I limped back toward the Cherokee. Sam was next to me. I said, "You guys finish the search at the Bigg home, Sam?"
"Mostly."
"Did you find anything?"
He shrugged. He wasn't sure he wanted to answer my question.
I said, "I don't like this, Sam."
"I don't either. Come on, I'll take you home." He stopped. "Did you know Lucy had visited Susan here?"
"No, Sam, I didn't. She didn't tell me."
He studied my face in a way that left me convinced that he was deciding whether to believe me or not.
I said, "What do you think of Mrs. Peterson?"
"I have trouble believing she's related to Lucy. I now know exactly where I come down on the whole nature/nurture debate. That's what I think. How's your ass holding up?"
"Not too good. I think maybe I should've borrowed some of Susan's pain meds."
"That's a felony. I would've had to take you in for it. Come on, I'll drive you home."
Before he had a chance to fire the car's ignition, Sam's phone sounded again. He flipped it open and said, "Purdy."
I shifted my weight to take the pressure off my wound. It didn't help.
Sam's eyes were open wide as he listened to the phone call. After about a minute, he said, "Be right there."
"Be right where?"
"Marin Bigg is awake and talking. We're going to Community, see if she has any insight into anything."
"Like who murdered her mother?"
"Yeah, like that."
"Drop me off at the Boulderado on the way. I'll get a cab home."
"Sorry, this game has gone into overtime and you're still in the lineup. I want your opinion of her. We're still not sure if she's part of Ramp's crew or if she's a victim."
CHAPTER 39
Lucy spent the night in a filthy construction trailer in Denver's Central Platte Valley, not too far from the REI that had taken over the old Forney Train Museum. A quick glance at the painting on the sign that graced the entrance to the construction site left her thinking that the building that was being framed was going to be some overpriced loft development.
Her hands and ankles were bound by plastic handcuffs that Ramp had discovered in the trunk of her Volvo after he'd parked it in a big shed in an industrial neighborhood on Denver's west side, somewhere between Broadway and Interstate 25. Ramp waited until after dark before he drove them in a gray Ford truck a mile or two to the construction site.
Since they'd arrived he'd only removed the bindings on Lucy's wrists and ankles twice, each time to allow her to use the portable toilet outside the construction trailer. He'd covered her with her own handgun the whole time. When she was done in the toilet, he'd had her rebind her own ankles and then lie prone on her abdomen before he recinched her wrists. Each step he prefaced with "please" and closed with "thank you."
Ramp fed Lucy a dinner of Slim Jims and Dr Pepper. She declined dessert, which was Little Debbie's oatmeal cookies, even though she'd adored their supersweetness when her dad had given them to her as a kid. Ramp allowed Lucy the small sofa that was tucked into one end of the trailer while he curled up on an army-surplus cot ten feet away. The sofa smelled. When Lucy commented on the odor, he told her that he'd smelled it, too, and thought the aroma was from construction adhesive.
Some kind of radio transmitting device-it looked to Lucy like a garage door opener-was taped to the inside of Ramp's left wrist. He demonstrated how he could hit the button with either hand at any time he wanted.
She'd asked him where the bomb was.
"Close by," he'd responded.
"A shaped charge?"
His eyes twinkled. "You've been talking to my grandma," he said. "She's a piece of work. I love that woman to death."
Lucy said, "Yes, I talked to her this morning."
"She tell you where to find me?"
"No. She didn't. I asked, but she wouldn't tell me. She wanted to talk to you and your dad first."
"That sounds like her." He ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair. "She's gotten bitter. It's been hard to watch."
"Your grandmother's had a lot of loss recently. Her husband, your uncle, your mom-it's a lot for someone to deal with."
"I know," he acknowledged. "It's still been hard to watch. When you love somebody, it's hard to watch."
She noted the empathy. Lucy hadn't yet heard a word of malice from Jason Ramp Bass. Not one.
He was a cute kid with tousled blond-brown hair, good skin, and a single silver earring in his right ear. He was also blessed with his grandmother's dazzling blue eyes and the kind of fetching smile that probably opened a lot of doors with girls while he was in high school, which Lucy figured wasn't too long ago.
"What do you like to be called?" she asked him after he told her it was time to get some sleep, that tomorrow was going to be a busy day.
"Jason. I like that best."
"Not Ramp?"
"Nah. My friends hung it on me, but I never loved it."
"Is tomorrow going to be busy for me, or just for you?"
"Both of us. I didn't originally plan on it, but I'm beginning to see how having a hostage might be helpful."
The word sent chills through Lucy. She was the hostage. "What's going to happen? What are your plans, Jason?"
He didn't have to think long before he answered her question. "My plans? I want to get a dialogue going."
"A dialogue?"
"A dialogue. About justice in America. The way it works, the way it doesn't. I have a friend-he's black, a guy I went to high school with-who's doing more time for selling speed than the murderer who killed my mom got for killing his first victim. Is that right? I want a dialogue about stuff like that. I think it's time that we had a dialogue about that. As a society. About sentences and judges and courts and parole. About protecting innocent people. About malpractice in courts the same way we talk about malpractice in hospitals."
"The inequities," Lucy said.
"Yeah, the inequities," he repeated. Lucy thought he seemed pleased at her choice of words.
He stood and moved across the room to the sofa. "I'm going to have to tape you down so I can get some rest without worrying about you trying to get away. What position do you want to be in?"
She thought about it. "On my back, I guess." She could only imagine how sore she would be by morning.
"You want to go to the Super Bowl first?"
"What?"
"The plastic head outside. It's called the Super Bowl. You want to go again before I tie you down?"
"I just went."
"Whatever."
He grabbed a huge roll of duct tape and wound it individually around her ankles and then under and around the sofa. He repeated the procedure twice more and moved up her torso. She could tell that the proximity to her breasts made him uncomfortable. With her manacled hands she held them up and out of the way so that he could wrap her around her rib cage.
"Not too tight, please. I need to breathe."
"I'll be careful," he said.
"Thanks."
He returned to his cot. "Don't know if you noticed, but there was an actual dialogue for a while after the shootings at Columbine, and again for a little while after the thing at Santana, that high school near San Diego. About bullying, and cliques, and jocks and freaks, and insiders and outsiders in high school, how destructive it all is. It got drowned out by all the hoopla because those kids were so angry and so stupid about what they did, so the dialogue didn't do enough or last long enough to accomplish what it could've. The Columbine kids and that boy at Santana were more interested in the killing than the talking. I'm more interested in the talking. I want this dialogue to last longer. And I think it will. I hope it makes a difference, though I doubt I'll be around to see it when it does."
Lucy had a hard time finding a position where she could see her captor across the narrow trailer. But she knew she'd just heard him predict that he wasn't likely to survive whatever was about to happen. "You're sure that you're not just trying to get even? To get some retribution for what happened to your mother?"