Mirror Image

by Dennis Palumbo

  He was visibly agitated, and took a few deep breaths to calm himself. Beyond the bubble of light cast by the desk lamp, the room faded into a thick darkness.

  “I will now return to the facts of the Wingfield case, as they’ve been presented to me in these documents. I will do so with alacrity, and then I will return to my bed.”

  “I’ll bet you will. And you’ll sleep like a baby. I mean, how can you work for a man like Miles Wingfield? Why would you help him?”

  His voice was cool and placid as a deep lake. “I should think that obvious. Because his complaint against you affords me the opportunity to injure you, to bring you pain. As you did me.”

  I sat back, at a loss. It wasn’t that anything he said surprised me. It was the purity of intent. As always, Phil Camden’s clarity of purpose was breathtaking.

  I looked at him. “You’re wrong, Phil. I loved Barbara with all my heart, as you did. And this is wrong.”

  He held my eyes for a long moment, then referred once again to his notebook.

  “The facts are plain: you mishandled Kevin Wingfield’s case from the start. The patient was found wandering in a convenience store, with no memory of the preceding three hours. A dissociative state triggered by a violent encounter with a burglar. Given these symptoms, his history of voluntary and involuntary commitment, and obvious borderline features—”

  Here he stopped, fixing me with a stare. “Given these conditions, a course of drug therapy, behavioral protocols and rigid out-patient monitoring is the conventional, prescribed treatment. As I will testify.”

  “Hell, you just outlined the kind of treatment Kevin had been receiving for years, with little real effect.”

  He shrugged this off, but I pressed on.

  “Look, I honestly think our work together after the robbery attempt was the first genuine incursion into Kevin’s inner world. The sexual and physical abuse he’d suffered as a child denied him the healthy development he needed, the affective attunement he yearned for.”

  “Which you provided, by virtue of your superior wisdom and compassion?”

  “Which I hoped to provide, by giving him a model to emulate. From which he’d hopefully emerge, with enough inner resources to become whole again.”

  I took a breath. “It was a risk, yes, but a calculated one. Based on our level of trust and intimacy. On Kevin’s courage. It was our work together, and I believe in it.”

  Camden just shook his head. “I always felt you took your cases too personally.”

  “How should I take them—impersonally?” My voice hardened. “Christ, you can’t even work with patients.”

  “No need. You know my methodology. Who Kevin was, as a person, is irrelevant.”

  “Not to me.”

  We just stared at each other. Two entrenched, unmoving antagonists. Using professional differences to mask what really lay between us. And always would.

  Finally, I stood up. “To hell with this. I’m not going to defend my work with a patient. Not to you.”

  “Perhaps not. But soon you will have to. In court.”

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “This is pointless,” he said wearily. “You’ve stormed the barricades, confronted your foe. Now let’s both return to our lives and await the inevitable legal conflict.”

  He shut off the lamp and the room was plunged into darkness, except for a dim light thrown from the hall.

  Camden slowly got to his feet.

  “I trust you can see your way out?”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The uniformed cop stationed outside my office was apparently expecting me, since he gave me a nod as I neared the door. What he wasn’t expecting was the cup of coffee I handed him, from the all-night diner around the corner.

  He was heavy and florid-faced, and climbed up out of the metal folding chair with some effort. He took the steaming Styrofoam cup in both hands.

  “Thanks, Doc. Lt. Villanova told me you was comin’.”

  Flat Pittsburgh vowels. A working-man’s stance, weight shifted to one foot. Pure blue-collar cop. Like my old man.

  “Sorry for the late visit,” I said. “Couple things I want to check in the office.”

  “No problem. Besides, it’s nice to have company. CSU’s been here and gone. Quiet as a tomb since yesterday.”

  The cop, whose name tag read Johnson, lifted the yellow crime scene tape from across the office door.

  “By the way,” he said, as he ushered me in, “we put your mail in a pile on the floor. After goin’ through it. Ya know, for threats an’ stuff.”

