“Don’t turn around.”

Her chest pounded. She was having trouble catching her breath.

Less than a second later her feet were out from beneath her and something sharp and hard was surrounding her neck and her attempts at breathing were thwarted. Totally thwarted.

She struggled at the ligature. It didn’t help.

Moments later she didn’t even feel the cold chill of the Pacific as she spilled forward into the darkness.

Patients returning to see me after an extended absence from treatment, like Gibbs Storey, tend to labor under the suspicion that a decade does nothing to alter my recall of the facts of their lives. The truth is that that is not the truth. Since Gibbs and Sterling last left my office on their way to Capistrano or Corona or Laguna or Newport Beach or wherever they ended up, a few hundred new patients had crossed my threshold and told me their tales. That’s too many stories for my brain to juggle. Way too many. Scores too many. Sometimes I got the details confused. I would assign faulty facts to a patient or misremember who had died in what year, who had what illness, and who had slept with whom.

So why didn’t I just go back to my patient files and refresh my memory?

Because as a general rule I put few facts in my case notes. The more potentially private the fact, the less likely I was to put it on paper. Why? Because doctor-patient confidentiality is not a brick wall that forever separates my knowledge of my patient from the gaze of the judicial system. Confidentiality is actually a brick wall with a few conveniently spaced locked gates. And the courts, not I, hold the keys to those gates. Whatever I wrote down might therefore someday become public. In all my years in clinical practice I hadn’t discovered a single reason to volunteer to be a conduit to making the private public.

Consequently, I didn’t write much down.

I caught Diane Estevez in our little kitchen about an hour after Gibbs left my office. Diane would remember everything that I’d forgotten about our ancient conjoint treatment of the Storeys. I suspected sometimes when I queried her about such things that Diane made up whatever she didn’t actually remember, but in any event, her recall would appear seamless and complete.

“Hey, Alan, how’s Sam?”

Although I hadn’t had a chance to tell her about Sam’s heart attack, I wasn’t surprised that she already knew. Diane had sources everywhere. If gossip was an art form, she was the Picasso of our generation.

“He had an angiogram this morning. I’ll know more later today when I go visit him.”

“Angioplasty, too? Stent?”

“I’m still waiting to hear.”

“But it was an MI?”

“Enzymes say yes. They used clot busters.”

“Keep me informed.”

“Of course, but we both know that you’ll probably know his prognosis before his cardiologist does. Guess who I saw this morning?”

Diane was scooping ground coffee into a filter basket. My question caused her to lose count of her tablespoons. She said, “Shit. Tell me.”

Dr. Estevez and I had been friends since we’d interned together many years before. Although our practices were independent businesses, we shared the first floor, and the ownership, of a small century-plus-old Victorian that housed our clinical offices on Walnut Street on the edge of downtown Boulder.

“Guess.”

“D. B. Cooper?”

An inside joke. “Close,” I said. “How about Gibbs Storey?”

She looked at me. “The Dancing Queen?”

Diane had always called Gibbs “the Dancing Queen.” I thought the moniker was some obscure reference to the old ABBA song, but I wasn’t absolutely certain what the allusion was. I did know that Diane had never been fond of Gibbs. And I’d never been fond of ABBA. Not before the Broadway play.

Not since.

“That’s the one.”

“Where’d you see her? In town someplace?”

“No, right here. In my office.”

She placed the carafe full of water in the sink and faced me.

“For therapy?”

“It’s what I do.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Diane wasn’t being argumentative-although she was quite capable of it. She was querying me as to why I was breaching Gibbs’s confidentiality so cavalierly.

“Because I have a signed release to talk to you.” Before she’d left my office at the conclusion of her session, I’d asked Gibbs if I could consult with Diane, and she’d said I could.

“I’m not going to like this, am I?” Diane asked.

“Probably not.”

“Is she still with Platinum? Or did she leave him? If she’s still with him, don’t even ask because I’m not doing conjoint again. Especially with them. With her. Count me out. I mean it.”

“Platinum” was Diane’s nickname for Sterling. Although I was never quite sure, I’d always operated under the assumption that she wasn’t particularly fond of him, either. Regardless, I knew she’d liked him more than she’d liked Gibbs.

Hell, she liked bad cheese more than she liked Gibbs.

“She’s still with him. At least temporarily. She doesn’t feel she can leave him without him resorting to stalking her, or something worse.”

Diane shot me an I-told-you-so glance. “Every battered woman feels that way. That’s why God invented safe houses and restraining orders. The Dancing Queen will need a good kick in the butt to get out of that marriage. God knows Sterling will never leave her.”

“Why’s that?”

“ ’Cause she’s such a little dreamboat. You ever notice her fingers? She has perfect little fingers.”

I didn’t admit to Diane that I had, in fact, just noticed Gibbs’s fingers. Instead, I said, “Anybody ever tell you that you have a propensity for sarcasm?”

“Don’t worry; the tendency is soluble in caffeine. Let me finish making myself some coffee, and I’ll be much nicer. I’m glad it’s your job to help the Dancing Queen, not mine. Don’t even think of recruiting me for this one. I’m out, Alan. Out. Out, out, out.”

Diane was better at acting definitive than she was at being definitive. Despite her best efforts, compassion softened her steely heart. Still, I knew I had to get her on board before she convinced herself that she really was a taciturn bitch. I said, “Gibbs thinks Sterling murdered someone a few years ago.”

Without missing a beat, Diane said, “Sometimes I pretend Raoul’s on the FBI’s most-wanted list. I play the special agent making the bust. If we don’t run it into the ground, it’s always kind of fun.”

Diane’s husband was an irascible Spaniard named Raoul Estevez. I knew nothing about their sex life and preferred it that way.

“I’m not kidding, Diane. Gibbs thinks he may have killed a friend of theirs. A woman he was involved with.”

The pause that followed permitted Diane sufficient time to convince herself that the calendar indicated November, not April first.

“And you believe her?”

“A hundred percent? No, not that he did it. Not yet. But yes, I do believe that she believes what she told me.”

“How does she know? What’s her evidence against him?”

“It’s a mix of things. Things he did. Things he said. Part circumstantial, part supposition, part confession.”

“If Lauren heard it, would she be swayed?” Lauren, my wife, was a deputy district attorney for Boulder County. Where prosecutorial conclusions were concerned, she was a stickler for, well, facts.

I shrugged. “I asked myself the same question and decided Lauren would be interested in what Gibbs has to say.”

“But Sterling confessed?”

“So Gibbs says. Not an ‘I did it’ confession exactly, but he told her things that she thinks only the murderer would know.”

“If-a big ‘if’-what she says is real,” Diane reminded me before she shifted her focus from the forensic to the psychological, “why now? Why is she talking about this now? The murder of the friend was when?”