"You were trying to decide whether to lie to me right then, weren't you? What did you decide?"
"I decided to tell you the truth." She paused. "Mostly because you can check for yourself on caller ID."
She waited for him to check the caller ID log. He didn't. "So your friend, this detective, he makes a habit of calling you in the middle of the night?"
"Sam knows I'm missing by now. I told him I'd check in with him when I got back from seeing your grandmother."
"What will he do if he thinks you're missing?"
"Whatever he can think of to find me. Sam's relentless and he's pretty resourceful."
"What does he know?"
"Whatever Alan Gregory knows, Sam knows. They're good friends."
"You making this whole thing up as you go along? You're pretty good if you are."
"It's all true, Jason."
"Do they know about the bombs?"
"For sure? No. But they're the ones who found the bomb at Royal Peterson's house, and Dr. Gregory was so worried that you might have targeted his wife with a bomb that he brought an explosive-sniffing dog into his house and to check his cars."
"Really? You mentioned his wife already. Who is she?"
"She's a deputy DA in Boulder who was tangentially involved in Marin's rape case."
"Her name?"
"Lauren Crowder."
"Doesn't ring a bell. I don't think Marin mentioned her."
Lucy shrugged to hide her sense of relief.
Ramp was flipping the phone into the air, catching it again as it completed one end-to-end rotation.
She said, "The special part you mentioned that would be coming at the end of the day. That's part of your route?"
"It is."
"What good am I in all this?"
"So far you're just good company. I appreciate that. I'm still considering what else you'll do."
"You're going to kill me, aren't you, Jason?" The use of his name was intentional. She even emphasized it.
He stepped back from the window and moved halfway into a shadowed place close to the wall. "I don't think I'll have to. I really hope not."
"I don't understand."
"If I'm still standing at the end of the day, your job is over. I won't have to kill you."
"But if they catch up with you before that?"
"That's up to them, of course. Your presence is to ensure that I get to keep going. To finish what I started."
"But there will be bombs close by all day long. Who knows what will happen? That's what you're saying?"
Ramp's hand flashed toward his right hip as though he'd been stung there by a yellow jacket.
The swift movement of his hand caused Lucy's breath to catch in the middle of her chest as though she'd suddenly been dipped in ice water.
He lifted a beeper from his belt and lit the screen.
"Wow," he said. "What a surprise. I have to go make a call. I'm going to have to gag you. I'm sorry."
"Please, no."
"I said I'm sorry. You want something to drink first?"
CHAPTER 41
T hey wheeled her to X-ray. She went out a back door when the tech went to get something."
A young detective whom I'd never met was the one doing the I-can't-believe-it-but-we-lost-her shuffle. Even without glancing at his face, I could tell that Sam Purdy wanted to take someone's head off and was considering whether this young man's noggin would be a good place to start.
Sam said, "We were watching her, right?"
"Yeah, we had someone outside her door for her protection. He followed her wheelchair down to X-ray and checked out the room. He thought the other door in the room went to a place for developing the X-ray film or something. Didn't know it led to a hallway."
"So she went out that other door? That's how she got away from him? She just walked away?"
"Yes."
"What's she wearing? One of those hospital gowns?"
"Probably not. There's a supply closet close by where scrubs are stored. We found a gown on the floor by the scrubs. We think it was hers. So she's probably wearing scrubs. Light purple. You know, like lavender."
Sam glared. My guess was that he was reacting to the detective's use of "lavender."
"She's barefoot?"
"She's wearing a pair of those little foam hospital slippers, as far as we know. They weren't with the gown."
"What kind of head start did she get?"
"A few minutes. Maybe five."
"The building get sealed?"
"Not for another five or so minutes after that."
"Maybe ten?"
"Yeah, maybe ten. Seven or eight, you know."
"She's ambulatory?"
"Unfortunately, yeah. Injuries from the bomb were to her upper body. Worst damage is to her left hand, from shrapnel. That's what she was in surgery for earlier. Her face is cut up, too. She has a bandage on her cheek right here, between her ear and her eye." He touched his own face to demonstrate the spot. "Got patched up by a plastic surgeon."
"So she's ambulatory and she has a ten- to fifteen-minute head start. She could be somewhere in this big hospital or she could be out on the street."
"That's the situation."
"What did you get before she ran?"
"Not much. Her surgeon only gave me about five minutes with her at first. She was still pretty groggy from the anesthesia and the painkillers, said she didn't remember anything at all about the bombing. Kept asking me about her mom as though she couldn't believe she was dead."
"But she knew?"
"She knew."
Sam inhaled like he was about to blow up a balloon. Then he sighed. "Nothing at all about this guy Ramp?"
"I asked, Sam. Said she didn't even know him. Didn't know what the hell I was talking about."
A uniformed officer approached us and waited until Sam said, "What do you want, Officer?"
"Sorry to interrupt but we just discovered that a purse is missing. One of the X-ray techs is telling us that her purse is gone along with her denim jacket. The purse was in a little room where the staff hangs out sometimes at the back of radiology. Kind of like a little lounge."
"What was in the purse?"
"What you'd expect. Wallet, ID, about fifty bucks."
