Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  “I’m not done. Her boyfriend? No, not me—the one she hit with a hammer while he was sleeping—was a retired cop from Cheyenne. She hit him in the eye, by the way. One blow. He was never charged with abusing her. Insufficient evidence. She saw it otherwise, of course. Apparently now she has…issues with cops. Prior to busting out his eyeball with the hammer, she’d had a couple of documented ER visits with suspicious bruising, another with a broken bone in her wrist. She had some statements from girlfriends about what an asshole he was. She thinks he got off because he was wrapped in a blue blanket.”

  I said, “She hooked up with another abuser in Pueblo.”

  Sam wasn’t interested. “Last September twenty-eighth her boyfriend—eye patch and all—came home with a first date to his house in Cheyenne. His date was a juvenile court judge. They walked into his living room to find the wall area above his fireplace filled with child porn. Elegantly framed child porn. The juvy judge ran for the Tetons. Cops showed up within the hour along with a warrant to search his house and his computer. Turned out he was dirty up to his…well, eyeball.

  “Three o’clock the next morning he died in a head-on with an eighteen-wheeler on I-80 just west of Laramie. Manner of death was suicide. Report says he’d been drinking.”

  “I assume J. Winter didn’t leave any fingerprints in Wyoming. Literally or figuratively.”

  “None there’s any record of.”

  “These people are good.”

  “They are.”

  “Why is she helping McClelland?”

  “I figure they’re helping each other,” Sam said. “He helped her set her boyfriend up. She’s helping him set us up.”

  “How would McClelland have done it? Set up her old boyfriend from Pueblo?”

  “Cons run computer scams from inside all the time. Walls just aren’t walls anymore. They get a proxy outside to do the Internet shit they can’t get away with inside. The guy has had a lot of free time to get skilled on the Internet. Plan shit.”

  “He could have been setting us up for years.”

  “Everybody needs a hobby.”

  A question that I suspected might prove irrelevant came to mind. “Did anyone ever determine whether the porn was the boyfriend’s and she just displayed it in his house? Or did she plant it?”

  Sam paused a moment to frame his answer. “Officially she’s not tied to this, Alan. She was interviewed during the investigation. That’s all. There’s a contact note in her jacket, that’s the only way I found out about it. No witnesses put her on the scene. No forensics place her in his house. What are you asking?”

  I was thinking about the photos taken in Sam’s bedroom, and about TSA’s suspicious focus on Lauren’s bottle of Sativex at the airport. “I’m wondering whether she sets people up—like she did with you and those photos, and with Lauren and her drug, like she was trying to do with us earlier on the trail—or whether she sometimes just discovers people have existing vulnerabilities and exploits them? Reveals their secrets?”

  “Is that a difference that makes a difference?” he asked.

  It does to me. An ancient concept from the psychology of perception that I’d learned, and forgotten, from graduate school came buzzing into my skull like a mosquito taking advantage of a rip in a screen door. The JND—the just-noticeable-difference. If humans can’t perceive the difference between one measurement and another does the difference really matter, psychologically speaking? Only when delta crosses the threshold of human perception—the JND—does the difference prove meaningful from the perspective of human behavior. Of psychology.

  “Tell me this,” I said. “If the kiddie porn didn’t belong to the ex-cop in Cheyenne, why did he kill himself?”

  “So maybe it was his,” Sam said. “Point?”

  “It makes a difference, Sam.” A just-noticeable-difference. “This woman is a different adversary if she has two weapons. With Lauren and with you she created new vulnerabilities. With her old boyfriend and the porn, we don’t know. He could have had an existing vulnerability and she and McClelland exploited it. Or she could have created it from whole cloth.”

  Sam said, “You’re giving me a headache. I just don’t see how it makes any difference.”

  That’s because your secret has already been revealed, I thought. Mine hasn’t.

  I let it go, and filled him in on the situation with Lauren. Told him I’d begun sorting the damage in Grace’s room, making an inventory of essentials and favorite things I’d need to replace.

