Free Fairstein, Linda - Final Jeopardy by Final Jeopardy (v1.1) [html] Page B

The cop they send for a job like this is likely to be too young for you, don’t you think?”
    “Too tired to think, Mike. Good night.”
    I took the copy of W that arrived in today’s mail into the bathroom, ran the water as hot as I could stand it, poured a few more drops of Chanel into the tub, and climbed in to decompress.
    As hard as I tried to lose myself in the smashing outfits for spring and the gaunt models who obviously didn’t indulge in a lot of Steve’s pizza, my mind kept making its own connections. I thought back to what I had told the serial rape victim Katherine Fryer in my office earlier this morning: like it or not, try or not, you will have flashbacks; things you see and hear will trigger memories of events or conversations, and some of them will be significant to the investigation.
    Now things were forcing themselves through my own head. Mike’s parting joke about calling the doc next door and the earlier coincidence of running into David Mitchell and the fact that David is a shrink and my skepticism about my own need for a shrink. It all connected back to where I did not want to go at that precise point in time:
    Isabella.
    Why had I blown her off so abruptly when she talked about a second stalker? I knew I was feeling guilty for having done it, since he might have been her killer. Now my mind was racing as the chain of thoughts kept triggering portions of her phone calls to me. What had she said about a shrink? I know she had used that expression in one of our talks, but I couldn’t remember whether she said she was seeing one because of the stalker or that she was imagining that the stalker was a psychiatrist.
    There would be more flashbacks to conversation, I knew, especially if I tried to ignore them. Tomorrow I could call Nina in L.A. and she would undoubtedly know more about it. She probably listened to Isabella more seriously than I did and would know the significance of the reference to the shrink. I took my own advice and got out of the bathtub, wrapped myself in a towel, and walked to the desk to write down my chain of thoughts, just as I told my victims to do.
    Then I started to dry myself off and set the alarm for 6 A.M.
    Before I could settle comfortably onto the bed, the telephone rang. I picked it up and said, “Hello,” only to be met by dead silence. I repeated my greeting and again got no response. I reached over to replace the receiver in its cradle, shivering from head to toe as I did so, and convincing myself that the chills were caused by my emergence from the late-night bath, and not by the eerie stillness on the phone line. I pulled up the covers and concentrated on the hopeless task of falling asleep for a few hours, before setting off to see how my beloved Vineyard road had been turned into the scene of a murder.
    CHAPTER
    Mike was in front of the building exactly on time, with a cup of black coffee for each of us. Neither he nor I functions well in the early morning, so we were quiet on the short ride to La Guardia. He parked his car at the Port Authority Police Building and the cops dropped us off at the old deco Marine Air Terminal that services the Delta Shuttle.
    My bodyguard happened to be terrified of flying so he was also a bit subdued for that reason. It always amazed me that a guy who was so fearless in the face of homicidal maniacs and bloodthirsty drug lords was frightened of airplane travel, but we had been to Chicago and Miami together for extradition hearings so I knew that Mike would be saying novenas until we were up and down safely on each leg of the trip. The odds of an NYPD detective being killed by crossfire on a street in Washington Heights were far greater than his dying in a plane crash, but we each have our own demons and I wasn’t about to mess with his.
    The jet lifted quickly off runway three-three on the cloudless morning, and as the copilot suggested that the passengers on the right-hand side of the plane enjoy the sweeping view of the