There was a stillness in the September-morning air that was like the stillness in the heart of a gliding submarine, engines extinguished to elude the enemy’s listening devices. The whole landscape was held motionless in the invisible grip of a vast calm, the calm before a storm, a calm as deep and unpredictable as the ocean.
It had been a strangely subdued summer, the semi-drought slowly draining the life out of the grass and trees. Now the leaves were fading from green to tan and had already begun to drop silently from the branches of the maples and beeches, offering little prospect of a colorful autumn.
Dave Gurney stood just inside the French doors of his farm-style kitchen, looking out over the garden and the mowed lawn that separated the big house from the overgrown pasture that sloped down to the pond and the old red barn. He was vaguely uncomfortable and unfocused, his attention drifting between the asparagus patch at the end of the garden and the small yellow bulldozer beside the barn. He sipped sourly at his morning coffee, which was losing its warmth in the dry air.
To manure or not to manure-that was the asparagus question. Or at least it was the first question. If the answer turned out to be yes, that would raise a second question: bulk or bagged? Fertilizer, he had been informed by various websites to which he’d been directed by Madeleine, was the key to success with asparagus, but whether he needed to supplement last spring’s application with a fresh load now was not entirely clear.
He’d been trying, at least halfheartedly, for their two years in the Catskills to immerse himself in these house-and-garden issues that Madeleine had taken up with instant enthusiasm, but always nibbling at his efforts were the disturbing termites of buyer’s remorse-remorse not so much at the purchase of that specific house on its fifty scenic acres, which he continued to view as a good investment, but at the underlying life-changing decision to leave the NYPD and take his pension at the age of forty-six. The nagging question was, had he traded in his first-class detective’s shield for the horticultural duties of a would-be country squire too soon?
Certain ominous events suggested that he had. Since relocating to their pastoral paradise, he had developed a transient tic in his left eyelid. To his chagrin and Madeleine’s distress, he had started smoking again sporadically after fifteen years of abstinence. And, of course, there was the elephant in the room-his decision to involve himself the previous autumn, a year into his supposed retirement, in the horrific Mellery murder case.
He’d barely survived that experience, had even endangered Madeleine in the process, and in the moment of clarity that a close encounter with death often provides, he had for a while felt motivated to devote himself fully to the simple pleasures of their new rural life. But there’s a funny thing about a crystal-clear image of the way you ought to live. If you don’t actively hang on to it every day, the vision rapidly fades. A moment of grace is only a moment of grace. Unembraced, it soon becomes a kind of ghost, a pale retinal image receding out of reach like the memory of a dream, receding until it becomes eventually no more than a discordant note in the undertone of your life.
Understanding this process, Gurney discovered, does not provide a magic key to reversing it-with the result that a kind of halfheartedness was the best attitude toward the bucolic life that he could muster. It was an attitude that put him out of sync with his wife. It also made him wonder whether anyone could ever really change or, more to the point, whether he could ever change. In his darker moments, he was disheartened by the arthritic rigidity of his own way of thinking, his own way of being.
The bulldozer situation was a good example. He’d bought a small, old, used one six months earlier, describing it to Madeleine as a practical tool appropriate to their proprietorship of fifty acres of woods and meadows and a quarter-mile-long dirt driveway. He saw it as a means of making necessary landscaping repairs and positive improvements-a good and useful thing. She seemed to see it from the beginning, however, not as a vehicle promising his greater involvement in their new life but as a noisy, diesel-stinking symbol of his discontent-his dissatisfaction with their environment, his unhappiness with their move from the city to the mountains, his control freak’s mania for bulldozing an unacceptable new world into the shape of his own brain. She’d articulated her objection only once, and briefly at that: “Why can’t you just accept all this around us as a gift, an incredibly beautiful gift, and stop trying to fix it?”
As he stood at the glass doors, uncomfortably recalling her comment, hearing its gently exasperated tone in his mind’s ear, her actual voice intruded from somewhere behind him.
“Any chance you’ll get to my bike brakes before tomorrow?”
“I said I would.” He took another sip of his coffee and winced. It was unpleasantly cold. He glanced at the old regulator clock over the pine sideboard. He had nearly an hour free before he had to leave to deliver one of his occasional guest lectures at the state police academy in Albany.
“You should come with me one of these days,” she said, as though the idea had just occurred to her.
“I will,” he said-his usual reply to her periodic suggestions that he join her on one of her bike rides through the rolling farmland and forest that constituted most of the western Catskills. He turned toward her. She was standing in the doorway of the dining area in worn tights, a baggy sweatshirt, and a paint-stained baseball hat. Suddenly he couldn’t help smiling.
“What?” she said, cocking her head.
“Nothing.” Sometimes her presence was so instantly charming that it emptied his mind of every tangled, negative thought. She was that rare creature: a very beautiful woman who seemed to care very little about how she looked. She came over and stood next to him, surveying the outdoors.
“The deer have been at the birdseed,” she said, sounding more amused than annoyed.
Across the lawn three shepherd’s-crook finch feeders had been tugged far out of plumb. Gazing at them, he realized that he shared, at least to some extent, Madeleine’s benign feelings toward the deer and whatever minor damage they caused-which seemed peculiar, since his feelings were entirely different from hers concerning the depredations of the squirrels who even now were consuming the seed the deer had been unable to extract from the bottoms of the feeders. Twitchy, quick, aggressive in their movements, they seemed motivated by an obsessive rodent hunger, an avariciously concentrated desire to consume every available speck of food.
His smile evaporating, Gurney watched them with a low-level edginess that in his more objective moments he suspected was becoming his reflexive reaction to too many things-an edginess that arose from and highlighted the fault lines in his marriage. Madeleine would describe the squirrels as fascinating, clever, resourceful, awe-inspiring in their energy and determination. She seemed to love them as she loved most things in life. He, on the other hand, wanted to shoot them.
Well, not shoot them, exactly, not actually kill or maim them, but maybe thwack them with an air pistol hard enough to knock them off the finch feeders and send them fleeing into the woods where they belonged. Killing was not a solution that ever appealed to him. In all his years in the NYPD, in all his years as a homicide detective, in twenty-five years of dealing with violent men in a violent city, he had never drawn his gun, had hardly touched it outside a firing range, and he had no desire to start now. Whatever it was that had drawn him to police work, that had wed him to the job for so many years, it surely wasn’t the appeal of a gun or the deceptively simple solution it offers.
He became aware that Madeleine was watching him with that curious, appraising look of hers-probably guessing from the tightness in his jaw his thoughts about the squirrels. In response to her apparent clairvoyance, he wanted to say something that would justify his hostility to the fluffy-tailed rats, but the ringing of the phone intervened-in fact, the ringing of two phones intervened simultaneously, the wired phone in the den and his own cell phone on the kitchen sideboard. Madeleine headed for the den. Gurney picked up the cell.
Jack Hardwick was a nasty, abrasive, watery-eyed cynic who drank too much and viewed just about everything in life as a sour joke. He had few enthusiastic admirers and did not readily inspire trust. Gurney was convinced that if all of Hardwick’s questionable motives were removed, he wouldn’t have any motives left.
But Gurney also considered him one of the smartest, most insightful detectives he’d ever worked with. So when he put the phone to his ear and heard that unmistakable sandpaper voice, it generated some mixed feelings.
“Davey boy!”
Gurney winced. He was not a Davey-boyish kind of guy, never would be, which he assumed was the precise reason Hardwick had chosen that particular sobriquet.
“What can I do for you, Jack?”
The man’s braying laugh was as annoying and irrelevant as ever. “When we were working on the Mellery case, you used to brag about getting up with the chickens. Just thought I’d call and see if it was true.”
There was a certain amount of banter one always had to endure before Hardwick would deign to get to the issue at hand.
“What do you want, Jack?”
“You got any actual live chickens on that farm of yours, running around clucking and shitting, or is that ‘up with the chickens’ just some kind of folksy saying?”
“What do you want, Jack?”
“Why the hell would I want anything? Can’t one old buddy just call another old buddy for old times’ sake?”
“Shove the ‘old buddy’ crap, Jack, and tell me why you’re calling.”
Again the braying laugh. “That’s so cold, Gurney, so cold.”
“Look. I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet. You don’t get to the point in the next five seconds, I hang up. Five… four… three… two… one…”
“Debutante bride got whacked at her own wedding. Thought you might be interested.”
“Why would I be interested in that?”
“Shit, how could an ace homicide detective not be interested? Did I say she got ‘whacked’? Should’ve said ‘hacked.’ Murder weapon was a machete.”
“The ace is retired.”
There was a loud, prolonged bray.
“No joke, Jack. I’m really retired.”
“Like you were when you leaped in to solve the Mellery case?”
“That was a temporary detour.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Look, Jack…” Gurney was losing patience.
“Okay. You’re retired. I got it. Now give me two minutes to explain the opportunity here.”
“Jack, for the love of Christ…”
“Two lousy minutes. Two. You’re so fucking busy massaging your retirement golf balls you can’t spare your old partner two minutes?”
The image triggered the tiny tic in Gurney’s eyelid. “We were never partners.”
“How the hell can you say that?”
“We worked on a couple of cases together. We weren’t partners.”
If he were to be completely honest about it, Gurney would have to admit that he and Hardwick did have, in at least one respect, a unique relationship. Ten years earlier, working in jurisdictions a hundred miles apart on different aspects of the same murder case, they had individually discovered separate halves of the victim’s severed body. That sort of serendipity in detection can forge a strong, if bizarre, bond.
Hardwick lowered his voice into the sincere-pathetic register. “Do I get two minutes or don’t I?”
Gurney gave up. “Go ahead.”
Hardwick jumped back into his characteristic carnival-barker-with-throat-cancer oratorical style. “You’re obviously a busy guy, so let me get right to it. I want to do you a giant favor.” He paused. “You still there?”
“Talk faster.”
“Ungrateful bastard! All right, here’s what I got for you. Sensational murder committed four months ago. Spoiled little rich girl marries hotshot celebrity psychiatrist. An hour later at the wedding reception on the psychiatrist’s fancy estate, his demented gardener decapitates her with a machete and escapes.”
Gurney had a slight recollection of seeing a couple of tabloid headlines at that time that were probably related to the affair: BLISS TO BLOODBATH and NEW BRIDE BUTCHERED. He waited for Hardwick to go on. Instead the man coughed so disgustingly that Gurney had to hold the phone away from his ear.
Eventually Hardwick asked again, “You still there?”
“Yep.”
“Quiet as a corpse. You ought to make little beeping sounds every ten seconds, let people know you’re still alive.”
“Jack, why the hell are you calling me?”
“I’m handing you the case of a lifetime.”
“I’m not a cop anymore. You’re not making any sense.”
“Maybe your hearing is failing in your old age. What are you, forty-eight or eighty-eight? Listen up. Here’s the meat of the story. The daughter of one of the richest neurosurgeons in the world marries a controversial hotshot psychiatrist, a psychiatrist who’s appeared on Oprah, for Godsake. An hour later, in the midst of two hundred guests, she steps into the gardener’s cottage. She’s had a few drinks, wants the gardener to join in the wedding toast. When she doesn’t come out, her new husband sends someone to get her, but the cottage door is locked and she doesn’t answer. Then the husband, the renowned Dr. Scott Ashton, goes and bangs on the door and calls to her. No response. He gets a key, opens the door, and finds her sitting there in her wedding dress with her head chopped off-back window of the cottage open, no gardener in sight. Pretty soon every cop in the county is at the scene. In case you didn’t get the message yet, these are very important people. Case ends up in our lap at BCI, specifically in my lap. Starts out simple-find the crazy gardener. Then it starts getting complicated. This was not your average gardener. The renowned Dr. Ashton had sort of taken him under his wing. Hector Flores-that’s the gardener-was an undocumented Mexican laborer. Ashton hires him, soon realizes that the man is smart, very smart, so he starts testing him, pushing him, educating him. Over a period of two to three years, Hector becomes more like the doctor’s protégé than his leaf raker. Almost a member of the family. Seems that with his new status, he even had an affair with the wife of one of Ashton’s neighbors. Interesting character, Señor Flores. After the murder he disappears off the face of the earth, along with the neighbor’s wife. Last concrete trace of Hector is the bloody machete he left a hundred and fifty yards away in the woods.”
“So where did all this end up?”
“Nowhere.”
“What do you mean?”
“My brilliant captain had a certain view of the case-you might recall Rod Rodriguez?”
Gurney recalled him with a shudder. Ten months earlier-six months before the murder Hardwick was describing-Gurney had been involved semiofficially in an investigation controlled by a unit of the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation that the rigid, ambitious Rodriguez commanded.
“His view was that we should bring in for questioning every Mexican within twenty miles of the crime and threaten them with all kinds of crap until one of them led us to Hector Flores, and if that didn’t work, we should extend the radius to fifty miles. That’s where he wanted all the resources-one hundred percent.”
“You didn’t agree with that?”
“There were other avenues worth exploring. It’s possible Hector was not what he appeared to be. The whole thing had a funny feel to it.”
“So what happened?”
“I told Rodriguez he was full of shit.”
“Really?” Gurney smiled for the first time.
“Yeah, really. So I was taken off the case. And it was given to Blatt.”
“Blatt!?” The name tasted like a mouthful of food gone bad. He remembered Investigator Arlo Blatt as the only BCI detective more irritating than Rodriguez. Blatt embodied an attitude Gurney’s favorite college professor long ago had described as “ignorance armed and ready for battle.”
Hardwick went on. “So Blatt did exactly what Rodriguez told him to do, and he got nowhere. Four months have passed, and we know less today than when we started. But I can tell you’re wondering, what’s all this got to do with Dave Gurney?”
“The question did cross my mind.”
“The mother of the bride is not satisfied. She suspects that the investigation’s been botched. She has no confidence in Rodriguez, she thinks Blatt’s an idiot. But she thinks you’re a genius.”
“She thinks what?”
“She came to me last week-four months to the day after the murder, wondering if I could get back on the case or, if I couldn’t do that, could I work on it without anybody knowing. I told her that wouldn’t be a practical approach, my hands were tied, I was already on pretty thin ice with the bureau-however, I did happen to have personal access to the most highly decorated detective in the history of the NYPD, recently retired, still full of vim and vigor, a man who would be more than happy to provide her with an alternative to the Rodriguez-Blatt approach. To put the icing on the cake, I just happened to have a copy of that adoring little piece that New York magazine did on you after you cracked the Satanic Santa case. What was it they called you-Supercop? She was impressed.”
Gurney grimaced. Several possible responses collided in his head, all canceling each other out.
Hardwick seemed encouraged by his silence. “She’d love to meet you. Oh, did I mention? She’s drop-dead gorgeous, early forties but looks about thirty-two. And she made it clear that money wasn’t an issue. You could pretty much name your price. Seriously-two hundred dollars an hour would not be a problem. Not that you’d be motivated by anything as common as money.”
“Speaking of motives, what’s in it for you?”
Hardwick’s effort to sound innocent instead sounded comical. “Seeing justice done? Helping out a family that’s been through hell? I mean, losing a child’s got to be the worst thing in the world, right?”
Gurney froze. The mention of losing a child still had the power to send a tremor through his heart. It was more than fifteen years since Danny, barely four at the time, had stepped into the street when Gurney wasn’t looking, but grief, he’d discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then “moved on” (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves-waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living.
“You still there?”
Gurney grunted.
Hardwick went on. “I want to do what I can for these people. Besides-”
“Besides,” Gurney broke in, speaking fast, forcing his debilitating emotion aside, “if I did get involved, which I have no intention of doing, it would drive Rodriguez batshit, wouldn’t it? And if I managed to come up with something, something new, something significant, it would make him and Blatt look really bad, wouldn’t it? Might that be one of your perfectly good reasons?”
Hardwick cleared his throat again. “That’s a fucked-up way of looking at it. Fact is, we got a tragically bereaved mother here who isn’t satisfied with the progress of the police investigation-which I can understand, since the incompetent Arlo Blatt and his crew have rousted every Mexican in the county and haven’t come up with so much as a taco fart. She’s desperate for a real detective. So I’m laying this golden egg in your lap.”
“That’s great, Jack, but I’m not in the PI business.”
“For the love of God, Davey, just talk to her. That’s all I’m asking you to do. Just talk to her. She’s lonely, vulnerable, beautiful, with big bucks to burn. And deep down inside, Davey boy, deep down inside there’s something wild in that woman. I guarantee it. Cross my heart and hope to die!”
“Jack, the last thing I need right now-”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re happily married, in love with your wife, yadda, yadda, yadda. All right. Fine. And maybe you don’t care about a chance to reveal Rod Rodriguez finally and absolutely as the total asshole he really is. Okay. But this case is complex.” He gave the word a depth of meaning, made it sound like the most precious of all characteristics. “It’s got layers to it, Davey. It’s a fucking onion.”
“So?”
“You’re a natural-born onion peeler-the best that ever was.”
When Gurney finally noticed Madeleine at the den door, he wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there, nor even how long he himself had been at the den window facing the back pasture that ran up toward the wooded ridge behind the house. To save his life, he could not have described the pasture’s current pattern of blazing goldenrod, browning grasses, and wild blue asters at which he had appeared to be gazing, but he could have come very close to reciting Hardwick’s telephone narrative word for word.
“So?” said Madeleine.
“So?” he repeated, as though he hadn’t understood the question.
She smiled impatiently.
“That was Jack Hardwick.” He was about to ask if she remembered Jack Hardwick, chief investigator on the Mellery case, when the look in her eyes told him he didn’t need to ask. It was the look she got whenever a name came up that was associated with that terrible chain of murders.
She stared at him, waiting, unblinking.
“He wants my advice.”
Still she waited.
“He wants me to speak to the mother of a girl who was killed. She was killed on her wedding day.” He was about to say how she was killed, describe the peculiar details, but realized that would be a mistake.
Madeleine nodded almost imperceptibly.
“You all right?” he asked.
“I’d been wondering how long it would take.”
“How long…?”
“For you to find another… situation that required your attention.”
“All I’m going to do is talk to her.”
“Right. And then, after a nice long talk, you’ll conclude that there’s nothing especially interesting about a woman being killed on her wedding day, and you’ll yawn and walk away. Is that the way you see it?”
His voice tightened reflexively. “I don’t know enough yet to see it in any particular way.”
She gave him her patented skeptical smile. “I have to go,” she said. Then, seeming to notice the question in his eyes, she added, “The clinic, remember? See you back here tonight.” And she was gone.
At first he just stared at the empty doorway. Then he thought he should go after her, started to do so, got as far as the middle of the kitchen, stopped, and wondered what he would say, had no idea, thought he should go after her anyway, went out the side door by the garden. But by the time he got around to the front of the house, her car was halfway down the rough little farm lane that bisected the low pasture. He wondered if she saw him in her rearview mirror, wondered if it made a difference that he’d come out after her.
In recent months he’d imagined that things were going pretty well. The raw emotion at the end of the Mellery nightmare had evolved into an imperfect peace. He and Madeleine had slipped smoothly, gradually, mostly unconsciously into affectionate or at least tolerant patterns of behavior that resembled separate elliptical orbits. While he gave his occasional lectures at the state police academy, she had accepted a part-time position in the local mental-health clinic, doing intakes and assessments. It was a function for which her LCSW credentials and experience clearly overqualified her, but it seemed to have provided a sense of balance in their marriage, a relief from the pressure of their unrealistic expectations of each other. Or was that just wishful thinking?
Wishful thinking. The universal anodyne.
He stood in the matted, drought-wilted grass and watched her car disappear behind the barn onto the narrow town road. His feet were cold. He looked down and discovered he had come outside in his socks, which were now absorbing the morning dew. As he turned to go back into the house, a movement by the barn caught his eye.
A lone coyote had emerged from the woods and was loping across the clearing between the barn and the pond. Partway across, the animal stopped, turning its head toward Gurney, and studied him for a long ten seconds. It was an intelligent look, thought Gurney. A look of pure, unemotional calculation.
“What goal is common to every undercover assignment?”
Gurney’s question was greeted by various expressions of interest and confusion on the thirty-nine faces in the academy classroom. Most guest instructors started their lectures by introducing themselves and giving their résumé highlights, then presented an outline of the subjects to be covered, content and objectives, blah, blah, blah-a general overview to which no one paid much attention. Gurney preferred a cut-to-the-chase approach, particularly for a seminar group like this, made up of experienced officers. And they’d know who he was, anyway. He had a definite reputation in law-enforcement circles. Professionally, the reputation was about as good as it gets in that world, and since his retirement from the NYPD two years earlier, it had only gotten better-if being regarded with increasing levels of respect, awe, envy, and resentment could be considered “better.” Personally, he wished he had no reputation at all, no image to live up to. Or fall short of.
“Think about it,” he said with quiet intensity, making eye contact with as many people in the room as he could. “What’s the one thing you need to achieve in every undercover situation? This is an important question. I’d like to get a response from each of you.”
A hand went up in the front row. The face, set atop a hulking offensive lineman’s body, was young and baffled. “Wouldn’t the goal be different in every case?”
“The situation would be different,” said Gurney, nodding agreeably. “The people would be different. The risks and rewards would be different. The depth and duration of your immersion in the environment would be different. The persona you project, your cover story, could be very different. The nature of the intelligence or evidence to be acquired would vary from case to case. There are definitely lots of differences. But”-he paused, again making as much eye contact as possible before continuing with rising emphasis-“there’s one goal common to every assignment. It’s your primary goal as an undercover officer. Your success in achieving every other goal of an operation hangs on your success in achieving this primary goal. Your life depends on it. Tell me what you think it is.”
For nearly half a minute, there was absolute silence, the only movement the formation of thoughtful frowns. Waiting for the replies he knew would eventually come, Gurney glanced around at his physical surroundings-the concrete-block walls with their matte beige paint; the vinyl-tile floor whose brown-and-tan pattern was indistinguishable from the scuff marks that obscured it; the rows of long, speckled-gray Formica tables, shabby with age, serving as shared desks; the stark orange plastic chairs with tubular chrome legs, too small for their large and muscular occupants, their brightness oddly depressing. A time capsule of mid-seventies architectural awfulness, the room created a bleak echo of his last city precinct.
“Gathering accurate information?” offered a questioning face in the second row.
“A reasonable guess,” said Gurney encouragingly. “Anyone have any other ideas?”
Half a dozen suggestions followed rapidly, mostly from the front of the room, mostly variations on the accurate-information theme.
“Any other ideas?” Gurney prodded.
“Goal is to get the bad guys off the street,” came a comment in a weary growl from the back row.
“Prevent crime,” said another.
“Get the truth, the whole truth, the facts, names, find out what’s going down, who’s doing what to who, what the plan is, who’s the man, who sits on top of the food chain, follow the money, shit like that. Basically, you want to know everything there is to be known-it’s that simple.” The dark, wiry man who rattled off this litany of goals with his arms folded across his chest was sitting directly in front of where Gurney was standing. His smirk announced that there was no more to be said on the subject. The name on the tent card nearest him on the long table read “Det. Falcone.”
“Any other ideas?” asked Gurney blandly, scanning the far corners of the room. The wiry man looked disgusted.
After a long pause, one of the three women attendees spoke up in a low but confident Hispanic-accented voice. “Establish and maintain trust.”
“What was that?” The question came from three different directions at once.
“Establish and maintain trust,” she repeated, a bit louder.
“Interesting,” said Gurney. “What makes that the most important goal?”
She gave a little shrug as though the answer were the most obvious thing on earth. “Because if you don’t have their trust, you have nothing.”
Gurney smiled. “ ‘If you don’t have their trust, you have nothing.’ Very good. Anybody disagree with that?”
Nobody did.
“Of course we want the truth,” said Gurney. “The whole truth, with all the incriminating details, just like Detective Falcone here said.”
The man eyed him coldly.
Gurney went on, “But as this other officer said-without trust what do you have? You have nothing. Maybe worse than nothing. So trust comes first-always. Put trust first, you’ve got a good chance of getting the truth. Put getting the truth first, you’ve got a good chance of getting a bullet in the back of the head.”
That got some nods, plus some increased attention.
“Which brings us to the second big question for today. How do you do it? How do you go about establishing the level of trust that will not only keep you alive but also make your undercover work pay off?” Gurney felt himself warming to the subject. As his energy level rose, he could see it starting to spread out into his audience.
“Remember, in this game you’re dealing with naturally suspicious people. Some of these guys are very impulsive. Not only might they shoot you on the spot, but they’d also be proud of it. They like looking bad. They like looking sharp, quick, decisive. How do you get guys like that to trust you? How do you survive long enough to make the operation worthwhile?”
This time the responses came quicker.
“By acting and behaving like they do.”
“By acting exactly like whoever you’re supposed to be.”
“Consistency. Stick to your cover identity, no matter what.”
“Believe the identity. Believe that you really are who you say you are.”
“Stay cool, always cool, no sweat. Show no fear.”
“Courage.”
“Brass balls.”
“Believe your own truth, baby. I am who I am. I am invincible. Untouchable. Do not fuck with me.”
“Yeah, make believe you’re Al Pacino,” said Falcone, looking for a laugh, not getting it, just creating a hiccup in the group momentum.
Gurney ignored him, glanced inquiringly at the Hispanic woman.
She hesitated. “You have to show them some passion.”
This triggered a few wiseass laughs around the room and a leering grin from Falcone.
“Grow up, assholes,” she said calmly. “What I mean is, you have to let them see something real in you. Something they can feel, that they know in their gut is true. It can’t all be bullshit.”
Gurney felt a pleasant rush of excitement-his reaction whenever he recognized a star student in one of his classes. It was an experience that reinforced his decision to participate as a guest lecturer in these seminars.
“ ‘It can’t all be bullshit,’ ” he repeated, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. “Absolutely true. Authentic emotion-credible passion-is essential to effective deception. Your undercover persona must be based on a real emotional piece of yourself. Otherwise it’s all posing, all imitation, all fake, all bullshit. And superficial bullshit rarely works. Superficial bullshit gets undercover people killed.”
He did a quick survey of the thirty-nine faces and found he now had the positive attention of at least thirty-five. “So it’s all about trust. Credibility. The more your target believes in you, the more you’ll get out of him. And a big part of his belief in you depends on your ability to channel real emotion into your artificial role, to use a real piece of yourself to bring your cover personality to life-real anger, rage, greed, lust, disgust-whatever the moment calls for.”
He turned away from them, ostensibly to insert an old VHS videotape into a player beneath a large monitor set against the front wall and to check that everything was plugged in. When he turned back, however, his expression-in fact, the whole attitude of his body, the way he moved, the impression he gave of a man struggling to stifle a volcano of rage-sent a shock wave of tension through the classroom.
“You gonna get some crazy motherfucker to buy your act, you better find a sick place in you, then you talk to him from that place, you let that crazy motherfucker know that deep down inside you there’s an even crazier motherfucker who someday is gonna tear some motherfucker’s heart out, chew it up, and spit it in his fucking face. But for now, just for now, you’re keeping that rabid dog in your gut under control. Just barely under control.” He took a sudden step toward the first row and noted with satisfaction that everyone, including Falcone-especially Falcone-jerked back into a position of defensive readiness.
“Okay,” said Gurney with a reassuring smile, resuming his normal demeanor, “that’s just a quick example of the emotional side. Credible passion. Most of you had a gut-level reaction to that anger, that lunacy. Your first thought was that it was real, that this Gurney guy’s got a screw loose, right?”
There were some nods, a few nervous laughs, as the body language in the room relaxed about halfway.
“So what are you saying?” asked Falcone edgily. “That somewhere inside you there’s a fucking lunatic?”
“I’ll leave that question open for now.”
There were a few more laughs, friendlier.
“But the fact is, there’s more shit, nasty shit, inside each of us-all of us-than we realize. Don’t let it go to waste. Find it and use it. In the undercover life, the shit you normally don’t want to look at in yourself could be your biggest asset. The buried treasure that saves your life.”
There were personal examples he could have given them, situations in which he had taken a dark tile from the mosaic of his childhood and magnified it into a hellish mural that fooled some very perceptive antagonists. In fact, the single most compelling example of the process had occurred at the end of the Mellery case, less than a year earlier. But he wasn’t about to go into that now. It was attached to some unresolved issues in his life he didn’t feel like stirring up, not now, not for a seminar. Besides, it wasn’t necessary. He had the feeling his students were already with him. Their minds were more open. They’d stopped debating. They were thinking, wondering, receptive.
“Okay, like I said, that was the emotional part. Now I want to take you to the next level-the level where your brains and emotions come together and make you the best undercover operative you can be, not just a guy with a stupid hat and baggy pants falling off his ass trying to look like a crack addict.”
A few smiles, shrugs, maybe a defensive frown here and there.
“Now-I want you to ask yourselves a strange question. I want you to ask yourself why you believe the things you believe. Why do I believe anything?”
Before they had time to get lost in, or put off by, the abstract depths of this line of inquiry, he punched the “play” button on the videotape machine. As the first image appeared, he said, “While you’re watching the video clip, keep that question in the back of your mind: Why do I believe anything?”
It was a famous scene from a famous movie, but as Gurney scanned the faces in the room, he saw no sign that anyone recognized it. In the scene, an older man is interrogating a younger man.
The young man is eager to work for the Irgun, a radical organization fighting to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine at the end of World War II. He presents himself boastfully as a demolitions expert, seasoned in combat, who acquired his expertise with dynamite by fighting the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. He claims that after killing many Nazis he was captured and imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was assigned to a routine cleaning job.
The older man wants to know more. He asks him several specific questions about his story, the camp, his duties.
The young man’s version of events begins to fall apart when the interrogator reveals that there was no dynamite available in the Warsaw Ghetto. As his heroic narrative crumbles, he’s forced to admit that he learned what he knows about dynamite from his real job in the camp, which was blasting holes in the ground big enough to hold the thousands of bodies of his fellow prisoners, being killed each day in the gas chambers. Beyond that, the older man makes him admit, even more degradingly, that his other job was picking the gold fillings out of the mouths of the corpses. And finally, collapsing in tears of rage and shame, the young man admits that his captors repeatedly raped him.
The raw truth is exposed-along with his desperation to redeem himself. The scene concludes with his induction into the Irgun.
Gurney switched off the tape player.
“So,” he said, turning to the thirty-nine faces, “what was that all about?”
“Every interview should be that simple,” said Falcone dismissively.
“And that fast,” someone chimed in from the back row.
Gurney nodded. “Things in movies always seem simpler and faster than real life. But something happens in that scene that’s very interesting. When you remember it a week or a month from now, what aspect do you think will stick with you?”
“The kid getting raped,” said a broad-shouldered guy next to Falcone.
Murmurs of agreement spread around the room, encouraging other people to speak up.
“His breakdown in the interrogation.”
“Yeah, the whole macho thing evaporating.”
