Mind Games (50 page)

Beside Grace, Sam moaned, a new, different kind of a sound.

‘Sam!’ Grace turned and shook him by the shoulders, yanked at his hair. ‘Sam, you have to wake up now!’ He moaned some more, so she slapped his face, and she didn’t
even have to steel herself to do it, it was just life or death, as simple as that. ‘
Sam
, you have to wake
up
!’

It was the first time Grace had taken her eyes away from Parés since he’d grabbed Cathy, and it was a second too long.

‘Grace, watch
out
!’

She spun around to see that Cathy had wrested herself free, and Parés was coming at them, at the bed, and the scalpel was coming down again, and this time it was coming straight for
Sam—

Grace screamed again as she used the last of her strength to shove him clear, but she wasn’t fast enough, and the blade scythed into Sam’s side. With a shriek of agony, he came to
and kicked out reflexively with both feet, catching Parés in the stomach and knocking him off balance. Grace tumbled off the bed and was almost beside Cathy when she saw that the girl had
the scalpel again, and instantly Grace knew what she was going to do.

‘
No
, Cathy!’ Grace couldn’t let her do that, couldn’t let her destroy herself completely. She grabbed the first thing that came to hand – a book from her
bedside table. ‘Cathy, get clear!’ she yelled. ‘Get
away
!’

Grace threw the book as hard as she could at Parés’ head, heard the dull, sickening, infinitely
satisfying
, sound of it hitting, heard him cry out, clutching his temple,
watched him stagger. And then she saw that Cathy had dropped the scalpel again, and Grace dived for it – and suddenly for the first time,
she
was in control.

‘Grace,
don’t!
’

She only half heard Sam’s voice, but she wasn’t listening, and now
she
was raising the weapon, and it felt good in her hand, powerful – and Parés was still
stumbling around, holding his head. And for one long moment it wasn’t Parés or Broderick that Grace was seeing – it was Frank Lucca, her own monster father, and it wasn’t
Cathy he’d been half-killing, it was Claudia, and Grace didn’t think she knew anymore, or
cared
anymore, which father she was going to kill, so long as she
finished
him, finished the
nightmare—

The first shot exploded past her head, crunched clear through Parés’ hand, ricocheted against the wall beside the bed, made Grace drop the scalpel and sent Cathy, shrieking in
terror, crawling away while her tormentor squealed like a wounded animal.

Grace turned and saw that Sam had dragged himself off the bed and had his .38 in both his shaking hands – Grace hadn’t even seen him bring the hideous, horrific, wonderful gun
into
the house.

‘Grace, get down on the floor!’ Sam commanded. ‘Get
down!
’

Grace got the hell down, but Sam’s hands were trembling violently, and his eyes were screwed up as if he couldn’t see properly, and Grace realized that the drugs inside him were
interfering with his vision.

‘He’s got it again!’ she heard Cathy shriek.

The explosion of the second bullet grazed Parés’ left cheek.

He put a hand up to touch it, wiped away the streak of blood and laughed, a cold, harsh sound. And then he began to move back towards Grace.

The third explosion slammed clean into his chest.

Eric Parés, once known as John Broderick, fell backwards lightly on to Grace’s bedroom rug, the scalpel still in his right hand. His body hitting the floor seemed to make no sound
at all, though maybe it was because the thunder of the shots was still ringing in Grace’s ears.

She stared up at Sam. He was saying something to her, but Grace couldn’t hear him. She turned around again, searching for Cathy, saw her over by the door, huddled, head down, with her arms
around her knees.

Very slowly, very painfully – as Sam bent to take the weapon out of her father’s hand and then pulled the phone on to the floor to call for back-up – Grace crawled towards
her.

Bogeymen are tough to kill.

John Broderick had made it through surgery at Jackson Memorial into intensive care, and, according to his doctors, there was no reason to doubt that he would survive to face justice.
Grace’s and Sam’s wounds had been superficial. Cathy, David Becket and his colleagues at Miami General said, was going to need careful observation for several days at least while a
series of tests – physical, neurological and psychological – were run to determine that no permanent damage had been done by the long-term drug and hypnotic abuse she had suffered.