  “Find any kiddie porn in there?” he asked.

  “Not funny.”

  “You’re right. It’s not. But my point is—”

  “I get your point. I don’t think you’re getting mine. From what I could see in those two grainy photographs you showed me, she was enticing you—or trying to entice you—into having sex with her, Sam. In my mind that makes it different than if you were seducing her.”

  He sighed. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t see it. I did what I did. I”—he emphasized the pronoun—“allowed her into my bedroom. I”—he did it again—“didn’t walk out when she took off her shirt. That was all me, all my doing. So she enticed me. It takes more willpower not to eat chocolate cake when you’re standing inside a bakery. Don’t care. Responsibility is responsibility.”

  I knew it wasn’t that simple. Not for me.

  I spent the evening trying to determine my personal vulnerability to J. Winter Brown. My efforts took two distinct directions. The first was concrete: I reexamined the house with as fine a comb as I could muster, searching for anything she might have left behind during her intrusion the day before.

  That search came up empty. I wasn’t reassured; I assumed that my filter had been too coarse.

  The second search was virtual. Armed with my aging Pentium and my credit card—and with more clues than Michael McClelland or J. Winter could have had when they started a similar search—I began to do the kind of reexamination of my own life’s most tragic day using the same strategies that I’d used to uncover the truth about Tharon Thibodeaux’s fateful Christmas party in the French Quarter.

  After an hour on the Internet I had found a couple of old newspaper articles that referenced the events that had taken place in my family’s home in Thousand Oaks, California, when I was thirteen, but my name wasn’t in either article. My parents were identified. I was not. At no point was there a suggestion that what happened had been anything more than a domestic disturbance gone very badly.

  I had known where to look, though. I knew about Thousand Oaks. I knew the year, the month, and the day. I knew the key words that would allow the Web’s search engines to filter through the googols of bytes of archived data to zero in on that hour on that day in that place.

  After I succeeded in finding the articles using what I knew, I tried to find them pretending that I didn’t know where to look. Without the benefit of my inside knowledge I couldn’t get there. I couldn’t get back to Thousand Oaks. I couldn’t get back to that kitchen.

  I couldn’t get back to that indelible day.

  If I couldn’t get there I tried to convince myself that neither Michael McClelland nor J. Winter Brown could get there. The only reasonable conclusion: my secret was safe.

  It didn’t feel safe.

  Lauren called just before eight. She and Grace were in a “nice enough” hotel with a pool in Grand Junction, on the other side of the state. “It’s close to the airport,” she explained. “We can get out quickly.” We talked about her meeting with the attorney in Denver, whether charges were likely—the short answer was “yes”—and we talked about Grace. I let her know that Michael McClelland was being assessed at the state penitentiary, but she’d already heard that news through her office.

  The last time the phone rang that evening was the most surprising. It was Sam again. Pay phone again. He started the conversation by saying, “Don’t interrupt me. I don’t want to be telling you this. You understand?”


  “Yes,” I said. Sam sounded exhausted. Totally spent.

  “This has to do with whether Currie was in the uncovering-secrets business, or the creating-secrets business.”

  “Okay.” I hoped Sam didn’t consider my word an interruption.

  “Amanda Ross’s parents live out in Gunbarrel. She’s been recuperating there since she was discharged from the rehab hospital.”

  Sam was telling me that the rookie cop who’d been clipped and hurt during the hit-and-run the grand jury was investigating was likely a Boulder native, and that she was living in town with her parents. He was also implying that her injuries continued to interfere with her ability to live independently. I resisted my temptation to ask a clarifying question or two.

  “I visited her tonight.” He hesitated. “That part is…not new. My visiting.” He paused again. He was, I thought, allowing some time for what he’d just admitted to sink in, or allowing himself some time to recover from the disclosure. Maybe both. “I showed her the photo of J. Winter Brown that you sent me. Ready to be surprised?” His monotone made a sudden turn down Sardonic Lane. “Turns out Amanda knows her. Knows her…well.”

  No. I hadn’t been prepared for how sharp the turn was going to be.

