The thought of sleeping next to Grace Lucca was pretty damned wonderful.
The thought of waking up beside her, of course, was even better.
Chapter Forty-one
At two-thirty-three, Grace was still awake and reading Tom Sawyer in Hayman’s guest bedroom when she heard a step outside the door. Quickly, reflexively, she put out her right hand, switched out the bedside lamp and lay down on her side.
She heard the door open, quietly, slowly, heard the tread on the carpet. She closed her eyes, forced herself to bring her breathing under control, wanting it to sound even and calm so that Hayman would think she was sleeping.
What the hell was he doing, coming into her room in the middle of the goddamned night? Had he seen the light from under the door? Did he know she was shamming sleep?
It’s okay, Lucca, Grace told herself behind closed eyelids, if he does turn out to be a major creep, you’re a big girl, you know how to handle yourself
‘Grace?’
His voice was very low and close. He sounded unsure of whether she was asleep or not. He sounded, thank God, she thought, as if he didn’t mean to wake her if she really was out of it. She considered stirring and answering him, then decided against. If he had a good reason for wanting her up at this time of night, he’d hardly be tiptoeing around the room like a goddamned burglar.
She went on with the act.
‘Okay, Grace,’ he said, just as softly.
She felt the air fan a little close to her face as he moved again – it was desperately hard not to hold her breath, not to squeeze her eyelids more tightly shut or open them to see what he was doing.
A floorboard creaked beneath the carpet. He was moving away, Grace thought, back towards the door, which meant he was probably somewhere behind her now, and no longer able to see her face. She tried to remember the positioning of the two mirrors in the room – the one on the dressing table, the other a freestanding cheval glass – in case he could still see her reflection.
She heard the door close.
And waited. Was he gone, or was he still in the room with her?
Nothing.
She went on waiting.
Still nothing.
From somewhere else in the house, some distance away this time, she heard another door closing, and knew he really was gone.
Thank you, Jesus.
Slowly, Grace opened her eyes, stared into the darkness and let out a long exhalation of relief.
She wanted to turn the light on. She wanted to find her clothes and leave. But that didn’t seem like the best thing to do.
“Okay, Grace.” She couldn’t figure out what that had meant. She couldn’t decide if it had meant, “Okay, Grace, if you’re sound asleep I don’t want to disturb you”, or if it had meant, “Okay, Grace, have it your way – play your little games”. If it was the first, she could just about contemplate staying, at least until morning. If it was the latter, there was something implicitly unpleasant behind the words that made her want to get the hell out of Peter Hayman’s house sometime within the next five minutes.
Her eyes grew more accustomed to the dark. Slowly, carefully, she climbed out of bed, went over to one of the windows, and opened the blinds a little. There was enough of a moon to light her way, enough for her to be able to check that she had slid the bolt on the porch door. Why would he need to come that way, Lucca, when he can use the regular door?
She couldn’t recall a lock on the door to the hallway, but she tiptoed across to double check. There was a lock, but no key. She looked around. She could have pushed a chair under the handle, which would not only delay anyone entering but make a noise, too – but that seemed a little heavy-handed, especially as she felt it was now somewhat unlikely that Hayman would put in a repeat appearance that night.
In the end she chose a slightly subtler approach, one that might allow her to get at least some sleep, and that – if her host decided to bring her a cup of coffee in the morning – could be politely explained away. The old travel bag left in front of the door in error. A simple piece of carelessness that Hayman could hardly argue with by saying that it hadn’t been there when he’d come into the room in the middle of the night.
Grace went to the bathroom, peed without flushing the john in case he heard her, then washed her hands, splashed her face and went back to bed. For about another hour, she lay awake, becoming more and more sure by the minute that she would get no rest at all. But slowly, gradually, her mind and body let go their grip, sheer fatigue took over, and she drifted away.
Chapter Forty-two
At a little after four-thirty Sunday morning, Sam was still awake. He’d wanted to sleep, he needed to sleep, dammit, but something was going around and around in his overtired brain, and he couldn’t seem to focus on it precisely. It was like watching out for an individual on one of those high-speed fairground rides – now you saw them, then they were whipped away and gone.
He’d just about given up on sleep and on working out what was bugging him, had just got up to drink some juice and switch on an old movie on cable, when he suddenly understood what the problem was.
It had gotten submerged beneath the mixed-up satisfaction and sense of despair that the rapist’s confession had brought him, and then it had been all but forgotten in the paperwork frenzy that had followed.
Dr Peter Hayman.
The fact that Angie Carlino had found no record for the psychiatrist until he’d arrived on Key Largo in 1992.
There could, Sam knew, be any number of explanations for that. Most likely, come Monday, he or Angie would contact the American Psychiatric Association in Washington DC and resurrect the whole of the rest of Hayman’s professional life from college to the move to the Keys, and the blip could be wiped out. Sam knew he had no choice but to wait for that to happen.
But meanwhile, he couldn’t help dabbling with some disturbing possible connections.
John Broderick had disappeared off Pensacola in the fall of 1989. As of this moment, Peter Hayman seemed to have appeared out of nowhere less than three years later. More than enough time for a man to have had extensive plastic surgery heal completely, and to have created a new, safe, living situation for himself under a new identity.
