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  Sitting back hard in his chair, Ricky realized he was at a critical moment. In the hours since the letter appeared in his waiting room, he’d been caught up in a series of actions that he had absolutely no perspective upon. Analysis is about patience and he’d had none. It is about time, and there was none available. His glance caught the calendar Virgil had provided him. The fourteen days remaining seemed an impossibly brief time. For a second, he thought of a death row prisoner, told that the governor had signed his death warrant, specifying date, time, and place of execution. This was a crushing image, and he turned away from it, telling himself that even in a prison, men fought hard for life. Ricky breathed in fiercely. It is, he thought, the greatest luxury of our existence, no matter how miserable, that we don’t know our allotted span of days. The calendar on his desk seemed to mock him.

  “It isn’t a game,” he said to no one. “It’s never been a game.”

  He reached out and seized Rumplestiltskin’s letter and examined the small rhyme. It’s a clue, he shouted to himself. A clue from a psychopath. Look at it closely!

  “ . . . Mother, father, and young child . . .”

  Well, he thought to himself, it’s interesting that the letter writer uses the word child, because that doesn’t specify gender.

  “ . . . When my father sailed away . . .”

  The father left. Sail could be either literal or symbolic, but in either case, the father left the family. Whatever the causes of the abandonment, Rumplestiltskin must have harbored his resentment for years. It had to be further fueled by the mother, who was left behind. He had played some part in the creation of a rage that had taken years to turn murderous. But which part? That’s what he needed to figure out.

  Rumplestiltskin, he believed in that moment, was the child of a patient. The question was, what sort of patient?

  An unhappy and unsuccessful patient, obviously. Someone who’d cut short their treatment, possibly. But which direction did the patient occupy: the mother left behind with resentment and children, or the father, who’d abandoned the family? Had he failed in his treatment of the woman cut adrift, or had he been the impetus for the man to run out on his family? He thought this was a little bit like the Japanese film Rashomon, where the same event is examined from diametrically different positions, with wildly disparate interpretations. Into a situation ripe for murderous anger, he’d played a role, but on which side, he couldn’t tell. Regardless, Ricky thought the time frame would necessarily have happened between twenty and twenty-five years earlier, because Rumplestiltskin had to grow into the adult of means necessary to plan the elaborate details of the game.

  How long, Ricky wondered, does it take to create a murderer? Ten years? Twenty years? A single instant?

  He did not know, but suspected he could learn.

  This gave him the first sense of satisfaction he’d felt since he’d opened the letter in his waiting room. A feeling not precisely of confidence hit him, but one of ability. What he failed to see was that he had been adrift in the real, grime-streaked world of Detective Riggins, overmatched and out of place, and that once he was functioning back within the world he knew, the world of emotion and action defined by psychology, he was comfortable.

  Zimmerman, an unhappy man who needed much help that was too slow in coming, faded from his thoughts and at the same time Ricky did not make the second realization, the one that might have stopped him cold: that he had begun to play a game on the playing field designed uniquely for him, just as Rumplestiltskin told him that he would.

  An analyst is not like the surgeon, who can look at the heart monitor attached to his patient and recognize success or failure from the blips on a screen. Measurements are far more subjective. Cured, a word with all sorts of hidden absolutes, isn’t attached to an analytic course of treatment, even though the profession employs many medical connections.

  Ricky was back at the creation of a list. He was taking a period of ten years, from 1975, when he began his residency, through 1985, and writing down the name of everyone he’d seen in treatment during that space of time. He discovered that it was relatively easy, as he went year by year, to come up with the names of the long-term patients, the ones who had engaged in traditional analyses. Those names jumped out, and he was pleased that he was able to recall faces, voices, and more than a few details about their situations. In some cases, he could recall the names of spouses, parents, children, where they worked and where they grew up, in addition to his clinical diagnosis and assessment of their problems. This was all very helpful, he thought, but he doubted that anyone who’d had a long-term course of treatment had created the person now threatening him.

  Rumplestiltskin would be the child of someone whose connection had been more tenuous. Someone who left treatment abruptly. Someone who had quit coming to his office after only a few sessions.

  Remembering those patients was a far more difficult enterprise.

  He sat at his desk, a legal pad of paper in front of him, free-associating, month by month right through his past, trying to picture people from a quarter century earlier. This was the psychoanalytic equivalent of heavy lifting; names, faces, problems came back slowly to him. He wished that he’d kept more-organized records, but what little he’d been able to find, what few notes and documents he had from that ancient period, were all of the people who’d stuck with the course of treatment, and had, in their own way, over years of flopping down on the couch and talking, left marks in his memory.

  He had to find the person who’d left a scar.

  Ricky was approaching the dilemma in the only way he knew how. He recognized that it wasn’t particularly efficient, but he was at a loss as to how else to proceed.

  It was slow going, the morning’s minutes evaporating around him in silence. The list he was creating grew haphazardly. A person staring in at Ricky would have seen him bent over slightly in his chair, pen in hand, like some blocked poet searching for an impossible rhyme to a word like granite.

