“You’re good,” I said, trying to sound unaffected by all the exertion.
“Never knew I liked doing this until I moved here. Same for snowshoeing. And fly-fishing. I guess I owe WITSEC something, right? Who would have pegged me for an outdoorswoman?” She laughed.
She laughs with much more ease than she used to, I thought. “I guess,” I said, thinking it prudent to limit myself to short sentences. Kirsten had arrived in the Rocky Mountain West as a young professional woman and mother more inclined to a fine pedicure than a tough training ride.
“You have some problems,” she said, without a hitch in her rhythm. I glanced over at her. Although she’d slowed her spin, her helmeted head was down, and her Lycra-molded form was almost perfect.
I mentally checked my own form, tuning in to the vibrations passing through the tires and frame of my bicycle. I didn’t see the problem, and I didn’t feel the problem.
“Not a riding problem, Alan. You have legal problems.”
Shit. “Sam’s going to press for access to the files that were on my desk?”
“I wish it was that simple,” she said. “Worst possible outcome of that would be manageable.” As she wet her lips with her tongue, I could tell she wasn’t even breathing hard. “The shoes they collected during the search? Cozy has a contact somewhere in the department. In the lab maybe. There was blood on the sole of one of your shoes.”
I was mystified by the revelation for a couple of revolutions of the pedals. Then I remembered Kol and the bizarre fountain-bathing episode. “I know what that is. I had a patient who had an amazing bloody nose last week—a day or two before the purse thing. I can check my calendar and be more precise. There was blood all over the waiting room. I’m not surprised that some got on my shoes. It’s no big thing. Don’t sweat it.”
We both slowed to see what an ancient hay truck in front of us was planning at the upcoming intersection. The driver had slowed the truck to a crawl and was straddling the center line of the two-lane roadway. One of two brake lights was illuminated, but neither turn signal was flashing.
“Male patient or female patient?” Kirsten asked. Her eyes were locked on the flapping tarp that covered the ass of the truck.
“Male,” I said, wondering why it was an important distinction.
She looked at me. “Then it wasn’t his blood on your shoes.”
She returned her attention to the road and braked hard. Reflexively, I did, too. In front of us the truck started a wide right turn across the road. The driver paused his maneuver just long enough to hold his hand out and flip us off. I’d been riding for too many years to be surprised at the gesture. The truck driver’s manners didn’t faze Kirsten.
“It wasn’t his blood,” she repeated as she stopped her bike.
“I cleaned it up—it was everywhere. His clothes, the fountain in the waiting room. The floor. My partner’s new furniture.”
“Cozy’s source says it was a woman’s blood.”
“What woman?”
“All we know is that the initial DNA shows no y chromosome.”
I sat up straight on the saddle. “Maybe it’s Diane’s. She might have cut herself. Or maybe one of the workers…We have this new fountain. Maybe the water artist cut herself.” I waved vaguely west. “She’s from near here. A llama ranch in Niwot.”
“What?”
Kirsten hadn’t been in Boulder quite long enough for phrases like “the water artist” or “llama ranch in Niwot” to become vernacular for her. I provided a translation. “A woman was doing some metal work in the waiting room—maybe she cut herself.”
She asked, “Any other way that your shoe could have come in contact with a woman’s blood?”
“Lauren? Sure, I suppose. Gracie? She’s a kid—you know what that’s like, she cuts herself all the time. Scrapes and things. But those shoes? I wear them mostly to work. The only blood I remember seeing recently is from this patient and his nosebleed. I bet Cozy’s information is wrong.”
“There’s another office, right? Upstairs.”
“A software guy. A man. He’s not around much.”
“Does he have employees?” I shook my head. “Visitors? Clients?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Receptionists? Janitors?”
“Somebody comes in and cleans a couple of nights a week, but that’s a man, too. I’m sure the blood on my shoe is from the mess my patient made in the waiting room.”
