Diagnosis Murder 6 - The Dead Letter (4 page)

"That's her husband?" Mark asked.

Steve nodded. "Isn't my job glamorous?"

"This is why I am in no hurry to get married," Jesse said.

Steve gave him a look. "Because you're afraid Susan is going to mow you down with a car?"

"Women are irrational," Jesse said. "It's a medical fact."

Mark raised an eyebrow. "Is that so?"

"You've got to keep up on the latest advances in medical research, Mark. These are the results of an exhaustive study conducted over years and years."

"And where was this study done?" Mark asked.

"My apartment," Jesse said.

"I'm not advocating vehicular homicide," Steve said, "but I think Monette Hobbes had a good, rational reason for being upset with her husband."

Steve opened the envelope wide enough so they could take a discreet peek at the photos inside.

"We found these pictures all over her front seat, he said.

Mark and Jesse glanced at the pictures. They didn't leave much to the imagination.

"Whoever took this was inside the motel room. How does someone get a picture like this without the couple knowing about it?" Mark asked.

"The same way you get pictures inside someone's heart," Steve said. "You can snake a tiny camera under a doorjamb or through an air vent. Or there's always the low-tech approach. If you know the hotel the couple likes to go to, you can hide the cameras ahead of time and slip the guy at the front desk a few bucks to book the couple into the room you've rigged."

"I take it that isn't the woman you arrested," Jesse said, pointing to a photo showing a woman walking to a room at the Movieland Motor Inn with the late Lowell Hobbes.

"I don't know who she is," Steve said, "but I noticed she's a lot younger and a lot prettier than his wife."

"I'm sure Mrs. Hobbes noticed it, too." Mark said.

"I guess motive isn't going to be a big mystery in this case," Jesse said.

Mark looked past Steve to the admittance desk, then motioned to his son to follow his gaze. "Whoever the woman in the photo is, she's right behind you."

Steve turned to see. It was definitely the woman in the pictures, though she seemed older and more mature than she did in the grainy eight-by-tens. She looked like a fashion model who was dressing down so she wouldn't be recognized in public. She wore an oversized sweatshirt and loose-fitting pants that resembled pajama bottoms, casual clothing that did nothing to diminish her beauty.

"Why doesn't everybody come to me like this?" Steve said. "It would really cut down on the time I spend in traffic."

As he started to approach the woman, he noticed that both doctors were accompanying him.

"What do you two think you're doing?" Steve asked.

"I was the attending physician," Jesse said. "I need to as certain her relationship to the patient and determine whether she has the legal right to be informed of his condition."

Steve looked at his dad. "And you?"

"I'm supervising the attending physician to see that hospital protocol is strictly observed in this sensitive situation."

Steve shook his head. "I don't know why I even bother to ask."

"Neither do I," Jesse said.

The three men reached the desk. Up close, Mark could see that the woman was agitated, tapping her foot and biting her lower lip. Before Steve could open his mouth, Mark spoke up.

"Excuse me. I'm Dr. Mark Sloan, chief of internal medicine. May I help you with something?"

"Yes, my name is LeSabre Brower. I was told that my father was brought here. He was in a terrible accident. Somebody ran him over."

"He's your
father
?" Steve said.

"Stepfather. What difference does it make?" she said, be coming more irritable and anxious by the second. "Who are you?"

"Lieutenant Steve Sloan, LAPD. I'm investigating the incident."

"Have you reached my mom? I've tried calling her at home and on her cell, and I can't get her."

"We've been in touch," Steve said. "I can assure you that she's aware of the situation."

LeSabre turned to Mark. "Where is he? How badly is he hurt?" Before she could say anything, she read the expression on his face. "Oh my God. Is he going to be all right? I want to see him. Now."

"Maybe we should go somewhere quiet where we can talk, Miss Brower," Mark said, putting his arm around her as she started to cry.

CHAPTER TWO

It took LeSabre about twenty minutes to cry herself out after Mark told her that her stepfather was dead. She sat slumped, exhausted, in the center of the couch in the doctors' lounge, her eyes bloodshot, her cheeks flushed, embracing herself and rocking gently back and forth.

