Missing Persons Page 14

  “That woman” was Hannah. “I’ll think about it,” I said, curious as to why Sam was suddenly so concerned about Jaris Slocum’s welfare.

  “You have other reasons, don’t you?” he said.

  “What?”

  “For asking about Reese.”

  The boomerang of subjects threw me. All I managed was a solitary, “What?”

  “Thought so.”

  I had been trying not to sound defensive; apparently I wasn’t succeeding. The truth was I wasn’t that interested in Reese. Reese was a foot in the door. I wanted to hear Sam’s thoughts on anything to do with the Millers, hoping to hear something that would ease my mind about my last meeting with Bob.

  I said, “No, no. What you said at Simon’s hockey game got me thinking, and I’ve been wanting to hear what you know about Reese. Not as a cop, just as a parent.”

  “Yeah? That’s all you’re wanting to know, what I know as a parent?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Pardon me if I don’t believe you.” Sam’s thunderous strides punctuated the silence that followed. Boom, boom. Boom, boom. He broke the tension by asking, “What do you know about the Pearl Street Mile? I’m thinking it’s more my distance than 10K.”

  The Pearl Street Mile is a summer evening race run around the Downtown Boulder Mall. Compared to the carnival spectacle of the massive holiday weekend Bolder Boulder, the Pearl Street Mile is a relatively sedate event.

  “Not much.” I told him what I knew, adding, “You’re going to pass on the Bolder Boulder?”

  “No. Just trying to find the right distance for my running style.”

  “And you’re thinking you’re built for speed, not endurance?”

  My sarcasm was rarely wasted on Sam.

  “You take what God gives you, you know.”

  Nor his on me.

  “I know.”

  Sam pulled up short and put his hands on his ample hips. I stopped a couple of strides later and turned back to face him. He wasn’t breathing hard but each exhale temporarily hid his round face behind a miasma of fog.

  My neighborhood, Spanish Hills, is a rural enclave of mostly elegant homes-ours was one of the few exceptions-on the hillsides that comprise the eastern rise of the Boulder Valley, not far from the scenic overlook on the Boulder Turnpike. The western rim of the valley is formed by the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, and by comparison the vanilla hills of the eastern rim are, well, wimpy.

  The spot where Sam paused on our run was on the top of a rounded ridge just north and east of my house. From where I stood, Sam’s right ear was totally obscuring the rock formation known as Devil’s Thumb. I’d always thought that the huge natural sculpture more closely resembled an altogether different part of the devil’s anatomy, but maybe that was just me.

  “What?” I asked for about the tenth time that morning.

  “You got something. So tell me what it is, get it off your chest. No secrets, just get it off your chest.”

  Sam wasn’t being a bully. He was perfectly capable of it, but at that moment he was merely making me an offer. The features on his face suddenly lit up just a little. The phenomenon was illumination, not insight. Far behind me the morning sun was breasting the almost imperceptible arc of the wide horizon of the Great Plains.

  Sam and I had been here before. I knew something I’d learned in therapy that I thought he should know, but I couldn’t tell him about it. With a few exceptions, the rules said I couldn’t tell Sam anything a patient had told me. Life had taught me over the past few years that assiduously adhering to those rules was sometimes as dangerous as breaking them. I was confident that I would ultimately decide what to reveal based on that reality, and that with enough creativity I could find a way to tell Sam what I wanted to tell him without the rules ever knowing they’d been sullied.

  Below us, the headlights of a car snaked down the dirt and gravel lane that led to my house. In the predawn shadows I couldn’t identify any features of the car. The guy who delivered the morning paper? No, it wasn’t him; he had a rusty, old post-World War II Dodge Power Wagon that sent its bass rumble bouncing through the hills. In its own way, the sound was as distinctive an announcement siren as the syrupy melody of the ice cream man.

  I watched the car’s progress until it disappeared behind the contour of an intervening hill. It was probably the nanny that Adrienne, our urologist neighbor, sometimes brought in to watch Jonas at an ungodly hour so she could keep her morning surgical schedule.

