Blood Memory

Catherine shifted her weight on the hard seat and looked across the metal table at the man with black hair cropped short over his ears, silver at the temples. “Detective Bustamante,” he’d said when he met her in the lobby at Denver Police Headquarters. “Nick Bustamante.” He had held out a large hand that could probably wrap around a basketball. “I’m handling the investigation into last night’s shooting.”

“I’m okay,” she managed. They were in a cubicle not much larger than a closet with a one-way glass panel behind Bustamante and a door that led into the wide corridor they had traversed after they had stepped out of the elevator. Someone on the other side of the glass would videotape the interview, Bustamante had explained. She had a prickly sense of invisible eyes moving over her.

“I told the officers everything last night,” she said. Nick Bustamante was handsome in an unaware way. Dark eyes, the hint of a shadow along his jaw. “Can we finish up here? I have to check in at work and get back to the hospital.”

The sun was rising when she had left Denver Health. Layers of golds, tangerines, and magentas filled the eastern sky and cast a bloodred hue over the skyscrapers in the distance. She had hurried across the parking lot to her silver convertible and, somehow, had found her way through the empty streets back to her town house, but she couldn’t have retraced the route she’d taken. She remembered gripping the steering wheel, barely aware of the parking lots, gas stations, and stores, and finally the residential neighborhoods that blurred past.

She’d had to duck under the yellow police tape to get into the town house, ignoring the words Do Not Cross. She had forced herself to look away from the dark brown smears on the tile as she’d walked through the kitchen and out the back door to check on Rex in the dog run. Refilling the water dish, shaking dried food out of the bag into his pan, patting his head, going through the morning routine on automatic, as if everything were normal.

Back inside, she had climbed the stairs and fallen into an exhausted and jerky half sleep for about an hour, she guessed, although time had stood still since Maury was shot, as if everything had coalesced into that moment. She had felt groggy and half-sick as she’d dragged herself to her feet, showered, pulled on a sleeveless dress and sandals, and tried to do something with her makeup so that the woman staring back in the bathroom mirror didn’t resemble a drawn, blanched character in a horror movie. She had run her fingers through her black, shoulder-length hair and pushed back the shorter pieces that fell about her face, then made her way down the stairs—don’t look, don’t look. Then she had driven downtown to police headquarters, still on automatic, following the instructions of the police officer last night, as if she no longer had any control over her own life.

“I’m sorry to put you through it again,” Bustamante said, his attention still on the sheet of paper. He wore a white shirt, opened at the neck, and a summer-weight, tweedy brown jacket that, she guessed, he’d pulled on for the interview, judging by the uneasy way it rode across his broad shoulders. He would never be mistaken for a banker, she thought.

He looked up at her. “I need your statement today as well. You would be surprised how many details victims recall after the shock begins to wear off.” A flickering of sympathetic light in his dark eyes. “You must still be in shock after seeing your friend shot.”

“I don’t know if he’s going to make it,” Catherine said, and with that, the hard knots of anxiety and fear she’d been struggling to swallow back began pouring out. The interview room and the man on the other side of the metal table were a watery blur. She ran her palm across her cheeks in a not very successful attempt to wipe away the warm tears that kept coming, barely aware of the white square that Nick Bustamante held out to her. She took the handkerchief, mopped at the moisture, and blew her nose.

“Philip and I were at the hospital the rest of the night,” she said, closing her fist around the damp handkerchief. She felt as if she were still in the ICU waiting room, she and Philip sitting side by side, two plastic statues molded to the plastic chairs, and all the time she had felt the resentment and anger blowing off Philip like smoke. Every time the metal door had swung open and a green-clad doctor walked through, they had jumped up and asked about Maury. The answer was always the same—no change—and always delivered in a flat, neutral tone. As if it weren’t Maury they were talking about—big, smiling, bearlike Maury— but some anonymous gunshot victim brought in from the street.

“I see,” Bustamante said, as if he’d just framed a picture in his mind. He leaned back against his chair. “Is that why you called Maury after you spotted the man following you last night?”

“No, you don’t see. We’re not in a relationship, if that’s what you’re thinking. Maury and I are good friends, that’s all.” She could see by the way his features rearranged themselves around some new idea that it was exactly what he had been thinking. “It’s not sexual. Maury’s gay.” God, what did this have to do with anything? Silence filtered between them a moment. “They should have let us see him. What if he should die? He will have died alone, and we . . .” The tears started again. She rolled up the moist handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes.

“I know somebody in hospital administration,” Bustamante said. “I’ll call her. Perhaps she can arrange to relax the rules in this case, if Philip agrees. No promises.”

He went back to the file folder, thumbed through the thin stack of papers, and pushed one toward her. It was a map of her neighborhood, enlarged from a map of Denver. A thick red line had been drawn around the town house development. “Show me where you first spotted the attacker,” he said.

