The Program Read online

  “Maybe,” my therapist said.

  “Trouble is,” I said, “I’m not quite sure what role she was supposed to be playing tonight.”

  He laughed. It sounded like music to me.

  LANDON WAS ASLEEP in her clothes sideways on top of her bed. Her CD player was spinning a tune by some group whose fame would certainly have evaporated by the time I learned who they were.

  Unless she was ill my daughter slept like she was in suspended animation. I undressed her and pulled a nightgown over her head without hearing even a whimper from her. The possibility of waking her so that she could pee and brush her teeth crossed my mind, but I decided against it. It would take a bushel more energy than I possessed to rouse her from her slumber, and the truth was that I envied both her innocence and her sleep.

  Before I flicked off the light I quieted her CD player and knelt by the side of her bed. I quickly read the Spartan language of Goodnight Moon. The bedtime ritual went much more quickly when I didn’t have to share the pictures or laugh as she pointed out the mouse on each page.

  My last words before “I love you” were the almost as familiar “Goodnight noises everywhere.” I closed the book and leaned over to touch my lips to her cheek. I tasted salt when I kissed her.

  My daughter, the little Mia.

  I WAS FEELING so languid that the walk from her room to my own felt interminable, like crossing a continent. My fatigue was a midafternoon on a hot New Orleans day kind of tired. Siesta tired. Ceiling-fan tired. But I knew I was too anxious to sleep. I still had a riddle to solve—whether or not to end the evening—and most likely my stay in Boulder—by calling Ron Kriciak and telling him about the woman with the camera who was staying at the motel near the mouth of Boulder Canyon.

  My bedroom was dark and I left it that way.

  I tugged open the drapes and scanned the sky for shooting stars. None. I scanned the parking lot for unfamiliar cars. None. I tried not to look in the bright space between the parking lot and the night sky, because in-between was what I would be losing when I left. Boulder and all its promises, Colorado and all its loveliness.

  I heard a muffled cough, a swallowed little growl, and stood silently, controlling my breathing until I was certain that Landon wasn’t waking with a cough.

  I counted to ten. Nothing.

  With one quick motion I crossed my arms and pulled my top over my head and then stripped off my bra. I unbuttoned my shorts and allowed them to drop on the floor exactly where I was standing. I stepped backward one step and stood there in my panties while I welcomed a whale.

  Robert usually sensed when I was naked—I don’t know how he knew, exactly—and he could always be counted on to care that I was naked. He’d slip up behind me silently and reach around and cup my breasts in his big hands or he’d run his fingernails down the long muscles of my back or he’d shed his own clothes before he approached me and he’d turn and fit his long back right up against my own and he’d thread his fingers into mine and ass-to-ass, we’d dance naked.

  He’d sing a song, something romantic.

  Or something silly.

  NOW, AT THIS time in my life, no one cared that I was naked.

  No one even knew.

  The Robert whale was swimming away when I heard another muffled cough.

  This time I turned.

  6

  Alan Gregory hung up the phone after talking with Peyton and rejoined his wife on the narrow deck off their bedroom. He wrapped a lightweight chenille throw that was the color of Dijon mustard over her shoulders before he sat back down.

  In front of them the sky was gray, streaked with silver. The air had begun the transition from hot to warm.

  She murmured thanks for the blanket and they sat silently for a few minutes. Emily was at the end of the deck intently watching the narrow trail that wound through the prairie grasses just west of the house. It was the trail that the red foxes used during their nightly prowls. Emily wouldn’t bark when the first fox stepped onto the tableau, but every muscle in her strong body would tense and she’d lower herself to be ready, her snout just over the edge of the decking.

  For what was she getting prepared? A leap into the dusk? Alan and Lauren had never guessed.

  Alan was about to say something about the apparent increase in the critter population around their house when Lauren asked, “Was it a real emergency?” She was referring to the page Alan had received. He had just returned from returning a call to the number that had flashed on his pager.

