Line of Fire (5 page)

7

O
phelia—from our earliest introduction in the days after her trailers were towed into Spanish Hills—seemed to live her life breasts-first. From the tai chi she practiced outside to greet the dawn on temperate mornings while wearing a wife-beater that had belonged to her mysterious ex, to the late-day, head-bowed, arms-up-and-out curtsies she did to pay homage to the dance of the sun above the Rockies, Ophelia insisted that her breasts be a primary component of her persona.

Our geographic circumstances—we were neighbors across a narrow lane—dictated that I was seeing Ophelia a lot, which meant I was seeing a lot of Ophelia’s breasts. It didn’t take long after I first made her acquaintance to become certain that Ophelia’s daily revelations were nothing sexual. She had no intent to entice, or to flirt, or to seduce. What she did—for a reason that my Ph.D. in psychology was insufficient to help me fathom, and at the end of the day the reason was none of my business—was celebrate her upper body.

When I suggested to Jonas, my son, that he try not to stare, he reminded me that I had told him after we’d seen
Shakespeare in Love
together—an experience that had left both father and son surprised at the screen time devoted to Gwyneth Paltrow’s uncovered breasts—that no one had ever been hurt by gazing at a boob.

He was right. I had said that then. And I had meant it. In fact, if I had second rules of parenting sons, the gazing-at-a-boob canon would have been in contention. But the parenting I had to do at that moment was about Ophelia, so I explained to Jonas that the issue wasn’t the noticing of her breasts, but the staring at them as though he’d bought a ticket to a show and they were the only members of the cast.

“It’s a matter of respect,” I said. “Ophelia can dress how she pleases. I don’t imagine she expects you not to notice her breasts, but I think she expects that you treat them as just a part of who she is, not all of who she is.”

Jonas’s bewildered face conveyed his impression that I had to be kidding.

I tried an example. “Your sister has pretty hair. People compliment her on it all the time. And then they move on.”

Jonas thought about it for a moment. “I got it,” he said. “I should just treat Ophelia’s boobs like they’re there. And move on.”

“Breasts, not boobs. But yes,” I said.

He took two steps. “Should I tell her they’re nice? Like Grace’s hair?”

I still had some parenting to do.

• • •

Sam’s infatuation with Ophelia may have been part of a grand Cupidian design, but I had goosed the process along.

On a classic June Front Range evening, Sam had arrived at my house for a visit. The temperature hovered in the high seventies and the humidity was in the teens. I greeted him at his old Jeep Cherokee, my back to Ophelia’s temporary residence. From his perch on the driver’s seat, Sam had a clear view of my new neighbor’s property.

He asked, “Is the county going to allow that?”

He was seeing Ophelia’s trailers for the first time. The trailers—novel to him, but not new models, not even close—had been towed down the dirt and gravel lane two weeks earlier. The delivery had to have been an elegant elephant pas de deux.

“They towed them in while we were at work. We knew some equipment was coming, but we didn’t expect the doublewide. Our new neighbor moved in the next weekend. She says the housing is a temporary arrangement until construction is finished on her new place. She’s going to build a little farther up the hill.”

“I don’t think the county allows that,” Sam said. “You can’t do that here. Hell, you can’t do anything here. This is Boulder.” He began to pull himself from his car.

I’d known Sam a long time. Despite his law enforcement responsibilities he wasn’t someone who gave a lot of thought to Boulder County planning, and if he did, his predilection would not have been toward enforcement. If Sam were developing a sudden interest in the issue I could shuttle him up Sunshine Canyon toward the mountain enclave of Ward, where building-code breaches and zoning violations were a competitive sport and as much a point of civic pride as the docile dogs that roamed, and owned, the center of town. A quick jaunt through Ward would reveal enough code-abusive dwellings to keep a platoon of inspectors busy until the return of Halley’s Comet.

Sam blinked twice. And then he froze, one foot on the dusty ground, one foot in the old Jeep. I watched his head lock into place a split second before I heard a screen door slam.

Ophelia, proprietress of Casa de las Dos Casas
—
House of the Two Houses
—
had just stepped outside onto the little deck adjacent to the west side of her prefabricated abode. I looked over my shoulder as she combined a cleansing breath with the beginning of a long, deep curtsy in the direction of the gathering sunset. She was wearing her ode-to-whatever outfit—a long, gauzy skirt that skimmed the tops of her bare feet and a scoop-necked, sleeveless T-shirt that was a couple of sizes too large. The T had the faded numeral 23 across the front. The curtsy was elaborate; Ophelia extended her arms while pinching the hem of the billowing skirt fabric between her thumbs and index fingers.

