Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  Marlene Martinez wasn’t the on-call psychiatrist that night. She, not Tharon Thibodeaux, was Carson Leopold’s outpatient therapist in the clinic. Dr. Martinez had been present at the party, Eusto reported. She had been drinking. Her clinical supervisor—a senior faculty member very familiar with Leopold’s case—had been at the party, too. He, too, had been drinking.

  Eusto described the emergency on-call system that the clinic employed for after-hours emergencies. The nurse who had volunteered to talk to Eusto suggested that the on-call resident had mishandled the crisis that had transpired during the department Christmas party. She identified the psychiatrist taking the first call that night as Dr. Tharon Thibodeaux.

  The nurse also told the reporter that Thibodeaux, too, had been drinking while at the party. She disclosed the detail that Tharon liked single-malt Scotch.

  It was Thibodeaux who returned the first emergency call to Carson. It was Thibodeaux who was convinced he could manage the crisis. It was Thibodeaux who was too full of pride, or hubris, to turn the phone call over to Marlene Martinez, Carson’s doctor. It was Thibodeaux who was determined to demonstrate his clinical acumen in front of the assembled faculty of the psychiatry department.

  And it was Thibodeaux holding the phone as Carson Leopold jumped.

  I didn’t learn from the articles if Tharon Thibodeaux had ever been professionally disciplined for his involvement in the death of Cars Leopold. I assumed he had been. But I also assumed that given the reality that during the entire crisis he was within spitting distance of his immediate clinical supervisor, the director of his clinical training program, and the department chair, not to mention the patient’s own therapist and her supervising psychiatrist, any discipline was handed out gingerly, and privately.

  In the intervening years the incident had become Tharon’s secret, though. That much was clear.

  Tharon’s business card was still in my wallet, where I’d stashed it after leaving Kaladi. I e-mailed him at the state hospital. I attached a link to the fourth of Joanna Eusto’s articles in the Times-Picayune. The subject line on the message read, “You can have your secret. I want her name.” I tagged on a list of all my phone numbers.

  Tharon had been kind to me. I felt a pang about blackmailing him. I walked back upstairs and stood in the doorway to my daughter’s room. The guilt disappeared in about two seconds.

  The final thing I did before I climbed into bed was to return to the flight-tracking Web site and confirm that the plane with my family was safely on the ground in Florida.

  FORTY-FIVE

  I WOKE with a headache early the next morning, aware that I was alone in the house with the dogs. I’d left my cell charging in the kitchen. One glance at it and I knew I’d received a call overnight. It was from a pay phone. The voice-mail message was simple. “Wynne—I think it’s w-y-n-n-e—Brown—b-r-o-w-n.” Tharon had decided that my price for protecting his secret was something he was willing to pay.

  Now what? I thought. I have a name. Now what?

  During our meeting in Denver Tharon had volunteered that Michael’s friend at the state hospital was a psychologist. He had also implied, though never said directly, that she was a clinician.

  I started digging through old membership rosters from professional associations that I had belonged to over my years in practice: American Psychological Association, Colorado Psychological Association, the National Register of Health Service Providers in Psychology. I couldn’t find Wynne Brown listed anywhere.

  I tried a Google search. “Your search did not match any documents,” was the instantaneous reply.

  I went back through everything I had, looking through the voluminous lists of Browns for alternative spellings of female first names that might leave the diminutive of “Wynne.” Assuming that Tharon might have gotten the spelling wrong, I included “Wyn,” “Wynn,” and “Win.”

  Winifred? Winston? Winfred? Wynonna?

  Nothing.

  I finally spotted a candidate the third time through a five-year-old directory of members of the Colorado Psychological Association: J. Winter Brown, Ph.D.

  Wynne Brown.

  The J. had thrown me, of course.

  The phone rang. Not my cell—the landline in the house. Caller ID was no help. It read OUT OF AREA.

  “Hello,” I said.

