Dry Ice Page 32

  I had no idea how people did that.

  The assistant warden stood. He said, “We’re set then. Dr. Gregory, right this way. Everyone else, please remain in this room.”

  I followed him down a corridor, through a locked steel door, and down another corridor. We turned left. We turned left again. When we passed through yet another security door it was apparent to me that we had crossed an important line. The final security barricade we cleared was electronic and more substantial than the ones before, and the architecture on the other side revealed we had left a transitional wing and entered a correctional one. We stopped thirty seconds later outside a nondescript room with a heavy steel door. A correctional officer stood sentry.

  The assistant warden said, “The inmate is waiting inside.”

  “Okay,” I replied.

  “You frightened?” he asked me on an inhale.

  I said, “More nervous than frightened, but yeah, I’m scared.”

  “You should be. I read his jacket. Guys like him? They’re like old munitions. Designed to be dangerous, kind of unstable. They can go off at any time.”

  “Old bombs don’t hold grudges,” I said. “He does.”

  He flattened his mouth into a wry smile. “Don’t be a hero in there, Doctor.”

  “Not in my repertoire,” I said.

  “If that was the case you wouldn’t be here,” he said.

  You don’t know why I’m here. You have no idea, I thought. He wanted me to reply, to reveal something.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  A decent bullshit detector would be a prerequisite for a job like his, and he seemed to have one. I hoped that he had been the only one at the conference table who was questioning my motives for being in Pueblo to see McClelland.

  He said, “I’ll be present later at the debriefing. See you then.” He nodded at the officer. The officer unlocked the door.

  Bingo, I thought.

  FIFTY-THREE

  “I KNEW you’d come.”

  Michael McClelland was in prison garb. The clothes made him look a little pudgier than I recalled from my brief glances at him in Lauren’s office. He didn’t appear villainous. I saw no lingering signs of the wounds he’d suffered during his arrest years before. All the institutional food he’d been eating over the years at the state’s expense had helped him put on a few pounds. My overall impression was of a State Farm agent whose office had been stuck for a decade between a Wendy’s and a KFC.

  After locating the bright-red panic button, I sat down across from him with my back to the door. Three feet of brushed-steel tabletop separated us.

  On my side of the table someone had scratched, “My mother made me a queer.” Below it, a different hand had etched out a retort: “Will she make me one too?”

  “Nervous?” McClelland asked.

  I hadn’t yet spoken a word. My first was not going to be a reply to that question.

  I waited. It’s what I do.

  “I thought I was the one who was supposed to be mute,” he said, elevating his eyebrows.

  “This is your meeting,” I said. “If I’m not convinced within the next five minutes why you wanted me here, I’ll knock on that door and leave. I won’t come back.”

  He made a tsking sound with his tongue on the roof of his mouth.

  I had an impulse to stand up and do a side-kick into his Adam’s apple. I wondered if a clean hit would snap his neck. Although I had no martial-arts skills—attempting the maneuver was more likely to rip my groin than break his neck—the fantasy soothed me. I felt my breathing slow. My blood pressure descended from the stratosphere.

  I waited. After a reasonable interval—I’d left my watch in the car, so I was guessing—I said, “Four minutes.”

  I silently counted to sixty. I said, “Three.”

  I did it again. I said, “Two.” The room was quiet. I could hear the pop-swish of my pulse as blood rushed close to my ears.

  He said, “You won’t leave.”

  I counted to fifty. I said, “One more minute.”

  At my internal count of forty-five, I stood up, pushed my chair back into place and stepped toward the door.

  “I know what happened in Thousand Oaks, you hypocritical asshole.”

  I looked over my shoulder at him. I was trying to look blasé. I’d been preparing myself for that one. Didn’t really believe it would happen. Still…

  You do know. Wow.

  I said, “That’s all you got?”

  I watched his reaction for about five seconds. I thought he was a little taken aback by my lack of response, but I wasn’t sure. He had a pretty good poker face.

