Doctor Maggie Connolly’s office vibrated with the nervous energy of a Pomeranian going to see the vet about his balls.
J.D. blinked. “I really don’t like spiders.” The faded teardrop tattoo at the corner of her patient’s eye crinkled, like he was holding real emotion in the inked drop. Her work with the prisons was a job she inherited from her father, but this guy was mostly a marshmallow… if you ignored his controversial twenties. At least, that’s what the parole board had decided after her assessment. Maybe not the marshmallow part, exactly, but life would be more fun if all psychological states were described using dessert.
“That’s fair,” she said, adjusting her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose—very librarian meets barn owl. They went well with her dork-chic corduroys. “We can hold our sessions in the spare office, or I can refer you to another psychologist. My partner is excellent.” Owen would not appreciate her referring parolees his way; she’d referred Tristan Simms six months prior, and Simms had yet to make an appointment.
That hadn’t stopped Tristan from calling Maggie herself, but no doctor should treat a man they had less-than-professional dreams about. It might have been sexual attraction or merely a response to the highly stressful situation they’d found themselves in last year. Then, Tristan, her patient, had been the top suspect in a series of homicides.
She pushed her curly red hair off her forehead; the back of her neck was damp. Avoidance was the best course of action when it came to Tristan Simms. She was sure. Mostly.
J.D. cut his eyes at the tank behind her—at Fluffy. J.D. shook his head. “We can keep meeting here,” he said.
“A tough guy, eh?” It was a terrible New Jersey accent, but you didn’t get to be a first-class geek without taking some risks.
His shoulders stiffened; his chest puffed out. “Tougher than a bug.”
“Arachnid.” Right, that’s the information he came here for. She cleared her throat. “But perhaps we could explore what toughness means to you. Vulnerability is often a more accurate sign of strength.” Unlike, say, killing someone in a bar fight as J.D. had.
He frowned. It made the teardrop on his cheek lengthen in the early morning light. Tattoos didn’t age well. If she ever got a teardrop, she’d ink it on her shoulder where it would spread to look like a cancerous mole. At least she could use that to freak out her friends.
The session ate through the next hour, and by the time she walked J.D. to the front door and collapsed back into her chair, the sun had moved beyond the lower pane of the window to cast sharp blades of springtime warmth against the floor. It had been six months since her house burned to the ground, and she still occasionally felt the blistering heat of that night when the sun hit her skin. At least she’d fared better than the body in the garage.
It would have been hard to fare worse.
She dragged her gaze from the sun-soaked hardwood. She should call Reid. The detective, and Tristan’s half brother, had taken to picking her brain about his cases. But six months of history wouldn’t help once he realized she’d gotten J.D. out on parole. He was the one who’d put J.D. behind bars.
She hadn’t done anything wrong, of course, but…
Maggie sighed and reached for her cell, but she hadn’t even gotten it out of the drawer when it rang. Speak of the devil.
“Hey, Maggie, you free?” The words exploded from the earpiece before she had a chance to say hello. “I need to talk to you,” he barked.
I’m sure you do. She sat back in the chair and reached out to tap the bobblehead at the corner of her desk—Bert from Sesame Street nodded his support. “Listen, I know you’re irritated about the parole board’s decision, but they agreed with my assessment.”
“Wait… what?” A pause, then, “Oh, no, I don’t care about that—the guy served his time. Stupid to get that tattoo when he didn’t even kill a man on purpose. Posturing for the other inmates, I guess.” He snorted. “Idiot.”
This wasn’t about J.D.? Then why was he calling? “Coffee?” she said cautiously. The coffee shop up the road was their usual meeting place. They brewed a mean chai. “We can meet over my lunch hour if it needs to be today, but I’ve only got twenty minutes then. Or you can stop by the office this evening. My last session is over at four-thirty.”
Reid cleared his throat, then said something she couldn’t discern—muffled, as if he had covered the mouthpiece. “Tonight works,” he said finally, but the sharp edge on his voice remained. Definitely not a social call. “We won’t be finished processing by lunch.”
Processing? As in… evidence? “What’s going on, Reid?”
“I’ll explain when I get there. But I think I’ll need all the time you can spare today. You might be the only person who can help me.”
It was weird how much he sounded like his brother when he said it. They both acted as if she were the only shrink on the planet. “Okay. I’ll see you around five o’clock?”
Silence. Bert glared at her. She glanced at the phone’s screen—everything was fine on her end. Had Reid’s cell dropped the call?
“Reid? Are you okay?”
“No,” he said, but it came out a sigh. “I’m really not.”