Prayers for Rain (16 page)

Angie had even drawn up a crude diagram of the accident scene. It showed the placement of all forty-six witnesses at the time of the accident, and looked like a rough representation of a football game after a broken play. The majority of the witnesses—twenty-six—had been standing on the southwest corner of Purchase and Congress. Stockbrokers, mostly, heading for South Station after a day in the financial district, they stood waiting for the light to change. Another thirteen stood on the northwest corner, directly across from David Wetterau as he jaywalked toward them. Two more witnesses stood on the northeast corner, and a third drove the car behind Steven
Kearns, the driver of the car that eventually clipped Wetterau’s head. Of the remaining five witnesses, two had stepped off the curb on the southeast corner as the light turned yellow, and three were in the crosswalk, jaywalking like Wetterau—two heading west into the financial district, one heading east.

The closest witness had been that man, the one heading east. His name was Miles Brewster, and just after he passed David Wetterau, Wetterau stepped in the pothole. The car was already traveling through the intersection, and when Wetterau fell, Steven Kearns immediately went into his swerve and those in the crosswalk scattered.

“Except for Brewster,” I said.

“Huh?” Angie looked up from the photos of David Wetterau and the other woman.

“Why didn’t this Brewster guy panic, too?”

She slid her chair over beside mine and looked down at the diagram.

“He’s here,” I said and placed my finger on the crude stick figure she’d labeled
W#7
. “He’s moved past Wetterau, so his back would have been to the car.”

“Right.”

“He hears tires squeal. He turns
back
, sees the car plowing
toward
him, and yet he’s—” I found his statement, read from it. “He’s, quote, ‘a foot from the guy, reaching toward him, you know, sorta frozen’ when Wetterau gets hit.”

Angie took the statement from my hand and read it. “Yeah, but you can freeze up in this sort of situation.”

“But he’s not frozen, he’s
reaching
.” I pulled my chair in closer to the table, pointed at W#7 in the diagram. “His back was to it, Ange. He had to turn, see it develop. His arm’s not frozen, but his legs are? He’s standing, by his own admission, a foot, maybe two, from car tires and a rear bumper sliding out of control.”

She stared down at the diagram, rubbed her face. “Our
possession of these statements is illegal. We can’t reinterview Brewster and let on that we know what his original statement was.”

I sighed. “That do make it tougher.”

“It do.”

“But the guy bears a second look, you agree?”

“Definitely.”

She sat back in her chair, raised both hands to her head to push back hair that wasn’t there anymore. She caught herself at the same time I did, gave my wide grin her middle finger as she brought her hands back down.

“Okay,” she said, and drummed her pen on her notepad. “What’s our list of priorities here?”

“First, talk to Karen’s psychiatrist.”

She nodded. “That’s a hell of a leak coming from her office.”

“Second, talk to Brewster. You got an address?”

She pulled a piece of paper from the bottom of the thermal fax pile. “Miles Brewster,” she said, “Twelve Landsdowne Street.” She looked up from the page and her mouth remained open.

“Gee,” I said, “what’s wrong with this picture?”

“Twelve Landsdowne,” she said. “That would make it—”

“Fenway Park.”

She groaned. “How’s a cop not notice that?”

I shrugged. “A rookie taking the statements at the scene. Forty-six witnesses, he’s tired, whatever.”

“Shit.”

“But Brewster,” I said, “is now officially dirty.”

Angie dropped the fax paper to the table. “This wasn’t an accident.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Your operating theory.”

“Brewster’s walking east, Wetterau’s walking west. Brewster slips out his foot as they pass. Boom.”

She nodded, excitement surging past the fatigue in her
face. “Brewster says he was reaching down to pick Wetterau back
up
.”

“But he was actually holding him down,” I said.

Angie lit a cigarette, squinted through the smoke at her diagram. “We’ve stumbled onto something ugly here, pal.”

I nodded. “Big ol’ hunk of ugly.”

Dr. Diane Bourne’s office was housed on the second floor of a brownstone on Fairfield Street, in between a gallery specializing in mid-thirteenth-century East African kitchen pottery and a place that stitched bumper stickers on canvas and then sewed them to magnets for easy refrigerator attachment.

