The Last Lie Read online

  “Ma’am?” he said, not eager to get into a discussion about expensive coffee or how to get from point A to point B in Boulder. Like arguing evolution with his aunt.

  She said, “Not one sip. Because . . . I didn’t know. I mean, I just did not know. I didn’t want it to . . . mess things up? Do you know what I mean? In the lab? Later? I couldn’t decide if it would or it wouldn’t . . . I tried to remember if I’d seen anything like it on CSI. About coffee, after. Or coffee before, even, I guess.” She paused to give it some more thought. “I don’t think I have seen it. Have they done a show on that? Did I miss it? I must have missed it. Do you know? Is it okay? Maybe it was on Law & Order. The sex one. I don’t watch that one all the time. I miss a lot of those.” She looked in the direction of the officer’s bewildered face, not quite making contact with his eyes. “Do you watch CSI?”

  He did not want to have a conversation with this woman about CSI. He hated conversations with civilians about television cops. To his continuing dismay, a surprising number of civilians tried to initiate those kinds of discussions with him. If Missy were in the right mood, sometimes she would go ahead and engage in those conversations. Drove Heath crazy. Missy knew all the fake cops’ names, even the ones on cable.

  He picked one of the woman’s other questions and tried to answer that. “Is it okay to have coffee?” he said. “That’s what you want to know? If you can take a sip?” He was once again thinking this must all be part of some complicated domestic. His cop radar was telling him he’d just stumbled onto some potentially toxic jitter in a jar right there in front of the damn headquarters building.

  The woman’s husband didn’t want her to be drinking coffee, or was pissed that she spent too much at Starbucks, or maybe it was the pumpkin she’d added to her latte. Sometimes it was something nuts like that—the pumpkin she added to her friggin’ latte.

  Trainers were always telling patrol officers responding to domestics to identify the precipitating event. This time? Heath was thinking the precipitant was a pumpkin latte. Didn’t feel right, though. His caution nerves were continuing to fire.

  The woman made the most puzzled face before she leaned closer to him and lowered her voice to an almost-whisper. “I haven’t even peed yet,” she said. “I really, really need to pee. And now, talking about it—about peeing—is making it even worse. I was doing okay about that, before.”

  Heath guessed right then what was going on. When she said she hadn’t even peed.

  He spread his feet and he set his jaw. For him, anger always came before sadness. Resolve before compassion. Widening his stance and setting his jaw helped him keep the rage where it needed to be.

  “May I have some of my coffee?” she asked. “Do you think that’s okay? Or maybe I could pee first. What do you—” She stopped herself midsentence.

  His voice was softer when he spoke next. “How about you bring the cup of coffee inside with you, ma’am? The detective I’ll introduce you to will know the answer to your question. All your questions. I’m sure about that. Do you think I could see your driver’s license? The registration and insurance card, too? Please? Then you can come with me. We’ll go inside. Together.”

  She noticed the name tag on his chest as though it was suddenly illuminated. Locked onto it for a few seconds. She then made eye contact with him for the first time. “Do you have a woman?” she asked him. “Officer Heath Wade.”

  Oh shit, he thought. His ring finger, like hers, was naked. He closed his left hand. He immediately recognized that the fist could present a problem. He opened it back up. “Ma’am?” he said.

  “A woman detective?” she said. “I think I would like to talk with a woman detective.”

  Officer Heath Wade waited for the woman to find the papers he requested. He waited for her to open the car door. Even in trying circumstances, he was a meticulous cop. Anything he didn’t have to touch, he didn’t want to touch. Another one of Missy’s favorite sayings on patrol was “You never know.” He tried not to touch things he didn’t have to touch because “you never know.”

  After the woman had climbed out of the driver’s seat, he took the license and registration and insurance card from her hand and slid them into his shirt pocket. He directed her to stand on a spot on the sidewalk about ten feet out in front of the car. “Please wait there, right there,” he said. She didn’t move. He had to guide her to the spot.

  He pulled a latex glove from a pouch on his belt, stretched it onto his right hand, reached inside the car, switched off the ignition, and removed her wad of keys. He kept an eye on her the entire time.

  He used his gloved hand to shut the car door. He found the button on the key fob that locked the doors. He said, “Talk about what, ma’am?” not really expecting a straightforward answer. “Do you want to talk with a woman detective?”

  “The rape,” she said. “The . . . rape. What else?”

  1

  The damn housewarming took place in Spanish Hills on the Friday evening just after Halloween.

  I had no way to know it at the time, but a strand of silk from the tangled web of that party had begun spinning my way long before the first guests arrived.

  A psychotherapy supervision session I’d had a few days before the party had been far from routine. I remembered many details. Topics had included vacation time, desert rituals, plastic surgery, an eighteen-foot-long bridal train, naked breasts, fluorescent Crocs, and quality embroidery.

  Supervision? I’ve been practicing my craft in Boulder, Colorado, for so long that my longevity alone had qualified me to enter the realm of experienced clinicians who attract the attention of young psychotherapists eager for professional guidance. Occasionally, I succumbed to a plea for help.

  I’ve never thought that supervision was the right word for the complex professional relationship during which most of the actual training of psychotherapists occurs. But supervision is what it’s been called as long as I’ve been in the business.

  I first heard the word used in that context during graduate school. I was a first-semester graduate student in clinical psychology when my academic adviser informed me that the time had arrived for me to begin psychotherapy.

  I was initially taken aback at the presumption of his suggestion, even suffering a transient how-dare-he moment of personal offense. As my defensiveness waned and the reality of my questionable mental health seeped into my awareness, I thought, I could probably use the help. I nodded to my adviser. I said, “Okay.”

  He stared back at me with an expression on his face indicating that he had not been seeking my assent about anything. He then proceeded to inform me who my supervisor was going to be at the start of the coming semester.

  My supervisor. The psychotherapy my adviser wanted me to start involved my functioning in the therapist role, not the patient role. I had a little trouble with the concept. Seeing clients? Me? Already? He told me that some unsuspecting freshman English major would probably be cast in the patient role.

  I could hardly have been more surprised at the news that I was about to start being a therapist. I could only guess how the freshman English major was going to feel.

  My guide on the perilous journey to becoming a functioning psychotherapist was my “supervisor,” a well-practiced clinician who would educate, guide, inform, instruct, confront, critique, cajole, explore, and do whatever else he or she determined was necessary in order to help me develop the knowledge, the skills, the maturity, the self-awareness, and the sensitivity necessary to be an effective therapist.

  I thought it then and I continued to think it: supervisor is not the right word for the role. Not even close. But it’s the label we have.

  For the next ten years or so—five more in graduate school, a year of clinical internship, a couple of years prelicensure, a few more postlicensure—I had supervisors. A few were good; a couple were very good. One was so skillful that he elevated the game to another level. Two or three others? I could have learned as much about psychotherapy
by talking with a random customer about snow tires in a 7-Eleven.

  I’D BECOME AN EXPERIENCED THERAPIST. I was a supervisor. One of the clinicians I was supervising was a young Boulder psychologist named Hella Zoet, Ph.D. We’d known each other professionally for a while. She had been one of the advanced graduate students from the university that I had supervised in previous years. After graduate school she’d gone off for her internship year in L.A., then had worked briefly in Grand Junction, across the Rockies on the Western Slope, before returning to Boulder as a full-fledged Ph.D. Hella had a freshly framed Colorado psychologist’s license hanging on the wall of her private practice office a few blocks from mine.

  Hella had asked me to supervise her practice while she established herself professionally in town. She wasn’t required to seek postlicensure supervision. It was something she’d chosen for professional development.

  Hella was a wisp of a woman. She was maybe five feet tall, with bright blue eyes and straight, fine blond hair that she wore mostly down. Her ears always poked through the hair on each side of her head. I’d never asked her age, but during her student years I had guessed she was a few years older than most of the department’s clinical graduate students. I guessed that she was older because of her maturity, not because she looked anywhere close to her actual age. She was doomed, or blessed, to be carded by bartenders until she was forty.

  Hella was skillful, smart, intuitive, imaginative, and compassionate. I had no doubts about her diagnostic acumen or her therapeutic talents. If she ultimately decided to set down roots in Boulder—I wasn’t sure she would; my gut told me that Hella had some vagabond in her—I expected to be referring cases to her for years to come.

  Hella favored long skirts. She also favored sitting during supervision with her legs crossed or folded beneath her. So those long skirts served a purpose.

  As we walked from the waiting room to my office, she greeted me with a caution. She said, “We have some things to talk about today.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  She crossed her legs beneath her and arranged her skirt. She made a face I couldn’t interpret as she said, “Do you remember when I told you about running into that patient at Burning Man a while back? In September?”

  I nodded. Hella had mentioned an encounter with a patient at Nevada’s Burning Man festival in passing. That was all. I had followed up by asking her if it was something she and I should discuss. At the time, she had chosen to wait to see how the issue developed with her patient in treatment. I hadn’t challenged her. We’d moved on to another topic.

  Just as every coach coaches differently, every psychotherapy supervisor supervises differently. Some supervisors focus more on process issues between the therapist and his or her patient; some supervisors will pay more attention to the content—facts—that are revealed during the treatment. Some are rigorous proponents of a treatment model or theoretical approach. Some supervisors are big-picture advocates; others sweat the smallest details of what happens in the treatment.

  My own style was to let my supervisee lead me to areas requiring my attention. That’s what Hella did that day. I considered it my responsibility to keep peering over her shoulder to see where she was headed.

  “Now, I think we should talk more about me running into her that night,” she said. “It’s come back up.”

  The patient Hella had crossed paths with at Burning Man was a thirty-four-year-old systems analyst whom Hella had been seeing for individual psychotherapy since late that same spring. The patient’s presenting problems were unresolved grief issues, depression, and anxiety. The immediate precipitant for the therapy was the sudden death of the woman’s husband on a Sunday morning the previous April. He had been playing a round with some friends in a foursome at a Denver golf course. He collapsed a second after he released the grip on his three-wood at the apex of his tee shot on the fifth hole. He had died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Cause of death was an M.I. Terrible family history, it turned out.

