“Have you done something to my wife or daughter?”
“See? That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Right now? I think you’re beginning to get it. My desperation. That’s good.”
“Answer my question.” I stood up. “Have you done something to my family?”
A creaking sound pierced through the house. The floor? A door? Had I caused that?
“Did you hear that?” Bill asked. He stood, too.
“Yes. Is someone else here?”
“No. Maybe it was nothing. Old houses, you know.”
Was he unconcerned, or merely cavalier? I couldn’t tell.
Another creak disturbed the quiet.
“Then again,” Bill said. “I’m going to check around a little. You want to call your wife and daughter, ease your mind, you go right ahead.”
Bill stood and left the kitchen. Immediately, I pulled out my cell and phoned home. No answer. I tried Lauren’s cell. No answer. I placed the phone in front of me on the table. My heart was pounding. Bill came back into the room.
“See anything?”
“No.” He spotted the phone on the table. “Don’t worry, I’m sure they’re fine,” he said, as though he knew I hadn’t reached Lauren.
Any pretense of patience gone from my voice, I asked, “What can I do to help, Bill? You said this was about Mallory. Tell me what’s going on or I’m leaving.”
Certain sounds are as clear as photographs. Glass breaking is one of those sounds. The stark retort of shattering glass filled the house.
“Shit,” Bill said. He stood.
I stood, too. “Where?” I whispered.
“Sounded like the basement.”
I wasn’t so sure, but it wasn’t my house.
He moved toward the stairs. “I’m going down. Probably just some neighbor kid trying to scare me. It’s been like that around here.”
“I’ll call nine-one-one.”
“No, this is my home. No police. I’ll handle it. Stay here.”
He flicked on a light and disappeared down the basement stairs. I spotted a rack of knives on the kitchen counter and shuffled a little closer to them.
Before I reached the counter, all the lights in the house flashed off, at once.
70
I stumbled back toward the table to grab my phone and as I reached out I managed to push it over the edge onto the floor. The phone clattered and slid away into the darkness. I dropped down to my hands and knees to try to locate it.
“Alan!” Bill stage-whispered from the basement. “Down here, please, hurry.”
“I’m calling for help.”
“Please, it’s Mallory!”
The tunnel? I scrambled to my feet and felt my way toward the basement stairs, found them, and slowly started descending. A solitary step into the basement I ran into someone. The shock of the collision took my breath away.
“It’s me,” Bill whispered. I could feel his breath on my face. “Come on.”
He took my wrist and led me across a room and through a doorway. “This is where the glass broke, I think.”
I couldn’t see broken glass. But then, I couldn’t see much. “You said it was Mallory. Where is she?”
“What are you talking about?”
What? “Where’s the tunnel?” I asked.
“In the crawl space.”
Somewhere nearby, a door closed in the house. Bill released my arm and stepped away from me, back toward the door we’d just come through.
I moved in the same direction.
“Shhh,” he said.
“Is there a phone down here?” I whispered.
“Quiet. I need to listen.”
The door at the far side of the room we were in opened slowly. A figure paused in the doorway-a black silhouette against an almost black background. Burnt food on a cast-iron skillet.
Mallory? No. Too large, too masculine.
Bob? Maybe.
I was about to call Bob’s name when the person’s right arm began to rise and a brilliant flash blinded me and a deafening roar blasted my ears. Before I could even process the first explosion, another one erupted. Then, I thought, another. The figure’s knees began to buckle and he grasped at the door frame with both hands.
The support did him no good. A second later he heaved forward and collapsed to the floor.
My hearing temporarily gone, my eyes useless in a basement dark as a moonless night, I was most aware of the smell of the burnt powder from the gun. I was trying to figure out what had just happened. Bill touched my arm and forced a flashlight into my hand. I flicked it on and saw the gun he was holding. It was a revolver. A big thing.
