Dry Ice (32 page)

    "Just a second, Kirsten. I want to watch this." I knew he'd look for me again. I wanted to see what was in his eyes when he spotted me.

    McClelland had a bare grin on his face when he looked my way. It wasn't glee, and it wasn't the expression of someone who had just surrendered after a lost battle. It was the face of someone who had sacrificed a pawn to set up an opponent's rook, the face of the guy who had marched his squadron of soldiers into the belly of the Trojan horse.

    The cops pushed him and shoved him toward the door. He lowered his head as though he was on a perp-walk trying to shield his face from the camera. At the very last moment he raised his head again, looked up directly at me, and smiled a full-toothed smile. His expression was triumphant.

    Like he'd just hit a three-pointer at the buzzer. From halfcourt.

    Two seconds later he was gone, whisked down the hall. Next stop? Probably the county jail. Soon enough he'd be back in Pueblo. It was possible because of the escape he'd be moved someplace more secure. I'd learn that soon enough.

    I said, "This stunt was a warning to Lauren and me that it's not over."

    "What's not over?" Kirsten asked.

    I didn't have an easy answer. Plenty of candidates to choose from. But no answer that wouldn't require a retelling of my therapy with McClelland all those years before. I thought of saying the single word that was bouncing around in my head:
retribution
. Although it sounded melodramatic it had always been the defining psychological motivation in Michael's pathetic life. I had been his therapist. I knew that he carried enough vengeance within him to fuel a lifetime of psychological terrorism.

    Kirsten put her hand on my back, between my shoulder blades. She was close enough that I could smell her. Her perfume softened me. I let it. A slap of reactive guilt diminished in an instant.

    "He's back in custody, Alan. It should be over now."

    
It's not
. But I didn't argue. I said, "I'm done here. Let's go."

    As we stepped into the elevator my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I checked the screen.

    It read, ALARMS INC.

    The doors closed. I flipped open my phone and put it to my ear. Nothing. The west side of Boulder's cell-phone lottery had eaten another one of my calls.

    I was thinking,
Alarms Inc. shouldn't be calling me. I don't
need this
.

Alarms Incorporated was the local company that monitored the intrusion and fire-alarm systems at our home. When they received a signal indicating a potential problem they initiated a series of calls. My mobile phone was the first number on the list.

Since I don't answer my phone when I'm in session with a

patient, I'd instructed them to call Sam Purdy immediately, too. If neither of us responded Adrienne's home phone was the third option. If nothing else worked Alarms Inc. was supposed to call the sheriff or the fire department to investigate.

    By the time I managed to get a clear cell signal and return the call, the dispatcher informed me they had reached Mr. Purdy. He had assured them he was on his way to my home to investigate the breach, which involved the sensor on the door that led from our basement below the two decks on the west side of the house.

    "That sounded ominous. What is it?" Kirsten said after I was done with the call. We were outside standing on the edge of the parking lot adjacent to the Justice Center.

    "An alarm at my house, probably nothing. It's a sensor on a door that's given us trouble before."

    She put her hand on my back again. "Probably nothing? That's not the way your luck has been running."

    "Sam's on his way there. I'll wait to hear from him. Right now I need to find Lauren."

    "Yes, you do."

    "We still need to talk. You and I."

    She held my gaze. "If you want me off the case, I understand. Say the word and I'll speak to Cozy about it. But right now? You do need to find your wife."

All I was able to learn in the next ten minutes at the Justice Center was that Lauren was "detained" by something that had to do with the Michael McClelland fiasco in her office. She sent word through Melissa—the young deputy DA who had been so pleasant during the meeting at our house the day the grand jury witness disappeared—that I should go on home. She would be in touch.

    I was five minutes from the house when Sam called my cell. "You talked to the alarm company?" he asked.

"I did."

    "I just got to your place. I don't see any problems," he said.

    "Thanks, I'll be there in a few minutes. I'm crossing under Foothills right now."

