he didn’t see his mother. Whoever it was left. Remember, the door opening? Then the thump. Surely Grant’s body hitting the floor. Then a pause. Then Francis walks in, finds the body…”
“There’s a lot of supposition there, don’t you think?” Quincy said.
“No I don’t,” Hannibal said, facing the doctor across Dean’s sleeping form. “What’s the alternative? She opens the door, stabs him, stands there for a minute to think about it, and THEN screams? No, she came in after the fact and found the body. Wake him up.”
Quincy hesitated. “That might not be a good idea.”
“There’s no time, Doc,” Hannibal said. “If you want to save him, wake him up.”
27
Dean still looked like a child to Hannibal, even after dressing in chinos and a sweatshirt. Bea sat beside him on the edge of the bed and held him for a good five minutes while Hannibal conferred in a corner with Cindy and Quincy. They had agreed to stay away until he felt receptive to questioning.
“I’m ready to talk, Mr. Jones,” he called over Bea’s shoulder. When she shook her head at him, he added, “I want to find out what really happened. I think you can help me find out.”
Hannibal walked in close to Dean, looking into his eyes, which were as big as those of a Japanese anime figure, and asked himself one last time if the boy could really understand the truth.
“Okay Dean, what I need now is not what you saw or what you heard. I need to know what you thought. Are you ready to talk about that?”
Dean shrugged and sighed. “I’ve got nothing to hide, Mr. Jones. I just don’t know if I know what I was thinking ten years ago.”
“Let’s keep this simple,” Hannibal said, pulling a chair over to the bed and dropping into it. “You do remember who your baby-sitter was in those days, don’t you?”
Dean’s eyes widened for a second, then narrowed to slits. He lowered his head to look down at Hannibal’s hands. “Yes. It was Joan Kitteridge.”
Bea pulled his arm and turned him to herself. “Your boss was your baby-sitter?”
“Coincidence?” Cindy asked, standing behind Hannibal’s chair.
Dean shook his head. “I’ve tried to stay close to her. Thought I could maybe find out. Something.”
“You thought she had something to do with your father’s death, didn’t you?” Hannibal asked. “Maybe it was her voice you heard arguing with your father that night.”
“But baby,” Bea said, pulling his head to her with a moan and staring deep into his eyes. “I don’t understand. If you suspected Joan enough to follow her for all these years, why did you try to tell people you killed your father? You said you killed him and Oscar. Why?”
Dean seized Bea’s arms. It was the first intensity Hannibal had seen out of him. His breath was labored, as if pushing a great weight. Hannibal thought maybe there was a great weight, but it was on his chest.
“Don’t you see? At first I thought mother had killed him, because he was with Joan. I’m the one who told mother they were together. If I’d kept my mouth shut, she wouldn’t have known, and my father would be alive today. I’m the one responsible. I killed him.”
Hannibal stood and started pacing again, rounding the three sides of the bed and turning around to retrace his steps. “Okay, Dean, the little boy in you might believe that, but when you grew up you must have realized there were other possible answers. And you obviously thought Joan Kitteridge knew something, right? That’s why you followed her around.”
Bea looked at Dean with a different expression now, as if just accepting an unexpected depth in this man she loved. “You followed her?”
“She was my father’s girlfriend,” Dean said, squeezing Bea with one arm. “She watched me every day. Practically family. But when the trial started up, she was nowhere to be seen. And over the years I started to wonder why. I began to remember that there was another man. I think she had another boyfriend.”
“Actually,” Hannibal said, “There’s good reason to believe she was married at the time.”
“Well, that didn’t change my guilt,” Dean said. “If Joan’s other man did it, mother must have told him about Joan and my father. Again, if I’d kept my mouth shut, Papa would be alive today.”
“Or Joan did it herself,” Hannibal put it, “to keep him from confronting her husband.”
“Well anyway, I felt like I had to know what really happened. So when I finished school, I tracked her down. I think she gave me a job out of sympathy.”
Now Cindy looked at Dean out the corner of her eye. “Now I’m thinking you were close to Oscar, but not for the reason I first thought.”
“I know Oscar, er, experimented,” Dean said with a grin, “but he and I were never more than friends. We got to talking one day and it turned out we had some background in common. And he told me once that he had something on Joan, some kind of information that might tie in to something bad in her past.”
Hannibal almost lunged toward Dean, pushed by the force of a revelation. “Of course! That’s why you felt guilty about Oscar. You thought he was killed because of something you told him, maybe just confirming Joan’s connection to your father’s murder.”
“Yes,” Dean said, hanging his head again, “So you see, I killed him too.”
“Well I don’t think so,” Hannibal said, laying a hand on Dean’s shoulder. “It looks like Oscar was a blackmailer maybe, so lots of people might have had a reason for going after him. Personally, I think your boss Joan is the lead suspect. I’m thinking she did the deed and left. Your mother comes in, sees her husband dead and picks up the knife just like people always do in the movies.”
“I’m sorry,” Quincy said from the other side of the bed. “Believe me, Joan was just not capable of that sort of a crime.”
The whole room seemed to hold its breath as a single thought jumped from Hannibal’s mind to everyone else’s like a psychic signal. Finally, when it became too uncomfortable to hold his breath any longer, Hannibal looked up at the older psychiatrist, forcing calm into his voice.
“And just exactly how would you know that, Doctor?”
28
Under the stars Quincy Roberts’ white shirt glowed, making him look like some puffy, gray-bearded angel recently descended from the dark clear sky to a muddled ball of confusion. Cindy and Hannibal faced him as if awaiting the answers to all questions. Hannibal’s stomach rumbled, reminding him how the day had gotten away from him. Maybe he should have stopped for a bite, but he was hungry for something else even more than food. He hungered for the truth.
“So she was a nut case way back then,” Hannibal said, foregoing all delicacy.
Quincy bristled. “Joan Kitteridge was my patient, yes, but she was never violent. In fact, I’d go on record as saying she was incapable of violence. She had serious ego strength issues. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“Us now or the police later,” Cindy said. “They’d just subpoena your patient records. It IS a murder investigation.”
“It was so long ago it probably doesn’t matter now,” Quincy said. He drew in a deep breath but puffed it out as if a great weight had slammed into his chest. “The poor girl was so badly dominated by that man she could hardly breath without his approval. How she survived to be a success in the business world…”
“By that man,” Hannibal prodded, “you mean her husband?”
“Well of course,” Quincy said. “So young to be married, too. If I could have gotten him to come in to therapy I might have helped her more, but I never even saw the man.”
By the time Hannibal got home, he was both ravenous and irritated. At these times he appreciated Cindy’s perceptiveness. She knew the wise thing to do was to keep her distance until he was fed and calmer. It was a good
