Kitteredge was staring at Shawn.“That’s the painting,” he said. “You’re seeing The Defence of Guenevere.”
“Is that what it is?” Shawn said.
For the first time since the body had been unveiled, Kitteredge looked hopeful. “You see it in detail?”
“It’s like Avatar,” Shawn said. “I can visualize every tiny bit of the image in perfect detail. Which is good, because that way I don’t have to pay attention to the crummy script.”
Kitteredge turned to Gus excitedly. “Do you realize what this means?” he said. “There’s hope. As long as Shawn can hold that image in his head, we have chance to decipher the clues in the painting and break this conspiracy wide open.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Gus said. “Let’s get moving. And fast.”
The street was still clogged with cars hopelessly grid-locked. All they had to do was weave their way through the stopped autos and they’d be free.
And better yet, Shawn had saved them. It wasn’t so much that he’d restored Kitteredge’s hope, although that was certainly a positive thing. Somehow he’d managed to memorize the entire painting in the one brief glance he’d gotten at it. They had a chance to solve this thing and clear Kitteredge’s name.
Gus took a step off the curb, then realized he couldn’t go any farther. There was a hand clutching his shoulder, and it wouldn’t let him move.
Gus looked back and saw that the hand belonged to one of the cops. The other one had taken hold of Shawn.
“No one’s moving anywhere,” Gus’ captor said. “Not until we’ve got a few answers.”
Chapter Twenty-one
When he was little, Carlton Lassiter had, unlike any other child in the history of medicine, loved going to the doctor’s office.
It wasn’t the waiting room filled with toys and tattered copies of Highlights for Children that attracted him, although he did love studying the adventures of Goofus and Gallant. And it wasn’t the lollipop or similar bribe that would be offered if he managed to make it through the appointment without bursting into hysterical screams.
What he loved about those visits was precisely what most children hated. The biting cold of the stethoscope against his chest. The invasion of personal privacy when the nurse jammed the thermometer under his tongue or any other place she might choose. And most of all the harsh jab and searing pain of the hypodermic needle.
It wasn’t that little Carlton Lassiter had been a mini-masochist. Even as he welcomed these insults he knew how unpleasant they were.
But he also understood instinctively what the other children couldn’t begin to imagine: that the world existed in a constant state of war between the forces of order and those of chaos. And there was never any doubt in his mind which side he chose. Every indignity inflicted on him by the medical profession was actually a blow against chaos-in this case the chaos that existed to disrupt the order of the body’s natural workings.
It was possible that in his preschool days Lassiter was not able to articulate this philosophy quite so precisely, and that he had come to the understanding only in his adult years. But the doctor’s office was always a happy place for him, and the colder and less pleasant it was, the better it made him feel.
So even though Lassiter shared every police officer’s distrust of department therapists, he felt a sense of security as he pulled his cruiser into the parking lot of the low white hacienda that housed Dr. Olivia McCormick’s offices. Doctors meant order, and order was always good.
But as he stepped into the waiting room that sense of security began to slip away. Lassiter believed in changing primary care physicians every year so that he’d always have a new set of eyes to catch anything the last pair had missed, which meant he had plenty of experience with doctors’ waiting rooms. And he knew what they were supposed to be like. First, there was the lighting. It needed to be the harshest fluorescent available, to render any trace of illness instantly apparent. The walls should be painted glossy white and the floor covered in matching linoleum or thin carpet to give the light plenty of hard surface to bounce off of. There should be chairs molded out of plastic that were impossible to sit in without slipping onto the floor unless you kept both feet planted at all times. Ideally the molded plastic should have cracked in several places to pinch his skin whenever he shifted position. And there should be a sliding glass window behind which sat a hatchet-faced receptionist whose only interest in life was making the patients wait as long as possible to give whatever germs they were carrying the chance to manifest themselves.
