Dry Ice (11 page)

    To my surprise she stopped. "What's going on?"

    "Someone threw a purse over the back fence last night. A patient pointed it out. I brought it in here, which was apparently a grievous sin. It turns out that it may be an important purse in an investigation of Sam's. Given his mood I promise that you don't want to find out what will happen if you set foot in here."

    "Sam said I couldn't use the waiting room."

    "How many patients do you have today?"

    "Three," she said. "They all really like the new waiting room."

    I said I was sorry. Diane looked like she was about to cry.
Las Vegas,
I thought.
She hasn't recovered from Las Vegas.

    "Can you put up a note and ask them to wait on the front porch? Then bring them in the side door into your office?"

    "Are the police going to screw it up? The waiting room?" she asked.

I ENDED up driving home that evening wearing a zip-up paper suit. On my feet were some beat-up flip-flops I found in the cargo section of my wagon.

    The Tyvek jumpsuit was a gift from a member of the crimescene team. A young female tech offered it in exchange for the clothes I had been wearing when I'd had the misfortune to come in contact with the apparently radioactive purse from the backyard. She had me stand on some sheets of clean paper and undress while she retrieved and individually bagged my shirt, my sweater, my trousers, my socks, and my shoes. It was only after some prolonged deliberation with her boss that they concluded that Locard's principle—one of the guiding tenets governing the transfer of evidence from one surface to another at crime scenes—wouldn't apply to my underwear.

    I think I was supposed to be grateful.

Sam requested warrants for the office and yard, and for my person.

    While we were waiting for the warrants to arrive, he and I maintained a standoff through the glass of the French door. Sam stood a step outside with his arms folded across his chest, silently daring me to go near my desk again. I sat on the floor opposite the door with my back against the wall, silently daring him to come back in without a warrant.

    I used my cell phone to cancel my appointments. I thought briefly about calling Lauren and asking her to intervene, but I didn't. She was already juggling enough and didn't need a new conflict of interest added to her stress load. I also knew she wouldn't intervene and I didn't want to know what that would feel like.

    Cozier Maitlin and the warrants showed up almost simultaneously just before two o'clock. I heard Cozy's booming voice, and stepped to the door just in time to see Sam hand Cozy the papers. While Cozy flipped pages Sam appeared to be greeting someone I couldn't see. Cozy refolded the warrants, put a hand on Sam's shoulder, and started talking with him in a low voice.

    Sam's a big guy, but he was dwarfed by Cozy. My lawyer is six-eight.

    Not thrilled at being excluded from the negotiation, I opened the door to join their tête-à-tête.

    Each of them raised a hand to stop me. Sam added, "Stay where you are."

    Cozy nodded. "Do what he says." His voice filled the atmosphere the way a fart fills an elevator. "And close that door."

    
Do what he says?
I closed the door.

    That's when Kirsten Lord walked into the frame. She had apparently been waiting out of my sight down the driveway. She was dressed in modest heels, a skirt that fell just below her knees, and a tailored long-sleeved shirt. She had a slim briefcase slung over her shoulder.

   She looked like a lawyer, which shouldn't have surprised me. Kirsten was a lawyer. The last time she and I had talked, though—and it had been a while—she hadn't been practicing law; she had been apprenticing as a restaurant cook at the Boulderado Hotel. But before that she had been an attorney whose allegiances were firmly on the prosecutorial side of the bar. If she was accompanying Cozy, it was clear evidence that she had crossed over to the defense table.

    Kirsten had once, briefly, been my patient. The timing was easy to recall; Lauren had been pregnant with Grace during the interlude when Kirsten had been seeing me for treatment. Gracie was almost five.

    Sam and Cozy continued to confer for three or four more minutes. While they chatted, the crime-scene team began to congregate near the garage. Kirsten waited a few respectful steps away from them, as if at attention. She didn't look my way. Finally, Cozy walked away from Sam and disappeared from my sight down the driveway. Kirsten spun and followed him.

