Diane didn’t miss much.

“Did your schizoid man bring that boom box with him into therapy?” she asked me as we both rushed toward our office suite’s only bathroom in the few moments that we were stealing between sessions.

I’d never told Diane that Bob suffered from schizoid disorder. But she was an astute diagnostician and had probably come to her own DSM conclusion about him after one or two awkward encounters while she was retrieving a patient in the waiting room.

For appearance’ sake, I played coy. “My last appointment brought a boom box with him, yeah. Actually played me a song on it. Could you hear it through the wall?”

I slowed so that Diane could make it through the door into our tiny kitchen before I did. As she crossed the space and spun into the adjacent bathroom she didn’t pause to thank me for my gesture.

“What song?” she called through the closed door.

Diane was just making conversation. She didn’t really care what song. I was pleased that her mood seemed improved. She hadn’t enjoyed too many good days since Hannah’s death.

“ ‘Runaway.’ ”

“Del Shannon?”

“No, some boy band.”

“Holy moly. Which one?”

To my dismay, “Holy moly” had apparently survived the cut. “How the hell would I know? All I listen to anymore is Raffi and The Wiggles.”

“Your boy-band days will come sooner than you’d like and you’ll look back wistfully on the Raffi period. Was it about Mallory? Is that why he played the song?”

The toilet flushed loudly as I pondered the eerie accuracy of Diane’s associative intuitiveness. “Why would you guess that?”

Efficient sink sounds. The door opened. Finally.

“Because I am the psycholog-ess,” she offered, as though it somehow explained her rare perceptive skills.

“What?”

“Never mind. Could he be an Asperger? Your guy? Mr. Boom Box.”

Diane’s question knocked me off balance just a little. Fortunately, I’d already given the issue some thought. I said, “From a pure social-skills point of view, maybe. But the criteria for schizoid fit him like a glove.”

“It’s trendy, you know. Diagnosing Aspies. Schizoid is so… sixties.”

“Yeah.” I squeezed past her into the bathroom. I didn’t feel comfortable discussing Bob’s diagnosis and, anyway, my bladder was screaming.

“You want coffee?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I called through the door as I fumbled with my zipper. At that moment, the thought of adding another liquid, especially a diuretic, to my system seemed masochistic.

Diane said, “I still haven’t heard from the cops about Hannah’s session with Mallory. I kind of thought I would.”

“After this much time I don’t think you’re going to.” The relief I’d begun to experience in the privacy of the bathroom was exquisite. Talking out loud felt like a particularly intrusive chore.

“Do you think she ran?” Diane asked.

“I do.”

“Someone should know what I learned from Hannah.”

I moved to wash my hands, but didn’t reply. Wasn’t sure how to reply. Eventually I said, “It’d be great if you could say something, but you can’t.”

“Too many people think they know what was going on in that family. The media does, the cops do, Mallory’s father probably does, too. Truth is that it seems like a lot of people all know a little bit but nobody is talking to each other. Nobody has the whole picture.”

I dried my hands while I considered her point. I had to admit she had one. Although I could have argued that the same thing was true about almost any family anywhere, the Miller family was a special case. It seemed likely that despite the intense law enforcement and media assault on their privacy, no one had developed a complete picture of what had been going on in the Miller household prior to Christmas night.

“I’ve been wondering,” Diane said. “Do you think Mary Black would talk to me?”

I opened the door. “About what?”

Diane had one hip against the kitchen counter. She was sipping from a big pink mug of coffee. “Mrs. Miller, Mallory’s mom.”

“No, of course not. Why would she?”

She ignored my question. “Would she talk to you, then? You referred Mrs. Miller to her.”

“Last time I checked it didn’t give me lifetime access to the woman’s mental health records.” I squeezed past Diane, and began to snoop around in our little refrigerator for something with caffeine. “What do you hope to find by talking to Mary, anyway?”

“I can’t talk to her father. There has to be some way to pull all this together.”

“ ‘All this’ being the Millers’ family situation?”

“Yes…”

She’d spoken the simple affirmation as though it constituted an incomplete sentence. I suspected that the other part of the sentence-the part she’d kept to herself-would be something about Hannah’s death and Diane’s ongoing lament that the cops-specifically the evil asshole, Jaris Slocum-weren’t doing much to find Hannah’s killer.

Diane remained certain that out there-somewhere-was Hannah’s killer.

For whatever reason, she decided that it wasn’t judicious to go there with me right then. I couldn’t see a reason to quibble with that judgment so I spent a silent moment reflecting on some of the crazy cases I’d been involved with over the past few years, looking for lessons on how to “pull all this together.”

All I saw were ways to repeat mistakes I’d already made; I couldn’t see a single advisable choice. I said, “Sometimes there isn’t, Diane. Sometimes we end up knowing things that other people should probably know. But that’s just the way it is.”

Her reply? “This coffee’s old. When did you make it?”

“Before lunch.”

She poured the contents of her mug into the sink. “I know somebody who might talk to me. Fill in some pieces.”

“Yeah, who?” I expected a punch line.

She fumbled around in a cupboard and came out with a mint Milano. “I never got my trip to Vegas.”

I wondered where the cookie stash was hidden; I hadn’t spotted them earlier in the day. A millisecond after I absorbed her taunt I realized that she might not be joking. “Diane, you wouldn’t.”

“I wouldn’t? Watch me. It’s winter and it’s cold here, if you haven’t noticed. It’s warm there. The craps tables are open twenty-four seven. Want to come?”

She’d stepped out of the kitchen and started back down the hallway to her office.

I stuck my head out the door. “You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding.”

As she turned the corner toward the waiting room to retrieve her next patient she wiggled her ass in reply. Over her shoulder she called out, “For the record, I think he’s schizoid, too. Asperger, my…” She gave her ass one final shake to finish the sentence.

No boom box on New Year’s Eve afternoon during Bob’s additional, additional therapy time. I wasn’t surprised; I actually half expected that he would behave as though our conversation about Mallory had never taken place.

Bob slipped his ancient leather-bottomed North Face backpack from his shoulder onto the floor and sat heavily across from me. He didn’t bother to remove the well-worn fleece-lined denim jacket that covered one of the button-down blue oxford dress shirts he wore year round. Bob had two denim jackets. This one, with the fleece, was the winter version. The other one, unlined, was reserved for spring and fall.

He didn’t say hello to me. He hadn’t looked in my direction since I’d retrieved him from the waiting room and led him to my office. I thought he looked particularly tired and distant, which left me again questioning the wisdom of scheduling a third session with a man who used so much of his energy to maintain interpersonal distance.

I said, “Hello, Bob.”

His gaze was locked on a particular spot on the wall behind me, over my left shoulder. I was tempted to turn and see what was so interesting to him, but I didn’t. I knew I’d discover nothing there but paint.