Dry Ice (31 page)

    I took two steps closer to the door to try to see what was going on in the offices. People parted in front of me as though I were a drunk panhandler in need of a shower. I could have interpreted the gesture as a sign of respect or compassion because of Lauren's circumstances. But Elliot's reaction to my presence in the DA's office was enough to convince me that I shouldn't allow myself the luxury of perceiving generosity in the staff's behavior. In my heart I knew Lauren's colleagues were giving me room because I was radioactive and no one wanted to be in my orbit.

    What I didn't know was how radioactive I was. Or precisely why.

From my fresh vantage at the front of the throng I could see down the hall into Lauren's office. At least five cops were crowded into the small space near the door. They blocked my view of her desk.

    Behind me someone with a pleasant tenor and an appealingly warped sense of humor started humming the score of the battle scene in
Star Wars.
The cavalry was coming. I looked down the hall. A big cop was striding down the corridor from stage right carrying a set of bolt cutters big enough to slice off a man's arm in one thwack.

    Despite the commotion and despite the glass partition separating me from the corridor I could hear him call out to his colleagues, "Coming through." The cops who were crammed into Lauren's office backed off to clear a path for him.

    That's when I saw Michael McClelland's face for the first time in years.

    He was sitting at my wife's desk. In her
chair
. His hands— his wrists now cuffed together by the cops—rested on the desktop. Michael hadn't aged as much as I thought he should have. He hadn't lost any of the baby fat in his jowls, his hair hadn't lost any of its color. I saw no anxiety in his clear eyes, no skin sagging from the gravity of despair.

    Behind him I spotted a familiar framed photograph of Grace. In the picture my daughter was hugging Emily. Anvil was standing in his always-odd tough-guy pose at her knees. I loved that picture. I hated that it was over Michael's shoulder.

    I felt still. For five or six seconds I watched McClelland's impassive face. I watched his eyes follow the action of the cops who were moving around him. I watched the acknowledgment wash over his expression as he spotted the bolt cutters and realized that the next act of the play he was directing was about to begin.

    He looked up. The second his eyes found mine, I stopped feeling still.

    McClelland smiled when he spotted me. He lifted his hands from the desktop. He did it slowly, probably so that he wouldn't startle his captors. With his left hand he pointed at me using his index finger. With his right hand he formed his fingers into a position with the middle three fingers curled to his palm, his pinky and thumb extended. I initially mistook it for a University of Texas "Hook 'em, 'Horns" cheer—but realized he was extending his thumb instead of his index finger. I next mistook the gesture as the laid-back
shaka
sign that native Hawaiians use to spread a little nonverbal aloha. It was neither.

    He lowered his head and raised the hand toward his face with the end of his thumb up toward his right ear, the end of his pinky near his lips. The woman beside me translated. She said, "I think he wants to talk to you." There was surprise in her voice.

    I said, "I think you're right." I wasn't at all ambushed by the fact that Michael McClelland wanted to talk with me. I was already considering other things.
Why had he chosen this place?
This drama? This audience?

    The cops in Lauren's office saw his gesture, too, and they followed his gaze out the door. A couple of the cops turned and spotted me at the glass, staring right back at their prisoner. Without hesitation they closed ranks so that their thick torsos again blocked me from seeing McClelland. And him from seeing me.

    Elliot Bellhaven used his voice well, forming crisp consonants and resonant vowels. His vocal skills made him a formidable courtroom orator. When I heard someone behind me begin to address the room, I knew that it was Elliot.

    "We're going to clear this office," he said in a louder than necessary voice. "Everyone move downstairs to the first floor, please. Calmly. No need to rush. No need to go to your desks."

    I neither turned to watch him nor moved to obey him. My eyes stayed focused on the doorway to Lauren's office.

    The people beside me did turn. Elliot was their boss. He wasn't mine.

    Elliot waited a few seconds before he repeated, "Everyone."

    With that I figured he was talking directly to me. Ten seconds later I heard his voice again. He had moved so that he was right behind me.

