White River Burning

44

Twenty-four hours after the discovery of the gruesome homicide at the cabin, Gurney was heading into the County Office Building for an early-morning meeting with Sheridan Kline.

The ponderous redbrick exterior, coated with a century of soot and grime, dated back to the structure’s original use as a mental facility—the Bumblebee Lunatic Asylum—named after its eccentric founder, George Bumblebee. In the midsixties the interior of the structure had been gutted, redesigned, and repurposed to house the local bureaucracy. Cynics enjoyed pointing out that the building’s history made it an ideal home for its current inhabitants.

The lobby security system had been upgraded since Gurney’s last visit during the harrowing case of the bride who’d been decapitated at her wedding reception. It now involved two separate electronic screenings and the presentation of multiple forms of identification. He was eventually directed to follow a series of signs that brought him to a frosted-glass door bearing the words DISTRICT ATTORNEY.

He wondered which version of Kline he’d be meeting with.

Would it be the baffled, disbelieving, nearly speechless man he’d encountered on the phone the previous morning when he’d called to tell him about the discovery of the rifle, the branding iron, the red motorcycle, and Turlock’s mauled body? Or would it be the man who showed up an hour later at the scene with Mark Torres, Bobby Bascomb, Garrett Felder, Shelby Towns, and Paul Aziz—hell-bent to demonstrate his decisiveness by issuing nonstop orders to people who knew far more about processing crime scenes than he did?

Gurney opened the door and walked into the reception room. Kline’s alluring assistant, who had clearly maintained her fondness for formfitting cashmere sweaters, eyed him with a subtle smile.

“I’ll let him know you’re here,” she said in her memorably soft voice.

As she was about to pick up her phone, a door in the back wall of the reception room opened and Sheridan Kline came striding over to Gurney, hand outstretched with that same semblance of warmth Gurney remembered from their first meeting years earlier.

“David. Right on time. I’m always impressed by punctuality.” He led the way into his office. “Coffee or tea?”

“Coffee.”

He clicked his tongue approvingly. “You a dog man or a cat man?”

“Dog.”

“I thought so. Dog people prefer coffee. Cat people like tea. Herbal tea. Ever notice that?” It wasn’t a question. He turned to the door and called out, “Two coffees, Ellen.”

He pointed Gurney toward the familiar leather sofa, while he sat in the leather armchair across from it, a glass coffee table between them.

Gurney was for the moment absorbed in the déjà vu experience not only of the seating arrangement but of Kline’s comments on punctuality and the dog-coffee cat-tea associations. The man had made exactly the same observations when they’d met during the Mellery case. Perhaps he was trying to reset their relationship to an earlier, more positive status. Or maybe these were things he said so often he had no idea to whom he’d said them before.

He leaned forward with what could be mistaken for companionable intensity. “That was really something yesterday.”

Gurney nodded.

“God-awful homicide.”

“Yes.”

“Plus evidence connected to all the murders. What a shock!”

“Yes.”

“Hope you didn’t mind my asking you to leave the scene after you got us oriented.”

Gurney had seen it as a sign of Kline’s annoyance at the fact that the people reporting to him were addressing their questions to Gurney and Hardwick.

“The thing was,” explained Kline awkwardly, “with Hardwick not having official LEO status, there could have been issues down the road about crime-scene protocol.”

“No problem.”

“Good. We’ve received some more information, amplifying what you’d already found. An overnight ballistics comparison connected the rifle in Beckert’s cellar to the Steele and Loomis shootings as well as to the incident in your backyard.” Kline paused. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, there’s more. Thrasher did a prelim autopsy on Turlock’s remains. Guess what he found.”

“A steel arrow buried in his back?”

“Thrasher told you?”

“No.”

“Then how—?”

“When I was still inside the cabin, I heard the dogs coming. Probably from a point in the woods near the edge of the clearing, about a hundred yards away. Turlock would have heard them, too. But he never fired a shot. In fact, his Glock was still holstered. That makes no sense, unless he was already incapacitated when the dogs started coming. And the Gort brothers seem to be awfully good with those crossbows.”

Kline stared at him. “There’s no doubt in your mind it was them?”

“I don’t know of any other homicidal crossbow experts around here with a large pack of attack dogs and a major murder motive.”

“The motive being revenge for Turlock’s raid on their compound?”

“That, and for publicly blaming them for the BDA murders.” Gurney paused. “That gives us means and motive. Opportunity isn’t quite so obvious. It would depend on the Gorts knowing that Turlock was going to show up at the cabin when he did. That’s a big issue. So you’re not quite to home base.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“You have Beckert in custody yet?”

“We’re working on it. Currently he’s nowhere to be found. Which brings me to the main point of this conversation.” Kline paused, sat back in his chair, and steepled his fingers in front of his chin. “Your discoveries, for which you deserve tremendous credit, have turned the case around a hundred eighty degrees from the way we all saw it.”

Gurney calmly pointed out that from the beginning he’d been uneasy with the way everyone saw it, that he’d raised objections, and that Kline had essentially fired him for not embracing the official version.

Kline looked pained. “That seems a little oversimplified. But the last thing I want to do now is debate what’s behind us—especially considering the challenge in front of us. We’ve had more upheaval in the past twenty-four hours than I’ve ever seen in any case, anytime. So far we’ve managed to keep a lid on what’s going to be an explosive story, but that won’t last. The facts will come out. We’ll have to do our best to present them in a positive way. Keep control of the narrative. Maintain public trust in law enforcement. I assume you agree?”

“More or less.”

Kline blinked at Gurney’s less-than-enthusiastic response but continued along his path. “Handled correctly, this huge mess can be positioned as a law enforcement triumph. The message we have to convey is that nobody is above the law, that we follow without fear or favor wherever the truth leads us.”

“That was Beckert’s message, before he ended up on the wrong end of it.”

“That doesn’t mean it was the wrong message.”

Gurney smiled. “Just the wrong messenger?”

“In hindsight, obviously. But that’s not my point. The problem now is that everything’s upside down. Could be viewed by the media as chaos. We need to convey the opposite. We need to convey stability. The message is that law enforcement is still operating on an even keel. The public needs to see stability, continuity, competence.”

“I agree.”

“Stability, continuity, and competence are the three keys to keeping external conditions from sinking the ship. But here’s the thing. These qualities by themselves are just words. They need life. And you’re a big part of that life.”

Kline was leaning forward now. He seemed to be drawing energy and conviction from his own statements. “David, you’ve been pursuing the truth from the start like a heat-seeking missile. And, because of you, we’re practically there. I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that this could be the single greatest triumph of your law-enforcement career. Best of all, it would be a triumph for law enforcement itself. For the rule of law. And that’s what it’s all about, right?”

The moment he fell silent, his attractive assistant entered the room carrying a black-lacquered tray with a silver coffeepot, two cups, and a china creamer and sugar bowl, and set it all down on the glass coffee table.

When she left, Gurney refocused. “What do you want from me, Sheridan?”

“I just want to know I can count on your continuing insights and advice to . . . to help bring this ship into port.”

Gurney pondered his apparent transformation from heat-seeking missile to harbor pilot, as well as Kline’s endless capacity for duplicity.

“You want me to stay involved in the investigation?”

“In wrapping up the loose ends. Pulling it all together. Continuity.” When Gurney didn’t respond, Kline added, “On your own terms.”

“Freedom to follow the loose ends wherever they lead, without interference?”

Kline bridled for a moment at that last word, but then emitted a sigh of resignation. “We need some clarity regarding the motivation for each of the four homicides. Plus Turlock’s. We need to know specifically who did what. And we need to find the Gorts. You can follow any of those trails however you want.”

“I’ll have full access to Torres, Felder, Thrasher, lab personnel, ballistics, et cetera?”

“No problem.” Kline eyed him anxiously. “So . . . you’ll do it?”

Gurney didn’t reply right away. He asked himself yet again why he was doing what he was doing. The virtuous answers, of course, were simple. He was seeing the case through to its conclusion because of his commitment to the wives of the murdered officers. And because the deaths of Jordan and Tooker deserved every bit as much of his attention as those of Steele and Loomis. And because the solution of these murders, along with Turlock’s, might lead to the exposure of underlying patterns of corruption. And because bringing closure to so many open wounds might bring a modicum of peace to White River.

These motives were real and they were powerful. But he knew there was also something driving him forward that was less altruistic, something in the wiring of his brain—a relentless desire to know, to figure things out. It had been his driving force throughout his career, perhaps throughout his life. He really had no choice.

“Have Mark Torres call me.”

Gurney wasn’t even a third of the way back to Walnut Crossing when he got Torres’s call.

“The DA asked me to provide you with any information you want, especially the stuff that came to light after you left the site yesterday. Is this a good time?”

Gurney saw that he was approaching Snook’s Nursery and figured it would be a convenient place to stop. “Yes, this is a good time.” He pulled into the long narrow parking lot in front of the greenhouses. “How late were you there?”

“All day, all night. Garrett and Shelby set up their halogens and worked until dawn.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, first Paul Aziz photographed the whole site, then Turlock’s body, then each piece of evidence before it was bagged and labeled. Most of the items were found in and around the shed where your guy Hardwick found the branding iron. There were two sets of clothes, buried behind the shed, with bloodstains that match the positions of abrasions on Jordan’s and Tooker’s bodies. Inside the shed there was a coil of rope that matches the rope segment recovered from the Gorts’ compound—which seems to link Beckert and Turlock to the playground murders as well as an attempt to frame the Gorts for it. There were bloodstains on the back seat of the UTV. Thrasher did a quick field test on the blood types, and they match those of Jordan and Tooker.”

“Any fingerprints on the UTV steering wheel?”

“Old, smudged, not useful.”

“How about on the handgrips of the Yamaha bike?”

“Same. But Beckert’s prints appear in various other places on the UTV, and Turlock’s appear on the bike’s gas cap, which you’d expect, with the UTV being registered to Beckert and the bike to Turlock. And speaking of prints, this morning we finally got a reply from AFIS on that pen you found in the yard behind the Poulter Street house. The print on it is definitely Turlock’s.”

“That’s quite a pile of evidence.”

“There’s more. In a fire pit in the woods in back of the shed we found burned pieces of a baseball bat and nightstick—the likely weapons used on Jordan and Tooker—plus two hypodermic needles of the preloaded type.”

“Used?”

“Used and tossed in the fire with the bat and nightstick. But the labeling on one needle didn’t burn completely. Enough was left for Thrasher to tell it was propofol.”

“So the evidence pile keeps growing.”

“And there’s more. Remember at your house the other night Garrett said your power line had been severed by some sort of cable cutter? We found one under loose floorboards in the shed.”

“Quite a productive evening.”

“And I haven’t even mentioned the most interesting find—a pair of pliers that prove you were right.” Torres inserted a dramatic pause.

Gurney hated dramatic pauses. “What are you talking about?”

“There was a small tool kit under the sink in the cabin. Garrett thinks the pliers in the kit made the marks on the switched toilet handles. He’s having the lab do a comparison to be sure, but he tends to be right about stuff like that.”

Gurney felt the satisfaction of being on the right track. “Anything else?”

“Maybe, maybe not. That notebook computer and the phone you found in the cabin loft—they were password-protected, but we sent them to the forensic computer lab in Albany, and we hope to hear something back from them later this week.”

“This all sounds like a prosecutor’s dream. Do we know yet why Turlock showed up at the cabin when he did?”

“We think so. There were two battery-operated silent alarm systems—motion-activated—one in the cabin, one in the shed. They were programmed to contact certain phone numbers, presumably Turlock’s being one of them, which would explain why he showed up. Garrett was having trouble with a privacy code protecting the numbers, so we sent the devices to Albany along with the phone and computer.”

“Any leads on locating Beckert?”

“Not yet. His cell phone’s apparently been turned off. His wife claims she has no idea where he is. The DA’s getting a search warrant for their house in case she refuses access. Beckert doesn’t seem to have any personal friends, so that’s not a useful avenue. We’ve put a watch on his credit cards. So far no activity. He was seen leaving headquarters around five thirty the night before last. But we haven’t found anyone who saw him after that. His wife was at some three-day spa getaway with a couple of friends and claims she has no idea what time he got home that night or whether he came home at all.”

“He took his car?”

“Probably. All we know for sure is that it’s gone from the headquarters parking lot.”

A silence ensued as Gurney pondered the timing of the man’s disappearance the night before the incident at the gun club.

Torres spoke first. “It’s really pretty amazing.”

“What is?”

“How you’ve been right about everything. I remember in the very first meeting you came to—your uneasiness with the assumptions everyone was making about the case. It was like you knew instantly there was something wrong with the basic hypothesis. I could see how disturbed Beckert and Turlock were by the issues you were raising. Now we know why.”

“We still have a long way to go. A lot of open questions.”

“That reminds me of something you commented on in the video of the Steele shooting—the red laser dot on the back of Steele’s head as he was patrolling the edge of the crowd. You wondered why the dot followed him as long as it did. I think you said it was like two minutes?”

“That’s right.”

“Have you figured it out?”

“Not yet.”

“You still feel it’s significant?”

“Yes.”

“It seems like such a small thing.”

Gurney said nothing. But he was thinking it was the small things that often mattered the most, especially the ones that didn’t seem to make sense.

45

Gurney remained parked in front of the nursery greenhouses after ending his call with Torres. Hoping he wouldn’t be spotted by Rob Snook, he leaned back in his seat and tried to clear his mind and sort out his priorities for the rest of the day.

Clearing his mind, it turned out, wasn’t so easy. Something was bothering him, though he wasn’t sure what. Perhaps Madeleine’s prolonged absence? He always felt odd when she was away from home, and phone conversations didn’t really solve the problem.

He’d filled her in the previous evening on the gun club discoveries and the Turlock homicide, minus its more grotesque details. He’d cautioned her against saying anything yet to Kim or Heather, adding that he’d be meeting with the DA to review the situation. She’d told him she’d be staying at the inn on the Mercy medical campus for at least another twenty-four hours, at which point various Steele and Loomis relatives were expected to arrive. She’d reminded him to refill the feeders and let the chickens into their fenced run. He’d told her he loved her and missed her, and she’d said the same.

What he hadn’t mentioned was that someone had taken a shot at him. He told himself at first it was because he didn’t want to alarm her with the specter of a possibly ongoing danger. A day later—with the rifle recovered, Turlock dead, and Beckert apparently on the run—he told himself it was because there was no longer any danger, and therefore no urgency in discussing the matter. But he had to admit now, sitting there in front of Snook’s greenhouses, that he always found it suspicious when someone offered shifting reasons for the same conclusion. A wise friend once commented that the more reasons someone gave you for their behavior, the less likely any of them was the real reason.

Perhaps that was what was bothering him—not so much Madeleine’s absence as his own evasiveness. He resolved to be more open with her in their next conversation. That simple resolution, as resolutions often do, lightened his mood. He pulled out of the parking lot—focused now on getting home, reviewing the case files, and trying to make sense of the inconsistent details.

Twenty-five minutes later, as he was driving up through the low pasture to the house, deciding which file to tackle first, he was surprised to catch a glimpse of Madeleine in her straw gardening hat by one of the flower beds.

When he got out of the car, he found her kneeling by the bed next to the asparagus patch. She was planting the delphiniums he’d brought home two days earlier. She looked pale and exhausted.

“Did something happen?” he asked. “I thought you were staying over at the hospital.”

“The relatives arrived sooner than expected. And I was more worn out than I realized.” She laid her trowel down by the flowers, shaking her head. “It’s awful. Kim is full of such a terrible anger. At first it was all inside. Now it’s coming out. Heather is worse. Completely shut down. Like she’s not there at all.” Madeleine paused. “Is there anything we can tell them about the progress you’re making? What you told me on the phone last night sounded huge. It might offer them some kind of relief. . . or distraction.”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“The current status of an investigation is not something that can be—”

She cut him off. “Yes, yes, I know all that. It’s just . . . there’s so much misery, not knowing anything. I was just hoping . . .” She picked up her trowel, then put it down again and got to her feet. “Did you have your meeting with Kline?”

“That’s where I’m coming from.”

“Did anything get resolved?”

“Not really.”

“What did he want?”

“On the surface, my help in wrapping things up. In reality, my silence. The last thing he wants is for the media to find out he fired me three days ago for suggesting he had the case all wrong.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I’d see the case through to the end.”

She looked confused. “Isn’t it essentially over?”

“Yes and no. There’s a lot of evidence implicating Beckert and Turlock—the things I told you about on the phone, plus a lot more that was discovered overnight and this morning, including the fact that Beckert seems to have disappeared.”

“Disappeared? Does that make him a fugitive?”

“I don’t know what language Kline will be using publicly, but it sounds like a reasonable label to me. The new evidence doesn’t leave much doubt about his involvement in the playground murders as well as the shootings. So everything’s turned around, with Cory for all practical purposes exonerated.”

She laid her trowel down and regarded him closely. “Do I hear a reservation in your voice?”

“Just a feeling that I’m still missing something. I’m having trouble matching the risk and brutality of the murders with the supposed reward.”

“Doesn’t that happen? What about the people who get shot for a pair of sneakers?”

“That happens. But not as part of a well-thought-out plan. Cory is convinced that it’s all about Beckert’s political future—eliminating people who might create problems for him.”

“You think the man is capable of that?”

“He’s cold enough. But it still seems out of proportion. There’s something in the payoff that I’m not seeing clearly. Maybe I’m asking the wrong questions.”

“What do you mean?”

“Years ago in the academy I attended a class on investigatory techniques. One morning the instructor asked us, ‘Why do those deer always run out in front of cars at night?’ He got a bunch of answers. Panic, disorientation caused by the headlights, evolutionary dysfunction. Then he pointed out that there was a flawed assumption in the wording of the question itself. How did we know deer always did that at night? Maybe most of them didn’t run out in the road, but we didn’t realize it, because we could only see the ones that did. And he pointed out that there was a subtle misdirection lurking in the phrase run out in front of cars—making it sound as though the activity were something clearly dysfunctional. Suppose the question were reworded this way: ‘Why do some deer attempt to cross the road when a car is approaching?’ That way of asking points toward a different set of possible explanations. Since deer are very territorial, perhaps their first instinct in a moment of danger is to head for the part of their territory in which they feel most secure. Perhaps they’re just moving instinctively toward a place of safety. Other deer in the immediate area may be running in the opposite direction—away from the road—to get to their places of safety, but those deer are less likely to be seen, especially at night. Anyway, his point was simple. Ask the wrong question, and you never get to the truth.”

Madeleine’s impatience was showing. “So what question about the case do you think you’re getting wrong?”

“I wish I knew.”

She stared up at him for a long moment. “What’s your next step?”

“Review the files, look for things that should be done, and do them.”

“And report back to Kline?”

“Eventually. He’d be quite content to have me do nothing—so long as I don’t rock the boat or make him look bad.”

“Because he has political ambitions of his own?”

“Probably. Until yesterday that meant hitching a ride with Beckert. I assume now he’s seeing his future more as a solo act.”

Rising to her feet and brushing the soil off her hands, she produced a less-than-happy smile. “I’m going inside. Do you want some lunch?”

A short while later, as they were silently finishing their meal, it occurred to Gurney that if he didn’t tell her now about the severing of the power line and the subsequent gunshot, he probably never would. So he did, describing the event as unthreateningly as he could—as Beckert or Turlock simply taking a shot at the back of the house when he went out to get the generator started.

She gave him a look. “You don’t think he was aiming at you?”

“If he wanted to hit me, he would have kept shooting.”

“How do you know it was Beckert or Turlock?”

“I found the rifle that fired the shot in their cabin the next morning.”

“And now Turlock is dead.”

“Yes.”

“And Beckert is on the run?”

“So it seems.”

She nodded, frowning. “This shooting incident was . . . the night before last?”

“Yes.”

“What took you so long to tell me?”

He hesitated. “I think I was afraid of bringing up memories of the Jillian Perry case.”

Her expression darkened at the mention of the invasion of their home during that particularly disturbing series of murders.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you right away.”

She gave him one of those long looks that made him feel transparent. Then she picked up their plates and carried them to the sink.

He suppressed an urge to make more excuses for himself. He went into the den and took out the case materials. With the branding iron and propofol needles now linking Beckert and Turlock directly to the BDA deaths, he opened the consolidated file on Jordan and Tooker.

It contained surprisingly little beyond the incident report, notes on the interview with the dog walker who found the bodies, printouts of some of Paul Aziz’s photos, the two autopsy reports, an investigatory progress form with little progress recorded beyond a description of Turlock’s raid on the Gort brothers’ compound and the evidence he supposedly “found” there. There was also some bare-bones data on the victims. Tooker, according to the file, was a loner with no known family connections nor any personal associations outside the BDA. Jordan was married, but there was no record of any interview being conducted with his wife, beyond a note indicating that she had been informed of his death.

It was clear to Gurney that the decision to target the Gorts for the murders of Jordan and Tooker had dramatically narrowed the scope of the investigation, eliminating virtually all activities not directly supportive of that view of the case. The decision had created a yawning information gap that he felt an itch to rectify.

Remembering that the Reverend Coolidge had provided an alibi for Jordan and Tooker after the Steele shooting and had later spoken highly of them, Gurney thought the pastor might have a phone number for Jordan’s wife.

He placed a call to Coolidge. As he was leaving a message, the man picked up, his tone professionally warm. “Good to hear from you, David. How’s your investigation going?”

“We’ve made some interesting discoveries. Which is why I’m calling you. I want to get in touch with Marcel Jordan’s wife. I was hoping you might have a number for her.”

“Ah. Well.” Coolidge hesitated. “I don’t believe Tania is willing to speak to anyone in law enforcement—which is how she’d view you, regardless of how independent your relationship with officialdom might be.”

“Not even if she could be helpful in solving her husband’s murder—and possibly revealing the complicity of people in law enforcement?”

There was a pregnant silence. “Are you serious? That’s . . . a possibility?”

“Yes.”

“Let me get back to you.”

It didn’t take long.

Coolidge called back in less than ten minutes to inform Gurney that Tania declined to speak to him on the phone but that she’d be willing to meet with him at the church.

Forty-five minutes later Gurney was pulling into the lot at Saint Thomas the Apostle. He parked and took the path through the old churchyard.

He was almost to the building’s back door when he saw her, standing very still among the moss-stained gravestones. A tall, brown-skinned thirtysomething woman in a plain gray tee shirt and sweatpants, she had the lean body and wiry arms of a long-distance runner. Her dark, suspicious eyes were fixed on him.

“Tania?”

She didn’t answer.

“I’m Dave Gurney.”

Again she remained silent.

“Would you prefer to talk out here or inside?”

“Maybe I’ve decided not to speak to you at all.”

“Is that true?”

“Suppose it is.”

“Then I’ll get back in my car and go home.”

