“Medication and a structured environment.”
She didn’t seem comforted. “So you learned nothing there?”
“Not so far. Later we went to Claire Argent’s house.” I described the place. “What do you think?”
“About what?”
“The way she lived.”
She drank tea, put the cup aside, thought awhile. “Would I want to live like that?
Not forever, but maybe for a short stretch. Take a nice vacation from all the complications.”
“Complications,” I said.
She smiled. “Not you, honey. Just… circumstances. Obligations, deadlines-life piling up. Like when I was handling all the construction. Or now, when the orders stack up and everyone wants results yesterday. Sometimes life can start to feel like too much homework, and a little simplicity doesn’t sound bad at all.”
“This was more than simplicity, Robin. This was… bleak. Sad.”
“You’re saying she was depressed?”
“I don’t know enough to diagnose her,” I said. “But the feeling I got from the place was-inorganic. Blank.”
“Did you see any evidence she was neglecting herself?” she said.
“No. And everyone describes her as pleasant, dependable. Distant, but no obvious pathology.”
“So maybe inwardly she was fine, too.”
“Maybe,” I said. “The only things she did amass were books. Maybe intellectual stimulation was what turned her on.”
“There you go. She trimmed things down to concentrate on what mattered to her.”
I didn’t answer.
“You don’t think so,” she said.
“Pretty severe trim,” I said. “There was nothing personal in the entire house. Not a single family photo.”
“Perhaps she wasn’t close to her family. Or she had problems with them. But even so, how different does that make her from millions of other people, Alex? She sounds to me more like… someone cerebral. Living in her head. Enjoying her privacy. Even if she did have social problems, what does any of that have to do with her murder?”
“Maybe nothing.” I spooned more rice onto my plate, played with grains of basmati, took a bite of bread. “If she wanted intellectual stimulation, why switch from a research job to Starkweather?”
“What kind of research was she doing?”
“Alcoholism and how it affects reaction time.”
“Anything earth-shattering?”
“Not to me.” I summarized the studies. “Actually, it was pretty mundane.”
“Could be she came to a realization: she’d been a good little girl, doing what was expected of her since grad school. She got tired of hacking it out. Wanted to actually help someone.”
“She didn’t pick a very easy group to help.”
“So it was the challenge that motivated her. That, and tackling something new.”
“The men at Starkweather don’t get cured.”
“Then I don’t know. All out of guesses.”
“I’m not trying to be contentious,” I said. “She just really puzzles me. And I think there’s a good deal of truth in what you’re saying. She got divorced within the last year or so. Maybe she was trying to cut free on several levels. Maybe for someone who’d been grinding out studies year after year, Starkweather seemed novel.”
She smiled and stroked my face. “If knitted brows are any kind of measure, Milo’s getting his money’s worth out of you.”
“The other thing I wonder about is the first case-Richard Dada, the would-be actor.
On the surface, he and Claire have little in common. But what they do seem to share is negative space-an absence of friends, enemies, quirks. Both of them were very neat. No entanglements. Maybe we’re talking about loneliness and an attempt to fill the void. Some sort of lonely-hearts hookup with the wrong person.”
“A man and a woman?” she said. “A bisexual killer?”
“That would make Dada gay, and Milo never found any indication of that. Or maybe it had nothing to do with sex-just companionship, some kind of common-interest club. On the other hand, the cases could be unrelated.”
I raised her hand to my lips, kissed the fingertips one by one. “Mr. Romantic. I’d better switch gears before I drive you into isolation.”
She grinned, waved languidly, kissed air, put on her Bette Davis voice. “Pass me the spinach, dahling. Then you can pay the check and sweep me off my feet to the nearest
Baskin
Robbins for some jamoca almond fudge. After that, hi-ho all the way home, where you ah cawjully invited to add some entanglement to my life.”