White River Burning

15

As they waited for Beckert and Turlock, the members of the critical situation management team were in the same seats they’d been in the previous day, but the mood in the room was markedly different. There was no idle talk—in fact, no talk at all.

Gurney’s mind was seesawing between his promise to reconsider his involvement with Kline and this tectonic shift in the nature of the situation.

Dwayne Shucker’s eyes were closed, but the tiny tics playing at his eyelids belied any sense of restfulness. Goodson Cloutz’s mouth was drawn into a tight line. Sheridan Kline’s fingers were drumming lightly on the table. Mark Torres was focused on getting his laptop communicating with the screen on the wall above Cloutz’s head. Gurney was struck not so much by everyone’s discomfort, but by their apparent unwillingness to say a word before Beckert delivered his own view of the situation.

At precisely 2:00 PM Beckert and Turlock strode into the room and took their seats. If the murder of two men Beckert had wrongly implied were cop killers had any effect on his self-confidence, it wasn’t obvious. Turlock looked about as concerned as a sledgehammer.

Beckert glanced at Torres’s computer. “You have that ready?”

“Yes, sir.” Torres tapped a key, and the screen on the wall displayed the words WILLARD PARK CRIME SCENE.

“Just hold it there for a minute. I want to say a few words about perspective. At noon today I was interviewed by RAM News. Just before the camera started recording, the reporter made a comment to me. ‘This new development changes everything, doesn’t it?’ It wasn’t really a question. It was an assumption. A dangerous one. And a false one. What happened last night in Willard Park, far from changing everything, simply narrows our focus.”

The mayor’s eyes were wide open. The sheriff was leaning forward, as if he’d misheard something. Beckert went on. “We know from our source that three individuals may have been involved in the plot to murder Officer Steele. Two of those conspirators, Jordan and Tooker, provided an alibi covering the time of the shooting. All this means is that the third member of the conspiracy was probably the actual shooter. From a messaging perspective, the focus of our search has been narrowed. Not changed. Even more important, when mentioning Jordan and Tooker, avoid the word ‘innocent.’ There are many ways to be guilty of murder. Pulling a trigger is only one of them.”

The sheriff was moistening his lips. “I do admire your way with words, Dell.”

Kline looked uneasy. “Do we know anything more about this third man?”

“Our source is working on that.”

“Are they willing to get on the stand, if it comes to that?”

“One step at a time, Sheridan. Right now, the priority is information. And so far the information from this source has been pure gold. If I mentioned testifying publicly, it would evaporate.”

Kline didn’t seem surprised by the answer.

“One more point regarding the Willard Park incident,” said Beckert. “It’s important to avoid incendiary phrases. Let’s agree right now on the proper wording. These two individuals were found dead, details to be determined by autopsy. Do not refer to them as having been beaten to death.”

Frown lines creased the mayor’s fleshy face. “But if that’s what happened . . . ?”

Beckert explained patiently. “Found dead is neutral. Beaten to death is emotionally charged in a way that could exacerbate the situation on the street. We can’t prevent the media from using the term, but we should definitely not encourage it.”

Some puzzlement lingered in the mayor’s expression, and Beckert went on. “It’s the description of an event that the public actually absorbs, the images and emotions conveyed by the words, not the event itself. Words matter.”

“You’re talking about spin?”

Beckert frowned. “That term minimizes its importance. Spin isn’t the icing on the cake. It’s the cake. Messaging is everything. It’s politics, Dwayne. And politics is no small thing.”

Shucker nodded with the dawning grin of a man seeing the light.

Beckert turned toward Torres. “Okay, bring us up to date.”

“Yes, sir. At seven ten this morning our 911 center received a call from a local citizen walking his dog—reporting the discovery of two bodies in Willard Park. The 911 center contacted White River PD, and mobile patrol officers were dispatched to the location. First officer on the scene conducted a prelim interview with the caller, observed and confirmed the facts, secured the site, and reported to the duty sergeant, who notified Deputy Chief Turlock, who notified me. Upon arrival, I contacted our evidence unit, the ME’s office, and the photographer who—”

Kline interrupted. “You checked the bodies for signs of life?”

“Yes, sir, as part of my initial observations. As additional mobile patrol units arrived I enlisted their support in taping the scene perimeter. When the evidence officer arrived, I assigned three patrol officers to assist him in a wide-area cross-grid search. I ordered the remaining patrol units to close off vehicular and pedestrian access to the vicinity.”

The mayor looked worried. “How big a vicinity?”

“About fifty acres in the no-go zone, but the evidence search is currently concentrated in two or three acres.”

“How about the media vultures?”

“They’re subject to the same no-go zone as the general public.”

“I hate them bastards.”

“They can be difficult, but we’re keeping them at bay.”

That got Gurney’s attention. “They showed up at the site this morning?”

“Yes, sir. First thing. As we were setting up our perimeter tapes.”

“Your initial communication regarding the incident—it occurred by phone or radio?”

“By phone, sir.”

“Interesting.”

Beckert’s gaze rested on Gurney for a moment before he turned back to Torres. “Let’s move on to your crime-scene assessment.”

“Yes, sir. It will be clearer if I begin with the photographs and video I just received from Paul Aziz.”

The sheriff raised his head like a hound catching a scent. “Azeeez? I thought Scotty Maclinter did our forensic photos.”

“That’s correct, sir, but he suffered an injury last night at the VFW. He’s in the hospital.”

“What kinda injury?”

“He fell down the stairs on his way to the men’s room.”

“Hah. I do believe the boy’s done that before. Be advisable in future for him to pee in the parking lot. Meantime, who’s this Aziz?”

“One of our dispatchers, who also happens to be a professional photographer. He filled in for Officer Maclinter once before. Excellent work.”

“Hell kinda name’s Aziz?”

“I’m not sure, sir. Possibly Jordanian or Syrian?”

“Well, ain’t that somethin’? Seems like our country’s gettin’ more and more of them kind of people.”

Gurney was taken aback by Cloutz’s obnoxious tone and depressed by the thought that it was probably a key part of what got him elected.

Torres, after an unpleasant glance in Cloutz’s direction, returned to his presentation. “Paul provided us with more than we need for the purpose of documenting the crime scene, but his video coverage of possible approach and departure paths from the location of the bodies could be useful. And it shows the visual limitations of the weather conditions.”

Kline frowned. “What limitations?”

“Fog. Began around midnight. Didn’t clear up till around ten this morning. You can see for yourself in this opening segment of the video.” Torres tapped a computer key and pointed to the monitor on the wall.

At first, all that was visible was the fog itself, a formless gray mass that seemed to be moving in slow motion past the camera. As the dark branches of nearby trees began to emerge from the murky background on both sides of the screen, it became evident that the camera operator was proceeding along a heavily wooded trail. Gurney thought he could hear footsteps and the sound of someone breathing. As he leaned forward to listen more carefully, he was startled by a sudden high-pitched shriek.

“Jesus!” said Kline. “What the hell . . .”

“Blackbirds,” said Torres. “Paul was recording audio along with the video.”

“Damn things,” said the sheriff. “On that twisty little trail that touches the south corner of the lake, am I right?”

The mayor frowned. “How’d you know that?”

“I’m blind, I ain’t deaf. Fact I hear better’n most. The wife takes me for walks on that trail sometimes, knowin’ I hate the screamin’ of them damn birds. I been tryin’ to get Clifford Merganthaller to exterminate them in pursuit of peace and quiet. For an animal control officer, he’s woefully unwillin’ to exert any control at all. Boy’s ’bout as useless as them damn birds that don’t do nothin’ but scream and shit.”

The mayor leaned forward. “Glory be to God, you can hear them shit?”

“Don’t need to hear ’em doin’ what I know they’re doin’. Every livin’ bein’ shits. Some of ’em a hell of a lot more ’n others.” The antic observation had a nasty undertone.

Beckert glanced at Torres. “Let’s move this along.”

“We’re coming up to the place where the trail comes out into the clearing.”

The shrieks of the birds on the audio track were growing more insistent.

Out of the dark constriction of the trail, the screen now displayed an open area where the fog had thinned enough for Gurney to make out a wide expanse of lakeside reeds and a shedlike building. As the camera moved forward he was able to read a sign on the building listing hourly rates for kayak rentals.

The black form of a bird swooped through the camera’s field of view.

As the camera moved on, the ghostlike shapes of playground equipment began to come into view—a tall slide, a pair of seesaws, the angled braces of a swing set, and finally the geometrical structure of a large jungle gym.

Gurney could feel his chest tightening in anticipation of what he was about to see. No matter how many times he’d come upon it in his career, the sight of violent death always jarred him.

This time was no exception.

As the camera panned slowly across the front of the jungle gym, the bodies of the two victims were gradually revealed. They were tied to the structure in standing positions, side by side—secured in place by ropes around their legs, stomachs, and necks. Both men were African American. Both were stripped naked. Both bodies showed obvious signs of having been beaten. Their faces were swollen, their expressions grotesque. Between the feet of one there appeared to be a deposit of feces.

“Christ Almighty,” murmured Shucker.

Kline’s lips drew back in revulsion.

Turlock was gazing at the screen with icy detachment.

Beckert turned to Torres, who was looking sick. “Who has custody of this material?”

“Sir?”

“This video and whatever still shots were taken of the bodies—who has possession of the original digital files?”

“I do.”

“In what form?”

“The memory chips from the cameras Paul used.”

“Did he make copies?”

“I don’t think so. He warned me not to lose the chips.”

“If one frame of that leaks onto the internet, we’ll have a race war on our hands.”

“I’m aware of the risk, sir.”

“We’ll come back to that,” said Beckert. “Let’s move on to the details.”

“Right.” Torres took a deep breath and continued. “Our initial inspection of the victims revealed livor mortis. We left both bodies in situ, pending the ME’s—”

Shucker interrupted him. “That the same as what they call rigor mortis?”

“No, sir. Rigor refers to the stiffening of the deceased’s muscles, usually two or three hours after death. Livor mortis occurs sooner. It refers to the pooling of the blood in the lowest parts of the body, once the heart stops beating. In this case it was observable in their feet.” He tapped a computer key several times, scrolling rapidly through a series of photos and stopping when the screen showed a close-up of the victims’ legs from the knees down. The skin tone was brown except on the feet, where it was a dark purple. There were bruises on the shins and abrasions on the ankles.

Shucker’s expression suggested he’d been given more information than he’d wanted.

Torres continued. “In a few minutes, we’ll come back to some marks on the feet that could be very significant. But first we’ll proceed in the normal order of our victim close-ups, starting at the head and working our way down.”

Displaying photos of both men in a split-screen format as he spoke, he pointed out numerous contusions on their faces, torsos, and legs. His voice was tight with an apparent effort to control his distress—but the details of his commentary were vivid enough to provoke a response from the blind sheriff.

“It does sound like them boys truly got the shit beat out of them.” To say his tone was uncaring would overestimate its warmth.

Torres stared at him. He tapped a key and brought up a final pair of photos on the split screen—closeup shots of the soles of the victims’ feet.

Kline leaned forward. “Jesus, what on God’s earth . . . ?”

Turlock gazed at the screen with no more reaction than a boulder.

A frown darkened Beckert’s face—a cloud passing over Mount Rushmore.

