Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories, Volume 3

by Jeffery Deaver

  Rhyme glanced at his textbook, sitting in an evidence collection bag. “Why did you happen to buy it?”

  Ferguson explained that as a documentary TV producer he watched as many competitors’ programs as he could. “I saw the episode on A&E about that murder in Florida, where you were talking about evidence. I thought it was brilliant. I thought maybe my company could do something along those lines. So I ordered your book. But I never got around to doing the show. I went on to other things.”

  “And your wife knew about the book?” Sellitto asked.

  “I guess I mentioned the project to her and that I was reading it. She’s been in my apartment off and on over the past year. She must’ve stolen it sometime when she was over.” He regarded Rhyme. “But why didn’t you think I was the one, like she planned?”

  Rhyme said, “I did at first. But then I decided it wouldn’t’ve been smart for somebody to use a book that could be traced to them as a template for murder. But it’d be very smart for someone else to use that book. And whoever put this together was brilliant.”

  “He profiled you,” Sachs said with a smile.

  Rhyme grimaced.

  Sellitto had then spoken to Ferguson and learned of the nasty divorce, which gave them the idea that his ex might be behind it. They learned, too, that he’d just dropped off Vicki Sellick, the woman he was dating, at her apartment.

  They’d tried to call the woman but, when she hadn’t picked up, Sachs and the team had sped there to see if she was in fact under attack.

  “She was nuts,” Ferguson muttered. “Insane.”

  “Ah, madness and brilliance—they’re not mutually exclusive,” Rhyme replied. “I think we can agree on that.”

  Then Marko rubbed his close-cropped head and laughed. “I’m sort of surprised you didn’t suspect me. I mean, think about it. I was first on the scene at the Twenty-sixth Street homicide, I knew forensics, I’d taken your course and you could assume I’d read your book.”

  Rhyme grunted. “Well, sorry to say, kid, but you were a suspect. The first one.”

  “Me?”

  “Sure. For the reasons you just mentioned.”

  Sellitto said, “But Linc had me check you out. You were in the lab in Queens, working late, when the first vic was killed.”

  “We had to check. No offense,” Rhyme said.

  “It’s cool, sir…Lincoln.”

  “All right,” Sellitto muttered. “I got paperwork to do.” He left with Ferguson, who would go downtown to dictate his statement. Marko, too, left for the night.

  “That his first name or last?” Rhyme asked.

  “Don’t know,” Sachs replied.

  An hour later, she’d finished bundling up the last of the evidence collection bags and jars and boxes for transport to the evidence storage facility in Queens.

  “We’ll definitely need to air the place out,” Rhyme muttered. “Smells like an alleyway in here.”

  Sachs agreed. She flung open the windows and poured them each a Glenmorangie Scotch. She dropped into the rattan chair beside Rhyme’s Storm Arrow. His drink was in a tumbler, sprouting a straw. She placed it in a cup holder near his mouth. He had good movement of his right arm and hand, thanks to the surgery, but he was still learning the subtleties of control and didn’t want to risk spilling valuable single-malt.

  “So,” she said, regarding him with a gleam in her eye.

  “You’re looking coy, Sachs.”

  “Well, I was just thinking. Are you finally going to admit that there’s more to policing than physical evidence?”

  Rhyme thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so.”

  She laughed. “Rhyme, we closed this one because of deductions from witness statements and observations…and a little profiling. Evidence didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Ah,” Rhyme said, “but there’s a flaw in your logic, Sachs.”

  “Which is?”

  “Those deductions and observations all came from the fact that somebody bought a textbook of mine, correct?”

  “True.”

  “And what was the book about?”

  She shrugged. “Evidence.”

  “Ergo, physical evidence was the basis for closing the case.”

  “You’re not going to concede this one, are you, Rhyme?”

  “Do I ever?” he asked and, placing his hand on hers, enjoyed a long sip of the smoky liquor.

  PARADICE

  a John Pellam story

  ON ONE SIDE WAS ROCK, dark as old bone. On the other a drop of a hundred feet.

