Man Overboard

by J. A. Jance

  30

  The main attraction for the Irish Brew Pub was the fact that it was within walking distance of Joel’s new office. The restaurant’s booths were oversized, cozy affairs with exceptionally high backs. When things got too rowdy, the tall banquettes were good for sound-deadening purposes. For Beth Wordon that day, they provided something she needed desperately—privacy.

  “Corrine claims I’m only marrying you for your money?” Joel demanded when she finished relating that part of her story. “Are you kidding?”

  “That’s only one of the things she said to me,” Beth answered. “She also says I’m a suicidal mental case.”

  With a grilled tuna sandwich sitting untouched on her plate, Beth studied her fiancé’s face, looking for signs that he’d had any idea about what his ex-wife had been up to. It seemed as though Joel was thunderstruck by the news and outraged, too, but Beth couldn’t be sure.

  “So she’s, like, what, calling you on the phone to dish out all this crap?” Joel demanded. “How’d she even get your number? I sure as hell never gave it to her.”

  “And she knows about the cutting,” Beth added miserably. “She specifically mentioned the cutting. And the eating disorder. She knows about all of it. Someone must have told her.”

  “Wait,” Joel said, holding up his hand like a traffic cop. “Are you thinking I did that? Is that what this is all about? Do you think I’m the one who told her?”

  “Did you?”

  “Absolutely not! No way!”

  Beth could see that Joel was angered by her implication—angered in a way she had never seen before—but she had embarked on this course of action, of getting the whole sordid mess out into the open, and she refused to back down.

  “My parents know about all of it,” she said. “Dr. Cannon encouraged me to tell them as part of my treatment, and I did. Marissa has known about it since junior high. And you’ve known for a year and a little bit.”

  “So maybe your parents are behind this,” Joel said. “Maybe they’re just pretending to be happy as clams about our getting married. Maybe your stepfather is worried about the possibility of my getting my grubby hands on part of your inheritance.”

  “My parents wouldn’t do that,” Beth countered. “They love me. And they love you, too.”

  Joel reached for his phone.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to call Corrine and ask her what the hell she thinks she’s doing. If she’s been calling you and harassing you, I’m going to put a stop to it once and for all.”

  “Don’t call her,” Beth pleaded. “Please. It’ll just make things worse. Besides, she hasn’t been calling me. She’s been sending me texts.”

  “Texts?” Joel asked. “Over your phone?” He held out his hand. “Let me see them. I want to know exactly what she’s been saying.”

  “That’s the thing. I can’t show them to you,” Beth said, close to tears.

  “Why not?”

  “As soon as I read them, they disappear.”

  “What do you mean? Texts don’t just disappear. The only way that happens is if you delete them.”

  “But they do disappear,” Beth insisted. “The words are right there on the screen, but only for a few minutes. Then, after I read them, they’re gone. I can’t copy them or save them or even highlight them.”

  “That’s totally nuts,” Joel declared. “Whoever heard of disappearing texts? I didn’t even know such a thing existed. But when it comes to Corrine, I wouldn’t put anything past that woman. Her whole purpose in life right now is to make me as miserable as possible. Since you make me happy, she’ll do anything within her power to run you off—including hiring some IT asshole who has figured out how to send texts in what amounts to invisible ink.”

  “You do believe me?” Beth asked in a very small voice.

  “Hell yes, I believe you,” Joel replied with that wry grin of his that always melted Beth’s heart. “As for where Corrine is getting her information? If it didn’t come from your parents or Marissa or me, maybe it’s time to have a little heart-to-heart chat with Dr. Cannon. Maybe she’s the source of this supposedly private information. When it comes to suspects, it seems to me she’s the only one left.”

  A few minutes later, when Joel had to rush back to the office, Beth lingered. She had forty-five minutes to spare before meeting her mother for the fitting, and there was no sense going all the way back home when Josephina’s was so close.

  Sitting there alone in the still-noisy pub, Beth tried to feel relieved. After all, Joel had believed her. Joel loved her, and he hadn’t questioned the veracity of what she said about those disappearing texts for one moment. How Corrine had come to have Beth’s private information didn’t really matter as long as Joel was in her corner, right?

  Beth’s sandwich was cold by then, but she nibbled at the edges of it nonetheless. She’d had nothing to eat that morning, and she couldn’t afford to turn up at the wine bar too hungry or not hungry enough. The fact that she was back to cutting was a bad sign, but Beth recognized avoiding food as a trigger for something potentially much, much worse. The idea of being sucked back into the whole eating disorder nightmare terrified her.

  A few minutes later an e-mail alert sounded on her phone. She jumped as though someone had just touched her with a live wire. Was this another message from Corrine? She reached for the device as gingerly as if it were a hand grenade. When she saw Dr. Cannon’s name on her new e-mail list, she came close to dropping the phone.

  Before she could select it to read, however, another one of Corrine’s poisonous texts began scrolling across her screen:

  Putting Joel’s wedding ring on your finger isn’t going to protect you from your own worst enemy—you. You’ve gone back to cutting, and now you’ll go back to the rest of it, too.