The mayor looked confused and worried.

Burned deeply into the sole of each victim’s left foot were three capital letters, a grotesque monogram. It brought to Gurney’s mind an image from an old Western—red-hot letters on the end of a branding iron, smoking and hissing into the side of a steer.

KRS

16

The sheriff broke the fraught silence. “The hell y’all gone quiet for?”

Torres described the photo.

“Shit,” muttered the sheriff.

Shucker looked around the table. “KRS? What the hell’s that, somebody’s initials?”

“Could be,” said Beckert.

Gurney was pretty sure it was something else. He knew from experience that initials left at murder scenes generally stood for an organization the killer considered himself part of or for a title he’d given himself.

“KRS brings to mind KKK,” said the sheriff. “If this damn thing gets pegged as a white-supremacist hate crime, we’ll get overrun by the feds, which is unpleasant to contemplate. You got any thoughts on that, Dell?”

“I’m sure we can postpone FBI intrusion for a while. After all, this could be a personal revenge killing rather a racial act—a tricky argument to make, I know, but it could serve our purposes.”

“BDA agitators’ll be screamin’ for federal intervention.”

“No doubt. To keep control of the process, we need to—number one—craft the right public message. And—number two—demonstrate rapid progress toward an arrest. Those are both achievable objectives—so long as we adhere to procedures, manage our communications carefully, and avoid stupid mistakes.”

Shucker looked miserable. “I just hope to God we don’t start hearing on TV that White River’s got Ku Kluxers running around killing people in public parks. The tourist-dependent members of the Chamber would go—”

Shucker’s worry was cut off by three loud raps at the conference room door. Before anyone could respond, it was thrust open and the lanky medical examiner strode in and hefted his fat briefcase onto the chair next to Kline’s.

“Hate being late, gentlemen, but there’s been more autopsies in the past three days than in three normal months.”

Beckert told him to proceed.

Thrasher removed a sheet of paper from his briefcase, perused it for a few seconds, and put it back. He pushed his horn-rimmed glasses higher on the bridge of his nose and surveyed the group around the table. His gaze hesitated for only a moment at Gurney before he launched into a summary of his findings.

“Both victims suffered death by asphyxiation, consistent with strangulation. Multiple contusions on face, torso, arms, and legs are consistent with a methodical assault, utilizing at least two distinct club-like instruments.”

Torres asked, “Like baseball bats?”

“One of them, possibly. There were also contusions caused by something the approximate diameter of a police nightstick.”

“So,” Kline mused, “at least two assailants.”

Thrasher nodded. “A reasonable inference.”

Torres looked uncomfortable. “You say one of them used a nightstick?”

“Or something similar. Typical nightsticks have circular grooves at one or both ends to improve the wielder’s grip. Welts across the lower back of the victims display patterns consistent with grooves.”

The sheriff spoke up. “Anyone can get anything these days on the internet. So I hope we ain’t assumin’ the presence of a nightstick implies the presence of a police officer.”

Beckert nodded. “There are people who’d gladly leap to that conclusion, so we’ll stick to the word ‘club’ rather than ‘nightstick’ in any press statements.”

Thrasher continued. “Interestingly, the injuries show a remarkable similarity in the number and placement of the blows to the two bodies.”

Kline looked puzzled. “Similarity?”

“In my experience as an emergency room physician and as a pathologist, I’ve examined hundreds of victims of assaults. Such injuries tend to be of a more random nature—random in placement and in force.”

Torres looked as puzzled as Kline. “What are you getting at?”

“These blows were not delivered in the heat of passion characteristic of assaults in general. Their similar distribution on each body, the similar force with which they were delivered, and their similar number—twenty-one distinct contusions on Tooker, twenty-two on Jordan—are consistent with a methodical approach.”

“Designed to achieve what?”

“That’s what you gentlemen are paid to figure out. I merely observe and report.”

Kline asked if he’d noted any other oddities.

“Well, naturally the burn marks on the feet. They’re consistent with the application of a custom-made branding iron—like a hobbyist’s wood-burning instrument. An unusual element in itself, even without the additional peculiarity.”

“What peculiarity?”

“The burned-in letters have perfectly sharp borders.”

“Meaning what?”

“During the application of the red-hot iron the feet remained perfectly motionless.”

Torres spoke up. “I saw ligature marks on the ankles, meaning they were tied together. Also, one of the assailants could have been holding them down. Wouldn’t that account for it?”

“Not completely. The application of the hot iron to a sensitive area of the foot would have produced a spasm, creating observable blurring at the border of the impression.”

“So that means what? That they were unconscious?”

“Almost certainly. Yet none of the cranial injuries appear to be sufficient to cause loss of consciousness.”

“So they were drugged?”

“Yes. To the point of zero physical sensation. Something to think about.”

Beckert nodded thoughtfully. “When you think about that—the difficulties that would pose, the possible motives—what comes to mind?”

“That question moves beyond medical facts into the area of criminal hypothesizing—your specialty, not mine. I wish you the best of luck.” He picked up his briefcase and headed for the door. “My office will forward you the initial autopsy report later this afternoon. The simple opiate screens were negative, by the way. Alcohol screens were above the legal limit for driving, but hardly consistent with anesthesia. Full tox screens will be available in another day or two.”

After Thrasher’s parting comment the mayor spoke up. “What the hell was he getting at—that business about the beating they got not being normal?”

The sheriff was the first to respond. “He implied it was done with a high degree of plannin’ and purpose.”

“What kinda purpose?”

“Sounded a little like he didn’t know, and a lot like he didn’t want to say.”

Beckert addressed the table in general. “Our ME has a habit of making dramatic entrances, stirring the pot, and dashing off. We’ll stick to his professional observations, evaluate them in the light of all the other evidence, and form our own conclusions.” He turned to Torres. “Let’s take a look at what you discovered at the crime scene.”

Torres tapped a couple of computer keys, resuming his description of the evidence photos as they appeared. “These are the ropes that were used to tie the victims to the crossbars of the jungle gym. We preserved the knots and the rope-end cuts for eventual matching if we can find the source.”

“How come you saved the knots?” Shucker asked.

“They would have been handled the most, so they’d be most likely to have retained abraded skin cells.” He went on to the next photo. “We found these tire tracks approaching the jungle gym structure and stopping in front of it . . . and we found these similar tracks on one of the trails in the adjacent woods. The forensics team—”

Kline interrupted. “Have you determined the type of vehicle?”

“We believe it was a full-size UTV, something like a Kawasaki Mule. Forensics is looking to match the tread pattern and width to a specific model and year. Actually, we had a piece of luck with those tires. They dropped some compacted soil on the ground near the swing set, soil that had been trapped in the tread grooves. And it doesn’t appear to be native to that part of the park.”

Gurney smiled. “Nice, Mark. A possible link to the primary crime scene.”

The mayor looked bewildered. “What primary crime scene?”

“The location where Jordan and Tooker were drugged, stripped, beaten, and branded,” explained Gurney. “Because that earlier site would be where most of the violence took place, it would be the most promising site for recovering physical evidence.” He turned to Torres. “If I were you, I’d have that tread soil analyzed. There may be something distinctive about it.”

The sheriff cleared his throat. “Assumin’ it ain’t horseshit.”

Torres blinked. “Sir?”

“Folks ride horses on them trails.”

Torres continued, “We found several items in the immediate area that may be related to the incident. Human hairs, a lottery ticket, two cigarette butts, a flashlight battery, and an item of special interest—a used condom. It was discovered in a grassy area about a hundred feet from the bodies, partly sheltered by a row of bushes. It didn’t look like it had been there very long.”

“And you’re thinking whoever left it there might be a witness?” asked Kline.

“It’s a possibility, sir. We rushed it to Albany. We might get a hit on CODIS and get an ID. It’s a long shot, but . . .”

Beckert nodded. “Anything more to show us?”

“Some satellite views of the area to identify possible site entry and exit routes. Judging from the leaves partly off the trees, the photos were probably taken last autumn.”

Centered on the jungle gym, the first photo encompassed the immediate area of the crime scene—the kayak rental building, the reedy shore of the lake, some of the surrounding trees. Torres pointed out the locations of the tire tracks.

The next two photos showed more of the park and more of the wooded areas. The final shot showed the entire park, bordered on three sides by city streets and on the fourth by an extensive wilderness area into which some of the park’s trails extended.

A couple of miles into that wilderness area another lake was visible. Along its shore were a number of small clearings. Torres explained that the White River Gun Club owned the lake and the land around it, and in the clearings there were cabins owned by club members. “Mostly White River cops, as far as I know,” he added. He glanced at Beckert and Turlock as if for confirmation, but neither man responded.

“The dog walker who discovered the bodies,” said Kline, “where did he come from?”

Torres got up, went over to the screen, and traced the route as he was describing it. “He came into the park through the entrance on the east side, crossed the main field, passed the statue of Colonel Willard, and headed down toward the lake. Because of the fog this morning, he got within about fifty feet of the bodies before he realized what he was looking at. Was still a nervous wreck when we arrived.”

Beckert pointed at the screen. “That large field he crossed, the one taking up the northeast quadrant of the park—that’s where the BDA demonstration was held and where our officer was shot. I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that Jordan and Tooker were executed in that same park. Clearly a symbolic action. Which reinforces the importance of our maintaining control of the narrative. It’s vital that any new piece of evidence, information, rumor—anything at all with any bearing on any of the three killings—be reported at once to Judd or to me directly.”

Evidently satisfied that silence meant agreement, Beckert moved on. “Given the pressures of dealing with two explosive crimes—and the need to make rapid progress on both fronts at once—I’m dividing the investigative duties. Detective Torres, your primary responsibility will be the Steele sniper shooting. With our first two suspects out of the picture, your focus will be identifying and locating the third man—the actual shooter.”

Gurney was struck by the insinuation in Beckert’s choice of words—how the third man being the “actual” shooter subtly maintained, in some non-trigger-pulling capacity, the involvement of Jordan and Tooker.

Beckert went on, “Because of its complex public relations dimensions, I’ll assume personal responsibility for the investigation into these playground homicides. The case file, incident report, site sketches, and photos should be turned over to me as soon as we’re finished here. Including the memory chips from Paul Aziz’s cameras. Understood?”

Torres looked puzzled by the shift in responsibility. “Yes, sir.”

“Then that’s all for now. Except for one thing.” He looked at Gurney. “The phone. Is Steele’s wife going to hand it over voluntarily or not?”

“We’ll see. I left a message for her.”

“She has until tomorrow morning. Either she hands it over by then, or we visit her with a warrant and take it. Questions, anyone? No? Good. We’ll meet here tomorrow the same time.”

He placed his hands on the table, pushed back his chair, and stood up decisively—the very image of determination. Behind him, the picture window displayed its panorama of stone buildings with spirals of razor wire gleaming in the afternoon sun.

17

When Gurney came out into the police headquarters parking lot and headed for his Outback, he saw Kline standing next to it, taking a deep drag on a cigarette. He exhaled slowly, the hand holding the cigarette moving in a wide arc down to his side.

Déjà vu—a disturbing decades-old image of Gurney’s mother. Her bursts of nervous chain-smoking. The desperate pursuit of peace revealing a terrible anxiety.

