Shakespeares Counselor Page 0,21

Our therapist hurled herself into the big man's arms and sobbed against his chest. "I can't stand this again, Cliff!"

"What's happened?" he said gently, while Stokes, Claude, and I stood and listened.

"Somebody killed a woman and left her in my office!"

Cliff's dark eyes bored into Claude, another large white male.

"Is this true?" he asked, as though Tamsin often made up fantasies of this nature. Or as though he wished she had.

"I'm afraid so. I'm the police chief, Claude Friedrich. I don't believe I've had the pleasure?" Claude extended his hand, and Cliff disengaged from Tamsin to shake it.

"Cliff Eggers," he responded. "I'm Tamsin's husband."

"What do you do, Mr. Eggers?" Claude asked in a social way, though I could practically see Detective Stokes twitch.

"I'm a medical transcriptionist," he said, making an obvious effort to relax. "I believe your wife is one of my clients. Mostly I work out of our home, my wife's and mine."

We must all have looked blank.

"Doctors record what they find when they examine a patient, and what they're going to do about it. I take the recordings and enter the information into a computerized record. That's paring my job down to the bare bones."

I had no idea Carrie employed a medical whatever, and from his face Claude had either been ignorant of it, too, or had forgotten; he wasn't happy with himself. I was probably the only one present who knew him well enough to tell, though.

"You live here in Shakespeare?" Claude said.

"Right over on Compton." Cliff Eggers's big hand smoothed Tamsin's hair in a cherishing gesture.

I was about to ask Tamsin if she'd heard anyone leave the building before our group had broken in, when I heard a voice calling, "Lily! Lily!"

I peered around the parking lot, trying to find its source. Full dark had fallen now, and the lights of the parking lot were busy with insects. The people buzzed around below them, looking as patternless as the bugs. I was hoping all the police were more purposeful than they appeared. Claude was no fool, and he'd sent everyone in his department through as much training as he could afford. No wonder he was so quick to snap up a detective from a big force, one who was sure to have more experience than anyone he could hire locally. And though he'd never spoken to me of it, I was aware that Claude had quotas he had to meet, and his force was probably always trying to catch up on the minority percentage, especially since Shakespeare had had some racial troubles about eighteen months ago.

"Lily!"

And there he was; the most handsome young man in Shakespeare, prom king, and thorn in my side, Bobo Winthrop. My heart sank, while another part of me reacted in a far different way.

I turned a hose on myself mentally.

"Bobo," I said formally.

He disregarded my tone and put his arm around me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Claude's bushy eyebrows escalate toward his hairline.

"You okay?" Bobo asked tenderly.

"Yes, thank you," I said, my voice as stiff as I could make it.

"Is this your friend, Lily?" Tamsin asked. She'd recovered enough to try to slip back into her therapist role, and the neutral word friend suddenly seemed to have many implications.

"This is Bobo Winthrop," I told her. "Bobo: Tamsin Lynd, Cliff Eggers." I had done my duty.

"What happened here?" Bobo asked, giving Tamsin and Cliff a distracted nod. I was glad to see that Detective Stokes had drawn Claude away to huddle with him on real police business.

I wanted to be somewhere else. I started walking to my car, wondering if anyone would stop me. No one did. Bobo trailed after me, if a six-foot-tall blond can be said to trail.

"A woman got killed in there tonight," I said to my large shadow when we reached my car. "She was stabbed, or stuck through somehow."

"Who was she?" Bobo loomed over me while I pulled my keys out of my pocket. I wondered where the rest of my therapy group had gone. The police station? Home? If Melanie didn't tell the police the identity of the corpse herself, they'd find it out pretty quick. She'd look bad.

"I didn't know her," I said accurately, if not exactly honestly. Bobo touched my face, a stroke of his palm against my cheek.

"I'm going home," I said.

"Jack there tonight?"

"No, he's on the road."

"You need me to be there? I'll be glad - "

"No." Clipped and final, it was as definite as it