The Birthday Girl (14 page)

She switched back to her normal voice. 'Yeah, now I'm the all-American girl. Do you think I have an accent?'

Freeman shook his head. 'Only when you lose your temper,' he said.

'I do not!' she laughed.

He drained his glass. 'I'm going to shower,' he said. On his way out of the door he noticed that the red light was flashing on the bottom of the phone. He pressed the playback button. The message was from Nancy in Dr Brown's office. She asked if Katherine would call back as soon as possible. Freeman thought she sounded close to tears. He turned to look at Mersiha. 'Any idea what that's about?'

Mersiha shrugged. 'My appointment isn't until the day after tomorrow. Do you want me to call her?'

'No, that's okay. Tell Katherine when she gets back.' As he headed up the stairs he heard Katherine's car growling down the drive. 'There she is now,' he called down to Mersiha.

Five minutes later, as he was soaping himself in the shower, Katherine came into the bathroom. He saw her through the rippled glass screen as she leaned against the sink. 'Do you wanna join me, Kat?' he called. When she didn't reply, he slid the glass partition open. Katherine was deathly pale, her hands either side of her face, her steepled fingers covering her nose as if stifling a sneeze. 'What's wrong?' he said. A sudden fear gripped his heart. 'Is Mersiha all right?'

'It's Art Brown. He's been shot.'

'Shot? Is he okay?'

'He's in Johns Hopkins.'

Freeman got out of the shower and grabbed a towel. Water 110 STEPHEN LEATHER pooled around his feet as he went over to his wife. 'What happened?'

'Nancy said it was a prowler. Yesterday morning. He must have been in the house looking for something to steal and Art disturbed him. I can't believe it. What is this country coming to?'

Freeman wrapped the towel around his waist and held Katherine, trying to find a compromise position where he could comfort her without soaking her clothing. 'He's going to be all right, isn't he?' he asked.

Katherine nodded. 'He was shot in the leg. But the bullet just missed an artery, Nancy said. He could have died. In Parkton, of all places. The suburbs are supposed to be safe, for God's sake. It's not as if it happened in East Baltimore.'

Freeman stroked her hair. 'I know, I know,' was all he could think of saying.

'You're not even safe in your own home these days. Carjackings, robberies, shootings, even in the suburbs.' She pulled away from him. There were damp patches on her shirt from his wet chest and he could see the outline of her breasts through the material. 'I'm going to lie down,' she said. 'Maybe I'll take a pill.'

Katherine often had trouble sleeping and she had a bottle of Sominex in her bedside cabinet. He watched her walk down the hallway to the bedroom, a little surprised at her reaction because it wasn't like her to show so much emotion, not since her father had died, anyway. An aunt, admittedly one with whom she'd had little contact in recent years, had died after a short illness a few months earlier and she hadn't shown a tenth of the grief she was showing over a bullet in Art Brown's leg. Freeman scratched his wet hair. Maybe it was because Dr Brown was closer to home. Katherine took Mersiha to all her sessions with the psychiatrist and they'd met socially at various charity functions, but even so her reaction seemed a little extreme. He wondered if there was something else worrying her.

He towelled himself dry, put on a bathrobe and went into their bedroom. She was already under the covers, a red satin sleep-mask over her eyes. The bottle of sleeping tablets was by THE BIRTHDAY GIRL 111 the bed and she was snoring softly, but Freeman had the feeling that she was only pretending. He stood for a while, watching the slow rise and fall of the quilt, then he dressed in jeans and an old sweatshirt and went downstairs. Mersiha was still in the kitchen, sitting at the table and reading the Baltimore Sun.

She looked up and tapped an inside page of the newspaper. 'It's here,' she said. 'It happened yesterday morning. Isn't it amazing?'

Freeman sat down next to her and she slid the paper across to him. There were only half a dozen paragraphs on the page. The shooting in the leg of a Parkton psychiatrist wasn't considered a major news story on a day when two young girls had been killed in a drive-by shooting and a police officer had been shot in the chest during a city drugs bust. According to the article, an intruder had entered through an unlocked door and had surprised Dr Brown in his bedroom. The psychiatrist had told police that a young black male had threatened to shoot him unless he'd told him where he kept his money. When Dr Brown had insisted that there was no money in the house, the intruder had shot him once and fled. The description Dr Brown gave to the police fitted about half of the city's young black males. The gun had been a .22-calibre, the weapon of choice among inner-city drug dealers.

