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  Hilary Norman and The Murder Room

  ››› This title is part of The Murder Room, our series dedicated to making available out-of-print or hard-to-find titles by classic crime writers.

  Crime fiction has always held up a mirror to society. The Victorians were fascinated by sensational murder and the emerging science of detection; now we are obsessed with the forensic detail of violent death. And no other genre has so captivated and enthralled readers.

  Vast troves of classic crime writing have for a long time been unavailable to all but the most dedicated frequenters of second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing means that we are now able to bring you the backlists of a huge range of titles by classic and contemporary crime writers, some of which have been out of print for decades.

  From the genteel amateur private eyes of the Golden Age and the femmes fatales of pulp fiction, to the morally ambiguous hard-boiled detectives of mid twentieth-century America and their descendants who walk our twenty-first century streets, The Murder Room has it all. ›››

  The Murder Room

  Where Criminal Minds Meet

  themurderroom.com

  Mind Games

  Hilary Norman

  Contents

  Cover

  The Murder Room Introduction

  Title page

  Preface

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Chapter Sixty-five

  Chapter Sixty-six

  Chapter Sixty-seven

  Chapter Sixty-eight

  Chapter Sixty-nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-one

  Chapter Seventy-two

  Chapter Seventy-three

  Chapter Seventy-four

  Chapter Seventy-five

  Chapter Seventy-six

  Chapter Seventy-seven

  Chapter Seventy-eight

  Chapter Seventy-nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-one

  Chapter Eighty-two

  Chapter Eighty-three

  Chapter Eighty-four

  Chapter Eighty-five

  Chapter Eighty-six

  Outro

  By Hilary Norman

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Copyright page

  Chapter One

  FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 1998

  The Robbins’ housekeeper, Anita del Fuego, arrived at work same time as every morning at the house on Pine Tree Drive: six-thirty. She enjoyed the short walk from the K bus stop, liked the cool fragrance of the tall double line of pines that bisected and gave the exclusive Miami Beach road its name. A morning person by nature, Anita was singing softly as she let herself in through the side entrance, hung her bright floral polyester jacket on its hook, took down the white pinafore – fresh washed and pressed, just the way Señora Robbins liked her to wear – and changed into her white, soft-soled nurse’s shoes. Still singing, she made her way into the kitchen – and stopped.

  Something was not right.

  The house was too quiet and too dark. The blinds in the kitchen were shut and there was no aroma of fresh-perked coffee. Señor Robbins always made the first pot about a half-hour before Anita got to work; sometimes she found him still peaceably sitting at the kitchen table, though more often than not he was either upstairs getting dressed or had already left for business. Whichever, the señor always opened all the blinds and drapes on the first floor before the housekeeper’s arrival.

  Not today.

  Anita went out into the hallway and listened. Quiet. It was way too quiet.

  She lifted her wrist close to her face to peer at her watch, checking that she hadn’t made a mistake about the time. The watch said six-thirty-five. High time for young Cathy to be up and about, getting showered and dressed for school.

  Her skin prickled. She had a bad feeling.

  ‘Ridículo, Anita,’ she rebuked herself, softly. All this was, probably, a case of everyone oversleeping, and when she went upstairs and knocked on Cathy’s door she would find her lying curled up on her side under her comforter, the way she always slept.

  Encouraged, Anita started up the stairs. That was all this was. First she would wake Cathy, then the girl could go rouse her momia and papá . . . Or maybe Señor Robbins had left the house real early to go to the market for his restaurants, too early to make coffee and open the drapes – and the señora had forgotten to set her own alarm clock. That was all.

  So why did she still have such a bad feeling?

  Cathy was not in her bed. The bathroom door was open.

  ‘Cathy?’ Anita called softly.

  No answer.

  She went to the door and looked inside. The shower curtain was open and dry, and the pale pink bath towel was neatly folded over the warming rail.

  Anita’s palms grew clammy. She didn’t know why she was so afraid, but something was gnawing at her mind, growing by the second, something dark and nasty, something she had a powerful urge to run away from. She opened her mouth to call out a second time, more loudly, then shut it again, silenced by the stillness and that feeling inside her head.

  Cobarde, she chastised herself. Coward.

  She turned around, left Cathy’s empty room and walked along the corridor to the señor and señora’s closed bedroom door. She knocked, twice, tentatively. The silence grew heavier. She knocked again, gripped the door handle in her fingers, felt its coolness against her own rising heat. For another moment she wavered – and then she opened the door.

  It was very dark in the room. The thick drapes were still closed. Anita took two steps inside and stopped, waiting for her eyes to grow used to the dimness.

  Slowly, the bed cam
e into focus. She could see vague shapes. Humps and lumps. Black waves. Motionless waves. Anita stood very still, trying to listen past the air-conditioner’s hum.

