A Fatal Frame of Mind Page 10

  But Shawn had insisted that being psychic was their brand. More importantly, it was fun. Shawn took great pleasure from the fact that so many people assumed he was a phony. That way, when he solved the case his audience would be doubly astonished.

  Over the years, Gus had come around to Shawn’s way of seeing things. He, too, relished the skepticism that inevitably accompanied the announcement of Shawn’s psychic abilities, because he knew they’d leave the cynics desperately grasping to explain how Shawn had solved the case without the aid of the spectral world.

  But as he guided Professor Kitteredge through the throngs of people clustered on the museum steps, Gus felt that old embarrassment flooding back. Kitteredge was a noted intellectual, one of the foremost scholars in the world. Of course he’d see through the ludicrous notion of a psychic detective agency. This hadn’t seemed important to Gus before—after all, he’d been operating under the assumption that Kitteredge had turned to Psych for help. Now that he knew the truth, he was doubly humiliated. He’d mistaken a form letter asking for cash for a personal plea for aid, and he’d been exposed as the kind of lowlife phony who preyed on the weak of mind.

  “So you’re a psychic?” Kitteredge said as Gus maneuvered him around a clutch of Danish teenagers and the mountain of backpacks surrounding them.

  “Not me,” Gus said. He yearned to tell Professor Kitteredge the truth, to explain that the psychic claims were just a marketing gimmick, that behind the false advertising there lay a great private detective agency. But he couldn’t—and he wouldn’t. “Shawn’s the psychic. I’m just a detective.”

  “It’s better that way,” Shawn said. “You don’t want two psychics in the same room. It’s like having two homeless guys begging for change on the same corner. The spirits don’t know which way to turn.”

  They reached the sidewalk. All they had to do now was get across the street to the parking lot and make their way to space forty-nine, where the Echo was waiting for them.

  Except that wasn’t exactly all they had to do, Gus realized as he risked a glance over his shoulder. They had to make it to space forty-nine before the two policemen caught up with them and beat them to the ground with their nightsticks. And the rate at which the cops were closing the distance between them made that prospect seem increasingly unlikely.

  “You don’t have to believe that Shawn’s psychic, Professor,” Gus said desperately, trying to get Kitteredge to increase his pace. “Just have a little faith that we’re your friends and we’re trying to get you out of the serious trouble you’re in.”

  “At least that’s what the spirits are saying,” Shawn said.

  To Gus’ horror, Kitteredge did the worst thing he could possibly do. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “If you’re psychic, then tell me one thing,” Kitteredge said.

  “When you were seventeen,” Shawn said.

  Gus could feel himself dying a little inside. The fact that Shawn was almost inevitably right, both about the question people—well, men anyway—would ask to test his prowess and about their age when they lost their virginity, did nothing to keep him from dreading this moment. Not every male human being thought exactly the same way, and someday Shawn would run into a man who had a different test to assess his powers. There was a good chance that Kitteredge would be the one.

  Kitteredge didn’t even seem to notice that Shawn had spoken. He was still in the process of formulating his question. “Do you use postcognition and psychometry, or are you simply a telepath?”

  Gus was about to leap to Shawn’s defense when he realized what the professor had asked. “You believe in psychic powers?” he said.

  “It’s not a question of whether I believe or not,” Kitteredge said. “Either they exist or they don’t, and my belief one way or the other can’t have an impact on that at all. And if your partner does possess supernatural powers, I’d like to know which ones he claims.”

  Gus risked another glance back over his shoulder and saw that the officers were only a few steps back. “Unfortunately, teleportation isn’t one of them,” Gus said. “Can’t we talk about this in the car?”

  “I really need to know,” Kitteredge said. “If he can truly commune with spirits, there might be a way out of this for me.”

  “My powers take all kinds of forms,” Shawn said. “Pretty much at random. You never know how they’re going to manifest themselves. It’s kind of like the prize inside the Cracker Jack box.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Kitteredge said.

  “Sometimes spirits talk to me,” Shawn said. “Sometimes I get visions. Like right now.”

  “What are you seeing?” Kitteredge said.

  “It’s a stone room in a big castle,” Shawn said.“There’s a woman standing in the middle of the floor, holding out her arms as if begging for help. The rug she’s standing on is woven with a pattern of leaves and flowers. And—”

  Kitteredge was staring at Shawn.“That’s the painting,” he said. “You’re seeing The Defence of Guenevere.”

  “Is that what it is?” Shawn said.

  For the first time since the body had been unveiled, Kitteredge looked hopeful. “You see it in detail?”

  “It’s like Avatar,” Shawn said. “I can visualize every tiny bit of the image in perfect detail. Which is good, because that way I don’t have to pay attention to the crummy script.”

  Kitteredge turned to Gus excitedly. “Do you realize what this means?” he said. “There’s hope. As long as Shawn can hold that image in his head, we have chance to decipher the clues in the painting and break this conspiracy wide open.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Gus said. “Let’s get moving. And fast.”

  The street was still clogged with cars hopelessly grid-locked. All they had to do was weave their way through the stopped autos and they’d be free.

