Psych: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read

by William Rabkin

  “As I said, we are here to solve a series of baffling crimes,” Shawn continued. “Who killed John Marichal? Who killed Dallas Steele? Who killed Betty Walinski?”

  “Tara Larison,” Coules said. “Can we go home now?”

  “Impossible,” Shawn said. “Tara couldn’t have killed all those people.”

  “Why not?” Lassiter said.

  “Because she’s the most obvious suspect,” Shawn said.

  “Right, because she’s killed a bunch of people before,” O’Hara said.

  “But the most obvious suspect is never the killer,” Shawn said. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”

  Gus stared at him. “This is all you’ve got?”

  Shawn shrugged. “It sounded good when I came up with it.”

  Gus stared down at the ice cubes in his glass. Maybe if he studied them hard enough, he’d find a subliminal picture of the real killer. Because that looked like the only thing that was going to keep the police from taking Shawn’s confession in a couple of hours.

  “Actually, Mr. Spencer, the likeliest suspect is almost always guilty,” Chief Vick said. “That’s what makes them obvious—evidence they’ve created in their commission of the crimes.”

  Coules and the detectives muttered their agreement. Shawn held up a hand to silence them.

  “Then let me give you another reason why I know Tara didn’t kill John Marichal and Betty Walinski,” Shawn said. “Because she did kill Fred Larison and Aunt Enid. Because this very morning she tried to kill Gus.”

  “Well, I’m convinced,” Lassiter muttered. “Can we go home now?”

  “Every one of those killings was staged to look like an accident,” Shawn said. “A fall down the stairs, a trip over a skateboard. At first I assumed, like you, that this was the work of a canny criminal covering up her crimes. But then she tried to kill Gus, and even though we caught her in the act, she insisted that it was an accident.”

  “That’s right,” Gus said. Maybe there was hope outside of the dream of an ice-cube portrait. “She claimed I fell down a flight of stairs in a one-story building.”

  “So she’s nuts,” Coules said. “Big deal.”

  “It is a big deal. She needs to believe she’s not a killer, just the victim of a series of tragic accidents. That’s why she fooled me for so long. Because even though she had killed several people, she was completely convinced in her own mind that she didn’t.”

  “So when you read her aura, it proclaimed her innocence,” Veronica said.

  Shawn shot her a grateful smile. “Exactly. But for her to keep up the illusion, when she killed, she arranged the scene to look like an accident. Whoever killed John Marichal and Betty Walinski didn’t bother to make them look like anything other than victims of cold-blooded murder.”

  Shawn turned to Gus to see how he was doing. Gus gave him a quick thumbs-up.

  “What about Dallas Steele?” Arno rattled his handcuffs for emphasis. “I saw her kill him. And I’m willing to testify—as long as they reduce these ridiculous charges against me.”

  “I’m glad you brought that up,” Shawn said. “And so is Fluffy, by the way.”

  Arno made a move toward Shawn, but Lassiter pulled him back.

  “You didn’t see Tara kill Steele. You saw her standing over him with a knife.”

  “The knife forensics proved was the murder weapon,” Coules said.

  “She made no attempt to hide or to claim Steele’s death was an accident,” Shawn said. “So we can all agree that Tara is innocent.”

  Chief Vick held up her watch. “The one thing we can all agree on is that you have twenty-eight minutes left.”

  “If Tara didn’t kill these people, who did?” Shawn said. “Before we can answer that question, we have to understand what an ex-con, a tackle shop widow, and a billionaire venture capitalist who didn’t know how to tie his shoes in kindergarten had in common.”

  “Nothing,” Lassiter said.

  “Do you think so?” Shawn said. “Let’s go back to the beginning and figure out where it all began. At first I thought it was the towing of Gus’ car. That’s what took us to the impound lot.”

  “He was parked illegally,” Lassiter snapped.

  “But that’s not what kept us at the impound lot.” Shawn ignored Lassiter as he plowed on. “Six thousand dollars of parking tickets did that. So we have to go back a little further to discover where this story really begins. To find our killer, we need to understand who is responsible for those tickets.”

  “Umm, you?” Gus said. There was one ice cube that seemed to be growing a face as it melted.

  “Only in a technical sense,” Shawn said. “I accuse . . . her.” He pointed a finger at the coffee girl, who gazed back at him, perplexed.

  “Me?”

  Henry pulled her to his side. “Shawn, this is ridiculous.”

  “Is it really?” Shawn said.

  “Yes,” Gus said. The face on the cube was looking more like an elephant and less like a suspect. Gus rattled the ice, hoping to find another image. Instead, he saw something on the bottom of the glass. It looked like a shard of gray plastic.

  “Think about it,” Shawn said. “She’s a seemingly insignificant player in the drama. We never even saw her once over the course of the investigation, but somehow her name kept on coming up.”

  “We don’t even know her name,” Gus said.

