“Look at me. I’m a restaurant shift manager,” said Zoe blinking back tears. “My imagination is what makes my otherwise pretty dull life seem exciting and full of color. I wake up every morning ready for my next great adventure. That’s why I write. Does that make sense to you, Dr. Eisdorfer?”

“An active imagination is a wonderful thing,” said the therapist, “but it seems to get you into a bit of trouble. Your husband is frustrated and worried about you, especially after that incident with the Peruvians. What if we channel your imaginative thoughts into your writing?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if instead of calling an embassy, the CIA, the Department of Health, or the Drug Enforcement Agency, you started by writing things down.”

“You mean like a short story?”

“Exactly,” said the therapist. “Instead of involving the law, some government agency or the United Nations, what if you wrote a short story and then brought it with you to our session? Together, we could bang on it before you alerted the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security or some other official organization.”

“I suppose I could do that.”

Dr. Eisdorfer smiled. “Let’s try it for the next few weeks and see how it goes.”

That’s exactly what Zoe did. For several months she threw herself into her writing and every time she had a notion about a potential crime or something that just didn’t look quite right, she’d turn it into a short story and bring it with her to the therapy session. For four months Zoe dutifully brought her stories to Dr. Eisdorfer who marveled at her creativity. Together they examined how some of the incidents or people Zoe “noticed” might have been a coincidence or nothing at all.

When her conspiracy theories were funneled into her writing, things between Zoe and Conner moved into a much better place. He stopped micromanaging her and she was generally more relaxed.

All that changed when Zoe witnessed the masked woman plotting to murder her husband from her living-room window. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t ignore what she had seen. Convinced the incident in the park was real and believing a man’s life was at stake, Zoe was committed to seeing it through even if it did cause problems in her marriage.

38

Thursday—June 4, 2020

“There’s an order to this,” said Heather Kim sitting at her desk in the bullpen, shaking her head and staring up at a giant map of the Upper West Side pinned on the wall. “I keep coming back to this map. My gut says the answer is right there in front of us.”

“We’ve looked at the map a thousand times from every angle,” said Daryl Williams, taking a sip of his fourth coffee. “If it’s saying something, it’s not talking to me.”