“Just a break-in as far as I can tell. Sergeant Burns said they’re not even sure if it was a burglary yet. Might just be vandalism. He did mention something about a death threat left at the scene though.”
The words death threat caused Mac’s blood pressure to spike. “Who made the original call to dispatch?”
“Uh…let me see.”
Mac’s patience with Daniels was dwindling fast.
“Looks like it was a…” He heard Daniels shuffling papers on the other end of the line. “Miss Emily Simon. Hey, you don’t think she’s related to—”
“I’ll be there in ten!” Mac hit end call on his phone and tossed it back on the nightstand.
God dammit! Hadn’t he warned her about what someone could do with one small piece of information?
He had a strong suspicion that weasel Frank had something to with this, and this time he wasn’t only going to let Sean punch the guy in the face when they caught him. He was going to do it himself.
* * *
“Do you have any idea who might have done this?”
In the hallway, just outside her wrecked office, Emily tried to concentrate on Sergeant Burns’ questions, but over his shoulder she noticed two officers picking up papers that the breeze had kicked up.
“Ms. Simon?” Burns prompted.
The younger of the two officers began reading from the paper he’d snatched on its way out the window.
“Excuse me!” Emily pushed past Sergeant Burns and into her office. She grabbed the paper from the uniformed officer whose curious gaze was glued to the page. “I’m sorry, you need to leave.”
“Leave?”
The young officer shot a confused look at his Sergeant.
Burns stepped in from the hall. “Ms. Simon we need to go through your office and collect any pertinent evidence that might help us discover who did this.”
Emily didn’t answer. Instead, she frantically collected as many papers as she could from the floor, clutching the haphazard stack to her chest.
“Ms. Simon, please, let us do our job.” When Emily failed to acknowledge his plea, Burns asked, “Do you have important files that someone would want access to?”
Exasperated, Emily stopped her cleanup mission and addressed the officer. “Sergeant Burns, you must understand, everything that goes on in this room is subject to counselor-client privilege.” She tugged on a note sheet that was half sticking out of her filing cabinet, waving in the wind like a pathetic white flag. “I take notes—personal notes—on each session that I have with a client. It helps me remember what went on in the previous session and plan for the next one. These notes are confidential. And I cannot allow you or your officers to go through them.”
Emily scanned the office for any more escaped pages when she felt Sergeant Burns’ hand on her shoulder. It was meant to be a calming gesture, but it only succeeded in agitating her further. “Please. You’ve seen the graffiti on the wall. These papers are irrelevant. They pertain to several different people who I’m certain are not connected with this incident. Could you just give me twenty minutes to collect my notes and put them back in their files?” She waved a hand, gesturing to the mess that was her office. “Then you can look around all you like in here.”
Sergeant Burns removed his hand from her shoulder and rested both hands on his duty belt, his stance transforming from consolatory to confrontational. “Is there something in this office that you don’t want us to find out about?”
Oh, that did it. “Yes, I believe that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” Her patience had evidently blown out the broken window like so many of her papers. “Now, if you don’t mind, kindly, get out of my office.”
She looked pointedly at the two officers currently searching the room. The younger one headed for the door, but the older officer—who was in plain clothes and Emily suspected was a detective—took up Sergeant Burns’ argument.
“Look lady, you called us. You want us to figure out who did this, but you’re making our job very difficult.”
Emily, not usually a confrontational person, found it difficult to restrain herself from stomping her feet and shouting in frustration. Mentally counting to five, she took a long slow breath. “And what about my job? It’s my job to keep my clients’ information confidential. All I’m asking is that you allow me to go through my files privately. If there is anything missing, I will happily let you know.” Emily attempted to straighten her stack of papers, tapping them on her desk several times. “However, for now I’d appreciate it if you stopped scooping up these papers and left my office.”
Sergeant Burns looked like he might be considering her request but the detective was incredulous. “There could be finger prints on those pages. That’s valuable evidence you’re asking us to overlook.”
