'I talked with that family counselor today,' Susan said.
'Rebecca Stimpson, MSW?'
'Yes. She had been doing some marriage counseling with the Washburns and it was sort of delicate because of confidentiality. But, phrased just right, it's pretty clear that Ms. Stimpson, MSW, did not feel that the Washburns were on the road to reconciliation.'
'She have any views on Ray's potential for violence?'
'Not really. She couldn't rule it out, but, as you know, predicting behavior is nearly impossible. Also, in truth Ms. Stimpson doesn't seem like a therapeutic heavyweight.'
'She has a master's in social work,' I said.
'Yes, and I believe in the value of fuller and more specialized training; but it's not her academic credentials; there are people with PhDs in psychology and M.D. psychiatrists who aren't therapeutic heavyweights either. It's temperament and, for lack of a better word, simple intelligence. Ms. Stimpson isn't very smart.'
'You trust her opinion on Washburn?'
Susan sipped some more Diet Coke. She was tossing a salad composed of endive, julienne of red and yellow peppers, and arugula.
'It's hard to see how she could have been totally misled. She saw them together once a week for several months.'
'So if she's not misled, then Ray was lying,' I said.
'Not necessarily,' Susan said. 'Some clients simply want something so badly, they believe it despite everything.'
'And if they are forced to see the truth?' I said.
Susan shook her head. 'Need is a powerhouse,' she said.
'So if the therapist is right…' I said.
'Counselor,' Susan said. 'Not therapist. She wasn't doing therapy.'
I grinned. 'Correct, just a test to see if you were listening. So if the counselor is right, Raymond is somewhat obsessed, or he is lying. Or the counselor is wrong and it's another Red Rose killing, or both. Or neither, and something we haven't any idea about is going on.'
'Fascinating work,' Susan said.
'Not unlike your own,' I said.
Susan put a loaf of fresh French bread on the table and the salad, served on two glass salad plates.
'Metaphors for life,' she said. 'Your profession and mine.'
I sat at the table beside her.
'You be Simone de Beauvoir,' I said, 'and I'll be Sartre and we'll consider defining life by living.'
Susan smiled and patted my hand with hers. She was still wearing the twisted bandana that she used to hold her hair back when she worked out.
On most people I thought it hokey. It looked exactly right on her.
'Eat your fucking salad,' she said.
We ate dinner and cleaned up and Susan settled in on the couch beside me to read the American Journal of Therapeutics. I watched the Braves and the Reds on cable.
'It's Skip Carey and John Sterling,' I said to Susan.
'So?'
'They have a four-man broadcast crew and they do radio and television and they rotate the crew so that the same two guys are never together, and I'm trying to figure out the pattern.'
Susan put her magazine down and looked at me silently.
'Really?' she said.
'And,' I said, 'there's a pattern within the patter in that each guy does some play-by-play and some color on both radio and television.'
Susan looked at me some more and breathed deeply and exhaled slowly and went back to her magazine.
By the time the ball game ended Susan had fallen asleep with her magazine still open before her. I bent over and picked her up and carried her to bed and put her down on it. It woke her up and she gazed up at me with her big eyes.
'What made you think I was sleepy?' she said.
'I'm a trained investigator,' I said.
She smiled and made a kissing motion with her mouth. I bent over and kissed her goodnight and headed home. As I started down the stairs I heard the front door shut softly. I froze, listening. The front door should have been locked. I felt the adrenaline surge and I went down the stairs in a rush. The front door had been jimmied. I pulled it open. There was the hint of movement past one of the big shrubs in Susan's yard. I went over the porch railing and landed five feet below, next to the shrub. Something, probably a fist, hit me in the forehead.
It wasn't a major league punch but it jarred me, and a figure burst from behind the bush and headed up Linnaean Street, toward Mass. Ave. I went after him with my chimes still ringing. I had run five miles a day for the last twenty years and planned to run him down. In a block, I hadn't closed the gap. He hurdled a waist-high fence
