Dry Ice (44 page)

    "That's not what I meant," she said. "Do you want to talk?" She took her eyes from the road momentarily and glanced at me.

    Eliminating what had just happened at New Max—I wasn't prepared to discuss that—I began doing an inventory of the possible topics for our talk. I quickly narrowed the list to two. One, my toxic history. Two, Kirsten once loving me. Did I want to talk? Hardly.

    My phone vibrated in my pocket. Saved by the bell.

    "Just a second," I said to Kirsten. The screen told me the call was from Lauren's mobile. Involuntarily, I tensed. I flipped open the phone and said, "Hello."

    "Elliot just called," Lauren said. Her tone was light, playful. "He wants me to talk some sense into you."

    "Based on the look in his eyes the last time I saw him I would wager that he would prefer you beat some sense into me," I said.

    Lauren laughed. "That too. Michael admitted it was all an act?"

    "Basically." I paused. I didn't want Lauren to have to do Elliot's bidding. Putting her in the middle wouldn't help me. It certainly wouldn't help her. "I've told Elliot all I'm going to tell him, Lauren."

    "He said Michael attacked you. Are you okay?"

    "Fine," I said. In our family "fine" covered a lot of ground.

    "His jaw is broken," Lauren said.

    
Really? Cool.
"Let's not . . . go there."

    "Okay—that's not why I'm calling. Gracie and I are heading home. We're at the airport; we'll board in a few minutes. You and I have some things to talk about."

    I did another inventory. Again, I quickly narrowed the topics down to two. One, my toxic history. Two, the state of our marriage.

This is going to be a fun night
.

    "Yes, we do," I agreed. McClelland's final threat to go after Grace reverberated in my head. "It may not be safe yet—you know that?" I was painfully aware that J. Winter B. remained unaccounted for.

    "I know," she said. She told me that a deputy would pick them up for the ride from DIA to Boulder. "The sheriff promised me a few more days of protection. We can decide . . . together what happens after that."

    My wife wasn't asking for me to place my imprimatur on her plans. Continued protest would have been futile. We would have the prudent-parent talk face-to-face.

    "That was Lauren," I said to Kirsten after I closed the phone.

    Before Kirsten could comment her cell started singing in her satchel. Some classical riff. I thought Brahms. I reached over and took the wheel so she could track down the phone.

    She found it, eyed the screen, and said, "My boss."

    Cozy. I released the wheel. "Elliot must be calling everyone we know," I said.

    Kirsten did more listening than talking during the call. I couldn't discern much from her end of the conversation. She closed the phone after three or four minutes.

    "Cozy's not happy," she said. "With you."

    "It's a big club," I replied without any compassion for his predicament. I figured his dismay was an act—he couldn't admit it, but I thought he approved of what I did.

    "Or me," Kirsten added.

    "I'll explain to him that I set you up."

    "The police located the missing grand jury witness late this morning," Kirsten said, changing directions.

    "Dead?" McClelland's evasiveness had convinced me that the witness was dead.

    "Buried below a grave out in that cemetery over by the Diagonal."

    I recalled the article I'd read in the
News
. "'Below'? Is that what you said?"

    "Sam had his partner—Lucy?—interview Nicole's coworkers at the cemetery. Nicole's supervisor remembered that shortly before she died she worked late one evening by herself doing final preparations on a grave for a morning interment. He knew exactly which grave it was. The 'alone' part concerned Lucy. She got an order to exhume, but the only corpse in the casket was the one that was supposed to be there. They were getting ready to reinter when Sam phoned Lucy and suggested they dig down a little.

    "The witness's body was below the casket buried a few inches deeper in the dirt than the normal grave. They almost missed it."

    
An effective place to hide a dead body. How did Sam know
to look there?

    "Cause?" I asked. Of death, I meant. Kirsten knew that.

    "There's serious decomposition, but the coroner's assistant told Sam that there were some deep lacerations and that the woman's hyoid was crushed. Post is tomorrow."

    "Asphyxiation," I said. Specifically strangulation. The missing witness had been murdered. "Sam put all this together?"

    "That's what Cozy said."

    "I thought he was off the case."

    "Not so much, apparently," Kirsten said. "There's more. You want to hear it?"

    "Please."

    "They finally found where your patient—Nicole—had been living. She was renting a trailer east of town just off Valmont. Her landlord thought she was a flight attendant, so he didn't give her absence a second thought. The sheriff executed a warrant. The bathroom in the trailer lit up with Luminol and violet light. It had been cleaned but there had been a lot of blood. Sam's take is that the grand jury witness was killed in the bathtub. Cut first, then strangled."

    
Ah.
She probably wouldn't die when she was supposed to. "Kol's nosebleed in my office? That's where the blood was from?"

    "Cozy said they're checking to see if it matches the blood from the woman's body they exhumed at the cemetery. And from your shoe. He's hoping it does."

    
Me too.

The adrenaline rush from the fight with McClelland had worn off and the anesthetic insulation of shock had disappeared by the time we entered Colorado Springs on Highway 115. Kirsten prepared to pull onto I-25 for the shot north to Denver. I said, "Please keep going straight. I think I remember a hospital not too far up ahead. I'm pretty sure my hand is broken."

   "What?"

   It wasn't a difficult diagnosis. I couldn't move either my pinky or the ring finger of my right hand without an exquisite agony that burned like a molten hammer striking my bones.

   "You don't want to know. But I do need to see a doctor. I'm going to lie to him or her—I would be grateful if you don't insist on witnessing that."

We left the emergency room at Penrose Hospital about two hours later. I found it fitting and ironic that the cast on my hand looked like a boxing glove.

   I had a dozen Vicodin in my pocket. I left them there. The throbbing seemed important.

   About an hour outside of Boulder Kirsten asked, "Would you like to talk now?"

