Last Lie (23 page)

I walked to the front door and looked out the window. Both vehicles I'd spotted earlier were gone. Casey Sparrow had moved on. Diane, I hoped, had gone home to sleep in her own bed with her husband. I was also hoping that Mimi had gone with her.

I wondered if Hake was going to spend the night in jail. Or at home.

The front porch lights were on in the house across the way, but the rest of the place was almost completely dark. The only light was a faint glow through one of the upstairs bedroom windows, as though someone had left on the central hall light.

I double-checked the locks on our front door before I turned to walk back to our bedroom. I tripped almost immediately. When I looked down, there was barely enough light to let me know that I'd just tripped over Jonas's beloved sneaks.

Huh. He wasn't asleep after all.
He'd heard me trip over the shoes and carried them upstairs. I flicked on the overhead light. I noticed that the laces were covered in fine sawdust.
Has he been going inside his father's woodshop? How would he get in?
I didn't have ready answers to my questions. I kicked the shoes aside and continued to the bedroom, stopping first at the master closet, where I reached up and felt for the Glock hidden in the recess on top of the tallboy. It was there. By choice, I don't handle many guns. But each time I hefted Lauren's Glock, it was always colder and heavier than I expected it to be, or remembered it being.

For many people a loaded gun provides an additional sense of security. For me, a loaded gun is a loaded gun. Loaded with connotations as well as bullets. People comfortable with firearms tend to perceive guns as doing good things. People uncomfortable with firearms, like me, perceive them as being agents of fate.

Sometimes fate is kind. Sometimes not.

Recently, fate had been something of a bitch.

I FINALLY FELL ASLEEP but woke when Lauren crawled into bed. I opened one eye. The digital clock read 3:22. She brushed her feet against me as she pulled the comforter over her. "You okay?" I said into the dark.

"Good," she said in a voice that said to go back to sleep, that she didn't want to talk.

Her feet were just-out-of-the-fridge cold. I mumbled, "If you want, you can put your feet on me. To warm them up."

She flattened the bottoms of her feet against my calves, which told me that she was lying in bed with her back to me. I felt a chill shiver through me all the way to my liver. "Thanks," she said. "You're so warm."

That's me,
I thought.

LAUREN GOT OUT OF BED just in time to kiss the kids on their way to carpool. I was almost ready to follow them out the door.

"You have to go in to work this morning?" I asked as I pulled on a coat. I knew she did. She had the prosecutorial side of a homicide investigation to manage. And, from an office politics perspective, she had collegial and managerial expectations to exceed. Lauren felt that everyone who mattered in her office was eyeing her for indications that multiple sclerosis had finally taken enough of a toll on her that she could no longer do her job. That would make her even more determined to prove them wrong.

"Absolutely," she said. "Any news on your friend?"

"He's in ICU."

"Sorry."

"How bad was it last night?" I asked. "In Devil's Thumb?"

"Some of the cops were saying last night that big crime scenes are a lot like movie sets. A lot of waiting around. I think I got back here around three, a little after. Getting search warrants is always slower than you imagine. We had to call Judge Delonis for the warrants. You know her?" I shook my head. "She must take sleepers--it was that hard to get her to wake up and focus on the homicide. She hung up on the detective three different times before he got her out of bed."

"What about the scene?"

"Truly bloody. As bad a stabbing as I've ever seen. Crime scene guys think it was a big knife. We didn't find it, though. Police will send dogs into the greenbelt today looking for evidence. Still have a lot of canvassing to do, too."

I made a face. "Domestic?" I asked.

"Didn't look like it. Guy lived alone. Appears he was surprised in his garage after the door came down. Significant spatter on the back of the garage door."

"He confronted a burglar? That sort of thing?"

"At first that's what we thought, but the more the detectives pieced the evidence together, the more it looked like the homeowner had been ambushed. No sign he was running away from his attacker. No initial face-to-face confrontation at all. ME tentatively put the first two cuts--a stab and a slash--as coming from behind the guy. Crime scene guys thought there was a short fight because there was one wound on his wrist that might have been defensive. As if--and it's not certain--he had been turning around. But everyone agrees he was already bleeding out by then."

"So it wasn't a burglary?"

"Hard to say. It could turn out that he interrupted it before it got started. Garage break-ins aren't uncommon--there have been a couple in Table Mesa in the past few weeks. Might end up just being a wrong place, wrong time thing. Intruder felt cornered, so he attacked. There's still a lot of evidence to sort out. Detectives and forensic teams will be there all day, I'm sure."

