A Grave Talent km-1

by Laurie R. King

  "Casey Martinelli, and Al may have forgotten to tell you I was a she or he may have been aiming at the truly liberated attitude of not noticing or he may have had some obscure reason of his own. At any rate, I'm glad to meet you, and thank you for coming."

  "I would have come tomorrow even if you people hadn't called, as soon as I read the morning paper. No, no luggage, just this. I hope you haven't been up all night to meet me."

  "Oh, no, I set my alarm clock for midnight. That's my car, over there." She had to scurry to keep up with him, for despite the bulky case he bounced off the balls of his feet in an energetic stride. She pegged him for a handball player.

  "Do the police always park under No Parking signs?" he asked curiously as she reached past him to unlock his door.

  "Only when we know that the person on duty won't have it towed. Inconvenient, that. Do you want your case in the back? No? Okay."

  Kate buckled herself in and settled down for a nice fast drive on a nearly deserted freeway. As they passed the Bufano statue, Bruckner stretched until his joints cracked and then slumped down in the seat with a little sigh of pleasure.

  "Hard flight?" she asked.

  "Flying is the pits. A surefire way to produce long-term symptoms of hostility towards humankind. Particularly its younger generation," he said sourly.

  "I take it you didn't get much sleep. Well, there's no need to make conversation now, if you want to close your eyes."

  "I'll sleep later. First of all, cards on the table. Your Inspector Hawkin said that Vaun is no longer under suspicion of committing those murders. Is that true, or did he just want to manipulate me into coming out to treat her? It's difficult to tell, over the telephone."

  "Wouldn't you have come in either case?"

  "No." Kate glanced over at him. "I said I would have come out, but only to see her and her family. I'm not going to bring Vaun back to life just for you people to lock her up. If that's the choice, you can let me out now and I'll make my own arrangements."

  "I thought you were her friend. They say she'll die if she's left like this."

  "That's her choice. She'd die anyway, if she was imprisoned again. It would be deliberate cruelty, and I'll have nothing to do with it. Vaun isn't my client, my patient. She's a beloved friend, and I refuse to interfere in her life that way merely for the convenience of the police."

  Kate, hardened cop that she was, found it difficult not to be shocked. She cleared her throat.

  "Yes. Well, you don't need to worry, it's obvious now that she's a victim, not a perpetrator." She gave him a synopsis of the last few days, ending with what they knew of Andy Lewis/Tony Dodson. He made no comment for several miles.

  "Yes," he said finally. "I know about Andy. We worked on that for a long time, Vaun and I."

  "What—" she began, then realized that he would undoubtedly refuse to talk about Vaun's revelations during therapy, and changed it to, "Is all this possible? I mean, it seems such an unlikely scenario, even to us—some lunatic who goes to such elaborate lengths to make life hell for a woman he resents, then tries to kill her, and all without giving himself away."

  "Oh yes, it's quite possible. And, from what I know of Andy Lewis, through Vaun, you're probably looking at the right man."

  "I wish I could understand it." Kate heard the plaintive undertone in her voice and hastened to modify it. "I mean, I've been a cop for six years now, and God knows I've seen what people can do to each other. But this one, it makes even a torture-murder look straightforward. I just can't get a handle on it, can't imagine his motives."

  "The mind of someone like Andy Lewis is not finally comprehensible to a normal, sane human being. You can trace patterns, even analyze the labyrinth enough to plot its development, but motives and sequences are very slippery things, even at the best of times."

  "But if he's so abnormal, why didn't we see him earlier?"

  "Because he's very good at keeping up the front. When you track him down you'll probably find all kinds of criminal, even pathological, behavior, but until you pry up the lid, all will look normal. Actually, I would venture a theory that had it not been for Vaun, it would have remained at that. He would never have taken to murdering children, or not for many years at any rate."

  "You mean Vaun set him off?"

  "Triggered him, yes. She must never suspect this, by the way."

  "No. Oh, God no. You don't mean she did anything deliberately, I take it."