  The voice was Lauren’s. It was as tight as my hamstrings after a tough mountain climb, as cold as Gunnison in mid-January. She said, “I hope you didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  I could have asked “With what?” but that appeared to be a trap waiting to be sprung. I looked at the digital clock in the corner of the computer screen. Seven-ten A.M. That meant it was nine-ten in Florida. I said, “You guys are still in Miami?”

  “We’re in Denver, Alan.”

  It was a simple declarative sentence, but it was also an accusation. She knew it, and I knew it. The sentence didn’t include a whole lot of information. I couldn’t guess what I had done.

  “Why? What happened?” I asked.

  “You don’t know? That’s what you’re telling me?”

  “I don’t know. That’s exactly what I’m telling you. I tracked your flight last night. It landed in Miami. What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “TSA pulled me aside for a search as I was going through security with Grace. They found the Sativex in my purse. We weren’t allowed to fly to Miami. I had to turn over our passports.”

  “Where are you?”

  “One of those bed-in-a-box hotels by DIA.” Lauren wasn’t a big fan of the franchising of hotels and motels. The bed-in-abox moniker was one of her kinder diminutives for them.

  “Grace is okay?”

  “You know Grace—it’s all lemons and lemonade for her. She’s having a great time. She’s counting takeoffs and landings.” Lauren’s voice changed completely as she asked our daughter, “How many now, honey?”

  I heard Gracie call out, “Ninety-six.”

  I smiled.

  “You didn’t tell anyone, Alan?”

  “About your drugs? Of course not.” I knew from the tone of her question that she wasn’t predisposed to believe my denial. “What’s going to happen? Were you arrested?”

  “No. Detained for a while. I’m waiting for a call from the U.S. Attorney’s office. It’s a mess.” She changed her voice to a whisper. “This is a federal felony they’re discussing, Alan.”

  “God.”

  “No one knew but you. No one.”

  I fought my impulse to argue. I said, “Maybe it was incidental to the search. Maybe they found it when they were looking for…whatever the hell it is that TSA is searching for lately.”

  She was completely prepared for me to launch that argument—she took aim at it as though she’d been shooting skeet and my argument was the clay pigeon she was most determined to obliterate. “And how many TSA agents do you think could identify a bottle of Sativex even if the damn thing was hanging from a chain under their noses? It looks completely benign. I had other medicines in my purse. Narcotics. Injectable interferon. They barely looked at them. Why would they focus on the Sativex? Why? There’s no good reason. They were looking for it. They opened my purse and went right for it.”

  I chose silence. In her current state of mind Lauren’s focus on the topic of how the TSA employee found the Sativex had no margin for me. Finally in a voice as kind as I could manage I said, “Why would you think I would tell anyone?”

  “Please, Alan. Don’t, dammit. Don’t get all offended on me. Can you focus on my problem for a second?”

  I almost snapped back. Almost. “Forget the hurt, Lauren. What about the logic? What possible advantage would it give me to have you arrested at the airport in front of our daughter?”

  She was quiet for a few seconds. Then she said, “My cell is vibrating—I have to go. I’ll call you back when I know something.”

  Was her phone really vibrating? I had my doubts.


  I made some more coffee. In my mind I was staring at the puzzle. The pieces were floating. I moved them around. I was trying to find the right place for the confusing contours of the newest piece—what had happened to my wife in the security line at DIA.

  I came up with no good place to stick that news. Coincidence? Maybe. But probably not. What?

  I went back to the computer. Two reasons: One, my task with J. Winter wasn’t done. And two, it gave me something to do.

  Another Google search confirmed J. Winter Brown’s gender. The information was contained in the most innocuous of data: She had run in a 5K charity race in Vail in 1998. Her results were listed among the women participants. J. Winter wasn’t an elite runner, but she wasn’t bad. At that altitude I could not have kept up with her.

  I kept waiting for the phone to ring with news from Lauren. It didn’t.

