His books were stacked between bricks and boards, his bed pulled out of a sofa, his refrigerator was empty but for a slice of pizza going green, and the grounds around his cabin were overgrown with weeds and brambles. Behind the cabin, in the middle of a nest of blackberry vines, stood his victory garden: ten bushy marijuana plants, sticky with buds that smelled of skunk and spice. Not a day passed that he didn’t want to plow them under and sterilize the ground they grew in. And not a day passed that he didn’t work his way through the brambles and lovingly harvest the sticky green that would sustain his habit through the day.

The researchers said that marijuana was only psychologically addictive. Theo had read all the papers. They only mentioned the night sweats and mental spiders of withdrawal in passing, as if they were no more unpleasant than a tetanus shot. But Theo had tried to quit. He’d wrung out three sets of sheets in one night and paced the cabin looking for distraction until he thought his head might explode, only to give up and suck the piquant smoke from his Sneaky Pete so he could find sleep. The researchers obvi-ously didn’t get it, but Sheriff John Burton did. He understood Theo’s weakness and held it over him like the proverbial sword. That Burton had his own Achilles’ heel and more to lose from its discovery didn’t seem to matter. Logically, Theo had him in a standoff. But emotionally, Burton had the upper hand. Theo was always the one to blink.

He snatched Sneaky Pete off his orange crate coffee table and headed out the door to return Bess Leander’s pills to the scene of the crime.

Valerie

Dr. Valerie Riordan sat at her desk, looking at the icons of her life: a tiny digital stock ticker that she would surreptitiously glance down at during appointments; a gold Mont Blanc desk set, the pens jutting from the jade base like the antennae of a goldbug; a set of bookends fashioned in the likenesses of Freud and Jung, bracing leather-bound copies of The Psychology of the Unconscious, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), The Interpretation of Dreams, and The Physician’s Desk Reference; and a plaster-cast bust of Hippocrates that dispensed Post-it notes from the base.