story is told. What matters is what comes next. I’m hoping it will be nothing, and it probably will be, but it never hurts to be sure. Being sure helps a person sleep better at night.
“When you go to those conferences and symposiums, I want you to talk about my case. I want you to describe it. Write it up if you like, that would be fine, too. I want you to be specific about my belief, which you’re welcome to characterize as delusional, that I encountered a creature that renews itself by eating the pain of the dying. Will you do that? And if you ever—ever—meet or get an email from a fellow therapist who says he has or had a patient suffering from that exact same delusion, will you give that therapist my name and telephone number?” And then, to be gender neutral (which she always strives to be): “Or her.”
Morton had frowned. “That would hardly be ethical.”
“You’re wrong,” Holly said. “I’ve checked the law. Talking to another therapist’s patient would be unethical, but you can give the therapist my name and number if I give you permission to do so. And I do.”
Holly waited for his response.
4
She pauses her recording long enough to check the time and get a second cup of coffee. It will give her the jitters and acid indigestion, but she needs it.
“I saw him thinking it over,” Holly says into her phone. “I think what tipped the scales was knowing what a good story my story would make in his next book or article or compensated appearance. It did, too. I read one of the articles and looked at one of the conference videos. He changes the locations, and he calls me Carolyn H., but otherwise it’s the whole megillah. He’s especially good when talking about what happened to our perp when I hit him with the Happy Slapper—that brought gasps from the audience in the video. And I’ll give him this, he always ends my part of his lectures by saying he would like to hear from anyone with patients suffering similar delusional fantasies.”
She pauses to think, then restarts the recording.
“Dr. Morton called last night. It’s been awhile, but I knew who it was right away, and I knew it was going to lead back to Ondowsky. I remember something else you said once, Ralph: there’s evil in the world, but there’s also a force for good. You were thinking about the piece of menu you found, the one from a restaurant in Dayton. That fragment linked the murder in Flint City to two similar murders in Ohio. That’s how I came to be involved, just a little scrap of paper that could have easily blown away. Maybe something wanted it to be found. I like to think so, anyway. And maybe that same thing, that force, has something more for me to do. Because I can believe the unbelievable. I don’t want to, but I can.”
She stops there and puts her phone in her purse. It’s still way early to go to the airport, but she will, anyway. It’s just how she rolls.
I’ll be early to my own funeral, she thinks, and opens her iPad to find the nearest Uber.
5
At five in the morning, the cavernous airport terminal is almost completely deserted. When it’s filled with travelers (sometimes absolutely bursting at the seams with their chattering bustle) the music floating down from the overhead speakers is barely noticeable, but at this hour, with nothing but the hum of a janitor’s floor-buffer to compete with, Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” sounds not just eerie but like a harbinger of doom.
Nothing is open on the concourse except for Au Bon Pain, but that’s good enough for Holly. She resists the temptation to put another coffee on her tray, settles instead for a plastic cup of orange juice and a bagel, and takes the tray to a table at the back. After looking around to make sure no one is close (she is, in fact, the only current customer), she takes out her phone and resumes her report, speaking low and stopping every so often to marshal her thoughts. She still hopes Ralph will never get this. She still hopes that what she thinks may be a monster will only turn out to be a shadow. But if he does get it, she wants to make sure he gets all of it.
Especially if she’s dead.
6
From Holly Gibney’s report to Detective Ralph Anderson: