Blind Spot (39 page)

According to the now-defunct agreement Mike had hammered out with Frank, Alexa was to enter through the back door to avoid the media. When Suki got to the station, she saw why Mike had wanted this arrangement. The grassy knoll in front of the building was completely filled with men and women scribbling notes and photographing a spectacle sure to gladden the hearts of television news directors and newspaper editors all over the commonwealth: a pretty, teenage girl with no record, cuffed, a cop at each elbow, being led into an affluent, small-town police station to face a murder charge.

Suki put her head down and ran toward the front door. She ignored all comers, elbowing a willowy woman in a red suit out of her way and butting a man with her shoulder. Proper etiquette was not high on her priority list at the moment.

On the way over, Suki had almost driven off the road trying to steer and call Mike from her car phone. She was barely able to do one thing at a time, let alone two, but neither could wait. At a red light, she had finally managed to punch the correct numbers and reached Betty, who promised to beep Mike and have him meet her at the police station. He was in Concord—at Lindsey’s trial, Suki knew—so he wasn’t far. Betty estimated he would be there in less than half an hour and asked if Suki could hold down the fort until then. Suki assured her she could, but had begged her to tell Mike to come as soon as was humanly possible. As she ran up the stairs, she prayed Kenneth was on duty.

He was, and he was waiting for her. As she was buzzed through the door, Suki flashed on the first time they had met, the night of Jonah’s murder, when Kenneth had stood on this same spot and reached a long-fingered hand to her, a smile on his face. He wasn’t smiling now; his face was all angles and reminded her of photos of Abraham Lincoln during the desperate days of the Civil War.

“She’s in processing,” Kenneth said, taking Suki’s arm. “Downstairs.” He led her along a narrow corridor lined by a wall of windows overlooking a bank of computers: the emergency center. But if there was an emergency, it was not being attended to: everyone behind the glass was watching her.

Suki turned to Kenneth. “Frank made a deal with Mike,” she told him as she tried to catch her breath. “We were supposed to bring her in on Wednesday. It wasn’t supposed to be—”

He hushed her with a finger to his lips. “Not here.”

“Is it because of the fingerprints?” Suki demanded. “Is that why?”

Kenneth shook his head. “Listen, under normal circumstances no one’s allowed at a booking, but I made a pitch for an exception in this case—for you to stay with her, given her age and the, ah, the severity of the circumstances.”

“Can I see her now?”

“Your lawyer’s on his way?”

“Where is she?” Suki demanded, fear sending her voice up two octaves. “I have to see her!”

Kenneth stopped at the top of stairs and gripped Suki’s shoulders. “You’ve got to listen to me,” he urged in a fierce whisper. “If you get the least bit hysterical, cause Alexa to get hysterical, they’ll yank you out of there before you can say ‘boo.’”

“But I’m her—”

“I told them you were a forensic psychologist,” he interrupted. “That you were used to dealing with the legal system—that you were calm and together, and you’d help ease the process for both them and Alexa. It wasn’t an easy sell, so if you want to be with her, you’ve got to be who I said you were.”

Suki took a shuddering breath and looked down at the linoleum floor. “Thank you,” she whispered. Her eyes filled with tears, at Alexa’s predicament, at Kenneth’s kindness, but she blinked them back furiously. Later, she would cry. Later there would be plenty of time. She raised her chin and squared her shoulders. “Let’s go.”

When they got to the bottom of the stairs, Suki scanned the area for Alexa. To her left were three barred cells; Suki averted her eyes from their cold barrenness as soon as she saw they were empty. To her right was a closed door. Straight ahead was the processing area: desk, computer, camera, fingerprinting equipment, breathalyzer machine, milling cops. No Alexa. Suki whipped her head around to recheck everywhere she had already looked. She grabbed Kenneth’s arm. “Where is she?”

“She’s probably in with the matron,” he said gently.

The matron. Alexa was being searched. Her possessions taken away, her body violated. “No,” Suki moaned, closing her eyes as a wave of nausea rolled through her. “No.”

“Suki.” Kenneth turned her toward him. “I know this is hard, but you’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to do it for Alexa. I’m here, and I’ll stay here. I’m with you both all the way, but you’ve got to get a grip on yourself. You can’t come apart now.”

