PART FIVE. The Houseguest
I wasn't too surprised that Kimber Lister didn't immediately return my call after I'd left him a message asking for an update about A. J."s health. I knew from experience how reticent she was to discuss her illness, and Kimber had already informed me that she wanted the facts of her current condition handled with discretion.
When Kimber finally did phone, he didn't mention A. J. at all. The purpose of his call was to inform me that he was coming to Colorado to coordinate Locard's search of Gloria's Silky Road Ranch. He understood that we had a pleasant guest room and wondered if he could impose upon Lauren and me to stay in our home for one night before he headed into the mountains.
Initially, I was surprised by his request. After a moment's contemplation, I was shocked by it. Kimber Lister did not strike me as the guest-room-of-an-almost-complete-stranger type of traveler. I would have suspected him to be someone who assiduously counted guidebook stars prior to choosing his hotels.
I stammered out an invitation and told him we would be delighted to have him as our guest.
He thanked me, said he would be arriving late in the afternoon on Thursday, and asked that I send him directions to our house. I promised I would and wondered aloud if anyone else from the team would be coming to Colorado.
"Yes," he said.
"Others will be arriving. Given the political ramifications of our next move, we are proceeding with utmost caution."
"Because of the potential involvement of Dr. Welle?"
"Yes, because of the potential involvement of Dr. Welle."
Kimber arrived via Lincoln Town Car about a half hour after I got home from my office. The car was a deep navy in color and the windows were tinted as dark as the law allowed. A driver in a polo shirt and khakis deposited Kimber's luggage-two small honey-leather cases-on our tiny front porch. No money changed hands. The Lincoln kicked up a lot of dust as it exited the lane.
I'd prepared for Kimber's arrival by depositing Emily at Adrienne and Jonas's house. The sounds of her determined barking nevertheless pierced the quiet lane.
I concluded that I had been wise in deciding to introduce the dog to our guest later in the evening.
Kimber's handshake was meaty and moist. I noticed that he was sweating; tiny beads of moisture dotted his upper lip and his brow. He kept raising his chin into the air as though his collar were too tight. It wasn't. The top button of his denim shirt wasn't even closed. I worried that he was having an acute reaction to the altitude change.
"Do you mind if…?" he asked, swallowing.
"Maybe we… can-would it be all right if we moved inside your home?" He forced a smile. His usually sonorous voice was oddly hollow.
"Of course," I said.
"Please come in." I led him to the western side of the house and settled him onto a chair in the living room. The weather was putting on a show that afternoon. The sky directly to the west was a brilliant blue, but immense thunderheads had flared near the Continental Divide and were flanking Boulder to both the north and the south. Lightning jumped up from the mountainsides and lit the gray walls of the storms as the rumble of thunder shook the house.
Kimber didn't seem to notice any of it. He actually rotated on his chair so that his back faced the glass. I excused myself to get him a big glass of water.
Dehydration is often a major factor inhibiting altitude adjustment. By the time I returned to the living room Kimber was breathing through his open mouth, his chest rising noticeably with every inhale. One of his eyelids seemed to twitch as he blinked.
I sat down across from him and placed the water close by.
"Kimber," I said softly in my office voice, "are you all right?"
He raised his eyebrows and shook his head.
"No. Not really." He swallowed again.
"I'm wondering, although I hate to impose further… but… do you have a room where I can rest for a… few minutes.
Someplace that's maybe… oh… not quite so bright? Darker would be great.
Ideal even." I stood and asked him to follow me. I led him downstairs to the guest room, where I pulled the curtains across the windows. His bedroom was now cool and dark. I could almost feel his sense of relief as the room fell into shadows.
"This will be fine. I think I'll, um, I'll just rest for a little bit. The travel? I'm not accustomed anymore."
"I'll be upstairs, Kimber. No rush. Please rest as long as you would like.
Later we'll discuss dinner."
"You're so kind," he said. As I pulled the door closed I saw that he was already flat on his back on the bed, a pillow plopped over his face.
I wondered about migraines.
