At first she thought she must have heard him wrong. She didn’t know what to say. She remembered his touching her on the landing and now wondered if indeed it had been a grope and not a harmless miscalculation.

“I’m sorry. You’re offended,” he said apologetically, his voice low and soothing.

“No, of course not,” she answered quickly. If she wasn’t careful, her paranoia could lose her the sale. “I’m afraid I’m just not as prepared as I should be to help you.”

“It’s really quite painless,” he told her as though he were explaining a surgical procedure. “I use only my fingertips. I assure you, I won’t be pawing you.” His lips curved into another smile, and Tess felt ridiculous making a fuss.

“Please, go ahead.” She stepped closer, despite her apprehension.

He set the cane aside and started slowly, gently at her hair, using both hands, but only the tips of his fingers. She avoided looking up at him, staring off over his shoulder. His hands smelled faintly of ammonia, or was it simply the overpowering scent of the freshly scrubbed wooden floor? His fingers stroked her forehead and moved over her eyelids.

She tried to ignore their dampness, but glanced at his face for any indication that he was as uncomfortable as she was. No, he seemed calm and composed and his fingers began their descent on either side of her face, sliding down her cheeks. She dismissed what felt like a caress. But then his fingertips moved to her lips. His index finger lingered too long, rubbing back and forth. For a second it felt as though he might press it into her mouth. Startled by the sensation and the thought, Tess looked at his eyes. She tried to see beyond the dark lenses, and when she was successful, getting a glimpse of his black eyes, she saw that he was staring directly at her. Was that possible? No, of course not. She was simply being paranoid, an annoying tendency left over from her past life.

By now his fingers had wandered to her chin, tracing their way down to her neck. They briefly wisped beneath the neckline of her blouse, brushing her collarbone, hesitating as if he was testing her, as if asking how far she would let him go. She began to step back just when he wrapped his fingers around her throat.

“What are you doing?” Tess gasped and grabbed at his large hands.

Now he squeezed, choking her, his eyes definitely staring into hers, a twisted smile at his lips. She clawed at the fingers, steel vise grips clamped like the jaws of a pit bull. She struggled and twisted, but he shoved her back. Her head knocked into the wall with such a force she closed her eyes against the pain. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. God, he was so strong.

When she opened her eyes, she saw that he had released one of his hands. She was able to suck in air, her lungs aching and greedy. Before she could gather her strength, he shoved his arm up against her to hold her in place, stabbing his elbow into her throat and cutting off her air once again. That’s when she saw the syringe in his free hand.

The terror spread through her quickly, her arms and legs flaying in defense. It was useless. He was much too strong. The needle poked through her jacket and sunk deep into the skin of her arm. She felt her entire body jerk. In seconds the room began to spin. Her hands, her knees, her muscles became limp, and then the room went black.

CHAPTER 32

The minute Maggie walked into Dr. James Kernan’s office she felt like a nineteen-year-old college student again. The feelings of confusion, wonder and intimidation all came back to her in a rush of sights and smells. His office, set in the Wilmington Towers in Washington, D.C., and no longer on the University of Virginia’s campus, still looked and smelled the same.

Immediately, her nostrils were accosted by stale cigar smoke, old leather and Ben-Gay rubbing ointment. The tiny space was littered with the same strange paraphernalia. A human brain’s dissected frontal lobe bulged in a mason jar filled with formaldehyde. The jar acted as a makeshift bookend, ironically holding up such texts as Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of Evil, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and what Maggie knew to be a rare first edition of Alice In Wonderland. Of the three, the last seemed most appropriate for the professor of psychology who easily conjured up images of the Mad Hatter.

On the mahogany credenza across the room were antique instruments, their shapes and points intriguing until they were recognized as surgical instruments once used to perform lobotomies. On the wall behind the matching mahogany desk were black-and-white photographs of the procedure. Another equally disturbing photograph included a young woman undergoing shock treatment. The woman’s empty eyes and resigned posture beneath the ominous iron equipment had always reminded Maggie more of an execution than a medical treatment. Sometimes she questioned how she could be involved in a profession that, at one time, could be so brutal while pretending to cure the ailments of the psyche.

Kernan, however, embraced the eccentricities of their profession. His office was simply an extension of the strange little man. A man as notorious for his crude jokes about “nutcases” as he was for his own version of shock treatment, which he had perfected on his students.

The man loved mind games and could lure and trick a person into them without warning. One moment he would drill an unprepared freshman with rapid-fire questions, not allowing the poor student to even answer. The next minute he’d be in a corner of the classroom, standing silently with his face to the wall. Then still later, he’d climb atop a desk and lecture while teetering from one desk to another, his small, stocky but aging body threatening to send him falling while he lectured and did a balancing act at the same time. Even the se-niors in his classes had no idea what to expect of their odd professor. And this was the man the FBI trusted to determine her sanity?

Maggie heard the familiar clomp-squeak of his footsteps outside the office. Instinctively, she sat up straight and stopped her browsing. Even the man’s footsteps transformed her into an incompetent college kid.

Dr. Kernan entered his office unceremoniously and shuffled to his desk without recognizing or acknowledging Maggie. He plopped down into the leather chair, sending it into a series of creaks. Maggie couldn’t be sure that all the creaks came from the chair and not the old man’s joints.

He began rummaging through stacks of papers. She watched quietly, her hands folded in her lap. Kernan looked as though he had shrunk since the last time she had seen him, over ten years ago. Back then he had seemed ancient, but now his shoulders were hunched, his hands trembled and were speckled with brown spots. His hair, just as white as she remembered, was thin and feathery, revealing more brown spots on his forehead and the top of his head. Tufts of white hair protruded from his ears.

Finally he appeared to find what he had been so desperately in search of. He struggled to open the tin box of breath mints, took two without offering any to Maggie and snapped the container shut.

“O’Dell, Margaret,” he said to himself, still not acknowledging her presence.

He sorted through the rubble again. “Class of 1990.” He stopped and thumbed through a folder. Maggie glanced at the cover to see if he was reading her file, only to discover a label that read, Twenty-five Best Internet Porn Sites.

“I remember a Margaret O’Dell,” he said without looking up at her, and in a voice that sounded like a senile old man talking to himself. “O’Dell, O’Dell, the farmer and the dell.”

Maggie shifted in her chair, forcing herself to be patient, to be polite. Nothing had changed. Why was she surprised to find him treating patients the same way he had treated his students, playing silly word games, reducing names and identities to nursery rhymes? It was all part of his intimidation.