Missing Persons Read online

  We shook hands. “Good evening, Alan. At least the location is convenient this time. And the weather is delightful for December. No blizzard. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that.”

  “Thanks for coming so quickly, Cozy. This is Raoul Estevez. Raoul, Cozier Maitlin.”

  “A pleasure, Mr. Estevez. I’m aware of your work.” That was Cozy’s way of communicating that he wasn’t worried about his fee. “It is your wife who is being detained?”

  “In that car.” Raoul pointed at the squad that was parked at an angle on the lawn in front of the building where Hannah lay dead.

  “Do you want to know what happened?” I asked.

  “I understand someone died here under suspicious circumstances. Beyond that, not really. If either of you was an intimate of the deceased, please let me offer my condolences,” Cozy said, insincerely. He lifted one of his long legs, stepped over the crime-scene tape, and somehow managed to adopt an even more imperial deportment as he moved out onto the lawn. He paused, turned back to Raoul, and said, “Give me a moment or two to sort this out. Everything will be fine. It will.” After one more step, Cozy looked back over his shoulder at me. “Lauren said I’d be speaking with Jaris Slocum. That’s true?”

  I nodded. I considered the wisdom of editorializing about Detective Slocum’s apparent personality flaws, but decided that I didn’t need to do anything to inflame the situation any further.

  “Slocum is… difficult,” Cozy said. He said it in such a way that it sounded more damning than Sam Purdy informing me that Slocum was an asshole, or than Lauren concurring.

  “That’s been my experience so far this evening,” I replied.

  I was feeling a million things. Grief, anger, frustration, fear, even some relief, now that Cozy was there. Still, my anticipation of what was to come next was so sharp that I would have yanked out my wallet and maxed out all my credit cards for a ticket to the production I was about to get to witness for free.

  Cozy immediately marched over to the cruiser and confronted the patrol cop assigned to keep watch on Diane, who was continuing to fume in the backseat. Cozy’s approach wasn’t tentative, and didn’t have any excuse-me-please in it. He moved in until he stood toe-to-toe with the cop, a young black man who was about six-two, 210.

  Cozy dwarfed him.

  Cozy’s introductory gambit to the officer consisted of a few words that caused the man to react by trying to step back to create some breathing room. But since the cop was already leaning against the car there was no place for him to go and he had to crane his neck upward to even see Cozy’s face. I imagined that the view was like gazing up from below Mt. Rushmore.

  The patrol cop listened to Cozy for only another beat or two before he raised his voice and barked, “Step back, sir! Step back! Now! That’s a warning!”

  The cop’s hand gravitated ominously toward his holster.

  I held my breath and instinctively grabbed Raoul’s arm so he wouldn’t do something valiant, and stupid. I’d known him a long time, and knew that Raoul was capable of both.

  Cozy, of course, didn’t step back an inch. He was daring the cop to get physical with him. And if the young cop preferred to do loud, Cozy could do loud just fine. With volume that matched the patrol cop’s do-what-I-say voice and then raised a few decibels for good measure, Cozy announced, “I am her attorney and I would like to speak with my client, officer. Officer”-Cozy leaned back at his waist so that he could read the cop’s name tag-“Leamer. It’s a pleasure to meet you. My client-that is she, by the way, that you are protecting-won’t, will not, be answering any more of the detectives’ questions tonight.”

  The volume of that soliloquy drew virtually everyone’s attention to the cruiser, including Jaris Slocum’s. He was up on the front porch and immediately began a march toward the car with long strides, his hands tightened into fists. Cozy must have felt him coming. He spun away from the patrol cop and greeted Slocum with, “A pleasure seeing you, as always. Is my client actually in custody, Detective?”

  Slocum stopped five feet from Cozy. I don’t know why he kept his distance-maybe so that he wasn’t close enough to shake Cozy’s outstretched hand. Slocum’s mouth opened and closed about a centimeter as he tried to process the latest developments: A large, imperial criminal defense attorney had penetrated the perimeter and he seemed to be making speeches for the benefit of the dozens of gathered citizens.

