Manner of Death

by Stephen White

  "He was a white male, late twenties. Normal to stocky build. Light complexion." I tried to manufacture a snapshot in my head. I couldn't. "I'd say average height, five-ten, six feet, maybe one-eighty. Crew cut, I think."

  "That sounds like a hundred guys. Half the security officers at the plant looked like that."

  "No one specific?"

  "Sorry. If anything jogs my memory and makes this guy pop up, I'll be sure to let you know. You have a card? A business card you can leave with me?"

  I pulled one from my wallet and held it in my hand, he was still across the room. I wasn't ready to be dismissed. I wanted him to keep talking. "It must have been tough at Rocky Flats then. In the early eighties, especially in security. So much was going on, so much, I don't know, negativity. In the country, in the community. It must have been a tough time."

  "Oh, it was negative, all right, the pressure was enormous. Not only from the plant management. But from the Energy Department, the FBI, even some spooks who came around who I was sure were CIA, there were the damn protesters at the fence, the terrorist threat was constant, industrial espionage was always a concern, and there was always the problem of keeping tabs on the damn plutonium a damn microgram at a time. Not to mention keeping track of all the damn dirty waste, well, well. Employees, too. Had to keep an eye on all of them. I swear half of them couldn't be trusted to check a fence for shorts. It was a hard time. But we had no incursions. I'm still proud of that. In my eight years as chief, we had no incursions."

  "Incursions?"

  "Penetrations of the internal security perimeter. None of the bad guys got in to sabotage us. I considered that was my primary responsibility. Counter-terrorism. Protecting the plant from subversives."

  I didn't even want to consider the consequences of the havoc a bad guy could cause inside a place as toxic as Rocky Flats, a little plutonium here, a little plutonium there ... I was tempted to ask Loomis if any of his predecessors or successors had been less successful at protecting the internal security perimeter than he was. But I feared he would begin to realize that he was talking out of school, and shut up.

  "You were chief for what years?"

  "‘979 to ‘987. Retired in'87."

  "How many years did you have in?"

  "Started in '63 as a guard. Twenty-four years in all. Some of those years were better than others. I used to be a hothead, see. Thought I knew everything. Made myself miserable for a stretch there at the beginning."

  "Youth," I said.

  He seemed to contemplate something. "I stayed young and foolish longer than most. I'm afraid. Never too late to grow up, though, that's what I finally decided. Confucius said that the best time to plant a tree is ten years ago, the second-best time is now, that says it all. I decided, that says it all."

  I said. "In ‘982, this employee I'm trying to find, this C.R., apparently caused a disturbance of some kind at work, the incident at the plant, whatever it was, was serious enough that someone in authority felt tha employee needed to be evaluated by a psychiatrist, he was taken directly from work to the emergency room at the medical school hospital in Denver."

  As casually as I could, as I was playing my second-best card. I examined the profile of Reggie's face, he remained, I thought, impassive. Perhaps his eyebrows elevated a millimeter or two, but that was all.

  "You that psychiatrist?"

  "No, I'm a psychologist."

  "I recall that happening a couple of times. Disturbances. Employees who couldn't cut the mustard, handle the pressure. Sometimes I think just being around the juice made some of them crazy."

  "The juice?"

  "Plutonium, that's what I called it sometimes. Don't recall who might have been involved in those incidents, though. Like I said, long time ago. Wouldn't have taken much to get us to ferry someone away from the site back then, we required discipline at Rocky Flats in those days. Military-style discipline. Didn't tolerate much lip."

  He still hadn't made a move to come across the room for my business card, and I didn't stand and extend it toward him. I decided that the time had come for me to play my trump card.

  "One more thing; I almost forgot. This next part may seem odd. One of the reasons that this particular man is so memorable to all of us who were involved with him back then is that he kept going on and on about D. B. Cooper. You know, the hijacker? Kept telling everyone that he knew who D. B. Cooper was. Does that ring any bells?"

