Missing Persons Page 7

  “With Raoul?” That was wishful thinking on my part. The worse the party, the more grateful I was for Raoul’s company. After-Christmas shopping on the Mall sounded like a very bad party.

  “Shopping? With me? Are you kidding? He won’t shop with me.”

  There was a caution there I knew; Raoul was a wise man. I swallowed a sigh. “Okay, where do think you’re going to be? I’ll meet you someplace.”

  The little office building that Diane and I owned together was an architecturally pedestrian-certainly not a painted-lady-early-1900s Victorian house on the west end of Walnut, a couple of blocks from the Pearl Street Mall. The odds of finding street parking in downtown Boulder during the closeout-sale-frenzied week between Christmas and New Year’s were about the same as the odds of being eaten by a great white shark, so Diane was planning to stash her Saab behind our building and start her quest for bargains near Ninth and Pearl on the west end of downtown. Since I had a patient to see, I told her I’d park at our offices, too, and suggested we rendezvous outside Peppercorn at three.

  Dirty snow from the Christmas-night snowstorm lingered in shady places along the herringbone brick pathways of the Mall, but despite what the calendar said, the day was pleasant in the sun. That’s where I was sitting enjoying an afternoon interlude when Diane sauntered up to me at about ten after. She was carrying two huge shopping bags. I gave her a hug and a kiss on one cheek. She gave me one of the bags to carry. In many ways-mostly but not entirely good-Diane and I were like an old married couple.

  We began walking, the sun low against our backs. From the heft of the bag in my hand, I surmised that she had been scouring the sales for either bricks or bullion.

  “This doesn’t happen to me, you know,” she said. “This is the sort of thing that happens to you. This stuff with this mystery girl and Hannah. This murder and kidnapping and cops and criminals crap I seem to be mixed up with. It’s your specialty, not mine.”

  I was tempted to argue that it was debatable that Hannah had been murdered, and that it seemed more likely that Mallory was indeed a runaway and not a kidnap victim. But Diane’s bigger point was close to the truth. Karma did seem to deliver mayhem to my door with disturbing regularity.

  “If it’s what you think it is, I’m mixed up in it, too, Diane.”

  For a moment she was quiet. She either didn’t quite hear me, she didn’t quite believe me, or she was busy discounting my words as an unwelcome empathic gesture.

  Finally, she replied, “Sure, you were part of the Hannah thing. I know, I know. I know you were there. And well, now you’re part of this other thing, but that’s only because I’ve dragged you into it. Listen, if you’d rather I talk to someone else about this, I understand. But I really felt I needed a second opinion about what to do next, and I don’t know anyone else who has as much experience with crazy therapy crap as you do.”

  Crazy therapy crap? Once again I was tempted to argue her premise, but recognizing the futility, I said, “The truth is that I was a little bit mixed up in the Mallory thing already, even before we talked.”

  She heard me that time. Her voice grew conspiratorial. “What?”

  I shook my head and kept walking. “I need to make this a consultation, too. My knowledge is clinical, just like yours.”

  She’d grown tired of the forced-infantry-march nature of our pace and abruptly stopped walking. Once I realized she had stopped I did, too, and turned back to face her. Over the top of her head the sun was looming just above the highest peaks of the Front Range in the southwest sky. The light was sharp but gentle. It felt only faintly warm on my face.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  It was a shrink phrase, psychotherapy shorthand for “go on” or “don’t stop there” or “damn your resistance, spill the beans.”

  “This is for real-a professional consultation-you can’t tell anyone.”

  “Holy moly,” she said.

  I wished I had my sunglasses on my eyes instead of in my jacket pocket. I was squinting into the sun. Holy moly? “Is that a yes?”

  “I’m thinking. You get into the weirdest things, Alan. I’m not sure I want any part of whatever it is.”

  She was playing with me. “Sure you do,” I said.

