“No witnesses,” Cap said. “But this lady he yelled at, she’d already left the building before he started shooting. Obviously, she was a witness, and someone he couldn’t get at now.”

“You think John realized his mistake after the shootings?”

“Otherwise, he probably would have gone after the lady and plugged her instead of himself.”

“It’s possible,” Lou said. “It’s sort of like Meacham’s widow realizing after the fact how she caused an accident because she was trying to prevent one. If that’s the case, then Carolyn wasn’t just traumatized by her husband’s death. She was acting just as crazy as he was.”

Cap reinserted his mouth guard, put up his gloved hands, and resumed his fancy footwork. “Not just crazy,” he said. “Redonkulously crazy.”

CHAPTER 13

Babs Peterbee, the sixty-three-year-old matronly receptionist, greeted Lou’s arrival with a look befitting a funeral. Lou was accustomed to seeing the effervescent woman lodged behind her desk in the cramped Physician Wellness Office. But throughout all the tragic clients, disciplinary hearings, and budget crises, he had never seen her looking so deeply concerned.

“He’s waiting for you in his office,” Peterbee said as he approached her meticulous workstation.

“Mood?” Lou asked.

“Cat 5. I’m so sorry, Dr. Welcome.”

It was a poorly guarded secret that the staff at the PWO measured Walter Filstrup’s demeanor on the Saffir–Simpson scale, the one used by meteorologists to rate the power of hurricanes. The director seemed to enjoy his reputation and fostered it. Most days, Filstrup was a Category 2: strong winds. A couple of times that Lou remembered, he spiked up to a Category 4. But never in the two and a half years since the shrink was hired to run the PWO had he been labeled a Cat 5 by any of the staff.

“The only thing I have to fear, is fear itself,” Lou said, giving Peterbee a Winston Churchill V before he remembered that the quote was from FDR.

Okay, he was more nervous than he was willing to admit.

“I wish that were the case, Lou. I really do,” she responded. Peterbee puckered her face, possibly holding back tears.

“Hey,” Lou said, “we both know I’ve been through worse.”

“Just don’t let anyone change you. Since you got here, you’ve made a huge difference in the lives of a lot of people.”

“I can only be me,” Lou sang to the tune of the Sinatra song.

The PWO somehow managed to squeeze four cubicles, a reception desk, small conference room, supply closet (where they also kept the printer and fax machine), and Filstrup’s office into 850 square feet of space. Teeth on full clench, Lou knocked on the director’s closed door, imagining his dentist, Dr. Moskowitz, poised by one of the space-age chairs in his dental office, licking his chops as a couple of crowns drew ever closer.

Ready for battle, he thought.

“Come on in,” he heard Filstrup say. The man sounded bright and unburdened.

Another bad sign.

Filstrup’s office was, as usual, cluttered and uninviting. His bookshelves overflowed with medical textbooks, and his desk was lost beneath dictations, articles, and client’s charts—an absolute HIPAA nightmare. By contrast, the psychiatrist himself was neatly and nattily dressed in a favored blue suit, crisp white dress shirt, and solid gray tie. He was a trim, modestly built man. His horseshoe head of hair was a chestnut brown, his glasses gold wire-rimmed, and his face without distinctive features.