CHAPTER 27

Sitting with three strangers in the waiting room, I browse the headlines of today’s New York Times on my Kindle, because I refuse to touch any magazine left hanging around a doctor’s office. Even a psychiatrist’s.

I check my watch. I arrived a half hour early for my appointment, but forty-nine minutes later I’ve yet to see a single patient exit the office. My initial thought is that Dr. Damien Opono is fucking with my head.

It came to me last night, as I was flooring the Maserati through the dreamlike tunnel punched into the side of the mountain on H-3 on my way to see Erin Simms in Kaneohe, that I am about to break.

Get thee to a doctor of psychiatry, I told myself. So with my hands-free—yes, it’s finally a law here in Hawaii—I dialed Hoshi’s home number and asked her to set up an emergency appointment with the first psychiatrist on the island she could get in touch with at such a late hour. Thirty minutes later, Hoshi left a message on my cell saying that I had a ten o’clock appointment with Dr. Damien Opono in downtown Honolulu.

By the time Hoshi left said message, I was already in Kaneohe, melting inside Erin in the hot tub on her lanai, the jets like a third set of hands massaging us in the warm, dark night. When my lips moved from hers down to the nape of her long smooth neck, Erin’s soft moans soared like gulls over the bay and I knew that every thrust was putting us further at risk. But I didn’t care. I had dropped Miss Hawaii at her Ewa Beach home and raced across the island to make love to an accused mass murderer. Something, I realized as my heart thumped hard in my chest, is not quite right.

When my cell phone buzzes, I put both my thoughts and Kindle to sleep, then reach into my front pants pocket. The Caller ID reads RESTRICTED but I answer the call anyway. Just another occupational hazard.

“Mr. Corvelli, this is Isaac Cassel. Erin tells me we need to meet.”

“Where?”

“Waikiki?”

“All right. The Bleu Sharq on Kalakaua across from the beach. When?”

“Right now?”

“I’m on my way.”

Just as I stand, a woman with a bunch of balled-up, wet tissues steps out of Dr. Opono’s office.

“Mr. Corvelli,” the receptionist says from behind her desk, “Dr. Opono will see you now.”

“Sorry,” I say, returning the phone to my pocket. “Please tell Dr. Opono that I’m flattered but I’m afraid he’ll have to wait.”