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I shrieked like a B-movie starlet and bolted sideways, making for the door again. He lunged after me. I skidded to a halt at the end of my desk, teetered on one shoe, and dashed off in the other direction. He was close behind. I screamed again. His hand closed on my jacket. Fabric tore. Buttons popped. I turned in desperation. There was no hope now. He was twice my weight and strength, but there was nothing to do but fight, so I swung with all my might. My fist thudded against his ear like the swat of a swallow’s wing. He caught my wrist with little effort and grinned into my face as he pushed me toward the floor.

I was blubbering something incoherent, promises or threats or prayers. Who knows? Then suddenly, his grip gave a little. I scrambled backward, trying to gain my feet. He stumbled, grabbed his chest with clawed hands, and dropped to his knees. I lurched toward the phone, jabbing at numbers with spastic fingers and yammering into the receiver.

Bomstad rolled his eyes up toward mine. I dropped the phone and staggered against the wall. Then, like a melodramatic overactor, he fell to the floor, dead as a thumbtack.

2

Even choosing the perfect dinner wine loses its earth-shattering importance if your guests happen to be cannibals and you, the unsuspecting entrée.

—Dr. Candon,
psych professor

M
A’AM. MS. M
C
MULLEN.”

I tried to concentrate. The police had arrived with head-spinning haste. Apparently someone had heard my scream and dialed 911. My own call had probably gone to a hang-glider in Tibet.

Everything seemed foggy and unfocused, except for the body lying immobile on my overpriced Berber. That was as clear as vodka. His eyes were open and vividly blue, his hands limp, his fingers slightly curled. He lay on his back, but his jacket had fallen across his crotch with blessed kindness. Still, my stomach threatened to reject both the yogurt and the dehydrated orange.

“Ms. McMullen.”

“What?” I dragged my attention shakily away from Bomstad’s blank-eyed stare and supported myself with a hand on the top of my desk. The oak grain felt coarse and solid beneath my fingers. But the world still seemed strangely off-kilter. Maybe it was because I was wearing only one shoe. Maybe not.

The man addressing me was dark. Dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes, dark clothes. “Are you Christina McMullen?”

“Yes. I’m . . . Yes.” I sounded, I thought, about as bright as a Russian olive.

He stared at me for a good fifteen seconds, then, “I’m Lieutenant Rivera.”

I said nothing. My gaze was being dragged mercilessly toward the floor again. Those sky-blue eyes, those large, open hands.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re a psychiatrist?”

I pulled my attention doggedly back to the lieutenant’s face. It was devoid of expression, except possibly anger. A shade of distrust. Could be he looked cynical. Maybe devoid wasn’t exactly the right word.

His brows were set low over coffee-colored eyes that matched the dark hue of his jacket, and his lips were drawn in a straight, hard line.

“Psychologist,” I said. “I’m a . . .” My voice wavered a little on the vowels, making me sound like a prepubescent tuba player. “Psychologist.”

He didn’t seem to notice or care about the distinction. “This your office?”

“Yes.”

“You work here alone?”

“Yes. No. I . . .” Three men were examining the body and muttering among themselves. A fat guy in a wrinkled dress shirt that was miraculously too large said something from the corner of his mouth and the other two laughed. My stomach heaved.

“Yes or no. Which is it?” asked the lieutenant. Patience didn’t seem to be his virtue. Or empathy. Apparently, the fact that there was a dead guy staring at my ceiling didn’t faze him much, but it wasn’t doing a hell of a lot for my equilibrium.

“No. I usually have a . . . secretary.” For a moment I completely forgot her name, but then she’d only been my best friend since fifth grade, when she’d kissed Richie Mailor and declared him to have lips like the spotted pictus our science teacher kept in his aquarium. “Elaine . . . Butterfield.”

He was staring at me again. “Have you been drinking, Ms. McMullen?”

“I . . . No.”

“There are two glasses.”

“Ahhh . . .” My mind was wandering again. My focus crept in the direction of the corpse.

“Ms. McMullen.”

“Mr. Bomstad brought wine,” I said.

“How long have you two been lovers?”

My eyes snapped back to Dark Man. “What?”

“You and Bomstad,” he said. His tone was as dry as Bond’s martini. “How long have you been lovers?”

