Here’s the truth about psychologists.

We endure all those years of school--the killer exams, even graveyard shifts interviewing God-talkers and mothers who drown their babies--because we want to help people, of course. But that’s not the brass ring. The top prize, once we’re stamped and certified, is that we can draw a line in the sand. Crazies on one side; psychologists on the other.

Well, that’s not how it worked out. At least not for me.

My name is Jessica Rose LeFave, Ph.D., P.C., and I could not breathe.

I was parked on the curb at 44 War Admiral Run at the Flower Mound Country Club, staring up at the ugliest mansion on the planet. The Taj MaHorror. Killer August sunshine glinted off four stories of polished black granite and gleaming white marble. A red banner, “True Guns presents Charming Billy!” left over from last night’s movie kickoff party flapped at half-mast off the central balcony. Legitimate residents of the Flower Mound had nicknamed the house, calling it an abomination, the creation of a demonic woman.

That woman, Bernice Jackson, and her husband were found this morning inside the Taj MaHorror face up in their bed, their breastbones split, their hearts exploded.

The Chief of Detectives, Don Wilder, who’d called me to do a psychological profile on the killer, leaned on his plain-wrapper Crown Victoria across the street, finishing up a cell phone call. Catching my attention, he pointed to his phone and shrugged. I smiled slightly as if to say, “Sure, no hurry, I’m cool,” which was a total lie.

The thing was, I was excited.

Not for the reason helicopters zigzagged overhead and Flower Mound Country Club security officers chased after photographers scurrying onto the scene like deranged spiders after someone stomped on their nest. Bernice Jackson was big news. Re-writing the Battle of the Alamo and the escapades of Billy the Kid into wildly successful soft-porn novels and movies had landed Bernice on every “top ten most fascinating people” list among the tabloid crowd, and the “ten most hated” list among those of us believing in truth, justice, and the Texan way. The history-raping woman’s celebrity wasn’t what had my heart racing and my chest tight. I was excited because Bernice Jackson had been a psychiatry patient of my husband’s at the time of his death. Since watching David’s bloated and fish-eaten corpse dragged out of Lake Austin, I’d lingered behind the curtain of real life, praying for a lead, a way to understand. A ghost, scouring the crowd for a monster, a list of David’s patients clutched in my fist.

I know. Claiming a connection between the murder of the notorious Bernice Jackson this morning and David’s death ten months ago, was a leap. More than a leap. Maybe a delusion. Still, David had been edgy about someone on my list that last afternoon. Even frightened. David knew something. Something someone believed was worth killing him to keep quiet. And now the Jacksons murdered. Just maybe…

Not that I was delighted two people were inside the Taj MaHorror with their chests carved open. While I admit to being neurotic, panicked, and a history freak, I had not prayed for anyone to die. The governor’s wife caught boinking her bodyguard or Miss Texas’ stomach-stapling scars up close on the ten o’clock news would have been plenty. David’s practice was loaded with high-profile Texans packing blackmail-worthy secrets.

Investigators were kind when I shared my theory that David was killed to bury a confidence told in therapy. At least they were kind until I became a blonde girl nuisance, then the police moved on.

No one but me believed David was murdered.

The Chief closed his phone, smiled “Good morning,” and headed my direction. A step later he answered his phone again and held up a spread hand indicating he’d be another five minutes. I was Don Wilder’s favorite profiler on cases with media interest and we were friends. But if the Chief had any idea why I was chewing my lower my lip like a triple-shot latte junkie at an herbal tea convention, I wouldn’t have been sitting in my car waiting and he wouldn’t have been smiling. I’d already shot myself twice in the foot claiming crossovers between David’s death and candidates on my list caught doing bad things. Don Wilder had been the person in the police department taking the heat for my previous spectacular and very public misfires.

This morning was my last bullet.

I squinted up through the Lexus windshield.

Okay, about the rich bitch car.

Sure, the Lexus reeked insecurity, and I don’t run from that call. I know the gorgeous horses, the car, even the Mt. Laurel house were pathetic attempts to make up for my slummer status among the legacy riders of the Flower Mound horsy set. No amount of education and paid labor could buy old-money breeding, but they were all I had.

The best I could do as a kid were sporadic riding lessons, funded by hoarding lunch money and my allowance, squirreling away gift money, talking my parents into cash instead of buying me clothes, and serving as my sister’s slave. (A nickel for buffing her shoes, a dime for a biking to the Sac ’N Pac for Hershey bars and peanut patties, a nickel for warming her clothes in front of the bathroom wall heater.) At thirteen, I lied my way into a shift at a tin storage-shed hamburger joint. From there my horse-supporting career took off, landing me positions as a cafeteria aide and, once I could cake on enough mascara and blush to pass for a trashy sixteen, Dairy Queen.

The police think I’m crazy. Some of my friends say I’m obsessed while others line up with my sister the Baptist and say that after what I did, I deserve what’s happened. Both coalitions claim I persist in believing David was murdered because I can’t accept the truth, and they could be right. As a kid, I pretended I belonged to the riding and horse show set. I stayed terrified my equestrian buddies, who spent summers in Europe and afternoons in lessons, would walk in on me behind a sticky counter taking orders or mopping up, and find out I was a sham.

Is that what I was doing now? Creating illusions for others, delusions for myself--rather than admit that David and I could never belong in the lucky group of “good and happily married couples?” Was my fervor now just pretending that our marriage was something it was not? That I’m something I’m not?

Did I mention that David’s blood alcohol was twice the legal limit? That a downtown Hilton receipt and another woman’s wedding rings were found in his pocket?

I fingered those diamonds in the left front pocket of my jeans. I clinked my odd souvenirs against my gold band, the one David had a Mexico City street jeweler deliver to the Camino Real Hotel where we’d said our vows hidden from family and friends.

The gaudy wedding set, still damp from the lake, was presented to me at the coroner’s office along with David’s wallet, two quarters and a dime. Accidents don’t rate evidence files.

Neither the alcohol nor the rings matched up with the man I knew and loved.

Of course, that was just the point the police tried to make—that I didn’t know my husband as well as I thought I did. According to their findings, David, speeding and in a drunken stupor, plunged his Pathfinder over a cliff on a curving road nowhere near the hospital where he’d told me he was working late. What wasn’t in the report, but accepted as fact by everyone but me, was that David, the psychiatrist with the finest reputation in Austin, the man who’d risked everything to take a chance on me, wasn’t as perfect as I had believed.

The Chief of Detectives glanced my way again and nodded an apology. “No problem,” I indicated, “no hurry at all.”

Bernice Jackson. Sheesh. Why hadn’t I zeroed in on the Jacksons before now? With all my analyzing of David’s notes, my long nights of half-cocked stalking—the notorious Jackson name should have leapt off his appointment log and slapped me silly. Bernice’s rise from receptionist at her husband’s one truck plumbing company to queen of her own movie empire was built on lies and secrets. Everyone knew that.

If only I knew why Bernice Jackson had come to see David. A diagnosis or a presenting problem. But David’s notes were scarce, as though he’d known they’d one day be called into court. Who was Bernice Jackson behind the stories and the lies? I’d like to think if David’s notes had given me more, enough to warn me about the depth of Bernice Jackson’s disturbance, I wouldn’t have withheld information from the police that steamy August morning, and wouldn’t, within a week, end up in a Mexican jungle with an AK-47 in my face.

I’d like to think that, but who am I kidding? Remember when your parents asked if you’d jump off a cliff just because some other idiot kid did?

I was that idiot kid.