Mind Games (52 page)

‘We still don’t know that he wasn’t.’

They both drank some more whisky and were silent for a while.

‘What does it mean?’ Grace asked, finally. ‘I mean, what’s the connection between them? How did Hayman get to be on Broderick’s boat?’

‘We don’t know about the connection yet,’ Sam answered. ‘But it seems that, for whatever reason, Broderick must have been watching the
Snowbird.
We know he was
at the detention centre early that afternoon, but that still gave him enough time to get down to Key Largo. There were a few other boats around, remember, when the coastguard got to us on
Kuntz’s boat? Broderick must have picked Hayman – Harding – up after the capsize, stashed him on the
Healer
and then gotten out of the way.’

Grace nodded, slowly. ‘Watching. Waiting. That’s what Broderick’s been doing all these years, isn’t it?’

‘Care to know Martinez’s verdict on the Broderick-Harding link?’

Grace nodded again.

Sam’s grin was wry and bleak.

‘One sick fuck attracts another,’ he said.

The
Healer
, they learned, had been registered for the past ten years to one James Brody, supposedly a resident of West Palm Beach. Broderick, the police concluded, had
planned well, simply sailing away from his own pre-arranged capsize off Pensacola and moving on shore whenever it suited him.

Sam had predicted ten days or so earlier that sooner or later Broderick would want to talk, want to brag about his achievements.

He was talking now.

They asked him about Peter Hayman. He said that, much as he would have loved to have taken credit for actively
creating
that particular scenario, he could only claim
to have taken advantage of the situation that had presented itself to him so conveniently. He’d been keeping an eye on Grace Lucca ever since she’d first gone to Frances Dean’s
home in Goral Gables to see Cathy. He was, as they’d already figured out, an avid watcher – an opportunist he supposed they’d call him. It was one of the entertainments that had
kept him going during his years of waiting: observing those who had no idea they were being observed. Broderick recalled two instances when he’d seen Grace sense someone watching her –
once in Saks close to home in glitzy Bal Harbour; the other time right after the black Jew cop’s little brother’s barmitzvah, on the road to the Keys to visit with her sister.
He’d noted the way she’d squirmed in the department store, the way she’d had to keep checking the rearview mirror of her Mazda, and he’d enjoyed the power it had given him
over her.

Broderick hadn’t known that Peter Hayman, psychiatrist and published expert on MSBP, had even existed before he’d watched him drawing Grace aside that day at the Westin in Key Largo,
but after that he’d made it his business to find out all there was to know about him – and oh, it had been almost
blissful
to learn how much there
was
to know. That
was when he’d decided to turn himself into Dr Eric Parés, he told his team of interviewers – at that time including Detective Martinez for the Miami Beach Police Department,
Sergeant Rodriguez for the City of Miami and the State Attorney. And, of course, after that it had been just a matter of time before Parés had been ready to apply for his job in whichever
prison facility the girl had ended up in. After all, everyone knew how hungry they were for qualified physicians in those miserable places, and doctors willing to put up with low-life patients,
lousy conditions and pay were hard to come by. It had suited him, though, in many ways. His daughter aside, he had found those women fascinating, to watch and to treat and, when it was safe, to
play his games with.

‘He wanted to know if we could guess why he took the name,’ Martinez told Sam later, back at the department. ‘He knew we couldn’t guess – the
slime was smirking all over his face.’

‘It’s an anagram,’ Sam said.

‘You got that?’ Martinez looked surprised.

‘Grace got it,’ Sam told him. ‘Last night. She was doing some reading on MSBP, and suddenly she remembered the guy who’d turned the original Baron
Münchhausen’s tall tales into a book.’

‘Rudolph Erich Raspe,’ Martinez contributed.

‘That’s the guy.’

Martinez shook his head. ‘Arrogant sick fuck,’ he said.

