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No one reported seeing her arrive at her office building. The few of Ha
The detectives weren’t able to develop any motive for an assault. Ha
The cops had no physical evidence that a crime had been committed. Actually, the truth was that they had way too much physical evidence. The little office building was chock-full of fingerprints and trace evidence. Dozens of different patients made their way through the space every week.
Hair, fibers? All the police could want, and more. Apparently Ha
Mary Black, the psychiatrist and mother of three who shared office space with Ha
Diane was ambivalent about keeping the information to herself. After what Jaris Slocum had done to her the evening Ha
Ha
The dual traumas either had been unintentional blows suffered during the fall in the gym the morning she died-one impact caused by the tile floor, one by something else-or had been the result of two blows to her head intentionally inflicted by an assailant. Sam pointedly reminded me that a third possibility existed: One blow had been suffered during the fall at the health club, and the second blow, the fatal one, had been inflicted by an assailant at Ha
Diane heard the coroner’s findings first. Diane always tended to hear gossip first. What source she might have in the medical examiner’s office eluded me, but she found me on Friday morning at the office at a moment when we were both between patients and stu
“Somebody may have killed her, Alan. My God, somebody may have killed her. Why would somebody want to kill Ha
I held her while she wept. I’d lost count of how many times I’d held Diane while she wept since Ha
I asked myself the same question Diane was asking a dozen times a day for a while after that. Why would somebody want to kill Ha
I couldn’t provide an answer. I used the fact that I couldn’t answer it to console myself with the likelihood that Ha
But the police were left with a buffet of anomalies that they couldn’t explain. Why was Ha
Hanukkah had arrived and Christmas was growing ever closer.
The effort to determine the ma
Media interest in the case declined quickly, and Ha
7
If you don’t happen to be an inveterate shopper intent on milking the swollen teat of post-holiday sales-I am not-and if you aren’t required to be at work-it was a Sunday, and I wasn’t-the day after Christmas is a sleep-in day.
Or maybe-if the snow gods have conspired with the ski gods to dump ten powdery inches of flash-frozen Dom Perignon on the upper reaches of Beaver Creek and one of your wife’s friends has generously offered two free holiday season nights at her Bachelor Gulch ski villa-the day after Christmas is most definitely a play day.
Lauren and I had packed our ski stuff and winter clothing and an immense quantity of three-year-old paraphernalia the night before and were out of bed well before dawn in an almost certainly futile attempt to beat the pre-ski traffic that seemed to always clog I-70 West into the Colorado Rockies during the winter months. She was fixing some breakfast for our still-sleeping daughter, Grace; I was loading the car. While I was on a trip into the kitchen to grab a cooler to lug to the garage, Lauren said, “See that?”
“What?”
She pointed at the tiny kitchen TV, which was tuned to a local cha
I assumed she meant the crawl, the strip of text that I always seemed to be reading when I should be watching the screen and that I never seemed to be reading when news about some important update was moving across the screen that I should probably be reading. From the time that crawls first appeared on TV screens, I’d decided that I was genetically incapable of reading the moving words and simultaneously attending to what was happening on the rest of the screen. I’d long ago concluded that I did not possess a twenty-first-century mind.
I lifted the heavy cooler laden with God-knows-what and took a lumbering step toward the door. “Nope, didn’t see it.”
“It said that-”
“We have breaking news from our Boulder bureau,” interrupted one of the morning anchors. With that preamble I turned my attention back toward the TV, but my eyes immediately found the crawl and I couldn’t have told you which of the two anchors was speaking. “Apparently-and details are sketchy-apparently, and this is truly hard to believe, another little girl has disappeared on Christmas night in Boulder. We have a reporter on the way to the scene right now and should have more information momentarily. June?”