  Not good.

  “Haven’t decided? Is that it? Perhaps I can help,” Cozy taunted. His words were polite, his tone was even doing a clever masquerade as respectful. But everyone, especially Slocum, knew it was a taunt.

  Slocum opened his mouth again, but still no words came out. Finally he was able to mutter, “I’m trying to investigate a suspicious death here.”

  Cozy’s reply was immediate. “Good for you. As a taxpayer, I applaud your… conscientiousness. But that is neither here nor there at the moment, is it? The question at hand is, you see, quite simple.” Cozy leaned over and smiled at Diane in the backseat of the cruiser before returning his attention to Slocum. “Is my client in custody? Yes or no?”

  Cozy’s voice carried through the heavy December air as though he were a thespian center stage at the Globe.

  “She is not under arrest.”

  “Ah, but I didn’t ask you that, did I?” He was doing his best to sound like Olivier doing Henry IV. “I asked you if my client was in your custody-yes, or no.”

  I could barely discern Slocum’s response. I thought he said, “For now, she is… um, being detained for questioning.”

  “I appreciate that clarification. As of now she is officially declining your invitation for further questioning, so I assume, then, that she is free to go.” Cozy leaned over and made quite a show of staring into the backseat of the cruiser. With mock horror he added, “Has she been handcuffed, Detective Slocum?” He included Jaris’s name so that the assembled citizenry would know who was responsible for the travesty. Had he next recited Slocum’s badge number-had Slocum been wearing a badge-I would not have been surprised. “Is that possible? Is she really handcuffed and locked in the backseat of a police cruiser? Are you planning on taking her to the jail and booking her?”

  “She was not being cooperative.”

  Cozy held out his own wrists and used the full power of his baritone. “Was she? Like my client, I too am planning to be uncooperative if this is the way the Boulder Police Department is choosing to behave toward its law-abiding citizens.”

  “Mr. Maitlin,” Slocum implored.

  At that moment I actually had just the slightest sympathy for Jaris Slocum. Cozy’s performance had gone more than a little over the top.

  Cozy ignored Slocum’s plea and made a great show of holding out his French-cuffed wrists to see if Slocum would dare put a slightly less elegant pair of cuffs on them. “Would you like to handcuff me, as well? Is that the current policy of the department when citizens exercise their constitutional prerogatives to grieve silently?”

  I could tell that Jaris Slocum would have loved nothing better at that moment than to handcuff Cozier Maitlin, but the presence of fifty or so civilian witnesses served to deter his more primitive impulses.

  Darrell Olson’s primary role in his detective partnership was, apparently, to sense what was about to go wrong between Slocum and one of Boulder ’s citizens. Once again, Darrell did his job with aplomb. He rushed up, grabbed Slocum’s arm, pulled him closer to the house-and much farther from Cozy-and went nose to nose with him for about half a minute. I couldn’t hear a word of their argument but my respect for Darrell C. R. Olson expanded exponentially as he barked whatever he was barking. When the tête-à-tête between the two detectives was over, Slocum climbed the porch and marched into the old house where Hannah lay dead.

  Olson returned to Cozy. He used a low voice to address him, modeling for him, hoping to reduce the inflammation. As he spoke he spread his hands in conciliation, palms up, like a don trying to pacify a peer. I couldn’t
tell what he was saying, but it took him a minute or more to get through it.

  Cozy’s reply wasn’t a whisper; his tone remained floridly oratorical. “No, Detective. Not in a few minutes. Right now. I want the cuffs off my client and I want her released. Now. There is no point whatsoever in prolonging her agony. She is despairing over her friend’s death. I guarantee you that this interview is over for tonight.”

  Olson dipped his head a little and spoke again. It was apparent that he was still determined to try to be deferential, to try to lower the temperature of the conflict a little, but that he was also trying not to roll over to Cozy’s demands.

  Cozy listened to Darrell’s continued plea, thought for a moment, and decided that he wanted none of it. He said, “Now, Detective.” Cozy gestured toward the old house and Jaris Slocum, and in a much lower, tempered voice added, “That man is your problem, not mine. You have my sympathy, but nothing more. Now, please.”

