across her face.
“It’s all right, ma’am. We don’t need the full story.”
I figured we’d get it from the arrest report, save the poor woman the retelling.
She said, “He stopped taking those things. What happened with the police finally made him stop.”
“How was his behavior before the end?” I asked. “Normal?”
A grandfather clock in the hall chimed. We waited until it fell silent.
“About a month before…that day, he seemed depressed again. He came over to see me less. He was quieter, like he was deciding on something.”
“Could it have been something with his work? Unhappiness?”
She walked to the mother-and-son photo. Touched it with reverence. “He loved his work. He was born to help people get better. He consulted in the region’s best facilities. Bernie was on the board at Mobile Regional Hospital. He had a private practice.”
It was a good place to take our leave, on the high note of her son’s achievements. As we moved to the door, I asked one final question.
“Excuse me, Ms. Rudolnick. Did your son have a specialty?”
She exhaled a plume of smoke, spun a tobacco-stained finger at her temple. “He worked with tormented minds.”
Psychotics? A bell rang in my head. Had Rudolnick known Harwood earlier? I wondered. Did they have a history? What if Harwood had been a patient, or part of a study?
I said, “I don’t suppose he ever mentioned patients by name.”
She crushed the cigarette dead in the ashtray, set it aside. “He was absolute about privacy.”
Harry said, “The records your son kept about his patients. All gone, right?”
“They were in his house and I didn’t know what to do with them. I keep them in storage. I don’t know why.”
“Would it be possible to look at them?”
She held up her hands, waving my words away. “No. It’s all confidential, a bond of trust.”
Harry stepped close. Gathered her hands in his, held them steady. I could never do anything that simple and perfect. “It might be helpful, Ms. Rudolnick,” he said quietly. “It would never go further than Carson and me. And it might be our key to finding who killed your son.”
Her eyes shimmered with tears and her mouth pursed tight. “It was that filthy Harwood animal, scum. Piece of dirt…piece of shit.”
“I wish that was true, ma’am. But Leland Harwood was just a tool, a hammer. The man who swung the hammer is still out there.”
She shook her head. “No. It can’t be. It’s not right.”
“Detective Ryder talked to Leland Harwood an hour before he died, ma’am. He thinks Harwood was sent to harm your son.”
She looked at me. “Is that true?”
I nodded. “Leland Harwood was an enforcer. He always worked for others.”
Her face tightened in anger. She turned to Harry.
“You’ll respect the confidentiality of my son’s files?”
“You have our word on it,” Harry said.
Kayla Rudolnick looked into Harry’s eyes until she found something she needed to see.
“The storage facility is on Cottage Hill Road. I’ll get you the key.”
There were eight white boxes in the facility, rows of locked cages in an old warehouse; a guard had been alerted to our visit. We took the boxes from the cage rented by Ms. Rudolnick and stowed them in the trunk of the Crown Vic.
Picking up the last of the boxes, Harry nodded through the grid at the adjoining enclosure. I saw a crib, boxes of child’s toys, stuffed animals, posters pulled from walls, the tape at the edges brittle and yellow. A small wheelchair. A red bicycle with training wheels. Even under dust, the bike looked unused.
I suddenly knew what used-up prayers looked like. Harry sighed, shook his head, and we tiptoed away like thieves.
We dropped the files at Harry’s house, then returned to the station. I tapped Rudolnick, Bernard, into my computer, expecting an arrest record. Mitigating circumstances allowing Rudolnick to pay a fine, perhaps, slip past punishment if he enrolled in a program and stayed clean.
The computer whirred and beeped, and came up blinking: NO RECORD.
I tried again. Same effect. Harry stared at the screen.
“Either the bust never happened, or it got wiped clean. And the second option takes some doing.”
Ms. Verhooven gestured for Lucas to follow her. There was no furniture in the room and the Realtor’s high heels banged on the parquet floor. Ms. Verhooven was as bright as a new trumpet: blond hair, yellow dress, white shoes. Bright teeth moving behind glossy pink lips. Long legs sheathed in silky hose, rising up past the knee-high hemline toward…Lucas felt himself hardening and looked away, knowing such notions had to be sublimated for now, to use a term from Rudolnick’s world.
Ms. Verhooven pushed open a door and gestured grandly, like a woman on a TV game show.
“Ta-da!” she said.
Lucas stared at a toilet. “Ta-da?”
The fixture was cream-colored, just like the adjoining countertop. Ms. Verhooven bent over the counter, stroked it like it was a kitten.
“Quartz countertops in the restroom, Mr. Lucasian. Real, honest manufactured stone. Over at Midtowne Office Estates the counters are only Corian.”
Lucas nodded, though he had no idea what she was talking about. He was most interested in the sink.
Note to self, he thought, buy bath towels.
There was a faux-baroque gilt-framed mirror on the wall. Lucas glanced at a slender and clean-shaven man with a neat part in his short and trendy, red-highlighted hair. His suit was dark and conservative, like the blue shirt and muted tie. He looked young but affluent. A success-driven young man, a starry-eyed entrepreneur with backing from Daddy, ready to make it on his own in the world. There were plenty of them out there.
Lucas winked at the entrepreneur, then turned his attention to the sink, turning the hot water on and off.
“The neighborhood seems quite nice, Ms. Verhooven, a warren of free enterprise.”
“This is mid-Mobile’s most prestigious mercantile complex, Mr. Lucasian. An address here has cachet.” She pronounced it catch-hay. “You’re lucky. This location did have an interested party and a hold on the space for several months. But something fell through and it’s now available.”
Lucas almost laughed. They used to be office parks, now they were mercantile complexes. With catch-hay, nonetheless. He looked through slat blinds at several small clusters of offices, redbrick buildings, the tallest four stories. The grounds were nicely landscaped, myrtle and dogwood. A few magnolia bushes, the ever-present azaleas.
“You’re in a wonderful business community, Mr. Lucasian,” the rental agent chirped, seeing his eyes scanning the community of red boxes. “Accounting firms, brokerages, financial advisors, that sort of thing. Four or five doctors. Two corporate headquarters, three legal firms…”
Lucas wandered through rooms smelling of fresh paint and cleanser. He struck several poses he found particularly businesslike: holding his chin and nodding out the window, clasping his hands at his belt and arching an eyebrow at the ceiling, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall.
“It feels very businessy,” he said, pushing from the wall. “A place to call home.”
Ms. Verhooven beamed. “What is it, basically, that your firm does, Mr. Lucasian?”
“Basically, I’m in securities,” Lucas said. He chuckled at the wonderful double entendre: insecurities.
Lucas looked across the street at the nearest building, a hundred feet distant. The top floor, fourth, was large and sparsely populated offices, a quiet little kingdom of teak and brass. On the next three floors, cubicle drones could be seen shuffling papers and talking on phones. There were four levels, but only the top floor interested
