Bad Love

11

I made it to Benedict a few minutes later.

The black van and the unmarked were gone. Two of the three garage doors were open and I saw Robin inside, wearing work clothes and goggles, standing behind her lathe.

She saw me coming and turned off the machine. A gold BMW coupe was parked in the third garage. The rest of the space was a near duplicate of the Venice shop.

"Looks like you're all set up," I said.

She pushed her goggles up on her forehead. "This isn't too bad, actually, as long as I leave the door open for ventilation. How come you're back so soon?"

"No one home."

"Flake out on you?"

"It looks like they're gone for a while."

"Moved out?"

"Must be the week for it."

"How could you tell?"

"Two days' mail in the box and her husband's business was padlocked."

"Considerate of her to let you know."

"Etiquette isn't her strong suit. She wasn't thrilled about my evaluation in the first place, though I thought we were making progress. She probably took the girls out of state- maybe Hawaii. When I spoke to her yesterday she made a crack about a Honolulu vacation. Or Mexico. Her husband may have family there… I'd better call the judge."

"We set up an office for you in one of the bedrooms," she said, leaning over and pecking my cheek. "Gave you the one with the best view, plus there's a Hockney on the wall- two guys showering." She smiled. "Poor Milo- he was a little embarrassed about it- started muttering about the "atmosphere.' Almost apologizing. After all he did to help us. I sat him down and we had a good talk."

"About what?"

"Stuff- the meaning of life. I told him you could handle the atmosphere."

"What he say to that?"

"Just grunted and rubbed his face the way he does. Then I made coffee and told him if he ever learned to play an instrument I'd build one for him."

"Safe offer," I said.

"Maybe not. When we were talking, it came up that he used to play the accordion when he was a kid. And he sings- have you ever heard him?"

"No."

"Well, he sang for me this afternoon. After some prodding. Did an old Irish folk song- and guess what? He's got a really nice voice."

"Basso profundo?"

"Tenor, of all things. He used to be in the church choir when he was a little boy."

I smiled. "That's a little hard to picture."

"There's probably a lot about him you don't know."

"Probably," I said. "Each year I get in touch with more of my ignorance… Speaking of grunts, where's our guest?"

"Sleeping in the service porch. I tried keeping him here while I worked, but he kept charging the machines- he was ready to take on the bandsaw when I got him out of here and locked him in."

"Tough love, huh? Did he do his little strangulation routine?"

"Oh, sure," she said. She put her hand around her throat and made a gagging sound. "I yelled at him to be quiet and he stopped."

"Poor guy. He probably thought you were going to be his salvation."

She grinned. "I may be sultry and sensual, but I ain't easy."

• • •

I let the dog loose, gave him time to pee outside, and took him into my new office. A chrome-and-glass-topped desk was pushed up against one wall. My papers and books were piled neatly on a black velour couch. The view was fantastic, but after a few minutes I stopped noticing it.

I phoned superior court, got Steve Huff in his chambers, and told him about Evelyn Rodriguez's no-show.

"Maybe she just forgot," he said. "Denial, avoidance, whatever."

"I think there's a good chance she's gone, Steve." I described Roddy Rodriguez's locked yard.

"Sounds like it," he said. "There goes another one."

"Can't say that I blame her. When I saw her two days ago, she really opened up about the girls' problems. They're having plenty of them. And Donald wrote me a letter- no remorse, just tooting his own horn as a good dad."

"Wrote you a letter?"

"His lawyer's been calling me, too."

"Any intimidation?"

I hesitated. "No, just nagging."

"Too bad. No law against that… no, can't say that I blame her either, Alex- off the record. Do you want to wait and try again, or just write up your report now- document all the crap she told you?"

"What's the difference?"

"The difference is how quickly you want to get paid versus how much lead time you want to give her, if she has hightailed it. Once you put it in writing and I receive it, I'm obligated to send it over to Bucklear. Even with reasonable delays he gets it in a couple of weeks or so, then he files paper and gets warrants out on her."

"A murderer gets warrants on a grandmother taking her grandkids out of town? Do we file that under "I for irony' or "N for nuts'?"

"Do I take that to mean you'll wait?"

"How much lead time can I give her?"

"A reasonable period. Consistent with typical medical-psychological practice."

"Meaning??"

"Meaning what shrinks normally do. Three, four, even five weeks wouldn't chafe any hides- you guys are notorious for being sloppy about your paperwork. You might even stretch it to six or seven- but you never heard that from me. In fact, we never had this talk, did we?"

