Line of Fire (11 page)

“A moment ago, you expressed concern that I might not be able to help you. Help you with what, Amanda? What exactly are you here seeking my help for?”

She didn’t move. I said, “Last week it was to help your friend. This week? What?” Silence. I said, “Today is about you. Just like last week’s session was about you. Last week wasn’t about your friend. This week is not about your brother.”

She nodded. Her lips flattened into the most bittersweet of smiles.

“One hundred days after the first night I touched him, my brother died.”

Amanda began to gather her things. I hadn’t noticed that the time was up. She hung her jacket over her arm. She hooked the handle of her purse in her fingers. She said, “My friend? The one I am so concerned about? From last week?”

“Yes.”

“This economy? A while back, I lost my job. Was unemployed for a long time. I’ve been putting together gigs to keep going. My friend is one of my gigs.”

I nodded. For young people disadvantaged by our stagnant economy, gigology—piecing together jobs—had become part of the culture of adaptation.

“The job I do for him?” She paused. “I’m his companion. He pays me . . . to be with him.”

My breath caught in my chest for a split second, as though the power serving my grid were suddenly interrupted and my nervous system suffered a rolling brownout.

My eyes flitted to the digital clock behind Amanda. In that brief instant, the numbers changed from :44 to :45. The session was over.

Amanda stood. I got to my feet a second after she did. My balance felt just the slightest bit compromised, which was likely Amanda’s intent. She had saved that last bit of news until the end of the session for a reason.

We stood there, two feet apart, eye to eye, for a few seconds.

She said, “Now you will get some time to decide how you feel about what I do for a living.”

I opened my mouth to reply—aware of the overt challenge inherent in her timing. My instinct was to find some magic reply that would shed some light on the dynamic between us. I found nothing.

Amanda said, “Thank you.” She made a graceful pirouette before she walked toward the door. She pulled it closed behind her.

17

I
spent the remaining moments before my next appointment, an initial session with a new patient, trying to clear my head so I would be ready.

I had no way to know it, but no amount of preparation would have left me ready for him.

• • •

The intake session started off not unlike many other first appointments.

The moment the man sat down he said, “How do I start?”

That was how I translated what he said, anyway.

The words in that first quick sentence came out as a mashed-syllable mumble—“Howdeyestrt.” He spoke as though his last stop before my office had been an extended visit with his dentist, a practitioner who favored massive doses of Novocain. I had to replay the speech sounds in my head a couple of times before I felt that I comprehended the noises my patient was making.

I could have said nothing in reply. Or I could have suggested he begin anywhere he liked. Instead, I rolled out my well-practiced opening line.

I asked him how I could be of help.

He didn’t have a ready answer. He stuck his tongue against his cheek far in the back of his mouth on the left side.

My initial impressions of the man included that he was anxious and that he was not a typical patient for my practice. His presentation had an edgy, muted hipster vibe that would hardly stand out on the sidewalks of Boulder, especially on The Hill, but if putting food in my children’s lunch boxes depended on my maintaining a vibrant hipster caseload, my kids would have been hungry. Mid-to-late-twenties guys like my new patient were not the bread and butter of a Boulder psychotherapy practice like mine. I could recall only one quasi-hipster I’d treated in the previous couple of years. He’d agreed to see me for four sessions only because his parents were threatening to kick him out of their guesthouse if he didn’t go to therapy for at least a month.

He made a consistent argument to me that his presence in a therapist’s office was ironic, because he didn’t have any problems. Initially, I was content to point out that, despite his protests, he had at least one very concrete problem: his parents were threatening to kick him out of his house if his lifestyle didn’t undergo metamorphoses.

He and I had made some progress over our four sessions. I had ended up liking him quite a bit. By the end of the month he’d found a job. He told his parents he was working in a used record store, but what he was actually doing was selling medical marijuana. He told me he was also thinking about graduate school.

