Mind Games (24 page)

Jerry Wagner agreed to see Grace again just before lunch on Friday. (His lunch, not hers, since Grace knew she’d be lucky to find time to grab more than cheese and
crackers until nightfall at the earliest.)

Top of her anxieties about Cathy was the option open to the State of Florida to try the fourteen year old as an adult rather than a minor. They could do that, Grace had discovered, if the grand
jury came to an indictment, because of the grievous nature of the crimes. It happened quite often, she had learned, when kids killed, and one of the worst aspects from Grace’s point-of-view
was that it would mean Cathy’s being transferred to an adult prison facility for the long wait until the trial.

‘I need to know,’ she told Wagner, ‘if there’s anything I can do or say that might make a difference to the judge’s decision about that.’

‘Unfortunately, I don’t think there is.’ He shook his head. ‘In our state, in a case like this – four brutal deaths – it’s almost a foregone conclusion
that Cathy’s going to be bound into the adult court.’

‘But surely we can try and fight it?’ Grace was trying hard to keep calm again in the face of this man’s depressing response. ‘Maybe if I go before the court and tell
them what I think this might do to Cathy?’

‘Compared to what she’s accused of doing to the victims, I’m afraid that any traumatizing effect on Cathy you could come up with just wouldn’t balance the books.’
Wagner leaned forward, his short curly hair, piercingly blue eyes and curved nose giving him the look of a Roman in a dark suit rather than a toga. ‘Dr Lucca, I know this is tough to take,
but—’

‘What this is is guilty till proven innocent,’ Grace cut in passionately. ‘I mean, it’s so appallingly
unjust
.’

‘It does seem that way.’

‘It doesn’t just seem that way, Mr Wagner – it
is
that way. I can just about begin to contemplate the rationale that a juvenile found guilty of a terrible crime like
homicide should be treated as an adult, though I find even that hard to accept – but we’re talking here about taking an innocent child and doing our best to destroy her before
she’s even come to trial.’

Wagner sat back again. ‘I didn’t say I agreed with the system, doctor,’ he said gently. ‘Don’t you think I want to help my client every step of the way? I’d
like nothing more than to keep her out of the adult facility – no, that’s not true. What I’d really like is to get her out on bail and into some kind of safe, state-approved home
until the trial.’

‘That would be wonderful.’ Grace jumped hungrily on his words.

‘I said that’s what I’d really
like
,’ Wagner pointed out, ‘but it’s wholly and absolutely out of the question.’ He paused. ‘This is a
long haul case, Dr Lucca. We all need to keep clearly focused on our ultimate goals.’

‘My goal’s to keep Cathy sane,’ Grace said.

‘And mine’s to make sure she walks free when all this is over,’ Wagner added. ‘And I have no doubt that you can do a whole lot to keep Cathy sane, no matter where she has
to spend the next few months.’

Grace nodded, bit her lip, then took a deep breath.

‘I do have something else I think you should know about,’ she said.

Wagner checked his Cartier wristwatch. ‘I have a lunch meeting in twenty minutes.’

‘It’s very important,’ Grace told him. ‘Possibly crucial to the case.’

His mouth pursed and he nodded. ‘Shoot,’ he said.

She told him, as concisely as possible, about her still-hypothetical, still-off-the-planet, theory about John Broderick.

‘It’s certainly a fascinating notion,’ he said, once he’d finished writing notes on his yellow legal pad.

Grace’s heart began to sink.

‘I take it there’s no hard evidence to support your theory that Broderick didn’t die in that storm?’

‘None except that his body was never found,’ she replied. ‘I was hoping you might ask one of your investigators to check into his last weeks, maybe even hours.’

‘We might do that,’ Wagner said. ‘I’ll certainly be raising it with my colleagues.’ He paused. ‘You have to admit your suggestion that he’s waited
almost ten years to resurrect himself in order to murder a bunch of people and frame his own daughter is pretty far-fetched?’

Grace gritted her teeth and ploughed on. ‘It may sound far-fetched at first hearing, Mr Wagner,’ she told him. ‘But we’re talking about a man
proven
to be
possessive, obsessive, jealous and cruel.’

‘Unfortunately, the case against him never came to a hearing stage.’

