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  I stood on one of the steps and said, "Hello again. I think you may be looking for me."

  "What? Oh. Darn. It's you again. Hello." He made a mess of folding the newspaper and stood up. He towered over me by at least ten or eleven inches.

  Subtracting for the stair tread I was on, that made him six six or so.

  Involuntarily I took a sideways step away from him. I said, "Yes. It's me."

  "I didn't see you coming. I saw your car in back and expected you would come out this other door, here." He pointed at the front door of the building, then proceeded to wipe his palms on the thighs of his khakis. Before he spoke, he swallowed.

  "Hello, then. I'm, I'm Kevin." He held out his hand for me to shake.

  I stepped up to the porch and we shook hands. His was huge and soft. He offered almost no resistance during the greeting, as though he was afraid to hurt me with his grip. Shaking his hand was like sticking my hand into a warm loaf of Wonder bread. My tone more tempered, I said, "I'm Alan Gregory. But I think you already know that."

  "Well, I do now, I guess. If I had known who you were before I would have said hello up on the road earlier. Where you live, you know? You kind of caught me by surprise up there. Embarrassing. I'm Kevin, by the way, Kevin Sample." He smiled in a manner I found quite affecting.

  "I hear you've been asking around about some stuff that has to do with my dad."

  Picking up my new crank at the bike shop would have to wait until tomorrow or the next day. I said, "Yes, Kevin. As a matter of fact, I have," and I invited Brian Sample's son into my office.

  Kevin Sample was a veterinary student up the road in Port Collins at Colorado State University. I didn't ask but I assumed that he was planning to specialize in treating large animals.

  Most of the strangers I'd met recently had been either new therapy patients-with all their inherent defenses-or people associated with the lives and deaths of Tami and Miko-with all their invisible agendas. Kevin presented himself so differently from either category that I was briefly taken aback by his manner.

  The young man appeared to lack guile. Absolutely.

  "You stayed at a B and B in Steamboat recently. The owner, Libby, is an old friend of our family. She phoned my mom and said you were asking questions about Gloria Welle's death. My mom told me about the call. I've been waiting a long time for someone to care enough to ask some questions about what my father did that day. I thought I'd come down and talk to you about him. Who knows, might help us both."

  I was trying to decide whether or not to admit to Kevin that my queries during my recent visit to Steamboat were actually directed not at learning more about his father, but rather at learning more about Raymond Welle. I postponed the decision and asked, "Help you how, Kevin?"

  "Dennis was my twin brother. Did you know that?"

  His reply felt like a non sequitur. I said, "No, I didn't know that."

  "Fraternal twins, not identical. But we were tight." I watched Kevin smile again, then watched the smile vanish.

  "In less than a year I lost the two most important people in my life. I lost my brother first and then I lost my father.

  And because of what Dad did on his last day on earth, I lost all sense of my family. I lost all my friends. Eventually I lost my school. Mom and I left Steamboat a few years after what happened up at the Silky Road. We had to, I guess. It's been just me and Mom since then. To be honest, she never got over Dennis's dying. And she certainly never got over what happened at the Silky Road."

  I was still waiting to hear how talking with me about his father was going to help Kevin Sample. The tone of his words had caused me to begin to wonder whether he was perceiving me as a potential therapist.

  "Can you imagine what it was like for him after Dennis died? For my dad?" he asked, and shook his head.

  "You know that my father poured the drinks to the man who ended up killing Dennis? My dad felt that it was exactly the same as if he ended up killing his own son. Well, when you imagine what it was like in our house, imagine the worst. Because that's how it was. The guilt. The shame. The recriminations. The anger. The anger was vicious. It was all there in our house after the accident." Honestly, I said, "I can't really imagine. It's too horrible."

  "The truth is I lost my father and my brother on the same night. Dad was never the same after Dennis died."

  I needed a clarification.

  "The anger? It was his?"

  "No. Mom's. She could be… mean. Still can be. She had a mean streak even before the accident. But after? Especially after Dad decided he was going to sell the bar and she saw the writing on the wall. She knew they were going to lose the business and then we were probably going to lose the house.

