“The same stuff you and I do,” Archie said. “My work.” In fact he’d been more up front with Gretchen. He had shared everything. The stress of the investigation. The pressure it put on his relationship with Debbie. “My marriage.”
Rosenberg raised an eyebrow. “It must have been quite upsetting to realize that you had shared all of those personal thoughts with a killer.”
Quite upsetting. That was one way of putting it. The funny thing was, at the time, it had been nice to have someone to talk to. Too bad she carved people up for fun. “She was a good listener,” Archie said.
“So you spent more time with her than the others did,” Rosenberg said, her pen poised over the notebook.
“Yes,” Archie said. “I guess so.”
“Where did you have your counseling sessions?” she asked.
Archie lifted a hand. “Right here.”
Rosenberg sat up and looked around her home office. “I understand why she would consult with you about a case here, but that’s unusual. That she would actually treat you in her home.”
“Why?” Archie asked. “You do.”
“I’m a psychologist,” Rosenberg said. “She said she was a psychiatrist.” She wrote something on the legal pad, shaking her head.
“She wasn’t really a psychiatrist,” Archie reminded her.
Rosenberg looked up from the legal pad. “Did you ever suspect her?” she asked.
There went the leg again. Archie didn’t bother to stop it. It felt good, somewhere for the nervous energy to go. He lifted his cup of coffee, but didn’t take a drink. “About the time the paralytic drug she slipped in my coffee kicked in,” he said. He set the paper coffee cup on the floor, opened the pillbox on his lap, removed a pill, and swallowed it.
“What was that?” Rosenberg asked.
“An Altoid,” Archie said.
Rosenberg smiled. “I’m not sure you’re supposed to swallow those.”
Archie smiled back. “I was hungry.”
Rosenberg leaned forward and then uncrossed and crossed her legs again. “I can’t help you if you’re not honest with me,” she said.
Archie looked down at his hands. Sometimes he thought he could still see the faint tan line where his wedding ring had been. “I think about her sometimes,” he said softly.
“About Gretchen Lowell,” Rosenberg said.
Archie looked up. “I fantasize about fucking her,” he said.
Rosenberg laid the pen down on the pad. “She held you captive for ten days,” she said. “You were powerless. Perhaps your fantasies are a way of having power over her.”
“So it’s perfectly healthy,” Archie said.
“It’s understandable,” Rosenberg said. “I didn’t say it was healthy.” She reached across and put a hand on Archie’s forearm. She wore rings on all her fingers. “Do you want to get past this? To give up the pills? To get over what happened to you? To be happy with your family?”
“Yes,” Archie said.
“That’s the first step.”
Archie rubbed the back of his neck. “How many are there?”
Rosenberg smiled. “One less.”
There were five Vicodin lined up like little piano keys on Archie’s office desk. Archie swept them into his hand and washed them down with the dregs of the cold coffee he had left from his session with Rosenberg.
It was mid-morning and they were still waiting on the crime lab report on the new bodies. Archie glanced down at Susan Ward’s story in the Herald in his lap. MYSTERY KID LEADS COPS TO NEW BODIES. It didn’t even make the front page. It was in the Metro section, dwarfed by ongoing coverage of the senator’s death. Maybe the mystery kid’s parents would see the story and piece it together. Archie wanted to at least prove to Henry that he wasn’t going crazy. In the meantime they had the standard poodle in custody. On the off chance he passed any clues.
Archie touched his right side, where his persistent cramp had returned. The Vicodin didn’t seem to help.
He opened his desk drawer, and there was Gretchen. He’d gone back to the log the night before for the book. He’d told himself he didn’t want to litter, didn’t want one of the crime techs to find it, that he wanted the closure of lighting the thing on fire, et cetera. Then why had he brought it to his office, brushed the mud off, and put it in his desk drawer?
Raul Sanchez poked his head in Archie’s office door, and Archie slammed the drawer shut. Sanchez had foregone his FBI cap and windbreaker for a brown suit and tie. You almost couldn’t tell it was a clip-on. “Meeting with the mayor,” he explained. “They’re already planning a public funeral for Castle down at the Waterfront. Speakers. Tents. The whole enchilada.” He smiled at the enchilada line. “Traffic downtown is gonna be fucked.”
“I’ll make a note to be out of town,” Archie said. Watching people weep over Castle was a little more than Archie could bear right now.
“You going to Parker’s service?” Sanchez asked.