Warning Signs

by Stephen White

  She pushed her tongue between her front teeth and her upper lip and left it there for a few seconds. "My husband never got over it. He attacked the rapist after he got out of jail. Ringing any bells yet? The man had transferred to Metro. The college in Denver, you know? My husband waited for him to get out of class one night and attacked him in the parking lot at Auraria. I bet the story's ringing those bells now. People forget about rape; they don't forget about assaults on rapists. What does that tell you about this society's priorities?"

  Now I remembered what had happened to Marin Bigg. Her father had beaten her rapist to the brink of death with a cut-off baseball bat that big-rig drivers call a tire checker.

  "Leo? My husband? His mistake was that he attacked him in Denver. Want to know why that was a mistake? Because they actually hold trials in Denver. The prosecutors in Denver actually prosecute-they don't plead everything out like they do in Boulder. My husband's trial lasted three days. The jury was out for three hours. Three hours. The judge gave Leo six years. The jury foreman phoned me later, after the trial, and he apologized. Said that the jury thought the judge would be lenient, that they never expected him to give my husband six years. Thought that the judge would slap him on the wrist.

  "Yeah, the foreman called and said he was sorry. My husband's in Buena Vista. My daughter's scarred for life. My kids don't have a father. I don't have a husband. But the jury foreman was sorry. At least there's that. Right? God, it was such a relief that the man was sorry."

  The sarcasm seeped between us like toxic sludge. I was thinking about what to say. I was trying to trace the connection between Marin Bigg's tragedy-the whole Bigg family's tragedy-and the anniversary of the massacre at Columbine. I was trying to fit the Harrises and the Klebolds into the puzzle. I was trying to think of something to say that might be more palliative than "It's apparent how angry you are."

  Naomi interrupted my reverie. "But it's Paul I'm worried about. My son. I haven't talked about him. He's seventeen. He's a senior at Fairview."

  The clock showed that we had seven minutes left in the session. Fairview was one of Boulder's two high schools. I watched Naomi's discomfort as thirty seconds ticked away before I pulled her back. I said, "You're worried about Paul, Naomi?"

  "Yes, I'm worried about Paul. Of course I'm worried about Paul. He's angry. He's young. He's male. He's big. And he thinks that he's been wronged. Wouldn't you be worried about him?"

  Her tone was more than sarcastic. It was slightly snide.

  I opened my mouth to clarify that the wrong she was alluding to was his sister's rape and its aftermath, but Naomi was quicker than I. "I can't really afford this," she said. Again, I thought I heard some disdain in her tone.

  I wondered whether she was talking about money, or whether her complaint was a metaphor for something else. I was about to ask which when she continued.

  "Leo's a physician-an oncologist. That gives you some idea of the kind of income we lost when they sent him to prison." She raised her cruelly trimmed eyebrows. "A lot. Now? I'm working as an office manager; I run the practice of one of Leo's old colleagues. How's that for a state of affairs? Let's say things are tight financially in the Bigg household. And it turns out that you're not even a provider with my managed-care plan."

  I could've told her that I wasn't a provider with any managed-care plan, but I didn't. I got lost for a moment as I tried to remember a session with another recent patient where I'd felt so tongue-tied, but I couldn't.

  Finally, I said, "Even with the little you've told me, I'm becoming more and more convinced that you can't afford not to do this, Naomi."

  She flashed a quick glance at me, sniffed audibly. The sniff wasn't purely derisive, but close. "Go on," she said.

  Softly, I said, "I think you might want to tell me more about Paul. Your concerns."

  She softened noticeably. "Paul's a good kid. He's my buddy, my friend. He's polite, responsible. He's never been in any kind of trouble at all. If you met him, you'd like him. Everybody does."

  "Yes?"

  "High school has been tough for him, especially after what happened to his sister and his father. He's been an outsider all through school, very resentful of the popular kids, you know, the athletes. He wasn't treated well. He saw Dr. Haven for a while for help with his… impulses. You know her? Dr. Haven? She thought he was depressed, I think. I was never so sure."

