Blind Spot (22 page)

Lindsey apparently didn’t understand this, for as soon as she entered the room, she said, “I’m sorry about calling your house last night. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think it was absolutely necessary.”

“Apology accepted.” Suki waved Lindsey into the chair in front of the desk. “But let’s keep that on hold for the time be—”

“But if I can’t tell Alexa,” Lindsey interrupted, “I have to tell you.”

“I want to talk about what happened ten years ago,” Suki said. “On the afternoon of May tenth, at two forty Beacon Street.”

Lindsey blanched, as if hearing the address of the house in which Richard Stoddard had died was a physical blow. “Isabel’s house,” she muttered.

“Do you think you could tell me about it?” Suki asked.

“No one ever believes me.”

“Give me a shot. Just narrate the events, tell it like you’d tell a story around a campfire.” Suki wanted Lindsey to lose herself in the telling, so she could watch Lindsey’s facial expressions, her body language, listen to what she chose to reveal as well as what she chose to leave unsaid. Suki hoped not to have to interrupt or ask leading questions. “I won’t listen with any preconceived notions if you don’t talk with any,” she added.

Lindsey snorted. “What are we, if not a bundle of preconceived notions?”

“Look,” Suki said, sitting back in her chair, “you’re a smart, educated woman, and so am I. We can continue to play these linguistic games, wasting both your time and mine—but only
your
mother’s money—or we can get some work done.”

Lindsey’s sigh was large and dramatic. “Richard and I were standing on the top of the stairs, arguing, holding a carton full of my stuff,” she said in a long-suffering voice. “Richard had one end—he was backing down the stairs—I had the other. I was mad, so I told him to leave and let go of the box. Isabel saw her opening and gave him a push—the weight of the box did the rest. He fell. She won. I lost.”

“I see how you lost,” Suki said, “but how did Isabel win?”

“Remember the other day when I was telling you how possessive ghosts are? Well, after I moved in, Isabel and I really connected. We were together all the time. We went for walks, played practical jokes on Edgar—we both thought he was a self-impressed jerk.” A smiled played across Lindsey’s face at the memory, then she sobered. “When I met Richard, I guess I stopped spending as much time with her and she got jealous.”

“Jealous of you as a girlfriend?”

“Not a girlfriend in the sexual sense,” Lindsey said. “A girlfriend in the friend sense. You’ve got to remember, Isabel had been alone for a long, long time. And even when she was alive, I don’t think she had any friends.”

Suki watched Lindsey closely. Her words were bizarre yet clearly heartfelt, and she spoke as if completely confident of her reasonableness. “So Isabel killed Richard to get your friendship back?”

“Pretty effective, huh?” Lindsey’s smile was fast and fleeting. “There’s not much else to tell. You can read all the gory details in the trial transcript. About how I told Richard to get out of my life. About how Edgar was standing at the bottom of the stairs and claimed
I
pushed Richard, although it was clear there was no way he could actually see. About how Richard broke his neck and was probably dead before he hit the bottom.” Lindsey swung her head as if to throw off the image, but her eyes were dark and haunted, and it was apparent this recounting was painful.

Once again, Suki had the thought that Lindsey hadn’t killed Richard, and, once again, she chastised herself. Lindsey’s mental state at the time of the crime was her only concern. “Richard was a nice guy, huh?”

Lindsey didn’t say anything.

“How long had you known him?”

“Can’t you get Mike to give you the transcripts?” Lindsey asked. “Everything you want to know is in there.”

Suki could feel Lindsey’s resistance, as hard and as strong as the bars on the window. “You never testified,” she said. “The transcript won’t tell me your story. It’ll only tell me everyone else’s.”

Lindsey narrowed her eyes. “You already have it—you’ve already read it.”

Suki felt professionally bound to tell the truth. “Yes,” she said, “but it didn’t tell me what I want to know.”

“And what exactly do you want to know?”

“I want to know what happened for you,” Suki said. “What you were feeling and thinking.”

“Before? During? After?”

“I’ve got time for them all.”

Lindsey explained that Richard was helping her pack because he didn’t think it was safe for her to live alone any more. “When I told him Isabel was going to kill me—or him—he said I should move to his apartment. That it would be safer for me.”