"Judge who?" I said.

"Attaboy- oops, bailiff's buzzing me, time to be Solomonic again, bye-bye." I put the phone down. The bulldog placed his paws on my knees and tried to get up on my lap. I lifted him and he settled on me like a warm hunk of clay. At least thirty pounds.

The Hockney was right in front of me. Great painting. As was the Thomas Hart Benton drawing on the opposite wall- a mural study depicting hypermuscular workmen cheerfully constructing a WPA dam.

I looked at both of them for a while and wondered what Robin and Milo had talked about. The dog stayed as motionless as a little furry Buddha. I rubbed his head and his jowls and he licked my hand. A boy and his dog… I realized I hadn't gotten the number for the bulldog club, yet. Almost five p.m. Too late to call the AKC.

I'd do it tomorrow morning.

Denial, avoidance, whatever.

• • •

That night I slept fitfully. Friday morning at eight I phoned North Carolina and got an address for the French Bulldog Club of America, in Rahway, New Jersey. A post office box. No phone number was available.

At eight-ten, I called the Rodriguez house. A phone company recording said that line had been disconnected. I pictured Evelyn and the girls barreling over a dirt road in Baja, Rodriguez following in his truck. Or maybe the four of them, wandering through Waikiki with glazed tourists' eyes. If only they knew how much we had in common now…

I began unpacking books. At eight thirty-five, the doorbell rang and Milo appeared on one of the TV monitors, tapping a foot and carrying a white bag.

"Breakfast," he said, as I let him in. "I already gave Ms. Castagna hers. God, that woman works- what've you been doing?"

"Getting organized."

"Sleep okay?"

"Great," I lied. "Thanks a lot for setting us up."

He looked around. "How's the office?"

"Perfect."

"Great view, huh?"

"To die for."

We went into the kitchen and he took some onion rolls and two Styrofoam cups of coffee out of the bag.

We sat at a blue granite table. He said, "What's your schedule like today?"

"It's pretty open now that the Wallace thing's on hold. Looks like Grandma decided to take matters into her own hands."

I recounted what I'd found in Sunland.

He said, "They're probably better off. If you feel like taking on a little assignment, I've got one for you."

"What?"

"Go over to the Mental Health Center and talk to Ms. Jean Jeffers. I finally got through to her- she actually called me back last night, which I thought was pretty cool for a bureaucrat. Better attitude than I expected, too. Down to earth. Not that she shouldn't cooperate, after what happened to Becky. I told her we'd come across some harassment crimes- didn't go into specifics- that we had reason to believe might be coming from one of her patients. Someone we also had reason to believe was a buddy of Hewitt's. Mentioning his name got her going- she went on about how Becky's murder had traumatized all of them. Still sounds pretty shook up."

He tore an onion roll into three pieces, placed the segments on the table like monte cards, picked one up, and ate it.

"Anyway, I asked her if she knew who Hewitt hung out with and she said no. Then I asked her if I could look at her patient roster, and she said she wanted to help but no- the confidentiality thing. So I threw Tarasoff at her, hoping she didn't know the law that well. But she did: no specific threat against a specific victim, no Tarasoff obligation. At that point, I played my trump card: told her the department had a consultant doing some profiling work for us on psycho crimes- a genuine "pee aitch dee' who respected confidentiality and would be discreet, and I gave her your name in case maybe she heard of you. And guess what, she thought she had. Especially after I told her you were semi-famous."

"Hoo-hah."

"Hoo-hah to the max. She said she couldn't promise anything, but she'd be willing to at least talk to you. Maybe there'd be some way to work something out. The more we talked, the friendlier she got. My feeling is she wants to help but is afraid of being burned by more publicity. So be gentle with her."

"No brass knucks," I said. "How much do I tell her?"

He ate another piece of roll. "As little as possible."

"When can she see me?"

"This afternoon. Here's the number." He took a scrap of paper out of his pocket, gave it to me, and stood.

"Where you going?" I said.

"Over the hill. Van Nuys. Try to find out what I can about who cut up Myra Paprock five years ago."

After he was gone, I called in for messages- still nothing from Shirley Rosenblatt in New York- then wrote a letter to the bulldog club informing them I'd found what might possibly be a member's pet. At nine-thirty, I phoned Jean Jeffers and was put through to her secretary, who sounded as if she'd been expecting me. An appointment with Ms. Jeffers was available in an hour if I was free.