'Amazing, isn't it?' Mersiha said. 'I was supposed to see him tomorrow evening. That's why Nancy called. I guess that means no more sessions for a while.'

Freeman folded the paper and gently rapped his daughter on the head. 'I'm sure it'll take more than a bullet in the leg to stop Dr Brown from seeing you. Katherine said he'll be out of hospital in a day or two.'

Mersiha shook her head. 'She said Nancy gave her the names of some other shrinks. She said Dr Brown wouldn't be working for a while.'

'We'll see,' Freeman said. 'And don't call them shrinks. At sixty dollars an hour they're highly trained professional psychiatrists, okay?'

Mersiha laughed. 'Sure, Dad. Whatever you say. Where's Katherine?'

Freeman nodded upstairs. 'In bed. She isn't feeling very well.'

'Shall I take her up something?'

'No, let her sleep. She's tired.' Freeman looked at his watch. 'Do you want to catch a movie?'

Mersiha's eyes widened. 'Yeah, sure!' she said. 'That'd be great.'

Katherine took the blue and white striped laundry bag out of the wicker basket and carried it over her shoulder to the bathroom opposite Mersiha's bedroom. She pulled out the laundry bag full of Mersiha's dirty clothes and dragged both bags down the stairs to the laundry room. After she'd emptied both bags on to the table, she quickly sorted through the pile, putting the whites on one side and everything else into the washing machine. She reached for a pair of Mersiha's black Levis and turned them inside out. There was something hard inside one of the back pockets. Katherine slid her fingers into the pocket and pulled out the object. It was a brass shell case, and it glittered under the fluorescent lights.

She frowned, tossed the cartridge into the air and caught it. She made a fist and put it to her lips, blowing into her clenched hand like a magician preparing to make it disappear, but when she opened her fingers it was still there. She put it into the pocket of her dress and carried on throwing the dirty laundry into the washing machine.

Later, with the machine started on its washing cycle, she poured coffee into two mugs and carried them through into the sitting room where her husband was sitting with his feet on the coffee table, a stack of papers on his lap.

'Thanks, honey,' he said.

Katherine put the mugs on the table and tossed him the brass cartridge. Freeman caught it one-handed. 'What's this?' he said, frowning.

'What does it look like?' she asked.

'I know what it is, honey. Why are you giving it to me?'

'I found it in Mersiha's jeans?'

'You what?'

'I found it in the back pocket of her jeans. I just want to know what we're going to do about it. Or to be more accurate, what you're going to do about it.'

The?'

Katherine raised one eyebrow archly. 'Tony, I don't want to keep repeating myself. That's a cartridge case, isn't it?'

Freeman nodded. 'Yeah, a .22 by the look of it. What on earth would she be doing with it?' He looked up. 'Do you think she got it at school?' . 'I've no idea,' Katherine said.

'Have you found anything else?'

'I haven't searched her room, if that's what you mean. You know how closely she guards her privacy. I think you're going to have to talk to her. She's being funny with me at the moment.'

'Funny?'

'She doesn't seem to want even to be in the same room with me.'

'What sparked that off?'

'God knows. But I don't think she's in the mood for a heart-to-heart, not with me anyway. Besides, she's always been a daddy's girl.'

Freeman couldn't help but smile. 'We're both her parents. Maybe we should tackle her together.'

Katherine shook her head. 'She's sure to feel threatened if we both confront her.'

'Toss you for it?' Freeman joked.

Katherine pointed her finger at her husband. 'It's your turn.'

'What do you mean, my turn? I tell you what, you take this one, and I'll give her the sex talk. Deal?'

Katherine smiled. 'You know full well that I gave her the sex talk two years ago. And the menstruation talk. And the drugs talk.'

'I did the drugs talk,' Freeman reminded her.

'You gave her the first drugs talk -1 had to redo it a couple of 114 STEPHEN LEATHER weeks later. Your jokes about not remembering much about the sixties garbled the message somewhat.'

'Okay, okay,' Freeman said, holding up his hands in surrender. 'I'll give her the gun talk.'

'We just have to know where she got it from, that's all.'

'She might have found it.' Freeman slipped the cartridge case into his shirt pocket. 'So, what's happening with Art?'

