Let the Devil Sleep

Chapter 2

The Gurney property was situated on the saddle of a ridge at the end of a rural road outside the Catskill village of Walnut Crossing. The old farmhouse was set on the gentle southern slope of the saddle. An overgrown pasture separated it from a large red barn and a deep pond ringed by cattails and willows, backed by a beech, maple, and black-cherry forest. To the north a second pasture rose along the ridgeline toward a pine forest and a string of small abandoned bluestone quarries that looked out over the next valley.

The weather had gone through the kind of dramatic about-face that was far more common in the Catskill Mountains than in New York City, where Dave and Madeleine had come from. The sky had become a featureless slaty blanket drawn over the hills. The temperature seemed to have dropped at least ten degrees in ten minutes.

A superfine sleet was beginning to fall. Gurney closed the French doors. As he pulled them tight to secure the latches, he felt a piercing pain in the right side of his stomach. A moment later another followed. This was something he was used to, nothing that three ibuprofens couldn’t suppress. He headed for the bathroom medicine cabinet, thinking that the worst part of it wasn’t the physical discomfort, the worst part was the feeling of vulnerability, the realization that the only reason he was alive was that he’d been lucky.

Luck was not a concept he liked. It seemed to him to be the fool’s substitute for competence. Random chance had saved his life, but random chance was not a trustworthy ally. He knew younger men who believed in good luck, relied on good luck, thought it was something they owned. But at the age of forty-eight, Gurney knew damn well that luck is only luck, and the invisible hand that flips the coin is as cold as a corpse.

The pain in his side also reminded him that he’d been meaning to cancel his upcoming appointment with his neurologist in Binghamton. He’d had four appointments with the man in less than four months, and they seemed increasingly pointless, unless the only point was to send Gurney’s insurance company another bill.

He kept that phone number with his other medical numbers in his den desk. Instead of continuing into the bathroom for the ibuprofen, he went into the den to make the call. As he was entering the number, he was picturing the doctor: a preoccupied man in his late thirties, with wavy black hair already receding, small eyes, girlish mouth, weak chin, silky hands, manicured fingernails, expensive loafers, dismissive manner, and no visible interest in anything that Gurney thought or felt. The three women who inhabited his sleek, contemporary reception area seemed perpetually confused and irritated by the doctor, by his patients, and by the data on their computer screens.

The phone was answered on the fourth ring with an impatience verging on contempt. “Dr. Huffbarger’s office.”

“This is David Gurney, I have an upcoming appointment that I’d-”

The sharp voice cut him off. “Hold on, please.”

In the background he could hear a raised male voice that he thought for a moment belonged to an angry patient reeling off a long, urgent complaint-until a second voice asked a question and a third voice joined the fray in a similar tone of loud, fast-talking indignation-and Gurney realized that what he was hearing was the cable news channel that made sitting in Huffbarger’s waiting room insufferable.

“Hello?” said Gurney with a definite edge. “Anybody there? Hello?”

“Just a minute, please.”

The voices that he found so abrasively empty-headed continued in the background. He was about to hang up when the receptionist’s voice returned.

“Dr. Huffbarger’s office, can I help you?”

“Yes. This is David Gurney. I have an appointment I want to cancel.”

“The date?”

“A week from today at eleven-forty A.M.”

“Spell your name, please.”

He was about to question how many people had appointments on that same day at 11:40, but he spelled his name instead.

“And when do you wish to reschedule it?”

“I don’t. I’m just canceling it.”

“You’ll need to reschedule it.”

“What?”

“I can reschedule Dr. Huffbarger’s appointments, not cancel them.”

“But the fact is-”

She interrupted, sounding exasperated. “An existing appointment can’t be removed from the system without inserting a revised date. That’s the doctor’s policy.”

Gurney could feel his lips tightening with anger, way too much anger. “I don’t really care much about his system or his policy,” he said slowly, stiffly. “Consider my appointment canceled.”

“There will be a missed-appointment charge.”

“No there won’t. And if Huffbarger has a problem with that, tell him to call me.” He hung up, tense, feeling a twinge of chagrin at his childish twisting of the neurologist’s name.

He stared out the den window at the high pasture without really seeing it.

What the hell’s the matter with me?

A jab of pain in his right side offered a partial answer. It also reminded him that he’d been on his way to the medicine cabinet when he’d made his appointment-canceling detour.

