I read it a couple of times, letting the facts sink in. So, Dr. Gorevale had been getting too close to some of his female patients. Perhaps that explained why he’d moved around more often than a pawn on a parkside chessboard. Typing sildenafil citrate into a search engine, I discovered it was a generic name for Viagra. Talk about those who lived by the sword dying by the sword. I reread the obituary. The list of places where he’d run his practice was longer than the jacket of the book had revealed. I took out the handwritten note again. I hope that I shall always be with you, every step of your journey. You are forever in my heart, as I am in yours. The phony bastard. How many patients had he pitched that line to?

My cell phone rang and a number appeared on the cracked screen. It was Martin, and I let him go to voicemail. I told myself that I wasn’t ready to deal with him before noon, but that wasn’t it. I could believe that Claudia had fallen for her therapist; the things I’d heard from Tariq, Rachel Heidegger, and Melissa Ardito all supported this. But Gorevale had died in September, and Claudia and Martin had been in touch after that. I didn’t know what had happened between them, but the possibilities unsettled me.

Emails from old friends in the newspaper business were trickling in, but they weren’t anything I wanted to read. Jesse had told me that a local television news station had run a story about Claudia and the dead body found in her apartment. One particularly inept journalist wrote, “It’s rare to get a suspect as attractive as your sister.” I closed the laptop without responding.

There was no way I could wait any longer to wake Jesse. I had to talk with the only sane person I trusted completely. I made coffee for him, hoping that the combination of the aroma and the sunlight streaming in the window would get him up off the sofa, where he’d passed out after Tariq had gone. By the time I brought Jesse a cup, he was sitting with his head in his hands.

“Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,” I teased. He grunted, which was about as much of a response as anyone ever got when he was in that state. “Do you want anything to eat?” Grunt. I went back to the kitchen, chopped up some spinach and onion, tossed them into a skillet with eggs and feta and scrambled it together. “I’m too lazy to make an omelet,” I explained, sliding a plate and a fork in front him. When I came back to the living room with my own plate and more juice, Jesse’s breakfast had vanished.