Line of Fire (25 page)

She went on. “I saw that dirt road when I was in Frederick. It’s just an access . . . thing for the farmers. Tres said the man stopped about halfway down. He pulled on a white suit that was inside the gym bag. Tres said, ‘He became like a ghost.
Espíritu
.’ That’s the word Tres used. A spirit.”

Damn Tyvek.

“Tres didn’t see the man go into the cottage—the back door isn’t visible from his window. He doesn’t know what happened inside. He saw the ghost again later. Tres knows the time—after two o’clock. The man removed the white suit before he got back to the main road. He got in the car. He drove away toward the mountains.”

There had to be more to the story. Lauren didn’t have enough. “Why Sam?” I said. “The Avalanche bag? The Twins cap? Is that all?”

Lauren was a prosecutor presenting her case. My questions were inconsequential. She said, “While the man was gone from his view, Tres drew a picture of the car parked nearby. He drew a boxy thing, the shape of a station wagon or SUV. In his drawing, he used two numbers and two letters from the license plate.”

I saw more holes. There are thousands of dark Jeep Cherokees on Colorado’s roads, and tens of thousands of look-alikes. Had Lauren checked the partial plate and matched it to Sam’s car? Even if she had, it was only a partial. That meant doubt. “You ran the plate?”

“I didn’t have to. I recognized the car.”

From a child’s drawing?
No way. Not possible. An old navy Jeep Cherokee? It was way too common a car along the Front Range.
Trying not to sound defensive, I said, “Sam has a very common car.”

She nodded in agreement. “Elias Tres didn’t draw Sam’s car, babe. He drew mine. He drew our Audi. The car in the picture has three interlocking circles on the front. Tres called them ‘the rounds.’ The Audi logo has four.”

Not enough
.
No
. Audis, even wagons, are plentiful along Colorado’s Front Range.

But my heart rate didn’t slow. Lauren wasn’t done. I could tell she had more.
God.

“Tres’s picture shows a ball on the back of the car. Gracie’s pink soccer ball decal? Tres even colored the ball pink.”

There are not many Audi wagons with a pink soccer ball on the back.
I couldn’t imagine a way to explain the soccer ball.

“The Audi wagon he drew?” Lauren said. “It’s a white car.”

The moment she mentioned the car’s paint color, I knew my long subterfuge was over. I could almost hear an extended drumroll accompanying the pregnant pause Lauren inserted before she added, “But it has a black design on its roof.”

I stood. The act felt involuntary, as though I were a marionette and fate had yanked my strings.

39

M
ore than a year before Frederick—long before Adrienne died, long before Sam killed Currie—I had gotten ambitious around the house, as I was prone to do. My home repair initiatives were frequently misadventures, often to everyone’s amusement, occasionally to someone’s regret. The precipitant for my industriousness that time was that our garage door opener had failed. I was determined to install a new one myself. The guy at McGuckin cheered me on, convinced me I could do it. But the repair didn’t go well. Or, in a more optimistic appraisal, the repair went well but its success was short-lived.

The heaviest part of the new machine fell from the garage rafters onto the roof of our Audi wagon three days post-installation, putting a significant dent in the car’s top.

Our mechanic, an ever-resourceful Scot, arranged for a cousin of his to pop out the dent. We elected not to pay him to repaint the car. By then, our Audi had almost a hundred thousand miles on the odometer. Lauren and I planned to drive the wagon to its death. A contrasting blotch of primer on the roof would be an inconsequential scar visible only from helicopters and from the cabs of eighteen-wheelers. We asked our mechanic to tell his cousin to sand and prime the damaged area to prevent rust, but to stop there.

The blotch of dark gray primer formed—either by the cousin’s intent or by divine accident—a shape over two feet wide. Everyone I showed it to thought the design looked like a five-point star.

We’d ended up with what I suspected was the only two-toned Audi A4 wagon roof in all of Colorado, certainly the only one with a primer stain in the shape of a star. I never thought that fact would make a difference to anybody.

• • •

Our car had to have been in Frederick the night that Currie died.

I didn’t
know
how our car got to Frederick that night. But I thought I could guess how our car got to Frederick that night. Murphy’s Law had something to do with it.

