Warning Signs

CHAPTER 39

Lucy spent the night in a filthy construction trailer in Denver's Central Platte Valley, not too far from the REI that had taken over the old Forney Train Museum. A quick glance at the painting on the sign that graced the entrance to the construction site left her thinking that the building that was being framed was going to be some overpriced loft development.

Her hands and ankles were bound by plastic handcuffs that Ramp had discovered in the trunk of her Volvo after he'd parked it in a big shed in an industrial neighborhood on Denver's west side, somewhere between Broadway and Interstate 25. Ramp waited until after dark before he drove them in a gray Ford truck a mile or two to the construction site.

Since they'd arrived he'd only removed the bindings on Lucy's wrists and ankles twice, each time to allow her to use the portable toilet outside the construction trailer. He'd covered her with her own handgun the whole time. When she was done in the toilet, he'd had her rebind her own ankles and then lie prone on her abdomen before he recinched her wrists. Each step he prefaced with "please" and closed with "thank you."

Ramp fed Lucy a dinner of Slim Jims and Dr Pepper. She declined dessert, which was Little Debbie's oatmeal cookies, even though she'd adored their supersweetness when her dad had given them to her as a kid. Ramp allowed Lucy the small sofa that was tucked into one end of the trailer while he curled up on an army-surplus cot ten feet away. The sofa smelled. When Lucy commented on the odor, he told her that he'd smelled it, too, and thought the aroma was from construction adhesive.

Some kind of radio transmitting device-it looked to Lucy like a garage door opener-was taped to the inside of Ramp's left wrist. He demonstrated how he could hit the button with either hand at any time he wanted.

She'd asked him where the bomb was.

"Close by," he'd responded.

"A shaped charge?"

His eyes twinkled. "You've been talking to my grandma," he said. "She's a piece of work. I love that woman to death."

Lucy said, "Yes, I talked to her this morning."

"She tell you where to find me?"

"No. She didn't. I asked, but she wouldn't tell me. She wanted to talk to you and your dad first."

"That sounds like her." He ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair. "She's gotten bitter. It's been hard to watch."

"Your grandmother's had a lot of loss recently. Her husband, your uncle, your mom-it's a lot for someone to deal with."

"I know," he acknowledged. "It's still been hard to watch. When you love somebody, it's hard to watch."

She noted the empathy. Lucy hadn't yet heard a word of malice from Jason Ramp Bass. Not one.

He was a cute kid with tousled blond-brown hair, good skin, and a single silver earring in his right ear. He was also blessed with his grandmother's dazzling blue eyes and the kind of fetching smile that probably opened a lot of doors with girls while he was in high school, which Lucy figured wasn't too long ago.

"What do you like to be called?" she asked him after he told her it was time to get some sleep, that tomorrow was going to be a busy day.

"Jason. I like that best."

"Not Ramp?"

"Nah. My friends hung it on me, but I never loved it."

"Is tomorrow going to be busy for me, or just for you?"

"Both of us. I didn't originally plan on it, but I'm beginning to see how having a hostage might be helpful."

The word sent chills through Lucy. She was the hostage. "What's going to happen? What are your plans, Jason?"

He didn't have to think long before he answered her question. "My plans? I want to get a dialogue going."

"A dialogue?"

"A dialogue. About justice in America. The way it works, the way it doesn't. I have a friend-he's black, a guy I went to high school with-who's doing more time for selling speed than the murderer who killed my mom got for killing his first victim. Is that right? I want a dialogue about stuff like that. I think it's time that we had a dialogue about that. As a society. About sentences and judges and courts and parole. About protecting innocent people. About malpractice in courts the same way we talk about malpractice in hospitals."

"The inequities," Lucy said.

"Yeah, the inequities," he repeated. Lucy thought he seemed pleased at her choice of words.

He stood and moved across the room to the sofa. "I'm going to have to tape you down so I can get some rest without worrying about you trying to get away. What position do you want to be in?"

She thought about it. "On my back, I guess." She could only imagine how sore she would be by morning.

"You want to go to the Super Bowl first?"

"What?"

"The plastic head outside. It's called the Super Bowl. You want to go again before I tie you down?"

"I just went."

"Whatever."

He grabbed a huge roll of duct tape and wound it individually around her ankles and then under and around the sofa. He repeated the procedure twice more and moved up her torso. She could tell that the proximity to her breasts made him uncomfortable. With her manacled hands she held them up and out of the way so that he could wrap her around her rib cage.

"Not too tight, please. I need to breathe."

"I'll be careful," he said.

"Thanks."

He returned to his cot. "Don't know if you noticed, but there was an actual dialogue for a while after the shootings at Columbine, and again for a little while after the thing at Santana, that high school near San Diego. About bullying, and cliques, and jocks and freaks, and insiders and outsiders in high school, how destructive it all is. It got drowned out by all the hoopla because those kids were so angry and so stupid about what they did, so the dialogue didn't do enough or last long enough to accomplish what it could've. The Columbine kids and that boy at Santana were more interested in the killing than the talking. I'm more interested in the talking. I want this dialogue to last longer. And I think it will. I hope it makes a difference, though I doubt I'll be around to see it when it does."

