Let Me Call You Sweetheart

64

Kerry looked with dismay at the stack of files on the worktable beside her desk. She knew she had to get to them soon; it was time to assign new cases. In addition, there were some plea bargains she had to discuss with Frank or Carmen, the first assistant. There was so much to be done there, and she should be focusing her attention.

Instead she asked her secretary to try to reach Dr. Craig Riker, the psychiatrist she sometimes used as a prosecution witness in murder trials. Riker was an experienced, no-nonsense doctor whose philosophy she shared. He believed that, while life does deal some pretty tough blows, a person just has to lick his wounds and then get on with it. Most important, he had a way of defusing the obfuscating psychiatric jargon spouted by the shrinks the defense attorneys lined up.

She especially loved him when, asked if he considered a defendant insane, he answered, “I think he’s nuts, but not insane. He knew exactly what he was doing when he went into his aunt’s home and killed her. He’d read the will.”

“Dr. Riker is with a patient,” Kerry’s secretary reported.

“He’ll call you back at ten of eleven.”

And true to his word, at exactly ten of eleven Janet called in that Dr. Riker was on the phone. “What’s up, Kerry?”

She told him about Dr. Smith giving other women his daughter’s face. “He denied in so many words that he did any work on Suzanne,” she explained, “which could be true. He may have referred her to a colleague. But is making other women look like Suzanne a form of grieving?”

“It’s a pretty sick form of grieving,” Riker told her. “You say he hadn’t seen her from the time she was a baby?”

“That’s right.”

“And then she appeared in his office?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of guy is this Smith?”

“Rather formidable.”

“A loner?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Kerry, I need to know more and I’d certainly like to know whether or not he operated on his daughter, asked a colleague to do the job, or if she had the surgery before she went to him.”

“I hadn’t thought about the last possibility.”

“But if, and I stress the word, if, he met Suzanne after all those years, saw a plain or even a palpably homely young woman, operated on her, created a beauty and then was enchanted by what he’d done, I think we’ve got to look for erotomania.”

“What is that?” Kerry asked.

“It covers a lot of territory. But if a doctor who is a loner meets his daughter after all those years, transforms her into a beauty and then has the sense of having done something magnificent, we could argue that it falls into that category. He’s possessive of her, even in love with her. It’s a delusional disorder that often applies to stalkers, for example.”

Kerry thought of Deidre Reardon telling her how Dr. Smith treated Suzanne as an object. She told Dr. Riker about Smith patting away a smudge on Suzanne’s cheek and then lecturing her on preserving beauty. She also told him of Kate Carpenter’s conversation with Barbara Tompkins, and of the latter’s fear that Smith was stalking her.

There was a pause. “Kerry, I’ve got my next patient coming in.

Keep me posted, won’t you? This is a case I’d love to follow.”