Last Run (13 page)

Saul shuddered.

‘Nice.’

Terri’s voice behind him made him jump.

‘Lovely to know this is what my boyfriend gets up to while I’m sleeping.’

Saul turned around, saw her standing in her short, sheer black robe, hair tousled, raw anger in her eyes. ‘I just—’

‘You just happened to go through my files—’

‘Of course not,’ Saul protested, standing up. ‘This was on the floor.’

Terri snatched it from his fingers. ‘I cannot
believe
you, Saul. I thought I could trust you.’

‘You can trust me.’ He was more than dismayed by the accusation. ‘You know I’d never touch your private stuff.’

‘So this – ’ she held the photo up – ‘conveniently flew out of the filing cabinet?’

‘For God’s sake, Terri, I told you it was on the floor over there.’ He pointed at the corner. ‘You probably dropped it before dinner, or whenever it was you felt like
looking at something this awful.’

‘Murder is awful, Saul, ugly.’

‘Murder is not your
business
.’

‘Not this again, please, not this
again.
’ She shook her head, turned away from him, flung herself down hard in one corner of the couch.

‘So where did you get it?’ Saul asked.

‘None of
your
business,’ Terri flashed back.

‘This is the woman up in Hallandale, isn’t it?’

She didn’t answer.

‘So how come a rookie working Property, even an
obsessed
rookie – ’ Saul used the word knowing it would inflame because now he was mad, too – ‘managed to
finagle her way on to a murder scene in a different county, for God’s sake?’ He was shaking now, hating his anger, hating this whole thing. ‘And why in
hell
are you still
putting your own job on the line this crazy way?’

‘Because the great Sam Becket and his team – ’ Terri was back on her feet – ‘and the Broward County Sheriff have managed diddlyshit, and this might just be my
chance to prove myself. You still don’t get how important that is to me, do you?’

‘I think looking at stuff like that, taking pictures like that, is
sick.
’

‘You think I’m sick – ’ she got right up close, practically in his face – ‘maybe you better get out of my home.’

‘Terri, for God’s sake—’

‘In fact – ’ her eyes were blazing – ‘maybe you better get out of my
life
.’

‘Teté, stop this!’ He wasn’t pleading, he was too angry to plead, but he couldn’t stand the way this was going, knew it was out of control. ‘We need to
talk.’

‘I don’t want to talk with a guy who says he loves me but doesn’t want to even try to understand me, who doesn’t even
trust
me.’

‘You’re the one who just accused me of going through your things.’

‘I want you to leave,’ Terri said. ‘Go home to your daddy and your books, and don’t forget to tell big bro all about me.’

‘Teté, this is nuts.’

‘Get the fuck
out
!’ she screamed.

He went.

It was Saul’s turn to go to Grace for advice.

Everyone ended up there sometime, David had once joked.

‘Shrink wisdom,’ he called it.

‘Wisdom shrunk,’ Grace had said recently, self-deprecatingly. The more her pregnancy advanced, the more she felt that was true.

If Saul needed advice, the last thing she wanted was to sell him short.

‘I may not be the best person to speak to about this,’ she told him when he showed up at lunchtime on Wednesday with a pastrami on rye for himself, and turkey for her, from the
Rascal House. ‘But I can
not
say no to that sandwich, especially since Lucia the healthy eating queen’s off sick today.’ She looked down at her sandwich. ‘Except
you’re going to have to split your pastrami.’

‘Isn’t it bad for you?’ Saul asked.

‘Half a pastrami, nearly seven months gone? Nah,’ Grace said. ‘But don’t tell anyone.’

Grace ate heartily, but Saul found he was too upset to do more than pick.

‘This is between us, right?’ he said. ‘You won’t tell Sam.’

‘I’m not too thrilled by that,’ Grace said frankly. ‘We tend to share.’

‘Pretend I’m a patient,’ Saul said.

‘You’re not.’

‘It’s nothing he needs to know,’ Saul told her.

‘And more than probably I’ll agree with that,’ Grace said. ‘But I’m not going to make promises I can’t keep.’

Saul looked even more disconsolate, tugged at the crust of the half a turkey sandwich Grace had foisted on him.

