Mind Games (40 page)

They’d been over the events of the previous Sunday more than a dozen times and it always came out the same way for both Grace and Sam. Sam’s job meant almost
everything to him, but he still could not bring himself to regret having gone to help Grace out of what he’d felt certain had been a dangerous situation. Seeing her apparently struggling with
a man he thought might be a killer, Sam had not felt he had any choice.

And there, of course, was the rub.

They didn’t
know
if Hayman had been a killer.

They didn’t know if he’d been anything more or less than he had claimed to be. A psychiatrist whose only
proven
misdemeanour to date was that he’d spooked Grace by
coming into her bedroom in the early hours of Sunday morning.

The illness that had struck her so abruptly had passed almost as swiftly as it had come, and there was no way of accurately checking what might have been on the gauze Hayman had put on her cut,
because it had been as soaked as the rest of her when Grace had taken her tumble into the ocean – and whatever might have been in the hypodermic syringe had been lost along with Hayman.

Grace had gone back and forth, with and without Sam, trawling her memory for worthwhile clues. Sam had reminded her that Broderick had made two botched suicide attempts before the supposed
drowning by slitting his wrists and throat, and she’d struggled to recall seeing any signs of scarring on Hayman’s neck or arms. She’d come to realize then that each time
she’d seen him, Hayman had worn long-sleeved garments and had his neck covered, but even if that added a tad more weight to their personal suspicions of the man, as evidence it was probably
less
than circumstantial. In other words, unless Peter Hayman’s body washed up comparatively soon, they wouldn’t know if it bore any traces of scars that might correlate to
Broderick’s.

And Hayman – like Broderick before him – was still missing.

That was what could happen when a man got swept overboard in the ocean. That was what all kinds of people had pointed out to Grace when she had raised the question of Broderick’s survival
– and now, it seemed to her, she’d handed them their proof of that on a plate.

Any confusion Grace had been left with immediately following the capsizing of the
Snowbird
had now turned into a vast sense of guilt. If she had not reacted in that hysterical,
unprofessional way . . . if Sam had not seen her struggling with Hayman . . .

All her suspicions – every
one
of them, it seemed to Grace now that she had time to reflect on them – had been purely circumstantial or even less. They might even have been
entirely in her mind.

And the bottom line was that an innocent man – a decent man – might be dead because of her.

Hayman had still not been found, dead or alive. Sam was still on suspension, able for the first time to give too damned much of his attention to S-BOP and his role in
Il
Trovatore.

Cathy was still in the Female House of Detention.

Grace had gone to see her just once. She’d found her listless and depressed, and had come away anguished at not having had one single crumb of comfort to offer her. The only fragment of
halfway decent news was that David Becket had come good and had visited her twice since Sam had remembered to ask him to – and since the murder of Anna Valdez, Judy Becket had withdrawn her
opposition to the visits.

Grace wished to high heaven that anyone had said that the Valdez case strengthened Cathy’s position in any way, but they had not said that.

She wasn’t sure if she could face seeing her again.

With Sam unable to get to his case files and loth to ask too much of Al Martinez, he had requested his father to ask his contact at Lafayette Hospital for another photograph of
John Broderick. It arrived three days later on the last Wednesday in May, and Sam brought it directly to Grace’s house together with the author photograph from the back flap of one of Peter
Hayman’s books.

Grace stared at them both for a long time.

‘Anything?’ Sam asked at last.

Her eyes were sore from staring. ‘Not really.’

‘We know the height’s a match,’ Sam said.

‘But that’s all that is,’ Grace said.

They were so utterly different. Broderick was fair-haired, blue-eyed, round-faced – overweight – with a large nose and narrow lips. Hayman was a slim-built man with brown hair and
eyes and a regular kind of nose and mouth. He could, of course, as they’d already discussed, have coloured his hair and worn tinted contacts. He could have radically altered his diet and the
shape of his nose, mouth and face, but chances were they would only find out if Hayman had ever undergone plastic surgery if his body washed up – and if the ocean’s greed held on to him
long enough for his flesh to decompose or even fall away, the only thing the ME would be able to judge was whether or not any facial bones had been surgically interfered with.