    Sam began talking to one of the forensics guys, pointing at the back of the yard where I'd picked up the purse, and then at my office. Seconds later, my cell rang.

    "I'm out in front of your building. Sam's going to let your little indiscretion with the files slide."

    It was Cozy. "He is?" I asked, surprised but grateful.

    "He could have insisted that the files be collected and be turned over to a judge or special master. Or he could have busted your ass and thrown you in jail for obstruction."

    "Why is he being so . . . nice?"

    "I don't know. It concerns me a little that I don't know. But my primary goals were to keep you from being arrested and to protect your clinical files. I am two-for-two. I think that means I get paid double. Are you going to need any more help cooperating, or can I go back to my office?"

    "The warrants are good?"

    "The warrants are stupendous. They cover your yard, your office, the hallway, and the doorway you use to the waiting room. Sam said you maintain you never moved past the doorway. Sam's playing nice—he wrote them quite narrowly. He could have gotten the whole building. There is another warrant for your person. The judge gave them the right to collect exemplars from you. Today, they'll just get a complete set of your prints, but they have the right to sample your hair and blood, too. I assured him we would cooperate." He paused. "We will cooperate if and when they request the blood and the swabs and the hair, won't we, Dr. Gregory?"

    "It's just a damn purse, Cozy."

    "Not to them. When they ask for your blood, your reply will be to expose a vein, one of your favorites, click your heels together, and say, 'How much, sir?'"

    Through the door's glass I noted that a police photographer was busy taking a series of establishing shots in the backyard. "You have a new associate, Cozy?"

    "I didn't tell you? I think you know her. Ms. Lord is a tad green about the nuances of this side of the law, but she's sharp and she provides some needed estrogen at the defense table. Juries like that. Depending on how this evolves she may end up helping me with your . . . situation. I have some travel planned. She knows a little about the people's side of these things. It's a perspective I have a tendency to lose sight of."

    Cozy wasn't prone to admitting deficiencies. I didn't know what else to say, so I asked, "My day is history, right? My practice, I mean. My patients?"

    "Yes," Cozy said. "The poor souls will have to muddle along without your guidance for another week. I don't know how I manage some days." He hung up.

    Empathy, like hand-holding, wasn't his long suit.

I had the right to observe the search. I wanted to make sure that no one tried to breach the locks on my file cabinet, and I wanted to make sure that no one confused Diane's office with mine.

    Though the search did include the connecting hallway between our offices, the search warrant did not include Diane's consultation space, nor did it include the cramped upstairs office where our software-entrepreneur tenant labored on occasion. I couldn't even remember the last time I'd climbed those stairs. Certainly months, possibly years.

    From my perspective, it did appear that the forensic bloodhounds were doing what Sam had said they would do—looking for trace that might have been transferred from the purse to surfaces in my office or on my clothing. Since I had admitted to Sam that I'd made a couple of round-trips to collect patients, the techs were also looking for trace that I might then have inadvertently transferred to surfaces in the hallway or the interior doorway to the waiting room.

    Sam didn't speak to me until late afternoon. By then I was growing fatigued with my paper clown's outfit. He approached me, holding one of the warrants that he'd shown to Cozy. "Don't know what Mr. Maitlin told you about this, but it includes your garage," he said, poking at the paper with his stubby index finger.

    I laughed. Not my brightest move, considering the circumstances. And the suit.

    Sam didn't see the humor. In a tone intended to remind him that we were friends—good friends—I said, "Don't waste your time, Sam. I haven't been anywhere near the garage. The purse hasn't been anywhere near the garage."

    "Since when?"

    "Since . . . ever."

    "You know where the purse has been?"

    "Of course not. I was talking about after I saw it the first time. Jesus."

    "Then what—you're telling me you've never been in your own garage? You expect me to believe that?"

    "I've never been in there. Look at it, for God's sake. Sneeze and the thing will fall on your head."

