Bob lived in a couple of rooms he rented above the detached garage of a modest house near Nineteenth and Pine. He described his landlords as “old people,” and maintained that he never spoke with them at all. Despite the fact that they lived less than fifty feet from his rented rooms, he mailed his rent check to them every month.

He could walk to work at the university from his flat and used the classic Camaro primarily to cruise around downtown or the Hill or other student haunts on weekend nights. In a rare flash of insight he’d once acknowledged that he drove his prize around town on pleasant evenings hoping that someone would find his ride cool, though the few times that he and his car had generated attention out in public he’d been pretty certain that the students had been taunting him.

After a lifetime feeling that he’d been born with the birthmark of a bull’s-eye on his chest, Bob was familiar with being taunted and appeared immune to it. Frankly, the incidents with the university students hadn’t seemed to trouble him. He was perplexed, however, that the kids didn’t find his car cool.

To Bob, that was crazy.

Over the last year he had begun to visit Boulder’s clubs and bars with some regularity, at least a couple of times a month. His pub-crawling wasn’t designed to accommodate a drinking habit-a period of severe bingeing in his early twenties had actually caused him to swear off alcohol. Regardless, he was way too cheap to splurge on nightclub-priced drinks. And he didn’t go out to the clubs to hang out in the glow of the pretty people. After a firm confrontation from me one day-“Come on, Bob, why do you go?”-he admitted that he went out to nightspots to “watch them.”

I guessed that he meant the girls, but I couldn’t get him to admit it. So I reserved judgment, aware that Bob could just as well have been spying on the boys. In my presence, he’d never admitted to any feeling that I would categorize as either romantic or sexual toward people of either gender.

That’s all he would say about his clubbing predilection, that he went to “watch them.” I was left to wonder: If the watching wasn’t some once-removed sexual thing, was it voyeuristic? Anthropological? Maybe part of some arcane sociological experiment? After almost two years of trying to understand such things about Bob I still wasn’t sure, and on those Tuesday nights when I was driving home after I’d completed a session with him and found myself still musing about Bob’s narrow life, the fact that there was so much I didn’t know troubled me.

I suspected that the pretty objects of Bob’s fascination were at least equally troubled when they looked up to discover Bob’s shimmying eyes locked on to their own as they downed designer cocktails in Boulder’s latest trendy nightspot.

I also had little doubt that Bob would avert his eyes the moment his prey noticed that he was staring. I knew it because in two years of sessions Bob had never held eye contact with me for more than a split second.

Other than the regular interaction he had with his boss in the physics department at the university-it was at her insistence that he’d sought therapy-the psychotherapy with me was, to my knowledge, Bob’s primary ongoing human relationship that didn’t include at least one cyber-buffer. Although I suspected that he trusted me more than he trusted his boss, I reminded myself that he didn’t even trust her enough to allow her the responsibility of keeping the begonia on his desk watered during his infrequent holidays from work.

He certainly didn’t trust me enough to accept my oft-repeated suggestions about the potential benefits of psychopharmacology. I raised the issue occasionally, but never pressed it. Although I held out hopes that the right antidepressant might dent his veneer of despair, the odds of medication impacting Bob’s underlying character disorder were slim. But then-I had to admit-so were the odds that psychotherapy would ever make any profound difference in his functioning.

That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try.

Bob did trust me just enough to come back to see me every Tuesday afternoon at 4:45. That was the foundation of our relationship. In two years of treatment, he’d missed only one session, and had canceled that appointment four weeks in advance. Forty-five minutes, once a week, that was our deal. Bob knew what time our appointment started. He knew when it ended. After a hundred tries, though, he still had only the most vague concept of what should happen in between.

I saw him on a sliding scale, discounting my usual fee by well more than half so that he could afford to come in. Bob would always pay me at the beginning of the last session of each month, just before I handed out my bills. His personal check to me was always placed in the same type of security envelope, was always folded the same way, and was always double sealed, once by licking the flap, and once by the addition of two long strips of Scotch tape.

Bob’s handwriting was tiny and precise and rounded. The first time he gave me a check I had to use a magnifying glass to read the amount. I didn’t know how the university credit union managed to clear his checks. But it did.

On occasional Tuesdays during our time together we did something that loosely resembled traditional psychotherapy. More often the sessions were an odd interchange that to an outsider probably would look more like social skills training than anything psychotherapeutic. Not unlike someone afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome, Bob had no innate sense of how human interaction should work. He would end up being insulting when his intent was to be impersonally cordial. He would often be cruel while he was merely trying to create some protective psychological space. During the first year of treatment we’d spent a half dozen autumn Tuesdays troubleshooting how Bob might respond differently when a student walked up to his desk in the physics department and said, “Good morning,” or “Hi.”

His previous stock reply-“What difference does it make?”-hadn’t been working too well for him.

The most surprising thing about psychotherapy with Bob? As the months passed I’d grown fond of this man who was about as easy to get close to as a porcupine. In the lingo, I had developed a positive countertransference for him. And maybe because I’d developed affection for Bob my empathy for his plight was sometimes swollen out of proportion.

I vowed to keep an eye on it.

Bob’s connection to the Millers didn’t appear to be particularly unique or interesting. He hadn’t baby-sat Mallory, nor had he gone to high school with Mrs. Miller. He wasn’t a family friend, hadn’t played Santa at any Miller family holiday gatherings. In fact, his particular connection to the girl’s disappearance seemed to be a relatively common affliction that he shared with many viewers of cable news TV stations. Bob, it turned out, had quickly grown obsessed by Mallory’s disappearance, which, I feared, meant that for at least forty-five minutes a week I was likely to be forced to be vicariously obsessed by Mallory’s disappearance, too.

I was less than thrilled by the revelation that Bob was transfixed by Mallory’s plight. As he described his fascination my silent protest was a pathetic No, please no. At a clinical level Bob didn’t need the obsession; his pathological casserole was certainly not wanting for the addition of an obsessive crust of any description. At a more selfish level, I’d already begun hoping-like the great majority of Boulderites-that the case of the disappearing girl was going to go away gently, that Sam and his like-minded police colleagues were right and that this time the case of the disappearing girl wasn’t really a case of a disappearing girl at all. Like ninety-nine percent of Boulder’s residents, I was hoping that Mallory Miller-despite what I’d learned about her recent history from Diane-was just a girl who’d left home for one of the many bad reasons that young teenage girls choose to leave home.