‘When you first saw Broderick’s picture,’ Sam reminded Grace, ‘you thought there was something familiar about him.’

‘I remember.’

‘But you don’t think now it was because of Hayman?’

‘I don’t know.’ Grace felt frustrated enough to weep. ‘I don’t
know.
’

Sam reached out and stroked her cheek. ‘Take it easy, Grace.’

For a moment, she didn’t trust herself to speak.

‘I started wondering,’ Sam said, slowly, ‘if we could maybe show Hayman’s photograph to Cathy – but in the first place, I think it might be too heavy for her, and
anyway, I don’t think there’s much point at this stage.’

‘She was so young,’ Grace said, ‘when she last saw her father. If I thought there was some real hope of her recognizing Hayman, I think I’d consider taking the chance,
but to be honest, it would take something close to a miracle for her to link that face with one she’s done her best to forget.’

‘Even if she did,’ Sam said, ‘in order for it to be admissible as an ID, I guess it would have to be organized in front of witnesses acceptable to the State Attorney, and that
could be a no-win situation, If Cathy didn’t recognize Hayman, she’d be back to square one, and if she did, the prosecution would claim she was just trying to save herself.’

Sam and Grace had previously played out one game, just between themselves, with a modicum of success. Sam had brought Grace a gruesomely accurate timetable of when and where
the scalpel killer had struck each time, and she had done what she could to see if what little she knew of Peter Hayman’s movements might rule him out as a suspect.

It was, of course, much too little.

They knew that Marie and Arnold Robbins had been murdered in the early hours of Friday, April 3, and they knew that Beatrice Flager had been killed at around four a.m. on Wednesday, April 8
– all three deaths coming before Grace’s first encounter with Hayman at the seminar at the Westin in Key Largo on Monday, April 13. They knew that Sam’s father had been stabbed at
his downtown Miami office one week later on April 20 – a matter of some eight hours or so after Grace had shared dinner with Hayman at his house. They were, of course, because of the killing
of Anna Valdez, no longer certain if the same person had attacked David Becket as the other victims, but there was no question that Hayman could, theoretically, have driven to Miami in time to stab
the doctor.

Frances Dean’s death had occurred early on Tuesday, April 21, and Anna Valdez had died early on Sunday, May 17.

‘While you were
with
Hayman at his house,’ Sam had reminded Grace.

‘But I wasn’t with him all night,’ she had pointed out. ‘I know he came into my room just after two-thirty and was there for a few minutes. After that, I heard a door
close somewhere—’

‘But not the front door,’ Sam had said.

‘I don’t know – just a door.’

‘Did you hear a car?’

‘I don’t think I heard a car,’ Grace had answered, ‘but that doesn’t mean Peter stayed home the rest of the night. Next time I saw him, he was making breakfast at
around nine a.m.’

There were Cathy’s journal entries to consider, too, those which Sam had found unconvincing from the moment he’d seen them. The first two entries had been created on Cathy’s
computer on March 31 and April 9 – both dates falling before Grace’s first meeting with Hayman – and the final damning entry had been logged on Saturday, April 18, one day before
Hayman had called to invite Grace down to Key Largo. Once again, there was nothing to rule him out, but neither was there anything clearly supporting the notion that he might have found a way to
tamper with Cathy’s computer.

The night after Grace and Sam had tried comparing the photographs, Martinez called Sam at home.

‘Absolutely no record of any Peter Hayman at the University of Washington.’

Sam fought not to raise his hopes prematurely. ‘Did you try births?’

‘Births and marriages and high school records,’ Martinez told him.

‘And?’

‘
Nada
.’ Martinez paused. ‘Nothing from any hospital in Seattle either. And Angie Carlino says no one by that name and description ever worked as a shrink in St Pete or
any other city on the Florida west coast.’

‘Okay,’ Sam said.

‘What does that mean?’ Grace asked him later, after he’d told her the news. ‘I mean, what can we really
do
with this
non-information?’

