Dry Ice (20 page)

    I paused, my mouth open, as Kol's voice in my head—unbidden—provided me with more reason to be cautious.
"I mean
it's not like what happened with . . . your dad."

    I had a motive. A motive I didn't want to discuss with Kirsten, or with anybody else.

    She rescued me from the impasse in my internal dialogue. She said, "Remember, I know what it's like to be a target." She allowed that thought to pool on the surface and begin to penetrate my porous shell before she continued. "It's like recognizing that someone you love has died. The first stage is denial."

LAUREN AND I entered the twilight of the day under the jointly constructed pretense that the latest series of marital earthquakes hadn't done any structural damage.

    Neither of us was inclined to cook but our decision to have a pizza delivered wasn't well considered. We hadn't bothered to warn the sheriff's deputy parked outside to expect a visitor from Abo's. When the delivery guy drove his big Ford pickup down the lane as though he were trying to lock in the best time in the quarter-mile at Bandimere, he blew right past the deputy's SUV. Neither Lauren nor I saw what happened next, but when the knock came at our door the deputy was standing a few steps behind the pizza delivery guy with his hand hovering close to his holstered handgun.

    The pizza guy's eyes had that red-lights-in-the-rearviewmirror look.

    The cop suggested that the next time we were expecting someone we should—maybe—let him know in advance.

    After dinner—we'd ordered enough for the deputy, too— Lauren took Grace away for a bath and twenty minutes later handed me a warm, pink, sweet-smelling little girl in fresh pajamas. Her flannel pj's were covered with puppies jumping over rainbows on their way to distant planets. As I cradled my sleepy daughter against my chest on the amble down the hall to her room, I watched Lauren retreat to the master bedroom. She was walking slowly, staying close to the wall—she didn't want to limp or lose her balance in front of Grace.

    We liked to think we fooled our daughter. We knew we didn't.

    Gracie and I laughed and cuddled. She helped me read the night's stories before I tucked her into bed. I consoled myself that we may have succeeded in insulating her from evil for one more day.

The day had been warm, and the evening was too. From the bedroom door I could see that Lauren was enjoying the light breeze on one of the two narrow chaises on the small deck outside our bedroom. Her shoulders were covered in a chenille throw I'd given her for Christmas the previous December. The throw was the color of the
crema
that forms on top of a well-crafted cup of espresso. That night, in the muted light on the deck, her black hair was the coffee.

    Before joining her outside I found the shoe box with her bong on the high shelf in the closet. I carried the bong to the kitchen and added water and a few fresh flutes of lemon peel to the reservoir. I splashed a little Zinfandel port—Lauren had recently discovered she had a taste for it—into a glass and carried everything back to the bedroom. I also retrieved her tiny stash of dried buds from a locked drawer in her dressing table, and grabbed a disposable lighter.

    I placed everything on a table between the two chaises before I handed her the port. She took a small sip. After a slow minute I lifted the bong and offered it to her.

    "No," she said. I thought she'd spoken sharply but allowed that it may have been hypersensitivity on my part. It had been the type of day that could have left me prone to that vulnerability. Two beats passed before she added, "Thank you. I know you're trying to help. But I think I've explained that I don't think it's something I should do anymore. It's not something I'm
going
to do anymore. Respect that, okay? Please."

    She had explained. But she hadn't disposed of the bong, or flushed her stash down the toilet. To me, that indicated ambivalence. I could have argued that point with her, but I wasn't that stupid. Or at least not quite that stupid.

    "Gracie's in dreamland," I said. "Playing with Teryl all day wiped her out. She's sound asleep. She'll never know." I touched her on the arm. "Even if she does figure it out we can find a way to explain it to her. It's obvious you're in pain. Nothing else seems to help as much as the dope does."

    Lauren shook her head, her eyes focused on the shallow moonlight above the Divide, not on me. She sighed with frustration before she continued. "I have it . . . under control right now. Do I look like I'm in pain?"