She cocked her head, first one way then the other, with no discernible meaning. “We’ll talk right here. What did it mean, what you said to the pastor?”

“I told him we’ve made some discoveries concerning your husband’s murder.”

“You told him police might have been involved.”

“I said it looked that way.”

“What facts do you have?”

“I can’t reveal specific evidence. But I suspect that your husband and Virgil Tooker, as well as the two police officers, may all have been killed by the same person.”

“Not by the Payne boy or them Gort lunatics?”

“I don’t believe so.” He studied her impassive face for some reaction but saw none. Behind her loomed the marble angel on whose wing Coolidge a few days earlier had extinguished his cigarette.

“The man you’re calling my husband,” she said after a pause, “was really more my ex, though we never got divorced. We were living in the same house, for the economies of it, but we were separated in our minds. Man was a fool.” Another pause. “What do you want from me?”

“Your help in getting to the truth of what happened.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“You could start with why you say Marcel was a fool.”

“He had a weakness. Women loved him . . . and he loved them back.”

“That’s what ended your marriage?”

“It created situations that were a pain to my heart. But I tried to live with the weakness because there was so much strength in him otherwise. Strength and a true desire for justice—justice for people who have no power. He wanted to stand up for those people—to do what he could to take some of the strife and fear out of their lives. That was his vision for the BDA.”

“How did he get along with the other two BDA leaders?”

“Virgil Tooker and Blaze Jackson?”

Gurney nodded.

“Well . . . I’d have to say that Virgil wasn’t really what you’d call a leader. He was just a good man and happened to be close to Marcel, and Marcel pretty much pulled him into that position because he trusted him. The man had no huge talent, no huge fault. He just wanted to do the right thing. That’s all Virgil wanted. To be helpful.”

Gurney was struck by the echo of Mark Torres’s goal as a police officer.

“And Blaze Jackson?”

The first sign of emotion appeared on Tania’s face, something hard and bitter. When she spoke, her voice was almost frighteningly calm. “Blaze Lovely Jackson is the Devil incarnate. Ain’t nothing that bitch wouldn’t do to get what she wants. Blaze is all about Blaze. Fiery talker, loves to be onstage, loves the attention, people looking up at her. Loves to lay it down hard on the corrupt police and stir up the crowd. But all the time she’s got her evil eye on what’s in it for her—what she can take from someone else.”

“Was she the reason for your separation from your husband?”

“My husband was a fool. That was the reason for our separation.”

A brief silence fell between them.

Gurney asked if she’d seen Marcel or Virgil at any time in the forty-eight hours before they were killed. She shook her head. He asked if she’d seen or heard anything before or after their murders that might relate to them in any way.

“Nothing. Only the fact that Blaze is now the sole leader of the Black Defense Alliance, a position which the bitch surely loves.”

“She likes being in charge?”

“Power is what she likes. Likes it way too much.”

Gurney sensed the beginning of restlessness in Tania’s body language. He wanted to keep the door open for possible future conversations, so he decided to end this one now. “I appreciate your taking the time to meet with me, Tania. You’ve been very open. And what you’ve told me is quite helpful. Thank you.”

“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not here to do you a favor. You said police could be involved in the shit that went down, and I’d love to see that get proven and them get put in the penitentiary with the brothers waiting for them. That would be a sweetness to my heart. So don’t go thinking the wrong way. I live in a divided world, and not on your side of the line.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Do you know why this spot right here is my favorite place in all of White River?”

He glanced around the old graveyard. “Tell me.”

“It’s full of dead white people.”

46

Gurney’s route from Saint Thomas the Apostle back toward the interstate put him on the road that bordered Willard Park. As he approached the main entrance, Paul Aziz’s photos came to mind, and he decided to take another look at the playground area.

The parking lot was nearly full, unsurprising on a balmy spring afternoon. He found a spot, then took the pedestrian path along the edge of the mowed field where the BDA demonstration had taken place. The statue of the colonel had been cordoned off with Police Line Do Not Cross yellow tape, an apparent effort to keep it from being toppled or defaced before an official decision could be made regarding its fate. Although the rest of the park appeared well populated with sunbathers, Frisbee tossers, dog walkers, and young mothers with toddlers, the playground was deserted. Gurney wondered how long it would take for its forbidding aura to fade. A hand-printed sign on the kayak rental shed said CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

The blackbirds, however, continued to occupy the dense reeds along the edge of the lake. As Gurney approached the swing set, they rose up and began shrieking and swooping over his head. But when he stopped there they soon lost interest and settled back into the reeds.

The UTV tire tracks documented in Aziz’s photos were no longer visible, but Gurney remembered where they’d been. He looked once more at the jungle gym crossbar with the two shiny spots that his conversation with Aziz had persuaded him were indeed clamp marks.

He began running scenarios through his head, picturing the likely steps that would have been taken in bringing the two victims to that point and binding them to the bars.

He imagined Jordan and Tooker being persuaded to attend a meeting at some site where they were rendered controllable with a combination of alcohol and midazolam. They were then brought to the cabin, or more likely to the shed behind it. There they would have been heavily sedated with propofol, preparatory to being beaten, stripped, and branded—creating the illusion of a violent racist attack. They would then have been strapped into Beckert’s UTV and transported from the cabin via the connecting trail system to the playground.

He pictured the UTV emerging from the woods in the predawn darkness, proceeding toward the jungle gym, stopping in front of it—a chill mist drifting through the headlight beams. Beckert and Turlock were in the front seat. Jordan and Tooker—naked, anesthetized, close to death—were in the back seat. Behind them in the utility box were coils of rope and a sturdy clamp.

He pictured Beckert and Turlock getting out with flashlights, quickly deciding which man would be bound up first . . . and then what?

One option would be for Beckert and Turlock together to lift one of the victims out of the UTV and stand him upright with his back against the bars. While one of them held the man in place the other could get the clamp and one of the ropes, tie an end of the rope around the man’s neck, loop the rest of it over the bar in back of his head, and hold it in place with the clamp until it could be knotted securely. They could then tie the man’s torso and legs to the lower bars to ensure that he remained in a standing position. Meanwhile a slow, fatal strangulation would likely be occurring.

As Gurney thought about it, the process seemed revolting but feasible. Then it dawned on him that there was an easier way—a way that would have required virtually no physical effort. Each victim in turn could have been pulled out of the back of the UTV and dumped on the ground in front of the jungle gym. After one of the ropes had been tied around the victim’s chest, the free end could be passed over a bar and tied to the back of the UTV. The UTV could then be driven forward, causing the rope to lift the victim up toward the bar. The clamp could then be employed to hold the rope in place while the end was detached from the UTV, wrapped around the bar, and knotted. Finally, the victim could be secured in his grotesque standing position by pulling the rest of the rope tightly around his legs, torso, and, with fatal effect, his neck.

That way would definitely be easier. In fact, it would be so easy it obviated the need for two men—meaning that the double murder could have been carried out by either Beckert or Turlock. It was even possible one had acted without the other’s knowledge. If so, Gurney wondered if that might have had something to do with Turlock’s murder.

After a final look around the playground, as he turned to head back to the parking lot, he noticed he was being watched by one of the dog walkers—a short, muscular man with a gray buzz cut and two large Dobermans. He was standing in the middle of the path about fifty yards away. As Gurney got closer he could see anger in the man’s eyes. With little appetite for confrontation, Gurney stayed toward the edge of the path. “Good-looking dogs,” he said pleasantly as he was passing.

The man ignored the compliment and gestured toward the playground. “You one of the cops looking into this thing?”

Gurney stopped. “That’s right. Do you have any information about it?”

“Couple of the brothahs got what they deserved.”

“How do you figure that?”

“White River used to be a nice place to live. Great place to bring up kids. Safe little town. Look at it now. Street I live on used to be beautiful. You should see it today. Section Eight housing. Free rent for freeloaders. Next door I got a crazy son of a bitch in a dashiki. Like he’s actually from Africa. Lives with his two baby mamas. You and I pay for that! And here’s the thing. He’s got this black rooster. And white hens. That’s a hostile message. Every year he slaughters the white hens. In his backyard. Where I can see it. Chops their heads off. But never the black rooster. What do you call that?”

“What do you call it?”

“What it is. A terroristic threat. That’s what you should be worried about.”

“Do you want to make a complaint?”

“That’s what I’m doing. Right here. Right now.”

“To make a formal complaint, you need to visit police headquarters and fill out—”

The man interrupted with a disgusted wave of his hand. “Waste of time. Everybody knows that.” He turned away abruptly, gave a tug on the dogs’ leashes, and strode out into the field, muttering obscenities.

Gurney proceeded along the path to his car, reminded once more of the fear and loathing in the melting pot of America.

Once he was sitting in the Outback, it occurred to him that he should pass along to Mark Torres the fact that the murders of Jordan and Tooker could have been managed by one person. He placed the call. As usual, Torres picked up quickly and sounded eager to hear whatever Gurney had to say.

He explained his one-man theory.

Torres was quiet for a moment. “Do you think this should change our focus?”

“For now we just need to keep the possibility in mind and see how it fits with whatever else we learn. Speaking of which, have we found out if Beckert and Turlock have alibis for the night of the Jordan-Tooker murders or the night of the sniper shootings?”

“So far, no one we’ve spoken to recalls being with them on those occasions. But that’s not surprising. They didn’t exactly hang out with the troops. Turlock reported only to Beckert, and Beckert reports only to the mayor. You met Dwayne Shucker, so you can imagine there wasn’t much actual reporting going on there. Beckert’s wife’s been no help. Apparently has a busy social life, isn’t home much, and doesn’t keep tabs on her husband. As for Turlock, he lives alone. Nearest neighbor is a mile away and claims to know nothing about him.”

The Outback was getting hot in the afternoon sun in the unshaded parking area, and Gurney opened the windows. “The Jordan-Tooker file shows no real interviews after the murders, other than a couple of cryptic notations about tips from unnamed informants and a brief statement from the guy who found the bodies. Am I missing something?”

“Not as far as I know. Remember, I had the case for less than a day. Once Turlock took it over, it was all about the Gorts.”

“None of Jordan’s or Tooker’s associates were interviewed?”

“The only associates either of them seemed to have were the BDA members who were arrested in the raid on their headquarters. With charges pending, they were advised by counsel not to make any statements at all to the police.”

“What about Jordan’s wife?”

“She refused to talk to Turlock.” Torres paused. “Some people here see us as an occupying army.”

“Actually, I spoke to her today.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“I told her I thought that someone in law enforcement might go down for the killing. She liked that idea.”

“I bet. Did she say anything useful?”

“She made it pretty clear that Marcel had gotten sexually involved with Blaze Jackson. And that Blaze is a nasty piece of work.”

“Wait, hold on a second.”

Gurney could hear an indistinct conversation in the background. When Torres got back on the line he sounded upbeat. “That was Shelby Towns. She said that a pair of boots found in the cabin are a perfect tread match for the boot prints found on the stairs in the Poulter Street house.”

“Are they Turlock’s or Beckert’s? Or could she tell?”

“Turlock’s. She could tell by the size. Looks like he was the Loomis shooter. So this is coming together in a way that—sorry, hold on again.”

After another background conversation, Torres returned. “Shelby says that Cory Payne’s fingerprints are on all those cartridges you found with the rifle.”

“That’s consistent with Cory’s story of helping his father with the reloading process. Any other news?”

“Just that the DA will be appearing this evening on NewsBreakers.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the lead-in program to RAM’s Battleground Tonight. Should be interesting to watch Kline explaining how his godlike hero turned into a devil overnight.”

Gurney agreed. Since Kline couldn’t keep the media at bay forever, he’d evidently decided to jump in with both feet in a desperate effort to shape the narrative.

47

Just before 6:00 PM Gurney opened his laptop and went to the RAM website. As it was loading, something caught his eye through the window next to his desk—a spot of fuchsia moving along the top of the high pasture. He realized it was Madeleine in her bright windbreaker mowing the grass swath that separated the pasture from the woods. He watched as she turned the riding mower onto a path that led down to the house. Then he went to the “Live Stream” page and clicked on View Now. A moment later the screen was filled with bright-blue words flashing against a black background:

RAM NEWSBREAKERS

SPECIAL EARLY EDITION

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW NOW

The words exploded into pieces, then the pieces flew back together to form new words:

THE HUNTER BECOMES

THE HUNTED

IN STUNNING REVERSAL

Those words in turn exploded, only to be immediately reconstituted in another headline:

TOP COP

NOW PRIME SUSPECT

IN SENSATIONAL WHITE RIVER MURDERS

On a final drumbeat the scene switched to a shot of a male and female news team, making a show of jotting down last-minute notes at their RAM-TV news desk. The female member was the first to put down her pen and look directly into the camera.

“Good evening. I’m Stacey Kilbrick.”

Gurney noted that her default expression of serious professional concern had been ratcheted up into a grim intensity. He was momentarily distracted by the ringing of his phone. He saw that it was Thrasher and he let it go to voicemail.

The male on the screen put down his pen. Neat and petulant, he looked like a flight attendant with a grievance. “Good evening. I’m Rory Kronck. We have a big story for you tonight—a NewsBreakers exclusive report on the mind-boggling developments in White River, New York. Lay out the facts for our viewers, Stacey.”

“As you were saying, Rory, those facts are nothing short of amazing. The hunter has become the hunted. Disturbing new evidence is linking Dell Beckert, former White River police chief and nationally known law-and-order advocate, to four shocking murders that his own department was investigating. And now it appears that he’s taken off for parts unknown, under a heavy cloud of suspicion.” She turned toward Kronck. “We’ve covered our share of wild stories over the years, Rory, but I’ve never seen the likes of this. Have you?”

“Never, Stacey. And the vanishing chief is just part of it. The deputy chief, we’ve just learned, has turned up dead. And we’re talking about the kind of grisly murder that’s usually reserved for horror movies.”

Kilbrick produced a theatrical look of revulsion. “Apart from the gory details, the real shocker to me is the way the whole case has been flipped upside down. Don’t you agree?”

“Totally.”

“I understand a lot of the credit goes to the district attorney and to a very special homicide detective attached to his department.”

“That’s absolutely true. In fact, just before this program I had a revealing conversation with DA Kline.”

“Great, Rory. Let’s run that tape right now.”

Gurney heard the side door out by the mudroom open and close. A minute later Madeleine came into the den.

She peered at his laptop screen. “What are you watching?”

“Live interview with Kline.”

She pulled a chair over and sat down.

The scene on the screen had shifted to a bare-bones interview setting. Kline and Kronck were sitting in chairs facing each other with a bookcase in the background. Kline appeared to have just gotten a haircut.

Kronck was leaning forward, in the middle of a sentence. “. . . a word that’s on everyone’s mind: ‘shocker’! Top cop becomes top suspect. And his son, who was your top suspect, has essentially been declared innocent. Our heads are spinning. Let me ask you the obvious question. If your view of the case today is right, how could you have been so wrong yesterday?”

Kline’s reaction was a pained smile. “That sounds like a simple question, Rory, but the reality isn’t simple at all. You have to remember that the earlier case hypothesis that zeroed in on Cory Payne for the sniper shootings and the Gort twins for the playground murders was a willful deception created by our current suspect. From the very beginning there was a concerted effort by WRPD leadership to mislead my office. This is not a matter of our misreading the case. What we’re dealing with is a vicious and devious betrayal of the public trust by a man whose sworn duty it was to treat that trust as sacred.”

“You make it sound like an act of real treachery.”

“I see it as a form of moral decay.”

“How deep in the department might that decay go?”

“That’s something we’re actively looking into.”

“Your resources must be stretched pretty thin. With so many unanswered questions about these terrible crimes, and who’s trustworthy and who’s not, not to mention the ongoing racial unrest in parts of White River, where’s the necessary manpower coming from?”

Kline moved uncomfortably in his chair. “The situation is actually well in hand.”

“Are there any plans to bring in the state police? Or the FBI, considering the possible hate-crime angle?”

“Not at this time.”

“So you’re saying you have all the resources you need?”

“I’m not just saying it, Rory, I know it for a fact.”

“You sound amazingly confident, considering what you’re facing. Four sensational murders—five now, counting the deputy chief. Wouldn’t it make sense to bring in the kind of expertise that the state police could offer? With all due respect, sir, yours is a rural county in which the typical crimes are drunk driving, minor drug offenses, and disturbing the peace. What you’re facing now is infinitely more complicated. Doesn’t that worry you?”

Kline took a deep breath. “Normally we don’t reveal staffing details, Rory, but for the sake of public confidence I want to put this expertise issue to rest. The fact is, our level of investigatory sophistication right now is unsurpassed. A key member of my current team happens to be Dave Gurney, the highly decorated detective who holds the record for the largest number of cleared homicide cases in the history of the New York City Police Department. I’m talking about close to a hundred homicides solved personally by this man—including famous serial murder cases. It’s through his relentless questioning and his insights that we’ve arrived at our current understanding of the situation in White River. You asked why I wasn’t bringing in state police investigators. The fact is, Dave Gurney has given advanced seminars on homicide investigation at the state police academy. So in the matter of expertise, we take a back seat to no one. We have the best there is.”

“That’s fascinating news. I’m impressed.”

Kline said nothing.

“I appreciate that your time is limited, sir, and I know you have a final message you want to leave with our viewers.”

“Yes, I do.” He gazed sternly into the camera. “Our top priority right now is locating Dell Beckert.”

A phone number appeared at the bottom of the screen.

Kline continued, “If you know anything about his whereabouts, or if you know anyone who does, please call this number. He may be driving a black Dodge Durango, New York plate number CBIIWRPD.”

The screen displayed the plate number, a photograph of Beckert in his police uniform, and the phone number.

Kline concluded, “If you have any information that might help us find this man, please call this number now. You don’t need to identify yourself unless you wish to. We just want whatever information you can provide. Thank you.”

The screen was filled briefly with just the phone number, which was then replaced by a live shot of Stacey Kilbrick and Rory Kronck at their news desk.

“Wow,” said Kilbrick. “The DA has some big-city talent in his little upstate department.”

“So it seems,” said Kronck.

“Hmm. How much do we know about this Dave Gurney?”

“We know that New York magazine ran a front-page profile on him a few years ago. The article title was ‘Supercop’—which I guess says it all.”

“So there’s no end to the surprises in this story. Great job, Rory.”

He produced a self-satisfied smirk.

“I’m Stacey Kilbrick for NewsBreakers. After these important messages I’ll be back with the latest battle over transgender troops serving in the U.S. Marine Corps.”

Gurney closed the “Live Stream” page and left the RAM website.

Madeleine was watching him. “Are you concerned about Kline going public with your involvement?”

He turned up his palms in a gesture of resignation. “I’d rather he hadn’t. But I don’t think he’s any happier about it than I am.”

“What do you mean?”

“Kline is not a credit sharer. He did it because he was trapped. Kronck was poking at the weakness of his resources and implying that he ought to bring in an outside agency, which Kline absolutely doesn’t want to do. He’s afraid it would be portrayed as a surrender on his part, and he wants to come out of this with a personal victory. Bragging about my background was a way to beat back Kronck’s suggestion that his department couldn’t handle the challenge.”

“I bet that Kilbrick woman tries to get you on her program.”

“It’ll be a snowy day in hell when I say yes to that.” He glanced at the time in the corner of the screen. “It’s twenty past six. You have any ideas about dinner?”

She frowned. “Tonight is my dinner meeting with the town political action group. You remember I told you about this, right?”

“I forgot it was tonight.”

“I may be late. Our discussions have a way of going on and on. There’s all sorts of stuff in the fridge. And pasta in the yellow cabinet.”

An hour later—as he was finishing the plate of spaghetti, diced tomatoes, zucchini, and Parmesan cheese he’d prepared for himself—he got a call from Cory Payne. There was a level of excitement in the young man’s voice that Gurney hadn’t heard before.

“Dave! Are you seeing the news stories on the internet?”

“About what?”

“The case! It started with RAM News announcing that you guys are focused on my father—who’s disappeared. The DA gave an interview about it, and all the other news sites are picking it up. Wild headlines are popping up. ‘Son Innocent, Father Guilty’—stuff like that. It’s all turned around. I’m not the target anymore. You must know all this, right?”

“I know some significant discoveries have been made.”

“That’s a mild way of putting it. I feel like I owe you my life!”

“It’s not over yet.”

“But it sounds like everything’s finally going in the right direction. Jesus, God, what a relief!” He paused. “Is this because of stuff you found at his cabin?”

“I can’t talk about that. Evidence disclosures would need to come from the DA. But that reminds me—why didn’t you tell me about the second key?”

“What?”

“You told me about the key for the cabin, but not the other one for the shed.”

“You just lost me.”

“The shed behind the cabin.”

“I don’t know anything about a shed. I’ve only been to his cabin.” Payne sounded mystified.

“Did he show you the cabin basement?”

“No. I didn’t realize it had one.”

“Where did he set up his reloading equipment?”

“On a dinner table in the middle of the room.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Maybe a flannel shirt. I don’t know about his pants. Maybe chinos? He never wore jeans. Oh, and some kind of disposable gloves, like doctors wear. I think to keep the gunpowder off his hands.”

“Since you came to live in White River, how much contact have you had with Judd Turlock?”

“I’ve seen him with my father. He wasn’t the sort of person you’d want to get to know. Even making eye contact with him was scary. One of the news stories said that he was found murdered at the gun club. Are you the one who found him?”

“I was there.”

“How was he killed?”

“Sorry, that’s another one for the DA to answer.”

“I understand.” He paused. “Well, the main reason I called was to thank you. Thank you for giving me back my life.”

Now Gurney paused. “I have another question. When you were a kid, before you got sent to that boarding school, did your father try to interest you in guns or hunting or anything like that?”

There was a long silence. When Payne finally replied, the excitement had drained from his voice.

“My father never tried to interest me in anything. The only concern he had was that I never do anything that might embarrass him.”

Gurney felt an unpleasant tremor of recognition. There was a time when he had a similar resentment toward his own father.

48

He wasn’t sure what to do next. He had the feeling that things were coming to a head and he needed to press forward. While the next step was eluding him, he decided to check his phone to make sure he was up to date with his messages.

There was just one, the call from Thrasher that had come in while he was watching Battleground Tonight. He pressed the Play icon.

“Detective Gurney, Walter Thrasher here. No doubt the nonstop horrors of White River are absorbing your attention. But I feel the need to fill you in on the even more gruesome history of your own idyllic hillside. Call when you can. In the meantime, I’d strongly advise you not to do any more excavating—not until I prepare you for what you’re likely to find.”

Gurney felt a surge of curiosity and alarm.

He called Thrasher back immediately, got his voicemail, and left a message.

Then he forced his attention back to the White River affair and what unresolved aspect he should address first. The ice-pick murder of Rick Loomis came to mind, which in turn reminded him of the hospital personnel list and the fact that he still hadn’t examined the section covering employees who had resigned or been terminated.