The greatest concern voiced by the teenager during the early hours had been for Harry, and nothing would convince her that he was perfectly recovered from his own drugs ordeal until David Becket
talked the hospital management into letting Teddy Lopez bring the dog in for a brief visit on the second day.

‘Better now?’ Grace asked Cathy, after Teddy and Harry – bright-eyed and bouncing and no worse off for having napped his way through the ordeal – had gone back home.

‘Aren’t you?’ she said, lying back against her pillows.

Grace smiled. ‘Of course.’

‘How’s your shoulder?’ Cathy asked.

‘Not bad.’ Grace was sitting in a wheelchair, orders of the hospital.

‘What about Sam?’

‘Getting better. Complaining more about where I scratched him to try waking him up than about the cut in his side.’

Grace waited for Cathy to ask about Parés, but she didn’t, which was no real surprise. She considered playing it Cathy’s way for a while longer – acting as if he
didn’t exist – but there was one crucial element that Grace felt Cathy needed to know, and to
believe
, as soon as possible.

‘Parés is going to make it,’ she said. ‘But he’s in a maximum security ward at Jackson Memorial.’ Grace paused, watching Cathy’s face.
‘There’s no way on earth for him to escape.’

‘Like he did before, you mean,’ Cathy said, quietly.

Neither Sam nor Grace had been certain how much she had taken in of Sunday night’s happenings – Grace hadn’t even been sure if Cathy had realized that Parés was really
her father. Now she knew.

‘So you know who he really is?’ Grace said, just as softly. Cathy didn’t look at her, kept her eyes trained on a fold in the sheets on her bed. ‘I heard
everything,’ she said. ‘It was all muffled and weird, like I had a blanket over my head or something, but I heard every word you and he were saying.’ She paused, still looking
down. ‘Don’t ask me how I feel about it, Grace, because I don’t know.’

‘I’m not going to ask,’ Grace said. ‘Not yet.’

At last, the blue eyes turned back her way, and they were pools of confusion and disbelief. ‘Is it true?’ Cathy asked. ‘Is Dr Parés really my father?’

‘It seems that way,’ Grace answered. ‘We don’t have one hundred per cent confirmation yet, but there’s really very little doubt.’

Cathy was silent again for a few seconds.

‘So he killed my mom and Arnie,’ she said. ‘And Aunt Frances.’

‘Yes.’

‘And Beatrice Flager.’

‘It certainly looks that way.’

‘And he would have killed us, too, if . . .’

‘I think he might have.’ Grace seldom saw any good purpose in lying.

Cathy looked away again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, softly.

‘What for?’

‘Because he’s my father.’

Quiet rage seethed through Grace. She leaned forward in the wheelchair. ‘You are not responsible for anything he’s done, Cathy. It’s the other way around.’ She had to
swallow hard to contain her anger. ‘Don’t you ever forget that, not even for a second.’

‘He said he blamed me for everything.’ Cathy’s voice was flat again. ‘I heard him. He said that I screamed whenever he touched me. He said that I hated him.’

‘He isn’t a rational man, Cathy.’ Grace’s right hand clenched the arm of her chair. She wanted to weep for the girl. ‘I don’t know exactly why, but I’m
not certain that he ever
was
rational.’

Cathy looked right at Grace again, and her eyes were suddenly wet. ‘I didn’t hate him, you know. Mom did – and Aunt Frances.’ She shook her head. ‘But I don’t
think I ever did.’

Grace didn’t speak.

‘I do hate him now, though,’ Cathy said.

Thank God for that, at least
, Grace thought, but refrained from saying.

She believed it, though, with all her heart. Hate had its place in the scheme of things, she’d often thought. She knew it wasn’t a Christian way to think – she knew that if she
weren’t such a badly lapsed Catholic, she would probably have felt compelled to raise the matter in the confessional.

But Grace did believe in hate, just as she believed in evil.

It existed, all right.

If she hadn’t been sure of that before, she was now.

It took some time to put together.