“It’s funny,” said the only black woman. “He starts out by telling lies about himself to get what he wants, but he ends up getting it-getting into the Irgun-by finally telling the truth. By the way, what the hell is the Irgun?”
That got the biggest laugh of the day.
“Okay,” said Gurney. “Let’s stop there and take a closer look. The naïve young guy wants to get into the organization. He tells a lot of lies to make himself look good. The smart old guy sees through it, calls him on his bullshit, drags the truth out of him. And it just so happens that the awfulness of the truth makes the kid an ideal psychological candidate for the fanatical Irgun. So they let him join. Is that a fair summary of what we just saw?”
There were various nods and grunts of agreement, some more cautious than others.
“Anyone think that’s not what we saw?”
Gurney’s Hispanic star looked troubled, which made him grin, which seemed to give her the nudge she needed. “I’m not saying that’s not what I saw. It’s a movie, I know, and in the movie what you said is probably true. But if that was real-you know, a real interview video-it might not be true.”
“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” someone whispered, not quite softly enough.
“I’ll tell you what the fuck it’s supposed to mean,” she said, sparking to the challenge. “It means there’s no proof at all that the old guy actually got to the truth. So the young guy breaks down and cries and says he got fucked in the ass, excuse my language. ‘Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, I’m no big hero after all, just a pathetic little pussycat that gave the Nazis blow jobs.’ So how do we know that story isn’t just more bullshit? Maybe the pussycat is smarter than he looks.”
Christ, thought Gurney, she did it again. He decided to step into the speculative silence that followed her impressive exposition. “Which brings us to the question we started with,” he said. “Why do we believe what we believe? As this perceptive officer here just pointed out, the interrogator in that scene may not have gotten to the truth at all. The question is, what made him think that he did?”
This new twist produced a number of reactions.
“Sometimes your gut tells you what’s what, you know?”
“Maybe the breakdown the kid had looked legit to him. Maybe you had to be there, catch the attitude.”
“Real world, the interrogator would know more stuff than he’s putting on the table. Could be the kid’s confession squares with some of that stuff, confirms it.”
Other officers offered variations on these themes. Others said nothing but listened intently to every word. A few, like Falcone, looked as if the question was making their heads hurt.
When the flow of replies seemed to be stopping, Gurney stepped in with another question. “Do you think a tough-minded interrogator could be misled once in a while by his own wishful thinking?”
A few nods, a few affirmative grunts, a few expressions of pained indecision or maybe plain indigestion.
A guy at the far end of the second row, with a fire-hydrant neck emerging from a black T-shirt, along with densely tattooed Popeye forearms, a shaved head, and tiny eyes-eyes that looked like they were being forced shut by the muscles in his cheeks-raised his hand. The fingers were curled almost into a fist. The voice was slow, deliberate, thoughtful. “You asking, do we sometimes believe what we want to believe?”
“That’s pretty much what I’m asking,” said Gurney. “What do you think?”
The squinty eyes opened a little. “I think that’s… right. That’s human nature.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll speak for myself. I’ve made mistakes because of that… factor. Not because I so much want to believe good things about people. I’ve been on the job awhile, don’t have a lot of illusions about people’s motives, what they’re willing to do.” He bared his teeth in apparent revulsion at some passing image. “I’ve seen my share of hideous shit. Lot of people in this room have seen the same shit. What I’m saying, though, is that sometimes I get an idea about the way something is, and I may not even know how much I want that idea to be right. Like, I know what went down, or I know exactly how some scumbag thinks. I know why he did what he did. Except sometimes-not often, but definitely sometimes-I don’t know shit, I just think I do. In fact, I’m positive I do. It’s like an occupational hazard.” He fell silent, gave the impression that he was considering the bleak implications of what he’d said.
Once again, for perhaps the thousandth time in his life, Gurney was reminded that his first impressions were not especially reliable.
“Thank you, Detective Beltzer,” he said to the big man, glancing at his ID tag. “That was very good.” He scanned the faces along the rows of tables and saw no signs of disagreement. Even Falcone seemed subdued.
Gurney took a minute to extract a mint from a little tin box and pop it into his mouth. Mostly he was stalling to let Beltzer’s comments resonate before going on.
“In the scene we watched,” said Gurney with new animation, “that interrogator might want to believe in the validity of the young man’s breakdown for a number of reasons. Name one.” He pointed randomly at an officer who hadn’t yet spoken.
The man blinked, looked embarrassed. Gurney waited.
“I guess… I guess he might like the idea that he broke the kid’s story… you know, that he succeeded in the interrogation.”
“Absolutely,” said Gurney. He caught the eye of another previously silent attendee. “Name one more.”
The very Irish face beneath a carroty crew cut grinned. “Thought he’d win a few points, maybe. Must report to somebody. Enjoy walking into the boss’s office. ‘Look at what I did.’ Get some props. Maybe a boost for a promotion.”
“Sure, I can see that,” said Gurney. “Can anyone name another reason he might want to believe the kid’s story?”
“Power,” said the young Hispanic woman disdainfully.
“How so?”
“He’d like the idea that he forced the truth out of the subject, forced him to admit painful things, forced him to give up what he was trying to hide, forced him to expose his shame, made him crawl, even made him cry.” She looked like she was smelling garbage. “He’d get a rush out of it, feel like Superman, the all-powerful genius detective. Like God.”
“Big emotional benefit,” said Gurney. “Could warp a man’s vision.”
“Oh, yeah,” she agreed. “Big time.”
Gurney saw a hand go up in the back of the room, a brown-faced man with short, wavy hair who hadn’t yet spoken. “Excuse me, sir, I’m confused. There’s an interrogation-techniques seminar here in this building and an undercover seminar. Two separate seminars, right? I signed up for undercover. Am I in the right place? This, what I’m hearing, it’s all about interrogation.”
“You’re in the right place,” said Gurney. “We’re here to talk about undercover, but there’s a link between the two activities. If you understand how an interrogator can fool himself because of what he wants to believe, you can use the same principle to get the target of your undercover operation to believe in you. It’s all about maneuvering the target into ‘discovering’ the facts about you that you want him to believe. It’s about giving him a powerful motive to swallow your bullshit. It’s about making him want to believe you-just like the guy in the movie wants to believe the confession. There’s tremendous believability to facts a person thinks he’s discovered. When your target believes that he knows things about you that you didn’twant him to know, those things will seem doubly true to him. When he thinks he’s penetrated below your surface layer, what he uncovers in that deeper layer he’ll see as the real truth. That’s what I call the eureka fallacy. It’s that peculiar trick of the mind that gives total credibility to what you think you’ve discovered on your own.”
“The what fallacy?” The question came from multiple directions.
“The eureka fallacy. It’s a Greek word roughly translated as ‘I found it’ or, in the context in which I’m using it, ‘I’ve discovered the truth.’ The point is…” Gurney slowed down to emphasize his next statement. “The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth. So what I’m saying is this: Let your target think he’s discovering something about you. Then he’ll feel that he really knows you. That’s the place at which you will have established Trust. You will have established Trust, with a capital T, the trust that makes everything else possible. We’re going to spend the rest of the day showing you how to make that happen-how to make the thing you want your target to believe about you the very thing he thinks he’s discovering on his own. But right now let’s take a break.”
Saying this, Gurney realized that he’d grown up in an era when “a break” automatically meant a cigarette break. Now, for virtually everyone, it meant a cell-phoning or texting break. As if to illustrate the thought, most of the officers getting to their feet and heading for the door were reaching for their BlackBerrys.
Gurney took a deep breath, extended his arms above his head, and stretched his back slowly from side to side. His introductory segment had created more muscle tension than he’d realized.
The female Hispanic officer waited for the tide of cell phoners to pass, then approached Gurney as he was removing the videotape from the machine. Her hair was thick and framed her face in a mass of soft, kinky curls. Her full figure was packed into a pair of tight black jeans and a tight gray sweater with a swooping neckline. Her lips glistened. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said with a serious-student frown. “That was really good.”
“The tape, you mean?”
“No, I mean you. I mean… what I mean is”-she was incongruously blushing under her serious demeanor-“your whole presentation, your explanation of why people believe things, why they believe some things more strongly, all of that. Like that eureka fallacy thing-that really made me think. The whole presentation was really good.”
“Your own contributions helped make it good.”
She smiled. “I guess we’re just on the same wavelength.”
By the time Gurney was nearing the end of his two-hour drive from the academy in Albany to his farmhouse in Walnut Crossing, dusk was settling stealthily into the winding valleys of the western Catskills.
As he turned off the county road onto the dirt-and-gravel lane that led up to his hilltop property, the jazzed illusion of energy he’d received from two large containers of strong coffee during the afternoon seminar break was now sinking deep into its inversion phase. The fading day generated an overwrought image that he assumed was the product of caffeine withdrawal: summer sidling off the stage like an aging actor while autumn, the undertaker, waited in the wings.
Christ, my brain is turning to mush.
He parked the car as usual on the worn patch of weedy grass at the top of the pasture, parallel to the house, facing a deep rose-and-purple swath of sunset clouds beyond the far ridge.
He entered the house through the side door, kicked off his shoes in the room that served as a laundry and pantry, and continued into the kitchen. Madeleine was on her knees in front of the sink, brushing shards of a broken wineglass into a dustpan. He stood watching her for several seconds before speaking. “What happened?”
“What does it look like?”
He let a few more seconds pass. “How are things at the clinic?”
“Okay, I guess.” She stood, smiled gamely, walked over to the pantry, and emptied the dustpan noisily into the plastic trash barrel. He walked to the French doors and stared out at the monochrome landscape, at the large pile of logs by the woodshed waiting to be split and stacked, the grass that needed its final mowing of the season, the ferny asparagus ready to be cut down for the winter-cut and then burned to avoid the risk of asparagus beetles.
Madeleine came back into the kitchen, switched on the recessed lights in the ceiling over the sideboard, replaced the dustpan under the sink. The increased illumination in the room had the effect of further darkening the outside world, turning the glass doors into reflectors.
“I left some salmon on the stove,” she said, “and some rice.”
“Thank you.” He watched her in the glass pane. She seemed to be gazing into the dishwater in the sink. He remembered her saying something about going out that night, and he decided to risk a guess. “Book-club night.”
She smiled. He wasn’t sure whether it was because he’d gotten it right or wrong.
“How was the academy?” she asked.
“Not bad. A mixed bag of attendees-all the basic types. There’s always the cautious group-the ones who wait and watch, who believe in saying as little as possible. The utilitarians, the ones who want to know exactly how they can use every fact you give them. The minimizers who want to know as little as possible, get involved as little as possible, do as little as possible. The cynics who want to prove that any idea that didn’t occur first to them is bullshit. And, of course, the ‘positives’-probably the best name for them-the ones who want to learn as much as they can, see more clearly, become better cops.” He felt comfortable talking, wanted to go on, but she was studying the dishwater again. “So… yeah,” he concluded, “it was an okay day. The ‘positives’ made it… interesting.”
“Men or women?”
“What?”
She lifted the spatula out of the water, frowning at it as though noticing for the first time how dull and scratched it was. “The ‘positives’-were they men or women?”
It was curious how guilty he could feel when, really, there was nothing to feel guilty about. “Men and women,” he replied.
She held the spatula up closer to the light, wrinkled her nose in disapproval, and tossed it into the garbage receptacle under the sink.
“Look,” he said. “About this morning. This business with Jack Hardwick. I think we need to start that discussion over again.”
“You’re meeting with the victim’s mother. What is there to discuss?”
“There are good reasons to meet with her,” he pressed on blindly. “And there may be some good reasons not to.”
“A very intelligent way of looking at it.” She seemed coolly amused. Or, at least, in an ironical mood. “Can’t talk about it right now, though. Don’t want to be late. For my book club.”
He heard a subtle emphasis on that last phrase-just enough, perhaps, to let him know she knew that he’d guessed. A remarkable woman, he thought. And despite his anxiety and exhaustion, he couldn’t help smiling.
As usual, Madeleine was first up the next morning.
Gurney awoke to the hiss and gurgle of the coffeemaker-along with the sinking realization that he’d forgotten to fix her bicycle brakes.
Hard upon that pang came a sense of uneasiness about his plan to meet later that morning with Val Perry. Although he’d emphasized to Jack Hardwick that his willingness to talk to her did not imply any further commitment-that the meeting was primarily a gesture of courtesy and condolence to someone who’d suffered a dreadful loss-a cloud of second thoughts was descending on him. Pushing them aside as best he could, he showered, dressed, and strode purposefully out through the kitchen to the pantry, mumbling good morning to Madeleine, who was sitting in her customary position at the breakfast table with a slice of toast in her hand and a book propped open in front of her. Slipping into his canvas barn jacket that he removed from its hook in the pantry, he went out the side door and headed for the tractor shed that housed their bicycles and kayaks. The sun had not yet appeared, and the morning was surprisingly raw for early September.
He rolled Madeleine’s bicycle out from behind the tractor into the light at the front of the open shed. The aluminum frame was shockingly cold. The two small wrenches he chose from the set on the shed wall were just as cold.
Cursing, twice banging his knuckles against the sharp edges of the front forks, the second time drawing blood, he adjusted the cables that controlled the position of the brake pads. Creating the proper clearance-allowing the wheel to move freely when the brake was disengaged, yet providing adequate pressure against the rim when the brake was applied-was a trial-and-error process that he had to repeat four times to get right. Finally, with more relief than satisfaction, he declared the job done, replaced the wrenches, and headed back to the house, one hand numb and the other aching.
Passing the woodshed and the adjacent pile of logs made him wonder for the tenth time in as many days, should he rent a wood-splitter or buy one? There were disadvantages either way. The sun was still not up, but the squirrels were already engaged in their morning attack on the bird feeders, raising another question that seemed to have no happy answer. And, of course, there was the matter of the manure for the asparagus.
He went into the kitchen and ran warm water over his hands.
As the stinging subsided, he announced, “Your brakes are fixed.”
“Thank you,” said Madeleine cheerily without looking up from her book.
Half an hour later-resembling a paint-by-numbers sunset in her lavender fleece pants, pink Windbreaker, red gloves, and an orange wool hat pulled down over her ears-she went out to the shed, mounted her bike, rode slowly and bumpily down the pasture path, and disappeared onto the town road beyond the barn.
Gurney spent the next hour on a mental review of the facts of the crime as they had been related to him by Hardwick. Each time he went over the scenario, he was increasingly troubled by its theatricality, its almost-operatic excess.
At 9:00 A.M. exactly, the time appointed for his meeting with Val Perry, he went to the window to see if she might be coming up the road.
Think of the devil and the devil arrives. In this case at the wheel of a Turbo Porsche in racing green-a model Gurney thought sold for around $160,000. The sleek vehicle crept past the barn, past the pond, slowly up the pasture hillside, to the small parking area next to the house, its hugely powerful engine purring softly. With a mixture of cautious curiosity and a bit more excitement than he’d want to admit, Gurney went out to greet his guest.
The woman who emerged from the car was tall and curvaceously slim, wearing a satiny cream blouse and satiny black pants. Her shoulder-length black hair was cut in a straight bob across her forehead like Uma Thurman’s in Pulp Fiction. She was, as Hardwick had promised, “drop-dead gorgeous.” But there was something more-a tension in her as striking as her looks.
She took in her surroundings with a few appraising glances that seemed to absorb everything and reveal nothing. An ingrained habit of circumspection, thought Gurney.
She walked toward him with the hint of a grimace-or was it the customary set of her mouth?
“Mr. Gurney, Val Perry. I appreciate your making time for me,” she said, extending her hand. “Or should I call you Detective Gurney?”
“I left the title in the city when I retired. Call me Dave.” They shook hands. The intensity of her gaze and strength of her grip surprised him. “Would you like to come inside?”
She hesitated, glancing around the garden and the small bluestone patio. “Can we sit out here?”
The question surprised him. Even though the sun was now well above the eastern ridge in a cloudless sky and most of the dew was gone from the grass, the morning was still chilly.
“Seasonal affective disorder,” she said with an explanatory smile. “Do you know what that is?”
“Yes.” He returned her smile. “I think I have a mild case of it myself.”
“I have more than a mild case. From this time of year on, I need as much light, preferably sun, as possible. Or I really do want to kill myself. So if you don’t mind, Dave, perhaps we could sit out here?” It wasn’t really a question.
The detective part of his brain, dominant and hardwired, unaffected by the technicality of retirement, wondered about her seasonal-disorder story, wondered if there was another reason. An eccentric control need, a desire to make others conform to her whims? A desire, for whatever reason, to keep him off balance? Neurotic claustrophobia? An effort to minimize the risk of being recorded? And if being recorded was a worry, did it have a practical or paranoid basis?
He led her to the patio that separated the French doors from the asparagus bed. He indicated a couple of folding chairs on either side of a small café table Madeleine had purchased at an auction. “Is this all right?”
“It’s fine,” she said, pulling one of the chairs out from the table and sitting on it without bothering to brush off the seat.
No concern about ruining her obviously pricey slacks. Ditto the ecru leather handbag she tossed on the still-damp tabletop.
She studied his face with interest. “How much information has Investigator Hardwick already given you?”
Hard edge on the voice, hard look in the almond eyes.
“He gave me the basic facts surrounding the events leading up to and following the… the murder of your daughter. Mrs. Perry, if I may stop for a moment. I need to tell you before we go on how terribly sorry I am for your loss.”
At first she didn’t react at all. Then she nodded, but the movement was so slight it could have been nothing more than a tremor.
“Thank you,” she said abruptly. “I appreciate that.”
Clearly she didn’t.
“But my loss is not the issue. The issue is Hector Flores.” She articulated the name with tightened lips as though biting down defiantly on a bad tooth. “What did Hardwick tell you about him?”
“He said there was clear and convincing evidence of his guilt… that he was a strange, controversial character… that his background is still undetermined and his motivation uncertain. Current location unknown.”
“Current location unknown!” She repeated the phrase with a kind of ferocity, leaning toward him over the little table, placing her palms on the moist metal surface. Her wedding ring was a simple platinum band, but her engagement ring was crowned with the largest diamond he’d ever seen. “You summed it up perfectly,” she went on, her eyes as wildly bright as the stone. “ ‘Current location unknown.’ That’s not acceptable. Not endurable. I’m hiring you to put an end to it.”
He sighed softly. “I think we may be getting a little ahead of ourselves.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” The pressure of her hands on the tabletop had turned her knuckles white.
He answered almost sleepily, an inverted reaction he’d always had to displays of emotion. “I don’t know yet if it makes any sense for me to get involved in a situation that’s the subject of an active police investigation.”
Her lips twitched into an ugly smile. “How much do you want?”
He shook his head slowly. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”
“What do you want? Name it.”
“I have no idea what I want, Mrs. Perry. There are a lot of things I don’t know.”
She took her hands off the table and placed them in her lap, interlacing the fingers as though it were a technique to maintain self-control. “I’ll keep it simple. You find Hector Flores. You arrest him or kill him. Whichever you do, I’ll give you whatever you want. Whatever you want.”
Gurney leaned back from the table, letting his gaze drift to the asparagus patch. At the far end of it, a red hummingbird feeder hung from a shepherd’s crook. He could hear the rising and falling pitch of the buzzing wings as two of the tiny birds swooped viciously at each other-each claiming sole right to the sugar water, or so it seemed. On the other hand, it might be some strange remnant of a spring mating dance, and what looked like a killer instinct might be another instinct altogether.
He made an effort to focus his attention on Val Perry’s eyes, trying to discern the reality behind the beauty-the actual contents of this perfect vessel. There was rage in her, no doubt of that. Desperation. A difficult past-he would bet on that. Regret. Loneliness, though she would not admit to the vulnerability that word implied. Intelligence. Impulsiveness and stubbornness-the impulsiveness to grab hold of something without thinking, the stubbornness to never let it go. And something darker. A hatred of her own life?
Enough, he said to himself. Too easy to confuse speculation with insight. Too easy to fall in love with a wild guess and follow it over a cliff.
“Tell me about your daughter,” he said.
Something in her expression shifted, as if she, too, were putting aside a certain train of thought.
“Jillian was difficult.” Her announcement had the dramatic tone of the opening sentence of a story read aloud. He suspected that whatever followed would be something she’d said many times before. “More than difficult,” she continued. “Jillian was dependent on medication to remain merely difficult and not utterly impossible. She was wild, narcissistic, promiscuous, conniving, vicious. Addicted to oxies, roxies, Ecstasy, and crack cocaine. A world-class liar. Dangerously precocious. Horribly attuned to the weaknesses of other people. Unpredictably violent. With an unhealthy passion for unhealthy men. And that’s with the benefit of the finest therapy money could buy.” Oddly excited by this litany of abuse, she sounded more like a sadist hacking at a stranger with a razor than a mother describing the emotional disorders of her child. “Did Hardwick tell you what I’m telling you about Jillian?” she asked.
“I don’t recall those specific details.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He mentioned that she came from a family with a lot of money.”
She made a loud, grating sound-a sound he was surprised to hear coming from so delicate a mouth. He was even more surprised to realize that it was a burst of laughter.
“Oh, yes!” she cried, the harshness of the laugh still in her voice. “We’re definitely a family with a lot of money. You might say we have a shitload of it.” She articulated the vulgarity with a contemptuous relish. “Does it shock you that I don’t sound the way a bereaved parent is supposed to sound?”
The chilling specter of his own loss limited his response, making speech difficult. He finally said, “I’ve seen stranger reactions to death than yours, Mrs. Perry. I’m not sure how we’re… how someone in your circumstances… is supposed to sound.”
She seemed to be considering this. “You say you’ve seen stranger reactions to death, but have you ever seen a stranger death? A stranger death than Jillian’s?”
He didn’t answer. The question sounded histrionic. The more Gurney looked into those intense eyes, the harder it became to assemble what he saw into one personality. Had she always been so fragmented, or was there something about her daughter’s murder that broke her into these incompatible pieces?
“Tell me more about Jillian,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Apart from the personal characteristics you mentioned, do you know anything about your daughter’s life that might have given this Flores a motive for killing her?”
“You’re asking me why Hector Flores did what he did? I have no idea. Neither do the police. They’ve spent the past four months bouncing back and forth between two theories, both idiotic. One is that Hector was gay, secretly in love with Scott Ashton, resentful of Jillian’s relationship with him, and driven by jealousy to kill her. And the opportunity to kill her in her wedding dress would be irresistible to his drama-queen sensibility. Makes a nice story. Their other theory contradicts the first. A marine engineer and his wife lived next door to Scott. The engineer was away a lot on ships. The wife disappeared the same time Hector did. So the police geniuses conclude that they were having an affair, which Jillian found out about and threatened to reveal to get back at Hector, with whom she was also having an affair, and one thing led to another, and-”
“And he cut off her head at the wedding reception to keep her quiet?” Gurney broke in, incredulous. Hearing himself, he immediately regretted the brutality of the comment and was about to apologize.
But Val Perry showed no reaction to it. “I told you, they’re morons. According to them, Hector Flores was either a closeted homosexual pining madly for the love of his employer or a macho Latino screwing every woman in sight and using his machete on anyone who objected. Maybe they’ll flip a coin to decide which fairy tale they believe.”
“How much contact did you personally have with Flores?”
“None. I never had the pleasure of meeting him. Unfortunately, I have a very vivid picture of him in my mind. He lives there in my mind, with no other address. As you said, ‘current location unknown.’ I have a feeling he’ll live there until he’s captured or dead. With your help I look forward to solving that problem.”
“Mrs. Perry, you used the word ‘dead’ a few times, so I need to make something clear, so there’s no misunderstanding. I’m not a hit man. If that’s part of the assignment, spoken or unspoken, you need to look elsewhere-starting now.”
She studied his face. “The assignment is to find Hector Flores… and bring him to justice. That’s it. That’s the assignment.”
“Then I need to ask you…” he began, then stopped as a grayish brown movement in the pasture caught his attention. A coyote-likely the one he’d seen the day before-was crossing the field. He followed its progress until it disappeared into the maple copse on the far side of the pond.
“What is it?” she asked, turning in her chair.
“Maybe a loose dog. Sorry for the distraction. What I want to know is, why me? If the money supply is as unlimited as you say, you could hire a small army. Or you could hire people who would be, shall we say, less careful about the fugitive’s availability for trial. So why me?”
“Jack Hardwick recommended you. He said you were the best. The very best. He said if anyone could get to the bottom of it-resolve it, end it-you could.”
“And you believed him?”
“Shouldn’t I have?”
“Why did you?”
She considered this for a while, as though a great deal depended on the answer. “He was the initial officer on the case. The chief investigator. I found him rude, obscene, cynical, jabbing people with the sharp end of a stick whenever he could. Horrible. But almost always right. This may not make much sense to you, but I understand dreadful people like Jack Hardwick. I even trust them. So here we are, Detective Gurney.”
He stared at the asparagus ferns, calculating, for no reason he was aware of, the compass point to which they were leaning en masse. Presumably, it would be 180 degrees away from the prevailing winds on the mountain, into the lee of the storms. Val Perry seemed content with his silence. He could still hear the modulated buzzing of the hummingbirds’ wings as they continued their ritual combat-if that’s what it was. It sometimes went on for an hour or more. It was hard to understand how such a prolonged confrontation, or seduction, could be an efficient use of energy.
“You mentioned a few minutes ago that Jillian had an unhealthy interest in unhealthy men. Were you including Scott Ashton in that description?”
“God, no, of course not. Scott was the best thing that ever happened to Jillian.”
“You approved of their marriage decision?”
“Approved? How quaint!”
“I’ll put it another way. Were you pleased?”
Her mouth smiled while her eyes regarded him coolly. “Jillian had certain significant… deficits, shall we say? Deficits that demanded professional intervention for the foreseeable future. Being married to a psychiatrist, one of the best in the field, could certainly be an advantage. I know that sounds… wrong, somehow. Exploitative, perhaps? But Jillian was unique in many ways. And uniquely in need of help.”
Gurney raised a quizzical eyebrow.
She sighed. “Are you aware that Dr. Ashton is the director of the special high school Jillian attended?”
“Wouldn’t that create a conflict of-”
“No,” she interrupted, sounding like she was accustomed to arguing the point. “He’s a psychiatrist, but when she was enrolled at the school, he was never her psychiatrist. So there was no ethical issue, no doctor-patient thing. Naturally, people talked. Gossip-gossip-gossip. ‘He’s a doctor, she was a patient, blah, blah, blah.’ But the legal, ethical reality was more like a former student marrying the president of her college. She left that place when she was seventeen. She and Scott didn’t become personally involved for another year and a half. End of story. Of course, it wasn’t the end of the gossip.” Defiance flashed in her eyes.
“Seems like skating close to the edge,” commented Gurney, as much to himself as to Val Perry.
Again she burst into her shocking laugh. “If Jillian thought they were skating close to the edge, for her that would have been the best thing about it. The edge was where she always wanted to be.”
Interesting, thought Gurney. Interesting, too, was the glitter in Val Perry’s eyes. Maybe Jillian wasn’t the only one in love with life on the edge.
“And Dr. Ashton?” he asked mildly.
“Scott doesn’t care what anyone thinks about anything.” It was a trait she clearly admired.
“So when Jillian was eighteen, maybe nineteen, he proposed marriage?”
“Nineteen. She did the proposing, he accepted.”
As he considered this, he watched the strange excitement in her subsiding.
“So he accepted her proposal. How did you feel about that?”
At first he thought she hadn’t heard him. Then, in a small hoarse voice, looking away, she said, “Relieved.” She stared at Gurney’s asparagus ferns as though somewhere among them she might locate an appropriate explanation for her rapidly shifting feelings. A mild breeze had materialized while they’d been speaking, and the tops of the ferns were waving gently.
He waited, saying nothing.
She blinked, her jaw muscles clenching and relaxing. When she spoke, it was with apparent effort, forcing the individual words out as though each were as heavy as something in a dream. “I was relieved to have the responsibility taken off my hands.” She opened her mouth as though she were about to say more, then closed it with only a slight shake of her head. A gesture of disapproval, thought Gurney. Disapproval of herself. Was that the root of her desire to see Hector Flores dead? To pay her guilty debt to her daughter?
Whoa. Slow down. Stay in touch with the facts.
“I didn’t intend…” She let her voice trail off, leaving it unclear what was unintended.
“What do you think of Scott Ashton?” Gurney asked in a brisk tone, as far from her dark and complex mood as he could get.
She responded instantly, as though the question were a lifesaving escape hatch. “Scott Ashton is brilliant, ambitious, decisive…” She paused.
“And?”
“And cool to the touch.”
“Why do you think he would want to marry a-”
“A woman as crazy as Jillian?” She shrugged unconvincingly. “Possibly because she was breathtakingly beautiful?”
He nodded, unconvinced.
“I know this sounds incredibly trite, but Jillian was special, really special.” She gave the word an almost lurid depth and color. “Did you know her IQ was 168?”
“That’s remarkable.”
“Yes. It was the highest score the testing service had ever measured. They tested her three times, just to make sure.”
“So in addition to everything else, Jillian was a genius?”
“Oh, yes, a genius,” she agreed, a brittle animation returning to her voice. “And, of course, a nymphomaniac. Did I forget to mention that?”
She searched his face for a reaction.
He looked off into the distance, out over the treetops beyond the barn. “And all you want me to do is look for Hector Flores.”
“Not look for him. Find him.”
Gurney had a fondness for puzzles, but this one was starting to feel more like a nightmare. Besides, Madeleine would never…
Jesus, think of her name and…
Amazingly, there she was, in her explosion of red and orange attire, making her way gradually up through the pasture, pushing her bicycle along the rutted incline of the path.
Val Perry turned anxiously in her chair to follow his gaze. “Are you expecting someone?”
“My wife.”
They said nothing more until Madeleine arrived at the edge of the patio on her way to the shed. The women exchanged blandly polite gazes. Gurney introduced them, saying only-to maintain the appearance of confidentiality-that Val was “a friend of a friend” who had dropped by for some professional advice.
“It’s so restful here,” said Val Perry, her emphasis making it sound like a foreign word whose pronunciation she was practicing. “You must love it.”
“I do,” said Madeleine. She gave the woman a brief smile and rolled her bicycle on toward the shed.
“Well,” said Val Perry uneasily, after Madeleine had passed out of sight behind the rhododendrons at the back of the garden, “is there anything else I can tell you?”
“Were you bothered at all by the nineteen versus thirty-eight difference in ages?”
“No,” she snapped, confirming his suspicion that she was.
“How does your husband feel about your intention to engage a private detective?”
“He’s supportive,” she said.
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“He supports what I want to do.”
Gurney waited.
“Are you asking me how much he’s willing to pay?” Anger twisted some of the beauty out of her face.
Gurney shook his head. “It’s not that.”