I grabbed a roll, put on a tie, and left.

• • •

The center was in a block of cheerless, pastel-colored apartments, in a quiet part of West L.A. not far from Santa Monica. An old, working-class district, near an industrial park whose galloping expansion had been choked off by hard times. Constructus interruptus had left its mark all over the neighborhood- half-framed buildings, empty lots dug out for foundations and left as dry sumps, pigeon-specked FOR SALE signs, boarded-up windows on condemned prewar bungalows.

The clinic was the only charming bit of architecture in sight. Its front windows were barred, but boxes filled with begonias hung from the iron. The spot on the sidewalk where Dorsey Hewitt had fallen dead was clean. But for a couple of trash-choked shopping carts in front, it could have been a private sanitarium.

A generous lot next door was two-thirds empty and marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. NO PATIENT PARKING. I decided a consultant qualified as someone's employee, and parked there.

I made my way back to the front of the building, passing the section of wall that had been obsessed upon by the TV camera. A cement cornerstone etched with names of forgotten politicos stated that the building had been dedicated as a veterans clinic in 1919. The door Hewitt had come out of was just to the right, unmarked and locked- two locks, each almost as large as the one sealing Roddy Rodriguez's brickyard.

The main entrance was dead center, through a squat arch leading to a courtyard with an empty fountain. A loggia to the right of the fountain- the path Hewitt would have taken to get to the unmarked door- was sectioned off by thick steel mesh that looked brand-new. An open hallway on the opposite side led me around the fountain to glass-paned doors.

A blue-uniformed guard stood behind the doors, tall, old, black, chewing gum. He looked me over and unlatched one of the doors, then pointed to a metal detector to his left- one of those walk-through airport things. I set it off and had to give the guard my keys before passing silently.

"Go 'head," he said, handing them back.

I walked up to a reception desk. A young black woman sat behind more mesh. "Can I help you?"

"Dr. Delaware for Ms. Jeffers."

"One minute." She got on the phone. Behind her were three other women at desks, typing and talking into receivers. The windows behind them were barred. Through the bars, I saw trucks, cars, and shadows- the gray, graffitied walls of an alley.

I was standing in a small, unfurnished area painted light green and broken only by a single door to the right. Claustrophobic. It reminded me of the sally port at the county jail and I wondered how a paranoid schizophrenic or someone in crisis would handle it. How easy it would be for someone with a muddled psyche to make it from the no-parking lot, through the metal detector, to this holding cell.

The receptionist said, "Okay, she's all the way down at the end," and pressed a button. The door buzzed- not quite as loudly as the one at the pawnshop, but just as obnoxiously- and I opened it and stepped into a very long, cream-colored hall marked by lots of doors. Thick, gray carpeting covered the floor. The light was very bright.

Most of the doors were blank, a few were labeled THERAPY, and even fewer bore slide-in signs with people's names on them. The cream paint smelled fresh; how many coats had it taken to cover up the blood?

The corridor was silent except for my footsteps- the kind of womblike damping that comes only from real soundproofing. As I made my way to the end, a door on the left opened, spilling out people but no noise.

Three people, two women and a man, poorly dressed and shuffling. Not a group; each walked alone. The man was lantern-jawed and stooped, the women heavy and red-faced, with cracked swollen legs and stringy hair. All of them looked down at the carpet as they passed me. They grasped small white pieces of paper, "Rx" stamped at the top.

The room they'd exited was classroom-sized and crowded with another thirty or so people queued up before a metal desk. A young man sat at the desk, talked briefly to each person who stood before him, then filled out a prescription blank and handed it over with a smile. The people in line scuffed forward as automatically as cans on a conveyor belt. Some of them held out their hands in anticipation before they got to the doctor. None of them left without paper, none seemed cheered.

I resumed walking. The door at the end had a slide-in that said JEAN JEFFERS, MSW, LCSW. DIRECTOR.

Inside was a five-by-five secretarial area occupied by a young, full-faced, Asian woman. Her desk was barely big enough to hold a PC and a blotter. The wall behind her was so narrow that a dark, mock wood door almost filled it. A radio on an end table played soft rock almost inaudibly. A nameplate in front of the computer said MARY CHIN.

She said, "Dr. Delaware? Go right in, Jean will see you."

"Thank you."

She began to open the door. A woman caught it from the other side and pulled it all the way back. Forty-five or so, tall and blond. She wore a crimson shirtdress gathered at the waist by a wide, white belt.

