“Remains?”
“We just got on this.”
“Circumstances?”
“She told her co-workers she was going to meet some girlfriends for a drink after work. Disappeared.”
“No body?”
“That’s what we’re trying to confirm. It was dumped on us as a typical without-a-trace, but a local cop told me he doesn’t know what all the fuss is about, that they have it as a cleared homicide. We’re waiting to hear back from the homicide guy. You know what it’s like with the holidays coming.”
“Is the press on this?”
“Nobody’s called me personally, but I think yes, probably.”
“Four? You said four?”
“Four total, including the California murder.”
“Where are the other two?”
“Augusta, Georgia, and West Point, New York.”
“That would be, what, the Masters and… I don’t know, the Army-Navy game?”
“I guess,” Lucy said. Other than occasional Broncos football, she didn’t pay much attention to sports she didn’t participate in, and she didn’t apologize for it.
I asked, “Any progress on the river search down here? Did Storey’s body show up today? Tell me yes. If you tell me yes, maybe I’ll come home.”
“I wish I could tell you yes, Sam. They’re still looking, but nobody seems hopeful about finding the body. The search is winding down. Oh, and in case it matters, you were right about Storey. He is, or was, a swimmer-a star on his college water polo team.”
“Water polo? Didn’t play that a lot when I was growing up in Minnesota.”
Lucy knew me well enough not to respond to my sarcasm. She asked, “You’re not in touch with the local authorities down there?”
“I made a courtesy call when I first got here. They’re looking for a body. I’m looking for something else.”
“You think he’s alive?”
“I’m not ready to think out loud. I assume someone interviewed Sterling’s friend Brian Miles.”
“Georgia State Police talked to him. Miles said Sterling called from Tallahassee and said he was coming to visit but never showed up. The story checks out.” Through the phone I heard an overhead page in the background.
“Where are you right now, Luce?”
“Whole Foods, getting something for dinner. Why?”
“You going back to the department?”
“I’ll be eating at my desk. For now, this case is all computer and phone work.”
“I’ll keep my pager on. Enjoy your dinner.”
“You okay, Sam?”
“I’m meeting some nice people down here. Luce? Send some patrols past Gibbs Storey’s house. Can you do that?”
“Sure. You do think he’s alive?”
“I forgot, one more thing. Is Reynoso still in Boulder, or did she go back to California?”
“Her? None of the above. I heard she was leaving for Georgia to look for Sterling. You haven’t run across her yet?”
“I think I’d recall that.”
She laughed. “I imagine she’ll be trying to find you.”
“We’ll see how good a detective she is. Thanks, Luce. Talk to you.”
I leaned back against the headboard of the motel bed. My mass caused it to crack hard against the wall, and I imagined what a percussive racket an energetic couple could make on this bed. The thought froze me for a moment, as I wondered when the last time was that Sherry and I had rocked a bed. I mean really rocked it.
I couldn’t recall.
Lucy had said that there were suspected victims of Sterling Storey in Augusta and Indianapolis.
Augusta was closer, but I’d be flying blind if I went there. Indianapolis was farther, but at least Lucy would have facts to feed me. What did I hope to find?
I didn’t know. Maybe when I tripped over it, I’d know.
The guy at the desk didn’t use a wheelchair as much as he wore one. It was hard to imagine him without the aged, rusting contraption that was pressing hard against his fleshy hips as he rolled back and forth behind the motel’s counter. A tiny color TV-maybe three inches across-hung upside down on a braided nylon rope around his neck. He was watching a game show, occasionally tipping the little television toward the ceiling and staring down in the general direction of his navel.
Wheel of Fortune?I wasn’t sure.
I tipped him ten bucks when he let me check out without paying for the few minutes I’d actually used the room.
“The way I see it, you’re not checking out. What you’re doing is unchecking in” was how he put it. “Where you off to in such a hurry?”
“Indianapolis, I think. Got a call, so I gotta go.”
“Never been there.”
“Me, neither,” I said. I turned to leave but had a thought, so I stopped and asked him, “You ever had a turducken?”
“Sure, sure.” He smiled so fast, his cheeks shook and his triple chin momentarily became one. “I have, I sure have. Three years ago. Thanksgiving supper. My aunt Totsy’s-she’s my daddy’s little sister-her place on the Delta. It’s a meal not to be missed, not to be missed.”
“This trip I have to take up north means I’m going to lose what may be my one and only chance to savor a turducken. And I’m beginning to think that’s a minor tragedy. Well, I do hope you have a good Thanksgiving, sir,” I said.
“I’ll be right here,” he said, as a way of letting me know he didn’t expect to enjoy his holiday much or get anywhere close either to a turducken or to a family gathering at his aunt Totsy’s on the Mississippi Delta. When he said “here,” he didn’t point at the office he was in or at his wheelchair.
What he did was, he touched his TV-on-a-rope.
A minute or two communing with Rand McNally left me with the impression that I could get to Indianapolis in ten to twelve hours of hard road time. I planned to drive for six, sleep for six, drive for six more, and then find someplace for lunch close to the RCA Dome.
