Assuming my family was safely out of town, my biggest remaining personal jeopardy had to be something that would make me appear criminally liable for Kol's death, or something that would tie me to the missing grand jury witness. For Michael McClelland to do any more damage than he'd done, he would have to reveal some evidence that aggravated one or both of those vulnerabilities.
I hoped there were no witnesses to my recklessness with Lauren's Glock.
As I cleaned up my daughter's room and made a list of all the things I needed to replace, I wondered what time bomb McClelland or his minions might have planted in my house during the break-in that would stain me with the taint of the first two problems, and when it was scheduled to explode.
Just before dusk Sam called from a pay phone. The man had a huge stash of quarters. No greeting. His voice was icy, with just a hint of the warmth of irony at the edges. "Justine Winter Brown—aka Currie the nutritionist—has one solitary prior. Assault with a deadly weapon. The victim? Her boyfriend. The weapon? A ball-peen hammer. Gives you the shivers, don't it? Her defense? PTSD from chronic domestic abuse. Jury bought her story, or her lawyer's story; I don't actually know whose story it was. But that's why she was in Pueblo. Not guilty by reason of insanity. She was there getting . . . well. According to her jacket, she was planning to live somewhere near Ft. Morgan after her discharge. Want to hear the psychobabble?"
"Of course," I said. "It's the best part." I was thinking about all the psychological excuses I'd devised for Michael McClelland after his crime spree.
"Beyond post-traumatic stress disorder, the buzzwords are 'hostile-dependent,' 'passive aggressive,' and 'cunning.'"
"Not too imaginative. Anything there that doesn't fit?"
"I'm not done. Her boyfriend? No, not me—the one she hit with a hammer while he was sleeping—was a retired cop from Cheyenne. She hit him in the eye, by the way. One blow. He was never charged with abusing her. Insufficient evidence. She saw it otherwise, of course. Apparently now she has . . . issues with cops. Prior to busting out his eyeball with the hammer, she'd had a couple of documented ER visits with suspicious bruising, another with a broken bone in her wrist. She had some statements from girlfriends about what an asshole he was. She thinks he got off because he was wrapped in a blue blanket."
I said, "She hooked up with another abuser in Pueblo."
Sam wasn't interested. "Last September twenty-eighth her boyfriend—eye patch and all—came home with a first date to his house in Cheyenne. His date was a juvenile court judge. They walked into his living room to find the wall area above his fireplace filled with child porn. Elegantly framed child porn. The juvy judge ran for the Tetons. Cops showed up within the hour along with a warrant to search his house and his computer. Turned out he was dirty up to his . . . well, eyeball.
"Three o'clock the next morning he died in a head-on with an eighteen-wheeler on I-80 just west of Laramie. Manner of death was suicide. Report says he'd been drinking."
"I assume J. Winter didn't leave any fingerprints in Wyoming. Literally or figuratively."
"None there's any record of."
"These people are good."
"They are."
"Why is she helping McClelland?"
"I figure they're helping each other," Sam said. "He helped her set her boyfriend up. She's helping him set us up."
"How would McClelland have done it? Set up her old boyfriend from Pueblo?"
"Cons run computer scams from inside all the time. Walls just aren't walls anymore. They get a proxy outside to do the Internet shit they can't get away with inside. The guy has had a lot of free time to get skilled on the Internet. Plan shit."
"He could have been setting us up for years."
"Everybody needs a hobby."
A question that I suspected might prove irrelevant came to mind. "Did anyone ever determine whether the porn was the boyfriend's and she just displayed it in his house? Or did she plant it?"
Sam paused a moment to frame his answer. "Officially she's not tied to this, Alan. She was interviewed during the investigation. That's all. There's a contact note in her jacket, that's the only way I found out about it. No witnesses put her on the scene. No forensics place her in his house. What are you asking?"
