The Analyst

She took a deep breath, then added: “Got all that, Ricky?”

He remained silent, and she said it again, harsher.

“Got all that, Ricky?”

“Yes,” he said. But of course he knew that he didn’t as he hung up the phone.

Chapter Seven

Zimmerman’s ghost seemed to be laughing at him.

It was the morning after a fitful night. He had not slept much, but when he had, he had dreamed vividly, fantastically, of his dead wife sitting by his side in a vibrant red two-seater sports car that he did not recognize, but knew belonged to him. They were parked by the edge of the ocean in deep sand on a familiar beach near their vacation cottage on the Cape. It had seemed to Ricky in the dream that the gray-green Atlantic waters, the color they took on in anticipation of a storm, were sweeping ever closer to him, threatening to overtake the car in a flood tide, and he struggled madly to open the door, but when he tried to work the handle he had seen a bloodstained and gri

Ricky dressed in faded, ratty, khaki trousers that were frayed at the cuffs and which showed all the signs of longtime use that teenagers would ordinarily have paid extra for at the mall, but which in his case were the results of years of wear and tear during the summer vacation, the only time he wore them. On his feet he placed an equally tattered pair of boat shoes and over his torso an old blue button-down shirt too worn for wear anytime other than the weekend. He dragged a comb through his hair. He looked up at his face in the mirror and thought he wore all the outward appearances of a man of accomplishments dressing down for the begi

He shook his head and dragged himself into the small kitchen. For breakfast, he made himself a solitary slice of dry wheat toast and some black coffee which tasted bitter no matter how many spoonfuls of sugar he dropped in. He chewed the toast with an indifference that surprised him. He had absolutely no appetite.

He carried his rapidly cooling coffee into his office where he put Rumplestiltskin’s letter on the desk in front of him. Occasionally he would sneak a glance out the window, as if he hoped to catch a glimpse of the naked Virgil lurking on the sidewalk, or occupying a window from an apartment in the building across the narrow street. He knew she was somewhere close, or, at least, believed her to be, based on what she had told him.

Ricky shuddered once, involuntarily. He stared at the words of the clue.

For a moment, he felt a dizziness mingled with a flash of heat.

“What is happening?” he demanded of himself out loud.

Roger Zimmerman seemed to enter the room at that moment, as irritating and demanding in death as he was in life. As always, he wanted answers to all the wrong questions.

He dialed the dead man’s apartment number again, hoping to reach someone. Ricky knew he was obliged to speak with someone about Zimmerman’s death, but precisely who, eluded him. The mother was still inexplicably unaccounted for, and Ricky wished he’d had the sense to ask Detective Riggins where the woman was. He guessed with some neighbor, or in a hospital. Zimmerman had a younger brother who lived in California with whom he’d co

But that moment had been many months, and in greater likelihood, years away.

Zimmerman still had arrived at his session daily, still considering analysis to be nothing more than a fifty-minute venting opportunity, like a steam whistle on the side of an engine waiting for the conductor’s tug. What little insight he’d gained he mostly used to pave new avenues of anger.

Complaining was fun for him. He wasn’t boxed in and encircled by despair.

Ricky shook his head. In twenty-five years, he’d had three patients who killed themselves. Two of those had been referred to him already displaying all the classic warning signs and had been in treatment only briefly before taking their own lives. He had felt helpless on those occasions, but a helplessness that didn’t carry blame. The third death, however, he did not like to think about because the person had been a longtime patient, whose downward spiral Ricky had been unable to arrest, even with prescriptions for mood elevators, a course he rarely took. It had been years since he’d thought of that patient, and he had not liked mentioning him to Detective Riggins, even if he had withheld the details of the case from the rude and only mildly inquisitive detective.

Shuddering briefly, as if the room had suddenly grown cold, Ricky thought: That was a portrait of suicide. Zimmerman wasn’t.

But the idea that Zimmerman was pushed in front of a subway train to send Ricky a message was far more horrifying. It struck at his heart. It was the sort of idea that was like a spark landing in a pool of gasoline.

It was, equally, an impossible idea. He envisioned himself walking back into Detective Riggins’s overbright and modestly filthy office and claiming that some strangers had deliberately murdered a person they didn’t know and didn’t care about in the slightest in order to force Ricky into playing some sort of death game.

He thought: It’s true, but not believable, especially to some underpaid and overworked Transit Authority detective.

And, in the same moment, he realized that they knew that.

The man who called himself Rumplestiltskin and the woman who went by Virgil understood that there was no hard evidence whatsoever that might co