Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  “No,” she said, after a heartbeat passed. “But you’ve been leaving me for months. You just never packed your things.”

  I held my breath. I was concerned that I couldn’t inhale without making a noise that sounded like a gasp.

  In a whisper that was so low it approached silence, I thought she said, “Coward.”

  But it could have been my imagination.

  THIRTY-NINE

  I SPENT some time with Grace and finally got her to bed forty-five minutes past her bedtime. She asked lots of questions. I noted with some sadness that a scant majority of her sentences placed emphasis on a specific word. I did my best to share her enthusiasm about the upcoming adventure to Bimini. Given her excitement I wanted to see some serious yawning before I tucked her in that night.

  The master bedroom was dark and the door closed when I turned off Grace’s light. I retreated to the kitchen, opened the pantry, and spotted an empty spot on the top shelf.

  I’d forgotten to buy more vodka. I said, “Shit.”

  I returned Kirsten’s call from the deck off the great room. “It’s Alan,” I said.

  “I called hours ago. You call this ‘soon’?”

  She was being playful. I said, “It’s been a difficult night.”

  She ditched the jovial tone. “Anything I can do?”

  “No. Thanks for asking.”

  “We have news.”

  “Good news?”

  “News. Are you someplace Lauren can overhear you? I don’t want her to know we know this.”

  “She can’t hear me,” I said. The multiple meanings didn’t escape me.

  “You know Amanda Ross?” Kirsten asked.

  “Of course.” Ross was a rookie Boulder cop who’d been seriously hurt in a hit-and-run late the previous summer after she’d stopped her cruiser to examine an abandoned car near Eben Fine Park at the entrance to Boulder Canyon. Like almost everyone else in town I’d stopped paying attention to her tragedy at some point. Last I’d heard Ross was in a rehab facility.

  The accident was one of those senseless tragedies that captivates a community for a while. But only for a while. The community heals. Amanda Ross, however, didn’t. Her injuries had been severe. She would apparently never be the same.

  The investigation of the incident had been vigorous and thorough. My impression was that it had also been fruitless. Sam had mentioned it to me a few times, mostly to vent his frustration that the perpetrator was still out there. It hadn’t been his case, but its impact on him was clear. “What if it were me?” he asked me once. “What would happen to Simon if I couldn’t work? You think disability is enough?”

  I didn’t have an answer for him.

  Kirsten said, “That’s what the grand jury is investigating.”

  “That explains a lot,” I said. The secrecy. Sam’s tenaciousness about the purse. The over-the-top forensic response at my office. If a guy almost kills a cop he can expect the cops to use their best game to track him down.

  “Yes,” Kirsten agreed. “The grand jury witness who disappeared? The one whose purse was in your yard? She apparently saw some or all of what happened right after the hit-and-run. She came forward late—I don’t know how late—gave a partial statement to the police and then refused to cooperate any further. The police think someone got to her—that she was threatened.”

  I filled in the blanks. “And the grand jury was the method the DA chose to compel her testimony, despite the threat?” One of the rare reasons that Colorado District Attorneys utilize a grand jury is to force testimony from recalcitrant witnesses. Although cops have plenty of ways to encourage witnesses to talk, they have no legal means to force a witness to cooperate prior to trial. Grand juries do.

  “Yes,” Kirsten said. “We heard that she was offered protection. She declined.”

  “Without her they have no case? Safe assumption?”

  “Basically.”

  I waited a few seconds. I said, “You and I need to talk, Kirsten.”

  She hesitated before she said, “Maybe…but maybe not. I didn’t mean to put you in an awkward place the other day. I’m sorry if I did. I was…smitten with you, Alan. I admit it.”

  “Was?”

  “Please, don’t…”

  “I think it’s—”

  “No, no—stop,” she said softly. “You touched something in me. I will be forever grateful to you. You’ll always have a special place in my heart.”