  She was cruel to him after that. And he just took it from her. It was like a penance for him."

  "But it took its toll?"

  "You know about the suicide attempt?"

  I nodded.

  "Not much. Just what I saw on the news." I didn't mention the fact that I'd seen videotapes of the news earlier that day.

  "He took an overdose. Pills and alcohol. She found him in the basement. Mom did.

  Made me drive him to the hospital. She wouldn't call for an ambulance. She didn't want the neighbors to know what he'd done. She didn't want anything to do with him. Didn't visit him in the hospital. She called him 'the coward' after that. To me. To his face. To any friends the two of them had left. He didn't have a name anymore. To her, he was just 'the coward." She wouldn't let him come back home after he got out of the hospital. He stayed with some people in town.

  Eventually he got a little apartment."

  Every day in my practice I saw men and women who had crumbled in the face of psychological stresses that didn't begin to compare to the pressures that this young man had endured as an adolescent. Yet he appeared emotionally intact. I wondered about things I couldn't assess so readily, about his relationships with women, and his relationships with mentors in the veterinary school.

  Still, I marveled.

  Kevin interrupted my reverie.

  "That's when Dad went to see Dr. Welle. After the suicide attempt."

  I nodded knowingly.

  Kevin spotted my arrogance and corrected me, gently.

  "No, you don't understand.

  This is the part that people get confused about. Dad liked Dr. Welle. He liked him a lot. He wouldn't have done anything to hurt him. Anything."

  I was perplexed. This young man seemed way too intelligent to discount, so cavalierly, the evidence of his fathers crime.

  "You don't believe that your father shot Gloria Welle, Kevin?"

  The young man's face tightened. I saw wrinkles around his eyes where there had been none before.

  "Of course he shot her. There's no other explanation for what happened at the Silky Road that day. But it wasn't because he was angry at Dr. Welle. That's the part that everyone has wrong. And that's the part that I want to help everybody clear up."

  "And you know that how?" My voice was soft. He was out on a limb and I wanted to offer him a cushioned place to fall.

  "Because I had breakfast with him that morning. With Dad. He was pretty upbeat.

  Not happy, not like that. He wasn't capable of being happy anymore. But he was up enough that we could actually have a conversation, you know? That hadn't happened a lot recently. He told me that Dr. Welle was a man he could trust. A man who was going to save him from himself." Kevin pulled a battered little notebook from his shirt pocket and slapped it on his thigh.

  "I'm not making all this up. I kept a journal in those days. Like a diary?

  That's how I know."

  "So why do you think it, um… happened?"

  "At first I thought maybe he just snapped. I'd been worried about him losing it-you know, going crazy?-for a while."

  "But you rejected that?"

  "Yes sir, I did. I didn't think he could go from being reasonable at breakfast to being psychopathic and homicidal midmorning. Now maybe that's possibl
e with some people. But not with my dad. And then there's the gun he used."

  "Yes."

  "It was his. When Dennis and I were, oh, twelve or thirteen, he'd showed us where it was at home and taught us how to use it. He also told me that he could never use it himself-could never point it at another human being-unless the family was in danger. He wanted us to feel the exact same way. He meant what he said that day. I know it. I knew him."

  I wanted to believe Kevin was correct in the same way I often wanted to believe in the veracity of my patients as they constructed and polished a version of reality that would shine more brightly than the tarnished one that often stains the truth. Kevin's view of his father was part of his ego's defenses against the enormous weight of his pain. I decided to say nothing that might interfere with the integrity of those defenses. He needed them.

  I said, "It must be hard making sense of what happened, then."

  "Yeah," he acknowledged.

  "Hard."

  I watched a tear form in the corner of his eye. Kevin didn't react to it until it had migrated halfway down his nose.

  "There is one way that you might be able to discover… some information that might help you answer the questions you have about your father's frame of mind."

  He swallowed.

  "How?"

