by Thomas Zigal
Kurt swallowed dryly. “Close enough,” he said. “Do you know who wrote the letters, Doctor?”
“Yes, I do,” Westbrook said, working a lens with his handkerchief. “Nicole wrote them herself.”
The hairs stood up on the back of Kurt’s neck.
“She played that game for years. I have to admit I fell for it myself the first time.”
Westbrook rose and went to his desk to retrieve a set of keys, then unlocked a file cabinet and rolled out a drawer. After a few
moments of thumbing through the dividers he found the folder he was looking for and held it up as evidence. “I’ve collected some of her more creative missives,” he said, dropping the folder onto his desk blotter. “She pretended they were from old lovers. Usually anonymous, but once or twice she used Rocky’s name to get my attention.” The psychiatrist gazed across the room at Kurt and smiled sadly. “I agree with you that her writing skills were quite convincing.”
Kurt was having difficulty finding his voice. “May I see them?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not, Sheriff. Client confidentiality. Even a dead woman has a right to privacy.”
“Why did she write them?”
“She was a very disturbed woman. There are no simple explanations,” Westbrook said. “She resorted to this game when she was desperate and in fear of losing someone. And frankly, she enjoyed the melodrama. The letters gave her a rush.”
He studied Kurt with bemused pity. “Nicole was a very alluring woman,” he said, smiling sympathetically. “Feel flattered that she chose you to play the game.”
It wasn’t flattery Kurt felt, but anger and humiliation. Nicole had wrapped him around her finger. She had used the break-in to seduce the naive cop who had symbolically rescued her. He imagined it had happened the same way twenty years ago with her psychiatrist, the stable authority figure assigned to rescue her from a prosecutor bent on sending her to prison for murder. Kurt knew that if they trusted each other, he and Westbrook, this would be the moment when they faced their own complicity—how the holding of her hand and a few consoling words had quickly led to the sweet scent of jas-mine and sandalwood.
But what about the phone message? If Nicole had written the letters, why had she called with such terror in her voice? It’s him—he’s alive! It couldn’t have been an act. Unless she was…what? Completely deranged. As truly psychotic as Westbrook had diagnosed her.
Kurt reached into his pants pocket and found Rocky’s ring. “Have you ever seen this before?” He crossed the room and dropped the ring into Westbrook’s hand.
The psychiatrist examined the I Ching symbols. “No, not that I recall,” he said. “Should I have?”
“You never saw it in Nicole’s possession?”
He studied the ring more closely, measuring its weight in his palm. “It’s a man’s ring, isn’t it?”
Kurt nodded.
Westbrook shrugged and returned the heavy gold band. “She had so many things like this,” he said. “There were dozens of baubles that meant something special to her. I would venture to say she collected jewelry like she collected companions. Something new and dear every week.”
Kurt felt the psychiatrist’s eyes follow him as he turned toward the deck doors and the morning sunshine warming the glass. Gazing outside, he could see the old T-bar framework and the deep draw through the mountains and the narrow seam that had been his escape from that snowslide in 1964. Today it looked like a thin white tributary branching off course at forty-five degrees, but back when they were racing for their lives the opening seemed as wide as a canyon. Bert had spotted the fissure ahead and waved them over, and they had shredded through the cutoff while the avalanche thundered past them down the main chute toward the valley floor. If the side trail hadn’t been there that day, the Mullers and Jake Pfeil would now be distant memories in the local lore like those daring Dartmouth boys whose bodies hadn’t surfaced until the summer thaw.
“The way it happened, it could’ve been an accident,” Kurt said, forcing himself back to the present. He turned to stare at Westbrook. “Something frightened her and she bolted for the doors.” A voice from her past on the telephone? “She didn’t seem to be fully aware of where her actions would lead her.”
“Yes,” Westbrook said thoughtfully, nodding, agreeing with Kurt’s observation. “It sounds like the behavior of a very disoriented person.”
“I discovered the Risperidone in her drawer. Had you cautioned her not to drink alcohol while she was taking it?”
