Coloradans don’t tolerate gray skies with any equanimity.
Other weather we endure. Gray skies, no.
On the high desert landscape where the Great Plains rise into the Front Range of the Rockies, we live through the often relentless heat of June and July with little complaint, reassuring each other that even though it’s 103 degrees outside, at least it’s a dry heat.
Our once-a-decade oh-my-God blizzards, or our annual winter cold snaps of day-after-day temperatures below zero and wind chills that feel arctic? Most of us write them off as the price of living in close proximity to the best skiing on the planet.
The hundred-mile-an-hour winter Chinooks blowing out of the mountains in January and February? Hey, lean into it, it’s only a little wind.
Golf-ball-size hail? Fierce summer thunderstorms? We live in a desert. We need the moisture.
But the absence of sunshine?
After two consecutive overcast days the grumbling begins, everyone’s temper shortens, traffic cops stop giving warnings, and people aren’t quite as nice to their dogs. Add a third or, God forbid, a fourth day of concrete-colored skies, and most of the state’s residents, especially the natives, begin to wonder for what it is they’re being punished. A few furtively check their IDs to see if they’ve been magically relocated to Seattle or Cleveland or Buffalo or some other sunshine-deprived location as penance for an obviously serious transgression against humanity.
It’s not that it’s always sunny here. But I have to admit that it feels like it’s always sunny here. The tourist board throws around statistics: We have 300-plus days of sunshine each year, we’re sunnier than San Diego, much sunnier than Miami. I don’t know if any of it’s true. But I do know that the reality is that in Colorado I awaken every morning expecting to see the sun for a healthy chunk of the day.
One day of gray is disappointing. Two days in a row becomes a mini-crisis.
Anything more is cause for alarm.
Once the sun had set on Diane and me as we walked the Mall sharing our secrets about the Miller family, the rest of that week between Christmas and New Year’s-the week after Mallory disappeared-was meteorologically bleak. Thursday brought constant flurries under steely skies. Friday taunted-the sun’s silhouette was occasionally visible behind quickly passing clouds, but warming rays never reached the ground in a way that left behind even a hint of a shadow. Saturday, snow flurries fell intermittently all day long, icy winds howled from Wyoming, and by nightfall downy drifts began to cushion the bases of fences and the low sections of walls that dared to face north.
The sun had disappeared from our state-probably forever-it seemed.
A googol of reporters was camped out in Boulder, still expecting-or, God forbid, hoping for-a garroted body to emerge from a Boulder basement.
But Mallory Miller stayed stubbornly missing.
I was getting dragged into the riddle of her absence further and further.
Everybody was cranky.
Everybody, that is, except Sam Purdy.
And Sam probably should have been cranky. He had been for all of the many years we’d been friends. A lot was going on in his life. He was on the cusp of completing his first holiday season as an unmarried man. He had just celebrated the anniversary of surviving for a year after a heart attack-he’d reminded me that it beat the alternative, hands-down-and he had just managed to complete twelve-plus months without developing a fresh gallstone.
He was still learning the ropes of single-parenting his son, Simon.
And because of Mallory Miller, he was being forced to work overtime on a high-profile holiday crime, not exactly his thing, as part of a team of many detectives, most definitely not his thing.
But Sam’s mood was good. Boulder’s streak of gray days was nothing compared to the winter stretches he’d endured in his family home on Minnesota’s Iron Range. His health problems? He had grown philosophical about them, felt he was doing all he could-with diet and exercise-to manage them. His divorce? Despite some stumbles he thought that he and Sherry had handled it all like grown-ups. Was there enough money to go around? Of course not-as Sam had indelicately put it, “I live in fucking Boulder. How could there be enough money?” Sam’s son Simon? He was a good kid. He had some emotional bruises from what his parents’ marital disruption had forced him to endure, but Sam was confident that his son would do okay.
I didn’t disagree.
The Mallory Miller case? Right from the start, Sam had pitched his tent in the don’t-get-too-worked-up-about-this, she’s-a-runaway camp. But he was a professional cop, and until his captain told him otherwise he planned to continue to investigate the details of her disappearance as though she might have been kidnapped by some mysterious intruder.
I knew the truth about Sam’s personal life. I knew that Sam’s pleasant demeanor wasn’t due to his positive outlook, but rather that his positive outlook was due to a girl.
Okay, a woman. Her name was Carmen Reynoso. She was a cop, another detective, a class act who lived somewhere within commuting distance of the police department in Laguna Beach, California, and she and Sam were in love. They had met a little more than a year before while on the track of a serial killer.
It was a long story in which I’d had a part, and I liked to think I’d introduced them.
Sam and Simon had tickets, or some airline’s digital equivalent, to fly to John Wayne International Airport to spend the New Year’s holiday with Carmen and her daughter, Jessie. Jessie, a student at UC Santa Cruz, had promised Simon a trip to Disneyland during the visit.
In Sam’s world, gray skies or blue skies, all was cool.
I met Sam at the new ice rink off the Boulder Turnpike in Superior, where Simon’s peewee team was playing on the Wednesday night that fell within our streak of end-of-the-year bleak weather. Simon-who, unlike his father, played offense-was doing a sleep-over at a teammate’s house after the game and Sam and I were going to go someplace for a beer. It had been a while since we’d had time to get together socially.
