On Harrow Hill

41

In the forty-eight hours following the shooting, a new case narrative, complete with ample evidence, had been constructed—with Chandler Aspern, mayor of Larchfield, as its central villain.

Gurney found the new hypothesis more or less satisfactory. On the downside, it left some significant questions unanswered. On the upside, it provided credible explanations for two elements that had been troubling him—the call Tate made to Aspern’s number from the mortuary and the disparity between the fates of Ruby-­June Hooper and Mary Kane.

On the morning of the third day after the shooting, the Aspern-centered theory of the Larchfield murders was scheduled to be presented to the county district attorney, with the objective of securing agreement that the new narrative could be released to the media and the case could be closed.

Gurney had agreed to be present at the meeting.

At Morgan’s request, he arrived at headquarters twenty minutes early for a run-through of how Morgan intended to present the evidence of Aspern’s guilt.

When Morgan asked for his comments at the end of the run-through, Gurney said that it all sounded fine. In fact, he did have some lingering concerns, but he knew raising them at this point would only make Morgan more nervous.

“Have you ever met our DA?” Morgan asked.

“No.”

“She’s a fast-talking hotshot being groomed for bigger things by the powers that be.”

“Have you had problems with her?”

“Nothing major, just the static created by the kind of person who wants everything perfect and wants it yesterday.”

“You expecting significant static in this meeting?”

Before Morgan could answer, there was a knock on his open door. It was the desk sergeant.

“Stryker is here,” he said, as if announcing the arrival of the IRS.

Brad Slovak and Kyra Barstow were already at the conference table. They were seated across from Martin Carmody, the PR man, and Greta Vickerz, the mechanical engineering professor who’d concluded that Tate’s casket had been broken open from the inside.

An athletic-looking woman with short brown hair was standing at the end of the table, talking on her phone. She appeared to be in her late twenties, which would make her the youngest of the state’s district attorneys, but there was nothing particularly youthful in her cool, hard expression.

Gurney chose a seat next to Vickerz. Morgan remained standing until Stryker ended her call and took her seat. She laid her phone in front of her, conspicuously checked the time, and said without any greeting or preamble, “Your show, Chief.”

Morgan cleared his throat. “I think you know everyone in the room, Cam, except Dave Gurney—”

“I know who he is. Let’s begin.”

The tic at the corner of Morgan’s mouth was back. “I thought we’d start at the beginning—with the videos that document Billy Tate’s fall from the church roof and his subsequent revival and departure from Peale’s Funeral—”

Stryker cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I’ve already seen them. RAM-News has been running leaked copies day and night.”

“Then I’m sure you saw Tate sending two text messages from the embalming room?”

“That’s what he appeared to be doing.”

“Phone records show that the first was to Selena Cursen, the woman he was living with, letting her know he was alive. The second was to Chandler Aspern, suggesting a mutually beneficial opportunity and his intention to visit him later that night.”

“I saw the texts in the case file. Are you assuming that after Tate left the mortuary he drove to Aspern’s house?”

“Correct.”

“Then what?”

“Then he spelled out for Aspern the mutual opportunity he’d referred to in his text.”

“Do you know what that opportunity was?”

“We have a pretty good idea.”

“You mean an unsupported speculation?” A pen had appeared in Stryker’s hand, and she was tapping it lightly on the table.

Morgan’s tic was accelerating. “I’d prefer to call it a reasonable conjecture, Cam—one that’s supported by what happened afterward. We believe that Tate realized he was in a unique position. He was supposedly dead, and if his body was missing, the natural belief would be that it had been stolen. He could have seen that as an opportunity.”

“To do what?”

“Get even with Angus Russell for having had him arrested and sent to prison. Maybe settle other scores as well. And get away with it, being officially dead.”

“What’s the connection to Aspern?”

“It was known that Aspern and Angus were enemies and that there was an enormous amount of money at stake. I can see Tate approaching Aspern that night with a simple question: What would Angus’s death be worth to you? Maybe they discussed the details, maybe they didn’t, but then something happened that Tate hadn’t anticipated.”

Stryker’s pen stopped tapping. There was a spark of interest in her eyes. “Aspern turned on him?”

“Aspern killed him.”

“Because he didn’t trust him?” Lack of trust appeared to be a feeling she could relate to.

“Right. Why take a chance—when he could do it himself in a way that would incriminate Tate? It seems that Tate came up with the perfect crime and ended up being the victim of his own cleverness.”

“So, you’re suggesting that Aspern killed Tate, and then killed Angus?”

“I think Aspern killed Tate, then cut his hands off, so he could leave his prints at the crime scene. He put on Tate’s clothes, took the scalpels and bone mallet that Tate stole from the mortuary, and set out for the Russell estate in Tate’s Jeep. Incidentally, the fact that it was Aspern in the Jeep gave us the answer to a certain nagging question we had from the beginning.” Morgan turned to Gurney, who picked up the narration.

“We were baffled by the fact that two people had encountered the Jeep and its driver on Waterview Drive that night, but only one of them was killed. Ruby-June Hooper says she recognized Billy Tate and spoke to him, with no consequences. Then, a mile down the road, Mary Kane had an encounter with him and ended up dead. But if the driver of the Jeep was Chandler Aspern, there’s a logical explanation. Because of the hoodie and the only illumination being moonlight, Ruby-June Hooper assumed it was Billy and called him by name. That would have been exactly what Aspern wanted, so he drove on. But suppose Mary Kane saw the driver more clearly under that bright streetlight across from her cottage. Suppose she realized it wasn’t Billy, or even recognized Aspern. That may have been what got her killed. We have a recording of the incident on her phone—which she was using to record birdcalls—that’s consistent with this scenario.”

Stryker nodded slowly, as though she were evaluating how the puzzle pieces were being assembled. “Why the Linda Mason murder two days later?”

“Another guess, but I’d say he wanted to add a finishing touch to his framing of Billy Tate, who was widely known to have threatened Linda Mason, just like he threatened Angus Russell.”

“Aspern had nothing against the Mason woman personally?”

“We can’t be sure of that, but it looks like her murder was mainly a prop to cement our focus on Tate.”

“Like the hellfire symbols and the Dark Angel messages?”

“Exactly.”

“Okay,” said Stryker, again tapping her pen on the table and turning her attention back to Morgan. “That brings us to Aspern’s ill-fated attack on Lorinda Russell—which I’m having some trouble with. Take me through it. I want facts, not conjectures.”

Morgan smiled. “We’re in good shape on this final piece.”

“We better be, because all we have so far is a collection of reasonable guesses.”

Morgan opened the app on his phone that controlled the room’s video equipment. He touched an icon, and the big screen on the wall came to life. Everyone shifted in their chairs for a better view of it. Even as he swiveled around, PR expert Martin Carmody maintained the steepled-fingers pose of a strategic thinker.

“After Angus’s murder, Lorinda got in touch with a home security outfit, who got the first camera installed and running the day before Aspern’s break-in. So we have a high-resolution record of his arrival on the property in Tate’s Jeep and his approach to the conservatory door, wearing his Billy Tate disguise.”

“In Tate’s Jeep? I thought your department had taken possession of that.”

“We’d found the vehicle on Aspern’s property. Kyra Barstow completed her forensic examination of it on-site, but there was a delay in having it moved to the county impound lot. So Aspern had easy access to it that night.”

Stryker nodded tentatively. “And, according to your new view of the case, he would have had the key?”

“Exactly. He would have taken it from Tate after he killed him.” Morgan touched another icon, and the screen was filled with an image Gurney recognized as the area of lawn between the conservatory and the woods. The image definition in the moonlight was extraordinarily sharp.

“Keep your eyes on the trail opening,” said Morgan.

The front of a vehicle, recognizably a Jeep even in the semidarkness, came slowly into view and stopped at the edge of the lawn.

A dark figure emerged from the Jeep into the moonlight. He seemed to be wearing the same gray hoodie, black jeans, and sneakers Tate had been wearing in the mortuary video. The figure moved quickly across the camera’s field of view toward the house. Because of the angle of the camera and the size of the sweatshirt’s hood, his face was hardly visible. For a second Gurney thought he could see a thick black mark on the side of his cheek.

Morgan looked down the table at Cam Stryker. “His line of movement puts him on a direct path to the conservatory.”

The hooded figure passed out of the frame, and the screen went blank.

Morgan added, “Detective Gurney and I interviewed Lorinda Russell later that night, and the story she told us begins where that video left off.”

“The interview was recorded?”

“It was.”

“Where?”

“In a cottage on the estate.”

“Why there?”

“Mrs. Russell has a phobic reaction to blood. She insisted that she couldn’t stay in the main house until the body and all visible signs of blood were removed. She had the same reaction when her husband was killed.”

“It’s an audio recording?”

“Audio and video—already cued up in the system, ready to go.”

She checked the time on her phone. “Let’s do it.”

The first image on the screen was of Lorinda sitting in one of the cottage’s chintz-covered armchairs, wearing a cream-colored silk blouse that seemed a well-chosen counterpoint to the dark shoulder-length hair that framed her face. She managed to appear both magnetic and untouchable.

Stryker stared at the freeze-frame image. “This is the woman so shattered by the sight of blood that she couldn’t stay in the same house with it?” She looked at Morgan. “Really?”

Morgan shifted in his chair. “Lorinda is . . . an unusual person.”

“An unusual person whose husband was brutally murdered last week, who just came within seconds of having her own throat cut, who just shot a man dead, and she’s sitting there like the queen of serenity.” Stryker opened her palms as if searching for an explanation. “Is she on drugs?”

“Not that we know of,” said Morgan.

After Morgan put the video in motion, the first voice heard on it was Gurney’s, coming from somewhere off camera.

“As I explained, Mrs. Russell, we’re recording this. Please describe in as much detail as you can everything that happened this evening—beginning with where you were and what you were doing when you got your first indication of a possible intruder.”

Lorinda’s unblinking eyes were gazing out of the screen at whoever might be watching the video—the result of the fact that she’d been looking not at Gurney but directly at the camera positioned next to him.

She spoke with a voice that revealed no emotion, no geographic roots.

“It was nine o’clock. I was in the downstairs office. I was about to make a call, and I saw the time on my phone.”

“Who were you calling?” asked Gurney’s off-camera voice.

“Danforth Peale—to let him know that the medical examiner was ready to release Angus’s body, and I wanted to discuss the arrangements.”

“Wasn’t nine o’clock at night an odd time to be calling him about that?”

“It was when the subject occurred to me. It needed to be dealt with. I don’t like putting things off.”

“Did you complete the call?”

“Peale didn’t pick up. It went to his voicemail.”

“Did you leave a message?”

“No. That’s when I heard the glass breaking. It sounded like it was in the conservatory.”

“What did you do then?”

“I went to a cabinet where Angus kept one of his guns. A Glock 9. I took it out, switched off the safety, and went to the conservatory.”

“Did it occur to you to call 911?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Or your groundskeeper? Doesn’t he have an apartment over the garage?”

“He spends his nights with a woman in Bastenburg.”

“Okay. So, you went to the conservatory. What then?”

“At first, nothing. There’s a hallway that connects the main part of the house to the conservatory. I waited there for a minute until my eyes adjusted to the moonlight. I heard more glass breaking. Then I saw someone pushing the conservatory door open.”

“How clearly did you see him?”

“Clearly enough to see that he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and had a black mark down the side of his face. I saw something in his hand—a knife with a short blade. I raised the Glock. I stepped from the anteroom into the conservatory. I told him to stay where he was and drop the knife. He stayed perfectly still for a few seconds, then rushed at me with the knife.”

“You could see the knife clearly?”

“It was shining in the moonlight—the moonlight coming through the glass roof.”

“Go on.”

“I pulled the trigger—twice, I think. He collapsed on the floor in front of me. I backed away. He wasn’t moving. A dark spot was spreading out on the back of his sweatshirt. I couldn’t look at it. The thought of it . . . I . . . I went back into the house. I called the police.”

“You called Chief Morgan directly?”

“Yes.”

“Rather than 911?”

“Angus always said, call the person in charge, anyone else is a waste of time.”

“Did you go back into the conservatory for any reason before the police arrived?”

“No.”

“Where did you go?”

“To a bench out in the entry hall near the front door.”

“Did you make any other phone calls?”

“No.”

“What did you do with the gun?”

“I kept it in my hand. When the first officer arrived, I gave it to him.”

“Were you in the conservatory for any reason after the police came?”

“No. They told me there was a lot of blood.”

“When you called Chief Morgan, you told him you’d shot Billy Tate, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“What made you think it was Tate?”

“He looked exactly like Tate in the video they kept showing on TV. The hoodie. The black pants. The mark on his face. And he broke in through the same door Tate used the night he killed Angus. I’d just had the glass replaced.”

“When you were told it was Chandler Aspern in Tate’s clothes, what was your reaction?”

“Surprise.”

“Not shock?”

“I guess you could call it shock.”

“Why would Aspern attack you like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“When was your last contact with him?”

“We spoke on the phone that afternoon.”

“What about?”

“His legal disputes with Angus. His lease on his side of Harrow Hill. Development rights. Money.”

“Who called who?”

“I called him.”

“Why that afternoon?”

“Why not?”

“What was the purpose of the call?”

“To see if our conflicts could be resolved.”

“How did it go?”

“Not as I wished. I offered to buy back his lease. He insisted on an absurd price.”

“How did the conversation end?”

“I told him what my final proposal was, and that he’d be wise to accept it. He told me I was an ignorant little bitch. I told him if he wanted to have a calm face-to-face discussion, I would be available that evening or the following day. He ended the call.”

“You weren’t too angry at him to make that offer—after being called an ignorant bitch?”

“Business is business. Emotions are for children and actors.”

Morgan touched an icon on his phone and the video ceased, leaving just a freeze-frame of Lorinda—her dark eyes gazing from the screen at the group around the conference table.

“We also have a written statement from her,” said Morgan. “It was taken later, but it’s essentially identical to what you just saw.”

Stryker emitted a low whistle. She was tapping her pen again. “Does the physical evidence support her story?”

“There are no obvious inconsistencies,” Morgan said, adding, “The photographs taken at the scene support what she told us. Do you want to see them?”

“Definitely.”

All eyes returned to the screen.

The initial images documented the site. They showed the shattered glass in the door, the botanical-garden interior, the planting beds, and the paths of yellow stone between the beds.

The next sequence focused mainly on the body, facedown, showing it from different angles. Blood had soaked through the hood and the back of the sweatshirt Aspern was wearing and had pooled on the stone floor around his head. Close-ups of these areas elicited grunts of distress from Greta Vickerz and Martin Carmody.

There were also close-ups of other parts of the body—the hands, on which Aspern wore tight nitrile gloves; the black jeans; the sneakers. Gurney was reasonably sure they were the same sneakers Tate had been wearing in the photographs taken after his fall from the church roof. The design of the uppers, the tread pattern of the soles, even the distinctive fat laces looked familiar.

Another sequence of photos showed the body after it had been rolled over on its back. Aspern’s small black eyes were instantly recognizable, even though they had lost their intensity. Part of his lower chin was missing, and his jaw was shattered. A bloodstain covered the entire front of the sweatshirt, and there was a dark bullet hole in the center of the stain. In a final wide-angle photo, Gurney saw part of the big wood-framed device with overhead pulleys for moving the larger plants, which he remembered from his first visit.

Morgan touched an icon on his phone, and the screen went blank.

“Very instructive, and very convincing regarding Aspern’s break-in,” Stryker said. “Do we also have physical evidence linking Aspern to Tate?”

Morgan looked at Slovak. “Go through the list.”

“The clothes Aspern was wearing are definitely Tate’s,” Slovak said. “We have DNA confirmation from blood and epithelial cells. Next to Aspern’s body we found one of the scalpels Tate stole from Peale’s mortuary—and the bone mallet he used to break the glass. Both of those tools had Tate’s residual fingerprints on them. And when we searched Aspern’s house, we found a container of Linda Mason’s blood in his refrigerator.”

Martin Carmody made a small sound of disgust.

Slovak continued. “We brought in a K9 team to see if we could track Tate—when we still believed he was our killer—but what they ended up finding were pieces of his body buried in the woods near Aspern’s house. The flesh on the face had the burnt gash from the lightning. All the body parts have gone to the ME’s office for final identification and, if we’re lucky, cause-of-death determination.”

Greta Vickerz wrinkled her nose, as though the odor of death had entered the room.

“Then there’s the big one,” said Slovak. “The severed hand we found in a plastic bag in the pocket of the sweatshirt Aspern was wearing has been identified as Tate’s. We believe Aspern was carrying it so he could put Tate’s prints on the conservatory door, and maybe on other surfaces in the house.”

Carmody looked nauseated.

Cam Stryker’s expression revealed nothing. “Has the phone call Lorinda Russell said she made to Aspern been verified?”

Morgan answered. “The carrier shows a call of approximately six minutes from her number to Aspern’s number that afternoon.”

“Do you have Aspern’s phone?”

“Not yet. It wasn’t on his body. We’ve checked his car—actually, all three of his cars—a BMW, a Porsche, and a Mercedes—as well as his golf cart and Tate’s Jeep. We’re still searching his house for it, as well as for anything else that might help us understand his motivation.”

“His motivation—what’s your hypothesis for that?”

Morgan wiped sweat off his forehead. “We haven’t gotten very far with that. Maybe he thought that whoever would inherit Lorinda’s control of the Russell half of Harrow Hill would be easier to deal with. Maybe he killed Angus in the belief that she’d be easier to deal with, then found out she wasn’t.”

“What’s Lorinda’s understanding of the motivation issue? Has she said anything other than what’s in that interview video?”

“We tried to pursue that with her, but she seems to have surprisingly little interest in understanding what happened or why. She said talking about it is a waste of time.”

“Does she have any close relatives?”

“One of the so-called Patriarchs in Silas Gant’s church may be a cousin of hers, but she claims not to know whether he is or isn’t.”

Stryker uttered a one-syllable laugh. “There’s something missing in that woman. What do you make of her?”

Morgan turned up his palms. “She’s a mystery.”

“That’s all you can say?”

He shrugged. “She’s the ultimate closed book.”

“Okay. Moving on. Do you have the Aspern autopsy report yet?”

Morgan looked relieved to be on firmer ground. “We do. There’s nothing unexpected in it. He was struck by two rounds. The one that entered through the lower jaw blew away the brain stem. The one through the sternum exploded the heart and severed the spine. Either one would have been instantly fatal.”

“He was struck by both while he was upright?”

“Yes. They passed through him at essentially the same angle.”

“Lorinda evidently has a steady hand and a fast trigger finger.”

Morgan remained silent.

Stryker laid her pen down. With her elbows on the table she raised her hands, interlocked her fingers, and rested her forehead against them. In a different person it might have looked like a posture of prayer. In Stryker it looked like intense thought.

After a long minute she lowered her hands to the table and cleared her throat. “Okay. I think we can wrap this up. A reasonable conclusion has been reached, based on substantial physical and circumstantial evidence. Chandler Aspern, the Larchfield murderer, was shot and killed in the course of an attack on a potential fourth victim. Et cetera. Chief, I suggest you draft and deliver a confident statement to that effect. End of a complicated mess. End of a media circus. Justice triumphant.”

Morgan sat back in his chair, a smile on his face, and looked down the table at Carmody. “Martin, I’ll be calling on your expertise—to bury this monster once and for all.”

Carmody rubbed his hands together. “It’ll be my pleasure.”

42

Later in his office, alone with Gurney, Morgan’s exhilaration at the case’s sudden ending was giving way to his chronic habit of worry.

“You were awfully quiet in that meeting,” he said.

Gurney shrugged. “I had nothing useful to say—certainly nothing that would have gotten you the resolution you wanted from Stryker any sooner.”

Morgan eyed him uneasily. “Do you have a problem with the resolution?”

“Nothing I can put my finger on.”

“It makes sense.”

“More or less.”

“It avoids a complicated trial, legal challenges, defense attorneys picking our procedures apart, turning everything inside out.”

“True.”

“But you think there’s a loose end somewhere?”

“I have no idea.”

Morgan nodded meaninglessly.

Then Gurney asked, “How’s Selena?”

“I don’t know. We can check.”

“Good idea.”

Morgan changed the subject. “You told Barstow to check for beer cans or bottles out on the road by the Cursen place?”

“Her idea, as I recall.”

“The thing is, her people found a can with a clear thumbprint belonging to a guy by the name of Randall Fleck. Long rap sheet. Drunk and disorderly, harassment, assault, et cetera. Since the can was beside a public road, and the soil traces in the tires of his motorcycle weren’t unique to the Cursen property, we couldn’t link him directly the attack on the house, but we did manage to nail him with felony possession of three unregistered handguns and a fully automatic Uzi. We also confiscated a flamethrower. Hell of a thing! But they’re perfectly legal, no paperwork required, so he’ll eventually be able to get it back. In the meantime, I’m keeping it with his guns in our evidence locker.”

“Does he have any known connection to Gant?”

“The address on his license is the address of the storefront in Bastenburg that’s leased to the Church of the Patriarchs. And Gant himself bailed him out the minute the judge set the amount yesterday afternoon. Fleck was supposed to return for a court appearance this morning, but I got a message on my phone saying he didn’t show up.”

“Sounds like the Reverend was in a big hurry to spring him.”

Morgan nodded. “Bastenburg PD’s on the lookout for him. Once we’ve put this Aspern-Tate nightmare behind us, we can put more resources against Fleck and the Cursen thing.”

Gurney felt a flash of anger. “What you’re calling ‘the Cursen thing’ could also be described as two counts of attempted murder.”