"You're good?" I said.

She smiled. "Yeah. I'm glad I went--I'm glad I showed everybody that I could go to a scene, do my part. The police did a good job. The warrants were clean. The scene was managed well. Forensic response was tight. Evidence collected by the book. I was pleased."

"Witnesses?"

"Immediate neighbors heard nothing. The fact that the house borders greenbelt complicates things. Provides unmonitored, unlit access to the property. We're hoping for something from the canvassing today."

I leaned in and kissed her. "Well, I have an early patient. Coffee's made. You think you're home for dinner?"

"I sure hope so. I plan to be home by midday."

I grabbed my keys and opened the door. I remembered the big Audi and the red hair. I turned. "I think Casey might have been here last night. Does she have a big Audi SUV? Gray?"

"I think she does. She got it because it's big enough to hold all her dogs."

"She came by. I'm assuming to see Mimi. I found that interesting."

Lauren narrowed her eyes. "I do, too. Was that after Hake left the police station? Did she bring him home?"

"I didn't know that he was released. It's possible she brought him home, I guess. I didn't see him."

"Someone had to give him a ride from 33rd Street. His car was impounded. I think he left the police department around eleven. No media tried to follow Casey here? That's hard to believe if she had Hake in the car."

I hadn't considered the fact that Mattin Snow, post hit-and-run bicycle accident, would attract the various species of opportunistic press like horse shit attracts the various species of opportunistic flies.

"Casey was here before eleven. I didn't see other cars on the lane. It's possible I may have just missed Mattin. But I don't think I would have missed any other cars."

"Emily wouldn't have missed him," Lauren said. "She can smell Hake a mile away."

Emily misses little that happens in her parish. Especially when it involves potential adversaries.

32

T
he big house appeared deserted. As I pulled out of the garage, I saw no signs that anyone was home.

I took South Boulder Road west all the way to Broadway, which is not my normal route to my office. I wanted to lay my eyes on the intersection where Rafa had been hurt. Morning traffic cooperated, jamming the intersection and forcing me to miss the light at Broadway. While I was stopped at the signal, I eyed the area and imagined how the accident might have happened. It was easy to see that a simple swerve--two feet, three at the most--by a distracted driver on a cell phone could have caused the driver's car to swerve into the edge of the bike lane.

From the saddle of my bicycle I'd watched the same confluence of events occur a dozen times. Or a hundred. Most of the time an alert cyclist reacts in time to avoid the swerving car. Other times the driver recognizes his carelessness just in time to jerk back to his lane. The circumstances were routine and mundane. It could have been any cyclist in that accident. It could have been me.

I parked my car where our garage had stood adjacent to our little Victorian. I'd inherited the prime parking location because Diane considered the precise spot of the garage's tragic demise to be bad juju. I, on the other hand, considered the rectangle of reclaimed territory a newly created and most convenient parking space, juju be damned.

The clock visible from my desk revealed that my first session of the day was scheduled to start in six minutes. I was about to close my office door and use a few of those six minutes to try to collect my thoughts when my cell phone chirped with a happy sound indicating the arrival of another text message. The sound also served as a reminder to me that I had not checked the previous message, the one that had come in while I was driving. I read the second text. It was from Sam.

It read,
I think not.

Really?
I was doubly curious. I looked above the "I think not" text to read the message that had beeped at me during my commute to my office. That one was from Sam, too.
This is about to go public. Devil's Thumb vic is the cook from the party. Coincidence?

It took me a moment to remember the ex-Pain Perdu chef's name. Preston Georges. I focused my attention on Sam's news. Someone who had been in attendance during the Friday-night housewarming in Spanish Hills was dead. Apparently murdered.

What might his murder have to do with the festivities, or the events that followed? I had nothing. I texted Sam.
Ideas?

I'm a man of ideas.

He was, actually. I typed,
Relevant ones?

It's not my case, remember?

Sam definitely had ideas, but he wasn't prepared to share them with me.

One eye on the clock, I cursed silently while I booted up my laptop so I could check the
Camera
website and my e-mail. The digital display on the far wall reminded me that only two minutes remained until I had to walk down the hall to retrieve my first patient of the morning.

I had two fresh e-mail messages. The first was from Hella. The message was too long for a text. She thought we should meet. It was urgent. She could be at my office at eleven fifteen, three fifteen, or four forty-five. She explained it was about "the DNA."

