Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  “Out of maybe a hundred and fifty shots there were about a dozen pictures of your kid. About a dozen pictures of mine. Simon at school, at hockey. Grace at school, at soccer.” He paused for five seconds, at least. “That’s all.”

  The air in my lungs felt cold, my legs inadequate to support my weight. My tongue felt like it was made of peanut butter. I was able to say, “I think it’s enough.”

  “Took me a while but I found her. One of the pictures was of a horse with a horse trailer in the background. Partial plate, Nebraska. Wasn’t easy but I tracked down the trailer, found the guy who owned it, got him to tell me where it was about the time we were on the Royal Arch Trail. Staked out the ranch. And…there she was.”

  “Frederick?”

  “Exactly. We talked. At first she denied everything.”

  “Then?”

  “Remember something, Alan: We had nothing on her. Nothing that I could take to my bosses or to the sheriff.”

  We did have the digital photographs but my recklessness with Lauren’s Glock rendered them impractical as leverage. In reality they proved little anyway.

  “She gave Teresa the Sativex,” I said. “We can prove that.” I was groping for magic—a fool trying to change the past. I knew better.

  “That might be a crime in Canada. Not here,” Sam said. “Didn’t help us.” I watched a dirty white van pull up to the shuttered gas station, slow to a crawl, and speed away. A dozen heads popped up as it accelerated down the road.

  Coyote, I thought.

  Sam went on. “I showed her a few of the pictures. She admitted she’d followed me that day that you were in Denver and she’d sent me that e-mail threatening to reveal that I’d been staking out the grand jury witness’s house. The witness lived up Coal Creek, if you care.”

  “Gotcha,” I said. I didn’t want to interrupt him with the news that I didn’t care.

  “Currie prepared your patient, Nicole, for her therapy with you. ‘Rehearsing her,’ she called it. I could tell she enjoyed that part. She told me to ask you if you liked the Angelina Jolie thing. I don’t know what that means, but there it is. Currie softened Nicole up for the suicide too, but McClelland was the one who ended up doing it. It was Currie living in the barn. And she was the one who tore up Grace’s room later on.”

  “She’s…loquacious? Or you were being persuasive?”

  “At the beginning, persuasion. Once she realized I had the camera, what I knew already, she got chatty. Nothing had really changed for her, Alan. She was still willing to…planning to…I made sure of that—110 percent sure—before…”

  “I understand,” I said. I didn’t want him to have to say it. Currie had been willing to hurt our kids to hurt us.

  “She said they’d made a pact to help each other. Her and…The whole time I was with her—I mean before—I missed her cold heart. Totally missed it. Part of their deal was if he was unable, she would…tie up loose ends. That’s what she called them. ‘Loose ends.’ I asked her if she’d consider backing out of the deal. She didn’t answer, but…her eyes told me she wouldn’t.”

  Our kids were the loose ends. “Was she still in touch with him? At New Max?”

  “She wouldn’t say. I asked. I think she might have been in love with him. People. Go figure.”

  More than half a century before, Los Alamos had been one of those obscure places where good and evil came together so seamlessly that wise, decent people couldn’t tell them apart.

  I had known for most of my life what that demarcation looked like just before it disappeared.

  Sam knew too—Frederick, Colorado, had become his Los Alamos.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  He thought for a while before he replied. “My kid’s safe. I’m sleeping fine. Your kids are safe. You should be too.”

  Shortly after getting back from Israel with Jonas I’d told Sam about Thousand Oaks over a couple of beers on the rooftop deck of the West End Tavern. He let me talk it out, but he didn’t try to convince me anything would make it better. As we were heading back to our cars he told me two other things: He was leaving the next day for Laguna Beach to end things with Carmen. And the unidentified prints in the barn had turned out to be Jonas’s.

  Damn, and damn.

  I’d let Diane know about Thousand Oaks, too—over Nebbiolo, salumi, and speck at Frasca.

  And I kept my promise to tell Kirsten, as we ate #5’s—I was over-easy, she was scrambled—at the Village on Folsom.

  Sam knew what I was up against when he suggested how I should be sleeping.

  “Should be,” I said. “Maybe soon.”

  “I’m not proud of any of this,” he said. “But I don’t regret it either. Had to be done. I tried to see it work out some other way. Couldn’t. Kept thinking about the ball-peen hammer and the framed porn and the eighteen-wheeler near Laramie. Nicole’s neck. Grace’s room. The pictures of the kids.”

