We were skirting Kokomo when she asked me about my heart.
“You feeling okay? You want me to drive, I will.”
“I’m cool,” I said, trying to be cool.
“Hear you had a heart attack.”
“Just a little one.”
“Still,” she said.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
The tires hummed along on the highway.
Carmen Reynoso knew when conversations were over. I was already liking that about her.
Half a mile or so later I asked, “What have you been able to learn about Holly Malone?”
“Not much. She’s an assistant director in the Sports Information Office at Notre Dame. Started in the office as an intern when she was just out of school. She’s twenty-nine, attractive. People like her.”
“You said she’s single?”
“No, widowed. She has a four-year-old son.”
“How did her husband die?”
“Cancer.”
“Can’t blame that on Sterling, can we?” I said. “Have you spoken with her?”
“I called. She was relatively pleasant until I mentioned Sterling. That’s apparently a sore spot for her.”
“Sore?”
“She wanted to know how I knew about him. My take was that she knew he was married when she did whatever it was she did with him. I thought she was embarrassed that I’d found out about their… history.”
Kind of like having people know you lived through disco and didn’t do anything to stop it,I thought.Felonious stuff.
“Got a photo?”
She retrieved a folded eight-and-a-half-by-eleven from her purse. “Pulled this off the Web. That’s her on the left. First row.”
I put my glasses on the end of my nose. It was a crappy picture of a group of people standing in front of a building. Holly Malone stood out as though she were Technicolor and everybody else was black-and-white. “She’s cute. Has a nice smile.”
“Yeah.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of Brian Miles, would you?”
Carmen pulled another crappy picture out of her bag and handed it to me.
One glance, and I knew there were no man-boobs on Miles. Nope. I kept that thought to myself while I stuffed my glasses back in my pocket. “We going to find Holly in town for the holiday?”
“We are. She’s cooking for her two sisters and two brothers-in-law. They’re all coming down from Chicago with their kids.”
“Yeah?”
“She told me all that before I mentioned Sterling. Holly’s chatty. If you’re interested, she’s doing a traditional bird and is poaching some salmon for her sister, who doesn’t eat meat.”
“Given the circumstances, I bet the salmon would consider itself meat.”
Carmen chuckled. After her laughter quieted, I let the whine of the road fill my ears for a minute or two. I was thinking,This is okay.
I asked, “For argument’s sake, why would he risk it? I mean Sterling. Let’s say he survived the river. Why put himself in a position to be caught? Why not just run for it?”
“Odds are he’ll do just that, Sam. Odds are we’re wasting our time. Five years from now he’ll get picked up on a DUI in Idaho, and his prints will get flagged by AFIS. That’s the only way we’ll know where’s he’s been since he crawled out of the Ochlockonee.”
“I can tell you don’t really believe that.”
“Serial killers-and maybe especially serial killers who don’t choose strangers as their victims-they don’t think like you and me. They just don’t. Why would Sterling go back and kill Holly? I don’t know. Why did he kill the other four women? We don’t know that yet, either. But I don’t want the fact that I’m slow to the draw to cost some young widow in South Bend her life.”
Slow to the draw?I wondered what she meant. I felt regret hanging on to her words like an anchor.
FORTY-NINE
ALAN
I bumbled my way through my last session of the afternoon. Diane, bless her heart, was in my office seconds after my patient departed. “So who wants to destroy you?”
I knew Diane loved me, but I also thought I detected a troubling touch of glee in her tone, a rub-your-hands-together, muted Wicked-Witch-of-the-West-type cackle.
“I can’t think of anyone.”
“God, I can.”
“You can?”
She went into a staccato litany of some of my more public cases of the past ten years, eventually, and probably accurately, identifying a long roster of people who might be prone to seeking some redress for wrongs they could have been convinced they suffered because of me. It wasn’t a pleasant list for me to contemplate. As Diane’s soliloquy began to take on Elizabethan dimensions, I found myself wishing I’d walked out to my car and gone right home.
