Mind Games (7 page)

Cathy looked back up at her again. ‘You don’t think they do suspect me, do you, Grace?’ Her voice was deceptively soft, but the plea was clear behind her eyes. ‘You
don’t think anyone thinks I could do something like that, do you?’

‘I doubt it very much.’ Grace was determined to be straight.

‘I didn’t really get why my aunt was so upset,’ Cathy went on. ‘I mean, I thought Detective Becket was being nice, but she just got more and more uptight, you
know?’

‘I can understand why she would.’

Silence ruled again. Grace let it go on for a while, mentally drawing a pencil line beneath that topic, before broaching the next. Their hour was ticking by. Despite her reluctance to think too
much about time, Grace had learned to tell, without glancing at a watch, how much of a session was left. They still had plenty in hand, but she had in mind to finish early and maybe go out on deck
with Cathy and Harry, simply to hang out for a while. She didn’t want to overtax Cathy, didn’t want to put her off coming back. Still, there was one more avenue she wanted to try
opening before they stopped.

‘You told me yesterday that you went to a therapist once before.’

‘Yes.’

‘You said you didn’t trust her.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes.’

Cathy hesitated. ‘She taped everything I said.’

‘You didn’t like that.’

‘No.’ She paused. ‘You’re not taping me, are you, Grace?’

‘No, I’m not.’

Cathy eyed the notepad on Grace’s lap. ‘You haven’t written anything down.’

‘I don’t always. Sometimes I like to,’ Grace explained, ‘if there’s something important I’m worried I might forget. But I have a pretty good memory, on the
whole. After you go, I might make some notes, and then next time – if you want to come again – you might see me taking a look at what I wrote last time.’ She paused. ‘Is
that okay with you?’

‘I guess.’

She seemed to accept what Grace had said, but the uneasiness had crept back in and Grace could sense her starting to put up shutters, knew that by bringing up the subject of her former
therapist, she had entered high-risk territory. She decided to veer back to safer ground before suggesting they called it a day.

‘I hope you feel you can trust me, Cathy,’ she said.

‘I hope so, too,’ she answered.

Five minutes later, Frances Dean arrived, earlier than scheduled, seeming edgy and anxious to take her niece away. Grace was frequently left after sessions feeling uncertain of a patient’s
– or their parents’ or guardians’ – faith in her, unsure of whether they would, given a choice, actually return for more. It always mattered to her a great deal.

If she was honest with herself, however, she wasn’t sure if she always cared quite as much as she did about Cathy Robbins.

Sam Becket and Detective Al Martinez stood out in the backyard of a Coconut Grove house a little after noon. It was humid and unpleasant and the air was full of small insects,
but Sam was glad to be outside for a while, away from the scent of blood. He wondered, for a moment, why Beatrice Flager, the victim, a fifty-two-year-old divorced psychotherapist, had not put up a
lanai or any kind of bug screening – though no amount of insect-proof mesh could have protected her from whoever had pierced her left temple with a fine, sharp weapon of some kind.

‘So what do you think?’ he asked his partner.

‘You’re the main man on this one. What do you think?’ Martinez had a round, kindly face, sharp, dark eyes and wavy hair. A slightly built man who only reached Sam’s
shoulder, he was a man of strong opinions, quiet and calm until roused when, once in a while, he turned into a pitbull.

‘Too soon to tell.’

‘I’ll bet the wad it’s the same perp.’ Martinez’s accent was light, but his vocabulary tended to stray from refined to street tough.

‘I’m not a betting man,’ Sam reminded him.

The call from Elliot Sanders, the ME who’d come out to the house on Pine Tree Drive five days earlier, had surprised Sam. First, it was a pure coincidence for the same
doc to have taken both cases. Second, if an ME noted a possible connection between cases in separate jurisdictions, the police investigators usually only heard about it after the weekly Dade County
medical examiners’ meeting. Even then, if a potential link had been spotted, Sam would have expected to have to wait for the other police department – in this case the City of Miami PD,
who policed Coconut Grove – to be ready to share any relevant information with Miami Beach. Dr Sanders, however, was a big, broad man who did his damnedest to see commonsense prevail.
He’d seen the similarity to the Robbins’ killings immediately, had seen no point in not alerting the guy in charge of the Miami Beach case, and had convinced the local investigators to
let Becket and one colleague drive over to take a look.

