Chapter 20
Mitch lowered his badge from directly in front of Dylan’s face but held her stare of patent disbelief as she asked, “What did you say?”
“Roland Malone is your patient. I want to know what he’s confessed to you.”
Her breathing was rapid, shallow, and seemingly insufficient. She wet her lips. “That’s what I thought you said, but I hoped I was wrong. You know I can’t divulge—”
“Don’t give me that privilege crap, Dylan. You can divulge it.”
She made several attempts to speak but seemed incapable of forming words. He should feel good about that. He’d gotten her right where he’d wanted her—distressed and dismayed.
But it didn’t feel good. Not at all. Not like he had imagined it would.
When they had come face-to-face for the first time in her office waiting room and she had extended her hand to him, he’d wanted to bust through that barrier of cool composure.
He’d wanted to see her rattled and rendered speechless.
But he knew now that her aloofness was an affectation, one she armed herself with in the name of professionalism. When they’d kissed last night, her safeguards hadn’t stood a chance against the fire they’d stoked. And they hadn’t even turned on the furnace full blast.
No, he didn’t want to take a victory lap over the bewilderment with which she was looking at him now. But he steeled himself against letting the softer emotions he’d developed for Dylan, the woman, become a deterrent to cracking Dr. Reede, Roland Malone’s counselor.
“What has Malone confided to you, Dylan?”
“All of this, your undercover work tonight, everything, has been about Roland?”
“Yes.”
“Is he the reason you came to me as a patient?”
“John mandated it.”
He could practically hear the gears grinding in her brain. “Yes,” she said, nodding slowly, “John Bowie mandated it. But you made certain that he would.”
He admitted to that with a half shrug. “For a long time, he had been after me to get help. So, yeah, ding ding,” he said, tapping his forehead. “If I pushed him into making it compulsory, I could get to you.”
“Why not just make an appointment to see me on your own?”
“Malone would have smelled a rat.”
“I don’t understand. How does he even know you?”
“We’ll get to that. Anyway, I protested loudly and obscenely to John’s insistence, then made it look like I gave in under duress.”
“So you devised this elaborate scheme. You faked the drunken rampage.”
He nodded. “Counting on John’s response to it. I figured he would make therapy mandatory.”
“What if I hadn’t been on his list of psychologists?”
“I would have kept rejecting them for one reason or another until your name came around. But when he gave me his list, there you were. Actually, I wasn’t all that surprised.
John would have shopped top of the line for me.
The shrink the department typically uses works on the cheap, and his track record for turning somebody around sucks, while you have a four-and-a-half-star rating. ”
He paused, frowning thoughtfully. “You could probably bump it up to five stars if you upgraded the candy in the waiting room to Snickers instead of those hard things.”
She had gone from dismay to distrust to outright anger. He’d watched the evolution. That last remark set her off. “Don’t you dare be cute with me.” Fury-generated tears filled her eyes. “Do you not see that what you’ve done is despicable, or do you just not care?”
Mitch pretended to be unmoved by her increasing anger.
When he made no attempt to defend himself, she placed her fingertips vertically against her forehead and rubbed it, as though to erase all the negative connotations of what he was telling her.
“Ellie told me that while you waited in the lobby, you seemed nervous, that you were stunned when you learned I was a woman. That was all an act?”
“Putting on acts is a crucial part of my job.”
“You’re very good at it,” she said with emotional huskiness.
The disillusionment in her eyes hurt him to his core.
“How did you find out that Roland was my patient? And if you say that it’s classified, I’ll scream.”
Jim Tucker had told him. He hadn’t asked Tucker how he’d come by the information, because Tucker wouldn’t have told him. But as soon as Tucker had shared it with him, he’d begun devising this plan.
He said, “I was tipped by a colleague who knew I would be interested to learn that Malone was routinely coming to Auclair for sessions with a Dr. Dylan Reede.”
“Why would that interest you?”
Rather than answer, he asked, “Why did Malone pick you? Or is that one of the confidences you’re sworn to protect?”
“I have several patients who come to me from out of town, usually because of one privacy issue or another.”
“Okay. He’s known because of his popular restaurant, so, for the moment, I’ll accept the privacy factor.”
“Like your hush-hush, out-of-town AA meetings.”
“Yeah, like that,” he said, frowning at her. “Anyhow, after I was given your name, I looked you up and admit to being surprised that you weren’t male as your name had led me to assume.
