Bad Love by Jonathan Kellerman Read Free Book Online

at Western Peds, a period marked by long days and longer nights on the cancer ward and the genetic disorders unit, holding the hands of dying children and listening to families with unanswerable questions.
    In March of that year, the head of psychiatry and the chief psychologist both chose to go on sabbatical. Though they weren’t on speaking terms and the chief never returned, their last official cooperative venture was designating me interim chief.
    Slapping my back and grinding their teeth around their pipe bits, they worked hard at making it sound like a stepping-stone to something wonderful. What it had amounted to was more administrative chores and just enough of a temporary pay raise to kick me into the next tax bracket, but I’d been too young to know any better.
    Back then, Western Peds had been a prestigious place, and I learned quickly that one aspect of my new job was fielding requests from other agencies and institutions wanting to associate with the hospital. Most common were proposals for jointly sponsored conferences, to which the hospital would contribute its good name and its physical premises in return for continuing-education credits for the medical staff and a percentage of the box office. Of the scores of requests received yearly, a good many were psychiatric or psychological in nature. Of those, only two or three were accepted.
    Katarina de Bosch’s letter had been one of several I received, just weeks after assuming my new post. I scanned it and rejected it.
    Not a tough decision — the subject matter didn’t interest me or my staff: the front-line battles we were waging on the wards placed the theorizations of classical psychoanalysis low on our want list. And from my readings of his work, Andres de Bosch was a middleweight analyst — a prolific but superficial writer who’d produced little in the way of original thought and had parlayed a year in Vienna as one of Freud’s students and membership in the French resistance into an international reputation. I wasn’t even sure he was still alive; the letter from his daughter didn’t make it clear, and the conference she proposed had a memorial flavor to it.
    I wrote her a polite letter.
    Two weeks later I was called in to see the medical director, a pediatric surgeon named Henry Bork who favored Hickey-Freeman suits, Jamaican cigars, and sawtooth abstract art, and who hadn’t operated in years.
    “Alex.” He smiled and motioned to a Breuer chair. A slender woman was sitting in a matching nest of leather and chrome on the other side of the room.
    She looked to be slightly older than me — early thirties, I guessed — but her face was one of those long, sallow constructions that would always seem aged. The beginnings of worry lines suggested themselves at crucial junctures, like a portrait artist’s initial tracings. Her lips were chapped — all of her looked dry — and her only makeup was a couple of grudging lines of mascara.
    Her eyes were large enough without the shadowing, dark, heavy lidded, slightly bloodshot, close set. Her nose was prominent, down tilted, and sharp, with a small bulb at the tip. Full wide lips were set sternly. Her legs were pressed together at the knees, feet set squarely on the floor.
    She wore a coarse, black, scallop-necked wool sweater over a pleated black skirt, stockings tinted to mimic a Caribbean tan, and black loafers. No jewelry. Her hair was straight, brown, and long, drawn back very tightly from a low, flat brow, and fastened above each ear with wide, black, wooden barrettes. A houndstooth jacket was draped over her lap. Near one shoe was a black leatherette attaché case.
    As I sat down, she watched me, hands resting upon one another, spindly and white. The top one was sprinkled with some sort of eczematous rash. Her nails were cut short. One cuticle looked raw.
    Bork stepped between us and spread his arms as if preparing to conduct a symphony.
    “Dr. Delaware, Dr. Katarina de Bosch. Dr. de Bosch,