The office was done up in some kind of Laura Ashley meets the Spanish Inquisition decor. Plump armchairs and couches with floral stitching bore an inviting sense of softness that was all but overwhelmed by their colors—blood reds and pitch ebonies, carpets that matched, paintings on the wall by Bosch and Blake. I’d always thought a psychiatrist’s room was supposed to say Please, tell me your problems, not Please, don’t scream.

Diane Bourne was in her late thirties and so svelte I had to resist the urge to call in some takeout, force-feed her lunch. Dressed in a white sleeveless sheath dress that rode high up her throat and low to her knee, she stood out amid all the dark like a ghost floating through the moors. Her hair and skin were so pale it was hard to see where one began and the other ended, and even her eyes were the translucent gray of an ice storm. The tight dress, instead of making her look scrawny, seemed to accentuate the few soft parts of her, the flesh that swelled just slightly over her calves and hips and
shoulders. The overall effect, I thought, as she took a seat behind her smoked glass desk, was of an engine—sleek, well-tuned, revving at every red light.

As soon as we took our seats at the desk, Dr. Diane Bourne moved a small metronome to her left, so that her view of us was completely unobstructed, and lit a cigarette.

She gave Angie a small, dark smile. “Now, what can I do for you?”

“We’re looking into the death of Karen Nichols,” Angie said.

“Yes,” she said, and sucked a small white cloud of smoke back into her lungs, “Mr. Kenzie mentioned as much on the phone.” She tapped a modicum of ash into a crystal ashtray. “He was rather”—her mist-gray eyes met mine—“cagey about anything else.”

“Cagey,” I said.

She took another small hit off the cigarette and crossed her long legs. “You like that?”

“Oh, yeah.” I raised my eyebrows up and down several times.

She gave me a wisp of a smile and turned back to Angie. “As I hope I made quite clear to Mr. Kenzie, I have no inclination to discuss anything in regards to Miss Nichols’s therapy.”

Angie snapped her fingers. “Nuts.”

Diane Bourne swiveled back to me. “Mr. Kenzie, however, intimated over the—”

“Intimated?” Angie said.

“Intimated, yes, over the phone that he had information which could—do I have this right, Mr. Kenzie?—pose questions as to potential ethical violations in my handling of Ms. Nichols.”

I met her arched eyebrow with two of my own. “I wouldn’t say I was quite so—”

“Articulate?”

“Verbose,” I said. “But, otherwise, Dr. Bourne, that was the gist, yes.”

Dr. Bourne moved the ashtray a bit to her left so that we could see the small tape recorder behind it. “It’s my legal duty to inform you that this conversation is being recorded.”

“Cool,” I said. “Let me ask you—where’d you get that? Sharper Image, right? I’ve never seen one look so chic.” I looked at Angie. “You?”

“I’m still back at ‘intimated,’” she said.

I nodded. “That was a good one. I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but jeez.”

Diane Bourne shaved some excess ash off against the Waterford crystal. “You two have a very nice act going.”

Angie slugged my shoulder and I swept a hand at the back of her head that she ducked at the last moment. Then we both smiled at Dr. Diane Bourne.

She took another tiny toke off her cigarette. “Sort of a Butch and Sundance thing without the homosexual subtext.”

“Usually we get the Nick and Nora thing,” I said to Angie.

“Or the Chico and Groucho,” Angie reminded me.

“With the homosexual subtext, though. But that Butch and Sundance thing.”

“Quite the compliment,” Angie said.

I turned away from Angie and leaned my elbows on Dr. Bourne’s desk, looked past the swing of the metronome and into her pale, pale eyes. “Why would one of your patients have your session notes in her possession, Doctor?”

She didn’t say anything. She sat very still, her shoulders hunched very slightly, as if preparing for a sudden bite of cold air.

I leaned back in my chair. “Can you tell me that?”

She cocked her head to the left. “Would you repeat your question, please?”

Angie did so. I provided sign language.

“I don’t quite understand what you’re driving at.” She
shaved off another sliver of ash in the crystal.

Angie said, “Is it common practice for you to take notes during sessions with your patients?”

“Yes. It’s common with most—”

“And is it your practice, Doctor, to then mail those notes to the patients they concern?”

“Of course not.”