    He was leaning against his Cherokee when I pulled up to the house, his legs crossed at the ankles, his arms crossed over his chest. I hopped out of my car. "I'm sorry you had to do this, Sam."

    "No big deal. It's not like I have much of a caseload right now. Gives me an excuse to talk to you face-to-face."

    "The alarm company said the signal came from the west basement door."

    "That's what they told me, too. I checked. If somebody went in that way they used a key. It's all locked up. No sign of forced entry."

    "Did you check Adrienne's house and the barn?"

    He nodded. "I'm quick. No bodies hanging anywhere."

    "Funny." My keys were in my hand. I dangled them. "Check inside?"

    The April day was lovely. Lauren had been last to leave the house in the morning; she'd put the dogs in the fenced run for the day. I greeted them and set them free. I thought they seemed squirrelly, especially Emily, which raised my anxiety a notch.

    I held the dogs back as Sam walked ahead of us down the front hall. "No sign of trouble here," he called from the direction of the kitchen and great room. "You want to check the bedrooms or should I?"

    I thought of Lauren's bong. "I'll be right there," I said.

    The dogs beat me to him. He was standing near the kitchen island. He surprised me with his next question. "Does it feel to you like anyone's been here?"

    I weighed his words for nuance. Sam wasn't a touchy-feely kind of cop. He didn't often ask for affective impressions of events. I decided to answer as though he were sincere, and hope that I didn't regret it. "The dogs are different. Mostly Emily. Could be they're excited about seeing you, but they're edgy about something."

    "That's it?"

    "Could have been a fox getting close to their run. A stray dog on the lane."

    "Or a stranger wandering around their house, eh? Basement or bedrooms first? You choose."

    I gestured toward the stairs. Sam went down first. Emily passed him on the way to the basement. She wasn't about to let anyone get down ahead of her. That wasn't unusual behavior; that was her nature. She had as much alpha in her as any female I'd ever met.

    Our basement consisted of a dark guest bedroom, a cramped bathroom with cranberry tile and pink fixtures that had been on its knees begging for renovation since the first time I'd seen it, a small sitting room that Lauren and I had set up as a makeshift home office by sticking an old partner's desk in the middle, and some laundry and utility space. The best part of the basement was that it was a walk-out. A solitary exterior door opened to the downhill slope on the west side of the house beneath the great room deck. Lauren and I had plans for a big patio down there. Flagstone, with a hot tub and a fire pit.

    We'd had the plans for years.

    The iPod was sitting in its dock adjacent to the spot on the partner's desk where Lauren kept her laptop. I pointed at it. "A thief would've grabbed that first, right?"

    "If it was a thief," Sam said.

    I didn't know what that meant. One of the only things that had been keeping me calm about the alarm signal was my absolute assurance that the intruder hadn't been Michael McClelland. He had been otherwise occupied. "Nothing looks amiss," I said.

    Sam was examining the interior of the door jamb and the moldings, and checking the integrity of the lockset. He was wearing green latex gloves. I hadn't seen him put them on. "Amiss? That's a good one. I'll put that in the report I'm not going to write: 'Homeowner saw nothing amiss.'"

    "Do you see something?"

    "No." He inhaled and exhaled in a rhythm that was at once unnatural and familiar—in his nose, out his mouth through pursed lips. Y
oga?
Maybe
. Sam?

    He asked, "What about now—does it feel right down here?"

    
Everything feels right but the nature of your questions
and the fact that you're breathing like the Sultan of Iyengar,
I thought. But I nodded. "Yeah. It's okay."

    We did a quick perusal of the other downstairs rooms and climbed back up to the main floor. Emily raced to be the first to join Anvil on the landing. Anvil hadn't bothered to make the initial descent. He was getting old. His hips could do the stairs in an emergency if he had to. This trip hadn't been an imperative for him.

    "Bedrooms?" Sam said. He was deferring to me.

