Dry Ice (23 page)

    "Yes."

    "You agreed to meet me without many questions. You must have some idea."

    
I was too drunk to ask them,
I thought. I said, "Some." The advantage was all Thibodeaux's.

    I was growing more and more accustomed to that posture.

    He sat back, supporting his big cup with outstretched fingers the way the prongs of a setting support a diamond. "I grew up in New Orleans," he said. "All my family is still there. Kaladi"—he smiled—"is no Café du Monde, but I like it here. I come whenever I'm in town."

    I felt the change in tone viscerally. The wrangle was over. I exhaled, and nodded.

THIBODEAUX MAY or may not have recognized that my nod contained all the assumptions he'd corrected a hundred times, and all the questions he'd heard a hundred times, or a thousand times, since the storms. Maybe he thought it was easier just to get the story out of the way whenever he met someone new. Regardless, he was ready.

    "We had water only a foot deep on the first floor of my parents' house on the edge of the Garden District. Not much wind damage. They were fine, they had evacuated early on. Looters came but only took things that could be replaced. Had to rip up the floors, clean out mold. House is almost the same. City isn't."

    He was talking about the destructo-twins, Katrina and Rita. In his voice I heard the kind of stoicism that accompanies the salty crust of dried tears. Katrina had left New Orleans an amputee. The city was alive, but she was missing limbs. The eventual rebuilding of the annihilated neighborhoods would be like fitting New Orleans for prostheses. The city of New Orleans might be able to walk again but Tharon's jury was out as to whether she would ever strut the way she once had.

    I thought he might stop his tale right there, but Tharon wasn't done.

    "My mama's mother lived in Creole. That's in Cameron Parish. She survived Katrina. But Rita? People forget about Rita, but Rita was hard on the folks to the west. My grandmother died a week to the day after Rita passed. She broke her leg evacuating before the storm, but she died of a broken heart. After the funeral we found a piece of her house—the same house where my mama grew up, the same house where we all used to gather on holidays—we found her parlor where it had floated inland almost a half mile. The table where we sat for family feasts and celebrations, that big mahogany table was still inside the crushed parlor."

    I felt the discomfort I feel when I'm in the presence of someone who has suffered a senseless tragedy. Had a child killed by a drunk driver. Had a sister or daughter victimized by a rapist. I didn't know what to say.

    He rescued me. He said, "That's the postscript to my story. Here's the Pueblo connection: I went to college and medical school in Florida, made my way back to New Orleans for my residency," he said. "Matched at Charity. That's where I met my wife. As fate would have it, she was from Rocky Ford." For my benefit, he added, "That's east of Pueblo." I already knew—in Colorado if you like sweet melons you know where Rocky Ford is. "She had followed a boyfriend to New Orleans after she finished nursing school up in Greeley. Didn't take long for the boyfriend to become an ex. He was a bit too fond of some of the seamier aspects of the Quarter." He mimed an injection into his forearm.

    Tharon's family history was his way of explaining how he'd ended up in the clinical and geographic backwater represented by Colorado's primary psychiatric inpatient facility.

    "We had two kids right away. Boy and a girl. I had a good practice. My wife—Willis—asked me to move to Colorado when her mother got ill three years ago. She reminded me a hundred times that she'd agreed to live in Slidell—against her wishes—when I was setting up my first office." He looked up. "Slidell's not that bad, but Willis . . . '' He left the thought unfinished.

    "That's where we were during the storms—Slidell. Our house survived. But it was the last straw for Willis. I gave in. We rented our house to my brother and his wife. Katrina had taken theirs. I agreed to try Colorado for a year. That's where my grandmother's dining-room table is now, by the way. In Rocky Ford." He smiled ironically. "Dry air here is murder on old mahogany. I think the desert's going to end up proving harder on it than Rita ever was."

    I nodded. I agreed with him about the effect of Colorado's dry air on fine furniture, but I nodded to keep him talking.

    "I admit that I came here thinking Willis's mother would die soon enough and we'd head back to Louisiana, or maybe Florida. I hated it here from day one. Staying was never the plan."