“Then how,” Angie said, “did your notes for a session with Karen Nichols, dated April the sixth, 1994, end up in Miss Nichols’s possession?”

“I have no idea,” Dr. Bourne said with the barely patient air of a matron speaking to a child. “Possibly she took them herself during one of her visits.”

“You keep your files locked?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then how could Karen break into them?”

Her chiseled face slackened along the jawline and her lips parted. “She couldn’t,” she said eventually.

“Which would suggest,” Angie said, “that you or someone from your office gave confidential, potentially damaging information to a conceivably unbalanced client.”

Dr. Bourne closed her mouth and her jaw tightened. “Hardly, Ms. Gennaro. I seem to remember that we had a break-in here a few—”

“Excuse me?” Angie leaned forward. “You
seem to remember
a break-in?”

“Yes.”

“So there’d be a police report.”

“A what?”

“A police report,” I said.

“No. Nothing of value seemed to be missing.”

“Just confidential files,” I said.

“No. I never said—”

Angie said, “Because I would think your other clients would expect to be notified if—”

“Ms. Gennaro, I don’t think—”

“—confidential documents relating to the most per
sonal aspects of their lives were in the hands of an unknown third party.” Angie looked over at me. “Don’t you agree?”

“We could let them know,” I said. “Purely as a public service.”

Dr. Bourne’s cigarette had turned to a curled finger of white ash in the crystal tray. As I watched, the finger collapsed.

“Logistically,” Angie said, “that would be tough.”

“Nah,” I said. “We just sit outside in our car. Every time we see someone rich who’s approaching the building and looks a little funny in the head, we assume they’re a client of Dr. Bourne’s and—”

“You will not.”

“—we approach and tell them about the break-in.”

“In the interest of the public good,” Angie said. “People’s right to know. Gosh, we’re kinda swell that way, aren’t we?”

I nodded. “No coal in our stockings this Christmas.”

Diane Bourne lit a second cigarette and watched us through the smoke, her pale eyes flat and seemingly nonplussed. “What do you want?” she said, and I detected just the hint of a throb in her vocal cords, a slight ticking not unlike the metronome.

“For starters,” I said, “we want to know how those session notes took flight from your office.”

“I haven’t the faintest.”

Angie lit her own cigarette. “Get the faintest, lady.”

Diane Bourne uncrossed her legs and tucked them to the side in that effortless way all women can and no man is remotely capable of. She held her cigarette up by her temple and gazed at Blake’s
Los
on the east wall, a painting that was about as calming as a plane crash.

“I had a temp secretary a couple of months ago. I sensed—no proof, mind you, just a sense—that she had been going through the files. She was only with me a week, so I didn’t give it much thought after she left.”

“Her name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“But you have records.”

“Of course. I’ll have Miles get them for you on your way out.” Then she smiled. “Oh, I forgot, he’s not here today. Well, I’ll make a note to have him send that information to you.”

Angie was sitting two feet away, but I could feel her pulse quicken and her blood warm along with my own.

I indicated the outer office with a backward jerk of my thumb. “Miles would be who?”

She suddenly looked as if she regretted ever mentioning him. “He’s, ah, just someone who works for me part-time as a secretary.”

“Part-time,” I said. “So he has another job?”

She nodded.

“Where?”

“Why?”

“Curious,” I said. “It’s an occupational hazard. Humor me.”

She sighed. “He works at Evanton Hospital in Wellesley.”

“The psych hospital?”

“Yes.”

“Doing what?” Angie asked.

“He’s their records clerk.”

“And how long has he worked here?”

“Why do you ask?” Another small cock of the head.

“I’m trying to ascertain who has access to your files, Doctor.”

She leaned forward, tapped some ash into the tray. “Miles Lovell has been in my employ for three and a half years, Mr. Kenzie, and to answer your next question, No, he would have no reason to remove session notes from Karen Nichols’s file and mail them to her.”

Lovell, I thought. Not Brewster. Uses a false last name, but sticks to his first name out of comfort. Not a bad move if your name is John. Kind of dumb, though, if you name’s somewhat less common.

“Okay.” I smiled. Picture of the satisfied detective. No more questions here about ol’ Miles Lovell. He’s right as rain in my book, ma’am.

