Theresa on Chicago Chronicles

Final Audience with Edward — Sunday, March 3, 1991, 5:42 PM

Sun, 03 Mar 1991 17:42:00 +0000

The Brown Palace Hotel (Ship Tavern) / Tremont Place

Denver, Colorado

Twenty-three degrees and dropping. The wind came down off the Rockies and found Tremont Place like it had been looking for it.

The Brown Palace sat at the corner of Tremont and 17th – red sandstone, nine stories, the oldest hotel in Denver still taking guests. It had survived fires, depressions, and a hundred years of Colorado politics. Theresa parked the IROC-Z on 18th, two blocks east. Monica rode shotgun. Marcus and Emerson in the back. Nobody had spoken since Cherry Hills.

Dr. Liverman / The Klondike Confrontation — Saturday, March 2, 1991, 5:50 PM

Sat, 02 Mar 1991 17:50:00 +0000

Cherry Hills Village / Englewood / Sloan’s Lake / CU Auraria / County Road 73 (Sedalia)

Denver, Colorado

The bartender’s name didn’t matter. Off shift from a place called Hank’s on South Broadway, white button-down untucked, sleeves rolled past forearms that had been pouring rail whiskey since three in the afternoon. He crossed the parking lot toward a Dodge pickup and Flash came at him on a diagonal, fast and easy, and the man never registered a threat.

A Heart Beat — Saturday, March 2, 1991, 5:41 PM

Sat, 02 Mar 1991 17:41:00 +0000

Cherry Hills Village, Colorado

Denver, Colorado

The footlocker sat open on Emerson’s kitchen table. Good oak, meant for dinner guests who stopped coming six years ago when the second wife packed her Samsonite and took the Volvo north on I-25. Now it held stoppered glass vials in wooden racks, a leather folder, and a sheaf of notes in handwriting that belonged to a dead man’s employee.

Theresa hadn’t sat down. She stood at the table’s edge with her hands flat on the wood, spine straight, weight forward – lab posture, Metro State posture, the body defaulting to the only stance it trusted. She read the labels before she touched anything. The overhead fluorescent buzzed at a frequency she’d never noticed when she was alive. She noticed everything now. The click of the furnace cycling. The tick of ice reforming in gutters outside. Four floors up, Windsor’s heartbeat – steady, sixty-two beats per minute, the sleeping pulse of a man with no reason to be afraid.