Stephen White: Missing Persons

“Over here,” Bill said. I pointed the light in the direction of his voice. He’d stepped away from me and was standing in front of a gray electrical panel. With the benefit of the illumination he reached up and pulled hard at the main power circuit.

Instantly the lights in the house came back on.

With great relief I realized that I didn’t recognize the man in the heap at the foot of the stairs. It definitely wasn’t Bob.

The butt of a pistol had come to rest two inches from the man’s nose. Had the man been holding it? I didn’t remember hearing it clatter to the floor. I said, “Who is it? Do you know him?”

Bill moved closer. “It’s Doyle.”

He didn’t sound surprised.

I was.

“Doyle’s already dead, Bill.”

“That must have been somebody else they found in the mountains. That’s Doyle, right there.”

I used the toe of my shoe to move the pistol away, knelt, and placed my quivering fingers on the side of the man’s neck. I couldn’t find a pulse. I thought of Hannah a month before, the same fingers, the same result.

“Who was it that they found near Allenspark?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t care. Doyle’s dead for sure, now. For me, that’s nothing but good news.”

Bill wasn’t upset.

“Why… did you shoot him?”

“He broke into my house. You saw that.”

“He’s been in your house a dozen times. Why did you shoot him?”

“You saw what happened. A broken window. An intruder in the dark. He was going to shoot me. Us.”

He stressed the words “intruder” and “dark.” I thought his explanation sounded rehearsed and I immediately questioned whether Bill knew that Doyle was going to be in his house, in his basement. “Did you know he was coming over?”

Bill didn’t answer me. “Did you? Did you know he was coming over?”

He still didn’t reply. I thought, Damn, make my day.

You set this up, you bastard.

Car thieves steal cars. Bank robbers rob banks. For Bill, this was the white van and the orthodontist all over again.

I started up the stairs to get my phone to call 911. When I was about halfway up I heard a woman’s voice. “Willy? You down there? What was that noise?”

Willy?

Rachel.

“Rachel? Baby?” Bill said.

This time he sounded surprised.

Sam didn’t arrive first-some patrol cops did-but he was there within fifteen minutes.

He wasn’t happy to find me in Bill Miller’s house.

He wasn’t happy to hear Bill Miller claiming that he and I had been having a psychotherapy session when we heard the glass break. He wasn’t happy to hear me concur with Bill that what he had told me prior to the shooting had to stay confidential.

What was Sam happy about?

I think he was reasonably pleased that Rachel Miller was there, and that she was insisting that her daughter, Mallory, was fine. “She’ll be here any minute. Any minute,” Rachel kept saying. “Don’t worry, don’t worry.”

Before he and I were separated by the cops, Bill readily admitted shooting the intruder in his house, whom he continued to insist was the man he knew as his next-door neighbor, Doyle Chandler.

Sam parked me in the Millers’ living room. “You okay?” he asked.

I said I was.

“Good. What about Rachel?” he said to me. “How did she look to you? As a shrink.”

“From what little I saw, not too bad. I suspect she’s on her meds. I’d have to evaluate her to be sure, but she looks much better than I would have predicted.”

“Do you believe what she’s saying about Mallory?”

“I think she believes what she’s saying about Mallory. It’s either delusional, or it’s not. I don’t know her well enough to tell you which.”

“Thank you, Dr. Freud.”

“There’s a chance she’s telling the truth, Sam. That’s a good thing. Hope, right? Has she said how she got here?”

“ ‘With Mallory and her friend.’ I’m thinking Bob, the Camaro guy.”

“You never found him this morning?”

“No.”

“Is Bill claiming the shooting was a ‘make my day’ thing?”

Colorado has a frontier-justice “Get Out of Jail Free” law that permits citizens to use deadly force to protect personal property. Intrude on a Coloradan’s homestead-and raise enough of a ruckus while you’re at it-and you had better hope that the homeowner isn’t armed, because he or she has every legal right to blow you to smithereens, even if you’re not threatening any imminent bodily harm. The law is popularly known as the “Make My Day” law.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “He is. Loudly. Was it?”

“I’m not a lawyer, but probably. Glass broke, power went out, suddenly the guy is there in the basement. Bill shot him. Three times, I think.”

“Three?”

“Yeah. I think three. He kept shooting.”

“Was the guy armed?”

“It was dark. After the lights were back on, I saw a gun next to him on the floor.”

“All sounds pretty convenient.”

“Maybe, I don’t know. Bill’s been through a lot.”

“The broken glass? You see it?” Sam asked.

“No.”

“Wasn’t a window. Somebody put a couple of clear vases or something on the sill in the basement window well. Anyone who opened the window would have knocked them off. I find that kind of… suspicious.”

“People put stuff on windowsills all the time.”

“Window was unlocked,” Sam said. “No sign it was forced.”

“A lot of people have been in and out of this house lately.”

“You sticking up for him?”

I didn’t want to go there. “Bill said the guy he shot was Doyle, Sam. Is that possible?”

“Yeah, I heard. Maybe he has a twin,” he said. “Only thing I know for certain about this whole mess is that there are way too many Doyle Chandlers around for my taste.” He stood up. “Tell me again, why were you here?”

I looked him in the eye and told him it was privileged, which told him almost all he needed to know.

Diane wasn’t in danger anymore. I had secrets to keep.

“Figured.” He ran his fingers through his hair while he continued to stare at me. His next sentence surprised me. “Scott Truscott says you solved the Hannah Grant thing.”

I shrugged. “I had a thought; I shared it with him. He put it all together; I guess the coroner agreed.”

Sam’s raised eyebrows mocked me more than his words did. “A thought? You had a thought? You seem to have a lot of thoughts.” He paused. “And a lot of sources.”

I took the comment exactly as Sam intended it-as an accusation.

A patrol cop stuck her head into the room and said, “Detective? That Cadillac? The BOLO? We got it.”

“Where?”

“CU. Parking lot near the stadium. SWAT’s responding.”

He looked at me, waiting to see if I was going to be obstinate. I surprised him, I think. I said, “Duane Labs. Plasma physics. Fourth floor.”

Sam repeated the location into his radio as he rushed from the room, leaving me alone.

I walked to a beat-up mahogany secretary, picked up the telephone, and called my house. Lauren and Grace were safely home from a wonderful dress-up afternoon, enjoying high tea at the Brown Palace in Denver. Turned out that Gracie loved scones and clotted cream and peppermint tea in china cups, and was absolutely over the moon for cucumber sandwiches. I gave Lauren a concise version of what was going on in Boulder and assured her I’d be fine. After we hung up I dialed a second number from memory.

“Cozy?” I said. “Hate to ruin your Saturday, but someone I know needs a lawyer.”