Stephen White - Warning Signs

"I wondered," I said, recalling that Lucy had told her attorneys that if people knew why she was at Roy's house it would only support the contention that she had a motive to kill him. Now she was telling me that the reason she was there filled her with shame.

She said, "There's an old saying about good intentions. A proverb, or an aphorism. Are they the same thing, proverbs and aphorisms? Do you know it? Something like the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

I said, "The reason you were at Royal's house-that's still what you're talking about?"

Did she nod in reply? I wasn't quite certain. Finally, she said, "This one was-paved with good intentions, I mean. Not a whole lot of good judgment maybe, but a whole lot of good intentions."

She lowered her head and Grace almost disappeared in the cascade of blond hair. "Grace's done with the bottle. Should she have more? How do you know how much to feed her?"

"We give her what she wants. That seems to work."

Lucy closed her eyes slowly and left them shut. She said, "It's different for adults, I guess."

"What do you mean?"

She opened her eyes and looked up at me. The corners of her mouth turned up in a wry grin. She said, "Giving people what they want, it's more complicated with adults than it is with babies."

"I'm no expert with babies but my initial impression after six months' experience as a father is that almost everything is more complicated with adults than it is with babies." Grace spit out the nipple and started to squirm on Lucy's lap. "She probably needs to be burped, Lucy. Though she sometimes makes that same face in preparation for fouling another diaper. You want to burp her? Don't be surprised if she releases pressure at both ends simultaneously."

"Love to." She moved Grace gingerly up toward her shoulder. "Did Sam tell you that I got engaged a couple of weeks ago?"

"No, Lucy, he didn't. Congratulations. Who's the lucky guy?"

"He's not a cop," she replied.

An interesting prologue, I thought.

"His name is Grant. He's with the Forest Service. I met him last fall when I was out hiking, if you can believe it."

"That's wonderful. When is-"

"Who could guess? Everything's up in the air right now. You know, because of… Royal."

I was about to ask Lucy how she'd come to know Royal Peterson when Cozy's huge frame filled the bedroom doorway. He was carrying our foster poodle, Anvil. Anvil looked content in his arms. Against Cozy's huge frame, the sixteen-pound dog also looked like a hamster.

Cozy said, "Hello again, Alan. Did you get some dinner? Wonderful stuff. There's a tart in the refrigerator for later, too. Almonds. No, I didn't bake it. Lucy, want to join us? We're just about ready to get started again."

"Sure." She handed me the baby and said, "Thanks. That was a nice talk. I really appreciate it."

"No problem," I said.

From the other room, Lauren called out, "Sweetie, if you left your pager in the kitchen, it just went off."

I traipsed intothe kitchen with Grace in my arms. I didn't recognize the number on my beeper, so I called my office voice mail to see what the emergency page was about. The message was from Naomi Bigg and it was succinct. "Dr. Gregory? There's something more I need to say about what we talked about earlier. Please give me a call."

I asked Grace if she wanted to hazard a guess about Naomi Bigg's pressing problem.

She didn't. Grace had wisdom beyond her months.

I dialed the number off the screen of my pager and heard a smoker's raspy "Hello."

Although I was pretty sure that the voice was Naomi's, I said, "Naomi Bigg, please."

"Dr. Gregory? It's me."

"I'm returning your page." I made certain my tone was as level as a freshly plumbed door.

"You're prompt. Leo always made them wait. He said it was too reinforcing to call right away."

It was becoming clear to me that maybe Leo Bigg was a jerk in more ways than one. Intentionally keeping cancer patients waiting for return phone calls? While I busied myself closing up the cardboard boxes of Chinese food, I let the ball bounce around on Naomi's side of the net.

She took a whack at it after a few seconds. "I was thinking about how we left things today, and what you must be thinking."

"What must I be thinking?"

"That the wouldn't-it-be-cool game I was describing-the one that the boys play-that it might somehow be, I don't know, related to what happened to the district attorney. I assume that I left you with that impression."

Naomi was right on. That was certainly on the list of things that I had been thinking.

She said, "I'm not naive, okay? I can add two and two as well as you can. But, see, none of the wouldn't-it-be-cool games with Ramp and Paul ever-ever-involved someone being assaulted the way that Royal Peterson was assaulted. The news reports all say that he was beaten, you know, hit on the head with something."

I listened as she sucked on a cigarette. She said, "The boys have never joked about doing anything like that-ambushing someone and hitting them on the head, beating them up. You ask me, I think they're too cowardly to do something that confrontational. That's why I don't think they had anything to do with what happened to Peterson."

The argument she was making wasn't particularly compelling. I concluded that the purpose of her call was to reveal to me the foundation for her rationalization. She was eager for me to sign up to support her psychological defenses; she didn't really expect to convince me that her hypothesis was true.

Not feeling particularly cooperative, I assaulted the rationalization I was hearing. "Had the wouldn't-it-be-cool games you overheard ever concerned Royal Peterson in any context?"

"Well, sure. Paul knows the DA's role in the plea-bargain process. Paul and Ramp talked about Peterson all the time. But Roy Peterson was one of ten wouldn't-it-be-cool targets, maybe more. Most of them were people that Ramp was angry at, by the way, not Paul."

"And since Roy Peterson was beaten and not-what?-you think it's evidence that Paul and Ramp weren't involved?"

"Bombs. The boys always joked about using a bomb."

Without any deliberation, I sat down. I had to consciously inhale a breath before I could say, "A bomb? They joked about using a bomb."

"I don't know whether it was a bomb exactly. I don't know about those things. But an explosive of some kind. It's one of Ramp's little hobbies. He talks about blowing things up all the time. He goes out to some ranch out east somewhere, Limon or someplace, and practices. Paul says that once he went out there with Ramp and they actually blew up an old truck. You know, a wreck.

"Ramp's the one who says things like, 'Wouldn't it be cool if the district attorney's house just blew up one day?' Or 'Wouldn't it be cool if so-and-so's car blew up one day?' Like that. All of that stuff comes from Ramp. Paul never talks like that when Ramp's not around."

"Blowing stuff up is a hobby of Ramp's?"

"I don't know, an outside interest, that kind of hobby."

Silently, I counted to ten. Fortunately or unfortunately, the delay didn't change what I was going to say. "I want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. Because Royal Peterson wasn't killed by an explosive of some kind, you would like to believe that Paul and Ramp weren't involved in whatever happened at his house, even though they'd made overt threats against him."

"They never threatened him. It was just talk about what they wished would happen. When they heard he was dead, it's not like they celebrated or anything."

How nice. "So there's no chance they followed through on their fantasies?"

"Exactly. It was like they felt guilty because they were wishing for someone to die and then it happened. You know what that would be like. You'd feel guilty, responsible. Anybody would."