Warning Signs

by Stephen White

  Lucy joined me by the window. "What you just said about someone who doesn't want to believe what they're seeing is true? That could be any one of us. It could certainly be me. I think it could be you, too."

  I didn't turn to face her. Instead I examined her reflection in the glass. "The biggest reason that I was reluctant to clue Sam in about the bomb and that I'm reluctant to tell Lauren or involve the police-or even to involve you, Lucy-is that I'm terrified that this patient of mine will figure out that I've breached her confidence and then she won't-"

  "Come back to see you again."

  "Exactly. Then I wouldn't have any way of knowing… what kind of danger Lauren might really be in."

  Lucy bit her bottom lip, touched me on the shoulder, and said, "You're telling me to be careful?"

  "You could say that."

  "But you're not going to tell me who your patient is?"

  "No."

  After a moment, she nodded in resignation. "Then I'll work on discovering who this Ramp guy in Denver is. It's something. Does he use that name online?"

  "I don't know."

  "I'll also find out what I can about the original Bigg case. See if there are any other potential targets. Maybe somebody in the probation department did an investigation on the rapist and issued a report that the family didn't like. A social worker, someone like that, you never know."

  "You never know," I agreed.

  CHAPTER 21

  T hat afternoon, while Lauren and Grace napped, I duct-taped a hand mirror to a length of PVC pipe left over from our home remodeling and used the device to check the undercarriage of both of our cars for bombs. I didn't spot anything that didn't match the rather perfect coating of gray-brown grime that was slicked beneath each vehicle, although I did discover a leak in the left front axle boot on my car that I hadn't known about.

  When I went back inside the house, I phoned Sam Purdy and asked him for Dorsey's phone number. I could tell that he thought he knew why I wanted it, but he didn't say anything, he just gave it to me. In return for his graciousness, I didn't chew on him about his disclosure to Lucy.

  Dorsey couldn't have been kinder when I called. She said that she and Shadow could come by and snoop around that evening around six. I told her that we'd be gone; I didn't want my wife to be home during the search. Before we hung up, I gave Dorsey directions to the house and explained where she could find a key.

  When Lauren woke up from her nap, I announced I was treating my girls to an early dinner at Rhumba. Since I didn't want Adrienne wondering why a bomb-sniffing dog was snooping around my house, I invited her and Jonas to come along with us downtown for dinner.

  Lauren, of course, wanted to know why I insisted on putting the dogs into the dog run instead of leaving them to roam the house, which is what we would typically do. In response to her question, I said something inane about getting the new litter of fox kits accustomed to the dogs. She looked at me funny but, to my relief, decided not to argue with me. I shushed her out the door ahead of me so that I could lock up the house without setting the burglar alarm.

  All the subterfuge and anxiety had left me absolutely exhausted by the time everyone was packed into Adrienne's Suburban for the ride downtown. As she pulled her huge vehicle out onto the lane, Adrienne reminded me, gleefully, that I'd become one of those people who dragged young children along to nice restaurants and ate dinner at five-thirty on weekends.

  I smiled at my baby and knew that what my friend was saying was true. Absolutely.

  D orsey had promised me that she would tie something to the front doorknob if Shadow had sensed any explosives on the property. She also said that she would call the bomb squad. Even though I didn't see any emergency vehicles as Adrienne drove back down the lane after dinner, my eyes stayed plastered on the front door.

  My relief was palpable as I recognized that the doorknob appeared to be unadorned. The brass handle actually seemed to glow as though Dorsey had polished it.

  Adrienne and her son, Jonas, decided to enjoy the sunset and accompany Lauren and Grace and the dogs for a walk through the neighborhood. I pretended that I'd been paged and begged off the evening excursion with the excuse that I had a phone call to return.

  I dialed the second I was back in the house. "Dorsey, it's Alan."

  "Hi, Alan. Nice house you have, terrific view. And great dogs. What's the big one? Shadow wanted to play with her in the worst way."

