Saturday, 12 December 2015
2:15 P.M.
Curtis had not been at the field office when Baxter and Rouche stopped by. Neither had she returned any of their calls. Unsure whether she had just taken an extended lunch to clear her head or, quite understandably, stood down for the remainder of the day, they decided to press on without her.
The address of the practice, scrawled across the back of Rouche’s hand, had led them to a grand building on East 20th Street overlooking Gramercy Park. They climbed the steps between the imposing columns of the ornate portico.
Baxter felt a little underdressed as they crossed an impressive reception area and were instructed to take a seat. Overwhelmed by the number of buttons on the coffee machine, she poured herself a glass of water and sat down opposite Rouche, classical music softening the silence.
“We’ll catch up with Curtis at the hotel,” Rouche told her, more for his own benefit, seeing as Baxter had not spoken a word in over five minutes. “She probably needs a bit more time.”
“She might need more than that,” said Baxter, looking pointedly around at where they were.
“Hmmm.”
“What? It might help.”
“They’ll suggest it, no doubt.”
“Do you have a problem with that?” asked Baxter, a little defensively.
After the dust had settled on the Ragdoll case, and she was able to stop long enough to actually process what had happened, she had been to talk to someone. She had always considered it a provision for weaker people than her, for people unable to cope with the trials of everyday life, but she had been wrong. It had been far easier to express her feelings to a complete stranger than to anybody who knew her, who might judge her, who expected more from her. Over several sessions, she had gradually come to terms with the death of one of her closest friends: Benjamin Chambers, a man who had been more of a father figure to her than a colleague.
“I have no problem with other people doing it,” answered Rouche, “but it’s certainly not anything I’d ever consider.”
“Yeah, you’re just too strong a person to have any issues, aren’t you?” snapped Baxter, aware that she was revealing something deeply personal with the outburst. “You are perfect.”
“I am far from perfect,” said Rouche calmly.
“You think? Ordering your colleagues to let you die. Screaming at the friend who killed an innocent man to save you. Smiling as some nutjob points a gun at you.”
“Not this again.”
“I’m just saying, if anybody needs to talk through some of their shit . . . it’s you.”
“You done?” asked Rouche.
Baxter kept quiet, suspecting that she had perhaps crossed a line. They sat in silence for a moment until the scowling receptionist lost interest.
“I pray,” said Rouche, back to his amiable self. “That’s where I went while you were at the hospital. That’s where I talk through my ‘shit’ every single day because I fear I might have more than anybody.”
Something in Rouche’s tone told Baxter that he meant it.
“You misunderstand my misgivings,” he continued. “I pass no judgment on the person looking for help; we all are. It’s the person paid to listen that I don’t trust. Because the idea of someone out there knowing everything about me that I try so hard to hide away terrifies me—as it should everyone else. No one should have that much power over you.”
Baxter had never thought about it like that before, projecting a certain professional detachment onto the authoritative doctor. Had she been fooling herself into believing that someone in such a profession was bound by a set of laws and decorum more stringent than those that Baxter flaunted so regularly within her own? Had she tried to ignore that the woman had a mouth located just a few inches below her greedy ears just like everybody else?
She had just begun dissecting each and every conversation that she had had with the counselor when they were invited in to see Dr. Arun. His luxurious office was a more relaxed take on the reception area, with a tree standing watch beside the window. He offered them seats at his tidy desk. A thick file sat atop, labeled with Glenn Arnolds’s name.
“May I see some identification before we start?” asked the doctor firmly but politely. He raised his eyebrows on reading Baxter’s Metropolitan Police–issued card but did not question it.
“So I believe you require some information on one of my patients. I presume there is no need to tell you that most of what is documented here is protected by doctor-patient confidentiality.”
“He’s dead,” blurted Baxter.
“Oh!” said Dr. Arun. “I’m very sorry to hear that. But it does not change the fact that—”
“He murdered someone,” Baxter continued. It was not technically true but was far simpler than the actual story.
“I see.”
“In quite possibly the darkest and most disturbing way that either of us has ever seen.”
“Right,” said the doctor, his mind immediately jumping to the horrific reports coming out of Grand Central Terminal. “OK. What do you need?”
Glenn Arnolds had been diagnosed with acute schizoaffective disorder at the age of ten, attributed to the untimely death of his twin brother the previous year: a blood clot in the brain. Glenn had gone through life expecting to suffer the same fate at any given moment, not helped any by his propensity for severe headaches. He had lived his life literally waiting to die while mourning the death of his twin. This had led to him becoming increasingly reclusive and depressed, and had prompted a tendency to regard life as cheap and fleeting, just as his brother’s had been.
He had transferred to the Gramercy Practice three years earlier, had a flawless attendance record, and had been making significant progress in both one-on-one and group sessions. With the exception of mild depressive episodes, his psychotic symptoms had been kept at bay by prescription meds. In summary, he had never shown the slightest indication of violence toward anybody.
