“At another time I might make rude references to lower g.i. practices performed aboard trains,” she answered. “But not now. It sounds like somebody trying to remember ‘pulmonary edema,’ which basically means your lungs are a mess. Don’t tell me Pond has it.”
“No, his father does. The father’s in the hospital and Jeffrey and his mother have been there with him since four yesterday afternoon. I’m sure the FBI already has this information and has checked it out. They tracked Pond to his father’s hospital room last night. If what Mrs. Pond says is true, Jeffrey couldn’t have orchestrated all that publicity about himself last night. E-mails were sent to the papers, TV stations, the police. And to me. Pond wasn’t even near a computer. I’ll check it out with Rathbone, but I’m afraid Pond’s not Sword. So what about the blood test on Kate? And is Pieter there with her? Has he come around yet?”
“Apparently Pieter left a message on Kate’s home answering machine this morning,” Rox said. “He told her he’ll be leaving for Holland on Thursday and prefers not to speak with her between now and then. Meanwhile, Kate’s blood is positive for trace amounts of an MAOI. It’s almost gone now. The big surge would probably have been four or five days ago. She’s shaky but she’s taking it pretty well. I’m going to call Rathbone right now with the test results.”
“Five days ago was Friday, the night of her fundraiser, Rox,” I said. “And somebody sent a deli tray containing everything necessary to kill her.”
“Yep, right down to the canned figs,” Roxie agreed. “But she didn’t eat any of it because she’s on this diet, so she’s fine. Sword may have been at that fundraiser, Blue. If our perp’s a male, he might have been there to get a trophy of some sort. Might even have been taking photographs of the event. If it’s one of the women then probably not, but who knows? Do you remember seeing any of the Rainer staff there that evening?”
“Rox, I’d never seen any of the Rainer staff at that point, and there were seventy-five people milling around an art gallery where all the lights are on the art, not the crowd. There was a photographer, but then there always is at these things. I think he ducked out right after the news about Dixie’s death, probably to get the photos in to his paper. Everybody there except BB and Kate were strangers to me. It’s not likely I’d remember if I didsee somebody like Eldridge or Grecchi or Megan, although I might have remembered Pond. He’d have been the only muscle-bound bodybuilder in a sea of oxford cloth and trendy little suits. I don’t remember seeing him, though, and he’s out of the running since last night, anyway.”
“Probably,” she agreed. “I need to go, Blue. Have to be at Rathbone’s office in a half hour. Do whatever it is you have to do, but there’s no point in placing yourself in danger. The FBI and the police will handle it from here. Stay away from the rest of the Rainer staff, okay? Especially Grecchi. I don’t like what’s shaping up here and I don’t want anything to do with it. The FBI and the cops will have to take it from here.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call you at home later.”
I knew what Roxie meant. I’d mentioned it when we discussed taking this case. If Isadora Grecchi was the killer, then her depressive disorder would be seen as a cause of her criminal behavior. The publicity attendant upon Grecchi’s capture would only reinforce the public’s belief that everybody with a psychiatric diagnosis is a violent predator.
The media would have a field day, running sidebars about Jack the Ripper and interviews with colorful “mental health professionals” whose credentials could be traced to mail-order diploma mills in Texas. Some of these would hint broadly that demonic possession is more prevalent than we think. In short, Grecchi’s history of depression would turn an already horrible situation into a debacle of escalating ruin. It would hurt thousands of people. I didn’t want it to happen any more than Roxie did.
And maybe I could head it off, I thought. Maybe I could talk to Grecchi, not asking her to admit guilt but nonetheless orchestrating a tidy conclusion in which she’d be whisked to some secure facility with no fanfare. I’d be a negotiator, I decided. I’d seen this done in movies.
I didn’t call first, merely drove to Isadora Grecchi’s home in Mission Hills and parked in front. Then I let Brontë out on the passenger’s side and we climbed the steps to Grecchi’s porch. I didn’t look behind me, didn’t scrutinize a plumber’s van across the street that might have been a plumber’s van and might have been a stakeout. It seemed best to pretend I didn’t know they were there. If they were.
