Mind Games (39 page)

‘Grace, hang
on
!’

She heard the cracking first, as the mainsail ripped, and the mast split and wrenched, and then an awful groaning as the
Snowbird
reacted. She sounded like a great, living, wounded
creature as she rolled and pitched.

‘Oh, dear
God
!’ Hayman yelled. ‘She’s going over!’

Everything broke loose, went wild. Grace knew she was in the water, knew she was under, and it was so black, and she was swallowing the ocean, and she knew she was going to drown, and the only
things that went through her mind then were Sam, and then Claudia, and then Harry, in that order . . .

And that was all.

‘Oh, no, you don’t.’

Grace came to to the sound of a strange voice and someone’s hands pumping at her back to get the ocean out of her lungs – and then she was too busy retching and
coughing to think about anything else.

‘You’re all right now,’ the voice said.

The hands rolled her over. Grace stared up into pale, frightened eyes below a bald, domed head, and suddenly reality came back.

‘Sam!’

‘It’s okay, Grace,’ the bald man said, holding her down. ‘I’m Phil Kuntz, and you’re going to be all right.’

‘Let me
go
,’ she said as violently as she could, her voice still half choked.

He let her go and Grace sat up, saw she was on the deck of a small boat – the runaround that had rammed the
Snowbird.
‘Where’s Sam?’

‘He’s in the water,’ the man called Kuntz told her.

‘What?’ She struggled to her feet, and he helped her. ‘
Sam
!’

‘He’s trying to find the other guy,’ Kuntz said.

Grace tore herself away from his hands and got to the side of the boat, and there was Sam, in the ocean, over to the left, treading water and gulping air.

‘Sam!’

The
Delia
rocked wildly – for the first time, Grace noticed the
Snowbird
on her side a distance away over to the right.

‘
Sam!
’ she yelled at him. ‘Get up here!’

He raised a hand, took another big gulp of air, and dived underwater.

‘Oh, my God, what’s he
doing
!’ Grace turned to stare at Kuntz, saw that he was wearing a life vest, saw another on the seat behind him. ‘Why don’t you
do
something –
help
him? Why isn’t Sam wearing a life vest?’

‘Because your crazy boyfriend took the damned thing off so he could dive for Hayman.’ Kuntz shook his head. ‘Best way I can help now is stay on the
Delia
with you
– if he finds the other guy, we can get the PFD back to him.’ His pale eyes were fixed on the water. ‘I’ve put out a Mayday – the Coast Guard should be here any
time.’

Grace stared back at the water. There was no sign of Sam.

‘Give me the vest.’ She tried to grab at the second PFD. ‘Give it to me – if you won’t help him, I will!’

‘No way, lady.’ Kuntz took hold of the life vest with one hand and grabbed Grace around the waist with his spare arm. ‘Not after your man went to so much trouble to save your
hide.’

Sam came up, gasping for air.

‘Sam, for God’s sake,’ Grace screamed at him over the wind, ‘give it up!’

‘She’s right, man!’ Kuntz yelled beside her. ‘Get on the boat!’

Sam shook his head, and Grace saw him take another great gulp of air, and then he was arcing back into the water like a strong, dark seal, gone again, down into the depths.

‘He’s crazy,’ Kuntz said. ‘He’s not going to find him now.’

‘You have to
do
something!’ Grace was crying.

‘I told you, lady, there’s help on the way.’

He was still gripping her around the waist, but Grace could feel her legs starting to give way, and she’d forgotten for those few minutes how bad she’d been feeling before, and what
scraps of sense remained in her warned her that if she got back into the water she’d probably just end up needing to be rescued all over again . . .

Sam reappeared. It was obvious from the way he was gasping, from the way every sinew on his neck was standing out, that it was getting harder.

‘Sam, please give it up!’ Grace begged, her voice cracking.

‘I
can’t
!’ His own voice was hoarse and weak – it was a struggle to hear him. ‘I can’t just let the bastard drown!’

He was gulping air again – it was obvious he was getting ready to take another dive—

From somewhere, Grace heard the wail of a siren and a motor. She and Kuntz whirled around and saw the Coast Guard launch and a cluster of smaller boats all heading towards the
Delia
from one of the Keys.

