Warning Signs

by Stephen White

  "I'm working under the assumption that Ramp's a nickname, so I didn't expect to find him on that list, and I didn't. Then I made another list of all the sons of murdered mothers who would be between sixteen and twenty-five years old today. Guess how many that is?"

  "Too many. I don't want to know."

  "Until I have something else to go on, I'm working under the assumption that his mother was killed in the metro area. A broader net is just unworkable for me."

  "What about the bomb in the Petersons' house? Did that give the bomb squad any clues?"

  "Sammy found out what he could for me. But, no. No latents on the bomb. No unusual materials used in the construction. The explosive was commercial dynamite, slightly aged, a little unstable, but not too bad. No recognizable signature. And the architecture of the device didn't draw any hits from the ATF database."

  "That's not much."

  Lucy said, "I'm left with the phone book."

  "Anything there?"

  "I've called all the Denver metro Ramps. There aren't that many. I reached two of the listings and ruled them out. A couple more I just got answering machines. Outside Denver metro there are, I think, three more Ramps. I'm going to try them tonight over dinner. It's a good time to reach people."

  "So that leaves us where?" I asked.

  "We still have the car bomb in Denver. I think-my gut feeling is-that, failing to find Ramp directly, the car bomb in Denver is our best link to him. I have trouble believing that discovering two explosive devices in the metro area on the same day can be isolated events. Sam has a contact with the Denver bomb squad."

  "Walter."

  "What?"

  "Sam's contact's name is Walter. Or at least he calls him Walter."

  Lucy laughed. The sound was a refreshing trill. "That means Sam thinks he's reliable. When he doesn't trust sources or snitches, he gives them names that begin with L-stands for loser. When he thinks they're reliable, he gives them names that begin with W. Those are the winners. So Sam trusts this guy, whoever he is. But until Sam hears more from Walter or something breaks in the news, we're in the dark about the Denver situation."

  "That leaves us with Paul or with the mythical Ramp."

  "Yes. And the path to Paul leads directly back to your patient, right?"

  "Right. But Paul also should eventually lead us to Ramp."

  "I agree. That's why Paul is next on my agenda."

  I considered the options. If Lucy was discovered following Paul, it would become clear to Naomi that I'd been sharing her information with someone else. That would certainly end the therapy.

  "Lucy, I'll follow Paul. If I'm discovered doing it, I have a chance of explaining away my indiscretion. If you get discovered, I'm screwed. My patient would stop talking to me. And I can't risk that."

  "You don't know how to do this. This is police work."

  "Paul's in school during the day. I know where he works. I know where he lives. I should be able to figure out when he's hanging out with his friend. My patient says they usually get together in Boulder, not Denver."

  "And what will you do then?"

  "Get a photograph. Get Ramp's license plate number. That should be enough for you to go on, right?"

  "Should be," she acknowledged. "Should be."

  CHAPTER 24

  C ozy's office suite took up a good-sized chunk of the west side-that's the side with the view-of the eighth-that's the top-floor of the Colorado Building on Fourteenth Street near the Pearl Street Mall. After leaving my office, I found a parking place on Walnut, fed the meter, and entered the lobby, which was sized not to impress visitors but rather to maximize leasable square footage for the landlords. One of the building's two elevators was being used for a furniture delivery; the other one-the one I rode in-stopped at five of the eight floors on the way to the top.

  I found Cozy and Lauren sitting at each end of a walnut conference table, the surface of which was carpeted with books and papers. Cozy was facing the door and saw me enter. He had a phone to his ear and a file in his other hand. His greeting was a nod.

  I walked up behind Lauren and kissed her on her hair. She reached up and slid her warm fingers across the skin on the back of my neck. I almost asked, "How did you know it was me?" But I didn't. I said, "Hi, how you doing?"

  "Tired, but okay."

  "You at a place you can stop? We need to get home and rescue Viv. She's had a long day with the baby."

  She smiled and said, "Sure."

