Last Lie
Authors: Stephen White
Table of Contents
ALSO BY STEPHEN WHITE
The Siege
Dead Time
Dry Ice
Kill Me
Missing Persons
Blinded
The Best Revenge
Warning Signs
The Program
Cold Case
Manner of Death
Critical Conditions
Remote Control
Harm's Way
Higher Authority
Private Practices
Privileged Information
DUTTON
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, August 2010
Copyright (c) 2010 by Stephen W. White
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK--MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
White, Stephen, 1951-
The last lie / by Stephen White.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-45770-2
1. Gregory, Alan (Fictitious character)--Fiction. 2. Clinical psychologists--Fiction. 3. Widows--Crimes against--Fiction 4. Boulder (Colo.)--Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.H47477L37 2010
813'.54--dc22
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to Robert Barnett
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
H. L. Mencken
PROLOGUE
S
urveillance footage indicated that a woman drove her 2005 Hyundai Santa Fe to the front of the Boulder Police Department at seven forty-five on Saturday morning. The car entered the frame from the south, which meant the driver had turned onto 33rd Street from Arapahoe before she pulled to a stop at the curb opposite the main entrance. The SUV ended up on the wrong side of the road, where the woman sat almost motionless behind the wheel in the don't-even-think-about-parking-here zone for over eleven minutes.
A uniformed officer striding toward his patrol vehicle in the lot adjacent to the building noted the car with the engine running. He tapped on the glass of the driver's door with the tip of his key. The woman at the wheel did not acknowledge him. Not at first.
The officer raised his voice so he could be heard through the glass, instructing her to move her car. He gestured at the NO PARKING signs. There were so many of them, they could have been part of a public art installation.
Over an after-shift beer he would freely admit to another cop that he had little patience with citizens who acted as though simple rules--STOP, YIELD, NO PARKING--didn't apply to them. He considered the citations he wrote for most misdemeanor violations to be nothing more than comeuppance for violating gotta-get-along karma.
The shift he was finishing that morning hadn't been a good one. Before returning to the department to get some guidance from his sergeant on another matter, he had answered three domestic calls in a row. One right after the friggin' next. A double-wide off Valmont, a decent split-level with a great view below the Flatirons, and a gazillion-square-foot McMansion out near the reservoir.
He hated domestics, especially weekend, middle-of-the-night domestics. Every last one felt like Russian roulette to him. His domestic call mantra was "Knock on the door and fuckin' duck."
A half second before the patrol cop reached for his citation book, the woman in the parked car lowered her window and turned her head toward him. She did not, however, look at his face. He instructed her to remove her sunglasses.
She hesitated a beat too long before she pushed the shades up onto her forehead.
Lady,
he said to himself,
I've had a bad night. Don't fucking push me.
His usual partner, Missy Abrams, counseled him to have conversations with himself before he had them with citizens. He thought Missy would be pleased when he told her later that he'd been acting on her advice, though she wouldn't be thrilled with the exact nature of the internal dialogue.
"Progress," she would say. "Baby steps."
His first thought when he looked at the woman's face after she pushed the glasses up to her hairline was that someone had hit her in the eye. His adrenaline surged at the possibility that he had just stumbled onto his fourth domestic in a row. That would have been a dubious personal record. But further examination caused him to conclude that the woman looked more like she had started to remove her makeup and had stopped halfway through the process. That's what left her with smudged mascara and half-removed eyeliner. And that's why he'd initially thought she looked so bruised. Some tears were mixed in, too, he thought.
So. This woman had stopped removing her makeup without completing the job, and then she'd driven to the police station. She'd parked in a no-parking zone on the wrong side of the street with her engine running. And then she just sat there, crying.
He tried to make sense of that progression but drew a blank.
He was wishing he had just kept on walking to his cruiser. If he'd kept on walking, she would eventually have gone inside and spoken to Ruth Anne at the desk. Ruth Anne was, like, unflappable.
Or the woman would have just driven away, no one the wiser.
The woman's breathing changed suddenly and audibly. That got his attention. It started coming in rushed little inhales that were paired in twos followed by long silent exhales. He mistook the pattern for hiccups. The officer's ex-wife got hiccup jags that sounded similar.
The presence of the hiccups caused him to lean in a little closer to the open window. He expected to detect the telltale aroma of alcohol on the woman's breath.
