Mind Games (8 page)

‘It’s okay, Aunt Frances,’ Cathy said.

‘You say you knew Beatrice Flager?’ Sam asked the teenager.

She nodded. ‘A little.’ Her voice was very quiet now, almost too soft to hear. ‘I know she was a therapist.’

‘How do you know that, Cathy?’ Martinez asked.

‘I saw her one time.’ She glanced sideways at her aunt, taking in her tightly compressed lips and shocked eyes.

‘Professionally?’ Martinez asked, and she nodded.

‘Do you mind telling us why?’ Sam asked.

‘
I
mind,’ Frances said.

‘No, it’s okay,’ Cathy told her again, then looked up at Sam. ‘I went because Arnie – my father – wanted me to.’

‘Why did he want you to see a therapist?’

‘Don’t answer that.’ Frances stood up. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think my niece should answer any more questions.’

‘I don’t have anything to hide, Aunt Frances.’

‘I know you don’t.’ Frances didn’t look at Cathy, kept her still angry eyes firmly on Sam’s, ignoring Martinez. ‘Does my niece need a lawyer, Detective
Becket?’ She shook her head again. ‘I can’t believe I’m really asking that question, but it suddenly seems the right thing to do.’

Sam looked at her. She’d seemed so frail earlier, and yet as soon as the impact of what was going on – of why they had come to her house again – had hit her, Frances Dean had
seemed almost to grow in stature and strength. He felt a kick of admiration for her, and hoped he would have no reason to cause her any more pain.

‘The questions are just routine, ma’am,’ Martinez said again.

She turned her eyes back to him. ‘Is it
routine
to harass a child who’s just lost her parents, detective? A child who’s still going through hell?’

Martinez stayed calm, the way he almost always did.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, ‘under the circumstances, I’m afraid it is.’

‘Then your routines are very savage,’ Frances said.

‘I can’t disagree with you,’ Sam said quietly.

Grace was in the kitchen, sharing a coffee break at around eleven o’clock with Teddy Lopez – the young man who kept house for her several times a week and who took
care of Harry when she could not – when Sam Becket telephoned.

‘There’s been a development I think maybe you should know about, Dr Lucca,’ he told her.

‘What kind of development?’

She was using the cordless phone at the kitchen table, and sensing business – which, from his three years’ experience of working with the doctor, he knew meant privacy – Teddy
picked up his coffee cup and went out on to the deck to finish it there.

‘This may well be unconnected,’ Sam said, ‘but given that we’ve already had to talk to Cathy and her aunt about it, I figure I should mention it to you.’

He told her about the new murder, told her that the victim, a psychotherapist named Beatrice Flager, had seen Cathy Robbins as a patient in the past. The news shook Grace up more than a little.
When the detective told her, in strict confidence, that there was a possibility that the weapon had, once again, been a scalpel-type blade, she felt the chill of goose-bumps parading up her
spine.

‘Did you know that Cathy had seen a therapist in the past?’ Sam asked.

‘She mentioned it to me,’ Grace answered as evenly as she could. ‘She didn’t tell me the therapist’s name.’

‘We know it was Mrs Flager,’ he said. ‘Cathy volunteered the information herself. Do you know why she saw her?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘And if you did, you probably wouldn’t tell me.’

‘Probably not,’ Grace agreed.

‘Anyway,’ Sam went on, ‘we had to pay Mrs Dean and her niece a visit yesterday to ask a few more routine questions, and the lady got pretty upset —’

‘What kind of questions?’ Grace broke in.

‘Just routine.’

‘You said that already,’ she said. ‘Did Cathy get upset, too?’

‘Briefly,’ Sam said. ‘But after that she seemed quite calm, on the face of it. Anyway’ – he went on again, smoothly, as if she hadn’t interrupted him –
‘I was thinking that it might be useful if you could get in touch with them again.’

‘Useful for whom?’

Sam heard the crispness in her tone. ‘I’m not sending you in as a police spy, Dr Lucca.’ There was a smile in his voice.

‘Are you sure?’

‘You seem to have gotten through to both Cathy and her aunt, that’s all,’ he said lightly. ‘And I have a feeling that however calm she might have seemed, Cathy could use
all the help she can get.’

‘You don’t expect me to report back to you then?’ Grace asked.

‘Are you always this suspicious, doctor?’

‘Pretty much,’ she answered.

‘Maybe you have just cause,’ Sam admitted.

Grace’s cheeks were warm as she put down the phone. She knew it was partly guilt that had made her attack him just now. Guilt for not mentioning what had started running through her mind
the instant she’d heard about Beatrice Flager.

What Cathy had said about the therapist she’d been to once.

I didn’t feel I could trust her. She taped everything I said.

All the way through that conversation with Becket, Grace had wanted to ask if the psychotherapist’s records had been tampered with in any way. If her tapes, or transcriptions, had been
stolen or destroyed. But she hadn’t asked, had not said a word.

‘Doctor-patient confidentiality,’ she muttered out loud.

Which was, of course, a perfectly reasonable excuse. But still Grace was aware of a silent struggle already going on in her mind between her loyalties to Cathy Robbins and to the law.

