The Last Blue Plate Special (25 page)

“Which is?”

“Nine and a half. I’ve got huge feet.”

“Great. So how big are Grecchi’s feet?”

I felt inadequate, sloppy, a bad detective. “I didn’t look at her feet,” I admitted, then remembered she’d been barefooted
when BB and I arrived. “Well, actually, I guess I did. She didn’t have any shoes on, and she was painting. The place smelled
like oil paint.”

“Her
feet,
Blue,” he insisted. “Did she have big feet? Could those have been her prints you saw?”

“Wes, I didn’t notice,” I apologized. “I didn’t know I was supposed to look at feet. I just can’t answer. Feet all look the
same to me.”

His sigh was irritable and tired. “What about Megan Rainer? Berryman wasn’t with you for that one, so I haven’t heard anything.
What was your take?”

“She wasn’t home,” I answered. “Their daughter had been stepped on by a horse and Megan took her down into San Diego to have
her foot X-rayed. I talked to the husband, Chris—”

“Did you confirm that?” he interrupted. “Where did she take the daughter? What hospital? What time? All you have is the husband’s
word on it. Maybe the daughter was at a friend’s and there was no horse. Maybe Megan was someplace else, like out at your
place strewing plates around. Maybe Nugent’s lying to protect his wife.”

I remembered Christopher Nugent, stuck for years in a trap usually reserved for women. He wanted out, wanted to move to Northern
California and grow things. If Megan was the perp in this string of murders, then he was doomed to domestic slavery forever.
Megan would go to prison for the rest of her life and he’d have to raise two children alone. Good-bye, dream. It dawned on
me that Chris Nugent had some very good reasons for lying.

“I hadn’t thought of it, but you may be right,” I told Rathbone. “He wants to get out of here; they both do. Move up north
and do something with sustainable agriculture. Trees and herbs. They’d planned on leaving in two years, anyway. Megan would
work at the clinic until they had enough of a nest egg that they could live frugally off their investments. That was the plan,
except they were both tired of waiting. But Wes … ?”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t believe Chris Nugent would look the other way if he knew his wife was killing people. He’s an intelligent, thoughtful
man. Who could pretend not to see something that serious?”

Wes Rathbone sighed. “You’d be surprised at how easily people don’t see what they don’t want to see. Nugent may not ‘know’
Megan’s the perp, but maybe he senses something’s terribly wrong with her. He thinks she’s just nervous, unhappy. He thinks
whatever’s wrong will go away when they get out of here, when they get to their dream. That’s all he can let himself think.
It’s not unusual; people are like that. Cops call it ‘blind in both ears.’”

“He was pretty defensive about her concealed weapon arrest,” I agreed. “He showed me her paint ball gun and a big plastic
jar of paint balls. He said they have a friend who’s a nun and she likes to play paint ball because it relieves her anger
over a school massacre she was involved in. Guatemala. It made a sort of sense.”

“Megan Rainer hasn’t been in Guatemala,” Rathbone said. “And her husband knows there’s something not quite right about her
passion for shooting at people, or he wouldn’t have been defensive. What about these damn plates? See any of ’em anywhere?”

“No,” I answered. “But Jeffrey Pond used a lot of religious language and he’s just been through a nasty divorce. Hates his
ex-wife, who set up a friend to accuse him of rape. I’d say he’s got some motivation to hate women.”

“Yeah, we checked that thing out. It was a setup. Goes on all the time in divorce cases. The guy got royally screwed.”

“So has he been home for the last five hours?” I asked, trying to imagine muscle-bound Jeffrey Pond lumbering around the desert
in order to leave a blue willow plate on the ground.

“None of them are home, haven’t been since we got word of Bettina Ashe’s death. Or else nobody’s answering the phone. The
only house we’ve got surveillance on is Grecchi’s. So what’s your take on Eldridge?”

“Strange as the rest of them,” I told him. “Stuffy. The wife seems odd, too. Something out of
Stepford Wives.
She lets him interrupt everything she says, and at one point it seemed like he didn’t remember their daughter’s name. He
called her Ann and then later Kara called the girl Namey.”

“Namey?”

