Truth was, I was being rude. I didn’t like it when people screwed around with their phones during conversations the way I was doing with Mattin right then. I didn’t care, of course, about his sensibilities. Being rude was nothing compared to what I had in mind for Mattin Snow.
I held the screen out so that Mattin could see what I’d been up to with the cell phone. The picture I was displaying for him wasn’t the most lurid of the photographs Jonas had stored on his mobile. But it was pretty damn incriminating.
Mattin glanced at it the way a casual acquaintance glances at proffered vacation photos he doesn’t really want to see.
I watched his face as his eyes focused and his cortex made some initial sense of the image he was seeing. His jaw shifted a centimeter to one side and then a full centimeter to the other. He then brought his jaw back to center, as though his jawbone were a rudder, and after a temporary loss of control, he’d succeeded in bringing his craft back to straight and level.
He took a quick look at me, a fiery hot what the fuck flashing in his eyes. The flash disappeared quickly. He found his composure.
Mattin was good.
All he saw from me was my well-practiced psychologist mask. And maybe, if he was more perceptive than he’d already demonstrated, he could discern the barest hint of a smile in my eyes. He looked back down at the image on the screen for a few more seconds. He was inhaling slowly the whole time. Through his nose.
He lifted himself onto his toes. I thought the lawyer in him wanted to object to the court about the evidence I was introducing.
When he looked up again, he captured my gaze in a manner that I thought was intended to be intimidating. He thrust his shoulders back, pushed his chest out, and raised his chin. He leaned forward, closing the distance between us to mere inches.
I felt like retreating. I didn’t.
His feet moved as he inched even closer to me. I held my ground while I endeavored to contain my sadistic glee at the box I had just created for him. I was truly curious to see what he would do with so little room to maneuver. I wondered whether he had a surprise or two for me.
In the exact same tone of voice he’d used to tell me that he was thinking about building his new house a little farther up the hill, he said, “That doesn’t prove anything. Nothing. That . . is just a . . . dirty picture.”
“Really?” I said. I had to keep from adding Tell me.
“It reveals nothing about consent.”
I was impressed that he was able to maintain his composure so well. But his use of consent? That, I thought, was the magic Kobe Bryant word. Was Mattin one of the lawyers who had learned that lesson well?
Decorum was apparently the order of the day, so I kept my tone even to match Mattin’s. I asked, “Does it have to? I mean, really? The dirty picture? Must it prove anything? To be . . . influential?”
I intentionally chose a neutral word. I’d silently ruled out using devastating in lieu of influential.
“I’m a lawyer. Trust me,” he said, apparently unaware of the absurdity of the last suggestion. “That photo cannot be used against me. It shows consenting adults. Nothing more.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected—showing him one of the photographs that morning had been a bit of an impulse play on my part—but I think I expected better than that from him. Mattin had to see the flaws in his own reasoning. Then I realized that he was responding as though he was talking to another lawyer. Someone inclined to bargain about words like consent and quibble about levels of consciousness. Someone who knew the arcane rules that exist between gentlemen and ladies in these disputes.
And cared about them.
I allowed seconds to tick away, giving Mattin an extended interlude to ponder the depth of his dilemma. I used the time to choose a second photo for him to consider. The second photograph I displayed for him was the next in the series, an even more appalling indictment than the first. But it wasn’t the worst of them.
I was saving that one. Just in case.
The second image I showed Mattin had him in tight exercise pants and a taut, long-sleeved T-shirt. He had pulled a surgeon’s cap over his head. The hat was printed in an almost-cute sailboat motif.
His victim’s pajama bottoms had been lowered to her knees.
I’m a road cyclist. During phases when I’m serious about my sport, I shave my legs. It’s not a fashion statement. Following a, for me, inevitable fall from my bike, the subsequent road rash is less severe on well-shaved skin.
Mattin wasn’t a cyclist. But the photograph made clear that he’d shaved most if not all the hair on his hands, feet, and lower legs. And his pubic hair, along with any hair that had sprouted on his testicles.
It was, to be sure, much more detail than I ever really wanted to know about the man’s grooming. But my son’s photograph revealed those details. The picture showed Mattin standing, his right foot slightly forward of his left, beside the young widow’s chair. The waistband of Mattin’s pants was pulled back behind his scrotum, displaying not only his partial erection but also his hairless testicles. He was leaning forward over the woman’s upper body.
In this photograph, she appeared more than a little sleepy. Her eyes were at half-mast, as though they had already gone into mourning over what was being done to her. If pressed, stuporous is the word I would have used to describe her apparent level of consciousness.
The woman’s face was about a foot away from Mattin’s penis.
Devil’s Dick, indeed.
In that photo, again, the kitchen in the background was unoccupied.
The man standing in front of me behind the crime scene tape that surrounded his burned-down house was a despicable, criminal assailant who apparently wanted to have a discussion with me about proof. And consent.
