Blind Spot (29 page)

“Looks like we may not have as much business as you had hoped.” Suki told her about the accident.

Jen’s eyes widened as Suki related the story. She had been at the Cape since last Thursday and wasn’t a big newspaper reader. “I can’t believe Charlie Gasperini’s dead,” she said, dropping into the old couch across from Suki. “I never really liked the guy all that much, but dead. Jesus.”

“Charlie wasn’t such a bad guy.”

“But this has all worked out in Alexa’s favor?” Jen asked, her antenna picking up the relevant point.

“Frank Maxwell’s acting chief, and he seems to think Charlie was wrong about Alexa.” Suki looked down at the MMPI scoring sheet. “He didn’t exactly say it, but both Mike and I are pretty sure he’s going to go after the boys.”

Jen vaulted from the couch and gave Suki a hug. “That’s terrific. Really terrific—although I’m sorry Charlie had to die to make it happen.”

Suki swallowed hard, not trusting herself to speak.

Jen scrutinized Suki’s face, then looked at the papers on the desk, catching, as always, that Suki had said all she wanted to say on a particular subject. “Now that your problems are over, can I go back to giving you shit?”

“I wouldn’t say my problems are exactly over.…”

“But I’m going to give you shit anyway.” Jen pointed at the printouts. “What the hell are you doing with these stupid paper-and-pencil tests?” She shook her head with exaggerated distress. “The numbers may be useful for the rat-lab contingent, but they aren’t worth a hill of beans to us.”

Suki twisted her head and looked at Jen. “They don’t give rats MMPIs.”

But Jen didn’t even crack a smile. “You know the only way to know anything is through face-to-face. You’re a fabulous therapist, incredibly intuitive. What the hell are those scores going to do for you? They’re all correlations anyway. Just like intelligence and height.” Jen grabbed her hat off the coatrack. This hat was a deep crimson with a wide band of velvet: as outlandish as Jen’s headgear always was. She raised her eyebrows at Suki. Come on, she seemed to be saying, fight me on this one.

But Suki didn’t want to fight. She knew the intelligence-height argument: if you gave intelligence tests to a random sample of the population and matched their scores with their height, you would consistently discover that the taller someone was, the smarter they were. And although this was true, there was an important variable missing from the equation: age. “Do you ever wonder about the paranormal?” she asked instead. “Do you think any of it could be true?”

Jen’s hat stopped midway between the coatrack and her head. “You mean ESP and mediums who can put you in touch with the entity of some famous dead person?”

“More like being able to predict the future.”

“Oh, crystal balls and palm readers and fortune cookies. Sure,” Jen said. “I believe in them all.”

“I’m serious.”

“Why?” Jen twirled her hat on her finger.

Suki hesitated. “It’s complicated,” she said. “I’d just like to hear your honest opinion: do you think it’s possible that some people might have the ability to tap into future events? That there are more senses then just the five we know of?”

“Hello! Hello!” Jen leaned over and knocked on the desk in front of Suki. “Anyone home?” she asked. “How the hell can you tap into something that hasn’t happened yet?”

“Well, what if everything were going on at the same time? You know, like a fourth dimension?”

“Oh, so now you’re talking six senses
and
four dimensions. Soon you’ll be discovering past lives and astral projecting your family to a fab vacation in Disney World.”

“I know it seems kind of out there, but how can you be so sure it’s not true?”

Jen patted her hat onto her head, then tugged at the brim, setting it at a jaunty angle. “Because if it were true, don’t you think someone would have figured out how to use it to make a killing on the stock market by now?” She winked. “Great news about Alexa. When this is all over I’m taking you out for a celebration dinner and we’ll drink a shitload of champagne.” Jen blew Suki a kiss. “Until we puke,” she added, then slipped out the door.

Suki put the MMPI printout in the file with Smith-Holt’s report on Lindsey’s EEG and MRI, thinking that Jen, in her inimitable way, had managed to refute Suki’s two current theories: Lindsey was
not
crazy and the paranormal was
not
possible. She didn’t want to think what this might imply for Alexa.

