Stephen White - Cold Case

After her friend dropped her off, Lauren and I took Emily for a walk before dinner. Lauren was wearing a new maternity top that, to my eye, had enough gussets sewn into the front to permit her to carry quintuplets to term. On the way out the lane I told her about Kevin's arrival on our doorstep that afternoon and replayed his impressions of his brothers death and his reluctance to believe the theories about his fathers motives the last day at the Silky Road Ranch.

Her assessment of Kevin's protest about his father's intentions when he shot Gloria Welle was about the same as mine had been. She said, "He sounds like a kid who's trying to make sense of the unfathomable. You like this?" She fingered the hem of the new top she was wearing.

"Yes. Of course. It's, urn, nice." My praise was so weak I didn't even believe me.

She punched me on the arm.

"Get used to it. I got some jeans and some shorts with elastic waists, too."

"I can't wait to see them."

She hit me again.

As we climbed a ridge to the east to watch the shadows edge into the valley, I moved on to the next part of Kevins story.

"There's more that I learned from Kevin. I should have made this connection on my own, but I didn't. It turns out that Kevin and his brother were the exact same age as Tami and Miko. They were in the same year at school. Kevin knew both of the girls."

Lauren looked my way, raised her eyebrows, and asked, "The plot thickens. So were they friends?" "Kevin says his brother was actually closer to Tami and Miko than he was. Kevin says that Dennis, his brother, was the better skier. This group of kids who hung out together-apparently they were all pretty great skiers. Only the best of them could ski with Tami and Miko, though. That wasn't Kevin-but he knew the girls well enough. They had classes together, hung out together after school.

You know. It was a pretty small town then." "Still is," she said, pointing out a big bird soaring high above Highway 36.

"Especially if you leave out the tourists." "Is that a hawk?" I asked.

"Don't know. Maybe. Did he date either of them?"

"Says not."

"And? What does he remember about what happened to them? What does he think?"

"Mostly he just remembers it as the beginning of the tragedies. That's what he calls that time in his life.

"The tragedies."

"The hawk, or whatever it was, swooped behind a ridge top. Above the grasses on the crest of the hill the sky had turned thick and black. A massive thunderstorm was building in the foothills near Golden. Lauren said, "I'm glad that's not coming our way. Bet it's full of hail."

We started back toward our house just in case Lauren's meteorological forecasting abilities were flawed. Emily ran into the thick grass along the lane and pawed frantically at something in the dirt. We waited for her to finish whatever she was doing. She dawdled until a crisp crack of thunder in the distance spooked her out of the meadow, her ears as plastered down as a Bouvier's cropped ears can be. If she had possessed more than a nub of a tail it would have been between her legs. Emily despised thunder and lightning.

Lauren asked, "Did Kevin and his friends have theories about the girls? About their disappearance? About the murders?"

"Sure. At first-for a few days, he said-everybody thought that the girls had run away. He describes Tami the same way everyone else does. Heart of gold, a lot of fun, but a bit of a wild child. She was always talking about wanting to see the world, to go places. To get away. Her friends thought she may have had a fight with her parents about something and just taken off."

"Did she argue a lot with her parents?"

"The impression I got is that it was a love-hate thing. She and her mom would be real tight and then Tami would push her away for a while."

Lauren chewed on my impression.

"And Kevin and his buddies-they thought that Miko would just go along with Tami if she ran?"

"I asked the same thing. He was evasive about that. Said Miko wasn't really like that. Wasn't really a follower. But he didn't elaborate."

Lauren knelt down to comfort Emily after another explosive clap of thunder.

"And after? After the bodies were found? What did he and his friends think then?"

"Kevin said that he and his buddies all bought into the stranger theory. None of them wanted to believe that anyone they knew in town could do what had been done to their friends. He said that none of them really considered that it might have been a local. But…"

"But?" "But… he also told me that there was a rumor going around that Miko was seeing an older guy. Somebody in town."

"But they didn't know who?"

"No, they didn't."

"Did they speculate?" She stood back up.

"Yeah. And this is where it gets really interesting. Kevin and his friends thought it might be Raymond Welle. Some of the kids had seen the two of them together a couple of times. Going for a walk. Having coffee. Things like that."

"Did Kevin know that Miko was in psychotherapy with Welle?"

"It didn't sound like he knew. I didn't tell him. Couldn't figure out a way to ask directly without spilling the beans."

She threaded her fingers through mine and pulled my hand over her abdomen. The tight bulge made my heart jump every time I felt it. I desperately hoped to feel a kick from her womb.

No.

She asked, "Could that be benign? Mariko and Welle being out together? Could that have been part of her psychotherapy?"

I thought about it.

"Could have been. Would have been unusual, but not unheard-of. Sometimes with kids, you find they talk more openly outside the office. I've done it with a couple of adolescents. It could have been that. At this point you have to give Welle the benefit of the doubt about the therapy. I keep reminding myself that Miko's parents thought he worked wonders with their daughter."

Lauren stopped and picked up a stick. She shook it in Emily's face and threw it deep into the meadow. My wife has a good arm, and the stick covered a lot of territory before it fell to the ground. Emily stared at her as though she were a moron. She laughed at the dog and said, "Take all the speculation to its most toxic conclusion, sweets, and it gives Welle a pretty darn good motive."

It was exactly what I'd been thinking since I'd waved good-bye to Kevin an hour earlier in downtown Boulder.

"You mean if we accept the proposition that he was involved with Mariko?"

"Yes. Absolutely. What if-I'm speculating here, so cut me some slack-what if Tami found out somehow that her friend was involved with Raymond Welle? Or what if Miko told Tami that she was screwing around with Welle and Welle suddenly saw some threat to this wonderful life he was building for himself? You know, his practice, his little radio show up there, his marriage even. It gives him a motive for the murders."

"That's a lot of ifs. But you're right. If he was sexually involved with Mariko, and if Tami knew about it, it would give Welle a motive."

"No one in Locard has discovered anything that gives anyone else a motive, have they?"

I shook my head.

"They haven't told us anything. But that doesn't mean they don't know something."

"So?"

I pressed.

"Who could corroborate what might have been going on with Miko and Welle?"

"Welle could."

"Yeah, and he's going to admit it. Right."

"I don't know who else would know. You have to assume that he would have been smart enough to keep it a secret."

"You know, none of this is in the records we got from Locard. None of it. The original investigation should have uncovered some of this information, even if it was just categorized as rumor. Phil Barrett and his detectives should have talked to all the girls' friends. All of them. One of them should have mentioned to the police the possibility that she had an older lover."