“How was he paying for the pleasure of your company?” Rouche asked the doctor.
Baxter wondered whether he had phrased the question intentionally to make the psychiatrist sound like a prostitute.
“Doesn’t look like you guys come cheap,” he added.
“Health insurance,” answered Dr. Arun with just a hint of injustice in his voice. “Very good health insurance. I believe that when his twin died, his parents signed him up for the best they could afford. Since the mental illness was diagnosed afterwards . . .” The doctor finished his sentence with a shrug.
“And in your ‘professional opinion’ . . .”
Baxter glared at him.
“. . . how did Glenn seem to you over the past couple of weeks?” asked Rouche.
“I’m sorry?”
“Did he present any indication that he might have relapsed? Or could he have stopped taking his meds?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know,” said Dr. Arun in confusion. “I have never met him.”
“What?” asked Baxter.
“We had our first session scheduled for next week. I’m sorry. I thought you knew. I’ve taken over Dr. Bantham’s client list. He left the practice last Friday.”
Baxter and Rouche looked at one another.
“Last Friday?” she asked. “Was this a planned resignation?”
“Oh yes. I was interviewed for the role a good two months ago.”
Baxter sighed, having thought they were onto something.
“We’re still going to need to talk to him,” Rouche told the doctor. “Think you could find us some contact details?”
There had been no answer on either phone number supplied by the scary receptionist. She had printed off a home address for Dr. Bantham in Westchester County, approximately a fifty-minute drive from Manhattan. With the FBI still attempting to identify Glenn Arnolds’s victim, Glenn Arnolds’s body somewhere between the hospital morgue and the forensic lab, and Curtis ignoring them, they elected to risk a wasted journey up to Rye to pay the doctor a visit.
Baxter didn’t have high expectations as she read the directions out to Rouche:
“With the golf course on the left, we should cross over Beaver Swamp Brook any second, then it’s the next right turn off Locust Avenue.”
“Lovely.”
They pulled into an idyllic cul-de-sac. It had clearly been snowing heavily north of the city. Inches of powder balanced on the beautifully pruned hedges lining the sweeping driveways, which had been brushed clear to reveal the wet gravel beneath. Perfect snowmen stood proudly in generous gardens, surrounded by sets of small footprints. Wood siding of various hues adorned each home, giving the wintry scene a Scandinavian edge. It was hard to picture the pandemonium of Times Square less than an hour’s drive away.
“I have a suspicion that the town planner wanted to keep this place secret,” said Rouche as he looked for house numbers. He was unable to resist enviously imagining his family coming home to one of these perfect properties. “What’s this one, Dog Shit Drive?”
Baxter laughed, as did Rouche at the unfamiliar sound.
They turned into a driveway at the end of the road just as the twilight activated the automatic sensors leading up to the triple garage. It was not looking hopeful. None of the lights were on inside the house, and unlike the neighboring properties, an unspoiled layer of snow covered the driveway, garden, and path up to the front door.
They parked up and stepped out into the silent garden. Wind chimes played softly on the breeze from the porch of another house, and they could hear a car speeding along a road somewhere far off in the distance. Baxter was shocked by the cold; it felt several degrees cooler than it had back in the city. They crunched loudly toward the front door in the fading light, the tall trees that surrounded them draining of color and definition with every passing second.
Rouche rang the doorbell.
Nothing.
Baxter trampled the flower bed to peer through a large window, the dark bulbs of fairy lights nailed into the frame reminding her of Rouche’s neglected family home. She squinted, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. She thought she could make out the hint of a warm glow coming from another room.
“Might be a light on,” she called to Rouche as he knocked at the door.
She stomped over more flower beds, turned the corner, and peered through the side windows, where she thought she had seen the light. But the house was completely dark inside. She sighed and made her way back to Rouche.
“Probably on holiday. It is nearly Christmas,” she said.
“Probably.”
“Wanna try the neighbors?”
“Nah, not tonight. It’s too cold. I’ll leave a card, and we can make some phone calls in the morning,” said Rouche, already heading back toward the warm car.
“Plus you promised us dinner tonight,” Baxter reminded him.
“Well, yeah, if we find Curtis. I wasn’t rude to you.”
“You were a bit rude.”
Rouche smiled. “Yeah, maybe a bit rude.”
They climbed back into the car and turned up the heater. Rouche reversed down the long driveway, guided by the twinkling lights of the house opposite. With one final glance back at his dream home, the car wheelspun down the curb, and they drove away back to Manhattan.
A few minutes passed, in which the night swallowed up the last of the dying light. And then, somewhere inside the lifeless house, the warm glow returned, burning against the darkness.
Thomas woke up at the kitchen table with Echo’s rear end pressed into his face. He sat up as the clock on the cooker changed to 2:19 A.M. The remnants of the dinner he had cooked for himself and Baxter sat in the center of the table beside his phone: no new text messages, no missed calls.