  While she packed up, I examined the overriding reason-hell, the only reason other than its central location-for leasing office space in the Colorado Building: the view.

  The streets in downtown Boulder are numbered in ascending order beginning at the base of the foothills of the Rockies. That means that Fourteenth Street is roughly fourteen blocks away from the dramatic incline of the mountains, an almost perfect distance to maximize the view. From Cozy's eighth-floor perch, high above the treetops, Boulder in springtime appeared as a lush landscape of old redbrick and flagstone buildings flanked by gentle rises to the north-Mapleton Hill-to the south-Chautauqua, and barricaded to the west by the vaulting presence of the foothills of the Rockies.

  As dusk approached, the vista was glorious.

  Lauren and I had almost the same view from our home miles to the east, but ours was wide angle. This was zoom. Every time I saw the close-up perspective from this elevated perch, I was captivated by the difference. Our view from home was mostly sky-the monumental mountains ended up being dwarfed by the infinite western sky. This view was mostly mountains, their sheer mass and grandeur looming over a town that appeared to have been built to the wrong scale.

  Lauren took my hand and pulled me away from the windows. We both said good-bye to Cozy. He tucked the phone between his shoulder and his ear and waved good-bye.

  I n the elevator, Lauren said, "It hasn't been a particularly good afternoon for Lucy, sweets."

  I swallowed. "Tell me."

  "Over the last hour or so, Cozy and I learned some new things. When Sam and Lucy worked up Royal's house after the murder, one of the pieces of evidence they recovered was unwashed laundry from on top of the washing machine. There was also some laundry in the dryer. Did you know about any of that? I don't remember whether I told you. It hadn't seemed important until today. Anyway, it turns out that a sheet had some stains on it. It now appears that the police suspect that they can link the DNA on the stains to Lucy."

  "What kind of stains?"

  She sighed. "They think they're vaginal secretions."

  "Vaginal secretions?" I said. Lions and tigers and bears. "Oh my."

  The elevator door opened at the fourth floor. A psychologist, someone I barely knew from some insipid meeting of local psychologists I'd once attended against my better judgment, entered the elevator. I smiled and said, "Hello." She struggled, without apparent success, to place my face before she turned around and stared at the doors. Lauren slid her hand into mine and squeezed. The three of us stood silently and watched the numbers.

  It took me only two of the remaining three floors to decide that there weren't very many ways for Lucy Tanner to have left vaginal secretions on sheets in Royal Peterson's house.

  In fact, I could only think of one. I wasted a moment considering whether I was being unimaginative.

  Outside the building on the Fourteenth Street sidewalk, Lauren asked, "Are you parked nearby?"

  "Not too far, over on Walnut. Is your car ready to be picked up?" Her car was in the shop.

  She shook her head. "No, they're still waiting for that thing to be delivered. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not." She checked her watch and said, "Let's walk up the Mall for a block or two and circle back to your car. We have time."

  The "thing" was a transmission gasket. I took her briefcase and hung it over my shoulder. We held hands. As we turned the corner onto Pearl Street, I said, "Vaginal secretions?"

  "Yeah, sorry to say. Apparently the police think they found the whole damn wet spot."
/>   "Semen?"

  "No."

  "Really?"

  "Think condom," she said.

  "Oh," I said, feeling stupid. "Did they find that?"

  "No."

  Wispy clouds hung like smoke above the foothills of the Front Range. The sun was already invisible from our near vantage, though the sky above our heads was still bright. The cloud pattern promised a great finale to sunset, but I knew we wouldn't be home in time to catch it.

  Lauren said, "It's too soon to know for sure. But that's the general direction that this is heading. Damned by a wet spot."

  While I considered the timelessness of Macbeth, we crossed Thirteenth and moved slowly toward Broadway.

  I stated the obvious. "So Lucy and Royal were having an affair?"

  "Lucy won't talk about it. She continues to maintain that the details of her relationship to Royal will only serve to solidify the notion that she had a motive to kill him."

