Missing Persons

3

Neither Diane nor I was going to get home in time for dinner.

It had taken all of my physical strength to keep Diane away from her friend’s inert body-I was far from being able to consider it a corpse-and it had taken all my powers of persuasion to get both Diane and the Cheetos lady out of the house while we waited for the police to arrive.

I was staggered by Hannah’s death, but my loss was nothing compared to the loss that either Diane or Hannah’s patient was feeling. I kept telling myself that I could freak out later.

Diane needed to freak out now.

Outside the house, after I’d called 911 on my cell, I was standing helplessly with Diane on the front walk when she said, “I don’t want to leave Hannah alone. She shouldn’t be alone. Let me go in and wait with her. Please. What can it hurt?”

My arm was firmly around her shoulders and I know I whispered replies to her pleadings, but I don’t recall exactly what I said. My tight grasp on Diane reinforced my words: I didn’t think she should go back inside.

Had Hannah died at home after an illness I would have led Diane to her friend’s bedside, not held her back. But Hannah had apparently died in strange circumstances in her colleague’s office. Until those circumstances became clear, I knew from my coroner’s experience that the environment around Hannah’s body should stay uncontaminated.

Three things kept replaying in my brain.

Hannah had been in Mary Black’s office, not in her own.

Hannah’s purse had been in the middle of her office floor.

Her shirt was pulled up and tucked under her bra.

Why, why, and why?

The lady with the frizzy hair had moved away from Diane and me and taken off her shoes. She was sitting, almost immobile, her chin in her hands, on one of the steps leading up to the wooden porch at the front of the house. Her tears had stopped flowing, her expression a blank mask of shock.

“Are you sure she’s dead?” Diane demanded more than once in those first few moments. I explained that I’d felt for a pulse and told her that Hannah’s skin was already cold. And then I explained it again.

I didn’t say anything about the dark stain of urine.

“She hates being cold,” Diane protested. “Hannah shouldn’t be cold. She doesn’t like winter. Maybe a blanket. I could find a blanket. I have one in the car. Raoul makes me keep one in the car in case…”

It wasn’t easy but I was able to get Diane settled on a kidney-shaped concrete bench that sat amidst some wild grasses beside the front walk about halfway to the street. I stepped a yard away from her, pulled out my cell phone, hit the speed dial and reached Lauren, my wife, who had probably just walked in the door from her job as a prosecutor for Boulder County.

“Hey, it’s me. I’m glad you’re home.”

“What’s wrong?”

She could tell something was.

“Hannah Grant?” I said. “You remember her?”

“Diane’s friend.”

“She was going to cover for us while we were in Vegas. She’s dead. We just found her body in her office. We’re waiting for the cops.”

“My God. Are you all right?”

“We’re okay. Call Raoul, okay? Tell him Diane’s going to be late. I don’t know how late, but you know how these things go. It’s probably going to be a while.” Raoul Estevez was Diane’s husband. “Diane’s very upset. They were close friends.”

Lauren set her empathy aside for a moment and got down to business. Her business. Cops and courts and lawyers and bad guys. “Do you and Diane need lawyers?”

“No, nothing like that. Hannah wasn’t returning Diane’s messages about coverage for our trip. We were concerned. We just walked in and… found her body. That’s all.”

“You’re sure? Don’t just say yes. I want you to think before you answer me.”

I thought. “Yeah, that’s all.”

“How did she die?”

“No idea. There was no blood I could see. Could be natural causes, but my gut says not. Her body’s in a funny position.” I was still thinking, too, about that black patent-leather purse in the middle of the floor and about the blouse tucked up under the front of her bra. “Is there any reason a woman would tuck her shirttail up under the front of her bra?” I asked.

“What? The front tail?”

“Yes.”

“No, not that I can think of.”

From the south side of the Pearl Street Mall I heard the piercing intrusion of a siren approaching, fast.

I said, “The cops are here, babe. I should go.”

“I’ll make some calls. Stay in touch. I love you.”

“Me, too,” I said. Diane walked up next to me. I said, “Lauren’s going to call Raoul and let him know what’s going on.”

“What is going on?” she asked me. “Do we know?”

The first of what would become four squad cars rolled up over the curb and then slowly powered up onto the sidewalk, blocking the path. A couple of patrol cops I didn’t know jumped out of the car. The look on their faces was either that they didn’t believe whatever the dispatcher had told them about why they were rolling to the Broadway address, or that they were hoping the dispatcher had gotten the story wrong. I stepped forward, introduced myself, told them I had called 911, and I explained what we had found inside.

One cop marched to the front door to check out my story. The other one stayed outside with his three witnesses. A minute later a couple of EMTs arrived in their bright, boxy wagon. They too went inside to confirm what I already knew. Everything everyone did, it seemed, was preceded and followed by whispers into radios.

To me it all felt like slow motion. I was thinking: Somebody is dead. We should hurry. The reality was, of course, different. The reality was: Somebody was dead. What was the point of hurrying?

More patrol cops arrived in the next few minutes, and after a brief consultation with the two first responders a couple of them strung a perimeter of crime-scene tape that reached all the way to the big trees along the front curb and included the larger houses and yards on each side. Gawking drivers quickly brought traffic to a virtual standstill.

Call it bad luck, call it a side effect of being married to a prosecutor, or of being best friends with a cop, but I’d been around enough crime scenes to know what to expect and wasn’t at all surprised that Diane and the Cheetos lady and I were soon separated from one another.

The women were each offered a seat in the back of different squad cars while I was shuttled to the front porch of the elegantly restored Victorian next door. From there I watched the cluster of uniformed cops disperse. Two headed to the back of the house clutching a fat wheel of crime-scene tape. The ones who’d stayed in front were trying to look like they had something important to do, something besides wait. The EMTs waited for something, too.

We were all doing indeterminate time in the wake of unexplained death, a sentence that would endure until the arrival of an unmarked car bringing detectives to the scene.

Part of me wanted to see my friend, Sam Purdy, step out of the detectives’ sedan.

That was the selfish part.

The generous part of me hoped that he had the evening off.