The Last Blue Plate Special (31 page)

“Apparently Pieter left a message on Kate’s home answering machine this morning,” Rox said. “He told her he’ll be leaving
for Holland on Thursday and prefers not to speak with her between now and then. Meanwhile, Kate’s blood is positive for trace
amounts of an MAOI. It’s almost gone now. The big surge would probably have been four or five days ago. She’s shaky but she’s
taking it pretty well. I’m going to call Rathbone right now with the test results.”

“Five days ago was Friday, the night of her fundraiser, Rox,” I said. “And somebody sent a deli tray containing everything
necessary to kill her.”

“Yep, right down to the canned figs,” Roxie agreed. “But she didn’t eat any of it because she’s on this diet, so she’s fine.
Sword may have been at that fundraiser, Blue. If our perp’s a male, he might have been there to get a trophy of some sort.
Might even have been taking photographs of the event. If it’s one of the women then probably not, but who knows? Do you remember
seeing any of the Rainer staff there that evening?”

“Rox, I’d never seen any of the Rainer staff at that point, and there were seventy-five people milling around an art gallery
where all the lights are on the art, not the crowd. There was a photographer, but then there always is at these things. I
think he ducked out right after the news about Dixie’s death, probably to get the photos in to his paper. Everybody there
except BB and Kate were strangers to me. It’s not likely I’d remember if I
did
see somebody like Eldridge or Grecchi or Megan, although I might have remembered Pond. He’d have been the only muscle-bound
bodybuilder in a sea of oxford cloth and trendy little suits. I don’t remember seeing him, though, and he’s out of the running
since last night, anyway.”

“Probably,” she agreed. “I need to go, Blue. Have to be at Rathbone’s office in a half hour. Do whatever it is you have to
do, but there’s no point in placing yourself in danger. The FBI and the police will handle it from here. Stay away from the
rest of the Rainer staff, okay? Especially Grecchi. I don’t like what’s shaping up here and I don’t want anything to do with
it. The FBI and the cops will have to take it from here.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call you at home later.”

I knew what Roxie meant. I’d mentioned it when we discussed taking this case. If Isadora Grecchi was the killer, then her
depressive disorder would be seen as a cause of her criminal behavior. The publicity attendant upon Grecchi’s capture would
only reinforce the public’s belief that everybody with a psychiatric diagnosis is a violent predator.

The media would have a field day, running sidebars about Jack the Ripper and interviews with colorful “mental health professionals”
whose credentials could be traced to mail-order diploma mills in Texas. Some of these would hint broadly that demonic possession
is more prevalent than we think. In short, Grecchi’s history of depression would turn an already horrible situation into a
debacle of escalating ruin. It would hurt thousands of people. I didn’t want it to happen any more than Roxie did.

And maybe I could head it off,
I thought. Maybe I could talk to Grecchi, not asking her to admit guilt but nonetheless orchestrating a tidy conclusion in
which she’d be whisked to some secure facility with no fanfare. I’d be a negotiator, I decided. I’d seen this done in movies.

I didn’t call first, merely drove to Isadora Grecchi’s home in Mission Hills and parked in front. Then I let Brontë out on
the passenger’s side and we climbed the steps to Grecchi’s porch. I didn’t look behind me, didn’t scrutinize a plumber’s van
across the street that might have been a plumber’s van and might have been a stakeout. It seemed best to pretend I didn’t
know they were there. If they were.

“Dr. Grecchi?” I called through the screen door. “It’s Blue McCarron. I need to talk to you. There’s no one with me but my
dog, Brontë.”

There was no answer from inside. No smell of oil paint, either. No sound. I could see through the house to the deck over the
canyon behind it. Three pigeons were walking around aimlessly on the redwood decking as though waiting for a phone call that
would tell them what to do next. And yet the place didn’t feel empty. What it felt like was
wrong.

“Dr. Grecchi?”

Still no response but she had to be there. The house was open, doors and windows admitting the warm, dry breeze. The screen
door latch turned in my hand, and I yelled one last time before going in.

“Dr. Grecchi!”

