Confidential(93)

“Lucinda or Lucy?” Headshake. “Flora?” Headshake. “Greer?” Headshake. “None of those is familiar to you?”

“Not the names. The stories might be.”

“Did he tell you he was sleeping with any of his patients?”

She looks shocked. “Absolutely not.”

“Then you probably don’t know these stories.”

“Have you checked out these stories? That really doesn’t sound like Michael.”

“I’ve got some reliable sources.” Reliable might be a stretch, but still.

She seems to be carefully considering her words. “Truthfully, over the past six months, Michael hasn’t been himself. He was clearly under enormous strain, and he was experiencing a lot of conflicting emotions.”

“What kind of conflicting emotions?”

“Sometimes when I saw him, he was euphoric. Sometimes he was despondent. Sometimes he even seemed frightened. He could move between those emotions in a single conversation. I’d advised him to seek personal therapy.”

“Isn’t that why he was seeing you?”

“No. Consultation is definitely not the same. For one thing, it’s not even confidential, which is why I can talk to you. For another, our focus was the clients, not his mental health.”

“But you were concerned about his mental health, which is why you advised him to get his own therapist?”

She hesitates, then looks down at her hands, her eyes moistening. “I have a lot of guilt about what happened to Michael. I should have done more, but I didn’t want to get more involved. I didn’t want to ask more questions because I was uncomfortable with what he told me.”

“Which was?”

“He told me he was falling in love with one client, and that another seemed to be in love with him, and a former client was stalking him. But he told me explicitly that he wasn’t sleeping with the woman for whom he had feelings, and that she’d ended treatment with him.” She grabs for a tissue. “I should have asked more questions. If I had, maybe . . .”

But I’d stopped listening.

It’s like that game Fuck, Marry, Kill. He was fucking Lucinda, he wanted to marry Greer, and he wanted to kill Flora. Only one of them got to him first, the one with the motive—no, the biological imperative. Women are wired to save their kids, no matter what.

I know which one got to him, only I can’t get to her.

I was warned by my sergeant to stop leaving her voice mails. That’s what she was calling harassment, but everything I said in my messages was true. That I understood it, I really did. She’d gotten tricked into that contract, and after all she’d learned, she couldn’t have him out in the world. He could get to her kid. She’d guaranteed him a certain amount of visitation and even if she managed to block him, the kid would get older and go looking. An absent father can make as much of an impression as a present one. And if Michael wanted to get to that kid, he’d find a way. He could inflict some serious damage; he was adept at psychological warfare. She’s practically a mother; she had to do what she had to do. No one would fault her.

Unless Dr. Devers can give me something specific enough to take to the sergeant, I might have to bend a few rules. Those records are so close, and they must hold some clues. Sometimes you have to go gray to do the right thing.





BEFORE





CHAPTER 76





FLORA


If anything was going to happen to Michael, I needed to make it happen. Lucinda was lovely and delicate and useless, and Greer was just a liar. She had no sense of sisterhood whatsoever. She cared only about herself, and her story that she was the one that got away.

Like I was buying that.

I fingered her money in my pocket as I walked back to my car. It niggled at me, why she’d called me and shown up here today, and why she was at his office the other day—on a Wednesday—after the evidence suggested that she was no longer in therapy with him.

She had to be sleeping with him, and that was a crime. He was supposed to wait two years before being with a former client, and he waited, what, a month or two, at most?

I could really use Greer’s testimony. She’d be able to convince a jury, whereas I shuddered to think what would happen to Lucinda if you put her on the stand. She’d splinter into a million pieces. But she was obviously telling the truth; she’d been ruined by it.

Somehow, Michael had brainwashed Greer. Just because she looked together and competent didn’t mean that he couldn’t work his magic on her. He was a master at that, at finding the chinks in someone’s armor. Now I needed to find that same chink, and what he had on her, psychologically speaking.

Let the cyberstalking begin! Back home in my apartment, I had at her. I already knew that Michael was a nonpresence online. I used to think it was because of his profession, but now I understood the real reason he needed to protect his privacy.

Greer had a large footprint when it came to her work. The company she built looked impressive. But weirdly, she was on sabbatical, and as I continued to search, it looked like she had started it right around the time she ended therapy.

Coincidence? I thought not.

I’d say that she and Michael had some sort of love shack, but I’d stalked him enough during that time to know that his routines had stayed largely the same.