Shut Your Eyes Tight

Chapter 43

No bone shatters as painfully as the illusion of invulnerability. Gurney had no idea how long he’d been sitting in his car, nor how it had gotten to where it was parked, nor what time it was. What he knew was that it was late enough to be dark, that he had a dizzying headache along with feelings of anxiety and nausea, and no memory of anything that had occurred after his second glass of wine at lunch. He checked his watch. It told him it was 8:45 P.M. He’d never had so devastating a reaction to any amount of alcohol, much less two glasses of white wine.

The first explanation that came to mind was that he’d been drugged.

But why?

Staring blankly at that question intensified his anxiety. Staring helplessly into the empty space that should have been filled with recollections of the afternoon made it worse. Then he realized with a slap-in-the-face kind of surprise that he was sitting not behind the steering wheel of his car but in the passenger seat. The fact that it had taken a full minute of consciousness for him to become aware of this ratcheted his anxiety in the direction of panic.

He looked out the windows, front and back, and discovered that he was in the middle of a long block-probably a crosstown block somewhere in Manhattan-too far from either corner for him to read the street signs. The street was busy enough with normal traffic, mostly cabs tailgating other cabs, but no nearby pedestrians. He opened the door and got out cautiously, stiffly, achingly. He felt like he’d been sitting for a long time in an awkward position. He looked up and down both sides of the street for some identifiable structure.

The unlighted building directly across the street from his car was some sort of institutional building, perhaps a school, with broad stone steps and massive doors at least ten feet high. The classical façade was colonnaded.

Then he saw it.

Above the high Greek columns, in the center of a kind of frieze extending the length of the four-story building, just below the heavily shadowed roofline, an engraved motto was barely visible: AD STUDIUM VERITATIS.

Ad Studium Veritatis? Genesius Prep? His own high school? What the hell…?

He stared, blinking, at the dark stone edifice, trying to make sense of the situation. He’d been in the passenger seat of his own car, so someone else must have driven him here. Who? He had no idea, no memory of driving or being driven.

Why here?

Surely it wasn’t a coincidence that he’d been driven to this particular spot on this particular block out of a thousand blocks in Manhattan, directly across the street from the front door of the high school from which he’d graduated thirty years earlier-the academically revered institution to which he’d been awarded a scholarship, commuted to from his parents’ apartment in the Bronx, hated, and hadn’t visited since. A school he never spoke of. A school very few people knew he’d attended.

What in the name of God was going on?

Again he looked up and down the street, as if someone familiar might appear out of the darkness with a simple explanation. No one appeared. He got back into his car, this time into the driver’s seat. Finding his key in the ignition was a momentary relief, certainly better than not finding it, but did little to calm his jumping thoughts.

Sonya. Sonya might know something. She might have been in touch with Jykynstyl. But if Jykynstyl was responsible, if Jykynstyl had drugged him…

Was it possible that Sonya was part of it all? Had she set him up?

Set him up for what? And why? What sense did any of it make? And why bring him here? Why go to the trouble? How would Jykynstyl know what high school he’d gone to? And what would the point be? To prove that the details of his personal life were accessible? To focus him on the past? To remind him of something specific from his teenage years, some person or event from those wretched years at St. Genesius? Give him a panic attack? But why on earth would the world-renowned Jay Jykynstyl want to do any of that?

It was ridiculous.

On the other hand, to pile conundrum on conundrum, was there any proof that the man he’d met in the brownstone was in fact Jay Jykynstyl? But if he wasn’t-if the man was an impostor-what could be the point of so elaborate a deception?

And if in fact he’d been drugged, what was the nature of the drug? Had it knocked him out in the manner of a powerful sedative or anesthetic, or was it something like Rohypnol-a disinhibiting amnesiac-a more problematic possibility?

Or was there something organically wrong with him? Severe dehydration could produce disorientation, even some memory confusion.

But not like this. Not a total eight-hour memory blackout.

A brain tumor? Embolism? Stroke?

Was it conceivable that he had left Jykynstyl’s brownstone, gotten into his car, decided on some nostalgic whim to take a look at his old school, gotten out of his car, maybe even gone inside, and then…?

And then what? Come back out, maybe gotten into the passenger seat to put something into the glove box or take something out of it, and then had some sort of seizure? Passed out? A certain type of seizure could produce retroactive amnesia, blocking recall of the period preceding as well as following it. Was that it-some acute brain pathology?

Questions and more questions. And no answers. There was a tightness in the pit of his stomach like a fistful of gravel.

He looked in the glove box but found nothing unusual. The car manual, a few old service receipts, a small flashlight, the plastic cap from a water bottle.

He patted his jacket pockets and found his cell phone. There were seven voice-mail messages and one text message waiting for him. Apparently he’d been in demand during the missing hours. Maybe among the messages would be the explanation he was looking for.

The first voice mail, received at 3:44 P.M., was from Sonya. “David? You still at lunch? I guess that’s a good sign. I want to know everything. Call me the minute you can. Kiss, kiss.”

Voice mail number two, at 4:01, was from the DA. “David, Sheridan Kline here. Wanted to fill you in as a matter of courtesy. A question you had raised regarding the Karnala Fashion angle-you might want to know that that’s been checked out, and there’s some interesting information on that. You know anything about the Skard family? S-K-A-R-D. Give me a call ASAP.”

Skard? A peculiar name, and there was something familiar about it, a feeling that he had come upon it before, perhaps seen it in print somewhere, not all that long ago.

Number three, at 4:32, was from Kyle. “Hi, Dad. What’s up? So far Columbia’s great, I think. I mean, it’s read, read, read, lecture, lecture, lecture, read, read, read. But it’s going to be worth it. Really worth it. You have any idea what a good class-action trial attorney can make? Monster bucks! Got to run. Late for another class. Keep forgetting what time it is. Call you later.”

Number four, at 5:05, was Sonya again. “David? What’s happening? Is this the world’s longest lunch or what? Call me. Call me!”

Number five, the shortest, at 5:07, was from Hardwick. “Hey, ace, I’m back on the case!” He sounded nasty, triumphant, and drunk.

Number six, at 5:50, was from Kline’s favorite forensic psychologist. “Hi, David, this is Rebecca Holdenfield. Sheridan said you were getting some ideas about the machete murderer that you wanted to discuss. I’m pretty busy, but for this I can find time. Mornings are terrible, later in the day is better. Call me with some days and hours that work for you, and we’ll figure something out. From what little I know so far, I’d say you’re chasing a very sick man.” The animation bubbling beneath her professional tone made it clear that she liked nothing better than chasing a very sick man. She concluded by leaving a number with an Albany area code.

The seventh and final voice mail, received at 8:35, was from Sonya. “Shit, David, are you alive?”

He checked his watch again: 8:58 P.M.

He listened again to the last message, and then again, searching for a serious meaning in Sonya’s question. There didn’t seem to be any, beyond the exasperation of someone whose calls weren’t being returned. He started to call her back, then remembered he also had a text message and decided to check that first.

It was short, anonymous, ambiguous: SUCH PASSIONS! SUCH SECRETS! SUCH WONDERFUL PHOTOGRAPHS!

He sat and stared at it. On second thought, although it left much to the imagination, it wasn’t ambiguous at all. In fact, what it left to the imagination was far too clear.

He could feel the imagined contents of those photos exploding in his life like a roadside bomb.

Chapter 44

Keeping his balance, staying focused, and subjecting the facts to a dispassionate analysis had been the pillars of Gurney’s success as a homicide cop.

At the moment he was having a hell of a time doing any of those things. His mind was churning with unknowns, with terrible possibilities.

Who the hell was this Jykynstyl character? Or was the proper question, who the hell was this character posing as Jykynstyl? What was the nature of the threat, the purpose of the threat? It was fairly certain that the scenario, whatever it was, was criminal. The hope that he’d gotten harmlessly drunk or that the text message had a harmless meaning seemed delusional. He needed to face the fact that he’d been drugged and that the worst-case scenario-involving a massive dose of Rohypnol in that first glass of white wine-was the most likely scenario.

Rohypnol plus alcohol. The disinhibiting amnesiac cocktail. The date-rape cocktail that dissolves clear judgment, fears, and second thoughts. That strips the mind of moral and practical inhibitions, that blocks the intervention of reason and conscience, that has the power to reduce you to the sum of your primal appetites. The drug combo with the potential to convert one’s impulses, however foolish, into actions, however damaging. The nasty elixir that prioritizes the wants of the primitive lizard brain, regardless of the expense to the whole person, then cloaks the experience-which might last anywhere from six to twelve hours-in an impenetrable amnesia. It was as though it had been invented to facilitate disasters. The kinds of disasters Gurney was imagining as he sat in his car, helpless and scattered, trying to get his head around facts that refused to cohere.

Madeleine had made him a believer in small, simple actions, in putting one foot in front of the other, but when nothing made sense and every direction held a shadowy threat, it wasn’t easy to decide where to put that first foot.

However, it did occur to him that remaining parked on that dark block was accomplishing nothing. If he drove away, even if he hadn’t decided where he was going, he might at least be able to tell if he was being watched or followed. Before he could get tangled up in reasons not to, he started the car, waited for the light at the end of the street to turn green, waited for three taxis in a row to race by, switched on his headlights, pulled out quickly, and made it through the Madison Avenue intersection just before the light turned red behind him. He drove on, turning randomly at a series of intersections until he was positive no one was tailing him, working his way down the east side of Manhattan from the Eighties to the Sixties.

Without having made a conscious decision to do so, Gurney arrived at the block where Jykynstyl’s residence was located. He drove through the block once, came around, and entered it again. There were no lights showing in the windows of the big brownstone. He parked in the same illegal space he’d occupied nine hours earlier.

He was jittery and unsure what he was going to do next, but taking even the action he had so far was calming him. He remembered he had a phone number for Jykynstyl in his wallet-a number Sonya had given him in case he got delayed in traffic. He called the number now without bothering to plan what he’d say. Maybe something like, Hell of a party, Jay! Got photos? Or something a little more Hardwick-like: Hey, fuckface, fuck with me, you get a bullet between your fucking eyes. He ended up not saying any of those things, because when he called the number Sonya gave him, a recorded voice announced that it was out of service.

He had an urge to bang on the door until someone answered it. Then he remembered something Jykynstyl had said about always being in motion, never staying anywhere very long, and he was suddenly convinced that the brownstone was empty, the man was gone, and banging on the door would be utterly pointless.

He should call Madeleine, let her know how late he’d be. But how late was that going to be? Should he tell her about the amnesia? Waking up across the street from St. Genesius? The photo threat? Or would all that just worry her sick for no reason?

Maybe he should call Sonya first, see if she could throw any light on what was going on. How much did she really know about Jay Jykynstyl? Was there any reality at all to the hundred-thousand-dollar offer? Was all that just a ruse to get him to come to the city for a private lunch? So he could be drugged and… and what?

Maybe he ought to get to an ER and have them run a tox screen-find out before they were metabolized away exactly what chemicals he’d ingested, replace his suspicions with evidence. On the other hand, the record of a tox screen could create questions and complications. He found himself in the catch-22 of wanting to find out what had happened before taking any official steps to find out what had happened.

As he felt himself slipping into a pit of indecision, a large white van came to a stop less than thirty feet away, directly in front of the brownstone. The wash of headlights from a passing car made the green lettering on the side of the van legible: WHITE STAR COMMERCIAL CLEANING.

Gurney heard a sliding door open on the far side of the van, followed by a few comments in Spanish, then the door sliding shut. The van pulled away, leaving a drably uniformed man and woman in the semidarkness at the door of the brownstone. The man opened it with a key affixed to a ring at his belt. They entered the building, and moments later a light came on in the foyer. Shortly after that a light came on in another ground-floor window. That was followed at approximately two-minute intervals by the appearance of lights in windows on each of the building’s four stories.

Gurney decided to bluff his way in. He looked like a cop, sounded like a cop, and his membership card in an association of retired detectives could be mistaken for active credentials.

When he came to the front door, he found it still open. He walked into the vestibule and listened. There were no footsteps, no voices. He tried the door that led from the vestibule into the rest of the house. It, too, was unlocked. He opened it and listened again. He heard nothing except the muted whine of a vacuum from one of the upper floors. He stepped inside and closed the door gently behind him.

The cleaning people had turned on all the lights, giving the large, foyerlike room a colder, barer look than he remembered. The brightness had diminished the richness of the mahogany staircase that was the room’s main feature. The wood-paneled walls had been cheapened as well, as though the unflattering light had stripped off their antique patina.

In the far wall, there were two doors. One of them, he recalled, was the door to the little elevator into which he’d been escorted by Jykynstyl’s daughter-if in fact that’s who she was, which he now doubted. The door next to it was ajar, and the room beyond it was as brightly illuminated as the large foyer in which he stood.

It appeared to be what real-estate ads refer to as a “media” room. It was visually dominated by a flat-panel video screen with half a dozen armchairs arranged at various angles to it. There was a wet bar in the rear corner, and against an adjoining wall there was a sideboard with an array of wine and cocktail glasses and a stack of glass plates appropriate for elegant desserts or lines of coke. He checked the drawers of the sideboard and found them empty. The wet bar’s cabinets and small refrigerator were locked. He left the room as quietly as he’d entered it and headed for the staircase.

The Persian runner cushioned his rapid steps as he climbed the risers two at a time to the second floor, then to the third. The vacuum sound was louder here, and he imagined that at any moment the cleaning team might descend from the floor above, so reconnaissance time was limited. An archway led into a corridor with five doors. He assumed that the one at the far end would be for the elevator and the other four would open into bedrooms. He went to the nearest door and turned the knob as soundlessly as he could. As he did so, he heard the muffled thump of the elevator stopping farther down the hall, followed by the smooth whoosh of its sliding door.

He stepped quickly into an unlit room he assumed was a bedroom and eased the door shut behind him, hoping that whoever had emerged from the elevator, presumably one of the cleaning people, had been looking in another direction.

It dawned on him that he was in a bit of a situation: unable to conceal himself because the room was too dark for him to locate an appropriate spot and unable to turn on a light for fear it would give him away. And if he were caught hiding pathetically behind a bedroom door, he could hardly bluff his way out at that point by flashing a set of retired-detective credentials. What the hell was he doing there, anyway? What was it he hoped to discover? Jykynstyl’s wallet with a clue to another identity? Conspiratorial e-mail? The photographs referred to in the text message? Something incriminating enough to Jykynstyl to neutralize any threat? Those possibilities were the stuff of implausible caper movies. So why had he put himself in this ridiculous position, lurking in the dark like an idiot burglar?

The vacuum roared to life in the hall outside the door, its shadow passing back and forth across the half inch of light that intruded between the door bottom and the carpet pile. He stepped back gingerly against the wall, feeling his way. He heard a door opening directly across the hall. A few seconds later, the roar of the vacuum diminished, suggesting that it and its operator had entered the opposite room.

Gurney’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness, which the crack of light shining under the door was diluting just enough for him to make out a few large shapes: the footboard of a king-size bed, the curving wings of a Queen Anne chair, a dark armoire against a lighter wall.

He decided to take a chance. He felt along the wall behind him for the light switch and found a dimmer knob. He turned it until it was approximately in the middle of its range, then depressed it to its “on” position and immediately back to its “off” position. He was betting that the cleaners were sufficiently busy that the resulting half-second flash of muted light beneath the door would go unnoticed.

What he saw in the brief moment of illumination was a spacious bedroom with the furnishings whose outlines he’d discerned in the semidarkness, plus two smaller chairs, a low chest of drawers with an elaborate mirror above it, and a pair of nightstands with ornate lamps. There was nothing unexpected or strange-except for his reaction. In the instant it was visible, the scene ignited in him the experience of déjà vu. He was sure he had seen before everything exactly as it appeared in that flash of light.

The visceral sense of familiarity was followed a few seconds later by a chilling question: Had he been in this bedroom earlier that day? The chill grew into a kind of nausea. He must have been here, in this room. Why else would he have such an intense feeling about it, about the bed, the position of the chairs, the scalloped crest of the armoire?

More important, how far might the disinhibiting power of alcohol and Rohypnol take one? How much of what one believed, how much of one’s true value system, how much of what was precious to one-how much of all that could be swept away by that chemical mixture? Never in his whole life had he felt so vulnerable, such a stranger to himself-so unsure of who he was or of what he might be capable of doing-as he did at that moment.

Then, gradually, the vertiginous feeling of helplessness and incomprehension was replaced by alternating currents of fear and rage. Uncharacteristically, he embraced the rage. The steel of the rage. The strength and willfulness of the rage.

He opened the door and stepped out into the light.

The drone of the vacuum was coming from a room farther down the corridor. Gurney walked rapidly the other way, back to the big staircase. His recollection of the brevity of his noontime elevator ride told him that the sitting room and dining room were almost certainly on the second floor. Hoping that something in those rooms might provide a thread of memory he could follow, he descended the stairs.

An archway led from the landing to the rest of the second floor. Passing through it, Gurney found himself in the Victorian parlor where he’d met Jykynstyl. As elsewhere in the house, all the lights had been turned on by the cleaners, with a similarly bleak effect. Even the giant potted plants had lost their luxuriance. He walked through the sitting area into the dining room. Dishes, glasses, silverware had all been removed. So had the Holbein portrait. Or Holbein fake.

Gurney realized he knew nothing for certain about his lunch visit that day. The safest assumption would be that every element of it was phony. Especially the extravagant purchase offer for his mug-shot portraits. The idea that all of that was bogus, that there never was any money on the table, never any admiration for his insights or talents, brought with it a surprising shock to his ego-followed by chagrin at how much the offer and the accompanying flattery had meant to him.

He recalled a therapist once telling him that the only way one can judge the strength of one’s attachment to something is by the level of pain caused by its removal. It seemed clear now that the potential rewards of the Jykynstyl fantasy had been as important to him as… as believing that they weren’t important at all. Which made him feel like an idiot doubled.

He looked around the dining room. His ecstatic vision of a sailboat on Puget Sound returned with the sourness of regurgitated wine. He studied the freshly polished surface of the table. Not a hint of a smudge or fingerprint anywhere. He went back into the sitting room. There was a faint, complex smell in the air of which he’d been dimly aware as he’d passed through the room minutes before. Now he tried to isolate its elements. Alcohol, stale smoke, ashes in the fireplace, leather, moist plant soil, furniture polish, old wood. Nothing surprising. Nothing out of place.

He sighed with a sense of frustration and failure, the pointless risk of having entered the house. The place radiated a hostile emptiness-no feeling that anyone actually lived there. Jykynstyl had admitted as much with his vague description of a traveling lifestyle, and God only knew where the “daughters” spent their time.

The vacuum sound on the floor above grew louder. Gurney took a last look around the room, then headed for the staircase. He was halfway down to the first floor when a vivid recollection brought him to a full stop.

The smell of alcohol.

The little glass.

Christ!

He strode back up the stairs, two at time, back into the sitting room, over to the cavernous leather armchair from which Jykynstyl had greeted him upon his arrival, the chair from which the apparently infirm man had had such difficulty rising that he needed two free hands on the arms to support himself. And having no convenient table on which to lay his little glass of absinthe…

Gurney reached into the base of the thick tropical plant. And there it was-shielded from casual sight by the high rim of the pot and the dark, drooping leaves. He carefully wrapped it in his handkerchief and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

The question facing him, back in his car a minute later, was what to do with it.

Chapter 45

The fact that the Nineteenth Precinct station house was just a few blocks away on East Sixty-seventh Street focused Gurney on a mental list of the contacts he had there. He knew at least half a dozen detectives in the Nineteenth, maybe two of them well enough to approach for an awkward favor. And getting a set of prints lifted from the pilfered cordial glass and run against the FBI database-a process that would demand some wiggling around the need for a case number-was definitely awkward. He wasn’t about to explain his interest in knowing more about his luncheon host, but he wasn’t about to invent a lie that could later blow up in his face.

He decided he’d have to find another way to go about it. He placed the little glass carefully in the console compartment, put his cell phone on the seat beside him, started the car, and headed for the George Washington Bridge.

The first call he made along the way was to Sonya Reynolds.

“Where the hell have you been? What the hell have you been doing all afternoon?” She sounded angry, anxious, and completely ignorant of the day’s events, which he found reassuring.

“Great questions. I don’t know the answer to either one.”

“What happened? What are you talking about?”

“How much do you know about Jay Jykynstyl?”

“What’s this about? What the hell happened?”

“I’m not sure. Nothing good.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How much do you know about Jykynstyl?”

“I know what’s reported in the art media. Big buyer, very selective. Huge financial influence on the market. Likes to be anonymous. Doesn’t allow his photograph to be taken. Likes there to be a lot of confusion about his personal life, even where he lives. Even whether he’s straight or gay. The more confusion, the more he likes it. Kind of obsessed with his privacy.”

“So you’d never met him, never even seen a photo of him, before he dropped into your gallery one day and said he wanted to buy my stuff?”

“What are you getting at?”

“How do you know that the man you spoke to is Jay Jykynstyl? Because he said so?”

“No. Exactly the opposite.”

“He said he wasn’t Jay Jykynstyl?”

“He said his name was Jay. Just Jay.”

“So how…?”

“I kept asking him, told him it would be very difficult to do business with him without knowing his full name, that it was ridiculous for me not to know who I was dealing with when so much money would be involved.”

“And he said… what?”

“He said Javits. His name was Jay Javits.”

“Like Jacob Javits? The guy who used to be a senator?”

“Right, but he said it sort of odd like, like the name just occurred to him and he felt he had to say something because I was making a big issue out of it. Dave, tell me why the fuck we’re talking about this. I want to know right now what happened today.”

“What happened is… it became plain that this whole deal is bullshit. I believe I was drugged and that lunch was some kind of setup that had nothing to do with my artwork.”

“That’s insane.”

“Getting back to the man’s identity-he told you his name was Jay Javits and you concluded from that that his name was Jay Jykynstyl?”

“Not like that, no. Don’t be silly. During the course of our conversation, we were talking about how pretty the lake was, and he mentioned he could see it from his room, so I asked him where he was staying, and he told me at a very beautiful inn, like he didn’t want me to know the name. So later I called the Huntington, the most exclusive inn on the lake, and I asked if they had a Jay Javits registered there. At first the guy sounded confused, and then he asked me if maybe I had the name wrong. And I said sure, I’m getting older and my hearing is bad and sometimes I get names wrong. I tried to sound pathetic.”

“And you think you succeeded?”

“I must have. He said, ‘Could the person you want be named Jykynstyl?’ ”

“I asked him to spell the name, and he did, and I thought to myself, ‘Holy fucking Christ, is it really possible?’ So I asked him to describe this Jykynstyl guest, and he did, and it was obviously the same guy who had come to the gallery. So, you see, he didn’t want me to know who he was, but I found out.”

Gurney was silent. He thought a far more likely possibility was that Sonya had been smoothly manipulated into believing that the man was Jykynstyl-in a way that would leave her with no doubts about her conclusion. The subtlety and expertise of the con job was almost more disturbing than the con itself.

“You still there, David?”

“I need to make some more calls, and then I’ll get back to you.”

“You still haven’t told me what happened.”

“I have no idea what happened-other than the fact that I was lied to, drugged, driven around the city in a blackout, and threatened. Why and by whom I have no idea. I’m doing my best to find out. And I will find out.” The optimism in those last five words bore little relationship to the anger, fear, and confusion he felt. He promised again to get back to her.

His next call was to Madeleine. He made it without thinking about what he was going to say or checking the time. It wasn’t until she picked up with a sleepy sound in her voice that he glanced at the dashboard clock and saw that it was 10:04 P.M.

“I was wondering when you’d finally call,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Pretty much. Sorry I didn’t call sooner. Things were a little nuts this afternoon.”

“What do you mean, ‘pretty much’?”

“Huh? Oh, I mean I’m okay, just in the middle of a little mystery.”

“How little?”

“Hard to say. But it seems that the Jykynstyl thing is some kind of con. I’ve been sort of running around tonight trying to get a handle on it.”

“What happened?” She was totally alert now, speaking in the perfectly calm voice that both masked and exposed her concern.

He was aware that he had a choice. He could relate everything he knew and feared, regardless of the effect on her. Or he could present a less complete, less disturbing version. In what he would later see as a self-deluding bit of fancy dancing, he chose the latter as a first step and told himself he would present the whole story as soon as he understood it better himself.

“I started feeling funny at lunch, and later, in the car, I was having trouble remembering the conversation we’d had.” He told himself that this was true, albeit somewhat minimized.

“Sounds like you were drunk.” Her voice was more questioning than assertive.

“Maybe. But… I’m not sure.”

“You think you were drugged?”

“It’s one of the possibilities I’ve been considering. Even though it doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, I’ve been checking the place out, and all I know for sure is that there’s something wrong about the whole situation-and the hundred-thousand-dollar offer is almost certainly baloney. But what I actually called to say is that I’m just leaving Manhattan and I should be home in about two and a half hours. I’m really sorry I didn’t call earlier.”

“Don’t race.”

“See you soon. Love you.”

He nearly missed the last exit from the Harlem River Drive to the GW Bridge. With a quick glance to his right, he swerved into the exit lane and onto the ramp, triggering the blare of an indignant car horn.

It was too late to call Kline. But if Hardwick was indeed back on the case, he might know something about the Karnala inquiry and Kline’s phone-message reference to the Skard family. With a little luck, Hardwick would be awake, would answer the phone, and be willing to talk.

All three turned out to be true.

“What’s up, Sherlock? You couldn’t wait till morning to congratulate me on my reinstatement?”

“Congratulations.”

“Apparently you got everybody believing that Mapleshade grads are dropping like flies and everybody in the world has to be interviewed-which has created this huge manpower crunch that forced Rodriguez to bring me back into it. Almost made his head explode.”

“I’m glad you’re back. I have a couple of questions.”

“About the pooch?”

“Pooch?”

“The one that dug up Kiki.”

“The hell are you talking about, Jack?”

“Marian Eliot’s curious Airedale. You haven’t heard?”

“Tell me.”

“She was out working in her rose garden with Melpomene tied to a tree.”

“Who?”

“The Airedale’s name is Melpomene. Very sophisticated bitch. Somehow Melpomene manages to untie her rope. She wanders over behind the Muller house, starts rooting around in back of the woodshed. By the time Old Lady Eliot gets over there to retrieve her, Melpomene’s got a pretty good hole going. Something catches Old Lady Eliot’s eye. Guess what?”

“Jack, for Christ’s sake, just tell me.”

“She thought it was one of her gardening gloves.”

“For Christ’s sake, Jack…”

“Think about it. What might look like a glove?”

“Jack…”

“It was a decomposed hand.”

“And this hand was attached to Kiki Muller, the woman who supposedly ran off with Hector Flores?”

“The very same.”

Gurney was silent for a good five seconds.

“You got the wheels turning, Sherlock? Deducing, inducing, whatever the hell you do?”

“How did Kiki’s husband react to this?”

“Crazy Carl? Trainman under the tree? No reaction at all. I think his shrink has him so zapped on Xanax he’s beyond reaction. Fucking zombie. Or he’s putting on a hell of an act.”

“Is there any cause or approximate date of death?”

“She only got dug up this morning. But she’d definitely been in the ground awhile. Maybe a few months, which would put it back to the time of Hector’s disappearance.”

“What about the cause?”

“The ME hasn’t put it in writing yet, but based on my observation of the body I’d be willing to take a guess.”

Hardwick paused. Gurney clenched his teeth. He knew what was coming.

“I’d say her death might be related to the fact that her head was chopped off.”

Chapter 46

Arriving home well after midnight, Gurney got so little sleep that night that it hardly felt like sleep at all.

The next morning over coffee with Madeleine, he attributed his restlessness to his suspicions regarding “Jykynstyl” and to the growing intensity of the Perry case. Without saying so, he also attributed it to the metabolites of whatever chemical he’d been dosed with.

“You should have gone to the hospital.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Maybe you should go back to bed.”

“Too much going on. Besides, I’m too wound up to sleep.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Work.”

“You know it’s Sunday, right?”

“Right.” But he’d forgotten that it was. His confusion was scaring him. He had to do something to focus his mind on something concrete, a path to clarity, one foot after another.

“Maybe you should call Dichter’s office, ask if he can fit you in today.”

He shook his head. Dichter was their family doctor. Dr. Dichter. The silliness of it almost always made him smile, but not today.

“You said you might have been drugged. Are you taking that seriously enough? What kind of drug are you talking about?”

He wasn’t going to raise the specter of Rohypnol. Its sexual associations would trigger an explosion of questions and concerns he didn’t feel capable of discussing. “I’m not sure. I’m guessing it was something with blackout effects similar to alcohol.”

She gave him that assessing look of hers that made him feel naked.

“Whatever it was,” he said, “it’s wearing off.” He knew he was sounding too casual, or at least too eager to move to another subject.

“Maybe there’s something you should be taking to counteract it.”

He shook his head. “I’m sure my body’s natural detoxing process will take care of it. What I need in the meantime is something to focus on.” That thought led him directly back to the Perry case, which led him to the call he’d made to Hardwick the previous evening, which led him to the sudden realization that their discussion of Melpomene and Kiki Muller’s decomposing hand had caused him to forget why he’d called Hardwick in the first place.

A moment later he was back on the phone to him.

“Skard?” rasped Hardwick unhappily. “Yeah, that name came up in connection with Karnala Fashion. By the way, it’s Sunday fucking morning. How urgent is this?”

Nothing with Hardwick was easy. But if you played the game, you could make it less difficult. One way to play was to escalate the vulgarity.

“How about a shotgun-to-your-balls level of urgency?”

For a couple of seconds, Hardwick was quiet, as if considering the number of points to award for artfulness of expression. “Karnala Fashion turns out to be a complicated outfit, hard to pin down. It’s owned by another corporation, which is owned by another corporation, which is owned by another corporation in the Cayman Islands. Very hard to say what business they’re actually in. But there seems to be a Sardinian connection, and the Sardinian connection seems to be connected to the Skard family. The Skards are reputed to be very bad people.”

“Reputed to be?”

“I don’t mean to suggest there’s any doubt about it. There’s just no legal proof of it. According to our friends at Interpol, no member of the Skard family has ever been convicted of anything. Potential witnesses always change their minds. Or they disappear.”

“The Skards own Karnala Fashion?”

“Probably. Everything about them is probably this, probably that. They don’t put much on paper.”

“So what the hell is Karnala Fashion all about?”

“Nobody knows. We can’t find a single fabric supplier or clothing retailer who’s ever done business with them. They run ads for incredibly expensive women’s clothes, but we can’t find evidence that they actually sell them.”

“What do their representatives say about that?”

“We can’t find any representatives.”

“Jesus, Jack, who places the ads? Who pays for them?”

“It’s all done by e-mail.”

“E-mail from where?”

“Sometimes from the Cayman Islands. Sometimes from Sardinia.”

“But…”

“I know. It doesn’t make sense. It’s being pursued. We’re waiting for more stuff from Interpol. Also from the Italian police. Also from the Cayman Islands. It’s tricky, since nobody’s been convicted of anything and the missing girls aren’t officially missing. Even if they were, their connection to Karnala wouldn’t prove anything, and there’s nothing on paper connecting Karnala to the Skards. Reputed is as good as it gets. Legally, we’re in a minefield in a fog. Plus, thanks to the observations you shared with the DA, the whole case is now being run like a cover-your-ass panic attack.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that instead of a couple of guys in that minefield, we’ve got a dozen tripping over one another.”

“Admit it, Jack, you love it.”

“Fuck you.”

“Right. So I guess this wouldn’t be a good time to ask you for a favor.”

“Like what?” He was suddenly placid. Hardwick was strange that way. His reactions were backward, like a hyperactive kid being calmed by an upper. The best time to ask him for a favor was the exact time you’d think would be the worst, and vice versa. The same upside-down principle governed his response to risk. He tended to view it as a positive factor in any equation. Unlike most cops, who tend by nature to be hierarchical and conservative, Hardwick had the true maverick gene. He was lucky to be alive.

“It’s a rule breaker,” said Gurney, feeling for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours that he was on solid ground. Why hadn’t he thought of Hardwick sooner? “It might involve a little deviousness.”

“What is it?” The man sounded like he’d just been offered a surprise dessert.

“I need to get some prints lifted off a small glass and run against the FBI database.”

“Let me guess-you don’t want anyone to know why, you don’t want a case file opened, and you don’t want the inquiry to be traced back to you.”

“Something like that.”

“Where and when do I get this glass?”

“How about at Abelard’s in ten minutes?”

“Gurney, you’re a presumptuous dick.”

Chapter 47

After entrusting the glass to Hardwick in the tiny parking area in front of Abelard’s, Gurney was struck by the idea of continuing on to Tambury. Abelard’s, after all, was nearly halfway there, and the scene of the crime might have more to reveal to him. He also wanted to keep moving, keep the anxiety of the Jykynstyl business from enveloping him.

He thought about those outdoorsy aristocrats Marian Eliot and Melpomene, Melpomene rooting up the dirt behind the Muller shed, Kiki’s hand sticking out of the ground like a grungy garden glove. And Carl. Christmas Carl. Carl who might very well end up in the frame for his wife’s murder. Of course, the fact that her head was cut off would point the finger at Hector. But if Carl were clever…

Had he discovered her affair with Hector? And decided to kill her the way Hector had killed Jillian Perry? Conceivable but unlikely. If Carl were guilty, that would make Kiki’s murder a tangent off the main course of the Mapleshade business. It would also mean that Carl had been furious enough to kill his wife, rational enough to mimic Hector’s MO, and foolish enough to bury her in a shallow grave in his own backyard. Gurney had seen stranger sequences of events, but that didn’t make this scenario feel any more credible.

He suspected there was a better explanation for Kiki Muller’s murder than the rage of a jealous husband, something that would attach it more directly to the larger mystery at Mapleshade. As he turned into Badger Lane from Higgles Road, he was starting to feel like himself again. He was far from whistling a happy tune, but at least he felt like a detective. And he didn’t feel like throwing up.

Two tattooed clones of Calvin Harlen were standing with the man himself next to the manure pile that separated the wreck of a house from the wreck of a barn. Their dull eyes followed Gurney’s car into the lane with a lazy malevolence.

Driving up toward Ashton’s house, he half expected to see Marian Eliot and Melpomene, exposer of buried sins, striking a dour pose on their front porch, but there was no sign of either. Nor was there any sign of life at the Muller house.

When he got out of his car in Ashton’s brick-paved driveway, he was struck again by the English ambience of the place-its subtle communication of wealth and quiet exclusivity. Rather than proceeding straight to the front door, he walked over to the arched trellis that served as an entryway to the broad lawn extending far behind the house. Although the surrounding shrubs were still primarily green, scattered tinges of yellow and red were beginning to appear in the trees.

“Detective Gurney?”

He turned toward the house. Scott Ashton was standing at the open side door.

Gurney smiled. “Sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning.”

Ashton mirrored his smile. “I wouldn’t expect any distinction between weekday and weekend in a murder investigation. Is there anything specific…?”

“Actually, I was wondering if I could take a closer look at the area around the cottage.”

“A closer look?”

“That’s right. If you don’t mind?”

“Anything in particular you’re interested in?”

“I’m hoping I’ll know it when I see it.”

Ashton’s even smile was as measured as his voice. “Let me know if you need any help. I’ll be with my father in the library.”

Some people have “dens,” thought Gurney, and some people have “libraries.” Who said America was a classless society? Certainly no one whose home was built of Cotswold stone and whose father was named Hobart Ashton.

He walked from the driveway across the side lawn through the trellis to the main area of the rear lawn. He’d been so preoccupied that he hadn’t noticed until that very moment what a strangely perfect day it was, one of those autumn days when the altered angle of the sun, the altered color of the leaves, and an absolute stillness in the air conspired to create a world of timeless peace, a world that required nothing of him, a world whose peace took his breath away.

Like all the moments of serenity in Gurney’s life, this one was short-lived. He had come here to focus on a murder, to absorb more fully the nitty-gritty reality of the place in which it happened, the locale in which the murderer went about his business.

He continued around the back of the house to the broad stone patio, to the small round table-the table where four months earlier a bullet from a.257 Weatherby rifle had shattered Ashton’s teacup. He wondered where Hector Flores was at that very moment. He might be anywhere. He might be in the woods watching the house, keeping an eye on Ashton and his father, keeping an eye on Gurney.

Gurney’s attention moved to the cottage, to what had happened the day of the murder, the day of the wedding. From where he was standing, he could see the front and one side, as well as the part of the woods that Flores would have had to pass through in order to deposit the machete where it was found. In May the leaves would have been coming out, as now they were thinning, making the visibility conditions in the thicket roughly the same.

As he’d done many times during the past week, Gurney envisioned an athletic Latino male climbing out the back window of the cottage, running with the evasive steps of a soccer player through the trees and thornbushes to a point approximately 150 yards away, and half concealing the bloodied machete under some leaves. And then… then what? Slipping some sort of plastic bags over his feet? Or spraying them with some chemical to destroy the continuity of the scent trail? So he could proceed tracelessly to some other destination in the copse or on the road beyond it? So he could meet up with Kiki Muller, waiting in her car to drive him safely out of the area before the police arrived? Or take him to her own house? To her own house where he then killed and buried her? But why? What sense did any of that make? Or was that the wrong question, assuming as it did that the scenario had to make practical sense? Suppose a large part of it had been driven by pure pathology, by some warped fantasy? But that was not a useful avenue to explore. Because if nothing made sense, there was no way to make sense of it. And he had the feeling that, under the cloak of fury and lunacy, it all somehow did make sense.

So why was the machete only partially concealed? It seemed senseless to go to the trouble of covering the blade while leaving the handle in plain sight. For some reason that small discrepancy was the one that bothered him the most. Perhaps bothered was the wrong word. He was actually quite fond of discrepancies, because his experience told him that they eventually provided a window into the truth.

He sat down at the table and gazed into the woods, imagining as best he could the path of the running man. The view of those 150 yards from cottage to machete site was almost entirely obscured, not only by the foliage of the copse itself but by the rhododendron border that separated the wild area from the lawn and the flower beds. Gurney tried to estimate how deeply into the woods someone could see, and he concluded that it was not very deeply at all-making it easy for a man to pass where Flores had evidently passed without anyone on the lawn noticing him. In fact, by far the most distant object in the woods Gurney could see through the foliage from where he was sitting was the black trunk of a cherry tree. And he could see only a narrow slice of it through a gap in the bushes no more than a few inches wide.

True, that visible bit of tree trunk was on the far side of the route Flores would have to have taken, and theoretically, if someone had been staring into the woods, focused on that spot at the right moment, he or she might have caught a split-second glimpse of a person passing it. But it would have meant nothing at the time. And the chance of someone’s attention being focused on that precise spot at that time was about as likely as…

Jesus Christ!

Gurney’s eyes widened at the obvious thing he’d almost missed.

He stared through the foliage at the black, scaly bark of the cherry tree. Then, keeping it in sight, he walked toward it-straight across the patio, through the flower bed where Ashton had collapsed, through the rhododendron border of the lawn, and into the copse. His direction was approximately perpendicular to the route he assumed Flores would have traveled from the cottage to the machete site. He wanted to be sure there was no way the man could have avoided passing in front of the cherry tree.

When Gurney reached the edge of the ravine that he remembered from his first examination of the copse a couple of days earlier, his assumption was confirmed. The tree was on the far side of the ravine, which was long and deep with precipitous sides. Any route from the cottage that would pass behind the tree would involve crossing that ravine at least twice-a time-consuming task that would have been impossible to accomplish before the area was swarming with people after the discovery of the body-not to mention the fact that the scent trail ran along the near side of the ravine, not the far side. Which meant that anyone going from the cottage to the machete site had to pass in front of the tree. There was simply no way not to.

