Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  “Lucy?” I thought the voice on the line had been Sam’s partner, but I wasn’t a hundred-percent sure. She’d already hung up. I e-mailed Lauren again. “I’ll be on my cell for a while. Call me.”

  “Emily?” I said to my sleeping Bouvier. “Want to go for a hike?” For a small child Emily didn’t have a large receptive vocabulary, but for a middle-aged dog I thought she was an eighty-pound Einstein. “Want,” “go,” and “hike” were three of her favorite words. She went nuts. That meant yes.

  I changed my shoes, threw on a fleece vest, deliberately chose a few things to toss into a shoulder pack, ran back inside to get a second bottle of water—the first had been for Emily—and shuttled the big dog into my car.

  FORTY-SIX

  HOW MANY times had I done the Royal Arch Trail? Twenty? Fifty? For a short roundtrip hike from an urban center like Boulder a day hiker couldn’t ask for much more reward from a short investment. Heading in, the view toward the hills—Emily and I entered via the worn Mesa Trail from Chautauqua—provided a picture-window close-up of all three Flatirons against a deep-water blue sky. After cutting off onto the Royal Arch—the route starts in the shadows as a short climb along a causeway-like ridge—the trail follows some uphill cutbacks until it descends for a short stretch. From there a steep approach carries hikers toward the rock arch and the reward of an unusual angle view of all three Flatirons, an eagle’s perspective on Boulder and, on a clear day, Denver glistening like some dirty quartz spilled on the threshold of the Great Plains.

  It was a clear day. The prize at the end of the climb promised to be breathtaking, but I doubted I’d get that far. According to the message Sam wanted to meet along the trail’s first ridge past the Bluebell Shelter. No way would the Royal Arch Trail be deserted on a fine spring day—the first section, the Mesa Trail traverse across the greenbelt above Chautauqua, was the closest thing in Boulder to a hiking Main Street—but I figured that was part of Sam’s strategy. He’d purposefully picked a well-traveled path, the kind of place in Boulder that people unexpectedly run into friends. With any luck he and I could find a place to talk that provided privacy and maybe the bonus of a peekaboo view of the Third Flatiron.

  Even though we jogged all the way to the creek I had to hold Emily back on her retractable lead. She was in one of her moods that left me incapable of moving fast enough to keep up with the pace that she had determined was reasonable. Shortly after we passed the ranger station she dropped her snout to the packed earth and locked on to the scent of some critter that didn’t meet her olfactory criteria for friendliness. At first I thought she might have picked up evidence that Sam had ascended right in front of us but Emily’s behavior wasn’t the excited, playful dance she uses to respond to a friendly scent, it was the businesslike march of wariness with which she approaches a foe.

  I wondered whether she was detecting the presence of a dog she’d had a run-in with before, or if maybe she was sensing the recent passing of her local adversary, a red fox. I definitely didn’t want her to be on the trail of a mountain lion or brown bear, and I hoped it wasn’t a porcupine awaiting us. Those encounters didn’t end well. On another day I might have taken her off her lead to see where she might go exploring on her own, but Boulder was constantly changing its enforcement policy about dogs and leashes on the greenbelt and in the mountain parks and I hadn’t been paying enough attention to know whether we were in a period of laissez-faire enforcement, or whether it was one of those times when the dog-poop intolerant were mapping canine feces with GPS and posting the hard, and occasionally soft, evidence on the Web. I did know that this was a day I could not risk getting a citation from the dog police, so I kept Emily within the range her lead allowed.

  She tugged on the line to communicate what she thought of my caution.

  Emily and I had to wait on the ridge for Sam to arrive. We said hello to a few hikers descending from the arch, but no one followed us uphill while we waited. I assumed that the wind—it had begun blowing hard from the south and the gusts were accelerating as they cleaved along the spine of the ridge—was keeping people on the lower trails. I wasn’t dressed for a spring gale. Emily was—subarctic was fine with her—but the insistent southern blow was bringing in distant, uninteresting smells and I could feel her frustration as her nose twitched and her head turned and darted with her realization that she’d lost the scent she had been scurrying after up the hill.

