The skin of the man lying on the mattress was inhumanly gray, the color of wet cement. Casey thought it should be easy to identify the man—how many gray people could possibly have been reported missing out there?
The patient’s right ear was red-orange like the glow of a burner on an electric range. His left arm was confined from the biceps down in a splint and soft cast. His wide forehead was scraped raw on one side. A sheet covered him to his chest, which was hairless and strong. Bands of gauze and tape wrapped the area between the top of the sheet and his nipples. Monitor wires snaked off the gurney and two infusion pumps dumped fluids into his veins, while a drain gurgled and sucked waste from a tube in his abdomen. His arms were thick and defined by long ridges of muscle, even in sleep.
Casey guessed that the man was either in his late thirties or his early forties.
“Ready?” Lauren asked.
“What’s the best way to do this? Do you want to try to stand up?”
“Peripheral vision is all I have, and my left eye seems better than my right. That’s how I want to look at him, sideways from my left. Help me up, Case. I feel shaky.”
Casey stood next to Lauren as she raised herself from the wheelchair and supported her under one elbow and across her back.
Lauren was wearing foam-rubber hospital-issue slippers. She shuffled them on the floor as she rotated ninety degrees and tried to focus her gaze on the man on the gurney.
At first the details were too hazy. He was the outline of a man, not a man at all. Lauren was bombarded with the image of the ghost in the blue hood in the storm. The rage.
She couldn’t rely on memory, she had to know. She blinked, trying to clear her vision. Tilted her head a few degrees more, steadying herself with a hand on Casey’s arm.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“Oh, boy, here we go, I was afraid of this,” Casey said, guiding her client, who was quivering, back onto the seat of the wheelchair.
“Five minutes alone, that’s it,” said Malloy. “I don’t have all night to wait for the two of you to decide whether you’re going to tell me what you saw in there.”
“What is it with you and time? You’re worse than a lawyer with that watch of yours.”
Casey pushed Lauren’s wheelchair past Malloy into an empty nurses lounge and closed the door, leaving the detective in the hallway. She hunched down in front of her client and put one of her hands on top of each of Lauren’s.
“My gosh, your hands are so warm, Lauren. I take it that you know who John Doe is?”
Lauren nodded. “Yes. His name is Kevin Quirk.”
“How do you know him?”
Lauren shook her head, trying to find some way to make sense of what had happened. “I just met him a couple of days ago. He was a Secret Service agent who was assigned to protect Emma. She really likes him. God, I hope I didn’t actually shoot him.”
As a denial from a client charged with attempted murder, Casey had been hoping for something a little more definitive.
Scott Malloy paced nearby outside the closed door, glancing at his watch, not exactly eavesdropping, not averse to stray sounds floating his way, either.
Through the heavy door, he was pretty sure it was Casey Sparrow who he heard say, “Oh shit.”
Casey said, incredulously, “You mean Emma is still being protected by the Secret Service?”
“No, she’s not. Kevin’s retired. He owns a security company in Colorado Springs. She had asked him for some help recently.”
“The Springs? Not exactly my favorite town. What kind of help did she need?”
“Protection.”
“From?”
Lauren exhaled slowly and said, “It’s complicated.” She forced a smile. “Emma was…the target of a carjacking or kidnapping attempt a few days ago.”
“I don’t remember reading anything about that.”
“We didn’t report it. Emma didn’t want the press to know.”
“You said ‘we’ didn’t report it?”
“Alan and I were there, too. See, Casey, I keep telling you it’s complicated.”
Casey laughed affectionately.
“It is, Case. Really.”
“You no longer have to convince me. Put your lawyer hat on for a minute. This will have to be your call because, quite simply, I don’t have enough facts to make it. Do we help Malloy out, tell him who this guy is, or do you play dumb?”
Lauren considered the ramifications of helping the police with the identification. Once the authorities had Kevin Quirk’s name, it would lead the police directly to Emma Spire’s door.
