William Rabkin - A Fatal Frame of Mind

But for the past fifteen minutes he’d had the chance to give the grain the kind of study it deserved, and he felt he now knew it well enough to draw its pattern from memory if he needed to.

Somewhere, in some part of his brain that wasn’t completely occupied with the office’s furniture, he was aware that the desk’s occupant was talking to him. Apparently Chief Vick has been speaking the entire time he’d been staring at her desk. Her voice sounded sympathetic and yet with an undertone of steel, which was, he realized, not unlike the composition of that desk.

“No one blames you for this, Carlton,” Chief Vick said. “As this process moves forward it’s important that you understand that.”

Lassiter felt his head nodding. Apparently some part of him was aware of what the chief was saying, or at least could figure out the correct response from her tone of voice.

“But it’s also crucial that the Santa Barbara Police Department understand exactly what went wrong here,” Vick continued. “We’re not looking to point fingers or find a scapegoat. We just need to know if there are problems in our procedures that need to be fixed to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”

Whatever part of him that was controlling his muscles made Lassiter’s head nod again.

“And the first tool we need to use in our study of this incident is going to be the report of the officer who was at the center of it,” Vick said. She opened a file that was lying on her desk and pulled out a single sheet of paper. “That’s why I need you to rewrite this.”

She pushed the paper across the desk at him. His eyes, attracted by the movement, shifted up to see that it was a report form with a couple lines of type on it. He vaguely remembered having turned in a similar form a short while before.

“That’s my report,” Lassiter said, shifting his gaze back to the comfortingly familiar sight of walnut grain.

Chief Vick picked up the paper and sighed heavily. “This is the report you want to turn in?”

“It’s the truth,” Lassiter said.

“Detective Carlton Lassiter failed in his duty and allowed the suspect to take him hostage, shaming not only the Santa Barbara Police Department but every law enforcement agency everywhere in the world,” she read. “The entire fault rests with him. The only mistake made by any other member of the force was in opening the car trunk in which Detective Lassiter had been locked instead of leaving him there to suffocate.”

“Is there something in there you disagree with?” Lassiter said. “I think it sums up the situation pretty well.”

Chief Vick let out a deep sigh and shoved the paper across the desk at him. “I can’t give this to the police commission,” she said. “And I won’t turn it over to Internal Affairs. I will not let you destroy your career over this.”

One of Lassiter’s hands reached out and took the paper. “What do you want me to say?”

“You’ve written a million reports,” she said. “You know what has to be in it. I need a complete accounting of everything that happened, starting with your arrival at the museum and ending with your rescue.”

Lassiter stared down at the paper in his hand. He read the words over again. It said everything there was to say about the incident. “So you want me to pad it out?” he said.

“I’ve told you what I expect, Detective,” Chief Vick said, the edge of steel now rising above the sympathetic tone. “And I expect it no later than tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” He knew what that word meant-a day that would begin when this one was finally over. But he couldn’t quite imagine it ever coming, because he was pretty sure that this day would never actually end.

“Tomorrow, Carlton,” Vick said, her tone softening again. “Right now, what I want you to do is go home and get some sleep. The next couple of days are going to be rough. Internal Affairs will need to do a thorough review, and the press is going to be all over this. Our departmental therapists are excellent at dealing with post-traumatic stress, and I strongly urge you to take advantage of their expertise. But first you need to go home and get some rest.”

“I need to work,” Lassiter said. “I need to catch Kitteredge.”

“You don’t need to do anything but rest, Detective,” Chief Vick said. “Juliet O’Hara is leading the search for Kitteredge.”

“But I need to-”

“Go home right now,” Chief Vick said. “You can take a personal day, if you’d like. Or I could suspend you pending review. But either way you’re off this case.”

“When a problem looks unsolvable,”Shawn said, “it just means that we’re not looking at it the right way.”

Despite Kitteredge’s insistence that the guise of museum docent provided a cloak of invisibility to rival the one elves hand out to ring-bearing hobbits, Gus and Shawn had felt that the European painting galleries were too well attended to make a safe hiding place. After a quick study of the museum map, they located the one spot in the institution that no one would ever walk into intentionally. And indeed, the Oceanic Arts and Crafts gallery was as deserted as any movie theater showing the second half of Funny People.

Had Gus been in more of a cultural mood he might have stopped to consider the unfairness of this. It was true that a lot of the Micronesian wood carvings all began to look alike very quickly, but some of the Melanesian works carried a sexual charge that Fragonard could only have dreamed of achieving. Granted, erotic sculptures of fertility goddesses would never replace Cinemax After Dark, but Gus was surprised not to see more teenage boys loitering around down here.

But right now, culture was the last thing on anyone’s minds. Even Kitteredge, who had started a brief discussion on the destruction of traditional art forms in the Oceanic cultures after World War II when they first entered the gallery, quickly wrapped it up as they began to focus on the difficulty of the task before them.

“The problem is that we have to get into a gallery that’s under constant guard by an armed police officer,” Gus said. “Is there another way to look at that?”

“There’s always another way,” Shawn said. “For instance, we could say that the core problem is that you haven’t come up with a solution.”

“Me?” Gus said. “What about you?”

“I don’t want to hog all the glory,” Shawn said. “Especially since you were the one Professor Kitteredge asked for help.”

“I’m willing to give up some glory,” Gus said. “In fact, you can have it all. So solve.”

“I can’t yet,” Shawn said. “Because we haven’t come up with the right way to ask the question. Once we do that, the answer will be obvious.”

“So what is the right question?” Gus said.

“That is,” Shawn said. “And now that you’ve asked it, the answer should be obvious to you. So go ahead and answer.”

The only answer that Gus could come up with seemed inappropriate to use in a museum frequented by families, even if none of them happened to be in this gallery. “What if we set some papers on fire so the alarm went off?” Gus said.

“Then steel doors would slam down on every gallery, and all the air would be sucked out to put out the fire and protect the art,” Shawn said.

“That wouldn’t happen,” Gus said.

“It did when Pierce Brosnan tried it,” Shawn said.

“First of all, you’re not Pierce Brosnan,” Gus said.

“I could be,” Shawn said. “I am wearing a tuxedo.”

“And second, that was a movie,” Gus said. “No museum is going to have steel doors that slam down on galleries if there’s a fire. What if there are people inside? They could suffocate or burn to death.”