  Olson shook his head, scratched his ear, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and mumbled something to Officer Leamer. Without so much as a nod, the detective walked away from Cozy and the patrol car.

  Leamer opened the back door of the cruiser, helped Diane to her feet, and removed the handcuffs from behind her back. The fire in her eyes, if focused, could have ignited candles across the street.

  Cozy introduced himself to his client and said something to her so quietly I couldn’t discern a word. Diane had fresh tears on her face. She said, “Thank you, thank you.” Then, as though she’d somehow forgotten, she cried, “My God, Hannah’s dead.”

  Raoul said, “That’s it?” Actually, what he said was, “C’est finis?”

  I said, “For now.”

  6

  Diane and I didn’t make it to Vegas.

  Hannah Grant’s ashes were interred the following Tuesday after a sentimental service in one of the downtown churches. I had never before seen so much of Boulder ’s mental health community present in one place.

  I was in a pretty good position to know that the police were flummoxed by the case. The local media was already reporting that the cops had no active leads. Lauren confirmed to me that after a week the investigation was spinning its wheels. My friend Sam Purdy, the Boulder police detective, usually wouldn’t talk out of school about important cases with me, but he did roll his eyes when I mentioned Hannah.

  That told me a lot.

  During one late-night phone conversation he went way out on a limb. “We got crap,” was what he said.

  Lauren swore me to secrecy but revealed that Slocum and Olson had located no witnesses to anything that supported a finding of homicide. No one had seen Hannah leave her south Boulder condo the morning of her death, but she’d arrived at Rallysport Health Club early enough to work out before driving away just before 8:30. The time was almost certain. Two different witnesses recalled an incident in the locker room-Hannah had tripped over another woman’s gym bag on the way back from the shower and both women had fallen hard to the floor. The witnesses were confident that they knew what time Hannah had dressed after her workout before heading to her car.

  They were confident about one other thing, too. As she fell, Hannah had definitely hit her head on the tile floor. Someone had offered to go get ice. Hannah had declined; she said she was fine and had to get to work.

  No one reported seeing her arrive at her office building. The few of Hannah’s patients who had shown up for appointments on the day she died and who had voluntarily come forward to speak with the police reported nothing that provided any direction for the investigation.

  The detectives weren’t able to develop any motive for an assault. Hannah’s personal life revealed no promising leads. Her finances were pristine. Her professional record was free of formal complaints.

  The cops had no physical evidence that a crime had been committed. Actually, the truth was that they had way too much physical evidence. The little office building was chock-full of fingerprints and trace evidence. Dozens of different patients made their way through the space every week.

  Hair, fibers? All the police could want, and more. Apparently Hannah’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies had lacunae in the terrain where “neat” stopped and “clean” began. For investigators, Hannah’s housekeeping weakness created a problem. To use trace evidence to rule in the presence of an intruder in the building, Jaris Slocum and Darrell Olson had to rule out the presence of any and all routine visitors to the building, which meant-minimally-obtaining exemplar prints and DNA samples from all of Hannah’s patients and all of Mary Black’s patients and from any other routine visitors to the building, including the woman who delivered the mail, the guys from UPS and FedEx, and the various tat-ted and pierced kids who delivered takeout from restaurants on the nearby Pearl Street Mall.

  Mary Black, the psychiatrist and mother of three who shared office space with Hannah, declined to make her patient roster available to the police, citing doctor-patient confidentiality. Diane, whom Hannah had entrusted with the clinical responsibility of closing her practice in the event of her death, also declined to make Hannah’s patient roster available to the police, citing the same doctor-patient confidentiality issues. When the police pressed the issue, she’d enlisted Cozy Maitlin to run interference for her.

  Diane was ambivalent about keeping the information to herself. After what Jaris Slocum had done to her the evening Hannah’s body was discovered, Diane wasn’t, of course, particularly inclined to cooperate with him. But she was eager to do anything she could to help identify anyone who might have had anything to do with Hannah’s death. As far as Hannah’s patient roster was concerned, though, Diane had decided that was information to which Slocum wasn’t entitled.

