Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  Though the search did include the connecting hallway between our offices, the search warrant did not include Diane’s consultation space, nor did it include the cramped upstairs office where our software-entrepreneur tenant labored on occasion. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d climbed those stairs. Certainly months, possibly years.

  From my perspective, it did appear that the forensic bloodhounds were doing what Sam had said they would do—looking for trace that might have been transferred from the purse to surfaces in my office or on my clothing. Since I had admitted to Sam that I’d made a couple of round-trips to collect patients, the techs were also looking for trace that I might then have inadvertently transferred to surfaces in the hallway or the interior doorway to the waiting room.

  Sam didn’t speak to me until late afternoon. By then I was growing fatigued with my paper clown’s outfit. He approached me, holding one of the warrants that he’d shown to Cozy. “Don’t know what Mr. Maitlin told you about this, but it includes your garage,” he said, poking at the paper with his stubby index finger.

  I laughed. Not my brightest move, considering the circumstances. And the suit.

  Sam didn’t see the humor. In a tone intended to remind him that we were friends—good friends—I said, “Don’t waste your time, Sam. I haven’t been anywhere near the garage. The purse hasn’t been anywhere near the garage.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since…ever.”

  “You know where the purse has been?”

  “Of course not. I was talking about after I saw it the first time. Jesus.”

  “Then what—you’re telling me you’ve never been in your own garage? You expect me to believe that?”

  “I’ve never been in there. Look at it, for God’s sake. Sneeze and the thing will fall on your head.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know. If you look through the cracks in the walls it’s pretty much empty. An old rake, maybe. A shovel. Some jars. Lumber.”

  “I think we’re going to take a look,” he said. He was inspecting the exterior as he spoke. I watched him as he paced around the perimeter of the thing as though he were looking for vulnerabilities in an enemy’s fortifications. He ended his tour in front of me, examining the two front doors.

  I guessed what he was thinking. “I wouldn’t open those.” The moment I said the words I knew Sam would take my suggestion as a challenge, not as a caution.

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “You should have the photographer take some pictures of what it looks like right now, before you go in. Something I can use to file a damage claim later on.”

  Sam shook his head dismissively, pulled on a pair of fresh latex gloves, and stepped up to the big hinged doors at the front of the rickety structure.

  “I’d suggest a hardhat,” I said. “Or body armor. Or maybe one of those cool little bomb-sniffing robots.”

  He tried his best to ignore me but I could tell he found my protests aggravating, which provided me some small measure of satisfaction.

  The handles on the garage doors were rusty, the wooden exterior weathered and cracked. The hinges and the door hardware were powdered with dark orange-brown oxidation. Whatever paint had once been on the surface of the wood had been sandblasted away by a century of Chinooks. The only evidence of the building’s original hue was some dark green tint deep in the fissures of the wood.

  Sam yanked on the left-side door. The handle came off in his hand. He tightened his fist around it and held it up close to his face. I could tell he wanted to throw it at someone. Someone like me. Instead he tossed it at my feet and moved his attention to the right-side door. Given the way the building leaned, the right door was the structural member that I thought had been propping up the building since sometime shortly after the end of the Coolidge administration.

  “I wouldn’t. Seriously. I’m not being difficult. The thing is a hundred-year-old house of cards. It’s going to collapse if you pull that door out.”

  “It’s been here this long, it’ll be here one more day. We have lots of buildings like this in Minnesota.”

  Sam was from the Iron Range in the northern part of Minnesota. It was probably true that he had seen a lot of crumbling pine buildings. That day his confidence was misplaced, though. I was sure of that.

  He set his feet and pulled hard at the handle. The door emitted a loud squeal as though it had been injured. But it didn’t move. I stepped back, anticipating catastrophe. Sam lowered his center of gravity, grasped the handle with both hands, and gave it a good yank. The door creaked outward about six inches before that handle, too, came off in his hand. He stumbled backward and fell ignominiously onto his ass in the space between my car and Diane’s. By then, I had retreated far enough that I was standing about six feet behind him as he propped himself on his elbows.

