Hell (15 page)

She was here, in jail, because she had killed a man.

An innocent man.

She had taken his life.

Don't
, she told herself.
Not now.

If she let herself go down that path now, in here, let herself believe it, really
feel
it, she feared she might lose herself deep inside the guilt.

And then how would she ever get out, go home, hold Joshua again?

But she was a killer now.

Killers had no rights.

Don't
, she told herself again.

Not now.

Not yet.

Plenty of time for that later.

The longest, darkest night for Sam, too.

And for Cathy, who remembered what incarceration felt like.

Sam had come downstairs at four a.m., had found her in the kitchen, sitting over an untouched cup of herbal tea, had given her a hug, then poured himself a glass of water and sat down beside her.

He knew that she was remembering.

‘It won't be the same for Grace,' he told her, trying to reassure himself, he realized, as much as their daughter. ‘You were a child.'

And you were innocent.

The unspoken words hung in the air, both of them experiencing terrible guilt for the implications of their thoughts. Yet the facts were undeniable.

Because Grace had killed a man.

A man who had terrified her but who, it appeared, had meant her no harm.

Her patient's mother's friend.

Sam had seen Sara Mankowitz only briefly at the scene, had seen a distraught woman struggling with shock and the overriding need to take care of her son.

But he had heard what she'd said to the Key Biscayne officers.

‘He was coming to help.'

Martinez had voiced it well enough in a phone call earlier.

‘Oh, man, what a mess.'

Saul had been the most stoic, the staunchest of them all.

‘It makes no sense,' he had said. ‘Grace is all about
not
hurting anyone.'

And Claudia, shocked almost beyond speech, was presently doing the most valuable thing she could; sitting with Joshua, who'd woken a while ago and begun to cry, his distress only seeming to intensify when Sam had picked him up.

Little boy's antennae in fine working order.

Unlike their lives.

Jerry Wagner met with Sam in a corridor at the courthouse one hour before Grace's first court appearance.

They spoke fast, Wagner saying he needed everything Sam could tell him about what had led Grace to act in such a massively uncharacteristic way.

‘It's abundantly plain,' the lawyer said, ‘that violence is anathema to her, and yet there's no denying that she did what she's accused of. It was not an accident, in that the gas pedal did not jam, nor did she put her foot on that pedal instead of the brake, because she would have said so before anything else, and everyone who was at the scene knows she did not say that.'

‘You push someone hard enough,' Sam began.

‘But Charles Duggan did not push Grace,' Wagner said, cutting that line off. ‘That's our problem. She ran him down, and she's admitted it. She told him to get away, because she thought he was someone else, but he was not. Mistaken identity won't wash with a car as a weapon any more than it would with a gun, you know that. Duggan was an innocent victim, and there seems no changing that.'

‘There has to be,' Sam said.

‘You have something?' Wagner's eyes were sharper than ever.

‘No.' Sam shook his head. ‘Not yet.'

‘Then just give me what you do have.'

Sam outlined the Cooper story and their ordeals, along with Grace's unproven sightings of Cal-Cooper both last spring and more recently, consolidated them with the fact that the killer had written to Sam in March a year ago. After which he brought Wagner up to date with the new killings and the psychological onslaught by the ‘heart killer' against their family.

‘Enough for self-defense,' Wagner said.

‘If Duggan were Cooper,' Sam said, his hopelessness growing.

‘Probably more than enough for temporary insanity,' Wagner said, ‘if that was the way we wanted to go.'

‘Don't we?' Sam said.

‘Statistically, it's a tough road,' Wagner said, ‘and even if a judge or jury buys it, there's the worry of having to prove that the defendant – Grace – is no longer insane and does not, therefore, have to be remanded to an institution.' He paused. ‘Worst case, Grace could be remanded to an institution until “recovery”, and then transferred to jail to finish her sentence.'

He saw the horror in Sam's eyes, felt great pity for him.

