A Grave Talent (23 page)

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 pleasant 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?"

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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."

"You haven't had a break? You go ahead, I'll stay here until you get back."

When the woman returned, Kate went for coffee and a stale roll, retrieved some clothes from her car, had a shower, and returned just as Lucy was going off duty. Her replacement was a massive Hispanic man whose movements were slow, except for those of his eyes. Kate introduced himself and made sure he knew that he was not to enter the room if he could possibly avoid it, and then very quietly. She then let herself in with only a faint click.

The first thing she noticed was the bright drawing taped to the wall above the light. Teddy's effort, no doubt. Paul McCartney was singing about blackbirds. The bed's inhabitant lay as before, limp and remote. Her hair had been heavily brushed. The perfume from the roses on the bedside table rose above the pervasive medicinal smell of a hospital room, two dozen incongruously perfect scarlet blooms hacked off and stuck into an institutional mayonnaise jar with patches of the label still clinging. Next to the jar were several items that Bruckner must have brought with him: a flat box of jumbo-sized crayons, the kind designed for pudgy little hands, a package of Conte crayons, and one of charcoal sticks. Kate wondered if he was planning on some kind of sleep-drawing with the unconscious woman and wished she could be witness to it.

Bruckner was sitting on the edge of the bed, bent forward in close scrutiny of Vaun's right hand, which lay curled up on her chest. He looked around when Kate came in, winced, stood up slowly, and eased his back. He was wearing a drooping bud in the lapel of his corduroy jacket. His hair stood on end, his five o'clock shadow was verging on an early beard, and when he came over to Kate he brought the mustiness of stale sweat. They both kept their voices very low.

"How is it going?" she asked him.

"Too early yet to know. Hawkin said you'd be able to help me today?"

"I haven't heard any different. What do you want me to do?"

"Relieve me for a couple of hours. I've got to shave, and I should talk to Tanaka and go through her records so I look professional."

"There's a shower in number seventeen," she suggested.

"I am looking forward to using it." He dug a crumpled shirt and a zip bag from his briefcase, and handed Kate two cassettes. "Put these on next, and brush her hair. Don't talk to her, and try to keep out of her line of sight. And watch her."

So for two hours Kate listened to half-remembered songs by Judy Collins and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel, and brushed firmly until the black curls lay flat against the head and pillow, and held her breath at several imagined movements and once at a faint noise that she decided must have come from the tape player. At the end of the hypnotic time, she was startled at the careless shock of the door being thrown open and Bruckner carrying in the canvas. He propped it on a chair against the wall facing the bed, and as she looked at it Kate realized that it had no signature. Bruckner came back with the glowing velvet and the quilt, and closed the door. She got up from the bed and went to whisper that there was no change, but his eyes swept over Vaun and the monitor that he had reattached to her, and grinned.

"Oh, yes there is. Look at her color, and her pulse rate."

Kate looked more closely, but could see no variation in the skin. The luminous numbers on the monitor had read between 55 and 58 before, and now read 59, hardly a noteworthy increase, she thought. It blinked to 60, then back to 59, and stayed there.

"No movement, though?"

"I thought a couple of times, but it's kind of like staring at a spot on a blank wall: It starts to jump after a while."

He nodded, tossed the velvet on the chair, and shook out the quilt to spread over the bed. He picked up Vaun's loose right hand and something fell out onto the folds of the bed, a small black something that brought an intake of breath and a look of slow, intense satisfaction to his face. He turned the flaccid hand over, plucked something from the furled fingers, and laid the hand down again on the bed, patting it affectionately. He walked around the bed to Kate and held out his hand. On his palm lay two short lengths of a charcoal stick. Kate picked them up and looked curiously at him.

"She broke it," he explained. "She felt it, knew what it was, and tightened up on it enough to snap it."

"And that makes you happy."

"That makes me very happy indeed. I'll need you again in two or three hours. Will you be here?"