  I was trying not to laugh. The paper suit helped with my restraint.

  Wood began to creak in the garage. The creaks were almost immediately accompanied by pops. The pops were followed by a few measures of the eerie screeching sound that old nails make as they’re being yanked at awkward angles from dry wood.

  “Get out of the way, Sam,” I said. “She’s coming down.”

  Sam scooted back like an insect retreating from a foe. Three loud cracks snapped in quick succession.

  For five seconds the building stood silently with dust, like smoke, rising in little puffs from its joints. The structure seemed to be quivering like an athlete at the end of a long workout, and I had almost convinced myself it was going to remain standing when it groaned and creaked and screeched even louder than before.

  Then it tumbled over.

  The garage fell to the west as I had long suspected it would. But it didn’t fall over dramatically like a redwood sawed off in an old-growth forest. It fell like an old man who had suddenly lost purchase with his cane. Slowly. Inelegantly. In a heap.

  Once it had finished collapsing onto its side with a final cacophony of pops and cracks, the building sent up a cloud of dust that quickly covered the cars, and Sam, in a fine, likely toxic, film.

  “Damn,” Sam said, still on his elbows and ass, his head inches from my feet.

  If I hadn’t been wearing the Tyvek jumpsuit and that pair of sky blue flip-flops, I think I would have said, “I told you so.”

  FIFTEEN

  LAUREN GOT home even later than I did that night. When I greeted her at the door, I spotted a Boulder County sheriff’s cruiser parked at the entrance to the lane.

  Oh yeah, I thought. Michael McClelland. Him. I’d almost forgotten.

  She and I had only a few seconds to talk—she’d ordered Chinese delivery for dinner—before she got a call she insisted she had to take. She retreated to the bedroom with her phone. By the time the call was over her second evening meeting in a row was about to begin. Sam arrived in a convoy with a young female deputy DA named Melissa something. I didn’t know Melissa. Lauren announced that they would be working upstairs. Lauren undoubtedly told her colleagues it would be more comfortable than our basement. As true as that might be, I also knew that her decision to work on the main floor was a sign that my wife’s legs likely weren’t behaving well enough for her to descend stairs in the company of company.

  I shook Melissa’s hand—it was cold. So was she. I said a quick hello to Sam. He’d showered and changed since his afternoon spent playing destructo-cop with the garage. He was wearing what I thought of as his “Carmen clothes,” which meant he was dressed as though he gave a damn how he looked.

  Like a good spouse—one who hadn’t been strip-searched that afternoon at the order of one of my houseguests—I politely retreated and spent the evening with Grace in the bedrooms.

  I stepped out to the kitchen only twice. The first time I put together two plates of lo mein and spicy shrimp with peppers, and I then I went back out once an hour or so later on to get Grace something to drink. Lauren smiled at me, but
no one spoke while I was in the room. A whiteboard had been set up on an easel on the far side of the kitchen table and was covered with a bulleted list of possibilities of how the purse had ended up in the backyard of my office. I examined the options casually as I poured and then diluted some juice for Gracie.

  • Thrown from Canyon

  The back fence of my yard was a good thirty yards from the closest westbound lane of Canyon Boulevard. It made no sense to me that someone interested in getting rid of a stolen purse would attempt to make that kind of throw, either from the sidewalk or from a moving vehicle. A person could have stepped across the adjacent empty lot and dumped it over the fence, but I couldn’t figure out why someone would do that. Boulder Creek was nearby. The empty lot between the office and Canyon would have been a much better place for disposal. The surrounding downtown area was dotted with Dumpsters and trash cans. There were plenty of available places to stash a stolen purse and run little risk of having it discovered.

  • Wanted it to be found

  Couldn’t really argue with that one. The purse had been tossed, or placed, out in the open. If someone had thrown it over the fence into our yard so that someone would find it, the effort had been successful.