Morgan looked like he’d been slapped. “You’re right—if the idiots knew the house was occupied. Otherwise, they could end up pleading out to aggravated vandalism or reckless endangerment.”

Gurney restrained an urge to argue the point. He realized that he was in a combative mood—and that getting out of Morgan’s office might be a good idea. In fact, getting out of Larchfield, at least for the rest of the day, might be an even better idea.

When his homeward route took him through the main street of Bastenburg, he saw a row of black motorcycles at the curb by the Church of the Patriarchs storefront. He parked a block past the storefront and walked back.

The front door was obstructed by a burly man in motorcycle leathers with weathered yellow skin and a rust-colored beard.

Gurney held up his police ID. “Detective Gurney—here to see Silas Gant. Please ask him to step out on the street.”

“The Reverend is busy.”

“This is police business. I need to speak to him now.”

The man didn’t move.

“Do you understand what I just said?”

“It’s you that needs to understand.”

“Step away from the door, sir.”

The man stayed where he was.

Gurney moved forward at an angle, as if to get around him. The man sidestepped and began shoving him back away from the door. Gurney bent his knees to lower his center of gravity, set one foot firmly behind him, and drove his right elbow forward into the man’s solar plexus, causing him to crash into the door, gasping.

The door was yanked open from the inside. Another large bearded man stepped out—with two more in the doorway behind him. He glanced back and forth between Gurney and the fellow sagging against the doorjamb. He slowly balled his hands into fists.

“What the fuck is this?”

“Police business. Step back inside. Now!”

The man stayed where he was until a soft voice behind him said, “It’s okay, Deke, I’ll take care of it.” Then he and the others in the doorway backed away, taking their limp associate with them.

Silas Gant stepped forward, his gray pompadour as unruffled as his tone. His eyes were fixed on Gurney. He showed no emotion beyond a mild curiosity.

“Can I be of some assistance?” He sounded almost paternal.

“Gurney, Larchfield Police.” He held up his ID. “I’m looking for Randall Fleck.”

“He’s not here, as I’ve already explained to the appropriate authorities. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

The question brought Gurney face-to-face with the fact that, uncharacteristically, he’d given no thought to what he wanted to accomplish. The impulse to stop there had come from another part of him, the part that had responded with pain to the attack on Selena Cursen—the part of him that was full of the equally uncharacteristic anger that had driven his elbow into the stomach of the man guarding the door.

He spoke now with a calm emphasis on every word. “You’re an impressive speaker, sir. The things you say, people take them to heart. So the next time you make a speech to your congregation, you might want to include a clear condemnation of the attack on the Cursen house by a pack of ignorant, drunken slimebags.”

Gant’s bland expression congealed for a second into something less pleasant, which he covered with a patronizing smile. “You need to understand, Detective, that those who revel in unholy lifestyles and in the open adoration of Satan may provoke strong responses from well-meaning individuals.”

“Well-meaning individuals. I’ll bear that in mind.”

“You do that.”

“By the way,” said Gurney, “if you run into Randall Fleck, let him know that he and his well-meaning friends have made the biggest mistake of their miserable lives.” He paused, then winked at Gant. “You have a nice day, Reverend.”

43

As Gurney was driving past his barn, he thought he saw a faint image of the Dark Angel message coming through the two coats of paint he’d applied to cover it. Then, as his angle of sight changed, the image disappeared. Hoping it had been a mere trick of the afternoon light, he continued up through the pasture to the house. He parked in his usual spot, got out, and was surprised to find Madeleine weeding the asparagus patch.

“I thought you were working at the clinic today.”

“I was. Half day. Want to go for a swim in the pond? I was in a little while ago. The water is wonderful.”

He tried to think of a credible reason to say no but nothing came to mind. He wasn’t as fond of the chilly spring-fed pond as she was. But maybe a quick immersion was just what he needed to wash away the lingering discomfort of his confrontation with Gant.

“Okay,” he said.

Half an hour later, with cool water dripping from his hair into his eyes, he stepped out of the pond onto its grassy verge. Madeleine rolled up a towel and tossed it to him from her lawn chair. After a quick wipe-down he sat in the chair next to her, shaded by a tree with glossy emerald leaves. He extended his legs out from the shade into the warmth of the sun.

“Such a lovely day,” said Madeleine with a happy sigh.

“Hmm.”

“Did you notice the wild irises?”

He looked around. Between the pond and the end of the road he spotted the intricate blue blossoms swaying in the breeze.

“Very nice,” he said.

“The hummingbirds are back. And the orioles. And the nuthatches—the ones that hang upside down on the feeders.”

“Hmm.”

He reclined the back of his chair a couple of notches and closed his eyes.

A minute later she asked, “Are you napping?”

“Just . . . emptying my mind.”

Their brains were wired differently in that respect. Madeleine’s sense of peace in the outdoors was derived from her visual connection to it. The richness and variety of the colors transfixed her. Birds and flowers and sunsets were soothing manifestations of beauty. She seemed skeptical of Gurney’s preference for the elusive scents and sensations of nature, the feeling of a light breeze, the sounds closest to silence—best experienced with his eyes shut.

“Well,” she said, “in case I forget to mention it later . . . you should put another coat of paint on the barn door.”

“Oh?”

“That horrible thing is starting to show through.”

“Okay. I’ll take care of it.”

He soon discovered that his goal of letting his mind wander peacefully was not about to be realized, as the thought of the message on the barn drew him once again into wondering about its purpose.

When Billy Tate was assumed to be responsible for it, the question of motive was looser. When a perp is deemed mentally unbalanced or wildly impulsive, motivation becomes a factor hardly worth considering. But now all the evidence indicated that Chandler Aspern, not Billy Tate, was behind everything. And with Aspern it was reasonable to assume a practical motivation.

So, what was it?

The simplest would be a desire to reinforce the fiction that Billy Tate was still alive and raising hell. But the problem with that was proportionality. Did the risk/cost of the action align with the likely benefit?

In this case, how did the reinforcement of an already-accepted belief justify the risk involved in Aspern’s driving up to Gurney’s barn, leaving distinctive tread marks in the soil next to it, and exposing his attention-getting BMW to potential witnesses?

It was hard to see how that made sense.

“You’re at work, aren’t you?”

Madeleine’s voice drew him back into the moment.

He smiled. “I guess so. Sorry. That barn problem is eating at me.”

“The show-through?”

“No. Why the message was put there to begin with.”

She raised an eyebrow.

He explained the risk-reward problem.

“Hmm. Maybe the reward was something bigger than what you’re assuming?”

That struck him as an interesting possibility, but nothing tangible came to mind.

“So,” she asked, “what exactly is the status of the case? When you told me about the Russell woman shooting Aspern, I got the impression it was done with.”

“Technically, that’s true. This morning the DA sat through a presentation of a fairly convincing point-by-point scenario—complete with physical evidence, including Billy Tate’s chopped-off hand. The three murders originally attributed to Tate, as well as the murder of Tate himself, have now been attributed to Chandler Aspern. Aspern’s own homicide has been accepted as a noncriminal act of self-­defense. So we have five dead bodies, all neatly packaged with a narrative blessed by the DA herself. Case officially closed.”

“But?”

“I have an uncomfortable feeling about it all.”

44

After applying another coat of paint to the barn door and cutting back the fast-growing shoots of the forsythia next to it, Gurney spent the remainder of the afternoon on his riding mower. It had been a wetter-than-average early May, the grass was thriving, and the perimeter paths were blending into the fields they circled.

When Madeleine moved through an environment like that, it captivated her with the details of its beauty—the wildflowers dotted over the hillside, the songs of the meadow birds, the colors of the butterflies. For him, it was mainly a nonintrusive backdrop for his own thoughts. Those thoughts, as he rode the mower along the sunny border of the high pasture, were following shadowy paths through the unresolved issues of the case.

Most perplexing to him were Aspern’s motives, not only for defacing his barn, but for attacking Lorinda Russell. And there was the disappearance of Randall Fleck, with its echo of the disappearances of Angus Russell’s enemies. There was no apparent link between those old events and this new one. But what if there was? So his thoughts went, winding in circles, going nowhere.

That evening after dinner, he decided to give Mike Morgan a call and share his concerns.

Morgan’s reaction was angry and dismissive.

“Christ, Dave, I spent two hours with Carmody this afternoon polishing our closing statement to the media. Smooth, well-reasoned, coherent. We recorded it, and he sent it out to every media outlet that’s been covering the case. Now you come to me with doubts, poking holes in the logic? What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“You had this same reaction when I questioned Tate’s role in the case, and again when I raised a concern about the BMW on my road. You didn’t want to hear it.”

“Fine. But what am I supposed to do? Issue a retraction?”

“I’m not suggesting you go public with anything at this point. All I’m doing is sharing the questions that are on my mind. Doesn’t it bother you that we don’t really know why Aspern tried to kill Lorinda, or why he chose to do it that particular night?”

“Life is full of questions I can’t answer. Can’t we just let this resolution alone? For God’s sake, Dave, let it rest in peace!”

With Morgan on the edge of panic, Gurney ended the call. As he stood on the patio in the gathering dusk, watching the evening breeze bend the tops of the asparagus ferns, a question that had occurred to him before was nagging at him again. Had Russell installed Morgan as police chief in spite of his weaknesses . . . or because of them?

He awoke the following morning in a more pragmatic frame of mind. With Morgan determined to drop the final curtain on the case, it was obvious that his own relationship with the Larchfield PD was about to end. He decided to prepare for that possibility.

As soon as he got dressed and switched on the coffee maker, he called Slovak.

“Morning, sir, what’s up?” There was a case-closed cheeriness in his voice.

“Morning, Brad. I need a copy of the Russell case file with up-to-date interview notes and verbatims, plus a USB drive with the security videos and crime-scene photos. I’ll be there at nine thirty. Can you have all that ready for me by then?”

“Absolutely.”

It wasn’t that he intended to continue a private investigation of an officially closed case. He just wanted to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. At least, that’s what he told himself.

Without waking Madeleine, he set out immediately for Larchfield. The previous day’s sunny weather had been replaced by an unsettled atmosphere that carried the threat of thunderstorms.

He parked on Cotswold Lane in front of police headquarters. As soon as he entered, the desk sergeant held up a bulging manila envelope.

“For you, from Slovak.”

Gurney took the envelope and left immediately to minimize the chance of encountering Morgan. Back in his car, he opened the envelope to be sure it contained the requested USB drive. Then he made his way around the one-way streets bordering the village square, drove up and over the hill that separated Larchfield from Bastenburg, and headed for home.

By the time he got back to Walnut Crossing at 10:40 a.m., dark clouds were massing, and there were rumbles of thunder. As he was parking next to the asparagus patch, raindrops began splattering on the windshield. He hurried into the house and closed the French doors by the breakfast table, then brought his laptop out from the den.

When he went to the sink island to make his second coffee of the morning, he found a note from Madeleine saying she’d be working at the clinic all day.

When the coffee was ready, he brought the steaming mug to the table. He opened the manila envelope, took out the case file, and inserted the USB drive in his laptop.

Clicking on the USB icon opened a window that revealed nine more icons, one for each of five digital video files and one for each of four sets of photographs from the homicide sites. He decided to review the videos first—in chronological order, beginning with the one of Tate being knocked from the roof of St. Giles.

Having already examined it more than once, he fast-forwarded his way through most of it. He did the same with the one showing Tate’s “resurrection” in Peale’s mortuary.

He devoted more time to the video from Lorinda Russell’s new security ­camera—showing Aspern, masquerading as Tate, approaching the conservatory. Despite the limited illumination provided by the moonlight, the clarity was remarkable. Visible details included the original bloodstain on the sweatshirt hood, the mallet in his hand used for breaking the glass in the conservatory door, the white laces in his sneakers, and the bulge in the sweatshirt pocket where he was carrying the bagged hand of Billy Tate.

The next video was of Lorinda responding to Gurney’s questions about the shooting. Once again he was struck by the woman’s glacial indifference and how little she revealed of herself. Gaining some insight into the appetites that drove the decisions inside that glossy shell might be worth some effort.

But where to begin?

He’d already heard from some locals who knew her—Helen Stone, Hilda Russell, Greg Mason, Mike Morgan—but those conversations had elicited more information about their feelings than hers. One exception was Greg Mason’s comment that she was the only student in the high school who wasn’t afraid of Billy Tate.

As he thought back over what little he’d been told about her behavior, he recalled Morgan mentioning the “inappropriate relationship” she’d reportedly had when she was fifteen with her high school principal. He wondered if now, thirteen years later, that man might be willing to talk about her.

He placed a call to Greg Mason.

Apparently noting Gurney’s name on his screen, Mason began speaking in a rush of angry excitement. “I heard the news about Aspern. That evil son of a bitch! I wish I was there when Lorinda shot him. Are you sure he’s dead?”

“I’m sure.”

“My God, you know somebody for so many years, then you discover you didn’t know him at all. I never liked him. But who would have expected this?”

“I hope his death brings you some closure.”

“I don’t know what ‘closure’ is. I’m just glad the son of a bitch is dead. Is that what you called to tell me?”

“Actually, I wanted to follow up on a subject I raised when we spoke in your office. The rumored relationship between Lorinda—Lori Strane—and Principal Bullock.”

“I told you—I don’t talk about rumors.”

“I respect that. But when something like this pops up in the course of an investigation, it needs to be addressed. I want to speak directly to Bullock, and I was hoping you might know someone who could put me in touch with him.”

“He’s been gone for at least twelve years.”

“He must have left a forwarding address with the school.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“But someone in the records department would know, right?”

“The only person likely to know anything would be Betty Brill.”

“Does she have a title?”

“APA. Assistant Principal for Administration.”

Gurney thanked him, called Larchfield Academy, and asked for Betty Brill.

When she picked up, he stated his name and police affiliation and explained that he needed to get in touch with the school’s former principal.

“Hanley Bullock?” Her voice sounded dry, tight, and unhappy with the subject.

“Yes.”

He heard the sound of tapping on a keyboard. Then more tapping. And more tapping.

“All I can give you is the forwarding address he provided a month after his resignation. I have no idea if it’s still valid.”

“Any phone number?”

“No.” She sniffed and spelled out Bullock’s forwarding address with a clear distaste for anything associated with the man.

Gurney entered it—36 Haze Street, Crickton, NY—into Google Maps. The app displayed an estimated drive time of an hour and nine minutes from Walnut Crossing.

The street view of the address showed the front of what looked like an old rooming house with a wide, uneven porch. Trudy’s Antique Treasures was on its left side and Flacco’s Deli on its right. Gurney found the deli’s website and got its phone number.

A bored female voice answered on the fourth ring. “Flacco’s, what can I do for you?”

Gurney explained that he was trying to get in touch with someone by the name of Hanley Bullock, who was a tenant in the building next door, and he was wondering if someone at the deli might have the name or the phone number of the building’s owner.

“Hold on,” she said. “You want to talk to my father.”

Two minutes later a gravelly male voice said, “Who is this?”

Gurney explained who he was and what he wanted.

“That guy you’re looking for isn’t here anymore.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

“Died years ago.”

“I see. Do you happen to know how he died?”

“Look, I don’t really know who you are.”

Gurney repeated his name and affiliation.

“Look, buddy, anybody can say anything on the phone. You say you’re a detective. How do I know that? I got a call from somebody yesterday, said he was the IRS, and I should give him my credit card number to avoid being arrested for fraud.”

“Perhaps you can just give me the name or phone number for the building’s owner?”

“I’m the building’s owner.”

“Is it still a rooming house?”

“Not a rooming house. Never was. It’s rental apartments. Very nice.”

“And you are . . . ?”

“George Flacco.”

“All right, George, I understand your desire to be sure who you’re talking to. But let me ask you simple question. Is there something in particular about Hanley Bullock’s death that makes it a sensitive issue?”

“Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. Like I told you, I’m not saying things on the phone without some identifying corroboration.”

“That’s fine, George. I respect that. I’m going to drive down to Crickton later today with appropriate police identification. After you’re satisfied, we can talk about your former tenant. We can do it at your place of business or at the Crickton police station, if you’d feel more comfortable there.”

Never in Gurney’s recollection had anyone opted for the greater comfort of a police station.

“My deli is okay,” said Flacco with a resounding lack of enthusiasm. “I’m here until six. Then I’m gone.”

“That’s fine, George. I’ll be there at five.”

Most of Crickton turned out to look exactly like the street-view photo of the rooming house on Haze Street. An old river town, conspicuously ungentrified, it had numerous old redbrick buildings that once housed mills, manufacturing businesses, and implement suppliers to the mom-and-pop dairy farms that no longer existed.

On the far side of Trudy’s Antique Treasures there was an abandoned nineteenth-­century building whose dark brick facade was the color of smoke. A decrepit sign hanging below the boarded-up second-floor windows proclaimed, BEST FURNITURE AND COFFINS FOR ALL BUDGETS.

A bell over the deli’s door produced a jangly ring as Gurney entered. The place smelled of dampness and cats. There was a white metal-and-glass case of cold cuts and salads to his right; a wall-long case of beers, sodas, and caffeine drinks to his left; four tables with chairs in the middle space; and a row of shelves across the back, full of candy and chips. There were no customers.

One of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling was buzzing. He heard a toilet flushing in a back room. A moment later a small dark-haired man—presumably George Flacco—and a heavyset redheaded woman emerged from a doorway behind the cold-cuts counter and came around it into the table area.

“You’re the one that called me?” said the man.

“That’s right.” Gurney took out his Larchfield ID and held it up.

The redheaded woman peered at it, looking back and forth several times between Gurney’s face and the picture of his face.

“You’re a detective?” She made it sound like a trick question.

“Yes. For twenty-five years in New York City. Right now I’m working up in Larchfield.”

“They have crime up there, do they?” She said it with a nasty sense of triumph, as though she’d caught the town in a lie.

“Yes, they do.”

She folded her heavy sunburned arms and gave Gurney a challenging look. “When that Bullock fellow came here, we didn’t know the first thing about him abusing that young girl up there in that fancy school.”

“No way you could have,” said Gurney.

“We heard the story later. After he was gone.”

“I’m just interested in learning what you thought of him while he was here, what he was like, what finally happened to him.”

With a small nod of satisfaction she turned to the small dark man, who seemed to take that as an okay to proceed.

“So, Detective,” he said in his gravelly voice, “what do you want to know?”

“Anything at all you can remember about him. Friends? Visitors? What he talked about? How he spent his time? How he died?”

“The ‘friends’ part is easy. He didn’t have any. Ditto for visitors.”

“Until the end,” corrected the redhead.

“I’m coming to that, Clarice. Don’t rush me.” He turned back to Gurney. “What else did you ask me?”

“What he talked about.”

“Another easy one. Nothing. He didn’t talk to nobody. Not a word.”

“Until the end,” said Clarice.

“Yeah, but not much even then. And we don’t know what he said. Why do you keep interrupting me?”

She ignored the question.

He turned to Gurney. “What else?”

“How did he spend his time?”

“He watched TV.”

“We don’t know that,” said Clarice.

“Yeah, we do. His TV was on eighteen hours a day.”

“How can you be sure he was watching it, George?”

“Why else would he have the fucking thing on?”

“Some people just like it. The voices. It’s company.”

He turned to Gurney. “You had another question, right?”

“How did he die? He wasn’t that old, was he?”

“Not really. Forty, forty-two maybe.”

“Maybe forty-four, forty-five,” said Clarice. “But he was a heavy drinker.”

“How could you tell?” asked Gurney.

“The vodka bottles in the garbage. And the only time you’d see him on the street was coming or going to Gaffy’s Liquors. The man had a problem.”

“A dirty past,” added George. “We found out later. A kid not even half his age. He’s lucky he didn’t go to prison. They don’t like guys like that in prison.”

“How did you find out about the problem with the girl?”

“I don’t remember. I think somebody we knew might have known somebody in Larchfield. Right, Clarice?” When she didn’t answer, he continued. “Anyway, the story got passed along. And we heard the name. Hanley Bullock. Figured there couldn’t be two Hanley Bullocks around. So that was it. But that was after he died.”

“And that happened . . . how, exactly?”

“Now we get into the funny part.”

“Funny weird,” said Clarice.

“This guy showed up one day. A big guy on a black motorcycle, asking up and down the street if anyone knew Hanley Bullock.”

“This was before we heard about the problem in Larchfield,” said Clarice.

“He said he was Hanley’s cousin, and he knew Hanley lived in Crickton, and he thought he’d drop by and say hello on his way through. So we gave him the apartment number.”

“As I recall,” said Clarice, “it was Trudy down the block gave him the apartment number.”

“Whoever the hell gave it to him, he got the number and went to the apartment. Pretty soon the radio came on. Country music. Stayed on for hours. And we could hear the big guy’s voice. Had a loud laugh.”

“You folks have an apartment in the same building?”

“Yeah, it’s our building. Pluses and minuses to that, I can tell you. So we hear a lot, want to or not. Mostly we’d rather not.”

“Did you get the big guy’s name?”

“I don’t recall it. You, Clarice?”

She made a constipated kind of face, as if trying to remember were a physical strain. “Country-music kind of name,” she announced finally. “What it was I couldn’t tell you. We’re talking ten years ago.”

“Okay,” said Gurney, turning back to George. “So you heard them in Bullock’s apartment, playing music and laughing?”

“The music, yeah, and the big guy letting out a loud laugh every so often. I don’t believe I ever heard Hanley laugh—not then, not ever.”

“This went on how long?”

