The Program

by Stephen White

  A policewoman from the Slaughter force met me at the curb and was almost strong enough to restrain me from my sprint to the front porch of the Larsen home. Almost. Once I was past her, though, she was nowhere nearly fast enough to keep up with me. I paid no heed to her verbal protests that I stop, and I didn’t knock at the front door but instead just threw open the screen and called, “Baby! Matilda! Matilda!”

  Libby Larsen walked into the toy-strewn entryway of her home wiping her hands on a kitchen towel that was decorated with blue pineapples. “Matilda?” she scoffed. “How could you?” she demanded. She tossed the towel over her shoulder and moved her clean hands to her ample hips in the international sign of housewifely indignation. “How could you lie to me? To us? How could you even think about putting all the other children in danger like that?”

  Her outrage deflected off of me like X rays off of lead. No penetration whatsoever. She didn’t even know what danger was. I had a daughter to protect.

  “Matilda!” I yelled.

  I don’t believe that I was always so callous. Perhaps I was. Maybe it was the work I did. Or having my husband murdered. I just don’t know.

  Libby said, “She’s in the kitchen with the police.” She pronounced it poe-lease. “I’ll tell you, ma’am, but you have some explaining to do. To them. And when they’re done with you, you have some explaining to do to me.” She was acting as though someone usually gave pause when she used that tone of voice. Must have been her children. Couldn’t imagine that it caused her husband to cower. But I didn’t really know Bud Larsen. Maybe Libby was married to a wimp.

  I ran past her toward the kitchen.

  Matilda was sitting at the big oak breakfast table and was flanked on each side by a police officer. One was black, one was white. Neither of the two men weighed less than two hundred pounds. Their uniform hats sat before them on the table and looked large enough to act as toaster caddies. My gangly daughter was dwarfed by the scale of it all.

  “Honey,” I said, my voice full of tenderness now that I knew she was alive and breathing. I held out my arms.

  “Mommy,” she said and immediately slithered down on her chair, disappearing below the edge of the tabletop before the two big cops could figure out what to do to stop her. She was between their legs and up in my arms in seconds. “Mommy,” she said again. “Mommy.”

  “Shhh,” I whispered into her golden hair.

  “They made me tell them about Daddy.”

  “Shhh.”

  “And that my name isn’t Matilda.”

  “Shhh.”

  “And that your name isn’t Katherine Shaw.”

  “Shhh.”

  “The bad man came just like you said he would. But it wasn’t a man, Mommy. The bad man wasn’t a man.”

  “Shhh.”

  “What are we gonna do, Mommy? What are we gonna do?”

  “Oh my baby,” I murmured.

  WHAT HAD HAPPENED was that Matilda was playing defense—it was her nature—and Jennifer had kicked the soccer ball toward the net with all the might of her surprisingly strong left leg. Matilda managed to get up high and deflect the ball so that it sailed above the goal. Robert used to say proudly that his daughter had coiled springs in her legs, not femurs. Matilda chased the ball through the bushes into the next-door-neighbor’s yard.

  That’s when she met the woman in the green halter-top and cargo shorts. “She looked just like the pictures of the girls from the Abercrombie catalog,” was how my suddenly fashion-conscious preteen described the woman who was lurking on the other side of the bushes.

  “Was she young or old?” I asked.

  “Young. Twenty.” Matilda pronounced her conclusion with a degree of confidence that I didn’t share. I’d interviewed hundreds of witnesses in the past few years, and Matilda was approaching her rendition of events with an assurance that made me wary. But that, too, was her nature.

  “And?”

  “And she walked over to me and asked me if I’d seen her dog.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “Mom,” she scolded me. “Don’t cuss. Anyway, I remembered. You told me that the bad guys might say something about losing a dog or a cat and needing my help to find them, so I was ready. When she grabbed me, I was already running, I swear.”

  “Don’t swear. You were already running?”