  Loomis slid his lower jawbone to the left a good inch, giving his face a cockeyed slant, then he shifted it the same distance to the right for about ten seconds before centering it. "Oh,” he chuckled, and shook his head in a disbelieving gesture. "There's a memory, isn't it? I hadn't thought about that in years, but I'm not totally surprised to hear you say it, there was plenty of talk around the plant about all that D. B. Cooper stuff. Had been for vears, actually, since a few vears after the hijacking at least. Rumor was that Cooper, or whoever had pretended to be Cooper, actually worked at the Flats. It was all legend, abominable snowman stuff, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not aware of anyone ever taking it seriously."

  He narrowed his eyes and asked. "You didn't? Did you?" He employed a gotcha voice.

  I shook my head. "No. I just thought it was curious. Thought it might help you pin down this guy's identity for me. You know, maybe there was one particular employee who just couldn't let the whole D. B. Cooper thing go."

  "Bet he even offered to expose him? The real D. B.

  Cooper?"

  "Why would you say that?"

  "Happened all the time. Someone would have a beef about somebody and suddenly everybody wanted to know if so-and-so was working or off that Thanksgiving weekend."

  "How did it get started? The legend?"

  "Don't rightly remember."

  "But no one employee stands out?"

  He appeared thoughtful for a moment. "Sorry, maybe the personnel office at the plant can help you with those initials you have. Narrow down your search. I'm sure they still have the records, maybe even photographs, maybe they'll let you thumb through the photos."

  "That won't work. I'm afraid, we asked around. Personnel records are confidential."

  Reggie said. "Ah." and nodded in a way that told me he already knew that. "So, um: why do you need to find, um.., this particular man?" Something about the exaggerated casualness of his question made me think that he was trying to appear uninterested.

  I found that interesting.

  "Some people have been hurt. Others are in some danger, we thought he could help us sort some things out." I didn't know what else I could say.

  Reggie again said. "Ah."

  TWENTY-ONE

  I left Reggie Loomis's ersatz catering business just in time to get to my office to see my next patient, a woman named Victoria Pearsall. By necessity, I fought to set aside my frustration about accomplishing so little during the meeting with Loomis so I could focus on the business at hand, with Victoria, that meant attending to her continuing complaints about the harassment she allegedly suffered at the hands of her boss at Ball Aerospace. I'd listened to these litanies from Victoria on and off— mostly on— for months now and I'd decided that her boss was not only not the ogre she made him out to be but was a man with angelic patience who was a viable candidate for canonization. Despite persistent and. I thought, stellar efforts on my part at reflection, confrontation, and interpretation. Victoria and I concluded the session, as we had each and every previous one, with the great majority of Victoria's plated armor intact, as I said. "See you next week." I knew that this thirty-seven-year-old woman and I still had a long, long way to go to get to the root of her problem.

  Which, of course, was her.

  I barely had time to pee before ray next patient arrived. His name was Riley Grant. Riley had been a patient of mine for almost three years, and the difficult days of his treatment were behind him. Originally, he'd been sent to me by a Boulder County judge who offered him a choice between psychotherapy and thirty days in a concre
te room with steel bars in a dull neighborhood by the Boulder airport.

  It says volumes about Riley that he asked the judge if he could think about his options overnight.

  His crime? After the car he was driving was cut off by a bicyclist who was crossing Broadway on a red light at the Downtown Boulder Mall. Riley sped up in order to cut off the offending bicyclist at Canyon Boulevard. Riley then climbed out of his car, a big black Lexus, and proceeded to turn the offending bicycle into a piece of modern art that closely resembled a bird's nest constructed by a condor.

  When provoked. Riley used to have quite a temper. When not provoked. Riley used to be merely a bully. But that was almost three years ago.

  Now he was a reminder to me of the wonder of this work I did. Riley's progress gave me hope for Victoria, and I was confident someday she would give me hope for another patient whose intractable problems vexed me no end.