Broderick had been a physician. Dr Hayman was a psychiatrist with – as of tonight – dubious credentials. Broderick had been an abuser. Peter Hayman had a self-professed interest in a particular branch of mental illness considered by many to be a grievous form of abuse.
And then there was the double shooting: the reason Hayman had given Grace for his particular interest in the Robbins case. Except that Angie Carlino had found no record of that either.
Sam sat up in an armchair in front of his TV, the sound muted, the black and white picture blurring in front of his weary eyes.
‘You’re being crazy, man,’ he told himself.
Of course it was a crazy connection to be making. A few words from the song ‘Jealous Guy’ played in his mind. Could that be all it was? Had the fact that Grace had been spending time talking to Hayman, shrink-to-shrink, about the Robbins case, been bugging him? He frowned at the possibility. He preferred to think he had a greater respect for both Grace Lucca’s professionalism and personal choice than that; he hoped he was better than that.
Grace had looked at Lafayette Hospital’s photograph of Broderick and had said there was something familiar about the man. They’d both concluded it was simply because he was Cathy’s father, but what if it hadn’t been a heredity thing?
‘Damn,’ Sam said.
He got up out of the chair, stalked across to the window, rubbed the back of his neck with his right hand, rotated his shoulders to try and relax himself. He didn’t have a clue what Hayman looked like. Obviously, he didn’t look anything like Broderick, or Grace would have placed him the instant she’d seen the photograph.
‘C’mon, Becket.’
He turned away from the glass. Grace was a trained observer with years of practice in seeing past e
xteriors to the stuff inside that really counted. If Hayman was Broderick – even if she had no cause to contemplate their being one and the same – she would have sensed enough to mistrust the man.
Wouldn’t she?
He wanted to talk to her, but it was five in the morning, and in any case he wasn’t sure what the hell he could or should have said to her. What he was going to have to do instead was contain himself and go on trying to check out Hayman. He thought that Grace had said he was concentrating on writing these days rather than practising as a psychiatrist. If the guy had anything in print, his publishers were the obvious route to go – and maybe those missing years would emerge on Monday.
Except it wasn’t just years that seemed to be missing.
It was most of a life.
Chapter Forty-three
‘Boy, have we lucked out with the weather today,’ Hayman said as he set a dish of pancakes on the white-painted rattan table on his ocean-facing porch. ‘Best sailing weather I’ve seen in a while.’
‘It does look tempting,’ Grace admitted.
She was tempted. In the light of the gorgeous morning, with a serious breakfast all laid out before her, she also had to admit that her nighttime fears seemed groundless – especially in view of the fact that Hayman had asked her almost as soon as she’d appeared in the kitchen a half-hour ago if something had disturbed her in the night.
‘I thought I heard a sound from your room,’ he’d told her.
‘What kind of a sound?’ Grace had asked him, giving nothing away.
‘I thought it was you, crying out,’ he’d answered. ‘I went to check on you, but you were sleeping, so I didn’t wake you.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess it was a night bird or maybe it was just in my head – or maybe you were dreaming.’
‘I don’t remember any bad dreams,’ Grace had said. ‘Though that doesn’t mean I didn’t have any.’
‘Strange bed, strange place,’ he’d said lightly, closing the subject, and Grace had decided she was happy to close it, too.
Sitting on the porch now, eating pancakes with pure maple syrup, drinking good coffee and gazing out to sea through palm trees and mangroves, she also decided that it would be plain foolish to go back to Miami without getting in at least a few hours’ sailing with Hayman and his friends.
They’d just about finished clearing away the dishes and Hayman was insisting on doing the washing up when the doorbell – an old ship’s bell – clanged, heralding the arrival of two of those friends.
‘Betty and Miles Flanagan’ – Hayman brought them into the kitchen and made the introductions – ‘Dr Grace Lucca.’
‘Glad to know you, Grace,’ Miles said. ‘May I call you Grace?’
They all settled down around the kitchen table while Hayman put on more coffee. The Flanagans were both small and slim, a trim, agile, pink-cheeked pair who looked more like brother and sister than husband and wife, which she knew them to be.
‘Peter tells us you have a sister with a place close by,’ Betty said.
‘On Islamorada,’ Grace told her. ‘She loves it.’
‘How about you?’ Miles asked. ‘Wouldn’t you like to escape too?’
‘Not really,’ she answered. ‘I’m pretty much set where I am.’
It turned out that the Flanagans had their own boat, and were impatient to be on the ocean, but Hayman said he had a few things he needed to see to around the house before going out, so they made a tentative arrangement to meet for a picnic lunch on El Radabob Key and the Flanagans left.
‘I’d assumed we were all sailing together,’ Grace said as they drove away.
‘Uh-uh.’ Hayman shook his head. ‘Miles is nuts about his own boat and can’t stand having anyone tell him what to do. You wouldn’t want to actually sail with him, believe me. We’ll probably meet up with Jack and Tina Weintraub – they keep their boat at the same marina as mine. They’re a lot more easy going than the Flanagans.’