"All day and tonight, so far as I know. Shall I come back in two hours?"

"Make it three. If I want you before that I'll ask Cesar or whoever's on duty to find you."

So Kate waited. She ate an overcooked lunch in the hospital cafeteria, ducked a reporter by diving into the kitchen and emerging from the back door in a white coat, talked to Hawkin when he called from San Jose, found someone to remove the stitches from the healed cuts in her back, and felt generally useless. In two hours and fifty minutes she went back to the room, and Bruckner told her what to do. She thought he was crazy, but she did it: she stood next to the unconscious woman
(did
her face seem less waxen?) telling her in slow, emphatic tones the outline of their investigation. She dwelt on Angie's concern for Vaun but not on her need for comfort; she told of Tony Dodson/Andy Lewis and his assumed guilt, though she did not say that he was missing; and finally she stressed that the police were aware and satisfied that Vaun was a victim, not a suspect, as much a victim as Tina Merrill, Amanda Bloom, and Samantha Donaldson. Then she went away, and fidgeted, and talked on the telephone to Lee and to Hawkin, and slept fitfully in a hospital bed on the other side of the wall from Vaun's.

The next morning Vaun's pulse rate was 62, and she had broken another charcoal stick and a Conte crayon.

It was a dreadful day, that Thursday. Bruckner called her in twice to repeat her story to the senseless figure on the bed and then sent her away. She couldn't go home, because he wanted her close and Hawkin had turned her over to him. She couldn't leave the hospital without trailing a conglomeration of loud people with flashbulbs and microphones. Tanaka and his assistants began to stop by and stare at the door with pointed questions, which they all knew she couldn't answer. Hawkin and Trujillo disappeared to direct the hunt for Andy Lewis. She felt closed in, forgotten, pushed to one side, bloated from the cafeteria food and the lack of exercise, and altogether gloomy about the future of the case and about her future as a detective.

At ten o'clock that night Vaun's pulse rate was 63. She had not moved. There was now a thick orange crayon in her hand. Her picture rose up at the foot of her bed, arrogant, demanding, unfinished. Bruckner subsisted on coffee and looked drawn, nearly as pale as his patient. His voice was hoarse. Kate went to bed to the whisper of music through the wall, and woke to silence. It was dark outside.

Vaun's guard paced up and down in the hallway, nervously fingering the clasp on his holster and eyeing the door, so dead silent after all these many hours. Kate met his glance, hesitated, and reached for the door handle.

The magnificent painting, what was left of it, leaned drunkenly against the wall. The canvas was sliced in two places, and the soft paint remained only in chunks and smears; the image had disappeared. A palette knife gleamed on the floor, its edges clotted darkly. Kate took two rapid steps inside, and the bed came into view.

The wires from the monitor lay in a tangle on the floor. The machine had been turned off. The tape player sat in silence on top of it. The IV bag dripped patiently into its tube and onto a growing puddle on the linoleum. Gerry Bruckner lay asleep on the bed, in socks and jeans and shirtsleeves, his right arm under the head of Vaun Adams, his left arm around her shoulders. She lay almost invisible, turned toward him under the patchwork quilt that covered the hospital blankets, her curls buried against his chest, completely within the circle of his arms. Rose petals covered the small table and spilled onto the floor, and their final perfume mixed with the fumes of turpentine and filled the room, driving out any smell of illness. Kate padded silently in and turned off the IV, and closed the door carefully behind her when she left. She stood in the hall feeling the stupid grin on her face.

"Is everything okay?" asked the anxious guard.

"I think it will be, but look, nobody is to go in there. If the nurse wants to change the IV drip, tell her it's been disconnected, she doesn't need to do anything. Nobody is to go in," she repeated, "not Tanaka, not the head of the hospital, not the President himself. Nobody. If you need me, have me beeped."

She went off humming to wake Hawkin with the first good news in many days.