The DNA?
It was way too early for any laboratory results to be available from the DNA samples that Mattin Snow had provided to the authorities--if indeed he'd provided any--upon his return from Napa the day before. Even initial DNA readings of quality samples from a laboratory willing to drop everything to test them wouldn't be available for days. I couldn't imagine what other DNA Hella might want to discuss with me.

The other e-mail was from Raoul. He, too, was thinking that he and I should meet. His concern was about the
Daily Camera
redevelopment project. That situation was urgent, too. He said things had reached a "tipping point" in due diligence and we needed a decision about including the Walnut property. He used the words
this morning.

Ha!
I thought. "We" hadn't even begun to discuss price or timing. Nor had I given any real thought to the ramifications of the decision to sell, such as where the hell Diane and I would relocate our offices. Lauren and I had not edged past the most preliminary of discussions about the financial consequences of selling Walnut Street, had not explored further the question of the sale of her rental home on the Hill or revisited the loaded possibility of packing up our family, leaving Spanish Hills, and moving to town.

The reality was that I had plenty to distract my attention without adding into the mix either Hella's pressing DNA concerns, whatever they might be, or Raoul's real estate development deadlines, not to mention the associated dominoes that would fall should those deadlines be met, or missed.

The condition of my friend Rafael was nearer the top of the list of my more pressing concerns. One eye on the ticking clock, I typed out a quick e-mail to a biking friend, hoping for an update about Rafa's health by the time my first session of the morning was over.

Also near the top of the list was the whole question of the death, apparently murder, of Preston Georges in his garage in Devil's Thumb, and the not-at-all-philosophical question about exactly where that felony might fit into the Friday-night-at-the-neighbors' mix of already perplexing felonies. Most imminently, a present responsibility would confront me, too. I had a patient who was about to walk into my office expecting, completely reasonably, my undivided attention.

My first patient that morning was a too-sweet-for-her-own-good forty-three-year-old mother of four whose upbringing had rendered her completely incapable of setting limits with the most important people in her life. The immediate consequence of her flawed limit-setting had to do with her own mother, a woman my patient had described as a demanding, intrusive, yet charming lady who was in the process of moving, both unbidden and unwelcome, to Boulder from Austin, Texas. Without any discussion with her daughter, the woman had placed a lowball offer on a house around the corner from her youngest and was currently awaiting a reply from the seller's Realtor.

The purpose of that morning's session, in my patient's eyes at least, was for me to tell my patient what to do to stop her mother from moving.

My take? My role was to be helpful, but slightly less practically so. Ideally, I would accomplish two things during the session that morning: to make a dent in my patient's characterological limit-setting problem through the miracle of insight. And to simultaneously provide her some guidance on the what-the-heck--my patient did not use foul language, even tame foul language--might-she-do-about-her-mother-moving-in-around-the-corner problem.

This was bread-and-butter work for a clinical psychologist in general practice. I was expected to get it right. I wanted to get it right. But that morning my attention was getting stuck in a place that had nothing to do with that morning's reality. Instead, I was proving unable to keep my mind from focusing an unwarranted amount of energy on the chain-smoking, bad-driving caterer, Eric, and the unknown dealer he was trying to meet up with on South Boulder Road before the guy headed to Breckenridge, along with his stash, for the weekend.

I was particularly fixated on whether one of the items in inventory in that particular dealer's stash was Rohypnol, bootleg or pharm.

I was also investing too much of my limited energy into the identity of the mystery guy wearing the hoodie and ski cap that Eric and Nicole had almost run over on the lane after they'd just missed running over me on the night of the Friday-evening housewarming gathering.

I was trying to leave open the possibility that my mind's apparent associative hopscotching might prove elucidative and become part of my creative process, but my thinking seemed to be producing nothing but disjointed, tangential musings.

At that instant a tiny light flashed red near my office door. The red light indicated that the overwhelmed mother of four, having completed dropping her admittedly unruly brood--limit-setting wasn't her forte as a parent, either--at school, had arrived in my waiting room, anxious to learn in forty-five short minutes a crucial life skill that she had completely failed to master in her previous forty-three years.

LATER IN THE MORNING, at eleven fifteen, three consecutive sessions under my belt, the red light flashed on once more. Hella had arrived almost as soon as my ten thirty had departed. My next patient was due at eleven forty-five. Hella and I would have thirty minutes to puzzle out something useful about the mysteries of the double helix.

