by Tom Wright
‘Is this related to what you said you needed to tell me?’
‘In a way. With Dr Gold of course everything was about money. She was as dishonest with the insurance companies as they were with us, and I’m sure if anyone wanted to really look at the records they could make some kind of case against her. Probably against me too, as far as that goes.’ She touched a tissue to her eyes. ‘I’m not saying I deserve to be delivered from what I’ve done,’ she went on. Another glance at Ritchie, who again nodded reassuringly. ‘I’ll render unto Caesar what I must.’
‘Mrs Cutchell – ’
‘And whether I am punished or not, I’ll never work in an environment like that again, I can promise you,’ she said. ‘But what I thought you should see was this.’ She picked up a printout from the side table and handed it to me. It was a column of letter sequences, in caps, and beside that a column of number/letter combinations:
ALK 00800M
CR 01200M
FB 01400Q
FJJ 00150W
FO 02000Q
LNF 00400M
LNR 00600M
MR 01000Q
PSF 10000Q
VBM 00300M
ZK 00500M
‘Where did you get this?’ I said.
‘From Dr Gold’s computer. I printed it out the day I was fired. In fact, it’s the reason she let me go. She caught me with it on the screen, but I’d already slipped this into my purse.’
‘I get the idea you knew exactly what this was,’ I said.
‘Yes, sir, I know what it is. Earlier I said all the billing went through my hands. I should have said all the regular billing did. This list had to do with a special account Dr Gold kept. I found out about it when the bank mixed up the statements one month and I opened the wrong one.’
‘Then the letters on the left would be people’s initials – ’
She nodded.
‘And the numbers on the right are dollar amounts?’
‘Right. Four hundred, a thousand, twelve hundred and so forth. Regular payments.’
I glanced up at her. ‘Did you know who the payments were for?’
‘Dr Gold. Her private account.’
‘What about the letters on the right?’
‘That tells you whether the payment was to be made weekly, monthly or quarterly.’
‘You know these patients?’
‘No. At least I don’t recognise the initials, but Dr Gold called them patients when she walked in on me.’
‘What else did she say?’
‘She screamed that this was privileged information, that I had no right to be snooping in her computer, things like that.’
‘How did you get into her files?’ I said. ‘Wasn’t this password protected?’
‘Oh, yes, it was. Dr Gold thought she was smarter than everyone else, but she had a habit of using the names of constellations as passwords. Signs of the zodiac, I guess they’re called. Brother Ritchie thinks it was part of an overall pattern of evil. And that what happened to Dr Gold was a righteous judgement on her.’ She glanced at the preacher again and got another thin smile and a hint of a nod. ‘Anyway, I got in on the third try. Leo.’
‘Mrs Cutchell, what did you say Dr Gold’s hourly fee was?’
‘A hundred and ninety-five dollars an hour. More for going to court or testing.’
‘How often did she see the patients?’
‘Usually once a week.’
I looked down the list of figures, all of them round and tidy sums. What did anybody sell – or buy – for such nice even amounts like these? ‘That fee doesn’t match up with these numbers,’ I said. ‘Did she charge anybody by the month for their visits? Or by the quarter?’
‘No.’
‘So – ’
‘So these entries have nothing to do with treatment, Lieutenant Bonham.’
Of course they didn’t. No one spoke for a few seconds as the only plausible explanation buzzed silently around the room a couple of times and came in for a landing.
‘Because they’re blackmail payments,’ I said unnecessarily.
With this much at least off her chest, Mrs Cutchell, then her husband and finally Brother Ritchie, nodded.
THIRTY-FIVE
When I called District Attorney Rick Hart for an appointment, I didn’t mention his younger brother Robert, or the fact that I had managed to steer him into rehab instead of jail the year before. Rick didn’t mention my troubles with the city manager. On this don’t-ask-don’t-tell basis we met at his office and got down to business.
‘There’s got to be some way we can at least get the names,’ I said as we sat on opposite sides of his busy-looking mahogany desk.