"And the denim? Blue, faded, what?"
"Blue, not too old. From The Gap."
"Great," Sam said. "Just fucking great. Now she has money and street clothes. Has anybody called RTD or the taxi companies?"
"We're on that."
Sam stuck his hands in his pockets, probably to quell his impulse to place them around somebody's neck.
I couldn't see sticking around any longer. I'd been able to convince myself that I might be of some assistance in helping Sam evaluate Marin Bigg. But I didn't see a thing that I could contribute now that the task had evolved into searching for her. Anyway, my ass hurt.
I said, "I'm going to get a cab home, Sam. Call me if there's something else that I can do."
"Yeah," he said.
Reading between the lines, I realized that his words were kind of like "Thanks for your help."
"Wait a second. Before you go, give me your take on all this. She's hurt, she's on the run. Her mother's dead. Her house is surrounded by the good guys. Where would she go? The girl? Where do you think she'd go?"
"That's a tough one. She's young. I'm not sure she'd do anything that you or I might consider predictable."
"Think."
"Assuming that this kid Ramp set off the bomb that killed her mother, she'd try and find him, I think."
"To get even?"
"Possibly. But maybe to join back up with him. It all depends where her allegiance was strongest."
"You mean to him or to her mother?"
"Yes, that's exactly what I mean. She didn't seem that tight with her mother when I saw her yesterday."
"She could forgive Ramp for killing her mother?" Sam looked a little incredulous at the thought.
"Naomi was about to
turn her in to the police. Or at least turn her in to me. Marin may be part of this whole conspiracy with Ramp. She may feel that she was betrayed by her mother. Teenagers make strong alliances with their friends, Sam. Stronger than with their families sometimes."
"So you think that if we find her in the next little while, she could lead us to Ramp?"
I knew Sam was thinking that leading him to Ramp meant leading him to Lucy. "I suppose."
"But you're not sure when she finds this Ramp whether she wants to kill him or kiss him?"
"She may not be sure, either." I was so tired that I wanted to sit down, but my butt screamed at the thought of having weight on it. "The only thing we know for sure is that one of them is going to eventually show up at Nora's house," I said. "To set off that bomb that they left there. That's your best bet of finding one of them. Stake out Nora's house and wait."
"It's not going to happen. Those damn Fox News people have the story about the bomb at Nora's house already. They ran with it on their nine o'clock news. If the kids are paying any attention at all, they'll know we found that bomb."
There's another bomb. That lawyer.
As the echo of Naomi's warning sounded in my head, a new question surfaced. Was the bomb at Nora's house the one that Naomi was warning me about? The hospital hallway felt cold in the way that only hospital hallways can. I wished I had a sweater.
"Go ahead and go home," Sam told me. "If you hear from Lucy…"
"Of course."
I turned to leave, stopped. "Sam? What if there's another bomb? One that you guys didn't find this afternoon? What if the one at Nora's wasn't even the one that Naomi was telling me about?"
He snapped at me as though he was irritated that I wasn't already gone. "What are you saying?"
"I don't know exactly. It's just that-I'm thinking that maybe there might be someone at risk that we haven't thought about. Maybe there are some people on the wouldn't-it-be-cool list that we haven't even considered."
"More lawyers?"
"I guess. Naomi said, 'That lawyer.' "
There's another bomb. That lawyer.
"You mean besides Nora and Royal?"
"That's what I'm thinking."
Sam's voice took on the timbre of debate. "We checked for bombs around the judge who accepted the plea on Marin's rape. Negative. We checked Cozy Maitlin's house and office. He was the rapist's defense attorney. Negative. We checked everything on Lauren, who was assisting Nora with the prosecution. Negative. We checked and found devices at Nora's and at Royal Peterson's home. So who's left?"
"Maybe Lauren and Nora can answer that. I don't know the system well enough to know who else might have been involved."
He took a step away from me before he stopped and faced me again. "How come every time I think you're going to bring clarity to a process, you end up clouding everything up like a damn fog machine? Why do you think that is?"
CHAPTER 42
S he didn't like being bound.
She despised being gagged.
It was obvious that he hadn't planned for this step, either. The gag he fashioned was a clean white sock stuffed partway into her mouth and held in place by a long strip of duct tape.
The ambivalence she was feeling when he left the trailer ambushed her. She found herself wavering back and forth between wishing that Ramp wouldn't be gone long and hoping that the next person she saw walk through the door of the construction trailer would be the job site foreman stumbling in shortly after the eastern sky was streaked with bands of orange and blue. He'd be carrying a cardboard cup of gas station coffee and his brain would be brimming with the assorted headaches that he'd have to solve before lunch. Lucy imagined that he'd drop the coffee at the sight of the woman duct-taped to his sofa.
But Lucy was also hoping that Ramp wouldn't be gone long.
There was a name for what she was feeling. She tried to remember what she'd read about it. It was something Scandinavian. The Copenhagen Effect? No. The Stockholm Syndrome? Yes, that was it. The Stockholm Syndrome. Something about a train hijacking. The psychological phenomenon where hostages begin identifying with their captors.
