Obsessed

by G. H. Ephron

  When Emily arrived she was visibly elated—tendrils of hair had escaped from her ponytail and curled around her face.

  “I think I’m starting to get the hang of this therapy thing,” she said. “You’ll never guess what Mr. Black did.”

  “Let me guess. He didn’t amputate his arm.”

  “He got it tattooed.”

  That was the last thing I’d expected.

  “Got himself a fire-breathing dragon slithering from his wrist to his elbow. He tells me what the hell, he’s going to have it cut off anyway. So now he’s got this tattoo and he’s enjoying putting it out there, watching people react, adjust their assessment of him.”

  “Makes him feel powerful?” I said.

  “Says he feels great. And attractive. And interesting. And before he knows it, he meets this woman. She comments on his tattoo. She thinks it’s cool. She thinks he’s cool.”

  “And?”

  “Just what you’d expect from two consenting adults.”

  “Goes to show, patients never fail to surprise.”

  “I do think I was able to help. He was saying that having his arm bound wasn’t helpful. Made him feel more conspicuous, not less, and he couldn’t stand the pity and disgust he saw in their eyes. It wasn’t all that different from the way they looked at his arm. He said he might as well go around in short sleeves and flaunt it. So all I said was, ‘Maybe you should.’

  “He just sat there. Looked at me like I’d whacked him upside the head with a two-by-four. Didn’t even tell me he was going to do it. Just shows up for the next session in a short-sleeved shirt and gets the biggest kick out of my reaction. Truly, I was stunned.

  “He’s dropped that mantra about his arm and how he needs to cut it off. Thank God for that at least. And he’s starting to introspect in ways he couldn’t before. I think he’s ready to try to figure out who he really is.”

  “Congratulations. Now you can start on the real therapy.”

  “I know there’s still a lot of work to be done. But thank you,” Emily said. “This never would have happened if I’d kept pushing my own agenda on him. I’m so relieved that finally something is going right.” Her elation was contagious. “I feel like celebrating. I’m going to buy myself a drink after work—want to join me?”

  I wanted to say yes, but there was a momentary hesitation that wouldn’t have been there with any other post-doc. I pushed away the uneasiness. Why not savor this clear-cut success—such things were rare in this profession.

  “Let me know when you’re leaving,” I said. “I’m buying.”

  Emily checked her watch. “I’ve got a six o’clock with a new patient. He should be here any minute. Okay if I come get you when I finish with him?” She paused on her way out the door. “I forgot to ask. Did you get a chance to look at those obituaries?”

  “Yeah. I wanted to ask you about them. But we can talk about that after.”

  I’d returned a half-dozen phone calls and was in the middle of editing a paper when Emily returned. “What happened? New patient get cold feet?” I asked.

  “I guess. He never showed up.” Emily was slightly out of breath. “I just ran down to the lobby to be sure no one was there waiting for me. Then I called the number outpatient services gave me. It’s disconnected.”

  “That’s odd,” I said. “And damned annoying.”

  “Nothing can upset me today,” Emily said. She looked at me expectantly. Then at the papers I had spread over my desk. “Oh. You’re still working?”

  “Just give me some time to finish up.”

  Twenty minutes later we took the elevator down to the basement and continued out through the tunnel.

  “About the obituaries,” I said, handing her back the envelope, “tell me again where you found them?”

  “They were in one of Leonard’s file cabinets. He had them in a folder marked ‘invoices.’”

  “That’s odd.”

  “I thought it was odd, too. Lenny was super-organized. That’s what made me think he was hiding them.”

  “From whom?”

  “Dr. Shands? Dr. Pullaski? Me?” She thought for a minute more. “Patients? Obituaries of former patients would be last thing you’d want someone coming in for a medical test to see.”

  “Did you think Leonard was concerned? Did he think there was something suspicious about any of those deaths?” I asked, holding open the door to the outside.