  "As innocent as one chemical reacting with another. No, that's not a good analogy, because in a reaction both chemicals are changed, and in this case Vaun remains Vaun. Vaun doesn't need to do anything deliberately to change people's lives. Perhaps a better image is that of a black hole, one of those things the astronomers love to speculate about, so massive they influence the motions of everything around them in space, so immensely powerful that even light particles can't escape, so that they cannot even be seen except by inference, by reading the erratic movements of nearby planets and stars. Vaun passes by, utterly tied up with her own inner workings, and people begin to wobble. Tommy Chesler makes adult friends for the first time in his life. John Tyler gets serious. Angie Dodson looks at her hobbies and sees a mature art form. Andy Lewis is nudged from criminality to pathology. A psychiatrist in Chicago tears his thinning hair out and finds himself practicing a style of psychotherapy unknown to modern science, and damned if it doesn't work. God only knows what effect she's having on a couple of unsuspecting homicide detectives from the big city," he laughed. "And none of it deliberate. Vaun is as passive and as powerful as a force of nature. Her only deliberate actions are on canvas, and even then she would insist that there's no choice, only the recognition of what's needed next. Someday Vaun may be forced into action. I can't imagine what would do it—certainly not a threat to herself; perhaps to protect someone she loved—but I can imagine that the results would be spectacular. Or perhaps catastrophic."

  Bruckner talked with the enthusiasm of a man finally permitted to speak about something that has long fascinated him, and Kate was not certain what was required of her in the role of coenthusiast.

  "You sound like you've given this a great deal of thought." She settled for a cheap therapist's tell-me-more noise. He caught her uncertainty and laughed happily.

  "Said she, dubiously. Yes, Vaun is the sort of person one tends to think about. My wife wants me to work up a paper on the 'triggering personality' concept, but I can't see that it would do much good. After all, you can't very well treat the innocent trigger, even if the explosive personality blames him, or her. And it's hardly a new idea, after all. Do you know Othello?"

  "Er___"

  "Iago is a nasty, sly, traitorous character, but even he needs his self-respect. To justify to himself the enormity of his own evil, he blames his victim Cassio for it, saying, 'He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.' Count on it, when you find Andy, he'll blame Vaun."

  "He's proving a slippery character to find."

  "If you're patient, he'll come to you. Not turn himself in, I don't mean that, but he'll come. He won't be able to help himself, not now. It's gone too far. However. Enough of Andy Lewis and black holes, and chemical reactions. Metaphors and analogies are the curse of cheap psychotherapy. Tell me about Vaun. How she is."

  "Vaun? No change, they say, over and over."

  "I don't want that 'they' way. I know what 'they' say, endlessly. How do you think she looks?" he pressed.

  "I don't know how she looks. She's unconscious. She looks like someone who got run over by an overdose, is how she looks. I'm no doctor."

  "Good, I don't want a doctor's eyes, I want your eyes. In one word, don't stop to think about it, how does she look?"

  "Dead. Dead is how she looks. I'm sorry, you're her friend, but you did ask."

  "Yes, I did, didn't I?" He sighed. "All right, tell me about her. What kind of room do they have her in? Who comes in contact with her, and how do they touch her? And what do they smell like?" He spoke as if unaware o
f the lunacy of his words, and Kate looked closely to see if he was serious before she began hesitantly to answer him. He made short notes by the light of the glove compartment in a small notebook that he pulled from his jacket pocket, and asked more questions. Then, abruptly, he flipped the glove compartment shut and leaned back.

  "Right, that'll do for now. I'll need a few things—any chance of getting someone started on them at this hour?"

  Kate reached for the car phone, got the hospital exchange, asked for the extension of the room Hawkin had said he would be using. He answered on the second ring.

  "Hawkin."

  "Sorry to wake you Al, but Dr. Bruckner has a list of things he's going to need, and it might save some time if he has them there when we get in."

  "Go ahead."

