“But we found nothing that says Haziq is a bad guy. He had a bad uncle. That’s not a crime.”
“Politically? Other people won’t see it the way you do, Jonas. You’re smart. You know that. Elliot is smart. If he was involved with Haziq, he knows what this news getting out would mean. It’s the only theory we have that explains why he is so willing to throw your dad in jail.”
“And you’re what? You’re going to out Elliot and Haziq as a couple? That’s not right. It may not even be true.”
“Alan won’t tell anyone about this but Elliot. You know that. If it’s not true they were a couple, it is what it is. We tried. We lost. If Elliot did have a thing with Haziq, Elliot will recognize his vulnerability. This isn’t really about them being gay. It’s about them being a couple. Politically, is it fair? No. But Elliot wouldn’t get away with this news getting out if he was straight and his girlfriend was a Bin Laden niece. If he’s gay and his boyfriend was a Bin Laden nephew? The public will definitely not forget that. That’s Alan’s leverage. It’s why I have to tell him.
“Elliot’s the one who started this war with your mom and dad. And I can’t think of another way to help Alan stay out of jail today, right now, than to let him know that Elliot may have been hiding the fact he had a relationship with Haziq bin Laden.”
“What if we’re wrong?”
“If we’re wrong? Alan’s in trouble. We can’t debate this any longer, Jonas. I have to do it now. I’m sorry.”
Jonas said, “Haziq could be your kid. It could be his life.”
Sam said, “Yeah.” The tears in his eyes revealed that he knew that Jonas was not speaking hypothetically.
Jonas stood up. He said, “It sucks.”
Sam said, “It does suck.”
The second he got into his Cherokee, Sam used his smartphone to type “Beard” into search on Urban Dictionary. He read the definition. Damn. He started driving back to town but he knew Alan might not have the luxury of waiting to learn what Jonas had discovered.
He stopped the Cherokee near the mailboxes on the lane. He switched to his burner. The signal was one bar. Aloud he said, “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong.”
He texted Alan one more time.
He opened the driver’s side window a couple of inches as he pulled away. If he saw flashing lights in the mirror on his way back to town he had to be prepared to ditch his burner’s SIM. Fast.
75
ALAN
I FINALLY HEARD THE front door open. Raoul is leaving, I thought. And I am losing my chance to confront him.
I heard a voice of caution in my head. Do not do it. Don’t talk to him, Alan. The voice of caution was not Lauren’s. It was Kirsten’s. But I couldn’t let Raoul go. I knew that moment might be my last chance to speak with him. As I grabbed the doorknob I heard Raoul say, “Please, come in. He’s back there. Bathroom or bedroom, I’m not sure which. I heard his voice earlier. It’s him. There’s no back door.”
That gave me pause.
Amanda said, “What the hell is going on? Who are you? Raoul, who is he?”
Raoul said, “This is when you should be quiet, Amanda.” He shushed her.
I expected Amanda to protest. She did not. My burner buzzed again.
It was Sam, again, on his burner. Sam’s previous text about our small dog’s original name had baffled me. The new text read:
HB MAYBE with bf haziq bin laden—HBL—in Boston 9-08-01. Nephew of Osama. MAYBE BF! Found Laurens photo from Boston globe BG. Where r u?
Holy shit. That, I thought, explains a lot. Maybe.
Sam’s maybe meant it might be time to gamble. I thought of Carl Luppo and his Powerball. Maybe. And the bullet that found him in Pacific Palisades. Maybe.
I thought of Ivy Baldwin dying peacefully in bed as an old man after a full lifetime of high-wire maybes.
But Sam’s maybe meant caution was in order, too.
The page from the Field Notes book meant Lauren knew some of this, too. But she wasn’t sure. She had her own maybe. I’d decided that NoE was her shorthand for no evidence.
Instinctively I knew, no matter what I did next, I had to protect Sam’s clean hands. I took a moment to extract the SIM—and all its data—from my burner. I entered the adjacent bathroom and dropped the card into the toilet. I slowly ran water into the sink. I submerged the burner and held it under until it stopped bubbling.