She seemed not to hear him. “I told you money was not an issue. I told you we have a shitload of money-a shitload, Mr. Gurney, a SHITLOAD-and I’ll spend whatever it takes to get done what I want to get done!”
Cherry splotches were appearing on her vanilla skin, the words rushing out contemptuously. “My husband is the fucking highest-paid fucking neurosurgeon in the fucking world! He makes over forty fucking million dollars a year! We live in a fucking twelve-million-dollar house! You see this fucking thing on my finger?” She glared furiously at her ring, as though it were a tumor on her hand. “This shiny lump of shit is worth two million fucking dollars! For fucking Christ’s sake, don’t ask me about money!”
Gurney was sitting back, his fingers steepled under his chin. Madeleine had returned and was standing quietly at the edge of the patio. She came over to the table.
“You all right?” she asked, as though the meltdown she’d just witnessed had no more significance than a bad fit of sneezing.
“Sorry,” said Val Perry vaguely.
“You want some water?”
“No, I’m fine, I’m perfectly… I’m… No, actually, yes, water would be good. Thank you.”
Madeleine smiled, nodded pleasantly, and went into the house through the French doors.
“My point,” said Val Perry, nervously straightening her blouse, “my point, which I… overstated… My point is simply that money is not an issue. The goal is the important thing. Whatever resources are needed to reach the goal… the resources are available. That’s all I was trying to say.” She pressed her lips together as if to ensure no further outburst.
Madeleine returned with a glass of water and laid it on the table. The woman picked it up, drank half, and put it down carefully. “Thank you.”
“Well,” said Madeleine, with a malicious twinkle in her eye as she went back into the house, “if you need anything else, just holler.”
Val Perry sat erect and motionless. She seemed to be reassembling her composure through an act of will. After a minute she took a deep breath.
“I’m not sure what to say next. Maybe there’s nothing to say, other than to ask for your help.” She swallowed. “Will you help me?”
Interesting. She could have said, “Will you take the case?” Did she consider that way of saying it and realize that this was a better way, a way that would be harder to reject?
However she asked, he knew he’d be crazy to say yes.
He said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I can.”
She didn’t react, just sat there, holding on to the edge of the table, looking into his eyes. He wondered if she’d heard him.
“Why not?” she asked in a tiny voice.
He considered what to say.
For one thing, Mrs. Perry, you seem a bit too much like your descriptions of your daughter. My inevitable collision with the official investigating agency could turn into a major train wreck. And Madeleine’s potential reaction to my immersion in another murder case could redefine marital trouble.
What he actually said was, “My involvement could disrupt the ongoing police efforts, and that would be bad for everyone involved.”
“I see.”
He saw in her expression no real understanding or acceptance of his decision. He watched her, waiting for her next move.
“I understand your reluctance,” she said. “I’d feel the same way in your place. All I ask is that you keep an open mind until you see the video.”
“The video?”
“Didn’t Jack Hardwick mention it?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, it’s all there, the whole… event.”
“You don’t mean a video of the reception where the murder took place?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. The whole thing was recorded. Every minute of it. It’s all on a neat little DVD.”
In the Gurneys’ spacious farmhouse kitchen, there were two tables for meals-the cherrywood Shaker trestle table used mainly for guest dinners, when it would be dusted off and bedecked by Madeleine with candles and bright flowers from their garden, and the so-called breakfast table, with a round pine top on a cream-painted pedestal base, where, singly or together, they ate most of their meals. This smaller table stood just inside the south-facing French doors. On a clear day, it was touched by sunlight from early morning till sunset, making it one of their favorite places to read.
At two-thirty that afternoon, they were sitting in their usual chairs when Madeleine looked up from her book, a biography of John Adams. Adams was her favorite president-largely, it seemed, because his solution to most emotional and physical problems was to take long, curative walks in the woods. She frowned attentively. “I hear a car.”
Gurney cupped his hand to his ear, but even then it was a good ten seconds before he heard it, too. “It’s Jack Hardwick. Apparently there’s a complete video record of the party where the Perry girl was killed. He said he’d bring it over. I said I’d take a look.”
She closed her book, letting her gaze drift into the middle distance beyond the glass doors. “Has it occurred to you that your prospective client is… not exactly sane?”
“All I’m doing is looking at the video. No promises to anyone. You’re welcome to watch it with me.”
Madeleine’s quick flash of a smile seemed to brush aside the invitation. She went on. “I’d be willing to go a little further and say that she’s a poisonous psycho who probably fits at least half a dozen diagnostic codes from the DSM-IV. And whatever she’s told you? I’ll bet it’s not the whole truth, not even close.”
As she was speaking, she was picking unconsciously at the cuticle of her thumb with one of her fingernails, an intermittent new habit that Gurney regarded with alarm as a kind of tremor in her otherwise stable constitution.
Minor and short-lived as these moments were, they shook him, interrupted his fantasy of her infinite resilience, left him temporarily without that secure point of reference, the night-light that warded off gloom and monsters. Absurdly, this tiny nervous gesture had the power to arouse the feeling of sickness and constriction he’d had as a child when his mother started smoking. His mother puffing anxiously on her cigarette, sucking the mouthfuls of smoke into her lungs. Get hold of yourself, Gurney. Grow up, for Godsake.
“But I’m sure you know all that already, right?”
He stared at her for a moment, searching for the conversational thread he’d lost.
She shook her head in mock despair. “I’ll be in my sewing room for a while. Then I have to run up to the stores in Oneonta. If there’s anything you want, add it to the list on the sideboard.”
Hardwick arrived with a gust of wind and a growling muffler. He parked his vintage gas guzzler-a red GTO half restored, with epoxy patches yet to be primed-next to Gurney’s green Subaru Outback. The wind channeled an eddy of fallen leaves around the cars. The first thing Hardwick did when he got out was to cough violently, hack up phlegm, and spit it on the ground.
“Never could stand the stink of dead leaves! Always reminded me of horse manure.”
“Nicely put, Jack,” said Gurney as they shook hands. “You have a delicate way with words.”
They faced each other like badly matched bookends. Hardwick’s messy crew cut, florid skin, spider-veined nose, and watery blue malamute eyes gave him the appearance of a badly aging man with a perennial hangover. By contrast, Gurney’s salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed-too neatly, Madeleine often told him-and at forty-eight he was still trim, kept his stomach firm with a regimen of sit-ups before his morning shower, and looked barely forty.
As Gurney ushered him into the house, Hardwick grinned. “She got to you, eh?”
“Not sure what you mean, Jack.”
“What was it got your attention? Love of truth and justice? Chance to kick Rodriguez in the balls? Or was it her fantastic ass?”
“Hard to say, Jack.” He found himself articulating the man’s name with a peculiar emphasis, as though it were a quick left jab. “Right now I’m just curious about the video.”
“That so? Not bored to death yet by retirement? Not desperate to get back in the game? Not hot to help the hot lady?”
“Just like to see the video. You bring it?”
“The murder movie? You’ve never seen anything like it, Davey boy. High-def DVD taken at the crime scene with the crime in progress.”
Hardwick was standing in the middle of the big room that served as kitchen, dining room, and sitting room, with an old country stove at one end and a fieldstone fireplace forty feet away at the other end. His gaze covered it all in a few seconds. “Shit, it’s a fucking feature spread in Mother Earth News.”
“The DVD player is in the den,” said Gurney, leading the way.
The video began arrestingly with an aerial shot of the countryside, the camera’s position slowly moving down at a steep angle until it was sweeping over green treetops, the bright green of springtime, following the course of a narrow road and a rushing stream-parallel ribbons of black asphalt and glittering water that linked a series of well-kept homes amid sprawling lawns and picturesque outbuildings.
An estate somewhat larger and grander than any of the others came into view, and the progress of the airborne camera slowed. When it reached a position directly above a vast emerald lawn with daffodil borders, its forward movement ceased entirely, and it descended smoothly to ground level.
“Jesus,” said Gurney. “They rented a helicopter to shoot their wedding video?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” rasped Hardwick. “Actually, the helicopter was just for the intro. From this point on, the video was recorded by four fixed cameras that were set up on the lawn in a way that covered the whole property. So there’s a complete sound-and-image file of everything that happened outdoors.”
The cream-colored stone house with its surrounding stone patios and free-form flower beds looked like a transplant from the Cotswolds-springtime in the bucolic English countryside.
“Where is this place?” asked Gurney as he and Hardwick settled down on the den couch in front of the DVD monitor.
Hardwick feigned surprise. “You don’t recognize the exclusive little hamlet of Tambury?”
“Why should I?”
“Tambury is a hotbed of important people, and you’re an important guy. Anyone who’s anybody knows somebody who lives in Tambury.”
“Guess I haven’t made the grade. You going to tell me where it is?”
“Hour northeast of here, halfway to Albany. I’ll give you directions.”
“I won’t be needing-” Gurney began, then stopped with a quizzical frown. “Wait a second. That wouldn’t by any chance be within Sheridan Kline’s-”
Hardwick cut him off. “Kline’s county? You bet it would. So you’ll have a chance to work with your old friends. The DA has a soft spot in his heart for you.”
“Jesus,” muttered Gurney.
“Man thinks you’re a fucking genius. Course, he did take the credit for your Mellery triumph, being the suck-ass politician he is, but deep down inside he knows he owes you.”
Gurney shook his head, looking back at the screen as he spoke. “Deep down inside Sheridan Kline there is nothing but a black hole.”
“Davey, Davey, Davey, you have such cruel opinions of God’s children.” Then, without waiting for a response, he turned to the screen and began narrating the video.
“Caterers,” he said as a team of spikily coiffed young men and women in black pants and crisp white tunics set up a serving bar and half a dozen hot tables.
“The host,” he said, pointing at the screen as a smiling man in a midnight blue suit with a red flower on the lapel emerged from an arched doorway in the back of the house and walked out onto the lawn. “Fiancé, groom, husband, widower-all true on the same day, so call him whatever you want.”
“Scott Ashton?”
“The man himself.”
The man made his way purposefully along the edge of a flower bed toward the right side of the screen, but just before he disappeared, the angle of the scene switched, showing him walking toward what appeared to be a small guest cottage situated at the edge of the lawn where it abutted the woods, perhaps a hundred feet from the main house.
“How many cameras did you say this was shot with?” asked Gurney.
“Four on tripods-plus the one in the helicopter.”
“Who did the editing?”
“Video department at the bureau.”
Gurney watched Scott Ashton knocking on the cottage door-watched and heard, although the sound was not as sharp as the picture. The front of the door and Ashton’s back were about forty-five degrees to the camera. Ashton knocked again, calling out, “Hector.”
Gurney then heard what sounded to him like a Spanish-accented voice, too faint for the words to be recognizable. He glanced questioningly at Hardwick.
“We did an audio enhancement in the lab. ‘Está abierta.’ Translation: ‘It’s open.’ Confirms what Ashton thought he remembered Hector saying.”
Ashton opened the door, went inside, closed it behind him.
Hardwick picked up the remote, pressed the “fast-forward” button, explaining, “He’s in there five or six minutes. Then he opens the door, and you can hear Ashton saying, ‘If you change your mind…’ Then he comes out, closes the door behind him, walks away.” Hardwick let go of the “fast-forward” button as Ashton was emerging from the cottage, looking less happy than when he went in.
“Is that the way they spoke to each other?” asked Gurney. “Ashton speaking English, Flores speaking Spanish?”
“I asked about that myself. Ashton told me it was a recent development, that up till a month or two earlier they’d both been speaking English. Said he believed it was a form of hostile regression, that going back to his native Spanish was Hector’s way of rejecting Ashton-by rejecting the language he’d taught him. Or some kind of psychobabble bullshit like that.”
On the screen, as Ashton was about to exit the frame, the view switched to another camera to reveal him walking toward a Greek-columned garden pavilion-the kind of miniature Parthenon-like structure popularized by Victorian landscape designers-where four tuxedoed men were arranging their music stands and folding chairs. Ashton spoke briefly with the tuxedoed men, but none of the voices were audible.
“String quartet instead of your basic DJ?” asked Gurney.
“This is Tambury-nothing basic about it.” Hardwick fast-forwarded through the rest of Ashton’s conversation with the musicians, through panning shots of the baronial grounds and main house, the catering staff arranging dinner plates and silverware on white linen tablecloths, a pair of willowy female bartenders setting up bottles and glasses, close-ups of red and white petunias cascading from carved stone urns.
“This was exactly four months ago?” asked Gurney.
Hardwick nodded. “Second Sunday in May. Perfect time for a wedding. Glories of spring, balmy breezes, nest-building time, doves cooing.”
The relentlessly sardonic tone was rubbing Gurney’s nerves raw.
When Hardwick stopped fast-forwarding and returned the DVD to “play” mode, the camera was focused on an elaborate ivied trellis that served as an entryway to the main expanse of the lawn. A loose line of wedding guests was strolling through it. There was music in the background, something cheerily baroque.
As each couple passed under the arched bower, Hardwick identified them, referring to a wrinkled list he’d pulled from his pants pocket. “Tambury chief of police Burt Luntz and his wife… President of Dartwell College and her husband… Ashton’s literary agent and her husband… President of the Tambury British Heritage Society and his wife… Congresswoman Liz Laughton and her husband… Philanthropist Angus Boyd and his young male whatever-he-is, calls him his ‘assistant’… Editor of the International Journal of Clinical Psychology and his wife… Lieutenant governor and his wife… Dean of the medical-”
Gurney interrupted. “Are they all like that?”
“Do they all reek of money, power, connections? Yes. CEOs, major politicians, newspaper publishers, even a goddamn bishop.”
For the next ten minutes, the stream of privileged overachievers flowed into Scott Ashton’s backyard botanical garden. None appeared out of place in the rarefied environment. But none appeared particularly thrilled to be there.
“We’re getting to the end of the line,” said Hardwick. “Next we have the bride’s parents: Dr. Withrow Perry, world-famous neurosurgeon, and Val Perry, his trophy wife.”
The doctor looked to be in his early sixties. He had a fleshy, contemptuous mouth, the double chin of a gourmand, and sharp eyes. He moved with a surprising quickness and grace-like a former fencing instructor, thought Gurney, remembering the lessons he and Madeleine had taken together in the second or third year of their marriage, when they were still actively searching for things they might enjoy doing together.
The Val Perry standing beside the doctor on the screen like a film fantasy of Cleopatra radiated a satisfaction missing from the Val Perry who’d visited Gurney that morning.
“And now,” said Hardwick, “the groom and his soon-to-be-headless bride.”
“Jesus,” murmured Gurney. There were times when Hardwick’s lack of feeling seemed to go far enough beyond routine cop cynicism to qualify him as a marginal sociopath. But this was neither the time nor the place to… to what? To tell the man he was a sick prick?
Gurney took a deep breath and refocused his attention on the video-on Dr. Scott Ashton and Jillian Perry Ashton walking together toward the camera, smiling-a smattering of applause, a few shouts of “Bravo!” and a joyful baroque crescendo in the background.
Gurney was staring in amazement at the bride.
“The hell is wrong?” asked Hardwick.
“She’s not quite what I imagined.”
“The hell did you expect?”
“From what her mother told me, I wasn’t expecting her to look like a cover shot on Brides magazine.”
Hardwick studied the image of the beaming young beauty in a floor-length white satin gown, the modest neckline dotted with tiny sequins, her white-gloved hands holding a bouquet of pink tea roses, her golden hair swept up in a tight swirl topped by a glittering tiara, her almond eyes accented with a touch of eyeliner, her perfect mouth enlivened with a lipstick that matched the pink of the tea roses.
Hardwick shrugged. “Don’t they all want to look like that?”
Gurney frowned, troubled by the conventionality of Jillian’s appearance.
“It’s in their goddamn genes,” Hardwick insisted.
“Yeah, maybe,” said Gurney, unconvinced.
Hardwick fast-forwarded through scenes of bride and groom moving through the crowd, the string quartet attacking their instruments with great gusto, the catering staff gliding among the sipping and munching throng. “We’re going to cut to the chase,” he said, “straight to the segment where everything happens.”
“You mean the actual murder?”
“Plus some interesting stuff just before and just after.”
After a few seconds of digital artifacts, the screen was filled with a medium shot of three people conversing in a triangle. Some words were more audible than others, partly buried in the buzz of other conversations, partly overwhelmed by the exuberance of Vivaldi.
Hardwick pulled another folded sheet of paper from his pocket, opened it, and handed it to Gurney, who recognized the familiar format: the typed transcript of a recorded conversation.
“Watch the video and listen to the sound track,” said Hardwick. “I’ll tell you when you can start following it on the transcript, in case you can’t make out the audio. The three speakers are Chief Luntz and his wife, Carol, both facing you, and Ashton, with his back to you.” The Luntzes were holding tall drinks topped with lime wedges. The chief was balancing a couple of canapés on the palm of his free hand. Whatever Ashton was drinking he was holding in front of him, out of the fixed camera’s line of sight. The audible snippets of dialogue seemed thoroughly trite and came entirely from Mrs. Luntz.
“Yes, yes… day for it… fortunate that the forecast, which was very… flowers… the time of year that makes living in the Catskills worthwhile… music, very different, perfect for the occasion… mosquito, not a single… altitude makes it impossible, thank God, because mosquitoes down on Long Island… ticks, no ticks at all, thank God… had Lyme disease, absolutely horrible… wrong diagnosis… nauseous, aching, absolutely in despair, wanted to kill herself, the pain…”
As Gurney glanced sideways at Hardwick on the couch, a raised eyebrow questioning the point of all this, he heard the chief’s louder voice for the first time. “Carol, it’s no time to be talking about ticks. It’s a happy day-right, Doctor?”
Hardwick pointed a forefinger at the top line of the typed page on Gurney’s lap.
Gurney looked down at it, finding it a useful supplement to the hubbub on the sound track.
SCOTT ASHTON:
Very happy, indeed, Chief.
CAROL LUNTZ:
I was just trying to say how perfect everything is today-no bugs, no rain, no problems at all. And what a lovely affair, the music, handsome men everywhere…
CHIEF LUNTZ:
How you doing with your Mexican genius?
SCOTT ASHTON:
I wish I knew, Chief. Sometimes…
C AROL L UNTZ:
I heard there were some… strange… I don’t know, I don’t like repeating…
S COTT A SHTON:
Hector is going through some sort of emotional difficulty. His behavior has been different lately. I guess it’s been noticed. I’d be very interested in anything you’ve witnessed, anything that caught your attention.
C AROL L UNTZ:
Well, not witnessed by me, not directly, I only… rumors, but I try not to listen to rumors.
S COTT A SHTON:
Oh. Oh, just one second. Excuse me just one minute. Jillian seems to be waving at me.
Hardwick pushed the “pause” button. “See?” he said. “On the far left side of the picture?” Frozen in the pause frame was Jillian, looking in Ashton’s direction, holding up the gold watch on her left wrist and pointing to it. Hardwick pushed “play” again, and the action resumed. As Ashton made his way across the lawn through a scattering of guests to Jillian, the Luntzes continued their conversation without him, most of which was clear enough to Gurney with only an occasional glance at the transcript.
C HIEF L UNTZ:
You planning to tell him about that business with Kiki Muller?
C AROL L UNTZ:
Don’t you think he has a right to know?
C HIEF L UNTZ:
You don’t even know how that rumor started.
C AROL L UNTZ:
I think it’s more than a rumor.
C HIEF L UNTZ:
Yeah, yeah, you think. You don’t know. You think.
C AROL L UNTZ:
If you had someone living in your house, eating your food, who was secretly screwing your neighbor’s wife, wouldn’t you want to know?
C HIEF L UNTZ:
What I’m saying is, you don’t know.
C AROL L UNTZ:
What do I need, pictures?
C HIEF L UNTZ:
Pictures would help.
C AROL L UNTZ:
Burt, you can be ridiculous all you want, but if some weirdo Mexican was living in our house and screwing Charley Maxon’s wife, what would you do then, wait for pictures?
C HIEF L UNTZ:
Jesus fucking Christ, Carol…
C AROL L UNTZ:
Burt, that’s blasphemy. I told you, Burt, don’t talk that way.
C HIEF L UNTZ:
Got it. No blasphemy. Listen-here’s the point. You heard something from somebody who heard something from somebody who heard something from somebody-
C AROL L UNTZ:
All right, Burt, we can do without the sarcasm!
They fell silent. After a minute or so, the chief tried to get one of the canapés resting on his left hand into his mouth, finally succeeding by employing the base of his glass like a tiny shovel. His wife made a face, looked away, drained her drink, began tapping her foot to the rhythms emanating from the mini-Parthenon. Her expression became festive, bordering on manic, and her gaze darted around the crowd as though searching for a promised celebrity. When one of the servers approached with a tray of drinks, she traded in her empty glass for a full one. The chief was now observing her with lips compressed into a hard line.
C HIEF L UNTZ:
You might want to slow down a bit.
C AROL L UNTZ:
I beg your pardon?
C HIEF L UNTZ:
You heard me.
C AROL L UNTZ:
Someone’s got to tell the truth.
C HIEF L UNTZ:
What truth?
C AROL L UNTZ:
The truth about Scott’s slimy Mexican.
C HIEF L UNTZ:
The truth? Or is it just a rotten little rumor embellished by one of your idiot friends-total, slanderous, actionable bullcrap!
While the tempers of the Luntzes flared, Ashton and Jillian were visible in the left background of the scene, their distance from the fixed camera position putting their conversation out of audio range. It ended with Jillian turning and walking in the direction of the cottage, which was set with its rear against the bordering woodland on the opposite side of the lawn, and Ashton heading back toward the Luntzes with a troubled frown.
When Carol Luntz saw Ashton approaching, she downed her margarita in a couple of fast swallows. Her husband reacted to this with an inaudible word hissed through clenched teeth. (Gurney glanced down at the audio transcript, but it offered no interpretation.)
Switching expressions as Ashton rejoined them, the chief asked, “So, Scott, everything okay? Everything fine?”
“I hope so,” said Ashton. “I mean, I wish Jillian would just…” He shook his head, his voice trailing off.
“Oh, God,” exclaimed Carol Luntz, rather too hopefully, “there’s nothing wrong, is there?”
Ashton shook his head. “Jillian wants Hector to join us for the wedding toast. He told us earlier he doesn’t want to, and… well, that’s about it.” He smiled awkwardly, gazing down at the grass.
“What’s his problem, anyway?” asked Carol, leaning in toward Ashton.
Hardwick pushed “pause,” freezing Carol in a conspiratorial pose. He turned to Gurney with the fire of a man sharing a revelation. “This bitch is one of those bitches that gets off on trouble, wants to savor every detail, pretends she’s bursting with empathy. Cries for your pain and hopes you die so she can cry harder and show the world how much she cares.”
Gurney sensed truth in the diagnosis but found Hardwick’s excess hard to take. “What’s next?” he asked, turning impatiently toward the screen.
“Relax. It gets better.” Hardwick pushed “play,” reanimating the exchange between Carol Luntz and Scott Ashton.
Ashton was saying, “It’s all rather silly; I don’t want to bore you with it.”
“But what’s wrong with that man?” Carol persisted, turning wrong into a wail.
Ashton shrugged, looked too exhausted to keep the matter private any longer. “Hector has a negative attitude toward Jillian. Jillian, on the other hand, is determined to solve whatever undefined issue has come between them. For that reason she insisted that I invite him to our reception, which I attempted to do on two occasions-a week ago and again this morning. On both occasions he declined. Just a moment ago Jillian called me over to inform me that she intends to pry him out of his little cottage over there for the wedding toast. In my opinion it’s a waste of time, and I told her so.”
“Why would she want to bother with… with… him?” She stumbled at the end, as though grabbing for a nasty epithet and finding none within reach.
“Good question, Carol, but not one I can answer.”
His comment was followed by a cut to the view from another camera, a camera positioned to cover a quadrant of the property that included the cottage, the rose garden, and half of the main house. Jillian, the picture-book bride, was knocking on the cottage door.
Again Hardwick stopped the video, causing the three figures to break down into a mosaic pattern on the screen. “All right,” he said. “Here we are. Starting now. The critical fourteen minutes. The fourteen minutes during which Hector Flores kills Jillian Perry Ashton. The fourteen minutes during which he cuts her head off with a machete, slips out the back window, and escapes without a trace. Those fourteen minutes start when she steps inside and closes the door.”
Hardwick released the “pause” button, and the action resumed. Jillian opened the cottage door, stepped inside, and closed it behind her.
“That’s it,” said Hardwick, pointing at the screen, “the last sight of her alive.”
The camera remained on the cottage while Gurney imagined the murder about to occur behind the floral-curtained windows.
“You said Flores ‘slips out the back window and escapes without a trace’ after killing her. You mean that literally?”
“Well,” said Hardwick, pausing dramatically, “I’d have to say… yes and no.”
Gurney sighed and waited.
“The thing is,” said Hardwick, “Flores’s disappearance has a familiar echo about it.” Another pause, accented by a sly smile. “There was a trail from the back window of the cottage that went out into the woods.”
“What’s your point, Jack?”
“That trail out into the woods? It just stopped dead a hundred and fifty yards from the house.”
“What are you saying?”
“It doesn’t remind you of anything?”
Gurney stared at him incredulously. “You mean the Mellery case?”
“Don’t know of a whole lot of other murder cases with trails stopping in the middle of the woods with no obvious explanation.”
“So you’re saying… what?”
“Nothing definite. Just wondering if you might have missed a loose end when you wrapped up the Mellery lunacy.”
“What kind of loose end?”
“Possibility of an accomplice?”
“Accomplice? Are you nuts? You know as well as I do there was nothing about the Mellery case that suggested even the remote possibility of more than one perp.”
“You a little touchy on that subject?”
“Touchy? I’m touchy about time-wasting suggestions based on nothing more than your demented sense of humor.”
“So it’s all a coincidence?” Hardwick was striking the precise supercilious note that went through Gurney like nails on a blackboard.
“All what, Jack?”
“The MO similarities.”
“You better tell me pretty damn quick what you’re talking about.”
Hardwick’s mouth stretched sideways-maybe a grin, maybe a grimace. “Watch the movie,” he said. “Only a few minutes to go.”
A few minutes passed. Nothing of significance was happening on the screen. Several guests wandered over to the flower beds that bordered the cottage, and one of the women in the group, the one Hardwick had earlier identified as the lieutenant governor’s wife, seemed to be conducting a kind of botanical tour, speaking energetically as she pointed at various blooms. Her group moved gradually out of the frame as though attached by invisible threads to its leader. The camera remained focused on the cottage. The curtained windows revealed nothing.
Just as Gurney was about to question the purpose of this segment of the video, the view switched back to one showing Scott Ashton and the Luntzes in the foreground and the cottage in the background.
“Time for the toast,” Ashton was saying. All three were looking toward the cottage. Ashton glanced at his watch, raised his hand in a summoning gesture, and called to a member of the serving staff. She hurried over with an accommodating smile.
“Yes, sir?”
He pointed toward the cottage. “Let my wife know it’s past four o’clock.”
“She’s in that cute little house over there by the trees?”
“Yes, please tell her it’s time for the wedding toast.”
As she headed off on her assignment, Ashton turned to the Luntzes. “Jillian tends to lose track of time, especially when she’s trying to get someone to do what she wants.”
The video showed the young woman crossing the lawn, arriving at the cottage door, and knocking. After a few seconds, she knocked again, then tried the knob with no success. She looked back across the lawn toward Ashton, turning her palms up in a gesture of bafflement. In reply he mimed a more energetic knock. She frowned but made the repeat effort, anyway. (This time the sound was loud enough to register on the sound track of the camera, which Gurney reckoned must have been around fifty feet from the cottage.) When there was no reply to her final attempt, she turned up her palms again and shook her head.
Ashton muttered something, seemingly more to himself than to the Luntzes, and strode off toward the cottage. He went straight to the door, knocked loudly, then yanked and pushed roughly at the knob, at the same time calling, “Jilli! Jilli, the door is locked! Jillian!” He stood scowling at the door, his body language conveying frustration and confusion, then turned and walked briskly to the back door of the main house.
Perched on the arm of Gurney’s couch, Hardwick explained, “He went to get a key. Told us he always kept an extra in the pantry.”
A moment later the video showed Ashton emerging from the main house. He went back to the cottage door, knocked again, apparently got no response, inserted a key, opened the door inward. From the perspective of the camera recording all this, about forty-five degrees to the cottage, very little of the building’s interior was visible and only Ashton’s back, but there was an abrupt stiffening in his body. After a momentary hesitation, he stepped inside. Several seconds later there was an awful sound, a howl of shock and anguish-the word “HELP” screamed desperately once, twice, three times, and then, seconds later, Scott Ashton came staggering out the door, tripping over his own feet, falling sideways into a flower bed, screaming “HELP” so primally and repeatedly that it ceased being a word at all.
The wedding videographer’s stationary cameras, positioned at their four key viewpoints on the lawn, continued to run for another twelve minutes after Ashton’s collapse, creating a comprehensive video record of the ensuing chaos-at which point they were switched off and impounded by Chief Luntz for their evidentiary value.
The full twelve minutes of hyperactivity were included on the edited DVD that Gurney was watching with Hardwick-twelve minutes of shouted orders and questions, horrified shrieks, guests running to Ashton, into the cottage, backing out, a woman falling, another tripping over her, falling on top of her, guests helping Ashton up from the flower bed, guiding him to the back door of the main house, Luntz blocking the door of the cottage and frantically working his cell phone, guests turning this way and that with crazed looks, the four musicians entering the scene, one violinist with his instrument still in his hand, another with just his bow, three uniformed Tambury cops running up to Luntz as he guarded the doorway, the president of the British Heritage Society vomiting on the grass.
At the end of the recording, after a final digital jitter, Gurney sat back slowly on his couch and looked over at Hardwick.
“Jesus.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think I’d like to know a little more.”
“For instance?”
“When did BCI arrive at the scene, and what did you find in the cottage?”
“Uniformed troopers arrived three minutes after Luntz shut down the cameras, which would be fifteen minutes after Ashton discovered the body. While Luntz was calling in his own uniforms, guests were calling 911-which got passed along to the trooper barracks and the sheriff’s department. As soon as the uniforms took a peek in the cottage, they called BCI, call got routed to me, and I got to the scene maybe twenty-five minutes later. So the customary clusterfuck was in high gear in no time at all.”
“And?”
“And the prevailing wisdom was that the whole deal should get dumped ASAP into BCI’s lap-which meant Senior Investigator Jack Hardwick’s lap. Where it remained for approximately one week, until I had the urge to inform our beloved captain that his approach to the case-the approach he insisted I follow-had certain logical flaws.”
Gurney smiled. “You told him he was a fucking idiot?”
“Words to that effect.”
“And he reassigned the case to Arlo Blatt?”
