The address Lyla Olsen gave Virgil turned out to be a two-story brick house off of Mack Avenue near the edge of Grosse Pointe. It was a neighborhood composed of quiet, tree-lined streets fronting big homes on quarter-acre lots.
“The psychiatry business must pay pretty well,” Virgil muttered to himself as he parked out front. When he pressed the bell, chimes bonged his arrival from somewhere deep inside.
“Marshal Quinn, please come in,” Lyla Olsen said and pulled the door open wide. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, maybe a woman in her fifties, thin with sharp features, hair short or maybe tightly packed in a bun. Whatever it was, this woman wasn’t it. Virgil figured her for someplace shy of forty, pretty, with honey hair just touching her shoulders, and a nicely rounded figure that her silk dress did nothing to hide.
Well, that explains the big house, he thought. A woman like this probably has a husband and three or four kids, maybe even a dog.
“I’ve cleared the dining-room table for us,” she said as she led him deeper into the house, then stopped in a formal room centered with an oak table surrounded by eight high-backed chairs. Through the arched doorway behind her Virgil caught a glimpse of the kitchen and a large backyard beyond.
“You have a beautiful home,” he said when he noticed her following his gaze, then he asked, “Do you have children?” and saw her smile fade.
“No, I live here alone,” Lyla answered in an almost embarrassed tone. “You must think it’s strange, such a big house for only one person.”
“No, it’s a lovely home,” Virgil said. “I’d live in a place like this if I could.”
“Are you married? — Oh, sorry, please sit down.” She waved him to the chair across from her in the middle of the table. Virgil took it and dropped his files on the oak surface a couple of places down.
“No, I’m not.” He tried to keep his tone casual but it sounded like an apology.
“Well, good for us,” Lyla said with forced brightness then changed the subject. “I picked up some lunch. There’s a very nice Italian restaurant nearby. Veal scallopini for you and a chicken Caesar and soup for me, if that’s all right.”
“It sounds terrific,” Virgil said, but she was already heading for the kitchen. A minute later she filled the table with glasses and plates.
“I’ve opened a Pellegrino.” She handed him a tall glass filled with ice and a slice of lemon.
“Thanks.” Virgil was starting to wonder where all this hospitality was going.
A moment later she sat down across from him.
“I thought we could eat and get acquainted before diving into the gruesome details of your murders,” she said, glancing at the pile of files.
“Sure.” Virgil stabbed one of the petite green beans with his fork. “Do you work with the police a lot?”
“No, no I don’t. My practice is rather specialized. It’s difficult to describe.”
“Well,” Virgil said, glancing around, “whatever it is, you must be very good at it.”
Lyla was silent for a moment, weighing Virgil’s comment.
“It’s a blessing and a curse,” she said at last then looked down and busied herself with her salad. “Sometimes I think I’m like King Midas,” she added, not looking up.
“What?”
“Oh, let’s talk about you. How do your parents feel about your working in law enforcement?”
“My father’s dead. He was a cop. He was killed in the line of duty when I was ten. My mother pretends I’m more of a paper-pusher in the federal bureaucracy than a field agent.”
“Because that’s what you told her,” Lyla replied.
“She’s happier that way.”
“Was your wife also unhappy about your job?”
“How did you know I was married?” Virgil asked, pausing in the middle of slicing off a piece of veal.
“I just assumed that a handsome man like you would have gotten married and you told me that you were single so I figured that there was a divorce somewhere along the way. Sorry, if I intruded. It’s a habit of my profession.” She gave him another nervous smile and turned back to her meal.
“No, it’s all right. It’s not a secret. . . . Actually, my wife, my ex-wife, hated my job. She was obsessed with the idea that because of me some band of criminals was going to come after her. She hated it so much that she ran away. I came home one day and she was gone. Poof,” Virgil said, his mind sliding back in time.
“How long ago was that?”
“A bit over nine years.”
“That must have been very painful.” Lyla’s expression suddenly turned serious, but Virgil didn’t notice. His attention was now far away.
“I wouldn’t have minded if it was only her, but she took our daughter with her,” he said bitterly.
“And you haven’t seen your daughter since,” Lyla replied, more a statement than a question.
“I’ll find her. One of these days I’ll find her.” Virgil’s mind snapped back to the present and he was surprised at the sadness he saw in Lyla’s eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to burden you with my problems. You must get that a lot. As soon as someone finds out that you’re a therapist, they blurt out all their troubles and want you to tell them how to fix their lives.” Virgil said it lightly, as if it were all a comical little concern.
“No, they don’t. I don’t meet many people, socially, and my clients . . . my practice doesn’t work that way.”
Lyla looked down and picked at her plate.
“Well, good. I’m glad people don’t pester you like that.” Virgil paused but she continued to stare at her food. “We’ve spent all this time talking about me. Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself.”
Lyla speared a fragment of chicken then thought better of it and put down her fork.
“All right,” she said, looking Virgil full in the face as if answering a challenge. “I’m thirty-seven years old. I’ve never been married. I make a quarter of a million dollars a year watching business negotiations and then telling my clients how much more money their opponent is willing to spend and which terms they really care about and which ones are only a bluff. I can read people’s emotions the way you can read a watch.” She stared at Virgil as if her outburst was a dare.
“I . . . ,” he began then drifted to a stop. “That’s what you meant about being like Midas, isn’t it? That you can’t turn off your gift.”
“Gift? There’s such a thing as seeing too much. . . . Physician, heal thyself,” she said, then looked down, and pushed her plate away. “I thought . . . . I’m sorry.”
“You’ve done nothing to be sorry for. I asked about you and you told me.”
