Kill the Next One

by Federico Axat

  “That’s why Wendell was trying to set me against you and Roger. God, I’m still thinking of the guy as if he really existed.”

  Look, Ted, there’s some information up here, in your head—Wendell bent over and pointed his index finger at Ted’s forehead—that’s bad news for you. For me, too—I won’t deny it.

  “Now I understand why Holly doesn’t want to see me,” Ted said.

  “Actually, Holly does want to see you.”

  “Really?”

  “She understands that you would never have hurt Lynch under normal circumstances. She’s confident that the treatment you’re getting here will turn you back into the person you always were.”

  “So you were able to talk to her?”

  Laura nodded.

  “I talked with her today, first thing, just as I promised you. Now that we’ve made all this progress, I honestly think it might be a good idea for you to see the girls. Holly has said she’s ready to bring them with her whenever we ask.”

  A mixture of happiness and anxiety rushed over Ted, but his memories of happier times with his daughters prevailed—a collage of images of Nadine and Cindy, of hugs, of good night kisses, of bedtime stories. The tears soon came. He was crying for the first time since he arrived at Lavender seven months earlier.

  46

  Marcus was instructing his secretary not to let anyone interrupt him—he had to go over the expense reports and forward them to the general director—when Laura appeared in the hallway. In an instant his priorities changed.

  “What a pleasant surprise!” he said when he saw her.

  His secretary, who knew him better than his own mother did, peered over the round rims of her glasses at him, her expression a mix of reproach and pity.

  “Are you busy now?” Laura asked as she walked into his office.

  He followed her. “No more than usual. You look happy. Did something happen?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Just a little.”

  “I’m pleased,” she admitted. “I talked with Ted about what he did to Lynch, about Wendell, about everything. He had a revealing dream last night in which he almost discovered it by himself. I felt it was the right moment, and I wasn’t wrong.”

  “I’m so glad.” Marcus pushed aside the papers cluttering his desk.

  “You’re really not busy?”

  “Not at all,” he said, lowering his voice.

  “I think I’m getting very near the bottom of it all, Marcus.”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  “You’re part of the story now. You can’t get away from me.” She winked at him.

  Marcus laughed.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But when you write your book about it, do me a favor and leave out our little deal to get McKay transferred to my wing.”

  “Speaking of which, I never thanked you enough for that. I drag you into my crazy schemes and you’re always there for me. Thank you.”

  “As I said, I’m glad I was able to help.”

  “Well, I didn’t come just to tell you that, or to interrupt you while you’re preparing the expense reports.” Laura pointed to the documents Marcus had piled to one side. “Want to come over to my house tomorrow for dinner?”

  “Of course.”

  “Terrific. Is seven okay?”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow at seven.”

  “I’ll ask my sister to come pick up Walter. He loves spending the night with his older cousins, and they love to spoil him.”

  Marcus didn’t react right away. Was this a date?

  Laura stood up. “So I’ll see you tomorrow,” she announced. “I’ll let you get on with your work…”

  He gave her one last smile before closing the door. Back in the lobby, Laura stifled a laugh. Dropping the invitation on him like that had been a little mean of her, she knew. Marcus had been expecting another request for a favor at work, not an invitation to dinner at her house.

  Claudia caught the mischievous look on Laura’s face and glared at her with her watchdog eyes. Dr. Hill immediately composed herself and nodded good-bye to the secretary.

  47

  Walter sat on the living room sofa with his backpack and a bag of carefully chosen toys, waiting. Though his aunt wasn’t coming for him until six, he had insisted on being ready way in advance. In case Aunt Deedee gets here early. The fact was, Walter never slept over at anyone’s house, not even his father’s (since the jerk had never bothered to fix up a bedroom for his son), except at the house of Aunt Deedee and her daughters, Grace and Michelle, his cousins.

  Laura came downstairs and saw him sitting there, quiet and eager, clutching his backpack and bag, ready to bolt from the house as soon as the doorbell rang. Her heart melted. He was sitting in the same spot where he usually waited for his father, whose habit of canceling his plans at the last minute was clearly undermining Walter’s self-esteem. Another reason to despise her ex, Laura thought.

  “Will she come, Mommy?”

  She sat next to him and stroked his cheek.

  “Of course she will.”

  Walter nodded, relieved. Just then he seemed to notice the dress his mother was wearing and the makeup she had put on. He looked her up and down.

  “Is Marcus your boyfriend?”

  Laura thought the question was hilarious, but when she saw Walter’s serious expression she maintained her composure. She smiled gently.

  “Marcus is my friend. We work together and have lots in common.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re wearing a dress.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Yes.” Walter thought over what he should say before he went on. “Daddy has girlfriends. Marcus could be your boyfriend. Grace has a boyfriend, too, but that’s a secret. Aunt Deedee doesn’t know about him.”

  “For now, Mommy doesn’t have any boyfriends. If that changes, I’ll let you know, okay?”

  Walter seemed to approve.

  Deedee arrived at that moment. Walter jumped up and, still clutching his things, ran to the front door. He surprised his aunt before she could ring the bell.

  “How’s my favorite nephew?”