  What do you see when you look in the mirror? Do you see how fat you’re getting—fat and ugly? Good luck with the wedding dress fitting. I’ll be surprised if you’re able to squeeze into it.

  That’s what the boys tell me—that you’re so fat they’re embarrassed to be seen in public with you, and I don’t blame them. Yes, what a mess you are, Joel’s poor little ugly rich girl. Joel’s a mighty paltry excuse for a man, but he deserves better than you and so do my boys.

  Beth read the words through once and then they were gone. Her hand was shaking so badly that she was incapable of trying to capture them. It didn’t matter—she already knew it wouldn’t have worked.

  When the latest text disappeared, Beth was left staring at the e-mail list. She selected the one from Dr. Cannon, opened it, and read it. As she internalized the words, she realized Joel had to be right. Except for the wedding dress fitting, Dr. Amelia Cannon had to be the source of the privileged information being fed to Corrine.

  Beth read through the e-mail several more times before finally noticing that there was a phone number at the end of the note. Beth dialed the number while still seething with anger.

  “How dare you?” she demanded when she heard Dr. Cannon’s voice on the other end of the line. “How could you do something like this?”

  “Beth?” Dr. Cannon asked. “Is this you? Do something like what? What’s wrong?”

  “Of course it’s me,” Beth answered. “Who else did you think would call you? Besides, you know good and well what’s wrong. Now that your mother’s dead, you’re probably trying to restart your practice. Is that what this is all about? Is that why you’re telling Joel’s ex all the things I told you in session, so she can send me texts about them? What kind of a monster are you?”

  “Beth, please,” Dr. Cannon was saying. “Slow down. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Right,” Beth countered. “Of course you don’t. You don’t know anything at all about how Joel’s ex-wife happens to be privy to all the things I said to you in what were supposed to
be private counseling sessions? How would she know about the cutting if you hadn’t told her? How would she know about the rest of it—the eating disorder and all of that? And how can you let her do this to me when it’s just two days to my wedding?”

  “Beth, please believe me. I know nothing about this, and I haven’t told anyone anything, and most especially not Joel’s ex-wife,” Dr. Cannon declared. “It’s simply not true. How could I have told her? I don’t even know the woman.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Beth screeched into the phone. “I wouldn’t come back to you as a patient if you were the last doctor on earth. I’d rather be dead!”

  Suddenly a concerned-looking waitress appeared at Beth’s side. “Excuse me, miss,” she said. “Do you mind cooling it a little?”

  Beth looked around the room in horror. She’d had no idea that she had been screaming into the phone, but she must have been. Other people were peeking out of their high-backed booths, staring at her and listening to her every word.

  “Go to hell, Dr. Cannon,” Beth snarled into the phone. “Go straight to hell!”

  Ending the call and grabbing her purse, she fled.

  31

  Some seven hundred miles away from San Jose, California, in a cluttered condo in Carefree, Arizona, a stunned Amelia Cannon stared at her now silent phone. She knew how people sounded when they were in crisis. Beth Wordon, wounded and desperate, was definitely there.

  She was somehow under the impression that Amelia had been feeding privileged information to Beth’s fiancé’s ex-wife? How could she? For one thing, Amelia didn’t know the ex-wife. In fact, at this exact moment, she couldn’t even recall Beth’s fiancé’s name. But more than that, after years of working together, how could Beth even think that a reputable, trained psychiatrist—someone who cared about her and someone she had trusted—would do such a despicable thing?

  As for that privileged information? Amelia stopped cold and a sudden chill ran down her spine. What about Roger McGeary? What if someone had been playing him the same way, using material gleaned from Amelia’s own case notes to push the man over the edge, both literally and figuratively? And how was any of that possible? There could be only one answer about the source of that information. Since it hadn’t come from her directly, it must have come from the data breach. Did that mean that someone was actively targeting her former patients—harassing and tormenting them?

  Amelia had released Roger from active treatment and had been considering doing the same with Beth when the data breach had occurred, but just because patients were no longer under her care didn’t mean they were ten feet tall and bullet proof. People who came from backgrounds with a history of familial suicide weren’t prone to being instantly or permanently healed. Some would spend the whole of their lives being emotionally fragile and many of them, given the right stimulus, susceptible to relapse.

  Beth had said that the offending information was being sent to her in text form. Was it possible the same thing had happened to Roger? And what was it that woman, Ali, had told her earlier—something to the effect that Roger’s aunt had given Stuart Ramey access to his computer and probably to his cell phone as well? If someone was using information gleaned from Amelia’s own case records to poison Roger’s thinking with texts or e-mail messages, Amelia was sure she would recognize it. Might there still be some trace of messages like that lingering in Roger’s electronic devices? And if Amelia’s information had been used to drive Roger to the extreme of taking his own life, was Beth in danger of suffering the same fate?

  Amelia reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the card Ali Reynolds had given her earlier. A moment after she dialed the number, Ali answered the phone.

  “This is Dr. Cannon calling,” Amelia explained. “Something has come up on this end. Would it be possible for you to put me in touch with Roger’s friend Stuart?”

