Collateral Damage (29 page)

“If that's the truth it's sure not what he said in court,” Hannibal said. “Did you hear it?”

Bea looked up, her brow knit. “I heard him say he caught his mother with the knife, standing over his father. What a horrible thing for a child to see.”

“No, no,” Hannibal said, breaking away from Cindy and pacing toward the bed. “There was an argument, but he didn't see his mother. Whoever it was left. Remember, the door opening? Then the thump. Surely Grant's body hitting the floor. Then a pause. Then Francis walks in, finds the body…”

“There's a lot of supposition there, don't you think?” Quincy said.

“Well, no I don't,” Hannibal said, facing the doctor across Dean's sleeping form. “What's the alternative? She opens the door, stabs him, stands there for a minute to think about it, and THEN screams? No, she came in after the fact and found the body. Wake him up.”

Quincy hesitated. “That might not be a good idea.”

“There's no time, Doc,” Hannibal said. “If you want to save him, wake him up.”

Dean still looked like a child to Hannibal, even after dressing in chinos and a sweatshirt. Bea sat beside him on the edge of the bed and held him for a good five minutes while Hannibal conferred in a corner with Cindy and Quincy. They had agreed to stay away until he felt receptive to questioning.

“I'm ready to talk, Mr. Jones,” he called over Bea's shoulder. When she shook her head at him, he added, “I want to find out what really happened. I think you can help me find out.”

Hannibal walked in close to Dean, looking closely into his eyes, big like Japanese anime figures, and asked himself one last time if the boy could really understand the truth.

“Okay Dean, what I need now is not what you saw or what you heard. I need to know what you thought. Are you ready to talk about that?”

Dean shrugged and sighed. “I've got nothing to hide, Mr. Jones. I just don't know if I know what I was thinking ten years ago.”

“Let's keep this simple,” Hannibal said, pulling a chair over to the bed and dropping into it. “You do remember who your baby-sitter was in those days, don't you?”

Dean's eyes widened, then narrowed to slits. He lowered his head to look down at Hannibal's hands. “Yes. It was Joan Kitteridge.”

Bea pulled his arm and turned him to herself. “Your boss was your baby-sitter?”

“Coincidence?” Cindy asked, standing behind Hannibal's chair.

Dean shook his head. “I've tried to stay close to her. Thought I could maybe find out.

Something.”

“You thought she had something to do with your father's death didn't you?” Hannibal asked. “Maybe it was her voice you heard arguing with your father that night.”

“But baby,” Bea moaned, pulling his head to her and staring deep into his eyes. “I don't understand. If you suspected Joan enough to follow her for all these years, why did you try to tell people you killed your father? You said you killed him and Oscar. Why?”

Dean seized Bea's arms. It was the first intensity Hannibal had seen out of him. His breath was labored, as if pushing a great weight. Hannibal thought maybe there was a great weight, but it was on his chest.

“Don't you see? At first I thought mother had killed him, because he was with Joan. I'm the one who told mother they were together. If I'd kept my mouth shut, she wouldn't have known, and my father would be alive today. I'm the one responsible. I killed him.”

Hannibal stood and started pacing again, rounding the three sides of the bed and turning around to retrace his steps. “Okay, Dean, the little boy in you might believe that, but when you grew up you must have realized there were other possible answers. And you obviously thought Joan Kitteridge knew something, right? That's why you followed her around.”

Bea looked at Dean with a different expression now, as if just accepting an unexpected depth in this man she loved. “You followed her?”

“She was my father's girlfriend,” Dean said, squeezing Bea with one arm. “She watched me every day. Practically family. But when the trial started up, she was nowhere to be seen. And over the years I started to wonder why. I began to remember that there was another man. I think she had another boyfriend.”

“Actually,” Hannibal said, “There's good reason to believe she was married at the time.”

“Well, that didn't change my guilt,” Dean muttered. “If Joan's other man did it, mother must have told him about Joan and my father. Again, if I'd kept my mouth shut, Papa would be alive today.”

“Or Joan did it herself,” Hannibal put it, “to keep him from confronting her husband.”

“Well anyway, I felt like I had to know what really happened. So when I finished school, I tracked her down. I think she gave me a job out of sympathy.”

Now Cindy looked at Dean out the corner of her eye. “Now I'm thinking you were close to Oscar, but not for the reason I first thought.”

“I know Oscar, er, experimented,” Dean said with a grin, “but he and I were never more than friends. We got to talking one day and it turned out we had some background in common. And he told me once that he had something on Joan, some kind of information that might tie in to something bad in her past.”

Hannibal almost lunged toward Dean, pushed by the force of a revelation. “Of course! That's why you felt guilty about Oscar. You thought he was killed because of something you told him, maybe just confirming Joan's connection to your father's murder.”

“Yes,” Dean said, hanging his head again, “So you see, I killed him too.”

“Well I don't think so,” Hannibal said, laying a hand on Dean's shoulder. “It looks like Oscar was a blackmailer maybe, so lots of people might have had a reason for going after him. Personally, I think your boss Joan is the lead suspect. I'm thinking she did the deed and left. Your mother comes in, sees her husband dead and picks up the knife just like people always do in the movies.”

“I'm sorry,” Quincy said from the other side of the bed. “Believe me, Joan was just not capable of that sort of a crime.”

The whole room seemed to hold its breath as a single thought jumped from Hannibal's mind to everyone else's like a psychic signal. Finally, when he could no longer hold his
breath comfortably, Hannibal looked up at the older psychiatrist, forcing calm into his voice.

“And just exactly how would you know that, Doctor?”

