Mind Games (49 page)

‘Where’s Harry?’ Grace asked, suddenly.

‘Probably boycotting me.’

‘Shall I go find him?’

‘Only after you’ve healed my back,’ Sam said.

They thought they were going to make love. As it turned out, halfway through rubbing Sam’s back, Grace realized he was already two-thirds asleep and that she wasn’t far behind
him.

‘Sweet dreams, Sam,’ she said, softly.

‘You, too, Gracie.’

He had watched, listened and waited.

It had taken forever for them to finish their food and wine and wash their dishes and take the damned dog for his walk, and then it had taken another eternity for them to get themselves into
their bed.

Black and white.

Black Jew cop, white Guinea shrink. The kind of people who were allowed to take charge of young girls. Instead of their own father.

Another obscenity.

He’d gotten very good at waiting. He’d gotten good at a whole lot of things over the years, had refined many useful skills, but maybe the ability to wait,
patiently, stoically, was his greatest gift. He could wait out a tortoise in a marathon if he wanted to.

He could wait forever for the right payback.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t had fun along the way. Oh, he’d had heaps of fun. It hadn’t been what
they’d
had in mind for him – not
that bitch and her daughter.
Bitch kitty and baby kitty.
One dead now, the other having it tough.

About to get tougher.

Nothing she didn’t deserve.

She’d screwed it all up for him, after all. From conception through to rejection. Her doing, as much as her mother’s.

Bitch kitty’s sister had called him a power maniac. Because he liked being in control of his wife and child. He showed
her
who was in charge when the time was right.

He’d had plenty of time to think about power. Everyone wanted it. Not just the strong or rich or wicked. You saw it everyday, everyplace, in all shapes and sizes. The infant, controlling
its mother. The adolescent tyrant. The raging teenager. User of sexuality. Hungry lion flexing his jaws in the cities. Workaholic exec driving her staff to breakdown. Bus driver slamming his door
on a latecomer. Judge dispensing justice.
So-called
justice. Moaning wife. Sick patient.

The desire for control was a human need. No one was too young or too old. They all craved it, all used it. It was just that some were better at using it than others.

Control. Power.

He loved it all right.

He’d watched, listened and waited some more.

And now they were all sleeping.

Even the mutt, thanks to him.

He began to move, quietly, from his hiding place, into the main body of the house. Even in the dark, he knew his way. He’d been here a few times now, and he’d always had a
razor-sharp memory for detail. So he knew where the kitchen table was and the chairs, and the doorknobs and handles, knew where each creaking floorboard was on the staircase.

His heart was pumping. He was sweating just a little.

It felt great.

His feet were silent on rubber soles as he passed the sleeping dog and entered the girl’s room.

She was dreaming, eyelids, arms and hands moving.

Bad dreams. He knew that for sure. Awful nightmares. The kind of wild, crazed, violent dreams likely to assault an individual who’d taken a large enough dose of methylphenidate mixed with
diazepam.

It was exactly as he’d calculated.

Soon, very soon now, she would wake up, and if he’d got the dosage right – and he always did, didn’t he? – she would be someplace between a trance and a full-blown,
paranoid psychotic state.

He bent over and whispered into her left ear.

A little something he’d prepared earlier. Courtesy of good old Aesop.

‘
Enemies’ promises are made to be broken
.’

She stirred. Her eyelashes fluttered.

‘Grace and Sam don’t believe in you anymore,’ he told her. ‘It’s just a matter of time now until they put you back in jail.’

She moaned, stirred again.

‘Unless you stop them,’ he said into her ear. ‘You can stop them, Cathy. You know you can.’ He paused, one more time. ‘You have to stop them, Cathy, before they
destroy you.’

With his latex-gloved right hand, he took the scalpel out of his blazer pocket, and placed it in her hand, closed her fingers around it.

And stepped back into the shadows.

Cathy woke up, shuddering, sweating, heart hammering.

She sat up. Slid her feet out of bed and on to the floor.

Stood up.

The scalpel fell out of her hand. She stared down at it.

‘Pick it up, Cathy.’

The voice came out of the darkness, out of the night.

‘Pick it up, Cathy.’

She picked it up. It felt cool in her hand. Smooth.