    Like "Does this dress make me look fat?" it was not a question that begged an answer in the affirmative. "You did earlier," I said, straddling the fence she seemed intent on erecting between us.

    "Maybe I was, but I'm managing okay right now. Nice night," she said.

    "Better than the day that preceded it," I said. I was trying to be sardonic, and I was also trying to goad us to confront the mastodon that had edged its way into our relationship that afternoon.

    She sipped some port and wetted her lips with her tongue before she said, "We're in difficult places. Professionally. Both of us. Until we know better what's what with all this, we probably shouldn't talk about it."

    
Professionally?
Did Lauren really think this was just a professional problem?

    Her words were relatively benign, her argument somewhat reasonable. But I felt the fissure between us quake into a chasm. My concern about her and me was much more personal than professional.

    I considered the possibility that I was catastrophizing and that the day had jaded my perspective. "We've always been able to find ways to talk about things without . . . being too specific," I said. "We can do that same dance. We can do it right now. We're good at it. I think it's important. Essential even."

    "This time is different," she replied with no hint of fresh contemplation. "This thing today, it involves both of us. Professionally, I mean. Your patient, my case. Usually it's just one of us that has to do the confidentiality two-step. Right now, it's both of us. That makes it trickier."

    "Your case? You won't be involved with what happened here today—not for something that took place right next door. And certainly not if it's even tangentially related to your husband. As—I admit—it appears to be. If it actually turns out there was a crime involved, somebody else in the office will handle this."

    I waited for her to say, "Of course." She didn't. That's when I knew that the case she was referring to wasn't just Kol. Kirsten had identified the blood on my shoe as the nexus. Apparently, she'd been right. I asked, "Lauren, does the man who died in the barn have something to do with the other case, the one with Sam?"

    I meant the grand jury case, of course, but I couldn't say it. Lauren wouldn't acknowledge the grand jury case. If I wanted to talk about the grand jury, I had to couch my words in code.

    "You know I can't talk about things that I can't . . . talk about," she said. She took a long draw from the port, leaving only an opaque puddle in the bottom of the glass. Her purple eyes were the color of the port stain. The color of the night sky.

    She reached over and took my hand. "I'm sorry about your patient. It has to be hard."

    Her words felt like a cold compress. The late-day graveland-honey timbre that the hour and her fatigue had allowed into her voice was something that I always associated with intimacy. I sensed some welcome lift beneath my wings.

    "It is hard," I acknowledged. "Thanks."

    Lauren shifted her weight, bent a leg, straightened it. Did it all again. It was an effort to interfere with spasticity in her calf or her quad or her hamstrings. I knew what she was doing with her leg was merely a gesture; it wouldn't help. She did many useless things to try to temper the whims of multiple sclerosis. Futile calisthenics was only one of them. Ironically, smoking dope from a lemon-scented bong on our deck facing the Front Range had been one of the few useful ones.

    When she spoke again her voice was lower. And less certain. "Were you kidding a minute ago? About what you said?" she asked.

    "What I said about what?"

    "About the man who died in the barn."

    "Jesus, no. I was hoping you'd tell me if he was somehow related to what you've been doing with Sam. I'm trying to figure out all the ways this is complicated. If it came across as a joke, I apologize."

    She glanced over at me, disbelief painted on her brow like a tattoo. "You could tell me how you knew the person in the barn if that person wasn't one of your patients, right?"

    "Yes."

    She swung her legs over the edge of the chaise. She put her left hand on my knee. "Okay then. Will you tell me how you knew that person?"

    Lauren was asking me to tell her a story by refusing to tell her a story. Where the grand jury was concerned I had asked her to do the same. I played along. I said, "I'm sorry, I can't . . . tell you."

    With that denial I had just informed my wife that Kol was my patient. I considered it no big deal; within moments of getting back home after dropping Grace off at Teryl's house, Lauren had figured out that the dead guy in the barn was my patient. I had done nothing since to dissuade her. Given that she had already guessed, I was wondering why she wanted me to make the indirect admission aloud. I couldn't figure it out. I said, "I wish I could tell you more."

