I asked, “Who do you think the tipster is, the guy who’s calling Crime Stoppers?”

“Don’t know.”

“Who’d know what he knows? Can’t be too many people.”

“It’s a fair question.”

“You’re not curious?” I asked.

“ ’Course I’m curious. I just don’t know. Do you?”

I was thinking that I had a pretty good idea, but I didn’t feel much like sharing right then. It was probably a side effect of the toxic music that was being forced into my ears like a watermelon suppository. So I said, “Sure don’t.”

We were skirting Kokomo when she asked me about my heart.

“You feeling okay? You want me to drive, I will.”

“I’m cool,” I said, trying to be cool.

“Hear you had a heart attack.”

“Just a little one.”

“Still,” she said.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

The tires hummed along on the highway.

Carmen Reynoso knew when conversations were over. I was already liking that about her.

Half a mile or so later I asked, “What have you been able to learn about Holly Malone?”

“Not much. She’s an assistant director in the Sports Information Office at Notre Dame. Started in the office as an intern when she was just out of school. She’s twenty-nine, attractive. People like her.”

“You said she’s single?”

“No, widowed. She has a four-year-old son.”

“How did her husband die?”

“Cancer.”

“Can’t blame that on Sterling, can we?” I said. “Have you spoken with her?”

“I called. She was relatively pleasant until I mentioned Sterling. That’s apparently a sore spot for her.”

“Sore?”

“She wanted to know how I knew about him. My take was that she knew he was married when she did whatever it was she did with him. I thought she was embarrassed that I’d found out about their… history.”

Kind of like having people know you lived through disco and didn’t do anything to stop it,I thought.Felonious stuff.

“Got a photo?”

She retrieved a folded eight-and-a-half-by-eleven from her purse. “Pulled this off the Web. That’s her on the left. First row.”

I put my glasses on the end of my nose. It was a crappy picture of a group of people standing in front of a building. Holly Malone stood out as though she were Technicolor and everybody else was black-and-white. “She’s cute. Has a nice smile.”

“Yeah.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of Brian Miles, would you?”

Carmen pulled another crappy picture out of her bag and handed it to me.

One glance, and I knew there were no man-boobs on Miles. Nope. I kept that thought to myself while I stuffed my glasses back in my pocket. “We going to find Holly in town for the holiday?”

“We are. She’s cooking for her two sisters and two brothers-in-law. They’re all coming down from Chicago with their kids.”

“Yeah?”

“She told me all that before I mentioned Sterling. Holly’s chatty. If you’re interested, she’s doing a traditional bird and is poaching some salmon for her sister, who doesn’t eat meat.”

“Given the circumstances, I bet the salmon would consider itself meat.”

Carmen chuckled. After her laughter quieted, I let the whine of the road fill my ears for a minute or two. I was thinking,This is okay.

I asked, “For argument’s sake, why would he risk it? I mean Sterling. Let’s say he survived the river. Why put himself in a position to be caught? Why not just run for it?”

“Odds are he’ll do just that, Sam. Odds are we’re wasting our time. Five years from now he’ll get picked up on a DUI in Idaho, and his prints will get flagged by AFIS. That’s the only way we’ll know where’s he’s been since he crawled out of the Ochlockonee.”

“I can tell you don’t really believe that.”

“Serial killers-and maybe especially serial killers who don’t choose strangers as their victims-they don’t think like you and me. They just don’t. Why would Sterling go back and kill Holly? I don’t know. Why did he kill the other four women? We don’t know that yet, either. But I don’t want the fact that I’m slow to the draw to cost some young widow in South Bend her life.”

Slow to the draw?I wondered what she meant. I felt regret hanging on to her words like an anchor.

I bumbled my way through my last session of the afternoon. Diane, bless her heart, was in my office seconds after my patient departed. “So who wants to destroy you?”

I knew Diane loved me, but I also thought I detected a troubling touch of glee in her tone, a rub-your-hands-together, muted Wicked-Witch-of-the-West-type cackle.

“I can’t think of anyone.”

“God, I can.”

“You can?”

She went into a staccato litany of some of my more public cases of the past ten years, eventually, and probably accurately, identifying a long roster of people who might be prone to seeking some redress for wrongs they could have been convinced they suffered because of me. It wasn’t a pleasant list for me to contemplate. As Diane’s soliloquy began to take on Elizabethan dimensions, I found myself wishing I’d walked out to my car and gone right home.

“You done?” I asked when she paused to come up for oxygen.

“I think so,” she said. “Are you going to be able to remember all that, or do you want me take some notes for you?”

“Oh, I’ll remember.”

It turned out the pause was only Diane’s version of a pit stop. Within seconds she was gaining speed again. Unfortunately for me, my seat belt wasn’t fastened. She asked, “What about your current patients? You really pissed any of them off? Any of them want your, you know?”

I didn’t know. Nor did I want to know, particularly. I said, “Not that I know of. Other than the leaks over the last few days. The three people whose information leaked aren’t too thrilled with me. Other than that, my caseload is reasonably content with my efforts.”

“Then what about nuts? You treating anybody really crazy right now? Any psychotic transferences creeping up on you? Ooooh, or any really hot erotic transference? Those can get wild. That might do it.”

Despite the irreverent tone, her questions were reasonable. I thought seriously about my answers before I said, “No, nothing.”

“Damn.”

She seemed disappointed. I wasn’t sure what to make of that.

“I have to get home. I have baking to do for tomorrow. Raoul has developed this thing for pumpkin pie. Who would have guessed? You sure you don’t want to come over for Thanksgiving?”

“Thanks, but Lauren doesn’t feel up to being with people. She’s a little… irritable.”

“Which we know is the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘bitchy.’”

“Yes.”

“Alan?”

She was in the doorway to my office, staring right at me.

“Yeah?”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Jump this hurdle. Move on.”

I wished her a happy Thanksgiving before I retraced my steps to my office and called Craig Adamson to discuss our fractured appointment that afternoon. His machine picked up. I left a message, packed up my things, and headed home.

The weather was pure Front Range autumn. Sweater-cold, hands-in-pockets, gusty-wind weather that came along with a promise of snow that is fulfilled less often than you’d think along the eastern face of the Rockies in October and November. I usually found the fall totally exhilarating, swollen with provocation.

But not that day.

The next day would be Thanksgiving. As I drove away from downtown Boulder, I reminded myself to count my blessings. It wasn’t a short list-and Grace was firmly ensconced at numero uno-but I found myself distracted somewhere near number two or three by some of life’s recent challenges.

My wife’s feet were so full of edema, they wouldn’t fit into Bozo’s shoes, let alone her own. Somebody had bugged my office. My career was hanging by a thread. My best friend was alone somewhere in the Midwest, trying to find a way to recover from a troubled marriage and an angry heart. I had a patient whose husband might be trying to kill her.