Remote Control

by Stephen White

  “What about her medicine?”

  “I’ll take it to her.”

  “Will they let you see her?” Alan felt defeated. “If they do, will you tell her that I love her?”

  Cozy smiled warmly, his face conveying a degree of compassion that surprised Alan. “I probably won’t see her until after she’s booked over at the jail, if at all. Casey will be the one to meet with her. If the cops decided to do Lauren a favor, then Casey may have already spoken to her. And…I think we may discover the answer to that mystery momentarily.”

  “How?”

  Cozy pointed out the windshield of the car at a figure huddled in a heavy coat, jogging flatfooted out the front door of the police station. “If I’m not mistaken, I think that shimmering red hair belongs to Casey Sparrow.”

  Cozy waited until Casey was ten feet from the front of his BMW before he reached over in front of Alan and pressed on the horn button for about three seconds. Casey started at the sound and slipped onto her butt in the snow, her briefcase flying.

  Alan jumped from the car and offered his hand to help her to her feet. He said, “Casey, you okay?” as she eased herself up and started to wipe snow off her clothing.

  “Did you blast that horn at me? Jesus Christ, Alan, what the hell were you thinking? You almost gave me a heart attack. Where’s my briefcase?”

  “No, it was Cozy, he’s in the car. He hit the horn. I don’t think he meant to frighten you, I’m sure it was inadvertent.”

  “You don’t know him, do you? Cozy doesn’t have accidents. Cozy causes other people to have accidents.”

  “Casey, were you able to see Lauren? What’s going to happen? How is she holding up?”

  “Let’s get out of the snow, and I’ll tell you what’s going on.”

  Alan Gregory returned to the driver’s seat of Cozy’s car. Casey Sparrow slid into the backseat.

  Casey said, “Hey, Cozy, I owe you one. Thanks for helping Lauren out tonight.”

  Alan’s ear told him that two messages were being communicated. Casey was not only warning Cozy about upcoming retribution for the horn thing, she was also thanking him for being so responsive to her urgent plea for help on a weekend night. Although his experience with Cozier Maitlin was extremely limited, Alan guessed that Cozy was disposed to hear only the latter of Casey’s two messages.

  “What do you know so far, Casey?”

  “I know Lauren’s on her way to the jail and that we need to get over there so I can talk with her some more. Because I still don’t understand what happened tonight. So move. Alan, why are you driving Cozy’s limo?”

  Cozy answered for him. “There are actually two reasons that Alan is driving. First, I am temporarily without possession of my driver’s license, and second, I don’t believe in driving in blizzards.”

  Casey made a scolding face at him. “No license? A DUI, Cozy? Really?”

  “Hardly. A speed trap thing.”

  “Speeding is only a few points. How many times? What are we talking, ten?”

  “Four, thank you. On one occasion I apparently exceeded the speed limit by a factor of three.”

  Casey shook her head. “You’re a slow learner, Cozy. Alan, you know where the jail is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why don’t we head out? I’ll fill you in on what I know. And you can tell me if you discovered anything.”

  Alan said, “Let’s take two cars. Yours and mine, leave Cozy’s here. It’s not made for snow, anyway.”

  “Good idea. I’ll take Cozy in my truck. We’ll meet you over there.”

  Cozy said, “Wait a second,” and whispered something to Casey. She listened and nodded her head.

  Cozy faced Alan. “Alan, there’s no point in you going to the jail. You’re not going to see Lauren tonight. After hours, like this, they won’t even let you inside and you’ll end up sitting in your car freezing in the parking lot until we’re done. Give Casey the medicine you have with you. She’ll take it in to Lauren. Then, if you still want to be helpful, go back up the hill and get Erin. She’ll be done soon. Then go home and try and get some sleep; you’ll need it. Lauren will have her first appearance tomorrow afternoon. You can see her then.”

  “At the Justice Center?”

  “No. At the jail. There’s a courtroom there that they use for pretrial appearances. But we’ll be in touch before then.”

