Warning Signs

by Stephen White

  Another sign above the workbench in the explosives shed: Novelty creates confusion. Practice eliminates novelty.

  "Right on, Granddad," Ramp said.

  He collected three radio transmitters from the kitchen cupboard above the dishwasher. The three devices were dissimilar. One was a garage door opener. One had operated a remote-control children's car. The third had been designed to operate a model airplane. He placed them in a leather dopp kit that was already provisioned with fresh batteries for the transmitters.

  He pried the floorboard away from the wall and pocketed the Zip disc that he'd stashed there. His work clothes and the other supplies were already packed in a duffel bag that he'd used to carry his soccer clothes when he was in high school.

  Last, he retrieved a fresh battery for his cell phone, dumped everything into the duffel with his clothes, locked up his apartment, and descended the stairs toward his car.

  CHAPTER 34

  B efore I was allowed to leave the hospital, a lot of people wanted to talk to me. Almost all of them were from law enforcement.

  Lauren, I think, wanted only to yell at me. But she didn't. She was overtly kind to me the way that I knew I would someday be overtly kind to Grace after she cut herself or broke a bone solely because of her poor judgment and stupidity.

  Lauren could afford to be kind to me because she knew that I knew how stupid I'd been. She knew it because I reminded her of it every few minutes.

  The first few repetitive apologies took place while I was still at the hospital. The neurologist who was assessing me for closed head injuries actually expressed concern to Lauren that my perseveration might be ample evidence that I'd suffered brain trauma. Soon, however, my wife concluded that my refrain was merely a recurring prayer seeking psychological absolution for my mortal sins against good judgment.

  A s the shadows were fading and darkness was sealing the end of the day, Lauren drove me home. On the way down North Broadway, I heard birds singing that had probably been singing the evening before and smelled flowers that had certainly smelled just as sweet that morning. But, after surviving the explosion, my senses felt sharper. I wanted to test the hypothesis further and taste my wife's kiss, but she was in no mood to indulge me. As we cruised past the new Bureau of Standards building on South Broadway near Table Mesa, Lauren used an oh-by-the-way tone to caution me that serious discussions were probably ongoing in the district attorney's office about whether or not I could be charged with a crime. Something about withholding evidence.

  Like what? I wondered, though not aloud. For some reason, Lauren's warning didn't particularly alarm me. What were they going to do to me?

  Maybe I'd be arrested for not blowing the whistle on a kid who had been dead for six years.

  I decided that it would almost be worth going to trial just to hear the opening statements on that one.

  P rior to making Ella Ramp's acquaintance in Agate that afternoon, the act of rationalizing my willingness to disclose confidential information to the Boulder Police had taken some significant gymnastics. Because patient privilege survives patient death, even the fact that Naomi was now dead wasn't actually enough to free me from my legal restrictions to keep quiet. What finally liberated me to open my mouth to the authorities about all the things I'd learned from Naomi in psychotherapy was the now undeniable reality that Naomi's fears about bombs and explosives weren't the product of her imagination, and my near one-hundred-percent assurance that the bomber was a kid in Denver named Jason Ramp Bass. My assurance that Jason Bass had set a bomb off in the Louis Vuitton bag that Naomi always carried slung from her shoulder was as close to one hundred percent as it could get.

  The leap from those realizations to the acceptance that other people were still in danger from other bombs was all that I needed to free myself from the bounds of confidentiality. Lawyers and practitioners could argue whether the circumstances actually constituted legally enforceable Tarasoff conditions, but the truth was that I had lost any remaining interest I'd had in debating the finer legal and ethical threads.

  I ran my belated rationalizations by Lauren. She made it clear that she thought I'd jumped through the progression of ethical hoops in a peculiarly tardy fashion. Although it was clear she was admonishing me, I was relieved that she was at least trying to be nice about it.