  “You’re right, I do. I’m a glutton for punishment. Okay, go ahead and consult with me.” She raised her chin an inch and tilted it up to the side as though she were opening herself for a right cross. I opened my mouth to reply just as she changed her strategy. “No, no, let me guess.” She made a face that a bad acting student might make to try to portray someone cogitating, contorted it a few times for dramatic effect, and finally said, “Nope, I give up.”

  “Years ago, I saw the Millers, Mallory’s parents-those Millers-for an assessment. One session only. Turned out to be a long eval, over two hours. I saw them as a couple, immediately recognized that Mrs. Miller’s individual problems were… significant, and referred her on to Mary Black for ongoing treatment and some serious pharmacological intervention. I never saw them again. Mary took over from there. Mr. Miller came back sometime later to thank me for my help. But I never laid eyes on the kids, don’t even remember if I knew their names.”

  Diane was a smart lady. She made all the appropriate connections instantly. “That must be how Mallory knew about Hannah, right? Right? I bet the crazy mother parked Mallory in the waiting room while she had her psychotherapy sessions and her med consultations with Mary. Don’t you think? If Hannah had seen a little girl alone in the waiting room she would have chatted her up. You know she would have. She would have made friends with her. Especially if she saw her sitting out there alone on a regular basis. That’s the connection. That’s it.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “That’s probably it.” Hannah’s kindness was almost as legendary as her obsessiveness. I had no trouble manufacturing a vision of Hannah on her knees in the waiting room connecting with a lonely or frightened little girl who was waiting for her mother to finish an appointment with her psychiatrist.

  Hi, sweetheart, what’s your name?

  I’m Mallory.

  I’m Hannah. You waiting for your mom to finish her meeting?

  “Holy moly,” Diane repeated.

  Diane started walking down the Mall again. I tagged along behind. “Holy moly” was a new phrase for Diane. I was already beginning to hope that-like most everything designed by Microsoft-it came equipped with built-in obsolescence.

  I said, “I’d bet mortgage money that her disease isn’t stable. Rachel Miller sabotaged every last treatment that Mary Black tried years ago.”

  Diane added an edge to her tone and said, “Why do you say ‘disease’? Almost everyone else says ‘illness.’ ”

  “A lot of other people say ‘clients.’ I say ‘patients.’ Do you know why? ‘Patient’ is from the Latin. It means ‘one who suffers.’ It fits what we do.”

  She smiled, and shifted her voice into sarcasm mode. “I bet if a new client walked into your office and had to listen to you parsing Latin all day long, she’d become one-who-suffers in no time at all. You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Other people say ‘illness’?”

  “They do.”

  It probably wasn’t true. Diane’s penchant for assuredness about this kind of thing often had scant correlation to reality. Regardless, it took me only about three steps to arrive at an answer to her question. “Think about it. The word is disease. Dis. Ease. It’s apropos, don’t you think, to what we deal with every day?”

  In my peripheral vision I could tell that Diane had shaken off my explanation with the same ease with which she’d just ridiculed the tiny bit of Latin I recalled from high school. I consoled myself with the fact that she was equally dismissive as she discounted her husband Raoul’s opinions about just about everything political.

  Thankfully, she moved on to a fresh thought, and said, “In case you didn’t know it, she’s in Las Vegas. The girl told Hannah that her mother is living in Las Vegas. She gets phone calls fr
om her every once in a while. Her father doesn’t know that they’re in touch as much as they are. It’s a source of conflict. The girl wasn’t sure what to do.”

  “Vegas?” I asked, but it was more of an “ah-ha!” exclamation than a question. I was thinking, Of course Rachel Miller is in Las Vegas. Where else would someone go who is addicted to weddings?

  “You don’t sound that surprised, Alan. Does she gamble? Is that part of her pathology, her dis-ease?”

  “No,” I said, refusing to bite. “She goes to weddings. That’s what the presenting complaint was for the couple’s therapy: Rachel Miller went to lots and lots of weddings. She thought she was a special guest at all of them. It was the center of her delusional world. I suspected that she had command hallucinations but she didn’t admit to hearing voices during our one interview. Her husband told me she did, that she heard voices.”