  I worked well into the evening. My last two patients were both men in their late twenties with relationship issues. One was a gay computer cartographer named John Fry and the other one was a straight fireman named Tom Jenkins. Neither of them had been in treatment long, and neither was doing much work in therapy, that day I found myself pressing each one of them harder than I usually did. I wasn't sure why I felt so aggressive, but it didn't seem to make much difference in either treatment. I blamed it on Victoria and reminded myself that to tear down a wall, it was necessary to remove a lot of bricks.

  John asked for an extra session the following week. Tom warned me that a change in his work schedule might force him to cancel his next appointment, he said he'd call. I felt a certain symmetry at work.

  The night was moonless and dark by the time I locked up the building. Diane was long gone, she'd told me earlier in the day that she was going out house hunting with a real estate agent friend of hers.

  One of the casualties of being on the hit list of a mass murderer was the loss of my routine. I felt as though I'd relinquished the capacity to accomplish the mundane or the habitual. Now, every act I performed required that I contemplate the possibility of danger. It was as though I were living in a haunted house that had been set up to spook me at any turn.

  Did Diane usually leave the back door to her office unlocked? No, she didn't. Since this time she had, I was forced to retrace my steps and search the entire building where we had our offices to make sure no intruders had entered through her carelessly unlocked back door.

  Only a week before, turning the deadbolt would have sufficed.

  Outside. I walked once around my car before I got in, immediately locking the doors after me. I winced as I turned the key to the ignition, as though wincing would offer some protection against a car bomb. Twice, in the first couple of days after Arnie's funeral. I'd actually gotten down on my knees and examined the undercarriage of the Land Cruiser, looking for explosives. I stopped the ritual of genuflecting beside my car only after I admitted to myself that unless the mad bomber had conveniently marked his package "Dynamite" or "C-4." I probably wouldn't have been able to tell an explosive device from my catalytic converter.

  Lauren was at some lawyers' function that she didn't want to attend. Sam was at an early season Avalanche game with his brother-in-law and niece, and since I'd already checked on Dresden's progress with tha renovation and addition over my lunch hour. I had the evening to myself. Usually, I would have enjoyed the opportunity to have a few hours alone. Now, being alone let my paranoia run unchecked. Given the current circumstances, this was not a good thing.

  Conjuring up an image of Sam's kidney stone— the fantasy closely resembled Gibraltar passing through a straw— I bypassed Nick-n-Willy's and instead stopped by Sushi Zanmai to pick up some sushi for dinner. I was tempted to sit at the sushi bar and eat, but guilt about my dog motivated me to take the food home. I stuck the styrofoam box in the refrigerator while I took Emily out for an evening stroll, she was still fascinated by the novel urban odors of her temporary home, and our walk through the western edge of the Hill was anything but brisk, she demonstrated not only a need to pee on an astonishing number of mysterious odors, but also a bladder capacity that defied logic, we concluded the stroll with a shortcut home that took us through the old Columbia Cemetery on Ninth Street, although the walk hadn't been strenuous enough to get my heart rate up, walking through a century-old graveyard on a moonless night with a price on my head sure was.

  The sushi was good. I poured a beer and tried to interest myself in the fall television season. It didn't work, the fall season. I mean. I watched a little of the hockey game that Sam was attending, but the Avs were up five-zip in the second period and I quickly lost interest in that, too.

  My pager went off and I picked up a message off voice mail. It was Tom Jenkins, my patient from that afternoon, letting me know he was going to have to cover an extra shift the following week and needed to either cancel or reschedule. I made a note to call him at work the next day to try to find a new time.

  After considering it for a few minutes. I asked Emily if I should phone Sawyer and tell her about meeting with Reggie Loomis. I interpreted her silence to mean "Sure, why not?"

  I phoned Sawyer, the line was busy.

  I read the note I'd written myself about Riley Grant. Immediately., I thought about Reggie Loomis, the juxtaposition allowed me to see something that had been hovering just outside the reach of my awareness all evening long.

  The two men had a lot in common.