“Dr. Grecchi?” I called through the screen door. “It’s Blue McCarron. I need to talk to you. There’s no one with me but my dog, Brontë.”
There was no answer from inside. No smell of oil paint, either. No sound. I could see through the house to the deck over the canyon behind it. Three pigeons were walking around aimlessly on the redwood decking as though waiting for a phone call that would tell them what to do next. And yet the place didn’t feel empty. What it felt like was wrong.
“Dr. Grecchi?”
Still no response but she had to be there. The house was open, doors and windows admitting the warm, dry breeze. The screen door latch turned in my hand, and I yelled one last time before going in.
“Dr. Grecchi!”
It was Brontë who found her, no doubt drawn by the scent of blood. I could smell it myself by the time I reached the bathroom door where Brontë was snuffling and whining at a puddle of dark red liquid filling the grout lines between the bright yellow tiles of the floor. A sweet, metallic scent like wet iron railings. Isadora Grecchi sat on the floor, her back against the side of a yellow bathtub. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and in her right hand was a knife fitted with a single-edge razor. Artists use these knives to cut canvas prior to stretching it on a frame. Her left wrist was slashed on its interior side so deeply I could see the white bones inside. Bones I’d learned in junior high school are called the radius and ulna.
We feel these bones in our own arms every day and know their Latin names. They aren’t as unfamiliar as, say, the vomer, a flat bone lying vertically in the middle of our skulls. The top edge of the vomer forms part of the septum of the nose. Still, we expect to go through whole lifetimes never actually seeing a radius and ulna, ever. I hated myself for feeling sick.
“Oh my God!” I said, grabbing a thick white washcloth from a bar on the wall and clamping it over the wound and the naked bones with my hand.
Isadora Grecchi wasn’t dead. Her eyes were open and moving as she watched me kneeling in the mess, telling her to hold her left arm up, finally compressing the wound by wrapping the wash-cloth in about a mile of dental floss I found in the medicine cabinet. Neither was she saying anything. The only sound for several seconds was Brontë’s nervous whining.
“I’m going to leave you here and go call 911,” I finally said. “I want you to give me the knife.”
I saw her glance at the object still clutched in her right hand as though identifying it required effort. Then it clattered to the floor. Leaning across her, I grabbed the knife, wondering how long I would remember this strange moment of intimacy with one of the cultural icons of my time—a serial murderer.
Roxie had said this would happen. That Sword would probably become so tormented that suicide would be the only source of relief, and Grecchi’s history of clinical depression made it a certainty. Sprinting to Grecchi’s wall phone in the kitchen, I jabbed the three numbers before realizing the line was dead. The cord running into the wall had been cut, probably with the same instrument she’d used to reveal the bones of her arm. She wanted to make sure she couldn’t change her mind and call for help at the last minute, I thought. Or else she hadn’t wanted to hear the phone ringing as she slowly bled out alone on her bathroom floor.
Brontë had followed me into the kitchen, her nails clacking against hardwood. I could see her pawprints, dark red against the polished floor. Only then did I notice that I was about to vomit. The smell was everywhere. Blood. It was on my hands and Brontë�
��s paws. It was dripping from the hem of my skirt where I’d knelt in a pool of red to bind a washcloth around Isadora Grecchi’s wrist. I had to get outside, quickly.
On the porch I took deep breaths and told Brontë to stay.Then I started toward the plumber’s van across the street until a chubby red-haired man in a blue uniform pulled a spool of plumber’s snake from inside the van and took it into one of the houses. So it really was just a plumber’s van complete with a real plumber. Where are the cops when you need them?
I remembered the cell phone and dashed to my truck to make the call. Yes, I would stay with the victim until the paramedics arrived. No, I didn’t know the next of kin.
Isadora Grecchi probably didn’t have any kin, I thought as I went back into her house, taking the cell phone and the little .38 with me. Isadora Grecchi would turn out to be a loner, a social isolate whose private thoughts and fantasies became real to her over time because there was no one around to curb those fantasies. I’d seen it a hundred times in books and movies. The weirdo who lives alone in the old house for years, tearing the wings off flies. And then one day the Avon lady mistakenly rings his rusty doorbell and is not seen again until a hardened police detective turns green at what is pulled from the well in the property’s overgrown garden.