‘How come you don’t moor your boat here?’
‘She’s pretty big, and she’s been getting a spruce-up.’ Hayman smiled. ‘The Snowbird’s the apple of my eye. I hope you’re going to like her.’
‘I’m sure I shall.’
He took his coffee cup over to the sink, and started washing up. Grace glanced around for a cloth to help with the drying.
‘No work for you,’ Hayman said. ‘You have one whole day’s vacation. That is, assuming you’ll be wanting to get back in time for business as usual tomorrow – or am I wrong about that?’
‘Afraid not,’ Grace said.
‘Then you just sit and let me work.’
She smiled at him. ‘You don’t need to tell me twice.’
He took a sponge cloth and wiped over one of the counters. ‘Mind if I ask a work-related question, Grace?’
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if I can pretend to forget or even wind down in a single day.’
‘Do you still think Cathy’s father’s alive and the killer?’
‘I’m more certain than ever,’ she answered.
‘We haven’t really talked since her transfer to the adult jail.’ Hayman rinsed out the coffee pot. ‘How’s she coping?’
‘She’s a mess, Peter,’ Grace said, ‘which is why I’m so determined not to rest until I’ve found a way to prove Broderick faked his death. The more I think about it – the more I look at everything that’s happened – the more I feel that nothing else seems to make sense.’
‘Nothing except the possibility that Cathy Robbins is a very sick young woman,’ Hayman said, turning off the water and wiping his hands with paper towel.
‘No, Peter,’ Grace said firmly. ‘That’s the other thing I’ve grown increasingly convinced of over the weeks. Cathy is not mentally ill – which is not to say that she isn’t terribly disturbed by all that’s happened to her, but that’s a normal, a wholly sane reaction.’ She paused. ‘I’ve seen her angry a couple of times now, but that anger’s been rational.’
Hayman came back across and joined her at the table. ‘What degree of anger are we talking about here?’
‘Nothing really violent, if that’s what you’re asking,’ Grace said. ‘It’s frustration and fear. And Cathy’s grown very suspicious of adults, but there’s good reason for that – it doesn’t mean she’s paranoid.’ She paused again. ‘You know, Peter, I’ve observed her closely when she’s talked about the old incident with her mother’s goldfish.’
‘You said she’s always denied that.’
‘She not only denies it, but her revulsion over those ugly little killings is very real and her distress over that accusation is just as acutely painful as it ever was – even now.’ She read Hayman’s expression. ‘And no, I don’t think she was obsessed enough by that to kill.’
‘And you don’t believe she killed the fish either,’ Hayman said.
‘No, I don’t,’ Grace said. ‘Her blood may have tested positive for cannabis at the time, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if Broderick didn’t find a way to get that into her, the same way he gave Marie progestogen instead of B12.’
‘I hate to put a damper on all this, Grace,’ Hayman said, ‘but I did tell you last time we met that I was concerned about it.’
‘I know you did,’ Grace said. ‘Just before you suggested I get hold of a photograph of Broderick.’
‘Did you do that?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’ He paused. ‘Did you recognize him?’
‘No,’ she said.
Hayman shook his head and stood up. ‘Grace, isn’t this starting to sound like the old get-out for the wife-and-child-beater abused in his own childhood? I mean, I don’t know – maybe Broderick did survive that storm – maybe you’re right, and he did slip cannabis into Cathy’s vitamin capsules, and maybe he did even get her high and wild enough to cut the heads off those fish – or maybe, as you’re suggesting, he did do even that himself—’
‘If he did survive,’ Grace interrupted, ‘then I’m almost certain he
did all those things and more.’
‘I still don’t think you can entirely ignore the possibility that all that old trauma really may have helped turn Cathy into exactly what the State Attorney thinks she is.’
‘A multiple murderess?’
‘Maybe.’ Hayman sat down again. ‘And maybe she’s also become a damned accomplished liar.’
Grace felt almost too disappointed to speak.
‘I’m sorry, Grace.’ Hayman was gentle. ‘You know that up to a point, I’m just playing devil’s advocate.’
‘But only up to a point,’ she said.
‘I’m afraid so,’ he agreed. ‘I just think it’s important you get some balance back into your thinking about this case.’
‘Is that why you asked me down here?’
‘Only partly.’ He paused. ‘Mostly, I asked you because I figured you needed a break.’ He stood up again. ‘How about I squeeze a few oranges and make us some juice before we get ready to hit the water?’
Grace nodded. ‘That sounds good.’
Hayman picked up their cups, put them into the sink, then went to the refrigerator and pulled out a half-dozen oranges.
‘Can I help?’ Grace asked.
‘I’m fine. You just sit there and take it easy.’
‘Okay,’ she said.
Something had just struck her. Something Hayman had said. His reference to the possibility of Broderick’s having slipped cannabis into Cathy’s vitamin capsules. Such a clear, precise image. The thing was, Grace didn’t know if Cathy had taken vitamins.
Surely, if it was true, only one person could know about that.
‘All done.’ Hayman poured juice into two glasses and brought them over to the table. ‘Are you all right, Grace?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said.
‘I’ve upset you, haven’t I?’
Mind Games Page 25
