They sat in one of the plush booths. The booths were comfortable enough to sit in for the length of time it might take one to slowly sip at a coffee and eat a slice of cake guaranteed to place one into cardiac arrest twenty years before the steadily dropping average age, but any longer than that would cause pain. An hours stay in one of the ergonomically designed things would most likely cause serious damage to the lumbar region.

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They pulled out their PDAs. Old models they would be the laughing stock of the techno-savvy younger generation, but they were serviceable. They still had physical keyboards, even though both units technically supported touch screen interfaces. They pulled up their notes, and set their PDAs to pair so they could trade. Photos, notes, small audio clips containing personal thoughts on the scenes, victims, information gathered so far, all flew back and forth between their devices in a flurry of radio-waves. It was a grim irony that the hand scrawled notes that each had written into their devices were still illegible to anyone but themselves. Harvey’s PDA kept attempting to switch to Arabic language character sets when he attempted to get the device to turn his writing to text. Comedic value of that aside, the contents of those hand scrawled notes, the photos, the dictaphone recordings, were grim indeed. Gallows humour was the best spin that one could put on the smirk that crossed Trey’s face. Sad indifference for Harvey’s.

“Ok,” sighed Harvey as he rubbed the bridge of his nose “the more we get, the less it makes any sense… Am I the only one that feels this way?”

“Mmm, yeah, but no. You’re right though. The more we get, the more we’re not getting. I’m getting jack of this shit.”

Trey took a pull on his ‘drink’ before continuing “No DNA evidence. No fibre evidence. No prints. It’s like this guy’s watched every fucking episode of Law & Order and CSI, then checked off everything that you can actually look for at a crime scene and made sure it’s not there.”

“Mmm,” Harvey agreed, nodding into his mug of what he really wished to be coffee “plus we’ve got no motive, no notes or clues left behind like a ‘smart-than-thou’ psycho fuck would leave behind. Nothing tying the victims together, either. He’s like a fucking ghost, this guy.”

They both stared at the table for a few moment, as Harvey drummed his fingers against the poorly polished surface. He beat a repetitive tattoo. One beat, three beats, four beats, one beat. Over, and over, like the catch to some half remembered rock song. His poorly cut nails dug small rivets in the cheap surface coat of the soft wood, his drumming growing harder, faster, as he grew more agitated by the whole situation.

“Shit!” Harvey grunted, grimacing into his coffee.

“Yeah, it kind of is,and this case is frustrating too” replied Trey “Let’s go back to the office and look at the case file. Maybe we missed something.”

Harvey sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

---

He looked about the offices furnishings. The doctor, in his good graces, provided his patients with a range of seats so that they may feel more comfortable by picking that which was closest to their own favourite, their own safe place, their own child hood memory of sitting in Daddy’s or Grandpa’s chair. The large yoga cushion no doubt evoked memories of the traumatic womb and birthing experience for the chronically fit late thirty somethings that had recently had their spiritual reawakenings thanks to yoga and the power of their swami. Jeremry couldn’t help but think of some muscular himbo type with short, spiked up hair named Brad talking in gentle, Marlboro man tones as he patted firm and shapley thighs into position before suggesting that one on one private sessions were available for a nominal fee. There was of course and easy-over arm chair. The kind that seemed huge and could contain ones entire body as a child, but later in life was merely comfortable provided your torso had the exactly correct proportions to sit in them like some kind of Egyptian god with the scathing gaze of their animal eyes. The egg chair didn’t even bear thinking about.

And the Chesterfield chaise lounge.

There was always a Chesterfield chaise lounge. It was an archetype. A meme. An original and the best. A stereotype so ingrained that Jeremy was certain that nine ouf of every ten patients, himself included, would always sit down, hoist their legs up, and lie down as the Doctor sat behind the head of the chair as they proceeded to let loose a deluge of their own personal issues and inner demons. The deep, burgundy-brown of the leather contained the scent of a thousand oily and dry and wretched and besodden scalps, filled with Stygian depths that no one could ever hope to truly plumb. Worn away in part by the hundreds of patients that had reclined their heads on the arm, and rested their arses in the middle, holding their cheeks clenched so as to not let go of their darkest secrets, until it came out, flooding out, in a chorus of tears and angry shouts and cries for their mothers.

The ultimate “fuck you” from Sigmund Freud, because in the end, the sick mother fucker was right about two things: Everyone else was ultimately a mother (or father) fucker, and anally retentive when it came to what mattered.

Jeremy did what nine out of ten other patients did. He sat down on the Chesterfield Chaise lounge, swung his legs over the side, and rested his head in the deep groove made by a tens of thousands of other heads resting in that spot, his own among the past multitudes. And of course, he was entirely oblivious to the true nature of the Freudian insistence on placing the psychotherapist behind the patient, just like all the others. It would never do for a patient to see the looks of horror that passed by, fleeting in broken gaps and cracks of the professionalism so fastidiously maintained, on the faces of their curer.

Or worse yet, the looks of delight.

“So, my dear Jeremy,” The doctor began “Shall we continue where we left off last time? Or do you wish to explore new avenues? I believe at the point we are at, both we be equally productive.”