  And better yet, Shawn had saved them. It wasn’t so much that he’d restored Kitteredge’s hope, although that was certainly a positive thing. Somehow he’d managed to memorize the entire painting in the one brief glance he’d gotten at it. They had a chance to solve this thing and clear Kitteredge’s name.

  Gus took a step off the curb, then realized he couldn’t go any farther. There was a hand clutching his shoulder, and it wouldn’t let him move.

  Gus looked back and saw that the hand belonged to one of the cops. The other one had taken hold of Shawn.

  “No one’s moving anywhere,” Gus’ captor said. “Not until we’ve got a few answers.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  When he was little, Carlton Lassiter had, unlike any other child in the history of medicine, loved going to the doctor’s office.

  It wasn’t the waiting room filled with toys and tattered copies of Highlights for Children that attracted him, although he did love studying the adventures of Goofus and Gallant. And it wasn’t the lollipop or similar bribe that would be offered if he managed to make it through the appointment without bursting into hysterical screams.

  What he loved about those visits was precisely what most children hated. The biting cold of the stethoscope against his chest. The invasion of personal privacy when the nurse jammed the thermometer under his tongue or any other place she might choose. And most of all the harsh jab and searing pain of the hypodermic needle.

  It wasn’t that little Carlton Lassiter had been a mini-masochist. Even as he welcomed these insults he knew how unpleasant they were.

  But he also understood instinctively what the other children couldn’t begin to imagine: that the world existed in a constant state of war between the forces of order and those of chaos. And there was never any doubt in his mind which side he chose. Every indignity inflicted on him by the medical profession was actually a blow against chaos—in this case the chaos that existed to disrupt the order of the body’s natural workings.

  It was possible that in his preschool days Lassiter was not able to articulate this philosophy quite so precisely, and that
he had come to the understanding only in his adult years. But the doctor’s office was always a happy place for him, and the colder and less pleasant it was, the better it made him feel.

  So even though Lassiter shared every police officer’s distrust of department therapists, he felt a sense of security as he pulled his cruiser into the parking lot of the low white hacienda that housed Dr. Olivia McCormick’s offices. Doctors meant order, and order was always good.

  But as he stepped into the waiting room that sense of security began to slip away. Lassiter believed in changing primary care physicians every year so that he’d always have a new set of eyes to catch anything the last pair had missed, which meant he had plenty of experience with doctors’ waiting rooms. And he knew what they were supposed to be like. First, there was the lighting. It needed to be the harshest fluorescent available, to render any trace of illness instantly apparent. The walls should be painted glossy white and the floor covered in matching linoleum or thin carpet to give the light plenty of hard surface to bounce off of. There should be chairs molded out of plastic that were impossible to sit in without slipping onto the floor unless you kept both feet planted at all times. Ideally the molded plastic should have cracked in several places to pinch his skin whenever he shifted position. And there should be a sliding glass window behind which sat a hatchet-faced receptionist whose only interest in life was making the patients wait as long as possible to give whatever germs they were carrying the chance to manifest themselves.

  Dr. Olivia McCormick’s waiting room was all wrong. It was furnished in the warmest of greens and browns. There were soft sofas against the walls, which were themselves covered with subtly colored fabrics. Blooming flowers trailed out of hanging pots, and soothing music played softly through hidden speakers. There wasn’t even a receptionist to demand proof of insurance. Instead, as Lassiter came in—and even before he’d had the chance to step back outside and make sure he hadn’t walked by mistake into one of the few remaining Good Earth restaurants that had escaped America’s reconnection with sanity after the fern-bar-meets-sprouts craze of the midseventies—an inside door swung open and a kindergarten teacher leaned out.

  “Detective Lassiter?” she said in a voice that promised juice and cookies. “Please come this way.”

  Although her graying ponytail and loose, flowing tie-dyed dress suggested an afternoon to be spent learning to tie his shoes followed by nap time, Lassiter realized that this was supposed to be the doctor.

  Lassiter didn’t have a problem with female doctors. Some of his favorite GPs had been women. But they had also been warriors in the battle against death, disease, and decay. They wore starched white lab coats and jammed their instruments in whichever orifice they chose with no consideration that they were working on anything resembling a sentient human being.

  This one, he knew, was no warrior. Confronted with chaos, she’d invite it in for a chat and rap about what made it so disorganized.

  But there was no way for him to leave now. The chief had made it very clear that he needed to talk to the department therapist before she’d clear him to go back to work on his case. And he would make any sacrifice if it would let him bring Professor Langston Kitteredge to justice.

  Lassiter let McCormick lead him into her inner office and sit him down in a comfortable armchair upholstered in soft brown leather. She sat opposite him on what looked like an overgrown footstool.

  “I want to let you know I’m here to help, Detective,” she said in a voice so calming he could almost feel it smoothing his hair. “My only goal is to get you over your trauma as quickly as possible.”

  “In that case, consider yourself a success,” Lassiter said. “Trauma was over before it began.”

  The smile she’d had fixed on her face since the first second he saw her wavered for a second, then came back. “No trauma at all?”