  “Paranoid schizophrenia?”

  “That’s what I thought at the time, but a lot has changed in how we all view psychotic process, you know? I’m not sure how I’d diagnose her today.”

  “Mixed thought and mood disorder? That’s what you’re thinking?” Diane asked.

  “Something like that, yes.”

  By that time Diane and I had covered all four blocks and were at the east end of the Mall. We were waiting at the light to cross Fifteenth onto the sidewalk on the still-sunny side of Pearl Street. I said, “You want to keep going or head back?”

  “I don’t care. We can walk to Denver if you want, but I want to hear more about Mallory’s mother and all the weddings.”

  It took me a while but I explained Mrs. Miller’s odd nuptial delusions to Diane, who had many questions, some psychological in nature, more having to do with wedding logistics, owning all those outfits, and buying all those gifts.

  I had answers for a paltry few of the questions in any of the categories, psychological or matrimonial. After multiple prods on her part I tried to refocus her by saying, “I only saw the Millers for that one session. That’s all. Most of my energy went into trying to understand her history and then trying to prepare the two of them for a whole different kind of treatment than they’d come in the door thinking they’d get.”

  “Receptions, too?” Diane asked, ignoring my pleas of ignorance.

  I told her, yes, that Rachel had also attended the receptions. I shared the story about the one at the Boulderado where she’d been busted by the sheriff’s deputy.

  Diane had more questions. While I protested my continued ignorance about most things matrimonial, Diane chided me that it had been a very long session I’d had with the Millers, and I should know more than I was letting on.

  Once Diane had-finally-exhausted her queries about Mrs. Miller and her serial wedding attendance, I had a question of my own. It was the question that I had wanted to ask Diane since the moment she told me that Hannah had done an intake with the girl who was probably Mallory. “Do you think it’s possible that Mallory went to Vegas to see her mother? Based on what Hannah told you, would she have done that? Could that be what this is all about?”

  “It’s possible. Hannah stressed that the girl missed her mother. May even have said it a couple of times, so you have to wonder. Hannah focused on the mother/daughter relationship and the conflicts between the girl and her dad.”

  “Might explain the Christmas Day stomachache,” I said. “Her holiday anxiety, missing her mom.”

  “Psychosomatic?”

  “Why not? If she was worried enough to seek a therapist on her own, she could certainly be worried enough to develop symptoms.”

  She paused after a couple more steps. We had walked all the way down to Eighteenth Street by then, almost a full ten blocks from our cars. I stopped and turned back to the west. The late December sun was just a slash of brilliance above the Divide and pedestrian traffic was thinning out on the Mall.

  “What was the mother like, Alan? Could she have come and taken Mallory?” Diane asked.

  “I suppose that’s possible. Anything is, but-”

  “The cops would check that first, right? They would have gone to Vegas and checked with Mallory’s mother to see if her kid was there, to see if the mom had been in Boulder?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was also thinking that the Boulder cops who went to Vegas would probably have found a truly disturbed woman.

  Diane casually tapped me on the shoulder and handed me the second shopping bag. Like a fool, I took it.

  We started walking back in the direction of the mountains. The western sky was much brighter than the eastern sky had been. She asked, “So are you ready now?”

  Segue or no segue, I knew exactly what she was talking about. We really had been friends a long, long time. “Sure, as ready as I’ll be. So what else did the girl tell Hannah?”

  12

  The moment the sun completed its descent behind the Rockies the day turned from pleasantly brisk to downright cold. What I had been considering a light breeze felt decidedly like an icy wind. Diane had seen it coming-now that I was schlepping both of her shopping bags she was able to shove her mittened hands deep into her jacket pockets for additional warmth.

  My gloves were in my car and the flesh on my hands was the color of the fat on a slab of uncooked bacon.

  “The kid was concerned that her dad was ‘up to something’ or ‘into something.’ She’d left Hannah with the impression that she didn’t like it, whatever it was. The girl was feeling like she had to do something about it, or else. That kind of thing.”