  To Sam, I said, “Do you guys know much about the house next door to the Millers? The one that’s for sale?”

  “Us guys?”

  “The cops.”

  Sam started jogging in place. The sight of the ruby fabric stretching across his thick thighs made me think of a matched pair of prosciutto di Parma.

  He took off down the trail. I did, too. Over his shoulder, he said, “There something you think we-us cops-should know about the guy next door?”

  After a few strides I replied, “Not really.”

  “Not really? Or not at all?”

  I didn’t know enough about the Millers’ neighbor to answer Sam’s question, and I wasn’t totally comfortable with the territory I was taking him, so I asked, “What kind of fighting did Reese have trouble with?”

  “If you’ve been watching all that cable then you know what those kids have been through. He’s a good kid.”

  He hadn’t answered my question. I was forced to hustle to keep up with him; the pace he was setting for the second mile was way too fast. “You mean been through with his mom?”

  Without any hesitation, Sam said, “What do you know about the trouble with the kids’ mom?”

  Startled, I realized three things. The first two? The eastern sky was brightening, and the day had begun. Number three? Maybe there hadn’t been anything in the news about the difficulty that the Miller children might have had with their mom, and I’d just told Sam Purdy that I knew something he didn’t think I should know.

  Oops. The information wasn’t particularly important. The fact that I had an avenue to know it? Sam would find that important.

  24

  The pace that Sam set for the last mile and a half of our run precluded chatting. Despite my usually rigorous bicycling regimen I was seriously winded by the conclusion of our morning jaunt. To my relief Sam was, too.

  As soon as we’d come within sight of my house I’d started looking around for the car that had come down the lane a little earlier. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in front of our house. It wasn’t in front of Adrienne’s either.

  The hue of the sky told me that we’d arrived back where we’d started shortly before six. I invited Sam in for coffee. He declined. “Sherry has Simon. She’s bringing him back over early so she can get to class. I need to be home to feed him and get him off to school.”

  Sherry was Sam’s ex. She was living in Northglenn, a suburb north of Denver, and attending school at Auraria. She’d sold her flower business and was studying to be an EMT. The custody arrangement that she and Sam had negotiated was so complicated that I thought it would require single-variable calculus equations to put it on paper. But the plan worked; I’d not once heard Sam complain about the convoluted logistics.

  He opened the door to his old navy Cherokee. In the thin light the dried muck on the lower third of the squat body made the car appear to have a custom paint job. Almost. “How many miles you have on this thing?” I asked.

  “Odometer broke at one-forty-seven-something. That was on the day that the Supreme Court decided who our president was going to be. So more than one-forty-seven. Plenty more than one-forty-seven.”

  “How old is it?”

  “It’s a ’90.” He climbed in. The concave driver’s seat accepted his rear end the way Lauren’s out-thrust hip supported our daughter’s cute butt. Naturally. With just the slightest trace of a smile in his eyes-it was impish, almost ironic-he said, “You know what? That makes this car the same exact age as Mallory
Miller.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  He wasn’t done. “And the other girl, too. I’m sure you remember her. She was a 1990, too.”

  The one who had been murdered in the dark hours overnight on another Christmas Day. The pretty little blonde whose one-time beauty-queen momma wanted her daughter to be a beauty queen, too. The one whose pathetic father had carried her lifeless body up the stairs from the basement like a spray of damaged flowers. Yes, I remembered that other girl. Too well.

  “See you,” Sam said. “Thanks for the run.”

  The Cherokee chugged north down the lane. Before it was out of sight the rumble of the old Dodge Power Wagon signaled that the newspaper delivery guy was heading in our direction. I watched his headlights dance in the grasses before I stepped inside and started a pot of coffee. A few minutes later I was still wet from the shower when Grace announced the beginning of her day. My sleepy wife crashed into me in the doorway as we rushed toward our daughter’s room.