‘It did up to a point,’ Grace pointed out. ‘Marie Broderick did get a court order to stop him seeing Cathy.’ She continued as if he hadn’t interrupted. ‘We
know Broderick was an unethical physician and an immoral man who forced medication on his family in order to punish, control and manipulate them. Now just supposing he didn’t die nine years
ago, don’t you have to consider him the most likely suspect?’

Wagner scribbled a few more notes on his pad. ‘You know, even if we don’t manage to find anything to support your theory, this information may help Cathy,’ he said,
thoughtfully, ‘though perhaps not in the way you’re hoping.’

Grace’s heart sank further, to someplace below her stomach.

‘If nothing else,’ Wagner went on, ‘this should at least strengthen our chance of pulling off an insanity plea. We can argue that all she’d been through in her young life
just drove her right over the edge.’

‘But that’s the
last
thing I’m saying.’

Wagner glanced at his watch again, and began to stack the three neat piles of paperwork on his desk into one pile – the clearest message yet that their meeting was drawing to an end.
‘I’m grateful to you, Dr Lucca, for what you’ve told me. We’ll certainly be checking into Broderick’s death. If we find even a scrap of something useful, I can assure
you we’ll jump on it with everything we’ve got.’

‘Thank you for that,’ Grace said, despondently.

‘Will you do something for me, doctor? If we don’t come up with an alternative suspect?’

‘If I can.’

‘Think about – just
consider
– helping us, down the road, to persuade Cathy to go with an insanity plea.’ Wagner paused, his eyes serious. ‘I know it
sounds like a negative approach, and I can see how it would go against the grain for you – and, I promise you, it would only be a last resort. But just keep in mind that at the end of the
day, it may make all the difference to getting Cathy out of jail.’

Grace felt like crying as she walked out of that perfect office. The worst of it, she decided, getting into the elevator, was that with Cathy in such poor shape, and with the evidence so heavily
weighted against her, she thought she could almost see Jerry Wagner’s point-of-view.

Almost.

Sam’s call that morning had been the high spot of Grace’s day. She had found the book for Saul a week earlier in Barnes & Noble in Coral Gables and had held
back for a few moments, worrying about Judy Becket’s feelings – but the book had been particularly handsome, and Grace liked the idea of giving some kind of keepsake, so she’d
gone ahead, sent it to Sam and left the final decision to him.

‘It’s a wonderful gift,’ he’d told her on the phone. ‘Much too generous, but very, very kind.’

‘I liked it,’ Grace had said, ‘though it did cross my mind afterwards that Saul would probably have preferred something a little cooler.’

‘No way,’ Sam had put her straight. ‘He’s going to love it.’

‘You don’t think it’s inappropriate for me to send a gift?’

‘The only thing that’s inappropriate, Grace, is that you should have been put in a position where you have to think twice about it.’

That was when he’d told her about the quiet way they’d decided to organize the barmitzvah, and when he’d asked if she would like to come to Golden Beach Temple on Saturday
morning and to stay for kiddush afterward.

‘I don’t know, Sam,’ Grace had said, uncertainly.

‘You don’t know if you can come, or if you want to come, or you don’t know because of what my mother said last time she saw you?’

‘Not guilty on the first two,’ she’d said, grinning into the phone.

‘My mother will be too busy being scared in case Saul screws up and being proud when he doesn’t, and being happy because Dad’s there to share it with her, even to notice who
else is there.’

‘I just don’t want to spoil the day for her, Sam.’

‘What about my day?’ he’d asked.

‘I don’t want to spoil your day either.’

‘So you’ll come?’

Grace had still been smiling when she’d put down the phone.

She had been to temple a few times in her life, all of them since she and Claudia had moved to Florida. Friends’ weddings, a patient’s batmitzvah – and Grace
had attended a Passover seder that still ranked with her as a warm and happy memory. But Saul Becket’s
bar
mitzvah was her first, and from the moment Sam’s young brother got up
there and Grace heard his halting, semi-broken voice singing those ancient, to her incomprehensible, words, she felt transported. The notion that with this rite of passage a boy moved into manhood
had always struck her as fanciful, mostly because it was, from her standpoint, impossible. Not that she hadn’t seen children flung headlong into maturity almost overnight, but that had always
been because some terrible adversity or trauma had catapulted them out of childhood. A ritual in a place of worship, followed most often by a party of some kind, was not, thank God, in the same
league.

