Last Run (37 page)

Multi-system organ dysfunction, they were told, leading to probable multiple organ failure and, ultimately, death.

The doctors were still doing what they were sworn to do.

The police were hoping to do the same, but they and the state attorney were on a frustrating kind of standby, since there was no guarantee that she would live, let alone be fit enough to face
charges, which had resulted – to date – in none being formally filed.

‘No prospect of speedy trial,’ Sam had explained to Grace and Cathy, ‘which a lot of defense attorneys file these days.’

‘And Lucia’s in no condition to run,’ Grace had said.

‘No flight risk at all,’ Sam had agreed, ‘which means Martinez and Rowan and the others – ’ he was resigned, for now, to excluding himself, since he was still
suspended from duties –  ‘can take their time working up the investigation.’

Time and effort was needed to link the murders of Gregory Hoffman, Teresa Suarez, the probable killing of Phil Busseto, and the attempted murder of Samuel Becket – adding to the mix those
other homicides after which Lucia had aided and abetted Kez; and monitoring her medical progress with regard to when – if ever – the time might come to file charges and make a formal
arrest.

One multiple killer beyond justice.

The other too sick even to warrant a guard at her door.

Sam Becket more likely than Lucia, at this time, to face charges.

Chapter Thirty-nine

October 6

Kez was laid to rest eight days after Terri’s cremation, the funeral in Naples, in keeping with a letter of wishes left by Lucia.

‘
It was the place she considered her sanctuary
’
–
her aunt had written – ‘
the nearest she had to a real home.
’

Martinez had told Sam about the letter, and Sam, in turn, had told Cathy.

Cathy did not believe Lucia’s decision the right one. Kez might have called the Naples apartment her ‘sanctuary’, but her
home
had been in the old clapboard house on
Matilda Street in Coconut Grove, the spartan space with the Flo-Jo posters and the track photograph of herself, running free. That other place had, Cathy suspected, been largely her aunt’s
creation, somewhere for her niece to escape to when she’d been
bad.

She kept those thoughts to herself.

‘Any time you need to talk,’ Grace had told her, ‘I’m here for you.’

She had said that several times.

‘Same as always,’ she had said.

Not the same, though, Cathy had realized. Never the same again.

She did not go to the funeral, even though Grace and Sam had both said they would understand if she did, had even encouraged her to go.

‘I can’t,’ she had told Grace. ‘It wouldn’t feel right.’

‘You loved Kez,’ Grace had said. ‘That would make it right.’

‘Saul couldn’t go to Teté’s,’ Cathy had said.

‘Exactly. Because he couldn’t,’ Sam had said. ‘Different.’

Cathy had stayed away from Terri’s funeral, too, had told the others that she thought she might go to Miami General to be with Saul during the service and interment, but when the time came
she had felt too guilty, had written him a note and gone running instead, which had made her feel even more ashamed.

No one had criticized her, but she had seen disappointment in their faces.

‘I guess I’m a coward,’ she had said.

‘Some things,’ Grace had said, ‘can be very hard to face.’

Saul was the one who had almost swayed Cathy about Kez’s funeral.

She was a sick person,
he had typed left-handed into the computer they’d recently given him, and which he had used to write his own eulogy for Terri.
We all know that. It
doesn’t change how you felt about her.

‘What Kez did to you changed that,’ Cathy said.

‘If I could,’ Saul typed, ‘I would go with you.’

‘I wouldn’t let you,’ Cathy told him.

David said much the same thing, and had offered to accompany her.

‘You need to say goodbye,’ he said. ‘It’s important.’

‘Maybe I will,’ Cathy told him. ‘But later, some time when it’s more private.’

‘See that you do,’ David said.

It had been a long time since Cathy had felt so alone.

A time of great closeness in the Becket family. Her family.

A time of bonding between Joshua and his parents and grandfather and uncle – and Cathy felt nothing but love for this new scrap of an infant, strong enough to bawl his lungs out and
disturb them all, morning, noon and night. His Aunt Claudia had come from Seattle to help out, and there had been a few raw, painful encounters between her and Grace because her sister had felt so
wounded by her exclusion during their worst of times.