  Tell me about it, I thought. The connection was especially noisy. I blamed it on the antique phone and my proximity to all that plutonium.

  He went on. “What you did on the trail? With Lauren’s Glock? That was kind of preemptive, don’t you think?”

  “What do you mean?” I was afraid Sam was launching some unwelcome, ill-timed political allegory.

  “You didn’t wait for her to shoot first. You recognized danger. You protected me.”

  I saw where he was going. “Yeah.”

  “That’s all I did. Preemption. I couldn’t wait for her to shoot first.” He paused. “Couldn’t.”

  The kids, I thought. I never would have endorsed a death sentence for McClelland for what he had done years before. Never. But I was copacetic about J. Winter B.’s capital end. Didn’t add up.

  I was looking for right and wrong. They were nowhere to be found.

  “If I was the one who found her,” I said, “I’m not sure I could have done it.”

  “Yeah, well. You don’t know. Until you’re in the room and you see the alternatives…Until then, you don’t really know.” He paused. “Backed into a corner with your kid behind you? I think you’d do whatever’s necessary.”

  “Yeah.” He was right. I would. And how would I cope with having done whatever was necessary?

  Dry ice.

  “I should go,” Sam said.

  “Can I ask you one more thing? Something I’ve been wondering?”

  “What?”

  “How did you know the grand jury witness’s body would be buried below that grave in the cemetery? How did you guess to look there?”

  For a moment I wasn’t sure he planned to answer me. Then he said, “Wasn’t a guess. The dead girl—Nicole—was alone that night while she was digging the grave. That’s what the supervisor told Lucy. But she was never alone with the casket—it was still at the funeral home. There was no way for her to switch bodies or to stick an extra corpse into the box. Her only option for hiding a body would be to have a funeral before the funeral.”

  His voice trailed off at the end. Sam wasn’t done—I could tell something had gone unsaid. Something important. “What?” I said. “What else?”

  Quick inhale, long exhale. “The witness? Donna? She’d been buried wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. No shoes or socks. No ID. No underwear. But your business card was in the front pocket of her jeans.”

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. J. Winter must have picked up one of my cards during her therapist-shopping visit the previous fall. “Elliot didn’t tell Cozy about that.”

  “He may not even have told Lauren. Elliot’s willing—not eager—to believe you were framed. But the card doesn’t help you—and it won’t go away. Don’t be confused—Elliot’s not…your ally. In the wrong hands…Thought you should know.”

  “McClelland and Currie were thorough.”

  “I’m sleeping okay now, Alan. Let this go. It’s our turn to get lucky.”

  The walk back up the hill to the breeder’s h
ome was almost half a mile. I took the six of diamonds from my wallet. That’s where I’d stashed it minutes after I discovered it in my sport-coat pocket. Over the intervening weeks I had concluded that had it been chosen out of the deck for any reason at all, it had been chosen because it was a crappy card. That’s what Michael McClelland and J. Winter B. had worked so hard to deal me. A crappy card.

  I ripped off a tiny piece of the card every fifty yards or so, scattering the fragments one at a time into the windy landscape above Los Alamos. The cast on my hand made the task much more difficult than it should have been.

  Los Alamos had proven to be almost as good at keeping secrets as I had.

  I didn’t bother to glance behind me as I paced up the hill. I knew I had a fresh cloud chasing me.

  I felt it there, looming. And I smelled the stink of wolf.

  Damn. The list of people I could never tell stretched out for miles.

  SIXTY-ONE

  HAVANESE ARE the national dogs of Cuba. To aficionados, like the kind New Mexico breeder, they are every bit the island treasure that is a fine Cohiba, and more. To Jonas, his new puppy was a bundle of verve, an injection of hope, and a talisman granted to him by his dead mother.

  The drive north was a riot. The portable kennel was big; the dog was not. The breeder promised us she would eventually top out at ten or twelve pounds. From the looks of her I suspected half of it would be hair. She was a silky soccer ball with legs and a tail that curled up like an apostrophe above her ass. She treated the kennel like she was a platinum rock star and it was a five-star hotel suite she was determined to trash. While Jonas continued to ponder names for the exuberant dog, I silently tagged her Haldol. It would take a healthy dose of the drug to dent her effervescent energy.