“You done?” I asked when she paused to come up for oxygen.
“I think so,” she said. “Are you going to be able to remember all that, or do you want me take some notes for you?”
“Oh, I’ll remember.”
It turned out the pause was only Diane’s version of a pit stop. Within seconds she was gaining speed again. Unfortunately for me, my seat belt wasn’t fastened. She asked, “What about your current patients? You really pissed any of them off? Any of them want your, you know?”
I didn’t know. Nor did I want to know, particularly. I said, “Not that I know of. Other than the leaks over the last few days. The three people whose information leaked aren’t too thrilled with me. Other than that, my caseload is reasonably content with my efforts.”
“Then what about nuts? You treating anybody really crazy right now? Any psychotic transferences creeping up on you? Ooooh, or any really hot erotic transference? Those can get wild. That might do it.”
Despite the irreverent tone, her questions were reasonable. I thought seriously about my answers before I said, “No, nothing.”
“Damn.”
She seemed disappointed. I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
“I have to get home. I have baking to do for tomorrow. Raoul has developed this thing for pumpkin pie. Who would have guessed? You sure you don’t want to come over for Thanksgiving?”
“Thanks, but Lauren doesn’t feel up to being with people. She’s a little… irritable.”
“Which we know is the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘bitchy.’”
“Yes.”
“Alan?”
She was in the doorway to my office, staring right at me.
“Yeah?”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Jump this hurdle. Move on.”
I wished her a happy Thanksgiving before I retraced my steps to my office and called Craig Adamson to discuss our fractured appointment that afternoon. His machine picked up. I left a message, packed up my things, and headed home.
The weather was pure Front Range autumn. Sweater-cold, hands-in-pockets, gusty-wind weather that came along with a promise of snow that is fulfilled less often than you’d think along the eastern face of the Rockies in October and November. I usually found the fall totally exhilarating, swollen with provocation.
But not that day.
The next day would be Thanksgiving. As I drove away from downtown Boulder, I reminded myself to count my blessings. It wasn’t a short list-and Grace was firmly ensconced at numero uno-but I found myself distracted somewhere near number two or three by some of life’s recent challenges.
My wife’s feet were so full of edema, they wouldn’t fit into Bozo’s shoes, let alone her own. Somebody had bugged my office. My career was hanging by a thread. My best friend was alone somewhere in the Midwest, trying to find a way to recover from a troubled marriage and an angry heart. I had a patient whose husband might be trying to kill her.
And I had an enemy I couldn’t identify.
I stopped on the way home to finish up the last of the holiday shopping. Bakery, groceries, wine. Everything took twice as long as it should have, of course. The butcher had our turkey listed under Allen, not
Gregory, and I wasted almost half an hour trying to help him track down the bird while at least a dozen other joyous citizens waited behind me for their turkeys.
They expressed their holiday cheer to me via a well-rehearsed melody of sighs, nasal snorts, and whispers of “dear Lord” and “Jesus.”
They weren’t praying.
Sam once warned me that I would rue the day my parents decided to burden me with two first names. Maybe he was right. It wouldn’t be the first time Sam had been right.
I wondered how he would spend the holiday.
The buffalo cap was out of Lauren’s arm when I got home. That was her holiday gift, although the steroid misery wasn’t completely over. She’d go from getting a gram a day of Solumedrol directly into her veins to getting eighty milligrams of prednisone into her mouth. Gradually eighty would become sixty and sixty would become forty and forty would become… and two or three weeks from now-I hoped by Christmas, for sure-she’d be completely finished with the steroidal assault on her metabolism. A few weeks later the side effects would dissipate to zero, and she and I would begin the familiar low-grade worry about the next time the elephant would camp out in our living room.