  Ricky labored hard and alone.

  It was nearing noontime when the buzzer on his door rang.

  The sound seemed to rip him from reverie. He straightened up abruptly, feeling the muscles in his back tighten and his throat suddenly grow dry. The buzzer rang a second time, unmistakably someone unaware of his patients’ assigned ring.

  He rose and crossed his office, crossed the waiting room and cautiously approached the door he so rarely locked. There was a peephole in the middle of the oaken slab, which he couldn’t recall the last time he’d used, and he put his eye to the circle to stare through as the buzzer sounded one more time.

  On the other side was a young man wearing a sweat-stained blue Federal Express shirt, clutching an envelope and an electronic clipboard in his hand. He looked mildly irritated and seemed about to turn away, when Ricky unlocked the door. He only loosened the dead bolts, however, leaving the chain fastened.

  “Yes?” Ricky asked.

  “I have a letter here for a Doctor Starks. Is that you, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need a signature.”

  Ricky hesitated. “Do you have some identification?”

  “What?” the young man asked with a grin. “The uniform isn’t enough?” He sighed and twisted his body to show a plastic encased picture identification that was clipped to his shirt. “Can you read that?” he asked. “All I’m looking for is a signature, then I’m out of here.”

  Ricky reluctantly opened the door. “Where do I sign?”

  The deliveryman offered him the clipboard and pointed at the twenty-second line down. “Right there,” he said. Ricky signed. The deliveryman checked the signature, then ran an electronic tabulator across a bar code. The machine beeped twice. Ricky had no idea what that was about. Then the deliveryman handed him the small cardboard one-day express envelope. “Have a nice day,” he said, with a tone that implied that he didn’t really care one way or the other what sort of day Ricky had, but that he’d been taught to say it, and he was fo
llowing designated procedure in any case.

  Ricky paused in the doorway, staring down at the label on the envelope. The return address was from the New York Psychoanalytic Society, an organization that he was a longtime member of, but had had precious little to do with over the years. The society was something of a governing body for New York’s psychoanalysts, but Ricky had always shunned the politicking and connecting that accompanied any such organization. He went to an occasional society-sponsored lecture, and he flipped through the society’s semiannual journal to keep up with his peers and their opinions, but he avoided participating in the panel discussions the society held just as much as he avoided the holiday cocktail parties.

  He stepped back into his waiting room, locking the doors behind him, wondering why the society had written to him at this point. He suspected that close to a hundred percent of the society was taking off on August vacations anyway. Like so many aspects of the process, in the psychoanalytic world, the summer month was sacred.

  Ricky found the tab and pulled open the cardboard envelope. Inside there was a regular letter-sized envelope bearing the society’s embossed return address in the corner. His name was typed on the envelope, and along the bottom there was a single line: by overnight courier—urgent.

  He opened the envelope and withdrew two sheets of paper. The first bore the masthead of the society. He saw immediately that the letter was from the organization’s president, a physician some ten years older than he, and whom he knew only vaguely. He could not recall ever conversing with the man, other than perhaps a handshake and forgettable pleasantry.

  He read swiftly:

  Dear Dr. Starks:

  It is my unfortunate duty to inform you that the

  Psychoanalytic Society is in receipt of a significant

  complaint concerning your relationship with a former

  patient. I have enclosed a copy of the complaining

  letter.

  As per the society’s bylaws, and after discussing the issue

  with the leadership of this organization, I have turned the

  entire matter over to the state’s board of medical ethics

  investigators. You should be hearing from personnel

  in that office in the very near future.

  I would urge you to obtain competent legal counsel at your

  earliest convenience. I am optimistic that we will be

  able to keep the nature of this complaint out of the

  news media, as allegations such as these throw our

  entire profession into disrepute.

  Ricky barely glanced at the signature, as he turned to the second sheet of paper. This, too, was a letter, but addressed to the society’s president, with copies to the vice president, ethics committee chairman, each doctor on the six-person ethics committee, the society’s secretary, and treasurer. In fact, Ricky realized, any physician whose name was attached in any way to the society’s leadership had received a copy. It read:

  Dear Sir or Madam:

  More than six years ago, I entered into a course of

  psychoanalytic treatment with Dr. Frederick Starks, a

  member of your organization. Some three months into

  a four-times-weekly series of sessions, he began to ask

  me what might be considered inappropriate questions.

  These were always about my sexual relations with

  the various partners I had leading up to and including

  a failed marriage. I assumed that these inquiries were

  a part of the analytic process. However, as the sessions

  continued, he kept demanding more and more explicit

  details of my sex life. The tone of these questions became

  increasingly pornographic. Every time I tried to change the

  subject matter, he invariably forced it back, always increasing

  the quality and quantity of description. I complained, but

  he countered that the root of my depression resided in my

  failure to fully give myself in sexual encounters. It was shortly

  after that suggestion that he raped me for the first time.