  Another hour of diligent searching filled out J. Winter’s professional background for me. B.A., University of Michigan, Ph.D., UCLA. She’d worked professionally—doing forensic evaluations, among other things—in Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon before setting up a private practice in Greeley, Colorado, in 1996. I could find no professional mention of her after 2002.

  I went into the kitchen and ate some yogurt—even though the container warned me that it had expired around the time that Nicole Cruz had been hanging in the barn—and some apple-sauce while standing at the counter. The snack was like going to a gas station to fill my car. Fuel.

  Then I went back to J. Winter Brown. I struck researching gold in an online edition of a January 1999 issue of an alumni bulletin published by the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. In it was a photograph of four local psychologists who were generously donating their time as volunteer faculty in the psychology department. The third of the four, second from the right, was identified as Dr. Wynne Brown.

  No J. Winter.

  I immediately recognized her. Son of a bitch, I thought.

  Some of my colleagues considered me crazy to do it, but the intake policy I employed for my practice gave potential patients a free session to decide if I was the right therapist for them. If the patient decided I was a good match and chose to continue to see me for treatment I would charge them for the initial visit. But if they never came back I didn’t bill them for the trial session.

  J. Winter Brown was one of those patients who never came back.

  I’d seen her once—my appointment calendar said it was the previous fall, about ten days after I’d watched that other patient shot on the evening news. I probably wasn’t at the top of my clinical game during that appointment; my patient’s public, violent death had shaken me up. Brown had used her real name with me right from the start; my records showed that I had set a time for the intake late on a Tuesday afternoon with a woman named Justine Brown.

  Although I recalled seeing her, the session wasn’t particularly memorable. She had admitted from the start that she was therapist-shopping—not an unusual form of mental-health recreation in Boulder, where more psychotherapists labor within five blocks of my office than live in all of Wyoming—and she’d spent much of the forty-five minutes we were together asking me questions about my practice, my experience, and my background, both professional and personal. I’d answered some of her questions, deflected others.

  I’d suggested, as I routinely did during sessions that developed like that one did, that interviewing me was perhaps not the best way to get a sense of how I worked, or what it would be like to be in treatment with me. The subtle confrontation had deflected off Justine Brown like a hailstone off a pitched metal roof.

  I was certain that she had not mentioned the fact that she was a psychologist. I would have remembered that. At the end of that first session I’d offered her the opportunity to schedule a second. She demurred; she would think about it and call if she was interested in continuing. I didn’t think I would hear from her again.

  She’d never called back. In that sense, I’d been right.

  But I had heard from her again. I no longer had doubts about that.

  The brainstorm about where she fit came in the shower. I had a towel around my waist but I was still wet when I reached Sam on his cell. We spoke at the exact same instant.

  He said, “You idiot—you’re at home. This can’t happen. You dialed by mistake. Got it? Jesus.” Or something to that effect.

  I said, “I’m sending an attachment to Lucy’s e-mail.”

  We both hung up as though it had been a race to see who could disconnect first.

  I put on the same clothes I’d taken off the night before and forwarded the photo from the University of Northern Colorado to Lucy’s computer in an e-mail.

  I’d expected to get confirmation of my suspicion from Sam immediately. I didn’t. After the first ten minutes passed I began thinking that I might have been wrong about my conclusion regarding J. Winter Brown.

  Sam didn’t get back to me for almost half an hour. The call came in on the landline. Caller ID read PAY PHONE. “How did you get this?” he asked.

  I was relieved to hear his confirmation. “Online. I think I have most of it.”

  “I can’t frigging believe this. Jesus. We have to talk—now.”

  “I have one more thing to nail down. Call me again in an hour. Then we’ll find a way to meet.”

  “Wait, Alan. You shouldn’t—”

  I hung up. Immediately I had second thoughts. It might be prudent to meet with Sam first and wait to do the additional research. Then I thought about Lauren stewing in the DIA airport hotel, eager to learn how she’d been snared by TSA.