DUI? DWI?
Or his recent favorite catchall, DWO--Driving While Oblivious. Texting, iPods, Big Macs, mascara, whatever. DWO was a small addition to state motor vehicle law that he felt was long overdue.
Had the woman been drinking?
Maybe yes, maybe no.
He wasn't sure. He decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. It wasn't a compassionate gesture. He just wanted her to move her damn car half a block down the street--on the other side, so it was pointed in the right direction.
He said, "You know you can't park here, right?" He gestured again at the signs that were all over the place, not pretending to hide his exasperation. She didn't react. "Tell me this, you waiting for someone?"
The woman considered his question for a good ten seconds, which was out near the frontier of the cop's patience. "No," she said finally. "There's no one."
Either a simple
yes
or
no
in reply would have been fine with him, though he had a bias toward
yes,
because that would have indicated that another human being might soon arrive to spare him this situation.
But the woman had answered with something existential.
In the officer's cumulative experience with Boulder's citizens--a cohort that was more prone to existential retorts than most--eight in the morning was a tad too early for philosophical reflection.
The officer took a deep breath while he admitted that the situation confronting him was not a simple karma violation. He was not that lucky a cop. He thought about what his patrol partner would have said were she with him right then.
Missy--he told her at some point almost every shift when conversation dragged between them--was like the all-time worst cop name ever. Every time he told her that she called him an asshole. "You're an asshole, Heath. Period. End of sentence."
He knew what Missy would want him to say right at that moment. So that's what he said: "Are you all right, ma'am? Do you require some assistance?"
He was hoping she'd reply
yes
to the first question,
no
to the second. But he wasn't holding his breath.
"Assistance," the woman repeated after a perplexed interlude. "Help?" she then said, as she completed some translation of his trailing question. She puffed out her cheeks as though the combination of questions completely stumped her. She finally said, "I'm--There's--Sometime . . . last night?" She punctuated each of the fractured sentences with interruptions of the gasp-gasp-silence breathing melody.
"Take your time," the officer said. It was another useful phrase that he'd learned from Missy.
It was Missy who had convinced him that there was a subset of citizens who were not inclined to speed up their cooperation under insistent verbal pressure from a large man with biceps the size of two-liter Coke bottles, who was wearing a uniform, and who also happened to be armed with a handgun and a baton.
Some citizens, that set of facts motivates. Other citizens, that set of facts flusters.
Missy would say "discombobulates."
That this particular citizen fell into the "discombobulates" category, the officer had absolutely no doubt.
The woman in the Hyundai spread the fingers of her left hand, palm up, so her manicured nails jutted just out the open window. "Last night? Well, yeah, it had to be. No, maybe early this morn--I--That's . . . no. It had to be--No. No. The time part is hard. Why is it all so . . . See . . . okay, okay, I've been--" she said.
She pulled her hand back, curled it into a fist, and shook it like it was her turn with the bones at a craps table. But her expression made clear that she wished she could shake the fist in someone's face. Someone in particular.
The cop noted the absence of a wedding band on her ring finger. Since his own divorce, final only five months before, he had started noticing women's ring fingers. At first, it was the weirdest thing for him, like suddenly discovering women had noses.
He didn't think she noticed him noticing her ring finger. She had something else on her mind. "There's been a--" she said, once again spreading the fingers of her left hand. "I'm pretty sure--Yes, I am, I
am
pretty, pretty sure. I am," she said. "Or . . . I wouldn't be here, right?" She flattened her lips.
He said, "That's not for me to say, ma'am. Why you're here. That's what we're trying to determine."
But his reply seemed to puzzle the woman. "Well, of course. Why would--I didn't . . . No, no, I did not," she said. "I haven't at all, with--Not since, oh God, not since
that
day.
That
very morning, if you can believe it. Lord. But even then I didn't . . . give him--" Her shoulders sagged. "Lord. I wish I had. Even if . . . It wasn't usual for us, far from it. Morning? On a Sunday? On a golf Sunday? But . . . last night? I didn't. I did not. And I certainly didn't give . . ." Her voice trailed off. "But he . . . did. He did it. It's not that I really remember but--I mean, but how else? Right? I can tell. I just can. Other women? Maybe not. I've never had that conversation. Maybe I should have had--But, it doesn't matter, because I can tell." She paused for a couple of quick gasps and one long exhale. She did it one more time. Then she briefly touched the side of her face, on the right side. "I can. I know."