As Lauren arrived home from work, her car was being tailed by a Ford Taurus driven by Russ Claven. His front-seat passenger was Flynn Coe. The patch on Flynn's eye that day was egg-yolk yellow. From a distance I thought it looked like corduroy.
I'd been outside on the lane playing a game with the dog and Jonas that involved my alternately throwing tennis balls for Emily to run after and not retrieve and for Jonas to jump at and not catch. At the sound of the cars I scrambled to corral both the child and the dog.
Lauren was out of her car before russ and Flynn got out of theirs. She hugged me quickly and asked, "Were we expecting Flynn and Russ?"
I whispered back, "No. And Kimber's already arrived. He's downstairs resting.
He looked terrible when he got here. I'm afraid he's not well." "Okay," she said, and hustled over to give Jonas a kiss and help restrain Emily, who was not pleased at the arrival of strangers on her home turf.
Flynn picked up the vibes before Lauren and I had a chance to explain.
"Russ just admitted to me that he never got around to calling you to let you know we were coming. I'm so sorry to burst in on you like this. Just point us to a motel. We'll be fine." I said, "We'd love to have you stay with us, Flynn, but Kimber Lister is already here. He's resting down in the guest room."
"What?"
Flynn's reaction surprised me.
"Lauren and I didn't know you and Russ were coming, Flynn. When Kimber asked, we agreed to let him stay with us." She spun and said to Russ, "Get this: Kimber's here, Russ. Right now. As we speak."
Russ was leaning down in the driver's seat, fumbling with levers that he hoped would pop the latch on the trunk. He stopped what he was doing and said, "What?
You're kidding. Colorado, here? Or here, here?" He pointed at the dirt by his feet.
"Both."
"No shit? I never thought I'd see it."
Flynn turned back to me.
"I never thought I'd see it, either."
"See what?" Lauren and I asked in unison.
"See him leave the neighborhood where he lives in Adams Morgan. He hasn't been outside-what would you say, Russ?-a three-block radius of that place of his since he moved in."
"No more than three blocks. Maybe only two," Russ agreed.
Lauren said, "You have to be kidding."
I recalled the sweating, the nervousness, the agitation, the change in his breathing. I realized that I hadn't been witnessing altitude sickness or an incipient migraine headache. I'd been witnessing a panic attack.
I asked, "Agoraphobia?" Russ said, "Bingo."
Jonas and I consumed a few minutes in a heated negotiation over custody of Emily. I wanted to take her home with me right then. Jonas wanted to keep her at his house forever and ever. Our compromise? Jonas could have the dog until dinnertime.
After I turned Jonas back over to his nanny, Lauren, Flynn, Russ, and I moved inside to the living room.
"That's why Kimber founded Lo-card?" I asked.
"Because he has agoraphobia?"
Russ answered my question.
"After Kimber's illness progressed-I mean after it got severe enough that he was a virtual prisoner to it-he obviously couldn't continue working in the field, so-"
"Working in the field as what?" Lauren asked.
"What's his specialty?
"
"Kimber was the head of the FBI division that uses computers to assist investigations. He's considered the top forensic-database guy in the country, maybe the world. He's also a wizard on the Internet."
I was impressed.
"Anyway, he wanted to continue his work after he got sick. Because of his reputation in the field he had already been invited to be a member of Vidocq, in Philadelphia. You know Vidocq, right? After he went on medical leave he went ahead and joined, became a full-fledged VSM-that's a Vidocq Society Member.
But soon enough he discovered that the train trips from D.C. to Philly for the Vidocq luncheons were impossible for him to manage-again, because of his phobias-and he was forced to resign his membership. That's when he and A. J, and a couple of others began to develop the concept of Locard." "Which," Lauren said, "always meets in Washington. In Adams Morgan. In Kimber's loft."
"Right," said Flynn.
"And to my knowledge Kimber hasn't done a day of fieldwork since the organization started assisting on cases in the mid-nineties. Until today. Which says something about how seriously he views the progress of this particular investigation."
Russ agreed.
