Authors: Hilary Norman
She shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen him dig up so much as a buried bone in all the years we’ve been together.’
Harry was scrabbling crazily now, making small eager sounds.
‘Well, he sure seems to think he’s found something now,’ Sam said.
Grace looked at Cathy, saw curiosity in her eyes. Then Grace looked at Sam, and saw that he, too, was watching Cathy.
Grace’s bad feeling returned.
‘There it is,’ Cathy said, suddenly coming to life. ‘Hey, boy, what’ve you got?’ She got down on her knees beside Harry, delighted as a young child to see a dog
digging up a find.
Grace felt sick. She looked up, and now Sam was looking at her, and Grace realized at that moment that, cop or not, he felt as lousy as she did, like if he could have turned tail and got the
hell out of there he would have.
But he couldn’t.
Harry barked.
‘What —?’ The question died on Cathy’s lips. What began as a simply quizzical, confused expression, turned almost instantly into sheerest horror. Grace watched her lips
turn white, saw her sway, ran to stop her falling sideways.
‘Harry, get away,’ Sam said.
‘Harry,’ Grace urged from Cathy’s side. ‘Come here.’
Something in his mistress’s tone warned Harry this was not a game, and he came away from the small hole he’d dug. Sam was already taking gloves out of his pocket. Swiftly,
methodically, he pulled them on, then extracted a plastic evidence envelope – Grace hated seeing how prepared he’d been, as if he’d known he might strike lucky if he came along
with her and Cathy. He crouched down, withdrew Harry’s find, shook the excess dirt gently from it, then put it in the bag.
There was no doubting what it was.
The funeral was hideous.
It was unclear, until the hour itself, whether or not Cathy was to be allowed to attend, but in the event the powers-that-were agreed that she could go to Our Lady of Mercy cemetery en route
from the Juvenile Assessment Centre – where she had spent the last day and night undergoing basic evaluation and processing – to the Youth Facility up on NW 27th Street in Miami where
she would remain at least until her case came before the grand jury.
Cathy, flanked by officers and handcuffed, looked to Grace as if she had lost several pounds in weight overnight and gained almost as many years. Her hair, lank and greasy, was tied back off her
face, and she looked shockingly haggard. She was wearing a black skirt and blouse at least two sizes too large for her, and her eyes were bewildered and frightened. A man in a dark suit stood close
by, giving her occasional reassuring glances, and Grace guessed that he might be the lawyer Frances Dean had retained for Cathy when she’d been taken in for questioning after Beatrice
Flager’s murder. He looked like a lawyer, aged about forty-five, sleek, sturdy and prosperous, with dark, curling hair cut framelike around his compact head, his nose small but curved, his
eyes blue and piercing. Grace hoped, with all her might, that he was the best damned lawyer for the job.
‘Hello, Grace,’ Cathy said softly as she approached.
‘Hello, Cathy.’ Grace tried not to glance at her shackled wrists or at the officers to either side of the teenager, kept her eyes trained firmly on Cathy’s mask of a face.
‘Are you holding up?’
‘I guess.’ Cathy swallowed. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
‘Of course I’m here.’ Grace put out a hand to touch her left arm. ‘I’m going to be here for you as long as it takes to get this cleared up.’
Cathy didn’t answer, seemed incapable of speaking again. Swiftly, apprehensively, she looked back at a dark-haired girl – her friend Jill, Grace thought, the one in the photograph in
Cathy’s room at home. Jill managed a brief, frozen smile, then, perhaps constrained by the woman beside her, looked away from her friend and down at the ground.
Out of the corner of her right eye, Grace glimpsed Sam, standing with another man; probably, she thought, another detective, or perhaps one of his superior officers. He saw her, nodded, gave the
smallest of smiles, but made no move towards her. It occurred to Grace, not for the first time, that perhaps, no matter how Sam felt as a private individual, they were now on opposite sides of a
great divide.
The service got underway. It was a hot, humid, wet afternoon, and as Grace allowed the words to float someplace over her head, she was hard put to decide which was the most
dismal aspect of all. The pair of simple polished coffins being lowered into the ground. The chief mourner in handcuffs. Her utter isolation – the fact that if there were relatives or other
friends present, they never approached her; a typhoid carrier, Grace thought, might have attracted more physical warmth from the other mourners than Cathy received. The knowledge that within a
comparatively short time there would be another funeral to attend, probably in almost identical circumstances.