But all of it, the hurt and the disruption and the worries over Saul, and the ongoing uncertainties about Sam’s career, all of it spelled
family
and was, therefore, warming and
ultimately reassuring to Cathy. And yet, included as she undeniably was in all of it, and as loving and supportive as everyone had been to her, Cathy still felt isolated by her guilt for having
brought Kez to them.

‘I have similar feelings, sometimes,’ Grace had told her during one of their talks, ‘because I worked with Lucia all that time and never recognized her pain.’

Cathy believed her, yet the knowledge brought her no comfort.

‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ Sam had told her more than once.

‘I don’t,’ Cathy had said. ‘Not really.’

She could see that Sam had not believed her, that he was worried for her. She loved him so much, loved them all without reservation.

Yet she chose not to tell them the truth about how she really felt.

Who she
really
blamed.

If she had told them they might have become more concerned, might have thought about watching her more closely, more carefully, in case she did something foolish.

Like going to see Lucia.

Chapter Forty

October 12

They let her visit.

They would not have done so had formal charges been filed and a guard placed at the door of Lucia’s hospital room. Cathy was not, after all, family – though the lack of any close
relatives (Gina had not appeared at her daughter’s funeral) had helped in the acceptance that Lucia was no flight risk.

No family or close friends, therefore, to plan a breakout. And Lucia was dying. So they saw no reason not to let Cathy see her.

The nurse she spoke to before her visit had told her it was possible Lucia might understand her if she wanted to talk to her, though she could expect no response.

Kez’s aunt’s eyes were closed and she was on a ventilator, tubes all over, monitors quietly following her progress.

Cathy waited until they were alone, and then she placed the gift she had brought with her on her bedside table and drew the visitor’s chair close up to the bed.

‘I have things to say,’ she told Lucia.

She waited for a moment, watched the pinched, greyish face, watched the chest rise and fall, watched the tissue paper eyelids.

‘I blame you,’ Cathy said.

She waited another moment, as if the eyes might open, then went on.

‘I blame you, Lucia, because you knew what Kez was and you said nothing. Did nothing to stop me falling in love with her. You put us all in danger. Saul and Sam and Grace, and all the
others, too. The ones she murdered, the ones you killed, or tried to kill, in her name.’

No point to this.

It was like talking to a corpse. But people did that all the time in funeral homes and at gravesides.

And Cathy had a little more that she needed to say.

‘Most of all, though, I blame you for Kez.’

The pain was flowing again, heat in her veins, raising the pitch of her voice.

‘You should have helped her, Lucia. Not the sick way you chose.’

Too loud.

Cathy took a breath and went on.

‘If you had got her treatment after the first time, when she was still a child, she could have been
helped
and it would all have been behind her by now. They’d probably have
sent her to a psych unit, and they could have taken care of her. Kez could have had a chance to move on and be a great athlete.’

Her palms were damp and she was trembling, feeling sick.

‘And all those people would not be
dead
.’

The door opened and Cathy froze, waited to be thrown out.

A nurse, kind-faced, Filipina, offered her something to drink.

‘No, thank you,’ Cathy told her. ‘I’m fine.’

‘It’s good,’ the woman said, ‘that someone’s here for her.’

‘Yes,’ Cathy said. ‘Thank you.’

She waited until the door had been closed for a minute.

‘Grace feels bad for you,’ she went on. ‘She hated you at first for what you did to Sam, what you’d done to Greg, but she’s a shrink and she’s
kind
and
she tends to blame herself for things that aren’t her fault. She thinks she should have known that you were tortured – her word, not mine. She thinks she should have been able to help
you.’ Cathy shook her head. ‘Not me. Just so you know, Lucia. I don’t feel any compassion for you. I blame you for destroying Kez.’

The tissue eyelids flickered then and the tracings on one of the monitors jerked a little, then went on as before. Probably just a reflex, she supposed.

The nurse, though, had said that Lucia might just hear her.

‘That’s it, really,’ Cathy said. ‘That’s what I came to say. That I blame you for everything. Just so you know.’

She stood up.

‘I brought you a little something. There’s a card, too. It says: “I thought you might find a
use
for these.” ’

She watched the dying woman, studied her one last time.