  Reggie had told me that he used to be a hothead when he was young, that he had made himself miserable, that fact alone made Reggie a lot like Riley before he and I had started to work some of it out together in therapy. I pondered the question of how Reggie had managed to quiet his own fires, and transform himself from a hothead security specialist into a culinary philanthropist with a La Connie.

  • • •

  The second time I called Santa Barbara, Sawyer answered, breathless, after the third ring.

  "I had a feeling it was you. It's the only reason I picked up. I'm on the treadmill; I usually don't answer when I'm working out."

  She was panting. I said. "I'll call back."

  "No, no. Only eighty-three more seconds. I hate the damn grades more than the speed. How are you? Take your time answering. It's easier for me to listen than it is to talk."

  I spent those eighty-three seconds relaying the gist of my visit with Reggie Loomis and the urban legends about D. B. Cooper.

  "I'm done,” she said. "Speaking of urban legends, do you get this whole endorphin thing? I've never felt high after exercising. Not once. I only feel sweaty and out of breath and tired."

  "I, uh. I like to work out. But I'm not much of a runner."

  "Figures. But basically no luck with your interview?"

  "Basically. I may go back and see him again, maybe he'll be more reflective after he gets time to think about it all. What about you? Wait, maybe we shouldn't be having this conversation on our home phones."

  "It's okay. I had my house swept."

  "What?"

  "I have a lot of contacts in law enforcement. I had somebody check my house for the presence of bugs. I'm clean. I assume you are, too, anyway, regarding Chester? I did good. Real good. I know who Chester is. I know where Chester lives, and I know what Chester does for a Irving."

  I was impressed. "That's great. How did you do it?"

  Her breathing was beginning to slow, her words no longer punctuated by sharp gasps for oxygen. "USCF. United States Chess Federation. Given what we remembered about him, I assumed he'd be a member. It wasn't that hard to find out the information, a lawyer friend of mine is a chess player, too, he made the call to the organization for me, pretended he was a tournament director and that they owed this guy prize money, anyway, Chester's name is Victor Garritson, he's an independent software consultant, and he lives in the desert just outside Cave Creek, Arizona."

  "That's near Phoenix, isn't it?"

  "Good. Yes."

  "What's next for us?"
/>
  "Shouldn't we pay him a visit? I think we should pay him a visit unannounced. See the look on his face when he lays eyes on us. You said you take Fridays off, right? So what are you doing this Friday?"

  "I guess." I said. "I'm flying to Phoenix."

  "Me too." Sawyer allowed. "What a coincidence."

  Lauren looked like she had the stamina of steam-table vegetables when she got home from her legal affair. I lit two candles, drew her a bath, and set up a nice plate of maguro, unagi, and shinko maki for her to enjoy in the living room after her bath.

  She was pink and grateful and smelled of vanilla and jasmine, all of it made me happy. While she began to eat. I shared the details of my conversation with Sawyer, especially her discoveries about Chester— leaving out his real name— and asked her if she would come with me to Arizona.

  "I have a trial on Friday, hon. I can't go with you to Phoenix."

  "Any chance of a plea bargain?"

  "Fifty-fifty. But you know how that goes, we may not settle until ten minutes before trial."

  "Damn," I said.

  "You'll do fine,” she assured me.

  I wasn't sure exactly what she meant by that. Was she offering some confidence about the task at hand, interviewing Chester? Or was she making a more profound comment about my capacity to deal with the jumble of feelings I had about Sawyer?

  Before I could inquire, she said. "How was your little meeting today? With that patient's boss you were going to talk with?"

  "More interesting than enlightening." I told her about Reggie Loomis and the La Comue, about his charity work, and his lack of specific memory of employees at Rocky Flats. I also explained that he felt the D. B. Cooper thing was a dead end, that the whole theory of Cooper working at the Flats had been tossed around at the plant for years after the hijacking. "He made it sound like it had become an institutional parlor game."

  Her eyes smiled softly, she was more interested in Reggie Loomis's kitchen. "I'm envious, a six-burner La Cornue? But no griddle? I'd get a griddle on mine. I'm too addicted to pancakes."