Blinded (34 page)

The house was calm when I got home from the two-act farce I’d produced at my office.

The meeting with Jim Zebid had been brief and relatively cordial. He seemed surprised by my revelation that some of the same lapses in confidentiality that had been plaguing my practice were also plaguing my partner’s practice next door. I went into a long explanation about the design of the soundproofing of the interior walls of the offices and why we had ruled out the possibility of eavesdroppers. I then revealed that my partner and I were planning to interview the couple who cleaned the offices for us the next day, and that we suspected that one or both of them may have found a way to get into our locked filing cabinets.

I promised to let him know the results of our inquiries.

He thanked me as he left. Truthfully? I didn’t see a sign that he was playing along with me. He was a better actor than I was.

I helped Grace into her pajamas and told Lauren to keep playing pool, that I would happily read stories to Grace before bed. I checked the charge on my cell phone battery, stuffed the phone into the pocket of my corduroys, and settled into the big chair in Grace’s room to read. She picked the same books that she picked every night-she was in a phase where she liked the idea of cardboard characters popping up at her as she turned the pages. Her current favorite was a tall skinny book full of multicolored, pop-up monsters. We read it twice-I admit that I did most of the reading-and her delight was no more muted the second time through than it had been the first.

That’s when the phone rang in my pocket.

I kissed Grace, lowered her into her crib, opened the phone, wrapped it hastily in one of my daughter’s lilliputian T-shirts, dropped my voice an octave, took a deep breath, and said, “Yeah?”

“You don’t know me, but… but don’t hang up.”

“What?”

“How’s your sc-scrotum feeling? Your… balls?”

“What the- Who’s this?”

“Just listen to me. The doctor who did your vasectomy? She-”

“What the- How do you-”

“No, no, listen to me. She screwed up when she did it. She clipped a nerve. No, snipped, snipped a nerve. You may be… impotent. You need to get a lawyer, sue her ass. She’s… out to get you.”

“Who are you?”

“A friend. You can… trust me.”

My friend hung up.

I did, too.

While I tried to still my pulse, I kissed Grace again, told her I loved her, and made sure her favorite stuffed toys were within her sight.

I walked back out to the pool table, told Lauren that Grace was tucked in and waiting for a good-night kiss, and then plopped down on the sofa in the living room.

The lights of Boulder twinkled in the dark at my feet.

Emily waddled in, her stubby tail darting around on her butt in a parody of wagging, her paw umbrella clacking on the wood floor with each fourth step. She stood in front of me for a moment, looked me right in the eyes, and then lowered her head onto my lap. Prior to joining me in the living room she’d apparently just completed a visit to her water dish, and her long beard was dripping with enough water to wash a small car.

She was telling me that things were going to be all right.

Her instincts about such matters were usually infallible, but this time I couldn’t figure out how it was all going to turn out okay.

“Calm, Gibbs. Calm. Did you call nine-one-one?”

“Yes.”

“What did you see?”

“In the parking lot-he-he got out of his car. I saw him.”

“Sterling’s outside? Is he alone?” I said, repeating some of what Gibbs told me so that Carmen would know what I was hearing. Carmen was standing three feet away. I watched her eyebrows jump up at the news about Sterling. “You’re not sure. The lights in your room, are they on or off?”

“On.”

“Turn them off. The TV, too. Shhhh. Quiet now.”

“I’m scared.”

“The door’s locked, right? The chain, too?”

“Yes. Help me, Sam. Help me.”

“Do you hear sirens yet?”

“No, no!”

Carmen’s eyes told me she was puzzled, the kind of puzzled usually reserved for those times when you think you just heard your cat ask you for a beer.

“Shhhh,” I told Gibbs. “Quiet voice. What floor are you on?”

“Um, uh. Third. Third story.”

“Third story. Get on the floor, okay? On the far side of the bed, away from the door. Can you do that?” As soon as I told her to get on the floor, I remembered that she was on her cell phone and wished I’d sent her into the bathroom.

“Yes, yes. Help me.”

“Sirens yet?”

“Uh, no. No.”

The commercial section of Vail is a few blocks wide, a few dozen blocks long. That’s it. A cruiser in a hurry could get from one end to the other in seconds. Where were they?

“You’re on the floor, right, Gibbs?”

“Yes.”

“You’re doing good.”

“Come help me.”

“I’m in Indiana, Gibbs.”

“I know. Come help me.”

“Someone will be there any second.”

I heard pounding. Gibbs said, “He’s here, Sam. He’s here. Oh no, oh no.”

“Someone’s there?” I mimed the act of knocking so that Carmen would know what Gibbs was saying. “It might be the police, Gibbs. Stay still. If you know it’s him, run for the bathroom.”

More pounding.

This time Carmen mimed the act of knocking. Then, inexplicably, she pointed down toward the floor.

For a long moment I was confused by Carmen’s charade and then, suddenly, I got it.

Holy shit.

I lowered the phone from my ear, and my pulse rocketed as though my heart had a turbocharger on it.