“Yeah. Wes, I haven’t had time to organize anything from today. I need to look at some stats before I can give you anything
usable. If you can just wait—”

“Betsy Ashe is dead, Blue,” he said. “One of the most prominent women in San Diego, as well as one of the wealthiest, and
a good friend of this police department. We knew she was in danger and we let her die. The next one could be your friend Kate
Van Der Elst. She’s the last of the Rainer patients known to have received a threat. We can’t wait.”

His voice sounded like a mooring cable groaning against an enormous burden. Wes Rathbone hadn’t wanted to be a cop’s cop anymore,
just wanted to enjoy life with his Annie. Circumstances had pulled him back to that earlier persona. I could tell he didn’t
like it, but I knew he didn’t have any choice.

“I’m going to help you with this thing,” I told him. “Just give me time to talk to Rox, look at some data, pull it together.
What we need to know is right in front of us. We just can’t see it.”

“Yeah, right,” he answered. “Now, what about the old guy? Do you think he could have done it, done something that’s killing
these women?”

I continued to feel pushed, unprepared. I didn’t know what I was talking about and yet I knew at least as much as anybody
else. It felt silly until I realized the silliness was just a skin over my fear. Three women dead now, no end in sight, and
the killer luring me to play a child’s game amid prehistoric rubble. The killer leaving me gifts in the dark.

“Rainer had the same opportunity as everybody else, Wes,” I said. “And he’s depressed over his wife’s death and Megan not
wanting to run the clinic, and now having to close it. But of all of them I think he’s the least likely. He’s just an old-fashioned
guy, a traditionalist. His life’s in shambles and he doesn’t know which way to turn right now. He’s afraid to get rid of his
wife’s
computer
, you know? He’s lost.”

“Probably our man,” Rathbone said bleakly. “In the movies it’s always the one you least suspect.”

“This isn’t a movie,” I said unnecessarily. “Tell Annie hi for me. I want to call Rox now, go over the interviews. If we come
up with anything I’ll call you back.”

“Do that,” Rathbone said tersely, and then hung up.

I phoned Rox, who didn’t answer. Probably in the bathroom, I thought, and left a message asking her to call right away. Then
I listened to the messages on my answering machine.

The first was from my brother, David, nothing but a taped female voice saying, “This is a collect call from a prisoner at
… the Missouri State Penitentiary. The prisoner placing the call is …” Here I heard my brother’s voice saying, “the Apeman
of Alcatraz,” a joke about my doctoral dissertation, which had been a failed endeavor to explain David’s self-destructive
behavior by comparing human males to other male primates. I learned a lot about apes and still don’t know why my twin brother
chose to behave like one.

Prison phone systems are automated so that if you’re willing to accept the call you have to push a number. Even if you don’t,
you’re billed for the call. One of the thousand ways everybody makes money off people who have no choices. I hoped David would
call back. He might, I thought, have some insights into Sword. After all, he lived with killers.

The next message was from Kate Van Der Elst, who seemed to be crying.

“I need to talk to you as soon as possible, Blue,” she said. “I just heard about Betsy Ashe’s death. It was on the six o’clock
news. They didn’t say anything about the link to the Rainer Clinic, but I’m sure that’s where Betsy would go for that kind
of thing, and I’m sure that’s what happened. Just like Mary Harriet and Dixie. Somebody at Rainer did something to all of
them that killed them. And I may be next.”

Here she breathed a shuddering sigh and then went on.

“When Pieter heard about Betsy Ashe, he gave me an ultimatum. Either I withdrew from the race or he’d leave me. I refused
to withdraw. He’s gone. Moved into a hotel downtown. He said he was flying back to Amsterdam tomorrow if he could make the
arrangements. He said he didn’t want to stay just to watch me commit suicide. Please call no matter what time you get in.
I don’t know what to do. I’m scared.”

So Pieter Van Der Elst wasn’t the saint I’d imagined him to be, I thought. Nobody ever is. But what could he be thinking,
leaving Kate alone now? That she’d knuckle under to his demands, crumble under the terrible weight of his love for her? Did
he think he could preserve her life by breaking her spirit? Why couldn’t he see that what would remain of Kate after he broke
her would be worthy only of his contempt? Yet I’d seen it before. Couples, parents with grown children still under their control.
One broken by the exertion of the other’s will, the other now bored and bitter and trapped. Pieter Van Der Elst, I realized,
had just made an epic mistake that could cost him what he valued most.

