Free Mind Games by Hilary Norman Page A

her.
    ‘I wouldn’t miss it,’ she said.
    Frances Dean was evasive on the telephone, bordering on hostile, but Grace had the feeling that was probably because the older woman was now associating her with Sam Becket and
the rest of the Miami Beach Police Department – and with Beatrice Flager’s murder plainly raising the temperature of suspicion towards her niece, Grace could hardly blame Frances for
that. Nor could she, Grace supposed, somewhat grudgingly, entirely blame Sam Becket for doing what the taxpayer paid him to do.
    Out of the blue, something came back to her. The niggly feeling she’d had last Saturday after she’d noticed the Band-Aid on Cathy’s arm and failed to ask Becket about it. Now
Grace had just been given the perfect opportunity by Frances Dean to abandon this case, to forget all about Cathy and Marie and Arnold Robbins, to legitimately walk away from a girl who might
– who just
might
– have murdered three people, one of them her own mother.
    The thing was, Grace simply did not believe that. And even if she did, it was not in her province to prove Cathy Robbins’ innocence or guilt. If she was going to continue with an ugly
situation that was likely to turn even uglier, Grace was going to have to stick around to help Cathy come to terms and deal with what had happened to her.
    Even if what had happened to her was becoming a killer.

Chapter Eleven
FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 1998
    Grace had to break through two barriers next morning in order to set up her new session with Cathy. First she had to persuade Frances that, no matter what she might be feeling
about the way the investigation was being conducted, Grace was still on her niece’s side. Second, she had to obtain police permission to use the specific location she had in mind for this
next meeting. The Robbins’ house on Pine Tree Drive was officially still a crime scene, cordoned off from normality, but it was where Grace felt she most wanted to speak with Cathy –
provided the teenager agreed.
    She did agree. Grace had been almost certain she would.
    ‘So long as we don’t have to go back to that room,’ she said.
    ‘We most certainly don’t,’ Grace assured her.
    Going back to the scene of the horror was not Grace’s reason for wanting to take Cathy to the house. She was aware that one of the traumas adding to the girl’s load was the fact that
she had been wrenched, from one moment to the next, out of her home. As if the manner of losing her parents had not been horrifying enough, Cathy had simultaneously lost that other major anchor.
Home was where people needed to go to lick their wounds, to begin to recover. In her aunt’s house – however well-meaning Frances Dean was trying to be – Cathy couldn’t be
herself. She had her aunt’s own grief and immaculate rooms to be considerate of. She had a room of her own to go to, to be alone, but it was not
hers
. Grace was in no way
underestimating the potential trauma of making this first journey back into what had surely, in her mind, now become a house of horror. Yet that last event, that last nightmare, represented only
one night; Cathy Robbins had lived within those walls for years. She needed, Grace thought, to touch base with her roots, with herself, and going back with someone sufficiently detached to let her
react the way she needed to, might, Grace hoped, be good for her.
    Sam Becket, too, thought it a good idea. He’d brought up the notion with her aunt at one point, in the hope that returning to the house might jog something in Cathy’s memory, but
Frances Dean had rejected it ferociously. He was glad she had given her consent to Grace.
    ‘I guess she doesn’t consider you family enemy number one,’ he said on the phone, after giving her police permission to enter the crime scene.
    ‘I guess she doesn’t think I’ll just be taking Cathy home to try and trap her,’ Grace said. ‘Not that that’s why I think you would have taken her