“You must be the detectives from Denton,” he said, not getting up.
Josie and Noah both showed him their credentials. He studied each one for a long moment. Then, apparently satisfied, he put his cigar into the ashtray and his book into his lap. He motioned toward a wicker bench across from where he sat. “Please,” he said.
“Dr. Buckley,” Josie said. “On the phone you said Lorelei wasn’t your patient, yet you’ve clearly prescribed medication to her. That’s a pretty serious admission. Your license could be revoked or suspended.”
“Will you report me, then?” he asked in a tone that sounded like he almost wished they would.
Noah said, “We have to discuss it with our Chief. For now, we just need to know why you would be prescribing medications for someone who was not a patient.”
“Her son was my patient.”
Josie felt a tickle at the back of her neck. “I’m sorry, Dr. Buckley. You said her son?”
“Rory Mitchell.” He put his book onto the table and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I can tell by the looks on your faces that news of Lorelei’s son is a complete shock to you. This is exactly how she wanted it, although ultimately, I’m not sure that it served her all that well. She is dead, after all.”
Noah asked, “How old is her son?”
“Oh, he would be fifteen by now, I imagine. Detectives, if you want to know who killed Lorelei and anyone else living in her house, you need look no further than Rory.”
“He wasn’t there,” Josie said. “There was no evidence that he even lived there. No one has even mentioned him.”
Buckley gave a pained smile. “Because he was her secret.”
Noah said, “How and why would you keep a child a secret?”
“Have you found out about Lorelei’s past? I assume you have if you’re here talking to me.”
“She was a psychologist,” Josie said. “She specialized in adolescent abnormal psychology, and she was attacked by a patient who killed his mother and then, later, himself.”
Buckley nodded. Gone was his smile. “I’ve already admitted to prescribing medications to someone who isn’t my patient, and now I’m going to tell you something else that would end my career, except that I will retire now that Lorelei no longer needs me. I haven’t treated patients in over five years. Rory was my last patient. Only Lorelei didn’t want him in any system—not the medical system, not the mental health system, and certainly not the criminal justice system—so I prescribed his drugs to her, and she dispensed them to Rory as needed.”
“What’s the other thing you were going to tell us?” Josie asked, sensing he was losing track of his thoughts.
He raised a finger in the air. “Oh right. Yes. Here it is.” He put his hand back into his lap. “Lorelei and I were colleagues. She was a great deal younger than I was, but so brilliant. Very successful treating even the most difficult patients. Her specialty was cognitive behavioral therapy. She didn’t like to medicate patients. That was my job. We often disagreed on when or whether to medicate patients. We had many arguments. Then there was a particularly troublesome patient. She had worked with him for just over three years. She’d made great progress.”
“What was his diagnosis?” Josie asked.
Buckley waved a hand. “Oh dear. Is there ever one single diagnosis for the children most afflicted in mind and heart? Many children have several comorbidities. Therefore, it becomes difficult to treat one without somehow worsening the other—or others. The trickiest cases are the ones that you cannot pin down to one single cause. Imagine, if you will, a child who comes to a clinic with a general feeling of malaise. He doesn’t feel well. Perhaps he is achy or his stomach bothers him. Perhaps he has headaches or fatigue. Overall, he simply doesn’t feel right. He’s not able to function well. What do you do?”
He went silent, as if waiting for an answer. Finally, Noah ventured a guess. “Try to rule out different causes until you’ve narrowed it down to one or two?”
Buckley smiled. “Yes. Indeed. That is part of what I tried to do. If you have a child who is experiencing episodes of extreme rage, who is acting out violently, you might say perhaps this child has intermittent explosive disorder, conduct disorder, or oppositional defiant disorder, or a number of other things. It will help to pinpoint which one, if possible. But what if you’ve got symptoms and behaviors that are more consistent with ADHD, OCD, or even bipolar disorder? What if you believe there is some combination of these at work? What if that child also displays indicators of schizophrenia? What if he has fixed paranoid delusions? We do try to narrow it down, but sometimes we cannot. Sometimes the inner workings of these various syndromes and disorders on a child’s mind are so complex, we can only treat them through trial and error.”
Josie said, “You’re saying the patient that you and Lorelei treated twenty years ago suffered from multiple diagnoses, some of which caused him to have violent episodes?”
“Precisely, yes.”
Noah said, “Lorelei didn’t want to medicate him?”
“Quite the opposite. She did want to medicate him. She’d gotten as far as she could with him using her therapies, and she believed he was declining. Headed toward some kind of psychotic break. She wanted me to medicate him.”
“But you didn’t,” said Josie.
“I did not.”
Noah said, “If she believed this patient was that much of a danger to others or himself, couldn’t she have him committed?”
“She did. But you must understand, there are few structures,