“You’re very nice, but now I see that you’re not, that we could never . . . fit.” She took a breath then looked at Virgil’s mostly-empty plate. “Would you like some coffee and desert?”
“I’m good, thanks. It was a lovely lunch.”
Lyla forced her lips into a smile. “I’ll clear the dishes and then we can talk about your case.”
Virgil spent the next half hour describing the killers’ actions and answering Lyla’s almost constant stream of questions until, finally, she said, “All right. That’s enough,” and leaned back in her chair.
“What do you think?”
“They’re sociopaths, not psychopaths. For them there isn’t any right or wrong, just what they see as good or bad for them in the next few hours or days. They aren’t killing people because they enjoy it. They’re doing it for some other reason.”
“Some reason other than robbery?”
Lyla shrugged. “I don’t know. I can only tell you that somehow they think killing their victims benefits them. Their motives are financial or personal, not emotional or psychological. Is it possible that one of them has some physical characteristic, a missing limb, a peculiar voice, something that they’re afraid someone would recognize, something that could be used to identify them if anyone was left alive?”
“One of their victims survived and he didn’t notice anything like that.”
“Perhaps they were hired by a sadist or some other deviant who accompanies them and pays them to let him kill the victims.”
How does that help us catch them? Virgil thought but asked instead, “Is there anything else you can tell me about them?”
Lyla closed her eyes and thought for a moment.
“At least one of them is intelligent and very organized. The rest are probably just brutes. I would expect them to be spending large amounts of money and bragging about what they’ve done.”
“We’ve been watching for that but our CIs haven’t heard anything.”
“Then I’m sorry that I’ve wasted your time.”
“You haven’t. I appreciate your help. If you want to send the city a bill. . . .” Virgil gave her one of his new business cards.
“No, I don’t,” Lyla said but still accepted the card.
“Well.” Virgil started to rise.
“I’m not good with people,” Lyla said suddenly. “The real reason that I don’t have a regular practice is that I never know what to say, when to talk and when to keep my mouth shut. Psychiatrists have to know that, know how to keep their mouths shut.
“We’re not supposed to just tell a patient, ‘Your problem is this’ or ‘To feel better you have to do that’. We’re suppose to ask questions and sometimes bury little hints in the way we phrase them or in the tone of our voice in the hope that the patient will figure out the answers to his problems all on his own.
“The idea is that a patient will never change his life, change the way he sees the world, because of what someone else tells him; that he will only accept a painful truth and act on it if he discovers it on his own. Do you believe that’s true, Virgil?” Lyla asked with a sudden intensity and leaned toward him.
“I think things work better if you just say what needs to be said. At least that way it’s the other person’s choice if they want to listen or not.”
For the first time since he arrived Lyla gave him a genuinely pleased smile.
“You would make a terrible psychiatrist,” she told him. “If we just told people things then thirty or forty hours of billable time would be shrunk down to fifteen minutes. . . . But, personally, I’m glad to hear you say that.”
“Why?”
“Because I like you. That’s why I invited you here. I saw that video of you on YouTube and I saw what a handsome, honorable man you were, and I thought that maybe . . . but there I go saying the wrong thing again.”
“I’m very flattered. You’re a beautiful woman. Unfortunately, my job here is only temporary. I’ll be gone in a couple of months so there wouldn’t be much point in our starting anything up. Otherwise. . . .”
“That’s. . . , well, thank you. I told you that I can’t turn off my . . . ‘talent’ I suppose you would say. I just see things about people whether I want to or not. Would you like me to tell you what I see in you?”
Do I? Virgil asked himself, then the question, Is ignorance really bliss? morphed into, Am I such a coward that I’m afraid to hear what she has to say?
“I would appreciate that,” he said and wondered if he hadn’t just made a terrible mistake.
“All right.” In an instant Lyla’s face seemed to collapse into an emotionless mask. “One of the reasons you became a police officer is that you wanted to protect the world from people like the man who killed your father. You became a police officer to take over the job he started but that he wasn’t able to finish, the job your father gave his life to do – protecting the innocent.
“What you need to remember is that your badge and your gun are not who you are. They’re only symbols of what your father and now you stand for. Doing your job is the better part of you, but there’s a danger that you may allow what you do to become, in your mind, what you are, so you have to watch out for that.”
What? Virgil thought. Where did all that stuff come from? But she wasn’t done.
“On some level you’re struggling with feelings of abandonment. First, your father left you, then your wife left you, and then your daughter left you.”
Out of nowhere the thought, And Janet left me, jumped into his head.
“Of course, none of that is factually true. You father didn’t choose to leave you. He died. Your daughter didn’t choose to leave you. She was taken away against her will. Your wife did leave you, but that decision flowed from her disturbed personality, not from any fault of yours. Intellectually, you know all this, but knowing it and accepting it are sometimes two different things.
“Feelings of abandonment can lead to insecurity and guilt which in turn can fuel irrational or obsessive actions. If you cling to those emotions, to feelings of guilt and insecurity, then you may become a prisoner of obsessive and possibly destructive behavior.
“If you can emotionally understand that you have done nothing wrong, that you have not failed those who love you, then you can deal with what’s happened in your life. You have to accept that you’re not responsible for their leaving you, that you can remember them without letting their memory keep you from moving on with your life. . . . Wouldn’t it be wonderful having me as your girlfriend?” Lyla said, only half jokingly.
“I–”
“No, don’t say anything. Just put everything I’ve told you in the back of your head and we’ll pretend that none of this happened. Maybe someday it will mean something to you, or maybe I’m just . . . . What’s a polite word for ‘crazy’? Sorry. I told you I was a terrible psychiatrist.”
Before Virgil could speak Lyla stood and quickly led him to the door.