“I think I’ll pass, thanks.”

“Are we done, then?”

“Yes,” Cozy said. He seemed satisfied. About what, I didn’t know.

Mitchell locked up and left us in the driveway, where Cozy and I leaned against his BMW.

“I met with Merritt’s stepfather this morning, Cozy. He signed a release for me to talk with you. He told me that he’d been here to put pressure on Dr. Robilio a couple of days before he died.”

“Really?”

He didn’t seem surprised.

“Trent says the meeting left him quite angry. Talked about it at home with Brenda. Merritt may have heard it.”

“Did he threaten the doctor?”

“No. But he was belligerent. And he says he told his wife he’d kill Robilio if he thought it would do any good. He’s afraid maybe he gave Merritt the idea.”

“I already knew he’d been here. My investigator interviewed all the neighbors. One of them remembered his car from earlier in the week. I assume the police already know all this, too.”

“Is that what you were pressing Mitchell about?”

“Upstairs? I was fishing, trying to get Mitchell to admit they had Trent’s prints.”

“And they don’t?”

“They’re not saying. Something is confusing them or they would have taken Merritt into custody already. There’s too much evidence and this is too political a case for so much procrastination.”

I thought about the delay. “You know, they may not have file prints for John, Cozy. He’s new in the state. He may not even have bothered to get a Colorado driver’s license.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. Wonder if they’ve thought of it. We’ll keep it to ourselves for now. Where’s he from? Where’d he live before?”

“Kansas, I think. Wichita.”

“Okay.”

“Cozy, is there something else that’s important about the master bedroom? What was Mitchell doing up there? Any idea?”

“I don’t know. An inconsistency of some kind. Typically, the prosecution doesn’t hesitate to gloat about things that they consider to be crystal clear.”

“Are Merritt’s prints up there?”

“I’m guessing yes. But I don’t know.”

“John’s?”

“Don’t know that, either.”

“Do Merritt’s prints make burglary more likely as a motive?”

“If they are there, I suppose. More than that, it just makes it more difficult for the police to pin down a scenario. The handgun that killed him? The wife says he kept it upstairs in a little box in a drawer in his bedside table. Somebody went upstairs and retrieved the weapon. Him? Was he afraid of her? Did he think there was an intruder in the house? Her? If she was planning on killing him, she wouldn’t break in hoping to find a weapon, would she? But she’s a kid. Who knows what she was thinking? See, it’s confusing.”

He concluded, “They think she did it. They’re not sure how it came down. That’s why they’re hesitating.”

I stuffed my hands in my pockets.

Cozy said, “I like a client who knows when to keep her mouth shut. But this is over the top. I need this kid to talk to me, Alan. Do something.”

Twenty-six

I stopped at Abo’s for a slice of pizza after leaving Dead Ed’s house and barely had time to eat it and squeeze in a return phone call from Sam Purdy before my one o’clock patient.

“Hi, Sam, you made it back down from the ranch?”

“Got back around five this morning. Lucy just woke me up. The Summit County cops haven’t located Haldeman yet. And the prints on the pop cans in the barn belong to the two kids. You were right.”

Having my suspicions confirmed disappointed me. I was hoping Madison and Brad were simple runaways well on their way to someplace like Sacramento or Billings. “So how do you have it? How are they mixed up in this?”

“Great question. And how the hell did they know about Ed’s cabin and his damned RV? I don’t know any of it. Lucy’s presenting everything to Malloy and the brass at a meeting right now. Maybe they’ve developed something that will help make sense of it.”

“Someone should call the girl’s mom, Sam. She’s worried sick.”

“Yeah, don’t worry. I’ll get someone to call her. Lucy’s good at that.”

I was trying to finesse a way to let Sam know about John Trent’s visit to Ed Robilio a couple of days before his death. But I couldn’t find a detour around the confidentiality issues. Cozy figured that the cops already knew, and if Lucy knew, then Sam knew, so I decided to let it rest.

“I was just at the Robilio house with Cozy Maitlin. He talked Mitchell Crest into giving him a little tour of the crime scene. Cozy’s suspicious that there’s some evidence that your colleagues haven’t explained, some physical evidence or some fingerprints or something, and that’s why Merritt hasn’t been charged. You know anything?”

He was silent.

“Okay, let me rephrase my question. You know anything you can tell me? Anything I can use with Merritt to goose her to talk? I have to get her to start talking, Sam. She’s not helping Cozy at all. And I can’t judge how suicidal she might still be.”

When he spoke, his voice had slowed and softened. The change in tenor grabbed my attention. He asked, “You saw her the first day in the hospital, right, after her overdose?”

“Yes, I did. Not in the ER, but upstairs in the ICU. She wasn’t conscious, though.”

“When you were there-think back-did you notice her hands, her fingernails?”

Oh, God. “Yes, they were painted red. A bright cherry red.”

He was silent again. Waiting for me to join him somewhere. Guiding me someplace significant with his formidable will.

I said, “One nail was broken. Badly. The kind of break that would really hurt. Let me think. It would have been her left hand. I was sitting on the left side of the bed. The ring finger. The ring finger of her left hand.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“The next day when I saw her upstairs, after she regained consciousness, the nail polish had been removed and the break had been filed down.” I paused, trying to remember. “I think that’s it.”

“Remind me, what was your question before?”

What? “I asked if there was anything that you could tell me-”

“Yeah, I remember, that was it. Listen, I have to go. Brenda’s agreed to have lunch with me, if you can believe it. I don’t think I should be late. Good luck with Merritt later on, say hi for me. Tell her I love her.”

As was becoming our routine, I greeted Merritt in the dayroom and walked beside her as we made our way across the locked unit to the walk-in-closet-size interview room. Other than the night she visited her sister, she had not been allowed off the unit.

On the aggravating drive into Denver I continued to question my therapeutic strategy with her. From the start, I had been treating her as though she were any other patient, any other talking patient, and would schedule and start a daily psychotherapy session, as though such a thing could exist solely in silence. And as though time were on my side and the corrosive quality of familiarity and routine would eventually sway her enough so she would trust me sufficiently to begin talking.

So far, though, my strategy hadn’t worked; no words but mine had fractured the silence in the interview room.

I’d decided that today would need to be different. The eroding quality of time wasn’t working well as a strategy. Two kids were in significant danger. And the police were going to be questioning John Trent about his actions soon enough.

I turned the knob and pushed the door inward. Merritt preceded me inside, as she had each time. This time, though, she walked across the room and curled herself casually in the chair that I had used the previous three days.

The room was furnished with a total of six chairs so that small groups and families could meet. I chose one of the chairs about five feet from her and sat down. I had spent much of the hour on the drive from Boulder to Denver pondering how long I would permit this session to go on in silence before I exposed my new strategy. Was ten minutes long enough? Twenty minutes too long? Or should I go right after her from the first bell. What?