Compound Fractures Read online

  “Alan, did you have a motive to shoot your wife?”

  Without any further hesitation, he said, “I did. That’s the problem. At some point, they’ll figure that out. He certainly will. And he won’t let go. That, by the way, is the exact sort of thing that can’t go in your notes.”

  He?

  Bump-bump.

  1

  Before That Morning

  SAM AND LUCY

  THE DEAD GUY? He was, what, a psychologist or something? Psychiatrist?”

  Sam Purdy didn’t reply to the man’s questions. He introduced himself curtly, slammed his car door, and took a few steps away.

  The detective had responded to the call on Prado expecting to see a familiar house. But the house was gone. He walked up near the edge of the debris and faced the wide V that Eldorado Canyon carves into the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies.

  Sam was aware that he shouldn’t be able to see Eldorado at all. The damn house should be in the way.

  The last time Purdy had been on Prado was the week of 9/11. In 2001. Since then Prado had been but one tile in the mosaic that made up his 9/11 grief and confusion.

  The damn void changes everything. I can see things I couldn’t see.

  Sam wanted to chew on that. To weigh the possibility that moving beyond the old grief—he hadn’t—might require his willingness to see things that weren’t visible before.

  The RP, the reporting party, had a different idea. The man, fit and gray, stepped in front of the detective, blocking his view. “Took you long enough to get here. I called 911 like three hours ago.” The man’s thumbs were tapping at his phone, a touch screen the size of a slab of Spam. “Two hours and thirteen minutes to be precise. I started my phone’s stopwatch.” He held it up in case the detective doubted him.

  Purdy sighed a sigh of capitulation. “This is your property?”

  “In six months it’ll be my castle. Where you been?” The man tapped his wrist. “Time is money.”

  Purdy noted the absence of a watch on the tapped wrist. He said, “This? Not an emergency. And this? Not a conversation. I ask questions. You answer them.”

  The man nodded. Sam refocused on the absent house. He wasn’t done reflecting on absence and opportunity. Not even close.

  The RP couldn’t stay quiet. Purdy tuned back in as the man said, “… have to admit that this is big. You guys missed the gun. Could it have come after? No way. You’re going to have to, what, reopen? Is that what you say? Big deal.” Sam watched the man punctuate his self-congratulation with a tightened fist and a muted arm clench, mimicking Kobe after a clutch three.

  The guy had no way to know that Sam hated Kobe Bryant like he hated jock itch.

  Sam moved a finger to his lips. In a low voice he said, “Quiet. Shhh.”

  The ensuing peace lasted no more than half a minute before the man blurted, “I love northern light. It’s soft. You have any? At your house?”

  The question left Sam at a loss. In Sam’s world, if you have southern light and you turn around, you get northern light. How could a house have one and not the other?

  The RP brought his outstretched hands together above his head. He slipped one foot from a sandal and shaped the arch to the other leg’s knobby knee. “Six months from now? Maybe seven. Ten? Kitchen there. Study here.” He indicated floor plan features with thrusts of his head. “This wall glass, triple-paned. Ceilings, twelve feet. I was thinking fourteen, but— Trim? Beetle-kill, painted. No VOC. LEED Platinum or Diamond, whatever is best. Can houses get that? My kid has allergies. Hell, my dog has allergies. I want the best LEED.”

  The guy said “LEED” and Sam understood him. That told Sam two important things about himself. It indicated he was conversant with contemporary environmental building standards. And it meant maybe he’d been in Boulder too long.

  “The vista will do all the heavy lifting. Across the mesa. Flatirons at dawn? I’m up early. You? Cannot wait. No sun in my eyes. Not a ray. Pool table there. No shadows.” He cackled in anticipatory glee.

  Sam wondered if there were people troubled by shadows on their pool tables. His friends, Alan and Lauren, had a pool table in a room that faced west. Has Lauren been bothered all these years by shadows? At least she’s had the good sense not to bitch about it.

  “Sounds sublime,” Sam said. Faking interest in rich people’s concerns had long been a reflex for him. He thought the time had come for rich people to feign interest in his problems. He was still waiting on that.

  He faced the homeowner. “What did you touch before I got here? Be specific.”

