Mind Games Read Online Free

parents’ bedroom and finding them dead. They were already dead, she told Grace, her voice dull, almost a monotone. It was a quality Grace had
encountered several times before in badly traumatized patients, as if they felt that by keeping all the feelings and reactions suppressed, jammed down tight, they might be able to keep control of
them.
    ‘I don’t remember any more after that,’ Cathy went on. ‘Until Anita woke me up and started screaming.’ She looked right at Grace. ‘How could I have gone to
sleep?’ she asked, and for the very first time a glimpse of horror showed through the blandness. ‘How did I get into that bed? How did I
do
that?’
    Grace saw that she badly needed an answer. It wasn’t the first time she’d had none to give a patient crying out for help, but that made it no less painful or frustrating.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

Chapter Five
    Sam Becket was a surprise to Grace. His father, the doctor, was a middle-aged, stockily built Caucasian Jew of no more than five feet ten who tended to wear even fine clothes
as if he’d crawled straight out of bed into them. The detective was at least six-three, African-American, rangy but noticeably powerful even in his conservative dark suit. Intrigued as Grace
was, however, origins and family backgrounds were not on the agenda for either her or Becket that afternoon. The late Marie and Arnold Robbins and their daughter were of much more pressing
concern.
    ‘It’s only a first impression, of course,’ Grace said, ‘but I think that Cathy may genuinely not know anything that’s going to be particularly helpful to your
investigation.’
    It was just after seven p.m. and she was facing the detective across a file-stacked desk in one corner of the large open-plan office that housed the Person Crimes unit inside the attractive,
modern white Miami Beach Police Department building on Washington Avenue in South Beach. It was a small, overcrowded but workmanlike space, its only real colour splashing out of a Florida Grand
Opera poster for
Aida.
    ‘I realize that you’re going to have to talk to her yourself again,’ she went on, ‘and maybe you will get more details from her in time. But as to whether they’ll
help you find the person who did this, I don’t know.’
    ‘At least she’s started talking.’
    ‘So far as that goes,’ Grace qualified carefully. ‘She’s still in deep shock.’
    ‘Do you think she’s blocking?’ Becket asked.
    ‘Of course she is.’ Grace took a long look at his lean face, trying to gauge what she was up against, wondering how much she was going to have to spell out.
She’s blocking
the way her mother looked with her throat cut, or what it felt like to lie down between her butchered parents and to hold their bloody bodies
. . .
    ‘How can she not?’ Becket asked.
    His voice was soft, his dark brown eyes bleak. Policeman or not, maybe he was his father’s son after all. Grace let herself relax just a little.
    ‘When will you talk to her again?’ she asked. In her ideal world, a victim like Cathy Robbins ought not to have to confront a single police officer unless she elected to, but, not
entirely unlike Chicago – Grace Lucca’s home town – Miami was a million gruesome miles away from Utopia. She might not like it, but she had to accept that before this was over,
Cathy would face any number of inquisitors; so better, perhaps, that she should at least begin with the son of a gentle, caring, clever man.
    ‘Tomorrow,’ Becket answered. ‘Can’t hold off any longer.’
    It was still Sunday, but the unit was a fairly busy place. There were three other men coming and going, sometimes working at desks, sometimes speaking to each other,
occasionally coming to have a swift word with Becket or simply to drop papers under his nose. In his capacity as lead investigator on the Robbins case, he explained to Grace, it was vital that
every grain of gathered information should come to him as soon