What had Kevin been doing in the middle of the road in front of Emma’s house last night? Why was he so angry when I saw him? Why wouldn’t he identify himself when I called out?
She had plenty of new questions and no real answers to any of the old ones. She said, “I think we’re talking ‘blind,’ Case, not ‘dumb.’ And, no, I’m not playing.”
Malloy was livid. “What do you mean, she doesn’t know who it is? That’s bullshit.”
“Our agreement, Detective, was that it was our prerogative to decide if Lauren could determine the man’s identity. She’s not one hundred percent certain and we’ve chosen to exercise that prerogative.”
“But, I heard you—” He caught himself before he revealed his eavesdropping.
“You heard me what, Detective?”
“I heard you say you and your client would like to be cooperative.”
“Nice recovery, Scott. Fatigue’s catching up with you, isn’t it? Sometimes when you roll the dice, you crap out. This is one of those times.”
“The man’s health is in jeopardy. His family could provide important history. You saw him; he’s in critical condition.”
“Have the doctor call me. Where’s Lauren’s bodyguard? I’m taking her back downstairs to her room. Want to come?”
Cozier Maitlin’s cellular phone was chirping in his pocket as he rejoined Alan and Adrienne in the kitchen. He smiled at Adrienne and said, “No smoking guns,” while he flipped the phone open.
“Maitlin,” he offered in greeting.
“Hi, it’s Casey. I’ve got some news.”
For a full minute, Cozy listened to Casey Sparrow’s account of Lauren’s identification of the wounded man. Then he spent an equal amount of time explaining to Casey about the shooting on the Downtown Mall and the imminent search of Lauren and Alan’s residence. He ended the call without bothering to say good-bye.
Alan interjected, “How’s Lauren?”
“About the same. Casey says they moved her to a private room and gave her something to help her go back to sleep. Casey’s going to spend the night there, at the hospital, rather than trying to go home.
“Lauren ID’s the guy. Said to tell you it was ‘Q,’ that you would fill me in on who he is.”
Alan’s stomach heaved. Kevin Quirk? God, that complicates things.
Maitlin continued, “Casey must think that somebody involved in this actually has the ability to listen in on my cell phone. Anyway, for reasons I hope you are about to make clear, Lauren elected not to share the identification of the shooting victim with Detective Malloy, who, according to Casey, ‘wasn’t pleasant’ and who has now departed the hospital for other pastures. I imagine, this one.
“So Alan, enlighten me. Who’s Q?”
Alan turned his back to his guests and put a kettle on the stove for tea. He didn’t want them to see his face as he considered Lauren’s revelation about the shooting victim.
“His name is Kevin Quirk. He was a Secret Service agent who protected Emma for a while.”
Adrienne and Cozy settled side by side on stools that had been handmade by Adrienne’s deceased husband, Peter. Alan was distracted for a moment considering what Peter would think about this middle-of-the-night state of affairs, but yanked himself back to reality after recognizing that he missed his dead friend at the oddest of times.
Cozy said, “Our shooting victim is a Secret
Service agent? That should make things easy for your wife. Jesus.”
“Past tense, Cozy. Quirk retired from the Secret Service, is in the computer security business. He was helping Emma now as a friend, trying to help her get the disc back.”
“He didn’t have this disc with him when he was shot, did he? Does anyone know that? You said he was looking for it, right?”
Adrienne was uncharacteristically quiet.
Alan chose his words carefully. He said, “Yes, Emma had told him about it being missing, and had asked for his help in getting it back. I saw him earlier today and he was going out looking for it.”
“And we don’t know if he was successful in that endeavor, do we? At this point we are left to assume that searching for the disc is what got him shot. God, I wonder if the police have it.”
Alan felt sweat beading on his temples and thought for a moment about how he wanted to respond.
Adrienne rescued him. She turned to Cozy with a seductive smile that Alan didn’t know she had in her, and said, “I suppose we could walk over to my place and ask Emma.”
