Angel's Advocate (28 page)

“Nah. Just a momentary diversion. If you ask me, one of those reporters brought ’em along just to see if they could get one of us out of the house. The minute I went out there I got a microphone stuck in my face and they started with the questions about the so-called payoff to Miss Chavez.”

Bree’s hand went to the syringe and the paperweight tucked in her pocket. “I can get an injunction to keep them off the property, George.”

He shook his head dismissively. “I’ve got people to handle that. Let’s call Cliff’s Edge and get on with this. The sooner I can get back to real work, the better.”

It’s a white whale, I say.

—
Moby-Dick
, Herman Melville

“Uncle Jay drew blood from me,” Lindsey said with a shrug.

“You mean John Lindquist,” Bree said.

Lindsey nodded. “And when he wasn’t around, Dad did. No one was supposed to know about it.” She looked at the syringe Bree had laid on the table in front of her. The headmistress, a Miss Violet Henry, had offered them the use of a well-appointed, quiet conference room on the main floor of the beautiful old mansion that housed Cliff’s Edge Academy. “You read Anne Rice?”

“What? No, no, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“When I was little, I used to think they were vampires, Dad and Uncle Jay. Or that they were using the blood for some weird rite, you know? Like in that video game, Vampire’s Bloodlust. And then I’d pee in a cup.”

Lab tests, Bree thought. Weird rite, indeed. But for what?

“So?” Lindsey challenged her.

“I think that’s the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Yeah?” Lindsey said. “You believe me?”

“Of course I believe you,” Bree said gently. “What I have a really hard time understanding is why. I mean, don’t you get regular physicals?”

Lindsey picked at her upper lip. “I’ve got AIDS, I guess. They didn’t want anyone to know.”

“What!” Bree reached across the table and took Lindsey’s hands in her own. “Who told you that?”

“Well, it’s got to be something like that, doesn’t it? Uncle Jay told me if anybody knew what I had, there wouldn’t be a school in the country that’d take me, and I wouldn’t have any friends.”

Bree turned Lindsey’s hands over and looked at the nails. They were bitten down to the quick. But the color was good, her hands were warm, and, as hospital records might have expressed it, hers was the body of a well-nourished white female approximately seventeen years of age. Other than the troubled hunch of her shoulders and her sullen expression, Lindsey looked perfectly healthy. Which, as Bree well knew, was no proof at all that the child wasn’t dying of something awful. If she had been on uppers, there was no sign of it now.

“Are you taking any kind of medications for this condition, Lin?”

“Vitamins.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, yeah!” She slouched further down in the chair and glared at Bree like an angry cat.

“And what about other kinds of drugs?”

“That’s the first thing any of you think when you talk to kids,” Lindsey said. “Drugs drugs. Blah blah blah. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We don’t do drugs.” She looked away and drummed her fingers on the table.

Bree caught the use of the word “we” and sent up a brief apology for the deception she was about to practice. She said smoothly, “That’s not what I hear, Lindsey.”

Was that a flicker of alarm in those angry eyes? It was. Good.

“I’ve talked to Chad.”

“Chad.” Her tone was absolutely flat.

“Madison and Hartley, too.”

Silence. Lindsey hunched her shoulders and shut down.

Bree let it roll on. It’s surprisingly hard to maintain total silence between two people. Bree remained perfectly still, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes steady on Lindsey’s bowed head. She knew what she had to do. If anyone needed Bree’s services as a lawyer, it was poor Lindsey.

“Just a few uppers once in a while,” Lindsey said. She rubbed her nose fiercely. “And a downer or two. And only from Chad. And then when—” She clamped her mouth shut.

“When what?” Bree asked gently.

“My dad found out. He made us break up. He threatened to do something totally gross to Chad’s dad, like taking away his law license.”

Bree doubted even Probert Chandler could accomplish that. But she had a brief, unwelcome vision of the celestial scales of justice and the little dial that pointed down down down. “When was this?”

Lindsey sighed. “A couple of weeks before he died. I dunno. The accident was in June, right? So it was later. A couple of weeks after Chad was supposed to graduate from high school.”

“This didn’t happen the day of your father’s . . . accident?”

“Nope.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.” She stared at Bree, and then barked with laughter. “You think Chad had something to do with my dad’s death? No way. No way. Chad, he’s . . . well, he’s comfy. You know. Cosy. Nice. Besides,” she added earnestly, “he’s a vegetarian.”

Bree pinched her knee hard, so she wouldn’t laugh, and took a moment to compose herself. Then she put her elbows on the table and leaned forward to stare at Lindsey eye to eye. “Then, I want the whole story about this syringe. From the first you remember up to right now.”

There wasn’t much more to the story, actually. Lindsey didn’t remember a time when her view of the universe failed to coincide with the expectations of the world around her. As nearly as Bree could tell, Lindsey arrived in this world with a permanent inability to do the good thing and, worse yet, a positive drive to do the bad.

When she left, she took Lindsey’s supply of vitamins with her.

“It’s a horrible story,” she said to Hunter several hours later. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to think. She remembers talking to a series of doctors when she was little. And the blood draws started after she turned ten. She has that specific a recall because she screamed when a few blood drops got on a pair of jeans she’d gotten as a tenth birthday present. They had sequins on the cuffs, she said. And she outgrew them way too fast.” She wanted to put her head in her hands and weep. Instead, she took a bite of her Cobb salad. “I stopped back at the office before I came here, and Ron had dug up her medical records for me. I’m so bummed I don’t even want to take a look. What the hell do you suppose was going on?”

“I think you’ve gotten way overinvolved in this case.” Hunter ate his Brunswick stew with calm efficiency.

They’d met for dinner at Isaac’s. It was late, after ten, and Bree felt as if she hadn’t slept for days. Her eyes were sandy. Her head ached.