“All that afternoon and into the night. In the morning, it was real quiet. Round about midday, a fancy car pulled up in front of the building. I could see it right out this front window. A fancy little man got out of the car with one of them little black doctor’s bags and went into the building. I thought, what kind of trouble we got now? And I followed him in, caught up with him at the foot of the stairs. He said he was a doctor and he’d gotten a call about a Mr. Bullock. I gave him the number of the apartment, and up he went. Half hour later he came down, came into the deli here, asked what my relationship was to Mr. Bullock. I told him it wasn’t any kind of relationship, Mr. Bullock was just our tenant. He said he regretted to inform me that Mr. Bullock had suffered two massive heart attacks and had passed away. Since he’d been present when the second one occurred, he was able to sign a death certificate without hesitation. And since Mr. Bullock’s cousin was present and willing to be responsible for the removal of the body, there would be no problem or inconvenience for me. In fact, he said, a call had already been made and a removal vehicle was on the way. That’s what he called it. A removal vehicle.”

“How did they bring the body down the stairs?” asked Gurney.

“You recall, Clarice?”

“One of them body bags like you see on TV, with handles on it. The two of them carried it down—the big guy and the doctor. Someone else had arrived in a hearse—what the doctor called the removal vehicle. They loaded the body in it, and off they went. The big guy on his motorcycle, the doctor in his shiny black car, and Mr. Bullock’s body in the hearse.”

“You mentioned a couple of minutes ago there was something weird about the situation. What was it?”

“I guess the way it felt.” Clarice looked at her husband. “What would you say it was?”

“How fast it all happened. One day he was fine, next morning he was dead, and an hour later he was heading out of town in the back of a hearse. And that was that. The end. We never heard another word. No obituary notices, no nothing. One day he’s our tenant in apartment 2A, next day it’s like he never existed.”

Clarice was nodding. “It was way too fast. Everyone was in a hurry. I told the big guy with the beard, the one who said he was his cousin, I told him that Bullock was a month behind in his rent. He asked me how much he owed, took out his wallet, and gave me the money in cash. Didn’t even ask for a receipt. I wasn’t worried about it at the time. I’m being totally honest here, it doesn’t sound nice, but I just wanted the damn body out of that apartment. But I got to thinking about it ­afterward—what the heck was the big rush?”

“Interesting. So, there were three people involved in the removal—the guy with the beard, the doctor, and the hearse driver. I know it was a long time ago, but I’d like you to try to picture them. As best you can. Any details you can remember—anything at all, no matter how trivial it might seem.”

They looked at each other. Clarice spoke first. “The big guy was like six three, six four, black leather jacket, big beard, dull eyes. The hearse driver . . .” She hesitated. “I think he was kinda thin, balding. In his forties, I’d guess. Maybe around the same age as Mr. Bullock. Anything come to your mind, George?”

He shook his head.

“What about the doctor?” asked Gurney.

She closed her eyes tightly, as if straining again to visualize something. “My own height, I think, because I sort of recall being even with him, not looking up or down. I remember him being neatly dressed, maybe in a dark suit? And sunglasses. He was wearing sunglasses, so I didn’t see his eyes. I don’t remember anything else, except his hair.”

“What about his hair?”

“It was perfect,” said Clarice.

“Too perfect,” said George.

“What color was it?”

“Gray,” said George.

“Silver,” said Clarice.

45

At 6:07 p.m. by his dashboard clock, about halfway home, Gurney pulled over on the weedy shoulder of the road to make some calls. The first, to Madeleine, which went to voicemail, was to apologize for not being there to get dinner ready and to let her know that he’d be arriving around 6:45.

His next call, to Hardwick, also went to voicemail. He left a message.

“I’m hoping we can get together tomorrow. The Larchfield situation may be wrapped up. But it feels a little off-center. I just discovered something that could be an unexploded bomb. I can be at Abelard’s by eleven. If you can’t make it, call me. Otherwise, I’ll see you there.”

His third call was to Slovak, who picked up on the first ring.

“Yes, sir?”

“Hi, Brad. I was wondering if you had any luck yet with your search for Aspern’s phone.”

“No, not really.”

“Not really?”

“I mean, we didn’t find it, but we weren’t looking very long. The chief pulled everyone off the case. He said it’s done and over with, and he reassigned everyone to normal duties.” He paused. “You think that’s a problem?”

“I have no idea.” Gurney was thinking it might very well turn out to be a problem, but there was no point in putting Slovak between a rock and a hard place.

“I was wondering . . . are you still interested in knowing about stuff related to the case?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well . . . an odd thing happened about an hour ago. I got a call from Harold Storm, who owns the liquor store in town. He’d heard about Aspern committing the murders that had been blamed on Tate and then getting shot at the Russell estate.”

“And?”

“He said Aspern had been in the store earlier that evening, and that he’d bought a bottle of wine.”

“So?”

“It was a three-hundred-dollar bottle.”

“What was his point in telling you this?”

“He said since it was Aspern, and since he was in the store just a few hours before he got shot, he thought he should let us know. You think it means anything?”

“Hard to say,” said Gurney. “But you sound like you’ve been giving it some thought.”

“Actually, I have. And I figured maybe the wine was to celebrate—you know, later that night.”

“Celebrate what?”

“Getting rid of Lorinda.”

“You figure he was planning to cut her throat, pop the cork, and celebrate his victory?”

“Can’t you just see it?”

Not really, thought Gurney, but he didn’t say so.

For the rest of his drive to Walnut Crossing, his mind was leaping from case to case, from Aspern back to Bullock, from ten years ago to the present. He was trying not to give too much weight to what the Flaccos told him. Ten years after the events, the “facts” in their memories were simply not reliable. He reminded himself of the lessons he taught at the academy regarding the fallibility of eyewitnesses and the overeagerness of investigators to believe them.

When he finally got home, it was nearly seven. The dishes in the sink revealed that Madeleine had already eaten, as did the sound of her cello coming from the upstairs room where she practiced after dinner. He went to the wok on the stove and found a still-warm mixture of rice, scallops, and bok choy. He went to the foot of the stairs and called up to Madeleine.

“I’m home.”

“Good,” she called back without interrupting her melodic bowing. “Dinner’s in the wok.”

“Sorry I’m so late. Something came up.”

There was no answer but the music.

After eating, he cleared the table and opened his laptop. He knew that the best antidote to useless speculation was a deep dive into a sea of facts.

He reinserted the USB drive with all the videos and crime-scene photos. He reviewed every item, every detail, until he could no longer keep his eyes open.

Morning came with a clap of thunder, followed by the downpour that had seemed imminent the previous day.

As Gurney steered the Outback into Abelard’s parking area, Hardwick’s growling GTO was pulling in from the other side. They emerged from their cars at the same time. The rain had finally let up, leaving large puddles on the saturated ground and a cool, clean scent in the air. They went inside and sat at their usual table.

Marika came over holding a small pad and pencil. The hair that was blue a few days before was now platinum blond. Her lipstick was retro red.

“Hey, boys, what’s it gonna be today?” She seemed to be doing a riff on a diner waitress in an old movie.

Hardwick ordered regular coffee, black. Gurney ordered a double espresso. Hardwick then turned to Gurney.

“I saw your friend Morgan on TV last night. Quite the fucking story.”

“What did you think of it?”

“You mean, what do I think of the little creep with the deer-turd eyes turning out to be the bad guy? Hey, Larchfield’s a creepy shithole, so the idea that the shithole mayor is a multiple murderer didn’t exactly knock me off my feet.” He paused and gave Gurney an appraising look. “But that phone message you left for me sounded like you’re not on board with the happy resolution.”

Gurney shrugged. “There are always unresolved issues when the people you’d most like to interview are all dead.”

“Issues like the ‘unexploded bomb’ you mentioned in your message? The fuck is that about?”

It was about what George and Clarice Flacco had told Gurney during his visit to Crickton. He filled Hardwick in on the background events—Hanley Bullock’s rumored “affair” with the underage Lori Strane, his subsequent resignation from Larchfield Academy, his relocation to Crickton, and his embrace of vodka.

“The same Lori Strane who later became Mrs. Angus Russell?”

“The very one.” Gurney then related in detail the Flaccos’ account of what had happened the day of Bullock’s death and who was present for it.

Hardwick reacted with his routine skepticism. “So when Bullock croaked, a bearded guy and a gray-haired guy were there. That’s it?”

“A big bearded guy who arrived on a black motorcycle and a neat little guy with silver-gray hair.”

“So you’ve decided that the big guy must have been one of Gant’s Patriarchs and the little guy was Gant himself—and that they were sent there by Angus Russell to ice Bullock?”

“That thought did occur to me.”

“The motive being what?”

“Angus wanting to flex his muscles? Show Lorinda what he had the power to do? Possibly give her a subtle warning? Maybe he liked the idea of making Bullock pay for what he did with a fifteen-year-old. Or maybe Bullock discovered something damaging about Angus, tried to take advantage of it, and didn’t realize who he was dealing with.”

“How far out on that branch do you want to get before it breaks and dumps you in the shitter? Sure, what you’re saying is possible. But it’s equally possible that the big guy really was Bullock’s cousin, the gray-haired guy really was a doctor, and Bullock really did die of a heart attack. And it’s very possible that the Flaccos’ recollections of what happened on one high-stress day ten years ago are totally screwed up. And no matter what the truth is, at this point who the hell cares? More to the fucking point, why do you care?”

“If Angus was behind it and Gant was involved, it would be evidence of a long-standing criminal relationship between the Russells and the Patriarchs, and it would suggest that they may have cooperated in those unsolved ‘disappearances’ of Angus’s enemies. Hilda Russell told me that Angus gave a lot of money to Gant’s church. That could have been a way of paying him for services rendered—and even getting a tax deduction for it.”

“Christ, you’re actually thinking that the Reverend is a hit man?”

“I’m thinking he could be. Interestingly, he bailed out one of his Patriarchs—who could have proved to be a dangerous embarrassment—and the guy hasn’t been seen since.”

“Which means he’s holed up somewhere with half a dozen hookers on meth.”

“Always possible. But I’d bet on a terminal disappearance.”

“Because he knew too much?”

“Because he could link Gant’s Patriarchs to an armed attack on a local eccentric.”

Marika arrived with their coffees. It took Hardwick a moment to refocus. “You’ve shared these thoughts with Morgan?”

Gurney shook his head. “Morgan doesn’t want complications. He’s committed to a simple message: evil has been vanquished, peace has been restored. No doubts. No questions. No static.”

Hardwick made a sucking noise through his teeth. “Look, I’m not saying this Bullock thing is worth pursuing, but if it were, where would you start?”

Gurney smiled. “I’d ask someone with a PI license who knows his way around the block to find out if Bullock ever had a big bearded motorcycle-riding cousin.”

“Basic footwork like that too boring for a genius like you?”

“My credentials are from Larchfield PD. Someone could call to check me out. I don’t want Morgan to know I’m still poking at the edges of a closed case.”

Hardwick gave him a major you’re-going-to-owe-me look before asking, “Did the Flaccos get the doctor’s name?”

“They couldn’t remember.”

“Or the name of the guy who said he was Bullock’s cousin?”

“Bullock’s ex-wife might be a good place to start.”

“Naturally, you’ll give me her name and contact information?”

“That would take the fun out of it.”

Hardwick stared down into his coffee mug. “I’m missing something here. What’s Bullock’s demise got to do with Angus getting his throat cut ten years later?”

“Maybe nothing. But the likely involvement of Gant in the Bullock thing is just one of the oddities troubling my sleep.”

“How many fucking oddities you talking about?”

“Aspern’s phone hasn’t been found. And Morgan’s case-closed fixation means no one is allowed to look for it.”

“That’s the kind of shit keeping you awake at night?”

“Not just that. Aspern drives a 530e BMW. A few nights ago a message was painted on my barn in the blood of one of the victims. A guy at the end of my road saw someone coming down from my property in a BMW. He was pretty sure it was a 530e. And there were tread marks in the soil by my barn that have been ID’d as belonging to a 5 Series BMW.”

“So you’re thinking this was Aspern?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The risk-reward ratio. Aspern was no fool. So why expose himself like that, carrying the blood of one of the victims in his car, leaving his tire tracks on my property? For what? To make me think Billy Tate did it? I don’t get the point of that. That’s not enough of a payoff to take the chance of being caught.”

“Maybe Aspern was crazier than you think.”

Gurney sighed, unconvinced. “Madeleine said I might not be seeing what his goal really was. Maybe it was something that was worth the big risk after all.”

“And Morgan—”

“Morgan doesn’t want to hear a word about it.”

Hardwick’s expression turned sour. “You think the fucker is bent?”

“I never thought so before. I still don’t want to. But his determination to shut things down is so damn rigid . . . it’s becoming another sleep disturber.”

After a silence during which they both paid attention to their coffees, Hardwick developed a puzzled look. “This Bullock thing—what sent you off looking for him to begin with?”

“Curiosity about Lorinda. Apart from a few obvious characteristics, she baffles me. I wanted to find someone who might know her better than the people I’ve talked to so far.”

By the time Gurney got back to Walnut Crossing, the weather had changed again. The sky was clear, the grass was drying in the midday sun, and the chickens were pecking energetically at the cracked corn that Madeleine had tossed into the fenced run before she left for work. Swallows were swerving through the air over the low pasture.

He brought his laptop out to the little table on the patio and began yet another review of the security camera videos and homicide scene photos—searching for anything odd, anything unexpected, anything inconsistent.

He spent an hour going through all the visual files in chronological order. He then went back and replayed the video of Tate emerging from the cadaver-storage cabinet and making his way around the embalming room. Next he examined the video of Aspern in Tate’s clothes approaching the conservatory.

He was struck by Aspern’s attention to the details of the deception, even to the extent of mimicking Tate’s halting stride and the forward hunch of his shoulders—which he’d probably observed in the leaked video on the RAM-TV website. His attention was also drawn to the floppy white laces on Tate’s sneakers—worn by Tate himself in the first video and by Aspern disguised as Tate in the second. The bow loops appeared noticeably smaller in the second, but that was perhaps too small a point for even the detail-focused Aspern to have bothered to get right.

Next he viewed the still photos of Aspern’s body on the conservatory floor in Tate’s now blood-soaked clothes—twelve in its facedown position and another twelve taken after the body had been turned over by the ME for an in situ exam and pronouncement of death.

He noticed that the bow loops visible in these photos were larger than they had seemed in at least one of the two preceding videos. He replayed the videos to be sure, and what he found puzzled him. The bows in the still photos of Aspern’s body on the floor were larger than the ones in the video of his approach to the house.

That made no sense—unless Aspern had retied his laces in the time between his walking across the lawn and his breaking into the conservatory. But why would he do that? This was a man on his way to cut a woman’s throat. A man carrying another man’s severed hand in his sweatshirt pocket. Would he stop in the midst of this grotesque mission to retie his shoelaces?

But he either retied them or he didn’t. And if he didn’t, who did? And why?

The ringing of his phone interrupted his train of thought.

It was Slovak.

“Sorry to bother you, sir. I just wanted to make sure you knew about Carol Morgan. She passed, sir, early this morning.”

“Jesus. How’s Mike doing?”

“I don’t really know. I think he’s at home.”

“Okay. Thanks for letting me know.”

Gurney laid his phone down next to his laptop on the table and sat gazing out over the pasture. As a homicide detective, death was part of his life. Approaching it objectively was the essence of his job. But this sort of death was different. It came at him from an angle that bypassed his professionalism. It touched that mostly hidden part of him that responded to the world with emotion rather than analysis.

He picked up his phone and placed a call to Morgan.

“Yeah?” His voice was ragged.

“Mike, I just heard about Carol. I’m so sorry.”

“Who is this?”

“Dave Gurney.”

“Oh.”

“Are you all right?”

“What? No. No. Not really.”

“Is there anything I can do for you? Anything you need?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

He didn’t answer.

“Mike?”

There was a sound that might have been a stifled sob. Or a cough.

Gurney waited.

“She didn’t know who I was, Dave. I was there, standing next to the bed. She was awake, looking right at me. ‘Who are you?’ That’s what she said, looking right at me. I said, ‘It’s Mike. Your husband. It’s me. Mike.’ She said, ‘I don’t have a husband.’ I didn’t know what to say. I tried to hold her hand. She pulled it away. Then she closed her eyes. That was it. She stopped breathing. That was the end.”

Gurney heard that stifled sound again. This time he was certain it was a sob.

46

Gurney wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting there on the patio. The phone call with Mike Morgan had broken his sense of time.

Finding himself gazing blankly at the rectangle of yellow string Madeleine had set up next to the chicken coop, he got up and walked over for a closer look.

Picturing as best he could the alpaca shelter diagram she’d gotten from Dennis Winkler, he paced along the edges of the rectangle to get an idea of the dimensions. He went back to his laptop and spent the next half hour figuring out the lumber and hardware needs and putting together a materials list. Having done that, he felt less adrift. Over the years he’d come to rely on the grounding effect of small practical actions.

Now, in the hope of maintaining that effect and perhaps solving the shoelace conundrum, he returned to his examination of the photo and video files. An attentive pass through all the material took another hour. He was in the middle of a second pass at five thirty when Madeleine called to tell him that she and Gerry were going to dinner in Oneonta and then to a movie, so she wouldn’t be home until sometime after ten.

He brought his laptop inside to the table by the French doors and once again gave his attention to all the pictures documenting the movements of Billy Tate and Chandler Aspern. He was convinced that in one of images he would find an explanation for the inconsistent sizes of the bow loops on the sneakers.

Three hours later he still had not succeeded. He suspected the answer was staring him in the face and he just wasn’t recognizing it. Perhaps he should take a break. His need for sleep was undeniable, and he knew that pushing himself any further at that point would not be productive. He decided to lie down without setting his alarm, letting his brain determine how much rest it required.

Too tired to fall into a natural sleep, he slipped into a state of uneasy, semi-­wakeful dreaming. Even that was interrupted—by Madeleine’s arriving home and opening the bedroom windows, then by a cramp in his leg, and still later by the yipping of coyotes in the high pasture.

A little after four in the morning he gave up hope of sleeping comfortably—the result of a fretful dream that featured Tate with his spray can, applying figure eight hellfire symbols on the church steeple. The dream kept repeating, with the variation that Tate sometimes held the spray can in his right hand and sometimes in his left hand.

Gurney was made so restless by the contradictory images that he felt a need to resolve the confusion then and there. He got up and went out to the table where he’d left his laptop and opened the two video files.

What he saw on the screen provided the resolution, but at the cost of more confusion. On the church roof Tate sprayed the symbol on the steeple with his left hand, but in the embalming room he scraped it on the wall with his right.

He then opened the video of Aspern approaching the conservatory in his Tate disguise. He was holding the mallet in his right hand. But Gurney recalled Aspern being left-handed.

“Do you realize what time it is?”

He was startled at the closeness of Madeleine’s voice. She was standing in the kitchen just a few feet away. It was 4:25, at least a half hour before dawn.

“I was having trouble sleeping,” he said.

“Are you coming back to bed?”

Her tone made it sound more like an invitation than a question.

He followed her into the bedroom. One thing led to another, and he finally sank into a real sleep.

He awoke around eight when Madeleine left for the clinic, drifted back to sleep, and awoke again suddenly at nine thirty with his phone ringing on the night table. He blinked, squinting at the screen. It was Jack Hardwick.

“Wake up, you fucker. You sound drunk.”

“You have news?”

“Yeah, I have news. The kiddie-banger had two cousins. One’s a nun, the other died of AIDS twenty years ago. No relatives with a beard or a big bad motorcycle.”

“You got this from his ex-wife?”

“No. The ex-wife wouldn’t say a word about him. Still hates the ground he walked on. But she did give me the name and address of his brother. The brother didn’t like him, either. Referred to him as a drunken sleaze who deserved to be dead. Had less than no interest in the circumstances of his death. Said if Hanley got iced he’d shake the hand of the iceman. But at least he was willing to give me the cousin data.”

“So the guy who claimed to be Bullock’s cousin was lying.”

“Fact that he wasn’t Bullock’s cousin doesn’t make him a Patriarch.”

“But it does make it more likely.”

“More likely don’t mean shit. But for the sake of argument, let’s imagine you’re right. What’s your hotshot scenario for how it all went down?”

Gurney sat up on the edge of the bed and took a few moments to organize the sequence in his mind.

“The way I see it, it all starts when Angus Russell, for whatever reason, decides he wants Hanley Bullock dead. He makes his desire known to Silas Gant. Gant sends one of his trusted Patriarchs down to Crickton to deal with it in a way that creates the fewest possible waves. Maybe the guy invents a story that gets him invited into the apartment. Or maybe he just knocks on the door and blackjacks him as soon as he opens it. Once he’s inside he finishes Bullock off quietly, probably by strangling him. He spends the night there—playing music, laughing, making whatever sounds the Flaccos say they heard. In the morning Gant shows up—the neat little ‘doctor’ with the silver-gray hair. After spending some time in the apartment, he comes out and gives George and Clarice the sad news about Mr. Bullock’s fatal heart attack. A little while later an accomplice shows up in a hearse, the body is bagged and removed from the premises, and everybody disappears over the horizon. No obvious evidence of any crime. Bullock had no one in his life who cared enough to look into the situation. The perfect crime, right down to the hearse.”

“What do you mean?”

“Even if it got stopped for a traffic violation and the cop found the body in it, there wouldn’t have been a problem. It’s a hearse. There’s supposed to be a body in it.”

“Very smooth. Assuming it’s true. But all it means, at the most, is that Angus had a criminal relationship with Gant—ten years ago. You’re trying to link a possible old Angus-Gant relationship to the current craziness with Aspern. The hell kind of link could there be?”

“Maybe none. But the more I learn about Larchfield, the more it seems that everything is wired together.”

“Maybe it’s time for dynamite. Just blow the fucking place off the face of the earth.”

“Always an option. But I’d like to get answers to a few bothersome questions first.”