I flushed the toilet. My burner was drowning, its memory was in Boulder’s sewers. I could no longer reach Sam or my lawyer. Raoul and someone he knew were outside the door.
My degrees of freedom were officially exhausted. The sound of the flushing toilet announced my presence to Raoul and his guest. I opened the door.
Helliot was walking toward me. He stopped.
I felt serene when I saw him. I said, “Hello, Raoul. Hello, Elliot.” Amanda looked baffled. “Amanda, in case you haven’t been introduced, this is the Boulder County DA, Elliot Bellhaven. Don’t be alarmed. He’s here to see me, not you.”
Raoul spoke to Amanda. “You are fine, cherie. We can go, find somewhere to talk. About the future. This doesn’t concern us.”
I looked at my old friend. “How is Diane, Raoul?”
My earnest question—I had feared that when I finally spoke those words to him they would not sound sincere—seemed to cause him to freeze as if in a still frame. For an instant he moved not a muscle. Then he glanced at Amanda before his eyes came back to me. He said, “My Diane is sick. The surgery—they operated to remove the glioma—could have gone better. That’s what they said. The radiation they did? It’s been hard on her. Toxic.”
“Her prognosis?” I asked. “Are the doctors optimistic?”
“Some days I hear more hope than I hear on other days. Lately, less hope, I think. Certainly less than I would like. It could be my ears, not their words. Who knows?”
I expected to feel sorrow at Diane’s plight. I didn’t. I felt no glee, but no sorrow.
“I heard she is in Arizona. Still?” I said.
He sucked air through his clenched teeth. “You don’t need to know that, Alain.”
I was stung but managed to keep my voice cordial as I said, “Diane is why you are helping Elliot frame me?” I said. “To try to keep her out of prison? Does she know you’re here in Boulder? What you’re doing to me? To my children?”
Raoul went back into freeze-frame. He didn’t reply. He didn’t move. His eyes told me he couldn’t believe I’d asked him that question. Again he looked to Amanda.
I suddenly realized he didn’t know that I knew. He thought I was ignorant about the affair.
I understood protecting family. At almost any cost. I had come to accept that I might be too comfortable rationalizing those particular costs. But Raoul didn’t know that about me. He couldn’t know that his motive to protect Diane was more palatable to me than had been his motive to seduce my wife.
I lost focus for a moment as I questioned my assumption. Who, I wondered, had seduced whom?
I forced myself back to the moment. Amanda’s expression revealed that she recognized that a setup was in progress and that she didn’t understand its parameters. She looked to me, not to Raoul, for guidance. “Should I go, Alan?”
I shook my head. “Please stay for a moment, Amanda. I think everyone should stay. Raoul, I don’t believe she wishes to go anywhere with you.”
Raoul had regained his equilibrium. He grinned. I had to admit that the man had a million-dollar smile. I felt an unpleasant urge to remove some of his perfect teeth.
Elliot grinned, too. He said, “I don’t think what you believe is relevant, Alan. Do you fail to recognize your disadvantage? The gravity of why we’re here?”
I assumed he meant my imminent arrest. I recalled Sam and the Kumamotos and the glass of rye teetering on his belly. That the only thing more alluring than the spectacle of success was the prospect of spectacular failure. That’s where I was with Elliot.
I would either pull off this long shot or I w
ould go down in dazzling flames.
I also heard Elliot’s words as his acknowledgment, and his caution to me, that he was in possession of Lauren’s missing yellow Field Notes.
Elliot didn’t know that I, too, had a copy. Or that I had, courtesy of Sam, a recent annotated translation of the most pertinent line of Lauren’s notes. Well, maybe.
I said, “I think I do understand why you’re here, Elliot. The gravity? I may understand that better than you.”
I held my hands in front of my body, tapping my inner wrists together to suggest my capitulation. I interweaved my fingers and placed my hands on top of my head. “If you wish to detain me, Elliot, do it. Before I hear Miranda I’d like to say something. Voluntarily. I’m sure you appreciate the value of having these two witnesses affirm that I am speaking to you of my own free will prior to being taken into custody.”
