Blinded (22 page)

Tuesday morning found Lauren solidly in hyperenergized zombie mode-think the Energizer Bunny meets
Night of the Living Dead
.

Her affected leg was no worse, maybe a little better. Less weakness. That was the good news.

But there wasn’t enough good news. Worry about Lauren and the future-hers, Grace’s, ours-stabbed at me incessantly, but she and I didn’t talk about it during the duration of the extended steroid fog. Neither of us once mentioned the bull elephant that had pitched a tent in our living room.

We’d made it through the night-me with little sleep, her with less than that-and thanks to Viv’s early-morning assistance with Grace, I managed to get to the office in time for my first appointment.

Tuesday’s workday was remarkable only for its normalcy. I spent an entire day at work feeling almost effective. Going home that evening, I faced the more daunting task of trying to be an effective husband and father in a home that was quaking from the aftershocks of illness and treatment.

Together-Grace and Lauren and I, with a full assist from Viv and the puppies-we made it. Wednesday morning came. The respite of a four-day holiday weekend was only one workday away.

How hard could that be?

The local media had begun feasting on the Storeys’ troubles. The morning TV news shows and the Boulder and Denver papers had pieced together most of the details of Gibbs’s and Sterling’s ties to Louise Lake. Now they were busy fleshing out the more lurid parts of the tale, including the details of the fruitless search of the Ochlockonee River and the revelation that authorities suspected that Sterling Storey might be involved in the deaths of three other women.

I anticipated that Gibbs would be overwhelmed by the public revelations. Reactive hibernation wasn’t out of the question, and I wasn’t a hundred percent sure she would show up for her early-morning appointment.

But she did.

“Not Safe House. I don’t want to go there, I just don’t think I’d fit in.”

That was actually Gibbs’s opening gambit, her first words after a perfunctory “good morning.”

Had I expected it? No, not really. Was I surprised? No, not at all. The insidious nature of battering caused the pendulum of hope to swing from reality to denial and back again. This was Gibbs’s denial talking. The way she introduced it told me that she had been busy having a conversation with me in her head and had just then decided to allow me to mouth my own lines. I was more than content to let her go on without me for a while, if she would.

“They followed me here. I’m sure they did. They were waiting outside this morning when I opened the garage.”

“They?”

“Those newspeople.”

I nodded. I could have encouraged her to go off on a rant about those newspeople, but I chose to look down the other path she’d offered. “You don’t think you would fit in at Safe House, Gibbs?”

“I’m not a battered woman.”

Arguing the point was a tempting option, but I made a quick judgment that it was neither the right issue nor the right time. Gibbs, I suspected, was protesting a different kind of “fitting in.” And the truth was that her rationalization wasn’t the real issue; her denial was.

Gently, I tried to draw her back. “But you are in need of a safe place to stay-you accept that?”

“I’m trying to be… cautious. Detective Purdy suggested it. Just in case there’s a chance that”-she took a moment to decide how she wanted to complete her thought-“that I might be in some danger. He said he talked to you, too. Right?”

I nodded. I reminded myself that it had been I who had invited Sam into this conundrum; I shouldn’t be too surprised that he was complicating it. At least his advice to Gibbs was sound.

“And now, with all the cameras, I can’t stay at home anyway. I can’t. I’m not even going to go back. I have some things in the car, and I have to find someplace else to stay.”

“What are you considering?”

“I was hoping you would have an alternative… for me.” She lifted her eyebrows. “Someplace besides Safe House.”

Were there other options? Of course. Many women in vulnerable circumstances turned to friends or family for shelter. I usually didn’t think that it was a good idea. “I think Safe House is where you belong. They know what they’re doing. It’s not just the shelter that they offer. It’s the support, the counseling, and their experience. Everything. They work well with the police. They’re the pros. When the stakes are this high, I think you go with the best.”

