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  No, I reassured her. Why? Because the reassurance was at least as true as my doubts and a whole lot truer than my fears.

  She made a noise in response. Disappointment? Dismissal? Relief? I wished I knew.

  The cream of reassurance that I was whipping was already in stiff peaks. I added more sugar until it tasted just right. “I’m not going anywhere, sweetie. I love you.”

  It was all true. A little less than totally honest, but all true. Imperfect honesty in an imperfect world. Nobody, least of all Lauren, would have to spend the day removing anyhachasfrom theircabezas.

  But the telephone was a terrible instrument for gauging the effectiveness of comfort, and I feared that my words were barely palliative.

  I was packing up to go home when my pager vibrated on my hip. No message, but I recognized the number. I threw my briefcase and jacket back down on top of the desk and dialed deliberately, giving myself time to pull my thoughts together.

  I wondered whether the state of Georgia was in the Central or Eastern Time zone. I guessed Eastern. It took me most of a minute to find a place where I could balance my current annoyance with my compassion and my friendship.

  Sam answered. “Hey, Alan.”

  I said, “Hi, Sam. What’s up?”

  “I’m in Georgia.”

  “Yeah.” I wanted to say I knew that already, but confidentiality rules. “What time is it there?”

  “A little after eight. How pissed off are you?”

  “Lauren’s sick. I don’t have enough energy to waste any of it being pissed off at you.”

  “What’s going on with Lauren?”

  I explained Lauren’s predicament as though I were talking to a friend, and Sam said all the right things in return. I felt better. Then I asked, “What about you. You feeling okay?”

  “This-this road trip-has been kind of good for me, I think. Takes my mind off things. No chest pains so far. I’m watching my diet. Taking all my damn pills.”

  “Exercise?”

  “I walk when I can.”

  “It’s important, Sam.”

  “Yeah.”

  The “yeah” was his way of indicating to me that it was time to move on.

  “Nothing from Sherry?”

  “Nothing. Simon’s okay, though; I talked to Angus.”

  He paused long enough for me to respond. When I didn’t, he said, “She loves me. I love her.”

  “You still worried that it’s not enough?”

  “Things are complicated, you know? Life, marriage, relationships-it’s all complicated. Listen, I thought you might want to know that I think he might be alive. Sterling.”

  “What? Really?”

  “The whole accident/rescue thing is too goofy for words. Nothing came down in a way that gives me any confidence in a scenario of him rushing to help someone and accidentally ending up drowning in a raging river.”

  “Like?”

  “I’ll tell you later when I have more time. A for-instance, though-on one side of the car he was trying to reach was all this brush and trees and crap-you know, stuff to hold on to-on the other side was a muddy riverbank, real steep. Which one do you think he chose?”

  “The mud.”

  “Yeah. Like I said, goofy. I think if your IQ is anywhere near your golf score, you choose the side with the bushes on it. I keep trying to come up with excuses for him, but I’m failing.”

  “You think he planned it so he went into the river, or maybe just found himself swimming and took advantage of serendipity?”

  “Good question, Alan. I’m impressed. Turns out that he hesitated at the top long enough to think it all through. Actually drove past the accident scene once and then came back. So yeah, I’m thinking premeditation. I got Lucy checking to see what kind of swimmer he was.”

  “I bet she finds out he was pretty good.” I was thinking that anybody who crewed on a big expensive yacht and gave diving demos had to be more than a little comfortable in the water.

  “What do you mean?” Sam asked.

  I realized how close I’d come to an unwitting disclosure. “Nothing. I just think Lucy might find something.”

  “You could save her some work.”

  “Maybe, but I won’t.”

  He let it go. “In case you’re wondering, I’m planning on keeping my suspicions to myself until I have a little more evidence.”

  He was telling me he wasn’t going to tell Gibbs he thought Sterling was alive. “Does that mean you’re coming back home now?”