Westbrook appeared wounded by the question. “Nicole was well informed about her medication,” he said defensively. “She knew the rules.”
Kurt wanted to make his point. “But as you know, Dr. Westbrook, she’d had problems with substance abuse and alcohol in the past. She dearly loved her Scotch. Did you consider the possibility that she would drink while she was on Risperidone, and that the results might be dangerous to her?”
“She gave me her word she wouldn’t drink,” the psychiatrist said, disappointment smothering his words. “I can’t count how many times I tried to persuade her to enter a rehab program to get help for her addictive behavior.”
“I’ve done a little research on Risperidone. Mixed with alcohol, it can cause hallucinations.”
Westbrook held up his hand, a gesture calling for patience and sound judgment. “Let’s wait for the autopsy report—shall we?—before we rush to any conclusions about her physiological condition.”
There was a knock at the door. Someone in the corridor spoke Westbrook’s name. “Yes?” he said with a faint note of irritation.
The door cracked open and Tanya’s smiling face appeared. “The break is over, Jay,” she said. “Will you be joining us, or should I tell them you’re delayed?”
He took a deep breath to calm himself and gazed across the room at Kurt. “Yes, darling, tell them I’ll be right along,” he said. The soft intimacy in his voice made Kurt wonder if Westbrook and Tanya were lovers. “I believe the sheriff and I have reached the end of our discussion.”
He searched his desk drawer for a pencil, a notepad. “Thank you for driving out to speak with me personally,” he said, jotting something on the yellow pad. “Nicole’s death is a loss we all must bear. Those of us who loved her will always feel guilty that we didn’t do more to help.”
Kurt understood the guilt. He could still hear Nicole’s desperate voice on the message recorder: Are you there, darling? Please pick up, I need you!
He took one last look around the pinewood office. Every inch of space was carefully arranged to provide a warm, safe haven for the troubled souls seeking Westbrook’s guidance. “You’ve got a nice place here, Doctor,” he said. “Will you be able to hang on to it now that Nicole is dead?”
The psychiatrist’s head snapped up from whatever he was writing and he straightened his shoulders. The question seemed to annoy him. “Under the circumstances I haven’t given it much thought,” he said.
“I hope you get along with her brothers.”
Westbrook bristled. “I do,” he said, visibly offended. “We’ve been family for quite a long time.”
Kurt nodded. Meg’s brother still called him every now and then from California. “Right,” he added with a smile. “Why let a bad marriage ruin a good relationship?”
He slid open the glass door, the way he’d come in. The outside air was cool and sweet with woodsmoke. Wind rustled the spruce trees at the foot of the mountain.
“One final question, Doctor,” he said, pausing at the doorway. “In those letters you’ve collected, did Nicole ever mention the name Pariah?”
Westbrook regarded Kurt with professional curiosity. “Yes, I’m familiar with Pariah,” he said, not entirely surprised that Kurt knew the name.
“Who is she? Or should I say, who was she?”
The psychiatrist studied him in silence, his face suddenly pale and drawn. “Pariah was the bad girl. The one Rocky hated. The femme fatale the whole world blamed for killing
a legend,” he said. “Sheriff Muller, whenever Nicole had sunk to the depths of her depression and was feeling persecuted, Pariah was the secret name she called herself.”
Chapter nine
Kurt drove back down the ranch road to the creek and got out of his Jeep to throw rocks in the stream. As a boy he had learned to calm down by walking along Hunter Creek in total solitude and hurling rocks at whatever floated by. His own personal therapy. The hourly rate was considerably cheaper than Westbrook’s.
He brushed the snow off a chunk of sandstone and hummed it at a frozen tree root embedded in thin ice, remembering what Muffin had once observed about the women he had become involved with: “It’s none of my business, Kurt, but these past few years since your divorce you’ve covered some pretty rough ground in your private life. I imagine it’s enough to make you wonder about yourself.”
They were fly-fishing together not long after Kurt had tried to save his boyhood sweetheart from dying violently in a Las Vegas parking garage.