  I knocked on the door. The steel absorbed the sound as though I’d pounded on foam rubber. I hoped the officer outside had heard my knock. I eyed the emergency button.

  McClelland pushed his chair back from the table. I didn’t have to turn around to know what he was doing. The sound was distinctive.

  How long did the assistant warden say this interval was going to be? Between knocking and the door opening?

  I knocked again. I used the side of my fist.

  “My escape from Pueblo wasn’t planned and I’m in a position I didn’t anticipate. I have a deal for you.”

  An officer opened the door. He was a tall black man with shoulders that could make a yardstick disappear. “Sit,” he barked at McClelland. I flinched at the sharp crack of his voice. Behind him, I could see another officer—a woman—holding two sets of steel shackles. Another male officer was behind her.

  I turned my head and saw McClelland sit.

  “Are we permitted some water, sir?” I asked the correctional officer with the meter of shoulders.

  He looked into my eyes for a few seconds, gauging my sincerity. Apparently satisfied, he nodded and then closed the door. I stayed where I was. The door reopened in about a minute. After staring McClelland into ten seconds of paralysis, he handed me two foam cups of water. I said, “Thank you.”

  I placed the water on the table. I sat back down. To McClelland I said, “Why didn’t you just run? When you walked away from the clinic?”

  “And spare you this? By ‘you’ I mean Lauren and Purdy too, of course. I had too much invested in this plan to run.”

  “Vengeance is more satisfying than freedom?”

  “For the first hour or so I was out, I was tempted to head for Mexico. But I hadn’t planned it out. I didn’t have money. Hadn’t done any research. I’m a planner by character, not an improviser. I knew there was a chance I might make it to freedom, but I thought the odds were greater I’d get caught first and that I’d just end up having to stand trial. Then? All the work I’d put into fucking up your life would have been for naught.” He smiled. “Getting even with you personally was an acceptable alternative.”

  I wasn’t surprised that vindictiveness was so high on his list of motivations. It always had been. I said, “Tell me what you want.”

  He drank half the water before he sat back on his chair. “I want to go back to Pueblo. I don’t belong here. Needless to say, I don’t want to be judged competent. I don’t want to stand trial. I want you to…help me with that.”

  Michael didn’t want to be in the state penitentiary. And he wanted me to make a clinical argument that he remained too mentally ill to be declared competent to proceed within the criminal-justice system. He was suffering a contemporary version of Yossarian’s catch-22—if you don’t want to be in a place like New Max, then you’re not too crazy to be there. The irony was sweet.

  I said, “What’s in it for me?”

  “I keep your secret.”

  I shrugged. “And what? I wait until the next time you feel like pulling it out for a little blackmail?”

  He shrugged back. “Maybe you’ll have to trust me.”

  “Trust won’t be part of any agreement we reach.”

  “You’re talking about an agreement. We’re halfway there.” He paused. His ne
xt words sounded academic, as though he were a scientist addressing a colleague. “The truth is that you have a weakness for flawed people, Doctor. You’ve spent a career believing in people who don’t deserve your faith. You did it with my sister. You did it with me. With your friend the detective. You even did it with your wife. You’ll do it again.” He paused. “And again. And again. We both know why. Just us. Let’s leave it that way.”

  His simple assessment of my professional life and my personal vulnerabilities wounded me. I tried not to let him see the blood flowing from the gash he cut.

  Believing that the most flawed among us could change and believing that even the most flawed among us deserved a chance to change had been the fuel in the motor that had driven me through college and graduate school.

  Before that it had been the argument I’d made to my mother about my father.

  And to my father about my mother.

  To myself about both of them.

  I’d been a thirteen-year-old philosopher/psychologist who knew shit about philosophy or psychology.

  What had changed since? I feared not much. I’d read a lot of books. Taken a lot of classes. I’d gotten older. But I continued to find myself ambushed by psychopaths and sociopaths and by lesser versions of evil, too.