  “Thanks, officer.” I crossed the darkened waiting room and unlocked the connecting door to my office.

  “Take as long as ya want,” he said. “Touch anything ya want. Tech boys have dusted the hell outta the place.”

  I waited till he went back out into the hall, then I entered my office and flipped on the overhead.

  Strange feeling. The last time I was in here, Casey and I had been backing away from the knife that killed Kevin Wingfield.

  I glanced at my desk top. The blotter had been taken down to forensics. Everything else remained, but had obviously been moved, examined.

  I opened the desk drawer and checked the organizer tray. The little compartments holding paper-clips, pens, stamps. In one, I found what I was looking for. Or, rather, didn’t find it. Which was what I’d expected.

  This compartment was where I kept the spare keys. One to the public rest rooms, down the hall. The other a spare office key that opened both the outer door and the inner, connecting door.

  This key, as I’d guessed, was gone.

  It was the only thing that made sense. Kevin had often taken various things from my office when I wasn’t looking. My pen. A letter-opener. What if one time, when I’d stepped out of the room for some reason, he’d opened the desk drawer to see what he could find?

  My office key. Labeled with my suite number. It would have been irresistible. So easy to slip in his pocket, carry it around with him during the day.

  Then, the night of his murder, he’s stabbed on the way to his car in the garage. During the assault, the key falls from his pocket. The killer apparently hadn’t gone through his victim’s pockets after the murder, since the cops had Kevin’s personal effects. In fact, that same night Polk had shown me my monogrammed pen recovered from the body.

  So the key must have fallen out, with my pen and the other things Polk showed me. The killer spots it. By now, he knows he’s killed the wrong man. But he scoops up the key, sees the label. It’s the key to my suite.

  Maybe he decides right then to come back later, leave the knife as a warning to me. Maybe he’s not thought ahead that far. But he pockets the key anyway, and takes off…

  Yes. Had to be how the killer got in and planted the knife. Which meant it hadn’t been with the key I’d given Noah. Which also meant there was no reason to mention that key to the cops, and getting Noah mixed up in all this.

  I picked up the pile of mail the cops had left—some journals, invitations to conferences, and the like—and went back out into the hall. Officer Johnson had finished his coffee and was leaning back heavily in his chair.

  “Got what you needed, Doc?”

  “Thanks, yeah.”

  I left him there, a tired beat cop on the late shift, rocking back slightly on his heels, guarding an empty room.

  ***

  I was tossing the stack of mail onto the passenger seat of the Mustang when my cell rang. I sat behind the wheel, glanced at the dashboard clock. Two a.m.

  It was Casey. “Hey, you’re up.”

  “More or less. I just left my office. I think I got something the cops’ll want.”

  “Great. I wanted to talk to you, too.”

  I settled back in the seat. “Shoot.”

  “Not on the phone. Why don’t you come over?”

  “Now?”

  A long pause.

  “Danny. Don’t make me ask twice.”

>   I chewed on that. But not for too long.

  “Okay, give me your address.”

  She did, and hung up. I looked at the phone in my hand. Then at my own eyes in the rear view mirror.

  Did I know what I was doing? Did I care?

  ***

  Casey’s condo was near Edgewood, her building part of a new, upscale complex set against its sloping hills.

  I followed a series of lights atop identical brass poles to the residents’ parking lot, and then searched for the visitor spaces she’d told me about.

  The night air had dropped another ten degrees. I pulled my coat up around my throat and hurried to the front of her building. I buzzed her number. She buzzed back, and I was in.

  I found her door and knocked. Nothing. Knocked again.

  “Come in,” she called from the other side of the door.

  I did. Her place was spacious, yet simply furnished. Almost perfunctory. As though her sense of herself, her measure, lay elsewhere. In paneled offices, hammering out deals with defense lawyers. In courtrooms, examining witnesses and confounding suspects. Alone in a bar at some ungodly hour, going over briefs. No, Casey didn’t live here. She lived only in those places. For those places.

