Dry Ice (37 page)

    "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 said, "That wasn't our witness in the picture you sent, Alan. That was Currie."

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-younow step. But her motion wasn't in a straight line. It was fortyfive 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.

    Emily might get shot. I might get shot.

    The third option was so natural I found myself choosing it without any further deliberation. I took two steps to my right until I was behind the narrow trunk of a beetle-kill pine. I rotated my day pack to one side, reached into the zippered front section, and removed Lauren's Glock.

    When she wasn't carrying it—she had a permit for the 9 mm; the airport was one of the few locations where she didn't have it with her—Lauren stored her loaded pistol in a locked cabinet in our closet at home. I had assumed that it was loaded when I'd grabbed it an hour before and stuck it in my rucksack. It certainly had a magazine in it, but I was intentionally so ignorant about guns that I didn't know how to determine if the magazine had bullets in it. Nor did I know how to put ammunition into the magazine if it didn't.

    I'd probably held Lauren's gun three times before that day. Pulling the trigger? I'd performed that act on handguns exactly three times in my life—only two of those intentionally—but neither time with the Glock.

I spread my feet, leaned back against the tree, extended my arm, supported my right wrist with my left hand, and tried to line up the sights on the gun on the person in front of me.

    
What am I doing?
I was doing things I'd seen actors do in the movies.
How sorry is this?

    
Sam.
That's what I was doing.

    I adjusted my aim about two feet. One foot higher, one foot to the right.

    My eyes were open. Wide open.

    I squeezed the trigger.

    Nothing happened.

    The Glock doesn't have a conventional safety, but Lauren had once insisted on demonstrating for me how to work the manual lock on the back of the grip. Just in case.

    I exhaled. Found the cylindrical lock. Released it. And then I started the process of aiming all over again.
Sam.

    The branch I was leaning on snapped. The crack sounded as loud as a shot.

    I watched my target react by lifting himself up from the crevice—he or she was wearing a stocking cap the same graybrown as the rocks—and then rotate back toward the noise, and me. I squeezed the trigger, firing a round. By then Emily had started barking. The man made a wise decision—he moved forward and crouched to leap down from the outcropping toward the Royal Arch Trail below.

    I thought he was going after Sam.