  Alan began to protest, “Casey—”

  “He’s right. Do what he says. It’s best.” Her voice was soft.

  Alan turned his head away and got lost in the static of the falling snow. Reluctantly he handed over the medicine and opened the car door.

  “My beeper is on now, okay? You’ll call me with any news, right? I mean anything.”

  “It’s better this way, Casey. We don’t need him pacing around outside the jail.”

  “I know. But I want to take my truck.”

  “Fine. You talked with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “She’s emotional, she’s scared, she’s humiliated, and despite it all, she’s managing to keep her dignity. They haven’t wrestled that from her yet. I don’t know if I could go through what she’s going through without some self-pity. I don’t see any in her, at all. I truly admire that.”

  “That is all nice and humane and compassionate of you, Casey,” he said with mild rebuke in his tone, “but at the moment I’m actually more interested in her view of the events of the evening that led to her arrest.”

  “Wheat from the chaff time, Cozy? Bottom line is that she’s basically saying that she doesn’t think she did it.”

  He smiled in the dark. “Gosh, now that’s a novel defense. I’ve never used it before.” Cozy was intent on getting a reading on his colleague as much as he was eager to get a feeling for his new client.

  The windows of the BMW were plastered with a mix of ice and snow. The inside of the car seemed to Casey Sparrow like the igloo of a wealthy Eskimo.

  Casey said, “You know Emma Spire, don’t you? You know she lives in town?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, our client is maintaining that this all has something to do with Emma Spire and that Lauren was at her house protecting her against a rape of some kind. Lauren is insisting that we leave Emma out of it. I don’t know the hows or the whys. We were interrupted before I got the details. You know about her illness?”

  “Obliquely.”

  “Her vision is deteriorating badly.”

  “The illness is…?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “People say she has something bad. That’s all I know.”

  “Apparently, it’s multiple sclerosis. A big secret. I don’t see how she could have shot a man from that far away.”

  MS? thought Cozy. “The cops won’t care if it was a lucky shot. They care about pulling the trigger and hitting the target. They don’t add or take away points for luck. But the Emma Spire angle? I knew she lived up there. I asked the husband about it. He, too, is being quite circumspect. I think he knows the details, at least some of them. I’m afraid we need to proceed tonight as though our client may be more culpable than either of us would like to believe. What did you mean, by the way, by ‘a rape of some kind’?”

  “I don’t know what I meant. That’s one of the reasons I want to talk to Lauren again tonight. Lauren seems to think Emma Spire is still in some danger.”

  If there were a more forlorn circumstance on the face of the planet than a journey to jail in the backseat of a squad car at midnight in a blizzard, Lauren was having trouble imagining what it might be.

  She was actually most frightened of the isolating quiet, of being ignored as though she had no physical presence at all. In the time it had taken her to squeeze a handgun trigger, her status had devolved from that of esteemed citizen to that of offender. As far as the justice system was concerned, it was as though she had checked her identity and her worth and her humanity into the evidence locker along with her cl
othing.

  She wondered if she would ever get any of it back.

  The pain behind her eyes hadn’t diminished. That meant the episode with her vision wasn’t over and that she might suffer even more vision deterioration before the night was over. The gray fuzz on the edges of her perception might soon grow as black as charcoal.

  She felt the car slither into another slow turn. They were now on Valmont. One more turn to come at Airport Road. Then a minute later they would be at the jail.

  God.

  She slunk farther down onto the seat. Silently she mouthed, “Alan, where are you? Please help me. Please.”

  Lauren had never entered the jail through the garage before.

  On the back side of the building, away from the public entrance, the black-and-white patrol car stopped at a speaker mounted on a pole. The officer opened his window and pressed a button. A voice responded. In the backseat, Lauren couldn’t understand what was being said. An icy wind blew snow into the car. The officer who was driving identified himself and said he had a prisoner for booking. A security camera that was directed at his windshield monitored the whole interchange.