   "Yes," I said, "I would. But I need to tell Lauren before I tell anyone else."

   "Is it as bad as you make it seem?"

   "I don't know anymore," I said. "It feels monumental, but I'm not sure."

    "Robert's murder felt like the end of the world, Alan. It wasn't." She paused. "It was close, but it wasn't. But remember . . . I had some help."

    Robert was Kirsten's dead husband.

    "Thank you," I said.

IT TOOK a long time to get Grace settled that night. By the time we were all back home I'd done all I could to obscure the profanity of what had happened in my daughter's bedroom, but I could tell that Grace sensed that her space had been violated and that she had suffered some kind of intimate assault.

    I ached for her as she tried to process the muted obscenity of it all.

    I asked Lauren not to check her e-mail until we had a chance to talk. Why? I suspected that Michael's threat about revealing my secret would take place that way. I wanted the chance to tell her myself first.

Lauren took a long bath after Grace was asleep. I found her later wrapped in her heaviest robe on the chaise on the bedroom deck. The night was crystalline, but not warm. She was toking on her bong, the musty smoke furling out above the high prairie. Her iPod was playing in its speaker dock in the bedroom. The playlist was one I'd remembered from just before the device had been mothballed. She was listening to a set of Dusty Springfield. The set started and stopped with Lauren's favorite Dusty song, "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me."

    I had a Vicodin buzz. With the help of the narcotics the percussion in my broken hand was subdued and almost equivalent to the pain in the places in my left arm that had absorbed the thrust of the chair McClelland had thrown at me. Either ache in isolation would have interfered with my concentration—I appreciated the balance of the stereo agony.

    I had no regrets about sucker punching McClelland. None. I assumed his jaw hurt more than my hand did. I wondered how long he would survive at New Max. If the over/under was six weeks, I would have bet the mortgage money on the under.

    Wishful thinking.

I settled onto the other chaise.

    Lauren and I had covered the easy ground already. We'd done that during the remaining daylight hours.

    Her health? Music no longer hurt, but her legs did. Her legal and work situation? Not good. The U.S. Attorney thought he had a case against her. The grand jury investigation that had been so important to Lauren had died along with its star witness. I didn't know how to let her know that the witness had been a fraud. I knew I'd find a way. Other deputies in Lauren's office were assigned to prosecute the witness's murder.

    My legal and work situation? Not good. My practice was in tatters. Cozy and Kirsten were doing their best to clean up after me legally. Would they be successful? The jury was out. Even if the criminal problems went away, my civil liability was malignant.

    Sam's situation? A mess. He and I had talked briefly. He was on paid leave from the police department awaiting word what his discipline would be for failing to alert the DA about his romantic relationship with Amanda Ross. The next time Simon was scheduled to stay with his mother, Sam was planning to fly to California to end things with Carmen.

    I made sure he understood the continuing threat to our families from McClelland and Currie. Sam volunteered to keep an eye on my family during his leave of absence. I accepted. I liked that he had my back. I hoped it was enough.

    The whereabouts of J. Winter B.? Unknown. The apartment near Euclid and 30th Street where Sam thought she was living after separating from her husband had been vacated. The authorities would be of no help; no peace officer in any jurisdiction had tied her to a single crime associated with Michael McClelland.

    J. Winter B. remained worrisome to me, and to Sam, to say the least. Michael's final threat hadn't faded from my memory at all. I knew the deputy on the lane wasn't going to be sufficient.

    My visit to Pueblo? My tête-à-tête with Michael? I wouldn't tell Lauren any more than that I'd broken my hand while I was there. The circumstances? She was better off not knowing. She accepted that reality like a pro. She said that she was hoping I'd broken my hand on Michael's face. I didn't pop that balloon. If I felt compelled to admit what I did to Michael's face, I would probably end up choosing Kirsten so that I could enjoy the legal shelter of her advocacy. She was prohibited from telling anyone. Lauren wasn't.

    Lauren had asked me if I knew what had happened to the three rounds that were missing from her Glock. I told her I knew. She wondered aloud if she should be concerned.

    I said I didn't think so. I pondered what else I might have forgotten to do to cover my tracks.

    Elliot had informed Lauren that Michael McClelland was on suicide watch in the infirmary at New Max and that he was acting more paranoid than ever. I knew that the heightened scrutiny would diminish over time. That was the nature of institutions. If McClelland wanted to kill himself he would find a way. If he did, I suspected he would goad someone else to do it for him.

    I expected to have frequent moments when I fantasized about being that man.

    I took a deeper breath than usual, counted to three, and said, "I've been keeping something big from you."

    She looked at me. Slowly, her violet eyes narrowed in resignation. Not alarm. They were asking, "Another woman?"

    I shook my head. "It goes back to before we met."

    "Your family?" she said.

    
She knew.
"Do you know?"

    She shook her head while she shrugged her shoulders. "I never really understood your . . . thing with your mother. You know that. The distance, especially. You've always given me the impression the topic was . . . unwelcome. Except for T., I'm not that close to my family either. Neither of us has ever questioned . . . the other one's old garbage. If I left you alone, I hoped you would leave me alone. You did." She flicked the lighter, toked from the bong, and while trying to trap the smoke in her lungs admitted, "Maybe I didn't really want to know."

    
Too late for that,
I thought as the sweet smoke began to drift my way.

    "Can I go first?" she asked.

    "What do you mean?" I said. My naïveté was almost innocent. Almost. The reality had much more to do with gullibility than with innocence.

    "I have something to tell you too," she said. "A secret, I guess."

    The careful choreography I'd been sketching in my head didn't include a solo for Lauren. Only my solitary lament followed by an unrehearsed pas de deux. The last duet would be a tragedy, I feared. "You do?" I said.
Another man?
I must have missed that.