“He did exactly that, and there it has remained stuck for nearly four months now in a dust storm of wheel spinning, without a centimeter of real progress. Hence the beautiful mother of the beautiful bride’s interest in exploring another avenue of resolution.”
An exploration likely to replace the dust storm of wheel spinning with a shit storm of territorial defense, thought Gurney.
Back away now, before it’s too late, the small voice of wisdom whispered.
Then another voice spoke with a carefree confidence. You should at least find out what they discovered in the cottage. More knowledge is always a good thing.
“So you arrived at the scene and someone directed you to the body?” asked Gurney.
A twitch in Hardwick’s mouth signaled the arrival of the memory. “Yes. I was directed to the body. I was conscious of how the fuckers were watching me as they brought me to the doorway. I remember thinking, ‘They’re expecting a major reaction, which means that there’s something awful in there.’ ” He paused. His lips drew back from his teeth for a second or two, and then he went on. “Well, I was right about that. One hundred percent right.” He seemed authentically disturbed.
“The body was visible from the doorway?” asked Gurney.
“Oh, yeah, it was visible all right.”
Hardwick heaved himself up from the couch, rubbed his face roughly with both hands like a man trying to get himself fully awake after a night of bad dreams.
“Any chance you might have a cold bottle of beer in the house?”
“Not at the moment,” said Gurney.
“Not at the moment? Fuck does that mean? Not at the moment, but maybe in a minute or two an icy Heineken might materialize in front of me?”
Gurney noted that whatever fleeting vulnerability the man had just experienced at his recollection of what he’d seen four months ago was now gone.
“So,” Gurney went on, ignoring the beer diversion, “the body was observable from the doorway?”
Hardwick walked over to the den window that looked out on the back pasture. The northern sky was dusky gray. As he spoke, he gazed out in the direction of the high ridge that led to the old bluestone quarry.
“The body was sitting in a chair at a small square table in the front room, six feet from the entry door.” He grimaced, as one might at the smell of a skunk. “As I said, the body was sitting at the table. But the head was not on the body. The head was on the table in a pool of blood. On the table, facing the body, still wearing the tiara you saw in the video.”
He paused, as if to ensure the accurate ordering of details. “The cottage had three rooms-the front room and, behind it, a small kitchen and a small bedroom-plus a tiny bathroom and a closet off the bedroom. Wood floors, no rugs, nothing on the walls. Apart from the substantial amount of blood on and around the body, there were a few drops of blood toward the back of the room near the bedroom doorway and a few more drops near the bedroom window, which was wide open.”
“Escape route?” asked Gurney.
“No doubt about that. Partial footprint in the soil outside the window.” Hardwick turned from the den window and gave Gurney one of his obnoxiously sly looks. “That’s where it gets interesting.”
“The facts, Jack, just the facts. Spare me the coy bullshit.”
“Luntz had called the sheriff’s department because they had the nearest K-9 team, and they got to Ashton’s estate about five minutes after I did. The dog picks up a scent from a pair of Flores’s boots and races straight out through the woods like the trail is red hot. But he stops all of a sudden a hundred and fifty yards from the cottage-sniffing, sniffing, sniffing around in a pretty tight circle, and he stops and barks right on top of the weapon, which turned out to be a razor-sharp machete. But here’s the thing-after he found the machete, he couldn’t pick up any scent leading away from it. Handler led him around in a small circle, then a wider circle-kept at it for half an hour-but it was no good. The only trail the dog could find led from the back window of the cottage to the machete, nowhere else.”
“This machete was just lying out there on the ground?” asked Gurney.
“It had some leaves and loose dirt kicked over the blade, like a half-assed attempt had been made to conceal it.”
Gurney pondered this for a few seconds. “No doubt about it being the murder weapon?”
Hardwick looked surprised by the question. “Zero doubt. Victim’s blood still on it. Perfect DNA match. Also supported by the ME’s report.” Hardwick’s tone switched to one of rote repetition of something he’d said many times before. “Death caused by the severing of both carotid arteries and the spinal column between the cervical vertebrae C1 and C2 as the result of a chopping blow by a sharp, heavy blade, delivered with great force. Damage to neck tissues and vertebrae consistent with the machete discovered in the wooded area adjacent to the crime scene. So,” said Hardwick, switching back to his normal tone, “zero doubt. DNA is DNA.”
Gurney nodded slowly, absorbing this.
Hardwick continued, adding a familiar touch of provocation. “The only open question about that particular spot in the woods is why the trail stopped there, kind of like the trail at the Mellery crime scene that just-”
“Hold on a second, Jack. There’s a big difference between the visible boot prints we found at Mellery’s place and an invisible scent trail.”
“Fact is, they both ended in the middle of nowhere with no explanation.”
“No, Jack,” Gurney snapped, “the fact is, there was a perfectly good explanation for the boot prints-just as there will be a perfectly good, but entirely different, explanation for your scent problem.”
“Ah, Davey boy, that’s what always impressed me about you: your omniscience.”
“You know, I always believed you were smarter than you pretended to be. Now I’m not so sure.”
Hardwick’s smirk conveyed a sense of satisfaction with Gurney’s irritation. He switched to a new tone, all innocence and earnest curiosity. “So what do you think happened? How could Flores’s scent trail just end like that?”
Gurney shrugged. “Changed his shoes? Put plastic bags over his feet?”
“Why the hell would he do that?”
“Maybe to create the problem the dog ended up having? Make it impossible to track him wherever he went next, wherever he went to hide out?”
“Like Kiki Muller’s house?”
“I heard that name on the tape. Isn’t she the one who-”
“Who Flores was supposedly screwing. Right. Lived next door to Ashton. Wife of Carl Muller, marine engineer who was away on a ship half the time. Kiki was never seen after the day Flores disappeared, presumably not a coincidence.”
Gurney leaned back on the couch, mulling this over, having trouble with a piece of it. “I can understand why Flores might take precautions to keep from being tracked to a neighbor’s house or wherever he was actually going, but why wouldn’t he do that before he left the cottage? Why in the woods? Why after he went out and hid the machete and not before?”
“Maybe he wanted to get out of the cottage ASAP?”
“Maybe. Or maybe he wanted us to find the machete?”
“Then why bury it?”
“You mean half bury it. Didn’t you say that only the blade was covered with dirt?”
Hardwick smiled. “Interesting questions. Definitely worth pursuing.”
“And one other thing,” said Gurney. “Has anyone verified where either of the Mullers was at the time of the murder?”
“We know that Carl was chief engineer on a commercial fishing boat about fifty miles off Montauk that whole week. But we couldn’t find anyone who’d seen Kiki the day of the murder, or the day before for that matter.”
“That mean anything to you?”
“Not a damn thing. Very private kind of community-at least at Ashton’s end of the road. Minimum property size is ten acres, private kind of people, not likely to hang out at the back fence and shoot the shit, probably be considered rude up there to say hello without an invitation.”
“Do we know if anyone saw her anytime after her husband left for Montauk?”
“Seems nobody did, but…” Hardwick shrugged, reiterating that not being seen by your neighbors in Tambury was the rule, not the exception.
“And the guests at the reception, their locations were all accounted for during ‘the critical fourteen minutes’ you referred to?”
“Yep. Day after the murder, I went thorough the video personally, accounted for the whereabouts of every guest for every minute the victim was in that cottage-with our encouraging captain telling me I was wasting time that I should be spending searching the woods for Hector Flores. Who the hell knows, maybe numbnuts was right for once. Of course, if I’d ignored the video and it later turned out… well, you know what the little shithead is like.” He hissed the obscenity through tightened lips. “What are you looking at me like that for?”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m crazy.”
“You are crazy,” said Gurney lightly. He was also thinking that during the ten months since they’d been involved in the Mellery case, Hardwick’s attitude toward Captain Rod Rodriguez had for some reason progressed from contemptuous to venomous.
“Maybe I am,” said Hardwick, as much to himself as to Gurney. “Seems to be the general consensus.” He turned and stared out the den window again. It was darker now, the northern ridge nearly black against a slate sky.
Gurney wondered: Was Hardwick, uncharacteristically, inviting a personal discussion? Did he have a problem that he might actually be willing to talk about?
Whatever personal door might have been ajar was quickly closed. Hardwick pivoted on his heel, the sardonic spark back in his eye. “There’s a question about the fourteen minutes. Might not be exactly fourteen. I’d like to get your omniscient perspective.” He came away from the window, sat on the arm of the couch farthest from Gurney, spoke to the coffee table as though it were a communications channel between them. “No doubt about the point when the clock starts running. When Jillian walked into the cottage, she was alive. Nineteen minutes later, when Ashton opened the door, she was sitting at the table in two pieces.” He wrinkled his nose and added, “Each piece in its own private puddle of blood.”
“Nineteen? Not fourteen?”
“Fourteen takes it back to the point when the catering girl knocked and got no answer. Reasonable assumption would be that the victim didn’t answer because the victim was already dead.”
“But not necessarily?”
“Not necessarily, because at that point she might have been taking orders from Flores with a machete in his hand, telling her to keep her mouth shut.”
Gurney thought about it, pictured it.
“You got a preference?” asked Hardwick.
“Preference?”
“You think she got the big slice before or after the fourteen-minute mark?”
The big slice? Gurney sighed, knowing the routine: Hardwick being outrageous, his audience wincing. Probably been going on all his life, the shock-jock clown-a style reinforced by the prevailing cynicism in the world of law enforcement, deepening and souring as he aged, concentrated by career problems and bad chemistry with his boss.
“So?” Hardwick prodded. “Which is it?”
“Almost certainly before the first knock on the door. Probably quite a bit before. Most likely within a minute or two of her entering the cottage.”
“Why?”
“The sooner he did it, the more time he’d have to escape before her body was discovered. The more time he’d have to get rid of the machete, to do whatever he did to keep the dogs from following the trail any farther, to get to where he was going before the neighborhood was flooded with cops.”
Hardwick looked skeptical, but not more so than usual-it had become the natural set of his features. “You’re assuming this was all conducted according to plan, all premeditated?”
“That would be my take on it. You see it differently?”
“There are problems either way.”
“For instance?”
Hardwick shook his head. “First, give me your argument for premeditation.”
“The position of the head.”
Hardwick’s mouth twitched. “What about it?”
“The way you described it-facing the body, tiara in place. It sounds like a deliberate arrangement that meant something to the killer or was intended to mean something to someone else. Not a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
Hardwick looked like he had a touch of acid reflux. “Problem with premeditation is that going into the cottage was the victim’s idea. How would Flores know she was going to do that?”
“How do you know she hadn’t discussed it with him beforehand?”
“She told Ashton she just wanted to talk Flores into joining the wedding toast.”
Gurney smiled, waited for Hardwick to think about what he was saying.
Hardwick cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You think that was bullshit? That she had some other reason for going into the cottage? That Flores had set her up earlier with some line of shit and she was lying to Ashton about the wedding-toast thing? Those are big assumptions, based on nothing.”
“If the murder was premeditated, something along those lines must have happened.”
“But if it wasn’t premeditated?”
“Nonsense, Jack. This wasn’t an impulse. It was a message. I don’t know who the recipient was or what it meant. But it was definitely a message.”
Hardwick made another acid-reflux face but didn’t argue. “Speaking of messages, we found an odd one on the victim’s cell phone-a text message sent to her an hour before she was killed. It said, ‘For all the reasons I have written.’ According to the phone company, the message came from Flores’s phone, but it was signed ‘Edward Vallory.’ That name mean anything to you?”
“Not a thing.” The room had grown dark, and they could hardly see each other at opposite ends of the couch. Gurney switched on the end-table lamp beside him.
Hardwick rubbed his face again, hard, with the palms of both hands. “Before I forget, I wanted to mention a small oddity I observed at the scene and was reminded of in the ME’s report. Might not mean anything, but… the blood on the body itself, the torso, it was all on the far side.”
“Far side?”
“Yeah, the side away from where Flores would have been standing when he swung the machete.”
“Your point being?”
“Well, you know… you know how you just kind of absorb what you’re seeing at a homicide scene? And you start to picture what it was that someone did that would account for things being the way they are?”
Gurney shrugged. “Sure. It’s automatic. That’s what we do.”
“Well, I’m looking at how the blood from the carotids all went down the far side of her body, despite the fact that the torso was sitting up straight, kind of supported by the chair arms, and I’m wondering why. I mean, there’s an artery on each side, so how come all the blood went one way?”
“And what did you picture happening?”
Hardwick bared his teeth in a quick flinch of distaste. “I pictured Flores grabbing her by the hair with one hand and swinging that machete full force with the other right through her neck-which is pretty much what the ME says must have happened.”
“And?”
“And then… then he holds the severed head at an angle against the pulsing neck. In other words, he uses the head to deflect the blood. To keep it from getting on him.”
Gurney began to nod slowly. “The ultimate sociopathic moment…”
Hardwick offered a small grimace of agreement. “Not that hacking her head off had left much doubt about the killer’s mental status. But… there’s something about the… the practicality of the gesture that’s kind of disturbing. Talk about having ice water in your veins…”
Gurney continued to nod. He could see and feel what Hardwick was getting at.
The two men were silent for several long, thoughtful seconds. “There’s a small oddity that’s been bothering me, too,” said Gurney. “Nothing macabre, just a bit perplexing.”
“What?”
“The wedding reception’s guest list.”
“You mean the hot-shit who’s who of upstate New York?”
“When you were at the scene, do you recall seeing anybody under the age of thirty-five? Because watching that video just now, I didn’t.”
Hardwick blinked, scowled, looked like he was flipping through files in his head. “Probably not. So what?”
“Definitely no one in their twenties?”
“Apart from the catering staff, definitely no one in their twenties. So what?”
“Just wondering why the bride didn’t have any friends at her own wedding.”
When Hardwick left just before sunset, turning down a halfhearted offer to stay for dinner, he entrusted his copy of the DVD to Gurney, along with a copy of the case file containing records of the initial days when he was chief investigating officer and of the subsequent months during which Arlo Blatt was in charge. It was everything Gurney could have asked for, which he found unsettling. Hardwick was taking a major risk in copying police file material, removing it from headquarters, and giving it to an individual with no authorization to have it.
Why would he do that?
The simple answer-that any substantial progress Gurney might make would embarrass a senior BCI officer for whom Hardwick had no respect-didn’t quite justify the level of risk the man was subjecting himself to. Perhaps the full answer could be discovered in the file material itself. Gurney had spread it out on the main dining table under the chandelier-which, as the light from the windows faded, would be the brightest place in the house.
He’d divided the voluminous reports and other documents into piles according to the type of information they contained. Within each pile he placed the items in chronological order as best he could.
Altogether it was a daunting aggregation of data: incident reports, field notes, investigative progress reports, sixty-two interview summaries and transcripts (from one to fourteen pages each), landline and cell-phone records, crime-scene photos taken by BCI personnel, additional still photos culled from the wedding videographer’s cameras, the minutely detailed thirty-six-page ViCAP crime-description form, the stolen-object report form, the serial-number database form, an identikit portrait of Hector Flores, the autopsy report, evidence-collection forms, forensic lab reports, DNA blood-sample analyses, the K-9 team report, a master list of wedding guests with contact info and nature of their relationship with the victim and/or Scott Ashton, sketches and aerial photos of the Ashton estate, interior sketches of the cottage with measurements of the front room, biographical data sheets, and, of course, the DVD that Gurney had viewed.
By the time he’d sorted it all into some kind of workable order, it was nearly 7:00 P.M. At first the lateness of the hour surprised him, and then it didn’t. Time always accelerated when his mind was fully engaged, and it seemed to be fully engaged only when, he realized a little ruefully, a puzzle had been placed before him. Madeleine had once told him that his life had narrowed down to one obsessive pursuit: unraveling the mysteries of other people’s deaths. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.
He reached for the file folder nearest him on the table. It was the set of scene-of-crime reports created by the evidence techs. The top form described the cottage’s immediate surroundings. The next form recorded their initial visual inventory of the interior. It was striking in its brevity. The cottage contained none of the normal objects and materials that a crime lab would subject to analysis for trace evidence. No furniture beyond the table on which the victim’s head was found, the narrow chair with wooden arms in which the body was propped up, and one similar chair across from it. There were no lounging chairs, couches, beds, blankets, or rugs. Equally strange, there were no clothes in the closet, no clothes or footwear of any kind anywhere in the cottage-with one peculiar exception: a pair of light rubber boots, the kind normally worn over regular shoes. These boots were found in the bedroom next to the window through which the killer had evidently exited. No doubt they were the boots the dog got the scent from to follow the trail.
He turned in his chair toward the French doors and gazed out over the pasture, his eyes alive with speculation. The peculiarities and complications of the case-what Sherlock Holmes would have called “its unique features”-were multiplying, generating like an electrical current the magnetic field that drew Gurney to problems that would naturally repel most men.
His thoughts were interrupted by the loud squeak of the side door opening-a squeak that for the past year he’d been meaning to eliminate with a drop of oil.
“Madeleine?”
“Yes.” She came into the kitchen with three straining plastic bags from the supermarket in each hand, hefted all six of them up onto the sideboard, and headed back out.
“Can I help?” he said.
There was no answer, just the sound of the side door opening and closing. A minute later the sound was repeated, followed by her return to the kitchen with a second load of bags, which she also placed on the sideboard. Only then did she take off the quirky purple, green, and pink Peruvian hat with the dangling ear flaps that always seemed to add an antic dimension to whatever her underlying mood might be.
He felt the transient tic in his left eyelid, a twitch in the nerve so distinct it had taken several trips to the mirror in recent months to convince him that it wasn’t visible. He wanted to ask where she’d been, apart from the supermarket, but he had the feeling she might have mentioned the rest of her plan to him earlier, and his failure to remember it would not be a good thing. Madeleine equated forgetting, as she equated poor hearing, with lack of interest. Maybe she was right. In twenty-five years in the NYPD, he’d never forgotten to show up for a witness interview, never forgotten a court date, never forgotten what a suspect said or how he sounded, never forgotten a single thing of significance to his job.
Had anything else ever come close in importance to his job? Even made it into the same ballpark? Parents? Wives? Children?
When his mother died, he’d felt almost nothing. No, it was worse than that. Colder and more self-centered than that. He’d felt a sense of relief, the removal of a burden, a simplification of his life. When his first wife left him, another complication was removed. Another impediment out of the way, relief from the pressure of having to respond to the needs of a difficult person. Freedom.
Madeleine went to the refrigerator, started taking out glass containers of food left over from the night before and from the night before that. She laid them in a row on the countertop next to the microwave, five of them, removed the tops. He watched her from the other side of the sink island.
“Have you eaten yet?” she asked.
“No, I was waiting for you to come home,” he replied, not quite truthfully.
She glanced past him at the papers spread out on the dining table, raised an eyebrow.
“Bunch of stuff from Jack Hardwick,” he said, too casually. “He asked me to look it over.” He imagined her level gaze examining his thoughts. He added, “It’s stuff from the Jillian Perry case file.” He paused. “I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to do, or why anyone thinks my observations would be helpful under the existing circumstances, but… I’ll take a look at what’s here and give him my reactions.”
“And her?”
“Her?”
“Val Perry. Will you be giving her your reactions, too?” Madeleine’s voice had taken on a light, airy quality that communicated rather than concealed her concern.
Gurney stared down into the fruit bowl on the granite top of the sink island, resting his hands on the cold surface. Several fruit flies, disturbed by his presence, rose from a bunch of bananas, flew in asymmetric zigzags above the bowl, then settled again on the fruit, becoming invisible against the speckled skin.
He tried to speak softly, but the effect was condescending. “I think you’re disturbed by the assumptions you’re making, not by what’s actually happening.”
“You mean my assumption that you’ve already decided to jump on the roller coaster?”
“Maddie, how many times do I have to say it? I haven’t made any commitment to anyone to do anything. I’ve made absolutely no decision to get involved in any way beyond reading the case file.”
She gave him a look he couldn’t quite understand, a look that went into him-a look that was knowing and gentle and strangely sad.
She began placing the tops back on the glass storage containers. He watched her without comment until she started putting the containers back into the refrigerator.
“Aren’t you going to eat anything?” he asked.
“I’m not that hungry right now. I think I’ll take a shower. If it wakes me up, then I’ll eat. If it makes me drowsy, I’ll go to bed early.” As she passed the table with its burden of paperwork, she said, “Before our guests arrive tomorrow, you’ll put all that away where we won’t have to look at it, right?” She left the room, and half a minute later he heard the bathroom door closing.
Guests? Tomorrow? Christ!
A dim recollection, something Madeleine had mentioned to him about someone coming for dinner-the shadow of a memory, stored in an inaccessible storage bin, a bin containing objects of little importance.
What the hell is going on with you? Isn’t there any room left in your head for ordinary life? For a simple life, shared in good and simple ways, with ordinary people? Or maybe there was never any room for that. Maybe you always were the way you are right now. Maybe life here on a secluded mountaintop-cut loose from the demands of the job, deprived of convenient excuses for never being present in the lives of people you claim to love-is making the truth harder to hide. Could the simple truth be that you don’t really care about anybody?
He walked around to the far side of the sink island and switched on the coffeemaker. Like Madeleine, he’d lost his appetite for dinner. But the idea of coffee was appealing. It was going to be a long night.
It made sense to begin at the beginning by examining the identikit portrait of Hector Flores.
Gurney had mixed feelings about computer-generated facial composites. Constructed from the input of eyewitnesses, they mirrored the strengths and weaknesses of all eyewitness testimony.
In the case of Hector Flores, however, there was good reason to trust the likeness. The descriptive details had been provided by a man with the observational skills of a psychiatrist and who was said to have been in daily contact with the subject for nearly three years. A computer rendering with input of that quality could rival a good photograph.
The image was of a man, probably in his mid-thirties, good-looking in an unremarkable way. The facial bone structure was regular, with no feature predominating. The skin was relatively free of lines, the eyes dark and emotionless. The hair was black, fairly neat, casually parted. There was only one distinguishing mark Gurney could discern, oddly shocking in the midst of such an otherwise ordinary appearance: The man’s right earlobe was missing.
Appended to the composite portrait was the inventory of physical statistics. (Again Gurney’s assumption was that these would have been provided primarily by Ashton and would therefore have a high likelihood of accuracy.) Hector Flores’s height was listed as five feet nine inches; weight 140-150; race/nationality Hispanic; eyes dark brown; hair black, straight; complexion tan, clear; teeth uneven, with one gold incisor, upper left. In the “Scars and Other Identifying Marks” section, there were two entries: the missing earlobe and severe scarring on the right knee.
Gurney looked again at the picture, searched for some spark of madness, a glimpse of the mind of the ice man who beheaded a woman, used the head to deflect the body’s spurting blood away from himself, then placed her head on the table, facing the body from which it came. In the eyes of some killers-Charlie Manson, for instance-there was a demonic intensity, urgent and unconcealed, but most of the murderers Gurney had brought to justice during his career as a homicide detective were driven by a less obvious madness. Hector Flores’s bland, uncommunicative face-in which Gurney could see no hint of the hideous violence of the crime itself-put him in this category.
Stapled to the physical-statistics form was a typed page with the heading “Supplementary Statement Provided by Dr. Scott Ashton on May 11, 2009.” It was signed by Ashton and witnessed by Hardwick, as chief investigating officer. The statement was brief, considering the time period and events it covered.
My first meeting with Hector Flores was in late April of 2006, when he came to my home as a day laborer looking for employment. Starting then, I began giving him work around the yard-mowing, raking, mulching, fertilizing, etc. He spoke almost no English at first but learned quickly, impressing me with his energy and intelligence. In the following weeks, seeing that he was a skilled carpenter, I came to rely on him for a broad range of outdoor and indoor maintenance and repair projects. By mid-July he was working in and around the house seven days a week-adding routine housecleaning to his list of chores. He was becoming the perfect domestic employee, showing great initiative and common sense. In late August he asked if, in lieu of some of the money I was paying him, he might be allowed to occupy the small unfurnished cottage behind the house on the days he was here. With some misgivings I agreed, and shortly thereafter he began living in it, approximately four days a week. He got himself a small table and two chairs at a thrift store, and later aninexpensive computer. He said that was all he wanted. He slept in a sleeping bag, insisted that was the way he was most comfortable. As time passed, he began exploring various educational opportunities on the Internet. Meanwhile his appetite for work only seemed to grow, and he began evolving into a kind of personal assistant. By the end of the year, I was trusting him with reasonable amounts of cash, and he was handling occasional grocery shopping and other errands with great efficiency. His English had become grammatically flawless, although it was still heavily accented, and his manner was charming. He frequently answered my phone, took cogent messages, even provided me with subtle shadings of information about the tone or mood of certain callers. (In retrospect this seems bizarre-that I would be relying in this way on a man who had not long before been looking for a job spreading mulch-but the arrangement worked well, without a single problem I was aware of, for almost two years.) Things began to change in the fall of 2008, when Jillian Perry came into my life. Flores soon became moody and reclusive, always finding reasons to be away from the house when Jillian was present. The changes became more disturbing in early 2009, when we announced our wedding plans. He disappeared for several days. When he returned, he claimed to have discovered terrible things about Jillian and that I would be risking my life by marrying her, but he refused to provide details. He said that he couldn’t tell me anything more without revealing the source of his information, which he couldn’t do. He begged me to reconsider my decision to marry. When it became clear that I was not going to reconsider anything without knowing exactly what he was talking about, and that I would not tolerate unsupported accusations, he seemed to accept the situation, although he continued to avoid Jillian. In retrospect, of course, I should have fired him at these indications of his instability, but with the arrogance of my profession, I assumed that I would be able to discover the nature of the problem and solve it. I saw myself conducting a grand experiment in education, never fully accepting the fact that I was dealing with a dangerously complex personality and that everything might spin out of control. I must also admit that he had made mylife easier and more convenient in so many ways that I was reluctant to let him go. I cannot overemphasize the degree to which his intelligence, rapid self-education, and range of talents had impressed me-all of which now sounds delusional in the light of what has happened. My final encounter with Hector Flores occurred the morning of the wedding. Jillian, who was well aware that Hector despised her, was obsessed with getting him to accept the reality of our marriage, and she prevailed upon me to make one last effort to persuade him to attend the ceremony. I went to the cottage that morning, found him sitting like a block of stone at the table. I went through the motions of extending one more invitation, which he refused. He was dressed entirely in black-black T-shirt, black jeans, black belt, black shoes. Perhaps that should have meant something to me. That was the last I saw of him.
At that point in the transcript, Hardwick had inserted a handwritten marginal notation: “Upon submission and review of the above written statement by Scott Ashton, it was supplemented by the following questions and answers.”
J.H.:
Do I understand correctly that you knew little or nothing about this man’s background?
S.A.:
That’s correct.
J.H.:
He provided virtually no information about himself?
S.A.:
Correct.
J.H.:
Yet you came to trust him enough to let him live on your property, have access to your home, answer your phone?
S.A.:
I’m aware that it sounds idiotic, but I regarded his refusal to talk about his past as a form of honesty. I mean, if he’d wanted to conceal something, it would have been more persuasive to construct a fictitious past. But he didn’t do that. In an upside-down way, that impressed me. So yes, I trusted him even though he refused to discuss his past.
Gurney read the entire statement a second time, more slowly, and then a third time. He found the narrative as extraordinary for what was left out as for what was put in. Among the missing elements was a singular lack of fury. And a striking absence of the visceral horror that on the day prior to making this statement had sent the man reeling out of the cottage seconds after he’d entered it, screaming and collapsing.
Was the change simply the result of medication? A psychiatrist would have easy access to appropriate sedatives. Or was it something more than that? Impossible to tell from just words on paper. It would be interesting to meet the man, look into his eyes, hear his voice.
At least the portion of the statement referring to the unfurnished state of the cottage and Flores’s insistence on keeping it that way answered part of the mystery of its bareness in the evidence report-part, but not all. It didn’t explain why there were no clothes or shoes or bathroom items. It didn’t explain what had happened to the computer. Or why, if he removed all his personal items, Flores had chosen to leave behind a pair of boots.
Gurney’s gaze wandered over the piles of documents arrayed in front of him. He remembered earlier seeing two incident reports, not just the one he would have expected, covering the murder, and wondering why. He reached across the table, extracted the second from under the first.
It had been generated by the Tambury Village PD in response to a call received at 4:15 P.M. on May 17, 2009-exactly one week after the murder. Complainant was listed as Dr. Scott Ashton of 42 Badger Lane, Tambury, New York. The report was filed by Sergeant Keith Garbelly. It was noted that a copy had been forwarded to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation at State Police Regional Headquarters, to the attention of Senior Investigator J. Hardwick. Gurney assumed that it was a copy of that copy he was now reading.
Complainant was sitting at patio table on south side of residence, facing main lawn area, with cup of tea on table. His habit in good weather. Heard single gunshot, simultaneously witnessed teacup shatter. Ran into house through back (patio) door, called Tambury PD. When I arrived on scene (with backup following) complainant appeared tense, anxious. Initial interview conductedin living room. Complainant could not pinpoint source of gunshot, guessed “long range, from that general direction” (gestured out the rear window toward wooded hillside at least 300 yards away). Complainant had no additional understanding of the event, other than “possibly connected to the murder of my wife.” Claimed no actual knowledge of what the connection might be. Speculated that Hector Flores might want to kill him, too, but could provide no reason or motive.
A copy of a BCI investigatory follow-up form was clipped to the initial incident report, indicating that a quick handoff of the matter had occurred, consistent with BCI’s primary responsibility for the case. The follow-up form had three short entries and one long one, all initialed “JH.”
Search of Ashton property, woods, hills: negative. Area interviews: negative.
Reconstruction of cup shows impact point at exact top-to-bottom, left-to-right center. Lends support to the hypothesis that cup, not Ashton, may have been shooter’s target.
Bullet fragments recovered from patio area too small for conclusive ballistics. Best guess: small to med caliber high-powered rifle, equipped with sophisticated scope, in the hands of an experienced shooter.
Weapon estimate and cup-as-target conclusion shared with Scott Ashton to ascertain whether he knew anyone with that kind of equipment and shooting skills. Subject appeared troubled. When pressed, he named two people with similar rifle and scope: himself and Jillian’s father, Dr. Withrow Perry. Perry, he said, liked to go on exotic hunting trips and was an expert marksman. Ashton claimed to have purchased his own rifle (high-end Weatherby.257) at Perry’s suggestion. When I asked to see it, he discovered that it was missing from the wooden case in which he kept it locked in his den closet. He could not date the last time he had seen the gun but said that it might have been two or three months earlier. Asked whether Hector Flores knew of its existence andlocation, he replied that Flores had accompanied him to Kingston the day he purchased it and that Flores had built the oak box in which it was stored.
