Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  I touched the doorbell. I waited. I knocked. I waited some more, hoping for someone’s eye to darken the small circle of the peephole in the door. Hoping that Kol would open the door and prove Marty Driver wrong. But that didn’t happen.

  Before I returned to the elevator I used the interior landmarks around me—the elevators, the fire stairs, and a tall, thin solitary window that faced toward busy Canyon Boulevard—to try to ascertain the exposure that number 307 would have to the street. It appeared that Kol’s unit, or his purported unit, would indeed face both Canyon and Broadway and have fine views to the west and to the south.

  Back out on the sidewalk I screened my eyes and looked up toward the windows that I thought belonged to 307. I saw nothing but glare. I crossed over to the other side of Canyon and looked up again. From that vantage, it was apparent that there was nothing about the unit that made it appear to have been occupied. No window coverings. No planters on the small balcony.

  Shit. Absolutely unbidden, Kol’s words from our last session exploded into my head: “I mean it’s not like what happened with…your dad.” Those words were immediately followed by a visual image of the note on my door—The second happened here—and by Sam’s questions from earlier that morning: “What about your family?”

  Oh my God—Kol does know about my father.

  Kol knows. Then, chasing it like a wolf after prey, Does McClelland?

  TWENTY

  I DIDN’T notice the bandanna until I got home from my unsuccessful search for Kol’s loft. The kerchief may have been there when I’d driven away from the house, but if it was I had missed it.

  Adrienne, our neighbor, owned the small barn that had been part of the original ranch property. The barn backed up to the edge of the ridge at the southern end of the lane. Behind the barn the ridge dropped off into an undulating valley before rising up toward the scenic overlook on Highway 36.

  Adrienne’s husband, Peter, since deceased, had expanded and renovated the barn into a shop for his carpentry studio. The new garage that Lauren and I built in the intervening years partially obscured our view of the barn from the front of our house. As I drove back in the lane from town the bright blue fabric of the bandanna that was tied in a loose knot around the handles of the sliding barn doors was hard to miss.

  My mouth fell open when I saw it. My mind made most of the connections without any conscious direction. The bandanna was a thunderstorm parked over a canyon, unleashing a flash flood from my past. But the bandanna didn’t feel like a mere trigger for my memory. I knew instantly that it was also a warning.

  Before his arrest, the bandanna had become McClelland’s terrorist calling card. Old feelings of vulnerability washed over me. Cicero. Oh my God. After he’d stolen my dog—it was his way of boasting that he could get to me at will—he’d tied a bandanna around her neck before returning her.

  I stopped the car near the garage and hit the button on the opener. The big door swung up. Lauren’s car was absent from her parking space. She wasn’t home. I wasn’t aware that I had stopped breathing, but when I spotted the empty stall in the garage, I felt my lungs fill again. I told myself that my family was safe and I tried to believe it.

  I killed the engine and ran back toward the house. I fumbled trying to unlock the door, dropping the keys twice in the process. I finally got the key in the lock and the door open and found Emily and Anvil waiting eagerly on the other side.

  The dogs were fine. To their great dismay I left them in the house and retraced my steps toward the barn. By then I was convinced that the message of this bandanna was not about the dogs—it was about the barn.

  After her husband’s death years before, Adrienne had never been able to bring herself to use Peter’s studio for anything other than household storage. I knew that Peter’s tools and power equipment would be in the same locations they were when he died. Discarded furniture from the house and toys that Jonas had outgrown would be piled haphazardly wherever Adrienne had left them. Most of the mess was just inside the front doors.

  I tried to remember the last time I had been in the barn. It had been years.

  I stepped up to the rolling doors. As always, they were secured together by a galvanized hook and rasp and a big brass padlock. The lock appeared undisturbed.

  The addition Peter had built on the western edge of the structure had a shed roof and a solitary window facing the lane. I cupped my hand over my eyes and peered through the dirty glass. Peter’s longest workbench was shrouded in duck cloth, as it had been since his death.