  “If he did, he didn’t tell me,” Emily said, pulling her jacket around her against the cool evening breeze.

  “Could you look up when these patients had their last appointment at the MRI lab?”

  “No problem. It would be in their files and—” Emily’s voice died off. “What on earth?”

  The parking lot below us was lit up like a stage set, the exits cordoned off. Pulsing lights reflected off the asphalt and surrounding tree branches.

  “Maybe there’s been an assault?” Emily said, hurrying over to the steps.

  I followed her. Car accident seemed more likely. But there were too many emergency vehicles for a fender bender. An ambulance and a police cruiser were nose to nose in the parking lot. Between them, emergency personnel were huddled. A police officer moved aside and I could see what looked like a man in dark clothing lying on the ground.

  Emily picked up a gym bag that had been left on the steps. “This is Kyle’s,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “And isn’t that Kyle’s car?” A black Range Rover was one of a handful of cars still in the parking lot.

  Emily’s knees buckled under her and she sank down on the step.

  I sat beside her. She had her face pressed into the gym bag.

  “You go. I can’t,” she said. She looked so pale and she was shaking so hard I was afraid she was going to keel over. When I hesitated, she said, “Go! Please. Find out what happened.”

  I got up and started down the steps. As I moved closer, I could see that the victim was lying on his stomach, legs splayed. He was a big man, broad back, dark hair, and his face was turned away from me. One of the men standing beside him looked up at me—it was MacRae.

  “Stay back!” one of the officers barked in my direction.

  MacRae came over to me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “If we’d been able to hold him longer, he’d still be alive,” MacRae said. “Poor bastard. Looks like he got hit.”

  I looked for skid marks near the body but didn’t see any. About twenty feet away, a police photographer was taking pictures of the pavement. “You think it happened over there?” I asked.

  MacRae shrugged, his usual noncommittal self. Now Emily was standing at the base of the steps, still clutching Kyle’s gym bag to her chest.

  The camera flashed two more times. It was a long way from those skid marks to where Kyle was now. Would’ve had to have been hit at high speed to have been catapulted that far. There was no way to build up that kind of speed in the parking lot. More likely he crawled to where he was now.

  One of the officers who’d been working over the body came over to us. He handed MacRae something small. MacRae held it in his palm.

  “Recognize this?” he asked, but he wasn’t talking to me. He was showing it to Emily, who’d come up behind me. She was still pale, like she was in shock. She gasped when she saw what looked like a small piece of gold jewelry. Before it had been run over, it might have been a tiny pin or a ring in the shape of a woman.

  I put my hand on Emily’s shoulder and hoped she was getting the message. Don’t say anything.

  “What’s that?” MacRae asked Emily, indicating the gym bag.

  “I think it’s Kyle’s,” Emily said. “I found it up there on one of the steps.”

  “I’ll take it,” MacRae said, and he took the bag from her. “I’d like you both to stick around, particularly you Dr. Ryan. I have some questions.”

  Emily gave a mute nod. She was staring at where her car was parked in the far corner of the lot. A man in a uniform was runn
ing a flashlight carefully over the body of the Miata and taking notes.

  I remembered what Emily had said happened to that stranger who’d stalked her when she was in college. He died in a car accident. Hit by a car in a parking lot? I wondered.

  21

  WE WATCHED from the steps as the investigators methodically worked their way across the parking lot. Emily alternately wept and cursed. Kyle was dead, and whoever did it had used her car. After a while, she just sat there staring off into space as the gravity of her situation seemed to settle over her. I put my arm around her, but I felt the distance between us growing as I sat there thinking.

  I wondered when the medical examiner would place the time of death. While Emily was—and the word supposedly slipped into my head—waiting for a new patient who’d never showed?