  Deedee gave Walter a bear hug.

  “I thought you weren’t coming. Are my cousins here?”

  “They stayed home to wait for you. I had to run a few errands first.”

  Still hugging Walter, Deedee glanced over his shoulder. When she saw how Laura was dressed, she mimed a “Wow” that her big sister didn’t miss.

  “Jessica Rabbit wants her dress back,” Deedee said.

  Laura frowned.

  “Who’s Jessica Rabbit?” Walter asked.

  “Nobody,” Laura said. “Your aunt is acting smart.”

  “Yeah, she’s very smart,” Walter said, the sarcastic banter of the two sisters going right over his head.

  “Well, Walt, time for us to skedaddle. Michelle has been asking about you all day long.”

  “Bye, Mommy!” Walter couldn’t stop smiling. He went over to Laura and she crouched down to give him a kiss.

  Deedee took advantage of his turned back and pointed at Laura’s dress and gave it a thumbs-up.

  “Say hi to the girls for me,” Laura said. “Have a great time!”

  “You too!” Deedee replied as they went out the door.

  Laura stood in the front yard and waved good-bye. She lingered there for a minute or more after the car vanished down Embers Lane.

  Back inside, she checked to see how the dinner was doing. She had decided to make a roast with beets and potatoes, a dish she found easy to slap together. The only disadvantage was the three hours plus that it had to remain in the oven, but it was almost done.

  Marcus was punctual. He gave her the bottle of wine he had insisted on bringing, and he praised her dress. He looked very elegant himself, in dress pants, a linen sports coat, and a modern gray hat that Laura didn’t think she had seen before.

  “It smells wonderful!”


  “I’m warning you: cooking isn’t my strong point, though I do have my specialties. Come on. Let’s have a glass of wine while things finish cooking.”

  The table was set, but instead of sitting there, they went to the living room sofa and made small talk for a while: about Walter, about the hospital. The conversation drifted naturally toward film, in which they already knew they had similar interests, and then a seemingly harmless comment by Marcus led them to a subject he would rather have avoided: his recently defunct relationship with Carmen. Anyway, his interest in Laura had long been obvious, and she was a very perceptive and intelligent woman. Not talking about the elephant in the room wouldn’t have made it invisible.

  Dinner was relaxed. The roast was exquisite, and Marcus allowed himself to relish the moment. He wasn’t going to tell Laura that he thought about her constantly while she was raising a forkful of roast beet to her mouth.

  “I read your draft account of the first cycle,” he said, referring to a document Laura had emailed him.

  Laura instantly perked up. “What did you think of it?”

  “I read it yesterday, in one sitting,” Marcus said. It was incredible how talking about his field of knowledge immediately gave him back his confidence. “I found it extremely interesting. Now I have a better understanding of your—”

  “Obsession.”

  Marcus laughed.

  “I was going to say your dedication and enthusiasm. But it’s true, the case has got you a little obsessed. First, let me tell you that I agree with your manner of presenting it. From the patient’s point of view. It’s spot-on correct. Each cycle was real for Ted; substituting them for an outsider’s account of his first months in the hospital is a very useful way of presenting things from his perspective. In fact, I think your presentation was what brought one interesting fact to mind for me.”

  Laura’s eyes widened.

  “What is it? Wait a second, wait a second—help me carry all this to the kitchen. We’ll have some coffee and you’ll tell me all about it. I know myself. I won’t be able to stop.”

  This was exactly what Marcus had feared.

  “Sounds perfect.”

  They made two trips to the kitchen in silence, crossing paths in the middle, in an everyday ritual of mutual trust. Marcus pictured doing this day after day, and he felt a shiver; that’s how foolish he was.

  When the coffee was ready they went back to the living room.

  “I agree with you that the first cycle is perfect, a closed cycle,” Marcus said. “Wendell represents everything that Ted hates about himself, and dissociating himself from Wendell in order to kill him seems reasonable. Now that we’ve seen the sticker in Blaine’s house, it’s logical to assume that every sequence in the cycle has a basis in reality.”

  “That’s true,” Laura agreed.

  “Let me run through them and see if we’re on the same page about the moment when each of them diverged from reality, because that’s where we might find the most interesting points for analysis.”

  Laura listened intently, hands clasped around her coffee cup.

  “Let’s start with the suicide itself,” Marcus said. “The part where the young Lynch interrupts and makes his eloquent proposal. That’s easy enough: Ted wanted to kill himself at some point, for reasons we don’t know, and when he was about to do it, something or someone interrupted him. Maybe Lynch himself, though for a completely different reason than Ted recalls.”

  “I don’t think it was Lynch, but I do agree that Ted had reached the point of trying to take his own life.”

  “The next event is Blaine’s murder. Ted went to his house, hid in the closet, and saw the sticker. He clearly didn’t go there to kill Blaine, but he must have been there, since we’ve seen the sticker with our own eyes. That’s the piece that doesn’t fit.”

  “I’ve been thinking it over, and I believe we have to discard the possibility that Ted saw the sticker farther back in the past—for example, when other people were living there. In that case, how could he have learned that Blaine later lived in the same house? That makes no sense.”