  Our ten-minute wait was on the verge of becoming fifteen and I’d begun to question the wisdom of the rendezvous. My mobile-phone signal was jumping back and forth between no signal and a solitary bar. I was cold and getting colder. The lovely view had stopped feeling mesmerizing.

  Most of all I had started wondering if I had been set up. Was someone other than Sam waiting to meet me up the Royal Arch Trail? Or had someone wanted to get me away from my home? I should have stopped at Chautauqua at a pay phone and confirmed the plans with Sam. Once I’d let that regret out of the cage a slew of others stampeded out right after it.

  I should have told Lauren what had happened when I was a kid.

  I should have left the purse in the backyard.

  I should have let my patient pick a different therapist to watch him die on the evening news.

  I should have long ago stopped trying to be so damn helpful.

  Emily barked. The sound startled me so much I almost yelped back at her.

  I was sitting facing back down the trail in order to spot Sam’s approach. Emily was beside me looking up the trail toward the nearest crest, her nose in the wind, her long facial hair blown back so she looked like Chewbacca’s first cousin. Her initial solitary bark—the one that almost stopped my heart—was followed by a rat-a-tat series of roars that sounded like she was shooting them from a Gatling gun.

  I spun around, but saw no one. Not uphill. Not down. “What is it, girl?” I asked.

  She jumped 180 degrees and stared down the trail, standing like a statue—the only motion was her wet black nose twitching to catch molecules that were to her as prey-specific as a DNA profile.

  She didn’t answer me. She twirled again and launched herself past me up the ridge. I almost lost hold of her lead.

  Sam had made it to within five feet of us before he said, “Sorry, you weren’t here before, and I thought maybe I had time to make it to the arch. I’d forgotten how nice it is up there. You been waiting long? This wind, huh?”

  He saw the aggravation on my face. Wisely, he allowed Emily to have most of his attention. “Hey. I said I was sorry. I needed the distraction.”

  I had no energy to squander on being angry at Sam. I had too many other things to be angry about. He started the conversation in exactly the right key to soften my mood. “You ever feel that your life is about to turn to shit?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  “You said you were checking on something else? The other piece you mentioned when you hung up on me?”

  “Lauren’s problem at the airport? You know the details?” I asked.

  Sam nodded. “Broad strokes? Yes. Details? No.”

  “The woman in the picture I sent you set her up. The ‘how’ is a little complicated. I’ll fill you in on that whenever you want.”

  “About that picture you sent, I—”

  “I know—your witness. I don’t know where she fits, but I know her real name. Or her alias, whatever. It’s not much, but it’s something.”

  “My what?” he asked. Until then his voice had been floating along on the insistent wind, its volume varying with the gusts. It suddenly pierced through.

  “Your witness. The grand jury?” I said.

  “What the hell are you talking about? You found her too?”

  Too? “The photo I e-mailed. Your witness?” I was beginning to get the sense that Sam and I were reading from different scripts.

  He stood up. He twisted his head to look up the ridge, and then down the trail. Satisfied no one was in our vicinity he sa
id, “That wasn’t our witness in the picture you sent, Alan. That was Currie.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  I STOOD up beside him. The wind seemed to pause. Emily’s nose twitched and she wandered away the full length of her lead. “Your nutritionist?” I said.

  Sam wasn’t interested in dealing with my surprise. He said, “I need to know exactly how you found out whatever you found out. And what the hell she has to do with the rest of this mess.”

  “Your nutritionist?” I said again. The picture in my head wasn’t of a woman in a lab coat studying dietary records, but rather of the woman with blond hair captured in profiled silhouette in Sam’s bedroom. The white crescent of the cup of her bra figured prominently in the image I was blinking from my consciousness.

  “Yeah, my frigging nutritionist. Now tell me where she fits.”

