Read Mirror Image for Free Online Page B

fifty minutes up?”
    “No, I’ve got a date with the cops. Besides—”
    Just then, I saw the color drain from Noah’s face. He was staring at something past my shoulder.
    “Well, fuck me,” he said quietly.
    I turned, as the last person in the world I wanted to see that day came through the door.

Chapter Ten
     
    Dr. Brooks Riley, Chief Psychiatrist at Ten Oaks, was drunk. He steadied himself in the doorway, squinting with exaggerated horror into the bar.
    “Rinaldi! Are you hiding somewhere in this floating menace to public health?”
    I was off my stool and across the room before Riley could take another step. Faces looked up from leather booths. The murmur of voices grew still.
    “What the hell are you doing?” I said to him.
    Riley was about my height, with the kind of proud, old-money good looks that usually made me think of yacht clubs, not hospitals. At least when he was sober. I’d never seen him drunk before.
    “We’re celebrating.” He raked a hand through rich, dark hair. His tie, clasped to his shirt with a Harvard alumni pin, was undone at the throat. Despite the Armani suit, he looked, to my surprise, like hell.
    “We?”
    He glanced back in the direction of the door. “The boss and his wife. While we’re chatting in here, they’re outside, battling hypothermia.”
    “Shit.” I took Riley by the arm and marched us back out the way he’d come in.
    Outside on the sidewalk, the night air had dropped a dozen degrees. A clammy chill joined the fog wafting up from the river’s edge.
    “We were beginning to wonder,” Albert Garman said pointedly. A slight, balding man in his late fifties, he looked even less imposing swallowed up in an overcoat and thick scarf. Only his eyes, which managed to be both pale and penetrating—especially when presiding over case presentations—betrayed his intelligence and ambition. In only six years as Clinical Director, he’d turned Ten Oaks into the most successful private psychiatric facility in the state.
    His wife Elaine, mid-forties, and a full head taller than her husband, shivered next to him in her fur coat. According to clinic gossip, her rail-thin figure was the result of a diet rich in cocaine.
    I shook hands with both of them. “Come on, you two, let’s go inside.”
    Elaine’s laugh was raw as sand. “Honey, I’ve never been that desperate for a drink.”
    “We thought perhaps you’d be here,” Garman said. “I wondered if you might like to join us at dinner.”
    Highly unlikely . This had to be about Kevin Merrick.
    “We called your office,” Riley sniffed, “ and your house, looking for you. After hearing on the news—”
    “Yes.” Garman glanced past me, at the bar. “Then I remembered your having an interest in this place…”
    “We’re on our way to Schaeffer’s for dinner,” Riley went on, oblivious. “This way, you’d get to explain yourself over a nice lobster.”
    “Explain…?” I glared at him.
    “Look, Dan,” Garman said smoothly, “Elaine and I invited Brooks to join us for drinks and dinner. We’ve got good news to celebrate. Then, of course, when we learned about the death of your patient—”
    “He was the poor bastard you presented at our last case conference, right?” Riley brayed. “Pathetically mirroring you, with your encouragement…”
    Garman gave Riley a sharp look, then turned back to me. “Honestly, Dan, I just felt you could use some support. I’ve lost patients myself, and I know how—”
    “Hey, guys, I’m freezing my tits off.” Elaine bundled her coat tighter. “Can we get to the point?”
    “Elaine…” Garman gazed helplessly at his wife.
    But she’d pivoted on a high heel and was staring at me. “Look. My sister is seeing some hot-shot at the DA’s office, and he told her, off the record, that the murdered guy was found dressed like you. That the cops think you were the one supposed to get killed.”
    Garman was shaking his head. “Your sister should learn to keep her