Was she identifying with him? Lucy didn't think so. His rationalizations for the next day's terror rang hollow for her.
But she liked Jason Ramp Bass. She liked his charm. She liked his respectful manner. She liked the fact that he adored his mother. She even admired the way he'd managed to subvert his rage into something concise and, well, neat.
She wished she could see a clock. She wished she could roll onto her side. She wished she could empty her bladder. Mostly she wished she could call Sam and tell him to send in the cavalry.
People were going to die tomorrow. Nobody knew but her. And she couldn't do a thing about it.
L ucy had dozed off and didn't realize the door to the trailer was opening again. She didn't even hear Ramp enter or approach her.
He touched her gently on the cheek and said, "Hey, gotta get up. Plans have changed. Lucy, Lucy."
When she opened her eyelids, the soft blue of his eyes filled her vision like the sunlight fills the morning sky. Behind him the room was dark but the picket fence shadows still lined the ceiling.
"Hi," she said into the gag. Her heart pounded in her chest and the tape around her body suddenly seemed too tight to allow her to draw a breath.
Part of her response, she knew, was terror about what was going to happen next.
Part of it wasn't.
H e removed the duct tape but not the gag and neither the wrist nor the ankle restraints, and he helped her to her feet.
"I'm going to carry you outside to the truck. You want to use the bathroom first?"
She nodded definitively.
She guessed he was only five ten or five eleven, maybe one hundred sixty pounds, but he lifted her effortlessly and carried her out the door the way a new husband lifts his bride over the threshold. She would have hooked an arm around his neck if she could, but she couldn't.
He stood her up outside the chemical toilet and opened the door. She held out her wrists for him to cut her plastic cuffs. Instead, he grabbed her around the waist and lifted her inside the plastic door. "I don't have time to free your restraints. You want help or can you do this yourself?"
She spoke into her gag and nodded her head. He reached up and stretched the sock away from her lips. She spit cotton before she said, "Undo my pants and pull them over my hips."
He hesitated.
"I can do the rest. Do that much." She held up her bound wrists. "I'm not going to slap you, don't worry."
He fumbled with the belt on her pants and had even more trouble with the button. The zipper he mastered quickly.
She wriggled her hips to help him get the tight pants over her butt and hips and stood still while he yanked the waistband all the way down to her upper thighs. Even through the gag, she figured he could tell that at that point she said, "Okay. That's enough."
She thought she saw his gaze focus momentarily on the lime-green triangle of her exposed underwear before he stepped back and gently closed the door of the chemical toilet.
A minute or so later she knocked the door back open with her shoulder. The top of her pants was at mid-thigh, as high as she could get them on her own. "Help me," she said.
She watched as he moved his eyes quickly from her upper legs and crotch to her face, and then back down.
He didn't hesitate this time. As he tugged her pants into place, his fingers grazed the soft skin that was exposed below the hem of her underwear. She felt his knuckles press against her belly as he buttoned her jeans, and she found herself holding her breath as he pulled up the zipper and closed the belt.
With an arm around her waist, he lifted her from the toilet and carried her to a different truck than the one she'd ridden in a few hours before.
This one was a small flatbed with welding supplies strapped into place in the back. The sign on the driver's door read "JT Welding Supplies."
"You're going t
o have to curl up on the floor. Can you do that? The alternative is that box in the back of the truck. But that will get hot tomorrow, I promise."
Lucy tilted her head at the cab. More despair. Tomorrow seemed like a long way away.
"Good choice," he said.
Once she was curled up on the floor of the cab, Ramp said, "While I was gone, I talked to your doctor friend. I think we're cool. And, for what it's worth, I think he's worried about you."
CHAPTER 43
C ruising taxicabs are rare at any hour in Boulder. Past midnight there was no hope I would find a cab prowling the streets of Boulder, so I used my cell phone to request that a taxi be sent to the emergency entrance of the hospital. The dispatcher yawned twice before he responded by asking for my phone number and telling me to watch for a car within five minutes, maybe less.
The cell phone rang a few seconds after I ended the call with Yellow Cab. I guessed it was the dispatcher phoning back to ascertain that I was someone who really wanted a ride.
I said, "Hello."
A male voice said, "Is this Alan Gregory?"
I thought the voice was young, and immediately recognized that it wasn't the bored dispatcher with whom I'd just spoken. "Yes, it is. Who's this?"
"Never mind. Tell me what you know about Paul Bigg. I want to hear everything."
My ass suddenly stopped hurting. My ass actually stopped existing. I repeated, "Who is this?"
"Use your imagination and you'll know who this is. Now tell me what you know about Paul Bigg. This is a test, by the way. It's pass/fail. You get one chance. There are no retests."
My mouth felt as though I'd just tried to swallow a dirt clod and failed. I almost coughed out the answer to his question. "He died in a Little League accident about six years ago. A heart rhythm problem, I think."
"Go on."
I assumed I was talking to the infamous Ramp. I couldn't begin to guess what he wanted or how he'd managed to reach me on this number. "His mother, her name is Naomi, acts-acted-as though he were alive sometimes. She talked about him as though he'd never died."
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