But see, that was the thing. That was what he knew set him apart, made him a better friend than most. The fact that he valued every single moment with his friends so much. That he treated every time they went out together or saw one another as a special occasion.

  He had so much to talk about with his best friend. They didn’t have enough chances to talk. They never had. That was the way of life, always something or someone getting in the way.

  Well, tonight, nothing was going to get in the way. He had made a whole plan to make sure of that.

  Tonight they would be able to talk as much as they wanted. And every night after this, too. They would never be interrupted again. That was the beauty of his plan.

  Because when you had a best friend, someone who was really important to you, you had to make sure that you had all the opportunities in the world to appreciate and value them as much as you could. Life was too short to spend it without the people you loved.

  He’d only decided that recently, although he knew how true it was as soon as the thought settled in his mind. You had to spend time with the people you loved, and if there were barriers in the way that would stop that from happening, you simply had to do all you could to remove them.

  He’d done it twice before. He would do it again.

  He would do anything for his best friend.

  Even if that best friend was never really going to know all that he had done, all that he had sacrificed. It wasn’t about that. You didn’t do things for people in order to receive their thanks. You did it because you loved them and you knew they deserved it.

  He straightened his tie in the mirror. Yes, tonight he was going to make sure that he and his best friend had the time of their lives – and that the party would never stop again.

  He took one last look, finally satisfied that he looked good enough to call on his best friend, and then gathered his tools. He stepped out the front door and locked it behind him, glancing around the neighborhood. No one was going to notice him. He wasn’t afraid of that.

  No one ever did.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Laura stared at Dr. Vincent Usipov, sitting across from her in the precinct’s interview room, and mentally dared him to say it again.

  “Where were you yesterday evening, after you finished your sessions for the day?”

  “No comment.”

  Laura felt her teeth grinding together against her will. The therapist was outwardly cool and calm, even though she could sense the undercurrent of furious anger rolling off him like a storm cloud.

  Suspects like him were hard to break. They knew all the tricks. Not only that, but they could read Laura and Nate, sitting beside her, just as easily as they could read one of their patients. It was hard to bluff, trick, or phase them. It was hard to make them blurt out something they didn’t want to say.

  Something he had proven over what felt like a day of interrogation, but had really been more like thirty minutes. Usipov was so coolly confident he hadn’t even asked for a lawyer again.

  That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try her damn hardest to get him to confess what he’d done, though.

  “We have your patient log,” Laura said, picking up a tablet wrapped in protective plastic and waving it at him. “We know your last appointment was at five in the evening. Where did you go after that?”

  “No comment.”

  Laura tried not to let anything show on her face. She sighed as if she was bored and leaned back in her chair. “You know there’s CCTV outside your office building, don’t you?” she asked, almost casually. “And you know that we can use that to see when you got into your car, and then follow camera footage across the road network to see where you drove. You might as well tell us now.”

  “No comment.”

  Laura pinched the bridge of her nose, sighed again in spite of herself, and decided on a different tack. “Look. I get that you’re not our biggest fans right now. But this isn’t about us, or about you, or even about Stanley. This is about two of your patients who have lost their lives. Been murdered. Now, you can continue acting like a suspect, or you can act like a therapist who cares for his patients and actually talk to us. Which is it going to be?”

  Usipov hesitated. She saw it in his face: she’d got to him a little bit. Just a little bit. But that was a start.

  “You said former patients, before,” he said, surprising her by not repeating his usual words. “How do you know they were my patients, if it was ages ago?”

  “I didn’t say anything about how much time had passed,” Laura replied. “I called them former patients because they’re dead. They aren’t anyone’s patients now. We know they were both working with you because they both have your number as a frequent repeated fixture in their call logs, over the last few months.”

  Dr. Usipov sat up straight. Beside Laura, Nate flinched as if he was about to physically intervene. When Usipov didn’t try anything further, Nate relaxed. “You mean they’re current patients?” he asked, his face going into a very different expression from the calm mask he’d been wearing. He actually looked concerned – worried. “Who?”

  “Kenya Lankenua,” Laura said, watching his face carefully for his reaction. He seemed to crumple a little. “And John Wiggins.”

  There: complete shock and sorrow. The doctor was good, but Laura didn’t think he was faking it. Either he’d had no idea those patients of his were dead, or he was a much better actor than she had him pegged for.

  “Oh, God,” he muttered, staring down at the table, his eyes moving from side to side as he processed the information. “Oh, no. John was doing so well. We’d just turned a corner. And Kenya – oh, God. She had her whole life ahead of her.”

  “Are you going to answer our questions, now?” Laura asked.

  Dr. Usipov shifted in his seat, looking up. His whole demeanor had changed, his face dropping open, his shoulders drooping. “Last night I went to stay with a friend of mine. A female friend, if you catch my drift. It’s a new thing – we’ve only spent a few nights together. I can give you her name and number, and the roads I drove along to get there, if that will help speed up the process.”

