Cold Case Page 17

  "That's a lot of ifs. But you're right. If he was sexually involved with Mariko, and if Tami knew about it, it would give Welle a motive."

  "No one in Locard has discovered anything that gives anyone else a motive, have they?"

  I shook my head.

  "They haven't told us anything. But that doesn't mean they don't know something."

  "So?"

  I pressed.

  "Who could corroborate what might have been going on with Miko and Welle?"

  "Welle could."

  "Yeah, and he's going to admit it. Right."

  "I don't know who else would know. You have to assume that he would have been smart enough to keep it a secret."

  "You know, none of this is in the records we got from Locard. None of it. The original investigation should have uncovered some of this information, even if it was just categorized as rumor. Phil Barrett and his detectives should have talked to all the girls' friends. All of them. One of them should have mentioned to the police the possibility that she had an older lover."

  "Makes you wonder all over again, doesn't it? About the thoroughness of the initial investigation?"

  "To tell you the truth, it makes me wonder more about Phil Barrett. And whether he was already in bed with Raymond Welle back then."

  We heard a car approaching from behind us and moved off to the shoulder. I called Emily to my side while Adrienne plowed by in her Suburban. She honked.

  We waved. I heard Jonas yell, "Emily, you want to come over and play?"

  The dust settled around us, on us.

  "You knew him back then-Raymond," I said to Lauren.

  "And you've known a lot of violent criminals, right? Do you think he could have done it?"

  "What? Screwed one of his patients? Or murdered two high school girls?"

  "I don't know. Take your pick."

  We walked a good ten paces before she responded again.

  "My answer is that… he wouldn't have suffered a single night of guilt for being unfaithful to Gloria.

  Would he have done it with a sixteen-year-old? I really hope not. And murder?

  That's something else. I don't know." We walked a few more steps.

  "And the very fact that I don't know is incredibly troubling."

  "Was the marriage, Gloria and Rays… I don't know… stable?"

  She shrugged. " I didn't know them that well as a couple. Gloria was a flirt, but that was just her nature. She may have said something to Jake about problems, but I think he would have told me. If they kept their problems up in Steamboat with them I'm not sure any of the family down here would have known."

  The fax machine had been busy while we were out on our walk.

  "Look at this," Lauren said, handing me three sheets, keeping one for herself.

  "It appears that your reporter friend did exactly what she said she was going to do."

  I was busy throwing together some lo mein with shrimp and bok choy. Dark, leafy greens had become as much of a staple in our diet as kibble was in Emily's. I dried my hands and examined the first page of the fax.

  It was an article from that day's Washington Post. The byline was Dorothy Levin's. The headline was

  "Trail of Questions Dogs Candidate's Finances." The focus of the piece was Raymond Welle. I read quickly and skimmed the continuation on the next page.

  In the margin of the first sheet Dorothy had scribbled, "Et voila. Steamboat is breathtaking. Literally. There is no air up here." I nipped a page and said, "I wonder what this means?" I was reading another note from Dorothy, this one in the margin of the last sheet. It read, "Met with a guy today who couldn't help me with my stuff but seemed to know a lot about Gloria's death. Interesting… I'm going to follow up. Planning on seeing someone else, too." Lauren asked, "What?"

  I pointed out Dorothy's margin note. Lauren shrugged.

  "I bet there are a lot of people in Steamboat with a lot of opinions about Gloria Welle's murder."

  "You're right." I smacked the paper.

  "But at least Dorothy kept her word. I don't think my name is in the article," I said, smiling.

  "You're much happier after reading that article than Raymond Welle is going to be." She read the fine print on the leading edge of the fax.

  "This was sent from Steamboat. She's still in Colorado?" "The last time I talked with her she told me she had some interviews to do at the ski area on Monday. She was trying to decide whether to stay over or go back east for the weekend. I guess she stayed over." I shook the pages in my hand.

  "How serious are these allegations she's making? Can you tell?"