“That’s your new neighbor?” Sam asked.

I said, “Ophelia. I like her a lot. She’s going to be much better than the last ones.”

“Low bar,” Sam pointed out. “Your last neighbors were murderers and rapists. And arsonists. And a lawyer. There are lifers in Cañon City who have cell mates who are ‘better’”—Sam used air quotes for that word—“than your last neighbors.”

The last neighbors had, during their exceedingly brief residence in Spanish Hills, caused my family and me more than a few heartaches. And they, collectively, committed a plethora of felonies, including the torching of the century-plus-old farmhouse that had once stood where Ophelia’s doublewide was plopped.

“Want to introduce me?” Sam asked.

Ophelia was continuing her imitation of a statue of a woman doing a curtsy. Recent experience informed me that she could hold that pose for a long time.

I think Sam was transfixed by Ophelia from that moment on. Prior to that day, he had been hanging on to a long-distance love affair that ended the way cars run out of fuel on flat ground. Gradually. Sam woke one morning to the awareness that he’d been dumped a couple of miles back. The slow death of that love didn’t ease his recovery from being dumped. His reaction to Ophelia was the first indication that he had any interest in climbing back into the relationship driver’s seat.

Ophelia could have that kind of effect on a single man. Even at thirty paces, given halfway-normal distance vision.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m happy to introduce you. I think, maybe, you’ll like her.”

“Maybe?”

“She’s an independent thinker,” I said. “There was a time when you might have had trouble with her . . . perspective on things.”

“But I’ve grown?” Sam said, daring me to argue. He looked at me for a moment, which meant he looked away from Ophelia for a moment. I think he took his eyes from her just to prove to himself that he could. Then he said, “Should we, I don’t know, give her a chance to . . . finish what she’s doing? Maybe cover up a little?”

“You mean her breasts?” By then, I was no longer bashful about Ophelia’s breasts. I had come to a certain acceptance that she wasn’t.

Sam said, “They’re almost . . . exposed.”

I was tempted to point out to Sam that if the angle were a little better, or if he stepped a little closer, he would likely discover that all the important parts were indeed available for inspection. But he would learn all that himself soon enough.

I said, “If you’re waiting for Ophelia to pull on a sweater, it’s not going to happen unless a cold front blows through. That outfit is pretty much par for the course. I’m thinking winter may bring a change, a genuflection to the climate, so to speak. If this makes you uncomfortable, I’ll get back to you come November, introduce you then.”

“Really?” Sam asked. “That’s how she dresses?”

“That’s a casual look. She dresses it up when she goes out. But otherwise? Yes.”

“Lauren doesn’t care?”

“We don’t talk about Ophelia’s anatomy much, but as far as I can tell, Lauren is pro-boob, and rather amused by it all. I think Gracie coming-of-age might prompt a maternal reconsideration. But for now, my wife is cool. The ladies get along well.”

Sam said, “Sherry would have put blinders on me. She is so not pro-boob.”

I smiled at the image of Sam with blinders. “This extended curtsy will last a couple more minutes. It’s her personal homage to the evening celestial show.”

“Like a spiritual thing?” Sam asked.

Sam was old school. Where spiritual inclinations were concerned, he preferred organized religion—the more organized the better, as long as it didn’t involve Catholics or Mormons doing the organizing—to any free-form spirituality. Especially to any of the out-on-the-edge spiritual movements he tended to trip over from time to time in Boulder.

Boulder had rubbed off on Sam. He recognized that an occasional meal could be composed without contributions from animals. He exercised outdoors. He had learned to appreciate the nuances of the local microbrews.

But New Age anything so wasn’t his thing.

“It is spiritual,” I said. “But not formal. She’s not a Druid, or a Wiccan, if that’s what worries you. What she practices seems to be within the realm of garden-variety Boulder spirituality.”

“That’s supposed to be reassuring?” Sam said. “Is she Tantric?”

Tantric?
“Would that be good, or bad? From your perspective?”

He did a little two-step. I had no idea what that was about. He said, “I’ve been curious. I’ll admit that.”

“Maybe Ophelia’s your girl,” I said.

His phone appeared again. He said, “I can Google it.”

“No need to do that for me,” I said. “Want a beer? I’d love to hear about your Tantric inclinations.”

I’d pushed him too far. He said, “Don’t be an asshole, Alan. And yeah, I’ll take a beer. What you got?”

A stop at Liquor Mart was on my to-do list. I said, “I think all I have left is some Karma that Lauren bought.”

Sam glared at me. “Is there a beer called Karma?”