  "Talk with Dr. Welle" Kevin laughed bitterly.

  "My mom tried. Years ago. He wouldn't talk to her. Said he didn't have the right to tell anyone what my father said to him. during therapy.

  Confidentiality."

  "Technically, that's true. But after your father died the rights to control the record of what happened in his treatment with Dr. Welle passed to the person who controlled your father's estate. If that person asked Dr. Welle about your father's treatment, Dr. Welle would have to respond. He'd have no choice."

  "That would be my uncle Larry. My dad's brother. He handled Dad's estate."

  "If your uncle Larry sends Dr. Welle a letter identifying himself as the personal representative of your father's estate-if I were him, I'd have the letter notarized-and authorizing the release of confidential records, Dr. Welle should be happy to cooperate with the request."

  "That's it?"

  "That should be all it takes."

  "Will you write that down for me? How to do it?"

  "Of course " Across the room I spotted a tiny red dot light up beside the door.

  The light was a sign that my next patient had arrived. I said, "Kevin, I have an appointment now. Just one more today. I'll be done in about forty-five minutes.

  Would you like to get together again when I'm done and talk some more about all this? Maybe go have a beer or something? I'll go over the instructions on how to approach Dr. Welle again then."

  He smiled.

  "That would be great. But maybe coffee or something to eat. I don't drink."

  I felt foolish.

  I was late getting home after meeting with Kevin Sample. Once my last patient had left my office I'd walked Kevin over to the Mall and offered to buy him something to eat. He wavered for a moment on the sidewalk between Juanita's and Tom's Tavern on Pearl Street, finally choosing Tom's and ordering a cheeseburger, salad, fries, and onion rings. He drank lemonade. He devoured the food and afterward talked almost nonstop for another hour.

  I walked him back to his car and watched him drive away, hoping he felt more contentment than he had when he decided to come to Boulder and look me up. On the way out of town I stopped at the police station to leave the videotape of the news coverage of Gloria Welle's murder for Sam. Despite the errand, I made it home before Lauren returned from her shopping excursion to Denver.

  After her friend dropped her off, Lauren and I took Emily for a walk before dinner. Lauren was wearing a new maternity top that, to my eye, had enough gussets sewn into the front to permit her to carry quintuplets to term. On the way out the lane I told her about Kevin's arrival on our doorstep that afternoon and replayed his impressions of his brothers death and his reluctance to believe the theories about his fathers motives the last day at the Silky Road Ranch.

  Her assessment of Kevin's protest about his father's intentions when he shot Gloria Welle was about the same as mine had been. She said, "He sounds like a kid who's trying to make sense of the unfathomable. You like this?" She fingered the hem of the new top she was wearing.

  "Yes. Of course. It's, urn, nice." My praise was so weak I didn't even believe me.

  She punched me on the arm.

  "Get used to it. I got some jeans and some shorts with elastic waists, too."

  "I can't wait to see them."

  She hit me again.

  As we climbed a ridge to the east to watch the shadows edge into the valley, I moved on to the next part of Kevins story.

  "There's more that I learned from Kevin. I should have made this connection on my own, but I didn't. It turns out that Kevin and his brother were the exact same age as Tami and Miko. They were in the same year at school. Kevin knew both of the girls."

  Lauren looked my way, raised her eyebrows, and asked, "The plot thickens. So were they friends?" "Kevin says his brother was actually closer to Tami and Miko than he was. Kevin says that Dennis, his brother, was the better skier. This group of kids who hung out together-apparently they were all pretty great skiers. Only the best of them could ski with Tami and Miko, though. That wasn't Kevin-but he knew the girls well enough. They had classes together, hung out together after school.

  You know. It was a pretty small town then." "Still is," she said, pointing out a big bird soaring high above Highway 36.

  "Especially if you leave out the tourists." "Is that a hawk?" I asked.

  "Don't know. Maybe. Did he date either of them?"

  "Says not."

  "And? What does he remember about what happened to them? What does he think?"

