The Program

by Stephen White

  Alan spoke slowly, carefully. “I don’t think I know anything that can help you find her, Ron.” He let his words settle.

  Ron raised his chin. Alan thought he was still trying to look intimidating. “I’ll get a court order to make you talk if I need one. I’m not going to mess around with you in these circumstances. There’s a different set of priorities here.”

  Alan struggled to decide whether or not Peyton would want him to trust Ron Kriciak with more information. “There are? I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way, Ron. I don’t know if you’ve been down this road before, but I have. The courts might subpoena me but they can’t make me talk. I won’t divulge confidential information from her therapy sessions. The only reasons I could breech her confidence would be if she were in imminent danger, if she threatened someone, or if she hurt a child. That’s it. But even that’s irrelevant in this circumstance because I don’t know anything that will help you find her or help you explain why she is missing. I wish I did.”

  “She hasn’t said anything about feeling like she’s in danger? Nothing along those lines? She hasn’t mentioned anyplace she might go if she was frightened?”

  Alan exhaled and then took a deep breath before he said, “I’ve gotten the impression from earlier conversations with you that you perceived Peyton as still feeling vulnerable and … distrusting of almost everybody, you guys in WITSEC included. I have no reason to argue with that impression. Is that clear enough for you?”

  Ron nodded as though he finally heard. “But where she might go if she panicked? She hasn’t said anything about that?”

  “I don’t know anything that can help you there. Nothing.”

  “Has she had specific concerns about us? About the Marshals Service?”

  Alan’s eyes said “Yes.”

  Ron said, “Shit.” His left foot began tapping. “Has she reported seeing anyone from her previous life?”

  Alan stared at him. “I can’t tell you what she reported to me. I will state again that I don’t know anything to explain the current circumstances other than to support your earlier impressions that she remained frightened of the people who are after her and she remained suspicious of the Marshals Service.”

  Alan expected that Ron was about to become exasperated by his repeated protestations of privilege. But, instead, Kriciak seemed to be getting the hang of how to translate the conversation.

  “Nothing?”

  “Sorry, nothing.”

  “You screwing with me? This is an official interview. I’m a federal officer. I’ll get your ass.”

  “I’m not screwing with you, Ron. Has she done this before? Disappeared overnight?”

  Alan noted a hesitation before Ron responded. “We don’t watch her all the time. She might have been gone some night. She certainly hasn’t reported her window being busted before.”

  Alan said, “Maybe she went someplace she would feel safe. There’s a possibility this could be nothing, then, right? There could be a reasonable explanation.”

  “Her front window was busted out. Her bedroom furniture was all over the place. There was blood.”

  “Her car?”

  “It’s there.”

  “When’s the last time you heard from her, Ron?”

  “She was seen yesterday.”

  Alan noted the awkward construction. “And …?”

  “And what?”

  “And did whoever saw her yesterday notice anything out of the ordinary in her behavior?”

  Ron hesitated again but said, “No.”

  “Have there been new threats against her?”

  “This is my interview.”

  Alan allowed his mind to find an innocent explanation. He said, “Let’s both of us pray that she met a guy, and that her daughter’s at a friend’s house at a sleepover. Let’s pray that’s what this is.”

  Ron stood. “She never talked about being somewhere else to feel safe? Even just in passing?”

  “Sorry, Ron.”

  A MINUTE LATER, Dr. Gregory escorted Kelli Wynton back down the hall into his office. Again, he apologized for the interruption.

  She said, “It’s fine. It was all kind of exciting.” She hesitated. “He’s really what he says he is?”

  Dr. Gregory nodded.

  “Are you in, um, some kind of trouble with … him?”

  “I do some consulting work for the Marshals Service. The interruption was the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh …” She reached up and touched the soft spot below her left ear with the index finger of her right hand. “I didn’t notice he was wearing a ring. Do you know if he’s seeing anybody?”

