Cold Case

by Stephen White

  "Room service isn't bad here. It's Italian. I love room service. Don't you love room service?"

  "I have a cop friend here in Boulder who thinks that if Welle was the target of an assassination then the target shoot was pure amateur hour. Wrong weapon at the wrong distance fired at the wrong target in the wrong circumstances."

  "You agree with your friend?"

  "I just know what I saw. Somebody shooting at the doorway of a building where a controversial congressman was raising campaign funds to run for the Senate. It doesn't make sense to rule him out as a target. It doesn't make sense to assume he was the target, either."

  "That's what I'm thinking, too. I'm trying to put together a list of the other people who were close to the doorway so I can rule them out as possible targets.

  I have the names of the two people who were hit by debris and a few others' names, too. Do you know who any of those people were?"

  "Sorry. I don't run in the rich-white-guys-over-forty-five circles. But I'll bet the Denver papers and the local TV station shows manage to run most of them down for you."

  "Figured you wouldn't know, but thought I'd ask. I've got the Channel 2 news on right now. They're not giving out names. And I can't wait for the Denver papers to fill out my piece. I only have half an hour till deadline." I heard her light a cigarette.

  "At least they still let you smoke in hotel rooms in this state.

  That's something, right? I was afraid I'd be out on the roof with coyotes or something." She sucked hard and exhaled before she continued.

  "The shooter's escape was well planned today, don't you think? Have you thought about that? The getaway? Not amateurish at all. And you were right about the white van being found at that grocery store close by. King Soopers? What kind of a name is that, anyway? I thought Winn Dixie was a stupid name for a supermarket. But King Soopers? In case you care, the van had been stolen the night before in… Aurora. That's like a suburb, right? No witnesses yet who saw anybody switch vehicles in the parking lot. I bet the guy just got out of the van, walked in one door of the store, walked right out another, and got into his second vehicle."

  Made sense to me.

  "Are you heading back to D.C. in the morning?"

  "I could. But I have some people to see in Steamboat Springs on Monday about this campaign-finance thing. How far away is that? Looks close enough on the map. I may just spend the weekend there."

  "If you drive, it's over three hours by car assuming you don't get lost in the mountains."

  "You mean I have an alternative? I can fly there? There's an airport?"

  "Yes. Yampa Valley."

  The nicotine was invigorating her.

  "Cool. Maybe I'll do that. That's Yampa spelled how? Y-a-m-p-a? Like it sounds?

  Bet you it's one of those little planes though, isn't it? I don't really like them. Too… tubey. And I like jets more than propellers. I wonder why that is…"

  I didn't know why it was but I suspected Dorothy didn't need to hear that from me.

  She plowed on.

  "Do you know Ray Welle hasn't done a single interview-broadcast or print-about his wife being murdered since he was elected to Congress? I find that kind of strange, don't you? He wouldn't shut up about it when he was on the radio every day. And do you know her parents-I'm talking about Welle s dead wife, now-you remember about her being taken hostage and executed, right?

  Her parents live a few blocks away from where we were this morning. Okay, they don't actually live there-people that rich don't actually live in just one place-but they have a house there. She grew up there. Gloria did. Right around the corner from where the Coors kidnapping took place. Bad neighborhood for having your rich kids kidnapped. Oh Christ! There's another one. Hold on."

  "Another what?"

  "My hotel room has been invaded by these kamikaze moths that buzz around like they're drunk. They dive-bomb right at you, flap all over the place. And they're covered with dirt."

  I laughed.

  "They're miller moths. They're pretty harmless. They're migratory; they'll all be gone in a few weeks."

  "Ahhh. Shit. It almost flew in my mouth. Gross. This one will be gone before that, I promise you." I could hear her whacking at it.

  "Got it!

  Yes!"

  I hadn't known that Gloria's parents-Lauren's ex-in-laws-lived so close to the Phipps Mansion. I also couldn't see how it meant anything significant.

  "Who are you going to see in Steamboat?"

