I prodded her resistance directly. I went after the soft flanks of her denial. Nothing seemed to work.
Sometimes that was the nature of psychotherapy.
After Gibbs left her session-her exit was marked by a promise to call me once she was settled into a hotel-I ran into Diane in the hallway as we were both on the way to the bathroom. She was wearing jeans and a sweater: not office garb.
“I just came in to get my appointment book,” she explained. “I have jury duty. Have to be at the courthouse in ten minutes. God, I hope I get sequestered. It would be so great to get sequestered.”
“No lawyer in this town is going to let you sit on a jury.”
“Why not?”
With the frequency with which Diane testified on custody and child abuse issues, she knew the county’s judges and clerks, and the law, better than half the members of the bar. Every attorney wanted to believe that at the conclusion of a trial what ruled in the jury room were the echoes of the lawyer’s own words of wisdom. But any lawyer who had ever crossed paths with Diane Estevez knew that she wouldn’t think of allowing that to occur. Were she seated on a jury, what would rule in the jury room was what Diane wanted to rule in the jury room-which meant that the odds of Diane being chosen as a juror in Boulder County were about the same as Al Gore spending Christmas on a ranch in Crawford, Texas.
She tilted her head back toward my office, sniffed the air, and said, “Do I smell the Dancing Queen?”
I flared my nostrils and tested the air but didn’t detect anything. Was I immune to my client’s perfume? As a way of changing the subject, I asked, “You can’t hear anything in your office, can you? When I’m in my office doing therapy, you don’t overhear my sessions?”
“With your voice? You speak so quietly, I’m surprised sometimes that your own patients can hear you. Why, did I miss something good?”
“Nothing? You can’t hear a thing?”
“No. Why? Can you hear me?”
“I hear you laugh.”
She laughed. “Why are you asking?”
“I’ve had a few accusations from patients in the last few days that I’m divulging information that I heard during therapy. They’re… concerning; they’re accusations about serious things.”
“Accusations? Not just worries?”
“Accusations.”
“Oh, the Dancing Queen? Are you the anonymous tipster? You’re the one who called Crime Stoppers on Platinum?”
“Diane.”
She had really perked up. “Well, are you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Nothing inadvertent?”
“No.”
She squeezed past me and slipped into the bathroom. As she shut the door, she said, “Maybe your office is bugged.”
I said, “Ha. Very funny.”
But I’d barely shifted my weight from one foot to the other before I thought:Sam.
Rhymes withdamn.
FORTY-THREE
It was surprisingly easy to find someone to sweep my office for bugs. I called a couple of lawyers I knew through Lauren, who put me in touch with the private investigators they used, and the two investigators both pointed me toward the same company: West Security.
The electronic security specialist I talked to at West was a woman named Tayisha Rosenthal. She explained that I had my choice between a cursory sweep of my office for about half of my practice’s daily earnings, and a thorough sweep, which would cost me twice what my practice typically generated in a day. If I chose the thorough examination, she would give me a 99.99 percent assurance that my office was not being monitored by listening devices.
I said I would take the deluxe package.
She asked when.
“As soon as possible.”
“Can you do noon?” she said. “I can squeeze you in at noon.”
I looked at my calendar. It would mean canceling a patient, maybe two. I said yes and I gave her the address.
I’d made a bad error in judgment when I’d asked Gibbs for freedom to consult with Sam about her suspicions about Sterling. That was certain. And it was clear that Sam had gone too far when he’d approached Gibbs himself and decided to take off on some ill-thought-out quest in Georgia.
But bugging my office?
He’d gone too far.
Way too far.
I picked up my address book and began looking for the phone numbers of the two patients whose appointments would have to be rescheduled.
Like neighbors everywhere, Diane and I kept keys to each other’s office. Highly doubtful that what might be said in my own office would ultimately remain confidential, I took advantage of Diane’s tour in jury duty limbo and saw the rest of my morning’s appointments in her hopefully uncorrupted space. When my patients asked me about the change, I explained that my office was being fumigated. It was as close to the truth as I was willing to get.
Right at twelve o’clock I paced out to my waiting room where I spied an unfamiliar woman reading a copy ofSports Illustrated. She was a young African American with close-cropped hair and soft features. When she looked up, I saw that her dark eyes were brilliant, like fire and onyx.
“Tayisha Rosenthal?” I said. “Alan Gregory.”
I invited her back to my office. She grabbed a fat metal aluminum briefcase, and I allowed her to precede me down the hall. “It’s not this whole place, right?”
“No, not unless you find something in my office. Then I suppose you’ll have to search the whole building.”
She tapped her watch. “Won’t be today.”
“I understand.”
She stood in my office for a moment reconnoitering the place, then took long strides across the room to my desk, opened her case like a giant clamshell, and started fishing out equipment.
I waved her back into the hallway and pulled the door closed. “Let’s talk out here. Just in case.”
“You sticking around? You want to watch me work?” she asked.
“Why? Is that extra?” It was a lame attempt on my part to find humor in the experience.
She laughed. “Nah. I’ll give you a running commentary of what I’m doing if you want.”
“That would be great.”
“Good. But the commentary is extra. Make it fifty, cash.” She held out her hand. “Up front.”
“Excuse me?”
She laughed again. “Kidding. You’re a shrink, right? I thought you people were supposed to treat paranoids, not become one yourself. And here you are thinking that people are listening to your every word, just like some nutcase. Aren’t you supposed to be the healthy one?”
“Yeah, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
“There’s some irony there, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I admitted, “there is.” I was eager to change the subject. “How does someone end up doing this-what you do-for a living? Sweeping buildings for bugs?”
“Army intelligence. I did this same kind of thing for Uncle Sam’s Army of One for four years.”
She looked too young to have completed four years in the army. Apparently, she could tell that’s what I was thinking.
“I’m twenty-four,” she said. “Old enough. Do the math.”
She stepped back inside the office and went to work.
The equipment she’d pulled out of foam rubber compartments in her metal case seemed to have been cobbled together from the detritus of a few visits to Radio Shack. Microphones, earphones, and a little machine that looked like what I thought a modern Geiger counter would look like. Gauges with long, jumpy needles. Digital scoreboards. A few knobs and switches that required some fiddling.
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.