Dry Ice (35 page)

    Eusto had reported in her second T
imes-Picayune
article that Leopold had already been through three therapists in a little over a year when he killed himself. Tharon had told me that the suicidal patient had been handed off to him the July before the suicide, just as Tharon began his outpatient clinic rotation. One of Leopold's friends told the reporter that Cars's last session with his current therapist was scheduled for the second week in January the following year.

    Would that be because Carson was better? No, it would be because Tharon's rotation was ending.

The second fact about which Tharon had been disingenuous to me was his contention that Carson Leopold had no prior history of suicidal behavior.

   During the course of her investigation of his death, Joanna Eusto had interviewed Carson's boss at the porn shop. She'd talked with five people who identified themselves as Cars's friends, and she spoke by phone with his sister in Philadelphia. She noted that she had been unable to interview any spokesper son from the outpatient clinic where Carson Leopold was being treated.

    Eusto had learned that Leopold had been hospitalized twice in the previous twelve months. Both hospitalizations had been brief, and both had been precipitated by suicidal behavior. The first was a threat to kill himself with a gun. The police who burst into his rented room found the gun, but no ammunition. The second admission was for treatment of an overdose of various medicines that he had stolen from friends' homes. The lethality risk of the attempt had been judged low. Both suicidal gestures had taken place during windows of time when Leopold was being transferred from one clinician to another at the outpatient clinic.

The last of the distortions in Thibodeaux's retelling of what happened to Carson Leopold was the most damning.

    Joanna Eusto didn't uncover the revealing facts until she was approached by a psychiatric nurse employed at the clinic. Eusto's subsequent article, the fourth piece on the saga for the T
imes-Picayune,
was headlined: SEVENTEEN PSYCHIATRISTS WATCHED MAN JUMP.

    The story wasn't about the failures of a healthcare discipline. It was about the failure of a system. If Cars Leopold's therapist had been a clinical psych intern, and not a psychiatric resident, the headline could just as easily have read: SEVENTEEN PSYCHOLOGISTS WATCHED MAN JUMP.

    In her article, Eusto named names.

    Marlene Martinez wasn't the on-call psychiatrist that night. She, not Tharon Thibodeaux, was Carson Leopold's outpatient therapist in the clinic. Dr. Martinez had been present at the party, Eusto reported. She had been drinking. Her clinical supervisor— a senior faculty member very familiar with Leopold's case—had been at the party, too. He, too, had been drinking.

    Eusto described the emergency on-call system that the clinic employed for after-hours emergencies. The nurse who had volunteered to talk to Eusto suggested that the on-call resident had mishandled the crisis that had transpired during the department Christmas party. She identified the psychiatrist taking the first call that night as Dr. Tharon Thibodeaux.

    The nurse also told the reporter that Thibodeaux, too, had been drinking while at the party. She disclosed the detail that Tharon liked single-malt Scotch.

    It was Thibodeaux who returned the first emergency call to Carson. It was Thibodeaux who was convinced he could manage the crisis. It was Thibodeaux who was too full of pride, or hubris, to turn the phone call over to Marlene Martinez, Carson's doctor. It was Thibodeaux who was determined to demonstrate his clinical acumen in front of the assembled faculty of the psychiatry department.

    And it was Thibodeaux holding the phone as Carson Leopold jumped.

I didn't learn from the articles if Tharon Thibodeaux had ever been professionally disciplined for his involvement in the death of Cars Leopold. I assumed he had been. But I also assumed that given the reality that during the entire crisis he was within spitting distance of his immediate clinical supervisor, the director of his clinical training program, and the department chair, not to mention the patient's own therapist and her supervising psychiatrist, any discipline was handed out gingerly, and privately.

    In the intervening years the incident had become Tharon's secret, though. That much was clear.

    Tharon had been kind to me. I felt a pang about blackmailing him. I walked back upstairs and stood in the doorway to my daughter's room. The guilt disappeared in about two seconds.

    The final thing I did before I climbed into bed was to return to the flight-tracking Web site and confirm that the plane with my family was safely on the ground in Florida.

I WOKE with a headache early the next morning, aware that I was alone in the house with the dogs. I'd left my cell charging in the kitchen. One glance at it and I knew I'd received a call overnight. It was from a pay phone. The voice-mail message was simple. "Wynne—I think it's w-y-n-n-e—Brown—b-r-o-w-n." Tharon had decided that my price for protecting his secret was something he was willing to pay.

Now what?
I thought.
I have a name. Now what?

During our meeting in Denver Tharon had volunteered that Michael's friend at the state hospital was a psychologist. He had also implied, though never said directly, that she was a clinician.

    I started digging through old membership rosters from professional associations that I had belonged to over my years in practice: American Psychological Association, Colorado Psychological Association, the National Register of Health Service Providers in Psychology. I couldn't find Wynne Brown listed anywhere.

    I tried a Google search. "Your search did not match any documents," was the instantaneous reply.

    I went back through everything I had, looking through the voluminous lists of Browns for alternative spellings of female first names that might leave the diminutive of "Wynne." Assuming that Tharon might have gotten the spelling wrong, I included "Wyn," "Wynn," and "Win."

Winifred? Winston? Winfred? Wynonna?

Nothing.

    I finally spotted a candidate the third time through a fiveyear-old directory of members of the Colorado Psychological Association: J. Winter Brown, Ph.D.

    Wynne Brown.

    The J. had thrown me, of course.

    The phone rang. Not my cell—the landline in the house. Caller ID was no help. It read OUT OF AREA.

    "Hello," I said.

    The voice was Lauren's. It was as tight as my hamstrings after a tough mountain climb, as cold as Gunnison in mid-January. She said, "I hope you didn't have anything to do with this."