"He knows that Locard can't afford to be wrong if we're about to accuse Raymond Welle of complicity in the murder of two teenage girls. If we blow this one, we're toast. Kimber knows that."
Flynn raised her bottle of beer.
"To Kimber, I guess. And us. I hope we don't screw this up."
We toasted Kimber. And not screwing up.
The sound of the downstairs toilet flushing alerted me that Kimber might be joining us soon. But then the clarion call of the plumbing let us know that he had started using the downstairs shower. By the time he'd climbed upstairs a pizza delivery had just arrived and I was setting out beer and opening a bottle of wine. The sun was completely obscured by the mountains and the end-of-the-day thunder-and-lightning show had changed venues and was illuminating the eastern plains and not the foothills. Kimber appeared rejuvenated, the tension in his manner greatly diminished. But the confidence he'd displayed in Washington was absent-in our house he was obviously awkward and out of his element.
I walked the western perimeter of the living room and, one by one, lowered the window shades that we occasionally employed to block the searing rays of the late-afternoon sun. The big room upstairs quickly grew even duskier.
At Kimber's urging, Flynn, as case manager, reviewed the progress of the investigation of the two dead girls for Lauren and me, highlighting the forensic findings that had focused attention on the Silky Road. The key pieces of evidence, it turned out, were eight minute grains of rock that had been removed from the skull wound of Tami Franklin.
"That was the first wound she suffered that night," Russ said.
"It would not have been fatal on its own, not immediately, though it was a bad injury. It crushed bone"-he stood between Lauren and me and placed his fingers on a spot about three inches behind our right ears--"right about here. The wound was eight centimeters by eleven centimeters. The grains were recovered during the initial autopsy. They'd been examined back in 1989, but no progress was made on identification at the time."
Flynn took over again.
"But we enlisted a geologist-actually, a petrologist-and he's been able to confirm that that the grains were from a relatively unusual form of imported limestone. There were, in addition to the rock fragments, grains of a man-made mortar. We assumed we were looking for a rock wall made out of limestone. So we began -looking for commercial and residential installations that might have used that specific rock for ornamental walls in Routt County. The building department records in Routt County weren't much help. Chief Smith began checking with local contractors and masons. He finally found a place that recalled using some of this imported limestone for a series of rock knee walls." Lauren said, "The Silky Road Ranch."
Kimber pursed his lips and nodded.
"Right. But even that information wasn't enough to justify a search. Not when the target happens to be the private property of a prominent member of Congress" Flynn looked at me.
"We'd been hoping that the case file you got from Welle-Mariko's?-might offer some support for Welle's involvement, but so far the results from the documents examiner have been inconclusive. Still, the fruit of your interviews, Alan-especially the information about Joey and Mariko's sister, Satoshi-kept leading us back to the Silky Road. Eventually, with Satoshis testimony that her sister took her to see Welle, we could even place Mariko at the ranch the night she disappeared."
"But not Tami," I said.
"Right. Not Tami. And it was Tami's skull that produced the rock fragments.
Reluctantly, we concluded that we needed more evidence to justify asking for permission to search the ranch. We wanted to have enough evidence to proceed to the district attorney if Welle denied us access on a voluntary basis." Flynn said, "When Russ and I came out here to visit a couple of weeks back, we reviewed all the lab samples that were taken back in 1989. We went back over the girls' clothes looking for trace. Russ looked at the original autopsy photos and reexamined the wounds from the amputations. We used techniques that were unavailable back then to look for latents on all the physical evidence."
Russ made a noise with his lips and said, "Nada."
"Until we got to the splinter."
"What splinter?"
"A postmortem splinter in Mariko's left arm, just below her elbow. The splinter was large-over a centimeter-and was totally embedded beneath her skin. Like the rock fragments removed from Tami's skull wound, the splinter was removed and cataloged during the original autopsy, but its significance was never appreciated."
"The splinter is of a hardwood with a polyurethane finish. It's sanded flat on one side. We assumed it had come from a hardwood floor or a finished piece of furniture, like a tabletop."
