In Pursuit of Justice Read Free

table. The furniture was arranged upon a thick oriental carpet in front of a stone fireplace; the walls on either side were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and a large antique mahogany desk sat before bay windows that looked out on a well-tended flower garden. It was a functional but decidedly comfortable space. “Sit down. Do you want coffee or…let me see, I think I have some soda.”
    “No, I’m fine. I’ve been drinking coffee all day.”
    “You look tired, Catherine,” the chief of psychiatry said kindly, thinking to herself that the woman across from her looked more than tired. She’d lost weight; there were new stress lines around her green eyes and a few more wisps of early gray in her hair. “Even considering the fact that it is Friday evening, with your clinical load and the recent events, you have every right to be weary.”
    “I am. That’s why I’m here…in part.”
    “From the beginning, then,” Hazel urged, settling back and looking for all the world as if she had nothing better to do than to listen indefinitely to her younger colleague.
    “I’m not sleeping.” They were in Hazel’s private home office, and the warm comfortable atmosphere was a welcome relief from the too bright, too impersonal spaces of the university clinic. Still, Catherine found it difficult to relax as she leaned forward, her clasped hands on her knees, her fingers intertwined to hide the faint tremor. “I think I have post—”
    “Let’s wait before we worry about the diagnosis, shall we? Just tell me what’s happening.”
    “Of course.” Catherine smiled ruefully and ran a hand through her collar-length auburn hair, then regarded her friend and mentor apologetically. At sixty, Hazel was fit and vigorous, her quick blue eyes catching every nuance of expression, and she allowed nothing of consequence to pass without comment. “Is there anything worse than a physician as a patient?”
    “Not many I can think of right offhand.”
    “This is hard…”
    “Being a psychiatrist doesn’t make it any easier. That’s for television programs. Maybe I can help. This isn’t about work, I take it? You would have come to the cafeteria for that.”
    Catherine smiled. When she needed a curbside consult, or just assurance that she was following the right clinical course in a difficult case, she sought out Hazel’s advice during the chief’s morning ritual of coffee and danish in the hospital cafeteria. “No. It’s not work. It’s the shooting.”
    “What about the shooting?”
    “My…part in it.”
    Hazel regarded her steadily. “What part was that?”
    “I insisted on going to meet him,” Catherine said slowly, looking beyond Hazel’s face into the past. “Rebecca didn’t want me to go, practically begged me not to get involved. But I wanted to. I wanted to. I thought I could stop him.” She brought tormented eyes to meet Hazel’s. “My arrogance almost got her killed.”
    “Why aren’t you sleeping?” Hazel asked, choosing not to comment but to let her talk. She had known Catherine since the younger psychiatrist was a resident, and she considered them friends as well as colleagues. What Catherine needed was for her to listen, not to point out the obvious fallacy in her reasoning. Reason carried very little weight where the emotions were concerned.
    “I dream,” Catherine replied, her voice choking. “I…feel him. He’s hurting me, and I want Rebecca to come. I want her to make him stop. I want her to kill him.”
    “Go on.”
    “I’m so cold. He’s torn my blouse.” She shivered, rubbing her arms unconsciously. “I call out for her, and she comes for me. I’m so glad, so relieved. And then he shoots, and she’s bleeding. She’s bleeding and there’s so much blood…oh God, there’s so much blood…”
    Catherine pushed back in her chair, as if pushing away the images, breathing rapidly, struggling to erase the vivid memories. “It was my fault.”
    “No, Catherine,” Hazel