Line of Fire (27 page)

44

H
e said, “Jesus.” He kicked a foot so it scuffled on the linoleum. He shifted his weight. He did the kicking, scuffling motion a second time with the other foot.

He said, “Diane? Really?”

He knew the facts. He sought understanding. Failing that, he wanted a perp. But I wasn’t quite ready to string Diane up. “She’s not well. I think she mistook Lauren for somebody . . .”

“Yeah?” he asked. It wasn’t a curious yeah
.
It was a dismissive yeah
.
A
so what
yeah. It was his way of saying that lots of people are not well, but that Diane was the one who shot my wife in the back. He asked, “You got somebody particular in mind?”

“I think Diane made an assumption. Time of day. Maybe a car outside. Hair color. Similarities.” I heard myself. I was sure I sounded to Sam like someone who was trying to convince himself about something.

Sam wasn’t about to cut me any slack with my theory. He said, “But the . . . the misidentification? It involved somebody Diane wanted to shoot? In the back?”

It was a tough point to argue. “She hasn’t been well. Not for a long time. I didn’t see how bad it was. Or maybe I didn’t want to acknowledge how bad it was.”

Sam was suspicious of the defense, however tepid, that I was sketching out for my friend. I loved Diane. I also knew that my anger at her would eventually show up, the way that it’s always the visitor you don’t want to see who arrives with the most suitcases. I knew that when my rage arrived and pounded on my door, it would move in for an extended stay. I knew that my rage would loom large, that it would scream loud, and that despite my efforts to tame it, it would prove mean enough to blow fire.

Until it showed up, I had no plans to go looking for it.

Sam said, “They haven’t found her. I heard—Sengupta is the lead detective on this—that Raoul is concerned that she might have, well, you know.”

Suicide?
I hadn’t gone there. But the moment Sam raised the issue of Diane’s self-destructive risk I gave some consideration to my friend’s state of mind. “It’s possible,” I said. “She could have decided to try to . . .” I hesitated as I tried to think of how and where Diane might take her own life. She was in possession of a handgun, obviously. Would she shoot herself with it? I didn’t think so. But when I woke almost twenty hours earlier, I hadn’t been thinking that she would shoot anyone else that day, either.

Where might she go to kill herself?
I was drawing a blank on that one.

“You guys checked her house?” I asked.

Sam nodded. “Early on. That whole area’s been evacuated because of the fire. Lee Hill and Olde Stage are closed.” Those were the primary routes that led to Diane and Raoul’s foothills home.

I said, “Raoul is back in Boulder?”

“Sengupta told Lucy he flew in from out of town. Got back around dinnertime.”

Sengupta hadn’t been a detective for long. I’d met him once. Pleasant guy. Kept his cards close to his chest. I was getting the impression that Sam was taking some incomprehensible pleasure from speaking Sengupta’s name. Foreign words didn’t exactly roll off of Sam’s Iron Range tongue. That he pronounced his colleague’s surname with accented grace was apparently a source of simple joy for Sam on a day that was threatening to come to a conclusion without even a trickle of the stuff.

I said, “Raoul was in Chicago, or maybe Cleveland, I think. Did Sengupta say anything else? Had Raoul spoken with Diane . . . since . . . ?”

I thought, but didn’t say,
Since she shot my wife.

Sam shook his head and raised his hands in some don’t-blame-the-messenger mime-ology. “Everything I know is thirdhand. From Sengupta, through Lucy, mostly.” I swallowed a wry Sengupta grin. “But, no—Raoul says he hasn’t spoken with her. As of maybe twenty minutes ago, no sign of her since this morning. Everyone’s out looking for her and her car. APB. BOLOs across the state.”

Be on the lookout for a 2008 Saab convertible, metallic gray . . .

Sam leaned in again. He lowered the volume of his whisper so it was closing in on mosquito-buzz territory. “I know you haven’t been outside, but it’s not normal out there. Resources are scarce. Because of the fire, and the evacuations, and all the closed roads. Our assets are supporting the firefighters.”

“I get it,” I said. On another day, Lauren’s shooting would have been the biggest news in Boulder. That day? Not even close.

Sam said, “You haven’t talked with Diane, have you? You know, after?”

After she shot my wife in the back?
I had not. As Lauren slumped to the floor, Diane had walked from my office, leaving the spare key dangling in the deadbolt.

