Warning Signs

CHAPTER 12

The eastern rim of the Boulder Valley was growing dark as I made the final turn onto the lane that led to our house. My headlights immediately illuminated the side of my neighbor Adrienne's big blue Suburban, which was parked at an angle across the narrow width of the gravel lane, just beyond the permanent tin placard that identified the path to our little piece of paradise as a "Private Road." Taped to the side of Adrienne's huge vehicle was a poster-board sign that read NO PRES.

I recognized the artist, and the spelling. The poster was the work of Jonas, Adrienne's son. I was left with an inescapable conclusion: The kid shared not only his mother's aversion to the media but also her spelling challenges.

I pulled around Adrienne's behemoth and drove through the dry grasses until I could ease back up on the lane. In front of our house I found exactly what I was expecting to find, and I also found one surprise. Cozy's BMW was the expectation.

Lucy Tanner's red Volvo turbo was the surprise.

I said quick hellos to everyone, retrieved Grace from her bouncy chair in the center of the coffee table, and retreated from the living room so that Cozy and Lauren could continue to huddle with their client.

Dinner was in a dozen white boxes that were spread all over the kitchen counter, an amazing variety of take-out Chinese, all courtesy of Cozy. But as attractive as the buffet looked, I wasn't hungry. My appetite hadn't recovered from Naomi Bigg's provocative wouldn't-it-be-cool revelations or from her numbing menopause lament.

I stood with Grace in my arms, contemplating a spring roll, but grabbed only a beer on my way to the far end of the house.

The day after Grace was born, Lucy Tanner had stopped by Community Hospital and dropped off a gift, a charming, developmentally appropriate, black-and-white stuffed Gund musical clown with a garish face. Grace loved having the thing hanging above her crib. I didn't think I'd seen Lucy since that day in the hospital.

Although I'd crossed paths with her from time to time over the years during various misadventures I'd had with Sam Purdy, she and I had never grown close. She was a personable, friendly woman with a quick mind, a gentle wit, and an admirable tolerance of her quirky partner. She knew when to let Sam be the boss and she knew when to draw a line across his nose and dare him to cross it. I didn't recall ever seeing her misstep with Sam Purdy, which wasn't easy. I couldn't say the same thing about my own interactions with our mutual friend.

Lucy was uncommonly pretty. Not remarkably pretty, but uncommonly so. With the exception of her glistening blond hair there was nothing conventionally attractive about her features, but the constellation that the individual stars created was alluring, even magnetic. Many men embarrassed themselves when Lucy was in their vicinity, and Lucy was not at all reticent to take advantage of the phenomenon, either personally or professionally.

Over the years, I'd seen her in leather; I'd seen her in a little black dress; I'd seen her in brand-new Donna Karan, but-with the exception of her hours on the job-I'd never seen her dressed to blend in. Lucy always managed to stand off by herself. I suppose that I perceived her as living her life surrounded by a fence. Not chain link topped with razor wire, but more like a good strong wrought-iron barrier with an imposing gate.

Lucy would let you look into her world and its carefully manicured gardens, but she always made it clear that she didn't welcome uninvited visitors.

I was more than a little surprised when I saw Lucy standing in the open doorway to the master bedroom pantomiming a knuckle rap and saying, "Knock, knock." I'd changed into an old pair of shorts and a white T-shirt. Grace was in a fresh diaper and absolutely nothing else.

What do you say to an acquaintance who is suspected of murder? I tried, "I'm so sorry about all this you're going through. It must be like taking a holiday in hell."

"Thanks, Alan. May I come in? Cozy and Lauren are both on the phone. I thought I'd take a little break and was hoping I could sneak another look at the baby. She's wonderful."

Lucy was wearing a starched white shirt and jeans that fit her like hot wax. No jewelry. Black flats. Very little makeup. Given what she'd been through, I expected she would look tired, but she didn't. She somehow managed to slide her hands into the back pockets of her jeans.