‘Sam,
look
!’ Grace screamed. ‘They’re coming to help!’

‘You can quit now, man,’ Kuntz yelled.

‘Not until I find him!’ Sam took a final breath and dived again.

‘
Sam!
’

‘Come on, you guys!’ Kuntz was yelling at the Coast Guard officers.

‘You have to
help
him!’ Grace screamed at them. ‘He’s down there!’

‘Two overboard!’ Kuntz shouted. ‘One black, one white!’

The officers on board were getting their equipment on – Grace wondered why the hell they hadn’t put it on before.

‘The black guy’s a cop!’ Kuntz told them. ‘Get him out first!’

Grace looked sideways at his ugly, bald head, and wanted to kiss him, and then she looked back at the Coast Guard launch, and the divers were already sitting on the edge, backs to the water, and
then they did that back flip thing that professional divers always did and were gone from sight . . .

She didn’t know if she held her breath or simply stopped breathing.

She thought later that if it had taken another few seconds, she might have passed out again from lack of oxygen if nothing else.

She saw one of the divers’ heads emerge first.

‘Oh, dear God,’ Grace cried out and grabbed at Kuntz, dug her fingers into his right arm. ‘Where’s Sam? Where’s
Sam
?’

‘There!’ Kuntz yelled.

‘
Where
?’

‘Over there – to the right!’

Grace whipped her head around so fast she felt dizzy enough to fall down – but there he was, looking exhausted, but there he
was
, and he was alive, and one of the divers had him
around the chest and was towing him back to the big launch.

‘Is he okay?’ she shouted across the water.

No one answered her.

‘Is he
okay
?’ she screamed.

Sam raised a hand, gave a limp kind of a waving salute, and Grace knew it was for her and started crying again.

‘I don’t mean to be a killjoy, lady,’ Kuntz said, on her left, and his voice was pretty shaky, too, ‘but do you think you could get your nails out of my arm while I still
have some skin left?’

The search for Hayman went on for several hours, they told Grace, long after she, Sam and Kuntz were back on dry land, getting taken care of and answering a few preliminary
questions. But they didn’t find him.

Sam came to see Grace in her room at Mariners Hospital on Plantation Key. She was too out of it to say anything much, and she wasn’t sure that what she did manage to say made any sense.
Sam didn’t say too much either. Grace could tell, just by looking at him, that he felt the same about her being alive and in one piece as she did about him. But neither of them was in the
mood for celebration.

A man was, in all likelihood, dead. Even if he was Broderick, escape-artist-supreme, there could, on this occasion, have been no escape, not with so many there on the scene, searching for
him.

So he was, almost certainly, dead.

Because of Grace and Sam.

If he did turn out to be John Broderick, they probably would, in the fullness of time, remember that his death, second time around, was a good thing.

The other possibility was almost too unthinkable to endure.

Grace asked the question first, before Sam. She thought he might not have asked it, not that night, anyway, because of the effect he feared it would have on her.

But she did ask it. She had to.

‘What if it wasn’t him? What if he was just Peter Hayman?’

Sam said nothing, just held her hand tighter, but his eyes were tortured.

There was no answer to the question.

Or if there was, they were much too afraid to hear it.

In the days following the capsizing of the
Snowbird
, nothing good had happened except, from Grace’s standpoint, for having had Claudia by her side just about
morning, noon and night. Hayman’s body still had not been found; Sam was in considerable pain from having jarred his back during his rescue bid on the boat and was, additionally, in
twenty-eight different kinds of trouble with the Miami Beach Police Department; and Grace had undergone every kind of test in the book – under David Becket’s supervision – to try
to ascertain what had started making her feel so bad halfway through Sunday morning, but nothing had showed up.

‘Probably a virus,’ they’d told her at Mariners Hospital.

‘One of those things,’ they’d said at Miami General after running the tests. Medical tests were something Grace generally did her level best to steer clear of, but in this
instance she was so desperate to have her instincts proven at least
halfway
sound that she was prepared to put up with almost anything.

