Prayers For Rain Part 40

"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 W#7. "He's moved past Wetterau, so his back would have been to the car."

"Right."

"He hears tires squeal. He turns back back, sees the car plowing toward 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. .h.i.t." 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. .h.i.t."

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 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 b.u.mper 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 h.e.l.l 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."

"s.h.i.+t."

"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 pa.s.s. Boom."

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

16.

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 st.i.tched b.u.mper 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 st.i.tching 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 gla.s.s 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 un.o.bstructed, 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 modic.u.m of ash into a crystal ashtray. "He was rather"-her mist-gray eyes met mine-"cagey about anything else."

"Cagey," I said.

She took another small hit off the cigarette and crossed her long legs. "You like that?"

"Oh, yeah." I raised my eyebrows up and down several times.

She gave me a wisp of a smile and turned back to Angie. "As I hope I made quite clear to Mr. Kenzie, I have no inclination to discuss anything in regards to Miss Nichols's therapy."

Angie snapped her fingers. "Nuts."

Diane Bourne swiveled back to me. "Mr. Kenzie, however, intimated over the-"