Catherine pulled the map closer and set her index finger on the spot a block and a half from her townhome. “Here,” she said. “He may have started following me earlier.” Then she told him how she thought she’d heard footsteps behind her, but when she had turned around, no one was there. It struck her now that the man hadn’t wanted her to see him at that point, yet a few yards later, he had been confident enough not to care. The idea sent a chill through her. At that moment, he had been confident there was nothing she could do.

She hunched forward, clasped her arms against the chill, and told him the rest of it. How she had kept walking at the same steady pace, how she had waited until she was out of sight around the corner before she broke into a run and got inside her townhome. She had called Maury before she’d called the police.

She felt the pressure of the tears forming again. She pressed the handkerchief against her eyes. “The bastard crashed through the door with Maury and shot him,” she said. “I never should have called him. This wouldn’t have happened.” Her mouth felt dry, bitter tasting. She wished she had a drink—bourbon or a glass of wine.

She had to look away. Beyond the glass, a camera was videotaping everything; officers were watching and listening. There was no hiding from the truth: she had sacrificed Maury for her own safety. The realization made her feel sick to her stomach. What had she been thinking? That Maury could protect her from a man with a gun? And yet, she hadn’t known the man had a gun. She hadn’t wanted to be alone, that was all, and she knew Maury would have stayed until the police found the man or morning arrived, whichever came first, and she could forget the whole nightmare of it—the hunter coming down the moonlit sidewalk, stalking her.

“You said he’s your friend. Wouldn’t he have wanted you to call him?” Bustamante set his elbows on the table and regarded her over clasped hands. Something new had come into his eyes, as if he had been observing her under a microscope and found something unexpectedly interesting. “If the attacker was lurking outside when Maury Beekner arrived . . .”

“What do you mean, if?” Catherine stared at him. “Obviously he was waiting outside.” She’d covered enough criminal cases for the Journal to know how investigations went: Everything was on the table. No account of what had occurred was ever taken at face value. Stories were always layered, like plaster on a wall. Peel back the top coat and you got a different design, a whole different wall.

“That would explain why the neighbors heard the commotion, but nobody recognized the gunshot,” Bustamante said. His voice was neutral. “Describe him for me. Anything familiar about him?” A distant look came into his eyes. He was still peeling back the layers, and she had the sickening sense that he expected to find something else.

“My God!” Catherine started to get to her feet, then sat down hard. She could feel the flush of anger in her face. “The man who shot Maury was six feet tall.” She kept her voice steady and certain. “He had on a bulky jacket that made him seem bigger than he might have been. He seemed slim, wiry, with a big jacket on. He was dressed all in black—black pants, black jacket, black knit hat. He wore black gloves.” She didn’t know why she remembered the gloves, except that, closing her eyes, trying to remember every detail, she could see the image of him lasered on the back of her eyelids. “He looked like a monster.”

She opened her eyes. “He’s a rapist. He was trolling for a woman out alone. He happened in my neighborhood and zeroed in on me, that’s all. It could have been any woman.”

“Now what are you saying?” Catherine had the sense that he was probing yet another layer that she hadn’t realized existed. “That I was his target? He was after me? That’s ridiculous. I told you, I don’t know why anyone would want to harm me. There’s a rapist in the Washington Park area, right? He hasn’t been arrested yet.”

“Washington Park’s three miles away. No reports of intruders in your neighborhood. Last year there was a domestic disturbance call, and a couple of months ago, one of the neighbors backed out of his driveway and scraped the side of the car parked across the street. You live in a safe neighborhood.” Bustamante spread his large hands. Wisps of black hair curled over the edge of his jacket sleeves. “He used a gun with a silencer, he wore gloves. Isn’t it possible he was a man with a specific mission and he came prepared?”

“About ten days ago, I was having coffee at a shop around the corner from the Journal. I realized I didn’t have my purse. I went back to the counter and the clerk gave it to me. Said someone had just turned it in. I must have set it down while I was ordering. Nothing was missing. It didn’t look as if anything inside had been disturbed.”

“Oh, God.” She looked away. Where was this going? All this probing, and what good would it do? Her mouth had gone dry. She needed something to drink. “I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s all.”

He didn’t say anything, and Catherine understood he was waiting for her to go on. “I don’t have much of a family,” she said. “I was adopted when I was five years old. Now it’s just my mother, Marie, and me. I’ve always called her Marie.” Why was she going on like this? What did this matter? “My father died when I was a teenager. No brothers or sisters. Maury’s like a brother.”

“Who want to kill me?” She forced a little laugh that sounded like the rasp of a death cough. “None who might care that much,” she said, folding her hands in her lap, avoiding his eyes. She felt like a schoolgirl called into the principal’s office for breaking some rule she didn’t know existed. “I haven’t been in a serious relationship”—she shrugged— “since my divorce.”

