I walked up behind Lauren and kissed her on her hair. She reached up and slid her warm fingers across the skin on the back of my neck. I almost asked, "How did you know it was me?" But I didn't. I said, "Hi, how you doing?"
"Tired, but okay."
"You at a place you can stop? We need to get home and rescue Viv. She's had a long day with the baby."
She smiled and said, "Sure."
While she packed up, I examined the overriding reason-hell, the only reason other than its central location-for leasing office space in the Colorado Building: the view.
The streets in downtown Boulder are numbered in ascending order beginning at the base of the foothills of the Rockies. That means that Fourteenth Street is roughly fourteen blocks away from the dramatic incline of the mountains, an almost perfect distance to maximize the view. From Cozy's eighth-floor perch, high above the treetops, Boulder in springtime appeared as a lush landscape of old redbrick and flagstone buildings flanked by gentle rises to the north-Mapleton Hill-to the south-Chautauqua, and barricaded to the west by the vaulting presence of the foothills of the Rockies.
As dusk approached, the vista was glorious.
Lauren and I had almost the same view from our home miles to the east, but ours was wide angle. This was zoom. Every time I saw the close-up perspective from this elevated perch, I was captivated by the difference. Our view from home was mostly sky-the monumental mountains ended up being dwarfed by the infinite western sky. This view was mostly mountains, their sheer mass and grandeur looming over a town that appeared to have been built to the wrong scale.
Lauren took my hand and pulled me away from the windows. We both said good-bye to Cozy. He tucked the phone between his shoulder and his ear and waved good-bye.
In the elevator, Lauren said, "It hasn't been a particularly good afternoon for Lucy, sweets."
I swallowed. "Tell me."
"Over the last hour or so, Cozy and I learned some new things. When Sam and Lucy worked up Royal's house after the murder, one of the pieces of evidence they recovered was unwashed laundry from on top of the washing machine. There was also some laundry in the dryer. Did you know about any of that? I don't remember whether I told you. It hadn't seemed important until today. Anyway, it turns out that a sheet had some stains on it. It now appears that the police suspect that they can link the DNA on the stains to Lucy."
"What kind of stains?"
She sighed. "They think they're vaginal secretions."
"Vaginal secretions?" I said. Lions and tigers and bears. "Oh my."
The elevator door opened at the fourth floor. A psychologist, someone I barely knew from some insipid meeting of local psychologists I'd once attended against my better judgment, entered the elevator. I smiled and said, "Hello." She struggled, without apparent success, to place my face before she turned around and stared at the doors. Lauren slid her hand into mine and squeezed. The three of us stood silently and watched the numbers.
It took me only two of the remaining three floors to decide that there weren't very many ways for Lucy Tanner to have left vaginal secretions on sheets in Royal Peterson's house.
In fact, I could only think of one. I wasted a moment considering whether I was being unimaginative.
Outside the building on the Fourteenth Street sidewalk, Lauren asked, "Are you parked nearby?"
"Not too far, over on Walnut. Is your car ready to be picked up?" Her car was in the shop.
She shook her head. "No, they're still waiting for that thing to be delivered. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not." She checked her watch and said, "Let's walk up the Mall for a block or two and circle back to your car. We have time."
The "thing" was a transmission gasket. I took her briefcase and hung it over my shoulder. We held hands. As we turned the corner onto Pearl Street, I said, "Vaginal secretions?"
"Yeah, sorry to say. Apparently the police think they found the whole damn wet spot."
"Semen?"
"No."
"Really?"
"Think condom," she said.
"Oh," I said, feeling stupid. "Did they find that?"
"No."
Wispy clouds hung like smoke above the foothills of the Front Range. The sun was already invisible from our near vantage, though the sky above our heads was still bright. The cloud pattern promised a great finale to sunset, but I knew we wouldn't be home in time to catch it.
Lauren said, "It's too soon to know for sure. But that's the general direction that this is heading. Damned by a wet spot."
While I considered the timelessness of Macbeth, we crossed Thirteenth and moved slowly toward Broadway.
I stated the obvious. "So Lucy and Royal were having an affair?"
"Lucy won't talk about it. She continues to maintain that the details of her relationship to Royal will only serve to solidify the notion that she had a motive to kill him."
I tried to think like a prosecutor. It was not a natural act. "The police think they have means-her fingerprints are on the pottery. They think they have opportunity-a witness places her on the scene. And Lucy basically admits that she had motive. This doesn't look great for your client."
"Tell me about it."
"Lucy was having an affair with Roy and she'd decided to break up with him?" I asked. "Is that what she's saying?"
"She's not saying. But that's what I'm guessing. She's recently engaged, you know?"
"I know, she told me. But the engagement predates the wet spot by a couple of weeks. What's your theory of what happened? One last time with Royal? A good-bye fuck?"
She shook her head. "Nothing fits particularly well, I admit it. Pretty night, isn't it?"
"Lovely. Assume you're right, babe. How do things develop that night so that she ends up whacking him on the head with a lamp?"
"Like I said, nothing fits well."
"Self-defense?"
"Cozy and I would love self-defense. Lucy isn't offering, though. She maintains she had nothing to do with Royal's murder."
"What about Lucy's fiancé? If he found out about the affair, he'd have a motive, too, wouldn't he?"
"We're there already. Cozy's investigator has begun looking into that for us, though Lucy doesn't even know we have an investigator looking at him. I'm sure she'd go nuts if she knew what we were doing."
"And the bomb? What about the bomb? What's the theory as to why Lucy would want to blow up the Peterson house?"
"The bomb is our salvation. It's the only thing keeping Lucy out of jail right now. They can't tie her to it. If they found a molecule of evidence that put Lucy and that bomb in the same room, she'd be screwed."
I was amazed at how quickly my wife, a lifelong prosecutor, had adopted the vernacular of a defense attorney. People who were her colleagues days before were now "they."
At Broadway, we turned around and traced our steps back down the Mall toward the car. "How do you and Cozy know about the wet spot? There's no required discovery yet, is there? Lucy hasn't been charged."
"No formal discovery, no." She gave my hand a squeeze. "Let's just say that the politics in the DA's office right now are working to our advantage. Everyone's posturing to take Royal's place. Everyone's scrambling to keep this thing from going to a special prosecutor. Keeping us informed is part of… someone's strategy."
"Who's feeding you? Mitchell? Elliot? I bet it's not Nora."
She said, "No, of course it's not Nora. And that's all I'm telling you."
On the way home from downtown I slowed to a stop at a red light at the corner of Broadway and University by the Hill. As if to prove to me that Boulder really is a small town, Naomi Bigg pulled up in the lane next to us driving a filthy BMW sedan. She was wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. I don't think she saw me and I said nothing to Lauren about her presence next to us.