That one previous hipster psychotherapy experience left me curious whether my new patient’s appearance in my office that day might have been somebody else’s idea. Perhaps a parent, growing tired of his living in the basement. Or the court, growing tired of a swelling misdemeanor rap sheet. Or whatever physician had treated him for the apparent injuries he’d recently suffered.

From his physical appearance—he was healing from a slew of injuries—I suspected he had been in a bad fight, and lost, or a bad accident, and had been lucky to survive.

I reminded myself to keep an open mind.

His reply to my query about how I could be of help was, “Igothrtanaformiafir. Oocanprolleetell. Broakmyfash.”

I leaned forward and asked him to please repeat what he said, as slowly as he could. I explained that I was having trouble understanding him.

He took a deep breath. Exhaled. Inhaled again. He said, “Sorry. The olds tell me I mumble when I’m nervous. And it’s hard to talk now, with my jaw. I mumble even more.”

The olds?
I thought. Back to the Urban Dictionary.
Is that me? Huh.

He then repeated what he had said before, forcing unnatural pauses between the words. “I got hurt during the Fourmile Fire. Among other things, I broke my face.” He waved at his jawline, then tugged at his hair, which was cut at various lengths, depending on the location of the nearest head wound.

I was relieved that he could temper the mumbling with some effort. I had begun to fear that his speech difficulty was going to be a constant part of our time together.

I had no idea at that point that as far as my fears went, that particular one was completely overdetermined.

• • •

When he’d made the appointment with me on the phone, he’d used the name Ricky Contreras. To me, it was just a name.

During the first moments he was in my office, as I struggled to make sense of his pressured, garbled speech, I considered the possibility that his speaking pattern was the result of the poor grasp of English of a nonnative speaker—Contreras can be an ethnically Mexican name—or was a consequence of his apparent recent facial injuries. My gut instinct said that neither was the correct explanation. Although mumbled and rushed, Ricky’s English wasn’t accented or flawed. His sentence structure was fine.

Even after I had managed to get him to acknowledge his tendency to mumble when anxious, and after I had asked him to slow down and repeat his reasons for coming in for therapy, Ricky’s speech sped right back up.

Trying to comprehend the staccato bursts of syllables as they piled up on each other like railcars in a train wreck required that I use all my brainpower to reverse engineer the sounds into something that might resemble words from an English-language dictionary. I then had to break the words apart into sentences that I might comprehend.

I steeled myself. Listening to him for an entire forty-five-minute session was going to be exhausting.

• • •

Ricky Contreras had been injured the first night of the Fourmile Fire in an auto accident. That fact alone should have made me suspicious, but it didn’t. I had still not made any connection between him and the unconscious man that Sam and I had visited in the ICU. I did not make that connection until he rolled up his shirtsleeves and exposed a distinctive tattoo on the underside of his left forearm.

Ice-cold Satan,
I thought.
The Saturnian symbol for
namaste
.

That is the moment I realized that I was sitting a few feet away from Sleepy Doe.

Rick explained that it was his reputed unconsciousness in the days after the accident that motivated him to seek help from a therapist. His physicians’ descriptions of his absent consciousness, he told me, never felt accurate to him. He was, in fact, certain that he had clear memories of things that had happened in the ICU during the time when he was supposedly in a coma.

He admitted he was having some trouble, still, sorting out what might have been real about the experiences he was recalling from his first few days in the ICU and what might have been the result of imaginings caused by his head injuries.

He told me he was hoping I could be of some help sorting all that out.

I had grown so anxious by then that I was reminding myself to breathe. To buy myself some time to ponder the mess I was in, I asked, “Since your discharge, I assume you’ve followed up with a neurologist?”

Rick had. The outpatient neurologist had, in fact, recently assured him that his recovery was on track, and perhaps even ahead of schedule. The doctor expected a complete, or near-complete, recovery to what Rick called “pre-morph-ed” neurological status. I made an assumption that my new patient had meant “pre-morbid,” but I didn’t correct him.

It would not have been a therapeutic thing to do.

18

R
icky Contreras left my office abruptly after only twenty minutes. He apologized for the quick exit, said he had another meeting he had to attend.

