The Last Blue Plate Special (33 page)

“How did she get from there to becoming a doctor?” I asked. “It seems unlikely, given what you’ve told me.”

Rainer glanced at his watch. “I only have a few more minutes,” he said. “Isadora tried a number of things after she turned
eighteen and was no longer under the jurisdiction of the court, some of them criminal but nothing serious. Drugs, petty thefts.
I was always able to prevent her spending time in jail. Eventually she asked if I’d pay her tuition for college, and I agreed.
There were starts and stops, but she’s quite intelligent and found a way to build self-esteem by getting good grades. She
was given a partial scholarship to medical school, and I funded the rest. Her choice to become a doctor was merely an attempt
to please me, I’m afraid. Isadora merely regards it as a job. She has little or no real feeling for people, but neither is
she hateful, which is my point in giving you her history. You must understand. I
know
Isadora.”

“Yes, you do,” I agreed as we walked back toward the emergency room doors. “Dr. Rainer, that blue willow plate on the wall
of your surgical waiting room. Is that plate Isadora’s?”

“Dr. Bouchie told me this murderer has some connection to those plates,” he said, frowning. “No, Dr. McCarron, that plate
belonged to my wife. Marlis decorated the waiting room. I had a professional do the rest of the office, but the waiting room
was Mar’s project. Years ago, after Megan went off to college, Mar developed an interest in antique china, joined a collector’s
club. The blue willow was the best piece in her collection and she felt it should be displayed. She created that wall of plates
to complement the blue willow. Isadora had nothing to do with it and in fact probably couldn’t name the pattern if asked.”

“Why did Isadora choose to go into anesthesiology? If she were basing her career choices on yours, wouldn’t she have chosen
cosmetic surgery?”

Rainer sighed and then nodded. I had the feeling he’d thought about the answers to these questions for years.

“Marlis and I had hoped Isadora would marry, maybe adopt children, have a life like ours,” he said, shaking his head. “We
still didn’t understand how impossible that was. At one point we suspected the existence of a lesbian relationship with one
of her professors in med school. I know I appear an old fuddyduddy to you young people, Dr. McCarron,” he said, smiling for
the first time, “but let me tell you that was
fine
with us. We just wanted Isadora to have a deep connection, a love to make her life as complete as we knew it could be. But
I’m afraid we were only imagining loves for Isadora. In truth, there were none, have never been.

“Anesthesiology is lucrative but requires very long hours,” he explained. “Few women specialize in it for that reason. It’s
incompatible with family life. Isadora wanted a great deal of financial security, wanted to repay me for the costs of her
education, and did. She knew she would never have a family. Anesthesiology seemed the right choice.”

His hand was on the e.r. door now, and I could see Roxie, Rathbone, and a man with a cord running from his shirt collar to
his right ear hurrying from the parking lot across the street.

“But here is what you must know in order to understand both Isadora’s innocence of these crimes and the reason for what must
seem an incriminating attempt to end her own life. Last night she came to me, came to my apartment, with an investment idea.
I don’t have time to explain it in detail, but it involved our jointly underwriting a breast-surgery clinic she would direct.
She wanted me to be on staff for occasional reconstructive surgeries. We talked until very late, and then she stayed and slept
on the couch. I know she didn’t leave because the door can only be unlocked from either side with a key. It was locked, and
I had the key. She could not have sent those messages last night, Dr. McCarron.

“Isadora is a difficult, troubled woman and always will be,” he concluded. “She must live with a serious psychiatric disorder
and the baggage from a brutal childhood, but she isn’t a murderer. These facts do not make her a murderer. I hope you and
the others”—he nodded toward the three approaching figures—“are able to draw that distinction.”

“But did you agree to this investment idea, this clinic?” I yelled as he went inside.

“No,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ve decided to move up north to be near Chris and Megan and my grandchildren.”

A few things were beginning to make sense, I thought as the door closed behind him. Grecchi had needed to hold on to Rainer,
her lifelong source of stability. With the closing of the Rainer Clinic she’d come up with a plan, a new clinic they’d fund
jointly. She’d be the director and he’d be around to do surgeries when his skills were needed. Mostly, he’d be around. But
he’d said no, plummeting her into panic and suicidal despair. I guessed it made sense.