  In front of them, a big industrial door opened slowly, revealing a starkly lit garage big enough to hold four vehicles in two lanes. The patrol car pulled in alongside a patrol car from the Longmont Police Department. The Boulder County Jail, staffed by the Boulder County Sheriff’s Department, served the whole county, from the eleven-thousand-foot mountains to the wheat-carpeted plains.

  The big door closed behind the Boulder patrol car as soon as it entered. Most nights, the deputies closed the door quickly as a security concern. This night they were more interested in keeping the ferocity of the storm outside.

  A female sheriff’s deputy waited on one side of the garage. Malloy had called the jail and warned the booking sergeant that a female prisoner was on the way. The sheriff’s deputy waited until the driver of the patrol car had pulled himself out of the car, then she opened the backseat door and half-lifted Lauren out into the garage.

  The Boulder cop came around the car. The deputy said, “Miserable out there, huh?”

  “Awful. I hate these fall snowstorms. We almost got sideswiped by a pickup on Valmont. He barely missed us. I’m still shaking.”

  “People can’t drive in the snow.”

  “Wish I owned a body shop tomorrow.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  The deputy finally turned her attention to Lauren and said, “This way,” tugging Lauren to the north side of the garage where she stood her in front of a blue screen marked “Video Search.” The deputy patted Lauren down much more thoroughly than she had been searched at the police department. Lauren felt the deputy’s hands go places that she had never considered someone’s hands would ever go without her permission. Still cuffed, Lauren was then led through a heavy steel jail door into a small window-lined anteroom that was all cinder block and metal.

  The deputy said, “Take a seat,” pointing her finger at a stainless-steel bench that folded down from the wall across the room.

  Lauren couldn’t see well enough to tell exactly where the little bench was and since her hands were still hooked she couldn’t feel for it. Finally, she thought she had figured out where it was, stooped to sit, and tumbled off the edge to the floor.

  The deputy asked the Boulder cop, “She drunk? High on something?” and began to help her prisoner to her feet.

  The BPD officer said, “Didn’t think so, nobody told me anything about that. Just told me to keep my damn mouth shut.”

  Lauren blinked hard and said, “I’ve been having some trouble with my vision.”

  The deputy looked at the patrol cop. Her expression said, Yeah, right.

  “You have glasses, honey?” She had changed her tone; she was talking to Lauren as though she were a drunk. She asked the cop, “She have glasses with her?”

  “Maybe Detective Malloy has them. I don’t. He’s on his way over in a while to do the arrest paperwork.”

  The deputy guided Lauren to the bench and pushed down on her shoulders until she was perched on it. “Lift your feet now, one at a time.”

  Lauren did. Wearing latex gloves, the deputy pulled Lauren’s wet shoes off, then her socks, and carefully examined the insides of her shoes and the soles of her feet for contraband or weapons.

  To the officer who brought Lauren over, the deputy said, “She’s clean. You can unhook her now.”

  He pulled out a key and released the restraints. “The cuffs aren’t mine. They belong to Detective Malloy. Just hold ’em for him, if you don’t mind. Like I said, he’ll be over here soon enough.”

  “We can’t start booking her until he logs her in. You want to do that part before you go? It’d speed things up. I’ll get you some coffee.”

  “No, just park her in a holding cell. She can wait to be booked. Anybody tell you that she’s a deputy DA?”

  “No. No shit.” The deputy gazed down at Lauren, still seated on the stainless-steel bench, as though she had just realized her prisoner was still in the room.

  “Here? Boulder County? What’d she do?”

  “Yeah, here. She shot somebody is all I know. Half the brass in town is at the department tonight frettin’ about this and that. Cross your t’s and dot your i’s on this one, that’d be my advice.”

  “Huh, I appreciate you telling me. In that case, I think I will leave her out of the pit and stick her in a holding cell until the detective gets here to log her in. Maybe let my sergeant handle this.” She fingered the sleeve of Lauren’s police department sweats. “You want these clothes back? I can get her changed out before you go.”