By then Lucy should know something new.
And I might have a clue what I was doing.
FORTY-TWO
ALAN
Tuesday morning found Lauren solidly in hyperenergized zombie mode-think the Energizer Bunny meetsNight of the Living Dead.
Her affected leg was no worse, maybe a little better. Less weakness. That was the good news.
But there wasn’t enough good news. Worry about Lauren and the future-hers, Grace’s, ours-stabbed at me incessantly, but she and I didn’t talk about it during the duration of the extended steroid fog. Neither of us once mentioned the bull elephant that had pitched a tent in our living room.
We’d made it through the night-me with little sleep, her with less than that-and thanks to Viv’s early-morning assistance with Grace, I managed to get to the office in time for my first appointment.
Tuesday’s workday was remarkable only for its normalcy. I spent an entire day at work feeling almost effective. Going home that evening, I faced the more daunting task of trying to be an effective husband and father in a home that was quaking from the aftershocks of illness and treatment.
Together-Grace and Lauren and I, with a full assist from Viv and the puppies-we made it. Wednesday morning came. The respite of a four-day holiday weekend was only one workday away.
How hard could that be?
The local media had begun feasting on the Storeys’ troubles. The morning TV news shows and the Boulder and Denver papers had pieced together most of the details of Gibbs’s and Sterling’s ties to Louise Lake. Now they were busy fleshing out the more lurid parts of the tale, including the details of the fruitless search of the Ochlockonee River and the revelation that authorities suspected that Sterling Storey might be involved in the deaths of three other women.
I anticipated that Gibbs would be overwhelmed by the public revelations. Reactive hibernation wasn’t out of the question, and I wasn’t a hundred percent sure she would show up for her early-morning appointment.
But she did.
/>
“Not Safe House. I don’t want to go there, I just don’t think I’d fit in.”
That was actually Gibbs’s opening gambit, her first words after a perfunctory “good morning.”
Had I expected it? No, not really. Was I surprised? No, not at all. The insidious nature of battering caused the pendulum of hope to swing from reality to denial and back again. This was Gibbs’s denial talking. The way she introduced it told me that she had been busy having a conversation with me in her head and had just then decided to allow me to mouth my own lines. I was more than content to let her go on without me for a while, if she would.
“They followed me here. I’m sure they did. They were waiting outside this morning when I opened the garage.”
“They?”
“Those newspeople.”
I nodded. I could have encouraged her to go off on a rant about those newspeople, but I chose to look down the other path she’d offered. “You don’t think you would fit in at Safe House, Gibbs?”
“I’m not a battered woman.”
Arguing the point was a tempting option, but I made a quick judgment that it was neither the right issue nor the right time. Gibbs, I suspected, was protesting a different kind of “fitting in.” And the truth was that her rationalization wasn’t the real issue; her denial was.
Gently, I tried to draw her back. “But you are in need of a safe place to stay-you accept that?”
“I’m trying to be… cautious. Detective Purdy suggested it. Just in case there’s a chance that”-she took a moment to decide how she wanted to complete her thought-“that I might be in some danger. He said he talked to you, too. Right?”
I nodded. I reminded myself that it had been I who had invited Sam into this conundrum; I shouldn’t be too surprised that he was complicating it. At least his advice to Gibbs was sound.
“And now, with all the cameras, I can’t stay at home anyway. I can’t. I’m not even going to go back. I have some things in the car, and I have to find someplace else to stay.”
“What are you considering?”
“I was hoping you would have an alternative… for me.” She lifted her eyebrows. “Someplace besides Safe House.”
Were there other options? Of course. Many women in vulnerable circumstances turned to friends or family for shelter. I usually didn’t think that it was a good idea. “I think Safe House is where you belong. They know what they’re doing. It’s not just the shelter that they offer. It’s the support, the counseling, and their experience. Everything. They work well with the police. They’re the pros. When the stakes are this high, I think you go with the best.”
Watching her face as I made my speech, I realized that it was as though I hadn’t been speaking at all. She waited until the aggravating noise of my voice subsided before she said, “I’m actually thinking about going to a hotel. I’d be more comfortable there, I think. You know, more privacy?”
Not to mention a private bath, maid service, nice linens, room service, and maybe a chocolate on her pillow.
I stated the obvious: “Isn’t that the first place Sterling would look for you?”
“He’s dead, Dr. Gregory. Dead.”
I softened my tone a little. “Is that what you believe, Gibbs?”
“No, not really,” she said without any contemplation. “But it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it? For everybody?”
I didn’t respond. It wasn’t a tactical silence. I just didn’t know what to say. She leaned over and touched the handle on her purse. For a moment I thought she was going to grab it, stand up, and go. She didn’t.
She settled back, crossed her legs, and said, “He went back to kill them, you know.”
No, I didn’t know. “I don’t think I understand.”
“Sterling met them one year. Had his little flings with them. And he went back to see them again the next time.”
“The next time?”
“The next time he was covering the event, whatever it was. The golf tournament, or game, or race, or whatever it was. A lot of this stuff he produces is annual, you know? He goes back to some of the same places, and he does basically the same thing every year.”
