The Kill Riff (22 page)

    
LUCAS.
Underlined three, now four times on the pad.

    He was capable of utilizing such lethal-looking stuff, she was certain. That led naturally to that trusty cop show standard, motive.

    The question marks were beginning to clog up the page. Superficially, Lucas' motive could be a member-specific vendetta against the former components of a now defunct band called Whip Hand. Cause: the death of Lucas' only daughter, Kristen, during a crowd riot at a Whip Hand concert.

    Lucas had confronted the band's lead man, Gabriel Stannard, on the steps of the Beverly Hills courthouse with a purgative gesture that could be interpreted as an act of aggression, the promise of future retribution, or a threat. Low-wattage terrorism against someone protected by vast wealth.

    But Lucas had been cured and was not capable of becoming a methodical hit man. Not now.

    He had not been committed to the mental hospital. He'd come voluntarily. That man, Sara thought, could not be behind these hideous and calculated terminations.

    Both Lucases had been cured. Hadn't he?

    There was the Lucas whose wife, Cory, had left him, whose little girl had been stomped into the concrete at a Whip Hand show, a man full of remorse and suicidal tendencies. The urge to end his life had never radiated too strongly, but Sara had recognized the signs, the seeds, the little things that could resonate with deadly certainty and start a chain reaction in the mind. That sort of mental critical mass had sent much stronger men jumping off the top floors of skyscrapers. She had noted it, accounted for it, and treated it. She did her job.

    Then there was the other Lucas.

    The strength of the black tea was making her back teeth ache. She shifted the pad to her opposite knee, and her free foot tingled with pins and needles.

    Cory Ellington had been found dead in a hotel room of a Seconal overdose. Lucas' complicity had never been suggested, but it had been intimated. Everybody knew that Vietnam vets were dangerous, homicidal, on hair triggers. It was a popular delusion on the order of catching herpes from toilet seats-untrue, yet holding the potency of mythology. Things did not have to be true to scare people. And wasn't the stunt with the plastic gun the sort of thing an unhinged vet would pull? The newspapers would certainly see it that way.

    There was Lucas the grief-burdened widower and pain-wracked father. And there was Lucas the problem solver, the team component who interfaced so well with the group at Kroeger Concepts.

    Nobody would care that Lucas' undistinguished military tour had in no way unbalanced him mentally. You never heard about the vets who had returned physically intact and totally blase about their service, the guys to whom the military had been just a job, a duty to dispose. The image of the berserk Nam psychopath was ever so much more media fun. Likewise, these same nobodies would give not a sterling goddamn that Cory had ridden the suicide train, because the image of the wife killer was even more fun. Lucas was a victim of the Lizzie Borden syndrome. Lizzie had been acquitted, but that didn't change the rhyme about the axe and the forty whacks. Lucas was a victim of the same sort of prejudice. Please deposit Nobel Prizes for deductive logic on the pedestal by the door.

    Sara listened to the breeze kicking up outside and played devil's advocate. If Lucas was guilty, if he in fact had done it… well now, that really screwed up the TV viewing schedule for the evening, didn't it?

    In both murders the weapons had been military in origin. Sara had no idea how difficult it might be to deprive someone of the burden of life, but if Lucas was constitutionally able to blow one man apart and gut a second like a dinner trout, it would surely have been within his ability to force-feed Cory five dozen reds and forge a suicide note or make her write one under duress. DIE AND ROT IN HELL YOU FUCKER THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT. The note blamed Lucas; the logic was crystalline. If you accuse yourself before others can, then they hesitate to point the finger. What if the rough message of that note had been directed not by Cory at Lucas, but the other way around?

    There was a second message to ponder: KILL SATANIST ROCK. All the photos of Room 704 had included that admonition, which dripped redly down the wall scant feet from where all two hundred-plus pounds of Brion Hardin had faded into rigor mortis.