We had a light dinner as a family-actually I had a light dinner; Lauren was suffering the kind of munchies usually associated with chronic cannabis use but also common among steroid users, so she put down an unusual quantity of food-and then I read stories and got Grace down for the night. Lauren spent the whole time playing pool-the repetitive, endless nature of the game was one of the few things that seemed to help her outlast the Solumedrol.
After Grace was asleep, I joined Lauren in the dining room, where her pool table took up the space that an architect once envisaged for a dining room table. She didn’t invite me to join her game. Lauren was once a highly rated amateur pool player. Let’s just say that I wasn’t. My opposing her in pool was as ludicrous a match-up as my lining up against Lance Armstrong for a quick sprint up Coal Creek Canyon to Wondervu on bikes.
Her strokes economical, Lauren dropped ball after ball into the leather pockets.
Through the steroid clatter in her brain she listened as attentively as she could to my story about Tayisha and the surreptitious device that was discovered in my sofa cushion. Other than offering empathy and wondering why I hadn’t already involved the police, Lauren didn’t have much to say in reply.
She was still playing pool when I retired to bed around ten.
I missed her.
The phone rang minutes after I flicked off the lights. I pounced on it so the ringing wouldn’t stir Grace. As I lifted the receiver, I could still hear thethwop-crackof the pool balls coming from the dining room.
My “hello” earned me a “hey, buddy” from Sam.
“You okay?” I asked a little too urgently. I’d already convinced myself he was calling from some emergency room in some hospital. I was in a state of mind where I didn’t have any confidence that anyone I cared about was okay.
“Yeah, fine, considering. Guess where I am?”
Given the mood I was in, I didn’t want to play along, but Sam sounded happier than I’d heard him sound since his MI, so I tried to remember where he’d been the last time we talked. I thought Georgia, so I guessed, “Atlanta.”
“South Bend.”
My pulse jumped, just like that.
I was tired, but not so tired that my brain was unable to make the associations necessary to take me back to Gibbs’s psychotherapy session the day before and to her revelation that Sterling had once been involved with a woman who lived in South Bend, Indiana.
Notre Dame University. The Sports Information Office.
Sam went on, filling the void. “Carmen Reynoso tracked me down. Remember her? It was her idea to come to South Bend.”
Sam was telling me something. Given the hour, I had to believe it was something important. Maybe because of how close I’d been to REM time when he phoned, I wasn’t getting it. Not quite.
“Yeah? How’s South Bend?”
“I’m not a big Notre Dame fan. I liked Indianapolis, though. I didn’t expect to, but I did.”
“I’m not a Notre Dame fan, either. It’s like the Yankees, I think. You either love the Irish or you hate ’em.” I was still drawing a blank. I wished I weren’t so tired. God, I was tired.
Sam said, “There’s a woman here that Carmen thinks we should go see.”
Carmen?Sam called her Carmen. That’s when I got it.
Carmen Reynoso knew what I knew about South Bend. My next line in the script? “I guess I’m wondering how Carmen heard about the woman in South Bend.”
“Tip from Crime Stoppers. A guy.”
“Anonymous?”
“You know how people are; they don’t like to get involved. Listen, I don’t need any details or anything, but-you know me-I’m curious whether you’ve had any conversations at work lately about any women in South Bend.”
“Turns out I have, Sam. Just yesterday, as a matter of fact, I had a conversation about a young woman who lives in South Bend. Can’t say any more, because of how I heard it, but yeah.”
“Any reason to believe she might be in some danger?” Sam asked.
“The woman in South Bend or the woman who told me about the woman in South Bend?”
Damn!I’d just exceeded the parameters of the game I was playing. I’d told Sam that I’d heard about South Bend from a woman. He could have guessed it on his own. He probably had, of course. That would have been okay. What wasn’t okay was that I’d told him.
“Either. Both,” he said. “Listen, you ever heard of a guy named Brian Miles?”
“Don’t think so. Why?”
“He’s some old friend of Sterling Storey’s. And it turns out his background is in microelectronics. Given your conundrum, that might be important.”