It was Brontë who found her, no doubt drawn by the scent of blood. I could smell it myself by the time I reached the bathroom
door where Brontë was snuffling and whining at a puddle of dark red liquid filling the grout lines between the bright yellow
tiles of the floor. A sweet, metallic scent like wet iron railings. Isadora Grecchi sat on the floor, her back against the
side of a yellow bathtub. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and in her right hand was a knife fitted with a single-edge
razor. Artists use these knives to cut canvas prior to stretching it on a frame. Her left wrist was slashed on its interior
side so deeply I could see the white bones inside. Bones I’d learned in junior high school are called the radius and ulna.

We feel these bones in our own arms every day and know their Latin names. They aren’t as unfamiliar as, say, the vomer, a
flat bone lying vertically in the middle of our skulls. The top edge of the vomer forms part of the septum of the nose. Still,
we expect to go through whole lifetimes never actually
seeing
a radius and ulna, ever. I hated myself for feeling sick.

“Oh my God!” I said, grabbing a thick white washcloth from a bar on the wall and clamping it over the wound and the naked
bones with my hand.

Isadora Grecchi wasn’t dead. Her eyes were open and moving as she watched me kneeling in the mess, telling her to hold her
left arm up, finally compressing the wound by wrapping the wash-cloth in about a mile of dental floss I found in the medicine
cabinet. Neither was she saying anything. The only sound for several seconds was Brontë’s nervous whining.

“I’m going to leave you here and go call 911,” I finally said. “I want you to give me the knife.”

I saw her glance at the object still clutched in her right hand as though identifying it required effort. Then it clattered
to the floor. Leaning across her, I grabbed the knife, wondering how long I would remember this strange moment of intimacy
with one of the cultural icons of my time—a serial murderer.

Roxie had said this would happen. That Sword would probably become so tormented that suicide would be the only source of relief,
and Grecchi’s history of clinical depression made it a certainty. Sprinting to Grecchi’s wall phone in the kitchen, I jabbed
the three numbers before realizing the line was dead. The cord running into the wall had been cut, probably with the same
instrument she’d used to reveal the bones of her arm. She wanted to make sure she couldn’t change her mind and call for help
at the last minute, I thought. Or else she hadn’t wanted to hear the phone ringing as she slowly bled out alone on her bathroom
floor.

Brontë had followed me into the kitchen, her nails clacking against hardwood. I could see her pawprints, dark red against
the polished floor. Only then did I notice that I was about to vomit. The smell was everywhere. Blood. It was on my hands
and Brontë’s paws. It was dripping from the hem of my skirt where I’d knelt in a pool of red to bind a washcloth around Isadora
Grecchi’s wrist. I had to get outside, quickly.

On the porch I took deep breaths and told Brontë to
stay.
Then I started toward the plumber’s van across the street until a chubby red-haired man in a blue uniform pulled a spool of
plumber’s snake from inside the van and took it into one of the houses. So it really was just a plumber’s van complete with
a real plumber. Where are the cops when you need them?

I remembered the cell phone and dashed to my truck to make the call. Yes, I would stay with the victim until the paramedics
arrived. No, I didn’t know the next of kin.

Isadora Grecchi probably didn’t have any kin, I thought as I went back into her house, taking the cell phone and the little
.38 with me. Isadora Grecchi would turn out to be a loner, a social isolate whose private thoughts and fantasies became real
to her over time because there was no one around to curb those fantasies. I’d seen it a hundred times in books and movies.
The weirdo who lives alone in the old house for years, tearing the wings off flies. And then one day the Avon lady mistakenly
rings his rusty doorbell and is not seen again until a hardened police detective turns green at what is pulled from the well
in the property’s overgrown garden.

She was still sitting on the bathroom floor when I returned, still silent.

“The paramedics will be here within five minutes,” I told her, feeling suddenly edgy.

She was too weak to move and seemed to be in a kind of trance, but I was afraid of her. Not because I believed she’d killed
her own patients with an obscure chemical. I hadn’t seen her do that; it was abstract. I was afraid of her because she’d laid
open her own wrist. Because she’d brought light to something that is never supposed to be seen. Those bones. The sight of
what lies beneath the skin, of the truth behind the facade, is taboo. The sight of those white bones made me sick with a fear
I recognized as primitive and magical, but there was nothing I could do about it.