‘Files are out, names are out, billing records are out,’ he said, shaking his head tiredly. ‘You know this stuff as well as I do, Jim. It all comes under the statute.’ He tossed his pencil onto the yellow pad on his desk and blew out his breath. Touched by the afternoon sun angling through the window, his kinky red hair glowed like incandescent filaments around the edges. ‘I don’t like it any better than you do,’ he said, ‘but there it is. Inge’s gonna toss anything he thinks we developed from those records – it’s all fruit of the same fuckin’ poisoned tree.’ He took a clove from the small cut-glass candy dish beside his desk calendar, bit it in half with savage precision.
I said, ‘What about the Cutchell list?’
Hart stood and walked to the window, staring abstractly into the pale sky, five and a half pudgy feet of disgust in pinstripe worsted. Finally he said, ‘Considering how you came by it, I think we can dance our way around that. As far as it goes. What the hell good it’ll do us is the real question. No way to decipher the initials or connect them to anything. Same for the numbers.’
We both knew our best hope for finding out who planned and ordered Gold’s killing was her patient records, either in her computer files or as hard copy. All the records had been in custody and under seal at Three since the day the body was discovered, but without a court order they might as well have been on Phobos. If Rick’s office used the information anyway and got caught, it would blow the entire case. Even physical possession of the records put the police and prosecutors at the dark end of a grey area.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Forget the names. How about just initials?’
He turned to face me. ‘What do you mean?’
‘LA tells me psychologists are supposed to make arrangements with somebody, a master I think they call it, to handle their records if something happens to them, they die or whatever. My guess, Gold would never do that – she was too paranoid. If I’m right, maybe you can get Judge Inge to appoint a master, another psychologist, to oversee the files and have the names converted to initials. We look for matches with the Cutchell list. Find them and you’ve got probable cause, even with Inge.’
Hart stared at me. He went back to his desk, tapped his teeth with his fingernail. ‘By God,’ he said. He scribbled a couple of lines on the pad. ‘By God, we might just make that work.’ He leaned back in his chair and thought for a minute. ‘Give me the rest of the day,’ he said. ‘I’ll pull up some case law and talk to the judge.’
Under the deal he eventually worked out with Inge, a psychologist master – Max, as it turned out – was appointed by the judge to supervise the preparation of the list. The final roster came to 582 sets of initials representing all the cases in Gold’s active and recent files, and it was in Hart’s hands before lunch on the day it was finished. I got OZ on the phone and told him what we had.
There was a silence as he thought about it. Finally he said, ‘How good does it eyeball?’
‘First look, the initials on Earlene Cutchell’s list don’t seem to match any from Gold’s files, so it’s probably going to take some decoding, but it’s the best shot we’ve had so far.’
‘Then run with it,’ he said. ‘The council’s still leaning on us hard to chase these yahoos out in the woods, so I’ll do-si-do ’em a little to keep the heat off. Hazen’s jaws a
re gettin’ pretty tight. He keeps asking me where you’re at. I still haven’t heard anything about a subpoena for you but it could be out there, so look sharp. Meantime, there ain’t no point in getting anybody else hung out to dry until we know something for sure.’
My phone rang. It was Dispatch.
To tell me LA had been shot.
THIRTY-SIX
‘What’s her condition?’ I asked the dispatcher, my chest tight. ‘Where was she hit?’ The light around me seemed to pulse with invisible colour, my own voice hollow and distant.
A hesitation. ‘Uh, the responding MTs advise it was a, uh, head wound, sir. We don’t have any other information right now.’
I pictured LA’s defiant hair, her dark sceptical eyes, her rare but beautiful smile. A head wound? That couldn’t be right. There had to be some mistake. Head wounds killed people, and LA couldn’t be dead. That couldn’t happen; the universe couldn’t do anything so terrible without some kind of forewarning.
But it could.
The universe wasn’t the responsible party here, though, and I knew it. It wasn’t the universe that had brought LA into this and put her directly in harm’s way. Gotten her killed. This was my fight, not hers; her work had been healing broken minds and hearts, not chasing murdering assholes to whom her life meant nothing at all.