  Jill Haven was a psychiatrist who specialized in treating adolescents. She was good. "Yes," I said. "I know her."

  "Well, it's not important. He doesn't see her anymore. His grades are better, good even. He has a few friends, dates some nice girls. Paul's settled down now. He plays keyboards-that's really his love-and he works at Starbucks. On the Mall? You may have seen him there. He's one of their best baristas. I think he's the best. He makes a killer mocha."

  Hearing the word "killer" from Naomi Bigg's mouth gave me a chill. My office was at the west end of downtown, and I didn't get down to the east end of the Downtown Boulder Mall, where Starbucks was, very often, so I doubted that I'd met Paul Bigg. But it was possible.

  I found myself fighting off stereotypical visual images of Starbucks's male employees. I wasn't entirely successful. In my mind, Paul suddenly had a persona; he was a tall, distracted kid with a pierced tongue and a sloppy tattoo wearing a filthy green apron.

  I allowed Naomi a minute to find the detour she needed to get around her litany of her son's exemplary qualities. She didn't appear to be making a concerted effort to find an alternate route. Finally, I said, "I don't think you've told me why you're worried about him, Naomi."

  "I always worry about my children. That's just me. But right now-well, since last fall-I'm worried about him because it seems… that he wants to get even. He wants… retribution."

  "Because of Marin?"

  "Sure. And because of Leo."

  I should have paused here and allowed her to read the trail ahead, choose her own path, but I didn't. I said, "Is Paul planning something, some kind of retribution?" I was careful to use her word. My heart was pounding in my chest. It's rare that I ask a patient a question when I don't want to hear the answer. But I didn't want to hear Naomi's answer to my question. I was thinking of Columbine and a dozen other school shootings.

  But mostly I was thinking about Columbine.

  She was silent for longer than I was comfortable with. Her shoulders sank noticeably. "I don't know for sure. Okay? I don't know anything for sure, but I think sometimes he wants to hurt people. As a way of getting even."

  "People?"

  "People who he thinks are responsible for what happened. I don't know. He doesn't exactly talk to me about all this. He's a teenager. We have to remember that he's only a teenager."

  The clock was ticking down toward one-fifteen, the end of our session. I considered extending the time. On the opposite wall, the red light was lit. My next patient was already sitting in the waiting room. "You think he wants to hurt people? You suspect-"

  "I didn't say I suspect anything. I said I'm concerned."

  She was right. That's exactly what she had said.

  Thirty seconds. Twenty-five. Twenty.

  "Naomi?" I said, waiting until she found my eyes with hers. The moment they locked on, I felt another chill.

  "Yes?"

  In other circumstances I would not have pressed her, especially not this early in treatment. She and I had not yet established an alliance, certainly not one that I felt with any assurance could withstand the assault I was contemplating. I questioned my words even before they were out of my mouth.

  "Are your concerns about Paul related to the ones you mentioned during yesterday's session?"

  She lifted her left wrist and stared at her watch in a manner that left no doubt that she didn't care that I saw her looking. "You mean what I was saying about parental responsibility? About the Harrises and the Klebolds? My sympathy for the position they find themselves in?"

  Her tone was provocative. Obviously provocative. I di
dn't recall Naomi having said anything about sympathy for the position of the Klebolds and Harrises, but I said, "Yes."

  She stood up. "Oh my, oh my, look at the time. I'm going to be late getting back to work." She had a package of Salem Slims in her hand before she reached the door. The appearance of the smokes was like magic; I hadn't witnessed the sleight of hand that produced them.

  I lifted my book from the table beside my chair. "I think we should set another appointment, Naomi."

  She tapped a cigarette into her left hand and fumbled in her purse for a lighter. "Of course, sure. What do you have? Lunch or after work? It's all I can do. Maybe this time next week? And we have to talk about money. I don't know how I'm going to pay for all this."

  Intentionally ignoring the financial question, I said, "Please sit down, I need to say something."

  One sigh later she perched on the edge of the chair.