  “No, I’m not done looking.”

  I allowed the buzz on the line to dominate for a few seconds before I asked, “Why, Sam? Why are you doing this?”

  “This’ll sound goofy, but I figure Sterling can teach me something about marriage. Sterling and Gibbs both, actually.”

  “What?” My “what?” was undiluted incredulity.

  “Yeah.”

  He was serious. I could tell. “That’s the craziest thing I think I’ve ever heard. And considering what I do for a living, that’s wild indeed.”

  “Maybe it is crazy,” he said. “But it feels okay to me.”

  “Sam, what if you’re right about Sterling? What if he’s not dead? What if he comes after her?”

  “Gibbs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t think about that.” He was silent for a moment. “No, I don’t think he will.”

  “I do.”

  “Why?”

  “He has reasons,” I said.

  “Things I don’t know?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t know what you know.”

  “You know exactly what I don’t know. Just tell me, there are reasons?”

  “Yes, for sure there are reasons,” I said. I counted the dead women on the fingers of my right hand.At least four reasons,I said to myself.

  “Then I’ll call her and tell her that I’m not convinced he’s dead. And she should be careful. Can you get her someplace safe to stay?”

  “Let’s say that offer is on the table.”

  Again he grew quiet for a few seconds before he said, “I hate situations like this. I hate ’em. The exact same woman who wouldn’t let her kid walk out the front door to ride a bike without a damn bicycle helmet won’t take the simplest step-the simplest step-to keep her own head from getting bashed in by some guy she’s sure loves her. I hate those situations.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” I didn’t know what else to say. Silently and involuntarily my brain was busy translating “to keep her own head from getting bashed in” to a pidgin Spanish version containingcabezasandhachas. Silently but totally voluntarily, I cursed Diane.

  “By the way,” Sam added, “I forgot to tell you: The tip the police got on that judge’s husband? About the cocaine? It came from inside the DA’s office. That’s all I could find out. Hope it helps.”

  Helps? No, not exactly.All that meant to me was that Jim Zebid, if he learned the same facts that Sam had just disclosed to me-which he most likely would-would have more reason than he already did to believe that it was indeed I who had leaked the information about Jara Heller’s husband’s cocaine problems to Lauren, who had in turn acted on it through some colleague in the DA’s office.

  Great.

  My second attempt to get out of the office ended almost the exact same way the first had ended: My vibrating pager interfered just before I made it to the door. Once again I dumped my things on the desk. Once again I recognized the phone number on the pager screen.

  Gibbs was breathless. She answered before I was certain her phone had even rung. “She just left. Just now! Two minutes ago! How could you? Howcouldyou? I trusted you!”

  “Gibbs,” I pleaded. “Slow down, slow down. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “She just left. I can’t believe you told her!”

  “Who is ‘she,’ Gibbs?”

  “Reynoso. That-that-”

  “What is it you think I told her? I haven’t spoken with her since Saturday. I didn’t even know
she was still in town.” My defensiveness was too reflexive; I was getting frustrated about the repeated accusations from my patients about my indiscretions with their secrets. And it was showing.

  Half a beat passed. Hesitation? A pause to reload? I wasn’t sure. But Gibbs’s fury was turned down a notch when she resumed. “You’re saying you didn’t tell her about the other women? You didn’t tell her what I told you this morning?”

  It was apparent from her voice that she wasn’t particularly predisposed to believing that I hadn’t spilled the beans.

  I, too, hesitated. The “other women” could have been the ones that Gibbs told me Sterling had slept with during their marriage, or they could have been the ones she told me he had killed. But a quick review convinced me that I hadn’t told Carmen Reynoso about either group of other women. I replayed the events in my head thoroughly enough to convince myself that I hadn’t even known about either group before that morning’s session with Gibbs.

  Then I remembered that wasn’t exactly true. I had known about Gibbs’s concern about other murder victims for most of a week; I just hadn’t known details until that morning. But the reality was that I hadn’t revealed the facts of Gibbs’s concern to anyone. I was certain of it.