  Nothing seemed out of place.

  I stepped back and tried to spot any sign of forced entry on the front of the barn. The windows were intact. All that was unusual was the bandanna loosely tying the door handles together.

  I began a slow march around the building, starting with Peter’s addition. No broken glass. I peeked in each window. Stepped back to check the condition of the skylights. I saw nothing of concern. The two square windows high on the barn’s southern gable were intact. I kept walking.

  The only other door into the building was on the east side, just around the south corner. When I turned that corner I saw the door was open about an inch, propped in place with a brick.

  Michael McClelland. He’d been there. In the barn. Through that door. He wanted me to know that he’d been there. He could have closed the door. He probably could have relocked it. But he didn’t. McClelland had left it open so that I would find it. He’d left the bandanna so that I wouldn’t miss it.

  Why? So that I could find whatever it was that he had left for me inside.

  Was he in there? Was this mano a mano time? I backtracked to the garage and pulled my favorite old softball bat from the jumble of sports equipment that Lauren and I kept stashed in a plastic bin in the far corner. I thought of calling Sam but I rejected the idea. I knew he’d take over and ultimately he wouldn’t let me see whatever was inside the barn. Ditto for the Boulder County sheriff.

  My wife had a carry permit for a handgun. I wondered if I’d feel safer with her semiautomatic in my hand.

  Three things gave me pause about the gun. One, I’d never fired it. Two, given the fact that McClelland was on the loose, I was relatively certain Lauren had the gun with her. In her purse. Or in her briefcase. Certainly in her car.

  The third thing was the most compelling: my history with guns was far from illustrious.

  I settled for the bat. And a dog. I went back to the house and got Emily and put her on a lead. Bringing Anvil wasn’t an option; despite his tough-guy posing he wasn’t built for combat any more than I was. Bouviers with fangs bared are, on the other hand, terrifying.

  Although I have significantly more power from the right I’ve always been able to make decent contact from the left side of the plate. Given the location of the open door—on the far end of the east wall—I decided to walk inside the barn batting goofy. The danger, if it came, would most likely be on my right as I stepped inside. The instant I sensed any jeopardy I was going to swing at danger as though it were a high fastball.

  I was hoping Emily would be a beacon for me, would give me a little warning about what was coming. When she sensed something, she’d pull back onto her haunches as she snarled and showed her teeth. When I felt her warning I’d swing at the letters. Letter-high is where the meat would be. I didn’t need a home run. Swinging high—above the level of Emily’s head—would keep her safe.

  I took Emily off her lead and slipped my fingers beneath her collar. I asked her if she wanted to go see Peter. Her ears perked up at the question. She’d loved her days hanging out in the barn with him while I was at work. Then I mouthed, “Hey Peter, take my back,” as I moved the brick aside and pushed the door open with the toe of my shoe.

  The space was flooded with light from the skylights on the shed roof. But the glare was from the west and everything I could see was in shadows. I knew the layout of the space well—Peter and I often drank beer and talked at the end
of the day as he cleaned up the shop after he’d shut down his tools.

  The barn was mostly one big room. Along part of the east wall was an old animal stall that Peter had finished out and rocked-off for painting and staining his pieces. A large exhaust fan had pulled fumes from the space.

  On the southern wall was a counter with a small refrigerator, and Peter’s throne. Up two steps, behind a lovely mahogany outhouse door with a curved quarter-moon, Peter had framed-off an area no bigger than a large closet. Inside was a toilet. The stainless steel, composting contraption had been state of the art when Peter installed it. He’d been quite proud of the thing. Environmentally. Design-wise. Craftsmanship. Everything. He’d called it “The Good Head” and happily showed it off to anyone who visited his studio.

  The area under the center gable was wide open, divided only by support beams and posts, ventilation ducts, Peter’s power equipment, his workbenches, lumber storage racks, a complex system of dust-collection hoses, and the carcasses of a few projects that he’d left unfinished when he died.