Gurney turned the form over, looked for a backup sheet, riffled through the pile from which it came, but could find no follow-up entry on the interview that must have been conducted subsequently with Withrow Perry. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it had fallen into the crack that sometimes swallowed critical issues during the transfer of a case from one CIO to another-in this case from the wild-swinging Hardwick to the clumsy Blatt. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine that happening.
It was time for a second cup of coffee.
It could have been any number of things-the fresh rush of caffeine, a natural restlessness arising from sitting in the same chair too long, the oppressive prospect of navigating his solitary way in the middle of the night through that landscape of unprioritized documents, the seemingly unpursued questions concerning the whereabouts of Withrow Perry and his rifle on the afternoon of May 17. Perhaps it was all those forces together that drove him to pick up his cell phone and call Jack Hardwick. All those forces, plus an idea that had occurred to him about the shattered teacup.
The phone was answered after five rings, just as Gurney was thinking about the message he’d leave.
“Yeah?”
“Lot of charm in that greeting, Jack.”
“If I knew it was just you, I wouldn’t have tried so hard. What’s up?”
“That’s a big file you gave me.”
“You got a question?”
“I’m looking at five hundred sheets of paper here. Just wondering if you wanted to point me in any particular direction.”
Hardwick erupted in one of his harsh laughs that sounded more like a sandblasting tool than a human emotion. “Shit, Gurney, Holmes isn’t supposed to ask Watson to point him in the right direction.”
“Let me put it another way,” said Gurney, remembering what a pain it always was to get a simple answer out of Hardwick. “Are there any documents in this mountain of crap that you think I’d find especially interesting?”
“Like pictures of naked women?”
These games with Hardwick could go on way too long. Gurney decided to change the rules, change the subject, catch him off balance.
“Jillian Perry was beheaded at 4:13 P.M.,” he announced. “Give or take thirty seconds.”
There was a brief silence. “How the fuck…?”
Gurney pictured Hardwick’s mind caroming over the case terrain-around the cottage, the woods, the lawn-trying to pick up the clue he’d missed. After allowing what he imagined to be the man’s amazement and frustration to blossom fully, Gurney whispered, “The answer is in the tea leaves.” Then he broke the connection.
Hardwick called back ten minutes later, faster than Gurney had expected. The surprising truth about Hardwick: Lurking at the center of that exasperating personality was a very sharp mind. How far might the man have gone, Gurney often wondered, and how much happier might he be were he not so encumbered by his own attitudes? Of course, that was a question that applied to a lot of people, himself not the least.
Gurney didn’t bother saying hello. “You agree with me, Jack?”
“It’s not a sure thing.”
“Nothing is. But you understand the logic, right?”
“Sure,” said Hardwick, managing to convey that he understood it without being impressed by it. “The time Tambury PD got the call from Ashton about the teacup was four-fifteen. And Ashton said he ran into the house as soon as he realized what had happened. Making some assumptions about the time it would take him to get from the patio table to the nearest phone inside the house, maybe looking out the window a few times to check for any sign of the shooter, dialing the actual local PD number rather than just 911, allowing for a couple of rings before it was answered-all that would put the actual gunshot back to about four-thirteen. But that’s just the gunshot. To connect it the way you’re connecting it to the exact time of the murder the week before, you gotta make three giant leaps. One, the teacup shooter is the same guy who killed the bride. Two, he knew the precise minute he killed her. Three, he wanted to send a message by blasting the teacup at the same minute of the same hour of the same day of the week. That’s what you’re saying?”
“Close enough.”
“It’s not impossible.” Hardwick’s voice conjured the habitually skeptical expression that had etched permanent lines into his face. “But so what? What the hell difference does it make whether it’s true or not?”
“I don’t know yet. But there’s something about the echo effect…”
“One severed head and one smashed teacup, each in the middle of a table, one week apart?”
“Something like that,” said Gurney, suddenly doubtful. Hardwick’s tone had a way of making other people’s ideas sound absurd. “But getting back to the mountain of crap you dumped in my lap, is there anyplace you’d like me to start?”
“Start anywhere, ace. You won’t be disappointed. Just about every sheet of paper there has at least one weird twist. Never seen a weirder, twistier case. Or a weirder, twistier bunch of people. The message from my gut? Whatever the fuck’s going on ain’t what it seems to be.”
“One more question, Jack. How come there’s no record of a follow-up interview with Withrow Perry regarding the teacup incident?”
After a moment’s silence, Hardwick emitted a raspy bray, hardly a laugh at all. “Sharp, Davey, very sharp. Zeroed in on that super quick. There wasn’t any official interview because I was officially removed from the case the same day we discovered that the good doctor happened to own the perfect gun for putting a bullet through a teacup at three hundred yards. I’d call the failure to follow up on that fact a fucking stupid oversight on the part of the new CIO, wouldn’t you?”
“I gather you didn’t go out of your way to remind him?”
“Not allowed anywhere near the active investigation. I was warned off by no less than our revered captain.”
“And you were taken off the case because…?”
“I already told you. I spoke inappropriately to my superior. I informed him of the limitations of his approach. I may also have alluded to the limitations of his intelligence and general unsuitability for command.”
A long ten seconds passed without either man speaking.
“You sound like you hate him, Jack.”
“Hate? Nah. I don’t hate him. I don’t hate anybody. I love the whole fucking world.”
Having cleared just enough space for his laptop between a couple of document piles on the long table, Gurney went to the Google Earth website and entered Ashton’s Tambury address. He centered the image over the cottage and the thicket behind it, enlarging it to the maximum resolution available. With the help of the scale data attached to the image and the directional and distance information from the rear of the cottage shown in the case file, Gurney was able to narrow the location of the murder weapon’s discovery to a fairly small area in the thicket about a hundred feet from Badger Lane. So after leaving the cottage through the back window, Flores walked or ran out there, partially covered the blade of the still-bloody weapon with some dirt and leaves, and then… what? Managed to get to the road without leaving any further scent for the dogs to follow? Headed down the hill to Kiki Muller’s house? Or was she right there on the road in her car-waiting to help him escape, waiting to run off with him to a new life they’d been planning together?
Or did Flores simply walk back to the cottage? Is that why the scent trail went no farther than the machete? Is it conceivable that Flores concealed himself in or around the cottage itself-concealed himself so effectively that a swarm of troopers, detectives, and crime-scene techs failed to discover him? That seemed unlikely.
As Gurney looked up from his laptop screen, he was startled to see Madeleine sitting at the end of the table, watching him-so startled that he jumped in his seat.
“Jesus! How long have you been there?”
She shrugged, made no effort to answer.
“What time is it?” he asked, and immediately saw the inanity of the question. The clock over the sideboard was in his line of sight, not hers. The time, 10:55 P.M., was also displayed on the computer screen in front of him.
“What are you doing?” she asked. It sounded less a question than a challenge.
He hesitated. “Just trying to make sense out of this… material.”
“Hmm.” It was like one syllable of a humorless laugh.
He tried to return her steady gaze, found it difficult.
“What are you thinking?” he said.
She smiled and frowned, almost at the same time.
“I’m thinking life is short,” she said finally, in the way of someone who has come face-to-face with a sad truth.
“And therefore…?”
Just as he concluded she wasn’t going to answer him, she did. “Therefore we’re running out of time.” She cocked her head-or maybe it was a tiny, involuntary spasm-and regarded him curiously.
“Time for what?” he was tempted to ask, feeling an urge to turn this untethered exchange into a more manageable argument, but something in her eyes stopped him. Instead he asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head. “Life is short. That’s all. It’s something to consider.”
Several times during the hour following Madeleine’s visit to the kitchen, Gurney was on the verge of going into the bedroom to pursue the significance of her comment.
Madeleine did, from time to time, for brief periods, seem to view things through a bleak lens. It was as though the focus of her vision shifted to a barren spot in the landscape and saw in it a paradigm of the whole earth. But the shift had always been temporary; her focus widened again, her joy and pragmatism returned. It had happened that way before, so no doubt it would happen that way again. But for the moment her attitude disconcerted him, creating an anxious hollowness in his stomach-a feeling that he wanted to escape from. He went to the coatrack in the pantry, slipped on a light jacket, and stepped out through the side door into the starless night.
Somewhere above the thick overcast, a partial moon made the darkness less than total. As soon as he could discern the outline of the path through the overgrown weeds, he followed it down the gentle pasture slope to the weathered bench that faced the pond. He sat, watching and listening, and his eyes slowly distinguished a few dim shapes, edges of objects, perhaps parts of trees, but nothing clearly enough to be identified for sure. Then, across the pond, maybe twenty degrees off his line of sight, he sensed a slight movement. When he looked directly at the spot, the dark shapes, indistinct at best-large bramble bushes, drooping branches, cattails growing up in tangled clumps at the edge of the water, and whatever else might be there-blended formlessly together. But when he looked away, just off to the side of where he thought the movement had been, he saw it again-almost certainly an animal of some kind, perhaps the size of a small deer or a large dog. His eyes darted back, and once again it disappeared.
He understood the retinal-sensitivity phenomenon involved. It was the reason that one could often see a dim star by looking not directly at it but to the side of it. And the animal, if that’s what he’d seen, if he’d seen anything at all, was surely harmless. Even if it was a small bear, bears in the Catskills were no danger to anyone, much less to someone sitting quietly a hundred yards away. And yet at some primal level of perception, there was something eerie about an unidentifiable movement in the dark.
The night was windless, soundless, had a dead stillness about it, but to Gurney it felt far from peaceful. He realized that this deficit resided more likely in his own mind than in the atmosphere around him, was attributable more to the tension in his marriage than to shadows in the woods.
The tension in his marriage. His marriage was not perfect. It had twice been on the brink of fracturing. Fifteen years earlier, when their four-year-old son was killed in an accident for which Gurney held himself responsible, he had become an emotionally frozen mess, almost impossible to live with. And just ten months ago, his obsessive immersion in the Mellery case came close to ending not only his marriage but his life.
However, he liked to think that the difficulty between him and Madeleine was simple, or at least that he understood it. To begin with, they occupied radically different boxes on the Myers-Briggs personality grid. His instinctive route to understanding was primarily through thinking, hers was through feeling. He was fascinated by connecting the dots, she by the dots themselves. He was energized by solitude, drained by social engagement, and for her the reverse was true. For him, observing was just one tool to enable clearer judging; for her, judging was just one tool to enable clearer observing.
Within the framework of traditional psychological testing, they had very little in common. Yet there was an electricity that often ran with a shocking joy through their shared perceptions of people or events, a shared sense of irony, a shared sense of what was touching, what was funny, what was precious, what was honest, and what was dishonest. A shared sense that the other was unique and more important than anyone else. An electricity that Gurney, in his warmer and fuzzier moments, believed to be the essence of love.
So there it was-the contradiction that described their relationship. They were seriously, contentiously, sometimes miserably different in their hardwired inclinations, yet joined by powerful moments of common insight and affection. The problem was… since their move to Walnut Crossing, those moments had been few and far between. It had been a long time since they’d hugged each other, really hugged each other, as if each were holding the most precious object in the universe.
Sitting there in the dark, lost in these thoughts, he had drifted inward, away from his surroundings. The yipping of coyotes brought him back.
It was hard to pinpoint the location of the sharp, feral cries or the number of animals. He guessed it was a pack of three or four or five somewhere on the next ridge, a mile or so east of the pond. When the yipping stopped suddenly, it deepened the silence. Gurney pulled up his jacket zipper a few more inches.
His mind was soon filling the sensory void with more ideas about his marriage. But he was aware that generalizations, as much as he was addicted to them, did little to solve problems on the ground. And the pressing problem on the ground right now was the need to make a decision, a decision about which he and Madeleine were obviously at odds: to accept the Perry case or not.
He had a vivid sense of how Madeleine felt about it, not only from her latest comments but also from the low drumbeat of concern she’d been expressing at any police-related activity he’d gotten close to since retiring two years earlier. He assumed she would see the Perry case as a black-and-white issue. His acceptance of the case would prove that his obsession with solving murders, even in retirement, was intractable and that their future together would be clouded. His rejection of the case, on the other hand, would signal a change, the first step in his transformation from a workaholic detective into a bird-watching, kayak-paddling nature enthusiast. But, he argued in his imagination, as though she were present, black-and-white options are unrealistic and lead to lousy decisions, because by definition they exclude so many solutions. In this instance the most tenable course would surely lie in a middle ground between black and white.
Following this general principle, he realized how the ideal compromise could be defined. He would accept the case, but with a strict time limitation-say, one week. Two weeks maximum. Within that circumscribed time period, he would delve into the evidence, pursue loose ends, perhaps reinterview some key people, follow the facts, find out what he could, offer his conclusions and recommendations, and…
At that point the yipping of the coyotes started again as abruptly as it had ceased, seeming closer now, perhaps halfway down the wooded slope descending toward the barn. The sounds were jagged, shrill, excited. Gurney wasn’t sure whether they were actually drawing closer or just getting louder. Then nothing. Not the tiniest sound. A piercing silence. Ten slow seconds passed. Then, one by one, they began to howl. Gooseflesh spread up Gurney’s back and along the outside of his arms to the backs of his hands. Once more he thought he saw from the corner of his eye some hint of motion in the dark.
There was the sound of a car door slamming. Then there were headlights coming down through the pasture, the beams waving erratically over the scrubby vegetation, the car traveling too fast for the uneven surface. It jounced and came to a halt at the end of a short sideways skid about ten feet from the bench.
From the open driver’s window came Madeleine’s voice, uncharacteristically loud, even panicky. “David!” And again, even as he rose from the bench, moving toward the car in the peripheral glare of the headlights, her voice nearly screeching, “David!”
Not until he was in the car and she was closing her window did he notice that the chorus of ghastly howling had stopped. She pressed the button that locked the doors and put her hands on the wheel. His eyes were now sufficiently adjusted to the darkness that he could see-perhaps partly see, partly imagine-the rigidity of her arms and grip, the tightness of the skin over her knuckles.
“Didn’t… didn’t you hear them getting closer?” she asked, sounding out of breath.
“I heard them. I assumed they were chasing something-a rabbit, maybe.”
“A rabbit?” Her voice was hoarse, incredulous.
Surely he could not have seen so much detail, but her face seemed to tremble with barely restrained emotion. Eventually she took a long, shaky breath, then another, opened her hands on the steering wheel, flexed the fingers.
“What were you doing down here?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Just… thinking about things, trying to… figure out what to do.”
After another long breath, a steadier one, she turned the ignition key, unaware that the engine was still running, producing a grating shriek of protest from the starter mechanism and an echoing burst of irritation from her own throat.
She turned around in front of the barn and drove back up through the pasture to the house. She parked the car closer than usual to the side door.
“And what was it you figured out?” she asked as he was about to get out.
“Sorry?” He’d heard the question, wanted to postpone answering it.
She seemed aware of all this, just turned her head partly toward him and waited.
“I was just trying to figure a way… a way of approaching things reasonably.”
“Reasonably.” She articulated the word in a tone that seemed to strip it of its meaning.
“Maybe we could talk about it in the house,” he said, opening his door, wanting to escape, if only for a minute. As he started to step out, his foot caught on something like a bar or a pole on the car floor. He looked down and saw in the yellowish wash of the dome light the heavy wooden handle of the ax they normally kept in the wood bin by the side door.
“What’s this?” he said.
“An ax.”
“I mean, what’s it doing in the car?”
“It was the first thing I saw.”
“You know, coyotes are not really-”
“How the hell do you know that?” she interrupted furiously. “How the hell do you know that?” She jerked away as though he had reached for her arm. She got out of the car in a clumsy rush, slammed the door, ran into the house.
During the wee hours of the morning, the heavy overcast had been blown away by a fast-moving cold front of dry, autumnal air. At dawn the sky was a pale blue and by nine a deep azure. The day promised to be crisp and lucid, as bright and reassuring as the night before had been bleak and unnerving.
Gurney sat at the breakfast table in a slanting rectangle of sunlight, gazing out through the French doors at the yellowish green asparagus ferns swaying in the breeze. As he raised his warm coffee mug to his lips, the world appeared to be a place of defined edges, of definable problems and appropriate responses-a world in which his planned two-week approach to the Perry matter made perfect sense.
The fact that Madeleine an hour earlier had greeted his presentation of the idea with a less-than-happy stare was not surprising. He hadn’t expected her to be thrilled. A black-and-white frame of mind naturally resists compromise, he told himself. But reality was on his side, and in time she would recognize the reasonableness of his approach. He was sure of it.
In the meantime he wasn’t going to allow her doubts to paralyze him.
When Madeleine went out to her garden to bring in the season’s final harvest of string beans, he went to the center drawer of the sideboard to get a yellow legal pad on which to start a list of priorities.
Call Val Perry, discuss two-week commitment.
Set hourly rate. Other fees, costs. E-mail follow-up.
Inform Hardwick.
Interview Scott Ashton-ask VP to expedite.
Ashton background, associates, friends, enemies.
Jillian background, associates, friends, enemies.
It occurred to Gurney that agreeing with Val Perry on the terms of their arrangement took priority over extending his list of things to do. He put down his pen and picked up his cell phone. He was routed directly into her voice mail. He left his number and a brief message referring to “possible next steps.”
She called back less than two minutes later. There was a childish elation in her voice, plus the kind of intimacy that sometimes results from the lifting of a great burden. “Dave! It was so good to hear your voice just now! I was afraid you wouldn’t want anything to do with me after the way I behaved yesterday. I’m sorry about that. I hope I didn’t scare you off. I didn’t, did I?”
“Don’t worry about it. I just wanted to get back to you and let you know what I’d be willing to do.”
“I see.” Apprehension had taken her elation down a notch.
“I’m still not sure how helpful I can be.”
“I’m positive you could be very helpful.”
“I appreciate your confidence, but the fact is-”
“Excuse me a second,” she broke in, then spoke away from the phone. “Could you wait just a minute? I’m on the phone… What?… Oh, shit! All right. I’ll look at it. Where is it? Show it to me… That’s it?… Fine!… Yes, it’s fine. Yes!” Then, back on the phone, to Gurney, “God! You hire someone to do something and it turns into a full-time job for you, too. Don’t people realize that you’re hiring them in order to have them do the job?” She let out an exasperated sigh. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be wasting your time with this. I just had the kitchen redone, with special tiles that were custom-made in Provence, and there doesn’t seem to be any end to the problems between the installer and the interior designer, but this is not what you’re calling about. I’m sorry, I really am. Wait. I’m closing the door. Maybe they can understand a closed door. Okay, you were starting to say what you’d be willing to do. Please go on.”
“Two weeks,” he said. “I’ll work on it for two weeks. I’ll look into the case, do what I can, make whatever progress I can in that period of time.”
“Why only two weeks?” Her voice was strained, as though she were consciously trying to practice the alien virtue of patience.
Why indeed? Until she asked this obvious question, he had not recognized the difficulty of articulating a sensible answer. The real answer, of course, involved his desire to mitigate Madeleine’s reaction to his involvement in the case, not the nature of the case itself.
“Because… in two weeks I’ll either have made significant progress or… I’ll have demonstrated that I’m not the right guy for the job.”
“I see.”
“I’ll maintain a daily log and bill you weekly at the rate of a hundred dollars an hour, plus out-of-pocket expenses.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll clear any major expenses with you beforehand: air travel, anything that-”
She interrupted. “What do you need to start? A retainer? You want me to sign something?”
“I’ll draft an agreement and e-mail it. Just print it out, sign it, scan it, and e-mail it back. I don’t have a PI license, so officially you’ll be retaining me not as a detective but as a consultant to review the evidence and evaluate the status of the investigation. No need for money up front. I’ll send you an invoice a week from today.”
“Fine. What else?”
“A question-out of left field, maybe, but it’s been on my mind since I watched the video.”
“What?” There was a touch of alarm in her voice.
“Why weren’t there any friends of Jillian’s at the wedding?”
She emitted a sharp little laugh. “Jillian had no friends at the wedding because Jillian had no friends.”
“None at all?”
“I described my daughter to you yesterday. Are you shocked that she would have no friends? Let me make something perfectly clear. My daughter, Jillian Perry, was a sociopath. A sociopath.” She repeated the term as though she were teaching it to an ESL student. “The concept of friendship did not fit in her brain.”
Gurney hesitated before going on. “Mrs. Perry, I’m having trouble-”
“Val.”
“All right. Val, I’m having trouble putting a couple of things together here. I’m wondering-”
She cut him off again. “You’re wondering why the hell I’m so determined to… to bring to justice… the killer of a daughter I obviously couldn’t stand?”
“Close enough.”
“Two answers. That’s the way I am. And it’s none of your fucking business!” She paused. “And maybe there’s a third answer. I was a lousy mother, really lousy, when Jilli was a kid. And now… Shit… never mind. Let’s go back to it being none of your fucking business.”
In the past four months, he’d hardly thought of the other one at all-the one just before the Perry bitch, the one of little importance by comparison, the overshadowed one, the one no one had discovered yet, the one whose fame was yet to come-the one whose elimination was, in part, a matter of convenience. Some might say entirely a matter of convenience, but they would be wrong. Her end was well deserved, for all the reasons that damned her kind:
the stain of Eve,
rotten heart,
rutting heart,
heart of a slut,
a slut at heart,
sweat on the upper lip,
grunts of a pig,
horrid gasps,
lips parting,
lascivious lips, devouring lips,
wet tongue,
slithering serpent,
enveloping legs,
slippery skin,
vile fluids,
slime of a snail.
Wiped clean by death,
evaporated by death,
damp limbs dried by death,
purification by desiccation,
dry as dust.
Harmless as a mummy.
Vaya con Dios!
He smiled. He must remember to think of her more often-to keep her death alive.
By 10:00 A.M., Gurney had e-mailed Val Perry a memo of agreement and called three numbers she’d given him for Scott Ashton-his home number, personal cell number, and the Mapleshade Residential Academy number-in an effort to arrange a meeting. He’d left voice-mail messages at the first two and a live message at the third, with an assistant who identified herself only as Ms. Liston.
At 10:30 Ashton called him back, said he’d gotten all three messages, plus one from Val Perry explaining Gurney’s role. “She said you’d want to speak to me.”
Ashton’s voice was familiar from the video, but richer and softer on the phone, impersonally warm, like an advertising voice for an expensive product-quite suitable for a top-shelf psychiatrist, thought Gurney.
“That’s right, sir,” he said. “As soon as it’s convenient for you.”
“Today?”
“Today would be ideal.”
“The academy at noon or my home at two. Your choice.”
Gurney chose the latter. If he started out for Tambury immediately, he’d have time to drive around, get a sense of the area, Ashton’s road in particular, maybe talk to a neighbor or two. He went to the table, got the BCI interview list that Hardwick had provided, and made a pencil dot next to each name with a Badger Lane address. From the same pile, he chose the folder marked “Interview Summaries” and headed for his car.
The village of Tambury owed its sleepy, secluded quality in part to having grown up around an intersection of two nineteenth-century roads that had been bypassed by newer routes, a circumstance that usually produces an economic decline. However, Tambury’s location in a high open valley on the northern edge of the mountains with postcard views in every direction saved it. The combination of out-of-the-way peace and great beauty made it an attractive location for wealthy retirees and second-home owners.
But not all the population fit that description. Calvin Harlen’s weed-choked shambles of a former dairy farm sat at the corner of Higgles Road and Badger Lane. It was just past noon when the crisp librarian’s voice of Gurney’s GPS delivered him to this final segment of his hour-and-a-quarter drive from Walnut Crossing. He pulled over onto the northbound shoulder of Higgles Road and eyed the dilapidated property, whose most striking feature was a ten-foot-high mountain of manure, overgrown with monstrous weeds, next to a barn that was leaning precipitously toward it. On the far side of the barn, sinking into a field of waist-high scrub, a haphazard line of rusting cars was punctuated by a yellow school-bus carcass with no wheels.
Gurney opened his folder of interview summaries and pulled the appropriate one to the top. He read:
Calvin Harlen. Age 39. Divorced. Self-employed, odd jobs (home repair, lawn mowing, snowplowing, seasonal deer cutting, taxidermy). General maintenance work for Scott Ashton until arrival of Hector Flores, who took over his jobs. Claims he had “unwritten contract” with Ashton that Ashton broke. Claims (without supporting facts) that Flores was illegal alien, gay, HIV-positive, crack addict. Referred to Flores as a “filthy spic,” Ashton as a “lying piece of shit,” Jillian Perry as a “snotty little cunt,” and Kiki Muller as a “spic-fucking whore.” No knowledge of the homicide, related events, location of the suspect. Claims he was working alone in his barn the afternoon of the homicide.
Subject has low credibility. Unstable. Record of multiple arrests over 20-year period, for bad checks, domestic violence, drunk and disorderly, harassment, menacing, assault. (See Unified Criminal Record form attached.)
Gurney closed the folder, put it on the passenger seat. Apparently Calvin Harlen’s life had been a prolonged audition for White-Trash Poster Boy.
He got out of the car, locked it, and walked across the trafficless road to a rutted expanse of dirt that served as a kind of driveway onto the property. It forked into two loosely defined directions, separated by a triangle of stunted grass: one toward the manure pile and barn on the right, the other on the left toward a ramshackle two-story farmhouse whose last paint job was so many decades in the past that the patches of paint on the rotting wood no longer had a definable color. The porch overhang was supported by a few four-by-four posts of more recent vintage than the house but far from new. On one of the posts was a plywood sign advertising DEER CUTING in red, dripping, hand-painted letters.
From inside the house came an eruption of the frantic barking of at least two large-sounding dogs. Gurney waited to see if the commotion would bring someone to the door.
It brought someone out of the barn, or at least out from someplace behind the manure pile-a thin, weathered man with a shaved head, holding what appeared to be either a very fine screwdriver or an ice pick.
“You lose something?” He was smirking as though the question were a clever joke.
“You asking me if I lost something?” said Gurney.
“You say you’re lost?”
Whatever the game was, the thin man seemed to be enjoying it.
Gurney wanted to knock him off balance, make him wonder what the game was.
“I know some people with dogs,” said Gurney. “Right kind of dog, you can make a lot of money. Wrong kind, you’re out of luck.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
It took Gurney a second or two-and the sudden end of the barking in the house-to realize whom the thin man had shouted at.
The situation had the potential for becoming unsafe. Gurney knew he still had the option of walking away, but he wanted to stay, had a lunatic urge to spar with the lunatic. He began studying the ground around him. After a while he picked up a small oval stone about the size of a robin’s egg. He massaged it slowly between his palms as if to warm it, flipped it in the air like a coin, caught and enclosed it in his right fist.
“Fuck are you doing?” the man asked, taking a short step closer.
“Shhh,” said Gurney softly. Finger by finger, he slowly opened his fist, examined the stone closely, grinned, and tossed it over his shoulder.
“What the fuck…?”
“Sorry, Calvin, didn’t mean to ignore you. But that’s the way I make my decisions, and it takes a lot of concentration.”
The man’s eyes widened. “How’d you know my name?”
“Everybody knows you, Calvin. Or do you prefer being called Mr. Hard-On?”
“What?”
“Calvin, then. Simpler. Nicer.”
“The fuck are you? What do you want?”
“I want to know where I can find Hector Flores.”
“Hec… What?”
“I’m looking for him, Calvin. I’m going to find him. Thought maybe you could help me.”
“How the hell…? Who…? You ain’t no cop, right?”
Gurney said nothing, just let his expression fade into his best imitation of a dead-eyed killer. The ice-man look seemed to rivet Harlen, widen his eyes a little more.
“Flores the spic, that’s who you’re after?”
“Can you help me, Calvin?”
“I don’t know. How?”
“Maybe you just could tell me everything you know-about our mutual friend.” Gurney inflected the last three words with such ironic menace that he was afraid for a second he’d overdone it. But Harlen’s inane grin removed the fear that anything with this guy could be overdone.
“Yeah, sure, why not? Like what do you want to know?”
“To start with, do you know where he came from?”
“Bus stop in the village where these spic workers come, hang around. They loiter,” he said, making it sound like a legal term for masturbating in public.
“How about before that? You know where he came from originally?”
“Some Mexican dump, wherever the fuck they all come from.”
“He never told you?”
Harlen shook his head.
“Did he ever tell you anything?”
“Like what?”
“Anything at all. Did you ever actually speak to him?”
“Once. On the phone. Which is another reason I know he’s full of shit. Last-I don’t know-October, November? I called Dr. Ashton about the snowplowing, but the spic answered the phone, wanted to know what I wanted. Told him I wanted to talk to the doctor, why the fuck should I talk to him? Tells me I got to tell him what it’s about and he’ll tell the doctor. I tell him I didn’t call to talk to him-go fuck himself! Who the fuck’s he think he is? These fucking Mexican scumbags, they come up here, bring their fucking swine-flu AIDS leprosy shit, go on fucking welfare, steal fucking jobs, don’t pay taxes, nothing, fucking stupid diseased bastards. I ever see the slimy little fuck again, I’ll shoot him in the fucking head. First I’ll shoot his fucking balls off.”
In the middle of Harlen’s rant, one of the dogs in the house started barking again. Harlen turned to the side, spit on the ground, shook his head, shouted, “Shut the fuck up!” The barking stopped.
“You said that was another reason you knew he was full of shit?”
“What?”
“You said that speaking to Flores on the phone was another reason you knew he was full of shit.”
“Right.”
“Full of shit how?”
“Fuckhead came here, couldn’t speak a fucking word of English. Year later he’s talking like a fucking-I don’t know, a fucking… like he knows everything.”
“Right, so you figure… what, Calvin?”
“I figure maybe it was all bullshit, you know what I mean?”
“Tell me.”
“Nobody learns English that fucking fast.”
“You’re thinking he wasn’t really a Mexican?”
“I’m saying he was full of shit, pulling some kind of deal.”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s obvious, man. He’s that fucking smart, why the fuck did he show up at the doctor’s house asking if he could rake leaves? He had a fucking agenda, man.”
“Interesting, Calvin. You’re a bright guy. I like the way you think.”
Harlen nodded, then spit on the ground again as if to emphasize his agreement with the compliment. “And there’s another thing.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Guilty spic would never let you see his face. Always had one of them rodeo hats on, brim pulled down in front, sunglasses. You know what I think? I think he was afraid to be seen, always hiding in the big house or in that fucking dollhouse. Just like the cunt.”
“Which cunt would that be?”
“The cunt that got whacked. Drive past you on the road, she’d look away like you was some kind of dirt. Like you was roadkill, fucking stupid cunt. So I’m thinking maybe they had something on the side, right, her and Mr. Fucking Greaseball? Both too fucking guilty to look anybody in the eye. Then I’m thinking, hey, wait a minute, maybe it’s more than that. Maybe the spic is afraid of being identified. You ever think of that?”
