Cold Case

by Stephen White

  From a distance.

  "If it turns out we need him, the local corner is an M.D." but not a forensic pathologist. He's out of town on a family thing of some kind. They reached him on his pager. He's coming back into town tonight, late. Percy Smith asked him, hypothetically, if they found a body was it all right with him if I took a look at it. Coroner said it was cool.

  "Anyway, Flynn goes in and does her thing for a while. She-"

  "She's separated from her husband, Russ. Dorothy is. She was fearful he was stalking her. When she described his behavior to me, I worried about his potential for being violent."

  "Really? That may fit what we see in there. Know his name?"

  "Douglas. She called him Douglas."

  "Great. See? This is exactly why we wanted you to join us here. We figured you might know something that would help. Anything else?"

  I was speechless.

  Russ filled the void.

  "Turns out that what we have looks like a crime of passion. There was almost certainly a struggle. There was a knife, or something equally sharp. I think Flynn sees it the same way. For now."

  "But? I hear a 'but' lurking in there."

  "But… Dorothy's also a nationally known reporter who has just published a highly critical piece about a well-known local politician who's prominent enough that his problems are beginning to show up on national radar. And then it turns out her hotel room is trashed and streaked with blood. Can't ignore those facts either."

  I was having trouble riding along with Russ as he was doing his problem solving.

  I said, "She's funny. Witty, too. Dorothy." I was beginning to digest the idea of her being dead.

  He touched me on the shoulder again.

  "Like I said, it's always harder always when it's someone you know. No sign of forced entry into her room, by the way. She let whoever it was in. Which means Smith can't rule out hotel personnel. That's a lot of people to interview."

  I got the sense that his mind was wandering away from the conversation we were having. He cupped my elbow in his hand and eased me down the hall closer to room 505. The hotel was configured in a T;

  room 505 was near the center of the intersecting hallway. We stood against the wall on the far side of the corridor. A second perimeter of yellow crime-scene tape blocked any closer access to the body.

  "This is her room. You can't go in, of course."

  I didn't want to. I didn't tell him that.

  Close by, between the two perimeters of tape, detectives and cops huddled together in separate clusters, their voices hushed to reverent whispers. None of them faced the door to the room; most of them were no more comfortable around violence than I was.

  The door to 505 was open. From where I stood across the hall I could see part of the bedspread on the floor at the foot of the near side of the king bed. The sheets and blankets were ripped and torn from the end of the bed. The mattress was exposed. At the far end of the room a side chair lay on its side on the floor next to an overturned telephone. Above the chair a smear of blood as wide as a wrist ran at least eighteen inches across the glass panes of the doors that led from Dorothys room out to a small wooden balcony.

  In the distance, through the glass, I could see the ski runs decked out for summer. A steady stream of mountain bikers flowed down the mountain trails.

  Today, from my vantage, the green grass of the runs appeared smeared with blood.

  Dorothy's blood? Likely.

  The gondola continued carrying tourists to the top of the mountain.

  As I narrowed my focus back to the room, I became aware that I was breathing through my mouth. That's when I saw Flynn Coming into my field of vision.

  Her hair was covered by a surgeon's cap and her gloved hands were clasped behind her back. She seemed to be examining the carpeting beside Dorothy's bed.

  Percy Smith startled me by opening the door directly behind where I was standing.

  "Got a little command post set up in there." He pointed toward the room behind him.

  "My idea."

  I ignored his bluster and told him without being asked what I had told Russ Claven about Dorothy's marital problems. Smith jotted down everything I said in great detail. He asked a few questions. I answered them.

  "And this story she's been working on? The one about Ray Welle. What can you tell me about that?"

  "Don't know anything more than I read in yesterdays Washington Post. She faxed me a copy of the article at my home in Boulder on Saturday. Campaign irregularities that go back a few years."

  "You wouldn't happen to have the article with you?"

  "No"

  "But it's about Ray Welle and the fund-raising rumors?"

  "Yes. Something like that. Also, she hand wrote a note on it about having met with somebody who wasn't helpful with the campaign thing but who seemed to know a lot about Gloria Welle's murder."

  "This person have a name?"

  "It's a man. She didn't give a name. She's a reporter. That makes him a source.

  She wouldn't give out his name. She also said she had another meeting planned.

  Didn't say with whom." Russ said, "Flynn hasn't searched carefully, but she didn't see a laptop in the hotel room. Did Ms. Levin use one?"

  I tried to remember.

  "Yes. She mentioned one at one point. She said hers was too heavy. Could this have been… I don't know, a burglary?" Oddly, I found the possibility soothing. I wanted to think that this had been a greed-based, random attack. I directed the question at Russ.

  Percy Smith raised his voice to a patiently pious tone that reminded me of Charlton Heston sermonizing about the Second Amendment. Smith said, "I'm of the opinion that… we have a lot of ground to cover before we arrive in the territory of the coulda's and the shoulda's."

  Russ waited patiently for Smith to cease pontificating, then responded more directly to my question.

  "Anythings possible. It's even possible… that maybe someone really didn't want her to work on her story anymore."

  "Theory," complained Smith.