"Doctor? I'm Jean." She held out her hand. Almost as big as mine, lanolin soft. The left one bore a ruby solitaire ring over a broad, gold wedding band.

More white in her teardrop earrings and a mock ivory bracelet around one wrist. A sensible-looking watch encircled the other.

She had a strong frame and carried no extra fat. The belt showed off a firm waist. Her face was long, lightly tanned, with soft, generous features. Only her upper lip had been skimped upon by nature- not much more than a pencil line. Its mate was full and glossed. Dark blue eyes studied me from under black lashes. Gold-framed half-glasses hung from a white cord around her neck. Her hair was frosted almost white at the tips, clipped short in back and layered back at the sides. Pure utility except for a thick, Veronica Lake flap in front. It swooped to the right, almost hiding her right eye. A handsome woman.

She flipped her hair and smiled.

"Thanks for seeing me," I said.

"Of course, doctor. Please have a seat."

Her office was the standard twelve-by-twelve setup, with a real wood desk, two upholstered armchairs, a three-drawer double file, a nearly empty bookcase, and some paintings of seagulls. On the desk were a pen, a memo pad, and a short stack of file folders.

A photo in a standup frame was centered on one of the shelves- she and a nice-looking, heavyset man about her age, the two of them in Hawaiian shirts and bedecked with leis. Social work diplomas made out to Jean Marie LaPorte were propped on another shelf, all from California colleges. I scanned the dates. If she'd graduated college at twenty-two, she was exactly forty-five.

"You're a clinical psychologist, right?" she said, sitting behind the desk.

I took one of the chairs. "Yes."

"You know, when Detective Sturgis mentioned your name I thought I recognized it, though I still can't figure out from where."

She smiled again. I returned it.

She said, "How does a psychologist come to be a police consultant?"

"By accident, really. Several years ago I was treating some children who'd been abused at a day-care center. I ended up testifying in court and getting involved in the legal system. One thing led to another."

"Day-care center- the man who took pictures? The one involved with that horrible molesters' club?"

I nodded.

"Well, that must be where I remember your name from. You were quite a hero, weren't you?"

"Not really. I did my job."

"Well," she said, sitting forward and pushing hair out of her eyes, "I'm sure you're being modest. Child abuse is so- to tell you the truth, I couldn't work with it myself. Which may sound funny considering what we deal with here. But children-" She shook her head. "It would be too hard for me to find any sympathy for the abusers even if they were once victims themselves."

"I know what you mean."

"To me that's the lowest- violating a child's trust. How do you manage to deal with it?"

"It wasn't easy," I said. "I saw myself as the child's ally and tried to do whatever helped."

"Tried? You don't do abuse work anymore?"

"Occasionally, when it comes up as part of a custody case. Mostly I consult the court on trauma and divorce issues."

"Do you do any therapy at all?"

"Not much."

"Me, neither." She sat back. "My main goal in school was to become a therapist, but I can't remember the last time I actually did any real therapy."

She smiled again and shook her head. The wave of hair covered her eyes and she flipped it back- a curiously adolescent mannerism.

"Anyway," she said, "about what Detective Sturgis wants, I just don't know how I can really help. I really need to safeguard our people's confidentiality- despite what happened to Becky." She folded her lips inward, lowered her eyes, and shook her head.

I said, "It must have been terrifying."

"It happened too quickly to be terrifying- the terrifying part didn't hit me until after it was over- seeing her… what he… now I really know what they mean by posttraumatic stress. No substitute for direct experience, huh?"

She pressed the skinny upper lip with one finger, as if keeping it still.

"No one knew what he was doing to her. I was right here, going about my business the whole time he was- the treatment rooms are totally soundproofed. He-" She removed her finger. A white pressure circle dotted her lip, then slowly faded.

"Then I heard noise from the hall," she said. "That horrible screaming- he just kept screaming."

" 'Bad love,' " I said.

Her mouth remained open. The blue eyes dulled for a second. "Yes… he… I went out to Mary's office and she wasn't there, so I opened the door to the hall and saw him. Screaming, waving it- the knife- splashing blood, the wall- he saw me- I saw his eyes settle on me- focusing- and he kept screaming. I slammed the door, shoved Mary's desk up against it, and ran back into my office. Slammed that door and blocked it. I hid behind my chair the whole time it was… it wasn't till later that I found out he'd grabbed Adeline." She wiped her eyes. "I'm sorry, you don't need to hear this."

"No, no, please."

