Compulsion (4 page)

He turned to face me.  "I didn’t mean that the way it came out.  I’m running on empty.  I was up all night."

"No apology required."

"So how about you?  Mass General’s the end of the line.  Impressive stuff."

"You definitely didn’t fly here to flatter me about my job."

He leaned a little into my space.  "Look, I heard everything you told me on the phone yesterday.  Believe me, I still get nightmares from that case myself.  I can still see—"

"—Then you’re still human," I interrupted, not needing a recap of the carnage.

"And I don’t blame you one bit for not wanting to get involved this time."

"Good.  Because I’m not planning to."

"Can I tell you what’s bothering me?" he said.

"Didn’t you just say you wanted nothing to do with my couch?"

Anderson didn’t break stride.  "Like I said on the phone, with all his millions, Darwin Bishop pretty much invited me to question his son.  Right in the house.  No attorney present.  No nothing.  He could have pulled a Ramsey, tied the department into knots for months until we proved probable cause."  He shook his head.  "The kid wouldn’t talk, but even so..."

"Maybe he’s got no reason to get in your way.  Maybe his little girl died of SIDS, after all."

"But she didn’t."

"You know that for a fact," I said.

"We got the autopsy results late last night," Anderson said.  "Brooke Bishop died of asphyxiation due to airway obstruction."  He dropped his voice, maybe to take the edge off his words.  "Her nasal passages and trachea were filled with plastic sealant, like you’d use to caulk up a window."

My stomach fell.  I tried not to think of little Brooke’s last minutes of life, but unwelcome images and feelings crashed through my resistance.  I imagined her watching the person approaching her, maybe even smiling expectantly, cooing, then opening her eyes wider with curiosity at the white tube of caulk.  I felt her laugh as the plastic tip tickled the rim of one nostril, then fall silent and begin to squirm as the tip moved deeper inside.  I felt her begin to gag and strain, mouth open, lungs sealed.  Cut off.  Did she, I wondered, wish some last, infantile wish to be held?  Did her mind flee to a memory of her mother’s face or smell or touch?

"
Frank?
" Anderson said.

I focused on him again.  "I’m listening," I said.

"Like I was saying," he went on, "if I’m Darwin Bishop, loaded to the gills, I get Billy the best lawyer money can—"

"Billy?" I broke in.

"They obviously renamed the kid when they brought him over from Russia," Anderson said.  "American as apple pie, huh?"

I had lost one patient to suicide in my seventeen years as a psychiatrist.  He was a depressed teenager named Billy Fisk.  I had never stopped feeling responsible for his death.  "Right," I said.

"Right?"

I closed my eyes, remembering Fisk.

"
There are no coincidences
," the voice at the back of my mind prodded me.  "
Take it as a sign
."

"You still with me?" Anderson said.

I looked at him.  "What else do you know about the family?"

Anderson relaxed visibly and let out a sigh.

"I’m just asking a question," I said.  "I’m not signing onto the case."

He held up a hand.  "Of course not."  His tone said he thought otherwise.  "It turns out Darwin Bishop grew up in Brooklyn," he said, "even though you’d never know it from his voice or the way he carries himself.  He’s all Park Avenue and Nantucket now.  Fifty-one years old.  His wife Julia is a former model.  It’s his second marriage."

"Much younger?" I said.

"Mid-thirties," Anderson said.

"How’s she bearing up?"

"What would you expect?"

"I don’t.  Ever," I said.  "That way I’m never surprised."

"She’s a basket case," Anderson said.  "She hardly leaves the twins’ bedroom."

"And the other adopted son?  The seventeen-year-old.  What’s he like?"

Anderson shrugged.  "I only got about ten minutes with him.  His name is Garret.  Bishop adopted him a year before his divorce.  He’s a golden boy.  Good-looking.  Straight A’s at Andover Academy.  Varsity tennis and lacrosse.  Headed for Yale in the fall.  You know the pedigree."

"Did you learn anything from him?" I asked.

"I’d say he’s in shock," Anderson said.  "He kept holding his head in his hands, saying, ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’  He was worried about his mother, mostly — whether she’d hold up.  She’s got a history of depression."

"Why did Bishop adopt the two boys in the first place?" I asked.