Yeah, it might be.“An awful lot depends on what really happened in that river in Georgia, doesn’t it?”
“The Ochlockonee,” Sam said. “Funny, but it’s gotten to the point where I like saying it. Och-lock-onee. Ochlockonee. You know it’s yellow? The river?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“It is. Anyway, I figure it about the same way you do. It’s all going to come down to Sterling and the Ochlockonee.” He paused. “How’s Lauren feeling? Any change?”
“Her leg’s a little better. The medicine’s making her nuts, though. Thanks for asking.”
“Tell her I’m thinking about her.”
“I will. Sam, it was Crime Stoppers, huh? That’s how you knew about South Bend?”
“Yeah.”
“Hard to trace, those Crime Stoppers calls?”
“We don’t trace them. Did I say it was a guy who called?”
“Yeah, you did. And you said that this Brian Miles guy is in microelectronics. I’m grateful.”
“Well, I hope it helps you with your puzzle.”
“The fact that it’s a guy cuts the number of suspects in half, roughly.”
“There you go. Process of elimination. Just like a real cop.”
Did I fall back to sleep right away? Hardly. I was consumed with thoughts of Gibbs and Sterling and St. Tropez and a balcony on Wilshire Boulevard and women in Augusta and Indianapolis and Laguna Beach and West Point and a guy named Brian Miles in microelectronics and mostly-mostly-Sterling saying “catch me.”
“Sex. It’s not just for procreation anymore.”
Maybe Sam would catch him after all.
Maybe in South Bend.
Maybe.
I listened to the mutedthwop-crackof the pool balls for a while and toyed with counting sheep.
Instead, recalling Diane’s admonishment, I conjured images of me jumping hurdles, and I numbered each one as it passed beneath my feet.
FIFTY
SAM
Carmen Reynoso had an address for Holly Malone and a little map to the Malone house that she’d printed off the Internet. Although we didn’t get into South Bend until after eleven, we decide
d to drive by Holly’s residence just to make ourselves familiar with the area. We found the bungalow on a corner in a neighborhood more upscale than I thought that a university sports information officer could afford.
Carmen said, “Craftsman style. Nice.”
I think I surprised her by saying, “This is the territory for it. Stickley worked around here someplace, didn’t he?” The truth was that I knew damn well that Gustav Stickley’s furniture company had been just up the road in Grand Rapids, but I didn’t want to come across as a smart-ass. I figured Reynoso took me for a fat, dumb cop-most people did. Partly I cultivate that impression for strategic purposes: I like the advantage that comes with being underestimated. But partly I do it because I’m most comfortable hanging with people that fat, dumb cops get to hang with. Talking Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright and Elbert Hubbard doesn’t go over too well in most areas of my life.
That’s okay with me. The point of knowing stuff isn’t so you can let other people know you know it. Occasionally feigning ignorance is a small sacrifice for the companionship of good people. And in my life I got to hang with more than my share of good people.
Carmen smiled at me after my comment about Stickley’s furniture company. She didn’t just smile; she smiled at me. Her lips stayed smoothly together, though, so I still didn’t get a chance to see her teeth. But I wondered if the quick smile was her way of telling me that she cultivated the angry Hispanic persona the way I cultivated the fat doofus persona. We would see.
The Malone bungalow was an Arts and Crafts classic. It had a shingled roof, a wide front porch supported by small clusters of efficient pillars, elegantly grouped windows, and a solitary second-story dormer that faced the street. The lights were all off downstairs, but the flickering glow of a TV screen was playing shadow games on the curtains in the dormer.
I circled the block once, hoping Sterling was stupid enough to be waiting in a car parked on the street watching Holly through binoculars. No such luck. I ended up parking on the corner opposite the house beneath a big tree that was totally naked of its leaves. After a second or two I killed the headlights and the engine on the Cherokee. The valves clattered loudly as they tried to find someplace comfortable to rest. I shifted my ass and did the same.
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