“We weren’t lovers.”

I can’t actually say he raised his brows. Maybe one. Just a notch.

“We weren’t lovers,” I repeated, more emphatically. “He attacked me.”

“Do your customers always bring . . . refreshments to their sessions?”

I stared at him. I’d worked my damn ass off to become a high-class psychologist and I didn’t like his tone. “I can’t dictate what my clients do with their time,” I said.

“It’s your office. I would think you could.”

So that’s the way it was. My brother Pete and I used to have spitting contests. I had been declared the indisputable winner. But perhaps spitting wouldn’t be appropriate here. Just a stare-down, then. “You can think anything you want, Lieutenant . . .”

“Rivera.”

“We weren’t lovers, Mr. Raver.”

Something like a grin appeared on his face, or maybe he was just curling a lip as he sized up his prey. There was a shallow scar at the right corner of his mouth. Maybe that’s why his expression looked more like a predatory snarl than a smile. The romance novelists would have called it sardonic. I didn’t read romance anymore. Now I was studying Tolstoy and thinking deep thoughts. Mostly I was thinking of giving up reading.

“What was he doing here after hours with no one else in the office?” Rivera asked.

“Elaine had a yoga class.”

“Did she?” he asked, and I wondered if he actually saw some significance in my blathering. “There’s a stain on your blouse, Ms. McMullen. Is it blood?”

“No.” I had never had a stain that fascinated people to such an extraordinary extent. “Why would you think—”

“What was he doing here?”

I felt breathless. As if I’d run a long way. I don’t like to run a long way. I’d tried it on more than one occasion. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, in fact, if you call three miles a long way. I do. “What?” I said, struggling with the fog that threatened to engulf the interior of my cranium.

“Lover boy.” He nodded toward Bomstad’s body. “Why was he here?”

“For therapy,” I replied, “like all my clients.”

Two more men and one woman had joined the mob by the corpse. One of the men squatted by the body, suit crumpled, pen and clipboard in hand.

“What were you seeing him for?”

The fellow with the clipboard reached for Bomstad with his pen.

I jerked my attention back to Dark Man and raised my chin. I was pretty sure I looked like Hester Prynne. A first-rate martyr, but I felt a little faint. “Impotence,” I said.

“Hey.” The suited fellow’s voice was loud enough to wake the dead. Almost. “Looky here. He’s got a woody.”

Rivera’s eyes burned. I could almost meet them. “Damn, you’re good,” he said and my knees buckled.

I
woke up in my own bed. I didn’t remember much about getting there. My head felt fuzzy and my stomach queasy. It took a minute for the memories to come rolling back into my brain. It was a dream. A bad dream, I told myself. But I’m nothing if not a realist. Which was what had convinced me to become a therapist in the first place. After years of depraved dating it had become apparent that all men are psychopaths. Therefore half the population needs professional attention. It was bound to be a lucrative field, and easy.

How many times could I be wrong?

I shut my eyes, trying to block out the previous night, but a dead body with a hard-on pretty much etches itself into one’s memory. A noise distracted me and I rolled over, listening. My doorbell rang, making me wonder foggily if that was what had awakened me in the first place.

Questions rolled around in my head like BBs in a walnut shell but I fought off my bedsheets and staggered toward the door. It took me a minute to realize I was still wearing one shoe. It was a Ferragamo and matched my skirt. My jacket and blouse, however, were gone. I stopped dead in the middle of the floor. The doorbell rang again, drawing my gaze up from my not quite willowy body.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Police.”

A dozen thoughts garbled through me. Not one could be voiced in polite company.

“Just a minute,” I yelled and plucking off my shoe, staggered back to my bedroom for a shirt. But once there I merely gazed around in disjointed uncertainty. I’m tidy enough, but I don’t like to be obsessive about it. I’d thrown my robe over the foot rail of my bed and left my horoscope beside it before galloping off to work on Thursday morning. I was an Aquarius and yesterday was predicted to be my lucky day.

I dragged on the robe. Classy, it was not. Nor did it exactly match my rumpled skirt or the irritably discarded shoe that still dangled from my fingertips.

The doorbell screamed at me. I plowed toward it and looked through the peephole. Lieutenant Rivera stood on my porch, looking grim.