  Hannah’s death officially remained “suspicious” until the Boulder County coroner issued his report eight days after her death. The medical examiner had identified two discrete blows to Hannah’s head, and he identified her cause of death as traumatic head injury resulting in cerebral hemorrhage. He specified the manner of her death as “undetermined.” The ME’s opinion was that the damage inflicted by a flat surface, possibly the tile floor at Rallysport, had not been sufficient to cause Hannah’s death. Hannah’s death was directly attributable to the second head trauma, origin unknown.

  The dual traumas either had been unintentional blows suffered during the fall in the gym the morning she died-one impact caused by the tile floor, one by something else-or had been the result of two blows to her head intentionally inflicted by an assailant. Sam pointedly reminded me that a third possibility existed: One blow had been suffered during the fall at the health club, and the second blow, the fatal one, had been inflicted by an assailant at Hannah’s office.

  Diane heard the coroner’s findings first. Diane always tended to hear gossip first. What source she might have in the medical examiner’s office eluded me, but she found me on Friday morning at the office at a moment when we were both between patients and stunned me with the news.

  “Somebody may have killed her, Alan. My God, somebody may have killed her. Why would somebody want to kill Hannah?”

  I held her while she wept. I’d lost count of how many times I’d held Diane while she wept since Hannah’s death. The tears weren’t endless, but they were frequent. Diane’s grief arrived in short, intense bursts, like the August monsoons. Clear skies before, clear skies after.

  I asked myself the same question Diane was asking a dozen times a day for a while after that. Why would somebody want to kill Hannah?

  I couldn’t provide an answer. I used the fact that I couldn’t answer it to console myself with the likelihood that Hannah’s death had been accidental. Nothing more than a freak reaction to a silly accident in a health club locker room.

  But the police were left with a buffet of anomalies that they couldn’t explain. Why was Hannah’s purse on the floor of her office, a place she would never leave it? Why was Hannah’s body found in Mary Black’s office, a place she had no reason to go? And why was Hannah’s
blouse tucked up under the front of her bra?

  Hanukkah had arrived and Christmas was growing ever closer.

  The effort to determine the manner of Hannah’s death turned colder along with the weather.

  Media interest in the case declined quickly, and Hannah’s very public death soon became what, perhaps, it really had been all along-a private tragedy.

  7

  If you don’t happen to be an inveterate shopper intent on milking the swollen teat of post-holiday sales-I am not-and if you aren’t required to be at work-it was a Sunday, and I wasn’t-the day after Christmas is a sleep-in day.

  Or maybe-if the snow gods have conspired with the ski gods to dump ten powdery inches of flash-frozen Dom Perignon on the upper reaches of Beaver Creek and one of your wife’s friends has generously offered two free holiday season nights at her Bachelor Gulch ski villa-the day after Christmas is most definitely a play day.

  Lauren and I had packed our ski stuff and winter clothing and an immense quantity of three-year-old paraphernalia the night before and were out of bed well before dawn in an almost certainly futile attempt to beat the pre-ski traffic that seemed to always clog I-70 West into the Colorado Rockies during the winter months. She was fixing some breakfast for our still-sleeping daughter, Grace; I was loading the car. While I was on a trip into the kitchen to grab a cooler to lug to the garage, Lauren said, “See that?”

  “What?”

  She pointed at the tiny kitchen TV, which was tuned to a local channel so we could hear the ski-traffic report. Why? I wasn’t sure. If the traffic was awful, we’d take I-70 into the mountains. If the traffic was light, we’d do the same thing. She said, “That thing at the bottom of the screen.”

  I assumed she meant the crawl, the strip of text that I always seemed to be reading when I should be watching the screen and that I never seemed to be reading when news about some important update was moving across the screen that I should probably be reading. From the time that crawls first appeared on TV screens, I’d decided that I was genetically incapable of reading the moving words and simultaneously attending to what was happening on the rest of the screen. I’d long ago concluded that I did not possess a twenty-first-century mind.