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At our next session, I’d asked Gina what her parents had said. She told me she had forgotten to ask about how her uncle had died. When she had forgotten again at the next session, I stopped asking.
Why had she not been able to ask her parents? And why wouldn’t her parents have told her how he had died?
Maybe because it had never happened.
Gina’s uncle, whoever he was, was alive.
Why hadn’t this possibility occurred to me before now?
I got up and turned on my light. I went to my file cabinet, unlocked it, and shuffled through the files until I found hers. I pulled out the suicide letter she’d written me.
He’s not worth dying for.
Words alone weren’t proof positive that a patient wasn’t suicidal, but they were a damned good indicator. What if Gina hadn’t written this note? What if someone had locked her in a garage with a running car, just as the masked man had done to me?
I was a good therapist, goddamnit. Some of my patients had been suicidal in the past, and I had always known. I had referred them for hospitalization in most cases. So how could I have missed that Gina was suicidal?
Perhaps because she wasn’t.
And had she truly been in love with me? I’d had patients fall for me before. It was a common phenomenon, and I’d always recognized it and taken care of it before it went too far. Perhaps I hadn’t noticed it with Gina because I hadn’t expected a woman to fall in love with me.
Or…perhaps I hadn’t noticed it with Gina because it wasn’t true.
Was it possible that the letter was a forgery?
And why a letter? Why hadn’t she e-mailed me? Nearly no one sent letters through the mail anymore…
An e-mail would be traceable. But an old-fashioned letter…
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I shuffled through the file again, looking for something, anything, with Gina’s handwriting on it. She had never sent me a check. Her therapy had been covered by her insurance.
Where could I find her handwriting?
I glanced at the letter again. Some words were blurred, and I honestly didn’t know if the wetness had come from my tears or Gina’s. The writing was shaky, though I hadn’t thought anything about that at the time.
But now, looking at the penmanship, I could see that she’d been trembling. Anyone about to commit suicide could have been trembling. But something else might have made her tremble as she wrote.
Fear.
Chapter Twenty–One
Jonah
I will have you.
I read the text again.
I had run the phone number through a simple search and come up empty-handed.
Clearly, the text had come from Brooke Bailey. The area code was from Iowa, where her fiancé, Nico Kostas, had told her he was an Iowa senator, although there was no record of him in either the United States Senate or the Iowa Senate.
Had Brooke been living in Iowa?
I decided to ignore the text. She was simply a needy woman, a model past her prime, who had stared death in the face and made it through. On top of that, her so-called fiancé had bailed on her and had probably tried to have her killed, although she didn’t know the latter, and unfortunately we couldn’t prove it anyway.
My stomach growled. It was getting close to dinnertime, but I didn’t want to wake Melanie. God knew she needed her rest. I shuffled into the kitchen and took a look in the cupboards. Melanie had laid in quite a few staples. I opened the refrigerator and took out an apple, biting into the crisp fruit. That would hold me over until I figured out what I was doing for dinner.
My phone buzzed again in my pocket. This time it was a text from Talon.