‘But I guess you’re too far gone for that,’ she said.

Somewhere nearby a man was weeping, a thin, bereft sound.

‘I’ll leave them for you, all the same,’ Cathy said. ‘Then maybe, if you ever do open your eyes, you’ll see how pretty they are. If you do, I guess it’ll
really hurt you not to be able to touch them.’

She went to the door.

‘I hope so, anyway,’ she said.

Chapter Forty-one

October 13

Martinez called Sam next day. Told him what Cathy had done. About the visit.

‘Did you know she was going?’

Sam said he had not known.

‘Was there a problem?’ he asked, already tense.

He had been sitting in the kitchen with Woody, drinking freshly squeezed orange juice. He had not felt like coffee since getting out of the hospital – had told Martinez to tell the guys
not to trouble returning his espresso machine when they were done testing – and the only tea he was tending to drink these days came in little bags out of sealed packets from the
supermarket.

Upstairs, Joshua – safe with his mom – had been crying for his feed and had now stopped, and just before the phone rang Sam had been about to go join them, the thought already in his
mind of their infant son at Grace’s breast.

Sweetest picture in the world, bar none.

‘No problem with the visit, as such,’ Martinez answered. ‘It was the gift she left.’

‘Tell me.’ Sam’s heart beat faster.

‘It’s OK.’ His good friend was swift with reassurance these days. ‘It might not have been, might have spelled big trouble for Cathy, if the guy who got what it
really
was hadn’t come to me.’

‘Jesus,’ Sam said. ‘So what was it?’

‘Bunch of flowers,’ Martinez said. ‘Pretty things, he said. Pretty colour, the nurse said, when she showed them to the officer – nice young guy called Domingo –
checking in on Lucia.’

‘Tell me,’ Sam said again, tersely.

‘Jimsonweed,’ Martinez said.

They both knew about jimsonweed – aka Devil’s Trumpet and Mad Apple and a whole bunch of other names – from way back, had arrested a teenager only a few months back who’d
run amok on a beach after smoking the weed.

‘Common as shit,’ Martinez went on, ‘so Cathy could have picked them at the roadside just about any place.’

Sam’s mind went straight there, to an image of their grieving, messed-up daughter gathering toxic weeds by the side of some highway – and they were highly toxic, he knew that. He
supposed that if she’d meant serious business, Cathy could have gone to greater trouble, gone in search of something even more obviously deadly, but she had known, of course, that Lucia was
beyond the effort.

‘She just left them, right?’ he asked. ‘She didn’t
do
anything with them, didn’t try to . . . ?’

‘She didn’t try to ram them down Lucia’s throat,’ Martinez said, ‘or squeeze their sap into her IV, nothing like that. But she left a card with them, wrote on it
that Lucia might find a
use
for them.’

Both men had heard from Grace what Lucia had said to her during that afternoon, the words that had jolted her into checking the back of that photograph. ‘
You might find a use for
it
.’

‘So I figured it was more of a gesture,’ Martinez went on, ‘than anything real harmful. Cathy throwing the bitch’s gift right back at her, maybe.’

‘Sounds about right,’ Sam said. ‘I guess.’

‘To Domingo, too,’ Martinez said. ‘Which was why he brought the flowers and the card to me instead of reporting it.’

Silently, Sam blessed Officer Domingo.

 ‘What did you do with them, Al?’ he asked.

 ‘What would I want with lousy weeds?’ Martinez said. ‘I wrapped them up and threw them out with my garbage. The card too.’

‘Thanks, Al,’ Sam said. ‘I owe you. Again.’

‘You’d do it for me,’ Martinez said.

‘Think I should speak to Domingo?’

‘I wouldn’t,’ Martinez said. ‘I just figured you should know.’

‘Thanks, man,’ Sam told him. ‘I’m . . . we’re very grateful.’

 ‘Nada,’ Martinez said. ‘No big deal.’

‘How much of a problem,’ he asked Grace a little while later, ‘do you think we have?’

‘I think we have all kinds of problems.’ She sighed. ‘If you’re asking me if I think Cathy’s gift to Lucia signals a career in poisoning, then no, I don’t
think so.’