"Well, he's not underachieving now."
She chuckled. " I don't know about that. Ever take a close look at the current makeup of the House of Representatives? Most of those people wouldn't stand a chance of winning a second day on Wheel of Fortune. You have to admit that Congress has fulfilled the founding fathers' dreams and become the ultimate equal-opportunity employer."
"But before he was elected, Raymond Welle had his own nationally syndicated radio show. Not too many people get that far."
"And the ones who do? Whom exactly are we talking about, sweetie? Howard Stern and Don Imus? Rush Limbaugh? Dr. Laura?" She smiled at me in a way that was, at once, both patronizing and enormously affectionate.
"Are you going to try to make an argument that the cream has floated to the top of that vat?"
The premise was distasteful.
"I'll grant you a point on that. But you do have to admit he's made a name for himself. Raymond."
"Sure he's made a name for himself. What did he call himself on that stupid radio show before he was elected? America's therapist? And his campaign slogan, what was it?
"Colorado needs to get Welle." But I don't think he did it all himself. Raymond's where he is because he was smart enough and slimy enough first to marry Gloria, and second, to capitalize on the fact that she was brutally murdered.
They used each other while they were alive. He got the last laugh though: he used her after she was dead. The man took his grief and vengeance onto his radio show like he was the one who'd invented the Greek tragedy."
My wife was being unusually reproachful. Typically, she found a way to shadow her criticisms behind a veil of acceptance.
"So, can I safely assume that you didn't really like Raymond very much?" I asked.
"No," she replied.
"I didn't. And I still don't."
"Is it politics? What?"
I watched her face contort into a yawn. The day of travel and meetings was taking a toll on her energy.
"What he spouts off about, that's not politics. I'm sorry, that's dogma."
"What then? Why the negativity?"
Lauren picked some turkey from the side of her sandwich and slid it into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed before she responded to my question.
"If you knew him in high school-Raymond, I mean he would have been the boy who was always between cliques. He was the kid who considered himself too good for the group he was with and he would be doing everything he could to ingratiate himself with the group he wanted to be in.
When I met him, he'd already managed to marry into the best clique he'd ever find. I suppose I was as guilty of that sin as he was. What I never liked about him is that he felt that his marriage, and his new status, elevated him to some new exalted level. Raymond actually believed that he was a better person because he'd married Gloria."
Lauren and I had never done a detailed tour of the marital territory she'd left behind with her divorce, so my next question to her was not uncomplicated. I couldn't foresee how she'd reply. I asked, "What was it like for you when you were married to Jake? I mean socially, I guess. You know, in the world of wealth and privilege?"
She sipped through a straw from a bottle of herbal tea before she replied.
"What was it like up there? Well, the food was almost always good. The sheets were always soft. The flowers were always fresh. The lines were short. But the people? The people were the same as they are everywhere else. Some wonderful, some ordinary, some despicable."
"Raymond?"
"He was never ordinary."
After lunch, the group filed out of the theater and descended the wide oak stairs to the main room in Kimber Listers flat. Chairs were pulled in from the dining-room table. Large pillows were tossed on the wood floor. Lister and Russ Claven wheeled an old-fashioned schoolhouse chalkboard in from another room.
Before everyone was settled down, Lister began to make introductions of the visitors to the proceedings. First he introduced the current chief of the Steamboat Springs Police Department, a barrel-chested man with red hair named Percy Smith was identified as the man responsible for bringing the case of the two dead girls to the attention of Locard. The next introduction was Lauren.
Finally, me. The group pretty much ignored us.
Lauren and I had grabbed a small chintz love seat at the back of the room. I sat enthralled as a discussion of the facts about the two dead girls slowly developed into a tornadic debate about whether the case could be closed with help from the group that was assembled. Questions were posed. Some were answered. Some were deflected or deferred. Lister outlined every advance and failure of the debate on the chalkboard with a fine hand that wasted precious little chalk.
The woman with the eye patch, it turned out, was a crime-scene specialist from North Carolina. Her name was Flynn Coe. She quickly became the focus of much of the early discussion, which dealt with the management-or mismanagement-of the crime scenes where the two girls had been found and where the snowmobile had been recovered. I assumed that Flynn had studied the police reports in advance of the meetings, because her comprehension of the problems posed by the collection and contamination of the evidence was so thorough and thoughtful.
russ Claven, much to my surprise, revealed himself as a forensic pathologist who was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins. I struggled to understand the nuances of the questions that were thrown his way about the initial autopsies, tissue preservation, and the effects of longterm freezing on human cadavers. Most of it, thankfully, was way over my head.
I was also trying to begin to internalize a roster of the other regular members of Locard. At least three or four people in the room were FBI, including a supervisor from the Bureau's crime lab, and a hair-and-fibers specialist whose head was as bald as a baby's butt. I counted two prosecutors besides Lauren, one federal, one Maryland. Two homicide detectives. A faculty member from Northeastern University. A ballistics person who didn't look old enough for full membership in the NRA. A document analyst. A forensic dentist. A forensic anthropologist. A couple of cops whose specialties I couldn't discern. A forensic psychiatrist who looked like a game-show host, and A. J." who was a forensic psychologist. Two or three people never said enough to permit me to make a guess about their professional specialties.
After the focus shifted from Flynn Coe and the crime scene, a number of questions were directed to A. J." who had already completed a search of the FBI VICAP database looking for evidence of similar crimes in other jurisdictions. A few Locard members argued that two murders of young men-one in Arizona the year before, one in Texas the year after-that were accompanied by hand amputations warranted further analysis. To me, A. J. seemed skeptical about the connection.
The very fact that she wanted me to assess the pre morbid psychology of the two girls argued against her having much faith in the serial-killer theory.
My watch told me that we were almost two hours into the debate before a sedate woman who sat far off to the side in the gathering took a break from her needlepoint long enough to speak for the first time. I guessed she was in her early sixties. She wore a long denim skirt and a pale green cardigan over an eyelet blouse. Only the top of the cardigan was buttoned. Everyone in the room quieted in response to her clearing her throat. As the room hushed, she lifted her half-glasses from her nose and dropped them gingerly to her ample chest, where they hung on a beaded chain. She said, "Excuse me, please, Kimber. But I have a question. Maybe two."
Kimber softened his booming voice as much as he could, which wasn't much.
"Yes, Mary. Of course."
"What consideration was given to the involvement of the brother? Tami Franklin's brother? The one who claims he knew where she was taking the snowmobile that night?"
Percy Smith, the current chief of the Steamboat Springs Police Department, responded.