Dry Ice (36 page)

    I'd suggested, as I routinely did during sessions that developed like that one did, that interviewing me was perhaps not the best way to get a sense of how I worked, or what it would be like to be in treatment with me. The subtle confrontation had deflected off Justine Brown like a hailstone off a pitched metal roof.

    I was certain that she had not mentioned the fact that she was a psychologist. I would have remembered that. At the end of that first session I'd offered her the opportunity to schedule a second. She demurred; she would think about it and call if she was interested in continuing. I didn't think I would hear from her again.

    She'd never called back. In that sense, I'd been right.

    But I had heard from her again. I no longer had doubts about that.

The brainstorm about where she fit came in the shower. I had a towel around my waist but I was still wet when I reached Sam on his cell. We spoke at the exact same instant.

    He said, "You idiot—you're at home. This can't happen. You dialed by mistake. Got it? Jesus." Or something to that effect.

    I said, "I'm sending an attachment to Lucy's e-mail."

    We both hung up as though it had been a race to see who could disconnect first.

    I put on the same clothes I'd taken off the night before and forwarded the photo from the University of Northern Colorado to Lucy's computer in an e-mail.

    I'd expected to get confirmation of my suspicion from Sam immediately. I didn't. After the first ten minutes passed I began thinking that I might have been wrong about my conclusion regarding J. Winter Brown.

    Sam didn't get back to me for almost half an hour. The call came in on the landline. Caller ID read PAY PHONE. "How did you get this?" he asked.

    I was relieved to hear his confirmation. "Online. I think I have most of it."

    "I can't frigging believe this. Jesus. We have to talk—now."

    "I have one more thing to nail down. Call me again in an hour. Then we'll find a way to meet."

    "Wait, Alan. You shouldn't—"

    I hung up. Immediately I had second thoughts. It might be prudent to meet with Sam first and wait to do the additional research. Then I thought about Lauren stewing in the DIA airport hotel, eager to learn how she'd been snared by TSA.

    Sam undoubtedly had a list of things he didn't want me to do. Just in case what I planned to do next was on that list, I decided I would wait to hear his admonitions.

    He called back right away, as I suspected he would. I let voice-mail take over. I knew he couldn't leave me a message; a digital record would provide enduring evidence that he had phoned. If someone looked later on that wouldn't look good. All he did on the voice message was growl.

Lauren's little sister's e-mail address was in my computer's address book.

    I lost twenty minutes downloading some free software that would help me crop the photo of J. Winter Brown. I was a novice; taking care of the digital family photo album was Lauren's job, not mine.

    I lost twenty more minutes trying to figure out how to use the new software. The process looked like it should be easy. And because it looked like it should be idiot-proof, I felt like a complete dolt when it took me so long to crop a solitary photograph. Once I had eliminated Brown's colleagues from the picture, I enlarged what was left and attached the photo to an e-mail that I sent to Teresa.

    On the subject line I wrote, simply, "Recognize this woman?"

    Two minutes later I received an effervescent reply. "Hi!!!! That's Barbara, my friend from Vancouver? Do you know her?!! That's soooo great!!!!"

    Teresa used exclamation points as though she'd won a lifetime supply on a game show. She thought she'd never run out. By contrast I lived life as though I'd been granted half a dozen at birth, and was told they had to last me until I took my last breath. I saved most of my allotment for Grace.

    Was attitude about punctuation nature or nurture? I promised myself I'd ponder that at some other time.

    Some people who knew Teresa only casually considered her to be naïve. It wasn't a fair description. Teresa lived life with an abundance of trust. Most of the time it was an endearing trait.

    Occasionally it bit her in the ass. This was one of those times. This time Teresa's free-trust attitude had also bitten Lauren in the ass.

I picked up the phone to tell Kirsten what I'd learned about the grand jury witness. I got no answer at her home, at the office, or on her mobile.

   Rehearsing the words made my discovery seem much less consequential than it had when it had been bouncing around silently in my brain. So I knew the grand jury witness had an alias? Sam and Lauren may have known that all along. How was that going to help me?

   A fleeting dulcet tone indicated that another e-mail had arrived at my computer. I clicked the message open. It was from Lucy, Sam's partner. Or from Sam, using his partner's account.

The message was curt. "You know about L.?"

I clicked "Reply," typed "Yes," and clicked "Send."

    My enthusiasm about what I'd accomplished by discovering the photo of J. Winter Brown continued to fade.

    I reminded myself that I had learned something significant and that Lauren needed to know that she'd been set up with the Sativex—and that it hadn't been by me. I also weighed how urgent it was to let Sam in on the fact that J. Winter was involved in Lauren's pharmaceutical entrapment. I decided that could wait until I'd told Lauren what was going on—I had to allow for the possibility that she might want me to guard the information and not share it with Sam.

    Another e-mail arrived. Teresa. Nothing in the subject line.

    The message: "Lauren just texted me. OMG!!! OMG!!!"

    
Oh my God, indeed.
I replied, "shhhh, keep it to yourself" and hit "Enter."

    I called my wife's mobile from my mobile. The call went right to voice-mail. I figured it meant Lauren was using her phone. Maybe she was talking with the U.S. Attorney.

   I knew that since Lauren was trapped in a bed-in-a-box motel room near DIA, her laptop would be open on the faux wood desktop and the machine would be hooked up to whatever kind of broadband connection was available in the room.

   I sent her an e-mail. In the subject line, I typed, "News." In the body of the message I wrote, "T's friend in BC is a friend of M."

   I waited ten minutes for a reply. Nothing came back. I tried Lauren's cell twice more. Each time I was routed directly to her voice-mail. I didn't leave messages.

   Another call came in on the landline. PAY PHONE was my clue. Sam.