  Music played from two Bose speakers set in the ceiling corners at the recommended angle apart. Something a little too high-tech for my tastes. Oh well.

  “Casey?” I took a few more steps into the living room.

  “In here.” I tried to track her voice.

  “Where?” This was ludicrous.

  Her voice had an edge. “Where do you think?”

  I took a breath. Tried to have a coherent thought. Make some kind of argument within myself about what I was doing. What we were doing.

  Then I went into the bedroom. She wasn’t there.

  “Hey,” she called out from another room. “You gonna give me a hand or what?”

  I turned, now better able to gauge the direction of her voice. I crossed the hallway, made a left, and went into the kitchen.

  Casey was leaning against a large cooking island that dominated the small kitchen. It had a tiled top, and, for half its width, a thick wooden chopping block.

  She was propped against the wood, blowing a wisp of hair out of her eyes, as she struggled to open a bottle of Merlot. She was dressed simply in jeans and an oversized Land’s End shirt. Her feet were bare.

  Her eyes cut over at mine. “Yo. Feel free to jump right in, Sir Galahad.”

  I took the bottle from her. The corkscrew was buried up to the hilt. I braced the bottle against my upraised knee, got some leverage, and twisted. In half a minute, I got the cork out.

  Only then did I look up, to see Casey smiling at what was probably a look of intense concentration on my face.

  “Good man.” She scooped up two wine glasses from near the sink and placed them on the tiled counter. I poured us each a glass. She raised hers in a toast.

  “To peace in our time,” she said.

  I laughed, and we drank our wine in silence. Then she put down her glass, took mine from my hand, and began unbuttoning her shirt.

  “Okay, so much for the formalities,” she said, resting her hand on the chopping block. “Now come over here and fuck me.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “Go ahead,” Casey said. “Knock yourself out.”

  Her eyes burned, an ice-blue flame holding pride and challenge. Inviting my hunger, my abandon, my need.

  We were in her bedroom now, washed by pale lights. She arched her back against the cool white sheets, her naked body a leonine display of golden skin and taut, gym-toned muscle. My fingers traced the swell of her breasts, curved along the honeyed cavern of her inner thighs.

  Her body moved beneath my touch as though snaked with fire. She drew me into her and laughed as I crested up once more, pulled into the vortex, lost, beyond all thought.

  Now we were loving again, fucking, hard, sweat slick where our bodies slammed together, her blonde hair splayed against the pillows. Then she was astride me, her knees digging into my ribs, her neck curved like a smooth white sculpture as she reared back.

  We found each other again and again the rest of the night, hovering somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, desire slaked and then reborn…

  As the hours melted away until dawn.

  Her touch, her mouth, her fierceness.

  She denied me nothing.

  ***

  Casey came out of the shower still dripping wet and rolled onto the bed beside me. After a quick kiss, she turned her head toward the TV.

  “Anything new?” she asked, pulling back her wet hair to lay her cheek against my chest.

  “No. They all smell blood in the water. CNN ran the press conference with Sinclair and the Chief again.”

  “Wingfield go on camera yet?”

  “No. On Good Morning, America, one of his lawyers said he’s in seclusion. Unavailable for comment.”

  She tilted her head up. Eyes narrowed with concern.

  “They’re going to come after you again, Danny. The press. The cops. Kevin Wingfield is the Dead Celebrity of the Hour, and you were his therapist. And, Christ, if it leaks that he was dressed like you, that the killer…”

  I said nothing. Her arms encircled my waist.

  “I already know the answer to this,” she said flatly. “But any way I can talk you into laying low? Going into seclusion yourself till this whole mess burns itself out?”

  “No way. I’m in it and I’m getting in deeper. Maybe I can come up with something. Go at it from a different angle than the cops.”

  “Like with the office key,” she said. I’d told her how I thought the killer had gotten in to plant the knife.

