Free Last Lie by Stephen White Page B

developing law enforcement situations. Occasionally, a crime scene or a fresh development in an ongoing investigation might require immediate consultation from the DA's office.
    Lauren didn't reply. Since her last MS exacerbation, she hadn't been taking much call time. It was a sensitive subject for her. She stood up, shifted her weight onto her cane, and began the laborious process of walking down the hall toward the kitchen. She hated the cane. Hated the weak leg.
    "How are you doing?" I said as I examined her gait for signs of change. Her recovery from a serious exacerbation that had left her temporarily unable to walk had been agonizingly slow. Although we rarely talked about the future of her illness, we were both concerned that her recovery from the recent event had reached a plateau, which might indicate permanent damage to the affected nerve.
    Permanent damage could mean permanent disability. A long relationship with the cane. We were both scared.
    "It's getting old," she said without turning her head. "I had trouble with the lift on the stairs again when I went down to check on Jonas this morning. We have to get someone out to look at it again."
    After she regained enough strength to get around with the cane, I'd had a lift installed on the stairs that led to the basement so that she would be able to get down there to check on Jonas.
    "I'll take care of it," I said. "First thing Monday."

9
    I n my personal-life lexicon, walnut, as a noun, typically referred not to the hard-shelled nut essential to a Waldorf salad, but rather to the unremarkable Victorian house that had been home to my clinical psychology practice, and that of Raoul's psychologist wife, Diane, for many years.
    Diane and I jointly owned the century-old building on Walnut Street. Our utilitarian workspace on the first floor included our two consulting offices, which faced the backyard; a shared waiting room fronting the street; a tiny kitchen; and a solitary bathroom.
    We rented out a minuscule second-floor office suite. Over the years, the upstairs space had successfully incubated the businesses of a half dozen or so budding entrepreneurs. We gravitated toward tenants who didn't seem inclined to require us to act like landlords. The rental suite was currently occupied by a woman about my age whose stated business purpose was independent product enhancement."
    Diane and I didn't know what that meant, but we hoped she wasn't hooking. At the end of the day, we didn't really want to know. The fallout from a revelation that we were leasing space to a sex worker would undoubtedly force us to act like landlords. Neither of us wanted that.
    We had originally purchased the house on Walnut just before downtown Boulder began its gradual transformation from Rocky Mountain cool to oh-so-trendy hot, and quite a while before our questionable neighborhood on the wrong side of Ninth Street began its conversion from being a desolate haven for body shops, bail bonds-men, crappy student housing, scrap metal shops, and light industrial warehouses.
    Diane and I didn't buy the old house because it sat on thirty-nine one-hundredths of an acre--almost an entire sixth of a hectare--that happened to be situated less than three blocks from Boulder's commercial heart at the corner of Broadway and Pearl. Buying a decent-sized chunk of desirable, developable real estate in such a prime location in the depths of a soft market would have demonstrated investment acumen, a trait that Diane and I lacked equally.
    We bought the Walnut house because it was the best property we could afford within easy walking distance of town, my requirement, that also had at least one off-street parking place, Diane's nonnegotiable condition for her Saab convertible.
    The house had been nearly derelict at the time we purchased it. The real estate agent assumed we planned to scrape and rebuild--during the initial showing she made a point of telling us that the purchase price did not include demo costs. We