I leave the door open.

Dr. Nathaniel Burke died at his desk on a Tuesday morning, forty-one years into a quiet Brooklyn practice. Fourteen hundred files have to be read, sorted, and closed ? dull hourly work, the kind that goes to a forensic psychologist with a mark on his record and nobody calling him.

On the nineteenth day Elias Mercer opens a drawer and finds a working notebook. On the last page, written seven days before Burke died, there is one sentence and a small pencil dot beside it.

Then he checks the index, and one line does not follow the chronology.

File 114 holds four hundred and fifty-one pages about a man who was never a patient.

No consent. No diagnosis. No payment. No name ? eleven years, and not once. Every Tuesday at half past six, when the building was empty, one man walked into that office believing one thing was happening.

It was something else.

Mercer has no mandate, no access, and no right to ask a single one of the questions he now has. He has four hundred pages written by a dead colleague that prove nothing at all ? and that were not hidden, but left, by a man who made sure somebody would come looking.

The question is not what Nathaniel Burke saw. It is why he said nothing for eleven years.

The Last Lie is the second novel in The Elias Mercer Files. It can be read on its own.