  I needed to change the subject with McClelland. “Back up,” I said. “Walking away from that clinic wasn’t planned?”

  “Planned? How about stupid? The fool left me unshackled. Five seconds later I was walking out the door. It was so…enticing. So much had been set up by then and…I had to go and get impulsive. Greedy.”

  “And now you’re here. That wasn’t part of the plan either. Yes? The stunt you pulled at the Justice Center? You were trying to show everybody how nuts you were?”

  “Pretty much. ‘Cunning, but severely psychotic. Extremely paranoid.’ That’s what the psychiatrist said about me last time. I spend a lot of my time trying to reinforce that impression. I didn’t have much choice at the end. A cop almost spotted me in your neighborhood. Then two cops followed me into the Boulder Army Store when I was lifting bandannas. Turned out they were after a different shoplifter.” He made an exasperated face. “I didn’t have money. No safe place to stay. I was afraid I’d get picked up for some petty crime or that some cop would stumble on me in Boulder and I would lose control of events.” He shook his head. Then he smiled. “This was never about getting free. It was about getting even.”

  “But they brought you here, not to Pueblo. Miscalculation? Yes?”

  “I’m here. It wasn’t part of the plan. Get them to send me back to Pueblo and all is forgiven. And forgotten. I call off what’s pending. Your bride doesn’t have to know what you did. Your future is in your hands now.”

  “Forgiven? You don’t have the currency you need to buy that kind of favor.”

  “Because I’m such a nice guy, I’ll even tell you who’s been helping me.”

  That was his sweetener. I was assuming that Michael didn’t know that Sam and I knew about J. Winter B. He was either confirming that fact or he was screwing with me. I wasn’t sure it mattered which was true. The fact I already knew she was out there and that I knew her identity made me invulnerable to the leverage McClelland was counting on using.

  “And why would I care about that? The cops might care. I don’t.”

  “My accomplice helped me set up your wife,” he said. “You must have some feelings about that. Aren’t you curious how we did it?”

  “It’s not too hard for me to see how that was done. Your accomplice is resourceful. He probably watched Lauren smoking dope outside our house at night. Somehow he tied Lauren to her sister in Seattle and…” I shrugged. “The rest? Inventive, yes.”

  “Reading her e-mail helped. Did you know the signal from your wireless network makes it out to the barn?” Michael said. “The security settings? Pure bullshit. Your wife really should use passwords. Here’s a freebie: call a locksmith. We made a copy of the key you hide under the flagstone.”

  Note to self: Change locks. Secure network. Get new e-mail accounts. Use passwords.

  “Lauren was set up with aplomb, I admit that. Though I’m still not sure how your friend managed to do the thing with the grand jury witness. That was more complicated.”

  His vanity was showing. I was praying he would keep talking. “I’ve been waiting—patiently—for a witness-less crime in Boulder that would keep the cops’ interest. When we finally got one—the hit-and-run—we created a witness. We tantalized the cops with what the witness might know. We created a threat to the witness. That was all prelude.

  “Then we planted the purse at your office. That was the trap.”

  “The purse was risky, Michael. What if I hadn’t spotted it?”

  “The purse was elegant, Alan. And I always have a plan B. Always.”

  “The witness was another accomplice? How do you find these people?” I asked as if I didn’t care.

  “That was paid help, actually. It’s somebody my accomplice recruited in town. We convinced the ‘witness’ that her role would be simple. She needed a friend, and she needed money—we gave her the first and promised her enough of the second to move back to Alaska. That’s where she’s from.”

  He waited for me to react. I didn’t.

  He went on. “The blood was a nice touch, don’t you think? The nosebleed? Nicole said you never suspected it wasn’t hers.”

  Nicole was right.

  He sat back. “You thought she was a man, didn’t you? She thought you did.”