“Like what?”

“Hold on for a minute.”

Gurney went to the bathroom and splashed some cold water on his face, then slipped on a pair of jeans and a tee shirt before returning to the phone. “You still there?”

“Waiting patiently for your questions.”

“Okay. On the roof of St. Giles Billy Tate was using his left hand. In the mortuary video he was using his right hand. How would you explain that?”

“He fell off the fucking roof. Maybe he broke his left hand.”

“Okay. How about Aspern? In the video of him approaching the Russell house, he’s carrying a mallet in his right hand. But when I met with him in his office I’d swear he was left-handed.”

“So he was ambidextrous. Lot of people are. Or maybe his left hand was occupied with something the video didn’t catch. What else is bothering you?”

“The tire marks next to my barn—forensically ID’d as belonging to the same BMW model that Aspern drives, one that’s extremely rare around Walnut Crossing. In fact, in my five years here I’ve never seen a single one. So it seems he took a very large risk, compared to very little reward. What does that tell us?”

“You’re the one that keeps thinking about it. What does it tell you?”

“That we may need to reevaluate our suppositions.”

“Shit, Gurney, try using smaller words for us mortals.”

“I thought originally the risk was that the unusual car would be observed and linked to Aspern—which is exactly what happened. But suppose I’ve been looking at it upside down.”

“Meaning what?”

“I’ve been assuming that the risk was that the car might be ID’d. But maybe that was the objective. What I thought was an effort by Aspern to further incriminate Billy Tate could just as easily have been an effort by a third party to incriminate Aspern. The distinctive tread marks left in the soft earth by my barn may have been left there on purpose.”

Hardwick grunted. He sounded unconvinced. “So, if it wasn’t Aspern, your ‘third party’ just happened to own the same kind of car? That’s a big fucking coincidence.”

“The car may have been rented. There are elite rental outfits that specialize in vehicles like that. I know it seems like one more complication in a case that’s already mired in complications, but I have a feeling I’m onto something.”

“I have a feeling, too. Like I’m in the land of make-believe.”

“What you need to clear your mind is a practical assignment, Jack. Something along the lines of identifying rental agencies dealing in relatively new BMWs and discovering if any of them recently provided a customer with a 530e. Sound like something you’d be willing to sink your teeth into?”

“Fuck you, Sherlock.”

Gurney assumed that was a yes.

47

Giving voice to his car theory seemed to give it greater credibility. However, Gurney was wary of the temptation to embrace any new idea too tightly. One of the most dangerous traps in an investigation was the trick of the mind that turned possibility into probability and probability into certainty. The antidotes were patience and more facts. Gurney was hoping that Hardwick’s efforts would contribute significantly to the second part of that.

His revised view of the barn incident raised new questions. Making Aspern the target of a clever deception potentially changed him from a perp to a victim. Did that mean he was innocent of the murders of Angus Russell, Mary Kane, Linda Mason, and Billy Tate?

If the barn incident was a deliberate attempt to cast suspicion on Aspern, a question remained concerning its motivation. Was Aspern an innocent man being framed for the Larchfield murders? Or was someone who knew Aspern was guilty trying to bring him to the attention of law enforcement?

Gurney saw problems with both interpretations. If Aspern were guilty, why had the unknown individual chosen such an elaborate approach, when he or she could have accomplished the same thing with an anonymous call or text that spelled out whatever incriminating information they had? But if Aspern were innocent, how could one explain his bizarre attempt on Lorinda Russell’s life?

Gurney made himself an extra-strong mug of coffee, opened the French doors to let in the cool morning air, and settled down at the breakfast table to wrestle with the possibilities. Once again he was interrupted by the ringing of his phone.

The number on the screen was faintly familiar.

“Detective?”

“Yes?”

“I remembered his name.”

“Sorry, who is this?”

“Clarice. Clarice Flacco. You said to call if I remembered anything else. It was Otis. The one with the motorcycle. His name was Otis.”

“He told you that?”

“No, that’s why I didn’t remember. He didn’t tell me his name. It was tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand, one letter on each knuckle. I didn’t see it at first because he was wearing gloves. When he was about to leave, he took out his wallet to pay for Mr. Bullock’s back rent. Did I tell you about that?”

“You did.”

“Anyway,” said Clarice, “he took off his gloves, to get the money out of his wallet. That’s when I saw the name. Otis.”

“Did you happen to see the knuckles of his other hand?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay, Clarice, that’s very helpful. By the way, did anyone ever call or come to see you about Mr. Bullock’s possessions? Whatever was left in the apartment?”

“He didn’t have hardly anything.” There was a defensiveness in her tone now. “No personal items, credit cards, checks, phone. Definitely no cash. The cousin must have took all that. I don’t know if Mr. Bullock ever had a computer. I forget what happened about the clothes and furniture. We probably gave whatever there was to the Salvation Army.”

Gurney had his doubts about that, but saw no point in pursuing it. He thanked her for getting in touch with him and encouraged her to call again if new memories surfaced.

Then he called Hardwick and left a message:

“Regarding the Crickton thing, the big guy’s name was Otis. As in Otis Strane. As far as I’m concerned, that seals the deal on Gant-Patriarch involvement in Bullock’s death. The question is, what might that have to do with the present situation? Maybe nothing, right? On the other hand, maybe everything. Let’s talk.”

Next, he called Slovak.

As usual, he picked up immediately. “Yes, sir?”

“Morning, Brad. I wanted to follow up with you on a few loose ends. That call you told me you got from the liquor store owner, about Aspern buying a three-hundred-dollar bottle of wine. Did you ever find the bottle?”

“No, sir. Like I told you, once the DA gave the word to close the case, Chief Morgan shut everything down.”

“So, the bottle of wine might still be in Aspern’s house?”

“I guess, but . . .”

“I know the chief doesn’t want to allocate resources to a cleared case, but this wouldn’t fall in that category. No expenditures involved, and hardly any time—just a final check of the victim’s residence. I bet you and a couple of your people could handle it in less than an hour. A bottle of wine shouldn’t be too hard to spot.”

“Yeah, I guess. Okay. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

“Have you heard from the chief this morning?”

“No, sir. I left a message, but he hasn’t gotten back to me.”

“And there’s no command structure between you and him, is that right?”

“Right. We’ve always been a small department, pretty informal, with the sergeants reporting directly to the chief. We never had layers of lieutenants and captains. I guess that’s good and bad.”

“Okay, Brad, let me know how the wine search turns out. And keep an eye open for Aspern’s missing phone.”

“Yes, sir.”

Next, Gurney turned his attention to the question he’d raised with Hardwick. If someone wanted Aspern to appear responsible for the message on the barn and, by extension, for the Larchfield murders . . . were they trying to frame an innocent man or focus attention on a guilty one?

Neither possibility made much sense. He couldn’t recall a single instance of anyone engaging in an act of criminal mischief in order to draw law enforcement attention to a real evildoer. On the other hand, Aspern’s attack on Lorinda made it difficult to view him as the innocent victim of a frame job.

Gurney concluded that he was missing something—something that could be the key to a completely different understanding of the murders. And that brought back the feeling he might have overlooked something crucial in the videos. He decided to make his way through them one final time. He opened his laptop and began the familiar process.

The video of Tate on the roof of St. Giles yielded no new information. It just reinforced the impression Gurney had of Tate’s recklessness. There were no “Aha!” moments in the mortuary video, either. His attention was drawn mainly to the splintering sound of the casket bursting open. The sound conjured an image of a gasping, wild-eyed Billy Tate—panic and confusion mixed with a surge of relief at breaking out of a confinement he could not at that moment have understood.

He recalled that Dr. Vickerz’s analysis of the torn wood fibers around the latch had focused on the direction from which the force had been applied to break open the casket lid, not on how much force had been required. In a practical sense it might not matter. Whatever the amount of force, it had been sufficient, and Tate was reputed to have been unusually strong. Still, it remained an unknown, and Gurney was hungry for facts.

He didn’t have a number for Vickerz, so he called Barstow and left a message asking that Vickerz perform an additional experiment to determine how much upward force would have been needed against the inside of the casket lid to tear the wood apart from the metal latch. He was hoping that Barstow would pass the request along without challenging the appropriateness of conducting another test in the context of a closed case, and that Vickerz’s scientific curiosity would carry the ball from there.

Going through the rest of the videos, he saw nothing he hadn’t seen before. He was still made uneasy by the fact that Aspern was carrying the mallet in his right hand as he approached the conservatory, and even more uneasy by the discrepancy between the size of the shoelace bows in that video of Aspern’s approach and their size in the post-shooting photos of his body.

These oddities brought to mind a digital video issue frequently in the news—deepfake manipulation. Although that technology appeared to have no application to these videos, other forms of manipulation were possible.

He placed another call to Barstow. This time she picked up.

“Sorry I missed your first call. Greta’s on the job. She’s obsessive, so you’re sure to get a precise answer. Obsession can be a good thing, don’t you think?”

“It depends.”

“I agree. Anything else?”

“Can your computer lab test the integrity of video files?”

“There are some basic diagnostics. You have a worry?”

“With all the digital fakery going on these days, it seems worth checking. I’m talking about the videos that were shown in the meeting with Cam Stryker.”

“I’ll call you as soon as we have something.”

He thanked her and ended the call.

As he was about to close down his laptop, a document title in the Recent Activity window caught his eye—“Materials List for Alpaca Shed”—reminding him that there were other areas of his life that needed his attention.

He decided to make a start on the project.

48

The following morning was the Platonic ideal of spring in the Catskills. The early sunlight slanting across the hillsides illuminated countless shades of green. The low pasture was dotted with patches of purple clover. The sun was warm, the breeze was cool, and the scent of lilacs sweetened the air.

He was sitting with Madeleine at the patio table, sharing a breakfast of blueberry pancakes. Every once in a while Madeleine glanced with a smile at the start he’d made the previous afternoon on the shed. The necessary lumber was piled neatly next to the chicken coop. The holes for the corner posts had been dug—no small achievement in the rocky soil—and two of the posts had been set and braced.

“I can help with the next steps,” she said happily. “We can work on it together this weekend.”

Oddly, it was at times like this—when he’d acted like a real husband instead of like a detective who was sharing the house—that he felt his marital shortcomings most acutely.

She was gazing at him as though she were reading his mind. She got up from the table, came around behind him, and kissed him on the back of the neck.

At exactly ten o’clock that morning, he received the first of the phone calls he’d been hoping for.

“Good morning, Detective. This is Greta Vickerz. I have the information for you. You want me to give you first the number of pounds force required, or the method of testing?”

“Good morning, Dr. Vickerz. In whatever order you wish.”

“Method first is more logical, followed by results. First, we reinstalled the metal latch in an undamaged area of the wood. Second, we drilled a small hole in the casket lid and inserted a narrow cable with a bracket on the inside of the lid to hold it in place. Third, we closed the lid and engaged the latch. Fourth, we attached the cable to the laboratory’s spring scale and ratcheted it up until breaking force was achieved, providing force measurement in pounds. You understand?”

“I think so.”

“Then we repeated the procedure, again reinstalling the latch in a second undamaged area. This was to provide a second reading. There was less than ten percent variance in the necessary breaking force, so the results have a good confidence level. You want numbers now?”

“Please.”

“First test, breaking force one hundred fourteen pounds. Second test, one hundred six pounds. Average one hundred ten pounds.”

“So, you’re saying that the original breaking force exerted on the inside of that lid in the mortuary would have been in that neighborhood?”

“I would say with ninety percent confidence that the force would have been between ninety and one hundred thirty pounds.”

“This is helpful. Thank you.”

“All very interesting. If you want, I can investigate further an oddity.”

“Sorry?”

“For testing, we removed the lining from the casket. In the bottom, we observed a hole, seven millimeters in diameter.”

“Part of the original structure of the casket?”

“Drilled later.”

“Any obvious function?”

“No.”

“Too small for an air hole, I would think.”

“Too small, wrong place. Also an air hole in a casket would be . . . hard to understand.”

Like everything else in this case, thought Gurney.

He asked if she could imagine any possible purpose for it. She said no, but she could develop a technical study proposal with a cost estimate. That struck him as a process more likely to raise red flags than produce useful results. The little hole was intriguing, but its relevance was questionable. He thanked her again and ended the call.

He spent some time thinking about the force that Tate had to apply to break open the casket. Considering his damaged physical condition, even the lower end of the range seemed challenging. But his constricted position, an apparent limitation, could have been an advantage, since it was similar to a weight lifter’s bench-press posture. Bottom line, Vickerz’s testing was instructive without resolving anything.

Gurney couldn’t help wondering about that seven-millimeter hole in the bottom of the casket, but his wondering was truncated by another phone call—this one from Hardwick.

“Hey, Sherlock, definitely some odd shit connected to that BMW. I found an outfit down in Montville—calls itself Eleganza Luxury Rentals—specializing in everything from Beemers and Audis up to Bentleys and Lamborghinis. Funny thing happened. I called them last night and told the guy who answered that I was looking to rent a 5 Series BMW, preferably a 530e. He said I was in luck. They had that exact car in dark blue—just returned yesterday after being out for three or four days.”

“That has to be the one. Were you able to get the renter’s name?”

“Good news and bad news. The guy I spoke to was the service manager, not the agent who rented the car. They were just closing, and the agent was gone for the day. So I called back this morning. Got the agent. Totally different story. Very vague. And get this. He claims there was a glitch in the system, and the information on the renter was accidentally deleted. And naturally the agent’s description of him is useless. Normal height, normal weight, ordinary voice, wore a hat, wore sunglasses. Could even have been a woman.”

“Interesting.”

“So, the bad news is we don’t know who rented the car. The good news is the slimebag agent was apparently motivated to fuck up the record system, which suggests that the renter bribed him to hide his identity, which suggests you may be right about the car being used for a shady purpose.”

“Nice to discover I’m moving in the right direction.”

“So the evidence would suggest. But be careful where you step, Davey boy. Pride goeth before the fall. And I’d hate to see you trip into a pile of shit.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

As soon as he ended the call he placed one to Slovak.

“Brad, I need a favor. Remember those three churches over in Bastenburg that had the Dark Angel message scrawled on their doors?”

“Absolutely. We had the uniforms out canvassing for anyone who might’ve seen Tate’s orange Jeep in the neighborhood.”

“We need to go back and ask about a dark blue BMW—and whether anyone can recall anything about the driver. I know these things get hazy fast, but it’s worth a try.”

“This is ringing a bell. Hold on a second, let me bring up the interview reports on the computer.”

A minute or two later, Slovak was back. “I knew it sounded familiar. The manager of an all-night laundromat down the block from one of the churches said there was, quote, ‘one of them fancy BMWs’ in his parking lot the night in question. He noticed it because, ‘Ain’t nobody in Bastenburg got the spare cash for a ride like that.’ We didn’t follow up because we were just looking for people who saw Tate’s Jeep.”

“I need you to pay him a visit and find out if he saw the driver. But keep that between you and me for now.”

“Will do.”

Gurney gave his next call some thought before placing it. He was reluctant to disturb Morgan, but even more reluctant to withhold information that could upend the case conclusion presented to the public.

Morgan picked up on the fourth ring.

“Yeah?” His voice sounded dull as lead.

“Mike? This is Dave Gurney.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry to be bothering you, Mike, but there are some developments in the Russell case that you need to be aware of.”

Morgan didn’t reply.

“Would it be all right if I came to see you?”

“Yeah.”

He asked Morgan for his home address, entered it in his GPS, and set out.

The splendid May morning was largely wasted on him, preoccupied as he was by Morgan’s emotional state, which sounded darker than normal grief.

He’d once told Gurney that his home was in the wilderness outside Larchfield—an apt description, Gurney discovered, as his GPS led him off the county route onto a rutted road that wound its way through several miles of boggy woodland before arriving at a log home in the middle of a small clearing. The lawn needed mowing. Beds of wilted pansies and daffodils separated the lawn from the house.

Gurney pulled up next to Morgan’s Tahoe in front of a covered porch and got out. There were four Adirondack chairs on the porch. Morgan was sitting in one of them. His hair was uncombed, he needed a shave, and his shirt had the wrinkled look of having been slept in.

Gurney sat in the chair nearest him. “How are you doing, Mike?”

Morgan smiled in a way that conveyed only depression. “The case is messed up, right? That what you came to tell me?”

“There’s evidence that suggests it may be more complicated than we thought.”

“More complicated?”

“There are problems with the version given to Cam Stryker.”

“Problems?”

“Serious doubts.”

“Christ.” He shook his head slowly. “It never ends. It just gets worse. Worse and worse.”

Gurney noted a half-empty bottle of bourbon by the leg of Morgan’s chair. He wondered if the man were drunk as well as depressed and grieving.

Morgan coughed weakly, his body shaking. “You heard about Peale suing Fallow? Alleging gross incompetence. Failure to conduct appropriate tests to justify the pronouncement of death. Causing irreparable harm to his funeral home and personal reputation.”

He picked up the bourbon bottle, looked at it, moistened his lips, then put it back. He turned to Gurney. “You suggesting that Aspern isn’t our perp after all?”

“All we know at the moment is that someone seems to have gone to considerable trouble to incriminate him.”

“What about that bloody mess at Lorinda’s? Wasn’t he trying to kill her?”

“The situation may not be what it seems to be.”

Morgan’s eyes widened slowly. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure I do, either. I do know that Aspern got a call from Lorinda a few hours before she shot him, and his phone is missing. I’m thinking he might have recorded the call, and that’s the reason it’s missing.”

“Lorinda? You’re saying . . . what? That she set Aspern up? That she . . . murdered him?”

“I’m saying it’s possible. With an accomplice. She couldn’t have done it alone.”

Morgan picked up his bottle again. This time he opened it and took a long wincing swallow before putting it back. “You have any idea who this accomplice could be?”

“Nothing solid. But I did make an interesting discovery. It looks like Hanley Bullock, the principal who was involved with fifteen-year-old Lorinda, was murdered ten years ago—I suspect at the request of either Angus Russell or Lorinda herself. It was right around the time of their marriage.”

Morgan looked like he was trying to see through a fog. “What’s that . . . got to do with . . . anything?”

“The hit man was either Otis Strane or Silas Gant. I believe they were both present, and there’s reason to believe there was a long-standing relationship between the Russells and Gant.”

There was a panicky edge on Morgan’s voice. “I don’t . . . I mean . . . so what?”

“You asked me who Lorinda’s accomplice might be.”

“Silas Gant?”

“If he provided that kind of service before, why not again?”

Morgan picked up his bottle and held it on the arm of his chair without opening it. He appeared to be gazing into it as if it might hold the answer to a question. He cleared his throat. “You think Lorinda could be . . . that deeply involved . . . with Gant?”

“Why not? It could be a mutually beneficial relationship. She’d get an iceman to remove inconvenient people from her world, and he’d get sex, money, or whatever else she might be willing to offer.”

A long minute passed before Morgan spoke again. Gurney had the strange sense that something inside the man was collapsing.

“You know all about the mess I created in the NYPD. Maybe Carol knew, too. I’m not sure. Even if she did, she was still willing to come up to Larchfield with me. Let the past be the past. New life. Everything was good. Then, about a year ago . . . the addiction came back. The obsession. Full force. Crazier than ever.”

“Crazier in what way?”

“The woman I got involved with. The choice I made. A god-awful choice. The worst. Absolutely the worst.”

“Lorinda Russell?”

Morgan’s jaw went slack. He stared at Gurney. “How did you know?”

“Just a guess.”

“Now you’re telling me she’s in bed with Silas Gant, and they murdered Aspern.”

“I can’t prove that, Mike. I’m just filling you in on how it looks.”

“Gant is the evil piece of shit Carol was at war with.”

Gurney said nothing.

“You always get to the ugly truth. You dig it up and drag it into the daylight.”

Gurney waited a moment, then asked, “Who initiated the affair?”

Morgan blinked, refocusing. “I thought I did. Now I don’t know.”

“What do you think she wanted from you?”

He managed a weak shrug. “I thought it was about sex.”

“But now you’re not so sure?”

“I’m not sure of anything.”

“What else might she have wanted from you?”

“I have no idea,” said Morgan, a bit too quickly.

“I’ll put it another way. Did she ever talk to you about wanting anything in her life to be different from the way it was?”

Morgan stared into his bottle of half-finished bourbon as if looking for any answer other than the one that he couldn’t evade. “Yes,” he finally said, almost inaudibly. “She talked about how much brighter things would be . . . if it weren’t for Angus.”

Gurney let Morgan sit with the echo and implication of his own words.

“You think she was asking me . . . to make that happen?”

“What do you think?”

49

As Gurney drove home to Walnut Crossing, he pondered the likely result of Lorinda’s view of what would make her life brighter—namely, that she’d finally found someone more willing than Morgan to grasp what she was asking for and to make it happen.

Someone like Silas Gant.

Gurney recognized that he was on dangerous ground with this idea—in no small part because of his eagerness to embrace it. He wanted the multiple murderer to be Gant. It was time to sit down again with Jack Hardwick, ultimate skeptic.

The man answered his call and agreed to meet him at Abelard’s in forty-five minutes.

Along the way Gurney called Slovak to find out if Aspern’s phone or his three-hundred-dollar bottle of wine had been located. Slovak reported that they hadn’t, despite a careful search of Aspern’s house, garage, and three cars. Although Gurney knew their absence proved nothing, it was encouragingly consistent with the case narrative coming together in his mind.

When he arrived at Abelard’s, Hardwick was sitting at their regular table and had already secured a large black coffee for himself and a double espresso for Gurney.

“Thanks, Jack. I appreciate your coming.”