  “Well, not totally running running. But I was starting to run when she grabbed me on my arm, right here.” My daughter fingered the biceps of her left arm. “See? That’s where she grabbed me.” The hard red outlines of the woman’s fingers were clearly visible below the mahogany of Matilda’s summer tan.

  “Go on, Sweetie. I’m proud of you.”

  “Okay. It’s like … then she reached out and grabbed me as hard as she could. But I was too sweaty and her hand was too sweaty and I was too quick for her and I got away and I ran and I ran and I screamed and I yelled just like you taught me to do and I cut back through the bushes toward the Larsens’ and when I turned around to look she’d stopped coming after me and she’d started running the other way and there was a car there waiting for her and that was it.”

  But, of course, that wasn’t it.

  Not even close.

  chapter

  two

  EPIDURAL

  1

  Alan Gregory raised the pillows from the carpeted floor and helped his pregnant wife to her feet. He asked, “So what do you think?” Lauren smiled her gratitude for his assistance and said, “What do I think? You mean about this?” She punched one of the pillows against his chest and said, “Here’s what I think: Can you spell epidural?”

  He laughed and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Is it safe for me to assume that you’re not completely sold on huffing and puffing your way through the bliss of childbirth?”

  She wanted to make sure he knew she wasn’t kidding. When he leaned over to kiss her, one hand on her swollen belly, she was almost convinced. But not quite. With emphasis, she said, “e—p —i —”

  “All right, I hear you. We’ll get some names of anesthesiologists from Adrienne. But we’ll finish the class, right?”

  “Yeah, we’ll finish the class. Jody wants us to finish the class.” Jody was Lauren’s OB. Lauren tilted her head toward the front of the conference room where they’d just attended their initial Lamaze class—First Child after Thirty—and whispered, “Do you know anybody in our group? None of your patients, I hope. That would be awkward.”

  “No, no patients. But I do know the woman who was sitting over by the door.” He looked over in that direction but the woman had already left the room. “She’s a psychiatrist from Denver. I wasn’t aware she lived close to us. Her name’s Teri Grady. I’ve worked with her a few times over the years. I like her. She’s funny. I take it there was no one in here with us that you’ve prosecuted?” Lauren was a deputy district attorney for Boulder County.

  “God forbid. No, no one I’ve prosecuted.”

  “You want to stop on the way home, get something to eat? I promised I’d take you to Dandelion if you behaved yourself during class.”

  “Did I behave myself?” she asked with attractive petulance.

  “You did fine. You made a couple of gratuitous faces. But you did fine.”

  “What faces? I didn’t make any faces, did I?”

  He smiled. She knew she’d made some faces.

  She said, “I think I’ll take a rain check on Dandelion. I told Adrienne that she could start teaching me some yoga tonight. You don’t mind?”

  “Mind? Of course not. May I watch?”

  She socked him on the arm. “Not on your life.”

  “Darn. She’s really into it, isn’t she? The yoga thing?”

  “I think she looks great. Don’t you think she looks great? You have to have noticed what yoga’s done for her butt.”

  He glanced at his wife with a sideways glance. “We’re talking Adrienne’s butt, right? No, I hate to disappoint you, but I haven’t noticed what yoga’s don
e for Adrienne’s butt.”

  “Well, I have, and I’m hoping it’ll do the same for mine.”

  “Your butt, beautiful wife, doesn’t need the same.”

  “And you’re sweet.”

  He slid his hand perilously close to that butt as they walked from the hospital toward the car. “Don’t worry about tonight—I have some calls to make. I’ll make dinner while you and Adrienne do whatever it is you’re going to do.”

  ALAN AND LAUREN lived in a recently renovated ranch house on the eastern side of the Boulder Valley, in the shadows of the scenic overlook that adorned the high point on Highway 36 as it threaded into Boulder from Denver’s northwestern suburbs. Adrienne, their urologist friend, and Jonas, her son, were their only close neighbors on the dirt lane that dead-ended in the clearing between their homes.