I was thinking about the photos taken in Sam's bedroom, and about TSA's suspicious focus on Lauren's bottle of Sativex at the airport. "I'm wondering whether she sets people up—like she did with you and those photos, and with Lauren and her drug, like she was trying to do with us earlier on the trail—or whether she sometimes just discovers people have existing vulnerabilities and exploits them? Reveals their secrets?"
"Is that a difference that makes a difference?" he asked.
It does to me.
An ancient concept from the psychology of perception that I'd learned, and forgotten, from graduate school came buzzing into my skull like a mosquito taking advantage of a rip in a screen door. The JND—the just-noticeable-difference. If humans can't perceive the difference between one measurement and another does the difference really matter, psychologically speaking? Only when delta crosses the threshold of human perception—the JND—does the difference prove meaningful from the perspective of human behavior. Of psychology.
"Tell me this," I said. "If the kiddie porn didn't belong to the ex-cop in Cheyenne, why did he kill himself?"
"So maybe it was his," Sam said. "Point?"
"It makes a difference, Sam."
A just-noticeable-difference.
"This woman is a different adversary if she has two weapons. With Lauren and with you she created new vulnerabilities. With her old boyfriend and the porn, we don't know. He could have had an existing vulnerability and she and McClelland exploited it. Or she could have created it from whole cloth."
Sam said, "You're giving me a headache. I just don't see how it makes any difference."
That's because your secret has already been revealed,
I thought.
Mine hasn't.
I let it go, and filled him in on the situation with Lauren. Told him I'd begun sorting the damage in Grace's room, making an inventory of essentials and favorite things I'd need to replace.
"Find any kiddie porn in there?" he asked.
"Not funny."
"You're right. It's not. But my point is—"
"I get your point. I don't think you're getting mine. From what I could see in those two grainy photographs you showed me, she was enticing you—or trying to entice you—into having sex with her, Sam. In my mind that makes it different than if you were seducing her."
He sighed. "Sorry," he said. "I don't see it. I did what I did. I"—he emphasized the pronoun—"allowed her into my bedroom. I"—he did it again—"didn't walk out when she took off her shirt. That was all me, all my doing. So she enticed me. It takes more willpower not to eat chocolate cake when you're standing inside a bakery. Don't care. Responsibility is responsibility."
I knew it wasn't that simple. Not for me.
I spent the evening trying to determine my personal vulnerability to J. Winter Brown. My efforts took two distinct directions. The first was concrete: I reexamined the house with as fine a comb as I could muster, searching for anything she might have left behind during her intrusion the day before.
That search came up empty. I wasn't reassured; I assumed that my filter had been too coarse.
The second search was virtual. Armed with my aging Pentium and my credit card—and with more clues than Michael McClelland or J. Winter could have had when they started a similar search—I began to do the kind of reexamination of my own life's most tragic day using the same strategies that I'd used to uncover the truth about Tharon Thibodeaux's fateful Christmas party in the French Quarter.
After an hour on the Internet I had found a couple of old newspaper articles that referenced the events that had taken place in my family's home in Thousand Oaks, California, when I was thirteen, but my name wasn't in either article. My parents were identified. I was not. At no point was there a suggestion that what happened had been anything more than a domestic disturbance gone very badly.
I had known where to look, though. I knew about Thousand Oaks. I knew the year, the month, and the day. I knew the key words that would allow the Web's search engines to filter through the googols of bytes of archived data to zero in on that hour on that day in that place.
After I succeeded in finding the articles using what I knew, I tried to find them pretending that I didn't know where to look. Without the benefit of my inside knowledge I couldn't get there. I couldn't get back to Thousand Oaks. I couldn't get back to that kitchen.
I couldn't get back to that indelible day.
If I couldn't get there I tried to convince myself that neither Michael McClelland nor J. Winter Brown could get there. The only reasonable conclusion: my secret was safe.
It didn't feel safe.