  He thought for a moment. “In my patient’s mind it was.”

  “Was?”

  He laughed at himself. “I guess I’m not that much of a magician. Is. In her mind it is.”

  She fished. “Her? And you’re feeling okay with things the way you left them with her?”

  He guessed, incorrectly, that Lauren was concerned that this emergency page might be the first in a series, that it would interfere with their evening. He said, “No, I’m still worried about her actually. I wouldn’t be surprised if she calls again.”

  Lauren’s eyes narrowed but she didn’t look his way. “Should I be worried about her, too?” she asked.

  His breathing changed. He knew it. He knew that she knew it. He tried to erase the alteration in his breathing from the universe by reaching over and touching her and saying, “All you need to worry about is our baby.”

  Lauren nodded and wondered what was going on with Kirsten Lord that felt like an emergency her husband could solve. She lowered her hands to the underside of her swollen belly and grew silent.

  Alan said, “I actually considered asking Sam to send a patrol car by this patient’s house tonight. She has some … fears.”

  “Yes?”

  “I ended up deciding that the issues… the fears… were more psychological than … actual.”

  Lauren felt her pulse rise. The baby gave her a couple of swift kicks in the kidneys. “You don’t sound totally confident in your decision. What could it hurt to send someone by?”

  “Let me think about it,” he said.

  She got up. She had to pee.

  She always had to pee.

  7

  Carl watched Peyton and her daughter drive away from the picnic they’d had together on the Mall before he walked back to his own car. He changed his clothes from a duffel bag he kept in the trunk. First he swapped out his sunglasses, then he pulled on a purple Colorado Rockies wind-breaker, and then he topped the outfit with a brimmed hat celebrating the Bronco’s second Super Bowl victory. Quite early in his brief sojourn in Colorado, Carl had discovered that this particular outfit was suitable for virtually every public occasion in the Greater Denver Metropolitan area, with the possible exceptions of weddings and funerals.

  So far he hadn’t attended any of those.

  He climbed into his car, backtracked to the south, and headed west on Arapahoe until he pulled into the parking lot at Eben Fine Park. After a short walk he spotted the woman-with-the-camera’s car right in front of her cabin where he’d hoped to find it. That was good.

  He watched a pizza being delivered to her room by a young man whose Toyota Tercel had a Blackjack Pizza sign attached to the roof. The pizza delivery was good news. Carl figured that the woman in the cabin would be home for a while.

  As far as Carl knew, Peyton had never seen his car, so he used it to drive back east on Arapahoe past Thirtieth and then past the Foothills Parkway to the cluster of town houses where Peyton lived with her daughter. He cruised the neighborhood once, trying to spot Ron Kriciak or another follower from the Marshals Service, but he didn’t see anyone suspicious. Carl found a spot to park under a tree on an adjacent street and climbed out of the car.

  Out loud, he said, “She’s not gone yet, right? So our job’s not done? Am I right, or what?”

  A little yip emerged from the backseat.

  “Let’s go for a walk. Whattya say? I think both of us could use a little walk. Come on. Come.”

  CARL LUPPO’S DOG was a m
iniature poodle, maybe sixteen pounds. When he got the dog from a breeder a few weeks after he’d arrived in Colorado, it was already six years old. The dog was in the process of being retired—Carl assumed forcibly—from life as a stud and was saddled with the unfortunate moniker of Christopher. The dog had a peculiar habit of standing with his front legs bowed out, as though he was posing for a doggie bodybuilding magazine. Carl thought it made Christopher look tough, so he’d immediately renamed the black dog Anvil.

  Years before, when he was still in the Family and still lived with his family, his wife had always had standards, the big poodles, and she’d insisted on spending a damn fortune grooming the two dogs so that they looked fey. “Fey” was a word Carl had heard on the streets growing up, and he wasn’t sure exactly what it meant. But he was pretty sure it applied to the way his two dogs looked after they were clipped and shaved and combed out to appear as though they’d each swallowed about a dozen inflated hairballs.

