Mind Games (29 page)

Until they heard Sam’s pager.

‘No,’ he said.

Grace was beyond words, almost beyond breathing.

‘Go’way,’ Sam said.

‘It won’t,’ she managed to say.

He rolled them both over so they were face to face. ‘I’m sorry, Grace.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘No, I mean I’m really sorry.’

‘I know you are.’ She smiled into his eyes. ‘Shouldn’t you answer it?’

‘Yeah.’ He started kissing her mouth again.

‘Sam.’

‘Mm?’

‘Your pager.’

It wasn’t the pager that got to Grace in the end – there was something semi-comical about being interrupted in the middle of lovemaking by a beeper, and next time
she knew it might well be her own cellular phone that got in the way of things. But the sad and awful truth about Sam’s job, even more than her own, was that a call in the night was likely to
mean nothing less than more violence and pain, and that was the salutary thought Grace went home with to her house on the water, and the one that kept her awake for most of the rest of the night,
with Harry lying across her feet, the way he usually did. She wanted to think about Sam, about the broadness and leanness and strength of him, about his gentleness and passion and humour. But
flashes kept coming into her mind instead of somebody traumatized or even injured, of a body lying on some street or on some floor or across some bed, maybe bloody, maybe strangled, maybe cut,
maybe . . .

‘Stop it now, Grace,’ she told herself out loud in the dark.

Harry grumbled and turned around.

Grace wondered if it was a man, woman or child, waiting for Sam, dead or injured or merely in shock.
Merely
. She thought about the tenderness of the man, of the bereaved father, the
disappointed husband, the kind and grateful son. She thought about his talent, about his glorious, vibrant voice and the way he’d talked about wrapping himself in a magic cloak when he sang.
It was hard reconciling those things with the man who right now might be kneeling over a dead civilian, checking for clues, maybe even already making an arrest . . . maybe in danger . . .

‘Cut it
out
, Grace,’ she told herself.

She was a very disciplined woman when she really set her mind to it.

She cut it out, and went to sleep.

It had been on the wall when Cathy had come back into her cell after dinner. There was no way of knowing when it had been done, or by whom. It might have happened while she was
still on kitchen duty, scrubbing vegetables and floors, scraping her fingers and her knees – or it might have been done at dinner time.

It was dark now. The lights had been turned off hours before, and though that first, terrifying blindness had long since passed, it was still much too dim to see anything more than vague shapes
and shades of grey.

Cathy didn’t need light to see what was on her cell wall.

It was etched into her brain, right behind her eyes.

The hideous parody, carved into the stone.

CA
THY
RO
BB
INS TOOK A
KNIFE
AND
SLI
CED
AWAY HER
MOMMY’S LIFE
AND WHEN
SHE
SAW WHAT
SHE
HAD
DONE, SHE FIGURED
IT WAS SO MUCH
FUN,
SHE DID IT TO HER
DADDY
TOO
. . .
AND HER
SHRINK . . .
AND HER
DOC . . .
AND HER
AUNTIE .
. .

Cathy had screamed when she’d first seen it, and a guard had come running, but when she’d looked at the writing, she’d just shrugged and given a mean kind of
smile.

You deserve everything you get
, that smile had said.

And she’d locked Cathy’s door and, not long after, the lights had gone out.

And now Cathy was still sitting all hunched up on her bed, trying to keep warm, trying not to feel the walls closing in on her, trying not to see those ugly words, trying not to hear them going
around and around in her mind.

Trying not to scream.

It had been a rape case that had taken him away from her the previous night, Sam told Grace when he called her just before ten o’clock.

‘How’s the victim?’ she asked.

‘Battered. Shocked.’ Sam paused. ‘As you’d expect.’

‘Do you know who did it?’

‘Maybe. It’s too soon to say much.’ He paused again. ‘I’m going to be pretty tied up all day and probably most of tonight. I’m sorry, Grace.’

‘What for?’

‘I’d like to have seen you is what for.’

‘Me too,’ Grace said. ‘But you don’t have to give me a thought, Sam. Just do what you have to do.’

‘I’ll be doing that,’ Sam told her, ‘but don’t expect me not to think about you at least once.’

