I said, "It must be hard making sense of what happened, then."
"Yeah," he acknowledged.
"Hard."
I watched a tear form in the corner of his eye. Kevin didn't react to it until it had migrated halfway down his nose.
"There is one way that you might be able to discover… some information that might help you answer the questions you have about your father's frame of mind."
He swallowed.
"How?"
"Talk with Dr. Welle" Kevin laughed bitterly.
"My mom tried. Years ago. He wouldn't talk to her. Said he didn't have the right to tell anyone what my father said to him. during therapy.
Confidentiality."
"Technically, that's true. But after your father died the rights to control the record of what happened in his treatment with Dr. Welle passed to the person who controlled your father's estate. If that person asked Dr. Welle about your father's treatment, Dr. Welle would have to respond. He'd have no choice."
"That would be my uncle Larry. My dad's brother. He handled Dad's estate."
"If your uncle Larry sends Dr. Welle a letter identifying himself as the personal representative of your father's estate-if I were him, I'd have the letter notarized-and authorizing the release of confidential records, Dr. Welle should be happy to cooperate with the request."
"That's it?"
"That should be all it takes."
"Will you write that down for me? How to do it?"
"Of course " Across the room I spotted a tiny red dot light up beside the door.
The light was a sign that my next patient had arrived. I said, "Kevin, I have an appointment now. Just one more today. I'll be done in about forty-five minutes.
Would you like to get together again when I'm done and talk some more about all this? Maybe go have a beer or something? I'll go over the instructions on how to approach Dr. Welle again then."
He smiled.
"That would be great. But maybe coffee or something to eat. I don't drink."
I felt foolish.
I was late getting home after meeting with Kevin Sample. Once my last patient had left my office I'd walked Kevin over to the Mall and offered to buy him something to eat. He wavered for a moment on the sidewalk between Juanita's and Tom's Tavern on Pearl Street, finally choosing Tom's and ordering a cheeseburger, salad, fries, and onion rings. He drank lemonade. He devoured the food and afterward talked almost nonstop for another hour.
I walked him back to his car and watched him drive away, hoping he felt more contentment than he had when he decided to come to Boulder and look me up. On the way out of town I stopped at the police station to leave the videotape of the news coverage of Gloria Welle's murder for Sam. Despite the errand, I made it home before Lauren returned from her shopping excursion to Denver.
After her friend dropped her off, Lauren and I took Emily for a walk before dinner. Lauren was wearing a new maternity top that, to my eye, had enough gussets sewn into the front to permit her to carry quintuplets to term. On the way out the lane I told her about Kevin's arrival on our doorstep that afternoon and replayed his impressions of his brothers death and his reluctance to believe the theories about his fathers motives the last day at the Silky Road Ranch.
Her assessment of Kevin's protest about his father's intentions when he shot Gloria Welle was about the same as mine had been. She said, "He sounds like a kid who's trying to make sense of the unfathomable. You like this?" She fingered the hem of the new top she was wearing.
"Yes. Of course. It's, urn, nice." My praise was so weak I didn't even believe me.
She punched me on the arm.
"Get used to it. I got some jeans and some shorts with elastic waists, too."
"I can't wait to see them."
She hit me again.
As we climbed a ridge to the east to watch the shadows edge into the valley, I moved on to the next part of Kevins story.
"There's more that I learned from Kevin. I should have made this connection on my own, but I didn't. It turns out that Kevin and his brother were the exact same age as Tami and Miko. They were in the same year at school. Kevin knew both of the girls."
Lauren looked my way, raised her eyebrows, and asked, "The plot thickens. So were they friends?" "Kevin says his brother was actually closer to Tami and Miko than he was. Kevin says that Dennis, his brother, was the better skier. This group of kids who hung out together-apparently they were all pretty great skiers. Only the best of them could ski with Tami and Miko, though. That wasn't Kevin-but he knew the girls well enough. They had classes together, hung out together after school.
You know. It was a pretty small town then." "Still is," she said, pointing out a big bird soaring high above Highway 36.
"Especially if you leave out the tourists." "Is that a hawk?" I asked.
"Don't know. Maybe. Did he date either of them?"
"Says not."
"And? What does he remember about what happened to them? What does he think?"
"Mostly he just remembers it as the beginning of the tragedies. That's what he calls that time in his life.
"The tragedies."
"The hawk, or whatever it was, swooped behind a ridge top. Above the grasses on the crest of the hill the sky had turned thick and black. A massive thunderstorm was building in the foothills near Golden. Lauren said, "I'm glad that's not coming our way. Bet it's full of hail."
We started back toward our house just in case Lauren's meteorological forecasting abilities were flawed. Emily ran into the thick grass along the lane and pawed frantically at something in the dirt. We waited for her to finish whatever she was doing. She dawdled until a crisp crack of thunder in the distance spooked her out of the meadow, her ears as plastered down as a Bouvier's cropped ears can be. If she had possessed more than a nub of a tail it would have been between her legs. Emily despised thunder and lightning.
Lauren asked, "Did Kevin and his friends have theories about the girls? About their disappearance? About the murders?"
"Sure. At first-for a few days, he said-everybody thought that the girls had run away. He describes Tami the same way everyone else does. Heart of gold, a lot of fun, but a bit of a wild child. She was always talking about wanting to see the world, to go places. To get away. Her friends thought she may have had a fight with her parents about something and just taken off."
"Did she argue a lot with her parents?"
"The impression I got is that it was a love-hate thing. She and her mom would be real tight and then Tami would push her away for a while."
Lauren chewed on my impression.
"And Kevin and his buddies-they thought that Miko would just go along with Tami if she ran?"
"I asked the same thing. He was evasive about that. Said Miko wasn't really like that. Wasn't really a follower. But he didn't elaborate."
Lauren knelt down to comfort Emily after another explosive clap of thunder.
"And after? After the bodies were found? What did he and his friends think then?"
"Kevin said that he and his buddies all bought into the stranger theory. None of them wanted to believe that anyone they knew in town could do what had been done to their friends. He said that none of them really considered that it might have been a local. But…"
"But?" "But… he also told me that there was a rumor going around that Miko was seeing an older guy. Somebody in town."
"But they didn't know who?"
"No, they didn't."
"Did they speculate?" She stood back up.
"Yeah. And this is where it gets really interesting. Kevin and his friends thought it might be Raymond Welle. Some of the kids had seen the two of them together a couple of times. Going for a walk. Having coffee. Things like that."
"Did Kevin know that Miko was in psychotherapy with Welle?"
"It didn't sound like he knew. I didn't tell him. Couldn't figure out a way to ask directly without spilling the beans."