  Casey sat up on her elbows, watching archived footage of Wingfield shaking hands with the German Chancellor, doing schtick with the President at his vacation ranch.

  Then pictures of Wingfield BioTech labs and corporate offices around the world. The last image was a college snapshot of Kevin Wingfield, the same one they’d run with the murder story when he was still just Kevin Merrick.

  I stirred. “Listen, while we’re on the subject…”

  Her smile was a tease. “I get it. You just slept with me so I’d keep you in the loop about the investigation.”

  “You got me, Counselor.” I bent and kissed her softly. “But let’s face it, I’ve probably been cut from Sgt. Polk’s Christmas card list. And I bet Sinclair’s decided against inviting me to his country club.” I looked off. “So unless I can work something out with Eleanor Lowrey…”

  Casey punched my arm. “Don’t push it, Doc.” Her eyes darkened. “And don’t get cocky. I don’t like that.”

  I met her gaze. “Duly noted.”

  Then, with the quickness of a summer storm, her face suddenly brightened.

  “I did hear a couple things, though. Last night. The first was about the murder weapon.”

  I stared at her. “Okay, you got my attention.”

  “Forensics finally ID’d the knife. Only it’s not a knife. It’s kitchenware. A skewer, like for shish-ka-bob. Very upscale. You can get it from Williams-Sonoma.”

  “Funny. Exotic and mundane at the same time.”

  “But listen. The skewers are sold as a set of two.”

  I let out a breath.

  “Yeah, I know.” Her voice softened. “That’s why you gotta be cool, Danny. The bastard’s still walking around out there, waiting to use the other one.”

  “Again, duly noted. The second piece of news?”

  “Biegler finally sent Polk up to Cloverbrook to talk to James Stickey. He’s meeting him later today.”

  “I don’t know. I think you were right about the break-in at Kevin’s apartment being just a coincidence. Besides, Stickey was already in prison when Kevin was killed.”

  She shrugged. “Biegler’s desperate. He knows his job’s on the line. His clearance rate sucks lately, and nobody likes the little prick anyway. It’d serve him right to finish up his twen
ty in Parks and Recreation.”

  “Sinclair’s got to be feeling the heat, too.”

  “Or basking in it. He knows a conviction on Kevin’s murder pretty much lands him in the governor’s mansion.”

  We channel-surfed the news for a few more minutes. The networks had already begun running a colorful graphic under their coverage of the story: “The Hunt for Kevin’s Killer.”

  “Look,” I said reluctantly, “I’ve got some calls to make, and I have to be across town by one.”

  “And I’m due in court in an hour. So we’ll have to make it fast.”

  “What?”

  She grinned. “You didn’t think you were getting out of here without feeding me breakfast?”

  Then she put her head under the covers.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  I was feeling all of my forty years as I headed downtown under a bright, cool sun. But despite whatever was happening between me and Casey—not to mention the accumulated effects of sleep deprivation—my mind was buzzing. There was a lot to do.

  Traffic slowed as I neared the Fort Pitt Bridge, so I scanned the news stations. Nothing new, though I did learn that the police were releasing Kevin’s body to Wingfield tomorrow for a private service. Talk about slicing through red tape. The chief also promised—again—to spare no effort to bring a speedy resolution to the case.

  Not surprisingly, Brooks Riley’s murder had a much lower profile. At this point there were few leads. However, patients and staff at Ten Oaks were still being questioned, as were the victim’s family and friends.

  I shut off the radio and made the turn onto my street. Then I hit the brakes.

  Quickly, I pulled around behind the Mobil station on the corner. Shielded by a towering maple, I peered at my house a hundred yards down the street.

  It had begun. There were at least a dozen news vans parked at or near the house. Reporters paced the curb, lounged in my driveway, perched on my front porch rail.

  I looked left at the corner, where a black sedan was parked at the curb. A disgruntled-looking guy with a briefcase leaned against the car, arms folded.