When Gurney finally concluded the interview, thanking Harlen and telling him he’d be in touch, he wasn’t sure how much he’d learned or what it might be worth. If Ashton had started using Flores instead of Harlen for jobs around the property, Harlen would no doubt have a huge resentment, and all the rest, all the bile that Harlen had been spewing, might have arisen directly from the blow to his wallet and his pride. Or maybe there was more to it. Maybe, as Hardwick had claimed, the whole situation had hidden layers, wasn’t what it seemed to be at all.
Gurney returned to his car on the shoulder of Higgles Road and wrote three short notes to himself in a little spiral pad.
Flores not who he said he was? Not Mexican?
Flores afraid of Harlen recognizing him from past? Or afraid of Harlen being able to ID him in the future? Why, if Ashton could ID him?
Any evidence of an affair between Flores and Jillian? Any prior connection between them? Any pre-Tambury motive for the murder?
He looked skeptically at his own questions, doubtful that any of them would lead to a useful discovery. Calvin Harlen, angry and seemingly paranoid, was hardly a reliable source.
He checked the clock on the dashboard: 1:00 P.M. If he skipped lunch, he’d have time for one more interview before his appointment with Ashton.
The Muller property was next to the last at the high end of Badger Lane, the last being Ashton’s manicured paradise. It was a world apart from Harlen’s dump at the corner of Higgles Road.
Gurney pulled over just past a mailbox bearing the address listed for Carl Muller on his interview master sheet. The house was a very large white Colonial with classic black trim and shutters, set well back from the road. Unlike the meticulously tended houses preceding it, it had a subtle aura of neglect-a shutter a little askew, a broken-off branch lying on the front lawn, grass shaggy, fallen leaves matted on the driveway, a blown-over lawn chair upside down on a brick path by the side door.
Standing at the paneled front door, Gurney could hear music playing faintly somewhere inside. There was no doorbell, just an antique brass knocker, which he used several times with increasing impact before the door was finally opened.
The man facing him did not look well. Gurney figured that his age could be anywhere from forty-five to sixty, depending on how much of his appearance was attributable to sickness. His limp hair matched the grayish beige of his drooping cardigan.
“Hello,” he said, with no hint of greeting or curiosity.
It struck Gurney as an odd way for the man to speak to a stranger at his door. “Mr. Muller?”
The man blinked, looked like he was listening to a taped replay of the question. “I’m Carl Muller.” His voice had the pallid, toneless quality of his skin.
“My name is Dave Gurney, sir. I’m involved in the search for Hector Flores. I was wondering if I might have a minute or two of your time.”
The taped replay took longer this time. “Now?”
“If that’s possible, sir. It would be very helpful.”
Muller nodded slowly. He stepped back, making a vague gesture with his hand.
Gurney stepped into the dark center hall of a well-preserved nineteenth-century home with wide floorboards and abundant original woodwork. The music he’d dimly heard before entering he now heard more identifiably. It was, strangely out of season, “Adeste Fideles,” and it seemed to be coming from the basement. There was another sound as well, a kind of low, rhythmic buzzing, also coming from somewhere below them. To Gurney’s left, a double doorway opened into a formal dining room with a massive fireplace. In front of him, the broad hallway extended to the rear of the house, where there was a glass-paneled door to what appeared to be an endless lawn. On the side of the hallway, a wide staircase with an elaborate balustrade led to the second floor. To his right was an old-fashioned parlor furnished with overstuffed couches and armchairs and antique tables and sideboards over which hung Winslow-style seascapes. Gurney’s impression was that the inside of the house was better cared for than the outside. Muller smiled vacuously, as though waiting to be told what to do next.
“Lovely house,” said Gurney pleasantly. “Looks very comfortable. Perhaps we could sit for a moment and talk?”
Again the tape delay. “All right.”
When he didn’t move, Gurney gestured inquiringly toward the parlor.
“Of course,” said Muller, blinking as though he were just waking up. “What did you say your name was?” Without waiting for an answer, he led the way to a pair of armchairs that faced each other in front of the fireplace. “So,” he said casually when they were both seated, “what’s this all about?”
The tone of the question was, like everything else about Carl Muller, roughly twenty degrees off center. Unless the man had some organic tendency toward confusion-unlikely in the rigorous profession of marine engineering-the explanation had to be some form of medication, perhaps understandable in the aftermath of his wife’s disappearing with a murderer.
Maybe because of the position of the heating vents, Gurney noted that the strains of “Adeste Fideles” and the faint rising and falling buzz were more audible in this room than in the hall. He was tempted to ask about it but thought it better to stay focused on what he really wanted to know.
“You’re a detective,” said Muller-a statement, not a question.
Gurney smiled. “I won’t keep you long, sir. There are just a few things I need to ask you.”
“Carl.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Carl.” He was gazing into the fireplace, speaking as though the ashy remnants of the last fire had jogged his memory. “My name is Carl.”
“Okay, Carl. First question,” said Gurney. “Before the day she disappeared, did Mrs. Muller have any contact with Hector Flores that you were aware of?”
“Kiki,” he said-another revelation from the ashes.
Gurney repeated his question, changing the name.
“She would have, wouldn’t she? Under the circumstances?”
“The circumstances being…?”
Muller’s eyes closed and opened, too lethargic a process to be described as a blink. “Her therapy sessions.”
“Therapy sessions? With whom?”
Muller looked at Gurney for the first time since they’d entered the room, blinking more quickly now. “Dr. Ashton.”
“The doctor has an office in his home? Next door?”
“Yes.”
“How long had she been seeing him?”
“Six months. A year. Less? More? I don’t remember.”
“When was her last session?”
“Tuesday. They were always on Tuesday.”
For a moment Gurney was bewildered. “You mean the Tuesday before she disappeared?”
“That’s right, Tuesday.”
“And you’re assuming that Mrs. Muller-Kiki-would have had contact with Flores when she went to Ashton’s office?”
Muller didn’t answer. His gaze had returned to the fireplace.
“Did she ever talk about him?”
“Who?”
“Hector Flores?”
“He wasn’t the sort of person we’d discuss.”
“What sort of person was he?”
Muller uttered a humorless little laugh and shook his head. “That would be obvious, wouldn’t it?”
“Obvious?”
“From his name,” said Muller with sudden, intense disdain. He was still staring into the fireplace.
“A Spanish name?”
“They’re all the same, you know. So bloody obvious. Our country is being stabbed in the back.”
“By Mexicans?”
“Mexicans are just the tip of the knife.”
“That’s the kind of person Hector was?”
“Have you ever been to those countries?”
“Latin countries?”
“Countries with hot climates.”
“Can’t say that I have, Carl.”
“Filthy places, every one of them. Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia, Brazil, Puerto Rico-every one of them, filthy!”
“Like Hector?”
“Filthy!”
Muller glared at the ash-covered iron grate as though it were displaying infuriating images of that filth.
Gurney sat silently for a minute, waiting for the storm to subside. He watched the man’s shoulders slowly relaxing, his grip on the arms of the chair loosening, his eyes closing.
“Carl?”
“Yes?” Muller’s eyes reopened. His expression had become shockingly bland.
Gurney spoke softly. “Did you ever have evidence that anything inappropriate might be going on between your wife and Hector Flores?”
Muller looked perplexed. “What did you say your name was?”
“My name? Dave. Dave Gurney.”
“Dave? What a remarkable coincidence! Did you know that was my middle name?”
“No, Carl, I didn’t.”
“Carl David Muller.” He stared into the middle distance. “ ‘Carl David,’ my mother used to say, ‘Carl David Muller, you go straight to your room. Carl David Muller, you better behave or Santa may lose your Christmas list. You mind what I say, Carl David.’ ”
He stood up from his chair, straightened his back, and chanted the words in the voice of a woman-“Carl David Muller”-as though the name and voice had the power to break down the wall to another world. Then he walked out of the room.
Gurney heard the front door opening.
He found Muller holding it ajar.
“It was nice of you to drop by,” said Muller blandly. “You have to leave now. Sometimes I forget. I’m not supposed to let people into the house.”
“Thank you, Carl, I appreciate your time.” Taken aback by what looked like some form of psychotic decompensation, Gurney was inclined to comply with Muller’s request in order to avoid creating any additional stress, then make some calls from his car and wait for help to arrive.
By the time he was halfway to his car, he had second thoughts. It might be better to keep an eye on the man. He returned to the front door, hoping he wouldn’t have a problem persuading Muller to admit him a second time, but the door wasn’t fully closed. He knocked on it, anyway. There was no response. He eased it open and looked inside. Muller wasn’t there, but a door in the hallway that Gurney was sure had been shut before was now ajar. Stepping into the center hall, he called out as mildly and pleasantly as he could, “Mr. Muller? Carl? It’s Dave. You there, Carl?”
No answer. But one thing was certain. The buzzing sound-more of a metallic whooshing sound, now that he could hear it more clearly-and the “Adeste Fideles” Christmas hymn were coming from someplace behind that barely open hall door. He went to it, nudged it wide open with his toe. Dimly lit stairs led down to the basement.
Cautiously, Gurney started down. After a few steps, he called out again, “Mr. Muller? Are you down there?”
A boy-soprano choir began to reprise the hymn in English: “O come, all ye faithful / Joyful and triumphant / O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem.”
The stairs were enclosed on both sides all the way down, so only a small slice of the basement was visible to Gurney as he gradually descended the steps. The part he could see seemed to be “finished” with the traditional vinyl tiles and pine paneling of millions of other American basements. For a brief moment, the commonness of it was oddly reassuring. That feeling disappeared when he stepped out of the stairwell and turned to the source of the light.
In the far corner of the room was a very large Christmas tree, its top bent over against the nine-foot-high ceiling. Its hundreds of tiny lights were the room’s source of illumination. There were colored garlands and foil icicles and scores of glass ornaments in every traditional Christmas shape from simple orbs to handblown glass angels-all hanging from silver hooks. The room was filled with a piney fragrance.
Beside the tree, standing transfixed behind a huge platform the size of two Ping-Pong tables set end to end, was Carl Muller. His hands were on two control levers attached to a black metal box. A model train buzzed around the perimeter of the platform, made figure eights across the middle, climbed and descended gentle grades, roared through mountain tunnels, passed through tiny villages and farms, crossed rivers, traversed forests… around and around… again… again.
Muller’s eyes-glimmering spots in the sagging pallor of his face-glowed with all the colors of the tree lights. He reminded Gurney of a person afflicted with progeria, the weird accelerated-aging disease that makes a child look like an old man.
After a while Gurney went back upstairs. He decided to go on to Scott Ashton’s house and see what the doctor knew about Muller’s condition. The trains and the tree provided reasonable evidence that it was an ongoing situation, not an acute breakdown requiring intervention.
Without setting the lock, he closed the heavy front door behind him with a solid thump. As he started back along the brick path to the lane where his car was parked, an elderly woman was getting out of a vintage Land Rover that was parked directly behind his Outback.
She opened the rear door, spoke a few stern, clipped words, and out stepped a very large dog, an Airedale.
The woman, like her imposing dog, had something about her that was both patrician and wiry. Her complexion was as outdoorsy as Muller’s was sickly. She came toward Gurney with the determined stride of a hiker, leading the dog on a short leash, carrying a walking stick more like a cudgel than a cane. Halfway up the path, she stopped with feet apart, stick planted firmly to one side and the dog on the other, blocking his way.
“I’m Marian Eliot,” she announced-as one might announce, “I am your judge and jury.”
The name was familiar to Gurney. It had appeared on the list of Ashton’s neighbors interviewed by the BCI team.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“My name is Gurney. Why do you ask?”
She tightened her grip on her long, gnarled stick: scepter and potential weapon. This was a woman accustomed to being answered, not questioned, but it would be a mistake to be bullied by her. It would make it impossible to gain her respect.
Her eyes narrowed. “What are you doing here?”
“I’d be tempted to say it’s none of your business, if your concern for Mr. Muller weren’t so obvious.”
He wasn’t sure whether he’d hit the right note of assertiveness and sensitivity until, at the conclusion of a piercing stare, she asked, “Is he all right?”
“Depends on what you mean by all right.”
There was a flicker of something in her expression suggesting that she understood his equivocation.
“He’s in the basement,” Gurney added.
She made a scrunched-up face, nodded, seemed to be picturing something. “With the trains?” Her imperious voice had softened.
“Yes. A regular thing with him?”
She studied the top end of her big stick as though it might be a source of useful information or next steps. She exhibited no interest in answering Gurney’s question.
He decided to nudge the conversation forward from a different angle. “I’m involved in the Perry murder investigation. I remember your name from the list of people who were interviewed back in May.”
She made a contemptuous little sound. “It wasn’t really an interview. I was initially contacted by… I’ll remember the name in a moment… Senior Investigator Hardpan, Hardscrabble, Hard-something… a rough-edged man, but far from stupid. Fascinating in a way-rather like a smart rhinoceros. Unfortunately, he disappeared from the case and was replaced by someone called Blatt, or Splat, or something like that. Blatt-Splat was marginally less rude and far less intelligent. We spoke only briefly, but the brevity was a blessing, believe me. Whenever I meet a man like that, my heart goes out to the teachers who once had to endure him from September to June.”
The comment brought forth a recollection of the words next to the name Marian Eliot on the interview file’s cover sheet: Professor of Philosophy, retired (Princeton).
“In a way that’s why I’m here,” said Gurney. “I’ve been asked to follow up on some of the interviews, get some more detail into the picture, maybe develop a better understanding of what really happened.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “What really happened? You have doubts about that?”
Gurney shrugged. “Some pieces of the puzzle are still missing.”
“I thought the only things missing were the Mexican ax murderer and Carl’s wife.” She seemed both intrigued and annoyed that the situation might not be as she had assumed. The Airedale’s sharp, querying eyes seemed to be taking it all in.
Gurney suggested, “Perhaps we could speak somewhere other than right here?”
Marian Eliot’s suggested location for carrying on their conversation was her own home, which happened to be across the lane and a hundred yards back down the hill from Carl Muller’s. The actual location turned out to be not so much her home as her driveway, where she enlisted Gurney’s help unloading bags of peat moss and mulch from the back of her Land Rover.
She’d traded her cudgel for a hoe and stood by the edge of a rose garden about thirty feet from the vehicle. As Gurney hefted the bags into a wheelbarrow, she asked him about his precise role in the investigation and his position in the state police chain of command.
His explanation that he was an “evidence consultant” who’d been retained by the victim’s mother outside the official BCI process was greeted with a skeptical eye and tightened lips.
“What on earth is that supposed to mean?”
He decided to take a chance and reply bluntly. “I’ll tell you what it means if you can keep it to yourself. The fact is, it’s a job description that lets me carry on an investigation without waiting for the state to issue an official PI license. If you want to check on my background as an NYPD homicide detective, call the smart rhinoceros-whose name, by the way, is Jack Hardwick.”
“Hah! Good luck with the state! Do you think you might be able to push that wheelbarrow over here?”
Gurney took that as her way of accepting him and how things were. He made three more trips from the back of the Land Rover to the rose garden. After the third she invited him to sit with her on a white-enameled cast-iron bench under an overgrown apple tree.
She turned so she could look at him squarely. “What’s all this about missing pieces?”
“We’ll come to the missing pieces, but I need to ask a few questions first to help me get oriented.” He was feeling his way toward the right balance of assertiveness and accommodation, watching her body language for signs of needed course corrections. “First question: How would you describe Dr. Ashton in a sentence or two?”
“I wouldn’t try. He’s not the sort of man to be captured in a sentence or two.”
“A complex man?”
“Very.”
“Any predominant personality trait?”
“I wouldn’t know how to answer that.”
Gurney suspected that the quickest means of getting something from Marian Eliot was to stop tugging on it. He sat back and studied the shapes of the apple tree’s branches, twisty from a series of long-ago prunings.
He was right. After a minute she began speaking. “I’ll tell you something about Scott, something he did, but you’ll have to make up your own mind about what it means, whether it would add up to a ‘personality trait.’ ” She articulated the phrase distastefully, as though she found it too simplistic a concept to apply to human beings.
“When Scott was still in medical school, he wrote the book that made him famous-well, famous in certain academic circles. It was called The Empathy Trap. It argued quite cogently-with biological and psychological data to back up his hypothesis-that empathy is essentially a boundary defect, that the empathic feelings human beings have for one another are really a form of confusion. His point was that we care about each other because at some location in the brain we fail to distinguish between self and other. He conducted one elegantly simple experiment in which the subjects watched a man peeling an apple. In the course of peeling it, the man’s hand seemed to slip and the knife jabbed his finger. The subjects were being videotaped for later analysis of their reactions to the jabbing. Virtually all the subjects reflexively flinched. Only two out of the hundred tested failed to have any reaction, and when those two were later given psychological tests, they revealed the mental and emotional characteristics common to sociopaths. Scott’s contention was that we flinch when someone else is cut because for a split second we fail to distinguish between that person and ourselves. In other words, the normal human being’s boundary is imperfect in a way that the sociopath’s is perfect. The sociopath never confuses himself and his needs with anyone else’s and therefore has no feelings related to the welfare of others.”
Gurney smiled. “Sounds like an idea that could stir up a reaction.”
“Oh, indeed it did. Of course, a lot of the reaction had to do with Scott’s choice of words: perfect and imperfect. His language was interpreted by some of his peers as a glorification of the sociopath.” Marian Eliot’s eyes were gleaming with excitement. “But all that was part of his plan. Bottom line, he got the attention he wanted. At the age of twenty-three he was the hottest topic in the field.”
“So he’s smart, and he knows how to-”
“Wait,” she interrupted, “that’s not the end of the story. A few months after his book stirred up that hornet’s nest of controversy, another book was published that was in essence a broadside attack on Scott’s theory of empathy. The title of the competing book was Heart and Soul. It was rigorous and well argued, but its tone was entirely different. Its message was that love is all that matters, and ‘boundary porosity’-as Scott had described empathy-was in fact an evolutionary leap forward and the very essence of human relationships. People in the field were dividing into opposing camps. Journal articles were generated by the score. Impassioned letters were written.” She sat back against the arm of the bench, watching his expression.
“I have a feeling,” said Gurney, “that there’s more.”
“More indeed. A year later it was discovered that Scott Ashton had written both books.” She paused. “What do you think of that?”
“I’m not sure what I think of it. How was it received in his field?”
“Total rage. Felt like they’d all been had. Some truth in that. But the books themselves were unimpeachable. Both perfectly legitimate contributions.”
“And you think all that was to draw attention to himself?”
“No!” she snapped. “Of course not! The tone was attention-getting. Posing as two writers in conflict with each other was attention-getting. But there was a deeper purpose, a deeper message to each reader: You need to make up your own mind, find your own truth.”
“So you’d say Ashton was a pretty smart guy?”
“Brilliant, actually. Unconventional and unpredictable. A supremely good listener and a fast learner. And a strangely tragic figure.”
Gurney was getting the impression that despite being in her late sixties, Marian Eliot was afflicted with something she would surely never acknowledge: a consuming crush on a man who was nearly three decades her junior.
“You mean ‘tragic’ in the sense of what happened on his wedding day?”
“It goes well beyond that. The murder, of course, ended up being part of it. But consider the mythic archetypes embedded in the story from start to finish.” She paused, allowing him time for such consideration.
“Not sure I follow that.”
“Cinderella… Pygmalion… Frankenstein.”
“You’re taking about the evolution of Scott Ashton’s relationship with Hector Flores?”
“Precisely.” She gave him a smile of approval befitting a good student. “The story has a classic beginning: A stranger wanders into the village, hungry, looking for work. A local landowner, a man of substance, hires him, takes him to his home, tries him at various tasks, sees great potential in him, gives him increasing responsibility, gives him entry into a new life. The poor scullery worker, in effect, is magically elevated to a rich new life. Not the Cinderella story in its gender details, but certainly in its essence. Yet in the larger scheme of the Ashton-Flores saga, the Cinderella story is only act one. Then a new paradigm becomes operative, as Dr. Ashton grows enthralled by the opportunity to mold his student into something greater, to lead him to his highest potential, to sculpt the statue into a kind of perfection-to bring Hector Flores to life in the fullest possible sense. He buys him books, a computer, online courses-spends hours each day supervising his education, pushing him toward a kind of perfection. Not the Pygmalion myth in its specific Greek details, but close enough. That was act two. Act three, of course, became the Frankenstein story. Intended to be the best of human creatures, Flores turns out to harbor the worst of human flaws, bringing havoc and horror into the life of the genius who created him.”
Nodding slowly, appreciatively, Gurney took all of this in-fascinated not only by the fairy-tale parallels to the real-life events but also by Marian Eliot’s insistence on their huge significance. Her eyes burned with conviction and something that resembled triumph. The question in Gurney’s mind: Was the triumph in some way related to the tragedy, or did it simply reflect an academic’s satisfaction with the profundity of her own understanding?
After a brief silence during which her excitement subsided, she asked, “What were you hoping to find out from Carl?”
“I don’t know. Maybe why the inside of his house is so much neater than the outside.” He wasn’t entirely serious, but she replied in a businesslike tone.
“I look in on Carl fairly regularly. He hasn’t been himself since Kiki disappeared. Understandable. While I’m there, I put things where they seem to belong. It’s nothing, really.” She gazed over Gurney’s shoulder in the direction of Muller’s house, hidden behind a couple of acres of trees. “He takes better care of himself than you might think.”
“You’ve heard his opinion of Latinos?”
She uttered a short, exasperated sigh. “Carl’s position on that issue isn’t much different from the campaign speeches of certain public figures.”
Gurney gave her a curious look.
“Yes, I know, he’s a bit intense about it, but considering… well, considering the situation with his wife…” Her voice trailed off.
“And the Christmas tree in September? And the Christmas carols?”
“He likes them. Finds them soothing.” She stood, took her hoe with a firm hand from where it was leaning against the trunk of the apple tree, and gave Gurney a quick little nod that communicated the end of their conversation. Discussing Carl’s craziness was clearly not her favorite activity. “I have work to do. Good luck with your inquiries, Mr. Gurney.”
Either she had forgotten or she had consciously chosen not to pursue her earlier interest in the missing puzzle pieces. Gurney wondered which it was.
The big Airedale, seemingly sensing a change in the emotional atmosphere, appeared out of nowhere at her side.
“Thank you for your time. And your insight,” Gurney said. “I hope you’ll give me an opportunity to speak with you again.”
“We’ll see. Despite retirement, I lead a busy life.”
She turned to the rose garden with her hoe and began hacking fiercely into the crusty soil, as if disciplining an unruly element of her own nature.
Many of the houses on Badger Lane, especially those up toward Ashton’s end of the road, were old and large and had been maintained or restored with costly attention to detail. The result was a casual elegance toward which Gurney felt a resentment he would have resisted identifying as envy. Even measured by the elevated standards of Badger Lane, the Ashton property was striking: an impeccable two-story farmhouse of pale yellow stone surrounded by wild roses, huge free-form flower beds with herbaceous borders, and trellises of English ivy serving as passageways among the various areas of a gently sloping lawn. Gurney parked in a Belgian-block driveway that led to the kind of garage a real-estate agent would call a carriage house. Across the lawn stood the classical pavilion where the wedding musicians had played.
Gurney got out of his car and was immediately struck by a scent in the air. As he struggled to name it, a man came around from the rear of the main house carrying a pruning saw. Scott Ashton looked familiar but different, less vivid in person than on video. He was dressed in casually expensive country attire: Donegal tweed pants and a tailored flannel shirt. He noted Gurney’s presence without apparent pleasure or displeasure.
“You’re on time,” he said. His voice was even, mellow, impersonal.
“I appreciate your willingness to see me, Dr. Ashton.”
“Would you like to come inside?” It was purely a question, not an invitation.
“It would be helpful if I could see the area behind the house first-the location of the garden cottage. Also the patio table where you were sitting when the bullet hit the teacup.”
Ashton responded with a movement of his hand indicating that Gurney should follow him. As they passed through the trellis linking the garage and driveway area beside the house to the main lawn behind it-the trellis through which the wedding guests had entered the reception-Gurney experienced a feeling of combined recognition and dislocation. The pavilion, the cottage, the rear of the main house, the stone patio, the flower beds, the enclosing woods were recognizable but jarringly altered by the change of season, the emptiness, the silence. The odd scent in the air, exotically herbal, was stronger here. Gurney asked about it.
Ashton motioned vaguely toward the planting beds bordering the patio. “Chamomile, windflower, mallow, bergamot, tansy, boxwood. The relative strength of each component changes with the direction of the breeze.”
“Do you have a new gardener?”
Ashton’s features tightened. “In place of Hector Flores?”
“I understood he handled most of the work around the house.”
“No, he hasn’t been replaced.” Ashton noted the pruning saw he was carrying and smiled without warmth. “Unless by myself.” He turned toward the patio. “There’s that table you wanted to see.” He led Gurney through an opening in the low stone wall to an iron table with a pair of matching chairs near the back door of the house.
“Did you want to sit here?” Once again it was a question, not an invitation.
Gurney had settled into the chair that gave him the best view of the areas he remembered from the video when a slight movement drew his attention to the far side of the patio. There, on a small bench against the sunny back wall of the house, sat an elderly man in a brown cardigan with a twig in his hand. He was rocking his hand from side to side, making the twig resemble a metronome. The man had thinning gray hair, sallow skin, and a dazed look.
“My father,” said Ashton, sitting in the chair opposite Gurney.
“Here for a visit?”
Ashton paused. “Yes, a visit.”
Gurney responded with a curious look.
“He’s been in a private nursing home for about two years as the result of progressive dementia and aphasia.”
“He can’t speak?”
“Hasn’t been able to for at least a year now.”
“You brought him here for a visit?”
Ashton’s eyes narrowed as though he might be about to tell Gurney it was none of his business, but then his expression softened. “Jillian’s… death created… a kind of loneliness.” He seemed confused by the word and hesitated. “I think it was a week or two after her death that I decided to bring my father here for a while. I thought that being with him, taking care of him…” Again he fell silent.
“How do you manage that, going to Mapleshade every day?”
“He comes with me. Surprisingly, it’s not a problem. Physically, he’s fine. No difficulty walking. No difficulty with stairs. No difficulty eating. He can tend to his… hygiene requirements. In addition to the speech issue, the deficit is mainly in orientation. He’s generally confused about where he is, thinks he’s back in the Park Avenue apartment where we lived when I was a child.”
“Nice neighborhood.” Gurney glanced across the patio at the old man on the bench.
“Nice enough. He was a bit of a financial genius. Hobart Ashton. Trusted member of a social class in which all the men’s names sounded like boys’ prep schools.”
It was an old witticism and sounded stale. Gurney smiled politely.
Ashton cleared his throat. “You didn’t come here to talk about my father. And I don’t have much time. So what can I do for you?”
Gurney put his hands on the table. “Is this where you were sitting the day of the gunshot?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t make you nervous to be in the same spot?”
“A lot of things make me nervous.”
“I’d never know it, looking at you.”
There was a long silence, broken by Gurney. “Did you think the shooter hit what he was aiming at?”
“Yes.”
“What makes you so sure he wasn’t aiming at you and missed?”
“Did you see Schindler’s List? There is a scene in which Schindler attempts to talk the camp commandant into sparing the lives of Jews whom he would normally shoot for minor offenses. Schindler tells him that being able to shoot them, having a perfect right to shoot them, and then choosing in a godlike way to spare them, would be the greatest proof of his power over them.”
“That’s what you think Flores was doing? Proving, by sparing you and smashing the teacup, that he has the power to kill you?”
“It’s a reasonable hypothesis.”
“Assuming that the shooter was Flores.”
Ashton held Gurney’s gaze. “Who else did you have in mind?”
“You told the original investigating officer that Withrow Perry had a rifle of the same caliber as the bullet fragments gathered from this patio.”
“Have you ever met him or spoken to him?”
“Not yet.”
“Once you do, I think you’ll find the notion of Dr. Withrow Perry crawling around in those woods with a sniperscope utterly ridiculous.”
“But not so ridiculous for Hector Flores?”
“Hector has proven himself capable of anything.”
“That scene you mentioned from Schindler’s List? As I think about it, I seem to remember that the commandant doesn’t take the advice for very long. He doesn’t have the patience for it, and he very quickly goes back to shooting Jews who aren’t behaving the way he wants them to.”
Ashton did not reply. His gaze drifted toward the wooded hillside behind the pavilion and rested there.
Most of Gurney’s decisions were conscious and well calculated, with one conspicuous exception: deciding when it was time to switch the tone of an interview. That was a gut call, and right then it felt like the right time. He leaned back in his iron chair and said, “Marian Eliot is quite a fan of yours.”
The signs were subtle; maybe Gurney was imagining them, but he got the impression from the odd look Ashton gave him that for the first time in their conversation he’d been thrown off stride. He recovered quickly.
“Marian is easy to charm,” he said in his smooth psychiatrist’s voice, “as long as you don’t try to be charming.”
Gurney realized that that had been his own perception, precisely. “She thinks you’re a genius.”
“She has her enthusiasms.”
Gurney tried another twist. “What did Kiki Muller think of you?”
“I have no idea.”
“You were her psychiatrist?”
“Very briefly.”
“A year doesn’t seem that brief.”
“A year? More like two months, not even two months.”
“When did the two months end?”
“I can’t tell you that. Confidentiality restrictions. I shouldn’t even have said two months.”
“Her husband told me that she had an appointment with you every Tuesday up until the week she disappeared.”
Ashton offered only an incredulous frown and shook his head.
“Let me ask you something, Dr. Ashton. Without improperly divulging anything Kiki Muller might have told you during the time she was seeing you, can you tell me why her treatment period ended so quickly?”
He considered this, seemed uncomfortable answering. “I discontinued it.”
“Can you tell me why you did that?”
He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then seemed to make a decision. “I discontinued her therapy because in my opinion she wasn’t interested in therapy. She was only interested in being here.”
“Here? On your property?”
“She’d show up half an hour early for her appointments, then linger afterward, supposedly fascinated by the landscaping, the flowers, whatever. The fact is, wherever Hector was, that’s where her attention was. But she wouldn’t admit it. Which made her communications with me dishonest and pointless. So I stopped seeing her after six or seven sessions. I’m taking a risk in telling you this, but it seems an important fact if she was lying about the duration of her treatment. The truth is, she ceased being my patient at least nine months prior to her disappearance.”
“Might she have been seeing Hector secretly all that time, telling her husband she was coming here for her appointments with you?”
Ashton took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’d hate to think something so blatant was going on under my nose, right there in that damned cottage. But it’s consistent with the two of them running off together… afterward.”
“This Hector Flores character,” said Gurney abruptly, “what kind of person were you imagining he was?”