   "Yeah," I said.

   "Go up the Royal Arch Trail from Chautauqua. He'll find you on the other side of the Bluebell Shelter, past the creek on the ridge."

    "Lucy?" I thought the voice on the line had been Sam's partner, but I wasn't a hundred-percent sure. She'd already hung up. I e-mailed Lauren again. "I'll be on my cell for a while. Call me."

    "Emily?" I said to my sleeping Bouvier. "Want to go for a hike?" For a small child Emily didn't have a large receptive vocabulary, but for a middle-aged dog I thought she was an eighty-pound Einstein. "Want," "go," and "hike" were three of her favorite words. She went nuts. That meant yes.

    I changed my shoes, threw on a fleece vest, deliberately chose a few things to toss into a shoulder pack, ran back inside to get a second bottle of water—the first had been for Emily—and shuttled the big dog into my car.

HOW MANY times had I done the Royal Arch Trail? Twenty? Fifty? For a short roundtrip hike from an urban center like Boulder a day hiker couldn't ask for much more reward from a short investment. Heading in, the view toward the hills—Emily and I entered via the worn Mesa Trail from Chautauqua—provided a picture-window close-up of all three Flatirons against a deepwater blue sky. After cutting off onto the Royal Arch—the route starts in the shadows as a short climb along a causeway-like ridge—the trail follows some uphill cutbacks until it descends for a short stretch. From there a steep approach carries hikers toward the rock arch and the reward of an unusual angle view of all three Flatirons, an eagle's perspective on Boulder and, on a clear day, Denver glistening like some dirty quartz spilled on the threshold of the Great Plains.

    It was a clear day. The prize at the end of the climb promised to be breathtaking, but I doubted I'd get that far. According to the message Sam wanted to meet along the trail's first ridge past the Bluebell Shelter. No way would the Royal Arch Trail be deserted on a fine spring day—the first section, the Mesa Trail traverse across the greenbelt above Chautauqua, was the closest thing in Boulder to a hiking Main Street—but I figured that was part of Sam's strategy. He'd purposefully picked a well-traveled path, the kind of place in Boulder that people unexpectedly run into friends. With any luck he and I could find a place to talk that provided privacy and maybe the bonus of a peekaboo view of the Third Flatiron.

Even though we jogged all the way to the creek I had to hold Emily back on her retractable lead. She was in one of her moods that left me incapable of moving fast enough to keep up with the pace that she had determined was reasonable. Shortly after we passed the ranger station she dropped her snout to the packed earth and locked on to the scent of some critter that didn't meet her olfactory criteria for friendliness. At first I thought she might have picked up evidence that Sam had ascended right in front of us but Emily's behavior wasn't the excited, playful dance she uses to respond to a friendly scent, it was the businesslike march of wariness with which she approaches a foe.

    I wondered whether she was detecting the presence of a dog she'd had a run-in with before, or if maybe she was sensing the recent passing of her local adversary, a red fox. I definitely didn't want her to be on the trail of a mountain lion or brown bear, and I hoped it wasn't a porcupine awaiting us. Those encounters didn't end well. On another day I might have taken her off her lead to see where she might go exploring on her own, but Boulder was constantly changing its enforcement policy about dogs and leashes on the greenbelt and in the mountain parks and I hadn't been paying enough attention to know whether we were in a period of laissez-faire enforcement, or whether it was one of those times when the dog-poop intolerant were mapping canine feces with GPS and posting the hard, and occasionally soft, evidence on the Web. I did know that this was a day I could not risk getting a citation from the dog police, so I kept Emily within the range her lead allowed.

    She tugged on the line to communicate what she thought of my caution.

    Our ten-minute wait was on the verge of becoming fifteen and I'd begun to question the wisdom of the rendezvous. My mobile-phone signal was jumping back and forth between no signal and a solitary bar. I was cold and getting colder. The lovely view had stopped feeling mesmerizing.

    Most of all I had started wondering if I had been set up. Was someone other than Sam waiting to meet me up the Royal Arch Trail? Or had someone wanted to get me away from my home?
I should have stopped at Chautauqua at a pay phone and con
firmed the plans with Sam.
Once I'd let that regret out of the cage a slew of others stampeded out right after it.

    
I should have told Lauren what had happened when I was
a kid.

    
I should have left the purse in the backyard.

    
I should have let my patient pick a different therapist to
watch him die on the evening news.

    
I should have long ago stopped trying to be so damn
helpful.

Emily barked. The sound startled me so much I almost yelped back at her.

    I was sitting facing back down the trail in order to spot Sam's approach. Emily was beside me looking up the trail to ward the nearest crest, her nose in the wind, her long facial hair blown back so she looked like Chewbacca's first cousin. Her initial solitary bark—the one that almost stopped my heart— was followed by a rat-a-tat series of roars that sounded like she was shooting them from a Gatling gun.

    I spun around, but saw no one. Not uphill. Not down. "What is it, girl?" I asked.

    She jumped 180 degrees and stared down the trail, standing like a statue—the only motion was her wet black nose twitching to catch molecules that were to her as prey-specific as a DNA profile.

    She didn't answer me. She twirled again and launched herself past me up the ridge. I almost lost hold of her lead.

    Sam had made it to within five feet of us before he said, "Sorry, you weren't here before, and I thought maybe I had time to make it to the arch. I'd forgotten how nice it is up there. You been waiting long? This wind, huh?"

    He saw the aggravation on my face. Wisely, he allowed Emily to have most of his attention. "Hey. I said I was sorry. I needed the distraction."

    I had no energy to squander on being angry at Sam. I had too many other things to be angry about. He started the conversation in exactly the right key to soften my mood. "You ever feel that your life is about to turn to shit?"