  She began to tremble.

  There was a smell in the air.

  It was unmistakable. Hot and animal, somewhere between the scent of her own monthly regla and the heavy odour she smelt whenever she saw her cousin Bobby who worked at the meat market.

  A sick sound of revulsion was muffled against her lips even as it emerged, squashed flat by her right hand. Seconds passed. Still scarcely daring to move, still half-blind, Anita tilted her face slightly towards the windows. To open the drapes she would have to walk across the room, to pass the bed and those humps beneath the quilt that looked so black in the dark.

  Turn on the light.

  Anita backed up to the door, found the switch with her left hand.

  And flicked it.

  And saw that the blackness covering the bed was not a quilt after all.

  It was what she had smelled.

  Blood.

  Spread over the three of them and over the sheets and pillows. Sprayed up over the headboard and the wall and the lampshades on both bedside tables.

  Anita opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. The black, sick sensation was swamping her, suffocating her, sucking her in, like the corkscrew spiral of a tornado drawing everything into itself. Her whole being seemed engulfed in that twisting funnel, was being sucked down, down into a black, narrow, contracting hole. All dead, all dead, the only words, the only halfway coherent thoughts spinning down with her.

  Three corpses.

  The middle one stirred. Sat up.

  Anita’s scream began then, and did not stop. It came from deep inside her, from within that narrow whirling bore of terror, came twisting, surging, gushing, roaring out through her mouth into the death silence.

  As Cathy Robbins, her blue eyes almost bright against her bloodsoaked cheeks and forehead, her golden hair matted and darkened, lifted both her arms towards Anita in speechless supplication.

  The housekeeper stared at the girl’s mouth, saw that it, too, was red.

  Still screaming, Anita del Fuego turned and ran.

  Chapter Two

  He left Martinez, Riley, the ME, the Crime Scene guys and the Assistant State Attorney with the distraught Mrs del Fuego and the deceased, and took the vigil with the living for himself. Detective Samuel Becket had been with the Person Crimes unit of the Miami Beach Police Department for six years, and had seen his share of homicides, but the sheer horror never diminished so far as he was concerned. Sam knew that his sense of motivation for solving those violent, most inhumane crimes was as undiluted as ever, but he still – when he was in a position to have a say in the matter – got the hell away from the grisly end of things first chance he got. Sergeant Kovac having appointed him lead investigator for this particular case, Sam was, as it turned out, in that position today.

  In Miami Beach, in his experience, death didn’t come much grislier than this. Arnold and Marie Robbins – an affluent, middle-class, middle-aged couple in the restaurant business – dead in their kingsize Miami Beach bed with their jugulars sliced and their fourteen-year-old daughter lying snuggled up between them, alive and unharmed.

  Physically unharmed, anyway. As to the rest, Cathy Robbins was now tucked up between white hospital sheets in Miami General, being taken care of by the best there was. In Sam’s book, anyhow.

  ‘How’s she doing?’ he asked his father.

  ‘How should she be doing?’

  Dr David Becket and his son both turned and looked through the glass into the private room where Cathy Robbins was lying, eyes closed and perfectly still. Her left arm, resting on top of the covers, showed a healthy Florida tan, but her face was so white it seemed almost translucent.

  As a detective, Sam knew full well that – theoretically at least – being a family member placed indisputably at the murder scene made the girl a possible suspect. He knew it, and he’d seen in the eyes of both Sergeant Kovac and Al Martinez that they knew it, too. But ever since joining the force, Sam had developed a habit of silently, privately, splitting himself down his emotional core, one half Sam-the-cop, the other half Sam-the-man. Right now, Sam-the-man was looking at a child-woman who had just been extracted from hell on earth, and thinking about what she might have endured, and his heart was going out to her.

  ‘Has she spoken?’ he asked his father.

  ‘Not really,’ David Becket said. ‘A word or two, nothing to help you.’ He paused, his open, expressive face clearly revealing his dismay. At fifty-six years of age, a paediatrician with a sideline as a volunteer general practitioner on West Flagler Street in downtown Miami, he’d seen more than his fair share of anguish, yet he had never learned to tame the acuteness of his own imagination. His patients suffered from sickness or drug abuse or violence or depression, and David felt their suffering. It was exactly what he had been warned to guard against all those years back in medical school, but it was probably at least part of the reason they flocked to him day after day, night after night, in the hospital and in the ‘freebie’ clinic he shared with Fred Delano and Joan Melnick. It was also part of the reason his wife Judy, still fretting after all these years, periodically asked him to give up that practice because of its inherent physical and emotional dangers.

  ‘Where did Mrs Dean go?’ Sam asked. Anita del Fuego had told them that Cathy Robbins’ next-of-kin now was her mother’s sister, Frances Dean.