  "She's a Bouvier des Flandres, a Belgian sheepdog. It's just as well she was in the run-she doesn't always play well with strange dogs." Dorsey may have wanted to chat about the puppies, but I needed to cut to the chase. "The doorknob was empty. I take it you and Shadow didn't find anything?"

  "No, your house is clean, so is the garage, so are the cars. I don't know if we were supposed to, but we also did that barn that's a little bit south of your house. It's clean, too."

  "The workshop? It actually belongs to our neighbor, but thanks. Can't be too cautious."

  "You know," she said, pausing, "Sam didn't really give me much background on all of this."

  "I wish I could tell you something, Dorsey. I wish I could."

  She paused for a few seconds. I wondered if I heard the wind-whistling-in-the-canyon sound of a deep drag on a joint. "You're a shrink, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "This has something to do with that?"

  "Yeah, it does."

  "Okay, well. You let us know if we can be of any more help. Shadow's always looking for training opportunities that involve field trips. She graduates in a couple of weeks and then I'll be dealing with a rookie. If you need help, now's the best time."

  CHAPTER 22

  L ucy Tanner promised to check in with me on Sunday. She didn't. Grace and I spent the day together as Lauren did her best to cope with the toxic consequences of her weekly interferon injection. She loved the drug almost as much as she hated it. As long as she'd been taking the stuff, it had kept its promise to keep the MS dragons on the other side of the moat. The price for the prophylaxis was that she was sick-sometimes moderately, sometimes severely-for the twenty-four hours after the long needle left her thigh.

  Grace and I did what we could to make her comfortable. Whatever it was we did, it felt inadequate. And probably was.

  M onday at twelve-fifteen Naomi Bigg showed up right on time for her appointment.

  Over the weekend there was virtually no way that she could have avoided the extensive news coverage of the discovery of the explosive device in Royal and Susan Peterson's house. I expected to spend the Monday session dealing with Naomi about my role in the detection of that bomb and rehearsed my arguments as she settled herself on the chair.

  Naomi started her session by saying, "What I've been thinking? I've been thinking that there's a big difference between the Klebolds and the Harrises and me-I mean the situation I'm in."

  She paused as though she wanted me to ask her what the difference was. I didn't ask. I was too busy trying to spot the ambush that I was sure she was planning about the Peterson bomb.

  She went on unprompted. "The difference is that there was no way to defend-to justify-what those two kids were planning. No matter how you look at it, Eric and Dylan were targeting innocent children. They were planning indiscriminate slaughter. They were blaming the world for the way they thought they'd been treated. They wanted blood, they wanted gallons of it, and they wanted it from innocents. If their parents had an inkling of that, there is no excuse for them not acting."

  Her words shook me. I stopped plotting my defense to accusations of clueing the police in to look for the bomb. As always, Naomi Bigg had a knack for capturing my attention.

  The question that almost jumped out of my mouth-but didn't-was, And there is a way to justify what your child and his friend are planning? I think the reason I didn't actually ask the question out loud was that I feared I was incapable of keeping the incredulousness out of my inflection.

  After a few sessions with me, Naomi was growing accustomed
to the silences. She didn't hesitate to pick up on her own. "The wouldn't-it-be-cool games that the boys play always target-for want of a better word-perpetrators. People who actually bear responsibility for some serious, serious injustice. That's what's different. So even if Paul and Ramp are actually planning something and not just… talking-and I'm not convinced that they are-I think, knowing what I know, that I'm in a different position than the Harrises and the Klebolds. It's a big difference."

  What? "It's different because in your circumstances the potential victims… deserve what happens to them? Is that it?"