  “Not my problem. Work that all out with the detective. I’m out of here. Night.”

  Lauren was terrified.

  She knew the jail terrain and although it had never frightened her before, it did now. The booking room lay on the other side of the far door. She knew the booking room well, knew most of the faces and some of the names of the sheriff’s deputies who staffed it. She knew what the computers did and where the cameras pointed. She knew where each of the holding cells was located and she knew which door led to the courtroom.

  She knew where the print roller was.

  She knew that a handful of minor-league felons would be in the pit grumbling about being busted while they watched whatever drivel was on the color TV that was mounted high on the wall out of their reach.

  She felt so alone at that moment that she feared she had to remember to breathe and that she would somehow forget and she would just die.

  “Come on, ma’am, let’s go. Get you some jail clothes. Hope you like blue.”

  Lauren dreaded the next few steps. She figured that everyone wearing a uniform in the booking room was waiting for her entrance. She hung her head as she was led through the booking room, then quickly out the other side, and down a hallway to a small dressing room with a shower. She imagined the glares of the deputies in the booking room, the odd mixture of disdain and pity on their faces. She wondered if the sergeant who ran the booking room was there. She was fond of him and didn’t want to face him under these circumstances.

  From previous visits to the jail, Lauren was familiar with the changing rooms. Once inside, she felt along the wall for a bench and sat. “You want underwear? We got bras and panties. I’m going to let you keep those shoes, though, they seem to fit you okay.”

  In response to the question about the underwear, Lauren, who was usually incredibly picky about her underwear, said, “Please.” Her voice felt tiny, entirely too small for someone in need of grown-up undergarments.

  Thirty seconds later the deputy threw the underwear and the navy blue jail issue into Lauren’s lap. Other than the color and the big BCSD stenciled on the back, the outfit was reminiscent of surgeon’s scrubs.

  “Let me know if these don’t fit. I’ll try to get you some others, but mostly I’m pretty good with sizes. Used to work a little retail over the holidays and such. And—
trust me, you don’t want to ignore this—if you need to use the facilities, these commodes in here are a lot more private than what you’re going to find out in the holding cells. I’d recommend these.”

  Lauren began to cry.

  “Jeez, honey, don’t go crying. We’ll get you down to the infirmary and see if Demain’s free. After that, we’re going to isolate you as best we can. Can’t really risk having you in the women’s module or hanging out with the customers that are still in booking, you know what I mean. Those folks might recognize you. Can’t have that given what you may have already done to them.”

  Lauren knew that all these things represented special treatment from the deputy. Her horror was in realizing how terrible this felt even with the additional favors.

  How bad can it get?

  She remembered what Emma was facing and shuddered. Right now, she thought, I’ll take the assault on my freedom and privacy over the assault on hers.

  Despite the horrendous weather conditions she faced at the scene of the shooting, Erin Rand settled into her usual investigatory routine. For Erin, that meant doing the easy things first. She liked to feel oriented.

  After yanking her hat down tight and tugging her collar up to her chin, she high-stepped through the snow, methodically covering the perimeter of the crime scene tape, stopping every so often to add a detail to a diagram she was trying to sketch.

  As she strolled, her notepad became soaked and she gave up trying to add new details. She hiked the taped perimeter once more, this time letting her camera do the recording. The snow complicated everything.

  She decided to move her action off the street and begin to try to goad some neighborhood residents into speaking with her. Maybe one of them would even invite her inside and let her warm her fingers and dry off.

  Recalling Detective Purdy’s advice, Erin aimed herself at the house on what she thought was the southeastern corner of the block. The porch light was still on, though, and she focused with total determination on the climb to the front door. A long staircase rose from the sidewalk to the house. The treads had disappeared under the snow and from Erin’s vantage the path up appeared to be nothing more than a steep hill awaiting the first sled of winter. With the toe of one boot she felt for the first step, grabbed the wrought-iron railing, and began to pull her way up the slope.