“Let me see—here it is: “Relationship between D and G strained. Me? D's growth?' Yes, I see what you mean. Then right after that, she mentions another p-c—the session where he actually kissed her. . . . You know, you could read this and feel almost as if she was seducing him.” She crumpled the notes. “God, what a travesty—why are you interested in this Gritz? You think he could be the one harassing people?”

“It's possible.”

“Why? What else has he done criminally?”

“I'm not sure of the details, but the harassment involved the words “bad love'—”

“What Hewitt screamed . . . Does that actually mean something? What's going on?”

Her fingers had become laced with mine. I looked at them and she pulled away and fooled with her hair. The flap covered one eye. The exposed one was alive with fear.

I said, “I don't know, Jean. But given the notes, I have to wonder if Gritz played a role in getting Hewitt to murder Becky.”

“Played a role? How?”

“By working on Hewitt's paranoia—telling Hewitt things about Becky. If he was a close friend, he'd know which buttons to push.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “And now he's missing . . . it's not over, is it?”

“Maybe it is. This is all conjecture, Jean. But finding Gritz would help clear it up. Any chance he was a patient at the center?”

“The name doesn't ring a bell . . . bad love . . . I thought Hewitt was just raving, now you're saying maybe he was reacting to something that had gone on between him and Becky? That he killed her because she rejected him.”

“Could be,” I said. “I found a reference to “bad love' in the psych literature. It's a term coined by a psychoanalyst named Andres de Bosch.”

She stared at me, nodded slowly. “I think I've heard of him. What did he say about it?”

“He used it to describe poor child rearing—a parent betraying a child's trust. Building up faith and then destroying it. In extreme cases, he theorized, it could lead to violence. If you consider the therapist-patient relationship similar to child rearing, the same theory could be applied to cases of transference gone really bad. Hewitt may have heard about “bad love' somewhere—probably from another therapist or even from Gritz. When he felt Becky had rejected him, he fell apart, became a betrayed child—and lashed out violently.”

“Betrayed child?” she said. “You're saying his killing her was a tantrum?”

“A tantrum heated to the boiling point by Hewitt's delusions. And by his failure to take his medication. Who knows, Gritz may have convinced him not to take it.”

“Gritz,” she said. “How do you spell it?”

I told her. “Be good to know if he was one of your patients.”

“I'll comb the files first thing tomorrow, take that damned storage room apart if I have to. If he's anywhere in there, I'll call you right away. We need to know for our own safety.”