  I was summoned back to Cozy’s office at eleven o’clock the next morning to discuss the ramifications of the news about Amanda Ross. When we were done I planned to go to Salvaggio’s for the sandwich I’d passed on the previous day. I was thinking of going with the spicy capicolla. It was the kind of hot that could take my mind off things.

  Kirsten was late for the meeting. I wondered if it was an intentional ploy to avoid having any time with me. It was probably a good thing.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. Had Cozy not just taken a call of his own—in a replay of my last visit Nigel’s voice on the intercom identified the caller as Ms. Lord—I probably would have ignored the intrusion. Instead I pulled the cell from my coat and looked at the screen.

  Lauren on her mobile. My attention was divided; I was anxious to eavesdrop on Cozy’s conversation with Kirsten. I let the call roll over to voice-mail. I figured Lauren was going to tell me what time she and Grace were leaving for Miami. I rationalized that it was the kind of detail better recorded by voice-mail or text.

  Fifteen seconds later my phone vibrated again. Lauren, again.

  I stood up and walked as far from Cozy’s desk as I could. I went to the southern end of the wall of windows and let my eyes follow the wide lanes of Canyon Boulevard to the west. From my high perch I had no difficulty seeing the long horizontal wall of concrete-framed windows that included Lauren’s office at the Justice Center ten blocks away.

  I hit the button to return her call. While the connection was going through, I pondered the unpleasant reality that, in its own squat, horizontal, prestressed concrete kind of way, the original wing of the Boulder County Justice Center where my wife worked was almost as much of an architectural blight on the entrance to Boulder Canyon as the Colorado Building was on downtown.

  Neither effort was ever going to be part of a retrospective on the golden age of Boulder architecture.

  “Hi,” I said when Lauren answered. I didn’t know what to expect. We hadn’t had a meaningful conversation since she shared her impression that I’d been in the process of leaving her for months.

  Her greeting wasn’t a hello—it was the kind of noise someone makes when they try to speak during the rushed inhale between sobs.

  “Lauren?”

  She continued to attempt to talk in between gasps. “He’s…sitting in my office. In my…desk…chair. Right now. The police are…”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in…the DA’s office.”

  “You’re okay?”

  She sobbed, “Yes.”

  When people around me get frantic, I tend to adopt a false calm. It’s not a skill I was born with—overreaction to crisis was once as natural to me as bleeding from a wound. Maybe the faux composure was a skill I’d acquired during my training as a therapist. Regardless, it had become reflexive for me, like opening an umbrella in a deluge.

  My voice lower and softer, the volume reduced, I asked, “Sweetie, who is it that’s sitting in your office?”

  Lauren said, “Michael”—swallow—“McClelland.”

  FORTY

  MICHAEL HAD used nylon chains inserted into reinforced rubber hoses to affix one leg to Lauren’s desk and one wrist to her chair. Otherwise he would undoubtedly have been taken into custody and transported to the public safety building or the county jail before I arrived at the Justice Center.

  I had strolled the few blocks to Cozy’s office from mine. Cozy and Kirsten both walked to work as a matter of routine, so I could
n’t beg a ride from either of them. Likewise, Nigel did me no good; his wife dropped him off at work each morning. Boulder is not the kind of town where a pedestrian can stand on a busy corner and flag down a passing taxi. The wait could be five minutes, or five hours. The bus? Going west on Canyon? Not likely.

  My wife was terrified. My nemesis—Jesus, I had a nemesis—was blocks away, terrorizing her. And maybe worse. My only way to cover the distance between us—nine or ten blocks, depending how I counted—was on foot. I did consider the wisdom of adding to my accumulating roster of alleged felonies by committing a poorly planned carjacking, but rejected it.

  I jogged to Lauren’s rescue. Along the way I speed-dialed her office number and her cell number a half-dozen times. No one picked up her office phone. Her mobile went straight to voice-mail each time. I tried Sam, too, but he didn’t answer any of his numbers. Along the way I actually passed within a half-block of my office, and my car, but by then I figured I could cover the remaining distance more quickly on foot.

