Dry Ice Read online

  I watched my wife’s face as the dead air was annihilated by Case’s powerful voice. Lauren marched over and whispered something to the older of the two paramedics. He looked up at her—I think to judge whether or not she was serious—and asked a question. She replied with a nod and a single word. I think the word was “off.” He seemed to wait for her to continue, to offer him some explanation. When she didn’t, he leaned inside the cab and flicked off the radio.

  I’m sure that the assembled personnel thought my wife was being a prude about the boys playing music on the rig radio while a vic hung dead in the nearby building.

  I knew differently. Lauren might have thought that the music was disrespectful, even callous. But out here in the country, outside the public view, she would have swallowed her judgment, bit her tongue, and allowed the paramedics and the cops to have their tunes until the work resumed. Lauren had asked them to turn off the radio because the sounds were hurting her brain.

  She needed to be thinking clearly. She was concerned she couldn’t think clearly while coping with whatever it was that would be playing on KBCO.

  I went inside the house and started some coffee. While the coffee dripped I put together a cooler full of soft drinks and bottled water and filled it with ice.

  While I found a place in the shade for the cooler I overheard a newly arrived sheriff’s investigator making a loud case to Lauren that I had the legal right to grant law enforcement access to the barn since I was the owner’s proxy while she was away.

  “It’s a gray area,” she said. “There’s no need to rush any of this. Elliot’s position is clear. If we can’t get Adrienne—she’s the homeowner, it’s her barn—on the phone for permission, we wait for a warrant. Nobody wants to risk any of this. Let’s do it right.”

  I went back into the house to retrieve the coffee. I recognized that if I wanted some privacy to talk with Adrienne, calling her from inside my own home while Lauren was occupied outside felt like the best option. The time difference between Boulder and Tel Aviv or Jerusalem was nine or ten hours. Simple arithmetic told me that although it was late, it wasn’t the middle of the night in Israel. I had Adrienne’s travel itinerary someplace in the house and figured I could track her down at her hotel before she went to bed, but I decided to take the path of least resistance and speed-dialed her first on her mobile phone. It was a shot in the dark—I didn’t know if she was carrying a phone that would work in Israel.

  Half a world away Adrienne answered after two rings. Her greeting, “I just stepped away from a lovely dinner so you’d better not be calling to say hi. Did my damn house burn down? Did it?” From her tone I couldn’t tell whether she’d be happier if the answer was “yes” or if the answer was “no.” As usual, Adrienne made me smile.

  I managed to get her focused on the strange developments in Spanish Hills and from the privacy of my kitchen I explained the situation, including details—like the disappearing bandanna—that I hadn’t shared with the police who were assembled outside. A surgeon by training, Adrienne wasn’t easily flustered during crises. It was clear from her reaction to my recitation that as long as the body hanging from the rafter in the barn was a stranger to her she wasn’t going to lose any holiday sleep over the odd circumstances that were developing half a planet away in Boulder.

  She cut right to the chase when I asked her whether she wanted to permit the police access to the barn. “It’s your dead patient, so it’s your call. If you want to delay them for some reason that’s cool, put somebody on the phone and I’ll tell them I want a warrant. If you want me to give them permission, I’ll give them permission. What’s it gonna be? Dessert is calling.”

  Making the cops wait for a warrant wasn’t going to gain me any advantage. “I’ll put Lauren on. Go ahead and tell her to let them in. You guys having a good time?”

  “The best,” she said. “Be quick though, I was serious—dessert is on the way. Tell me something—in Boulder, I don’t like honey, or raisins, or nuts. Here, I can’t get enough of ’em. Dates, too. Dates? Why is that?”

  “I don’t know, Adrienne. Maybe it’s the place.”

  “Back home I’m not any more of a Jew than you are. I’d get lost if I had to drive to temple. So how come when I’m here I feel like a Jew? How does that work?”

  “Is it a good thing, Adrienne?”