It was at this moment that I saw my own selfishness and stupidity more clearly than ever before in my life. I’d been unforgivably blind, bringing this horror down on us, inviting disaster with open arms and sacrificing LA’s life on the altar of my own fucking brainlessness.
On my way to St Vincent’s I got Dispatch again to tell them where I was. ‘Let Patrol know,’ I said. ‘And if there’s anybody out there who doesn’t know this truck, give them the description and tell them if they want to see their kids again, don’t get in my way.’
‘Roger that, sir.’ He told me the shooting had been called in from Burnsville Road and 59 South, where somebody in a passing vehicle had apparently fired at least one shot at LA from the next lane as she drove north toward the interstate. No reports of anybody hearing shots. Her unsteered vehicle had then drifted into the median, where it had bogged down in the soft soil of a drainage swale and come to a stop. Nobody had gotten a plate number or description of the shooter’s vehicle. No witnesses to the shooting itself had been located.
I managed to get Mouncey on her cell and asked her to get to the scene and take control of the investigation, but there was nothing else I could do. And there was no excuse for not seeing that something like this was coming. I should have given more weight to the threat sandwiched into Keets’ words. I should never have underestimated him like this. I should have taken all the precautions that hadn’t occurred to me then but were so obvious to me now.
What I couldn’t stop hearing and re-hearing in my mind was Dispatch telling me LA had been shot in the head, and what I couldn’t stop seeing was a parade of images of the head-injury victims I’d seen over the years: faces shot away, skulls blown apart like melons, bodies gone slack and pale. And finally a mental picture of LA lying on a hospital gurney, what was left of her face covered by a bloody sheet. I caught myself flexing my right hand again and again, remembering what Max had said about a man’s capacity for violence, and understood finally that this was what it took to blow away ten thousand years of civilisation in half a second: the murder of your own flesh and blood. I realised now how absolutely wrong I’d been to stop Bo from killing Tidwell. If I’d just let him pull the trigger that day, he’d still be alive and telling dirty jokes and yelling at the Cowboys on the TV screen, whether he was still carrying a badge or not. His instinct had been the true one, not mine.
It was a mistake I was never going to make again.
As if I weren’t the cause of what had happened, I served notice on the heavens: the world was now a free-fire zone. There was no hole deep enough to hide LA’s killer, not anywhere, and no mercy imaginable for him. I struggled to beat back my nausea and keep my thoughts focused. I had to maintain clarity and control for what I was going to do.
I slammed through the ER entrance, blew past the clerk and a nurse in pink scrubs who actually ran away when she saw me, looked into Room 1 where I saw a grass-stained teenager with a swollen ankle, into Room 2 where a kid was screaming about a bug in his ear. I ripped the curtain to Room 3 aside but it was empty.
I found LA in Room 4. She was sitting on the edge of the table as a young oriental doctor in blue scrubs carefully stitched a cut above her left eyebrow. There were other, smaller cuts on her cheek and up near her hairline. Bunched bloody towels lay on the table beside her and on the floor, and a couple of nurses were re-kitting the cranial trauma gear. There was blood all over the front of LA’s white pullover shirt.
Catching sight of me from the corner of her eye, she said, ‘I’m okay, Bis.’
‘Is she, doc?’ My own blood was roaring in my ears.
‘Yes, she is. There is a small artery here, and all the blood caused a little hysteria with the onlookers, but the bullets did not strike her at all. These injuries are from flying glass. This one will make a small scar, but a cute one. She is going to be fine.’
THIRTY-SEVEN
Two hours after getting LA through the discharge hassle and driving her back to Lanshire, I was out of a job. I’d gone to Three with the idea of catching up on the dailies and updating OZ, but he had checked out right after lunch and still wasn’t back. I was telling Ridout about the Cutchell interview when I looked up and saw OZ walking across the squad room from the direction of the elevators, his jaw tight. He caught my eye and nodded toward his office. I caught up with him and closed the door behind me as he was bringing out a fifth of Jack Daniels and a couple of jelly glasses from the bottom drawer of his desk. He poured three fingers of whisky into each glass.
