Dry Ice (12 page)

LAUREN GOT home even later than I did that night. When I greeted her at the door, I spotted a Boulder County sheriff's cruiser parked at the entrance to the lane.

    
Oh yeah,
I thought.
Michael McClelland. Him.
I'd almost forgotten.

    She and I had only a few seconds to talk—she'd ordered Chinese delivery for dinner—before she got a call she insisted she had to take. She retreated to the bedroom with her phone. By the time the call was over her second evening meeting in a row was about to begin. Sam arrived in a convoy with a young female deputy DA named Melissa something. I didn't know Melissa. Lauren announced that they would be working upstairs. Lauren undoubtedly told her colleagues it would be more comfortable than our basement. As true as that might be, I also knew that her decision to work on the main floor was a sign that my wife's legs likely weren't behaving well enough for her to descend stairs in the company of company.

    I shook Melissa's hand—it was cold. So was she. I said a quick hello to Sam. He'd showered and changed since his afternoon spent playing destructo-cop with the garage. He was wearing what I thought of as his "Carmen clothes," which meant he was dressed as though he gave a damn how he looked.

    Like a good spouse—one who hadn't been strip-searched that afternoon at the order of one of my houseguests—I politely retreated and spent the evening with Grace in the bedrooms.

    I stepped out to the kitchen only twice. The first time I put together two plates of lo mein and spicy shrimp with peppers, and I then I went back out once an hour or so later on to get Grace something to drink. Lauren smiled at me, but no one spoke while I was in the room. A whiteboard had been set up on an easel on the far side of the kitchen table and was covered with a bulleted list of possibilities of how the purse had ended up in the backyard of my office. I examined the options casually as I poured and then diluted some juice for Gracie.

    The back fence of my yard was a good thirty yards from the closest westbound lane of Canyon Boulevard. It made no sense to me that someone interested in getting rid of a stolen purse would attempt to make that kind of throw, either from the sidewalk or from a moving vehicle. A person could have stepped across the adjacent empty lot and dumped it over the fence, but I couldn't figure out why someone would do that. Boulder Creek was nearby. The empty lot between the office and Canyon would have been a much better place for disposal. The surrounding downtown area was dotted with Dumpsters and trash cans. There were plenty of available places to stash a stolen purse and run little risk of having it discovered.

    
They are actually considering the possibility that Diane or
I are involved?
I picked up Grace's juice and retraced my steps down the hall. The last thing I heard behind me was a whispered question from the young DA. Melissa had one of those unfortunate whispers that carried like the bark of a neighbor's dog. "Did he see the board just then? Could you tell? Was he looking?"

    Sam's cynical reply: "He saw it."

Later, after everyone had left and after I'd taken the dogs out for a final stroll, I joined Lauren in bed. She said, "Sam told me about this afternoon. You and I probably shouldn't discuss it. You understand?"

   I thought I understood. But I said, "Not really."

   She was ready with the rationale. "If it turns out that you're involved in the . . . work . . . we're doing—even inadvertently— it will compromise my ability to lead the investigation. And it might interfere with Sam's ability to participate. In the meantime the DA doesn't want either of us to have any conversations with you about . . . any of it."

   "I can't tell you my side?"

   "Once the forensics on the purse and your . . . things . . . come back negative and we're confident that it's just a coincidence that it ended up in your yard . . . then we can talk. I'm really sorry you got dragged into it, babe. This investigation is a big deal. That's why Sam's being the way he is." She kissed me slowly. It was almost an invitation.

   "How are you feeling?" I asked. "Your legs? You didn't go downstairs tonight."

    "My legs are fine. I wanted to use the table—to spread some things out. Thanks for keeping Grace occupied."

    She wasn't telling me anything about her health but was tacitly acknowledging that the stress was taking a toll. I said, "Kirsten Lord has started working with Cozy. Did you know that? She showed up when I called him for help with the warrant today."