Suki swallowed the bile that filled her throat. She thought of all the difficult moments she had survived in her life: her mother’s death, Stan’s abandonment, the past three weeks. And although none of those events could touch the horror of this moment, she knew she could survive this, too. She opened her eyes. “I’m … I’m all right,” she managed to say. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll get you a glass of water.”

Suki nodded gratefully as he led her toward the processing area. She leaned against the cinder block wall while she waited for his return. She pressed her hot cheek to the cool bricks and took a series of deep breaths. She would survive this. And so would Alexa.

Kenneth returned and handed her a funnel-shaped paper cup filled with water. He glanced over his shoulder at the door at the bottom of the stairs. “It shouldn’t be much longer,” he said.

Suki downed the water in a single gulp and turned away from the closed door, toward the processing area. She couldn’t think about what was going on in there. What was happening to Alexa. She focused on the activity in front of her. A uniformed cop sat behind the desk, typing with two fingers on a computer keyboard. Setting up the booking form, Suki knew. She realized she knew too much. She knew the Murphy bar attached to the front of the desk, with a single pair of handcuffs dangling from it, was to restrain agitated prisoners. She knew the mounted camera in the corner would record the entire process, that the video screen to its right would display it. She knew the still camera attached to the desk was for the mug shot, that Alexa would be seated on the swivel chair, and that due to a recent court decision, there would be no height lines behind her, no placard in front of her. Suki knew the lockers were for personal possessions, the large black drum for fingerprints. She turned away.

Suki wasn’t sure how long she stood there, her eyes riveted to the row of metal lockers on the wall in front of her, not wanting to turn right, not willing to turn left. She thought of the beach at Key Biscayne. Of the quiet park. Of the tiny sandpipers scuttling along the water’s edge.

She was yanked from Key Biscayne by the sound of an opening door. She jumped and started toward it, but Kenneth held her back.

“Stay here,” he hissed in her ear. “You can’t go to her. You have to stay here.”

“But Mike isn’t here yet,” Suki said. “They can’t do this without her lawyer.”

“It’s legal to book without counsel,” Kenneth said, and of course Suki knew this was true. “It shouldn’t take too long.”

Alexa emerged from the door, followed by the policewoman who had been at the house. The handcuffs had been removed and, from a distance, she looked strangely ordinary in her jeans and T-shirt, like her everyday self. But as she approached them, Suki could see the glazed look in her eye. When Alexa saw her mother, she nodded. “Mom,” she said, her voice emotionless.

Suki’s arms ached with their emptiness, and she gripped her hands into fists. “They’re going to let me stay with you, honey,” she said. “Right here the whole time. Right here.”

Alexa gave Suki a vacant smile as the policewoman led her to the Murphy bar. Suki understood that Alexa had removed herself also, that she was in her own Key Biscayne.

The processing began with the Miranda rights, which Alexa acknowledged in a barely perceptible whisper.

“You’ll have to speak up, young lady,” the policeman behind the desk barked at her.

Alexa jumped back. “I understand,” she said a bit more loudly, the tremor in her voice as audible as the words.

The policewoman turned and motioned to Suki. Suki looked up at Kenneth and he nodded. She went and stood next to Alexa. She took her hand. “Thank you,” she whispered to the policewoman.

The policewoman, whose name tag identified her as Karen Adler, leaned over and turned the television so that it faced away from them. Suki would be forever grateful for Karen’s kindness.

The policeman behind the desk glared at Karen, but she smiled sweetly and took up position on the other side of Alexa. “Name?” he snapped. As if he didn’t know. He continued on in this manner, asking questions in a cold tone that bordered on rude. Alexa answered softly, but calmly, in her somewhere-else voice. Suki held her hand tight.

As Suki had known she would be, Alexa was photographed, face forward and face sideways. Then she was fingerprinted. Fortunately, it was Karen who rolled her fingers across the old machine and then pressed them to the recording sheets. There was one set for the FBI, one set for the commonwealth and one set for Witton. Thirty times Karen rolled Alexa’s fingers. Thirty times Alexa allowed her limp fingers to be rolled; it was obvious she was not really present.

When the processing was complete, Suki and Kenneth followed Karen and Alexa back down the corridor to the room at the foot of the stairs. When they got to the doorway, Karen put her hands on Alexa’s shoulders. “I need to put you in the cell now,” she said gently. “I’ll be in the room right outside, the door has a big window, if you need me, just wave.”