  Now she was trembling, suppressing the sobs. It felt completely genuine. Still, I found myself wondering exactly how long it had been since Kyle was run down. Emily had been out of breath when she reappeared in my office, as if she’d been running. Said she’d gone downstairs to see if the patient was waiting for her in the lobby. If Kyle was killed at around six, she’d have had time to get to the parking lot and back. Outpatient services were usually very careful about making appointments for new patients. Standard procedure would have been for them to check that contact information was genuine. Had they really scheduled Emily an appointment with a nonexistent patient, or had Emily made that up in order to buy herself time? It was something I could check in the morning.

  If you took as a starting point that Kyle helped Emily kill Philbrick, it all made sense. Emily enlists Kyle’s help to eliminate the stalker who’s been making life miserable for her. After they kill him things start to heat up. Kyle gets taken in for questioning. Maybe he begins to crack under pressure. Emily’s afraid he’s about to spill the truth.

  She arranges for him to meet her in the parking lot at the time when she’s supposedly waiting for a new patient. When Kyle shows up, she runs him down. But it’s a little car and he’s a big man. The initial impact isn’t enough. He crawls across the parking lot, trying to get away. So she runs over him again. How many times did it take? Then she parks her car off in the corner of the lot and races back through the tunnel and up to the third floor. When she shows up in my office she’s still out of breath.

  All of that fit together. But there were pieces that didn’t make sense. Why run Kyle down with her own car and in so doing make herself seem guilty? Why leave her car not fifty feet from the body where the police could so easily see the damaged fender? Why not wait a few minutes so she wasn’t so out of breath when she came to my office? And why show up in the parking lot afterward, right in the middle of the police investigation?

  I knew what Emily would say. She was being set up. Someone had stolen her keys again. I’d been there, witnessed how the stalker let the air out of her tire, unlocked her car and helped himself to her belongings—intimate items that were hers…and an earring.

  Now I realized what the bit of gold jewelry was that the police had found on the pavement—it was the ear clip that Emily sometimes wore hooked over the top of her ear. Was that the earring she’d claimed had been stolen by her stalker? Did the word stalker belong in quotation marks?

  A pair of tow trucks arrived—I assumed one was for Emily’s car and one was for Kyle’s. MacRae strode over to us.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Emily told me as she rose to meet him. She squared her shoulders and, before he could get a word out, announced, “I know you have questions, and I’d be happy to answer them. But first I’d like to call my attorney.”

  MacRae already had his pad out. “I’m not arresting you, just trying to help you out here,” he said, giving us his I’m-just-a-poor-slob-trying-to-do-my-job look. “Just wondering when you last saw the victim?”

  Emily shook her head.

  MacRae gave me a cold look. “How about you, Dr. Zak? I’m sure you won’t mind answering a few questions.”

  He clicked open his pen and launched into his questions. Most of them established that I couldn’t vouch for Emily’s whereabouts for the better part of the last hour. When he was done, MacRae stood there clicking his pen rapidly open and shut.

  “I want to see you tomorrow, first thing,” he told Emily. “With your attorney, of course.”

  I didn’t take Emily home. I phoned Annie and she helped me locate Chip at the Harvard Club, where he was in the middle of a squash match and not thrilled about having been tracked down. He met us at his office.

  Still wearing shorts and a sweaty T-shirt, Chip looked rather incongruous in the well-appointed, skylighted office in the building where he and Annie had opened their practice after they left the public defender’s office. With its exposed brick walls and oversized windows, the building had been a stable back in the 1800s when horses and buggies clopped along the cobblestone streets in this part of East Cambridge, Boston’s first industrial center. Perfect location for a criminal law practice—the courthouse and jail were just a few blocks away.

  He had a mahogany desk, leather-seated desk chair, an abstract oil painting on the wall. The only hint of Chip’s dubious past was a 1976 Fillmore East Grateful Dead poster hanging on the back of his office door—a red, white, and blue skeleton.

  After an hour spent talking to Emily, Chip had covered six pages of a yellow pad with notes scrawled in a hand that only he could read. He leaned back in his chair.