    I hadn't made the drive down the turnpike to argue with the man about the relative value of cities. If Denver, let alone Pueblo or Rocky Ford, had to go toe-to-toe with New Orleans on cuisine or atmosphere the fight would be a first-round knockout.

    "Five months after we got here my wife's mother died. Complications of emphysema. Three weeks later Willis filed for divorce. She filed"—from his lips the word "filed" rhymed comfortably with "wild"—"in Pueblo County."

    "You're stuck," I said. I'd done enough work with divorcing parents to understand the ramifications of custody and visitation prerogatives on parental freedom. If Tharon wanted to see his kids frequently and regularly he would have to find a job in Pueblo County. Or, if he didn't mind a numbing Front Range commute, he could choose to live up the interstate in Colorado Springs.

    Colorado Springs was the reddest of cities in this purplepink state. If his political leanings shaded toward the blue, and I was suspecting that Tharon's did, the Springs would not feel like a welcoming political bosom. Complicating things even more was the fact that Thibodeaux was a psychiatrist. If he desired to practice his specialty in Pueblo, his options were limited to the state hospital. Few small towns close to Pueblo have the population base and the help-seeking culture necessary to support a solo practitioner in psychiatry. There are no large towns close to Pueblo.

    "I am stuck," he said. "I adore my children."

    I sat back and I waited. Truth was, I was feeling pretty stuck myself. But I suspected that Thibodeaux knew that already.

Often in my career I'd been in the position of trying to find a way to twist reality so that I could share clinical information with someone I thought needed to hear it but to whom I had no right to tell it. My own experiences wrestling with that dilemma had convinced me that prodding Thibodeaux to overcome whatever ethical constraints he was feeling wasn't likely to be salutary. He needed to hurdle the moral and ethical barricades on his own. I thought he could do it.

    He had tracked me down, after all, and we were sitting more than a hundred miles away from his reluctant home, beneath an eight-foot levee of 151.8-pound burlap sacks of green free-trade organic coffee beans. Those facts convinced me that Dr. Thibodeaux had arrived in Denver with the momentum to clear the obstacles.

    "We have a patient in common," he said, finally.

    "I wondered about that," I said, relieved to have finally reached the starting line. "Not one of my proudest clinical moments." I added the qualifier hoping that my contrition would add a little grease to the ethical skids on which Thibodeaux was—I was praying—beginning to slip. And I added it because it was true. If Thibodeaux had bothered to look at any of the early court records that accompanied McClelland's admission to the state hospital he would have noted my silence regarding the misguided recommendations to the court from so many years before.

    He would know that Michael McClelland was a clinical ghost from my early career, and he could probably guess McClelland's ghost was one that I was desperately seeking a chance to banish. He might not have known that I was in Denver figuratively on my knees praying that Thibodeaux was willing to be my exorcist.

    My fantasy was that Tharon was about to tell me he knew all about his patient's fixation on red bandannas. And all about his plans for retribution on my wife. And on me. On my family.

    "When you get access to the hospital records, and you will—fortunately or unfortunately—you'll get everything I'm about to tell you," he said. "So although I'm jumping the gun a little, I'm not really breaking the rules. That's my rationalization."

    
Why will I get access to Michael's hospital records?
I wondered. I couldn't think of a single reason that I would be in a position to ever see them, but I wasn't going to tell Tharon that.
Rationalize away,
I thought.
Go for it.

    "I've been in your shoes," he said. I noted with some clinical envy that his voice, like Bill Clinton's, conveyed empathy the way a wheelbarrow transports dirt. "That's part of it, too. The reason I decided to talk with you."

    "My shoes?" I asked.

    "With a patient, I mean. During my residency at Charity. I don't want anyone else to have to go through what I did."

    "I appreciate that," I said. I was curious about what had happened during Tharon's residency. But I didn't ask—the story sounded like a digression waiting to happen.

