I printed it and faxed it on its way before I climbed into bed beside my sleeping wife.
Russ and Flynn arrived the next afternoon a few minutes before one. The trunk of their rental car was packed full of heavy nylon duffel bags.
Among other things, Russ had come to Colorado do some rock climbing.
Russ Claven, it turned out, was blessed and burdened with more energy than even my friend Adrienne. And Adrienne was occasionally so hypo manic I considered her in need of medication.
After popping the trunk open and saying a cursory hello to Lauren and me, Russ patted a frantically barking Emily on the head, found his way inside to the bathroom to pee and change clothes, to the kitchen to examine the contents of our refrigerator and swipe an apple, and then back outside. Lauren and I were still standing near the car renewing our brief acquaintance with Flynn Coe.
Flynn's eye patch that day was a rusty satin stripe. The stripes were horizontal and the patch went well with her hair.
Russ interrupted and asked for directions to Eldorado Canyon. I drew him a crude map on the back of his airline-ticket envelope. His eyes brightened; he couldn't believe he was only ten minutes away from the rock-climbing equivalent of Disneyland. He asked Flynn if she was cool hanging out by herself for a while.
She said she was. He asked me whether I wanted to go climbing with him. I declined. I think he was relieved that I'd declined. Russ jumped into the car and took off west toward Eldorado.
We invited Flynn inside. She excused herself to the bathroom after suggesting that traveling cross-country in the airplane seat beside Russ Claven did not make for a particularly restful journey. But I thought she offered the assessment with humor and at least a trace of affection. * * *
Flynn wasn't as good a pool player as Lauren was, but at least she could give her a competitive game, which was something I'd never managed to do.
Considering how much her eye patch must have compromised her depth perception, Flynn's playing was all the more remarkable. I could tell that she wasn't accustomed to running into players with Lauren's skill, but she handled the competition, and the repeated losses, with grace.
I parked myself on a nearby chair while I watched the women demonstrate their talents, and actually had the feeling they forgot I was there.
Once Lauren managed to get Flynn talking, she spoke of herself with little self-consciousness.
Flynn Coe had been a protegee of Henry Lee's in the Connecticut State Police crime lab. She had worked with him for over three years before she was recruited away by the North Carolina authorities to run their crime lab facilities, the job she still held at the age of thirty-three. She'd been married once at twenty-four, divorced at twenty-six, and had a nine-year-old daughter named Jennifer.
Flynn had known Kimber Lister for years, had actually met him when she was attending a training seminar at the FBI Academy on a fellowship when she was still a graduate student at Northwestern. Years later, when he'd started to discuss his ideas for Locard with her, she'd volunteered her services before he got around to asking her to join.
After almost ninety minutes of pool Lauren excused herself to go rest. I asked Flynn if she was tired from her trip, if she wanted someplace to lie down. She said she didn't and followed me into the kitchen, where I began to prepare some food.
"Will you and Russ stay for dinner?" I asked.
"Sounds great to me but I think we need to wait for Russ. He may have other ideas about tonight."
"Are you two on your way to Steamboat Springs?"
She nodded.
"Eventually. I need to interview the people who worked the initial crime scenes and I want to examine the physical evidence that's still in storage. It helps me sometimes. And Russ wants to talk to the doc who did the autopsies on the girls and check on the storage of some blood and tissue and fluid samples that he wants to retest."
My head was mostly inside the refrigerator as I said, "I don't really know how to ask this, but, are you and Russ, you know, a couple?"
I looked back and watched her smile, suppressing a giggle.
"God no. But I have to admit that we tried once a few years back. Neither of us could do it. Even long-distance we couldn't make it work. I spent the whole time feeling like Captain Ahab. Always trying to reel him in, always feeling that he was too big, too strong, too indefatigable for me. So… it didn't work romantically. But I've learned to love him anyway. He's a good man." After a few minutes of small talk, I asked, "So-if you don't mind my asking-what happened to your eye, Flynn?"
She smiled.
"Most people don't ask."
"I'm sorry if I offended you. But you seem pretty comfortable with it, whatever it is."
"Comfortable? I don't know about that. You must be reading something into the patches, though. When it was clear to me that I had to start wearing one, I decided that I could either think of the patch as a medical device or think of it as jewelry. I decided that I liked the idea of jewelry better. I design them myself, and my sister makes them for me. Now, when people look at me fanny-you know, don't look me in the eye-I can allow myself to believe that they're distracted by the patch, not by my disability. It's a nice rationalization, a little advantage."
I finished washing some tiny round carrots that I had picked in Adrienne's garden. I handed Flynn a couple.
"So what happened?"
"I got… fooled… by a booby trap at a crime scene. A serial rapist left me a present. An explosion. My eye got mangled in the blast. The vision couldn't be saved. I can still perceive light with it, but it's distracting-it interferes with the vision in the good eye. And the scarring is… well… it's butt ugly. So I wear the patch."
"I'm sorry."
She bit off a piece of carrot and shook her head.
"Don't be. It was my own damn fault. I was careless. Good carrots."
We talked about the two dead girls and about Locard until Flynn said, "You're a believer now, aren't you?" I asked what she meant.
"This work we do. Investigating old crimes. Reopening wounds. Examining scars.
Finding answers. You like it, don't you?" I admitted that I did.
She smiled. Her eyebrow arched so that the narrow end peeked out from below the patch.
"By the time I get to see these old cases, everyone is always discouraged. The bodies are always buried, the crime-scene tape is always down, the blood is always dry. Always. When I arrive, what I try to bring along with me is some hope, some enthusiasm, and some science. I try to bring fresh blood to an investigation that is often as forlorn as the victim. I try to be… that fresh blood. I try to be a… transfusion."
"And you see that in me?" I asked.
"It seems that the work is most infectious for those of us in Locard who actually get to meet the families. If you do enough of this you'll see the variety of their responses. Some of them-I'm talking about the loved ones-are. almost numb to our arrival. The resumption of the investigation doesn't cut deeply for them at all; it's almost as though they're anesthetized to us.
But that's rare. More often we watch the parents or the wives or the children come alive with hope… or grief… or even rage. Sometimes in the end, we see gratitude. Even though we're always investigating something that has to do with death, the process somehow is incredibly invigorating for me. Others too."
She smiled warmly at me.
"Yes, I'm seeing some of that in you," she said.
"You're fresh blood, too."
Russ and Flynn agreed to stay for dinner, so they were still at our house when Phil Barrett called that evening. I excused myself from the table when the phone rang and took the call in the bedroom.