He had kept abreast of the latest developments from New York throughout the day, assuming that Baxter would be involved in some capacity. He had fought the overwhelming urge to contact her, just to ensure that she was all right, to let her know that he was there should she need to talk.
He had felt her slipping away from him over the past couple of months, not that he could say he ever truly had her in the first place. It seemed that the harder he tried to hold on to her, the further he ended up pushing her away. Even Edmunds had warned him off pressuring her. He had never considered himself a needy person, in fact quite the opposite. He was self-assured and independent. But the ridiculously unreasonable demands that Baxter’s job made of her had left him in a state of perpetual anxiety.
Was it “clingy” to want to know whether his girlfriend was still alive?
She would go nights without sleep, entire days fueled by coffee alone. She could be roaming any part of the city, at any hour, in the company of the very worst that London had to offer. She had grown so accustomed to the horrors she witnessed that she had become desensitized to it. And that was what worried him most: she was not afraid of anything.
Fear was a good thing. It kept one alert, careful. It kept one safe.
He got up, took the plate he had set aside for Baxter, just in case, and scooped the contents into Echo’s food bowl, who looked down at him as if he had just soiled a perfectly good pile of biscuits.
“Night, Echo,” he said.
He switched off the lights and went up to bed.
The dark bags under Edmunds’s eyes looked ghastly as they were thrown into shadow by the light radiating off his laptop. He switched on the kettle and had to remove his thick jumper because the small fan heater had excelled itself. Had the lamp he was working by not been resting on top of a lawnmower, he might have convinced himself he was somewhere more glamorous than his own decrepit shed.
He had spent hours wading through the killers’ financials. Blake had also been good enough to keep him in the loop regarding the Met’s investigation into the sixty-one-year-old cop-killing arsonist, Patrick Peter Fergus. This was on the proviso that Edmunds put in a good word with Baxter, which, of course, he had no intention of doing.
Due to his incarceration, Dominic Burrell’s accounts had taken a matter of minutes to work through; however, the same could not be said for their first killer, the bridge-diving Marcus Townsend. Despite being written as an endless list of transactions and balances, his financial history had been a riveting read. Edmunds could track it right back to his first tentative foray into illicit trading, watching his confidence growing proportionally to his various bank balances.
It had been a disaster waiting to happen. As the trades became more and more blatant, Edmunds could sense the addiction behind the numbers until the sudden cessation in mid-2007, the very worst thing that Townsend could have done. Edmunds could picture the scene: the police arriving at his offices, looking through the records, spooking him into incriminating himself through a drastic drop in personal profits, and Townsend admitting his guilt in trying to save himself. From there, it had been a tragic story for Townsend: fine after fine hacking away at his fortune before the value of whatever assets he still possessed crashed along with the worldwide markets.
He had been ruined.
Before moving on to Eduardo Medina’s accounts, Edmunds opened up the website for the Streets to Success initiative, in which Townsend had still been enrolled when he strung a body up over the Brooklyn Bridge. It was inspirational stuff, seeing the photographs of homeless people, who looked too far detached from society to ever return, dressed in shirts and ties on their first day of work. Perhaps that was why Edmunds lingered on the site for longer than he normally would have.
He came across a hyperlink, contained within one of the true stories, that caught his attention. He clicked on it and was redirected to another part of the site. He only read down to the third item on the list before excitedly throwing the dregs of his coffee across his lap. He checked his watch, counted out the hours on his fingers, and phoned Baxter.
Baxter was fast asleep. They had eventually caught up with Curtis back at the hotel, where Rouche had made a heartfelt apology, and she had reluctantly agreed to join them for some food. All a little drained after the eventful day, they had called it a night in order to get an early start in the morning.
Baxter reached for the buzzing phone: “Edmunds?” she groaned.
“Were you asleep?” he asked, a little judgmentally.
“Yes! Funnily enough. It’s all right for you—it’s . . . Wait, no, it’s not. What are you still doing up?”
“Going through the files you sent me,” he said, as though it were obvious.
Baxter yawned.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
He had finally learned how to speak to Baxter. If she wanted to talk about what had happened that morning at Grand Central, she would. If not, he would receive a one-word response and move on until such time as she did.
“Yeah.”
“I need you to get hold of some more stuff for me,” said Edmunds.
“I know. I’ll get you the files on the Mall and Grand Central tomorrow.”
“I’ve already got the London file.”
She didn’t even want to know how he had managed that, so decided not to ask.
“I need complete medical records for all of them,” said Edmunds.
“Medical? OK. Looking for anything in particular?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a hunch.”
Baxter trusted Edmunds’s intuition even more than her own.
“I’ll send them to you tomorrow. I mean, later.”
“Thanks. I’ll let you get back to sleep. Good night.”
“Edmunds?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t forget why you left the team in the first place.”
Edmunds understood the underlying sentiment. This was Baxter’s way of saying that she was worried about him. He had to smile.
“I won’t.”