He went to his desk, got out the USB drive containing the list, and inserted it in his laptop. A few moments later he was opening the Res-Term section of the Mercy Hospital Consolidated Personnel File. As he went through the columns of names and addresses, he recognized only one name. But it definitely got his attention:

JACKSON, BLAZE L., 115 BORDEN STREET, WHITE RIVER, NY

Her resignation or termination—the file didn’t indicate which—had occurred on February 12, just three months earlier. The remaining data was limited to her landline and cell phone numbers.

As he was entering this information in his address book, the Borden Street location was ringing a faint bell. He was sure he’d seen that address before, but he couldn’t place where. He opened Google Street View and entered the address, but what he saw wasn’t familiar. He returned to the personnel list and looked again at the address. That’s when it occurred to him that it wasn’t the physical location that was ringing a bell, it was the typed address on the file page. He’d seen that address somewhere else in the same document.

He went to the main part of the list that was devoted to active employees and began scrolling slowly through the names and addresses. Finally, there it was—in the section covering security, maintenance, and housekeeping:

CREEL, CHALISE J., 115 BORDEN STREET, WHITE RIVER, NY

The landline number given for her was the same as the one listed for Blaze Jackson, but she had a different cell number. So, thought Gurney, they were roommates at least. And possibly more than that.

Just as interesting was the fact that Chalise Creel was a name he’d seen before, and not just in the personnel list. It had appeared on the name tag of the cleaning woman on the ICU floor at the hospital—the woman with the almond-shaped eyes who’d emptied the trash basket in the visitors’ lounge the day he was there with Kim, Heather, and Madeleine. A woman who would have had easy access to Rick Loomis. A woman whose routine presence the nursing staff would have had no reason to question.

The insertion of the ice pick, however, into Loomis’s brain stem would have required specific medical knowledge. Which raised questions about Creel’s background, as well as Jackson’s. Gurney needed to find out what Jackson’s job at the hospital had been, and the reason she was no longer there. Could the Jackson-Creel relationship be connected directly to the murder of Rick Loomis? Might one of them have been the source of the drugs used on Jordan and Tooker? And perhaps the biggest question of all—were Jackson and Creel entangled with Judd Turlock and Dell Beckert?

The hospital seemed the logical place to start searching for answers. Gurney’s call was answered by an automated branching system that connected him eventually to Abby Marsh in the HR department. She was still in her office at a quarter past eight. She sounded as harried as she was the day Gurney had gotten the file from her.

“Yes?”

“Abby, this is Dave Gurney. I was wondering if—”

She broke in. “The man of the hour.”

“Sorry?”

“We have a TV in our cafeteria. I was grabbing a quick dinner, and saw the interview with the district attorney. What can I do for you?”

“I need some information on two of your employees—one past, one present. Blaze Jackson and Chalise Creel. Are you familiar with them?”

“Jackson, definitely. Creel, slightly. Is there a problem?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Is Creel working now?”

“Hold on. I’ll check . . . Okay, here it is. According to the schedule, she’s on the four-to-twelve shift. So, yes, she’d be working now.”

“Sorry, what I meant was, do you know for a fact that she’s actually there?”

“That wouldn’t be in our computer system.”

“But someone must know whether she’s there or not.”

“Her shift supervisor. Do you want me to call him?”

“Please.”

“I’m going to put you on hold.”

“Thank you, Abby.”

Five minutes passed. When she finally reconnected with Gurney she sounded worried. “Chalise Creel didn’t show up for her shift this afternoon, she didn’t show up yesterday, and she didn’t call in either day. Her supervisor tried to reach her yesterday. When he tried again today he got an automated message saying her voicemail was full.”

“She’s been reliable until now?”

“Apparently. No red flags in her file. But the fact that you’re asking about her—is that something we should be concerned about?”

“Too soon to tell. Did you know that she has the same address as Blaze Jackson?”

“The same address?” The worry in Abby Marsh’s voice went up a notch.

“Yes. And the same landline number.”

Marsh said nothing.

Rather than ask whether Jackson had resigned or been terminated—a question that Marsh might not be able to answer for privacy reasons—Gurney employed the presumptive approach detectives often used in dealing with similar situations. “When Jackson was terminated, were there any repercussions?”

“What kind of repercussions?”

“Did she deny what she was being accused of?”

“Of course. Until we showed her our pharmacy security video.”

Gurney decided to continue his presumptive approach. “She had the propofol in her possession? And the midazolam?”

“The propofol was right there on the video. The midazolam would have been harder to prove. Bottom line, she agreed to resign, and we agreed not to press charges. There would have been no point. Propofol is not technically a controlled substance like midazolam, so legally the charges wouldn’t have amounted to much. But who gave you all this information?”

Gurney was tempted to tell her that she just did. But revealing that he’d tricked her would do no one any good. And he wasn’t particularly proud of it. He said instead, not untruthfully, “The truth has a way of leaking out.”

She paused. “Can you tell me why you’re looking for Chalise Creel?”

He worded his answer conservatively. “She may have been in the vicinity of the ICU at the time Rick Loomis was attacked.”

Abby Marsh’s dead silence indicated that she got the point.

The first thing Gurney did after thanking her for her help and ending the call was to check Creel’s landline and cell numbers and place calls to them both. Both calls went to voicemail, and both mailboxes were full. He placed a call to Jackson’s cell number. That call also went to voicemail, and that mailbox was also full. He sat back in his chair and gazed out the rear window at the hillside, now almost entirely enveloped in darkness.

Somewhere in the high pine forest a coyote pack began to howl.

He thought about the link between Blaze Jackson and Chalise Creel. He thought about their unwillingness or inability to accept phone calls, about Jackson’s drug-related exit from Mercy Hospital, about Creel’s access to the ICU.

After a quarter of an hour of indecision he called Torres.

“Mark, there’s a situation we need to look into.” He related his conversation with Abby Marsh and asked Torres to get over to the Jackson-Creel apartment as soon as possible. “If either one of them is present, hold on to them. I’ll meet you there.”

He drove well above the speed limit all the way to the White River exit on the interstate, then relied on his GPS to lead him through the city’s maze of one-way streets. His destination turned out to be in the middle of a ragged block in the Grinton neighborhood.

In the light of the sole functioning street lamp, the side of Borden Street on which number 115 was located appeared intact. On the opposite side only burned-out shells remained. Torres’s Crown Victoria was already there. Gurney pulled in behind it.

Getting out of his car he was struck by the sharp odor of wet ashes and underlying decay. Like the adjoining structures to its left and right, number 115 was a grimy four-story tenement with a steel door. A man and a woman were sitting in plastic lawn chairs in the semidarkness in front of the building. The man was small, wiry, and brown-skinned, with an unkempt gray Afro. The woman was blond and remarkably rotund—creating an impression of having been inflated. Her face was illuminated by the cold glow of her phone screen.

The man watched Gurney approaching. “Apartment you want’s on the fourth floor,” he announced in a loud voice. “Man who came before you has been up there awhile.”

Gurney stopped. “Do you happen to know the women who live there—Blaze Jackson and Chalise Creel?”

The man grinned. “Everybody knows Miss Lovely. She’s famous.”

“What about Chalise?”

“Chalise don’t talk to nobody.”

“Have you seen either of them in the past few days?”

“Don’t believe so.”

Gurney looked at the woman. “How about you. Do you know either of the ladies on the fourth floor?”

She showed no sign of hearing the question.

The man leaned forward in his lawn chair. “Brenda only knows what’s on her phone.”

Gurney nodded. “Do you know if the ladies had any recent visitors?”

“Brothers comin’ and goin’ all the time.”

“Anyone else?”

“Man in the big car, couple days back.”

Gurney pointed to the Crown Vic. “Big car like that?”

“Taller. More shine. Cowboy kind of name.”

“Durango?”

“Yeah. Pretty sure. Durango.”

“You saw the driver?”

“White man. Saw him from my window.” He pointed toward the second floor.

“Can you describe him?”

“I just did.”

“Tall? Short? Thin? Fat?”

“Regular size.”

“Type of clothing?”

“Dark.”

“Hair color, length?

“Dark hat, didn’t see no hair.”

“And this was when?”

“Had to be night before last.”

“Do you know what time he arrived?”

“Nighttime. Maybe ten, eleven.”

“Do you know how long he was here?”

“The man came in the night, is all I know. Car was gone in the morning.”

Gurney was considering his next question when he heard his name being called. He looked up and saw Torres at an open window on the top floor.

“Dave, you need to come up here!” The strain in his voice gave Gurney a hint of what to expect when he reached the apartment.

Gurney entered the building and bounded up through the stairwell two steps at a time. The fourth-floor apartment door was open, held that way by Torres, who stepped back to let Gurney into a narrow foyer lighted by a single ceiling fixture. He handed Gurney a pair of latex gloves and Tyvek shoe covers.

Gurney put them on without asking any questions. He knew he’d have the answers soon enough.

“They’re in the living room,” said Torres.

The sickening smell that intensified as Gurney passed through the foyer was one he knew well but had never gotten used to.

Two African American women in short skirts and satin tops were sitting on the living room couch. They were leaning against each other—as though, instead of going out for the evening, they’d fallen asleep in the middle of an intimate conversation. Looking closer, Gurney could see on their skin the characteristic sheen of autolysis. In addition, there were signs that the first gases of decomposition were beginning to bloat their bodies. But the faces were still recognizable. He was sure the one on the left belonged to the fiery woman he’d seen on RAM-TV’s Battleground Tonight. And he had a feeling that the face on the right belonged to the almond-eyed cleaning woman he’d seen in the ICU visitors’ lounge.

As was usually the case with corpses at this stage, flies were everywhere—most thickly concentrated on the mouths, eyes, and ears. The apartment’s two front windows were wide open, likely an effort by Torres to mitigate the stench.

There were two empty glasses, open bottles of vodka and raspberry liqueur, and two glittery purses on the coffee table in front of the couch—along with a number of hypodermic needles. Gurney counted eight, all used and empty. Their labels indicated they were of the preloaded type containing propofol.

“Blaze Lovely Jackson and Chalise Jackson Creel,” said Torres. “At least that’s what it says on the driver’s licenses in those purses. Sounds like they might be sisters.”

Gurney nodded. “Have you called the ME’s office?”

“Thrasher said he could be here in twenty-five minutes, and that was twenty minutes ago. I called Garrett Felder, too. He’s on his way.”

“Good. You’ve been through the apartment?”

“A general look-around.”

“Anything get your attention?”

“One thing, actually.” Torres pointed to a small desk against the wall opposite the couch. He opened the top drawer all the way. In the back behind a ream of paper there was a plastic zip-top bag containing what appeared to be a stack of twenty-dollar bills. Gurney guesstimated the total, if they were all twenties, to be at least three thousand dollars.

He frowned. “Interesting.”

“The money?”

“The plastic bag.”

“The bag? Why—?”

Torres’s question was truncated by the sound of a car door closing in the street below.

49

Shortly after Thrasher’s arrival, Garrett Felder came trudging up the stairs with his evidence-collection equipment, followed by Paul Aziz with his camera. While the three donned their Tyvek suits, Torres acquainted them with the basic facts of the situation, after which he and Gurney took a low-profile position, mostly observing the technical work in progress and being careful not to get in the way.

From time to time Felder and Aziz expressed their dismay at the odor that had permeated the apartment. Thrasher acted as if it didn’t exist.

After watching them for a while, Torres took Gurney aside and informed him that he’d been contacted earlier that day by the lead singer of an obscure old rock band. “He told me he’d heard a news report a few days ago that members of a white-supremacist group called Knights of the Rising Sun were wanted by the police in White River. That would have been when Turlock and Beckert were publicly linking the KRS website to the Jordan-Tooker murders and to the Gorts. Anyway, the news reporter included the website address in the story. The rock-band guy got curious and went to the site—because he remembered the phrase ‘knights of the rising sun’ was in one of his old songs.”

Gurney chimed in. “And on the website he found the video of him and his band performing that song. But he didn’t know anything about any white-supremacist group and his band had never given anyone the rights to the video.”

Torres looked baffled. “How on earth do you know that?”

“It’s the only way it would make sense, considering the fact that the whole KRS business was a fabrication. I figure the website creator found the old video somewhere—maybe on YouTube—copied it, and used it. I’d also bet that the band’s actual name has the phrase ‘white supremacist’ or words to that effect in it.”

Torres stared at Gurney. “He told me his band, as sort of a joke, was named ‘The Texas Skinhead White Supremacy Heavy Metal Rockers.’ But how could you possibly know that?”

“Once it was apparent that the KRS thing was a form of misdirection, I asked myself how I’d go about creating a phony website like that. Rather than trying to invent the content from scratch, I’d do an internet search of terms like ‘white supremacist’ to see what was out there—what I could adapt or just plain steal. The next step—”

Thrasher interrupted their conversation. “Cadaver van’ll be here momentarily. Time of death I’d put in a window of forty-eight to seventy-two hours ago. I may be able to be a bit more precise when I get them open—day after tomorrow if nothing unforeseen occurs. Meanwhile it looks similar in both cases to the chemical preamble to the Jordan and Tooker homicides. I would expect our lab tests to reveal alcohol, metabolites of midazolam, and signs of propofol toxicity.”

“Why midazolam?” asked Gurney. “Aren’t the other benzodiazepines more readily available?”

“Generally, yes.”

“Then why—”

“Anterograde amnesia.”

“What’s that?”

“One of the special effects of midazolam is to impair the creation of memories. That might be advantageous to a perpetrator in a criminal situation—in case the victim survived. There could, of course, be other reasons for its selection. Up to you to sort that out.” He pointed at one of the bottles on the coffee table. “While you’re at it, I suggest you get an analysis of that raspberry liqueur.”

“Any reason in particular?” asked Gurney, his annoyance rising at Thrasher’s habit of doling out information in pieces rather than laying it all out at once.

“Midazolam is available as a syrup. Has a bitter taste. A strong, sweet liqueur might be an ideal delivery vehicle.”

“I take it there’s no chance of this being a double suicide?”

“I wouldn’t say no chance. But damn little chance.” Thrasher stepped out of the living room into the little foyer and began removing his Tyvek suit.

Gurney followed him. “By the way, I got your phone message.”

Thrasher nodded, peeling off his latex gloves.

“I’d like to know what this excavation mystery is all about,” said Gurney.

“When can we sit down and talk about it?”

“How about right now?”

Thrasher produced an unpleasant smile. “The subject is a sensitive one. This is neither the time nor the place.”

“Then pick a time and place.”

Thrasher’s smile hardened. “Your house. Tomorrow evening. I’m speaking at the annual dinner of the Forensic Pathology Association in Syracuse. I should be passing through Walnut Crossing on my way there around five.”

“I’ll see you then.”

Thrasher rolled up his Tyvek coveralls, removed his shoe covers, stuffed everything in an expensive-looking leather bag, and left without another word.

Gurney returned to Torres in the living room, intending to resume his explanation of the likely KRS website creation process, when Garrett Felder came over, smartphone in hand, obviously excited.

“Look at this!” He held up his phone so Torres and Gurney could both see the screen. It displayed side-by-side photos of two thumbprints. They appeared to be identical.

“Clean, shiny, nonporous surfaces are a godsend. Look at these prints! Like they get on TV. Perfect!”

Gurney and Torres peered at them.

“There’s no doubt these two came from the same thumb,” continued Felder. “Different time, different place. But the same thumb. Print on the left I just lifted from the plastic bag of twenties in the desk drawer. Print on the right I lifted yesterday from an alarm clock in the loft of Dell Beckert’s cabin. It also matches a bunch of prints on his furniture, his faucets, his UTV.”

“Do we know for a fact those prints in the cabin are Beckert’s?” asked Gurney.

Felder nodded. “Confirmation yesterday from AFIS—from their file of active LEO prints.”

Torres seemed taken aback. “Jackson and Creel got that money directly from Beckert?”

“We know Jackson did,” said Felder. “Her prints and Beckert’s are both on the bag.”

“You took prints from Jackson’s body?” asked Gurney.

“Quick ones. Thrasher’ll do the official set at autopsy. Anyway, I’ve got more work to do now. Just wanted to clue you in.” Felder slipped his phone through a slit in his Tyvek coverall into his pocket and headed for a hallway off the side of the living room. On the wall next to the hallway there was a poster-sized print of a famous sixties radical thrusting an iconic black power fist into the air.

A moment later Paul Aziz came out of the same hallway. He announced that he’d finished. Patting his camera affectionately, he asked if Gurney or Torres had any special requests beyond the standard crime-scene collection. Torres looked questioningly at Gurney, who said no. Aziz promised to email them photo sets the following morning and was gone.

Torres turned to Gurney with a puzzled look. “This financial connection between Dell Beckert and Blaze Jackson . . . it doesn’t seem to surprise you.”

“I’m only surprised that we found such clear evidence of it. When the hospital HR director admitted that Jackson was fired for stealing propofol hypodermics, and propofol hypodermics had been found on Beckert’s property, it was natural to suspect a connection.”

“You think the money was Beckert’s payment to her for the drugs?”

Gurney shrugged. “It would seem to be payment for something. We need to know more about what went on between them. Obviously the chief of police wouldn’t ask a leader of the BDA to steal propofol for him unless they had an established relationship.”

Torres looked baffled. “Like what?”

“There are some interesting possibilities. Remember that revelation a few years back that one of the biggest mobsters in Boston was a major FBI informant?”

Torres’s eyes widened. “You think Jackson was fingering people for Beckert?”

“We’ve heard she was ambitious and ruthless. She could have been selectively informing on people she wanted out of her way. It could have been a useful association that got deeper as time passed. It’s not inconceivable that they collaborated on the elimination of Jordan and Tooker—an outcome we’ve been told they may both have wanted for their own reasons.”

“Are you suggesting Beckert did this?” Torres gestured toward the couch.

“The guy downstairs in the lawn chair claims that a white man in a black Durango was here two nights ago—just within Thrasher’s time-of-death window.”

“Jesus,” said Torres softly.

Gurney looked over at the bottles and glasses on the table and Jackson and Creel in their party clothes. “Maybe Beckert suggested a little toast to their success.”

Torres picked up the hypothetical narrative. “The midazolam in the drinks relaxes them to the point of not knowing what’s going on. Then he injects them with fatal overdoses of propofol. And just leaves everything there, so it’ll look like a drug party gone bad.” He hesitated, frowning. “But why kill them?”

Gurney smiled. “The demon of negative projection.”

“The what?”

“Let’s assume that Beckert relied on their help to get rid of people who could cause problems for him. At least Jordan and Tooker, and probably Loomis in the hospital. But that put them in a position where they could cause even bigger problems, because of what they knew. Once he started envisioning situations in which they might roll over on him, or even try to blackmail him, that would have done it. His political future and personal safety would have been far more important to him than the lives of two potential troublemakers.”

Torres nodded slowly. “You think he might have set Turlock up? By sending him out to the gun club and letting the Gorts know he’d be there? I mean, Turlock probably knew more damaging stuff about him than anyone else on earth, and if he’d outlived his usefulness . . .”

“That would depend on Beckert being in contact with the Gorts, which—”

Torres’s phone rang. He frowned at the screen. “It’s the DA’s office.” He listened intently for a minute or two. The only sound in the apartment was the hum of Felder’s evidence vac as he ran it slowly over the rug in front of the couch.

Torres finally spoke. “Okay . . . Yes, I know the area . . . Right, it looks that way . . . I agree . . . Thank you.” He ended the call and turned to Gurney. “That was the woman in Kline’s office who’s taking calls in response to his TV request for information on Beckert’s whereabouts.”

“Anything useful?”

“A caller said he saw a man earlier tonight in a gas station over near Bass River. The man was filling a couple of five-gallon gas cans in the back of a black Durango. The Durango plate number ended with the letters WRPD.”

“Did the caller identify himself?”

“No. He asked if there was a reward. She told him there wasn’t, and he hung up. Phone company says the call came from a prepaid.”

“Does Kline’s office have a recording of it?”

“No. The line they’re using bypasses their automatic system.”

“Too bad.” Gurney paused. “Bass River’s out by the reservoir, right?”

“Right. Other side of the mountain from the gun club. Heavily forested land. Not many roads.” Torres eyed Gurney’s expression. “Something about that bothering you?”

“I’m just thinking that if Beckert’s on the run, it’s surprising he’s still in the area.”

“Maybe he’s got a second cabin nobody knows about. In the woods somewhere, off the grid. Maybe that’s what the gas cans were for—a generator. What do you think?”

“I guess it’s possible.”

“You sound doubtful.”

“Driving his own vehicle with a distinctive plate number close to home seems like a stupid thing to do.”

“People make mistakes under pressure, right?”

“True,” said Gurney.

In fact, he thought with a twinge of anxiety, he might be doing that himself.

50

It was after midnight when Gurney got home from White River. He parked by the side door. The thought occurred to him, as it had done on many previous occasions, that it would make sense to add a garage to the house. It was something Madeleine had mentioned from time to time, and it was the sort of thing they could work on together. After the case was wrapped up he’d have to give the project some serious thought.

Before going into the house he stood for a while next to the Outback in the moonlight, inhaling the sweet, earthy spring air—an antidote to the odor of death he had experienced earlier. However, the nights were a lot chillier up in the hills around Walnut Crossing than down in White River, and it wasn’t long before a shiver persuaded him to go inside.

Despite feeling wired from the intense evening, he decided to lie down, close his eyes, and try to get some rest. Madeleine was asleep, but when he got into bed she woke up enough to murmur, “You’re home.”

“Yes.”

“Everything all right?”

“More or less.”

It took a moment for that to register.

“What’s the ‘less’ part?”

“The White River thing keeps getting crazier. How was your political action meeting?”

“Stupid. Tell you about it in the morning.”

“Okay. G’night.”

“G’night.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

A minute later the soft rhythm of her breathing told him she was asleep.

As he lay staring out the open window at the shapes of the trees, just visible in the silvery moonlight, his thoughts centered on the relationship between Dell Beckert and Blaze Jackson. He wondered if she might have been the unnamed informant referred to more than once in the critical-situation-management team meetings. Did Beckert have something on her that forced her cooperation, or had the initiative been hers? Was the bag of money in the drawer a onetime transaction, or was it part of an ongoing arrangement? Was it a payment for value received, or money extorted in return for silence? Given Jackson’s physical attractiveness and reputed sexual appetite, might her connection to Beckert have included that element? Or was it purely a business relationship?

And what about the Rick Loomis connection? If Beckert and Turlock were behind the Poulter Street attempt on Loomis’s life, then presumably they were also behind the fatal attack in the hospital. Did Beckert and Jackson enlist Chalise Creel and show her how to drive that ice pick into the man’s brain stem?