Under the stars Quincy, Roberts' white shirt glowed, making him look like some puffy, gray-bearded angel recently descended from the dark clear sky to a muddled ball of confusion. Cindy and Hannibal faced him as if awaiting the answers to all questions. Hannibal's stomach rumbled, reminding him how the day had gotten away from him. Maybe he should have stopped for a bite, but he was hungry for something else even more than food. He hungered for the truth.

“So she was a nut case way back then,” Hannibal said, none too delicately.

Quincy bristled. “Joan Kitteridge was my patient, yes, but she was never violent. In fact, I'd go on record as saying she was incapable of violence. She had serious ego strength issues. I shouldn't be telling you this.”

“Us now or the police later,” Cindy said. “They'd just subpoena your patient records. It IS a murder investigation.”

“It was so long ago it probably doesn't matter now,” Quincy said. He drew in a deep breath and puffed it out heavily. “The poor girl was so badly dominated by that man she could hardly breath without his approval. How she survived to be a success in the business world…”

“By that man,” Hannibal prodded, “you mean her husband?”

“Well of course,” Quincy said. “So young to be married, too. If I could have gotten him to come in to therapy I might have helped her more, but I never even saw the man.”

By the time Hannibal got home, he was both ravenous and irritated. At these times, Cindy knew the wise thing to do was keep her distance until he was fed and calmer. It was a good time to be alone, just the two of them, at least until he could regain his perspective. That's why her mouth dropped open in fear and her eyes darted back at Hannibal when they found Anna Ingersoll slumped into his doorway. Hannibal stared at her for a moment, as if he spotted a booby trap set between himself and his long delayed dinner.

“What are you doing here?” he asked between tightened lips.

“I didn't know where else to go,” Anna said.

Sensing that Hannibal was about to tell her, Cindy said, “We're about to have a late supper. Some sandwiches and maybe some soup. Why don't you come inside and join us?”

The trio entered Hannibal's railroad apartment and he led them down its length toward the kitchen. At his bedroom, he stopped to lose his suit coat, tie and shoulder holster. In the kitchen, he dropped into a chair and began rolling up his sleeves. Anna sat opposite him but Cindy went straight for the coffeepot. Hannibal smiled when she handed him a steaming mug, the first sign that he might soon return to normal. But knowing the job was only half done, Cindy loaded bread, mayonnaise and lettuce onto the table, then pulled out the half ham she knew was in the refrigerator.

After taking a long slow sip of coffee, Hannibal turned his attention to Anna for the first time. Her short-cropped hair was recently dyed a slightly darker blonde than before, a color that always looked dirty to him.

“What brought you here?”

“He's been following me,” Anna said, her body vibrating the way a Chihuahua's does. “Day and night, just won't leave me alone. I need some peace. I knew Nicky would be safe at Monty's so I left him there and took off. Ended up here.”

“Well you'll be safe here,” Cindy said, carving thin slices off the ham with a butcher knife, “but you can't keep running forever. You need to get a restraining order against that big lug.”

Hannibal carefully spread the right amount of stone-ground mustard on a slice of dark rye bread, positioned two slices of the honey baked ham on it, covered them with a slice of extra sharp cheddar cheese and laid on the second slice of bread. His mouth began to water in anticipation as his nose reacted to the sharp scent of the mustard mingled with the sweet aroma of the ham. This was going to be good.

“That's a legal issue,” he said, not looking up from his sandwich, “which we can deal with tomorrow.” Then he wrapped his mouth around a big bite of the sandwich. His eyes half closed as he chewed. Cindy smiled.

“He'll be okay now,” she said. “And I'm betting he'll be fine with you staying over in his office tonight if it will make you feel better.”

“Yes,” Anna said quietly. “That would be nice. Sometimes I just get so scared. I guess it's the memories. It's like I carry in my head every time he's hit me with those big ugly hands of his.”

Anna jumped like a bee-stung child at the thump on the back door. Two more heavy blows followed. Hannibal muttered an obscenity under his breath, put down his sandwich and stood. The pounding was coming from his front door. After one more sip of coffee he walked back through his apartment to open it. He knew who he would find on his doorstep, he just didn't have the patience for it right now.

Standing just inside the door, Hannibal said, “It's late. What do you want?”

“I can't find Anna,” Isaac Ingersoll said from the other side of the door.

Hannibal unlocked the door and opened it as far as its safety chain would allow to stare up into Isaac's watery blue eyes. “I am not the missing person's bureau. Besides, if you can't find her it probably means she doesn't want to be found. I don't thinks she wants to see you.”

“I don't care,” Isaac said, and the beer cloud drifted down into Hannibal's face. “I need her.”

“You see, that's your problem,” Hannibal said. “You don't care what she wants, but you know, she has the right to do
whatever she wants. Now, I think it's time you went home and got some sleep, don't you?”

Hannibal thought he had the situation under control and his mind wandered for just a second to honey-baked ham and coffee. That's when Isaac's eyes left Hannibal's and turned to the darkness behind him and to his left. Hannibal turned his head in time to catch a quick glimpse of Anna's terror-stricken face before she darted back into the darkness.

Before he could turn his head back, the edge of the door slammed into his face. Pain lanced out from his temple to fill his head as he staggered back. Darkness flowed in around him, but a missile shot through that darkness to smash into his chest hard enough to drive all breath from his body. Even as he dropped to his knees, Hannibal knew that missile was Isaac's fist. He felt more than heard heavy footfalls moving away toward the kitchen.

Damn. How could he have been so stupid? To trust that monster to behave rationally was a huge mistake. Self-loathing rose like bile into Hannibal's throat. He was the reason Anna was now in danger. And worse, Cindy was in that same room standing in the path of a human locomotive.