Ricky felt a sudden thirst, as if his throat were parched by heat.

He realized he knew absolutely next to nothing about crime and criminals. He had no special expertise in violence. Indeed, he had little interest in that field. He doubted that he even knew any forensic psychiatrists. None were included in his extremely small circle of occasional friends and professional acquaintances with whom he kept current.

He glanced over at the textbooks lining his shelves. Krafft-Ebing was there, with his seminal work on sexual psychopathology. But that was it, and he rather doubted that Rumplestiltskin was a sexual psychopath, even with the pornographic message he’d sent to Ricky’s great-niece.

“Who are you?” he said out loud.

Then he shook his head.

“No,” he said slowly. “First, what are you?” And then, he told himself, after I can answer that, I will determine who you are.

I can do this, Ricky thought, trying to bolster his own confidence. Tomorrow I will sit down and rack my memory and create a list of former patients. I will divide them into categories that represent all the stages of my professional life. Then I will start to investigate. Find the failure that will connect me to this fellow, Rumplestiltskin.

Exhausted, not at all certain that he had accomplished anything, Ricky stumbled out of his office and into his small bedroom. It was a simple, monklike room with a bed stand, a chest of drawers, a modest closet, and a single bed. Once there had been a double bed with an ornate headboard and colorful paintings on the walls, but after his wife’s death he’d given away their bed, choosing something simpler and narrower.