  "I don't really know the federal election laws very well, but if what the Post found is actually true, it will make Ray pretty uncomfortable. Especially the allegations about the Japanese contributions being tunneled through employees of the ski company. He won't want to deal with this so close to the election.

  Not after what Clinton and Gore and Reno went through with those Buddhist nuns.

  Remember that? And especially after he was one of the House members who was so instrumental in killing the latest campaign-reform bill."

  My mind was still consumed by the possibility that Raymond Welle's biggest problem was an old murder investigation, not a new campaign-finance probe. I pointed to the sheet of paper Lauren still held in her left hand.

  "What's on that last page? That's not from Dorothy?"

  "No. This one's from Russ Claven. Remember our chauffeur to the Locard meeting in Washington? He and Flynn Coe are flying in tomorrow. They want to see us before they go up to Steamboat."

  I spent a moment trying to remember some of the people I'd met at the meeting in Washington. " Flynn's the one with the eye patch?"

  "Yes. And the great smile. She's the forensics-crime scene expert. Our case coordinator."

  "What time do they get in?"

  "Their flight gets in at eleven-thirty. According to this, they want directions here. To our house."

  "Here? Where are they staying?"

  "Doesn't say."

  "Let me see that." She handed me the fax. The stationery was from Johns Hopkins Medical School. That meant Claven.

  "Do you think they want to stay here, with us?"

  "Doesn't say."

  "We only have one guest room. Are they a couple?"

  She pointed at the sheet in my hand and laughed.

  "Doesn't say."

  Lauren's day had fatigued her. While she went to bed early, I plopped in front of the word processor and typed a report for A. J. Simes. I wanted to bring her up to speed on my meeting with Kevin Sample and to relay his suspicions that Mariko Hamamoto might have been having an affair with an older man and that Mariko's adolescent peers considered Raymond Welle to be a likely suspect.

  I printed it and faxed it on its way before I climbed into bed beside my sleeping wife.

  Russ and Flynn arrived the next afternoon a few minutes before one. The trunk of their rental car was packed full of heavy nylon duffel bags.

  Among other things, Russ had come to Colorado do some rock climbing.

  Russ Claven, it turned out, was blessed and burdened with more energy than even my friend Adrienne. And Adrienne was occasionally so hypo manic I considered her in need of medication.

  After popping the trunk open and saying a cursory hello to Lauren and me, Russ patted a frantically barking Emily on the head, found his way inside to the bathroom to pee and change clothes, to the kitchen to examine the contents of our refrigerator and swipe an apple, and then back outside. Lauren and I were still standing near the car renewing our brief acquaintance with Flynn Coe.

  Flynn's eye patch that day was a rusty satin stripe. The stripes were horizontal and the patch went well with her hair.

  Russ interrupted and asked for directions to Eldorado Canyon. I drew him a crude map on the back of his airline-ticket envelope. His eyes brightened; he couldn't believe he was only ten minutes away from the rock-climbing equivalent of Disneyland. He asked Flynn if she was
cool hanging out by herself for a while.

  She said she was. He asked me whether I wanted to go climbing with him. I declined. I think he was relieved that I'd declined. Russ jumped into the car and took off west toward Eldorado.

  We invited Flynn inside. She excused herself to the bathroom after suggesting that traveling cross-country in the airplane seat beside Russ Claven did not make for a particularly restful journey. But I thought she offered the assessment with humor and at least a trace of affection. * * *

  Flynn wasn't as good a pool player as Lauren was, but at least she could give her a competitive game, which was something I'd never managed to do.

  Considering how much her eye patch must have compromised her depth perception, Flynn's playing was all the more remarkable. I could tell that she wasn't accustomed to running into players with Lauren's skill, but she handled the competition, and the repeated losses, with grace.

  I parked myself on a nearby chair while I watched the women demonstrate their talents, and actually had the feeling they forgot I was there.

  Once Lauren managed to get Flynn talking, she spoke of herself with little self-consciousness.

