CHAPTER ONE
“How’s your sleep?”
Dr. Susan Okafor delivered the question with her typical innocent smile and piercing gaze. Kate Valentine absorbed the question with her typical urge to shove the pillow on the good doctor’s futon down the aforementioned good doctor’s throat.
I am not good at therapy, Kate thought morosely.
“Umm… good.”
Dr. Okafor stared at her, not replying, letting her eyes communicate her distrust.
“Yeah, I mean, sleep is always kind of sporadic when you work for the FBI.”
“Are you working on a case right now?”
Kate’s fingers tightened, making the knuckles stand out white on her knees. She wished she could control that reaction, but it was as involuntary as the tears that came every night after she came home from another day of barely talking to Marcus. If he was even there to talk to.
“No,” she admitted. “My boss has decided that I should take a step back from the Cox case.”
Actually, Winters had expressly ordered Kate to stay away.
And she was staying away. This time, she was listening. She’d see if that made things better or worse, or if they made no difference at all.
“Is that distance impacting your sleep?”
Kate sighed. “My sleep is fine, Dr. Okafor.”
Dr. Okafor set her notebook on the corner of an oiled cherrywood desk and folded her hands in her lap. Kate noted that the doctor’s knuckles didn’t turn white. “Kate, if I’m going to help you, you need to be honest with me.”
Kate rolled her eyes. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“You can start by telling me what’s keeping you up at night.”
Gee, where should I start? Could it be the deranged serial killer who thinks God prophesied my suffering and death at his hands who is now on the loose again?
Could it be my ex-not-quite-boyfriend, who isn't even my friend anymore, who's splitting his time between working the case I'm not allowed to work and managing his divorce to the woman he actually loved?
Could it be my mother's constant badgering that I try again with said partner?
She decided to summarize instead. “Stuff.”
Dr. Okafor sighed and picked up her notebook again. The danger was passed. For now.
“Kate, I’m concerned that you feel you deserve the suffering you’ve experienced.”
That comment blindsided Kate. It was an unusual sensation for a woman as experienced at interrogating suspects as Kate was. She opened her mouth but managed only to stammer before taking a quick breath and finally forming words. “I don’t deserve it.”
“You don’t, but you’re behaving as though you feel you do.”
Heat climbed Kate’s cheeks. “Really? You think that I think I deserve to have my life fall apart? I deserve to be the pet obsession of the Lawgiver? I deserve to have my relationship fall apart before it starts and to have my boss treat me like I’m as fragile as crystal?
“Do you think that?”
“No! What kind of question is that?”
“An honest one.”
Kate's hands gripped tighter, and she now realized it was her body's instinctive defense against grabbing the embroidered woolen throw pillow and acting out her fantasy of force-feeding Dr. Okafor. "Well, no. I don't think I deserve any of this."
Dr. Okafor nodded. “I ask because you’re not making any attempt to improve your life or your circumstances. You’ve refused Director Winters’ offer of protective custody. You’ve refused to allow your partner to stay with you.”
“You mean the partner who broke up with me because his ex-wife didn’t like that we got together after she left him?
Dr. Okafor raised her left eyebrow. It was always the left one. Kate was beginning to suspect the woman had suffered a stroke on the right side. Or the left side. Was it true that each side of your brain controlled the opposite side of the body?
“It was my understanding that you broke up with him,” Dr. Okafor said.
Kate rolled her eyes. “It was mutual. The point is, I don’t think the two of us should sleep together.”
“Couldn’t he sleep on the couch?”
Kate laughed. Not a humorous sound at all. “So because I don’t want to live with my ex-boyfriend, I hate myself?”
“I didn’t say you hated myself.”
“No, just that I deserve to be the pet obsession of a serial killer.”
“I didn’t say that either. What I said was that I’m concerned that you might think that you deserve the suffering you’ve endured.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Then why won’t you accept protective custody? Why are you distancing yourself from your family and friends?”
“So now my family’s part of this too?”
“When’s the last time you saw your mother?”
Kate took a deep breath and lowered her face so Dr. Okafor wouldn’t see the flush. Kate was fair-skinned, a descendant of equally fair-skinned Europeans on both sides of her family, and she had a frustrating tendency to blush so deeply her skin was nearly the same shade as her bright auburn hair.