I moved the phone back to my face and said, “Gibbs? Stay quiet until you’re sure who it is. Don’t open the door. Shhhh.”

With the pad of my thumb firmly over the phone’s microphone, I leaned over to Holly’s oldest sister and whispered, “Get the kids and get out of the house. Now! Front door, everybody. Got a cell?”

She nodded.

“Call nine-one-one when you get outside. Tell them cops are in the basement and guns are drawn.”

I looked at Artie.

His mouth was open. His brain wasn’t.

He was staring at the big gun that was filling my hand.

“Artie?” I said, careful not to raise the hand with the pistol. “Put the knife down on the counter and follow your sister-in-law. Go on, get out of here.”

Artie followed my directions robotically. I raised the phone back to my face.

“Gibbs, are you there?” I asked.

Nothing.

Shit.

Maybe it was something she saw in my eyes, maybe it was something else entirely, but Lauren didn’t even flinch when I told her I had to go back out on Thanksgiving night to see someone. She caressed my neck for a moment, kissed me in the lingering manner that more often than not constitutes an invitation, pulled away only an inch, and said, “Be careful. Please.” Both dogs stayed by her side as I headed out the door.

Since my errand required that I pick something up at my office, I parked the car there before I strolled the short distance over to Pearl Street. I didn’t take my usual pedestrian route, which would have led a block or more northeast in the direction of the Mall, but instead ambled westward toward the sleepy part of Pearl, the part that’s on the side of Ninth nearest the mountains. The wind was gusting from Wyoming that evening, the collar on my coat was up, and my hands were stuffed in my pockets to thwart the chill.

I walked slowly, trying to find a reason not to do what I was about to do. Whatever that reason might have been, though, I wasn’t able to walk slowly enough to find it.

My destination was a cluster of condos on the north side of Pearl that had been designed to mimic a grouping of Victorian row houses. Wedding cake trim, different on every home, was painted in colors that had aged to a palate that resembled the range of hues of an Easter basket. Lights from the waning moments of holiday celebrations brightened windows in about half of the units that I could see from the sidewalk on the far side of Pearl. From the way the numbers were running, I figured I would find the town house I was looking for at the west end of the front row.

The lights in that unit were on.

Each week, when Lauren injects a long needle full of interferon into her thigh to protect herself from a double-cross from her own immune system, she uncaps the needle and plunges it straight into her thigh. “Every second of delay makes it harder to do,” she says. “No delay.”

So I didn’t delay at the door. I didn’t want this to be any harder to do than it felt like it was already. I took my left hand out of my pocket, extended a finger, and touched the doorbell.

He came to the door quickly, within seconds. I could see the shadow of his eyeball as it darkened the peephole. He didn’t open the door quickly, though. He stood behind the closed door and watched me, and watched me, and watched me through the tiny lens embedded in the door.

I checked my wristwatch after a while and began timing our little standoff. In other circumstances, with another person, I might have chosen a strategy other than dawdling, perhaps peppering the doorbell with repeated pushes, or maybe calling out, “Come on, open the door.”

But not then. Not with him. With him I stood back a step and allowed him to see me clearly. Every couple of minutes I pulled my hands from my pockets and turned completely around so that he could be confident that I wasn’t hiding anything behind my back.

Six minutes and ten seconds passed before he finally relented to some internal pressure I probably couldn’t fathom and opened the door. When the time came, he didn’t open it just a crack. He flung it wide open as though that had been his plan all along.

His physical appearance was a bit of a shock to me. He was wearing gray cotton sweats on top of a nylon running suit, had dark glasses over his eyes, and had a bandanna tied over his mouth and chin like he was Jesse James preparing to knock over a bank.

“Hello, Craig,” I said. “I think I have something of yours. Can we talk?”

“You’re the one,” he said. “You’re the one.”

Craig didn’t invite me inside, which didn’t surprise me. I sat on the steps leading up to his town house while we talked. The whole time he stood a few feet from me with his back to the front door. He was more wary of me than he was during our office visits, but I’d anticipated that he might be. The therapy session that Sharon Lewis had busted in on and aborted late the previous afternoon was certain to take a considerable toll on someone like Craig, especially in the trust-your-therapist department.

Within minutes of sitting down on Craig’s porch I reached a clinical decision about what I needed to do, but I didn’t decide exactly how to go about doing it until another fifteen minutes passed. When I explained my thinking to him, Craig was so agreeable with my plan that I guessed he’d arrived at some version of it himself long before I’d arrived at his door. I’d hoped he would be cooperative, but I was prepared to do it the hard way if I had to.

His anesthesiologist parents lived in a lavish house they’d recently built a few blocks away on Third Street. To their credit, they both rushed to their son’s home within minutes when I phoned and told them what I had in mind.

