Line of Fire (6 page)

9

W
e had two dogs. Emily was a late middle-aged Bouvier des Flandres—a big, intimidating black bear of a Belgian herding dog. Fiji was a young Havanese. She believed herself to be of royal stock and deserving of the life of a princess, but she had the inbred attitude of a dog whose ancestors’ job had been to protect a Cuban peasant’s chickens from the local foxes. The Havanese was twelve pounds, give or take. For most of her short life the dozen pounds had consisted primarily of silky hair and relentless cuteness. Only recently had she shown signs of growing out of the manic part of her youthful personality. I was grateful.

Emily was grateful, too. She had suffered through Fiji’s puppydom with profound reluctance.

I waited to phone Sam until I had the dogs out for their late evening stroll on the dirt and gravel lane near my house. Emily bounded off the moment I said, “Go.” She had earned the right to accomplish rounds of her parish solo. I kept Fiji close. She had way too much confidence in her ability to go paw to paw with red foxes and raccoons. Coyotes and porcupines? I didn’t even like to think about it.

“Got a minute?” I asked when Sam answered. “Or are you otherwise engaged?”

Sam’s car was at Ophelia’s. I didn’t think that they were carnally occupied. Old used doublewides are not renowned for their insulation, thermal or sound. I knew more about my neighbors’ intimate schedule than I ever wanted to know.

“What we do is our business.”

“I’m down the lane with the dogs. Join me. It’s important.”

“Can Ophelia come?”

“Not that kind of conversation.”

Two minutes later I heard Sam approaching. I heard him because he was wearing flip-flops, which I considered another sign of Ophelia’s influence. Sam didn’t yet wear flip-flops with aplomb. Each step came accompanied by a loud slap.

Emily bounded out of the blackness and blocked Sam before he got within twenty yards. The big dog’s greeting took a good minute. Then it was Fiji’s turn. Finally, mine.

“What’s up?” Sam said. I handed him a beer and a bottle opener. “Appreciated,” he said as he popped the top. I held out my hand to get my bottle opener back. Sam included the just-removed beer cap in the bounty. I pocketed it. If I hadn’t been there I’m pretty sure he would have Frisbeed the thing into the tall grasses.

It might have nicked a piece of granite. Caused a spark. Fried the whole valley.

“What you said you were worried about in the ICU? Remember?”

He stopped the bottle inches from his mouth. He said, “We’re not talking about my intercom, are we?”

“No. We’re never going to talk about that again. Lauren got a call from an investigator in Weld County. She has a meeting tomorrow. They might have a new witness. Someone who saw a visitor. She thinks Weld wants to reconsider manner.”

“Of death? Jesus.” Sam lifted the bottle the rest of the way and finished half of the beer before he lowered it. “That’s not good,” he said. “What kind of witness?”

“She doesn’t know.”

Sam lifted one foot from the ground and wiggled his toes. He kept wiggling his foot until I looked down, too. He said, “Huh. I get blisters between my toes from these things. Does that go away? Or do the kind of people who wear these just live with it?”

Sam was talking about the flip-flops. The kind of people who wear them? I didn’t want to know. I said, “The cool people get used to them.”

He finished the beer before he mumbled, “Asshole.”

I said, “You were thirsty.”

“That wasn’t thirst.” He examined the empty. “What about time frame?”

“If you wear them every day, you should be good to go in a week. Your toes will adjust. Your feet will feel liberated. When that day comes we’ll have a ceremony and we’ll make you an honorary Westerner.”

“I wasn’t asking about the damn flip-flops. What’s the time frame for when the witness saw whatever the witness saw? Prior to time of death? After? That’s important. Given my role in things.”

“I didn’t want to seem too curious with Lauren. When she senses curiosity from me, she tends to stop talking about her cases. She’s most comfortable talking about her work when I’m helpful or when I seem only mildly interested. If I’m distracted, she stops. If I ask too many questions, she stops.”

He said, “I’m the same way with civilians.”

“Like me?”

“Yep. You be a civilian.” He extended the hand with the empty bottle. I took it. I wasn’t proud that I allowed Sam to treat me like his personal Eco-Cycle attendant. But he knew I wouldn’t trust him to recycle the bottle on his own. Sam was not bashful about exploiting advantages. “I guess we’ll know soon, huh?” Sam said.

