Dry Ice (22 page)

    I didn't know how to reply. Or if I should reply. Sam was taking a big risk by calling me. Cozy and Kirsten would be livid that Sam had called. Almost as livid as they would be that I hadn't hung up on him.

    I had been considering the possibility that McClelland was setting me up since the moment the bandanna disappeared from the handles on the barn doors. That my best friend was considering the same possibility was heartwarming.

    "Did you hear me?" Sam asked.

    "I did," I said. "There's more about today—things you don't know."

    Phone lines are never actually silent. Sam and I both listened to the sounds that were accompanying our breathing. "Yeah?" he said. "You gonna tell me or what?"

    I didn't think he'd believe me about the bandanna. I opened my mouth, but I didn't speak. I needed to tell him about the bandanna, but all I was thinking about was the Sativex, and about Bimini, and about Kol being Nicole.

    He hung up. I whispered a profanity. At myself, not at him.

    I carried the phone with me as I went out onto the deck off the great room. The night had turned cool. Appropriate to the season. Spring, not fall. Sam thought I was being set up and he didn't even know about the missing bandanna.

    Michael McClelland.
If he's setting me up,
I thought,
the
guy is good.

FIVE MINUTES later the phone rang again. It was Diane. She'd heard, of course, about the events of the day. Her domestic intelligence put the NSA to shame.

    She wanted to know how I was. She also wanted to know if she knew the suicide victim from crossing paths in the waiting room. She described a number of my patients who wore their depression like some Muslim women wear
burkas
. I told her no, it was none of those. She didn't come close to describing Kol. Diane was sweet and supportive and she even managed to briefly make me laugh. But Diane was fragile. She didn't try to inject herself into my crisis, something she would have done in the past. I didn't consider inviting her to join the fray. She remained much too raw.

    The phone rang yet again seconds after I hung up. This time the caller ID read OUT OF AREA. I guessed Sam had something else to say. "Good," I said aloud, allowing myself a pumped fist of triumph without any recognition that the gesture was fueled by alcohol. I picked up the phone and said, "Hello."

    "Dr. Gregory? Dr. Alan Gregory?"

    I didn't know the voice. But it definitely wasn't that of an Iron Ranger.

    "Yes," I said. "This is he." The vodka had a little trouble with the
s'
s in "this" and "is." The one in "yes" hadn't been so much of a problem. I was inebriated enough to find that interesting.

    "My name is Tharon Thibodeaux. I'm a psychiatrist at IFP.

I apologize for calling so late; I hope I'm not intruding. Your phone's been busy for much of the evening. I assumed that meant you were awake. I thought it was important that we talk."

    My reaction? I loved his name. I loved the way he spoke his name. Thibodeaux, while a common enough surname in the South, was one of those rare American monikers that immediately identifies a person not only with a heritage, but also with a region and with a particular city. Dr. Tharon Thibodeaux had roots near New Orleans, Louisiana.

    But because my conversation was taking place with Dr. Thibodeaux and not with Sam, as I'd been expecting, I felt as though I had to switch the language I was speaking. Thibodeaux's soft melodic accent helped cushion the shock, but I had to goad my brain to make the transition. I wasn't going to be hearing caution or comfort, or insults, from a northern plains friend. Instead, I needed to prepare to speak with a southern gulf mentalhealth colleague using the peculiar vernacular we employ with each other in professional circumstances.

    
Why is this guy calling?
I wondered, finally. "Hello, Dr. Thibodeaux," I said. "I'm not familiar with IFP."

    "Institute for Forensic Psychiatry. It's the inpatient treatment facility at the Colorado Mental Health Institute that deals with offenders with psychiatric illnesses."

    Meant nothing. Then I realized that the Colorado Mental Health Institute was the recently sanitized official name of the old Colorado State Hospital. I didn't know anyone in the field who referred to the facility down south as anything other than the "state hospital" or simply "Pueblo." I wasn't sure I'd ever heard anyone say the "Colorado Mental Health Institute" before. I blamed the vodka for the delay I'd suffered in making the translation.

