Blind Spot (17 page)

“Can’t take the chance,” Finlay interrupted.

“Finlay?” Lil was standing in the kitchen doorway. Her apron was still on backward and her lipstick was still splayed across her face, but her eyes were alive. “Why didn’t you tell me Warren and Suki were here?” she demanded. “Did you offer them some coffee or tea? Some cookies?” She turned to Suki and Warren. “I’m so glad to see you both. Let me go get you some of my fresh-baked cookies.” She headed toward the kitchen then swung around. “Are you two an item?” she asked.

Suki smiled. The old Lil was back, speaking her mind. It was just as Finlay had said: in and out, minute by minute. “No,” she said. “We just stopped by for a quick visit.”

Lil narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “There’s something funny going on here.…”

“Now, Lil,” Finlay said, reaching up and placing a placating hand on her arm. “There’s no need to bother your little head about—”

“I’m not a child,” Lil snapped, whipping her arm out from under her husband’s hand. The pink bow in her hair fell to the floor. “And my ‘little head’
is
bothered. Why were you talking about Stan’s girl, Alexa? Does this have something to do with your new job?”

Suki and Warren exchanged glances, but neither said a word. Suki felt hope flare through her and she grabbed Warren’s hand.

“It’s complicated, Lil,” Finlay tried again. The crackling of his knuckles was sharp and loud.

Lil crossed her arms over her large breasts. “Right is right and wrong is wrong,” she said, as if she had a much better grasp on the situation than Finlay had led them to believe.

“You know Ellery got me this new job. You know he’ll jinx it for us and then we won’t be able to make it.”

“Pooh on Ellery McKinna,” Lil said. “The Lord will provide.”

“The Lord isn’t going to pay the doctor bills,” Finlay said, but Suki detected the beginning of resignation in his voice. She clutched Warren’s hand more tightly and held her breath.

“Then the government will,” Lil declared.

“Aw, Lil, that doesn’t—”

Lil wagged her finger at him again. “Right is right and wrong is wrong, and it’s very wrong not to offer our guests something to eat. I’m going to get those cookies I made this morning, and when I come back we’ll continue our discussion.”

“You didn’t make any cookies this morning,” Finlay said softly, but Lil didn’t appear to hear him. She bustled toward the kitchen. When she got there, she sat back down at the table and resumed her dreamy gazing.

Finlay sighed and stood up. “‘From the mouths of babes.’”

Suki paced the L-shaped corridor of the Witton police station. She had been up and down the hallway so many times she was beginning to imagine she could differentiate between the design of the brown-speckled tile at the entrance of the interrogation room and the design of the brown-speckled tile at the foot of the stairway. The station bustled with noise and activity, but no one paid her any mind. She couldn’t imagine what was taking so long.

Although Kenneth had tried to convince her to go home, promising he would call as soon as the boys had completed their statements, Suki could not leave. Alexa was going to be cleared, and Suki wanted to be here. The second it happened. The moment it became fact. Even if it took all night.

The ride back from Sunderland had been even more uncomfortable than the ride out, if that was possible. Finlay had huddled in the back seat, silent and pale, cracking his knuckles until Suki was sure his fingers would fall off. Lil, who Finlay had decided could not be left alone, spent the ride reading every sign she saw. “Palmer Ware. Lee Lenox,” she called out, as if she was reading men’s names instead of passing towns. “Sturbridge Worcester.”

Warren had been quiet, focused on seeing through the driving storm. Suki, too, said nothing as she stared out the window at the rain that continued unabated. She was edgy and jumpy and played silly games with herself such as if-I-see-three-Connecticut-licence-plates-in-three-minutes-it-means-Alexa-will-be-cleared and if- four- black-cars-pass-us-it-means-Finlay’s-going-to-change-his-mind. By the time they reached the police station, Suki was a wreck.

But everything went smoothly. Kenneth was on duty and Finlay’s daughter, who Finlay had called before they left Sunderland, was there waiting for them. With Donna at his elbow, Finlay stood tall and told the detective why he had come. As Kenneth disappeared into an interrogation room, he flashed Suki a “thumbs-up” sign. He looked like a happy, redheaded Abe Lincoln. Suki grinned at the closed door, finally allowing herself to believe that this really was happening.

