9780451468161: Compound Fractures
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0451468163 ISBN 13: 9780451468161
Verlag: Berkley, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

For more than twenty years, in nearly a score of bestselling crime novels, Stephen White’s stories of Boulder psychologist Alan Gregory have captivated millions of readers. Now Compound Fractures provides a riveting last chapter to the series.

Nothing is as it seems to Alan, as unexpected threats and intimate betrayals force him to revisit a cruel ethical dilemma that turned his life upside down as a young psychologist. He has to judge whether the people reentering his life after long absences are friends or foes. He has to make sense of echoes of distant tragedies while he decides if there is anyone he can really trust. And as the clock ticks down, he must solve a deadly mystery in Eldorado Springs that has been brewing for more than a decade....

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen White is a clinical psychologist and the New York Times bestselling author of the Alan Gregory novels. He lives in Colorado.

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Prologue

Doctor Lila

One session stood out. It was our second. I have replayed the session in my head at least ten times. It was when my perspective changed. The day I got suspicious. On occasion I went back over it to see if there was a nuance I missed. Other times the loop replayed itself, an earworm, a melody my memory couldn’t cut loose.

It’s not in my personality to recall moments of assurance with much clarity. What I tend to recall vividly are my doubts and my fears. That therapy loop earned the replays because it was the session when my doubts and my fears began to crystallize, when I went from thinking that I might be in over my therapeutic head to wondering what the hell I might have gotten myself into with Dr. Alan Gregory.

Or as I called him, my patient.



My name is Delilah Mary Travis. My friends call me Lila.

Most of my patients call me Dr. Travis, or Delilah.

Alan Gregory called me Lila. But we weren’t friends.

It was the third week of January. The session had been fitful. I felt no rhythm in his words.

As the end of our time approached I said, “I don’t know what happened that morning. The day of the fire. The morning of the shooting. Moment by moment. You may think I know. You may wish I knew. You may want to proceed as though I know what you need me to know. But I don’t know.”

He didn’t reply. That happened frequently with us.

During Alan’s previous visit I’d asked him why he’d picked me to be his therapist. He said it was because he wanted a therapist he didn’t know—he knew almost everybody in Boulder—and because someone he trusted had once said good things about my work. I’d asked him why he didn’t go to Denver; there had to be therapists there he didn’t know. He said it was too much for him then. An almost three-hour round-trip? He said he couldn’t do it.

I began to think he’d been less than honest. I began to believe he chose me because I was inexperienced. He thought he could manipulate me.

I said, “I imagine it will be tender for you, sharing the story. But at some point you will need to tell me those details.”

He stood. His timing was impeccable; he rose within seconds of the precise forty-five-minute mark. As a therapist he had sat through a million forty-five-minute hours. After the first few thousand or so he’d undoubtedly internalized the session interval.

I had not. My hours in the consultation chair were still in high triple-digits. The clock I relied upon was digital. It was not visible from his seat.

“Who does, Lila?” he replied. “Know? What happened, I mean.”

Who knows? You’re going existential about that? You were there, I wasn’t. If I had been there I would know what the hell happened.

I kept the rant to myself. I said, “Are you unsure what happened that day?”

No dissociation, please. I don’t have the chops for fugue. Not your fugue.

His face adjusted into an expression I couldn’t interpret. He had a few of those. Then he said, “Am I ‘sure’? A lot of certainty is squeezed into that syllable. Certainty is elusive for me. Death? Certain. Everything else? Uncertain.”

God.

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s part of what happened that morning that you don’t know. That maybe no one else knows.” He took a deep breath. “My wife was in my office to caution me about a development in a case she was working. When she came to see me she didn’t understand the implications of what she had learned. She thought she did, but she did not. She was being generous, maybe loving—I go back and forth about that—by warning me about legal action that was coming against someone I know.”

“Legal action?”

“Taking that person into custody. For questioning. Or arrest. Like that.”

“Thanks,” I said. Why I thanked him I did not know.

“I told her that if she were to start arresting people she would have to begin by arresting me.”

I was disbelieving. I’m sure I looked it. I said, “You?”

He said, “It’s complicated. This may help: After Lauren told me what she was about to do, I knew the time had arrived to reveal some secrets I’d been keeping from her. I did that—I revealed some things I had done.”

“Things?” Jesus.

“Acts.”

That sure clears things up. I said, “You’re being vague.”

“Intentionally. I am revealing I have secrets, but I am not revealing those secrets.”

“Trust?” I said. Not exactly a therapeutic reach on my part. It was like a meteorologist forecasting rain seconds after she opens her umbrella.

“Yes. Lauren recognized the implications of what I told her. I knew she would, but I had hoped that my admission might alter the tilt of her heart. In my favor.”

To him, his failure to trust me required no exploration. I felt it as a wound.

“I was wrong,” he said. “Lauren was angry. Not understanding. All that my revelation changed for her that morning was her thinking about whom to arrest.”

Alan Gregory was one of those people who confused me when he told me things intended to alleviate my confusion. By then that wasn’t news for me.

I said, “She was going to arrest you? When she was shot?”

“Not at the beginning of her visit but, yes, by the end. When she was shot.”

His shoulders fell. Some amount of tension disappeared from his temples and his jaw. He seemed relieved to have breached this wall with me. We made brief eye contact. The intimacy of it all stunned me. Part of me melted with his glance, as though for that instant alone our arteries shared the same pumping heart.

He shook his head, as though he were as amazed as I was. His breath was shallow. “That morning? The fire up the street? Don’t forget the fire.”

My breathing was shallow, too. The mirroring was not intentional. No, I had not forgotten the fire.

In a way that I don’t think I had ever felt before in my time as a therapist, I was aware that a patient was sharing a dangerous secret with me. Not just a sensitive truth—that’s routine—but a dangerous one. Dangerous for him. And possibly dangerous for me.

Alan Gregory woke to foreboding every morning of his life. To help him I would need to understand his foreboding. Perhaps even to feel it.

I said, “Could you please sit back down, Alan?” If he considered me a peer he wouldn’t put me in the position I was in. I knew that. I didn’t like it.

“Our time is up,” he said.

I swallowed a sigh. “That’s my call. This is my office. I am your therapist.” I shouldn’t have had to remind him of that. We’d work on that issue later. The list of what we would work on later was becoming unwieldy.

He nodded. But he remained standing. He seemed more paralyzed than defiant.

“Your wife was about to have you arrested for what?”

“Something serious,” Alan said. “A felony. I can’t discuss it.”

“Can’t?”

He sat down. “I will tell you what I told Lauren that morning: my caution has to do with clean hands.” He looked at his hands as though he couldn’t not look at his hands.

With monumental self-control I managed not to look at my hands. I was aware that his wife was shot not too...

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Verlag
Berkley
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0451468163
ISBN 13 
9780451468161
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
528
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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