Cozy said, “What?”
“Emma’s here, Cozy. She came by sometime earlier tonight. Adrienne’s been providing her with shelter from the storm.”
Emily, the dog, greeted Adrienne and Alan at the door with a sleepy, bent-ear, butt-wagging hello. She growled deeply at Cozy.
Adrienne reprimanded her, “Shhh. You wake my baby and our love affair is over.”
Emma had pulled one of Adrienne’s bulky cotton sweaters over her leotard. She was curled up on a corner of the sofa in the family room flipping mindlessly between the Home Shopping Channel and an infomercial touting a new piece of home exercise equipment. When tugged out from beneath the bed by a buxom woman dressed in a thong, the thing seemed to unfold like a giant spider that was ready to pounce and devour her.
Emma gave the trio entering the room half a glance.
Emily growled at Cozy again before prancing over to Emma and laying her head on the young woman’s lap. Emma touched her absently.
Alan joined Emma on the couch. Her eyes, usually so lively, seemed to sag, not only from exhaustion, but also with the burden of something infinitely heavier. Her usually electric smile was unplugged. She had been alone in the room before Alan and Adrienne and Cozy arrived, and she was alone in the room now that there were four people and a dog in it.
Alan was startled by the regression in Emma’s emotional state and by the deterioration in her appearance since he had last seen her late in the afternoon. An office word entered his head and stayed there like an unwelcome visitor from out of town. The word was “decompensation.” Clinically, it described the mental state of someone whose ego had succumbed to pressures greater than it could bear.
Cozy settled into a ladderback chair at a game table far across the room and said nothing, having an instinctual awareness that a quick, polite introduction wasn’t called for in this situation. Adrienne offered a sotto voce “Hi, dear” and excused herself to go upstairs and check on her toddler.
Alan waited to see if Emma was planning to speak. When it appeared she wasn’t, he said, “Hello, Emma.”
She didn’t acknowledge that he had spoken to her. She didn’t look at him.
“It’s Alan, Emma. How are you?”
She thumbed the remote and found an evangelist who was encouraging her to repent her sins. The man’s nose was pickled with red veins that made it easy to believe that he himself had committed enough sins to know his way around repentance.
“Tough night for you. We’ve been looking for you, wondering if you were okay.”
She flicked channels again.
“Is there anything that I can do to help?” Although Alan’s impulse was to reach over and attempt to soothe away her pain, he was keeping his physical distance. He made his voice as soft as infant’s hair, inviting her to join him in some human interaction. Anything.
She began to move her fingers in her lap as though she were typing. Both hands danced, her fingertips pecking out imaginary keys in a pantomime of communication that Alan found affecting.
After half a minute, she stopped.
Alan said, “I wish I could read what you just wrote. But I’m not able to. Perhaps you could say some of it out loud so I could hear it.”
Her long fingers straightened and again she gripped the remote control. Quickly, she found the infomercial.
Emma’s shoulders sagged half an inch and she sighed.
Alan glanced back at Cozy, who, given his vocation—defending individuals whose impulses had temporarily overwhelmed their judgment—had spent more than his share of hours fencing in the excesses of people whose emotional health was about as stable as a trailer park in a tornado. Cozy raised his eyebrows and shrugged his big shoulders to indicate he didn’t know how to help.
Alan’s clinical acumen was screaming that he was sharing a sofa with someone who was impaired enough to be placed on a mental health hold-and-treat. Even against Emma’s will, he could hospitalize her and then get a colleague to care for her for up to seventy-two hours if he judged her to be “severely impaired” or a danger to herself or others.
He confronted her more directly. “Emma, did you hear about Lauren tonight? What happened earlier?”
No response.
“She’s been arrested. She was trying to help you get the disc back. It’s something about a shooting.”
Emma said nothing but blinked twice in rapid succession. She’d heard him. She knew.
“She’s been asking about you. She’s worried about you.”