She studied the metal table: the file folder and the printed map with the thick, red lines, the stream of light reflected from the fluorescent fixture overhead. Detective Bustamante had done his homework. “There would be no reason for Lawrence to want me killed, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“I’m not implying anything,” Bustamante said. “I want to nail the guy that followed you home last night and shot Maury Beekner. I don’t want him out walking the streets, so why don’t you just tell me about your relationship with Lawrence Stern.”

“There is no relationship.” This was complicated, she was thinking. She hurried on: “We parted on friendly terms, irreconcilable differences, or some such. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“We wanted different things, different lives.” She paused for a moment, trying to gather her thoughts into a logical sequence that would make sense to this stranger probing into her life. “We came from different backgrounds,” she said. “I grew up on the northwest side, not quite the right side, an adopted girl with no background, and Lawrence—well, he came from a pioneer Colorado family, the Denver Country Club and all that. He was Harvard; I was Metro State. He was WASP in capital letters, a real blueblood, a Denver aristocrat.” She paused. “And I don’t really know who I am.”

That had stopped him, she thought. She tried for a smile to let him know that it was all right. It was just the way things were. When he didn’t say anything, she said, “You might say that my genealogy is mixed. I’m part Indian, Arapaho, maybe, but it wasn’t something that was ever discussed. It was a miracle Lawrence and I ever met.”

She went on: “I was a general assignment reporter at the Journal, occasionally covering social news. You know, who attended which fund-raising event and donated the most money, who wore tailored tuxedos and designer gowns and had the biggest hair, the best face-lifts, and the whitest smiles. Supposedly it was a temporary assignment until a position as investigative reporter opened up. It lasted three years. I didn’t mind it all that much. I got to see another world, and I met interesting people.”

Catherine nodded. “I did a story on his engagement party. We ran photos of several guests and a photo of Lawrence holding his fiancée’s hand. Very blond, very beautiful, and appropriate for him. He should have married her, but I remember that when the photographer snapped the picture, Lawrence was looking at me. He called the next day and invited me to lunch. I thought he was going to give me a scoop about the upcoming wedding. Instead, he told me they had agreed to call it off.”

She took a moment before she said, “I’ll answer the question because you’ll just keep asking until I do. Lawrence and I parted on good terms. There’s no alimony. He gave me a town house, a car, and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. We go to lunch occasionally. We’re friends.” We sleep together once in a while, she was thinking, but that wasn’t any of Detective Bustamante’s business.

“Two hundred and fifty thou from the Stern family?” Bustamante shook his head. “Didn’t I just read your ex-husband built the hundred-million-dollar office and residential complex near Colorado Boulevard? Six years of marriage, seems like you could have gotten more.”

She shrugged. “I stopped working for a while when I was married. Lawrence didn’t really approve, and . . .” She tried to blink back the memories looming in front of her. “. . . there were so many obligations.”

Bustamante folded his elbows on the table and leaned toward her. “I want you to think very carefully. Anybody called or e-mailed you, taken issue with what you’ve written?”

“You mean, called me too dumb to be a reporter, too biased toward the right or the left, too stubborn and pigheaded to see the truth?” Catherine shook her head. This wasn’t the early decades of the last century when irate readers broke into the offices of the Denver newspapers and shot at the editors, wounding some of them. “It’s part of the business. I report the facts as I find them.”

“State treasurer charged with embezzlement. You came down pretty hard on that story. Went into his background, wrote about how he’d been fired from a job twenty years ago after accounting irregularities were discovered. And what about the Civic Center architectural plans? How many stories did you write on how the design had nothing to do with Denver’s history and how it would destroy Civic Center? Seems to me your stories influenced the city council’s vote. The architects folded their tent and went back to Boston or New York or wherever they came from.”

“The point is, Catherine,” he said, “you’ve taken on tough issues involving important people. Last couple of weeks you’ve written about how the Arapahos and Cheyennes have filed claims on twenty-seven million acres of Colorado.”

“It’s a developing story. The government has already settled the land claims. The tribes were paid $15 million in 1965. They’re hoping Congress will reopen the agreement.” She shrugged. “Look, the Mirror has been covering the same story. Nothing I’ve written would make someone want to kill me.” Catherine started to lift herself to her feet. “Are we done here?”

Bustamante stood up, reached inside his sport coat, and pulled out a business card. He leaned over the table, scratched a number on the back side of the card, and handed it to her. “You can reach me on my cell at any time.” Then he closed the file folder over the thin stack of papers and picked it up. “You should stay somewhere else for a while,” he said.

“Somewhere else?” The town house was home. There wasn’t anywhere else. She didn’t want to camp out in some motel that allowed dogs. “Check your unsolved rape cases,” she said.

Catherine stood rooted to the floor. She felt as if he’d slapped her in the face with a wet towel. He knows where you live. She had been pushing the truth from her mind. She had to hold on to the edge of the table a moment before she trusted herself to cross the room and walk into the corridor. She had no idea where she and Rex could go.