"Of course. You want to hold her? She has a fresh diaper-so it's a rare opportunity. Take advantage of it while you can."

She smiled and lifted her arms. "May I?"

I handed Grace over to her. She took the baby with an awkward motion that spoke of unfamiliarity with infants. She said, "Is she always this good?"

"In a word, no. But she's still a wonderful baby. We've been very lucky."

I gestured toward an upholstered chair by the western window. Lucy sat and made a cute face for Grace's benefit. She said, "Sorry to take over your house. It's been hard to find a place to meet that's not surrounded by the media. My place is impossible. Cozy's office, his house…"

"Don't mention it, Lucy. I'm glad there's a place you can go without being harassed."

For a moment she focused all her attention on Grace, whose face was beginning to scrunch up into one of her pre-distress configurations. "Am I doing something wrong?" Lucy asked.

"No, she may be hungry, or she may be cutting a tooth. Those are my current all-purpose explanations for Grace being unhappy. I'm planning to expand the list as necessary as she grows older. But I am hoping those two will suffice at least until her mid-teens."

Lucy laughed gently. "Were life so simple, huh? I wish those were my only two potential problems."

"I do, too, Lucy. I do, too."

Without taking her eyes from the baby, she said, "I told Lauren she could tell you what's been going on. I assume she told you I was there that night? At Royal's house?"

Grace captured and then started sucking on Lucy's pinky. I reached to the bed behind me, grabbed a bottle, and handed it over to Lucy. Grace started eating. "She was hungry," Lucy said.

"Yes, she told me you were at the house."

"The press will probably find out soon."

"They usually seem to discover these things."

"I think it was somebody at the department who leaked the fact that I'd been questioned to the media. That still hurts. Sammy picked me up before dawn so nobody would notice."

"Sam's a sweetheart, Lucy. It could have been somebody at the DA's office who was the leak, couldn't it? It might not have been one of your colleagues."

"I suppose," she said before she grew quiet for a moment, apparently fascinated by the simple act of an infant eating. I guessed Lucy was thirty-two, thirty-three years old. She was unmarried and childless, certainly vulnerable to the gravitational pull of maternal yearnings.

I was about to comment about that when she asked, "Alan? You ever do anything…? God… you ever do anything that you're so ashamed of…?" She stared out the window at the lights of the city and the silhouette of the mountains. "So ashamed of that you'd do almost anything to undo it?"

"I don't know," I replied, in a moment of stark ineloquence. "Maybe." I tried to guess what was coming next, but was drawing a blank.

"You've probably already figured it out, but I'm talking about the reason I was at Roy Peterson's house."

Moments like these-when acquaintances or friends begin to open up to me as though we were patient and doctor sitting in my office-are always awkward for me. My practiced instinct was to warn Lucy that she enjoyed no confidentiality here in my bedroom, but a friend wouldn't do that, a friend would just listen.

"I wondered," I said, recalling that Lucy had told her attorneys that if people knew why she was at Roy's house it would only support the contention that she had a motive to kill him. Now she was telling me that the reason she was there filled her with shame.

She said, "There's an old saying about good intentions. A proverb, or an aphorism. Are they the same thing, proverbs and aphorisms? Do you know it? Something like the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

I said, "The reason you were at Royal's house-that's still what you're talking about?"

Did she nod in reply? I wasn't quite certain. Finally, she said, "This one was-paved with good intentions, I mean. Not a whole lot of good judgment maybe, but a whole lot of good intentions."

She lowered her head and Grace almost disappeared in the cascade of blond hair. "Grace's done with the bottle. Should she have more? How do you know how much to feed her?"

"We give her what she wants. That seems to work."

Lucy closed her eyes slowly and left them shut. She said, "It's different for adults, I guess."

"What do you mean?"

She opened her eyes and looked up at me. The corners of her mouth turned up in a wry grin. She said, "Giving people what they want, it's more complicated with adults than it is with babies."

