William Rabkin - Psych - A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read

“Only in a technical sense,” Shawn said. “I accuse… her.” He pointed a finger at the coffee girl, who gazed back at him, perplexed.

“Me?”

Henry pulled her to his side. “Shawn, this is ridiculous.”

“Is it really?” Shawn said.

“Yes,” Gus said. The face on the cube was looking more like an elephant and less like a suspect. Gus rattled the ice, hoping to find another image. Instead, he saw something on the bottom of the glass. It looked like a shard of gray plastic.

“Think about it,” Shawn said. “She’s a seemingly insignificant player in the drama. We never even saw her once over the course of the investigation, but somehow her name kept on coming up.”

“We don’t even know her name,” Gus said.

“It’s Mindy,” the coffee girl said. She looked up at Henry adoringly. “Mindy Stackman. I’m in the book.”

“Why do you think there were all those constant, subtle, seemingly meaningless references to a character we never see? To establish her as a plausible suspect. And then she appears here for reasons no one understands.”

“She’s here because I brought her here,” Lassiter said. “And I brought her here because she was on your list.”

“And now she’s finally unmasked as the real killer,” Shawn concluded. “Can you imagine an ending more satisfying than that? More technically perfect? Even Joe Eszterhas would approve, and he wrote both Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct. ”

“He also wrote F.I.S.T., which is what you’re going to get in your face if you don’t stop saying things about me.” Mindy looked around at the accusing faces. “What? You’ve never seen a film major working at a coffeehouse before?”

“Fourteen minutes, Mr. Spencer,” Chief Vick said.

“Is there one reason why we shouldn’t think Mindy is the killer?”

“There’s no evidence,” O’Hara said.

“There’s no motive,” Lassiter said.

“There’s no connection,” Coules said. “Except some arbitrary pattern you imposed on a series of events because it’s convenient for you.”

“And that’s a bad thing?” Shawn said.

“Obviously,” Coules said.

“So why wasn’t it just as bad when you assumed that Dallas Steele’s murder was connected to the killings of John Marichal and Betty Walinski?”

Gus stopped trying to fish the thing out of the glass. Shawn actually seemed to be on the verge of a point. “The only reason to accuse Tara is a pattern. And the police created that pattern.”

“She was holding the knife!” Coules said.

“And because of that, you created this pattern that said she must have committed those other two murders,” Shawn said. “Because she’s the one person who could have had any reason, no matter how vague, for killing all three victims. But if you stop assuming there’s only one killer, there’s no reason for her to have done any of it.”

“Are you saying there are two killers, Mr. Spencer?” Chief Vick tapped her watch significantly.

“Disappointing, isn’t it?” Shawn said. “Classically, it’s much more satisfying to wrap up everything together. So if you want to go that way, I’ll understand and I’ll testify against Mindy.”

“That’s it,” Mindy said. “You are so banned from the Coffee Barn.”

“But if we want the truth, we have to dig a little deeper. Let’s think back to the first time Gus and I went to the impound yard.”

Shawn stopped. The others began to murmur their irritation as he stood silently, his head slightly cocked, his hands frozen in the air.

Gus nudged him. “What are you doing?”

“I’m waiting for the flashback.”

“We don’t have flashbacks. This is real life, not CSI.”

Shawn looked crushed. “Really?”

“Get on with it!”

Shawn sighed. “I’ve been informed that the flashbacks aren’t working. So while I go through this, please try to picture it in grainy black-and-white, maybe with a slight blurring effect on the action. Alicia?”

A harp glissando filled the room. Gus turned and saw that the woman in black had unpacked her case and taken out a full-size harp, which she was now seated in front of.

“What the hell is that?” Lassiter said.

“If we don’t have different film stocks, how are we going to differentiate past and present? Please, when you hear the harp, assume the image is dissolving away.”

“My life is dissolving away,” Galen said. “What am I doing here?”

“Quiet, you,” Lassiter snapped.

“I thought we went over the plan,” Gus said. “You didn’t mention any of this.”

“I was born to improvise.”

“When you call hours in advance to request the services of a harpist, that’s not improvising anymore?”

“It’s not?”

Chief Vick cleared her throat. “Your time is up, Mr. Spencer.”

Shawn checked his own watch, then cast a glance around the room.

“Okay, fine, you’re right,” Shawn said. “No drama, no flashbacks, no suspense, no craft. If all you want is the killer’s identity, it’s yours. Bert Coules did it. Come on, Gus.”

Shawn headed for the door. Walking behind him, Gus saw that his feet seemed to be dragging on the floor.

“That’s outrageous,” Coules shouted. It seemed like he was shouting, anyway. The words came out slowly and hesitantly. “You can’t accuse me of killing three people and just walk out of here.” He turned to the detectives. “Stop him.”

The detectives seemed frozen to the ground. They stared blindly into space. Gus looked around the room and saw that the others all appeared to be imitating department-store mannequins.

“There you go again,” Shawn said. His feet were barely lifting off the ground with each step. His words were beginning to slur. “Not three people. Just John Marichal and Betty Walinski. Although I might suggest revisiting her husband’s autopsy, just in case.”

“What’s going on here, Shawn?” Gus said. “And who killed Dallas Steele?”

“Look in your glass,” Shawn said, the words coming out with obvious effort. “The killer just revealed hims…”

Shawn’s voice trailed off. He stared blankly into space. Gus nudged him, but Shawn didn’t react. He seemed to be in a coma, like all the others.

What had happened to them? And why wasn’t it happening to Gus? He dumped the glass on the ground and scrabbled through the ice cubes to find the piece of gray plastic. It wasn’t the broken shard he’d assumed it to be. It was a tiny model of a gun. The kind you’d find mounted on a toy warship.

The kind you’d find mounted on a toy ship that transformed into a robot. And that would come off easily, since the glue holding it on, when exposed to water, dissolved into a hallucinogenic drug.

Someone must have spiked the Blak Shawn served here. And, Gus realized, it wasn’t the first time. Whoever it was must have also drugged Dallas Steele before killing him, and drugged Tara before putting the knife in her hand. That would explain why Tara seemed so lost and so docile when she was discovered standing over the body, and why she couldn’t remember anything about the killing. That was what Shawn had been trying to tell him.

It could have been Veronica. But Steele told her he’d given them the consulting position to help them. He wouldn’t have revealed the truth about the toy boats. And even if she wanted to kill her husband, how would she know about Tara? Gus could ask her, but she was as frozen as her guests.

At least Gus knew the crucial question to ask: Who knew both about Tara and the toy boats? And how had they found out?

Something was tickling the back of Gus’ brain. Something Shawn had said earlier. When he’d jumped up and announced he knew who killed Dallas Steele.