‘Fortunately,' he went on, ‘as you know, we don't have to state our plea till the arraignment, so we have time to work out the best possible way to go.'

Arraignment. Jail. Sentence. Those words applying to Grace.

Unthinkable.

He had never seen her as pale and drawn as this.

Except maybe while Cal the Hater had had Joshua.

But she was holding up somehow, her bearing erect, her voice only a little shaky when she spoke.

He read the gladness in her eyes when she saw him.

Something very different when she saw Cathy and Saul.

Shame already eating away at her.

Bail was set, after argument between the state and defense, at one hundred thousand dollars. Sam paid ten per cent to the bondsman, and six hours later she was released.

She had thought, during the long night, that she would remember every single instant of that for the rest of her life. Yet by morning, with more unknown terrors to face, it had already begun to blur: the searching, the fingerprinting, the sampling of DNA, the transport, her first surge of panic in the cell, her fear of the other prisoners, the noises. Everything fading out except for the stench ingrained in her nostrils and throat and on her skin and in her hair, making her long, above all else, for hot water and soap.

She let them hug her, one at a time, but found she could not embrace them in return. ‘I'm sorry,' she told them. ‘I just feel so unclean.'

‘I know,' Cathy said.

‘We'll walk ahead,' Saul said.

Always tactful, Sam's young brother. As warm as their father, but David usually spoke candidly, whereas Saul generally took time to consider other people's feelings.

‘I must sound very ungrateful,' Grace said to Sam, as they walked slowly behind the others, her need to hang back seeming bizarre, given how desperately she longed to leave, ‘but I wish we were going home instead of to Claudia's.'

‘No choice, sweetheart,' Sam said, the Key Biscayne address having been officially entered as her place of residence for the time being.

Not to mention that less than four days ago an excised human heart had been placed in their bathtub.

‘I know,' Grace said. ‘It just seems hard right now.'

Sam looked at her, understood her wish for privacy.

‘In some ways, I guess it will be,' he said. ‘But I'm going to be a whole lot happier knowing you're safe at Claudia's.' He was unsmiling. ‘And staying there this time.'

‘Am I under house arrest?' It was an effort to sound light.

He gripped her hand. ‘I just mean no going out alone.'

No such stipulations had been made by the judge. Her passport and driver's license had been handed in, and she was to have no communication with any witnesses. And, of course, there was the bond.

‘I'm just so sorry, Sam.'

She kept on saying that, but she knew already that there were no words to express the vastness of her regret.

The kind that a person might pray never to have to feel.

‘Will you do something for me?' she said.

‘Anything.'

‘Call Magda, ask her to cancel all my appointments.'

‘Till when?'

She had stopped walking. ‘Indefinitely.'

He felt the implications of that word like another cut of foreboding.

‘You're allowed to work,' he said.

‘I can't,' she said. ‘Not now.'

‘Not yet, maybe.'

‘Will you call her?' she said. ‘Please, Sam.'

‘Sure,' he said, and began to move, but she caught at his arm, stopped him.

‘One more request,' she said. ‘Bigger.'

He waited.

‘I know better than to say that I need to speak to Charles Duggan's family – God knows I have no right to ask them for anything.' She continued quickly. ‘But maybe you could talk to them, tell them how deeply sorry I am.'

‘They may not want to talk to me either,' Sam said.

‘No.' Grace looked at Cathy and Saul, waiting by the Saab. ‘It hasn't begun to sink in yet, not really. Not for me, and I guess not for any of you either. What I've done.'

Sam saw her pain, and the knowledge that it was probably just a fraction of what lay ahead grabbed at his own heart, squeezed it hard.

‘We'll get through it,' he said.

‘I don't see how we can,' Grace said.

‘Together,' Sam said. ‘Like always.'

‘I don't know,' she said.

Because some things were just too bad to get through.

And anyway, after her trial they might not be together.

A little after six thirty, with Grace sleeping and the family quietly on alert for anything she might need, Sam headed back to the station, where Martinez was waiting for him, the unit still busy with detectives catching up on paperwork at the end of a hard week.

