I wasn't in the mood. "Sam, I'm not in the mood."
"Okay, I'll just tell you. I'm sitting on the stairs that go up to the second floor in Naomi Bigg's house. We're executing a search warrant."
"Oh," I said. I wasn't surprised about anything but that it had taken so long for the search to begin. I assumed the delay was a paperwork/convince-the-judge kind of problem. I doubted that any evidence of the explosives would be discovered at the Bigg home. Whatever law enforcement personnel ended up searching the Ramp ranch between Agate and Limon were the ones who would find the explosive residue.
"Finding anything?" My feelings about Sam's errand were more than a little confused. Maybe it was the minor concussion. But I wasn't exactly sure whether I wanted Sam to answer my question "Yes" or to answer it "No."
He made a nasal sound that I couldn't interpret. "Who knows? We just got here and we're still looking. I tell you, it's going to take all night to go over this place. Rich people's houses have lots of rooms and they own lots of shit. You ever notice that? This house has a little room that seems to be set aside just for wrapping presents. Like a gift-wrap room. Who has a gift-wrap room? Well, the Biggs do. I look at some of the stuff in this place and I wonder how somebody could be standing in a store somewhere and ever convince themselves that they actually needed one of those. You know the kind of stuff that I mean?"
I did, and I didn't. "You wanted something, Sam?"
"You're okay, right? Just the bump on your head and the cut on your butt?"
"Upper leg, Sam. That, and a dead patient whose daughter is still in serious condition in the hospital. And Lucy." I let the words hang.
He said, "Every cop in the state is looking for Ramp. I'm hoping there's something here that helps us find him. We find him, I think we find her. Anyway, I was telling you what I discovered here. Right at the top of the stairs, first door on the left, is the kid's room. You know, Paul? The one who died playing Little League? The one you thought was busy planning his own little Columbine?"
Regardless of the fact that I'd almost been killed by a bomb earlier that day, my friend Sam wasn't above a well-placed dig. I tried to deflect it. "Paul's room is still there?" I was thinking out loud; I knew that I was still struggling to understand the extent of Naomi's delusions.
Sam, of course, seized on the opportunity to take me literally. "Sure. That happens when kids die. Parents aren't ready to let go. They preserve stuff. Bedroom is often high on the list. This shouldn't be news to you, Alan. It's like your field, you know? Human behavior?"
"Yeah."
"Anyway, I thought I'd call you because I thought it was interesting what's plastered all over the kid's door. Outside of the door, facing the hallway. It's kind of goofy."
"What?"
"Little signs. Maybe fifty of 'em. Maybe more, who knows. I'm sure somebody will end up counting them. They're all lined up in neat rows and columns. The signs are all different designs-no two of 'em match-but they all say one of two things. Though some are in languages I don't even want to know. Want to guess?"
"No."
"About half of them say 'Do not disturb.' The other half say 'Be right back.' You being a shrink, I thought you'd get a kick out of that."
"Little 'Do not disturb' signs and 'Be right back' signs? All over his door?"
"Yeah, just like the ones you hang from the doorknob when you're staying at a Ramada. Though you probably don't stay at Ramada, do you? Those kinds of signs. The kid must have collected them."
"I don't know about that. I wonder if it was Paul or his mother who put them on the door. What does the room look like?"
"Like a kid's room. It does have a certain time-warp quality. Kid liked the old Dallas Cowboys. Lots of Troy Aikman and Emmett what's-his-face. Good stuff, expensive. Autographed jerseys. Signed pictures. Emmett Smith? Is that it? I think that's right, Smith. I should know that. He sure gave my Vikings enough grief over the years, didn't he?"
I didn't know. "But nothing unusual?"
"Not at first glance. Just the signs. I thought those were unusual, that's why I called."
Although I didn't believe what I was about to say, I said, "They could just be a preadolescent boy putting up a 'No trespassing' sign."
"Doesn't feel that way. I'll get a picture of the door to show you. This is something."
While I was considering the discovery, I said, "Is there someplace in the house where somebody could have made a bomb, Sam?"
"Not at first glance. There's no obvious workshop and we haven't identified any explosives. We'll swab for residue, but I'm betting that we'll come up with jack."
"Then what?"
"Everybody's looking for Ramp. That's where the money is. We're hoping to find an address or phone number here. Other than pointing us toward the Internet and to his grandparents' ranch, you don't know where to send us to find him, right? No recovered memories since this afternoon?"
The "recovered memories" comment was another dig.
"Has anyone talked to Marin, Sam? Is she awake? Maybe she knows something about Ramp."
"Scott Malloy's standing by over at the hospital to talk to her the moment she's able."
"How bad are her injuries?"
"To quote one of the docs, the wounds are uglier than they are serious. Her mom absorbed most of the blast. They think Marin will be fine-if her luck is bad she may lose use of an eye."
"Poor kid."
"Poor kid was mixed up with somebody who made bombs. For all we know right now, she was helping him."
CHAPTER 35
It took Lucy more than a thimbleful of patience, but she'd waited until she was in Agate before she made her next move. She'd allowed Alan to pull out ahead of her and watched him turn onto the interstate as he headed west toward Boulder. She turned into a gas station adjacent to I-70, filled the Volvo's tank, and bought a carton of chocolate milk and a tasteless sandwich filled with milky-white slices of something masquerading as turkey.
She didn't call Sam Purdy.
Instead, she made a phone call to a police department colleague who'd made no secret of the fact that he was eager to get into her pants, and asked him for help tracking down Jason Ramp Bass's current address in Denver. She didn't tell the man why she wanted the address. And he didn't ask.
As she killed the call she figured that she'd know exactly where to find Ramp before she was done with her sandwich.
She was wrong. The return call with Ramp's address didn't come for almost two and a half hours. Her contact had been yanked into a meeting before he'd been able to get back to her with the information. When he finally did phone, he dangled the address like a carrot at the end of a stick until she agreed to have a drink with him after work. She picked a day for the rendezvous that was almost a week away. It left her plenty of time to cancel.
Once she had the address, she thought once more about calling Sam Purdy with the day's news. If she called him, he'd make her back off, wouldn't even let her close to the case. That wasn't okay.
She reached the same decision she'd reached every other time she'd pondered the problem since Agate. She decided to find Ramp by herself.
Capitol Hill in Denver is just south of the Uptown neighborhood where Jason Ramp Bass once lived with his parents. Although it bears some resemblance to Uptown, Capitol Hill is more densely populated, is even more diverse, and suffers from fewer pockets of acute gentrification than does its northern neighbor.
The apartment building where Lucy thought Ramp lived was in no danger of going condo, and nobody in their right mind was ever going to mistake it for a loft. It was a postwar brick rectangle that looked as though it had been modeled after a shoebox. It was flanked on each side by gorgeous stone mansions.