  Despite his perception of his wife’s sartorial mistreatment of the family dogs, Carl had learned to adore the character and poise of his two poodles, Lois and Clark, and started looking for one for himself as soon as he was settled in Colorado. The day Carl found Christopher, he’d had to endure listening to the owner go on and on about how one of the dog’s first sires had actually made it to Westminster. But Carl was smitten by the dog, so he put up with the owner, and after being granted the great honor of purchasing her dog, he’d immediately had Anvil re-groomed to disguise any underlying feyness that might be lurking in the dog’s genes.

  Carl was aware that with Anvil’s new haircut, his new home, and his fresh name change the dog could have been safely ensconced as a participant in the Federal Dog Security Program.

  Carl decided to call the new program DOGSEC. And Carl not only ran the program, he ran it well.

  The only dog enrolled in DOGSEC was so well disguised he didn’t have to worry about a thing. Carl figured that the newly reincarnated Anvil could take a dump in his old owner’s front yard and the woman wouldn’t be able to recognize him anymore.

  ONCE ANVIL HAD jumped from the backseat of the car to the front, Carl clipped a retractable leash to his collar and grabbed a couple of plastic bags from the glove box to corral the dog’s inevitable poop. The two of them started to stroll Peyton’s neighborhood. Carl didn’t underestimate the benefit of having a dog on a leash when he wanted to blend into a residential area. Shortly after acquiring the dog, he had learned that Anvil was also a reliable chick magnet, as his older daughter used to call it. When he was lonely, which was often, Carl considered the chick-magnet thing a good deal. When he was trying to be inconspicuous, Carl wasn’t so sure. But he’d also learned that the dog was so cute that the strangers who approached him rarely even bothered to look his way.

  Sometimes that was fine with Carl.

  8

  Please don’t have a cough; bad time to catch a cold, baby, is what I was thinking as I stepped toward Landon’s room. My path to the bedroom door took me right past the foot of my double bed.

  Along with virtually everything else in the house, I’d rented the bed shortly after I arrived in Boulder. It was utilitarian. A mattress and box spring sat on a metal frame that was attached to an oak headboard that was dressed up with some inlay. I’d tried to soften the hard lines of the ensemble with nice linens and a bed skirt and had even added a couple of upholstered pillows I got at Pier One.

  It was okay, what I’d done. Sure, the walls above the bed were bare. And, of course, the night table was oak veneer, not antique bird’s-eye maple. The room certainly didn’t evoke memories of the romantic hideaway I’d put together for Robert and me in our home in New Orleans with its linens and accessories from Frette in Manhattan, but … Robert was dead and I doubted if I would ever see New Orleans again. What had once felt like an absolute necessity of mine—to feel Frette sheets against my bare skin each night—now felt like a laughable indulgence.

  I had walked almost completely past the bed when I heard the stifled cough for the third time.

  It wasn’t Landon.

  The sound came from my right, not from the open door in front of me.

  I began to turn my head and barely caught sight of the motion that was rising at the edge of my peripheral vision. It appeared as though the pillows resting against the headboard were levitating and hanging in the air above the bed. When I turned my head to look they actually began flying at me from across the room and the mattress began rising rapidly from the frame, head over foot.

  I froze in my steps as I struggled, unsuccessfully, to make sense of what I was seeing.

  I heard a deep bass groan from below the erupting mass of bedding and I thought, Landon!

  A loud cough followed, this one unmuffled.

  Landon!

  The mattress kept coming up toward me, all the way to vertical, then beyond. The chenille bedspread that covered the sheets slid to the carpet near my feet and the mattress started to soar at me. It was about to pin me to the wall when I crouched, leapt forward, and pounded hard on my hands and knees toward the door. My only thought was that I had to get to my baby.

  “Every precious thing I lose, you will lose two.”

