Tough Cookie

Surrounded by ski patrol members and uniformed sheriff’s deputies, my husband stood by a scarred oak desk. All the law enforcement folks seemed to be talking at once.

“Hello?” I called politely. “Would it be okay for me to take off?”

Tom murmured to a deputy and the deputy nodded. Then my husband turned and beckoned for me to come forward. When I joined them, Tom said, “Look, but don’t touch. Please.”

Perplexed, I stared down at the desktop. It was strewn with pamphlets, maps, memos, correspondence. Nothing on it looked especially unusual.

“Look at what?” I asked Tom.

With his fingertip, Tom carefully pushed back piles of paper, exposing an open greeting card. All the deputies and ski patrol folks craned down to make their own closer inspection. As a result, I couldn’t read the thing.

“Wait.” Tom’s ocean-green eyes regarded me solemnly; he spoke deliberately. “Don’t look at it yet, Miss G. I need to know precisely what Doug Portman said he had for me. Word for word.”

“Well,” I began. I shifted uncomfortably. “It wasn’t that memorable. He said, ‘I’ve got something for Tom in my car.’ That’s it. Why?”

Tom waved me forward. The crowd pulled back. As I leaned toward the opened card, Tom warned, “Don’t even breathe close to it.”

“What does the outside say?”

“It’s a congratulations card. The outside message reads: ‘Good Job!’”

Inside the card, an explosion of bright yellow stars was accompanied by the card’s own greeting: You’re a Star! Beside the yellow stars, where your thumbs grasp a card to open it, was something much more menacing.

Glued on both inside card edges were two perfectly round, filled pieces of plastic material. I frowned. From Med Wives 101, I recognized the plastic rounds as transdermal patches. Each was filled with a blue gelatinous substance. Patches of this type were usually used to administer pain or nausea medication through the skin, when the patient was unable to take a pill or give himself a shot. I looked more closely and saw a small, hand-printed message.

Thanks for nothing, Asshole! You’re dead!!! There was no signature.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded, mystified. “Was this card in an envelope? Was it addressed to someone?”

“It was in an envelope, an opened one, but there was no one’s name on it,” Tom said grimly. “This may be related to your coffee lady Cinda’s story. Maybe this is the threat the guy was bragging about making. Threaten a cop? Threaten a parole board member? Anyway, I have to stay here and talk to these people. Then I’m going to take this card down to the crime lab.” He shook his head. “If that blue jelly contains, say, anthrax, we could be dealing with something nasty. I’ve already called over to the coroner about getting the crime lab to run a couple of different drug screens on Doug Portman.”

“So you think he …” I couldn’t finish my thought.

“Might have been poisoned? Might have been close to dead before he hit that last mogul? Don’t know.”

My skin crawled. “Tom. Please tell me you didn’t touch those patches.”

“Nah. Sniffed ’em, though.” Everyone laughed except me.

Irritably, I said, “Cinda told me that her waiter, Davey, talked to Barton Reed, the guy who was making the threats. Last night.”

Tom riffled through the chaos on the ski patrol desk and unearthed a blank piece of paper. “Could you draw me a map to get to Cinda’s place?”

It was while I was doing this that Hoskins and Bancock appeared at my side and announced I was free to go. They might be calling me later, they said again. As I handed Tom my crudely drawn map, Marla phoned. She eagerly informed Tom she’d be at our house at three o’clock, and did I need a bottle of cognac, prescription tranquilizers, or chocolate cookies and freshly ground espresso beans? Whatever you think, Tom told her, with a rich chuckle. That meant she’d show up with all of it.

Blisteringly cold sheets of snowflakes assaulted us on the way to my van. Words were blown out of our mouths into the swirling snow. When we finally found my vehicle, we moved Tom’s skis out onto the snow-covered lot and searched in vain for my tire chains. I hadn’t used them for three winters, and they weren’t wedged into any of the van’s crevices. We put Tom’s precious skis and my battered ones back in and flung my equipment behind the front seat. Then Tom hugged me hard and murmured into my ear that he’d be home as soon as possible.

“Take it slow and you’ll be fine,” he assured me. “I’ll call you. And Miss G.—until then, please try to stay out of trouble.”

There’s nothing like a Colorado winter to give you respect for nature’s harsher side, I reflected as I piloted the van up the interstate’s long climb to the Continental Divide. Vehicles of all varieties—with Nebraska, Illinois, Texas, and yes, Colorado license plates—littered the snowbanked shoulder of the ascent. Drivers struggling to dig out and chain up soon became caked with snow. They looked like miniature Abominable Snowmen.