That is what I thought he said, anyway.

“But this was helpful,” he added.

I wasn’t accustomed to patients deciding when a session was over. I told him I would have to charge him for the full time we had scheduled. He asked how much he owed. I repeated the number I had given him on the phone when we’d scheduled the appointment. From his pocket he pulled a wad of bills wrapped in a purple broccoli band, and he peeled off enough cash to pay me.

Actually, he included forty dollars too much. I pointed out the overage, fearing that he intended the extra as a gratuity.

He told me he didn’t have any small bills and he would like me to hold on to it, apply it next time.

“You would like another visit?” I said while trying to disguise my amazement.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Now that I’ve gotten to know you a little, I have some questions for you.”

I wasn’t planning to work that Friday, but I made an exception for Ricky Contreras. We picked a time in the afternoon.

Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

• • •

Sam had previously invited me—it was more like a summons—to meet up with him over my lunch break. He had spent his morning at the Justice Center, across Canyon Boulevard not far from my office, waiting less than patiently to testify at an assault trial. That’s why he had insisted that our rendezvous take place on the Boulder Creek trail near the criminal courts. I didn’t often cross Canyon during a workday; most days the road felt like too daunting a barricade for pedestrian transit and offered too little reward on the other side.

I was feeling an acute need to tell him about the brand-new problem I feared we were facing—the fact that Sleepy Doe, who became Coma Doe, had tracked me down—but Sam already had an agenda in mind for our meeting. Sam’s goal was to chastise me about my decision to visit Frederick.

I acquiesced, listening without much rancor to his partisan redescription of my supposed sins. But I felt that the tenor of his conclusion, “Don’t do it again, Alan,” constituted an unnecessary provocation.

The directive was particularly unpalatable because Sam delivered it in his cop voice, not his friend voice. The general “it” he was referring to was my cycling sojourn to Frederick and my extended encounter with Currie’s landlord-once-removed, Izza.

“That’s an order, Detective?” I said. I didn’t even try to disguise my sarcasm.

He sighed at me. “Do not go back there. Under any circumstances. You don’t know what you’re doing. What you’re getting into. Who might be paying attention to you in that location.” Sam shook his head in a way I construed to be demeaning. “There are a lot of moving parts to all this. Don’t—Just don’t. What kind of name is Izza anyway?”

Sam’s question about Izza’s name was not born of curiosity. His current stress level was causing a regressive reversion to cranky, narrow-minded Sam, questioning anything he didn’t understand or endorse. He could have just as easily framed his rant with a pointless demand to know why people were no longer named Tom or Mary. Or Sam.

“It’s short for Isabel,” I said, wondering why I bothered. “Some of what you’re saying about my trip to Frederick may well be true. I’ll give you that. But—”

“You’ll give me that. Gee, thanks. I—”

“Think, Sam. Damn it. What’s the harm? I have a much better understanding of what happened that night. The terrain. Who the players are. How it went down.”

Sam was waiting to pounce. I hadn’t recognized that the demeaning act I had just endured had actually represented restraint on his part. “And you think that’s a good thing? Are you really as simple as you sound? You act as though you’re the only one on the planet with eyes and ears. You need me to walk you through some of the absolutely catastrophic ways this could go wrong?”

“I’m not asking for your imprimatur. Maybe I do think that what I learned is a good thing. And was worth the modicum of risk I took.”

“Imprimatur?
Modicum?
You kidding me? If you think using ten-buck words makes what you did more reasonable, then you’re an idiot. This isn’t about what facts you know, or might learn. This is about what facts
they
know. And I’m still trying to discover what facts they know. What information the sheriff has now that he didn’t have when Currie’s body was found. What this purported new witness of theirs saw.”

At times, when Sam got impassioned he could sound as though he’d just stepped out of northern Minnesota for the first time. Other times when Sam got impassioned he could sound as though he’d spent his whole life in Des Moines. This was an example of the latter. The Iron Range patois was absent.

