Critical Conditions, page 20
I was also going to tell Sam what Diane had told me, that the motor home was apparently not a pedestrian Winnebago. But Sunny returned before Lucy or I could elaborate. Sam’s voice once again became sweetness and light as he asked her, “Did your mother know where to find the keys?”
Sunny held up a jumble of metal and plastic and nodded. “My father liked things organized. But it was my mother who did the organizing.”
Sam said, “To get back to visitors for a second, you have family close by? An aunt or an uncle or something? Do I have that right?”
Sunny raised her sandy eyebrows in a manner that everyone but Sam found comical. “Nice try, but dead end. Daddy loved his children but we didn’t get to use the cabin by ourselves. He didn’t even like Mom’s sister or her husband. There is no way that the Porters would have been granted a stay at this ranch. Sorry.”
“Your father and his sister-in-law didn’t get along?”
“You could say that. Abby, my aunt, drinks. It’s a problem. Daddy found her weak. Her husband, my Uncle Andrew, loved to tease Daddy. My father didn’t have much of a sense of humor, so Andrew’s act never went over well. Anyway, my aunt and uncle are in the middle of a divorce. It’s messy, a custody thing, you know?”
Craig Larsen stepped forward, his boot heels causing loud smacks on the wood floor. “Sunny, you said something about your father hunting a little while ago, didn’t you? Did your father keep guns up here?”
“I suppose he did. He has some he used for hunting. He didn’t keep any rifles down in Boulder. So he must have kept them here or in Aspen.”
Sam turned to me and mouthed, “Aspen?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
Nonchalantly, Craig asked, “Where would you think they would be? The playroom?”
Sunny giggled and said, “Game room. Game room. I suppose that’s where he would keep them. It’s down this way if you’d like to look.”
We followed her through the kitchen to a room similar in size to the living room. It was filled with Dead Ed’s toys and games. A corner bar had stools for six serious drinkers. I was looking around for an ostentatious gun rack, while Sam, Lucy, and Craig Larsen spotted the locked gun cabinet immediately.
Deputy Larsen tried keys off the ring that Sunny had produced, hoping to find one that fit the hefty lock on the cabinet.
Offhandedly, Sam asked, “Sunny, your folks own a place in Aspen, too? Like this one?”
“No, it’s a condominium, in town. My mom likes Aspen, the shops and things. It’s not country like this, though, and it’s much smaller.”
“Anyone been up there since your father died?”
“Not that I know of. There’s a management company there that looks after things. I’m sure we could have someone check it out with a phone call.”
Larsen finally found a key that opened the cabinet door. He rooted around inside before facing Sunny. He said, “The cabinet is empty. There’s room for half a dozen rifles or shotguns in here, and drawers for three handguns at least.” He stepped back so we could see the empty case. “See, no weapons.”
Sam asked, “Any ammunition?”
Larsen shook his head. “Sunny, you have any way of knowing what weapons should be in this cabinet?”
She shook her head. “Mom would know. But I’d rather not upset her.”
Lucy said, “Well, it appears we may have a crime now. I don’t especially like it when weapons are missing. How about we all start being a little more careful with what we touch.”
Larsen used the telephone to request some backup and some forensic help. When he was done, we took two cars, mine and the deputy’s, down the hill to the barn to check on the RV. On the way, I asked Sam what he thought was going on.
“It looks like Sunny might be right. Someone may indeed have been staying in the house without permission. It’s not a typical B and E. They don’t appear to have taken anything except the weapons, assuming the weapons were actually there in the first place. They didn’t do any damage. At this point, I don’t see that it’s much more than a security concern. I imagine the locals can handle it just fine.”
If I allowed myself the luxury of believing him, his opinion would be good news. Indulging myself, I smiled as I was driving. I had a fleeting image of lowering my head to my pillow in Boulder as the bedside clock signaled midnight.
But I didn’t believe what Sam was telling me. He was being uncharacteristically optimistic.
