Dry Ice Read online

  “You’re not going anywhere near your desk, and you’re not touching those files until forensics is done working this room. There might be trace on those files from the purse. We need to know exactly how the purse got into your yard, Alan. We need to know how long it’s been there and, most importantly, we need to know who put it there.”

  I said, “You know how the crime-scene people work. It’ll take them all day to do this room.” He didn’t disagree with me. I babbled on. “The files are on the cabinet, Sam. The purse is on the desk. Locard’s principle, you know? Remember that? The purse never got anywhere near those files. I guarantee it. Hell, there’s much more likely to be trace on me than there is to be trace on those files.”

  I regretted the argument the moment I made it.

  “Thanks for that. I’ll keep you here, too, until the forensics guys can examine you for trace.”

  “I’m not leaving those files out, Sam.”

  “I’m not offering you a choice. The crime-scene van will be here before long. I’m sure we can work something out.”

  Over the years, I’d heard Sam pander to a lot of citizens. The “we can work something out” sounded like he was pandering to me. I knew he wasn’t planning to work anything out, at least not to my satisfaction.

  “Sam, come on.”

  “Don’t beg. It’s unbecoming. This is a crime scene.”

  “I’ll call Cozy,” I said, feeling like a wimp being terrorized by a bully, threatening to call a big brother to defend me. Cozier Maitlin was my lawyer—a big, tall, smart, arrogant son of a bitch whom even Sam respected. Sam had once enlisted Cozy to defend his partner when a capital charge was looming.

  “It won’t change anything. Not today. Not about this.” He exhaled audibly through his nose. “You shouldn’t have invited me in,” he said.

  “This is bullshit,” I said.

  Sam shrugged. As always, being his friend turned out to be much easier when he and I were on the same side.

  THIRTEEN

  THE SILENT standoff stretched from one minute to two. Sam didn’t want to get physical with me. He wasn’t eager to order me to assume the position, and he didn’t want to resort to cuffing me. I didn’t want to make a mad dash to my desk to lock up my files. Had I run, Sam probably would have tackled me. Even before he’d lost all the weight he had been quick on his feet. Any physical contest between us would have been no contest. If he could catch me he could subdue me.

  Diane saved us from our bad choices and interrupted our standoff by pulling her latest convertible into the driveway. Her tires made a popping racket on the gravel path, drawing Sam’s attention outside.

  Our long driveway runs down the side of the house to a decrepit single-car garage that I’d always assumed was built originally for either a horse-drawn buggy or one of Henry Ford’s first models. Diane and I were convinced that any attempt to actually open the barnlike garage doors would cause the structure to tumble over, so we parked our cars side by side about ten feet away.

  For a decade we’d been waiting for a good Chinook to blow the thing over and end our ambivalence about what to do with it, but the predominant tilt of the structure was to the west, allowing it to lean into the Chinooks, which always originate in the mountains. We’d long guessed that when the thing finally fell it would tumble toward the setting sun, and that our cars were safe when they were parked on the north side.

  Sam turned and watched Diane shut down her Saab, gather her things, and then climb out of the car. When she started schlepping everything toward the yard and not toward her office door—probably drawn by the unusual lure of Sam’s presence in the open back door to my office—he adjusted his position so that he could stand in the doorway and prepare to stop her advance.

  “Diane, don’t go there,” he said. “Stay out of the yard. That’s a police order.”

  She replied with a non sequitur. “Hi, Sam. Did you see the new waiting room? What do you think? Pretty cool? Like that fountain? That’s soapstone, by the way. Just in case you were wondering.” She thought he was kidding about the “police order” part. Not that it would have made a whole lot of difference to her if he wasn’t. She knew Sam well enough to know he wouldn’t give the soapstone a moment’s reflection.

  “Diane, you can’t go—Stop right where you are. It’s a crime scene. There’s been a—Please don’t—Diane, goddamn…” He raised his voice and yelled, “Hey!”

