“You must be Detective Ryder,” the lips said as the woman opened the door wide and gestured me inside. “It’s good to meet you. I’m Alec Kavanaugh. Come in, make yourself comfortable.”

Businesslike, I noted. Voice in professional mode, friend-like overtones with we’ve-got-fifty-minutes underpinnings. The room was large, a few planted palms breaking the space into regions: the desk region, the overstuffed analyst’s chair region, the Freud-inspired couch region. The colors were corals playing against cool gray. I smelled air freshener, pine-bodied, something with a name like Winter Forest. Kavanaugh gestured between the couch – spare and futon-inspired, one end up-angled – and the big fluffy chair.

“Do you have a preference?” she asked.

“I’m a traditionalist. I’ll take the couch.”

I thought it would be amusing to lay the wrong way, with my feet elevated. Doc Kavanaugh didn’t seem to notice, or maybe most of her patients were dyslexic.

She took the chair, turning it to face me through five feet of winter-pine air. She crossed long legs. Her smile was clinically perfect.

“I’d like to ask a few generic questions, Detective Ryder. Or may I call you Carson?”

“No.”

She nodded. “That’s absolutely fine. What brings you here, Detective Ryder?”

“I watch a lot of TV, Doctor. Or so I am told by others.”

“How much television do others find to be too much?”

“The average American watches something like five hours of tube a day, Doctor. I average about two.”

“What do you think that means?”

“Someone owes me three hours.”

She just looked over her eyeglasses. A humorless woman. This might actually be fun, batting around words with a humorless chick shrinkadoodler.

She said, “What did you used to do before you started watching television?”

“Masturbate.”

She said nothing for so long that I had to fill the silence.

“Fish, swim, kayak,” I said. “Run in circles. That was my favorite. Running in tiny little circles until I could bite my tail.”

She was either writing down my answers on a pad, or pretending to. She looked up.

“When did you last do one of those activities?”

“I went fishing with Harry one week ago.”

She would have received an overview of my recent work record from Tom Mason, part of the process. Thus she’d know about us finding the kid. She’d now be wondering why I didn’t mention it, then play the denial card which I’d trump by telling her I’d omitted the kid on purpose, leading to a gotcha! moment.

She seemed to study her notes. Looked up at me. “Any thoughts on why you’ve shifted from physical activities to television?”

“Maybe I’m tired of running in those little circles.”

I heard her shift in her seat as she leaned forward.

“Do you think you have angry moments?”

I sat up quickly, slamming my feet on the floor. I shook my fist at her and screwed up my face in angry disgust.

I yelled, “FUCK YOU!”

She smiled. “Very amusing.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You can leave now.”

“I uh – what?”

“You can leave now. We’re done here.”

I looked at the clock on her desk; four minutes had elapsed. I was supposed to have forty-six more minutes in my session.

“It was obvious I was kidding,” I explained patiently. “Answering a question about anger by pretending to be angry.”

She stood and walked to her desk, showing me her back. She tossed the notepad on the desktop. Stifled a yawn.

Said, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”

Chapter 34

On the way to the department I planned to stop at the health-food emporium and grab a toasted lentil something-or-other, but pulled into a convenience store and selected a pair of pink-frosted Krispy-Kremes. I’d been faithful to Fossie’s regimen for about a week – vites and grains and juices and teas – but figured a little processed flour and sugar wouldn’t be fatal. I poured two extra-large coffees for accompaniment. In the checkout line I noticed a familiar face on a tabloid newspaper beside the register: the face was Scaler’s, the rag was the World-Week News, which had never before met a Scaler idea it didn’t like.

The headline read: Reverend Scaler’s Death is S&M Scene!

The subhead read: Torture and Devil Worship and a Gay Black Lover.

A starburst in the corner read: A Tangled Web of Weird!

Uh-oh, I thought, reaching for a copy. What went wrong here?

Waiting my turn at the checkout, I sucked on one of my coffees and read. The tabloid’s story was basically true to the facts because they couldn’t be improved upon: one of the nation’s most arch-conservative, family-values-trumpeting moralists had died while being whipped by a gay black junkie prostitute. The candles at the scene were depicted as symbols of Satan. It was a leap, but then it was the World-Week News.

I set the paper beside my coffees. The clerk, a plump, hair-netted woman in her late forties, scowled at the paper as she rang it up.

“Can you believe that guy?” she said, not hiding the anger and betrayal. “All those years of pretending to be holy. What a scummy fake.”

I must have been under Harry’s more-generous influence and mumbled something about all the facts not yet in.

“They’re in enough for me,” she said, anger bright in her face as she handed me my receipt. “The people at my church got all his books and his sermons on CD. But not for long.”

“How so, ma’am?” I asked.

“Tonight we’re gonna light up a big bonfire to lay ’em all on.”

I left the place realizing Scaler’s reputation was as destroyed as if it had been ground zero at an H-bomb test.

When I hit the department Harry was mainlining coffee, chomping a danish, and trying to draw a connections line: who touched who when? None of the lines on the page went far. I waited for him to make reference to yesterday, but the event in my living room seemed to have disappeared as far as he was concerned; fine with me.

Tom Mason wandered over and held up a copy of the World-Week News, the Scaler edition.

“You guys seen this?”

I nodded. “Everything’s out. No more secrets for the Rev. His rep’s going down in flames.”

“I talked to a buddy in Miami where the rag’s written,” Tom said. “For this to hit stands today the story and pictures had to have been ready yesterday. Who leaked and why?”

I did the money-whisk. “The rag pays, people send the stuff in.”

Harry scanned the story, set the paper aside. “Scaler did everything in a big way. Same for his fall from grace.”

“He’s still falling,” Tom said, finger-twitching us to the window. Seeing a CNN van, we sprinted to the conference room and turned on the television.

“First this message,” the anchor was saying, ‘then a bizarre and provocative update on the death of famed religious leader Richard Scaler.”

“This ain’t good,” Tom Mason said.

After a minute of commercial the anchor segued to a local CNN stringer in Mobile, squinting into sunlight. Her hair was strawberry blonde, her face the shape of a heart. I saw our building in the background, MPD headquarters. The stringer lifted the mic to her lips, shook back her hair, a move I’m sure they teach in Reporting 101.

“Sources close to the deceased suggest that the Mobile Police believe the last person to see Richard Scaler alive was a black male prostitute named LaPierre O’Fong. It’s been suggested that Reverend Scaler died of a heart attack suffered during…erotic games. In another bizarre twist, O’Fong was one of the four addicts who died after OD’ing on uncut heroin earlier this week, adding yet another layer of infamy to the once-impeccable reputation of Richard Scaler…”