Missing Persons

62

I was wide-eyed and body-weary long before Sam’s arrival for our Saturday run, but the winter sky was too black for daybreak and the bedroom too cold to consider popping right out of bed. I waited for the growl of the paper guy’s Power Wagon to come and go and for the first unmistakable illuminations of dawn before I rolled reluctantly into the day.

Even the dogs thought I was crazy. Emily sighed at me, but she didn’t bother to get up to see what I had planned. Anvil, whose ears were beginning to fail him, didn’t acknowledge that I’d moved.

I forced myself to drink some water and I downed a banana after mindlessly trying to peel a plantain that Lauren or Viv had stuck in the fruit bowl. The plantain wasn’t ripe and wasn’t at all eager to be peeled. I totally mangled the thing before I figured out that I wasn’t wrestling with a mutant Chiquita.

New errand: Replace the damn plantain.

I thought I heard a car on the lane and peeked out the front door at 7:25. No Sam. I was hoping he’d spaced out the run or that he’d overslept. Jogging on a fifteen-degree morning didn’t sound any more appetizing to me than had eating an under-ripe plantain.

Seven-thirty. No Sam. Out loud, I prayed, “Give it a rest, Sammy. Take a day off.” That, of course, is when he drove up the lane. He climbed out of the Cherokee in his fancy running duds and a brand-new pair of trainers. His frosty breath was visible in long, slow rolls. Lauren’s advice from the night before felt as sage to me as it had then, but I still hadn’t decided exactly what I knew that I could tell Sam that might help Diane. He rescued me from my temporary paralysis by saying, “Let’s stretch a minute. I want to tell you about the tunnel search.”

The tunnel. The opening that had been excavated from Doyle’s basement was cut at a steep enough angle that it actually descended all the way down below the spread footing of the foundation of the Millers’ house. At that point the track-and-trolley system terminated and a vertical shaft about two feet in diameter rose straight up into the Millers’ crawl space. The top of the shaft was covered by a fitted piece of one-inch-thick plywood upholstered with an ample amount of dirt that had been glued to the wood with some kind of industrial-strength adhesive.

Were someone to venture into the crawl space, any evidence of the construction project was hidden from view by the thick-milled black-plastic sheeting that stretched from foundation wall to foundation wall over the entire expanse. The plastic was installed to collect the natural radon that was common in soil in Colorado, so the gases could be vented to the outdoors and the lungs of the home’s inhabitants could be protected from the toxic consequences of long-term radiation exposure.

Access from the tunnel into the Miller home was ingenious. False sills had been attached to the tops of the foundation walls in the corner closest to the tunnel shaft. The plastic sheeting had been removed from the original sills and reattached to the false sills, where it could be easily lifted and folded back to reveal the opening of the shaft. After an intruder was ready to return to Doyle’s house next door, he had only to lock the false sills back in place-which would return the plastic to its normal location-and then slide the plywood lid back over the shaft.

A cursory examination of the crawl space by someone in the Miller home would reveal no evidence of the tunnel. Once Sam was down in the crawl space, it had taken him a few minutes to figure out exactly how it all worked, despite the fact that he knew almost precisely where the tunnel should be entering the house. The only clue to the location, he said, was a slight interruption in the dust pattern on top of the plastic sheeting.

Bill Miller professed shock and ignorance at the discovery of the tunnel. Although the revised warrant that Sam delivered to Bill’s door gave him no choice about the matter, he was totally cooperative with the police about access to his crawl space.

He also rapidly put two and two together and got four. “Where is Doyle?” Bill had demanded. “Have you guys talked to him? Is he under arrest? Somebody tell me something! Does he know where Mallory is?”

Sam made a tactical decision to allow Bill to hover close by during the search-he wanted to observe him-but he wasn’t buying Bill’s act. “He knew it was there,” Sam told me. “Might even have known Doyle was dead.”

“He knew about the tunnel? What makes you think that?”

“You interview enough people you get to know when they’re lying. Meryl Streep could lie to me and get away with it, maybe Al Pacino. Definitely what’s-his-face, Anthony Hopkins. But Bill Miller? He couldn’t even get a bit part with the Flatirons Players. Must be the same for you, you know, in your business.”

