Blinded

by Stephen White

  Blinded

  Stephen White

  Amazon.com Review

  Boulder psychologist Alan Gregory hasn't seen former patient Gibbs Storey since she and her husband were in marriage counseling with him almost a decade ago. So when she walks into his office with a startling declaration-that she believes her husband murdered at least one woman, and may be planning to kill more-Gregory finds himself on the horns of a dilemma that's not just professional but personal as well: He can't reveal what his patient has told him, not even to his wife, who's a prosecutor, or his friend Sam, who's a cop. What's more, his feelings for Gibbs may be clouding his judgment about the truth of what she professes. Though he telegraphs the denouement too early, Stephen White once again turns in a thoughtful, well crafted novel full of interesting insights on marriage, friendship, the human condition, and the Colorado landscape.

  From Publishers Weekly

  Murder, sex and guilt are all on the couch in bestseller White's latest (Cold Case; Manner of Death; etc.) featuring ongoing series hero Alan Gregory, a low-key sleuth/psychologist. As always, the author delivers an absorbing mystery, a mix of interesting subplots involving Gregory's sympathetic friends and family, and a paean to the beauty of the Colorado countryside. This time he splits the point of view equally between Gregory and Gregory's best friend, Boulder police detective Sam Purdey. Sam has just had a heart attack and is facing a dreaded rehabilitation regimen when his wife decides to leave him, perhaps permanently. Gregory has his own plateful of domestic difficulties caring for his MS-stricken wife and his toddler daughter while tending to a full caseload of clients who run the gamut from mildly neurotic to full-blown psychotic. An old patient he hasn't seen in a year, the beautiful Gibbs Storey, comes back for therapy and announces that her husband has murdered a former lover, and she's not sure what to do about it. And by the way, she thinks he may have murdered a bunch of other women as well. Gregory decides that, as a therapist, he cannot report the murders to the police, spending pages and pages justifying his decision. He turns to recuperating pal Sam, and the two of them separately follow various threads until all is resolved, just in the nick of time. White is known for his surprise endings, and this one is no exception. Aside from the repetitive and less than convincing ethical considerations, it's an engrossing addition to an excellent series.

  Stephen White

  Blinded

  Book 12 in the Dr. Alan Gregory series

  PROLOGUE

  SAM

  Every cop knows the taste and the odor that assault the senses when tenderness collides with evil. It’s a baby coddled in a bassinet in a fume-filled meth shack. It’s the fractured face of someone’s grandma after a purse-snatcher has done his thing. It’s a pregnant woman bloodied and dead on the floor.

  I’d been a cop a long time. I knew the aroma. And I knew the taste.

  I did.

  It may sound goofy, but I also believed that on good days I could smell the spark before I smelled the fire and I could taste the poison before it reached my lips. On good days I could stand firm between tenderness and evil. On good days I could make a difference.

  What the heck is it about a woman sleeping? Okay, a woman who isn’t your wife of double-digit years.

  A woman was sleeping right beside me, no more than half a foot away. The spice of her perfume tickled the back of my throat, and the fire from inside her radiated right through my clothes. Yeah, I was paying attention to a thousand things I should have been ignoring. The intimacy of her breathing. The edginess of her eyes darting below their lids. The pure power of the rise and fall of her chest. The vulnerability of her slightly parted legs. They were all way too distracting to me.

  Guilt about it all? A little maybe. Not that much. Not given what had happened already.

  Still, I should have been looking in the other direction, out the window. I should have been watching for signs of the inevitable collision-for the arrival of the evil-because I knew that it was coming. I did. I could taste it in one tiny spot on the back of my tongue. Left side, all the way back where an oral surgeon having a very bad day had once hacked out one of my wisdom teeth.

  I allowed myself a last greedy inhale of her tenderness-just one more taste-before I forced my attention outside. Had I missed something? Didn’t look like it, no. But when I cracked open the window, I instantly detected tenderness in the air out there, too. Outside right on in, the tenderness was being swept along on the glorious aroma of a roasting Thanksgiving turkey.