Bruckner looked empty, Kate thought. It was late morning, and he had come out to talk with her and Hawkin. The psychiatrist slumped into the armchair, head lolling against the back, hands limp over the chair's arms, only his eyes moving. He looked like someone recovering from a long fever, pale, exhausted, and very grateful. His athletic bounce was gone, and he was speaking to Hawkin in a slow voice several tones lower than normal.

"I should have been back today. I can stretch it to Sunday, but I have to be there at nine o'clock Monday morning. I haven't told her yet, because she's in such a fragile state, but we must decide very soon who's going to take my place."

"Tanaka? Or one of his people?" asked Hawkin.

"It doesn't need to be a doctor. In fact, from her point of view it might be better if it weren't. She needs a friend, to protect her until she can grow some skin back."

"Someone from Tyler's Road?"

"She has three friends there: Angie Dodson, Tommy Chesler, and Tyler. I can't see Tommy coping, somehow. Angie would be ideal, but I don't know how she's dealing with her husband's role in it, and we don't want a weepy, guilt-ridden woman near Vaun. Tyler--I don't know. An ex-lover might be uncomfortable, and he's got too much on his hands as it is."

"You have somebody in mind?"

"What about Casey?"

Hawkin did not seem in the least surprised, but Kate jumped up from her chair and stared at the two men.

"No!"

"C'mon, Casey," Hawkin reassured. "She's going to need a bodyguard anyway until we get our hands on Lewis. You've done that kind of work before. You've been on this case from the beginning, and though normally you'd be too high a rank for straight guard work, she's an important lady and Lewis is without a doubt still after her."

"Al, this could drag on for weeks. Months!"

"I don't think so. If it does we'll make other arrangements. I want you to do this, Casey. I could order you," he pointed out. She saw nothing in his face but the decision, and she sighed.

"All right, then, two weeks. I'll babysit her for two weeks, that's all."

"That'll get us started anyway."

"Not here, though," said Bruckner firmly.

"No, not here," Hawkin reassured him. "Someplace quiet and safe."

"Good."

"When will she be able to talk to us? We have to get a statement from her."

"She's asleep now. I think she'll sleep for some time. Tonight, maybe? She'll eat and the nurse wants to bathe her, so about eight? But it'll have to be short."

"Twenty minutes okay?"

"That should be fine." Bruckner closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and pushed himself to his feet. "Now for the good Dr. Tanaka and writing up what I did with Vaun so that it doesn't sound like absolute quackery." He laid his hand lightly on Kate's shoulder as he went by. "Thank you, Casey."

When they were alone Hawkin went to stand by the window and light a cigarette. He smoked it and looked out between the blinds, and Kate pushed herself deeper into her chair and watched him warily.

"I've become very suspicious of your cigarettes, Al," she said finally. "I told you I'd babysit her. What else do you want?"

He turned around, surprised, and looked down at the thing in his hand, smiled sheepishly, and went across to the chair opposite Kate.

"The problem is what to do next. We can't very well send Vaun home and trust that Lewis will go away and play elsewhere. I can't very well go to the captain and say, 'Well, awfully sorry we don't have your man, but I sincerely doubt he'll try anything like it again, for a while anyway.' We're stuck unless we can track him down or flush him out."

"You want to use Vaun for bait," Kate said flatly.

"You have any other ideas?"

"She's in no shape for it, mentally or physically. Bruckner would have a fit."

"He won't know. She's a big girl, it's her decision. In ten days she'll be on her feet and Lewis will be relaxing, convinced he's shaken us, and starting to sniff out ways to get back at her."

"You're so sure about him?"

"Yes." Hard, flat certainty.

"All right, you're the boss. So what is it you're going to try and wheedle out of me?"

"You live on Russian Hill, don't you?"

The room was suddenly very cold, and a hand was at her throat.

"Al, no."

"You don't? I could have sworn--"

"Yes, I live there, but no. It's not my house, you can't ask it of me."