    I could have asked
"With what?"
but that appeared to be a trap waiting to be sprung. I looked at the digital clock in the corner of the computer screen. Seven-ten A.M. That meant it was nine-ten in Florida. I said, "You guys are still in Miami?"

    "We're in Denver, Alan."

    It was a simple declarative sentence, but it was also an accusation. She knew it, and I knew it. The sentence didn't include a whole lot of information. I couldn't guess what I had done.

    "Why? What happened?" I asked.

    "You don't know? That's what you're telling me?"

    "I don't know. That's exactly what I'm telling you. I tracked your flight last night. It landed in Miami. What's wrong? What happened?"

    "TSA pulled me aside for a search as I was going through security with Grace. They found the Sativex in my purse. We weren't allowed to fly to Miami. I had to turn over our passports."

    "Where are you?"

    "One of those bed-in-a-box hotels by DIA." Lauren wasn't a big fan of the franchising of hotels and motels. The bed-in-abox moniker was one of her kinder diminutives for them.

    "Grace is okay?"

    "You know Grace—it's all lemons and lemonade for her. She's having a great time. She's counting takeoffs and landings." Lauren's voice changed completely as she asked our daughter, "How many now, honey?"

    I heard Gracie call out, "Ninety-six."

    I smiled.

    "You didn't tell anyone, Alan?"

    "About your drugs? Of course not." I knew from the tone of her question that she wasn't predisposed to believe my denial. "What's going to happen? Were you arrested?"

    "No. Detained for a while. I'm waiting for a call from the U.S. Attorney's office. It's a mess." She changed her voice to a whisper. "This is a federal felony they're discussing, Alan."

    "God."

    "No one knew but you. No one."

    I fought my impulse to argue. I said, "Maybe it was incidental to the search. Maybe they found it when they were looking for . . . whatever the hell it is that TSA is searching for lately."

    She was completely prepared for me to launch that argument— she took aim at it as though she'd been shooting skeet and my argument was the clay pigeon she was most determined to obliterate. "And how many TSA agents do you think could identify a bottle of Sativex even if the damn thing was hanging from a chain under their noses? It looks completely benign. I had other medicines in my purse. Narcotics. Injectable interferon. They barely looked at them. Why would they focus on the Sativex? Why? There's no good reason. They were looking for it. They opened my purse and went right for it."

    I chose silence. In her current state of mind Lauren's focus on the topic of how the TSA employee found the Sativex had no margin for me. Finally in a voice as kind as I could manage I said, "Why would you think I would tell anyone?"

    "Please, Alan. Don't, dammit. Don't get all offended on me. Can you focus on
my
problem for a second?"

    I almost snapped back. Almost. "Forget the hurt, Lauren. What about the logic? What possible advantage would it give me to have you arrested at the airport in front of our daughter?"

    She was quiet for a few seconds. Then she said, "My cell is vibrating—I have to go. I'll call you back when I know something."

    Was her phone really vibrating? I had my doubts.

I made some more coffee. In my mind I was staring at the puzzle. The pieces were floating. I moved them around. I was trying to find the right place for the confusing contours of the newest piece—what had happened to my wife in the security line at DIA.

    I came up with no good place to stick that news.
Coinci
dence?
Maybe. But probably not.
What?

    I went back to the computer. Two reasons: One, my task with J. Winter wasn't done. And two, it gave me something to do.

    Another Google search confirmed J. Winter Brown's gender. The information was contained in the most innocuous of data: She had run in a 5K charity race in Vail in 1998. Her results were listed among the women participants. J. Winter wasn't an elite runner, but she wasn't bad. At that altitude I could not have kept up with her.

    I kept waiting for the phone to ring with news from Lauren. It didn't.

    Another hour of diligent searching filled out J. Winter's professional background for me. B.A., University of Michigan, Ph.D., UCLA. She'd worked professionally—doing forensic evaluations, among other things—in Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon before setting up a private practice in Greeley, Colorado, in

1996. I could find no professional mention of her after 2002.

I went into the kitchen and ate some yogurt—even though the container warned me that it had expired around the time that Nicole Cruz had been hanging in the barn—and some applesauce while standing at the counter. The snack was like going to a gas station to fill my car. Fuel.

    Then I went back to J. Winter Brown. I struck researching gold in an online edition of a January 1999 issue of an alumni bulletin published by the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. In it was a photograph of four local psychologists who were generously donating their time as volunteer faculty in the psychology department. The third of the four, second from the right, was identified as Dr. Wynne Brown.

    No
J. Winter.

    I immediately recognized her.
Son of a bitch,
I thought.

Some of my colleagues considered me crazy to do it, but the intake policy I employed for my practice gave potential patients a free session to decide if I was the right therapist for them. If the patient decided I was a good match and chose to continue to see me for treatment I would charge them for the initial visit. But if they never came back I didn't bill them for the trial session.

    J. Winter Brown was one of those patients who never came back.

    I'd seen her once—my appointment calendar said it was the previous fall, about ten days after I'd watched that other patient shot on the evening news. I probably wasn't at the top of my clinical game during that appointment; my patient's public, violent death had shaken me up. Brown had used her real name with me right from the start; my records showed that I had set a time for the intake late on a Tuesday afternoon with a woman named Justine Brown.

    Although I recalled seeing her, the session wasn't particularly memorable. She had admitted from the start that she was therapist-shopping—not an unusual form of mental-health rec reation in Boulder, where more psychotherapists labor within five blocks of my office than live in all of Wyoming—and she'd spent much of the forty-five minutes we were together asking me questions about my practice, my experience, and my background, both professional and personal. I'd answered some of her questions, deflected others.