“I have a gun,” I said, slapping the pistol held against my side by the elastic waistbands of my skirt and half-slip. “Don’t
try anything.”

The words sounded stagey and laughable. Like bits of conversation overheard in restaurants. Hearing them, it was obvious how
much we try to make sense of our experiences through the dialogues of fiction. Which are invariably not quite right.

When I glanced at Grecchi again there were tears spilling from her eyes. But she didn’t move and then I heard the siren of
an emergency vehicle. As the paramedics worked on her I called the Rainer Clinic again on the cell phone. Roxie might still
be there. I needed to hear her voice, to hear her explain oh-so rationally what had just happened. Why I saw those bones.
But it was Rainer who answered.

“No, Dr. Bouchie left just after speaking with you,” he said. “I was about to leave as well. Perhaps you can reach her at
the police station. She said she was going there.”

“I’ll call her there,” I said, nervous about how the old fellow would react when I told him. He’d worked with Isadora Grecchi
for years. But then he’d worked with all of them for years.

“Dr. Rainer, Isadora Grecchi has just tried to take her own life,” I pronounced quietly. “She cut her left wrist with an artist’s
canvas knife. I’m at her house. I’ve called 911 and the paramedics are here now. She’s alive and conscious, although she hasn’t
said anything. I think we’ve got our killer, Dr. Rainer. I think this thing is over.”

The silence then was too long. Five seconds, six, seven.

“Dr. Rainer?”

“No.” His voice was strangled.

“What?”

“No!” I couldn’t tell whether he was angry or stricken with grief.

“I’m so sorry, Dr. Rainer,” I bumbled on. “It’s got to be a shock for you. But it would have been a shock no matter which
one it was. Is there someone you can call? Someone who can be with you now? I’ll phone Megan and tell her you—”

“Stop patronizing me, Dr. McCarron,” he interrupted. His voice now had an edge, like a knife felt through cloth. “You don’t
understand this at all. Now please, tell me where they’ll take Isadora. Which hospital?”

The paramedics were strapping Grecchi onto a wheeled gurney in the hall. Her eyes were still open, watching them. They looked
like the eyes of refugees, that hollow, bereft look.

“Which hospital will you take her to?” I asked.

“University of California San Diego Medical Center,” one of the paramedics answered. “She’s gonna be fine.”

“Did you hear that?” I asked Rainer. “UCSD.”

“Yes. Tell her I’ll be at the hospital immediately. I’m leaving now. Are they giving her blood? How much blood did she lose?”

“Her employer, a doctor, wants to know how much blood she’s lost and if you’re …”

“Tell him she’ll be okay,” was the flat answer. But my question brought a fresh spill of tears from Grecchi, who was trying
to shake her head, trying to say, “No,” to something.

“Dr. Rainer will be at the hospital soon,” I told her. The statement caused an increased tossing of her head that the paramedics
curbed with a head clamp designed to stabilize the neck in spinal injuries. Her right arm was already secured to the side
of the gurney with a leather cuff, and webbed plastic bands crossed her chest and legs. I remembered that UCSD’s medical center
has a psychiatric unit. And I realized that’s where they were taking Isadora Grecchi.

“She’s very disoriented,” I told Jennings Rainer. “Perhaps it would be best if you didn’t come right away. I imagine the police
and FBI will want to talk to her first, as soon as she’s able.”

“Dr. McCarron, your assumptions are in error,” he said, angry now. “Isadora is not the perpetrator of these crimes. You must
explain that to the authorities.”

There was no point in arguing with him, I thought. He was in shock and irrational, unable to process the situation. That would
take time.

“The paramedics are leaving now, Dr. Rainer,” I said. “I need to phone Detective Rathbone.”

“You must tell Detective Rathbone that Isadora could not have sent all those messages last night threatening to murder the
vice presidential candidate because she was with
me
all night and I would have seen if she had.”

With that he hung up. I watched Isadora Grecchi’s face as they carried her out, trussed to the gurney so tightly she couldn’t
move. Terror in those dark brown eyes. Her face seemed gray and spittle was forming at the edges of her mouth as she thrashed
against the restraints and tried to say, “No, no.” Serial killer or not, I couldn’t stand it.