Prayers for Rain (Kenzie & Gennaro 5)

“Okay,” she said, and drummed her pen on her notepad. “What’s our list of priorities here?”

“First, talk to Karen’s psychiatrist.”

She nodded. “That’s a hell of a leak coming from her office.”

“Second, talk to Brewster. You got an address?”

She pulled a piece of paper from the bottom of the thermal fax pile. “Miles Brewster,” she said, “ Twelve Landsdowne Street.” She looked up from the page and her mouth remained open.

“Gee,” I said, “what’s wrong with this picture?”

“Twelve Landsdowne,” she said. “That would make it-”

“ Fenway Park.”

She groaned. “How’s a cop not notice that?”

I shrugged. “A rookie taking the statements at the scene. Forty-six witnesses, he’s tired, whatever.”

“Shit.”

“But Brewster,” I said, “is now officially dirty.”

Angie dropped the fax paper to the table. “This wasn’t an accident.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Your operating theory.”

“Brewster’s walking east, Wetterau’s walking west. Brewster slips out his foot as they pass. Boom.”

She nodded, excitement surging past the fatigue in her face. “Brewster says he was reaching down to pick Wetterau back up.”

“But he was actually holding him down,” I said.

Angie lit a cigarette, squinted through the smoke at her diagram. “We’ve stumbled onto something ugly here, pal.”

I nodded. “Big ol’ hunk of ugly.”

16

Dr. Diane Bourne’s office was housed on the second floor of a brownstone on Fairfield Street, in between a gallery specializing in mid-thirteenth-century East African kitchen pottery and a place that stitched bumper stickers on canvas and then sewed them to magnets for easy refrigerator attachment.

The office was done up in some kind of Laura Ashley meets the Spanish Inquisition decor. Plump armchairs and couches with floral stitching bore an inviting sense of softness that was all but overwhelmed by their colors-blood reds and pitch ebonies, carpets that matched, paintings on the wall by Bosch and Blake. I’d always thought a psychiatrist’s room was supposed to say Please, tell me your problems, not Please, don’t scream.

Diane Bourne was in her late thirties and so svelte I had to resist the urge to call in some takeout, force-feed her lunch. Dressed in a white sleeveless sheath dress that rode high up her throat and low to her knee, she stood out amid all the dark like a ghost floating through the moors. Her hair and skin were so pale it was hard to see where one began and the other ended, and even her eyes were the translucent gray of an ice storm. The tight dress, instead of making her look scrawny, seemed to accentuate the few soft parts of her, the flesh that swelled just slightly over her calves and hips and shoulders. The overall effect, I thought, as she took a seat behind her smoked glass desk, was of an engine-sleek, well-tuned, revving at every red light.

As soon as we took our seats at the desk, Dr. Diane Bourne moved a small metronome to her left, so that her view of us was completely unobstructed, and lit a cigarette.

She gave Angie a small, dark smile. “Now, what can I do for you?”

“We’re looking into the death of Karen Nichols,” Angie said.

“Yes,” she said, and sucked a small white cloud of smoke back into her lungs, “Mr. Kenzie mentioned as much on the phone.” She tapped a modicum of ash into a crystal ashtray. “He was rather”-her mist-gray eyes met mine-“cagey about anything else.”

“Cagey,” I said.

She took another small hit off the cigarette and crossed her long legs. “You like that?”

“Oh, yeah.” I raised my eyebrows up and down several times.

She gave me a wisp of a smile and turned back to Angie. “As I hope I made quite clear to Mr. Kenzie, I have no inclination to discuss anything in regards to Miss Nichols’s therapy.”

Angie snapped her fingers. “Nuts.”

Diane Bourne swiveled back to me. “Mr. Kenzie, however, intimated over the-”

“Intimated?” Angie said.

“Intimated, yes, over the phone that he had information which could-do I have this right, Mr. Kenzie?-pose questions as to potential ethical violations in my handling of Ms. Nichols.”

I met her arched eyebrow with two of my own. “I wouldn’t say I was quite so-”

“Articulate?”

“Verbose,” I said. “But, otherwise, Dr. Bourne, that was the gist, yes.”

Dr. Bourne moved the ashtray a bit to her left so that we could see the small tape recorder behind it. “It’s my legal duty to inform you that this conversation is being recorded.”

“Cool,” I said. “Let me ask you-where’d you get that? Sharper Image, right? I’ve never seen one look so chic.” I looked at Angie. “You?”

“I’m still back at ‘intimated,’” she said.

I nodded. “That was a good one. I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but jeez.”

Diane Bourne shaved some excess ash off against the Waterford crystal. “You two have a very nice act going.”

Angie slugged my shoulder and I swept a hand at the back of her head that she ducked at the last moment. Then we both smiled at Dr. Diane Bourne.

She took another tiny toke off her cigarette. “Sort of a Butch and Sundance thing without the homosexual subtext.”

“Usually we get the Nick and Nora thing,” I said to Angie.

“Or the Chico and Groucho,” Angie reminded me.

“With the homosexual subtext, though. But that Butch and Sundance thing.”

“Quite the compliment,” Angie said.

I turned away from Angie and leaned my elbows on Dr. Bourne’s desk, looked past the swing of the metronome and into her pale, pale eyes. “Why would one of your patients have your session notes in her possession, Doctor?”

She didn’t say anything. She sat very still, her shoulders hunched very slightly, as if preparing for a sudden bite of cold air.

I leaned back in my chair. “Can you tell me that?”

She cocked her head to the left. “Would you repeat your question, please?”

Angie did so. I provided sign language.

“I don’t quite understand what you’re driving at.” She shaved off another sliver of ash in the crystal.

Angie said, “Is it common practice for you to take notes during sessions with your patients?”