  I said, “No, not a word.”

  “You didn’t talk with her today?”

  “No, Gibbs. I’ve been here at the office since this morning’s appointment with you. I haven’t shared the information you told me this morning with anyone. I wish you would give me permission, but until you do, I won’t share that information with anyone.”

  “Well, I’ve never told anyone but you about these other women. How does she know?”

  Damn good question.

  Damn good.

  Gibbs said good-bye after she asked me to change her regular appointment time on Tuesday. I offered her a slot that had just opened up on Wednesday.

  I left my things on the desk and wandered around my office.

  It wasn’t a small room, nor was it palatial. Fifteen by twenty-two feet, maybe. Space enough for a chunky desk, a file cabinet, a seating area, and a couple of bookcases. Three windows and a solitary French door brought in abundant light. Double doors-not side by side, but back to back-one opening in, one opening out, provided security and soundproofing to the interior hallway that Diane and I shared. We’d spent a bundle during remodeling constructing the interior walls of offset studs and had even set the extra-sound-retardant Sheetrock in channels, all in an effort to reduce noise transmission from the office to the hallway and from office to office. The entire back hallway was separated from the waiting area by a door with a deadbolt lock. After an intrusion years before, Diane’s husband had installed a sophisticated alarm system in the building, too.

  I assured myself that there was no way someone could eavesdrop on a psychotherapy session in my office.

  What about someone in Diane’s office? Could they have eavesdropped? No, that wasn’t possible. During the course of an average day the only sound I heard through our acoustically deadened adjoining wall was an occasional burst of Diane’s sharp laughter. I couldn’t recall a single instance of overhearing one of her patient’s words. The tones of normal conversation just didn’t make it through the walls.

  I plopped down on the sofa and reviewed my day.

  No matter from what angle I examined it, I couldn’t remember a solitary indiscretion on my part regarding Gibbs’s admissions to me about the other women. I hadn’t written any of the data in my case notes. And I hadn’t spoken a word about it to anyone.

  Not even Sam? No, not even Sam.

  Which meant one thing: The cops were developing the same information on their own.

  What other conclusion was possible?

  The answer to that question would come, unfortunately, soon enough.

  FORTY-ONE

  SAM

  Before I left their home, the Wolf sisters invited me to come back in a few days for Thanksgiving supper. They explained that they usually deep-fried a turkey for the large group of family and friends that gathered in their home, but this year they were planning to slow-roast something they called a turducken for the first time, and thought that I would be a perfect addition to their holiday table.

  “You deep-fry your turkey?” I said. When I’d first heard about people preparing their birds that way, I thought it was an urban myth, like jackalopes. Then the Boulder Fire Department started answering calls for turkey-fryer fires, and I accepted that it was a real thing, though I still couldn’t figure out what people did with all the leftover oil.

  Mary Ellen said, “It’s the best way to do it, absolutely. Moist? Oh, Mr. Purdy. But we’re going to try something new and finally do a turducken this year. Mr. Prudhomme, Mr. Paul Prudhomme from New Orleans”-when she spoke the name of the Louisiana city, it was only one word, and it was absent thew,and when she spoke Mr. Prudhomme’s name, it was with a reverence customarily reserved for heroes or saints-“recommends a very slow oven, so we’ll actually have to start roasting that delight before we go to bed on Wednesday evening. The house should smell like the Lord’s own grandmother’s kitchen when we awaken Thursday morning.”

  Mary Pat was the one who recognized the ignorance in my eyes. “A turducken is a Cajun treat, Mr. Purdy. Oyster dressing and andouille sausage and a few other goodies are stuffed into a chicken that is then stuffed into a duck that is then stuffed into a turkey. More dressing is added between each bird during the assembly. It’s all boneless. It’s all delicious.”