“It’s the life,” Muffin had said, standing thigh-deep in the Fryingpan River several yards downstream from him. “Let me give you some cheap advice you don’t want to hear. Stay away from the women you come across on the job. They’re halfway gone by the time you meet them. Busted luck, heavy baggage, some kind of Oprah tragedy making every one of them miserable. You need to find yourself a nice stable lady who loves dogs and children and putters around in her garden. Somebody who isn’t beaten up by her past.”
Kurt picked up another rock and watched a harem of elk emerge from the dense stand of willow trees on the opposite bank, a dozen cows with their calves meandering upstream. It was the rutting season and the old bull he had seen earlier was trailing close behind, 700 pounds of meat and 40 pounds of antler, sniffing Kurt’s scent in the wind and barking to warn the others of danger.
The cell phone chirped in the Jeep, disrupting the serenity of the moment. He chucked the rock into the stream and jogged back to respond to the call.
“Hey, Kurt, got your message,” Muffin said. “I filed the request for Miz Bauer’s phone log. We could have it by the end of the day.”
Within these mountains where the elk roamed unharmed, the line connection was weak and her voice wavered in and out.
“Lean on them. I want to know if someone called her around four a.m., just before she jumped.”
“What makes you think that?”
He wasn’t ready to tell her about Nicole’s message. Not yet. Without corroborating evidence, Muffin would dismiss the call as the rantings of a madwoman. “The phone was off the hook,” he said. “I’ve got a gut feeling.”
“Okay, whatever. I’m on it.”
“What did you find out about the Menendez twins?”
“The chauffeur, Kyle Martin, has two priors,” she said. “Destruction of property in Pitkin—that fence he sawed down—and criminal trespass last year in Utah. He and two accomplices tried to free fifteen hundred minks at a fur farm near Provo. They were apprehended by the owners and turned over to the local sheriff.”
Mink. Elk. “Another animal rights freak,” Kurt said.
“Which explains how he and Miz Bauer found each other.”
Rumors had persisted for years that Nicole Bauer had secretly financed the 1990 anti-fur initiative, a proposal to ban the wearing of dead animals on your person in Aspen. The initiative ultimately failed at the ballot box, but the volatile debate had left its mark on the town’s conscience. Few women wore furs in public anymore, even to the ritzy ski-season galas. And when they did, they could be overheard explaining, It’s an old family heirloom, darling, left to me by my grandmother. I just couldn’t throw it out.
“It so happens she was the one who paid Kyle’s fine for the fence damage and bailed him out of the county tank,” Muffin said.
Kurt gazed upstream. The elk had found their way to an aspen grove, where they were busy stripping the bark off the slender trees. “Any idea what kind of relationship they had?” he asked, trying to conceal the resentment behind his question.
“He says she was like a big sister to him. Poor kid lost it when he told us how he looked over the railing and saw a white form on the rocks below.”
Kurt closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see Nicole’s body the way they’d found her. “What about the other one—Lyle?”
“Lyle Gunderson. He grew up here. No sheet. Seems pretty clean,” she said. “You know his parents, don’t you? Gus and Marjie, local art crowd. They sent Lyle to Reed College a couple of years ago, but he flunked out or something and came on back home.”
Kurt had crossed paths with the Gundersons over the years. Gus taught ceramics at the Anderson Ranch Art School and Marjie had conducted seminars in New Age healing at Star Meadow before the center closed down. She was a friend of Kurt’s ex-wife, Meg.
“Did you bag those ashes in the fireplace?” he asked.
“Yeah, we brought it all down to the department for a closer look. Murphy is sifting through it right now. It’s a mess, Kurt. He hasn’t found anything you didn’t.”
If they were able to recover a few pages, he would show them to Westbrook and verify if the language and typeface matched Nicole’s earlier compositions.
“Burned letters are the least of our worries,” Muffin said. “The wolves are knocking on our door.”
“The press?”
“Worse. The Bauer family.”
He knew this was coming.
“Her two brothers will be in soon, Learjet from Denver. They’re bringing their own medical examiner. They insist that he be allowed to observe the autopsy.”
