Bad Love

She flipped her hair and smiled.

'Thanks for seeing me,' I said.

'Of course, doctor. Please have a seat.'

Her office was the standard twelve-by-twelve setup, with a real wood desk, two upholstered armchairs, a three-drawer double file, a nearly empty bookcase, and some paintings of seagulls. On the desk were a pen, a memo pad, and a short stack of file folders.

A photo in a standup frame was centered on one of the shelves- she and a nice-looking, heavyset man about her age, the two of them in Hawaiian shirts and bedecked with leis. Social work diplomas made out to Jean Marie LaPorte were propped on another shelf, all from California colleges. I scanned the dates. If she'd graduated college at twenty-two, she was exactly forty-five.

'You're a clinical psychologist, right?' she said, sitting behind the desk.

I took one of the chairs. 'Yes.'

'You know, when Detective Sturgis mentioned your name I thought I recognized it, though I still can't figure out from where.'

She smiled again. I returned it.

She said, 'How does a psychologist come to be a police consultant?'

'By accident, really. Several years ago I was treating some children who'd been abused at a day-care center. I ended up testifying in court and getting involved in the legal system. One thing led to another.'

'Day-care center- the man who took pictures? The one involved with that horrible molesters' club?'

I nodded.

'Well, that must be where I remember your name from. You were quite a hero, weren't you?'

'Not really. I did my job.'

'Well,' she said, sitting forward and pushing hair out of her eyes, 'I'm sure you're being modest. Child abuse is so- to tell you the truth, I couldn't work with it myself. Which may sound funny considering what we deal with here. But children-' She shook her head. 'It would be too hard for me to find any sympathy for the abusers even if they were once victims themselves.'

'I know what you mean.'

'To me that's the lowest- violating a child's trust. How do you manage to deal with it?'

'It wasn't easy,' I said. 'I saw myself as the child's ally and tried to do whatever helped.'

'Tried? You don't do abuse work anymore?'

'Occasionally, when it comes up as part of a custody case. Mostly I consult the court on trauma and divorce issues.'

'Do you do any therapy at all?'

'Not much.'

'Me, neither.' She sat back. 'My main goal in school was to become a therapist, but I can't remember the last time I actually did any real therapy.'

She smiled again and shook her head. The wave of hair covered her eyes and she flipped it back- a curiously adolescent mannerism.

'Anyway,' she said, 'about what Detective Sturgis wants, I just don't know how I can really help. I really need to safeguard our people's confidentiality- despite what happened to Becky.' She folded her lips inward, lowered her eyes, and shook her head.

I said, 'It must have been terrifying.'

'It happened too quickly to be terrifying- the terrifying part didn't hit me until after it was over- seeing her… what he… now I really know what they mean by posttraumatic stress. No substitute for direct experience, huh?'

She pressed the skinny upper lip with one finger, as if keeping it still.

'No one knew what he was doing to her. I was right here, going about my business the whole time he was- the treatment rooms are totally soundproofed. He-' She removed her finger. A white pressure circle dotted her lip, then slowly faded.

'Then I heard noise from the hall,' she said. 'That horrible screaming- he just kept screaming.'

' 'Bad love,' ' I said.

Her mouth remained open. The blue eyes dulled for a second. 'Yes… he… I went out to Mary's office and she wasn't there, so I opened the door to the hall and saw him. Screaming, waving it- the knife- splashing blood, the wall- he saw me- I saw his eyes settle on me- focusing- and he kept screaming. I slammed the door, shoved Mary's desk up against it, and ran back into my office. Slammed that door and blocked it. I hid behind my chair the whole time it was… it wasn't till later that I found out he'd grabbed Adeline.' She wiped her eyes. 'I'm sorry, you don't need to hear this.'

'No, no, please.'

She glanced at her message pad. Blank. Picking up the pen, she wrote something on it.

'No, that's it- I've told it so many times… no one knows how long he- if she suffered for a long time. That's the one thing I can hope. That she didn't. The thought of her trapped in there with him…' She shook her head and touched her temples. 'They soundproofed the rooms back in the sixties, when this place was a Vietnam veterans' counseling center. We sure don't need it.'

'Why's that?'

'Because no one does much therapy around here.'

She took a deep breath and slapped her hands lightly on the desk. 'Life goes on, right? Would you like something to drink? We've got a coffee machine in the other wing. I can have Mary go get some.'

'No, thanks.'

'Lucky choice.' Smile. 'It's actually pretty vile.'

'How come no one does much therapy?' I said. 'Too disturbed a population?'

'Too disturbed, too poor, too many of them. They need food and shelter and to stop hearing voices. The preferred treatment is Thorazine. And Haldol and lithium and Tegretol and whatever else chases the demons away. Counseling would be a nice luxury, but with our caseload it ends up being a very low priority. Not to mention funding. That's why we don't have any psychologists on our staff, just caseworkers, and most of them are SWAs- assistants. Like Becky.'

'On the way in I saw a doctor giving out prescriptions.'

'That's right,' she said. 'It's Friday, isn't it? That's Dr. Wintell, our once-a-week psychiatrist. He's just out of his residency, a real nice kid. But when his practice builds up, he'll be out of here like all the others.'

'If no one does therapy, what was Becky doing with Hewitt in the therapy room?'

'I didn't say we never talk to our people, just that we don't do much insight work. Sometimes we get cramped for space and the workers use the treatment rooms to do their paperwork. Basically, all of us use what's on hand. As to what Becky was doing with him, it could have been anything. Giving him a voucher for an SRO hotel, telling him where to get deloused. Then again, maybe she was trying to get into his head- she was that kind of person.'

'What kind is that?'

'An optimist. Idealistic. Most of us start out that way, don't we?'

I nodded. 'Did Hewitt have a history of violence?'

'None that was listed in our files. He'd been arrested just a few weeks before for theft and was due to stand trial- maybe she was counseling him about that. There was nothing on paper that would have warned us. And even if he was violent, there's a good chance the information would never have gotten to us, with all the red tape.'

She put down her pen and looked at me. Flipped her hair. 'The truth is, he was exactly like so many others who come in and out of here- there's still no way to know.'

She picked up one of the folders.

'This is his file. The police confiscated it and returned it, so I guess it's not confidential anymore.'

Inside were only two sheets, one clipped to each of the covers. The first was an intake form listing Dorsey Hewitt's age as thirty-one and his address as 'none.' Under REASON FOR REFERRAL someone had written