Missing Persons

6

Diane and I didn’t make it to Vegas.

Hannah Grant’s ashes were interred the following Tuesday after a sentimental service in one of the downtown churches. I had never before seen so much of Boulder ’s mental health community present in one place.

I was in a pretty good position to know that the police were flummoxed by the case. The local media was already reporting that the cops had no active leads. Lauren confirmed to me that after a week the investigation was spinning its wheels. My friend Sam Purdy, the Boulder police detective, usually wouldn’t talk out of school about important cases with me, but he did roll his eyes when I mentioned Hannah.

That told me a lot.

During one late-night phone conversation he went way out on a limb. “We got crap,” was what he said.

Lauren swore me to secrecy but revealed that Slocum and Olson had located no witnesses to anything that supported a finding of homicide. No one had seen Hannah leave her south Boulder condo the morning of her death, but she’d arrived at Rallysport Health Club early enough to work out before driving away just before 8:30. The time was almost certain. Two different witnesses recalled an incident in the locker room-Hannah had tripped over another woman’s gym bag on the way back from the shower and both women had fallen hard to the floor. The witnesses were confident that they knew what time Hannah had dressed after her workout before heading to her car.

They were confident about one other thing, too. As she fell, Hannah had definitely hit her head on the tile floor. Someone had offered to go get ice. Hannah had declined; she said she was fine and had to get to work.

No one reported seeing her arrive at her office building. The few of Hannah’s patients who had shown up for appointments on the day she died and who had voluntarily come forward to speak with the police reported nothing that provided any direction for the investigation.

The detectives weren’t able to develop any motive for an assault. Hannah’s personal life revealed no promising leads. Her finances were pristine. Her professional record was free of formal complaints.

The cops had no physical evidence that a crime had been committed. Actually, the truth was that they had way too much physical evidence. The little office building was chock-full of fingerprints and trace evidence. Dozens of different patients made their way through the space every week.

Hair, fibers? All the police could want, and more. Apparently Hannah’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies had lacunae in the terrain where “neat” stopped and “clean” began. For investigators, Hannah’s housekeeping weakness created a problem. To use trace evidence to rule in the presence of an intruder in the building, Jaris Slocum and Darrell Olson had to rule out the presence of any and all routine visitors to the building, which meant-minimally-obtaining exemplar prints and DNA samples from all of Hannah’s patients and all of Mary Black’s patients and from any other routine visitors to the building, including the woman who delivered the mail, the guys from UPS and FedEx, and the various tat-ted and pierced kids who delivered takeout from restaurants on the nearby Pearl Street Mall.

Mary Black, the psychiatrist and mother of three who shared office space with Hannah, declined to make her patient roster available to the police, citing doctor-patient confidentiality. Diane, whom Hannah had entrusted with the clinical responsibility of closing her practice in the event of her death, also declined to make Hannah’s patient roster available to the police, citing the same doctor-patient confidentiality issues. When the police pressed the issue, she’d enlisted Cozy Maitlin to run interference for her.

Diane was ambivalent about keeping the information to herself. After what Jaris Slocum had done to her the evening Hannah’s body was discovered, Diane wasn’t, of course, particularly inclined to cooperate with him. But she was eager to do anything she could to help identify anyone who might have had anything to do with Hannah’s death. As far as Hannah’s patient roster was concerned, though, Diane had decided that was information to which Slocum wasn’t entitled.

Hannah’s death officially remained “suspicious” until the Boulder County coroner issued his report eight days after her death. The medical examiner had identified two discrete blows to Hannah’s head, and he identified her cause of death as traumatic head injury resulting in cerebral hemorrhage. He specified the manner of her death as “undetermined.” The ME’s opinion was that the damage inflicted by a flat surface, possibly the tile floor at Rallysport, had not been sufficient to cause Hannah’s death. Hannah’s death was directly attributable to the second head trauma, origin unknown.

The dual traumas either had been unintentional blows suffered during the fall in the gym the morning she died-one impact caused by the tile floor, one by something else-or had been the result of two blows to her head intentionally inflicted by an assailant. Sam pointedly reminded me that a third possibility existed: One blow had been suffered during the fall at the health club, and the second blow, the fatal one, had been inflicted by an assailant at Hannah’s office.

Diane heard the coroner’s findings first. Diane always tended to hear gossip first. What source she might have in the medical examiner’s office eluded me, but she found me on Friday morning at the office at a moment when we were both between patients and stunned me with the news.

“Somebody may have killed her, Alan. My God, somebody may have killed her. Why would somebody want to kill Hannah?”

I held her while she wept. I’d lost count of how many times I’d held Diane while she wept since Hannah’s death. The tears weren’t endless, but they were frequent. Diane’s grief arrived in short, intense bursts, like the August monsoons. Clear skies before, clear skies after.

I asked myself the same question Diane was asking a dozen times a day for a while after that. Why would somebody want to kill Hannah?

I couldn’t provide an answer. I used the fact that I couldn’t answer it to console myself with the likelihood that Hannah’s death had been accidental. Nothing more than a freak reaction to a silly accident in a health club locker room.

But the police were left with a buffet of anomalies that they couldn’t explain. Why was Hannah’s purse on the floor of her office, a place she would never leave it? Why was Hannah’s body found in Mary Black’s office, a place she had no reason to go? And why was Hannah’s blouse tucked up under the front of her bra?

Hanukkah had arrived and Christmas was growing ever closer.

The effort to determine the manner of Hannah’s death turned colder along with the weather.

Media interest in the case declined quickly, and Hannah’s very public death soon became what, perhaps, it really had been all along-a private tragedy.