Dr. Diane Bourne’s office was housed on the second floor of a brownstone on Fairfield Street, in between a gallery specializing in mid-thirteenth-century East African kitchen pottery and a place that stitched bumper stickers on canvas and then sewed them to magnets for easy refrigerator attachment.
The office was done up in some kind of Laura Ashley meets the Spanish Inquisition decor. Plump armchairs and couches with floral stitching bore an inviting sense of softness that was all but overwhelmed by their colors—blood reds and pitch ebonies, carpets that matched, paintings on the wall by Bosch and Blake. I’d always thought a psychiatrist’s room was supposed to say Please, tell me your problems, not Please, don’t scream.
Diane Bourne was in her late thirties and so svelte I had to resist the urge to call in some takeout, force-feed her lunch. Dressed in a white sleeveless sheath dress that rode high up her throat and low to her knee, she stood out amid all the dark like a ghost floating through the moors. Her hair and skin were so pale it was hard to see where one began and the other ended, and even her eyes were the translucent gray of an ice storm. The tight dress, instead of making her look scrawny, seemed to accentuate the few soft parts of her, the flesh that swelled just slightly over her calves and hips and shoulders. The overall effect, I thought, as she took a seat behind her smoked glass desk, was of an engine—sleek, well-tuned, revving at every red light.
As soon as we took our seats at the desk, Dr. Diane Bourne moved a small metronome to her left, so that her view of us was completely unobstructed, and lit a cigarette.
She gave Angie a small, dark smile. “Now, what can I do for you?”
“We’re looking into the death of Karen Nichols,” Angie said.
“Yes,” she said, and sucked a small white cloud of smoke back into her lungs, “Mr. Kenzie mentioned as much on the phone.” She tapped a modicum of ash into a crystal ashtray. “He was rather”—her mist-gray eyes met mine—“cagey about anything else.”
“Cagey,” I said.
She took another small hit off the cigarette and crossed her long legs. “You like that?”
“Oh, yeah.” I raised my eyebrows up and down several times.
She gave me a wisp of a smile and turned back to Angie. “As I hope I made quite clear to Mr. Kenzie, I have no inclination to discuss anything in regards to Miss Nichols’s therapy.”
Angie snapped her fingers. “Nuts.”
Diane Bourne swiveled back to me. “Mr. Kenzie, however, intimated over the—”
“Intimated?” Angie said.
“Intimated, yes, over the phone that he had information which could—do I have this right, Mr. Kenzie?—pose questions as to potential ethical violations in my handling of Ms. Nichols.”
I met her arched eyebrow with two of my own. “I wouldn’t say I was quite so—”
“Articulate?”
“Verbose,” I said. “But, otherwise, Dr. Bourne, that was the gist, yes.”
Dr. Bourne moved the ashtray a bit to her left so that we could see the small tape recorder behind it. “It’s my legal duty to inform you that this conversation is being recorded.”
“Cool,” I said. “Let me ask you—where’d you get that? Sharper Image, right? I’ve never seen one look so chic.” I looked at Angie. “You?”
“I’m still back at ‘intimated,’” she said.
I nodded. “That was a good one. I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but jeez.”
Diane Bourne shaved some excess ash off against the Waterford crystal. “You two have a very nice act going.”
Angie slugged my shoulder and I swept a hand at the back of her head that she ducked at the last moment. Then we both smiled at Dr. Diane Bourne.
She took another tiny toke off her cigarette. “Sort of a Butch and Sundance thing without the homosexual subtext.”
“Usually we get the Nick and Nora thing,” I said to Angie.
“Or the Chico and Groucho,” Angie reminded me.
“With the homosexual subtext, though. But that Butch and Sundance thing.”
“Quite the compliment,” Angie said.
I turned away from Angie and leaned my elbows on Dr. Bourne’s desk, looked past the swing of the metronome and into her pale, pale eyes. “Why would one of your patients have your session notes in her possession, Doctor?”