“Want one or not?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

I wasn’t. I herded him toward the door. “Are we done talking about zoning?”

“Think so,” he said, stealing a final glance toward Ophelia.

We stepped inside to a pair of dogs eager to offer their canine hellos.

“What color is Ophelia’s hair, Sam?”

“Not quite as dark as Lauren’s.” Lauren’s hair was as black as Beelzebub’s soul.

I was impressed. “Just checking,” I said.

“Is she a big LeBron or Michael Jordan fan?” Sam said. “The twenty-three?”

“It’s not about hoops. I asked once,” I said, shaking my head. “She wanted to know who they were.”

• • •

By the Fourth of July, Sam and Ophelia were an item.

That Independence Day we all gathered on our roof high above the Boulder Valley to watch the celebratory fireworks displays. Me, Lauren, Grace and Jonas, and Ophelia and Sam. Sam’s son, Simon, was with his mother.

Ophelia made homemade root beer for the kids. The adults were drinking beer or a devious and deceptive cocktail Lauren concocted with Peak Spirits Eau de Vie, a potion made from organic peaches, magic, and snowmelt on the Western Slope.

I counted eighteen different displays of fireworks visible from our rooftop that year, hardly a record. The fireworks we could see were clustered mostly to the north and northeast, toward the parts of Boulder County that were on the edge of the Great Plains prairie. The only display anywhere close to the mountains that year was the one at Folsom Field on the university campus.

A wet early spring and an unseasonably dry May and June had conspired to leave the foothills grasslands crisp, and the forests around them—scarred by acre after acre of beetle-killed pine—were tinder-dry.

Everyone without a serious DSM diagnosis was being compulsive about fire.

It could have been wishful thinking on my part, but I thought that even the smokers—the only class of serial litterers still on the loose in Boulder County—were tossing fewer butts from their car windows than they had in the past.

Red Flag Warnings were posted from Pueblo all the way north to the Wyoming border.

The soon-to-arrive monsoon season, with its daily afternoon dumps of tropical moisture from the gulfs of Mexico or California, would be a mixed blessing. The intense bursts of rain would mitigate the aridity. But the thunderstorms would spawn fierce lightning parades that could provide ignition.

It turned out that the monsoons teased that year, but they never really arrived.

As Labor Day approached, Boulder’s mountain backdrop was nothing but kindling.

Sam, the ace detective, had become my new occasional neighbor.

8

I
n the days after my patient died firefighters struggled to tame the raging Fourmile Fire. Boulder held its collective breath. Everyone knew someone who’d been evacuated. Almost everyone knew someone who had lost a home to the flames. During the extended battle to control the huge perimeter each fresh gust brought a burst of anxiety to town. The danger posed by a simple shift in prevailing winds was palpable.

The Fourmile Fire was the unthinkable wildfire we had all been dreading. What scared us all even more? We all knew it could have been more devastating. Hell, no one had died. The fire could have consumed Gold Hill on that first day. Or it could have started miles closer to town.

Even worse? We all knew that the Front Range was as parched the day the Fourmile Fire was contained as it had been the day the wildfire started burning.

• • •

On the evening that the end of the fire was in sight Lauren’s mood was bright and she was more animated after work than I’d seen her be in a while. We were straightening up the kitchen after a supper of
chilaquiles
. She was loading dishes. I was washing pans.

The kids—back in school after their summer breaks—had descended to their basement domain. Jonas was undoubtedly doing homework. Gracie? Not so reliably.

If I had to bet, I would have bet that she was dancing, or thinking about dancing.

Lauren said, “Do you remember—it was a few years ago—there was a suspicious death in a rented house on a ranch outside Frederick? A woman in her midthirties.”

After my conversation with Sam in the ICU a few days prior, the word Frederick got my instant attention. I inserted therapy-cool modulation into my voice before I said, “No, doesn’t ring a bell. Why?”

“Sure you remember. It was the woman who we thought might have known Michael McClelland. She’d spent time at the state hospital the same time he was there?”

• • •

Michael McClelland had been my patient when I first met Lauren, years before. I eventually connected him to the abuse and death of his sister. He had retaliated by trying to rip apart the lives of everyone he felt was culpable for his subsequent arrest.

That meant Lauren, Sam, me.

His assault on us had been deliberate and relentless. He’d orchestrated it first from his job in the Severe Storms Laboratory at NOAA, later from the Colorado state hospital in Pueblo, and most recently from the state prison in Buena Vista.

He had proven to be a brilliant, tenacious adversary.

• • •

I said, “I guess I was trying to forget.”