Except for a delicious, tense Thanksgiving dinner where both Kate and her mother had avoided broaching any subject that could be considered remotely difficult, Kate hadn’t seen her mother in over a month.
After returning to Portland, Maine upon the conclusion of her last disaster of a case, she’d lived with Catherine for a while, but her mother’s incessant badgering about Marcus got to be overwhelming, so now she lived in her apartment again and barely talked to her mother besides the occasional good morning texts or lighthearted gossip, always from her mother to her and not the other way around.
“I…” Kate lifted her hands and let them drop.
Dr. Okafor leaned slightly forward. Her face took on an earnest expression.
Here we go.
“Kate, the symptoms you’re displaying are very concerning.
You’re not sleeping well. You’re isolating yourself from your friends and family.
You’re refusing protection despite the credible threat of danger.
I’m worried that you feel you deserve for bad things to happen to you, and you’re using Cox’s escape as an excuse to leave yourself vulnerable while at the same time refusing to confront—”
Kate stood before Dr. Okafor could finish. She was seeing Dr. Okafor at Winters’ request, not her instruction, so she didn’t have to sit through this bullshit to protect her job. “Thank you, Doctor. I think we’re done here.”
“Kate, I’m not trying to—”
“I won’t be making another appointment.”
“Kate. Kate!”
But Kate was gone, storming out of Dr. Okafor’s office and past the surprised receptionist who stammered something she didn’t bother to listen to.
She left the building—stormed out, of course—and jumped into the driver’s seat of an old, dented RAV4 with chipped paint and a wheezy engine that burned oil almost as fast as it burned gas.
Said engine wheezed to life with a cough and a puff of gray smoke—still from the exhaust and not the block, thankfully—and Kate drove out of the parking lot and headed home.
She didn’t quite storm out of the parking lot.
In its best years, the old four-banger couldn’t have stormed out of anywhere, and its best years were long behind it.
The best Kate could manage was eventually cresting sixty a mile after merging onto US 302, a speed she maintained for exactly one more mile before exiting the highway onto Robin Avenue.
Here, she slowed to the posted speed limit of thirty-five.
She wasn’t angry enough to kill someone in a car accident.
Not even her well-deserving self, so shove that trumpet up your ass and talk through it, Dr. Okafor.
She pulled off of the avenue onto Plain Street, a fitting name for a fitting street sporting run-down gray homes and three run-down gray apartment buildings, one of which sported the second-story one-bedroom unit that Special Agent Kate Valentine, FBI, called home.
With her wheezy old SUV safely parked in her assigned space and free to rest, Kate could storm once more. She didn’t, though. There was no point. No one was there to see her, and no one who could see her would take time out of their working-class days to dwell on it.
Instead, she walked across the parking lot and the narrow courtyard with its double-bathtub-sized pool and precisely two stunted, leafless excuses for trees.
It was November in Portland, and while there was only enough snow on the ground to make the gray look even grayer, it was still too cold for any of the deciduous trees in the area to sport leaves.
These particular trees were barely leaved even in summer, though, so they were still crappy trees.
She continued walking, up the stairs to the second floor, and after an excruciating extra seven seconds fumbling with the damned sticky lock into her apartment.
She dropped her bag on the floor by the door and dropped her coat over the back of the couch.
She walked into her kitchen, and, instead of contemplating the solitary, empty life the apartment represented, she looked through her kitchen window at the street below.
The first tendrils of fog were beginning to creep up from the ground, but the bright white LED lamps didn’t even have the decency to soften that fog, instead glaring intensely off of it, like a false, toothy smile frozen on the face of a madwoman.
She missed the old sodium-vapor lamps. Those, at least, had the decency to admit when the world they illuminated was bleak.
Kate stared at those lamps until she felt her lips wanting to mimic that smile.
Then she trudged (like walking but slower and more defeated) to the living room, plopped onto the couch, and ordered pizza.
The one thing she could count on in life was that, fog of early winter and insane grin of LED lights notwithstanding, Pizza Express would have her pepperoni and cheese at her doorstep in thirty minutes or less.
While she waited, she stared at the flat black screen of her switched-off television. It was a fitting end to a shitty day.
Besides, nothing on television would do anything to stave off the nightmares when sleep finally came.