When Kline saw Gurney approaching, he took a final drag, threw the butt to the ground, and stepped on it as if it were a wasp that had just stung him.

There was a briefcase at his feet. He reached down and pulled a large manila envelope out of it. “Everything you asked for yesterday. Full copy of the Steele case file. Incident and interview reports, crime-scene photos and sketches, ballistics report. Plus Jordan’s and Tooker’s past arrests and your temporary credentials—special senior investigator, office of the district attorney.” He handed the envelope to Gurney.

“Anything on the so-called third man?”

“If there’s anything on that, Beckert’s keeping it to himself.”

“Like the identities of his informants?”

“Right.” He took out another cigarette, hurriedly lit it, and took a particularly long drag before continuing. “So . . . what are your observations so far?”

“You look like an extremely worried man.”

Kline said nothing.

That in itself said something.

Gurney decided to push further. “The obvious interpretation of the message on Steele’s phone is that someone in the department might take advantage of the chaos in the streets to get rid of him. If that someone turned out to be Turlock, or even Beckert—”

“Jesus!” Kline raised his hand. “You have any evidence for what you’re saying?”

“None. But I don’t have any evidence that points to a third man from the BDA either.”

“What about these two new homicides? You have any thoughts?”

“Only that they may not be what they seem to be.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Thrasher’s comments about the damage to the bodies.”

Kline was looking increasingly miserable. “If they aren’t what they seem to be, what the hell are they?”

“I need time to think about that.”

“While you’re thinking about Steele?”

“I guess.”

“So which case is your priority?”

“The Steele shooting.”

“Why?”

“Because it came first, and something in it may explain the odd aspects of the other.”

Kline frowned, evidently trying to digest this. Then he pointed to the manila envelope in Gurney’s hand. “Let me know if anything in the case file pops out at you. You have my personal cell number. Call me anytime. Day or night.”

Away from the depressing environs of White River, the countryside had a bucolic timelessness, displaying the glories of early May. Black Angus cows dotted the hillsides. Apple trees were in blossom. The black earth of freshly tilled cornfields alternated with fields of emerald grass and buttercups. Only dimly aware of the beauty around him, Gurney spent the drive home pondering the strange facts of both cases. Despite his decision to focus on the sniper attack, he found it difficult to keep Thrasher’s comments about the beatings and brandings from intruding into his thoughts.

As he arrived at the narrow road that led to his hilltop property, his attention switched to a more pressing issue. Having told Madeleine that he’d sleep on the question of whether to continue his involvement with Kline, he felt the need to make a decision. On the one hand, there was the growing challenge of the situation itself and the accelerating pressure to avert an escalation of violence. Daunting as that sounded, it was the kind of challenge he was built for. On the other hand, there was his discomfort with the district attorney himself.

He felt as if he were locked in a loop of indecision. Each time he was about to conclude that the importance of the case might outweigh the risk of trusting Kline, the memory of Madeleine’s question intervened. My God, David, on what planet would that be considered a good idea?

As he was parking by the side door of the old farmhouse, still wrestling with his dilemma, his phone rang.

“Gurney here.”

“Thanks for picking up. It’s Mark Torres. Do you have a minute?”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m calling about the photos Paul Aziz took at Willard Park. I was wondering if you might want to see them.”

“The photos you showed at the meeting today?”

“I just showed the ones I thought were most important. Paul took over two hundred shots. Before I turned the camera chips over to Chief Beckert, I downloaded everything to my laptop.”

“And you want me to have all that?”

“As you know, I’ve been taken off the Jordan-Tooker case to concentrate on the Steele shooting. But I figured you’d still have an interest in both cases and the photos might be helpful to you.”

“You don’t think Beckert will share them with me?”

Torres hesitated. “I couldn’t say.”

Gurney wondered if Torres was suffering from the same distrust of the WRPD brass that seemed to have infected Kline. In any event, it wouldn’t hurt to take a look at Aziz’s photos. “How do you want to get them to me?”

“Through a file-sharing service. As soon as I get it set up, I’ll email you.”

Viewing this minor involvement with the photos as a separate matter from any decision about his overall commitment, Gurney thanked Torres and said he’d watch for the email. He ended the call, got out of the car, and went into the house.

According to the old regulator clock on the kitchen wall, it was a minute past five. He called Madeleine’s name. There was no response. He knew it wasn’t one of her workdays at the clinic; and if she’d been called in, she’d have left a note for him on the door.

He went back outside and checked the areas where she enjoyed busying herself—the garden beds, the asparagus patch, and the prefab greenhouse they’d erected earlier that spring to get a head start on the short upstate growing season.

He called her name again. He went around to the rear of the house, looking across the high pasture to the edge of the encircling forest. The only living creatures he saw were the distant vultures riding the updrafts over the ridge.

He decided to go back inside and call her cell phone. But just then he caught sight of her, making her way up through the low pasture from the direction of the pond. He noted something different about the way she was walking, something less spirited than usual in her step. When she came closer he could see that her expression was almost grim. And when she was closer still, he could see in her eyes the signs of recent tears.

“What is it?” he asked.

She looked around uncertainly until her eyes came to rest on the pair of Adirondack chairs facing each other in the middle of the stone patio. “Can we sit out here for a while?”

“Sure. Is something wrong?”

When they were both seated, their knees almost touching, she closed her eyes for a long moment, as though trying to arrange her thoughts.

“Maddie? Did something happen?”

“Kim Steele was here.”

“What did she want?”

“She brought her husband’s cell phone.”

“She left it with you?”

“Yes.”

He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. “Her visit was . . . upsetting?”

“Yes.”

“Because of what happened to her husband?”

“Because of the kind of person he was.” She swallowed. “He was like you.”

“And you’re thinking . . . what happened to him could have happened to me?”

“Yes.” After a few moments she continued. “The way she described him . . . was exactly how I would describe you. Believing that being a cop was a good way of life, a way of being useful. Believing that doing what’s right was the most important thing.”

They sat there for a long while in silence.

“There’s something else,” she said, wiping away a tear. “They lost a child.”

He felt a chill rising into his chest.

“An infant. A car accident.”

“Jesus.”

“They’re us, David, twenty years ago. The only difference is that you’re alive, and her husband isn’t.”

Looking into her eyes, he could see that the power of her identification with another woman’s pain had upended yesterday’s reality.

“I didn’t want you getting into this thing, getting tangled up with Sheridan Kline. But now, I can’t help thinking that if this had happened to you . . .”

“You would have wanted someone to do something about it.”

“Yes. Someone good and honest and determined enough to get to the bottom of it.” She paused, then added emphatically, “Yes. I would have wanted that.”

18

The shift in Madeleine’s view had a profound effect on Gurney. Her change of heart felt to him like a kind of liberation. What was clear to her was now clear to him. His job was simply to solve the murder of Kim Steele’s husband.

The rest—Kline’s shadowy motives for pulling him in, the putative political connections and ambitions of Dell Beckert, White River’s potential race war—were important but secondary issues. They would become relevant only if they helped explain the death of John Steele.

After dinner, Gurney retreated to the den with the case file Kline had given him in the parking lot and the cell phone Kim had left with Madeleine. The first thing he did—after checking for the phone’s call records and text chains and discovering they’d all been deleted except for the final warning—was to call the district attorney’s personal number.

Kline picked up immediately, his voice anxious. “Yes?”

“I have Steele’s cell phone.”

“His wife gave it to you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you . . . find anything in it? Anything relevant?”

“Nothing but the last message.”

“How quickly can you get the phone to me?”

Gurney was struck by the wording of Kline’s question, the me in particular. He wondered if the intention was as exclusive as it sounded. “I could bring it to tomorrow’s team meeting. Beckert seemed eager for it.”

When Kline responded with silence, he went on. “Or, since time is a critical factor, you might want to send one of your people to my house for it, and they could drive it directly to computer forensics in Albany. And in the meantime you could get a warrant for the service provider’s call records.”

“Hmm . . . so . . . you’re suggesting that in the interest of saving time we bypass White River PD and go directly to the state lab?”

Gurney almost laughed out loud. Instinctive ass-coverer that he was, Kline was making it clear that this route, which he obviously preferred, was Gurney’s suggestion.

“It would be a reasonable way to proceed,” said Gurney.

“You’re probably right. Considering the importance of the time factor. Okay. I’ll have a car at your house tomorrow morning at seven sharp.”

The conversation confirmed for Gurney that the man was uneasy enough with Beckert, or someone else in the department, to keep the phone out of their hands until there was an objective record of whatever information could be extracted from it.

He turned his attention to the manila envelope, pulled out the case file, and spread out its contents on the den desk. He saw the standard items—the incident report, witness statements, site photos and sketches, early progress reports, various updates and addenda—none of which at first glance were especially helpful or surprising. There was also a DVD. It was labeled RAM-CAM VIDEO, WILLARD PARK, STEELE HOMICIDE. He pushed aside the other items and inserted it in his laptop’s external drive.

The video was as he remembered it from the big-screen TV at the Gelters’ party and again at the first CSMT meeting. Presumably excerpted from a longer recording, the segment began about three minutes prior to the shot and continued for about two minutes after it. During this viewing, Gurney timed the appearance of the red laser dot on the back of Steele’s head, confirming his initial estimate that it preceded the fatal shot by just over two minutes. The precision with which the dot followed Steele’s movements confirmed his impression that the rifle that fired the shot was mounted on a tripod, possibly one with a motion-dampening mechanism of the kind used in filmmaking.

He watched the video three times. On the third viewing he noted an oddity that hadn’t struck him before. When Steele was shot he was moving to a new position on the sidewalk. But for nearly twenty seconds leading up to that he’d been standing still. Why had the shooter bypassed that easy opportunity in favor of a riskier moving target?

He continued going through the file until he came to a computer printout labeled “Potential Shooter Sites Defined by Bullet Trajectory Parameters.” The printout displayed a narrow, triangular outline overlaid on a map of White River. The tip of the triangle touched the spot at the edge of the park where Steele was shot. The outline extended out from that point approximately a quarter of a mile across the center of the city—enclosing the likely area from which the shot had come, based on the calculated trajectory.

Although there was no indication in the file what was being done with this diagram, it was obvious to Gurney that the next step would be to narrow the possibilities by going to the spot where Steele was standing at the moment of impact and with binoculars survey the area contained within the triangle to find the clear lines of sight to windows, rooftops, and open areas not obscured by other structures. Since the target had to be visible to the sniper, the sniper’s location would have to be visible from the target’s location. Taking this simple step would dramatically limit the areas that needed to be searched.

He was tempted to call Mark Torres and make sure this was happening. But something told him not to interfere. The sniper’s location would soon be identified and turned over to the crime-scene team with their cameras, vacuums, evidence bags, and fingerprint kits. In the interim there was plenty for him to do that didn’t involve stepping on other people’s toes.

Another face-to-face conversation with Kim Steele, for example, might be a more productive use of his time. During her visit earlier that day Kim had given Madeleine her address, email, and phone number.

He picked up his phone and entered Kim’s number.

“Yes?” Her voice was leaden.

“Kim, this is Dave Gurney.”

“Yes?”

“I have a meeting in White River tomorrow. I was wondering if I could stop by on my way and talk to you.”

“Tomorrow?”

“It would be sometime in the morning. Is that all right?”