  "Unless I'm misreading your concerns-and I don't think I am-the issues you're raising about your son, Paul, are quite serious. Waiting until next week to address those concerns doesn't feel prudent. You decided to come in to see me this week for a reason. You said that you hoped that I could help with your confusion. You mentioned an anniversary that's occurring this week. Are the consequences of putting off our discussion something you want to… contemplate?"

  She busied herself fingering the long cigarette. "What are you saying, Dr. Gregory?"

  "I'm offering you another appointment tonight to give us more time to explore all this. I'm not convinced we should wait."

  "Tonight? I can't, I just can't."

  "Tomorrow at five forty-five then?"

  She considered my offer, finally saying, "All right. Tomorrow at five forty-five."

  Over the years, I'd fallen into the habit of taking most Fridays off. Since Grace's birth, I'd promised myself I'd be even more diligent in protecting my Fridays. Occasionally, I knew, I would have to use the time for emergencies. I'd already decided that whatever was going on with Naomi Bigg and her son Paul qualified as an emergency.

  "And again Friday at noon?" I said. "If it turns out that it's not necessary, we'll reconsider."

  "See you tomorrow, I guess." She didn't even go through the motions of promising to be on time. "I have to think about all this some more. I'll call you if I change my mind."

  I have to admit that I was hoping she would almost as much as I was hoping she wouldn't.

  CHAPTER 10

  O ccasionally, I had days at work when I concluded that my patients had spent the previous evening conspiring to find ways to make me crazy. That Tuesday afternoon-after Naomi Bigg had left my office-was one of those. My one-fifteen had just been fired from his new job at Amgen. His résumé for the past twelve months was longer than mine was for my lifetime. I was certain that his parents had been told repeatedly during his preschool years that their son didn't play well with others.

  He and I had a lot of work to do.

  My two o'clock was a massage therapist with a phobia of gooseflesh. Not the kind of gooseflesh that geese have, but the kind of gooseflesh that people get. How weird was that phobia? So weird that I'd never even been able to find a name for it. The closest I'd been able to get was doraphobia-the fear of the fur or skin of animals. But that wasn't it. Quite simply, this massage therapist was terrified of goose bumps, and although she'd been symptom-free for months, she'd chosen that day to suffer a relapse.

  Unfortunately, gooseflesh phobia is a difficult condition for which to design effective behavioral desensitization. Photographs of goose bumps did nothing to instigate my patient's terror, and finding reliable sources of gooseflesh so that I could design progressive exposures for her proved, well, ludicrous. Although medication and psychotherapy had kept her symptoms in remission for almost a year, she explained to me that she had literally run out of a morning hot-stone session in abject panic.

  I listened as patiently as I could while I entertained the possibility that she might be better off in a profession where her clients kept their clothes on.

  As soon as she'd left my office a woman I'd been seeing for about three months left an urgent message.

  The Boulder Police had arrested both her and her husband after a domestic disturbance. He'd been taken to the hospital with a closed head injury. She'd been taken to jail. The fact that she'd been arrested for a domestic disturbance came as no surprise; her marriage was about as stable as an eight-year-old with matches in a fireworks factory. Nor did the fact that she had apparently won the fight; she was tough. What did surprise me was that she chose to use her sole phone call to get in touch with me, and not to call an attorney.

  Did I mention that her judgment sucked? It was one of the items we were addressing in the treatment plan.

  I was home before Lauren, and Viv seemed eager for some adult company before she left for the day. We sat outside with Grace and the dogs on the deck off the living room and chatted about how school was going for Viv and how cute my baby was. I sipped a beer; Viv drank tea. The sun ducked behind clouds before it plunged behind the Rockies.

  As Viv stood to leave she told me that she'd left some shrimp marinating in the refrigerator-she used a word in her native language that I didn't understand before she fumbled for the English word "soaking"-and that she'd already heated up the grill.

  I felt blessed that she was watching over my child and my family and I told her so. She blushed.

  L auren came home exhausted. She'd spent much of the day pigeonholed in a conference room in Cozy's Fourteenth Street offices with Lucy Tanner.