  She heard momentary hesitation on the other end of the line. “Stuart isn’t available right now. Is there some way I could be of help?”

  Amelia paused for a moment, staring at the card in her hand. “It says here that High Noon specializes in cyber security, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Ali said, “that’s true. As I told you, we undertook the Roger ­McGeary situation strictly as a personal favor for his Aunt Julia and for Stuart.”

  “But you have access to Roger’s computer and to his files, right? That’s cyber, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  Taking a deep breath, Amelia rushed on. “As I told you, I closed down my practice in California primarily because there had been a serious data breach. My patients’ records were targeted and perhaps stolen as well—the records along with all my case notes. I’ve just had a very disturbing call from one of my former patients. She’s evidently being harassed with mysterious texts that seem to contain information that may have been drawn directly from my confidential files.”

  “And you’re wondering if the same thing might have happened to Roger?” Ali asked.

  “Yes,” Amelia said with a relieved sigh. “That’s it exactly.”

  “The situation with this other patient,” Ali said, “how serious is it?”

  Amelia paused. “My practice dealt with suicide and suicide prevention. The woman who called me today was in full crisis mode. Without some kind of immediate intervention, she may well harm herself.”

  “You’ve tried calling back?”

  “Yes, she isn’t picking up, but before I attempt to contact anyone else, including her parents or the local authorities, I wanted to have some idea if anyone else might be in danger as well, and if Roger was targeted the same way . . .”

  “Hang on,” Ali interrupted. “Stu didn’t mention anything like that to me, but let me see if I can locate him and put him on the line.”

  While she waited on hold, Amelia paced the small living room, dodging around the partially packed boxes. To her way of thinking, it took forever. When a male voice finally came on the line, it sounded as though the man had been awakened out of a sound sleep.

  “Stu Ramey here,” he said. “We’re on speaker, and Ali just now brought me up to date. How can we help?”

  “In the days before Roger died, did you find any e-mails or messages that might have originated in his counseling sessions with me?”

  “I didn’t see anything like that on his social media accounts,” Stuart said, “but in his computer I did find a file with your name on it. It contains a document he wrote about his mother—maybe a draft of a conversation the two of them had . . .”

  “Yes,” Amelia said. “It’s a reconstruction of a conversation he and his mother had on the night of his high school graduation.”

  “His mother was a bitch,” Stuart said. “It sounded like she was goading him to do the same thing his father did.”

  Yes, Amelia thought. That’s exactly what she was doing.

  “Did it work?” Stu asked. “Is that what set off that initial suicide attempt that landed Roger in a mental institution?”

  Roger had written down his mother’s words at Amelia’s instigation, re-creating the conversation exactly to the best of his recollection. Amelia had hoped that by giving Roger a chance to deal with the hurtful words as an adult rather than as a vulnerable teenager, he might be able to divest them of some of their soul-crippling power.

  Roger had brought her a printed copy of what he’d written, and Amelia had dutifully scanned it into her case files. Roger was dead. Even though Amelia still owed her patients their full measure of confidentiality, Stuart Ramey wasn’t reading the words from one of her confidential files. They were right there in a file on a computer to which Stuart had been given unlimited access by Roger himself.

  “Probably,” Amelia said. She fully expected Stuart to press her for more details, but he surprised her.

  “Tell me about the data breach,” Stuart said. “The one th
at caused you to shutter your practice. When did it happen? Who investigated it? What were their conclusions?”

  It took Amelia a moment to switch gears. “It happened in the latter part of February and was discovered by a routine virus scan of some kind. I didn’t find out about it until later—sometime in April. The IT guy I talked to told me that my files had been singled out.”

  “We don’t know for sure that all these things are related, but we can’t afford to ignore the possibility,” Ali said, breaking into the conversation. “And if they are, Dr. Cannon, if the data breach led to what happened to Roger and to what’s happening now with this other person, we have to do something to protect her.”

  “We’re going to need her name and her phone number,” Stu said.

  “I can’t possibly . . .” Amelia began.

  “Do you think she’s in danger right now or not?”

  The problem was Amelia did believe Beth to be in danger—mortal danger—and that meant all confidentiality bets were off.

  “Her name’s Beth—Beth Wordon,” Amelia answered after a pause. “Oh, and I just remembered her fiancé’s name—it’s Joel something. That’s it: Joel Williams. She said the texts were coming from Joel’s ex-wife. I don’t have any idea what the ex’s name is, but Beth did say that the wedding is supposed to happen sometime soon—two days from now.”

  “And her phone number?” Stu asked.

  “It’s on my phone, but I can’t see it or send it while I’m talking to you.”

  “As soon as you hang up, send Beth’s number to Ali’s phone. Then start texting Beth yourself. If she’s receiving harassing texts, she’s going to read whatever messages show up on her phone, including yours.”

  “Should I tell her about the hacker?”

  “Absolutely. Tell her that someone is using information from your stolen patient records to attack you, and they’re doing it by targeting your former patients. Tell her that the same thing may have happened to others and that she needs to call you.”

  “What are you going to do in the meantime?” Amelia asked.