Dr. Olivia McCormick’s waiting room was all wrong. It was furnished in the warmest of greens and browns. There were soft sofas against the walls, which were themselves covered with subtly colored fabrics. Blooming flowers trailed out of hanging pots, and soothing music played softly through hidden speakers. There wasn’t even a receptionist to demand proof of insurance. Instead, as Lassiter came in-and even before he’d had the chance to step back outside and make sure he hadn’t walked by mistake into one of the few remaining Good Earth restaurants that had escaped America’s reconnection with sanity after the fern-bar-meets-sprouts craze of the midseventies-an inside door swung open and a kindergarten teacher leaned out.
“Detective Lassiter?” she said in a voice that promised juice and cookies. “Please come this way.”
Although her graying ponytail and loose, flowing tie-dyed dress suggested an afternoon to be spent learning to tie his shoes followed by nap time, Lassiter realized that this was supposed to be the doctor.
Lassiter didn’t have a problem with female doctors. Some of his favorite GPs had been women. But they had also been warriors in the battle against death, disease, and decay. They wore starched white lab coats and jammed their instruments in whichever orifice they chose with no consideration that they were working on anything resembling a sentient human being.
This one, he knew, was no warrior. Confronted with chaos, she’d invite it in for a chat and rap about what made it so disorganized.
But there was no way for him to leave now. The chief had made it very clear that he needed to talk to the department therapist before she’d clear him to go back to work on his case. And he would make any sacrifice if it would let him bring Professor Langston Kitteredge to justice.
Lassiter let McCormick lead him into her inner office and sit him down in a comfortable armchair upholstered in soft brown leather. She sat opposite him on what looked like an overgrown footstool.
“I want to let you know I’m here to help, Detective,” she said in a voice so calming he could almost feel it smoothing his hair. “My only goal is to get you over your trauma as quickly as possible.”
“In that case, consider yourself a success,” Lassiter said. “Trauma was over before it began.”
The smile she’d had fixed on her face since the first second he saw her wavered for a second, then came back. “No trauma at all?”
“No trauma, no drama, that’s my mantra,” he said. Actually, Lassiter had never had a mantra, considering such things foolish wastes of breath, but he figured it might move things along more quickly if he spoke in a language she could understand.
“But there was quite a bit of drama, wasn’t there?” she said. “I read your report. An armed suspect used you as a hostage in order to escape custody, didn’t he?”
Lassiter cursed under his breath. He’d known it was a mistake to write up the extended report the chief had asked for. Only for internal use, she’d said. Well now he saw exactly what “internal” meant-anyone who felt a right to meddle in the internal aspects of his life.
“All in a day’s work,” Lassiter said. “I admit, it was not a pleasant experience, and it left with me a bad taste in my mouth. But I also know how to get that taste out-a special kind of mouthwash called bringing the scum-bag back in. So thanks for seeing me so quickly, but I’d better get back out on those mean streets.”
He bounded out of his chair and headed for the door.
�
��We still have most of our hour left, Detective Lassiter,” McCormick said in the same calm tone. “I would really appreciate it if you’d stay and talk about what happened this morning.”
“Maybe we could do it another day,” Lassiter said, one hand firmly clutching the doorknob. “Once the perp is in custody I’ll have plenty of time to chat.”
He turned the knob and opened the door. But before he could step through, he heard a voice from behind him. In certain superficial ways it sounded like Olivia McCormick. But underneath there was a tone of steel, like the indestructible armature under a Terminator’s skin.
“If you walk out that door, you will never walk back into the Santa Barbara Police Department,” the voice said.
Lassiter turned back and saw the skinless Terminator version of Olivia McCormick sitting where the kindergarten teacher had just been. She still had the same ponytail and hippie dress, but there was a light in her eyes that looked like it could kill from this distance.
“Excuse me?” Lassiter said.
“You are on medical leave pending my report,” McCormick said. “Until I sign off on your condition, you are suspended. And believe me when I say this applies not only to the SBPD but to any law enforcement agency you can think of, including the school district crossing guard corps. So unless you want to spend the rest of your working life as a security guard in a shopping mall, you will sit down and start talking.”