    My solitary connection to the Colorado State Hospital was Michael McClelland. He was most definitely an offender with a psychiatric illness. Or two.

    Thibodeaux was calling about McClelland. "It's not too late, not at all," I said.

    Thibodeaux must have known Michael McClelland, must have learned about his escape from custody, and knew enough about McClelland's criminal and psychological history to track me down. But why track me down? I didn't know that. Good news? Bad news?

    My gut said bad news. Late at night on a weekend? Bad news.

    From his brief introduction I thought Dr. Thibodeaux sounded young. Maybe it was the Cajun/Creole/Bayou undertones that sang in his voice. But I also allowed for the possibility that my assessment was just a reflection of the fact that at that moment I was feeling old.

    We had lapsed into silence. By training, we were both people accustomed to waiting for other people to talk. "I shouldn't be doing this," he said, finally.

    
Don't go soft on me now, Tharon. You picked up the phone,
now talk.

    I began to smell decay again. What was decaying was my hope. Whatever reservations Thibodeaux was having about whatever he was doing and shouldn't be doing, he would have to confront on his own. I wasn't going to help him resolve his dilemma. I had too many of my own to contend with.

    He said, "I don't have a release to share any clinical information with you. That should come as no surprise."

    Figured that.
Don't think I'm going to help you corral any
deviant impulses. I want whatever you're willing to give. Tell
me all about McClelland, Dr. Thibodeaux. Tell me what I need
to know to find him. To protect my family. To keep them from
the sands of Bimini.

    Two hours and an additional inch of vodka later I found restless sleep while I was formulating the lie I would offer Lauren the next morning.

On my way to Denver I stopped at a pay phone on Federal near the turnpike and called Sam's cell. He didn't pick up. I had decided to tell him about the bandanna.

    I didn't leave a voice message. Messages could be subpoenaed. I called Kirsten's home and left her a voice-mail with the bad news that I hadn't even known the sex of the patient who had killed herself the previous day. Voice messages to lawyers couldn't be subpoenaed.

    Traffic was no problem. I got to Denver around twenty-five minutes later and stopped at another pay phone in a strip center just off I-25 and University near DU. Sam answered after a couple of rings.

    The signal was crappy. Even his "Yeah?" broke up.

    "It's me," I said.

    "You at a pay phone?" he asked. I heard only about half the syllables. That's what I guessed he asked.

    "I am. Where are you? You're breaking up."

    "Someplace I'm not supposed to be. At the moment, I'm just hoping I'm upwind from some damn dogs. This is the first signal I've had up here."

    "You working?" I asked.

    "What do you want, Alan?"

    "It's about yesterday."

    "Am I going to regret hearing it?" Sam asked.

    "Maybe."

    "Go ahead," he said. That's when the mobile-phone lottery decided to kill the call.

    I tried twice more to reach him without success. Whatever

I parked on the street near the place that Thibodeaux had chosen for our rendezvous. I was familiar with the neighborhood from previous visits to the University of Denver, mostly for professional meetings. I didn't know the coffeehouse he had picked, but it was immediately apparent that it was not a close relative of the Starbucks across the street. In the careless ambience department, Kaladi put even the most determinedly déclassé Boulder java roost to shame. The walls were painted the color of the flesh of a blood orange and the red oak on the floor was scratched beyond its years. The place was thrown together as though someone had accumulated enough battered tables and chairs to crowd the back room at a small family-run coffee roaster in Brooklyn or San Francisco's North Beach in the late 1960s.

    None of the patrons—mostly hungover DU students and neighborhood types—fit my preconception for a state-hospital psychiatrist. I ordered a drink from the counter and felt fortunate to snare a table. The coffee tasted like mid-morning at a stand-up coffee bar in Siena.