The thought of Poulter Street reminded Gurney of a question he’d asked Torres to pursue: Had the real estate agent who’d arranged for the leases on the two sniper sites actually met with Jordan, whose name was on the leases, or had the transaction been handled by an intermediary?

Torres had told Gurney the information would be available as soon as the agent returned from vacation. Gurney’s eagerness to pursue the matter, along with the impossibility of doing so at two o’clock in the morning, kept him spinning what-if scenarios until he finally drifted into an uneasy sleep.

When he awoke at nine the next morning the sky was blue, and through the open windows he could hear Madeleine out mowing. His first thought was to get in touch with Acme Realty.

He called Mark Torres for the agent’s name, which had slipped his mind.

“Laura Conway,” said Torres. “I have a reminder on my phone to check with her this morning. I’m on my way into Kline’s office to brief him on the Jackson-Creel homicides. By the way, we’ve confirmed that Blaze and Chalise are sisters. And it seems that Chalise has a pretty extensive mental health history, which we’re trying to get access to. As for Laura Conway, if you want to talk to her yourself—”

“I do. Can you give me the number?”

Three minutes later, Laura Conway was telling him what he’d half expected to hear.

“It was all handled by Blaze Jackson. I believe she was Mr. Jordan’s business manager, or something like that. She chose the apartment on Bridge Street and the house over on Poulter.”

“But both of those leases were signed by Marcel Jordan?”

“That’s correct. As I remember, Ms. Jackson took the physical documents to him and brought them back to our office.”

“Were you aware of her prominent role in the Black Defense Alliance?”

“I have no interest in politics. I avoid watching the news. It’s too upsetting.”

“So you never met Marcel Jordan?”

“No.”

“Or spoke to him?”

“No.”

“Did he provide you with any financial references?”

“No.”

“You didn’t require assurances that he could afford those rentals?”

“We didn’t consider it necessary.”

“Isn’t that unusual?”

“It’s not the normal thing. But neither was the arrangement.”

“Meaning?”

“Both rentals were paid for in advance. For the entire year. In cash.”

“Did that concern you?”

“Some people like cash transactions. I don’t question things like that.”

“Did it cross your mind that Mr. Jordan might not know that his name was on that lease?”

“I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t he know?”

Gurney was sure the answer was that Jordan was being set up in a complex Beckert-Turlock conspiracy to frame him and his BDA associates, along with Cory Payne, for the murders of John Steele and Rick Loomis. So he wasn’t surprised to learn of the man’s potential ignorance of the lease. What got his attention was the presence of Blaze Jackson—with its suggestion of her involvement in the affair from the beginning.

He ended the call and stood for a minute at the window, gazing out at the row of blooming chokecherry trees along the side of the high pasture. He was wondering how extensively involved Blaze Jackson had been in the White River deaths and whether she had been the brains or the tool. As he was turning this over in his mind, his eye caught a movement in the sky above the trees. A red-tailed hawk was circling the edge of the field, searching no doubt for some smaller bird or furry creature to pierce with its talons, tear apart, and devour. Nature, he concluded for the hundredth time, for all its sweetness and blossoms and birdsong, was essentially a horror show.

His phone rang on the nightstand behind him. He turned away from the window and took the call. “Gurney here.”

“Hello, Dave. It’s Marv Gelter.”

“Marv. Good morning.”

“Good and busy is what it is. You’re quite the disrupter, my friend. Whole new political landscape out there.”

Gurney remained silent.

“No time to waste. Let me get to the point. You free for lunch?”

“That would depend on the agenda.”

“Of course it would! The agenda concerns your future. You just turned the world upside down, my friend. Time to take advantage of that. Time to take a look at the rest of your life.”

Gurney’s visceral dislike of Gelter was outweighed by his curiosity.

“Where do you want to meet?”

“The Blue Swan. Lockenberry. Twelve noon.”

By the time he was ready to leave, Madeleine’s mowing had taken her up around the high pasture into one of the grassy trails through the pines. He left her a note with a brief explanation hoping he’d be back by three that afternoon. Then he got the address of the restaurant from the internet, put it into his GPS, and set out.

The immaculate village of Lockenberry, just a mile or so past the Gelters’ strange cubical house, was nestled in its own small valley where spring was further advanced than in the neighboring hills. Daffodils, jonquils, and apple blossoms were already giving way to a profusion of lilacs. The Blue Swan was located on a tranquil, shaded lane off the main street. An elegantly understated sign beside a bluestone path leading to the front door was all that distinguished it from the picture-book Colonial homes on either side of it.

Gurney was met in the cherrywood entry hall by a statuesque blonde with a faint Scandinavian accent.

“Welcome, Mr. Gurney. Mr. Gelter will be here shortly. May I show you to your table?”

He followed her along a carpeted hallway to a high-ceilinged room with a chandelier. The walls consisted of alternating panels of impressionist-style floral murals and gleaming mirrors. There was a single table in the center of the room—round, with a white linen tablecloth, two French provincial dining chairs, and two elaborate place settings. The statuesque blonde pulled out one of the chairs for him.

“May I get you something to drink, Mr. Gurney?”

“Plain water.”

Moments later, Marv Gelter strode into the room—concentrated energy and darting gaze belying the laid-back look of his country-squire tweeds. It was as though a Ralph Lauren weekend ensemble was being modeled by a large caffeinated rat.

“Dave! Glad you made it! Sorry to be late.” He sat across the table from Gurney, glancing back toward the hallway. “Lova, darling, where the hell are you?”

The Nordic beauty entered the room, bringing them two glasses on a silver tray—plain water for Gurney and a rosy-hued drink that looked like a Campari and soda for Gelter. She placed them on the table, stood back, and waited. Gelter took a quick swallow of his. Gurney wondered if he did anything slowly.

“No menu here, David. They do the classics. Fantastic cassoulet. Coq au vin. Confit de canard. Boeuf bourguignon. Whatever you like.”

Gurney looked up at the Nordic beauty, who seemed faintly amused.

“The beef,” he said.

She smiled and left the room.

He looked at Gelter. “You’re not eating?”

“They know what I like.” He took another swig of his drink and grinned with more adrenaline than warmth. “So. You triggered an earthquake. How’s it feel?”

“Unfinished.”

“Hah! Unfinished. I like that. A man who’s never satisfied. Always moving forward. Good! Very good!” He eyed Gurney with a glittery intensity. “So here we are. Dell Beckert, God rest his soul, is a dead issue. Even if he’s alive, he’s dead. You saw to that. Fine. The question is, what’s next?”

“Next for who?”

“You, David. You’re the one I’m having lunch with. What’s next for you?”

Gurney shrugged. “Mow my fields, feed my chickens, build a bigger woodshed.”

Gelter pursed his lips unpleasantly. “Kline’ll probably make you an offer. Maybe to run his investigation department. That something you’d like?”

“No.”

“I don’t blame you. Waste of your talents. Which are more substantial than you know.” The adrenaline grin returned. “You’ve got a shitload of modesty. Shitload of integrity. Big balls. You walked into that White River cesspool where nobody knew what the fuck was going on, you figured it out, showed the district attorney which end was up. That’s impressive.” He paused. “You know what else it is? It’s a story. A story with a hero. A cool, smart, straight-shooter hero. Supercop. That’s what that magazine called you, am I right?”

Gurney nodded uncomfortably.

“Damn, David, you are the man! You even have those old blue-eyed cowboy good looks. A goddamn real-life hero. You know how deep a hunger there is out there for a real hero?”

Gurney stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

“The hell you think I’m talking about? Beckert’s out, Gurney’s in!”

“In what?”

“The office of the attorney general.”

The Nordic beauty appeared with two delicate china plates. The one with an artfully arranged antipasto she placed in front of Gurney. The one with a dozen or so mandarin orange segments arranged in a circle around a small finger bowl she placed in front of Gelter. She left the room as quietly as she’d entered it.

Gurney’s tone matched his incredulous expression. “You’re suggesting I compete in the special election?”

“I can see you winning it by a bigger margin than Beckert would have.”

Gurney was silent for a long moment. “You don’t seem upset by what’s happened.”

“I was extremely upset. For ten minutes. More than that’s a self-indulgent waste of time. Then I asked myself the only sane question. What now? It doesn’t matter what life puts in front of us. Could be a gold mine. Could be a pile of crap. The question’s the same. What now?”

“Does it bother you that you were so wrong about Beckert?”

Gelter picked up a little wedge of orange and examined it before popping it in his mouth. “Life goes on. If people disappoint you, fuck ’em. Problems can become solutions. Like this situation right here. You’re better than Beckert, which I might not have realized if he was still around. That worthless lump of socialist shit, Maynard Biggs, won’t have a chance against you.”

“You hate him that much?”

He examined another orange wedge before devouring it. “I don’t hate him. Don’t give a flying fuck about him. What I hate is what he stands for. The philosophy. The belief system. The entitlement.”

“The entitlement?”

“With a capital fucking E. These useless fuckers have rights! Rights to whatever they want. No need to work, save, support their own children. No need to do a damn thing—because they had a great-great-great-great-fucking-grandfather who three hundred fucking years ago got sold by some African scumbag to a slave trader. This ancient history, you see, entitles them to the fruits of my current labor.” He turned his head to the side and spit an orange seed out onto the Oriental carpet.

Gurney shrugged. “The one time I saw Biggs on television his statements on the racial divide seemed mild and reasonable.”

“Pretty wrapping on a box of scorpions.”

“And you see me as some sort of solution to this?”

“I see you as a way to keep the levers of power out of the wrong hands.”

“If I were to be elected with your help, what would I owe you?”

“Nada. The defeat of Maynard Biggs would be my payment.”

“I’ll sleep on it.”

“Fine, but don’t sleep too long. There’s a filing deadline three days from now. Say yes, and I promise you you’ll win.”

“You really don’t think Biggs has a chance?”

“Not against you. And I could always turn up a few students who might recall instances of inappropriate advances from their professor.” Gelter smiled venomously.

Gelter’s main course arrived, a colorful bouillabaisse, followed by Gurney’s boeuf bourguignon. They ate, mostly in silence, and both declined dessert.

The subject of their meeting wasn’t mentioned again until they were out in front of the restaurant, about to get into their cars.

“As soon as you say yes,” said Gelter, “we’ll put you on NewsBreakers and have Kilbrick and Kronck introduce you to the world. They’re both dying to talk to you.” When Gurney didn’t reply, he continued. “Just think about what you could do with the power and influence of the AG title. All the right contacts. Whole new world. I know people who’d kill for that spot!”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Opportunity of a lifetime,” Gelter added, flashing his adrenaline-charged grin one more time as he stepped into his red Ferrari.

51

Gurney sipped the cup of coffee he’d made the minute he’d arrived home from Lockenberry. Purple finches were busy at the feeder Madeleine had set up at the edge of the patio. She was at the sink island chopping onions for soup.

“So,” she said lightly, “what did he want?”

“He wants me to run for attorney general.”

The knife paused on the cutting board, but she didn’t look as surprised as he’d expected. “In place of Dell Beckert?”

“Exactly.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I guess he wants a real law-and-order hero to replace the one that blew up in his face.”

“That’s pretty much what he said.”

“He didn’t waste any time.”

“No.”

“Clever, cold, and calculating.”

“All of that.”

“And it goes without saying that he has the connections to get you in the race?”

“Not just that. He told me I’d win.”

“What did you say to that?”

“That I’d sleep on it.”

“What were you thinking when you said it?”

“I was thinking that after two minutes of feeling flattered, I’d ponder the unknowns, imagine the problems, talk to you about it, then turn it down.”

She laughed. “Interesting process. What does the attorney general do, anyway?”

“I’m sure there’s a description of responsibilities on the state website, but what a real live person might choose to spend his time on is another matter. The last occupant of the office is rumored to have fucked himself to death with a Las Vegas hooker.”

“So you’re really not interested?”

“In jumping into a political shark tank? With the backing of a man I don’t even like being in the same room with?”

Madeleine raised a curious eyebrow. “You did agree to have lunch with him.”

“To find out why he wanted to have lunch with me.”

“And now you know.”

“Now I know—unless his agenda is more twisted than I realize.”

She gave him one of her searching looks, and a silence fell between them.

“Oh, by the way,” he said as he was finishing his coffee, “I crossed paths with Walter Thrasher at the crime scene in White River last night. He said he’d drop by around five today to talk about our archaeology project.”

“What is there to talk about?”

Gurney realized he hadn’t shared Thrasher’s phone message with her. “He’s done some research on the objects I found. His comments have been rather strange. I’m hoping he’ll clarify the situation this afternoon.”

Madeleine’s silence eloquently conveyed her hostility to the project.

Thinking of Thrasher reminded him of the Jackson-Creel apartment. Madeleine reacted to the look on his face.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Just . . . a little jolt from last night. I’m fine.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

He didn’t want to, but he’d learned over the years that describing something that was disturbing him loosened its grip on his mind. So he told her the story, beginning with his discovery on the hospital personnel list that Blaze Jackson and Chalise Creel shared an address and ending with the scene in the apartment—the decomposing bodies, the propofol hypodermics, the money, and the fingerprint link to Dell Beckert.

She smiled. “You must feel good about that.”

“About what?” There was sourness in his voice.

“Being right about Beckert. You were uncomfortable with him from the beginning. And now you’ve amassed all this evidence of his involvement in . . . how many murders?”

“At least four. Six, if he killed those two women. Seven, if he set up Judd Turlock.”

“If it wasn’t for you, that Payne boy would probably be in jail.”

He shook his head. “I doubt it. A good defense lawyer would have seen that the evidence against him was a setup. As for the evidence against Beckert, we got lucky out at the gun club.”

“You’re not giving yourself enough credit. You’re the one who decided to go there and check it out. You’re the one who turned the whole case around. You’re the one who’s gotten to the truth.”

“We’ve had some luck. Recoverable bullets. Clean ballistics. Clear evidence that—”

She interrupted him. “You don’t sound very proud of what you’ve accomplished.”

“And you sound like you’re talking to one of your clients at the clinic.”

She sighed. “I’m just wondering why you don’t feel better about the progress you’ve made.”

“I’ll feel better when it’s all over.”

Thrasher arrived at five twenty, negotiating the uneven lane up through the pasture with obvious care in his pristine Audi. After getting out of the car he stood for a few moments surveying the surrounding landscape, then came over to the open French doors.

“Damned construction workers on the interstate, busily doing nothing except impeding traffic,” he said as Gurney let him in.

From his position in the breakfast nook he looked around the big farmhouse kitchen with an appraising eye. His gaze lingered on the fireplace at the far end. “Nice old mantel. Chestnut. Unique color. Style of the hearth appears to be early eighteen hundreds. You research the provenance of the house when you bought it?”

“No. Do you think there’s some connection between this house and—”

“The remains of the house down by the pond? Lord, no. That predates this by more than a hundred years.” He put his briefcase down on the dining table.

Madeleine, who’d been upstairs practicing a Bach piece on her cello, came in from the hallway.

Gurney introduced her.

“Asparagus,” said Thrasher. “Wise choice.”

“Excuse me?”

“I noticed your asparagus bed out there. Only vegetable worth the trouble of growing at home. Freshness. Huge difference.” He glanced around again. “Might be a good idea to have a seat.”

“How about right here,” suggested Gurney, gesturing to the chairs at the table. He added, “We’re eager to find out what this is all about.”

“Good. I’m hoping your interest will survive the answer.”

With curious frowns, Gurney and Madeleine took seats next to each other at the table.

Thrasher remained standing on the opposite side. “First, a bit of background. As you know, my vocation is forensic pathology, with a focus on determining the causes of untimely death. My avocation, however, is the examination of northeastern Colonial life, with a focus on its darker aspects, particularly the malignant synergy of slavery and psychopathology. I’m sure you’re aware that slavery was not an exclusively Southern phenomenon. In Colonial New York City in seventeen hundred, nearly half the households owned at least one slave. Chattel slavery—the buying and selling of human beings over whom the owner had absolute control—was widely accepted.”

“We’re aware of the history,” said Madeleine.

“A glaring defect of history as it is commonly taught is that the events of an era are often seen acting upon one another in only very large terms—for example, the interaction between advances in mechanization and the movement of populations to manufacturing centers. We read about these interactions and think we’re grasping the essence of an age. Or we read about slavery in the context of agricultural economics and we think we understand it—when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s possible to read a dozen books about it and never feel the horror of it—never even glimpse the malignant synergy I mentioned a moment ago.”

“What synergy?” asked Madeleine.

“The appalling ways in which some of society’s ills combine with others.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I wrote an article on the subject last year for a journal of cultural psychology. The title was ‘Victims for Sale: Torture, Sexual Abuse, and Serial Murder in Colonial America.’ I’m working on another right now—detailing the confluence of psychopathic disorders and a legal system that permitted one person to own another.”

“What does this have to do with us?”

“I’m coming to that. The average American’s image of Colonial America doesn’t run much deeper than stolid-looking Pilgrims in big black hats, happy Indians, brotherly love, religious freedom, and occasional hardship. Colonial reality, of course, was something else entirely. Filth, fear, starvation, ignorance, disease, superstition, the practice of witchcraft and the torture and hanging of witches, heresy trials, cruel punishments, banishments, absurd medical practices, pain and death everywhere. And of course, all the major mental disorders and predatory behaviors—all rampant, all misunderstood. Psychopaths who—”

Madeleine broke in impatiently. “Dr. Thrasher . . .”

He ignored the interruption. “The convergence of two great ills. The desire of the psychopath to exert total control over another person—to use, to abuse, to kill. Imagine that urge combined with the institution of slavery—a system that enabled the easy purchase of potential victims at a public market. Men, women, and children for sale. Objects to be employed at the owner’s pleasure. Human beings with hardly any more rights than farm animals. Human beings with virtually no effective legal protection against constant rape, and worse. Men, women, and children whose deaths, accidental or intentional, few authorities would bother to seriously investigate.”

“Enough!” said Madeleine. “I asked you a question. What does this have to do with us?”

Thrasher blinked in surprise, then replied matter-of-factly. “The old foundation David uncovered dates, in my opinion, to the very early seventeen hundreds. There were no settlements in this part of the state at that time. This was a frontier wilderness, the essence of the unknown—a place of savagery, danger, and isolation. No one would have chosen to live here, this far from a protective community, unless they were under constraint.”

“Constraint?”

“The people who came here would have done so for one of two reasons. One, they were engaging in practices that would have been considered abhorrent to their community and so came here to avoid possible exposure. Or two, they were exposed—and banished.”

There was a silence, broken by Gurney.

“What kind of practices are you talking about?”

“The objects you found indicate some involvement with witchcraft. That may have been the reason they were driven out of their original community. But I believe that witchcraft was the least of their transgressions. I believe the essence of what was happening in that house by your pond three hundred years ago was what we would define today as serial murder.”

Madeleine’s eyes widened. “What?!”

“Two years ago I was called in to examine the buried remains of an early-eighteenth-century house over by Marley Mountain. I found some items related to sorcery rituals; but more significantly, there were iron shackles and other evidence of individuals having been held in captivity. There were several devices typically used in the torture of prisoners, including implements for breaking bones, extracting fingernails and teeth. An excavation of the grounds around that foundation uncovered partial skeletal remains of at least ten children. DNA testing of their extracted teeth traced their genetic lineage to West Africa. In other words, to the slave trade.”

Madeleine’s gaze was fixed on Thrasher with a growing revulsion.

Gurney broke the silence. “Are you suggesting a connection between the house you’re talking about and what we found here?”

“The similarities between your excavation, even in this early stage, and the Marley Mountain site are striking.”

“What are you suggesting we do?”

“I’m suggesting we bring in the appropriate archaeological equipment and personnel to explore the site with the thoroughness it deserves. The more hard evidence we can find to document the existence of psychopathic elements in the treatment of slaves, the more accurate the historical picture becomes.”

Now Madeleine spoke up. “How sure are you?”

“About the abuse and murder of slaves? One hundred percent.”

“No, I mean how sure are you that those things took place here, on our property?”

“To be absolutely sure, more digging will be necessary. That’s why I’m here. To explain the research opportunity and enlist your cooperation.”

“That’s not my question. Based on what you’ve seen, how sure are you right now that the kind of horrors you described actually occurred here?”

Thrasher looked pained. “If I had to assign to my opinion a level of confidence, based only on what’s been unearthed so far, I’d put it around seventy-five percent.”

“Fine,” said Madeleine with a brittle smile. “That leaves a twenty-five percent chance that whatever is down there by the pond has nothing to do with the serial murder of slave children. Is that right?”

Thrasher let out an exasperated sigh. “More or less.”

“Fine. Thank you for the history lesson, Doctor. It’s been very enlightening. David and I will discuss the situation, and we’ll let you know what we decide.”

It took Thrasher a moment to realize that he’d been dismissed.

52

The charged silence that followed Madeleine’s final comment persisted long after Thrasher had departed. It reminded Gurney of the silence in their car on the way home from a medical appointment years earlier, during which he’d been informed that the results of an initial MRI had been inconclusive regarding a possible cancer and that he’d need to undergo additional tests.

Such a disturbing subject. Such a major unknown. So little to be said.

They hardly spoke at all during a brief dinner. It wasn’t until Gurney began to clear the table that Madeleine commented, “I hope what I said to him, the way I said it, isn’t going to create a problem in your professional relationship.”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t make much difference how he feels about me.”

She looked doubtful. He carried their dishes to the sink, then came back and sat down.

“Twenty-five percent is a lot,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So there’s a good chance he’s wrong.”

“Yes.”

She nodded, appearing comforted that he’d agreed, even if he’d done so without much conviction. She stood up from the table. “I have some watering to do while it’s still light out. The new delphiniums from Snook’s were looking droopy today.”

She slipped into a pair of clogs by the French doors and headed for the flower bed, calling back over her shoulder, “Leave the dishes in the sink. I’ll take care of them later.”

He remained where he was, immersed in dreadful images raised by Thrasher’s comments on the “malignant synergy” between psychopathic obsessions and the availability of purchasable victims to satisfy them. There was a particular horror in the mundane practicality of buying human beings to torture or kill. He tried to imagine the unique terror experienced by those in that helpless position. The terror of being under the absolute control of another person.

His phone rang, a welcome distraction.

It was Hardwick.

“Shit, Gurney, I’m impressed that you took my call.”

Gurney sighed. “Why is that, Jack?”

“According to RAM-TV, you’re a man destined for greatness.”

“What are you talking about?”

“NewsBreakers just did an interview with Cory Payne. He told the world you saved his life. But that was nothing compared to what Stacey Kilbrick said about you.”

“What did she say?”

“I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the surprise. All I can say is that I feel privileged to be speaking with a man of your caliber.”