    Lucas was a stolid atheist; always had been. He enjoyed rock, and not just 1960s nostalgia, either. He'd introduced Sara to Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream and a defunct group called U.K. and the resurgent Slade and even, god help her, a kicky little number called "Golden Shower of Hits" by the Circle Jerks. Scragging the demons of rock'n'roll in the name of Jesus was totally out of character, a contradiction of all the facets of Lucas that she understood.

    Think you understand, her mind nagged.

    The legal pad was filled with accusations and dirty brainstorming. The thought of exonerating Lucas made Sara's heartbeat quicken in hope, but one word hung like a sty in her mind's eye to upset any neat deduction of innocence. The.word sizzled in danger red and SOS yellow, and the word was diversion-from the medical Latin divergere, to extend in different directions from a common point.

    The art of diversion was a hallmark of military strategy, second nature to an experienced campaigner. Lucas qualified. Didn't he?

    His suicidal tendencies had certainly seemed bonafide enough to fool a psychiatrist. What if they had been mapped out to do just that, on purpose, to divert her from other things?

    What if the attraction she felt for Lucas Ellington had been programmed the same way, for the same purpose?

    More question marks on the yellow legal page.

    It dawned on Sara that Lucas could very well have planned his entire "recovery," leading everyone at Olive Grove along so they would unhesitatingly put the stamp of approval on his cured mind. No, this man could not be capable of such a vendetta. We fixed him up. He was broke, but now he's all better.

    What if Lucas was out there settling his score, evening up, reachieving some balance? What could her role be? Perhaps he planned to recover all he'd lost, and that meant getting himself a replacement for Cory. And if he actually had murdered Cory…

    Sara's eyes defocused suddenly in mild shock at the logic chain she'd just linked together. Bad as the idea of a surrogate Cory was, what if Lucas found himself a surrogate Kristen?

    What if you strolled up to an epileptic and blinked a red light in his face until he tipped over?

    Anger flared then, and she threw the legal pad across the room. The pages rattled, the wings of a chaotic yellow bird flailing in ungainly flight, and it crash-landed in a wad near the front door. She felt like crying. She felt like punching out the reading lamp, which hung over her shoulder like a peeking judge of her thoughts.

    Why hadn't Lucas called her?

    Two days. Two absolute meatgrinder days at Olive Grove, during which Lucas' slick disappearing act had nibbled, then gnawed, at her concentration. The Lucas she knew would have phoned. Lucas always comes back, Burt Kroeger had told her. The emotional weight she had assigned to Lucas' calling had become frightening.

    Now that he was out, was this the noise of the boom dropping? Had the vanishing act been planned all along as well?
Haven't you learned any goddamn thing in thirty-eight years, Sara?

    "Aren't you glad you can heal people?" she said to no one. The dark tea mimicked the deep brown of her hair, the mahogany of her eyes. Her hair was in a short, stylish, executive crop. She had been raking her fingers through it, contemplatively, and it stuck out here and there. She looked at her reflection and saw her tongue busily belaboring the chapped scab on her lip. She felt like trashing the teacup for the satisfaction of hearing breaking glass. But that would be acting like a nut. It'd only lose her the cup, which had a big, grinning white cat on it and was one of her favorites.

    Lucas had not called her. That had been the keynote of the evening, of the whole week. He'd gone incommunicado, and she felt jilted, left in the lurch like some high school muffin clutching a corsage on prom night. To make herself feel better, she'd made Lucas into a superhuman assassin of rock musicians. In all likelihood, Lucas was tending a campfire someplace, as Burt had said. And the killings, which the papers were already calling "rock sanctions" in anticipation of a series of them, were probably the work of one or more religious fruitcakes, folks who wanted to kill satanist rock in the name of their god. The sort of fanatics who made the patients at Olive Grove look not just normal, but dull. Lucas' problem was over; she'd helped him solve it. It was her problem that she had to deal with.

    It began to sprinkle rain outside. The Valley was thirsty.

