Part Three
THERAPY
Chapter 46
“A LEX ! HEY, YOU! How you been? Long time no see, big guy. You’re looking good.”
I waved to a petite, pretty woman named Malina Freeman and kept on running. Malina was a fixture in the neighborhood, kind of like me. She was around the same age as I was and owned the newspaper store where the two of us used to spend our allowances on candy and soda when we were kids. Rumor had it that she liked me. Hey, I liked Malina too, always had.
My flapping feet kept me headed north on Fifth Street like they knew the way, and the neighborhood scrolled by. Toward Seward Square, I hung a right and took the long way around. It didn’t make logical sense to go that way, but I didn’t do it for logical reasons.
The news about Maria’s murderer was the one thing holding me back these days. Now I was avoiding the block where it had happened and, at the same time, working hard to remember Maria as I had known her, not as I had lost her. I was also spending time every day trying to track down her killer ? now that I suspected he was still out there somewhere.
I turned right on Seventh, then headed toward the National Mall, pushing a little harder. When I got to my building at Indiana Avenue, I eked out just enough wind to take the four flights up, two steps at a time.
My new office was a converted studio apartment, one large room with a small bath and an alcove kitchen off to the side. Lots of natural light streamed in through a semicircle of windows in the turreted corner.
That’s where I’d set up two comfortable chairs and a small couch for therapy sessions.
Just being here got me pretty excited. I’d put out my shingle, and I was ready to see my first patient.
Three stacks of case files were waiting on my desk, two from the Bureau and another sent over from DCPD. Most of the files represented possible consulting jobs. A few crimes to solve? An occasional dead body ? I guess that was realistic.
The first file I looked at was a serial case in Georgia, someone the media had dubbed “the Midnight Caller.” Three black men were dead already, with a successively shorter interval between each homicide. It was a decent case for me, except for the six hundred miles between DC and Atlanta.
I set the file aside.
The next case was closer to home. Two history professors at the University of Maryland, perhaps intimately involved, had been found dead in a classroom. The bodies had been hung from ceiling beams. Local police had a suspect but wanted to work up a profile before they went any further.
I put that file back on my desk with a yellow sticker attached.
Yellow, for maybe.
There was a knock on my door.
“It’s open,” I called out, and immediately became suspicious, paranoid, whatever it is that I am most of the time.
What had Nana said when I’d left the house earlier? Try not to get shot at.