Gurney’s customary uneasiness at any public mention of his name was amplified by the fact of its occurring on RAM-TV. It certainly wasn’t something he could ignore, particularly after Marv Gelter’s comments at lunch. He went into the den, accessed the site on his laptop, and clicked on that day’s edition of NewsBreakers. He used the time slider on the video window to get past the promotional graphics to the point where Stacey Kilbrick and Rory Kronck, sitting at their studio news desk, frowning with concern, were addressing their top story. As the audio kicked in, Kilbrick was in the middle of a sentence.

“. . . learned today that there have been two more suspicious deaths in White River. The bodies of Blaze Lovely Jackson, a leader of the Black Defense Alliance, and her sister, Chalise Jackson Creel, were found in their apartment by detectives Mark Torres and David Gurney—someone we’ll have more to say about later in this program. The district attorney’s office, which is overseeing the investigation, is calling the deaths possible homicides.”

She turned toward Kronck. “The terrible carnage in White River just keeps going on. What do you think are the chances these ‘possible’ homicides turn out to be the real thing?”

“My guess would be ninety-nine percent. But so far the DA has released very little specific information. I suspect he wants to be absolutely certain before he has to acknowledge two more murders on his watch—two more murders in a case that was already bizarre.”

Kilbrick nodded grimly. “On the other hand, Cory Payne, son of the mysteriously missing police chief, was very forthcoming with his own view of the situation.”

“You can say that again, Stacey! I overheard your interview with him, and that young man certainly doesn’t pull his punches. Let’s show our viewers what we’re talking about.”

The scene shifted to the simple setting in which Gurney recalled seeing Kronck interviewing Kline. The most conspicuous difference now was the camera being positioned to include the interviewer’s short red skirt and long, shapely legs.

Payne appeared somewhat academic in a brown tweed sport jacket, a pale-blue shirt open at the neck, and tan slacks. His hair was still pulled back in a ponytail, but it looked more carefully combed than Gurney remembered. His face looked freshly shaved.

“What are you watching?”

Madeleine’s voice behind him at the den door surprised him. He hadn’t heard her come in.

“Cory Payne. Being interviewed. On that NewsBreakers program.”

She pulled a second chair over to the desk and peered intently at the screen.

Kilbrick was resting a clipboard and a pen on her crossed legs. She leaned forward with an expression of painful earnestness. “Welcome to NewsBreakers, Cory. I appreciate your coming here today. You’ve been at the center of the most disturbing criminal case I’ve ever encountered as a journalist. Among other horrible events, your own father accused you of murder on national television. I can’t imagine how that must have felt. We sometimes use the term ‘worst moment of my life’ loosely. But in this instance, would you say that was true?”

“No.”

“No?” Kilbrick blinked, evidently nonplussed.

“It was the most infuriating,” explained Payne, “but far from the worst.”

“Well . . . that does raise an obvious question.”

He waited for her to ask it.

“Tell us, Cory, what was the worst moment of your life?”

“The moment at boarding school when I was told that my mother had died. That was the worst. Nothing has ever come close to that.”

Kilbrick consulted her clipboard. “That was when you were fourteen?”

“Yes.”

“Your father was already prominent in law enforcement at that time. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And he made a number of public statements blaming illegal drugs, specifically heroin, for her death.” She looked up from her clipboard. “Was that true?”

Payne’s gaze turned icy. “As true as blaming a rope for the death of a hanged man.”

Kilbrick looked excited. “Interesting answer. Could you expand on that?”

“Heroin is just a thing. Like a rope. Or a bullet.”

“Are you saying there was more to your mother’s death than a simple overdose?”

Payne spoke softly. “I’m saying that he killed her.”

“Your father killed your mother?”

“Yes.”

“With drugs?”

“Yes.”

Kilbrick looked stunned. “Why?”

“For the same reason he killed John Steele, Rick Loomis, Marcel Jordan, Virgil Tooker, Blaze Jackson, Chalise Creel, and Judd Turlock.”

She stared at him.

“They threatened his future, the way he wanted things to turn out.”

“Threatened all of that . . . how?”

“They knew things about him.”

“What did they know?”

“That he wasn’t what he seemed to be. That he was dishonest, cruel, manipulative. That he extorted confessions, tampered with evidence, and destroyed people’s lives to build his own reputation. To ensure his own security. To prove to himself how powerful he was. He was a truly evil man. A killer. A monster.”

Kilbrick was staring at him now in amazement. She looked down at her clipboard, then back at him. “You said . . . I believe . . . that he killed Judd Turlock?”

“Yes.”

“The information we have from the DA’s office is that the Gort brothers are being sought in connection with the Turlock homicide.”

“My father has always used other people to do his dirty work. The Gorts were convenient tools for dealing with Turlock.”

“We were told that Judd Turlock was your father’s longtime friend. Why would—”

Payne cut her off. “Longtime tool and strong-arm man. Not friend. He had no friends. Friendship requires caring about another human being. My father never cared about anyone but himself. If you want to know why he would have arranged for Turlock to be killed, the answer is simple. He outlived his usefulness.”

Kilbrick nodded, glancing up out of the frame as though checking the time. “This has been . . . remarkable. I have no more questions. Is there anything you’d like to add before we wrap this up?”

“Yes.” He looked directly into the camera. “I want to thank Detective David Gurney with all my heart and soul. He was the one who saw through the framework of false evidence that made it look as though I’d killed those two police officers. Without his insight and persistence, the world might never have known the truth about Dell Beckert, the truth of what he is and what he always was. A destroyer of lives. A controlling monster, a corrupter, a killer. I want to thank Detective Gurney for the truth, and I want the world to know that I owe him my life.”

Gurney grimaced.

The scene shifted back to the studio news desk.

Kronck turned to Kilbrick. “Wow, Stacey, astounding interview!”

“Payne certainly had a lot to say, and he wasn’t shy about saying it.”

“I noticed the name David Gurney came up again—in a very favorable way—just like it did in my interview with Sheridan Kline.”

Kilbrick nodded. “I noticed that, too. And you know what I’m thinking right now? It’s kind of a wild possibility . . . but I’m thinking David Gurney might be a great choice for our next attorney general. What do you think?”

“I think that’s a fabulous idea!”

“Okay!” said Kilbrick, smiling, turning to the camera. “Stay with us. Our next guest—”

Gurney closed the video window and turned to Madeleine. “I have a creepy feeling that Gelter is using Kilbrick and Kronck to push his AG idea.”

“You think he has that kind of influence at RAM-TV?”

“I suspect he may own it.”

53

The weather the following morning matched Gurney’s mood—gray and unsettled. Restless breezes kept changing direction, pushing the asparagus ferns this way and that. Even Madeleine seemed at odds. A mottled overcast was obscuring the sun, and Gurney was surprised to see by the old regulator clock on the kitchen wall that it was already past nine. As they were finishing their oatmeal, Madeleine frowned and tilted her head toward the French doors.

“What is it?” he asked. His hearing was normal, but hers was extraordinary and she was usually aware of approaching sounds before he was.

“Someone’s coming.”

He opened the doors and soon he heard it—a vehicle coming up the town road. As he watched, a large SUV came into view. It slowed and came to a stop between the barn and the pond. When he went out on the patio for a clearer view he saw that it was a dark-green Range Rover, its polish glistening even in the sunless light.

The driver emerged, a solid-looking man in a blue blazer and gray slacks. He opened the rear door, and a woman stepped out. She was wearing a khaki jacket, riding breeches, and knee-high boots. She stood there for a few moments, looking around at the fields and woods and up across the pasture to the Gurney house. After lighting a cigarette, she and her driver got back in the big green vehicle.

Gurney watched as it proceeded slowly up through the pasture to the house, where it stopped not far from his Outback, which by comparison seemed very small. Again the driver got out first and opened the rear door for the lady, who Gurney could now see was probably somewhere in her late forties. Her ash-blond hair was arranged in a short asymmetrical style that looked expensive and aggressive. After a final drag, she dropped her cigarette and crushed it into the ground with the tip of a boot that looked every bit as costly as her hairdo.

As she surveyed the property around her with a dour expression, her driver noticed Gurney standing on the patio. He said something to her, she glanced over, and then she nodded to him. She lit another cigarette.

He approached the patio. He had a hard, expressionless, ex-military look about him. For a heavy man his step was light and athletic.

“David Gurney?”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Haley Beckert would like to speak with you.”

“Dell Beckert’s wife?”

“That’s correct.”

“Would she like to come into the house?”

“Mrs. Beckert would prefer to remain outdoors.”

“Fine. We can talk right here.” He gestured toward the two Adirondack chairs.

The driver returned to the Range Rover and spoke briefly to the woman. She nodded, crushed the second cigarette as she had the first, then made her way around the asparagus patch and flower bed to the patio. When they came face-to-face she looked at him with the same distaste with which she’d regarded the surrounding landscape, but with an added element of curiosity.

Neither offered to shake hands. “Would you like to sit down?” he asked.

She didn’t reply.

He waited.

“Who’s paying you, Mr. Gurney?” She had the syrupy voice and hard eyes of many a Southern politician.

He replied blandly, “I work for the district attorney.”

“Who else?”

“Nobody else.”

“So this story you’ve sold to Kline, this fantasy about the most respected police chief in America being a serial murderer—running around shooting people, beating people, God knows what else—all of that bilious nonsense is the product of an honest investigation?” Her voice was dripping with sarcasm.

“It’s the product of evidence.”

She uttered a bark of a laugh. “Evidence no doubt discovered by you. I’ve been told that from day one you did everything you could to weaken the case against that little reptile Cory Payne—and you constantly tried to undermine my husband.”

“The evidence against Payne was questionable. The evidence that he was being framed was far more convincing.”

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Mr. Gurney. If anyone is being framed, it’s Dell Beckert. I’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise you. And you’ll regret your part in it. Deeply and permanently regret it.”

He didn’t react, just held her gaze. “Do you know where your husband is?”

“If I did, you’d be the last person on earth I’d tell.”

“Doesn’t his running away strike you as peculiar?”

Her jaw muscles tightened. After regarding him venomously for a long moment she said, “I was told that a TV newsperson mentioned your name last night in connection with the election for attorney general. I don’t suppose your interest in that position would explain your attacks on my husband?”

“I have no interest in that position.”

“Because if that’s what this is all about, I will destroy you. There will nothing left of you or your so-called supercop reputation. Nothing!”

He saw no point in trying to explain his position to her.

She turned away and walked quickly to the big SUV. She got into the rear seat, and the driver closed the door. A few moments later the Range Rover was heading silently down the uneven path toward the barn and the town road beyond it.

Gurney stood for a while on the patio, replaying the scene in his mind—the strained expression, the rigid body language, the accusatory tone. Having conducted thousands of interviews over the years with the family members of fugitives and otherwise missing persons, he had gotten good at reading these situations. He was reasonably sure that the fury Haley Beckert expressed was the product of fear, and that her fear was the product of being blindsided by events she didn’t understand.

The cool, humid breezes, though still shifting direction, were growing stronger, creating the feeling of an impending thunderstorm. He went inside and closed the French doors.

Madeleine was sitting in one of the armchairs by the fireplace reading a book. She’d started a small fire, which was flickering weakly. He was tempted to rearrange the logs but he knew his interference would not be appreciated. He sat in the armchair that faced hers.

“I assume you overheard all that?” he said.

Her eyes remained on her book. “Hard not to.”

“Any reaction?”

“She’s used to getting her way.”

He stared at the fire for a while, repressing the urge to fix it. “So. What do you think I should do?”

She looked up. “I guess that depends on whether you see the case as open or closed.”

“Technically, the case remains open until Beckert is located, prosecuted, and—”

She cut him off. “I don’t mean technically, I mean in your own mind.”

“If you’re talking about a sense of completion, I’m not there yet.”

“What’s missing—other than Beckert himself?”

“I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like trying to scratch an itch that keeps moving.”

She closed her book. “You have doubts about Beckert’s guilt?”

He frowned. “The evidence against him is substantial.”

“The evidence against his son looked that way, too.”

“Not to me. I had concerns about all of it. From the beginning.”

“You have no similar concerns about the evidence against the father?”

“Not really. No.”

She cocked her head curiously.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Could that have anything to do with your ‘eureka’ theory?”

He didn’t reply. He knew not to answer too quickly when a question got under his skin.

54

On the occasions when he’d conducted seminars on criminal investigation, he’d always included a discussion of a subtle investigatorial trap he’d named “The Eureka Fallacy.” Simply stated, it was the tendency to give one’s own discoveries greater weight than discoveries made or reported by others, especially if the things one has discovered had been purposely concealed (hence the term eureka, Greek for “I have found it!”). A manifestation of the basic human tendency to trust one’s own perceptions as objective and accurate and competing points of view as subjective and prone to error, it could derail an investigation and was responsible for an unknown number of wrongful arrests and prosecutions.

Even being fully aware of the phenomenon, Gurney resisted seeing it in himself. The mind has strong defenses against self-doubt. However, since Madeleine raised the question, he forced himself to take a closer look at it. Was he, in fact, applying a double standard of credibility to the evidence against Payne and the evidence against Beckert? He didn’t think so, but that meant little. He would need to look at the evidence piece by piece to make sure he was subjecting all of it to the same level of scrutiny.

He got up from his chair by the fireplace, went to his desk in the den, took out the case files and his own notes, and began what he hoped would be a clear-eyed review.

By the time Madeleine interrupted the process a little after twelve to let him know she was leaving for an afternoon shift at the clinic, he had reached two conclusions.

The first, reassuringly unchanged from what it had been, was that every piece of evidence against Cory Payne could be explained away, and the switched toilet handle was as convincing proof of a frame job as one could imagine.

His second conclusion, somewhat disconcerting, was that the evidence against Beckert and/or Turlock had the same weaknesses as the evidence against Payne. It was all portable and therefore plantable. Even the items bearing fingerprints—the pen he’d found in the grass in back of the Poulter Street house, the plastic bag at Blaze Jackson’s apartment—could have been acquired in an innocent environment for later use in an incriminating one. In short, although there was no proof of it—no equivalent to the switched toilet handle—it was possible that Beckert was also being framed. It was admittedly a rather farfetched scenario. But the evidence in hand against Beckert wasn’t nearly as solid as it seemed at first glance. In fact, a clever trial lawyer might make it appear very shaky indeed.

For some time after Madeleine left, Gurney remained at his desk, staring out the den window, wondering about the advisability of raising the issue with Kline. It would not be a welcome subject. He decided to speak to Torres first.

The call was picked up immediately.

“Hey, Dave, I was just about to call you. Big morning here, lot of stuff coming in at once. Bad news first. There was no CODIS hit on the DNA from that used condom found near the Willard Park playground. So that’s a dead end. But finding an eyewitness to what went down that night was always a long shot anyway. Now the good news. We got a report from the Albany computer lab on the laptop you found under a mattress in the cabin. Key discovery was a series of searches on brain structure, specifically something called the ‘medulla oblongata’ and the extent of protection afforded by adjacent bone structures. The kind of information—and anatomical diagrams—someone might need if they wanted to drive an ice pick into someone’s brain stem. It looks like a solid link between Beckert and the attack on Loomis.”

Gurney wasn’t sure how solid it was, but it certainly was suggestive.

“And that’s not all,” continued Torres. “The lab sent us a report on the phone that was taped to the bottom of one of the footboards. The call record confirms Payne’s explanation for why he was in the Bridge Street area the night Steele was shot. He claimed he’d gotten a series of texts, setting up a meeting behind the apartment building, then moving it to the other side of the bridge, then canceling it. Those texts were sent from that phone you found in the cabin.”

“Interesting,” said Gurney. “Kline have any reaction to that?”

“He’s a happy man. He says it feels like we’re finally tying the bow on the package.”

Gurney’s idea of a bow on the package would be a credible confession from Beckert. Kline’s use of that wrapped-up image to describe the accumulation of a few extra pieces of portable-plantable evidence seemed to make the search for the perp a postscript. That could turn out to be a major mistake.

Gurney ended his call with Torres and entered Kline’s number.

“David. What can I do for you?” The man’s hurried tone suggested that ‘nothing’ would be the only welcome answer.

“I want to share a concern.”

“Oh?” There was more anxiety than curiosity in that single syllable.

“I’ve been thinking about the evidence that appears to incriminate Beckert.”

“Appears to?”

“Exactly. The evidence against Cory Payne had weaknesses that a defense attorney could have exploited at trial. Successfully, in my opinion.”

“Your point being?”

“The evidence against Beckert has some of the same weaknesses.”

“Nonsense. The evidence against Beckert is overwhelming.”

“That’s what you said three days ago about Payne.”

Kline’s voice was tight and cold. “Why are we having this conversation?”

“So you don’t walk into a courtroom thinking you have more than you do.”

“You’re not suggesting that Beckert is being framed just like Payne was, are you? Tell me you’re not that crazy.”

“What I’m telling you is that your case isn’t the slam-dunk affair you think it is. From an evidentiary point of view—”

Kline cut him off. “Fine. Point taken. Anything else?”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you that there’s too much evidence?” He could picture a half-angry, half-puzzled frown on Kline’s face in the ensuing silence. He continued. “Framers want to make sure their targets look guilty as hell. So they overdo it. I can’t prove that’s what happened here, but you shouldn’t dismiss the possibility.”

“Your possibility is the craziest hypothesis I’ve ever heard. Just listen to yourself. You’re saying that someone framed Cory Payne for the sniper attacks on Steele and Loomis, then framed Dell Beckert for the same attacks? Plus those on Jordan and Tooker? And Jackson and Creel? Have you ever in your life heard of any case remotely like that?”

“No.”

“So . . . you just dreamed up the least likely scenario on God’s earth? And decided to drop it in my lap?”

“Look, Sheridan, I’m not saying I understand what this White River mess is all about—only that it needs to be investigated further. We need a full understanding of who did what, and why. It’s vital that Beckert be located and—”

“Hold on! Hold it right there! Our goal is not a full understanding of anything. I administer a process of criminal investigation, indictment, and prosecution. I’m not running the Ultimate Truth Psychology Club. As for finding Beckert, it’s possible we never will. Frankly that wouldn’t be the worst thing. He can be indicted in absentia. If the case were to end with him seen as a guilty fugitive, that would be an adequate conclusion. A well-publicized indictment can project the same sense of law-enforcement success as a guilty verdict at trial. I’ll just say one more thing. It would be inadvisable for you to go public with your baseless double-frame theory. It would do nothing except create more chaos and controversy—not to mention a loss of credibility for this department and you personally. Our discussion of this topic is over.”

In retrospect, Gurney found nothing surprising in Kline’s reaction. Having the case careen around another curve was simply not acceptable. Kline’s own public image was his ultimate concern. Procedural smoothness was a key goal. Surprises were unwelcome. Yet another course reversal was to be avoided at all cost.

If anyone were going to upend the case once again, Gurney realized he was the one who would have to find answers to the questions raised by his own unlikely hypothesis—the first of which was the most baffling.

Cui bono?

To whose advantage would it be to frame both Payne and Beckert?

55

Despite Hardwick’s sometimes grating skepticism and verbal abuse, Gurney respected the intelligence and honesty that made him a valuable sounding board.

Rather than trying to explain his new concerns by phone, he decided, after checking with Hardwick to make sure he’d be home, to drive to his place in the hills above Dillweed later that afternoon.

The challenging grin that Gurney knew so well was already on the man’s face as he opened the door. He was holding two bottles of Grolsch. He handed one to Gurney and led the way to the small round table in the corner of the front room.

“So, Davey boy, what’s the story?”

Gurney took a sip of his Grolsch, set the bottle on the table, and proceeded to review the range of his own doubts and speculations. When he was finished Hardwick stared at him for a long moment before speaking.

“Am I hearing this right? You’re suggesting that after someone framed Payne for the whack jobs on the cops, he also framed Beckert for the same shootings? What the hell for? As a backup if the first frame fell apart? That was his fucking plan B? And then he frames Beckert for the Jordan and Tooker murders as well? And for Jackson and Creel?”

“I realize it sounds a little off-the-wall.”

“A little? It makes no fucking sense at all. I mean, what the hell kind of a plan is that? And who on earth would benefit from it?”

“That’s my basic question. Maybe someone who hated them both and didn’t care which one went down? Or maybe someone trying to drive the ultimate wedge between them? Or maybe someone who just considered them convenient scapegoats?”

“Maybe, maybe, maybe.” Hardwick gazed long and hard at his Grolsch. “Look, I get the fact that somebody framed Payne. You can’t argue with the toilet handle. But what makes you so sure that Beckert was framed, too? The fact that there’s too much evidence against him? That’s got to be the most absurd reason I ever heard for assuming a suspect is innocent.”

“It’s not just too much evidence. It’s that it’s all so convenient. Even the full-metal-jacket rounds with perfect ballistic markings. And the ease of . . .” Gurney’s voice trailed off.

Hardwick looked up from his beer bottle. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m thinking about the ease of recovering them. We’ve been thinking of that as a lucky break. But what if that was the shooter’s intention?”

“His intention?”

“Remember the thing in the Steele video that bothered me? The laser dot?”

“What about it?”

“The delay. The two-minute delay between the sniper getting the scope dot on the back of Steele’s head and the fatal shot. Why did he wait so long?”

“Who the fuck knows?”

“Suppose he was waiting for Steele to pass in front of that pine at the edge of the field?”

“For what?”

“To ensure that the bullet would be recoverable.”

Hardwick’s default expression of disbelief was on full display.

Gurney went on. “The same logic could apply to the Loomis shot, except in that case it was more rushed, with him coming out of his house and heading for his car. That shot happened with the front door post just behind him. Another easily recoverable round. I was there when Garrett Felder dug it out. Same thing again with the shot at the back of my house. Another intact round, easily recoverable from the porch post.”

Hardwick made his acid-reflux face. “So you’ve got three situations with a common factor. But that’s no proof of anything. In fact, it sounds like the kind of shit lawyers focus on to mind-fuck a jury.”

“I know it’s not conclusive. But it seems very convenient to have recovered three perfectly intact rounds with clean ballistics linking them directly to a rifle in Beckert’s cabin.” Gurney paused before going on. “It’s like the plastic bag with the money. Why plastic? Well, unlike some paper, it just happens to hold a perfect print. Anyone with access to Beckert’s home or his office could have taken a plastic bag he’d used for something else—then later put the money in it, and left it in Jackson’s apartment.”

“The killer just pops into Beckert’s kitchen, takes a bag out of his refrigerator, makes sure there’s a good print on it, than heads for Jackson’s place and—?”

Gurney cut him off. “No. I’m thinking this whole White River thing was planned way ahead of time. There was nothing spontaneous or opportunistic about it. It was just made to look that way. Think about it. A white cop being shot at a racial demonstration. Followed by a pair of black men being beaten and strangled. Followed by another white cop being shot. The Black Defense Alliance being blamed for the shootings, along with Cory Payne. And the white-supremacist Gort twins, along with the so-called Knights of the Rising Sun, being blamed for Jordan and Tooker. Followed by our discoveries at the gun club—the rifle, the rope, the branding iron—suggesting that Beckert and Turlock carried out all four murders and framed Payne and the Gorts. But what if all that evidence at the gun club was planted there? The whole damn thing shows signs of having been meticulously constructed—layer upon layer of deception, all orchestrated in advance. We peel away one false layer, and we discover another false layer. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Hell of a summation,” said Hardwick sourly. “It’s just missing a couple of details. Like who the fuck did all that orchestrating—and what the fuck was the purpose of it all?”