“And… he continued his affairs? He saw the same women each year in each city?”
To me, it sounded exhausting.
“If he… liked them. If their first encounter was… you know. Then, yes, he saw the same women again.”
I tried to gauge her discomfort at our discussion of Sterling’s serial infidelity. I thought it was high. Or maybe I just thought it should be high.
“And then he killed them?” I asked. I knew the beginning of the story, and a lot of the middle, and the very end, but it felt as though somebody had ripped out a chunk of pages just before the conclusion.
“Not usually. Just sometimes.”
Great,I thought, allowing myself the luxury of some irony.Maybe he can be rehabilitated.
“Go on, please, Gibbs. Was there a method to his… a way to understand the motivation he used to… I mean, how did he, um-”
“Decide? Some of them wanted more from him. That wasn’t the arrangement. That’s why I think he…”
Killed them.
“They were the ones who wouldn’t let go, who insisted. That’s what put them at risk.”
The arrangement?
Was Gibbs implying that the women were responsible for their own murders by violating some agreement they had with Sterling? Reaching such a conclusion would not have been that atypical for a battered woman.
Damn,I said to myself. Gibbs had once again distracted me. I’d been confronting her about her decision to stay in a hotel, not Safe House, and she’d managed to change the subject to murder. A compelling change, I had to admit: This misdirection was not the work of an amateur.
I prepared to point out the process when her face displayed sudden alarm. “You’re not going to tell anyone what I just told you, right? Not the police? If anybody learns this, Dr. Gregory, they will have learned it from you. No one else knows about it. I couldn’t bear it if any of this got out. I couldn’t.”
I’d been expecting Gibbs to revisit her distrust of the reliability of my silence from the moment she’d walked in the door, but the timing surprised me, and an undertow of accusation sucked at me. I said, “I haven’t broken your trust, Gibbs. And I won’t.”
“Good.” She smiled at me. “No matter where we go-you and I-we end up talking about sex, don’t we?”
Were we just talking about sex? Or had I just been witness to yet another one of the greatest illusions since Penn and Teller?
“Sex. It’s not just for procreation anymore.”
In the ensuing minutes, in case I required it, I received a refresher course in the resilience of denial and the elasticity of resistance. Gibbs and I covered no new ground. The topic of Sterling’s affairs? It was of no apparent interest to her. “Old news,” she declared. “I prefer to look forward.”
Sterling’s being alive, or dead? “I think Detective Purdy is right. He’s alive. I would know if he were dead. I would. That changes things. It does. I have decisions to make. Different ones.”
The danger she was in? “He wouldn’t hurt me. He did it once and he apologized. He won’t do it again. I just need to get away from all the media.”
I prodded her resistance directly. I went after the soft flanks of her denial. Nothing seemed to work.
Sometimes that was the nature of psychotherapy.
After Gibbs left her session-her exit was marked by a promise to call me once she was settled into a hotel-I ran into Diane in the hallway as we were both on the way to the bathroom. She was wearing jeans and a sweater: not office garb.
“I just came in to get my appointment book,” she explained. “I have jury duty. Have to be at the courthouse in ten minutes. God, I hope I get sequestered. It would be so great to get sequestered.”
“No lawyer in this town is going to let you sit on a jury.”
“Why not?”
&nbs
p; With the frequency with which Diane testified on custody and child abuse issues, she knew the county’s judges and clerks, and the law, better than half the members of the bar. Every attorney wanted to believe that at the conclusion of a trial what ruled in the jury room were the echoes of the lawyer’s own words of wisdom. But any lawyer who had ever crossed paths with Diane Estevez knew that she wouldn’t think of allowing that to occur. Were she seated on a jury, what would rule in the jury room was what Diane wanted to rule in the jury room-which meant that the odds of Diane being chosen as a juror in Boulder County were about the same as Al Gore spending Christmas on a ranch in Crawford, Texas.
She tilted her head back toward my office, sniffed the air, and said, “Do I smell the Dancing Queen?”
I flared my nostrils and tested the air but didn’t detect anything. Was I immune to my client’s perfume? As a way of changing the subject, I asked, “You can’t hear anything in your office, can you? When I’m in my office doing therapy, you don’t overhear my sessions?”
“With your voice? You speak so quietly, I’m surprised sometimes that your own patients can hear you. Why, did I miss something good?”
“Nothing? You can’t hear a thing?”
“No. Why? Can you hear me?”
“I hear you laugh.”
She laughed. “Why are you asking?”
“I’ve had a few accusations from patients in the last few days that I’m divulging information that I heard during therapy. They’re… concerning; they’re accusations about serious things.”
“Accusations? Not just worries?”
“Accusations.”
“Oh, the Dancing Queen? Are you the anonymous tipster? You’re the one who called Crime Stoppers on Platinum?”
“Diane.”
She had really perked up. “Well, are you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Nothing inadvertent?”
“No.”
She squeezed past me and slipped into the bathroom. As she shut the door, she said, “Maybe your office is bugged.”
I said, “Ha. Very funny.”
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