‘You really need to unload, don’t you?’ Grace said.

‘Yes,’ Saul said. ‘But I really need you to keep quiet with Sam, too.’

She sighed. ‘OK. Tell me.’

‘You’re sure?’

Grace shrugged. ‘You haven’t left me much choice.’

He told her about the photograph and the fight.

‘She’s obsessed by these killings,’ he said. ‘But if I say anything like that, it’s a real red rag to a bull, you know? She says I’ve always known how
seriously she takes her work – which is true, of course I know, and I’ve always respected that about her.’

‘That’s the impression I’ve had,’ Grace said.

‘But she’s also always known how to have the best time.’ Saul shook his head. ‘I’ve never met anyone like Teté, so full of life. She’s always left me
way behind, flying ahead of me, which just bowls me over.’

‘And that’s changed?’

‘Not completely, of course not. Just last night, before our fight, we had a great evening, great dinner, great music, amazing—’ He broke off, a little embarrassed.

‘I get the picture.’ Grace smiled.

‘And then I found this photo – and it was just lying on the floor, so I picked it up, and I’d never go through Teté’s things –  but she came in and saw
me looking at it, and she lost it, accused me of invading her privacy, and that made me mad, and we just went from there.’ He paused. ‘All the way to her screaming at me to get
out.’

‘Have you talked to her since?’

‘I called this morning, got voicemail. She hasn’t called back.’ Saul looked suddenly miserable enough to cry. ‘I’m not sure she will, Grace.’

‘Maybe not after one message,’ Grace said gently. ‘Maybe Terri might need a little more than that.’

‘But I didn’t do anything wrong,’ Saul protested.

‘I’m sure you didn’t,’ Grace said. ‘But Terri clearly felt you did, which is something you’re both going to have to address.’

‘Her not trusting me, you mean.’

‘Goes both ways, Saul,’ Grace said. ‘You ought to know, better than most, what it’s like for police officers sometimes. It’s a given that there are going to be
times when Terri – just like Sam – gets completely wrapped in a job.’

‘But that’s the whole point.’ Saul was frustrated. ‘This isn’t
her
job. It’s Sam’s work I think she’s trying to do. It’s these
murders that she’s completely obsessed by, and I don’t know what to do about it.’

‘And you don’t want me to talk to Sam?’ Grace asked.

‘Absolutely not,’ Saul said. ‘Please, Grace.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Then, if you really feel you’re right about this, you have to go on talking to Terri.’

‘I’m not sure there’s anything left to say,’ Saul said.

‘Then unless you find something,’ Grace said, ‘you’re in a lot of trouble.’

Chapter Fifteen

Cathy was missing Kez.

Missing her so much she was finding it hard to focus on anything else. Since being asked to leave; to go make up her mind about how she felt about a
real
relationship with Kez. About
having a lesbian relationship.

About being gay.

‘I’m not interested in being an experiment,’ Kez had said.

The words were all still rolling around in her head, driving her mad. She hadn’t been able to face summer school, had done little but run since then, racing herself to exhaustion before
heading home and being a pain in the ass to everyone there, even being unforgivably curt to Lucia when she’d asked if she was OK. Sam and Grace weren’t too impressed with her and she
couldn’t blame them, though she felt that they were upset
for
her, too, sensing that her lousy mood had something to do with Kez, and for some idiotic reason, that pissed her off even
more.

Acting like a child.

Which meant, of course, that Kez had been right to tell her to leave, which conclusion made Cathy feel
even
worse. And it wasn’t helping one bit that she didn’t feel able to
speak to Grace or Sam about her feelings and emotions, but the fact was she
knew
they were relieved that this relationship appeared to be over.

Or maybe they didn’t feel that way at all, maybe she was just reading things that weren’t there. Neither of them, in any case, seemed to be thinking too much about
her
at all.
Sam’s mind was jammed full of work and Grace and the baby, and Grace wasn’t really herself, which Cathy knew was mostly the pregnancy and hormones, and she was still busy with patients,
and the horrible thing that had happened to Greg Hoffman had really freaked her out. And Cathy couldn’t have been happier they were finally going to have a baby together, knew how miserable
they’d both been after the miscarriages, and the last thing in the world she wanted was to upset them. But this whole thing, this
mess
with Kez, was confusing the hell out of her, and
she wished she knew what to do for the best. What was right . . .