“Over here,” Bill said. I pointed the light in the direction of his voice. He’d stepped away from me and was standing in front of a gray electrical panel. With the benefit of the illumination he reached up and pulled hard at the main power circuit.
Instantly the lights in the house came back on.
With great relief I realized that I didn’t recognize the man in the heap at the foot of the stairs. It definitely wasn’t Bob.
The butt of a pistol had come to rest two inches from the man’s nose. Had the man been holding it? I didn’t remember hearing it clatter to the floor. I said, “Who is it? Do you know him?”
Bill moved closer. “It’s Doyle.”
He didn’t sound surprised.
71
I was.
“Doyle’s already dead, Bill.”
“That must have been somebody else they found in the mountains. That’s Doyle, right there.”
I used the toe of my shoe to move the pistol away, knelt, and placed my quivering fingers on the side of the man’s neck. I couldn’t find a pulse. I thought of Hannah a month before, the same fingers, the same result.
“Who was it that they found near Allenspark?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Doyle’s dead for sure, now. For me, that’s nothing but good news.”
Bill wasn’t upset.
“Why… did you shoot him?”
“He broke into my house. You saw that.”
“He’s been in your house a dozen times. Why did you shoot him?”
“You saw what happened. A broken window. An intruder in the dark. He was going to shoot me. Us.”
He stressed the words “intruder” and “dark.” I thought his explanation sounded rehearsed and I immediately questioned whether Bill knew that Doyle was going to be in his house, in his basement. “Did you know he was coming over?”
Bill didn’t answer me. “Did you? Did you know he was coming over?”
He still didn’t reply. I thought, Damn, make my day.
You set this up, you bastard.
Car thieves steal cars. Bank robbers rob banks. For Bill, this was the white van and the orthodontist all over again.
I started up the stairs to get my phone to call 911. When I was about halfway up I heard a woman’s voice. “Willy? You down there? What was that noise?”
72
Willy?
Rachel.
“Rachel? Baby?” Bill said.
This time he sounded surprised.
73
Sam didn’t arrive first-some patrol cops did-but he was there within fifteen minutes.
He wasn’t happy to find me in Bill Miller’s house.
He wasn’t happy to hear Bill Miller claiming that he and I had been having a psychotherapy session when we heard the glass break. He wasn’t happy to hear me concur with Bill that what he had told me prior to the shooting had to stay confidential.
What was Sam happy about?
I think he was reasonably pleased that Rachel Miller was there, and that she was insisting that her daughter, Mallory, was fine. “She’ll be here any minute. Any minute,” Rachel kept saying. “Don’t worry, don’t worry.”
Before he and I were separated by the cops, Bill readily admitted shooting the intruder in his house, whom he continued to insist was the man he knew as his next-door neighbor, Do
yle Chandler.
Sam parked me in the Millers’ living room. “You okay?” he asked.
I said I was.
“Good. What about Rachel?” he said to me. “How did she look to you? As a shrink.”
“From what little I saw, not too bad. I suspect she’s on her meds. I’d have to evaluate her to be sure, but she looks much better than I would have predicted.”
“Do you believe what she’s saying about Mallory?”
“I think she believes what she’s saying about Mallory. It’s either delusional, or it’s not. I don’t know her well enough to tell you which.”
“Thank you, Dr. Freud.”
“There’s a chance she’s telling the truth, Sam. That’s a good thing. Hope, right? Has she said how she got here?”
“ ‘With Mallory and her friend.’ I’m thinking Bob, the Camaro guy.”
“You never found him this morning?”
“No.”
“Is Bill claiming the shooting was a ‘make my day’ thing?”
Colorado has a frontier-justice “Get Out of Jail Free” law that permits citizens to use deadly force to protect personal property. Intrude on a Coloradan’s homestead-and raise enough of a ruckus while you’re at it-and you had better hope that the homeowner isn’t armed, because he or she has every legal right to blow you to smithereens, even if you’re not threatening any imminent bodily harm. The law is popularly known as the “Make My Day” law.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “He is. Loudly. Was it?”
