Dry Ice Page 26

  I followed him to the great room, pretending to have control of my impulses.

  “We have to decide how to play this,” he said, forcing calm into his manner.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Grace’s room. Me being here with you. Those are problems. For both of us. We shouldn’t be together.”

  I thought about it, decided I didn’t share his level of concern. “The alarm company called you. They’d already called me. It was a predetermined thing. We ended up here at the same time. Events were out of our control.”

  Sam considered my argument. “Okay, all right. Then you should call 911. I’ll wait outside for the sheriff to get here. I’ll let the deputy see me sitting outside, tell him what happened, and then I’ll leave before they come in to look around.” He was thinking out loud.

  “The sheriff’s not coming in here,” I said. “And I’m not calling 911. You should just leave now, Sam. Forget what you saw in Grace’s room. It never happened.”

  “You have to call.”

  “Why? Nothing important is missing from the house. The alarm company has two previous false alarms from that door sensor. You’ve already convinced me that the most likely reason for the break-in was to leave something here, not to take something from here. Why would I want to invite the sheriff back inside my house to look for whatever was left behind? How well did that work out for me last time, Sam? At my office? Inviting you in?”

  For a moment he thought I was taking a shot at him. The flame of that flare burned out quickly, though, and his eyes soon belied some empathy for my position. But he wasn’t convinced. “Grace’s room, Alan? It’s been…”

  “Violated,” I said. “Obscenely violated. The pertinent question remains why?”

  “To terrorize you.”

  “Done. It worked. Why else?”

  Sam was ready. “For the same reason they took the pictures in my bedroom. To show that they can.”

  “Agreed. I’m vulnerable. There’s a news flash. Again, done. Why else? Why plunder my daughter’s room?”

  He looked frustrated for a moment and then he exhaled loudly. “So that you would have no choice but to call the sheriff to investigate.”

  I almost said, “Bingo.” I didn’t. I said, “Yes. Whoever was in here today wants the sheriff to have an excuse to come into my house.”

  I felt neurons firing. Little sparks were flying. In micro-time, potassium and sodium imbalances were being settled by infinitesimal flashes of brain lightning. My mind was catching up with reality. It felt good.

  The cloud fell back, just a little.

  “Sam, I need you to do something for me. Get a cruiser to go by Grace’s school until Lauren or I can get there to pick her up. I don’t want to be misreading this message—what they did to her room—if you know what I mean.”

  He opened his cell and held down a single button. A few seconds later he said, “Luce? Me. I need a favor. Off the record.” He covered the microphone and looked at me. “What’s the address of the school?”

  I gave him the intersection. He repeated it to Lucy, his partner, and vaguely explained the situation. “No trail on this. Understand?…Just a little extra attention would be great. Few extra passes by whatever cruiser is already there. I’ll let you know when her parents have her home…Right, tell the patrol guys that wide-eyes would be great.”

  “Wait, Sam.”

  “Hold on, Lucy. What?”

  I said, “They should be looking for a woman.”

  “How do you know that?” he said. He wasn’t merely curious; that could have waited. He was challenging me.

  “Because that’s McClelland’s history. His psychological advantage is with women. He doesn’t have a good record with men. Men have proven to be his downfall.”

  Sam stared at me as though he was deciding whether to trust my psychological voodoo this time. The last time I’d applied it to McClelland had certainly been a fiasco. Finally, he said, “Luce? Tell them to keep a special eye out for a woman—or women—who doesn’t seem to belong…Any age, but don’t rule out young…I know that makes things trickier outside a school. Sorry.”

  He closed the phone. To me he said, “Done.” As he put the phone back in his coat the white edges of the two photographs were briefly visible sticking out of his pocket.

  I said, “Call Lucy back, Sam.”

  He snapped, “Jesus. Why?”

  I modulated my voice as much as I could. “Because you need to get some patrols to go by Simon’s school, too.”

