She lifted her left arm and focused her attention on her fancy watch. "Oh my, the time. We have to stop already, don't we?"
I looked at the small clock on the étagère behind the sofa. We had only two minutes remaining in the session. "In a couple of minutes," I said. "You were talking about how the Harrises and the Klebolds should or shouldn't have known about what their kids were going to do."
Her eyes closed and her breathing became shallow. "It's a hard question to answer from a distance, isn't it? When the tragedy is so terrible, people are so quick to judge."
"Is that how it feels to you?" I asked.
"Can I come back for another session? Now that I've started, I think I'd like to continue talking about all this," she said.
"Of course. We'll find another time before you go." I was rushing my words, husbanding the few remaining seconds. I forced myself to slow down. "Do you have children, Naomi?"
"Work is… difficult. I'd need something late in the day. Or maybe I can get away over lunch."
"We still have a minute or so."
"I need to go."
I considered pointing out the resistance she was demonstrating, but it was too early in the process. Anyway, I knew I was being aggressive with my questions. I checked my book. "Thursday at five-thirty?"
"No, not on Thursday. There's a… Never mind. I'm sorry, anything else?"
"The only other time I can offer is twelve-thirty tomorrow."
"That's fine. I'll do a late lunch, sure. And yes, I have two children. A boy and a girl."
I couldn't help myself. I asked, "Are you struggling with some of the same questions?"
She was searching her purse for something, perhaps a pen. She said, "Same as… what?"
"As the Harrises and the Klebolds? As the parents of Eric and Dylan?"
Once more she focused on her watch. "You know, I think our time is up," she said, stealing my line. She stood and quickly walked toward the door, pausing only long enough to say, "See you tomorrow."
I didn't want her to leave yet. I needed my questions answered. What were her children planning? What did she know? "We have some paperwork to do before you go," I said to her back.
"Tomorrow, okay? We'll do it then. I promise I'll be on time."
CHAPTER 7
I didn't recall locking up my office after Naomi Bigg departed, nor did I remember climbing into my car.
It wasn't the first time in the past few months that the passage of time had escaped my conscious awareness. I feared it wouldn't be the last.
I knew it wouldn't be the last.
See, the previous autumn I'd killed a man.
I'd used a handgun, a silenced.22, and I'd shot him in the head from a distance of about thirty inches. The little slug had entered the man's cranium through his cheek, just below his left eye. The little round of lead had never exited his head.
My own eyes had been closed when I pulled the trigger.
I don't regret pulling the trigger. The man was intent on killing me, my wife, and my then-unborn baby. I don't regret killing him. That's not to say I didn't relive the moment constantly. But every time I replayed it, I once again closed my finger over the metal wand of the trigger, and every time I squeezed gently.
It never changed with the replaying. Every time, I killed him.
It was the right thing to do.
But righteousness failed to quiet the replays. The chaos of the moment still cascaded into my waking thoughts and continued to infiltrate my dreams.
Pieces only. Fragments.
Not the sound of the.22, though. With the suppressor on the barrel, the surprisingly heavy Ruger made just a heartbeat of a sound. Instead, what I still heard during my private nights was the roar of the man's gun as he tried to shoot me. That night the roar had exploded only four times.
But in my relentless dreams the events of the killing continued to explode all night long.
And his grip. The night that I killed the man, I'd felt his hand close around my ankle as though I were his safety line and he was falling off a cliff. When the dreams came, I found myself shaking my leg in my sleep to free myself from his grasp. I'd wake up and he'd be gone. But the next night, or the one after that, his fingers were back on my leg, locked on my skin like leeches.
And Emily, our big dog-I knew she was barking even though I couldn't hear her. She'd barked furiously at the man I killed that night, her jaws clapping open and closed, her eyes orange and fierce in the dim, dusky light. Now she visited in my dreams, too, sounding her clarion all over again. Warning, imploring. Fierce, silent.
The morning after the dreams, I would wake knowing in my heart that I'd done the right thing and knowing in my soul that I'd never be the same man again.
As I drove home after my first appointment with Naomi Bigg, I told myself that the intensity I was feeling after hearing her fears was due to the incessant echoes of that night the previous autumn.
The night that I shot a man with a silenced.22.
CHAPTER 8
Cozier Maitlin's black BMW was parked in front of our house. Viv's purple Hyundai wasn't.
Our Bouvier, Emily, greeted me at the door. Inside I found Lauren on the couch with Grace and Anvil sharing her lap. Cozy was sitting on what I liked to think of as my chair. In navy suit trousers, a white shirt that had no business looking as crisp as it did this late in the day, and a solid burgundy tie, Cozy offered a much less maniacal portrait than he had the day before when Sam and I had rousted him out of bed before dawn.
A smile to Grace earned me a smile in return. A kiss to my wife did the same. "So I take it you guys are a team?" I asked.
Lauren's grin told me she was happy with the decision she'd made. "Congratulations," I said. "What does Lucy think?"
"She's thrilled," Lauren said. "Or as happy as someone could be in her circumstances."
Cozy said, "I apologize for invading your home. The media doesn't know that Lauren is on board, yet, so for now we're safe up here. They have my house and office staked out, cameras and microphones everywhere. What do they do with all that equipment in between sieges? I was just asking Lauren-you guys control that little road out there?"
"Kind of. We share ownership of the lane with Adrienne."
Cozy said, "Oh."
He and our friend and neighbor, Adrienne, had been in a hot and heavy romance until Cozy made the mistake of introducing her to his ex-wife and Adrienne decided she preferred to navigate the romantic possibilities with Cozy's ex. So the mention of Adrienne's name was not uncomplicated for Cozy. She represented the second woman in a decade who had chosen to leave him for a chance at the fairer sex. Even to someone as pathologically noninsightful as Cozier Maitlin, that fact caused some considerable dis-ease.
He jerked his attention back to the question at hand. "But if you needed to, you could block off the lane? What I'm getting at, of course, is a way of keeping the press at a reasonable distance, should that become necessary."
"That's an oxymoron, Cozy. 'Press' and 'reasonable distance'-it doesn't compute. But the answer to your question is yes. We could block off the lane anytime we wanted. I'm sure Adrienne would happily go along. You know Adrienne; she loves mischief."
He said, "Hopefully it won't be necessary to involve her."
"What are you guys hearing about the case? What's the mood downtown?"
Lauren responded. "Lucy's been on the police force a long time and apparently she has some loyal friends. It looks like the chasm that already existed between the Boulder Police and the DA's office is in danger of growing into the Grand Canyon over this case."