  “ ‘Up to something’? That’s a quote?”

  “Close as I can remember. It was a casual consultation-I didn’t exactly memorize it. I didn’t know what was about to happen.”

  “ ‘Or else’? What did that mean?”

  Diane shrugged. “I should have asked. I didn’t ask. She also had some friend trouble, too, was conflicted about some guy she was seeing.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “I guess.”

  “It felt like typical adolescent stuff to you?”

  “At the time it did.”

  “And the nature of what the girl’s father was up to?”

  “Hannah didn’t know.”

  “Precipitant?”

  “See, that’s the thing. I asked Hannah that, too. Hannah felt there was some urgency for the girl, but couldn’t get the kid to admit to anything.”

  “A secret?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “The holidays?”

  “Hannah didn’t stress that part. I suppose it’s possible.”

  “The police should know all this,” I said. “Boulder’s two most high-profile recent…”

  I didn’t know what to call Hannah’s death and Mallory’s disappearance. Diane did. “Crimes. The word you’re looking for is ‘crimes.’ ‘Felonies’ would work fine, too.”

  “Whatever. The police would want to know that there’s a possible connection-a big connection-between Hannah’s death and Mallory’s disappearance. But nobody knows about it but you,” I said.

  “And you,” she reminded me.

  “Mostly you. It’s too bad you can’t tell the police.”

  She skipped for one step. I think that’s what she did, anyway-just one little schoolgirl skip. Why? Who knew? “I bet that twerp Slocum would love to know what the two of us know, wouldn’t he? He’d probably cuff me again and throw me in the slammer if he knew what I was keeping from him.”

  I was thinking that not only would Detective Slocum like to know, but so would Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Geraldo Rivera, and Oprah. Not to mention the Enquirer and the Sun and the Star.

  And Bill Miller.

  I was also thinking that Diane’s continuing animosity toward Detective Jaris Slocum, though completely understandable, was one of the ways that she was postponing her grief about Hannah’s death. That moment, however, wasn’t the time to confront her with that particular reality. Years of experience with her had taught me that with Diane I had to pick my spots.


  “Raoul wants me to sue Slocum. Did I tell you that?”

  “For what?”

  “He doesn’t care. He calls him ‘that little fascist.’ ‘Let’s sue that little fascist, baby,’ he tells me. He hates it when I say it, but sometimes he’s such an American.”

  I said, “Raoul has too much time on his hands. He needs to go start a new company or something.” Diane’s husband was a legendary Boulder entrepreneur. When he wasn’t nurturing somebody else’s start-up tech company, he was busy casting the bricks to create a new one of his own.

  As we crossed back over Fifteenth to the herringbone pathways of the Mall, Diane asked the money question: “So what do I do about all this?”

  “Did Hannah leave any notes?”

  “She named me in her will to handle the details of closing up her practice should anything happen to her. But I haven’t found any notes about that session. Zip, nada.”

  Few therapists show the foresight to make death stipulations in their wills. But Hannah had. I said, “She knew Paul Weinman back when, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, she knew Paul.” Paul had been another friend of Diane’s, a psychologist who’d skied into a tree at Breckenridge years before. His sudden death, and the subsequent uncertainty about what to do with his current cases and his practice records, had caused a lot of procrastinating Boulder therapists to make plans for what would happen to their practices in case of their own death.

  “Do the police have her appointment calendar?” I asked.

  “Hannah just used initials, same as us. They would have to cross-reference the calendar with her billing records or her clinical files to find out who she was seeing. Cozy is handling the cops for me, and he’s not going to let them see anything confidential.”

  “Anything else important in Hannah’s records?”

  “Not really. Closing her practice has been routine. I’ve done a few one-time visits with her patients to check for decompensation or acute reactive problems to her… death. I decided to pick up a couple of her cases. Oh, and did I tell you I’m going to see the woman who was at her office that day, the day that Hannah died?”