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  She eyed him for a while, deciding.

  “I’ve had problems with my legs for a long time, but it’s been unclear what’s been going on. Just this morning I got word that an MRI I had last week shows a little lesion on my spinal column. The radiologist thinks that could explain a lot of my problems. My neurologist was pretty surprised by the news.”

  “Why?”

  “I think he was beginning to believe that it was all in my head. And I think I was beginning to agree with him.”

  “A lesion? That sounds like it could be serious.”

  “That’s exactly what I said to my doctor.”

  “Well, is it? Serious?”

  “He says he doesn’t know yet. He wants to do more tests to see what it really is. You know how it goes with doctors.”

  “You’ll keep me informed?”

  “Maybe.”

  He shook his head gently. “It’s not just a leave. You know it isn’t. You won’t be coming back to work.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You’re so sure?”

  “I have radar for some things. It’s the way I knew that Cynthia was screwing her boss. This is one of the things I have radar for.”

  “I’m not screwing my boss, Bill.”

  He found something funny in whatever image he conjured of the SAC and Kelda romantically entwined. “Thank God for that, Kelda. But you are sneaking out the back door. Whether you admit it to yourself or not, you’re leaving. There’ll be somebody fresh at your desk next week. Some frigging new guy.”

  She was tempted to argue with him. Didn’t. Tacitly granting his point, she said, “I like forensic accounting, and I’m pretty good at it. I think I can find some work if I need to.”

  “I suspect you can,” he said, pouring some fresh wine into his empty glass. “And you’ll probably make enough to afford to drink this stuff whenever you want.”

  “It’d be nice to make some money for a change.”

  He looked into his wine as he asked. “Are you still going to see him, Kelda?”

  She stopped breathing. She was thinking,I can’t see Ira anymore, he’s dead. Her grief had almost erupted through her façade when she realized that Bill wasn’t talking about Ira at all.

  “Tom Clone?” she asked. “You mean date him?”

  “I guess that’s what I mean.”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t talked. You know, since . . .” She thought about Tom for a few seconds and repeated, “I don’t know.”

  “But you were dating him? That’s what that was that you two were doing?”

  “I don’t even know that for sure. Maybe. It was just one of those things. We went out. I didn’t let myself think about what it meant. I was more curious than interested, if that makes any sense. It didn’t feel romantic. I felt that I needed to be with him for some other reason. There was a connection to him because of . . . the knife . . . and everything. And I wanted to understand him. That was part of it. What he’d been through, you know? I was curious.”

  “Like with Rosa?” he said. “That kind of connection? The way you still see her sometimes?”

  The irony and innocence of the question almost caused Kelda to lose her balance on the stool. “Yes,” she managed. “Kind of like that. But maybe it was more like the way that I always wished I’d had a chance to get inside the head of the guy who kidnapped her. To know evil like that. I didn’t know what it was going to be with Tom, what I was going to discover about him. But I had to look, you know? Like at a traffic accident?” She liked the sound of the rationale. “Yeah, more like that.”

  They sat in silence until Bill said, “In my head, Kelda—and this is just me—this right here”—he waved an index finger between her stool and his—“right now, is my first date since I kicked Cynthia out of the house. I thought you should know that I feel that way, so there’s no confusion. I haven’t felt I could trust anybody since she did what she did to me.”

  Kelda almost blurted, “And you trustme ?”

  She didn’t.

  But she thought it was likely that Bill Graves was about to make the same mistake with her that he’d made with Cynthia. The poor guy still didn’t know whom he could trust. Just the slightest encouragement on her part, she figured, and she and Bill would be done talking about Tom Clone for a while.

  She looked away long enough to consider the likelihood that Dr. Gregory would tell her that accepting Bill’s advances might be a repetition of the pattern with Ira, and man after man before him. What had Alan said? That her romantic relationships always seemed to mix business with pleasure? Yes, that she chose boyfriends because of something they could do for her.

  But Dr. Gregory’s comments made no more sense to her then than they had when he’d first uttered them.

