I quickly grew bored and found myself using my time in Raymond Welle's home to familiarize myself with the key places in the drama that had occurred between Brian Sample and Gloria Welle in 1992. I imagined Gloria greeting Brian at the front door and I made a guess as to which telephone Gloria might have used to call her husband and warn him that one of his patients had invaded their home.
I guessed she would have used the kitchen phone.
I examined the small window that Brian had busted out with the butt of his gun so that he could shoot at the assembled sheriff's vehicles. The window was an eighteen-inch square mounted above pecan cabinets in the butlers pantry. In order to reach it to shoot out the window Brian would have had to kneel on the countertop. I considered the selection of that particular window an odd choice in a house that had enough glass to construct a commercial greenhouse. I also thought that I recalled reading news reports that Brian had broken out the laundry-room window. I walked from the butler's pantry to the adjacent laundry room to check it out. Sure enough, Brian would have had a much easier shot from there. But the window in the laundry room was a narrow double-hung. It was not the one that Brian had chosen to bust out.
I couldn't resist a ghoulish peek into the guest-room closet where Gloria had been murdered, so I followed Flynn and Russ into that room with interest. The guest suite was decorated in the ruggedly stylish manner that Ralph Lauren and Robert Redford were eager for the world to accept as the authentic portrayal of American western design. Tasteful?
I wasn't sure, but probably. Expensive?
Without a doubt.
Flynn photographed and measured the room, and I waited impatiently until she finally got around to opening the closet door to take photographs in there. I peered over her shoulder into a closet that was quite a bit larger than the one that Kimber was using downstairs in the guest room of our house in Boulder. The closet at the Silky Road was a U-shaped walk-in with shelves outfitted like a fine haberdashers display cases. The open center area of the closet was only about three feet square-just enough room for the chair that Brian carried in for Gloria to sit on. The day of the Locard search there was no wine stored on the closet shelves. I checked. Nor was there evidence of Gloria Welle's blood or Robert Mondavi's red wine on the floor. I checked for those, too.
Besides the master and guest suites, the house had two other bedrooms. One, apparently, was set aside for Phil Barrett's occasional stays at the ranch. Although the bed in that room was made-I assumed by Sylvie-it was clear that Phil was a slob. Although he'd only arrived at the ranch that morning, his suitcase spilled clothes as though an inconsiderate thief had ransacked it after breakfast.
The second of the spare bedrooms had never been decorated. The windows lacked coverings and the floor space was used for file storage. I saw one box marked "Demo Tapes." At least a dozen boxes held copies of Toward Healing America:
America's Therapist's Prescription/or a Better Future.
The architectural layout convinced me that when Gloria Welle was designing this house she was planning for a family with at least two children. The knowledge saddened me.
The master bedroom was at the eastern end of the house at the end of a long hallway that was lit with a clerestory. By the time Brian Sample had walked this hall, I thought, Gloria Welle was already dead or dying in the closet in the guest suite. The master bedroom at the end of the hall was vast, with a sitting area as large as most people's living rooms and a four-poster bed the size of an uninhabited island. An alcove near the bathroom contained a compact desk topped with a laptop computer. The far wall, the one that would catch the morning sun after it had cleared the Continental Divide and then lifted itself over the tops of the fir and aspen groves, was nothing but a series of wide glass doors. I counted six of them.
The deck outside the bedroom windows stepped down twice from the house until it ended above two final stairs that led down to a narrow lawn that abutted the forest. A redwood railing, alternately carved and straight in two-foot sections, lined the north and south sides of the deck.
By all reports I'd read and seen, Brian Sample had leapt that rail on the way to his death.
I wondered why he hadn't just taken the stairs.
Sylvie showed up around two o'clock with a couple of six-packs of soft drinks and a big bag of deli sandwiches from the general store up the hill in Clark.
She was dressed in tennis clothes. Flynn and Russ immediately cornered her to question her about the fire in the bunkhouse. I was ready for a break, so I carried a pretty good ham sandwich on sourdough outside to my car and used the cell phone to call Sam Purdy in Boulder. I wanted to talk about Gloria Welle's murder, and he was the only one I could think of who I thought would share my interest in the subject. I found him at his desk at the police department.
I told him why I was at the Silky Road Ranch. He listened patiently to my explanation before he said, "Raymond Welle's no fool, Alan. If he was guilty of something he certainly wouldn't give a world-class forensic investigator the run of his place. Your search is going to be a dead end. Nice try, though."
"Flynn already seems confident that she has reason to hope for a match."
"We'll see. If you're right, I'll buy you a beer. Hell, if you're wrong I'll buy you a beer. But don't get your hopes up."
"Sam, the reason I called isn't because of the two dead girls. While the Locard forensic people have been doing their things here, I've spent my time walking through the house trying to re-create exactly what happened the day that Gloria Welle was murdered. You remember that you thought that the whole story was goofy, at least the way the police presented it?"
"Yeah, I remember I thought that. It was goofy. Still is goofy."
"Well, I have two more goofy things for you." I reminded him about the window Brian had busted out to shoot at the sheriff's vehicles and explained what an odd choice of windows it had been. That earned me a bored "hmm" from Sam. I said, "Well? What do you think?"
"I think it's been a lot of years since she died, maybe the landscaping outside the windows has changed. Maybe there was a big bush in front of that laundry-room window back then. Maybe Welle changed the cabinetry in that other room-what did you call it, a butler's pantry? Who knows?"
It was possible. I'd go back and look at the news footage again to see if there was a bush in front of the laundry room back in 1992. "What about this, then?
You remember the television news reports said that when Brian was trying to escape from the master bedroom he leaped over the deck railing and started running toward the woods? That's when he shot at the cops the second time.
Remember that?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I was just out there, on that deck. The center section of the deck-the part closest to those woods-doesn't even have a railing. It steps right down onto the lawn. I'm wondering why Brian Sample didn't just take those two stairs down to the grass and head straight for the woods. Why did he jump the railing, run toward the cops, and fire at them first?"
Sam was silent for a moment before he responded.
"That's a decent question. I'm thinking… that… who knows? Maybe… maybe he wanted the cops to kill him. It happens sometimes. We call it suicide by cop. There's this story-happened recently-of one guy who led this cop on a high-speed chase, and after he was pulled over he got out of his car holding a handgun. He slowly raised it up and pointed it right at the cop. Wouldn't drop it. The cop Cook cover and warned him. Guy still wouldn't drop it, so the cop fired till his pistol was empty. The guy died. Turns out the handgun the guy was carrying was a toy and there was a suicide note on the front seat of his car apologizing to the cop. Guy said he was too much of a coward to kill himself."