  S am called around nine o'clock that evening. He had news. The Boulder Police had discovered an "explosive device" during a sweep of the home of the woman who ran the District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit. The bomb was found in Nora Doyle's garage, well hidden among some gardening supplies that were stored directly opposite the driver's side door of her Honda Accord. Had the bomb gone off, Nora might have been impaled on a hoe.

  The bomb squad thought the initiator was radio controlled. Sam promised to tell me more when he knew more.

  There's another bomb. That lawyer.

  Cozier Maitlin's office, car, and Mapleton Hill home had been swept with extreme care, with negative results. The evacuation of the Colorado Building on Fourteenth Street had apparently been quite an inconvenience for quite a lot of people. Sam reported that at least one passerby voiced her hope that if there was indeed a bomb, she was praying it was big enough to bring the damn ugly place down.

  The home and chambers of Superior Court Judge Richard Bates Leventhal, who had approved the plea bargain in Marin Bigg's rape, were swept, too. No bombs were discovered.

  Lauren and I already knew, of course, that our property had been re-searched without result before I'd left the hospital that afternoon.

  A t times of stress, I ride my bike. The more stress I feel, the harder I ride. The amount of stress I was feeling the day Naomi died would have necessitated a fierce climb-a muscle-burning, ass-never-touches-the-saddle ascent that few mountain ranges in the world can offer on paved roads. But the eleven stitches high on the back of my leg near the imaginary line where butt becomes hip and my quasi-concussion conspired to keep me housebound and off my bicycle. My stress relief would have to come from baby Grace, who, bless her heart, handled the job effortlessly, and from the dogs, who, though generally amusing, weren't quite as reliable a tranquilizer as Xanax.

  I tried to read. Couldn't concentrate. I tried to nap. Couldn't sleep. Mostly I spent the evening thinking.

  Pondering.

  Okay, perseverating.

  P atients lie to me all the time.

  All the time.

  Most of the time I accept the mistruths as being part of the process that people go through while they're coming to terms with the myriad of ways that they are lying to themselves. I don't, as a rule, take it personally when I learn that I've been served untruths by patients. And I'm usually not even embarrassed when I discover that I've fallen hook, line, and sinker for the prevarications.

  I've heard colleagues say that they know when their patients are lying to them. I find the contention preposterous. I can't usually tell, and even when I think I can tell, I'm not usually sure. And I'm almost always unconvinced that it matters. I try to make it my job to learn as much from my patients' lies as I do from the truth. Either way, the therapy benefits.

  But Naomi Bigg had lied to me.

  She'd really, really lied to me. And I'd fallen for her creative story like a four-year-old stuffing a tooth beneath his pillow believes in visions of an impending visit from a dental fairy carrying a twinkling wand and dressed in white organza.

  Paul Bigg, Naomi's living, breathing, wouldn't-it-be-cool, green-apron-wearing kid, was dead.

  Or was he?

  I was rapidly approaching a conclusion that Paul hadn't ever really been dead for his mother. Although I'd probably never know for sure, I suspected that Naomi hadn't resurrected Paul solely for my benefit; I suspected that Naomi had never really buried her son at all. In the psychotherapy I'd been doing with Naomi, I wondered if I'd just been hanging out on the bank of the pond, witnessing the ripples of her unsettled grief.

  The psychological process Naomi had been engaged in was ei
ther crafty as hell or it was delusional as hell. My money was on delusional, on some kind of narrowly defined psychotic process.

  If I was right, it meant that, as Naomi's therapist, I'd totally missed the presence of her psychotic symptoms.

  There was no escaping the fact that my care of Naomi Bigg had not been one of my better clinical moments.

  L auren put Grace to bed while I watched the local TV news accounts of the bombing death of Naomi Bigg. Marin, according to all reports, was out of surgery but remained in serious condition.

  Reading between the lines, I assumed she was still uncommunicative with the police.

  The other big story of the day was the Daily Camera's revelation about Lucy Tanner's parentage. The local legal analysts made it clear that the Boulder prosecutors were getting perilously close to believing that they had a motive that would firmly tie Lucy to the Royal Peterson murder.