“It’s all right. I’m here.”

He wondered whether her monotone responses were coming from the exhaustion of grief or an emotion-deadening medication. “Thank you, Kim. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

That night, for the first time in more than a year, he had the dream—a dreadful, disjointed replaying of the accident, long ago, that killed his four-year-old son.

On their way to the playground on a sunny day.

Danny walking in front of him.

Following a pigeon on the sidewalk.

He himself only partly present.

Pondering a twist in a murder case he was working on.

Distracted by a bright idea, a possible solution.

The pigeon stepping off the curb into the street.

Danny following the pigeon.

The sickening, heart-stopping thump.

Danny’s body tossed through the air, hitting the pavement, rolling.

Rolling.

The red BMW racing away.

Screeching around a corner.

Gone.

Gurney awoke in an agony of grief. In the gray light of dawn. Madeleine holding his hand. She knew about the dream. He’d been having it, on and off, for nearly twenty years.

When the lingering images had subsided and the worst of the feeling had passed, he got up, took a shower, and dressed.

At 7:00 AM Kline’s man arrived as promised, accepted Steele’s cell phone, and departed with hardly a word.

At 7:45 AM Geraldine Mirkle arrived to pick up Madeleine for one of their same-schedule days at the clinic.

At 8:30 AM Gurney left for his meeting with Kim Steele.

His GPS directed him off the interstate at the Larvaton-Badminton exit onto Fishers Road heading north toward Angina. A few miles later it directed him onto Dry Brook Lane, a gravelly road that rose in a series of S curves through an old hardwood forest. At a driveway marked by a brightly painted mailbox, his GPS announced he had reached his destination. The driveway brought him into a clearing, at the center of which stood a small farmhouse surrounded by flower beds and lush spring grass. A red barn with a metal roof stood at the edge of the clearing. Kim Steele’s small white car was parked by the house, and he parked next to it.

He knocked on the side door and waited. He knocked again. After a third attempt he went around to the back door, with the same result. While he was puzzling over the situation, he looked out over the back field toward the barn and noticed a riding mower next to the barn door.

As he headed across the field, Kim Steele emerged from the barn toting a large red gas can. She carried it to the mower and was in the process of opening the gas tank when she saw him. She watched him approaching, then returned to her task, hefting the can into position and wrestling its stiff spout into the tank opening. She spoke without looking up.

“Things have to get done.”

“Can I help?”

She seemed not to hear him. Appearing marginally more organized than the last time he’d seen her, she was wearing the same shirt, but the buttons were now aligned. Her hair seemed neater, shinier.

“They called him in on his day off,” she said, trying to balance the big can over the tank. “He wanted to mow this field. He said it was important to mow it at least once a week. Or the grass would clog the mower. Once it gets clogged . . .”

“Let me help you with that.” He reached for the can.

“No! This is my job.”

“Okay.” He paused. “You were saying they called him in?”

She nodded.

“Because of the demonstration?”

“They were calling everyone in.”

“Did he say who in the department called him?”

She shook her head.

“Do you remember if there were any other calls for him that day?”

“The day he was killed?” It wasn’t a question so much as a burst of anger.

He paused again. “I know it’s horrible to think about this—”

She cut him off. “It’s all I think about. There’s nothing else I can think about. So ask whatever you want.”

He nodded. “I’m just wondering if John got any other calls that day, other than the message you found on his phone.”

“Shit!”

The mower’s gas tank was overflowing. She yanked the can away and dropped it on the ground. She appeared close to tears.

The situation touched him in a way that made it difficult for him to speak.

The strong odor of the fuel filled the still air.

“That overflowing-gas thing happens to me all the time,” he said awkwardly.

She said nothing.

“Can I mow the field for you?”

“What?”

“I spend a lot of time mowing at home. I enjoy it. It would be one less thing for you to have to do. I’d be happy to do it.”

She looked at him, blinking as if to clear her vision. “That’s kind of you. But I have to do these things myself.”

A silence fell between them.

He asked, “Have John’s friends from the department been coming by to see you?”

“Some people came. I told them to go away.”

“You didn’t want them here?”

“I can’t bear to even look at them until I know what happened.”

“You don’t trust anyone in the department?”

“No. Only Rick Loomis.”

“He’s different from the others?”

“Rick and John were friends. Allies.”

“Allies suggests they had enemies.”

“Yes. They had enemies.”

“Do you know the names of their enemies?”

“I wish to God I did. But John didn’t believe in bringing the ugly details of his work home. I’m sure he thought he was making my life easier by keeping things to himself.”

“Do you know if Rick Loomis shared your husband’s suspicions about things that were going on in the department?”

“I think so.”

“Was he helping him look into old cases?”

“They were working on something together. I know I sound hopelessly vague.” She sighed, picked up the gas tank cap, and screwed it back on. “If you’d like to come in for a while, I could make some coffee.”

“I’d like that. And I’d like to hear more about your husband—anything you want to tell me. I’d like to understand who he was.” As soon as he said it, he could see in her eyes the impact of that past tense verb, was. He wished he’d found another way of saying it.

She nodded, wiped her hands on her jeans, and led the way across the field to the house.

The back door opened into a narrow hallway that led to an eat-in kitchen. There was a broken dish on the floor by the sink. The khaki jacket she’d worn on her first trip to Gurney’s house was lying across the seat of a chair. The table was covered with a disordered pile of papers. She looked around in dismay. “I didn’t realize . . . what a mess. Let me just . . .” Her voice trailed off.

She gathered the papers together and took them into the next room. She returned, got the jacket, and took that away. She seemed not to notice the broken dish. She gestured toward one of the chairs at the table, and Gurney sat down. Distractedly, she went through the steps of setting up the coffee machine.

While the coffee was brewing, she stood gazing out the window. When it was ready, she poured a mug and brought it to the table.

She sat down across from him and smiled in a way that he found almost unbearably sad. “What do you want to know about John?” she asked.

“What was important to him. His ambitions. How he ended up in the WRPD. When he started getting uncomfortable with it. Any hints of trouble, prior to the text message, that could relate to what happened.”

She gave him a long, thoughtful look. “Interesting questions.”

“In what way?”

“They have nothing to do with the WRPD theory that the attack was a political act by black radicals.”

He smiled at her perceptiveness. “The WRPD theory is being pursued by WRPD people. There’s no point my heading down the same avenue.”

“You mean the same dead end?”

“Too soon to say.” He sipped his coffee. “Tell me about John.”

“He was the nicest, smartest man in the world. We met in college. Ithaca. John was a psych major. Very serious. Very handsome. We got married right after graduation. He’d already taken the state police exam, and a few months later he was inducted. I was pregnant by then. Everything seemed to be going well. He graduated from the academy at the top of his class. Life was perfect. Then, a month after our baby was born, there was an automobile accident. She didn’t survive.” Kim fell silent, biting her lower lip and looking away toward the window. A few moments later she took a deep breath, sat up straight in her chair, and continued.

“He spent the next three years as a state trooper. He got a master’s degree in criminology in his spare time. It was around that time that Dell Beckert was hired to clean up the White River Police Department. He made a big impression—forcing a lot of people out on corruption charges, bringing in fresh faces.”

She paused. When she went on, something rueful, maybe even bitter, entered her voice. “The image Beckert projected—sweeping out the dirt, purifying the place—I think that struck a chord with John. So he moved from the NYSP to the supposedly wonderful new WRPD.”

“When did he realize it might not be as perfect as he’d imagined?”

“It was a gradual thing. His attitude toward the job changed. I remember it getting darker a year ago with the Laxton Jones shooting. After that . . . there was a kind of tension in him that wasn’t there before.”

“How about recently?”

“It was getting worse.”

Gurney took another sip of his coffee. “You said he’d gotten degrees in psychology and criminology?”

She nodded, almost smiled. “Yes. He loved his work and loved learning anything connected with it. In fact, he just started taking some law courses.”

Gurney hesitated. “He was a basic patrol officer, right?”

There was a combative flash in her eyes. “You mean just a basic patrol officer? You’re asking why he wasn’t chasing promotions?”

He shrugged. “Most cops I’ve known who’ve pursued advanced degrees—”

She cut him off. “Pursued them because of career ambitions? The truth is, John has . . . had . . . enormous ambition. But not for promotions. He wanted to be out on the street. That’s what he signed up for. The degrees, all the reading he did, it was to be as good at the job as he could be. His ambition was to lead an honest, useful, positive life. That’s all he ever . . .”

She lowered her head slowly and began to sob.

Several minutes later, after that wave of grief had run its course, she sat back in her chair and wiped her eyes. “Do you have any more questions?”

“Do you know if he ever received threats or hints of trouble other than the text message?”

She shook her head.

“If something should come to mind—”

“I’ll call you. I promise.”

“Okay. One last thing. Do you think Rick Loomis would talk to me?”

“I’m sure he’ll talk to you. But if you’re asking how open he’ll be about what he and John were working on, that I don’t know.”

“Would you be willing to call him, tell him who I am and that I’d appreciate sitting down with him?”

She cocked her head curiously. “You want me to tell him that he should trust you?”

“Just tell him whatever you’re comfortable telling him. It’s entirely up to you.”

Her eyes met his, and for a moment he had the same feeling he had on the occasions when Madeleine’s gaze seemed to be looking into his soul.

“Yes,” she said. “I can do that.”

19

Toward the end of Gurney’s visit with Kim Steele, the vibrating mode on his phone had made him aware of receiving a call, but he’d let it go rather than interrupt the emotional flow of their conversation.

Now, on his way back to the interstate, he pulled over onto the grassy verge of Fishers Road and listened to the message. It was from Sheridan Kline. The man didn’t bother to identify himself; his self-important, slightly nasal voice was identification enough.

“I hope you get this message soon. We have a schedule change. Our meeting has just been moved up to twelve noon. Major progress. Noon sharp. Be there!”

Gurney checked the current time—11:04.

He figured that without traffic he could be in White River by eleven thirty. Despite his earlier decision to avoid conflict with the WRPD by avoiding the crime scene, he was tempted now to do at least a drive-by—to get a visceral sense of the location he’d seen only on video.

As expected, there was no traffic. It was just 11:29 when he turned off the interstate. The White River exit ramp led to a local road that descended from a green landscape of woods and meadows into an area of man-made desolation. He drove past the big rusting conveyors of the defunct Handsome Brothers stone quarry and into the city itself, where the stench of smoke and ashes began to infiltrate the car.

Recalling from the White River map how the main streets were laid out, he made his way onto the avenue that skirted the boarded-up buildings of the Grinton section and led directly to Willard Park.

He turned onto the road adjacent to the park, and soon came to a barricade consisting of yellow sawhorses, each of which bore the warning Police Line Do Not Cross.

Leaving his car there and stepping between the sawhorses, he went ahead on foot to a circular area that was more aggressively cordoned off with a double perimeter of yellow police tape. The protected area encompassed the edge of the field where the demonstration had been held, an enormous pine whose lowest branches were a good twenty feet above the ground, and part of the sidewalk. On the sidewalk was a large, irregularly shaped reddish-brown stain.

Gurney was sure that the crime-scene specialists would have been long finished with their evidence gathering and that his presence posed no danger of contamination. When he entered the taped-off area, however, he did step gingerly around that stain as a gesture of respect.