    Dos Piedras was an upper-income bedroom community tucked just off Interstate 5, due east of Santa Barbara. A fifteen-minute drive over pleasant country backroads led to Olive Grove, where the hospital was, and most of the local shopping. The terrain around Dos Piedras was hilly and rolling, still mostly open. A glut of condos was working its way up from the south, and a lot of property was subdivided into generous tracts for the well-to-do. Dos Piedras's main lure was that it was not shoved up against anything else, like an airport or a military base or a microchip plant. It stood at a fair remove from major highway arteries and most urban interferences, which enhanced a sensation of calm remoteness and thereby lent the area its identity. Olive Grove's fire department handled most crises; the sheriffs, law enforcement. There was a quaint little cemetery almost a century old next to a church that was more a tourist attraction than a sanctuary for worship. Small municipal airfields were all around in Santa Barbara, Lancaster, Mojave, and private planes could often be seen dotting the intensely blue sky or making steady, buzzing progress among the night stars.

    
Rough flying tonight,
Sara thought,
if the rain gets worse.
It was pouring outside, battering her window-panes and blurring the view.

    Forty was creeping up on her like a mugger in an alley, and she hated the way she let it prod her. Lucas' attraction to her had been not only welcomed, but invited. So long as he was officially her patient, she never had to let him know that he was helping her, too. It was the safest relationship in the world-a secret, perhaps one-way infatuation. Now he'd bolted, evaporated with no forwarding address, and she was scared, and she reprimanded herself for her vulnerability.

    It wasn't thirty-eight years. It was thirty-nine years, two months from now. She thought of erosion, undermining her with slow inexorability. Hadn't her almost-forty years taught her anything?

    Sara had been on the losing end of a made-in-paradise marriage to another doctor, Spencer Parrish. This ideal union had taken five full years to disintegrate. Spence had always been more interested in maximizing his investments than in emotional gobbledygook that might hamper his progress up the ladders of the world. He had planned a corporation, not a marriage, and Sara did not want to play vice president. Mismanagement had killed Spence's co-op when Sara was thirty-four. She had been painstaking and careful, not rushing into matrimony while too young. It hadn't saved her. She still had to learn the same tough lessons in the same impossible ways.

    There was a card tacked near her desk at Olive Grove: The difficult we do immediately; the impossible will be done by morning. As she had discovered, the best way to learn how to do something was to do it wrong. The psychological weight of getting married had not rendered marriage immune to the rules by which she'd lived most of her life until that point. No fair, she'd thought. She broke, she healed, she learned.

    She had rebounded from Spence into an on-and-off relationship with a writer named Stephen Grave, who masterminded several popular paperback series-what he called "violence books," with calling-card titles like
The Expediter
and
SSS: Special Sanction Squad
. The sole condition Steve imposed on their relationship was that Sara understand his deadlines, and that sometimes he would have to work to the exclusion of everything else… except perhaps for a therapeutic fucking session in bed after another twenty-five pages had been laid to rest. Steve pulled a pile of contracts. He tended to hole up in his rented cottage, working and working, rarely seeing daylight, sometimes at mirror odds with Sara's waking hours. She told him that she understood and did not mind. They went to restaurants and to the movies in Olive Grove… and that was about it. She told him she didn't mind. She lied to herself. And Steve would nod patiently or murmur at intervals over the phone, until she realized that he was not really listening and was putting up with her in order to get back to his typewriter, where his attention was locked up. She finally understood that she did not wish to compete with Steve's endless writing. It was a bitch goddess that she could not beat. Ultimately she had fled. Another two years gone. To this day it was difficult to resist the urge to pick up the phone and talk to Steve; Steve was very good at talking and helping her get a handle on her fears. Even, she thought, if he really didn't give a damn about what frightened her.

    When her rebound fizzled out she saw no one for six months, then overcompensated. It was a textbook pattern she hated herself for recognizing. She shared various beds with several monied, handsome nonentities from Santa Barbara's upper crust. The Mercedes and the overpriced eateries and exclusive clubs got boring when experienced in the company of men whose sole purpose was the pursuit of perfect meat, the cultivation of empty beauty. But it was a brief, comfortable time unmarred by thought. When she felt the need to plug her brain back in, she abandoned the fashion plates and retreated into her work at the hospital.