  I tried to think like a prosecutor. It was not a natural act. "The police think they have means-her fingerprints are on the pottery. They think they have opportunity-a witness places her on the scene. And Lucy basically admits that she had motive. This doesn't look great for your client."

  "Tell me about it."

  "Lucy was having an affair with Roy and she'd decided to break up with him?" I asked. "Is that what she's saying?"

  "She's not saying. But that's what I'm guessing. She's recently engaged, you know?"

  "I know, she told me. But the engagement predates the wet spot by a couple of weeks. What's your theory of what happened? One last time with Royal? A good-bye fuck?"

  She shook her head. "Nothing fits particularly well, I admit it. Pretty night, isn't it?"

  "Lovely. Assume you're right, babe. How do things develop that night so that she ends up whacking him on the head with a lamp?"

  "Like I said, nothing fits well."

  "Self-defense?"

  "Cozy and I would love self-defense. Lucy isn't offering, though. She maintains she had nothing to do with Royal's murder."

  "What about Lucy's fiancé? If he found out about the affair, he'd have a motive, too, wouldn't he?"

  "We're there already. Cozy's investigator has begun looking into that for us, though Lucy doesn't even know we have an investigator looking at him. I'm sure she'd go nuts if she knew what we were doing."

  "And the bomb? What about the bomb? What's the theory as to why Lucy would want to blow up the Peterson house?"

  "The bomb is our salvation. It's the only thing keeping Lucy out of jail right now. They can't tie her to it. If they found a molecule of evidence that put Lucy and that bomb in the same room, she'd be screwed."

  I was amazed at how quickly my wife, a lifelong prosecutor, had adopted the vernacular of a defense attorney. People who were her colleagues days before were now "they."

  At Broadway, we turned around and traced our steps back down the Mall toward the car. "How do you and Cozy know about the wet spot? There's no required discovery yet, is there? Lucy hasn't been charged."

  "No formal discovery, no." She gave my hand a squeeze. "Let's just say that the politics in the DA's office right now are working to our advantage. Everyone's posturing to take Royal's place. Everyone's scrambling to keep this thing from going to a special prosecutor. Keeping us informed is part of… someone's strategy."

  "Who's feeding you? Mitchell? Elliot? I bet it's not Nora."

  She said, "No, of course it's not Nora. And that's all I'm telling you."

  O n the way home from downtown I slowed to a stop at a red light at the corner of Broadway and University by the Hill. As if to prove to me that Boulder really is a small town, Naomi Bigg pulled up in the lane next to us driving a filthy BMW sedan. She was wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. I don't think she saw me and I said nothing to Lauren about her presence next to us.

  Just before the light changed to green, Naomi lowered her window about six inches, took a final deep drag on her cigarette, and tossed the still-lit butt onto the road between our cars.

  I didn't get it.

  People like Naomi, someone who I suspected wouldn't consider tossing a candy wrapper or a pop can onto the street, thought nothing of discarding cigarette butt after cigarette butt onto public sidewalks and thoroughfares.

  Was there some statute I didn't know about that exempted cigarette butts from littering concerns? I suspected that what was more likely was that this was smokers' revenge for society's continuing anticigarette bias.

  I also suspected that no matter how successful psychotherapy was, Naomi would still be littering her cigarette butts when we were done.

  L ater Monday evening I ran into Adrienne while I was taking the dogs outside for them to do their thing at the end of the day. I'd spotted the lights on in her dead husband Peter's old workshop, a barn he'd renovated into a woodworking facility that would leave weekend hobbyists drooling. When the dogs and I walked over we found Adrienne looking futilely for something that she'd put in the workshop in her version of storage, which as far as I'd been able to discern basically involved moving things to a location where she didn't trip over them on a daily basis. So far, nothing she'd moved into the old barn had been labeled, and as far as I could tell, nothing had been organized.

  "Hey," she said as I stood in the open doorway. She spoke to me without looking up from the box in which she was rooting around. "You should keep Anvil away from the fields for the foreseeable future. The momma fox just had some new kits, everybody in the family looks hungry, and your poodle, such as he is, looks suspiciously like lunch."