  An enduring mystery of his death was the flying three-wood. The other members of the foursome said the club left his hands like a rocket. It had never been located.

  From the beginning of the treatment, Hella considered her psychotherapy with the golfer’s widow to be progressing uneventfully. The woman was committed to the treatment, was motivated to do some work, and her presenting symptoms were beginning to remit. She was tentatively examining underlying issues in the marriage, a relationship that she had begun to acknowledge had been less than satisfying for a long while.

  When Hella initially presented the case to me, I wondered aloud, as I usually do with supervisees, about her diagnostic impressions of her patient.

  Hella had prefaced her reply with some insight into her countertransference. “I really like this woman,” she said. “She’s funny, she’s self-effacing. She has a deep soul.”

  I said, “Noted.”

  “Diagnostically?” she went on. “I think she’s half-lost.”

  I was unfamiliar. “Is that one of the new diagnoses I should expect from DSM-5?”

  She said, “When I was an intern in L.A., I did outpatient work in a clinic in West Hollywood. Many of my outpatients were in therapy because they were half . . . lost. It’s a descriptive diagnosis I like to use. Serves me well clinically, too. In addition to being half-lost, this woman also meets criteria for reactive depression and for an anxiety disorder. But the truth is she is in therapy because she lives in Boulder, not in Boise or Biloxi, and because since her husband’s death she’s been feeling . . . half-lost.”

  In supervision, as in life, the squeaky wheel tends to get the grease. A good supervisor is the mechanic who can hear the telltale squeak even when the supervisee thinks everything is running along fine. But that hadn’t been the case with the Three-Wood Widow—which was the shorthand name that Hella used to provide instant context for me when she wished to discuss the young woman. It had been my impression that Hella had the case under control. She and I had been paying it only passing attention in supervision.

  Hella began relating her fresh concerns about the extracurricular encounter with her patient by revealing that she was a Burning Man veteran, a factlet that surprised me not at all. The previous month’s celebration in the Nevada desert, it turned out, had been Hella’s ninth consecutive in attendance. I, on the other hand, hadn’t even been aware of the existence of Burning Man for anywhere approaching nine years.

  Those facts said something important about both of us.

  Since Hella had initially mentioned the festival, I’d done some reading to flesh out my understanding of a celebration that, frankly, didn’t sound particularly understandable to an outsider, which I was. Burning Man is an annual festival of experimentation, expression, and self- and community reliance that takes place for a week each September on a remote playa in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert wilderness. Once an intimate affair, it has grown into a gathering of almost fifty thousand people.

  Hella identified herself as one of the founding members of a Burning Man theme camp—she explained that her theme camp was composed of a cadre of like-minded souls who met up annually during the festival in Nevada. Her group lived together under the stars while they created a complex, intentionally interactive art installation for a onetime performance during the festival.

  Hella’s recounting of the patient/therapist extracurricular encounter at Burning Man began with particular bemusement in her eyes and in her voice. “The final performance put on by our camp traditionally involves fire. I mean, it’s Burning Man, right? Fire, for us, is . . . a force of rebirth. We—the group, the camp—have always strived to play with perception, to maximize the use of shadows, to contrast the interface of light and dark. Destruction and construction. Good and evil. Life and death. Positive and negative space. Integration and conflagration. We are attempting to control the ultimately uncontrollable. To freeze movement that can’t be frozen. And always, always, to succeed by failing.”

 
; Hella’s tone changed not at all as she continued. “During that one grand performance each festival, we encourage participation from attendees outside the theme camp. Although it’s not a requirement, and we have never attempted to design the performance that way—not consciously anyway—inevitably some of the people from inside the camp and others who join with us in the performance and in the celebration that follows participate while in various stages of . . . undress. Depending, of course, on the weather.”

  I’m not completely sure that Hella paused between the of and the undress. It’s possible that my ears added those ellipses.

  I did endeavor to be a self-aware supervisor.

  I reminded myself that the dialogue I was having with Hella was, in fact, supervision and not psychotherapy. And that the events she was describing had taken place during her vacation time, in her personal life, in a land far, far away. With that spirit in mind, I continued to swallow the many questions I had about light and dark and shadows and theme camps and freezing movement and positive and negative space and the demographics of the group and controlling the uncontrollable. I particularly withheld comment about integration and conflagration, and about the various stages of . . . undress of the participants.

  I also swallowed a few whys. Six or seven, at least. I was wishing they were relevant—I was that curious—but they weren’t. Not yet.

  Hella went on. “What I’m about to tell you next is more information than I would like to share with you, and I hope it’s more information than you would like to learn about me, but . . . this is supervision, and I think you need to understand the context of my run-in with my patient. In the event it is becoming relevant in the therapy. Right?”

  I suspect that Hella was hoping I’d say Not really. But I didn’t. I said, “If it’s becoming relevant, I think I do need to understand a little more.”

  She looked at me and smiled an okay-here-goes smile with her bright eyes wide and her ears poking through her blond hair. At that moment, she appeared elfish. “That particular night, for that particular part of the performance—it was during the final half hour, near the finale—I was wearing”—she poked a shoe out from beneath her voluminous skirt—“these boots.”