Except why would she undermine her own security, represented by Rainer, by killing patients at his clinic? To get even with
him for abandoning her to a Denver social services agency over forty years ago? The child Isadora, I imagined, would have
been jealous of Megan Rainer, who had supplanted her in the Rainers’ home. Had the adult Isadora transgressed an unthinkable
ethical boundary and killed patients as a way of hurting Megan? But Megan wasn’t going to take over the clinic, anyway. Its
closing now only benefitted her, allowed her the fulfillment of her dream two years before she’d expected.

And the enigmatic blue willow plates. I remembered feeling that a child had been outside my place that night, that I’d been
playing hide and seek with a child who’d left me a strange gift in the dark. Did that child live inside the mind of a fifty-one-year-old
woman whose blood now dried on the hem of my skirt?

The train of thought was like a maze. It led nowhere, didn’t work, made no sense. But then real people have never made much
sense to me, only numbers. Charts and graphs and statistical estimations make sense. So does my notion of the universe, the
grid, although the sense is beyond comprehension. Hard data and a slapstick universal irony are my realms. Forget everything
in between.

“Girl,” Roxie said with concern as she and Rathbone and the FBI field agent reached my side, “you’re a mess.”

“So it’s Grecchi,” Rathbone noted, unfazed by my bloody skirt and fingernails. “You and Berryman nailed it during the interviews.
Has she confessed?”

“She hasn’t said anything, Wes,” I explained. “And she’s sedated now. Rainer’s going to try to repair her arm. The doctors
were saying stuff about ligaments and nerve damage. She won’t be able to work if she’s lost the use of her hand.”

The FBI agent looked a little like a balding Lyle Lovett, but his eyes lacked that lost-boy confusion. He seemed deeply focused.

“She’s not going to be working anytime soon,” he announced authoritatively. “Not where she’s going.”

“How bad was the cut?” Roxie asked.

“To the bones.”

“Might be able to restore some mobility if they get to it soon,” she said. “And it’s not her working arm, anyway, is it? People
usually cut both wrists. I imagine she instinctively saved the hand she uses professionally. What a sad story.”

For a second I remembered Grecchi as she looked when BB and I had left her house, painting in the sunlit studio off her kitchen.
Painting with her
left
hand, I remembered, as with her right she flipped us the bird.

“Rox, she’s left-handed!” I whispered, not wanting Rathbone and the agent to hear, although I didn’t know why.

“One for the books,” the agent said, his voice resonating with victory. “One of the first female serials. Fits the ‘organized’
profile in every way except sex. White, a loner, professional job, every which way except she’s not a he. Gonna rewrite the
profile with this one. Crazy, too. I always thought the bureau ought to keep records on crazies, everybody the shrinks keep
under control with medications. Be easy enough to do through the pharmacies. Make our job a lot easier.”

I could see the muscles flexing in Roxie’s jaw.

“You’d have nearly half the population of the United States on your list,” she said softly, but he didn’t hear her.

“One for the books,” the agent said again. “They’re almost always white males, but not this time. This time it’s a crazy woman
and it’s on my beat.”

“I’m going to go home before I kill that man,” Roxie said through clenched teeth as the two men pushed open the emergency
room doors and vanished inside. “Then I could take out a couple more of them and become the first
black
female serial killer in history.”

“
Really
one for the books,” I replied, grinning. “But first let’s get some coffee. There’s something not right about what’s happened
here, this thing with Grecchi.”

“I been noticing that,” Rox said dismally. “Girl, I been noticing that.”

I
changed into my jeans in the truck and tossed the bloody skirt in a city trash receptacle as Rox and Brontë and I walked
to a nearby Starbucks. We sat outside and I watched as Rox toyed with a cappuccino. At an adjoining table a couple in nearly
identical business suits were discussing the presidential campaign.

“You’re going to vote for the ticket just because the vice presidential candidate’s a woman,” the man said.

“And you’re not going to vote for the ticket just because she’s not a man,” his companion answered. “You can’t stand the idea
of women in positions of power.”