  The second I broke free of the falling mattress I felt the grip of a strong hand around my right ankle. The pressure that closed suddenly on my leg felt like the grasp of the devil. Hot and strong and unrelenting in its pressure. I was dragged backward by the force, away from the door, away from my daughter.

  I thought about chinos and silenced weapons.

  I screamed, “Baby, run! Run! The bad man is here!”

  Before the words were out of my mouth I felt the weight of him cover me as one of his gloved hands masked my face. I bit at the fabric of the glove that covered my mouth—it was a rubbery material covered with tiny round nubs—but I couldn’t get my teeth spread far enough apart to get his fingers between them.

  My next scream died in his hand.

  The bad man is here!

  But why is it a man? Didn’t Carl say that the person following me in the car was a woman?

  The thought disintegrated as I tried to squirm out from beneath him. I couldn’t. The mass on top of me seemed to be equivalent to the weight of a car. I was flattened face first into the carpet, a killer’s hand smashed furiously into my mouth.

  “Run, baby, run!” I tried to yell again. But all of the volume was in my head.

  My mind jumped. I thought about damsels and needing help and calling Ron Kriciak and telling him I was being followed. But I thought mostly about my little baby, and I prayed that she hadn’t managed to sleep through the ruckus.

  “Every precious thing I lose, you will lose two.”

  I imagined her running down the stairs like Mia Hamm streaking toward the goal, flying like the wind.

  “Score, baby, score!”

  The man had moved a knee to the middle of my back, and he was sticking something over my mouth. I could barely breathe.

  I didn’t want to be tied up. I so much didn’t want to be tied up.

  He started securing my wrists behind my back. He was using tape. I could smell the adhesive. I struggled, temporarily freeing one arm from his grip. He increased the pressure on my spine with his knee. When I was afraid my back was going to snap, I relented.

  He finished my wrists, then he did my ankles.

  I felt trussed.

  After he was done cinching me he never said a word. But he gave me a hard whack on the side of my head with his hand. It felt like a warning about what was to come.

  He stood and stepped over me. For a second, in the darkness of the room, I could see the outlines of his shoes. Black, rubber-soled lace-ups. I hung onto the image as though it were as important a piece of evidence as a strand of DNA. I repeated it to myself. “Blackrubbersoledlaceups. Blackrubbersoledlaceups.”

  The man cleared his throat and swallowed. He said, “You can’t hide.” Then he walked out the door of my bedroom and closed the d
oor behind him.

  I struggled onto my side and lifted myself to my knees before I lost my balance and fell over again, closer to the wall with the window, farther from the door.

  Farther from my baby.

  Oh Landon!

  Using the window ledge for balance, I somehow managed to get to my feet. I was just about to turn my back to try to manipulate the crank with my cinched hands in order to call for help when I saw a man standing on the sidewalk in front of my town house. He had a small dog on a leash.

  He was staring right up at me in the window.

  His mouth was open.

  The dog on the leash was a little black poodle, its front legs bowed out like Popeye’s arms.

  The man was Carl Luppo.

  I didn’t know who the dog was.

  9

  Carl and Anvil had walked past Peyton’s town house once and were looping back to return to his car when Carl sensed some movement in one of the upstairs windows and figured he’d been made. He shrugged and glanced up where he thought he’d seen the movement.

  Carl Luppo later chided himself for noticing that Peyton was mostly naked before he noticed that she had a band of tape over her mouth. The two perceptions happened so close together in time, however, that it didn’t slow Carl’s decisiveness.

  Anvil acted as though Carl’s sudden sprint to the front door of the town house was an expected part of their evening stroll. The dog flanked his owner step for step, prancing on the end of the lead with his head held high, his prior-life showring memories providing all the behavioral guidance he needed.

  Although Carl Luppo wasn’t a huge man, his mass wasn’t insubstantial, either. Once he’d arrived on Peyton’s porch and determined that the door was locked, he lowered his left shoulder and threw his dense weight against Peyton’s front door with a ferocity for which he’d found no particular use since his release from prison.