Craig chose to take an ambulance to the psychiatric hospital across town, not to ride over with his parents. Although I didn’t understand his reasons, I supported his decision. Reluctantly, his parents did, too. When I phoned for the ambulance, I requested that a police patrol car come by, as well. I hadn’t placed a person on a seventy-two-hour mental health hold for a while, and I had to ask the patrol officer for remedial instruction on how to go about it. Despite the fact that Craig was agreeable to being admitted to the hospital, I didn’t want him changing his mind and discharging himself before he was stabilized by the combination of medicine and a safe, controlled environment.

I didn’t accompany the Adamson family to the hospital. As the ambulance drove off, I turned my collar back up, stuffed my hands back into my pockets, and commenced the short stroll back to my office. I had a few calls to make to assure medical backup for Craig’s admission and to get initial orders to the nurses on the unit.

I’d see Craig again the next day as an inpatient. I thought I knew where the psychotherapy session with him would begin. Craig had already admitted calling me that night about Adrienne’s fake malpractice case. He’d denied, however, that the listening equipment that had been planted in my office belonged to him.

That troubled me. That’s where I thought we’d start.

Carmen and I could have lost some important seconds by engaging in a how-could-I-be-so-stupid contest, but we mutually decided not to bother. We both knew it would have ended up a draw.

If the Malone home was a good example of the breed, whatever elegance and purity of design the Craftsman-era architects had built into the floor plans of their bungalows did not extend into basement layout. Holly’s basement was a dark, confusing warren of tiny rooms with low ceilings. The aroma in the cellar was of moist concrete, standing water, and air freshener. I thought it was the same flowers-in-a-can Glade that Sherry liked to make such a show of spraying after I used the bathroom.

On our way down to the basement I was a few risers above Carmen. The stairs didn’t squeak as we descended. Not a peep, which I thought was evidence of rather impressive construction.

Rooms opened up onto each side of the postage-stamp-size landing at the bottom of the stairs. We paused at the landing, our bodies touching at our hips. The phone was still at my ear. Once again I whispered, “Gibbs?”

Nothing came back into the earpiece. I shook my head at Carmen. She nodded and tilted her head to the left, so that’s the direction we headed first.

She was still walking point.

Cellar noises? Nothing I didn’t expect. Furnace sighs, plumbing burps, old-house creaks. But no more pounding. Above us the scampering of feet as children and parents rushed from the house had stopped.

The first room to our left was a furnace room with an alcove that had a workbench built in under a window well.

In the dark basement my eyes found shapes but no details. As I followed Carmen toward the door that would take us to the next surprise space in the maze, my foot brushed something on the floor that I hadn’t seen. Carmen heard the noise I made. She stopped.

I crouched down and felt along the cold concrete surface with my hand.

I lifted a woman’s shoe. A clog. Not really a clog; Sherry used another name for shoes like it, but I couldn’t remember what. Why? I really didn’t care.

Had Holly been wearing clogs in the kitchen that morning? I should have remembered, but the picture in my head of Holly preparing the turkey didn’t go all the way down to the floor.

Carmen leaned over to touch the shoe. Feeling what it was, she took it from me and set it aside. With her head close enough that I could feel her breath on my cheek, she said, “Let’s go.”

The next room was small and seemed to be full of stuff. Holly probably called it her storage room. But I could tell from the haphazard pattern of shadows that it was the place she stashed the junk she didn’t know what else to do with. Storage is one thing. Sticking stuff in a room is another thing entirely. There’s a big difference. Sherry did storage. I stuck stuff in rooms.

Carmen’s eyes must have adjusted to the dark better than mine. She found a path through the stuff, and we were across that room and through another door in seconds.

The next room we entered was a bathroom. A window well provided enough light that I realized that “bathroom” was a generous description for the space. It was a tiny concrete room with inelegant plumbing and a couple of fixtures that existed in the time warp between modern and antique. Despite the shadows I could see streaks of rust on the porcelain surfaces of both the sink and the toilet.

Carmen reached behind her and held out her hand to stop my progress. Her fingers found me just below my belt.

It certainly stopped my progress.

Through the open door in front of Carmen I could see a square shape emerging from the darkness.

A washing machine. Maybe a dryer.

Here we go,
I thought.
Here we go.

I retraced all my steps to the landing at the foot of the stairs and opened the door that Carmen and I hadn’t taken the first time. The room I entered was the largest room in the basement and was furnished with somebody else’s things. A night-light spread a shadowy brilliance across its lowest reaches. From the looks of the bases of the pieces, I guessed that these were Holly’s grandmother’s things. Every one-sofa, chest, chair, table-was ornate, heavy, grandmothery.

Four long strides, and I was across the room and standing at the door that I was almost certain led into the laundry room. Carmen was waiting at the other door on the far side of the basement.

My role was straightforward. I was to keep anyone from exiting through this door until I went in on Carmen’s signal. That was the plan.

From then on we would improvise. And hopefully try not to shoot each other in the process.

The phone call with Gibbs was over. I’d stuffed the cell back in my pocket.

My handgun was ready.

I was wondering precisely what the signal was going to be when I heard Carmen yell, “Police! Freeze!” and figured that was probably it.

I pulled open the door and stepped inside the laundry room in a flash, though it turned out there was little cause for hurry.