My situation, baby. As the bastardized snippet of the Who’s legendary anthem ran uninvited through my brain, I placed my mug on the coffee table and used both hands to tug my sweat-pants higher on my hips and to retie the drawstring.
I felt eminently more presentable. “Of course,” I said. Ever the gracious host.
“The Colorado Department of Corrections, the Department of Human Services—more specifically the Mental Health Institute in Pueblo—and the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office would like your assistance.”
For some reason my brain—insistent on reconstructing the old song by the Who—wandered to the lyric about f-fad-ing away.
“How?” I asked, determined to keep any more of the song out of my head.
“As you predicted…Michael McClelland hasn’t spoken a word to law enforcement since we removed him from Lauren’s office and returned him to custody. He told another inmate that he would speak only to you. He also asked that inmate to relay an offer to give you permission to speak with us after the two of you talked. We are wondering if you would be willing to have such a meeting on our behalf.”
Another matter entirely? Ha.
I turned away from Elliot. Although I was pleased my internal dialogue had moved away from “My Generation” lyrics, I was way too hungover to manage to mount a workable facsimile of my therapist-facade and I was afraid that if I tried I would instead end up looking like some devilish Pixar villain after a bender. My back to him, I said, “Did McClelland say anything to the other inmate about Harry Potter by any chance? Voldemort maybe?”
Elliot was momentarily speechless. He recovered with, “Yes. He did. How do you know that?”
I ignored him. “Where’s this rendezvous supposed to take place?”
“In Cañon City.”
Cañon City meant the state penitentiary. New Max. I turned. “When?”
“As soon as possible. Later today, if we can arrange it.”
Elliot was gazing across the room at the empty champagne bottle. If he was having trouble counting the number of glasses on the table he needed to use only the middle finger of one hand.
I was prepared to volunteer one of mine.
My anti-pettiness campaign was in tatters.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
Elliot blinked twice. He hadn’t expected reticence. He said, “That’s it? I thought you would jump at the opportunity.”
The inside of my mouth felt as though someone had slathered it overnight with Elmer’s Glue and covered the glue with grass clippings. I ran my tongue into the area between my front teeth and whatever it was that had replaced my gums. “I can see how you would think that,” I said. “I’ll be in touch in the next couple of hours. How’s that? I need a shower, in case you hadn’t noticed.” I raised my arm and smelled my left pit. As an act of disrespect I thought it was quite, well, pithy.
Elliot didn’t bite. I would have been disappointed if he had. “I was hoping for an answer before I left,” he said.
“Do you have a few extra minutes, Elliot? If you do, please have a seat—I’ll give you a list of all the things that I’ve been hoping for lately. We can do a comparison, see how much good hope is doing each of us these days.”
FIFTY-ONE
I SANG the hell out of “My Generation” in the shower until Townshend’s and Daltrey’s rebellion swirled down the drain.
Kirsten cut a deal with Elliot. I stayed out of it.
She insisted on driving me south to Cañon City. Part of the arrangement was that Cozy’s law firm’s fees for Kirsten’s journey would be paid for by one of the state agencies so eager for my appearance at New Max.
I put on some decent corduroys and a cotton sweater for the trip. I had chosen not to wear a tie, assuming that would be on the prohibited clothing list. The sweater I was wearing would disguise the fact that I wasn’t wearing a belt for the same reason. I folded my favorite black sport jacket over the back of a bar stool in the kitchen. I hoped the relative formality of the blazer might distract attention from my bloodshot eyes.
Kirsten called me from South Boulder Road. “Two-minute warning,” she said and hung up. I’d already taken the dogs out in preparation for their long afternoon alone. I reached for my coat. A splash of color caught my eye.
The top half of a bright red diamond.
I stepped back. I stepped forward. I leaned over. A playing card—specifically the six of diamonds—had been tucked into the outer lapel pocket of my sport jacket.
I hadn’t put it there. It was a pocket I never use.
Without touching the card I could see that someone with a neat feminine hand had written on it with a felt-tip pen. By leaning way over I was able to read the message. It said, “Dr. G—you were a great help, xxxox, D.”
D? I wasn’t so mentally impaired that I failed to recognize the implication: the missing grand jury witness’s first name was Donna. It was on the prescription bottle for Valtrex that I’d found in her purse.
The phone rang. Emily started sprinting toward the front of the house. Kirsten must have pulled up outside. I grabbed the phone and said, “Couple more minutes.”
I leaned over and stared at the playing card.
Bingo, I thought.
It took longer than the promised two minutes for me to get out to Kirsten’s car. I wasted most of that interval standing catatonic in the great room.
Her dashboard clock said it was lunchtime. My stomach wasn’t sure it agreed. I was still quaking from the discovery of the six of diamonds and I was repeatedly cautioning myself to act cool—for the rest of the day I knew I needed to manage a reasonable masquerade of a Boulder psychologist.
Telling Kirsten about the playing card was tempting but it would have meant telling her about a lot of other things that I wasn’t ready to divulge. The list included the ransacking of Grace’s room, the gunplay on the Royal Arch Trail, Sam and Currie, and my fears about J. Winter B.