Gurney made the trip home from Tambury to Walnut Crossing in fifty-five minutes instead of the normal hour and a quarter. He was in a hurry to take a closer look at the video material from the wedding reception. He also realized that his rush might be arising from a need to stay as involved as possible in the Perry murder-a murder that, however horrendous, caused him far less anxiety than did the Jykynstyl situation.

Madeleine’s car was parked next to the house, and her bicycle was leaning against the garden shed. He guessed she’d be in the kitchen, but when he went in through the side door and called out, “I’m home,” there was no answer.

He went straight to the long table that separated the big kitchen from the sitting area-the table where his copies of the case materials were laid out, much to Madeleine’s annoyance. Amid the folders was a set of DVDs.

The one on top, the one he sat through with Hardwick, bore a label that said “Perry-Ashton Reception, Comprehensive BCI Edit.” But it was another DVD, one of the unedited originals, that Gurney was looking for. There were five to choose from. The first was labeled “Helicopter, General Aerial Views and Descent.” The other four, each containing the video captured by one of the stationary ground cameras at the reception, were labeled according to the compass orientation of each camera’s field of view.

He took the four DVDs into the den, opened his laptop, went to Google Earth, and typed in, “Badger Lane, Tambury, NY.” Thirty seconds later he was looking at a satellite photo of Ashton’s property, complete with altitude and compass points. Even the tea table on the patio was identifiable.

He chose the approximate point in the woods where he figured the visible tree trunk would be. Using the Google compass points, he calculated the heading from the table to the tree. The heading was eighty-five degrees-close to due east.

He shuffled through the DVDs. The last one was labeled “East by Northeast.” He popped it into the player across from the couch, located the point at which Jillian Perry had entered the cottage, and settled down to give the next fourteen minutes of the video his total attention.

He watched it once, twice, with increasing bafflement. Then he watched it again, this third time letting it run to the point when Luntz, the local police chief, had secured the scene and the state cops were arriving.

Something was wrong. More than wrong. Impossible.

He called Hardwick, who, in no hurry, answered on the seventh ring.

“What can I do for you, ace?”

“How sure are you that the input tapes of the wedding reception are complete?”

“What do you mean, ‘complete’?”

“One of the four fixed cameras was set up so that its field of view covered the cottage and a broad stretch of woods to the left of the cottage. That stretch of woods includes all the space that Flores had to pass through in order to ditch the murder weapon where he did.”

“So?”

“So there’s a tree trunk in back of that area that’s visible through gaps in the foliage from the angle of the patio, which was also the angle of one of the cameras.”

“And?”

“That tree trunk, I repeat, is in back of the route Flores would have to have taken to place the machete where it was found. That tree trunk is clearly and continually visible on the high-def video recorded by that camera.”

“Your point being what?”

“I watched the video three times to be absolutely sure. Jack, no one passed in front of that tree.”

Hardwick sounded subdued. “I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I. Is there any possibility that the machete in the woods wasn’t the murder weapon?”

“We have a perfect DNA match. The fresh blood on the machete was Jillian Perry’s. Potential error factor is less than one in a million. Not to mention the fact that the ME report refers to a powerful blow from a heavy, sharp blade. And what’s the alternative, anyway? That Flores secretly disposed of a second bloody machete, the real murder weapon, after wiping some of the blood from it onto the first one? But he’d still have to get it to where we found it. I mean, what the hell are we talking about? How could it not be the murder weapon?”

Gurney sighed. “So what we have, basically, is an impossible situation.”

Chapter 48

If the facts contradict each other, it means that some of them aren’t facts.

One of his instructors at the NYPD academy had made that observation in class one day. Gurney never forgot it.

If he was going to base any conclusions on the content of the video, he needed to test its factualness a little further. On the DVD case, there was a phone number for the company, Perfect Memories, that had handled the videography.

He called the number, left a message mentioning the names Ashton and Perry, and had barely concluded when his phone rang and Perfect Memories appeared as the caller ID.

A professionally pleasant and alert female voice asked, “How can I help you?”

Gurney explained who he was and how he was trying to assist Val Perry, mother of the late bride, and how important he believed the video material produced by Perfect Memories would be in capturing the madman who’d killed Jillian and providing closure for her family. All he needed was an absolutely certain answer to one question, but he needed to hear it from the person who’d supervised the project.

“That would be me.”

“And you are…?”

“Jennifer Stillman. I’m the managing director here.”

Managing director. British-sounding title. Nice touch for the upscale market. “What I need to know, Jennifer, is whether there were any time breaks in any of the original recordings.”

“Absolutely not.” Her response was crisp and immediate.

“Not even for a fraction of a second?”

“Absolutely not.”

“You seem remarkably sure. Has the question come up before?”

“Not the question, but that specific requirement.”

“Requirement?”

“It was actually written into the production contract that the video had to cover the entire venue during the entire reception, start to finish, with absolutely nothing left out. Apparently the bride wanted literally all of it recorded-every inch of that reception, for every second it lasted.”

Jennifer Stillman’s tone told Gurney this was not exactly a standard request, or at least the client’s emphasis on it was not standard. He asked about it, just to be sure.

“Well…” She hesitated. “I’d say that it was unusually important to them. Or at least to her. When Dr. Ashton passed along the request to us, he seemed a little…” Again she hesitated. “I shouldn’t be saying any of this. I’m not a mind reader.”

“Jennifer, this is important. As you know, it’s a murder case. My main concern is that I can be confident that the DVDs contain an uninterrupted video record-nothing missing, no dropped frames.”

“There were certainly no dropped frames. Holes would create glitches in the time code, and the computer would flag that.”

“Okay. Good to know. Thank you. Just one more thing-you were starting to say something about Dr. Ashton?”

“Not really. Just… it was just that he seemed a little embarrassed talking about his fiancée’s obsession with every instant of the reception being recorded. Like maybe he was embarrassed by the romantic sentimentality of it, or maybe he thought it sounded childish, I really don’t know. It’s not my place to judge why people want what they want. The customer is always right, right?”

“Thank you, Jennifer. You’ve been extremely helpful.”

It might not be Jennifer Stillman’s job to judge why people wanted what they wanted, but it was a big part of Gurney’s job. Understanding motivations could make all the difference, and in this instance a weird one came to mind: One reason a person might want total video coverage of an event was security. Either because they believed that the deterrent effect of multiple cameras in continuous recording mode would keep some feared event from occurring or because they wanted to have an indisputable record of anything that did occur.

And then there was the question of who it was that wanted all those cameras running. It hadn’t escaped Gurney’s notice that the request had been positioned to Ms. Stillman as coming from Jillian, but that Jillian herself hadn’t been present, and the request had been “passed along” by Ashton. So it might have been his idea and he had chosen to present it as hers. But why would he do that? What difference did it make whose idea it was?

The possibility that he or she had been motivated by the security aspect of the cameras-the possibility that at least one of them, maybe both, had reason to be apprehensive about what might happen that day-was intriguing.

Their most likely focus of concern would have been Flores, who reportedly had been acting strangely. Maybe the camera emphasis had come from Jillian, just as Ashton had said. Maybe she had reasons to fear Flores. After all, her cell records for the weeks preceding the murder indicated numerous text messages from Flores’s phone-including the final one, the only one that hadn’t been deleted: FOR ALL THE REASONS I HAVE WRITTEN. EDWARD VALLORY. In light of the prologue to Vallory’s play, that message could certainly be interpreted as a threat. So maybe she went to see him in the cottage to discuss something a lot less pleasant than a wedding toast.

When Gurney was engaged in stitching together the pieces of evidence, interpretation, hearsay, and logical leaps that constituted his understanding of a crime, the process filled his mind completely, obliterating his sense of time and place. Thus, when he looked at the clock on the den bookcase and saw that it was 5:05 P.M., it both surprised him and didn’t surprise him-like the stiffness in his legs when he stood up.

Madeleine was still out. Perhaps he should get something started for dinner, or at least check to see if she’d left anything on the countertop that needed to go into the oven. He was heading in that direction when the phone on his desk rang and brought him back. The caller ID said Jack Hardwick.

“Golly, Supercop, you’ve got one hell of a creepy friend!”

“Meaning?”

“Hope you weren’t near a school yard with this guy.”

Gurney had a sinking feeling about where this was heading. “The hell are you talking about, Jack?”

“Touchy, touchy. This sweetheart a close buddy of yours?”

“Enough bullshit. What’s this about?”

“The gentleman you were drinking with? Whose glass you walked off with? Whose prints you asked me to run? Sound familiar, Sherlock?”

“What did you find out?”

“Quite a bit.”

“Jack…”

“I found out that his name is Saul Steck. Professional name Paul Starbuck.”

“His profession being…?”

“Nothing currently. At least nothing on record. Until fifteen years ago he was a Hollywood actor on the come. TV commercials, couple of movies.” Hardwick was in arch storyteller mode, with a dramatic pause after each sentence. “Then he had a little problem.”

“Jack, can we move this along? What little problem?”

“Accused of raping an underage girl. Once that hit the media, other victims started coming out of the woodwork. Saul-Paul was indicted on a bunch of rape and molestation charges. Fond of drugging fourteen-year-old girls. Took a lot of very explicit pictures. Ended his acting career. Could have gone to prison for the rest of his life. Too bad he didn’t. Best place for the little scumbag. However, family money bought enough expert medical testimony to get him committed to a psych hospital, from which he was quietly released five years ago. Dropped off the radar screen. Current address unknown. Except maybe by you? I mean, you got that cute little glass somewhere, right?”

Chapter 49

Gurney stood at the French doors facing the lavender remnants of a spectacular sunset that he hadn’t really noticed, trying to assimilate the latest aftershock of the Jykynstyl earthquake.

Information. He needed information. What did he need to find out first? He should grab a pad and start listing the questions, prioritizing. An obvious one came immediately to mind: Who owned the brownstone?

How to pursue the question was not so obvious.

The old catch-22 again. To disentangle himself from the snare, he needed to know whose snare it was. But pursuing that question naïvely, without any idea what the answer might be, could get him more deeply entangled. Unanswered questions were threatening to make other questions unanswerable.

“Hello!”

It was Madeleine’s voice. Like a voice that awakens you in the morning, jarring you into the room, into the specific day of the week.

He turned toward the little hall that led from the kitchen to the mudroom. “Is that you?” he asked. Of course it was. An inane question. When she didn’t answer, he asked it again, louder.

She responded by appearing in the kitchen doorway, frowning at him.

“Did you just come in?” he asked.

“No, I’ve been standing in the mudroom all afternoon. What kind of question is that?”

“I didn’t hear you come in.”

“And yet,” she said cheerily, “here I am.”

“Yes,” he said. “Here you are.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I’m fine. Maybe a little hungry.”

She glanced at a bowl on the sideboard. “The scallops should be defrosted by now. Do you want to sauté them while I get the water on for the rice?”

“Sure.” He was hoping that the simple task might provide at least a partial escape from the Saul-Paul whirlpool that was engulfing his mind.

He sautéed the scallops in olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, and capers. Madeleine boiled some basmati rice and made a salad of oranges, avocados, and diced red onions. He was having a hell of a time staying focused, staying in the room, staying in the present. Fond of drugging fourteen-year-old girls. Took a lot of very explicit pictures.

Halfway through dinner he realized that Madeleine had been describing a hike she’d taken that afternoon through the meandering trails that linked their 50 acres with their neighbor’s 350. Hardly a word had registered with him. He smiled gamely and made a belated effort to listen.

“… amazingly intense green, even in the shade. And underneath the blanket of ferns there were the smallest purple flowers you can imagine.” As she spoke, there was a light in her eyes brighter than any light in the room. “Almost microscopic. Like the teeniest blue-and-purple snowflakes.”

Blue-and-purple snowflakes? Mother of God! The tension, the incongruity, the gap he felt between her elation and his anxiety brought him close to groaning aloud. Her field of perfect emerald ferns and his own nightmare of poisonous thorns. Her lively honesty and his… his what?

His encounter with the devil?

Get a grip, Gurney. Get a grip. What the hell are you so afraid of?

The answer only darkened the pit and greased the walls.

You’re afraid of yourself. Afraid of what you might have done.

He sat in a kind of emotional paralysis through the rest of dinner, trying to eat enough to conceal the fact that he wasn’t really eating, pretending to appreciate Madeleine’s descriptions of her outing. But the more she enthused over the beauty of the black-eyed Susans, the perfume in the air, the azure of the wild asters, the more isolated, dislocated, and crazy he felt. He became aware that Madeleine had stopped talking. She was watching him with concern. He wondered if she’d asked him something and was waiting for an answer. He didn’t want to admit how distracted he was, or why.

“Have you spoken to Kyle?” Her question seemed to arise out of nothing. Or had she already asked it? Or segued to it while he was immersed in himself?

“Kyle?”

“Your son.”

He hadn’t actually been asking a question, just repeating the word, the name, as a way of stepping ashore, of being present. Too tangled a thing to explain. “I’ve tried. We’ve traded calls, left messages. A few times.”

“You should try harder. Keep at it until you get him.”

He nodded, didn’t want to argue, didn’t know what to say.

She smiled. “It would be good for him. Good for both of you.”

He nodded again.

“You’re his father.”

“I know.”

“Well, then.” It was a conclusive statement. She began to clear the dishes.

He watched her make two trips to the sink. When she came back with a damp sponge and paper towel to wipe the table, he said, “He’s very focused on money.”

She lifted the tray that held the napkins so she could wipe under it. “So what?”

“He wants to be a trial lawyer.”

“Not necessarily a bad thing.”

“It seems to be all about the big money, big house, big car.”

“Maybe he wants to be noticed.”

“Noticed?”

“Little boys like to be noticed by their fathers,” she said.

“Kyle is hardly a little boy.”

“But that’s exactly what he is,” she insisted. “And if you refuse to notice him, then he’ll have to settle for impressing the rest of the world.”

“I’m not refusing to do anything. That’s psychobabble bullshit.”

“Maybe you’re right. Who knows?” Madeleine had perfected the art of sidestepping an attack, of remaining untouched. It left him lurching into empty space.

He continued to sit at the table as she washed the dishes. His eyes began to close. As he’d discovered many times before, the by-product of intense anxiety is exhaustion. He drifted into a kind of half sleep.

Chapter 50

“You should come to bed.” It was Madeleine’s voice.

He opened his eyes. She’d turned off all but one light and was on her way out of the kitchen with a book under her arm. The drooping position of his head on his chest had produced a sharp pain in his collarbone. As he straightened himself, he discovered a matching pain in the back of his neck. Instead of refreshing him, his doze at the table had reconstituted his worries.

His level of agitation would make real sleep impossible. But he had to do something to avoid bouncing from one Saul Steck horror scenario to another.

He could return Sheridan Kline’s phone call. The man had left that vague message for him about the Skard family. He’d already followed up on it with Hardwick, but maybe the DA knew more than Hardwick. Of course, the DA’s office would be closed. It was Sunday night.

He did have Kline’s personal cell number. Because he had it from the days of the Mellery case, it hadn’t seemed appropriate to use it, uninvited, in connection with the current matter. But right now protocol seemed less important than maintaining his sanity.

He went into the den, got the number, and made the call. He was prepared to leave a message and get a return call later, figuring that the odds were in favor of a control freak like Kline wanting phone conversations to occur on his own schedule. So he was surprised when the man answered.

“Gurney?”

“I apologize for calling so late.”

“I thought you’d call me back this afternoon at the office. Chasing down that Karnala thing was your idea.”

“Sorry, I got a little tangled up. In your phone message, you asked if I’d heard of the Skard family.”

“That’s where the Karnala thread led us. Familiar name to you?”

“Yes and no.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“What I meant, Sheridan, is that it struck me as familiar, but I don’t know why. Jack Hardwick filled me in on the fact that the Skards are bad guys with Sardinian roots. But I still can’t place where I know the name from. I do know that I came upon it very recently.”

“That’s all Hardwick told you?”

“He told me that no Skard has ever been convicted of anything. And that whatever business Karnala Fashion may be in, it’s not the fashion business.”

“So you know as much I know. What else did you call me for?”

“I’d like to be involved on a more official basis.”

“Meaning what?”

“Updates, invitations to meetings.”

“Why?”

“I’ve gotten kind of attached to the case. And so far my instincts about it have been pretty good.”

“That’s an open question.”

“Look, Sheridan, all I’m saying is, we can help each other. The more I know and the quicker I know it, the more help I can be.”

There was a long silence. Gurney’s intuition told him it was more technique than indecision on Kline’s part. He waited.

Kline emitted a humorless laugh. Gurney kept waiting.

“You know Rodriguez can’t stand you, right?”

“Sure.”

“And you know Blatt can’t stand you, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“And that even Bill Anderson isn’t very fond of you?”

“Right.”

“So you’ll be about as welcome at BCI as a fart in an elevator. You realize that?”

“I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute.”

There was another silence, followed by another chilly Kline chuckle.

“Here’s what I’ll do: I’m going to tell everyone we have a Gurney problem. Gurney is a loose cannon. And the best way to control a loose cannon is to keep an eye on it, keep it on a short leash, keep it in the corral. And the way I plan to keep an eye on you is to have you over here a lot, sharing your loose-cannon thoughts with us. How does that sound to you?”

Keeping a loose cannon on a short leash in a corral sounded to Gurney like a symptom of mental disintegration. “Sounds workable, sir.”

“Good. There’s a meeting at BCI tomorrow morning at ten. Be there.” Kline hung up without saying good-bye.

Chapter 51

For the rest of the evening, Gurney felt both energized and calmed by the conversation and its promise of ongoing involvement.

He was pleased and rather surprised to still feel the same way when he awoke at sunrise the following day. In an effort to feed that feeling, to stay within the comparatively safe and solid confines of a world in which he was the hunter and not the quarry, he reviewed the Perry file for the tenth time while he had his morning coffee. Then he called Rebecca Holdenfield’s number and left a message asking if he could drop by her Albany office that afternoon following his meeting at BCI.

Making calls, returning calls, making appointments-the activity created a sense of momentum. He called Val Perry’s number and was shunted into her voice mail. He’d barely said, “This is Dave Gurney,” when she picked up, surprising him. He hadn’t figured her for an early riser.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

Unprepared for an actual conversation, he replied, “Just wanted to touch base.”

“Oh? And…?” She sounded edgy, but maybe no edgier than usual.

“Does the name Skard mean anything to you?”

“No. Should it?”

“I was just wondering if Jillian had ever mentioned it.”

“Jillian never mentioned anything. It wasn’t like she shared things with me. I thought I’d made that clear.”

“Perfectly clear, several times. But some questions have to be asked, even if I’m ninety-nine percent sure what the answer’s going to be.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Did Jillian ever ask you or your husband to buy her an expensive car?”

“There was hardly anything Jillian didn’t demand at some point, so I suppose she must have. On the other hand, she made it clear from the time she was twelve that Withrow and I were irrelevant to her happiness, that she could always find a rich man to give her whatever she wanted, so as far as she was concerned, we could go fuck ourselves.” She paused, perhaps savoring the shock value of her observations. “I’m on my way out. Any more questions?”

“That’s it for now, Mrs. Perry. Thank you for your time.”

Like Sheridan Kline the night before, Val Perry hung up without bothering to say good-bye. Whatever it was that Gurney was contributing to the investigation of her daughter’s murder, it clearly wasn’t what she’d been hoping for.

At 9:50 A.M. he pulled in to the parking lot of the fortresslike state police facility where his 10:00 A.M. meeting was to take place. During the minute or so that he was searching for a space, his phone rang twice. The first was a voice call, the second a text message. He was looking forward to at least one of them being from Rebecca Holdenfield.

As soon as he’d parked, he took out his phone and checked the text message first. The source was a cell number with a Manhattan area code.

As he read the message, a flood of fear rose from his gut into his chest.

ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT MY GIRLS? THEY’RE THINKING ABOUT YOU.

He reread it, then reread it again. He looked at the originating number. The fact that the sender hadn’t bothered to block it surely meant it was assigned to an untraceable prepaid phone. But it also meant he could send a reply message.

After dismissing the expressions of fury and bravado that came to mind, he decided on three unemotional little words: TELL ME MORE.

As he pressed “send,” he noted that the time was 9:59. He hurried into the building.

When he arrived in the bleak institutional conference room, the six chairs at the oblong table were already taken. The closest thing to a greeting he received was Hardwick pointing at a handful of folding chairs leaning against the wall by the coffee urn. Rodriguez, Anderson, and Blatt ignored him. Gurney could imagine their unenthusiastic reactions to the DA’s artful nonsense about controlling the loose cannon by inviting him to their meetings.

Sergeant Wigg, a wiry redhead familiar to Gurney as the efficient evidence-team coordinator from the Mellery affair, was sitting at the far end of the table studying the screen of her laptop-exactly the way he’d remembered her. Her main agenda would be the pursuit of factual certainty and logical coherence. Gurney opened his folding chair and placed it at the end of the table facing her. It was 10:05 on the wall clock.

Sheridan Kline frowned at his watch. “Okay, people. We’re running a little late. I’ve got a tight schedule today. Maybe we could start with anything new, significant progress, promising directions?”

Rodriguez cleared his throat.

“Dave’s got some news,” interjected Hardwick, “a peculiar thing at the crime scene. Might make a good way to kick off the meeting.”

Kline’s eyes widened. “What now?”

Gurney had intended to wait until later in the meeting to bring up the problem, in the hope that some piece of information along the way might cast light on it. But now that Hardwick was forcing the issue, it would be awkward to delay it.

“We’re imagining that after killing Jillian, Flores went out through the woods to the spot where we found the machete, is that right?” said Gurney.

Rodriguez adjusted his steel-rimmed glasses. “Imagining? I’d say we have conclusive evidence to that effect.”

Gurney sighed. “Problem is, we have some video data that doesn’t support that hypothesis.”

Kline went into rapid-blinking mode. “Video data?”

Gurney painstakingly explained how the continuous visibility of the tree trunk in the reception video proved that Flores could not have taken the necessary route through the woods, since anyone taking such a route would have to pass between the camera in that corner of the property and the tree, and he would have to appear, albeit fleetingly, in the picture.

Rodriguez was frowning like a man who suspected he was being tricked but didn’t know how. Anderson was frowning like a man trying to stay awake. Wigg looked up from her laptop screen, which Gurney interpreted as a sign of high interest.

“So he went around the long way, in back of the tree,” said Blatt. “I don’t see the problem.”

“The problem, Arlo, is the terrain. I’m sure you’ve checked it out?”

“What terrain problem are you talking about?”

“The ravine. In order to get from the cottage to the place the machete was found without walking in front of that tree would require someone to go straight back from the cottage, then slide down a long, steep slope with a lot of loose stones, then travel another five hundred feet on the rocky, uneven bottom of the ravine to get to the first place where there’s any possibility of climbing back out. And even there the loose stones and dirt make it no easy thing. Not to mention that the point at which you get back on level ground is nowhere near the place where the machete was found.”

Blatt sighed as though he were already aware of all this and it made no difference. “Just because it wasn’t easy doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”

“Another problem is the time it would take.”

“Meaning?” asked Kline.

“I checked out that area pretty carefully. Going via the ravine route to the machete site would just take too damn long. I don’t think he’d want to be scrambling around back there when the body was discovered and people started swarming all over the place. Plus, there are two bigger problems. One: Why make it so god-awfully difficult, when he could have ditched the machete anywhere? Two-and this is pretty much the clincher: The scent trail follows the route in front of the tree, not behind it.”

“Wait a second,” said Rodriguez. “Aren’t you contradicting yourself? You’re saying that all those factors prove that Flores took the route in front of the tree, but the video proves he didn’t. What on earth does that add up to?”

“An equation with a serious flaw,” said Gurney, “but I’ll be damned if I can see what it is.”

For the next hour and a half, the group questioned him about the reliability of the video’s time code, the potential for dropped frames, the position of the cherry tree in relation to the cottage and the machete and the ravine. They retrieved the crime-scene sketches from the master case file, passed them around the room, studied them. They went off on brief tangents about the fabled talents and accomplishments of K-9 teams. They debated the alternative scenarios for Flores’s disappearance after depositing the murder weapon, for Kiki Muller’s possible involvement as an accessory after the fact, and when and why she’d been killed. They pursued a few speculative notions concerning the psychopathology of cutting off a victim’s head. At the end of it all, however, the basic puzzle seemed no closer to solution.

“So,” said Rodriguez, summing up the central conundrum as simply as anyone could, “according to Dave Gurney, we can be absolutely certain of two things. First, Hector Flores had to pass in front of the cherry tree. Second, he couldn’t have.”

“A very interesting situation,” said Gurney, feeling the electricity in the contradiction.

“This might be a good time to take a short lunch break,” said the captain, who seemed to be feeling more frustration than electricity.

Chapter 52

Lunch was not a social occasion, which was fine with Gurney, who was about as far from being a social animal as a man could be and still be married. Instead of gravitating to the cafeteria, everyone scattered for the allotted half hour to commune with BlackBerrys and laptops.

He might have been happier, however, with thirty minutes of macho camaraderie than he was sitting alone on a chilly bench outside the state police fortress, absorbing the latest text message he found on his phone-evidently a response to his “Tell me more” request.

It said, YOU’RE SUCH AN INTERESTING MAN, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN MY DAUGHTERS WOULD ADORE YOU. IT WAS SO GOOD OF YOU TO COME TO THE CITY. NEXT TIME THEY WILL COME TO YOU. WHEN? WHO CAN SAY? THEY WANT IT TO BE A SURPRISE.

Gurney stared at the words, even as they slammed his mind back to the unsettling smiles of those young women, back to the pale Montrachet lifted in a toast, back to the looming black wall of his amnesia.

He toyed with the idea of sending a message that began, “Dear Saul…” But he decided to keep his knowledge of the identity of Jykynstyl’s impersonator to himself, at least for now. He didn’t know how much that card might be worth, and he didn’t want to play it before he understood the game. Besides, holding on to it gave him, in a minuscule way, a feeling of power. Like carrying a penknife in a bad neighborhood.

By the time he reentered the conference room, he was desperate to get his mind back on the Perry case. Kline, Rodriguez, and Wigg were already seated. Anderson was approaching the table, focused fiercely on a coffee cup so full that it made walking a challenge. Blatt was at the urn, tilting it forward to extract a final black trickle. Hardwick was missing.

Rodriguez looked at his watch. “It’s time, people. Some of us are here, some of us aren’t, but that’s their problem. Time for a status report on the family interviews. Bill, you’re up.”

Anderson set his coffee on the table with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb. “Okay,” he said. He sat, opened a file folder, and began examining and rearranging its contents. “Okay. Here’s where we are. We started with a master list of all graduates for all twenty years Mapleshade has been in operation, and then we narrowed that to a list of graduates from the past five years. Five years ago is when the focus of the place changed from a general adolescent population with behavioral problems to female adolescent sex abusers.”

“Convicted offenders?” asked Kline.

“No. All private interventions through family members, therapists, doctors. Mapleshade’s population is basically warped sicko kids whose families are trying to keep them out of the juvie court system or just get them the hell out of town, out of the house, before they get caught doing what they’re doing. The parents send them to Mapleshade, pay the tuition, and hope that Ashton solves the problem.”

“And does he?”

“Hard to say. The families won’t talk about it, so all we have to go by is a cross-check of graduate names against the national sex-offender database to see if any of them got tangled up with the legal system as adults since leaving Mapleshade. So far that isn’t turning up much. A couple from the graduating classes of four and five years ago, none from the past three years. Hard to say what that means.”

Kline shrugged. “Could mean that Ashton knows what he’s doing. Or it could just reflect the fact that abuse perpetrated by females is grossly underreported to the police and tends not to be prosecuted.”

“How grossly?” asked Blatt.

“Excuse me?”

“How grossly underreported and underprosecuted do you think it is?”

Kline leaned back in his chair, looking annoyed at what he obviously considered a distraction. His tone was stiff, academic, impatient. “Some data suggests that approximately twenty percent of all women and ten percent of all men were sexually abused as children, and that the perpetrator was female in about ten percent of the total cases. Bottom line, we’re talking about millions of instances of sexual abuse and hundreds of thousands of instances in which the perp was female. But you know as well as I do, there’s always been a double standard-a reluctance by families to report mothers, sisters, and baby-sitters to the police, a reluctance by law enforcement to take abuse accusations against young women seriously, a reluctance by courts to convict them. Society can’t quite seem to accept the reality of female sexual predators like we accept the reality of male predators. But some studies suggest that a lot of men convicted of rape were sexually abused by females when they were children.” Kline shook his head, hesitated. “Jesus, I could tell you stories from right here in this county-cases that come into family court through social services. You know about this stuff-mothers pimping out their own kids, selling porno videos of them having sex with each other. Jesus. And what finally works its way into the legal system is just a fraction of what’s going on. But you get my point. Enough said, okay? We should get back to the agenda.”

Blatt shrugged.

Rodriguez nodded in agreement. “Okay, Bill, let’s move on with the phone-call report.”

Anderson shuffled once more through his papers, which were spreading out over a larger area of the table. “The addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information we used were the most recent on file. The number of graduates within the five-year target period is a hundred and fifty-two. Average is about thirty per year. Of the hundred and fifty-two, we think we have currently valid contact information for a hundred and twenty-six. Initial calls have been placed to all hundred and twenty-six. Of those calls, forty resulted in immediate contact, with either the graduate herself or a family member. Of the remaining eighty-six for whom we left messages, twelve had gotten back to us as of nine forty-five this morning.”

“That makes fifty-two live contacts,” said Kline quickly. “What’s the bottom line?”

“Hard to say.” Anderson sounded like everything in his life was hard.

“Jesus, Lieutenant…”

“What I mean is, the results are mixed.” He fished another sheet of paper out of his pile. “Out of the fifty-two, we spoke directly to the graduate herself in eleven instances. No problem there, right? I mean, if we spoke to them, they’re not missing.”

“How about the other forty-one?”

“In twenty-nine instances, the individual we spoke to-parent, spouse, sibling, roommate, significant other-claimed to know the location of the graduate and to be in contact with her.”

Kline was keeping a running tally on a pad. “And the other twelve?”

“One told us her daughter had died in an automobile accident. One was extremely vague, probably high on something, didn’t seem to know much of anything. One other claimed to know the exact whereabouts of the subject but refused to provide any further information.”

Kline scribbled something on his pad. “And the other nine?”

“The other nine-all parents or stepparents-said they had no idea where their daughter was.”

There was a speculative silence in the room, broken by Gurney. “How many of those disappearances began with an argument about a car?”

Anderson consulted his notes, frowning at them as though they were the cause of his weariness. “Six.”

“Wow,” said Kline with a soft little whistle. “And that’s in addition to the ones Ashton and the Liston girl already told Gurney about?”

“Right.”

“Jesus. So the total is close to a dozen. And there are still a hell of a lot of families we haven’t spoken to yet. Wow. Anyone want to comment on this?”

“I think we owe a thank-you to Dave Gurney!” said Hardwick, who had slipped into the room unnoticed. He glanced at Rodriguez. “If he hadn’t nudged us in this direction…”

“Nice you could find time to join us,” said the captain.

“Let’s not get carried away with crazy theories,” said Anderson glumly. “There’s still no evidence of abduction and no evidence of any other related crime. We could be overreacting. All this might be nothing more than a few rebellious kids cooking up a little scheme together.”

“Dave?” said Kline, ignoring Anderson. “You want to say anything at this juncture?”

“One question for Bill. What’s the pattern of distribution of the missing girls over the five graduating classes you looked at?”

Anderson gave his head a little shake as if he hadn’t heard right. “Excuse me?”

“The girls who disappeared-which graduating classes were they in?”

Anderson sighed, went back to flipping through his pile of papers. “Whatever you need,” he muttered, generalizing to no one in particular, “it’s always on the bottom.” He poked through at least a dozen pieces of paper before he fastened on one of them. “Okay… looks like… 2009… 2008… 2007… 2006. And that’s it. None from 2005. Earliest disappearances, if you want to call them that, were from the May 2006 graduating class.”

“So, all within the past four years,” concluded Kline. “Or, actually, the past three and a half years.”

“So what?” said Blatt, shrugging. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“For one thing,” suggested Gurney, “it means that the disappearances began occurring shortly after Hector Flores arrived on the scene.”

Chapter 53

Kline turned toward Gurney. “That ties in with what Ashton’s assistant told you. Didn’t she say that the two graduates she couldn’t get in touch with had gotten interested in Flores when he was working on the grounds at Mapleshade?”

“Yes.”

“This is the damnedest thing,” Kline went on excitedly. “Let’s assume for a minute that Flores is the key to everything-that once we figure out what brought him here, we’ll understand everything else. We’ll understand Jillian Perry’s murder, Kiki Muller’s murder, how and why he hid the machete where he did, why the camera didn’t pick him up, the disappearance of God only knows how many Mapleshade graduates…”

“That last thing could be a harem thing,” said Blatt.

“A what?” said Kline.

“Like Charlie Manson.”

“You’re saying he might have been looking for followers? For impressionable young women?”

“For female sex maniacs. That’s what Mapleshade’s all about, right?”

Gurney looked at Rodriguez to see how he might react to Blatt’s comment in light of the situation with his daughter, but if he felt anything, he was hiding it under a thoughtful scowl.

Kline’s mental computer seemed to be back in high gear, as he presumably weighed the media benefits of trying and convicting his very own Manson. He tried to build on Blatt’s idea. “So you’re imagining that Flores had a little commune tucked away somewhere, and he talked these women into leaving home, covering their tracks, and going there?”

He turned to the captain, seemed deterred by the scowl, and addressed Hardwick instead. “You have any thoughts on that?”

Hardwick responded with the ironic leer. “I was thinking Jim Jones myself. Charismatic leader with a congregation of nubile acolytes.”

“The hell is Jim Jones?” asked Blatt.

Kline answered. “Jonestown. The massacre-suicide thing. Cyanide in the Kool-Aid. Wiped out nine hundred people.”

“Oh, yeah, the Kool-Aid.” Blatt grinned. “Right, Jonestown. Totally fucked up.”

Hardwick raised a cautionary finger. “Beware of men who invite you to places in the jungle they’ve named after themselves.”

The captain’s scowl was reaching thunderstorm intensity.

“Dave?” said Kline. “You have any ideas about Flores’s grand plan?”

“The problem with the commune thing is that Flores lived on Ashton’s property. If he was gathering these women and stashing them somewhere, it would have to be nearby. I don’t think that’s what it was about.”

“What, then?”

“I think it’s about what he told us it’s about. ‘For all the reasons I have written.’ ”

“And those reasons add up to what?”

“Revenge.”

“For?”

“If we take the Edward Vallory prologue seriously, for some major sexual offense.”

It was clear that Kline loved conflict. So it didn’t surprise Gurney that the next opinion he solicited was from Anderson.

“Bill?”

The man shook his head. “Revenge usually takes the form of a physical attack, broken bones, murder. In all these so-called disappearances there isn’t even a hint of that.” He leaned back in his chair. “Not a single hint of it. I think we need to take a more evidence-based approach.” He smiled, seemingly pleased with this neat summation.

Kline’s gaze settled on Sergeant Wigg, whose own gaze was, as always, on her computer screen. “Robin, anything you want to add?”

She answered immediately, without looking up. “Too many things don’t make sense. There’s bad data somewhere in the equation.”

“What kind of bad data?”

Before she could respond, the conference room’s door opened and a lean woman who could have inspired a Grant Wood painting stepped into the room. Her gray eyes settled on the captain.

“Sorry to interrupt, sir.” Her voice sounded like it was sharpened by the same cold winds as her face. “There’s been a significant development.”

“Come in,” commanded Rodriguez. “And close the door.”

She closed it, then stood as rigidly as an army private awaiting permission to speak.

Rodriguez seemed pleased by her formality. “All right, Gerson, what is it?”

“We’ve been informed that one of the young women on our call-and-locate list was the victim of a homicide three months ago.”

“Three months ago?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have the specifics?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go ahead.”

Her expression was as stiff as the starched collar of her shirt. “Name, Melanie Strum. Age eighteen. Graduated May first of this year from Mapleshade Academy. Last seen by her mother and stepfather in Scarsdale, New York, on May sixth. Her body was recovered from the basement of a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, on June twelfth.”

Rodriguez grimaced. “Cause of death?”

Gerson’s lips tightened.

“Cause of death?” he repeated.

“Her head was cut off. Sir.”

Rodriguez stared at Gerson. “How did this information come to us?”

“Through our outgoing calling process. Melanie Strum’s name was on the list subset assigned to me. I made the call.”

“Who did you speak to?”

She hesitated. “May I get my notes, sir?”

“Quickly, if you don’t mind.”

During the minute she was gone, the only person who spoke was Kline. “This could be it,” he said with an excited smile. “This could be the breakthrough.”

Anderson made a face like a man with a sore on the inside of his lip. Hardwick looked intensely interested. Wigg was inscrutable. Gurney was less disturbed than he would have been comfortable admitting. He told himself that his lack of shock or sadness was due to the fact that he had from the beginning assumed that the missing girls were dead. (On occasion, when he was alone and exhausted, some inner defense system would be breached and he would see himself as a man so emotionally disconnected from the lives of others, so lopsidedly devoted to his puzzle-solving agenda, that he hardly qualified as a member of the human family at all. However, that troubling vision would pass with a good night’s sleep, after which he would rationalize his lack of feeling as the normal by-product of a law-enforcement career.)

Gerson stepped back into the room, carrying a flip-top notepad. Her brown hair was pulled back severely into a tight ponytail, giving her features a skull-like immobility.

“Captain, I have the information on the Strum call.”

“Go ahead.”

She consulted her pad. “The phone was answered by Roger Strum, Melanie’s stepfather. When I explained the purpose of the call, he expressed confusion, then anger at the fact that we didn’t already know that Melanie was dead. His wife, Dana Strum, joined the conversation on the extension. They were upset. They provided the following facts: Acting on a tip, the Palm Beach police had entered the home of Jordan Ballston and discovered Melanie’s body in a basement freezer. The police-”

Kline interrupted. “Jordan Ballston, the hedge-fund guy?”

“There was no specific mention of a hedge fund, but in my follow-up call to the Palm Beach PD, they did say Ballston lived in a multi-million-dollar mansion.”

“The fucking freezer?” muttered Blatt, as though food-contamination concerns were making him queasy.

“Okay,” said Rodriguez, “keep going.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Strum mostly went on about how outraged they were that Ballston was out on bail. Who was he paying off? Did he have the judge in his pocket? Remarks like that. Mr. Strum indicated that if Ballston managed to buy himself out of this, he would personally ‘put a bullet in the bastard’s head.’ He repeated that several times. I was able to ascertain that they did have an argument with Melanie on May sixth, the day she left home, about a car she wanted them to buy for her-a Porsche Boxster that costs forty-seven thousand dollars. They say that she flew into a rage when they refused, said she hated them, didn’t want to live with them anymore, didn’t want to speak to them anymore. She said she was going to live with a friend. The following morning she was gone. The next time they saw her was when they ID’d the body in the Palm Beach morgue.”

“You said the local cops were acting on a tip when they found the body,” said Gurney. “Do we know anything more about that?”

She glanced at Rodriguez, apparently to confirm Gurney’s right to ask questions.

“Go ahead,” said the captain, with obvious mixed feelings.

She hesitated. “I told the chief investigating officer in Palm Beach that we had an interest in the case and we’d like as much information as possible. He said he’d be willing to talk to the person in charge of whatever investigation we had going on up here. He said he’d be available for the next half hour.”

After a few minutes of waffling on the pros and cons, the DA and the captain agreed that the call, with whatever information exchange would occur, would be a net plus all around. The conference room’s landline phone was moved to the center of the table around which they were all seated. Gerson dialed the direct number she’d been given by the detective in Palm Beach. She explained to him briefly who was in the room, then pushed the speakerphone button.

Rodriguez deferred to Kline, who provided the names and titles of the people at the table and described the case as a possible missing-persons investigation in its earliest stages.