  Flynn Coe had been a protegee of Henry Lee's in the Connecticut State Police crime lab. She had worked with him for over three years before she was recruited away by the North Carolina authorities to run their crime lab facilities, the job she still held at the age of thirty-three. She'd been married once at twenty-four, divorced at twenty-six, and had a nine-year-old daughter named Jennifer.

  Flynn had known Kimber Lister for years, had actually met him when she was attending a training seminar at the FBI Academy on a fellowship when she was still a graduate student at Northwestern. Years later, when he'd started to discuss his ideas for Locard with her, she'd volunteered her services before he got around to asking her to join.

  After almost ninety minutes of pool Lauren excused herself to go rest. I asked Flynn if she was tired from her trip, if she wanted someplace to lie down. She said she didn't and followed me into the kitchen, where I began to prepare some food.

  "Will you and Russ stay for dinner?" I asked.

  "Sounds great to me but I think we need to wait for Russ. He may have other ideas about tonight."

  "Are you two on your way to Steamboat Springs?"

  She nodded.

  "Eventually. I need to interview the people who worked the initial crime scenes and I want to examine the physical evidence that's still in storage. It helps me sometimes. And Russ wants to talk to the doc who did the autopsies on the girls and check on the storage of some blood and tissue and fluid samples that he wants to retest."

  My head was mostly inside the refrigerator as I said, "I don't really know how to ask this, but, are you and Russ, you know, a couple?"

  I looked back and watched her smile, suppressing a giggle.

  "God no. But I have to admit that we tried once a few years back. Neither of us could do it. Even long-distance we couldn't make it work. I spent the whole time feeling like Captain Ahab. Always trying to reel him in, always feeling that he was too big, too strong, too indefatigable for me. So… it didn't work romantically. But I've learned to love him anyway. He's a good man." After a few minutes of small talk, I asked, "So-if you don't mind my asking-what happened to your eye, Flynn?"

  She smiled.

  "Most people don't ask."

  "I'm sorry if I offended you. But you seem pretty comfortable with it, whatever it is."

  "Comfortable? I don't know about that. You must be reading something into the patches, though. When it was clear to me that I had to start wearing one, I decided that I could either think of the patch as a medical device or think of it as jewelry. I decided that I liked the idea of jewelry better. I design them myself, and my sister makes them for me. Now, when people look at me fanny-you know, don't look me in the eye-I can allow myself to believe that they're distracted by the patch, not by my disability. It's a nice rationalization, a little advantage."

  I finished washing some tiny round carrots that I had picked in Adrienne's garden. I handed Flynn a couple.

  "So what happened?"

  "I got… fooled… by a booby trap at a crime scene. A serial rapist left me a present. An explosion. My eye got mangled in the blast. The vision couldn't be saved. I can still perceive light with it, but it's distracting-it interferes with the vision in the good eye. And the scarring is… well… it's butt ugly. So I wear the patch."

  "I'm sorry."

  She bit off a piece of carrot and shook her head.

  "Don't be. It was my own damn fault. I was careless. Good carrots."

  We talked about the two dead girls and about Locard until Flynn said, "You're a believer now, aren't you?" I asked what she meant.

  "This work we do. Investigating old crimes. Reopening wounds. Examining scars.

  Finding answers. You like it, don't you?" I admitted that I did.

  She smiled. Her eyebrow arched so that the narrow end peeked out from below the patch.

  "By the time I get to see these old cases, everyone is always discouraged. The bodies are always buried, the crime-scene tape is always down, the blood is always dry. Always. When I arrive, what I try to bring along with me is some hope, some enthusiasm, and some science. I try to bring fresh blood to an investigation that is often as forlorn as the victim. I try to be… that fresh blood. I try to be a… transfusion."

  "And you see that in me?" I asked.

  "It seems that the work is most infectious for those of us in Locard who actually get to meet the families. If you do enough of this you'll see the variety of their responses. Some of them-I'm talking about the loved ones-are. almost numb to our arrival. The resumption of the investigation doesn't cut deeply for them at all; it's almost as though they're anesthetized to us.