  That night was a preview of midsummer’s attractions. The sun was descending toward the craggy cradle of the Rockies in a fashion that was peculiarly languid, and the evening air was more warm than cool for the first time all season. The sky was lit in the dusty pastels of Necco wafers. From one of the decks on the western side of their house, Lauren and Alan could see the lights of the parallel snakes of liquid traffic slithering slowly east and west on the Boulder Turnpike.

  When Alan had first moved into an earlier incarnation of this house in the seventies, Boulder knew no rush hour. When he first met Lauren in the early nineties, the turnpike was only crowded outbound in the morning and inbound in the evening. Now? Boulder had its own suburbs. Now? Boulder had too much traffic, too much of the time. Now? The Boulder Turnpike was a pipe corroded from too many vehicles.

  THEY SAID GOOD-BYE in the garage and Lauren started across the lane to Adrienne’s house while Alan walked to the front door to greet Emily, their Bouvier. The dog offered him a cursory hello—a dip of her head and a little hop on all fours—before she spotted Lauren meandering across the lane and darted past Alan’s legs to catch up with her. Alan called a warning to his wife who prepared herself to dart out of the way of the dog’s likely overexuberant greeting.

  Across the lane Jonas opened the front door of his house and squealed, “Em-i-ly! Come here! Emily!” Alan knew that their easily distracted dog wasn’t going to be coming home right away. He called to Lauren, “Have Jonas bring her home when she’s ready for dinner.” She waved that she’d heard him.

  THE HOUSE WAS lit with the light show from the western sky. A last sliver of yellow sun was crowning the peaks of the central Rockies like a thick pat of butter melting on oatmeal. Alan poured himself a glass of water that had come from nearby Eldorado Springs and grabbed a beer that had come from a brewery on nearby Canyon Boulevard. He planned to give himself a few minutes to enjoy the metamorphoses—day into night, pseudosummer into summer—before he started to make dinner.

  He picked up the phone to check messages, first at home—two, both for Lauren—and then at work—two more, neither urgent. He was relieved about the work news and began to relax. One of the patients in his clinical psychology practice had been on the verge of deteriorating for almost two weeks. Today’s dual stressors—her annual performance review at Celestial Seasonings, where she worked, and the final dissolution of her marriage by the Boulder County Court—threatened to take her over the edge. That she hadn’t left him a choppy message in her flat monotone meant that it was likely she had survived her day.

  For her, and for Alan, that was good.

  The moment he finished listening to his other message, yet another in a string of cancellations from a thirty-six-year-old man whose wife thought he needed therapy much more than he did, the phone rang. Alan took a long pull of beer before he answered, “Hello.”

  “Alan? It’s Teri Grady.”

  He was surprised. “Teri? Hi. It was fun seeing you tonight. I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk. I didn’t know you were pregnant. When are you due?”

  “That was my fault. Crawford needed to run right after class. He’s my husband—I don’t think you two have met. And I’m due in eight weeks.”

  “Maybe I can meet him next week at class. Or we could all get some dinner after class. You can meet Lauren, too.”

  “That sounds nice, but listen, I’m actually calling about something else. Seeing you tonight sparked an idea. I want to make you an offer.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s likely to sound strange.”

  “Then it will fit right into my life.”

  “There’s no reason you would know it, but one of the things I do—professionally, I mean—is that I’m the regional psychiatric consultant to the U.S. Marshals Service and to the Secret Service.”

  “No, I didn’t know it. That sounds like interesting work,” Alan said, as he tried to anticipate where the conversation was going.

  “You know, surprisingly enough, it’s one of the few things I do that is as interesting as it sounds. Anyway, I’m looking for someone to cover some of my responsibilities while I’m on maternity leave. I wondered whether you have some time and whether you’d be interested.”

  “I’m flattered, Teri. I do have some time, a few hours, anyway. I guess it depends on exactly what you’re looking for. I don’t think I could squeeze in regular trips to Denver, if that’s what it would take.”