“I can’t answer those questions. But I do know that if someone was trying to frame Beckert, he must have had access to Beckert’s cabin. Maybe we could start with that.”

“Oh, sure. Look into the least likely possibility first. That makes a shitload of sense.”

“Humor me.”

“Fine. Let’s get it over with. Call his wife. She’d probably know who he was close to.”

Gurney shook his head. “Haley Beauville Beckert sees everything that’s happened in White River as a giant conspiracy with her husband as the victim and the rest of us as the conspirators. I doubt at this point she’d give us the time of day. But Cory might know some names.”

Hardwick sighed impatiently. “Fine. Call the little fucker.”

Gurney took out his phone. As he was looking for Payne’s number he heard soft footsteps coming down the stairs from the second floor. A few seconds later Hardwick’s on-and-off girlfriend, Esti Moreno, entered the room.

She was a strikingly attractive young woman—all the more attractive at that moment in remarkably abbreviated shorts, a tight tee shirt, and glistening ebony hair still wet from the shower. She was also a tough undercover cop.

“David! How nice to see you!”

“Hello, Esti. Nice to see you, too.”

“Don’t let me interrupt you. I just came down for one of those.” Pointing at Gurney’s Grolsch, she passed through the sitting room and went into the kitchen.

Gurney made the call to Payne.

“I have an urgent question, Cory. Do you know if your father ever brought other people out to the gun club? Other than you. Other than Turlock.”

There was a short pause. “I’m pretty sure every hunting season he’d have his special people out there.”

“Special people?”

“The people who could be useful to him. That’s the only thing that ever made anyone special to him.”

“And those people were . . . who exactly?”

“DA Kline, Sheriff Cloutz, Mayor Shucker, Judge Puckett.”

“Anyone else?”

There was another short pause. “Yeah. Some rich guy. Marvin something. Obnoxious billionaire over in Lockenberry.”

“Gelter?”

“That’s it.”

“How about people in the department? Anyone ‘special’ there?”

“Obviously Turlock. Also a captain and a couple of lieutenants who did pretty much whatever he wanted them to do.”

“Like what?”

“Concocting phony cases against BDA members. Lying in court. Shit like that.”

“How do you know this?”

“Some BDA people told me. That’s the kind of stuff that Steele and Loomis were looking into . . . and Jordan and Tooker, too . . . which is obviously why they were all killed.”

“I need their names—the captain and his lieutenants.”

“Joe Beltz, Mitch Stacker, Bo Luckman.”

Gurney made a note of the names. “Do you know anyone else who might have had access to your father’s cabin?”

“I don’t know. His wife, I guess.”

“One more question. Did your father own any other real estate? Summer house, another cabin somewhere, anything like that?”

“Not that I’m aware of. But that doesn’t mean anything. My father is an iceberg. Most everything about him is below the surface. Why do you ask?”

“It’s a place he might be. Somewhere to stay out of sight. How about rentals? Leases? A place he might have used on hunting or fishing trips?”

“I don’t think he liked fishing.”

“Okay, Cory. Thanks for your help. If you think of anyone else who might have had access to his cabin, let me know.”

“Absolutely.”

Gurney ended the call.

Hardwick raised his Grolsch and took a long swallow. “That little fucker any help?”

“Yes and no. Apart from a growing list of unpleasant individuals—any one of whom could have seen where Beckert kept his cabin key—I’m not sure I know much more than I did before. I should get back to Mark Torres, see if he knows anything about Beckert’s associates.”

“Goddamn waste of time.” Hardwick punctuated his comment by putting his bottle down on the table with noticeable firmness. “Focusing on people with access to the cabin isn’t relevant to anything other than your double-framing idea—which is definitely on the batshit end of the hypothesis spectrum.”

“You may be right. But there’s no harm in asking the question.” He took a sip of his Grolsch and placed the call to Torres.

“Mark, I’m trying to get a sense of the people Beckert was close to. I was given the names of three members of the WRPD command staff—Beltz, Stacker, and Luckman. What can you tell me about them?”

Torres’s initial response was an uneasy hesitation. “Wait a second. Just making sure . . . there are no open ears nearby. Okay. I can’t really tell you much, beyond the fact that they spent a lot of time in Beckert’s office—more than most of the guys who report to him. Maybe it’s my imagination, but they’ve been looking pretty nervous since he disappeared.”

“They need to be questioned. Do you know if Kline’s gotten to them yet?”

“I don’t know. He’s not telling us much.”

“How many people does he have working on Beckert’s disappearance?”

“Actively searching for him? None, as far as I know. His priority is totally on the physical evidence side. You think that’s a mistake?”

“Frankly, yes. Beckert’s connected to everything that’s happened. And his role in the case may not be what it seems to be. Locating him could resolve some questions.”

“What do you think we should be doing?”

“Everything possible to find him. I’d like to know whether he owns any other property in this part of the state. Someplace he might go if he didn’t want to be found.”

“We could have our county clerk check for his name in the property tax rolls.”

“If you can free up a couple of uniforms, you could have them check the adjoining counties, too. They should also check the names Beauville, Turlock, and Blaze Jackson. She seems to have been involved from the beginning.”

“Okay. I’ll get someone on it.”

“Before you go, a question about the silent alarm system at the cabin. You told me there was some password protection on the list of numbers it was programmed to call.”

“Right—and computer forensics did get back to us on that. There were three cell numbers. Beckert’s, Turlock’s, and an anonymous prepaid. No way to track down that one.”

“Not to its owner, but to its nearest cell tower when it received the alarm call. That could be helpful. In fact, you ought to get the receiving locations of the other two as well. Be interesting to know if Beckert was still in the area that morning when Turlock was killed.”

“No problem. I’ll get in touch with the phone company right now.”

After Gurney ended the call, Hardwick asked, “Where do you think he is?”

“I have no idea, just a hope that he’s still in the area.”

“Kline’s got an APB out on him?”

“Yes, but that’s about it.” Gurney paused. “I’ve been thinking about something you told me last week. About Beckert’s family problems. You mentioned that the boot-camp school he sent Cory to was down South. Do you know where in the South? Or what the name of the school was?”

“I could find out. I know the state police guy who recommended it to Beckert.”

“I was wondering if it might be in Virginia. Like Beckert’s own prep school. And his wife’s family. It’s a state he might know well and head for if he wanted to disappear for a while.”

Hardwick eyed Gurney over the top of his Grolsch bottle. “What are you suggesting?”

“Just thinking out loud.”

“Horseshit. You’re asking me to explore this Virginia possibility, start checking out all the places Beckert could be. Which would be an enormous pain in the ass.”

Gurney shrugged. “Just a thought. While Torres is checking tax rolls in the towns around here, I’ll be looking into rentals. There are no public records arranged by tenants’ names, but Acme Realty might have a searchable database of renters in the White River area. I’ll drop in on Laura Conway tomorrow morning.”

“What’s the matter with the phone?”

“Face-to-face is always better.”

56

Gurney was the first one up the following day. He’d had his initial cup of coffee and put out the bird feeders before Madeleine appeared for breakfast. She had her cello with her, which reminded him that her string group was booked for a morning concert at a local nursing home.

While she was preparing a bowl of her homemade granola, he scrambled three eggs for himself. They sat down together at the breakfast table.

“Have you spoken to Thrasher?” she asked.

“No. I wasn’t sure what to say. I guess we need to discuss it.”

She laid down her spoon. “Discuss it?”

“Discuss whether or not to let him go ahead with his exploration of the site.”

“You really think that needs to be discussed?”

He sighed, laying down his fork. “Okay. I’ll tell him the answer is no.”

She gave him a long look. “We live here, David. This is our home.”

He waited for her to go on. But that’s all she said.

The interstate portion of the drive was, as usual, relatively traffic-free. He pulled over just before the White River exit and entered Acme Realty’s address in his GPS. Six minutes later it delivered him to a storefront on Bridge Street, less than a block from the first sniper location.

He found that fact interesting, then dismissed it as one of those coincidences that usually end up meaning nothing. He’d learned over the years that one of the few investigatorial mistakes worse than failing to connect crucial dots was connecting irrelevant ones.

He got out in front of the office and began to examine the listings that filled the windows. Most of them were properties for sale, but there were rentals as well—both single-family homes and apartments. The area covered by the listings extended beyond White River into neighboring townships.

The front door opened. A rotund man with a chocolate-brown toupee and a salesman’s smile stepped out. “Beautiful day!”

Gurney nodded pleasantly.

The man raised a chubby hand toward the listings. “You have something in mind?”

“Hard to say.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right place. We can make it easy. That’s what we’re here for. You interested primarily in buying or renting?”

“Actually, I’ve already spoken to Ms. Conway. Is she in?”

“She is. If you’re already dealing with her, I’ll leave you to it. She’s one of our finest agents.” He opened the door. “After you, sir.”

Gurney walked into a carpeted area with an empty reception desk, a water cooler, a bulletin board with notes tacked to it, and two big tropical plants. Along the back of this area was a row of four glass-fronted cubicles with a name on each.

He’d been imagining someone young and blond. Laura Conway was middle-aged and dark-haired. She was wearing colorful rings on all ten fingers. A bright-green necklace drew attention to her already eye-catching cleavage. When she looked up from her desk, her earrings, gold disks the size of silver dollars, were set swinging. She greeted him with appraising eyes and a lipsticked smile.

“What can I do for you on this gorgeous day?”

“Hello, Laura. I’m Dave Gurney.”

It took a moment for the name to register. The wattage of the smile dropped noticeably. “Oh. Yes. The detective. Is there a problem?”

“May I?” He gestured toward one of the two spare chairs in the cubicle.

“Sure.” She placed her hands in front of her on the desk, interlocking her fingers.

He smiled. “I love the rings.”

“What?” She glanced down at them. “Oh. Thank you.”

“I’m sorry to be bothering you again, Laura. As you may have seen in the news, this crazy White River case just keeps getting crazier.”

She nodded.

“Have you heard that we’re trying to locate Dell Beckert, the former police chief?”

“It’s all over the news shows.”

“Right. So here’s the thing. We suspect he might still be in the White River area. We’re checking to see if he owns any local property. That’s easy for us to do. But he might be renting a place, and there are no public records of renters for us to check. Then I recalled someone telling me that you folks manage most of the rentals around here. So I figured if anyone could help us out, it would be you.”

She looked puzzled. “What kind of help do you want?”

“A simple tenant database search. Beckert may have leased a place himself, or he could be staying in a house or apartment leased by someone close to him. I’ll give you a few names, you run them against your master file of tenants, and we’ll see if you get any hits. Pretty straightforward. I already know about the apartment on Bridge Street and the house on Poulter, so I just need to know about any others beyond those.” He added, “By the way, that necklace you’re wearing is gorgeous. It’s jade, right?”

She touched it gently with the tips of her fingers. “The highest quality jade.”

“That’s obvious. And it goes beautifully with those rings.”

She looked pleased. “I believe appearances matter. Not everyone today agrees with that.”

“Their loss,” he said.

She smiled. “Do you have those names with you?”

He gave her a piece of paper listing Beckert, Beauville, Turlock, Jackson, and Jordan, plus the three ranking WRPD officers whose names Payne had provided. She placed the paper in front of her keyboard, frowned thoughtfully, and got to work. A quarter of an hour later, the printer came to life. A single page slid out, and she handed it to Gurney. “Beyond the two you mentioned, these are the only three rentals that come up in connection with those names.”

The first property was a one-bedroom apartment on Bacon Street in the Grinton section of White River. It was on the top floor of a building owned by Carbo Holdings LLC. A one-year lease in the name of Marcel Jordan had begun four months earlier. The agent’s name was Lily Flack. Her notes indicated that the full $4,800 annual rental had been paid in advance in cash by the tenant’s representative, Blaze L. Jackson.

The second property was a single-family house in a place called Rapture Hill. It had also been leased four months earlier for one year—from the foreclosed properties division of a White River bank. The name of the lease-signing tenant was Blaze L. Jackson. The agent, Lily Flack, noted that Ms. Jackson had paid the full amount of the lease—$18,000—in cash.

The third property was an apartment in Grinton, leased to Marcel and Tania Jordan six years earlier and renewed annually every year since. That one didn’t strike Gurney as having any relevance to Beckert’s possible whereabouts. The other two locations, however, seemed worth looking into. He folded the sheet and put it in his jacket pocket.

Laura Conway was watching him carefully. “Is that what you wanted?”

“Yes,” he said. He made no move to get up from his chair.

“Is there something else?”

“Keys. To the first apartment and to the house.”

Her expression clouded. “I don’t think we can give out keys.”

“You want to ask your boss about that?”

She picked up her phone. Then she put it down and left the cubicle.

A couple of minutes later, the man who had greeted Gurney on the street appeared in the doorway, lips pursed. “I’m Chuck Brambledale, the manager here. You asked Laura for keys to two of our rentals?”

“We may need to enter them and we’d rather do it without causing excessive damage.”

His eyes widened. “You have . . . warrants?”

“Not exactly. But I understand we have a cooperative agreement.”

Brambledale stared into the middle distance for a few seconds. “Wait here.”

While he was alone in the cubicle, Gurney got up and examined a framed award on the wall. It was a Tri-County Association of Real Estate Professionals certificate recognizing Laura Conway as Salesperson of the Year—ten years earlier.

Brambledale reappeared with two keys. “The silver one is for the apartment—top floor, 4B. The brass one is for the house up in Rapture Hill. You know where that is?”

“No.”

“It’s an unincorporated locality north of White River. You know where the gun club is? Well, it’s just two or three miles farther up.”

“Past Clapp Hollow?”

“Between Clapp Hollow and Bass River. Middle of nowhere.” He handed the keys with obvious reluctance to Gurney. “Weird place.”

“How so?”

“The property was once owned by one of those end-times cults, which is how it got named Rapture Hill. Then the cult disappeared. Right off the face of the earth. Got raptured up to heaven, some folks said. Other folks said the cult somehow ran afoul of the Gort twins, and they’re all buried somewhere up there in the quarries. Only thing anyone knows for sure is that there was nobody to pay the mortgage, so now the bank’s got it. Hard to sell with the isolation and the peculiar history, so they decided to rent it.”

“The flowers are amazing!” Laura Conway appeared beside Brambledale. “The house itself is kind of plain, but wait till you see the flowers!”

“Flowers?” said Gurney.

“As part of our management service, we check on our rental properties at least once a month, and when we were up there two months ago we discovered that the tenant had Snook’s Nursery put in these beautiful beds of petunias. And lots of hanging baskets in front of the house.”

“Blaze Jackson hired Snook’s Nursery to plant petunias?”

Conway nodded. “I guess to cheer the place up. After that disappearing cult business, it always felt kind of spooky up there.”

Blaze Jackson? Petunias?

Mystified, Gurney thanked them both for their cooperation and returned to his car.

Although the Rapture Hill property was certainly more intriguing, it made logistical sense for him to visit the Bacon Street apartment first. He checked the printout Conway had given him and entered the address in his GPS.

He arrived there in less than three minutes.

Bacon Street had that universal quality of run-down areas—the brighter the day, the worse it looked. But at least it had escaped the arson outbreaks that had made some Grinton streets uninhabitable. The building number he was looking for was in the middle of the block. He parked in a no-parking zone by a hydrant and got out. It was a convenience when one was on police business, with the downside that it announced that one was on police business.

A man with tattooed arms and a red bandanna on his head was working on one of the ground-floor windows. He commented as Gurney approached, “Nice goddamn surprise.” His voice was rough but not hostile.

“What’s the surprise?”

“You’re a cop, right?”

“Right. And who are you?”

“I’m superintendent for all the buildings on this block. Paul Parkman’s the name.”

“What surprised you, Paul?”

“In my memory, this is the first time they sent anyone the same morning we called.”

“You called the police? What for?”

He pointed to a pried-apart security grating on the window. “Bastards broke in during the night. Vacant apartment, nothing to steal. So they shit on the floor. Two of them. Two separate piles of shit. Maybe you can get some DNA?”

“Interesting idea, Paul. But that’s not why I’m here.”

“No?” He uttered a sharp bark of a laugh. “Then what are you here for?”

“I need to check one of the apartments. Top floor, 4B. You know if it’s occupied?”

“Yes and no.”

“Meaning?”

“Yes, there’s officially a tenant. No, they’re never here.”

“Never?”

“Not to my knowledge. What is it you want to check? You think someone’s dead in there?”

“I doubt it. Any obstructions on the stairs?”

“Not to my knowledge. You want me to come up with you?”

“No need for that. I’ll call you if I need you.”

Gurney entered the building. The tiled foyer was reasonably clean, the staircase adequately lighted, and the all-too-common tenement odors of cabbage, urine, and vomit blessedly faint. The top-floor landing had been mopped in the not-too-distant past, and the two apartment doors on it were legibly marked—4A at one end, 4B at the other.

He pulled his Beretta out of its ankle holster, chambered a round, and clicked off the safety. He stood to the side of the 4B door and knocked on it. There was no response, no sound at all. He knocked harder, this time shouting, “Police! Open the door!”

Still nothing.

He inserted the key, turned the lock, and pushed the door open. He was struck immediately by the musty odor of a space whose windows hadn’t been opened for a very long time. He clicked the safety back on and slipped the Beretta into his jacket pocket. He switched on the ceiling light in the small entry hall and began making his way around the rather cramped apartment.

There was a small eat-in kitchen, a small living room, and a small bedroom and a closet-sized bathroom—all looking out over a weedy vacant lot. There was no furniture nor any other sign of habitation. And yet Blaze Jackson, supposedly acting for Jordan, had paid cash for a yearlong lease.

Had the place already served some purpose and been abandoned? Or was it intended for some future use? He stood at the living room window pondering the situation. The view from that window included some of Grinton, some of Bluestone, a narrow slice of Willard Park, and—he’d almost missed it through the hazy glass—the front of the police headquarters building. As he watched, a uniformed cop came out the main door, got into a squad car in the parking lot, and drove off.

His mind jumped to the obvious explanation that the apartment had been leased as a third potential sniper site. Why the other two had been used instead was a question that would need more thought. At the moment, however, it was outweighed by his desire to visit Rapture Hill. Perhaps when they were considered together the purpose of each location would become clearer.

57

Gurney by nature tended to go where his curiosity drew him without being overly concerned about backup. Oddities and discrepancies attracted his attention, arousing a desire to examine them more closely, even under conditions that might give others pause. In fact, it was his intention to proceed directly to the house at the end of Rapture Hill Road and no doubt that’s what he would have done, if Madeleine had not called while he was on his way.

She said she had no special reason for calling him, just a free moment and was wondering what he was doing. As he answered in some detail she was silent; he sensed the situation he was describing was making her uncomfortable.

Finally she said, “I don’t think you should go there alone. It’s too isolated. You don’t know what you could be walking into.”

She was right, of course. And while at another time he might have dismissed her concern, he was now inclined to be guided by it. At the next intersection he pulled over in front of an abandoned farm stand. The faded word “Pumpkins” appeared on a deteriorating sign.

He thought about the possibilities for backup. Any solution involving Kline, the WRPD, or the sheriff’s department would create its own set of problems. He decided to try Hardwick.

“Rapture Hill? The fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about a house in the middle of nowhere, where Dell Beckert might possibly be holed up.”

“What makes this a possibility?”

“The house was leased by Blaze Jackson, who almost certainly had some sort of relationship with Beckert. She paid the eighteen-thousand-dollar annual rent in advance. I doubt she had access to that kind of money herself, but I’m sure Beckert did. And the house is just a few miles from the gas station where his Durango was sighted a day or so after he disappeared. So it’s worth a look.”

“If you don’t mind wasting your time, go look.”

“I intend to.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“A possible welcoming committee.”

Hardwick paused for a moment. “You want Uncle Jack to ride shotgun again to cover your cowardly ass.”

“Something like that.”

“If the son of a bitch is there, maybe I could find a reason to pop him.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“You’re taking the joy out of this. The only upside of riding shotgun is getting to fire the fucking thing.”

“Well, there’s a chance we might run into the Gorts.”

“Okay. Where do I find you?”

The meeting place Gurney chose, after consulting Google Maps on his phone, was the intersection of a winding wilderness lane called Rockton Way and the starting point of Rapture Hill Road. When he got there he parked in a weedy space between the road surface and the evergreen woods.

According to his dashboard clock, a quarter of an hour had now passed since his call with Hardwick. He figured it would take Jack another half hour to make the trip from Dillweed. He fought an urge to proceed at least part of the way up Rapture Hill on his own. Not only would that defeat the purpose of having called Hardwick, it would increase the level of risk in return for no benefit other than learning thirty minutes sooner whatever there was to be learned.

He tilted his seat back and waited, occupying his mind with various permutations of who might have set up whom for each of the seven murders and why. He kept coming back to the question that had been haunting him for some time. Did the murders necessitate the apparent frame jobs, or were the frame jobs the goal that necessitated the murders? And did the same answer apply to each case?

After twenty-five minutes, he heard the welcome rumble of Hardwick’s GTO pulling in behind him. He got out to meet him.

The man’s favorite weapon, his Sig Sauer, was strapped on over the black tee shirt that had become as characteristic a part of him as those unsettling pale-blue eyes. In his left hand he carried a scoped AK-47 assault rifle.

“Just in case things get interesting,” he said with a manic gleam in his eye that might have unnerved someone who didn’t know him as well as Gurney did.

“Thanks for coming.”

He coughed up a wad of phlegm and spit it onto the dirt road. “Before I forget to mention it—I got in touch with that boarding school Cory got sent to in Virginia, plus Beckert’s old prep school. Nobody at either place had any idea if Beckert owned any property down there. I spoke to half a dozen county clerks in the areas around those schools and the areas around the Beauville family tobacco farms, but none of them would give me the time of day. So much for that—unless you want to spend the next week of your life in the ass end of that state going over tax rolls. Which I think would be an incredibly stupid idea.”

“Nobody would tell you anything?”

“The psychologist at Cory’s boarding school told me Cory was a lot like his father.”

“In what way?”

“Strong-willed. Determined. Precise. Controlling.”

“No details?”

“Confidentiality laws. Closest she came to anything specific was to say that his mother’s death had a major impact on him.”

“Nothing we didn’t know already. Right now I’m more interested in Beckert. I presume he was involved in his son’s intake interview. She say anything about him?”

“Strong-willed. Determined. Precise. Controlling.”