Looking closely at the tree, he could see the remnants of the channel cut by the bullet as it embedded itself in the relatively soft pine trunk. Some of the channel had been chiseled open to extract the bullet.

He took a pen from his shirt pocket and placed it in the channel against the side that appeared intact. The pen, aligned with the path of the bullet, then became a rough pointer to the source of the shot. He could see immediately that it corroborated the trajectory projection on the map in the case file. Gazing out in the indicated direction, he could see that the likely sources were limited to the upper floors of three or four apartment buildings.

He headed back to the barricade where he’d parked, in the hope of finding the binoculars he sometimes kept in the glove compartment. That goal was put aside, however, when he saw a WRPD cruiser pull up at the same barricade. The cop who emerged from the cruiser had an end-of-shift weariness about him. After looking over the Outback, presumably for any signs of official status, he turned his attention to Gurney.

“How’re we doing today, sir?” If the question was meant to sound friendly, it failed.

“I’m doing okay. How about you?”

The cop’s eyes hardened as if Gurney’s reply were a challenge.

“Are you aware that you’re in a restricted area?”

“I’m on the job. Investigation department, DA’s office.”

“That so?”

Gurney said nothing.

“Never saw you before. You want to show me some ID?”

Gurney took out his wallet and handed him the credentials he’d gotten from Kline.

He regarded them with a skeptical frown. “DA’s office? You know Jimmy Crandell?”

“Only person I know there is Sheridan Kline.”

The cop sucked thoughtfully at his teeth.

“Well, the thing is, this is a restricted area, so I need to ask you to leave.”

“The restriction applies to the DA’s investigators?”

“PIACA applies to everyone.”

“What’s PIACA?”

“Primary Investigative Agency Controls Access.”

“Nice acronym. Local invention?”

The cop began to redden from the neck up. “We’re not having a discussion here. We have a procedure, and the procedure is you leave. Your DA can complain to my chief anytime, if that’s what he wants. You want to cross our perimeters, you get permission first. Now move your car before I have it towed.”

Red-faced and narrow-eyed, the cop watched as Gurney turned his car around and headed back toward the center of White River.

Five minutes later he arrived at the bleak, colorless police headquarters and parked next to Kline’s big black SUV. As he was getting out of the car, his phone rang. There was no caller ID.

“Gurney here.”

“This is Rick Loomis. Kim Steele said you wanted to talk. She gave me your number.” The voice was young and serious, the accent definitely upstate.

“Did she explain who I am and how I’m involved in the case?”

“She did.”

“And you’re willing to discuss the . . . events . . . that you and John were looking into?”

“To some extent. But not on the phone.”

“I understand. How soon can we get together?”

“I’m off today, but I need to take care of a few things. Getting the garden ready for planting. How about three thirty at the Lucky Larvaton Diner? It’s in Angina. On the old Route Ten Bypass.”

“I’ll find it.”

“Okay. See you at three thirty.”

“Rick, one more thing. Is there anyone else I should be talking to . . . about the situation?”

He hesitated. “Maybe. But I’ll have to check with them first.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

He slipped the phone back in his pocket and headed into the headquarters building.

In the dreary conference room, he took his customary seat next to the DA at the long table. He noted an intermittent buzz in the room’s fluorescent light fixture—a sound so common in his old NYPD precinct house it made him feel for a moment that he was back there.

Kline gave him a nod. Torres entered the room with his laptop a moment later, looking tense but purposeful. At the end of the table, Sheriff Cloutz was moving his fingers in little undulations as though he were conducting a miniature orchestra. The expression in Beckert’s hard eyes was difficult to read.

Two seats were empty, Judd Turlock’s and Dwayne Shucker’s.

The sheriff licked his already moist lips. “Must be about time to begin.”

“We’re missing the mayor and the deputy chief,” said Kline.

“Today’s Rotary day for old Shucks,” said the sheriff. “Free lunch and a chance to talk up the importance of his reelection. We still expecting Judd?”

“We’ll be hearing from him momentarily,” said Beckert. He glanced at his phone on the table, moving it a fraction of an inch. “It’s a minute past twelve. Let’s begin. Detective Torres, tell us where we stand on the Steele shooting—progress made and progress anticipated.”

Torres sat up a little straighter in his chair. “Yes, sir. Since our last meeting we’ve acquired significant physical and video evidence. We located and examined the apartment from which the shot was fired. We found gunpowder residues there, along with a cartridge casing consistent with the bullet extracted from the tree in Willard Park. We have excellent fingerprints on several objects, including the cartridge, plus likely DNA residues on other objects. We even—”

Cloutz broke in. “What kind of residues?”

“Mucus with a trace of blood in a tissue, a Band-Aid with a trace of blood on it, and several hairs with enough follicle material for analysis.”

“That all?”

“We even recovered the tripod used to steady the rifle. We found it in the river by the Grinton Bridge, and there are clear fingerprints on it. We also have videos of a vehicle approaching the sniper site, parking behind the building shortly before the shot was fired, and leaving immediately afterward. We have additional video of the same vehicle heading for the bridge and then returning from it. Although the street lighting was poor, we were able to sharpen and read the plate number.”

“You sayin’ we have an ID on the shooter?”

“We have an ID on the car, a black 2007 Toyota Corolla, and the name and address on the registration—Devalon Jones of Thirty-Four Simone Street in Grinton.”

Kline leaned forward. “Related to the Laxton Jones who was killed a year ago?”

“His brother. Devalon was one of the founding members of the BDA—along with Jordan, Tooker, and Blaze Lovely Jackson.”

Kline grinned. “That does move the situation in an encouraging direction. Do we have this Devalon person in custody?”

“That’s the problem, sir. He’s been in custody for over a month now—in Dannemora, starting a three-to-five sentence for aggravated assault. Fractured a security guard’s skull at an Indian casino up north.”

Kline’s grin faded. “So his car was being used by someone else. Maybe another BDA member? I assume you’re checking that out?”

“We’ve started that process.”

Beckert turned to the sheriff. “Goodson, if this Devalon Jones passed his car along, one of your more cooperative guests at the jail might know something about that. Meanwhile, I’ll call the warden at Dannemora and see if Jones can be persuaded to part with the information himself.”

Cloutz licked his lips again before speaking. “Someone could explain to Devalon that the registration bein’ in his name makes him the presumptive provider of the vehicle to the shooter and accessory to the murder of a police officer. So he has an opportunity to use the free will with which his creator endowed him and give us the name, or . . . we can fry his ass.” He began to move his fingers again, ever so slightly, to some imagined music.

Beckert turned to Torres, who was glaring at Cloutz. “You said we have street videos of the car approaching and leaving the sniper location. Can you show them now?” It was a directive, not a question.

Torres turned his attention back to his laptop, clicked a few icons, and the monitor on the wall showed a grungy, poorly lit street with garbage bags piled along the curbs. A car appeared, passed through the camera’s field of view, and turned out of sight at the next intersection.

“This is Girder Street,” said Torres. “The footage is from a security camera on the front of a check-cashing place. We’ve edited it down to a few key moments. Watch this next car.”

A small, dark sedan entered the frame. Just before reaching the intersection, it made a turn into what appeared to be a driveway or alley behind an apartment building.

“That’s the building where the shot came from. That alley leads to a back entrance. The time code embedded in the video shows that the car arrived twenty-two minutes before the shot was fired. Now we skip ahead twenty-six minutes, exactly four minutes after the shot, and . . . there . . . you see the car emerging . . . turning . . . proceeding to the intersection . . . and making a right onto Bridge Street.”

The screen showed a wider but equally dismal street with steel-shuttered storefronts on both sides. “This segment comes from a CPSP installation colocated with the intersection traffic light.” He glanced over at Gurney. “Crime Prevention Surveillance Program. That’s an initiative we—”

He broke off his explanation and pointed at the screen. “Look . . . there . . . that’s our target vehicle, driving west on Bridge Street. See . . . right there . . . it passes the Bridge Closed detour sign and keeps heading toward it.”

Kline asked if that road led anywhere except to the bridge.

“No, sir. Just the bridge.”

“Is it possible to drive onto it?”

“Yes, simply by moving the cones blocking it off. And they had, in fact, been moved.”

“How about the other side? Could the vehicle have driven over the bridge to some other destination?”

“The stage of demolition would have made that impossible. We figured the most likely reason for driving out onto the span at that time of night would be to dump something in the river. And it turned out we were right. That’s where we found the tripod used to steady the rifle.”

He pointed to the screen. “There . . . the same vehicle . . . returning from the bridge.”

Kline’s smile returned. “Nice work, Detective.”

Gurney cocked his head curiously. “Mark, how do you know what the tripod was used for?”

“The proof is in the photos we took at the apartment used by the shooter.” He tapped a few keys, and the scene switched to a still photo of an apartment door with a security peephole. The apartment number, 5C, was scratched and faded. The next photo appeared to have been taken from the same position, looking into the apartment with the door open.

“The photos I really want to show you are a little farther on,” said Torres, “but I didn’t have time to change the sequence.”

“Who let you in?” asked Gurney.

“The janitor.”

Gurney recalled his own aborted investigation at the Willard Park site and the trajectory indicated by the bullet’s penetration of the tree. That trajectory included multiple windows in three different buildings. “How did you zero in on one particular apartment?”

“We got a tip.”

“By phone?”

“Text.”

“Anonymous or from a known source?”

Beckert intervened. “We have a policy against discussing sources. Let’s move along.”

The next photo had been taken from inside the apartment door looking through a small foyer into a large unfurnished room. There was an open window on the far side of the room. In the next photo, taken from a position near the center of the room, the open window framed a view of the city. Beyond some low roofs, Gurney could see a grassy area bordered by tall pines. As he looked closer, he could just make out a yellow line—the police tape demarcating the area where he’d just had his confrontation with the local cop. It was clear that the apartment would offer a sniper an ideal perch from which to pick off anyone in the vicinity of the field where the demonstration had been held.

“Okay,” said Torres with some excitement, “now we’re getting to the key pieces of evidence.”

The next photo, taken in the same room at floor level, showed the lower half of a steam radiator and the cramped space under it. In the radiator’s shadow, back against the wall, Gurney noted the soft sheen of a brass cartridge casing.

“A thirty-aught-six,” said Torres. “Same as the recovered bullet.”

“With a clear print on it?” asked Kline.

“Two. Probably thumb and forefinger, the way you’d chamber it in a bolt-action rifle.”

“Do we know it was a bolt-action?”

“That’s the action in most thirty-aught-sixes manufactured in the past fifty years. We’ll know for sure when ballistics takes a closer look at the extractor and ejector marks.”

The next photo was of the wooden floor. Torres pointed out three faint marks on the dusty surface, each about the size of a dime, positioned about three feet from each other, the corners of an imaginary triangle.

“See those little impressions?” said Torres. “Their positions correspond exactly to the positions of the feet of the tripod we found in the river. The height of the tripod placed in that spot would have provided a direct line of fire to the impact location.”

“You mean the back of John Steele’s head?” said Gurney.

“Yes. That’s correct.”

Torres proceeded to the next photo—a small bathroom containing a shower stall, a dirty washbasin, and a toilet. That was followed by two close-ups—the chrome handle on the toilet tank, then the inside of the toilet bowl. A crumpled ball of colored paper and a discolored Band-Aid were submerged in the water.