Alexa looked at her blankly, but Suki jumped forward. “Is that really necessary?”

“I’m afraid it is,” Karen said. “But as I told Alexa, I’ll be right here with her, and the room has just been renovated. It’s very clean. Would you like to see it?”

Suki had no desire to see the cell into which they were going to lock her child. It was about the last thing she wanted to do. “Yes,” she said.

Karen waved all three of them ahead of her into a square room with a desk. Off the room was the cell. There were no bars. The door was glass, like those doors leading to decks in contemporary houses. Suki and Stan had once discussed putting a similar door in their house. Now she knew they never would. Stan, she thought, not with her usual anger or disgust, but with sympathy. He was going to be devastated by this.

“—only for women,” Karen was saying. “The men’s cells were on your left as you came down the stairs.” She spoke with a sense of certainty and a touch of pride, and Suki knew part of Karen’s job was to lead schoolchildren on tours of the police station. “Take a look,” Karen offered.

Suki forced herself to peer through the glass. She caught her lip in her teeth. The cell was tiny, eight feet by eight feet at the most, and everything in it had rolled edges and was made of stainless steel. A single stainless steel sink-toilet unit—no seat—stood in one corner, and a stainless steel bench formed a bed along the far wall; it was covered by the kind of mat used on outdoor chaise lounges. A video camera with a wide-angle lens was mounted in the corner, and Suki knew it would be running all the time, as would the fluorescent lights on the ceiling. There would be no privacy, even for the most personal activities. Alexa couldn’t stay here. She could not. She would not.

Suki spun around. “My lawyer should be here any second,” she explained to Karen. “And we’re going straight to the arraignment as soon as he arrives. Do you think there might be some other place Alexa could wait until then? Some place not so … so cold? It won’t be more than a few minutes, I’m sure.” She reached for Alexa’s hand and held it tight. “I can’t imagine what’s holding him up.”

Karen glanced up at Kenneth and didn’t answer Suki. She busied herself looking for something in one of the desk drawers.

Suki squeezed Alexa’s hand encouragingly and turned to Kenneth. “That would be okay, wouldn’t it? You can arrange it, can’t you?”

Kenneth looked at his watch and shook his head slowly. He rubbed a finger to the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry, Suki,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “I wish there were something I could do.”

Suki stared blankly at Kenneth for a moment. He had been so great, so supportive, right from the beginning. Why was he backing off now? Had her early suspicions been correct? A small moan escaped her lips as Kenneth’s meaning became clear. She pulled Alexa to her. It was late Friday afternoon. There would be no arraignment today. Nor tomorrow. Nor the next day. The courthouse was closed, and would remain closed, for the weekend.

Her baby was going to be locked inside that cold, hard cell until Monday morning.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

S
tan had once decided he wanted to write screenplays and began taking courses at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. It turned out that he didn’t have the discipline—surprise, surprise—but it took about a year of classes before he admitted this. One night, about midway through his creative-writing phase—he also dabbled in jewelry design, hang gliding and underwater photography—he came home all excited about a new concept he had learned: the bleakest moment. The bleakest moment is the point in a movie when the main character hits rock bottom, when everything is as bad as it can be, when the character appears doomed. And that was exactly how Suki felt now. She had reached her bleakest moment. She was within it, surrounded and consumed and subsumed by it. Just as Lindsey had predicted: her worst fear had been realized.

Suki stared out her office window at the beautiful spring day beyond. But it
was
beyond: unable to touch her, to warm her, to soothe her. Her bleakest moment was beyond relief. She had just left her daughter in a jail cell, locked behind a glass door, surrounded by rolled stainless steel. A jail cell where Alexa had spent the night. A jail cell where she was going to spend two more.

Last night, after Mike had arrived at the police station and was unable—although he tried valiantly—to get Alexa released, Suki called her internist, Larry Starr. Larry phoned in a prescription for a strong sedative for both Suki and Alexa. Kenneth ran to Witton Drug to pick up the pills. According to Kenneth, who stayed with her until midnight, and Karen, who stayed with her until morning, Alexa had slept like a log. Suki had, too, although now she felt groggy and fuzzy. Better, perhaps, than being too cognizant.