  And in front, a Ford pickup, one of those fancy models, a pleasant navy-blue shade. It cruised down the steep grade, moving slow. The driver and passenger enjoying the Colorado scenery.

  Those were his choices: Rock. Air. Pickup.

  Which really wasn’t much of a choice at all as a means to die.

  John Pellam jammed his left boot on the emergency brake again. It dropped another notch toward the floor. The pads ground fiercely and slowed the big camper not at all. He was going close to sixty.

  He downshifted. Low gear screamed and the box threatened to tear apart. Don’t lose the gears, he told himself. Popped the lever back up to D.

  Sixty mph…seventy…

  Air. Rock.

  Seventy-five.

  Pickup.

  Choose one, Pellam thought. His foot cramped as he instinctively shoved the useless brake pedal to the floor again. Five minutes ago he’d been easing the chugging camper over Clement Pass, near Walsenburg, three hours south of Denver, admiring the stern, impressive scenery this cool spring morning. There’d been a soft hiss, his foot had gone to the floor and the Winnebago had started its free fall.

  From the tinny boom box on the passenger seat Kathy Mattea sang “Who Turned Out the Light?”

  Pellam squinted as he bore down on the pickup, honking the horn, flashing his lights to warn the driver out of the way. He caught a glimpse of sunglasses in the Ford’s rearview mirror. The driver, wearing a brown cowboy hat, spun around quickly to see how close the camper really was. Then turned back, hands clasped at ten to two on the wheel.

  Air, pickup…

  Pellam picked mountain. He eased to the right, thinking maybe he could brush against the rock and brush and pine, slow down enough so that when he went head-on into a tree it wouldn’t kill him. Maybe.

  But just as he swerved, the driver of the truck instinctively steered in the same direction—to the right, to escape onto the shoulder. Pellam sucked in an “Oh, hell” and spun the wheel to the left.

  So did the driver of the Ford. Like one of those little dances people do trying to get out of each other’s way as they approach on the sidewalk. Both vehicles swung back to the right then to the left once more as the camper bore down on the blue pickup. Pellam chose to stay in the left lane, on the edge of the cliff. The pickup veered back to the right. But it was too late; the camper struck its rear end—red and clear plastic shrapnel scattered over the asphalt—and hooked on to the pickup’s trailer hitch.

  The impact goosed the speed up to eighty.

  Pellam looked over the roof of the Ford. He had a fine view of where the road disappeared in a curve a half mile ahead. If they didn’t slow by then the two vehicles were going to sail into space in the finest tradition of hackneyed car chase scenes.

  Oh, hell. That wasn’t all: a new risk, a bicyclist. A woman, it seemed, on a mountain bike. She had one of those pistachio-shell-shaped helmets, in black, and a heavy backpack.

  She had no clue they were bearing down on her.

  For a moment the pickup wiggled out of control then straightened its course. The driver seemed to be looking back at Pellam more than ahead. He didn’t see the bike.

  Seventy miles an hour. A quarter mile from the curve.

  And a hundred feet from the bicyclist.

  “Look out!” Pellam shouted. Pointlessly.

  The driver of the pickup began to brake. The Ford vibrated powerfully. They slowed a few mil
es per hour.

  Maybe the curve wasn’t that sharp. He squinted at a yellow warning sign.

  The diagram showed a 180-degree switchback. A smaller sign commanded that thou shalt take the turn at ten miles an hour.

  But they’d be on the cyclist in seconds. Without a clue they were speeding toward her, she was coasting and weaving around in the right lane, avoiding rocks. And about to get crushed to death. Some riders had tiny rearview mirrors attached to their helmets. She didn’t.

  “Look!” Pellam shouted again and gestured.

  Whether the driver saw the gesture or not Pellam couldn’t say. But the passenger did and pointed.

  The pickup swerved to the left. Another squeal of brakes. The camper rode up higher on the hitch. It was like a fishhook. As they raced past the bicyclist, her mouth open in shock, she wove to the side, the far right, and managed to skid to a stop.

  That was one tragedy averted. But the other loomed.

  They were a thousand feet from the switchback.

  Pellam felt the vibrations again, from the brakes. They slowed to sixty-five then sixty. Downshift.