Lucy had a hard time finding a position where she could see her captor across the narrow trailer. But she knew she'd just heard him predict that he wasn't likely to survive whatever was about to happen. "You're sure that you're not just trying to get even? To get some retribution for what happened to your mother?"

His hands were locked behind his head and he was staring up at the trailer's ceiling. "You ever notice how this country doesn't seem to pay much attention to anything important until somebody dies? It's the funniest thing. Whether it's putting in a traffic light after a kid gets killed on the way to school or something like Columbine or the terrorists who blew up that ship-what was it, the Cole? Then it seems we forget about it just as fast as we remembered. Is that human nature, you think? I wonder about that a lot. The more spectacular way somebody dies, though, the longer we seem to talk about it. It's a peculiar thing in this country but I'm willing to take advantage of it. That's for sure.

"Tomorrow's going to be spectacular. There's no doubt about it. People will talk for a while. I just hope it's the right kind of dialogue."

Lucy was aware of parallel instincts. The part of her that was the hostage wanted the captor to fall asleep. The part of her that was a detective wanted to burst from her bonds, overwhelm him, and interrogate the bastard to find out his plans.

Ramp continued. "I don't feel good about what I did today, in case you're wondering. I didn't know how I'd feel if it came to that. But I do, now. I don't feel good about it."

Lucy wondered if he was talking about kidnapping her or if he was talking about something else.

"You mean kidnapping me?"

"No, no, no. I mean, I haven't even thought about how I feel about that. Not yet. I don't know if I will think about it for a while. I'm talking about the bomb in Boulder. Killing Marin's mom."

Lucy's heart felt like it hiccupped. "Marin's mom? You killed Naomi Bigg with a bomb?"

He sat up on his elbows. "You hadn't heard? It's been all over the news since this afternoon."

Her voice was fragile. "I hadn't heard anything about it. I've been avoiding the news because of…"

He finished her sentence. "The thing with your mother."

"Yeah, the thing with my mother."

"What is that? I don't understand. What is that thing with your mother? You've been like ignoring her or something? Pretending she wasn't your mom? I can't… imagine it. I'd give anything for a chance to spend another day with my mom. Anything."

"I envy you that. That she was so special to you."

"Your mom wasn't?"

"She left me and my dad when I was little."

"She just left?"

"I didn't see her or even hear from her for years, then I tracked her down when I was an adult, hoping for a reconciliation. But it didn't work out the way I wanted. We never got along. The police think that the fact that she and I had such a difficult relationship might have given me a motive to kill her husband. He was the Boulder County district attorney." Lucy suspected that Ramp knew all about the murder of Royal Peterson, but she kept her suspicions to herself.

Ramp lowered himself back down on the cot. "That doesn't make sense. Why would you kill him for that?"

Lucy sighed. "They think I was sleeping with my mother's husband. That maybe I killed him to shut him up or something, you know, so that she wouldn't find out about the affair."

Ramp was silent for a long stretch before he asked, "Were you? Were you sleeping with him?"

To Lucy, his words sounded reluctant, as though he didn't want to find out that it was true. She wasn't sure how to answer but didn't want to lie. "Yes," Lucy said. "I was. It's funny to say it. I haven't admitted that to anyone before right now. Not even my friends or my lawyers."

"But you didn't kill him."

"No, I didn't kill him."

Lucy recalled the conversation she had recently had with Alan Gregory and what he had said about intimacy. That true intimacy required not only disclosure, but also vulnerability.

Jason had just admitted a murder and she'd just admitted an affair with her mother's husband. That was disclosure.

If she got away, Jason Ramp Bass was on his way to life in prison or even death row in Cañon City. If she didn't get away, Ramp was probably going to kill her.

That was vulnerability.

She looked over at Ramp and thought that they were so intimate at that moment that they may as well have been sleeping naked in the same cot.

Ramp said, "In a way, we both lost our moms."

Lucy felt a flutter in her heart and thought that he'd made the words sound like the lyrics for a song.

He murmured, "Good night, Lucy. Get some sleep."

And she knew she was going to cry. But she wasn't sure why. Just that it had something to do with mothers.

The night before, when Lucy had walked unannounced into the master bedroom of the Peterson house on Jay Street, she'd said, "Susan, we need to talk."

Susan had looked up and greeted her without surprise. She'd said, "What? You think things have changed? Just because Royal's dead?"

"Everything's changed, Susan. You know that."

"You still call me Susan, not Mother. That hasn't changed. I still have this damn disease. That hasn't changed. Royal's not here anymore-that's all that's changed."

Lucy didn't bite. "I haven't told the police that you're my mother, Susan. I came here to talk with you because I think we should leave it that way."

Susan scoffed back. "Why? So your life isn't complicated by the fact that you have a disabled mother? Sorry, if they ask me, I'll tell them. I don't care who knows. I just lost my husband-nobody will care what happened with us, Lucy. They'll forgive me for what I did to you. They might not understand why you're so callous now, but they'll forgive me."

"Susan, what do you want from me?"

She straightened the sheets on her bed and hit the mute button on the remote control before she said, "Just do what's right, Lucy. Isn't that what I always taught you?"