The faint southern accent of the man on the other end made him sound like he might be a native Floridian, a rare breed in that state and almost unheard-of in Palm Beach. “Being alone in my office here, I feel kind of outnumbered. I’m Detective Lieutenant Darryl Becker. I understand from the officer I spoke to earlier that you folks would like to know more about the Strum murder.”

“We sure would appreciate knowing as much as you can tell us, Darryl,” said Kline, who seemed to be absorbing and reflecting Becker’s drawl. “One question we have right off the bat here-what kind of tip was it that led you fellas to the body?”

“Not a particularly voluntary one.”

“How so?”

“The gentleman who offered the information was not what you’d call a public-spirited citizen helping out the forces of good. He acquired his information in a somewhat compromising manner.”

“The hell’s he talking about?” murmured Blatt, not quite under his breath.

“How so?” repeated Kline.

“Man’s a burglar. A professional burglar. That’s what he does for a living.”

“He was caught in Ballston’s house?”

“No, sir, he wasn’t. He was apprehended emerging from another house a week after breaking into the Ballston place. Burglar’s name happens to be Edgar Rodriguez-no relative of your captain there, I’m sure.”

A snorting one-syllable laugh burst out of Blatt.

The captain’s jaw muscles bulged. The remark seemed to anger him far out of proportion to its mindlessness.

“Let me guess,” said Kline. “Edgar was looking at serious prison time, and he offered to trade some information about Ballston’s basement, something he’d seen there, for a more lenient approach to his situation?”

“That would be it in a nutshell, Mr. Kline. By the way, how do you spell that?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your name. How do you spell your name?”

“K-L-I-N-E.”

“Ah, with a K.” Becker sounded disappointed. “Thought it might be like Patsy.”

“Excuse me?”

“Patsy Cline. Not important. Sorry for the diversion. Go ahead with your questions.”

It took Kline a moment to get back on track. “So… what he told you was sufficient for a warrant?”

“It was indeed.”

“And when you exercised that warrant, you found what?”

“Melanie Strum. In two pieces. Wrapped in aluminum foil. In the bottom of a freezer chest. Underneath a hundred pounds of chicken breasts. And a fair amount of frozen broccoli.”

Hardwick produced a snorting laugh of his own, louder than Blatt’s.

Kline looked baffled. “Why was your burglar unwrapping aluminum foil packages at the bottom of a freezer?”

“He said it’s the first place he always looks. He said people think it’s the last place a burglar would look, so that’s where they put their valuable stuff. He said you want to find the diamonds, look in the freezer. He thought it was pretty funny, all those people thinking they had a bright idea, thinking they were going to fool him, thinking they were smarter than he was. Had a good laugh about it.”

“So he went to the freezer and started unwrapping the body, and-”

“Actually,” Becker interrupted, “he started unwrapping the head.”

Various guttural exclamations of disgust around the room were followed by a silence.

“You gentlemen still there?” There was a touch of amusement in Becker’s voice.

“We’re here,” said Rodriguez coldly. There was another silence.

“You gentlemen have any more questions, or does that pretty much wrap up your missing-person case?”

“I have a question,” said Gurney. “How’d you make the positive ID?”

“We got a DNA near hit on the sex-offender segment of the NCIC database.”

“Meaning a close family member?”

“Yep. Turned out to be Melanie’s biological heroin-addict father, Damian Clark, who’d been convicted of rape, aggravated sexual assault, sexual abuse of a minor, and several other unpleasant offenses about ten years ago. We tracked down the mother, who had divorced her rapist husband and remarried a man by the name of Roger Strum. She came down and ID’d the body. We also took a DNA sample from her and got a first-degree family confirmation like we did with the biological father. So there’s no doubt about the identity of the murdered girl. Any other questions?”

“You have any doubt about the identity of the murderer?” asked Gurney.

“Not a lot. There’s just something about Mr. Ballston.”

“The Strums seem pretty upset that he’s out on bail.”

“Not as upset as I am.”

“He managed to convince the judge he’s not a flight risk?”

“What he managed to do was post a ten-million-dollar bail bond and agree to what amounts to house arrest. He has to remain within the confines of his estate here in Palm Beach.”

“You don’t sound happy with that.”

“Happy? Did I mention that the ME concluded that before she was decapitated, Melanie Strum had been forcibly raped maybe a dozen times and that virtually every inch of her body had been lacerated with a razor blade? Am I happy that the man who did that is sitting next to his million-dollar swimming pool in his five-hundred-dollar designer sunglasses while the most expensive law firm in the state of Florida and the fanciest public-relations outfit in New York City are doing everything possible to position him as the innocent victim of an incompetent and corrupt police department? Are you asking me if I’m happy about that?”

“So it would be an understatement to say he’s not cooperating with the investigation?”

“Yes, sir. Yes indeed. That would be an understatement. Mr. Ballston’s attorneys have made it clear that their client will not say one word to anyone in law enforcement about the bogus case fabricated against him.”

“Before he decided to say nothing, did he offer any explanation for the presence of a murdered woman in his freezer?”

“Only that he has had frequent work done on his home, has had many household employees, and Lord only knows how many people might have had access to his basement-not to mention the burglar himself.”

Kline looked around the room, his hands palms up in a questioning gesture, but no one had anything to add. “Okay,” he said. “Detective Becker, I want to thank you for your help. And for your candor. And good luck with your case.”

There was a pause. Then the soft drawl. “Just wondering… if you gentlemen might know anything about this case up there on your end that could be useful to us down here?”

Kline and Rodriguez looked at each other. Gurney could see the wheels turning as they weighed the potential risks and rewards of openness. The captain finally offered a glum little shrug, deferring the decision to the DA.

“Well,” said Kline, making it all sound iffier than it really was, “we think it’s possible we may be looking for more than one mis-per.”

“Oh?” There was a silence, suggesting that Becker was either taking time to absorb this or wondering why it hadn’t been mentioned sooner. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its softness. “Exactly how many are we talking about?”

Chapter 54

On the long drive home, Gurney was obsessed by the situation in Palm Beach, by the image of Jordan Ballston beside his pool, by the desire to get to the man and get to the bottom of this bizarre case. But getting to the man would not be easy. Having insulated himself behind a wall of legal and PR spokespeople, Ballston sure as hell was not about to sit down for a friendly chat about the body in his basement.

Just outside the little village of Musgrave, Gurney pulled in to a Stewart’s convenience store for coffee. It was close to 3:00 P.M., and he was on the verge of caffeine withdrawal.

As he was getting back into his car with a steaming sixteen-ounce container, his phone was ringing.

It was Hardwick. “So what do you think, Davey? Whole new ball game?”

“Same game. New camera angle.”

“You see something you didn’t see before?”

“An opportunity. Just not sure how to get at it.”

“Ballston? You think he’s going to tell you anything? Good luck!”

“Only key we’ve got, Jack. Got to find a way to turn it.”

“You think he’s somehow behind this whole thing?”

“I don’t know enough yet to think anything. I can’t imagine any way he could have killed Jillian Perry. But I’ll say it again-he’s the only key we’ve got. He’s got a real name, a real business and personal background, and his ass is planted at a real address. Compared to him, Hector Flores is a ghost.”

“Okay, ace, you let us know when that genius brain of yours figures out how to turn the key. But that’s not why I called. Some more stuff on Karnala and its owners just drifted in.”

“Kline told me you discovered it wasn’t really a clothing company?”

Hardwick cleared his throat. “Tip of the proverbial iceberg. Or more like the tip of an insane asylum. We still don’t know for sure what business Karnala is in, but I got some data on the Skards. Definitely not people you want to fuck with.”

“Hold on a second, Jack.” Gurney opened his coffee container and took a long swallow. “Okay, talk to me.”

“We’re getting this in bits and pieces. Before they came to the U.S. and went international, the Skards originally operated out of Sardinia, which is part of Italy. Italy’s got three separate law-enforcement agencies, each with its own records, plus local stuff, and then there’s Interpol, which has access to some of it but not all of it. Plus, I’m getting snatches of stuff that’s not in any file-old rumors, hearsay, whatever-from a guy at Interpol I’ve done some favors for. So what I have is disconnected chunks, some of it unique, some of it repetitive, some of it contradictory. Some reliable, some not, but no way of knowing which is which.”

Gurney waited. It never helped to tell Hardwick to skip the preamble.

“At the visible level, the Skards are high-end international investors. Resorts, casinos, thousand-dollar-a-night hotels, companies that build million-dollar yachts, shit like that. But the betting is that the money they use to acquire those legal assets comes from somewhere else.”

“From a nastier enterprise they’re concealing?”

“Right, and the Skards are very effective concealers. In the whole bloody history of the family, there has been only one arrest-for an atrocious assault ten years ago-and not a single conviction. So there are no real criminal files, almost nothing on paper. Rumors keep surfacing that they’re into very-high-end prostitution, sex slavery, extreme S &M pornography, extortion. But none of that can be verified. They also have very aggressive legal representation that pounces with an instant libel suit when anything remotely critical appears in the press. There aren’t even any photographs of them.”

“What happened to the mug shot from the assault arrest?”

“Mysteriously disappeared.”

“Nobody has ever testified against these guys?”

“People who might know something, people who might be persuaded to say something, even just people who happen to be in the general vicinity of the Skards in times of stress, have a hell of a time staying alive. The few people who cooperated with media stories about the Skards, even anonymously, disappeared within days. The Skards have only one response to trouble-they erase it, totally, without compunction, and without a hint of concern for collateral damage. Perfect example: According to my Interpol contact, about ten years ago Giotto Skard, presumed head of the family, had a business disagreement with an Israeli real-estate developer. After a meeting in a small Tel Aviv nightclub during which Giotto appeared to agree to the Israeli’s terms, he said good-night, stepped outside, barred the exits, and burned the place down. He managed to kill the real-estate developer, along with fifty-two other people who just happened to be in there.”

“Their organization has never been penetrated?”

“Never.”

“Why not?”

“They have no organization in the usual sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Skards are the Skards. A biological family. The only way in is by birth or marriage-and right off the bat I can’t think of any female undercovers devoted enough to the job to marry into a pack of mass murderers.”

“Big family?”

Hardwick cleared his throat again. “Surprisingly small. Of the oldest generation, only one of three brothers is believed to still be alive. Giotto Skard. He may have killed the other two. But no one will say that. Not even whisper it. Not even as a joke. Giotto has-or maybe had-three sons. No one knows how many of them are still alive, or exactly how old they are, or where they might be. As I said, small as they are in numbers, the Skards operate internationally, so it’s presumed that the sons are in various places around the world where Skard interests need to be looked after.”

“Wait a second. If only family members are involved, what do they do for muscle?”

“The word is, they take care of problems themselves. The word is, they’re very prompt and very efficient. The word is, the Skards over the years have personally eliminated at least two hundred human obstacles to the family’s business objectives, not counting the nightclub massacre.”

“Nice people. With three sons, presumably Giotto had a wife?”

“Oh, indeed he did. Tirana Magdalena-the only member of the whole rotten Skard menagerie about which anything is actually known. And maybe the only person on earth who ever seriously inconvenienced Giotto and lived to tell it.”

“How’d she manage that?”

“She was the daughter of the head of an Albanian mafia family. I should say she is his daughter-she’s still alive, somewhere in her mid-sixties, in an institution for the criminally insane. The Albanian don is about ninety. Not that Giotto would be afraid of a mafia don. The word is, it was purely a business decision on Giotto’s part to let his wife live. He didn’t want to have to waste time and money killing the angry Albanians who would try to avenge her death.”

“How the hell do you know all this?”

“I don’t, really. Like I said, it’s mostly rumors from the guy at Interpol. Maybe mostly bullshit. But it sounds good to me.”

“Hold on. A second ago you said she was the only member of the Skard family about which anything is actually known. Known, you said.”

“Ah. But I haven’t gotten yet to the part that’s known. I was saving that till the end.”

Chapter 55

“Tirana Magdalena was Adnan Zog’s only daughter.”

“Zog being the don?”

“Zog being the don, or whatever they call that exalted position in Albania. Anyway, his daughter was drop-dead gorgeous.”

“How do you know that?”

“Her beauty was the stuff of legend. At least in the seedy underbelly of Eastern Europe. At least according to my Deep Throat contact at Interpol. Also, there are photographs. Many photographs. Unlike the Skards, the Zogs, particularly Tirana Magdalena, had no problem with fame. In addition to being gorgeous, she was also high-strung, weird, artsy, and obsessed with wanting to be a dancer. Papa Zog didn’t give a shit about what she wanted. He just saw her as something of potential value. So when the ambitious young Giotto Skard took an interest in the sixteen-year-old Tirana at the same time as he was negotiating a business alliance with Zog, Zog tossed her in as part of the deal. Probably saw it as a win-win. Zog gives Skard something Skard values that costs Zog nothing, plus he gets rid of his nutty, pain-in-the-ass daughter. This makes him and Giotto like blood brothers without even having to prick their thumbs.”

“Very efficient,” said Gurney.

“Very efficient. So now this wacky sixteen-year-old who has been raised by a lunatic Albanian murderer is married to a lunatic Sardinian murderer. And all she wants to do is dance. But all Giotto wants is sons-a lot of sons. Good for the business. So she starts having Giotto’s babies, which turn out to be all sons, just like he wants. Tiziano, Raffaello, Leonardo. Which makes him pretty happy. But all Tirana wants to do is dance. And each kid is making her a little crazier. By the time she has number three, she’s ready for the loony bin. Then she makes her big discovery. Coke! She discovers that snorting coke is almost as good as dancing. She snorts a lot of coke. When she can’t steal any more money from Giotto-a very dangerous activity, by the way-she starts fucking the local coke dealer. When Giotto finds out, he chops him up.”

“Chops him up?”

“Yeah. Literally. Into little pieces. To make a statement.”

“Impressive.”

“Right. So then Giotto decides to move the family to America. Better for everyone, he says. What he really means is, better for business. Business is all Giotto cares about. Once they’re over here, Tirana starts fucking American coke dealers. Giotto chops them up. Everyone she fucks gets chopped up. She’s fucking so many guys he can hardly keep up with it. Finally he kicks her out, along with son number three, Leonardo, who is now about ten years old and either gay or schizo or just too fucking oddball for Giotto to deal with. She takes the money Giotto gives her as a good-bye-and-get-lost present, and she opens a modeling agency for kids whose parents would love to get them into commercials, TV, whatever-offers acting and dancing classes to enhance their budding careers. Giotto meanwhile settles down with his two older sons to focus on their sex-and-extortion empire. Sounds like a happy ending for all concerned. But there was a flaw in the ointment.”

“Fly.”

“What?”

“A fly in the ointment, not a flaw.”

“Fly, flaw, whatever. The problem with cokehead Tirana’s modeling agency is that she’s molesting the kids. Not only is she still fucking coke dealers, now she’s fucking every ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old boy she can get her hands on.”

“Jesus. How did it end?”

“It ended with her being arrested and charged with about two dozen counts of sexual abuse, assault, sodomy, rape, you name it. She ended up being committed to a state mental hospital, where she remains to this day.”

“And her son?”

“By the time she was arrested, he was gone.”

“Gone?”

“Either ran away or was taken back by his father or was spirited off through some kind of private adoption. Or, knowing the Skards, he could very well be dead. Giotto would never let sentimentality keep him from tying up a loose end.”

Chapter 56

Halfway between his Stewart’s stop and Walnut Crossing, Gurney’s phone rang again. Rebecca Holdenfield’s voice was smart, edgy-as reminiscent of the young Sigourney Weaver as were her face and hair. “So I guess you’re not coming?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Don’t you check your messages?”

He remembered. That morning there had been one text and one voice mail. He’d checked the text first-the message that had spun him off into a world of speculation about his brownstone blackout. He’d never checked the voice mail.

“Christ, I’m sorry, Rebecca. I’m running too damn fast. You expected me this afternoon?”

“It was your request in your voice mail to me. So I said fine, come.”

“Any chance we could do it tomorrow? What’s tomorrow, anyway?”

“Tuesday. And I’m jammed all day. How about Thursday? That’s my next free time.”

“Too far away. Can we talk now?”

“I’m free till five. Which means we have about ten minutes. What’s the topic?”

“I’ve got a few: the effects of being raised by a promiscuous mother, the mind-set of women who sexually abuse children, the psychological weaknesses of male sex murderers… and the behavior range of adult males under the influence of a Rohypnol cocktail.”

After a two-second silence, she burst into laughter. “Sure. And in the time we have left after that, we can discuss the causes of divorce, ways to eliminate war, and-”

“Okay, okay, I get it. Pick the topic you think we have enough time to talk about.”

“You planning on spiking your next martini with Rohypnol?”

“Hardly.”

“Just an academic question, then?”

“Sort of.”

“Hmm. Well, there’s no standard range of behavior for intoxication in general. Different chemicals skew behavior in different directions. Cocaine, for example, tends to produce a heightened sexual drive. But if what you’re asking is, are there limits to the behavior that a nonhallucinogenic disinhibitor will allow, the answer is yes and no. There’s no specific limit that applies to everyone, but there are individual limits.”

“Like what?”

“There’s no way of knowing. The limitations on our behavior depend on the accuracy of our perceptions, the strength of our instinctive desires, and the strength of our fears. If the drug is a disinhibitor that removes our fear of consequences, then our behavior will reflect our desires and be limited mainly by pain, satisfaction, or exhaustion. We’ll do whatever we would do in a world with no consequences, but not things we have no desire to do. Disinhibitors give free rein to one’s existing impulses, but they don’t manufacture impulses that are inconsistent with the underlying psychic structure of the individual. Am I answering your question?”

“Bottom line, give people a drug like that and they might act out their fantasies?”

“They might even do things they’d been afraid to fantasize about.”

“I see,” he said, feeling sick to his stomach. “Let me change the subject to something completely different. A recent Mapleshade graduate has turned up dead-a sex murder in Florida. Rape, torture, decapitation, body in the suspect’s freezer.”

“How long?” As usual, Holdenfield was unfazed by gory details-or adept at making it seem that way.

“What do you mean?”

“How long was the body in the freezer?”

“ME thought a couple of days, maybe. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering what he was saving it for. It was a he, right?”

“Jordan Ballston, hotshot in the financial-derivatives business.”

“Ballston, the super-rich guy? I remember reading about that. First-degree murder charge. But that was months ago.”

“Right, but the identity of the victim was originally withheld from the media, and the connection to the other disappearances at Mapleshade was just discovered.”

“You’re sure there is a connection?”

“Hell of a coincidence if there isn’t one.”

“Do you guys get to interview Ballston?”

“Apparently not. He’s hunkering down behind a thorny hedge of attorneys.”

“Then what can I do for you?”

“Suppose I manage to get to him.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet. Just suppose I do.”

“Okay. I’m supposing. Now what?”

“What would he be most afraid of?”

“Surrounded by his thorny attorneys?” She clucked her tongue repeatedly, rapidly, making it sound like a finger-tapping accompaniment to fast thinking. “Not much… unless…”

“What?”

“Unless he thinks someone else knows what he’s done, someone who might have an agenda in conflict with his own. That kind of situation would leave a gap in his span of control. Sadistic sex murderers are control freaks to the max, and the one thing that will blow a control freak’s circuits is being at the mercy of someone else.” She paused for a moment. “Do you have a way of contacting Ballston?”

“Not yet.”

“Why do I have the feeling that you’re about to come up with one?”

“I appreciate your confidence.”

“I need to hang up now. Sorry I don’t have more time. Just remember, Dave, the more power he believes you have over him, the more likely he is to come apart.”

“Thanks, Becca. I appreciate your help.”

“I hope I didn’t make it sound like it’s going to be easy.”

“Don’t worry. ‘Easy’ is not what I’m imagining.”

“Good. Keep me up to date, okay? And good luck!”

The same mental-overload factor that caused him to neglect that morning’s phone message from Holdenfield kept him, for the rest of his trip home, oblivious to another spectacular mountain sunset. By the time he had turned off the county highway and driven up the winding road to his property, all that was left of it was a subdued wash of faded rose in the western sky, and even that he barely noticed.

At the transition area in front of his barn, where the town’s dirt road faded into his narrower and grassier driveway, he pulled over to his mailbox, which was cantilevered out from a fence post. As he was about to open it, a little patch of yellow on the hillside ahead caught his eye. The patch of yellow was moving slowly along the arc of the path over the high pasture. He recognized it as Madeleine’s light Windbreaker.

Because of the intervening ryegrass and milkweed, she was visible only from the waist up, but he imagined he could perceive the gentle rhythm of her steps. He sat and watched her until the trajectory of the path and the rolling contour of the field took her gradually out of sight, a solitary figure moving calmly into an obscuring ocean of tall grass.

He remained there awhile longer, gazing up at the deserted hillside, until all the color in the sky was gone, replaced by a gray as monotone as the note that registers the absence of a heartbeat. He blinked, found some dampness in his eyes, swiped at it with his knuckles, and drove the rest of the way up to the house.

He decided to take a shower in the hope that it might restore in him some sense of normalcy. As he stood in the heavy spray of hot water, its tingly massage relaxing his neck and shoulders, he let his mind drift into the sound: the soft roar of a summer downpour. For a strange second or two, his brain was filled with the pure and peaceful scent of rain. He scrubbed himself with soap and a rough sponge, rinsed, got out, and toweled himself dry.

Too drowsy now to dress, still warm from the shower, he pulled back the quilted cover on their bed and lay down on the cool sheet. For a wonderful minute, the whole world consisted of that cool sheet, grass-scented air wafting over him from an open window, imagined sunlight sparkling through the leaves of giant trees… as he descended the free-associating staircase of dreams into a deep sleep.

He awoke in the dark with no sense of the time. A pillow had been placed under his head, and the quilt had been drawn up to his chin. He got up, turned on the bedside lamp, and checked the clock. It was 7:49 P.M. He put on the clothes he’d had on before his shower and went out to the kitchen. Something baroque was faintly audible on the stereo. Madeleine was sitting at the smaller of the room’s two tables with a bowl of orange-colored soup and half a baguette, reading a book. She looked up as he entered the room.

She said, “I thought maybe you’d gone to bed for the night.”

“Apparently not,” he muttered. Finding his voice hoarse, he coughed to clear it.

Her eyes returned to her book. “If you feel like eating, there’s carrot soup in the pot and a stir-fried chicken thing in the wok.”

He yawned. “What are you reading?”

“The Natural History of Moths.”

“History of what?”

She articulated the word as one might to a lip-reader. “Moths.” She turned the page. “Was there any mail?”

“Mail? I… I don’t know. I think… Oh, right, I was about to get it, and then I saw you up on the hill and got distracted.”

“You’ve been distracted for a while.”

“Is that a fact?” He immediately regretted his defensive tone, but not enough to admit it.

“You don’t think so?”

He sighed nervously. “I suppose.” He went to the pot on the stove and ladled out a bowl of soup.

“Is there anything you want to talk about?”

He delayed answering until he was seated across from her with his soup and the other half of the baguette. “There’s a major development in the case. A former Mapleshade girl has turned up dead in Florida. Victim of a sex murderer.”

Madeleine closed her book, stared at him. “So you’re thinking… what?”

“It’s possible that the other girls who’ve disappeared have ended up the same way.”

“Murdered by the same person?”

“It’s possible.”

Madeleine studied his face as if unspoken information were written on it.

“What?” he asked.

“Is that what’s on your mind?”

A rush of unease passed through his stomach. “That’s part of it. Another part is that the police haven’t been able to get a single word out of the man they’ve charged with the murder-nothing beyond a categorical denial. Meanwhile his law firm and PR firm are creating alternative scenarios to feed to the media-lots of innocent reasons that a woman’s raped, tortured, and beheaded body might have been in his freezer.”

“And you’re thinking, if only you could sit down and talk to this monster…”

“I’m not saying that I’d get a confession, but…”

“But you’d do a better job than the locals?”

“That wouldn’t be so difficult.” He winced inwardly at his own arrogance.

Madeleine frowned. “It wouldn’t be the first time the star detective rose to the challenge and deciphered the mystery.”

He stared at her uncomfortably.

Again she seemed to be examining the message encoded in his expression.

“What?” he asked.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“But you’re thinking something. What is it? Tell me.”

She hesitated. “I thought you liked puzzles.”

“I admit that I do. So what?”

“So why do you look so miserable?”

The question jarred him. “Maybe I’m just exhausted. I don’t know.” But he did know. The reason he felt as bad as he did was that he couldn’t bring himself to tell her why he felt bad to begin with. His reluctance to reveal the full chagrin of being duped and the intensity of his worry over what may have happened during his period of amnesia had isolated him in a terrible way.

He shook his head, as if refusing the pleas of his better self, the small voice within that was begging him to lay the facts of the matter before this woman who loved him. His fear was so great that it blocked the very action that would have removed it.

Chapter 57

As strained as it often was, Gurney’s relationship with Madeleine had always been the chief pillar of his stability. But that relationship depended on a degree of openness he felt incapable of at the moment.

With the desperation of a drowning man, he embraced his only other pillar, his detective identity, and attempted to channel all his energies into Solving the Crime.

The most productive next step in that process, he was convinced, would be a conversation with Jordan Ballston. He needed to devise a way to bring that about. Rebecca had insisted that fear would be the key to cracking the shell of the rich psycho, and Gurney had no reason to disagree. Nor did he have any reason to disagree with her warning that it wouldn’t be easy.

Fear.

It was a subject with which Gurney had a raw, current, intimate familiarity. Perhaps that experience could be of some use. What exactly was it that frightened him so much? He retrieved the three alarming text messages and reread them carefully.

SUCH PASSIONS! SUCH SECRETS! SUCH WONDERFUL PHOTOGRAPHS!

ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT MY GIRLS? THEY’RE THINKING ABOUT YOU.

YOU’RE SUCH AN INTERESTING MAN, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN MY DAUGHTERS WOULD ADORE YOU. IT WAS SO GOOD OF YOU TO COME TO THE CITY. NEXT TIME THEY WILL COME TO YOU. WHEN? WHO CAN SAY? THEY WANT IT TO BE A SURPRISE.

The words generated a sick, hollow feeling in his chest.

Such virulent threats wrapped in such airy banalities.

So nonspecific, yet so malignant.

So nonspecific. Yes, that was it. It brought to mind his favorite English professor’s explanation of the emotional power of Harold Pinter: The perils that strike the greatest terror in us are not those which have been spelled out but those that our imaginations conjure. We are chilled to the bone not by the lengthy rants of an angry man but by the menace in a placid voice.

He remembered it because the truth of it had struck him immediately, and experience had reinforced it over the years. What we’re able to imagine is always worse than what reality places before us. The greatest fear by far is the fear of what we imagine is lurking in the dark.

So perhaps the best way to panic Ballston would be to give him an opportunity to panic himself. A frontal attack would be rebuffed by his legal army. Gurney needed a back door through the fortifications.

Ballston’s current defense strategy was a categorical denial of any knowledge of Melanie Strum dead or alive, plus the creation of an alternative hypothesis, involving the access other individuals had to his home, to explain the presence of her body. Such a strategy would collapse, disastrously for Ballston, if a prior link could be established between him and the girl. In the best possible outcome, the nature of that link would also explain how the murders of Melanie Strum, Jillian Perry, and Kiki Muller, as well as the disappearances of the other Mapleshade graduates, were connected. But whether it did or not, Gurney was sure that discovering Melanie’s route to Ballston’s basement freezer would be a giant step toward the final solution. And the possible exposure of that link would be Ballston’s greatest fear.

The question was how to trigger that fear-how to use it as an entry point into Ballston’s psyche, a way around the battlements manned by his lawyers. Was there a person, place, or thing the mention of which would open the door? Mapleshade? Jillian Perry? Kiki Muller? Hector Flores? Edward Vallory? Alessandro? Karnala Fashion? Giotto Skard?

And as hard as it would be to pick the magic name, the harder part would lie in managing whatever dialogue ensued-the Pinteresque art of implying without specifying, unnerving without providing details. The challenge would be to provide the dark space in which Ballston could imagine the worst, the platform on which he might hang himself.

Madeleine had gone in to bed. Gurney, however, was wide awake, pacing the length of the big kitchen, on fire with possibilities, risk evaluations, logistics. He narrowed the names of his potential door openers to the three he thought most promising: Mapleshade, Flores, Karnala.

Of those he finally put Karnala, by a millimeter, at the top of the list. Because all the Mapleshade girls known to be missing had appeared in near-pornographic Karnala Fashion ads, because Karnala did not seem to be in the business it pretended to be in, because Karnala was connected to the Skards, and the Skards were rumored to be involved in a criminal sex enterprise, and Melanie Strum’s murder was a sex crime. In fact, the Edward Vallory dimension and Mapleshade’s admissions policy suggested that everything connected with the case so far was in some way a sex crime or the result of a sex crime.

Gurney was aware that the logical chain back to Karnala was less than perfect, but demanding perfect logic (much as the concept appealed to him) did not lead to solutions, it led to paralysis. He’d learned that the key question in police work, as in life, was not “Am I absolutely sure of what I believe?” The question that mattered was “Am I sure enough to act on that belief?”

In this case Gurney’s answer was yes. He was willing to bet that there was something about Karnala that would unnerve Jordan Ballston. According to the old clock over the sideboard, it was just after ten when he placed a call to the Palm Beach Police Department to get Ballston’s unlisted number.

No one assigned to the Strum case was on duty that night, but the desk sergeant was able to give him Darryl Becker’s cell number.

Surprisingly, Becker picked up on the first ring.

Gurney explained what he wanted.

“Ballston’s not talking to anybody,” said Becker testily. “Communications go in and out through Markham, Mull & Sternberg, his main law firm. Thought I’d made that clear.”

“I may have a way of getting through to him.”

“How?”

“I’m going to toss a bomb through his window.”

“What kind of bomb?”

“The kind he’ll want to talk to me about.”

“This some kind of game, Gurney? I had a long day. I’d like some facts.”

“You sure about that?”

Becker was silent.

“Look, if I can knock this scumbag off balance, that’s a plus for everyone. Worst case, we’re maybe back where we started. All you’re giving me is a phone number, no official authorization to do anything, so if there’s any fallout at all, which I don’t think there will be, it doesn’t land on you. In fact, I’ve already forgotten in advance where I got the number from.”

There was another short silence, followed by a few clicks on a keypad, followed by Becker’s voice reading off a number that began with a Palm Beach area code. Then the connection was broken.

Gurney spent the next several minutes picturing and then immersing himself in a simple version of the kind of layered undercover persona he advocated in his academy lectures-in this case a reptilian ice man, lurking under a thin veneer of civilized manners.

Once he was satisfied with his sense of the attitude and tone, he activated the ID blocker on his phone and made the call to the Palm Beach number. It went straight into voice mail.

A spoiled, imperious voice announced, “This is Jordan. If you wish to receive a response, please leave a substantive message regarding the subject of your call.” He managed to imbue the please with a grating condescension that reversed its normal meaning.

Gurney spoke deliberately and a little awkwardly, as though he found the intricacies of polite speech a strange and difficult dance. He also added the subtlest hint of a Southern European accent. “The subject of my call is your relationship with Karnala Fashion, which I need to discuss with you as soon as possible. I’ll call you back in approximately thirty minutes. Please be available to answer the phone, and I’ll be more… substantive… at that time.”

Gurney was making some major assumptions: that Ballston was at home, as the stipulations of his bail arrangement required, that a man in his perilous position would be screening his calls and checking his messages obsessively, and that how he chose to handle the promised call thirty minutes later would reveal the nature of his involvement with Karnala.

Making one assumption was risky. Making three was crazy.

Chapter 58

At 10:58 P.M., Gurney made his second call. It was picked up after the third ring.

“This is Jordan.” The live voice sounded stiffer, older than the one on the recorded greeting.

Gurney grinned. It appeared that Karnala was indeed the magic word. Having hit it on the first shot gave him a burst of adrenaline. He felt like he’d gained entry to a high-stakes tournament in which the challenge was to deduce the rules of the game from the behavior of your opponent. He closed his eyes and stepped into his snake-pretending-to-be-harmless persona.

“Hello, Jordan. How are you this evening?”

“Fine.”

Gurney said nothing.

“What… what’s this about?”

“What do you think?”

“What? Who am I speaking to?”

“I’m a police officer, Jordan.”

“I have nothing to say to the police. That’s been made clear by-”

Gurney broke in. “Not even about Karnala?”

There was a pause. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gurney sighed, made a bored little sucking noise with his teeth.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ballston reiterated.

If he really didn’t, thought Gurney, he’d have hung up by now. Or he never would have taken the call. “Well, Jordan, the thing is, if you had any information you were willing to share, perhaps something could be worked out to your advantage.”

Ballston hesitated. “Look… uh, why don’t you give me your name, Officer?”

“That’s not a good idea.”

“Sorry? I don’t…”

“See, Jordan, this is a preliminary exploration here. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I’m not sure I do.”

Gurney sighed again, as though speech itself were a burden. “No formal offer can be made without some indication that it would be seriously considered. A willingness to provide useful information about Karnala Fashion could result in a very different prosecutorial attitude toward your case, but we would need to feel a sense of cooperation from you before we discuss the possibilities. I’m sure you understand.”

“No, I really don’t.” Ballston’s voice was brittle.

“No?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never heard of Caramel Fashion, or whatever the name of it is. So it’s impossible to tell you anything about it.”

Gurney laughed softly. “Very good, Jordan. That’s very good.”

“I’m serious. I know nothing about that company, that name, whatever it is.”

“That’s good to know.” Gurney let a glimpse of the reptile creep into his voice. “That’s good for you. Good for everybody.”

The glimpse seemed to have a stunning effect. Ballston was absolutely quiet.

“You still with us, Jordan?”

“Yes.”

“So we got that piece of it out of the way, right?”

“Piece of it?”

“That piece of the situation. But we got more to talk about.”

There was a pause. “You’re not really a cop, are you?”

“Of course I’m a cop. Why would I say I was a cop if I wasn’t a cop?”

“Who are you really, and what do you want?”

“I want to come see you.”

“See me?”

“I don’t like the phone so much.”

“I don’t understand what you want.”

“Just a little talk.”

“About what?”

“Enough bullshit. You’re a smart guy. Don’t talk like I’m stupid.”

Again Ballston seemed stunned into silence. Gurney thought he could hear a tremor in the man’s breathing. When Ballston spoke again, his voice had dropped to a frightened whisper.

“Look, I’m not sure who you are, but… everything is under control.”

“Good. Everyone will be glad to hear that.”

“Really. I mean it. Everything… is… under… control.”

“Good.”

“Then, what more…”

“A little talk. Face-to-face. We just want to be sure.”

“Sure? But why? I mean…”

“Like I said, Jordan… I don’t like the fucking phone!”

Another silence. This time Ballston hardly seemed to be breathing at all.

Gurney brought his tone back down to a velvety calm. “Okay, nothing to worry about. So here’s what we do. I come up to your place. We talk a little bit. That’s all. See? No problem. Easy.”

“When do you want to do this?”

“How about half an hour from now?”

“Tonight?” Ballston’s voice was close to breaking.

“Yeah, Jordan, tonight. When the fuck else would half an hour from now be?”

In Ballston’s silence, Gurney imagined he could sense pure fear. The ideal moment to end the call. He broke the connection and laid the phone down on the end of the dinner table.

In the dim light beyond the far end of the table, Madeleine was standing in the kitchen doorway in her pajamas. The top didn’t match the bottom. “What’s going on?” she asked, blinking sleepily.

“I think we have a fish on the line.”

“We?”

With a twinge of annoyance, he rephrased his comment. “The fish in Palm Beach seems to be hooked, at least for the moment.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Now what?”

“Reel him in. What else?”

“So who are you meeting with?”

“Meeting with?”

“In half an hour.”

“You heard me say that? Actually, I’m not meeting with anyone in half an hour. I wanted to give Mr. Ballston the idea that I was in the neighborhood. Ratchet up the uneasiness. I also said that I’d come up to his place, create the impression that I might be driving up from Lake Worth or South Palm.”

“What happens when you don’t show up?”

“He worries. Has some trouble sleeping.”

Madeleine looked skeptical. “Then what?”

“I haven’t worked that out yet.”

Despite the fact that this was partly true, Madeleine’s antenna seemed to detect the dishonesty in it. “So do you have a plan or don’t you?”

“I have sort of a plan.”

She waited, staring at him expectantly.

He couldn’t picture any way out of the spot he was in other than straight ahead. “I need to get in closer to him. It’s obvious he has some connection with Karnala Fashion, that the connection is dangerous, and that it frightens him. But I need to find out a lot more about it-exactly what the connection is, what Karnala is all about, how Karnala and Jordan Ballston are connected to the other pieces of the case. There’s no way I can do all that over the phone. I need to see his eyes, read his expressions, watch his body language. I also need to take advantage of the moment, while the son of a bitch is wriggling on the hook. Right now I have his fear working for me. But that won’t last.”

“So you’re on your way to Florida?”

“Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Maybe tomorrow?”

“Most likely tomorrow.”

“Tuesday.”

“Right.” He wondered if he’d forgotten something. “Do we have some other commitment?”

“What difference would it make?”

“Well, do we?”

“As I said, what difference would it make?”

Such a simple question, yet how strangely difficult to answer. Perhaps because Gurney heard it as a proxy for the larger questions that these days never seemed far from Madeleine’s mind: Will anything we plan to do together ever make a difference? Will any piece of our life together ever be more important than the next step in some investigation? Will our being together ever outweigh your being a detective? Or will chasing whatever you’re chasing always be at the heart of your life?

Then again, maybe he was reading too damn much into a cranky comment, a passing mood in the middle of the night. “Look, tell me if I’m supposed to be doing something tomorrow that I somehow forgot about,” he said earnestly, “and I’ll tell you if it makes a difference.”

“You’re such an accommodating man,” she said, mocking his earnestness. “I’m going back to bed.”

For some time after she left, his priorities were jumbled. He went to the unlit end of the room, the sitting area between the fieldstone fireplace and the iron woodstove. The air smelled cold and ashy. He sank into his dark leather armchair. He felt uneasy, unmoored. A man without a harbor.

He fell asleep.

He awoke at 2:00 A.M. He pushed himself up out of the chair, stretching his arms and back to work out the kinks.

The customary currents of his mind had reasserted themselves and seemingly resolved whatever doubts he might have had about his plans for the coming day. He got his credit card out of his wallet, went to the computer in the den, and typed on the search line, “Flights from Albany NY to Palm Beach FL.”

As his round-trip electronic tickets were printing out, along with a Palm Beach Tourist Guide, he was heading into the shower. And forty-five minutes later, having scribbled a note to Madeleine promising he’d be home that evening around seven, he was on his way to the airport, carrying nothing but his wallet, cell phone, and printouts.

During the sixty-mile drive east on I-88, he made four phone calls. The first was to a high-end limousine service, open twenty-four hours a day, to arrange for the right kind of car to meet him in Palm Beach. The next was to Val Perry, because he was going to be spending her money on some expensive but necessary purchases, and he wanted it on the record, if only by voice mail in the wee hours of the morning.

His third call, at 4:20 A.M., was to Darryl Becker. Amazingly, Becker not only picked up but sounded wide awake-or as wide awake as a man with a drawl could sound to northern ears.

“I’m just on my way out to the gym,” Becker said. “What’s up?”

“I have some good news, and I need a big favor.”

“How good and how big?”

“I took a wild swing at Ballston on the phone, and I hit a soft spot. I’m on my way to see him, to see what happens if I keep punching.”

“He doesn’t talk to cops. What the hell did you say to get through to him?”

“Long story, but the son of a bitch is going down.” Gurney was sounding a lot more confident than he really was.

“I’m impressed. So what’s the favor?”

“I need a couple of big guys, nastiest-looking big guys you know, to stand next to my car while I’m in Ballston’s house.”

Becker sounded incredulous. “You afraid someone’s going to steal it?”