  “All I think it’s going to involve is seeing one of my ongoing therapy patients, a guy currently in WITSEC, the Witness Security Program that’s run by the marshals office. You probably think of it as the Witness Protection Program. And possibly picking up a second therapy case, someone who’s being processed into the same program right now and who has already requested a referral for psychotherapy. She’ll be relocated to this region soon. Maybe as soon as next week. You wouldn’t have to see them in Denver; both of these people could come to your Boulder office.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Probably. The local WITSEC census is as large as the Marshals Service is comfortable with right now. There’s always the possibility that there will be fresh transfers in and out of the region, but most of the people in the program don’t get any mental health support. So it’s probably just going to be these two.”

  “How long is your maternity leave?”

  “I’m planning on six months after the delivery. My OB is concerned about some spotting I’ve had, though, and he’s threatened me with bed rest if it gets any worse. That’s why I’m looking for coverage already.”

  “What about meds, Teri?”

  “My guy is stable on Zoloft. John Connor—you know him from the medical school, right?—he’s the psychiatrist I inherited all this federal work from. He’s agreed to cover any medication issues that might come up during my leave. I don’t see any real challenges on the horizon pharmaceutically, but if you need some support, he’ll be available to you.”

  “I know John. What’s the Secret Service piece?”

  “John’s going to handle that unless the workload gets too tough, then I imagine he would call you to do some consultation. It’s sporadic work. During presidential and vice-presidential visits to the region, and during some visits by members of Congress and foreign leaders, the Secret Service has to assess risks on people in the region who they’ve identified as potential security threats. When the agents have a specific concern, they call and present material for consultation. Sometimes it’s on the phone, sometimes they want a face-to-face.”

  “But it’s rare?”

  “Yeah. As I said, John will cover that. You probably wouldn’t do any during the whole six months.”

  Alan watched as the last drop of the buttery sun melted into the highest valleys of the Rockies. “I have to admit that I’m intrigued, Teri. I’m always looking for ways to make my work seem more interesting, and this looks like it will do just that. But I’m curious, why me? Why not one of your psychiatric colleagues?”

  “It’s a fair question. First, I think you’re a good match for my current patient. He’s, uh, an interesting guy. But from what I recall about your style, I think
it will fit him well. Second, you’re flexible, and I’ve discovered that psychotherapy with this… population requires some therapeutic gymnastics. And last? I like this work a lot—a lot—and I don’t especially want to create competition for myself within the psychiatric community. You’re a safer bet for me. The Marshals Service prefers to have physicians, not psychologists, as their consultants.”

  Alan gave Teri points for honesty. But then, it was one of the things he always liked about her.

  “I’m more than intrigued, Teri. As I said, I’m always looking for opportunities to break the routine of what I do. Let me sleep on it and I’ll give you a call sometime tomorrow. Is that okay?”

  “Sure, but there’s one more piece to all this. You’ve never been in the military, have you?”

  “No, why?”

  “Wishful thinking. So I guess there’s no reason you would happen to already have a security clearance, is there?”

  “Sorry. Does that disqualify me?”

  “Not at all. But no skeletons, right? No disqualifiers? Nothing that would prevent you from getting one, a security clearance? Sorry, but I have to ask.”

  “No problem, Teri. Actually, I did some informal consulting for some FBI types a few months back. You may have heard about it—a couple of old murders up near Steamboat Springs. The people I worked with told me that they checked into my background before they approached me, and they acted comfortable enough with what they found. I think I can pass muster.”

  “Good. You should be fine then. I’ll look forward to hearing from you tomorrow. I hope you say yes. You have my home number?”

  He said he didn’t have it, and she dictated it before hanging up.

  He finished the beer. By the time he swallowed the last drop, he’d already decided that he was going to say “Yes.”

  LAUREN WALKED IN the door around eight-thirty to a meal of shrimp lo mein. She complained of not being very limber during her initial yoga session. “I couldn’t hold any of the balance poses that she tried to show me.”