket’s my dad,’ Sam told her.

‘How come?’ Borderline interested.

It was a question Sam had answered more times than he could count. A natural enough question given that Sam was an African-American and David was a Caucasian Jew. ‘Adopted,’ Sam
said.

‘Me, too,’ Cathy said, and closed her eyes.

She didn’t speak again until late that evening, long after Sam had gone. A nurse was in her room, putting down a jug of fresh water.

‘Did it really happen?’ Cathy asked her.

The nurse understood what she meant, but everyone had been alerted to be careful about what they said to Cathy Robbins, and so she froze for a second or two, saying nothing.

‘Okay,’ Cathy said, and shut down again.

Grace Lucca could not remember the last time she’d felt quite so relaxed, even on a Sunday. Weekends tended to be gentle family affairs for most of her neighbours on the
Bay Harbor Islands, the two miniature, self-contained communities that lay between exclusive Bal Harbour and North Miami. A number of the people who lived around Grace were professional men and
women with children of various ages. At weekends they pursued civilized amusements; they shopped, barbecued, shot baskets, tinkered with the boats some of them kept moored right outside their
backyards.

Grace had a mooring of her own, but though she thought about buying something small someday, she hadn’t done so yet. If she had, she doubted she’d find time to do much more than look
at it. For one thing, as a child and adolescent psychologist, she seemed to have developed a bad habit of being unable to turn down patients in real need whatever the day or hour, and for another,
she was less able than she ought to be to shut down from work.

This particular Sunday had started out differently, though. Both the afternoon appointments Grace had scheduled had been postponed, the weather was especially fine, and she’d woken up
feeling remarkably laidback. She’d taken a muffin, juice and coffee back to bed with the
Herald
and
New York Times
, dozed off in the midst of the Travel section, woken up to
find that Harry had burrowed right under the covers with her, and then she had gotten up to take a shower, do some overdue laundry and put together a sandwich. Now, a little after one
o’clock, she was sharing a
real
Sunday afternoon with Harry, sitting out on their deck, her long legs dangling over the side, bare toes brushing the water. That felt good. The whole
package felt good. Doing nothing, just sitting and gazing at the pretty, almost smugly secure Bal Harbour scene across the water.

Harry – a handsome, self-possessed, ten-year-old West Highland terrier – shifted a little, tucked his white-haired compact body closer in against Grace’s right thigh, and
wagged his stubby tail.

‘Is this good or is this
good
?’ she asked him.

The phone rang.

Grace sighed.

The machine picked up. From the deck, through the screen doors, she heard her own voice asking for name, number and message, then the high-pitched whistle and click as recording began, then a
stranger’s voice, deep and unfamiliar.

She looked down at Harry. ‘Do I go listen or do we go on sitting here?’ He snuck in even closer, keeping his little dark eyes on the water, and she fondled his ears. ‘I
know,’ she said. ‘But it could be important.’

Harry grunted as she got to her feet and shook the water off her toes. They’d been a good team from the start, Grace and Harry, from their Miami beginnings in the ground-floor beach
apartment that they’d escaped from in a hurry after it had gotten invaded by crabs, through the plush, too swanky Miami Beach condo from which Harry had come too perilously close, more than
once, to taking a dive from the terrace. But then Grace had found this little house on the island, tucked between two somewhat grander but no lovelier houses, and she and Harry had come home to
pure white stone, arched windows, a red, Mediterranean-style tiled roof, their own twin palms and fiery bottle brush tree and, best of all, the deck.

Grace had known right away that the house would work out well, too, as a professional environment, and it had. The parents who brought their children to her and left them in her care
appreciated, for the most part, the fact that it looked and felt safe and clean. From her standpoint Grace set great store by comfort and ease, which was why when the weather was fine – as it
almost always was in south-east Florida – and unless a patient had some kind of problem with being outdoors, they could sit out in the fresh air on the deck or inside the screening on the
lanai – and having Harry around tended to help relax most of the children Grace spent time with. Lord only knew many of them needed all the relaxation she could offer.

The phone message, from a detective of the Miami Beach Police Department, sounded urgent enough for her to return the call right away. The number was for a cellular phone, and
Detective Sam Becket picked up after just two rings.

‘Detective, this is Grace Lucca. I just got your message.’

‘I appreciate your calling back so fast, doctor.’ His voice was rich and gentle. He sounded, Grace thought, quite illogically, very unlike a policeman.

‘No problem. What can I do for you?’

‘My father tells me you have a talent for breaking through to badly traumatized kids.’

‘Your father?’ Grace tried ransacking her memory.

‘Dr David Becket. I believe you’ve worked together.’

‘We sure have.’ The craggy face of one of the gentlest paediatricians she knew sprang into Grace’s mind, and she smiled into the receiver. ‘It’s kind of him to have
said that about me.’ She paused. ‘So what’s the story, detective?’

Becket filled her in on the Cathy Robbins tragedy.

‘Cathy’s out of the hospital now,’ he told her, rounding off, ‘staying with her aunt – her mother’s sister – but she still won’t talk about what
happened.’

‘Not surprising, under the circumstances.’

Becket explained that his father, Frances Dean – the aunt – two counsellors from the Child Assessment Centre and a psychologist resident at Miami General had all failed to elicit any
response from the young teenager.

‘You realize there’s no guarantee she’ll talk to me either,’ Grace pointed out.

‘Of course not,’ Becket agreed, ‘but my father thinks she just might.’ He paused. ‘We have to find out what she knows.’

‘It might not be much,’ Grace said.