That surprised the receptionist enough that he actually looked at me. “Damn, now I lost my ranking!”

I supposed that referred to his game, not a contest for how long he could go without actually engaging with a visitor.

Marx appeared a few minutes later. I hadn’t expected to find him on a Sunday evening. I’d been trying to imagine scenarios that would persuade his backup to let me into Sonia’s room.

“I’m going out of town tomorrow,” he explained, ushering me into the Arrowfeather Room. “I wanted to get all the rescheduled therapy sessions and so on squared away with my administrative assistant.”

I turned down the offer of thin, overboiled coffee. “Did you know there was an attempt on Sonia Kiel’s life today? Someone posing as a brother tried to suffocate her.”

His pale face didn’t register emotion easily, but his reaction seemed more one of fatigue than alarm or astonishment. “Are you sure about that? I was told she went into arrest, but that didn’t surprise me. Her heart’s taken a lot of abuse.”

“Her drug use didn’t lead her to hold a pillow over her own face until she stopped breathing.”

At that he did flinch. “Are you sure?”

He pulled out his cell phone and started to text, but I took the phone from him.

“I am sure. If someone says otherwise, they’re either protecting Sonia’s assailant or keeping the news secret in hopes that the perp will think he got away with it. In which case it was wrong of me to tell you, but that’s water over the Kaw River dam now. I came here because I want to see Sonia’s writing.”

I powered off the phone and handed it back to him.

“I can’t do that. Resident records are confidential. Even if you had a warrant, we’re covered by HIPAA. Our therapists are licensed—”

“I don’t want to see what you’ve written about her,” I interrupted sharply. “I want to see what she wrote about herself.”

When he looked puzzled, puzzled and mulish both, I added, “You told me on Thursday that Sonia was always journaling about Matt Chastain and the protest out at the old missile silo. I want to see her journals, or computer files, or whatever she wrote on. She can’t give me permission. They’ve put her back into a protective coma.”

“I . . .” Marx fiddled with his phone, turned it back on, saw me eyeing him, and put it in his pocket. “I’ll have to consult our lawyers. I’ll be gone all this week. We can talk a week from Tuesday.”