  I cherish morning in our home. I love the soft carelessness of my wife after she’s slept, her flesh exposed near the unbuttoned top button or two of her pajamas. I love the fragrance at the nape of my daughter’s neck after a night of sweet dreams. I love the frantic energy that the dogs bring to each and every dawn.

  I adore the tang of fresh juice and the texture of bananas and the yeasty smell of toasted Great Harvest bread. I adore the first sip of hot coffee almost as much as I adore the aroma, and I relish the light that pours over the infinite plains and fills our little kitchen seconds before it jumps up and causes the crystalline formations on the Flatirons to sparkle like the facets of diamonds.

  No, that day I wasn’t necessarily thrilled about running around like a madman in order to make it to my office for my 7:15 appointment downtown, but it was, I figured, all part of the package.

  And all in all, it was a damn good package. I felt that way almost every morning and felt great fortune that almost every day in my home started with the unspoiled promise of fresh bliss.

  A year and a half earlier, Lauren had bought me a new BMW Mini as a gift. The generous gesture was intended to snap me out of a professional funk that I’d been sliding into, and her choice of cars paid homage to an old love of mine, a classic Mini Cooper named Sadie that I’d adopted in my youth. I drove the gift Mini on nice days for over a year before I sold it. I didn’t sell it because I didn’t like it. I sold it because every time I drove it I felt as though I was taking a holiday from responsible parenting. All the data said it was a safe car for its size. The problem, though, was its size. Compared to an elephantine Ford Expedition-and way too often on Boulder’s roads that was exactly the comparison I was forced to consider-my little Mini felt like a dainty ladybug.

  I’d put an ad in the paper after the previous autumn’s aspen season had peaked and ended up selling the Mini to a sophomore volleyball player from CU who had apparently convinced her parents that the little car was safe enough for her.

  When I pressed the button that opened the garage door the car that was waiting to take me downtown to my office was a three-year-old, four-wheel-drive Audi wagon with 27,000 miles on it. I’d bought it from Diane’s next-door neighbor when she moved to Phoenix to trade the cold of Colorado’s winters for the heat of Arizona’s summers. The Audi was a fun car. Not as much fun as the Mini. But fun enough. It could handle all but the deepest snow, there was room in the back for both dogs, and-most important-it had more airbags than cylinders, much more sheet metal than the Mini, and, rational or not, I didn’t feel like a lunatic when I strapped Grace into the backseat.

  I was only two steps away from the open garage door when I spotted a fresh set of headlights snaking down our lane.

  I stopped. Four cars at my house before 7 A.M.? For us, that constituted a parade.

  The approaching car had a throaty rumble, not as thumpy-thumpy as the newspaper guy’s Power Wagon, but certainly not that of a lightweight, well-mufflered, catalytic-converted Honda or Subaru either.

  Despite the incipient dawn the headlights were aimed right at my eyes and they blinded me until the car was about twenty feet away. I stood still, waiting for the reveal. Finally, the driver turned the car abruptly to the left and pulled it to a stop that was short enough to cause the vehicle to slide a foot or so on the dirt and gravel.

  The car was a shiny black Camaro that was much, much older than Sam’s Cherokee, but still a modern automotive wonder compared to the paper guy’s ancient Dodge truck.

  Bob Brandt climbed out from behind the wheel. He didn’t kill the engine, however, and the growl of the big motor in the Camaro continued to thunder off the hillsides. Bob didn’t say “Hi,” or “Good morning,” or “Sorry to intrude,” or anything else that most people might say in similar circumstances.

  I didn’t say some things, too. I didn’t say, “What are you doing here at this hour?” or, “How the hell do you know where I live?”

  My home phone number wasn’t listed. My home address was a carefully guarded secret. I didn’t encourage patients to call me after hours. I certainly didn’t encourage them to drop by whenever the hell they felt like it. Whatever early-morning calm the serenity of my family in my home had afforded me evaporated like the steam from pancakes on a hot griddle.

  I was feeling violated by Bob’s presence in front of my garage. But at some level I also felt grateful for another opportunity to connect with Bob about Mallory Miller.