The day before Sam killed Currie, Jonas and I were driving to New Mexico to pick up his new puppy from a Havanese breeder outside Los Alamos. The puppy was a gift that Adrienne had arranged for her son in the months before her tragic death. My car back then was a Mini Cooper. The initial plan had been for Jonas and me to take the Mini to Los Alamos; it was a more reliable vehicle than our other car, the aging-quasi-gracefully Audi wagon. The puppy’s travel kennel would be a tight fit in the Mini, but I was hopeful I could make it work.

The Audi scoffed at our plans. While Jonas and I were packing to leave for New Mexico, Lauren’s wagon refused to start. She was due in court in thirty minutes. Adrienne’s big Land Cruiser was a possible solution to the problem, but Lauren’s MS was in a phase that made climbing in and out of the tall vehicle difficult, and potentially dangerous. I told her to take the Mini to work; Jonas and I would use the Land Cruiser for our trip. We delayed our departure until a flatbed arrived to haul the Audi to the mechanic’s shop not far from my office.

On the way out of town I stopped to have the oil changed on the big Toyota. While that was happening, I called Sam Purdy to ask him to please retrieve the Audi from the repair shop and leave it at my office, so that Lauren could have her car once Jonas and I were back from New Mexico.

I didn’t know the reason, but after Sam had retrieved the Audi from the shop he had decided to take it to Frederick instead of using his Cherokee.

• • •

I raised my hands, palms up, toward Lauren. I was preparing to beg. For understanding? Certainly. For forgiveness? Yes. For freedom? Maybe.

She said, “Yes?”

I said, “I know.”

Her head snapped as her eyes found mine. She had not expected an admission. “You know what?”

In that moment—on that spot, faced with the truth—it was beyond my capability to devise a fresh layer for the too-complex subterfuge I was living.

My unless
,
I knew, had spawned its own unless. I sat down.

I said, “I know Sam was in Frederick that night. I did not know until right now that he had our car.”

Lauren seemed steady. She was a litigator, accustomed to hearing unexpected words from witnesses. I knew she was good at appearing steady even when she wasn’t.

I went on. “The woman? Justine Brown? She was doing Michael McClelland’s bidding. She’s the one who broke into our house and ransacked Grace’s room. She’s the one who beheaded Grace’s teddy bear.”

Puzzlement clouded Lauren’s eyes. She had expected something specific, but not that. “She what? What are you saying? Back then? That was her? And you knew all this?”

“She was threatening Simon and Grace. McClelland had sent her. Sam and I caught her following us. We ended up with her camera. We have the pictures she took. She had been stalking Grace and Simon.”

With an exotic note of bittersweet in her voice, one I had never before heard, my wife said, “Alan, do I need to Mirandize you?”

She wasn’t getting it. “No, you need to understand that Sam didn’t have a choice that night. He was—”

“Oh my God, oh my
God
! Alan, stop! I think you should call Cozy.”

I didn’t know how the conversation would end, but it wouldn’t end with me calling my lawyer. “Sam was protecting his son and our daughter. Justine Brown would have killed them. We had no time. We were out of options. He couldn’t put together enough evidence to make a case. There was no other way to protect our children.”

Lauren’s expression was of profound disbelief and an equal measure of disappointment. The disappointment sliced through me. Her violet eyes were wide, her lips parted. She said, “Sam was the Boulder cop, the one she was dating?”

“She got close to him. Yes. It was part of McClelland’s plan.”

Lauren returned to the beginning. “Grace? This woman was threatening Grace?”

Good.
I nodded. “She’s the one who broke into our house. Ransacked Grace’s room. She stalked the kids. Sam’s son. Our daughter. McClelland had already failed to get us. You, me, and Sam. Justine Brown had tried to get Sam and me, too. When that didn’t work, McClelland sent her after our kids. She would have killed them. I have no doubt.”

“You have no doubt? Are you judge? Or are you jury? Or wait, both?”

Defending myself from Lauren’s scorn was a fool’s errand. I said, “Sam told me later that she admitted it.”

Her eyes screamed belief and disbelief at once. “She confessed?” she said.

“I only learned that recently. Sam didn’t tell me in advance about his plan. I thought we would do something to stop her after I got back from New Mexico. Something together.”

She pounced. “You didn’t know? Sam didn’t tell you he was going to kill her?”

I heard that question for what it was: A lawyer’s question, not a wife’s question. Not a mother’s question. She was eyeing ways to diminish my culpability.