The truth was that my patients often lied to me with absolute impunity. I rationalized my often embarrassing credulity by trying to convince myself that when my patients lied to me they were lying to themselves as well, and that was why I was so inept at spotting their mistruths.

But the simple reality is that I am gullible. In reply to Sam, I said, “Yeah.”

He chuckled. “Exactly what I’m talking about. Exactly.”

I asked, “Speaking of being fooled-Jaris Slocum blew it, didn’t he? His piece of the investigation.”

Sam nodded. I’d expected him to mount a defense of Slocum, but he didn’t. He said, “I’ll deny this if it’s ever repeated, but Slocum didn’t ever lay eyes on the Millers’ neighbor. After the initial search of Chandler’s house was negative, Slocum did the follow-up interview by phone-by frigging phone-not in person.” Sam paused and grimaced like he had a bad tooth. “And he never ran him.”

I was incredulous at the last bit. Sam was admitting that the Boulder Police had never put Doyle Chandler’s particulars through the NCIC-National Crime Information Center-database.

“He never ran him? If he’d simply run him, you guys might have focused on Doyle a day or two after Christmas?”

“Something like that.”

“Would have changed everything. Everything. For Mallory, maybe for Diane,” I said. I’m a master of understatement.

“Woulda, coulda.”

Sam didn’t seem particularly contrite about his support for Jaris Slocum. Did I want him to be? I guess I did. It seemed to me that a whole gaggle of Sam’s colleagues had been complicit in covering for Jaris. “Well?” I asked. Sam wasn’t looking at me; he was staring at his right hamstring, which was the size of a pork tenderloin.

“Jaris is meeting with the bosses now. They’re trying to find a way out of this that doesn’t smell too bad for the department. But no matter what, it’s not going to turn out too good for Jaris.”

I considered what I’d witnessed at dinner at the Sunflower. “Alcohol?”

“That’s part of it.” Finally, he looked up from his leg.

“You knew?” I said.

“His wife left him a year ago, got his kids after a nasty custody eval. As you might expect, Jaris had developed a little animosity toward mental health professionals and lawyers after that little fiasco. He should never have been sent out to Hannah Grant’s office that night, but that’s hindsight-who knew that he’d be spending his evening hanging out with shrinks and lawyers?”

“Sounds like his superiors should have known enough to rein him in. You did. Darrell Olson did.”

“This all started right after Sherry left me. Despite the fact that I’d never really liked him, I had sympathy for the guy. I thought he just needed some room, some time to sort through all that was going on. We covered for him, all of us did. Could’ve been me, Alan. Could just as well have been me. Or you. You done chewing on him? I have other stuff I want to tell you.”

“He was still drinking the other night at dinner, Sam.”

“Couple of beers.”

“That he downed like Gatorade after a marathon.”

“And?” he said. He said it provocatively.

“And what?”

“You’re doing it again, Alan.”

“I’m doing what?”

“Cops are people. Guess what? We have problems. Sometimes we handle them, sometimes we don’t. Same as shrinks. Same as teachers. Everybody. Jaris Slocum screwed up. Happens. People cut him some slack. Nice people like Darrell Olson do that. Slocum hung himself with it. Happens. Get over it. Nobody knew he fudged his investigation of Doyle Chandler. And nobody guessed what was going to come of it.”

Sam offered me nothing but a stony face that was more punctuation than anything else. I read the punctuation to be a period.

I said, “Okay, I’m done.”

“Wise. The partials we found in the search last night? One of them is Bob Brandt’s right index finger.”

“Oh shit,” I said.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Oh shit. We have his fingerprint in the basement theater and we have his car leaving the garage of the house at the other end of the tunnel during the window when Mallory disappeared from her home. Circumstantially speaking, it doesn’t look too good.”

“But nothing on the BOLO?”

“It’s a rare car. It shouldn’t be as hard to find as it’s turning out to be. I’m thinking it’s parked inside someplace. I don’t think he’s using it; we’d have it by now. We’re going back into his place on Spruce later, this time with a warrant. We’re going to test that blood.”

“Pine.”

“Pine then.”

“Say hi to Jenifer for me.”

“Jenifer?”

“The cute kid? The one who wants to go to Clemson?”

“I’ll be sure to send your regards,” Sam said sarcastically.