  She laughed. “Good question, bubela. Yes, it’s a good thing. A very good thing. We’ll need to see if it sticks once I’m home. If it does maybe I’ll get bat mitzvahed. Though I’d probably need to find me a very, very, very reformed rabbi.”

  Adrienne’s personal life was sometimes a confused mess. Secret though? Hardly. “Am I invited?”

  “You have to ask?”

  “I’m walking outside right now to find Lauren so you can give her verbal permission to do the search.”

  “Before you do,” she said. “Two things. Call Cozier. That’s an order. You’re going to need someone to watch your back.”

  Adrienne and Cozy had been an item a few years back. That was shortly before she and Cozy’s ex-wife had become an item. She knew how good a lawyer he was. “Done already. He has my back. What’s the second thing?”

  “After they’re gone? The cops, I mean—open the doors and windows in the barn. Air it out. I don’t want to smell the guy when I get home. You understand?”

  “He’s”—I couldn’t think of a better word—“fresh. But you got it. When they let me, I’ll air it all out. Be safe. Love to Jonas.” I walked outside and spied Lauren across the way peering through the front window of the barn. I strolled over and handed her the phone. I said, “It’s Adrienne.”

  She looked me in the eyes and made a thumbs-up gesture and quickly changed it to a thumbs-down gesture. She wanted to know which it was.

  I offered the thumbs-up gesture in reply. My wife mouthed, “Thank you.” Into the phone she said, “Hi, Adrienne. Alan told you about our problem?”

  She made eye contact with Sam. He was standing a dozen steps away. After ten more seconds she gave him the thumbs-up sign. He nodded to her and then he looked at me. His gaze, I thought, was suspicious.

  I could tell he had a dozen questions for me. I knew my friend, and I knew what question would be number one: Why had I gone into the barn?

  “McClelland had left a bandanna on the barn door. That’s why I went in. A bandanna, just like with Cicero. You remember that, don’t you? What he did all those years ago? Don’t you remember?”

  “Let’s say I do. Where is the bandanna from the barn door, Alan?”

  “When I came back out and looked again, it was gone.”

  “It was gone?”

  “Yes, I think he took it.”

  “He took it? Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ah,” Sam would say.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  KIRSTEN’S ARRIVAL changed the atmosphere. She pulled me away from any proximity to the law-enforcement types and suggested we talk in her car—she didn’t want to risk being overheard at my house. I dangled some keys and suggested Adrienne’s home instead. I had to go over there anyway—given what had happened in the barn, I knew prudence dictated that I ensure that no poachers had camped out in Adrienne’s place since she’d left for Israel.

  I did a quick tour of the house and found nothing worrisome. Kirsten and I settled at the table that Peter had built for his family’s kitchen. Emily curled up at Kirsten’s feet. I’d already caught her up on what I’d found in the barn, and I was trying to explain the bandanna. “Emily’s our second Bouvier,” I explained to Kirsten. “The first one was Cicero. Shortly after I started seeing Michael McClelland for treatment, and shortly after I’d started dating Lauren, Cicero went missing. It wasn’t like her; she just disappeared one day. I eventually found her tied outside my house with a piece of twine. Someone had shaved her hair in a one-inch band around her neck and put a bandanna in place over her collar. Other than that, she was fin
e. It was a message to me—a warning—from McClelland about what had been going on. That’s why what he did today is important.”

  “This morning, after the bike ride, that’s what you saw on the front doors of the barn? A bandanna?”

  “Not right away. After you left I went downtown and tried to find the guy—”

  “What guy?”

  “Well, the dead guy. The guy who is hanging in the barn. His name is Kol Cruz. He’s the same guy you wanted permission to talk to about the bloody nose. The blood-on-my-shoes guy from last week?”

  After digesting the implications, she said, “That complicates things.”