  Sam blinked. He retrieved his phone and flipped it open. He covered the necessary territory with Lucy in less than a minute. The moment he killed the call he placed another one, again with speed-dial. He turned and took two steps farther away.

  For the new call he found a conciliatory tone that I’d rarely heard come out of his mouth. “Sherry? Me. Sorry to bug you…Hey, is this a bad time?…Okay, I’ll be quick. I’ve been thinking about this weekend. The trade you wanted to make? I was being a hardass before, and…I apologize. If you still want to take Simon to the mountains, you and, uh, Kevin can have him. We’ll work out an exchange weekend later on…I know, I know…No, not a holiday, Sherry. No, I’m not trying to get the Fourth of July from you. We’ll just find another regular weekend…I know it’s late notice. I said I was sorry. I’m stubborn sometimes, you know that…Five-thirty’s fine. He’ll be ready.”

  Sam turned to me as he shut the phone. “Sherry’s boyfriend. Kevin? The root-canal guy? He has a condo in Avon. There’s some endodontical gathering up in Vail this weekend. They wanted to take Simon.”

  Sam rolled his eyes. “Now the kid has to spend the weekend with a bunch of guys who’ve been doing root canals all week long. I bet there’ll be a lot of alcohol involved.”

  I had a less cynical perspective. I said, “Simon should be safe up there, Sam.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Grace is going to Bimini,” I said.

  “Bimini? Cool,” Sam said, knowing it wasn’t. He held his phone up for me to look at. “You still haven’t called Lauren.”

  “She’ll want me to have the cops investigate this. That’s a problem.”

  “Probably,” Sam agreed. “You two are having a rough patch?”

  “Rough patch” sounded quaint. I sighed. “Yes.”

  “That’s what Bimini’s about?”

  “Partially. That and McClelland.”

  I picked up the portable, walked out the front door, and called Lauren’s mobile from the porch.

  “I was just about to call you,” she said in greeting. “What a day.”

  “You’re all right?”

  “I was pretty shook up, but I’m okay. I can’t tell you how glad I am that he’s back in custody.”

  “I’m sorry you had to go through it,” I said. “Elliot wouldn’t let me see you.”

  “I heard,” she said.

  I couldn’t tell how to interpret that, but I wasn’t inclined toward assuming she was grateful. I was about to tell her about the break-in when she took a breath deep enough that I could hear the inhale over the phone. She said, “Alan? Grace and I have a six-forty-five flight to Miami. Tonight. I was going to tell you this afternoon, but…well. Things are going to be tight. Could you bring Gracie here? And feed her something first? I’m not going to be able to get home before we go to the airport. I’ve totally run out of time.”

  “What about your things?”

  She hesitated. The hesitation left me feeling like I was sucking bus exhaust. Finally, she said, “We’re all packed.”

  Oh. “Where are…the bags?” Please, tell me Grace’s things were not in her room.

  “In the trunk of my car.”

  More bus exhaust filled my lungs. My relief that the suitcases weren’t in Grace’s room was overwhelmed by the hollowness I felt that my wife had packed and prepared to leave.

  “Yes, I’ll bring her over. You want something to eat, t
oo?”

  FORTY-FOUR

  THE HOUSE was quiet.

  I monitored the six-forty-five flight from Denver to Miami on the Web. It took off eighteen minutes late from DIA and was due into Miami International fourteen minutes early. I realized I didn’t know what flight, or even what airline, my family would be taking to the Bahamas the next morning.

  I felt as empty as a fallow field.

  I took a credit card from my wallet and poured a tumbler of whiskey—it was either that or gin, and I couldn’t do gin. I carried the provisions to the basement and set the card and the drink on my side of the old partner’s desk. Lauren had her laptop with her, so I booted my aging desktop. What I planned—or hoped—to do on the Internet wasn’t complicated. Although I would have preferred the speed and reliability of Lauren’s computer, I didn’t think the task should be too much for my old machine. My main concern was that I maintained my computer almost as well as I maintained my car, which wasn’t well, and I suspected it was infested with more bugs than a picnic in the tropics.

