If any sculpture was designed to express the belief that analysis was as much art as medicine, it could do no better than the disarray surrounding him. There were no orderly forms, listing height, weight, race, religion, or place of national origin. He had no cleverly alphabetized documents delineating blood pressure, temperature, pulse rate, and urine output. Nor did he even have organized and accessible charts, listing patients’ names, addresses, next of kin, and diagnosis.

Ricky Starks was not an internist or a cardiologist or a pathologist who approached each patient seeking a clearly defined answer to an ailment, and who kept copious and detailed notes on treatment and progress. His chosen specialty defied the science that preoccupied other forms of medicine. It was this quality that madesomething of a medical outsider, and why most of the men and women attracted to the profession found it.

But at this moment, Ricky stood in the center of the growing mess and felt like a man emerging from an underground shelter after a tornado has swept overhead. He thought he had ignored what chaos his life really was until something big and disruptive had torn through, unsettling all the careful balances he’d created. Trying to sort his way through decades of patients and hundreds of daily therapies was probably hopeless.

Because he already suspected that Rumplestiltskin wasn’t there.

At least, not in readily identifiable form.

Ricky was absolutely certain that if the person who’d written the letter had ever graced his couch for any measurable length of treatment he would have recognized him. Tone. Style of writing. All the obvious moods of anger, rage, and fury. These elements would have been as distinctive and unmistakable to him as a fingerprint to a detective. Telltale clues that he would have been alert to.