Sam called around nine o'clock that evening. He had news. The Boulder Police had discovered an "explosive device" during a sweep of the home of the woman who ran the District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit. The bomb was found in Nora Doyle's garage, well hidden among some gardening supplies that were stored directly opposite the driver's side door of her Honda Accord. Had the bomb gone off, Nora might have been impaled on a hoe.
The bomb squad thought the initiator was radio controlled. Sam promised to tell me more when he knew more.
There's another bomb. That lawyer.
Cozier Maitlin's office, car, and Mapleton Hill home had been swept with extreme care, with negative results. The evacuation of the Colorado Building on Fourteenth Street had apparently been quite an inconvenience for quite a lot of people. Sam reported that at least one passerby voiced her hope that if there was indeed a bomb, she was praying it was big enough to bring the damn ugly place down.
The home and chambers of Superior Court Judge Richard Bates Leventhal, who had approved the plea bargain in Marin Bigg's rape, were swept, too. No bombs were discovered.
Lauren and I already knew, of course, that our property had been re-searched without result before I'd left the hospital that afternoon.
At times of stress, I ride my bike. The more stress I feel, the harder I ride. The amount of stress I was feeling the day Naomi died would have necessitated a fierce climb-a muscle-burning, ass-never-touches-the-saddle ascent that few mountain ranges in the world can offer on paved roads. But the eleven stitches high on the back of my leg near the imaginary line where butt becomes hip and my quasi-concussion conspired to keep me housebound and off my bicycle. My stress relief would have to come from baby Grace, who, bless her heart, handled the job effortlessly, and from the dogs, who, though generally amusing, weren't quite as reliable a tranquilizer as Xanax.
I tried to read. Couldn't concentrate. I tried to nap. Couldn't sleep. Mostly I spent the evening thinking.
Pondering.
Okay, perseverating.
Patients lie to me all the time.
All the time.
Most of the time I accept the mistruths as being part of the process that people go through while they're coming to terms with the myriad of ways that they are lying to themselves. I don't, as a rule, take it personally when I learn that I've been served untruths by patients. And I'm usually not even embarrassed when I discover that I've fallen hook, line, and sinker for the prevarications.
I've heard colleagues say that they know when their patients are lying to them. I find the contention preposterous. I can't usually tell, and even when I think I can tell, I'm not usually sure. And I'm almost always unconvinced that it matters. I try to make it my job to learn as much from my patients' lies as I do from the truth. Either way, the therapy benefits.
But Naomi Bigg had lied to me.
She'd really, really lied to me. And I'd fallen for her creative story like a four-year-old stuffing a tooth beneath his pillow believes in visions of an impending visit from a dental fairy carrying a twinkling wand and dressed in white organza.
Paul Bigg, Naomi's living, breathing, wouldn't-it-be-cool, green-apron-wearing kid, was dead.
Or was he?
I was rapidly approaching a conclusion that Paul hadn't ever really been dead for his mother. Although I'd probably never know for sure, I suspected that Naomi hadn't resurrected Paul solely for my benefit; I suspected that Naomi had never really buried her son at all. In the psychotherapy I'd been doing with Naomi, I wondered if I'd just been hanging out on the bank of the pond, witnessing the ripples of her unsettled grief.
The psychological process Naomi had been engaged in was either crafty as hell or it was delusional as hell. My money was on delusional, on some kind of narrowly defined psychotic process.
If I was right, it meant that, as Naomi's therapist, I'd totally missed the presence of her psychotic symptoms.
There was no escaping the fact that my care of Naomi Bigg had not been one of my better clinical moments.
Lauren put Grace to bed while I watched the local TV news accounts of the bombing death of Naomi Bigg. Marin, according to all reports, was out of surgery but remained in serious condition.
Reading between the lines, I assumed she was still uncommunicative with the police.
The other big story of the day was the Daily Camera's revelation about Lucy Tanner's parentage. The local legal analysts made it clear that the Boulder prosecutors were getting perilously close to believing that they had a motive that would firmly tie Lucy to the Royal Peterson murder.
Sam called again just as I was about to learn what the weather was going to be the next day in the Carolinas.
"Hey," he said.
"Hi," I replied. "Any word on Lucy?"
"No, not yet. Certain people aren't convinced he's got her. There's a consensus developing that she's just hiding from what was in the paper this morning. Guess where I am."
I wasn't in the mood. "Sam, I'm not in the mood."
"Okay, I'll just tell you. I'm sitting on the stairs that go up to the second floor in Naomi Bigg's house. We're executing a search warrant."
"Oh," I said. I wasn't surprised about anything but that it had taken so long for the search to begin. I assumed the delay was a paperwork/convince-the-judge kind of problem. I doubted that any evidence of the explosives would be discovered at the Bigg home. Whatever law enforcement personnel ended up searching the Ramp ranch between Agate and Limon were the ones who would find the explosive residue.
"Finding anything?" My feelings about Sam's errand were more than a little confused. Maybe it was the minor concussion. But I wasn't exactly sure whether I wanted Sam to answer my question "Yes" or to answer it "No."
He made a nasal sound that I couldn't interpret. "Who knows? We just got here and we're still looking. I tell you, it's going to take all night to go over this place. Rich people's houses have lots of rooms and they own lots of shit. You ever notice that? This house has a little room that seems to be set aside just for wrapping presents. Like a gift-wrap room. Who has a gift-wrap room? Well, the Biggs do. I look at some of the stuff in this place and I wonder how somebody could be standing in a store somewhere and ever convince themselves that they actually needed one of those. You know the kind of stuff that I mean?"
I did, and I didn't. "You wanted something, Sam?"
"You're okay, right? Just the bump on your head and the cut on your butt?"
"Upper leg, Sam. That, and a dead patient whose daughter is still in serious condition in the hospital. And Lucy." I let the words hang.
He said, "Every cop in the state is looking for Ramp. I'm hoping there's something here that helps us find him. We find him, I think we find her. Anyway, I was telling you what I discovered here. Right at the top of the stairs, first door on the left, is the kid's room. You know, Paul? The one who died playing Little League? The one you thought was busy planning his own little Columbine?"
Regardless of the fact that I'd almost been killed by a bomb earlier that day, my friend Sam wasn't above a well-placed dig. I tried to deflect it. "Paul's room is still there?" I was thinking out loud; I knew that I was still struggling to understand the extent of Naomi's delusions.
Sam, of course, seized on the opportunity to take me literally. "Sure. That happens when kids die. Parents aren't ready to let go. They preserve stuff. Bedroom is often high on the list. This shouldn't be news to you, Alan. It's like your field, you know? Human behavior?"