    "Come on, Alan," he said, just a trace of conciliation in his tone. "She's fine. You'll meet up with her downstairs after she's debriefed."

    "Why is he here, Elliot? Why did he turn himself in?"

    He had a ready reply. "Cons get comfortable inside. They want to go back. Happens all the time."

    "Not McClelland. He could be in Mexico by now. Or on his way to Peru. Why give up?"

    "He's crazy. Right?" Elliot shrugged. He wasn't interested in why.

    "People with mental illnesses don't have judgment? That's your explanation?"

    He snorted. "What's yours, Doctor? You were so good at understanding him last time around."

    Although I would have preferred to hit him, I answered him. "For most of us freedom is an overriding motivation. For some of us it's not. We need to know what's more important to this guy than his freedom."

    "He'll be interviewed."

    "He wants to talk with me."

    "You and I both know that's not going to happen."

    "Why not?" I asked, fighting to keep my exasperation under wraps.

    "He won't be rewarded for this stunt. McClelland's not calling the shots here. He's a fugitive. He'll be treated like a fugitive."

    "You're not curious?" I asked in a conversational tone that I was pleased remained in my repertoire. "What he might want? What he's been up to for the past few days? Why he chained himself to her desk instead of running for his life?"

    "He wanted to taste freedom. Found it overwhelming. How complicated is that?"

    Whatever conciliation had occurred between us was fleeting; I tasted a fresh undertone of condescension. It bit at my palate, like too much salt in the soup.

    "He's not going to talk to you," I said.

    "How can you be so sure of that?" he asked. He thought I was challenging him. Perhaps I was.

    I turned and faced him. "Because I know him."

    "That's all you got? You know him?"

    Elliot had given up any pretense of disguising his condescension. I said, "He's not going to talk to anyone from your office or to any cops. He hasn't spoken to a single member of the hospital clinical staff in Pueblo in years, Elliot. Not a syllable. He's been playing the system like a virtuoso." I was tempted to use Thibodeaux's Hendrix analogy, but I resisted.

    "How do you know . . . that?"

    I was pleased again. Elliot didn't know that McClelland had gone electively mute in Pueblo. I liked the advantage his ignorance gave me. Not because it would mean anything beyond the moment. I liked it because it allowed me a temporary petty perch just a little bit above him. In reply to his question I simply sighed. Telling Elliot how I knew about Michael's treatment progress in Pueblo, or lack thereof, wouldn't help my cause and it would be a betrayal of Tharon Thibodeaux's generosity.

    "He's not done, Elliot. He didn't walk away from the state hospital so he could have a holiday at the Boulderado or spend a weekend enjoying the pleasures of the Pearl Street Mall. He had something he wanted to accomplish, and he's not done."

    "What?" he asked.

    I tasted derision, not curiosity, in Elliot's question. Condescension was one thing; derision was something else entirely. I was being viewed through a translucent screen of contempt. Things were worse than I had imagined. I wondered what they had on me.

    I swallowed an impulsive, juvenile
"Fuck you."
Instead I said, "I don't know. What? You think it was an accident that he was camped out in a building fifty feet from my family's front door?"

    "You don't know that was him."

    I recalled Sam's caution about the forensic evidence collected in Peter's barn, and decided not to press that point. "You think it's a coincidence that he chained himself to Lauren's desk?"

    "Go home, Alan. Your family is safe. Enjoy the good news. We got the bad guy. He's back in custody."

    "
You
got the bad guy? Maybe I'm missing something, but I think the bad guy turned himself in. And I guarantee you it wasn't an act of capitulation on his part. McClelland has just gained some advantage. What? I don't know yet. But don't be naïve, Elliot. My family isn't safe. All that's happened is that McClelland knocked on your door so that you guys will make the mistake of thinking that's he's completed his sabbatical."

    Elliot sighed. The drama of his sigh put mine to shame. "Tell you what, Alan—I'll try not to be naïve if you'll try not to be so damn demeaning. How's that?"