  It wasn’t exactly what I was hoping to hear. “It turns out the phone number he had given me a few weeks ago no longer works, so I went to his loft to ask him if he’d agree to talk to you and maybe to the police. I thought if he could explain how I got the blood on my shoe it would make life easier for me with Lauren and Sam.”

  “I assume he wasn’t home.”

  I thought she was being sardonic but I wasn’t sure. “He’d apparently given me a fake address. The loft where he said he lives has never been occupied. It’s not his.”

  “You wonder…why he might do that?”

  “People lie to their therapists all the time.” Kirsten looked surprised. “What? They don’t lie to their lawyers?”

  Her delay in answering was pregnant. “Yes, they do. People lie to their lawyers all the time.” She raised her eyebrows a few millimeters. “Then you came back home and you saw the bandanna on the barn. And immediately it felt like…a private message?”

  “Because of the history with McClelland—the bandanna around Cicero’s neck? Yeah, it felt like a private message. At first I ran inside and checked on the dogs. After I saw they were okay I decided that the bandanna was telling me to go inside the barn.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “It was that clear to you?”

  “What else could it have meant?”

  She ignored my question. “You expected to…find what?”

  “McClelland. Or something related to him. Something like the note we found this morning. Another taunt. The next step in his provocation. That’s his nature. That’s what he did last time. He escalates.”

  “You often check the barn when Adrienne is out of town?”

  “I can’t remember the last time I was in there. Years, probably. Adrienne doesn’t use it.”

  “And Lauren knows that you don’t usually go in there?”

  “Yes,” I said. I knew that Kirsten’s question wasn’t whether my wife knew that I didn’t go in the barn, it was whether the deputy DA knew that I didn’t go in the barn.

  “Okay. You went into a building that you admit you never visit. Inside you found a patient of yours—a patient you had just made a special trip downtown to find—hanging dead from a rafter?”

  The scenario sounded worse coming from Kirsten’s lips than it did banging around in my head. “You should know something else,” I said. “The whole thing with Michael McClelland started with the suicide of one of my patients, too.”

  “Go on.”

  “The first time it was Michael’s sister who died. She was my patient. He had raped her.”

  Kirsten sat back on her chair. She said, “Is any of this going to be in the old police record? Will I be able to corroborate what you’re telling me?”

  Why, I wondered, do you need to corroborate it? “The suicide will, obviously. What McClelland did to her? No. The bandanna? Cicero wasn’t really hurt. It was just a taunt, like the note today. But Lauren suggested I give the bandanna to Sam. And I think I did.”

  “You think?”

  “I think. It was a long time ago.”

  “But you were sure it was McClelland who took your dog?”

  “Yes. I’ve always been sure it was him.”

  “And you feel the same way today? McClelland left the bandanna?”

  “Absolutely. I can’t figure out the connection between Kol and McClelland. Why would Kol kill himself in a barn next door to my house? Why would McClelland announce Kol’s suicide by putting a bandanna on the door?”

  “Yes?” Kirsten said.

  “It makes no sense,” I said. “But there has to be a link between them.”

  It wasn’t what she was hoping to hear. “Do either Sam or Lauren know that this guy in the barn is the same patient who was covered with blood in your waiting room?”

  “I told Sam that one of my patients had been bleeding in the waiting room. And he’s already guessed that the suicide victim is one of my patients. He doesn’t know they’re the same guy, yet. He’ll put it together, though. Sam’s good.”

  “Which means that Sam—who has already tied his missing grand jury witness’s purse to your office—is now going to tie this suicide victim to your office. Which gives him a nexus between the grand jury witness and the suicide in the barn.”

  “How? I don’t follow you.”

  “The blood on your shoe, remember? Purse at your office? Blood in your office? Dead patient in the barn? If it turns out there’s the same blood everywhere, Sam will connect those dots.”

  She was right. “I didn’t tell the police about the bandanna, Kirsten.”

  “Or Lauren?”

  “Or Lauren.”

  She shrugged. “Because there is no bandanna, right?”

  “There was.”