Sam’s last question left me uneasy. I was ready to go back into the room to be with Lauren. I placed my hand on the door. I paused, turned, and said, “Was that a detective question? Or a friend question?”

He replayed the audio in his head. He winced. “Forget I asked that,” he said. “Please. Please. Instinct. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

Sam said, “Hold on.” I stopped. “The fact that I’m here with you? And that I’m not in an interview room on Thirty-third asking for my lawyer? That means it’s possible Lauren didn’t tell anyone else what she knows.”

“Or?” I said. The day had provided me with a wealth of thinking and pondering time. “There’s a less optimistic possibility that would explain your temporary freedom.”

Sam had no trouble filling in the blank. “I know, or maybe she did tell. And with the fire and everything my colleagues just haven’t gotten around to us yet. They don’t expect us to . . . scramble.”

I nodded. “If that’s true—if Lauren had spoken with a colleague before she came to see me—there’s a good chance it’s not
us
they’re looking for, Sam,” I said. “When Lauren stopped by, she didn’t think I knew anything about Frederick. She knows I was in New Mexico that night—she didn’t think I was any part of Tres’s story.”

“She thinks it was just me?” Sam spoke with profound relief. I found his relief to be generous. I doubled the gratitude I felt at being his friend.

“She thought it was just you. But I told her the truth.” Sam narrowed his eyes and shook his head as though the motion could erase my words. “I told her what I knew.”

“No,” he said. The
you fucking idiot
was understood.

“I told her that I was every bit as responsible as—”

“You told her? What the f—? Are you—”

Kidding you? Nuts?
Does it matter?

“This is about both of us, Sam. Not about you. I explained to Lauren why Currie had to die that night, that I was part of it, that I would have done the same thing that—”

“No.”
Sam reached out. He put a hand on my shoulder. It felt heavy, like I imagined one paw of a big grizzly might feel a split second before the other paw swatted my head to the next county. “You were the one who was supposed to take care of my kid. That’s how this was supposed to . . .”

We were talking past each other. I said, “Simon has his mom, Sam. The moment Diane walked in? Lauren was furious at me, not at you. She was furious that I hadn’t trusted her.”

The nurse told Sam his time was up. Sam snorted, then he mumbled, “Almost.”

She spread her feet and opened her mouth to assert her authority. She wanted none of Sam’s attitude.

Sam hadn’t been quibbling with her announcement that his visit was over. Sam’s retort—“Almost”—had been an existential commentary. The nurse had no way to know that, of course. If you didn’t know Sam Purdy, you wouldn’t suspect by looking at him or listening to him that he had an existential streak as rich as a mother lode.

Sam hugged me again before he left. “One more thing. This is
not
a detective question. Has Izza told anyone else about her mother’s situation? Or about what Tres saw that night?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Why?”

He shook his head. “You’re not thinking clearly. If Lauren told her colleagues what she learned from Tres before she went to your office this morning, those colleagues don’t know you’re complicit in Currie’s murder. Lauren didn’t know you were complicit before she went to see you. So her colleagues can’t know, either.”

“Which means—”

“In their view, you still have clean hands,” Sam said.

Sam was excluding an important variable from his scenario. The unless. I wasn’t about to ignore the unless. “That’s true,” I said, “only if Lauren dies. If she dies, I may have clean hands. Or I may not.”

Sam nodded, agreeing. The circumstances felt surreal. If I suffered a loss so great I could hardly imagine it, I might be free.

“If Lauren lives,” I said, “she knows I don’t have clean hands.”

Sam had more comfort with conspiracy than I did. He said, “She knows, but does she tell? I think it depends on whether she told anyone what she knew before she went to see you. If she didn’t share earlier, then she’s going to have a tough call to make. She can become part of our enterprise or she can turn us in.”

“Her best move is to turn us in,” I said. “It’s the only strategy that guarantees that one of us would be free to take care of the kids. The clean hands would be hers. That’s how it should be.”

“It is the safest strategy. If she said something to a colleague before she went to your office, even something vague, then she has no choice—she has to turn me in,” Sam said. “But only me. She’s sharp; she’ll recognize that the only way to keep her own hands clean is to sacrifice me for the kids. You? It’s not so clear.”

The nurse walked by, tapping the face of her watch.