‘Just got back from a meeting with a bunch of them egg-suckers on the council,’ he said, tossing back his whisky. ‘They’re gonna call a special session as soon as they can get a quorum together.’ He rapped the glass down on his desk.
‘About what?’
‘You. They’re calling you a headcase, re-openin’ the investigation on that old collar at the graveyard, even talkin’ about you having something to do with Gold’s killing. Bastards say they’ll be looking at termination and maybe even some kind of charges. Sounds like they think they can get you behind bars.’ He shook his head in disgusted disbelief.
‘Hazen’s behind it?’
‘Like shit behind a goose. And for now you’re off the job, so I gotta have your sidearm and tin. Got your hideout piece?’
‘Yeah, I do.’
‘Good.’
As I tossed my Glock and badge case on OZ’s desk, I tried to imagine how the investigation was going to play out with me gone. I didn’t see how just taking me off the board could be enough to derail it, and without that there didn’t seem to be much benefit to Hazen, the council or anybody else in getting rid of me. But maybe I was overestimating my own importance. Maybe there was no connection between my heading the investigation and the sudden interest in bringing me down. I remembered Jaston Keets scoffing at the idea of death threats deterring me or the department, and he was right, because after me the next guy they’d have to get past would be OZ. It was hard to imagine anybody thinking that was going to be a better deal than keeping me.
I said, ‘What exactly is Hazen’s angle, OZ?’
He shook his head. ‘Damned if I know, Jim, but this ain’t over. Not by a long shot. You still got that hellacious boat?’
‘Yeah, I’ve still got her. Why?’
He told me what he had in mind.
The next day’s Gazette coverage of my firing – which I knew wasn’t Cass’s because she only wrote under a byline – turned out to be worth about seven column inches above the fold, far right:
Decorated TX-Side Cop Out;
Inquiry Pending
From Staff Reports
TRAVERTON, Texas -- Noted Texas-side pol
ice lieutenant James B. Bonham was today indefinitely suspended without pay, an action tantamount to firing, by city officials after City Manager Dwight Hazen announced an official inquiry into the near-fatal beating of a suspect in an earlier investigation. The suspect, Jeremy Gage Tidwell, who had been wanted for questioning in the murders of the wife and daughter of Bonham’s then partner, the late Robert ‘Bo’ Jackson, was critically injured while being taken into custody, requiring extensive plastic surgery of the face and jaw. According to Hazen, Bonham, who he says has a history of mental health problems, assaulted Tidwell in retaliation for the murders.
The rest of the article was more of the same, Hazen promising an arrest ‘when circumstances warrant’. I tossed the paper into the recycle bin and shrugged at LA, who sat across the kitchen table from me. She had changed the bandage above her eye, and the visible nicks and cuts on her face seemed to be healing well.
She took a sip of coffee from her mug and said, ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.’
‘OZ wants us to take Bufordine up to DeGray,’ I said. The boat had belonged to a Shreveport dope dealer before he got busted, after which it went through forfeiture proceedings and came up for auction in Traverton in the middle of a sleet storm. Realising nobody else was in the hunt, I bid two thousand dollars, all the disposable cash I had. Under normal conditions it wouldn’t have been enough to buy the trailer the boat rode on, but on this day it put me in possession of a bass rig worth more than my house, a Merc-powered 20-foot Allison capable of a hundred knots on flat water.
Looking the boat over, LA had said, ‘This is a phallic flip-off that can’t be topped, Bis. We’ll call her Bufordine.’
I would never have thought of christening a bass boat, but LA had liked Casey’s name for my truck and – probably thinking I needed more continuity in my life – decided to extend the theme.
‘Hey, that’s a great idea, Bis,’ LA said now. ‘Hell of a lot better than sitting around the house grinding your teeth and feeling sorry for yourself.’