“We got lucky here,” said Torres. “We got a good thumbprint on the flush handle, and the items in the bowl not only have prints on them but even some DNA material. The paper is a fast-food wrapper with an oily surface that preserved three good prints. The Band-Aid has a trace amount of blood.”

Kline was energized. “You’ve run the prints? Any hits?”

“Nothing at the local or state level. We’re waiting on IAFIS. Washington has over a hundred million print records, so we’re hopeful. Worst case is that the shooter has never been arrested, never been printed for any reason. But even then, once we zero in on the right guy, we’ve got overwhelming evidence tying him to the apartment, the casing, the tripod. And there’s one more piece I haven’t mentioned—a security camera out on Bridge Street recorded a side view of the shooter’s vehicle, with a dark image of the driver visible through the side window. It’s unreadable in its current condition, but the computer lab in Albany has some powerful enhancement software. So we’re hopeful.”

His statement was punctuated by the muted bing of a text arriving on Beckert’s phone.

“A facial ID would be damn near game-over,” said Kline.

Torres looked around the table. “Any questions?”

Beckert appeared preoccupied with the message on his phone.

The sheriff was smiling unpleasantly. “If our other inquiries ID the user of Devalon’s vehicle, Albany’s enhancement abracadabra could nail the boy to the wall. A photo is a beautiful thing. Very convincing to a jury.”

“Mr. Kline?” said Torres.

“No questions at the moment.”

“Detective Gurney?”

“Just wondering . . . how deep was the water?”

Torres looked puzzled. “In the toilet?”

“In the river.”

“Where we found the tripod? Roughly three feet.”

“Any prints on the window sash or sill?”

“Some very old and faded ones, nothing new.”

“Apartment door?”

“Same.”

“Bathroom door and basin faucets?”

“Same.”

“Were you able to find anyone in the building who heard the shot?”

“We spoke to a couple of tenants who thought they might have heard something like a shot. They were pretty vague about it. It’s not the kind of neighborhood where people talk to the police or want to admit being witnesses to anything.” He turned up his palms in a gesture of resignation. “Any other questions?”

“Not from me. Thank you, Mark. Good work.”

The young detective allowed himself a small look of satisfaction. He reminded Gurney of Kyle, his twenty-seven-year-old son from his first marriage. Which in turn reminded him that he owed him a call. Kyle had inherited his own tendency toward isolation, so their communications, though enjoyable when they occurred, were sporadic. He promised himself he’d make the call that day. Perhaps after dinner.

Beckert’s voice brought him back to the present.

“This would be a good time to transition to our progress on the Jordan and Tooker homicides. We had a breakthrough this morning in that investigation, and we expect another development within the next half hour. So this would be a reasonable time to take a short break.” He glanced at his phone. “We’ll reconvene at twelve forty-five. In the meantime, please remain in the building. Goodson, do you need any assistance?”

“I do not.” He ran the polished nail of his forefinger along the length of the white cane that lay across the table in front of him.

20

The meeting was reconvened at precisely 12:45. It made Gurney wonder if Beckert ever deviated from his strict notions of order and procedure—and what his reaction might be if someone disrupted his plans.

Beckert had brought a laptop with him, which he placed on the conference table. He chose as usual the chair in which he was framed by the room’s window and the landscape of prison architecture beyond it.

After syncing his computer with the wall monitor, he indicated that all was ready.

“We’ll begin with this morning’s discovery—the website of a white-supremacist group that claims to engage in vigilante activities. They maintain that blacks are planning to start a war with whites in America, a war that neither the police nor the military will be capable of stopping, since both have been infiltrated by blacks and their liberal supporters. The group believes it’s their God-given duty to eliminate what they call ‘the creeping black menace’ in order to save white America.”

“Eliminate?” said Kline.

“Eliminate,” repeated Beckert. “They included on the same web page an old photograph of a lynching with the caption, ‘The Solution.’ But that’s not the main reason our discovery of their website is important. Look at the screen. And listen carefully. This is their anthem.”

The screen turned bright red. A window opened in the center, and the video began. A four-man heavy-metal band was producing a cacophony of stomping feet, tortured musical notes, and barely intelligible lyrics. A few words, however, came through loud and clear.

“Fire” . . . “burning” . . . “blade” . . . “gun” . . . “noose.”

The video was grainy and the sound quality dreadful. The faces of the leather-clad, metal-studded band members were too ill-lit to be recognizable.

Kline shook his head. “If those lyrics are supposed to be telling me something, I’ll need a translator.”

“Fortunately,” said Beckert, “the words appear on their site.” He clicked on an icon and the rectangle that had framed the video now framed a photo of a typewritten page.

“Read the lyrics carefully. They answer an important question. Detective Torres, for the benefit of Sheriff Cloutz, you might want to read them aloud.”

Torres did as he was told.

We are the fire, we are the flood.

We are the storm cleansing the land,

the burning light of the rising sun.

We are the wind, the burning rain,

the shining blade, the blazing gun.

We are the flame of the rising sun.

Death to the rats creeping at night,

death to the vermin, one by one,

death by the fire of the rising sun.

We are the whip, we are the noose,

the battering club, the blazing gun.

We are the knights of the rising sun.

We are the storm, the raging flood,

the rain of fire whose time has come.

We are the knights of the rising sun.

“Jesus,” Torres muttered as he finished reading. “These people are goddamn off-the-scale crazy!”

“Clearly. But what else do the words tell us?” Beckert was addressing everyone at the table—in the tone of a man who likes asking questions he knows the answers to. A man who likes to feel in charge.

It was a game Gurney didn’t enjoy playing. He decided to end it. “They tell us what ‘KRS’ stands for.”

There was a baffled silence around the table. “I see it now,” said Torres finally. He turned to Cloutz. “In the lyrics they call themselves the ‘knights of the rising sun.’ The main initials of that would be ‘KRS.’ ”

“You boys gettin’ all excited over a coincidence of three letters?”

Beckert shook his head. “It’s not just that. The whole website incriminates them. Anarchist insanity. Terroristic threats. Glorification of vigilantism. Plus the final clincher. On a page titled ‘Battle News’ there’s a description of the situation here in White River. That plus ‘KRS’ being branded on the feet of Jordan and Tooker has to be more than a coincidence.”

Kline looked alarmed. “You think these people are here in White River? Do we have any idea who they are?”

“We have a good idea who two of them may be.”

“God Almighty,” cried Cloutz, “don’t tell me it’s the two I’m thinkin’ it is!”

Beckert said nothing.

“Am I right?” asked Cloutz. “Are we talkin’ about the goddamn twins?”

“Judd is looking into that right now.”

“By payin’ them a visit?”

“You could put it that way.”

“God Almighty!” Cloutz repeated with the unseemly excitement of a man anticipating a spectacular calamity. “I hope Judd realizes them boys are stone-cold crazy.”

“He knows who he’s dealing with,” said Beckert calmly.

Kline looked from Beckert to Cloutz and back again. “Who the hell are the twins?”

Cloutz emitted a nasty little laugh. “Fire, brimstone, explosions, every kinda insane shit you can imagine. You got anything you want to add to that, Dell, to flesh out the picture for Sheridan here? I know them boys have a special place in your head.”

“The Gort twins look like cartoons of mountain men. But there’s nothing funny about them.” There was acid in Beckert’s voice. “Gorts, Haddocks, and Flemms have been inbreeding and raising havoc in this part of the state for two hundred years. The extended clan is huge. Hundreds of people in this county are connected to it in one way or another. Some are successful, normal people. Some are well-armed survivalists. A few are moonshiners, or meth manufacturers. The worst of them all are the twins. Vicious racists, probable extortionists, possible murderers.”

“What am I missing here?” said Kline to Beckert. “I’m the county prosecutor. Why haven’t these people been brought to my attention before?”

“Because this is the first time we’ve been in a position to have a real chance of putting them away.”

“The first time? After what you and Goodson just said about them?”

This was the closest Gurney had seen Kline come to challenging Beckert about anything.

“Theoretically, we could have arrested them a number of times. The arrests would have been followed by dismissals or weak prosecutions and no convictions.”

“Weak? What do you mean by—”

“I mean people who make accusations against the Gorts invariably retract them or disappear. At best, you’d have a case that would be dismissed immediately or fall apart halfway through. Maybe you’re thinking that we could have put more pressure on them . . . brought them in every week for questioning . . . provoked them into hotheaded, ill-advised reactions. That might be a workable approach with someone other than the Gorts. But there’s an aspect to this I haven’t mentioned. In the polarized world of White River, the Gorts’ racial opinions have made them folk heroes to a large part of the white population. And, of course, there’s the religious angle. The twins are joint pastors of the Catskill Mountain White Heritage Church. And one of their devoted parishioners is our ever-popular home-bred white supremacist Garson Pike.”

“Jesus,” said Kline.

The name Garson Pike rang a bell with Gurney. For a moment he couldn’t place it. Then he remembered the RAM-TV debate between Blaze Lovely Jackson and a stiff-looking man with an intermittent stutter—a man whose main point was that blacks were responsible for all the problems in America.

Kline looked troubled. “The decision not to go after them was essentially political?”

Beckert answered without hesitation. “All our decisions are ultimately political. That’s the reality of democracy. Government by the will of the people. Attacking popular heroes does no one any good. It just raises everyone’s anger level. Especially when evidence evaporates and there’s no chance of getting a conviction.”

Kline looked less than satisfied, a mark of some intelligence in Gurney’s opinion. “What’s so different now?” he asked.

“Meaning?”

“You said Turlock was going after the Gort twins. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“With a warrant?”

“Yes.”

Kline’s frown was deepening. “Issued on what basis?”

“Reasonable certitude that the Gorts are members of a vigilante group called Knights of the Rising Sun, that they may have been directly involved in the Willard Park homicides, and that we expect to find evidence supporting both assertions in the Gorts’ private compound.”

“What changed the political calculation that kept them off-limits until now?”

“Popular as the Gorts may be in certain quarters, leaving dead bodies in a children’s playground is a game changer. It makes their arrest and prosecution acceptable to a majority of our citizens. And achievable—as long as we act quickly.”

“And as long as you find some hard evidence linking them to this Knights of the Rising Sun group. And to the murders.”

“I’m sure we’ll find what we need. But it will still be essential to describe the situation in the right terms. Clear, simple, moral terms that leave no doubt that justice will be done.”

“Biblical terms would be the best,” said the sheriff. “Folks hereabouts have a fondness for the Bible.”

“An interesting point,” said Beckert. “And while we’re on the subject—”

The soft bing of an arriving text stopped him in midsentence. He picked up his phone, and the message on its screen captured his full attention.

Torres, Kline, and Gurney were watching him.

Beckert looked up and announced with an unreadable expression, “Judd Turlock and his team have entered and secured the Gort compound out in Clapp Hollow. They’ve conducted a preliminary examination of the site, which appears to have been recently vacated. We’ll have Judd’s initial status report shortly, with on-site photos.”

“Gort boys slipped away, did they?” said the sheriff, his tone suggesting this was a predictable event.