Just after two-thirty p.m., Dr Parés telephoned.

‘Did you get to see Cathy yesterday?’ Grace was swift to ask.

‘Yes, I did, but that’s not why I’m calling,’ he said.

Something in his tone set Grace’s antennae on alert. ‘Has something happened to her?’

‘In a sense, yes, I’m afraid it has.’ The doctor went on swiftly but gently. ‘There was an incident this morning – another young woman was discovered in her cell
with lacerations to her back and shoulders. According to her, she was attacked some time before lockdown last night.’ Parés paused. ‘She says she didn’t see who it was, but
when Cathy’s cell was searched, a weapon was found.’

Grace’s stomach was in knots. ‘What kind of a weapon?’

‘A potato peeler. Apparently, Cathy was on kitchen duty yesterday.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘I understand, Dr Lucca,’ Parés said, sympathetically. ‘But I gather there were traces of blood still on the implement.’

Grace’s mind reeled. ‘I have to see her.’

‘That won’t be possible,’ Parés told her. ‘She’s in solitary confinement. The only people they’ll allow in are her lawyer and myself.’

‘But surely, as her psychologist—’

‘By all means, you can always ask, doctor,’ Parés said. ‘I think you should ask, but I would imagine it will be some days before you’re admitted.’ He paused
again. ‘I’m very sorry to give you bad news.’

Grace put down the telephone and called Jerry Wagner whose assistant, Veronica Blaustein, informed Grace that her boss had been out on business when the call had come in from
the house of detention, but that he would be calling there before the end of the day.

‘Would you please ask him to call me when he gets back?’ Grace asked.

‘I’ll certainly ask him,’ Ms Blaustein said, ‘but he may not come back to the office until Monday.’

‘I’m sure you’ll be talking to him,’ Grace pushed.

‘That depends on his schedule, Dr Lucca.’

Grace thought about calling Sam, but then she remembered the rape victim, and she knew without being told that the Female House of Detention was out of the Miami Beach Police Department’s
jurisdiction, which meant that there would be nothing Sam could do for Cathy. On the contrary, his involvement in this latest development would probably just end up adding more weight to the case
he’d already handed over to the State Attorney’s office.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said to Dora later, over a cup of tea.

‘There’s nothing you can do.’ Dora was to-the-point, as usual. ‘There are some people even you just can’t help, Dr Lucca.’ She never balked at giving Grace a
dose of her opinion, but she drew the line at calling her by her first name – something, she’d once explained, to do with the pleasure she took in working for a woman doctor.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘you have a patient coming in ten minutes – now
her
you may be able to do something for. So just drink your tea and try to relax a
little.’

Grace managed, as she always did, to focus on her patient, but she did not relax. Nor did Jerry Wagner get back to her. Sam did, nearing the end of his own twenty-four-hour
working day. He was too bushed to have much in the way of comfort to offer her regarding Cathy, but he promised to keep his ear to the ground and let her know the minute he heard anything.

‘That’s if I do hear anything,’ he added. ‘It’s out of—’

‘Your jurisdiction,’ Grace finished for him. ‘I know, Sam. I’m just letting off steam. I feel so cut off from her – I mean, if ever there was a time when a patient
needed me, it has to be Cathy right now, and all I’m supposed to do is wait till Monday morning and make an application to visit her.’

‘It’s rough,’ Sam said. ‘I’m sorry, Grace.’

She heard the exhaustion in his voice, and felt guilty. ‘No, I’m sorry. You’ve got more than enough to deal with, and what you need now is some wind-down time and
sleep.’

‘I gotta admit, sleep sounds pretty tempting.’

‘Any time off for good behaviour tomorrow or Sunday?’

‘Depends how soon we get this bad guy nailed down.’

‘I hope it’s real soon,’ Grace said, ‘for everyone’s sake.’

Sam called twice next morning before eleven, but each time Grace was engaged with a patient and both times, when she tried getting back to him, he was unavailable.

At five minutes past eleven, Peter Hayman called.

‘In case you hadn’t noticed, it is now officially the weekend,’ he said, ‘which is when some folk get it into their heads to quit work and relax. Now I just happen to be
planning to put in a few hours’ sailing with some friends this afternoon and tomorrow. How about you come down and join us?’

