Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

“Motive,” Angie said. “We keep coming back to motive.”

“I know.”

“Who really vandalized her car, and why?”

“Yup.”

“Who wrote the letters to Cody Falk, and why?”

“Why,” I said, “did someone feel the need to fuck with this woman’s life so completely she jumped off a building rather than take any more of it?”

“And did they go so far as to arrange David Wetterau’s accident?”

“Access is an issue, too,” I said.

She chewed her sandwich, dabbed the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “How so?”

“Who sent Karen the photos of David and the other woman? Hell, who took the photos?”

“They look professional to me.”

“Me, too.” I popped a cold french fry in my mouth. “And who gave Karen her own psychiatrist’s notes? That’s a big one.”

Angie nodded. “And why?” she said. “Why, why, why?”

It turned into a long night. We read through all forty-six statements given by the witnesses to David Wetterau’s accident, and a good half saw nothing at all, while the other twenty or so backed up the eventual police determination-Wetterau tripped in a pothole, got clipped in the head by a car doing everything in its power not to hit him.

Angie had even drawn up a crude diagram of the accident scene. It showed the placement of all forty-six witnesses at the time of the accident, and looked like a rough representation of a football game after a broken play. The majority of the witnesses-twenty-six-had been standing on the southwest corner of Purchase and Congress. Stockbrokers, mostly, heading for South Station after a day in the financial district, they stood waiting for the light to change. Another thirteen stood on the northwest corner, directly across from David Wetterau as he jaywalked toward them. Two more witnesses stood on the northeast corner, and a third drove the car behind Steven Kearns, the driver of the car that eventually clipped Wetterau’s head. Of the remaining five witnesses, two had stepped off the curb on the southeast corner as the light turned yellow, and three were in the crosswalk, jaywalking like Wetterau-two heading west into the financial district, one heading east.

The closest witness had been that man, the one heading east. His name was Miles Brewster, and just after he passed David Wetterau, Wetterau stepped in the pothole. The car was already traveling through the intersection, and when Wetterau fell, Steven Kearns immediately went into his swerve and those in the crosswalk scattered.

“Except for Brewster,” I said.

“Huh?” Angie looked up from the photos of David Wetterau and the other woman.

“Why didn’t this Brewster guy panic, too?”

She slid her chair over beside mine and looked down at the diagram.

“He’s here,” I said and placed my finger on the crude stick figure she’d labeled W#7 . “He’s moved past Wetterau, so his back would have been to the car.”

“Right.”

“He hears tires squeal. He turns back, sees the car plowing toward him, and yet he’s-” I found his statement, read from it. “He’s, quote, ‘a foot from the guy, reaching toward him, you know, sorta frozen’ when Wetterau gets hit.”

Angie took the statement from my hand and read it. “Yeah, but you can freeze up in this sort of situation.”

“But he’s not frozen, he’s reaching.” I pulled my chair in closer to the table, pointed at W#7 in the diagram. “His back was to it, Ange. He had to turn, see it develop. His arm’s not frozen, but his legs are? He’s standing, by his own admission, a foot, maybe two, from car tires and a rear bumper sliding out of control.”

She stared down at the diagram, rubbed her face. “Our possession of these statements is illegal. We can’t reinterview Brewster and let on that we know what his original statement was.”

I sighed. “That do make it tougher.”

“It do.”

“But the guy bears a second look, you agree?”

“Definitely.”

She sat back in her chair, raised both hands to her head to push back hair that wasn’t there anymore. She caught herself at the same time I did, gave my wide grin her middle finger as she brought her hands back down.

“Okay,” she said, and drummed her pen on her notepad. “What’s our list of priorities here?”

“First, talk to Karen’s psychiatrist.”

She nodded. “That’s a hell of a leak coming from her office.”

“Second, talk to Brewster. You got an address?”

She pulled a piece of paper from the bottom of the thermal fax pile. “Miles Brewster,” she said, “ Twelve Landsdowne Street.” She looked up from the page and her mouth remained open.

“Gee,” I said, “what’s wrong with this picture?”

“Twelve Landsdowne,” she said. “That would make it-”

“ Fenway Park.”

She groaned. “How’s a cop not notice that?”

I shrugged. “A rookie taking the statements at the scene. Forty-six witnesses, he’s tired, whatever.”

“Shit.”

“But Brewster,” I said, “is now officially dirty.”

Angie dropped the fax paper to the table. “This wasn’t an accident.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Your operating theory.”

“Brewster’s walking east, Wetterau’s walking west. Brewster slips out his foot as they pass. Boom.”

She nodded, excitement surging past the fatigue in her face. “Brewster says he was reaching down to pick Wetterau back up.”

“But he was actually holding him down,” I said.

Angie lit a cigarette, squinted through the smoke at her diagram. “We’ve stumbled onto something ugly here, pal.”

I nodded. “Big ol’ hunk of ugly.”

Dr. Diane Bourne’s office was housed on the second floor of a brownstone on Fairfield Street, in between a gallery specializing in mid-thirteenth-century East African kitchen pottery and a place that stitched bumper stickers on canvas and then sewed them to magnets for easy refrigerator attachment.

The office was done up in some kind of Laura Ashley meets the Spanish Inquisition decor. Plump armchairs and couches with floral stitching bore an inviting sense of softness that was all but overwhelmed by their colors-blood reds and pitch ebonies, carpets that matched, paintings on the wall by Bosch and Blake. I’d always thought a psychiatrist’s room was supposed to say Please, tell me your problems, not Please, don’t scream.

Diane Bourne was in her late thirties and so svelte I had to resist the urge to call in some takeout, force-feed her lunch. Dressed in a white sleeveless sheath dress that rode high up her throat and low to her knee, she stood out amid all the dark like a ghost floating through the moors. Her hair and skin were so pale it was hard to see where one began and the other ended, and even her eyes were the translucent gray of an ice storm. The tight dress, instead of making her look scrawny, seemed to accentuate the few soft parts of her, the flesh that swelled just slightly over her calves and hips and shoulders. The overall effect, I thought, as she took a seat behind her smoked glass desk, was of an engine-sleek, well-tuned, revving at every red light.

As soon as we took our seats at the desk, Dr. Diane Bourne moved a small metronome to her left, so that her view of us was completely unobstructed, and lit a cigarette.

She gave Angie a small, dark smile. “Now, what can I do for you?”

“We’re looking into the death of Karen Nichols,” Angie said.

“Yes,” she said, and sucked a small white cloud of smoke back into her lungs, “Mr. Kenzie mentioned as much on the phone.” She tapped a modicum of ash into a crystal ashtray. “He was rather”-her mist-gray eyes met mine-“cagey about anything else.”