"I don’t know.  I was focused on the kids themselves."

I nodded.  "So there’s Garret, then Billy, then Brooke and... what’s the surviving twin’s name?"

"Tess."

"Garret, Billy, Brooke, and Tess."

"Right."

"Was anybody else in the house the night before they found Brooke dead?" I asked.

"A nanny.  Claire Buckley.  She summers on the island with the family.  Takes care of the kids, gets a place to stay, half her nights and weekends free — that type of thing."

"Young and pretty," I said.  "Sticks close to the wife."

"You got it."

"Any guests that evening?"

"No," Anderson said.

I looked out over the water, its surface speckled with white, electric jewels of light.  "So why do you figure Mr. Bishop flung the door wide open for you?"

"I don’t know.  Like I said, that’s what bothers me."

"It was before the autopsy results," I said.

"Still..." Anderson said.

"Maybe he’s burnt out," I said.  "He’s gone to bat for Billy over his firesetting, his cruelty to animals — now this.  Maybe he finally gets the picture that Billy’s a dangerous kid."

"Could be."

"Or it could be something else."

"Like..." he said.

"Like maybe he’d rather have Billy take the fall than somebody else," I said.  "Like his golden boy.  Or his wife.  Or himself."

"Also possible," Anderson said.  He paused.  "If I had a psychiatrist working with me, I might actually be able to find out which answer is the right one."

I took a deep breath, let it out.

"I really need you on this," Anderson said.  "My gut tells me Billy Bishop isn’t guilty.  And if I’m right, that’s only half the problem.  Because then I’ve got to figure out who is.  There’s another baby girl in that house."

Anderson was right to worry about Tess.  In the dozen or so recorded cases of infanticide in families with twins, the surviving baby eventually dies mysteriously over seventy percent of the time, usually due to sudden heart or respiratory failure.  Some researchers have theorized that the jarring loss of one twin spawns a toxic grief reaction in the other that mysteriously shuts down cardiac conduction or short-circuits the respiratory drive.  An immeasurable connection of souls has been abruptly severed, sapping the will to live.  But the most convincing explanation is that the killer has simply been given time and opportunity to claim another victim — probably by suffocation — either because the wrong person was arrested or because lack of evidence precluded any arrest.

I looked up at the sky.  For some reason I pictured my father in a drunken rage, ready to mete out one of the beatings that were my childhood.  I thought how nice it would be to keep myself safe, for a change.  I thought how no one could blame me if I did.  Because I already had wounds crisscrossing my psyche like a map to hell.  And some of them had never stopped bleeding.

"
No one could blame you
," the voice whispered, "
except yourself
."

*            *            *

Justine had breakfast nearly ready when I got back to the loft.  Omelets and bacon sizzled on the stove.  Still-warm bagels from Katz’s, a sixty-five-year-old shop just beyond the 7-Eleven, were sliced and spread with cream cheese.  A deep red, sparkly liquid filled the blender.

"Strawberries, ice, and sugar," she said, without my asking.

"Everything looks wonderful," I said.

"So you will leave this minute or later today?"  She flipped an omelet.

I wasn’t expecting the question and didn’t answer.

She glanced at me.  "I know you have to go.  I could see it in your friend’s face."

"I told him I’d meet him at the airport in four hours.  He’s got a tough case on Nantucket.  A little girl was murdered."

"Oh, God," she said.  "How old?"

"Five months."

She looked at me in that searching way people sometimes do when confronted by man’s limitless capacity for cruelty.

"They’re saying her adopted brother did it," was all I could think of to say.  "He’s not well."

She shook her head.  Without another word she turned off the burners, arranged our food on plates, and poured the strawberry concoction into two glasses.  We sat on stools at the granite center island, eating in silence.  "You can visit me in Rio or Buzios," she said finally.

"Buzios," I said.  "As soon as I can get there."  I meant it.

She took another bite, pushed her plate away.  "This is a waste of time," she said.

I figured she was upset about my abrupt departure.  I expected a scene.

She shrugged.  "I don’t even like eggs."  She peeled off her shirt, tossed it on the floor, and walked over to the bed.