  ‘She’s resting in another room,’ David answered. ‘I gave her something to help her. She stayed with her niece for a while, but one of the nurses saw she was about to crack and got her out of the room.’

  ‘Do you know if Cathy said anything to her?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘How long till we can try talking to her?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ David said. ‘Who’s we?’

  Sam heard the caginess and understood it. ‘If the aunt agrees, probably me with a counsellor from the Child Assessment Centre.’ He saw his father’s nose wrinkle in disapproval. ‘She’s our only witness, Dad. You know we’ll be gentle.’

  ‘You’re investigating her parents’ murders,’ David said grimly. ‘How gentle can you be?’

  Sam gave a small, weary shrug. ‘Can I sit with her? I mean just sit.’

  ‘I have no problem with that, so long as it’s just sitting.’

  ‘Can’t do much more until Mrs Dean gives the okay.’ Sam paused. ‘I know you’d like us to leave her alone, but it isn’t going to happen.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘I’ll wait as long as I can, Dad.’

  ‘It’s her you have to wait for, not me.’

  Sam looked back through the glass. ‘At least she’s not catatonic.’

  ‘At least,’ David said wryly.

  ‘How long would you like me to tell the CAC counsellor to wait?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ It was David’s turn to shrug. ‘I never found my mother and father slaughtered in their bed.’

  Close up, the girl looked even paler, even more vulnerable. Her blonde hair was still damp at the roots from washing. A tiny speck of dried blood lay, like a final testimony, a horror freckle, at the base of her right ear lobe. Sam restrained his impulse to wipe it away. He looked at her left hand – no traces remained beneath her fingernails. If they had been polished that, too, had been removed, either by the police surgeon or by hospital personnel. Sitting on his hard plastic chair, Sam’s mind conjured up pictures of Cathy Robbins’ shower, of the unspeakable trauma of having her parents’ lifeblood scrubbed off her flesh, and then swiftly, urgently, he pushed the images away. His father was not the only one in their family with a too-vivid imagination; if Sam had not been adopted, he’d have assumed it flowed through their gene pool.

  ‘Hi.’

  Sam jolted in his chair. Cathy Robbins had opened her eyes and was looking at him. Her eyes were very blue, their pupils dilated, perhaps f
rom the sedative she had been given soon after she’d been found.

  ‘Hello, Cathy.’ He didn’t ask her how she was feeling, knew it would be both cruel and pointless. ‘I’m Detective Sam Becket from the Miami Beach Police Department.’

  ‘Two Beckets,’ she said softly.

  Nothing too fuzzy there. ‘Dr Becket’s my dad,’ Sam told her.

  ‘How come?’ Borderline interested.

  It was a question Sam had answered more times than he could count. A natural enough question given that Sam was an African-American and David was a Caucasian Jew. ‘Adopted,’ Sam said.

  ‘Me, too,’ Cathy said, and closed her eyes.

  She didn’t speak again until late that evening, long after Sam had gone. A nurse was in her room, putting down a jug of fresh water.

  ‘Did it really happen?’ Cathy asked her.

  The nurse understood what she meant, but everyone had been alerted to be careful about what they said to Cathy Robbins, and so she froze for a second or two, saying nothing.

  ‘Okay,’ Cathy said, and shut down again.

  Chapter Three

  SUNDAY, APRIL 5, 1998

  Grace Lucca could not remember the last time she’d felt quite so relaxed, even on a Sunday. Weekends tended to be gentle family affairs for most of her neighbours on the Bay Harbor Islands, the two miniature, self-contained communities that lay between exclusive Bal Harbour and North Miami. A number of the people who lived around Grace were professional men and women with children of various ages. At weekends they pursued civilized amusements; they shopped, barbecued, shot baskets, tinkered with the boats some of them kept moored right outside their backyards.

  Grace had a mooring of her own, but though she thought about buying something small someday, she hadn’t done so yet. If she had, she doubted she’d find time to do much more than look at it. For one thing, as a child and adolescent psychologist, she seemed to have developed a bad habit of being unable to turn down patients in real need whatever the day or hour, and for another, she was less able than she ought to be to shut down from work.

  This particular Sunday had started out differently, though. Both the afternoon appointments Grace had scheduled had been postponed, the weather was especially fine, and she’d woken up feeling remarkably laidback. She’d taken a muffin, juice and coffee back to bed with the Herald and New York Times, dozed off in the midst of the Travel section, woken up to find that Harry had burrowed right under the covers with her, and then she had gotten up to take a shower, do some overdue laundry and put together a sandwich. Now, a little after one o’clock, she was sharing a real Sunday afternoon with Harry, sitting out on their deck, her long legs dangling over the side, bare toes brushing the water. That felt good. The whole package felt good. Doing nothing, just sitting and gazing at the pretty, almost smugly secure Bal Harbour scene across the water.