“Alright. What do you need to know?”
“Anything you can tell us about him,” Laura said. “You said he was suffering from depression.”
“Yes, it had plagued him for a good few years before he made the decision to come to me,” Usipov said. “He told me that when his wife announced she wanted a divorce, it took away the one thing he wanted to live for. He was suicidal for a while. He would call me whenever he was at a particularly low point, and we had our phone sessions as well.”
“What about when he came into the office?” Nate asked.
Usipov looked up at him in surprise. “No, he never came in.”
Laura blinked. “You never met him face to face?”
Usipov shook his head. “Some people can’t,” he said. “Either through social anxiety, or because they can’t get out of the house, or because their lives are just too busy. John was working two jobs to try to make ends meet. He’d lost his former position around the time of the divorce being initiated, and he was worried he wouldn’t be able to afford a lawyer. But, he said, the need for therapy to keep him alive was greater than that. I gave him a discounted rate so we could continue talking over the phone, rather than charging full price.”
That shed a new light on things.
If Usipov had never even met his patient in person, then Laura believed more and more strongly that he wasn’t the man they were looking for. Of course, he could be lying once again – but it was too easy to check, with the CCTV and his patient records all available to them.
“And Kenya?”
“I never met her, either,” Usipov said. “She was also very busy, and then there was the shyness. Sometimes I would struggle to hear what she was saying over the phone. We exclusively called and always exactly at the time of her appointment. She was very punctual and respectful. Never made a mistake. Actually, that was one of the things we were working on – trying to get her to see that it was alright to be a little messy sometimes.”
Laura thought for a moment. She reached into her file, tilting it up so Usipov couldn’t see, and then glanced at Nate with a raised eyebrow. He quirked his eyebrow back at her, which she took to mean well, might as well try it. Permission granted, she pulled the photographs she’d been touching out of the file and placed them onto the table, facing towards Usipov.
The two crime scene shots: Kenya and John, both posed with their mannequins. “What can you tell us about this?”
Usipov blinked, and his face went a funny shade of gray as he looked down at the photographs. He clearly had never seen anything like this before – not just the strange poses, but the fact that the people in the shots were dead. People he had known. Laura supposed it must have been a shock, if you weren’t used to it.
“That’s…” He seemed to gather himself, giving his head a small shake and then frowning at the photographs again. “This kind of scene – I take it that’s not very usual in murders.”
“Not at all,” Laura said. “This is clearly a very deliberate staging. What do you think the killer might be trying to say?”
Usipov mulled over the pictures for a moment. “It’s disturbing,” he said. “But the way John’s posed – the mannequin almost makes me think of… well, me. A listener, someone who is there in a professional capacity to try to make him feel better.”
“What about Kenya?” Laura pressed.
“I didn’t have any kind of relationship with her that would prompt this kind of staging,” Usipov said right away. Laura had to resist the urge to roll her eyes. He wasn’t much of a psychologist if the only thing he could see was how the world related back to himself, rather than being able to put himself in someone else’s shoes. “I don’t really know what it means. Maybe it’s about being in a relationship with Kenya. Have you looked into her boyfriend?”
“Yes,” Laura said, resisting the urge to snap of course at the end. “Do you think it could relate to the fact that he cheated on her?”
Usipov stared at her for a moment. “He cheated?”
It was Laura’s turn to be surprised. “She didn’t talk about that in your sessions?”
“No,” Usipov said. “I knew they had broken up recently. Actually, our recent sessions focused on that a lot. She wanted to understand why he had broken it off with her. According to her, it came out of the blue. She said she’d done everything right – this was part of her issue, you see. She had the feeling she had to do everything exactly correctly, and when she didn’t get what she perceived as an appropriate reward, she would obsess over any small mistake she had made. This would then fuel again her perception of just rewards, and support her perfectionism, to the point of it being neurotic.”
Something clicked in Laura’s head. The boyfriend, Pete, had been so remorseful and upset about Kenya’s death and his cheating prior to it. He would now never be able to confess the truth to her or explain why he had wanted to break it off. That was why he was so guilty. Not just because he’d ended the relationship, but because he’d done it with a lie.
Still, neither Pete Yalling nor Vincent Usipov remained as suspects – which meant that they were running out of leads faster than they were finding them.
Laura sighed.
“We’re going to access your patient list,” she said. “With your permission, I think it is best that we warn as many of them as we can, after all. We’ll have some detectives from the local PD call each of them individually and let them know about the potential threat, just in case these murders are connected to your practice in some way.”
A drawn, harrowed look passed over Usipov’s face. “I hope I don’t lose any patients,” he said. A moment later, the look turned to one of horror. “I mean, or that anyone else dies, of course! I just – well, this is my livelihood, you know.”
“Of course,” Nate drawled, with complete deadpan seriousness. He shifted, and Laura did the same, gathering up the photos and her file. “You’re free to go home, Dr. Usipov. But please don’t go far. Remember, the same precautions should also apply to yourself. My advice would be to take all of your sessions over the phone from home until this case is solved – and keep your door locked.”
Usipov nodded grimly, his face pale. As she stood to leave, Laura was already putting him out of her mind, dismissing him now that he was no longer useful to the case. He clearly couldn’t even help by psychoanalyzing the killer any further than the basic observations she’d already been able to make, herself.
And there were far more serious things to focus on than whether he was going to lose his business as a result of the panic.
Because if Usipov wasn’t the killer, then the killer had to still be out there somewhere – and Laura had a growing uneasy feeling that it wouldn’t be too long before they were looking at another body posed next to a mannequin.