By the Time You Read This

51

CARDINAL WAITED, LISTENING. Old houses creak; it might have been nothing. Bell could already have fled, taken a cab to the airport.

A definite footfall.

He crossed the hall in three silent steps and opened the remaining door. A half flight of stairs led to a landing. Once more keeping to the edges, he moved toward the third floor. He could see nothing beyond the landing. When he reached it, he took a deep breath and turned toward the next flight, Beretta up.

“I thought it would be you,” Bell said.

The doctor was seated on the top step, an automatic in his hand—a Luger, if Cardinal was not mistaken—pointed right at Cardinal’s chest.

Had it happened a few weeks previously, Cardinal knew, the sight of Dr. Bell’s Luger pointed at his chest would have made him tremble. But standing on the steps below the doctor, he realized that, at this moment, he didn’t care.

“One thing you should know,” he said. “I have a significant advantage over you right now.”

“Why? Because you don’t care whether you live or die?”

Once again the doctor had read him perfectly.

“I assure you,” the doctor continued, “I am quite at the same point. I too have lost a wife.”

“‘Lost’ isn’t quite the word, is it? I know why you murdered your wife. She took your trophies. You’ve been collecting them for years. Mementoes of your triumphs. Your victories.”

“If you are referring to my discs, a more intelligent man would realize they are a teaching aid.”

“You don’t have any students.”

“Teaching aids for myself. Some of us do try to keep learning, you know, by reviewing sessions with particularly difficult clients.”

“Easy to gloat, too. To see how you encouraged your patients to kill themselves, all the while pretending to help them.”

“What I do is clarify. By reflecting a patient’s true feelings back at him or her, I give them the power to act on those feelings. New options can open up. Some may find new ways to ease the pain, if not to find earthly bliss. Others may choose to kill themselves, and that’s entirely their choice and their right.”

“Those discs clearly show you pick and choose which feelings to reflect. All the negative ones. Their blackest thoughts. You encourage them. ‘Write me out a suicide note. Let’s make it real, here. Let’s put it into words. Let’s take a real step toward actually doing it. Think of all the good things that’ll come out of it. An end to pain, for one. Ease the burden on your family, for another.’”

“True, in a lot of cases. Those are legitimate concerns.”

“And you make sure they have a lot of pills handy, in case they’re squeamish about blood, or …”

“Or what? Disfigurement? Yes, when they jump, it does terrible damage to the facial bones, doesn’t it?”

Cardinal’s finger tightened on the Beretta.

“Or you put them on an antidepressant. And then suddenly change it, or take them off it. Excellent way to put people over the edge.”

“Detective, if I made all my patients feel suicidal, I’d have no practice at all. If I really made people feel worse, no one would come back to me.”

“They don’t come back to you. They die.”

“Wonderful. Sherlock Holmes uncovers the truth about depression. Depressed patients kill themselves.”

“Yours do. They have to, don’t they.”

Bell raised the Luger so that it was now aimed at Cardinal’s face.

Cardinal jerked his Beretta up to firing position.

“I could kill you now,” he said, “and it would be justifiable homicide. I wouldn’t even have to lie about it.”

“Go ahead, then,” Bell said. His gun hand was wavering.

Cardinal noticed as from a great distance the fury burning through him, as if he were observing a wildfire from a helicopter.

“I know you want to kill me,” Bell said.

“And you want me to. It’s called suicide by cop. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? I read in your book how both your parents killed themselves—that might be a good reason for studying the treatment of depression. On the other hand, it might be a good reason for hating people who get depressed. And it might be a good reason for wanting to kill yourself.”

“You read that in my book too. The so-called suicide gene.”

“You’ve wanted to kill yourself for a long time, but, unlike so many of your patients, you can’t do it. Just like you say in your book: some people need to be around people who are capable of killing themselves. You need them to do it for you. You egg them on, manoeuvre them, manipulate them, all the time pretending to help them. But it’s you you’re trying to help. You’re trying to finish the one suicide you’ve always wanted to commit but never had the guts to follow through on. I wonder if you knew that way back when you first became a psychiatrist.”

“What have you got, Detective? A grade ten education? Do you really imagine you can analyze me?”