  She handed the instrument to her passenger, who first asked about Vaun; listened; asked about her pulse rate; told Hawkin not to bother, it wasn't that important; and asked if he had a pen. He read from his notebook: a cassette player; some roses, any color so long as they had a smell; a bristle hairbrush; some dark orange velvet; a patchwork quilt—perhaps one made by Angie Dodson?—a large pad of artist's watercolor paper; a can of turpentine; Vaun's most recent painting; and finally, complete privacy and quiet in Vaun's wing.

  "That means no voices in the hall, no rattling trays, no televisions, telephones, or clacking heels. Yes, I know they'll raise holy hell, but get it done. Yes, that's all for the moment. The orange velvet may have to wait until the shops open—I'll need a couple of yards. Right, see you soon."

  A smile played across Kate's lips at the thought of Hawkin following this younger man's emphatic orders and sending out for patchwork quilts and velvet at five o'clock in the morning. Bruckner's matter-of-factness was daunting—did he not consider that extraordinary list just the least bit odd? She glanced over and saw that he was studying his hands, lost in thought, slightly ill-looking in the green dashboard lights.

  "Do you mind my asking what you have in mind?" she asked him. His head came up and his teeth gleamed white at her.

  "My dear Watson, can you not deduce my purpose from my requirements?"

  "Sensory stimulation of some kind, but some of the things seem a bit—arcane."

  "Eye of newt and wing of bat," he cackled, and continued in a more normal voice. "All those things have strong personal associations for Vaun. Some of them I know from working with her in the prison—I know some of the passwords that worked before."

  "So you wouldn't ask for these things for just anyone in Vaun's state?"

  "Oh, God, no," he laughed. "What I'm going to do for Vaun bears very little resemblance to any sort of proper psychiatric treatment, even my more experimental approach. That's one of the reasons I insisted on complete privacy—the good Dr. Tanaka would be shocked out of his shoes by my irresponsibility. I go as a friend, masquerading as a doctor. And you are not to repeat that to anyone."

  "But what—I'm sorry, you probably get tired of explaining yourself to amateurs."

  "That's quite all right. You want to know what I'm going to do to make her notice those things, right?"

  "She is unconscious, after all."

  "Ah, but there you get into the amazing subtlety of the human mind. I suppose I ought to qualify all this by saying that I am working under the assumption that Vaun's current state is analogous to the state she was in when I first met her. Until I see her I can't know for certain, but her symptoms and vital signs are nearly identical. How much psychological theory do you know?"

  "I took some classes in psychology at the university. I don't know if you'd call it theory, it was more nuts-and-bolts stuff. Rats and such."

  "Well, then I hope you'll assume that what I'm going to tell you is generally accepted among my colleagues, instead of being on the outer fringes of experimentally verifiable hypotheses. I'm not going to tell you otherwise, because I'm right, and it is the truth."

  His voice was archly self-mocking with an undertone of dead seriousness, and Kate smiled.

  "Another question: Have you ever spent much time around a small baby?"

  "A baby?" Kate was surprised. "Not really. I have a nephew and I've changed his diapers, but not much more."

  "Then you may not have seen the way a very small baby can choose to block out the world when the stimuli become oppressive. Newborns in a hospital nursery, for example, can sleep despite the most appalling noise, not because, as some people insist, they're too undeveloped to hear it, but because the noise and the light and the cold, dry air and their hunger for their mothers and the strangeness of it all just overloads the circuits and the switches blow, and the whole system shuts down. That is not a technical explanation, by the way," he added with pious precision. "Severely traumatized or neglected children do the same thing sometimes, to an extreme. Even if their bodies are strong and healthy, they'll just curl up in a corner and die, unless something interrupts the process." Kate nodded with feeling, as the memory of a tiny blond girl from her first week as a policewoman came to her, a child dead not of malnutrition or abuse but from the starvation of human contact. "That is what Vaun is doing. She is not, strictly speaking, comatose. She is closer to the state we label catatonia, although normally—if 'normal' is not a contradiction in terms—catatonia is a temporary state into which a schizophrenic person retreats and comes out again within hours or, at the most, days. Normally.