  I even thought I knew the bird. It was a big tom, twenty-two pounds. Traditional stuffing like my mom used to make.

  Tenderness in here. Tenderness out there.

  So where was the evil?

  Where?

  I could taste the turkey as though it were already on my lips, and I could taste her spice as though her sleepy head were resting on my chest. But I could also taste that tiny spot of evil on the back of my tongue.

  She moaned just a little.

  Inside, I did, too.

  ONE

  ALAN

  Nine-fifteen on Monday morning. My second patient of the day.

  Gibbs Storey hadn’t changed much in the ten years since I’d last seen her. If anything, she appeared to be even more of a model of physical perfection than she’d been in the mid-nineties. I guessed yoga, maybe Pilates. Her impeccable complexion hadn’t suddenly become pocked with acne or ravaged by psoriasis, nor had her high cheekbones dropped to mortal levels. Her blond hair was shorter but no less radiant, and her eyes were the same sky blue I remembered. The absence of any wrinkles radiating around them caused me to wonder about a recent Botox poke, but I quickly surmised that Gibbs’s fair skin would probably never be susceptible to the tracks of age. She’d be in possession of some magic gene, and she’d be immune.

  She’d always had beauty karma. Along with popularity karma. And the ever-elusive charm karma.

  She didn’t have marriage karma, though.

  I’d first met Gibbs and her husband, Sterling, when they came to see my clinical psychology partner, Diane Estevez, and me for therapy for their troubled relationship. Diane and I saw them conjointly-a quaint, almost anachronistic therapeutic modality that involved pairing a couple of patients with a couple of therapists in the same room at the same time-for only three sessions. Ironically, with therapy fees being what they are and managed care being what it is, Diane and I hadn’t done a conjoint case together since that final session with Gibbs and Sterling Storey.

  After they’d abruptly canceled their fourth session and departed Boulder -“Dr. Gregory, Sterling got that job he wanted in L.A.! Isn’t that wonderful!” Gibbs informed me breathlessly in the voicemail she’d left along with her profound thanks for how helpful we’d been-neither Diane nor I had heard a word from either of them. That was true, at least, until Gibbs called, said she was back in town, and asked me for an individual appointment.

  Gibbs’s call requesting the individual appointment had come ten days before, on a Friday. My few free slots the following week didn’t meet any of her needs, so we’d settled on the Monday morning time. At the time she had accepted the week-and-a-half delay graciously.

  In the interim between her call and her first appointment, I’d pulled her thin file from a box in the storage area that was stuffed with the records of old, inactive cases and examined my sparse notes. The few lines of intake and progress reports that I’d scrawled after the conjoint sessions told me less than did my memory, but I didn’t need copious notes to remind me that Diane and I hadn’t been all that helpful to Gibbs and Sterling.

  Couples therapy is not individual therapy with two people. It is a whole different animal, more closely akin to group therapy with a radioactive dyad. Issues within couples aren’t subjected to the simple arithmetic
of doubling; problems seem to be susceptible to the more severe forces of logarithmic multiplication. Therapeutic resistance in couples work, especially conjoint couples work, isn’t just the familiar dance between therapist and patient. Instead, a well-choreographed routine between husband and wife takes place alongside every interaction between either client and either therapist. Each marital partner knows his or her steps like an experienced member of a ballroom dancing pair. She retreats as he aggresses. He surely demurs as she swoons.

  A couples therapist needs to learn everyone’s moves before he or she can be maximally effective.

  My memory of the Storeys’ conjoint treatment was that Diane and I had only just begun to recognize their peculiar tango when they terminated the therapy and moved to California.

  The first conjoint session had been a typical “what brings you in for help” introductory. “Communication” was the buzzword of the day in the care and feeding of relationships, and that’s the culprit the Storeys identified as the reason they had entered into our care. Each maintained that they desired assistance “communicating” more effectively with the other. He was, perhaps, a little less certain than she of his motivation.