‘I can’t, Peter,’ Grace said.

‘Wall-to-wall patients?’

‘A few,’ she told him. ‘And some other commitments.’

‘Pity.’ He seemed easy about it. ‘It might have been fun, and just the break you needed.’ He paused. ‘You don’t mind my calling to ask, do you, Grace?
It’s just a gorgeous morning down this way, and when my friends called, I thought of you.’

‘I’m glad you called,’ she said.

She called the house of detention, tried and failed to speak to Cathy or to get any useful information, and was told yet again that if she wanted to arrange a visit, she would
need to call again on Monday.

Two hours later, while she was making a sandwich, Sam got third time lucky, though it was a short and gruesome conversation because there had been another rape down on South Beach, which meant
that he and all his colleagues were going to be on heavy duty all weekend.

‘I’m sorry, Grace,’ he said. ‘And not just because of the case. Being paged the other night was a real bitch.’

‘For me too,’ she told him.

‘I’m not sure when I’ll even be able to call,’ he went on. ‘Cases like this, everyone tends to get pretty steamed up.’

‘I can imagine,’ Grace said.

‘I guess you probably can.’

Across the telephone line, Grace heard voices in the background.

‘Don’t worry about me, Sam,’ she said, gently.

The voices got raised.

‘Gotta go,’ he said.

Grace put down the phone. Her mind went, unbidden, to the night before last, up on Sam’s roof. Her body was still sore, grazed in parts from its rough and tumble brushes with concrete, but
the tenderness just brought back the other memories. Hot, spicy and damn near overpowering.

And she wasn’t remembering the pizza.

She ate her sandwich, cleared away that and breakfast, took Harry for a stroll around the island, came back and scanned her notes for her two-thirty patient. When the phone
rang again, she found herself hoping it might be Sam, but it was the mother of her four p.m. patient, explaining that her daughter had suddenly become extremely upset about coming to see Grace, and
so, if she didn’t mind too much, she felt it better to postpone. Grace told her that she didn’t mind, that it was important her daughter felt at least reasonably comfortable about
coming, and perhaps they could try rescheduling in a few days’ time.

She put down the phone and checked her calendar. The cancellation meant that her next patient was her last for the day – and she knew without looking that Sunday was appointment-free,
since she’d been planning to bring her records and paperwork up to date.

That had been before the night on Sam’s roof and the news about Cathy.

Suddenly, Grace felt terribly restless. Aimless.

If she sat at home all weekend, Grace began to think she might be in danger of regressing to adolescence, hoping each time the phone rang it would be Sam telling her that they’d caught the
rapist and that he was free to see her. She thought she’d learned a little more than that about the complexities of violent crime and police work during the past several weeks; unless the
rapist turned himself in or
was
turned in by a relative, she knew a speedy resolution was probably unlikely.

If she sat around the house for another day and a half, thinking about Cathy Robbins and potato peelers and attacks on other inmates, she’d be in need of therapy herself by Monday.

With five minutes to go before her two-thirty was due, she made up her mind and made the call to Peter Hayman.

‘Is the invitation still open?’

‘Sure is,’ he said.

‘I could leave town a little after four,’ she told him. ‘I guess it’s a bit late in the day to plan much sailing, but at least I could check into a hotel and be ready for
an early start, if that’s what you and your friends have in mind.’

‘Sounds great,’ Hayman said. ‘You sure you want to go to a hotel? I mean, if you don’t want to stay at your sister’s, you’d be welcome to use my guest
room.’

‘My sister’s up in Fort Lauderdale,’ Grace told him. ‘And frankly I think I’m just in the mood for a hotel. Maybe Pelican Lodge – I’ve been wanting to
try it for a while. But thank you for the invitation,’ she added.

Her doorbell rang.

‘I heard that,’ Hayman said. ‘Is it a patient?’

‘It is.’

‘How about I call the hotel for you, get you booked in?’

The bell rang again.

‘That would very kind. I don’t like to impose—’

‘Grace, go let them in. I’ll call you in an hour, let you know about the reservation.’