CHAPTER ELEVEN
Laura stared at Dr. Vincent Usipov, sitting across from her in the precinct’s interview room, and mentally dared him to say it again.
“Where were you yesterday evening, after you finished your sessions for the day?”
“No comment.”
Laura felt her teeth grinding together against her will. The therapist was outwardly cool and calm, even though she could sense the undercurrent of furious anger rolling off him like a storm cloud.
Suspects like him were hard to break. They knew all the tricks. Not only that, but they could read Laura and Nate, sitting beside her, just as easily as they could read one of their patients. It was hard to bluff, trick, or phase them. It was hard to make them blurt out something they didn’t want to say.
Something he had proven over what felt like a day of interrogation, but had really been more like thirty minutes. Usipov was so coolly confident he hadn’t even asked for a lawyer again.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try her damn hardest to get him to confess what he’d done, though.
“We have your patient log,” Laura said, picking up a tablet wrapped in protective plastic and waving it at him. “We know your last appointment was at five in the evening. Where did you go after that?”
“No comment.”
Laura tried not to let anything show on her face. She sighed as if she was bored and leaned back in her chair. “You know there’s CCTV outside your office building, don’t you?” she asked, almost casually. “And you know that we can use that to see when you got into your car, and then follow camera footage across the road network to see where you drove. You might as well tell us now.”
“No comment.”
Laura pinched the bridge of her nose, sighed again in spite of herself, and decided on a different tack. “Look. I get that you’re not our biggest fans right now. But this isn’t about us, or about you, or even about Stanley. This is about two of your patients who have lost their lives. Been murdered. Now, you can continue acting like a suspect, or you can act like a therapist who cares for his patients and actually talk to us. Which is it going to be?”
Usipov hesitated. She saw it in his face: she’d got to him a little bit. Just a little bit. But that was a start.
“You said former patients, before,” he said, surprising her by not repeating his usual words. “How do you know they were my patients, if it was ages ago?”
“I didn’t say anything about how much time had passed,” Laura replied. “I called them former patients because they’re dead. They aren’t anyone’s patients now. We know they were both working with you because they both have your number as a frequent repeated fixture in their call logs, over the last few months.”
Dr. Usipov sat up straight. Beside Laura, Nate flinched as if he was about to physically intervene. When Usipov didn’t try anything further, Nate relaxed. “You mean they’re current patients?” he asked, his face going into a very different expression from the calm mask he’d been wearing. He actually looked concerned – worried. “Who?”
“Kenya Lankenua,” Laura said, watching his face carefully for his reaction. He seemed to crumple a little. “And John Wiggins.”
There: complete shock and sorrow. The doctor was good, but Laura didn’t think he was faking it. Either he’d had no idea those patients of his were dead, or he was a much better actor than she had him pegged for.
“Oh, God,” he muttered, staring down at the table, his eyes moving from side to side as he processed the information. “Oh, no. John was doing so well. We’d just turned a corner. And Kenya – oh, God. She had her whole life ahead of her.”
“Are you going to answer our questions, now?” Laura asked.
Dr. Usipov shifted in his seat, looking up. His whole demeanor had changed, his face dropping open, his shoulders drooping. “Last night I went to stay with a friend of mine. A female friend, if you catch my drift. It’s a new thing – we’ve only spent a few nights together. I can give you her name and number, and the roads I drove along to get there, if that will help speed up the process.”
“Thank you, yes,” Laura said, spinning her notebook around and pushing it towards him, open on a blank page. She’d pass the information on to the local police via Captain Ortega as soon as they were done with the interview, get it checked out. Just because he was acting like he was cooperating now, didn’t mean he wasn’t lying through his teeth. “Can you tell me if there was any link between the two victims, anything they might have disclosed that would put them together in any way.”
Usipov thought for a moment, tapping his lip. “Well, yes,” he said, opening his eyes wide in alarm. “They’re both linked to me. You don’t think any more of my patients are in danger, do you?”
“What makes you ask that?” Nate said.
“Well, it can’t be a coincidence, can it?” Usipov asked. “They’re both my patients. And no, there wasn’t anything else they had in common. They had totally different lives, totally different issues. John was depressed, but Kenya was struggling with self-confidence and shyness. Two very different afflictions.”
“There wasn’t any other resource or service that you would normally refer your patients to, for example?” Laura asked. It was always worth asking. “Perhaps you sent them to get medication from the same pharmacy, or referred them to a massage therapist to work out physical tension, or sent them to a GP…?”
“No, not at all,” Usipov shook his head. “I wouldn’t. There’s no connection between the issues they were dealing with, so the same solution wouldn’t fit both of them. Besides, the only ‘cure’ I believe in is the talking cure – therapy. And that’s what I provide for them. Look, do you think my other patients could be in danger? Don’t I have a duty to warn them?”
Normally, Laura wasn’t against telling people to stay on their toes – but what would it achieve in this case? They had no idea if the killer was exclusively going after his patients, and if they were, they didn’t know what criteria he was using. They still hadn’t fully established, until his alibi was checked out, that Usipov himself wasn’t the murderer. And even if the third victim turned out to be one of his patients, too, Laura didn’t know what kind of precautions to tell them to take. They hadn’t worked out where the killer attacked his victims, how he attacked them, whether he got them in the alley or brought them there afterwards somehow.
“I wouldn’t jump the gun on that just yet,” Laura said. “First, let’s talk about these victims. John, first.”