  “Thank you, yes,” Laura said, spinning her notebook around and pushing it towards him, open on a blank page. She’d pass the information on to the local police via Captain Ortega as soon as they were done with the interview, get it checked out. Just because he was acting like he was cooperating now, didn’t mean he wasn’t lying through his teeth. “Can you tell me if there was any link between the two victims, anything they might have disclosed that would put them together in any way.”

  Usipov thought for a moment, tapping his lip. “Well, yes,” he said, opening his eyes wide in alarm. “They’re both linked to me. You don’t think any more of my patients are in danger, do you?”

  “What makes you ask that?” Nate said.

  “Well, it can’t be a coincidence, can it?” Usipov asked. “They’re both my patients. And no, there wasn’t anything else they had in common. They had totally different lives, totally different issues. John was depressed, but Kenya was struggling with self-confidence and shyness. Two very different afflictions.”

  “There wasn’t any other resource or service that you would normally refer your patients to, for example?” Laura asked. It was always worth asking. “Perhaps you sent them to get medication from the same pharmacy, or referred them to a massage therapist to work out physical tension, or sent them to a GP…?”

  “No, not at all,” Usipov shook his head. “I wouldn’t. There’s no connection between the issues they were dealing with, so the same solution wouldn’t fit both of them. Besides, the only ‘cure’ I believe in is the talking cure – therapy. And that’s what I provide for them. Look, do you think my other patients could be in danger? Don’t I have a duty to warn them?”

  Normally, Laura wasn’t against telling people to stay on their toes – but what would it achieve in this case? They had no idea if the killer was exclusively going after his patients, and if they were, they didn’t know what criteria he was using. They still hadn’t fully established, until his alibi was checked out, that Usipov himself wasn’t the murderer. And even if the third victim turned out to be one of his patients, too, Laura didn’t know what kind of precautions to tell them to take. They hadn’t worked out where the killer attacked his victims, how he attacked them, whether he got them in the alley or brought them there afterwards somehow.

  “I wouldn’t jump the gun on that just yet,” Laura said. “First, let’s talk about these victims. John, first.”

  “Alright. What do you need to know?”

  “Anything you can tell us about him,” Laura said. “You said he was suffering from depression.”

  “Yes, it had plagued him for a good few years before he made the decision to come to me,” Usipov said. “He told me that when his wife announced she wanted a divorce, it took away the one thing he wanted to live for. He was suicidal for a while. He would call me whenever he was at a particularly low point, and we had our phone sessions as well.”

  “What about when he came into the office?” Nate asked.

  Usipov looked up at him in surprise. “No, he never came in.”

  Laura blinked. “You never met him face to face?”

  Usipov shook his head. “Some people can’t,” he said. “Either through social anxiety, or because they can’t get out of the house, or because their lives are just too busy. John was working two jobs to try to make ends meet. He’d lost his former position around the time of the divorce being initiated, and he was worried he wouldn’t be able to afford a lawyer. But, he said, the need for therapy to keep him alive was greater than that. I gave him a discounted rate so we could continue talking over the phone, rather than charging full price.”

  That shed a new light on things.

  If Usipov had never even met his patient in person, then Laura believed more and more strongly that he wasn’t the man they were looking for. Of course, he could be lying once again – but it was too easy to check, with the CCTV and his patient records all available to them.

  “And Kenya?”

  “I never met her, either,” Usipov said. “She was also very busy, and then there was the shyness. Sometimes I would struggle to hear what she was saying over the phone. We exclusively called and always exactly at the time of her appointment. She was very punctual and respectful. Never made a mistake. Actually, that was one of the things we were working on – trying to get her to see that it was alright to be a little messy sometimes.”

  Laura thought for a moment. She reached into her file, tilting it up so Usipov couldn’t see, and then glanced at Nate with a raised eyebrow. He quirked his eyebrow back at her, which she took to mean well, might as well try it. Permission granted, she pulled the photographs she’d been touching out of the file and placed them onto the table, facing towards Usipov.

  The two crime scene shots: Kenya and John, both posed with their mannequins. “What can you tell us about this?”

  Usipov blinked, and his face went a funny shade of gray as he looked down at the photographs. He clearly had never seen anything like this before – not just the strange poses, but the fact that the people in the shots were dead. People he had known. Laura supposed it must have been a shock, if you weren’t used to it.

  “That’s…” He seemed to gather himself, giving his head a small shake and then frowning at the photographs again. “This kind of scene – I take it that’s not very usual in murders.”

  “Not at all,” Laura said. “This is clearly a very deliberate staging. What do you think the killer might be trying to say?”

  Usipov mulled over the pictures for a moment. “It’s disturbing,” he said. “But the way John’s posed – the mannequin almost makes me think of… well, me. A listener, someone who is there in a professional capacity to try to make him feel better.”

  “What about Kenya?” Laura pressed.

  “I didn’t have any kind of relationship with her that would prompt this kind of staging,” Usipov said right away. Laura had to resist the urge to roll her eyes. He wasn’t much of a psychologist if the only thing he could see was how the world related back to himself, rather than being able to put himself in someone else’s shoes. “I don’t really know what it means. Maybe it’s about being in a relationship with Kenya. Have you looked into her boyfriend?”