She didn’t say anything. She sat very still, her shoulders hunched very slightly, as if preparing for a sudden bite of cold air.
I leaned back in my chair. “Can you tell me that?”
She cocked her head to the left. “Would you repeat your question, please?”
Angie did so. I provided sign language.
“I don’t quite understand what you’re driving at.” She shaved off another sliver of ash in the crystal.
Angie said, “Is it common practice for you to take notes during sessions with your patients?”
“Yes. It’s common with most—”
“And is it your practice, Doctor, to then mail those notes to the patients they concern?”
“Of course not.”
“Then how,” Angie said, “did your notes for a session with Karen Nichols, dated April the sixth, 1994, end up in Miss Nichols’s possession?”
“I have no idea,” Dr. Bourne said with the barely patient air of a matron speaking to a child. “Possibly she took them herself during one of her visits.”
“You keep your files locked?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then how could Karen break into them?”
Her chiseled face slackened along the jawline and her lips parted. “She couldn’t,” she said eventually.
“Which would suggest,” Angie said, “that you or someone from your office gave confidential, potentially damaging information to a conceivably unbalanced client.”
Dr. Bourne closed her mouth and her jaw tightened. “Hardly, Ms. Gennaro. I seem to remember that we had a break-in here a few—”
“Excuse me?” Angie leaned forward. “You seem to remember a break-in?”
“Yes.”
“So there’d be a police report.”
“A what?”
“A police report,” I said.
“No. Nothing of value seemed to be missing.”
“Just confidential files,” I said.
“No. I never said—”
Angie said, “Because I would think your other clients would expect to be notified if—”
“Ms. Gennaro, I don’t think—”
“—confidential documents relating to the most personal aspects of their lives were in the hands of an unknown third party.” Angie looked over at me. “Don’t you agree?”
“We could let them know,” I said. “Purely as a public service.”
Dr. Bourne’s cigarette had turned to a curled finger of white ash in the crystal tray. As I watched, the finger collapsed.
“Logistically,” Angie said, “that would be tough.”
“Nah,” I said. “We just sit outside in our car. Every time we see someone rich who’s approaching the building and looks a little funny in the head, we assume they’re a client of Dr. Bourne’s and—”
“You will not.”
“—we approach and tell them about the break-in.”
“In the interest of the public good,” Angie said. “People’s right to know. Gosh, we’re kinda swell that way, aren’t we?”
I nodded. “No coal in our stockings this Christmas.”
Diane Bourne lit a second cigarette and watched us through the smoke, her pale eyes flat and seemingly nonplussed. “What do you want?” she said, and I detected just the hint of a throb in her vocal cords, a slight ticking not unlike the metronome.
“For starters,” I said, “we want to know how those session notes took flight from your office.”
“I haven’t the faintest.”
Angie lit her own cigarette. “Get the faintest, lady.”
Diane Bourne uncrossed her legs and tucked them to the side in that effortless way all women can and no man is remotely capable of. She held her cigarette up by her temple and gazed at Blake’s Los on the east wall, a painting that was about as calming as a plane crash.
“I had a temp secretary a couple of months ago. I sensed—no proof, mind you, just a sense—that she had been going through the files. She was only with me a week, so I didn’t give it much thought after she left.”
“Her name?”
“I don’t remember.”
“But you have records.”
“Of course. I’ll have Miles get them for you on your way out.” Then she smiled. “Oh, I forgot, he’s not here today. Well, I’ll make a note to have him send that information to you.”
Angie was sitting two feet away, but I could feel her pulse quicken and her blood warm along with my own.
I indicated the outer office with a backward jerk of my thumb. “Miles would be who?”
She suddenly looked as if she regretted ever mentioning him. “He’s, ah, just someone who works for me part-time as a secretary.”
“Part-time,” I said. “So he has another job?”
She nodded.
“Where?”
“Why?”
“Curious,” I said. “It’s an occupational hazard. Humor me.”