  “Good point. There was no way to tie the sticker to the articles about Blaine in the papers. Therefore we can conclude that Ted was in the house recently, hiding in that closet. From that point, reality diverges, and we don’t know in what direction. Do you rule out the possibility that he meant to kill Blaine?”

  “I don’t rule anything out. What Ted did to Lynch with the lamp was different. There was no planning involved.”

  “You’re right. Let’s keep going. The next episode is his visit to the lawyer, Robichaud, his childhood friend. You’ve talked to him, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. But he didn’t tell me much more than what I wrote in the draft. Ted went to him to draw up a will. He told Robichaud he wanted a lawyer who didn’t belong to his usual circle, which was very reasonable under the circumstances.”

  “In any case, the collection of figures from his past at Robichaud’s house, all those schoolmates he had never seen again, shows how he felt about those years, his regrets about how he had behaved with some of them. It was a smart move on your part to emphasize his past, especially his chess playing, to bring him back to reality.”

  “Thanks. Chess was there all along, in every one of his dreams, like a hook I could reel him in with. I wish I’d seen it earlier.”

  “It wouldn’t have changed much. It might not even have worked.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Continuing the timeline, we come to his visit to Lynch’s office,” Marcus said. “And that’s what I wanted to get to. The key is establishing exactly where the line between reality and Ted’s paranoia goes. We know he went to the office and met Lynch’s secretary, Nina, there. Now, she says she came in late that day—isn’t that right?”

  “It is.”

  “But what if she’s lying? What if, as in all the other sequences in the first cycle, this first part really happened?”

  Laura thought about it.

  “Do you think the police checked out her story?”

  Laura shook her head. The detective in charge of the brief investigation, a young man named Carl Brater who met with Laura twice after Ted was admitted to Lavender, seemed to focus solely on the question of who had committed the assault. There was no doubt that Ted had beaten Lynch nearly to death. The police found him at the scene of the crime, holding the bloody lamp; his prints were everywhere. Why look into whether his secretary had lied about some insignificant detail?

  “What I mean,” Marcus said, “is that if every sequence in the first cycle has roots in reality, as the sticker should lead us to believe, then it’s possible that Ted really did see Nina that day. Otherwise, why include her? She doesn’t fit any pattern, at least none that I can see. Seeing his childhood friends at Robichaud’s house is another matter.”

  Laura had never paid much attention to Ted’s meeting with Nina, focusing instead on his later conversation with Lynch. She realized now that she’d been wrong to neglect this angle. Why even mention the secretary if she’d come in late that day? What purpose could there be? She remembered something her father, an avid fan of detective stories, used to say: when a detail seems to play no role in the story, focus on it, because it is undoubtedly significant. Nina’s presence seemed to be one such detail.

  “According to Ted’s own version,” Marcus added, “he let her go when he started talking to Lynch, and Lynch was the one who asked her not to call the police. Why not suppose that this was where Ted’s delirium begins?”

  Laura was experiencing the nervous tension she always felt when she was on the verge of glimpsing some revelatory truth. Marcus’s words made perfect sense. She sprang to her feet.

  “What is it?”

  “Just a second, please.”

  She returned a minute later carrying a blue folder.

  “It’s a copy of the police report,” Laura announced. “I told Brater it might be important for the treatment and he gave i
t to me.”

  “A bit careless on his part.”

  “I can be persuasive when the situation demands it,” she said, giving her hair a quick flip before sitting down. She opened the folder. “Nina’s address ought to be here, along with her testimony.”

  Marcus stared openly at her, taking advantage of how absorbed she was in the document. Laura stopped when she came across the photos of Lynch’s office: a few wide-angle shots, a close-up of the body on the floor, another of the bronze lamp used in beating the lawyer, the wound to his head, the blows to his face…They were photocopies, so the quality was abysmal. One picture in particular grabbed Laura’s attention. She sat looking at it. Marcus leaned over but didn’t see anything special about it. It was the reception area, where Nina’s desk stood.

  “There,” Laura said, pointing to a corner of the desk.

  It was the box from Dunkin’ Donuts.

  “Those are the doughnuts Nina brought to the office that day,” Laura said. “She even offered one to Ted.”

  “Of course! Another detail that should have alerted us. This shows that Nina was with Ted! And no doubt she was there when Lynch arrived.”

  Laura stood up again, visibly losing her cool.

  “I can’t believe it. Why didn’t she say anything?”

  “Well, if things happened as we think they did, she left before Ted beat Lynch. It was a personal matter between friends.”

  “But he had a gun!”

  “If Lynch asked her not to tell the police, perhaps she was just following his instructions. And the next day, when the police told her that her boss was in a coma and that they had caught the guy who did it, she may have convinced herself that it made no sense to tell them that she’d been there. What did she say in her statement?”

  “That she’d asked for the day off to take care of some personal stuff. I doubt that Brater checked out her story.” Laura looked through the sheets in the file. “Here it is. What she said, to be exact, was that she had an appointment with the eye doctor. I have her phone number and address. Tomorrow I’ll go see her early in the morning before heading to the hospital.”