a friend of mine.”
I straightened. Now she was talking my language. “Is he cute?”
“She is a very good psychotherapist. One of the best in the city.”
“Wait,” I said as another thought occurred to me.
“No more waiting.”
“What if this happened decades ago? Would it have been harder to diagnose PTSD back then?”
“Possibly. PTSD has been around since the dawn of man, but it only gained notoriety as a diagnosis around the eighties. Then it took a while to catch on.”
“Thanks.” That might explain how Dr. Penn had missed it. Why she looked so hard at other causes of Harper’s illness. I had to find more about what happened to Harper during her parents’ honeymoon.
* * *
I decided to do a quick drive-by at Pari’s place to check on Harper. The shop wasn’t open yet, it was still early for a tattoo parlor, but Tre was there looking at Internet p**n . He had good taste.
“Where’s Pari?” I asked him.
He shrugged and I sensed a jolt of hostility. “She’s out.”
Uh-oh, trouble in paradise. He seemed really bummed. Not enough to hold my attention, though. I looked past him at the pictures of clients Pari had on her wall and pointed. “Hey, those are the Bandits.”
I stepped closer to the pic of the ragtag team of bikers. They owned my favorite mental asylum, for some bizarre reason, and the picture was of my favorite three bikers ever: Donovan, Eric, and Michael. They were showing off their tats, each of them posing like bodybuilders, but something about them clicked in the back of my mind. I’d seen them out of context recently, in another situation, another environment. It was odd. Something about their shape. Tall, medium-tall, and just plain medium.
“Okay, well, I’ll just be back here.”
Tre shrugged, his acknowledgment barely noticeable.
I wondered about the Bandits as long as my ADD would allow me to, then moved on to my childhood dream of being an astronaut and how I would’ve tried to save the world if a comet were headed toward Earth. I concluded that the human race was doomed.
“Hey, Harper,” I said, ducking into her closetlike room.
She’d been looking out a window the size of a business card and turned to me. “Hi.”
“Do you have a minute?”
“Really?” she asked, indicating her surroundings with her upturned palms.
“Right,” I said. “I hope Pari is treating you well.”
“She’s kind of different.”
“That she is.”
“Did you talk to Art?”
“Yes, and he’s definitely not our guy.”
“Oh, I know that. I was just hoping he might have figured something out.”
“Well, he did have some pretty interesting comments,” I said, my clever meaning disguised in a subtly subversive way. “He seems to think something happened to you while you were staying with your grandparents.”
She stood again, her jaw set in frustration. “It always comes back to that, but I just don’t remember. For some reason, by the time my family got me into therapy and I’d started to analyze what could have happened, I’d completely forgotten that week. It’s not all that unusual. I mean, how much about your childhood do you really remember?”
She had a point. Even my childhood was pretty spotty, and I could recollect anything if I wanted to. I couldn’t imagine how much a normal kid would forget.
“But he said you’d changed after you came back.”
She looked at me, confused. “He hardly knew me. My parents dated and got married before we knew what happened. Let’s just say we were not brought into the loop on that decision.”
“That’s weird. I wasn’t brought into the loop with my parents’ marriage either.”
“Really? How old were you?”
“Twelve months.”
She giggled. “I can’t imagine why they didn’t ask your opinion.”
“I know, right? Well, if you don’t have anything, I guess I might have to actually do some investigative work.”
She grinned. “Isn’t that what you do?”
“Oh, yeah, sure. Right.” I nudged her with my elbow. “I am a PI, after all.” Telling her I could talk to the dead and often used them to help me solve crimes might be awkward at this juncture. It would be best if she thought I had my crap together instead of scattered from here to Timbuktu, like, say, the crap on a cattle ranch. “Have you checked out Tre? He’s well worth the effort.”
Her shoulders raised in modesty. “Not yet.”
“Well, see that you do, missy. Hard manly flesh like that shouldn’t go to waste.”
“Okay. I promise.”
* * *
I stepped out of Pari’s shop just as my phone rang.
Speaking of whom, “Hey, Par.”
“Where the heck are you?”
I