“I need to create a certain impression.”

“When does this impression need to get created?”

“Around noontime today. By the way, the pay is pretty good. They get five hundred bucks apiece for an hour’s work.”

“For standing next to your car?”

“For standing next to my car and looking like mob muscle.”

“For five hundred an hour, that can be arranged. You can pick them up at my gym in West Palm. I’ll give you the address.”

Chapter 59

Gurney’s plane departed from Albany on schedule at 5:05 A.M. He switched planes in D.C., barely making a tight connection, and arrived in Palm Beach International Airport at 9:55 A.M.

In the designated limo-pickup area, among the dozen or so uniformed drivers awaiting incoming passengers, there was one driver with a sign bearing Gurney’s name.

He was a young Latino with high Indian cheekbones, hair as black as squid ink, and a diamond stud in one ear. He seemed at first a bit thrown off, even annoyed, by the absence of luggage-until Gurney handed him the address of their first stop: the Giacomo Emporium on Worth Avenue. Then he brightened, perhaps reasoning that a man who traveled light for convenience, later picking up what he needed at Giacomo, might be a lavish tipper.

“Car is right outside, sir,” he said, with an accent Gurney guessed to be Central American. “Very nice one.”

A power-assisted revolving door propelled them from the controlled, seasonless, indoor climate common to airports everywhere into a tropical steam bath-reminding Gurney there is nothing autumnal about southern Florida in September.

“Right over there, sir,” said the driver, his smile revealing surprisingly bad teeth for a young man. “First one.”

The car, as Gurney had specified in his predawn call, was a Mercedes S600 sedan, the sort of six-figure vehicle you might see once a year in Walnut Crossing. In Palm Beach it was as common as five-hundred-dollar sunglasses. Gurney slipped into the backseat-a quiet, dehumidified cocoon of soft leather, soft carpet, and softly tinted windows.

The driver closed the door for him, got in the front seat, and they glided soundlessly into the stream of taxis and shuttle buses.

“Temperature okay?”

“It’s fine.”

“You want music?”

“No, thank you.”

The driver sniffed, coughed, slowed to a crawl as the car passed through a pond-size puddle. “Been raining like a bitch.”

Gurney did not answer. He’d never been prone to conversing simply for the sake for conversing, and in the company of strangers he was more comfortable with silence. Not another word was spoken until the car came to a stop at the entrance to the very posh little shopping plaza where the Giacomo Emporium was located.

The driver looked at him through the rearview mirror. “You know how long you want to be here?”

“Not long,” said Gurney. “Fifteen minutes, max.”

“Then I stay here. Cops tell me no, then I circle.” He made an orbital gesture with his forefinger to illustrate the intended process. “I circle, keep coming around, passing this spot, until you’re here. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The shock of stepping back out into the hot, humid atmosphere was intensified by the visual impact of moving from the car’s tinted light into the full glare of the midmorning Florida sun. The plaza was landscaped with planting beds of palms and ferns and potted Asiatic lilies. The air smelled like boiled flowers.

Gurney hurried into the store, where the air smelled more like money than flowers. Customers, blond women from thirty to sixty, drifted through the meticulously crafted displays of clothes and accessories. Salespeople, anorexic boys and girls in their twenties, looked like they were trying to look like the anorexic boys and girls in Giacomo ads.

Gurney’s eagerness to flee this chic environment had him back on the street in ten minutes. Never had he spent so much on so little: an amazing $1,879.42 for one pair of jeans, one pair of moccasins, one polo shirt, and one pair of sunglasses-selected with the assistance of a willowy male exhibiting the fashionable ennui of a recent vampire victim.

In a changing room, Gurney had removed his battered jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, and socks and put on his pricey new apparel. He removed the tags and gave them to the salesperson along with his old clothes, which he asked to be wrapped in a Giacomo box.

It was then that the salesperson offered the first small smile Gurney had seen since entering the shop. “You’re like a Transformer,” he said, presumably referring to the popular toy that is instantly convertible from one thing into another.

The Mercedes was waiting. Gurney got in, checked his printed-out tourist guide, and gave the driver the next address, less than a mile away.

Nails Delicato was a tiny place, staffed by four dramatically coiffed manicurists who appeared to be teetering on the shaky fence that separated high-fashion models from high-priced hookers. No one seemed to notice or care that Gurney was the only male customer. The manicurist to whom he was assigned looked sleepy. Apart from apologizing several times for yawning while she was working on his nails, she said nothing until she was almost at the end of the process, applying a transparent polish.

“You have nice hands,” she observed. “You should take better care of them.” Her voice was both young and weary, and it seemed to resonate with the matter-of-fact sadness in her eyes.

As he was paying on the way out, he bought a small tube of hair gel from the display of creams and cosmetics on the counter. He opened the tube, spread a bit of the gel on his palms, and rubbed it into his hair, aiming for the disarranged look so popular at the moment.

“What do you think?” he asked the blankly beautiful young woman in charge of collecting the money. The question engaged her to a degree that surprised him. She blinked several times as if being summoned from a dream, came around to the front of the counter, and studied his head from various angles.

“Can I…?” she asked.

“Absolutely.”

She ran her fingers through his hair in rapid zigzags, flicking it this way and that and pulling up on bits of it to make it spikier. After a minute or two, she stepped back, her eyes lighting up with pleasure.

“That’s it!” she declared. “That’s the real you!”

He burst out laughing, which seemed to confuse her. Still laughing, he took her hand and, on an impulse, kissed it for no sensible reason he could think of-which also seemed to confuse her, but more pleasantly. Then he stepped out into the Florida steam bath and back into the Mercedes and gave the driver the address of Darryl Becker’s gym.

“We need to pick up a couple of guys in West Palm,” he explained. “Then we’re going to visit a man on South Ocean Boulevard.”

Chapter 60

As anyone who’d attended one of his academy lectures quickly realized, Gurney’s approach to undercover work was more complex than the average detective’s. It wasn’t just a matter of wrapping yourself in the manners, attitudes, and backstory of an assumed identity. It was more devious than that, and proportionally more difficult to manage. His “layered” approach involved creating a complex persona for the target to penetrate, a code for the target to break, a path the target could follow to arrive at the beliefs Gurney wanted him to embrace.

The current situation, however, added another dimension of difficulty. He had in past instances always known precisely what end-point belief about his identity he wanted his target to arrive at. But this time he didn’t. Because the appropriate identity would depend on the exact nature of the Karnala operation and Ballston’s connection to it-both still unknowns in the equation. It left Gurney in the position of having to feel his way forward, knowing that a misstep could be fatal.

As the car turned onto South Ocean Boulevard a couple of miles from Ballston’s address, the absurd difficulty of what Gurney was attempting began to sink in. He was walking into the home of a psychopathic sex murderer, unarmed. His only defense and only chance of success lay in the creation of a persona he would have to make up as he went along, following the currents of Ballston’s reactions as best he could, moment by moment. It was a challenge out of Alice in Wonderland. A sane man would probably turn back. A sane man with a wife and a son would certainly turn back.

He realized he was running too fast, that adrenaline was driving his decisions. It was a mistake that could easily lead to more mistakes. Worse, it deprived him of his main strength. It was in his analytic ability that he excelled, not in the quality of his adrenaline. He needed to think. He asked himself what he knew for sure, whether he had anything resembling a firm starting point for his conversation with Ballston.

He knew that the man was afraid and that his fear was related to Karnala Fashion. He knew that Karnala was reputedly controlled by the Skard family-who were, among other ugly things, high-end procurers. It also appeared that Melanie Strum had been sent to Ballston to satisfy his sexual needs. It was not too great a leap to imagine Karnala involved in that process. If evidence could be uncovered linking Karnala to both Ballston and Strum, then Ballston’s conviction would be assured. That could explain his fear. Except… Gurney had gotten the impression that the man had been frightened not only by his mention of Karnala, and therefore by Gurney’s knowledge of some link, but by Karnala itself.

And what was the significance of Ballston’s odd insistence on the phone that everything was “under control”? That wouldn’t make sense if Ballston believed that Gurney was any sort of legitimate detective. But it might make sense if he thought Gurney was a representative of Karnala or of some other dangerous organization with whom he was doing business.

This was the logic that led to the presence in the car of the two hulking, granite-faced men he’d just picked up in front of Darryl Becker’s gym. Apart from minimally identifying themselves as Dan and Frank and informing Gurney that Becker had filled them in and they “knew the routine,” they hadn’t said another word. They looked like linebackers on a prison football team, whose idea of communication was to smash into something at full speed, preferably another person.

As the car glided to a stop at the Ballston address, Gurney realized with a sinking feeling that his assumptions were, in reality, too iffy to support the course of action he was taking. Yet it was all he had. And he had to do something.

At his request, the two big men got out, and one of them opened his door. Gurney checked his watch. It was eleven forty-five. He put on his five-hundred-dollar Giacomo sunglasses and stepped out of the car in front of an ornate iron gate at the end of a yellow-pebbled driveway. The gate was the only break in the high stone wall that enclosed the oceanfront estate on its three land-facing sides. Like its neighbors on that stretch of luxury coastline, the property had been converted from a barrier sandbar of coarse grasses, sea oats, and saw palmettos into a lushly loamed and mulched botanical garden of frangipani, hibiscus, oleander, magnolia, and gardenia blossoms.

It smelled to Gurney like a gangster’s wake.

With his two hired companions standing by the car, radiating a barely suppressed violence, he approached the intercom on the stone pillar beside the gate. In addition to the camera built into the intercom, two separate security cameras were mounted on poles on either side of the driveway-at intersecting angles, which covered the approach to the gate as well as a wide segment of the adjacent boulevard. The gate was also directly observable from at least one second-floor window of the Spanish-style mansion at the end of the yellow driveway. In such a leafy, flowery environment, it said something about the owner’s obsessiveness that not a single fallen leaf or petal had been allowed to remain on the ground.

When Gurney pressed the intercom button, the response was immediate, the tone mechanically polite. “Good morning. Please identify yourself and the nature of your business.”

“Tell Jordan I’m here.”

There was a brief pause. “Please identify yourself and the nature of your business.”

Gurney smiled, then let the smile fade to zero. “Just tell him.”

Another pause. “I need to give Mr. Ballston a name.”

“Of course,” said Gurney, smiling again.

He recognized that he was at a fork in the road. He ran through the options and chose the one that offered the greatest reward, at the greatest risk.

He let the smile fade. “My name is Fuck You.”

Nothing happened for several seconds. Then there was a muted metallic click, and without another sound the gate swung slowly open.

One thing Gurney had forgotten to do in the rush to do everything else was to check the Internet for photos of Ballston. However, when the mansion door opened as he approached it, he had no doubt at all about the identity of the man standing there.

His appearance fulfilled the expectations one might have of a criminally decadent billionaire. There was a pampered look about his hair and skin and clothes; a disdainful set to his mouth, as though the world in general fell far below his standards; a self-indulgent cruelty in his eyes. There also seemed to be a sniffly twitch in his nose, suggestive of a coke addiction. It was abundantly apparent that Jordan Ballston was a man to whom nothing on earth was remotely as important as getting his own way, and getting it quickly, at whatever cost to others the process might entail.

He regarded Gurney with ill-concealed anxiety. His nose twitched. “I don’t understand what this is all about.” He looked past Gurney down the driveway at the well-guarded Mercedes, his eyes widening just a fraction.

Gurney shrugged, smiled like he was unsheathing a knife. “You want to talk outside?”

Ballston apparently heard this as a threat. He blinked, shook his head nervously. “Come in.”

“Nice pebbles,” said Gurney, ambling past Ballston into the house.

“What?”

“The yellow pebbles. In your driveway. Nice.”

“Oh.” Ballston nodded, looked confused.

Gurney stood in the middle of the grand foyer, affecting the gimlet eye of an assessor at a foreclosure. On the main wall facing him, between the curving arms of a double staircase, was a huge painting of a lawn chair-which he recognized from the art-appreciation course he’d attended with Madeleine a year and a half earlier, the course taught by Sonya Reynolds, the course that had launched him on his fateful mug-shot art “hobby.”

“I like that,” announced Gurney, pointing at it as though his benediction were a form of triage that saved it from the trash bin.

Ballston seemed vaguely relieved by the approval but no less confused.

“Guy’s a fucking faggot,” Gurney explained, “but his shit is worth a lot.”

Ballston made a hideous attempt at a grin. He cleared his throat but couldn’t seem to think of anything to say.

Gurney turned toward him, adjusting his sunglasses. “So, Jordan, you collect a lot of fag art?”

Ballston swallowed, sniffled, twitched. “Not really.”

“Not really? That’s very interesting. So where can we sit down and have a little talk?” From the trial-and-error experience of countless interrogations, Gurney had come to appreciate the unsettling effect of casual non sequiturs.

“Uh…” Ballston looked around him as though he were in someone else’s house. “In there?” He extended his arm cautiously toward a broad archway that led to an elegant, antique-furnished living room. “We could sit in there.”

“Wherever you’re comfortable, Jordan. We’ll sit down. Relax. Have a conversation.”

Ballston led the way stiffly to a pair of white-brocaded armchairs on opposite sides of a baroque card table. “Here?”

“Sure,” said Gurney. “Very nice table.” His expression contradicted the compliment. He sat down and watched Ballston do the same.

The man crossed his legs awkwardly, hesitated, uncrossed them, sniffled.

Gurney smiled. “Coke got you by the balls, huh?”

“Excuse me?”

“Not my concern.”

A long silence passed between them.

Ballston cleared his throat. It sounded dry. “So you… you said on the phone you’re a cop?”

“Right. I did say that. You got a good memory. Very important, a good memory.”

“That doesn’t look like a cop’s car out there.”

“Course not. I’m undercover, you know? Actually, I’m retired.”

“You always ride with bodyguards?”

“Bodyguards? What bodyguards? Why would I need bodyguards? Some friends gave me a ride, that’s all.”

“Friends?”

“Yeah. Friends.” Gurney sat back, stretching his neck from side to side, letting his gaze drift around the room. It was a room that could be on the cover of Architectural Digest. He waited for Ballston to speak.

Finally the man asked in a low voice, “Is there a particular problem?”

“You tell me.”

“Something must have brought you here… a specific concern.”

“You’re under a lot of pressure. Stress, you know?”

Ballston’s face tightened. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”

Gurney shrugged. “Stress is a terrible thing. It makes people… unpredictable.”

The tightness in Ballston’s face spread through his body. “I assure you the situation here will be resolved.”

“There’s a lot of different ways things get resolved.”

“I assure you that the situation will be resolved in a favorable way.”

“Favorable to who?”

“To… everyone concerned.”

“Suppose everyone’s interests don’t line up the same way.”

“I assure you that won’t be a problem.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that.” Gurney gazed lazily at the big pampered pig of a man across from him, allowing just enough of his disgust to seep through. “You see, Jordan, I’m a problem solver. But I got enough of them on my plate. I don’t want to be distracted by a new one. I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

Ballston’s voice was breaking. “There… won’t… be… any… new… problems.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“The problem this time was a freak one-in-a-million accident!”

“This time”? Mother of God, this is it! I’ve got the bastard! But for Christ’s sake, Gurney, don’t let it show. Relax. Take it easy. Relax.

Gurney shrugged. “That’s the way you see it, huh?”

“A fucking burglar, for shit sake! A fucking burglar who just happened to break in on exactly the wrong fucking night, the one fucking night that fucking cunt was in the fucking freezer!”

“So it was, like, a coincidence?”

“Of course it was a fucking coincidence! What else could it be?”

“I don’t know, Jordan. Only time anything ever went wrong, huh? Only time? You sure about that?”

“Absolutely!”

Gurney went back to stretching his neck slowly from side to side. “Too much fucking tension in this business. You ever try that yoga shit?”

“What?”

“You remember the Maharishi? What a fuckin’ hand job.”

“Who?”

“Before your time. I forget what a young man you are. So tell me, Jordan. How do we know nothing’s going to pop up and surprise us?”

Ballston blinked, sniffled, started to smile with jerky little movements of his lips.

“Did I ask a funny question?”

Ballston’s breathing became as jerky as his facial tics. Then his whole torso began to shake, and a series of sharp staccato sounds burst from his throat.

He was laughing. Horribly.

Gurney waited for the bizarre fit to subside. “You want to let me in on the joke?”

“Pop up,” said Ballston, the phrase triggering a renewed display of crazy machine-gun giggling.

Gurney waited, didn’t know what else to say or do. He remembered the wisdom an undercover partner had once shared with him: When in doubt, shut up.

“Sorry,” said Ballston. “No offense. But it’s such a funny image. Popping up! Two headless bodies, popping up out of the fucking ocean halfway to the fucking Bahamas! Shit, that is a picture!”

Mission accomplished! Probably. Maybe. Maintain credibility. Stay in character. Patience. See where it goes.

Gurney studied the fingernails on his right hand, then buffed their glossy surface on his jeans.

Ballston’s exhilaration faded.

“So you’re telling me everything’s under control?” asked Gurney, still buffing.

“Completely.”

Gurney nodded slowly. “So why am I still concerned?” When Ballston just stared at him, he continued. “Couple of things. Small questions. I’m sure you got good answers. First, suppose I was really a cop, or working for the cops. How the fuck do you know I’m not wired?”

Ballston smiled, looked relieved. “You see that thing on the credenza that looks like a DVD player? See the little green light? That would be a red light if there was any kind of recording or transmitting equipment operating anywhere in this room. It’s very reliable.”

“Good. I like reliable things. Reliable people.”

“Are you suggesting I’m not reliable?”

“How the fuck do you know I’m not a cop? How the fuck do you know that I’m not a cop who came here to find out exactly what you just told me with all that giggly crap, you fucking moron?”

Ballston looked like a rotten little boy who’d been slapped in the face. The ugly shock was replaced by an uglier grin. “Despite your opinion of me, I am an excellent judge of character. You don’t get as rich as I am by misreading people. So let me tell you something. The odds of you being a cop are about the same as the odds of the cops ever finding those headless cunts. I’m not going to lose sleep over either possibility.”

Gurney mirrored Ballston’s grin. “Confidence. Good. Very good. I like confidence.” Gurney stood suddenly. Ballston flinched. “Good luck, Mr. Ballston. We’ll be in touch if there are any unforeseen developments.”

As Gurney was passing through the front door, Ballston added a little twist. “You know, if I did think you were a cop, everything I told you would have been bullshit.”

Chapter 61

“Maybe that’s exactly what it was,” drawled Becker.

As Gurney emerged from the cool indulgence of the chauffeured Mercedes onto the broiling pavement in front of the airport terminal, he was on the phone to Darryl Becker, giving him as detailed a verbatim report as he could on his meeting with Jordan Ballston.

“I don’t think it was bullshit,” said Gurney. “I’ve had some experience with decompensating psychos. And I’d be willing to bet that some real energy was starting to come loose in that loony laugh and the image of decapitated women that went with it. But the bottom line is, we don’t have time to debate it. I strongly recommend you take what he said at face value and take immediate appropriate action.”

“I assume you’re not suggesting we search the Atlantic Ocean, so what are you suggesting?”

“The son of a bitch has a boat, right? He has to have a boat. Find the goddamn boat, put every tech you’ve got on it. Assume that he transported at least two bodies on that boat. Assume there’s still trace evidence somewhere on that boat-in some crack, crevice, corner-and don’t stop looking till you find it.”

“I hear what you’re saying. However, just to introduce a tiny speck of rational perspective here, let me point out that we don’t even know for a fact that Ballston has a boat. We don’t-”

Gurney broke in, “I’m telling you he has a boat. If anyone in this whole goddamn state owns a boat, he does.”

“As I was saying,” Becker drawled, “we have no evidence that he owns a boat, much less what kind of boat it might be, or where it might be, or when these alleged transportations of bodies took place, or whose bodies they were, or even if there were any bodies to begin with. You see my point?”

“Darryl, I have other calls to make. I’ll say this one last time. He has a boat. He’s had the bodies of at least two victims on it. Find the boat. Find the evidence. Do it now. We have to make this creep talk. We have to find out what the hell is going on. This thing is a lot bigger than Ballston, and I have a very bad feeling about it. A very urgent very bad feeling.” There was a silence too long for Gurney’s comfort. “You there, Darryl?”

“I promise nothing. We’ll do what we can do.”

As he made his way down an endless concourse to his flight gate, he placed a call to Sheridan Kline. He got Ellen Rackoff.

“He’s in court all afternoon,” she said. “Absolutely not interruptible.”

“How about Stimmel?”

“I think he’s in his office. You’d rather talk to him than to me?”

“It’s a practical need, not a personal preference.” Gurney couldn’t imagine wanting to talk to Kline’s relentlessly dour deputy. “There’s some super-urgent stuff he’s going to have to handle if Sheridan’s tied up.”

“Okay, just call this number again. If I don’t pick up, it’ll bounce over to him.”

He did what she said, and thirty seconds later Stimmel was on the line, his voice radiating all the charm of a swamp.

Gurney related enough of the story to convey his current view of the case: that it was potentially huge, that it combined elements of ruthless efficiency with sexual insanity, that Hector Flores and Jordan Ballston and the known deaths so far were just the visible pieces of an underground monster-and that if it turned out that as many as fifteen or twenty Mapleshade graduates were missing, then it was likely that all fifteen or twenty were going to end up raped, tortured, and decapitated.

He concluded, “Either you or Kline needs to get on the phone with the Palm Beach County district attorney within the next hour to accomplish two things. Number one, make sure that the PBPD is allocating sufficient resources to find Ballston’s boat and put it under a microscope ASAP. Number two, you guys need to convince the Palm Beach DA that full cooperation is the way to go here. You need to be very persuasive on the point that New York is holding the bigger end of the stick on this one-and that some kind of deal may have to be worked out with Ballston in order for us to get to Karnala Fashion, or whatever organization is at the root of whatever the hell is going on.”

“You think the DA in Florida is going to give Ballston a pass to make Sheridan’s life easier?” His tone made it plain he considered this idea absurd.

“I’m not talking about a pass. I’m talking about Ballston being made to understand that lethal injection is an absolute certainty for him unless he cooperates fully. And immediately.”

“And if he cooperates?”

“If he does-fully, truthfully, with no reservations-then maybe other outcomes could be considered.”

“That’s a tough sell.” Stimmel sounded like if he were the Florida DA, it would be an impossible sell.

“The fact is,” said Gurney, “getting Ballston to talk may be our only shot.”

“Our only shot at what?”

“A bunch of girls are missing. Unless we crack Ballston, I doubt we’ll ever find a single one of them alive.”

The rapid-fire pressures of the day caught up with Gurney on the second leg of the flight home, and his brain began shutting down. With the jet engines droning in his ears like a formless white noise, loosening his grip on the present, he drifted through unpleasant scenes and disjointed moments that hadn’t come to mind in over a decade: the visits he made to Florida after his parents moved from the Bronx to a rented bungalow in Magnolia, a little town that seemed to be the mother lode of bleakness and decay; a brown palmetto bug the size of a mouse, scuttling under the leafy detritus on the bungalow porch; tap water that tasted like recycled sewage but that his parents insisted had no taste at all; the times when his mother drew him aside to complain with tearful bitterness about her marriage, about his father, about his father’s selfishness, about her migraines, about her lack of sexual satisfaction.

Disturbing dreams, dark memories, and increasing dehydration through the remainder of the flight put Gurney in a state of anxious depression. As soon as he got off the plane in Albany, he bought a liter bottle of water at the inflated airport price and drank half of it on the way to the bathroom. In the relatively roomy wheelchair-accessible stall, he removed his chic jeans, polo shirt, and moccasins. He opened the Giacomo Emporium box he’d been carrying that contained his own original clothes and put them on. Then he put the new clothes into the box, and when he left the stall, he tossed the box into the garbage bin. He went to the basin and rinsed the gel out of his hair. He dried it roughly with a paper towel and looked at himself in the mirror, reassuring himself that he was again himself.

It was exactly 6:00 P.M., according to the parking booth’s clock, as he paid the twelve-dollar fee and the striped yellow barrier arm rose to let him pass. He headed for I-88 West with the late sun glaring through his windshield.

By the time he got to the exit for the county route that led from the interstate down through the northern Catskills to Walnut Crossing, an hour had passed; he’d finished his liter of water and was feeling better. It always surprised him that such a simple thing-you couldn’t get much simpler than water-could have such power to calm his thoughts. His emotional restoration gradually continued, and by the time he reached the little road that meandered up through the hills to his farmhouse, he was feeling close to normal.

He walked into the kitchen just as Madeleine was removing a roasting pan from the oven. She laid it on top of the stove, glanced at him with raised eyebrows, and said with a bit more sarcasm than surprise, “This is a shock.”

“Nice to see you, too.”

“Are you interested in having dinner?”

“I told you in the note I left for you this morning that I’d be home for dinner, and here I am.”

“Congratulations,” she said, getting a second dinner plate out of an overhead cabinet and laying it next to the one already on the countertop.

He gave her a narrow-eyed look. “Maybe we ought to try this again? Should I go out and come back in?”

She returned an extended parody of his look, then softened. “No. You’re right. You’re here. Get out another knife and fork, and let’s eat. I’m hungry.”

They filled their plates from the pan of roasted vegetables and chicken thighs and carried them to the round table by the French doors.

“I think it’s warm enough to open them,” she said-which he did.

As they sat down, a bath of sweetly fragrant air washed over them. Madeleine closed her eyes, a slow-motion smile wrinkling her cheeks. In the stillness Gurney thought he could hear the faint, soft cooing of mourning doves from the trees beyond the pasture.

“Lovely, lovely, lovely,” Madeleine half whispered. Then she sighed happily, opened her eyes, and began to eat.

At least a minute passed before she spoke again. “So tell me about your day,” she said, eyeing a parsnip on the tip of her fork.

He thought about it, frowning.

She waited, watching him.

He placed his elbows on the table, interlocking his fingers in front of his chin. “My day. Well. The highlight was the point at which the psychopath dissolved into giggles. A funny image occurred to him. An image involving two women he had raped, tortured, and decapitated.”

She studied his face, her lips tightening.

After a while he added, “So that’s the kind of day it was.”

“Did you accomplish what you set out to accomplish?”

He rubbed the knuckle of his forefinger slowly across his lips. “I think so.”

“Does that mean you’ve solved the Perry case?”

“I think I have part of the solution.”

“Good for you.”

A long silence passed between them.

Madeleine stood, picked up their plates, then the knives and forks. “She called today.”

“Who?”

“Your client.”

“Val Perry? You spoke to her?”

“She said that she was returning your call, that she had your home phone number with her but not your cell number.”

“And?”

“And she wanted you to know that three thousand dollars is not an amount of money you need to bother her about. ‘He should spend whatever the hell he needs to spend to find Hector Flores.’ That’s a quote. Sounds like an ideal client.” She let the dishes clatter into the sink. “What more could you ask for? Oh, by the way, speaking of decapitation…”

“Speaking of what?”

“The man in Florida you mentioned who decapitates people-it just reminded me to ask you about that doll.”

“Doll?”

“The one upstairs.”

“Upstairs?”

“What is this, the echo game?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m asking you about the doll on the bed in my sewing room.”

He shook his head, turned up his palms in bafflement.

There was a flicker of concern in her eyes. “The doll. The broken doll. On the bed. You don’t know anything about it?”

“You mean like a little girl’s doll?”

Her voice rose in alarm. “Yes, David! A little girl’s doll!”

He stood and walked quickly to the hall stairs, took two at a time, and in a matter of seconds was standing in the doorway of the spare bedroom Madeleine used for her needlework. The dying dusk threw only a dim gray light across the double bed. He flipped the wall switch, and a bright bedside lamp provided all the illumination he needed.

Propped against one of the pillows was an ordinary doll in a sitting position, unclothed-ordinary except for the fact that the head had been removed and was placed on the bedspread a few feet from the body, facing it.

Chapter 62

The dream was coming apart, cracking like the compartments of a brittle carton, no longer able to keep its unruly contents firmly in place.

Each night his scimitar victory over Salome was less clear, less certain. It was like an old-time television transmission being interrupted by a program on an adjoining frequency. Competing voices broke back and forth across each other. Images of Salome dancing were replaced in vivid flashes by those of another dancer.

In place of the strong and reassuring Vision of His Mission and His Method-the courage and conviction of John the Baptist-there were shards of memories, sudden sharp pieces he recoiled from, moments overwhelmingly familiar, nauseatingly familiar.

A woman dancing, her silky dress rising, showing her long legs, showing the little girls how to dance like Salome, how to dance in front of the little boys.

Salome doing the samba on a peach rug amid tropical plants, huge moist leaves, dripping. Showing the boys how to do the samba. How to hold her.

The peach rug and tropical plants were in her bedroom. She was showing him and his best friend from school how to do the samba. How to hold her.

The serpent moving from her mouth into his, searching, slithering.

Later he threw up, and she laughed. Threw up on the peach rug under the giant tropical plants, sweating, gasping. The world spinning, his stomach heaving.

She took him into the shower, her legs pressing against him.

She was crawling on the peach rug toward a boy and a girl, exhausted and inexhaustible. “Wait in the hall, darling.” Gasping. “I’ll be with you in a minute.” Her face gleaming with sweat, flushed. Biting her lip. Wild eyes.

Chapter 63

The BCI investigation team arrived in two installments-Jack Hardwick at midnight and the evidence team an hour later.

The techs in their white anticontamination suits were initially skeptical of a crime scene in which the only “crime” was the unexplained presence of a broken doll. They were accustomed to carnage, to the bloody remnants of mayhem and murder. So perhaps it was understandable that their first reactions were raised eyebrows and sideways glances.

Their initial suggestions-that the doll might have been put there by a visiting child or that it might be a practical joke-were perhaps understandable as well, but that did not make them tolerable to Madeleine, whose blunt question to Hardwick they probably overheard, judging by the expressions on their faces: “Are they drunk or just stupid?”

However, once Hardwick took them aside and explained the uncanny resemblance of the doll’s position to that of Jillian Perry’s body, they did as thorough and professional a job of processing the scene as if it had been riddled with bullets.

The results, unfortunately, didn’t amount to anything. All their fine-combing, print-lifting, and fiber- and soil-vacuuming efforts produced nothing of interest. The room contained the prints of one person, no doubt Madeleine’s. Ditto the few hairs found on the back of the chair by the window where Madeleine worked on her knitting. The inside of the frame of the adjoining window, the one Gurney was called upon to open when it got stuck, bore a second set, no doubt his. There were no prints on the body or head of the doll. The brand of doll was a popular one, sold at every Walmart in America. The downstairs entry doors had multiple prints identical to the prints found in the bedroom. No door or window in the house showed any sign of being forced. There were no prints on the outside of the windows. Luma-Lite examination of the floors showed no clear footprints that didn’t match either Dave’s or Madeleine’s shoe size. Examination of all the doors, banisters, countertops, faucets, and toilet handles for fingerprints produced the same results.

When the techs finally packed up their equipment and departed at around 4:00 A.M. in their van, they took with them the doll, the bedspread, and the throw rugs they had removed from the floor on either side of the bed.

“We’ll run the standard tests,” Gurney overheard them telling Hardwick on their way out, “but ten to one everything’s clean.” They sounded tired and frustrated.

When Hardwick came back into the kitchen and sat at the table across from him and Madeleine, Gurney commented, “Just like the scene in Ashton’s cottage.”

“Yeah,” said Hardwick with a bone-tired disconnectedness.

“What do you mean?” asked Madeleine, sounding antagonistic.

“The antiseptic quality of it all,” said Gurney. “No prints, no nothing.”

She made an almost agonized little sound in her throat. She took several deep breaths. “So… what… what are we supposed to do now? I mean, we can’t just…”

“There’ll be a cruiser here before I leave,” said Hardwick. “You’ll have protection for at least forty-eight hours, no problem.”

“No problem?” Madeleine stared at him, uncomprehending. “How can you…?” She didn’t finish the sentence, just shook her head, stood up, and left the room.

Gurney watched her go, at a loss for any comforting thing to say, as jarred by her emotion as he was by the event that had caused it.

Hardwick’s notebook was on the table in front of him. He opened it, found the page he wanted, and took a pen out of his shirt pocket. He didn’t write anything, just tapped idly with it on the open page. He looked exhausted and vaguely troubled.

“So…” he began. He cleared his throat. He spoke as if he were pushing the words uphill. “According to what I wrote down earlier… you were away all day.”

“Right. In Florida. Extracting a near confession from Jordan Ballston. Which I hope is being followed up as we speak.”

Hardwick laid down his pen, closed his eyes, and massaged them with his thumb and forefinger. When he opened them again, he looked back at his notebook. “And your wife told me she was out of the house all afternoon-from sometime around one till sometime around five-thirty-bike riding, then hiking through the woods. She does that a lot?”

“She does that a lot.”

“It’s a reasonable assumption, then, that the doll was… installed, shall we say, during that time window.”

“I’d say so,” said Gurney, becoming irritated at the reiteration of the obvious.

“Okay, so as soon as the morning shift comes on, I’ll send someone over to talk to your neighbors down the road. A passing car must be a big event up here.”

“Having live neighbors is a big event. There are only six houses on the road, and four of them belong to city people, only here on weekends.”

“Still, you never know. I’ll send someone over.”

“Fine.”

“You don’t sound optimistic.”

“Why the hell should I be optimistic?”

“Good point.” He picked up his pen and started tapping again on his notebook. “She says she’s sure she locked the doors when she went out. That sound right to you?”

“What do you mean, does it sound right?”

“I mean, is that something she normally does, lock the doors?”

“What she normally does is tell the truth. If she says she locked the doors, she locked the doors.”

Hardwick stared at him, seemed as if he were about to respond, and then changed his mind. More tapping. “So… if they were locked and there’s no sign of forced entry, that means someone came in with a key. You give keys to anyone?”

“No.”

“Any instances you can think of when your keys were out of your possession long enough for someone to make dupes?”

“No.”

“Really? Only takes twenty seconds to make a key.”

“I know how long it takes to make a key.”

Hardwick nodded, as though this were actual information. “Well, chances are, somebody got one somehow. You might want to change your locks.”

“Jack, who the hell do you think you’re talking to? This isn’t Home Safety Night at the PTA.”

Hardwick smiled, leaned back in his chair. “Right. I’m talking to Sherlock fucking Gurney. So tell me, Mr. Brilliant Fucking Detective, you have any bright ideas about this?”

“About the doll?”

“Yeah. About the doll.”

“Nothing that wouldn’t already be obvious to you.”

“That somebody’s trying to scare you off the case?”

“You have a better idea?”

Hardwick shrugged. He stopped tapping and began studying his pen as though it were a complex piece of evidence. “Anything else odd been happening?”

“Like what?”

“Like… odd. Have there been any other little… oddities in your life?”

Gurney uttered a short, humorless laugh. “Apart from every single aspect of this miserably odd case and all the miserably odd people involved in it, everything’s perfectly normal.” It wasn’t really an answer, and he suspected that Hardwick knew it wasn’t. For all the man’s bluster and vulgarity, he had one of the sharpest minds Gurney had encountered in all his years in law enforcement. He could easily have been a captain at thirty-five if he gave a damn about any of the things that captains need to give a damn about.

Hardwick looked up at the ceiling, his eyes following the crown molding as though it were the subject of what he was saying. “Remember the guy whose fingerprints were on that little cordial glass?”

A bad feeling seized Gurney’s stomach. “Saul Steck, aka Paul Starbuck?”

“Right. You remember what I told you?”

“You told me he was a successful character actor with a nasty interest in young girls. Got a psych commitment, eventually got out. What about him?”

“The guy who helped me lift the prints and run them through the system called me back last night with an interesting little addendum.”

“Yeah?”

Hardwick was squinting across the room at the farthest corner of the molding. “Seems that back before he was arrested, Steck used to have a porno website, and Starbuck wasn’t his only alias. His website, which featured underage girls, was called Sandy’s Den.”

Gurney waited for Hardwick’s gaze to return to him before replying. “You’re struck by the possibility that the name Sandy could be a nickname for Alessandro?”

Hardwick smiled. “Something like that.”

“World is full of meaningless coincidences, Jack.”

Hardwick nodded. He stood up from the table and looked out the window. “Cruiser’s here. Like I said, full coverage for two twenty-fours, minimum. After that, we’ll see. You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“She going to be okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I got to get home and get some sleep. I’ll call you later.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Jack.”

Hardwick hesitated. “You still have your weapon from the job?”

“No. Never liked carrying it. Didn’t even like having it around.”

“Well… considering the situation… you might want to pick up a shotgun.”

For a long while after Hardwick’s taillights receded down the pasture lane, Gurney sat alone at the table-absorbing the shock of the doll, contemplating the shifting landscape of the case.

It was conceivable, of course, that the names Sandy and Alessandro had each popped up with coincidental insignificance, but that was the definition of wishful thinking. A realistic man would have to accept that Sandy, the former photographer of the pornographic website, might very well be Alessandro, the current photographer of the near-pornographic Karnala ads-and that both names were aliases of the sex criminal Saul Steck.

But who was Hector Flores?

And why was Jillian Perry beheaded?

And Kiki Muller?

Had the women discovered something about Karnala? About Steck? About Flores himself?

And why had Steck drugged him? In order to photograph him with his “daughters”? To threaten him with public embarrassment, or worse? To have the leverage to control his input into the investigation? To blackmail him into providing inside information into its progress?

Or was the purpose of the drugging, like that of the decapitated doll, to demonstrate Gurney’s accessibility and vulnerability? To frighten him into backing away?

Or were both events prompted by something even sicker? Were they both part of a control freak’s game, an exciting way of demonstrating power and dominance? Something he did to prove he could do it? Something he did for a thrill?

Gurney’s hands were cold. He rubbed them hard against his thighs in an effort to warm them. It didn’t seem to be working very well. He started to shiver. He stood, tried rubbing his hands on his chest and upper arms, tried walking back and forth. He walked to the far end of the room, where sometimes the iron woodstove held some residual warmth from an earlier fire. But the dusty black metal was colder than his hand, and touching it made him shiver again.

He heard the click of the lamp switch in the bedroom, followed shortly by the squeak of the bathroom door. He’d talk to Madeleine, calm her nerves-after he managed to calm himself. He looked out the window, was reassured by the sight of the police cruiser by the side door.

He took the deepest breath he could, exhaled slowly. Slow, controlled breathing. Deliberation, determination. Positive thoughts. Thoughts of achievement and competence.

He reminded himself that the fingerprint trail that led to Steck existed because of his personal initiative in retrieving the glass under difficult circumstances.

That discovery had also connected the “Jykynstyl” drugging mystery with the Mapleshade murder-and-disappearance mysteries. And since he had a foot planted in each area, he was in a unique position to use one situation to illuminate the other.

His original insights and prodding had pulled the investigation out of the ditch it had been mired in-the search for an insane Mexican laborer-and put it on a new path.

His urging that all former Mapleshade graduates be contacted led not only to the discovery that the whereabouts of an extraordinary number of them were unknown but also to knowledge of the fate of Melanie Strum.

His judgment regarding the likely significance of Karnala had shaken loose a crazed revelation from Jordan Ballston that could well lead to a final solution.

Even the killer’s devotion of time, energy, and resources to the apparent goal of halting his efforts proved that he was on the right track.

He heard the bathroom door hinge squeak again and twenty seconds later the click of the lamp being switched off. Perhaps now that he had his feet on the ground, now that the chill was leaving his fingers, he could talk to Madeleine. But first he took the precaution of locking the side door not only with the knob lock but also with the dead bolt they never used. Then he latched all the ground-floor windows.

He went into the bedroom in what he considered to be a good frame of mind. He approached the bed in the dark. “Maddie?”

“You bastard!”

He’d expected her to be in bed, in front of him, but her voice, shocking in its anger, came from the far corner of the room.

“What?”

“What have you done?” Her voice, hardly above a whisper, was furious.

“Done? What…?”