  The man’s pace of speech went from zero to sixty in two seconds flat. “Bricks. Sorting bricks. Kicking bricks. Stacking bricks. Saving bricks. See that? Four-by-four-by-eight. Two of those. One, two. Four-by-four-by-eight-by-two. That’s two hundred fifty-six bricks. I’m on my way to four stacks, four-by-four-by-eight-by-four. Five hundred and twelve.” Deep breath. “Bricks.” During a second inhale he pointed in the direction of the neat piles on the edge of a driveway that led to the slab for a garage that was no longer there. “That neighbor—Thomas? Tomás? I don’t know—asked for bricks from the demo. His house was built in the late fifties, same as this, maybe same builder. He’s old. Thomas, not the builder. Builder’s probably dead. He wants a patio wall or a barbecue or— Who cares? I was being helpful. Sure. Sure— Also trying to prevent NIMBY problems. Two birds, five hundred and twelve stones. Yah!”

  Sam’s on-the-fly diagnosis was that the RP operated in too many simultaneous dimensions. Sam blamed that, too, on Boulder. He’d seen it take down lesser men.

  Sam asked, “Were you wearing those gloves?” Work gloves were tucked in the man’s belt. Canvas. Leather. “When you touched the bricks.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the gun you found? What about the gun?”

  “No.”

  “No, you didn’t touch it? Or no, you weren’t wearing the gloves when you did?”

  The guy pulled out his phone, began pecking with two thumbs. “I saw the gun when I lifted a brick. Took a photo. Here it was when I found it. There. See? Then I called you guys. Two hours and thirteen minutes later—”

  “Yeah, got that part. Show me the gun.” The man led the detective near the edge of the debris. He pointed at the revolver. Sam said, “So, when we run prints we won’t find yours? No stray DNA? We won’t see any disturbance in the dust that shows you moved the gun?”

  Purdy detected some hesitation. Damn. “Want to change your story, Mr… . Picker?” He recalled the man’s name from the call he got from dispatch.

  “It’s Pichter, like pitcher in baseball, but in a Jumble. And it’s not a story.”

  In a Jumble? “Let’s walk through it one more time, Mr. Pichter. So I understand.”

  “Like you’re slow?” Mr. Pichter said, stretching the last vowel a couple of beats.

  Purdy sucked his tongue to the roof of his mouth to keep from saying what he was thinking. It worked. “Sure,” Sam said, “like I’m slow.” Old-time Iron Rangers could turn a vowel into a fable. Sam did that with the o in slow. “You never lived here, Mr. Pichter? In this house. Yes or no.”

  “Got it thirty-two months ago. Short sale. Good deal, not a great deal. Land plus plus plus. I mean, this location? Let’s be real. Wanted a lot on this side of Prado since … for—uh-uh—ever. Who doesn’t? Had a tenant until Easter. Young guy. Does disaster response for State Farm. Tornados, fires, floods, hurricanes, whatnot. Not a lot of earthquakes lately. What’s that about, you think? Huh? Since he left, vacant. Approvals and permits? Pain pain pain. Delays—cost of money alone—twenty grand. That’s with interest rates in the crapper.” He shrugged a what-are-you-gonna-do shrug.

  Sam was speechless.

  Jumble Guy wasn’t. “Luck? Me? Don’t feel bad for me. I’ve had my share. I got a shitload of Apple when it was sixty-eight. Not in sixty-eight. At sixty-eight. It’s my iStock. And my brother-in-law g
ot me a hunk-hunka of the Chipotle IPO. My brother-in-law? Burritos? I like Mexican food even less than I like him. Now I’m rolling in the tortillas. Get it? And”—he held up his phone—“I’m an Android guy. Ha.”

  When the 2008 crash came, Sam learned that his retirement funds were invested in GM, some squirrelly mortgage bonds, and AIG. This assbite is sitting on a golden throne of Apple and the Chipotle IPO. Now he’s building a McPalace on Prado. Yeah, Sam thought, life is fair.

  “The demolition was when?” Sam asked.

  “Yesterday. Front loader had a hydraulic failure. They’ll be back to finish tomorrow first thing in the A.M.”

  Purdy returned his gaze to the cleft in the Rockies. Eldorado was sucking in the afternoon shadows as though it were a black hole. He turned his body right to face the mesa that rose up from South Boulder Creek. He shifted his focus back to the debris to try to digest anew the tragedy of demolishing what for over half a century had been a solid home. What a waste. Oh well. Money does what money does.

