The Profiler's Daughter (Sky Stone Thriller Series) (11 page)

“You are back,
Zvezdochka
. Wonderful!” The pet name meant ‘shining star’. Alexei had defected from the Soviet Union in the late seventies but the thick Russian inflection remained.

Sky held out the bottle of Stoli and the striped scarf.

“She bears gifts. A celebration is in order!” Alexei looped the scarf around his neck three times. “I have always wanted one,” he confided with a sheepish shrug.

He pulled two glass tumblers from a drawer and placed them on his desk with the exaggerated motion of ritual. Opening the bottle of Stoli, he filled each glass nearly to the brim and handed one to Sky.

Holding his tumbler high, Alexei said, “Let us toast to good things about bad times, to old friends and new enemies, to great tragedies and small pleasures!” He closed his eyes and drained half the glass in a single gulp. “Outstanding.”

Sky’s delicate sip prompted a laugh. “Champagne girl! You are kind to share toast of vodka with old Russian reprobate. Looking at you makes my eyes happy!”

He took another healthy swig and added “I have missed our lunches.”

At one point in her graduate studies, Sky became fascinated with the underlying mechanisms of hypnosis and attended one of Alexei’s workshops. Her first lesson included going into a hypnotic trance under Alexei’s soothing voice. The two became fast friends over lazy lunches, where they argued about everything from the relative merits of radical behaviorism and cognitive psychology to who was the greater writer, Nikolai Gogol or Raymond Carver. On rare occasions, Alexei would share one of his poems and Sky delighted at his work. ‘You are only one who gets me,’ Alexei would say. ‘You have Russian soul!’

Sky didn’t waste any time. “I’m working a case. A six-year-old girl may be my only witness.”

“Heartbreak Hill murder?” Alexei stroked his beard. “No matter! I do not want details.”

Sky held the hypnosis book up. “Any tips on hypnotizing a child that you forgot to put in here?”

“Ah.” Alexei took the book from her hand. “Written in Moscow. Smuggled out and published in states.” He shrugged. “For that alone I could have died in KGB labor camps.” His voice turned staccato. “You are with your detective again, yes?”

“Professional relationship. Strictly.” Sky emphasized the word with a hand chop.

“You cared great deal about your detective at one time. I seem to recall.” Alexei sat with his stout legs crossed at the knee.

“Things are different,” Sky said. “I’ve changed.”

“I agree. You are changed. Something in your face.” His eyebrows furrowed into a therapist’s scowl. “And change perhaps not for better, I am thinking.”

“It’s this murder investigation,” she said.

“I am acquainted with your work habits,
Zvezdochka
. Tenacity is well and good, but I see something else in your eyes.”

“What?”

“I see pain.”

An uncomfortable sensation of transparency washed over Sky. She reminded herself that Alexei was a seasoned clinician, why shouldn’t he see what others couldn’t?

Sky studied a collection of Egyptian antiquities displayed in a glass cabinet on the wall behind Alexei’s head. A dozen mummy-shaped figurines in shades of turquoise, aqua, and terracotta leaned in a single row against black velvet.

“I can’t make any mistakes with this little girl, Alexei.”

“You will not make mistake,” Alexei insisted. “Why do I know this? Because I taught you too well.”

Sky was thinking about the tiny mummies in the display case, the job they were meant to carry out: to act as workers in the afterworld, in place of the deceased. Did Nicolette have helpers in the afterworld?

Thoughts of her baby surfaced. The same old loop played in Sky’s head, all the possible scenarios that would have kept her from the car accident, the different streets she could have taken, the things she could have done differently that morning.

Alexei adjusted his vest. “To be honest, my dear, I do not think your ability to hypnotize child is issue. I think maybe you came here for altogether different reason.”

“I had a panic attack this morning,” Sky confessed. “When I saw Jake.” She described the detective’s alpha-male performance with Quentin at the crime scene, his insistence that Sky resume their relationship. “I told Jake it was over but he didn’t hear me. The man is dense, Alexei.”

“You were fine as long as your detective kept to business. When he got personal? Your body responded. Interesting!”

“It’s not interesting. It’s irritating as hell.”

Alexei gave a noncommittal grunt. “I want to ask you something,” he said. “Accident, when you lost baby. Describe, please.”

The request took Sky by surprise. It seemed to her that the accident was the last subject anyone wanted to discuss.