  "Just theory. Right now we need to collect evidence.

  We'll build a theory around the evidence we collect. We're not going to collect evidence to fit a theory. That's not how we do things around here."

  Russ Claven was standing slightly back from Percy Smith. I watched a small smile creep onto Russ's face as he papered himself back against the wall. He said, "Hey, Flynn, Alan's here."

  Flynn pulled the paper cap from her hair and leaned across the tape to kiss me on the cheek. Her unpatched eye captured both of mine and she said, "I'm so sorry. I got the impression you're fond of her." Flynn's tone told me that she thought that Dorothy Levin was dead. I swallowed back a tear and said, "I am." I was thinking, I was.

  Percy Smith interrupted.

  "ETA on the crime van is about ninety minutes. Anything else we should do before then, Flynn?" I thought I heard some smugness in his words.

  She said, "I've done what I can in there without compromising the scene for them."

  Russ interjected, "If a body shows up I'll need a physician with a Colorado license-something I happen to lack-to come with me. He or she can supervise me while I work up the body. The sooner we get somebody on deck the better, Chief.

  If circumstances arise I'd like to get started as soon as possible."

  "I'll get somebody on call. Anybody with a license will do?"

  "That's right. As long as they'll leave me alone to do my work."

  Flynn took me by the hand and said, "Come on. Why don't we go somewhere and get something to drink?" Smith said, "Room service set up a canteen for me down in 533. You go help yourselves."

  Flynn replied, "I think we'll get some distance from all this and go downstairs.

  Thanks, Percy."

  We settled into a booth in the restaurant off the lobby. The view was up the ski slopes and was almost identical to that in Dorothy's room. Each of us ordered ice tea. As soon as the waitress departed Flynn said, "He's al
l right, you know.

  Percy. You get past his narcissism and he's reasonably competent."

  The eye patch she was wearing that afternoon was of bronze satin stitched in concentric circles with burgundy thread. I found that it was distracting me as I said, "Maybe I'm not as generous as you are, Flynn. I find Percy Smith's narcissism to be a major impediment to perceiving his underlying strengths."

  She shrugged, and contemplated my face for several seconds.

  "You know what it is I do for a living? I mean really? What I do for a living is… I work other people's crime scenes. On every job I do, I'm an outsider.

  On every job I do, I'm a woman. On every job I do, I have only one eye. On every job I do, I'm a threat. Butting up against inflated egos conics with the territory. I would think you've seen your share of them along the way, too."

  "Maybe I'm more tolerant when I'm in my office."

  "And maybe you're more tolerant when you haven't just learned that someone you cared for may have been murdered?"

  "That too. You think she's dead?"

  She shrugged.

  "A lot of blood in there. A bad struggle. Let's say I'm afraid that she's dead."

  "Me too." "You haven't asked, but do you want my impression of what happened upstairs?"

  "Absolutely."

  "I could be wrong. These are first impressions, okay?"

  "Okay."

  "The evidence of struggle is clear. The room is trashed. It appears that the fight she put up was protracted and… valiant."

  "Help me with something, then. Why didn't anybody hear her? Why didn't she scream for help?"

  "Room on one side of hers is vacant. According to housekeeping, the neighbors in the other adjoining room haven't been around much. Dawn-to-dusk tourists.

  Why didn't she scream? Maybe she couldn't. She might have been gagged before she started resisting. One possibility of the order of events is that the offender entered her room and had her under control long enough to get a gag on her face.

  Probably at knife point At that point she broke free and started to fight."

  "Someone she knew?"

  Flynn chose not to answer me directly.

  "I think one of two things happened in that hotel room. Either what happened in there was, plain and simple, a crime of passion committed by someone with reason to be passionate enough to commit it.

  Or what happened in there was disguised to look like a crime of passion."

  "But not a burglary?"

  She touched my hand.

  "No. That would surprise me."

  "Russ said her computer was missing."

  "I only did a quick visual. I didn't see it. But we can't be sure that it's actually missing until the criminalists look around carefully."

  I repeated to Flynn my concerns about Dorothy's estranged husband, Douglas, and about her recent meeting in Steamboat with someone who wanted to talk about Gloria Welle's murder and her planned meeting with someone else.

  She didn't comment at all about the mystery man with the interest in Gloria Welle, but she looked relieved at the news about Douglas Levin-pleased that the crime scene might be a simple domestic scene gone bad. She said, "There you go then. If I were Douglas Levin I'd be getting my alibi on real straight right now. Real straight."

  Hearing Flynn comment about Douglas Levins need for an alibi caused me to recall the day I met Dorothy and left me concerned that I'd missed something important already.

  "I wonder if it was him in Denver on Friday, too?"

  "What do you mean? What happened on Friday?"

  "Those shots that were taken at Welle's fund-raiser on Friday? You read about them?"

  "Yes"

  "Dorothy was the Post reporter covering the event. She was directly in the line of fire. She and I had been talking until seconds before the shots rang out.

  Until right this second I didn't even consider that she might have been the target and not just a bystander."

  "She was literally in the line of fire?"

  "Yes"

  "Then, so… so were you."