“No individuals have been located on the property,” said Beckert. “We’ll know more soon.” He looked at his phone screen. “We’ll reconvene at one fifty.” He stood up from the table and left the room.

Gurney had a sudden thought about how he could use the free half hour, and he pursued Beckert out into the corridor, calling after him.

Beckert stopped and turned with an impatiently questioning look.

“I thought I’d take a quick run over to that place on the edge of Willard Park where John Steele was shot,” said Gurney. “To get a feel for the geography. Any problem with that?”

“No. Why would that be a problem?” Clearly annoyed by the interruption, he turned and strode down the corridor without waiting for an answer.

21

Gurney brought the Outback to a stop at the same barricade of yellow sawhorses where he’d parked earlier. Again he ignored the several Police Line Do Not Cross warnings and proceeded to the sidewalk that ran along the border of the field.

He walked forward slowly, reenacting as best he could the movements of Steele as he remembered them from the RAM-TV videos.

He walked looking to his left—out over the flat, neatly mowed field where the crowd had gathered for the demonstration, their backs to the sidewalk. At the opposite end of the open expanse there was a raised platform, no doubt the one that had been used by the BDA speakers. At the edge of the field loomed the contested statue of Colonel Willard.

He walked on, stopping intermittently, as Steele had, as if to pay closer attention to some part of the crowd. The first four trees he passed as he proceeded along the field’s edge were tall but relatively narrow-trunked. The fifth was the massive pine in which the steel-jacketed bullet had lodged itself after passing through the lower part of Steele’s skull, brain, and facial bone.

Three more times he walked back and forth, retracing Steele’s path to his death, and picturing as he did so the red laser dot of the sniper’s scope that had followed the man every step of the way. Gurney found the mental re-creation of this so vivid he had for a moment the disturbing illusion of feeling that dot on the back of his own head. At the end of his third passage, he stopped at the big pine and aligned himself with Steele’s position at the moment of impact. In his peripheral vision he was aware of the bloodstain where the man had fallen, his life abruptly over. John Steele. Husband of Kim Steele. Someone’s son. Someone’s friend. Someone’s partner. Reduced in one dreadful moment to memories in the minds of some, to pain in the hearts of others, to a brown stain on a concrete sidewalk.

Gurney was seized by a sudden, powerful sense of grief that took him by surprise. His chest and throat felt constricted. His eyes filled with tears.

He wasn’t aware of the cop coming up behind him until he heard a familiar, unpleasant voice. “Okay, buddy, you had a perfectly clear warning this morning about crossing—”

The cop stopped in midsentence when Gurney turned and faced him.

For a few seconds no one said anything.

Gurney wiped his eyes roughly with the back of his hand. “Beckert knows I’m here.”

The cop blinked and stared at him, something about the situation finally dawning on him. “Did you . . . uh . . . know Officer Steele?”

“Yes,” said Gurney. He didn’t feel that the answer was entirely untrue.

Back in the headquarters conference room, Torres and Kline were already in their seats, both checking their phones. The sheriff’s seat was empty. The mayor, however, was in his usual seat at the end of the table, engrossed in eating a piece of apple pie out of a Styrofoam box. His rust-colored comb-over was in slight disarray.

Gurney sat next to Kline. “Have we lost the sheriff?”

“He’s at the jail. Evidently one of the BDA detainees wants to trade information on our so-called third man for a get-out-of-jail-free card. Goodson likes to handle those interviews personally.” It was clear from Kline’s tone it was an appetite he didn’t share.

Gurney turned to the mayor. “I heard you were tied up at a Rotary lunch.”

Shucker swallowed, wiping crumbs from the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. “Roto-Rooter lunch would’ve been a better name for it.” His tone suggested he considered this comment clever and expected a request to elaborate.

Gurney said nothing.

“Sounds unpleasant,” said Kline.

The door opened and Beckert entered. He sat down, opened the laptop, and checked the time.

“It’s one fifty,” he announced. “Time to reconvene. Our current status is that Judd and his team are continuing their search of the Gorts’ compound. They’ve already found computer evidence that links them to the Knights of the Rising Sun, as well as some physical evidence that may tie them directly to Jordan and Tooker.”

Kline sat up a little straighter. “What’s the physical evidence?”

“We’ll get to that. I want you to see some photos first. They’ll give you some insight into the pair of lunatics we’re dealing with.” He tapped a key on his laptop, and the first photo appeared on the monitor.

It showed a dirt road hemmed in by tangled evergreens, leading to a gate in a high chain-link fence. Affixed to the fence were two square signs. The one to the left of the gate bore two lines of hand-printed words, too far from the camera to be legible. The one to the right, in addition to three lines of printing, had affixed to it what looked like an actual human skull.

The next photo Beckert showed was a close-up of the sign on the left.

THE LAWS OF MAN ARE TOOLS OF SATAN

THE GOVERNMENTS OF MAN ARE DENS OF SERPENTS

The next photo was a close-up of the sign with the skull. Gurney could now see that the skull was attached to the sign with a short arrow whose shaft and feathers protruded from the left eye socket. He recognized it as a crossbow bolt, a more powerful and deadly projectile than a normal arrow. The words printed below it were no more inviting.

CHURCH PROPERTY

ACCESS RESTRICTED

TRESPASSERS BEWARE

Shucker was half watching the screen as he pressed the back of his plastic fork into the corners of his pie container to extract the last few crumbs. “You see that skull, makes you wonder whose it is. And how it ended up there, out in the middle of nowhere. You know what I mean?”

No one responded.

Beckert let a few seconds pass before going on to the next shot. “This is a photo of a photo that Judd found in the tray of a computer printer in the Gorts’ cabin.”

Shucker blinked in confusion. “Say that again?”

Beckert repeated his statement with a slowness someone else might have found insulting, but Shucker just nodded. “Photo of a photo. Got it.”

What appeared on the screen was a picture of three strange figures in a room with log walls and a stone fireplace. Two of the figures were gaunt, bearded men in camo hunting clothes. One was much taller than the other—so much so that Gurney concluded that one must be a giant or the other a midget to account for such a difference. Between them stood a large black bear—although “stood” would not be the most accurate word, since the animal’s body was being held in an upright position by a rope. One end was fashioned into a sort of noose around the bear’s thick neck, and the other end was fastened to a low roof beam. On the mantel above the fireplace were several crossbows fitted with hunting scopes. In a jagged arc above them on the wall were dozens of broadhead hunting bolts.

“The Gorts with their latest trophy,” said Beckert.

“The Gorts?” said Gurney. “I thought you said they were twins.”

“They are. Ezechias is six foot two, and Ezechiel is four foot ten. Apart from that, they’re identical. Same face, same voice, same lunacy.”

“There’s no spring bear-hunting season, is there?” said Kline.

“Absolutely not.”

“So they just do as they please—hunt whenever they feel like it, in or out of season?”

“I’m sure they prefer to do it out of season. One more way to tell the law to go to hell.”

“They fish with dynamite,” said Shucker, pressing his little white fork into another corner of his pie box.

Gurney stared at him. “Dynamite?”

“When the Handsome Brothers stone quarry got shut down after the big explosion, the state auditors discovered someone had made off with a gross of dynamite sticks. Back then, the twins worked there. But every fall folks in the area claim there’s a loud thump up to Clapp Hollow Lake and then the Gort boys spend the next week or two salting fish for the winter. Course it’s hard to know what’s fact or fiction out there in the hollows.”

“We’re in a position now to say with certainty that the Gorts have the stolen dynamite,” said Beckert, “although that’s not something we’ll be saying publicly. Not at this time.”

Kline looked worried. “They have the dynamite? Where is it?”

“Presumably they have it with them. It seems the Gorts were tipped off prior to Judd’s raid, and they left with certain items.”

“How do you know?”

“We know certain things were there and now they’re not. Here’s a photo Judd took an hour ago.”

A new photo replaced the one of the Gorts with the bear. It was taken in the same room—but without the Gorts, without the bear, without the crossbows on the mantel, without the broadhead bolts on the wall.

“I see what’s missing, compared to the other photo,” said Kline, “but how do we know those things weren’t put somewhere else a long time ago? I mean, there’s no proof that the earlier photo of the Gorts with the bear was taken recently. Couldn’t the rearrangement of the room have happened weeks or months ago?”

“We have evidence that suggests a very recent time frame.” Beckert clicked his way rapidly through a number of photos, stopping at one of a fenced area attached to a large shed. He pointed at it. “That’s the kennel. See that material strewn across the ground? That’s what’s left of the bear meat. Evidently the Gorts dumped the carcass in the kennel and their dogs tore it to shreds. Judd also found a fresh bear pelt in a taxidermy shed next to the cabin. So our timing assumptions are valid regarding the removal of the bear and the crossbows—and the Gorts’ dogs as well. They were known to have about a dozen pit bulls that are now missing. But from the condition of the bear meat in the kennel—it’s only just beginning to decay—we know the dogs were there until sometime yesterday.”

Kline looked uneasy. “And the dynamite?”

“It’s likely that the Gorts had in their possession over a hundred sticks. Judd found an empty explosives crate next to a half-empty container of canvas bags. He figures the Gorts transferred the dynamite to the bags to make it easier to carry.”

Now it was Shucker’s turn to look worried. “You’re saying that two of the craziest men in White River have gone underground with a dozen attack dogs, enough arrows to kill off a small village, and enough dynamite to blow up a big one? How come you’re not in a panic?”

“I prefer to focus on the progress we’ve made and the high likelihood of a successful resolution.”

“Earlier you mentioned physical evidence linking the Gorts to Jordan and Tooker,” said Kline. “Can you tell us what that is?”

“The potentially damning item is a coil of rope found in one of their sheds. Judd’s impression is that it’s identical to the rope used in the playground. We’ll be getting a microscopic confirmation of that. If we get a cut match on the end fibers, that’ll clinch it.”

“You also mentioned computer evidence linking them to KRS?”

“Yes. On a thumb drive, taped to the bottom of a desk drawer. It contains the text and the graphic elements used to construct the KRS website. Meaning the Gorts either put the site together themselves or provided the elements to someone who did.”

Kline’s expression brightened. “So we’re really getting somewhere.”

“We are.”

“That thumb drive,” said Gurney, puzzled, “how were its contents examined?”

“On site, with Judd’s laptop. Minutes after it was discovered.”

“The drive wasn’t password-protected?”

“Apparently not,” said Beckert.

“And none of its individual files were password-protected?”

“Apparently not.”

“Did they find the computer that housed the files the thumb drive was backing up?”

“They found a printer, scanner, modem, and router, but not the computer itself.”

“Interesting,” mused Gurney, speaking to no one in particular. “The Gorts took their dogs, crossbows, arrows, explosives, computer, and God-only-knows what else. But they left an unprotected USB drive and a rope that could incriminate them in a double murder.”

Beckert’s voice grew noticeably colder. “We can speculate on the reasons for those lapses in judgment later. But right now there’s a more urgent priority. We need to encapsulate our progress in an appropriate statement. There are aspects to be emphasized and aspects to be avoided. Remember that we’re in the middle of a media minefield. Forgetting it could be fatal.”

Fatal to whom or to what? wondered Gurney. Was this about Beckert’s own political future? Or was something else involved?

Beckert continued. “Regarding our investigations—”

He was interrupted by a tapping at the door.