I had promised myself I wouldn’t resort to accusation. I couldn’t help it. I said, “You drove her car, Sam. What the hell were—”

“My water pump died. I was ready to go. I wasn’t sure I could be ready again. I had your keys. I took your car.”

“You risked us all.”

“Come on. I was risking us all anyway,” Sam said. “I didn’t expect to get caught. I couldn’t have done it if I thought I was going to be caught.”

I stared at him with a jumble of feelings in my heart. “The second rule of criminals?” I said. “None of them think they’ll get caught.”

Sam nodded. He left without another word.

• • •

He returned two minutes later. His hands were in his pockets. His eyes were narrow. He said, “I have to ask this. I think you were implying earlier that you know who Diane’s real target was when she shot Lauren. Yes?”

My heart dropped so fast I had an urge to lunge to catch it. Immediately, I saw where Sam was going. I didn’t move. I didn’t blink. I didn’t speak.

Sam went on. “That person might need some protecting. Seeing that Diane is not in custody. And that she is likely still armed.” He paused to allow me to process the risks. “And in case you’re forgetting the rules, this circumstance falls right smack in the middle of one of the exceptions to doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“Imminent danger?” I said.

“Yeah. That should cover it.”

The nurse who shooed Sam away earlier was jogging toward us to shoo him away again.

Sam reached out and touched my shoulder. He said, “Just saying.”

• • •

I left Amanda a voicemail asking her to call me, regardless of the hour. I said it was urgent. I sent her a text and an email with the same message.

Despite my best efforts to stay awake, I fell asleep in the chair beside Lauren’s bed.

I woke, completely disoriented, to the sound of her IV pump alarm. For the briefest of moments, the world was one where my wife hadn’t been shot by my dear friend. The respite from reality slipped through my fingers in the time it took to blink my eyes thrice.

I threw water on my face as a nurse silenced the machinery. It was almost three in the morning. I had two dozen text messages, almost as many voicemails.

Amanda had not returned my messages. That truly concerned me.

I scrolled for the kids’ names in the lists. I checked for Ophelia’s.

No news, good news,
I said to myself.
I thought I would try that one on as a mantra.

I stopped scrolling when I spotted Casey Sparrow’s name in the roster of text messages. My lawyer had reached out just before nine o’clock the night before.

I told Det Sengupta he could talk to you tomorrow morning at 10:30. Come by my office on S Broadway at ten. We’ll drive together. Sorry, best I could do.

The nurse asked me if I had eaten. I had to think. I said I had not. She told me to take a break, get something to eat. She said she would text me if there was any change.

I made her promise to be in touch. She crossed her heart.

I kissed Lauren’s forehead and went in search of fuel. I hoped something was open on Broadway so I could get a sandwich.

Once I made it down to the first floor, I could see that the western sky was lit in a way that felt obscenely celebratory. The fire was not under control. Billowing clouds of fresh smoke reflected the dancing lights of the flames back toward the city. Ashes floated in the air.

I still smelled dread.

I wondered if there was any way to get up to the hospital roof. I was sure that from up there I could see the precise locations of the flames on the near ridges.

With that thought, I felt an epiphany land on me with what felt like physical mass
.

I did next what lost despairing souls have done throughout the ages at the precise moment they are struck upside the head with an epiphany.

I used my mobile phone to call a taxi.

45

T
he driver I drew in the taxi lottery was a cannonball of a woman far enough north of seventy that her age created doubts for me about the wisdom of her occupation. I wondered whom she’d had to offend to earn the overnight shift in Boulder, which had to involve shuttling a steady stream of drunks from bars and clubs to homes or after-parties.

She was not only round, she was also little. No part of her head extended beyond the lowest perimeter of the seat’s headrest. Only about a third of the quantity of hair I expected protruded up from the top of her head into my visual field. My thoughts wandered initially toward chemotherapy, but within seconds I was weighing the possibility of alopecia.

In response to her jolly, “Your cabbist, sir,” I began hoping for alopecia. I asked her to please take me to the east end of the Mall. That was as specific as I planned to be.

She surprised me with a quick turn of her head. I leaned forward and spotted a mouthful of beautiful teeth and a smile as bright as my daughter’s. She said, “I don’t get too many pleases and thank-yous after the bars close. I am appreciative. That end of the Mall is what, Pearl and . . . Fifteenth Street?”