  Sam squatted to examine the revolver, a Smith & Wesson .38 Special. He guessed it was an Airweight, though he’d have to move a brick to be sure. It sat among chunks of mortar on the old concrete hearth. The gun was why he was there.

  He was tempted to get all self-critical about not looking up the damn chimney back then. The week of 9/11.

  But that was a week he’d been looking for terrorists, not for guns in chimneys.

  He stared at the revolver for half a minute praying it would speak some truth to him. It didn’t. It was a common enough handgun in a place he’d almost given up expecting to see one.

  Sam used his cop voice, absent any Iron Range embellishment, to say, “No. Sir.”

  “No what?” Jumble Man replied. His reply was naïve and hopeful, as though he anticipated learning something interesting about the .38 he’d discovered in the rubble of the chimney of the house he’d just knocked down.

  “No, your demo crew won’t be back tomorrow.”

  Sam used his radio to request forensic support just as his partner was rolling her vehicle to a stop directly behind Jumble Guy’s dusty Porsche SUV. Lucy’s phone was to her ear. Sam knew she was running the Porsche’s plates. She nodded a greeting. Sam nodded back wide-eyed—a silent caution to her to be careful about Jumble Guy.

  The man saw it all. “What? Who’s she? Come on, guy. Let’s work this out.”

  “Detective Purdy. Not ‘guy.’ That’s Detective Davenport. Don’t even think about calling her ‘girl.’ Won’t go well for you.”

  “I got a schedule. Cleanup in the morning, excavators in the afternoon. The diggers won’t break ground without a clean lot. Form guys on their heels. Then concrete, with a pumper. You know what a pumper costs? For a day? Foundation insulation, plumbing rough-ins. The plumbers were so hard to pin down. We’re drilling halfway to hell for the thermal heat.” He clapped his hands three times. “Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Schedule is king. King.”

  Sam considered pointing out that there had been three claps but four bams. And only two kings. He didn’t. He said, “Bummer.”

  Jumble Guy said, “I didn’t have to call. I was being a good citizen. That should be rewarded.”

  Sam smiled. “You’re going with that? I’ll make sure it’s in the report. We give citations sometimes. To good citizens. You could hang yours near your pool table. In the room with the northern windows. The one with no shadows.”

  “I did not have to call.”

  “But you did. Now? This is a crime scene. Pretend there’s yellow tape everywhere the house you hated used to be. Your job? Stay outside that tape.”

  “Give me a break.”

  Sam thought about it. Rejected it.

  He asked, “Do you know what prado means?”

  Jumble Guy mistook the question for a quiz, with a prize he wanted to win. He said, “In English? Damn, I should know that. My own street name. I give up, what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “My Spanish sucks. Do you know anything about Ivy Baldwin? From way back?”

  Jumble Guy made a face that exposed too many teeth, like an aggrieved rodent. “Who’s she? I don’t know her. Is that one of my new neighbors? I only know Thomas. Tomás. The brick guy. Come on. One more. Give me an easier one.”

  Sam kicked at a broken brick. “Never mind,” he said. “You lose.”

  2

  HOW DO YOU SEE it, boss?” Lucy asked.

  Sam made a noncommittal puffing sound through pursed lips. Pichter had started taking pictures of everything in sight with his damn phone. Maybe even video, which meant audio. Sam was behaving as though he was about to be on YouTube.

  One night shortly before Sam met Ophelia he’d descended into a funky muse about the actuarial likelihood that his lifetime could end up being split almost evenly between two centuries, the twentieth and twenty-first. By the time his lubricated lifespan contemplation neared completion, Sam reached a subjective conclusion that of the two centuries he would inhabit, the twenty-first was not shaping up to be his favorite.

  What happened on 9/11 was one of the reasons. YouTube was another. Sam had developed a persistent fear of becoming a trending topic on YouTube. He knew whatever video of him might captivate a YouTube audience would not reflect well on his character.

  “Nothing coherent.” Sam answered Lucy’s question in a low register so that Jumble Guy couldn’t eavesdrop.

  She gave Sam a chance to go on before she said, “This all happened that week, Sammy. I didn’t work this case with you, so you’re going to have to explain why finding a gun here all these years later is such a big deal.”