  Yeah,she thought.Even if he’s right, what’s so wrong with that?

  Forcing a smile onto her face, she looked up and touched Bill’s hand. She felt a sudden camaraderie with him. It surprised her. Warmth flushed her skin, and she knew she couldn’t blame it on the wine.

  Not totally, anyway.

  CHAPTER 62

  I’d cleared my schedule and had a day free of patients. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  First thing that morning, in return for a promised turn behind the wheel, the orthopedist who was treating my broken arm fitted me with a new cast that he thought would allow me to drive my still-virgin Mini. He had me sit in a plastic chair in his casting room with my arm extended at just the right angle, and then he proceeded to fit the fiberglass and plaster onto my hand in such a way that we both thought I could grasp an imaginary gearshift.

  It was amazing what difference a little geometry made. As I drove home to Spanish Hills in my old car, I felt like a new man.

  My very first spin in the reincarnated Mini was a solitary jaunt over the route of the famed Morgul Bismarck bicycle-racing course in the eastern side of the county, not far from my house. My arm ached from the effort when I was done, but the drive was worth every second of discomfort.

  Lauren was working only until noon and we were planning to meet for lunch. She was surprised when I called and said that I would pick her up at the district attorney’s office instead of meeting her at a downtown restaurant. She was shocked to see me pull up at the front doors of the Justice Center in the red and white Mini.

  “New cast,” I said, lifting my color-coordinated arm.

  A big smile on her face, she asked, “How is it?” She was talking about the car, not the cast.

  “I’ll show you. Get in.”

  The thing purred like a big cat as I motored north on Broadway before pulling up Lee Hill Road into the deep cavern behind one of the many hogbacks that line the long center stretch of Colorado’s Front Range. Omit the previous forty-eight hours and I couldn’t recall the last time I had been up Left Hand in a car, though I’d probably done the climb a dozen times on my bike in the past couple of years, so I knew the road with the intimacy of a cyclist. I skipped the bypass to Olde Stage and stayed on Lee Hill all the way up to Left Hand Canyon, where I turned west to go even farther into the mountains.

  Halfway up the climb Lauren said, “So are we eating or just motoring?”

  I said, “Eating, eventually. Motoring, definitely. Other things, too.”

  “Other things?”

  “Indeed.”

  “What about Grace?”

  “Viv will stay with her until we get home. I offered her twenty bucks on top of the extra hours she’ll get. She thought about it for a second or two before she said yes.”

  “So do you like your car?”

  “Watch.”

  With a short thrust of my casted arm, I downshifted. The little box on wheels hopped to attention and I maneuvered it through the curving canyons as though it had already memorized every turn.

  Ten minutes later, high in the Rockies, at the very top of Left Hand Canyon, we approached the anachronistic town of Ward. I said, “This is where it all happened the other night.”

&nbs
p; Lauren was still angry about the danger I’d put myself in for Tom Clone. But she nodded because she already knew that this is where it had all happened.

  I slowed to a crawl to allow a trio of dogs to cross the road. None of the dogs’ gene pools had been contaminated with an AKC specimen in many generations.

  She said, “You needed to come back, didn’t you?”

  I said, “Yes,” but I didn’t say more.

  A turn to the south on the other side of Ward would have brought us down the Peak to Peak toward Nederland, Barker Reservoir, and the upper reaches of Boulder Canyon. But I pulled north instead, leaving the little town of Ward behind us before I cut off onto the washboard dirt track of Gold Lake Road and meandered a few miles to the entrance to the remote Gold Lake Resort.

  “What’s this?” my wife asked.

  “A little treat for us. A thank-you for the car. A thank-you for being you. An apology for how . . . distracted I’ve been.”

  She gazed out at the pristine meadows and the pine and aspen forests that were spread in the wilderness below the Divide before her eyes settled on the log cabins clustered on a gentle hillside. “I didn’t even know this place was here.”

