Already Lured, page 6
“Yes,” Ginny said. She sniffed loudly and then stopped, almost as if the sound had startled her out of crying.
“Can you tell me anything that might help us figure out what happened to her?” Laura asked, phrasing it gently so as not to startle her in another way. “Or who did it?”
“I just don’t understand,” Ginny said, her voice going distant again. She was shaking her head slowly. “She just went out to work like normal. She was going to come right home. We just had Christmas.”
“I know this is hard to take in,” Laura said. She was frustrated but also incredibly sad for this poor woman. They needed answers, but Ginny had just lost the person she thought she was going to spend the rest of her life with. Maybe getting direct with some more specific and easy to answer questions would help. “What did Jessika do for work?”
“She’s a therapist,” Ginny said, stumbling over the tenses again. There was an added lightness in her face when she started to talk about her wife’s work, as though it made her happy and proud. “She specializes in trauma – people who have been through really awful experiences, usually when they nearly die. It’s quite common for people like that to experience PTSD or other forms of traumatic response. Jessika helps them to work through it.”
“Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?” Nate asked from his spot in the nearby armchair.
“For the most part,” Ginny nodded. “She keeps a few other tricks up her sleeve for patients who need more help. Oh… what will happen to them now?” She looked up at her mother as if for reassurance.
“I’m sure someone else will take them on, dear,” she told her daughter. “Don’t trouble yourself with that.”
“But they need her,” Ginny protested, and Laura’s heart broke just a little because she knew where it was coming from. Because Ginny was saying that she needed Jessika.
Laura hated doing family interviews so much.
“Her patients,” Nate said. “Did she ever have any that became too attached? Or perhaps any that became angry with her or raised disputes?”
“I don’t think so,” Ginny said. She looked up at Nate as if she hadn’t noticed him before. “She’s not allowed to talk about that kind of stuff. It’s confidential, you know? Patient privilege. She never said she was afraid or that anyone had been awful. She just carried their weight – their traumas. I don’t want you to look into them. I can’t imagine they would hurt her, and she would hate that. To have negative stereotypes fall on her patients. She cared for them so much.”
Laura nodded. She figured that in some ways it would be hard to tell the difference when you were around someone who worked in that field. Was she having a bad day personally, or was she just moved by the story of someone she had been treating?
And even as she nodded in agreement, she was wondering why Ginny wanted to ignore a possible avenue of investigation. Wouldn’t she want them to leave no stone unturned? Wouldn’t she want them to make sure they found out who did this, no matter who it was?
“Jessika was wearing a very interesting wedding ring,” Laura said, by way of introducing a new topic.
“Oh, yes!” Ginny reached out her own hand, showing an identical ring. “We loved them. It was a little nod to our love of puzzles and escape rooms. That’s what we did on our first date – an escape room.”
Laura nodded. That explained that. “Is there any way it could come open on its own?” she asked.
“Open?” Ginny frowned. “No, there’s no way. You had to press it a certain way. Jess learned how to do it with the same hand she was wearing it on, but that required a lot of practice and twisting her hand a specific way – and pulling the ring halfway up her finger, too. It’s not something that could happen by accident.”
“Then why would it be open?” Laura asked.
“It was…” Ginny’s face paled, then colored, then fresh tears came to her eyes. “Oh, God. She must have wanted me to know… wanted to show me that… that even though she’s gone…”
It was a fair explanation, but it was also one that threatened to derail the interview. Laura knew they had to change the subject before Ginny burst out crying and couldn’t recover.
“What about…” It was delicate, but Laura had to bring it up. “Anyone, whether a patient or otherwise, who had a problem with your marriage?”
Ginny looked at her blankly.
“With the fact that you’re gay?” Laura prompted.
Ginny shook her head. “Not specifically,” she said, which spoke to a whole lifetime of discrimination that couldn’t be pinned down to just one occasion.
“You can’t think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt her?” Laura asked.
“Never,” Ginny whispered, and she looked so lost that Laura wasn’t surprised when her mother moved to put her arms around her.
“I think that’s enough for now,” Ginny’s mother said, looking pointedly at Laura as if she was the one who had caused the grief in the first place. “Don’t you?”
“Alright,” Laura said, but she took out a business card and laid it on the table. Ginny was in shock now, but as the shock wore off, maybe something would come to her mind. “If you think of anything…”
There was no response from either of the women. Laura looked at Nate and raised her eyebrows; he nodded in agreement. The two of them stood and went to leave. Laura lingered in the doorway for a moment, feeling like she should say some kind of formal goodbye – but Ginny was sobbing quietly now into her mother’s shoulder. Laura bit her lip and walked away, leaving the house by the front door, and hugging herself tightly against the cold while Nate closed it behind them.
“What do you think?” Nate asked.
“It’s worth looking into her patients,” Laura said. “We need to get access to her files and also find out if there were any police reports from the last five or even ten years about harassment or violence towards her. She saw emotionally volatile people at work every single day. We wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we didn’t start there. And Ginny’s insistence that we not look at them… to me, it just makes me want to look even harder. Maybe she knows something about one of them that she doesn’t want us to.”
