“I added two more and made it a nice little pile. He pushed them all right back to me. I added two more. He did the same thing.”

Howie had turned down five grand. I was thinking, Wow. “So what are you going to do, Raoul?” I asked.

“I took four chips off the pile and slid the one that remained back across the table. I said, ‘Different question. Man or woman?’

“ ‘Yeah?’ Howie asked me. ‘For a grand? That’s all you want to know?’ I said that was the deal and he actually had to think about it. He is so wary of this person that gives him money so Rachel can attend weddings that he actually considered turning down a thousand dollars rather than reveal to me the person’s gender. Eventually, he picked up the chip and slipped it into his shirt pocket like it was a pack of matches. He said, ‘It’s a man. Not a man you want to fuck with.’ ”

“That was it?” I said. “That’s all you got for a thousand dollars?”

“In business you don’t always get value at the front end of a relationship. At the start you form a bond, establish platforms, ensure access. What I got for my thousand dollars is I got Howie on my payroll. And I reduced the possible suspects by half.”

“How do you find the man you’re looking for?”

Raoul sighed. “You remember a guy in Denver named Norm Clarke? Use to write for the Rocky.”

I remembered him. “The gossip columnist with the patch on his eye?”

“Sí. Well, I know him-he did a story on me back in the tech boom times. He lives in Vegas now, knows everybody. I’m meeting him downstairs a little later for a drink. I’m hoping he can help me find the man Howie was talking about.”

Grace’s unsettled whimper suddenly blossomed into a wail that was so powerful I could have sworn her lungs had been temporarily replaced by air compressors.

Raoul didn’t need to be told our conversation was over. I sprinted in Grace’s direction, praying that I could quiet her before Lauren’s sleep was shattered.

After getting all of four hours’ sleep I got all of four hours’ warning before the next shoe dropped. I spent most of those four hours wondering whether having any warning at all was a good thing or a bad thing.

I never quite decided.

Patients, when they call my office number, are given a voice-mail instruction to call my pager directly in the case of an emergency. How often do my patients take advantage of the opportunity to reach me on my beeper? Once or twice in a bad month, infrequently enough that the mere sight of an unfamiliar phone number on my pager makes me anxious. So, on Thursday morning, while I was idling at the intersection of Broadway and Baseline on the way to work and my beeper vibrated and displayed an unfamiliar (303) 443- number, I was wary.

The 443 prefix meant the call came from a Boulder address. That’s all I knew.

I returned the page as soon as I stepped into my office.

“This is Alan Gregory,” I said. “I’m returning a page to this number.” I don’t use the “Doctor” appellation in those circumstances because I don’t know if the person who called me will answer the phone or if someone else will. If it’s someone else, discretion might dictate that my profession remain secret.

“Thanks for calling back so soon,” the man on the line said. “This is Bill Miller.” And then, as if I might not know, he added, “I’m Mallory’s dad.”

What a sad thing, I mused, that he could use his daughter’s unfortunate notoriety as a quick social identifier. And an even sadder thing that he would.

“Mr. Miller,” I said, buying some time while I hurriedly chewed and swallowed the ramifications of the simple fact that he had called me. “What can I do for you?”

“Can you squeeze me in for an appointment? It’s… important.”

“Umm,” I managed. My eloquence, given the circumstances, was profound.

“Today, if possible,” Bill Miller said.

I wondered whether he was asking me to get my tongue untied sometime “today,” or whether he was asking for an appointment with me sometime “today.”

If you asked me to write an ethics problem for a psychologists’ licensing exam, or to dream up a delicious ethical conundrum for clinical psychology graduate students’ comprehensive exams, I don’t think I could have come up with something as devious as the dilemma I was facing at that moment.

“Do you have some time available?” he said, kindly pretending not to notice how flummoxed I was. “I’ll be as flexible as I need to be.”

The problem freezing my communication skills wasn’t my schedule. My practice calendar that day was no more or less constricted than usual. On most days, if I was willing to give up a meal or stay late at the office, I could squeeze in an emergency.

The problem I was struggling with was that I didn’t know if I could see Bill Miller professionally at all. The issue that was complicating what should have been a simple matter of logistics was a problem of professional ethics.

My initial impulse about the ethical maze? I didn’t think that I could see Bill Miller as a clinician. But I wasn’t at all sure I was correct in that snap assessment. The circumstances were complex. I quickly decided that I’d never confronted another set of facts quite as complex in my entire career.

The arguments for agreeing to see Bill Miller for therapy? They were easy. He had once, albeit briefly, been my patient. His present circumstances-or at least the ones I knew about-were so public and so tragic that they might cause someone to seek professional help. Empathy and compassion both argued for me to make myself available to him.

The arguments for refusing to see Bill Miller for therapy? This is where things got messy. Psychologists are under an ethical obligation to avoid what the profession calls “dual relationships.” At its heart, this is a conflict-of-interest clause, intended to ensure that a clinician is free to act in the best interest of his or her patient, uncomplicated by competing forces. In practice, the dictum requires that a clinician not wear two different hats in a patient’s life.

In simple English, it means I shouldn’t do psychotherapy with the woman who cuts my hair. I shouldn’t join a book group run by one of my therapy patients.

Simple, right?

Usually, yes. But try to apply those simple guidelines to my relationship with Bill Miller. That’s what I had been trying to do for the hours between his morning phone call and the midday appointment time I’d eventually offered him.

I hadn’t gotten very far.

Did the fact that I was a good friend of a Boulder cop who was involved with the investigation of Bill Miller’s daughter’s Christmas Day disappearance qualify as a dual relationship?

I wasn’t sure, but the degrees of separation seemed to be sufficient insulation.

Did the fact that my practice partner was covering the clinical work of a therapist who had died, and possibly been murdered, weeks after seeing Bill Miller’s daughter for a single therapy session qualify as a dual relationship?

Once again, blank spaces seemed to separate Bill Miller’s place on the board from the space that I was occupying.

Did the fact that I was seeing a patient who parked his car in the garage of the house of the man who lived right next door to the Millers qualify as a dual relationship?

Maybe, maybe not. In isolation, I would lean in the direction of “not.” My patient had spoken with Bill Miller’s daughter, considered her a friend. That was all I knew about Bob’s relationship to the Millers. It wasn’t much of a tie.

Did the fact that my partner and good friend had disappeared while on a trip to Las Vegas to try to arrange a meeting with Bill’s estranged wife constitute a dual relationship?

I knew of absolutely nothing that tied Bill Miller to any of those events.