“Would you be saying the same thing, Sam, if you weren’t sure of Merritt’s whereabouts for the last few days?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if our suspicions are right and her friend Madison is hooked up in this thing with Merritt somehow? What if it was Madison and her boyfriend, the frat kid, who have been camping out in Dead Ed’s cabin?”
He waved me off as though he’d already run the idea through the mill and rejected it. “The place is too neat for a couple of teenagers on the run. That’s what I think. If it were a couple of teenagers camping out, they would have trashed the place. You know kids.”
“Maybe that’s the point. Maybe they tried to make it look like they weren’t there.”
“Couple of kids, Alan. They’d be sloppy.”
“They were sloppy. Sunny picked it up in a second.”
“Still, too neat for kids.”
“Don’t underestimate them, Sam. Merritt’s a kid, too. So far, it hasn’t proved to be much of a defense for her.”
With that, we arrived at the barn.
I admit that I’d barely paid any attention to the structure on the original drive up the hill. After all, the Not So Lazy Seven was a ranch, and the building was designed to look like a barn. But examining it more closely the second time, it was apparent that the barn had been built not to service the ranch or to shelter animals but, instead, for the primary or exclusive purpose of garaging the motor home that Edward Robilio had named Haldeman.
The entry doors to the barn were huge, at least fifteen feet tall, and the double doors to the ersatz hayloft were, on closer examination, an obvious facade. On one side of the building a lower section was attached to the main structure under a long shed roof.
Sunny stood next to a steel door on the shed side and said, “This is where you go in.” She waited. “Craig, I think you still have the keys.”
The cops were hesitating. Sam whispered something to Craig Larsen and Craig nodded twice while he whispered a reply. Lucy walked around to the side of the structure and peered through a dusty window. Sam said, “Alan, why don’t you take Sunny back to your car for a few minutes while we look around. We would like to be certain that none of those missing guns ended up down here.”
I was opening my mouth to reply when I saw an automatic in Sam’s right hand. I had no idea where it had come from. Lucy was almost next to him, and she was pulling a weapon from her purse. Beside her, Craig Larsen was unsnapping his holster.
All in all, it seemed like a good time to be cooperative. I said, “Of course. We’ll be in the car.”
Twenty-three
Once the three cops drew their guns, every solitary second seemed to linger like a summer cold.
Beside me on the passenger seat of my car, Sunny Hasan was breathing deeply through barely parted lips, her expelled air sounding like a breeze whistling through a narrow canyon. Her wide eyes were fixed on the barn door, and she hadn’t said a word to me since she had perched herself primly on the seat. If I gave her a tub of popcorn and a Pepsi she would appear to be somebody’s date caught up in Bruce Willis’s latest extravaganza at the drive-in.
CR-ACK.
My instinct told me that the shot came from the barn, but I was so stunned by the fierceness of the explosion that I couldn’t be sure.
Sunny screamed and turned toward me. Roughly, I forced her head to her knees and threw myself on top of her. I wondered if the cops were wearing bulletproof vests. I thought of Lucy’s Donna Karan and I knew she wasn’t. I thought of little Simon Purdy, and I hoped his daddy was.
My heart jumped as Sam’s voice creased the night. “Down! Everybody down!”
I whispered, “Stay low,” and felt the deep purr of a whimper roll through Sunny’s body.
CR-ACK.
The second shot seemed even closer, so close it rocked the car.
Sunny said, “Oh my God, oh my God, I’m pregnant. Oh my baby, oh my God. My baby. Don’t hurt my baby.”
The Land Cruiser listed to starboard.
Between Sunny’s sobs, I thought I heard the crunch of gravel. I raised my head at the sound of a motor whirring in the barn and saw the tops of the big white doors start to swing outward.
The side door of the shed flew open and Sam ran out in a crouch, rolled once, and came up behind a propane tank with his automatic in his hand. Although the move had been graceful and athletic, the strategy was flawed. Sam, too, recognized immediately that using a tankful of compressed gas as cover in a gunfight might not be advisable, and ducked away. I couldn’t tell where he went.