“Okay. So much for that. Hopefully our visit here isn’t another dead end.”

Hardwick peered up the rutted road leading into the pine forest. “How far’s the house?”

“Little over a mile, according to the satellite map. All uphill.”

“We walk or drive?”

“Walk. Less chance of getting stuck, and it’ll give whoever might be there less notice of our—” He stopped as his eye caught a tiny glint of reflected light in a tree not far up the road. “If that’s what I think it is, we can forget about the element of surprise.”

Hardwick followed Gurney’s gaze. “Security camera?”

“Looks like it.”

They soon discovered that the reflection had indeed come from a security camera—a sophisticated model mounted about twelve feet off the ground on the trunk of a giant hemlock.

Hardwick peered up at it. “Axion Five Hundred,” he said with a combination of admiration and concern. “Motion-activated recording, satellite-based transmission. You want me to put a bullet in it?”

“No point. I drove into its field of view at least half an hour ago. If Beckert or anyone else is at the house, they already know we’re here.”

Hardwick nodded unhappily, and they continued moving forward.

As the ascent grew steeper and their progress slowed, a new theory began to take shape in Gurney’s mind. He decided to talk it out with Hardwick as they trudged along.

“Suppose that Beckert was the target from the beginning.”

Hardwick made a face. “You mean everyone was killed just so the sainted police chief could be framed for their murders?”

“I don’t know about everybody. Let’s say Steele, Loomis, Jordan, and Tooker. It may be that Turlock, Jackson, and Creel were just loose ends that needed to be cleaned up.”

“If Beckert was the target, what about Payne? Why was he framed first?”

“Maybe the ultimate purpose of that had nothing to do with Payne himself. Maybe it was just a way of damaging his father.”

“Damaging him how?”

“Politically. In that world, having a cop-killer son would seem to be a career-ender. Whoever engineered it couldn’t have anticipated Beckert turning it around into a plus.”

Hardwick looked unconvinced. “So what then?”

“Then, when the killer realizes the evil-son angle isn’t working out as planned, he takes all the physical evidence related to the first four murders and plants it out at the cabin, making it seem not only that Beckert was the murderer, but that he’d attempted to frame his own son for Steele and Loomis and the Gort brothers for Jordan and Tooker.”

Hardwick broke out in a sharp laugh. “You’ve got a hell of an imagination.”

“I’m just saying maybe that’s what happened. I have no proof.”

Hardwick grimaced. “Seems . . . diabolical. If you’re right, whoever set it up had no qualms about the murders and no qualms about the possibility of Cory spending the rest of his life in jail. All that just to mess up Beckert’s life? Seems out of proportion.”

“Even if I’m wrong about the motive, or about Beckert being the ultimate intended victim, the fact is that at least seven people have ended up dead, and some evil bastard killed them.”

A silence fell between them, broken by the ringing of Gurney’s phone.

The screen said it was Torres.

Gurney stopped where he was to take the call.

Torres’s voice was low and rushed. “New ball game. Kline just heard from Beckert. He wants to turn himself in.”

“When?”

“Today. The exact time depends on how soon we can make the arrangements he wants.”

“Arrangements?”

“Beckert wants certain people to be present, people he considers trustworthy witnesses. He says he doesn’t want what happened to Turlock to happen to him.”

“Who are these witnesses?”

“His wife, Haley; a wealthy political donor by the name of Marvin Gelter; Sheriff Cloutz; Mayor Shucker; and the WRPD captain you asked me about.”

“Quite a committee. Where is this surrender supposed to occur?”

There was a moment’s hesitation. “At the location where he’s been staying since he dropped out of sight.”

“That’s not exactly an answer.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that. Kline briefed a few of us and said it was confidential and that absolutely no details were to go to anyone else. He mentioned you, specifically.”

Gurney saw an opportunity to find out if he was in the right place. “Kline doesn’t want me to know about the house on Rapture Hill Road?”

There was a moment of dead silence. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

“But . . . how . . . how did you know . . .”

“Doesn’t matter. The thing is, I’m approaching the house right now. Tell Kline I’m here—and that I want to know what his plan is, so I don’t louse it up.”

“Jesus. Let me go find him. I’ll ask him to call you.”

Gurney turned to Hardwick and filled him in on the situation.

“Beckert wants to turn himself in? And then what? Confess to seven murders, then run for AG anyway, based on the impressive honesty of his confession?”

“At this point, who the hell knows—”

His phone rang, Kline’s name was on the screen.

“Gurney here.”

Kline was nearly shouting. “How the hell did you know where Beckert was? And why didn’t you notify me the instant you found out?”

“I didn’t know where he was. I was following a hunch.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“On Rapture Hill Road, not far from the house.”

“Don’t get any closer. In fact, don’t do a goddamn thing. This surrender is a big deal. As big as they come. I’m running the operation personally. Nothing happens before I get there. You read me?”

“Things may happen that require a response.”

“That’s not what I mean. You are to take no initiatives. None. You understand?”

“I do.”

“That’s good. I repeat, do nothing. I’m on my way.”

58

Gurney passed Kline’s comments along to Hardwick.

He bared his teeth in disgust. “Kline’s a pathetic little shit.”

“But he’s right about this being a big deal,” said Gurney. “Especially if the surrender is accompanied by a confession.”

“Which would knock your Beckert-as-victim theory on its ass.”

“If it gets us to the truth, that’s fine with me.”

“So what do we do until the cavalry arrives? Stand here holding our dicks?”

“We get off this road, stay out of sight, get closer to the house. After that . . . we’ll see.”

As they made their way up through the woods, the terrain began to level out. Soon they were able to glimpse through the hemlocks what appeared to be a mowed clearing. Using the drooping branches as a screen, they moved forward until they had a good view of a plain white farmhouse in the middle of a bright-green lawn. Next to the house was a garage-sized shed. Almost all the space in front of the house was filled with mulched beds and hanging baskets of red petunias.

“So what now?” muttered Hardwick.

“We treat this as a stakeout. See if anyone enters or leaves.”

“What if they do?”

“That depends on who they are.”

“That’s clear as mud.”

“Like life. Let’s take diagonal positions out of sight where we can watch the house without any cameras watching us.” Gurney pointed through the woods. “You go around that way to a point where you can see the left side of the house and the back. I’ll keep an eye on the front and right side. Give me a call when you’ve picked your spot.”

He put his phone on Vibrate so there’d be no chance of the ring giving away his location. Hardwick did the same.

Gurney made his way through the trees to a place that gave him good cover while affording decent views of the house and the shed. From his position he could see a small, very new-looking satellite dish mounted on the corner of the house. He also became aware of the muffled drone of a generator. As his ears became accustomed to the hum, he realized that he was also hearing a voice. It was too faint to identify any words, but as he listened he concluded that what he was hearing was the cadence of a TV newscaster. Under the intense circumstances, it seemed odd that Beckert would be watching television—unless, perhaps, he was expecting some announcement of his impending surrender.

Gurney’s phone vibrated. It was Hardwick.

“Reporting as requested. I just breathed in a goddamn gnat. Fucking thing is in my lungs.”

“At least it wasn’t a wasp.”

“Or a bird. Anyway, I’m in position. Now what?”

“Tell me something. If you listen carefully, can you hear something that sounds like a TV news show?”

“I hear a generator.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. But I do have a thought about your double-frame theory. Your idea that all this White River shit was ultimately devised to destroy Beckert raises a big cui bono question.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“You also aware of the answer?”

“No. But it sounds like you are.”

Hardwick inserted a dramatic pause before replying. “Maynard Biggs.”

Gurney was unimpressed. His recollection of Biggs as an honest, smart, compassionate man made him an unlikely multiple murderer. “Why Biggs?”

“He’s the only one who seems to benefit in any practical way from the destruction of Beckert. Remove the famous law-and-order police chief, and Biggs wins the AG election without breaking a sweat.”

It didn’t feel right, but he was determined to keep an open mind. “It’s a possibility. The problem is—”

He stopped speaking at the sound of a vehicle, maybe more than one, coming up the dirt road. “Hang on, Jack, we have visitors.”

He shifted his position in the woods for a better view of the opening where the road entered the clearing. The first vehicle to appear was Mark Torres’s Crown Victoria. The second was an unmarked black van, and that was followed by a dark nondescript SUV. They parked in a row at the edge of the clearing, facing the house. No one got out.

Gurney got back on the phone with Hardwick. “Can you see them from where you are?”

“Yeah. The van looks like SWAT. What do you think they’re planning to do?”

“Not much until Kline arrives. And there are other invitees coming to this party, assuming he got in touch with them. Let me check with Torres and get back to you.”

Torres picked up on the first ring.

“Dave? Where are you?”

“Nearby, but out of sight, which is the way I’d like to keep it for a while. Do you guys have a plan?”

“Kline’s calling the shots. Nothing happens until everyone gets here.”

“Who’s with you now?”

“SWAT and Captain Beltz. The mayor and the sheriff are being driven by a deputy in the sheriff’s car. Mr. Gelter is coming separately. Mrs. Beckert’s chauffeur is bringing her.”

“What about Kline?”

“He’s on his way. By himself, far as I know.”

“Anyone else?”

“No. Well, yes, in a way. The RAM-TV people.”

“What?”

“Another of Beckert’s conditions. More witnesses.”

“Kline agreed to that?”

“Agreed to it? He loves it.”

“Jesus.”

“Another piece of news. You asked about the locations of the phones that received calls from the alarm system at Beckert’s cabin when you and Hardwick were there. The calls went to Beckert’s phone, to Turlock’s, and to an anonymous prepaid. Beckert’s was turned off at the time, which makes sense if he was already on the run, so we have no location on that. Turlock’s was on, and the call was received through the Larvaton cell tower, which is the closest one to his house. It would explain why he showed up at the gun club that morning. No surprise there. The interesting one is the call to the prepaid. It was received through the White River tower, and thirty seconds later a call was made from that same prepaid to a phone registered to Ezechias Gort.”

This was no surprise to Gurney, having assumed that someone with reason to believe that Turlock would be present had notified one of the Gorts, but having it confirmed was encouraging. “Thanks for pursuing that, Mark. It’s a nice change of pace when something in this damn case makes sense.”

At the sound of another vehicle coming up the hill, they ended the call.

A maroon Escalade entered the clearing and came to a stop next to the Crown Victoria. A sheriff’s deputy got out of the driver’s seat and tapped on Torres’s window. After conferring for a few moments, he got back in the Escalade. For the ensuing quarter of an hour there was no other activity in the line of vehicles and no sound but the persistent hum of the generator and, at least to Gurney’s ear, the almost subliminal intonations of a cable news program.

Then Kline arrived in his Navigator, got out with a brisk man-in-command air about him, and paid a quick visit to each of the other vehicles. He was wearing a too-large windbreaker made of the stiff dark-blue fabric favored by most law-enforcement agencies. Across the back in bold letters were the words DISTRICT ATTORNEY.

He returned to the Navigator and stood in front of it, feet planted wide apart—the image of a conquering hero, had it not been for the oversize jacket making him look unusually small. Gurney was watching closely from his spot at the near edge of the woods as Kline took out his phone.

Gurney’s phone vibrated. He looked at the screen and took the call. “Hello, Sheridan. What’s the plan?”

Kline looked around the clearing. “Where are you?”

“Out of sight, keeping an eye on the house.”

“This is a surrender, not a battle.”

“Has he confessed to anything?”

“To everything. Everything except the Turlock homicide.”

“Why would he confess?”

“What difference does it make? The fact is, he did. We have it in writing.”

“In writing? How—”

Kline broke in impatiently. “Phone text. Electronic thumbprint attached.”

“Did you ever actually speak to him?”

“On the phone, briefly. There was noise in the background—probably that generator—which made it hard to hear him. I didn’t want any future disputes over what was said. So I told him to spell it out in a text, and that’s what he did.”

“And in that text he confessed to six murders?”

“He did.”

“You have no concerns about that?”

“I’m delighted with it. Obviously you’re not. Is that because it makes your idea that he was a helpless victim, framed by some Machiavellian genius, sound totally ridiculous?”

Gurney ignored the snark. “I’m concerned about it for two reasons. First, whatever else Beckert may be, he isn’t stupid. But confessing to multiple murders with no deal on the table is very stupid. It makes me wonder what’s going on. Second, I’ve been thinking about what drew me into this case to begin with—that message on Steele’s phone. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t what it seemed to be.”

Kline’s voice on the phone was clipped and angry. “It was exactly what it seemed to be—a warning to watch his back, which turned out to be very good advice. He just didn’t get it in time.”

“Maybe he wasn’t meant to.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The message was sent to his personal phone after he left for work—where he used the department-issued BlackBerry. So maybe the message wasn’t meant to be found until after he was killed.”

“After? For what purpose?”

“To point us toward the WRPD, and ultimately Beckert. Of course that would mean that the sender knew in advance that Steele would be killed. The so-called warning could have been the first subtle piece in the plot to incriminate Beckert.”

“Very clever. That’s what you’re all about, Gurney, isn’t it? One damn clever theory after another. Too bad this one is obvious nonsense. Maybe you didn’t hear me. WE HAVE A CONFESSION! Do I need to keep repeating that?”

In the hope that he might be able to better communicate his concerns face-to-face, Gurney ended the call and made his way out of his concealed position in the woods—which was starting to feel a bit ridiculous—and made his way over to Kline, whose exasperated expression offered zero encouragement.

“Look, Sheridan, I appreciate your position,” Gurney began, trying to sound as accommodating as possible. “I just think—”

He was interrupted by the deep growl of a finely tuned twelve-cylinder engine. It was Marv Gelter arriving in his classic red Ferrari.

The instant Kline saw Gelter he gave Gurney a dismissive wave of his hand and strode over to the Ferrari. When Gelter got out of the car, they engaged in a brief frowning discussion, Kline gesturing in an explanatory way toward the house. Then Gelter spotted Gurney and came over to him, leaving Kline staring after him.

His smile was as hard-edged as the scraping timbre of his voice. “Time flies, my friend. You owe me an answer. I hope it’s the right one.”

Gurney responded to the man’s intensity with a bland shrug. “The truth is, I’m afraid I’d make a lousy candidate and an even worse attorney general.”

“Hah! That’s exactly the kind of statement that’ll get you elected. The reluctant hero. No pretenses. Like a humble fucking astronaut. What a gift! And you don’t even know you have it. That’s the magic of it.”

Before Gurney could articulate a more definitive refusal, a large satellite-transmission media van pulled into the clearing, followed by a big Chevy SUV, both bearing the same promotional identification in red-white-and-blue lettering:

RAM-TV—ON THE SPOT

WHERE NEWS IS BREAKING!

As Stacey Kilbrick stepped out of the SUV, Kline hurried over to greet her.

“Circus time,” said Gelter. With a wink at Gurney he went over to join Kline and Kilbrick.

A restless breeze was beginning to stir. Gurney looked up and saw that a bank of clouds was slowly moving in from the west. The darkening sky lent a chilling visual effect to a situation that was making him increasingly uneasy. The fact that no one seemed to share his apprehension was only making it worse.

59

What went on for the next fifteen or twenty minutes looked to Gurney a lot more like the choreography of a media event than the securing of a site for a police operation.

As Kline, Gelter, and Kilbrick were conferring, one of her assistants was fussing with her hair, and a member of the TV crew was affixing a microphone to the collar of her blazer. Another crew member was working with the camera operator to pick a spot for her to stand that would show the house and the array of flower baskets in the background.

Meanwhile Mayor Shucker and Sheriff Cloutz had emerged from the Escalade and were standing next to it. Cloutz was rocking his white cane back and forth like a metronome. Shucker was eating a doughnut. Captain Beltz was leaning on the open door of his Explorer, smoking a cigarette with fierce inhalations.

Kilbrick took her place in front of the camera, adopted a highly energized and concerned expression, cleared her throat, gave the camera operator a nod, and began speaking.

“This is Stacey Kilbrick on location with a special edition of NewsBreakers. Due to a startling development in the White River multiple-murder case, we’re delaying until this evening the celebratory Mother’s Day interviews originally scheduled for this time slot. Instead, we’re bringing you—live and unedited—the final bizarre twist in this sensational case. We’ve just learned that fugitive police chief Dell Beckert, allegedly responsible for at least six of the seven recent White River homicides, is about to turn himself in to District Attorney Sheridan Kline—who’s here with me right now.”

Kline straightened his large jacket and, following a crew member’s silent direction, took a position on Kilbrick’s right.

She turned toward him. “I understand the hunt for Dell Beckert may be over.”

Kline produced a grim smile. “It looks that way. We’ve been closing in on him, and I guess he saw the writing on the wall.”

“Is it true that you’ve secured a confession?”

“Yes. A bare-bones confession. We have the essentials, and we expect he’ll be providing the details in the days to come.”

“When do you expect him to come out of the house and be taken into custody?”

“As soon as his wife arrives. His agreement to surrender peacefully and make a full confession came with the request that it occur in the presence of trustworthy witnesses. It’s quite an irony that this man who was willing to take the law into his own hands is now afraid that someone might do the same thing to him.”

As Kline was speaking, two more vehicles entered the clearing. They were stopped by Torres, who conferred briefly with each driver and then directed them to the end of the row of vehicles already present. Gurney recognized Haley Beauville Beckert’s imposing green Range Rover. The second car was a beige Camry. It had the look of a rental.

Cory Payne emerged from it, caught Gurney’s eye, and raised his hand in an urgent gesture. They made their way toward each other and met beside the RAM-TV van.

Payne looked agitated, running on nervous energy. “I got this weird message from my father. It sounds like he’s gone totally crazy.”

He showed Gurney the text on the screen of his iPhone, reading it aloud at the same time. “I’ve done what I’ve done for a greater good. Men of principle must act. I will surrender and explain everything on the top of Rapture Hill at 3:00 PM.”

Gurney found the message as disconcerting in its brevity as in its content. Before he could comment on it, Kline came striding over, demanding to know why Payne was there.

He showed him the text.

Kline read it twice and shook his head. His agitation level seemed to be rising by the minute. “Look, there’s obviously something going on with him. Mentally. Emotionally. Whatever. But that’s neither here nor there. The fact is he’s surrendering. That’s the part that matters. Let’s not get distracted. Cory, I’d advise you to stay back out of the way. In fact, that’s an order. I don’t want any surprises.” He took a deep breath and looked around the clearing. “The people Beckert requested have all arrived. In another few minutes we’ll be gathering them in front of the house. At that point he should present himself . . . and this goddamn nightmare will be over!”

He took another deep breath and headed over to the Range Rover to greet Beckert’s wife.

Kilbrick, meanwhile, was interviewing Dwayne Shucker in the area staked out by the TV crew about fifty feet from the house. Seeing Kline gesturing to her, Kilbrick concluded the interview and looked directly into the camera. “After these important announcements, we’ll be back with the event we’ve all been waiting for—the dramatic surrender of the White River killer.”

Kilbrick went to join Kline along with the three members of her crew. From their gestures and the way they were sizing up the large area in front of the house, Gurney concluded they were deciding on how the imminent appearance of Beckert, the positioning of the witnesses, and the actual movement of the man into Kline’s custody should be stage-managed for maximum clarity and dramatic impact. At one point he overheard the camera operator questioning how much screen space should be devoted to the floral display.

At the same time, Torres was talking to Beckert’s requested safe-passage committee—his wife, Haley; Sheriff Cloutz; Captain Beltz; Marv Gelter; and Mayor Shucker, fresh from his truncated interview with Kilbrick.

The four SWAT team members had come out of their unmarked van and were leaning against it with alert, impassive expressions. The sky was growing darker, and the petunia baskets were moving ever so slightly in the shifting breezes. The generator continued to hum in the background, nearly extinguishing that faint sound of a television voice.

There was something profoundly wrong about it all that had Gurney on edge.

The media aspect, of course, was surreal. But that was the least of it. The whole situation had a warped feeling about it—more like a bad dream than the culmination of a successful investigation.

Just then he overheard Kline telling Kilbrick and her crew that he was going to move his vehicle into a better position to receive Beckert when he was escorted from the front door of the house.

When Kline stepped away and headed for the Navigator, Gurney intercepted him. As disorganized as his thoughts were and as closed-minded as Kline had become, he felt compelled to share his concerns.

“Sheridan, we need to talk.”

Kline eyed him coldly. “What now?”

“Listen. Tell me what you hear.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Two sounds. The generator. And a television.”

Kline looked furious. But he listened, then nodded impatiently. “Okay, I hear something. A radio, television, something. What of it?”

“I’m certain it’s the sound of a television. And it’s obviously coming from the house.”

“Fine. What’s your point?”

“Doesn’t it seem odd to you that Beckert would be spending the last few minutes of his life as a free man watching television?”

“Maybe he’s watching the news, seeing what’s being said about him.”

“That can’t be very pleasant. He’s being excoriated. Publicly ripped to pieces. Portrayed as a serial murderer, a self-righteous maniac, a framer of innocent people, a complete law-and-order fraud. The image that meant everything to him is being flushed down the toilet. The world is being told that Dell Beckert is a despicable criminal nutcase, and that his life was a total lie. You think that’s what he wants to listen to?”

“Jesus Christ, Gurney. How should I know what he wants to listen to? Maybe it’s a form of self-hatred. Self-punishment. Who the hell knows. I’m about to take this man into custody. End of story.”

Kline brushed past Gurney and got into the Navigator. Easing it out of its position in the row of vehicles, he moved it to a spot where the camera could follow Beckert’s progress from the front door through the floral area and across fifty or sixty feet of lawn to the Navigator’s open rear door.

As he watched Kline making his preparations for his moment of televised law-enforcement glory, Gurney’s uneasiness increased, and the what-ifs multiplied in his mind.

What if all this, including Beckert’s confession, was some sort of elaborate ruse?

What if Kline’s view of the case and Gurney’s own view of it were both wrong?

What if Beckert wasn’t even in that house?

As his list of what-ifs grew longer, he eventually came to a particularly troubling one that an early mentor in the NYPD had drilled into him. He could picture the man’s hard Irish face and bright-blue eyes. He could hear the ironic challenge in his voice:

What if the perp intended you to discover everything you’ve discovered in order to lead you to where you are right now?

As Kline was making his way back to Kilbrick, Gurney stopped him again with a rising sense of urgency. “Sheridan, you need to reconsider the level of risk here. It may be higher than you think.”

“If you’re worried about your safety, feel free to leave.”

“I’m worried about the safety of everyone here.”

As they were speaking, Torres was ushering the chosen five witnesses toward the house. A concerned backward glance from Haley Beckert suggested she’d heard Gurney’s comment.

“Christ,” muttered Kline, “keep your voice down.”

“Keeping my voice down won’t diminish the risk.”