“I don’t have to. You can do it yourself. Why else would you devote your life to people you clearly hate? It must have been quite a strain keeping up that concerned, caring front all these years.”

“You don’t know anything about the people I treat. They’re scum. Whiners. Utterly useless. Utterly selfish. They’ve never done anything for anyone else in their entire miserable lives. Human garbage.”

“How does it make you feel, Doctor? Isn’t that your favourite question? How does it make you feel when they finally kill themselves? These whiners, this human garbage. It must feel—”

“Wonderful,” Bell said. “There’s no feeling like it. I couldn’t describe it to you. Better than sex. Better than heroin. I love it. So why don’t you kill me?”

“And when they won’t kill themselves,” Cardinal went on, “if they’re too strong, like Catherine …”

“It’s not my fault she didn’t get it. She was desperate to kill herself, she just wouldn’t admit it. How many times does she need to be hospitalized before she catches on?”

“That must be very … upsetting for you. It must be extremely—what’s the right word here—frustrating?”

Bell’s face was a portrait of contempt.

“Infuriating?”

Bell shook his head tightly. “You don’t know anything about me. No one does.”

“They know in Manchester. Or they will know, when they finally open their investigation.”

“You think so.”

“I know it. I also know you killed Catherine. Because, as you say, she just didn’t get it. She didn’t get that her therapist wanted her to commit suicide, and when she just would not take her own life, it was intolerable for you, and you had to kill her yourself.”

“Wouldn’t you like to think so? If she committed suicide, what does that make you, right? The big detective. The knight in shining armour. What becomes of him if he can’t save his own wife? If she can’t stand living with him anymore? If she hates him so thoroughly she can throw away the rest of her life rather than spend it with him? That’s unbearable, isn’t it, Detective? No wonder you have to believe I killed her.”

“I didn’t say I believed it,” Cardinal said. “I said I know it.”

He held up the tiny Baggie.

“What’s that supposed to be?”

“It’s a memory chip, Doctor. From Catherine’s camera.”

“Why should I care about that?”

“She took your picture when you came out onto the roof. She always did that—photographed whoever was around when she was taking pictures. She photographed everyone. She was essentially a shy person. Her camera was a kind of defence. You knew she took your picture and that’s why you took the camera with you when you left. You went down to where she fell and you took it away. I imagine you were too excited at the time to realize it had broken open, the chip had flown out. You must’ve been awfully disappointed when you got home and realized the camera was empty. I would have loved to have seen that moment. Better than heroin, for sure. Well, I’ve seen what’s on that chip, and your life is essentially over.”

“She was bipolar, Detective. Had been for decades. How many hospital admissions were there, all told? A dozen? Twenty?”

“I didn’t count them.”

“She would have killed herself eventually.”

“Is that what you tell yourself? Is that how you get to sleep at night?”

“Go ahead, then. Shoot me.”

“You want me to?”

“Go ahead. I’m not afraid.”

“Sorry, Doctor. No one’s going to do it for you ever again. You’re just going to have to shoot yourself.”

Cardinal lowered his gun so it was pointed at the floor.

Bell’s gun hand shook harder.

“I’ll kill you,” he said. “You know I can do it.”

“I’m not the one you want to kill, Doctor. I’m not one of your patients. One of your whiners, as you so compassionately call them. Killing me won’t stop the pain.”

With a jerk of his elbow, a marionette move in its suddenness, Bell aimed the Luger in a diagonal at his own temple.

“All these years,” Cardinal said, “it’s what you’ve really wanted, isn’t it.”

Beads of sweat sprung out on Bell’s brow. He squeezed his eyes shut. A single tear rolled down his cheek and into his beard.

“Go ahead. You don’t really want to spend the rest of your life in prison, do you?”

Hand and gun trembled. Bell’s whole body was shaking. Sweat rolled down the reddening face.

“You can’t do it, can you?”

Bell groaned, and a sob escaped from his woolly beard. The Luger dropped to the floor and tumbled down the steps. Cardinal picked it up.

“I think we’ve done some good work today, Doctor. I’d say we’ve got to the root of your problem. Now you’ll have a couple of decades in Kingston to work on it.”