Emily opened her mouth to answer, but was interrupted by a familiar voice.
“I think it’s my job to decide what’s evidence and what’s not, Detective Dorsey.”
At the sound of Mac’s confident baritone, Emily’s body reacted without permission from her brain with a skipped heartbeat and an unsettling flip of her stomach. He stood in the doorway, his muscled shoulders practically spanning the entire width of the entry, a furious expression on his face. When her brain regained functioning, she found her first thought was one of irritation. Why was this man constantly coming to her rescue? First paying for her coffee, then helping her ditch her date at Muldoon’s, then pitching in at Sean’s house, and now here, at the site of her latest debacle. She’d never asked to be rescued, and she certainly didn’t need him to swoop in now, goddammit.
“Officer McAvoy.” Purposefully addressing him formally, Emily gave Mac a curt nod of acknowledgement. “I was just explaining to these officers that as much as I appreciate their desire for a thorough investigation, I am ethically bound to keep my clients’ records private.” She began gently shooing the officers out of her office like a tour guide trying to keep the group moving. “Now, if you gentlemen don’t mind giving me a few moments to get my files back in order, I would be happy to answer any questions you have when I’ve finished.” Mac drew a breath as if to speak, but Emily cut him off. “If I discover that any files are missing, I won’t hesitate to let you know.”
Emily had one hand on the door, ready to close it behind the officers after they exited. The detective Mac had called Dorsey and his uniformed counterpart left silently, but Sergeant Burns and Mac were not so easily persuaded.
Mac appeared to take a mental inventory of the room, his gaze tracing every inch of her office. “The most likely areas for finger prints are going to be on the window sill, where he may have hoisted himself in and out of the room. And on the computer monitor, which he—or she—obviously picked up and threw. If you could touch as little as possible though, that would help.” He faced Emily. “Before you do any more to tidy up this room, may I take some pictures?”
A protest rose to Emily’s lips, but Mac pressed on. “They’ll be at enough of a distance that your notes won’t be legible. I just want to get some pictures of the room as you found it, with the full extent of the vandalism. That all right?”
He phrased his request as a question, but Emily knew better. It was an illusion for her benefit. Mac wouldn’t sacrifice an investigation just to suit her. She seesawed between gratitude that he was willing to give her some semblance of control and irritation that he could manipulate her so easily. Either way, she knew she could trust Mac to keep her clients’ records confidential, and so she nodded in reluctant consent.
A silent communication passed between Mac and Sergeant Burns before Burns left the room and shut the door behind him. Mac shuffled through a large black duffle bag on the floor and rose with an expensive looking Nikon camera in his hands. He held the camera up and raised his eyebrows in question.
Emily nodded, and Mac began snapping photos. She noticed that he never took a head-on or close-up shot of any of her files, and she relaxed enough to sit down in the overstuffed
chair her clients usually used.
With the Nikon aimed at her broken computer monitor and without pausing in his photo shoot, Mac asked quietly, “You doing okay?”
His attention ostensibly on the task of taking crime scene pictures—and therefore not on her—Emily felt her tough girl facade start to slip. She sighed. “Yeah, I’m okay. I’m just glad that no one was here when it happened and that no one was hurt.”
“I’m glad you weren’t hurt either.” From behind the camera, he inclined his head toward her soiled pants. “For about half a second when I walked in here, I thought that was blood on your slacks. I’m glad to see it was just coffee.”
Maybe that explained the murderous expression on his face when she’d first noticed him standing in her doorway. “It was damn hot coffee though. And now I have none,” she lamented.
He lowered the camera for a moment. “That’s okay. You weren’t going to drink it anyway.” His lips quirked in a teasing grin. “You just pretend to drink coffee like a big girl.”
“Wha—” Her mouth fell open in surprise. “You noticed that, huh?”