She was still sitting on the bathroom floor when I returned, still silent.
“The paramedics will be here within five minutes,” I told her, feeling suddenly edgy.
She was too weak to move and seemed to be in a kind of trance, but I was afraid of her. Not because I believed she’d killed her own patients with an obscure chemical. I hadn’t seen her do that; it was abstract. I was afraid of her because she’d laid open her own wrist. Because she’d brought light to something that is never supposed to be seen. Those bones. The sight of what lies beneath the skin, of the truth behind the facade, is taboo. The sight of those white bones made me sick with a fear I recognized as primitive and magical, but there was nothing I could do about it.
“I have a gun,” I said, slapping the pistol held against my side by the elastic waistbands of my skirt and half-slip. “Don’t try anything.”
The words sounded stagey and laughable. Like bits of conversation overheard in restaurants. Hearing them, it was obvious how much we try to make sense of our experiences through the dialogues of fiction. Which are invariably not quite right.
When I glanced at Grecchi again there were tears spilling from her eyes. But she didn’t move and then I heard the siren of an emergency vehicle. As the paramedics worked on her I called the Rainer Clinic again on the cell phone. Roxie might still be there. I needed to hear her voice, to hear her explain oh-so rationally what had just happened. Why I saw those bones. But it was Rainer who answered.
“No, Dr. Bouchie left just after speaking with you,” he said. “I was about to leave as well. Perhaps you can reach her at the police station. She said she was going there.”
“I’ll call her there,” I said, nervous about how the old fellow would react when I told him. He’d worked with Isadora Grecchi for years. But then he’d worked with all of them for years.
“Dr. Rainer, Isadora Grecchi has just tried to take her own life,” I pronounced quietly. “She cut her left wrist with an artist’s canvas knife. I’m at her house. I’ve called 911 and the paramedics are here now. She’s alive and conscious, although she hasn’t said anything. I think we’ve got our killer, Dr. Rainer. I think this thing is over.”
The silence then was too long. Five seconds, six, seven.
“Dr. Rainer?”
“No.” His voice was strangled.
“What?”
“No!” I couldn’t tell whether he was angry or stricken with grief.
“I’m so sorry, Dr. Rainer,” I bumbled on. “It’s got to be a shock for you. But it would have been a shock no matter which one it was. Is there someone you can call? Someone who can be with you now? I’ll phone Megan and tell her you—”
“Stop patronizing me, Dr. McCarron,” he interrupted. His voice now had an edge, like a knife felt through cloth. “You don’t understand this at all. Now please, tell me where they’ll take Isadora. Which hospital?”
The paramedics were strapping Grecchi onto a wheeled gurney in the hall. Her eyes were still open, watching them. They looked like the eyes of refugees, that hollow, bereft look.
“Which hospital will you take her to?” I asked.
“University of California San Diego Medical Center,” one of the paramedics answered. “She’s gonna be fine.”
“Did you hear that?” I asked Rainer. “UCSD.”
“Yes. Tell her I’ll be at the hospital immediately. I’m leaving now. Are they giving her blood? How much blood did she lose?”
“Her employer, a doctor, wants to know how much blood she’s lost and if you’re …”
“Tell him she’ll be okay,” was the flat answer. But my question brought a fresh spill of tears from Grecchi, who was trying to shake her head, trying to say, “No,” to something.
“Dr. Rainer will be at the hospital soon,” I told her. The statement caused an increased tossing of her head that the paramedics curbed with a head clamp designed to stabilize the neck in spinal injuries. Her right arm was already secured to the side of the gurney with a leather cuff, and webbed plastic bands crossed her chest and legs. I remembered that UCSD’s medical center has a psychiatric unit. And I realized that’s where they were taking Isadora Grecchi.