‘Not much, yet,’ Sam answered. ‘Except I think we can at least allow ourselves to believe that Hayman may not have been what he claimed to be – which maybe means
we’re not quite as guilty as we’ve been afraid we were.’

‘It isn’t very much, is it?’ Grace said.

‘Better than nothing,’ Sam said.

Grace was back at work. She’d had a long telephone conversation with Dr Magda Shrike, the woman who had been her mentor at the University of Miami, but who had relocated
to San Francisco a few years back. Grace was beginning to sense that she was on the brink of some kind of crisis of confidence, and what she needed was someone she trusted and respected to reassure
her that it was reasonable and safe for her to go on looking after patients while struggling to come to terms with her own problems.

‘Do
you
think it’s safe?’ Magda had asked.

Grace had known, of course, that was how it would go. She’d toss her the ball, and Magda would toss it straight back, which was, no doubt about it, the right thing to do since it was
Grace’s damned ball.

‘I think it is,’ she had answered. ‘Or maybe I just hope it is.’

‘Isn’t that all we ever do?’ Magda had reminded her. ‘We’re not cardiac surgeons, Grace – our errors aren’t as swift to rebound on us – or as
lethal, thank God. Do we ever really know for sure how effectively we’re doing our jobs?’

Grace had smiled into the phone. ‘Is that your way of telling me it’s all right for me to go back to work, Magda?’

‘It’s as close to that as you’re going to get from me.’

Dora Rabinovitch had begun scheduling appointments again, and Grace had promised herself that if she developed any post-traumatic symptoms that might affect her judgment in the
line of duty, she would think again, maybe even seek some counselling.

Dora was being supportive, and Claudia was calling daily to check that Grace was getting by. She and Sam were having quiet meals together regularly, but somehow neither of them seemed to feel it
was right to continue where they’d left off that night after the S-BOP rehearsal, when his pager had snatched him away from her side.

Harry was Grace’s most constant companion.

He didn’t seem to care that it was still possible she might have caused the death of an innocent man.

Things got worse before they got better.

On Monday afternoon, Al Martinez told Sam that there’d been another scalpel attack in a doctor’s surgery up in Dania, and the familiar MO had got people thinking that maybe Dr
Becket’s attack needed a little fresh scrutiny. However, no one investigating the Dania attack or the Valdez killing in Miami had anywhere close to enough new evidence to lead to the charges
against Cathy being dropped in the Becket stabbing. And even if that evidence were forthcoming, Martinez said, since the growing consensus of opinion was that all the surgery attacks were probably
unconnected to the other scalpel killings, it wouldn’t really help Cathy at all.

On Tuesday afternoon, they buried Frances Dean close to her sister and brother-in-law’s recently filled graves in the Our Lady of Mercy cemetery in SW Miami. When Cathy had stood at the
graveside on that other wet, humid afternoon, a newly charged juvenile, she had been in handcuffs. This time, she was in shackles. At her parents’ funeral, there had, at least, been one
friend present. This time, there was no sign of Jill or any other young friend of Cathy’s.

Grace was there for her, standing some distance away from Sam and Martinez, and her heart warmed just a scrap to see both David
and
Judy Becket in the small gathering. Grace wanted to
get close to the grieving, haunted looking teenager, but was not permitted, and the only one allowed in touching distance was Jerry Wagner who, Grace noted gratefully, was gripping his
client’s arm in support and murmuring to her every now and again, presumably to help her get through.

Try as they all might, Grace and Sam and even Martinez agreed later over a Jack Daniel’s or three – Martinez being off-duty – it had been impossible to give proper attention to
the service, or the memory of Frances Dean, or even to Cathy’s feelings.

The only real point of focus for all of them, from start to finish, had been those bands of iron chaining her ankles together.

On Thursday afternoon, Cathy told a guard in the laundry room that she had bad menstrual pains and needed to go lie down. She was asked if she needed to go to the infirmary,
but she said that all she thought she needed was fifteen to twenty minutes’ rest. They let her go.