“No, I can’t,” he agreed. “A woman vice president would be like a whale conducting a symphony. Ludicrous. Call me a retro
pig.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” the woman said through a dazzling smile, standing to leave. “Pigs are intelligent.”

Roxie and I applauded as she walked away, leaving him with the check.

“So what do we do now?” I asked after relating the story of Grecchi’s life as Jennings Rainer had told it to me. “Rainer says
she was at his place all night last night and so couldn’t have sent the spate of e-mails advertising Sword’s latest threat,
but everything else that’s happened points to Grecchi as the killer. And yet something doesn’t feel right about it. I’d cross
the street to avoid Isadora Grecchi; she’s rude and unpleasant. But when I saw her lying on the gurney, she looked so scared.
I felt sorry for her, Rox. How could I feel sorry for a woman who—”

“She could have loaded the e-mails in a program that automatically sends at a preselected time,” Rox interrupted. “You should
know that, but Rainer wouldn’t. He’s computer-illiterate. Where Grecchi spent the night is irrelevant. What bothers me is
the suicide attempt.”

“But you said Sword might do that. She’s done just what you said.”

“I don’t know what she’s done,” Roxie muttered, continuing to stir her cappuccino with a plastic straw. Her braids were adorned
with bright yellow straw beads that day. They matched her silk blouse but made no sound as she moved her head. The absence
of clacking made me feel deaf.

“What do you mean? She sliced open her wrist.”

“Blue,” Rox said, finally discarding the straw and sipping her coffee, “Grecchi is a doctor.”

“So, many people are,” I replied. “This one’s a doctor with a childhood from hell and a depressive disorder who for some reason
went ‘off,’ killed or attempted to kill prominent women in her care, and then tried to kill herself, just like you said. She’s
even got the crackpot religious history from a foster home in Colorado Springs. That’s where she probably heard the Isaiah
34 stuff like my dad said, the Sword of Heaven. It’s all there.”

“Yes, but any first-year med student knows that cutting the ventral side of the wrist is one of the least effective ways to
die,” Rox went on. “There’s only one very small and easily missed artery and the veins are also tiny. The normal clotting
action of the blood will seal both in a matter of minutes after an initial and dramatic bleed. The only way to lose enough
blood even to
faint
from a wrist cut is to keep the wound submerged in hot, preferably running water, which prevents clotting. Grecchi knew that,
and yet you didn’t say anything about hot water or any water. She was sitting on the bathroom floor next to the tub, but she
wasn’t holding her arm under the faucet to facilitate a bleed-out. This was no suicide attempt.”

The news made me feel good, for some reason.

“What was it, then?” I asked. “People always say when this happens it’s a cry for help. Was she crying for help?”

Rox finished her cappuccino and ordered another, eyes narrow with concentration.

“For the moment let’s assume Grecchi is innocent of the Sword murders but is depressed. It’s apparent from the several different
antidepressants BB saw in her medicine chest that something wasn’t working and her psychiatrist has been trying her on different
combinations, different meds. Eventually one of them will work and she knows that intellectually, but the depression makes
her
feel
there’s no hope, so she wants to make that desperate gesture that signals a need for somebody to help her. She chooses the
traditional wrist-cutting, but knows she isn’t really going to die. Which means she knows she’s going to be working again,
using her dominant
left
hand. What are the odds she’d cut her
left
wrist, knowing as she does the risk of impaired mobility?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Aren’t people sort of irrational at that point? Not thinking clearly?”

“Sometimes, not always. And if she weren’t thinking clearly and just acting out of despair, she’d automatically hold the knife
in her dominant hand, cutting the nondominant wrist. More to the point, Grecchi’s fifty-one. From what Rainer said, she’s
been dealing with clinical depression since she was fourteen. She’s experienced. Plus, she holds down a professional job,
does volunteer work on the side, enjoys art as an avocation, maintains, from what you say, an attractive home, keeps herself
presentable personally. She’s socially competent and successful. There’s been no break in this pattern. Then all of a sudden
she falls apart overnight? It doesn’t work that way, Blue. It doesn’t happen that fast. There’s just something fishy about
the way this happened.”