“When you go to those conferences and symposiums, I want you to talk about my case. I want you to describe it. Write it up if you like, that would be fine, too. I want you to be specific about my belief, which you’re welcome to characterize as delusional, that I encountered a creature that renews itself by eating the pain of the dying. Will you do that? And if you ever—ever—meet or get an email from a fellow therapist who says he has or had a patient suffering from that exact same delusion, will you give that therapist my name and telephone number?” And then, to be gender neutral (which she always strives to be): “Or her.”

Morton had frowned. “That would hardly be ethical.”

“You’re wrong,” Holly said. “I’ve checked the law. Talking to another therapist’s patient would be unethical, but you can give the therapist my name and number if I give you permission to do so. And I do.”

Holly waited for his response.

4

She pauses her recording long enough to check the time and get a second cup of coffee. It will give her the jitters and acid indigestion, but she needs it.

“I saw him thinking it over,” Holly says into her phone. “I think what tipped the scales was knowing what a good story my story would make in his next book or article or compensated appearance. It did, too. I read one of the articles and looked at one of the conference videos. He changes the locations, and he calls me Carolyn H., but otherwise it’s the whole megillah. He’s especially good when talking about what happened to our perp when I hit him with the Happy Slapper—that brought gasps from the audience in the video. And I’ll give him this, he always ends my part of his lectures by saying he would like to hear from anyone with patients suffering similar delusional fantasies.”

She pauses to think, then restarts the recording.

“Dr. Morton called last night. It’s been awhile, but I knew who it was right away, and I knew it was going to lead back to Ondowsky. I remember something else you said once, Ralph: there’s evil in the world, but there’s also a force for good. You were thinking about the piece of menu you found, the one from a restaurant in Dayton. That fragment linked the murder in Flint City to two similar murders in Ohio. That’s how I came to be involved, just a little scrap of paper that could have easily blown away. Maybe something wanted it to be found. I like to think so, anyway. And maybe that same thing, that force, has something more for me to do. Because I can believe the unbelievable. I don’t want to, but I can.”

She stops there and puts her phone in her purse. It’s still way early to go to the airport, but she will, anyway. It’s just how she rolls.

I’ll be early to my own funeral, she thinks, and opens her iPad to find the nearest Uber.

5

At five in the morning, the cavernous airport terminal is almost completely deserted. When it’s filled with travelers (sometimes absolutely bursting at the seams with their chattering bustle) the music floating down from the overhead speakers is barely noticeable, but at this hour, with nothing but the hum of a janitor’s floor-buffer to compete with, Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” sounds not just eerie but like a harbinger of doom.

Nothing is open on the concourse except for Au Bon Pain, but that’s good enough for Holly. She resists the temptation to put another coffee on her tray, settles instead for a plastic cup of orange juice and a bagel, and takes the tray to a table at the back. After looking around to make sure no one is close (she is, in fact, the only current customer), she takes out her phone and resumes her report, speaking low and stopping every so often to marshal her thoughts. She still hopes Ralph will never get this. She still hopes that what she thinks may be a monster will only turn out to be a shadow. But if he does get it, she wants to make sure he gets all of it.

Especially if she’s dead.

6

From Holly Gibney’s report to Detective Ralph Anderson:

Still December 16th. I’m at the airport, got here early, so I have some time. Actually quite a bit.

[Pause]

I think I left off by telling you that I knew Dr. Morton right away. Had him from hello, as the saying is. He said he’d checked with his lawyer after our last session—out of curiosity, he claimed—to find out if I was correct when I said that putting me in touch with another patient’s therapist wouldn’t be an ethical breach.

“It turned out to be a gray area,” he said, “so I didn’t do it, especially since you elected to stop therapy, at least with me. But the call I got yesterday from a Boston psychiatrist named Joel Lieberman made me reconsider.”

Ralph, Carl Morton has actually had news of another possible outsider for over a year, but he didn’t call me. He was timid. As a timid person myself I can understand that, but it still makes me mad. Probably it shouldn’t, because Mr. Bell didn’t know about Ondowsky then, but it still

[Pause]

I’m getting ahead of myself. Sorry. Let’s see if I can keep this in order.

In 2018 and 2019, Dr. Joel Lieberman was seeing a patient living in Portland, Maine. This patient took the Downeaster—I assume that’s a train—to keep his once-monthly appointments in Boston. The man, Dan Bell as it turns out, is an elderly gentleman who seemed perfectly rational to Dr. Lieberman except for his firm belief that he had discovered the existence of a supernatural creature, which he called a “psychic vampire.” Mr. Bell believed that this creature had been around for a long time, at least sixty years and perhaps much longer.

Lieberman attended a lecture Dr. Morton gave in Boston. Last summer, this was—2019. During his lecture, Dr. Morton discussed the case of “Carolyn H.” Me, in other words. He asked any attendees who had patients with similar delusions to get in touch with him, as I had asked. Lieberman did.

Have you got the picture? Morton talked about my case, as I asked him to. He inquired if there were doctors or therapists who’d had patients with similar neurotic convictions, also as I asked him to. But for sixteen months he didn’t put me in touch with Lieberman, as I practically implored him to do. His ethical concerns held him back, but there was something more. I’ll get to that.

Then, yesterday, Dr. Lieberman called Dr. Morton again. His patient from Portland had stopped coming in for sessions some time ago, and Lieberman assumed he had seen the last of him. But on the day after the Macready School explosion, the patient called out of the blue and asked if he could come in for an emergency session. He was extremely distraught, so Lieberman made room for him. The patient—Dan Bell, as I now know—claimed that the Macready School bombing was the work of this psychic vampire. He stated this unequivocally. He was so upset that Dr. Lieberman thought about an intervention and perhaps even a short involuntary committal. But then the man calmed down, and said he needed to discuss his ideas with someone he only knew of as Carolyn H.

I need to consult my notes here.

[Pause]

All right, I have them. Here I want to quote Carl Morton as exactly as I can, because it’s the other reason he hesitated to call me.

He said, “It wasn’t just ethical concerns that held me back, Holly. There is great danger in putting people with similar delusional ideations together. They have a tendency to reinforce each other, which can deepen neuroses into full-blown psychoses. This is well documented.”