  Her tone switched from conversational to suspicious. She said, "You connected up there?"

  "Not at all, no."

  "Then why do you want to know who I'm going to talk to? And why do I keep getting the feeling that you're more withholding than my two-year-old niece when she's constipated?"

  "I was just asking."

  "No you weren't. You weren't just asking. We're going back to class for a minute so pull out your syllabus. Here's lesson number two in Journalism 101.

  Let me show you how this is done. Okay? I'm actually going to answer your question.

  This is what it sounds like when somebody actually answers a question. Is your pencil ready? Pay attention. The reason I'm going to Steamboat Springs is to talk with some people who were involved with the ski area a few years ago. I need to talk with them about the campaign-finance irregularities I've been investigating. At the time, a big Japanese company controlled the resort. Does any of that information ring any bells for you?" She gave me two seconds to respond, then said, "Hello? I'm still listening for the peal of those bells."

  I swallowed and hoped she didn't hear me.

  She said, "Near the end there? A moment ago? That was a question. Now it's your turn to answer." Pause.

  "You know, you're not very good at this" I knew I was about to lie to her. I didn't want to tell her I'd been in Steamboat only a week ago and that I'd already interviewed someone who had been one of the local managers of the ski area back in the late eighties. I said, "No. No bells. What? Are you looking for foreign money being shoveled into Welle's campaign? Japanese money?"

  "Should I be?"

  I didn't answer. She said, "Were you always this bad in school? How the hell did you ever get a Ph. D.? Let me try an easier one for you. If I do go to Steamboat for the weekend, where should I stay? Keep in mind, there's a possibility this will be my dime."

  "Do you want charming or do you want efficiency?"

  "I want plumbing. I want to be able to smoke. And I want room service. Not necessarily in that order."

  The smoking part would limit her choices considerably. I suggested she call the Sheraton.

  My first wife, Merideth, had been a producer with Channel 9 in Denver. I still had some contacts at the station. I called one of them at home, a young man who had been an assistant producer. He had lusted after Merideth for the entire three years that he worked with her. I hoped that fact would make him guilty enough to agree to do me a favor.

  It did.

  I came home late Saturday morning after a long bike ride to Lyons and back and found that a messenger from Channel 9 had left the package beside the front door, as promised.

  Inside were two videotapes. One was a compilation of clips of the disappearance and murder of the two girls in the Elk River Valley. The other was a compilation of clips of the kidnapping and murder of Gloria Welle.

  I stripped out of my Lycra and took a shower. Lauren called while I was in the bathroom. She left a message letting me know that since I was seeing patients that afternoon, she and a girlfriend had decided to go shopping in Denver.

  Maternity things. She thought she'd be home for dinner.

  I made a sandwich and carried it into the living room. The first tape I stuck into the VCR was the Gloria Welle footage.

  Nineteen ninety-two. Channel 9's talent was a lot younger then. Still, except for some curious hair styles and some dubious wardrobe choices, Ed and Mike and Paula looked pretty good back in 1992.

  On tape, the entrance to the Sil
ky Road Ranch was totally different from the one I'd seen recently in person during my visit with Lauren. The day that Brian Sample went to visit Gloria Welle with retribution and murder in his heart, no gate at all blocked the entrance to the ranch. No imposing stone pillars marked the spot where the dirt lane broke off the county road. No video cameras checked on the arrival of visitors. No speakers announced curt warnings; no microphones eavesdropped on conversations. In those days before the murder, the sign that hung above the rough-cut pine logs that marked the entrance to the spread was carved of wood and read

  "Silky Road Ranch." It wasn't engraved on a stainless-steel plate that read

  "Gloria's Silky Road Ranch-No Visitors."

  The Silky Road wasn't a memorial to Gloria back then. It was just Gloria and Raymond Welle's horse ranch.

  It didn't surprise me that few of the actual details of the murder had stuck in my memory. The television stories about the crime referred to the victim of the murder as a "Denver debutante," "a wealthy socialite," or "the daughter of railroad billionaire Horace Tambor."