  He told me that unless I submitted, I would never feel better

  about myself.

  Having sex during therapy sessions became a requirement

  for continued treatment. He was insatiable.

  After six months, he told me that my treatment was at

  an end, and that there was nothing he could do for me.

  He said I was so repressed that a course of drugs and

  hospitalization was probably required. He urged me to

  check into a private psychiatric hospital in Vermont, but

  was unwilling to even make a call to that hospital’s

  director. He forced me to have anal sex with him the day he

  ended our sessions.

  It has taken me several years to recover from my

  relationship with Dr. Starks. During this time, I have

  been hospitalized three times, each time for more than

  six months. I bear the scars of two failed suicide attempts.

  It is only with the constant help of a caring therapist that

  I have begun the process of healing. This letter to your

  organization is a part of that process.

  For the time being, I feel I must remain anonymous,

  although Dr. Starks will know who I am. If you decide

  to pursue this matter, please direct your investigation to

  my attorney and/or my therapist.

  The letter was unsigned, but contained the name of a lawyer with a midtown address, and a psychiatrist with a suburban Boston listing.

  Ricky’s hands shook. He was dizzy, and slumped against a wall of his apartment to steady himself. He felt like a prizefighter who has absorbed a pummeling—disoriented, in pain, ready to drop to the canvas when the bell leaves him utterly defeated, but still standing.

  There was not a single word of truth in the letter. At least not one that he could discern.

  He wondered whether that would make even the slightest bit of a difference.

  Chapter Eight

  He looked down at the lies on the page in front of him and felt a great contradiction within him. His spirits plummeted, his heart was cold with despair of his own, as if some tenacity had been sucked out of him, and at the same moment, replaced with a rage that was so far distant from his normal character that it was almost unrecognizable. His hands started to quiver, his face flushed red, and a thin line of sweat broke out on his forehead. He could feel the same heat growing at the back of his neck, in his armpits, and down his throat. He turned away from the letters, raising his eyes, looking around for something he could seize hold of and break, but he could find nothing readily available, which angered him even more.

  Ricky paced back and forth across his office for a few moments. It was as if his entire body had acquired a nervous twitch. Finally, he flung himself down into his old leather chair, behind the head of the couch, and let the familiar creakings of the upholstery and the sensation of the polished fabric beneath his palms calm him, if only a little.

  He had absolutely no doubt who had concocted the complaint against him. The false anonymity of the phony victim guaranteed that. The more important question, he recognized, was determining why. There was an agenda, he understood, and he needed to isolate and identify what it was.

  Ricky kept a telephone on the floor next to his chair and he reached down and seized it. Within seconds he acquired the office number for the head of the Psychoanalytic Society from directory assistance. Refusing their electronic offer to dial the number for him, he furiously punched the numbers into the receiver, then leaned back, waiting for a response.

  The telephone was answered by the vaguely familiar voice of his fellow analyst. But it had the tinny, emotionless, and flat quality belonging to a recording.

  “Hello. You have reached the office of Doctor Martin Ro
th. I will be out of my office from August first to the twenty-ninth. If this is an emergency, please dial 555-1716, which will connect you with a service capable of reaching me while on vacation. You may also dial 555-2436 and speak with Doctor Albert Michaels at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, who is covering for me this month. If you feel this is a true crisis, please call both numbers and Doctor Michaels and I will both get back to you.”

  Ricky disconnected the recording and dialed the first of the two emergency numbers. He knew the second number was for a second- or third-year psychiatric resident at the hospital. The residents covered for the established physicians during vacation times, providing an outlet where prescriptions superseded the talk that was the mainstay of the analytic treatment plan.

  The first number, however, was an answering service.

  “Hello,” a woman’s voice responded wearily. “This is Doctor Roth’s service.”

  “I need to get the doctor a message,” Ricky said briskly.

  “The doctor is on vacation. In an emergency, you should call Doctor Albert Michaels at—”

  “I have that number,” Ricky interrupted, “but it’s not that sort of emergency and it’s not that sort of message.”

  The woman paused, more surprised than confused. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know if I should call him during his vacation for just any message . . .”

  “He will want to hear this,” Ricky said. It was difficult to conceal the coolness in his own voice.

  “I don’t know,” the woman repeated. “We have a procedure.”

  “Everyone has a procedure,” Ricky said bluntly. “Procedures exist to prevent contact. Not help it. People with small minds and vacant imaginations fill them with schedules and procedures. People of character know when to ignore protocol. Are you that sort of person, miss?”

  The woman hesitated. “What’s the message?” she abruptly demanded.

  “Tell Doctor Roth that Doctor Frederick Starks . . . you had better write this down because I want you to quote me precisely . . .”

  “I am writing it down,” the woman said sharply.

  “ . . . That Doctor Starks received his letter, reviewed the complaint contained within, and wishes to inform him that there is not a single word of truth in any of it. It is a complete and total fantasy.”