“Try this on: now that word of the reopening of the investigation is spreading, the investigators could be using rumors as bait, and they may have set up surveillance to see who shows up in Frederick to sniff around that bait. Did you consider that? That somebody might have watched you pedal into the middle of that mess in your weird little biking shoes and your chartreuse frigging helmet?”

I considered my new helmet to be more of a fluorescent green but decided not to press the point. I didn’t like the sound of the police-setting-a-trap part of Sam’s speech.

I said, “You think the sheriff might know I was there?”

“No, all I was thinking was the sheriff might know
someone
was there.” Sam’s tone revealed a worrisome combination of disbelief and disgust. “Because it didn’t enter my dimwitted brain that you would use your real name.”

“I did not. Well, my first name, yes. But that’s it. I left Izza, the landlord, with the clear impression I lived and worked in Denver. That I would commute if I rented the place. She doesn’t know who I am. Or where I live.”

Sam took two more steps before he spied the soft underbelly in my story. He stopped, already shaking his head in anticipatory dismay. “And later on, did you get back to her? To Izza? About not renting the cottage?”

“She asked me to let her know, one way or another.”

“Dear God above, please tell me you didn’t.”

I am an idiot.
I said, “Okay, she has my cell number from the text I sent.”

“Yeah, she has your effing cell number.”

“I’m sorry. But it’s not that big a deal. I was a pretty convincing prospective tenant. There is no reason for her to be suspicious of me. And, to be positive about all this for just a minute or two? A second perspective on how this went down could be a plus.”

“Yeah? ‘How this went down’? That hasn’t been a big question mark for me, seeing that I was there
.
I haven’t forgotten what happened. In fact, I will never forget what happened.”

Despite my hard-learned experience that contentious discussions with Sam when he was in a dyspeptic mood rarely got me anywhere, I pressed on. “But you don’t know who else might have seen something the night you were there. And that is a big deal, given what’s going on with the investigation.

“For example? There’s a little boy who lives at the end of the lane, the end that’s closest to town. I didn’t get a last name, but I know which house it is. Kid’s name is Elias Tres, like Elias the Third. Oh, and this is an interesting thing—he disagrees with the coroner’s finding about time of death. Izza gave me the impression that everybody in Frederick believes the kid’s version. They all think the medical examiner got it wrong.”

“Everyone believes the kid? That’s what Izza says?”

Sam was skilled at condescension. I had to give him that. I said, “Apparently.”

“Does Izza say the boy thinks the death was sooner or later than is in the record?”

“Tres thinks that her body was there a day longer than is in the coroner’s report.”

Sam took a couple of steps without adding anything demeaning. I saw progress.

He said, “I always assumed the coroner had it right. The date. I don’t think I checked. Maybe he got it wrong. That could help. If the record is wrong.”

“See?” I said. I was scoring that as a point for me. Sam might still have an advantage on the scoreboard, but I was no longer being shut out.

“Could the new witness be that kid?” Sam asked. He had his phone in his hand; I half expected him to use Google to search for the answer. “How old?”

“I don’t know for sure, but young. Izza described him as a chatterbox. Likable. He lives with his grandfather. His father died a while back in Afghanistan. Izza called the grandfather Big Elias, or Old Elias. For what it’s worth, I think Izza may have had a thing for Elias Tres’s father, the marine who died. People called him Segundo. He was the second Elias. Segundo means ‘second’ in Spanish.”

“I know that,” Sam said.

Sam didn’t know that, but I let it slide. Bilingual, Sam was not. Yes, he knew cerveza meant “beer.” But when Sam said “gracias,” the word never came out of his mouth the same way twice and rarely came out sounding the way a native Spanish speaker might appreciate. On a good day, Sam could order a Tex-Mex meal without embarrassment. That was about the extent of his Spanish language skills.

“Huh,” Sam said. “A kid? Under ten? Over ten? You really don’t know?”

“From the context, I would say he’s under ten. I got the impression he was only around five at the time of the . . . death. What I learned is going to give me an advantage when I’m talking with Lauren, Sam. When she mentions something about the case—and she will—I’ll be able to understand the context, tell whether it’s important.”