Instead, Suki focused on what the MMPI scores implied for Mike. Despite what Jen had said about personality tests, these scores were exactly what the defense attorney ordered. Although the prosecutor was sure to argue that Lindsey’s mental status in the present had nothing to do with her mental status the afternoon Richard died, Mike could counter that Lindsey’s MRI and EEG were identical to the ones administered at the time of the death. This assertion would again be contested, by the state’s forensic expert this time, who was likely to inform the jury that the link between neurological brain function and psychopathology could not always be made. Still, the power of the simultaneous presentation of Lindsey’s abnormal EEG, MRI and MMPI results was not to be underestimated.

Suki glanced at her watch. Just time enough to talk to Mike. They hadn’t spoken since their visit to the police station yesterday, and Suki was anxious to know if, upon reflection, Mike still thought the meeting with Maxwell had gone as well as he had indicated in the parking lot. Although she expected that he would, she wanted to hear him say it.

As she stood to go into her office and call Mike, the phone on the receptionist’s desk rang. It was Kenneth, and Suki now knew Kenneth well enough to recognize from the timbre of his “hello” that something was wrong. “What?” she demanded.

He sighed. “I wish I wasn’t always the bearer of bad news.”

“They’ve decided Charlie was murdered,” Suki guessed.

“Huh?” Kenneth was clearly surprised, and Suki could have shot herself for her stupidity. “No,” he said slowly, “nothing’s new there. It’s something else. About the Ward case. I didn’t want you to hear it from the news, or hear it and not understand what it really meant.”

Suki’s heart sank. “Just say it. Quick.”

“The boys are going to be arrested, but it’s not what you—”

“Why, that’s fantastic,” Suki cried. “Fabulous.”

“No, it’s not,” Kenneth said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“What do you mean?” Suki held her breath.

“They’re making a deal with Sutterlund’s office. The boys will plead guilty to accessory-after-the-fact charges, and in return for turning state’s evidence against Alexa, they’ll get off with a few months’ probation.”

“I … I don’t understand.” Suki dropped into the chair. “When Mike and I talked to Frank Maxwell yesterday he seemed to realize, he
did
realize, he knew, that Charlie was wrongly pushing for Alexa’s arrest. Frank knew—I know he did. I saw him. I saw his face.”

“Apparently, what Frank believed yesterday and what he believes today are two different things.”

“But he said the case was on hold,” Suki argued, even though she knew Kenneth was on her side. “That his manpower was all tied up with Charlie’s.”

“I guess he’s worked out his staffing problems.”

“McKinna,” Suki growled. “I’ll kill the bastard.”

“Take it easy, Suki. We don’t know that he—”

“Like hell we don’t!” she interrupted. “Ellery got to Frank, and I’m going to prove it.”

“Don’t waste your time.”

“We’re talking about my daughter,” Suki said. “That’s not what I consider a ‘waste of time.’”

“If it was my daughter, I’d go after that missing witness.”

“But what if I can prove Ellery’s screwing Alexa to keep Devin out of trouble? That he’s lying, creating false evidence. That he and Teddy Sutterlund are in cahoots—”

“The deal’s all locked up, Suki.” Kenneth’s voice contained real sorrow. “I’d say that the witness is about the only hope you’ve got.”

“But what if—”

“Listen,” Kenneth interrupted. “I’ve got to run, but I’ll give you a hand however I can.”

Suki’s patient walked into the waiting room. “Thanks,” she said brightly, too loudly. “I’ll call you back later.” Suki replaced the receiver in its cradle and smiled at Ronnie, a trim older woman who had survived a fiery car crash that her daughter and grandson had not.

Somehow, Suki managed to get through the next three hours and three patients. But after she had walked her last patient to the door, she dropped back into her chair and closed her eyes. How could she keep fighting when everything and everyone seemed to be working against her? If one of her patients came in with such a claim, she would assume they were overly paranoid, but in her own case she knew it wasn’t paranoia, it was reality.

The witness, Kenneth had said. The witness was her only chance. But how did she go about finding some unknown person who was obviously trying very hard to remain unfound? She had bombed out on the car. Where did she go next? To Lindsey Kern?

One of the books on the paranormal Suki had borrowed from the library was in her briefcase. She pulled it out and flipped to the index, searching for precognition. There was an entire chapter, which she skimmed. The gist of the chapter was that precognition was a real, research-substantiated phenomenon. But as Suki reread the pages more carefully, it became clear that “research-substantiated” did not have the meaning any of her professors would ordinarily attribute to it.