  “I’ll be honest with you, Dr. Ryan. I fully expect the DA will want to charge you with murder. We’ll talk to the police first thing tomorrow, offer to help their investigation in any way we can. You should be prepared for the possibility that they may want to hold you.”

  “Hold me? What about my jobs?” she asked. People did that, hung onto shreds of normal routine as a way of denying that the world was crumbling around them.

  “It would probably be a good idea to request a leave of absence. Until this sorts itself out,” Chip said. Emily swallowed a sob. “And when we do talk with the police,” Chip went on, giving her his sternest voice, “you must do exactly what I tell you. Is that understood? My job is to protect you.”

  Emily stood and went through the motions of shaking Chip’s hand and thanking him. I walked her to my car. All the way back to her apartment, Emily stared listlessly out the window. It was nearly ten when we got there.

  I walked her to her door. “Damn,” she said, punching the inside of her bag as she rummaged for her keys. There was a pool of light in the entryway. Her bag dropped and out spilled much of the contents, coins rolling every which way.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Emily shrieked, kicking and stomping, sending a tube of lipstick skittering into the grass. “Goddamn that fucking miserable sonofabitch!”

  “Calm down,” I said, putting my hands on her shoulders.

  She wrenched herself free and gave me an accusing look. “You think I did it, don’t you. You think I killed Lenny and then ran down Kyle.” She placed her heel on a hand mirror and ground down on it until it shattered. “That’s what everyone’s going to think. Maybe I should just give up.”

  She squatted and picked up one of the shards of mirror. Light glinted off the glass, sending a sliver of light into the darkness. She grew very still, her skin glowing pale in the evening light.

  She sighed and tossed the piece of glass into the bushes. She wiped away tears and picked out her keys, then gathered up the rest of her belongings and stuffed them back into the bag.

  I offered her a hand. She took it and pulled herself to her feet. Before I knew what was happening, she was in my arms, pressing herself against me. For an instant, it felt as if I were holding Kate—Kate was about the same size, with that same combination of physical vulnerability and strength. My breath caught as the smell of cinnamon and clove invaded my head. Kate’s smell. I knew it was a memory. I gave a long, shuddering inhale, willing the sensation to last. Then we were kissing, all the alarm bells I was hearing muffled by the
moment.

  Slowly, with more reluctance than I would have admitted, I pulled away.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” I said.

  She fiddled with her keys and stared down at them. “I suppose you’re right.” She straightened her jacket collar. “I’m sorry.” Her mouth was pouting now, sulky.

  I looked at her face, the long neck and delicate chin, dark lashes resting on flushed cheeks. Cinnamon and clove had vanished, replaced by a cold clarity as I wondered if I was looking into the face of a killer.

  “Assholes are us,” I thought as I sat in the car outside my house. Why had I allowed it to happen? One minute I’m thinking Emily could be a cold-blooded murderer who was now on her third victim. The next minute I’m holding her in my arms and kissing her. Worse still, enjoying it. Maybe Lewy body dementia was already affecting my judgment. If not, then what the hell was going on? The one thing I knew was I didn’t want to go home. I needed ballast and a strong dark beer.

  I called Annie and asked her to meet me at the Inman Lounge. When I got there the place was half full, and a pair of TVs over either end of the bar had on Seinfeld reruns.

  “It doesn’t look good for her,” Annie said. “Woman takes matters into her own hands, gets her boyfriend to help her kill the man who stalked her, then kills her boyfriend before he can implicate her. That’s how it’s supposed to look, anyway.”

  “Supposed to look?”

  Annie skimmed the head off her beer with her finger and licked it off. “Your friend Emily is a flake, and I’m sure she hasn’t got the world’s best judgment in people, but she’s not stupid. I think it’s been made to look as if she did it.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence that she says she had a stalker before, and he was killed in a car accident?”

  “You think he got run over in a parking lot?”