“Did I correctly intuit from what you said on the phone that the status of Mayor Turd-Eyes has been officially changed from villain to victim?”

“Not officially. Not yet. But I’m envisioning a whole new storyline for the case, and I wanted to get your opinion.”

“I can’t bear the fucking suspense.”

Gurney took a sip of his espresso and gathered his thoughts.

“Okay, here goes. It’s the same as the official version up to the point where Billy Tate walks out of the mortuary—but instead of taking his proposal for killing Angus to Chandler Aspern, he takes it to Lorinda Russell. She loves the idea, but she has an even better one. She calls in a hit man to kill Tate, and then kill Angus—using Tate’s fingerprints and the scalpels he stole from the mortuary to create crime-scene confusion and all the ‘walking dead’ nonsense. The hit man, wearing Tate’s clothes and driving his Jeep, also kills Mary Kane and Linda Mason, for the reasons we assumed they were killed. Then, with his help, Lorinda adds the brilliant twist of setting up Aspern for what would appear to be a self-defense killing—in order to end the police investigation of the other three murders and get rid of an aggressive legal antagonist at the same time.”

Hardwick’s acid-reflux expression was intense.

“You have a problem with this scenario?” asked Gurney.

“Too fucking clever, too fucking complicated, too many fucking spots where the train could’ve gone off the tracks.”

“You want to explain that?”

“First, tell me how you think they set up that self-defense ruse at the end.”

“Lorinda told us she called Aspern to discuss their dispute over his lease, and that the discussion ended badly. We know from the carrier’s records that she did make the call, but we have no way of verifying her version of the conversation. In fact, it may have been a lot friendlier than she claimed. She may have extended an offer he couldn’t refuse. Now that Angus is out of the picture, I’m sure we can work this out in an amicable way, et cetera. I suspect she might have emphasized the amicability angle by inviting him to have dinner with her. Aspern may have recorded the call, but his phone seems to have evaporated. Interestingly, he bought a very special bottle of wine later that afternoon, and I’m thinking it was to bring to Lorinda’s. You with this so far?”

“So far, it’s the fucking definition of hypothetical. But keep going.”

“Aspern arrives for dinner around seven o’clock. He and Lorinda have a few drinks. Maybe they open his fancy wine. At some point when he’s nice and relaxed, her hit-man accomplice—same one who killed Tate—comes into the room behind Aspern and renders him unconscious, probably with a blow to the base of the skull. Then—wearing Tate’s hoodie, jeans, and sneakers—he drives the vehicle Aspern arrived in back to Aspern’s house, gets Tate’s Jeep from its place in the woods, and drives to the point where the trail opens into the lawn by the conservatory. You following this so far?”

“What happens if Aspern wakes up while the accomplice is gone?”

“A forceful enough blow to the base of the skull would have kept him immobile for quite a while, if not paralyzed him. And he might have been tied up.”

“Okay, so the accomplice is in the Jeep at the trail opening. What now?”

“Now is where the security camera video takes over. We see a hooded figure emerge from the Jeep and walk across the lawn toward the house, holding a mallet. He passes out of the camera’s range, breaks the glass panel in the conservatory door, and enters the house. While he’s taking off his hoodie, jeans, and sneakers, Lorinda is stripping Aspern. Then they put Tate’s clothes on him and drag him into the conservatory.”

“But he must have been shot standing up, for the bullet trajectories to turn out the way they did. How’d they manage that?”

“That had me stumped. Then I remembered seeing a device in the conservatory for moving heavy tropical plants—a hoist with ratcheted pulleys.”

“You figure they used that to stand him up and shoot him?”

“It’s a possibility. It’s also interesting that the shooter placed one of the shots through Aspern’s lower jaw—creating a rear exit wound that would destroy any evidence of an earlier blow to the base of the skull.”

Hardwick’s acid reflux expression had shifted to his more common skeptical frown. “So, after he was shot twice, they dumped him on the floor, facedown, like he’d been coming at Lorinda when she shot him and his momentum carried him forward?”

“That’s the way it looks. The accomplice leaves. Lorinda gets rid of evidence of Aspern’s earlier presence in the house—for example, the wine bottle that disappeared along with his phone. She calls Mike Morgan and announces that she just shot Billy Tate. And everyone later swallows that as an understandable misidentification as a result of Aspern being in Tate’s clothes, limited moonlight visibility, and the body ending up facedown on the floor.”

“Clever as hell,” said Hardwick. “Almost too fucking clever. But it’s conceivable. Not goddamn likely, but more conceivable than the first part of the story—where Tate supposedly goes to Lorinda with an unsolicited offer to kill her husband, and she immediately calls in her friendly neighborhood hit man, who grabs a handful of scalpels and starts slicing throats. That strikes me as fucking nuts.”

“The logistics of that do seem tangled, but I think the basic thrust is valid.”

“The thrust being what exactly?”

“Originally, we thought Tate was the killer. Then we thought Aspern was the killer, trying to make it look like it was Tate. Now I’m pretty sure it was a third individual, trying to make it look like it was Aspern.”

“This third guy being Lorinda’s hit-man accomplice?”

“Yes.”

“And the winner’s name is . . . ?

“My guess is Silas Gant.”

“Based on what? A ten-year-old story about Hanley Bullock dying while being visited by a neat guy with gray hair and a rough guy with ‘OTIS’ tattooed on his knuckles?”

“That, and the fact that Gant’s church was getting major donations from Angus Russell—more likely for services rendered than from the goodness of his heart.”

“Fucking hell, Gurney, you’re not just doing a dance out at the end of a fragile branch, there’s no goddamn branch at all!” Hardwick picked up his coffee mug and took a large swallow.

Gurney shrugged. “I may have the logistics wrong. The truth may be simpler than I’m making it out to be. But I’m convinced there’s an evil relationship at the heart of what’s been happening in Larchfield. And I’d like to prove it.”

“Laudable goal, Sherlock. Any clue on how to make it happen?”

Gurney finished his double espresso before answering in a lowered voice. “Blackmail might be an interesting approach.”

Hardwick leaned back in his creaky chair, apparently giving the suggestion serious thought. “Could be a profitable approach, considering the resources at the disposal of the wealthy widow.”

Gurney sometimes found it difficult to know when Hardwick was joking. “Putting aside the major felony of actual blackmail, I think a pretense of blackmail could provide an interesting window into Lorinda’s guilt or innocence.”

“Sounds to me like you’re putting aside a pot-of-gold opportunity that the good Lord has placed before us. But so be it. Tell me more.”

“I’m thinking we could send a text message to Lorinda from an anonymous prepaid phone. A message that sounds like it’s coming from someone who’s secretly been keeping an eye on her—and who not only saw what happened to Chandler Aspern in the greenhouse, but has photographs of it. The message could conclude with a request for a personal meeting at the Russell house—say tomorrow evening at eight o’clock—along with a demand for ten thousand dollars.”

Hardwick smiled. “Nasty. How do you think she’ll react?”

“If she’s telling the truth about the Aspern shooting, her natural reaction would be to call the police and report receiving a baseless extortion threat. If she’s lying about the shooting, I suspect she’ll bring in some private muscle to deal with her greedy pen pal.”

“You’re imagining the private muscle will be Silas Gant?”

“Or Cousin Otis.”

Hardwick sucked at his teeth. “So, who gets to stand under the portico with his dick in his hand, pretending to be the blackmailer, while Reverend Silas and Cousin Otis lock and load?”

“Nobody. That’s the beauty of it. There’s no actual confrontation involved. A confrontation would be a disaster. The goal is just to discover which option Lorinda chooses—police or private muscle. And if she chooses the latter, it’ll be interesting to see who shows up to help solve her problem.”

“So we’re just observing?”

“Right.”

“From where? The top of a fucking tree?”

“We’re in the twenty-first century, Jack. Ever hear of a device called a drone?”

“Shit, Gurney, the kind of drone you need for serious remote surveillance is no goddamn toy. It’s got to be silent, super-stable, GPS-guidable, with hi-res video transmission, and at least a half hour to an hour flight time. You happen to have one of those in your glove compartment?”

“I don’t, but I’m thinking you could arrange an emergency overnight loan from your friends at the NYSP.”

“Fuck.”

“I knew I could rely on you.”

Hardwick gulped down the rest of his coffee.

50

On his way to Walnut Crossing, Gurney stopped at a mom-and-pop electronics shop in a roadside mall and made a cash purchase of a prepaid phone with a bundle of minutes.

As soon as he got home, he got a pad from the den and wrote out a rough draft of the message, along the lines of what he’d described at Abelard’s. Then he put the draft aside, intending to come back to it later with fresh eyes and make final adjustments to the wording before texting it to Lorinda’s cell number.

In the meantime, he got out the copy of the case file he’d received from Slovak and went to the section that dealt with the details of the security camera video from the night of the Aspern shooting. He was hoping it contained contact information for the company that installed the camera.

It did. It even included a Larchfield-area phone number, which he called.

After providing his name and the badge number on his LPD credentials, he was transferred to the company’s installation manager.

Yes, he was familiar with the details of the Russell job.

Yes, only one camera had been installed.

Yes, that was unusual on a house of that size.

Yes, additional cameras had been recommended, but Mrs. Russell insisted on proceeding gradually.

Yes, Mrs. Russell had chosen the location for the first installation. In fact, she’d even specified the camera’s angle and field of view.

Gurney emphasized that these inquiries were confidential aspects of an ongoing investigation and thanked the manager for his help.

Like the disappearance of the phone and the bottle of wine, the installation information by itself proved nothing. Lorinda’s evident manipulation of the situation could be rendered meaningless by a defense attorney. However, it provided support for his growing suspicion and additional justification for the sting-like operation he was about to set in motion.

Rarely had he been so sure of anyone’s complicity in a murder, with so little hard evidence. He was certain that Lorinda would fail to call the police. About Gant’s personal involvement in Aspern’s death, he was less certain. He was hoping the following night’s surveillance would add some clarity.

Gurney’s next call was to Slovak.

“Brad, I need to examine Aspern’s house. Can you send someone out there tomorrow morning to unlock it?”

“Do you think we missed something?”

“Nothing specific. In fact, I have no idea what I’m looking for. It’s just an itch I sometimes get—to walk through the world of a victim or a perp and see whatever I can see.”

“Okay, I’ll make sure the place is unlocked. If you want help with your walk-through, let me know.”

Gurney’s “walk-through” itch was real enough. But he also wanted to use the Aspern property as the control site for the drone. It was isolated, yet not too far from the Russell property, so if some malfunction caused the drone to come down in the intervening woods, he could easily retrieve it. And what he’d told Slovak would serve as a useful cover story in the event that he was seen there.

With that taken care of, he returned to his rough draft of the message to Lorinda. He read it over several times and made a few small changes. Then he entered it as a text on the anonymous phone and sent it to Lorinda’s cell number.

A simple action—with the potential for game-changing consequences.

He intended to pay a visit to Morgan the following morning to fill him in on the operation. Despite Morgan’s emotional state, letting him know about a major investigative initiative remained a formal necessity.

But that was a task for tomorrow. Seeing the case demanded nothing else of him for the remainder of the afternoon, he turned his attention to the alpaca shed.

By the time Madeleine got home from the clinic, he’d cut the lumber to the right sizes for the stud walls, rafters, and door framing and he’d restacked it, ready for use—without, however, proceeding with the actual construction, which he knew she wanted to be involved in.

His accomplishment left him feeling relaxed and pleasantly virtuous. Their dinner together was happy and stress-free, with frequent bursts of laughter. They headed for bed that evening earlier than usual.

He also woke up earlier than usual, well before dawn.

The euphoria of the previous evening had been replaced by the uncertainties of the Larchfield murders. He knew that trying to get back to sleep with that tangle of questions on his mind was pointless.

He showered and dressed and made himself a cup of coffee.

At daybreak he was on the patio with a second cup, imagining how Morgan might react to the explanation of the trap being set for Lorinda—and how Lorinda might react to the text he’d sent her.

At sunrise he heard his phone ringing in the house. He hurried inside to get to it before it woke Madeleine. He was surprised to see Kyra Barstow’s name on the screen.

“What’s up?”

“I asked Keith Boron, one of our computer techs, to analyze those video files you asked about. He told me this morning that he’s confident of the integrity of ninety-nine percent of the digital content, but there’s one percent that bothers him.”

“Bothers him how?”

“He says there’s a three-second sonic anomaly in the mortuary video.”

“What kind of sonic anomaly?”

“He said that the sound of the casket breaking open—the sound of the wood splintering—created a peculiar audio-frequency footprint.”

“What might that mean?”

“He’s performing additional tests to get to the bottom of it. I just wanted you to know that he found something odd, since you asked for the analysis. I’ll call as soon as I hear more.”

The chance of returning to bed at that point for anything resembling sweet dreams was zero. Apart from the jarring effect of one more oddity being added to a case already bursting with them, he’d promised Madeleine that he’d spend the morning working with her on the shed.

The challenge would be to stay in the moment—to keep his mind on leveling and squaring, screwing and hammering—rather than slipping off into the world of murderers and sonic anomalies.

When noon finally arrived, he concluded that he’d reached his goal of remaining focused on his physical efforts about half the time; even that was quite an achievement. He wished he could pay as close attention to domestic activities as he did to crime scenes, but his brain just wasn’t built that way.

In any event, the shed had now grown into a recognizable structure, needing only exterior siding and waterproof roofing to be complete. Madeleine was clearly happy with their joint endeavor—a mood that carried over into their lunch together.

As he was getting into the Outback at three that afternoon to set out for Larchfield, she was making a list of flowers she wanted to plant around the old henhouse and the new shed.

She came over to his car door. “I’m thinking mainly cornflowers and hollyhocks on the sunny sides and begonias on the shady sides. What do you think?”

“Sounds good.”

“Do you even know what they look like?”

“I’m picturing . . . something colorful.”

She sighed, leaned into the car, and kissed him.

“Be careful,” she said with sudden seriousness.

51

Number one on Gurney’s mental list of things to do in Larchfield was the visit to Morgan. On his way there he stopped for gas and called Morgan’s cell number. The call went to voicemail, and he left a message saying he was en route. He couldn’t help wondering what condition Morgan would be in. None of the likely possibilities were good, and the man’s failure to answer the phone was not encouraging.

With an ominous feeling, he drove on.

The spring weather was in the midst of another reversal, and by the time he reached Morgan’s house the blue skies of the morning had given way to dismal clouds. In the gloom the wilted daffodils in front of the porch looked like dead weeds.

There was no response to his knocking on the door. He knocked again, harder.

“Mike, it’s Dave Gurney!”

The door opened, and Morgan stared out at him—still unshaven, his hair uncombed, his gaze emotionless. He was wearing a food-stained tee shirt, jeans with the fly open, and one blue sock. He smelled of alcohol and sweat.

Gurney tried to smile. “Hello, Mike. Did you get my message?”

Morgan blinked and shook his head.

“Can I come in? Or would you rather come out?”

“Come out. Get some air.” He stepped out on the porch, took a deep breath, and sat down heavily in the nearest Adirondack chair. Gurney took the one next to it.

“I’m sorry to be bothering you like this, Mike, but I want you to be aware of a specific effort I’m making to verify the suspicions I have about the case.”

Morgan closed his eyes, then opened them. “Suspicions about Lorinda and Gant?”

“Yes. And anyone else who may have been involved in the murders.”

“You’re sure about Lorinda.” It was mostly a statement, with the hint of a question.

“Apart from Hilda Russell, she’s the only person alive who benefits from Angus’s death. And if Aspern’s death was set up the way I think it was, she was part of that, too.”

“That’s what you came to tell me?”

“I came to tell you that I have a way of testing her to see if I’m right.”

Morgan raised his head in a show of interest, and Gurney explained his plan for evaluating Lorinda’s reaction to a would-be blackmailer.

Morgan nodded slowly. “You want to see who she brings in . . . to handle the problem?”

“That, but mainly I wanted to see if she’d call the police when she received the text, as an innocent person would—which she still hasn’t done, even though I sent it to her yesterday.” He took a printed-out copy of the text from his pocket and handed it to Morgan.

He read it and reread it, then lowered it into his lap. “You think she’ll bring in Gant?”

“Yes, if I’m right about him being the family hit man. Or someone else, if I’m not. Either way, I’ll end up knowing more than I do now.”

Morgan nodded and looked away. His gaze settled for a while on the bed of withered daffodils. Then he picked up the copy of the text to Lorinda from his lap and read it again.

“It’s a horror show,” he said softly. “Everything. Life. A horror show.”

After a long silence, Gurney made an open-ended offer of help, to which Morgan had no reaction. So he said goodbye and left.

When he reached the end of the dirt road that connected Morgan’s property to the county road, he stopped and entered the address of Aspern’s Harrow Hill house in his GPS.

As he was about to set out again, his phone rang. It was Hardwick.

“Yes, Jack?”

“Where am I supposed to bring this thing?”

“You’re referring to the drone?”

“No, my giant dick. The fuck do you think I’m referring to?”

52

The route to the north side of Harrow Hill, the Aspern side, took Gurney through a landscape darker, wilder, less inhabited than the Waterview Drive approach to the Russell side. It had—like the vast, forested rise of Harrow Hill itself—a lonely, forbidding quality.

It was a feeling that only grew stronger as he followed Aspern’s mile-long driveway up through the dense evergreen woods and into the sunless clearing that surrounded the house—a large, muddy-brown, shingle-style structure with a distinctly joyless personality.

After walking around it and locating an open porch that appeared suitable for launching and controlling the drone, he decided to go inside. The front door was, as requested, unlocked.

The interior was upscale and impersonal, more like a hotel than a home. Open desk and bureau drawers, as well as open cabinets and closets, were evidence of Slovak’s search for Aspern’s phone and bottle of wine. The place told Gurney relatively little about its late occupant—beyond his being conventionally expensive in his tastes, with no apparent interest in art, music, or literature. There were no decorative objects, no photographs, nothing frivolous or quirky. There was a stillness about the place, outside and inside—not the stillness of ordinary repose, but the stillness of a cemetery.

Gurney continued his exploration of the house until he heard the unmistakable growl of Hardwick’s GTO.

They met on the open porch.

Hardwick opened a large aluminum anti-shock carrying case and gingerly removed a serious-looking quadcopter drone, a controller, a tablet computer, a battery charger, three batteries, and a manual.

“This little mother is a twelve-grand piece of equipment. Carbon fiber construction. Hasselblad lenses. GPS and GLONASS satellite guidance. Retractable landing gear. Sixty-minute flight time. External monitor feed.”

“Should we start studying that manual, or did your contact give you instructions?”

“He did. Good thing, because the fucking manual is incomprehensible. If I can manage to remember what he said, there’s at least a fifty-fifty chance I won’t crash the damn thing.”

Hardwick plugged the controller and the drone batteries into the multiple-input charger and the charger into the outlet on the porch.

Gurney checked his watch. It was 5:10 p.m.

“How long does it take?”

“The man told me an hour. Hopefully he wasn’t full of shit.”

At 6:05 p.m. the red light on the charger turned green.

Hardwick set up the tablet as a supplementary monitor with a live video feed, inserted a charged battery into the drone, then moved the drone out onto the lawn. “What time you want to start surveilling the Russell place?”

“Seven fifteen should be good. Based on the text I sent her, Lorinda will be expecting the blackmailer at eight. If she’s bringing in help, there’s a good chance they’ll be arriving somewhere in that forty-five-minute window. Between now and then, you might want to do a practice run, get a feel for the equipment.”

Resting the supplementary tablet monitor on the wide porch railing, Hardwick manipulated the buttons and levers on the controller. The four drone propellers began turning. With a muted whirring sound, the drone rose slowly into the air until it was well over the height of the tallest trees in the area. With Gurney and Hardwick observing its progress on the monitor, it proceeded to the preset GPS coordinates of a location with a wide-angle view of the front and one side of the Russell house, the allée, and the open entry gate.

Gurney suggested that there was more than enough clearance above the treetops to allow the drone’s altitude to be lowered in order to see under the portico. Hardwick made it happen. After experimenting with a number of alternate angles and zoom settings, the device was given a return-to-base command, and three minutes later it descended gently to the lawn.

At 7:10 p.m., responding to Hardwick’s controller inputs, the drone rose again into the overcast sky and flew to its intended position.

The transmitting video was remarkably sharp. The low light level from the dense overcast had no effect on the vibrancy of the image. Even the darker area beneath the portico was clearly detailed.

For the next half hour, nothing happened. That changed at 7:41.

A black motorcycle bearing a leather-clad rider with a black helmet passed through the gate into the allée and proceeded slowly toward the portico. It was followed by another, then another, until a total of seven had entered the estate grounds. They continued in single file under the portico and around the front corner of the house.

Hardwick was giving the tablet screen a squinty look. “You figure one of those fuckheads is Gant?”

“That would be my guess. The helmets make it hard to tell.”

Again in single file, but this time on foot, they came back around to the front of the house and up the wide marble steps while removing their helmets—six burly men with backwoods beards, followed by a smaller, clean-shaven man with a silvery pompadour.

The front door opened. As they went into the house, Gurney caught a glimpse of Lorinda in the foyer light, wearing a cream-colored jacket.

Again, all was peaceful on the tablet screen. A few birds flew by, heading for their evening roosts.

“Okay, Sherlock, I guess that’s it. You see what you wanted to see?”

“I think so. Lorinda was threatened with blackmail by someone who claimed to have incriminating photos of Aspern’s death, and she called Gant instead of the police. And Gant arrived with muscle to spare.”

“You figure that means she and Gant killed Aspern?”

“I’d say there’s an awfully good chance. You don’t think so?”

