He could practically hear the gears grinding in her brain. “Yes,” she said, nodding slowly, “John Bowie mandated it. But you made certain that he would.”
He admitted to that with a half shrug. “For a long time, he had been after me to get help. So, yeah, ding ding,” he said, tapping his forehead. “If I pushed him into making it compulsory, I could get to you.”
“Why not just make an appointment to see me on your own?”
“Malone would have smelled a rat.”
“I don’t understand. How does he even know you?”
“We’ll get to that. Anyway, I protested loudly and obscenelyto John’s insistence, then made it look like I gave in under duress.”
“So you devised this elaborate scheme. You faked the drunken rampage.”
He nodded. “Counting on John’s response to it. I figured he would make therapy mandatory.”
“What if I hadn’t been on his list of psychologists?”
“I would have kept rejecting them for one reason or another until your name came around. But when he gave me his list, there you were. Actually, I wasn’t all that surprised. John would have shopped top of the line for me. The shrink the department typically uses works on the cheap, and his track record for turning somebody around sucks, while you have a four-and-a-half-star rating.”
He paused, frowning thoughtfully. “You could probably bump it up to five stars if you upgraded the candy in the waiting room to Snickers instead of those hard things.”
She had gone from dismay to distrust to outright anger. He’d watched the evolution. That last remark set her off. “Don’t you dare be cute with me.” Fury-generated tears filled her eyes. “Do you not see that what you’ve done is despicable, or do you just not care?”
Mitch pretended to be unmoved by her increasing anger.
When he made no attempt to defend himself, she placed her fingertips vertically against her forehead and rubbed it, as though to erase all the negative connotations of what he was telling her. “Ellie told me that while you waited in the lobby, you seemed nervous, that you were stunned when you learned I was a woman. That was all an act?”
“Putting on acts is a crucial part of my job.”
“You’re very good at it,” she said with emotional huskiness.
The disillusionment in her eyes hurt him to his core.
“How did you find out that Roland was my patient? And if you say that it’s classified, I’ll scream.”
Jim Tucker had told him. He hadn’t asked Tucker how he’d come by the information, because Tucker wouldn’t have told him. But as soon as Tucker had shared it with him, he’d begun devising this plan.
He said, “I was tipped by a colleague who knew I would be interested to learn that Malone was routinely coming to Auclair for sessions with a Dr. Dylan Reede.”
“Why would that interest you?”
Rather than answer, he asked, “Why did Malone pick you? Or is that one of the confidences you’re sworn to protect?”
“I have several patients who come to me from out of town, usually because of one privacy issue or another.”
“Okay. He’s known because of his popular restaurant, so, for the moment, I’ll accept the privacy factor.”
“Like your hush-hush, out-of-town AA meetings.”
“Yeah, like that,” he said, frowning at her. “Anyhow, after I was given your name, I looked you up and admit to being surprised that you weren’t male as your name had led me to assume.
“In your waiting room that morning, I pretended to be out of my depth when, in fact, I knew exactly what I was wading into.” He hesitated, then added, “However, I was prepared to meet Roland Malone’s Dr. Reede. I wasn’t prepared foryou.”
“Oh, how sweet.” Her tone was sugary; her eyes were throwing daggers. “And I suppose you expect me to believe that when you kissed me that morning, it was spontaneous.”
“It was.
“Of course.”