Katherine lit a cigarette, took a deep drag and then exhaled before replying. 'I don't know. I just don't know. I can't even get through to him on the phone. All Nancy will say is that he's reducing his workload and that we should get someone else. She's nice about it and all, but it's like talking to a brick wall.'

'It doesn't make sense,' Freeman said. 'He said she was making progress. I can't see how he can drop her and call himself a professional. Do you think I should have a word with him?'

Katherine shuddered as if something cold had trickled down her back. 'Maybe. I don't know. Whatever you like.'

'Are you okay?' He reached out and put his hand on her wrist. She smiled nervously and slowly withdrew her hand from his touch, using it to brush her hair needlessly behind her ear.

They sat in silence for a while. Freeman didn't know why she was being so cold. He couldn't imagine what he'd done to upset her. He ran the conversation back in his mind, searching in vain for a clue to her annoyance.

'I'll speak to her, don't worry,' he said. 'But I'm sure it's nothing. Is she asleep now?'

'It's after eleven. What do you think?'

Freeman realised that whatever he said would only make matters worse. He decided to say nothing. He picked up his papers and pretended to study them. Katherine glared at him for a few seconds before she realised he wasn't going to answer. 'I'm going to bed,' she said frostily, extinguishing her cigarette. 'Don't wake me when you come up.' Her high heels tapped across the floor, echoing like pistol shots.

It was the same dream as always, but that didn't make it any easier to bear. Mersiha knew that she was dreaming, and part of her even knew that she was actually lying safe in her bedroom, but the terror and shame she felt were every bit as intense as if it were actually happening to her in the real world.

Her mother was there, but then she always was in the dream: screaming and pleading, held down by the men with guns. Mersiha was pleading, too, not for herself but for her mother, begging the men to leave her alone. The room was dark, but she could see the faces of the men, sweating skin and wide eyes, mouths distorted with hatred and lust, and she could see the blood on her mother's mouth, like badly applied lipstick. Hands grabbed for Mersiha, hands that ripped at her clothes and pinched and slapped, not because she was resisting but because they wanted to hurt her. They wanted her to cry, but she refused to give them the satisfaction. No matter what they did to her they would see only contempt in her eyes.

She was lifted bodily off the ground by unseen hands and rotated like lamb on a spit as her clothes were torn from her, and then they threw her down on to one of the many mattresses that were lying on the floor. She began to scream, knowing what was going to happen and that there was nothing she could do to prevent it. She began to scream, in pain, in sorrow, and, more than anything, in anger.

Freeman sat by the side of Mersiha's bed, rubbing the palms of his hands together. He hated to see the way his daughter was suffering, but Art Brown's advice had been unequivocal - waking her in the middle of a nightmare would do her more harm than good. The dreams had to run their course - it was her mind's way of dealing with the trauma. It was a healing process, like the gradual closing of a wound.

Mersiha tossed, her face bathed in sweat, her arms trying to fend off unseen assailants. Freeman could only imagine what she was going through. He reached over and stroked 116 STEPHEN LEATHER her forehead, hoping that in some way she'd know he was there, with her, even though she was still asleep. Her mouth opened and closed as if she were forming words, but no sounds came. He tried to read her lips, but whatever she was saying in her dream, it wasn't English. At least she wasn't screaming any more. She began shaking her head from side to side, her arms outstretched. Despite the torment she was going through, she wasn't crying. She looked angry, and for some reason he couldn't understand on a conscious level, Freeman was suddenly immensely proud of her.

Lennie Nelson unscrewed the cap from his plastic bottle of Evian water and put it next to his salad. He stabbed a piece of cucumber with his white plastic fork, dipped it in the Dijon mustard dressing and ate it as he studied his notes on Ventura Investments. He had gone as far as he could in discovering who was behind the investment vehicle, and his workload didn't allow him the luxury of the extended investigation he knew would be necessary if he was to make any further progress.

He'd called the Securities and Exchange Commission. They had no record of Ventura, but that was hardly surprising because it wasn't a public company and didn't appear to have raised money by issuing shares. The Corporations Bureau in Annapolis also drew a blank. The nature of the investment suggested a limited partnership, but he'd scoured state records to no avail. This surprised him, because he was sure that Maury Anderson had said that Ventura was composed of local investors. That had sparked the thought that maybe the investors had something to hide, and that thought had led swiftly to Delaware. Companies operating all over the United States were incorporated in Delaware to take advantage of the state's favourable regulations and low tax rates.