Nate nodded. “Agreed,” he said. “It makes me suspicious, although there’s a chance she really is just reflecting what she knew her wife’s wishes would be. And even if we find something that looks off, we’re going to need to find some link between any suspect and the other victim, too.”
“One bridge at a time,” Laura said. “Let’s get back over to that office.”
***
Laura pulled a file folder from the bookcase and opened it, looking inside. “Nothing in here,” she said. “It looks like admin.”
Nate sighed. “I didn’t know we were going to have to do an escape room as well as solving a murder today,” he complained.
Laura chuckled. “Well, the door’s open, so I don’t think this counts,” she said. She cast another look around the room, trying to think. “It has to be in here somewhere, doesn’t it? Cortez said there’s only a car key and a house key on the keychain she was found with. Unless the killer took the key to the file cabinet, it has to be in here.”
“Right, or she wouldn’t have been able to access her own files,” Nate said. He had a thoughtful look on his face. “I’m not ready to give up and assume it’s been taken yet. Let’s keep looking.”
“Look where?” Laura raised her hands in frustration. “It’s all just books about psychology and stupid ornaments!”
“Well, maybe we can figure it out somehow,” Nate said. “They loved puzzles, right?”
“Right…” Laura glanced around. What was it Nate had just said – that this was like being in an escape room?
What did they do in escape rooms?
She looked at the shelf closest to the desk. It was full of books about psychology: Unlocking the Inner Secrets of the Self, New CBT Techniques for the Modern City, Case Studies: A Look into Near Death Psychosis…
Wait. Unlocking secrets? Laura grabbed the book and then paused. Was that… a clunk she’d heard?
Laura opened the front cover of the book and looked inside. It was hollow, with a cut-out box rather than actual pages. In the middle of it all was a small silver key.
“Thank God for that,” Nate grinned. “You’re lucky today. Make sure to touch as much stuff as possible in case you get a vision.”
Laura rolled her eyes at him and took the key out. It had nothing to do with luck. “Let’s just see if it actually fits the lock before we start to celebrate,” she said. She tried it in the file cabinet’s lock and turned it – and with an audible click, all four of the drawers rocked very slightly, released from their trapped positions.
“Can we celebrate now?” Nate grinned, coming over to stand beside her.
Laura opened one of the drawers fully and thumbed through the files inside it, suppressing a groan. “Only if your preferred mode of celebration is to go through hundreds of files about therapy patients,” she said.
“What a wonderful coincidence,” Nate deadpanned, reaching in and grabbed a whole bunch of the files at once and taking them over to a small coffee table in front of a sofa.
Laura grabbed the rest from the drawer and thumped them down heavily on Jessika Granger’s desk. She sat down in the chair, casting a look over her shoulder at the other three drawers they hadn’t even opened yet in despair, and opened the first one to begin reading.
Each of Jessika’s patient files was well-organized into a standard structure, which was a plus. There was a front page with a photograph, some basic information and contact details, and a diagnosis with space for medication details. These had been filled in with a looping hand, which was much easier to read than that of many medical professionals Laura had come across. That was another blessing.
Thank you, Jessika Granger, Laura thought, and began to read.
The files all told a very similar story. Almost all the patients that Jessika took on, just as Ginny had told them, were involved in some kind of terrible accident or had a medical emergency that left them at risk of losing their lives. As a result, they’d ended up with mostly diagnoses of PTSD: flashbacks, new anxieties and fears, intrusive thoughts, nightmares. Almost all of them, too, had undertaken courses of CBT, just like Nate had predicted.
Every file seemed to have the same arc. They came to Jessika, she diagnosed and treated them, and they got better. Some of them were managing their symptoms well enough to leave her service after months, others after years, but most of the files appeared to be closed. Only a handful were current patients – which made sense, given that Jessika was working alone and only had so many available hours in her workday.
“This is useless,” Laura complained, dropping the last file onto the pile, all of them unhelpful. “All I’m getting from this is that she was a really great therapist who managed to cure almost everyone she met.”
“I don’t think it’s a case of curing when it comes to this kind of mental health issue,” Nate said mildly, flipping through another page of the file he was reading. “It’s more ongoing treatment until it reaches a manageable level.”
“You know what I mean,” Laura sighed. She dumped her pile back into the drawer, opened the one below it, and groaned. It was just as full as the first. “This is going to take us all day.”
Nate picked up his cell phone without taking his eyes away from the file, glanced at the screen once to check where the buttons were, and the put it to his ear. “Hi, Sergeant Cortez? Yeah, we’re at the therapist’s office. Yeah, Jessika Granger. If you could send a couple of detectives over to help us go through some files, that would be appreciated. Mhm. Thanks.”
He put the phone down without missing a beat in turning the page of the file, carrying on as if he hadn’t even paused in the first place.