  The “hey” was Sam’s acknowledgment that Diane had kept right on walking as though she hadn’t heard any of his admonitions. Diane generally wasn’t amenable to authority. If the authority was trying to tell her what she could and couldn’t do on her own property, the rebellious streak in her nature would be aggravated.

  “Yeah, right,” she said to him, confirming my thesis.

  Diane was in my line of sight by then, and she was heading straight toward my open door to see what was up. Diane was a fine clinician. She also had an intuitive nose for controversy, conflict, and gossip. She must have detected molecules floating in the air indicating the presence of all three.

  Sam stepped outside and jumped down the two steps to get physically between her and his suspected crime scene.

  I hopped forward, slammed the french door shut behind him, and turned the lever that locked the deadbolt. “You’re officially uninvited,” I said to him through the glass.

  Petty? God yes.

  A second later his eyes told me all I needed to know about his reaction. He was furious. I forced myself to walk in measured steps across the office, where I gathered up the clinical files I’d left in view, put them away where they belonged, locked the filing cabinet, and put the key inside my appointment book. I then packed my calendar into the shoulder bag I carried each day and slung it across my body. I scanned the office to see if anything remained in view that could reveal the identity of any of my patients.

  My phone memory. I dialed my home phone from my desk phone so that the last number dialed would be my own. I then cleared the call history from my mobile phone.

  Satisfied, I walked back across the office and reopened the french door. Diane hadn’t moved. She was arguing with Sam about where she couldn’t go, and why.

  “Get your warrant,” I said to Sam. “You’re not coming back in here without one.”

  “Who’s missing?” Diane asked me. “What’s he talking about? What purse? Why won’t you let him in your office?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “No, you won’t,” Sam said. “You won’t tell anyone a damn thing.”

  “Staying out of my office until you get a warrant is a Fourth Amendment thing. Telling Diane whatever I damn well want to tell her is a First Amendment thing. In case you’ve forgotten the limits of your police power I don’t think you have the authority to suspend random sections of the Bill of Rights at will.”

  Diane threw in her two cents’ worth. “He’s right, Sam. I think random suspension of constitutional rights remains the sole purview of the executive branch.” Sam and I had wasted a couple of pitchers of beer debating the Patriot Act and whatever the hell the NSA was up to. Diane had no way to know how much he disagreed with the point of view she was espousing.

  “Alan,” he said with a sigh. He was holding one hand out, beseeching me to be reasonable while he was holding up the other hand like a traffic cop imploring Diane to wait where she was and, by the way, to shut the fuck up. He’d temporarily lost his advantage and he needed us both to behave.

  “Get your warrant,” I said. I closed the door again. I locked the deadbolt, again.

  I pulled out my mobile phone and called Cozy Maitlin’s office.

  Sam either heard what I said, or he read my lips. He reacted with a mumbled, “Goddammit. Not him.”

  Cozy’s assistant, Nigel, said he was with a client.

  “I’m pretty sure I’m about to be arrested, Nigel. It would be nice to talk to him before that happens. I suspect this will be my
last opportunity.”

  Sam looked at me through the glass like he was about to kick down the door. It wouldn’t have surprised me too much if he did. Behind him, Diane’s mouth was agape.

  “Now what?” my lawyer said. Hand-holding wasn’t his thing.

  I explained the situation to Cozy.

  “What would he do if you tried to leave?” he asked me.

  I thought about it for a few seconds. “I think he’d put me in some kind of custody. Handcuffs, backseat of his car. He wasn’t in a good mood when he got here. He’s in less of a good mood now.”

  “We don’t want you in custody. Can you just…stay put?”

  “I have patients all afternoon.”

  “Don’t think so, not today. Given what little you’ve told me, he’ll get the warrant. The only question is whether he’s going to let you off the hook about the files you put away. He could go by the book and arrest you for obstruction or—”

  “I screwed up?”