Lauren called just before eight. She and Grace were in a "nice enough" hotel with a pool in Grand Junction, on the other side of the state. "It's close to the airport," she explained. "We can get out quickly." We talked about her meeting with the attorney in Denver, whether charges were likely—the short answer was "yes"—and we talked about Grace. I let her know that Michael McClelland was being assessed at the state penitentiary, but she'd already heard that news through her office.
The last time the phone rang that evening was the most surprising. It was Sam again. Pay phone again. He started the conversation by saying, "Don't interrupt me. I don't want to be telling you this. You understand?"
"Yes," I said. Sam sounded exhausted. Totally spent.
"This has to do with whether Currie was in the uncoveringsecrets business, or the creating-secrets business."
"Okay." I hoped Sam didn't consider my word an interruption.
"Amanda Ross's parents live out in Gunbarrel. She's been recuperating there since she was discharged from the rehab hospital."
Sam was telling me that the rookie cop who'd been clipped and hurt during the hit-and-run the grand jury was investigat ing was likely a Boulder native, and that she was living in town with her parents. He was also implying that her injuries continued to interfere with her ability to live independently. I resisted my temptation to ask a clarifying question or two.
"I visited her tonight." He hesitated. "That part is . . . not new. My visiting." He paused again. He was, I thought, allowing some time for what he'd just admitted to sink in, or allowing himself some time to recover from the disclosure. Maybe both. "I showed her the photo of J. Winter Brown that you sent me. Ready to be surprised?" His monotone made a sudden turn down Sardonic Lane. "Turns out Amanda knows her. Knows her . . . well."
No.
I hadn't been prepared for how sharp the turn was going to be.
The monotone came back. "Amanda said that Justine— that's what she calls her—goes to the same church Amanda's parents do. She was part of a group of people who offered to help out the family after the accident."
Oh shit. Oh shit.
"Amanda says she's been an angel. They've become friends."
I'm so sorry, Sam.
The connection was close to silent for a long interlude. His breathing, my breathing, digital clicks and pops. No words. Ten seconds or ten times ten seconds passed. I lost track. Finally he said, "You know what they call it? People Amanda's age? What I was before she got hurt?"
I thought I remembered from news reports that Amanda's age when she was injured was twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven. I also thought I knew the answer to Sam's question. I was hoping I was wrong.
I said, "No, I don't."
"'Fuck buddy,'" he said. "I was Amanda's fuck buddy."
I hadn't been wrong.
Jesus.
"Now I'm her fucked buddy. Your question is answered," Sam said. Then he hung up.
FIFTY
I AWAKENED the next morning to discover that someone had called a time-out.
The frantic events and the stunning sequence of disclosures had all stopped.
I did my part to contribute to the lull. I canceled my few remaining patients for the week and holed up at the house with the dogs. I hadn't shopped for a while and quickly ran out of fresh food. My appetite was almost nonexistent so I had no trouble sustaining myself out of the freezer and the cupboard.
I made a halfhearted vow not to drink the alcohol that remained in the house. All that was left to tempt me was half a bottle of Dewar's, a dusty, almost-full fifth of Beefeater, some old Amontillado that we used for cooking, Lauren's Zin port, and a few nice wines that we were saving for a special day.
I made only one trip away from home and didn't include a stop at a liquor store. I drove to Westminster—the risk of running into someone I knew in Boulder or at Flatiron Crossing seemed too great—to replace as many of the desecrated books and toys from Grace's room as I could. I bought new bedding and pillows and curtains and drove home with a mattress sticking out from the back of the wagon.
I got busy reconstructing Grace's room. Nigel interrupted me a couple of times with some specific timeline questions about Kol's treatment. I e-mailed him the details he wanted.
Neither Kirsten nor Cozy tried to contact me. Diane did
check in. Once I answered the phone when I saw her name on caller ID, the other times I didn't. She left a message promising never to play Enya in the waiting room if I came back to work.
I didn't read the papers, didn't watch the news.