I followed.  I could not have predicted how close to losing everything the Bishop case would bring me, but I must have sensed it.  Because as my eyes and hands and mouth traveled over Justine, I felt more than passion.  I felt the need to tap her spirit, to somehow use her aliveness to inoculate myself against death.

Chapter 3

Anderson and I took the forty-five-minute Cape Air flight out of Logan at 1:15
P.M.
  The nine-seat, single-pilot Cessna bounced a little in the wind, but gave us no big trouble and a pretty view of the sapphire blue Atlantic on approach.  We came in low enough to glimpse the surfers at Cisco Beach and got an eyeful of the island’s sprawling, gray-shingled estates.

Nantucket, nicknamed the ‘Gray Lady,’ is actually three islands shaped like a fat boomerang, with a couple spits of land broken off one end.  Legend attributes its formation to ashes which floated out of the pipe of the Indian giant Moshup, mythic guardian of the natives living on Cape Cod.  But if Moshup was charged with protecting his creation and his people, he failed.  During the 1700s, Quaker settlers from Massachusetts prevailed upon the kindly Wampanoag Indians to teach them who to fish Nantucket’s waters, hunt its fowl, and farm its soil.  In turn, the settlers taught the Indians just enough reading, writing, and arithmetic to sell their land.  The Indians learned so well and conveyed so many tracts that their livestock had nowhere left to graze.  That loss, together with mainland imports of whiskey and tuberculosis, left Abraham Quary as the last male Nantucket Indian, when he died in 1854.

Whaling was the life blood of Nantucket through the 1800s.  Herman Melville used the tragic voyage of Nantucket captain George Pollard, whose ship was rammed by a whale in 1820, as the basis for his masterpiece novel
Moby-Dick
.  Though perilous, whaling was well suited to the Quaker work ethic — and very profitable.  Money poured into the island, fueling a building boom that stripped most of its trees, but lined Main Street with mansions, one of the later and most prominent of them being Jared Coffin’s three-story home of English brick and Welsh slate.

In every chapter of its modern history, commerce has driven Nantucket’s growth while extracting bigger chunks of its soul.  So it should have come as no surprise when the decline of the whaling industry, accelerated by the fleet’s heavy losses during the Civil War, was followed by the ultimate devil’s bargain:  the growth of tourism.  The island slowly evolved into a playground of leisure, wealth, and reverie — enough to make any Quaker blanch.  Captain George Pollard’s home became the Seven Seas Gift Shop.  Jared Coffin’s mansion was turned into an inn filled with Colonial-style reproduction furnishings.

The working soul of Nantucket, the part that churned with native instinct and courage at sea, was buried under so much glitter as to be, for all intents and purposes, dead as the last Wampanoag.

On the flight over, North Anderson had told me that Darwin Bishop purchased his Nantucket estate in 1999, just after the IPO of Consolidated Minerals and Metals netted him $1.2 billion.  With that kind of windfall, $9.6 million for an eighteen-room spread on about five acres off Wauwinet Road, with views to the ocean and the harbor, must have seemed like petty cash.

CMM mined iron and copper from rich reserves in Russia’s Ukraine.  Even with the political instability in that region, the company continued to net massive profits exporting ore to other European nations, Asia, and the United States.  Consolidated had hinted at expansion into oil and natural gas, which would propel profits into the stratosphere.

"Does he know we’re coming?" I asked Anderson as we took the turn onto Wauwinet.

"If he didn’t, we wouldn’t make it to the door," Anderson said.  He motioned toward a pristine little cottage by the side of the road, with a slate roof, white shutters, and window boxes overflowing with flowers and vines.  "He calls that his ‘watch house.’"

I noticed two white Range Rovers with smoked windows parked next to the cottage.  "Why does he need someone to watch over him?" I asked.

"About a billion reasons, I’d guess," Anderson said.

The house looked very much like the clubhouse of a country club, with two dozen canopied windows running along its curved façade.  The exterior had weathered to the gray-brown of well-oiled leather.  Off to the right of the driveway stretched a pool of Olympic proportions, surrounded by twenty yards of mahogany decking.  A grove of olive green cloth umbrellas sheltered a half dozen white tables at poolside.  Just beyond them, nearer the ocean, I saw a man and a boy playing tennis on a clay court, running hard and raising clouds of dust.

I nodded at the court.  "Who are they?" I asked.