“Suppose she doesn’t trust cops. Just wants to handle the situation her own way. Keep control of the outcome. Attitude like that is fucking genetic, you know what I mean?”

“I do. But I think we can agree that what we saw on that screen was not a major indicator of innocence.”

Hardwick spit over the railing of the porch. “Fine. Can we get out of here now? I’m getting eaten alive by the goddamn gnats.”

Gurney nodded. “Bring the drone down, pack it up, and we’re done.”

Hardwick picked up the controller, checked the settings, and—

“Whoa!” cried Gurney, pointing at the tablet.

Hardwick leaned closer to the screen. “What the fuck?”

A dark vehicle, barely visible through the trees, had just come to a stop at the open entry gate.

“Can you reposition the drone for a better view?” asked Gurney.

Keeping an eye on the screen, Hardwick began adjusting the levers and dials on the controller. As the drone moved, its field of view changed, but none of the new perspectives offered a clearer view of the vehicle.

“Who the hell is that?” said Hardwick.

A dark figure emerged from the vehicle and started to move through the allée toward the house. Although the allée trees were in the way, the view here was less obstructed, and when the figure emerged into the open area beneath the portico, there was no obstruction at all. The screen showed an individual in a black, hooded, ankle-length poncho, standing perfectly still, approximately twenty feet from the steps leading up to the front door. Gurney was reminded of the Grim Reaper—this figure lacked only the scythe.

The door opened, and a big man in black leathers came out onto the steps, followed by another, and another, until six in all had arrayed themselves in a wide semicircle facing the motionless figure in the poncho. All six were carrying assault rifles. A seventh man then emerged and stood in front of the open doorway. A warm glow from the foyer behind him highlighted his silver-gray hair.

“It’s Gant, no doubt about it,” said Hardwick, “but what the fuck’s going on?”

Gurney had a sinking feeling about what was going on. A disaster that he’d failed to anticipate.

Gant appeared to be speaking—almost certainly to the figure in the poncho. Because of the hood, it was impossible to see if there was any response.

Gant spoke again, and his six companions began to raise their weapons.

There was a sudden movement under the poncho as the individual crouched, swiveling rapidly from left to right and back again, the poncho vibrating along with the movement, as one after another of the big men were knocked backward onto the marble steps.

Gurney heard the sound of an automatic weapon firing steadily for four or five seconds, the sound coming not via the drone, which wasn’t equipped for audio transmission, but directly through the half mile of forest that separated the Russell house from Aspern’s.

On the screen, Gant was now returning fire with a pistol.

The figure in the poncho staggered sideways—dropping what looked to Gurney like an Uzi with an extended magazine—and sank to his knees.

Gant took a step forward, raising his pistol slowly in a two-handed grip. As he was leveling it on his kneeling target, the side of the poncho flew up, revealing something that looked like a narrow-tubed leaf-blower. A stream of flame shot out of it, reaching Gant and instantly engulfing him.

Gant staggered backward, dropping the pistol, waving his arms wildly, falling through the open doorway behind him, pursued by that stream of flame, now reaching into the center hall of the house.

The wounded figure in the poncho struggled to an upright position. Stumbling forward, he turned the blast of fire on each of the men sprawled on the steps, then collapsed backward like a felled tree. The weapon was now pointing straight up, its long tongue of flame igniting the underside of the portico roof and cascading back down on the immobile figure in the poncho.

Seven burning bodies lay outside the Russell mansion. Inside, the fire was rapidly taking hold.

“Holy shit,” muttered Hardwick, staring openmouthed at the screen. “Who the fuck is the crazy motherfucker with the Uzi and the flamethrower?”

Gurney felt sick. He wished he didn’t know the answer.

“Mike Morgan.”

53

Gurney had to think fast. He could imagine the pointed second-guessing and blame-assigning that would go on at various official levels, including the DA’s office, regarding what was intended to be a safe investigatory ploy. But he realized if the drone element were removed from the equation . . . and if Morgan were to bear posthumous responsibility, as he surely should, for what happened . . . then there might still be a way of extracting persuasive evidence of Lorinda’s guilt from the hideous debacle.

He called Larchfield PD and spoke to the night-shift desk sergeant.

“This is Dave Gurney. I’m at the Aspern house on Harrow Hill. I’m calling to report gunfire in the area. My guess is a single automatic weapon with a large magazine. The sound came from the direction of the Russell house. I’m heading over there now through the woods.”

Hardwick meanwhile had retrieved the drone and was packing it in its carrying case, along with its accessories. Gurney told him to make a separate copy of the stored video, in the event that it might someday be needed, then delete the original file along with any related GPS data. “Then get out of here before the troops start swarming the area. I’ll meet them at the Russell place and make sure they come to the right conclusions about what happened there, based on the evidence on the ground.”

Hardwick left without another word.

Gurney brought up an off-road navigation app on his phone, entered the GPS coordinates for the Russell house, and hurried off in the direction it indicated. A few minutes later he called Larchfield PD again. He reported seeing an orange glow in the low clouds ahead, a likely sign of a major fire, and directed that all available fire and rescue equipment be dispatched ASAP.

Ten minutes later, when he emerged onto the back lawn of the Russell mansion, the fire had become a monster. Its shifting red and orange glare shone through all the windows Gurney could see. It sounded like a high wind through a thicket, its crackling like the snapping of branches. Flames were blowing out through an open rear window over a bed of tulips, already withered from the heat.

He ran around to the front of the house. The acrid smoke there carried the odor of gasoline and burnt flesh.

He counted six smoldering bodies splayed out in a loose arc across the marble steps and one on the ground under the charred portico. Near that seventh body there was an Uzi with a large aftermarket magazine. The body was Mike Morgan’s—not that it was easy to tell, since his head and upper body were burned to the point of no longer appearing human. His left hand, however, had escaped the burning gasoline that had descended on him from the geyser his flamethrower had produced in its final vertical position; its stubby fingertips, nails bitten to the quick, were all too recognizable.

With no protective clothing, Gurney was finding the heat from the open doorway of the burning house unbearable, and he retreated to the allée. Further now from the fire’s roar, he could hear the sirens of the slowly approaching emergency vehicles.

Seeing that Morgan’s Tahoe was blocking the gateway to the grounds, Gurney hurried over to move it, only to discover that Morgan had taken the key. No matter, he realized; one of the fire trucks could push it out of the way.

Then another thought occurred to him. Since Morgan was responsible for turning an information-gathering effort into this multiple-homicide apocalypse, it would simplify the investigation to place the initiating text in the hands of the investigators, ensuring that they would understand the preamble to the carnage. He took the anonymous phone out of his pocket—the phone from which the “blackmail” text had been sent to Lorinda—wiped off his fingerprints, and dropped it on the ground near the Tahoe. If anyone misconstrued the text to mean that Morgan had actual blackmail in mind, Gurney was sure he could persuade them otherwise.

The first arrivals were two Larchfield PD cruisers with two uniformed cops in each, followed by Slovak in his Dodge Charger. Leaving their vehicles at the entry gate behind the Tahoe, all five entered the grounds with their weapons drawn.

Gurney stood still, hands open and away from his body, until Slovak recognized him and came running over.

“Jesus, Dave, what the hell’s happening?”

“Looks like there was a shoot-out between Chief Morgan and half a dozen of Gant’s Patriarchs. One of Morgan’s hands is still wrapped around a flamethrower, which probably started the fire. Everyone out here is dead.”

Slovak looked around in wide-eyed amazement, horror, and excitement. “Is there anyone in the house?”

“We should assume Lorinda, until we find out otherwise. Also, I counted seven motorcycles in back of the house, but only six bodies on the ground, in addition to Morgan’s. So the seventh rider may be in the house. Beyond that, I have no idea. I looked for a way in, but the ground floor access points are all blocked by the fire.”

Slovak now was staring openmouthed at the bodies, repeating “Jesus” to himself and rubbing his scalp with both hands.

Gurney put a steadying hand on Slovak’s shoulder. “Look, Brad, you’re the ranking officer here. You need to take charge of the scene. If all those sirens I hear are any indication, this place is going to be an operational madhouse in a few minutes. I suggest you cordon off the area around the bodies and keep the fire engines to either side. Be sure to station one of your guys at the gate to keep a record of who enters and leaves. You’ve got a huge crime scene here and you can’t let it get out of control.”

“Right. Okay. Right. But . . . Chief Morgan? In a shoot-out? With Gant’s Patriarchs?”

“That’s the way it looks. I was over in Aspern’s house when I heard gunfire coming from this direction. I called headquarters, then got over here as fast as I could. What I saw when I arrived is what you see now.”

“He had a flamethrower?”

“Yes. Maybe the one confiscated from Randall Fleck.”

Soon the other vehicles began arriving, sirens blaring—Bastenburg, state police, and sheriff’s department cruisers; two EMT ambulances; another Larchfield cruiser; and finally a thousand-gallon pumper truck from the Larchfield Fire Department and another from Bastenburg.

Gurney remained at the periphery of the action, occasionally making sure that Slovak’s grasp of the situation was entirely consistent with the facts conveyed by the drone, without including anything beyond what could be seen or inferred from the evidence in front of them. It was a tricky balancing act.

He was pleased to see that one of the officers had found the phone on the ground and brought it to the attention of Slovak—who then mentioned it to Gurney, who agreed that it could be important.

Gurney was starting to ask if Barstow’s forensic team had been called in yet when he was stopped dead by a wavering scream piercing through the roar of the fire. He turned toward the house just as a second-floor casement window came flying open.

Lorinda Russell, the fire at her back and the sleeves of her cream-white jacket in flames, was trying to climb through the opening. She had one leg out when her hair went up in a sudden blaze. With a strangled screech of pain, she toppled back into the burning room. That final, dying cry was so dreadful—so razor-sharp in its agony—he feared he would never be free of it.

54

The unnatural May weather went overnight from merely dismal to raw and blustery.

“It’s more like winter than spring,” muttered Gurney, gazing out through the tightly shut French doors toward the old apple tree, whose few remaining blossoms were disintegrating in the wind.

Madeleine was looking at him over the rim of her coffee mug, which she was holding in both hands to warm them. “You want to talk about it?”

“The weather?”

“Last night’s insanity. Isn’t that what’s on your mind?”

It was, of course, very much on his mind, as it had been all through a restless night and into the morning.

“I’m not sure where to begin.”

She lowered her mug to the table. “With what’s bothering you the most.”

He took a moment to collect his thoughts. “I had a bright idea for discovering how Lorinda Russell would react to an extortion attempt by someone claiming to know that the shooting of Chandler Aspern wasn’t what it appeared to be. My idea turned into a nightmare.”

“I know. You told me all about it at two o’clock this morning.”

“I just can’t get it out of my head that I concocted this plan, and nine people ended up dead.”

“Was that your goal?”

“Of course not.”

“Was it something you imagined could happen?”

“No.”

“Why did it happen?”

“Morgan hijacked the plan for his own purpose.”

“What purpose was that?”

Gurney looked back out at the swaying branches of the apple tree. “My guess is that he wanted to make up for his own selfish behavior, his own mistakes, by killing the bad guys and going out in a blaze of glory. Or maybe he was feeling trapped and angry at himself and wanted to commit suicide in the most destructive way possible. Who the hell knows?”

“Do you feel responsible for his actions?”

“No.”

“Then what part of it can’t you let go of?”

He lifted his coffee mug, then put it down.

“Maybe I’m uncomfortable with the way I’m finessing the facts. At the scene last night, I avoided disclosing that I set up the trap. I shifted responsibility for the idea to Morgan by dropping the phone I used for my text to Lorinda near his vehicle. I told myself that raising my hand and claiming credit for the idea would only suck me into the murderous mess Morgan created—without my admission adding any clarity to the investigation.”

“And that has you tied up in knots?”

“Yes.”

“For his own selfish, erratic, suicidal reasons Morgan subverted your plan into a flaming disaster, and you’re bothered by the fact that you’re not broadcasting your ownership of the original version of the idea?”

Gurney sighed uncomfortably. “Yes.”

“Why does it bother you that you’re not accepting responsibility for something that is, in point of fact, not your responsibility?”

“Maybe because I’m being less than truthful, less than open about my part in it.”

She stared at him. “My God, do you have any idea how absurd that is?”

He didn’t reply.

“Perfection is a direction, not a goal. And perfectionism is a vice, not a virtue. You’re a human being, doing the best he can. And by the way, your ‘best’ is head and shoulders over most people’s. But you keep thinking it’s not good enough. Do you honestly believe that you should stand up and shout, Hey, it was my idea that this nutcase took advantage of in his own twisted way? Would that add a single speck of useful truth to anyone’s understanding of the whole Larchfield horror story? It wouldn’t. It would be nothing but a distraction. You know that. For God’s sake, accept it!”

They sat in silence until Madeleine added in a brighter tone, “Apart from the time you’re setting aside for self-flagellation, what’s on your schedule today?”

“There’s a noon meeting in Larchfield. I expect the DA will be taking control of the investigation herself or referring it to the state police.”

“It sounds like the people they’d want to talk to are all dead.”

It occurred to Gurney that he’d had the same thought after Aspern’s death.

The predictably huge media presence on Cotswold Lane, as well as in the police headquarters parking area, made getting from his Outback into the building a bit of a challenge. The sketchiness of what had leaked to the media overnight gave the questions shouted at him a wild scattershot quality.

“Is it true that a local pastor was burned to death?”

“Is this being treated as a hate crime?”

“Is there a connection to the zombie murders?”

“Is it true the attackers were armed with flamethrowers?”

“Are you exploring the Satanism angle?”

“Are you bringing in the FBI?”

“Is it true the police chief was involved in the shooting?”

“Is this connected to the murder of Angus Russell?”

“How many people were killed?”

“Was there a political motive?”

“Dave, can I ask you just one question?”

Gurney recognized the sharp voice, blond hair, and red blazer of Kelly Tremain of RAM News. It was the same just-one-question ploy she’d tried on him a week earlier. It hadn’t worked then, and it didn’t work now. He hurried past her into the big Victorian.

“Meeting’s in the conference room,” said the desk sergeant.

Gurney started down the hall, but stopped when his phone rang. He saw Hardwick’s name on the screen. He checked the time—11:54 a.m.—and decided to take the call.

“Gurney here.”

“Bad news, Sherlock. Gant’s not your man.”

“How do you know?”

“I have an app that tracks the latest news items mentioning any name I enter. On the night Aspern was killed, Gant was the featured speaker at a rally in West Virginia—sponsored by the Armed Ministers Movement. So Lorinda must have had a different helper.”

“Thanks. I’ll talk to you later. I need to go into a meeting. By the way, did you—”

“Did I return the borrowed device, without incident, scrubbed of all video and location data? Affirmative.”

Gurney ended the call and went into the conference room.

Cam Stryker was standing at the end of the long table, just finishing a call of her own. Hilda Russell was sitting across from Dr. Ronald Fallow. Brad Slovak was sitting across from Kyra Barstow. Gurney sat next to Slovak.

Stryker sat down, tapped a few icons on her phone, and laid it in front of her on the table. She began by asking Slovak to present a summary of the previous night’s Harrow Hill mayhem.

He stretched his neck, as if trying to loosen a cramp. “Fortunately, ma’am, we recovered a text message we believe Chief Morgan sent to Lorinda Russell the day before the mayhem. It gave us an insight into what happened, so maybe we should start with that?”

“Let’s see it.”

Slovak slid a printed copy over to her and passed others around the table.

As her eyes moved down the page, her expression, not pleasant to begin with, hardened. She read it again, slowly, then dropped it on the table as though the paper itself had become offensive.

“Proceed,” she said.

Slovak described a chain of events that matched in all significant details what Gurney had observed on the drone monitor—including Morgan’s dispatching of the Patriarchs with an Uzi, his use of the flamethrower on Gant and the fallen Patriarchs, and his own immolation.

He went on to list the names of the dead, and Gurney noted without surprise that Otis Strane was among them. He concluded with the fact that the burned bodies of Lorinda Russell and Silas Gant had been found in the house.

Stryker asked Fallow if he had any pre-autopsy comments on the bodies.

He declined to offer any.

Stryker asked Barstow if she had anything to add.

Based on the petrochemical residues, she offered her opinion that the overall fire, as well as the direct burns on the bodies of the Patriarchs, Gant, and Morgan, were caused by the gasoline-fueled flamethrower held by Morgan. She said that a more detailed report would be coming from Denzil Atkins, the county’s forensic fire expert.

“There was one unusual thing,” she added. “The phone found at the scene had no fingerprints on it. Odd for a phone.”

Apart from a momentary frown, Stryker showed little interest in the absence of prints. “Any other forensic developments I should be aware of?”

“We’re double-checking the video files from the mortuary camera. Our tech found a tiny audio blip, which may be nothing, but we want to be sure.”

Stryker turned to Hilda Russell.

“Anything to add?”

She responded with a priestly smile. “Not at the moment.”

Finally, Stryker turned to Gurney. She pointed at the text. “According to that, your old NYPD partner decided to try his hand at extortion. You have any thoughts about that?”

“Considering what happened last night, it’s difficult to read that as an actual extortion attempt. By way of background, Morgan told me a couple of days ago he had serious doubts about Lorinda’s version of how and why she shot Aspern. He’d found a discrepancy in the visual evidence.”

Stryker leaned forward. “What sort of discrepancy?”

“Aspern’s shoelaces in the approach video were tied differently from the shoelaces in the postmortem photos of his body on the conservatory floor.”

“Did you confirm that?”

“I did.”

“What does it mean to you?”

“Either Aspern’s body was tampered with after the shooting, or the individual in the approach video was someone other than Aspern. Either way, it suggests that Lorinda’s story was either incomplete or a complete fabrication.”

“Did Morgan confront her?”

“He said he wanted to test his idea first.”

“How?”

“He didn’t say. But the text that Brad just showed us may be the answer.”

Stryker picked up her copy and read it again.

Gurney could see in her eyes a rapid weighing of the possibilities.

“He sent this threat to . . . evaluate her response?”

Gurney paused before answering. It was important to get this just right—to ensure that attributing certain discoveries and conclusions to Morgan rather than to himself didn’t distort the underlying reality of the situation.

“Morgan was a troubled man. He suffered from anxiety and self-hatred, conditions that worsened considerably with his wife’s illness and death. In his state of mind, it’s inconceivable that he’d concoct a money-making scheme. I think this was a grandiose, suicidal confrontation with evil. You don’t bring a flamethrower to a discussion of your blackmail demands. I can see a Glock. Even the Uzi. But not a flamethrower.”

Stryker was silent for a long moment, keeping her gaze on Gurney.

“If the text was an effort to evaluate Lorinda Russell’s response, how would you explain what actually went down?”

“I think it’s clear that Morgan interpreted her failure to report the blackmail demand to the police as a sign of her guilt. So he came prepared for a confrontation.”

“Knowing that she’d probably make her own preparations and that he might be killed?”

“Yes. But he was determined to take the opposition down with him.”

Stryker steepled her fingers. “You sound very sure of all this.”

Gurney nodded. “I have a history with Morgan. What he did is consistent with what I know about him.”

“We’ll come back to that. First, I want to address a structural issue. In losing Chief Morgan, the department has lost what little command structure it had. Last night’s carnage obviously demands a thorough investigation with manpower resources that simply do not exist in Larchfield at this time. The best solution I see is for my office to assume overall responsibility for the investigation.”

She gestured toward Slovak and Barstow. “This doesn’t reflect in any way on your handling of the case. I want your good work to continue. Tomorrow morning, Detective Lieutenant Derek Hapsburg from my staff will step into a supervisory role and bring in whatever additional resources the case requires. When he arrives, we’ll sit down with you for a briefing on the facts. At that time, be ready to provide him with copies of the case files, along with the pertinent videos, et cetera. Any questions?”

Slovak raised his hand. “What about the media mob outside?”

“Give them no information. And I mean none. Refer them to Sergeant Pat Lemon, my media liaison. She’ll deal with them.”

Stryker looked at Barstow.

She shook her head. “No questions.”

“Reverend Russell?”

She produced one of her mild clerical smiles. “The additional resources you mentioned will certainly be welcome.”

“I should have asked—in your new role as acting mayor, would you prefer to be addressed that way, or shall we stay with Reverend?”

“Hilda would be entirely adequate.”

Stryker produced a cool smile of her own, then stood up from the table, indicating the meeting was over.

As the others rose to leave, she motioned to Gurney to stay.

When they were alone, she closed the conference room door and sat down across from him. “You seemed quite certain that your friend Morgan couldn’t be a blackmailer but could be a homicidal-suicidal maniac. Did I understand that correctly?”

“More or less.”

“What’s the ‘less’ part?”

“You referred to him as my friend. That’s a bit of an exaggeration.”

“Okay. What makes you so sure about the motives of this non-friend?”

“Apart from simple logic and the evidence on the ground?”

“Apart from that.”

After considering the pluses and minuses of revealing the event at the heart of his relationship with Mike Morgan, he decided to go ahead and tell Stryker the story of the apartment house shoot-out.

She paid close attention and at the end nodded slightly, as if she might be agreeing that it was relevant in understanding Morgan’s motives. Then she changed the subject.

“I’ve been in two meetings with you now, and both times I’ve gotten the impression that you know more than you’re saying. Is that true?”

“It’s not anything I know. It’s just a feeling.”

“What kind of feeling?”

“That it’s all too complicated.”

“What do you mean?”

“What we have here is a series of winding narratives that turn one way, then another way, but never seem to straighten out. When you get to the heart of it, there’s a straight line in every crime. But the straight line in what’s happening here is eluding me.”

“Maybe fourteen dead bodies can’t be lined up that neatly.”

Gurney didn’t reply.