Many things became crystal clear as Broderick went on spewing up his secrets like a magician entertaining a rapt audience. Other things remained mysteries, might always be
destined, Sam and Grace feared, to be guessed about and never confirmed. The things, for example, that had happened during the week before Broderick had launched his final attack, the things that
Cathy had apparently done that had so unnerved Grace and brought Sam into her house as lover and bodyguard.

Had Cathy actually
done
those things? Had she, driven by – virtually
controlled
by – Parés’ drugs and hypnosis programme, personally composed that last
H-A-T-E password-protected journal entry on Grace’s computer, or had Broderick slithered his way into the house without their knowledge? On the afternoon Grace had been down on the deck
talking with Gregory Lee, had Cathy perhaps dozed off while reading, and then sleepwalked her way – perhaps under some kind of hypnotic suggestion – into picking up Harry and placing
him up on the parapet outside Grace’s bedroom? Or had Cathy always been a sleepwalker, even as a young child? There was no one credible left alive to ask.

Broderick stopped talking after a while. He began trying to make deals again. A new confession for a computer in his cell. Another for books of his choice. Something really
‘
big
’ in exchange for regular trips to the library. No one was impressed. Even the FBI profiler now visiting him was confident that he would find it tough to stay silent for
long.

Either way, they had most of what they really needed.

He’d confessed to – boasted about – drugging and killing Marie and Arnold Robbins, and Beatrice Flager.

He’d confessed to letting himself in and out of the Robbins’ house over the last two years whenever it had suited him. He’d talked about doping Cathy with cannabis and cutting
the heads off Marie’s goldfish – and about, on the night of the first murders, burning one of Cathy’s voile nightgowns in the outside incinerator for the police to find.
He’d also admitted to the attack on the other female prisoner in the House of Detention and to the planting of the potato peeler in his daughter’s cell.

He had admitted freely to the manslaughter of Paul Harding.

He had refused pointblank to confess to any of the scalpel attacks in doctors’ offices – even the one on David Becket. And he had also, thus far, refused to admit to creating any of
the entries on Cathy’s computer, or to killing Frances Dean, or to burying the silver scalpel and rubber kitchen gloves in the backyard at Pine Tree Drive.

‘That’s just for the hell of it,’ Sam said to Grace. ‘So that the game doesn’t have to end yet. Maybe so he still gets to have his
trial.’

‘And so that Cathy gets to go on suffering,’ Grace added.

No one was being naive enough to imagine that Broderick’s confessions and incarceration would bring an end to Cathy’s pain.

That was going to run and run.

Even she agreed that she was going to need therapy for some time to help her get through. Her personal first choice for a therapist was still Grace, but she accepted now that that was
impossible. Not just because Grace had become much too close, but because the Department of Children and Families was considering her application to become a long-term foster parent to Cathy.

For now, though, there was still John Broderick to contend with. Still getting his jollies from setting people in motion, like mice in a maze with a lump of cheese at the centre. He hadn’t
needed drugs to set Grace in motion – he’d found other ways of manipulating her. Broderick’s disease might have started out with jealousy and hatred and a desire for revenge, but
these days Grace believed that he was getting genuine gratification from the mind games he was so gifted at playing – from setting people against each other.

Fine sport for a dead man.

And opportunities galore still to come on Death Row, if that was where they ended up sending him.

Two days after Labor Day, Jerry Wagner called Grace.

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he told her straight out, ‘and you’re going to like it even less.’

‘What now?’ Apprehension hit the pit of her stomach.

‘Broderick’s instructed his lawyer to try and block your application to foster Cathy.’

‘He can’t do that!’

‘He’s not likely to succeed,’ Wagner qualified, ‘but he can certainly create problems for you. Hate it or not, he’s still Cathy’s father—’

‘Who’s confessed to murdering her mother.’ Grace’s voice was loud with outrage, making Harry, over in the comer of her office, twitch his ears. ‘Who’s stated,
in front of witnesses, how much he
hates
his daughter.’