  “No trauma, no drama, that’s my mantra,” he said. Actually, Lassiter had never had a mantra, considering such things foolish wastes of breath, but he figured it might move things along more quickly if he spoke in a language she could understand.

  “But there was quite a bit of drama, wasn’t there?” she said. “I read your report. An armed suspect used you as a hostage in order to escape custody, didn’t he?”

  Lassiter cursed under his breath. He’d known it was a mistake to write up the extended report the chief had asked for. Only for internal use, she’d said. Well now he saw exactly what “internal” meant—anyone who felt a right to meddle in the internal aspects of his life.

  “All in a day’s work,” Lassiter said. “I admit, it was not a pleasant experience, and it left with me a bad taste in my mouth. But I also know how to get that taste out—a special kind of mouthwash called bringing the scum-bag back in. So thanks for seeing me so quickly, but I’d better get back out on those mean streets.”

  He bounded out of his chair and headed for the door.

  “We still have most of our hour left, Detective Lassiter,” McCormick said in the same calm tone. “I would really appreciate it if you’d stay and talk about what happened this morning.”

  “Maybe we could do it another day,” Lassiter said, one hand firmly clutching the doorknob. “Once the perp is in custody I’ll have plenty of time to chat.”

  He turned the knob and opened the door. But before he could step through, he heard a voice from behind him. In certain superficial ways it sounded like Olivia McCormick. But underneath there was a tone of steel, like the indestructible armature under a Terminator’s skin.

  “If you walk out that door, you will never walk back into the Santa Barbara Police Department,” the voice said.

  Lassiter turned back and saw the skinless Terminator version of Olivia McCormick sitting where the kindergarten teacher had just been. She still had the same ponytail and hippie dress, but there was a light in her eyes that looked like it could kill from this distance.

  “Excuse me?” Lassiter said.

  “You are on medical leave pending my report,” McCormick said. “Until I sign off on your condition, you are suspended. And believe me when I say this applies not only to the SBPD but to any law enforcement agency you can think of, including the school district crossing guard corps. So unless you want to spend the rest of your working life as a security guard in a shopping mall, you will sit down and start talking.”

  Lassiter’s legs marched him back to the comfortable chair and dropped him in.

  The steely light went out in McCormick’s eyes and she leaned forward, once again the kindergarten teacher.

  “So, Detective,” she said gently, “let’s talk about how you’re feeling.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  It wasn’t until he saw the windmill atop Pea Soup Andersen’s in Buellton that Gus was able to pull his eyes away from the rearview mirror. All the way up the 101 he’d expected to see red and blue lights flashing there. He couldn’t believe that the cops who’d stopped them outside the museum hadn’t just allowed them to flee in order to see where they were going.

  In fact, part of him believed the cops hadn’t actually allowed them to go at all. It was quite possible that the three of them had been arrested and thrown into jail. That Gus had gone to trial and been convicted as an accessory after the fact and, under California’s felony murder laws, had been sentenced to death. Now his body was lying in a cell on death row waiting for execution while his mind spun this elaborate fantasy of escape to keep from having to deal with the truth.

  Gus checked the rearview mirror again, this time to make sure that the passenger back there was still Professor Kitteredge. If he’d turned into Mariah Carey, that would have confirmed the death row fantasy scenario. He breathed a heavy sigh of relief to see his old professor, his head resting against the window as he snored quietly.

  Which meant the encounter with the police had been real, too. When Gus had turned around to meet the eyes of the officer whose hand was clutching his shoulder, he expected to see the steely stare of the hunter
looking down at his prey before administering the kill shot. Instead, the eyes were twinkling, and the face was smiling.

  “What can we do for you, Officer?” Shawn said cheerfully. It was a long-held theory of his that if you act like nothing is wrong convincingly enough, eventually the world will take your word for it. That long-held theory had never actually worked in practice, but he was eternally hopeful that this would change one day.

  “Do you know how long I’ve been searching for you?” the officer said.

  Gus checked the cop’s eyeline. He wasn’t looking at Kitteredge, who had turned his back and was now apparently fascinated by a seagull that was circling slowly above their heads. He was staring directly at Shawn and Gus.

  “Umm,” Gus said. “Us?”

  “For weeks!” the officer said. “My best buddy is getting married next month, and I’m supposed to put together a bachelor party for him. But he’s kind of a prude, so he doesn’t want strippers or anything like that. I’ve been killing myself trying to figure out some kind of entertainment—and then I heard you talking about being psychics!”

  “We’re not really that kind of psychics,” Gus said.

  “Sure you aren’t,” the cop said. “That’s why you’re wearing tuxedos on a Sunday afternoon, because you’re not on your way to a performance.”

  “But really we’re—” Gus started, but Shawn shoved him out of the way and stepped forward.

  “Available for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and bachelor parties,” Shawn said. “You have to excuse my partner—he’s afraid his mother will find out he went into showbiz.” He produced a card and handed it to the officer. “You can reach our booking office at that number. And just ignore the part where it says psychic detectives. It was supposed to say psychic entertainers, but the printer messed it up. We were going to have him redo it, but he gave us a great price on ten thousand cards.”