  "I know about the kits. They're cute. And Anvil's tough."

  She laughed. "Right, and I'm gorgeous." She mumbled a profanity that I think was intended for the box she was trying to open, not for me, before she addressed me again. "I ever tell you that I have a patient who's going through a sex change?"

  I raised my eyebrows.

  "No, I'm not doing the operation, if that's what you're thinking. Somebody else is actually responsible for remodeling the plumbing."

  "Your patient's a guy?" I asked to buy time. The whole topic of sexual transformation made me uncomfortable. Not philosophically, surgically.

  "Yeah. You interested?"

  "Interested? You mean-"

  "Not in trying it, doofus. In helping. You know, professionally. These guys all need psychotherapy. It's part of the protocol. It's required."

  "I don't know, Adrienne. How far along is the… how do you put it… the procedure? Is it like, well-"

  "What?"

  "Has he, um-"

  "You want to know if the hose is still on the fire truck?"

  I laughed.

  She laughed, too, and returned to rooting in the boxes. She said, "Don't worry, I was just pimping you. I wouldn't send this guy to you. It would make you both crazier than you already are."

  "Thanks. I appreciate it more than you know."

  She threw a box out of her way and the sound of glass breaking filled the old barn. She ignored the carnage. "So who was the dog snooping around here the other day?"

  I'd just recovered from one topic that made me anxious, so I wasn't well prepared for another. "Adrienne," I said. "You know, I disagree with what you said before-you are gorgeous. What, um, dog are you talking about?" Lying isn't one of my best things and I suspected that I'd just succeeded in alerting Adrienne that I was prevaricating.

  " 'What, um, dog am I talking about?' While we were at dinner the other night, somebody came by with a dog and they walked all around your place, inside and out, and then they came in here."

  "What?"

  She stood up and faced me. Adrienne was petite. She was holding a folded blanket that she'd pulled from a cardboard box. Next to Emily's bulky mass, she looked like she was a jockey preparing to saddle up for a ride. "Look," she said. "My latest excuse for a nanny came by while we were at dinner and saw some woman and her dog checking out your place like the DEA thinks you're fronting for some drug lord.
She said the woman and the dog came in here, too. This place is mine. That makes it my business. So tell me."

  Her hands were on her hips.

  Adrienne's history with nannies was not illustrious. I tried to distract her with a feint. "You're not happy with your nanny? I didn't know that."

  "Let me put it this way: I'll give you ten thousand dollars for the unconditional rights to Viv."

  "No way."

  "That's what I figured. Now tell me about the drug-sniffing pooch."

  I said, "I've been wondering, do you think I'm the right age to start having annual prostate exams?"

  "Answer my question or I'll glove up right now and give you one I promise you'll never forget."

  I pulled back a dusty canvas tarp and lifted myself up to sit on the edge of one of Peter's old workbenches. I knew that the fact that the shop was pretty much the way Peter had left it when he died had nothing to do with his wife's attempt to create a shrine. Adrienne wasn't exactly preserving Peter's shop in his memory; she just hadn't gotten around to moving any of his stuff, selling it, or giving it away. I suspected that with the exception of continued additions of boxes and assorted household junk from Adrienne, the barn wouldn't change much in the next decade.

  I asked, "Did you know Leo Bigg?"

  She lowered herself to the top of a box. The dogs immediately decided that she was prey and surrounded her. Emily sniffed her pockets for treats. Anvil tried to crawl onto her lap.

  She asked, "Where on earth is that question coming from?"

  "Just curious."

  She stared at me. "You're often difficult, Alan, but you're not usually this constipated. If you don't answer at least one of my questions, I swear I'm going to kidnap your dogs."

  I smiled. "If the threat of a sadistic prostate exam didn't sway me, you think the threat of moving my dogs across the lane and feeding them too many treats is going to unseal my lips?"

  "Talk."