  • Some connection to Walnut Street offices

  —patient

  —doctors

  —what?

  They are actually considering the possibility that Diane or I are involved? I picked up Grace’s juice and retraced my steps down the hall. The last thing I heard behind me was a whispered question from the young DA. Melissa had one of those unfortunate whispers that carried like the bark of a neighbor’s dog. “Did he see the board just then? Could you tell? Was he looking?”

  Sam’s cynical reply: “He saw it.”

  Later, after everyone had left and after I’d taken the dogs out for a final stroll, I joined Lauren in bed. She said, “Sam told me about this afternoon. You and I probably shouldn’t discuss it. You understand?”

  I thought I understood. But I said, “Not really.”

  She was ready with the rationale. “If it turns out that you’re involved in the…work…we’re doing—even inadvertently—it will compromise my ability to lead the investigation. And it might interfere with Sam’s ability to participate. In the meantime the DA doesn’t want either of us to have any conversations with you about…any of it.”

  “I can’t tell you my side?”

  “Once the forensics on the purse and your…things…come back negative and we’re confident that it’s just a coincidence that it ended up in your yard…then we can talk. I’m really sorry you got dragged into it, babe. This investigation is a big deal. That’s why Sam’s being the way he is.” She kissed me slowly. It was almost an invitation.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked. “Your legs? You didn’t go downstairs tonight.”

  “My legs are fine. I wanted to use the table—to spread some things out. Thanks for keeping Grace occupied.”

  She wasn’t telling me anything about her health but was tacitly acknowledging that the stress was taking a toll. I said, “Kirsten Lord has started working with Cozy. Did you know that? She showed up when I called him for help with the warrant today.”

  “I heard something a few weeks ago. I didn’t mention it?” she said.

  “Don’t think you did.”

  “I haven’t seen her that much the past year or two.”

  “You were pretty close friends for a while.”

  She crinkled her nose. “One of those things. We really can’t talk about this. What happened. Your attorneys.”

  I nodded.

  She said, “I’m sorry.”

  I had met Kirsten Lord during a brief window when I’d volunteered to be the acting Regional Psychological Consultant to the United States Marshal’s Witness Security Program—WITSEC—popularly known as the Witness Protection Program. Kirsten was a newbie enrollee in the program. She was not a typical WITSEC mobster or drug informant—she was a prosecutor from New Orleans whom the government was protecting as a threatened law enforcement officer after her husband had been gunned down in the French Quarter in retaliation for one of her prosecutions.

  She and her daughter had been resettled in Boulder for their first stint in government-devised anonymity purgatory. She’d ultimately decided to leave the protection of the program after the threat diminished and their security situation stabilized. She’d also decided to stay in Boulder. She and Lauren had become friends and that’s how I knew that Kirsten had spent a few of the intervening years exploring alternative careers. The fact that she’d recently hooked up with Cozier Maitlin, one of Boulder’s most prominent criminal defense attorneys, seemed to indicate that her days of career wanderlust had gone full circle.

  Our psychotherapy relationship had terminated when she chose to leave WITSEC. Beyond “Hello” and “How are you?” she and I had not spoken since she’d asked me for a referral to a new therapist.

  Twenty minutes after we’d climbed into bed I whispered, “You still awake?”

  Lauren didn’t answer. I listened for a while to the rhythm of her breathing, my ears tuned for the cadence of sleep. I didn’t hear it. I climbed out of bed, pulled on some sweats, wrapped a throw over my shoulders, and shuffled out to the narrow deck off the living room.

  I was thinking about secrets. Lauren’s and Sam’s. Mine.

  Later, in retrospect, I realized that my focus was probably a few degrees off-target. Secrets usually aren’t as important as our motivation for keeping them. I should have been thinking about the motivation for secrets.