  Completely out of breath from the exertion and the spent adrenaline, I somehow managed to clear security before I was stopped at the entrance to the ground floor staircase in the Justice Center by a uniformed deputy. That was the bad news.

  The good news was that she didn’t seem to recognize me.

  She was a stout woman with some kind of dermatological condition on the part of her neck that was visible above her collar. Her arms were folded across her chest and her feet were set well over a foot apart. Even had she been without a weapon—she wasn’t—she would have presented an imposing obstacle. As I walked closer she seemed to be treating my approach like a minor annoyance, a fly buzzing near her head. She didn’t even bother to look me in the eyes when she swatted me away with, “No one is allowed upstairs right now. Move on, away from the stairs.”

  No “Sir.” No “I’m sorry.”

  In a less frantic moment I might have deliberated about how to play the situation. But I wasn’t feeling deliberative. Naïvely, I thought I’d try the truth. I said, “My wife—”

  Before I could finish making my plea the courtroom doors to Division Six, about ten yards behind me, burst open and some guy in a corduroy suit and sneakers started running toward the main entrance to the building, well over a hundred feet away. A cacophony of shouts from inside the courtroom informed both the deputy and me that the guy who was running away shouldn’t be, and should be stopped.

  That was the deputy’s job.

  “Stay right here,” she said to me with a sigh that let me know she had chased felons down this corridor before, and that it wasn’t a favorite part of her job. She took off in a dead run. The man’s corduroy trousers squeaked with every one of his stubby strides. A blind cop could have tracked his getaway. The deputy, stout though she was, was blessed with fine form and surprising speed. The race was going to be no contest.

  I muttered, “Thank you,” to the escaping idiot and pulled open the door to the staircase. I hopped the stairs three at a time and sprinted the short distance toward my wife.

  The DA’s office suite usually hummed with a quiet foreboding efficiency. I knew almost all of the players who worked there and considered some of them friends. From my occasional visits I was also accustomed to the prevailing attitude toward the public inside the suite. The attitude was, yes, we are aware that we’re public servants but no, do not take that fact too personally. We may work for you, but we don’t work for you.

  That morning, the professional and support staff were clustered together in the public anteroom where a solitary receptionist greeted visitors near the door that led to the offices. Through the interior windows that flanked the connecting door it was apparent that the offices beyond the reception area had been taken over by uniformed law enforcement from both the sheriff and the police.

  I picked Elliot Bellhaven, the new senior deputy to the DA, from the group in the reception area. Elliot and I were friends, though not buddies. If Elliot had been evacuated from the offices almost everybody had been evacuated.

  I didn’t say hi. I said, “Where’s Lauren, Elliot?”

  “Alan?” he said. Then he paused. Elliot could be counted on to be three things: impeccably well dressed, polite in social situations, and deliberative in adversarial ones. He didn’t use the pause to straighten his tie. He used it to decide what to say to me. That meant that in his eyes our encounter was an adversarial situation. “What are you doing here? How did—”

  I’d been hoping for compassion. I didn’t get it. It stung. I shook it off.

  I could’ve told him about the idiot in the corduroy suit and the sneakers and the conscientious and swift deputy, but at that moment I wasn’t interested in answering his questions about why I happened to be visiting or how I’d bypassed security. “Where is Lauren, Elliot? Is she okay?”

  “She’s in the DA’s office surrounded by cops. She’s fine. A little shook up.” He paused again. “Somebody she prosecuted once—”

  Somebody she prosecuted once? Come on, Elliot, you can do better than that. How about “Somebody who tried to kill her once”?

  My patience was not exemplary. A little too tersely I said, “Where is McClelland?”

  Although he’d been fresh out of Harvard Law at the time, Elliot was one of the few people in the DA’s office who had been around when Michael McClelland began to assemble his roster of felonies in Boulder and Aspen. I didn’t have to explain my interest in McClelland to Elliot. He knew the history. Not as well as I did, but he knew it.