  “It’s Mindy,” the coffee girl said. She looked up at Henry adoringly. “Mindy Stackman. I’m in the book.”

  “Why do you think there were all those constant, subtle, seemingly meaningless references to a character we never see? To establish her as a plausible suspect. And then she appears here for reasons no one understands.”

  “She’s here because I brought her here,” Lassiter said. “And I brought her here because she was on your list.”

  “And now she’s finally unmasked as the real killer,” Shawn concluded. “Can you imagine an ending more satisfying than that? More technically perfect? Even Joe Eszterhas would approve, and he wrote both Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct.”

  “He also wrote F.I.S.T., which is what you’re going to get in your face if you don’t stop saying things about me.” Mindy looked around at the accusing faces. “What? You’ve never seen a film major working at a coffeehouse before?”

  “Fourteen minutes, Mr. Spencer,” Chief Vick said.

  “Is there one reason why we shouldn’t think Mindy is the killer?”

  “There’s no evidence,” O’Hara said.

  “There’s no motive,” Lassiter said.

  “There’s no connection,” Coules said. “Except some arbitrary pattern you imposed on a series of events because it’s convenient for you.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?” Shawn said.

  “Obviously,” Coules said.

  “So why wasn’t it just as bad when you assumed that Dallas Steele’s murder was connected to the killings of John Marichal and Betty Walinski?”

  Gus stopped trying to fish the thing out of the glass. Shawn actually seemed to be on the verge of a point. “The only reason to accuse Tara is a pattern. And the police created that pattern.”

  “She was holding the knife!” Coules said.

  “And because of that, you created this pattern that said she must have committed those other two murders,” Shawn said. “Because she’s the one person who could have had any reason, no matter how vague, for killing all three victims. But if you stop assuming there’s only one killer, there’s no reason for her to have done any of it.”

  “Are you saying there are two killers, Mr. Spencer?” Chief Vick tapped her watch significantly.

  “Disappointing, isn’t it?” Shawn said. “Classically, it’s much more satisfying to wrap up everything together. So if you want to go that way, I’ll understand and I’ll testify against Mindy.”

  “That’s it,” Mindy said. “You are so banned from the Coffee Barn.”

  “But if we want the truth, we have to dig a
little deeper. Let’s think back to the first time Gus and I went to the impound yard.”

  Shawn stopped. The others began to murmur their irritation as he stood silently, his head slightly cocked, his hands frozen in the air.

  Gus nudged him. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m waiting for the flashback.”

  “We don’t have flashbacks. This is real life, not CSI.”

  Shawn looked crushed. “Really?”

  “Get on with it!”

  Shawn sighed. “I’ve been informed that the flashbacks aren’t working. So while I go through this, please try to picture it in grainy black-and-white, maybe with a slight blurring effect on the action. Alicia?”

  A harp glissando filled the room. Gus turned and saw that the woman in black had unpacked her case and taken out a full-size harp, which she was now seated in front of.

  “What the hell is that?” Lassiter said.

  “If we don’t have different film stocks, how are we going to differentiate past and present? Please, when you hear the harp, assume the image is dissolving away.”

  “My life is dissolving away,” Galen said. “What am I doing here?”

  “Quiet, you,” Lassiter snapped.

  “I thought we went over the plan,” Gus said. “You didn’t mention any of this.”

  “I was born to improvise.”

  “When you call hours in advance to request the services of a harpist, that’s not improvising anymore?”

  “It’s not?”

  Chief Vick cleared her throat. “Your time is up, Mr. Spencer.”

  Shawn checked his own watch, then cast a glance around the room.

  “Okay, fine, you’re right,” Shawn said. “No drama, no flashbacks, no suspense, no craft. If all you want is the killer’s identity, it’s yours. Bert Coules did it. Come on, Gus.”

  Shawn headed for the door. Walking behind him, Gus saw that his feet seemed to be dragging on the floor.

  “That’s outrageous,” Coules shouted. It seemed like he was shouting, anyway. The words came out slowly and hesitantly. “You can’t accuse me of killing three people and just walk out of here.” He turned to the detectives. “Stop him.”

  The detectives seemed frozen to the ground. They stared blindly into space. Gus looked around the room and saw that the others all appeared to be imitating department-store mannequins.

  “There you go again,” Shawn said. His feet were barely lifting off the ground with each step. His words were beginning to slur. “Not three people. Just John Marichal and Betty Walinski. Although I might suggest revisiting her husband’s autopsy, just in case.”

  “What’s going on here, Shawn?” Gus said. “And who killed Dallas Steele?”

  “Look in your glass,” Shawn said, the words coming out with obvious effort. “The killer just revealed hims . . .”

  Shawn’s voice trailed off. He stared blankly into space. Gus nudged him, but Shawn didn’t react. He seemed to be in a coma, like all the others.