  Neither Diane nor I had believed either of them. No, we didn’t entertain the possibility that they were out-and-out lying to us-at least I didn’t; I could never be a hundred percent certain about Diane-but rather we were waiting for them to approach the revelation that they might be lying to themselves, or to each other, about their reason for being in our offices. “Communication problems” was a socially acceptable entree to treatment-an acceptable thing to tell their friends.

  But Diane and I weren’t at all convinced at the time that it was the reason we were seeing the Storeys.

  “Hi, Dr. Gregory,” Gibbs said as she settled on the chair in my office for her first individual appointment. Her greeting wasn’t coy exactly, but it wasn’t not-coy exactly, either. “Long time,” she added.

  Her fine hair was pulled back into a petite ponytail. She smiled in a way that almost dared me not to notice how together she looked.

  I nodded noncommittally. My practiced chin dip could have been measured in millimeters.

  “I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m here,” she said.

  Another microscopic nod on my part. Most days while doing my work as a psychologist, if I were paid by the word I’d go home a pauper. But Gibbs was right, I was wondering why she’d come back to see me after so many years. I had a guess-I was wagering that she’d divorced Sterling and had moved back to Boulder to start a new life. It was a scary journey for most people. Me? I was going to be the tour guide.

  That was my guess.

  “You remember Sterling? My husband?”

  Husband?Okay, I was wrong. The Storeys were separated then, not divorced.

  I spoke, but since it was Monday morning I failed to assemble a complete sentence. “Yes, of course” was all I said.

  Gibbs raised her fingertips to her lips and leaned forward as though she were whispering a profanity and was afraid her grandmother would overhear. She said, “I think he murdered a friend of ours in Laguna Beach.”

  Okay, I was wrong twice.

  TWO

  The previous weekend.

  I decided that I couldn’t stand watching her struggle with the damn halo.

  It just wasn’t natural.

  She hated it. And even for something as unearthly as a halo, it didn’t look right on her. Maybe it was the size-did the thing really have to be that big?-or maybe it was the way it seemed to block her off from the world. Was that the intent? And tight spaces? No way. If she could squeeze through a narrow pathway headfirst at all, she ended up making enough of a clanging racket that she emerged hanging her haloed head in shame. I wasn’t sure exactly what she hated most about wearing the damn thing, but I was absolutely sure that she hated it.

  Still, I’m a psychologist not only by training but also by demeanor, and I was determined to help her live with the halo. Taking it off wasn’t an option.

  We had our orders.

  I wondered, why not transparent material instead of opaque? Wouldn’t that be an improvement? Maybe a rearview mirror would be nice. Or… wouldn’t the plastic cone be more tolerable if it were just smaller?

  And there was always duct tape. Couldn’t I create some alternative with duct tape?

  The ultimate solution hit me at a quarter to three in the morning in the utter darkness that divides Saturday from Sunday as I was soothing my year-old daughter back to sleep on the upholstered rocker in her room.

  A paw umbrella.

  I had to figure out a way to make Emily a paw umbrella. If I could shield her paw from her mouth, then she wouldn’t have to wear a bizarre plastic Elizabethan collar to shield her mouth from her paw. A little over a week before, her veterinarian had excised a basal cell carcinoma from the top of her front left paw. Now the dressing was off so that the excision could be exposed to the air. Emily’s only job was to let the wound heal without the aid of her big tongue and her copious saliva, a state of affairs absolutely in contradiction to a Bouvier’s instincts, which dictated that her drool was the finest salve on the planet.

  The halo effectively prohibited her from licking the wound. But the bizarre collar was making our dog morose. A paw umbrella was the obvious alternative. How hard could that be?