‘No question about any of that, Grace,’ Wagner agreed.

‘Well, then?’

‘You still need to be prepared,’ the attorney told her.

‘For what?’ Outrage simmered down to unease.

‘Broderick’s told his lawyer that he won’t allow his daughter to continue to be exposed to “an immoral and unsuitable relationship”. His words, Grace,
obviously.’ Wagner sounded embarrassed.

‘Obviously.’

‘I’m sorry to have to load you with this, just when things looked like starting to settle down for Cathy.’

‘Not your fault, Jerry.’ Grace paused. ‘He can’t win on this, can he?’

‘I find it highly unlikely.’

‘Not impossible?’

‘
Highly
unlikely, Grace.’

‘But not impossible.’

‘Nothing’s impossible,’ the lawyer said.

Grace closed her eyes.

‘I’d like to kill him, Jerry.’

‘Off the record, Grace,’ Wagner said, ‘you’re not the only one.’

The note was waiting for Sam when he and Martinez walked into the big white police department building just after lunch. Sam’s return to full duty had been granted two
weeks before, and the detectives were both feeling relaxed after successfully helping to tie up a series of assaults around Indian Creek Drive.

‘Know who left this for me?’ Sam asked one of the uniformed guys at the desk as he started to slit open the envelope.

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘It was here when I came on duty.’

Martinez saw the expression changing on Sam’s face as he read. ‘What?’

Sam folded the small sheet of paper back in half. ‘You don’t want to know.’

Martinez laid a hand on Sam’s arm and steered him over to the far side of the lobby. ‘I got a feeling I do want to know.’ He paused. ‘Share, man.’

‘It’s heavy.’

‘Is it from Broderick?’

Sam shook his head. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Share,’ Martinez said again.

Sam handed him the note and envelope.

Martinez read, his face a mask.

Dad’s getting offed unless someone moves him
fast
. Otherwise this one’s for her.

Brothers in lo-places.

He said nothing, just folded it again and put it into the envelope.

‘What do you think?’ Sam asked.

Martinez took a moment. ‘About what?’

‘What do I do about the message, Al?’

Martinez’s eyes were grim. ‘I don’t see any message.’

The two men looked at each other for several more seconds.

‘How about I buy you a cup of coffee?’ Sam asked.

‘We just ate.’

‘I want another cup.’

Martinez nodded and gave Sam back the envelope. ‘Let’s go.’

They walked back outside into the hot sunshine, strolled down the broad stone steps and turned left along Washington until they reached the corner of 13th Street.

‘Got a light?’ Sam asked Martinez.

The other detective pulled a matchbook out of his pocket.

‘If this boomerangs,’ Sam said, ‘it’s on me, okay?’

‘It won’t.’

‘But if it does.’

‘Light the match, Becket.’

‘I mean it, Al,’ Sam said harshly. ‘You never saw this.’

‘Just do it,’ Martinez told him.

Sam lit a match, touched the flame to the corner of the envelope and held on to it until the small blaze was almost at his fingertips. It swirled silently down on to the concrete sidewalk and
turned into ash.

‘God forgive me,’ Sam said, ‘but I think I hope they mean it.’

Martinez put the sole of his right shoe over the ash and scuffed it around.

‘God forgives you, man.’ His dark eyes were sharper than ever. ‘If I know anything about anything, I figure He’s probably cheering.’

It went down on Sunday afternoon.

No one parted with dope easily in that place.

For Broderick, it seemed, a few of them made an exception.

A handful of condoms, stuffed with a contaminated blend of smack, coke and dust, and forced down his throat.

Then, when the time was right, a few sharp blows to the abdomen.

He had to have screamed while he was dying.

But no one heard.

Or came.

It had, the guards agreed later, to have been a far more agonizing way to go than anything the hot chair might ultimately have offered.

It seemed, they reckoned privately, a fitting kind of an end for a real piece of scum like John Broderick.