The trick, he realized, was determining who these ex-patients were, and then tracing them to Rumplestiltskin. Because that was clearly, now that he had thought about it for a few hours, where the connection rested. The person who wanted him to kill himself was someone’s child, spouse, or lover. The first task, Ricky thought aggressively, was determining what patient had left his treatment on the shakiest of circumstances. Then he could start backtracking.

He maneuvered amid the mess he’d created back to his desk and picked up Rumplestiltskin’s letter. I exist somewhere in your past. Ricky stared hard at the words, then looked back at the piles of notes scattered about the office.

All right, he said to himself. The first task is to organize my professional history. Find the segments that can be eliminated.

He sighed out loud. Did he make some mistake as a hospital resident more than twenty-five years earlier that was now returning to haunt him? Could he even remember those first patients? While he was undergoing his own analytic training he had been engaged in a study of paranoid schizophrenics who had been committed to the psychiatric wards at Bellevue Hospital. The study had been about determining predictability factors for violent crimes and had not been a clinical success. But he’d come to know and been involved in some treatment plans for men who went on to commit serious crimes. It had been the closest he’d ever come to forensic psychiatry and he hadn’t liked it much. When his work with the study was finished, he’d immediately retreated back into the far safer and physically less demanding world of Freud and his followers.