Tail Spin

his wife waiting for him at home, a beer for him in her hand. He threatened to hurt her, to take the kids, whatever.
    “She believed, she told me, that he would beat her. But the kids? The last one was out of the house in another six months so that wasn’t a problem. But he was—a great big honking problem.
    “So Dolores got to thinking. Who would vote for a congress-woman with a macho trucker lor a husband? She knew this guy wouldn’t rocket her to the stars, which she felt she deserved. For her that was winning a political office, one that paid her. He would only underscore her lack of any working credentials and what had been, to date, a worthless education.
    “Then, all of a sudden, this middle-aged woman proceeded to tell me that her husband was eighteen-wheeling on one of his regular runs through Alabama. When he pulled into his favorite truck stop to eat at the small diner, someone stepped out of the shadows and shot him dead.
    “Then Dolores said, ‘Watch this,’ and she manufactured instant tears, told me this was how she acted when the cops came to her house—you know, ‘Oh, how horrible, it must be a mistake, not my Lukey, oh God, what am I going to do, what about my poor fatherless children,’ that sort of thing. Then she told me she swooned—the shock, you know. Then suddenly, she started laughing. She nearly hyperventilated she laughed so hard. She told me between hiccups how she’d hired this thug from Savannah to shoot Lukey, paid him five hundred bucks, told him where to do it. She was very pleased with herself, with her ultimate solution to getting elected to Congress. I was so shocked I brought her out of it. She remembered exactly what she’d said, of course, and so there it all was, the eight-hundred-pound moose in the middle of my office. I told her she was my patient and I would never break confidentiality. Still, I could tell she was spooked. I never expected to see her again, and I didn’t. You think Dolores is the one out to kill me?”
    “She sounds like a better possibility than Lomas Clapman,” Savich said. “What she came to see you about professionally, any motive there if revealed?”
    “Probably not, her stepfather sexually abused her, and she was having nightmares about it on and off during the past year. It was driving her nuts, and so she came to see me. What brought it on? She didn’t know but that was the reason for the hypnosis—to take her back, to relive it, I guess you could say, in a controlled environment. But this is what popped out.”
    Savich nodded. “Okay, there was another patient the bartender heard you talking about, right? Pierre Barbeau.”
    “Ah, yes, Pierre. I nearly forgot. Pierre is very smart, knows his way in and out of the intelligence community. I’ve known him and his wife, Estelle, and his son, Jean David, for years. Molly and I played golf with them, socialized a bit with them. We weren’t best friends, but we had a pleasant acquaintanceship, I guess you could call it.
    “Anyway, Pierre’s a high-up liaison between the French National Police and our CIA. He’s arrogant and rather vain, but you’d expect that because he’s French, and over the years I just laughed at him when he’d go on and on about the superiority of the French. Blah blah blah, I tell him.
    “Then, out of the blue, he called me, said he was in turmoil —that was his word—and he needed my help.
    “Turns out it was about his son, Jean David, who, interestingly enough, was an American citizen, born unexpectedly three weeks early on vacation in Cape May, New Jersey, twenty-six years old, a Harvard graduate, very analytical, very bright, a nice guy, maybe even smarter than his old man, a strategic information analyst for the CIA, with a focus on the Middle East.
    “Yeah, I can see you’re getting the picture here. About six months ago lean David got involved with a young woman who said she was a graduate student and worked part-time for a charitable group funding education in the Middle East. Of course, the group was only a cover, and she was actually gathering money here in the U.S. for terrorist groups, and recruiting. She found the gold at the end of the rainbow in Jean David.
    “It wouldn’t have been all that big a deal if Jean David had, for example, been a Maytag repairman, but since he was an analyst in the CIA, we’re talking a major problem for him.
    “About a month and a half ago Jean David let her see some sensitive material pinpointing