  "Mostly he just remembers it as the beginning of the tragedies. That's what he calls that time in his life.

  "The tragedies."

  "The hawk, or whatever it was, swooped behind a ridge top. Above the grasses on the crest of the hill the sky had turned thick and black. A massive thunderstorm was building in the foothills near Golden. Lauren said, "I'm glad that's not coming our way. Bet it's full of hail."

  We started back toward our house just in case Lauren's meteorological forecasting abilities were flawed. Emily ran into the thick grass along the lane and pawed frantically at something in the dirt. We waited for her to finish whatever she was doing. She dawdled until a crisp crack of thunder in the distance spooked her out of the meadow, her ears as plastered down as a Bouvier's cropped ears can be. If she had possessed more than a nub of a tail it would have been between her legs. Emily despised thunder and lightning.

  Lauren asked, "Did Kevin and his friends have theories about the girls? About their disappearance? About the murders?"

  "Sure. At first-for a few days, he said-everybody thought that the girls had run away. He describes Tami the same way everyone else does. Heart of gold, a lot of fun, but a bit of a wild child. She was always talking about wanting to see the world, to go places. To get away. Her friends thought she may have had a fight with her parents about something and just taken off."

  "Did she argue a lot with her parents?"

  "The impression I got is that it was a love-hate thing. She and her mom would be real tight and then Tami would push her away for a while."

  Lauren chewed on my impression.

  "And Kevin and his buddies-they thought that Miko would just go along with Tami if she ran?"

  "I asked the same thing. He was evasive about that. Said Miko wasn't really like that. Wasn't really a follower. But he didn't elaborate."

  Lauren knelt down to comfort Emily after another explosive clap of thunder.

  "And after? After the bodies were found? What did he and his friends think then?"

  "Kevin said that he and his buddies all bought into the stranger theory. None of them wanted to believe that anyone they knew in town could do w
hat had been done to their friends. He said that none of them really considered that it might have been a local. But…"

  "But?" "But… he also told me that there was a rumor going around that Miko was seeing an older guy. Somebody in town."

  "But they didn't know who?"

  "No, they didn't."

  "Did they speculate?" She stood back up.

  "Yeah. And this is where it gets really interesting. Kevin and his friends thought it might be Raymond Welle. Some of the kids had seen the two of them together a couple of times. Going for a walk. Having coffee. Things like that."

  "Did Kevin know that Miko was in psychotherapy with Welle?"

  "It didn't sound like he knew. I didn't tell him. Couldn't figure out a way to ask directly without spilling the beans."

  She threaded her fingers through mine and pulled my hand over her abdomen. The tight bulge made my heart jump every time I felt it. I desperately hoped to feel a kick from her womb.

  No.

  She asked, "Could that be benign? Mariko and Welle being out together? Could that have been part of her psychotherapy?"

  I thought about it.

  "Could have been. Would have been unusual, but not unheard-of. Sometimes with kids, you find they talk more openly outside the office. I've done it with a couple of adolescents. It could have been that. At this point you have to give Welle the benefit of the doubt about the therapy. I keep reminding myself that Miko's parents thought he worked wonders with their daughter."

  Lauren stopped and picked up a stick. She shook it in Emily's face and threw it deep into the meadow. My wife has a good arm, and the stick covered a lot of territory before it fell to the ground. Emily stared at her as though she were a moron. She laughed at the dog and said, "Take all the speculation to its most toxic conclusion, sweets, and it gives Welle a pretty darn good motive."

  It was exactly what I'd been thinking since I'd waved good-bye to Kevin an hour earlier in downtown Boulder.

  "You mean if we accept the proposition that he was involved with Mariko?"

  "Yes. Absolutely. What if-I'm speculating here, so cut me some slack-what if Tami found out somehow that her friend was involved with Raymond Welle? Or what if Miko told Tami that she was screwing around with Welle and Welle suddenly saw some threat to this wonderful life he was building for himself? You know, his practice, his little radio show up there, his marriage even. It gives him a motive for the murders."