  But that's rare. More often we watch the parents or the wives or the children come alive with hope… or grief… or even rage. Sometimes in the end, we see gratitude. Even though we're always investigating something that has to do with death, the process somehow is incredibly invigorating for me. Others too."

  She smiled warmly at me.

  "Yes, I'm seeing some of that in you," she said.

  "You're fresh blood, too."

  Russ and Flynn agreed to stay for dinner, so they were still at our house when Phil Barrett called that evening. I excused myself from the table when the phone rang and took the call in the bedroom.

  Barrett was summoning me back to Steamboat to retrieve Mariko Hamamoto's case file from Raymond Welle. Welle would be departing for Washington at four-thirty the next afternoon. I'd need to be at his ranch by three at the latest. I explained to Barrett that I had patients scheduled on Monday and requested that he overnight the material to me at my expense.

  "Representative Welle didn't offer any latitude when I received my instructions, Dr. Gregory. He said if you want to see these records, you're going to have to meet with him again. He wants to go over them with you in person. It's not negotiable. Because of his schedule, it's either tomorrow in Steamboat or sometime much later on in Washington."

  Welle's request was not out of the ordinary. Clinicians often asked for, and usually were granted as a matter of courtesy, an opportunity to review case records face-to-face before making the copies available to other clinicians.

  Although I suspected that Welle's case notes would reveal little or nothing novel about his treatment of Mariko, I knew I couldn't risk not examining them.

  I suspected that Welle knew it, too.

  "I need to make some calls, try to get in touch with tomorrows appointments and try to reschedule them. Where can I reach you later tonight, Mr. Barrett?"

  He dictated a number and said, "Confirm by ten."

  I started making the calls.

  By the time I rejoined Lauren and our guests at the table, the dinner plates had been cleared and the rest of the wine had been consumed. Lauren frowned and asked me if everything was okay. I think she was assuming that I'd had an emergency i
n my practice.

  I replied, "That phone call earlier? That was Phil Barrett. Raymond Welle's chief of staff. Welle wants me to drive up to Steamboat tomorrow to meet with him about Mariko Hamamoto's treatment file. I've been busy rescheduling patients so I can go up there and do it. What a pain."

  Flynn identified the issue instantly.

  "Welle doesn't want to send the records to you-he wants to go over them with you in person."

  "Exactly." Russ said, "Which means he's concerned that there's something in there that might be misinterpreted."

  "I'm not sure I'm willing to jump to that conclusion," I said.

  "It could be something more benign; it may just be that the treatment file is really thin and he wants a chance to explain why he takes such sparse notes."

  Flynn again: "He couldn't do that over the phone?"

  "He obviously didn't want to."

  Flynn told me, "Try to get the original file. I can get a documents guy to look at them and see if anything's been forged or tampered with."

  "I doubt if he'll give me the originals. I wouldn't if I was in his shoes."

  "Never hurts to ask." Lauren asked, "So it sounds like you're going to go?" I said, "I'm not sure I have much choice. You working tomorrow? Can you come with me? "

  "Sorry, I'm too busy."

  "Well, if I have to go, I'm going to go up early. I want to be back before dark." I looked at Russ, then Flynn.

  "You want to ride up there with me, or do you want to take your own car?"

  Russ looked at Flynn and said, "We'll caravan. I do best when I have my own wheels."

  "He does," Flynn agreed, smiling at him.

  I went back to the bedroom and phoned Phil Barrett to confirm an eleven a.m. meeting with Raymond Welle. Barrett offered directions to the Silky Road Ranch.

  I accepted the directions; I didn't want to admit that I already knew my way around the Elk River Valley. My final telephone call of the evening was to the Sheraton in Steamboat Springs. Dorothy Levin didn't answer her phone. I left a message on her voice mail and asked her to meet me in the lobby for lunch at one o'clock.