Lassiter’s legs marched him back to the comfortable chair and dropped him in.
The steely light went out in McCormick’s eyes and she leaned forward, once again the kindergarten teacher.
“So, Detective,” she said gently, “let’s talk about how you’re feeling.”
Chapter Twenty-two
It wasn’t until he saw the windmill atop Pea Soup Andersen’s in Buellton that Gus was able to pull his eyes away from the rearview mirror. All the way up the 101 he’d expected to see red and blue lights flashing there. He couldn’t believe that the cops who’d stopped them outside the museum hadn’t just allowed them to flee in order to see where they were going.
In fact, part of him believed the cops hadn’t actually allowed them to go at all. It was quite possible that the three of them had been arrested and thrown into jail. That Gus had gone to trial and been convicted as an accessory after the fact and, under California’s felony murder laws, had been sentenced to death. Now his body was lying in a cell on death row waiting for execution while his mind spun this elaborate fantasy of escape to keep from having to deal with the truth.
Gus checked the rearview mirror again, this time to make sure that the passenger back there was still Professor Kitteredge. If he’d turned into Mariah Carey, that would have confirmed the death row fantasy scenario. He breathed a heavy sigh of relief to see his old professor, his head resting against the window as he snored quietly.
Which meant the encounter with the police had been real, too. When Gus had turned around to meet the eyes of the officer whose hand was clutching his shoulder, he expected to see the steely stare of the hunter looking down at his prey before administering the kill shot. Instead, the eyes were twinkling, and the face was smiling.
“What can we do for you, Officer?” Shawn said cheerfully. It was a long-held theory of his that if you act like nothing is wrong convincingly enough, eventually the world will take your word for it. That long-held theory had never actually worked in practice, but he was eternally hopeful that this would change one day.
“Do you know how long I’ve been searching for you?” the officer said.
Gus checked the cop’s eyeline. He wasn’t looking at Kitteredge, who had turned his back and was now apparently fascinated by a seagull that was circling slowly above their heads. He was staring directly at Shawn and Gus.
“Umm,” Gus said. “Us?”
“For weeks!” the officer said. “My best buddy is getting married next month, and I’m supposed to put together a bachelor party for him. But he’s kind of a prude, so he doesn’t want strippers or anything like that. I’ve been killing myself trying to figure out some kind of entertainment-and then I heard you talking about being psychics!”
“We’re not really that kind of psychics,” Gus said.
“Sure you aren’t,” the cop said. “That’s why you’re wearing tuxedos on a Sunday afternoon, because you’re not on your way to a performance.”
“But really we’re-” Gus started, but Shawn shoved him out of the way and stepped forward.
“Available for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and bachelor parties,” Shawn said. “You have to excuse my partner-he’s afraid his mother will find out he went into showbiz.” He produced a card and handed it to the officer. “You can reach our booking office at that number. And just ignore the part where it says psychic detectives. It was supposed to say psychic entertainers, but the printer messed it up. We were going to have him redo it, but he gave us a great price on ten thousand cards.”
The officer slipped the card into his pocket without looking at it. “You’ll be hearing from me,” he said. “And say-if you happen to know any hot girls, we’re not all prudes like the groom.”
Gus was searching for a way to answer that when some sort of shoving match broke out toward the top of the stairs. The cop gave Shawn a knowing wink, and he and his partner headed up to deal with the disturbance while the three of them ran to the Echo.
And that had been their last encounter with the police. They hadn’t even seen a highway patrolman on the freeway. Which didn’t keep Gus from worrying for the whole drive.
At least he was able to worry in peace and quiet. Shawn had closed his eyes and gone to sleep as soon as they hit the 101-less because he’d been up all night, Gus suspected, than because his other option was to spend the entire drive describing the missing painting in excruciating detail. Kitteredge, too, quickly nodded off.