“I’m not a lawyer, but probably. Glass broke, power went out, suddenly the guy is there in the basement. Bill shot him. Three times, I think.”
“Three?”
“Yeah. I think three. He kept shooting.”
“Was the guy armed?”
“It was dark. After the lights were back on, I saw a gun next to him on the floor.”
“All sounds pretty convenient.”
“Maybe, I don’t know. Bill’s been through a lot.”
“The broken glass? You see it?” Sam asked.
“No.”
“Wasn’t a window. Somebody put a couple of clear vases or something on the sill in the basement window well. Anyone who opened the window would have knocked them off. I find that kind of… suspicious.”
“People put stuff on windowsills all the time.”
“Window was unlocked,” Sam said. “No sign it was forced.”
“A lot of people have been in and out of this house lately.”
“You sticking up for him?”
I didn’t want to go there. “Bill said the guy he shot was Doyle, Sam. Is that possible?”
“Yeah, I heard. Maybe he has a twin,” he said. “Only thing I know for certain about this whole mess is that there are way too many Doyle Chandlers around for my taste.” He stood up. “Tell me again, why were you here?”
I looked him in the eye and told him it was privileged, which told him almost all he needed to know.
Diane wasn’t in danger anymore. I had secrets to keep.
“Figured.” He ran his fingers through his hair while he continued to stare at me. His next sentence surprised me. “Scott Truscott says you solved the Hannah Grant thing.”
I shrugged. “I had a thought; I shared it with him. He put it all together; I guess the coroner agreed.”
Sam’s raised eyebrows mocked me more than his words did. “A thought? You had a thought? You seem to have a lot of thoughts.” He paused. “And a lot of sources.”
I took the comment exactly as Sam intended it-as an accusation.
A patrol cop stuck her head into the room and said, “Detective? That Cadillac? The BOLO? We got it.”
“Where?”
“CU. Parking lot near the stadium. SWAT’s responding.”
He looked at me, waiting to see if I was going to be obstinate. I surprised him, I think. I said, “Duane Labs. Plasma physics. Fourth floor.”
Sam repeated the location into his radio as he rushed from the room, leaving me alone.
I walked to a beat-up mahogany secretary, picked up the telephone, and called my house. Lauren and Grace were safely home from a wonderful dress-up afternoon, enjoying high tea at the Brown Palace in Denver. Turned out that Gracie loved scones and clotted cream and peppermint tea in china cups, and was absolutely over the moon for cucumber sandwiches. I gave Lauren a concise version of what was going on in Boulder and assured her I’d be fine. After we hung up I dialed a second number from memory.
“Cozy?” I said. “Hate to ruin your Saturday, but someone I know needs a lawyer.”
74
Bob had indeed told Mallory about the tunnel.
She’d used it on Christmas night to get away from the bad guy she had convinced herself was waiting to do to her what had been done eight years before to her young friend. She’d discovered Bob watching movies in Doyle’s theater, and had asked him for help in getting away.
Bob had complied.
Mallory had stayed in Bob’s flat for the first few days after she’d left home. Once she’d recovered from her Christmas night fright, she ended up mostly terrified about the ruckus she’d caused by running away, and fearful of the repercussions she was sure she would face when she surfaced. She never was quite sure what to make of the fact that the therapist from whom she’d sought help had died.
Out of boredom as much as anything, she finally cajoled Bob into a road trip to see “our mothers.”
Their first stop was Las Vegas, where they picked up Rachel. The second stop was the assisted-living facility in southern Colorado where the trio paid a brief visit to Bob’s mother. That’s where Bob switched the Camaro-it had developed a problem with its clutch-for his mother’s pale-yellow ’88 DeVille, which was almost, but not quite, as cherry as Bob’s ’60s muscle car.