As soon as the man who’d called himself Eric Parés was out of the ICU and it was deemed decent to go to work on him, they took dental impressions and X-rays and had John
Broderick’s dentist up in Tallahassee confirm that Parés and Broderick were one and the same. They had already ascertained that he wore brown contact lenses and dyed his hair, and
they’d found fine scarring around his ears from where he’d had help from a plastic surgeon to lessen the roundness of his face. More X-rays proved that his large nose had been reduced.
The scars on the insides of both wrists and on his throat had been left to nature; probably, the consensus of opinion was, Broderick had feared that asking a plastic surgeon to rid him of those
might have drawn excessive attention to himself.

The day after Broderick had been brought into Jackson Memorial, officers from the City of Miami Police Department had entered the apartment that Parés had given as his address when
he’d fraudulently applied for his part-time job as physician to the inmates of the Female House of Detention.

The apartment was a one-bed in the Latin Quarter just off the Tamiami Trail. It was small, clean and tidy – a place for everything and everything in its place. The search was meticulous.
The officers went through every piece of paper in every file in a two-drawer cabinet – only half filled – and found no trace of anything referring to either John Broderick or the
Robbins family. To all intents and purposes, it
was
the home of Eric Parés, MD – the only true strangeness about it being that none of Parés’ papers dated back
past May that same year.

‘Broderick isn’t talking,’ Sam told Grace. ‘He knows we know who he is and what he’s done, but he’s not playing ball.’ He paused.
‘Oh, yeah, and he said – and I quote – that if the “nigger Jew cop comes anywhere near him, he’ll shut up tighter than a coffin”.’

‘Nice,’ Grace said.

They were home from the hospital, had been for a few days now, though Cathy was still there, growing stronger but still being monitored for after-effects. It was evening, and they were out on
Grace’s deck with Harry.

‘Not that I can talk to him anyway,’ Sam said, ‘since all he’s charged with so far is filling Cathy with drugs and wounding the two of us.’

‘They will break him down, won’t they?’

‘I’m not a betting man,’ Sam said, ‘but I’d say they will, given time. We already know a few things about Broderick. When he gets mad, he spews it out – and
he likes bragging about how smart he is.’

‘But he likes power more,’ Grace pointed out quickly. ‘And so long as he’s not talking, he keeps that, doesn’t he?’

‘To a degree.’

‘What happens if he doesn’t confess and we can’t prove what he did?’

‘We will prove it.’ Sam was definite.

‘But what if we can’t? Isn’t there always going to be a chance that Cathy could still get blamed – maybe for doing the killings under hypnosis, or
sleepwalking?’

‘No State Attorney’s going to take that before a jury, Grace.’

‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘But we need a resolution to this. An ending.
Cathy
needs an ending if she’s ever going to get through it all and move forward.’

Broderick was out of hospital and in prison.

Within a few days of his settling down in his maximum security cell, he made it known to his lawyer that he might now be willing to start talking, but that he had one condition.

Sam thought about going over to Grace’s house to break the news to her, but he was on duty and he knew it was too important to wait till evening – and besides, there was no way of
softening the impact of Broderick’s demand.

‘He wants to see Cathy,’ Sam told Grace on the phone.

He knew, more or less, what she was going to say. Cathy had only been back home for a few days. She was in good shape physically, but emotionally she was fragile. How could she not be?

‘Over my dead body.’

‘The chief says we have to ask her.’

‘The hell we do.’

Sam gave her a moment. ‘You could be with her.’

‘I don’t want her to be put through that, Sam,’ Grace said.

‘I know. Nor do I.’ He paused. ‘And I don’t want to say what I have to say next, either.’

‘Please tell me it has nothing to do with Broderick’s being her father?’ Grace’s voice was very strained.

‘That’s what he still is,’ Sam said quietly. ‘I hate it as much as you do.’

‘Then please stop this from happening.’

‘I don’t think I can do that.’

‘Sure you can – just tell the chief that we’re not going to ask Cathy.’

‘If we don’t, someone else will.’

Grace said nothing.

‘Maybe it’ll help,’ Sam said.

‘How could seeing that monster possibly
help
?’

‘What’s that word you used – when you talked about going back to Chicago for your mother’s funeral?’ Sam searched for it. ‘Closure.’

‘I think that what I told you,’ Grace said, coolly, ‘was that I didn’t think I had achieved closure.’