“This is my home. This is my sanctuary.”

“Yes?”

“Yes? Yes? How could you? How could you bring this horror into my home?”

Gurney was rendered speechless by the question and by its intensity. He felt his way along the edge of the bed and turned on the lamp.

The antique rocker that was usually near the foot of the bed had been pushed into the corner farthest from the windows. Madeleine was sitting in it, still fully dressed, her knees pulled up in front of her body. Gurney was startled first by the raw emotion in her eyes, then by the sharp pair of scissors in each of her clenched fists.

He’d had much training and practice in the technique of talking an overwrought person down into a calmer state of mind, but none of it seemed appropriate at that moment. He sat on the corner of the bed closest to her.

“Someone invaded my home. Why, David? Why did they do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do! You know exactly what’s happening.”

He watched her, watched the scissors. Her knuckles were white.

“You’re supposed to protect us,” she went on in a trembling whisper. “Protect our home, make it safe. But you’ve done the opposite. The opposite. You’ve let horrible people come into our lives, come into our home. MY HOME!” she shouted at him, her voice breaking. “YOU LET MONSTERS INTO MY HOME!”

Gurney had never seen this kind of rage in her before. He said nothing. He had no words in his mind, not even thoughts. He hardly moved, hardly took a breath. The emotional explosion seemed to clear the room, the world, of all other realities. He waited. No other option occurred to him.

After a while, he wasn’t sure how long, she said, “I can’t believe what you’ve done.”

“This wasn’t my intention.” His voice sounded strange to him. Small.

She made a sound that might have been mistaken for laughter but sounded to him more like a brief convulsion in her lungs. “That horrible mug-shot art-that was the beginning. Pictures of the most disgusting monsters on earth. But that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough having them in our computer, having them on the screen staring at us.”

“Maddie, I promise you-whoever got into our house, I’ll find them. I’ll put an end to them. This will never happen again.”

She shook her head. “It’s too late. Don’t you see what you’ve done?”

“I see that war has been declared. We’ve been attacked.”

“No! You-don’t you see what you’ve done?”

“What I did is kick a rattlesnake out from under a rock.”

“You brought this into our lives.”

He said nothing, just bowed his head.

“We moved to the country. To a beautiful place. Lilacs and apple blossoms. A pond.”

“Maddie, I promise you, I’ll kill the snake.”

She seemed not to be listening. “Don’t you see what you’ve done?” She gestured slowly with one of her scissors to the dark window beside him. “Those woods, the woods where I take my walks, he was hiding in those woods, watching me.”

“What makes you think you were being watched?”

“God, it’s obvious! He put that hideous thing in the room I work in, the room I read in, the room with my favorite window, the window I sit next to with my knitting. The room overlooking the woods. He knew it was a room I used. If he’d put that thing in the spare bedroom across the hall, I might not have found it for a month. So he knew. He saw me in the window. And the only way he could see me in the window was from the woods.” She paused, stared at him accusingly. “You see what I mean, David? You’ve destroyed my woods. How can I ever walk out there again?”

“I’ll kill the snake. It’ll be all right.”

“Until you kick the next one out from under its rock.” She shook her head and sighed. “I can’t believe what you’ve done to the most beautiful place in the world.”

It seemed to Gurney that once in a while, unpredictably, the elements of an otherwise indifferent universe conspired to produce in him an eerie frisson, and so it was that at that very moment behind the farmhouse, beyond the high pasture, out on the northern ridge, the coyotes began to howl.

Madeleine closed her eyes and lowered her knees. She rested her fists on her lap and loosened her grip on the two scissors enough for the blood to flow back into her knuckles. She tilted her head back against the headrest of the chair. Her mouth relaxed. It was as though the howling of the coyotes, weird and unsettling to her at other times, touched her that night in an entirely different way.

As the first gray swath of dawn appeared in the bedroom’s east-facing window, she fell asleep. After a while Gurney took the scissors from her hands and switched off the light.

Chapter 64

As the yellow rays of the rising sun slanted across the pasture, Gurney sat at the breakfast table drinking a second cup of coffee. A few minutes earlier, he’d watched the changing of the guard as the day-shift trooper cruiser arrived to replace the one summoned by Hardwick. He’d gone out to offer the new trooper breakfast, but the young man had declined with crisp, military politeness. “Thank you, sir, but I’ve already had breakfast, sir.”

A dull sciatic ache had settled in Gurney’s left leg, as he grappled with questions whose resolutions were eluding his grasp like slippery fish.

Should he ask Hardwick to get him a copy of the mug shot that must have been taken at the time of Saul Steck’s arrest-so he could be sure there was no mistake about the fingerprints-or might the paper trail generated between BCI and the original prosecuting jurisdiction raise too many questions?

Should he ask Hardwick, or maybe one of his old partners at the NYPD, to check the city tax rolls for ownership information on the brownstone, or might even that simple exercise raise a chain of sticky questions?

Was there any reason to doubt Sonya’s claim to have been as thoroughly duped by the “Jykynstyl” story as he was-apart from the fact that she struck Gurney as the sort of woman not likely to be duped by anyone?

Should he get a shotgun for the house, or would Madeleine be more upset than reassured by its presence?

Should they move out, live in a hotel until the case was resolved? But suppose it wasn’t resolved for weeks, or months, or ever?

Should he follow up with Darryl Becker on the status of the search for Ballston’s boat?

Should he follow up with BCI on the progress of the calls being made to the Mapleshade graduates and their families?

Was everything that had happened-from the arrival of Hector Flores in Tambury through the murders of Jillian and Kiki and the disappearances of all those girls, right up to the complex brownstone deception, the Ballston sex murders, and the beheaded doll-was all that the product of a single mind? And if so, was the driving force of that mind a practical criminal enterprise or a psychotic mania?

Most disturbingly to Gurney, why was he finding these knots so difficult to untangle?

Even the simplest of questions-should he continue weighing alternatives, or return to bed and try to empty his mind, or busy himself physically-had become ensnared in a mental process that conjured an objection to every conclusion. Even the idea of taking a few ibuprofens for his aching sciatic nerve met with an unwillingness to go into the bedroom to get the bottle.

He stared out at the asparagus ferns, motionless in the dead morning calm. He felt disconnected, as though his customary attachments to the world had been broken. It was the same unmoored sense he’d had when his first wife announced her intention to divorce him, and years later when little Danny was killed, and again when his own father died. And now…

And now that Madeleine…

His eyes filled with tears. And as his sight grew blurry, he had the first perfectly clear thought he’d had in a long time. It was so simple. He would quit the case.

The purity and rightness of the decision was reflected in an immediate feeling of freedom, an immediate impulse to action.

He went into the den and called Val Perry.

He got her voice mail, was tempted to leave his resignation message, but felt that doing it that way was too impersonal, too avoidant. So he left a message saying only that he needed to speak to her as soon as possible. Then he got a glass of water, went into the bedroom, and took three ibuprofens.

Madeleine had moved from the rocking chair to the bed. She was still dressed, lying on top of the spread rather than under it, but she was sleeping peacefully. He lay down next to her.

When he awoke at noon, she was no longer there.

He felt a small stab of fear, relieved a moment later by the sound of the kitchen sink running. He went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, brushed his teeth, changed his clothes-did the things that would make it feel as much as possible like a new day.

When he went out to the kitchen, Madeleine was transferring some soup from a large pot to a plastic storage container. She put the container in the refrigerator and the pot in the sink and dried her hands on a dish towel. Her expression told him nothing.

“I’ve made a decision,” he said.

She gave him a look that told him she knew what he was about to say.

“I’m backing out of the case.”

She folded the towel and hung it over the edge of the dish drainer. “Why?”

“Because of everything that’s happened.”

She studied him for a few seconds, turned, and looked thoughtfully out the window nearest the sink.

“I left a message for Val Perry,” he said.

She turned back toward him. Her Mona Lisa smile came and went like a flicker of light. “It’s a beautiful day,” she said. “Do you want to come for a little walk?”

“Sure.” Normally he would have resisted the suggestion or, at best, accompanied her reluctantly, but at that moment he had no resistance in him.

It had turned into one of those soft September days when the temperature outside was the same as inside, and the only difference he sensed as they stepped out onto the little side porch was the leafy smell of the autumn air. The trooper sitting in his cruiser by the asparagus patch lowered his window and looked questioningly at them.

“Just stretching our legs,” said Gurney. “We’ll stay in sight.”

The young man nodded.

They followed the swath they kept mowed along the edge of the woods to prevent saplings from encroaching on the field. They circled slowly down to the bench by the pond, where they sat in silence.

It was quiet around the pond in September-unlike May and June, when the croaking frogs and screeching blackbirds maintained a constant territorial ruckus.

Madeleine took his hand in hers.

He lost track of time, a casualty of emotion.

At some point Madeleine said softly, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“My expectation… that everything should always be exactly the way I want it.”

“Maybe that’s the way everything should be. Maybe the way you want things is right.”

“I’d like to think so. But… I doubt that it’s true. And I don’t think you should give up the job you agreed to do.”

“I’ve already made up my mind.”

“Then you should change your mind.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a detective, and I have no right to demand that you should magically turn into something else.”

“I don’t know much about magic, but you have every right in the world to ask me to see things another way. And God knows I have no right at all to put anything ahead of your safety and happiness. Sometimes… I look at things I’ve done… situations I’ve created… dangers I didn’t pay enough attention to-and I think I must be insane.”

“Maybe sometimes,” she said. “Maybe just a little.” She looked out over the pond with a sad smile and squeezed his hand. The air was perfectly still. Even the tops of the tall cattail rushes were as motionless as a photograph. She closed her eyes, but the expression on her face grew more poignant. “I shouldn’t have attacked you the way I did, shouldn’t have said what I did, shouldn’t have called you a bastard. That’s the last thing on earth anyone should ever call you.” She opened her eyes and looked directly at him. “You’re a good man, David Gurney. An honest man. A brilliant man. An amazingly talented man. Maybe the best detective in the whole world.”

A nervous laugh burst from his throat. “God save us all!”

“I’m serious. Maybe the best detective in the whole world. So how can I tell you to stop being that, to be something else? It’s not fair. It’s not right.”

He looked out over the glassy pond at the upside-down reflections of the maples that grew on the far side. “I don’t see it in those terms.”

She ignored his response. “So here’s what you should do. You agreed to take on the Perry case for two weeks. Today is Wednesday. Your two weeks will be up this Saturday. Just three more days. Finish the job.”

“There’s no need for me to do that.”

“I know. I know you’re willing to give it up. Which is exactly what makes it all right not to.”

“Say that again?”

She laughed, ignoring his question. “Where would they be without you?”

He shook his head. “I hope you’re joking.”

“Why?”

“The last thing on earth I need is for my arrogance to be reinforced.”

“The last thing on earth you need is a wife who thinks you should be someone else.”

After a while they ambled, hand in hand, back up through the pasture, nodded pleasantly to their bodyguard, and went into the house.

Madeleine made a small cherrywood fire in the big fieldstone fireplace, opening the window next to it to keep the room from getting too warm.

For the rest of the afternoon, they did something they rarely did: nothing at all. They lounged on the couch, letting themselves be lazily hypnotized by the fire. Later Madeleine thought out loud about possible planting changes in the garden for the following spring. Still later, perhaps to keep a flood of worries at bay, she read a chapter of Moby-Dick aloud to him-both pleased and perplexed by what she continued to refer to as “the most peculiar book I’ve ever read.”

She tended the fire. He showed her pictures of garden pavilions and screened gazebos in a book he’d picked up months earlier at Home Depot, and they talked about building one next summer, maybe by the pond. They dozed on and off, and the afternoon passed. They had an early supper of soup and salad while the sunset was still bright in the sky, illuminating the maples on the opposite hillside. They went to bed at dusk, made love with a kind of tenderness that grew quickly into a desperate urgency, slept for over ten hours, and awoke simultaneously at the first gray light of dawn.

Chapter 65

Gurney had finished his scrambled eggs and toast and was about to take his plate to the sink. Madeleine looked up at him from her bowl of oatmeal and raisins and said, “I assume you’ve forgotten already where I’m going today.”

Over supper the night before, he’d persuaded her with some difficulty to spend the next couple of days with her sister in New Jersey-a prudent precaution, under the circumstances-while he wrapped up his commitment to the case. But now he wrinkled his face in concentration, making a show of bafflement. She laughed at his exaggerated expression. “Your undercover acting technique must have been a lot more persuasive than that. Or you were dealing with idiots.”

After she finished her oatmeal and had a second cup of coffee, she took a shower and got dressed. At eight-thirty she gave him a tight hug and a kiss, a worried look, then another kiss, and left for her sister’s suburban palace in Ridgewood.

When her car was well down the road, he got into his own car and followed her. Knowing the route she would take, he was able to stay far behind her, keeping her only occasionally in sight. His goal was not to follow her but to make sure no one else was following her.

After a few deserted miles, he was sure enough, and he returned home.

As he parked by the trooper’s car, they exchanged small, friendly salutes.

Before going into the house, he stood by the side door and looked around. He had for a moment a timeless feeling, the feeling of standing in a painting. As he entered the house, the feeling of peace was disturbed by his cell phone with the short ring that signaled the arrival of a text message-and utterly shattered by the message itself:

SORRY I MISSED YOU THE OTHER DAY. I’LL TRY AGAIN. HOPE YOU ENJOY THE DOLL.

Gurney felt an irrational impulse to charge into the woods, as though the message had been sent by someone who was at that moment lurking behind a tree trunk watching him-to shout obscenities at his invisible foe. Instead he read the message again. It included the originating number, unblocked, just like the previous messages, making it a virtual certainty that the cell phone was the untraceable prepaid variety.

It might be helpful to know the originating cell tower location, but that was a process with some sticky strings attached.

Since the intrusion of the doll into the house had been reported, it had the status of an open investigation. In that context an anonymous text message referring to the doll was a form of evidence that should be reported. However, a cell-records warrant with its ensuing data search would reveal that previous text messages had been sent to Gurney’s number from the same phone, and that he had replied to them. He felt trapped in a box of his own making, a box in which every solution would create a bigger problem.

He cursed himself for his ego-driven agreement to take on one more murder case no one else could solve; for his ego-driven willingness to let Sonya Reynolds back into his life; for his ego-driven blindness to the Jykynstyl deception; for his ego-driven desire to keep the consequences, and possible photographs, from Madeleine; for the absurd and dangerous bind in which he now found himself.

But cursing himself for his failings was getting him nowhere. He had to do something. But what?

The phone ringing on the kitchen sideboard answered the question for him.

It was Sheridan Kline, exuding his oiliest enthusiasm. “Dave! Glad you picked up. Get on your horse, my friend. We need you here pronto.”

“What’s happening?”

“What’s happening is that Darryl Becker of Palm Beach’s Finest found Ballston’s boat, just like you said he would. Guess what else he found.”

“I’m not a guesser.”

“Hah! Fact is, you made a damn good guess about that boat-and the possibility that the Palm Beach techs would find something on it. Well, they did. They found a tiny bloodstain… which generated a rush DNA profile… which triggered a CODIS near hit… which produced a change of heart on the part of Mr. Ballston. Or at least it produced a change in his legal strategy. He and his attorney are now in full-cooperation-to-avoid-lethal-injection mode.”

“Back up a second,” said Gurney. “The CODIS near hit-whose name popped up?”

“Worked the same way it worked with Melanie Strum-a first-degree family relationship, in this case a convicted child molester by the name of Wayne Dawker. Same last name as a Mapleshade girl, Kim Dawker, who went missing three months before Melanie. Turns out Wayne is Kim’s older brother. Ballston’s lawyers might be good enough to wiggle around one dead girl on his hands, but not two.”

“How’d they get the CODIS response so fast?”

“The phrase ‘serial murder conspiracy’ could be a motivator. Or maybe somebody in Palm Beach just happens to have the right phone number.” Kline sounded envious.

“Either way is fine with me,” said Gurney. “What’s next?”

“This afternoon Becker will be conducting a formal interrogation of Ballston, which Ballston has agreed to. We’ve been invited to participate through a computer-conferencing process. We witness the interrogation on a computer monitor and transmit any questions we want asked. I’ve insisted you be included.”

“What’s my role?”

“Submit the right question at the right time? Figure out how forthcoming he’s being? You’re the one who knows this creep best. Hey-speaking of creeps-I heard you had a little unauthorized-entry incident at your house.”

“You could call it that. Kind of unnerving at first, but… I’m sure we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

“Looks like someone doesn’t want you on the case-you figure that’s what it is?”

“I don’t know what else it could be.”

“Well, we can talk about it when you get here.”

“Right.” In fact, Gurney had no desire whatever to talk about it. As long as he could remember, he’d recoiled from the discussion of anything remotely connected to his own vulnerability. It was the same dysfunctional form of damage control that was keeping him from being less than forthcoming with Madeleine about his Rohypnol fears.

The police academy’s computer-video equipment had been updated more recently than BCI’s, so it was in the academy’s teleconferencing center that everyone gathered shortly before two that afternoon. The “center” was a conference room whose main feature was a flat-screen monitor mounted on the front wall. A semicircular table with a dozen chairs faced the screen. The attendees were all familiar to Gurney. Some, like Rebecca Holdenfield, he was happier to see than others.

He was relieved to note that they all seemed absorbed in their anticipation of what was about to occur-too absorbed to start asking about the doll and its implications.

Sergeant Robin Wigg was sitting at a small separate table in a corner of the room with two open laptops, a cell phone, and a keyboard with which she seemed to be controlling the monitor on the wall. As she tapped at the keys, the screen displayed a series of digital artifacts and numerical codes, then sprang to high-definition life-and quickly became the focus of everyone’s attention.

It showed a standard interrogation room with concrete-block walls. In the center of the room was a gray metal table. On one side of it sat Detective Darryl Becker. Facing him on the other side were two men. One looked like he’d stepped out of a GQ article on America’s best-dressed attorneys. The other was Jordan Ballston, in whom a devastating transformation had taken place. He looked sweaty and rumpled. His body sagged, his mouth was slightly open, and his hollow gaze was fixed on the table.

Becker turned crisply to the camera. “We’re about ready to get started. Hope we’re loud and clear at the remote location. Please confirm that.” He stared at the screen of a laptop facing him on the table.

Gurney heard Wigg tapping on her keyboard.

A few moments later, Becker smiled at his screen and gave a happy thumbs-up sign.

Rodriguez, who’d been conferring in whispers with Kline, stepped to the front of the room. “Listen up, people. We’re here to witness an interrogation, to which we’ve been invited to contribute. As the result of the discovery of new evidence on his property-”

“Bloodstains on his boat, found as the result of Gurney’s nudging,” interrupted Kline. He loved to stir the pot, keep the animosities boiling.

Rodriguez blinked and continued. “As a result of this evidence, the defendant has changed his story. In an effort to escape the certainty of the Florida death penalty, he’s offering not only to confess to the Melanie Strum murder but to provide details regarding a larger criminal conspiracy-a conspiracy that may relate to the apparent disappearances of other Mapleshade graduates. You should note that the defendant is making this statement to save his life and may be motivated to say more than he actually knows about this so-called conspiracy.”

As if to discount the captain’s caution, Hardwick called across the room to Gurney, who was seated at the opposite end of the half-moon table. “Congratulations, Sherlock! You ought to consider a career in law enforcement. We need brains like yours.”

A voice from the monitor on the wall redirected everyone’s attention.

Chapter 66

“It’s now 2:03 P.M., September twentieth. This is Detective Lieutenant Darryl Becker of the Palm Beach Police Department. With me in Interrogation Room Number One are Jordan Ballston and his attorney Stanford Mull. This interrogation is being recorded.” Becker looked from the camera to Ballston. “Are you Jordan Ballston of South Ocean Boulevard, Palm Beach?”

Ballston answered without raising his eyes from the table. “Yes, I am.”

“Have you agreed after consultation with your attorney to make a complete and truthful statement regarding the murder of Melanie Strum?”

Stanford Mull put his hand on Ballston’s forearm. “Jordan, I must-”

“Yes, I have,” said Ballston.

Becker went on. “Do you agree to answer fully and truthfully all questions put to you in regard to this matter?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Please describe in detail how you came into contact with Melanie Strum and everything that occurred thereafter, including how and why you killed her.”

Mull looked agonized. “For Godsake, Jordan-”

Ballston looked up for the first time. “Enough, Stan, enough! I’ve made my decision. You’re not here to get in my way. I just want you to be fully aware of everything I say.”

Mull shook his head.

Ballston seemed relieved by his attorney’s silence. He looked up at the camera. “How large an audience do I have?”

Becker looked disgusted. “Does it matter?”

“The damnedest things end up on YouTube.”

“This won’t.”

“Too bad.” Ballston smiled horribly. “Where should I begin?”

“At the beginning.”

“You mean when I saw my uncle fucking my mother when I was six years old?”

Becker hesitated. “Why don’t you start by telling us how you met Melanie Strum?”

Ballston leaned back in his chair, addressing his answer in an almost dreamy tone to a point somewhere high on the wall behind Becker. “I acquired Melanie through the special Karnala process. The process involves a branching journey through a sequence of portals. Now, each of these portals-”

“Hold on. You need to describe this in plain English. What the hell is a portal?”

Gurney wanted to tell Becker to relax, let the man speak, ask the questions later. But telling Becker what to do at this point could derail him completely.

“I’m talking about website links and passages. Internet sites offering choices of other sites, chat rooms leading to other chat rooms, always in the direction of exploring narrower and more intense interests, and finally leading to a direct one-on-one e-mail or text-message correspondence between customer and provider.” In light of the underlying subject matter, Ballston’s professorial tone struck Gurney as surreal.

“You mean you tell them what kind of girl you want and they deliver her?”

“No, no, nothing as abrupt or crude as that. As I said, the Karnala process is special. The price is high, but the methodology is elegant. Once the direct correspondence has proven satisfactory on both sides-”

“Satisfactory? In what way?”

“In the way of credibility. The people at Karnala become convinced of the seriousness of the customer’s intentions, and the customer becomes convinced of Karnala’s legitimacy.”

“Legitimacy?”

“What? Oh, I see your problem. I mean legitimacy in the sense of being who you claim to be and not, for example, the agent of some pathetic sting operation.”

Gurney was fascinated by the dynamics of the interrogation. Ballston, who was implicating himself in a capital crime for which he was bargaining to receive a less-than-capital sentence, seemed to be drawing a sense of control from his own calm narrative. Becker, nominally in charge, was the rattled one.

“Okay,” said Becker, “assuming that everyone ends up satisfied with everyone else’s legitimacy, what then?”

“Then,” said Ballston, pausing dramatically and looking Becker in the eye for the first time, “the elegant touch: the Karnala ads in the Sunday Times.”

“Say that again?”

“Karnala Fashion. Featuring the highest clothing prices on the planet: one-of-a-kind outfits, custom-designed for you, at a hundred thousand dollars and up. Lovely ads. Lovely girls. Girls wearing nothing but a couple of diaphanous scarves. Very stimulating.”

“What’s the relevance of these ads?”

“Think about it.”

Ballston’s creepy gentility was getting to Becker. “Shit, Ballston, I don’t have time for games.”

Ballston sighed. “I’d have thought it was obvious, Lieutenant. The ads aren’t for the clothes. They’re for the girls.”

“You’re telling me the girls in the ads are for sale?”

“Correct.”

Becker blinked, looked incredulous. “For a hundred thousand dollars?”

“And up.”

“So then what? You send off a check for a hundred grand, and they FedEx you the world’s highest-priced hooker?”

“Hardly, Lieutenant. You don’t order a Rolls-Royce from a magazine ad.”

“So you… what? Visit the Karnala showroom?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. The showroom is actually a screening room. Each of the currently available girls, including the girl featured in the advertisement, introduces herself in her own intimate video.”

“You talking about individual porno movies?”

“Something much better than that. Karnala operates at the most sophisticated end of the business. These girls and their video presentations are remarkably intelligent, wonderfully subtle, and carefully preselected to meet the customer’s emotional needs.” The tip of Ballston’s tongue ran idly across his upper lip. Becker looked like he might explode out of his chair. “I think what you’re failing to grasp, Lieutenant, is that these are girls with very interesting sexual histories, girls with intense sexual appetites of their own. These are not hookers, Lieutenant, these are very special girls.”

“That’s what makes them worth a hundred grand?”

Ballston sighed indulgently. “And up.”

Becker nodded blankly. The man appeared to Gurney to be lost. “A hundred grand… for nymphomania… sophistication…?”

Ballston smiled softly. “For being exactly what one wants. For being the glove that fits the hand.”

“Tell me more.”

“There are some very good wines available for fifty dollars a bottle, wines that achieve ninety percent of perfection. A far smaller number, available for five hundred dollars a bottle, achieve ninety-nine percent of perfection. But for that final one percent of absolute perfection-for that you’ll pay five thousand dollars a bottle. Some people can’t tell the difference. Some can.”

“Damn! Here’s ordinary little me, thinking that a pricey hooker is just a pricey hooker.”

“For you, Lieutenant, I’m sure that’s the ultimate truth.”

Becker went rigid in his chair, his face expressionless. Gurney had seen that look too many times in his career. What followed it was usually unfortunate, occasionally career-ending. He hoped the camera and the presence of Stanford Mull, Esquire, would be effective deterrents.

Apparently they were. Becker slowly relaxed, looking around the room for a long minute, looking everywhere except at Ballston.

Gurney wondered what Ballston’s game was. Was he calculatedly trying to ignite a violent reaction in exchange for a legal advantage? Or was his laid-back condescension an effort to demonstrate his superiority as his life collapsed?

When Becker spoke, his voice was unnaturally casual. “So tell me about that screening room, Jordan.” He articulated the name in a way that sounded oddly insulting.

If Ballston heard it that way, he ignored it. “Small, comfortable, lovely carpet.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. When I was picked up at Newark Airport, I was given a blindfold-one of those sleeping masks you see in old black-and-white movies. I was told by the driver to put it on and not take it off until I was informed that I was in the screening room.”

“And you didn’t cheat?”

“Karnala is not an organization that encourages cheating.”

Becker nodded, smiled. “Do you think they might consider what you’re telling us today a form of cheating?”

“I’m afraid they might,” said Ballston.

“So you look at these… videos and… you see something you like. What then?”

“You verbally accept the terms of the purchase, you replace your blindfold, and you are driven back to the airport. You arrange for a wire transfer of the purchase price to a bank-account number in the Cayman Islands, and a few days later the girl of your dreams rings your doorbell.”

“And then?”

“And then… whatever one wishes to happen… happens.”

“And the girl of your dreams ends up dead.”

Ballston smiled. “Of course.”

“Of course?”

“That’s what the transaction is all about. Didn’t you know that?”

“All about… killing them?”

“The girls Karnala provides are very bad girls. They’ve done terrible things. In their videos they describe in detail what they’ve done. Unbelievably terrible things.”

Becker moved back slightly in his chair. He was clearly in over his head. Even Stanford Mull’s poker face had assumed a certain rigidity. Their reactions seemed to energize Ballston. Life seemed to be flowing back into him. His eyes brightened.

“Terrible things that require terrible punishments.”

There was a kind of universal pause, maybe two or three seconds, in which it seemed that no one in the Palm Beach interrogation room or the BCI teleconferencing room was breathing.

Darryl Becker broke the spell with a practical question in a routine tone of voice. “Let’s be perfectly clear on this. You killed Melanie Strum?”

“That’s correct.”

“And Karnala had sent other girls to you?”

“Correct.”

“How many others?”

“Two prior to Melanie.”

“How much did you know about them?”

“About the boring details of their day-to-day existences, nothing. About their passions and their transgressions, everything.”

“Did you know where they came from?”

“No.”

“How Karnala recruited them?”

“No.”

“Did you ever try to find out?”

“That was specifically discouraged.”

Becker leaned back from the table and studied Ballston’s face.

As Gurney watched Becker on the screen, it looked to him as if the man was stalling, overwhelmed by his introduction to a level of sickness he hadn’t anticipated, trying to figure out where to go next with the interrogation.

Gurney turned to Rodriguez. The captain looked every bit as nonplussed as Darryl Becker by Ballston’s revelations and nonchalance.

“Sir?” At first Rodriguez seemed not to hear him. “Sir, I’d like to send a request down to Palm Beach.”

“What kind of request?”

“I want Becker to ask Ballston why he cut off Melanie’s head.”

The captain’s faced twitched in revulsion. “Obviously because he’s a sick, sadistic, murdering creep.”

“I think it could be useful to ask the question.”

Rodriguez looked pained. “What else could it be, other than part of his disgusting ritual?”

“Like cutting off Jillian’s head was part of Hector’s ritual?”

“What’s your point?”

Gurney’s tone hardened. “It’s a simple question, and it has to be asked. We’re running out of time.” He knew that Rodriguez’s horrendous difficulties with his crack-addict daughter were compromising the man’s ability to deal directly with a case so close to home, but that was not Gurney’s largest concern.

Rodriguez’s face reddened, an effect heightened by the contrast with his starched white collar and dyed black hair. After a moment he turned toward Wigg with an air of surrender. “Man has a question. ‘Why did Ballston cut off her head?’ Send it.”

Wigg’s fingers tapped rapidly on her keyboard.

On the teleconferencing monitor, Becker was pressing Ballston about where Karnala got the girls, and Ballston was reiterating his total lack of knowledge in that area.

Becker looked like he was considering yet another way to pursue this when his attention was drawn to his laptop, apparently to the question Wigg had just transmitted. He looked up at the camera and nodded before switching subjects.

“So, Jordan, tell me… why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Kill Melanie Strum in that particular way.”

“I’m afraid that’s a private matter.”

“Private, hell. The deal was we ask questions, you answer them.”

“Well…” Ballston’s bravado was fading. “I would say it was partly a matter of personal preference, and…” He looked for the first time in the interrogation mildly anxious. “I have to ask you something, Lieutenant. Are you referring to… the whole process… or simply the removal of the head?”

Becker hesitated. The banal tone of the conversation seemed to be twisting his grip on reality. “For now… let’s say we’re mainly concerned about the removal.”

“I see. Well, the removal was, shall we say, a courtesy.”

“It was a what?”

“A courtesy. A gentlemen’s agreement.”

“An agreement… to do what?”

Ballston shook his head in despair, like the sophisticated tutor of a dull student. “I think I’ve explained the basic arrangement, and Karnala’s expertise in catering to the psychological dimension, their ability to provide a unique product. You did understand all that, Lieutenant?”

“Yeah, I understood it fine.”

“They’re the ultimate source of the ultimate product.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“As a condition for an ongoing business relationship, they did have that one small stipulation.”

“The stipulation being that you cut off the victim’s head?”

“After the process. An addendum, if you will.”

“And the purpose of this ‘addendum’ was… what?”

“Who knows? We all have our preferences.”

“Preferences?”

“It was suggested that it was important to someone at Karnala.”

“Jesus. Did you ever ask them to explain that?”

“Oh, my, Lieutenant, you really don’t know the first thing about Karnala, do you?” Ballston’s weird serenity level was rising in direct proportion to Becker’s consternation.

Chapter 67

At the conclusion of Jordan Ballston’s initial interrogation-the first of three that had been scheduled so that questions raised by the first could be revisited, questions that had been omitted could be asked, and the full scope of Ballston’s dealings with Karnala could be probed and documented-the teleconferencing transmission was terminated.

When the monitor went blank, Blatt was the first to speak. “What an evil scumbag!”

Rodriguez took a spotless handkerchief from his pocket, removed his wire-rimmed glasses, and began polishing them distractedly. It was the first time Gurney had seen him with his glasses off. Without them his eyes looked smaller and weaker, the skin around them older.

Kline slid his chair back from the table. “Damn! Don’t believe I’ve ever witnessed an interrogation quite like that. What’d you think, Becca?”

Holdenfield arched her eyebrows. “Care to be more specific?”

“Do you buy that incredible story?”

“If you’re asking me do I think he was telling the truth as he sees it, the answer is yes.”

“Evil scumbag like that has no regard for the truth,” said Blatt.

Holdenfield smiled, addressed Blatt as she might a well-meaning child. “An accurate observation, Arlo. Telling the truth would not rank high among Mr. Ballston’s values. Unless he thought it would save his life.”

Blatt persevered. “I wouldn’t trust him to take out the garbage.”

“I’ll tell you what my reaction is,” announced Kline. He waited for all of them to give him their attention. “Assuming that his statements are accurate, Karnala may be one of the most depraved criminal enterprises ever uncovered. The Ballston piece of it, horrendous as it may be, is likely just the tip of an iceberg-an iceberg from hell.”

The harsh, single-syllable laugh that erupted from Hardwick was only partially concealed as a cough, but Kline’s dramatic momentum carried him on. “Karnala sounds like a large, disciplined, ruthless operation. The authorities in Florida have grabbed one small appendage: one customer. But we have the opportunity to expose and destroy the whole enterprise. Our success could make the difference between life and death for Lord only knows how many young women. Speaking of which, Rod, this might be a good time for a progress report on the calls to the graduates.”

The captain put his glasses on, then took them off again. It was as though the twists of the case and its personal echoes were challenging his ability to function. “Bill,” he said with some effort, “give us the data from the interviews.”

Anderson swallowed a chunk of doughnut and washed it down with a mouthful of coffee. “Of the hundred and fifty-two names on our list, calls have now been completed to or returned by at least one household member in a hundred and twelve cases.” He shuffled through the papers in his folder. “Of those hundred and twelve, we’ve broken out the responses into a number of categories. For example-”

Kline looked restless. “Can we cut to the chase here? Just the number of girls who are not locatable, especially if they had the car argument before leaving home?”

Anderson did some more shuffling, went through half a dozen sheets of paper half a dozen times. He finally announced that twenty-one girls’ whereabouts were unknown to their families, and seventeen of them had had the car argument-including those mentioned by Ashton and by Savannah Liston.

“So it seems that the pattern is holding up,” said Kline. He switched his attention to Hardwick. “Anything new on the Karnala connection?”

“Nothing new-just that the Skards definitely run it and Interpol thinks the Skards these days are mainly into sex slavery.”

Blatt looked interested. “How about being a little more explicit about this ‘sex slavery’ thing?”

Surprisingly, Rodriguez spoke up immediately, his voice full of anger. “I think we all know exactly what it is-the most revolting business on earth. The scum of the earth as sellers, the scum of the earth as buyers. Think about it, Arlo. You’ll know you have the right picture when it makes you want to vomit.” His intensity created an uneasy silence in the room.

Kline cleared his throat, his face screwed up in a kind of exaggerated disgust. “My own concept of sex trafficking involves Thai peasant girls being shipped to fat Arabs. Are we imagining something like that is happening with Mapleshade girls? I’m having a hard time seeing that. Can someone please enlighten me? Dave, you have any comment?”

“No comment on the Thai-Arab observation, but I do have two questions. First, do we believe that Flores is connected to the Skards? And if so, what does that suggest? I mean, since the Skard operation is a family affair, is it possible that Flores-”

“Might be a Skard himself?” Kline slapped his hand on the table. “Damn, why not?”

Blatt scratched his head in an unconscious parody of confusion. “What are you saying? That Hector Flores is actually one of those boys whose mother was screwing all the coke dealers?”

“Wow!” said Kline. “That would give the whole affair a new center of gravity.”

“More like two centers of gravity,” said Gurney.

“Two?”

“Money and sexual pathology. I mean, if this were simply a financial venture, why the weird Edward Vallory stuff?”

“Hmm. Good question. Becca?”

She looked at Gurney. “Are you suggesting there’s a contradiction?”

“Not a contradiction, just a question about which is the dog and which is the tail.”

Her interest seemed to increase. “And your conclusion?”

He shrugged. “I’ve learned never to underestimate the power of pathology.”

Her lips moved in a slight smile of agreement. “The Interpol background summary I was given indicated Giotto Skard had three sons: Tiziano, Raffaello, Leonardo. If Hector Flores is one of them, the question is, which one?”

Kline stared at her. “You have an opinion about that?”

“It’s more of a guess than a professional opinion, but if we assign a high value to sexual pathology as a motive in the case, then I’d probably lean toward Leonardo.”

“Why?”

“He’s the one the mother took with her when Giotto finally kicked her out. He’s the one who was with her the longest.”

“You saying that could turn you into a homicidal maniac?” asked Blatt. “Being close to your mother?”

Holdenfield shrugged. “That depends on who your mother is. Being close to a normal female parent is very different from being the object of prolonged abuse by a sociopathic drug addict and sexual predator like Tirana Zog.”

“I get that,” interjected Kline. “But how would the crazy effects of that kind of upbringing-the lunacy, rage, instability-how would that fit into what appears to be a highly organized criminal enterprise?”

Holdenfield smiled. “Insanity is not always an obstacle to the achievement of one’s goals. Joseph Stalin isn’t the only paranoid schizophrenic who made his way to the top. Sometimes there’s a malignant synergy between pathology and the pursuit of practical objectives. Especially in brutal enterprises like the sex trade.”

Blatt looked intrigued. “So you’re saying nutcases make the best gangsters?”

“Not always. But let’s assume for a moment that your Hector Flores is really Leonardo Skard. And that being raised by a psychotic, promiscuous, incestuous mother made him more than a little bit crazy. Let’s also assume that the Skard organization, through Karnala, is as involved in high-end prostitution and sex slavery as BCI’s contacts at Interpol claim and as Jordan Ballston’s confession confirms.”

“Lot of assumptions,” said Anderson, trying to extract another doughnut crumb from the fibers of his napkin.

“Good assumptions, in my opinion,” said Kline.

“And if those assumptions are true,” said Gurney, “then Leonardo seems to have found himself the perfect job.”

“What perfect job?” asked Blatt.

“A job that neatly combines the family business with his personal hatred of women.”

Kline’s initial expression of puzzlement gave way to amazement. “The job of a recruiter!”

“Exactly,” said Gurney. “Suppose Skard-aka Flores-came to Mapleshade specifically to identify and recruit young women who might be persuaded to satisfy the sexual needs of wealthy men. Of course, he’d describe the arrangement in a way that would appeal to their own needs and fantasies. They’d never know, until it was too late, that they were being delivered into the hands of sexual sadists who intended to kill them-men like Jordan Ballston.”

Blatt’s eyes widened. “That is some extremely sick shit.”

“Profit and pathology, hand in hand,” said Gurney. “I knew more than one hit man who thought of himself as a businessman who just happened to be in a business most people didn’t have the stomach for. Like embalming. He talked about it as though it were primarily a source of income and only secondarily about killing people. Of course, the truth is the opposite. Killing is about killing. It’s about an icy kind of hatred-which the hit man converts into a business. Maybe that’s what we’re seeing here.”

Anderson crumpled his napkin into a ball. “We’re getting kind of theoretical, aren’t we?”

“I think Dave is right on point,” said Holdenfield. “Pathology and practicality. Leonardo Skard, in the guise of Hector Flores, may be making his living by arranging for the torture and beheading of women who remind him of his mother.”

Rodriguez rose slowly from his chair. “I think this might be a good time to take a break here. Okay? Ten minutes. Restrooms. Coffee. Et cetera.”

“Just one final point,” said Holdenfield. “With all the talk about Jillian Perry being killed on her wedding day, has it occurred to anyone that it was also Mother’s Day?”

Chapter 68

Kline, Rodriguez, Anderson, Blatt, Hardwick, and Wigg left the room. Gurney was about to follow when he saw Holdenfield, still in her chair, removing a set of photocopies from her briefcase-photocopies of several Karnala ads. She spread them out in front of her. He walked around to her side of the table and gazed down at them. They had a different impact on him now-presenting a harsher image of disorder and deception-since Ballston had revealed their purpose.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Mapleshade supposedly provides some sort of remediation for unhealthy sexual fixations. Christ, if what I’m seeing in the faces of these young women reflects the benefit of therapy, what the hell were they like before?”

“Worse.”

“Jesus.”