  “Good. Then it will be a surprise for you. It was once a camp for affluent girls from St. Louis. Now it’s something else.”

  “Affluent girls,” she repeated absently. I watched her eyes and could tell she was transfixed by the reflection of Sawtooth Mountain in the still waters of Gold Lake. “Something else indeed,” she said.

  Twenty minutes later, after we changed out of our clothes in one of the resort’s tepees, we were sitting in a stone-lined hot pool on the uncluttered banks of Gold Lake. The summer wonder of the Indian Peaks Wilderness towered above us to the west, the cold face of Longs Peak’s glaciers dominating the sky to the north. As sublime as the setting was, I knew our stay in the pool would be brief; Lauren’s MS severely reduced her tolerance to hot water.

  “Can I break the mood?” I asked.

  “Only if you really, really have to.”

  “What’s going to happen to Tom Clone? Did you hear anything at the office this morning?” I’d called Tom a few times at Community Hospital, but the police weren’t permitting him to receive calls, at least not from the likes of me.

  Lauren’s eyes were closed, the water lapping at the skin of her throat and steam enveloping her dark hair. “Physically, he’s going to be okay. I heard that he’ll be ready to leave the hospital today, and nobody in the office seems to think he’ll be arrested when he gets out. Given everything we know about what happened up there that night—I guess it’s uphere that night, isn’t it?—I don’t think he’s going to be charged with any crimes. Unless the sheriff’s investigators develop something new, what we have so far would never stand up to a jury. You’ve read theCamera, Alan; public sentiment is definitely to set Tom Clone free. He’s done thirteen years already for a crime he didn’t commit. Nobody wants to see him go back to prison for whatever part he played in whatever the hell happened two nights ago. Call the shooting self-defense, call it whatever you want, but, after what he went through up here, I think he’s going to walk out of that hospital something resembling a free man. For once in his life, everybody seems to want to grant him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “So he really gets to start from square one? A new life. A clean slate.”

  “In theory. But after what he’s been through, he’s probably starting from square minus four or five. He’ll have his grandfather to lean on, though. I heard this morning that he’s doing better, is out of the ICU.”

  “That makes me happy.”

  She opened her violet eyes wide and looked at me. She said, “Show me where everything happened.”

  My new cast high in the air, I floated to the other side of the pool and pointed west and slightly south toward the Continental Divide, in the direction of the lodgepole and aspen forests that surround Brainard Lake.

  “Right over there,” I said. “No more than a couple of miles from here. Just a little bit west and south of Ward.”

  “This side of the Peak to Peak or the other side?”

  “The other side.”

  She floated over beside me and seemed to stare directly at the spot in the wilderness where I was pretty sure Boca’s cabin stood. Below the surface of the pool, her hand found the soft skin adjacent to my navel.

  She said, “Are you going to keep seeing him for therapy?” Although I’d never said a word to Lauren about treating Tom Clone, events had made it crystal clear exactly who had been the recipient of my house call.

  I didn’t answer right away, trying to conjure an ethically appropriate way to respond. Finally, I said, “Usually when a patient wants to continue in therapy, it’s fine with me, too.”

  “And there’s no reason to think that this case would be unusual?”

  I almost laughed at the thought that this case wasn’t unusual. But I said, “No. There’s no reason to think that.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m sure he needs you.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. Didn’t know whether to tell her about the bricklayer who was afraid he’d grown to despise the bricks. Nor did I want to admit to her my own failure to grant Tom the benefit of the doubt.

  She said, “Just don’t do it again, okay? Something stupid like the other night? Just don’t do it.”

  I’d already prepared my defense. “I want Grace to know the difference between right and wrong. I want her to know that people matter. Given the work we do, you and me, sometimes . . . we’re going to need to be part of the lesson.”

  “Well, I want Grace to know her father.”

  “Okay,” I said. I’d been trumped. I knew that if Lauren and I debated this fifty times, I would win exactly none of the contests.

  Zero.