I had no doubt she knew the geography, but I played along. “I think that’s right.”

“Pretty sure it’s a one-way in the wrong direction. I’d have to circle back—go all the way to Walnut on Broadway, or weave through on Fourteenth and then around. Is Fifteenth and Spruce okay? Or Sixteenth and Pearl? Probably save you a buck.”

I smiled, an act that reminded me I’d had the kind of day that caused a smile to feel as though it might fracture something in my face. My cabbist brightened her grin in return. At the hospital my appearance had earned me a few turned heads—I remained styled, after all, in bloodstained scrubs and blood-filled shoes without socks. In response to the pain in my calf, I was limping the limp of an advanced-stage syphilitic.

The driver had to have noticed all that as I approached and settled into her car. Despite it all, she was looking out for me. I was certain she needed the buck more than I did. I would accept the savings graciously and give it back to her as part of her tip. I said, “Sixteenth and Pearl is fine. Thank you.”

I explained that I might need to get back to the hospital urgently. She said, “At your beck and call till dawn,” and handed me a card with her personal mobile number listed below her job title: Cabbist.

Once she dropped me off I kept my head down as I hugged the storefronts along Pearl Street. Two police cruisers passed during my short stroll, one driving in each direction. The one heading east slowed beside me as I neared Frasca. The officer kept pace, right behind me, until I reached the next corner.

I stopped to tie my shoes, which were loafers. The squad moved on at a crawl. I wondered if
my
presence—and not just the presence of any random, bloody, disheveled pedestrian—had been noted. In a determined attempt to keep my paranoia in check, I tried to convince myself it was just a cop on patrol making a citizen nervous to see how said citizen would respond to the duress. I had witnessed Sam do a version of the same provocation a dozen times. It was second nature to him.

I had told him it wasn’t one of my favorite things about cops.

He’d laughed and told me that was a second rule about cops: cops don’t care much about citizens’ favorite things about cops.

• • •

From the moment I climbed out of the taxi I had been trying to recall the silly ditty that Diane had been singing the first evening we’d visited the garish flat off Pearl Street together.

The rhyme came to me as I turned the corner. “
Who you gonna tell? Everybody. What you gonna sell? Sell me, baby!
”

I was prepared to decipher a four-digit code from that song so I could enter it into the lockbox to retrieve the keys that would allow me inside the front door. I might also have to guess an additional code for the alarm system. I had already decided to go with
t-e-l-l, s-e-l-l,
or
b-a-b-y.
My money was on
s-e-l-l,
a sales agent word, for the lockbox,
b-a-b-y
for the alarm.

The next step of my grand plan would be to find the disguised door that Diane had told me was located somewhere behind the staircase, the door that would take me inside the garage. From there, I would use the private elevator to get from the garage into the garish flat. My planning beyond that point lacked specificity. But I was neither alert enough nor in the correct frame of mind to engage in the kind of critical thinking that would have helped me recognize the inherent perils of my unplanned steps.

My anticipatory ditty-singing was for naught. Even from the sidewalk in front of the gallery, I could tell that the door fronting the sidewalk was not quite latched. A quick glance up the stairs confirmed that the door to the flat wasn’t even closed all the way—a bar of light the width of a paring knife blade allowed a dull, though distinctive vertical gap to glow on the side of the door nearest the knob.

Diane had to know I would find her.
That’s what I was thinking. I was also close to concluding that she wanted me to find her. If I couldn’t warn Amanda about Diane, second best was finding Diane myself.

I paused before I began to trudge up the stairs. I thought of calling Sam.

But Sam was a cop. I wasn’t ready to have the cops take over. Not before I had spoken with Diane. I knew well that this might be the last opportunity I would have for an unmonitored conversation with Diane. I needed that opportunity.

I thought of calling Cozier Maitlin, Diane’s criminal defense lawyer. Cozy lived close by near Mapleton Hill, only two minutes away by car. But Cozy would most certainly have advised Diane not to speak with me. That would have been appropriate legal advice, given the circumstances. The thing was—I wasn’t ready to have Diane suddenly begin to act appropriately. Not quite yet.

I thought of calling Raoul.

