"Yeah."
"Anyway, I thought I'd call you because I thought it was interesting what's plastered all over the kid's door. Outside of the door, facing the hallway. It's kind of goofy."
"What?"
"Little signs. Maybe fifty of 'em. Maybe more, who knows. I'm sure somebody will end up counting them. They're all lined up in neat rows and columns. The signs are all different designs-no two of 'em match-but they all say one of two things. Though some are in languages I don't even want to know. Want to guess?"
"No."
"About half of them say 'Do not disturb.' The other half say 'Be right back.' You being a shrink, I thought you'd get a kick out of that."
"Little 'Do not disturb' signs and 'Be right back' signs? All over his door?"
"Yeah, just like the ones you hang from the doorknob when you're staying at a Ramada. Though you probably don't stay at Ramada, do you? Those kinds of signs. The kid must have collected them."
"I don't know about that. I wonder if it was Paul or his mother who put them on the door. What does the room look like?"
"Like a kid's room. It does have a certain time-warp quality. Kid liked the old Dallas Cowboys. Lots of Troy Aikman and Emmett what's-his-face. Good stuff, expensive. Autographed jerseys. Signed pictures. Emmett Smith? Is that it? I think that's right, Smith. I should know that. He sure gave my Vikings enough grief over the years, didn't he?"
I didn't know. "But nothing unusual?"
"Not at first glance. Just the signs. I thought those were unusual, that's why I called."
Although I didn't believe what I was about to say, I said, "They could just be a preadolescent boy putting up a 'No trespassing' sign."
"Doesn't feel that way. I'll get a picture of the door to show you. This is something."
While I was considering the discovery, I said, "Is there someplace in the house where somebody could have made a bomb, Sam?"
"Not at first glance. There's no obvious workshop and we haven't identified any explosives. We'll swab for residue, but I'm betting that we'll come up with jack."
"Then what?"
"Everybody's looking for Ramp. That's where the money is. We're hoping to find an address or phone number here. Other than pointing us toward the Internet and to his grandparents' ranch, you don't know where to send us to find him, right? No recovered memories since this afternoon?"
The "recovered memories" comment was another dig.
"Has anyone talked to Marin, Sam? Is she awake? Maybe she knows something about Ramp."
"Scott Malloy's standing by over at the hospital to talk to her the moment she's able."
"How bad are her injuries?"
"To quote one of the docs, the wounds are uglier than they are serious. Her mom absorbed most of the blast. They think Marin will be fine-if her luck is bad she may lose use of an eye."
"Poor kid."
"Poor kid was mixed up with somebody who made bombs. For all we know right now, she was helping him."
CHAPTER 35
It took Lucy more than a thimbleful of patience, but she'd waited until she was in Agate before she made her next move. She'd allowed Alan to pull out ahead of her and watched him turn onto the interstate as he headed west toward Boulder. She turned into a gas station adjacent to I-70, filled the Volvo's tank, and bought a carton of chocolate milk and a tasteless sandwich filled with milky-white slices of something masquerading as turkey.
She didn't call Sam Purdy.
Instead, she made a phone call to a police department colleague who'd made no secret of the fact that he was eager to get into her pants, and asked him for help tracking down Jason Ramp Bass's current address in Denver. She didn't tell the man why she wanted the address. And he didn't ask.
As she killed the call she figured that she'd know exactly where to find Ramp before she was done with her sandwich.
She was wrong. The return call with Ramp's address didn't come for almost two and a half hours. Her contact had been yanked into a meeting before he'd been able to get back to her with the information. When he finally did phone, he dangled the address like a carrot at the end of a stick until she agreed to have a drink with him after work. She picked a day for the rendezvous that was almost a week away. It left her plenty of time to cancel.
Once she had the address, she thought once more about calling Sam Purdy with the day's news. If she called him, he'd make her back off, wouldn't even let her close to the case. That wasn't okay.
She reached the same decision she'd reached every other time she'd pondered the problem since Agate. She decided to find Ramp by herself.
Capitol Hill in Denver is just south of the Uptown neighborhood where Jason Ramp Bass once lived with his parents. Although it bears some resemblance to Uptown, Capitol Hill is more densely populated, is even more diverse, and suffers from fewer pockets of acute gentrification than does its northern neighbor.
The apartment building where Lucy thought Ramp lived was in no danger of going condo, and nobody in their right mind was ever going to mistake it for a loft. It was a postwar brick rectangle that looked as though it had been modeled after a shoebox. It was flanked on each side by gorgeous stone mansions.
She parked her car just down from Ramp's building on Pennsylvania Avenue and walked back toward it. The doorbell to apartment 3B was marked "Bass." Lucy smiled and shook her head. All day long, given the kind of day she'd expected to have, it had all been too easy. It was just about time, she thought, where something should go wrong.
To ring or not to ring, that was the next question.
She rings and he's not home, nothing's lost.
She rings and he's home-that's when things could get complicated. What would she say to him? Sam Purdy had always taught her to walk into any interview she conducted with the cards stacked in her favor. And with at least one ace tucked up her sleeve. Her favorite ace in the hole was her detective shield, and she'd had to give that up when she was suspended.
What else did she have?
Her wits. And her personal handgun. That was about it.
She backed down the concrete steps and started strolling away from the building to give herself time to rethink her options. She considered calling Cozy to see how bad the fallout had been from the Daily Camera story about her and Susan Peterson but decided that she could wait to learn about that. No matter how bad it had been, she was sure it had been bad enough. She also second-guessed her decision not to call Sam until she was absolutely certain that Jason Ramp Bass was the man they were looking for.
She reminded herself to think like a cop. There was no way she should approach Jason Bass alone without notifying somebody what she was up to. Ella Ramp may have already called her grandson and warned him that Lucy was on his tail. The young man could be armed.
Lucy stopped and used her cell phone to call Alan. She got his voice mail. "Alan, listen, it's Lucy. I think I found Ramp. He lives in Capitol Hill in Denver." She recited the address on Pennsylvania. "I'm heading up to his apartment to try and talk to him now. If for some reason I don't get back to you later today or this evening, call Sam and tell him what I was up to."
She hung up, squeezed her left triceps against her rib cage to feel the reassuring pressure of her holstered weapon, returned to the front door of the apartment building, and hit the bell marked "Bass."
No answer.
She tried the knob on the front door of the building. Locked.
One more time she tried the bell. As she waited for a response she backed away from the door and stared up at the fourth floor, trying to guess which apartment was Ramp's.
CHAPTER 36
Ramp was halfway to the Water Street location of the welding supply company where he worked when he realized that he'd forgotten his inspiration. He turned his car around and headed back to his apartment.