Startled and intrigued by the development, Sam and Martinez had wasted no time accepting the offer. It looked, Sanders said, as he’d hinted to Sam on the phone, like another scalpel
wound.

‘Think it could be the same weapon?’ Sam asked now, as the ME came out of the house to join him and Martinez.

‘Wouldn’t like to say.’ Sanders mopped his brow with a large handkerchief and lit a cigarette. For a physician he broke way too many health rules, smoking every chance he got,
carrying too much weight and drinking too much whisky, but most people who knew him agreed that for a man who spent so much of his life around cadavers, he was a whole lot of fun.

‘Time of death?’ Sam asked.

‘She’s been dead about eight hours, give or take.’ Sanders checked his watch. ‘Sometime around four a.m.’ He fanned himself with a pad of paper. ‘Air’s
like soup today. Mind you, it’s not much better in there.’

‘Air-con’s busted.’ Martinez had been nosing around, trying to find out whatever was up for grabs without raising hackles. The victim, he’d learned, had been found by her
next-door-neighbour after the second of her two clients for that morning had knocked on her front door to ask if she knew where Flager was. The client, a Cuban teenager, had been questioned and
allowed to leave, and the neighbour, in a state of semi-hysteria, was currently back in her own house being nursed through a cup of tea by one of the patrol officers who’d been first on the
scene.

‘What else do you have, doc?’ Sam asked the ME.

‘You want to take another look while I tell you?’ Sanders grinned. Sam Becket’s comparative squeamishness with messy corpses was well-known to him and his fellow examiners
– though at least in this case there was less blood splashed over the place itself than there had been in the Robbins’ bedroom. There was a short trail of the stuff ending three feet
from the couch where Flager’s body lay; probably the blood that had dripped from the blade before it was wiped by the killer. As yet, no trace had been found either of the weapon itself, or
of whatever had been used to clean it. There was also no sign of forced entry – the back door having been wide open – and the only apparent property damage was a smashed up
computer.

‘Don’t sweat it, Becket,’ Sanders told Sam, ‘we can stay out here.’ He glanced at his notes, though there was nothing in them that wasn’t still at the
forefront of his mind. ‘One puncture, clean through the temporal artery.’

‘So someone had to get up real close,’ Martinez said.

‘No sign of a fight,’ Sam added,

‘She’s on the couch,’ Sanders said, ‘so she might have been sleeping.’

‘The TV wasn’t on,’ Sam commented. ‘Most people fall asleep on their couches in front of the TV.’

‘You don’t,’ Martinez pointed out. ‘You’re always zeeing up on your roof.’

‘That’s a beach lounger, not a couch,’ Sam said. ‘Anyway, I aim to fall asleep up there.’ He paused. ‘Maybe she wasn’t alone on the couch.’

‘Possible,’ Sanders agreed. ‘Snuggled up close to someone with a scalpel in their pocket.’

‘If they were dressed,’ Martinez said.

‘She was dressed,’ Sam said.

‘Coulda hidden the scalpel under a cushion,’ Martinez suggested.

‘You’re sure it was a scalpel?’ Sam looked at Sanders.

‘So far as I can tell right now. Certainly a scalpel-like instrument, same as on Pine Tree.’

‘So maybe the same instrument,’ Martinez said. ‘The one that belonged to the Robbins girl.’

By three p.m. activity inside the house had begun to dwindle and Sam knew that Sergeant Rodriguez, his Miami PD counterpart, was unlikely to want him or Martinez around much
longer. The technicians had finished dusting, every conceivable photograph had been taken, the body had been thoroughly checked for crucial trace evidence that might have vanished en route to the
morgue, and then it had been taken away. The Miami Police team were engaged in examining the psychotherapist’s client files and calling at other houses along the Coconut Grove street –
though everyone knew it was unlikely anyone would have heard or seen anything useful at four in the morning. Anyway, the hour aside, with no gunshots and no apparent fight to play with there was
less than no hope of finding a witness – after all, a scalpel sliding comparatively smoothly into a possibly sleeping woman’s temple didn’t make a whole lot of noise, and the
sound of a computer being smashed wasn’t likely to rouse anyone outside the house.

Martinez found Sam in Flager’s bedroom just after three-thirty. ‘They think the air-con was broken deliberately.’

‘So she’d have to keep her windows open.’ Sam shook his head.