  “Water under the bridge. You made the first mistake by inviting him in. Sam exploited that. But he got sloppy and left an opening. To your credit you bagged one of his pawns. If he’s pissed-off enough he may go after one of your bishops or your rooks. Sam is capable of looking a few moves ahead. Will he? Different question.”

  Criminal defense was a contest for Cozy. The chess metaphors were a fresh touch—I was more accustomed to hearing sports analogies from him. Usually basketball.

  “Can you come over and…act imperious?” I’d seen Cozy do it before. I’d seen it work before, too.

  “I’m touched by your confidence in my abilities, but I have a hearing at one. I’ll come over and act imperious after that. I doubt that Sam will manage to get a search warrant before then. Have you talked to Lauren about this?”

  “No. What’s going on right now would put her in an awkward position. I’d like you to try to work this out without either of us having to make that call. She’s under a lot of stress because of an old case that’s resurfaced. A fresh conflict-of-interest between her grand jury investigator and her husband isn’t exactly what she needs right now.”

  “Bailing her husband out of the slammer wouldn’t improve her day much either.”

  “I’m counting on you to keep that from happening, Cozy.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, not agreeing to anything. “This one o’clock is a motion to suppress that I absolutely must win, and I can’t be late for the hearing. It’s Judge Lu. Enough said?”

  “Yes.” My wife had suffered the wrath of Judge Lu. Trudy Lu’s nickname was “Don’t-Be-Tardy Trudy.”

  As Cozy hung up, Diane appeared in my office door. She’d apparently entered the building through her office, and then used our shared hallway to come to my door. I barked, “Stop. For your own good, don’t come in here.”

  To my surprise she stopped. “What’s going on?”

  “Someone threw a purse over the back fence last night. A patient pointed it out. I brought it in here, which was apparently a grievous sin. It turns out that it may be an important purse in an investigation of Sam’s. Given his mood I promise that you don’t want to find out what will happen if you set foot in here.”

  “Sam said I couldn’t use the waiting room.”

  “How many patients do you have today?”

  “Three,” she said. “They all really like the new waiting room.”

  I said I was sorry. Diane looked like she was about to cry. Las Vegas, I thought. She hasn’t recovered from Las Vegas.

  “Can you put up a note and ask them to wait on the front porch? Then bring them in the side door into your office?”

  “Are the police going to screw it up? The waiting room?” she asked.

  FOURTEEN

  I ENDED up driving home that evening wearing a zip-up paper suit. On my feet were some beat-up flip-flops I found in the cargo section of my wagon.

  The Tyvek jumpsuit was a gift from a member of the crime-scene team. A young female tech offered it in exchange for the clothes I had been wearing when I’d had the misfortune to come in contact with the apparently radioactive purse from the backyard. She had me stand on some sheets of clean paper and undress while she retrieved and individually bagged my shirt, my sweater, my trousers, my socks, and my shoes. It was only after some prolonged deliberation with her boss that they concluded that Locard’s principle—one of the guiding tenets governing the transfer of evidence from one surface to another at crime scenes—wouldn’t apply to my underwear.

  I think I was supposed to be grateful.

  Sam requested warrants for the office and yard, and for my person.

  While we were waiting for the warrants to arrive, he and I maintained a standoff through the glass of the French door. Sam stood a step outside with his arms folded across his chest, silently daring me to go near my desk again. I sat on the floor opposite the door with my back against the wall, silently daring him to come back in without a warrant.

  I used my cell phone to cancel my appointments. I thought briefly about calling Lauren and asking her to intervene, but I didn’t. She was already juggling enough and didn’t need a new conflict of interest added to her stress load. I also knew she wouldn’t intervene and I didn’t want to know what that would feel like.

  Cozier Maitlin and the warrants showed up almost simultaneously just before two o’clock. I heard Cozy’s booming voice, and stepped to the door just in time to see Sam hand Cozy the papers. While Cozy flipped pages Sam appeared to be greeting someone I couldn’t see. Cozy refolded the warrants, put a hand on Sam’s shoulder, and started talking with him in a low voice.

