After about ten minutes of poking around and setting and resetting her electronics, opening drawers, and moving my furniture around, she said, “Hot-cha!”
By then I’d settled into a place on the floor by the office door, leaning against the wall reading the sameSports IllustratedTayisha had been perusing in the waiting room. Tiger Woods was apparently still winning golf tournaments.
Tayisha’s exclamation startled me. I looked up at the mess she’d made of my office and said, “What?”
She pointed toward the hallway, but she didn’t look my way; she was totally focused on one of her little digital gadgets.
We stepped out of the office.
“Yo, Doctor? You paying attention? Good. On these private gigs, like this-by private, I mean I’m not out doing one of my routine sweeps for corporate security purposes, just a one-time for somebody who thinks somebody’s listening in on him-on these private gigs I meet some of the craziest human beings ever. Nutsos. People with tin-foil all over their apartments. Husbands sure their wives are listening to them over the radio in their cars. Those guys always have mistresses, by the way. They’re always getting something on the side. It’s the guilt that makes them whacked; that’s what I think. But crazy? You bet. I do a couple, three of those a month. Most of the time I feel like I should keep a syringe of Thorazine in my briefcase, you know, just in case?” She smiled. “And-and-you want to know what? I’ve never found a device on one of those jobs. Not one.”
“Good, I’m glad to hear that.” Maybe Tayisha’s track record of ubiquitous failure boded well for me. Right at that moment I would rather have been judged crazy than discover that I’d been right about the bug.
“Until today,” she said.
“What?”
She pointed at the equipment she held in her left hand. “This says that there’s a device in there sending out a signal. Mmm-hmmm. Something’s generating a fairly healthy signal that’s going out of that room. It appears to be voice activated.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry, now that I’ve detected it, I’ll locate it in a minute or two. You be real quiet while I finish up, okay? I’m concentrating.”
Although in my fantasies I was already raising Sam by his thumbs, via pulleys, to some very high ceiling, the truth was that I had thought that I was being overly paranoid, too. I really hadn’t expected that Tayisha Rosenthal would discover any devices in my office.
Locating the bug took another five minutes. Ninety-nine-plus percent of the device was inside one of the throw pillows on the sofa where my patients often sat. The electronics were buried deep in the batting.
“That’s the transmitter. I just turned it off.” Zipping open the pillow, she pointed at a tiny box about the size of a pack of gum. “And this here”-she pulled the batting apart and revealed a braided wire-“is the antenna. Like little strands of hair.
“And this little baby-can you see that, right there?” She used the tip of a pencil as a pointer. “See how tiny that is? That’s the microphone. Good stuff. Quality equipment.”
The lead of the pencil was pointing directly at a small gray dot about the size of a lentil that extended out at the edge of the pillow, near the zipper. If you weren’t looking for it, you would never notice it.
“Really, that’s the microphone? What’s the range? How far can… a device like this transmit?”
“We could test it if you want, but I’d say not too far. I would guess that whoever’s listening has a car parked nearby with a good receiving antenna and a digital recorder for the output.”
The “output” was my therapy sessions. I waved at the pillow. “Who has stuff like this?”
“Lots of people. You can buy listening devices over the Internet these days. Easy. Equipment this good is pricey, though. Somebody invested some serious money going after whatever it is you have to say in here. The battery in the transmitter alone costs some serious bucks.”
“What do I do now?” I asked.
“How about what do I do now? What I do is I document this-what I found and where-and I take some good pictures of the equipment in place. You’ll get a fair-size stack of glossies for your photo album. Here’s your part: Then you authorize me to remove the device. After I do, I screen one more time to be absolutely positively certain that there isn’t a second device. Don’t worry, there isn’t. I’m ninety-eight percent sure already. Then you call the police to report the intrusion. There’ve been some laws broken in this room. Mmmm-hmm.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Then you sit down and have a long, hard conversation with yourself about who might do this to you.”
“And why,” I added.
“Yeah. That, too.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ll be out of here in ten minutes max. But hey, we’re going to have to find a time to do a sweep of the rest of the building now, too.”
She watched me swallow. The act was involuntary.
Tayisha was reassuring. “I’ll give you a good rate, don’t worry. This has been fun.”
I wasn’t having such a good time.
After punching in Sam’s pager number, I listened for the beep before I dialed 911 and my cell phone number. Then I sat on Diane’s desk and waited for my phone to vibrate. I used the dead time to try to compute the number of secrets from the number of patients that might have been intercepted by the jumble of sophisticated electronics that was stuffed in my sofa pillow. I quickly realized that I was missing an essential variable: I didn’t know how long the bug had been in place.
The earliest accusation I’d received from one of my patients was the one from my attorney client, Jim Zebid, the previous Sunday accusing me of leaking the story about Judge Heller’s husband selling cocaine. He’d told me that story the previous Tuesday, so the bug had been in place for at least eight days. Maybe longer.
I was seeing thirty-six patients a week. Which meant thirty-six unique sets of secrets were at risk of having been revealed.
After cursing silently for half a minute, I took Tayisha Rosenthal’s advice and began to have that long, hard conversation with myself about who might do this to me.
And why.
FORTY-FOUR
Nashville was one of those legendary American cities that I’d always wanted to visit, but when I finally got there at a quarter after one in the morning on a dark, misty night a couple of days before Thanksgiving, all I wanted to see was the lumpy synthetic pillow waiting for me on a Nashville motel room bed. I begged a Mountain Dew-distracted clerk for a five-thirty wake-up call and was in bed three minutes after I slid the plastic card into the lock on the door.
DO NOT DISTURBsign on the door. Strip, pee, meds, bed.
I slept like a dead man.
By the time five-thirty came, my car was chilly, Dixie dew coated the windshield, and preholiday Nashville was still as sleepy as I was. I walked a couple of blocks to a little convenience store to try to scrape together some breakfast. Satisfaction wasn’t in the cards. I was learning that one of the places where post-heart attack patients can’t conveniently dine is a convenience store. Breakfast choices at the gas station were limited to doughnuts-a pretty good variety, actually-or Danish, or a sad-looking egg-and-sausage thing on a croissant. I settled for a dry bagel, burnt decaf, yogurt, and a carton of orange juice and walked back to the motel with every intention of eating my ascetic meal, climbing into the Jeep, and pointing it vaguely north toward Indianapolis.
It didn’t happen.
I woke up later on only because I had to pee. The light outside my room said dusk. I used the bathroom, took off my clothes, killed my cell phone and pager, and fell back into bed. “Tired” didn’t come close to describing my fatigue. “Exhausted” wasn’t enough of a superlative.