Laura watched him for a second and then sighed. He was right, obviously, about that being the best course to take in order to ensure they got through all the files quickly. Maybe she just wasn’t used to working in a city where they had a force capable enough of doing these kinds of tasks. She definitely wasn’t used to having her own taskforce. They only got to bring in a team when things were really difficult and they’d been working on it for a while, which never happened for Laura and Nate.
Delegating was, apparently, not part of her skillset. It hadn’t even occurred to her as a possibility.
The detectives must have been nearby already because Laura had only managed to get through three more files before there was a knock at the door. She got up to answer it, honestly glad of an excuse to not be looking at the files for a moment because it was already feeling like her brain was going to melt out of her ears. Nate, on the other hand, had barely stirred at the sound of someone at the door. He was completely absorbed in the files.
Laura opened the door to see the two detectives she had requested – Cortez had sent frat bro cop and princess cop, which made her nervous. She hoped that she was wrongly judging books by their covers. If their personality types matched their looks, they might not end up making it quicker to get through the work after all.
“Hi,” she said, anyway. She didn’t bother trying to greet them by name – she knew there was a very low chance that she was going to get them right. “Come in. We’re checking through the patient files for signs of anyone who had violent tendencies, who had a grudge against Granger or was disgruntled with her services, anyone who showed worryingly obsessive behavior towards her, that kind of thing.”
“We’ll get right on it,” princess detective replied, dropping onto the sofa that was clearly normally used for patients as frat boy detective followed Laura to the file cabinet to grab some.
Laura sat back down at the desk, but she found her attention wandering now that she knew there was someone else going through the paper files. Maybe she would have more luck doing something else, like… looking through the computer, for example.
She placed her files on the coffee table for the others to go through and then booted the machine up, waiting for it to load impatiently. She flipped through the notebooks on Granger’s desk and found nothing – only torn-out pages. She traced the outline of letters on the uppermost page of one of them and thought she could make out general patient notes: Brian finding more success with new techn. – call with mother – no nightmares 2 mos – anxiety at work.
So, if she was reading things correctly, Granger’s method had been to make pen and paper notes during the session, then type them up, print them out for the files, and tear off and throw away the originals. No; Laura saw a shredder by the desk. She shredded her original notes to preserve client confidentiality. She was conscientious. Laura wondered if she would be turning in her grave – or, at least, turning in her drawer at the morgue – over everyone going through the files now.
The computer screen blinked to life – showing a login box requiring a password. Of course it did. Laura drummed her fingers on the desk for a minute, thinking. Granger was a sensible type and very security oriented. And yet, in a room that was very carefully devoid of her own personality, there was one personal object in sight. It was a photograph of herself and Ginny on their wedding day, both of them smiling in ivory gowns with floral crowns. They were standing next to a sign: J & G – 8/29/. One of their dresses covered the year, but that was enough to guess.
Laura typed in ‘Ginny829’ and held her breath.
The screen cleared onto a desktop, and she gave herself a victory grin.
She started clicking through folder after folder on the computer, to the background noise of the others turning their pages in a symphony of gentle swishing that seemed to go on so constantly they couldn’t possibly be reading everything properly. Laura stopped looking into the patient folders after a cursory examination of a few revealed them only to contain the same information Granger had ultimately printed out for the files anyway.
Another file that beckoned was interesting: some kind of briefing document, it looked like, saved onto the desktop directly. Laura opened it up and realized it was a list of her policies as a therapist. She scanned down it, seeing directives about how to make payment, what to do if you needed to miss a session…
And then, halfway down the list, a note that made Laura groan out loud.
“What is it?” Nate asked, his attention snapping to her immediately.
“I found her policy for new patients,” Laura said, spinning the chair around to look at the three others in the room. “She doesn’t take on patients with a history of violent or criminal behavior.”
There was a heavy sighing all around the room.
“That doesn’t mean we won’t find anything,” Princess detective pointed out. “They might have become violent or obsessive after she started treating them.”
Nate shrugged. “She’s right. We should still keep looking.”
“I agree, but I’m less optimistic,” Laura said. She turned back to clicking around on the computer. There was an email inbox which was depressingly neat and tidy: it looked like Granger only used it for patient communications, and almost everything was incredibly benign. Booking and rebooking appointments, sending copies of files or instructions for certain therapeutic strategies, alerting her whole patient list of an upcoming vacation she was taking.
None of it indicated any level of problem. The emails – both the ones sent and the ones received – all seemed to be polite and even formal in tone. According to everything she read, Laura supposed that Granger had never had an argument with a single patient in her entire time as a therapist.
All of which left them precisely nowhere.
Laura sighed, rubbing her temples.
“Nothing in my files,” Nate spoke up at last, breaking the studious silence.
“Nothing here, either,” Princess detective replied, apparently having just finished hers at the same time.
There was a long silence. Laura spun the chair and joined both Nate and Princess in watching Frat Bro finish the last file he was going through. He finally put it onto the pile with the others, sighing.
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