  Sam turned his back on Jumble Guy. “The scene inside this house was an epic mess. Body cooked for three days before we got it. Which was after raccoons came in through a doggie door and did their gnawing thing.” Sam pronounced gnaw with a hard g as though the word had two distinct syllables. Lucy had known Sam forever but even she couldn’t tell whether he had mispronounced the word or if he was making a point. “Maybe a coyote, too. Don’t recall the details. Wild things. By the time I walked in? What the deceased most resembled was a gunshot victim a few days after zombies had feasted on his flesh.”

  “Nice image. Thank you for that, Sam.”

  “Welcome. But we never found a gun.”

  The last time he was here, all those years earlier, he had thought of Lucy as his young partner. Damn. The woman is almost middle-aged. How the hell did that happen?

  She said, “Now you have your gun. That’s good, yeah?”

  “You would think. But this pistol comes with a surprise—that skinny chain you see on the trigger guard. That’s a complicating factor.”

  Lucy had noticed the chain. She had a ready explanation. “Maybe whoever stashed it wanted to make sure it didn’t fall out of the chimney. Used the chain to keep it up there. Away from the kids.”

  “Say that’s right. But if this was a self-inflicted wound—which is where I had my money back then—how did the gun get back up the chimney? How does that happen?”

  “So now you’re thinking homicide?” Lucy knew that a change in manner of death from suicide to homicide would turn this old case into a cold case.

  “The death has been ‘undetermined’ all this time. Nobody ever got off the fence. Back then it looked like suicide, it smelled like suicide. If it had been a zombie it would have walked like a suicide. But without a weapon nobody would make the call.”

  “Watching a lot of zombie shit on cable with Simon lately, Sam?”

  Sam grinned. “We bond over it, do Netflix marathons. Father, son, the living dead. That week, Luce? Nothing was clear. This death just got tossed into the big pile of crap that wasn’t clear.”

  “Where was the dog? There was a doggie door. Whose dog was it?”

  Sam was stumped. “I don’t know. I don’t … know. Vic’s or his roommate’s, I guess.”

  “Any gunshot residue on the vic? Did he pull the trigger?” Lucy asked.

  �
��Inconclusive, like everything else. Found residue, but some of the essential locations were … gone.”

  “Gone? What does that mean?”

  “The wild things. The vic was the feast. The guests were moveable.”

  “Yuck again, Sam,” Lucy said. “You been practicing grossing me out?”

  “A little bit.” He smiled.

  “Spatter? Was it consistent with suicide?”

  “I don’t recall it being inconsistent. What this didn’t look like was terrorism. That week, suicide was not priority one. That week, the rest of that year, we were chasing terrorist ghosts.”

  “Hey,” Lucy said, “we’ve both seen citizens hide guns in funny places. Inside a flue? If the fireplace was no longer in use, why not? I’ve seen stranger stashes. Maybe this was just a gun stash some citizen forgot about. Unrelated. Or, we could get lucky and lift some latents off the gun. If they’re the vic’s—”

  “You feel lucky, Luce? I don’t. Prints or not, if the gun was stashed back up that chimney, then it wasn’t the suicide weapon. A guy can’t shoot himself under the chin and then put the pistol away in some hidey-hole. Right?”

  “Fair assumption. If this was the gun, then someone else was here.”

  “But … the crime scene guys said the scene was not disturbed by people. Just critters. Who would know a guy had a gun stashed up the chimney? Guy who put it there. Who else? Other people who lived here? Maybe.”

  “Another fair assumption.” She watched his face, hoping for an indication of his mood, before she put a hand on each of his shoulders. “You really want to dig this up, Sam? The heroes died that week. The rest of us? We didn’t have a great week. You don’t need to make this perfect. I haven’t been hearing any clamor for a new conclusion.”

  “I should forget it?”

  “I’ll write an addendum about finding the handgun, put it in the file. We move on. Catch us some new criminals.”

  “Ballistics?” Sam asked.

  “Was there a slug for a match?”

  Sam shrugged. “I don’t recall. Probably.”

  “Shit, who cares? I vote to let it go. We have two different armed robbers out there right now that need arresting. That’s what we should be doing. Not this.”