He returned to the bathroom. He didn’t like the look of the man who looked back at him from the mirror on the cabinet door. His forehead was lined with worry, his skin colorless, his eyes dull and tired.

Christ.

He knew he had to get back to his daily exercise regimen-the sets of push-ups, chin-ups, sit-ups that had once kept him in better shape than most men half his age. But now the man in the mirror was looking every bit of forty-eight, and he wasn’t happy about it. He wasn’t happy about the daily messages of mortality his body was sending him. He wasn’t happy about his descent from mere introversion into isolation. He wasn’t happy about… anything.

He took the ibuprofen bottle from its shelf, tapped three of the little brown pills into his hand, frowned at them, popped them into his mouth. As he was running the water, waiting for it to get cold, he heard the phone ringing in the den. Huffbarger, he thought. Or Huffbarger’s office. He made no move to answer it. To hell with them.

Then he heard Madeleine’s footsteps coming down from upstairs. A few moments later, she picked up the phone, just as the call was switching over to their ancient answering machine. He could hear her voice but couldn’t make out the words. He half-filled a small plastic cup with water and washed down the three pills that were starting to dissolve on his tongue.

He assumed that Madeleine was dealing with the Huffbarger problem. Which was fine with him. But then he heard her footsteps coming across the hall and into the bedroom. She walked through the open bathroom door, extending the phone handset toward him.

“For you,” she said, handing it to him and leaving the room.

Anticipating some unpleasantness from Huffbarger or one of his malcontent receptionists, Gurney’s tone was defensively curt. “Yes?”

There was a second of silence before the caller spoke.

“David?” The bright female voice was certainly familiar, but his memory failed to attach a name or a face to it.

“Yes,” he said, more pleasantly this time. “I’m sorry, but I can’t quite place-”

“Oh, how could you forget? Oh, I am so hurt, Detective Gurney!” the caller cried with jokey exaggeration-and suddenly the laughing timbre and inflection of the words conjured up the person: a wiry, clever, high-energy blonde with a Queens accent and a model’s cheekbones.

“Connie. Jesus. Connie Clarke. It’s been a while.”

“Six years, to be exact.”

“Six years. Jesus.” The number didn’t mean much to him, didn’t surprise him, but he didn’t know what else to say.

He remembered their connection with mixed feelings. A freelance journalist, Connie Clarke had written a laudatory article about him for New York magazine after he’d solved the infamous Jason Strunk serial-murder case-just three years after he’d been promoted to detective first grade for solving the Jorge Kunzman serial-murder case. In fact, her article was a little too laudatory for comfort, dwelling as it did on his record number of homicide arrests and referring to him as the “NYPD Supercop”-a sobriquet that lent itself to scores of amusing variations created by his more imaginative colleagues.

“So how are things up there in peaceful retirement land?”

He could hear the grin in her question and assumed she knew about his unofficial involvement in the Mellery and Perry cases. “Sometimes more peaceful than other times.”

“Wow! Yeah! I guess that’s one way of putting it. You retire from the NYPD after twenty-five years, you’re up in the sleepy Catskills for about ten minutes, and all of a sudden you’re in the middle of one murder case after another. Seems to me you’re kind of a major-crime magnet. Wow! How does Madeleine feel about that?”

“You just had her on the phone. You should have asked her.”

Connie laughed as though he’d said something wonderfully witty.

“So between murder cases what’s your typical day like?”

“There’s not much to tell. It’s pretty uneventful. Madeleine stays busier than I do.”

“I’m having such a hard time picturing you in the middle of some kind of Norman Rockwell America. Dave making maple syrup. Dave making apple cider. Dave getting eggs from the henhouse.”

“I’m afraid not. No syrup, cider, or eggs.” What came to his mind was quite a different scenario describing the past six months. Dave playing the hero. Dave getting shot. Dave recovering too goddamn slowly. Dave sitting around listening to the ringing in his own ears. Dave getting depressed, hostile, isolated. Dave viewing every proposed activity as an infuriating assault on his right to remain in a paralyzing funk. Dave wanting to have nothing to do with anything.

“So what will you be doing today?”

“To be absolutely truthful with you, Connie, damn little. At most I’ll walk around the edges of the fields, maybe pick up some of the branches that blew down during the winter, maybe rake some fertilizer into the garden beds. Stuff like that.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad to me. I know people who’d give a lot to trade places with you.”