Kirsten released her handlebars and sat up tall on her saddle. She wore half gloves and her exposed fingernails showed the care of a recent manicure. The gaze she used to corral my attention was much more piercing and much more confident than anything I recalled from our earlier relationship when she was patient and I was doctor.
“Okay, let’s say you’re right and that Cozy’s information is wrong. Anything else you want to tell me before this goes further?” she asked.
She didn’t quite believe my protests about the blood, but hadn’t quite concluded I was lying to her. The consequences of what Kirsten was telling me became clear: A witness, crucial to a grand jury investigation, had gone missing. Her apparently ransacked purse had shown up in the yard of my building. A trace of a woman’s blood had been discovered on the sole of one of my shoes. What woman? That was unclear. What was clear was that I was a person of interest in some part of the grand jury investigation. The witness’s disappearance? Probably, but I didn’t know that for sure.
The cops probably didn’t even know that for sure. What did they suspect had happened to the witness? Witness tampering? Intimidation? Assault? Murder?
I watched the hay truck disappear over a distant rise on the intersecting county road. I went with the obvious: “I’m in some trouble here.”
“Cozy and I are concerned, yes.”
She’d adopted her new boss’s tendency for understatement. “What happens next?” I asked.
“We don’t think they’re planning to arrest you yet.”
“Jesus.”
“Do I need to caution you not to talk with anyone? Certainly not anyone from law enforcement.” I hesitated. She repeated, “Do I?”
I felt a sigh coming on, but thwarted it. “My wife is a deputy DA. My best friend is a Boulder detective temporarily assigned to her office.”
“We know that it’s going to be awkward. We’ve discussed asking you to move out of your house until this gets resolved.”
“Excuse me?”
“You could inadvertently say something incriminating to Lauren. Or to your friend. It’s a risk that we can’t afford to take.” She pulled her sunglasses down to the end of her nose and smiled at me. Her eyes were kind. “You helped me once. I’d like to return the favor. Will you let me do that?”
By asking me to leave my family? I nodded.
“Who is the patient with the nosebleed?” she asked. “I need to talk to him.”
“I can’t tell you that without his permission.”
“Then get his permission.”
SEVENTEEN
TWENTY MINUTES later I broke off the climb that we’d started up Lefthand Canyon toward Jamestown. We turned around long before Kirsten seemed fatigued by either the exertion or the altitude gain. I took the lead and chose the most direct route down the length of the Boulder Valley toward Spanish Hills. Her rider’s etiquette was refined—she offered to lead for a while and allow me to draft. I declined. I wanted to get home. And I wanted to arrive tired. More than tired. Exhausted.
When we completed the final incline up the lane off South Boulder Road toward my house the sheriff’s cruiser was gone from its location on the dirt shoulder. I tried to remember if Lauren had an early appointment on Saturday or any plans for a morning errand. I didn’t think so.
I helped Kirsten get her bike onto the rack on top of her car before I thanked her for the ride and told her I’d call her after I reached my nosebleed patient. She cautioned me again to be discreet with Sam and La
uren. We shook hands—it was awkward—and said good-bye. My cleats click-clacked on the gravel as I heel-toed toward the house. Almost immediately I noticed a piece of paper had been stuck in the jamb. From a half-dozen steps away I could identify the paper as a common lined index card.
I moved up onto the porch. From five feet away I could read the card. In a simple, neat, almost architectural hand, someone had written, “The second happened here.”
I stopped. “Kirsten,” I called without turning around.
She was right behind me. I hadn’t even heard her approach. She put her hand on my shoulder. “I saw it from my car. What is it?” I shook my head. “What does it mean? The second what happened here?” she asked.
I turned and looked at her just as she remembered. She’d let her blond hair down. Her bicycle helmet was in her hand. She’d also lowered the zipper on her Lycra to allow some air to circulate to her chest. The flesh below her neck was mottled pink from the ride. I watched recognition darken her eyes—she had been at my home when the first happened. Her daughter, Amy, had been there, too.