  He deliberated some more in reaction to my question about McClelland’s whereabouts. It was apparent from his consternated expression that he didn’t like the fact that I already had some idea of what was going on. “The police can handle this. Your wife is safe. Go home, go back to your office. I promise that I’ll call you when—”

  “Please don’t patronize me, Elliot.”

  With that I offended him. A slight man, he reacted to the offense by squaring his shoulders, straightening his spine, and raising his chin an inch. Then he said, “Okay, try this: Given…everything—everything—you really shouldn’t be here at all.”

  His caviling was disappointing. Even worse, it felt unkind. “Elliot, thanks for your help. I’ll remember it.”

  One of the reasons I’d entered the New Year determined to control my pettiness was that it was becoming a more frequent occurrence.

  “Alan,” he said. He was imploring me to be reasonable. All I felt was his judgment that I was being unreasonable. I blew past him. He called after me. “Go. It’s better for everyone. Especially Lauren.”

  I took two steps closer to the door to try to see what was going on in the offices. People parted in front of me as though I were a drunk panhandler in need of a shower. I could have interpreted the gesture as a sign of respect or compassion because of Lauren’s circumstances. But Elliot’s reaction to my presence in the DA’s office was enough to convince me that I shouldn’t allow myself the luxury of perceiving generosity in the staff’s behavior. In my heart I knew Lauren’s colleagues were giving me room because I was radioactive and no one wanted to be in my orbit.

  What I didn’t know was how radioactive I was. Or precisely why.

  From my fresh vantage at the front of the throng I could see down the hall into Lauren’s office. At least five cops were crowded into the small space near the door. They blocked my view of her desk.

  Behind me someone with a pleasant tenor and an appealingly warped sense of humor started humming the score of the battle scene in Star Wars. The cavalry was coming. I looked down the hall. A big cop was striding down the corridor from stage right carrying a set of bolt cutters big enough to slice off a man’s arm in one thwack.

  Despite the commotion and despite the glass partition separating me from the corridor I could hear him call out to his colleagues, “Coming through.” The cops who were crammed into Lauren’s office backed off to clear a path for him.

 
That’s when I saw Michael McClelland’s face for the first time in years.

  He was sitting at my wife’s desk. In her chair. His hands—his wrists now cuffed together by the cops—rested on the desktop. Michael hadn’t aged as much as I thought he should have. He hadn’t lost any of the baby fat in his jowls, his hair hadn’t lost any of its color. I saw no anxiety in his clear eyes, no skin sagging from the gravity of despair.

  Behind him I spotted a familiar framed photograph of Grace. In the picture my daughter was hugging Emily. Anvil was standing in his always-odd tough-guy pose at her knees. I loved that picture. I hated that it was over Michael’s shoulder.

  I felt still. For five or six seconds I watched McClelland’s impassive face. I watched his eyes follow the action of the cops who were moving around him. I watched the acknowledgment wash over his expression as he spotted the bolt cutters and realized that the next act of the play he was directing was about to begin.

  He looked up. The second his eyes found mine, I stopped feeling still.

  McClelland smiled when he spotted me. He lifted his hands from the desktop. He did it slowly, probably so that he wouldn’t startle his captors. With his left hand he pointed at me using his index finger. With his right hand he formed his fingers into a position with the middle three fingers curled to his palm, his pinky and thumb extended. I initially mistook it for a University of Texas “Hook ’em, ’Horns” cheer—but realized he was extending his thumb instead of his index finger. I next mistook the gesture as the laid-back shaka sign that native Hawaiians use to spread a little nonverbal aloha. It was neither.

  He lowered his head and raised the hand toward his face with the end of his thumb up toward his right ear, the end of his pinky near his lips. The woman beside me translated. She said, “I think he wants to talk to you.” There was surprise in her voice.

  I said, “I think you’re right.” I wasn’t at all ambushed by the fact that Michael McClelland wanted to talk with me. I was already considering other things. Why had he chosen this place? This drama? This audience?