These.

“I understand,” I said. But, of course, I didn’t.

I called Lauren. She didn’t return my call until midafternoon during a break in her trial. She’d already heard through the law enforcement grapevine about the discovery of the body of an unidentified male in a shallow grave not far from a trail that meandered off Highway 7 in northern Boulder County. She said she thought the location was east of Allenspark, actually closer to Lyons and Hygiene. I asked her to get me whatever information she could and to call me right back.

“Why are you interested in this?” she asked, of course. The tone of her question made it clear she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear my reply.

“It might be related to Diane,” I said.

“Two minutes,” she said.

It took her four. “We don’t have much yet. Pending a post, it appears to be a homicide. Animals had gotten to the body. ID found at the scene indicates it may be a man named-”

“Doyle Chandler.”

“How did you know? Is he one of your patients?”

I could have said, probably should have said, “You know I can’t answer that.” Instead, I said, “No.” Were the answer yes I would have answered with stony silence. Lauren and I both knew that the silent yes would have been just as declarative as the spoken no had been.

“One of Diane’s patients?”

Well, that was a thought. What if Diane had treated Doyle? I didn’t think so. I said, “No.”

“But you know him?” she asked.

“Personally, I don’t. Doyle Chandler owned the house that’s next door to Mallory Miller’s house on the Hill. When she disappeared he’d already moved away and put the place on the market.”

“I don’t think the police mentioned that this afternoon. Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Is this related to Mallory’s disappearance?”

“I don’t know. You have to wonder.”

“Diane’s disappearance?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“But you have reasons to be suspicious?”

“Yes.”

“Then this might be important to you: Sam’s up there. He asked the sheriff for permission.”

“He’s up where they found the body?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll call him.”

“Have you heard from Raoul?” Lauren asked.

“No. I’m still worried.”

“Keep me informed, okay?”

After we hung up, I sent Sam a text message on his pager: “I know about D. Call me. A.”

While I was waiting for Sam to get back to me, I took a call from Scott Truscott at the coroner’s office. “Try something on for me?” he said.

“Sure.”

“We know that Ms. Grant hit her head when she tripped that morning at Rallysport, right? On the tile floor in the locker room? That’s confirmed?”

Hannah Grant, okay. I fought to change gears. “Yes,” I said. “The witnesses apparently agree on that much.”

“She tells the women in the locker room she’s fine, and she drives straight to her office.”

“We think.”

“Okay, we think. On the way, or shortly after she gets there, though, she begins to feel that something’s not quite right-maybe she has a headache, maybe she’s a little confused, lightheaded-but she doesn’t put two and two together, doesn’t consider that she’s just bumped her head and that she might have a concussion, or worse. Instead she decides that after all the exercise she’d done that her sugar’s too low. She’s in her car by then, she doesn’t have any orange juice, so she sucks on a couple of LifeSavers. With me?”

“So far.”

“When she gets to her office she’s still not herself, not feeling right. The candy didn’t help-she’s not feeling better yet. How do we know? Easy: She puts her purse in the middle of the floor. All her friends say she’s a compulsive person, OCD, truly anal, so the purse? On the floor? That’s not like her. Totally out of character. At this point I think she’s feeling even worse, not better. Maybe much worse.”

“Why much worse, Scott?”

“Post showed two subdural hematomas, remember? One of those two certainly came from a blunt surface-the tile floor-at the health club, during that initial fall.”

“Yes.”

“So we know she has a subdural from that earlier trauma. My theory is she actually already has both subdurals-one from the impact with the floor, and one from something with a sharper edge, maybe the locker room bench-and she’s actively bleeding into one or both of those hematomas. Ms. Grant was on aspirin therapy-you might not know that. Family history of heart disease.”

“I didn’t.”

“Doesn’t matter. Pressure’s slowly increasing on her brain, and she’s gradually getting more symptomatic. Half an hour passes, then an hour, and she’s more and more confused, lethargic, maybe vertiginous. Anxious, probably. Not too surprisingly, her thinking’s impaired. All she can come up with is that her diabetes is way out of whack, she has a problem with her sugar. The LifeSavers were there, Alan; in her pocket, like you said. I confirmed that with the crime-scene photos. But if she ate them, they didn’t help, so she goes in the other direction, decides maybe she needs insulin.

“But her confusion is severe; she’s disoriented-she can’t even get her routine quite right. Instead of retrieving her kit from the kitchen to check her sugar, she tucks her shirt up under her bra the way she always does just prior to her injection.”

I saw where he was heading. “And instead of going to the kitchen for the insulin, she’s lost and she goes to the office across the hall?”

“Exactly. Maybe once she’s there she begins to recognize her confusion, and she sits. Maybe not. But that’s where she collapses, in that other office. Eventually, she loses consciousness. She’s still bleeding into one of those subdurals. Eventually, Ms. Grant dies from the intracranial pressure.”

“Go on,” I said.

“That’s where you find her. Her shirt is tucked up under her bra like she’s going to do an injection, but there’s no syringe around, no insulin. It’s definitely possible she’s eaten some candy. No weapon is ever recovered that matches the second trauma to her head. What am I missing?”

I couldn’t think of a single thing left unexplained. “Nothing, Scott. I think maybe you nailed it. No intruders, no assault, no murderer. No second blow to the head.”

“And no more ‘undetermined.’ Hannah Grant’s death was accidental.”

“I can’t tell you how relieved this makes me.”

“Do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Sit on this until I can run it by the coroner.”

“Of course.”

What was I thinking? I couldn’t wait to give the news to Diane. She’d be so happy.

It took Sam a couple of hours to reply to my message about Doyle’s body, but he did.

“How’d you hear?” Sam asked. Actually, it was more like a demand than a question.

“The real estate lady. She thought I might spot a housing opportunity in the ashes of the tragedy that was unfolding.”

“Shit. Who’d you tell?”

“Lauren. How come you guys didn’t let the DA know that Doyle Chandler lived next door to Mallory?”

“I’ve been busy.”

Right. “You still near Allenspark?”

“They just wrapped things up. I’m on my way back to Boulder now.”

“How long has your guy been dead?”

“My guy?” Sam laughed, turning my question into the melodic refrain of the Mary Wells ditty. “My guy has been dead a while. But it’s frigging cold up here, so the body’s been pretty well refrigerated. In the meantime, wild animals have been busy doing their wild animal thing. What they nibble on first? Let me tell you, it takes away much of my faith in the natural kingdom. ME’s going to have his hands full on this one.”

“Homicide?”

“If it’s a suicide, he was considerate enough to bury himself first. If it was an accident, he conveniently died by tripping and falling into a shallow grave.”

“Why’d you go up there?”

The signal faded and wavered. When it was strong enough to carry Sam’s voice again, I heard, “… and somebody convinced me that I should be asking this Doyle Chandler about the guy who used his garage in Boulder to store a classic old Camaro. The agent thought that since he moved away from his house in Boulder, Chandler was living out this way. I’d called the sheriff to give them a heads-up that I would be chatting with him as a follow-up to the Mallory Miller thing. When the sheriff learned that some snowshoers found what appeared to be his body, they gave me a courtesy jingle.