Long after Saul had left on Wednesday afternoon, Grace had found her mind straying back again to those last appointments with Gregory, trying to read between the lines. So
few
lines, so little said.

And then something else had come back to her. The afternoon of that last session with Greg, Cathy had brought Kez home to meet her, and then moments after they’d gone Terri had arrived,
making Grace wonder if she might have been waiting for them to leave so they could be alone.

A new possibility had just sprung to mind, unbidden and unwelcome. Maybe Terri had been waiting outside the house because she’d known that Gregory was with her. Greg, who it now seemed
might possibly have seen Rudolph Muller’s killer.

Nonsense.

Terri had come to see her because she was upset about Sam. And even if she had been trying to pump him and Saul for details about the homicide investigation, at no time had she attempted to do
so with Grace. Anyway, back then no one had known there was any chance that Greg might have seen anything or anyone connected with the Muller murder.

Coincidence, therefore, Terri arriving when she had; nothing more.

Poor Teté, Grace decided. Everyone down on her for that most heinous of female crimes: ambition.

Nothing new there then.

Still no break in the Muller homicide – nor any success linking the three recent victims. Nothing more in common than the nature of the crimes themselves, their beach
locations and South Florida.

And, of course, the continuing lack of evidence.

That one fragment of wood in Broward’s first case – no such luck in the Rivera killing – though as Doc Sanders had said at the time of that discovery, the fact that no sliver
had been found after the other assaults did not rule out the possibility of the weapon being the same.

Not if the killer was taking good care of his weapon between attacks.

Organized, then, if that was true. Even if the ferocity of the beatings indicated frenzy, the secondary attacks, on lips, throat and teeth, seemed, Sam thought, to point to possible
premeditation. And the more he thought about it, sweated it, the more he believed they
were
linked. Even if Detective Rowan did not agree.

Proving it was the problem. Not to mention finding the son-of-a-bitch behind it.

The chief didn’t like it when this amount of time had passed without so much as a sniff of a result. Captain Hernandez didn’t like it when the chief was unhappy, and Lieutenant Kovac
was grouchier than ever. None of the detectives liked having the captain or Kovac busting their chops, nor did they like failure.

Failing themselves, but most of all, the victim.

No one had come to learn much of great interest about Rudolph Muller, either good or bad, yet to their credit it bugged them a whole lot that an apparently honest, hard-working man with a
possible weakness about his appearance, but with no rumoured major narcissism or perversion – it bugged them that a guy like that, a regular guy, should go for a run on the beach,
their
beach, get his face smashed in, his throat cut, and not have anyone brought to book for it. Not the kind of victim, Muller, who got cops fired up as a rule, made them line up for
overtime night after night. But the Miami Beach police valued their city and were fond of their safe beaches, and they’d be damned if they were going to let some low-life scum or maniac get
away with splattering the sand with blood and brains, never mind scaring off innocent people.

So, for Muller’s sake, and, of course, his family’s: ‘Work harder,
think
harder, don’t give up.’ The whole unit’s motto at times like these,
Sam’s in particular right now. His case, after all.

Work harder.

Saul had decided he needed to take some special action.

Find a way, the
right
way, to make Terri understand how much she meant to him.

He hated the idea that she could even
think
he might snitch on her to Sam about the photograph, about anything; hated even more that Teté seemed to feel she was much less important
to him than his family.

Lonely girl, deep down, beneath the sharpness, behind the defensiveness. Saul knew how much she still missed her grandmother, and he sensed in her sometimes the kind of envy she’d admitted
to, though more often a touch of resentment of his close, loving family. If he thought about her violent father he could understand that.

He thought, for the most part, that he understood
her.
Knew, without question, that he loved her, would do anything to keep her.

Romance, for now, was his best bet. It was their greatest strength, after all, their love, their passion. Terri had three passions, of course: work, animals, and him – he hoped, still him.
Fact was he only really had her.