She focused on the tiniest terracotta mummy at the very end of the row. It was stubby, with a big head and a tiny body, like a dwarf. “It was morning,” she said. “Early May. I left the house and drove to City Hall. There were so many red tulips and yellow daffodils in bloom, more than I can ever remember.”

“City Hall, why?” Alexei said.

“To pick up the marriage license. The clerk had a blonde beehive, like Amy Winehouse. She said Jake was a real catch.” Sky’s voice felt funny. Like someone was squeezing her throat. “The lady with the beehive said the baby would be beautiful, with such beautiful parents.”

“I remember walking out of City Hall. I got into the car and put the seatbelt on. My belly was big and putting the belt on caused contractions.” Sky remembered the sunshine that morning. Dazzling, the way sunshine could be in May, in Massachusetts, after a long winter. “I came down the circular drive onto Homer Street. The marriage certificate was next to me, on the passenger’s seat. The last thing I remember is a sculpture in front of the library.”

“Describe, please.”

Sky closed her eyes. “It was a bronze statue of a girl, maybe ten years old, carrying an old-fashioned satchel in one hand and a book in the other. She’s reading the book while she’s walking.”

Sky shoved her hand into the pocket of her trench coat and rubbed the baby sweater between her fingers. “I remember wondering if the baby would be a book worm. You know, the kind of kid that goes to the library and gets a stack of books every Saturday?”

Sky opened her eyes. “That’s it.”

“What about accident?”

“No memory.” Sky said.

“Post-traumatic amnesia,” Alexei said. “Often reported in such cases. Perfectly normal.” He clasped his hands behind his head and studied Sky as though she were one of his artifacts. “Your accident,” he said. “Memory perhaps to work on?”

“Do you think it would help?” Sky was doubtful.

“No guarantees,” Alexei said. “Still, to quote the Bard: What is past is prologue.”

Sky didn’t feel optimistic.

Alexei pulled something from a drawer and handed it to her. “I want you to have. It is nothing, really. Bibelot.”

Sky held the gift in her palm: a small carving of a beetle, the color of old ivory, with stylized legs and scarring on the belly.

“Very rare, very old heart scarab, alabaster. Upper Egypt, unearthed near Cairo.” Alexei touched his hand to his chest. “Ancient Egyptians believed that heart was originator of all feeling and storehouse of memory. When I look at you, I think maybe Egyptians were right.”

Sky, astonished to see that nearly an hour had passed, stood to leave. “I have an appointment,” she explained.

“You must return!” Alexei insisted. “Trust me,
Zvezdochka
, I know more about repressed memory than you can imagine.”

Sky was anxious to press Alexei for more information because she knew virtually nothing about the therapist’s past. But there wasn’t time, the detectives would be waiting for her at Madeleine Fisk’s.

She said goodby to her old friend and left William James Hall, headed toward Mount Auburn Street with the Egyptian scarab tucked into her bra. Just over her heart.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“One of Horace’s students? Dead?” Madeleine Fisk looked at Sky and the detectives with practiced skepticism as they stood on the front porch of her narrow Victorian on Mount Auburn.

“Come in. I’m just making tea.” She guided them through the house to the kitchen, where a stainless steel tea kettle whistled on a stainless steel stove.

The professor’s ex-wife was dressed in black. Her slim body and silver chin-length hair gave her a streamlined, chic look. She moved with a dancer’s grace around the kitchen in bare feet, preparing chai tea (“organic,” she assured them), taking orders for cream and honey from the detectives, and pouring an assortment of Newman’s Own cookies onto a purple ceramic plate. She handed each a steaming mug and led them back to the living room.

“Horace is his own worst enemy.” Madeleine Fisk studied the plate of cookies and selected a fig bar. “Just last summer, one of his patients accused him of sexual misconduct.”

“Oh?” Sky pulled out her journal.

“What Horace does, and with whom, is of no concern to me, personally. We’ve been divorced ten years, I am happy to say. But I hate to see our son exposed to his father’s foibles.” She motioned to a framed studio photograph of a teenager in cap and gown. “He’s in his first year at Yale.”

Sky said. “What came of the sexual misconduct charge?”

“Oh, the state medical board dismissed the allegations, but I’ve no doubt he was bedding her. Horace never could keep his hand out of the cookie jar.” She offered a coy smile. “Actually, I was one of his patients. It’s where we met. You may find this hard to believe, but twenty-five years ago, Horace was hot.”

