At The Stroke Of Madness. Alex Kava

Saturday night. I haven’t been able to reach her. Then this morning she missed our weekly session. She never misses a session.”

      “Have you tried contacting her employer or any of her family?”

      “She’s an artist, self-employed. No family that I know of other than her grandmother. Actually she was out of town for her grandmother’s funeral. Another concern. You know how funerals can be emotional triggers.”

      Yes, Maggie did know. Over a decade later and she still wasn’t able to go to one without visions of her heroic, fire-fighting father lying in that huge mahogany box, his hair combed to the wrong side, his burnt hands wrapped in plastic and tucked at his sides.

      “Maggie?”

      “Could she simply have decided to stay an extra day or two?”

      “I doubt she would do that. She didn’t even want to be there for the funeral.”

      “Maybe her car broke down on the trip back?” Maggie couldn’t help wondering if Gwen was overreacting. It made sense that the woman may have wanted to be away from everyone and everything for a day or two without running back here for a session with her shrink to dissect how she was feeling. But then Maggie knew not everyone reacted to stress and tragedy like she did.

      “No, she rented a car up there. See, that’s another thing. The car hasn’t been turned in yet. The hotel told me she was scheduled for departure yesterday but she hasn’t checked out, nor has she contacted anyone about staying longer. And she missed her flight yesterday. She’s not like this. She has problems, but organization and reliability are not on the list.”

      “You said yourself that funerals can be emotionally draining. Maybe she just wanted a few more days before coming back to the everyday routine. By the way, how were you able to find out that she missed her flight?” Airlines didn’t just hand out their passenger manifest. After years of Gwen lecturing her about playing by the rules, Maggie waited for an admission of guilt. Now that she thought about it, Gwen had managed to get a lot of information that wasn’t usually handed out freely.

      “Maggie, there’s more to it.” The urgency returned to Gwen’s voice, dismissing any confession to rule breaking. “She said she was meeting someone … a man. That was the message and she was calling me to talk her out of it. She has this … this tendency …” She paused. “Look, Maggie, I can’t share the intimacies of her case. Let’s just say that in the past she’s made some bad choices when it comes to men.”

      Maggie glanced across the table to find Tully watching her, listening. He looked away quickly as if caught. She had noticed recently—although he tried to disguise it—that he seemed interested in anything related to Gwen Patterson. Or was it simply her imagination?

      “What are you saying, Gwen? That you think this man may have done something to her?”

      Silence again. Maggie waited. Was Gwen finally realizing that perhaps she was overreacting? And why was she being so overprotective with this particular woman? Maggie had never known Gwen to baby-sit her patients. Her friends, yes, but not her patients.

      “Maggie, is there some way you could check on her? Someone you might be able to call?”

      Maggie looked at Tully again. He had finished his lunch and now pretended to be watching out the window, another group of recruits down below in sweaty T-shirts and jogging shorts snaking through the woods.

      Maggie picked at her own lunch. Why had Gwen suddenly decided to become this patient’s caretaker? It seemed like a simple case of a grieving woman shutting herself away from her world for a while, perhaps even finding solace in a friendly stranger. Why didn’t Gwen see that?

      “Maggie?”

      “I’ll do what I can. Where was she staying?”

      “The funeral was in Wallingford, Connecticut, but she was staying at the Ramada Plaza Hotel next door in Meriden. I have the phone numbers and addresses right here. I can fax over some other information later. All I know about the man she was meeting was that she called him Sonny.”

      Maggie’s stomach gave a sudden flip while she took down the information. All the while she kept thinking, “Not Connecticut.”

      CHAPTER 4

      Sheriff Henry Watermeier shoved his hat back and swiped at the sweat on his forehead.

      “Fuck!” he muttered, wanting to walk, to pace off his frustration, but reminding himself to stand in one place. And so he did, hands on his belt buckle, waiting and watching and trying to think, trying to ignore the stench of death and the buzzing of flies. Jesus! The flies were a pain in the ass, miniature vultures, impatient and persistent despite the plastic tarp.

      It wasn’t the first body Henry had seen stuffed into a strange and unusual place. He had seen more than his share during his thirty years with the NYPD. But not here. Crimes like this weren’t supposed to happen in Connecticut. This was exactly the kind of stuff he had hoped to escape when his wife talked him into moving to the middle of nowhere. Yeah, sure, Fairfield County and the shore got its share of this kind of thing all the time. There were always plenty of high-profile cases—big fucking cases—like that stupid publicist driving her SUV over sixteen people, or even the Martha Moxley murder that took decades to solve, or Alex Cross, Connecticut’s very own preppy rapist. Yeah, there were plenty of crimes on the shore and closer to New York, but in the middle of Connecticut things were quieter. Crap like this wasn’t supposed to happen here.

      He had instructed his deputies to set up a wide perimeter, having them string up yellow crime-scene tape. It was going to take a hell of a lot of tape. He watched two of his men stretching it from tree to tree, Arliss with a fucking Marlboro hanging from his lips and that kid, Truman, screeching like a banshee at any of the outsiders who dared come within ten feet.

      “Arliss, make sure your butts don’t end up on the ground.” The deputy looked up, startled, as if he had no idea what his boss was talking about. “I mean the damned cigarette. Get it out of your mouth. Now.”

      Finally, a look of recognition crossed Arliss’s face as he grabbed at the cigarette, stubbed it out on a tree, started to fling it but stopped with his hand in midair. Henry could see the red start at his deputy’s neck as he tucked the rest of the cigarette under his hat and over his ear. It almost made Henry as mad as if Arliss had flung it. First major crime scene as New Haven County sheriff, maybe his last major crime scene of his career, and these goddamn screwups were going to make him look like a fucking idiot.

      Henry glanced over his shoulder, pretending to assess the scene when all he really wanted to know was if Channel 8 still had their camera on him. Should have known, the fucking lens was still pointed at his back. He could feel it like a laser beam slicing him in two. And that’s exactly what it could do if he wasn’t careful.

      Why the hell had Calvin Vargus called the goddamn media? Of course, he knew why, and he didn’t know Vargus except by reputation. The son of a bitch was living up to that reputation in spades, flapping his yap to that pretty little reporter from Hartford even after Henry told him to shut the fuck up. But he couldn’t make Vargus shut up. Not without locking him up. Although that wasn’t entirely out of the question.

      He needed to concentrate. Vargus was the least of his worries. He lifted the tarp and forced himself to look at the body again, or at least at the part sticking out of the barrel. From what he could see the blouse looked like silk with French cuffs. The fingernails were once professionally manicured. The hair may have been dyed—the roots were a bit darker. It was hard to tell since it was now matted and caked with blood. A shitload of blood. Definite death blow. Didn’t have to be a forensic scientist to know that.

      He dropped the tarp and wondered again if this poor woman was a local. Was she some bastard’s mistress? Before he left the station he had run the list of missing persons, highlighting those in New Haven County, but none of them fit the preliminary description. The list included a male college student who had skipped out on classes last spring, a teenage drug addict who had probably run away