‘Now go and do what you have to, Cathy.’

She couldn’t tell if the voice was in her head or coming out of the walls. Her heart was pounding so hard it was hurting her. There was a great pressure inside her skull, in her brain.

‘It
hurts
,’ she whimpered.

‘They’re your enemies, Cathy,’ the voice told her.

She put her hand, with the scalpel, up to her temple. She thought her head was going to burst. ‘But it
hurts
.’

‘Go and finish them, Cathy, and the pain will stop.’

‘But I—’

‘
Now
, Cathy. Do it to them before they do it to you.’ Pause. ‘It’s your last chance, Cathy. Your only chance.’

He watched as she lowered her hand from her head, still gripping the scalpel, and turned towards the door.

She moved slowly. He could see her trembling from where he stood.

Watching.

Waiting.

Grace didn’t know what woke her.

It could have been the door opening, or the movement towards the bed.

It might have been the small whisper of wind fanning her face as the scalpel drove down in a perfect arc towards her naked throat.

The brain works in mysterious ways.

She felt the air, saw the blade in the light from the window, jerked her head to the right as she registered the danger. The blade missed her neck and sliced into her shoulder instead.

She screamed.

Sam, lying beside her, groaned but didn’t move.

Grace screamed again.

And managed to hit the light switch.

Cathy was standing motionless beside the bed, a scalpel covered in Grace’s blood still in her right hand.

‘Cathy?’

Grace could see from the immense pupils and confusion in the young woman’s blue eyes that she was drugged.
Not sleepwalking
, Grace registered for the record, and wasn’t
that
nuts, slipping into shrink-mode now?

‘Sam.’ She pushed at his back with her right elbow, not taking her eyes off Cathy’s face for a second. ‘
Sam
.’

‘Don’t stop now, Cathy.’

A man was walking into the room. A stranger.

Tall, slim, dark-eyed, with receding black hair and a tidy beard.

‘You have to go on, Cathy,’ he told her. ‘You have to finish it now. You’ll never have another chance if you don’t do it now, believe me.’

Cathy wasn’t looking at him, but Grace could see her eyes reacting, moving rapidly, the irises flicking wildly back and forth.

They’re your enemies, Cathy,’ the man told her in his soft, husky, compelling voice.

Grace knew who he was.

The accent was gone, but she knew this was Eric Parés, purveyor of vitamins and relaxation therapies – and that had to be why Sam wasn’t waking up, because Parés had
been in the house and had put something in Sam’s anti-inflammatory pills – and Christ knew what he’d given Harry, too, because otherwise the terrier would have been barking his
head off by now.

‘You’re Broderick,’ she said, and now her head and eyes were moving back and forth between him and Cathy, and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do next.
‘You’re Parés and you’re Broderick, and you’ve done all the killing, and you’ve done this to your own daughter.’

‘Go on now, Cathy.’

He took no notice of Grace at all – she might have been invisible and mute.

Stop the bleeding.

Moving slowly, Grace took a handful of sheet and pressed it against the wound in her shoulder, knowing she had to play for time or
do
something.

Under the sheets, she kicked Sam with her right foot. For the second time, he gave a dull groan, but nothing else. She kicked him harder.

Parés was still focusing intently on Cathy.

‘You’re doing so well,’ he told her, ‘so
well
.’ His voice was honeyed now. ‘Just a little farther, not far to go. If you stop now, Cathy, you know
what will happen to you, what they’ll do to you. You’ll be sent back to that place – Grace and Sam will make
sure
you never come out again.’

Same game
,
Lucca. You have to play the same game.

Grace’s eyes swivelled down to check her shoulder. The blood was oozing through the white sheet, but at least it wasn’t gushing, and although she was shaking like a jello in an
earthquake, she didn’t think she was going to pass out quite yet. She looked back up at Cathy’s face, saw absence and wildness and bewilderment in her eyes, and knew that whatever mind
she had left right now was trapped in some internal firestorm beyond her understanding.