It got worse, briefly, after the burial, when the media, restrained till then by grudging respect, finally burst upon the scene like a maddened herd of cattle released from an abattoir, and
suddenly Cathy, despite the best efforts of the dark-suited man and the police, was surrounded for several long moments by hungry press and television reporters and camera crews. Grace stepped
back, escaping reflexively from the onslaught, but she caught one more glimpse of Cathy’s face as she was hustled back to the black car she’d arrived in. There was sheerest terror in
those blue eyes now, and Grace knew that that look in her eyes as a dozen microphones thrust into her face would be beamed into every home by nightfall and splashed on every front page in Florida,
or perhaps even farther afield, by breakfast-time next day.
The thought made her feel sick to her stomach.
It was another two days before Grace was allowed to see Cathy again, this time in a small locked room at the Youth Facility. Cathy had, to date, been charged with the first
degree murders of Marie and Arnold Robbins and Frances Dean. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that there would be more to follow. Bail, Grace had learned, was out of the question.
The scalpel dug up by Harry had been confirmed as the missing one from the solid silver collection bequeathed to Cathy by John Broderick, her natural father. There were no identifiable prints on
it, but Frances Dean’s blood and brain matter were still on the blade. It was, Sam had grimly explained to Grace on the telephone after the funeral, what every police officer and State
Attorney longed to get hold of these days: a smoking gun.
Grace had argued at great length over the discovery of the weapon. ‘Cathy
wanted
to go to the house,’ she had reminded him, more than once. ‘She chose to go into the
garden with us.’
‘And we know – and you say her aunt knew it too – that Cathy’s been back to the house more than once since you first took her there. Maybe she just felt compelled to go
back.’
‘But not with you,’ Grace had maintained. ‘Certainly not on the same day your people claim she buried a murder weapon there.’
‘Cathy didn’t know when she asked to go there that I was going to come along,’ Sam had pointed out. ‘And someone’s bound to argue that maybe she wanted to be
caught.’ He had paused. ‘Or that maybe she just wanted to be stopped.’
The scalpel had not been the only find for the prosecution that Tuesday. Within a half-hour of Sam’s bagging, photographing and documenting the new evidence and notifying
the county medical examiners’ and State Attorney’s offices, as well as the Coral Gables and City of Miami Police Departments, the real pros had taken over from Harry, and in less than
two hours a pair of rubber kitchen gloves had been unearthed just eight or nine feet from the first hole. Same brand as the ones used in Frances Dean’s kitchen. Both gloves loaded with blood,
dirt and smudged prints – Frances’ and Cathy’s among them. Whoever had buried them had, it was being hazarded, probably washed their hands in the Robbins’ swimming pool. The
water had been drained and all the filters carefully checked, but thus far nothing conclusive had been discovered.
Cathy said, in questioning, that she had used rubber gloves any number of times in her aunt’s kitchen for washing up, so of course if they’d come from Frances’ house then her
prints would be on them, inside and out – that didn’t mean she’d taken them from Coral Gables to Miami Beach in the middle of the night to use them to bury a murder weapon.
Anyway, Cathy said, when was she supposed to have
done
all this and how was she supposed to have gotten from her aunt’s place to her old home when she didn’t even drive a car,
and when none of the buses ran at night?
Grace knew about those questions of Cathy’s because she’d raised the same points during one of her conversations with Sam.
‘She made the 911 call just after seven a.m.,’ Sam had told her, ‘and the ME has the time of death down for sometime around two, which means she could have gotten to Pine Tree
Drive and back in time to pretend she’d just woken up, and to make the call.’
‘And how exactly is she supposed to have made this journey?’ Grace had asked, fighting the knot in her stomach. ‘I’m sure if she’d called a cab company, you’d
know about it – or are you suggesting she’s a secret driver?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ Sam had said. ‘There’s no record of a call to a cab company or any booking. It’s not impossible that Cathy has learned to drive
– some kids do – but if she’d taken her aunt’s car during the night, the local patrol officers would have noticed it gone.’