‘Could have been a touch of the ’flu,’ even David Becket had been forced to admit on one of his visits, ‘probably compounded by the tension you were going
through.’

‘You mean I was imagining it,’ she had said flatly.

‘Nothing imaginary about the ’flu.’

‘Then I was imagining being poisoned.’

‘I wish I could argue with you there, Grace,’ he’d said.

She knew no other doctor in the world could have meant that more than David Becket, knowing, as she did, what his son was currently up against.

Captain Hernandez and the chief
and
, worst of all, Internal Affairs had all gotten in on the act from day one, and Sam had been suspended, pending investigation, from
day three. It was, according to him, hardly surprising, given the cumulative weight of his misdemeanours.

One
: abandonment of his duty in Miami and going AWOL.

Two
: use of his badge out of jurisdiction to involve a civilian, one Philip Kuntz, in a potentially dangerous situation.

Three
: failure to report the situation to the Monroe County Sheriff.

Four
: probable aggravation of an already lethally tense scenario on board the
Snowbird.
Result: the capsizing of the craft and, ultimately, the probable drowning of Dr Peter
Hayman, a resident of Key Largo.

‘And there could be more,’ Sam told Grace over supper at her house on day four, the Thursday after the incident, ‘depending on how badly Phil Kuntz feels towards me as time
goes by.’

‘Kuntz thought you were a hero,’ Grace said. ‘He told me he figured you were brave enough when you rescued me, but he thought you were borderline crazy when you went down for
Hayman for the fourth time.’

‘He may change his mind,’ Sam said, grimly realistic. ‘I bullied him into taking his boat out in bad weather. I offered him inducements. I threatened him when he didn’t
want me to use his flare gun.’

‘You were afraid for me,’ Grace pointed out miserably. ‘The whole fiasco was my fault, Sam. I should never have let myself get into a situation I had doubts about from the
start. I’m supposed to be a trained psychologist – I’m supposed to have a
brain
– but all I did was underreact before I got on the
Snowbird
and then
overreact once I was on board.’

‘The guy was coming at you with a hypodermic, Grace.’

‘I know he was.’ She shook her head. ‘I know. And you thought I was in danger – which I guess I was—’

‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ Sam said. ‘Given it all to do again, I have a feeling I’d do most of it the same way.’ He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t make
it right in the eyes of my superiors.’

‘Makes it right for me,’ she said.

That doesn’t count,’ he said.

The really crazy part of it was that no one was doing what seemed to Grace the most obvious thing to do: searching Peter Hayman’s house. Sam shared her frustration, but
understood better than she did the protocol governing the situation. Hayman’s body had not been found. Nor had any family members been located. He had, as it turned out, written two published
volumes on Münchhausen’s Syndrome by proxy, and his Tampa-based publishers had cooperated fully, making Hayman’s author questionnaire available to the Monroe County Sheriff. The
psychiatrist’s answers, succinctly given in black ink, indicated his single, childless status, and gave University of Washington in Seattle as his
alma mater.
Relatives were still
being sought by the sheriff in all the accustomed ways. Everything else was, for the time being, on hold.

Grace and Sam had only come into possession of those few sparse facts courtesy of Al Martinez (who’d undertaken, off the record, to run his own check on Hayman’s credentials in
Seattle) and it was through Martinez also that they had received confirmation of what Sam had already anticipated: that until Hayman was officially recorded as dead or presumed dead, there was
absolutely no good reason for the authorities to invade his privacy.

‘Forget my suspicions,’ Grace said to Sam, ‘but what about yours? You’re not just some cranky civilian – you’re a
police
officer.’

‘I’m on suspension, Grace,’ Sam answered matter-of-factly. ‘I broke the rules without a scrap of hard evidence to back me up.’

Under the surface, he was just as frustrated as Grace was – and
she
hadn’t heard the words that Martinez had actually used. That the combined bullshit-rat-smellings of a
neurotic head-shrinker and her screw up cop-lover were not grounds for a warrant to search a fucking paper
bag
, let alone an upstanding citizen’s home.