  Lauren caught up with Grace. I waltzed out to Adrienne's garden and swiped two huge handfuls of spinach that I wilted in a couple of teaspoons of the marinade while shrimp and vegetables sizzled on the grill. When the food was done, Lauren and I sat down to dinner and Grace amused herself in her bouncy chair. Lauren asked about my day before I had a chance to ask about hers.

  Her question was polite, conversational, a simple "How was your day? Anything interesting?"

  I lifted an asparagus spear with my index finger and thumb-somebody had once told me that the French ate asparagus that way, so I'd convinced myself it was okay-and tried to mimic the casual tone of Lauren's question as I said, "You remember a case from about four years ago, a date rape involving a young Fairview High School girl and a guy from CU?"

  Lauren was eating her asparagus by using her silverware to cut it into bite-size pieces. She thought my rationale about the French eating with their fingers was lame. "My case or yours?" she asked.

  "Yours. DA's case."

  "Four years ago?"

  "Yeah."

  She sipped some wine. "Yes, I think I do. Why?"

  "What do you remember?"

  "Bigg. That was the girl, something Bigg. Marina, no… Marin Bigg. Her father went nuts after the boy got out of jail and tracked him down and beat him with a baseball bat. That's the case you're talking about, right? My memory is that the father got some hard time. But that was in Denver or somewhere, it wasn't ours."

  Grace was cooing and kicking her legs and generally succeeding in stealing more of Lauren's attention than I was getting.

  "Yes, that's the case. Since it was a rape prosecution, it would have been Nora's, right?" Nora Doyle had headed the sex crimes unit at the DA's office for as long as I could remember. Instituting the sex crimes unit had been one of Royal's many noteworthy innovations during his tenure.

  "Sure, it was Nora's case. But I helped her on it. You don't remember? That was the period where Roy and Nora had just started thinking about expanding the sex crimes office. I did half a dozen cases with Nora before she hired Erica in to pick up the slack. God, this shrimp is good. We should pay Viv something extra if she keeps cooking for us, don't you think? I'm beginning to feel guilty about all the extra work she's doing. And I think I might be getting addicted to her cooking."

  "I agree," I said as I set down my fork and picked up my beer. I'd lost my appetite, but I made a conscious effort to sound
normal. "You helped Nora? Were you a big part of the case?"

  Lauren hadn't even looked at me yet, so she couldn't be aware that I was almost paralyzed with fear by what she'd just told me. Naomi Bigg had said that her son Paul wanted to "hurt people he thinks are responsible."

  I'd just realized that list included Lauren.

  "We made an early decision to plead it out. Facts are often messy in date rape cases. Dueling witnesses. He says she consented. She says she was forced. Usually no injuries to use as evidence. Rape kit often doesn't tell you much. DNA and blood typing are useless. You know how it goes."

  "And you were involved in the decision to do the plea bargain?"

  "Sure."

  "Was it a clear-cut decision or was it controversial?"

  She glanced at me with slightly suspicious eyes. "You know that Royal and Nora always took date rape prosecution seriously. Always. The outcomes weren't always popular, but the cases were always examined carefully. It's been one of our strengths as long as I've been with the DA's office. You know how I feel about all this. We're good on rape, Alan. We're good."

  She hadn't answered my question. I said, "Was the family on board?"

  "An effort is always made to include the family. But I don't remember specifically. Given what happened later, I'd assume they never signed off on this one. But that's the way it goes sometimes. Given the evidence, I thought it was a good outcome. Still do. In a lot of jurisdictions the offender would have walked given the exact same circumstances."

  I knew she was right. "Who defended the boy? The rapist. Do you remember?"

  Between bites, she was playing with Grace. Finally, she looked over at me. "Funny you should ask. I think it was Cozy. Why is this so important?"

  "Somebody was talking about the case today at work," I said. "That's all. No big deal."

  L ater, after Grace was down for the night and the dogs were walked, Lauren climbed into bed beside me, and she said, "Lucy was there on Saturday night. At Royal's house."

  "She was? She admits it?"