    A stained copy of that morning's
Rocky Mountain News
offered a parsed account of what had happened in Peter's barn the day before. I learned the interesting fact that Nicole Cruz had been employed as a maintenance worker at one of Boulder's cemeteries.

    I read between the lines: my patient had been a gravedigger.
Great.
I appreciated the irony, even though the tally of my ignorance about her was beginning to reach a sum that in any other circumstance I might have registered as tragic.

    My pizza-box-size table was stuck at the bottom of a manmade cliff of sixty-nine-kilo burlap sacks of raw organic coffee beans. The bags were piled high on rolling carts stacked double on a steel frame. Once I'd finished turning the pages of Denver's tabloid I'd spent a few moments reading the labels on the burlap and doing the arithmetic necessary to try to decipher why the bags weighed sixty-nine kilos, and not sixty-five or seventy, and what sixty-nine kilos equaled in pounds. It took me longer than it should have to compute the answer—

151.8.

    The sixty-nine-kilo mystery consumed me until Thibodeaux walked up a few minutes later. Although Thibodeaux was younger than I, he wasn't much younger, nor was he as young as I expected. When I looked up in response to his greeting—"Dr. Gregory?"—my initial guess was that that he'd been out of his residency just shy of ten years. I'd been expecting someone only a few years out of training. That he wasn't young meant—if he possessed any skill whatsoever—he had enough experience to know what he was doing clinically and was coming perilously close to having had enough experience to have grown a little jaded while doing it.

    If he had appeared to be a few years younger I would have had an easier time answering one particular question that kept running through my mind: Why the hell would an established, presumably reasonably competent psychiatrist be providing clinical services in the chronically underfunded frontier outpost that was the Colorado State Hospital in Pueblo, or whatever its current name was?

    Once I rejected all the benevolent explanations—research opportunities, fascination with serious mental illness, dedication to public service, pathologic affection for dying high-desert mill towns—I was left with the likelihood that at some point in the recent past Dr. Tharon Thibodeaux had fucked up professionally almost as badly as I just had.

    My clinical future passed in front of me: when the lawsuits were over and my humiliation was complete, I would end up doing psychometrics and running group-therapy sessions in a state institution—excuse me, "institute"—in some town like Pueblo.

    "Dr. Gregory?" he said pleasantly a second time.

    I stood up. "Alan, please."

    "Tharon," he said.

    I slid his name into the mental file where I stored baby names for the second child I hoped to have with Lauren.
Tha
ron Gregory. Yeah.

    He placed his café au lait on the table and we shook hands. Once we sat, he looked me in the eyes in a way that's peculiar to mental-health types. I stifled a sigh; I consider the eye-lock thing to be a ritualistic pissing contest intended to determine professional advantage—the mental-health practitioner version of the touching of swords by opposing fencers, the tapping of gloves by boxers.

    It's basically an eye-contact challenge. Can you match my intensity, my ability to
connect
? I despised the little game and whenever I lost I considered it childish. I lost much more often than I won—which probably said something about my clinical
cojones
that I wasn't eager to admit.

    I was in no mood for a new-age joust with some psychiatrist from the state hospital who considered me an elitist clinical psychologist from elitist Boulder. I had just enough ego-observation skills remaining to recognize that given the likelihood that I'd just lost a patient to an absolutely unanticipated suicide, the idea of anyone considering me an elite therapist was as ironic as it was ridiculous.

    I held Tharon's magnetic gaze for only a couple of seconds before I looked away, my hope for the meeting evaporating along with my abdication of the eye-lock duel. I'd thrown in the figurative towel. The most attractive option in front of me was also the pettiest—gulping down my coffee and walking away. But if I did that, I knew I would never hear what this guy wanted to tell me about Michael McClelland.

    And there was my personal anti-pettiness campaign—which was in some disarray—to consider.

    He said, "You're wondering why you're here?"