Lucy covered Craig Larsen as he made a dash out the front doors of the barn and tried to camouflage himself behind a withered pine. Once they were in place, all the cops were quiet, not eager to draw attention to themselves. Their eyes scanned, trying to find a target, trying to find out if they were a target.
I knew they would all have been safer in the barn. They were risking themselves by spreading out. They were doing it for Sunny and me.
The roar of a high-revving engine fractured the silence, and in the confines of the river valley the whining of high RPMs and the melody of quick gear changes echoed as distinctively as heartbeats.
Of the three cops, Sam had the best cover. He was behind a boulder the size of a Volkswagen bug. He called out, “Anybody hurt?”
I said, “No, we’re fine. Scared.”
“See anything?”
“No.”
“Damn.”
Craig Larsen said something into his radio and waited a few long seconds for a garbled reply.
We all held our breath for the next gunshot. Sunny had lowered herself all the way into the footwell and had quieted her mantra to a hollow whisper: “Don’t hurt my baby, don’t hurt my baby, don’t hurt my baby.”
Except for the brightly lit spot where the cars were parked, the night was dark. I realized that Sunny and I were the only well-defined targets and felt, suddenly, as though I were wearing a bull’s-eye on my chest.
As though someone could read my thoughts, the floodlights died on the barn and I felt the darkness as though it were a blanket made of Kevlar. In a voice loud enough to be heard by her colleagues, Lucy said, “That was me. Just wanted to level the playing field.”
Sam said, “Good. Everybody stay down. Stay cool.”
In the distance, the whine of the motorcycle engine cleared the river valley, and the sound evaporated like mist in the sun.
I said, “He shot out my tire. There were two shots. Maybe he did Craig’s, too.”
Larsen broke his silence. “Too risky to check right now. This could be an ambush. Let’s wait for backup. Everybody be patient, keep your eyes open. Backup’s on the way. It won’t be long.”
Long, I decided, is relative.
Crouched over a frantic, pregnant stranger in the cross-fire of a potential shootout, the twelve minutes we waited for the Summit County sheriff to begin to arrive en masse seemed like an incredibly protracted time.
The reinforcements approached gingerly. They parked their vehicles a distance from the barn and scoured the surrounding woods and pastures carefully as they approached the two vehicles that were parked in the clearing in front of the barn.
It took a good twenty-five more minutes before someone yelled, “All clear.”
I sat upright and helped Sunny back onto her seat. She was holding both hands to her womb.
“You all right, Sunny? Is the baby okay?”
She was looking straight out the windshield, nodding rapidly, like a woodpecker attacking an ash.
I said, “Good. It’s over now. You’re both going to be okay.”
She faced me and narrowed her eyes, still nodding. Finally, she said, “Where’s Haldeman?”
I stared into the dark tunnel of the barn. Just then, Lucy flashed the lights back on and revealed a huge empty cavern where the motor coach was supposed to be.
Stupidly, I said, “I don’t know.”
Sam was with the local cops for a good half-hour before he found me struggling to get my damaged tire back in place under the car. He said, “You want some help with that? We spooked them coming here. Damn perps got away on the motorcycle.”
It wasn’t a question but I said, “That’s the way I worked it out, too. Came down the hill without power, rolled away without power. Started the bike down near the gate. What do you mean, you spooked them? Hand me that thing, there.”
“What thing? This thing?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s called a lug wrench,” Sam said. “They were here, in the barn, when we came down. Think they went out a back door as we came in the front.”
“How do you know?”
“Heat was on. A light was on in a tool room in back. Two cold drinks were open. One beer, one Diet Pepsi. They weren’t careful, we’ll get latents, lots of them. What are you guessing, they took off to the north?”
“That’s the way it sounded to me. The engine noise disappeared in that direction. Though I would think that there would be more options to the south, toward I-70. That’s the way I would have run.”
