TailSpin - Catherine Coulter [55]
“I only wish I’d instructed her to forget everything she’d told me when I brought her out of it, but I was so flustered by what she’d said, I didn’t.”
Sherlock said, “Why don’t you tell us exactly what she said so we can follow up on it.”
For several moments MacLean looked uncertain. Even after saying he’d tell them everything, they could see him bat tling with himself. Then the disease must have blunted his concerns, or his sense of self-preservation exerted itself, because he said, his voice smooth, like a man carrying on a superficial social conversation, “Like I told you already, Dolores was married young, to a trucker, had two kids, and managed to get herself a communications degree before she was twenty-five. Life happened, as it always does, but with her it took an interesting twist. She started getting a reputation for taking on the big dogs, sometimes even bringing them down. This made her adjust her thinking about what she wanted and how she was going to get it.
“Her trucker husband, however, didn’t want to get with the program. He wanted his wife waiting for him at home, a beer for him in her hand. He threatened to hurt her, to take the kids, whatever.
“She believed, she told me, that he would beat her. But the kids? The last one was out of the house in another six months so that wasn’t a problem. But he was—a great big honking problem.
“So Dolores got to thinking. Who would vote for a congresswoman with a macho trucker for a husband? She knew this guy wouldn’t rocket her to the stars, which she felt she deserved. For her that was winning a political office, one that paid her. He would only underscore her lack of any working credentials and what had been, to date, a worthless education.
“Then, all of a sudden, this middle-aged woman proceeded to tell me that her husband was eighteen-wheeling on one of his regular runs through Alabama. When he pulled into his favorite truck stop to eat at the small diner, someone stepped out of the shadows and shot him dead.
“Then Dolores said, ‘Watch this,’ and she manufactured instant tears, told me this was how she acted when the cops came to her house—you know, ‘Oh, how horrible, it must be a mistake, not my Lukey, oh God, what am I going to do, what about my poor fatherless children,’ that sort of thing. Then she told me she swooned—the shock, you know. Then suddenly, she started laughing. She nearly hyperventilated she laughed so hard. She told me between hiccups how she’d hired this thug from Savannah to shoot Lukey, paid him five hundred bucks, told him where to do it. She was very pleased with herself, with her ultimate solution to getting elected to Congress. I was so shocked I brought her out of it. She remembered exactly what she’d said, of course, and so there it all was, the eight-hundred-pound moose in the middle of my office. I told her she was my patient and I would never break confidentiality. Still, I could tell she was spooked. I never expected to see her again, and I didn’t. You think Dolores is the one out to kill me?”
“She sounds like a better possibility than Lomas Clapman,” Savich said. “What she came to see you about professionally, any motive there if revealed?”
“Probably not, her stepfather sexually abused her, and she was having nightmares about it on and off during the past year. It was driving her nuts, and so she came to see me. What brought it on? She didn’t know but that was the reason for the hypnosis—to take her back, to relive it, I guess you could say, in a controlled environment. But this is what popped out.”
Savich nodded. “Okay, there was another patient the bartender heard you talking about, right? Pierre Barbeau.”
“Ah, yes, Pierre. I nearly forgot. Pierre is very smart, knows his way in and out of the intelligence community. I’ve known him and his wife, Estelle, and his son, Jean David, for