    I went down the hall first. I started with the master. Our bed wasn't made, but that had nothing to do with the linens being tossed by an intruder. The clutter on each side of the bed seemed more severe than I recalled, but I knew it wasn't. Lauren and I were both capable of being serious slobs. The territory surrounding our bedside tables and the limited countertops in the master bathroom tended to display that tendency more radically than other surfaces in the house.

    I spotted Sam standing near the door. "This is how it usually looks," I said in explanation. I probably sounded a little defensive.

    "Mine too. It's odd having somebody in your bedroom, isn't it? I think it is. Maybe that's just me. Living room? Kitchen? It's cool. But my bedroom, that's . . ."

    I let my eyes cover the room. I walked over and opened the drawer in the dressing table where Lauren kept her nicer jewelry. She wasn't big on bling. I didn't do an inventory, but what I expected to be there—a little gold, a little silver, a gaudy platinum ring from an aunt—was there along with costume pieces that made up most of her collection.

    Sam said, "Sherry used to have this neat-freak devil that she let out of a cage once in a while, but since she split this is how things look in my room. Stuff doesn't ever get put away. Sometimes I think what's the point, other times I think I'm just a lazy fart."

    "If you weren't here I wouldn't give the mess a second thought," I said.

    "Nothing catches your eye as being out of place? Missing? Just . . . odd?"

    "Nothing, Sam," I said.

    "Smells? Any aroma that doesn't fit?"

    "What?"

    "People smell, Alan. They leave scents behind after they've been in a room. B.O., perfume, deodorant, whatever."

    I sniffed the air. It smelled like our bedroom. "Nothing." Emily still wouldn't settle. She was definitely thinking something was amiss. "Emily's not herself. That's for sure. Ask her about aroma."

    He scratched the dog's neck. "I have something to show you," he said. "Can I come in?"

    I remembered the innocuous question that had led to the standoff about the purse in my office. I almost laughed. I said, "Sure."

    He walked across the room until he was standing beside me. He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and handed me a couple of four-by-six photos. Grainy. Bad focus. Low light.

    "That's my bedroom," Sam said.

    "You keep these with you for moments like this?"

"Don't be an asshole."

    I was having trouble figuring out what I was supposed to be seeing in the images. A rectangular flash of brilliance centered near the top of each snapshot was apparently a window. "Okay," I said. "I'll try."

    He reached over my shoulder and pointed at a silhouette slightly off center on the left side. Not much resolution. The outline of the person was dark on darker. He said, "That's me."

    I felt as though I were interpreting a Gestalt puzzle, sorting out what was figure and what was ground. It took me a couple of seconds to make sense of the profile of Sam's body in the photo. He was sitting on a bed facing in the direction of the camera, but not quite at it. One foot was on the floor, the other leg bent at the knee, up on the bed. It was a queen bed, I thought. The sheets were stripes in light colors. Since the bed was unmade, the stripes went every which way.

    "I see."
Whoa. I see something else.
I saw a second silhouette.

    "My shirt's open," he said. He didn't want me to notice that on my own.

    "Yeah, I can tell. And, the woman?" I asked. "Who's she?"

THE WOMAN was completely in profile. She was facing Sam. Her shirt wasn't open; it was off. She was sitting with her right leg crossed over the left, her arms extended toward him. Her hands were lost in the dark pigment that seemed to obliterate his torso but I thought that they may have been locked behind his neck.

    In contrast to the variegated shadows that obscured her face the crisp whiteness of the side view of her bra caused a distracting delta image in the center of the shot.

    Light from the windows reflected off her blond hair.

    Blond hair meant the woman wasn't Carmen, Sam's California girlfriend. And although Sam's ex had gone through intermittent blond phases during their relationship, the woman in the photograph was way too slender to be Sherry, which meant this wasn't some old snapshot from their distant marriage.

    "Nothing happened. We kissed. Made out, whatever. I stopped it." Sam was embarrassed. "Her bra stayed on. Right where you see it there, exactly."

    "Okay." His defensiveness made the moment more awkward than it already was.