    "What's in it?"

    "I don't know. If you look through the cracks in the walls it's pretty much empty. An old rake, maybe. A shovel. Some jars. Lumber."

    "I think we're going to take a look," he said. He was in specting the exterior as he spoke. I watched him as he paced around the perimeter of the thing as though he were looking for vulnerabilities in an enemy's fortifications. He ended his tour in front of me, examining the two front doors.

    I guessed what he was thinking. "I wouldn't open those." The moment I said the words I knew Sam would take my suggestion as a challenge, not as a caution.

    "We'll see about that."

    "You should have the photographer take some pictures of what it looks like right now, before you go in. Something I can use to file a damage claim later on."

    Sam shook his head dismissively, pulled on a pair of fresh latex gloves, and stepped up to the big hinged doors at the front of the rickety structure.

    "I'd suggest a hardhat," I said. "Or body armor. Or maybe one of those cool little bomb-sniffing robots."

    He tried his best to ignore me but I could tell he found my protests aggravating, which provided me some small measure of satisfaction.

    The handles on the garage doors were rusty, the wooden exterior weathered and cracked. The hinges and the door hardware were powdered with dark orange-brown oxidation. Whatever paint had once been on the surface of the wood had been sandblasted away by a century of Chinooks. The only evidence of the building's original hue was some dark green tint deep in the fissures of the wood.

    Sam yanked on the left-side door. The handle came off in his hand. He tightened his fist around it and held it up close to his face. I could tell he wanted to throw it at someone. Someone like me. Instead he tossed it at my feet and moved his attention to the right-side door. Given the way the building leaned, the right door was the structural member that I thought had been propping up the building since sometime shortly after the end of the Coolidge administration.

    "I wouldn't. Seriously. I'm not being difficult. The thing is a hundred-year-old house of cards. It's going to collapse if you pull that door out."

    "It's been here this long, it'll be here one more day. We have lots of buildings like this in Minnesota."

    Sam was from the Iron Range in the northern part of Minnesota. It was probably true that he had seen a lot of crumbling pine buildings. That day his confidence was misplaced, though. I was sure of that.

    He set his feet and pulled hard at the handle. The door emitted a loud squeal as though it had been injured. But it didn't move. I stepped back, anticipating catastrophe. Sam lowered his center of gravity, grasped the handle with both hands, and gave it a good yank. The door creaked outward about six inches before that handle, too, came off in his hand. He stumbled backward and fell ignominiously onto his ass in the space between my car and Diane's. By then, I had retreated far enough that I was standing about six feet behind him as he propped himself on his elbows.

    I was trying not to laugh. The paper suit helped with my restraint.

    Wood began to creak in the garage. The creaks were almost immediately accompanied by pops. The pops were followed by a few measures of the eerie screeching sound that old nails make as they're being yanked at awkward angles from dry wood.

    "Get out of the way, Sam," I said. "She's coming down."

    Sam scooted back like an insect retreating from a foe. Three loud cracks snapped in quick succession.

    For five seconds the building stood silently with dust, like smoke, rising in little puffs from its joints. The structure seemed to be quivering like an athlete at the end of a long workout, and I had almost convinced myself it was going to remain standing when it groaned and creaked and screeched even louder than before.

Then it tumbled over.

    The garage fell to the west as I had long suspected it would. But it didn't fall over dramatically like a redwood sawed off in an old-growth forest. It fell like an old man who had suddenly lost purchase with his cane. Slowly. Inelegantly. In a heap.

    Once it had finished collapsing onto its side with a final cacophony of pops and cracks, the building sent up a cloud of dust that quickly covered the cars, and Sam, in a fine, likely toxic, film.

    "Damn," Sam said, still on his elbows and ass, his head inches from my feet.

    If I hadn't been wearing the Tyvek jumpsuit and that pair of sky blue flip-flops, I think I would have said, "I told you so."