She was comforting herself.

Mark had seen this behavior many times before. Giving people tragic news was something he did every day. Within seconds of performing the awful task, while the words still moved through the room like a breeze, he shifted out of himself. It wasn't so much an out-of-body experience as it was a change in perspective. He stopped being a participant in the drama and became a member of the audience, watching how people handled what he had told them.

What he observed was that the others in the room shifted perspectives, too. But not in the same way he did. They didn't step out of themselves. A different self took over instead.

After years of watching this phenomenon, he decided that perhaps everybody has a mild split personality, one part responsible for living, the other for survival. The living self was the more emotional part, while the survival self was pure logic and necessity.

It was LeSabre's living self that was mourning, it was her survival self giving her comfort, embracing her, and rocking her.

He had no empirical evidence for his hypothesis, but he believed it nonetheless. It was true even for himself. His living self delivered the bad news; his survival self slipped him into cold, observational mode the instant the task was complete.

Mark glanced at his son, who sat beside him facing LeSabre in one of the chairs they'd taken from a lunch table. The three of them were alone; Jesse had been called back to the ER in the middle of her crying jag.

Steve dealt with a lot more ugliness in his job than Mark did. Mark assumed that Steve's survival self was the dominant personality, at least while he was on the clock. It was why Steve appeared to be remote and unfeeling to people he encountered while doing his job.

It wasn't that he was unfeeling. It was that he couldn't risk feeling too much.

"Did you catch the person who did this?" LeSabre asked in a weak, distant voice.

"It was your mother," Steve said.

LeSabre looked up, her eyes pleading.

"No," she said.

Steve opened the manila envelope, took out the stack of pictures, and handed them to LeSabre. "I think this is what provoked her."

LeSabre glanced at the top photograph and her hands began to shake. She let the pictures slip from her fingers onto the floor.

"I don't understand," she said.

Steve glanced at his father, as if to say, What is there to understand? He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"You were having an affair with your stepfather," Steve said in a tone that was more than a little patronizing. "Your mother found out and was enraged. So she ran him down with her car."

LeSabre looked up at Steve. "But it was over."

"It doesn't look over to me." Steve motioned to the photos spread out on the floor. But she didn't look at them. She just shook her head.

"I fell in love with him the same time my mom did," LeSabre said. "He was so charming, so funny. When she said she was going to marry him, I couldn't have been happier."

"When did your affair start?" Mark asked cautiously.

"Nothing happened, not while I was growing up, if that's what you're thinking. Lowell isn't some sort of pedophile. Our relationship didn't change until after I left home and got my own place," LeSabre said, anger bringing some strength back to her voice. "He came over one afternoon to help me move some furniture. Afterwards, he stopped and looked at me in this peculiar way, as if seeing me for the first time. There were tears in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong, and he said, 'Nothing, it's just that you aren't a little girl any more.' For the first time, he saw me as a woman. And when he said that, I knew I was a woman, and that I wanted him to love me as a woman, too. So I kissed him."

Mark thought that a stronger man, a better man, would have gently rejected her and seen to it that she got some professional help for her inappropriate feelings. But Lowell Hobbes wasn't that man. He was weak. Worse than that, he was sick. He went from being a father, someone who should have been protecting and nurturing LeSabre, to being a predator, someone who manipulated and harmed the girl for his own needs.

Once again, LeSabre read the expressions on Mark's and Steve's faces and didn't like what she saw. Anger flashed in her sorrowful eyes.

"You're looking at me like it was incest or child abuse," she said. "You're wrong. He wasn't my birth father and he didn't adopt me. We were two consenting adults who fell in love. He didn't break any laws."

Perhaps not anything in the penal code, Mark thought, but he violated plenty of social, moral, and ethical codes of behavior. It wouldn't help to argue that point with her now, though.

"Who ended the relationship?" Mark asked.

"Lowell did," LeSabre said sadly. "He said he couldn't go on living two lives, it wasn't fair to me or to Mom. He broke my heart."