And yet, as she saw David and Judy Becket’s younger son standing up there between the rabbi and the cantor, his prayer shawl over his narrow shoulders, his face so earnest, his whole
bearing probably eight million miles away from how Saul Becket usually comported himself, Grace was intensely struck by the solemnity of the event. Even if this so-called man turned back into a
regular thirteen-year-old kid within an hour or so, she found herself suddenly understanding that this experience would remain with him, within him, rounding the angular youthful features that
lived inside the boy, and forming a strong spiritual springboard for the rest of his life.

It was a reform temple, with men and women sitting together, which Grace found warmer and more natural from her perspective. To her left, an old lady sucked peppermints and followed every Hebrew
word in her prayerbook, her frail right index finger tracing the letters, her mouth moving silently as she read. To her right, a girl of about eight shifted restlessly in her seat and did her best
to involve her sister – a year or two older and determined at least to
seem
as if she was following the service – in some sort of a game to pass the time. Grace understood how
she felt. She remembered interminable hours spent in church back in her early Chicago childhood, while the old Latin prayers and rituals had flowed over her head. She remembered being chastised for
daydreaming by her parents, for in those early days Frank Lucca had still found his way into church on a regular basis – and Grace supposed he might have spent many hours in the confessional
for years after that, probably seeking absolution for his crimes against her sister. Except, of course, that absolution could only be given if the confessor was determined not to sin again, and if
Grace knew Frank better than that, she was pretty sure that God did, in which case it was only a matter of time before hell-fire got around to consuming him.

She had taken a seat about a third from the rear, well away from the Becket family. Under other circumstances, Grace would have enjoyed nothing more than walking right up to David – who
had, being the stubborn man he was, insisted on leaving his wheelchair at the entrance – and letting him know how very glad she was to see him again, but she had resolved not to cause Judy
Becket even a moment’s discomfort during the service. Despite her good intentions, however, about a half-minute after Sam had been called up to read from the Torah, Judy swivelled around and
met her eyes, and Grace felt almost as if the other woman was piercing what she had hoped was an impenetrable mask of calm, uninvolved pleasure. Maybe, Grace thought, Judy could sense the effect
that Sam’s remarkable voice, so deep and rich and effortlessly melodic, was having upon her. Maybe Judy Becket knew, in that brief moment, that Grace’s involvement with him was
deepening way beyond merely professional, and maybe, too, that troubled her.

‘Mazeltov, Saul,’ Grace said to him afterward at the kiddush in the hall attached to the temple, shaking his hand. ‘I thought you were great, though I’m
afraid I didn’t understand much.’

‘That’s okay,’ he told her, then grinned. ‘Neither did I.’

‘You don’t have a drink, Grace,’ Sam said, coming up behind them. ‘Let me get you something.’

‘I can’t stay,’ she told him quickly.

‘You have to take a drink with us for luck,’ Sam said.

He brought her a glass of kosher wine, and she drank a toast to Saul.

‘I loved it,’ she said to Sam. ‘I mean, I really enjoyed it.’

‘How’d I do?’

‘Very impressive, I thought.’ She smiled up at him. ‘Not that I’m exactly an expert.’

‘I’m glad you came, Grace.’

‘Me, too.’

She saw Judy Becket coming their way. David, back in his chair, was still at the far end of the hall. Grace tensed, wanting to avoid the slightest unpleasantness.

‘I really do have to go, Sam.’

Judy was upon them. She was wearing navy blue, a dress and jacket, with white piping around the borders of the jacket, repeated in her wide-brimmed hat.

‘Dr Lucca,’ she said, looking elegant and at ease. ‘How kind of you to come.’

Grace put out her hand, wished her mazeltov and told her how fine she thought Saul had been. Judy’s grip was firm and calm, and her eyes met Grace’s evenly as she thanked her. Grace
felt more than a touch of admiration, together with regret for the bad start their relationship had been dealt.

‘I was just telling Sam that I have to leave.’