After the real fake Doyle was killed by Bill Miller in his basement, the police didn’t have too much difficulty piecing together the identity of the fake fake Doyle.
The man whose body had been discovered in the shallow grave near Allenspark turned out to be a homeless man named Eric Brewster whom Doyle had apparently hired to be an unidentifiable corpse rotting in the woods. That probably wasn’t the job description he’d offered Brewster when he’d recruited him off the streets of Cheyenne, but that was the job the poor man got. Doyle was ready for the Doyle Chandler identity to die, and he’d picked Brewster carefully, choosing a man about his size and coloring. He gave Brewster some of his own clothes before he led him out into the woods and shot him in the head. Doyle planted his ID on the body, reasonably figuring that a winter and spring in the elements would destroy any clues, except DNA, as to who the dead man really was. Without a sample for matching, he knew the DNA wouldn’t do law enforcement any good.
Doyle Chandler would be dead for at least the second time.
Raoul brought Diane home on a medical jet charter on Monday, the day after he rescued her. Medically she was going to be okay. Psychologically? We held our breaths; time would tell. She’d have love and support, all she needed. Would it be enough? I hoped it would. Diane was tough.
She used Scott Truscott’s assessment that Hannah Grant’s death was a tragic accident as a crutch to help herself get back on her feet. I wasn’t too surprised that Diane was back to work within a week. The first patient she saw on her initial day back?
Fittingly, it was the Cheetos lady. We passed each other in the hall as Diane led the woman from the waiting room to her office. She smiled at me as though we were buddies.
All, apparently, was forgiven.
With Diane safe, and Bob safe, and Mallory safe, I went back to keeping secrets. I was well aware that had Raoul found Diane even half a day later, I probably would have spilled all the beans I had on Bill Miller. With my friend out of harm’s way, though, I knew that revealing what I’d learned from my patients would have been nothing more than a self-destructive act of reprisal.
Still, believe me, I had considered it.
I didn’t reveal
what I knew about Bill and Walter and the orthodontist. I’d initially learned all those things in my role as a psychologist, and couldn’t rationalize revealing them. Did I feel good about keeping those secrets? No, I didn’t.
Deep down, I’m quite fond of the idea of justice. But, as fond as I am of justice, it’s not the business that I’m in.
Walter’s family soon reported him missing, but I kept my mouth shut about the location of his body. Raoul did, too. I wouldn’t have known anything about Walter if I hadn’t been treating Bill, so I considered that information privileged. Was I haunted by the fact that I had knowledge that could help end a family’s fruitless search for a missing husband and father?
Yes, I was.
Nor did I ever publicly share my suspicions that Bill had enticed Doyle back to his house so he could murder him, once and for all, or that I thought he’d arranged for me to be there as his hapless witness. I couldn’t prove any of it, but I believed it all to be true. I think Sam did, too. He told me that the police had some phone records that provided circumstantial support to the theory.
But Sam didn’t think he could prove it either. Lauren admitted that when the DA reviewed the evidence, she’d concurred.
The Millers became a family again: Mallory was home, Reese came back from his sabbatical with out-of-state relatives, and Rachel moved back into the house. Would the familial bliss last? I had my doubts. Mary Black, still consumed with her triplets, referred Rachel to a psychiatrist in Denver who was having success treating people with symptoms like Rachel’s with some innovative pharmaceutical cocktails.
Miracles happen sometimes. Rachel needed one, probably deserved one.
Bill?
As the dust was starting to settle I phoned him, and asked politely for one last session.
He declined.
I rephrased my request, turning it into something a little less polite and a little stronger than an invitation. He relented, as I knew he would, and when he came to my office to see me I didn’t bother to waste any time on therapeutic niceties. I told him I wanted both of his kids in therapy, and gave him the names of the carefully chosen therapists I wanted each of them to see. I made it clear that I wasn’t making a suggestion; the consequences of not heeding my advice would be harsh.
Missing Persons Page 37