  I followed a few false Google leads before I found the path I was looking for. The credit card proved an essential tool for buying my way into databases and archives that contained the specific information I was seeking. The whole process took me less than an hour. By the time I had what I wanted, it was clear to me that if I were a more skilled Internet researcher and had known what I was doing, I could have done the job in ten minutes. I comforted myself with the realization that back in my graduate-school days when research involved walking into actual brick and stone libraries, flipping through card catalogs, wandering through stacks, doing interlibrary loan, and reading musty newsprint—or juggling endless rolls of microfiche—the search would’ve taken me a week, easy.

  The lesson? Secrets are much more difficult to bury than they once were. A determined idiot like me, with a crappy old computer and a credit card with room left on its credit limit, could dig up a well-buried doozy in no time.

  In the end I’d had to print out only about a dozen pages.

  I’d finished all the whiskey. If I wanted to sleep for a few hours, though, I would need some more alcohol.

  Secrets, I was thinking as Emily and I climbed the stairs. If you keep one, it chases you relentlessly. Ironic how easy it has become to sneak up on someone else’s from behind.

  Anvil was curled up in a ball close to the heat vent in the great room. I woke him and took both dogs out to pee. The night was clear. In the springtime along the Front Range of the Rockies, clear usually meant cold.

  Tharon Thibodeaux had distorted a few pertinent details in the story he’d told me at Kaladi. The behavior of the patient who had jumped off the roof during the psychiatry department Christmas party when Thibodeaux was a resident wasn’t quite as unpredictable as Tharon had made it seem.

  The original incident had been reported dispassionately on an inner page in the metro news section in the New Orleans Times-Picayune the morning after the man’s suicide. N.O. MAN JUMPS TO DEATH was the headline. The patient’s name was Carson Leopold. The story was probably filed close to deadline; other details about the incident were sparse. Friends who were interviewed for a follow-up story in the next day’s edition called Mr. Leopold “Cars.” He’d been born in Philadelphia and had been living in New Orleans for a “couple of years.” He worked as a cashier in some kind of porn/sex-toy shop on the fringe of the Quarter.

  The reporter on the story was a woman named Joanna Eusto. I assumed that since she was chasing suicide stories for the metro pages in the week just prior to the holidays, she was a novice. From the tone of her reporting of the initial story and especially in that first follow-up, I could also surmise that she hadn’t been around long enough to become jaded. I could taste outrage in her measured words.

  Maybe the story of Carson Leopold’s death got traction because it was the holidays, or maybe not much else of note was happening in New Orleans that week, or maybe Eusto’s enthusiasm for digging at the edges of what looked like a garden-variety suicide grabbed her editor’s attention, but Leopold’s death earned five long follow-up pieces before the story permanently disappeared from the pages of the Times-Picayune just before New Year’s.

  The part about Cars jumping from the roof in view of the assembled clinicians of the psychiatry department turned out to be true. But Cars hadn’t actually been on the roof of the apartment building where the party was being held—according to Eusto he had been on the roof of the building across the street. At first reading I didn’t grasp the significance of that simple fact, but soon realized that as word spread at the party that a patient of Tharon’s was threatening to jump from the roof, all his colleagues would have actually been in a perfect position to watch the man’s manipulative antics on the ledge of the rooftop across the street.

  Leopold would not have been invisible to the partygoers, as Tharon had suggested to me. He wouldn’t have been invisible to Marlene, the resident who he said had been on-call for emergencies that night. He certainly wouldn’t have been invisible to Tharon Thibodeaux, who would’ve been watching in horror as his patient dove from the rooftop of the building across the street.