    He went on. "If it helps any with your feelings, or with the legal side of things for that matter, she was always gamey about her meds. From day one. It's all documented in the chart. Not just by me. Nursing notes, too. Not occasionally gamey. Always gamey. I don't think we ever kept her at adequate levels. Diagnostically I always thought we were dealing with a pure unipolar, but that was a minority opinion. The staff thought she was bipolar and that the manic episodes were infrequent."

    Thibodeaux had spoken a paragraph packed with clinical jargon. But I'd only heard two three-letter words. I had to go back and replay the sequence of sentences in my head to process anything more than the pair of words that kept floating in front of my eyes like holograms.

    
She.
He'd said "she."
Her.
He'd said "her."

    
Son of a bitch.
I felt the blood pour out of my face all at once like it was bathwater falling over the edge of a tub.

    Thibodeaux wasn't in Denver to spill the beans about his work with Michael McClelland. Thibodeaux was in town to talk with me about Nicole Cruz.

    Kol Cruz, not Michael McClelland, was the patient we'd shared. Which meant that Kol—Nicole—had been an inpatient in the forensic unit at the state hospital.

    That fact told me two troubling things. First, since mentally healthy people don't tend to spend much time on the wards at facilities like the one in Pueblo, Kol Cruz had apparently been much sicker than I'd recognized. And second, Kol had been at the state hospital at the same time as Michael McClelland.

    
What did that mean?
A lot, I was sure. What exactly? I didn't know.

    Tharon watched my stunned reaction to what I'm sure he thought were benign revelations about his patient's reluctance to take her meds and about the esoteric diagnostic dilemma she had presented to the clinical staff. I could tell by the look of concern on his face that he was about to inquire about my cataplexy.

    I blurted out a question. "Did Nicole know Michael McClelland?"

    My question wasn't one that Thibodeaux expected to hear. I watched the blood leave his face. Same way that it had hap pened to me a few seconds earlier—all at once, over the dam spillway.

    He regained his composure quickly. He lifted his cup, cradled it in both hands, sat back, and said, "How do you know . . . Michael McClelland?"

    
Holy shit,
I was thinking
. What the hell is going on?

KIRSTEN LORD lived in a small stone cottage off 4th Street in the warren of lanes of old Boulder that is crammed into the rise of land just north and west of downtown. The neighborhood is charming and convenient. Close to shopping. Close to dining. Close to hiking trails. Close to parks. The Rockies loom only a few blocks away, proximate enough to cast their shadows over the neighborhood by mid-afternoon in the winter months.

    Most parcels are small on the narrow lanes and some of the houses tiny by contemporary standards. Although a few of its siblings had been remodeled and rebuilt to reflect McMansion sensibilities, Boulder style, Kirsten's was one of the remaining Lilliputian homes. If she had been willing to give up those other perks—view, convenience, ambience—she could have quintupled the size of her cramped home by moving to one of the dozens of faux-Victorian or suburban chic developments recently constructed a few miles to the east or north of town.

"Amy went to a friend's house," she said when she opened the front door.

    I'd called Kirsten from my car a half mile before I'd reached the exit that I normally would have used to turn off to my house in Spanish Hills. I was on my way into Boulder from Kaladi and my meeting with Thibodeaux. I asked her if I could visit briefly to discuss some new information I'd learned regarding the person who'd killed herself in Peter's barn. Kirsten had hesitated for a second before she agreed, finally adding on an inhale, "Amy's home, and this place is pretty small, if you know what I mean."

    I guessed that she meant that she didn't want her Sunday interrupted. Although I was still reeling from what I'd learned during my discussion with Thibodeaux, I knew that I could wait until the next day to discuss the news with my lawyers. My situation wasn't an emergency. Not in any legal sense.

    "That's all right," I said. I've always felt that natural impediments are a great way to resolve ambivalence. Shall I take the elevator or the stairs? If the elevator is out of service, ambivalence tends to dissipate.

    "Don't be silly," she said. "Come on by. We may need to walk over to the office, or maybe we can grab something to eat on the Mall. You like the Kitchen? I'm a regular. It's quiet in the afternoon. We could get a glass of wine upstairs."