  Tops on that list? For years I would’ve argued that the top spot on the list was reserved for shame. That night, though, I should have been thinking that the top spot on the list had to do with control. Specifically, the control we lose when we free secrets from their locked dens. I should have been thinking about control.

  About losing it.

  When I finally slept that night I dreamed the garage had collapsed again. I was inside it. A man had his hand around my ankle.

  I had a gun.

  SIXTEEN

  KIRSTEN CALLED me later that week, on Friday evening. I took the call in the kitchen. Lauren was reading to Grace. No music was playing in the background, not even the Wiggles.

  After a greeting that I thought was too formal by double-digit degrees, Kirsten asked, “Do you still ride your bike?”

  “Whenever I can,” I said.

  It was a lie. Since the previous fall my bikes had been collecting dust. Biking had long been my primary stress-reduction tool, but for four or five months I’d been using the winter—cold, ice, road sand—as my excuse not to ride. With the weather improving I’d been compelled to become more imaginative with my rationalizations. Admitting the reality—I hadn’t felt like riding in half a year—wasn’t palatable. My denial wasn’t impregnable—I was aware it wasn’t a good sign that I’d traded in quality cardio for a diet of high-proof clear liquids.

  “We need to get reacquainted, Alan. There are some developments that you and I need to discuss. Are you up for a ride tomorrow? We can talk.”

  “You ride?” I said. “You have a road bike?”

  Kirsten Lord’s laugh told me she did, and that she found my incredulous tone amusing.

  “Cozy doesn’t want to be part of this?”

  “The talking part, or the riding part? Sorry,” she said. “I have trouble visualizing him on a bicycle. Doesn’t matter, he’s in La Jolla for a few days looking at a new weekend place. He found a condo with ten-foot ceilings and a partial view of the cove. So you’re stuck with me on this for now. I’m assuming enough water has passed under the bridge that you’re okay with us working together.”

  Five years? Was that sufficient ethical insulation between the termination of a doctor-patient relationship and the initiation of an attorney-client one? Probably. There weren’t any fixed guidelines in my profession. My personal rule of thumb was tha
t five years was a wide enough moat between the doctor-patient relationship and most of what might come next. Regardless, my ethical reticence wasn’t germane—given my unusual circumstances I wasn’t in a position to be too picky.

  “Sure,” I said. “What developments?”

  “In person. I have to do this early. Is seven okay? You can choose the route. Just not all mountains, please. I can definitely climb, but I can’t climb indefinitely.”

  Lauren and Grace were still asleep when I got out of bed.

  Kirsten arrived right at seven, and we started off down the lane a few minutes later. I waved good-bye to Lauren’s sentry—a solitary sheriff’s deputy slouched in the driver’s seat of her cruiser. The deputy was sipping from a container of coffee that I’d delivered a few minutes before along with a heads-up about Kirsten’s imminent arrival.

  Kirsten didn’t ask about the deputy’s presence. I figured she already knew.

  We began the ride on safe ground, literally and figuratively. The route north from my house on the eastern rim of the Boulder Valley is mostly rolling hills. Early on Saturday morning we would see little traffic. For the first few miles we rode side by side on quiet lanes and talked about our kids. Kirsten’s daughter, Amy, was solidly into the domain of teenage-girl no-parents’ land. I told Kirsten about Grace.

  The conversation moved to the events that had brought us together the first time. Neither of us had heard from Carl Luppo, the charismatic ex-mob guy who was my other WITSEC patient, since shortly after Kirsten had asked for “the paper”—her ticket out of Witness Protection. She was convinced that Carl was still alive somewhere, kicking ass. I wasn’t as optimistic as she was, but I kept those fears to myself.

  She pulled ahead of me and wasted no time getting her spin way up, maintaining a determined push that I wasn’t prepared to match. I tried to change mental gears and find a little competitive fire. I failed; within minutes of her acceleration I was struggling in her wake. My winter malaise had left me out of shape. We were almost due east of Niwot before Kirsten dropped back and rode side by side with me again.