  A skillful photographer for the Times-Picayune had managed to gain access to the flat directly above the one where the Christmas party had taken place. He used the access to frame a photograph that accompanied Eusto’s third piece on Carson Leopold’s suicide, the one in which she revealed that Carson had apparently chosen the time and place for his leap to maximize the audience for his death among the various doctors of the psychiatry department. The photo demonstrated—using perfect framing and spot-on depth-of-field—the view that the assembled psychiatrists would have had of Cars as he made his threats via mobile phone, and later, as he jumped to his death.

  They would have seen him leave the roof, and a second or two later they would have seen him crash into the top of the car below. And die.

  Cars Leopold was one of those patients whose story would sound familiar to anyone who had ever worked in the outpatient clinic of an urban psychiatric training facility. He was one of those difficult-to-treat, unrewarding patients who gets handed from psychology intern to social-work trainee to psychiatry resident as each clinician in turn completes his or her outpatient rotation and moves on to some new training opportunity in another setting. Carson might, or might not, have looked or felt better for a short time during each clinician’s window of care before he undoubtedly deteriorated again during each artificial transition from one training therapist to the next.

  The system was set up to maximize learning opportunities for young clinicians, not to maximize quality of care for the difficult-to-treat patients who predominated in the sliding-scale environment of the training clinic. A side effect of the training-first bias was that the system also maximized the opportunities for patients like Carson Leopold to repeatedly experience the disruption of the loss of a therapist.

  I had discovered no reason to doubt that Carson was, as Tharon had maintained, burdened with borderline personality disorder. Carrying that unenviable and difficult-to-treat diagnosis into an outpatient training clinic, he would have found himself at the bottom of the roster of patients that the young clinicians would be likely to select to continue to follow after they’d moved on to a new rotation. Psychopathologically speaking, Carson was the scrawny, unathletic kid with thick glasses who got chosen last, if at all, when sports teams were chosen at school. No therapist was likely to pick Carson as one of the few patients he or she would choose for their ongoing outpatient caseload after the clinic rotation was complete.

  Eusto had reported in her second Times-Picayune article that Leopold had already been through three therapists in a little over a year when he killed himself. Tharon had told me that the suicidal patient had been handed off to him the July before the suicide, just as Tharon began his outpatient clinic rotation. One of Leopold’s friends told the reporter that Cars’s last session with his current therapist was sc
heduled for the second week in January the following year.

  Would that be because Carson was better? No, it would be because Tharon’s rotation was ending.

  The second fact about which Tharon had been disingenuous to me was his contention that Carson Leopold had no prior history of suicidal behavior.

  During the course of her investigation of his death, Joanna Eusto had interviewed Carson’s boss at the porn shop. She’d talked with five people who identified themselves as Cars’s friends, and she spoke by phone with his sister in Philadelphia. She noted that she had been unable to interview any spokesperson from the outpatient clinic where Carson Leopold was being treated.

  Eusto had learned that Leopold had been hospitalized twice in the previous twelve months. Both hospitalizations had been brief, and both had been precipitated by suicidal behavior. The first was a threat to kill himself with a gun. The police who burst into his rented room found the gun, but no ammunition. The second admission was for treatment of an overdose of various medicines that he had stolen from friends’ homes. The lethality risk of the attempt had been judged low. Both suicidal gestures had taken place during windows of time when Leopold was being transferred from one clinician to another at the out-patient clinic.

  The last of the distortions in Thibodeaux’s retelling of what happened to Carson Leopold was the most damning.

  Joanna Eusto didn’t uncover the revealing facts until she was approached by a psychiatric nurse employed at the clinic. Eusto’s subsequent article, the fourth piece on the saga for the Times-Picayune, was headlined: SEVENTEEN PSYCHIATRISTS WATCHED MAN JUMP.

  The story wasn’t about the failures of a healthcare discipline. It was about the failure of a system. If Cars Leopold’s therapist had been a clinical psych intern, and not a psychiatric resident, the headline could just as easily have read: SEVENTEEN PSYCHOLOGISTS WATCHED MAN JUMP.

  In her article, Eusto named names.