Stephen White - Warning Signs

"Tonight? I can't, I just can't."

"Tomorrow at five forty-five then?"

She considered my offer, finally saying, "All right. Tomorrow at five forty-five."

Over the years, I'd fallen into the habit of taking most Fridays off. Since Grace's birth, I'd promised myself I'd be even more diligent in protecting my Fridays. Occasionally, I knew, I would have to use the time for emergencies. I'd already decided that whatever was going on with Naomi Bigg and her son Paul qualified as an emergency.

"And again Friday at noon?" I said. "If it turns out that it's not necessary, we'll reconsider."

"See you tomorrow, I guess." She didn't even go through the motions of promising to be on time. "I have to think about all this some more. I'll call you if I change my mind."

I have to admit that I was hoping she would almost as much as I was hoping she wouldn't.

O ccasionally, I had days at work when I concluded that my patients had spent the previous evening conspiring to find ways to make me crazy. That Tuesday afternoon-after Naomi Bigg had left my office-was one of those. My one-fifteen had just been fired from his new job at Amgen. His résumé for the past twelve months was longer than mine was for my lifetime. I was certain that his parents had been told repeatedly during his preschool years that their son didn't play well with others.

He and I had a lot of work to do.

My two o'clock was a massage therapist with a phobia of gooseflesh. Not the kind of gooseflesh that geese have, but the kind of gooseflesh that people get. How weird was that phobia? So weird that I'd never even been able to find a name for it. The closest I'd been able to get was doraphobia-the fear of the fur or skin of animals. But that wasn't it. Quite simply, this massage therapist was terrified of goose bumps, and although she'd been symptom-free for months, she'd chosen that day to suffer a relapse.

Unfortunately, gooseflesh phobia is a difficult condition for which to design effective behavioral desensitization. Photographs of goose bumps did nothing to instigate my patient's terror, and finding reliable sources of gooseflesh so that I could design progressive exposures for her proved, well, ludicrous. Although medication and psychotherapy had kept her symptoms in remission for almost a year, she explained to me that she had literally run out of a morning hot-stone session in abject panic.

I listened as patiently as I could while I entertained the possibility that she might be better off in a profession where her clients kept their clothes on.

As soon as she'd left my office a woman I'd been seeing for about three months left an urgent message.

The Boulder Police had arrested both her and her husband after a domestic disturbance. He'd been taken to the hospital with a closed head injury. She'd been taken to jail. The fact that she'd been arrested for a domestic disturbance came as no surprise; her marriage was about as stable as an eight-year-old with matches in a fireworks factory. Nor did the fact that she had apparently won the fight; she was tough. What did surprise me was that she chose to use her sole phone call to get in touch with me, and not to call an attorney.

Did I mention that her judgment sucked? It was one of the items we were addressing in the treatment plan.

I was homebefore Lauren, and Viv seemed eager for some adult company before she left for the day. We sat outside with Grace and the dogs on the deck off the living room and chatted about how school was going for Viv and how cute my baby was. I sipped a beer; Viv drank tea. The sun ducked behind clouds before it plunged behind the Rockies.

As Viv stood to leave she told me that she'd left some shrimp marinating in the refrigerator-she used a word in her native language that I didn't understand before she fumbled for the English word "soaking"-and that she'd already heated up the grill.

I felt blessed that she was watching over my child and my family and I told her so. She blushed.

L auren came homeexhausted. She'd spent much of the day pigeonholed in a conference room in Cozy's Fourteenth Street offices with Lucy Tanner.

Lauren caught up with Grace. I waltzed out to Adrienne's garden and swiped two huge handfuls of spinach that I wilted in a couple of teaspoons of the marinade while shrimp and vegetables sizzled on the grill. When the food was done, Lauren and I sat down to dinner and Grace amused herself in her bouncy chair. Lauren asked about my day before I had a chance to ask about hers.

Her question was polite, conversational, a simple "How was your day? Anything interesting?"

I lifted an asparagus spear with my index finger and thumb-somebody had once told me that the French ate asparagus that way, so I'd convinced myself it was okay-and tried to mimic the casual tone of Lauren's question as I said, "You remember a case from about four years ago, a date rape involving a young Fairview High School girl and a guy from CU?"

Lauren was eating her asparagus by using her silverware to cut it into bite-size pieces. She thought my rationale about the French eating with their fingers was lame. "My case or yours?" she asked.

"Yours. DA's case."

"Four years ago?"

"Yeah."

She sipped some wine. "Yes, I think I do. Why?"

"What do you remember?"

"Bigg. That was the girl, something Bigg. Marina, no… Marin Bigg. Her father went nuts after the boy got out of jail and tracked him down and beat him with a baseball bat. That's the case you're talking about, right? My memory is that the father got some hard time. But that was in Denver or somewhere, it wasn't ours."

Grace was cooing and kicking her legs and generally succeeding in stealing more of Lauren's attention than I was getting.

"Yes, that's the case. Since it was a rape prosecution, it would have been Nora's, right?" Nora Doyle had headed the sex crimes unit at the DA's office for as long as I could remember. Instituting the sex crimes unit had been one of Royal's many noteworthy innovations during his tenure.

"Sure, it was Nora's case. But I helped her on it. You don't remember? That was the period where Roy and Nora had just started thinking about expanding the sex crimes office. I did half a dozen cases with Nora before she hired Erica in to pick up the slack. God, this shrimp is good. We should pay Viv something extra if she keeps cooking for us, don't you think? I'm beginning to feel guilty about all the extra work she's doing. And I think I might be getting addicted to her cooking."

"I agree," I said as I set down my fork and picked up my beer. I'd lost my appetite, but I made a conscious effort to sound normal. "You helped Nora? Were you a big part of the case?"

Lauren hadn't even looked at me yet, so she couldn't be aware that I was almost paralyzed with fear by what she'd just told me. Naomi Bigg had said that her son Paul wanted to "hurt people he thinks are responsible."

I'd just realized that list included Lauren.

"We made an early decision to plead it out. Facts are often messy in date rape cases. Dueling witnesses. He says she consented. She says she was forced. Usually no injuries to use as evidence. Rape kit often doesn't tell you much. DNA and blood typing are useless. You know how it goes."

"And you were involved in the decision to do the plea bargain?"

"Sure."

"Was it a clear-cut decision or was it controversial?"

She glanced at me with slightly suspicious eyes. "You know that Royal and Nora always took date rape prosecution seriously. Always. The outcomes weren't always popular, but the cases were always examined carefully. It's been one of our strengths as long as I've been with the DA's office. You know how I feel about all this. We're good on rape, Alan. We're good."