“I’ve read some of Ashton’s journal articles. His goals are modest. Minimal, really. His critics say his approach borders on the immoral. The faith-based therapists can’t stand him. He believes in aiming not for major reorientations but for the smallest possible changes. One comment he made at a professional seminar became famous, or infamous. Ashton enjoys shocking his peers. He said if he could persuade a ten-year-old girl to perform fellatio on her twelve-year-old boyfriend instead of her eight-year-old cousin, he would consider the therapy a complete success. In some circles that approach is a tad controversial.”

“Progress, not perfection, eh?”

“Right.”

“Still, when I look at these expressions…”

“One thing you have to remember-the success rate in the field is not high. I’m sure that even Ashton fails more often than he succeeds. That’s just a fact of life. When you’re dealing with sex offenders…”

But Gurney had stopped listening to her.

Good God, why hadn’t it registered before?

Holdenfield was staring at him. “What is it?”

He didn’t answer immediately. There were implications to be considered, decisions to be made regarding how much to say. Crucial decisions. But making any decision at that moment was beyond his ability. He was nearly paralyzed by the realization that the bedroom in the photo was the room he’d stepped into to hide from the cleaning people the night he retrieved the little absinthe glass. He’d seen it for only a fraction of a second when he’d switched the light on and off to get his bearings. At the time it had triggered a strange sense of déjà vu-because he’d already seen the layout of the room in the photo of Jillian on Ashton’s wall, but that night in the brownstone he hadn’t been able to put the two images together.

“What is it?” Holdenfield repeated.

“It’s hard to explain,” he said, which was largely true. His voice was strained. He couldn’t take his eyes off the ad closest to him. The girl was crouched on a rumpled bed, appearing both exhausted and inexhaustible-inviting, threatening, daring. He was jarred by a flashback from a religious retreat in his freshman year at St. Genesius: a wild-eyed priest ranting about hellfire. A fire that burns for all eternity, that eats at your screaming flesh like a beast whose hunger grows with every bite.

Hardwick was the first to return to the conference room. He glanced at Gurney, the ad photo, and Holdenfield, and he seemed to sense immediately the tension in the air. Wigg returned next and took up her station in front of her laptop, followed by a glum Anderson and an antsy Blatt. Kline came in speaking on his cell, trailed by Rodriguez. Hardwick sat across from Gurney, watching him curiously.

“All right,” said Kline, again with the air of a man accomplishing a great deal. “Back on track. Following up on the question of the true identity of Hector Flores: Rod, I believe there was a plan to conduct some reinterviews of Ashton’s neighbors to make sure no details about Flores had slipped through the cracks first time around. How’s that going?”

Rodriguez looked for a moment like he was going to excoriate the whole exercise as a waste of time. Instead he turned to Anderson. “Anything new on that?”

Anderson folded his arms across his chest. “Not a single significant new fact.”

Kline shot Gurney a challenging glance-since the reinterviewing idea had been his.

Gurney wrenched his mind back to the discussion and turned to Anderson. “Did you manage to sort out the actual eyewitness stuff, which is scarce, from the hearsay stuff, which is endless?”

“Yeah, we did that.”

“And?”

“There’s kind of a problem with the eyewitness data.”

“What’s that?” interjected Kline.

“The eyewitnesses are mostly dead.”

Kline blinked. “Say that again?”

“The eyewitnesses are mostly dead.”

“Christ, I heard you. Tell me what you mean.”

“I mean, who actually spoke to Hector Flores? Or to Leonardo Skard, or whatever the hell we’re calling him now? Who had face-to-face contact? Jillian Perry, and she’s dead. Kiki Muller, and she’s dead. The girls who Savannah Liston saw talking to him when he was working on Ashton’s flower bed at Mapleshade, and they’re all missing-possibly dead, if they ended up with guys like Ballston.”

Kline looked skeptical. “I thought people saw him in the car with Ashton, or in town.”

“What they saw was somebody in a cowboy hat and sunglasses,” said Anderson. “None of them can provide a physical description worth a shit, excuse my language. We got a boatload of colorful anecdotes, but that’s about it. Seems like everybody is telling us stories that somebody else told them.”

Kline nodded. “That dovetails perfectly with the Skard reputation.”

Anderson gave him a sideways look.

“The Skards are supposedly ruthless about eliminating real witnesses. Seems like anyone who could finger one of the Skard boys ends up dead. What do you think, Dave?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

Kline gave him an odd look. “I’m asking if you think that the diminishing number of people who could ID Flores reinforces the idea that he might be one of the Skard boys.”

“To tell you the truth, Sheridan, at this point I’m not sure what I think. I keep wondering if anything that occurs to me about this case is true. My fear is that I’m missing something big that would explain everything. I’ve worked a hell of a lot of homicide cases over the years, and I’ve never worked one that felt as wrong as this one. It’s like there’s a definite elephant in the room that none of us is seeing.”

Kline sat back thoughtfully. “This may not be the elephant in the room, but I do have a question that keeps bothering me about the missing girls. I understand the car thing, that the girls are all legally adults, that they told their parents not to try to find them, but… don’t any of you find it peculiar that not a single parent notified the police?”

“I’m afraid there’s a sad, simple answer to your question,” said Holdenfield slowly, after a long silence. The oddly softened tone of her voice drew everyone’s attention. “Given a plausible explanation for their daughters’ departures and a request for no further contact, I suspect that the parents were secretly pleased. Many parents of aggressively troublesome children have a terrible fear they’re ashamed to admit: that they’ll be saddled with their little monsters forever. When the monsters finally leave, for whatever reason, I think the parents feel relief.”

Rodriguez looked sick. He stood quietly and headed for the door, his sallow skin ashen. Gurney guessed that Holdenfield had just hit the man’s most sensitive nerve dead-on, a nerve that had been exposed, prodded, needled, and battered from the moment the case had veered from his hunt for a Mexican gardener to a probe of disordered family relationships and sick young women. That nerve had been rubbed so raw over the past week it perhaps wasn’t surprising that a man of already limited flexibility was turning into a basket case.

The door opened before Rodriguez got to it. Gerson stepped in with a tinge of alarm on her lean face, effectively blocking his way. “Excuse me, sir, an urgent call.”

“Not now,” he muttered vaguely. “Maybe Anderson… or someone…”

“Sir, it’s an emergency. Another Mapleshade-related homicide.”

Rodriguez stared at her. “What?”

“A homicide-”

“Who?”

“A girl by the name of Savannah Liston.”

It seemed to take a few seconds for the news to register-as though he were listening to a translation. “Right,” he said finally, and followed her out of the room.

When he returned five minutes later, the vague speculations that had been drifting around the table in his absence were replaced by an eager attentiveness.

“Okay. Everyone is here who needs to be here,” he announced. “I’m only going to go through this once, so I suggest you take notes.”

Anderson and Blatt pulled out small identical notebooks and pens. Wigg’s fingers were poised over her laptop keys.

“That was Tambury police chief Burt Luntz. He called from his present location, a bungalow rented by Savannah Liston, an employee of Mapleshade.” There was strength and purpose in the captain’s voice, as though the task of passing along information had put him, at least temporarily, on solid ground. “At approximately five o’clock this morning, Chief Luntz received a phone call at his home. In what sounded to Luntz like a Spanish accent, all the caller said was, ‘Seventy-eight Buena Vista, for all the reasons I have written.’ When Luntz asked the caller for his name, his response was ‘Edward Vallory calls me the Spanish Gardener.’ At that point the caller hung up.”

Anderson frowned at his watch. “This was at five A.M.-ten hours ago-and we’re just hearing about it now?”

“Unfortunately, the call didn’t set off an alarm with Luntz. He just assumed it was a wrong number or the guy was drunk or maybe both. He’s not privy to the details of our investigation, so the Edward Vallory references meant nothing to him. Then, about half an hour ago, he got a call from a Dr. Lazarus at Mapleshade saying that they had an employee, normally responsible, who didn’t show up for work today, wasn’t answering her phone, and-considering all the crazy things going on-could Luntz send one of his local patrol cars by her house to make sure everything was all right? Then he gives the address as Seventy-eight Buena Vista Trail, which rings a bell, so Luntz drives over there himself.”

Kline was leaning forward in his chair like a sprinter on his mark. “And finds Savannah Liston dead?”

“He finds the back door unlocked, with Liston at the kitchen table. Same configuration as Jillian Perry.”

“Exactly the same?” asked Gurney.

“Apparently.”

“Where is Luntz now?” asked Kline.

“In the kitchen, with some Tambury uniforms on the way to set up a perimeter and secure the scene. He’s already gone through the house-lightly, just to verify that no one else is present. Hasn’t touched anything.”

“Did he say if he noticed anything odd?” asked Gurney.

“One thing. A pair of boots by the door. The kind you slip on over your shoes. Sound familiar?”

“The boots again. Jesus. There’s something about the boots.” Gurney’s tone held Rodriguez’s attention. “Captain, I know it’s not my place to… to try to influence your allocation of resources, but… may I make a suggestion?”

“Go ahead.”

“I would recommend that you get those boots to your lab people immediately, keep them here all night if you have to, and have them run every goddamn chemical-recognition test they can.”

“Looking for what?”

“I don’t know.”

Rodriguez made a face, but not as bad a one as Gurney had feared. “Based on nothing, that’s a hell of a shot in the dark, Gurney.”

“The boots have shown up twice. Before they show up again, I’d like to know why.”

Chapter 69

Anderson, Hardwick, and Blatt were dispatched to the Buena Vista scene, along with an evidence team selected by Sergeant Wigg, and a K-9 team. The ME’s office was notified. Gurney asked if he could accompany the BCI people to the scene. Rodriguez predictably refused. But he did give Wigg the assignment of coordinating and expediting lab work on the boots. Kline said something about agreeing on a damage-control strategy for a scheduled press conference, and he and the captain went off to confer privately, leaving Gurney and Holdenfield alone in the conference room.

“So?” she said. It was half a question, half an amused observation.

“So?” he repeated.

She shrugged, glanced at her briefcase, in which she had replaced her copies of the Karnala ads.

He guessed she wanted to know more about his earlier disturbed reaction. He’d already told her it was hard to explain. And he still wasn’t ready to talk about it, still hadn’t figured out the implications of full disclosure, still hadn’t figured out the damage-control options.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“I’d love to hear it.”

“I’d love to tell you about it, but… it’s complicated.” The first part was less true than the second part. “Maybe another time.”

“Okay.” She smiled back. “Another time.”

With no chance of direct access to the lab techs and no other compelling reason to hang around the state police campus, Gurney headed home to Walnut Crossing, with the day’s wild bits and pieces swirling through his head.

Ballston’s surreal confession, the genteel voice emanating from a hellish mind, describing his compliance with Karnala’s beheading request as a courtesy, the beheading of Savannah Liston echoing the beheaded doll on the bed echoing the beheaded bride at the table. And the rubber boots. Once again, the boots. Did he really think the lab tests would produce a revelation? He was too worn out from the day to know what he really thought.

The call he got from Sheridan Kline as he was finishing a bowl of leftover spaghetti added facts without adding progress. In addition to repeating everything Rodriguez had passed along from Luntz, Kline revealed that a bloodstained machete had been discovered by the K-9 team in a wooded area behind the bungalow and that the ME estimated the time of death to be roughly within a three-hour window of the cryptic predawn call Luntz had received.

There were many times in his career when Gurney had felt challenged. There were occasionally cases, such as the recent Mellery horror, in which he believed that the challenger might win. But never had he felt so broadly outmaneuvered. Sure, he had a general theory for what might be going on and who might be behind it-the whole Skard operation, with “Hector Flores” recruiting “bad girls” for the murderous pleasure of the sickest men on earth-but it was just a theory. And even if it were valid, it still didn’t come close to explaining the twisty mechanics of the murders themselves. It didn’t explain the impossible placement of the machete behind Ashton’s cottage. It didn’t explain the function of the boots. It didn’t explain the choice of the local victims.

Why, exactly, did Jillian Perry, Kiki Muller, and Savannah Liston all have to die?

Worst of all, without knowing why those three were killed, how would it be possible to protect whoever else might be in danger?

After exhausting himself by exploring the same blind alleys over and over, Gurney fell asleep around midnight.

When he awoke seven hours later, a gusty wind was heaving waves of gray rain against the bedroom windows. The window next to his bed-the only one in the house he’d left unlocked-was open two inches at the top, not enough to let the rain blow in but more than enough to admit a damp draft that made his sheets and pillow feel clammy.

The dismal atmosphere, the lack of light and color in the world, tempted him to stay in bed, uncomfortable as it was, but he knew that would be an emotional mistake, so he forced himself up and into the bathroom. His feet were cold. He turned on the shower.

Thank God, he thought once again, for the primal magic of water.

Cleanser, restorer, simplifier. As the tingling hot spray massaged his back, the muscles in his neck and shoulders relaxed. His knotted, hyperactive thoughts began to dissolve in the water’s soothing rush. Like surf hissing over sand… like a benign opiate… the pelting of the water on his skin made life seem simple and good.

Chapter 70

After a modest breakfast of two eggs and two slices of plain toast, Gurney decided to reground himself, as tedious as that might be, in the original facts of the case.

He spread out the segments of the file on the dining table and, with a spark of contrariness, reached for the document he’d had the most difficulty concentrating on when he’d gone through everything originally. It was a fifty-seven-page printout listing all the hundreds of sites Jillian had visited on the Internet and the hundreds of search terms she had entered in the browsers on her cell phone and her laptop during the last six months of her life-mostly related to chic travel destinations, super-expensive hotels, cars, jewelry.

After this personal computer and Web-usage data had been acquired by BCI, however, no analysis had been performed. Gurney suspected that it was just another piece of the investigation that had disappeared into the crevasse separating Hardwick’s stewardship from Blatt’s. The only indication that anyone other than himself had even seen it was a handwritten comment on a sticky note affixed to the first page: “Complete waste of time and resources.”

Perversely, Gurney’s suspicion that the comment was the captain’s had intensified his attention to every line of those fifty-seven pages. And without that attention boost, he might very well have missed one little five-letter word halfway down page thirty-seven.

Skard.

It appeared again on the following page, and twice more a few pages later.

The discovery propelled Gurney through the rest of the document, then back through all fifty-seven pages one more time. It was during this second pass that he made his second discovery.

The car makes that were scattered among the search terms-makes that at first had blended in his mind with the names of resorts, boutiques, and jewelers into a general image of material comfort-now formed a special pattern of their own.

He realized that they were the very same makes that had been the subjects of the missing girls’ arguments with their parents.

Could that be a coincidence?

What the hell had Jillian been up to?

What was it she needed to know about those cars? And why?

More important, what was she trying to find out about the Skard family?

How had she come to know they existed?

And what kind of relationship did she have with the man she’d known as Hector Flores?

Was it business? Or pleasure? Or something much sicker?

A closer look at the automobile URLs revealed that they were the proprietary advertising websites maintained by the companies to provide model, feature, and pricing information.

The search term “Skard” led to a site with information about a small town in Norway, as well as to a number of other sites with no connection to the Sardinia-based crime family. Which meant that Jillian had already learned in some other way about the family’s existence, or at least the existence of that name, and her Internet search was an attempt to find out more.

Gurney went back to the master list and noted the dates of her car and Skard searches. He discovered that she’d visited the car sites months before searching the Skard name. In fact, the car searches went back to the beginning of the six-month time window that had been documented, and he wondered how long she’d been pursuing that kind of data. He made a note to suggest to BCI that they get an expanded warrant for her search records going back at least two years.

Gurney stared out at the wet landscape. An intriguing, if highly speculative, scenario was beginning to take shape-a scenario in which Jillian may have played a much more active…

A low rumble from the road below the barn interrupted his train of thought. He went to the kitchen window, which offered the longest view in that direction, and noticed that the police cruiser was gone. He looked at the clock and realized that the promised forty-eight-hour protection window had expired. However, another vehicle, the source of the throaty engine rumble, now distinctly louder, came into view down at the point where the town road blended into the Gurney driveway.

It was a red Pontiac GTO, a seventies classic, and Gurney knew only one person who owned one-Jack Hardwick. The fact that he was driving the GTO instead of a black Crown Victoria meant he was off duty.

Gurney went to the side door and waited. Hardwick emerged from the car in old blue jeans and a white T-shirt under a well-worn motorcycle jacket-a retro tough guy stepping out of a time machine.

“This is quite a surprise,” said Gurney.

“Just thought I’d drop by, make sure you weren’t getting any more doll gifts.”

“Very thoughtful. Come on in.”

Inside, Hardwick said nothing, just let his gaze wander around the room.

“You drove a long way in the rain,” said Gurney.

“Rain stopped an hour ago.”

“No kidding. Guess I didn’t notice.”

“You look like your brain’s on another planet.”

“Then I guess it must be,” said Gurney with a sharper edge than he’d intended.

Hardwick showed no reaction. “That woodstove save you money?”

“What?”

“That woodstove, does it save you money on oil?”

“How the hell should I know? What are you here for, Jack?”

“Can’t a guy drop in on a buddy? Just to shoot the shit?”

“Neither one of us is the kind of guy who ever drops in on anyone. And neither of us has any interest in shooting the shit. So what are you here for?”

“Man wants to get to the point. Okay, I can respect that. No wasted time. How about you make some coffee and offer me a seat?”

“Right,” said Gurney. “I’ll make coffee. You sit wherever you want.”

Hardwick ambled to the far end of the big room and studied the stonework of the old fireplace. Gurney plugged in the coffeemaker and started the brewing process.

A few minutes later, they were facing each other in the pair of armchairs by the hearth.

“Not bad,” said Hardwick after a sip of his coffee.

“No, it’s actually pretty good. What the hell do you want, Jack?”

He took another sip before answering. “I thought maybe we could trade some information.”

“I don’t think I have anything worth trading.”

“Oh, yeah you do. No doubt about that. So what do you say? I tell you stuff, you tell me stuff.”

Gurney felt a surprising surge of anger. “Okay, Jack, why the hell not? You go first.”

“I spoke to my friend at Interpol again. Pushed him a bit on that ‘Sandy’s Den’ thing. And guess what? It was also called ‘Alessandro’s Den.’ Sometimes one, sometimes the other. That come as a big shock to you?”

“How could it be a shock?”

“Last time we talked about it, you seemed pretty sure it was all a coincidence. You don’t still think that, do you?”

“I guess not. There can’t be that many Alessandros in the sexy-photo business.”

“Right. So you got your little absinthe glass from Saul Steck, who happens to work under the name Alessandro for Karnala Fashion taking pictures of Mapleshade girls who shortly thereafter disappear. So tell me, ace, what the fuck are you up to? And by the way, while you’re explaining that, how about you explain the look on your face yesterday afternoon when you were staring over Holdenfield’s shoulder at that Karnala ad.”

Gurney leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and raised his coffee cup slowly to his lips. He took a few leisurely sips before opening his eyes. Still holding the cup in front of his mouth, he looked over at Hardwick. The man was in the identical position, his cup raised, watching Gurney. They traded small ironic smiles and lowered their cups to the arms of their chairs.

“Well,” began Gurney, “when all else fails, even the wicked sometimes need to fall back on honesty as the only way out.” Elbowing the potential consequences from his mind, he went on to tell Hardwick the whole Sonya-Mug Shot Art-Jykynstyl-amnesia story, including the ensuing text messages and his belated recognition of the brownstone bedroom in the Karnala ads. When he came to the end, he discovered that his coffee had gotten cold, but he finished it anyway.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” said Hardwick. “You realize what you’ve done to me?”

“Done to you?”

“By telling me all that shit, you’ve put me in the same fucking position you’re in.”

Gurney felt a huge sense of relief but didn’t think it would be a good idea to say so. Instead he said, “So what do you think we ought to do?”

“What do I think? You’re the fucking genius who failed to disclose significant new evidence in a felony investigation, which in itself is a felony. And telling me these things, you have now put me in the position of-guess what?-concealing significant new evidence in a felony investigation, which in itself is a felony. Unless, of course, I go immediately to Rodriguez and hang your ass out to dry. Jesus, Gurney! Now you ask me, what do I think we ought to do? And don’t think I didn’t pick up on that ‘we’ shit you dropped into the discussion. You’re the fucking genius who created this mess. What do you think needs to be done?”

The more agitated Hardwick got, the more relieved Gurney felt-because, perversely, it meant that Hardwick was committed to keeping his confession in confidence for the duration.

“I think if we solve the case,” said Gurney calmly, “the mess will take care of itself.”

“Oh, shit, yeah, sure. Why didn’t I think of that? Just solve the case! What a neat idea!”

“Let’s at least talk it through, Jack, see what we agree on, what we don’t agree on, get all the possibilities on the table. We may be closer to a solution than we think.” As soon as he said that, he realized he didn’t believe it, but to backtrack at this point would make him sound like he was losing it. Maybe he was.

Hardwick gave him a doubtful look. “Go ahead, Sherlock. I’m all ears, lay it out. I just hope that whatever the hell drug they gave you didn’t fry your brain.”

He wished Hardwick hadn’t said that. He got another cup of coffee and settled back in his chair.

“Okay, this is the way I picture it. It sort of looks like an H.”

“What looks like an H?”

“The structure of what’s happening. I just tend to see things geometrically. One of the verticals of the H is the established Skard family business-basically the worldwide sale of illegal, expensive forms of sexual gratification. According to your Interpol people, the Skards are a uniquely vicious and predatory crime family. Through Karnala, according to Jordan Ballston, they operate at the ugliest and most lethal S &M extremes of the sex business-selling carefully selected young women to wealthy sexual psychopaths.”

Hardwick was nodding in agreement.

Gurney went on. “The other vertical in the H is the Mapleshade Residential Academy. You already know most of this, but let me talk it through. Mapleshade treats girls with intensely disordered sexual obsessions, obsessions that lead to reckless predatory behavior. In recent years they’ve been focusing exclusively on that clientele and have become well known in the field-due to Scott Ashton’s huge academic reputation. He’s quite a star in that corner of psychopathology. Suppose the Skards became aware of Mapleshade and saw its potential.”

“Its potential for them?”

“Right. Mapleshade provided a concentrated population of intensely sexualized victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse. To the Skards it would look like-forgive my choice of words-the ultimate gourmet meat market.”

Hardwick’s pale blue eyes seemed to be searching for possible cracks in Gurney’s logic. After a few seconds, he said, “I can see that. What’s the crossbar on your H?”

“The crossbar connecting the Skards to Mapleshade is the man who called himself Hector Flores. It would seem that his way into Mapleshade was to make himself useful to Ashton, gain his trust, offer to do little jobs around the school.”

“But remember, none of the girls disappeared while they were still students.”

“No. That would have set off an instant alarm. There’s a vast difference between a ‘child’ disappearing from boarding school and an ‘adult’ choosing to leave home. I imagine he approached girls who were about to graduate, felt them out in a general way, proceeded cautiously, made specific offers only to the ones he knew would accept, then instructed them how to leave home without arousing suspicion, maybe even arranged for their transportation. Or that might have been handled by someone else in the organization, maybe by the same person who made the videos of the young women talking about their sexual obsessions.”

“That would be your buddy, Saul Steck-aka Alessandro, aka Jay Jykynstyl.”

“Entirely possible,” said Gurney.

“How would Flores have explained the need for the car argument?”

“He could have told them it was a necessary precaution, to make sure no one launched a mis-per hunt and located them with their new benefactor, creating embarrassment all around, ruining the deal.”

Hardwick nodded. “So Flores lays the big con on these wacko babes like he’s running a hot dating service-matches made in hell. Of course, once the young lady enters the gentleman’s home-without leaving any trace of where she’s gone-she discovers that the arrangement is not what she’d imagined. But at that point it’s too late to back out. Because the sick piece of shit who bought her has no intention of ever letting her see the light of day again. Which is fine with the Skards. More than fine, if we believe Ballston’s story about the icing on the cake, the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ to top off the process with a tasteful beheading.”

“That about sums it up,” said Gurney. “The theory is that Hector Flores, or Leonardo Skard, if that’s his true identity, was the prime facilitator of a kind of homicidal matchmaking service for dangerous sex maniacs-some more dangerous than others. Of course, it’s still just a theory.”

“Not a bad one,” said Hardwick, “as far as it goes. But it doesn’t explain Jillian Perry getting whacked on her wedding day.”

“I think that Jillian may have gotten involved with Hector Flores and that she may have learned at some point who he really was-maybe that his real name was Skard.”

“Involved with him how? Why?”

“Maybe Hector needed a helper. Maybe Jillian was his first con job when he arrived at Mapleshade three years ago, when she was still a student there. Maybe he made some promises to her. Maybe she was his little mole among the other students, helping him select likely candidates. And maybe she finally outlived her usefulness, or maybe she was even crazy enough to try to blackmail him after finding out who he was. Her mother told me she loved living on the edge-and you can’t get any closer to the edge than threatening a member of the Skard family.”

Hardwick looked incredulous. “So he cut off her head on her wedding day?”

“Or Mother’s Day, as Becca pointed out.”

“Becca?” Hardwick raised a leering eyebrow.

“Don’t be an asshole,” said Gurney.

“And what about Savannah Liston? Another Flores mole who outlived her usefulness?”

“It’s a workable hypothesis.”

“I thought she was the one who told you last week about a couple of girls she couldn’t get in touch with. If she was working with Flores, why would she do that?”

“Maybe he told her to. Maybe to give me the idea that I could trust her, confide in her. He might have realized that the investigation was going into high gear, and of course that would mean that we’d be talking to Mapleshade graduates. So it would only be a matter of time-and not much time at that-before we found out that a significant number of those graduates were unreachable. He might have been letting Savannah give me that fact a couple of days before we would have found out anyway-to create the impression that she was one of the good guys.”

“Do you think she knew… that she and Jillian both knew…?”

“Knew what was happening to the girls they were helping Flores recruit? I doubt it. They probably swallowed the basic sales pitch Hector was serving up-just introducing girls with special interests to men with special interests and earning a nice commission for their efforts. Of course, I don’t know any of that for sure. It’s possible that this whole case is one big trapdoor to hell, and I don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on.”

“Shit, Gurney. Your total lack of faith in your own theories is really encouraging. What do you suggest for our next move?”

Gurney was saved from the discomfort of having no answer by the ring of his cell phone.

It was Robin Wigg. She began, as usual, without any preamble. “I have preliminary results from the lab tests on the boots found in the Liston residence. Captain Rodriguez has authorized me to discuss them with you, since they were performed at your suggestion. Is this a convenient time?”

“Absolutely. What have you got?”

“A lot of what you might expect, plus something you wouldn’t expect. Shall I start with that?” There was something about Wigg’s calm, businesslike contralto that Gurney had always liked. Regardless of the content of the words, the tone said that order could prevail over chaos.

“Please. The solutions are usually in the surprises.”

“Yes, I find that to be true. The surprise was the presence on the boots of a particular pheromone: methyl p-hydroxybenzoate. How knowledgeable are you in this area?”

“I skipped chemistry in high school. You’d better start at the beginning.”

“Actually, it’s pretty simple. Pheromones are glandular secretions meant to transmit information from one animal to another. Specific pheromones secreted by an individual animal may attract, warn, calm, or excite another individual. Methyl p-hydroxybenzoate is a powerful canine-attractant pheromone, and it was identified in high concentrations on both boots.”

“And the effect of that would be…?”

“Any dog, but especially a tracking dog, would easily and eagerly follow a trail created by a person wearing those boots.”

“How would someone get access to this stuff?”

“Some canine pheromones are available commercially for use in animal shelters and behavior-modification regimens. It could have been acquired that way or from direct contact with a bitch in estrus.”

“Interesting. Is there any unintentional way you can think of for a chemical like that to get on someone’s boots?”

“In the concentrations in which it was found? Short of an explosion in a pheromone-bottling facility, no.”

“Very interesting. Thank you, Sergeant. I’m going to put Jack Hardwick on the phone. I’d appreciate your repeating to him what you told me-in case he has questions I can’t answer.”

Hardwick had one question. “When you call it an attractant pheromone secreted by a bitch in estrus, what you mean is a female sex scent no male dog could ignore, right?”

He listened to her brief answer, ended the call, and handed the phone back to Gurney, looking excited. “Holy shit. The irresistible scent of a bitch in heat. What do you make of that, Sherlock?”

“It’s obvious that Flores wanted to be absolutely sure that the K-9 dog would follow that trail like an arrow. He may even have done some Internet research and discovered that the state tracking dogs are all males.”

“Which obviously means that he wanted us to find the machete.”

“No doubt about it,” said Gurney. “And he wanted us to find it fast. Both times.”

“So what’s the scenario? He lops off their heads, puts on his doctored boots, scurries out into the woods, ditches the machete, comes back into the crime scene, takes off the boots, and… then what?”

“In the case of Savannah, he just walks away, drives away, whatever,” said Gurney. “The Jillian situation is the impossible one.”

“Because of the video problem?”

“That, plus the question of where could he have gone after he came back to the cottage?”

“Plus the more basic question: Why would he bother to come back at all?”

Gurney smiled. “That’s the one little piece of it I think I understand. He came back to leave the boots in plain sight so the tracking dog would be excited by that scent in the cottage and immediately follow it out to the murder weapon. He wanted us to find it fast.”

“Which brings us back to the big why?”

“It also brings us back one more time to the machete itself. I’m telling you, Jack, figure out how it got to where you found it without anyone being caught on camera and everything else will fall in place.”

“You really think so?”

“You don’t?”

Hardwick shrugged. “Some people say follow the money. You, on the other hand, are big on what you call ‘discrepancies.’ So you say follow the piece that makes no sense.”

“And what do you say?”

“I say follow the thing that keeps coming up again and again. In this case the thing that keeps coming up again and again is sex. In fact, as far as I can see, everything in this weird-ass case, one way or another, is about sex. Edward Vallory. Tirana Zog. Jordan Ballston. Saul Steck. The whole Skard criminal enterprise. Scott Ashton’s psychiatric specialty. The possible photographs that have you scared shitless. Even the fucking trail to the machete turns out to be about sex-the overwhelming sexual power of a bitch in heat. You know what I think, ace? I think it’s time you and I visited the epicenter of this sexual earthquake-the Mapleshade Residential Academy.”

Chapter 71

He was unhappy with the details of the final solution, its crude departure from the elegant simplicity of a razor-sharp blade, a carefully discriminating blade. But he could see no clearer way to the end of the road. He was appalled by the imprecision of it all, the abandonment of the fine distinctions that were his forte, but had come to view it as unavoidable. The collateral casualties would simply be a necessary evil. He took what solace he could in reminding himself that his planned action was the very definition-the very heart and soul-of a just war. What he was about to do was undeniably necessary, and if an action was necessary, then its unavoidable consequences were justified. The deaths of innocent children could be regarded as regrettable. But who was to say they were innocent? No one at Mapleshade was truly innocent. One could argue that they weren’t even children. They might not be adults legally, but they weren’t children, either. Not in any normal sense of the term.

So the day had arrived; the event was upon him; the opportunity, not taken, would not come again. Discipline and objectivity must be his watchwords. It was no time for flinching. He must hang on to the reality of the thing.

Edward Vallory had seen that reality with perfect clarity.

The hero of The Spanish Gardener didn’t flinch.

Now it was his turn to deliver the final blow to the whores and liars, the bits and pieces of the devil.

“She’s a nice little piece.” A revealing phrase. Think of the question it raises. A piece of what?

Voice of the snake. Slithering mouth. Sweat on the lips.

“Onto the heads of these serpents I shall bring down my sword of fire, and not one will slither away.

“Into the slime of their hearts I shall drive my stake of fire, and not one will continue to beat.

“Thus shall the sickening offspring of Eve be slain, and their abominations put to an end.

“For all the reasons I have written.”

Chapter 72

“What about that Zen thing you’re always saying about how the problem isn’t coming up with the wrong answers, it’s coming up with the wrong questions?”

Gurney and Hardwick were driving through the northern Catskill foothills toward Tambury, and Hardwick had been quiet for a while. But now there was something in his tone that implied he had more to say. “Maybe we shouldn’t be asking how Hector got the murder weapon from the cottage into the woods. Because, according to the video, he didn’t. So maybe that’s, like, Fact Number One that we need to accept.”

Gurney felt an odd tingle of anticipation on the back of his neck. “What do you think the right question is?”

“Suppose we just asked, how could the machete have gotten to where it was found?”

“Okay. That’s a more open-minded version of it, but I don’t see-”

“And how did her blood get on it?”

“What?”

Hardwick paused to blow his nose with his customary enthusiasm. He didn’t speak until he’d replaced his handkerchief in his pocket. “We’re assuming it’s the murder weapon because Jillian’s blood is on it. Is that a safe assumption? If there was some other way…”

“I went down that road already with you, and we got nowhere.”

Hardwick shrugged, unconvinced.

Gurney looked across at him. “How else could her blood get on it? And if the machete didn’t come from the cottage, where did it come from?”

“And when?”

“When?”

Hardwick sniffled, pulled out his handkerchief again, and wiped his nose. “Do you trust the video?”

“I spoke to the video company, and I spoke to the lab people who analyzed it. They tell me the video is accurate.”

“If that’s true, the machete couldn’t have come from the cottage between the murder and the time it was found. Period. So it wasn’t the murder weapon. Period. And the goddamn blood must have gotten on it another way.”

Gurney could feel an almost physical rearrangement of his thoughts taking place. He knew that Hardwick was right. “If the killer went to the trouble of putting the blood on it,” he said, half to himself, “that would create a new set of questions-not just how and when, but more important, why?”

Why indeed would the killer bother to construct so complex a deception? Theoretically, the purpose of any past action, if it proceeded according to plan, can be deciphered from its results. So what exactly, Gurney asked himself, were the results of the machete being placed where it was with Jillian’s blood on it?

He answered his own question aloud. “To begin with, it was found quickly and easily. And everyone jumped to the immediate conclusion that it was the murder weapon. Which aborted any further search for a possible weapon. The scent trail connecting the cottage to the machete seemed conclusive and seemed to prove that Flores had escaped by that route. The disappearance of Kiki Muller reinforced the idea that Flores had left the area, presumably in her company.”

“And now…?” asked Hardwick.

“And now there’s no reason to believe any of it. In fact, the whole crime scenario adopted by BCI seems to have been crafted by Flores.” He paused, thinking through a final implication. “Jesus.”

“What is it?”

“The reason Flores murdered Kiki and buried her in her own backyard…”

“So it would look like she’d run off with him?”

“Yes. And in that light it makes Kiki’s murder look like the coldest, most pragmatic execution imaginable.”

Hardwick appeared troubled. “If it was so fucking pragmatic, why such a grizzly method?”

“Maybe it’s another example of the killer’s dual motivation: practical advantage plus raging pathology.”

“Plus a talent for creating bullshit for people to spread around the neighborhood.”

“What kind of bullshit?”

Hardwick was obviously excited. “Think about it. This whole case has been full of juicy stories, from the very beginning. You remember the old-lady neighbor-Miriam, Marian, whatever, with the Airedale?”

“Marian Eliot.”

“Right, Marian Eliot, with all her Hector stories-Hector the star of the Cinderella story, Hector the star of the Frankenstein story. And if you read the neighborhood interview transcripts, you saw the Hector the Latin Lover story and Hector the Jealous Fag story. Along the way you even added your own: Hector the Avenger of Past Wrongs story.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying. I’m asking.”

“Asking what?”

“Where the fuck are all these stories coming from? They’re fascinating stories, but…”

“But what?”

“But zero solid evidence for any of them.”

Hardwick fell silent, but Gurney sensed that the man had more to say.

“And…?” he prompted.

Hardwick shook his head, as if unwilling to say more, then spoke anyway. “I used to believe that my first wife was a fucking saint.” He fell into a distant silence for a long minute or two, staring out at the passing landscape of wet fields and old farmhouses. “We tell ourselves stories. We miss the real evidence. That’s the problem. That’s the way our minds work. We love stories way too much. We need to believe them. And you know what? The need to believe can suck you right down the fucking drain.”

Chapter 73

Once they’d passed the exit for Higgles Road, Gurney’s GPS indicated that they’d be arriving at Mapleshade in another fourteen minutes. They’d taken Gurney’s conservative green Outback, which seemed more appropriate than Hardwick’s red GTO with its rumbling exhaust and hot-rod attitude. The mist had increased to a heavier drizzle, and Gurney upped the wiper speed. Weeks earlier an irritating squeak had developed in one of the wiper blades, which was overdue for replacement.

“How do you picture this guy we’ve been calling Hector Flores?” asked Hardwick.

“You mean his face?”

“All of him. What do you picture him doing?”

“I picture him standing naked in a yoga pose in Scott Ashton’s garden pavilion.”

“See what I mean?” said Hardwick. “You read about that in the interview summaries, right? But now you’re picturing it as vividly as if you saw it.”

Gurney shrugged. “We do that all the time. Not only do our minds connect the dots, they create dots where there aren’t any to begin with. Like you said, Jack, we’re wired to love stories-coherence.” A moment later he had a sudden, seemingly unrelated thought. “Was the blood still wet?”

Hardwick blinked. “What blood?”

“The blood on the machete. The blood you told me a minute ago couldn’t have come directly from the murder scene, because the machete wasn’t the murder weapon.”

“Of course it was wet. I mean… it looked wet. Let me think a second. What I saw of it looked wet, but it had dirt and leaves stuck to it.”

“Christ!” interrupted Gurney. “That could be the reason…”

“The reason for what?”

“The reason Flores half buried it. Buried the blade. Under a coating of damp leaves and earth.”

“So the blood on it wouldn’t dry?”

“Or wouldn’t oxidize in a way noticeably different from the blood around the body in the cottage. The point is, if the blood on the machete appeared to be in a more advanced state of oxidation than the blood on Jillian’s wedding dress, that’s something you or the techs would have noticed. If the blood on the machete was older than the blood on the victim…”

“We’d have known that it wasn’t the murder weapon.”

“Exactly. But the wet soil on the blade would have slowed the drying of the blood, plus it would have obscured any oxidation, any observable difference from the color of the blood found in the cottage.”

“And that’s not something the lab would have picked up, either,” said Hardwick.

“Of course not. The blood analysis wouldn’t have been done until the following day at the soonest, and at that point a difference of an hour or two in the origination time of the two samples would have been undetectable-unless they were running a sophisticated test to examine that specific factor. But unless you or the ME had flagged it, they wouldn’t have had any reason to do it.”

Hardwick was nodding slowly, his eyes sharp and thoughtful. “It kicks the foundation out from under some basic assumptions we’ve been making, but where does it take us?”

“Hah. Good question,” said Gurney. “Maybe it’s just one more indication that all the initial assumptions in this case were wrong.”

The efficient female voice of Gurney’s GPS directed him to proceed another half mile, then turn left.

The turn was marked by a simple black-and-white sign on a black wooden post: PRIVATE DRIVEWAY. The narrow, smoothly paved drive passed through a pine copse with branches overhanging from both sides, creating the feeling of a sculpted horticultural tunnel. Half a mile into this extended evergreen arbor they drove through an open gate in a tall chain-link fence and came to a stop at a raisable bar that was in its down position. Next to the bar was a handsome cedar-shingled security booth. On the wall facing Gurney, an elegant blue-and-gold sign read MAPLESHADE RESIDENTIAL ACADEMY. VISITS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. A thickly built man with thinning gray hair emerged from the booth. His black pants and gray shirt gave the impression of an informal uniform, and he had the neutral, appraising eyes of a retired cop. His mouth smiled politely. “Can I help you?”

“Dave Gurney and Senior Investigator Jack Hardwick, New York State Police, here to see Dr. Ashton.”

Hardwick pulled out his wallet, extended his BCI ID toward Gurney’s window.