She glanced at her message pad. Blank. Picking up the pen, she wrote something on it.

"No, that's it- I've told it so many times… no one knows how long he- if she suffered for a long time. That's the one thing I can hope. That she didn't. The thought of her trapped in there with him…" She shook her head and touched her temples. "They soundproofed the rooms back in the sixties, when this place was a Vietnam veterans' counseling center. We sure don't need it."

"Why's that?"

"Because no one does much therapy around here."

She took a deep breath and slapped her hands lightly on the desk. "Life goes on, right? Would you like something to drink? We've got a coffee machine in the other wing. I can have Mary go get some."

"No, thanks."

"Lucky choice." Smile. "It's actually pretty vile."

"How come no one does much therapy?" I said. "Too disturbed a population?"

"Too disturbed, too poor, too many of them. They need food and shelter and to stop hearing voices. The preferred treatment is Thorazine. And Haldol and lithium and Tegretol and whatever else chases the demons away. Counseling would be a nice luxury, but with our caseload it ends up being a very low priority. Not to mention funding. That's why we don't have any psychologists on our staff, just caseworkers, and most of them are SWAs- assistants. Like Becky."

"On the way in I saw a doctor giving out prescriptions."

"That's right," she said. "It's Friday, isn't it? That's Dr. Wintell, our once-a-week psychiatrist. He's just out of his residency, a real nice kid. But when his practice builds up, he'll be out of here like all the others."

"If no one does therapy, what was Becky doing with Hewitt in the therapy room?"

"I didn't say we never talk to our people, just that we don't do much insight work. Sometimes we get cramped for space and the workers use the treatment rooms to do their paperwork. Basically, all of us use what's on hand. As to what Becky was doing with him, it could have been anything. Giving him a voucher for an SRO hotel, telling him where to get deloused. Then again, maybe she was trying to get into his head- she was that kind of person."

"What kind is that?"

"An optimist. Idealistic. Most of us start out that way, don't we?"

I nodded. "Did Hewitt have a history of violence?"

"None that was listed in our files. He'd been arrested just a few weeks before for theft and was due to stand trial- maybe she was counseling him about that. There was nothing on paper that would have warned us. And even if he was violent, there's a good chance the information would never have gotten to us, with all the red tape."

She put down her pen and looked at me. Flipped her hair. "The truth is, he was exactly like so many others who come in and out of here- there's still no way to know."

She picked up one of the folders.

"This is his file. The police confiscated it and returned it, so I guess it's not confidential anymore."

Inside were only two sheets, one clipped to each of the covers. The first was an intake form listing Dorsey Hewitt's age as thirty-one and his address as "none." Under REASON FOR REFERRAL someone had written "multiple social problems." Under DIAGNOSIS: "prob. chron. schiz." The rest of the categories- PROGNOSIS, FAMILY SUPPORT, MEDICAL HISTORY, OTHER PSYCH. TREATMENT-had been left blank. Nothing about "bad love."

At the bottom of the form were notations of referral for food stamps. The signature read, "R. Basille, SWA."

The facing page was white and smooth, marked only with the notation, "Will follow as needed, R.B., SWA." The date was eight weeks prior to the murder. I handed the folder back.

"Not much," I said.

She gave a sad smile. "Paperwork wasn't Becky's forte."

"So you have no idea how many times she actually saw him?"

"Guess that doesn't say much for my administrative skills, does it? But I'm not one of those people who believes in riding the staff, checking out every little picayune detail. I try to find the best people I can, motivate them, and give them room to move. Generally it works out. With Becky…"

She threw up her hands. "She was a doll, a really sweet person. Not much for rules and regulations, but so what?"

She shook her head. "We'd talked about it- helping her get her paperwork in on time. She promised to try, but to tell the truth, I didn't harbor much hope. And I didn't care. Because she was productive where it counted- getting on the phone all day with agencies and arguing for every last penny for her cases. She stayed late, did whatever it took to help them. Who knows? Maybe she was going that extra mile for Hewitt."

She picked up the phone. "Mary? Coffee, please… No, just one."

Putting it down, she said, "The real horror is that it could happen again. We have a steel corral now, to direct them out onto the street after they get their meds. The county finally sent us a guard and the detector, but you tell me how to predict which of them is going to blow."

"We're not very good prophets under the best of circumstances."