Kline bridled visibly. “I have a fully equipped SWAT team here. Plus Captain Beltz. Plus Detective Torres. I have my own sidearm. I presume you do as well. I think we’re in a position to handle any surprises.” He started to walk away.

Gurney called after him. “Has it occurred to you that Beckert’s main supporters are all here?”

Kline stopped and turned. “So what?”

“Suppose they’re not here for the reason you think they are. Suppose you’re dead wrong about the whole point of this.”

Kline took a step toward Gurney and lowered his voice. “I’m warning you—if you sabotage our arrangements, if you do anything that impedes Beckert’s surrender, I’ll personally prosecute you for obstruction of justice.”

“Sheridan, the confession makes no sense. The surrender makes no sense. Something god-awful is going on that we’re not seeing.”

“Damnit! One more word . . . one more syllable of this craziness . . . and I’ll have you removed.”

Gurney said nothing. He saw Haley Beckert watching him with an intensely curious frown. She detached herself from the group Torres had assembled in a semicircle around the entrance to the house and walked back across the lawn toward Gurney and Kline.

A second later, the world exploded.

60

It took Gurney a moment to grasp the nature of the event.

A deafening blast, a physical shock wave slamming the side of his body facing the house, the stinging impact of what felt like birdshot to the side of his face and neck, the air full of flying dirt and dust and the caustic odor of dynamite—all this at once—followed by a sharp ringing in his ears that made the cries around him sound far away.

As the dust began to settle, the horror gradually came into focus.

Across the lawn on the smoldering, flattened grass lay Dwayne Shucker, Goodson Cloutz, and Joe Beltz—recognizable mainly by the intact pieces of clothing that clung to their shattered bodies. Even from some distance away Gurney could see with a surge of nausea that Shucker’s nose and jaw were gone. Beltz’s entire head was missing. Cloutz’s intestines were exposed. His right hand still gripped his white cane, but the hand was at least a yard from the bleeding stump of a wrist. Marvin Gelter, spread-eagled on his back, was covered with so much blood it was impossible to tell where it was coming from.

Torres was still on his feet, but barely so. He moved slowly toward the carnage, checking, it seemed, for signs of life like a medic on a devastated battlefield.

Haley Beckert was on her hands and knees about fifteen feet from Gurney. Her back, covered with dirt, was heaving with her rapid gasps. Her driver arrived at a run from the Range Rover and knelt beside her. He said something and she nodded. She looked around, coughing.

As more of Gurney’s hearing returned, he became aware of half-stifled yelps of pain behind him. He turned and saw that the four SWAT cops who’d been leaning against their van had all suffered some damage to their vision. They’d apparently all been looking toward the group in front of the house at the moment of the explosion, and all were hit in the face and eyes by the propelled dirt and debris.

One had dropped his assault rifle, and, as Gurney watched, he tripped over it and fell to the ground, cursing. Another with no rifle in sight was bent over, grimacing, trying to clear his vision. Another was walking in circles, holding his rifle in one hand, the fingertips of the other hand against his closed eyes, alternately groaning through clenched teeth and calling out, “What the fuck happened?” The fourth was standing with his back to the van, blinking hard, wincing, stumbling, trying to hold his rifle in a ready position, shouting repeatedly, “Answer me! Someone answer me!”

Cory Payne was on his knees in front of his car, bent over, patting the ground, apparently feeling for something he’d dropped.

Gurney ran over to him. “You all right?”

He looked up, dirt on his face, eyes tearing and half closed. “What the hell happened?”

“Explosion!”

“What? Was anyone hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Can’t tell.”

Cory was breathing fast, sounding panicked. “Can you see my phone?”

Gurney glanced around. “No.”

“I have to find it.”

Torres, in the midst of the human wreckage, called to Gurney in a shaky voice, “This one has a pulse! I can feel it. He’s breathing, too. Shallow breaths, but breathing. Jesus!”

He was crouching next to Gelter’s blood-soaked body, his fingertips on the side of the man’s neck. “I can’t tell where he’s bleeding from. What should I do?”

“Call headquarters,” cried Gurney. “Tell them to notify the local EMTs, state police, sheriff’s department. Message is: major crime scene, use of high explosives, multiple homicides. Sheriff, mayor, and a police captain all down.”

Torres straightened up, breathing hard, and took out his phone. Gurney could have made the call himself, of course, but he knew that following simple orders could steady a man, and it looked like Torres needed some steadying.

At that point Gurney noted that the front windows of the house had been blown in. He also realized that something was missing. The hanging baskets of petunias were gone. Obliterated. And most of the shepherd’s crooks on which they’d been hung had been flattened to the ground. So now he knew where the explosives had been positioned. And why the request for the “trustworthy witnesses” had specified that they be brought to the front of the house.

After Torres completed his task, Gurney asked him to do one more thing—call the department’s contact at the phone company and arrange for an immediate ping—a three-tower triangulation—to determine the precise current location of Beckert’s phone.

Torres looked puzzled. “Wouldn’t it have to be with him in the house?”

Gurney had no time to explain. “Just make that ping happen now.”

While Torres complied with the request, Gurney continued his rapid survey of the scene. Two members of the TV crew were holding on to the front door of the RAM van. Kilbrick’s camera operator, however, was still operating his camera. He was prowling around the lawn with a war-zone reporter’s intensity, panning here, panning there, zooming in on bodies and body parts, capturing it all. Kilbrick herself appeared to be rooted in one spot. The only movements Gurney could discern were small and tremor-like. She appeared to be looking wide-eyed at something in front of her feet.

That’s when he heard the howling. It was somewhere out in the woods. Distance and direction were hard to pin down. Coyotes, most likely, disturbed by the blast. Or it might be the Gorts’ pack of pit bulls, a more disconcerting possibility. He checked the Beretta in his jacket pocket. For one hallucinatory moment as he was scanning the edges of the clearing he thought he saw the Gort twins themselves in the dark shadows of the hemlocks—one tall, one short, both gaunt and bearded. But when he looked again there was no one there.

He returned his attention to what was in the clearing itself. In addition to the house windows, the explosion had blown in the door of the adjacent shed, revealing the Durango with its distinctive CBIIWRPD vanity plate. An acute moment of déjà vu intruded into Gurney’s already overloaded consciousness. He was sure it had nothing to do with having seen the plate number displayed during Kline’s recent RAM-TV interview. Whatever the connection was, it wasn’t that direct. But there was no time now to figure it out. Figuring out the who and the why behind what had just happened was a hell of a lot more urgent.

He saw Kline coming toward him. Perhaps the explosion and resulting slaughter had finally opened the man’s mind. There was a bewildered look in his eyes. “Have you called it in?”

“Torres did.”

“Good. We’ll get . . . get reinforcements, right?”

Gurney took a long look at him and realized he was in some kind of shock, and not entirely present. Maybe a sense of personal responsibility for what had happened had begun to dawn on him and something in his brain shut down. There seemed to be little use in engaging Kline in a discussion at this point.

When the EMTs arrived they could deal with Kline. In the meantime he suggested that Kline stay by his Navigator, so people could find him easily when they needed him. Kline seemed to think this was a good idea. In the meantime, Gurney had the feeling that lives were still at stake. He looked around, deciding on the next move.

A high-pitched whine drew his attention to Stacey Kilbrick, and he headed over to her. She was still transfixed by something on the ground—an object the size of a honeydew melon but uneven in shape. It was a mottled red with white patches. When he realized what he was looking at he stopped so suddenly he almost tripped.

It was Joe Beltz’s head, looking up at Kilbrick. His uniform hat was still on, although it had been knocked sideways at a jaunty angle. One of the eyes was wide open. The other was closed, as though the head were winking at her.

Kilbrick, who appeared frozen in place, let out another piteous mewling sound. Gurney stepped forward between her and the object of her terror, gripped her upper arms, turned her away, and led her firmly over to the RAM-TV van. He got her into the front passenger seat and told the two crew members who were standing by the door with terrified expressions to make sure the EMTs checked her out.

He moved farther down the row of vehicles to the black SWAT van and the four cops who were trying to regain their vision. He quickly introduced himself as a senior member of the district attorney’s investigative staff and announced that he and Detective Torres had assumed control of the site since they were both uninjured and the DA appeared disoriented as a result of the blast.

He told them he’d seen a garden hose and water spigot on the side of the shed. As soon as they could regain enough vision to function safely, they needed to take control of the house—and Beckert, if in fact he was there.

Nodding their agreement, they headed for the shed, led by the one whose vision was least impaired. Gurney then got on the phone to Hardwick, who answered immediately.

“What the goddamn hell is going on?”

“Good question. Where are you?”

“In the woods. I figured I’d stay out of sight. Element of surprise might turn out to be useful.”

“Good. The scene here is an absolute horror show. I’m thinking there’s only one way any of this makes any sense. The whole thing—from Steele’s murder right up through this explosion—has been a giant manipulation.”

Hardwick cleared his throat noisily. “Giant manipulations usually have giant goals. Any ideas about that?”

“Not yet, but—”

His comment was cut short by more howling in the woods, louder this time and more prolonged. Then it stopped as abruptly as it began.

As he ended the call, he felt a wave of jittery exhaustion pass through him. The cumulative horrors of the case were taking their toll. The widowed wives of Steele and Loomis. The gruesomely methodical murders of Marcel Jordan and Virgil Tooker. The ripped-apart body of Judd Turlock. Blaze Lovely Jackson and Chalise Creel, dressed for a night out, dead and rotting on their couch. And now this—this gory devastation on Rapture Hill.

Counting the latest, there were now ten dead in all.

For what?

When detectives looked for murder motives, they often settled on one of the big four: greed, power, lust, envy. One or more of those was almost always present. But there was a fifth motive that Gurney had come to believe was the most powerful of all. Hatred. Pure, raging, monomaniacal hatred.

That was the hidden force that he sensed was driving all this death and destruction.

This was not, however, the sort of practical insight that immediately identifies a prime suspect—since hatred at such a pathological level is often well concealed.

Looking for a simpler way forward, he decided to try a process of elimination. He began with a mental list of everyone who had a significant connection to the case. The first eliminations naturally were the ten murder victims themselves—plus Marvin Gelter, who was unlikely to have triggered the explosion that now had him close to death.

He was about to eliminate Haley Beckert for a similar reason, but he hesitated. Her stepping out of the fatal area of the explosion a moment before it occurred was probably just a lucky coincidence. However, at least for the moment, she should probably be left on the list.

Dell Beckert, as far as Gurney knew, was still alive. If the texted confession Kline had received was, in fact, from him, he was the prime suspect and then some. But that was a big if. Gurney still considered it quite possible that Beckert was being framed. And if he were guilty of the earlier murders, killing off the few people who might still be on his side would make no sense.

Cory was alive and at the scene, and the injury to his vision wouldn’t get him off the list of potential suspects. What did get him off the list was the fact that he’d been framed for the first two murders, and Gurney was convinced that the same mastermind behind those two was behind all those that followed.

Kline was alive and at the scene, but Gurney found it impossible to see the moderately dishonest, moderately intelligent, anxiety-prone DA as an evil genius.

Torres also was alive and at the scene. Gurney found him a more interesting potential suspect—but only because he seemed so honest, harmless, and naïve.

The Gort twins, on the other hand, would never be accused of being honest, harmless, or naïve. They had almost certainly been involved in the bloody demise of Turlock; they were the likely source of the dynamite; and that intermittent howling in the woods was likely from their dogs. But Gurney was reasonably certain they were acting as the instruments of the same unknown manipulator who had planted the KRS evidence in their compound in an effort to frame them for Jordan and Tooker, and at the same time set up Judd Turlock as the one who framed them. It was the only scenario that made sense.

Maynard Biggs, as Hardwick had pointed out, was the person who appeared to have the most to gain from the whole affair—especially if Beckert ended up being prosecuted for some or all of it. In fact, if there was one clear answer to the cui bono question, it was Maynard Biggs. However, Gurney resisted the possibility of the man’s guilt—probably because it would destroy whatever confidence he had in his ability to read character.

And, finally, there was the rector of Saint Thomas the Apostle Episcopal Church, the Reverend Whittaker Coolidge—the man who provided posthumous exonerations for Jordan and Tooker, who was a major defender of Cory Payne, an enemy of Dell Beckert, and a huge fan of Maynard Biggs. He was also the individual connected to the case who Gurney found the least knowable.

Having made his list, he discovered that it did little to illuminate the playing field. No one seemed to leap out in a clearly persuasive way. Perhaps the basic motive-means-opportunity screen could narrow it down a bit—especially the means and opportunity parts, since they were more easily discernible.

He had started to think about his list from that angle when he was interrupted by the return of the SWAT cops from the shed faucet, their faces and jacket fronts dripping wet. Red-eyed and squinting, they indicated they were ready.

Gurney hoped their vision had been sufficiently cleared. “Priorities right now are, one, making sure no one enters or leaves the site without my authorization; two, establishing a no-go zone around the immediate area of the explosion and casualties; three, searching and securing that house. That’s the tricky part. We don’t know if Beckert is in there or not, or what his intentions might be.”

The cop closest to Gurney replied, “The tricky part is what we’re good at.”

“Fine. Just let me know what you’re going to do before you do it.”

The four, conferring in low voices, went to their van.

Torres, frowning at his phone, approached Gurney.

“The phone company pinged Beckert’s phone. But I don’t know if we can trust the result. The ping coordinates show the phone being outside the house.”

Gurney was more excited than surprised. “Do you know what kind of phone he uses?”

“BlackBerry. Like everyone else in the department.”

“Where outside the house did the ping put the coordinates?”

“Pretty much where we’re standing.”

“Be more specific.”

“I can’t. Given the distance between cell towers out here, they said the placement resolution would be defined by a twenty-foot radius around the center point of the coordinates. So, a circle with a forty-foot diameter, which includes that whole row of vehicles and this area around us.”

“Okay. So now we know that someone else has Beckert’s BlackBerry. So we know that the messages Kline received from that phone came from someone other than Beckert—including the so-called confession, the offer to surrender, and the list of the people who were supposed to witness the surrender—three of whom are now dead.”

Torres was staring at him. “You look like you’re on the verge of understanding Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

“Better than that. I think I finally understand this whole wretched case. Come with me.”

Gurney half ran to the SWAT van. The four team members were there. Three were checking the magazines on their assault rifles. The other was hefting a battering ram out of a storage case.

“You’re not going to need the artillery,” said Gurney. “You’ll find Beckert in the house in whatever room the television is in. He’ll be watching RAM-TV. And you won’t need the battering ram.” Gurney reached into his pocket and handed the cop the key he’d been given at the real estate office that morning. “Don’t go into the house until I give you the word. I need to locate something first.”

The SWAT cops looked as baffled as Torres.

“Just wait till I give you the go-ahead,” said Gurney, “and everything will be fine.”

He turned to Torres. “We need to find a missing phone.”

“The BlackBerry?”

“No. Payne’s iPhone.”

Gurney led the way down the row of cars to the beige Camry. Payne was down on his hands and knees, peering and feeling underneath it.

“You haven’t found it yet?” asked Gurney.

Payne looked up, wincing. “No. With this grit in my eyes—”

Gurney cut him off. “Is there something in particular you need it for?”

“I want to try to reach my father.”

“I didn’t think you were on speaking terms.”

“We’re not. At least, we weren’t. But I thought . . . maybe . . . if he was responsible for that explosion . . . maybe I could find out what’s happening.”

Gurney made his way around the car. Then again. And once again, in widening circles. The fourth time around he finally spotted a shiny rectangle about ten feet back from the side of the car, close to the edge of the clearing. He picked it up and saw that it was indeed an iPhone. He went over to Torres and said matter-of-factly, “Go tell the team in the van to proceed immediately.”

Torres nodded and left.

Gurney held the phone up so Payne could see it. “This what you were looking for?”

“Yes, that’s it!” Payne scrambled to his feet, reaching out for it. “I must have been confused about where I was standing when that blast went off.”

Gurney regarded the phone curiously. “Mind if I take a look at it?”

Payne said nothing.

Gurney studied the screen and pretended to press one of the program icons.

“Don’t do that,” said Payne sharply. “I have things set up a certain way. Just the way I want them.”

Gurney nodded. “Do you think your father set off that explosion?”

“I . . . well . . . it’s possible, right? I mean, his message to me did sound pretty crazy.” He hesitated, squinting toward the wreckage and bodies on the ground in front of the house. “You said that people were injured. Was anyone killed?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Not your stepmother. She’s fine. In case you were worried.”

Payne showed no reaction. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Can I have my phone now?”

Gurney ignored the request. “So . . . if I open your address book . . . which phone number would I choose . . . to set off the final charge of dynamite?”

“What?”

“The final charge of dynamite. If I wanted to set it off—”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Gurney shrugged. “It worked for the dynamite in the petunia baskets, so I figure it should work for the dynamite in the house.”

Payne stared at him, the emotion in his expression not quite readable.

“You almost got away with it. John Steele . . . Rick Loomis . . . Marcel Jordan . . . Virgil Tooker . . . Judd Turlock . . . Blaze Lovely Jackson . . . Chalise Creel . . . Dwayne Shucker . . . Goodson Cloutz . . . Joe Beltz . . .”

“What are you talking about?” The question was oddly calm, almost perfunctory.

“Ten murders. You almost got away with them all. Such careful planning. Such meticulous execution. Such control. And then you forgot to close your eyes. Such a silly oversight after all that attention to detail. If you hadn’t gotten all that dirt blown into your eyes, you wouldn’t have lost your phone. And if you hadn’t lost your phone, you could have blown your father to pieces by now.”

Payne shook his head. “You’re the one who saved my life. You’re the one who proved I was innocent.”

“I didn’t prove you were innocent. I proved that you were framed.”

“You’re playing with words. They mean the same thing.”

“For a while I thought they did. That was my stupidity. Those toilet handles had me fooled. It never occurred to me that you might have been the one who switched them. It was the proof that someone had tried to frame you. Which made you appear to be an innocent victim of the real killer. And it instantly threw into doubt all the other evidence against you. It may be the cleverest criminal trick I’ve ever run into.”

As Gurney was speaking, he was watching Payne’s eyes. He’d learned long ago that any sudden physical movement is telegraphed first by the eyes. He saw no evidence of anything physical about to happen, but what he did see was more disturbing. Payne’s relatively normal range of expressions had deadened into something not quite human. The word “monster” tended to be overused in descriptions of murderers, but it seemed a conservative description of the unblinking creature returning Gurney’s gaze.

As he tightened his grip on the Beretta in his jacket pocket, an unnerving guttural shriek came from somewhere behind him, and a body hurtled past him, smashing Payne against the side of the car. It took Gurney a moment to realize that Haley Beauville Beckert was wildly punching and kicking Payne in an animal fury, screaming, “You filthy little bastard!”

Gurney drew his weapon, made a fast assessment of the situation, and decided that holding back for the right moment would be a safer option than trying to subdue Payne immediately.

That decision turned out to be a mistake.

After letting Haley exhaust her burst of furious energy, Payne turned her around, threw his arm around her neck, and dragged her backward with startling speed away from the car toward the edge of the clearing—a nine-millimeter Glock appearing simultaneously in his free hand.

Gurney remained where he was, steadying his Beretta on the roof of the Camry, waiting for a clear shot at Payne’s head. “It’s over, Cory. Don’t make it worse.”

Payne said nothing. He seemed well aware of Gurney’s goal. He was doing a good job of keeping his body safely behind Haley’s and repeatedly yanking her head from side to side in jerky movements that made taking a shot at him unacceptably risky.

Gurney called out to him again. “Let her go, Cory, and drop the nine. The longer you wait, the worse it’ll be.”

Astoundingly—or perhaps predictably, given the nature of RAM-TV—the roving camera operator took up a position forming a triangle with Gurney and Payne as the other two points. After a quick shot of Gurney, he panned in slowly on Payne and his hostage.

Gurney tried once more. “The longer you hold on to her, the nastier things will get.”

Payne burst out laughing. “It’s all for the best. All for the best.” He wasn’t talking to Gurney. He was talking to the camera. Which meant he was talking to Beckert via the TV in the house.

The ugly truth that Gurney had assembled from a number of observations, including the brand-new satellite dish on the corner of the house, was that while Payne was holding Beckert captive on Rapture Hill, he was forcing him to watch RAM-TV and witness the spectacle of his own ruination.

“All for the best!” Payne repeated, his mouth in a rictus of a grin aimed at the camera, his gaze as dead and cold as a shark’s. “All for the best. That’s what you said after you killed my mother. You called her a worthless addict. You said that her death from the drugs you gave her was all for the best. Then you replaced her with this vile, stinking bitch. You dared to replace her with this—this rotten, cancerous whore. All for the best!”

He gave Haley’s head a vicious jerk before going on with his speech to the camera. “You framed weak, frightened people to get them off the streets. Your streets. You sent helpless people to die in prison. All for the best. You put the girlfriend I loved in a hellhole where she was raped and killed. All for the best. You had nickel-and-dime drug dealers shot on the street for ‘resisting arrest.’ All for the best.”

He looked into the camera with those inhuman eyes. “So I’m thinking that I’ll do the same. Like father, like son. I’ll put a bullet in this whore’s head. All for the best. Happy Mother’s Day, bitch!”

Gurney jumped out from behind the Camry, firing his Beretta in the air and shouting, “Over here, scumbag!”

As the Glock swung away from Haley’s temple toward Gurney, a hard metallic impact rang out almost simultaneously with the sharp report of a rifle shot from the woods across the clearing, and the Glock flew out of Payne’s hand. After an instant of surprise, he shoved Haley toward Gurney and with a sprinter’s speed disappeared among the dark hemlocks. Less than a minute later that sector of the forest was filled with an eerie howling that increased steadily in volume and ferocity, then devolved suddenly into deep savage growls—until a high-pitched whistle produced an absolute silence.

It was then that the SWAT team emerged from the house with a drawn, hollow-eyed Dell Beckert. He had three sticks of dynamite with a cell phone detonator duct-taped to his stomach. The team leader placed a call to the NYSP to make sure an explosives expert was among the troops on the way. In the meantime, Beckert’s semireunion with his wife was conducted at a distance with desperately fraught expressions on both faces.

Hardwick stepped into the clearing from the nearby woods, cradling his AK-47. When he got close enough, Gurney asked casually, “So what was that Western-movie show-off shit all about?”

Hardwick looked offended. “Beg pardon?”

“Shooting the gun out of Payne’s hand. Nobody does that.”

“I know.”

“So how come you tried it?”

“I didn’t. I was aiming for his head and I missed.”

Soon the sound of approaching sirens reached the clearing. They seemed to be coming from all directions. Hardwick grimaced. “The classic clusterfuck is about to begin.”

The sun had long since been blotted out by a lowering bank of clouds. There was a gust of cold air across the clearing, and then the rain began to fall, turning the pulverized petunia blossoms that covered the ground into a million crimson specks—as though the rain itself was turning to blood.