“It sounds to me like she’s just a troubled kid.”

“Just!”

He reached out and placed his hand flat against the manila folder that held Lindsey’s records. “May I?”

“Those are confidential,” Bree said automatically.

“Well, I won’t ask you how you got them so quickly if you don’t nag me about looking at them.” Hunter didn’t wait for her reply, but paged through the neat stack of photocopies. Bree separated the bacon bits in her salad neatly from the chopped tomatoes and sprinkled salt over the diced hard-boiled egg. Then she ate all the black olives.

“Almost all of this is behaviorally oriented,” Hunter said. “Physically she’s fine.” He held up a densely printed sheet of cream-colored paper that listed lab results. Bree caught the first line: Blood type AB-, followed by a normal range for the hematocrit, sed rate, blah blah blah.

“And through the years,” Hunter said, “the blood draws were to test levels of various antidepressants, mood elevators, and serotonin reuptake inhibitors . . .” He tossed the file flat on the table. “All of this crap was in the vitamins. You know the drill.” He tapped the papers into a neat pile. “You haven’t seen this yet.”

“No. I don’t think I want to.”

“You might want to take a look at the name of the prescribing physician.” He lifted the top paper off the stack and handed it to her.

“Lindquist!” Bree said. “That son of a bitch!” For a brief, unsettling moment, the world tilted and she saw the restaurant, Hunter’s grim and angry visage, the stack of incriminating reports in a sea of red. Her hands clenched. A breeze rose around the table and stirred her hair. Her breath came short. With an effort, she calmed herself, but it was several minutes before she could speak. She knew Lindquist was a rat—but this violation of his oath as a physician was too much.

“The blood draws,” she said. Her voice was hoarse with rage. She took a sip of water. “They were just making sure the levels of the drugs they were giving her were safe.”

“Looks like it.”

“Well, that sucks,” Bree said furiously. “She’s a minor. Half that crap hasn’t been tested on kids. Who knows if it’s safe? What sucks the most is that they didn’t tell her.”

Hunter spread his hands in a gesture of demurral. “The tentative diagnoses are all pretty grim. Suicidal tendencies. Depression. Paranoia. Probable manic-depressive illness . . .”

“Bipolar disorder,” Bree said. “It’s called bipolar disorder now.” She contemplated the pile of grilled chicken that topped her salad and felt suddenly cheery. “I’ve got a lot of ammunition for a defense, at least.”

“If the Chandlers let you use it.”

Bree nodded. “And he was
trying
to save her, God help him. At the very least it’s mitigating.”

“Who was trying to save her?”

“Never mind,” Bree said. “Hey! Listen. I’m beginning to get a handle on Lindsey’s part of the problem at least. I just need the answers to two questions. First, I assume Payton McAllister spilled his guts with little or no prompting from you guys.”

Hunter grinned.

“He did. So who authorized the payoff to the Chavez family?”

“John Allen Lindquist.”

“Really!” Bree sat back. This was interesting. She would have made (and lost) a large bet that George was behind the cash payment. Maybe she was wrong about George. Or perhaps George and Lindquist were working together. She thought about George’s reaction when she’d last mentioned Lindquist to him. “And do you know who put the pressure on the DA’s office to make Cordy reconsider pressing charges in the cookie robbery?”

“It’s just scuttlebutt,” Hunter said cautiously.

“Then nod if it’s Lindquist.”

Hunter jerked his chin at her. She smiled grimly. “I thought so.”

“Any reason why you thought it was Lindquist?”

“He could close the Marlowe’s store here—that’s over five hundred jobs at risk, and it’s an election year. And he’s turned out to be pretty sneaky, all things considered. He and Probert double-teamed poor old Lindsey. And that rat George must have known, and let them do it.” She drummed her fingers on the table. “I wonder if I can sue the two of them, on Lindsey’s behalf. Putting her through all that trauma, all those years. All the secrecy. The fear she was dying of something horrible. What is
wrong
with people, Hunter? Maybe I can petition the court to get her away from them. I’m representing her now, did I tell you that? I’m going to tell George and his mother to go fly a kite. First thing in the morning.”

“Just to make this perfectly clear: you intend to sue your soon-to-be-former clients based on information received while they
were
your clients?”

Bree stared at him, her mouth slightly open. She sat that way for a long, agonizing moment. “Oh. My. God,” she said. “I can’t believe . . .” She buried her head in her arms and shouted silently into the tabletop. She raised her head, took a deep breath, and said, “I have to tell them I am going to resign as their counsel. And I have to do it now. And I’ve got to get some kind of retainer from Lindsey.”

“I’m sure they’re already well aware that you’ve been to see her.”

“How could they be?”

Hunter smiled. It wasn’t a very kind smile. It was a “gotcha” sort of smile. “Did you overhear George’s phone call to Cliff’s Edge?”

“Did I? No. Do you think I’m the kind of person who’d listen in on somebody’s private phone call?”

“You’d better be, if you’re going to become any kind of an investigator.”

“As a matter of fact,” she said with a rather pitiful attempt at dignity, “I went out to check on my dogs. Someone must have let them out of my car and let them run around the Chandler place, creating all kinds of havoc. I can’t imagine how they got out otherwise.” Well, she could, but she wasn’t about to let Hunter in on why.

“I can’t imagine anyone coming within half a mile of those animals voluntarily, much less putting a hand on the door of your little car. They’d eat whoever it was alive.” His look over his Brunswick stew was suspicious.

“Well, they were safely tucked up when I left them to drop in on the Chandlers and they were just as safely tucked up when I went out to check on them. We could go ahead and ask them what happened. Only I vote you do the talking.”

“Let’s get back to the point here,” he said patiently. “You drove up to Cliff’s Edge about just after lunch?”