The indecision of how to proceed tore at him. He was the patient here, and he was paying good money for a cure. The doctor should have been the one to make these sorts of decisions, hurry up, and cure him. He didn’t have time for the doctor to twaddle on this way, and he’d told him so in the first session. He had been emphatically clear on this point, stressing it to the utmost, nearly ranting to drive the point home like a nine inch nail would be driven in upon the Golgotha.

“I guess we should continue with the dream I was telling you about last time.” It was all that he could think to say. It shouldn’t have been a decision he needed to make.

“Which would that be? The one in which you are being crucified by nameless celebrities,” the doctor inquired with a raised eyebrow “or the recurring one in which you are some kind of avenging spirit, ritualising the murder of a sinner and taking the payment of… what was it again?”

The doctor flipped through the pad that contained Jeremy’s file until he found the correct point, made a quick scribbling sound as if he were underlining or circling a particular point, and then dog eared the page “Ah yes, the payment in the form of ‘two orbs’”

---

Their office, not that it was an office so much as a set of cubicles in which Trey had insisted they install a door on the otherwise door shaped opening, smelt like too much stale coffee and frustration.

Cubicles had been designed for the ultimate flexibility for workers in an office situation, something to allow the quick change or addition to space by the modification of partitions. Or breaking down the walls entirely so as to allow a specified area for each little drone within the office, and allowing all the freely share the information that passed their way to the others that would share the floor with them. A pity that the dream had been shattered like an oversized lolly handed to a petulant child at an amusement park. They had merely become a way of reminding their denizens that they were not important enough to warrant a permanent place in part of the machine, that they weren’t worth real walls, or real doors, or even a roof to call their own. They were common herd animals in a pen, to be watched over by their commanding officers, who in turn sat in their own fish tanks of glass walled offices, with the one concession to privacy being the installation of Venetian blinds that could never be closed enough to truly block the view of those on the floor.

A two way panopticon that ensured everyone worked all the time for fear of being caught slacking off.

It was why Trey had insisted that they increase the height of their partition walls and get a door installed. Not to his superiors, of courfse. That would be a fools errand, and flatly denied. He and Harvey had merely done it, and explained it away saying that they needed the extra space to organise “clue-maps”, and kept up the pretence by having bizarre photos, news clipping, and obscure bits of paper all linked by pins that had multi-coloured bits of string connecting them all.

It looked like the attic of a paranoid schizophrenic. Harvey had considered leaving hats made from tin-foil on the back-of-the-door hooks as a sarcastic homage to that very fact.

Harvey was not feeling terribly sarcastic at this point however. If anything, he was feeling vexed. No clues, no leads, no sense. It frustrated him. This in turn led on to a vicious cycle where he would feel sexually frustrated in turn, leading to further psychological frustration as there was nothing he could do about it there and then. The urge for sexual gratification during working hours, especially on days that were often far too long usually left him feeling too tired to actually do anything about it at the correct time and place, which in turn led to further frustrations, both sexual and psychological.

He was sure this was unhealthy.

He was sure that it was something he should keep to himself.

“God, I could use a wank.” he muttered under his breath.

Trey smirked over at his desk and proceeded to pull one cheek in and out at an increasingly rapid rate. Normally, he would be beyond such childish humour, but the thin walls allowed sound to travel almost as efficiently as if there was nothing there at all. He know precisely when there was someone outside their ad hoc office, and it amused him to no end to give those outside the impression that something inappropriate was indeed going on, because he also knew that the sound inside their cubicle was just as easily heard outside, including Harvey’s last utterance.

“Trey?”

“Yeah.”

“Quit jerking me off here and concentrate.”

An officer by the water cooler, three cubicles down, choked on his iced water mid anecdote. They should have been used to the unorthodox nature of the two by now, but no one truly was. Their sheer lack of professionalism drove others in the department to despair. Especially because they managed to get results by seeing connections no one else did. They would have made good intelligence analysts, had their own personality profiles not clearly classified them as security risks.

“Concentrate on what?” Trey snapped, kicking his feet onto the desk, his boots resounding with a thump that jarred Harvey’s senses each time he did it. The furniture that they were provided with by the department was cheap, and one day, those boots would snap right through. The feet inside would be protected by the heavy, lustreless black leather, and the heavier industrial steel cap. Perhaps a knee might have gotten twisted out, the cap making a popping sound like a postal tube finally giving way after being sealed too tightly, as one of the many variously sized belts that wrapped around the length of the calf of the boot caught on something. A jagged plank of wood, or office files, perhaps. A hip may have been put out of joint as one of the zippers caught a desk drawer in a hasty, and ill-fated move to get away before the imminent collapse of the desk brought other, heavier objects down onto a slender, wirey muscled thigh.

None of these things happened this time, nor the hundreds of times previously. The law of averages said it would eventually.

You might also like to read:

1. Penitence & Therapy pt2
2. Penitence & Therapy pt4
3. Penitence & Therapy pt5
4. Penitence & Therapy pt6
5. Penitence & Therapy pt8

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