Ashton winced. “You mean, as a psychiatrist, how could I have been so miserably wrong about someone I was observing daily for three years? The answer is embarrassingly simple: blindness in pursuit of a goal that had become far too important to me.”
“What goal was that?”
“The education and blossoming of Hector Flores.” Ashton looked like he was tasting something bitter. “His remarkable growth from gardener to polymath was going to be the subject of my next book-an exposition of the power of nurture over nature.”
“And after that,” said Gurney with more sarcasm than he’d intended, “a second book under another name demolishing the argument in your first book?”
Ashton’s lips stretched in a cold, slow-motion smile. “That was an informative conversation you had with Marian.”
“Which reminds me of something else I wanted to ask you. About Carl Muller. Are you aware of his emotional condition?”
“Not through any professional contact.”
“As a neighbor, then?”
“What is it you want to know?”
“Put simply, I’d like to know how nuts he really is.”
Again Ashton presented his humorless smile. “Basing my opinion on hearsay, I’d guess he’s in full retreat from reality. Specifically, from grown-up reality. Sexual reality.”
“You get all that from the fact that he plays with model trains?”
“There’s a key question one must always ask about inappropriate behavior: Is there an age at which that behavior would have been appropriate?”
“Not sure I understand.”
“Carl’s behavior appears appropriate for a prepubescent boy. Which suggests it may be a form of regression in which the individual returns to the last secure and happy time in his life. I’d say that Carl has regressed to a time in his life before women and sex entered the equation, before he experienced the pain of having a woman deceive him.”
“You’re saying that somehow he discovered his wife’s affair with Flores and it drove him off the deep end?”
“It’s possible, if he were fragile to begin with. It’s consistent with his current behavior.”
A bank of clouds, which had materialized out of nowhere in the blue sky, drifted gradually in front of the sun, dropping the temperature on the patio at least ten degrees. Ashton seemed not to notice. Gurney stuffed his hands into his pockets.
“Could a discovery like that be enough to make him kill her? Or kill Flores?”
Ashton frowned. “You have reason to believe that Kiki and Hector are dead?”
“None, apart from the fact that neither one of them has been seen for the past four months. But I have no evidence that they’re alive, either.”
Ashton looked at his watch, a softly burnished antique Cartier. “You’re painting a complicated picture, Detective.”
Gurney shrugged. “Too complicated?”
“Not for me to say. I’m not a forensic psychologist.”
“What are you?”
Ashton blinked, perhaps at the abruptness of the question. “I beg pardon?”
“Your field of expertise…?”
“Destructive sexual behavior, particularly sexual abuse.”
It was Gurney’s turn to blink. “I had the impression you were director of a school for troubled kids.”
“Yes. Mapleshade.”
“Mapleshade is for kids who’ve been sexually abused?”
“Sorry, Detective. You’re opening a subject that cannot be discussed briefly without the risk of misunderstanding, and I don’t have the time now to discuss it in detail. Perhaps another day.” He glanced again at his watch. “The fact is, I have two appointments this afternoon I need to prepare for. Do you have any simpler questions?”
“Two. Is it possible that you were mistaken about Hector Flores being Mexican?”
“Mistaken?”
Gurney waited.
Ashton appeared agitated, moved to the edge of his chair. “Yes, I may have been mistaken about that, along with everything else I thought I knew about him. Second question?”
“Does the name Edward Vallory mean anything to you?”
“You mean the text message on Jillian’s phone?”
“Yes. ‘For all the reasons I have written. Edward Vallory.’ ”
“No. The first officer on the case asked me about that. I said it wasn’t a familiar name then, and that hasn’t changed. I was told that the phone company traced the message back to Hector’s cell phone.”
“But you have no idea why he would use the name Edward Vallory?”
“None. I’m sorry, Detective, but I do need to prepare for my appointments.”
“Can I see you tomorrow?”
“I’ll be at Mapleshade all day-with a full schedule.”
“What time do you leave in the morning?”
“Here? Nine-thirty.”
“How about eight-thirty, then?”
Ashton’s expression flickered between consternation and concern. “All right. Eight-thirty tomorrow morning.”
On the way to his car, Gurney glanced back into the far corner of the patio. The sun was gone now, but Hobart Ashton’s metronomic twig was still rocking back and forth to a slow, monotonous beat.
As Gurney drove down Badger Lane under gathering clouds, the homes that had looked picturesque when bathed in sunlight now looked grim and guarded. He was eager to reach the openness of Higgles Road and the pastoral valleys that lay between Tambury and Walnut Crossing.
Ashton’s decision to end the interview, necessitating a return trip, didn’t bother Gurney at all. It would give him time to digest his first live impressions of the man, along with the opinions offered by his extraordinary neighbors. Having an opportunity to organize it all in his mind would help him start to make connections and put together the right questions for tomorrow. He decided he’d head straight for the Quick-Mart on Route 10, get the biggest container of coffee they offered, and make some notes.
As he came within sight of the intersection at Calvin Harlen’s tumbledown farm, he could see that a black car was blocking the road, angled directly across it. Two muscular young men with matching buzz cuts, sunglasses, dark jeans, and shiny Windbreakers were leaning against the side of the car, watching Gurney’s approach. The fact that the car was an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria-as obvious a law-enforcement vehicle as a cruiser with its siren blaring-made the state police ID tags pinned to their jackets no surprise.
They ambled over to where Gurney had stopped, one on each side of his car.
“License and registration,” said the one at Gurney’s window in none too friendly a tone.
Gurney already had his wallet out, but now he hesitated. “Blatt?”
The man’s mouth twitched as if a fly had landed on it. He slowly removed his glasses, managing to inject menace into the action. His eyes were small and mean. “Where do I know you from?”
“The Mellery case.”
He smiled. The wider the smile got, the nastier it got. “Gurney, right? The genius from shit city. The hell you doing here?”
“Visiting.”
“Visiting who?”
“When it’s appropriate to share that information with you, I will.”
“Appropriate? Appropriate? Get out of the car.”
Gurney complied calmly with the order. The other officer had circled around to the back of the car.
“Now, like I said, license and registration.”
Gurney opened his wallet, handed the two items to Blatt, who studied them with great care. Blatt went back to the Crown Victoria, got in, and started punching keys on his in-car computer. The officer in back of the car was watching Gurney as if he might be about to sprint across Higgles Road into the thornbushes. Gurney smiled wearily and tried to read the man’s ID, but the plastic holder was reflecting the light. He gave up and introduced himself instead. “I’m Dave Gurney, NYPD Homicide, retired.”
The officer nodded slightly. Several minutes passed. Then several more. Gurney leaned back against his car door, folded his arms, and closed his eyes. He had little appetite for pointless delays, and the complexity of the day was wearing him down. His fabled patience was fraying. Blatt returned and handed him back his items as though he were sick of holding them.
“What’s your business here?”
“You asked me that already.”
“All right, Gurney, let me make something clear to you. There’s a murder investigation in progress here. You understand what I’m saying? Murder investigation. Big mistake for you to get in the way. Obstruction of justice. Impeding the investigation of a felony. Get the message? So I’ll ask you one more time. What are you doing on Badger Lane?”
“Sorry, Blatt, private matter.”
“You saying you’re not here about the Perry case?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
Blatt turned to the other officer, spit on the ground, and pointed his thumb back at Gurney. “This is the guy that almost got everyone killed at the end of the Mellery case.”
The stupid accusation was dangerously close to pushing a button in Gurney that most people didn’t know existed.
Maybe the other officer sensed ominous vibrations, or maybe he’d gotten jammed up by Blatt’s animosities before, or maybe a little light finally went on. “Gurney?” he asked. “Isn’t that the guy with all the NYPD commendations?”
Blatt didn’t answer. But something about the question changed the dynamic of the situation just enough to restrain further escalation. He stared dully at Gurney.
“A word to the wise: Get out of here. Get out of here right this fucking minute. You even breathe on this case, I guarantee you’ll get banged for obstruction.” He raised his hand, pointed his forefinger between Gurney’s eyes, and dropped his thumb like a hammer.
Gurney nodded. “I hear you, but… I have a question. Suppose I discover that all your assumptions about this murder are bullshit. Who should I tell?”
The coffee on the drive home was a mistake. The cigarette was a bigger mistake.
The gas-station brew had been concentrated by time and evaporation into a caffeine-packed, tar-colored liquid that didn’t taste much like coffee at all. Gurney drank it anyway: a comforting ritual. Not so comforting was the impact of the caffeine on his nerves as the first rush of stimulation gave way to a vibrating anxiety that demanded a cigarette. But that, too, came with pluses and minuses: a brief feeling of ease and freedom, followed by thoughts as bleak as the dispiriting overcast. The memory of something a therapist had said fifteen years earlier: David, you behave like two different people. In your professional life, you have drive, determination, direction. In your personal life, you’re a ship without a rudder. Sometimes he had the illusion of making progress-giving up smoking, living more of his life outdoors and less of it in his head, focusing on the here and now and Madeleine. But inevitably he slipped back from what he’d hoped to be into the shape of the person he’d always been.
His new Subaru had no ashtray, and he was making do with the rinsed-out sardine tin he kept in the car for that purpose. As he ground his butt into it, it suddenly brought to mind another acute instance of failure in his personal life, another jabbing reminder of a mind adrift: He’d forgotten about dinner.
His call to Madeleine-omitting his memory lapse, asking only if she wanted him to pick up anything on his way home-did not leave him feeling any better. He had the sense that she knew he’d forgotten, knew he was trying to cover it up. It was a short call with long silences. Their final exchange:
“You’ll clear your murder files off the dinner table when you get home?”
“Yes. I said I would.”
“Good.”
For the balance of the drive, Gurney’s restless mind skittered around a set of bothersome questions: Why was Arlo Blatt waiting at the bottom of Badger Lane? There was no surveillance car there earlier. Had he been tipped that someone was asking questions? That Gurney in particular was asking questions? But who would care enough to call Blatt? Why was Blatt so eager to keep him off the case? Which reminded Gurney of another unresolved question: Why was Jack Hardwick so eager to have him on it?
At exactly 5:00 P.M. under a glowering sky, Gurney turned onto the dirt-and-gravel road that ran up into the hills to his farmhouse. A mile or so along the way, he caught sight of a car ahead of him, a grayish green Prius. As they proceeded up the dusty road, it became increasingly certain that the people in the car were the mystery dinner guests.
The Prius slowed to a cautious crawl on the rutted farm track through the pasture to the informal parking area of matted-down grass next to the house. A second before they emerged, Gurney remembered: George and Peggy Meeker. George, retired professor of entomology in his early sixties, a gangling praying mantis of a man; and Peggy, bubbly social worker in her early fifties who’d talked Madeleine into her current part-time job. As Gurney parked, the Meekers removed from their backseat a platter and a bowl covered with aluminum foil.
“Salad and dessert!” cried Peggy. “Sorry we’re late. George lost the car keys!” She seemed to find this both exasperating and entertaining.
George raised his hand in a gesture of greeting, accompanied by a sour glance at his wife. Gurney managed only a small smile of welcome. The George-and-Peggy dynamic was too close for comfort to what had gone on between his parents.
Madeleine came to the door, her smile directed at the Meekers.
“Salad and dessert,” explained Peggy, handing the covered dishes to Madeleine, who made appreciative noises and led the way into the big farmhouse kitchen.
“I love it!” said Peggy with wide-eyed appreciation, the same reaction she’d had on their two previous visits, adding as she always did, “It’s the perfect house for you two. Don’t you think it fits their personalities perfectly, George?”
George nodded agreeably, eyeing the case files on the table, tilting his head to read the abbreviated content descriptions on the covers. “I thought you were retired,” he said to Gurney.
“I am. This is just a brief consulting assignment.”
“An invitation to a beheading,” said Madeleine.
“What sort of consulting assignment?” asked Peggy with real interest.
“I’ve been asked to review the evidence in a murder case and suggest alternative directions for the investigation if they seem warranted.”
“Sounds fascinating,” said Peggy. “Is it a case that’s been in the news?”
He hesitated a moment before answering, “Yes, a few months ago. The tabloids referred to it as the case of the butchered bride.”
“No! Why, that’s incredible! You’re investigating that horrible murder? The young woman who was killed in her wedding dress? What exactly-”
Madeleine broke in, her voice’s volume a little high for the proximity of the company. “What can I get you folks to drink?”
Peggy kept her eyes on Gurney.
Madeleine went on, loud and cheery. “We have a California pinot grigio, an Italian Barolo, and a Finger Lakes something-or-other with a cute name.”
“Barolo for me,” said George.
“I want to hear the inside story of this murder,” declared Peggy, adding as an afterthought, “Any wine is fine for me. Except the cute one.”
“I’ll have a Barolo like George,” said Gurney.
“Could you clear the table now?” asked Madeleine.
“Absolutely,” said Gurney. He turned to the task and began consolidating the many piles of papers into a few. “I should have done it this morning. Can’t remember a damn thing anymore.”
Madeleine smiled dangerously, got a couple of bottles from the pantry, and went about the business of extracting corks.
“So…?” said Peggy, still staring expectantly at Gurney.
“How much do you remember from the news stories?” he asked.
“Gorgeous young woman, murdered by a crazy Mexican gardener about ten minutes after marrying none other than Scott Ashton.”
“Sounds like you know who he is.”
“Know who he is? Jeez, everybody in the world-Wait, let me take that back. Everybody in the world of social sciences knows Scott Ashton-or at least his reputation, his books, his journal articles. He’s the hottest sexual-abuse therapist out there.”
“Hottest?” said Madeleine, approaching with two glasses of red wine.
George guffawed, an oddly hearty sound from his sticklike frame.
Peggy winced. “Poor word choice. Should have said most famous. Lots of cutting-edge therapies. I’m sure Dave can tell us a heck of a lot more than that.” She accepted the glass Madeleine offered her, took a small sip, and smiled. “Lovely. Thanks.”
“So tomorrow’s the big day, right?” said Madeleine.
Peggy blinked confusedly at the change of subject.
“Big day,” echoed George.
“Not every day your son goes off to Harvard,” said Madeleine. “And didn’t you tell us he was going to major in biology?”
“That’s the plan,” said George, ever the cautious scientist.
Neither parent showed much appetite for the subject, perhaps because this was the third of their sons to take this path and everything that could be said had been said.
“Are you still teaching?” Peggy addressed the question to Gurney.
“You mean at the academy?”
“Guest lecturer, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, I do it from time to time. A special seminar on undercover work.”
“He teaches a course in lying,” said Madeleine.
The Meekers laughed uneasily. George polished off his Barolo.
“I teach the good guys how to lie to the bad guys so the bad guys tell the good guys what we need to know.”
“That’s a way of putting it,” said Madeleine.
“You must have some great stories,” said Peggy.
“George,” said Madeleine, stepping between Peggy and Gurney, “let me refill your glass.” He handed it to her, and she retreated to the sink island. “It must be a very nice feeling to have your sons following in your footsteps.”
“Well… not entirely in my footsteps. Biology, yes, in a general way, but so far no interest expressed by any of them in entomology, much less my own specialty of arachnology. On the contrary-”
“Now, if I remember rightly,” Peggy interrupted, “you folks have a son?”
“David has a son,” said Madeleine, stepping back to the sink island, pouring herself a pinot grigio.
“Ah. Yes. His name’s on the tip of my tongue-something with an L, or was it a K?”
“Kyle,” said Gurney, as though it were a word he rarely pronounced.
“He’s on Wall Street, right?”
“Was on Wall Street. Now he’s in law school.”
“Casualty of the bursting bubble?” asked George.
“More or less.”
“Classic disaster,” intoned George with intellectual disdain. “House of cards. Million-dollar mortgages being handed out like lollipops to three-year-olds. Moguls and bigwigs leaping from the towers of high finance. Bloody big bankers dug their own graves. Only bad thing is that our government in its infinite wisdom decided to resurrect the idiot bastards-bring them back to life with our tax money. Should have let the scum-of-the-earth CEOs rot in hell!”
“Bravo, George!” said Madeleine, raising her glass.
Peggy shot him an icy glance. “I’m sure he’s not including your son among the evildoers.”
Madeleine smiled at George. “You were starting to say something about your sons’ careers in biology?”
“Oh, yes. Well, no, actually, I was about to say that the oldest not only has no interest in arachnology, he claims to suffer from arachnophobia.” He said this as though it were the equivalent of apple pie-phobia. “And that’s not all, he even-”
“For Godsake, don’t get George talking about spiders,” said Peggy, interrupting him for the second time. “I realize that they’re the most fascinating creatures on earth, endlessly beneficial, and so forth and so on. But right now I would much rather hear about Dave’s murder case than the Peruvian orb weaver.”
“My lonely little vote would be for the orb weaver. But I guess that can wait,” said Madeleine, taking a long sip of her wine. “Why don’t you folks all sit by the fireplace and exhaust the subject of beheadings while I put a few finishing touches on dinner. It’ll just be a few minutes.”
“Can I help?” Peggy asked. She looked liked she was trying to assess Madeleine’s tone.
“No, everything is just about ready. Thanks, anyway.”
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
After another querying look, she retreated with the two men to three overstuffed chairs at the other end of the room. “Okay,” she said to Gurney as soon as they were settled, “tell us the story.”
By the time Madeleine called them to the table for dinner, it was getting close to six o’clock and Gurney had related a reasonably complete history of the case to date, including its twists and open ends. His narrative had been dramatic without being gory, suggestive of possible sexual entanglements without implying that they were the essence of the case, and as coherent as the facts permitted. The Meekers had been attentive, listening with care and saying nothing.
At the table-halfway into the spinach, walnut, and Stilton salad-the comments and questions started coming, mostly from Peggy.
“So if Flores was gay, the motive for killing the bride would be jealousy. But the method sounds psychotic. Is it believable that one of the top psychiatrists in the world wouldn’t have noticed that the man living on his property was stark raving mad-capable of chopping someone’s head off?”
“And if Flores was straight,” said Gurney, “the jealousy motive would disappear, but we’d still have the ‘stark raving mad’ part and the problem of Ashton’s not noticing it.”
Peggy leaned forward in her chair, gesturing with her fork. “Of course, his being straight works with the scenario that he was having an affair with the Muller woman, and their running off together, but then we’re left with the ‘stark raving mad’ thing as the only explanation for killing the bride.”
“Plus,” said Gurney, “you’d have both Scott Ashton and Kiki Muller both failing to notice that Flores is bonkers. And there’s another problem. What woman would willingly run off with a man who’d just cut off another woman’s head?”
Peggy gave a little shudder. “I can’t imagine that.”
Madeleine spoke with a bored sigh. “Didn’t seem to bother the wives of Henry VIII.”
There was a momentary silence, broken by another of George’s guffaws.
“I guess there might be a difference,” ventured Peggy, “between the king of England and a Mexican gardener.”
Madeleine, studying one of the walnuts in her salad, didn’t reply.
George stepped into the open space in the conversation. “What about the fellow you were telling us about with the toy trains, ‘Adeste Fideles,’ and so on? Suppose he killed them all.”
Peggy screwed up her face. “What are you talking about, George? All who?”
“It’s a possibility, isn’t it? Suppose his wife was a bit of a slut and jumped into bed with the Mexican. And maybe the bride was a bit of a slut, and she’d jumped in bed with the Mexican, too. Maybe Mr. Muller just decided to kill them all-good riddance to bad rubbish, two sluts and their cheap little Romeo.”
“My God, George!” cried Peggy. “You sound pleased with what happened to the victims.”
“All victims are not necessarily innocent.”
“George-”
“Why did he leave the machete in the woods?” Madeleine cut in.
After a pause during which everyone looked at her, Gurney asked, “Is it the trail that bothers you? The scent trail going only so far, then stopping?”
“It bothers me that the machete was left in the woods for no apparent reason. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Actually,” said Gurney, “that’s a hell of a good point. Let’s look closer at that.”
“Actually, let’s not.” Madeleine’s voice was controlled but rising. “I’m sorry I even mentioned it. In fact, this whole discussion is giving me indigestion. Can we please talk about something else?” There was an awkward silence around the table. “George, tell us about your favorite spider. I bet you have a favorite.”
“Oh… I couldn’t say.” He looked a bit disoriented, not quite here or there.
“Come on, George.”
“You heard-I’ve been warned off that subject.”
Peggy glanced around nervously. “Go ahead, George. It’s perfectly all right.”
Now everyone was looking at George. The attention seemed to please him. It was easy to imagine the man at the front of a college lecture hall-Professor Meeker, respected entomologist, font of wisdom and pertinent anecdotes.
Careful, Gurney, any judgment of him may apply to you. What are you doing at that police academy, anyway?
George raised his chin proudly. “Jumpers,” he said.
Madeleine’s eyes widened. “Jumping… spiders?”
“Yes.”
“Do they really jump?”
“Indeed they do. They can jump fifty times their body length. That’s the same as a six-foot man jumping the length of a football field, and the amazing thing is, they have practically no leg muscles. So how, you may ask, do they manage so prodigious a leap? With hydraulic pumps! Valves in their legs release spurts of pressurized blood, causing the legs to extend and propel them into the air. Imagine a deadly predator dropping out of nowhere onto its prey without warning. No hope of escape.” Meeker’s eyes sparkled. Not unlike a proud parent.
The parent thought made Gurney queasy.
“And then, of course,” Meeker went on excitedly, “there’s the black widow-a truly elegant killing machine. A creature lethal to adversaries a thousand times its size.”
“A creature,” said Peggy, coming to life, “that fits Scott Ashton’s definition of perfection.”
Madeleine gave her a quizzical look.
“I’m referring to Scott Ashton’s infamous book that treats empathy-concern for the welfare and feelings of others-as a defect, an imperfection in the human boundary system. The black widow spider, with its nasty habit of killing and eating its mate after intercourse, would probably be his idea of perfection. The perfection of the sociopath.”
“But since he wrote a second book attacking his first book,” said Gurney, “it’s hard to know what he really thinks of sociopaths or black widows-or anything, for that matter.”
Madeleine’s quizzical look at Peggy sharpened. “This is the man you said is a big authority on treating sexual-abuse victims?”
“Yes, but… not exactly. He doesn’t treat the victims. He treats the abusers.”
Madeleine’s expression shifted, as though she considered this bit of information of great significance.
For Gurney all it did was add to the list of questions he wanted to ask Ashton in the morning. And that reminded him of another open question, one he decided to ask his guests: “Does the name Edward Vallory ring a bell with either of you?”
At 10:45 P.M., just as Gurney finally dozed off, his cell phone rang on the night table on Madeleine’s side of the bed. He heard it ring, heard her answering it, heard her say, “I’ll see if he’s awake.” Then she tapped him on the arm and held the phone toward him until he sat up and took it.
It was Ashton’s smooth baritone, tightened slightly by anxiety. “Sorry to bother you, but this may be important. I received a text message a little while ago. The caller ID number indicates it came from Hector’s phone-one of those prepaid things. He got it about a year ago and gave me the number. But this text message-I believe it’s exactly the same as the one Jillian received on our wedding day: ‘For all the reasons I have written. Edward Vallory.’ I called the BCI office and reported it, and I wanted you to know about it as well.” He paused, cleared his throat nervously. “Do you think it means that Hector might be coming back?”
Gurney was not a man who revered the mystique of coincidence. In this case, however, the intrusion of the name Edward Vallory so soon after his bringing it up himself gave him an unpleasant chill.
It took over an hour for him to get back to sleep.
“Just two weeks,” said Gurney as he brought his coffee to the breakfast table.
“Hmm.” Madeleine was very articulate with her little sounds. This one conveyed that she understood what he was saying but had no desire to discuss the subject at the moment. In the early-morning light, she was somehow managing to read Crime and Punishment for an upcoming meeting of her book club.
“Just two weeks. That’s what I’m giving it.”
“That’s what you’ve decided?” she asked, without looking up.
“I don’t see why it should be such a huge problem.”
She partially closed the book, leaving her finger between the pages she was reading, tilted her head a little to the side, and gazed at him. “Exactly how huge a problem do you think it is?”
“Jesus, I’m not a mind reader. Forget it, erase that, that was a stupid comment. What I’m saying is, I’m limiting my involvement in this Perry business to a two-week window. No matter what happens, that’s it.” He put his coffee cup on the table, sat down across from her. “Look, I’m probably not making much sense here. But I really do understand your concern. I know what you went through last year.”
“Do you?”
He closed his eyes. “I think so. I really do. And it won’t happen again.”
The fact was, he’d almost been killed at the end of the last investigation he’d volunteered his way into. A full year into his retirement, he’d come closer to his own death than he ever had in over twenty years as an NYPD homicide detective. He thought it was probably that aspect of it that had hit Madeleine the hardest-not just the danger, but that it had actually increased at the very point in their lives when she’d imagined that it would go away.
A long silence passed between them.
She finally sighed, withdrew the finger she was using as a bookmark, and pushed the book away from her. “You know, Dave, what I want is not all that complicated. Or maybe it is. I’d thought when we left our careers behind we’d discover a different kind of life together.”
He smiled weakly. “All that damn asparagus is pretty different.”
“And your bulldozer is different. And my flower garden is different. But we seem to have trouble with the ‘life together’ part.”
“Don’t you think we’re together more now than when we were in the city?”
“I think we’re in the same house at the same time more often. But it’s obvious now that I was more willing to leave that other life behind us than you were. So that’s my mistake, thinking we were on the same page. My mistake,” she repeated, speaking softly with anger and sadness in her eyes.
He sat back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling. “A therapist once told me that an expectation is nothing but a resentment waiting to be born.” As soon as he said this, he wished he hadn’t. Jesus, he thought, if he’d been as clumsy in his undercover work as he was in speaking to his own wife, he’d have been sliced and diced a decade ago.
“Nothing but a resentment waiting to be born? Cute,” snapped Madeleine. “Very cute. What about hope? Did he have something equally clever and dismissive to say about hope?” The anger was moving from her eyes into her voice. “What about progress? Did he have anything to say about progress? Or closeness? What did he say about that?”
“Sorry,” Gurney said. “Just another stupid comment on my part. I seem to be full of them. Let me start over. All I wanted to say was that-”
She cut in, “That you’ve decided to sign on for a two-week tour of duty, working for a crazy woman, searching for a psychotic murderer?” She stared at him, apparently daring him to try restating the proposition in milder terms. “Okay, David. Fine. Two weeks. What can I say? You’re going to do what you’re going to do. And by the way, I know that what you do takes great strength, great courage, great honesty, and a superb mind. I really do know what a remarkable man you are. You truly are one in a million. I’m in awe of you, David. But you know what? I’d like to be a little less in awe of you and a little more with you. Do you think that would be possible? That’s all I want to know. Do you think we could be a little bit closer?”
His mind went nearly blank.
Then he muttered softly, “God, Maddie, I hope so.”
It started to rain on the way to Tambury. An intermittent-wiper sort of rain, more like a light drizzle. Gurney stopped along the way in Dillweed for a second cup of coffee-not at a gas station but at Abelard’s organic-produce market, where the coffee was freshly ground, freshly made, and very good.
He sat with the coffee in his parked car in front of the market, thumbing through the case notes, finding the page he wanted: a record supplied by the phone company of the dates and times of text-message exchanges between the cell phones of Jillian Perry and Hector Flores during the three weeks leading up to the murder-thirteen from Flores to Perry, twelve from Perry to Flores. On a separate sheet, stapled to the record, was a report from the state police computer lab, indicating that all messages had been deleted from Jillian Perry’s phone, with the exception of the final “Edward Vallory” message, received approximately one hour prior to the fourteen-minute window within which the murder was committed. The report also noted the fact that the phone company retains date, duration, originating and receiving cell numbers, and transmitting-cell-tower data on all calls, but no content data. So once those texts had been erased from Jillian’s phone, there was no method of retrieval, unless Hector had saved the message strings on his phone and its memory could be accessed in the future-not possibilities to be optimistic about.
Gurney put the sheets back into their folder, finished his coffee, and continued on through the gray, wet morning to his eight-thirty appointment with Scott Ashton.
The door swung open before Gurney had a chance to knock. Ashton was dressed as before in expensively casual clothes, the sort he might have ordered from a catalog with a Cotswold stone house on the cover.
“Come in, let’s get to it,” he said with a perfunctory smile. “We don’t have a great deal of time.” He led the way through a large center hall into a sitting room on the right that seemed to have been furnished in an earlier century. The upholstered chairs and settees were mostly Queen Anne. The tables, the mantel above the fireplace, the chair legs, and other wood surfaces had an ancient, softly lustrous patina.
Among the predictable grace notes one might expect to find in an upper-class English-style country home, there was one startling discordance. On the wall above the dark chestnut mantel hung a very large framed photograph in the horizontal orientation and the approximate size of a two-page spread in the magazine section of the Sunday Times.
Then Gurney realized why that particular size comparison came readily to mind: The photograph was one he’d actually seen in that very publication. It fit into that overpriced-fashion-ad genre in which the models gaze at each other or at the world in general with an arrogant, druggy sensuality. Even among its kind, however, this example was striking in its communication of something profoundly unwell. The composition consisted of two very young women, surely not yet out of their teens, sprawled on what appeared to be a bedroom floor, eyeing each other’s body with a combination of exhaustion and insatiable sexual hunger. They were naked except for a couple of adroitly placed silk scarves, presumably the products of the fashion house sponsoring the ad.
When Gurney looked closer, he saw that it was a manipulated photograph-in fact, two differently posed photographs of the same model positioned and retouched in a way that made them appear to be gazing at each other, adding a dimension of narcissism to the already ample pathology of the scene. It was, in a way, an impressive work of art-a depiction of pure decadence worthy of illustrating Dante’s Inferno. Gurney turned toward Ashton, his curiosity evident in his expression.
“Jillian,” said Ashton flatly. “My late wife.”
Gurney was speechless.
The picture raised so many questions that he didn’t know which to ask first.
He had the feeling that Ashton was not only observing but enjoying his confusion. Which raised more questions. Finally he thought of something to say, something he’d completely forgotten about during their first meeting. “I’m terribly sorry for your tragic loss. And I’m sorry for not saying so yesterday.”
A heaviness, a cloud of depression and weariness, seemed to draw all of Ashton’s features downward. “Thank you.”
“I’m surprised you’ve been able to stay in this house-seeing that cottage out in back every day, knowing what happened there.”
“It will be torn down,” said Ashton, almost brutally. “Torn down, crushed, burned. As soon as the police give their permission. They still have some lingering jurisdiction over it as a crime scene. But the day will come. The cottage will cease to exist.”
Ashton took a deep breath, and the display of emotion slowly faded. “So where shall be begin?” He gestured toward a pair of burgundy velvet wing chairs with a small, square table between them. The tabletop consisted of a hand-carved intarsia chessboard, but there were no chess pieces in sight.