  I let go of Emily’s collar. “Go find Peter. Good girl.”

  She took off as though she were heading into the brush after a red fox. I choked up a couple of inches and followed her inside.

  TWENTY-ONE

  MY ONLY other patient suicide had happened years before, early in my career. A knock on my door by a Boulder cop—a detective I’d never met named Sam Purdy—and a simple but loaded question: “You have a patient named Karen Eileen Hart?”

  Sam Purdy had found his way to my Spanish Hills door to inform me that my patient, Karen Hart, had ingested a lethal overdose of antidepressants and alcohol in her Maxwell Street apartment near downtown.

  He had a few questions for me. She had been depressed, yes. It was why I was treating her. And, yes, I had arranged for the consultation with the psychiatrist who had prescribed the antidepressant she used to overdose. Would I have considered her suicidal? No. Far from it. Had someone asked me the day before she died I would have listed Karen among my therapeutic success stories. She had been getting better. Sure, every therapist learns early on in his or her training that the most dangerous time for a suicidal patient is the brief transition after they begin to appear clinically brighter.

  But it wasn’t like that for Karen. She was getting better.

  She’d recently gotten braces, for God’s sake, and had begun to end her extended self-imposed social isolation. Who gets braces, I remember wondering, when she’s planning to kill herself?

  The pieces explaining the tragedy fell together in the months following her death as I came to understand what had happened to Karen Hart, and what—or more precisely, who—had precipitated the acute despair and hopelessness that had led her to swallow the antidepressants and the vodka. I’d never gotten over her needless death, though. Nor did I ever expect to.

  My personal history had taught me that some stains never bleach.

  Some days are never forgotten. They are indelible.

  The most eerie part of the second suicide? The one that day in Peter’s barn? Kol’s body was still swinging when I discovered it.

  I looked away, gagging down vomit. It took half a minute to compose myself before I could look a second time.

  Kol’s body swung in a tiny arc, no more than two or three inches back and forth. My eyes followed the sway involuntarily. This way, that way. A slow-motion tennis match.

  The look on his face was more shock than agony. His eyes were open and aghast; his tongue fat and protruding from his lips as though he’d died from gagging on a piece of raw meat.

  The look on his face was Holy shit, I didn’t know it would feel like this!

  His neck was clearly broken. The cincture’s single harsh tug had snapped his head to the side at an angle that no intact cervical vertebrae would permit. I saw no evidence that he’d used his fingernails to scratch at his throat or at the rope locked around his neck. I couldn’t imagine that anyone suffocating, no matter how intent he had been on dying, could refrain from scratching at a ligature strangling off his airway. I concluded that the cruel yank of the initial fall had killed him.

  The fall killed him. I hoped that the fall had killed him. I had read somewhere that dying from the fall wasn’t the rule with hangings—most victims died a more excruciating death from asphyxiation. That Kol didn’t appear to have died in prolonged agony made it easier to be in the room with his body.

  His knees were hanging at my eye level; his feet were about four feet from the floor. Much higher up, the rope was attached to a crossbeam that ran east to west near the top of the center gable of the post-and-beam barn. That location would have given him just enough room to sit on the beam while he tied off the thick rope, fashioned a noose, placed the noose around his neck, and…

  Jumped. The jumping part had to have been hard. Jesus.

  The swiftness of the jerk as the rope finished playing out its slack? It would be like—what? I wanted to never know.

  “Were we here, girl?” I asked Emily. “When he did this?” How big had the initial arc of the swing been? How long does it take for a pendulum of a certain length, traveling a certain initial arc, carrying a certain weight, to stop moving? I actually tried to remember some physics from high school. I failed.

  Michael McClelland wanted me to see this.

  My next thought: Bingo.

  Emily didn’t bark when she ran inside the barn ahead of me. She hadn’t sensed danger. But she had sensed something.

