Mind Games Read online

  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.’

  ‘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.

  Chapter Ten

  THURSDAY, APRIL 9, 1998

  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.’

  ‘He got mad?’

  ‘Not exactly. He got offended, said something about he’d done his bit by telling me, and now it was up to us, but he thought we should come.’ Claudia paused. ‘I’d say what he wants is for someone to shoulder the burden, take care of Mama after her operation.’

  ‘Well, that someone can’t be you,’ Grace said quickly, hoping to quash any feelings of guilt even before they were born. ‘You have Daniel and the boys to take care of
, and you can’t afford to risk getting sucked back into that old hellhole just because Frank Lucca makes one phone call in a decade.’

  ‘I know that, Grace,’ Claudia said, softly. ‘I didn’t say I’d go.’

  ‘Good,’ Grace said, a little sickened by the force of anger that had just welled up out of her. She shut her eyes again, thought about Ellen, pictured her sick and afraid and having to face coming home after surgery to her shitbag of a husband. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, violently, and opened her eyes.

  ‘Grace, are you okay?’

  ‘Yes. I guess.’ She knew she didn’t sound okay. ‘Just facing the fact that I’m trying to stop you from feeling guilty about Ellen, but I’m not even sure I can switch my own feelings off.’

  ‘You’re human, too, Grace,’ Claudia pointed out, calmly, then paused. ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘I think we should wait a while,’ Grace said. ‘With Easter in a couple of days, we probably couldn’t get a flight to Chicago if we wanted to. Anyway, we both have commitments.’ Cathy Robbins’ face came into her mind, and she remembered the phone number in her hand. ‘Matter of fact, sis, there’s someone I need to call right now.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Claudia said. ‘Are you still up for this weekend?’

  Grace thought about the prospect of two days and nights with her sister and brother-in-law and their sons down in Islamorada, and warmth coursed through her.

  ‘I wouldn’t miss it,’ she said.

  Frances Dean was evasive on the telephone, bordering on hostile, but Grace had the feeling that was probably because the older woman was now associating her with Sam Becket and the rest of the Miami Beach Police Department – and with Beatrice Flager’s murder plainly raising the temperature of suspicion towards her niece, Grace could hardly blame Frances for that. Nor could she, Grace supposed, somewhat grudgingly, entirely blame Sam Becket for doing what the taxpayer paid him to do.

  Out of the blue, something came back to her. The niggly feeling she’d had last Saturday after she’d noticed the Band-Aid on Cathy’s arm and failed to ask Becket about it. Now Grace had just been given the perfect opportunity by Frances Dean to abandon this case, to forget all about Cathy and Marie and Arnold Robbins, to legitimately walk away from a girl who might – who just might – have murdered three people, one of them her own mother.