Suki rested her elbows on the table and listened carefully. If Richard had thought Lindsey was incapable of taking care of herself that was another point for Mike: inability to handle the tasks of daily life is sometimes a symptom of mental illness.

“It was Isabel’s moment of victory,” Lindsey continued. “All along, Edgar said she wanted her house back. I never believed him, I used to laugh at him, but in the end, he was right.”

Suki nodded.

Lindsey described how Isabel had the power to get inside her brain and make her see visions of whatever Isabel wanted her to see. She declared the hallucinations that afternoon to be the most vivid and scary Isabel had ever created: man-size knives, ceiling-high balustrades, Richard transformed from flesh to mahogany. Isabel had laughed inside Lindsey’s head as Richard was tumbling down the stairs, as Richard was dying. “It was a gleeful sound,” Lindsey said. “Full of triumph.”

“What do you mean when you say Isabel could get ‘inside your head’?”

“She could make my mind part of her mind. I would see what she imagined, hear what she wanted to tell me.”

Suki wrote notes furiously and watched Lindsey as closely as she could. There was no doubt these were some serious delusions. “And what about afterward?” she asked gently. “After you realized Richard was dead. How was it for you then? What were you thinking? Feeling?”

“Isabel followed me into the hotel room where the police took me that night because I was afraid to stay alone in the apartment,” Lindsey answered. “She brought her journal, even though I had purposely left it behind. I shoved the journal in back of the bureau, to hide it, before I went to sleep. But in the morning, it was out again. And that’s when I knew.”

Suki sat silently and waited for Lindsey to finish. When Lindsey had picked all the lint off of her pants and inspected each of her fingernails, when it became apparent she wasn’t going to say any more without prompting, Suki reluctantly asked, “When you knew what?”

“When I knew I had to call Alexa and warn her.”

Suki wasn’t surprised by Lindsey’s swift change of topic; her patients’ logic chains were often missing a few links. She didn’t allow any emotion to cross on her face. She didn’t move a muscle. She watched Lindsey with the same thoughtful expression with which she had been watching her for the past few minutes, and she noted, not for the first time, that being a psychologist was a lot like being an actress.

“Alexa’s in danger—and so are you.”

“We were talking about Richard,” Suki reminded her gently. It didn’t take paranormal powers to know that Alexa was in danger—and by extension, Alexa’s mother.

“But it’s true,” Lindsey cried. “I can see the aura.”

“Lindsey,” Suki said. “I appreciate your concern, I really do, but—”

“I’ve never done any secretarial work in the superintendent’s office,” Lindsey interrupted.

Suki was caught off guard by this topic shift, and she could feel herself stiffen in surprise at Lindsey, once again, answering her unasked question.

Lindsey grinned. “It was just like Rizzo told you. I wrote down your telephone number when I first gave them my PIN list. I didn’t know who you were, but I knew I’d need you some day.” She crossed her arms. “Like those forced-choice precognition experiments I was telling you about. I saw a event before it happened in linear time—or maybe more correctly, I
sensed
the presence of a possible future event.”

Suki had checked on Lindsey’s facts, and sure enough, Honorton and Ferrari had done a meta-analysis of over three hundred precognition studies and discovered that approximately thirty percent of them did conclude that prescience was demonstrated by the subjects. The odds of this result happening by chance were about one in 10
²⁵
. She didn’t say anything.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Lindsey’s eyes suddenly filled with fear. “You’ve got to believe me,” she cried, grabbing one of Suki’s hands.

Suki reached toward the panic button with her other hand, but she didn’t press it. Something told her to wait, and she was always attentive to her instincts.

“You have to tell Alexa that the man she’s afraid of is the one who will ultimately free her.” Lindsey’s fingers pressed tightly into Suki’s flesh. “That she has to let him run his course. If she interferes, all may be lost.”

“You need to let go of me,” Suki said calmly. “Please let go of my hand.”

Lindsey released Suki immediately. She looked at her own hand as if she were surprised at what it had done. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I was just trying to help.”

Suki stood. “I’m sure you were, and as I said, I appreciate it, but it’s inappropriate and we can’t do it.” She walked to the door and rapped for the officer. “I think we’d better stop for today.”