  "Vaun, however, is not schizophrenic. She is an immensely sensitive artist who spends a good part of every day flaying herself and laying her lifeblood out on canvas for the world to gawk at. She maintains in her life the most tenuous of equilibriums, balanced between the world's pain and her own self-preservation, for the sake of the vision and the power she can find there, and only there, hanging on the very edge of the precipice.

  "Since December she has felt herself slipping. When the first body was discovered her past suddenly rose up to haunt her. The second one nearly drove her from Tyler's Road. The only thing that kept her there was sheer willpower. I have never known a person with as powerful, as one-track, as unshakable a will as Vaun's. She has carried through under loads that would crush most of us flat, but now that will has turned itself toward death. It's killing her. The growing fear of the last months, followed by the trauma of the overdose, has knocked her off her tightrope, and all her power is now taking her away from the world, away from pain, into peace.

  "I nearly lost her fifteen years ago. I was volunteering some time at the prison when I first saw her. She was completely withdrawn, curled fetally when they brought her out of the solitary cell. I waited in all my confident textbook knowledge for her to emerge, and a day passed, and two days, and four, and suddenly I realized that in spite of the IV her signs were weakening and she was slipping away. I worked my guts out for days, then, trying to find a way to get in, a key, some way to intervene in her chosen path. It was her paintings, of course, that made me do it. I'd go home and I wouldn't be able to sleep thinking of her paintings and of what I could do to restore them to the world. I learned more in my first two weeks with her than I had in all of my student days, and in fact my life since then has been largely an exploration of what she taught me. In my ignorance I nearly lost her, and God damn it, I'm not going to lose her now."

  He was silent for a long moment, then laughed quietly.

  "Have I answered your question?"

  "Sensory stimulation."

  "Of a highly specific, personalized variety. Do you know, it was only four or five years ago that I discovered why the smell of roses caused such a powerful reaction in her. She had come out to visit us—my wife and me—during the summer, and I found her in the garden one afternoon, tears streaming down her face, sobbing and laughing and shaking her head. She was sitting next to a couple of rosebushes my wife had planted, and she remembered: there was a faint smell of roses in the prison's solitary-confinement cells. Some quirk of the ventilation system brought it in from the warden's garden. For most people roses would be no more than a pleas
ant smell. For her the fragrance was the outside world, air and sun, while she lay curling up into a fetal ball choosing to die. We are nearly there, I think? To the hospital?"

  "Twenty minutes."

  "If you don't mind, I'll spend the time putting my thoughts together. I need to clear my mind before I see her."

  "Certainly."

  Kate called Hawkin and reported their progress, and drove into early dawn with a much-removed Bruckner, past the few stubborn press vehicles, their occupants distracted by a conveniently timed emergence by Trujillo, and up to the laundry entrance. Hawkin met them, and they wound their way through the silent, antiseptic halls to the wing that housed Vaun. The guard slipped out past them as they entered the room. Bruckner walked slowly up to the high bed and stood looking down at the sleeping woman. After a long minute he sighed, almost a groan, and with great gentleness put out two fingers to lift a lock of hair from Vaun's pale forehead, tucking it back with the others.

  "My little sweetheart," he whispered. "What have they done to you?"

  23

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  Kate collapsed for several hours in an adjoining room, and woke to find that the painting of the agonized woman, the intricate patchwork quilt from Vaun's bed, and a length of burnt-orange velvet had been delivered during the morning to the hallway outside Vaun's door. The guard sat next to them and rose when she saw Kate. Low music came from inside the room.

  "Morning, Lucy. It is still morning, isn't it?"

  "Barely. You want some coffee?"

  "I'll get some in a minute. Anything happening?"

  "Just this stuff arrived. Inspector Hawkin said nobody but you could go in, and the shrink hasn't been out, so I just left them here."

  "Have you heard from him? Hawkin, I mean? Or Trujillo?"

  "No, I've just been sitting here listening to golden oldies coming through the door and wishing I hadn't drunk so much coffee this morning."