Blinded (15 page)

The list of people who were going to be pissed at me was longer than usual.

Alan? Absolutely. Top of the list. My captain? He’d kill me if he got half a chance-save my insurance company a lot of money and my doctor a lot of work. My cardiologist? I think he was coming around to the reality that I wasn’t his normal post-MI patient. Still, he wasn’t going to be happy about my extracurricular activities. I was pretty sure about that. And Carmen Reynoso? Eh, so? It’d just give her another reason to look down her nose at us mountain cops.

Who else?

I wondered what Sherry would think, but I finally decided that I couldn’t really guess. I hadn’t thought she was the type of person who could walk out the door with my kid less than a week after I had a heart attack.

Who am I kidding? Sherry wouldn’t be surprised. When she heard what I was up to, she’d make that noise that I hated that came from someplace far back in her sinuses, but she wouldn’t be surprised.

The noise was her marital shorthand for “See what an asshole he is.”

Or maybe it was “What can I do with him?”

I didn’t know anymore.

But at that moment I was coming to the conclusion that being on medical leave from the department wasn’t all bad. My check was still coming in. The mortgage was going to get paid. I even liked not carrying my badge. And not having a gun on my hip or strapped below my armpit? It was fine, good even, at least for a while.

Two phone calls, and I had her address. If I was smarter, I could have figured it out in one, but I used one of the calls to get an answer to Alan’s question about how the cops were tipped about Jara Heller’s husband’s cocaine problems. I admit I frittered away a minute or two trying to figure out why Alan wanted to know, too.

Gibbs Storey’s house wasn’t that far from mine, geographically speaking. Ten blocks? Twelve? I could have walked over there easily, but I didn’t. Too much slush on the sidewalks, too little motivation to fight the muck on my part. I took the Cherokee and parked half a block down from her place. Why not in front?

I was on the lookout for media, especially media with cameras.

The whole connection between current Boulder residents Sterling and Gibbs Storey and the old murder in Laguna Beach hadn’t yet hit the papers, but I knew it would. Any minute, probably.

And Sterling’s disappearance in Georgia?

That was prime tabloid bait. The frosting on the cake. When that news hit the wires, we were talking nonstop cable TV chatter and lots of reporters making their first trips ever to southern Georgia so they could do their pompous stand-ups on some obscure bridge over the Ochlockonee River. There’d probably be good footage of gorgeous old bloodhounds on long leashes snuffling along the riverbank and maybe even some shots of gruff rescue guys in wet suits searching eddies. And of course, there’d be plenty of on-camera interviews with fat cops like me saying they’re doing the best they can, ferreting out every lead, examining every possibility.

So I checked the street in front of the house as carefully as I knew how. I didn’t want to get ambushed by some reporter.

Not yet.

Gibbs Storey was home. To my surprise, she answered her door. To my greater surprise, she invited me inside as soon as I told her I was a friend of her psychologist. That’s what got me inside her door: Alan. Whatever. I was grateful to be off the porch; I’d felt like I had a spotlight on me when I was standing outside like some Jehovah’s Witness or some almost-homeless guy walking across lawns going house to house spreading doorspam.

The entryway of the Storeys’ home was all rose-hued marble tile. Nothing was out of place in the part of the house that I could see from where I was standing. No dust, no dirt. No kids’ shoes. No crappy tennis balls the dog dragged in. If my crazy grandmother had had a ton of money and a totally different sense of what was tasteful-actually the dear old woman didn’t have any sense at all of what was tasteful-this is what her house would have looked like.

“You’re Dr. Gregory’s detective friend? The one he wanted to talk to about… my situation?”

That part couldn’t have gone better if I had written her lines myself. I’d never said I was a cop-technically since I was on leave, I wasn’t a functioning cop-but she’d generously gone ahead and granted me detective status. Alan had once told me that status was a simple thing, psychologically speaking. One person assigned it, and as soon as someone else agreed, the status became real. That’s all it took. Well, Gibbs had assigned me detective status. And me?

I didn’t contradict her. Thus, my status was real.

“Yeah. I’m Dr. Gregory’s friend. The one he talked to” was all I said.