  None of the reports identified Gloria as a successful horse breeder, or even as Mrs. Raymond Welle. Ray's radio fame was barely starting to percolate; and his first term in Congress wouldn't start until 1994.

  I was curious about having my memory tweaked. What had transpired on the ranch that day?

  According to the television news reports, the whole affair had lasted only ninety minutes. During that brief window of time, Brian Sample had somehow entered the ranch house, joined Gloria for tea, forced her to make a telephone call in an effort to lure Raymond Welle home from his office, locked Gloria in a guest-room closet, and then shot her to death right through the wooden door.

  Shortly thereafter, Brian had fired a few rounds at the arriving law enforcement authorities. The police had gunned him down as he made a dash to the woods to try to escape.

  A follow-up story the day after Gloria's murder reported that authorities had learned that the suspect in the killing, Brian Sample, had been a patient of Gloria Welle's husband, psychologist Dr. Raymond Welle. Sample was, it was assumed, bent on revenge when he invaded the Welle home. Although the exact motive for seeking revenge upon his psychotherapist wasn't revealed in the report, the reason that Sample had sought mental-health treatment was already apparently the stuff of local lore. No one in town had any questions at all about what the precipitant was for the almost yearlong decline in Sample's emotional state.

  Brian Sample had owned a local saloon called The Livery. On a Tuesday night eleven months before he killed Gloria Welle, Brian had been behind the bar of that saloon, pouring drinks. One of his customers that evening was a regular, a not-certified public accountant named Grant Wortham who played catcher on Brian's softball team. Wortham had come into the bar after work for a cheeseburger and a beer, and had left the establishment three hours later after consuming eight beers and two shots of Cuervo Gold. When he left to go home, Wortham climbed behind the wheel of his big old Dodge Ram pickup truck.

  Wortham had managed to maneuver the vehicle only three blocks before he ran a stop sign at the edge of town while going almost fifty miles an hour. In the intersection, the big truck demolished a bright red Subaru. The driver of the Subaru didn't leave an inch of skid mark on the road. The driver of the Subaru never saw the big truck coming.

  The driver of the Subaru was killed instantly.

  The driver of the Subaru was Brian Sample's son, Dennis. He had been on his way home from a Drama Club meeting at the high school.

  By delivering those beers and pouring those shots of tequila for Grant Wortham, Brian Sample had effectively handed a loaded gun to the man who would soon become his son's executioner.

  On the ides of March, Sample sold the bar for less than he owed the bank. Weeks after that Brian attempted suicide, overdosing intentionally on Jack Daniel's, Valium, and penicillin. When he got out of the hospital, his wife, Leigh, kicked him out of the house.

  Not too many more days passed before Brian Sample killed Gloria Welle.

  The last clip on the videotape was a montage of scenes from Gloria's Denver funeral. A massive procession from the synagogue to the cemetery had tied up the metro area's streets for most of an hour. To get my mind off the tragedy of Brian Sample's family, I stuffed the second of the two videotapes into the VCR. This one would tell the story of the two dead girls.

  I'd already crossed whatever line of psychological defense it required to think of them-deceased-as the "two dead girls," not as Tami and Miko. And, from the detailed presentation at the Locard briefing and from all the reading I'd done of the case documents, I already knew the details of the story that the television journalists were about to tell me, so little about the video anthology surprised me. My interest in reviewing the news reports was limited.

  I had, in fact, only one goal. I wanted to discover the identity of the local residents who had been interviewed by the surprisingly tenacious reporter that Channel 9 had sent to Steamboat Springs to report on the developing story. I was hoping to uncover the names of some locals who seemed to have been well acquainted with Tami and Miko.

  The first few reports had been taped in the late autumn days right after the girls had disappeared. The sheriff in Routt County, Phil Barrett, was a much smaller pork chop back then. He certainly gave a lot of interviews, and appeared to enjoy acting constipated around the media. One of his first impromptu press gatherings took place in front of the snowmobile trailer that had been discovered the day after the girls disappeared. The trailer had been found in the parking lot of a condominium near the gondola at the base of the ski resort.

