Stephen White - Cold Case

Kathy voice started off shaky and high-pitched. It reminded me of water flowing rapidly over stones in a shallow stream. "You've probably met everybody by now, haven't you?" She was directing her words to me.

"You've been busy. I know you talked to Joey, figured you talked to Dr. Welle.

I bet you probably talked to Mariko's parents, too, didn't you?"

"Yes. I spoke to her father, Taro. Her mother is in Japan."

"So you probably know about the girls being picked up for smoking marijuana?"

"At the hot springs at Strawberry Park."

"Right. Well, that's when it all started." She shook her head, disbelieving.

"With a couple of damn college boys on spring break giving a couple of country girls some free marijuana. And now look at us." She waved her hands out toward the blow down

"Over ten years have passed, and there's still dead bodies as far as you can see. Who would have predicted this?" "No one," I said. I was guessing at my lines, reading the cues from her eyes.

"No one," she agreed.

"No one would have predicted it."

Dell nodded in agreement. Kimber barely moved.

Cathy asked, "Did Phil Barrett ever tell you why the girls weren't arrested that night after he picked them up at the hot springs? Did he tell you that?"

She sounded almost defiant.

"Yes," I said.

"He did. He suggested he was being magnanimous. Didn't want them to suffer their whole lives for one small mistake."

She snickered as she walked from the heart of the woods to stand beside her husband.

"Magnanimous? Phil? Let me tell you something. Phil Barrett was being a prick.

There's only one reason that those girls weren't arrested. Want to know what that is? It's because I agreed to have an affair with him. That's why the girls got off that night." Dell took one hand off the shotgun and slid it to the small of his wife's back. She looked up at him with an expression that I could easily mistake for love.

"Dell didn't know. He didn't know any of this until recently. I did everything else on my own. I did it to protect Tami."

I had an image of an old model train I'd had as a child. Of placing the individual cars on the track. Of aligning the wheels. That's where we were in the story. The cars were on the track. Some of the wheels were aligned, some weren't. I couldn't guess where the train was going to go.

"Phil Barrett was blackmailing you?"

She seemed to like the sound of that. She said, "I guess."

"It sounds that way to me."

She glanced up at Dell again, this time plaintively. His eyes stayed fixed on Kimber and me. We remained still at the end of his shotgun. Cathy said, "Then. you know what Joey did to that girl? The Japanese one. Mariko's little sister?"

Now, Cathy was looking right at me. I nodded in response to her question. She continued staring, hard. I said, "Satoshi. Her name is Satoshi. Yes, I know what Joey did to her."

"After I found out about the… thing with Joey and that girl, I knew that I suddenly had another child to protect." I asked, "How did you know what Joey had done to Satoshi? Did he admit it to you?"

She appeared surprised at my question.

"Joey? Joey wouldn't admit to me that he'd passed gas in a lift line. No, Ray Welle called and told me. You know he'd been Joeys therapist?"

I nodded.

"Thought you knew. That whole thing with Joey having to go see Ray for therapy had started right after the last time Joey had gotten in trouble. Anyway, Ray phoned me that afternoon-the one, well, you know-and he said he'd gotten a call from Mariko asking for his help for her little sister. She'd told him what Joey had done to her, why her sister needed his help."

"The earlier incident with Joey was the one in the girls' bathroom at school?" I asked.

Cathy snorted.

"My. You do know everything." "No," I said.

"I don't." I still don't know where this train was heading once it made it around the bend.

Ray Welle had danced lithely through a slender crack in the rules that govern confidentiality. When Mariko had informed him that her sister had been raped by Joey Franklin, Mariko was no longer his patient. Her psychotherapy had terminated. Therefore, the information she shared on the phone about Satoshi being raped wasn't technically confidential. By any ethical standard, Ray Welle should have kept the news private, but legally he wasn't required to. And he didn't.

"After I heard what Joey had done, I immediately called Phil. I assumed that he and me were going to have another problem-like the one we'd had with Tami and the marijuana. I assumed I was going to need Phil's help again to keep one of my kids out of trouble." Her tone conveyed a combination of defeat and disgust.

"Phil agreed to meet me at the Silky Road. To talk about it."

"That's where you-"

"That's where we usually met."

I tried not to look at Dell, could only imagine his outrage at this story. I asked, "Did Ray know about the meetings on his ranch?"

"I doubt it. Gloria and I were friends… She was helpful to me. She and I worked out the details, and Phil and I met during the day times when Ray was in town. Gloria would always let me know when those two gay cowboys of hers were going on the road."

"But there was a problem that day. You and Phil arrived at the ranch before Mariko and Satoshi had left. They were still up at the house meeting with Dr. Welle."

"Yeah, that was a problem. I expected they'd be gone already. Didn't see how it would make much difference, though. Boy, was I wrong." She turned away from us, moving close to her husband. Almost inaudiblly, she said, "I don't want to talk about this anymore, Dell."

He shook his head, touched her hair.

"They should know, hon. They've come a long way for the truth."

"But I don't want you to have to hear it again."

He shook his head once more.

"That's not what's important right now."

I waited for Cathy. When she didn't continue on her own, I tried to prompt her.

"But Mariko saw you arrive at the ranch or she saw your car, or something.

Later she told Tami what Joey had done to Satoshi and told her that your car was over at the Silky Road. Tami probably wanted to confront you about Joey. Is that what happened?"

Cathy looked at Dell. He nodded to her to continue. Her voice was much flatter when she resumed her story.

"Yes, basically. The two girls came back to the ranch a while later. I'm sure Tami wanted to yell at me about her brother.

Knowing Tami, she would have wanted me to string him up by his toes right then and there. When she and Mariko got to the bunkhouse, I guess they saw my car. I was still… visiting… with Phil."

I watched Dell's eyes narrow. He swallowed twice. His finger caressed the trigger guard on the shotgun. I wondered exactly where and when he was planning to kill us.

I also wondered exactly what Kimber was planning to do with his little handgun.

Cathy stretched her neck, her chin as high as she could force it.

"Tami walked right in on us. Me and Phil. She didn't even knock, just walked right on in to the room." She said it as though the big sin of that day was Tami's failure to knock before she entered.

"Me and Phil were… whatever. We were… in the middle of things. I jumped right up from the sofa to try to calm Tami down. She was… upset, real upset. But she stepped back from me too fast and she tripped right over Phils boots. She stumbled and she fell over backward. That's when she cracked her head against the stone wall that runs around the base of the room. I still hear that sound. That thud. It was a wet sound and it was hard and oh, my, it was loud. I hear it in my dreams still. I hear it on the ranch. I hear it mostly when it rains. Don't know why that is, exactly."

I sensed self-pity creeping into Cathy's story. I wanted to snuff it out before it established a firm footing. I said, "But Tami wasn't dead, Cathy. The autopsy showed she didn't die from the blow to her head."