“Sometimes I’m pretty sure you have brain damage, Alan. Anybody ever recommend you get fitted for one of those protective helmet things?”

I took a deep breath and soldiered on. “Where did you park that night? I assume you didn’t drive up to the house and park on that road in front of the ranch. That would have been careless. You know, for an experienced detective like yourself.”

He glared at me. Early in our friendship, I would retreat, and cower just a little, when Sam descended into his intolerant zone. In recent years, as I began to stand my ground with his inner bully, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with me.

He said, “You don’t need to know where I left the car. Anything you don’t need to know, it’s better that you don’t know.”

I waited to shrug until I was certain he would witness my shrug. I said, “We don’t know what this supposed new witness saw that night. Could have been you, could have been your car. If the Jeep was parked a ways from the lane, then we’re talking about a whole new range of possible potential witnesses. That’s the type of thing I was hoping to narrow down by going out there—who could have seen you? Who might the witness be? So that’s why I think it would be helpful for me to know where you parked your damn car.”

Sam stuffed his hands into his pockets. He stayed silent as we approached a young mother who was pushing a twin stroller in the opposite direction. The stroller was one of the long narrow ones, not one of the side-by-sides. It had as many moving parts as a space shuttle. I suspected it cost as much as my first two cars, combined. The babies, most definitely fraternal, were asleep. The woman’s eyes widened as she moved closer to us. She lifted an index finger to her lips, imploring us to stay quiet while we passed.

Once we were downwind of the trio, Sam said, “Nobody saw the Jeep. Okay?”

“How can you be sure?”

“I’m sure. Let it go, Alan.”

I knew I was pushing my luck, and that I hadn’t started the conversation with much good fortune to spare. To maintain any credibility in the discussion of Frederick with Sam, I would have to convince him I had something important to add. I said, “Based on what I saw out there—the geography of that part of Frederick—I think you approached the cottage on foot down the dirt service road that runs north and south adjacent to the fields. Behind her place, on the east side? You know that road?”

He levitated one of his bulbous eyebrows. “Yeah? Go on.”

“I see you parking someplace else—maybe even in town, it’s not that far—and then walking down the state road until you got to the little ag access thing. I can’t see another way for you to have approached the cottage without being obvious. I don’t think you had any good choices, but I think that was the best of your bad choices.”

Sam raised both eyebrows. “Is that what you think?” he said. “That I didn’t have any good choices that night? What a revelation.”

My dime lost, I threw down my dollar. “The other approach—driving or walking down the lane that cuts off from the state road—would have left you visible to anyone in a few different houses, or to anyone who happened to be driving to or from any of the farms or ranches on that lane.” I no longer felt any confidence that Sam was paying attention to my conjecture.

After a few more steps he said, “Stay out of this, Alan. You’re smart enough to be dangerous. You’re not smart enough to be helpful.”

I chose to ignore the insult, which, from Sam, was tepid. I said, “It is what it is. I’m an accomplice. You are not going to change that by wishing it were different. If you get caught, I get caught. You can’t protect me.”

His voice took on a chill. “Could you possibly be as cavalier about this as you sound? We’re not talking about a slap on the wrist. We’re talking your career, gone. Your house, gone. We’re talking every penny you’ve ever saved for your family, for your wife’s old age, and for your kids’ college gone to lawyers. Then we’re talking about first-degree homicide. That means life in prison, or worse. You know about the worse?”

“I’ve covered this ground a hundred times in my head, Sam. It’s not abstract for me. The alternative? That woman was threatening our children. That woman was planning to kill our children. That damn woman had already broken into my daughter’s bedroom and destroyed her security and molested things that she loved. That bitch had already photographed our children—yours and mine—in places where they were most vulnerable to her.

“You want to talk about my vulnerability now? It’s a fraction of the vulnerability we had then. You told me that we had nothing to take to the police. No evidence to implicate her. You told me you acted that night because the only alternative to her death was living with the threat she posed to our children.