Jake snorted. “Not that I know of.”

Sobel’s mouth turned down at being contradicted.

How to say this without sounding like a prick? No clean route. “My father has been a raging alcoholic ever since he could raise his arm. He ate for shit. Never exercised. Ran himself ragged. Sometimes he’d stay up for a week solid, fueled on booze and anger. No, I don’t think that your tests have painted an entirely accurate picture.”

Sobel penciled a note onto the page. “What is his domestic life like?”

Jake felt the cold flash of wasted time burst in his head. “Dr. Sobel, I thought you had done an evaluation on my father. You should know all of these things. If you don’t even know who he was, how can you compare that to who he is?”

Sobel stopped nodding and folded his arms across his chest. “I am also trying to get a feel for you, and what you are willing to do for him, Mr. Cole. This is not solely about him. I need to see how much you’re willing to handle. How much you can handle. Your impressions of your father also give me a lot of insight into you.”

“You’re kidding.”

Sobel shook his head.

Jake reached into his jacket and took out a black leather billfold. He opened it to the badge and the ID card, leaned over, and slid it across the desk to the psychiatrist. “Dr. Sobel, I am not open for analysis. I am not interested in analysis. I have more dark secrets locked away in my head than you are ever going to know. But since you ask, I will provide you with a little insight into this classic Freudian situation.

“My father and I have not spoken for nearly thirty years. I do not like the man and, if you really want to get to the bottom of it, for a long time I hated him. No surprise there. Good old Sigmund handled this in his self-justifying twenty-first lecture in A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis. I’m sure you’ve read it, even if it is complete horseshit.

“I may think that how he raised me—or didn’t raise me—was shitty, but his work is something else entirely. I don’t think that money is any sort of a problem but I haven’t spoken to his lawyer. Worst-case scenario, I sell the house and that should buy him ten years wherever he needs. What I want out of you is where those ten years should be.”

Sobel closed Jake’s badge and slid it back across the desk. “Do you want to be involved?”

“I think we are getting a little ahead of ourselves here but the short answer is no. I need to know exactly what is wrong with my father so I can start making the proper arrangements for his future. A future that I have no intention of being involved in.” Jake knew he sounded like a prick but he didn’t care.

Sobel turned his thoughtful nod back on. “Right now your father is still suffering the effects of shock, a little post-traumatic stress disorder, and he’s been taking painkillers. These things combined don’t give me a very stable subject to begin with and when you throw in the classic signs of Alzheimer’s, things get exponentially complicated. He’s confused, he’s irritable, and he’s aggressive.”

Jake held up his hand. “Dr. Sobel, my father has been irritable and aggressive as long as I can remember.”

Sobel signaled that he expected to be allowed to finish. “That painting on the wall of his room—” he paused, and his voice softened, as if he were speaking to himself—“showed no degeneration in his motor skill, which is something I should see in a man at this stage of AD. That piece shows that he is more than capable of abstract thinking—the mere fact that he was able to make a connection between his blood and paint is abstract enough but when we add in the kind of picture he painted, I feel he can clearly think in abstract terms.” The psychiatrist turned back to his notes, flipped through a few pages. “His vocabulary shows no degeneration as far as I can tell. Like I said, I don’t have an evaluation from before his accident, but your father is very well spoken, if somewhat opinionated.” Sobel looked up from the folder and leaned back in his chair. He clasped his hands on top of his head and continued, “Symptomatically speaking, he lies somewhere between early and moderate dementia, stages two and three respectively. There are signs of moderate dementia and yet certain telltale signs of early dementia are missing, and vice versa. This disease is different in each individual but there are certain symptoms that are—or should be—a given.” There was a shift in his voice that told Jake there was something he wasn’t being told.

“Are you saying that he might not have Alzheimer’s?”

“I know you talked this through with his GP but I’m working in a vacuum here.” Sobel shrugged and with his hands knit together on top of his head, it looked like an exercise. “I don’t have a lot of collateral history from relatives or friends, and that is one of the cornerstones of diagnosing Alzheimer’s. Your father spent a lot of time alone and that doesn’t help me. He’s also an artist and artists are eccentric to begin with. I need to know certain things that, at this point, I don’t.”

“What are we not talking about, Dr. Sobel?”

“Excuse me?”

Jake smiled. “I can tell when I’m being left in the dark.”

“Jake, I don’t know exactly what is going on with your father. What I do know is that his neural pathways are not translating the real world into terms that he can always understand. I usually get to see a patient long before they begin to have even minor accidents. Your father set himself on fire and crashed through a plate-glass window. I am having a hard time believing that he managed to get to this point and still be living alone. He should have been here long before this. A year, maybe. Possibly before that.”

“I found sod and keys and paperbacks in his fridge. I don’t know how the hell he managed to live like that. I am not going to sit here and make excuses that you don’t really care about anyway, but I’ve been off the Christmas card list for a very long time.”

Sobel nodded again. “He’s not malnourished. He’s not suffering any deficiencies. And his hygiene, although not perfect, was much better than I expected.” He paused. “I don’t like his nightmares—combined with that painting that he did on his wall—” Did Sobel know that he had taken half the wall down last night? “That portrait came from somewhere deep in his mind. He’s frightened of something and it’s manifesting itself in his dreams and his rantings and he’s bringing it to the surface and trying to show it to the world. All this talk about this man of blood living in the floor has me con—”

Jake stood up. “What?”

Sobel froze, as if he had said something wrong. “This happens a lot. That painting is a manifestation of whatever he fears, and by bringing it out, he’s trying to tell us—”

“Forget the clinical diagnosis. I want to know what he said—exactly.” Jake reached across the desk and tore the file folder from Sobel’s grasp.

The doctor pushed his chair back and stood up. “Jake, I do not—”

“Sit down or call security,” Jake said flatly, and scanned the page of notes. “Here,” he said, pointing to Sobel’s notes. “Read this.” He spun the folder on the desk and held his finger to the page, like a drill instructor showing a drop zone to a cadet.

Sobel leaned over and focused on the writing. “For about fifteen minutes this morning the patient appeared lucid and was aware that he was in the hospital. Blood pressure and heart rate were stable and commensurate with a man of his age and general health. Only signs of the onset of dementia were several comments patient made regarding someone he called the blood man. When asked to explain, patient grew agitated, apologized. Heart rate and blood pressure began to climb and breathing became shallow, panicked. Patient asked the nurse to check the bathroom and the closet. Particularly the floor.” Sobel looked up. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”