  Five hundred feet.

  They’d slowed to fifty.

  Danger Sharp Curve.

  Down to forty-five leisurely miles an hour.

  The switchback loomed. Straight ahead, past the curve, Pellam could see nothing. No trees. No mountains. Just a huge empty space. The tourist marker at Clement Pass said the area boasted some of the most spectacular vertical drops in Colorado.

  Forty miles an hour. Thirty-nine.

  Maybe we’ll just bring this one off.

  But then the grade dropped, an acute angle, and the wedded vehicles began accelerating. Fifty, fifty-five.

  Pellam took off his Ray-Bans. Swept the pens and beer bottles off the dash. Knocked the boom box to the floor. Kathy continued to sing. The song “Grand Canyon” was coming up soon.

  A hundred feet from the switchback.

  With a huge scream the pickup’s nose dropped. The driver had locked the brakes in a last desperate attempt to stop. Blue smoke swirled as the truck fishtailed and the rear of the camper swung to the left. But the driver was good. He turned into the skid far enough to control it but not so much that he lost control. They straightened out and kept slowing.

  They were fifty feet from the edge of the switchback. The speed had dropped to fifty.

  Forty-five…

  But it wasn’t enough.

  Pellam threw his arms over his face, sank down into the seat.

  The pickup sliced through the pointless wooden guardrail and sailed over the edge of the road, the camper just behind.

  There was a loud thump as the undercarriage of the Ford uprooted a skinny tree and then a soft jolt. Pellam opened his eyes to find the vehicles rolling down a gentle ten-foot incline, smooth as a driveway, into the parking lot of the Overlook Diner, sitting in the middle of a spacious area on an outcropping of rock high above the valley floor.

  With a resounding snap the camper’s front bumper broke loose and fell beneath the front tires, slicing through and flattening them, a hard jolt that launched the boom box and possibly a beer bottle or two into Pellam’s ear and temple.

  He winced at the pain. The truck rolled leisurely through the lot and steered out of the way of the Winnebago, which hobbled on, slowing, toward the rear of the diner.

  Pellam’s laughter at the peaceful conclusion to the near-tragedy vanished as the camper’s nose headed directly for a large propane tank.

  Shit…

  Hitting the useless brakes again, couldn’t help himself, he squinted. But the dead tires slowed the camper significantly and the result of the collision was a quiet thonk, not the fireball that was the requisite conclusion of car chases in the sort of movies Pellam preferred not to work on.

  He lowered his head and inhaled deeply for a moment. Not praying. Just lowered his head. He climbed out and stretched. John Pellam was lean of face and frame and tall, with not-quite-trimmed dark hair. In his denim jacket, Noconas, well-traveled jeans and a black wrinkled dress shirt converted to casual wear, he resembled a cowboy, or at least was mistaken for one in places like this, though not in the low-rent district of Beverly Hills—yes, they exist—that was his mailing address. The cowboy aura he tended to perpetuate not for image but for sentiment; the story went that he was actually related to a figure from the Old West, Wild Bill Hickok.

  Pellam walked stiffly toward the pickup, noting the damage wasn’t terrible. Scraped paint and hitch, broken brake- and taillight.

  The driver, too, shut off the engine and eased the door open.

  Pellam approached. “Look, mister, I’m really sorry. The brakes…”

  The Stetson came off swiftly, unleashing a cascade of long chestnut hair. The woman was in her mid-thirties, petite, about five two or so. With a heart-shaped face, red lips, brows thick and dark, which, for some reason, made them wildly sensual.

  The passenger-side door opened and a young man—well built in a gangly sort of way, with an anemic goatee and short ruddy hair—climbed out. A cautious smile on his face. He looked as if he wanted to apologize for the accident, though passengers were probably not the first suspects traffic officers looked at.

  Pellam continued toward the driver.

  She took off her own Ray-Bans.

  He was thinking that her eyes were the palest, most piercing gray he’d ever seen when she drew back and decked him with a solid right to the jaw.