  What? I was distracted with the piece of the puzzle that I thought I had solved but that had been suddenly cast into the still-elusive category: If J. Winter Brown wasn’t the missing grand jury witness, who was? Why had she set Lauren up with the Sativex? And what role did either woman play in Michael McClelland’s scheme?

  “The woman in the photograph was a patient in the Colorado State Hospital with McClelland. They were friends. Confidants. Much closer than the professional staff was comfortable with.” “Confidants” had been one of Tharon’s words. “I thought she was the grand jury witness, Sam. I didn’t know she was…”

  The woman seducing you in your bedroom.

  “Shit,” Sam said. “I had a whole list of bad answers I was afraid I was going to hear from you. That one wasn’t even on my list. Goddammit. God…dammit.”

  I stared at the board. There were Parcheesi pieces on the Monopoly board. I meekly accepted the fact that with my assumptions proven errant, I was lost. I said, “He’s had a lot of years to plan this.”

  Sam was silent for almost a minute while he digested the new information. “How did you find out that she was at the state hospital?”

  “I blackmailed someone in a position to know both of them.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “A doctor?”

  I nodded.

  “Bravo,” he said.

  “She got out last year. She’s been planning this—whatever her part of this is—for a while. She came in to see me as a patient late last fall. One session. She never came back. I thought she was therapist-shopping. Obviously, she was checking me out…for something else.”

  I didn’t realize until I’d completed the disclosure that I’d just cavalierly massacred J. Winter’s confidentiality. It didn’t bother me a bit.

  “She saw you for therapy? So we can tie her directly to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re sure about her ties to Lauren?”

  “No doubt. She posed as a friend of Teresa—you remember Lauren’s sister? Teresa confirmed that the same woman is the one who got the drug that’s causing so much trouble for Lauren at the airport. That part’s complicated. Impressive from a planning point of view.”

  “And now she got me,” he said.

  “Yes. And now you.” She made it all the way into your bed, I thought.

  “She’s good,” Sam said. “I didn’t even consider the possibility that she took those pictures, Alan. It didn’t even cross my mind.” He shook his head. “Jesus.”

  “McClelland’s the maestro.”

  He was ignoring me. I stepped away to give him some room and to allow Emily enough play on her lead to explore the nearby woods she was dying to get into.

  My phone vibrated. I pulled it from my pocket and glanced at the screen. The source of the call was Lauren’s cell. I had one bar. Just one. I flicked the phone open.

  “Hey,” I said. “You okay?”

  Lauren told me I was breaking up. Anyway, that’s what I thought she told me. Reflexively I stood on my toes, as though that would make me a better target for cell signals. Idiot. I raised my voice as though talking louder would compensate for the signal weakness and said, “I’ll get a better signal and call you back in a few minutes.”

  The call died. Another glance at the screen confirmed that the solitary bar was gone and had been replaced by an X. “I need to head down the hill to call Lauren, Sam. I can’t get a signal up here. She doesn’t know the details about this woman yet. She doesn’t know how she was set up.”

  He checked his phone’s screen. “I don’t have a signal either. I should have thought about that when I picked this place. I was just trying to find someplace we wouldn’t be spotted.” Sam was already thinking about other things. “We need to stay in touch. You’re thinking this Brown woman was involved with the purse?”

  “Yes. Which means she had something to do with the disappearance of your grand jury witness. And I also think she had something to do with the…hanging in the barn. How? What? I don’t know.”

  Sam narrowed his eyes. “What makes you think she’s involved in what happened in the barn?”

  He wasn’t challenging me. He wanted to hear my theory. “She was close to Nicole Cruz when they were in the state hospital, Sam. They—McClelland, Nicole Cruz, and J. Winter—were all patients in Pueblo at the same time. Nicole Cruz didn’t know Michael McClelland in Pueblo, or knew him very little, but she knew J. Winter. They were close.”

  “Who’s J. Winter?”

  “Currie,” I said. “Her real name is J. Winter Brown, like in the caption of the picture. The J. is for Justine. Professionally, she went by J. Winter.”

  “Professionally?”

  “She’s a psychologist.”