The officer still thought she had hiccups.
She spread all ten fingers, both palms facing up. Her makeup-stained eye went wide. "I was not that . . ." She shook her head. "Not at all. To drive? I wouldn't have, of course. I'm careful about that. It doesn't take that much, but I'd eaten. Tired, sure, but--Not like--Not at all like--
"He did it," she said again. "He did it. To me."
The officer was not hearing alarm in her voice. Most people he dealt with in stressful situations, their demeanors were like I-70 in the mountains--all curves and ups and downs. But this woman's affect and tone were like I-70 in eastern Colorado. On the plains. Heading to Kansas. Other side of Limon. Flat and straight.
By the time she pulled up in front of the department, all of the terrible feelings and all of the momentum that had got her going that morning were spent. What was left of this woman's recent awful experience--whatever that might have been--was blunted. The officer later told Detective Davenport that the woman reminded him of his mother when she was really upset. Not bad-day upset. Holy-fuck upset. Like the morning a couple months before when she got the results of the Pap smear.
She'd managed just one crazy-making call, to her only son. After the call to Heath--there were times he really wished his sister hadn't moved to Tucson to be near her wiseass boyfriend with all the friggin' tats--he had rushed right over to his mother's house in Louisville. He sat with her at the kitchen table for five minutes while she petted a cat purring contentedly in her lap. He didn't recognize the cat.
She finally asked him if he knew that Louisville had been voted the best small town in America.
Heath said he did not know that. He didn't say what else he was thinking, which was that he didn't even remember the question being on the ballot. He waited. He knew more was coming. He spent the dead time trying to place the cat. Was his mother taking in strays? That would be a bad sign.
Minutes later, in the same bland tone she'd used to ask the question about America's best small town, she asked him if he knew that his mother had cervical cancer. Not "Do you know I have cervical cancer?" but "Do you know your mother has cervical cancer?"
His mother's tears didn't actually start flowing for another ten minutes. That's how long it took for her to leave the flat behind.
"WOULD YOU LIKE TO COME INSIDE?" the officer said to the woman in the Hyundai. "Talk to someone about what happened last night--or, or early this morning--maybe? With that man? The one you're talking about who did . . . something? I'm thinking, maybe you could talk to a detective, to help clear up . . . your thinking."
She reacted by reaching over to the center of the car and lifting a big cup of Starbucks coffee from the cup holder on the dash. Her sudden motion caused the officer to take an involuntary step away from the vehicle.
Pure instinct had him getting ready to fall to a crouch, slide to one side, and shift an open palm nearer his weapon. The string of damn domestic calls earlier in the shift had Heath on edge. "Jitter in a jar" is what Missy called domestics. When she said that to him while they were walking up to a house--"Here we go, jitter in a jar"--"Yep, knock and fuckin' duck" is what Heath would say right back at her.
Missy hated it whenever Heath said "fuckin' duck." For some reason he didn't get, that was fingernails on a blackboard for Missy.
"I haven't even had a sip," the woman said. "Of this. My latte? It's pumpkin. I just got it. Over by King Soopers? That Starbucks. I thought of stopping at the one on Baseline--you know that one?--but this one is closer. Maybe not as convenient, though. You think? I had to turn around."
"Ma'am?" he said, not eager to get into a discussion about expensive coffee or how to get from point A to point B in Boulder. Like arguing evolution with his aunt.
She said, "Not one sip. Because . . . I didn't know. I mean, I just did not know. I didn't want it to . . . mess things up? Do you know what I mean? In the lab? Later? I couldn't decide if it would or it wouldn't . . . I tried to remember if I'd seen anything like it on
CSI
. About coffee, after. Or coffee before, even, I guess." She paused to give it some more thought. "I don't think I have seen it. Have they done a show on that? Did I miss it? I must have missed it. Do you know? Is it okay? Maybe it was on
Law & Order
. The sex one. I don't watch that one all the time. I miss a lot of those." She looked in the direction of the officer's bewildered face, not quite making contact with his eyes. "Do you watch
CSI
?"