  What had happened to them? And why wasn’t it happening to Gus? He dumped the glass on the ground and scrabbled through the ice cubes to find the piece of gray plastic. It wasn’t the broken shard he’d assumed it to be. It was a tiny model of a gun. The kind you’d find mounted on a toy warship.

  The kind you’d find mounted on a toy ship that transformed into a robot. And that would come off easily, since the glue holding it on, when exposed to water, dissolved into a hallucinogenic drug.

  Someone must have spiked the Blāk Shawn served here. And, Gus realized, it wasn’t the first time. Whoever it was must have also drugged Dallas Steele before killing him, and drugged Tara before putting the knife in her hand. That would explain why Tara seemed so lost and so docile when she was discovered standing over the body, and why she couldn’t remember anything about the killing. That was what Shawn had been trying to tell him.

  It could have been Veronica. But Steele told her he’d given them the consulting position to help them. He wouldn’t have revealed the truth about the toy boats. And even if she wanted to kill her husband, how would she know about Tara? Gus could ask her, but she was as frozen as her guests.

  At least Gus knew the crucial question to ask: Who knew both about Tara and the toy boats? And how had they found out?

  Something was tickling the back of Gus’ brain. Something Shawn had said earlier. When he’d jumped up and announced he knew who killed Dallas Steele.

  Except it wasn’t something Shawn had said—Gus had said it. That sound traveled between the front seat and backseat of a car.

  Devon Shepler knew all about Tara, because they’d talked about her on the way up to Eagle’s View. And he knew about the disastrous investments because he’d been waiting to lead them up to the tower when Dallas revealed the truth. If he’d caught Tara breaking in to the house looking for them, it would have been easy to manipulate her into ingesting some of the drug—and even easier to slip it into Steele’s late-night beverage.

  But why would Shepler kill the man to whom he seemed so devoted? To whom he had dedicated every minute of his waking day? Who relied on him for everything?

  Gus tried to put himself in Shepler’s mind—and discovered it was frighteningly easy. He could feel the man’s resentment at being constantly needed and never rewarded, or even acknowledged. At being taken advantage of.

  How blind Gus had been not to see this all along. The way Shepler would freeze before answering a question or following an order—it wasn’t the pause of a methodical brain searching for the correct response. It was the moment he needed to get his rage in check before acting like the proper gentleman’s gentleman.

  Maybe Shepler tried to build a little something for himself. When Dallas told him that he’d hired a psychic genius to invest his money, it would have seemed like a perfect chance to get some for himself. How much of his life savings did he pour into their ridiculous investments? How much of Steele’s had he borrowed without permission? And then when he found out the truth that Dallas had casually destroyed him as collateral damage in a cruel scheme to humiliate Shawn, how great would his rage have been?

  And then Gus realized something else. Shawn had stopped him from drinking the Blāk. Stopped him by drinking it himself. At the time, Gus attributed it to his typical self-centeredness. Now he realized that Shawn had sacrificed himself for his friend. He was giving Gus the chance to get away—or to save the day.

  Gus patted Shawn on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, buddy,” he said. “I won’t let you down.”

  The door the waiters had come through swung open. Gus froze in position as Shepler led Tara in. Her eyes were blank, her steps unsteady. Gus suspected he knew how she’d disappeared after trying to kill him. Shepler found her and started feeding her small doses of the drug, not enough to paralyze, but sufficient to keep her extremely pliable.

  “Here we are, Tara,” Shepler said cheerfully. “All your friends are in one place.” He turned to the paralyzed crowd. “No, just stay where you are. No need to bother yourself for me.”

  Chuckling, he reached into his pocket and came out with the ugliest handgun Gus had ever seen. It had a wooden handle and black steel barrel, and when Shepler unfolded the front grip down, it looked like some kind of evil alien insect. Gus didn’t know enough about guns to identify the make or model, but he was pretty sure it would be able to take out everyone in the room.

  Shepler walked through the room, studying his victims like they were statues in a gallery. He stepped up to Veronica and leered in her face.

  “All this time you’ve thought I was just that useless little servant. You thought—” Shepler broke off. He raised the gun and pressed it to her temple. “Why am I making a speech? You’ll all be dead in thirty seconds.”

  “No!” The word was out of Gus’ mouth before he could stop it.

  Shepler wheeled around. “Who said that?”

  Gus tried to stay absolutely still. Shepler watched them all carefully for a moment, then shrugged. He turn
ed back to Veronica, raising the gun to her head.

  Gus dived for the ground and grabbed the only weapon he could find. Before Shepler could aim the gun, Gus hurled the glass directly at his head. The throw was perfectly aimed, the force was enough to take his head off his shoulders. Unfortunately, before it connected with its target Shepler stepped out of the way, and the glass sailed past him, shattering against the far wall.

  “That was a special Baccarat pattern made solely for Mr. Steele,” Shepler said as he aimed the gun at Gus. “Now I can only have two hundred forty-nine people over for dinner.”