Perhaps the flyers that were posted all over the ice rink doors should have been a caution for me about how the evening might progress, but, like most people in Boulder County, I was already growing somewhat immune to them. Two types predominated. Each version was on a standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper. One was on brilliant yellow stock, screamed “MISSING!” and had a black-and-white photograph of Mallory-she was airborne, just launched from a trampoline-above a brief physical description. The other flyer was on white copy paper and was adorned with a color photograph that had been taken by a school photographer who had already taken too many pictures that particular day. Large block letters asked, “HAVE YOU SEEN HER?”
No, was the short answer.
I hadn’t seen her. But in the few days since Mallory’s disappearance I’d seen, literally, thousands of the flyers. Volunteers had papered almost every vertical surface Boulder had to offer, and some horizontal ones as well, with a yellow flyer or a white one, or more often, with multiple copies of each.
Towers of Mallory.
White and yellow checkerboards of Mallory.
Although I was growing inured to the posters themselves, the messages weren’t lost on me. MISSING! and HAVE YOU SEEN HER? ran through my mind like an ever-repeating crawl at the bottom of some cosmic TV, the messages as insistent as the lyrics of an annoying jingle.
The two photographs of Mallory-one smiling and content, the other mischievous and teasing-had a much more subtle effect on me than did the banner headlines. The photos of the young girl lingered in my preconscious and provided fodder for unsettling dreams of the things that fathers dread. More than once I woke with a startling sense of vulnerability, a visceral awareness that I had a daughter and that it could have been she.
Sam had lost a lot of weight-I was guessing thirty-odd pounds-in the last year, but none of it in his face. He still had the face of a big, round guy. Much of the motivation for the weight loss had been medical. The past few years had confronted my friend with a minor heart attack, kidney stones, and gallstones. A new, healthy diet was one of his ways of fighting back.
He’d sworn off doughnuts and bacon and brats, and hadn’t had a burger and fries in most of a year. He was learning to cook and he’d already warned me that he was going to count on me to be his running buddy while he trained to run his first 10K, the late-spring Bolder Boulder.
Health aside, most of the motivation for his self-improvement program, though he’d never admit it to me, was his recent separation and divorce, and that new girlfriend in California. Sam was a mature guy, a serious cop, and a devoted father. Still, he wanted to be buff so he could get the girls.
Prior to that night, I’d never observed Sam watching his son play in a competitive game in any sport, and anticipated that it wasn’t going to be an inspiring sight, especially given the fact that the sport was hockey. Sam had a little bully in him-ask me, all effective cops do, they have to. In addition, Sam had the natural-born arrogance of Minnesotans who believe that they know more about hockey than any native-read: citizen of the United States of America-referee who might tie on skates and pull on a striped blouse in some Colorado barn. Sam granted Canadians special hockey dispensation.
I feared that it was a combustible combination of traits, and that I was about to discover that Sam was going to be one of those parents who give youth sports a rotten name. If, or when, he got too embarrassing to be with, I was more than prepared to move to a seat in the arena as far from him as possible.
Sam, as he often did, proved me wrong. Every word he screamed at the game was a word of encouragement. He knew the names of every one of Simon’s teammates and lavished praise on the kids for their shots and their passing, but especially for their positioning and their defense. He even screamed out some kind words for the opposing players.
The two times he yelled out to the referees it was with a hearty, “Hey, good call, guy. Let’s keep ’em safe out there.”
Between periods I asked, “Case driving you nuts?”
“Nah,” he said. But he knew what case I was talking about. “If cases like that drove me nuts, I’d have been hanging out in your office a long time ago.” That thought caused him to chuckle to himself; Sam’s opinion of psychotherapy wasn’t particularly benevolent. Then he lowered his voice and tilted his big head toward me. “There’re still some guys who think somebody took her, a few. But it didn’t come down that way. She was a kid with issues, Alan. The girl ran, plain and simple. Because of all the media and, you know-that other girl, back when, and what happened to her-the bosses have to go overboard on this, look for intruders under rugs, dot all the t’s and cross all the i’s, but everything or damn near everything says that she ran.
“Hey, a fourteen-year-old girl gone from home? It’s a sad thing. Worse around Christmastime. But it happens. This time it happened at the wrong time in the wrong town in the wrong neighborhood under the wrong circumstances, so now the whole world is watching one family’s tragedy unfold. But that’s all it is: one family’s tragedy. I’m afraid that the real tragedy is what happened to her after she ran; that’s what keeps me awake at night. Is she in a ditch somewhere? Discarded by the side of some highway? In some asshole pimp’s hands? When I hear what happened to her I think it’s going to break my heart. My advice? Leave it alone.”
He was probably right. But Diane’s story about Hannah Grant’s intake interview with Mallory was still haunting me. I wasn’t able to leave it alone.
“What about the guy that the Crandalls saw, the neighbors? The one they thought was loitering on the block before the snow started?”
Sam grimaced. “If those people were really so concerned, why didn’t they call us when they saw him? He was probably just some guy out for a stroll, trying to walk off his Christmas dinner. Maybe his kids were out caroling and he was keeping an eye on them. You know what it’s like after something like this. People think they’ve seen all kinds of things.”
“What about the blood?” I asked.
Sam looked at me sideways, as though that question had surprised him. “Simon cut his heel on the back door last summer, on the screen. My God, did it bleed. He hopped all over the house looking for me to get him a bandage and by the time he found me, there was blood everywhere. I still don’t think I got it all cleaned up. I’m not the world’s best housekeeper, and I promise you that I wouldn’t want the crime-scene guys checking my house for splatter. The fact that there’s some blood in the Millers’ house doesn’t mean any felonies came down. Hey, I bet if I walked in with some Luminol I could get your house to light up, too.”
“Well, then what about the snow thing?”