If Looks Could Kill (40 page)

She blinked a few times, trying to pull the room into focus, trying to pull her memory back.

"Chris?"

She turned her head to find good old dependable Sue sitting next to the bed. Chris tried to smile for her, wondered how long she'd been sitting there, thinking that she must have heard Sue's breathing and mistaken it for the wind or the ghost of Christian Evensong come back to haunt her.

"Hi."

Sue's expression was the same one she'd worn the day Tommy had fractured his skull on a bike. "How do you feel, sugar?"

Chris tried to lift her hand to wave away the gravity of the situation. "Stupid," she managed, although it came out closer to schtupid, and her hand never even twitched in the right direction.

Trust Sue to react with outrage. "Stupid?" she demanded hotly. "After what's happened to you? How dare you?"

Chris's smile felt more natural. "Thanks," she muttered carefully. "I needed that."

Sue was surprised into a sheepish grin.

"Am I at Puckett?"

"They thought it would be better for you. I tried to take you home, but they couldn't keep a..." Sue's voice faltered. Her eyes drifted.

"Guard," Chris said for her. "They couldn't keep a guard on me."

Sue nodded, ashamed.

"It's OK, honey. I'm a murder suspect. They do things like that for murder suspects."

"Oh, bullshit!" Sue retorted.

Chris decided it was time to sit up. She twitched a little without much noticeable success. With, however, effects. She winced. "Those damn ringbolts," she groused, and remembered. She'd cracked her hip on one when she'd wrestled with Elvis. "I have to apologize."

"For what?" Sue demanded, leaning forward in her chair as if getting poised to jump once more to Chris's defense.

It was Chris's turn to look sheepish. "For slugging Elvis. He didn't deserve that."

Sue grinned. "He only lost one tooth. You can't even tell the difference."

"Yeah, but he needs every one he has."

She was still feeling flat, empty. No emotions, none of the upheaval she sensed she should be experiencing. Her head was finally starting to clear, though. Like mist lifting, tendrils of confusion uncurled from pertinent facts. From memories. Like just what had brought her to be sedated at the jail in the first place.

She looked down at her hands, as if still expecting to see blood.

Sue understood without a word. "I'm so sorry, honey."

But Chris didn't hear her. She couldn't hear anything but the sudden buzz in her ears. A flash of terror swept away the rest of those deadening mists. Something had just crashed through the protective barrier of sedation.

Her wrists. Restraints. They'd tied her to the bed.

She didn't need to test them. She did anyway, pulling her arms up. Jerking to a stop only inches above the bed.

Suddenly she couldn't breathe.

"Chris?"

"Get these off," she begged, not able to look away. She bolted upright and came to another shuddering halt. A posey. They'd completely tied her down.

Sue was on her feet. "I can't," she protested, eyes wide. "I would, but they said it was for your protection."

"Get... them... off!" Chris panted, yanking with each word. Shaking the bed, sweating, panicking like a horse in a fire.

It was all coming back. All of it, every torture, every terrible penance she'd paid for her sins. She was paying for them again, and she wasn't going to survive it this time.

"Sue," she ordered, desperately trying to keep still, to keep her voice sane. "Get Tom here. Mac. I need... to talk to them."

"But Chris..."

Chris impaled her with a hard, level look that took every ounce of crumbling will. "Please, Sue. You don't know how important it is."

Mac made it there in five minutes. By the time he shoved open the door, Chris was drenched and shaking. Jaw clenched against the overwhelming urge to scream, to scrape her wrists raw in an attempt at escape. To gnaw at the cloth with her teeth if she had to. But if she did that, they'd never let her out. They'd make the mistake of thinking she needed more of the same to be controlled. Drugs and restraint. Age-old answers, palliative measures. Topped only by electric shock therapy in the hopes that the patient would simply forget that she had a problem and not need either of the former to control.

"Please," she rasped, not even able to look at him when he walked in. "Get me out."

"Give me your scissors," he barked to the nurse who'd followed him in.

The brisk little woman balked. "I don't think—"

His hand shot out. "Give me the goddamn scissors!"

Chris wasn't really sure whether he cut or just ripped, but within seconds, she was free. She came off the bed as if she were spring loaded, trailing the straps on the heavy cloth restraint jacket and sending the nurse stumbling back in alarm. The woman would have been down the hall for help if Mac hadn't slammed a hand against the door to keep it closed.

"I have a gun," he reminded the nurse gently. "She's not going to go far."

With fumbling hands, Chris ripped her way out of the posey and threw it to the floor. She made it to the window before the dizziness hit. Waves of it, swarming over her and stealing her balance. She grabbed the sill and closed her eyes, forcing herself to stay upright. Feeling the cool tile against her bare feet and the warm sun against her face. Then she finally managed her first good breath since waking up.

"Better?" Mac asked.

She just nodded.

Mac let go of the door. "You can go now," he told the nurse. "She'll be just fine."

"Don't count on it," the nurse warned, heading out anyway.

Chris laughed, the sound shrill against the sibilant hush of the closing door. "She's right, ya know. Most people who acted like I did would have gone right for your throat."

"Most people aren't that afraid of being closed in," he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't know they'd restrained you. I should have made it clear to John that I only wanted you in interrogation."

Chris gulped in some more air. Some more room. As soon as she could tell up from down she was going to start pacing. "They didn't know." Another breath, as if she could suck in control from the air itself. "Poor Sue. I think I scared her."

"She's OK. I told her to wait outside for Tom."

Chris nodded, closed her eyes. Fought her own body for control.

