“Hello?” calls a male voice. “Is that you, Dr. Ferry?”

“Yes,” I answer, embarrassed by the smallness of my voice in the dead air of the corridor.

“In here. End of the hall.”

The door at the end of the hall is partly open. I walk to within two steps of it, then pause and flatten my skirt against my thighs. It crinkled during the drive over.

“Come in,” says the voice. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

Right, I say silently, and walk through the door.

Nathan Malik sits at a large table facing the doorway. Despite the summer heat, he’s wearing black slacks and a black mock turtleneck, probably silk. There isn’t a spare ounce of fat on his muscular frame, and his bald head seems posed upon his body like a carved bust on a shelf. His skin is fair, almost pale, a difficult feat to manage in the New Orleans summer, but the paleness dramatically sets off his eyes, which have irises so brown they look black. His hands are small and appear delicate enough to be a woman’s. I try to imagine those hands firing bullets into the spines of five men in the past month, then finishing them off with a shot to the head.

In a single fluid movement Malik stands and gestures at a sofa opposite his desk. Black leather squares in a tubular chrome frame-a Mies van der Rohe, or maybe a knockoff. As I sit, I glance quickly around the office, but the place is so sparsely decorated that I only register a few details. Soft white walls, teak shelves, a couple of long, vertical paintings that look Chinese. To my left hangs a samurai sword, its truncated blade gleaming with threatening purpose. To my right, on a sideboard, sits a stone Buddha that looks authentic enough to have been stolen from an Asian jungle somewhere.

“Everyone likes the Buddha,” Malik says, taking his seat again.

“Where did you get it? I’ve never seen one like it.”

“I brought it back from Cambodia. It’s five hundred years old.”

“When were you there?”

“Nineteen sixty-nine.”

“As a soldier?”

A thin smile touches Malik’s lips. “An invader. I regret taking it, but I’m glad I have it now.”

Behind the psychiatrist hangs a large painted mandala, a circular geometric design of brilliant colors woven into a mazelike pattern to stimulate contemplation in the viewer. Carl Jung was fascinated with mandalas.

“I’m curiously happy that you’ve come,” Malik says.

“Are you?”

“Yes. I thought it would be you who showed up to take impressions of my teeth. I got a rather ugly little FBI dentist instead.”

I’m confused. “Did he take impressions of your teeth?”

“No, oddly enough. I assume that’s because my X-rays were sufficient to rule me out as a suspect. He did swab my mouth for DNA.”

I’m sitting the way Lauren Bacall sits in old movies, knees together but showing beneath the hem of my skirt, sandaled feet tucked a little behind me. As Malik’s eyes linger on my knees, it strikes me that I’m here to reverse the usual dynamic of the psychiatrist’s office-to extract information from the doctor rather than the other way around. Since Malik is probably an expert at verbal games, I decide to be direct.

“How did you know I was involved with this case, Doctor?”

He waves a hand as if dismissing a triviality. “The FBI wanted a few strands of my hair as well, but alas” He gestures at his bald pate and laughs.

Malik is testing me. “If the FBI came for hairs, they got them. One way or the other. Unless you’re bald down low as well, which I haven’t run across yet.”

“My, my. You don’t shy away from the earthy realities, do you?”

“Did you expect me to?”

He shrugs with obvious amusement. “I didn’t know. I was curious to see how you turned out. I mean, I’ve followed you in the newspapers, but stories like that never offer any meaningful detail.”

“Well? What do you think?”

“You’re still quite striking. Beyond that, I don’t yet know anything I didn’t know before.”

“Is that really why I’m here? You wanted to see how I turned out?”

“No. You’re here because none of this is accidental.”

“What?”

“Our juxtaposition in space and time. We knew each other years ago, seemingly in passing, and now we’re brought together again. Synchronicity, Jung called it. A seemingly acausal linkage of events which have great meaning or effects in human terms.”

“I call those coincidences. We didn’t actually come together until you asked for this meeting.”

“It would have happened sooner or later.”

I have a sudden urge to ask Malik if he knew my father, but instinct takes me in another direction. “Do you have a thing for me, Dr. Malik?”

“A thing?” Feigned ignorance doesn’t suit the psychiatrist well.

“Come on. An interest. A crush. A jones. ”

“Do many men react that way to you?”

“Enough.”

He nods slightly. “I’ll bet they do. You had them eating out of your hand at UMC. All those doctors in their forties salivating over you like a bitch in heat.”

Malik uses the word bitch like a man who breeds dogs, as though referring to a species far down the evolutionary scale. “You were one of them, as I recall.”

“I noticed you. I’ll admit that.”

“Why did you notice me?”

“You were out of the ordinary. Beautiful, highly sexual, you drank like a fish, and you could hold your own in conversation with people twenty years your senior. I was also bored.”

“Are you bored now?”

A thin smile. “No. It’s not often that I speak to someone with a live audience.”

I slide up my skirt and part my knees enough for Malik to see the transmitter pack taped to my inner thigh.

“Hello, everyone,” he says. “Voyeurs one and all.”

“If we’re done strolling down memory lane, I have some questions for you.”

“Fire away. Only I hope they’re your questions. I’d hate to think you volunteered to act as a mouthpiece for the FBI. That would be beneath you.”

“The questions are mine.”

“At your service, then.”

“Do you treat only patients who have repressed memories?”

Malik seems to be debating whether to answer this question. “No,” he says finally. “I specialize in the recovery of lost memories, but I also treat patients for bipolar disorder and for post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“PTSD solely as it relates to sexual abuse?”

Another hesitation. “I also treat some combat veterans.”

“ Vietnam veterans?”

“I’d rather not get into specifics about patients.”

I want to ask him about his service in Vietnam, but the time doesn’t yet seem right. “I’m going to ask you this straight out. Why won’t you reveal the names of your patients to the police?”

Whatever good humor was in the psychiatrist’s face vanishes. “Because I owe them my loyalty and my protection. I would never betray my patients in that way.”

“Would merely revealing their names constitute a betrayal?”

“Of course. Their lives would instantly be turned inside out by the police. Many of these patients are very fragile. They live in difficult family situations. For some, violence is a daily reality. For others, an ever-present possibility. I have no intention of putting them at risk to satisfy the whims of the state.”

“The ‘whims of the state’? The police are trying to stop a serial murderer who’s probably choosing his victims from among your patients.”

“None of my patients has died.”

“Their relatives have. Two that we know about, and maybe more.”

Malik looks at the ceiling in a way that’s almost a roll of his eyes. “Perhaps.”

Anger surges within me at his apparent smugness. “It’s not perhaps for you, is it? You know who else is at risk, yet you refuse to tell the police.”

Malik simply stares at me, his dark eyes flat and steady.

“How many of the murder victims were related to people you treat, Doctor?”

“Do you honestly think I’m going to answer that, Catherine?”