Watching her face as I made my speech, I realized that it was as though I hadn’t been speaking at all. She waited until the aggravating noise of my voice subsided before she said, “I’m actually thinking about going to a hotel. I’d be more comfortable there, I think. You know, more privacy?”

Not to mention a private bath, maid service, nice linens, room service, and maybe a chocolate on her pillow.

I stated the obvious: “Isn’t that the first place Sterling would look for you?”

“He’s dead, Dr. Gregory. Dead.”

I softened my tone a little. “Is that what you believe, Gibbs?”

“No, not really,” she said without any contemplation. “But it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it? For everybody?”

I didn’t respond. It wasn’t a tactical silence. I just didn’t know what to say. She leaned over and touched the handle on her purse. For a moment I thought she was going to grab it, stand up, and go. She didn’t.

She settled back, crossed her legs, and said, “He went back to kill them, you know.”

No, I didn’t know. “I don’t think I understand.”

“Sterling met them one year. Had his little flings with them. And he went back to see them again the next time.”

“The next time?”

“The next time he was covering the event, whatever it was. The golf tournament, or game, or race, or whatever it was. A lot of this stuff he produces is annual, you know? He goes back to some of the same places, and he does basically the same thing every year.”

“And… he continued his affairs? He saw the same women each year in each city?”

To me, it sounded exhausting.

“If he… liked them. If their first encounter was… you know. Then, yes, he saw the same women again.”

I tried to gauge her discomfort at our discussion of Sterling’s serial infidelity. I thought it was high. Or maybe I just thought it should be high.

“And then he killed them?” I asked. I knew the beginning of the story, and a lot of the middle, and the very end, but it felt as though somebody had ripped out a chunk of pages just before the conclusion.

“Not usually. Just sometimes.”

Great,
I thought, allowing myself the luxury of some irony.
Maybe he can be rehabilitated.

“Go on, please, Gibbs. Was there a method to his… a way to understand the motivation he used to… I mean, how did he, um-”

“Decide? Some of them wanted more from him. That wasn’t the arrangement. That’s why I think he…”

Killed them.

“They were the ones who wouldn’t let go, who insisted. That’s what put them at risk.”

The arrangement?

Was Gibbs implying that the women were responsible for their own murders by violating some agreement they had with Sterling? Reaching such a conclusion would not have been that atypical for a battered woman.

Damn,
I said to myself. Gibbs had once again distracted me. I’d been confronting her about her decision to stay in a hotel, not Safe House, and she’d managed to change the subject to murder. A compelling change, I had to admit: This misdirection was not the work of an amateur.

I prepared to point out the process when her face displayed sudden alarm. “You’re not going to tell anyone what I just told you, right? Not the police? If anybody learns this, Dr. Gregory, they will have learned it from you. No one else knows about it. I couldn’t bear it if any of this got out. I couldn’t.”

I’d been expecting Gibbs to revisit her distrust of the reliability of my silence from the moment she’d walked in the door, but the timing surprised me, and an undertow of accusation sucked at me. I said, “I haven’t broken your trust, Gibbs. And I won’t.”

“Good.” She smiled at me. “No matter where we go-you and I-we end up talking about sex, don’t we?”

Were we just talking about sex? Or had I just been witness to yet another one of the greatest illusions since Penn and Teller?

“Sex. It’s not just for procreation anymore.”

In the ensuing minutes, in case I required it, I received a refresher course in the resilience of denial and the elasticity of resistance. Gibbs and I covered no new ground. The topic of Sterling’s affairs? It was of no apparent interest to her. “Old news,” she declared. “I prefer to look forward.”

Sterling’s being alive, or dead? “I think Detective Purdy is right. He’s alive. I would know if he were dead. I would. That changes things. It does. I have decisions to make. Different ones.”

The danger she was in? “He wouldn’t hurt me. He did it once and he apologized. He won’t do it again. I just need to get away from all the media.”

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 with
damn
.

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 of
Sports 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 same
Sports Illustrated
Tayisha 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.