  She made me laugh. She made Jonas laugh. It was all good.

  At uneven intervals between Taos and the state line I dropped the three spent shells from Lauren’s Glock out the window along the highway. I’d forgotten I’d left them in the ashtray until Jonas had spotted them there.

  During a brief interlude north of Alamosa while both Jonas and the Havanese slept, I ran through a half-dozen scenarios of what had happened in the cottage on the ranch near Frederick between Sam and the woman he knew as Currie.

  I settled on one.

  Sam wouldn’t have taken any pleasure in what he had to do.

  I suspected he had used darkness and arrived at her home on foot just before midnight, after her neighbors—if she had any—were in bed. He pulled on gloves before he surprised her. They talked. Within moments he reached a decision about whether he could trust her or not. Once he arrived at “not” he offered her the Elavil that Sherry had left behind when she moved out of their house. Sam didn’t give Currie a choice of method. The selection of Jack Daniel’s as a chaser was, I think, hers. Sam would have wanted her to drink whatever booze she kept at home. They—a cop and a therapist—would both have known that alcohol increased the lethality of an Elavil overdose.

  The bath and the razor blade were probably J. Winter’s bargain for an alternative ending. Sam allowed her the option. He would have insisted she leave the door to the bath open while she carved her wrists. I suspect she soaked in the bath for a while but couldn’t bring herself to put the vertical slices into her arteries.

  It’s a notoriously tough cut.

  Sam was a thorough cop. He would have checked her home for a weapon. After she climbed out of the bath with her blood vessels intact, she returned to the front room to find Sam resigned to what was coming. He had added a Tyvek jumpsuit, shoe covers, and eye protection to his costume. He was holding a pistol—either one he found during his search or a throw-down he’d brought along. Sam wasn’t careless; he wouldn’t have trusted her not to turn the weapon on him. Although he’d make certain her hand was on the grip to be sure that investigators would find gunshot residue and metals in all the right places, Sam was the one who put the barrel to her throat below her chin and he was the one who pulled the trigger.

  Shoot!

  I couldn’t begin to guess where between Boulder and Frederick he’d dumped them all, which was just as well.

  SIXTY-TWO

  LAUREN AND I had our second child.

  Neither of us felt certain in our marriage. We were civil with each other, occasionally warm. At unguarded moments I had begun to feel hope for us. What she had done when she was twenty felt inconsequential to us as a couple. What I’d done when I was thirteen had been transformed into toxic history, but it was no longer a secret.

  It would never be inconsequential.

  We had two kids, just like I’d wanted.

  My new son and I had some crucial things in common: We had both watched a parent murdered.

  We’d both had indelible days, things we’d been part of that we would go forward in life not wanting to be true. We would each need to find the strength not to be defined by what had happened to us.

  And we each had a future that was as difficult to decipher as the way out of a sandstorm.

  What it would take for us to survive was clear, at least to me. We would need to sublimate, to use strength we had no reason to trust to transform the impact of the events that were themselves so transformative. Phoenixlike, we would try to end up doing something acceptable with our lives, even beneficial, despite our traumas.

  We would sublimate.

  We would both try to change from a solid state into a vapor without first melting.

  It was tricky stuff, the not melting.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The people who help me with each book not only spare readers from all manner of my idiocy, they also refresh my faith in the generosity of the human heart.

  This time I offer my thanks to Jane Davis for a thousand things done remarkably, to Chuck Lepley for his cogent and thoughtful instruction, to Judy Pomerantz for the early read, to Nancy Hall for the late one, and to Al Silverman and Patricia Limerick for the lift. Elyse Morgan’s astute eyes always capture more of my errors and inconsistencies than do anyone else’s—and this time her critical perspective, along with her absolute lack of hesitation to point out my failings, proved even more crucial than usual.

  Brian Tart, together with Neil Gordon, edited this book with great care and with vision to match. I thank them for their skill, and for all they do during the year to shepherd my work from desk to marketplace. My gratitude goes out to their colleagues at Dutton and NAL, as well—especially Lisa Johnson and Claire Zion.

  Special thanks to Robert Barnett for his graciousness and guidance.

  My family provides the platform that makes what I do possible. I will never be able to thank them enough.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Stephen White is a clinical psychologist and New York Times bestselling author of fourteen previous suspense novels, including Missing Persons and Kill Me. He lives in Colorado.