I moved like a sloth toward Elliot to allow him opportunity to protest. The grin stayed plastered on his face. “Don’t worry, I’m harmless.”
“I’m not worried,” he said. “About you.”
This isn’t Flagstaff, this is the Morgul Bismark. We’re not climbing big mountains. My territory, my advantage. You should be worried.
Maybe.
I felt a flicker of ambivalence about what I was about to do to protect my family and myself. If Sam was right Elliot had likely done nothing illegal prior to 9-11-2001. I thought it through. Because Elliot didn’t expect the world to treat him fairly when they discovered his romantic relationship with a Bin Laden relative in Boston, he had decided on a take-no-prisoners approach since then.
When Lauren became too curious about Elliot’s background, he made her one of his casualties. Elliot was eager to make me one of his casualties, too. And he was more than willing to allow my kids to become collateral damage.
Elliot’s transgression? I saw blind ambition. And political self-interest. I had little tolerance for those motivations.
Despite the risk that Sam was wrong—that maybe—and that I was wrong, I felt a sense of calm.
All the doubt, all the options, would come down to a binary outcome. What I was about to say to Elliot would either work. Or it wouldn’t. I had Ivy Baldwin on my mind. No one knew binary outcomes better than Ivy.
I leaned toward Elliot so that my lips were inches from his right ear. He leaned away. I leaned forward some more. I was not fond of his cologne. I felt exhilaration that was almost equivalent to my fear.
Ivy had been right about the high wire. It was the greatest poison in the world.
One drop would kill me.
I enunciated with exaggerated care as I whispered into Elliot Bellhaven’s ear, “Haziq”—I paused—“bin Laden.”
I began to count to myself, something I do reflexively in moments of unbearable anticipation. By the time I reached three, my confidence began evaporating.
I held my lips where they were. I was so close to Elliot that had he turned his face in my direction we would have kissed. By my count of six I began expecting Elliot to laugh at me, a laugh I feared I would hear echoed for my eternity in state prison.
I reached eleven before Elliot took his next breath.
76
DOCTOR LILA
MY SUPERVISOR SAID, “YOUR patients identified Mr. Bellhaven by name?”
They aren’t fools, I thought. “By his role. His position.”
“Specifically? The Boulder County district attorney?”
“No. In general terms. His legal authority.”
“It won’t work, Delilah. The duty to warn has never been interpreted the way you are suggesting. It has certainly never been invoked in a circumstance where the therapist’s determination of an overt threat is dependent on knowledge from two different clinical cases combined together. Let alone based on media reports of unknowable veracity. About a victim whose identity is a clear leap of faith. The ethics don’t back you up. The courts won’t see it the way you see it.”
I was prepared for that argument. I had rehearsed my response to it. “Prior to Tarasoff there was no duty to warn. But things evolve. That’s the nature of our profession. Ethical standards are organic, just like diagnoses. DSM-III became IV. Soon it will become V. Pathology standards change. Ethical standards do, too. Child endangerment wasn’t an exception to privilege in the first half of the twentieth century. Tarasoff will be superseded by an evolved ethical dictate about the duty to warn. You know that is true.”
“So why not your case? Why shouldn’t this … confabulation be the one that changes the world? That’s what you’re saying?”
Asshole. “Yes, why not this case? These cases. The consequences of inaction are immense. I don’t feel I can ignore the risk. I am not looking to change the world, but simply to prevent a tragedy. In good faith.”
“Hypothetically? Let’s say I concur, Delilah. What do you propose you have an obligation to do with your conclusion that Mr. Bellhaven is at risk?”
“Warn him.”
“You cannot. That’s a clear violation of confidentiality.”
I had done my homework. “Do you remember Michael McClelland? You were in town then. Practicing, I believe.”
“McClelland? What does he have to do with this? That was a long time ago. I’m surprised you even know about it.”