The answer to her question wasn’t a secret. It was old history for us—the night that the men who had been after Kirsten caught up with her. The final scene of the last act played out between me and one of the killers in the rubble of my front porch. I’d driven Adrienne’s Land Cruiser through the wall in an effort to destroy the man who was after Kirsten’s family and mine.
It had all happened right where we were standing.
“Oh my God,” she said. “That’s what this is about?”
My breathing was shallow. My pulse was racing. My instinct was to run to find my family.
“There’s this guy named Michael McClelland,” I said. I struggled to find a way to make the long story short for Kirsten. A way to help her understand what had happened between Lauren and me and Michael McClelland so long before. I said, “Back in New Orleans? Before you came to Boulder, before we ever met? The man who ordered your husband killed, what was his name?”
She swallowed once. “Ernesto Castro,” she said. Castro—someone she had prosecuted for rape who had promised to take revenge—was one of Kirsten’s secrets. The man’s name came out of her mouth in a hoarse whisper. The pink hue drained from the flesh on her chest. What had been mottled was uniformly pale.
The difference that day? She knew Castro was neutralized. I knew McClelland wasn’t.
“Michael McClelland is Lauren’s Ernesto Castro. A long time ago he tried to rape her—or kill her—as a way of getting even with me. I have no doubt he would try again if he had the chance. He escaped from the Colorado State Hospital a few days ago. We’re afraid this is his chance.”
“That’s why the deputy was here this morning? For Lauren’s protection? Cozy told me something about a problem with a case of hers. He didn’t make it sound that important.”
I looked at the note and nodded. The second happened here.
“Get even with you for what?” she asked, unwilling to let go of the question of McClelland’s motive.
It was a tough question to answer. I said, “I figured out what was going on between him and Lauren. Learned a little of what he had done before he met her. Guessed what he might do next. Sam helped me. We stopped him just before he…hurt her. We ruined his life. Now I think he wants to return the favor.” I fought a flush of despair at the simple equation I’d sketched.
“Lauren’s not the only possible target,” Kirsten said. “He can hurt her in other ways.” She was speaking from experience. She’d been steps away from her husband when a small man in chinos shot him in the head on the sidewalk outside Galatoire’s in New Orleans’s French Quarter as the couple rendezvoused for their wedding anniversary.
Kirsten’s husband had been an innocent.
“I know,” I said. “Grace is in danger, too. And me. And Sam. He was there at the end.”
Watching a patient—or ex-patient—have an acute episode of post-traumatic stress outside the office is not something most therapists get an opportunity to see. Usually, we hear about the awful moments and the insistent symptoms later, after the actual terror has abated, after the palms have dried, and after the pulse has slowed. But right in front of my eyes Kirsten was being flooded with the feelings of panic and terror and horror from the time of her husband’s murder, and from the time that her life and that of her daughter were so much at risk. Right on my front porch.
I reminded myself that I was no longer her therapist. I was her client. “Are you okay?” I asked.
She nodded. She wasn’t okay, but she didn’t know what she wanted from me. “Oh God,” she said. Kirsten’s personal nightmare was coming into fresh focus. She crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s not enough, you know? A deputy to keep an eye on her from across the road? It’s not enough. Not if the guy’s determined.”
“He’s determined. He’s vengeful. And he’s very smart.”
She knew the words to that tune. Her eyes went back to the note. “What does he have to do with that night? The night here? With us. Why would he mention that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But I had a guess: Because McClelland knows. To know there was a second meant he knew there was a first.
“Why ‘the second’? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It was a lie. A lie I hoped to get away with because Kirsten was asking the wrong question. She should have been asking about the first.
I pulled out my cell phone and tried Lauren on her mobile. It rolled over to voice-mail. I called Sam Purdy at home. He answered after two rings. I told him about the note. He sounded neither friendly nor sympathetic. He said he’d notify the sheriff and warned me not to go near it.
To Kirsten I said, “Sam is on his way. He’s calling the sheriff.”