Lauren explained. “Our office was involved briefly during the initial investigation because of the potential connection to McClelland. At the time she died the Weld County DA had some doubts about manner of death. The ME said suicide, but their investigators thought that the suicide appeared odd, almost staged. Didn’t we talk about it?” I shook my head. “We didn’t?” I was confident I would have remembered. “Anyway, the ME determination stood, and Weld County closed the file. This isn’t ringing a bell?”

“Vaguely,” I lied. “Frederick PD? Or Weld County?”

“Sheriff—the house is in the county, just outside the city limits. The evidence that perplexed them at the time was that the woman had gone through a progression of possible ways to kill herself that night—overdosing on prescription drugs and alcohol, slitting her wrists with a razor in the bathtub, maybe others, too—before she finally shot herself through the head.”

I glanced at Lauren to see if she was watching me. She wasn’t. She was closing the door to the dishwasher. I asked, “How would they know about the progression? Did she leave a note?”

“No note. Drugs on a table next to a glass of whiskey. Antidepressants. Her bathtub was full and there was a solitary razor blade right there on the rim of the tub—the kind of blade no woman would allow anywhere near her legs.”

Sam had once liked Currie. Perhaps it was the residue of that affection that inspired him to offer her a menu of ways to accomplish her demise. Sam had permitted her to pick her poison.

“No shallow cuts?” I asked. “No horizontal wounds?” I was asking about the razor blade, about signs of trepidation. I was asking questions that Lauren would expect a psychologist like me to ask.

Lauren took a seat at the counter across from the sink. She hadn’t started the dishwasher. The damn thing was so loud it would have made our conversation difficult.

I assumed Lauren knew what I was asking with my questions about wounds. People making suicidal gestures that involve slicing a wrist often first make tentative cuts. The trepidation cuts are typically too shallow to do the job, or they run in a less-lethal direction—horizontally instead of vertically.

“No,” she said. “No blood at all. It was as though she rejected the prospect of cutting herself before she started. “Have you ever seen that sort of thing? In one of your patients?”

“Can’t say I have,” I said. “Practice cuts, sure. But setting it all up, and then walking away to do something else? I don’t think so.”

As committed as I was to maintaining my grand lie with Lauren, I was not a capable liar. I wondered if she could sense how unconvincing I felt trying to preserve the pretense. If she was having any doubts about my act, she didn’t share them with me.

She asked, “What about from your training? Is that a common thing for suicidal people? To show that kind of ambivalence about method? To literally set all of her options out in front of her? At one time?”

I had to force myself to think about it dispassionately. “At the end? Like you’re describing? I would have to say no, it’s not typical. The back-and-forth about method is common, but the ambivalence tends to be prodromal—it happens during the suicidal-ideation phase. When you interview people who have survived a serious suicide attempt, they almost always report an interval that included a mental rehearsal of how they planned to take their life. It’s not uncommon for the person to try on different methods during the ideation/rehearsal phase. Eventually they settle on a method that feels right, or at least feels palatable enough to them that they become convinced they can . . . do it.”

“Palatable?”

“Bad word. Possible. Doable. At the end of the day, if you can’t swallow the pills, or make the cut, or jump off the bridge, or step off the chair, or pull the trigger, you can’t kill yourself. If she intends to die, the method has to be something she can do.”

“What do you mean ‘if she intends to die’? Isn’t dying always the intent?”

I shook my head. “It helps to think about suicidal behavior as having two pairs of defining variables. Picture a simple chi square—a two-by-two graph. On one axis is the dichotomy of intent—the person intends either to die or to survive. On the other axis is the dichotomy of lethality—the person chooses either a method of high lethality or one of low lethality.

“The two-by-two chi square allows for four possible combinations.” I turned over our grocery list and sketched a chi-square with four boxes. “People with low intent sometimes choose methods of high lethality. They can end up dying, almost by accident, because death wasn’t what they were seeking. The opposite is people who intended to die, but they chose a low-lethality method. They’re the ones who believed that five aspirin and two shots of vodka would kill them. But they end up surviving, again, almost by accident.”

“You drew four boxes. What are the other two?”

I squeezed water from a rag to use to wipe the counter. “I described low intent/high lethality, and high intent/low lethality. The other two are low intent/low lethality, and high intent/high lethality. People in both those categories get the outcome they intended. Low intent/low lethality is the classic ‘cry for help’ suicide attempt—someone who intends to survive but is eager for someone else to know about the gesture. That person doesn’t wish to die, and she chooses a method that makes death unlikely. High intent/high lethality is the guy who puts a shotgun barrel in his mouth and pulls the trigger with his toes. He intends to die and chooses a method that is damn near certain to do it.”

