Sam and Simon had tickets, or some airline’s digital equivalent, to fly to John Wayne International Airport to spend the New Year’s holiday with Carmen and her daughter, Jessie. Jessie, a student at UC Santa Cruz, had promised Simon a trip to Disneyland during the visit.
In Sam’s world, gray skies or blue skies, all was cool.
I met Sam at the new ice rink off the Boulder Turnpike in Superior, where Simon’s peewee team was playing on the Wednesday night that fell within our streak of end-of-the-year bleak weather. Simon-who, unlike his father, played offense-was doing a sleep-over at a teammate’s house after the game and Sam and I were going to go someplace for a beer. It had been a while since we’d had time to get together socially.
Perhaps the flyers that were posted all over the ice rink doors should have been a caution for me about how the evening might progress, but, like most people in Boulder County, I was already growing somewhat immune to them. Two types predominated. Each version was on a standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper. One was on brilliant yellow stock, screamed “MISSING!” and had a black-and-white photograph of Mallory-she was airborne, just launched from a trampoline-above a brief physical description. The other flyer was on white copy paper and was adorned with a color photograph that had been taken by a school photographer who had already taken too many pictures that particular day. Large block letters asked, “HAVE YOU SEEN HER?”
No, was the short answer.
I hadn’t seen her. But in the few days since Mallory’s disappearance I’d seen, literally, thousands of the flyers. Volunteers had papered almost every vertical surface Boulder had to offer, and some horizontal ones as well, with a yellow flyer or a white one, or more often, with multiple copies of each.
Towers of Mallory.
White and yellow checkerboards of Mallory.
Although I was growing inured to the posters themselves, the messages weren’t lost on me. MISSING! and HAVE YOU SEEN HER? ran through my mind like an ever-repeating crawl at the bottom of some cosmic TV, the messages as insistent as the lyrics of an annoying jingle.
The two photographs of Mallory-one smiling and content, the other mischievous and teasing-had a much more subtle effect on me than did the banner headlines. The photos of the young girl lingered in my preconscious and provided fodder for unsettling dreams of the things that fathers dread. More than once I woke with a startling sense of vulnerability, a visceral awareness that I had a daughter and that it could have been she.
Sam had lost a lot of weight-I was guessing thirty-odd pounds-in the last year, but none of it in his face. He still had the face of a big, round guy. Much of the motivation for the weight loss had been medical. The past few years had confronted my friend with a minor heart attack, kidney stones, and gallstones. A new, healthy diet was one of his ways of fighting back.
He’d sworn off doughnuts and bacon and brats, and hadn’t had a burger and fries in most of a year. He was learning to cook and he’d already warned me that he was going to count on me to be his running buddy while he trained to run his first 10K, the late-spring Bolder Boulder.
Health aside, most of the motivation for his self-improvement program, though he’d never admit it to me, was his recent separation and divorce, and that new girlfriend in California. Sam was a mature guy, a serious cop, and a devoted father. Still, he wanted to be buff so he could get the girls.
Prior to that night, I’d never observed Sam watching his son play in a competitive game in any sport, and anticipated that it wasn’t going to be an inspiring sight, especially given the fact that the sport was hockey. Sam had a little bully in him-ask me, all effective cops do, they have to. In addition, Sam had the natural-born arrogance of Minnesotans who believe that they know more about hockey than any native-read: citizen of the United States of America-referee who might tie on skates and pull on a striped blouse in some Colorado barn. Sam granted Canadians special hockey dispensation.
I feared that it was a combustible combination of traits, and that I was about to discover that Sam was going to be one of those parents who give youth sports a rotten name. If, or when, he got too embarrassing to be with, I was more than prepared to move to a seat in the arena as far from him as possible.
Sam, as he often did, proved me wrong. Every word he screamed at the game was a word of encouragement. He knew the names of every one of Simon’s teammates and lavished praise on the kids for their shots and their passing, but especially for their positioning and their defense. He even screamed out some kind words for the opposing players.
The two times he yelled out to the referees it was with a hearty, “Hey, good call, guy. Let’s keep ’em safe out there.”
Between periods I asked, “Case driving you nuts?”
“Nah,” he said. But he knew what case I was talking about. “If cases like that drove me nuts, I’d have been hanging out in your office a long time ago.” That thought caused him to chuckle to himself; Sam’s opinion of psychotherapy wasn’t particularly benevolent. Then he lowered his voice and tilted his big head toward me. “There’re still some guys who think somebody took her, a few. But it didn’t come down that way. She was a kid with issues, Alan. The girl ran, plain and simple. Because of all the media and, you know-that other girl, back when, and what happened to her-the bosses have to go overboard on this, look for intruders under rugs, dot all the t’s and cross all the i’s, but everything or damn near everything says that she ran.
“Hey, a fourteen-year-old girl gone from home? It’s a sad thing. Worse around Christmastime. But it happens. This time it happened at the wrong time in the wrong town in the wrong neighborhood under the wrong circumstances, so now the whole world is watching one family’s tragedy unfold. But that’s all it is: one family’s tragedy. I’m afraid that the real tragedy is what happened to her after she ran; that’s what keeps me awake at night. Is she in a ditch somewhere? Discarded by the side of some highway? In some asshole pimp’s hands? When I hear what happened to her I think it’s going to break my heart. My advice? Leave it alone.”
He was probably right. But Diane’s story about Hannah Grant’s intake interview with Mallory was still haunting me. I wasn’t able to leave it alone.
“What about the guy that the Crandalls saw, the neighbors? The one they thought was loitering on the block before the snow started?”
Sam grimaced. “If those people were really so concerned, why didn’t they call us when they saw him? He was probably just some guy out for a stroll, trying to walk off his Christmas dinner. Maybe his kids were out caroling and he was keeping an eye on them. You know what it’s like after something like this. People think they’ve seen all kinds of things.”
“What about the blood?” I asked.
Sam looked at me sideways, as though that question had surprised him. “Simon cut his heel on the back door last summer, on the screen. My God, did it bleed. He hopped all over the house looking for me to get him a bandage and by the time he found me, there was blood everywhere. I still don’t think I got it all cleaned up. I’m not the world’s best housekeeper, and I promise you that I wouldn’t want the crime-scene guys checking my house for splatter. The fact that there’s some blood in the Millers’ house doesn’t mean any felonies came down. Hey, I bet if I walked in with some Luminol I could get your house to light up, too.”
“Well, then what about the snow thing?”
17
The snow thing.
Christmas had been on the previous Saturday. The day had been clear and cold with a high temperature in the mid-twenties. An upslope developed and snow started falling in earnest in Boulder some time around seven o’clock in the evening. At first, it had been a steady snow; three quick inches fell before the wind shifted directions around 9:30 and the snow paused for an hour. When the upslope resumed so did the snow, which fell insistently until early morning.