Stephen White - Cold Case

"That too. You think she's dead?"

She shrugged.

"A lot of blood in there. A bad struggle. Let's say I'm afraid that she's dead."

"Me too." "You haven't asked, but do you want my impression of what happened upstairs?"

"Absolutely."

"I could be wrong. These are first impressions, okay?"

"Okay."

"The evidence of struggle is clear. The room is trashed. It appears that the fight she put up was protracted and… valiant."

"Help me with something, then. Why didn't anybody hear her? Why didn't she scream for help?"

"Room on one side of hers is vacant. According to housekeeping, the neighbors in the other adjoining room haven't been around much. Dawn-to-dusk tourists.

Why didn't she scream? Maybe she couldn't. She might have been gagged before she started resisting. One possibility of the order of events is that the offender entered her room and had her under control long enough to get a gag on her face.

Probably at knife point At that point she broke free and started to fight."

"Someone she knew?"

Flynn chose not to answer me directly.

"I think one of two things happened in that hotel room. Either what happened in there was, plain and simple, a crime of passion committed by someone with reason to be passionate enough to commit it.

Or what happened in there was disguised to look like a crime of passion."

"But not a burglary?"

She touched my hand.

"No. That would surprise me."

"Russ said her computer was missing."

"I only did a quick visual. I didn't see it. But we can't be sure that it's actually missing until the criminalists look around carefully."

I repeated to Flynn my concerns about Dorothy's estranged husband, Douglas, and about her recent meeting in Steamboat with someone who wanted to talk about Gloria Welle's murder and her planned meeting with someone else.

She didn't comment at all about the mystery man with the interest in Gloria Welle, but she looked relieved at the news about Douglas Levin-pleased that the crime scene might be a simple domestic scene gone bad. She said, "There you go then. If I were Douglas Levin I'd be getting my alibi on real straight right now. Real straight."

Hearing Flynn comment about Douglas Levins need for an alibi caused me to recall the day I met Dorothy and left me concerned that I'd missed something important already.

"I wonder if it was him in Denver on Friday, too?"

"What do you mean? What happened on Friday?"

"Those shots that were taken at Welle's fund-raiser on Friday? You read about them?"

"Yes"

"Dorothy was the Post reporter covering the event. She was directly in the line of fire. She and I had been talking until seconds before the shots rang out.

Until right this second I didn't even consider that she might have been the target and not just a bystander."

"She was literally in the line of fire?"

"Yes"

"Then, so… so were you."

"I was in my car. The shots were way too high to be aimed at me. Dorothy was between my car and the door. She was a potential target. I wasn't."

"The possibility that this is the second attempt on her life in a few days is something that has to be blended into the mix. I'll run it by Percy when we're done here."

I finished my iced tea and watched the clear cubes tumble together as I placed the glass back on the table.

My mind retreated from the horror of Dorothy Levin's hotel room, and I recalled my meeting with Ray Welle that morning and the suspicious last page of his treatment record.

"Flynn, can you do anything magical with a photocopy of a piece of paper?

Basically I want to know if you can help date it."

"Date the copy or date the original?"

"Date the original."

"Possibly. If it's a forgery, it will depend on how sophisticated the forgery was. If they used time-period-appropriate devices and materials to generate the document, it would be hard to pick up discrepancies on a photocopy. We're talking a machine copy? That kind of copy, right?"

"Right. Assuming the forgers weren't that good-that they might have made a mistake-what could you pick up?"

"I'm not a documents specialist, so this is an educated guess, but let's say they used a computer printer that generated a typeface that's common now but wasn't common then. That sort of thing would help date the document. Or, I don't know, maybe a reflection of the watermark on the paper came through on the copy.

With a watermark the documents people can sometimes date the paper of the original. There are ways. What do you have for me to look at?" I explained my suspicion about the last page of the file that I'd received from Raymond Welle that morning.

"Let me take the first-generation copy with me. I'll see what our documents examiner can do with it. Why would Welle forge something like that?"

"I don't know, Flynn. It's down in my car. Want to walk out with me? I'll get it for you."

She paid for the tea and followed me out of the hotel lobby and over to my car.

"Did you learn anything else from Welle this morning?"

I shook my head.

"No, the file is as thin as it could be. I'm still working under the impression that his psychotherapy of Mariko Hamamoto was relatively skillful. I did discover that Welle drives a Humvee. And that he was out playing golf with Joey Franklin this morning."

She raised her eyebrows. The patch moved provocatively.

"Really?"

"Raymond seems quite fond of Joey." "Does he?" she asked.

"You have any gut feelings that this guy Dorothy met with about Gloria Welle might be connected somehow to her disappearance? " Flynn shook her head.

"Why would that be connected? Gloria Welle's murder was solved, wasn't it? "

She must've seen something in my face as I conjured a response to her question.

"Isn't it?" she repeated.

"I guess," I said.

"I guess."

I drove back to Boulder later that afternoon without having learned anything new about Dorothy's disappearance and without having learned anything that I could use to fashion a cushion that might soften the blow of seeing her bloody hotel room.

By the time I'd traveled most of the way down the Divide and cut off onto Highway 6, the route into Golden was jammed with gambling traffic generated by the casinos of Central City and Blackhawk. I managed to pass one giant motor coach that was belching diesel fumes into my face only to end up smack behind another. At that point I gave up fighting the traffic and tried to get lost in the radio broadcast of a Rockies game at Shea Stadium in New York. After losing four in a row, the Rocks were up by three runs. The best thing about baseball is the constant opportunity for redemption. Almost every day the players and the teams get another chance to try to set things right. I wished life were like that. There were so many nights that I felt as though I were climbing into bed after going 0 for 4.

The ivory Lexus was in front of Adriennes house again, but I was too distraught over Dorothys disappearance to grant the solution to that puzzle much of my attention. Lauren was at a dinner meeting with a committee that was organizing a benefit for the Rocky Mountain MS Center, so the house was quiet when I got inside. I took care of Emily's pressing needs-food, water, exercise.

A. J. Simes called while I was outside with the dog. She left a terse message approving my request to fly to California to interview Satoshi Hamamoto. The approval felt like a small victory. I started throwing together a sandwich for myself for dinner while I mentally plotted when I could squeeze an abbreviated trip to Palo Alto into my schedule.

Sam interrupted my plans with a phone call and an invitation to go out for a beer to talk about the videotape of news clips about the murder at the Silky Road Ranch that I'd dropped off at the police department. My impulse was to stay home and pout about my rotten day, but I reminded myself he had done me a favor by looking at the tape, and I agreed to meet him at a barbecue place close to his house on North Broadway in twenty minutes.