  7

  Ron Kriciak used a pay phone, not his cell phone, to call Fenster Kastle in Washington, D.C. Ron was put right through to Kastle in his office in the U.S. Marshals Service.

  “You talked to her shrink?” Kastle asked.

  Ron said, “Yeah. Just now came out of his office. I don’t know if he knows anything or not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s smart enough to know he doesn’t have to talk to me, but he seemed to be trying to let me know that he doesn’t know anything that might help us. He seemed genuinely surprised by the news.”

  “We have any leverage with him?”

  “Not sure. His wife’s a DA. That might help. I’m going to call the woman he’s filling in for and see if she has any ideas on how to move him.”

  “News from our client’s town house?”

  “Nothing. Still don’t have any idea what came down there. Two different intruders is the way it looks. Our guy is only one of them and he’s still unconscious. We have word of a cab picking her up last evening at her town house at nine-twenty, taking her and her daughter either to the airport or to the bus station. We’re trying to ascertain which.”

  “I bet bus. She’d need ID at the airport. You’re following up on routes and drivers?”

  “I agree with your assessment. And yes, we’re looking at what directions she could have gone at that time of night.”

  “The local police are staying away?”

  “So far.”

  “What was our guy doing in that house, Ron?”

  “He’s not talking yet. I could only speculate.”

  “Then speculate.”

  “He didn’t like the fact that she was under our protection in the program. He was in her house either to scare her or to plant something that would make her look like a security risk.”

  Kastle waited. “Yes? You know something else. Don’t be playing with me, Ron. It’s not a level field we’re on.”

  Ron exhaled. “One of Ficklin’s friends lost his job with the program after the stink that our client made to Congress. Ficklin moaned about it constantly.”

  Kastle growled. “How did he find out she was there?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Find out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Keep me informed, Kriciak.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  chapter

  eight

  THE TRAIN IN THE PARK

  1

  My plan for disappearing with Landon covered the basics. Shelter, food, money. It didn’t cover the dead time in between.

  Landon and I had grown oddly accustomed to being prisoners. Slaughter, Louisiana, had been a prison for us. Boulder was a prison. Bigger, nicer—sure. But a prison’s a prison.

  This musty old cabin in Chautauqua was going to be a whole different kind of prison. It appeared that for a while we were going to be confined to this cell for twenty something hours a day. That left a lot of dead time.

  The time that came between eating-time and sleeping-time.

  I had packed our travel Scrabble game, which Landon loved to play. I enjoyed playing Scrabble slightly less than my daughter did, partially because I hadn’t beaten her since the day after her eighth birthday. As an alternative to Scrabble we’d gotten into the habit of playing gin
rummy games to a thousand. I could still beat her at that occasionally.

  The cottage’s game cupboard also came with an incomplete set of dominos, a peg-deficient game of Parcheesi, and a Monopoly game that belonged on “Antiques Roadshow.”

  And we had books. Landon and I, we always had books.

  That first night in the cottage I slept on a day-bed in the main room and awoke early, my T-shirt stuck to my back. Landon was curled on her side on the double bed in the solitary bedroom. I’d been too paranoid to open any windows the night before, so the cottage in Chautauqua was stuffy and smelled of a half-century of summer sweat. The furnishings in both rooms were Mission pieces, old and scratched and proud. I had a sense that Myrna, my landlord, didn’t have any idea how valuable they’d become over the years.

  I peed and threw water on my face before I set a kettle on the stove for instant coffee. I ate applesauce from a little plastic tub with a flimsy plastic spoon. The sweet fruit tasted so good I opened a second plastic tub and finished it before the water rolled to a boil.

  The telephone rang, and I was so startled by the noise that I almost screamed. The ring wasn’t the familiar electronic chirp of my phone at home, but was instead an old-fashioned rrrrrrrrring. If I disassembled the big black phone that sat on the end table by the sofa, I knew I would actually find a bell inside.