The guard eyed it carefully and made a sour face. “Okay, just stay right here while I call Dr. Ashton.” While keeping his gaze on the visitors, the man keyed in a code on his phone and began talking. “Sir, a Detective Hardwick and a Mr. Gurney here to see you.” A pause. “Yes, sir, they’re right here.” The guard shot them a nervous glance, then spoke into the phone. “No, sir, no one else with them… Yes, sir, of course.” The guard handed the phone to Gurney, who put the receiver to his ear.

It was Ashton. “I’m afraid you’ve caught me in the midst of something. I’m not sure I can see-”

“We only need to ask you a few questions, Doctor. And maybe someone on your staff could show us around the grounds afterward? We’d just like to get a feel for things.”

Ashton sighed. “Very well. I’ll make a few minutes for you. Someone will come to pick you up shortly. Please put the security man back on.”

After confirming Ashton’s authorization, the guard pointed to a small gravel area extending off the side of the pavement just past the booth. “Park over there. No cars beyond that point. Wait for your escort.” A moment later the bar across the driveway rose and Gurney drove through to the small designated parking area. From that position he could see a longer stretch of the fence than was visible as he was approaching it. He was surprised to see that apart from the portion adjoining the road and the booth, the fence was topped with spiral coils of razor wire.

Hardwick had noticed it, too. “You think it’s to keep the girls in or the local boys out?”

“I hadn’t thought about the boys,” said Gurney, “but you may be right. A boarding school full of sex-obsessed young women, even if their obsessions are hellish, could be quite a magnet.”

“You mean especially if they’re hellish. Hotter the better,” said Hardwick, getting out of the car. “Let’s go shoot the shit with the man at the gate.”

The guard, still standing in front of his booth, gave them a curious look-friendlier now that they’d been approved for entry. “This about the Liston girl who worked here?”

“You knew her?” asked Hardwick.

“Didn’t know her, just knew who she was. Worked for Dr. Ashton.”

“You know him?”

“Again, more to see him than to talk to him. He’s a little-what would you say? Distant?”

“Standoffish?”

“Yeah, I would say he was standoffish.”

“So he’s not the guy you report to?”

“Nah. Ashton doesn’t really have anything to do with anybody. A little too important, you know what I mean? Most of the staff here report to Dr. Lazarus.”

Gurney detected a not-quite-hidden distaste in the guard’s voice, waited for Hardwick to follow it up. When he didn’t, Gurney asked, “What kind of a guy is Lazarus?”

The guard hesitated, seemed to be looking for a way to say something without saying something that could get him in trouble.

“I hear he’s not a smiley-face kind of guy,” said Gurney, recalling Simon Kale’s unflattering description.

Gurney’s mild encouragement was enough to put a crack in the wall.

“Smiley-face? Jeez no. I mean, he’s okay, I guess, but…”

“But not too pleasant?” Gurney prompted.

“It’s just, I don’t know, like he’s kind of in his own world. Like sometimes you’ll be talking to him and you get the feeling that ninety percent of him is somewhere else. I remember once-” He broke off the sentence at the sound of tires rolling slowly on gravel.

They all looked toward the little parking area-and the dark blue minivan that was coming to a stop next to Gurney’s car.

“The man himself,” said the guard under his breath.

The man who emerged from the van was ageless but far from young, with even features that made his face look more artificial than handsome. His hair was as black as only dye could make it, and the contrast with his pale skin was striking. He pointed to the back door of the van.

“Please get in, Officers,” he said as he slipped back into the driver’s seat and waited. His attempted smile, if that’s what it was, resembled the strained expression of a man who found daylight unpleasant.

Gurney and Hardwick got in behind him.

Lazarus drove slowly, gazing intently at the road ahead. After a few hundred yards, they rounded a bend and the dark pine woods yielded to a parklike area of mowed grass and widely spaced maples. The driveway straightened into a classical allée, at the end of which stood a neo-Gothic Victorian mansion with several smaller structures of similar design on either side of it. In front of the mansion, the road split. Lazarus took the right fork, which brought them around beds of ornamental shrubs to the rear of the building. There the split road came back together in a second allée that proceeded on, surprisingly, to a large chapel of dark granite. Its narrow stained-glass windows might on a cheerier day have given the impression of ten-foot-high red pencils, but at that moment they looked to Gurney like bloody gashes in the stone.

“The school has its own church?” asked Hardwick.

“No. Not a church anymore. Deconsecrated a long time ago. Too bad, in a sense,” he added, with a touch of that disconnection the guard had described.

“How so?” asked Hardwick.

Lazarus answered slowly. “Churches are about good and evil. About guilt and punishment.” He shrugged, pulling up in front of the chapel and switching off the ignition. “But church or no church, we all pay for our sins one way or another, don’t we?”

“Where is everyone?” asked Hardwick.

“Inside.”

Gurney looked up at the imposing edifice, its stone face the color of dark shadows.

“Is Dr. Ashton in there?” Gurney pointed at the arched chapel door.

“I’ll show you.” Lazarus got out of the van.

They followed him up the granite steps and through the door into a wide, dimly lit vestibule that smelled to Gurney like the parish church of his Bronx childhood: a combination of masonry, old wood, the age-old soot of burned candle wicks. It was a scent with a strangely dislocating power, making him feel a need to whisper, to step quietly. From beyond a pair of heavy oak doors that would lead presumably into the main space of the chapel came the low murmur of many voices.

Above the doors, carved boldly into a wide stone lintel, were the words GATE OF HEAVEN.

Gurney gestured toward the doors. “Dr. Ashton is in there?”

“No. The girls are in there. Settling down. All a bit volatile today-shaken up by the news about the Liston girl. Dr. Ashton’s in the organ loft.”

“Organ loft?”

“That’s what it used to be. Converted now, of course. Converted into an office.” He pointed to a narrow doorway at the far end of the vestibule, leading to the foot of a dark staircase. “It’s the door at the top of those stairs.”

Gurney felt a chill. He wasn’t sure whether it was the natural temperature of the granite or something in Lazarus’s eyes, which he was sure were fixed on them as they climbed the shadowy stone steps.

Chapter 74

At the top of the cramped stairwell was a small landing, weirdly illuminated by one of the building’s narrow scarlet windows. Gurney knocked on the landing’s only door. Like the doors off the vestibule, it looked heavy, gloomy, uninviting.

“Come in.” Ashton’s mellifluous voice was strained.

Despite its weight and promise of creakiness, the door swung open fluidly, silently, into a comfortably proportioned room that might have passed for a bishop’s private study. Chestnut brown bookcases lined two of the windowless walls. There was a small fireplace of sooty fieldstone with old brass andirons. An ancient Persian rug covered the floor, except for a satin-polished border of cherrywood two feet wide all the way around the room. A few large lamps, set atop occasional tables, gave the dark, woody tones of the room an amber glow.

Scott Ashton sat wearing a troubled frown at an ornate black-oak desk, placed at a ninety-degree angle to the door. Behind him, on an oak sideboard with carved lion-head legs, was the room’s major concession to the current century-a large flat-screen computer monitor. He motioned Gurney and Hardwick vaguely to a pair of red velvet high-backed chairs across from him-the sort of chairs one might find in the sacristy of a cathedral.

“It just keeps getting worse and worse,” Ashton said.

Gurney assumed he was referring to the murder the previous evening of Savannah Liston and was about to offer some vague words of agreement and condolence.

“Frankly,” Ashton went on, turning away, “I find this organized-crime angle almost incomprehensible.” At that point the sight of his Bluetooth earpiece, along with the oddness of his comments, told Gurney that the man was in fact in the middle of a phone call. “Yes, I understand… I understand… My point is simply that every step forward makes the case more bizarre… Yes, Lieutenant. Tomorrow morning… Yes… Yes, I understand. Thank you for letting me know.”

Ashton turned toward his guests but seemed for a moment to be lost in contemplation of the conversation just ended.

“News?” asked Gurney.

“Are you aware of this… criminal-conspiracy theory? This… grand scheme that may involve Sardinian gangsters?” Ashton’s expression seemed strained by a combination of anxiety and disbelief.

“I’ve heard it discussed,” said Gurney.

“Do you think there’s any chance of it being true?”

“A chance, yes.”

Ashton shook his head, stared confusedly at his desk, then back up at the two detectives. “May I ask why you’re here?”

“Just a gut feeling,” said Hardwick.

“Gut feeling? What do you mean?”

“In every case there’s some common point where everything converges. So the place itself becomes a key. It could be a big help for us just to take a walk around, see what we can see.”

“I’m not sure that I-”

“Everything that’s happened seems to have some link back to Mapleshade. Would you agree with that?”

“I suppose. Perhaps. I don’t know.”

“You telling me you haven’t thought about it?” There was an edge in Hardwick’s voice.

“Of course I’ve thought about it.” Ashton looked perplexed. “I just can’t… see it that clearly. Maybe I’m too close to everything.”

“Does the name Skard mean anything to you?” asked Gurney.

“The detective on the phone just asked me the same question-something about some horrible Sardinian gang family. The answer is no.”

“You’re sure Jillian never mentioned it?”

“Jillian? No. Why would she?”

Gurney shrugged. “It’s possible that Skard may be Hector Flores’s real name.”

“Skard? How would Jillian know that?”

“I don’t know, but she apparently did an Internet search to find out more about it.”

Ashton shook his head again, the gesture resembling an involuntary shudder. “How awful does this have to get before it ends?” It was more a wail of protest than a question.

“You said something on the phone just now about tomorrow morning?”

“What? Oh, yes. Another twist. Your lieutenant feels that this conspiracy angle makes everything more urgent, so he’s pushing up the schedule for interviewing our students to tomorrow morning.”

“So where are they all?”

“What?”

“Your students. Where are they?”

“Oh. Forgive my distractedness, but that’s part of the reason for it. They’re downstairs in the main area of the chapel. It’s a calming environment. It’s been a wild day. Officially, Mapleshade students have no communication with the outside world. No TV, radio, computers, iPods, cell phones, nothing. But there are always leaks, always someone who’s managed to sneak in some device or other, and so of course they’ve heard about Savannah’s death, and… well, you can imagine. So we went into what a sterner facility might call ‘lockdown mode.’ Of course, we don’t call it that. Everything here is designed to have a softer edge.”

“Except for the razor wire,” said Hardwick.

“The fence is aimed at keeping problems out, not people in.”

“We were wondering about that.”

“I can assure you it’s for security, not captivity.”

“So right now they’re all downstairs in the chapel?” asked Hardwick.

“Correct. As I said, they find it calming.”

“I wouldn’t have thought they’d be religious,” said Gurney.

“Religious?” Ashton smiled humorlessly. “Hardly. There’s just something about stone churches, Gothic windows, the muted light. They calm the soul in a way that has nothing to do with theology.”

“The students don’t feel like they’re being punished?” asked Hardwick. “What about the ones who weren’t acting out?”

“The agitated ones settle down, feel better. The ones who were okay to begin with are given to understand that they are the main source of peace for the others. Bottom line, the agitated don’t feel singled out and the calm feel valuable.”

Gurney smiled. “You must have put a lot of thought and effort into engineering that view of the experience.”

“That’s part of my job.”

“You give them a framework for understanding what’s happening?”

“You could put it like that.”

“Like what a magician does,” said Gurney. “Or a politician.”

“Or any competent preacher or teacher or doctor,” said Ashton mildly.

“Incidentally,” said Gurney, deciding to test the effect of a hairpin turn in the conversation, “was Jillian injured in any way in the days leading up to the wedding-anything that would have caused bleeding?”

“Bleeding? Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”

“There’s a question about how the blood got on the bloody machete.”

“Question? How could that be a question? What do you mean?”

“I mean the machete might not have been the murder weapon after all.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It might have been placed in the woods prior to your wife’s murder, not after it.”

“But… I was told… her blood…”

“Some conclusions could have been premature. But here’s the thing: If the machete was put in the woods before the murder, then the blood on it must have come from Jillian before the murder. The question is, do you have any idea how that could have happened?”

Ashton looked stunned. His mouth opened. He seemed about to speak, didn’t, then finally did. “Well… yes, I do… at least theoretically. As you may know, Jillian was being treated for a bipolar disorder. She took a medication that required periodic blood tests to assure that it remained within the therapeutic range. Her blood was drawn once a month.”

“Who drew the blood?”

“A local phlebotomist. I believe she worked for a medical-services provider out of Cooperstown.”

“And what did she do with the blood sample?”

“She transported it to the lab where the lithium-level test was performed and the report was generated.”

“She transported it immediately?”

“I imagine she made a number of stops, her assigned client route, whatever that might be, and at the end of each day she’d deliver her samples to the lab.”

“You have her name and the names of the provider and the lab?”

“Yes, I do. I review-reviewed, I should say-a copy of the lab report every month.”

“Would you have a record of when the last blood sample was drawn?”

“No specific record, but it was always the second Friday of the month.”

Gurney thought for a moment. “That would have been two days before Jillian was killed.”

“You’re thinking that Flores somehow intervened at some point in that process and got hold of her blood? But why? I’m afraid I’m not really understanding what you’re saying about the machete. What would be the point of it?”

“I’m not sure, Doctor. But I have a feeling that the answer to that question is the missing piece at the center of the case.”

Ashton raised his eyebrows in a way that looked more baffled than skeptical. His eyes seemed to be moving across the disturbing points of some inner landscape. Eventually he closed them and sat back in his tall chair, his hands clasped over the ends of the elaborately carved armrests, his breathing deep and deliberate, as though he might be engaged in some tranquilizing mental exercise. But when he opened them again, he only looked worse.

“What a nightmare,” he said. He cleared his throat, but it sounded more like a whimper than a cough. “Tell me something, gentlemen. Have you ever felt like a complete failure? That’s how I feel right now. Every new horror… every death… every discovery about Flores or Skard or whatever his name is… every bizarre revelation about what’s really been happening here at the school-everything proves my total failure. What a brainless idiot I’ve been!” He shook his head-or rather moved it back and forth in slow motion, as if it were caught in some oscillating underwater current. “Such foolish, fatal pride. To think that I could cure a plague of such incredible, primitive power.”

“Plague?”

“Not the term my profession commonly applies to incest and the damage it does, but I think it’s quite accurate. The longer I’ve worked in this field, the more I’ve come to believe that of all the crimes human beings commit against one another, the most destructive by far is the sexual abuse of a child by an adult-especially a parent.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why? It’s simple. The two primal human relationship modes are parenting and mating. Incest destroys the distinct patterns of these two relationships by smashing them together, essentially polluting them both. I believe that there is traumatic damage to the neural structures that support the behaviors natural to each of these relationship modes and that keep them separate. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so,” said Gurney.

“A bit over my head,” said Hardwick, who’d been quietly observing the exchange between Ashton and Gurney.

Ashton shot him a glance of disbelief. “An effective therapy for that kind of trauma needs to rebuild boundaries between the parent-child repertoire of responses and the mating repertoire of responses. The tragedy is that no therapy can match in force-in sheer megatonnage of impact-the violation it seeks to repair. It’s like rebuilding with a teaspoon a wall smashed by a bulldozer.”

“But… wasn’t that the problem you chose to focus your career on?” asked Gurney.

“Yes. And now it’s perfectly clear that I’ve failed. Totally, miserably failed.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You mean not every graduate of Mapleshade has chosen to disappear into some sick sexual underworld? Not every one has been slaughtered for pleasure? Not every one has gone on to have children and rape them? Not every one has emerged as sick and deranged as when she entered? How can I know that? All I know at this point is that Mapleshade under my control, guided by my instincts and decisions, has turned into a magnet for horror and murder, a hunting preserve for a monster. Under my leadership Mapleshade has been utterly destroyed. That much I know.”

“So… what now?” asked Hardwick sharply.

“What now? Ah. The voice of a practical mind.” Ashton closed his eyes and said nothing for at least a full minute. When he spoke again, it was with a strained ordinariness. “What now? The next step? The next step for me is to go downstairs to the chapel, show my face, do what I can to calm their nerves. What your next step is… I have no idea. You say you came here because of a gut feeling. You’d better ask your gut what to do next.”

He got up from his massive velvet chair, taking something resembling a remote garage-door opener from the desk drawer. “The downstairs lights and locks are operated electronically,” he said, explaining the device. He started to leave, got as far as the door, came back, and switched on the large computer monitor behind his desk. A picture appeared: the main interior chapel space, with a stone floor and high stone walls whose colorless austerity was broken by intermittent burgundy drapes and indecipherable tapestries. The dark wood pews were not set in the rows typical of churches but had been rearranged into half a dozen seating areas, each made up of three pews formed into a loose triangle, evidently to facilitate discussion. These areas were filled with teenage girls. From the monitor speakers came a hubbub of female voices.

“There’s a high-definition camera and a mike down there, transmitting to this computer,” said Ashton. “Watch and listen, and you’ll get some sense of the situation.” Then he turned and left the room.

Chapter 75

The computer screen showed Scott Ashton coming in through the chapel’s rear door behind the groupings of pews and closing it behind him with a heavy thump, the small remote unit still in one hand. The girls filled most of the space in the pews-some sitting normally, some sideways, some in cross-legged yoga positions, some kneeling. Some seemed lost in their own thoughts, but most were engaged in conversations, some more audible than others.

The surprise for Gurney was the ordinariness of these girls. They looked at first glance like most self-absorbed female teenagers, hardly like the inmates of an institution ringed by razor wire. At this distance from the camera, the malignancy of the behavior that had brought them here was invisible. Gurney assumed that only face-to-face, with their expressions in sharper focus, would it become obvious that these creatures were more than ordinarily self-centered, reckless, cruel, and sex-driven. Ultimately, as it was with his murderer mug shots, the sign of danger, the ice, would be in the eyes.

Then he noticed that the students were not alone. In each of the pew triangles, there were one or two older individuals-probably teachers or counselors or whatever Mapleshade called their providers of guidance and therapy. In a rear corner of the room, almost invisible in the shadows, stood Dr. Lazarus, his arms folded, his expression unreadable.

Moments after Ashton entered, the girls began to notice him, and the conversational din began to diminish. One of the older-looking, more striking girls approached Ashton as he stood at the back of the center aisle. She was tall, blond, almond-eyed.

Gurney glanced over at Hardwick, who was leaning forward in his chair, studying the screen.

“Could you tell if he called her over?” Gurney asked.

“He may have gestured,” he said. “Sort of a wave. Why?”

“Just curious.”

On the super-sharp screen, the profiles of Ashton and the tall blonde were clear to the point that their lip movements were visible, but their voices were indistinct-words and phrases merging with the voices of a group of students near them.

Gurney leaned toward the monitor. “Do you have any idea what they’re saying?”

Hardwick focused intently on their faces, tilting his head as though that might heighten the discrimination of his hearing.

On the screen, the girl said something and smiled, Ashton said something and gestured. Then he walked purposefully down the center aisle and stepped up onto a raised portion of the floor, presumably the area the altar had occupied in the time of the building’s liturgical use. He turned to face the assembly of students, his back to the camera. The murmur melted away, and soon there was silence.

Gurney looked inquiringly at Hardwick. “Did you catch anything?”

He shook his head. “He could have said absolutely anything to her. I couldn’t pick the words out of the background noise. Maybe a lip-reader could tell. Not me.”

On the screen, Ashton began speaking with a natural-sounding authority, his chocolate baritone composed and satiny-and deeper than usual in the resonant Gothic nave.

“Ladies,” he began, inflecting the word with an almost reverential gentility, “terrible things have happened, frightening things, and everyone is upset. Angry, frightened, confused, and upset. Some of you are having trouble sleeping. Anxiety. Bad dreams. Just not knowing what’s really happening may be the worst part of it. We want to know what we’re facing, and no one is telling us.” Ashton radiated the angst of the mental states he was referring to. He had turned himself into a depiction of emotion and understanding, and yet at the same time, perhaps through the steady richness of his voice, its almost cellolike timbre, he was managing to communicate at some unconscious level a profound reassurance.

“Man, that’s good shit,” said Hardwick, in the tone of one admiring the legerdemain of a superior pickpocket.

“Definitely a pro,” agreed Gurney.

“Not as good as you, ace.”

Gurney screwed up his face into an uncomprehending question mark.

“I bet he could learn a thing or two from your academy gig.”

“What do you know about my acad-”

Hardwick pointed at the screen. “Shhh. Let’s not miss anything.”

Ashton’s words were moving like clear water over polished rocks. “Some of you have asked me about the progress of the criminal investigation. How much do the police know, what are they doing, how close are they to catching the guilty person? Logical questions, questions a lot of us are wondering about. I think it would help if we knew more, if we each had the opportunity to share our concerns, to ask what we want to ask, to get some answers. That’s why I’ve invited the key detectives working on the case to come here to Mapleshade tomorrow morning-to talk to us, let us know what’s happening, what’s likely to happen next. They’ll have questions, we’ll have questions. I believe that it will be a very useful conversation for all of us.”

Hardwick grinned. “What do you think of that?”

“I think he’s-”

“Smooth as a greased pig?”

Gurney shrugged. “I’d say he’s good at managing the way people see things.”

Hardwick pointed at the screen.

Ashton was taking a cell phone from a clip on his belt. He looked at it, frowned, pressed a button on it, and put it to his ear. He said something, but the girls in the pews had resumed talking to one another, and his words were again lost in the background chatter.

“Are you catching any of that?” asked Gurney.

Hardwick watched Ashton’s lips, then shook his head. “Same as before, when he was talking to the blonde. He could have said anything.”

The call ended, and Ashton replaced the phone in his pocket. A girl far in the back was raising her hand. Unseen or ignored by Ashton, she stood and waved it side to side, and that seemed to get his attention.

“Yes? Ladies… I think someone has a question, or a comment?”

The girl-who happened to be the almond-eyed blonde to whom Hardwick had just referred-asked her question. “I heard a rumor that Hector Flores was seen here today, right here in the chapel. Is that true?”

Ashton appeared uncharacteristically flustered. “What… Who told you that?”

“I don’t know. People were talking in the stairwell in the main house. I’m not sure who it was. I couldn’t see them from where I was standing. But one of them said she saw him-that she saw Hector. If that’s true, that’s scary.”

“If it were true, it would be,” said Ashton. “Maybe the person who said she saw him can tell us more about it. We’re all here. Whoever said it must be here, too.” He looked out at the assembly in an expectant silence, letting a protracted five seconds pass before adding with an avuncular tolerance, “Maybe some people just like to spread scary rumors.” But he didn’t sound entirely at ease. “Are there any more questions?”

One of the younger-looking girls raised her hand and asked, “How much longer do we have to stay in here?”

Ashton smiled like a loving father. “As long as the process is helpful and not a minute longer. I would hope that in each of your groups you’re sharing your thoughts, concerns, feelings-especially the fears that have naturally been triggered by Savannah’s death. I want you to express everything that comes to mind, to take advantage of the help your group facilitators can provide, the help you each can offer one another. The process works. We all know it works. Trust it.”

Ashton stepped down from the raised platform and began circulating around the room, appearing to offer a word of encouragement here and there but mainly observing the group discussions in progress in the pews. Sometimes he would appear to be listening carefully, other times withdrawing into his own thoughts.

As Gurney watched, his attention was drawn again to the fundamental weirdness of the scene. Deconsecrated though it might be, the building still looked, sounded, smelled, and felt very much like a church. Combining that with the wild and twisted energies of Mapleshade’s current residents was disconcerting.

In the chapel scene on the screen, Ashton was continuing his leisurely stroll among the students and their “facilitators,” but Gurney had stopped paying attention.

He closed his eyes and rested his head against the velvet back cushion of his chair. He concentrated as best he could on the simple feeling of his breath passing in and out through his nostrils. He was trying to clear his mind of what felt like an incoherent tangle of debris. He almost succeeded, but one little item refused to be swept away.

One little item.

It was a comment by Hardwick that had been gnawing at the edge of his consciousness-the comment he’d made when Gurney had asked him if he could tell what Ashton was saying to the girl who’d walked over to him when he entered the chapel.

Hardwick had replied that Ashton’s voice, amid all the others in the chapel, was indistinct, the words indecipherable.

He could have said absolutely anything to her.

That notion had been bothering Gurney.

And now he knew why.

It had triggered a memory, at first below the level of consciousness.

But now it came vividly to mind.

Another time. Another place. Scott Ashton in earnest conversation with a young blonde on the broad sweep of a manicured lawn. A conversation that could not be overheard. A conversation whose words were lost in the undertone of two hundred other voices. A conversation in which Scott Ashton could have said anything to Jillian Perry.

He could have said anything. And that single fact could change everything.

Hardwick was watching him. “You all right?”

Gurney nodded slightly, as if any greater movement might jar apart the infinitely delicate chain of possibilities he was considering.

He could have said anything. There really was no way of knowing what he said, because the actual voices couldn’t be heard. So what might he have said?

Suppose what he said was, “No matter what happens, don’t say a word.”

Suppose what he said was, “No matter what happens, don’t open the door.”

Suppose what he said was, “I have a surprise for you. Shut your eyes tight.”

Good God, suppose that’s exactly what he said! “For the biggest surprise of your life, shut your eyes tight.”

Chapter 76

“The hell’s the matter?” demanded Hardwick.

Gurney just shook his head, not ready to answer, as he followed the logical chain of possibilities in his mind with an animal excitement that brought him to his feet. He began to pace, slowly at first, across the antique carpet in front of Ashton’s desk. The large porcelain lamp on the near corner cast a soft circle of light, illuminating the intricate garden design in the carpet’s fine weave.

If he was right-and it was at least possible that he was right-what would follow from that?

On the screen, Ashton could be seen standing next to one of the dark red drapes that covered portions of the chapel walls, his gaze drifting benignly over the assembly.

“What is it?” demanded Hardwick. “The hell’s on your mind?”

Gurney stopped his pacing long enough to lower the sound slightly on the computer monitor in order to better focus on his own train of thought. “That comment you made a minute ago? That Ashton could have said anything?”

“Yeah? What about it?”

“You may have demolished one of the key assumptions we’ve been making about Jillian’s murder.”

“What assumption?”

“The biggest one of all. The assumption that we know why she went into the cottage.”

“Well, we know why she said she went in. On the video she told Ashton she wanted to persuade Flores to come out for the wedding toast. And Ashton argued with her. Told her not to bother with Flores. But she went right the fuck in, anyway.”

Gurney’s eyes gleamed. “Suppose that conversation never happened.”

“It was on the video.” Hardwick looked as annoyed by Gurney’s excitement as he was confused by what Gurney was saying.

Gurney spoke slowly, as if each word were precious. “That conversation isn’t actually on the reception video.”

“Of course it is.”

“No. What’s recorded on the video is a meeting between Scott Ashton and Jillian Perry on the lawn, at the reception, in the background of the scene-too far in the background for the camera to record their voices. The ‘conversation’ you’re recalling-and that everyone who’s seen that video has been recalling-is Scott Ashton’s description of the conversation to Burt Luntz and his wife, after it occurred. The fact is, we have no way of knowing what Jillian actually said to him or what he said to Jillian. And until now we’ve had no reason to question it. All we really have is what Ashton claims was said. And as you commented a minute ago on his inaudible conversation with that blonde in the chapel, he could have said anything.”

“Okay,” said Hardwick uncertainly. “Ashton could have said anything. I get that. But what do you think he actually said to her? I mean, what’s the point of this? Why would he lie about Jillian’s reason for going into the cottage?”

“I can think of at least one horrible reason. My point is-once again-we don’t know what we thought we knew. All we really know is that they spoke to each other and she went into the cottage.”

Hardwick began tapping impatiently on the carved arm of his thronelike chair. “That’s not all we know. Don’t I remember someone going to get her? Knocking at the cottage door? One of the catering people? And wasn’t she already dead-or at least not able to answer the door? I’m not getting where the hell you’re going with this.”

“Let’s start at the beginning. If you look at the actual visual evidence and forget the narrative we’ve been given, the question is, is there another credible narrative that’s consistent with what we see happening on the screen?”

“Like what?”

“On the video it looks like Jillian gets Ashton’s attention and points at her watch. Okay. Suppose he’d asked her to remind him when it was time for the wedding toast. And suppose when he went over to her, he told her that he had a huge surprise for her and he wanted her to go into the cottage, because that’s where he was going to give it to her-just before the toast. She should go into the cottage, lock the door, and be completely quiet. No matter who came to the door, she shouldn’t open it or say a word. It was all part of the big surprise, and she’d understand it all later.”

Hardwick was paying serious attention now. “So you’re saying that she may have been perfectly fine when the catering person knocked on the door?”

“And then when Ashton himself opened the door with his key, suppose he said something like, ‘Shut your eyes tight. Shut your eyes tight-for the biggest surprise of your life.’ ”

“And then what?”

Gurney paused. “You remember Jason Strunk?”

Hardwick frowned. “The serial killer? What’s he got to do with this?”

“Remember how he killed his victims?”

“Wasn’t he the one who chopped them up, then mailed the pieces to the local cops?”

“Right. But it’s the weapon he used that I was thinking about.”

“Meat cleaver, wasn’t it? Razor-sharp Japanese thing.”

“And he carried it in a simple plastic sheath under his jacket.”

“So… what are you saying? Oh, no, come on! You’re not saying that… that Scott Ashton went into the cottage, told his brand-new wife to close her eyes, and then chopped her head off?”

“Based on the visual evidence, it’s just as possible as the story we’ve been given.”

“God, lots of things are possible, but…” Hardwick shook his head. “Then what? After he chops off his bride’s head, he lays it neatly on the table, starts screaming, slips his bloody cleaver back into his plastic-lined pocket, comes stumbling out of the cottage, and collapses?”

Gurney went on. “Exactly. That last bit is recorded on the video-him screaming, stumbling out, collapsing in the flower bed. Everyone comes rushing over, everyone looks in the cottage, and everyone reaches what under the circumstances is the obvious conclusion. Exactly the conclusion Ashton would want them to reach. So there was no reason for anyone to search him. If he did have a cleaver or a similar weapon hidden inside his jacket, no one would ever have known. And as soon as the K-9 team found the bloody machete in the woods, everything seemed perfectly clear. The Hector Flores narrative was set in stone, just waiting for Rod Rodriguez to put his stamp of approval on it.”

“The machete… with Jillian’s blood… but how…?”

“That blood could easily have come from the sample taken for her lithium-level blood test two days earlier. Ashton could have canceled the regular phlebotomy appointment and drawn that sample himself. Or he could have gotten it some other way, pulled some kind of switch-just like we were starting to think Flores might have done. And he could have planted the machete in the woods that morning, before the reception. Could have smeared the blood on it, carried it out through the back window of the cottage, left a drop or two on the back windowsill, left that sex-pheromone trail with the boots for the dogs to follow, then came back in through the cottage. At that point, there wouldn’t have been any cameras running, which would explain how the machete got from the cottage to where it was found with no video record of anyone passing that goddamn tree.”

“Wait a second, you forgot something. How the hell did he swing a cleaver through her neck-through the carotids-without getting sprayed with blood? I mean, I know about that thing in the ME’s report about the blood all running down the far side of her body and my own idea of how the killer could have used the head itself to deflect the flow. But there’d still be some splatter, wouldn’t there?”

“Maybe there was.”

“And nobody noticed?”

“Think about it, Jack-the scene on the video. Ashton was wearing a dark suit. He falls in a muddy flower bed. A bed of rosebushes. With thorns. He was a muddy mess. And as I recall, some helpful guests took him into the house. I’d bet my pension he went to a bathroom. Which would offer an easy opportunity to ditch the cleaver, maybe even switch into a matching suit with some mud already on it. So when he came out, he’d still be a muddy mess, but a mess with no trace of the victim’s blood.”

“Fuck,” murmured Hardwick thoughtfully. “You really believe all that?”

“To be honest, Jack, I have no reason to believe any of it. But I do think it’s possible.”

“There are some problems with it, don’t you think?”

“Like the credibility problem of a famous psychiatrist being a stone-cold assassin?”

“Actually, that’s the part I like best,” said Hardwick.

Gurney grinned for the first time that day. “Any other problems?” he asked.

“Yeah. If Flores wasn’t in the cottage when Jillian was killed, where the hell was he?”

“Maybe he was already dead,” said Gurney. “Maybe Ashton killed him to make it look like he was guilty and ran away. Or maybe the whole scenario I just cooked up is as full of holes as every other theory of this case.”

“So this guy is either a world-class criminal or the innocent victim of one.” Hardwick glanced over at the monitor behind Ashton’s desk. “For a man whose whole world is supposedly collapsing, he looks pretty damn calm. Where did all the despair and hopelessness go?”

“They seem to have evaporated.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Emotional resilience? Putting up a good front?”

Hardwick looked increasingly baffled. “Why did he want us to watch this?”

Ashton was making his way slowly around the chapel, almost imperiously, like a guru among his disciples. Proprietary. Confident. Imperturbable. Radiating more pleasure and satisfaction by the minute. A man of power and respect. A Renaissance cardinal. An American president. A rock star.

“Scott Ashton seems to be a jewel of many facets,” said Gurney, fascinated.

“Or a murdering bastard,” countered Hardwick.

“We need to decide which.”

“How?”

“By reducing the equation to its bare essentials.”

“Which are?”

“Suppose that Ashton did in fact kill Jillian.”

“And that Hector wasn’t involved?”

“Right,” said Gurney. “What would follow from that starting point?”

“That Ashton is a very good liar.”

“So maybe he’s been telling a lot of other lies, and we haven’t noticed.”

“Lies about Hector Flores?”

“Right,” said Gurney again, frowning thoughtfully. “About… Hector… Flores.”

“What is it?”

“Just… thinking.”

“What?”

“Is it… possible that…?”

“What is it?” asked Hardwick.

“Just a minute. I just want to…” Gurney’s voice trailed off into the electricity of his racing thoughts.

“What?”

“Just… reducing… the equation. Reducing it to the simplest… possible…”

“God, don’t keep stopping in the middle of sentences! Spit it out!”

Christ it couldn’t be that simple, could it?

But maybe it was! Maybe it was perfectly, ridiculously simple!

Why hadn’t he seen it sooner?

He laughed.

“For Godsake, Gurney…”

He hadn’t seen it sooner because he’d been searching for a missing piece. And he hadn’t been able to find it. Of course he hadn’t been able to find it. Because there was no missing piece. There never was a MISSING piece. There was an EXTRA piece. The piece that kept getting in the way of everything else. The piece that had been gettingin the way of the truth from the beginning. The piece that had been designed specifically to get in the way of the truth.

Hardwick was glaring at him in frustration.

Gurney turned toward him with a wild smile. “Do you know why no one could find Hector Flores after the murder?”

“Because he was dead?”

“I don’t think so. There are three possible explanations. One, he escaped from the area like everyone thought he did. Two, he’s dead, killed by the real murderer of Jillian Perry. Or three… he was never alive to begin with.”

“The fuck are you talking about?”

“It’s possible that Hector Flores never existed, that there never was any such person as Hector Flores, that Hector Flores was a myth created by Scott Ashton.”

“But all the stories…”

“They could all have come from Ashton himself.”

“What!?”

“Why not? Stories get started, they spread, take on a life of their own-a point you’ve made many times. Why couldn’t the stories all have had the same starting point?”

“But people saw Flores in Ashton’s car.”

“They saw a Mexican day laborer in a straw cowboy hat with sunglasses. The man they saw could have been anyone Ashton might have hired on that particular day.”

“But I don’t get how…”

“Don’t you see? Ashton could have created all the stories himself, all the rumors. Perfect food for gossip. The special new gardener. The wonderfully industrious Mexican. The man who learned everything amazingly quickly. The man of tremendous potential. The Cinderella man. The protégé. The trusted personal assistant. The genius who began to develop little quirks. The man who stood naked on one foot in the garden pavilion. So many stories, so interesting, so colorful, so shocking, so delicious, so repeatable. The perfect food for gossip. God, don’t you see? He fed his neighbors an irresistible saga, and they ran with it, told it to one another, embellished it, told it to strangers. He created Hector Flores out of nothing and turned him into a legend, one chapter after another. A legend that Tambury couldn’t stop talking about. The man became bigger than life, realer than real.”

“What about the bullet in the teacup?”

“Easiest thing in the world. Ashton could have fired the bullet himself, hid the gun, reported it stolen. Perfectly believable that the crazy, ungrateful Mexican would have stolen the doctor’s expensive rifle.”

“Hold on a second. On that videotape, at the very beginning, before the reception starts, Ashton went to the cottage to talk to Flores. When he knocked on the door, the audio picked up a very low ‘Esta abierto.’ If there was no Hector Flores in there, who said that?”

“Obviously Ashton could have said it himself in a muffled voice. His back was to the camera.”

“But the girls Hector spoke to at Mapleshade…”

“The girls he supposedly spoke to are all conveniently dead or missing. So how do we know he ever spoke to anyone? There’s no one available who can actually say she saw him face-to-face. Isn’t that a pretty goddamn strange thing all by itself?”

They looked at each other, then at the computer screen, where Ashton could be seen speaking briefly to two of the girls, pointing instructively to various parts of the chapel area. He looked as relaxed and commanding as the winning general on the day the enemy surrendered.

Hardwick shook his head. “You really believe that Ashton came up with this incredibly elaborate scheme-that he invented this mythical person and managed to nurture the fiction for three years-just so he’d have someone to blame in case he decided someday to get married and murder his wife? Doesn’t that sound a little ridiculous?”

“Put that way, it sounds totally ridiculous. But suppose he had another reason for inventing Hector?”

“What reason?”

“I don’t know. A bigger reason. A more practical reason.”

“Seems awfully shaky. And what about the Skard business? Wasn’t that all based on the theory that one of the Skard brothers, probably Leonardo, was masquerading as Hector and talking unrepentant Mapleshade girls into leaving home for money and thrills after graduation? If there was no Hector, what happens to that whole sex-slavery scenario?”

“I don’t know.” It was a crucial question, thought Gurney. What sense did any of their theories make if they depended on the idea that Leonardo Skard was operating in the guise of Hector Flores-if no one called Hector Flores had ever existed?

Chapter 77

“By the way,” said Gurney, “you happen to have your weapon on you?”

“Always,” said Hardwick. “My ankle would feel naked without its little holster. In my humble opinion, bullets sometimes rank right up there with brains as problem solvers. Why do you ask? You intend to make a dramatic move?”

“No dramatic move just yet. We need to be a lot surer about what’s going on.”

“You sounded damn sure of yourself a minute ago.”

Gurney made a face. “All I’m sure of is that my version of the Perry murder is possible. Or that it’s not impossible. Scott Ashton could have killed Jillian Perry. Could have. But it needs more digging, more facts. Right now there’s zero evidence and zero motive. We’ve got nothing but speculation on my part, a logical exercise.”

“But what if-”

Hardwick’s question was cut short by the sound of the heavy chapel door on the floor below opening and shutting, followed by a sharp metallic click. They both leaned reflexively toward the shadowy stairs beyond the doorway of the office and listened for footsteps.

A minute later Scott Ashton emerged from the top of the stone stairwell and entered the office, moving with the same air of power and control they’d witnessed on the screen. He sank into the plushly upholstered chair behind his desk and removed his Bluetooth earpiece and dropped it in the top drawer. He brought his hands together on the massive black desktop, slowly interlocking the fingers-except for the thumbs which he held parallel to each other as if to facilitate a close comparison between them. It was a comparison that seemed to interest him. After smiling for some time at his private thoughts, he separated his hands, turning up the palms with the fingers loosely splayed in a queerly insouciant gesture.

Then he reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a small-caliber pistol. The action was casual-so similar to taking out a pack of cigarettes that, for a second, Gurney thought that that was what Ashton had done.

With an almost sleepy motion, he pointed the little semiautomatic, a.25-caliber Beretta, at a point somewhere between Gurney and Hardwick, but his eyes were fixed on Hardwick.

“Do me a favor, please. Put your hands on the arms of your chair. Right now, please. Thank you. Now, remaining seated just as you are, raise your feet slowly off the floor. Thank you. I really appreciate your cooperation. Raise them higher. Thank you. Now please extend your legs forward, toward my desk. Keep extending them until you can rest your feet on the desktop. Thank you. That’s very good, very accommodating.”