I said, “One of my professors knows Dr. Gregory, McClelland’s psychologist. She told me some things about the case. She thinks, and I agree, that ethical missteps were made. Mistakes in judgment.”
“By McClelland’s therapist?” he said. “What missteps?”
“McClelland tried to kill Dr. Gregory’s girlfriend. Did Dr. Gregory violate McClelland’s privilege when he helped the police track him down to prevent that murder? Did Dr. Gregory violate his professional ethics by trying to protect someone he cared about?”
“Those were extraordinary circumstances. And I think a careful analysis of what happened would reveal that the therapist in that case erred on the side of confidentiality, not on the side of disclosure. My advice is that you should do the same.”
I said, “I think we may be in agreement. See, that is the specific error in judgment I am questioning. How did his decision to be so protective of his patient’s privilege work out for Dr. Gregory? Or for Michael McClelland’s future victims? I’ve read interviews with law enforcement officials who maintain McClelland continued to arrange murders from the state hospital and later, from prison.”
I paused to give him a chance to contradict me. He didn’t. I said, “I want to do what is right. I don’t want those kinds of concerns chasing me because I failed to act. The men I am discussing have demonstrated a willingness to murder to protect themselves.”
“You think,” he said.
“I do think. Yes, I do. I am aware this is a judgment I am making.”
He asked, “Do you feel any personal danger from either of your patients?”
I said, “I have not been threatened. But I do feel vulnerable. Anyone would.”
I’d had supervisors like this man before. Pedantic ones. They were not my favorites. I had hoped to find an ally. I realized I wasn’t going to get one.
He said, “Our job as therapists isn’t to predict future wrongdoing by our patients, Doctor. You know that. The data show we are not good at it.”
“I am not predicting. I heard a threat. I would be reporting what I know.”
“You heard a generic assertion. You don’t know. By your own admission, you are surmising, linking disparate pieces of information. For some reason we both need to understand much better, you are reaching for a conclusion. Right now? You lack both the legal and ethical authority to take the steps you are contemplating.”
I said, “Well, I appreciate your counsel.”
“Is that capitulation? I’m surprised. You clearly disagree with me.”
“We’re not on exactly the same page. But I am here to learn.” I forced a smile.
“The Michael McClelland situation? Years ago? You seem to know that history
?”
“Yes,” I said. I was curious where he was going.
“Review it, please, before we speak again. That therapist never broke his patient’s privilege. He upheld our profession’s ethical standards.”
I said, “I am not in a position to argue that history with you. I wasn’t there. But my understanding is that McClelland’s therapist, Dr. Gregory, paid a high personal price for his decisions. And that other people—complete innocents—may have died because he decided to adhere to ethical standards that might have been outdated even back then.”
I put air quotes around the word ethical. I regretted doing that. Instantly.
I think that was what provoked him.
He went to his desk and returned with a leather portfolio. He began writing. “In my notes for today, I will make clear that I am advising you to act in a way consistent with applicable Colorado law, and to adhere to the current ethical standards of APA. You will get a letter by email later today reflecting that advice.”
He was warning me. I said, “Even if it means someone dies?”
I thought he seemed tired. He said, “We aren’t seers. We aren’t detectives. Or cops. What we do is hard enough. There is no need to complicate our role.”
“I think that if Alan Gregory had been more of a detective when he was treating Michael McClelland, and if he had been willing to involve the police earlier, the world would be a different and better place today.”
His voice softer, he said, “Yes? No? I can’t say. I do know that it is not our job. Think about what I’ve said. Please. Let’s meet again on Friday. Two o’clock?”
I thanked him as I gathered my things. Frankly I’d expected better from him. At his door I said, “To be clear, today’s meeting, between you and me? This is covered by the same privilege as psychotherapy, isn’t it?”
His eyes told me he saw the trap I’d set. The ethics of our profession did not allow a supervisor to break privilege, whether or not a supervisee heeded his counsel.
He couldn’t tell anyone we had met about my two patients.
“It is,” he said. “But I urge you in the strongest possible terms not to act precipitously before we speak again.”
Compound Fractures Page 37