  I waited for a second ring, but the phone rang only once. I found my wristwatch on the little table by the front door and watched the second hand sweep smoothly around the clock face. As the second hand moved, I parted the curtains on both sides of the living room and examined the quiet little lane in front of the cottage. The same few cars were visible that had been visible the night before. I didn’t expect to see anything suspicious, and I didn’t.

  After a little less than one full rotation of the second hand the bell blasted again. Rrrrrrrrring.

  I waited. No additional sounds.

  Carl.

  It was seven twenty-three. I’d been on the run less than twelve hours and he already wanted to talk.

  OKAY, IN HINDSIGHT maybe I should have prepared Landon for the wheelchair.

  When I went into the bedroom to rouse her after Carl’s call she awakened cranky and disoriented. No, she wasn’t eager to have her hair darkened to black. She didn’t like the sunglasses I’d picked out for her. She thought the clothes I’d chosen were “the epitome of disgusting.”

  Studying spelling had swollen Landon’s vocabulary beyond reason. Frequently I was proud. Often I was amused. Occasionally I was annoyed. This was one of my annoyed times. I said, “It’s e-pit-o-me, not ep-a-tome.”

  “What-ever. Then these clothes you want me to wear are the e-pit-o-me of disgusting.”

  I told her that was the point. She looked at me as though I was insane, and for the fifth or sixth time in twelve hours I wondered if I was.

  I actually thought of calling Ron Kriciak and asking for his help. One phone call, and Landon and I would soon be in the back of a U.S. Marshals Service van with two or three armed babysitters. The van would have opaque windows, and my daughter and I would awaken the next day in Omaha or Fresno or Walla Walla.

  There was only one problem. I knew in my heart that there was a fifty-fifty chance that the man I’d last seen in the trunk of my car was a U.S. marshal. Were I to call Ron, I would have even less confidence that WITSEC and the marshals could protect us than I’d had when we’d arrived in Boulder. And I still wouldn’t have any idea why Ron had been following me around town or why the man with the black lace-up shoes had been hiding under my bed.

  LANDON’S HAIR FRESHLY dyed, mine under a beret, I coaxed her onto the wheelchair and began the long journey into Boulder from our Chautauqua cottage. Landon pouted for the first six blocks, wouldn’t even play spelling games with me. She somehow managed to find at least three opportunities to use the word epitome in a sentence. Each time her pronunciation was perfect.

  She seemed especially annoyed that the wheelchair didn’t come equipped with a steering wheel.

  I cursed Robert and missed him like a drowning man misses air.

  THE OLD CHAUTAUQUA site enjoys prime Boulder real estate near the top of Baseline Road just before Baseline begins its steep ascent into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The turn-of-the-last-century Chautauqua complex of meeting rooms, auditoriums, and small summer cottages fills a few precious acres that stretch below the vast open space that leads up a steep slope to the base of the vaulting Flatirons. The Chautauqua site is high, with spectacular views to the west, north, and east. It’s isolated on the very edge of town. There’s precious little traffic.

  From the moment I found the ad for the cabin in the want ads, I thought it would be a great place to hide for a while.

  But it’s a long way on foot from Baseline Road to the Dushanbe Teahouse. By the time I’d pushed Landon’s wheelchair as far as the commercial district on The Hill, which was still a few blocks from the teahouse, I’d already decided that I was going to need to come up with a different meeting place for any future meetings with Carl Luppo. I’d also decided that on our return trip, Landon and I were going to take the city bus system as far back toward Chautauqua as we could. The route from Chautauqua to downtown Boulder was almost all downhill. The route from downtown Boulder back to Chautauqua definitely wasn’t.

  WE DIDN’T MAKE it to Dushanbe on time. The plan called for our arrival sixty minutes after Carl’s twin phone calls. We actually arrived eighty-five minutes later. I paused on the sidewalk outside the teahouse to remind Landon to act cool when she spotted Carl. I wheeled her inside, and I immediately saw Carl despite the large crowd in the room. He had two empty espresso cups on the table in front of him. As we walked in he looked up toward the door, gave us a cursory glance, then checked his wristwatch and returned his attention to the morning paper.