“Where does the woman in Frederick fit?”

“Two out of the three of the methods you described were seriously lethal.”

“Which one isn’t?”

“Wrist cutting can go either way. Unlike, say, jumping off the Golden Gate, which involves little skill beyond resolve, wrist slitting takes steady hands to achieve a lethal outcome. It’s quite lethal if it’s done correctly. But she may have decided she wasn’t capable.”

“Does that mean she was demonstrating ambivalence?”

“Her? No,” I said. “Not about dying. At the end, she chose to shoot herself in the head. That’s not a method of ambivalent intent.”

“But she was ambivalent about method?
How
to kill herself? Right?”

“Yes, but only about method. Is there something new in the case? Why is this coming back around?”

“There’s new evidence.”

“After all this time?”

“Happens.”

“Significant?”

Lauren shrugged. “The woman had a visitor the night she died.”

Sam? Someone else? Shit.
“I don’t see the relevance. From a suicidology point of view, the visitor could have been the precipitant for the suicide.”

Lauren reached over her shoulder and literally patted herself on the back. “That’s what I said. But the DA’s investigator in Weld County told me to keep an open mind.”

“The presence of a visitor might even provide a cogent explanation for the confusing suicidal behavior,” I said.

“Really? Please, go on,” Lauren said.

“The decision—to kill herself—may have been abrupt. Not premeditated. We mental health types like to think about suicide as part of a progression that goes from depression to hopelessness to suicidal ideation to suicidal planning to . . . finally reaching a decision to carry out the act. The last stage is the attempt.

“But there are exceptions. Sometimes suicidal behavior doesn’t adhere to the progression. If someone visited the woman that day—”

“Night,” Lauren said.

I’d known it was night. My misdirection was an intentional effort to augment my credibility about the ignorance I was feigning. I was operating well beyond my skill level.

“It’s possible that the visitor was the precipitant. Maybe the visit had a great impact. The person may have told the woman something, or showed her something that caused acute distress. Maybe, you know, the person gave her some news that night, something distressing—something powerful enough to precipitate a suicidal crisis that was not present before the visit.”

Lauren said, “It could have been a breakup. Or the person brought news of a death. Like that.”

“Anything that tapped some preexisting vulnerability. We know that the woman had a tough mental health history, right? She had an extended stay at a state hospital. It’s impossible to know for sure but the visitor might have been the precipitant.”

“In that scenario, the progression you described earlier would have been compressed. Yes? She wouldn’t have had an extended period of contemplation about whether, or how, to kill herself. The decisions—to kill herself and how to do it—could have been made on the spot. The mental rehearsal you were talking about could have taken place quickly. Hours, even minutes. But not days. Not weeks.”

I let out some more line. “I see where you’re going, but I’m not sure I agree. Remember her mental health history. She may have done some extensive contemplation about suicide beforehand but had not made a decision before that night. I bet if someone looked back closely at the victim, you might find a vulnerable individual who was predisposed to suicidal behavior.

“Most of us don’t react to bad news by suddenly trying on a sequence of methods we could use to kill ourselves. But a psychological autopsy might reveal signs that this woman was vulnerable, or even inclined, to self-destructive behavior.

“In her suicidal process, all that may have been lacking was an acute precipitant. The visitor may have delivered that.”

Lauren added, “She obviously hadn’t decided on method, though.” She walked back around the counter and started the dishwasher. The thing was on its last legs. We were using it more and more as a place to store dirty dishes. Neither of us wanted to take the time to research and buy a new machine. Or to invest the half day off work it would take to wait for someone to show up to install it. She raised her voice. “This helps me a lot. The point of all this is that the Weld sheriff is asking us to check some things in Boulder as he considers reopening.”

“What’s the Boulder piece?”

“She lived here before she moved to Frederick.”

I didn’t know if that was news. “Reopening would mean what?”

“They’re considering changing the determination of manner from suicide to homicide.”

Shit, shit.
“Homicide? I don’t understand. Why?”

“That’s what the investigator hinted at on the phone. Otherwise, why reopen?”

“Wow. They must know something else about that visitor.”

“I think I agree. Description? Identity? A witness who saw something, or someone.” I followed Lauren into the family room. She made the short trip without using her cane and with only a mild limp. “Elliot wants me to take a look at what Weld County has, but he’s not gung ho about investing any more of our resources in this.”

Elliot was Elliot Bellhaven, Lauren’s boss, the Boulder County DA. “Should be interesting,” I said.

“Can’t wait,” she said.

I was pretty sure she was being sarcastic.