"I'm no expert with babies but my initial impression after six months' experience as a father is that almost everything is more complicated with adults than it is with babies." Grace spit out the nipple and started to squirm on Lucy's lap. "She probably needs to be burped, Lucy. Though she sometimes makes that same face in preparation for fouling another diaper. You want to burp her? Don't be surprised if she releases pressure at both ends simultaneously."

"Love to." She moved Grace gingerly up toward her shoulder. "Did Sam tell you that I got engaged a couple of weeks ago?"

"No, Lucy, he didn't. Congratulations. Who's the lucky guy?"

"He's not a cop," she replied.

An interesting prologue, I thought.

"His name is Grant. He's with the Forest Service. I met him last fall when I was out hiking, if you can believe it."

"That's wonderful. When is-"

"Who could guess? Everything's up in the air right now. You know, because of… Royal."

I was about to ask Lucy how she'd come to know Royal Peterson when Cozy's huge frame filled the bedroom doorway. He was carrying our foster poodle, Anvil. Anvil looked content in his arms. Against Cozy's huge frame, the sixteen-pound dog also looked like a hamster.

Cozy said, "Hello again, Alan. Did you get some dinner? Wonderful stuff. There's a tart in the refrigerator for later, too. Almonds. No, I didn't bake it. Lucy, want to join us? We're just about ready to get started again."

"Sure." She handed me the baby and said, "Thanks. That was a nice talk. I really appreciate it."

"No problem," I said.

From the other room, Lauren called out, "Sweetie, if you left your pager in the kitchen, it just went off."

I traipsed into the kitchen with Grace in my arms. I didn't recognize the number on my beeper, so I called my office voice mail to see what the emergency page was about. The message was from Naomi Bigg and it was succinct. "Dr. Gregory? There's something more I need to say about what we talked about earlier. Please give me a call."

I asked Grace if she wanted to hazard a guess about Naomi Bigg's pressing problem.

She didn't. Grace had wisdom beyond her months.

I dialed the number off the screen of my pager and heard a smoker's raspy "Hello."

Although I was pretty sure that the voice was Naomi's, I said, "Naomi Bigg, please."

"Dr. Gregory? It's me."

"I'm returning your page." I made certain my tone was as level as a freshly plumbed door.

"You're prompt. Leo always made them wait. He said it was too reinforcing to call right away."

It was becoming clear to me that maybe Leo Bigg was a jerk in more ways than one. Intentionally keeping cancer patients waiting for return phone calls? While I busied myself closing up the cardboard boxes of Chinese food, I let the ball bounce around on Naomi's side of the net.

She took a whack at it after a few seconds. "I was thinking about how we left things today, and what you must be thinking."

"What must I be thinking?"

"That the wouldn't-it-be-cool game I was describing-the one that the boys play-that it might somehow be, I don't know, related to what happened to the district attorney. I assume that I left you with that impression."

Naomi was right on. That was certainly on the list of things that I had been thinking.

She said, "I'm not naive, okay? I can add two and two as well as you can. But, see, none of the wouldn't-it-be-cool games with Ramp and Paul ever-ever-involved someone being assaulted the way that Royal Peterson was assaulted. The news reports all say that he was beaten, you know, hit on the head with something."

I listened as she sucked on a cigarette. She said, "The boys have never joked about doing anything like that-ambushing someone and hitting them on the head, beating them up. You ask me, I think they're too cowardly to do something that confrontational. That's why I don't think they had anything to do with what happened to Peterson."

The argument she was making wasn't particularly compelling. I concluded that the purpose of her call was to reveal to me the foundation for her rationalization. She was eager for me to sign up to support her psychological defenses; she didn't really expect to convince me that her hypothesis was true.

Not feeling particularly cooperative, I assaulted the rationalization I was hearing. "Had the wouldn't-it-be-cool games you overheard ever concerned Royal Peterson in any context?"

"Well, sure. Paul knows the DA's role in the plea-bargain process. Paul and Ramp talked about Peterson all the time. But Roy Peterson was one of ten wouldn't-it-be-cool targets, maybe more. Most of them were people that Ramp was angry at, by the way, not Paul."

