Stephen White - Warning Signs

Lucy added, "I'm so sorry, too. What happened to your daughter is awful. Inexcusable."

Ella frosted her voice with defeat. "He didn't rape her. Coroner said he didn't rape her. I sometimes find myself wishing that he had. Wishing she hadn't fought him so hard so she might be alive."

Her words covered the contours of the irony of rape like upholstery covers an old sofa. "I'm so sorry, Ella," I said again. There should have been better words, but if there were, I didn't know them.

"I still go to church every Sunday, you know. Despite what God allowed to be done to my children. I made a pledge to keep giving Him a chance to explain Himself until the day that I die."

Lucy said, "It's my understanding that your grandson calls himself Ramp, still. That's in honor of his mother?"

"No, our name-his mother's maiden name-is his middle name. The boy's name is Jason Ramp Bass. His friends started calling him Ramp sometime in high school. Something about skateboarding I never understood. There's a lot about skateboarding I never understood." Ella sighed. "You get to be my age, you realize the list of things you never understood is a hell of a long one."

L ucy and Isat at the kitchen table with Ella for quite a while early that afternoon, learning about Denise and Pat, and the boy his grandmother called Jase.

"Pat couldn't manage Jase after Denise died. Boy gave him no end of trouble. So he came out here to live with me and Herbert. Jase didn't like it out here in the country but he adjusted okay. I give Herbert most of the credit for that. When Herbert was in town between demo jobs, the boy and him were inseparable. Always doing things together. Mostly cutting steel with explosives. Herbert said that the boy had a knack with explosives."

From the corner of my eye, I could see the screen on the television set on the counter. A teaser for the evening news was running. I wasn't sure if Lucy saw it, too, but assuming that Lucy's story was about to be featured, I knew that I didn't want Ella to be reminded of Lucy's recent notoriety.

I stood, carrying dishes toward the sink.

"Don't do that," Ella said. "I'll clean up."

"It's not a bother-it's the way I was brought up," I said. I switched the TV off before I stacked the dishes. "I hope you don't mind that I turned it off. It's distracting me."

"Oh, I don't mind. It's only there for company. And I've already got company, today."

"Where's Jase now? In Denver?" Lucy asked.

"Mmm-hmm. Denver. He works for a welding company. It's something else that Herbert taught him. Herbert was always cutting metal and welding metal for his experiments."

"Shaped charges," Lucy said.

"That's right." One side of Ella's mouth elevated in a smile. "You don't know what they are, do you?"

"No," she admitted. "I don't. I don't have a clue what a shaped charge is."

Ella laughed so hard she started to cough from a place deep in the recesses of her lungs. When she finally controlled the spasm, she said, "You two are going to go talk to him now, aren't you? Once you leave here."

Lucy and I both nodded.

"Figured. Well, I'll save you some time and tell you where to find him, but I want to talk to him first. I should also talk to Pat, his father, let him know what you told me. Once I do those two things, I'll tell you where to find Jase. If he really did what you say, well… But I want you to remember something, too. I want you to remember that the boy was hurt by his mother's death. You'll remember that? We've all been hurt by what happened."

I said, "Of course."

Lucy wrote her phone numbers on a sheet of paper and gave it to Ella. She said, "That's fair, Ella. You give me a call after you talk to Jason and his father, okay?"

Ella looked back up at me before she spoke to Lucy. "Right now, you're acting like you're going to wait to talk to Jase until I call you. But you won't wait. You're going to go try to find him as soon as you leave here. You're going to go out to your fancy car and get on your cell phone and call your cop friends or you're going to use some computer whizbang and do some magic thing that the police do on TV and you're going to try and find him. Clear as dew, you'd lie to an old woman."

Lucy said, "To track down whoever has been setting those bombs, Ella, I'd lie to every old woman I could find."

Ella opened a drawer that was recessed into the side of the kitchen table. She reached in and slid out a huge revolver. I thought it might be a.45. It was clean and gleamed with fresh oil. Ella rested the weapon on the table, the barrel pointed only slightly away from Lucy.

My heart galloped.

"I like you both," Ella said. "I do."

I thought, Hell's another .

L ucy dropped me off back at my car. Iwould've loved to have had some time to reflect with her over what we'd just learned-or, at the very least, to hear what she thought about Ella's revolver-but I had to rush to Boulder to have a prayer of getting back for my appointment with Naomi.

I held up my watch and said, "If I make it to my office on time, I'm meeting with her this afternoon." I was still reluctant to use my patient's name in conversation.

Lucy wasn't. She said, "You're seeing Naomi?"

"She said she had some news for me, something important. But what we just learned from Ella can't wait for that-Sam needs to know everything we heard right now. So do the Denver Police."

"I'll do that, don't worry," she said. "I know who to talk to. And maybe the fact that it comes from me will earn me some redemption."

I spent thelong drive back to Boulder watching my mirrors for a State Patrol cruiser and trying to prepare myself for what I expected would be a difficult session with Naomi.

When I got to my office and entered through the rear doors, it was only four-twenty but the red light on the far wall was already beaming. Naomi Bigg wasn't only on time for her extra appointment, she was early. And, given what Lucy and I had discovered about Ramp earlier that afternoon, I was more than ready for the meeting. I took a deep breath and made long strides down the hall to greet her.

But the woman I found standing in the middle of the waiting room wasn't Naomi Bigg.

She heard me open the door and barely threw a glance my way before she demanded, "Where is she? Is she back there? Where is she?"

The voice was frantic and distinctly young. The speaker was, too. When I didn't reply right away, she immediately turned back to scan the street, spying at something through the window.

I guessed that she was in her late teens, early twenties. She was blond and overweight. How overweight was hard to tell; her clothes hung on her like curtains. One eyebrow was pierced and adorned with a thin gold ring. Her hair was cut, well, badly, and dyed even worse, though I suspected that the aesthetic impact of the coiffure was intentional. I thought that there was something unusual about her makeup as well but couldn't decide exactly what. Maybe it was the color around her eyes.

"May I help you?" I asked.

"You're her doctor? My mother's doctor? Is she back there? God, this is important! Is she fucking back there yet? I need to talk to her!"

She'd begun screaming at me.

"No, she's not here yet. You're Marin, aren't you?"

She nodded and returned her attention to the window. I could see her shoulders rise and fall with each rapid breath.

I said, "I expect her any minute. You can talk to her then. In the meantime, is there anything that I can do to help you while-"

She raised her arms up above her head and then dropped them quickly past her waist, as though she were signaling the start of a race. "Oh my God, where is she? I can't believe he'd do this. I never thought he'd do this. It's not what she thinks. It isn't what she thinks."