    He was right; my condescension was coloring our interaction. If in no other way, my anti-pettiness campaign was paying off in self-awareness. That was something.

    Elliot's condescension and derision were invisible to him— denial means that zits and gray hair are unlikely to appear in the mirror. Contempt? Not a chance.

    I allowed myself the pleasant spray of a small victory. Although it was true that I hadn't exhibited anything resembling composure since I had made it up the stairs at the Justice Center, I had just managed to get the relentlessly charming Chief Deputy of the DA's office to lose any semblance of his. "I'll consider it," I said in response to his earlier offer about killing both his naïveté and my condescension with the same arrow.

    He stuffed his hands in his pockets and said, "Go home right now or I swear I'll get somebody to take you there whether you like it or not."

    With absolutely no condescension in my voice I said, "I'll leave after I talk to my wife."

    He scoffed, "You think you have that kind of leverage? Any leverage?"

    "I need leverage to talk with my wife?"

    He said, "I've been with her. She hasn't asked to talk to you."

    My own biased assessment was that he hadn't been as successful as I had been in getting all the contempt out of his delivery. I didn't want to discuss the state of my marriage with Elliot so I made a quick decision to change the subject to something more pertinent to my well-being than how long I would get to stay in the reception area of the DA's office. "I'm curious about something. Are you thinking of arresting me?"

    I knocked him off balance with the question. Just a little. It had been my intent to thwart the advantage he'd gained with his quip about Lauren not wanting to talk to me. He raised a finger to scratch at his eyebrow. The move was misdirection. Elliot was deliberating. If there was a way to play my query to his advantage, Elliot would find it.

    "For this? I just want you out of our way. We have work to do. Go home."

    "I'm not talking about this," I said.

    He touched his ear lobe, gave it a gentle squeeze. Raised his chin a centimeter. He reminded me of a third-base coach trying to set up a suicide squeeze. "You know that you and I can't talk about . . . any of the things that happened over the weekend. Certainly not without your attorney present."

    A voice emerged from behind us. "His attorney is present, Mr. Bellhaven. But thank you so much for extending the constitutional courtesy. An often neglected gesture, but always appreciated."

    Elliot turned to the voice. He found himself eye-to-eye with Kirsten Lord. She was in modest heels.

    Elliot, modest wingtips.

    "Kirsten Lord," she said, holding out her hand. "I don't think we've had the pleasure. I'm an associate of Cozier Maitlin. We represent Dr. Gregory."

    "Ms. Lord," he said. "I had heard that Cozy took on an associate. Don't know whether to offer my congratulations or my condolences. Regardless, it's a pleasure to meet you." In most circumstances Elliot did courtesy like cornstarch did silky.

   He stepped forward and shook her hand. He then retreated to the neutral territory halfway between me and my lawyer.

Kirsten smiled pleasantly as though she had all the time

in the world. Her Southern manners were a natural match for Elliot's patrician ones. She said, "As far as I'm concerned, you may go right ahead and answer Dr. Gregory's question. There is no longer any need to use my absence as an excuse not to reply. And I'm as anxious as my client is to hear what you have to say."

    Elliot scratched that itchy eyebrow again. Then he straightened his perfectly straight eyeglasses. "Now isn't the appropriate time," he said. "Will you please persuade your client to clear this office? The alternative is something . . . I would prefer to avoid."

    She looked at me then. Her glance was exceedingly brief, just long enough to allow her to make a determination about my disposition. Then she turned back to Elliot. "If you'll excuse us for just a few moments, Dr. Gregory and I will talk. I've always preferred to do my persuading in private."

"YOU'RE NOT going to win this one, Alan. Let's get out of here," Kirsten said. "We live to fight another day."

    I was back at the glass partition. Elliot had gone through the door into the interior corridor—if for no other reason than to demonstrate to me that he could and that I couldn't. It was apparent that the bolt cutter had worked on Michael's nylon chains. The cops were standing him up from Lauren's desk.