“No, I won’t.”
“Mitch, she doesn’t have the tools yet to deflect the dangers out there.”
“You’re lecturing me, Morgan. I already told you I wasn’t going to try to change your mind.”
“Right. Sorry. I really am sorry. I just hate not having her here. I hate being the one to say no, being the bad guy again.”
“It’s going to be fine.” He smiled. “Do you want to go out and get something to eat?”
I didn’t. I wanted to see Noah. I wanted to talk to him and tell him how I was feeling and sit in the kitchen with him and have him make us something to eat. Damn. I needed to stop thinking about Noah. I had told Nina I could do this and that I needed to do this and it was what I wanted.
“Sure, let’s go.”
“Where?”
“It doesn’t matter, wherever you want.”
“Morgan, just pick someplace.” He sounded irritated. This was all too familiar. A pressure was holding me down, a tightness wound around my chest. I recognized the signs. I’d forgotten how we had been together.
My marriage to Mitch hadn’t ended because he wanted it to. I hadn’t been happy, either, even if I chose not to think about it, even if I chose to hide behind my daughter and my work.
“Mitch,” I said, “my hand hurts and I’m tired from all the painkillers. I think I need to stay here. I need to go to sleep.”
I got up and walked him to the front door, where he leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “Call me tomorrow. And please, Morgan, stop being so stubborn. Take something to help with the pain.”
But once he had left, once the door had shut behind him and I was alone again in my home, my wrist wasn’t that bad and I wasn’t so tired anymore.
Sixty-Six
I struggled out of my clothes. Everything took so much time and effort with only one hand. Finally in my robe, I went into the kitchen and tried to get a glass of water from the dispenser, but I couldn’t push down the lever and hold the glass with the same hand. I gave up and used tap water.
Holding the glass in my left hand-which still felt odd- I walked down the hall toward my bedroom, but stopped first at Dulcie’s door.
I missed her. Not the willful teenager who looked at me with determined cold blue eyes and pinched her lips together, but the little girl who curled herself up in my arms, put her head on my shoulder and fell asleep in my lap.
There was something comforting about the small bed. I put the water down on the nightstand, lay back, turned on her television and channel-surfed until I found the news. I wanted to see if anything new had happened with Alan since I’d been hurt.
First up was an international story, about a bombing in the Middle East. Then a national story about a missing corporate jet over the Rockies. Then what I expected: a photograph of Alan Leightman filled the screen. It shouldn’t have surprised me at all, since I was prepared for it, but as I sat in my daughter’s bedroom, my wrist aching, listening to a reporter I didn’t know read the news that would ruin my client, I felt the sting of tears. A man’s whole reputation, after a life dedicated to the law, to doing the just thing, was being destroyed. Nothing, no matter what happened after this, would ever restore his stature, or probably his spirit.
I picked up the phone. I wasn’t going to call Noah to tell him that I missed him, or that I’d fallen, or that I was having second thoughts about Mitch, but to tell him that they had it all wrong: Alan couldn’t have killed anyone. I knew he couldn’t have. And that meant someone else was still out there. Someone dangerous. Someone they had to keep looking for.
I’d already dialed; I heard the first ring.
But what if I did tell Noah all that and he asked me how I knew-what could I say? I still didn’t have Alan’s permission to speak to the police about him.
I heard the second ring.
No, Alan had been insistent that I not tell anyone. Almost to the point of being threatening. And then, for the first time since the accident, I remembered the man in the shadows under the street lamp in the snow. The man who looked like Alan’s bodyguard, Terry Meziac.
“Hello?”
So instead of telling Noah what I called to tell him, I told him how I’d fallen and broken my wrist.
“Are you crying?” he asked.
I nodded, realized he couldn’t see me, and was about to say something when he said, “You shouldn’t have to cry by yourself. I’m on my way out. Would you like me to bring you something? Did you eat?”
I cried harder.
Sixty-Seven
Most men would have brought chicken noodle soup from one of the ubiquitous coffee shops on New York’s Upper East Side. Not Noah. He showed up with a quart of chicken gumbo with big chunks of tender white meat and tiny round slices of okra in a spicy tomato base that brought different tears to my eyes.
While we sat at the kitchen table and ate bowls of the thick Creole stew, I answered all his questions and told him everything but the one thing I wanted to talk to him about the most-how I’d seen Terry Meziac on the street, how I thought he was following me. About the threat Alan Leightman had almost made in my office. About how hard it was to reconcile the Alan who I had been treating for so long with the one who panicked at the thought of me telling anyone that he was in therapy with me, even if it helped him with the police.
Noah had warned me once that if Alan wasn’t guilty, then I was in danger. He’d meant that whoever was guilty might want to keep me quiet.
It had never occurred to him that Alan might have other reasons for wanting me kept quiet.
“Are you in much pain?” he asked.
“No.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Really, no. It was worse before. I took some painkillers.”
“The prescription kind?”
“No. But they helped.”
“Okay. But if you need something stronger, do you have it?”
I nodded.
We were both quiet for a few seconds.
“I need to tell you something about Alan Leightman. I can’t talk about it. I can’t tell you why I know. Or anything. Is that all right?”
“It will have to be all right.”
“There is no way that Alan Leightman killed those girls.”
“I know you believe that, but he confessed. We have evidence proving he watched them online.”
“That’s not evidence that he killed them, is it?”
He looked at me with a sympathetic smile. “No therapist wants to believe that she could have misread her patient. You can’t blame yourself.”
“Damn you. Damn you for patronizing me. First of all, I never said he was my patient.”
“I am not patronizing you. I’m telling you something you know is right. You don’t want him to be guilty. You don’t want to have missed the signs. I know how you feel. I understand.”
I stared down at the empty bowl. I’d never be able to make food that good.
How could I tell Noah that Alan didn’t have any of the personality traits of a person capable of carrying out those four macabre murders without revealing that he was my patient-and without breaking my promise that I would protect Alan’s privacy.
Was that the real reason I didn’t want to tell Noah? Or had Alan scared me? Had seeing Terry Meziac, or someone who I thought was Terry, scared me?
No, Alan wasn’t capable of harming me, even to keep whatever secret he was keeping. I’d worked with him long enough to know that. He’d been excited by risking his reputation and visiting those women online. And at the same time, he was shamed by it. But he had no interest in any of the women he watched. No need to reach out and try to get to know them, help them or hurt them. He didn’t see them as his tormentors. He’d been viewing Internet porn long enough to know that even if he got rid of three or four or five Web-cam girls, there would always be more just a few key strokes away. Yes, he needed the Web-cam girls the same way a coke addict needs a fix, but there was nothing violent about his obsession.