But Raoul was suddenly the most wild of wild cards. I didn’t know whether Diane wanted to kiss him. Or whether she wanted to kill him. Whatever she yearned to do would distract from my desire to have her undivided attention.

The truth was that I wanted to talk to Diane alone. I needed to ask her why. I needed to learn why she had opened fire in my office. I needed to understand
something
.

I called no one.

My calf grew weary of stair climbing after a measly four treads. Weary wasn’t the actual feeling. No burn I’d ever experienced in my quads during the ascent of an impossible grade on a high mountain pass on my bicycle came close to the burn I experienced in my wounded calf after those first four steps. I reconsidered my action plan, hopped back to start, and quickly found the disguised door that led to the garage.

Diane’s convertible Saab was inside.

The elevator cab was on the ground level.
Coincidence?
I wanted to think so, but it hadn’t been a day when coincidences were falling in my favor. I concluded that Diane had used the keys from the lockbox to unlock the elevator. I would find her upstairs. Waiting.

The elevator and I were on level 0. The control panel had options for 1 and for 2. I didn’t have a gut feeling about where in the flat I would find Diane. If she were fire-gazing, the best view of the Dome Fire would be from that expansive deck on the roof. I chose 2 because it was the highest option, and because I’d just learned I was better at descending stairs than I was at climbing them. Moments later, the elevator door opened silently into the short hallway on the bedroom level. The hallway was too dark to navigate. I found the flashlight app on my phone and tried to use it for illumination.
Ha.
All that it illuminated was my location. I turned it off.

The climb up the stairs to the roof was slow and painful. Although I didn’t think my presence at the flat would surprise Diane—the unlocked elevator had erased any doubts I had that she was anticipating someone’s arrival—I didn’t want to startle her with anything sudden. I stuck my head out the door at the top of the stairs and I called her name at a volume calculated to traverse the deck but not to wake the neighborhood.

She didn’t reply. I checked to make sure the door was unlocked before I stepped outside. The middle-of-the-night glow that was lighting the sky across the rooftops of downtown Boulder caused me to suck a volume of foul air into my lungs.

For a fleeting second I entertained the possibility that I was wrong about everything, that Diane wasn’t in the downtown flat at all—she was back up at her home on Lee Hill, somehow, with a match, or that Army-Navy Surplus flamethrower. The thought didn’t linger. My mouth had fallen open at the incongruous sight of flames spinning cyclonically from the tops of torching trees. The flickering night sky seemed almost as obscene as the burning trees. A slight shift of my gaze, only a few degrees to the north, allowed me to see a jagged line of persistent flames assembled like a cavalry of fire, awaiting orders. That section of the burn was scorching the top of the ridge that separated Boulder Canyon from Sunshine Canyon.

Every breath I took tasted like a fireplace with a clogged flue.

• • •

I spotted a dark form on one of four sleek teak chaises that were pointed toward the sunset on the far edge of the expansive roof deck. On nine random glorious Boulder nights out of ten, the location of those chaises would identify prime cocktail-sipping territory. This would have been the tenth night.

The form didn’t change shape as I approached.

“Hey,” I said when I was halfway there.

If it was Diane, she didn’t respond.

Oh
God
. I tasted a new flavor of dread. I narrowed my eyes to look for variations in the shadows below the chaise, trying to spot a dark stain on the dark wood in the dark night on the darkest of Boulder’s, and my own, dark days.

I was looking for the ripe, shimmering, swollen shape of a puddle of warm, pooled congealing blood. I didn’t see it.

I thought,
Diane wouldn’t use a gun, she’d OD.
That was how she would kill herself—an overdose. All irony about the day aside, Diane just wasn’t comfortable with violence. She was the girl who closed her eyes at cartoonish mayhem at the movies.

There would be, I assured myself, no blood pooling beneath that expensive chaise. If that was Diane I was seeing, and she had chosen to end her life, it would be a still form slowly yielding the last of its warmth after a toxic death.

Slightly louder, I said, “Diane? It’s Alan.”

Nothing. I stepped forward until I could identify the dark form on the chaise. It was the fake-fur throw from the tangerine couch downstairs in the living room. Someone had carried it up there while they rested on that chaise, eyeing the fire.

Behind me, I heard a noise. I translated the sound as coming from something weighty moving across heart redwood.

I turned in time to see a shadow on the glass panel of the door.

I heard a click.