Pack 'em up careful, okay? I don't want to see any scratches on that new driver."

I didn't hear him say "please."

Phil Barrett stood, and I decided I should, too.

Still twenty yards from the porch, Raymond said, "Joey let me beat him on a par three, Phil. The fourth, you know that one? The one with the green by the creek?

After I got a lucky tee-shot that left me a three-footer for a birdie, I think he intentionally put his in the sand so that I could say I beat him on a hole.

Had witnesses for it, too. Good kid. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Nice of him. Nice gesture. Only wished I had time to play eighteen with him. Who knows, I might have gotten lucky a second time." He reached into his pocket, pulled out a golf ball, and held it high in the air.

"I kept the ball I used, too. He even initialed it for me. When Joey goes and finally wins one of the majors, this will be a sweet memory for me."

He stuffed the ball back in his pocket.

"Alan, Alan. Welcome to Gloria's Silky Road. I can't tell you how grateful I am to you for pulverizing your schedule to accommodate my need to return to Washington. So kind of you. So kind. Please offer my personal apologies to all of your patients for the inconvenience I've caused them." He hopped up the two steps to the porch and held out his hand to me.

"I'll be sure to do that, Ray" Yeah, right after I distribute copies of my driving record and income tax returns to each of them.

"The only good news for me is that its real likely that they're all living outside my district. Don't have to worry much about voter backlash." He laughed and moved toward the front door.

"Come on inside, now. It's starting to get warm enough to cook oatmeal out here." We walked inside and stood in a bright entryway. The walls were papered in rich red paisley and the floor was made of octagonal limestone tiles. To my left I saw the huge post-and-beam space where Gloria Welle and Brian Sample had shared tea and Girl Scout Cookies. Ray said, "Phil, go find those files for me and bring them to us in the study."

I followed Welle down a narrow hall to a pine-paneled study. The room was large, but warm. One wall was covered with bookcases. I've learned that my eyes are as magnetically attracted to a wall of books as they are to a woman's cleavage. I had to remind myself not to be distracted, and I tried to stay focused on my conversation with Welle.

"Sit, sit."

I did, in a leather club chair beside a low table that had been built on a frame fashioned from an old wagon wheel. The wheel caused me to recall the photograph that Kimber Lister had used to begin his film about the two dead girls. Tami and Miko against a background of an old wagon wheel.

I expected Ray to take his place behind the monstrous desk halfway across the room. He didn't. He chose another one of the club chairs. As he sat down, his trousers rode up, and he spent a few moments trying to free his boxers or his briefs from the confines of his crotch. He yanked and tugged at his underwear as though I weren't even in the room.

Finally he said, "I don't know about you and the way you practice. But I've never been comfortable just handing over case files. I actually like to review them, explain them."

"Sometimes I feel the same way. Ray."

"Good!" he said much too jubilantly.

"Glad to know we're on the same page. Phil should be in here any second with those files. Phil! Hey!"

Phil chose that second to waddle through the door shaking two manila folders.

"Sylvie had these in the lockbox of papers that were packed to go back to the District. I had to dig them out." He handed the files to Raymond. I could tell he was dying to be invited to take a chair.

Without looking up Ray said, "This will be one of those clinical talks you're not allowed to listen to, Phil. Sorry. We won't be long."

Phil looked hurt.

"Oh. Sure. Sure. I'll be, uh, following up with Senator Specter's office about that highway matter, Ray. I'd like to have that whole thing settled before we get on the plane." To me, Phil said, "The congressman is trying to get funding for two additional lanes on 1-25 south out of Denver."

"That's great," I said, trying to sound like a grateful constituent though I was neither grateful nor Ray's constituent. And 1-25 south of Denver wasn't even in his district.

"Yeah." Ray's attention was already on the case file.

The label on the tab of the manila folder was handwritten but I couldn't read it from where I was sitting. I said, "That was scary the other day. What happened at the tennis house."

Ray shrugged, seemed nonplussed.

"You know, I didn't even hear the shots. Saw some people runnin' around crazy over by the door. Then Phil flattens me to the floor. Next thing I know I'm being hustled into a side room by a bunch of security types. I wasn't so much scared as I was… puzzled."

"Do your people think you were the target, though? The thought of someone coming after you with a gun has to be frightening regardless of the amount of security you might have."

"My people?" He chuckled and seemed to find the concept amusing.

"It's risky, being in public life. But the danger comes with the territory-that's what I think. We all have to come to terms with it. Those two Capitol policemen killed by that crazy guy? No more than sixty feet from my office. Who can predict those things?" He shook his head, and his voice changed an octave or two with that sentence. For a moment I thought he might have reminded himself of his wife's murder. When he continued, though, his tone had modulated again.

"I'm an outspoken advocate of some unpopular ideas. I always have been. And that, my friend, raises are." Listening to him, the thought that crossed my mind was stump speech, and I prepared myself for a long oration, but he quickly returned to the matter of the two dead girls.

"Here we go"-he opened the file and his face softened a little as he continued-"one of my absolutely favorite clients of all time."

Are? I repeated to myself while he silently perused the top sheet in Mariko Hamamoto's record. Had he really said, "raises are"? I tried to steal a look at the rest of the file on his lap. The collection was as thin as an anorexic gymnast. If it had held as many as six sheets of paper, I would have been surprised.

Fifteen minutes later we had accomplished our review. To say the case file added anything to my understanding of Miko's psychotherapy would have been a generous assessment. The first page in the folder was a typical doctors-waiting-room information form. The second was Colorado's mandatory disclosure statement for psychologists. Welle had asked both Mariko and her parents to sign it. The third page was a request for information about Mariko from the local high school. I didn't see any indication that he'd ever received anything back in writing. The next page was a photocopy of a billing record. The ledger form had been kept by hand. In 1988, Welle charged fifty bucks an hour.

Only on the last two pages did I see any useful information. Welle had scribbled a half a page of notes after his intake meetings with Mariko and had repeated the process after his first meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Hamamoto.

Nowhere in those intake musings did Welle offer opinions or perceptions different from those we'd discussed in Denver the previous week.

The last page in the file was the only page that surprised me at all. It was typed. The other pages were either printed forms that had been filled out in handwriting, or notes in Ray's handwriting.

The top of the last sheet was a five-point treatment plan listing outcome goals.

The bottom of the sheet was a termination summary that specified the accomplishment of the stated outcome goals. Basic stuff.