The rest of the messages were from Rox and Rathbone, frantic to reach me. As I erased them the phone rang.

“I’m at a pay phone in Borrego,” Roxie’s voice told me without preamble. “Unlock your gate.”

Rox does not come out here unless she has to, and she’s never come alone. Even the little desert town near my place feels
like Mars to her with its easy-going middle-class assumption that we all know the rules. And in reality, we all do. From the
tanned and lusty golf pro at Borrego’s big resort to me, the reclusive social psychologist who lives in a half-built desert
motel with her dog, everybody here knows exactly what to say when bumping into the Methodist minister at the grocery store.
And exactly what not to say when bumping into the minister’s wife with the golf pro in her car behind the same grocery at
midnight. The rules of white middle-classness are invisible but as dense as a web of lead.

“Okay, I’ll see you in a few minutes,” I agreed. No questions. But something was wrong. Seriously wrong. I felt a tidal wave
of uneasiness as I drove out to unlock my gate.

“What?” I asked through her car window as Roxie navigated the bumpy entrance to my property. In the dark she looked angry.
Or determined. Or sad. I couldn’t tell which.

“I need to talk to you,” was all she said.

So I relocked the gate and followed as her car bounced along the damp road. In my living room she flung herself on the couch
and looked distraught.

“What?”
I asked again, pacing beside my desk.

“Something’s come up. Not something I wanted to talk about on the phone. And I couldn’t reach you anyway. Rathbone, either.
We’ve both been—”

“Roxie, you drove all the way out here for a reason. And if you don’t tell me pretty soon I’m going to explode. Or implode.
What
is
it?”

I thought it was going to have something to do with Sword. Something she thought would upset me, like she’d figured out that
Jennings Rainer had not only murdered his patients but thirty other people as well. And been a Communist double-agent, too.

“Some folks in Philadelphia called today,” she began.

Philadelphia?

“Okay. What did they say?”

“Wanted to talk about a research project. Good funding. Has to do with analyzing a possible relationship between brain trauma
and the onset of major psychiatric disorders in people with the genetic history for it.”

Oh, no.

“So? People call you about this stuff all the time, don’t they? What did they want? For you to provide medical histories on
head injuries for all the psych clients at Donovan? I suppose each prisoner would have to sign a release, right?”

Nice try, McCarron, but who are you kidding?

“They need a project director,” she said, looking at me as if from a gallows. “The job includes an impressive salary, a staff
of fifteen, and extensive lecturing at universities both here and abroad. They want me.”

Train wreck, atom bomb, end of life as we know it.

She was wearing jeans, a black turtleneck, and tennis shoes. I noticed those things suddenly, as if my mind were taking snapshots
of her sitting there on my couch. As if I would want to remember her someday.
Click.
Roxie sitting on my couch on an October night.
Click.
Roxie’s hair in a hundred braids, the wooden beads silent as she sat there.
Click.
Roxie the way she looked the last time I ever saw her.

“Oh, God,” I said, and sat down beside her.

For a while we just sat there. Soon, I knew, we’d say a lot of things. But for that moment we just sat inside the news and
let it be. It was one of those moments when the barriers that always exist between people just dissolve. That sense of being
drawn through an open window to someplace unknown. Airy, dizzying, scary because there are no lies there. I noticed that we’d
grabbed each other’s hands, our fingers laced and holding tight.

“Blue, I don’t know what to do,” she said. “That’s why I had to see you, had to come out here tonight. They want me to fly
to Philadelphia next week for an interview. I said yes, but I’m not sure. They’re going to offer me the job. The interview’s
just a formality. But I’m not sure I can live without you and I can’t ask you to—”

“Shh,” I said against her braids as I held her and we both cried. My face hot and wet against hers, hands in each other’s
hair now, a terrible anger beneath it all. Then words.

“Oh, shit, Roxie. This is just
shit
!”

Me up and pacing now, banging things around on my desk. Me feeling like I’m supposed to act like this, but what I really want
to do is go back in time to the point before I met Roxie Bouchie and then
not
meet her.