Sam shook his head. “Backup would have been coming from the south. That’s where the population is. He’d risk running right into them. Anyway, I don’t think he’s running. He’s just returning to ground.”
“What do you mean?”
“They have the RV. They have it parked somewhere to the north. That’s their safe house.” He paused. “Bet you that the vehicles up at the cabin have flat tires, too. They didn’t want to be followed.”
“If they already have the RV, why would they risk coming back here?”
“They’re having generator problems. They were poring through Dead Ed’s service manuals and magazines, trying to figure it out. The books are open on the workbench.”
“If they’re worried about the generator, it means the thing isn’t hooked up to power any place, right? That means they’re not at a campground.”
Sam smiled at me as though I were an imbecile. “To say something that stupid, you must be really tired. A campground? Why didn’t I think of that? Maybe I’ll call the local KOA to see if the kids checked in. How about that? And while I do, you go home. You obviously need some sleep. I’ll catch a ride with Lucy.”
Although I didn’t think the campground conclusion was that stupid, I didn’t have to think twice about the offer. “Great idea. Sam, Sunny’s pregnant. She’s real worried about the baby.”
He nodded. “Listen, you did good with her. You weren’t in a pretty situation there, with the lights on and all, and you didn’t panic.”
It was almost midnight as I was climbing the steep incline of I-70 toward the Eisenhower Tunnel. I figured I would be in bed before one-thirty. And I figured I would wake up to find a message from Sam that it was Madison and her boyfriend, Brad, who were on the run in Dead Ed’s luxury motor coach.
I decided that the time had come to put some more pressure on Merritt to tell me exactly why.
Twenty-four
My office voice mail had plenty of messages when I woke up, but none of them was from Sam.
Lauren had returned my calls and suggested I try to reach her at the hospital. She left a number. I could hear frustration in her voice on the tape.
Adrienne had called about a “personal thing.” Was I free anytime soon?
Cozier Maitlin sounded quite pleased that he had cajoled the DA’s office into offering to give him a tour of Dead Ed’s home. He wanted me there, too. At eleven-thirty. He warned me not to be late.
Miggy Monroe had left a message that she still hadn’t heard from her daughter. Hope had deserted her; her tone was as flat as the Colorado prairie.
And John Trent wanted to see me. He’d be in Boulder this morning, back at The Children’s Hospital this afternoon. Would either of those work?
I wanted to go back to bed.
Lauren’s mom was recovering well from her heart attack. That was the good news. The bad news was that her doctors had just discovered a lump in her breast.
“Oh, God. I’m sorry, sweets. She doesn’t need this. How is everybody taking it?”
“Teresa’s here, she’s keeping everyone’s spirits up.” Teresa, Lauren’s younger sister, was a stand-up comic. “Teresa’s absolutely sure it’s nothing. You know my mom’s kind of flat-chested? Teresa said the lump would have to be benign, that the alternative is too ironic. She says that my mother having breast cancer would be like Dan Quayle having brain cancer.”
I laughed. “When will they know?”
“Biopsy is today around three.”
“Call me, okay?”
“Yeah. Miss you. Can you come out? I think I’ll be here for a while. Dad’s helpless.”
“I’m going to try. This case-the adolescent I told you about?-is still acute. When I’m sure this kid’s safe, I’ll be out. Are you feeling all right?”
“Same.”
“Is that okay?”
“No, but I can live with it.”
I was going to have to guess what she meant.
Although there were a lot of things about the case I was working on that I couldn’t reveal to Lauren, I had told her that Chaney was Sam’s niece. I don’t think she was surprised when I changed the conversation and said, “Sweets, I want to offer Sam some money. For his niece’s medical fund.”
“How much?”
“The remodeling money.”
“How much is that?”
“Almost thirty-one thousand.”
She didn’t hesitate. “Go ahead, I think it’s a great idea. But Sam won’t take it.”