“He’s the most trustworthy assistant I’ve ever had.”

“I’m sure he is.”

“Now,” she said, “have I answered all your questions?”

My smile widened. “Not even close.”

“Tell us about Karen Nichols,” Angie said.

“There’s very little to tell…”

Half an hour later she was still talking, ticking off the details of Karen Nichols’s psyche with all the consistency and emotion of that metronome of hers.

Karen, according to Dr. Diane Bourne, had been a classic bipolar manic depressive. She had over the years taken prescriptions for lithium, Depakote, and Tegretol, as well as the Prozac I’d found in Warren’s barn. Whether hers was a condition mandated by genetics became largely irrelevant when her father died and his killer shot himself in front of Karen. Following textbook patterns, according to Dr. Bourne, Karen, far from acting out as a child or an adolescent, had been preternaturally well behaved, molding herself into the role of perfect daughter, sister, and eventually, girlfriend.

“She modeled herself,” Dr. Bourne said, “like a lot of girls, after television ideals. Repeats mostly in Karen’s case. That was part of her pathology—to live as much in the past and an idealized America as she could, so she idolized Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards and also all those mothers from fifties and sixties sitcoms—Barbara Billingsley, Donna Reed, Mary Tyler Moore again as Dick Van Dyke’s wife. She read Jane Austen and missed the irony and anger of Austen’s work entirely. She chose instead to see her work as fantasies of how a good girl’s life could be successful if she lived correctly and opted to marry well like Emma or Elinor Dashwood. So this became the goal, and David Wetterau, her Darcy or Rob Petrie, if you will, was the linchpin to a happy life.”

“And when he was turned into a vegetable…”

“All those demons of hers, repressed for twenty years, came back to roost. I had long suspected that were Karen’s model life ever to suffer a serious fissure, her breakdown would manifest sexually.”

“Why would you suspect that?” Angie asked.

“You must understand that it was her father’s sexual liaisons with the wife of Lieutenant Crowe which predicated Lieutenant Crowe’s extreme act of violence and the death of Karen’s father.”

“So Karen’s father had an affair with his best friend’s wife.”

She nodded. “That’s what the shooting was all about. Add in certain aspects of the Electra complex, which at six years old would have surely been blooming, if not raging, in Karen, her guilt over her father’s death, and her conflicted sexual feelings for her brother, and you have a recipe for—”

“She had sexual relations with her brother?” I said.

Diane Bourne shook her head. “No. Emphatically, no. But, like a lot of women with an older stepbrother, she did, during adolescence, first recognize symptoms of her sexual awakening in terms of Wesley. The male ideal in Karen’s world, you see, was a dominating figure. Her natural father was a military man, a warrior. Her stepfather was domineering in his own right. Wesley Dawe was given to violent, psychotic episodes and, until his disappearance, was being treated with antipsychotic medication.”

“You treated Wesley?”

She nodded.

“Tell us about him.”

She pursed her lips and shook her head. “I think not.”

Angie looked at me. “Out to the car?”

I nodded. “Need to pick up a thermos of coffee, but then we’re good to go.”

We stood.

“Sit down, Ms. Gennaro, Mr. Kenzie.” Diane Bourne waved us down to our seats. “Jesus, you two don’t know when to quit.”

“Why we get the big bucks,” Angie said.

Dr. Bourne leaned back in her chair, parted the heavy curtains behind her, and looked out on the heat-choked brick of the building across Fairfield from her. The metallic roof of a tall truck bounced the hard sun back into her eyes. She dropped the curtain and blinked in the darkness of the room.

“Wesley Dawe,” she said, her fingers pinched over her eyelids, “was a very confused, angry young man the last time I saw him.”

“When was this?”

“Nine years ago.”

“And he was how old?”

“Twenty-three. His hatred of his father was total. His hatred of himself was only slightly less so. After he attacked Dr. Dawe that time, I recommended he be involuntarily committed for both his family’s well-being and his own.”

“Attacked how?”

“He stabbed his father, Mr. Kenzie. With a kitchen knife. Oh, typical of Wesley, he botched the job. He aimed for the neck, I think, but Dr. Dawe managed to raise his shoulder in time, and Wesley ran from the house.”