  Sam’s a big guy, but he was dwarfed by Cozy. My lawyer is six-eight.

  Not thrilled at being excluded from the negotiation, I opened the door to join their tête-à-tête.

  Each of them raised a hand to stop me. Sam added, “Stay where you are.”

  Cozy nodded. “Do what he says.” His voice filled the atmosphere the way a fart fills an elevator. “And close that door.”

  Do what he says? I closed the door.

  That’s when Kirsten Lord walked into the frame. She had apparently been waiting out of my sight down the driveway. She was dressed in modest heels, a skirt that fell just below her knees, and a tailored long-sleeved shirt. She had a slim briefcase slung over her shoulder.

  She looked like a lawyer, which shouldn’t have surprised me. Kirsten was a lawyer. The last time she and I had talked, though—and it had been a while—she hadn’t been practicing law; she had been apprenticing as a restaurant cook at the Boulderado Hotel. But before that she had been an attorney whose allegiances were firmly on the prosecutorial side of the bar. If she was accompanying Cozy, it was clear evidence that she had crossed over to the defense table.

  Kirsten had once, briefly, been my patient. The timing was easy to recall; Lauren had been pregnant with Grace during the interlude when Kirsten had been seeing me for treatment. Gracie was almost five.

  Sam and Cozy continued to confer for three or four more minutes. While they chatted, the crime-scene team began to congregate near the garage. Kirsten waited a few respectful steps away from them, as if at attention. She didn’t look my way. Finally, Cozy walked away from Sam and disappeared from my sight down the driveway. Kirsten spun and followed him.

  Sam began talking to one of the forensics guys, pointing at the back of the yard where I’d picked up the purse, and then at my office. Seconds later, my cell rang.

  “I’m out in front of your building. Sam’s going to let your little indiscretion with the files slide.”

  It was Cozy. “He is?” I asked, surprised but grateful.

  “He could have insisted that the files be collected and be turned over to a judge or special master. Or he could have busted your ass and thrown you in jail for obstruction.”

  “Why is he being so…nice?”

  “I don’t know. It concerns me a little that I don’t know. But my primary goals we
re to keep you from being arrested and to protect your clinical files. I am two-for-two. I think that means I get paid double. Are you going to need any more help cooperating, or can I go back to my office?”

  “The warrants are good?”

  “The warrants are stupendous. They cover your yard, your office, the hallway, and the doorway you use to the waiting room. Sam said you maintain you never moved past the doorway. Sam’s playing nice—he wrote them quite narrowly. He could have gotten the whole building. There is another warrant for your person. The judge gave them the right to collect exemplars from you. Today, they’ll just get a complete set of your prints, but they have the right to sample your hair and blood, too. I assured him we would cooperate.” He paused. “We will cooperate if and when they request the blood and the swabs and the hair, won’t we, Dr. Gregory?”

  “It’s just a damn purse, Cozy.”

  “Not to them. When they ask for your blood, your reply will be to expose a vein, one of your favorites, click your heels together, and say, ‘How much, sir?’”

  Through the door’s glass I noted that a police photographer was busy taking a series of establishing shots in the backyard. “You have a new associate, Cozy?”

  “I didn’t tell you? I think you know her. Ms. Lord is a tad green about the nuances of this side of the law, but she’s sharp and she provides some needed estrogen at the defense table. Juries like that. Depending on how this evolves she may end up helping me with your…situation. I have some travel planned. She knows a little about the people’s side of these things. It’s a perspective I have a tendency to lose sight of.”

  Cozy wasn’t prone to admitting deficiencies. I didn’t know what else to say, so I asked, “My day is history, right? My practice, I mean. My patients?”

  “Yes,” Cozy said. “The poor souls will have to muddle along without your guidance for another week. I don’t know how I manage some days.” He hung up.

  Empathy, like hand-holding, wasn’t his long suit.

  I had the right to observe the search. I wanted to make sure that no one tried to breach the locks on my file cabinet, and I wanted to make sure that no one confused Diane’s office with mine.