A second consequence of the previous night’s champagne indulgence—the hangover was the first—was that J. Winter Brown’s name had morphed in my consciousness into the more symmetric “J. Winter B.” and had apparently stuck there, which had, in turn, caused me to recall Diane’s caution about the dangers of too much symmetry. At the time she had been talking about the placement of the purple rug in the waiting room. But did the lesson generalize? Shit, I didn’t know.
Although the shower had helped burn off some fog, the “My Generation” episode had convinced me that my brain chemistry wasn’t sufficiently recovered from the hangover to deal with any abstract dangers presented by a sudden predilection toward symmetry. I decided to postpone giving Kirsten the latest updates until I was much more clearheaded about the potential ramifications.
She turned right onto South Boulder Road toward Louisville. When we approached the nearest convenience store I asked her to stop. There was a pay phone inside. I’d used it recently.
“I’ll be right back,” I said. Kirsten waited in the car.
I called Sam from the store phone. “It’s me,” I said when he answered. I was distracted watching a teenager in a black business suit turn his back to the register and stick a bag of sunflower seeds down his pants.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m kind of busy.”
“There was a deck of cards in the grand jury witness’s purse. Wound with a rubber band. I need to know—was it a full deck, or were any cards missing?” He didn’t respond right away. I added, “Time is kind of tight.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think it was a full deck.”
“It’s, um, important. Can you check and call me on my cell?”
“You found something,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
I bought two bottles of water and walked back to the car.
Most of the way out Highway 36 from Boulder Kirsten and I spoke like colleagues who were catching up after not seeing each other for a while. We pretended I hadn’t once
been her therapist and that she hadn’t once fallen in love with me. The pretense was weird, but in my life weird was the new black. I tried to make like Grace and roll with it.
As we crossed over Federal Boulevard she fumbled in her satchel and pulled out an envelope. Inside were two copies of a three-page agreement. “Elliot has requested that you sign this prior to seeing Michael McClelland.”
I flipped through the document. The letterhead was from the Boulder County DA’s office. “What does it say?”
“It says you’ll tell the…interested parties about your conversation with McClelland. It specifically denies you the right to claim doctor-patient privilege.”
“That’s not my privilege to renounce. The privilege belongs to the patient.”
She audibly swallowed a sigh. Kirsten knew to whom the privilege belonged and had been hoping to avoid an argument with me about the document. “In the agreement you acknowledge he is not a current patient. That’s all.”
“You think I should sign it?” I asked. I didn’t want to read the damn thing.
“The agreement includes a release of all liability should you be injured. You should think about that. Informally, Cozy and I were able to negotiate…certain considerations. If you want to talk to McClelland, yes, I think you should sign it.”
I took a pen from my inside coat pocket and scribbled a signature on the last page of each copy. I refolded them and returned them to the envelope. I rested the envelope on top of her satchel.
“You want to know what the considerations are?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said. “I would have driven all night in a blizzard and talked to McClelland for nothing. Elliot knows that.”
“That’s why you have attorneys,” she said.
“That, and keeping me out of jail.”
She found that amusing. I didn’t. I was too distracted wondering why Michael McClelland and J. Winter B. had chosen the six of diamonds.
We were quiet until we’d crossed the T-REX–improved Denver metro grid into Douglas County. Traffic used to cramp up near Denver’s borders and then thin out to the south. No longer. Taxpayers had spent a fortune to shove the congestion five miles away. The billions hadn’t bought a solution—they’d merely rented one. What a bargain.
We pushed down I-25 through Douglas County at the pace of a fast-food drive-through. A few flurries were falling along the Palmer Divide. Wet flakes. Nothing unusual, nothing serious. Springtime in the Rockies.
Kirsten said, “Snow.”
I said, “Yeah.”
The skies were gray on the back side of Monument Hill but the storm stayed confined to the ridgeline. Traffic had thinned.
We were approaching the Air Force Academy north of the Springs when I said, “I don’t want you in the room, Kirsten.”
“With Elliot? That’s a mistake.”
“With McClelland. That needs to be just me and him. No recording devices. No witnesses. I’d like you to make sure that there isn’t any one-way glass, or any cameras into the room. Just McClelland and me.”
“That’s my understanding of how it’s arranged, Alan. But later, when you speak with Elliot and whoever is there representing the Department of Corrections and the Institute for Forensic Psychiatry, I think I should be in the room.”
My phone vibrated. “That’s fine,” I said to Kirsten. The screen read PAY PHONE.
I flipped it open. “Yeah.”
“Can you talk?” Sam asked. He’d apparently heard the tentativeness in my “Yeah.”
“Not really.”
“Deck doesn’t have jokers. Does that change anything?”
“Nope. I appreciate the irony though.”
He said, “Hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades. A, B, C, or D?”
“B,” I said.
“Shit. I’m going to count. Tell me when to stop. Ace…two…three…four…five…six—”
“There you go.”
“Shit,” Sam said. “We didn’t catch there was a missing card in the deck. We should’ve caught it.”
“Some things are hard to notice,” I said.
“Where is it now? The card?”
“Can’t say.”
“Call me later? There’s some stuff cooking here, too.”