  Sam undoubtedly had a list of things he didn’t want me to do. Just in case what I planned to do next was on that list, I decided I would wait to hear his admonitions.

  He called back right away, as I suspected he would. I let voice-mail take over. I knew he couldn’t leave me a message; a digital record would provide enduring evidence that he had phoned. If someone looked later on that wouldn’t look good. All he did on the voice message was growl.

  Lauren’s little sister’s e-mail address was in my computer’s address book.

  I lost twenty minutes downloading some free software that would help me crop the photo of J. Winter Brown. I was a novice; taking care of the digital family photo album was Lauren’s job, not mine.

  I lost twenty more minutes trying to figure out how to use the new software. The process looked like it should be easy. And because it looked like it should be idiot-proof, I felt like a complete dolt when it took me so long to crop a solitary photograph. Once I had eliminated Brown’s colleagues from the picture, I enlarged what was left and attached the photo to an e-mail that I sent to Teresa.

  On the subject line I wrote, simply, “Recognize this woman?”

  Two minutes later I received an effervescent reply. “Hi!!!! That’s Barbara, my friend from Vancouver? Do you know her?!! That’s soooo great!!!!”

  Teresa used exclamation points as though she’d won a lifetime supply on a game show. She thought she’d never run out. By contrast I lived life as though I’d been granted half a dozen at birth, and was told they had to last me until I took my last breath. I saved most of my allotment for Grace.

  Was attitude about punctuation nature or nurture? I promised myself I’d ponder that at some other time.

  Some people who knew Teresa only casually considered her to be naïve. It wasn’t a fair description. Teresa lived life with an abundance of trust. Most of the time it was an endearing trait.

  Occasionally it bit her in the ass. This was one of those times. This time Teresa’s free-trust attitude had also bitten Lauren in the ass.

  I picked up the phone to tell Kirsten what I’d learned about the grand jury witness. I got no answer at her home, at the office, or on her mobile.

  Rehearsing the words made my discovery seem much less consequential than it had when it had been bouncing around silently in my brain. So I knew the grand jury witness h
ad an alias? Sam and Lauren may have known that all along. How was that going to help me?

  A fleeting dulcet tone indicated that another e-mail had arrived at my computer. I clicked the message open. It was from Lucy, Sam’s partner. Or from Sam, using his partner’s account.

  The message was curt. “You know about L.?”

  I clicked “Reply,” typed “Yes,” and clicked “Send.”

  My enthusiasm about what I’d accomplished by discovering the photo of J. Winter Brown continued to fade.

  I reminded myself that I had learned something significant and that Lauren needed to know that she’d been set up with the Sativex—and that it hadn’t been by me. I also weighed how urgent it was to let Sam in on the fact that J. Winter was involved in Lauren’s pharmaceutical entrapment. I decided that could wait until I’d told Lauren what was going on—I had to allow for the possibility that she might want me to guard the information and not share it with Sam.

  Another e-mail arrived. Teresa. Nothing in the subject line.

  The message: “Lauren just texted me. OMG!!! OMG!!!”

  Oh my God, indeed. I replied, “shhhh, keep it to yourself” and hit “Enter.”

  I called my wife’s mobile from my mobile. The call went right to voice-mail. I figured it meant Lauren was using her phone. Maybe she was talking with the U.S. Attorney.

  I knew that since Lauren was trapped in a bed-in-a-box motel room near DIA, her laptop would be open on the faux wood desktop and the machine would be hooked up to whatever kind of broadband connection was available in the room.

  I sent her an e-mail. In the subject line, I typed, “News.” In the body of the message I wrote, “T’s friend in BC is a friend of M.”

  I waited ten minutes for a reply. Nothing came back. I tried Lauren’s cell twice more. Each time I was routed directly to her voice-mail. I didn’t leave messages.

  Another call came in on the landline. PAY PHONE was my clue. Sam.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Go up the Royal Arch Trail from Chautauqua. He’ll find you on the other side of the Bluebell Shelter, past the creek on the ridge.”