Warning Signs

CHAPTER 44

Sam wasn't officially directing the search for Marin Bigg. He wasn't actually officially investigating anything that had to do with any of the Biggs, or anything to do with Ramp, or with the explosion outside my office.

Sam was freelancing.

He was at Community Hospital in the middle of the night because he was looking for Lucy. In his mind, this gave him a platinum-plated invitation to stick his bulbous nose anyplace he felt like sticking it. When I tracked him down inside the hospital, he was in a first-floor corridor pacing on the periphery of a conversation other cops were having about the search of the interior of the hospital that was taking place in an attempt to find Marin.

I caught his eye and mouthed, "Come here."

He apparently saw something in my face that indicated he should heed my invitation. He walked right over. I led him around the corner into an empty hallway that was lined with closed doors.

"What? I'm busy. I can't give you a ride."

I held up my cell phone. "Ramp just called me, Sam. I was standing outside waiting for a cab and he called me."

Sam grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me down the hall, checking knobs until he found an unlocked door. Once he closed it behind us, he blurted, "Tell me everything."

"He asked me about my 'tall blond friend.' He said it twice. I think he has Lucy."

He leaned his face within six inches of mine and froze me with his glare. "Did he say that?"

"No. But he knows things that I told Lucy. Things about Naomi and Marin and Paul Bigg. And he knew my cell number. Almost no one knows my cell number. But Lucy does."

I watched the tendons at the junctions of Sam's jawbones squirm like fat worms under his skin. "Have you tried her cell phone number?"

"No."

He yanked his phone from his belt and speed-dialed Lucy.

No answer.

He returned his focus to me. "Now tell me every last fucking word of your conversation."

I sat down on a flimsy plastic chair, hanging my wounded buttock over the edge.

I said, "This whole conversation with Ramp is crystal clear in my head. You want to take notes?"

My relating the details of the phone call and Sam's subsequent questions consumed about five minutes. He scribbled details in a notebook for the first sixty seconds or so.

After I was done and he'd asked his last question, he said, "Give me your cell phone."

At moments like this, Sam's intensity overwhelmed his civility, and the rules of polite discourse tended to escape him. I watched as he retrieved the number of the last person who had called me. In this case, that would be Ramp. He then pulled his own phone from a holster on his belt, called the department, and asked somebody to get a reverse listing for the number he'd taken from my phone. He waited for almost a minute before he said, "Figured. Thanks."

"Pay phone?" I said.

"At a 7-Eleven on Speer Boulevard near Federal in Denver. That was a mistake on the kid's part; it's a public place. Maybe there's a wit, somebody who saw him there a few minutes ago."

I couldn't see how that would help us much, unless the witness had thought that the guy talking on the phone had been so suspicious that the witness also decided to scribble down a license plate number or follow Ramp wherever he went after he made the call. I didn't share those thoughts with Sam. Although he was talking out loud, he was really talking to himself, and he was less than not interested in my opinion.

Sam handed me back the phone. "How's the battery on that thing?"

I looked down and checked. "Okay, maybe half charged. Why?"

" 'Cause we have to go to Denver. And when he calls again, I want to make sure the damn phone works."

"Sam, think. Think." I tapped my temple. "What are we going to do in Denver at this hour? We don't know anything."

"For starters, we're going to talk to the guy at the 7-Eleven. See what he can tell us about Ramp."

"What guy? You don't even know that there is a guy. You're guessing about there being a witness. You shouldn't be driving to west Denver on a wild-goose chase, you should be using your time arguing with your colleagues about ways to find Lucy."

With a defeated tone that I wasn't accustomed to hearing in his voice, he said, "I don't expect them to listen to me. There's a search on, but nobody wants to go out on a limb for her right now. Some cops are doing what they can, but to tell you the truth there are more people who believe she's hiding than there are that believe she's been kidnapped."

"You have to try to convince them, then. Tell them about the phone call I got from Ramp."

He stood up, towering over me. "You're right. Even though they're going to think I'm just trying to help Lucy with her defense, I need to try to convince them that Ramp has her." He reached down for the doorknob and added, "There's another bomb hidden someplace here in Boulder, isn't there? That's how you read what Ramp was saying to you?"

"Yeah. That's how I read it. At least one more."

"I agree. Somebody needs to find Marin. She's probably getting into position to set off another bomb."

"The question is, who's the target?"

There's another bomb. That lawyer.

He held the door for me, an act of graciousness that was quite unexpected given the circumstances.

I was a single step past him when it suddenly struck me what Ramp hadn't asked me.

"Sam, Ramp never asked me how Marin's doing."

I turned in time to watch his eyelids drift closed. He said, "Shit."

"That means that when I talked to him on the phone, he either already knew that she'd run from the hospital or he didn't care about her condition. I don't think he doesn't care."

"Shit," Sam repeated. "He's already talked to her." He pounded the doorframe with the blunt side of his closed fist. "What on earth have the two of them got cooked up for us?"

I was about to say, More bombs, but I didn't. Sam didn't often wax rhetorical, but I suspected right then that that was exactly what he was doing.