Sadie T. Marshall's derelict boatyard – Martinez told Sam – had been gone over as well as was feasible by City of Miami officers working without individual search warrants for every one of the rust buckets languishing there.

‘Nothing,' Martinez told him. ‘And no prints on the handbill.'

No Sadie either, as yet.

‘Ida called,' Martinez said. ‘They got a match for the heart in your tub.'

Sanders still leaning hard on the lab, it seemed.

‘Ricardo Torres?' Sam guessed.

The young man's mother having provided hair and a toothbrush.

‘Afraid so,' Martinez confirmed.

Sam's heart sank.

He thought about Lilian Torres, about the dark-eyed young man.

‘Broward have already seen his mom,' Martinez told him.

Their case, Sam supposed, since though Torres's heart had been dumped in Miami-Dade, it was just as feasible for now that the crime might have taken place closer to the victim's home.

Unless the Miami Beach detectives proved otherwise.

In the next half-hour or so, Sam's mood descended to the point where he was chewing out everyone who came near him, including Martinez when he tried telling him to take it easy. But it was only when Mike Alvarez told him to get the hell out of the office that Sam realized what he'd been doing, and apologized.

‘It's OK,' the lieutenant told him. ‘It's late on Friday and you've had twenty-four hours of hell, but you need to take some time out. Unless you can do the job, Sam, you're no use to anyone, least of all Grace.'

For the first time he could remember in a long while, Sam was not sure that he was fit for purpose, or was likely to be any time soon.

Rules, routines, methods, reports.

Everything could go hang so far as he was concerned, except for two things.

One: get Cooper.

Two: find some way to help Grace.

Nothing else mattered.

She saw her own face on the television news.

Robbie, sitting watching in one of the nooks, noticed her standing behind him and reached for the remote.

‘It's OK,' Grace told him.

Uncertain if seeing the story on screen made it more or even less real.

No photographs yet of Charles Duggan, nor any relatives yet to weep or talk about their loss.

Robbie turned off the TV anyway, stood up, looked at her, thought he'd never seen her look fragile before.

‘What can I do for you, Aunt Grace?'

‘Just be you, Robbie,' she told him.

Woody came up behind her, tail wagging, looking for a walk, the spaniel not far behind.

‘Not now, Woody,' Grace said.

‘He's OK,' Robbie said. ‘I took them both out a while back.'

And Claudia had given Joshua his dinner, bathed him and put him to bed, and already Grace felt surplus to requirements.

Better that way, perhaps.

If she was going to jail.

TWENTY-FOUR

May 8

S
he had not thought it possible for any night to seem longer or darker than the last, yet the hours spent in this big comfortable bed with Sam right beside her, seemed to her, if anything, even longer and more painful.

He was watching out for her, she was aware, all the time.

‘You need to rest,' she told him some time around three. ‘I'm OK.'

‘Me too,' he said.

Liars, both.

‘If you feel like talking,' he'd said earlier, ‘I'm here.'

‘I don't think I do,' she'd told him. ‘I don't think I can.'

‘You will.'

‘I know,' she'd said.

Except that talking would not make this right, would not make any of it go away or not have happened.

She was a psychologist, and she understood the processes, knew what was needed to help her own long-term healing after the trauma of harming another human being, knew the ‘symptoms' she could anticipate, knew, if anyone did, that there was treatment to be sought, aid to be had.

If she deserved it.

Which she surely did not.

Those thoughts, of course, were ‘symptomatic', too, and suddenly as she lay there beside Sam, so helpless in his own grief and fear for her, she wanted to scream at herself, because what
use
was any of her psychology training now to anyone? No use to Sam nor to their son, nor Cathy . . .

Nor to Charlie Duggan.

The memory seared more vividly than the clearest flash photograph – she was there again, in the car again, seeing
him
again, her right foot slamming down hard on the gas pedal again.