While the authors proclaimed that successful, systematic precognition research had been going on since the early thirties—as Lindsey had said, when J. B. Rhine first instituted his ESP-card experiments at Duke University—a closer analysis of the data indicated that almost three-quarters of the studies had serious methodological flaws. The footnotes and endnotes detailed the facts: the famous Honorton and Ferrari meta-analysis had used a database so heterogeneous as to render it virtually useless for combined analyses, subjects had been preselected by the experimenters in the Cleveland studies, shady claims and fraudulent conclusions were rampant. Despite their obvious prejudice in favor of the paranormal, the authors were forced to conclude that “precognition in forced-choice testing is a weak effect,” and that their most important finding was that the data offered “a clear signpost for the future direction of paranormal research.” Maybe Jen had a point.

Suki closed the book and stared at the painting of a futuristic, alien-looking man on the cover. He was naked and deathly pale; multicolored geometric shapes circled his head. If a book on parapsychology professing to be the most “authoritative, comprehensive and up-to-date” on the subject could say nothing more definitive than that precognition was a weak effect, how real could it be? And if precognition wasn’t real, then how had Lindsey known all she had?

Suki thought back to the things Lindsey had predicted—that an emergency phone call might be trouble at home, that Suki would want to find someone, that Finlay was near trees and water, that there was an aura of danger around Suki and Alexa—and she realized many of Lindsey’s predictions had either been vague or been something she easily could have learned from another source. The prophecies were like the astrology column in the
Globe
, like the little strips tucked inside fortune cookies that foretold great wealth or great disaster: Nothing more than hazy statements which could be read by the gullible as meant especially for them. But then there was the dead boy’s hand, the PIN number …

Suki pushed herself up from the desk. She couldn’t think about Lindsey now. She had to focus on Alexa, on the witness. The witness she had no idea how to find. Kenneth had said he’d do what he could, but Suki was afraid he was going to get his hands tied pretty quickly by Frank Maxwell. Her thoughts turned again to Warren Blanchard, to how he had offered to help. But what could Warren possibly do? He was a nice man, so genuinely concerned that day at the rec center, so worried about what Brendan had told her. What Brendan had told her. She froze, her hand halfway to the coatrack. About the drugs. Jesus. The drugs. There was so much going on, she had completely forgotten about the drugs.

She sat down, dialed the Witton Police Station and asked for Kenneth. When he came on the line, she didn’t bother with small talk. “Have you heard anything about kids selling drugs at the high school?” she asked.

“You really shouldn’t call me here.” Kenneth’s voice was low, tight.

Suki hadn’t thought about how her calling might affect Kenneth’s job—or his chances of being able to help her. She sat down in the chair. “Sorry,” she said, and she was. “Do you want to call me back?”

“Work or home?”

When Kenneth was once again on the line, he asked, “What’s this about drugs? Don’t you have enough to worry about?”

“Maybe it’s all the same worry.” Suki turned her chair and squinted out over the open fields. The sun was clear and strong, and the grass glowed in its warmth. It hurt to look at it.

“You think Alexa and the boys are mixed up with drugs?” Kenneth interrupted her thoughts. “That it has something to do with Jonah’s murder?”

She turned so she couldn’t see out the window. “You don’t sound surprised.”

“I’m a cop. There’s not much that can surprise me.”

“So there
are
drugs at the high school?”

“There’ve been drugs at the high school since the sixties. Maybe earlier.”

“How about something that’s being used by socalled ‘good kids’ to help them study?” Suki asked. “Some kind of speed? Methamphetamine maybe?”

“Sure, meth’s the kind of stuff they’d think would help them study, but in reality, it just fries their brains.”

“I was told it was ‘clean’—supplied by some adult ‘who knew what he was doing.’”

Kenneth chuckled. “It’s always supplied by some adult who knows exactly what he’s doing.”

“Do you think the boys could have been doing meth that night? That maybe Jonah was, too? Has anyone ever looked at the autopsy report? Was a tox screen done?”

Kenneth hesitated. “They almost always do a tox screen, but now that you bring it up, I can’t say I remember anyone ever mentioning any results. Too touchy—or maybe the family quashed it.”