  She ran to the floor below Kol’s body and did two familiar things. First, she did a series of patented Bouvier des Flandres four-footed leaps—levitating, spinning moves that carry the big dogs straight up on all fours. Emily reserves the quad leaps for times when she is eager to be able to fly. She’ll use them to close the gap on a squirrel in a tree, or to get closer to a particularly annoying raven perched above her. She uses them to let traffic helicopters know what she thinks of them hovering over the turnpike near her home. She once used one to try to nip at a 757 making a western approach into DIA during an upslope. On a good four-footed leap Emily can get a yard—maybe a little more—off the ground. At that altitude she’s capable of completing a 540-degree spin while she’s in the air. It’s an impressive spectacle.

  She completed three leaps and then did something else that is peculiar to the breed—she sat and looked up at the man dangling on the rope, and she started talking.

  Bouvier talking is difficult to describe. It is not barking. Bouvier barking, especially serious Bouvier barking, is not easily misconstrued as anything other than what it is. Bouviers bark in order to warn, to get attention, to give orders. If a Bouv is barking, it is clear that the Bouv expects someone or something to heed.

  The wise listener does just that. But Bouvier talking is something else. It is a throaty, not quite whiny, openmouthed sound that is modulated by the dog’s cheeks. The sounds have multiple inflections and can go on for long enough periods of time that it often seems as though some punctuation is called for.

  After many years as a companion to Bouviers I’ve deluded myself into believing that I can understand some of the conversational nuances when my dog talks to me.

  That time, no. I didn’t think Emily had a schema for the dead guy hanging from the rafters in Peter’s barn. She was as perplexed as I was. Were I to guess, that’s what I would have guessed she was talking about. That she didn’t quite get the guy on the rope.

  As with Karen Hart’s death so many years before, I didn’t see this suicide coming.

  Had there been warning signs? If there had been, I’d missed them.

  After the inevitable lawsuit was filed and after Kol Cruz’s rich mother’s fancy attorney finally got a chance to depose me, or after some judge granted the lawyer access to my therapy notes, I would need to reveal the embarrassing fact that over the time I’d been seeing Kol I had not scratched out one single concern about suicidal ideology, let alone any specific suici
dal threat. Kol, my notes would maintain, hadn’t been currently depressed. Hadn’t expressed any suicidal ideation.

  Suddenly I thought: history? Did Kol have a history of suicidal behavior?

  Ideation? Gestures? Attempts? I had never asked. I had never done a suicidal history with him. I had never perceived a need for one. In fact, I hadn’t done a formal mental-health history with Kol. My failure to take a history—my “professional negligence” is how Kol’s mother’s attorneys would characterize it—wouldn’t look good for me. My malpractice carrier would not be pleased.

  “Well, Dr. Gregory,” some lawyer would ask at my deposition, “what did Mr. Cruz say when you asked him about his history of prior suicide attempts?”

  Shit. How bad at a profession can one person be? Most therapists had never lost a single patient to suicide. I had now lost two.

  Double bingo.

  The bat was heavy in my hands. It was as useless as I felt.

  I bent my knees a little, raised the wood to a ready position behind my left ear, and took a smooth swing through the middle of an imaginary strike zone. In my mind the pitch was a slow curve that broke as though it had rolled off the edge of a table. A Sandy Koufax curve.

  I misjudged the break completely. My errant swing made strike three.

  When I looked up from my reverie, Kol was still there.

  But Emily was gone. I did what almost any dog owner would do. I said, “Emily, come.” It was a command that she obeyed about three times out of ten. I figured she knew what the words meant. I also figured that she knew that as the purported leader of her pack I wasn’t much of a disciplinarian. The consequences of ignoring me were quite tolerable. I wrote off the 30 percent compliance rate to chance, or canine generosity.

  A few feet away Kol was still swinging on his rope. The arc was growing smaller. The sway that I could initially measure in inches would soon require millimeters. Before long the pendulum keeping time to his death would find neutral.