“Do you share the doubts Morgan had about Chandler Aspern’s death?”

“I do.”

“Do you believe Lorinda Russell was involved?”

“I do. Along with an accomplice.”

“And who might that be?”

“We suspected Silas Gant, but it couldn’t have been him. He was addressing a religious gun rally hundreds of miles away the night of Aspern’s death.”

Stryker began tapping her pen lightly on the table.

“So, you’re telling me we still have a murderer on the loose?”

“It would seem so.”

55

After sharing with Stryker his other thoughts on the peculiarities of the case—which he still viewed as a single entity, convinced as he was that all the fatalities were connected by a single underlying cause—Gurney headed back to Walnut Crossing.

During the drive, he thought of little else but the open question of Lorinda’s accomplice in the murder of Aspern. If the individual approaching the conservatory wearing Billy Tate’s clothes in the security camera video wasn’t Aspern and wasn’t Gant, it had to be someone else of roughly the same size.

Someone else.

That simple phrase had an odd resonance in Gurney’s mind, the feeling of an elusive recollection that only became more so the harder he tried to identify it. When he turned his attention away from it, the feeling grew stronger. When he pursued it, it faded. It was frustrating—that stubborn trait of memory that refuses to be coerced, allowing access only when one stops beating on the door.

And so it was this time.

As Gurney was parking, his eyes on the half-finished alpaca shed, he recalled for no discernible reason something Clarice Flacco had said about the removal of Hanley Bullock’s body from his apartment. After describing how the “cousin” and the “doctor” had carried the body down the stairs, she had said, “Someone else had arrived in a hearse.”

He was surprised that someone’s use of a phrase as innocuous as “someone else” would create an echo to his own use of the same phrase days later. But what mattered to him now was not the phrase itself, but the far more interesting memory it led to—Clarice Flacco’s description of that individual. To be sure he was recalling it accurately, he took out his phone and checked the note he’d made about it after they spoke.

Thin, balding, forties. About the same age as Bullock.

In his forties, ten years ago.

The implications burst on Gurney like the flood of light from the halogens at a crime scene. He sat perfectly still in the Outback, as if any movement might shatter the picture of the Larchfield murders forming in his mind.

He began to see the straight line he’d been searching for.

It was the line that connected everything—from the ME’s hurried pronouncement of Tate’s death to Peale’s jacked-up Lexus behind the funeral home, from Lorinda’s promiscuity to Morgan’s blaze-of-glory suicide, from the shoelace discrepancy to everything Hilda Russell had told him about the prominent citizens of Larchfield, from the audio anomaly in the embalming room video to Peale’s rage at Fallow.

He grinned at the realization that the only person everyone said was wrong was the only one who was right. And the one who stood to lose the most was the one with the most to gain.

He was elated at finally grasping the simple truth at the root of it all, embarrassed by how easily he’d been deceived by the sequential narrative presented by Kyra Barstow and Greta Vickerz, and doubly embarrassed by having fallen into one of the classic traps he’d warned his academy class against. Worst of all, he’d ignored the investigation axiom tattooed on the arm of his crusty NYPD mentor:

Believe nothing. Trust no one. Question everything.

The excitement of clarity soon pushed his embarrassment aside. However, he realized that all his excitement had little practical value. He was sure of what had happened, but he had no proof. And acquiring that proof would not be easy, since almost everyone involved in the case was now dead.

With little time to waste, he decided to proceed immediately along one of the few still-open pathways. The first thing he did after hurrying into the house was call Slovak.

“Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”

“The first day I came to Larchfield I saw Peale’s Lexus jacked up in back of the funeral home. He later told me he’d borrowed the jack from a neighbor. Do you know who that might be?”

“My bet would be Hugh Stanhope. Man owns five Ferraris. Richer than God, but likes to get his hands dirty. Once he offered to soup up our Dodge Chargers. Why?”

“Do you think you could get the brand and model number of that jack from him—the one he lent to Peale?”

“I guess so. Sure. But—”

“It’s a long story, Brad. But I’m in a time crunch. I’ll explain later.”

“I’ll give him a call and get right back to you.”

Next he called Barstow and got her voicemail.

“Hi, Kyra. I have a question for you to pass along to that tech in your computer forensics department, the one who found the sonic anomaly in the mortuary video. Ask him if it could have been caused by that segment of the audio having been recorded twice. I just want a simple answer, no technical explanation required. And, yes, of course it’s urgent. Thanks.”

Realizing he was hungry, he opened a loaf of whole wheat bread and made himself a sandwich of cheese and pickles. Then he turned on the coffee machine and washed one of the mugs in the sink. As he was drying it, his phone rang.

It was Slovak with the jack information he’d asked for.

Gurney thanked him and went immediately to his laptop and the manufacturer’s website. He found the information he was looking for deep in the device’s technical specs. Like some of his other discoveries, by itself it proved nothing, but it encouraged him to take the next step.

He called Slovak again.

“Brad, we need to talk to Peale ASAP. I want you to locate him and let him know that, without realizing it, he may have some critical, time-sensitive information related to the case. Do it face-to-face.”

“Should I have him come in to headquarters?”

“That would be ideal. But if there’s some reason he can’t or won’t do that, just stay with him and let him know I’m on my way. Then call me and tell me where you are.”

“Will do.” Slovak hesitated. “Should we let Stryker know?”

“Not yet. I want to nail down a few facts first.”

That was certainly the truth. He could have added that he wanted to handle the situation in his own way without the possibility of interference, but that would only have given Slovak something else to worry about.

Gurney spent the next twenty-five minutes on his sandwich, his coffee, and his thoughts on how best to approach Peale.

Those thoughts, along with his preparation of a second cup of coffee, ended abruptly when Slovak called back with panic in his voice.

“Dave?”

“Yes?”

“I’m at Peale’s house. It’s been broken into. I think he’s been murdered.”

56

The stately stone residence of W. Danforth Peale III was located at the end of a white gravel driveway bordered by neatly trimmed boxwood hedges. The drive widened into a spacious oval in front of the house, an area now occupied by Slovak’s Charger, three patrol cars, Barstow’s van, an unmarked black Explorer, and the photographer’s Camry. Gurney parked next to the Camry.

To the left of the oval was a three-car garage. Its open doors revealed one small off-road utility vehicle, one antique British sports car, and one empty bay. Yellow police tape had been strung up around the garage, the house, and a wide swath of the surrounding lawn. A Larchfield cop with a clipboard was manning an opening in the tape.

He recognized Gurney, made a notation on the site’s access log, and pointed to the open back of Barstow’s van. “Gloves and shoe covers over there. Crime scene’s at the rear of the house.”

With gloves and booties on, Gurney headed around to the area behind the house, which was approximately half lawn and half stone patio. A corridor of sorts had been cordoned off with additional yellow tape, beginning at the back door of the house and extending across the patio onto the lawn. The rest of the lawn had been gridded with white string into a standard geometric search pattern. One of Barstow’s techs was proceeding slowly through it, his attention on the ground in front of him. A wide-eyed Slovak hurried over to Gurney.

“It looks like someone broke in through the back door and got into a scuffle with Peale, killed him, and dragged his body outside. There are tire marks on the grass—like they brought a car around to take the body away. Peale’s Lexus is gone, so that may be the vehicle that left the marks. The gas stove in the kitchen was still on, like Peale had been cooking something, but it was all just a blackened mess, the pot even had a hole burned through it. The house stinks from the smoke, lucky the whole place didn’t go up in a blaze.”

“Any estimate of the time this happened?”

“The blood is still tacky in a few spots, so I’m guessing sometime this morning?”

“What are you focused on right now?”

“I just sent two of our patrol guys around the neighborhood to find out if anyone noticed anyone coming or going around this house. And I issued an APB on Peale’s Lexus. What’s next, I’m not sure.” He lowered his voice. “DA Stryker has taken over the scene. She tells us to do one thing, then another thing. I don’t know if she knows what she’s doing herself.”

On cue, Stryker appeared inside the open back door and summoned Gurney over with a peremptory wave of her hand.

“Take a look in here. I want your interpretation of this.” Her voice had the rigid edge that often comes with an effort to project self-confidence.

When Gurney reached the taped corridor leading out from the back door, he noted the reddish-brown drag marks on the patio. He stepped gingerly around them and followed Stryker into the rear hall of the house. As he passed the door, he saw that the glass panel nearest the knob had been broken. Some of the glass pieces were on the hall floor and some were outside the doorway on the patio, seemingly where they had been dragged. Those had the same brownish-red traces on them as the hall floor and the patio stones.

Stryker pointed along the hallway. “Actual crime scene is in the kitchen.”

There was blood all over the floor, mainly, but also on the kitchen tabletop and chair back, where a handprint, perhaps of the staggering victim, had smeared it. There were scuff marks on the floor, a spoon, and the pieces of a broken bowl. There was an open oatmeal container and a measuring cup on a countertop next to the stove. The blackened, warped remnant of a pot sat on one of the burners. The tile wall behind the stove and the exhaust fan above it were covered with soot.

Gurney looked more closely at the central bloodstain on the floor. It appeared that a body or other substantial object had rested in it, then been dragged out of the kitchen, through the hall, and out the back door. He followed the smeared bloodstains out onto the patio and through the taped corridor onto the lawn, where they stopped. The portly photographer was taking multiple shots of that area, with Barstow and Slovak both directing him to places in the grass they wanted him to focus on.

Stryker had followed Gurney out of the house and was standing behind him.

“Well?”

Gurney ignored the question. He was estimating the distance from the last bloodstain in the grass to the indentations caused by a vehicle’s tires.

“Looks like this is where he dumped the body in the trunk,” said Slovak, stretching his thick neck from side to side.

Gurney noticed a plastic evidence bag in Barstow’s hand with something dark inside it. He asked what she’d found.

She held it up so he could see it more clearly. “Peale’s wallet. It was tossed on the grass over there.” She pointed to a spot a few feet from where they were standing. “Driver’s license, Lexus registration, credit cards were all missing, along with any cash he might have been carrying. Other items were still in it—golf club membership card, Mensa membership, hunting club membership, medical insurance cards.” A damp, gusty wind was blowing her hair sideways, but she seemed not to notice.

“Whoever did it just took the essentials,” added Slovak, unnecessarily.

“Well, Detective?” The edge in Stryker’s voice had become more insistent.

He turned to her. “Yes?”

“I’m waiting for your reaction.”

“So far, I have nothing to add to what’s obvious.”

“What would you say is obvious?”

“There’s a lot of blood in the kitchen. Some of it seems to have been dragged out here. And a vehicle of some sort was recently driven across the lawn.”

“That’s all your famous power of deduction tells you?”

“I’m afraid so.”

After staring at him for a moment in disbelief, she turned to Slovak. “How about you? How would you explain what we’re seeing here?”

He swallowed, in obvious between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place discomfort. “Well, ma’am . . . I guess . . . I mean . . . it seems that Dan Peale’s been murdered. By someone who broke in, struggled with him, and killed him. They probably used a knife . . . or scalpel . . . considering the amount of blood. Then they dragged his body out of the house, took his car keys, took the essential stuff out of his wallet, got his Lexus out of the garage, loaded his body in the trunk, and drove off.”

Stryker nodded encouragingly. “Anything else?”

“Peale was waiting for his oatmeal to cook when the killer broke in.”

“How do you know he wasn’t eating it?”

“The spoon and plate pieces we found on the floor are clean.”

She nodded again. “Very good. Any ideas about who the killer might be?”

After casting a nervous glance at Gurney, he cleared his throat. “Just one, but there’s no proof, it’s just an idea.”

“Ideas are exactly what we need at this point.”

He took a deep breath. “Dr. Ronald Fallow.”

Stryker blinked in surprise, then urged him to go on.

“Peale was suing him. He was telling everyone that since the false death pronouncement had destroyed his funeral business, he wanted Fallow’s medical license taken away, and he was suing him for, like, a hundred million dollars. And he kept bad-mouthing Fallow around town—like, nonstop. I figure Fallow got to the point where he just snapped.”

Stryker turned to Gurney, a glint of triumph in her eyes. “So, what do you think of that?”

“I’d have to give it some thought.”

“Good plan.” Her phone rang. She looked at the screen and, before stepping away to take the call, added pointedly, “Before you leave, I want to speak to you.”

Slovak looked at Gurney with a kind of questioning hopefulness. “I hope what I said was all right. She asked what I thought, and that was what I was thinking.”

Gurney smiled. “Ideas solve cases. Better to share them than keep them to yourself.”

Slovak seemed satisfied with that and headed for the house.

Barstow went back to conferring with the photographer over the tire tracks in the grass.

While Stryker was involved in her phone call, Gurney decided to take a walk around the exterior of Peale’s house. It appeared to be meticulously maintained, no doubt by hired gardeners. Peale didn’t strike him as the sort of man who’d want to muddy his knees weeding a flower bed.

He made a complete circuit of the place and found himself back at the yellow-tape entry point. The gray-haired cop with the clipboard gestured toward the house.

“Not bad for a caretaker’s cottage, eh?”

“Caretaker’s cottage?”

“Not now, of course, but that’s what it used to be. For the big Peale estate. Most of that got sold off years ago, when the current Mr. Peale was just a kid. All that’s left of it now is this ‘cottage’ and a few acres around it. Tell you what—I wouldn’t mind coming down in the world, if this was what I got to come down to. Everything’s relative, right?”

“Gurney!” Stryker was calling to him from a spot on the back lawn, away from the others working the scene.

He headed over, in no great rush, prepared for what he guessed would be her first question.

He was right.

“I’m curious about something. You told Slovak to find Peale. Why?”

“I wanted to speak to him—face-to-face, not on the phone.”

“Why?”

“A computer forensics tech found an anomaly in the security video of Tate’s resurrection in the mortuary. I wanted to question him about it.”

“What sort of anomaly?”

“That’s not clear, but even a slight possibility of there being anything misleading in that video would definitely need to be pursued.”

“So you diverted Slovak from the assignment I’d given him, in order to pursue this anomaly?”

Gurney was tempted to point out that the anomaly could end up being of far greater import than any assignment Slovak might have been diverted from, but he thought it better to let that obvious fact simply hang in the air between them.

And so it did, until Stryker moved on in an equally aggressive tone to her next topic.

“I’ve read the terms of your agreement with the Larchfield Police Department. The arrangement is loosely defined, to say the least. As part of regularizing the reporting structure here, we need to deal with that. For the duration of your activity on this case, you’ll be reporting to my Detective Lieutenant Hapsburg. That will be effective starting—”

Gurney cut her off. “You’ve misunderstood the nature of my involvement.”

Stryker blinked. “Misunderstood?”

“At Mike Morgan’s request, I volunteered to take a look at the case and offer my suggestions to him, to Brad Slovak, and to Kyra Barstow. I don’t report to anyone.”

“That’s neither professional nor appropriate. This is a law-enforcement operation. Accountability is a requirement, not an option.”

“I understand.”

“Good. Then, as of tomorrow morning, you’ll be reporting—”

He cut her off again. “What I understand is that the terms of my agreement are no longer acceptable—meaning that you’re not willing to have me involved in the only way that I’m willing to be involved. If you should happen to change your mind, the department has my number. In the meantime, good luck and be careful.”

She stared at him.

He nodded pleasantly, walked to the Outback, and headed for Walnut Crossing.

57

In the course of the trip home, Gurney received two calls. The first was from Slovak.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“Not at all.”

“Is it true that you’re off the case?”

“Officially, yes. The DA wants to organize the investigation in her own way.”

“Jeez, that sounds like a big mistake.”

“It’s her right.”

“I know, but she doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Would it be okay if I stayed in touch with you?”

“Sure.”

“Do you have any advice for me?”

“Relax. Do your job. And try to keep an open mind about Stryker.”

“Do you think I should be following up on my idea about Fallow being Peale’s murderer? Maybe I should see if he can account for his whereabouts this morning?”

“If I were you, I’d back up a little. Instead of rushing to answer the question of who killed Peale, ask yourself first, why was his body removed?”

“Do you already know why?”

“Not yet. But I think it’s the key question.”

After ending the call with Slovak, Gurney discovered a new voicemail message from Barstow.

“To your notion of a double recording being embedded in the mortuary audio, our tech says yes, it could explain the odd sonic footprint. Hope that’s what you wanted to hear. By the way, I heard you had a falling-out with Stryker. No shock to me. Someday that lady’s gonna bleed on her own sharp edge. Stay in touch. I like the way you think.”

Pleased but not surprised by the tech’s confirmation of his suspicion, he refocused on the matter at hand, specifically on the question he’d left with Slovak. Why was the body removed?

The normal answer didn’t apply. In every case he could recall that involved a missing body, it had been removed as part of an effort to conceal the fact that a homicide had taken place. But that could hardly be the reason in a situation where no effort had been made to clean up the blood and the evidence of a struggle.

When he arrived home at four thirty, he was no closer to an answer but even more convinced that it would hold the key to understanding what had happened in Peale’s kitchen that morning and why. When Madeleine got home a little after five, he tried to put that conundrum aside and shift his attention to a brighter subject.

Before he could settle on one, she presented one of her own.

“I heard we’re supposed to get thunderstorms later, so how about we eat early, then work on the shed till it gets dark?”

He agreed, making an effort to exhibit an appropriate level of enthusiasm, and after a simple dinner of salmon, rice, and asparagus, they set to work on the job of sheathing and roofing.

Both tasks involved trimming sheets of exterior plywood to the right size. Madeleine insisted on being the one to operate the handheld circular saw while he steadied the sheets on the supporting sawhorses. Since she’d never used a circular saw before, he spent some time showing her how to guide the spinning blade through the wood, how to avoid any kickback, and how the safety guard should be positioned. As he often did in these kinds of situations, he spent too much time explaining how to use the tool and warning of its dangers, and she grew impatient.

For the rest of the evening, however, all went well. The shed was successfully sided and roofed, and all that remained for another day was the installation of the door. As the dusk deepened and the wind rose, they left their tools in the nearly finished structure and went back into the house, sharing smiles of satisfaction. Madeleine was obviously happy with what she had done, and he was happy that she was happy.

Still in that mood later that night, they went to bed, made love, and drifted toward an untroubled sleep.

To Gurney, this state of mind and spirit amounted to a sense that all the bits and pieces of the world, however chaotic they might seem, were somehow in their proper places, and all was well. All was calm, timeless, and still.

Into this idyll of peace the sound intruded like a dagger.

It was the same ferocious, high-pitched howl he’d heard the night the Dark Angel message had appeared in blood on the barn door. But this time it was coming from somewhere closer to the house. Much closer.

“David, wake up!”

“I’m awake.”

“What are we going to do? Shall I turn on the light?”

“No. No lights.”

He rolled out of bed and dressed quickly in the dark. He took his Beretta from the night table drawer and stuck it in the back pocket of his jeans.

“What are you doing?” whispered Madeleine.

He didn’t answer.

He checked the time on his phone. It was just one minute after midnight. There was a distant flash of lightning, followed several seconds later by a rumble of thunder. The air from the open window was cool and damp.

He placed a call to Hardwick.

The voice that that answered was rough and sleepy. “Yeah?”

“Sorry to wake you, Jack. I’ve got a visitor.”

“You have a plan?”

“Catch him. ID him. Arrest him. Question him.”

“That’s not a plan.” Hardwick cleared his throat with disgusting thoroughness. “That’s a procedure-manual fantasy.”

“You have a better idea?”

“Put a bullet in his head, rocks in his pockets, and dump him in your pond.”

“Always a possibility. Drop by if you can.”

“On my way, Sherlock, locked and loaded.”

Gurney slipped the phone in his pocket. There was another flash of lightning and another rumble of thunder. The storm was getting closer.

Madeleine was sitting on the edge of the bed. “You called Hardwick.”

“Yes.”

“Why not 911?”

“He’ll get here quicker.”

“Quicker than the cops down in Walnut Crossing?”

“After ten o’clock there are no cops in Walnut Crossing. Everything gets redirected to the sheriff’s department in Bounderville.”

“So what will—” She stopped, staring out the window. “What’s that?”

Gurney looked out in the direction she was pointing. There was an almost imperceptible orange glow on the foliage of a tree by the corner of the house. The glow was faint and unsteady, like the reflection of a small fire. He moved closer to the window for a broader view. There was no fire visible on that side of the house.

He ran to the kitchen and saw it immediately through the French doors—the beginning of a fire at the point where the new shed and the chicken coop were joined together. Madeleine followed him and was heading for the doors.

He put out his arm to stop her. “Stay back! The son of a bitch is waiting for us to come out.”

“But we have to stop the fire!”

“We will. But not this way. That’s what he wants. I’m going out the back way.”

He ran to the bedroom, put on his sneakers, and slipped out through the window next to the bed. Landing on an uneven spot in the moist grass, he twisted his ankle sharply, the stab of pain diluted by adrenaline. He pulled the Beretta from his rear pocket and eased off the safety.

A triple flash of lightning illuminated the thicket behind the house. He saw no one. He made his way in the dark to the nearest corner of the house, then around that to the end of the side that faced the chicken coop. Crouching, he peered slowly around the corner drainpipe.

The fire was larger now, its glow clearly illuminating the area between the coop and the house. The area behind the coop and on Gurney’s side of it were left in darkness, seemingly deeper now in contrast with the blaze.

Still seeing no one, he crept out from the house as far as the asparagus bed, whose foot-high enclosure of four-by-fours offered partial shelter, and waited there to see what the next lightning flash might reveal.

The flash came a second later. What it revealed was both predictable and shocking.