“How did you find me? He said he wouldn’t tell you my name.”

“He didn’t. He kept his word; he’s big on that. But there’s a lot of other stuff going on-you must know that. Things that I’m in a position to hear about without any assistance from him. The search warrant here the other day? The cops visiting from the West Coast? It wasn’t hard to put numbers on the players’ backs, if you know what I mean. I sort of put two and two together on my own.”

She stared at me as though I were some kind of bizarre math whiz, and she feared I was about to do some jujitsu calculus on her.

I smiled back at her like a teddy bear. A big teddy bear with man-boobs.

I was wearing a coat, a nylon parka that had once had enough goose down in it to keep me warm in a blizzard. She wouldn’t know about the man-boobs. Hell, maybe she would. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t planning on taking the coat off in front of her.

Why? I just wasn’t going to do it.

Gibbs Storey was gorgeous, okay? I mean make-me-nervous, shift-my-weight, avert-my-eyes kind of gorgeous. The girls-guys-like-me-don’t-even-get-to-talk-to kind of gorgeous.

Not pretty.

Gibbs was movie-star stuff.

If she hadn’t been so pretty, or maybe if I had just been constitutionally more adept at being around someone so pretty, I might not have blurted out what I blurted out next. But she was, and I wasn’t.

I said, “And of course, I heard about your husband. That’s kind of why I’m here. Well, that is why I’m here.”

Her face decomposed into tears. For a moment I thought she was going to run into my arms. Fantasy? Maybe. But she didn’t turn to me; she turned and sprinted down the hall.

I decided that her rapid departure constituted an invitation, so I followed her.

It took about five minutes before things calmed down again.

We’d ended up in a long room that faced the greenbelt below the hogbacks on the western edge of town. Right where the Storeys’ carefully manicured backyard stopped, the scrub of the greenbelt began. The previous owners of this place must have had a scary, scary night in July 2002 when the Wonderland Lake fire erupted and looked as though it were planning on turning this particular section of Boulder into raw material for Kingsford.

A quick calculation told me that the room we were in was almost exactly the size of my house. This family room/breakfast nook/kitchen combo was as spotless as the entryway, but it wasn’t done in marble. This doesn’t-it-look-like-a-ski-lodge? haven was all dark wood floors and wood-beam ceilings and plaid sofas and furniture converted from farm implements and a chandelier made out of a heck of a lot of deer antlers. A moss rock fireplace divided the view of the sharp hogback to the west almost exactly in half. If the fireplace had ever had an actual fire in it, somebody with a serious aversion to ash-I’m talking phobia-had taken on the responsibility of cleaning up after the blaze.

It crossed my mind that maybe that’s why Gibbs Storey was seeing Alan. She was a neat freak, a pathological neat freak of some kind. He was trying to get her to loosen up, not dust for a day.

But who was I to say what was deviant, right?

While I was encouraging Gibbs Storey to stop crying-I do a surprising amount of that in my job day to day, and I’m pretty good at it-I was thinking that if somebody came and chopped off the rest of this house and just left this room standing, Sherry and I still couldn’t afford to live here.

Why did we fight so hard to stay in Boulder? Why? We worked our asses off, together we made a decent amount of money, or what should have been a decent amount of money, and what did we get for it? A barely insulated frame box with a crappy furnace, a twenty-year-old roof, and wall-to-wall carpeting that smelled like a colony of prairie dogs used it for a few years before donating it to the Goodwill. If you’re a cop, or a teacher, or a lady selling flowers in a little shop just off the Downtown Mall, that’s what working your ass off gets you, if you want the privilege of living a dozen blocks away from Gibbs and Sterling Storey in beautiful, beautiful Boulder.

It gets you shit.

Maybe Sherry was right. Maybe it was time for a change. Back to Minnesota? I didn’t know.

Gibbs was curled up in the corner of a big sofa. I was across from her on a chair made out of twigs and branches. Her sniffles seemed to be slowing. Finally, she whimpered, “I’m a private person. Soon everybody is going to know everything, right?”

Well, that gave me pause. I’m thinking I have a grieving widow on my hands, and that I’m going to be ladling out the comfort and tugging the tissues if I want to get anything out of her, but instead I’m wondering whether she’s upset just because her family secrets aren’t likely to remain secrets for too long.