“I will let you know if Lauren tells me more.”

“Basically, what, you’re playing dumb with her?”

“I am, and it’s not as easy as you would think.” Sam laughed. I went on. “Reading between the lines? It sounds like somebody is thinking the scene was staged. That the visitor arranged things to look like a suicide—a suicide where the victim couldn’t quite make up her mind about which method to use.”

Sam’s expression told me he wasn’t buying it. He said, “My cop brain says that’s bullshit. Why go to all that trouble? The self-inflicted gunshot was plenty believable. Skull bits and brain matter are compelling evidence.”

“You staged it,” I said. Injecting reality into the conjecture seemed appropriate.

Sam shook his head in a way intended to convey that I was an idiot. “But I didn’t manufacture any of it. I gave Currie options. Door A was an overdose with a whiskey chaser. Door B was to slit her arteries in the bathtub. Door C was the gun. She couldn’t decide. She peeked behind each door, but she couldn’t pick. I told her if she didn’t choose, I would. I wasn’t eager to wait around for the drugs to work. I wasn’t confident she could cut her wrists, and I didn’t want to watch her bleed out in the bathtub, anyway. The single gunshot? I hated doing it, but it was the best option.

“To get rid of the evidence about Door A and Door B, I would have had to erase all signs of Currie’s ambivalence, and that would have meant messing with what had become a crime scene. Detectives are pretty damn good at recognizing when someone has screwed around with a crime scene. So I left things as they were. I figured it would look like the home of an ambivalent suicide victim. It was what it was. The more I screwed around with the scene the more I increased the risk that someone would see evidence of my hand.”

“And now?”

“Now? Apparently they think there’s a killer who overstaged the set
after
he killed Currie. That’s bad police work.”

“But it isn’t exactly in the realm of fantasy. The investigators may be able to convince the DA.”

Sam sighed in a way that caused his cheeks to puff out. “I know, I know. The investigators may have the big picture kind of right, which worries me. I’ve been hoping all along it wouldn’t matter—that the clarity about the way she died would supersede everything else.

“There’s evidence that Currie was holding the gun that killed her. I made sure that her fingerprints were in the right places. Ballistics have to be consistent with a self-inflicted gunshot because that’s what happened—if you leave out the part about my . . . insistence. GSR had to reveal that gunshot residue was deposited in the right places. Blood spatter was uninterrupted. I made sure of that. Unless the mystery witness was looking through a window to see what came down, I don’t see my jeopardy in this.”

“Her weapon? Or yours?” I asked.

He hesitated before he said, “Not mine.”

“Are you really as . . . confident as you sound?” I almost said
complacent.

“No,” Sam said. He spent a long interlude staring at the western sky. Only the faintest evidence of the sunset was visible. “Truth is, I have been, up until this week. Confident. But now, not so much.” He shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “that I got you into this.”

“Bullshit,” he said.

My ears heard Sam’s protest as genuine, and generous. He was telling me that he didn’t want me to feel responsible. He knew I shared responsibility, but he wasn’t comfortable with me sharing the burden. “McClelland was my fight,” I said.

“That fight broadened to include cops, especially me, a long time before Frederick. And anyway, you didn’t make me pick Currie. I’ve picked some good women in my life. And I’ve picked some less-than-good women. I made plenty of bad choices along the way that led me to that house, that night. No matter how I spin it, I feel the same way I felt then. I would make the same decision, again.”

I was skeptical-plus. “I’ve replayed it a hundred times. Fifty of those times, easy, I tell Lauren what I’ve done. Keeping this secret eats at me.”

“You’re not thinking of talking, are you?”

I hesitated before I said, “No.”

Sam glared at me before he walked ten feet away. With his back turned he said, “After we found her camera? With the pictures of our kids? I admit I went back and forth a bit, but I eventually convinced myself that I was out of time. That . . . that monster was going to hurt my son. It all began to feel determined, you know? What I had to do. When I drove to Frederick it was as though I knew”—he pounded his chest with one closed fist—“how things would end. The details were in flux, but the outcome? She was going to kill our children. I couldn’t allow that. I knew when I got in the car that night that I was driving to that ranch to kill somebody who needed killing.”