  "I was in my car. The shots were way too high to be aimed at me. Dorothy was between my car and the door. She was a potential target. I wasn't."

  "The possibility that this is the second attempt on her life in a few days is something that has to be blended into the mix. I'll run it by Percy when we're done here."

  I finished my iced tea and watched the clear cubes tumble together as I placed the glass back on the table.

  My mind retreated from the horror of Dorothy Levin's hotel room, and I recalled my meeting with Ray Welle that morning and the suspicious last page of his treatment record.

  "Flynn, can you do anything magical with a photocopy of a piece of paper?

  Basically I want to know if you can help date it."

  "Date the copy or date the original?"

  "Date the original."

  "Possibly. If it's a forgery, it will depend on how sophisticated the forgery was. If they used time-period-appropriate devices and materials to generate the document, it would be hard to pick up discrepancies on a photocopy. We're talking a machine copy? That kind of copy, right?"

  "Right. Assuming the forgers weren't that good-that they might have made a mistake-what could you pick up?"

  "I'm not a documents specialist, so this is an educated guess, but let's say they used a computer printer that generated a typeface that's common now but wasn't common then. That sort of thing would help date the document. Or, I don't know, maybe a reflection of the watermark on the paper came through on the copy.

  With a watermark the documents people can sometimes date the paper of the original. There are ways. What do you have for me to look at?" I explained my suspicion about the last page of the file that I'd received from Raymond Welle that morning.

  "Let me take the first-generation copy with me. I'll see what our documents examiner can do with it. Why would Welle forge something like that?"

  "I don't know, Flynn. It's down in my car. Want to walk out with me? I'll get it for you."

  She paid for the tea and followed me out of the hotel lobby and over to my car.

  "Did you learn anything else from Welle this morning?"

  I shook my head.

  "No, the file is as thin as it could be. I'm still working under the impression that his psychotherapy of Mariko Hamamoto was relatively skillful. I did discover that Welle drives a Humvee. And that he was out playing golf with Joey Franklin this morning."

  She raised her eyebrows. The patch moved provocatively.

  "Really?"

  "Raymond seems quite fond of Joey." "Does he?" she asked.

  "You have any gut feelings that this guy Dorothy met with about Gloria Welle might be connected somehow to her disappearance? " Flynn shook her head.

  "Why would that be connected? Gloria Welle's murder was solved, wasn't it? "

  She must've seen something in my face as I conjured a response to her question.

  "Isn't it?" she repeated.

  "I guess," I said.

  "I guess."

  I drove back to Boulder later that afternoon without having learned anything new about Dorothy's disappearance and without having learned anything that I could use to fashion a cushion that might soften the blow of seeing her bloody hotel room.

  By the time I'd traveled most of the way down the Divide and cut off onto Highway 6, the route into Golden was jammed with gambling traffic generated by the casinos of Central City and Blackhawk. I managed to pass one giant motor coach that was belching diesel fumes into my face only to end up smack behind another. At that point I gave up fighting the traffic and tried to get lost in the radio broadcast of a Rockies game at Shea Stadium in New York. After losing four in a row, the Rocks were up by three runs. The best thing about baseball is the constant opportunity for redemption. Almost every day the players and the teams get another chance to try to set things right. I wished life were like that. There were so many nights that I felt as though
I were climbing into bed after going 0 for 4.

  The ivory Lexus was in front of Adriennes house again, but I was too distraught over Dorothys disappearance to grant the solution to that puzzle much of my attention. Lauren was at a dinner meeting with a committee that was organizing a benefit for the Rocky Mountain MS Center, so the house was quiet when I got inside. I took care of Emily's pressing needs-food, water, exercise.

  A. J. Simes called while I was outside with the dog. She left a terse message approving my request to fly to California to interview Satoshi Hamamoto. The approval felt like a small victory. I started throwing together a sandwich for myself for dinner while I mentally plotted when I could squeeze an abbreviated trip to Palo Alto into my schedule.

  Sam interrupted my plans with a phone call and an invitation to go out for a beer to talk about the videotape of news clips about the murder at the Silky Road Ranch that I'd dropped off at the police department. My impulse was to stay home and pout about my rotten day, but I reminded myself he had done me a favor by looking at the tape, and I agreed to meet him at a barbecue place close to his house on North Broadway in twenty minutes.

  Sam was in a good mood. That helped.

  The first beer helped, too. But not as much as the second.

  I'd already decided that I wouldn't tell Sam about Dorothys disappearance in Steamboat until we were done talking about the murder at the Silky Road Ranch.

  I didn't want to distract him.

  It turned out that Sam had been so troubled by two aspects of the news coverage of Gloria Welle's death that he'd made some calls himself to learn what he could about the details of the crime. It turned out that the two parts that had bothered him were things to which I hadn't given a second thought.

  I told him that.

  "That's why I'm the cop," he explained.

  "So the first problem, the problem with the shooting, what's that? I don't understand." "Like I said, the first thing I don't like is that the offender shot her right through the closet door. I've never heard of such a thing. This guy-this Brian Sample-he supposedly went there wanting vengeance, right?"

  He waited for me to reply. I said, "Yeah, that's the assumption."