Beyond the end of the coop, at the corner of the new shed, stood a perfect image of Billy Tate—the Billy Tate he’d seen in the video of the crazy night on the roof of St. Giles—Billy Tate in a gray hoodie and black jeans. But instead of a spray can for graffiti, this Billy Tate was carrying an AK-47. As suddenly as it had illuminated him, the flash died, and the hooded figure disappeared in the darkness, followed by a deafening crash of thunder.

The idea of calling out, “Police! Drop the gun! Now!” would satisfy a procedural guideline, but it would materially diminish the chances of survival—his own and Madeleine’s. And survival was now the imperative.

With one knee on the ground, Gurney raised his Beretta in a solid two-handed firing grip and waited again for the lightning. When the flash came, his view of the corner of the shed was partially blocked by the asparagus ferns bending and swaying in the wind. But he caught a glimpse of the assault rifle and the gray sweatshirt, and he fired off three quick rounds.

There was a yelp of pain, a curse, followed a moment later in the pitch darkness by half a dozen return rounds, two of which Gurney heard strike the low wall of the planting bed he was using as a shield.

Since there was no longer any downside in doing so, he shouted out the standard police warning. Twice. When there was no reply, he fired off another three rounds in the direction of the shed, then retreated around to the back of the house, feeling his way to the far side, from which he’d have a clear, direct line of fire to the hidden side of the shed.

Aided now by multiple lightning flashes, he ran toward that ideal position. Just as he arrived there, he stepped on the edge of a rock, turning the same ankle he’d injured on his way out the bedroom window. Feeling something in the joint snap, he stumbled out uncontrollably from behind the house into firelight and fell to the ground.

The hooded figure at the side of the shed whirled around, firing wildly in the direction of the sound. Gurney heard the sharp crack-crack-crack of the bullets hitting the house and still others ripping through the thick shrubs at the edge of the patio. From his prone position, he fired back—eight or nine rounds, he wasn’t sure which.

In the next lightning flash there was no sign of the hooded figure. Gurney forced himself to his feet, thinking that he would make his way back to the bedroom window and into the house for his shotgun. But when he tried to walk, he found that he couldn’t. His mind was racing for an alternative when the gray figure slowly emerged from the darkness by the shed into the light of the fire.

Gurney raised the Beretta, pulled the trigger, and heard the worst possible sound—the metallic click of the hammer on an empty chamber.

The gray figure moved a few steps forward, the AK-47 leveled at Gurney’s chest. The lack of any discernible features beneath the hood made the rasping laugh that came out of it seem hardly human.

“Time to take out the garbage,” said the voice. Neither identifiably male nor female, it sounded like something being extruded from a rusted machine.

Having been on the front line of hundreds of homicide investigations in the city, this was not the first time Gurney had found himself at a potentially fatal disadvantage with a killer. The crucial objective was to create a delay. The longer he could keep that trigger from being pulled, the better his chance of preventing it entirely.

His experience told him that most killers, unless driven by uncontrollable rages, could be tempted into pausing in situations like this in order to find out what the intended victim or the police might know about them or their crimes. The key was to reveal a sequence of facts, gradually drawing out the narrative without the real goal—delay—becoming obvious. This demanded a delicate balance. Details that carried an emotional charge were the best obscurers of delay, but they carried the risk of igniting a deadly reaction.

Gurney began with a simple question.

“Was she worth it?”

A jagged lightning strike punctuated the question, and for a startling second its flash was reflected in the malevolent eyes fixed on Gurney.

He continued, speaking softly, insinuatingly. “The high school goddess. Irresistible and untouchable. Except by Billy Tate. It must have been nearly unbearable that a scruffy delinquent like Tate could have what you couldn’t. And then, even worse, she sold herself to that disgusting old man on Harrow Hill. I can imagine your envy, the acid eating away your life, year after year. And then, the miracle. She spoke to you. Showed interest in you. My God, what a rush that must have been! Your chance at last. I wonder how long it took before she started telling you how unhappy she was with her married life, how she longed to be free of it. Perhaps she claimed to have certain feelings about you, maybe that she always felt you two had something in common. Maybe that was all the direction and encouragement you needed. Or maybe she was more specific about that terrible old Angus being the sole obstacle to her happiness—a happiness that she’d be inclined to share with you. Perhaps she gave you an advance taste of that happiness. You understood what she wanted you to do. You just weren’t sure how to proceed. So much at stake. Such a desirable prize. Such a terrible risk. But then the great opportunity fell into your lap.”

The chickens were squawking wildly now, no doubt sensing the growing conflagration on the outside of their coop.

When Gurney glanced in that direction, he noticed a dark figure moving along the edge of the firelit area and disappearing behind the coop.

He tried to maintain the calm flow of his narrative.

“The stars were aligned as never before. You knew you had to act immediately, or you never would. You explained the situation—the unique opportunity—to Lorinda. You told her it was now or never. She agreed. You stitched together a plan. And you pulled it off. Beautifully. At least the parts of the plan you could control. The hidden wild card was Mike Morgan. Anxious, guilt-ridden, womanizing Mike Morgan. Did Lorinda mention that you weren’t the first man she tried to interest in getting rid of Angus? No, I don’t suppose she did. Nobody wants to be second choice.”

The AK-47, which had been slightly lowered, was raised. Gurney heard a sound like a simmering growl emanating from the darkness under the hood. He had no alternative now but to press forward.

“But Morgan hadn’t gotten the message. He’d thought his relationship with Lorinda was just about casual sex, like all his other relationships. When Lorinda realized that he wasn’t going to take the next step, the only step that mattered to her, she moved on. To you.”

Gurney was wondering how much longer he could stretch this out. He hardly noticed that it had started to rain, and little rivulets of water were running down his face. “You know, I thought I had everything figured out. Then I walked into that kitchen, saw all that blood, saw the drag marks leading out to the tire impressions in the grass—and I was baffled all over again. I kept asking myself what seemed like the obvious question. Why was the body removed? But that was the wrong question, wasn’t it?”

A flash of lightning revealed teeth in what appeared to be a grin in the shadow of the hood.

“Goodbye, Detective.” The harshness, the raspiness, the effort at disguising the voice had ceased. It was clear, icy, and quite identifiable.

As the muzzle of the AK-47 was aimed at the center of Gurney’s breastbone, a shrill metallic whine arose behind the hooded figure, whose sudden effort to turn toward it ended in a horrific shriek as Madeleine thrust the circular saw forward and the teeth of the spinning blade tore through one of the hands holding the weapon.

A spray of blood whipped across Gurney’s face as a convulsive jerk of his attacker’s arm sent the AK-47 clattering across the patio.

The hooded figure staggered backward.

Madeleine attacked again.

Another shriek, longer and wilder than the first.

This time the spray of blood fell in a line across the patio, a severed hand fell on the grass at Gurney’s feet, and the hooded figure ran with a gagging scream into the darkness of the low pasture.

Madeleine was breathing hard, with a rigid grip on the still-whining saw.

“It’s okay,” said Gurney. “You can put it down.”

The meaning of his words seemed not to register.

It wasn’t until she noticed blood dripping from the blade housing onto her knuckles that she tossed the tool away from her. The sharp clang when it hit the stone patio seemed to bring her back from wherever the intensity of the experience had taken her. Tears welled in her eyes. Gurney tried to step toward her, but the pain that instantly shot up through his leg stopped him. She came to him, and they embraced for a long minute.

Gurney heard the sound of a car starting down by the barn and driving off into the night in a spray of gravel. He figured it was the missing Lexus.

“We have to put out the fire,” she said.

“Turn on the garden hose.”

The spigot was next to the back door. She switched on the patio floodlights, then turned on the spigot, unreeled the hose, and aimed it at the burning siding. The combination of water from the hose and the now-heavy rain extinguished the flames, converting the whole front of the coop and half of the shed siding into a smoldering black wall.

Gurney took out his phone. “Time to call 911.”

“I already did. Before I came out.”

The sound of a distant crash came from somewhere on the town road that led from their barn down the long hill to the county route.

“Help me to the Outback,” he said. “I need to get down to whatever just happened.”

She turned off the hose. “I’m going with you.”

A mile down the road, they came upon the collision. In the headlights of the Outback, it appeared that a silver-gray Lexus had smashed at high speed into the front of a red Pontiac GTO. Jack Hardwick was standing next to the Lexus. His head and face were covered with blood. It was mixing with the rain and running down onto his tee shirt. His nose looked broken.

Gurney struggled out of his car, putting all his weight on one leg and using the open door as a support. “Jack?”

Hardwick pointed at the driver’s-side window of the Lexus. “That bastard in the hoodie better be dead. Who the fuck is he, anyway?”

Gurney was 95 percent sure, about as sure as he ever was about anything.

“William Danforth Peale the Third.”

58

The Walnut Crossing hospital was a modest one-story structure whose services were limited to diagnostic imaging, lab analyses, and crisis medicine. Their emergency room was large for a small town and had recently been updated.

In a roomy private bay with a sliding glass door, Hardwick was propped up into a semi-sitting position on an ER bed. He was wearing a green hospital gown. His head and nose were bandaged, an IV tube ran from a clear plastic bag on a pole down into his forearm, and a set of wires connected him to a device with a vital-signs screen next to the bed.

Gurney, also in a hospital gown, was sitting in a wheelchair a few feet away. The lower half of his left leg was encased in a fiberglass cast. Madeleine was sitting next to him, dressed in the same black slacks and sweatshirt she’d worn in her attack on Peale.

With her back to the closed glass door, Cam Stryker, in a blue business suit, was sitting where she could face them all. She’d lowered one of the ER’s rolling tray tables to desk height in front of her. On it were an attaché case, an iPad, a phone, and a notebook. Detective Lieutenant Derek Hapsburg was standing near her, a small man with thin lips and a stony expression. His arms were folded.

A digital clock on the wall behind Hardwick’s bed said it was 4:05 a.m.

Stryker activated her iPad. After announcing the time, the fact that the meeting was being recorded, and the names of the people present, she asked Gurney to recount the events of the night in detail, from the moment he suspected the presence of a trespasser on his property up to his arrival at the fatal collision site.

He went through it all—beginning with Madeleine’s initial glimpse of the flickering orange glow, and proceeding in vivid detail through the exchange of gunfire, at which point Stryker interrupted to ask if he’d identified himself as a police officer. He said that he had, loud and clear, and that his announcement was ignored. All true enough. He went on to describe the injury that had rendered him helpless, Madeleine’s weaponizing of the battery-driven circular saw, the mutilation of Peale, and his shrieking flight into the night—the “escape” that ended in a fatal collision a mile down the road.

Stryker asked why he’d called Hardwick at the outset rather than 911. He gave her the same answer he’d given Madeleine. She frowned but said nothing.

She asked Madeleine to describe her thoughts, movements, reason for choosing the saw, what options she had considered, and what her intention was as she approached Peale.

Madeleine stared at her in disbelief. “A homicidal lunatic with an assault rifle was about to kill my husband. My intention was to save his life. I did what occurred to me. There was no time for options. If I’d stopped to consider options, my husband would be dead.”

Stryker nodded without conveying an iota of sympathy. She turned her attention back to Gurney.

“I understand that you told Jack Hardwick that the man who had just fled from your property and crashed into him was Danforth Peale. How did you know that?”

“I wasn’t absolutely certain until the very end—when he pointed that damn AK-47 at my heart and was about to pull the trigger. At that moment he abandoned the effort to disguise his voice. I recognized it. His intonations were quite distinctive.”

“You say that’s when you were absolutely certain. Does that mean at some earlier point you were moderately certain?”

Gurney wondered whether she was making a special effort to be grating, or if it was a natural gift. Either way, he decided to ignore the tone and respond to the content of the question.

“By yesterday morning I’d seen enough arrows pointing toward Peale to convince me that they weren’t all coincidental and that he was, in fact, Lorinda’s accomplice. But then—”

Stryker interrupted him.

“Why on earth did you keep this to yourself? You were right there with me at Peale’s house, but you didn’t say a single word. I’d like to know why.”

“What I thought I knew was rendered meaningless by what appeared to be Peale’s murder. It suddenly seemed more likely that Lorinda’s accomplice was someone else, and Peale was just his latest victim.”

Stryker began tapping her pen on the table. “And this confusion didn’t get cleared up until the moment you recognized his voice?”

“It started getting cleared up before that. My confusion when I saw that bloody kitchen and the drag marks outside was caused by my asking myself why the body had been removed. That stymied me. But when I asked instead why it was missing, the answer occurred to me. It was missing for the simple reason that it didn’t exist. There was no body—because there was no murder.”

Stryker’s pen stopped moving. “Then whose blood was it? Who got dragged out to the car?”

“The whole scene was a setup. Peale probably used his own blood. You’ll know for sure when you get the DNA results. As for the drag marks, he could have made those with anything. I suspect the moment he heard what had happened on Harrow Hill he realized his grand plan had collapsed and it was time to get the hell out of Larchfield. The ‘murder’ scene was an effort to cover his tracks.”

“Grand plan? What grand plan?”

“The plan he’d worked out with Lorinda from day one.”

“Day one? Are you suggesting that he killed everyone—Angus Russell, Mary Kane, Linda Mason, Chandler Aspern, Billy Tate?”

“Russell, Kane, Mason, Aspern—all of those, but not Tate. Definitely not Tate.”

“Then who—”

He cut her off. “There are some things you need to know about Larchfield. Some are a matter of public record, some I got from Hilda Russell, and some through my own investigation.”

Stryker laid her pen down, steepled her fingers, and gave Gurney her expressionless attention.

He told her about the past disappearances of people in conflict with Angus, Angus’s financial relationship with Silas Gant, Lorinda’s blood relationship with Otis Strane, and—according to Hilda—the existence of a long-standing shady relationship between the Russell and Peale families. He then described the suggestive circumstances of Hanley Bullock’s death, and how that death seemed to involve those relationships. Surely the neat man with the silver-gray pompadour was Gant and the man with “OTIS” tattooed on his knuckles was Otis Strane.

“I can’t prove it,” Gurney continued, “but I’d be willing to bet my pension that the hearse driver in Crickton that day, the man who drove off with Bullock’s body, was Danforth Peale’s father, who Hilda Russell described as the coldest man she’d ever met—a man whose ownership of hearses and cemeteries would put him in an ideal position for getting rid of bodies.”

Stryker opened her palms in a gesture of impatience. “That was ten years ago. What’s it got to do with—”

He cut her off again. “I got to thinking about the people Lorinda might be relying on. The first one who came to mind was Gant. But the night Aspern was killed, Gant was speaking at that gun rally in West Virginia. So it had to be someone else. And that’s when Peale came to mind, along with a simple thought: like father, like son.”

Stryker screwed up her face in disbelief. “Like father, like son? That’s it? That was your basis for zeroing in on Peale?”

Detective Lieutenant Hapsburg uttered a small snort of derision.

Hardwick eyed him as though he might be measuring him for a body bag.

“It wasn’t just that,” said Gurney mildly. “There was also that oddity in the audio portion of the mortuary video that I’ve already mentioned to you. The idea that something in that video might have been tampered with struck me as a red flag. And it turns out part of the audio may have been faked. In fact, I’m now sure that Peale’s security camera was recording a prerecorded sound of the casket being broken open, rather than the actual event.”

Stryker folded her arms. “Anything else?”

“Yes. One of the lab experts discovered a small hole that had been drilled in the bottom of the casket—which made no sense to me, until I remembered seeing Peale with an automobile jack. When I checked the specs on that model, they were consistent with my suspicion that Peale had been Lorinda’s accomplice from the beginning. They also explained how the first big trick in the case was pulled off.”

Stryker unfolded her arms, then folded them again. “You’re saying Peale was involved from the beginning, but you said a minute ago that he’s not the one who killed Tate. If he didn’t, who did?”

“That was the simplest piece of the puzzle,” said Gurney. “It was right in front of our faces all the time. In fact, we’d been told what the answer was. If only we’d been willing to believe it. If only—”

The detective lieutenant interrupted him. “We don’t need the big lead-in. How about you just answer the question.”

Gurney smiled. “Billy Tate was killed by a combination of a direct lightning strike and a devastating fall. Dr. Ronald Fallow declared him dead, correctly so. Fallow, the one person everyone came to believe was wrong, was the only one who was right. Tate was dead. But the circumstances surrounding his death very quickly captivated Danforth Peale. In fact, those circumstances were the irresistible gift placed in his hands—the golden opportunity of a lifetime.”

“Opportunity to do what?”

“What Lorinda Russell had made clear she wanted him to do: get rid of her husband. And now he had the perfect way to do it. The body that had been rolled into his mortuary that night belonged to a young man who had publicly threatened Angus Russell, who was known to be interested in witchcraft and Satanism—a loose cannon if there ever was one. And best of all, no one wanted the body. His stepmother wanted absolutely nothing of his; wouldn’t even touch his phone or car keys; wanted no memorial service, no visiting hours, nothing. All she asked was for Peale to store the body until she could decide how to dispose of it.”

“But the video . . .” began Stryker.

“The video was Peale’s stroke of genius. He was close enough to Tate’s size that he could fit into his clothes. He had mortician’s makeup he could use to make his face look convincingly burned and disfigured, at least from a distance. And he borrowed that auto jack from his neighbor as a way of breaking open the casket from the inside. I mentioned a minute ago that I checked the specs on that model. What I discovered was that it was electric and could be operated with a remote. That hole Peale drilled in the bottom of the casket was just right for the power cord. He put the jack in the casket, closed and latched the lid, then used the jack to push it open from the inside, ripping the latches out of the wood. He recorded that ripping, breaking sound. That evening, before the security camera was automatically switched on, he pushed the casket into the cadaver storage unit and stayed in there with it, with the door closed.

“Later, with the camera activated, he made all the sounds we heard on the video, building up to the moment when he played back the sound of the casket being broken open. You saw all the rest on the video—him emerging in Tate’s clothes, stumbling around the room, using Tate’s phone to send those texts to Selena Cursen and Aspern.”

Stryker was leaning forward now. “Why Aspern?”

“Framing Aspern was an option from the beginning, and sending him that text laid the groundwork.”

“What did he do with Tate’s body?”

“Cut off the hands to leave Tate’s fingerprints in the storage unit and wherever else they might be useful, took some blood to leave at Angus’s for DNA identification, then cut the rest of the body into pieces and buried them in the woods near Aspern’s house.”

“My God,” muttered Stryker. In her eyes Gurney could see her mind racing through everything she knew about the case, testing the credibility of what she’d just been told.

A nurse with a friendly face gave a perfunctory knock on the glass door behind Stryker and slid it open. “Sorry to interrupt, I need to look in on my patients.” She checked the numbers on the screen next to Hardwick’s bed and the fluid level in his plastic IV bag.

“I think you’ll live. We’ll keep you here for twenty-four hours, and if all your levels are stable at that point, we’ll turn you loose. One of our aftercare recommendations will be that you try to avoid major head-on collisions. At least for a while.” She smiled and turned to Gurney.

“Any pain?”

“Not really.”

“Good. As far as I know, you’re all set to go.” She smiled again and departed, sliding the glass door shut behind her.

Stryker was frowning, as though her review of the facts had hit a sticking point.

“According to your scenario, Peale went through that elaborate charade of Tate’s revival in the mortuary specifically to create the misleading security camera video. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“But I read in the interview notes that he claimed at first there was no video. Why would he do that?”

“I wondered about that myself—until a computer forensics expert told me that cloud-based backups are so common these days it’s the first thing they’d look for. If Peale was aware of that, he would have known that the video would come to light—and his professed ignorance of its existence would only add to its credibility.”

“You have a high opinion of Mr. Peale’s talent for deception.”

“I do.”

“One more question. If he set up that bloody scene at his house as part of his disappearing act—a way of escaping without anyone thinking he was still alive—why would he take time out to kill you?”

Gurney shrugged. “It doesn’t seem very practical, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“I’ll have to give that some thought.”

Hardwick spoke up. “I’ll tell you why. Once Sherlock here latches on to something, the son of a bitch never lets go. Peale was not stupid. Maybe he figured the only way to be sure this guy wouldn’t come knocking on his door a year down the road was to ice him now.”

After a long silence, Stryker nodded.

“That’s enough for now. We’ll be in touch.”

Since Gurney and Madeleine had ridden together to the hospital in the local EMS ambulance, they had no vehicle there, and an off-duty security guard offered to drive them home.

When they arrived at the point between the barn and the pond, where the town road dead-ended into their property, Madeleine asked that they be let out. It took Gurney a minute to manage his exit from the car and get upright on the crutches the hospital had provided. After the guard had refused Madeleine’s offer of payment for the ride and had headed back down the road, she suggested sitting for a while in the pair of lawn chairs by the pond.

With Gurney being new to crutches, it took some time to get there. When they were finally settled in, Madeleine explained that she was purposely delaying the sight of the burned henhouse and the terrifying memories it would evoke. She felt all that would be easier to face if she could wrap herself first in the beauty of the morning.

The rising sun was visible above the eastern ridge. The earlier thunderstorm was long gone, the sky was clear, the air was pleasantly cool, the water droplets on the grass were glimmering points of light. Swirls of tiny insects were rising and falling over the surface of the pond. Redwing blackbirds were building nests in the reeds. The night’s rain seemed to have intensified the blue of the wild irises by the road.

He reached out and held her hand.

“I was thinking,” she said, “that maybe we should go ahead and get a pair of alpacas.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I mean, I feel like we’ve been given a sign. Sort of, anyway.”

“How’s that?”

“If we hadn’t been talking about alpacas, we probably wouldn’t have thought of building the shed extension on the henhouse. And if we hadn’t built the shed, the saw wouldn’t have been out there, and I wouldn’t have known how to use it. So, in a way, talking about alpacas ended up saving your life.”

“Hmm.”

“So, what do you think?”