Cross

sense to go that way, but I didn’t do it for logical reasons.
    The news about Maria’s murderer was the one thing holding me back these days. Now I was avoiding the block where it had happened and, at the same time, working hard to remember Maria as I had known her, not as I had lost her. I was also spending time every day trying to track down her killer—now that I suspected he was still out there somewhere.
    I turned right on Seventh, then headed toward the National Mall, pushing a little harder. When I got to my building at Indiana Avenue, I eked out just enough wind to take the four flights up, two steps at a time.
    My new office was a converted studio apartment, one large room with a small bath and an alcove kitchen off to the side. Lots of natural light streamed in through a semicircle of windows in the turreted corner.
    That’s where I’d set up two comfortable chairs and a small couch for therapy sessions.
    Just being here got me pretty excited. I’d put out my shingle, and I was ready to see my first patient.
    Three stacks of case files were waiting on my desk, two from the Bureau and another sent over from DCPD. Most of the files represented possible consulting jobs. A few crimes to solve?
An occasional dead body?
I guess that was realistic.
    The first file I looked at was a serial case in Georgia, someone the media had dubbed “the Midnight Caller.” Three black men were dead already, with a successively shorter interval between each homicide. It was a decent case for me, except for the six hundred miles between DC and Atlanta.
    I set the file aside.
    The next case was closer to home. Two history professors at the University of Maryland, perhaps intimately involved, had been found dead in a classroom. The bodies had been hung from ceiling beams. Local police had a suspect but wanted to work up a profile before they went any further.
    I put that file back on my desk with a yellow sticker attached.
    Yellow, for
maybe.
    There was a knock on my door.
    “It’s open,” I called out, and immediately became suspicious, paranoid, whatever it is that I am most of the time.
    What had Nana said when I’d left the house earlier?
Try not to get shot at.

Chapter 47
    OLD HABITS DIE HARD. But it wasn’t Kyle Craig, or some other psychotic nutcase from my past come to visit.
    It was my first patient.
    The visitor took up most of the doorway where she now paused, as if scared to come in. Her face was turned down at the mouth, and her hand gripped the jamb while she tried to catch her breath, while keeping some dignity.
    “You putting in an elevator anytime soon?” she asked between gasps.
    “Sorry about all the stairs,” I said. “You must be Kim Stafford. I’m Alex Cross. Please, come in. There’s coffee, or I can get you water.”
    The very first patient of my new practice finally lumbered into my office. She was a heavyset woman, in her late twenties, I guessed, though she could have passed for forty. She was dressed very formally, in a dark skirt and white blouse that looked old but well made. A blue-and-lavender silk scarf was carefully tied under her chin.
    “You said on the machine that Robert Hatfield referred you?” I asked. “I used to work with Robert on the police force. Is he a friend of yours?”
    “Not really.”
    Okay, not a friend of Hatfield’s.
I waited for her to say more, but nothing came. She just stood in the middle of the office, seeming to quietly appraise everything in the room.
    “We can sit over here,” I prompted. She waited for me to sit first, so I did.
    Kim finally sat down herself, perched tentatively on the forward edge of the chair. One of her hands fluttered nervously around the knot in her scarf. The other was clenched into a fist.
    “I just need some help trying to understand someone,” she began. “Someone who gets angry sometimes.”
    “Is this someone close to you?”
    She stiffened. “I’m not giving you his name.”
    “No,” I said. “The name isn’t important. But is this a family member?”
    “Fiancé.”
    I nodded. “How long have you two been engaged? Is that all right to ask?”
    “Four years,” she said. “He wants me to lose some weight before we get married.”
    Maybe it was force of habit, but I was already working up a profile on the fiancé. Everything was her fault in the relationship; he took no responsibility for his own actions; her weight was his escape hatch.
    “Kim, when you say he gets angry a lot—can you tell me a