  * * *

  A COLD COLORADO DESERT WIND had come up and they were all inside the diner, the cast now including the town sheriff, fiftyish and twice Pellam’s weight. His name was partially H. Werther, according to his name plate. He stood near the counter, talking to the cowgirl.

  Pellam was sitting at a table while a medic who smelled of chewing tobacco worked on his jaw. Pellam was mad at himself. He’d been in more fights than he could—or cared to—count. He’d seen the squint in her eyes as he stepped close and had an idea that it was an about-to-swing squint. And all the while Pellam kept grinning like a freshman on a first date and thinking, Now, those are some extraordinary eyes.

  For Christsake, you might’ve ducked at least.

  The fist had glanced off bone and hadn’t caused any serious damage, though it loosened a tooth and laid open some skin.

  Six other patrons—two older couples and two single Cat-capped workers—watched with straight-faced amusement.

  “She got you good,” offered the medic, in a low voice so the sheriff didn’t hear.

  “It was the wreck, stuff flying everywhere.” He looked out the window at the damaged Winnebago. The medic looked, too. And, okay, it didn’t seem all that damaged. “Things flew around.”

  “Uhn,” he grunted.

  “A boom box.” He decided not to mention the beer bottles.

  “We’re trained to look for certain contusions and abrasions. Like, for domestic situations.”

  She barely tapped me, Pellam thought and wobbled the tooth again.

  The driver stood with her arms crossed. The hat was back on. The brown was set off by a small green feather. She gazed back as she spoke to the sheriff; the beige-uniformed man towered over her and his weight, not insignificant, was a high percentage muscle. Probably the only peace officer in whatever town this was; Pellam had passed a welcome-to sign but that had been just as the emergency brake pad had pungently melted and he hadn’t had the inclination to check out the name and population of the place where he was about to die. He guessed it was maybe a thousand souls.

  As the sheriff jotted in a small notebook Pellam studied the woman. She was calm now and he thought again how beautiful she looked.

  Pale eyes, dark eyebrows.

  Two red knuckles on her right hand.

  She and the sheriff stood next to the cash register, an old-time hand-crank model. The diner itself was a real relic, too. Aluminum trim, paint-spatter Formica countertops, black-and-white linoleum diamonds on the floor. Arterial blood red f
or the vinyl upholstery—booth and stool.

  The man who’d been in the passenger seat of the Ford stepped out of the washroom, still wearing a cautious smile. He was dressed in dark, baggy clothes—the sort you’d see in TriBeCa or on Melrose in West Hollywood. Pellam—for whom the line between movies and reality was always a little hazy—thought immediately that he could have stepped right out of a Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez flick. He wore no-nonsense hiking boots. Clutching his backpack, he laughed nervously again. To Pellam he nodded a rueful glance—the sort soldiers might exchange when they’ve just survived their first firefight. His hair was cut flat on the top, short on the sides—the kind of cut Pellam associated with characters in the comic books of his childhood; he mentally dubbed the man Butch.

  Was she his wife? Girlfriend, sister? She wore a wedding ring but was easily ten years older. Not that that meant anything nowadays—if it ever had. Pellam was experienced, but not particularly successful, in the esoterica of romance. His job didn’t allow much room for relationships.

  Or that’s what he told himself.

  The medic pressed a bandage on his jaw. “You’re good to go. Keep your guard up.”

  “It was a—”

  “Then against dangerous entertainment devices.” The man nodded a farewell to the sheriff, shoved a chaw in his mouth and left with his fix-’em-up bag.

  Pellam rose unsteadily and walked toward the driver and sheriff, who said, “Everybody, pull out some tickets for me, if you would.”

  Butch said evenly, “Yessir. Here you go.” A moment’s pause as he dug through his wallet, which was thick with scraps of paper. Pellam noted his license was Illinois. Taylor was his real name. Pellam was somehow disappointed at this.

  “Don’t look much like you,” the sheriff said, examining the license.

  “I didn’t have a beard then.” Pointing to the picture. “Or short hair.”

  “Can see that. I ain’t blind. Still don’t look like you.”

  “Well…” Taylor offered, for no particular purpose.

  “This your current residence? Chicago?”