Gurney decided to address the elephant in the room, the sensationally tawdry picture of Jillian, head-on. “I’d never have guessed that the girl in that photo on the wall was the bride I saw in the video.”
“The flowing white gown, demure makeup, et cetera?” Ashton looked almost amused.
“None of that seems consistent with this,” said Gurney, staring at the photo.
“Would it make more sense if you knew that her traditional bridal getup was Jillian’s idea of a joke?”
“A joke?”
“This may strike you as crude and unfeeling, Detective, but we haven’t much time, so let me tell you quickly about Jillian. Some of this you might have heard from her mother and some not. Jillian’s personality was irritable, intensely moody, easily bored, self-centered, intolerant, impatient, and volatile.”
“Quite a profile.”
“That was her brighter side-the relatively harmless Jillian, spoiled and bipolar. Her darker side was something else entirely.” Ashton paused, gazed fixedly at the picture on the wall as if to check the accuracy of his words.
Gurney waited, wondered where this extraordinary commentary was going.
“Jillian…” Ashton began, still looking at the picture, speaking softly now and more slowly. “Jillian was in her childhood a sexual predator, an abuser of other children. That was the chief symptom of the central pathology that brought her to Mapleshade at the age of thirteen. Her more obvious affective and behavioral problems were ripples on the surface.”
He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue, then rubbed them with his thumb and forefinger as if to dry them again. His gaze shifted from the picture to Gurney’s face. “Now, do you want to ask your questions, or shall I ask them for you?”
Gurney was happy to let Ashton keep talking. “What do you think my first question would be?”
“If your mind weren’t spinning with a dozen of them? I think your first question, at least to yourself, would be: Is Ashton crazy? Because, if so, that would explain a lot. But if not, then your second question would be: Why on earth would he want to marry a woman with such a disordered background? To the first question, I have no credible answer. No man is a trustworthy guarantor of his own sanity. To the second question, I would say that it’s unfairly slanted, since Jillian had another quality I failed to mention. Brilliance. Brilliance beyond the normal scope of the term. She had the fastest, most facile mind I’ve ever encountered. I am an exceptionally intelligent man, Detective. I am not being immodest, just truthful. You see the chessboard built into this table? There are no chessmen. I play without them. I find it a stimulating mental challenge to play the game in my mind, imagining and remembering the positions of the pieces. Sometimes I play against myself, visualizing the board alternately from the white side and the black side, back and forth. Most people are impressed by that ability. But believe me when I tell you that Jillian’s mind was more formidable than my own. I find intelligence like that in a woman very attractive-attractive in both the companionable and erotic senses.”
The more Gurney heard, the more questions came to mind. “I’ve heard that sexual abusers are often victims of abuse themselves. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“True in the case of Jillian?”
“Yes.”
“Who was the abuser?”
“It wasn’t just one person.”
“Who were they, then?”
“According to an unverified account, they were Val Perry’s crack-addict friends, and the abuse, by numerous perpetrators, occurred repeatedly between the ages of three and seven.”
“Jesus. Are there any legal intervention records, social-service case files?”
“None of it was reported at the time.”
“But when she was finally sent to Mapleshade, it all came out? What about the records of the treatment she was given, statements she made to her therapists?”
“There are none. I should explain something about Mapleshade. First of all, it’s a school, not a medical facility. A private school for young women with special problems. In recent years we have admitted a growing percentage of students whose problems center on sexual issues, especially abuse.”
“I was told that your treatment emphasis is on abusers rather than the abused.”
“Yes-although treatment is not the right word, since we are not, as I said, a medical facility. And the line between abuser and abused is not always as clear as you might think. The point I’m making is that Mapleshade is effective because it is discreet. We accept no court or social-service referrals, no insurance, no state aid, provide no medical or psychiatric diagnoses or treatment, and-this is vitally important-we keep no ‘patient’ records.”
“Yet the school apparently has a reputation for offering state-of-the-art treatment, or whatever you choose to call it, directed by the renowned Dr. Scott Ashton.” Gurney’s voice had taken on a sharper edge, to which Ashton showed no reaction.
“A greater stigma attaches to these disorders than to any other. Knowing that everything here is absolutely confidential, that there are no case files or insurance forms or therapy notes that can be purloined or subpoenaed, is a priceless benefit to our clientele. Legally we’re just a private secondary school with a knowledgeable staff available for informal chats on a variety of sensitive issues.”
Gurney sat back, pondering Mapleshade’s unusual structure and the implications of that structure. Perhaps sensing his uneasiness, Ashton added, “Consider this: The feeling of security that our system offers makes it possible for our students and their families to tell us things that they would never dream of divulging if the information were going into a file. There’s no source of guilt and shame and fear deeper than the disorders we deal with here.”
“Why didn’t you reveal Jillian’s horrendous background to the investigation team?”
“There was no reason to.”
“No reason?”
“My wife was killed by my psychotic gardener, who then escaped. The task of the police is to track him down. What should I have said? Oh, by the way, when my wife was three years old, she was raped by her mother’s crazed crackhead friends? How would that help them apprehend Hector Flores?”
“How old was she when she made the transition from victim to abuser?”
“Five.”
“Five?”
“This area of dysfunction always shocks people outside the field. The behavior is so inconsistent with what we like to think of as the innocence of childhood. Unfortunately, five-year-old abusers of even younger children are not as rare as you might think.”
“Jesus.” Gurney looked with growing concern at the picture on the wall. “Who were her victims?”
“I don’t know.”
“Val Perry is aware of all this?”
“Yes. She’s still not comfortable talking about it in any detail, in case you’re wondering why she didn’t tell you. But it’s why she came to you.”
“I don’t follow you.”
Ashton took a deep breath. “Val is driven by guilt. To make a complicated story simple, in her twenties she was part of a drug scene and not much of a mother. She surrounded herself with addicts even crazier than she was, which led to the abuse situation I described, which led to Jillian’s ensuing sexual aggression and other behavior disorders, which Val was unable to deal with. Her guilt tore her apart-a colorful cliché, but accurate. She felt responsible for every problem in her daughter’s life, and now she feels responsible for her death. She’s frustrated by the official police investigation-no leads, no progress, no closure. I believe she came to you in one final attempt to do something right for Jillian. Certainly too little too late, but it’s the only thing she could think of doing. She heard about you from one of the officers at BCI, about your reputation as a homicide detective in the city, read some article about you in New York magazine, and decided you represented her best and last chance to make up for being a terrible mother. It’s pathetic, but there it is.”
“How do you know all this?”
“After Jillian’s murder, Val was close to a breakdown, and she still is. Talking about these things was one way of holding herself together.”
“And you?”
“Me?”
“How have you held yourself together?”
“Is that curiosity or sarcasm?”
“Your discussion of the most horrible event of your life, and the people involved in it, seems remarkably detached. I don’t know what to make of that.”
“Don’t you? That’s hard to believe.”
“Meaning what?”
“My impression, Detective, is that you would respond the same way to the death of someone close to you.” He regarded Gurney with the neutrality of the classic therapist. “I suggest the parallel as a way of helping you understand my position. You’re asking yourself, ‘Is he concealing his emotion at the death of his wife, or is there no emotion to conceal?’ Before I give you the answer, think about what you saw on the video.”
“You mean your reaction to what you saw in the cottage?”
Ashton’s voice hardened, and he spoke with a rigidity that seemed to vibrate with the power of a barely contained fury. “I believe that part of Hector’s motive was to inflict pain on me. He succeeded. My pain was recorded on that video. It’s a fact I can’t change. However, I did make a resolution never to show that pain again. Not to anyone. Not ever.”
Gurney’s eyes rested on the chessboard’s delicate intarsia inlay. “You have no doubt at all about the murderer’s identity?”
Ashton blinked, looked like he was having trouble understanding the question. “I beg your pardon?”
“You have no doubt that Hector Flores is the person who killed your wife?”
“No doubt at all. I gave some thought to the suggestion you made yesterday that Carl Muller might be involved, but frankly I don’t see it.”
“Is it possible that Hector was gay, that the motive for the killing-”
“That’s absurd.”
“It’s a theory the police were considering.”
“I know something about sexuality. Trust me. Hector was not gay.” He looked deliberately at his watch.
Gurney sat back, waited for Ashton to make eye contact with him. “It must take a special kind of person-the field you’re in.”
“Meaning?”
“It must be depressing. I’ve heard that sex offenders are almost impossible to cure.”
Ashton sat back like Gurney, held his gaze, steepled his fingers under his chin. “That’s a media generalization. Half true, half nonsense.”
“Still, it must be a difficult kind of work.”
“What sort of difficulty are you imagining?”
“All the stress. So much at stake. The consequences of failure.”
“Like police work. Like life in general.” Again Ashton looked at his watch.
“So what’s the glue?” asked Gurney.
“The glue?”
“The thing that attaches you to the sexual-abuse field.”
“This is relevant to finding Flores?”
“It may be.”
Ashton closed his eyes and bowed his head so that his steepled fingers assumed a prayerful attitude. “You’re right about the high stakes. Sexual energy in general has tremendous power, the power to concentrate one’s attention like nothing else, to become the sole reality, to warp judgment, to obliterate pain and the perception of risk. The power to make all other considerations irrelevant. There is no force on earth that comes close to it in its power to blind and drive the individual in its grip. When this energy within a person is focused on an inappropriate object-specifically, another person of less-than-equal strength and understanding-the potential for damage is truly endless. Because in the intensity of its power and primitive excitement, its ability to twist reality, inappropriate sexual behavior can be as contagious as the bite of a vampire. In pursuit of the magic power of the abuser, the abused may become an abuser herself. There are simple evolutionary, neurological, and psychological roots for the overwhelming strength of the sex drive. Its diversions into destructive channels can be analyzed, described, diagrammed. But altering those diversions is another matter entirely. To understand the genesis of a tidal wave is one thing; to change its direction is something else.” He opened his eyes, lowered his steepled hands from his face.
“It’s the challenge in it that attracts you?”
“It’s the leverage in it.”
“You mean the ability to make a difference?”
“Yes!” Some inner rheostat turned up the light in Ashton’s eyes. “The ability to intervene in what otherwise would be an everlasting chain of misery spreading out from the abuser into everyone he or she touched, and from those to others, and down through future generations. This is not like the removal of a tumor, which may save one life. Success rates in the field are debatable, but even one success can prevent the destruction of a hundred lives.”
Gurney smiled, looked impressed. “So that’s the mission of Mapleshade?”
Ashton mirrored the smile. “Exactly.” Another glance at his watch. “And now I really do need to leave. You can stay if you wish, have a look around the grounds, a look at the cottage. The key is under the black rock to the right of the doorstep. If you want to see the spot where the machete was found, go around to the rear of the cottage as far as the middle window, then walk straight out into the woods about a hundred and fifty yards, and you’ll find a tall stake in the ground. There was originally a yellow police ribbon tied around the top, but that may be gone by now. Good luck, Detective.”
He showed Gurney out, left him standing on the brick-paved driveway, and drove off in a vintage Jaguar sedan, as evocatively English as the chamomile scent in the damp air.
Gurney felt an urgent need to sort and review, to take the mass of data and possibilities crowding his mind and arrange them in a manageable order. Although the drizzle had finally stopped, there was no place outside Ashton’s house dry enough to sit, so he retreated to his car. He took out the spiral pad with his notes on Calvin Harlen, turned to a new page, closed his eyes, and began rerunning the mental tapes of his meeting with Ashton.
He soon found this disciplined process hopeless. However hard he tried to go over the details in their actual chronology, weigh them, match them like puzzle pieces with similar pieces, one huge fact kept elbowing its way in front of all the others: Jillian Perry had sexually abused other children. It was not uncommon for a victim of that offense, or a member of a victim’s family, to seek revenge. It was not unheard-of for that revenge to take the form of murder.
The impact of this possibility filled his mind. It fit the contours of his thinking in a way no other aspect of the case had so far. Finally there was a motive that made sense, that didn’t bring with it an immediate surge of doubt, that didn’t create more problems than it solved. And along with it came certain implications. For example: The key questions about Hector Flores might not be where did he disappear to and how, but where did he come from and why? The focus needed to shift from what might have happened in Tambury that drove Flores to commit murder to what might have happened in the past that drove him to Tambury.
Gurney was now too restless to sit still. He got back out of his car, looked around at the house, the slate-roofed garage, the arched trellis entrance to the rear lawn. Was this the first view Hector Flores had had of Ashton’s manorial property three and a half years earlier? Or had he been looking it over for some time, watching Ashton come and go? When he knocked on the door for the first time, how far along were his plans? Was Jillian his target from the beginning? Was Ashton, director of the school she’d attended, a route to her? Or were his plans more general-perhaps a violent assault on one or more of the offenders that Mapleshade harbored? Or for that matter, might the original target have been Ashton himself-the harborer, the doctor who helped abusers? Might Jillian’s murder have offered a double benefit: her death and Ashton’s pain?
Whatever the specifics, the questions were the same: Who was Hector Flores, really? What awful transgression had brought so determined a killer to Ashton’s doorstep? A killer of such deception and foresight that he’d inveigled an invitation to live in a cottage in his eventual victim’s backyard. A web in which he’d waited. Waited for the ideal moment.
Hector Flores. A patient spider.
Gurney went to the cottage, unlocked the door.
Inside, the place had the bare look of an apartment for rent. No furniture, no possessions, nothing but a faint odor of detergent or disinfectant. The simplest of floor plans: a wide all-purpose room in front and two smaller rooms behind it-a bedroom and a kitchen, with a tiny bathroom and closet sandwiched between them. He stood in the middle of the front room and let his gaze travel slowly over the floor, walls, ceiling. His brain was not wired to accommodate the notion of a place having an aura, but every homicide scene he’d visited over the years affected him in a way that was both strange and familiar.
Responding to a call from the uniformed 911 responders, stepping into a violent crime scene with its blood and gristle, splintered bones and splattered brains, never failed to ignite in him a certain set of feelings: revulsion, pity, anger. But visiting the site at a later date-after the inevitable scouring, all tangible evidence of butchery removed-was just as deeply affecting, but in a different way. A blood-soaked room would slam him in the face. Later, stripped and sanitized, the same room would lay a cold hand on his heart, reminding him that at the center of the universe there was a boundless emptiness. A vacuum with a temperature of absolute zero.
He cleared his throat loudly, as if relying on the noise to transport him from these morbid musings to a more practical frame of mind. He went into the little kitchen, examined the empty drawers and cabinets. Then he went into the bedroom, straight to the window through which the killer had exited. He opened it, looked out, then climbed out through it.
The ground outside was only about a foot lower than the floor inside. He stood with his back to the cottage, peering out into the dreary copse. The atmosphere was humid, silent, the herbal redolence of the gardens yielding here to a woodsier scent. He made his way forward with long, deliberate steps, counting his paces. At 140 he caught sight of a yellow ribbon atop a plastic stake driven like a thin broomstick into the ground.
He went to the spot, looking around in all directions. His route was circumscribed on his right by a steep-sided ravine. The cottage behind him was hidden by the intervening foliage, as was the road that he knew from the Google satellite photos to lie fifty yards ahead. He examined the ground, the area of leafy soil where the machete had been partly concealed, wondering what might explain the inability of the K-9 team to follow the trail any farther. The idea that Flores had changed his shoes at this point, or covered them with plastic, and proceeded on through the woods to the road, or through the woods to another house on the lane (Kiki Muller’s?) seemed unlikely. The question that had bothered Gurney before still had no answer: What would the point be of leaving half a trail, a trail to the weapon? And if the goal was for the weapon to be found, why half bury it? And then there was the little mystery of the boots-the one personal item Flores had left behind, the boots that the scent-tracking dog had keyed on. How did they fit into Flores’s escape scenario?
Since the boots were found in the house, did that suggest that the trail to the machete could have been one leg of a round trip? Might Flores have come out here from the cottage, disposed of the machete, and returned the way he came-back through the window? That solved part of the scent-trail conundrum. But it created a new and greater difficulty: It put Flores back in the cottage at the point when the body was discovered, with no way of leaving it again unobserved prior to the arrival of the police. On top of that, the out-and-back hypothesis didn’t answer the other question: Why would Flores leave a trail out to the machete to begin with? Unless the whole idea was to create the impression that he’d left the area, when really he hadn’t… to create the impression that he’d run off through the woods, hurriedly hiding the machete on his way, when he was actually back in the cottage. But back in the cottage where? Where could a man hide in such a tiny building-a building fine-combed for six hours by a team of evidence techs whose whole expertise lay in missing nothing?
Gurney made his way back through the woods, climbed through the cottage window, and reexplored the three rooms, looking for access points to spaces above the ceiling or below the floor. The roof pitch was low, likely a truss structure that would have a limited area toward the middle where a man could sit or crouch. However, as with most such useless spaces, there was no entry point. The floor also appeared seamless, with no way down into whatever space might exist beneath it. He went from room to room, checking the position of each wall from each side of it to make sure there were no unaccounted-for interior spaces.
The notion that Flores had returned from the woods in those boots and secreted himself and remained undetected in this little twenty-four-by-twenty-four building was unraveling as rapidly as it had been conceived. Gurney locked the door, put the key back under the black rock, and returned to his car. He rummaged through his case folder and located Scott Ashton’s cell number.
The soft baritone recording, the essence of tranquillity, invited him to leave a message that would be returned as soon as possible, conveying through its chocolate tone the feeling that all the troubles in a person’s life were ultimately manageable. Gurney identified himself and said he had a few more questions about Flores.
He checked the dashboard clock. It was 10:31. Might be a good time to check in with Val Perry, share his initial thoughts on the case, see if she was still eager for him to pursue it. As he was about to place the call, the phone rang in his hand.
“Gurney.” It was a hard habit to break, having answered his phone that way for so many years at the NYPD.
“This is Scott Ashton. I got your message.”
“I was wondering… did you take Flores in your car with you from time to time?”
“Occasionally. When there was heavy shopping to do. Plant nurseries, lumberyards, that sort of thing. Why?”
“Did you ever notice him trying to avoid being seen by your neighbors? Hiding his face, anything like that?”
“Well… I don’t know. It’s hard to say. He tended to slouch. Wore a hat with a brim that curved down in front. Sunglasses. I suppose that might have been a way of hiding. Or not. How would I know? I mean, I did from time to time employ other day laborers on Hector’s days off, and they may have behaved in a similar way. It’s not something that I keyed in on.”
“Did you ever take Flores to Mapleshade?”
“To Mapleshade? Yes, quite a few times. He had volunteered to install a little flower garden behind my office. As other projects came up, he offered to help with them as well.”
“Did he have any contact with the students?”
“What are you getting at?”
“I have no idea,” said Gurney.
“He may have spoken to a few of the girls, or they may have spoken to him. I didn’t witness it, but it’s possible.”
“When was this?”
“He volunteered to help with the work at Mapleshade shortly after he arrived here. So about three years ago, give or take a month.”
“And that continued how long?”
“His trips to the school? Until… the end. Is there some significance I’m missing?”
Gurney ignored the question, asked another of his own. “Three years ago. At that time Jillian would still have been a student there, is that right?”
“Yes, but… Where are you going with this?”
“I wish I knew, Doctor. Just one more question. Did Jillian ever tell you about people she might have reason to be afraid of?”
After a pause long enough to make Gurney think the connection had been broken, Ashton replied, “Jillian wasn’t afraid of anyone. That may have been what killed her.”
Gurney sat in his car in Ashton’s driveway, gazing out past the ivied trellis at the site of the fatal wedding reception, trying to make sense of the bride and groom as a couple. Fellow geniuses they may have been, if Ashton were to be believed, but matching IQs were hardly a sufficient motive for marriage. Gurney remembered Val claiming that her daughter had an unhealthy interest in unhealthy men. Could that include Ashton, seemingly a paragon of rational stability? Not likely. Could Ashton be so much of a caretaker that he would be attracted to someone as patently troubled as Jillian? He didn’t appear to be. True, his professional specialty lay in that direction, but there was no evidence in the man himself of that nosy, parental protectiveness that characterized caretaker personalities. Or was Jillian just another material girl selling her young body to the highest bidder-in this case Ashton? Nothing about it felt that way.
So what the hell was the mystery factor that made that marriage seem like a good idea? Gurney concluded that he wasn’t going to figure it out sitting in the driveway.
He backed out, stopping just long enough to enter the number for the call he’d intended to make to Val Perry, then headed slowly down the long, shaded lane.
He was surprised and pleased when she answered on the second ring. Her voice had a subtle sexiness, even when all she was saying was, “Hello?”
“It’s Dave Gurney, Mrs. Perry. I’d like to fill you in on where I am and what I’m doing.”
“I told you to call me Val.”
“Val. Sorry. Do you have a couple of minutes?”
“If you’re making progress, you can have as much of my time as you want.”
“I don’t know how much progress I’m making, but I want you to know what’s on my mind. I don’t think the arrival of Hector Flores in Tambury three years ago was an accident, and I don’t think what he did to your daughter was a sudden decision. I’d bet that his name isn’t Flores, and I doubt that he’s Mexican. Whoever he is, I believe he had a purpose and a plan. I believe he came here because of something that happened in the past involving your daughter or Scott Ashton.”
“What sort of thing in the past?” She sounded like she was struggling to remain calm.
“It may have to do with why you sent Jillian to Mapleshade to begin with. Do you know of anything Jillian ever did that might make someone want to kill her?”
“You mean did she fuck up the lives of some little children? Did she give them nightmares and doubts they’ll have the rest of their lives? Did she make them frightened and guilty and crazy? Maybe crazy enough to do to someone else what she did to them? Maybe crazy enough to kill themselves? And might someone want to see her rot in hell for that? Is that what you mean?”
He was silent.
When she spoke again, she sounded weary. “Yes, she did things that might make someone want to kill her. There were times I could have killed her myself. Of course, that’s… that’s exactly what I ended up doing, isn’t it?”
A platitude about self-forgiveness passed through Gurney’s mind. Instead he said, “If you want to whip yourself to death, you’ll have to do it another time. Right now I’m working on an assignment you gave me. I called to let you know what I’m thinking and that it’s the opposite of the official police position. That collision may create problems. I need to know how far you’re willing to take this.”
“Follow the trail wherever it goes, whatever it costs. I want to get to the bottom of this. I want to get to the end of it. Is that clear?”
“One last question. You may find it in bad taste, but I have to ask it. Is it conceivable that Jillian was having an affair with Flores?”
“If he was male, good-looking, and dangerous, I’d say it was a lot more than conceivable.”
Gurney’s mood, along with his concept of the case, shifted more than once on the drive home.
The idea that Jillian’s murder was related to her chaotic past, a past to which Hector Flores might be connected, gave Gurney a sense of solid footing and a promising direction in which to press his inquiries. The ritualistic presentation of the corpse-with the severed head placed in the center of the table facing the body-was making a warped statement that went beyond simple homicide. It even occurred to him that the murder scene created an ironic echo of the photograph over Ashton’s fireplace, the two shots of Jillian manipulated into one scene: Jillian gazing hungrily at Jillian.
Jesus. Was it a joke? Was it possible that the arrangement of the body in the cottage was a subtle parody of Jillian Perry’s pose in a fashion ad? The thought made him nauseous, a rare reaction for a man whose years as a homicide cop had exposed him to just about everything people could do to other people.
He pulled over on the shoulder in front of a farm-equipment dealership, rooted through the papers on the seat next to him, found Jack Hardwick’s cell number. As it rang, his gaze wandered over the hillside behind the dealership offices, dotted with tractors large and small, balers, brush cutters, rotary rakes. Then he noted something moving. A dog? No, a coyote. A coyote loping across the hillside, traveling in a straight line, purposefully-almost, it struck Gurney, thoughtfully.
Hardwick picked up on the fifth ring, just as the call was going into voice mail.
“Davey boy, what’s up?”
Gurney grimaced-his usual reaction to the sardonic rasp of Hardwick’s voice. The tone reminded him of his father. Not the sandpapery sound itself, but the sharp cynicism shaping it.
“I have a question for you, Jack. When you pulled me into this Perry business, what did you think it was all about?”
“I didn’t pull you into it, just offered you an opportunity.”
“Right, fine. So what did you think this ‘opportunity’ was about?”
“Never got far enough into it to form a solid opinion.”
“Bullshit.”
“Anything I’d say would be pure speculation, so I’m not saying.”
“I don’t like games, Jack. Why did you want me involved? While you’re figuring out how not to answer that one, here’s another one: Why is Blatt bent out of shape? I ran into him yesterday, and he was beyond unpleasant.”
“No relevance.”
“What?”
“No relevance. Look, we had a little shake-up here. Like I told you, some static between me and Rodriguez re the direction of the investigation. So I’m off it, and Blatt’s on it. Ambitious little prick, no ability, just like Captain Rod. I call him Junior Shithead. This is his chance, prove himself, show he can handle a big case. But deep down he knows he’s a useless little turd. Now you come along-big star from the big city, genius who solved the Mellery murder case, et cetera. Course he hates you. The fuck you expect? But there’s no relevance. The fuck’s he gonna do? Keep doing what you’re doing, Sherlock, and don’t lose any sleep over Blatt.”
“Is that why you got me involved? To make Junior Shithead look bad?”
“To see that justice is done-by peeling the layers of a very interesting onion.”
“That’s what you think it is?”
“Don’t you?”
“Could be. Would you be surprised if we found out that Flores came to Tambury with a plan to kill someone?”
“I’d be surprised if he didn’t.”
“So tell me again why you got kicked off the case.”
“I told you-” Hardwick began with exaggerated impatience, but Gurney cut him off.
“Yeah, yeah, you were rude to Captain Rod. Why am I thinking it was more than that?”
“Because that’s what you think about everything. You don’t trust anybody. You’re not a trusting person, Davey. Look, I’ve got to take a wicked piss. Talk to you later.”
Nothing the man liked better, thought Gurney, than to make a wiseass exit. He put down the phone and restarted his car. A thin overcast still hung over the valley, but the white sun-disk behind it was brightening and the telephone poles were starting to cast faint shadows across the deserted road. The array of blue tractors for sale, still wet from the morning rain, began to gleam on the green hillside.
During the final half of the trip home, odd bits and pieces of the affair occupied his mind: Madeleine’s comment that the placement of the machete made no sense, the decision by a superrational man to marry a profoundly disturbed woman, Carl’s train going around and around under the tree, the Schindler’s List interpretation of the bullet through the teacup, the morass of sexual disorder in which everything seemed mired.
By the time he’d left the county highway and was following the dirt road that meandered up from the river valley into the hills, his thoughts had exhausted him. There was a CD protruding from the dashboard player. Craving distraction, he pushed it in. The voice that emerged from the speakers, accompanied by some bleak chords on an acoustic guitar, had the whiny singsong rhythm of Leonard Cohen at his bleakest. The performer was a sad-eyed middle-aged folkie by the unlikely name of Leighton Lake whom he and Madeleine had gone to see at a local music venue to which she’d acquired a season subscription. During intermission she’d purchased one of Lake’s CDs. Of all the songs on it, Gurney found the one he was listening to now, “At the End of My Time,” by far the most depressing.
There once was a time
When I had all the time
In the world. What a time
I had then, when I had
All the time in the world.
Lied to my lovers,
Chased all the others,
Left all my lovers behind,
When I had all the time
In the world.
Took what I wanted.
Never thought twice.
Had the time of my life
When I had all the time
In the world.
Lied to my lovers,
Chased all the others,
Left all my lovers behind,
When I had all the time
In the world.
No one’s left to lie to,
No one’s left to leave,
In this time of my life
At the end of my time
In this world.
Lied to my lovers,
Chased all the others,
Left all my lovers behind,
When I had all the time
In the world.
When I had all the time
In the world.
While Lake was crooning the final maudlin refrain, Gurney was passing between his barn and pond, with the old farmhouse just in sight beyond the patch of goldenrod at the top of the pasture. As he hit the player’s “off” button, wishing he’d done so sooner, his cell phone rang.
The caller ID displayed the words REYNOLDS GALLERY.
Jesus. What the hell did she want?
“Gurney here.” His voice was all business with an edge of suspicion.
“Dave! It’s Sonya Reynolds.” Her voice, as usual, radiated a level of animal magnetism that could get her stoned to death in some countries. “I have fabulous news for you,” she purred. “And I don’t mean a little fabulous. I mean change-your-life-forever fabulous! We have to get together ASAP.”
“Hello, Sonya.”
“Hello? I’m calling to give you the biggest gift you’ve ever been given, and that’s all you can say?”
“It’s good to hear from you. What are we talking about?”
Her answer was a rich, musical laugh, a sound as disturbingly sensual as everything else about her. “Oh, that’s my Dave! Detective Dave with the piercing blue eyes. Suspicious of everything. As though I were-What do you call it? A ‘perp’ like on TV? As though I were a perp-that’s what you call the bad guy, right? As though I were a perp giving you a fishy story.” She had a slight accent that reminded him of the alternate universe he’d discovered in the French and Italian movies of his college years.
“Never mind ‘fishy.’ So far you haven’t given me any story.”
Again that laugh, bringing to mind her luminous green eyes. “And I’m not going to, not until I see you. Tomorrow. It must be tomorrow. But you don’t have to come to me in Ithaca. I’ll come to you. Breakfast, lunch, dinner-anytime tomorrow you want. Just tell me what time, and we’ll pick a place. I guarantee you won’t be sorry.”
He still had no final name for the experience. Dream missed all the power of it. It was true that the first time it happened he was in the process of falling asleep, his senses disconnected from all the shabby demands of a disgusting world, his mind’s eye free to see what it would see, but there the superficial resemblance to common dreaming ended.
Vision was a larger, better word for it, but it, too, failed to convey even a fraction of the impact.
Guiding light captured a certain facet of it, an important facet, but the soap-opera association polluted the meaning hopelessly.
A guided meditation, then? No. That sounded trite and unexciting-the opposite of the experience itself.
A living fable?
Ah, yes. That was getting closer. It was, after all, the story of his salvation, the new pattern of his life’s purpose. The master allegory for his crusade.
His inspiration.
All he had to do was turn out the lights, close his eyes, put himself in the infinite potential of the darkness.
And summon the dancer.
In the embrace of the experience, the living fable, he knew who he was-so much more clearly than he did when his eyes and heart were distracted by the glittering trash and slimy cunts of the world, by noise, by seduction and filth.
In the embrace of the experience, in its absolute clarity and purity, he knew exactly who he was. Even if he was now, technically, afugitive, that fact-like his name in the world, the name by which ordinary people knew him-was secondary to his true identity.
His true identity was John the Baptist.
Just thinking of it gave him gooseflesh.
He was John the Baptist.
And the dancer was Salome.
Ever since the first time he’d had the experience, the story had been all his, his to live and his to change. It didn’t have to end the stupid way it ended in the Bible. Far from it. That was the beauty of it. And the thrill of it.