“Is that some kind of religious conviction?” Kurt asked.
“They make the rules as they go,” Muffin said.
The Bauers had money, they had political clout, they had strong ties to the religious Right. Their dynasty had begun four generations ago with hardrock mining in Colorado. Great-grandfather Walter Bauer, Sr., was the one who had hired goons to shoot up striking miners in Telluride and Ludlow. Over the next eighty years the family had branched into banking and real estate, and had even produced a popular soft-drink beverage called High Country Delight. Nicole’s early lifestyle had mocked everything the Bauer name stood for.
“Why don’t you come in and write up your statement?” Muffin said. “Get it out of the way before the Bauer boys show up and start asking hard questions.”
He could hear the misgivings in her voice. She didn’t know if he had done anything wrong, but he was her friend and partner and they had been through hell together more than once. She would do everything she could to protect him, whether he deserved it or not.
“And Kurt,” she added, her words ringing loud and clear through the static: “Do us both a favor and bring back the ring.”
Chapter ten
He knew something was wrong as soon as he opened the storm door and heard the music. Loud, haunting guitar chords, the stereo turned up to full volume, vibrating the glass in the windows. There were no vehicles under the parking shed, so it wasn’t Meg and Lennon. He unzipped his leather jacket and withdrew the Smith & Wesson .45 from his shoulder holster, then quickly crossed the mud porch and nudged open the front door, dropping to one knee and pointing the pistol into the dusky living room.
Someone had closed all the blinds. The air reeked of marijuana. Kurt could see the refrigerator door hanging open in the kitchen, the light shining. If he didn’t know better, he would have guessed his eight-year-old son had hitchhiked back home transformed into a metalhead teenager.
“I have a gun!” he shouted, his words drowned by the music. He shouted again, louder this time, trying to make himself heard: “Let me see you with your hands on your head!”
No one stirred. At first glance nothing appeared to be out of place. The house remained intact, a dated still life of flower vases and knotty pine paneling and old furniture that hadn’t changed since his mother had left it to him a decade ago. Gripping the pistol with both hands, he stood up and ve
ntured into the living room, his eyes searching for sudden movement. He knew the song booming from the stereo. He had listened to this album a million times when he was younger. Rocky Rhodes singing his heart out behind his wailing Rickenbacker guitar. “Blue Midnight,” his signature piece.
Every pore in his body opened up, streaming sweat. The .45 felt slippery in his hands. “Come out and show yourself!” he barked. In the back of his head a small edgy voice began to whisper what his body already knew.
On the floor near the stereo, Kurt’s ancient collection of tattered, taped-together album covers lay strewn about like a game of 52 Pickup with a large deck of cards. The intruder had shuffled through them, looking for this record to play. With one eye on far doorways and dark corners, Kurt lifted the lid on the turntable and removed the needle with a clumsy scratch, and the house fell into a deafening silence. But his ears were still ringing and his heart kept pounding to the heavy beat of Rocky’s drummer.
There was a cool draft through the house, a sure sign that someone had left the door open to the rear deck. He made his way across the living room with his arms extended, the pistol raised, his finger on the trigger. Skirting past the counter that cordoned off the kitchen area, he noticed a crushed beer can next to a bag of tortilla chips split open and spilled across the tiles. The son of a bitch had certainly made himself at home.
The sliding door had been smashed by a two-by-four from Kurt’s unfinished construction project out on the deck. There was a clear trail of footprints in the slush, leading to and from the door, but the sun was strong and the prints were already evaporating, spreading wide and leaking through the cracks. He hurried over to the rail and gazed in both directions, first at his backyard and then down the hill toward Red Mountain Road. There was no one in sight.
He went back inside and checked the house thoroughly, the closets, the showers, the narrow spaces underneath the beds. Then he walked back through each room and checked everything again. By the time he had holstered the .45 his wrists were aching from the strain. Exhausted, his energy depleted after the heavy adrenaline rush, he dragged himself into the study to phone the department and request assistance.