I waited until I was sure that Mattin had digested all the information in that second photograph before I said, “Not this one, either? So . . . it can’t be used against you? See, I’m thinking that to do . . . damage, to have . . . influence, it doesn’t have to be used against you in any . . . formal way. Not in a court of law. Not in any legal sense. I’m not a lawyer. So maybe I’m missing something about how these things work, lawyer to lawyer. But I would think just the circumstances depicted, and the lurid—is that the right word?—details in the photograph would . . .” I allowed him to finish the thought himself.
He physically turned away. From me. From the photo. From the reality. For those few moments, he faced due west. Toward the sunset, not the sunrise.
Whether he knew it or not, he was looking directly at Devil’s Thumb.
“You?” he demanded.
I should have expected the question, but I hadn’t. Of course he’d want to know if I’d been there that night. I wasn’t there to answer his questions. I chose to be a statue.
He quickly tired of waiting for a reply. “Is this . . . blackmail?” he asked. The question was part accusation, part pure wonder.
“God, no,” I said without any hesitation.
He took an additional step away. When he faced me again, a minute or so later, his eyes revealed a new level of fear and some confusion. He said, “What do you want from me? Not to build?” He scoffed audibly at that. His voice turned condescending. “Somebody is going to build here, Alan. Someone is going to build something nice up here, something modern up here, someone is going to soil your private little outdated paradise. And . . . someone is going to make you put your damn dog on a leash.”
Wow. The man has a figurative gun to his head, yet he can’t resist spitting in my face. Wow. Chutzpah, Adrienne. Chutzpah.
Knowing full well that my paradise had been fouled already, I waited to be sure Mattin was done speaking before I responded to his little tantrum. I was still feeling remarkably even-keeled. I said, “What do I want? Simple. Pretty much what I want from everyone. I would like you to do . . . the right thing.”
He scowled. Then he scoffed, “I don’t know what that means.”
He was showing exaspera
tion, and with the exasperation, some recognition of the extent of his vulnerability. I liked that. There have been times in my life when I would not have allowed myself to feel any pleasure from his vulnerability, but I was past that. I said, “Let me be perfectly clear: Personally? I don’t want anything from you. Nothing. I will take nothing from you. Ever. The truth is that although I don’t like you, I am not yet sure you have harmed me, or my family. I suspect if I gave you time, you would get around to harming us. But that is premonition, and thus, neither here nor there.”
I raised the phone. “I do know for a fact that you have harmed others.” Then I shut the phone and returned it to my pocket. “Your friend? In the picture? You want to argue consent with me? Go right ahead. It seems to me that you drugged her, and you raped her. You raped her. Someone you called your friend.
“You thought about it for a long time, too. This little set piece involved a lot of planning. Wardrobe, shaving, grooming. If this picture somehow gets public? Let’s make a date—you and I can have the whole consent discussion then, and we’ll see who lines up on your side. And who lines up on . . . hers.”
He glared at me.
“I worry about other women before her, too. I assume there were others. I fear there were many others. This . . . looks practiced, definitely not a first-time production—you perfected this choreography on earlier victims. That’s what I think.”
He had become the statue. He didn’t move a muscle.
“Your wife? Your stepson? Were they both victims, too? Or accomplices?”
I wanted him to defend himself with me so I could be cruel back to him.
He didn’t. I was disappointed. I had a taste for a little blood.
“So what would I like from you, Hake? For all of your victims? For them, I would like you to do the right thing.”
“What the hell does that mean?” he asked me.
“You can decide,” I said. “I’ll be watching.”
I could tell that he wanted to insult me or hit me or kill me. Okay, he wanted to kill me. But he couldn’t. Not there. Not then. He didn’t know if we were being observed. Or whose photos they were, or how many copies existed. He certainly didn’t know what the hell I would do with them next. Or had done with them already.
“If I do the right thing? I get those photos? All copies?”
“That would make this blackmail, Hake. I don’t do blackmail. You want to make a deal? You got the wrong guy.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“I don’t recall implying that you should.” I stepped away. “Let’s go, little girl,” I said to Fiji. “Let’s go find us a big prairie dog town.”
FIJI AND I didn’t go in search of prairie dogs. We drove over to the animal hospital on Baseline and we visited Emily.
She was conscious. She opened her eyes and wagged her nub of a tail when she heard my voice and grabbed on to the scent of her little sister. Fiji licked Emily’s face quasi-maniacally before she curled up between the big dog’s legs, resting her little head on her friend’s foreleg. The big Bouvier sighed.
I scratched my dog’s neck with one hand, while I placed my other open palm on her belly. I knew Fiji and I had only a few minutes to visit with her.
The vet assistant spent the whole time talking with me about the woods we weren’t out of and about the serious risk of infection from the wound. About how close the knife had come to her lung.
I couldn’t have found a better way to get the sour taste of Mattin Snow out of my mouth than those few minutes with my dogs.
Fiji and I brought home good dog news and bagels for breakfast.
As I put together a plate of Moe’s bagels and opened the tub of cream cheese, I said to Lauren, “One of us needs to take Jonas to get a new phone. He lost his in the . . . confusion in the house yesterday.”
Lauren said, “I’m taking the day off to spend with the kids. I’d love to do that with you, Jonas. It’s a date? You know what kind you want?”