“But you’re all alone in this,” Lindsey cried. “You’re trusting the wrong people, and if you don’t take my advice, if you let Alexa’s misplaced—”

The officer burst through the door, but when he saw Lindsey sitting in the chair, he visibly relaxed.

Suki turned to Lindsey. “I’ve arranged for you to undergo a series of neurological tests. The scheduling has to be worked out through the superintendent’s office, but it’ll probably be sometime early next week. Possibly sooner.”

Lindsey clenched her jaw and Suki thought she was going to protest the testing, but instead, Lindsey said, “You need to go with this man. It’s the only way you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

“More of your witchy bitchy New Age act, Kern?” the officer said with a sneer. He obviously wasn’t as fond of Lindsey as Darla was. “Hope this one’s better than the one about Billig.”

Lindsey stood and with great dignity said, “Billig’s time just hasn’t come yet.”

That night, Suki slept poorly. She was plagued by nightmares interrupted by bouts of insomnia and didn’t know which was worse, the anxiety-ridden hours of sleeplessness, every one of her fears enlarged in the psychotic darkness, or the dreams. Each time she woke, gleeful, triumphant laughter rang in her ears. At four-thirty, she climbed out of bed and sat down at her desk to compare the official version of Richard Stoddard’s death with the story Lindsey had told her. She needed to engage her mind. Fill it. Wrap it around a puzzle.

The Kern case did that, and more. For, aside from the delusions Lindsey described, and the fact she claimed a woman who had been dead for almost one hundred years was the murderer, the various accounts of the events surrounding Stoddard’s death were remarkably consistent. Edgar Price’s story was just as Lindsey had described it, and the police report, although sloppy and littered with holes, concurred on the basic details. Other testimony verified that Richard was indeed helping Lindsey move from her apartment into his, and that Lindsey and Richard had been involved in a serious relationship. A friend of Lindsey’s—who appeared to be Babs of the four-dimensional apple—claimed they were planning to be married, but this couldn’t be verified.

Suki pulled out the notes from her meeting with Lindsey, then referred to her forensic checklist, although, if Lindsey was telling the truth, the issues usually considered at this point in an evaluation were moot. If Lindsey hadn’t killed Richard, had never even considered killing Richard, then her remorse, premeditation or awareness of the wrongfulness of the crime were all irrelevant. She hadn’t used any weapons, nor did it appear she had ever considered an alternate strategy to bring about Stoddard’s demise, and “the cop at the elbow” test—the question of whether she would have done the same thing if a policeman were standing next to her—was clearly a useless concept. If Lindsey was telling the truth.

It was just as plausible that Lindsey had made up the entire story in the hope of getting out of Watkins. If Lindsey had read books on psychosis and temporal lobe epilepsy, if she
had
pushed Richard Stoddard down the stairs,
had
killed him in cold blood as a jury had found, if now she was acting and lying and prevaricating, then the checklist issues suddenly became applicable and Suki’s report quite straightforward to write.

On the other hand, it was also feasible Lindsey honestly believed Isabel had been standing on the stairs with her that afternoon, that Isabel was the one who pushed Richard, the one who laughed inside her head. This would support the contention that Lindsey was psychotic, that she was “suffering a substantial disorder of thought, mood, perception, orientation or memory which grossly impairs judgment, behavior [or] capacity to recognize reality.…” This was the threshold for determining legal sanity as outlined in the Code of Massachusetts Regulations, 3.01.

Suki stared out the window as fingers of dawn began to streak the sky. Of course, there was another possibility: that Lindsey believed Isabel had done all these things and was completely sane.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A
lexa was not pleased when Suki told her she was going to have a neurological test, and even less thrilled to find out it was an MRI. “I heard it’s really gross,” she complained as they drove to Kendall Radiology, the facility in Cambridge where the test was to be performed. “Kendra had to have her back checked after she was in that car accident with her dad, and she said she thought she was going to die of suffocation.”

“It’s just a big magnet that takes pictures of your brain,” Suki explained. “All you have to do is lay there. It doesn’t hurt at all.”

“But I have to get inside the machine, right? Kendra said it was incredibly claustrophobic. Like being in a coffin.”