Stephen White - Warning Signs

D orsey had promisedme that she would tie something to the front doorknob if Shadow had sensed any explosives on the property. She also said that she would call the bomb squad. Even though I didn't see any emergency vehicles as Adrienne drove back down the lane after dinner, my eyes stayed plastered on the front door.

My relief was palpable as I recognized that the doorknob appeared to be unadorned. The brass handle actually seemed to glow as though Dorsey had polished it.

Adrienne and her son, Jonas, decided to enjoy the sunset and accompany Lauren and Grace and the dogs for a walk through the neighborhood. I pretended that I'd been paged and begged off the evening excursion with the excuse that I had a phone call to return.

I dialed the second I was back in the house. "Dorsey, it's Alan."

"Hi, Alan. Nice house you have, terrific view. And great dogs. What's the big one? Shadow wanted to play with her in the worst way."

"She's a Bouvier des Flandres, a Belgian sheepdog. It's just as well she was in the run-she doesn't always play well with strange dogs." Dorsey may have wanted to chat about the puppies, but I needed to cut to the chase. "The doorknob was empty. I take it you and Shadow didn't find anything?"

"No, your house is clean, so is the garage, so are the cars. I don't know if we were supposed to, but we also did that barn that's a little bit south of your house. It's clean, too."

"The workshop? It actually belongs to our neighbor, but thanks. Can't be too cautious."

"You know," she said, pausing, "Sam didn't really give me much background on all of this."

"I wish I could tell you something, Dorsey. I wish I could."

She paused for a few seconds. I wondered if I heard the wind-whistling-in-the-canyon sound of a deep drag on a joint. "You're a shrink, right?"

"Yeah."

"This has something to do with that?"

"Yeah, it does."

"Okay, well. You let us know if we can be of any more help. Shadow's always looking for training opportunities that involve field trips. She graduates in a couple of weeks and then I'll be dealing with a rookie. If you need help, now's the best time."

L ucy Tanner promised to check in with me onSunday. She didn't. Grace and I spent the day together as Lauren did her best to cope with the toxic consequences of her weekly interferon injection. She loved the drug almost as much as she hated it. As long as she'd been taking the stuff, it had kept its promise to keep the MS dragons on the other side of the moat. The price for the prophylaxis was that she was sick-sometimes moderately, sometimes severely-for the twenty-four hours after the long needle left her thigh.

Grace and I did what we could to make her comfortable. Whatever it was we did, it felt inadequate. And probably was.

M onday at twelve-fifteenNaomi Bigg showed up right on time for her appointment.

Over the weekend there was virtually no way that she could have avoided the extensive news coverage of the discovery of the explosive device in Royal and Susan Peterson's house. I expected to spend the Monday session dealing with Naomi about my role in the detection of that bomb and rehearsed my arguments as she settled herself on the chair.

Naomi started her session by saying, "What I've been thinking? I've been thinking that there's a big difference between the Klebolds and the Harrises and me-I mean the situation I'm in."

She paused as though she wanted me to ask her what the difference was. I didn't ask. I was too busy trying to spot the ambush that I was sure she was planning about the Peterson bomb.

She went on unprompted. "The difference is that there was no way to defend-to justify-what those two kids were planning. No matter how you look at it, Eric and Dylan were targeting innocent children. They were planning indiscriminate slaughter. They were blaming the world for the way they thought they'd been treated. They wanted blood, they wanted gallons of it, and they wanted it from innocents. If their parents had an inkling of that, there is no excuse for them not acting."

Her words shook me. I stopped plotting my defense to accusations of clueing the police in to look for the bomb. As always, Naomi Bigg had a knack for capturing my attention.

The question that almost jumped out of my mouth-but didn't-was, And there is a way to justify what your child and his friend are planning ? I think the reason I didn't actually ask the question out loud was that I feared I was incapable of keeping the incredulousness out of my inflection.

After a few sessions with me, Naomi was growing accustomed to the silences. She didn't hesitate to pick up on her own. "The wouldn't-it-be-cool games that the boys play always target-for want of a better word-perpetrators. People who actually bear responsibility for some serious, serious injustice. That's what's different. So even if Paul and Ramp are actually planning something and not just… talking-and I'm not convinced that they are-I think, knowing what I know, that I'm in a different position than the Harrises and the Klebolds. It's a big difference."

What? "It's different because in your circumstances the potential victims… deserve what happens to them? Is that it?"

Naomi shrugged. "Want to know what I think? Five years ago, I was somebody who used to think that in this country, justice was equal for everybody. Justice was the courts and the police and the jails. The scales always balanced. What's-her-face never peeked out from beneath her blindfold. But I know now that that's not true. Justice isn't just. Justice isn't like a fresh coat of paint on a wall. It doesn't cover equally. It doesn't spread equally. In our system, justice is more like a line of summer thunderstorms. Some places get soaked. Other places stay bone dry. After going through what I've been through with my family, can I continue to believe that providing justice should be the sole province of the criminal justice system? For every ten good cops, there's a Royal Peterson. For every office full of passionate prosecutors, there's a rotten cop. And defense attorneys?" She groaned. "Don't even get me started on defense attorneys. Or parole boards? God in heaven. The system is too corrupt to be trusted."

"And the alternative… is for people who perceive themselves to be victims of injustice to be free to act on their own?"

She hesitated for only a few seconds. "In certain circumstances, I've concluded that the answer to that might be yes. I couldn't do it myself. But I can understand people doing it."

Was she talking about her husband and his cutoff baseball bat or her son and his friend and their bombs? I couldn't keep myself from asking, "So, if these victims of injustice decide to act as vigilantes based on their own conclusions about events, then their victims deserve what happens to them?"

"Victims?" she scoffed. "Like Royal Peterson? You calling Royal Peterson a victim? Royal Peterson wasn't a victim. He was the poster child of perpetrators. The true victims are the people who suffered because of his plea bargains-and believe me, there are dozens of them that are right now trying to pick up the pieces of their lives all over Boulder County."

As much as I disagreed with some of the prosecutorial decisions that Peterson had made over his long reign in Boulder, I knew the good he had done far outweighed his mistakes. I could barely contain my impulse to defend him. I said, "And because you disagree with some of his plea bargains, because of that, Peterson deserved to die?"

"I've already told you: I don't have any feelings about that. He's dead. I don't grieve him. I don't celebrate his death."

I struggled to control my breathing. "Let's say, Naomi, just for the sake of argument, that Ramp and Paul were involved in Royal Peterson's death. Your current feelings are that murdering Peterson was a reasonable reaction to what he did to your daughter?"