“In your waiting room that morning, I pretended to be out of my depth when, in fact, I knew exactly what I was wading into.” He hesitated, then added, “However, I was prepared to meet Roland Malone’s Dr. Reede. I wasn’t prepared for you.”
“Oh, how sweet.” Her tone was sugary; her eyes were throwing daggers. “And I suppose you expect me to believe that when you kissed me that morning, it was spontaneous.”
“It was.
“Of course.”
“I swear.”
She chuffed and turned her head aside.
“Think about it, Dylan. If you had ratted me out to John, told him you couldn’t continue with me, the jig would have been up. My scheme, as you call it, would have been screwed. So, yeah, that kiss was spontaneous, and it surprised the hell out of me, too.”
He waited her out until finally she looked back at him, then he said, “Why didn’t you tattle on me?
You’ve never given me a straight answer to that, only some psychological stuff about transference and manipulation.
Was that the real reason you didn’t tell John?
The only reason? Or was it because you felt the earth move the same as I did? ”
Whispering, “Damn you,” she raised both hands to cover her face and screamed behind them.
Her body shook with the effort it took to contain the emotional outburst. This Dylan was the polar opposite of the one with the tight ponytail, her face a mask, sitting primly on the edge of her sofa while jotting down notes about her truculent new patient.
This wasn’t the way he had wanted to watch her fall apart.
By a force of will, he kept himself from touching her while she struggled to temper her outrage. Ultimately she did, but even when she lowered her hands and looked at him, her eyes were glossed with tears borne of fury, her aspect hard and accusatory.
“All the trickery? What was it for? Besides making a fool of me, and continuing to, why did you do it?”
“Not to make a fool of you.”
“Then why?”
“I told you why. Roland Malone.”
“Then you’ve wasted your time and hoodwinking talents.
I will not disclose anything about a patient.
For which you should be very grateful, because I would have plenty to say about you.
Like you breaking into my office on Tuesday morning.
Were you after information on Roland? What were you looking for? ”
“You. Remember? I told you I thought you might be in another room.”
“Which is a damn lie that insults my intelligence.” She looked ready to throttle him. “Go play your cop games, Mitch, but leave me out of them.”
She turned in her seat and reached for the door handle, but before she could open it, Mitch placed his hand on her shoulder. “Listen to me, listen to me.”
She stopped her struggle to open the door and turned her head, making a point of focusing on his restraining hand. He removed it immediately.
She said, “I’m done listening. You lie. You connive. I would never trust another word out of your mouth. Nothing. Not ever again.”
“There are things you should know about Malone, if you don’t know them already.”
She was fumbling with the door handle, her efforts to unlatch it becoming more frantic. “Do you have a child lock on this?”
“No, it’s an old truck. The handle is contrary.” She stubbornly continued to yank on it. “Dylan, stop it, for god’s sake. Look around us. You can’t get out of the truck here.”
“Watch me.”
“How far do you think you’ll get in those shoes?”
“I’ll call Uber.”
“No telling how long that would take, if one would come at all. It’s dark out here. There’s nobody around. It’s beginning to rain in earnest. And—”
“What? And what?”
“And I have your phone.” Since taking it from her when she went into the drugstore, he’d had it tucked between his thighs along with his nine-millimeter.
“Give it to me!”
“I know you’re angry, but—”
“Angry?” She laughed with an edge of hysteria. “That doesn’t come close. I’m infuriated. Give. Me. My. Phone.”
“Shit!” he said under his breath. Then, “Listen. Just… please listen. I admit to everything you’ve accused me of.
The playacting, conniving, all of it. Hoodwinking?
” He leaned in and said with emphasis, “You’re damn right I use trickery, because many a time my life has depended on fooling people.
If I weren’t good at it, I’d be dead several times over. ”
“Your life didn’t depend on it this time.”
“That remains to be seen.”
She laughed. “What possible threat do I pose?”
“Malone.”
She took a breath to speak, but didn’t. She closed her mouth and visibly brought her rising temper under control again. She settled back but continued to regard him with suspicion. If he were to guess, he would think that in spite of herself, she was curious to know why he was interested in Malone.
He moderated his tone. “Give me a chance to explain why I tricked you. Please. Then if you still want to get out here in the middle of nowhere, I won’t stop you.”
“Why should I believe that?”