  I cupped some water in my good hand and watched it slip through the cracks between my fingers. “I can’t argue with you. I don’t know that what I did was right. It’s like justice. Just when you think you have a good way to hold on to it, it leaks out someplace and flows away.”

  “Welcome to my world,” Lauren said. “You balance yourself on top of the fence. You look in both directions and eventually you pick a side, and you jump off. That’s it. I’m sure you did what you thought was best. And that’s all you can do.” She rested her fingers on my cast. “I just need to know that you’ll always,always, consider Grace and me high in your equation.”

  I nodded as I lofted some more water and watched it spill away. But I wasn’t satisfied. “Aren’t there times when you think you know better, though? Times when you think that the justice you could create would be better than the justice the system dishes out?”

  “Of course there are those times,” Lauren said. “Frequently.”

  “Then what do you do?”

  “I let the system work.”

  “Even when you know it’s inadequate?”

  “Sure. But it’s inadequate almost by definition. Ultimately, by choosing to live in a civilized world, we trump any sense of ultimate justice. Truly satisfying justice—where the punishment really, really fits the crime—would demand that we do things that civilized societies can’t risk doing. It’s just the way it is. The system is imperfect.”

  I cupped one more handful of water. It took a second or two longer, but it, too, dripped away. Lauren seemed so at peace with the imperfections.

  “Hey, when’s lunch?” she asked. I figured she’d spotted the log cabin splendor of Alice’s Restaurant in the main lodge when we checked in.

  “I left my watch in the tepee. Half an hour or so is what I would guess. You have a facial scheduled after that. And then a foot massage in another one of the tepees.”

  My wife adored foot massages. “Really? A foot massage in a tepee?”

  “Really.”

  “What are you going to do while I get my massage?”

  “I thought I’d go for a hike. Or maybe see exactly how hard it is to padd
le a canoe with one arm in a cast.”

  She smirked. “There, that’s the answer to your question: That’s what justice is like—paddling a canoe with one arm in a cast. But we still have half an hour or so before lunch?”

  I nodded.

  “That should be enough time,” she said.

  “For what?”

  I felt her fingers move south.

  Every muscle in her body stilled for a moment as she said, “We all go through bad times.”

  “And usually we survive them?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “We do.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing is an individual endeavor. In my case, it’s me, maybe one or two dogs, and an otherwise empty room. Publishing, however, is a team sport, and I’m lucky to have a team of all-stars behind me. Kate Miciak and Nita Taublib edit the old-fashioned way, and I’m a better writer because of it. Irwyn Applebaum, in his inimitable fashion, asked a simple question at the beginning of this project that sharpened its focus. Others at Bantam Dell—Susan Corcoran, Elizabeth Hulsebosch, Deborah Dwyer—do their job as well as or better than anybody in this industry. Thanks so much to you all.

  I’m not naÏve enough to think that it stops there. Every player has his or her own team. Some of them I know well (thanks to Loyale Coles and Samantha Bruce-Benjamin), others I barely know, or have never met. But I know that they’ve left their mark on this book. My gratitude goes out to them.

  My agent, Lynn Nesbit, is backed up by a great team, too. Specific thanks to Amy Howell and Richard Morris. And I don’t want to forget Eileen Hutton and her staff at Brilliance Audio.

  In the early summer of 1997, I was invited by Paula Woodward of KUSA-TV in Denver to witness an interview she was conducting on Death Row at the Colorado State Penitentiary with a condemned prisoner named Gary Davis. In many ways the seeds ofThe Best Revenge were planted that day. I thank Paula for the unique opportunity she afforded me.

  Early readers of this manuscript helped me polish it. Elyse Morgan and Al Silverman continue to honor me with their critiques and their friendships. Jane Davis is the webmaster behind www.authorstephenwhite.com. She’s as good as they come, both as webmistress and human being. Nancy M. Hall’s astute eyes eliminated many errors in the final book. And, although this career of mine is extending into its second decade, I try not to lose sight of the beginning, when Patti and Jeff Limerick kicked open the first door for me.