Which left Gus time to finally ponder the question that would have occurred to him hours earlier if events hadn’t been moving so fast: What the hell were they doing?
When he and Shawn had set off to find Professor Kitteredge, it was to protect him from being discovered by a member of the force who might think him so dangerous he needed to be shot before being questioned. But Gus had never really considered what they were going to do once they’d found him-the task itself seemed so impossible that contemplating the next step felt like a waste of time. Then, once they had actually accomplished this, things started moving under their own impetus. Step by step, everything they did seemed to make sense at the time, and yet it didn’t actually add up to a logical plan.
In fact, nothing that had happened since they first showed up at the museum made any logical sense. Unless he meant dream logic. Because while Professor Kitteredge’s story about the search for King Arthur’s magic sword was powerfully convincing when he’d laid it out, once Gus had had the chance to think it over, it began to sound ridiculous. They might as well be searching for Cinderella’s glass slipper.
Gus knew there was only one right thing to do now. He should wake up Kitteredge and tell him he had no choice but to turn himself in. Then he’d pull into the Pea Soup parking lot and call Chief Vick to arrange the professor’s surrender. That would fulfill his original intention, which was to make sure Kitteredge would be safe until he could prove his innocence.
But Gus wasn’t sure he could do that from a jail cell. Not that he believed his old professor had anything to do with Filkins’ murder. But as long as Kitteredge was unable or unwilling to provide an alibi, then this mysterious conspiracy was their only hope of finding the real killer. And no matter how absurd it sounded, someone had been able to steal that painting from under the noses of the cops. If not an all-powerful conspiracy, then who could have done it? And if the only clues to the Cabal lay hidden in that painting, and the only available copy of the picture was the one in Shawn’s mind, then separating the professor from Shawn would present an insuperable obstacle to discovering the truth.
That meant findin
g a place to hide out until they could break the conspiracy and catch the killer. For the moment that wouldn’t be too hard. No one was looking for Gus and Shawn.
But they would be soon. As the manhunt broadened, it was unimaginable that one of the police officers they’d met today wouldn’t realize they’d seen Kitteredge. And once they did, they’d remember who was with him. Unless it was that last cop. He wouldn’t need to remember anything-Shawn had given him a card.
That gave them a few hours to find a hiding place and stock it with all the supplies they’d need until the case was over. Once their faces were on the news, they wouldn’t dare show them in public.
Which brought him to one last option. Gus didn’t think Professor Kitteredge would agree to turn himself in to the police. But if they stopped for lunch, there was no reason Gus couldn’t excuse himself to use the rest room and call Chief Vick. He could even do it anonymously, just a loyal citizen doing his duty by reporting a sighting of a wanted fugitive. He wouldn’t have to worry about Kitteredge being hurt, because the police would not risk using their guns in such a crowded public place. They’d simply surround the table and lead the professor away.
Gus hated himself for even allowing these thoughts to pass through his mind, but at the same time he knew that his self-loathing was completely irrational. Even though he was sure Professor Kitteredge was not a murderer, there was no denying he was a wanted felon. He had taken a police detective hostage and threatened to kill him with a knife that had already taken one life. Gus couldn’t pretend that he was protecting a pure innocent; on one level the man was a criminal.
And it wasn’t like he actually owed Kitteredge the kind of loyalty he gave his clients. After all, Kitteredge had never hired Psych. He hadn’t even come to Gus for help in solving a crime, as Gus had thought when he’d felt compelled to rescue him from the police. No-he’d just sent Gus a form letter begging for a donation. If that obligated him to save the professor’s hide, then he’d also have to rescue the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, the March of Dimes, and every other charity whose pleas clogged his mailbox. And at least the charities sent him personalized return address labels. They were unusable, true, because they had Ziggy on them, but they were a nice gesture. What had Professor Kitteredge ever done for him?
A Fatal Frame of Mind p-4 Page 10