  Bob spoke first. That was fine; it was definitely his turn. “What do you think about my car?” he asked. The Camaro’s motor-had he told me once, or twice, or ten times that it was a 396?-provided a percussive accompaniment that sounded like a big sub-woofer with an electrical short.

  I had no intention of chatting about cars with Bob at seven o’clock in the morning only steps from my front door and my darling daughter. “Good morning,” I said, while I told myself that Bob must have a reason-a good reason-for mounting this kind of intrusion.

  Bob was dressed in his ubiquitous outfit. Chinos, long-sleeve blue dress shirt, denim jacket-the fleece-lined one. Trail runners. He appeared nervous. I’d never before seen him outside the confines of my office, though, and was more than prepared to believe that he spent much of his life appearing nervous.

  “I have something…” He was looking at my Audi. “That yours?”

  He sounded surprised, as though he expected someone else’s car to be in my garage. “Why did you get rid of the Mini?”

  He asked as though he been wondering about it for a while and thought that he deserved an explanation. I wasn’t going to go there with him, either.

  “You like this better?” he asked, perseverating on the car.

  I counted to three. “Bob, you said you have something… What? Something you wanted to tell me-”

  “Something to give you. Is it the turbo? That’s the turbo, isn’t it?” He was still focused on the wagon. “Fixated” might be a better word.

  “I assume you came to my house because something feels urgent, Bob.” I could have just said, “Why are you here?”

  Bob didn’t get my drift. He thought about my question for a few seconds before he said, “Should it?”

  Seriously schizoid people relate the way people with sleep apnea breathe at night: in fits and starts. No organic rhythm. Just enough to maintain life. Sometimes not even that much. Nothing that should be natural and predictable about interacting with another human being is natural and predictable for them.

  Allowing the realization to settle that Bob’s appearance at my home at dawn was undoubtedly meaningful, I forced my discomfort that he knew where I lived away from center stage and stuffed some composure into my voice. I asked, “What brings you to my home so early in the morning, Bob?”

  What was I thinking? I was thinking “Mallory.”

  “I have to…” he said. I thought he’d stopped himself before he completed the sentence. “I wanted to give you… what I’ve been writing. We talked about it
. Remember?”

  You bet I remember.

  He leaned into the Camaro and came back out with an old, beat-up, dark-blue box imprinted with the logo of Kinko’s, the copy palace.

  “Here it is. It’s not done,” he said.

  He held it out for me. I took it. The ream-sized carton was far from full. I guessed it held fewer than a hundred pages. I was already wondering: Is this it? Is this really the reason he’s come to my home shortly after dawn? To give me part of a novel?

  “Don’t read it, yet. I’ll tell you when.”

  “You want me to have it, but not to read it?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought my question warranted a better explanation. Bob, apparently, didn’t agree. “That’s it?” I said.

  “I have a long way to go. I’m still trying to get it… I want it to be right before you read it.”

  “Couldn’t you have just held on to it until you decide that you would like me to read it?” Or until you see me tomorrow?

  He chanced a glance at me. The tenor of his look was questioning whether I had suddenly become mentally challenged. As though it would explain everything, he said, “This is a copy. It’s not the original. I have one, too.”

  He’d totally missed the point of my question. With Bob, that happened with some frequency.

  “Okay,” I said. I was already putting together a list of things we’d have to discuss during the next day’s session.

  “You’ll understand,” he assured me. “When I tell you it’s okay to read it, you’ll understand.”

  “You’ll explain?”

  “Yes. You like it?”

  I raised the box up a couple of inches. “I’ll let you know. After you tell me when I should read it.”

  “I meant the Camaro. It’s cherry, don’t you think?”

  I gazed at the glossy black car, its pristine paint marred only by the faintest hint of Spanish Hills dust. “Sure is,” I said. “It sure is.”

  “Yep,” he agreed.

  I took a deep breath and asked, “Bob, have you thought more about the question I asked you last week? Whether you know something about Mallory Miller that you should share with the police?”