Mac tapped his temple with his index finger. “I’m a trained observer, lady. Everything I see gets filed away and noted right up here.” He pointed that same finger at her. “And you, my dear, enjoy holding your cup and taking a whiff, but you do not drink.”
She blushed, the knowledge of how closely he’d watched her and how much he’d noticed, making her feel dizzy and warm. “This is unbelievable. I’ve never been called out on not drinking the coffee I order.”
He smiled, packing his camera back into the black duffle bag. He started removing materials she guessed were for lifting fingerprints. Seeing the tools reminded her of Detective Dorsey’s anger over her case notes.
She rose from her seat and started picking up her displaced files. “Listen, Mac. I’m sorry if I’ve pissed some people off about the case notes.”
He didn’t even look up from his work. “Dorsey’ll get over it.”
“I know. It’s just that…counselors have to be very careful about their notes. Anything we write can be subpoenaed in court and so, as a general rule, we try not to write a lot.”
Mac nodded, but didn’t look up from his task of sweeping what looked like coal dust over Emily’s formerly white window sill.
“Let’s say I’m seeing a couple in couple’s counseling and I write down that I think Mr. So-and-so might have a drinking problem. Two years down the road Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so are getting divorced, and Mrs. So-and-so wants my notes about a sneaking suspicion I had—not a fact mind you, but a professional hunch—to use against her husband in a custody battle. And I’d have to turn it over. Because it’s in writing and it’s in their file and yadda, yadda, yadda.”
Mac nodded again, letting her know that he was listening. But he still didn’t get it.
She reached for the last of her papers, tucked them in a file drawer to be sorted through later, and locked it. “That’s why many counselors keep a set of personal notes that aren’t put in an official file and why many opt not to keep notes like that at all, only recording factual observations and final diagnoses.” Emily looked down at her twisting hands, guilt about her note taking practices gnawing at her conscience. “But I need really thorough notes. And I have to write down hunches and more subjective observations…or I won’t remember them.”
Evidently catching on to Emily’s anxiety, Mac looked up, his hand frozen over the window, still holding the print brush.
Emily felt as if she was confessing to a counselor crime. “I try to remember to bring my personal notes home, to keep them out of permanent files, but I worry that I’ll misplace them, so lately I’ve been staying at work late, reviewing notes, reading them out loud, trying to commit them to memory and then editing out the things that shouldn’t be in them.” She trailed off. “It’s a difficult system to keep up with though.”
Mac set down his brush and came around to the front of Emily’s desk. He leaned back against it, directly in front of her, and dipped his head until she raised her downcast eyes to his face. “And that’s why you freaked out about anybody looking at your notes?”
She closed her eyes briefly and nodded.
“Because you were afraid we would see where you very unprofessionally wrote, note to self: this dude is bat-shit crazy in your case notes?” The deadpan tone almost fooled her, but then she caught the tiny creases twitching around his mouth and knew he was teasing her. He knew she wouldn’t write something that unprofessional.
She let out a surprised chuckle. Just moments ago, the combined stress from the break-in, the death threat, and anxiety over what she considered to be a huge professional failing had threatened to bring her to tears, but a few short sentences from Mac and she was laughing.
He reached for her hand and pulled her into his arms for a comforting hug. It was the kind of hug that one friend gives another in times of duress. Emily knew that, but it felt like more to her. She was situated between his legs as he leaned on the edge of the desk and her forehead fit perfectly against his neck, her head tucked under his chin. One of his hands cradled the back of her head and the other moved up and down her back, infusing her with warmth everywhere he touched. She hadn’t realized how cold the room was with the missing window until she felt the contrast of his warmth. Now she didn’t want to move. She felt his hard back muscles beneath her palms and breathed in his scent, a combination of soap and the warm cotton of his polo shirt.
He continued to hold her in silence and she drew strength from his quiet presence. She was grateful he didn’t offer her empty platitudes. He didn’t tell her everything was going to be okay or try to make light of her situation. He just held her.
