C Box - Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

Melissa whispered into my ear, “What bothers me is it’s as if I didn’t know Brian at all. Who are all of these people? The only one he’d ever mentioned was Barry. It seems like Brian had a secret life.”

“We were his secret life,” I said. “This room was his real life.”

The mayor finally stepped aside. The band, somewhat inexplicably, played a cover version of REM’s “Losing My Religion.”

“Goodness,” Melissa said. “Don’t they know they’re in a church? ”

Although Cody said he wouldn’t be there, I kept an eye out for him nevertheless. He’d left me with a strand of hope, and that strand was all I had.

When the band was through, a hip pastor with long hair and a stylish half beard and open shirt told us that we weren’t there to mourn a death but to celebrate the life of an “awesome” human being. He began telling anecdotes about Brian-all from Denver, where he became public, none from Montana-that apparently had been gathered up by Barry and Barry and Brian’s friends. Some were quite funny, but they were striking to Melissa and me because they were stories we’d never heard before about a friend we knew in a totally different context, and Melissa was soon both laughing and crying hard, which in turn made Angelina cry.

“I’ll take her outside,” I said, and Melissa willingly let me. Sanders followed.

The mountains were still shrouded in snow clouds. The ski resorts, from what I’d heard on the radio, were getting hammered. Marketing and PR spokesmen tried to outdo each other on the amount of “champagne powder” that had accumulated over the night. I knew most of the spokespeople personally from my work in tourism and knew they really weren’t as breathless about falling snow as they sounded on the radio.

Angelina preferred being outside to inside, as she usually did. She pushed away from me as soon as we were outside, wanting to get down. I held her as she tried to push away. I couldn’t let her down because Melissa had dressed her in a velvet dress, pink tights, and a heavy coat. As I struggled with her I found myself directly in front of Jim Doogan, who leaned against the trunk of a leafless tree and smoked a cigarette.

Doogan leveled his gaze at Sanders, who was a few steps behind me. He didn’t say who he was but apparently he didn’t need to.

“Give us a few minutes, will you?”

Sanders turned and walked back to the church and sprawled out on a bench.

“Is the mayor done in there?” Doogan asked.

“I think so.”

“Was he good?”

I shrugged. “Good enough. He didn’t say any bad things about Brian.”

He laughed. “That Eastman guy caused us a lot of headaches. He used to drive the mayor out of his mind because he knew how to work the system and work the mayor. I always thought it was sort of personal.”

“Brian was tough,” I said.

“He was. And there’s something I want to say to you. This is between us, okay?” Doogan said.

“Sure. I always confide with the guy who fires me. Not a problem.”

Doogan snorted a small laugh. “You know I’m no more than the messenger boy, right? The mayor and the judge are close. The judge’s wife is a major contributor, so the mayor has some obligations, if you catch my drift.”

“I do.” I fumbled with Angelina, held her tight to me. “But this is bigger than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember when we talked about Malcolm Harris?”

Doogan nodded.

“Do you know who his connection was here in Colorado?”

He shook his head.

“Aubrey Coates, the Monster of Desolation Canyon.”

Doogan was lifting the cigarette to his mouth, but he froze.

I said, “Like I told you the other day, the mayor may have a bigger problem on his hands than he realized. If it turns out a major international pedophilia ring is headquartered in this city right under his nose, that won’t help out his political ambitions, plus his pal the judge may be blamed for letting Coates walk. How will that one play on 9 News?”

Doogan said, “No, no. That wasn’t the judge. That was lousy police work. No way that could be linked back to the mayor in any way. You’re just throwing crap out there.”

I was just throwing crap out there, but some of it stuck. I could tell his head was spinning a little. He was thinking how to mitigate the situation.

Said Doogan, “You’re grasping at straws-anything to get back at that judge.”

I didn’t respond.

“I heard you tried to force your way in to see him the other day,” Doogan said. “And when you couldn’t get in, you called him, using my name with what could be construed to be vague threats. The mayor asked me to look into it, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

“Thank you.”

“I’d suggest not making a habit of that.”

He turned his attention to Angelina, who was still struggling and had knocked my hat screwy on my head. “This is your little girl, eh?”

“This is her.”

“She’s the one…”

“ Yes .”

He shook his head and looked away. He seemed genuinely moved.

I said, “Yes, she’s the one the mayor’s good friend Judge Moreland plans to take away from us Sunday.”

Doogan took a long pull from his cigarette and blew the smoke out in an endless stream. “Judge Moreland, he’s something else. He’s a type, Jack, a rare type. I see his kind all the time, but he’s a rare specimen.”

I let him go on. “You’re looking at things the wrong way. You’re making wrong assumptions. In my line of work, the politicos who are really going somewhere are never about the here and now. The good ones-and Moreland is a good one-think long-term. They fixate on the prize. Because they do, sometimes it isn’t easy to figure out the moves they’re making right in front of your eyes. You’ve gotta think long-term if you want to figure ’em out, and you haven’t been thinking long-term.”

I said, “What’s he fixated on?”

Doogan said, “The Supreme Court.”

I shook my head. “How can taking our little girl possibly help him get on the Supreme Court?”

“I don’t know, Jack. You need to figure that one out. But I know that’s what he wants.”

I LEFT DOOGAN there by his tree. Sanders was a few feet behind again. As we approached the parking lot, I heard a powerful burbling engine fire up, and I instantly recognized it. The sound was like a straight razor to my throat.

Garrett’s yellow H3 backed out away from us. I couldn’t see inside well because of the dark-tinted windows, but I thought I saw two profiles-Garrett and his father.

“What, do you know who that is?” Sanders asked, noting my reaction.

So Garrett had come to the funeral of the man he’d stomped to death to what, gloat? And why would Judge Moreland have come? To see what?

Angelina squirmed in my arms and pointed toward a squirrel scrambling down a tree. She said, “Cat!”

I started to laugh when something hit me so hard my knees nearly buckled. I looked from my little girl to the departing H3 and back to my little girl. I thought, He came hoping to see her.

Which went back to the beginning, the simple unanswered question: Why did they want her?

And everything seemed to make sudden and terrible sense.

Bulletproof . What could be more bulletproof than a pedophile being a partner in crime with a judge? The judge in whose courtroom the Monster of Desolation Canyon- another participant in the international ring-had gone free?

Angelina cried out, and I realized I was squeezing her too hard. I eased up and looked at her. She was beautiful by all accounts, with her dark flashing eyes, her smile, her manner, and not just proud-parent beautiful.