“Count on it.” I folded the phone. Traffic in Colorado Springs was almost as coagulated as it had been in Denver’s suburbs. “You don’t mind if I sleep the rest of the way down, Kirsten? I’m kind of…tired.”
“No, go right ahead,” she said.
I eased the seat back and closed my eyes. I said, “Sam’s the one who’s been feeding all the information from the investigation to you and Cozy, isn’t he?”
Kirsten didn’t answer right away. For some reason Sam wanted his generosity to me to remain a secret.
“The lab info? The other evidence?” I asked. “You know what I mean.”
She said, “I don’t want to lie to you.”
“And if I press this you might have to?”
“Something like that.” Kirsten softened her tone from the attorney range into the friend range and added, “You know you might feel better if you tell me what happened.” She paused. “When you were a child.”
She emphasized “child.”
“Want to bet?” I said. I immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry, Kirsten. That wasn’t kind. Maybe later.”
Then again, maybe not.
She woke me just outside Cañon City with a hand above my knee. “You ever been here before, Alan?”
I opened my eyes to the sign for the huge correctional complex. “No,” I said. “You?”
“In Louisiana and Florida? Plenty of times. Here, no. This is a first.”
I began to get anxious. I wasn’t accustomed to homicidal impulses. But as we drove into the small parking lot outside New Max, I felt them. I could imagine beating Michael McClelland to death. I could imagine strangling him. I could imagine stabbing him. I could imagine shooting him.
All with my eyes wide open.
Kirsten sensed something. “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?” she asked.
“Here?” I said. The modern complex looked less like my fantasy of a penitentiary than like some supersecret industrial facility with plenty of safeguards to keep visitors out. The most visible barriers were the redundant lines of concertina wire-topped fences, miles of them, it seemed.
“Good,” she said. “I don’t want to make the drive back by myself.”
FIFTY-TWO
GETTING THROUGH security was laborious. Kirsten warned me to leave any sharps and metal—pens, keys, coins, whatever—in her car, but even stripped of anything resembling contraband the searches and scans that we endured to get inside the prison were much more thorough than anything I was accustomed to at the airport.
Elliot Bellhaven was waiting on the other side of security with two people I didn’t know. One was an attractive fortyish woman with an uncomplicated smile who was representing the interests of the Department of Corrections; the other was a tall, balding man with small eyes who introduced himself as “Smith.” He was an assistant warden for New Max, the facility we were in. He had no soft edges. Not physically, not in manner, not in his voice. My immediate appraisal: I would hate to be an adolescent boy dating his daughter.
The assistant warden led us to a conference room that was appropriately institutional. A minute or two after Kirsten and I chose seats at the table, Tharon Thibodeaux joined the gathering as the representative of the Department of Human Services and the IFP in Pueblo. I was neither pleased nor displeased by his presence.
I took my cues from him as he introduced himself to Elliot and to the assistant warden. It was apparent from the kiss she got on the cheek that he already knew the woman from the Department of Corrections. Kirsten stood and shook Tharon’s hand; I thought she seemed pleased that another Southerner was present. He seemed delighted that an attractive Southern woman with a naked ring fin
ger was present. When she turned to sit down he looked at her ass.
To me he said, “Nice to meet you, Dr. Gregory.”
We shook hands. I said, “Likewise, Dr. Thibodeaux.”
Elliot and Tharon got right to work, talking ground rules and goals for “the interview”—that’s what everyone was calling my upcoming tête-à-tête with Michael McClelland. Kirsten seemed rapt by the minutiae of the process. In contrast, the woman from the Department of Corrections appeared to be there mostly as an observer. She was covering some superior’s butt.
I zoned out. Whatever agenda was on the table wasn’t mine.
The assistant warden brought me back to the present a few moments later. He spoke my name with an authority that was the homo-sapien equivalent of one of Emily’s “attention” barks. In reality all he said was, “Dr. Gregory?”
“Yes?” I said, my pulse accelerating.
“The room you will be in is intended for confidential discussions. No security will be present. We will neither be able to observe you nor overhear normal conversation. If you scream loudly enough we might be able to hear you. Per agreement, the inmate will not—I repeat, not—be shackled. The table in the room is fixed to the floor. The chairs—there will be two—are not. An emergency call button—it’s bright red, you’re unlikely to miss it—is beside the door that is approximately six feet behind your chair. The inmate will have already been seated when you enter the room. He will have been thoroughly searched. Any questions thus far?”
“No,” I said.
“Upon conclusion of your interview a simple knock on the door will alert the correctional officer outside that you are ready to exit. I suggest you ask the inmate to remain seated while you do that. After you knock there may be a brief delay to make sure adequate security is in place before the door is opened. Is all that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Ms. Lord?” Elliot said. “The agreement? Has Dr. Gregory signed it?”
“Of course, Mr. Bellhaven,” she said. She withdrew the envelope from her satchel and handed one of the two signed copies to Elliot. He shuffled through the pages quickly, and pocketed the document inside his jacket. He was wearing the same suit he’d had on when he’d visited me earlier that day. The damn shirt hadn’t wrinkled a bit.
Dry Ice Page 31