Warren was having dinner with Darcy, so he had dropped Suki off at home. When he climbed out of the car, he had given her a hug and mumbled awkwardly about how glad he was things had turned out as they had. His voice shook slightly. Suki was touched by his concern and decided she would invite him to dinner when this was all over. But she quickly forgot Warren as she ran in to tell Alexa the news, then climbed into her own car and drove back to the station. She had been walking the halls ever since.

The boys had been brought in while she was gone and placed in separate interrogation rooms with their parents and a rotating group of police. Uniforms and detectives and the state cop from the night Jonah was killed all cycled through the rooms. The media had gotten wind that something was up. Reporters bumped into each other in the small lobby.

Suki was sorry that she had missed Ellery’s arrival; she had been looking forward to greeting him, but consoled herself with the fact that she was sure to have another opportunity. Finlay and Lil were now long gone. They had left with Donna around five, both visibly exhausted. Suki hoped nothing would happen to Finlay. Given the situation, pressing charges seemed beyond cruel and unusual.

She continued her pacing, although she too was exhausted and, aside from coffee and a few packages of peanut butter crackers, hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. Her stomach growled and her head hurt; she decided a person couldn’t eat too many peanut butter crackers. Climbing past two policemen talking on the stairway, she headed upstairs to the vending machine. As she reached down to remove the orange package from the drawer, a hand gripped her shoulder. She swung around. Kenneth’s large frame filled the hallway. One look at his face and Suki froze.

“What?” she demanded.

“Come.” Kenneth gently took her arm. “Come on in here for a minute.” He waved toward a shadowy room filled with rows of empty chairs facing a podium. “We need to talk.”

“Finlay said the boys weren’t at the rec center,” Suki cried. “I heard him. He said Ellery got him to lie about it to save Devin’s skin!”

“Suki,” Kenneth begged, “it’s not that simple.”

Suki yanked her arm from Kenneth’s grasp. “Yes, it is,” she insisted, wishing that saying it would make it true, knowing that it did not. “It
is
that simple.”

Kenneth steered her into the darkened room. He closed the door but didn’t turn on the lights. A bank of windows lit the room with an eerie blue-white light from the parking lot below. The bustle and sounds of the station were muted; it all seemed very far away. Surreal.

“It’s too early to know exactly what this is going to mean for—” Kenneth began.

“Do the boys deny being there?” Suki interrupted. “Does Ellery still claim they were with him?”

“No.” Kenneth leaned against the back of one of the chairs and rubbed at his beard. “No, they admit they were in your car.”

“So what’s the problem?” Suki didn’t like the sound of the words:
your car
.

Kenneth clasped Suki’s shoulders and took a deep breath. “The boys all deny they had anything to do with the murder.”

“Deny it?” Suki shook her head, as if this movement would help her make some sense of Kenneth’s words. She felt as if she were floating, floating like Alice in a world where up was down and left was right. “But, but then how …?”

Kenneth dropped into an empty chair and pulled Suki into the one next to him; he took her small hands in his big ones. “Brendan says he didn’t see what happened, but both Devin and Sam claim it was Alexa who fired the gun.”

Suki stared at Kenneth. The blue-white light from the parking lot made his cheekbones stand out. He was all shadows and angles. Not of this world. “No,” Suki said from within a disquieting sense of déjàvu. “That can’t be. It’s impossible.”

Kenneth pressed her hands between his own as if the human contact might ease her pain. “Impossibly so.”

“
It’s the wrong thing to do
,” Alexa had said. “
Bad for you. Bad for us
.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I
t was first thing Monday morning, and Suki had a two-hour session with Lindsey to administer the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. She would have preferred three hours, but she was overloaded with both work and schemes to expose Ellery McKinna’s lies. She saw Ellery as a tiny, impotent figure, huddled behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz, pulling the strings that kept tripping Alexa. And she saw herself ripping back that curtain and revealing him for the coward he was.