  Sam called again just as I was about to learn what the weather was going to be the next day in the Carolinas.

  "Hey," he said.

  "Hi," I replied. "Any word on Lucy?"

  "No, not yet. Certain people aren't convinced he's got her. There's a consensus developing that she's just hiding from what was in the paper this morning. Guess where I am."

  I wasn't in the mood. "Sam, I'm not in the mood."

  "Okay, I'll just tell you. I'm sitting on the stairs that go up to the second floor in Naomi Bigg's house. We're executing a search warrant."

  "Oh," I said. I wasn't surprised about anything but that it had taken so long for the search to begin. I assumed the delay was a paperwork/convince-the-judge kind of problem. I doubted that any evidence of the explosives would be discovered at the Bigg home. Whatever law enforcement personnel ended up searching the Ramp ranch between Agate and Limon were the ones who would find the explosive residue.

  "Finding anything?" My feelings about Sam's errand were more than a little confused. Maybe it was the minor concussion. But I wasn't exactly sure whether I wanted Sam to answer my question "Yes" or to answer it "No."

  He made a nasal sound that I couldn't interpret. "Who knows? We just got here and we're still looking. I tell you, it's going to take all night to go over this place. Rich people's houses have lots of rooms and they own lots of shit. You ever notice that? This house has a little room that seems to be set aside just for wrapping presents. Like a gift-wrap room. Who has a gift-wrap room? Well, the Biggs do. I look at some of the stuff in this place and I wonder how somebody could be standing in a store somewhere and ever convince themselves that they actually needed one of those. You know the kind of stuff that I mean?"

  I did, and I didn't. "You wanted something, Sam?"

  "You're okay, right? Just the bump on your head and the cut on your butt?"

  "Upper leg, Sam. That, and a dead patient whose daughter is still in serious condition in the hospital. And Lucy." I let the words hang.

  He said, "Every cop in the state is looking for Ramp. I'm hoping there's something here that helps us find him. We find him, I think we find her. Anyway, I was telling you what I discovered here. Right at the top of the stairs, first door on the left, is the kid's room. You know, Paul? The one who died playing Little League? The one you thought was busy planning his own little Columbine?"

  Regardless of the fact that I'd almost been killed by a bomb earlier that day, my friend Sam wasn't above a well-placed dig. I tried to deflect it. "Paul's room is still there?" I was thinking out loud; I knew that I was still struggling to understand the extent of Naomi's delusions.

  Sam, of course, seized on the opportunity to take me literally. "Sure. That happens when kids die. Parents aren't ready to let go. They preserve stuff. Bedroom is often high on the list. This shouldn't be news to you, Alan. It's like your field, you know? Human behavior?"

  "Yeah."

  "Anyway, I thought I'd call you because I thought it was interesting what's plastered all over the kid's door. Outside of the door, facing the hallway. It's kind of goofy."

  "What?"

  "Little signs. Maybe fifty of 'em. Maybe more, who knows. I'm sure somebody will end up counting them. They're all lined up in neat rows and columns. The signs are all different designs-no two of 'em match-but they all say one of two things. Though some are in languages I don't even want to know. Want to guess?"

  "No."

  "About half of them say 'Do not disturb.' The other half say 'Be right back.' You being a shrink, I thought you'd get a kick out of that."

  "Little 'Do not disturb' signs and 'Be right back' signs? All over his door?"

  "Yeah, just like the ones you hang from the doorknob when you're staying at a Ramada. Though you probably don't stay at Ramada, do you? Those kinds of signs. The kid must have collected them."

  "I don't know about that. I wonder if it was Paul or his mother who put them on the door. What does the room look like?"

  "Like a kid's room. It does have a certain time-warp quality. Kid liked the old Dallas Cowboys. Lots of Troy Aikman and Emmett what's-his-face. Good stuff, expensive. Autographed jerseys. Signed pictures. Emmett Smith? Is that it? I think that's right, Smith. I should know that. He sure gave my Vikings enough grief over the years, didn't he?"

