“You drink how much?”

The court-ordered psychiatrist, Dr. Marshall Armistead, had been droning efficiently through a laundry list of medical history when an inattentive Tess tripped herself up by telling the truth. Tess was so bored, so detached, she couldn’t remember what she had said to provoke this reaction. Two drinks, three drinks. Was that really so much? Should she claim she was French on her mother’s side or backpedal?

Backpedal.

“I mean, not every night. But it’s not unusual for me to have wine with dinner, maybe two glasses. And I like to go out with friends at least once a week, have a cocktail.”

“Do you drink alone?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you drink to relax or to reward yourself?”

“I wouldn’t describe it that way.”

“Do you often feel hung over in the mornings?”

“Never.” She tried not to sound too hostile, too defensive. “Look, I know this drill. I don’t have a drinking problem.”

“Okay, we’ll move on. Drugs?”

“Only pot now.”

One eyebrow seemed to twitch at “only.” They were notable eyebrows, with an old man’s wildness, although Dr. Armistead appeared to be relatively young, no more than forty. He was bald, but in the nonchalant manner of a man who had lost his hair young and never mourned it. He had a full mouth and a prominent nose. The eyes beneath the animated brows were deep-set, a changeable hazel not unlike her own. But beady, Tess decided.

“Only marijuana now,” he echoed, picking apart her words. “So you’ve used other drugs?”

“I tried cocaine once. It made me speak very, very, very fast, and even I could tell I was inane. I don’t need to speed up. I was too old for the rave-and-ecstasy fad by the time it got to Baltimore or I might have tried that, just out of curiosity. But really I’m essentially drug-free. One nice thing about being self-employed, though, is no one can make me pee into a cup.”

“Essentially drug-free.” He checked his notes. “You do drink quite a bit of coffee.”

Tess sighed and rolled her eyes. “I know I don’t have a caffeine problem, because if I go a day without coffee, I don’t get headaches. And, really, I hardly smoke pot at all anymore. It’s a hassle to get it, and I have to worry about the consequences.”

“Consequences?”

“There’s a risk, given what I do, in breaking the law. As I get more successful, the risk is less worth taking.”

“And yet… you committed a felony.”

“I was charged with a felony. I pleaded to a misdemeanor.”

He frowned at the piece of paper in front of him. “But the original charge was a felony.”

“Charges don’t mean a thing in our system. Innocent until proven guilty, remember?”

He went back to the standard questions, and Tess’s attention wandered again, taking in her surroundings. She had expected grander surroundings at the famed Sheppard Pratt Hospital. After all, Zelda Fitzgerald had been treated here once. But the Jazz Age was over and the era of psychotropic drugs and HMOs was a bad fit for the once-elegant hospital. A certain genteel shabbiness was rampant inside the buildings, although the grounds were still lush. Here, for example, Dr. Armistead’s window was propped open with a small piece of plywood, so the outside breezes could combat the dry overheated air pumped out by the old radiator. Tess was especially struck by the dowdy wing chair in which she sat. The arms were so worn they were nothing but silken strings.

The doctor caught her combing those strings with her fingers and made a quick note on his Palm Pilot. Was it considered hostile to fiddle with string? Angry? Anal? Like many people who wandered into a psychiatrist’s office for the first time, Tess was worried she wouldn’t be allowed to leave.

“Is there mental illness in your family?”

“No, not really.” Her reply was automatic, and she immediately doubted its veracity. Really, insanity was the only explanation for some of them. But there was no diagnosed mental illness in her family, so she was telling the truth. Besides, the doctor was barreling ahead. There was no chance to revise or revisit her answers.

How did she sleep? Fine, most nights. Most nights? Well, everyone had a bad night now and then, right? Did her bad nights usually follow drinking?

“I told you I drink almost every night,” she pointed out.

After heavy nights of drinking, then? That wasn’t the pattern.

“So, there is a pattern?”

“No, that’s not what I meant. It’s just-I have bad dreams, sometimes. They come with the territory, the kind of work I do. I’ve seen more than my share of… disturbing things. But it’s not as if I’m a police officer, or a paramedic-”

“Or a doctor,” he said, gently making the case for his own profession. “Doctors see a lot of death too.”

“Not the kind of death I’ve seen, not unless they’re in the emergency room. And it’s not just death, anyway. The death is the least of it. I’ve seen what people will do to one another to get what they want, rationalizing all the while that it’s fair-or even moral.”

“Which is what you did, is it not?”

His voice remained gentle, nonjudgmental. She knew he was testing her, asking her to evaluate her behavior in the context of what she had just said, to hold it up to the light of her own logic and see if there were any holes in it.

Still, the question pissed her off.

“I tried to stop a pedophile from picking up little girls on the Internet.”

“Not a pedophile, as I understand it, not by clinical definition. He may have been stalking underage girls, but he wasn’t interested in little-girl girls, was he? Otherwise he wouldn’t have sought to meet you in a bar.”

“Okay, underage girls. Whom he apparently plied with roofies, which have no purpose except for date rape.”

“Yes, I saw the reference to that in the file the judge sent me. But do we know if he’s ever used those drugs?”

“He had them. It was only a matter of time.”

“So you took the law into your own hands.”

“I had heard about him from an underage girl I knew. She was safe, but I had to protect other girls who might run into him. To do that, I needed to figure out who he was.”

“Do you feel that way a lot? That you have to protect others?”

“Not particularly.”

“Have you ever used violence to protect-your word-anyone?”

Tess shook her head. She was proud of the fact that she relied on her wits more than her Smith amp; Wesson. She seldom fired her gun outside a range.

“Really? Judge Halsey sent me a note that I should ask you about the time you tried to beat a boy, down in Pigtown. It apparently came up in the prosecutor’s presentencing investigation.”

“I beat a boy in Pigtown-?” It was hard not to finish with the lyric “just to watch him die,” but she didn’t figure Dr. Armistead, with his wallful of degrees, for a Johnny Cash fan. The memory kicked in a beat later. The doctor’s bland encapsulation had taken the incident so far from its context that she hadn’t recognized her own past. “It wasn’t quite the way you make it sound. The ”boy‘ was a killer, barely human. He had used a young girl without any thought to the consequences. I snapped.“

“So you do have trouble controlling your emotions?”

“No, no, not at all. It was a most unusual circumstance.”

“But there was this boy and now there’s Mr. Pechter. And in both cases the trigger seemed to be the man’s manipulation of a younger, more inexperienced girl.”

“Twice isn’t a pattern.”

“Is twice all there is?”

Tess glanced at one of the several clocks in the room. They were all small and subtle, placed throughout the study as if they were nothing more than part of the decor. But wherever one looked, there was a clock, and they were all ruthlessly synchronized. She thought there should be a huge digital readout, showing the seconds counting down and the dollars going up, like that national debt clock that used to tour the nation. An hour with Dr. Armistead cost $150, of which her insurance would pay $100. That was a good deal, according to Tyner, who had used his contacts to find the doctor after almost every other therapist in town had claimed to be too busy or not a part of her insurance plan.