That was a whole different state of affairs.

“ ‘Everything’ being what exactly, ma’am?” I said. It was as innocuous as I could make the question sound. I hoped it was innocuous enough, because if Gibbs heard any semblance of the echo of what she’d just said to me-assuming she was one tenth as smart as she was pretty-I figured that my forward progress was going to be severely hampered.

She swallowed, opened her eyes a tad wider, and inhaled slowly. Yep, she’d caught wind of the echo.

“What is it that you want, Detective?”

“Please call me Sam. Sam Purdy.”

She dabbed at her eyes with one of the tissues I’d handed her. It wasn’t wadded; it was folded neatly. She used one of the sharp corners to do the dabbing. “But you are that detective friend of Dr. Gregory’s, right? The one who works with the Boulder Police Department?”

Tricky question. “That is how I make my living, ma’am.”

“Why are you here? Why did you come to see me this morning?”

“Something’s been troubling me, I mean wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night troubling me about… your situation, and I’m hoping you can help me make some of my confusion go away.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“You’ve lived with your husband a long time since you knew he had killed your old friend, right?”

“Yes.”

It was a reluctant yes. Not reluctant because the facts didn’t ring true to her, reluctant because she could spot the danger looming ahead if she accepted my premise.

“Well, I’d like to know how you could stay with him. It’s important. To me, really important. I don’t understand how you could go through the routines, you know, the daily… stuff that makes up marriage, knowing what you knew.”

“He’s my husband, Detective.”

Yeah, yeah.
But I heard the present tense. And knew she’d wanted me to hear the present tense.

“But wives leave husbands all the time, ma’am. All the time. They leave husbands over goofy things, over things that are much less consequential than murder. Money, booze, other women. Snoring, halitosis, sex-too much, not enough-you name it. But you didn’t, and I’m trying to understand that.”

What I didn’t say was
“My God, woman, your options are limitless. I know twenty men who would bow down and lick clean the ground you walk on.”

“I love Sterling.”

I wanted to touch my chest right then, press on my sternum with at least three fingers to see if the tightness I was feeling had to do with my heart or with my
heart,
but I was afraid it might freak her out to see me caressing myself, so I didn’t. Instead, I reached into my coat pocket and fingered the bottle of nitro the way I used to stroke the velvety rabbit’s foot I carried around in my pants pocket as a kid.

I said, “And that’s enough?”

“It was for me,” she said.

Past tense now.

I took a moment to look away from her and give myself a pep talk. I told myself that I could look her in the eye and not be weakened by her beauty. That my resolve wouldn’t dissolve in her loveliness.

When I looked back up at her, I was pretty sure that I’d been wrong.

“Can I admit what I’ve been wondering about you?” I said.

In an endearing way that ambushed me, she said, “Please.”

“I’ve been wondering whether you’ve been threatened, you know? Or maybe you’ve feared what your life would be like if you turned him in, what would happen to you. Is that what kept you from calling us?”

My mother collects Lladro angels. The smile Gibbs offered reminded me of the face of one of the angels, only prettier. “That wasn’t it, Detective. I’ve gone over all this with that woman detective. With Miss Reynoso.”

I waved off her objection. “Different departments. California, Colorado. It’s a left hand, right hand thing. I don’t mean to be repetitive-to force you to be repetitive-but in my business it truly helps sometimes to hear things yourself.” I glanced away from her, then right back. Gibbs Storey was still gorgeous; that hadn’t changed. “I’d understand those reasons. You know, if you were scared. If that’s the reason it took you so long to-”

“But you don’t understand that I love him. And that love made every choice difficult. Every option… complicated.”

Is that what love did? Would Sherry say the same thing? I didn’t know. I’d like to have asked her.

Maybe I would. Probably I wouldn’t.

I said, “I’m having a little trouble with that, I’ll admit.”

Gibbs stood up and crossed the space between us. She leaned over, placing her hands on her knees so that the flawless skin of her face was only about a foot from my eyes. She said, “Would you like something to drink, Detective? Some coffee, maybe? It’ll just take a minute.”