“She’s very disoriented,” I told Jennings Rainer. “Perhaps it would be best if you didn’t come right away. I imagine the police and FBI will want to talk to her first, as soon as she’s able.”
“Dr. McCarron, your assumptions are in error,” he said, angry now. “Isadora is not the perpetrator of these crimes. You must explain that to the authorities.”
There was no point in arguing with him, I thought. He was in shock and irrational, unable to process the situation. That would take time.
“The paramedics are leaving now, Dr. Rainer,” I said. “I need to phone Detective Rathbone.”
“You must tell Detective Rathbone that Isadora could not have sent all those messages last night threatening to murder the vice presidential candidate because she was with me all night and I would have seen if she had.”
With that he hung up. I watched Isadora Grecchi’s face as they carried her out, trussed to the gurney so tightly she couldn’t move. Terror in those dark brown eyes. Her face seemed gray and spittle was forming at the edges of her mouth as she thrashed against the restraints and tried to say, “No, no.” Serial killer or not, I couldn’t stand it.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll follow you to UCSD in my truck, okay? I’ll be right behind you.”
Without meaning to I reached down to touch her hand, which felt like a frozen glove.
“You won’t be alone,” I told her. “It’s not far to the hospital and I’ll be right behind you all the way.”
Brontë was happy to leave her station on the porch and eyed me curiously as we scrambled into the truck.
“Don’t even ask,” I told her.
But I didn’t feel sick anymore.
22
One for the Books
From the hospital emergency room I called Rathbone, who was with Roxie and the FBI field agent in charge of the investigation.
“Grecchi’s tried to kill herself,” I told him. “Cut her wrist. I found her, called 911, I’m at UCSD Med Center with her now, and Rainer’s on the way. He says Grecchi was with him all night last night and so she can’t be Sword.”
“He’s protecting her,” Rathbone said after conveying the information to everyone else. “Stay there until we get there.”
So I stayed with Isadora Grecchi as I’d promised, although they’d run a blood test and then sedated her within five minutes of our arrival. She now lay stuporous behind a curtain in one of the e.r.’s examining bays. There seemed to be no rush about sewing up her arm, which was no longer bleeding and was of interest to vari
ous medical personnel who drifted in and out muttering things about “flexors” and “the median nerve.”
“Need a reconstruction consult,” said a young man in scrubs, jotting notes on a chart. “Afraid she’s gonna lose some mobility in that hand. Get a plastic surgeon down here now, please,” he told a nurse.
“A surgeon is on the way,” I announced from my post beside Grecchi’s inert form. “Jennings Rainer. He’ll be here shortly.”
“Rainer?” the young doctor said. “I’ve heard of him. Hear he’s good. Have to clear it, though. He’s not on staff.”
“I’m sure there won’t be any problem,” I said as though I knew what I was talking about.
Even sedated, Isadora Grecchi seemed tense. Her dark, unruly hair stood out from her head in clumps against the pillow, and her facial muscles moved randomly from time to time, pulling her mouth into eerie, childlike grins that vanished in seconds. She was shivering and her skin felt cold. Since no one was paying any attention to me I opened every closet and cabinet until I located some blankets and piled them on top of her.
“It’s Blue McCarron. I’m still here. You’re not alone,” I told her repeatedly even though she couldn’t hear me. “And Dr. Rainer should arrive any minute.”
I wondered what would happen to her now. She’d be handcuffed to her bed under the eye of an armed guard in the hospital, probably. Then jail and a long, complicated trial. Then prison. Maybe a sentence of death, although it would never be carried out. The appeals would last longer than Isadora Grecchi, at fifty-one, would live. And why? Why had she chosen to kill women she herself had rendered unconscious and vulnerable, with a chemical she herself might have been prescribed? None of it made any sense.
I saw Jennings Rainer enter the e.r. examining area before he saw me. And if he’d been upset before, he wasn’t now. Dressed impeccably in a black cashmere jacket over a white polo shirt and khakis, he looked as though he’d been summoned from a golf course.
“Where is Dr. Grecchi?” he inquired politely of a nurse.
The Last Blue Plate Special Page 24