  I didn’t respond to that provocation. “You couldn’t have predicted that the hit-and-run would become a grand jury investigation,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No, that ambushed us. We adjusted. I saw it as an opportunity, but I never did figure out a way to use it to our advantage with Lauren. But Sam Purdy? God bless him, he walked right into the fire for us. What a hero that man is. A little undisciplined, but I already knew that, didn’t I?”

  Damn. You know about Amanda Ross.

  “Where is the witness now, Michael?”

  “The witness is…gone. Alaska? Maybe. Telling you where she is won’t help me. I’d rather talk about your wife. I’ve always liked talking about your wife.”

  I imagined a shotgun spray of buckshot turning his chest into pink mist. It calmed me like a good massage. “The problem is—your problem is, Michael—that your friend did too good a job of setting up my wife. He set her up in such a way that nothing is going to make her legal problems go away now. Nothing you can say will un-ring that bell. I think you, more than anyone, should know what it feels like to be painted into that kind of corner.”

  He thought about it for a moment. “You may be right. Obviously doesn’t matter to me beyond the current negotiation. The setups we did? Those were our insurance policies. The true vulnerabilities that you have—that all of you have—are the secrets I learned before we started. That was a lesson from my own life—one you helped me learn way back when. True vulnerability is in our secrets. You know damn well that it’s the case in your life. But maybe you want to believe it isn’t true for your wife’s or your friend’s? That’s naïve, Alan. Everyone has a secret. Or six. With the Net, and a little money to pay some data brokers? Secrets aren’t secret. They’re just hidden treasures, waiting to be exploited.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  LAUREN’S MARIJUANA? Sam’s affair? I thought. Is that what he’s talking about?

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Ever talk to a pickpocket?” Michael asked. “They’ll tell you that if you give a mark a few minutes he’ll touch his money. He’ll put his hand near his wallet or brush his fingers on the pocket where he keeps his billfold, or whatever. With secrets, it’s different. It can go either way. People either visit their secrets surreptitiously—like Sam with his little friend. You know about her? Or your wife with her dope at night. Or, people completely avoid their secrets.” He paused. “Like
you. You really should see your mother more often, Alan. Yes, yes, she’s a bit of a martyr, but she’s not the most disagreeable old lady on the planet.”

  He watched me, waiting for a reaction. J. Winter B. visited my mother. I was stone.

  “Observe people closely and you learn which way they handle their secrets. Sam Purdy? He’s a visitor. He can’t stay away from his torment. You? You’re an avoider. God are you an avoider. With people like you it takes more effort to uncover what’s hidden. We had to read your phone bills for a while before we realized where you never went, who you never called.” Michael raised his eyebrows. “Your mother generously pointed us in the right direction.”

  He wanted me to react. I wouldn’t.

  “Now, Lauren?” he went on. “Turns out she’s both a visitor and an avoider. I didn’t predict that. I thought she’d be an avoider like her husband.”

  “Tell me,” I said, trying the universal therapist prompt. I wanted to know what he meant about Lauren. What secret was she avoiding?

  He had a different agenda. “Purdy’s problems aren’t over,” McClelland said. “Neither are yours. Help me. They’ll go away. You’ll be glad you did.”

  I assumed he was alluding to the fact that Sam’s fuck-buddy affair with Amanda Ross wasn’t yet public. I had already surmised that J. Winter B. joined the church and befriended Amanda after following Sam to the hospital or to her house one night after the accident. Amanda eventually confided to her new friend about her affair with the detective, giving Michael fresh bullets for his gun. What was breathtaking to me was how effective a strategy he had used to acquire the ammunition for blackmail and disgrace.

  I felt a measure of relief that McClelland appeared to be running out of leverage. I savored the sour hint of desperation I’d begun tasting in his words.

  I said, “Then you should talk to Purdy. See if he can keep you out of permanent residency in one of the cellblocks down the hall.” I was hoping that McClelland didn’t have any more rounds in his magazine. “Your act was wearing thin in Pueblo before your latest campaign to ruin my life, Michael. I don’t think I’m predisposed to help you out any longer.”