    "I heard something a few weeks ago. I didn't mention it?" she said.

    "Don't think you did."

    "I haven't seen her that much the past year or two."

    "You were pretty close friends for a while."

    She crinkled her nose. "One of those things. We really can't talk about this. What happened. Your attorneys."

    I nodded.

    She said, "I'm sorry."

I had met Kirsten Lord during a brief window when I'd volunteered to be the acting Regional Psychological Consultant to the United States Marshal's Witness Security Program—WITSEC— popularly known as the Witness Protection Program. Kirsten was a newbie enrollee in the program. She was not a typical WITSEC mobster or drug informant—she was a prosecutor from New Orleans whom the government was protecting as a threatened law enforcement officer after her husband had been gunned down in the French Quarter in retaliation for one of her prosecutions.

    She and her daughter had been resettled in Boulder for their first stint in government-devised anonymity purgatory. She'd ultimately decided to leave the protection of the program after the threat diminished and their security situation stabilized. She'd also decided to stay in Boulder. She and Lauren had become friends and that's how I knew that Kirsten had spent a few of the intervening years exploring alternative careers. The fact that she'd recently hooked up with Cozier Maitlin, one of Boulder's most prominent criminal defense attorneys, seemed to indicate that her days of career wanderlust had gone full circle.

    Our psychotherapy relationship had terminated when she chose to leave WITSEC. Beyond "Hello" and "How are you?" she and I had not spoken since she'd asked me for a referral to a new therapist.

Twenty minutes after we'd climbed into bed I whispered, "You still awake?"

    Lauren didn't answer. I listened for a while to the rhythm of her breathing, my ears tuned for the cadence of sleep. I didn't hear it. I climbed out of bed, pulled on some sweats, wrapped a throw over my shoulders, and shuffled out to the narrow deck off the living room.

    I was thinking about secrets. Lauren's and Sam's. Mine.

    Later, in retrospect, I realized that my focus was probably a few degrees off-target. Secrets usually aren't as important as our motivation for keeping them. I should have been thinking about the motivation for secrets.

    Tops on that list? For years I would've argued that the top spot on the list was reserved for shame. That night, though, I should have been thinking that the top spot on the list had to do with control. Specifically, the control we lose when we free secrets from their locked dens. I should have been thinking about control.

    About losing it.

    When I finally slept that night I dreamed the garage had collapsed again. I was inside it. A man had his hand around my ankle.

    I had a gun.

KIRSTEN CALLED me later that week, on Friday evening. I took the call in the kitchen. Lauren was reading to Grace. No music was playing in the background, not even the Wiggles.

    After a greeting that I thought was too formal by doubledigit degrees, Kirsten asked, "Do you still ride your bike?"

    "Whenever I can," I said.

    It was a lie. Since the previous fall my bikes had been collecting dust. Biking had long been my primary stress-reduction tool, but for four or five months I'd been using the winter—cold, ice, road sand—as my excuse not to ride. With the weather improving I'd been compelled to become more imaginative with my rationalizations. Admitting the reality—I hadn't felt like riding in half a year—wasn't palatable. My denial wasn't impregnable—I was aware it wasn't a good sign that I'd traded in quality cardio for a diet of high-proof clear liquids.

    "We need to get reacquainted, Alan. There are some developments that you and I need to discuss. Are you up for a ride tomorrow? We can talk."

    "You ride?" I said. "You have a road bike?"

    Kirsten Lord's laugh told me she did, and that she found my incredulous tone amusing.

    "Cozy doesn't want to be part of this?"

    "The talking part, or the riding part? Sorry," she said. "I have trouble visualizing him on a bicycle. Doesn't matter, he's in La Jolla for a few days looking at a new weekend place. He found a condo with ten-foot ceilings and a partial view of the cove. So you're stuck with me on this for now. I'm assuming enough water has passed under the bridge that you're okay with us working together."