  I didn't know. "But nothing unusual?"

  "Not at first glance. Just the signs. I thought those were unusual, that's why I called."

  Although I didn't believe what I was about to say, I said, "They could just be a preadolescent boy putting up a 'No trespassing' sign."

  "Doesn't feel that way. I'll get a picture of the door to show you. This is something."

  While I was considering the discovery, I said, "Is there someplace in the house where somebody could have made a bomb, Sam?"

  "Not at first glance. There's no obvious workshop and we haven't identified any explosives. We'll swab for residue, but I'm betting that we'll come up with jack."

  "Then what?"

  "Everybody's looking for Ramp. That's where the money is. We're hoping to find an address or phone number here. Other than pointing us toward the Internet and to his grandparents' ranch, you don't know where to send us to find him, right? No recovered memories since this afternoon?"

  The "recovered memories" comment was another dig.

  "Has anyone talked to Marin, Sam? Is she awake? Maybe she knows something about Ramp."

  "Scott Malloy's standing by over at the hospital to talk to her the moment she's able."

  "How bad are her injuries?"

  "To quote one of the docs, the wounds are uglier than they are serious. Her mom absorbed most of the blast. They think Marin will be fine-if her luck is bad she may lose use of an eye."

  "Poor kid."

  "Poor kid was mixed up with somebody who made bombs. For all we know right now, she was helping him."

  CHAPTER 35

  I t took Lucy more than a thimbleful of patience, but she'd waited until she was in Agate before she made her next move. She'd allowed Alan to pull out ahead of her and watched him turn onto the interstate as he headed west toward Boulder. She turned into a gas station adjacent to I-70, filled the Volvo's tank, and bought a carton of chocolate milk and a tasteless sandwich filled with milky-white slices of something masquerading as turkey.

  She didn't call Sam Purdy.

  Instead, she made a phone call to a police department colleague who'd made no secret of the fact that he was eager to get into her pants, and asked him for help tracking down Jason Ramp Bass's current address in Denver. She didn't tell the man why she wanted the address. And he didn't ask.

  As she killed the call she figured that she'd know exactly where to find Ramp before she was done with her sandwich.

  S he was wrong. The return call with Ramp's address didn't come for almost two and a half hours. Her contact had been yanked into a meeting before he'd been able to get back to her with the information. When he finally did phone, he dangled the address like a carrot at the end of a stick until she agreed to have a drink with him after work. She picked a day for the
rendezvous that was almost a week away. It left her plenty of time to cancel.

  Once she had the address, she thought once more about calling Sam Purdy with the day's news. If she called him, he'd make her back off, wouldn't even let her close to the case. That wasn't okay.

  She reached the same decision she'd reached every other time she'd pondered the problem since Agate. She decided to find Ramp by herself.

  C apitol Hill in Denver is just south of the Uptown neighborhood where Jason Ramp Bass once lived with his parents. Although it bears some resemblance to Uptown, Capitol Hill is more densely populated, is even more diverse, and suffers from fewer pockets of acute gentrification than does its northern neighbor.

  The apartment building where Lucy thought Ramp lived was in no danger of going condo, and nobody in their right mind was ever going to mistake it for a loft. It was a postwar brick rectangle that looked as though it had been modeled after a shoebox. It was flanked on each side by gorgeous stone mansions.

  She parked her car just down from Ramp's building on Pennsylvania Avenue and walked back toward it. The doorbell to apartment 3B was marked "Bass." Lucy smiled and shook her head. All day long, given the kind of day she'd expected to have, it had all been too easy. It was just about time, she thought, where something should go wrong.

  To ring or not to ring, that was the next question.

  She rings and he's not home, nothing's lost.

  She rings and he's home-that's when things could get complicated. What would she say to him? Sam Purdy had always taught her to walk into any interview she conducted with the cards stacked in her favor. And with at least one ace tucked up her sleeve. Her favorite ace in the hole was her detective shield, and she'd had to give that up when she was suspended.