The phone rang. Lauren jumped up to answer it in the kitchen.
Flynn took over the story.
"I sent it out for more analysis. Turns out the wood is ebony. An unusual wood for furniture, a highly unusual wood for flooring. For us, that's good. We went back to the contractor who built the new buildings at the Silky Road and asked him if the flooring sub used any ebony." "The doorways," I said.
"There's a dark border on each side of all the entry-door thresholds. Is that ebony?"
Flynn nodded.
"That's right. According to the contractor, that wood bordering each door is ebony," Flynn said.
"We've concluded that there's a high degree of probability that the girls were killed at the Silky Road."
Two minutes later Lauren rejoined us in the living room and said, "Excuse me.
Everybody? Percy Smith is on the phone. There's a fire burning at the Silky Road Ranch. He wants to talk to Flynn."
Before he'd called my house trying to track down Flynn Coe, Percy Smith had already interviewed Sylvie Amato.
Sylvie had first smelled smoke while she was watching ESPN, hoping for some late coverage of women's tennis, which was her main summer thing. Skiing was her main winter thing. Sylvie had been killing time while waiting for her boyfriend, Jeff, to get home from his bar tending gig in town. They rented the old frame house that the two lesbian housekeepers had occupied when Gloria Welle was still alive. Sylvie also earned a few extra bucks by working as resident caretaker on the ranch and by acting as loyal gofer for Welle and his entourage during their infrequent visits to the Elk River Valley. I recalled that Sylvie was the one who had fetched me coffee in the Dilbert mug while I was cooling my heels with Phil Barrett waiting for Ray Welle to return from hitting nine with Joey Franklin. I imagined that her two jobs left Sylvie plenty of time to play tennis in the summer and to ski in the winter.
The smell of smoke on a warm early-summer night had been sufficient to yank Sylvie's attention away from the tube. She lifted her strong body from the floor in front of the TV to an open north-facing window and sniffed enough dry mountain air to conclude that the source of th
e smoke was probably an illegal campfire. She guessed the trespassers were somewhere down by the river or maybe even farther east, along the banks of Mad Creek. God, she hoped that nobody was camping on the ranch. She'd catch hell from Phil Barrett if he discovered that the perimeter of the Silky Road was being violated.
Sylvie pulled on some shoes and stepped from the kitchen out onto the covered porch that wrapped around three sides of the old ranch house. She was hoping to see the flicker of campfire flames someplace down-valley to reassure herself that whoever had pitched a tent had done so well outside the fences of the Silky Road.
She scanned the western sky and searched the wooded banks of the Elk River. She didn't see any sign of a fire down there, but the smell of smoke was even stronger than it had been before. As she turned the corner of the porch to check in another direction she couldn't miss the fact that the sky to the southwest was lit up like a carnival midway. Sylvie was certain that she was looking at a forest fire that was burning dangerously close by.
She ran inside and called 911.
The volunteer fire department from the tiny up-valley town of Clark arrived at the Silky Road Ranch minutes before the professional firefighters made it up the hill from Steamboat Springs. Both companies had steeled themselves for the grueling task of trying to contain an incipient forest fire that would immediately threaten life, property, and some of the most beautiful wilderness in the state. But what they discovered instead was a building fire that had fully engulfed the bunkhouse at the Silky Road Ranch. The roof of the adjacent stable was just starting to smolder. The closest woods were at least two hundred yards away though, and so far, no embers had drifted over to ignite the trees.
Since the bunkhouse was unoccupied, the firefighters sacrificed it and concentrated their attention on the stable, which they saved. They also managed to keep embers from igniting the drying grasses or the nearby trees.
Percy Smith harbored no doubts that the cause of the fire had been arson.
Lauren decided to stay in Boulder.
I could tell that she was eager to go to Steamboat with her, Flynn, Russ, and me, and I assumed that she was staying behind in order to conserve her strength for the baby. It was one of the first of countless sacrifices she and I would make for someone we had not yet met.
Cold Case Page 28