Lauren wasn’t actually taking time off. She’d been placed on administrative leave while the shooting was investigated. That was a discussion we would have with the kids another time, apparently.
Jonas nodded at her. She smiled back.
He looked over at me with a blank face. The kid was so beaten down. I read his expression as the kind of flat gratitude a mistreated animal displays when he or she thinks the latest whipping has ended.
My heart was so heavy for my son that I feared I might need to put it in a sling just to keep it in my chest.
I didn’t know what the rest of the day would bring.
But I knew this episode in our lives wasn’t over.
45
To my continued amazement, the backstory about the rape remained the best-kept secret in town. Casey Sparrow was doing her job. Cozier Maitlin was cooperating with her. So much was at stake, yet so many huge egos were behaving and making nice. I found it remarkable.
Attorney wizardry, indeed. Every time I reflected on the deafening public silence about the rape, I found myself repeating things that Sam had said to me over beers and grilled cheese sandwiches during that Lakers/Mavs game.
HELLA E-MAILED ME MIDMORNING. She said she’d been trying to reach me on my mobile. I phoned her back from a landline.
She mentioned that she’d heard about the fire and the shooting on the news. I didn’t know what it meant that she knew the headlines. Although Hella was aware that I lived on the east side of the Boulder Valley, I doubted that she knew precisely where.
Lauren’s role in the shooting wasn’t yet public. My name wasn’t in the first round of news stories at all, but I feared that my involvement would be teased out as soon as reporters got around to searching public property records.
Mattin Snow’s name was featured prominently in the initial news reports about the fire. I had no doubt that would set off alarms for Hella’s hospitalized patient.
The reality I had to deal with? Hella would soon enough discover that I had become a player in the drama that was her patient’s life.
Hella’s patient was stable and was in the process of being transferred from Colorado Springs to Denver for continued psychiatric hospitalization. Discharge pressure from her insurer, and Hella’s assessment that the acute danger was passing, would soon come together and argue for an early hospital release. In the next day or two—three at the outside—Hella would enter the uncomfortable clinical limbo that psychotherapists live with after a suicidal patient is discharged into outpatient care.
Hella told me she would be back in Boulder after she completed the hospital admission in Denver. We made an appointment for supervision for later in the week.
“We have a lot to talk about,” she said.
I didn’t disagree, but I knew some of it shouldn’t wait. As the media continued to string together facts and rumors about the previous night, Hella would soon figure out what had happened, and more important, my role in what had happened. I didn’t want her to learn those facts on the news.
“Before you go,” I said. I filled her in. I told her that the man her patient had accused of rape was my new neighbor. That his house had burned down. That more details would likely become public that involved me and my family.
Twice, she said, “I can’t believe this.” Three or four times, she asked, “You knew?”
She challenged me immediately, demanding to know if, given my relationship with the accused rapist, I should have been supervising her patient’s case at all. She asked, “Isn’t this the very definition of a clinical conflict of interest?”
I answered her question, despite the fact that she’d asked it rhetorically. I said, “No. It’s not.”
Was Hella indignant with me? Not quite. She was edging up near that line, but she wasn’t crossing it. At her age, in her shoes, I would have been asking the same questions she was asking. With even more attitude than she was mustering.
“It’s . . . not? You have to be kidding.”
I responded to her
challenge. “How long have you been seeing her for therapy?”
“Six months maybe. Since last spring.”
“How long have I been supervising your treatment of her?”
“The same.”
“I met my new neighbor for the first time the week of that housewarming. We spoke for one or two minutes at that time. My supervision of your treatment of your patient predated any relationship with him, however tangential, by almost a full six months.” I paused. “It’s not my practice to cease providing clinical services, including supervision, to people because of a secondary relationship I might establish long after the clinical care has been initiated. That . . . would be unethical.”
“And since?” Hella demanded. “Your relationship with him since?”
“He and I have exchanged hellos twice, in passing. That’s it, until this morning. We did speak briefly earlier this morning.”
“About?”
I’d anticipated this question. I’d decided to answer honestly but not fully. “We talked about the fire at his house. What might come next for him. Rebuilding. Moving on. We spoke for less than ten minutes in total.”
“You didn’t talk about his wife? What she did? His stepson’s death?”
“He didn’t bring those things up. I was trying to be . . . circumscribed with him because of the supervision. I am cognizant of the boundary issues involved, Hella.”
“In your mind, ethically, you haven’t crossed any lines here?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t.”
“Really?”
“If I knew then what I know now? I may not have supervised this case. But hindsight is perfect, and I didn’t know six months ago that your patient’s friend was going to buy the house next door and then sexually assault her.”
Hella started to speak. She stopped before I could identify the swallowed syllable.
“At the time we started talking about your patient, I had no conflicts of interest at all. Even months later, I was confident that I had sufficient degrees of separation to allow me to continue to supervise your work. The man was an acquaintance. I felt I could manage the relationship with him as it existed. Keeping things like this separate is something that psychotherapists, like us, do every day. We work in a small town.”
The Last Lie Page 35