The awareness was uncomfortable.

She was in her office searching for Frances Dean’s telephone number, and Harry, in the mood for a game, was trotting around the room with his red ball in his mouth, when
the phone rang again.

‘Grace, it’s me.’

‘Hi, sis.’ Grace found the number, and sat down. ‘What’s up?’ Her sister, Claudia Brownley – who, with her husband and children, divided her time between
their homes in Fort Lauderdale and the Keys – rarely called during working hours. ‘You okay?’

‘Yes and no,’ Claudia said. ‘Papa called.’

‘Frank phoned you?’ Grace had stopped calling her father Papa the day she and Claudia had left their parents’ home in Chicago more than sixteen years earlier. Frank Lucca
never
telephoned either of his daughters.

‘Mama has cancer,’ Claudia said. ‘She has to have surgery.’

‘What kind of cancer?’

‘I’m not sure. “Women’s stuff”, Papa said.’ Claudia paused. ‘He wants us to go home.’

Grace sat back in her chair, closed her eyes and took a breath. There was a small thud as the ball dropped out of Harry’s mouth. She opened her eyes. The white terrier was sitting, gazing
up at her expectantly.

‘How do you feel about that, sis?’ Grace asked quietly.

‘I don’t know how I feel about it,’ Claudia answered. ‘How about you?’

‘I guess I don’t know either.’

Grace didn’t even know how she felt about their mother having cancer. She had been conscious, even while asking it, that the first question out of her mouth had been ‘What kind of
cancer?’ rather than ‘How bad is it?’ But then, she and Claudia didn’t have the kind of relationship with their parents that would make them drop everything and fly back
home because of illness. The truth was, they didn’t have
any
kind of relationship with either Frank or Ellen Lucca.

Darkness and cold had brought Grace and Claudia to Florida all those years ago. And the need to stay close to each other. Claudia was the elder sister by a little over a year,
but in childhood it had generally been she who had come to Grace for comfort and strength after she’d caught a beating or something worse from their father. It had always been Claudia, the
gentler, more compliant sibling, who’d been the magnet for Frank Lucca’s rages and passions, while Grace – younger, more impulsive, more avid for learning and less pliable –
had seldom seemed to inflame him.

Not that there had ever been much logic in Frank’s choice for target practice. Lord knew he gave the impression that he’d grown to hate his wife, Ellen, yet he took out most of his
loathing and sexual frustration on little Claudia, who physically resembled
him
, rather than on Grace, who – like Ellen – was fair and blue-eyed and ought therefore, one might
have thought, to have been the one to spark him off.

Years later, Grace tended to refer to having followed Claudia to Miami, as if she had been the leader, but in reality that was far from true. It had all been Grace’s idea, from the day
she’d made friends with a girl named Betsy in her class at school in Chicago, who had a doting aunt and uncle who lived in the warm sunshine of Miami Beach. Grace began fantasizing about
going to Florida, far away from their father, the abuser, and their mother, whose own crime was that she had never lifted a finger or even raised her voice to help protect her children.

Gradually, fantasy became reality. Grace confided in Betsy, enlisting her sympathies, persuaded her to ask her relatives to find out for her where two teenage girls could live, cheaply but
safely, and then, the information in hand, had proceeded to work out a deal with their parents.

If Frank and Ellen didn’t try to stop them leaving, Grace and Claudia would not report them to the authorities. Frank called it blackmail, but Grace said it was just compromise. It was her
first experience of using psychology to resolve a bad situation, and she knew it had really only worked out because their parents didn’t give a damn about her or Claudia, but it was a heady
experience nonetheless – especially when she watched sixteen-year-old Claudia strengthen and blossom almost as soon as they left concrete, steel, icy winds and Frank, and reached palm trees,
blue ocean, sunshine and freedom. No
way
, the new Claudia said, was Grace quitting school, because she, Claudia, was going to find a job and work hard to make sure that Grace –
who’d always been smarter and more ambitious than she was – could finish high school and go to college.

Neither of them had ever laid eyes on Frank since fleeing Chicago and they had seen Ellen Lucca only once, back in the winter of 1992, when she had arrived unannounced on a Greyhound bus,
bruised and weary and in need of a break from her husband – but even then all she had really wanted to do was load her daughters with guilt for running out on her. She truly seemed to feel
that none of the responsibility had been hers, to believe that it had been their
duty
to take the pain and fear and to stay home for her sake.

No logic there either, Grace had learned, and that became a useful tool to take with her into the world of psychology and counselling: the awareness that in the recesses of the heart and soul
there was little logic, scanty justice, and no rules whatsoever.

‘Just how sick did Frank say Ellen is?’ she asked Claudia now.

‘He didn’t say,’ Claudia answered. ‘He was very vague. I asked if I could talk to Mama, but she couldn’t come to the phone – or he wouldn’t let
her.’ She sounded calm, yet her tone was shot through with traces of old bitterness. ‘I asked him what surgery she had to have, and he wouldn’t say, so I asked him straight out if
it was a hysterectomy, and that put the lid on it.’