An offer?
She went on. “Even a lowball offer would be…”
Acceptable? Delectable?
I asked, “Ms. Danna, who exactly is Mr. Chandler?”
“What? The owner of the house I showed you on Twelfth. The one with the water features and that yummy media center downstairs? I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”
“Doyle?”
“Yes, Doyle Chandler.”
“He’s dead?”
She was growing impatient with me. “Mm-hmmm,” was all she said in reply to my last question. Then she waited while I caught up.
“What detective phoned you?” I asked. I was thinking Sam.
“I don’t recall exactly. Mr. Chandler’s body was found up near Allenspark. Maybe it was an Allenspark detective.”
Allenspark is a small town in the mountains about thirty minutes from Boulder by car, not far from the eastern boundaries of Rocky Mountain National Park. When not swollen with summer tourists, Allenspark’s population typically hovered-guessing-somewhere around two hundred people. The village was as likely to have its own homicide detective as it was to have its own traffic helicopter. Any investigator involved in a homicide inquiry in Allenspark would be part of the County Sheriff’s department, on loan from a bigger city, like Boulder, or someone assigned from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
Rather than argue the point, I said, “I’ll talk it over with my wife and get back to you. The house is still a little small for us.”
“One word: cantilever. My mobile number is on the card I gave you. Call any time. When news gets out about this… situation, there will be other offers, certainly by close of business tomorrow. You can count on it. There have been four showings of that property this week alone and I don’t have to tell you how slow the beginning of January usually is. And that screen in the basement? Remember? Of course you do. I checked. It’s a Stewart Filmscreen. I told you, the best. Think hard-a house like that, a location like that, circumstances like…”
These.
“I understand,” I said. But, of course, I didn’t.
I called Lauren. She didn’t return my call until midafternoon during a break in her trial. She’d already heard through the law enforcement grapevine about the discovery of the body of an unidentified male in a shallow grave not far from a trail that meandered off Highway 7 in northern Boulder County. She said she thought the location was east of Allenspark, actually closer to Lyons and Hygiene. I asked her to get me whatever information she could and to call me right back.
“Why are you interested in this?” she asked, of course. The tone of her question made it clear she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear my reply.
“It might be related to Diane,” I said.
“Two minutes,” she said.
It took her four. “We don’t have much yet. Pending a post, it appears to be a homicide. Animals had gotten to the body. ID found at the scene indicates it may be a man named-”
“Doyle Chandler.”
“How did you know? Is he one of your patients?”
I could have said, probably should have said, “You know I can’t answer that.” Instead, I said, “No.” Were the answer yes I would have answered with stony silence. Lauren and I both knew that the silent yes would have been just as declarative as the spoken no had been.
“One of Diane’s patients?”
Well, that was a thought. What if Diane had treated Doyle? I didn’t think so. I said, “No.”
“But you know him?” she asked.
“Personally, I don’t. Doyle Chandler owned the house that’s next door to Mallory Miller’s house on the Hill. When she disappeared he’d already moved away and put the place on the market.”
“I don’t think the police mentioned that this afternoon. Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Is this related to Mallory’s disappearance?”
“I don’t know. You have to wonder.”
“Diane’s disappearance?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“But you have reasons to be suspicious?”
“Yes.”
“Then this might be important to you: Sam’s up there. He asked the sheriff for permission.”
“He’s up where they found the body?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll call him.”
“Have you heard from Raoul?” Lauren asked.
“No. I’m still worried.”
“Keep me informed, okay?”
After we hung up, I sent Sam a text message on his pager: “I know about D. Call me. A.”
While I was waiting for Sam to get back to me, I took a call from Scott Truscott at the coroner’s office. “Try something on for me?” he said.
“Sure.”
“We know that Ms. Grant hit her head when she tripped that morning at Rallysport, right? On the tile floor in the locker room? That’s confirmed?”
Hannah Grant, okay. I fought to change gears. “Yes,” I said. “The witnesses apparently agree on that much.”
“She tells the women in the locker room she’s fine, and she drives straight to her office.”
“We think.”
“Okay, we think. On the way, or shortly after she gets there, though, she begins to feel that something’s not quite right-maybe she has a headache, maybe she’s a little confused, lightheaded-but she doesn’t put two and two together, doesn’t consider that she’s just bumped her head and that she might have a concussion, or worse. Instead she decides that after all the exercise she’d done that her sugar’s too low. She’s in her car by then, she doesn’t have any orange juice, so she sucks on a couple of LifeSavers. With me?”
“So far.”
“When she gets to her office she’s still not herself, not feeling right. The candy didn’t help-she’s not feeling better yet. How do we know? Easy: She puts her purse in the middle of the floor. All her friends say she’s a compulsive person, OCD, truly anal, so the purse? On the floor? That’s not like her. Totally out of character. At this point I think she’s feeling even worse, not better. Maybe much worse.”
“Why much worse, Scott?”
“Post showed two subdural hematomas, remember? One of those two certainly came from a blunt surface-the tile floor-at the health club, during that initial fall.”
“Yes.”
“So we know she has a subdural from that earlier trauma. My theory is she actually already has both subdurals-one from the impact with the floor, and one from something with a sharper edge, maybe the locker room bench-and she’s actively bleeding into one or both of those hematomas. Ms. Grant was on aspirin therapy-you might not know that. Family history of heart disease.”
“I didn’t.”
“Doesn’t matter. Pressure’s slowly increasing on her brain, and she’s gradually getting more symptomatic. Half an hour passes, then an hour, and she’s more and more confused, lethargic, maybe vertiginous. Anxious, probably. Not too surprisingly, her thinking’s impaired. All she can come up with is that her diabetes is way out of whack, she has a problem with her sugar. The LifeSavers were there, Alan; in her pocket, like you said. I confirmed that with the crime-scene photos. But if she ate them, they didn’t help, so she goes in the other direction, decides maybe she needs insulin.
“But her confusion is severe; she’s disoriented-she can’t even get her routine quite right. Instead of retrieving her kit from the kitchen to check her sugar, she tucks her shirt up under her bra the way she always does just prior to her injection.”