    She stood suddenly, leaving her glass on the table. Then she turned her back to me, cocked out one hip, and rested her elbows on the deck railing. "I don't know what's going on, Alan, but I don't like it. I don't know why you're being this way with me. But with everything that's happened—that's happening—it makes me uneasy about . . . whatever else you might not be telling me."

    I stood, too. I was suspecting that she'd begun alluding to Michael McClelland's escape from custody and the note he'd left on our door, but I wasn't sure.
And what way was I being
with her?
I didn't know the answer to that. I knew I felt an immediate need to close the gap between us, so I stepped closer and put my arms around her from behind.

    She didn't return my embrace. She kept her arms by her sides, her elbows bent, her hands up near her neck. All in all, it was a fine posture for a woman concerned she was about to be garroted.

    "They'll catch him," I said. I was fishing and I knew it.

    She pulled away and looked back over her shoulder. "You think I'm worried about Michael right now, don't you? The note? That that's what I'm talking about?" Her eyes tightened into a squint. "You . . . really don't know about this . . . person today?"

    Her face told me that I wasn't the only one who was baffled. I shook my head. I was feeling as off-balance and uninformed as I'd ever felt in my life. "No, I guess maybe I don't," I said. I didn't even know what I didn't know. I was pretty confident I wasn't going to enjoy discovering it, whatever it was.

    "The person hanging in the barn today? The one you've been implying was your patient?"

    She seemed to want a response. I said, "He was my patient."

    "That wasn't a man, sweets. It was a woman."

    "No, it wasn't," I said, blurting the words, yet knowing in my marrow that my protest was futile.
A woman? Kol?

    In a soft I'm-so-sorry-but-there-is-no–Santa Claus voice, Lauren said, "Breasts, vagina. All the usual signs. She was all woman, Alan."

I STARED past Lauren toward the mountains, certain that she could spot the confusion persisting in my eyes. Any cushion was gone from her tone when she added, "If you don't believe me, go ahead and ask Scott."

    Scott Truscott was the assistant medical examiner. An old boss of mine. A competent, straight-shooting guy. He was among the second wave of responders to the scene. Most likely he would have been the first to open or remove any of Kol's clothing. Scott didn't miss much. He certainly wouldn't have made an error on Kol's sex.

    Then I thought,
What difference does it make? Other than
making me look more incompetent, what difference does it
make?
So Kol had disguised his, or her, gender with me. It didn't change anything. Boy or girl, dead was dead.

    I stammered, "His name was—" I stopped myself. Technically, I couldn't reveal my patient's name to Lauren.

    Lauren felt no such constraint. She said, "
Her
name was Nicole Cruz, sweetie. She may not have been the most feminine thing on the planet, but she was a girl."

    My wife was waiting for me to react. I tried to keep my face impassive, my eyes in therapeutic neutral.

    Lauren said, "You knew your patient's name, didn't you?"

    I didn't reply at first. Hinting at what I knew would inevitably open the door to what I didn't know. That path didn't seem likely to ameliorate my disadvantage. "You would think so," I said, finally.

What happened next left me reeling.

    Lauren emptied the water from the bong over the deck railing. I followed her inside as she returned the bag of dope to her dressing table. She dug into her purse—the one she carried most days to work—and pulled out a small pump-bottle similar to the one we used for temporary anesthesia when Grace had a sore throat.

    She held it up for me to read the label. I didn't recognize the bottle. "Sativex," it read.

    "I've been using this," she said. "For the pain in my legs. It works."

    This wasn't an oh-by-the-way moment. I recognized that she was making an admission of some kind—moving something with some serious specific gravity from the category of "secret" back to the category of "private." I didn't know if it was an admission of trust on her part, an acknowledgment of a prior mistrust, or—worst of all—a declaration that the issue of trust between us no longer mattered.