  Naomi shrugged. "Want to know what I think? Five years ago, I was somebody who used to think that in this country, justice was equal for everybody. Justice was the courts and the police and the jails. The scales always balanced. What's-her-face never peeked out from beneath her blindfold. But I know now that that's not true. Justice isn't just. Justice isn't like a fresh coat of paint on a wall. It doesn't cover equally. It doesn't spread equally. In our system, justice is more like a line of summer thunderstorms. Some places get soaked. Other places stay bone dry. After going through what I've been through with my family, can I continue to believe that providing justice should be the sole province of the criminal justice system? For every ten good cops, there's a Royal Peterson. For every office full of passionate prosecutors, there's a rotten cop. And defense attorneys?" She groaned. "Don't even get me started on defense attorneys. Or parole boards? God in heaven. The system is too corrupt to be trusted."

  "And the alternative… is for people who perceive themselves to be victims of injustice to be free to act on their own?"

  She hesitated for only a few seconds. "In certain circumstances, I've concluded that the answer to that might be yes. I couldn't do it myself. But I can understand people doing it."

  Was she talking about her husband and his cutoff baseball bat or her son and his friend and their bombs? I couldn't keep myself from asking, "So, if these victims of injustice decide to act as vigilantes based on their own conclusions about events, then their victims deserve what happens to them?"

  "Victims?" she scoffed. "Like Royal Peterson? You calling Royal Peterson a victim? Royal Peterson wasn't a victim. He was the poster child of perpetrators. The true victims are the people who suffered because of his plea bargains-and believe me, there are dozens of them that are right now trying to pick up the pieces of their lives all over Boulder County."

  As much as I disagreed with some of the prosecutorial decisions that Peterson had made over his long reign in Boulder, I knew the good he had done far outweighed his mistakes. I could barely contain my impulse to defend him. I said, "And because you disagree with some of his plea bargains, because of that, Peterson deserved to die?"

  "I've already told you: I don't have any feelings about that. He's dead. I don't grieve him. I don't celebrate his death."

  I struggled to control my breathing. "Let's say, Naomi, just for the sake of argument, that Ramp and Paul were involved in Royal Peterson's death. Your current feelings are that murdering Peterson was a reasonable reaction to what he did to your daughter?"

  She shrugged. "Who cries when a child molester is attacked in prison? Huh? Who grieves for that? Peterson ruined lives, too. Hundreds of them. Take a look at his record of plea bargains. Go ahead. Well, let's say someone felt he needed to be punished for that. If that's the case, then, yes, he paid for his sins. Some people might call what happened to him a crime. It feels like justice to me. I'm not going to grieve for that. I am not."

  She paused for an extended period, shifting her focus to the windows and the yard beyond. Then she said, "But I don't think they had anything to do with it. I just don't think they did."

  M inutes before the session was scheduled to end, Naomi abruptly stopped talking about a staffing problem in her office and said, "The bomb the police found last Friday? At the Petersons'?"

  "Yes?" I said, my heart racing.

  "Do you wonder how they knew to look for it? Have you wondered about that at all?"

  What was I going to say? No? Yes?

  "I have," she said, saving me from a lie. "And I'd like to think that you didn't have anything to do with the police deciding to look for it. I'd like to think that I can trust you."

  My ensuing silence wasn't strategic. I was absolutely tongue-tied. Yes, you can trust me, Naomi.

  No, you can't.

  "If I can't talk to you about these things, I don't think I'd talk to anyone about them. I certainly wouldn't talk to the police. Even if they knocked at my door, I wouldn't tell them a thing. You know what I mean, don't you? I really need to be able to trust you with all this."

  I nodded. I knew exactly what she meant. She was warning me to keep my mouth closed.

  Right then I should have heeded her advice. I didn't. I said, "Naomi, it's important that you understand that there are circumstances where I might have an ethical responsibility to reveal certain things that I hear in psychotherapy."

  She frowned. "That's obtuse. What are you talking about? What kind of circumstances?"

  "If I hear something that indicates to me that someone is being clearly threatened, for instance, I have a responsibility to warn that person or to tell the police about the threat. I have a specific responsibility to protect people from harm."

  "So I can't talk to you about these… feelings I'm having? About the concerns I have about the boys?"

  "Those two questions seem to imply that someone is actually being threatened, Naomi. Is that the case?"

