Every Dead Thing

“Frank select you personally?”

She looked puzzled. “Ye-es.”

“Get another job. He’s a deviant and he’s on his way out of business.”

I walked past her and entered Frank’s office while she took all this in. There was no patient in Frank’s consulting room, just the good doctor himself leafing through some notes on his desk. He didn’t look pleased to see me. His thin mustache curled in distaste like a black worm, and a red bloom spread from his neck to his high-domed forehead before disappearing into his brush of wiry black hair. He was tall, over six feet, and he worked out. He looked real good, but looks were as far as it went. There was nothing good about Fucking Frank Forbes. If he handed you a dollar, the ink would be running before it got to your wallet.

“Get the fuck out, Parker. In case you’ve forgotten, you can’t come barging in here anymore. You’re not a cop now and the force is probably all the richer for your absence.” He leaned toward the intercom button but his receptionist had already entered behind me.

“Call the police, Marcie. Better still, call my lawyer. Tell him I’m about to file for harassment.”

“Hear you’re giving him a lot of business at the moment, Frank,” I said, taking a seat in a leather upright opposite his desk. “I also hear Maibaum and Locke are handling the lawsuit for that unfortunate woman with the social disease. I’ve done some business with them in the past and they’re real hot. Maybe I could put them onto Elizabeth Gordon. You remember Elizabeth, don’t you, Frank?”

Frank cast an instinctive glance over his shoulder at the window and twisted his chair away from it.

“It’s okay, Marcie,” he said, nodding uneasily to the receptionist. I heard the door close softly behind me. “What do you want?”

“You have a patient called Catherine Demeter.”

“Come on, Parker, you know I can’t discuss my patients. Even if I could, I wouldn’t share shit with you.”

“Frank, you’re the worst shrink I know. I wouldn’t let a dog be treated by you because you’d probably try to fuck it, so save the ethics for the judge. I think she may be in trouble and I want to find her. If you don’t help me I’ll be in touch with Maibaum and Locke so fast you’ll think I’m telepathic.”

Frank tried to look like he was wrestling with his conscience, although he couldn’t have found his conscience without a shovel and an exhumation order.

“She missed an appointment yesterday. She didn’t give any notice.”

“Why was she seeing you?”

“Involutional melancholia, mainly. That’s depression to you, characteristic of middle to later stages of life. At least that’s what it seemed like, initially.”

“But…?”

“Parker, this is confidential. Even I have standards.”

“You’re joking. Go on.”

Frank sighed and fiddled with a pencil on his blotter, then moved to a cabinet, removed a file, and sat back down. He opened it, leafed through it, and began to talk.

“Her sister died when Catherine was eight, or rather her sister was killed. She was one of a number of children murdered in a town called Haven, in Virginia, in the late sixties, early seventies. The children, males and females, were abducted, tortured, and their remains dumped in the cellar of an empty house outside the town.” Frank was detached now, a doctor running through a case history that might have been as distant as a fairy tale to him for all the emotion he put into the telling.

“Her sister was the fourth child to die, but the first white child. After she disappeared the police began to take a real interest. A local woman, a wealthy local woman, was suspected. Her car had been seen near the house after one of the children disappeared, and then she tried an unsuccessful snatch on a kid from another town about twenty miles away. The kid, a boy, scratched up her face, then gave a description to the cops.

“They went after her but the locals heard and got to the house first. Her brother was there. He was a homosexual, according to locals, and the cops believed she had an accomplice, a male who might have driven the car while she made the snatches. The locals figured the brother was a likely suspect. He was found hanged in the basement.”

“And the woman?”

“Burned to death in another of the old houses. The case simply…faded away.”

“But not for Catherine?”

“No, not for her. She left the town after graduating from high school, but her parents stayed. The mother died about ten years ago, father shortly after. And Catherine Demeter just kept moving.”

“Did she ever go back to Haven?”

“No, not after the funerals. She said everything was dead to her there. And that’s it, pretty much. It all comes back to Haven.”

“Any boyfriends, or casuals?”

“None that she mentioned to me, and question time is over. Now get out. If you ever bring this up again, in public or in private, I’ll sue your ass for assault, harassment, and anything else my lawyer can come up with.”

I got up to leave.

“One more thing,” I said. “For Elizabeth Gordon and her continued nonacquaintance with Maibaum and Locke.”

“What?”

“The name of the woman who burned to death.”