She reached out and touched me on the arm. She managed a rueful little grin, arresting in the circumstances. She said, “What you need is a Carl Luppo, you know? That’s what you need.”
I smiled just as ruefully. Carl Luppo had turned out to be Kirsten’s unlikely guardian angel while she was hiding from Ernesto Castro’s bloody minions. Carl, an organized-crime refugee, had been secreted out of Boulder by the U.S. Marshals after he’d put his life on the line to protect Kirsten’s family, as well as mine. I knew that finding my own Carl Luppo wasn’t going to be easy.
Kirsten knew that, too.
I said, “McClelland could be watching us right this second.” By saying it aloud, I convinced myself that it was true—I looked over Kirsten toward the top of a bluff a few hundred yards away. On that bluff, at the spot where the turnpike from Denver dropped down the valley into Boulder, was the edge of the parking area for a scenic overlook. I half expected to see the outline of a familiar man standing on the rim staring right back at me with a pair of good binoculars.
I didn’t.
“Alan?” She was holding a business card. I took it. “I have to go get Amy. My cell is on the back. So is my home number. Call me as soon you know something.”
I watched her drive away.
McClelland knows, I thought. He couldn’t.
EIGHTEEN
SAM DIDN’T have to show up along with the sheriff’s investigator and county forensics tech who arrived to collect the card from my door. But he did. I was more grateful than suspicious.
I overheard a deputy tell Sam that a car was searching a perimeter around my home. I presumed the search was for McClelland. A helicopter would have been ideal, but Boulder law enforcement didn’t own one. I had no hope McClelland would be found.
Sam stepped back and leaned against his old Jeep. He watched from a distance as the tech took pictures of footprints that may or may not have been McClelland’s and of tire marks in the dust and gravel that may or may not have been left behind by a vehicle he may or may not have been using. The tech dusted the door for latents that neither Sam nor I thought belonged to McClelland. We watched the meticulous collection of the ind
ex card as it was placed into a lint-free envelope. Compared to what the forensics crew had done a few days before at my office, this wasn’t a big job, and it didn’t take long.
Sam kept his distance until the sheriff’s personnel were getting ready to leave. As the tech packed up, Sam sidled up beside me and asked, “You know what the note means?”
“On the card? Some kind of taunt.”
“Why ‘the second’? What was the first?”
Sam didn’t miss the obvious. “I couldn’t say,” I replied.
Sam probably knew I was lying. If he did, he let it go. The only reason he let it go was because he knew he shouldn’t have been talking to me without my attorney present. He said aloud what I’d been thinking: “They’re not going to find anything. The index card will be clean. Latents on the door won’t be his. Footprints and tire tracks won’t be worth shit.” He added a sarcastic afterthought: “Just like on TV.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It’s like me and ice-fishing. I drank a lot of beer and lost a lot of bait. Hardly ever got a pike. I was a legendarily bad ice-fisherman. But if you don’t raise the shanty, if you don’t drill the ice, if you don’t hang the smelt, if you don’t drop the line, you know you’re never going to get a pike. That’s for sure.”
I’d never been ice-fishing. Sam grew up in northern Minnesota. He had been ice-fishing. “And the beer?” I asked.
“Made losing the bait more tolerable.”
“I was surprised to see forensics at all. This is pretty minor league.”
“McClelland almost killed a cop. Doesn’t matter how long ago it was—we don’t forget. Lauren see any of this?” he asked.
He meant the card. I shook my head. “No.” I held up my cell. “I was on a bike ride when she left with Grace for a soccer parents’ meeting. I talked with her while you were on the way here.”
“They’re all right?”
“So far. A deputy is with them.”
He pointed across the lane at the big farmhouse that was slightly uphill from my home. Our house had originally been built as a caretaker’s cottage for the farmhouse. I’d rented the shack while I was in graduate school and later bought it from the woman who lived in the farmhouse and owned the surrounding acres.
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