  “I suspect you’re going to have a hard time convincing anybody of that now. It’s going to sound contrived.” Her voice grew soft, almost tender as she added, “They’re going to think you made it up.”

  “I should have told them right away.”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference. They still would have thought it was contrived.”

  “I had no reason to think the bandanna would disappear. I intentionally didn’t touch it.”

  “I know,” she said. I felt more relieved by that than I should have—the fact that my lawyer believed me wasn’t really much of a victory.

  “It’s hard to describe what I felt when I looked back over there and the bandanna was gone. After the shock, and then after the anger and frustration were gone, I had this feeling of…almost admiration. Michael McClelland is setting this up beautifully.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Alan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just what is it he’s setting up?”

  I thought about it for a moment before I said, “I don’t know. Something ugly.”

  My lawyer shivered as though she had a sudden chill.

  TWENTY-SIX

  MY CELL rang. I checked the screen. Sam. He knew I was inside Adrienne’s house talking with my lawyer. We’d walked right past him as we crossed the lane.

  To Kirsten I said, “This will take just a second.” Into the phone, I said, “Yes.”

  “I’m at the door. I need to ask you something.”

  Dangerous ground. Did my friend want to ask me something, or did the police detective want a free shot at me? I could think of only one way to find out.

  I covered the microphone and said, “It’s Sam.” Then I lifted my thumb and said, “My attorney’s sitting right beside me, Sam. She can hear what you want to ask?”

  “I got no problem with that.”

  I nodded for Kirsten’s benefit before I said, “The door’s unlocked. Come on in.”

  “He has a question,” I said to Kirsten. “He’s fine asking it in front of you.”

  “As though he has a choice,” she said without any apparent attitude. She leaned toward me and lowered her voice. “I’m allowing him in because I want to hear his question, not because I want him to hear your answer. Do you understand the difference?”

  I nodded. I was listening for the sound of Sam opening the door. It hadn’t happened.

  Kirsten said, “This death is the sheriff’s, not Sam’s. It’s county, not city. He’s here as a courtesy, probably fishing for more evidence that ties this back
to your office and that damn purse.”

  The door opened. Emily leapt up and raced toward the front of the house. She wasn’t barking—she knew it was Sam.

  Kirsten reached up and touched my face, turning my chin toward her. She waited until I was looking in her eyes. “When I say that’s it, that’s it. You shut up. Yes?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  After Sam was done greeting Emily at the front door he found us in the kitchen. He had his notebook in one hand, a pen in the other. “Counselor,” he said to Kirsten.

  She flattened her mouth into a replica of a smile. “Detective,” she said. “You realize that this ends when I say it ends. We’re on the same page?”

  Sam put the pen and the notebook into his left hand and rubbed his right eye with the knuckles on the back of his right hand. I’d seen him do it many times before and it always seemed he did it with enough force to cause pain. “Yeah,” he said. Then he yawned. I thought that the yawn was editorial until he contorted his face trying to stifle it. When he recognized that his effort to kill the yawn was futile, he just went ahead and leaned into it. After it was over, he looked up at the ceiling before he looked at me.

  “As far as the work I’m doing is concerned our friendship has become toxic.” He paused to let the final word sink in. “The purse in the yard, the forensics from your office, this guy hanging dead in your neighbor’s barn. It’s all too much for the DA to ignore. She knows you and I are friends, and she’s ordered me to stand down temporarily so that our friendship doesn’t compromise the…investigation. I got permission to come in here to tell you that myself. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I appreciate that. Thank you.” I wasn’t surprised that Sam was being sent to the bench. I was surprised that he was telling me about it in person.

  Sam lowered his voice. “Now that I’m here there’s something else I want to say.”

  I glanced at Kirsten in time to watch her raise her eyebrows.

  “The rafter the vic is hanging from?” Sam said. “It is eighteen feet, six and three-sixteenths inches—give or take—above the floor of the barn.”