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heavy bag in the basement, throwing combinations under the cold glare of the track lights. The large, pine-paneled room is lined with boxes and old tools. Like the unconscious itself, a windowless vault below ground level, a hoarder of memory and regret.
    Barefoot, stripped to my shorts, I was covered in sweat. I had Chick Corea on the CD. Loud. It was three a.m.
    I worked it hard. Muscles aching, eyes stinging with briny sweat; fists going numb, long past pain. At the end, I clung to the bag, face pressed against the slick, damp leather, gasping for breath.
    Memory fragments flickered like heat lightning in my mind: nine years old, the house on Winebiddle Street, my old man in pajamas and robe, sparring bare-handed with me, bob and weave, tapping my cheek with his powerful left, reminding me to keep my guard up, always up, another slap on my face, stinging, another life lesson, always harder than it needed to be…
    I pulled off my gloves, went upstairs and hit the shower. Standing under the hot water, steam rising, I peeled the cracked, grimy training tape from my hands. Blood-caked skin came away with it.
    I ducked my head under the scalding water. I wanted it to burn, to sear off the day’s events, to scour me clean.
    ***
     
    An hour later, in jeans and sweatshirt, I stood at the window in the front room. In the storm’s wake, the purple sky looked like a bruise, splotchy and sore, stretching to the horizon.
    Then I saw the headlights. The patrol unit doing its regular pass by my house. I found myself nodding to them through the curtains, though I doubt they saw it. Or were even looking.
    It was bullshit, and I knew it. Whoever tried to kill me wouldn’t be stupid enough to try again. Not in the same night. Not with the cops alerted.
    I was wide awake and jangly. Going into the kitchen, I flicked on the overhead, flooding me in light about as warm and consoling as a solar flare.
    Christ, I thought, gotta put in that dimmer switch…
    Funny, the things you think about at four a.m. A brutal murder and household chores. Death and dimmer switches.
    I poured myself a Jack Daniels, pulled up a chair. Polk had suggested I come up with a list of enemies, people who might bear a grudge against me. People from my past. Ex-lovers. Colleagues. Even patients.
    A list of enemies? Right. God knows, I’d pissed-off my share of people over the years—in all the above-mentioned categories—but not enough to warrant homicide. At least, I didn’t think so.
    Instead, I kept replaying Kevin’s last words to me as he left my office. “I’ve got lots of secrets…”
    The look I’d seen on his face. Not guarded, or challenging. Something else. In his eyes. A warning?
    No, a promise .
    I sat up. I’d misread that last moment between us. It wasn’t the usual patient’s yearning to disclose something painful, terrifying, held back by fear or shame.
    I must have passed some test today, and Kevin was sending me a message. He wasn’t wanting to tell me something else, something important. He was going to tell me. Soon.
    But what?

Chapter Eight
     
    Coffee in hand, I stood against the door to my back porch, watching the sun rise over the famed three rivers. The arteries in the heart of the city.
    Even with the sparse river traffic nowadays. Not like years ago, when the riverfront below was flanked by seventeen miles of steel mills. When coal barges and tugboats clogged the Point and black smoke belched from furnaces and foundries, sprinkling the old buildings with soot.
    Now, as the sun pulled deep reds and oranges out of the morning sky, the rain-washed city shone like a scale model under glass. And what new steel there was, embedded in freshly-poured concrete, was imported from Japan.
    At six on the dot, I went back inside the house, poured another mug of black coffee, and turned on KDKA-TV.
    Kevin’s murder was the lead story on the news. The anchorman explained that the body had been found “by his therapist, Dr. Daniel Rinaldi,