Sandra went to her office and put in a call to Congreve. Arthur Congreve was her superior at State. He supervised all the intake staff. Sandra didn’t like him—he struck her as aloof, professionally indifferent, and far too concerned with producing a smoothly trending flow of statistics that would impress the budget committees. Since he had been appointed last year, two of the facility’s best intake physicians had elected to quit rather than submit to his patient quotas. Sandra couldn’t imagine why he might have pulled the Mather file without warning her. Individual cases were usually far below Congreve’s personal radar.

Congreve started talking as soon as he picked up. “Help you, Sandra? I’m in B Wing, by the way, about to go into a meeting, so let’s make this quick.”

“Nurse Wattmore tells me you took the Orrin Mather file.”

“Yeah … I thought I saw her beady little eyes light up. Look, I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you beforehand. It’s only that we have a new intake person—Dr. Abe Fein, I’ll be introducing him at the next general meeting—and I thought I should walk him through a safe case. Mather’s the least troublesome candidate we’ve got on hand, and I didn’t want to start out the new guy with a hostile subject. Don’t worry, I’ll be backstopping Fein all the way.”

“I didn’t know we had a new hire.”

“Check your memos. Fein did his internship at Baylor in Dallas, very promising, and as I say, I’ll keep him on a short leash until he gets a handle on what we do here.”

“Thing is, I already put in the preliminaries with Orrin Mather. I think I established a little bit of rapport with him.”

“I assume everything pertinent is in the file. Is there anything else, Sandra? I don’t mean to be rude, but I have people waiting.”

She knew it would be useless to push. Despite his medical degree, Congreve had been hired by the board of directors for his managerial talents. As far as he was concerned, the intake psychiatrists were nothing more than hired help. “No, nothing else.”

“Okay. We’ll talk later.”

Threat or promise?

Sandra settled behind her desk. She was disappointed, obviously, and a little angry with Congreve for his preemptive behavior, not that it was uncharacteristic.

She thought about the file on Orrin Mather. She hadn’t entered anything into her notes about Officer Bose’s interest in the case. She’d promised Bose she would be discreet about the sci-fi narrative Mather had allegedly written. Was that promise still binding, under the circumstances?