"What's up?" I said after we exchanged quick hellos. I sat first. "You said you had DNA questions. News. Something."

We hadn't met for supervision since the session that ended so abruptly at her apartment. Hella settled in before she replied. She kicked off her shoes and tucked her bare feet under the ample flows of her long skirt. She hooked the hair on the left side of her head behind her ear. She thanked me for seeing her on such short notice. "So much so fast with this case, Alan. I truly am sorry to bother you again, but I don't know what to make of all that's happening. I don't want to screw anything up. For her. I'm really hoping you can give me some guidance."

I was hoping that, too.

"Her attorney phoned my patient early this morning. He'd just received a call from the lawyer representing the man my patient has accused of assaulting her." She paused and stared at my face. "You don't seem surprised by that."

"I'm married to a lawyer. Attorneys talk to each other. A lot. I may end up being more surprised when I learn what they talked about."

"Okay. The other attorney--it's a woman--told my patient's attorney that she had received preliminary DNA results for her client."

I made a perplexed face. There was so much wrong with Hella's story. First, it was too soon for DNA analysis to be complete. Second, any results, when they were revealed to the accuser's attorney, should come from law enforcement, not from opposing counsel.

I said, "I'm no expert on this, Hella, but isn't that pretty rapid turnaround for forensic DNA results?" I was acutely aware that I had to be careful with the provenance of my knowledge. I was limited to discussing with Hella only facts that Hella might have shared with me or that might be in the public domain. Hella, for instance, hadn't yet informed me that Mattin Snow had been summoned back to Boulder by sheriff's investigators. That meant that Hella didn't know that I was already aware that the accused had arrived back in town only the afternoon before.

I had no way to ascertain if Hella even knew the accused was in town. Nor did I know if Hella was aware of the bicycle accident that had occurred the previous evening.

I reminded myself to be careful.

"It would be early, way early," she said. "Exactly. The police requested the . . . DNA samples only a few days ago."

I asked, "Do you know if they've been collected? And, if so, when they were collected?"

Hella said, "I think they have been collected. But specifically? If they were collected, it would be recently. Maybe as recently as yesterday."

That Hella and I were on the same temporal page with our facts made my subterfuge less taxing. I hoped. I said, "My experience with this sort of thing is limited--I think you know my wife is a deputy district attorney--but my understanding is that it typically takes a significant amount of time to get DNA results back from a forensic laboratory." Lauren frequently complained of how long it took to get routine forensic reports back from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation laboratory. "Lauren has explained that the CBI lab is always working off a backlog of cases and that it's hard to get something new to rise to the top of the queue. It doesn't seem possible that the--"

"I know. It's not like it is on TV." Hella smiled. "Nothing happens overnight. I checked online for all this information, Alan. Can I finish? Maybe save us some time. We don't have much."

"Of course," I said.

"Late yesterday, the accused's lawyer told my patient's lawyer"--in my head I translated that Casey Sparrow had told Cozier Maitlin--"that the accused had voluntarily provided his own samples for DNA analysis, collected under the videotaped supervision of an ex-FBI agent, for submission to a qualified laboratory. This all happened early on--the day after the police first made the man aware of the accusations against him."

My mouth hung open. I was that surprised. "Really?" I said.

"According to his attorney, the samples were collected and sent to a private laboratory for analysis. All at the accused's expense."

Wow,
I thought. Mattin Snow did his own DNA tests. He anticipated the trajectory of the investigation, he knew what was coming, and he took evasive action.
He basically punted on third down.
A most inventive strategy.

Hella seemed to be waiting for me to say something intelligent about the news--not an unreasonable expectation in the circumstances. I said, "This is something new. I don't think I've ever heard of a potential criminal defendant doing his own anticipatory forensic laboratory work."

My initial reflexive response to the news Hella had shared was an urge to pick up a phone and ask my wife, the prosecutor, or my friend Sam, the detective, a pertinent question, or maybe two: Is it permissible for a criminal suspect to do a forensic examination on himself before the police get around to it?

And would the results be admissible in any court?

I suspected Lauren and Sam's response to the first question would be that suspects and their defense attorneys are free to do almost anything they want with their biological samples and their own money as long as they aren't tampering either with evidence or with jury pools along the way.

To the second question, the one about admissibility in court, I felt certain that Lauren and Sam would reply in perfect two-part harmony. They would say, "Hell, no. No law enforcement agency or court in Colorado is going to care about the results of those independent tests."