  I tried to imagine the cascade of flavors that Mary Pat was describing, and I was momentarily lost in the fantasy. My hand crept up the contours of my tummy until my thumb found the lower edge of my sternum. Sculpted in place, my hand could have been a monument to my ambivalence: Part of my hand-the part caressing my gut-honored my usually indulgent appetite, part of it-the thumb on my sternum-honored my cardiologist’s admonitions.

  “And you roast this… thing for how long?” I asked. “It must weigh most of a ton.”

  “We are doing a large one. Fourteen hours should bring it close to perfection. Then it will need to rest a while to stitch the flavors together before we carry it to the table.”

  With a smile as warm as apple pie, Mary Pat said, “And you haven’t had a real Thanksgiving supper until you’ve tasted my sister’s gravy, or her cornbread.”

  Mary Ellen savored the compliment. “Red pepper,” she explained. “Our mother’s secret. Abundant red pepper.”

  “Can I let you know?” I asked them. “My plans for Thursday are still a little up in the air.”

  “No need to call. You just come by if you can. We’ll have a place all set at the adult table for you, and you can be certain that the good Lord willing there will be no shortage of food beneath this roof on the day we give thanks. Mary Ellen will start carving right around two.”

  Less than a mile from the twins’ home I stopped on the shoulder of a fallow field of what I was still guessing had been cotton and called Alan Gregory to catch him up on what I was up to in Georgia, and then I called Gibbs Storey to tell her that I thought it was premature to assume her husband was dead.

  “He’s alive?” she replied, of course. What else would she say?

  I’d told her I thought that was a premature conclusion, too. But I suggested prudence might be warranted, and counseled her to temporarily move someplace where her husband couldn’t easily find her.

  “Sterling won’t hurt me,” she said.

  “If I had a dollar for every time a woman’s told me that in the past twenty years, I’d be driving a Lincoln.”

  She sighed at me and told me she’d think about it.

  “Trust me, Gibbs. You’re not thinking straight. After what you’ve been through…”

  “I’m fine.”

  It’s what I expected. I’d done what I could do. I folded up my phone and started driving again.

  An hour later I was on the outskirts of Albany, Georgia, trying to decide between two
adjacent motels for a place to spend the night when Lucy paged me using our personal code that indicated an emergency. At full arm’s length I could barely read the code: 911 followed by the phone number. Imaginative, no. But it worked for us.

  I picked the motel that wasn’t a national chain and finished checking in before I used my cell to return Lucy’s call. The motel room was full of my grandmother’s oldest chenille, the air was musty, and the background smells in the shadowy room were born of burnt tobacco and constant humidity and were as unfamiliar to me as the accents of all the people I was meeting in Georgia.

  Lucy had left me her own cell number, not her office number. I figured that was important.

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s me.”

  “Hi, Sammy. I really miss you. You okay?”

  “Later, what’s up?” She didn’t 911 me to ask me how I was doing.

  “Listen, you’re not going to believe this, but Crime Stoppers-yeah, I’m serious: Crime Stoppers-got a tip, anonymous, of course, that Sterling Storey may be responsible for as many as four murders. All women, all in towns where he’s worked over the years. He travels around producing sporting events on cable.”

  “I know about his job. Does the story check out?”

  “At least one piece of it seems to. There’s a woman in Indianapolis who went missing in the same circumstances that the tipster reported. She’s the same general description as Louise Lake-single, attractive, late twenties-and she worked where the guy said she worked. Donald and I have just started putting it together. There are other teams tracking down all the other women, but I haven’t heard anything about their progress.”

  “You have a name?”

  “Julie Franconia. She worked in PR or marketing or something for the Indiana Dome or-”

  “It’s the RCA Dome now, I think. The Colts play there. Peyton Manning. Good kid.”

  “Whatever. She disappeared in 2000. Late March, I think. Just a sec… yeah, March twenty-third, 2000.”