"And since Roy Peterson was beaten and not-what?-you think it's evidence that Paul and Ramp weren't involved?"

"Bombs. The boys always joked about using a bomb."

Without any deliberation, I sat down. I had to consciously inhale a breath before I could say, "A bomb? They joked about using a bomb."

"I don't know whether it was a bomb exactly. I don't know about those things. But an explosive of some kind. It's one of Ramp's little hobbies. He talks about blowing things up all the time. He goes out to some ranch out east somewhere, Limon or someplace, and practices. Paul says that once he went out there with Ramp and they actually blew up an old truck. You know, a wreck.

"Ramp's the one who says things like, 'Wouldn't it be cool if the district attorney's house just blew up one day?' Or 'Wouldn't it be cool if so-and-so's car blew up one day?' Like that. All of that stuff comes from Ramp. Paul never talks like that when Ramp's not around."

"Blowing stuff up is a hobby of Ramp's?"

"I don't know, an outside interest, that kind of hobby."

Silently, I counted to ten. Fortunately or unfortunately, the delay didn't change what I was going to say. "I want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. Because Royal Peterson wasn't killed by an explosive of some kind, you would like to believe that Paul and Ramp weren't involved in whatever happened at his house, even though they'd made overt threats against him."

"They never threatened him. It was just talk about what they wished would happen. When they heard he was dead, it's not like they celebrated or anything."

How nice. "So there's no chance they followed through on their fantasies?"

"Exactly. It was like they felt guilty because they were wishing for someone to die and then it happened. You know what that would be like. You'd feel guilty, responsible. Anybody would."

I considered her argument before I said, "That's a luxurious position for you to have, Naomi."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm thinking of the Klebolds and the Harrises. Over the months before that day at the high school, they probably made the same kinds of judgments about their children. Saw two here, and saw two there, but never allowed themselves to believe that the sum added up to four."

She sputtered as though she couldn't wait to respond to my words. "And, you know what? A thousand other parents-mothers like me-have done the exact same thing. We've seen things and never told the police. And our children never ended up doing a thing wrong. Not a thing. None of them. Two and two never added up. Ever. I thought you would understand."

"Understand what?"

"What it's like for parents. Aren't you a parent? Can you believe that your child is evil? Do you know how hard it is to cross that line?"

I looked down at Grace, asleep in my arms. No, I couldn't believe that my child was evil. Would ever be evil.

Not a chance.

"Not necessarily evil," I said, "but what about flawed? Troubled?" I added a bonus rationalization for Naomi's benefit. "Or what if the child is influenced by the wrong people? That happens."

"Killing someone isn't a flaw, Doctor. It's evil. And evil isn't in the air, you don't just catch it like a virus. It comes from somewhere, some injury deep inside." She paused. "And, although he's certainly been hurt badly by all that's happened, I don't believe my child has ever been to that place. I'd know it if… he had-I'm his mother."

I cushioned my voice, foaming the runway with my next words, trying to give her a soft place to land. "But you're not entirely sure, are you, Naomi? That's why we're talking."

She didn't want to come down gently. She said, "Maybe I shouldn't have called you after all. I'll see you on Friday-if I don't reconsider this whole thing."

Hurriedly, I interjected, "The reason you called tonight? Why is it important that I not misinterpret what you said today during our session? It's my impression that you're angry that I'm still able to see both sides of the coin."

"I don't want you to do anything stupid."

"I don't understand."

"I didn't want you to run off and tell anyone what I said. Send the bomb squad to my house or something. That's all."

"I couldn't reveal our conversation to anyone, Naomi. Not without your permission."

"I bet you could find a way around that."

"Are we talking about trust now?"

"I have no damn idea what we're talking about." She hung up as I was trying to figure out a discreet way to inquire about the other nine or so wouldn't-it-be-cool targets that Ramp and Paul had mentioned.

As the line went dead in my ear, I said, "Is my wife on that list, Naomi?"