He didn’t answer, just let the silence drag out, thinking it might force her to get to the point of the call. There had to be a point. He remembered Connie as a cordial and talky woman, but she always had a purpose. Her mind, under that windblown blond mane, was always working.

“You’re wondering why I called you,” she said. “Right?”

“The question did cross my mind.”

“I called you because I want to ask you for a favor. A huge favor.”

Gurney thought for a moment, then laughed.

“What’s the joke?” She sounded momentarily off balance.

“You once told me that it’s always better to ask for a big favor than a small one, because small ones are easier to refuse.”

“No! I can’t believe I said that. That sounds so manipulative. That’s awful. You’re making that up, aren’t you?” She was full of cheerful indignation. Connie never remained off balance for long.

“So what can I do for you?”

“You did make it up! I knew it!”

“As I said, what can I do for you?”

“Well, now I’m embarrassed to say it, but it really is a huge, huge favor.” She paused. “You remember Kim?”

“Your daughter?”

“My daughter who adores you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, David, David, David, all the women love you, and you don’t even notice.”

“I think I was in the same room with your daughter once, when she was… what, maybe fifteen?” His recollection was of a pretty but very serious-looking girl at lunch with him and Connie at Connie’s house, hovering at the periphery of their conversation, hardly saying a word.

“Actually, she was seventeen. And okay, maybe ‘adore’ is too gushy a word. But she thought you were really, really smart-and to Kim that means a lot. Now she’s twenty-three, and I happen to know she still has a very high opinion of Dave Gurney, Supercop.”

“That’s very nice, but… I’m getting a little lost here.”

“Of course you are, because I’m making such a mess of asking you for the super-huge favor. Maybe you ought to sit down-this could take a few minutes.”

Gurney was still standing by the sink in the bathroom. He walked out through the bedroom and across the hall into the den. He had no desire to sit. Instead he stood by the back window. “Okay, Connie, I’m sitting,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing bad, really. It’s overwhelmingly good. Kim has an incredible opportunity. Did I ever tell you she was interested in journalism?”

“Following in her mother’s footsteps?”

“God, don’t ever say that to her, she’d switch careers overnight! I think her greatest goal is total independence from her mother! And forget about footsteps. She’s on the verge of a major leap. So let me get down to the nitty-gritty here, before I lose you completely. She’s completing a master’s program in journalism at Syracuse. That’s not far from you, right?”

“It’s not exactly in the neighborhood. Maybe an hour and forty-five minutes away.”

“Okay, not too terribly far. Not much worse than my commute to the city. So anyway, for her final degree project she came up with an idea for a kind of reality miniseries about murder victims-well, actually, not the victims themselves, but the families, the children. She wants to look at the long-term effects of having a parent murdered, without any resolution.”

“Without-”

“Right-they’d all be cases where the killer was never caught. So the wound would never really have healed. No matter how much time passes, it remains the single biggest emotional fact in their lives-a giant force field that changes everything forever. She’s calling the series The Orphans of Murder. Is that great or what?”

“Sounds like an interesting idea.”

“Very interesting! But I’m leaving out the dynamite part. It’s not just an idea. It’s actually going to happen! It started out as an academic project, but her thesis adviser was so impressed that he helped her develop her outline into an actual proposal. He even got her to nail down some of her intended participants with exclusivity agreements so she’d be protected. Then he passed the proposal along to a production contact of his at RAM-TV. And guess what? The RAM guy wants it! Overnight this thing has been transformed from a frigging term paper into the kind of professional exposure that people with twenty years’ experience would kill for. RAM is the hottest thing out there.”

In Gurney’s opinion RAM was the organization most responsible for turning traditional news programming into a noisy, flashy, shallow, poisonously opinionated, alarmist carnival-but he overcame the temptation to say so.

“So now you’re wondering,” Connie went on excitedly, “what all this has to do with my favorite detective, right?”

“I’m waiting.”

“Couple of things. First, I need you to look over her shoulder.”

“Meaning what?”

“Just meet with her? Get a sense of what she’s doing? See if it reflects the world of homicide victims as you know it? She’s got this one big chance. If she doesn’t make too many mistakes, the sky’s the limit.”

“Hmm.”

“Does that little grunt mean you’ll do it? Will you, David, please?”