  The monotone came back. “Amanda said that Justine—that’s what she calls her—goes to the same church Amanda’s parents do. She was part of a group of people who offered to help out the family after the accident.”

  Oh shit. Oh shit.

  “Amanda says she’s been an angel. They’ve become friends.”

  I’m so sorry, Sam.

  The connection was close to silent for a long interlude. His breathing, my breathing, digital clicks and pops. No words. Ten seconds or ten times ten seconds passed. I lost track. Finally he said, “You know what they call it? People Amanda’s age? What I was before she got hurt?”

  I thought I remembered from news reports that Amanda’s age when she was injured was twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven. I also thought I knew the answer to Sam’s question. I was hoping I was wrong.

  I said, “No, I don’t.”

  “‘Fuck buddy,’” he said. “I was Amanda’s fuck buddy.”

  I hadn’t been wrong. Jesus.

  “Now I’m her fucked buddy. Your question is answered,” Sam said. Then he hung up.

  FIFTY

  I AWAKENED the next morning to discover that someone had called a time-out.

  The frantic events and the stunning sequence of disclosures had all stopped.

  I did my part to contribute to the lull. I canceled my few remaining patients for the week and holed up at the house with the dogs. I hadn’t shopped for a while and quickly ran out of fresh food. My appetite was almost nonexistent so I had no trouble sustaining myself out of the freezer and the cupboard.

  I made a halfhearted vow not to drink the alcohol that remained in the house. All that was left to tempt me was half a bottle of Dewar’s, a dusty, almost-full fifth of Beefeater, some old Amontillado that we used for cooking, Lauren’s Zin port, and a few nice wines that we were saving for a special day.

  I made only one trip away from home and didn’t include a stop at a liquor store. I drove to Westminster—the risk of running into someone I knew in Boulder or at Flatiron Crossing seemed too great—to replace as many of the desecrated books and toys from Grace’s room as I could. I bought new bedding and pillows and curtains and drove home with a mattress sticking out from the back of the wagon.

  I got busy reconstructing Grace’s room. Nigel interrupted me a couple of times with some specific timeline questions about Kol’s treatment. I e-mailed him the details he wanted.

  Neither Kirsten nor Cozy tried to contact me. Diane did check in. Once I answered the phone when I saw her name on caller ID, the other times I didn’t. She left a message promising never to play Enya in the waiting room if I came back to work.

  I didn’t read the papers, didn’t watch the news.

  Sam ceased his frequent forays to pay phones.

  Adrienne called from Israel. “It’s your Jewish friend,” she said in greeting. “Calling from the homeland.” She wanted to know how things were with the barn. I assured her she’d never be able to tell that anyone had been hanging from the rafters. She thought that was funny. Mostly she was calling to share her excitement about being in Israel, and about her newly discovered satisfaction that she and her son were Jews.

  I tried to share her joy. I didn’t tell her about the mess Lauren and I were in. That could wait until she got back to Spanish Hills.

  Lauren and I talked. We were polite. Grace was good. During one call I heard my daughter singing along to Simon & Garfunkel in the background. I allowed myself to perceive it as a good sign—perhaps Lauren’s aversion to music was declining.

  Michael McClelland and J. Winter Brown had maneuvered each of us—Lauren, Sam, and me—to the edge of our own personal cliffs.

  McClelland was behind the most secure walls the state of Colorado had to offer.

  J. Winter Brown was nowhere to be found.

  Lauren, I figured, was about to be indicted on federal drug charges.

  Sam’s relationship with Amanda Ross was likely soon to be revealed. The fact that he had failed to alert the DA about the sexual nature of that relationship prior to taking the job as the DA’s investigator on the grand jury investigating her hit-and-run could prove to be a career-ending decision for him.

  I assumed that he was suffering other consequences from the choices he’d made, specifically that he and Carmen were a romantic footnote. I didn’t know how he felt about that. Knowing Sam, certainly some guilt. Knowing Carmen a little, probably some loss.