‘Should’ve known better than to open the fuckin’ door,’ Martinez said.

‘Any prints on the air-con unit?’ Sam asked.

‘Not even a smudge.’ Martinez looked at Sam. ‘So what’s the link between the Robbinses and Flager?’

‘We don’t know yet that it’s the same weapon,’ Sam reminded him.

‘Two scalpels in a week?’ Martinez was sceptical.

‘Yeah, I know.’ Sam didn’t believe in coincidences either.

They left Sergeant Rodriguez and his squad sifting through the remnants of Beatrice Flager’s life and death, and drove over to Coral Gables to check on Frances
Dean’s and her niece’s whereabouts the previous night.

Mrs Dean’s answer was predictable.

‘We were here, at home – where else would we have been?’

They were standing in her living room. Frances Dean had not offered either of the detectives a seat, and Sam thought he well understood her desire to have them gone as swiftly as possible.

‘Are you sure that Cathy was here all night, ma’am?’ Martinez asked.

‘Of course I’m sure.’ Frances Dean looked baffled.

‘Were you sleepin’ in the same room as your niece, Mrs Dean?’

‘No,’ she answered, ‘but then again, I wasn’t sleeping at all, which is why I’m certain that Cathy was in her bedroom all night.’

‘You were awake all night, ma’am?’

Sam was letting Martinez run with it. Personally, he saw no good cause to doubt her word. Frances Dean looked like hell.

‘I don’t think I’ve slept more than a handful of hours since my sister and her husband were murdered, detective,’ she told Martinez. ‘My doctor gave me some pills,
but I don’t like the way they make me feel.’

‘So you would have known if Cathy had left her bedroom, or maybe the house?’

‘Yes, I would.’ Frances Dean looked up at Sam. ‘What is this about?’

‘Just routine,’ Sam said. ‘Would you mind if we ask your niece a few questions now?’

‘I would mind very much,’ Frances said heatedly, then lowered her voice to a distressed hiss. ‘Are you people
trying
to push that poor child right over the edge?
Because you’re going about it the perfect way.’

‘One more question, Mrs Dean,’ Sam said. ‘Have you heard of a woman named Beatrice Flager?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Who is she?’

‘A psychotherapist,’ Sam answered.

‘I know her.’

Sam, Martinez and Frances Dean all turned around and saw that Cathy, barefoot and wearing a blue sundress, had come into the room. There were dark rings beneath her eyes, Sam noticed right off,
that he didn’t recall seeing before. Otherwise, she looked composed. He wondered how long Cathy had been in or outside the room, listening to them. Being barefoot, it was perfectly reasonable
for her to have come in unnoticed, but there was something about the silent, almost deceitful way she had slid into the room that he found disturbing. It also raised some extra doubt about Frances
Dean’s claim that she would have known if Cathy had left her room or the house, since there was clearly more than a passing chance that she could not have known any such thing.

Sam looked at the girl’s upturned face. ‘Hello, Cathy,’ he said. ‘Would you like to sit down?’

‘No, thank you.’

They all went on standing, all stiff and uncomfortable except for Martinez, who was always telling Sam Becket that he was too friggin’ tenderhearted to be a cop.

‘The detectives were asking where we were last night.’ Frances Dean, voice still quivering with anger, was clearly determined to preempt the officers’ next move. ‘I told
them, of course, that we were in our beds.’

Sam and Martinez both watched Cathy and said nothing.

‘Why did you ask that?’ Cathy asked Sam. ‘And what does it have to do with Mrs Flager?’

‘She was killed last night,’ Martinez answered.

‘How?’ Cathy’s face gave little away.

‘She was stabbed.’

‘Oh God.’ Suddenly she grew very white. ‘Oh, God, that’s horrible.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to sit down now, Cathy?’ Sam asked her, gently.

Without a word, she sat, very slowly and quietly, on her aunt’s sofa. Frances Dean sat down beside her, close but not touching, her attitude protective.

Sam and Martinez, not invited to sit, remained standing.

‘Why are you —?’ Frances halted in mid-sentence, her face even paler than it had been, her eyes widening with new horror as she stared up at Sam. ‘What does this
woman’s death have to do with us?’

‘Like we said, ma’am,’ Martinez answered, ‘just routine.’

‘I don’t believe this.’ The aunt shook her head in disbelief. ‘I don’t believe any of this.’