“Connie, I don’t know a damn thing about journalism.” What he did know mostly disgusted him, but again he kept quiet.

“She’s got the journalism part down pat. And she’s as smart as anyone I know. But she’s still a kid.”

“Then what do I bring to the table? Old age?”

“Reality. Knowledge. Experience. Perspective. The incredible wisdom that comes from… how many homicide cases?”

He didn’t think that was a real question, so he didn’t try to answer it.

Connie continued with even more intensity. “She’s super capable, but ability isn’t the same as life experience. She’s in the process of interviewing people who’ve lost a parent or some other loved one to a murderer. She needs to be in a realistic frame of mind for that. She needs a broad view of the territory, you know what I mean? I guess what I’m saying is that so much is at stake, she needs to know as much as she possibly can.”

Gurney sighed. “God knows there’s a ton of stuff out there on grief, death, loss of a loved-”

She cut him off. “Yeah, yeah, I know-the pop-psych stages of grief, five stages of horseshit, whatever. That’s not what she needs. She needs to talk to someone who knows about murder, who’s seen the victims, talked to the families, looked in their eyes, the horror-someone who knows, not someone who wrote a frigging book.” There was a long silence between them. “So will you do it? Just meet with her once, just look at what she’s got and where she plans to go with it. See if it makes sense to you?”

As he stared out the den window at the back pasture, the idea of meeting with Connie’s daughter to review her entry ticket into the world of trash television was one of the least appealing prospects on earth. “You said there were a couple of things, Connie. What’s the second one?”

“Well…” Her voice weakened. “There may be an ex-boyfriend problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“That’s the question. Kim likes to sound invulnerable, you know? Like she’s not afraid of anything or anybody?”

“But…?”

“But at the very least, this asshole has been playing nasty little tricks on her.”

“Like what?”

“Like getting into her apartment and moving things around. There was something she started to tell me about a knife disappearing and later reappearing, but when I tried to get her to tell me more about it, she wouldn’t.”

“Then why do you think she brought it up?”

“Maybe she wants help, and at the same time she doesn’t want it, and she can’t make up her mind which it is.”

“Does the asshole have a name?”

“Robert Meese is his real name. He calls himself Robert Montague.”

“Is this somehow connected with her TV project?”

“I don’t know. I just have a feeling that the situation is worse than she’s willing to admit. Or at least admit to me. So… please, David? Please? I don’t know who else to ask.”

When he didn’t respond, she went on. “Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I’m imagining things. Maybe there’s no problem at all. But even if there isn’t, it would still be great if you could listen to her talk about her project, about these homicide victims and their families. It means so much to her. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime. She’s so determined, so confident.”

“You sound a little shaky.”

“I don’t know. I’m just… concerned.”

“About her project or about her ex-boyfriend?”

“Maybe both. I mean, on the one hand, it’s fantastic, right? But it just breaks my heart to think that she might be so determined and so confident and so independent that somehow she’d get in over her head without telling me, without my being able to help her. God, David, you have a son, right? Do you know what I’m feeling?”

Ten minutes after they’d ended the call, Gurney was still standing at the large north-facing den window, trying to makes sense of Connie’s uncharacteristically scattered tone, wondering why he’d finally agreed to talk to Kim and why the whole situation made him so uncomfortable.

He suspected that it had something to do with her last comment about his son. That, as always, was a sensitive area-for reasons he had no intention of examining right then.

The phone rang. He was surprised to find that he’d distractedly been holding it in his hand, having forgotten to hang it up. This time it really will be Huffbarger, he thought, calling to defend his idiotic cancellation policy. He was tempted to let it ring, let it go to the answering machine, let Huffbarger wait. But he also wanted to be done with it, didn’t want to be thinking about it. He pressed the TALK button.

“Dave Gurney here.”

A young female voice, clear and bright, said, “Dave, I want to thank you so much! Connie just called and told me that you’d be willing to talk to me.”

For a second he was confused. He always found it jarring when a parent was called by his or her first name.

“Kim?”

“Of course! Who did you think?” When he didn’t answer, she raced on. “Anyway, here’s why this situation is so cool. I’m headed up to Syracuse from the city. Right now I’m just where Route 17 meets I-81. Which means I can shoot across I-88 and be in Walnut Crossing in like thirty-five minutes. Is that okay with you? It’s super-short notice, I know, but it’s such serendipity! And I’m dying to see you again!”