William Rabkin - A Fatal Frame of Mind

He bounded out of his chair and headed for the door.

“We still have most of our hour left, Detective Lassiter,” McCormick said in the same calm tone. “I would really appreciate it if you’d stay and talk about what happened this morning.”

“Maybe we could do it another day,” Lassiter said, one hand firmly clutching the doorknob. “Once the perp is in custody I’ll have plenty of time to chat.”

He turned the knob and opened the door. But before he could step through, he heard a voice from behind him. In certain superficial ways it sounded like Olivia McCormick. But underneath there was a tone of steel, like the indestructible armature under a Terminator’s skin.

“If you walk out that door, you will never walk back into the Santa Barbara Police Department,” the voice said.

Lassiter turned back and saw the skinless Terminator version of Olivia McCormick sitting where the kindergarten teacher had just been. She still had the same ponytail and hippie dress, but there was a light in her eyes that looked like it could kill from this distance.

“Excuse me?” Lassiter said.

“You are on medical leave pending my report,” McCormick said. “Until I sign off on your condition, you are suspended. And believe me when I say this applies not only to the SBPD but to any law enforcement agency you can think of, including the school district crossing guard corps. So unless you want to spend the rest of your working life as a security guard in a shopping mall, you will sit down and start talking.”

Lassiter’s legs marched him back to the comfortable chair and dropped him in.

The steely light went out in McCormick’s eyes and she leaned forward, once again the kindergarten teacher.

“So, Detective,” she said gently, “let’s talk about how you’re feeling.”

It wasn’t until he saw the windmill atop Pea Soup Andersen’s in Buellton that Gus was able to pull his eyes away from the rearview mirror. All the way up the 101 he’d expected to see red and blue lights flashing there. He couldn’t believe that the cops who’d stopped them outside the museum hadn’t just allowed them to flee in order to see where they were going.

In fact, part of him believed the cops hadn’t actually allowed them to go at all. It was quite possible that the three of them had been arrested and thrown into jail. That Gus had gone to trial and been convicted as an accessory after the fact and, under California’s felony murder laws, had been sentenced to death. Now his body was lying in a cell on death row waiting for execution while his mind spun this elaborate fantasy of escape to keep from having to deal with the truth.

Gus checked the rearview mirror again, this time to make sure that the passenger back there was still Professor Kitteredge. If he’d turned into Mariah Carey, that would have confirmed the death row fantasy scenario. He breathed a heavy sigh of relief to see his old professor, his head resting against the window as he snored quietly.

Which meant the encounter with the police had been real, too. When Gus had turned around to meet the eyes of the officer whose hand was clutching his shoulder, he expected to see the steely stare of the hunter looking down at his prey before administering the kill shot. Instead, the eyes were twinkling, and the face was smiling.

“What can we do for you, Officer?” Shawn said cheerfully. It was a long-held theory of his that if you act like nothing is wrong convincingly enough, eventually the world will take your word for it. That long-held theory had never actually worked in practice, but he was eternally hopeful that this would change one day.

“Do you know how long I’ve been searching for you?” the officer said.

Gus checked the cop’s eyeline. He wasn’t looking at Kitteredge, who had turned his back and was now apparently fascinated by a seagull that was circling slowly above their heads. He was staring directly at Shawn and Gus.

“Umm,” Gus said. “Us?”

“For weeks!” the officer said. “My best buddy is getting married next month, and I’m supposed to put together a bachelor party for him. But he’s kind of a prude, so he doesn’t want strippers or anything like that. I’ve been killing myself trying to figure out some kind of entertainment-and then I heard you talking about being psychics!”

“We’re not really that kind of psychics,” Gus said.

“Sure you aren’t,” the cop said. “That’s why you’re wearing tuxedos on a Sunday afternoon, because you’re not on your way to a performance.”

“But really we’re-” Gus started, but Shawn shoved him out of the way and stepped forward.

“Available for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and bachelor parties,” Shawn said. “You have to excuse my partner-he’s afraid his mother will find out he went into showbiz.” He produced a card and handed it to the officer. “You can reach our booking office at that number. And just ignore the part where it says psychic detectives. It was supposed to say psychic entertainers, but the printer messed it up. We were going to have him redo it, but he gave us a great price on ten thousand cards.”

The officer slipped the card into his pocket without looking at it. “You’ll be hearing from me,” he said. “And say-if you happen to know any hot girls, we’re not all prudes like the groom.”

Gus was searching for a way to answer that when some sort of shoving match broke out toward the top of the stairs. The cop gave Shawn a knowing wink, and he and his partner headed up to deal with the disturbance while the three of them ran to the Echo.

And that had been their last encounter with the police. They hadn’t even seen a highway patrolman on the freeway. Which didn’t keep Gus from worrying for the whole drive.

At least he was able to worry in peace and quiet. Shawn had closed his eyes and gone to sleep as soon as they hit the 101-less because he’d been up all night, Gus suspected, than because his other option was to spend the entire drive describing the missing painting in excruciating detail. Kitteredge, too, quickly nodded off.

Which left Gus time to finally ponder the question that would have occurred to him hours earlier if events hadn’t been moving so fast: What the hell were they doing?

When he and Shawn had set off to find Professor Kitteredge, it was to protect him from being discovered by a member of the force who might think him so dangerous he needed to be shot before being questioned. But Gus had never really considered what they were going to do once they’d found him-the task itself seemed so impossible that contemplating the next step felt like a waste of time. Then, once they had actually accomplished this, things started moving under their own impetus. Step by step, everything they did seemed to make sense at the time, and yet it didn’t actually add up to a logical plan.

In fact, nothing that had happened since they first showed up at the museum made any logical sense. Unless he meant dream logic. Because while Professor Kitteredge’s story about the search for King Arthur’s magic sword was powerfully convincing when he’d laid it out, once Gus had had the chance to think it over, it began to sound ridiculous. They might as well be searching for Cinderella’s glass slipper.

Gus knew there was only one right thing to do now. He should wake up Kitteredge and tell him he had no choice but to turn himself in. Then he’d pull into the Pea Soup parking lot and call Chief Vick to arrange the professor’s surrender. That would fulfill his original intention, which was to make sure Kitteredge would be safe until he could prove his innocence.

But Gus wasn’t sure he could do that from a jail cell. Not that he believed his old professor had anything to do with Filkins’ murder. But as long as Kitteredge was unable or unwilling to provide an alibi, then this mysterious conspiracy was their only hope of finding the real killer. And no matter how absurd it sounded, someone had been able to steal that painting from under the noses of the cops. If not an all-powerful conspiracy, then who could have done it? And if the only clues to the Cabal lay hidden in that painting, and the only available copy of the picture was the one in Shawn’s mind, then separating the professor from Shawn would present an insuperable obstacle to discovering the truth.