  The base area of Mount Werner was far from the Strawberry Park hot springs and even farther from the upper reaches of the Elk River Valley.

  The mayor of Steamboat spoke on camera twice without revealing a thing. I assumed that her discretion soon caused her to be removed from a list of locals deserving airtime. Mr. and Mrs. Franklin made three different televised pleas for help and mercy, young Joey a silent witness in the background each time.

  The Hamamotos, in contrast, never appeared on any of Channel 9's broadcasts.

  One of the television reports had been taped at the high school. It piqued my interest. As I watched I wrote down the principal's name, those of two teachers who knew both girls, and the names of three classmates who identified themselves as good friends.

  It was a start.

  I glanced at my watch and noted that the first of my appointments with my rescheduled patients began in twenty minutes in my downtown office. Emily needed fresh water. I filled her bowl and hustled out the door.

  Our home is at the end of a dirt and gravel lane that Lauren and I share with only two other residents-our neighbor across the way, Adrienne, and her son, Jonas. By default, any traffic on the lane is either heading to one of our homes-or more likely the case-the driver is lost. Vehicles almost never park on our lane. Not only is there no reason, but there is also no room. The lane is barely wide enough for two small cars, and the shoulders are as soft as cotton candy.

  So I was perplexed by the white Nissan Pathfinder that I saw parked on the west shoulder of the lane when I climbed into my car to go to my office after lunch.

  I was sure the car hadn't been there when I'd ridden my bike home an hour or so earlier. I slowed my own car to a crawl as I edged past it.

  I didn't see a driver at first, so I stopped just opposite the car. A man suddenly sat up on the front seat. He appeared to be as startled as I was.

  I waved hello and lowered my window. So did he.

  "Hi," he said through a mouthful of food. He was listening to a country station on his radio.

  I wasn't.

  "Hello," I said.

  "Can I help you?"

  He swallowed and smiled.

  "No. No. Don't think so."

  The man was young, mid-twenties at the most. Wide shoulders, crew cut, small silver earring in his left ear. He held a drink cup from Wendy's i
n his right hand and a single French fry in the other. The French fry was long, laden with ketchup, and was drooping in the middle.

  Farther down the lane Jonas was home alone with his nanny. I wasn't comfortable having this stranger parked down the road from their house when I wasn't around.

  I said, "This is private property." "Really?" he said.

  "I didn't know that. I'll just go, I guess." Although he wouldn't look me in the eye, he could hardly have been more polite.

  I wrote the license-plate number of his SUV in the dust on my dashboard as I pulled away. I waited down near South Boulder Road until I saw his car leave the neighborhood.

  I was late for my one-thirty patient.

  I saw two patients in succession, after which I had a half-hour break-which barely gave me time to walk over to the Downtown Boulder Mall to pick up a part I'd ordered for my bike and grab something to eat to hold me over until dinner.

  I rushed out the back door of my office and down the driveway to the street. In my rush I almost missed noticing the white Nissan Pathfinder that was parked at the curb in front of the building. When I saw it I stopped in my tracks and looked over my shoulder. My heart rate jumped as I walked up to the car. No driver was sitting inside. I looked for a Wendy's bag on the seat. The car was tidy.

  I walked to the front bumper and checked the license plate. It matched the one I'd scribbled in my dashboard dust earlier that afternoon.

  I immediately accepted the obvious: that the presence of this vehicle first near my home and next in front of my office was not a coincidence. The echo of yesterday's gunplay hadn't quieted in my head, so I spun on my heels to go back inside to call Sam Purdy and ask him to check out the license-plate number for me. That's when I saw the young man who had been sitting in the car on the lane earlier in the day. He was perched on the rickety porch swing on the rickety front porch of the little Victorian house that contained my psychology office.

  He was reading the Boulder Planet.

  I hustled up the concrete walk. He didn't notice my approach. He was engrossed in the newspaper, humming something. Something country.