She sighed. “He works at Evanton Hospital in Wellesley.”
“The psych hospital?”
“Yes.”
“Doing what?” Angie asked.
“He’s their records clerk.”
“And how long has he worked here?”
“Why do you ask?” Another small cock of the head.
“I’m trying to ascertain who has access to your files, Doctor.”
She leaned forward, tapped some ash into the tray. “Miles Lovell has been in my employ for three and a half years, Mr. Kenzie, and to answer your next question, No, he would have no reason to remove session notes from Karen Nichols’s file and mail them to her.”
Lovell, I thought. Not Brewster. Uses a false last name, but sticks to his first name out of comfort. Not a bad move if your name is John. Kind of dumb, though, if you name’s somewhat less common.
“Okay.” I smiled. Picture of the satisfied detective. No more questions here about ol’ Miles Lovell. He’s right as rain in my book, ma’am.
“He’s the most trustworthy assistant I’ve ever had.”
“I’m sure he is.”
“Now,” she said, “have I answered all your questions?”
My smile widened. “Not even close.”
“Tell us about Karen Nichols,” Angie said.
“There’s very little to tell…”
Half an hour later she was still talking, ticking off the details of Karen Nichols’s psyche with all the consistency and emotion of that metronome of hers.
Karen, according to Dr. Diane Bourne, had been a classic bipolar manic depressive. She had over the years taken prescriptions for lithium, Depakote, and Tegretol, as well as the Prozac I’d found in Warren’s barn. Whether hers was a condition mandated by genetics became largely irrelevant when her father died and his killer shot himself in front of Karen. Following textbook patterns, according to Dr. Bourne, Karen, far from acting out as a child or an adolescent, had been preternaturally well behaved, molding herself into the role of perfect daughter, sister, and eventually, girlfriend.
“She modeled herself,” Dr. Bourne said, “like a lot of girls, after television ideals. Repeats mostly in Karen’s case. That was part of her pathology—to live as much in the past and an idealized America as she could, so she idolized Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards and also all those mothers from fifties and sixties sitcoms—Barbara Billingsley, Donna Reed, Mary Tyler Moore again as Dick Van Dyke’s wife. She read Jane Austen and missed the irony and anger of Austen’s work entirely. She chose instead to see her work as fantasies of how a good girl’s life could be successful if she lived correctly and opted to marry well like Emma or Elinor Dashwood. So this became the goal, and David Wetterau, her Darcy or Rob Petrie, if you will, was the linchpin to a happy life.”
“And when he was turned into a vegetable…”
“All those demons of hers, repressed for twenty years, came back to roost. I had long suspected that were Karen’s model life ever to suffer a serious fissure, her breakdown would manifest sexually.”
“Why would you suspect that?” Angie asked.
“You must understand that it was her father’s sexual liaisons with the wife of Lieutenant Crowe which predicated Lieutenant Crowe’s extreme act of violence and the death of Karen’s father.”
“So Karen’s father had an affair with his best friend’s wife.”
She nodded. “That’s what the shooting was all about. Add in certain aspects of the Electra complex, which at six years old would have surely been blooming, if not raging, in Karen, her guilt over her father’s death, and her conflicted sexual feelings for her brother, and you have a recipe for—”
“She had sexual relations with her brother?” I said.
Diane Bourne shook her head. “No. Emphatically, no. But, like a lot of women with an older stepbrother, she did, during adolescence, first recognize symptoms of her sexual awakening in terms of Wesley. The male ideal in Karen’s world, you see, was a dominating figure. Her natural father was a military man, a warrior. Her stepfather was domineering in his own right. Wesley Dawe was given to violent, psychotic episodes and, until his disappearance, was being treated with antipsychotic medication.”
“You treated Wesley?”
She nodded.
“Tell us about him.”
She pursed her lips and shook her head. “I think not.”
Angie looked at me. “Out to the car?”