Emily didn’t get a chance to find out how long he was willing to hold her like that. At the metallic click of her office doorknob turning, she pulled away from him and tried to look casual. Just standing in the middle of the office. Doing nothing. Totally normal. Nailed it.
The young uniformed officer, whose name Emily still hadn’t caught, peeked his head around the door. “Ms. Simon, if you have a moment, Detective Dorsey is in the conference room. He has a few questions for you.”
“I’m sure he does.” She hoped she’d succeeded in keeping the sarcasm from her voice but judging by the slight smirk on Mac’s face, she’d failed. “I’ll be right there, Officer,” she added more politely.
Turning to Mac, she sighed. “Well, I suppose I should go call Sean and tell him what happened before he finds out from somebody else.”
“Too late. I called him on my way here.”
“You did? Oh, shit. He was mad, wasn’t he?”
Mac nodded, clearly trying not to smile.
“At me for not calling him? Or at the situation?”
“It’s hard to say…I’m going to go with both. He’s on his way here.”
Emily felt her eyes roll involuntarily. “Do me a favor and don’t tell him I’m in the conference room when he gets here.”
Mac laughed. “I’m afraid I can’t promise that, but I promise to stick around and run interference between you two if needed.”
Emily smiled her thanks and headed for her interview with Detective Dorsey.
* * *
When Emily entered the conference room, she was relieved to see Asha sitting across from Dorsey. Knowing that she’d already ticked off the surly detective, it felt good to have at least one ally in the room.
She took the chair next to Asha.
“Ms. Simon.” Dorsey nodded a curt greeting to Emily. “Dr. Haryana and I were just about to discuss possible suspects, people who may have had a motive for breaking into your office. Do you have any ideas who may have done this?”
Emily hesitated. Yet another reason to be glad for Asha’s presence. Emily wasn’t entirely confident she knew what the parameters for client privilege were in this case. And truly, after all that had happened, she was just too exhausted to mentally wade through the gray areas of this
ethical dilemma.
She definitely suspected Carl. But did she have enough to go on to warrant telling Dorsey that he’d threatened to kill her during a session?
“Ms. Simon?” Dorsey’s irritated voice broke into her thoughts. “Is there anyone you think might have done this?” He said each word slowly, as if he feared she might be addled.
Thankfully, Asha stepped in. “Detective Dorsey, I suspect that Emily may be struggling with the question of whether or not she should repeat something that was said in a confidential session. Something that was very threatening, but taken within the context of this person’s emotional state, may not have actually been a threat.”
Asha directed her next comments to Emily. “I have some new information that may help you make this decision. I made some calls this morning and discovered that on Friday afternoon DCFS removed Nate from Carl’s custody.”
“Oh, dear.” It was for the best that Nate was away from Carl, but at the same time, this did not look good for Carl. After all, his exact words had been, If they take my son away because of this, I will fucking end you, ya hear me? I will kill you! And she knew those were his exact words because she’d written them down.
“That’s not all, I’m afraid,” Asha said. “A few moments ago, Carl’s probation officer called, wondering if we had any information about Carl’s whereabouts, because he did not check in as he was scheduled to this morning.”
Emily closed her eyes. “Oh, Carl. What have you gotten yourself into?”
“So, I take it, you believe that this Carl guy may have been the one to vandalize Ms. Simon’s office?” Dorsey asked.
Asha gave Emily an encouraging nod.
Emily sighed. “Yes. In the last session that Carl and I had, I gave him a choice. I told him he could place Nate with other relatives temporarily while he checked into an inpatient rehab facility or I was going to report his drug use to DCFS.” Emily swallowed in an effort to relieve a flare-up of heartburn. She did not want to say what she knew needed to be said. Carl wasn’t a bad person—particularly when sober—but he was making a lot of bad choices. It felt disloyal to drive the nails into his coffin, but he’d dug this grave, he was going to have to lie in it. “He wasn’t real thrilled with those two options. He told me that if his son was taken away, he would kill me.”
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