Hardwick followed all these instructions with the relaxed seriousness of a man listening to a yoga instructor. Once his feet were propped up on the desk, Ashton leaned across from his side of it, reached under Hardwick’s right cuff, and removed a Kel-Tec P-32 from its holster. He looked it over, hefted it in his hand, then placed it in the top desk drawer.

He sat again and smiled. “Ah, yes. Much better. Too many armed people in one room is a tragedy waiting to happen. Please, Detective, feel free to put your feet down. I think we can all relax, now that the order of things is clear.”

Ashton looked at one of them and then at the other in an idle, amused way. “I must say it’s turning into an absolutely fascinating day. So many… developments. And you, Detective Gurney, you’ve really had that little mind of yours in overdrive.” Ashton’s voice was purring with honeyed sarcasm. “Quite a lurid plot you’ve described. Sounds like a movie pitch. Scott Ashton, famous psychiatrist, murdered his wife in the presence of two hundred wedding guests. And all he had to tell her was, ‘Shut your eyes tight.’ There never was a Hector Flores. The bloody machete was a clever ruse. There was a cleaver in his pocket. A pseudo-accidental dive into the roses. A clever switch of suits in the bathroom. And so forth and so on. An ingenious conspiracy uncovered. A sensational murder case solved. Merchants of perversion exposed. The dead get their day of justice. The living live happily ever after. Is that about the size and shape of it?”

If he expected a reaction of shock or fear at his ability to summarize Gurney’s conversation with Hardwick, he was disappointed. One of Gurney’s strengths when blindsided was to react mildly but in a tone that was slightly off, a tone that might be appropriate to more secure circumstances. That’s what he did now.

“That pretty much sums it up,” he said simply. He showed no surprise that while Ashton was downstairs, he’d been listening in on their conversation-probably via a transmission to his earpiece from a hidden microphone. No-it was definitely a transmission to the earpiece. Gurney secretly kicked himself for not having noted the anomaly of Ashton’s speaking on a handheld cell phone earlier on the chapel floor-indicating that his earpiece at that moment was being used for something else. It was painful that something so obvious had escaped his notice, but that kind of pain he would never show.

Gurney found the effect of his blasé response hard to measure. He hoped it had the jarring effect intended. Any speck of doubt he could toss into Ashton’s grasp of the situation would be a plus.

Ashton shifted his gaze to Hardwick, whose eyes were on the pistol. Ashton shook his head as though admonishing a naughty child. “As they say in the movies, Detective, don’t even think about it. I’d have three bullets in your chest before you got out of your chair.”

Then he addressed Gurney in the same tone. “And you, Detective, you’re like a fly that’s found its way into the house. You buzz around, you walk on the ceiling. Bzzzz. You see what you can see. Bzzzz. But you have no grasp of what you see. Bzzzz. Then SWAT! All that buzzing around-for nothing. All that searching and looking-all of it for nothing. Because you can’t possibly understand what you see. How could you? You’re nothing but a fly.” He began to laugh, soundlessly.

Gurney knew that the strategic imperative was to create delay, to slow things down. If Ashton was the killer he appeared to be, the mind game would be what it usually was in such cases: a contest for the high ground of emotional control. So the practical agenda for Gurney now was to prolong it-to engage his opponent in the game and make it go on until a game-ending opportunity presented itself. He sat back in his chair and smiled. “But in this case, Ashton, the fly got it right, didn’t he? You wouldn’t have that gun in your hand if I hadn’t gotten it right.”

Ashton stopped laughing. “Gotten it right? The deductive mastermind is taking credit for having gotten it right? After I fed you all those little facts? The fact that some of our graduates were missing, the fact of the car arguments, the fact that the young ladies in question had all appeared in Karnala ads? If I hadn’t been tempted to tease you-to make the contest interesting-you wouldn’t have gotten any further than your moronic colleagues.”

Now Gurney laughed. “Making the contest interesting had nothing to do with it. You knew that our next step would be to talk to former students, and all those facts would come to light immediately. So you weren’t giving us a damn thing we wouldn’t have gotten in another day or two ourselves. It was a pathetic effort to buy our trust with information you couldn’t keep hidden.” Gurney’s reading of Ashton’s expression-a frozen attempt at the appearance of equanimity-convinced him that he’d hit the target dead center. But sometimes in the management of a confrontation like this, there was such a thing as being too right, of scoring too direct a hit.

Ashton’s next words gave him the awful feeling that this was one of those cases.

“There’s no point in wasting any more time. I want you to see something. I want you to see how the story ends.” He stood up and with his free hand dragged his heavy chair to a point near the open office door that formed a triangle with the large flat-screen monitor on the table behind his desk and the pair of chairs opposite the desk that were occupied by Gurney and Hardwick-a position with his back to the door from which he could observe the screen and them at the same time.

“Don’t look at me,” said Ashton, pointing at the computer. “Look at the screen. Reality TV. Mapleshade: The Final Episode. It’s not the finale I’d intended to write, but in reality television one has to be flexible. Okay. We’re all in our seats. The camera is running, the action is in progress, but I think we could use a little more light down there.” He took the small lights-and-locks electronic remote from his pocket and pressed a button.

The chapel nave grew brighter, as rows of wall-sconce lamps were illuminated. There was a brief hiatus in the conversational hum as the girls in the discussion groups looked around at the lamps.

“That’s better,” said Ashton, smiling with satisfaction at the screen. “Considering your contribution, Detective, I want to be sure you can see everything clearly.”

What contribution? Gurney wanted to ask. Instead he put his hand over his mouth and stifled a yawn. Then he glanced at his watch.

Ashton gave him a long, cool stare. “You won’t be bored much longer.” A swarm of minuscule tics migrated across his face. “You’re an educated man, Detective. Tell me something: The medieval term condign reparation-do you know what it means?”

Strangely, he did. From a college philosophy class. Condign reparation: Punishment in perfect balance with the offense. Punishment of an ideally appropriate nature.

“Yes, I do,” he answered, triggering a hint of surprise in Ashton’s eyes.

And then, at the edge of his field of vision, he detected something else-a quickly moving shadow. Or was it the edge of a dark piece of clothing, a sleeve perhaps? Whatever it was, it had disappeared in the recess of the landing, where there would be barely enough room for a man to stand, just outside the office doorway.

“Then you may be able to appreciate the damage your ignorance has done.”

“Tell me about it,” said Gurney, with a look of increasing interest that he hoped would hide-better than his feigned yawn-the fear he was feeling.

“You have exceptional mental wiring, Detective. Quite an efficient brain. A remarkable calculator of vectors and probabilities.”

This characterization was precisely the opposite of Gurney’s current estimate of his capabilities. He wondered, with a nauseating chill, if Ashton’s perception of his state of mind could be so keen that the observation was intended as a joke.

Gurney’s own sense was that the brain that was responsible for his great professional victories was sliding sideways in the mud, losing traction and direction, as it strained to fit together so many things at once: The unreal Hector. The unreal Jykynstyl. The decapitated Jillian Perry. The decapitated Kiki Muller. The decapitated Melanie Strum. The decapitated Savannah Liston. The decapitated doll in Madeleine’s sewing room.

Where was the center of gravity in all this-the place at which the lines of force converged? Was it here at Mapleshade? Or at the brownstone, tended by Steck’s “daughters”? Or in some obscure Sardinian café where Giotto Skard might at that very moment be sipping bitter espresso-lurking like a wizened spider at the center of his web, where all the threads of his enterprises converged?

Unanswered questions were piling up fast.

And now a very personal one: Why had he, Gurney, failed to consider the possibility that the room might be bugged?

He’d always felt that the “death wish” concept was a grossly facile and overused paradigm, but now he wondered if it might not be the best explanation of his own behavior.

Or was his mental hard drive just too damn full of undigested details?

Undigested details, wobbly theories, and murders.

When all else fails, return to the present.

Madeleine’s persistent advice: Be here, in the here and now. Pay attention.

Awareness of the moment: the holy grail of consciousness.

Ashton was in the middle of a sentence. “… tragicomic clumsiness of the criminal-justice system-which is neither just nor systematic, but surely criminal. When it comes to dealing with sex offenders, the system is inanely political and ludicrously inept. Of the offenders it catches, it helps none and makes the majority worse. It frees all those clever enough to fool the so-called professionals who evaluate them. It publishes public lists of sex offenders that are incomplete and useless. Under cover of this PR scam, it turns snakesloose to devour children!” He glared at Gurney, at Hardwick, at Gurney again. “This is the wretched system all your fine mental wiring, all your logic, all your investigative skill, all your intelligence ultimately serves.”

It was a strange speech, thought Gurney, an elegant diatribe with the practiced ring of one delivered before, perhaps at conferences of his peers, yet it was animated by a palpable fury that was far from artificial. As he gazed into Ashton’s eyes, he recognized this fury as an emotion he had seen before. He had seen it in the eyes of victims of sexual abuse. Most memorably, most vividly, he had seen it in the eyes of a fifty-year-old woman who was confessing to the ax murder of her seventy-five-year-old stepfather who had raped her when she was five.

Her defense in court was that she wanted to be sure her own granddaughter would have nothing to fear from him, that no one’s granddaughter would have anything to fear from him. Her eyes were full of a wild, protective rage, and despite the efforts of her attorney to silence her, she went on to swear that the only desire she had left was to kill them all, every monster, every abuser, kill them all, chop them to pieces. As she was removed from the court, she was shouting, screaming, that she would wait at the doors of prisons and kill every offender who was released, every single one of them who was turned loose on the world. She’d use every last ounce of strength God gave her to “chop them to pieces!”

That’s when Gurney caught a glimpse of the possible connection-the simple equation that might explain everything.

He spoke matter-of-factly, as if they’d been discussing the subject all evening. “There’s no chance of Tirana ever being turned loose on anyone.”

At first the man showed no reaction, seeming not to have heard the words Gurney had uttered, much less the accusations of murder they implied.

Behind Ashton on the dusky landing, however, Gurney detected another movement-more identifiably this time as a brown-clad arm and at the end of it a small reflective glint of something metallic. Then, as before, it was withdrawn into the shallow nook beyond the doorway.

Ashton’s head until then had been tilted a little to the left. Now it pivoted, in the slowest-motion arc imaginable, to the right. He switched the pistol from his right hand to his left, which rested in his lap. He elevated his right hand tentatively to the side of his head, so that his fingertips lightly touched his ear and his temple, remaining there in a gesture that was both delicate and disconcerting. Combined with the angle of his head, it created the peculiar impression of a man listening for some elusive melody.

Eventually his eyes met Gurney’s and he lowered his hand to the arm of his chair, at the same time raising the hand that held the pistol. A smile bloomed and faded on his face like some grotesque, short-lived flower. “You’re such a clever, clever man.”

The background murmur of voices emanating from the speakers in the monitor behind him grew louder, sharper.

Ashton seemed not to notice. “So clever, so perceptive, so eager to impress. Impress whom?, I wonder.”

“Something’s burning,” Hardwick said in a loud, urgent voice.

“You’re a child,” Ashton went on, following his own train of thought. “A child who’s learned a card trick and keeps showing it to the same people over and over, trying to re-create the reaction they had to it the first time.”

“Something’s goddamn burning!” Hardwick repeated, pointing at the screen.

Gurney was alternately watching the gun and the deceptively calm eyes of the man who held it. Whatever was happening on the screen would have to wait. He wanted Ashton to keep talking.

There was another movement on the landing, and a small man in a brown cardigan stepped slowly and quietly into the office doorway. It took Gurney’s mind an extra second to register that it was Hobart Ashton.

Gurney purposely kept his eyes on Scott Ashton’s gun. He wondered how much of what was happening, if anything, the father understood. What, if anything, did he intend to do? What accounted for the stealth of his approach? What knowledge or suspicion accounted for the caution with which he’d climbed the stairs and concealed himself on the landing? More urgently, could he see his son’s gun from where he stood? Would he even understand what it meant? How delusional was he? And perhaps most urgently, if the old man were to create, purposely or inadvertently, some momentary distraction, would it afford an opportunity for Gurney to launch himself across the room and get to the gun before Ashton could use it on him?

These desperate musings were interrupted by a sudden outburst.

“Shit! The chapel is on fire!” shouted Hardwick.

Gurney looked at the screen while staying peripherally aware of the positions of Scott Ashton and his father. On the screen, the video transmission clearly showed smoke coming from the sconce lamps on the chapel walls. The girls had either exited their seating areas or were in a hasty scramble to do so, congregating in the center aisle and on the raised platform nearest the camera position.

Gurney rose reflexively to his feet, followed by Hardwick.

“Careful, Detective,” said Ashton, switching the pistol to his right hand and pointing it at Gurney’s chest.

“Unlock the doors,” commanded Gurney.

“Not right now.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

From the monitor came an eruption of screams. Gurney glanced back at it just in time to see one of the girls operating a fire extinguisher that had turned into a flame thrower, laying a stream of burning liquid along the length of one of the wooden pews. Another girl came running to the spot with another extinguisher-with the same result, a stream of liquid that ignited the moment it touched the existing fire. It was clear that the extinguishers had been tampered with to reverse their effect. It reminded Gurney of an arson murder in the Bronx twenty years earlier, where it was discovered later that one of the fire extinguishers in a small hardware store had been emptied and recharged with jellied gasoline-homemade napalm.

The chapel was now in a state of panic.

“Unlock those fucking doors, you fucking asshole!” Hardwick shouted at Ashton.

Ashton’s father reached into the pocket of his sweater and withdrew something with a shiny end. As he unfolded a small blade from its handle, Gurney realized what it was-a simple pocketknife, the kind a Boy Scout might whittle a stick with. He held it at his side and stood, expressionlessly, his eyes on the high back of his son’s chair.

Scott Ashton’s gaze was fixed on Gurney. “This is not the finale I would have preferred, but it’s the one your brilliant interference requires. It’s the second-best solution.”

“God, let them out of that room, you fucking maniac!” shouted Hardwick.

“I did my best,” said Ashton calmly. “I had hopes. Each year a few were helped, but after a time I had to admit that most were not. Most left here as poisonous as the day they arrived, left us to go out into the world, poisoning and destroying others.”

“There was nothing you could do about that,” said Gurney.

“I didn’t think so, either… until I was given my Mission and my Method. If someone chose to lead a poisonous life, then at least I could limit her exposure, limit the period of her toxicity to others.”

The shouts and shrieks from the monitor speakers were growing more chaotic. Hardwick started moving toward Ashton with a black look on his face. Gurney put out his hand to hold him back, as Ashton raised his gun calmly, centering his aim on Hardwick’s chest.

“For Christ’s sake, Jack,” said Gurney, “let’s not provoke the bullet solution when we don’t have any.”

Hardwick stopped, his jaw muscles bulging.

Gurney offered Ashton an admiring smile. “Hence the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’?”

“Ah. Mr. Ballston has been talking.”

“About Karnala, yes. I’d like to know more.”

“You already know so much.”

“Tell me the rest.”

“It’s a simple story, Detective. I came from a dysfunctional family.” He grinned hideously, managing to convey the nightmares buried in that most overused of all pop-psych terms. Tics moved through his lips like insects under the skin. “I was finally extricated, adopted, given an education. I was drawn to a certain kind of work. Mostly I failed. My patients continued to rape children. I didn’t know what to do-until it occurred to me that my family connections provided a way to funnel the worst girls in the world to the worst men in the world.” He grinned again. “Condign reparation. A perfect solution.” The grin faded. “Clever young woman that she was, Jillian found out just a hair more than she should have, overheard a few words of a phone conversation she shouldn’t have, pursued her unfortunate curiosity, became a possible threat to the entire process. Of course, she never grasped the whole picture. But she imagined she could leverage her morsel of knowledge into some personal advantage. Marriage was her first demand. I knew it wouldn’t be her last. I addressed the situation in a way that I found particularly satisfying. Condignly satisfying. For a time all was well. Then you came along.” He aimed the pistol at Gurney’s face.

On the screen, two pews were in flames, flames were rising from half the lamps, some of the drapes were smoldering. Most of the girls were on the floor, some covering their faces, some trying to breathe through torn pieces of their clothing, some crying, some coughing, a few vomiting.

Hardwick appeared to be on the verge of an explosion.

“Then you came along,” Ashton repeated. “Clever, clever David Gurney. And this is the result.” He waved his gun at the screen. “Why didn’t your cleverness tell you that this is the way it would end? How else could it end? Did you really think I’d let them go? Is clever, clever David Gurney really that stupid?”

Hobart Ashton took a few short steps to the back of his son’s chair.

Hardwick screamed, “This is your solution, Ashton? This is it, you crazy fucker? Burn a hundred and twenty teenage girls to death? This is your fucking solution?”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, it is! You really thought when I was finally trapped, I’d let them go?” Ashton’s voice was rising now, out of control, hurtling at Gurney and Hardwick like a wild thing with a life of its own. “You thought I’d turn a nest of snakes loose on all the little babies of the world? These toxic things, these slimy, venomous things! Demented, rotten, sucking, slimy things! These slither-”

It happened so quickly that Gurney almost thought he hadn’t seen it. The sudden flash of an arm around from the back of the chair, a quick curving movement, and that was all-Ashton’s rant cut off in the middle of a word. Then the old man stepping quickly, athletically to the side of the chair, grasping the barrel of Ashton’s gun, pulling it away with a twisting yank and the disturbingly sharp crack of a finger bone. Ashton’s head lolled forward on his chest, and his body began to tilt forward, curling downward, toppling onto the floor, collapsing sideways into a fetal position. It was then that the actual method of killing was made obvious by all the blood that began to pool around his throat.

Hardwick’s jaw muscles bulged.

The little man in the brown cardigan wiped his pocketknife on the back cushion of the chair in which Ashton had been sitting, folded it deftly with one hand, and replaced it in his pocket.

Then he looked down at Ashton and, as if in benediction to his son’s passing soul, said softly, “You’re a piece of shit.”

Chapter 78

The intense revulsion Gurney had felt toward violence and blood as a rookie cop, especially the blood from a fatal wound, was something he had learned to contain and conceal during his twenty years in homicide. When he had to, he was able to cloak pretty effectively what he felt-or at least to wrap his horror in the semblance of mere distaste. Which is what he did now.

Commenting on the blood spreading out in a slow oval, being absorbed into the delicate intricacies of the Persian rug, he said, as if he were describing nothing more tragic than bird shit on a windshield, “What a fucking mess.”

Hardwick blinked. He stared first at Gurney, then at the body on the floor, then at the fiery bedlam on the screen. He looked uncomprehendingly at Ashton’s father. “The doors. Why don’t you unlock the fucking doors?”

Gurney and the old man gazed at each other with an eerie lack of any visible concern. In past difficulties the ability to project an attitude of perfect calm had served Gurney well, given him an advantage. But that didn’t seem to be the case now. The old man was radiating a quiet, brutal confidence. It was as though killing Ashton had brought him a deep peace and strength-as though an imbalance had finally been righted.

This was not a man with whom one could win a simple staring contest. Gurney decided to up the ante and change the rules. And he knew that he needed to do it quickly if anyone was going to get out of that building alive. It was time to take a wild swing.

“Reminds me of Tel Aviv,” said Gurney, gesturing toward the screen.

The little man blinked and stretched his lips in a meaningless smile.

Gurney sensed that the wild swing had produced a solid hit. But now what?

Hardwick was staring at them with a bewildered fury.

Gurney continued to focus on the man with the gun. “Too bad you didn’t come a little sooner.”

“What?”

“Too bad you didn’t come sooner. Like five months ago instead of three.”

The little man looked honestly curious. “What’s that to you?”

“You could’ve stopped that crazy shit with Jillian.”

“Ah.” He nodded slowly, almost appreciatively.

“Of course, if you’d intervened even sooner, back when you should have, everything would be different now. Better, I think, don’t you?”

The little man continued nodding, but vaguely, without any apparent meaning. Then he frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gurney was seized by the sickening possibility that he was on the wrong track. But there was nowhere left to go except forward, no time left for thinking twice. So, then, forward with a vengeance. “Maybe you should’ve killed him a long time ago. Maybe you should’ve strangled him when he was born, before Tirana really sank her teeth into him. Little fucker was nuts from the beginning, like his mother, not a businessman like you.”

Gurney searched the man’s face for the slightest reaction, but his expression was no more communicative-or human-than the pistol in his hand. So once again there was nowhere to go but forward. “That’s why you showed up here after the Jillian drama, right? Leonardo killing her was one thing, that could just be good business, but cutting her fucking head off at the wedding, that was… more than business. My guess is you came to keep an eye on things. Make sure that things were conducted in a more businesslike fashion. You didn’t want the crazy little fucker fucking it all up. But, to be fair, Leonardo had some strong points. Smart. Imaginative. Right?”

Still no reaction beyond a dead stare.

Gurney went on. “You have to admit that the Hector idea was pretty good. Inventing the perfect fall guy in case anyone caught on to all those Mapleshade graduates being unlocatable. So the mythical Hector ‘appeared on the scene’ just before the girls started disappearing. That shows forward thinking on Leonardo’s part. Real initiative. Good planning. But it came with a price. He was just too fucking crazy, wasn’t he? That’s why you finally had to do it. Backed into a corner. Crisis management.” Gurney shook his head, looked with dismay at the huge bloodstain on the rug between them. “Too fucking little, Giotto. Too fucking late.”

“The fuck did you call me?”

Gurney returned the man’s granite stare for a long moment before answering, “Don’t waste my time. I have a deal for you. You have five minutes to take it or leave it.” He thought he saw a tiny crack in the stone. For maybe a quarter of a second.

“The fuck did you call me?”

“Giotto, get it through your head. It’s over. The Skards are done. The Skards are fucking done. You get it? Clock’s ticking. Here’s the deal. You hand me the names and addresses of all Karnala’s customers, all the Jordan Ballston creeps you do business with. I especially want the addresses where some Mapleshade girls might still be alive. You give me all that and I give you a guarantee that you will live through the process of being arrested.”

The little man laughed, a sound like gravel being crushed under a blanket. “You got amazing balls, Gurney. You’re in the wrong fucking business.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re down to four and a half minutes. Time fucking flies. So if you choose not to give me the addresses I want, here’s what’s going to happen: There will be a careful, by-the-book attempt to take you into custody. You, however, will foolishly try to escape. In doing so you will endanger the life of a police officer, making it necessary to shoot you. You will be shot twice. The first bullet, a nine-millimeter hollow-point, will blow your balls off. The second will sever your spinal cord between the first and second cervical vertebrae, resulting in irreversible paralysis. This combination of wounds will convert you into a soprano in a wheelchair in a prison hospital for the rest of your fucking life. It will also give your fellow inmates an opportunity to piss in your face whenever they feel the urge. Okay? You understand the deal?”

Again came the laugh. A laugh that would make Hardwick’s nasty rasp sound sweet. “You know why you’re still alive, Gurney? Because I can’t fucking wait to hear what you’re going to say next.”

Gurney looked at his watch. “Three minutes and twenty seconds to go.”

There were no voices coming from the monitor now-just moans, hacking coughs, a sharp little scream, crying.

“What the fuck?” said Hardwick. “Jesus, what the fuck?”

Gurney looked at the screen, listened to the piteous sounds, turned to Hardwick, spoke with deliberate clarity and evenness. “In case I forget, remember that the door opener is in Ashton’s pocket.”

Hardwick looked strangely at him, seeming to register the implication of his statement.

“Time is running out,” Gurney added, turning toward Giotto Skard.

Again the old man laughed. He could not be bluffed. There would be no deal.

A girl’s face appeared on the screen, half obscured by a tumble of blond hair, full of fear and fury, larger than life, distorted into ugliness by its closeness to the camera.

“You fuck!” the girl screamed, her voice cracking. “You fuck! You fuck! You fuck!” She began to cough violently, wheezing, hacking.

The cadaverous Dr. Lazarus appeared from behind an upended pew, crawling like a giant black beetle across the smoky floor.

Giotto Skard was watching the screen. Worse than emotionless, he seemed amused.

This minor distraction, Gurney concluded, was as good as it was going to get. This one last chance was all he had left.

There was no one to blame. No one to save him. His own decisions had brought him to this place. This most dangerous place in all his life. This narrow place, teetering on the edge of hell.

Gate of Heaven.

There was only one thing he could do.

He hoped it would be enough.

If it wasn’t, he hoped that perhaps one day Madeleine would be able to forgive him.

Chapter 79

There was no course at the academy that adequately prepared you for being shot. Hearing it described by those who’d been through it gave you some idea, and seeing it happen added a certain disturbing dimension, but like most powerful experiences, the idea of it and the reality of it existed in two different worlds.

His plan, such as it was, conceived as it was in a second or two, was, like jumping out a window, simplicity itself. The plan was to launch himself directly at the little man with the gun, who was standing ten or twelve feet from him next to Ashton’s empty chair just inside the open door. The hope was to smash into him with sufficient force to drive him backward through the doorway-the momentum carrying them both over the small landing and down the stone stairs. The price was getting shot, probably more than once.

As Giotto Skard watched the blond girl shrieking “Fuck!” Gurney hurled himself forward with a guttural roar, placing one arm across the heart area of his chest and the other across his forehead. Skard’s.25-caliber pistol would not have great stopping power, except to those two areas, and Gurney was resigned to absorbing elsewhere whatever damage was necessary.

It was crazy, probably suicidal, but he saw no alternative.

The deafening report of the first shot in the small room came almost immediately. With a shocking impact, the bullet shattered Gurney’s right wrist, which was pressed against the heart side of his breastbone.

The second bullet was a spike of fire through his stomach.

The third was the bad one.

Neither here nor there.

An explosion of electricity. A blinding green spark, a spark like an exploding star. Screaming. A scream of terror and shock, screaming into a rage. The light is the scream, the scream is the light.

There is nothing. And there is something. At first it’s hard to tell which is which.

A white expanse. Could be nothing. Could be a ceiling.

Somewhere below the white expanse, somewhere above him, a black hook. A small black hook extended like a beckoning finger. A gesture of vast meaning. Too vast for words. Everything now is too vast for words. He can’t think of any words. Not a single one. Forgets what they are. Words. Small bumpy objects. Black plastic insects. Designs. Pieces of something. Alphabet soup.

From the hook hangs a colorless transparent bag. The bag is bulging with colorless transparent liquid. From the bag a transparent tube descends toward him. Like the neoprene gas tube on a model airplane in the park. He can smell the airplane fuel. He watches as the practiced flick of a deft forefinger on the propeller brings the little engine sputtering to life. The volume and pitch of the sound rises, the engine screaming, the scream building to a constant shriek. On the way home from the park, trailing his father, his taciturn father, he falls on a pile of stones. His knee is cut and bloody. The blood trickles down his shin onto his sock. He doesn’t cry. His father looks happy, looks proud of him, later tells his mother about his great achievement, that he’s reached an age where he doesn’t have to cry anymore. It’s a rare thing for his father to look at him with pride. His mother says, “For Godsake, he’s only four, he’s allowed to cry.” His father says nothing.

He sees himself driving his car. A familiar Catskill road. A deer crossing ahead of him, a doe passing into the opposite field. And then her fawn following her, unexpectedly. The thump. Image of the twisted body, mother looking back, waiting in the field.

Danny in the gutter, the red BMW speeding away. The pigeon he was following into the street flying away. He was only four.

Nino Rota music. Poignant, ironic, giddy. Like a sad circus. Sonya Reynolds slowly dancing. The autumn leaves falling.

Voices.

“Can he hear us now?”

“It’s possible. The brain scans yesterday showed significant activity in all the sensory centers.”

“Significant? But…?”

“The patterns remain erratic.”

“Meaning?”

“His brain shows evidence of normal function, but it comes and goes, and there’s some evidence of sensory switching, which may be temporary. It’s a bit like certain drug experiences, hallucinogenics, where sounds are seen and colors are heard.”

“And the prognosis for that is…?”

“Mrs. Gurney, with traumatic brain injuries…”

“I know you don’t know. But what do you think?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he recovered fully. I’ve seen cases in which a sudden spontaneous remission-”

“And you wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t?”

“Your husband was shot in the head. It’s remarkable that he’s alive.”

“Yes. Thank you. I understand. He may get better. Or he may get worse. And you really don’t have a clue, do you?”

“We’re doing as much as we can. When the brain swelling goes down, the situation may be clearer.”

“You’re sure he’s not in pain?”

“He’s not in pain.”

Heaven.

Warmth and coolness bathed him like the inflow and ebbing of a wave or a shifting summer breeze.

Now the coolness had the scent of dewy grass and the warmth carried the subtle scent of tulips in the sun.

The coolness was the coolness of his sheet, and the warmth was the warmth of women’s voices.

Warmth and coolness were combined in the soft pressure of lips against his forehead. A wonderful sweetness and gentleness.

Judgment.

New York County Criminal Court. A crappy courtroom, bleak, colorless. The judge a cartoon of exhaustion, cynicism, and faulty hearing.

“Detective Gurney, the accusations are voluminous. How do you plead?”

He can’t speak, can’t respond, can’t even move.

“Is the defendant present?”

“No!” cries a chorus of voices in unison.

A pigeon rises from the floor, disappears in the smoky air.

He wants, tries, to speak, to prove he is there, but he can’t speak, can’t utter a word or move a finger. He strains to force even a syllable, even a gagging cry from his throat.

The room is on fire. The judge’s robe is smoldering. He announces, wheezing, “The defendant is remanded for an indefinite period to the place where he is, which shall be reduced in size, until such time as the defendant is dead or insane.”

Hell.

He’s standing in a windowless room, a cramped room with stale air and an unmade bed. He looks for the door, but the only door opens into a closet, a closet just inches deep, a closet backed by a concrete wall. He’s having trouble breathing. He bangs on the walls, but the bang isn’t a bang; it’s a flash of fire and smoke. Then, by the side of the bed, he sees a slit in the wall and in the slit a pair of eyes watching him.

Then he’s in the space behind the wall, the space from which the eyes were watching, but the slit is gone and the space is totally dark. He tries to calm himself. Tries to breathe slowly, evenly. He tries to move, but the space is too small. He can’t raise his arms, can’t bend his knees. And he topples sideways, crashing to the floor, but the crash isn’t a crash; it’s a scream. He can’t move the arm beneath his body, can’t raise himself. The space is narrower there, nothing will move. An accelerating terror makes it almost impossible to breathe. If only he could make a sound, speak, cry out.

Far away the coyotes begin to howl.

Life.

“Are you sure he can hear me?” Her voice was pure hope.

“What I can tell you for sure is that the activity pattern I’m seeing on the scan is consistent with the neural activity of hearing.” His voice was as cool as a sheet of paper.

“Is it possible that he’s paralyzed?” Her voice was at the edge of darkness.

“The motor center wasn’t directly affected, so far as we can see. However, with injuries of this sort…”

“Yes, I know.”

“All right, Mrs. Gurney. I’ll leave you with him.”

“David,” she said softly.

He still couldn’t move, but the panic was evaporating, somehow diluted and dispersed by the sound of the woman’s voice. The enclosure that held him, whatever it was, no longer crushed him.

He knew the woman’s voice.

With her voice came the image of her face.

He opened his eyes. At first he saw nothing but light.

Then he saw her.

She was looking at him, smiling.

He tried to move, but nothing moved.

“You’re in a cast,” she said, “Relax.”

Suddenly he remembered the mad dash across the room at Giotto Skard, the first deafening shot.

“Is Jack all right?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

Tears filled his eyes, blurring her face.

After a while his memory expanded backward. “The fire…?”

“Everyone got out.”

“Ah. Good. Good. Jack found the…?” He couldn’t remember the word.

“The remote lock thing, yes. You reminded him to look in Ashton’s pocket.” She made an odd little laughing, choking, sobbing sound.

“What was that all about?”

“It just flashed through my mind that ‘Look in Ashton’s pocket’ might have been your last words.”

He started to laugh but immediately cried out from the pain in his chest, then started to laugh again and cried out again. “Oh, God, no, no, don’t make me laugh.” Tears were streaming down his cheeks. His chest ached dreadfully. He was becoming exhausted.

She leaned toward him and wiped his eyes with a crumpled tissue.

“What about Skard?” he asked, his voice hardly audible now.

“Giotto? You made as big a mess of him as he made of you.”

“Stairs?”

“Oh, yes. Probably the first time he’d ever been thrown down a flight of stairs by a man he’d already shot three times.”

There was so much in her voice, so many vying emotions, but he detected in that rich mixture an element of innocent pride. It made him laugh. The tears came again.

“Rest now,” she said. “People are going to be lining up to talk to you. Hardwick told everyone at BCI everything that happened, and everything you discovered about who was who and what was what, and he told them what an incredible hero you were and how many lives you saved, but they’re eager to hear it all from you personally.”

He said nothing for a while, trying to reach out as far as his memory would take him. “When did you talk to them?”

“Exactly two weeks ago today.”

“No, I mean about the… the Skard business, and the fire.”

“Two weeks ago today. The day it happened, the day I got back from New Jersey.”

“Jesus. You mean…?”

“You’ve been a little out of it.” She paused, her eyes filling suddenly with tears, her breath coming in shaky gasps. “I almost lost you,” she said, and as she said it, something wild and desperate swept across her face, something he’d never seen before.

Chapter 80

“Is he asleep?”

“Not really asleep. Just sort of dazed and dozing. They put him on a temporary Dilaudid drip to reduce the pain. If you talk to him, he’ll hear you.”

It was true. He smiled at the truth of it. But the drug did more than reduce the pain. It obliterated it in a wave of… of what? A wave of… okayness. He smiled at the okayness of it.

“I don’t want to disturb him.”

“Just say what you have to say. He’ll hear you perfectly well, and it won’t disturb him.”

He knew the voices. The voices of Val Perry and Madeleine. Beautiful voices.

Val Perry’s beautiful voice: “David? I came to thank you.” There was a long silence. The silence of a distant sailboat crossing a blue horizon. “I guess that’s all I really have to say. I’m leaving an envelope for you. I hope it’s enough. It’s ten times the amount we agreed on. If it’s not enough, let me know.” Another silence. A small sigh. The sigh of a breeze over a field of orange poppies. “Thank you.”

He couldn’t tell where his body ended and the bed began. He couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.

Then he was awake, looking up at Madeleine.

“It’s Jack,” she was saying. “Jack Hardwick from BCI. Can you talk to him? Or shall I tell him to come back tomorrow?”

He looked past her at the figure in the doorway, saw the gray crew cut, the ruddy face, the ice-blue malamute eyes.

“Now is good.” Something about the need to make sense with Hardwick, to focus, began to clear his thought process.

She nodded, stepped aside, as Hardwick came to the bed. “I’m going downstairs for some horrible coffee,” she said. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

“You know,” Hardwick rasped after she left the room, raising a bandaged hand, “one of those fucking bullets went right through you and hit me.”

Gurney looked at the hand, didn’t see much damage. He remembered how Marian Eliot had referred to Hardwick: a smart rhinoceros. He started to laugh. Apparently the Dilaudid drip had been reduced enough that the laugh hurt. “You have any news that I might care about?”

“You’re cold, Gurney, very cold.” Hardwick shook his head in mock distress. “You aware that you broke Giotto Skard’s back?”

“When I pushed him down the stairs?”

“You didn’t push him down the stairs. You rode him down the stairs like he was a fucking sled. Result being that he ended up in that paraplegic wheelchair you’d been threatening him with. And I guess then he started thinking about that other little unpleasantness you mentioned-the possibility of his fellow inmates taking the occasional piss in his face. So, bottom line, cut to the chase, he made a deal with the DA for life without parole with guaranteed medical separation from the general prison population.”

“What kind of deal?”

“He gave us the addresses of Karnala’s special customers. The ones who liked to go all the way.”

“And?”

“And some of the girls we found at those addresses were… still alive.”

“That was the deal?”

“Plus, he had to turn in the rest of the organization. Immediately.”

“He turned in his other two sons?”

“Without a second thought. Giotto Skard is not a sentimental man.”

Gurney smiled at the understatement.

Hardwick went on. “But I got a question for you. Given how… practical… he is about his business affairs, and how crazy Leonardo was, why didn’t Giotto do away with him the first time he heard about those peculiar little beheading requests that Leonardo was inserting into Karnala’s customer transactions?”

“Easy. Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

“The goose being Leonardo, aka Dr. Scott Ashton?”

“Ashton was big in his field… drawing card at Mapleshade. Kill him, the school might close… cut off a ready supply of sick young women.” Gurney’s eyes drifted shut momentarily. “Not something… not something Giotto would want to happen.”

“Then why kill him at the end?”

“All unraveling… going up in smoke, you might say. No more… golden eggs.”

“You okay, hotshot? You sound a little fuzzy.”

“Never better. Without the golden eggs… the crazy goose… becomes a liability. Risk-reward thing. In the chapel Giotto finally saw Leonardo as all risk, no reward. Scale tipped… Greater benefit in killing him than keeping him alive.”

Hardwick emitted a thoughtful grunt. “A very practical madman.”

“Yes.” After a long silence, Gurney asked, “Giotto turn in anyone else?”

“Saul Steck. We went in with some NYPD boys, found him in that Manhattan brownstone. Unfortunately, he shot himself before we could get to him. Interesting thing about Steck, by the way. Remember I told you about his stint in a psychiatric hospital after his arrest years ago on multiple rape charges? Guess who the consulting psychiatrist was in the hospital’s sex-offender rehabilitation program?”

“Ashton?”

“The very same. Guess he got to know Saul pretty well-decided he had enough potential to make an exception to the Skard family-only rule. When you think about it, the man was a damn good judge of character. Could spot a useful psychopathic scumbag a mile away.”

“You find out who Saul’s ‘daughters’ were?”

“Maybe new Mapleshade grads doing an internship? Who knows? They were gone when we got there, and I’d be damn surprised if they reappeared.”

This sounded to Gurney like some form of reassurance, but even in his gentle Dilaudid haze it didn’t entirely reassure him. The feeling created an awkward silence. Finally Gurney asked, “You find anything of interest on the premises?”

“Of interest? Oh, yeah, definitely. Lots of interesting videos. Young ladies describing their favorite activities in detail. Some sick shit. Very sick shit.”

Gurney nodded. “Anything else?”

Hardwick raised his arms in an exaggerated shrug. “Might have been. Who knows? You do your best to keep track of everything. But sometimes stuff just disappears. Never gets inventoried. Gets accidentally destroyed. You know how it is.”

Neither of them said anything for a few seconds.

Hardwick looked thoughtful, then amused. “You know, Gurney, you’re a more fucked-up guy than most people realize.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Hell no! Take me, for example. I appear totally fucked up. But inside I’m a rock. A finely tuned, well-balanced machine.”

“If you’re well balanced…” Normally Gurney could have ended the sentence with a smart rebuttal, but the Dilaudid was getting in the way, and his voice just trailed off.

The two men held each other’s gaze for a moment longer, and then Hardwick took a step toward the door. “Well, I’ll be seeing you around, okay?”

“Sure.”

He started to leave, then turned back for a moment. “Relax, Sherlock. Everything’s cool.”

“Thanks, Jack.”

Sometime after Hardwick left, Madeleine returned to the room, carrying a small container of coffee. Wrinkling her nose at it, she laid it on a metal table in the corner.

Gurney smiled. “Not very good?”

She didn’t answer. Instead she came to the side of the bed and took both of his hands in hers and held them tightly.

She stood there next to him, just like that, holding his hands, for a long while.

It could have been a minute or an hour. He couldn’t tell.

All he was truly aware of was her steady, perceptive, loving smile-the smile that was hers alone.

It enveloped him, warmed him, delighted him like nothing else on earth.

He was amazed that anyone who saw everything so clearly, who had all the light of the world in her eyes, saw in him something worthy of such a smile.

It was a smile that could make a man believe that life was good.