  "I've told you already that I don't think anyone's being threatened. I'm trying to understand my feelings. That's all."

  "I'm not convinced that's all you're trying to do."

  "What do you mean?"

  I was ready. "The last few times we've talked, it's felt to me as though you were trying to get me to do something to help you act on your feelings-to get you to do what you know is right. I think you may be trying to back me into the same corner that you feel backed into."

  "What corner are you talking about? What is 'right'?"

  "The right thing to do would be to protect people from harm. If the boys"-I almost choked as I used her vernacular-"do have a list of people they are thinking of hurting, then those people should be warned. They must be warned. And the boys should be stopped."

  "Oh really?"

  "Yes."

  "Is that what the Boulder DA did with my daughter's case? Putting her rapist in jail for a few months protected the people of Boulder from harm? That was his overriding concern when he made that decision? Protecting people? Innocent girls out on dates? Those kinds of innocent people? I don't think so."

  "I think you know what you have to do, Naomi."

  "Yeah? What's that?"

  "Can you answer that question yourself?"

  "Just like a freaking shrink," she scoffed. "Just like a freaking shrink. Ask a question, get a question."

  CHAPTER 23

  M y last session on Monday was over at five-fifteen, so I was surprised when I looked up as the session was ending and noticed that the red light was beaming on the wall.

  I gave my patient half a minute to exit the waiting room before I walked out to see whether the light was a mistake or whether I had scheduled another patient and had neglected to note it on my calendar.

  I did that sometimes.

  The waiting room was empty.

  I flicked off the light and moved back to my office to pack up. I walked in to find that Lucy Tanner was sitting in my chair.

  "I like this seat better than the other one. This is definitely the power chair in the room."

  "Hi, Lucy. How did you get in?" I made a conscious effort to keep my annoyance from my voice. Lucy's presence reminded me of the ethical malignancy that was metastasizing in my treatment of Naomi Bigg. But Lucy also represented my best hope for finding out what Ramp and Paul might be up to.

  She tilted her head toward the French door. "That's not much of a lock you have. I can recommend something th
at's a little harder to pick, if you would like. Sorry. I didn't want to be seen hanging out in your waiting room. How are you holding up?"

  I moved to the far end of the sofa and put my feet up. "I'm a wreck. I had a friend of Sam's who trains K-9 dogs come by my house and check for explosives Saturday. I couldn't believe I did it."

  "Dorsey? From Westminster?"

  I nodded.

  "You like her?"

  "I do."

  I thought Lucy clenched her teeth a little bit. I was about to inquire about her feelings about Dorsey when she distracted me by asking, "She and her dog find anything?"

  "Thankfully, no."

  "Good. She still smoking dope?"

  I swallowed. "I wouldn't know."

  "Learn anything new from your 'source'?"

  "My patient, Lucy. My patient. And no, I didn't learn anything that will help us much. Other than that she is seriously reluctant to believe that her son is plotting anything worrisome. And that if she's approached by the authorities she'll deny everything she told me."

  "She's warning you? Does she suspect something?"

  "She's suspicious about how the police happened to find the bomb in the Peterson house."

  "That's almost like an admission, isn't it?"

  "Maybe for a cop, Lucy. It's not enough for me."

  She manufactured a small smile. "Sorry I didn't call. I've been pretty busy. When I haven't been with Cozy or his investigator, I've been down in Denver mostly."

  "You find Ramp?"

  "Not even a trace. I tracked down all sorts of anti-law-enforcement Web sites and scoured the bulletin boards looking for his name. Nothing. Not a first name, not a last name, not a computer name. Asked some friends in the Denver and Aurora PDs if they had anything on anybody with that name, first or last. Nothing. I have a feeler out to someone on the Denver PD bomb squad to see if Ramp's in their database. I'm still waiting to hear.

  "Next brainstorm was that I went back ten years and looked at all the murdered women in the Denver metro area. Sorted out all the mothers, then sorted by mothers who had sons, then looked for kids named Ramp.