Mac waited for her, let her open her eyes out to the sun and just enjoy the sight of that open sky. She was still flashing back to that awful, small darkness. The smell of sour sweat and urine, old terror and thick fury. Terrible futility. It would be a precious long time before her heart slowed back down.

"You want to tell me about your stint on Fantasy Island?" he finally asked, his voice just as even as if he'd been asking about dinner preferences.

Chris straightened, her hands on the sun-warmed metal of the windowsill, her memory still fragmented. "How'd you know?" she asked.

"Deductive reasoning. Most people in a panic don't scream out recommended dosages for antipsychotics at the top of their lungs."

Another memory, Mac's hands. Tight, secure. His voice, always quiet, strong, steady.

"Oh, God," she moaned, closing her eyes in humiliation. "I tried to bite you, too."

She shot a careful look over her shoulder to see an edge of humor in his eyes. "Under different circumstances, it might have been an interesting tactic."

Chris wanted to giggle. She wanted to crawl away in shame. "Into bondage, huh, MacNamara? Well, I'm not."

"Obviously."

She finally took a look down, just to make sure it was there, and saw loose blue cotton and knees. "Jesus, I hate these things," she breathed in disgust, fingering the patient gown with a hand that trembled like an old woman's. Then her dismally slow brain filled in the rest of the pertinent information about patient gowns. "And keep your eyes off my backside."

She could hear the grin in his voice. "But it's so cute."

"Yeah," she countered, turning toward him, hands still on the sill. "My fantasies are all about drooling drugged-out psychotics, too." Just to make sure, she took a swipe at her chin to make sure it was dry. Humiliation and terror, her favorite memories.

That sapped a little of the light in Mac's eyes. "We're gonna have to get down to business sometime," he reminded her.

It took her fifteen minutes more to be able to pull thoughts together in a reasonable pattern. The staff left Mac alone with her, obviously figuring to either trust his aim or just scrape him off the floor after she got finished with him. Chris knew she was coming back on line when she began to pace again.

"What's going to happen?" she asked, feet padding against linoleum.

Mac never moved from where he was leaning against the door. Contrary to every hospital policy, he was smoking.

"You need a lawyer."

"Should you be the one advising me of this?"

"Nope."

"Okay. Lawyer. What else?"

"Arraignment hearing."

That brought her to a halt. "Before the judge, right?"

Mac's smile was not pretty.

"What are my options?" she asked.

"It's up to him to set bail. There's a very real possibility he won't."

Another surge, a blinding wave of fear. "Meaning?"

Chris managed, even though she knew.

Mac gave her a level look. "You'd be remanded to the county jail until trial."

Chris's knees almost buckled. She saw Mac move to intercede, and waved him off. Instead, she headed back for the sunlight. "I can't," she said, knowing just how it sounded. She shook her head, looking out to where the row of tulips was blooming on the hospital walk. Vivid reds and yellows, splashes of new color, so bright you could almost touch them from here. Rebirth, resurrection. For a while there, she'd thought she'd actually made it. "I can't."

Mac took a long drag from his cigarette and blew the smoke up toward the smoke detector. "I think you'd better tell me why."

"In that case," she answered, "you'd better get a tape recorder."

Mac took a second to answer. "After you've retained a lawyer."

* * *

City hall looked like a chorus number out of
Les Miserables.
Politicians courted cameras and citizens shouldered through to offer opinions. Harlan had gathered the majority of his flock to demand protection from the Satan among them and justice for her heinous crimes, and Sue served coffee to the Chris Jackson Freedom Fighters. A third contingent demanded protection for their children from the madwoman they hadn't seen in their midst, which entertained the reporters much more than the mayor. Mac was hip deep in a headache and not seeing his way out for the forseeable future.

"My client is undergoing psychiatric evaluation," the lawyer was informing the judge, who'd temporarily forsaken his chambers for the spotlight. The lawyer, a sharp, savvy black woman named Brenda Fitzwalter who'd hit Pyrite at light speed from St. Louis, hadn't wasted a millisecond in town. She'd even made friends with Mr. Lincoln. Mac had taken her to Harmonia's himself, which he was sure was not going to endear him to the judge's cronies.

The judge wasn't in the least impressed with Ms. Fitzwalter's arguments. "I don't care if she's having an audience with the Pope," he informed her from behind Mac's desk, his massive silver eyebrows bristling and his attitude patronizing and officious. "She's going to appear before my court in the morning for the arraignment. And may I say, Missy, I won't tolerate any of her outbursts."

"Call me Missy one more time," Brenda Fitzwalter challenged, leaning a slim hand on the battered old desk, "and I'll be talking to the judicial review board. Do I make myself perfectly clear?"

Mac ignored them all as he gathered together his tape recording equipment and sidled around the milling bodies to get back out the door.

He should have known better. John intercepted him first.

"Just thought you might want to know," he said. "Mary Willoughby reported a weenie-wagger this morning."

Mac shifted the equipment in his arms to rub at his head. "You're kidding. When?"

'"Bout four-fifteen. She'd gotten up to go to work at the hospital and saw this guy out on her lawn playing the one-handed flute. Right in front of the picture window."

Mac sighed. "Allen?"

"She didn't see a face. However, she would remember the flute. Said it was symphony quality."

Mac let out a surprised bark of laughter. "Head over to Allen's," he said. "Get inside and talk to him... wait a minute. Willoughby's is right behind Chris's, isn't it?"

John nodded.

Mac wasn't sure whether he felt better or worse. "Then make sure you talk to him. He might have seen something. After that, meet me over at the hospital. I have to do an interrogation."

Mac tried another run at the crowd. This time, Sue appeared in front of him like the avenging angel. "I'm counting on you," she warned.