As she waited for Lindsey, Suki pulled two MMPI test booklets and a scoring sheet from her briefcase. For the first time since Saturday night, she had a chance to think about something beside Finlay Thompson and Ellery McKinna. She had chosen the MMPI because it was the best paper-and-pencil test for dividing people into one of two groups, sane or insane, and was equally good at assessing malingering (in the vernacular, faking); it was the simplest and most direct way to get a gross assessment of Lindsey’s current mental status and, even more important, to rule out the chance that she was using her intelligence and manipulative skills to feign insanity.

Suki wondered if there was a paper-and-pencil test to assess precognitive ability. She knew quite a bit of research had been done in which subjects guessed the symbol on the back of so-called ESP cards, but somehow that seemed a qualitatively different thing from predicting the future. How would one even go about designing an experiment to measure precognition?

Suki flipped open one of the booklets. The MMPI consisted of over five hundred true-false questions such as “I worry about sexual matters,” “I sometimes tease animals,” and “I believe I’m being plotted against.” Although the test contained scales measuring everything from depression to hypomania to schizophrenia, Suki was most interested in Validity Scales L and F which, when scored together, were strong indicators of malingering. She needed to know how much she could trust Lindsey.

The door opened, and Darla’s large frame filled the doorway. Lindsey breezed into the room and wagged her finger playfully at Suki. “I told you I could’ve found that guy for you,” she said. “You should’ve let me help when you had the chance. It would’ve been so much easier.”

Suki said hello to Lindsey and nodded to Darla that she was free to leave.

Lindsey drummed the fingers of both hands on the table in a triumphant roll, then dropped into a chair. “I also warned you that you were on the wrong track—and I was right about that, too.” She leaned forward eagerly. Her face looked much better, less swollen, the blackened skin around her eye had shifted toward yellow-green. “Tell me exactly what happened, and I’ll tell you what I saw.” She was almost bouncing in her seat.

Suki glanced from her watch to the booklets in front of her, and then back at Lindsey. “I’m sorry, Lindsey,” she said, “but you know we can’t do that.”

Lindsey deflated into her chair, as if someone had pricked her with a pin and diffused all her energy. “More of that psychological mumbo-jumbo you shrinks like so much?” she grumbled.

“I want to give you what we call an objective personality assessment. It’s a self-report paper-and-pencil test that measures—”

“I rest my case,” Lindsey interrupted.

“Touché.” Suki flashed a quick smile of appreciation. “Have you ever taken an MMPI before?”

“Those tests are absurd,” Lindsey said. “How can you measure how crazy someone is by asking them if they like sex?”

Again, Suki had to appreciate Lindsey’s point—and her range of knowledge about all manner of things. Although psychologists routinely used standardized assessment tests—as did human resource people screening job applicants and consultants running focus groups on car-buying behavior—to measure everything from self-esteem to IQ to proclivity to have an extramarital affair, the error factors
were
quite large. “I know it seems strange,” Suki said, “and there’re plenty of people who agree with you, but these tests can be pretty powerful in court.”

“It’s a lot of bullshit,” Lindsey said without a hint of anger in her voice.

Suki watched Lindsey warily; these wide mood swings were not a good sign, nor was the contrast between Lindsey’s affect and her words. Suki wondered again if Lindsey might be using drugs. She waited.

“You really believe some number’s going to tell you anything about me?”

“It’s a piece of the picture.”

Lindsey stuffed a tendril of hair back into her ponytail. “I’ll make a deal with you,” she offered. “You talk to me about what happened this weekend and I’ll take your test.”

Suki shook her head. “You don’t have to take it if you don’t want to.”

“Did you know they have tests that measure precognitive ability?” Lindsey asked.

“You mean those ESP card experiments?”

Lindsey cleared her throat, assuming the demeanor of an instructor without much respect for her pupils. “They used to use those cards a lot—five symbols in a deck of twenty-five, five times five—especially J. B. Rhine and his cronies in the thirties and forties. But no one uses them any more. Now it’s much more high tech: random-number generators, bio-PK, the ganzfeld technique.”

Suki was hooked.

“And it’s real science.” Lindsey was grinning. “The random-number studies are a mind over matter thing. The subjects try to mentally ‘change’ how the numbers are distributed—you know, how with heads or tails, you’d expect a fifty-fifty split?—well, if the results aren’t fifty-fifty, or whatever’s expected, then the assumption is that there’s a psychic effect going on.”