Another pair of fast blinks. Alan was trying to decide whether or not to inform Emma that Kevin Quirk was the victim of the shooting. He guessed that the knowledge might serve to startle her from her withdrawn state, but he also feared that the news that a friend of hers had been shot might cause old nightmares of gunfire and death to resurface, and might precipitate a further disintegration of Emma’s fragile emotional condition.
Adrienne poked her head into the room and sensed the poignancy that hung like an aromatic fog. She took a step into the room and leaned her head close to Cozy when she whispered, “There are a bunch of lights coming down the lane, maybe half a dozen cars. I think it’s the police. I saw them out Jonas’s window.”
Cozy stood up and walked over behind the couch, silently cursing police timing. He lowered himself to one knee to diminish some of his height. He knew how intimidating his size could be to someone sitting, and fearful. Usually, he tried to use his size to his advantage. Not now.
“Alan, the police are here. We have to go back to your house.”
“Give me a minute, Cozy. You go. I need a little more time. Tell them I’m in the bathroom or something. I won’t be long.”
Cozy warned Alan. “Don’t let them get suspicious of this house, Alan. We don’t want them coming over here. They’re looking for Emma, too, remember that. We don’t know what her involvement is.”
“I know.”
Cozy backed out of the room to greet the police.
Alan turned back to Emma and slid forward to try and see more of her face than her profile offered, and said, bluntly, “I’m really concerned about you right now.”
After what felt like an interminable, almost excruciating delay, she said, “I am, too…. I keep remembering what Lauren said to me, that I don’t have to kill myself…. I’m trying to believe it.” Her voice was tiny and halting, as though she hadn’t spoken for a long time and was trying to remember how.
“Lauren was right, Emma. You don’t have to kill yourself. We’ll find another solution. There’s always another way. That’s not the answer.”
She still hadn’t looked at him.
“Maybe…I guess.”
“I have to go back over to my house to keep the police from coming over here. If I leave you alone here for a little while, you’re not going to hurt yourself, are you?”
“I don’t think so. I’m too tired.”
As
reassurance from a suicidal person, that rationale for avoiding self-destruction was lame.
“That’s not good enough, Emma. I need your assurance that you won’t hurt yourself while I’m gone. I need to go to my house to meet with the police. I know you don’t want them to find you, so don’t go outside. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Will you give me your word that you won’t hurt yourself?”
“You’re coming back here, though? To see me, when you’re done?”
“Yes, you’re safe here. No one knows that you’re here. Stay put, I’ll come back as soon as I can. The dog will keep you company.” That, he was thinking, is partly because the dog would go absolutely batshit if she saw a platoon of people dressed like mailmen invading her house.
“Okay.”
“Okay, what? You won’t hurt yourself?”
“Not before you get back.”
As a palliative for an anxious psychologist, it wasn’t much, but it was a step or two better than “I’m too tired.”
The lane was lined with vehicles. Patrol cars and unmarked detectives’ cars filled the plowed area around Alan and Lauren’s front door. Two Boulder County Sheriff’s Jeep Cherokees had joined the parade. Alan and Lauren lived in the county, not the city, and the sheriff insisted on having a representative on the scene during the search.
Scott Malloy, stoked with a huge cup of 7-Eleven coffee, was on the small concrete stoop speaking with Cozier Maitlin. Frustrated at what he wasn’t accomplishing at the ER, Malloy had decided to personally oversee the search of Lauren’s home. Alan had been hoping that Sam Purdy would be one of the detectives on the scene, but he wasn’t.
Alan was reluctant to go home to watch what the police were planning to do to his home. Some insults, he decided, shouldn’t be observed. He joined Adrienne on her front porch. She was surveying the activity, trying to blow vapor rings in the frigid air.
“I’m going to have to get someone to hospitalize her.”
Adrienne blew another ring. “I figured that. Tonight?”
Alan gestured at the circus across the lane. “I think so. As soon as they leave. I should go home first, check things out. Will you keep an eye on Emma?”
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