I braced myself and opened the door. He shouldered his way in. He wasn’t a huge man. Six foot maybe, only a few inches taller than myself, and not particularly broad, but every inch of him seemed to be devoid of fat. And this time I mean devoid.

He wore jeans that had seen some life and a charcoal-colored dress shirt. His hips were lean, his eyes steady, and his wrists dark and broad-boned where his sleeves were folded up from his workingman’s hands.

“Do you let just anyone in?”

I think I blinked at him. “What?”

“Your door,” he said. “Do you let everybody in who rings your bell?”

“I saw you through the peephole.”

“You didn’t even ask for my badge.”

The man was certifiable. Another candidate for the loony bin. Business was brisk.

“You thought I might forget you overnight?” I asked.

The almost-grin appeared, but Rivera turned, glancing around my foyer. It was really nothing more than a narrow entryway, but I liked to call it a vestibule.

“Nice place.”

Was he trying to be civil? I wondered numbly, and decided to take a chance. “Would you like some coffee?”

He turned back toward me as if just remembering my presence. “Did you prescribe the Viagra?”

“What?”

“Bomstad,” he said. “He’d taken a large dose of Viagra before visiting you. Did you prescribe it?”

I felt as if I’d lost a water ski and was now skidding across the surface of a lake on my face. “No. I’m—”

“Did you know he had a heart condition?”

“I’m a psychologist. I can’t prescribe drugs,” I said, still working on the last question.

“Even for a heart condition?”

“Not for anything.”

“Then you knew he had a weak heart.”

“No. I . . . No.”

“So you didn’t see any harm in trying to seduce him.”

I took a deep breath and counted to five. “I didn’t try to seduce anybody,” I said.

His gaze drifted down from my face. Mine followed, then I snapped the wayward robe together over the top of my bra. It was black and frayed and had cost me less than twelve dollars brand-new. Why spend $49.99 on a garment no one would ever see?

Rivera’s lips lifted.

“Why are you here?” I asked. My voice sounded angry. I hope. Maybe it was just a little bit breathless.

“I wanted to make sure you were all right. You seemed disoriented last night when I brought you home.”

“You brought—” The truth dawned a little slowly, but I was running on four hours of sleep and visions of a corpse with a woody. “What did you do with my blouse?”

“I was just trying to get you comfortable.”

I stared at him, then lifted my right hand. The single shoe dangled between us like rotten fruit. “You left the shoe but took the blouse?”

He shrugged and walked into my kitchen. It wasn’t a whole lot bigger than my vestibule. “Turns out it was a fruit stain. Cherry,” he said.

“You tested the stain?”

He shrugged again. His movements were Spartan, as if each one was calculated. His gaze traveled back to mine. “How long had you and Mr. Bomstad been seeing each other?”

“I told you . . .” His attention made me fidgety. I hated being fidgety. Fidgety is not classy. “I wasn’t
seeing
him.”

A brow flickered. “I meant professionally.”

“Oh. Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Three months. Maybe four.”

“And during that time how often did you have intercourse with him?”

He had taken a notebook from somewhere and flipped it open. I stared in disbelief. “I told you before, we didn’t have intercourse.”

“No. You told me before you weren’t lovers.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it.

“You were going to say something?”

It’s not as though I have a temper, but sometimes, when I’m tired, it’s best not to push me. Or when I’m hungry. I can get cranky when I’m hungry. And there are certain times of the month when I’m just better off left alone. “We weren’t lovers,” I said, keeping my tone admirably even. I
was
tired and hungry, but at least I wasn’t menstruating. “Neither . . .”—I pronounced it with an elegant hard
i
sound and felt better for it.—“. . . did we have intercourse.”

“Oh.” He said it casually, as if it didn’t matter. I ground my teeth and reconsidered the spitting contest.

“Were you aware of his activities?”

“Activities?” I said.

He shrugged. “What he did. Who he was.”

“He was a tight end for the Lions,” I said. “If that’s what you’re referring to.”

“Did you know he was a Peeping Tom?”

“What?” The air had been squashed out of my lungs again.

“And an exhibitionist?”

“Andrew?”

“Do you address all your customers by their first names?”