  He hadn’t recognized us. Amazing.

  It was the wheelchair. It was Boulder. It was the wheelchair in Boulder. People didn’t want to stare. People didn’t even want to see when there was a kid in a chair. I patted myself on the back for that one.

  I pushed Landon toward the table. Carl didn’t look up until we were five feet away. I said, “Hi.”

  Landon smiled for the first time all morning.

  Carl almost laughed out loud when he finally recognized us. With a quick motion he folded up the newspaper he’d been reading and stood to greet us. “You have a seat, both of you. Or one of you. I guess one of you’s already sitting. Whatever, I was starting to worry.”

  “It’s a long walk,” I said.

  “Oh, oh. Of course, of course. What do you want? Coffee, tea? The espresso’s okay. Hot chocolate for my little friend? What’s it gonna be? The pastries are pretty good, considering.”

  I assumed he meant considering they were made in Colorado and not wherever he was really from.

  A gorgeous young waitress approached us. Her waist-length hair was the color of the flesh of a bing cherry. I ordered tea. Landon ordered a decaf mocha—thank you, Robert—and a chocolate croissant. I thought she was acting a little precious for Carl’s benefit, but I wasn’t about to call her on it. At least she’d found a reason to stop pouting and she hadn’t forced “epitome” into a sentence since we’d arrived.

  Landon leaned forward on her chair and whispered, “Where’s Anvil? Did you bring him?”

  “No, sugar, he’s at home,” Carl said. “I knew I was going to be busy today. I have some appointments later on this morning. He doesn’t like it when I’m running around too much.”

  A minute later the woman with the beautiful hair brought us our drinks. I thought Carl was showing a little nervousness as he held up the newspaper and asked, “You seen the morning paper?”

  I shook my head. He handed me his folded copy of the Boulder Daily Camera. “Page one,” he said.

  My instantaneous fear was that I was going to discover that my photograph was placed prominently on the front page. But it wasn’t. The only picture I saw was a fine
color shot of a golden retriever romping in Boulder Creek. There were three articles that began above the fold. I scanned the headlines quickly, reaching a rapid conclusion that Carl wasn’t really trying to draw my attention to the follow-up story on the latest terrorist bombing in the Middle East or to the exposé the Daily Camera was doing on problems in the county clerk’s office.

  The third story above the fold was about an apparent murder at a motel in west Boulder. A woman from Indiana named Barbara Turner who was in town for meetings at the university had been found in her motel room with her neck broken. The room showed signs of a struggle. The police were thinking the crime might have been committed during a burglary.

  I read on and found that I had started tapping my right foot to control my mounting rage. Landon was peering up at me from over the top of her big coffee cup. Despite my efforts to mask what I was feeling, she noticed something in my face or eyes and said, “What is it, Mommy?”

  I said, “Nothing.” I said it with the kind of disingenuous voice I used when I was stopped by a cop for speeding. The voice I used when I said, “Is there a problem, Officer?”

  The newspaper article explained that the murder had taken place the previous evening at the Foot of the Mountain Motel. Had Carl mentioned the name of the motel where he had followed the woman who had been tailing me with the camera?

  I didn’t think he had. Just that it was on the west end of Arapahoe. Which is right at the foot of the mountains.

  Without gazing up, I touched the newspaper and with forced civility I asked, “Carl? Is that the … um … same motel?”

  “Same as what?” Landon asked enthusiastically.

  Carl said, “It is.”

  “Same as what?” Landon demanded more assertively.

  I looked at Carl with as much intensity as I dared muster. The determination in his expression matched my own. I shook my head as I mouthed, “Did you?”

  Landon’s eyes darted from my face to Carl’s and then back again. Loudly, she said, “Did he what?”