The distinction she was drawing wasn’t important. Even if I didn’t know, I
knew
. I said, “He told me right after. But not the details.”

Lauren’s eyes lost their fire. She said, “That’s when you should have told me. That’s when we should have gone to the police.”

It was my turn for disbelief. “To turn Sam in?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

“For saving our daughter’s life?”

“For killing a woman. Murder, Alan. Homicide.”

“For saving our daughter’s life, Lauren. Please.” She exhaled twice, with no breath in between. “That woman would have killed Grace and Simon,” I said. “Maybe even the next day. Sam confirmed it with her.”

“We don’t know that,” Lauren said. “Not for sure.”

“Sam knew it. I couldn’t risk it,” I said. “Could you?”

She stared at me. The meter between us became the Grand Canyon.

I had asked an impossible question. She had no answer. In- stead she moved on to a different accusation. “You knew that Grace was in that kind of danger? And you didn’t tell me? Her
mother
. We could have found a way to solve this. Together.”

I didn’t know exactly what I was being accused of not telling my wife.

That I was complicit in Justine Brown’s homicide?

Or that I knew that Justine Brown was an imminent danger to our daughter?

Nor did I know, in Lauren’s eyes, which omission constituted the greater sin.

40

L
auren said, “You didn’t trust me, Alan.”

I had imagined a version of this conversation with Lauren many times since the night Sam went to Frederick. Each imagining took me to the same spot on the edge of the same perilous cliff. In each version, on that rim, my balance impaired, Lauren would challenge me about trust.

“You didn’t trust me, Alan.”

I always got stuck formulating a reply. From her perspective, a dichotomy would be clear. I would either trust her. Or I would not.

But I never felt the luxury of black and white.

Would trusting Lauren mean believing she would act, as I had acted, to protect our family, our daughter, at all costs?
If I trusted that Lauren would act to protect our family, then after I confided in her—whether that was three years earlier, or that day in my office—she, too, would have remained silent about Frederick.

Or would trusting Lauren mean believing she would do what was right, what she was sworn to do, what she was obligated to do?
If I trusted that Lauren would act legally and morally, then after I confided in her she would have acceded to the law’s requirements. She would have felt compelled to turn Sam, and me, in to the police.

I had known all along that I would never have the freedom to blend the two versions of trust. At the end of some day—the day I chose to trust her, or the day that fate required that I trust her—I would be left knowing only one essential truth about my wife, and about trust.

Had I made a promise about trust? Had she? If so, what were the unlesses?

I’d gone back and forth scores of times. But I never settled the debate.

Of course, by being honest, I had promised to be honest. By not murdering previously, I had promised not to murder. But there was always an unless.
Right?

A gun, figurative or literal, to my daughter’s head.
This was that unless. A best-in-class unless.

All marriages have stories. In my office that day, I still did not know what trusting Lauren would mean. From our beginning together on a softball field in north Boulder, trust had always been part of our stories. Our promises. Our unlesses.

• • •

Softly I said, “What would you have had me do? Knowing the consequences?”

“I would have had you trust me,” she said. “About this, you should have trusted me.” She made it sound like an uncomplicated plea between lovers. But as a simple plea, it had never been engineered to carry the weight of the burdens of the lives of children.

“I do trust you,” I said, meaning it, and not knowing what it meant.

“This? Now?” she said. “This is you trusting me?”

It was. But by then, after Frederick, I was Gulliver, and I knew Lilliput. I was Alice, and I knew Wonderland. I was Dorothy, and I knew Oz.

To Lauren, who knew none of the places I’d been, my perspective was unimaginable. She couldn’t see what I needed her to see. She couldn’t believe what I needed her to believe. She couldn’t know what I needed her to know.

Lauren saw a simple promise broken. A promise about trust.

She could not know my unlesses. I wanted to believe that was on her. But I knew it was on me.

She said, “What would you have me do? Now that I have this?” She pulled Tres’s folded drawing from her purse. She threw it onto the coffee table between us.

I lifted the paper into my hands, glancing at it long enough to recognize that I was holding the evidence that would indict Sam. The three-year-old testimony of a savant kindergartener? That alone would not convict him. Never. Not without corroboration.

But this drawing, from that night? With the detail I was seeing?