  “Shit. Figures.” Sam said. “I need to get Lucy to run her.”

  “I have to get down the hill and get a cell signal.”

  He said, “I’ll give you a few minutes’ head start so nobody sees us walking out of here together.”

  I struggled to keep my feet as Emily yanked me down the trail. Near the bottom of the ridge she pulled me toward the woods with the determination of a tugboat moving a barge against the current on the Mississippi.

  I resisted for a moment—long enough to check my cell. Still no bars. “Two minutes,” I said to the dog, pretending to be her master. I trailed her by the length of her lead as she motored nose-down into the woods parallel to the ridge. We were climbing again. The southern wind had resumed blowing hard and we were heading straight into it. I was cold.

  The noise in the woods from the air knifing through the trees was spooky and I was anxious. I was anxious to figure out what was going on. I was anxious about the time I was wasting. And I was anxious that Emily was leading me into an unwelcome confrontation with some unfriendly critter that wasn’t going to be thrilled that we’d invaded his or her habitat. I was about to pretend to assert my authority when suddenly Emily stilled.

  Bouviers aren’t pointers, but when they’re not herding they have some hunting instincts. Many times in the past I’d watched Emily mark and then slowly approach squirrels and prairie dogs in the fields near the house, so I knew the signs she exhibited when she thought she had spotted prey. I also knew that her confidence was often misplaced. She never caught anything.

  It was definitely hunting behavior that she was exhibiting. She raised her head, lowered her haunches an inch or two, and moved her legs into a stalking position. If I drew lines connecting her paws they would have formed a parallelogram.

  What do you see, girl? Following her eyes, I didn’t see a thing.

  Her nose was up. From the back end of the long lead I could see it twitching. Her ears were up, too. Their musculature allowed them to scan around her like radar antennae. I let my eyes wander into the trees and onto some nearby outcroppings of rocks. Big cat, I was thinking. I’d only seen a couple in my life. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing the third.

  I whispered, “Settle.” The caution was for me as much as my dog. We had edged all the way back up the hill near the spot where we’d left Sam. Was she picking up his scent? Was that what
this was about? Emily’s tenacity was spooking me. I tugged on her lead and whispered, “Let’s go. Come on, heel.”

  The wind ate my words. The big dog didn’t budge. Her nose was locked onto something like a leech on flesh. She took a hunting step. A quiet, slow-dancing, I’m-sneaking-up-on-you-now step. But her motion wasn’t in a straight line. It was forty-five degrees to her left.

  She had something pegged. My eyes made a path through the trees in that direction. Nothing at first. Then, there. Forty yards ahead.

  No cat. No bear. “Holy shit.”

  I don’t need this, I thought.

  The angle of the body was so awkward that I thought the person was dead.

  Someone, man, woman—I no longer considered myself a reliable judge of gender—was wedged into a cut in the top of a rock outcropping. In distant geological times the ten-foot thrust of stone had probably been part of the spine of the ridge where Sam and I were talking a few minutes earlier. The fracture in the top of the formation wasn’t wide enough for the person to lay prone, so he—was it a he?—had wedged himself into the crack on his left side, his arms extended in front of him, away from me.

  I saw what appeared to be a readjusting motion—a quick bend of the knee, a flex of the right leg, and an extension and rotation of the right shoulder. That was it. Not much. But it was enough to let me know the person was alive. And it was enough to reveal that the person was holding something silver and black in his right hand.

  The hand was encased in a tight glove, like a liner.

  Shit. Sam.

  My options? I could release Emily. The problem was that Emily wouldn’t attack. I knew my dog well. She’d charge, ferocity in her eyes, and then she’d stop and try to bark the person into submission. Five feet away from him, ten feet away from him—she’d stop. She’d bare her fangs and bring the fear of God into the equation. But that was it. Then in all likelihood she would get shot.

  After that, I might get shot.

  Or I could scream to warn Sam. Would he hear me through the wind? I couldn’t be sure. But if Sam heard me, so would the person with the gun. He would turn.