  I explained my project to my friend Sam Purdy, who’d come over for a late-morning bike ride. We were sitting at the kitchen table in my Spanish Hills home. The Thanksgiving decorations embellishing all the stores in Boulder and the naked trees below us in the valley at the foot of the Rockies screamed late autumn, but the day promised to read more like late spring. Bright sun, clear skies, gentle breezes, and the guarantee of an afternoon in the seventies.

  “I decided-I think it was sometime around four o’clock this morning-that I needed to use rigid foam to make the doughnut piece,” I said. Sam didn’t answer me. I thought he was trying to swallow a belch. The surprising part was that he was trying to swallow it; Sam didn’t usually allow social decorum to interfere in his digestive processes.

  I proceeded to trace a circle about five inches in diameter and then began cutting a hole in the gardener’s kneeling pad that I’d swiped from my neighbor’s barn. “It has to hold its shape,” I explained. “This foam will be perfect.”

  “Lauren won’t care that you’re cutting up her stuff?” Sam knew me well enough to know that if it had to do with gardening, it couldn’t belong to me.

  “It’s not Lauren’s. I stole it from Adrienne’s shed. But even if it were Lauren’s, she wouldn’t care. It’s for a good cause.” Sam was a Boulder police detective, so I was demonstrating a modicum of trust by copping to a misdemeanor before lunch.

  Adrienne was my urologist neighbor and the keeper of a sizable vegetable garden. Our unofficial deal was this: For the right to steal goodies from her plot at will, each August, using her tomatoes, I made a year’s supply of fresh tomato sauce and roasted tomato salsa for her freezer.

  Her tomatoes and basil and chiles, my kitchen labor. Communal living at its purest. I figured that the foam rubber I’d swiped would somehow become part of the annual accounting.

  I cut a Bouvier-ankle-sized hole in the center of the disk of foam and then sliced from the center to the outside so I could close the contraption around Emily’s lower leg like a handcuff or, more accurately, pawcuff. The thing I’d created was the size of a DVD, more or less, but the hole in the center was larger, more like the circle in the middle of an old 45 rpm record.

  “Is Adrienne home?” Sam asked.

  I was so distracted by my veterinary appliance manufacturing that I almost failed to notice his fingers pressing up under his rib cage. Almost.

  “Why?” I asked. Adrienne was a good neighbor-she lived with her son in a big house across the dirt lane-and a great friend, but what I suspected was more germane to this discussion was the fact that she was also a fine urologist who had once treated
Sam for a kidney stone.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I was just wondering.”

  I began laying out some rigid plastic craft strips that I’d swiped from Lauren’s craft cupboard. Lauren wasn’t particularly craft-y; supplies tended to age indefinitely once they made it into crafts storage. There was some Elmer’s glue in there that I suspected dated back to Jimmy Carter’s administration.

  The plastic strips I chose were about two inches by four. To accomplish my design, I’d figured I would need to cover about 270 degrees of the foam circle with the plastic strips. With a pair of kitchen shears I began to turn my circle into a rough octagon to accommodate the attachment of the flat strips.

  Sam rotated his neck. Up. Side to side. Back. His fingertips disappeared below his ribs again.

  “Nothing?” I asked. “You sure?”

  “I’m thinking I may be developing another damn stone.”

  I tried not to act obvious as I began using filament tape to attach the plastic strips to the octagon of foam, but I was watching Sam, too. Sam was usually stressed out, he was chronically overweight, he frequently ignored the diet that Adrienne had recommended after his first stone, and he didn’t get enough exercise unless I dragged him along on an occasional bike ride somewhere. All in all, he was a prime candidate for a return trip down the river of agony that carried sharp little stones from the kidneys to the hellish port ofOh my God!

  “I’m sorry. Does it feel like the last one?” I asked. I’m quite adept at keeping alarm out of my voice. I think I kept the alarm out of my voice.

  “Not exactly. But then I’ve worked hard to repress the memory of the last one. Who knows?”

  “Suppress. Not repress. If you have to work hard at it, you’re suppressing. Repression is an unconscious act.”