His voice dropped. “You know what that’s called?” he asked me.

I did not know what Sam meant. I said, “No, I don’t.”

He faced me. “In my business, that is called premeditation.”

Sam was spelling out the stakes for us. Murder one. High stakes.

He went on. “I had convinced myself that the system wasn’t going to work for us, not in time. When she admitted she was going to do it—”

“Wait, Sam. Wait!” I hadn’t heard that part before. “She acknowledged she was going to hurt them?” He nodded. “What did she say?”

“She said McClelland didn’t consider them perfect substitutes, but they were good enough.”

Good enough?
“Substitutes for us? You and me?”

“You, me, and Lauren. McClelland wants us all. The way Currie put it that night? She said, ‘If he can’t kill you, he wants you to wish you were dead. All of you.’”

“God,” I said.

“She wouldn’t tell me how she was going to do it, only that it would be soon. Once I heard that? I’m okay with what I did.”

“Do I hear a but in there?”

“This is God’s truth—I was much more comfortable with what I did when I thought I’d gotten away with it than I am standing here right now knowing there’s an outside chance I’ll get caught. The consequences of not killing her? Unimaginable. The consequences of getting caught? God. I do not want to get caught. But I can live with it.”

“We’ll get caught together,” I said. “I won’t let you go down for this alone—”

“No,” Sam said. His slumped shoulders straightened. His tone—the soft one we’d both been using to share our confidences—took on a framework of hardened steel. He pointed at the center of my chest. I thought he was going to poke me. He said, “No fucking way.”

“This was my mess. Currie threatened my daughter. McClelland is my—”

“Currie threatened both our kids. I’ve been part of this since that first summer with McClelland in Aspen. Don’t rewrite this history. I was there.” I opened my mouth but didn’t get a word out before Sam said, “You didn’t go to Frederick that night. In fact, I think that travel and phone records will show you were in New Mexico. That, my friend, is quite an alibi. Use it.”

“I am an accomplice. Both before and after the fact.”

“Bullshit,” Sam said. “And don’t try to talk like a cop. You sound unconvincing.”

Arguing the point was futile. I redirected him to the issue Lauren had raised. “Has anyone ever tied you to her, Sam? During the original investigation? Did anyone figure out that you and Currie had been going out when she lived in Boulder?”

“We were done by then.”

“I know that. And you know what I’m asking.”

Sam stuffed his hands in his pockets. “She’d given me a bogus name when we met. I didn’t exactly introduce her around.” He rolled his eyes. “McClelland must have known—he put her up to all this. When I’ve worried about any of this over the past few years, he’s the one I end up worrying about. Not some unknown witness suddenly singing in Frederick. Fucking McClelland. He’s who I worry about.”

I woke with some regularity in the middle of the night with McClelland in my dreams, and a sharp fright in my heart.

His presence in my nightmares felt like the tip of a long blade pressuring the outer membrane of the pulsing muscle, threatening to pierce into the cavity where small cuts have big consequences. On the nights when my sleep was cut short by that blade, I didn’t so much wake from a bad dream as much as I woke to the acknowledgment of a bad, bad reality.

My reality, as surreal as it was to me every time I faced it, was that I had a nemesis. My nemesis was an ex-patient named Michael McClelland.

In some of the dreams, McClelland held the blade. In some of the dreams, McClelland was the blade. In the dreams that woke me, Michael McClelland—by profession, he was a Ph.D. meteorologist, a severe storms specialist—was my Rasputin. No matter how many times I’d thwarted him with guile, force, dumb luck, or the leverage of law, despite whatever I’d thrown back his way over the years, he kept resurrecting himself and finding new ways to come back at me. And at mine.

Sam’s seduction by Currie, her targeting of our children, and Sam’s solo determination that the only clean solution was for her to die were all part of that most recent go-round with Michael McClelland. Since then, McClelland had been convicted of murdering a cop years earlier in Aspen. He was serving a lifetime-plus in the Colorado penal system on the desolate outskirts of the mountain town of Buena Vista.

I didn’t allow myself the luxury of believing that Michael McClelland was done with his Rasputin act. When I least suspected it, I knew he would come back at me.

The tip of the blade pressing at the membrane of my heart would never let up.