That wasn't all he broke, Mark thought. The damage done to this young woman would take years of therapy to work through.

"His sacrifice made me love him even more," she said. "He set aside his own happiness for someone else's."

"When did you stop seeing each other?" Steve asked.

"A year ago," LeSabre said.

Mark and Steve shared a confused look. Steve picked up a picture of Lowell and his stepdaughter in front of a motel and held it up to LeSabre. "You're saying this was taken a year ago?"

She nodded and started to shake with dry sobs. "I love my mother. I didn't want to hurt her, either. But I did. Now Lowell is dead and my mother's life is ruined. Oh God, what have I done?"

Mark arranged for someone from the Community General psychiatric department to examine LeSabre and determine if she was potentially suicidal. If she wasn't, Mark wanted to be sure she was offered counseling and, if necessary, appropriate medication to help her deal with her emotional turmoil.

He left LeSabre in the care of the psychiatrist and joined Steve in the corridor.

"This just doesn't add up." Mark said. "If the affair was going on a year ago, why didn't Monette Hobbes run over her husband then? Why wait until now?"

"The anger could have been building up all this time," Steve said, "and today she finally lost it. I've seen it happen before."

"That's one possibility," Mark agreed. "The other is that Mrs. Hobbes didn't find out until today."

"Why would whoever took these pictures wait a year to give them to her?"

"Good question," Mark said. "One you should ask her."

"She's not talking," Steve said. "At least not to me. I tried to question her at the scene, and all she gave me was the finger."

"That's because you're the big, mean cop who wants to punish her for going after the monster who hurt her daughter. I might have better luck with her."

"Why would she talk to you?" Steve said. "You're some doctor she's never met."

"I'm her daughter's doctor," Mark said.

"You are?"

"I am now," Mark said. "That puts Monette Hobbes and me on the same side. We both want to help LeSabre."

If any other doctor had offered to question a homicide suspect, it would have been a laughable request. But Mark Sloan's skills as a doctor were greatly exceeded by his uncanny ability to solve murders. In his years as an unofficial consultant to the LAPD, Mark had sat across the interrogation table from some of the most clever and most sadistic killers in Los Angeles history. From the Clown Killer to the Silent Partner. From the Venice Strangler to the Sunnyview Bomber.

This was a low-profile case. Nobody was looking over Steve's shoulder on this one. There wasn't any doubt who the killer was. There were a dozen witnesses and a wealth of physical evidence. Monette Hobbes was going to prison, no doubt about it, so nobody was going to give Steve a hard time if he let his father talk to her.

Steve shrugged. "I suppose it's worth a try."

Monette Hobbes sat in the interrogation room, across the table from Mark, staring into her Styrofoam cup of coffee as if her eBay listings were visible at the bottom. She hadn't asked for a lawyer and raised no objection to seeing Mark, though she hadn't said a word since he introduced himself and told her that her daughter was under a psychiatrist's care.

So they sat in silence for the next twenty minutes, Monette staring into her coffee and Mark drawing on a yellow legal pad. He didn't want to pressure her. He wanted her to feel comfortable and safe with him. And if that meant sitting quietly and doodling, so be it.

"To hell with Woody Allen," she said finally.

"Pardon me?" Mark said, looking up from his scribblings.

"It's his fault for setting such a poor example," she said. "Woody took nudie pictures of Mia Farrow's daughter and ran off with her, didn't he?"

"I'm afraid I don't pay much attention to the personal lives of celebrities, Mrs. Hobbes."

"Well, that's what he did. Lowell drags me to see all of Woody Allen's movies, even though there hasn't been a good one in twenty years. Now I know why," Monette said. "If I could run Woody Allen down, too, I would, but the pervert never leaves New York."

"It sounds like your anger has been building up for some time," Mark said, glancing at the mirror to his left. He knew Steve was watching them on the other side of the glass.

"Since about noon," she said.

"What happened at noon?"

She looked Mark in the eye for the first time. "I opened my mailbox and saw the pictures of Lowell raping my daughter."