  “Yes,” Laura said, resisting the urge to snap of course at the end. “Do you think it could relate to the fact that he cheated on her?”

  Usipov stared at her for a moment. “He cheated?”

  It was Laura’s turn to be surprised. “She didn’t talk about that in your sessions?”

  “No,” Usipov said. “I knew they had broken up recently. Actually, our recent sessions focused on that a lot. She wanted to understand why he had broken it off with her. According to her, it came out of the blue. She said she’d done everything right – this was part of her issue, you see. She had the feeling she had to do everything exactly correctly, and when she didn’t get what she perceived as an appropriate reward, she would obsess over any small mistake she had made. This would then fuel again her perception of just rewards, and support her perfectionism, to the point of it being neurotic.”

  Something clicked in Laura’s head. The boyfriend, Pete, had been so remorseful and upset about Kenya’s death and his cheating prior to it. He would now never be able to confess the truth to her or explain why he had wanted to break it off. That was why he was so guilty. Not just because he’d ended the relationship, but because he’d done it with a lie.

  Still, neither Pete Yalling nor Vincent Usipov remained as suspects – which meant that they were running out of leads faster than they were finding them.

  Laura sighed.

  “We’re going to access your patient list,” she said. “With your permission, I think it is best that we warn as many of them as we can, after all. We’ll have some detectives from the local PD call each of them individually and let them know about the potential threat, just in case these murders are connected to your practice in some way.”

  A drawn, harrowed look passed over Usipov’s face. “I hope I don’t lose any patients,” he said. A moment later, the look turned to one of horror. “I mean, or that anyone else dies, of course! I just – well, this is my livelihood, you know.”

  “Of course,” Nate drawled, with complete deadpan seriousness. He shifted, and Laura did the same, gathering up the photos and her file. “You’re free to go home, Dr. Usipov. But please don’t go far. Remember, the same precautions should also apply to yourself. My advice would be to take all of your sessions over the phone from home until this case is solved – and keep your door locked.”

  Usipov nodded grimly, his face pale. As she stood to leave, Laura was already putting him out of her mind, dismissing him now that he was no longer useful to the case. He clearly couldn’t even help by psychoanalyzing the killer any further than the basic observations she’d already been able to make, herself.

  And there were far more serious things to focus on than whether he was going to lose his business as a result of the panic.

  Because if Usipov wasn’t the killer, then the killer had to still be out there somewhere – and Laura had a growing uneasy feeling that it wouldn’t be too long before they were looking at another body posed next to a mannequin.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Nate blew out a breath in the safety of the corridor, where no one could hear them. He and Laura were walking back through the precinct – but they’d come to a halt, realizing they had nowhere in mind to go. They hadn’t yet set up an office or desk space with the locals, and they hadn’t made a plan for what to do next.

  “Well?” he said, turning to look at her. “What do you think, next? Morgue? I don’t know if we’ll learn anything new from the bodies, but it could be worth a shot, even just to get a feel for the killer.”

  “No,” Laura said decisively. “I want to see the mannequins.”

  There was a moment of confusion – what could the mannequins tell them beyond what they could already see in the photographs? – but then the penny dropped.

  She’d told him, hadn’t she? She needed to touch something connected to the killer or the forthcoming events in order to get a vision. She needed something that was physically connected to the case. And these mannequins were clearly central.

  Nate’s heart was thumping wildly, even though all they were doing was standing still in a corridor. It was stupid, but so far he hadn’t really had to be confronted with these visions of hers. Even when she’d used one to save his life, he hadn’t been there when she had the actual vision.

  “I’ll come with you,” he said, his tongue feeling thick in his throat. Even if he was nervous – no, afraid – to really witness her psychic ability in action, he had to. This wasn’t like seeing her blank out for a second and then carry on. This would be watching her turn it on deliberately, trying to make it happen. And when she did, there would be no way for his rational mind to hold on any longer to the thought that maybe, just maybe, all of this was made up.

  Seeing it happen in real time, from start to finish, and having it affect the outcome of a case – that was going to be hard to take.

  All the same, he knew that if he was ever going to be as comfortable around her as he used to be, he was going to need it.

  “Alright,” Laura nodded. A hundred things passed between them in a glance, as they always did. She knew what he was saying: that he wanted to see it happen. And he knew that she was accepting that. In many ways, he guessed it was going to be just as weird for her to let him in on the process as it would be for him to see it.

  “I guess they’ll be in the evidence room,” Nate said. He had a feeling of wanting to take charge, to lead the way, so that at least he was in control of something. Underneath it all was a certain protectiveness, too. He’d always felt that, as the physically stronger of the two of them, it was his job to protect Laura from things that might try to harm her. Being law enforcement, unfortunately, getting put in the way of harm was sort of an occupational hazard. He couldn’t shield her from this. It was all inside her own head. The only thing he could really do would be to make sure there was nothing in her way.

 

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