    Five years? Was that sufficient ethical insulation between the termination of a doctor-patient relationship and the initiation of an attorney-client one? Probably. There weren't any fixed guidelines in my profession. My personal rule of thumb was that five years was a wide enough moat between the doctorpatient relationship and most of what might come next. Regardless, my ethical reticence wasn't germane—given my unusual circumstances I wasn't in a position to be too picky.

    "Sure," I said. "What developments?"

    "In person. I have to do this early. Is seven okay? You can choose the route. Just not all mountains, please. I can definitely climb, but I can't climb indefinitely."

Lauren and Grace were still asleep when I got out of bed.

    Kirsten arrived right at seven, and we started off down the lane a few minutes later. I waved good-bye to Lauren's sentry— a solitary sheriff's deputy slouched in the driver's seat of her cruiser. The deputy was sipping from a container of coffee that I'd delivered a few minutes before along with a heads-up about Kirsten's imminent arrival.

    Kirsten didn't ask about the deputy's presence. I figured she already knew.

    We began the ride on safe ground, literally and figuratively. The route north from my house on the eastern rim of the Boulder Valley is mostly rolling hills. Early on Saturday morning we would see little traffic. For the first few miles we rode side by side on quiet lanes and talked about our kids. Kirsten's daughter, Amy, was solidly into the domain of teenage-girl no-parents' land. I told Kirsten about Grace.

    The conversation moved to the events that had brought us together the first time. Neither of us had heard from Carl Luppo, the charismatic ex-mob guy who was my other WITSEC patient, since shortly after Kirsten had asked for "the paper"—her ticket out of Witness Protection. She was convinced that Carl was still alive somewhere, kicking ass. I wasn't as optimistic as she was, but I kept those fears to myself.

    She pulled ahead of me and wasted no time getting her spin way up, maintaining a determined push that I wasn't prepared to match. I tried to change mental gears and find a little competitive fire. I failed; within minutes of her acceleration I was struggling in her wake. My winter malaise had left me out of shape. We were almost due east of Niwot before Kirsten dropped back and rode side by side with me again.

    "You're good," I said, trying to sound unaffected by all the exertion.

    "Never knew I liked doing this until I moved here. Same for snowshoeing. And fly-fishing. I guess I owe WITSEC something, right? Who would have pegged me for an outdoorswoman?" She laughed.

    
She laughs with much more ease than she used to,
I thought. "I guess," I said, thinking it prudent to limit myself to short sentences. Kirsten had arrived in the Rocky Mountain West as a young professional woman and mother more inclined to a fine pedicure than a tough training ride.

    "You have some problems," she said, without a hitch in her rhythm. I glanced over at her. Although she'd slowed her spin, her helmeted head was down, and her Lycra-molded form was almost perfect.

    I mentally checked my own form, tuning in to the vibrations passing through the tires and frame of my bicycle. I didn't see the problem, and I didn't feel the problem.

    "Not a riding problem, Alan. You have legal problems."

    
Shit.
"Sam's going to press for access to the files that were on my desk?"

    "I wish it was that simple," she said. "Worst possible outcome of that would be manageable." As she wet her lips with her tongue, I could tell she wasn't even breathing hard. "The shoes they collected during the search? Cozy has a contact somewhere in the department. In the lab maybe. There was blood on the sole of one of your shoes."

    I was mystified by the revelation for a couple of revolutions of the pedals. Then I remembered Kol and the bizarre fountainbathing episode. "I know what that is. I had a patient who had an amazing bloody nose last week—a day or two before the purse thing. I can check my calendar and be more precise. There was blood all over the waiting room. I'm not surprised that some got on my shoes. It's no big thing. Don't sweat it."

    We both slowed to see what an ancient hay truck in front of us was planning at the upcoming intersection. The driver had slowed the truck to a crawl and was straddling the center line of the two-lane roadway. One of two brake lights was illuminated, but neither turn signal was flashing.