A jury would eat it up, and would convict Sam Purdy of murder. And a jury would convict me of something close enough to murder that the difference would make no difference.

Lauren said, “You asked me what I would have had you do. Well, it’s my turn. What would you have me do with that drawing now?”

“You were never supposed to know,” I said. I felt relief, lightness, saying the words, shedding the secret of my secret. “I wasn’t distrusting you. I was . . . protecting our family by insulating you from what . . . Sam and I did.

“For the kids’ sake—for all of them, Simon, Grace, now Jonas—Sam and I knew that one of us would need to have clean hands. Always. Sam and I . . . don’t.”

She seemed startled at the reality I presented. “Clean hands,” she said as she gazed at her elegant fingers. Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought she was trying to get a feel for the words, and for my predicament. I presumed, too, that she was deciding whether she could trust me about trusting her.

“It was never about trusting you,” I said. “I believed you would do what was right. That you wouldn’t risk Gracie. But one of us—you, me, or Sam—has to be able to deny everything. One of us has to be standing at the end, no matter how badly this blows up. One of us has to be able to care for the kids.

“I have been, and I am, prepared to go to prison to protect our kids. I can live with that outcome. I couldn’t have lived with the alternative. Now? You need clean hands. Gracie and Jonas need that.”

“Clean hands?” she said again, her eyes completely puzzled. “My
car,
babe? Sam used my car to commit a murder. How am I supposed to have clean hands?”

I reached to touch her. She pulled away. I said, “I didn’t know until right now that he used your car. I swear.”

“Where are my clean hands now, Alan?” Her voice had turned plaintive. “Who the hell is going to take care of our kids? Sam has Sherry for Simon. Who is going to take care of our babies?”

I could tell from the horror alighting in Lauren’s eyes that she was recognizing the dark reality she’d discovered that morning by meeting with Izza and with Elias Tres. Having met with them she was left with but two real choices. Any second she would understand what I already understood, that only one of those choices would leave her with anything resembling clean hands.

Her first option? Lauren could strike a match, a literal match, and hold the flame to the corner of Elias Tres’s drawing. Together she and I would witness the construction paper turn to ashes. A little more smoke on a day when Boulder was choking on the stuff.

Lauren was a seasoned prosecutor. Despite its allure, she would see the flaws in that solution. Witnesses would be left behind. Izza would know she handed Lauren the drawing. Elias Tres would know that Lauren had it.

Lauren’s other remaining choice was the one that would leave her with clean hands. She could pick up her phone and arrange for the police to arrest Sam Purdy and me for questioning in the murder of Justine Winter Brown.

We would be prosecuted a world away, in Weld County.

Sam would attest that he took Lauren’s car that night without permission.

Sam and I would, separately, agree to plea bargains. We would embrace any deal presented to us so that Lauren would have clean hands.

“No matter what? McClelland wins,” Lauren said as she began to get her arms around the only resolution. “He’s still standing.”

I couldn’t argue with her analysis. Michael McClelland would win this round. “The kids will be safe,” I said. My words were intended to acknowledge our rival’s victory but also underscored the enormity of our consolation prize.

“Safe?” she scoffed. “Not safe. McClelland isn’t done. He won’t stop.”

Sam and I will go to prison. Lauren will have clean hands. The kids? The kids will have a life without their fathers. Each will endure another loss. God.

And Lauren? She will awaken each morning with no safety net beside her.

It wasn’t the outcome that Sam and I had wanted. But it was the one we were ending up with.

• • •

I heard a click and then the sound of someone trying to turn the doorknob on the door that led from my office to the hallway. Because I was sitting in the seat where my patients usually sat, I was facing that door.

Lauren heard the noise, too. “Don’t tell me you’re expecting someone?” she said. “Not now. Make them go away.” The frustration in her voice was so thick it fogged the air between us.

“I’m not expecting anyone.” I was sure that I had locked the door after I followed Lauren into the office. For me, it was reflex. “No one should be here. I will—”

I heard the sound of a key sliding into the lock. I said, “Shit.”

Lauren puffed her cheeks. I knew well what exasperation looked like on my wife’s face. That’s what I was seeing. Complete, end-of-her-rope exasperation.

I thought,
Comadoe. How did he get my key?

I reached for a weapon, grabbing a heavy crystal turtle from the table.