The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

wanted to try and figure out what the women had told her. Obviously, they'd mention that he got high occasionally. Well, more than occasionally. But like any man, it worried him that they might have said something about his sexual performance. For some reason, it didn't bother him nearly as much that Val Riordanthink him a loser and a drug fiend as it did that she might think he was bad in the rack. He wanted to ponder the possibilities, think away the paranoia, but instead he dialed the sheriff's private number and was put right through.
    "What in the hell is the matter with you, Crowe? You stoned?"
    "No more than usual," Theo said. "What's the problem?"
    "The problem is you removed evidence from a crime scene."
    "I did?" Talking to the sheriff could drain all of Theo's energy instantly. He fell into a beanbag chair that expectorated Styrofoam beads from a failing seam with a sigh. "What evidence? What scene?"
    "The pills, Crowe.The suicide's husband said you took the pills with you. I want them back at the scene in ten minutes. I want my men out of there in half an hour. The M.E. will do the autopsy this afternoon and this case will close by dinnertime, got it?Run-of-the-mill suicide.Obit page only. No news.
    You understand?"
    "I was just checking on her condition with her psychiatrist. See if there were any indications she might be suicidal."
    "Crowe, you must resist the urge to play investigator or pretend that you are a law enforcement officer. The woman hung herself. She was depressed and she ended it all. The husband wasn't cheating, there was no money motive, and Mommy and Daddy weren't fighting."
    "They talked to the kids?"
    "Of course they talked to the kids. They're detectives. They investigate things. Now get over there and get them out ofNorthCounty. I'd send them over to get the pills from you, but I wouldn't want them to find your little victory garden, would you?"
    "I'm leaving now," Theo said.
    "This is the last I will hear of this,"Burton said. He hung up.
    Theo hung up the phone, closed his eyes, and turned into a human puddle in the beanbag chair.
    Forty-one years old and he still lived like a college student. His books were stacked between bricks and boards, his bed pulled out of a sofa, his refrigerator was empty but for a slice of pizza going green, and the grounds around his cabin were overgrown with weeds and brambles. Behind the cabin, in the middle of a nest of blackberryvines, stood his victory garden: ten bushy marijuana plants, sticky with buds that smelled of skunk and spice. Not a day passed that he didn't want to plow them under and sterilize the ground they grew in. And not a day passed that he didn't work his way through the brambles and lovingly harvest the sticky green that would sustain his habit through the day.
    The researchers said that marijuana was only psychologically addictive. Theo had read all the papers.
    They only mentioned the night sweats and mental spiders of withdrawal in passing, as if they were no more unpleasant than a tetanus shot. But Theo had tried to quit. He'd wrung out three sets of sheets in one night and paced the cabin looking for distraction until he thought his head might explode, only to give up and suck the piquant smoke from his Sneaky Pete so he could find sleep. The researchers obviously didn't get it, but Sheriff John Burton did. He understood Theo's weakness and held it over him like the proverbial sword.ThatBurton had his own Achilles' heel and more to lose from its discovery didn't seem to matter. Logically, Theo had him in a standoff. But emotionally,Burton had the upper hand. Theo was always the one to blink.
    He snatched Sneaky Pete off his orange crate coffee table and headed out the door to return Bess Leander's pills to the scene of the crime.
    Valerie Dr. Valerie Riordan sat at her desk, looking at the icons of her life: a tiny digital stock ticker that she would surreptitiously glance down at during appointments; a gold Mont Blanc desk set the pens jutting from the jade base like the antennae of a goldbug; a set of bookends fashioned in the likenesses of Freud and Jung, bracing leather-bound copies of The Psychology of the Unconscious, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), The Interpretation of Dreams, and The Physician's Desk Reference; and a plaster-cast bust of Hippocrates that dispensed Post-it notes from the base.
    Hippocrates, that wily Greek who turned medicine from magic to science. The author of