"No, we're not. Hundreds of people file in here each week, for meds and vouchers. We've got to let them in. We're the court of last resort. Any of them could be another Hewitt. Even if we wanted to lock them up, we couldn't. The state hospitals that haven't been shut down are filled to capacity- I don't know what your theory is about psychosis, but mine is that most psychotics are born with it- it's biological, like any other illness. But instead of treating them, we demonize them or idealize them, and they get caught in the squeeze between the do-gooders who think they should be allowed to run free and the skinflints who think all they need is to pull themselves up by the bootstraps."

"I know," I said. "When I was in grad school the whole community psych thing was in full bloom- schizophrenia as an alternative lifestyle, liberating patients from the back wards and empowering them to take over their own treatment."

"Empowering." She laughed without opening her mouth.

"I had a professor who was a fanatic on the subject," I said. "Studied the mental health system in Belgium or somewhere and wrote a book on it. He had us do a paper on deinstitutionalization. The more I researched it, the less feasible it seemed. I started to wonder what would happen to psychotics who needed medication and couldn't be counted upon to take it. He handed the paper back with one comment, "Medication is mind control,' and gave me a C-minus."

"Well, I give you an A. Some of our patients can't be counted upon to feed themselves, let alone calibrate dosage. In my opinion, deinstitutionalization's the major culprit in the homeless problem. Sure, some street people are working folks who hit the skids, but at least thirty or forty percent are severely mentally debilitated. They belong in hospitals, not under some freeway. And now with all the weird street drugs out there, the old cliché that the mentally ill aren't violent just isn't true anymore. Each year it gets uglier and uglier, Dr. Delaware. I pray there won't be another Hewitt, but I don't count on it."

"Do you try at all to identify which patients are violent?"

"If we have police records, we take them seriously, but like I said, that's rare. We've got to be our own police here. If someone goes around making threats, we call security. But most of them are quiet. Hewitt was. Didn't really relate to anyone else that I'm aware of- that's why we're probably not going to be much help to Detective Sturgis. What exactly is he after, anyway?"

"Apparently, he suspects Hewitt had a friend who may be harassing some people, and he's trying to find out if the friend was a patient here."

"Well, after Sturgis called me I asked some of the other workers if they'd seen Hewitt with anyone, and none of them had. The only one who might have known was Becky."

"Is she the only one who worked with him?"

She nodded.

"How long had she been working here?"

"A little over a year. She got her assistantship from junior college last summer and applied right afterward. One of those second careers- she'd worked as a secretary for a while, decided to go back to school in order to do something socially important- her words."

Her eyes flickered and her mouth set- the lower lip compressing and making her look older.

"Such a sweet girl," she said. She shook her head, then looked at me. "You know- I just thought of something. Hewitt's attorney- the one defending him on that theft thing? He might know if Hewitt had any friends. I think I've got his name tucked away somewhere- hold on."

She went to the file, opened the middle drawer, and began flipping. "Just one second, so much junk in here… He called me- the attorney- after Becky's murder. Wanting to know if there was anything he could do. I think he wanted to talk- to get his own guilt off his chest. I didn't have time for… ah, here we go."

She pulled out a piece of cardboard stapled with business cards. Working a staple free with her fingernails, she removed a card and gave it to me.

Cheap white paper, green letters.

Andrew Coburg

Attorney-at-Law

The Human Interest Law Center

1912 Lincoln Avenue

Venice, California

"Human interest law," I said.

"I think it's one of those storefront things."

"Thanks," I said, pocketing the card. "I'll pass it along to Detective Sturgis."

The door opened and Mary came in with the coffee.

Jean Jeffers thanked her and told her to tell someone named Amy that she'd be ready to see her in a minute.

When the door closed, she began stirring her coffee.

"Well," she said, "it was nice talking to you. Sorry I couldn't do more."

"Thanks for your time," I said. "Is there anyone else I could talk to who might be able to help?"

"No one I can think of."

"What about the woman he took hostage?"

"Adeline? Now there's a really sad story. She'd transferred over here a month before from a center in South Central because she had high blood pressure and wanted a safer environment."

She threw up her hands again and gave a sour laugh.

"Any particular reason Hewitt grabbed her?" I said.

"You mean did she know him?"

"Yes."

She shook her head. The hair flap obscured her eye and she left it there. "Just pure bad luck. She happened to be sitting at a desk in the hall, working, just as he was running out, and he grabbed her."

She walked me to the door. People kept coming out of the psychiatrist's office. She looked at them.

"How can you ever know someone like that, anyway?" she said. "When you get down to it, how can you ever really know anyone?"