‘Cathy.’ Grace tried to make her voice as soft and compelling as his, praying that the girl wasn’t too far under to respond to her. ‘I know how hard this is for you. I
know you don’t want to kill me or Sam. You don’t want to hurt anyone, Cathy, and you’ve never killed anyone. I know that – Sam and I both know that – and if you put
down that thing in your hand, just drop it on the floor, then everyone else will know it too, and all this pain will be over.’

Keeping her eyes trained on Cathy, Grace heard Parés move closer, heard his breathing speed up a little, then slow again, calm again, and she knew, she just
knew
he was getting
closer to what he saw as the climax of the horror game he’d been playing.

‘Put it down, Cathy.’ Grace’s voice was shaking again – there was no
way
of maintaining the illusion of calm. She sounded as desperate as she felt. ‘For
God’s sake, Cathy, you have to
listen
to me before it’s too late.’

‘It already is too late, Cathy,’ Parés said, less softly now, more commandingly, ‘if you don’t do what I tell you to do. You’ll be finished –
through
– unless you do it to them first. Just lift your arm again – just raise it – yes, that’s right—.’

Grace watched, horrified, as Cathy’s right arm lifted into the air.

‘It’s getting lighter, isn’t it, much lighter – and the steel in your hand is an arrow with a golden tip. It’s your passport out of here, Cathy . . .’

Grace saw Cathy’s fingers clasp more tightly around the instrument. Beside her, Sam slept on, dead to the world, and the blood was still flowing from Grace’s shoulder, and she knew
she was getting weaker . . .

‘Drop the scalpel, Cathy,’ she said suddenly, loudly, with all the strength she could muster. ‘Drop the goddamned
scalpel
, Cathy, or all you’ll be is a
murderer
, the way he wants you to be – a
killer.
’

Cathy dropped it. Grace lurched forward, trying to get to it, but Parés was there before her, snatched it from the rug, grabbed Cathy around her waist. Grace saw her head loll, heard the
reflexive, gasping intake of her breath as Parés tightened his grip around her middle.

‘Let her go,’ Grace begged him. ‘Hasn’t she been through enough?’

‘Not enough,’ he said. ‘Not yet. And don’t kid yourself that it matters if she’s the one who kills you, or if I do it myself, because I’ll be long gone when
you’re found, and she’ll be the last one to die.’

Beside Grace, Sam gave another groan. Silently, she slid her right hand beneath the bedclothes and dug all her fingernails into his side. He yelped in his sleep.

‘And later, much later,’ Parés went on, ‘when they do her postmortem, they’ll find quite a cocktail in her system – all kinds of nasty stimulants and
sedatives – and they’ll know it’s all stuff she probably got hooked on inside, the way so many of them do.’

‘You dirty son-of-a-bitch,’ Grace said as loudly as she could, and dug her nails back into Sam again, knowing she desperately needed to hurt him enough to bring him back to
consciousness. ‘You used to be a
doctor
, for God’s sake, a
real
doctor.’ She clawed Sam’s stomach, and this time, she thought she felt him trying to get
away from her nails, and oh,
Christ
, she hoped he was hurting, she hoped he was hurting enough to come
back
to them before it was too late—

‘Oh, yes, I was a doctor,’ Parés said. ‘A damned fine doctor, before my bitch of a wife and her tight-assed sister wrecked my career, after they and this little baby
girl’ – he was still tightening his hold around Cathy’s body, and any second now Grace was terrified she was going to hear the cracking of her ribs – ‘told the
powers-that-be that they didn’t
want
me anymore.’

‘Cathy was just a little
girl
when Marie got that court order,’ Grace cried out. ‘She was just an innocent little
child
!’ Cathy’s head was lolling
a different way now, and Grace could see her eyes rolling and her lips were starting to turn blue. ‘Let her go, please – you have to let her
go
!’

‘I don’t have to do
anything
,’ Parés spat. His eyes were filled with loathing. ‘She screamed at me whenever I touched her! She hated me from the moment
she came into this rotten, stinking world!’ He gulped for air, and now his expression was exhilarated. ‘So I took the power for myself, didn’t I? I knew I was smarter than they
were, than
any
of them were, so I ducked out of the picture for as long as I needed to, and look what happened, I got even smarter.’ He was flexing his right hand now around the
instrument. ‘Oh, the things I learned, Dr Dago Shrink, the things I
learned.
’