“No, ma’am, I never met your son.”
“It’s in the records. You didn’t look?”
“I don’t know what records you’re referring to, Miz Rudolnick.”
“The records down where you work.”
I finally made sense of what she was saying. And maybe why she’d been spooked by a reporter.
“Your son was arrested?” I asked. “When?”
She looked away. “Four years ago. He had some problems.”
“Can you explain, please?”
“After Shari left he became depressed. Sometimes – not often – he took things to help him cope, calm down. He was always high-strung.”
“Drugs?”
“He was a doctor. He used it like medicine.”
“Of course.”
“One day he came here. He was crying and I was terrified. He said there was a hospital worker he’d been buying some of his medicine from, and the police had been watching the hospital worker. Bernie was purchasing something. He was sure it would come out in the papers, his career would be over.”
She looked from my face to Harry’s. Though her son was dead, the episode printed fright and humiliation across her face.
“It’s all right, ma’am. We don’t need the full story.”
I figured we’d get it from the arrest report, save the poor woman the retelling.
She said, “He stopped taking those things. What happened with the police finally made him stop.”
“How was his behavior before the end?” I asked. “Normal?”
A grandfather clock in the hall chimed. We waited until it fell silent.
“About a month before…that day, he seemed depressed again. He came over to see me less. He was quieter, like he was deciding on something.”
“Could have been something with his work? Unhappiness?”
She walked to the mother-and-son photo. Touched it with reverence. “He loved his work. He was born to help people get better. He consulted in the region’s best facilities. Bernie was on the board at Mobile Regional Hospital. He had a private practice.”
It was a good place to take our leave, on the high note of her son’s achievements. As we moved to the door, I asked one final question.
“Excuse me, Mrs Rudolnick. Did your son have a specialty?”
She exhaled a plume of smoke, spun a tobacco-stained finger at her temple. “He worked with tormented minds.”
Psychotics? A bell rang in my head. Had Rudolnick known Harwood earlier? I wondered. Did they have a history? What if Harwood had been a patient, or part of a study?
I said, “I don’t suppose he ever mentioned patients by name.”
She crushed the cigarette dead in the ashtray and set it aside. “He was absolute about privacy.”
Harry said, “The records your son kept about his patients. All gone, right?”
“They were in his house and I didn’t know what to do with them. I keep them in storage. I don’t know why.”
“Would it be possible to look at them?”
She held up her hands, waving my words away. “No. It’s all confidential, a bond of trust.”
Harry stepped close. Gathered her hands in his, held them steady. I could never do anything that simple and perfect. “It might be helpful, Miz Rudolnick,” he said quietly. “It would never go further than Carson and me. And it might be our key to finding who killed your son.”
Her eyes shimmered with tears and her mouth pursed tight. “It was that filthy Harwood animal, scum. Piece of dirt…piece of shit.”
“I wish that was true, ma’am. But Leland Harwood was just a tool, a hammer. The man who swung the hammer is still out there.”
She shook her head. “No. It can’t be. It’s not right.”
“Detective Ryder talked to Leland Harwood an hour before he died, ma’am. He thinks Harwood was sent to harm your son.”
She looked at me. “Is that true?”
I nodded. “Leland Harwood was an enforcer. He always worked for others.”
Her face tightened in anger, turned to Harry.
“You’ll respect the confidentiality of my son’s files?”
“You have our word on it,” Harry said.
Kayla Rudolnick looked into Harry’s eyes until she found something she needed to see.
“The storage facility is on Cottage Hill Road. I’ll get you the key.”
There were eight white boxes in the facility, rows of locked cages in an old warehouse; a guard had been alerted to our visit. We took the boxes from the cage rented by Mrs Rudolnick and stowed them in the trunk of the Crown Vic.
Picking up the last of the boxes, Harry nodded through the grid at the adjoining enclosure. I saw a crib, boxes of child’s toys, stuffed animals, posters pulled from walls, the tape at the edges brittle and yellow. A small wheelchair. A red bicycle with training wheels. Even under dust, the bike looked unused.
I suddenly knew what used-up prayers looked like. Harry sighed, shook his head, and we tiptoed away like thieves.
We dropped the files at Harry’s house, then returned to the station. I tapped Rudolnick, Bernard, into my computer, expecting an arrest record. Mitigating circumstances allowing Rudolnick to pay a fine, perhaps, slip past punishment if he enrolled in a program and stayed clean.
The computer whirred and beeped, and came up blinking:
NO RECORD.
I tried again. Same effect. Harry stared at the screen.
“Either the bust never happened, or it got wiped totally clean. And the second option takes some doing.”
Ms Verhooven gestured for Lucas to follow her. There was no furniture in the room and the realtor’s high heels banged on the parquet floor. Ms Verhooven was as bright as a new trumpet: blonde hair, yellow dress, white shoes. Bright teeth moving behind glossy pink lips. Long legs sheathed in silky hose, rising up past the knee-high hemline toward…Lucas felt himself hardening and looked away, knowing such notions had to be sublimated, to use a term from Rudolnick’s world.
Ms Verhooven pushed open a door and gestured grandly, like a woman on a TV prize show.
“Ta-da!” she said.
Lucas stared at a toilet. “Ta-da?”
The fixture was cream colored, just like the adjoining countertop. Ms Verhooven bent over the counter, stroked it like a kitten.
“Granite countertops in the restroom, Mr Lucasian. Real, honest manufactured stone. Over at Midtowne Office Estates the counters are only Corian.”
Lucas nodded, though he had no idea what she was talking about. He was most interested in the sink.
Note to self, he thought, buy bath towels.
There was a faux baroque gilt-framed mirror on the wall. Lucas glanced at a slender and clean-shaven man with a neat part in his short and trendy, red-highlighted hair. His suit was dark and conservative, like the blue shirt and muted tie. He looked young but affluent. A success-driven young man, a starry-eyed entrepreneur with backing from Daddy, ready to make it on his own in the world. There were plenty