  I thought I was on the verge of the next shoe dropping in my own jeopardy. What would it be? Something awful about the missing grand jury witness? Something awful about my responsibility for Kol’s death? A witness to my target practice near the Flatirons?

  Although I continued to fear the disclosure of my longest-held secret, I wasn’t convinced that those concerns were anything more than paranoia.

  A knock on my door startled me a few minutes after eight o’clock the next morning. Emily, as she usually did, took the sharp rap to be a clarion of an imminent assault on the castle, and she went into the kind of tommy-gun barking she’d last exhibited when we’d been up on the Royal Arch Trail.

  I was hungover. I definitely didn’t need the percussion.

  Vodka wasn’t the culprit. It was long gone. The bourbon bottle, too, had already spent a couple of nights in the Eco-Cycle bin. Historically I couldn’t swallow Scotch to save my life, and gin left me with regrettable hangovers. Late the night before I’d spotted a bottle of Lanson on the top shelf of the refrigerator hiding behind a box of moldy strawberries. Lauren and I had been given the champagne at a holiday gathering at our house. We had promised each other we’d drink it like table wine—no waiting for a celebration.

  We hadn’t gotten around to it.

  My drinking decision the night before had been a choice among the Lanson, the Amontillado, or Lauren’s Zin port.

  It was in the table-wine spirit that I had opened the champagne. I drank it while I sat on the sofa and sewed the head back onto my daughter’s favorite stuffed bear, performing the delicate surgery three times before I was content with my efforts.

  Experience had taught me that I could drink half a bottle of champagne without rude consequences. The knock on the door the next morning taught me that apparently the same immunity didn’t apply to a full bottle. My tolerance for bubbly was dose specific. I would have to remember that.

  “Emily, please,” I muttered. I was begging her to stop barking. She didn’t stop barking. I opened the door.

  “Elliot,” I said. I could hardly have been more surprised. The Chief Deputy DA was at my door in full going-to-court attire. A dark suit. A shirt starched stiffly enough to keep a wave from crashing. An orange necktie that made me think of Indonesia. Those w
ingtips.

  “I tried to call yesterday,” he said. “You weren’t home. Or you wouldn’t answer. The machine was…off.”

  Caller ID had indeed read BOULDER COUNTY a few times the previous afternoon as the phone rang. Elliot was correct; I’d ignored those calls. I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to speak with who worked for the county. I said, “Sounds about right.”

  Emily had stopped barking. I released her collar. I didn’t recall grabbing it.

  “May I come in?”

  Here we go again, I thought. “As an officer of the fucking court, Elliot?”

  He raised his chin a smidge to deflect my profanity. “No,” he said. “As a visitor…to your home.”

  “Do my attorneys know you’re here?”

  “No. This doesn’t concern any possible legal…jeopardy. It’s another matter, entirely. If you feel uncomfortable you may call them. By all means. I’ll wait out here.”

  I stepped back and swept my left arm toward the family room. In for a dime…“There’s coffee in the kitchen. Help yourself.”

  I wandered away from him to collect my wits. I strolled onto the deck just long enough to learn how cold it was outside. Some weather was rolling in. I hadn’t been aware a front was approaching but I could feel the leading edge and could see a tsunami of white fluff spilling over the distant Divide. I went back inside the house. Elliot was leaning against the kitchen island holding a mug of coffee.

  Emily wasn’t sure she liked Elliot. Consistent with his nature, Anvil was less suspicious. Emily had always been the better judge of character.

  “We need a favor, Alan.”

  I laughed. It wasn’t a judicious move on my part, but in my defense I didn’t deliberate before chuckling. I just chuckled. “Yes?” I said as an afterthought. I then had an afterthought to the afterthought. “Who is ‘we,’ Elliot?”

  “The state of Colorado.”

  I lifted both eyebrows. “We talking your little chunk of it here in Boulder County? Or the whole thing, the part the governor usually runs?”

  He tensed his jaw before he replied. “Alan, I’m sorry about your situation. I truly am. Will you hear me out?”