Sky tried her best to imagine it.

“He hasn’t aged well, it’s true.” Madeleine Fisk seemed to read her thoughts. “You’re a psychologist, correct? Tell me, how can Horace entertain the notion that women are attracted to him for any reason other than the power he wields? Such as it is.” She brushed a few crumbs from her lap. “It would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetic.” She gestured to Axelrod, who was munching on a chocolate wafer. “Why, it would be like me and this young man having a sexual fling.”

Axelrod’s eyes bulged and he coughed up a chunk of cookie.

“Exactly,” Madeleine Fisk said. She seemed happy that her point was taken.

Kyle adjusted his wire rims. “Any romantic involvements between the professor and his students?”

“Horace caused me a great deal of pain when we were married. While I was pregnant with my son, Horace’s students – young girls – would call our house. Can you imagine?” She crossed her long legs. “I do believe the university’s recent sanctions have curbed Horace’s peccadilloes. He’s scared to death of the department chair. Two tenured professors have been called on the carpet for sexual harassment under Bea Allen’s watch. Horace is certainly on her radar screen, what with his latest client imbroglio.”

Sky said “One of Professor Fisk’s graduate students delivered an envelope to you last week.”

“Yes, from Genie Pharmaceutical. Horace does have his connections. In a few weeks I’ll be starting a new job in their Medical Affairs department. They’re based in Switzerland, of course, but they have a local operating company on Route 128.” Her voice dropped to a loud whisper. “The pay is rather phenomenal.”

“Professor Fisk is working with Wellbiogen, in Waltham,” Sky said. “What’s his connection to Genie Pharmaceutical?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.” Glancing at her son’s photograph, Madeleine Fisk added, “What I do know, is that four years of Yale tuition has Horace feeling poor. And we’re not even talking graduate school.” She smiled. “My new salary will easily cover our son’s education. It’s the first sensible thing Horace has done in years.”

“Are you familiar with the professor’s research?” Sky asked.

“Horace and his rats? I haven’t the least interest. Our son is our only common ground.”

Sky noticed a book on creating poetry, lying next to the purple plate of cookies. What was it about living in Cambridge and writing poetry, she wondered. Was there something in the water?

“Does Professor Fisk hunt?” Kyle asked. “Or fish?”

“God, no. Horace’s idea of going into the wild is a walk through the Public Garden.”

Sky said, “Did you know Nicolette Mercer?”

“No. I could never keep up with all of Horace’s graduate students, even when we were married. They came, they went.” She shrugged and held the plate out to Sky. “Cookie?”

Sky declined the cookie, but she did take Madeleine Fisk’s phone number. She left her card on the coffee table and led Kyle and Axelrod out the door, into a sleeting rain.

“Just got a Charlestown address for Templeton,” Kyle said as they climbed into the Crown Vic.

They headed into town on Memorial Drive through rush hour traffic, the kind that made Boston famous.

Charlestown was a peninsula just north of Boston proper, bordered by the Charles River and the Mystic River. Sky always felt like she’d stepped back a few centuries when she was in Charlestown. It was probably the narrow streets and the brick sidewalks. Or the colonial architecture. She could almost feel the spirits closing in, maybe from the battle of Bunker Hill, or immigrants from the potato famine, or victims of the Irish Mob wars. Take your pick. Charlestown was lousy with ghosts.

Ellery Templeton’s address was a classy brick townhouse on Main Street, midway between the Olives and Figs restaurants. A willowy woman with runway model looks and a British accent answered Templeton’s door.

“Haven’t seen Ellery for two days. I do believe he rehearses at Berklee on Mondays.” She smelled faintly of pot smoke and patchouli. “His Genuine John’s gig starts at ten.” She singled Sky out. “When you find Ellery, might you give him a message for me? Tell him to fuck himself.”

The door slammed shut.

Sky huddled with the detectives on the brick sidewalk in front of the townhouse.

“Ellery Templeton lives here?” Axelrod seemed surprised. “I figured he was in L.A..” He gave Sky a puzzled look. “Why don’t we just drive to Berklee?”

“A waste of time without the exact address,” Sky reasoned. The Berklee School of Music was on Boylston Street in Back Bay, about three miles south. “We’re better off catching him at Genuine John’s tonight.”