Stephen White - Cold Case

Lauren was out of her car before russ and Flynn got out of theirs. She hugged me quickly and asked, "Were we expecting Flynn and Russ?"

I whispered back, "No. And Kimber's already arrived. He's downstairs resting.

He looked terrible when he got here. I'm afraid he's not well." "Okay," she said, and hustled over to give Jonas a kiss and help restrain Emily, who was not pleased at the arrival of strangers on her home turf.

Flynn picked up the vibes before Lauren and I had a chance to explain.

"Russ just admitted to me that he never got around to calling you to let you know we were coming. I'm so sorry to burst in on you like this. Just point us to a motel. We'll be fine." I said, "We'd love to have you stay with us, Flynn, but Kimber Lister is already here. He's resting down in the guest room."

"What?"

Flynn's reaction surprised me.

"Lauren and I didn't know you and Russ were coming, Flynn. When Kimber asked, we agreed to let him stay with us." She spun and said to Russ, "Get this: Kimber's here, Russ. Right now. As we speak."

Russ was leaning down in the driver's seat, fumbling with levers that he hoped would pop the latch on the trunk. He stopped what he was doing and said, "What?

You're kidding. Colorado, here? Or here, here?" He pointed at the dirt by his feet.

"Both."

"No shit? I never thought I'd see it."

Flynn turned back to me.

"I never thought I'd see it, either."

"See what?" Lauren and I asked in unison.

"See him leave the neighborhood where he lives in Adams Morgan. He hasn't been outside-what would you say, Russ?-a three-block radius of that place of his since he moved in."

"No more than three blocks. Maybe only two," Russ agreed.

Lauren said, "You have to be kidding."

I recalled the sweating, the nervousness, the agitation, the change in his breathing. I realized that I hadn't been witnessing altitude sickness or an incipient migraine headache. I'd been witnessing a panic attack.

I asked, "Agoraphobia?" Russ said, "Bingo."

Jonas and I consumed a few minutes in a heated negotiation over custody of Emily. I wanted to take her home with me right then. Jonas wanted to keep her at his house forever and ever. Our compromise? Jonas could have the dog until dinnertime.

After I turned Jonas back over to his nanny, Lauren, Flynn, Russ, and I moved inside to the living room.

"That's why Kimber founded Lo-card?" I asked.

"Because he has agoraphobia?"

Russ answered my question.

"After Kimber's illness progressed-I mean after it got severe enough that he was a virtual prisoner to it-he obviously couldn't continue working in the field, so-"

"Working in the field as what?" Lauren asked.

"What's his specialty?"

"Kimber was the head of the FBI division that uses computers to assist investigations. He's considered the top forensic-database guy in the country, maybe the world. He's also a wizard on the Internet."

I was impressed.

"Anyway, he wanted to continue his work after he got sick. Because of his reputation in the field he had already been invited to be a member of Vidocq, in Philadelphia. You know Vidocq, right? After he went on medical leave he went ahead and joined, became a full-fledged VSM-that's a Vidocq Society Member.

But soon enough he discovered that the train trips from D.C. to Philly for the Vidocq luncheons were impossible for him to manage-again, because of his phobias-and he was forced to resign his membership. That's when he and A. J, and a couple of others began to develop the concept of Locard." "Which," Lauren said, "always meets in Washington. In Adams Morgan. In Kimber's loft."

"Right," said Flynn.

"And to my knowledge Kimber hasn't done a day of fieldwork since the organization started assisting on cases in the mid-nineties. Until today. Which says something about how seriously he views the progress of this particular investigation."

Russ agreed.

"He knows that Locard can't afford to be wrong if we're about to accuse Raymond Welle of complicity in the murder of two teenage girls. If we blow this one, we're toast. Kimber knows that."

Flynn raised her bottle of beer.

"To Kimber, I guess. And us. I hope we don't screw this up."

We toasted Kimber. And not screwing up.

The sound of the downstairs toilet flushing alerted me that Kimber might be joining us soon. But then the clarion call of the plumbing let us know that he had started using the downstairs shower. By the time he'd climbed upstairs a pizza delivery had just arrived and I was setting out beer and opening a bottle of wine. The sun was completely obscured by the mountains and the end-of-the-day thunder-and-lightning show had changed venues and was illuminating the eastern plains and not the foothills. Kimber appeared rejuvenated, the tension in his manner greatly diminished. But the confidence he'd displayed in Washington was absent-in our house he was obviously awkward and out of his element.

I walked the western perimeter of the living room and, one by one, lowered the window shades that we occasionally employed to block the searing rays of the late-afternoon sun. The big room upstairs quickly grew even duskier.

At Kimber's urging, Flynn, as case manager, reviewed the progress of the investigation of the two dead girls for Lauren and me, highlighting the forensic findings that had focused attention on the Silky Road. The key pieces of evidence, it turned out, were eight minute grains of rock that had been removed from the skull wound of Tami Franklin.

"That was the first wound she suffered that night," Russ said.

"It would not have been fatal on its own, not immediately, though it was a bad injury. It crushed bone"-he stood between Lauren and me and placed his fingers on a spot about three inches behind our right ears--"right about here. The wound was eight centimeters by eleven centimeters. The grains were recovered during the initial autopsy. They'd been examined back in 1989, but no progress was made on identification at the time."

Flynn took over again.

"But we enlisted a geologist-actually, a petrologist-and he's been able to confirm that that the grains were from a relatively unusual form of imported limestone. There were, in addition to the rock fragments, grains of a man-made mortar. We assumed we were looking for a rock wall made out of limestone. So we began -looking for commercial and residential installations that might have used that specific rock for ornamental walls in Routt County. The building department records in Routt County weren't much help. Chief Smith began checking with local contractors and masons. He finally found a place that recalled using some of this imported limestone for a series of rock knee walls." Lauren said, "The Silky Road Ranch."

Kimber pursed his lips and nodded.

"Right. But even that information wasn't enough to justify a search. Not when the target happens to be the private property of a prominent member of Congress" Flynn looked at me.

"We'd been hoping that the case file you got from Welle-Mariko's?-might offer some support for Welle's involvement, but so far the results from the documents examiner have been inconclusive. Still, the fruit of your interviews, Alan-especially the information about Joey and Mariko's sister, Satoshi-kept leading us back to the Silky Road. Eventually, with Satoshis testimony that her sister took her to see Welle, we could even place Mariko at the ranch the night she disappeared."

"But not Tami," I said.

"Right. Not Tami. And it was Tami's skull that produced the rock fragments.

Reluctantly, we concluded that we needed more evidence to justify asking for permission to search the ranch. We wanted to have enough evidence to proceed to the district attorney if Welle denied us access on a voluntary basis." Flynn said, "When Russ and I came out here to visit a couple of weeks back, we reviewed all the lab samples that were taken back in 1989. We went back over the girls' clothes looking for trace. Russ looked at the original autopsy photos and reexamined the wounds from the amputations. We used techniques that were unavailable back then to look for latents on all the physical evidence."