I nodded. “Need to pick up a thermos of coffee, but then we’re good to go.”
We stood.
“Sit down, Ms. Gennaro, Mr. Kenzie.” Diane Bourne waved us down to our seats. “Jesus, you two don’t know when to quit.”
“Why we get the big bucks,” Angie said.
Dr. Bourne leaned back in her chair, parted the heavy curtains behind her, and looked out on the heat-choked brick of the building across Fairfield from her. The metallic roof of a tall truck bounced the hard sun back into her eyes. She dropped the curtain and blinked in the darkness of the room.
“Wesley Dawe,” she said, her fingers pinched over her eyelids, “was a very confused, angry young man the last time I saw him.”
“When was this?”
“Nine years ago.”
“And he was how old?”
“Twenty-three. His hatred of his father was total. His hatred of himself was only slightly less so. After he attacked Dr. Dawe that time, I recommended he be involuntarily committed for both his family’s well-being and his own.”
“Attacked how?”
“He stabbed his father, Mr. Kenzie. With a kitchen knife. Oh, typical of Wesley, he botched the job. He aimed for the neck, I think, but Dr. Dawe managed to raise his shoulder in time, and Wesley ran from the house.”
“And when he was caught, you—”
“He was never caught. He disappeared that night. The night of Karen’s senior prom, actually.”
“And how did that affect Karen?” Angie asked.
“At the time? Not at all.” Diane Bourne’s eyes caught a glint of light slanting through the gap in the curtains behind her and the flat gray turned shiny alabaster. “Karen Nichols was powerful in her denial. It was her primary shield and her primary weapon. At the time, I think she said something to the effect of, ‘Oh, Wesley, he can’t seem to stop acting out,’ and then went on to speak in great detail about her prom.”
“Just like Mary Richards would,” Angie said.
“Very astute, Ms. Gennaro. Exactly like Mary Richards would. Accentuate the positive. Even to the detriment of your own psyche.”
“Back to Wesley,” I said.
“Wesley Dawe,” she said, exhausted now from our questions, “had a genius IQ and a weak, tortured psyche. It’s a potentially lethal combination. Maybe if he’d been allowed to mature into his late twenties with proper care, his intelligence would have been allowed to gain dominance over his psychosis and he would have led a so-called normal life. But when he was blamed for his baby sister’s death by his father, he snapped, and shortly thereafter, disappeared. It was a tragedy, really. He was such a brilliant boy.”
“It sounds like you admired him,” Angie said.
She leaned back in her chair, tilted her head toward the ceiling. “Wesley won a national chess tournament when he was nine. Think about that. Nine years old, he was better at something than any other child in the country under the age of fifteen. He had his first nervous breakdown at ten. He never played chess again.” She tilted her head forward, held us with those pale eyes. “He never played, period, again.”
She stood and her shimmering whiteness towered over us for a moment. “Let me see if I can find that temp’s name for you.”
She led us back into a rear office with a file cabinet and small desk, opened the file cabinet with a key, and riffled through it until she held up a piece of paper. “Pauline Stavaris. Lives—are you ready?”
“Pen in hand,” I said.
“Lives at Thirty-five Medford Street.”
“In Medford?”
“Everett.”
“Phone number?”
She gave it to me.
“I trust we’re done,” Diane Bourne said.
“Absolutely,” Angie said. “It was a pleasure.”
She led us back through her main office and then out to the foyer. She shook our hands.
“Karen wouldn’t have wanted this, you know.”
I stepped back from her. “Really?”
She waved at the foyer. “All this mess you’re stirring up. All this sullying of her reputation. She cared deeply about appearances.”
“What do you think her appearance was when the cops found her after a twenty-six-story swan dive? You tell me that, Doctor?”
She smiled tightly. “Goodbye, Mr. Kenzie, Ms. Gennaro. I trust I’ll never see either of you again.”
“Trust all you want,” Angie said.
“But don’t bet on it,” I said.