He’d paused. ‘One line of thinking is that she might have used a bicycle and sneaked out quietly. She says she brought her bike over from home two weeks ago.’
‘A
bicycle
?’ Grace might have laughed if she hadn’t been so furious. ‘Over the Mac Arthur Causeway in the middle of the night?’
‘It’s possible,’ Sam had said, quietly, taking no pleasure in his argument. ‘Cathy could have ridden the distance in about an hour, maybe a little more, which means she
could have left Granada Boulevard at around two-thirty, gotten home by three-forty-five, buried the weapon and gloves, left Pine Tree Drive again at around four-fifteen, and been home by
five-thirty.’
Grace had asked if anyone had reported seeing a blonde fourteen-year-old female riding a bicycle along that route that morning. No one had – but then, no one was looking. She asked if
physical evidence had been found that Cathy had undertaken such a long and arduous bike ride that morning.
‘Cathy’s a strong kid,’ Sam had reminded Grace. ‘We both saw the trophies for running in her room. Anyway, if she got back at five-thirty, that would have given her
plenty of time to shower and recover before making the 911 call at seven a.m.’
It Cathy had seemed bewildered and scared before, now, to Grace’s eyes, she seemed totally lost. When Grace arrived, the girl fell into her arms and wept for several
moments, but there was still nothing approaching hysteria, though the psychologist knew by now that that was simply not the way Cathy Broderick Robbins functioned. Truth to tell, Grace didn’t
claim to begin to understand how she
was
functioning, let alone surviving. They were keeping her away from her fellow inmates much of the time, and nights were being spent under lock and
key in solitary confinement.
‘Take me home,’ Cathy said, just once, in the small, secure room that had been provided for Grace’s visit. And then she remembered that she no longer had any place to go, and
stopped begging. Grace thought that it was like watching someone being punched in the solar plexus. Once realization struck her that there was nothing more Grace could do for her at that moment
other than offer comfort and promise to do her best for her, Cathy withdrew, both physically and emotionally.
‘It’s the goldfish all over again,’ she said, softly, harshly. ‘No one believed me then either.’
And after that, she wouldn’t say a word.
Grace went to Miami General to get the latest on David’s condition. She knew he was out of the ICU, and that he was, thank God, no longer deeply unconscious but running a
high fever and making no sense at all. Neither Sam nor young Saul was in his room, but Judy Becket was at her husband’s side.
She jumped to her feet the instant Grace entered the room.
‘Dr Lucca.’ There was not a trace of a smile on the small, elegant woman’s mouth. Her eyes were darkly shadowed, and her ill-fitting beige blouse betrayed the abrupt and
unhealthy weight loss that so often accompanies shock and ongoing fear.
‘How’s he doing?’ Grace asked.
‘What do you want?’ Judy Becket stood between Grace and the bed, so that Grace could not see her husband’s face without moving sideways, though she could hear that his
breathing was laboured.
‘To see Dr Becket,’ Grace answered. ‘I thought maybe, if you didn’t mind, I could sit with him for a while.’
‘I do mind very much.’
‘I know he needs to be quiet.’ Grace felt thrown by the other woman’s hostility. ‘I promise I’d just sit, nothing else.’
Judy Becket didn’t answer. Instead, she raised her right arm, indicating the door, giving Grace no choice but to go back through it. She came outside with her and closed the door very
softly.
‘It’s very clear to me,’ she said, ‘that your main concern for my husband now must be for him to recover sufficiently to clear that evil child you’re so fond
of.’ Her eyes glinted with anger. ‘Or maybe you’re hoping he never recovers in case he confirms to the police that it was she who stabbed him?’
‘You’re wrong,’ Grace said, stunned by her attack. ‘You must know that you couldn’t be more wrong, Mrs Becket.’ She was loth to fight back more vociferously.
Lord knew she could understand the other woman’s anguish.
‘I don’t know that, Dr Lucca.’ There was a slight tremor in her voice now, and she had to compress her lips for an instant before continuing. ‘Frankly, I don’t know
what to believe any more. I do know that I would like you to leave.’