Torres stood up and opened it.

It was the sheriff. “I hope my return isn’t breakin’ the flow of some brilliant crime analysis.”

“Come in, Goodson,” said Beckert. “We’re just summing up a few key points.”

“The summin’ up is the best part.” He made his way toward his seat at the end of the table.

Beckert began as he had before. “Regarding our investigations into the shooting and subsequent Willard Park homicides, there are three points that must guide all statements made outside this room. Number one, we are making rapid progress on both fronts. Arrests in both cases are anticipated within forty-eight hours. Number two, we have obtained evidence that will support airtight prosecutions and convictions. Number three, we are giving these cases equal priority and resources.” He looked around the table, then abruptly changed the subject. “Goodson, how did your conversation go with your snitch at the jail? Anything useful?”

“Interesting for sure. You can decide if it’s useful.”

“He wanted to trade information for a favor?”

“Of course. But it was a she, not a he. What she said was that Blaze Lovely Jackson, one of the three leaders of the BDA, had a falling out with her two coleaders, Jordan and Tooker.”

“How serious a falling out?”

“Serious serious, according to her. Said Blaze don’t play well with others. Not big on sharin’ power. Way she put it, Blaze is a vicious homicidal bitch, fond of usin’ a straight razor to end disputes. Suggested there could be some connection between her homicidal nature and the fate of her coleaders.”

“We’re now ninety-nine percent certain the Gorts were responsible for the killings. I find it hard to believe that a black female could have had any involvement in what we saw in that playground.”

Cloutz moistened his lips. “That would be my feeling too. But my little lady did say with great conviction that Blaze Lovely Jackson was capable of anything. Absolutely anything.”

Beckert said nothing. His own thoughts now seemed to be absorbing his full attention.

22

When the meeting broke up, Gurney headed out immediately. He didn’t want to be late for his three thirty meeting with Rick Loomis at the Lucky Larvaton Diner. But before he could get in his car, he heard footsteps hurrying toward him.

It was Kline coming across the parking lot, radiating an odd mixture of excitement and anxiety. “Where are you rushing off to?”

“I’m meeting someone for coffee. Did you need me for something?”

“I’d like some explanation of your reactions in there.”

“You sound concerned.”

“The news we got was all good. Rapid progress on all fronts. Videos of the ‘third man’ coming and going from the sniper site. The car traced to a BDA member, creating a clear BDA tie-in to Steele’s murder. Plus an equally clear vigilante group tie-in to the murder of the BDA leaders. The discovery of solid evidence in both cases. Situation under control. Risk of chaos reduced. A solid victory for law and order.” He looked at Gurney expectantly.

“What’s your question?”

“Given what I just said, why do you have that doubtful look on your face?”

“I’m a natural skeptic. It’s the way my mind works.”

“Even when the news is overwhelmingly positive?”

“Is that the way you’d describe it?”

Kline held Gurney’s gaze for a few seconds, then reached into his jacket pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. He lit one up with a vintage Zippo, took a deep drag, and slowly exhaled, watching the smoke dissipate into White River’s still-acrid air.

“Those concerns you seemed to have about the depth of the water under the Grinton Bridge . . . the way you were asking about the USB drive—all that worries me. It worries me not knowing what you’re thinking. What you’re suspecting. If something’s wrong, I need to know what it is.”

“The truth is, in both of these cases I’m having trouble getting my head around the thought processes of the killers.”

Kline took another drag on his cigarette. “I don’t find that very enlightening.”

“I find it helpful to put myself in the criminal’s position. To see the world from his point of view. I do that by studying what he’s done. I immerse myself in his preparations, his execution of his plan, his likely actions afterward. This usually gives me a sense of how the perp thinks, how he makes decisions. But this time it’s not happening.”

“Why not?”

“Half the actions in these cases contradict the other half. The perps are very careful and very careless. Take the sniper. He was careful not to get his fingerprints on the outer door, the window, the bathroom door. But he left a perfect print on the toilet’s flush handle. His marksmanship and location planning suggest he’s a real pro. But he drives an easily traceable car. He goes to the trouble of ditching the tripod. But he tosses it in water so shallow it’s easily visible.”

“You’re expecting these crazy killers to be totally logical?”

“No. I just think the possible significance of the discrepancies is being ignored. The same sort of peculiar questions arise in the Jordan-Tooker case. The cool and methodical nature of the beatings supposedly administered by crazy, hate-driven, white-supremacist vigilantes. The suspects’ prudently removing their computer, but foolishly leaving behind their USB drive with the incriminating website content.”

“That USB drive wasn’t just left behind. It was hidden under a desk drawer.”

“It was hidden in the first place any detective would look for it. Like the tripod, in a way. Hidden where it could easily be found.”

Kline sighed in frustration, dropping what was left of his cigarette onto the pavement and staring down at it. “So what’s your bottom line? That everybody but you is wrong? That none of our progress is really progress at all?”

“I don’t have a bottom line, Sheridan. I just have questions.”

Kline sighed again, ground out his cigarette, got into his SUV, and drove away.

The old Route Ten Bypass in Angina ran through a wide green valley dotted with weathered red barns. The sunny slopes of the south-facing hillsides were covered with alternating swaths of clover and buttercups. This idyllic landscape was pockmarked, however, by the detritus of a collapsed economy—abandoned homes, shuttered shops, closed schools.

Half a mile from Gurney’s destination, at an unpopulated intersection, an old man was sitting on a low stool by the side of the road. Displayed on a shabby card table next to him were the mounted head of a deer and an old microwave oven. Propped against a leg of the table was a piece of brown cardboard with a scribbled offer: BOTH FOR $20.

Coming to the Lucky Larvaton Diner, Gurney discovered that it shared a weedy parking lot with a small strip mall whose businesses were all defunct—Wally’s Wood Stoves, Furry Friends Pet Emporium, The Great Angina Pizzeria, and Tori’s Tints & Cuts. The final vacant storefront in the row promised in a curled and faded window poster that Champion Cheese would be “coming soon.”

The diner was across the lot from these empty stores. Built in the railroad-car style of traditional diners, it appeared to be in need of a good power-washing. There were two cars parked beside it—a dusty old Honda Civic and a turquoise Chevy Impala from the sixties—and a nondescript pickup truck out in front. Gurney parked next to the truck.

Inside, it looked not so much old-fashioned as just plain old. It had none of that ersatz “country charm” that exists in the minds of people who live in cities. There was a gritty reality to the scuffed brown linoleum, the smell of grease, the poor lighting. On the back wall a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN poster was curling in at its corners.

A thin, sharp-featured man with an oily black pompadour stood behind one end of the counter, peering down into the pages of a thick ledger. A middle-aged waitress with lifeless blond hair was perched on a stool at the opposite end of the counter examining her fingernails.

Halfway between them a stocky customer in faded farm overalls was hunched forward with his elbows on the worn Formica surface, eyes fixed on an old television that sat behind the counter on a microwave oven. The talking heads on the screen were proclaiming their opinions.

A row of booths ran along the diner’s window side. Gurney made his way to the booth farthest from the television. Despite his efforts to gather his thoughts for his meeting with Rick Loomis, snippets of the TV audio kept intruding:

“. . . zero respect for the police . . .”

“. . . throw away the key . . .”

“. . . worst elements getting all the sympathy . . .”

The blond waitress approached Gurney with a smile that was either sleepy or stoned. Possibly both. “Good afternoon, sir. How are you doing on this beautiful day?”

“Fine. How are you doing?”

The vague smile broadened. “I’m doing wonderful. Do you know what you want, or should I give you some time to think about it?”

“Just coffee.”

“No problem. Do you have a Lucky Larvaton gas card?”

“No.”

“You can earn free gas. Would you like one?”

“Not now, thank you.”

“Not a problem. Milk or cream?”

“Cream, on the side.”

“Just for one?”

“I’m expecting someone.”

“You’re the gentleman meeting Detective Rick, is that right?”

“Rick Loomis?”

“Detective Rick is what we call him. A very nice man.”

“Yes. I’m meeting him. Did he call?”

“He said he was trying to reach you, but he couldn’t get through. There are so many dead cell areas around here. You never know when you’re going to get cut off. At the village meetings they keep promising to do something about it. Promises, promises. My granddaddy used to say if promises was poop nobody’d have to buy fertilizer.”

“Very wise. Do you recall the message Detective Rick left for me?”

“That he’d be late.” She turned to the counter. “Lou, how late did he say he’d be?”

The man scrutinizing the ledger answered without looking up. “Quarter of an hour.”

He checked the time on his phone. It was 3:25. So now there was a total of twenty minutes to wait.

“He comes in here a lot, does he?” asked Gurney.

“Not really.”

“But you know him?”

“Of course.”

“How?”

“Because of the Pumpkin Murders.”

“Damn!” Lou spoke without looking up from the ledger. “There you go again!”

“Sorry, say that again?” said Gurney.

“The Pumpkin Murders,” repeated the waitress.

“Pumpkin? Is that someone’s name?”

Lou looked up. “You can’t keep calling them ‘murders.’ The cops never proved a damn thing. Nobody got incarcerated. You keep saying ‘murders’ you’ll get us sued for defamation.”

“Nobody’s suing nobody, Lou.”

“Whatever you call it,” said Gurney, “what did it have to do with Rick Loomis?”

The waitress answered, “He was the one on the case. The Pumpkin Murders.”

“There wasn’t no murder,” insisted Lou, his voice rising.

The waitress’s voice took on an edge of its own. “So what did the two of them do, Lou? Just crawl under that pile of pumpkins and lie there till they died of natural causes?”

“I’m not saying the pumpkins didn’t get dumped on them. You know I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is, it could’ve been an accident. Farm accidents happen every day. Worse ones than that. Where’s your presumption of innocence?”

The waitress shook her head at Gurney as though they both realized how silly Lou was being. “Here’s the real story. Evie Pringle and one of the harvesters out at the Pringle Squash Farm were having an affair.” She punctuated “affair” with a flash of knowing approval, as though it were something every woman aspired to.

“Black boy,” interjected Lou.

“Lou! You know darn well he was mostly white.”

“Black’s black. Like being pregnant.”

She shook her head and continued her story. “The way Detective Rick figured it, Evie and her boyfriend had gone into the underground entryway to the storm cellar in back of the barn. Earlier in the day Evie’s husband, Dick, had been out in the fields with his front loader gathering up all the leftover pumpkins, which folks don’t have much interest in after Halloween. He’d loaded all them unsalable pumpkins, three tons of them, in his big dump truck. Then, while Evie and her boyfriend were down in the storm cellar doing what they were doing, with the doors closed over them, Dick went and dumped three tons of pumpkins on top of those doors. And that’s the horrible way they met their maker, naked victims of Dick’s terrible revenge.”

Lou produced another snort. “Dick had a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

“A reasonable lie, you mean.”

He slammed the ledger shut. “It wasn’t no revenge and it wasn’t no lie. He was piling them pumpkins there temporary like, until he could move them to the main compost heap.”

She shook her head. “You don’t know nothing about revenge, Lou.”

That seemed to leave him at a loss.

Gurney took the opportunity to ask her a question that had been puzzling him. “Why was Loomis discussing this with you?”

“Because Lou here was in the same school class with Dick Pringle, and I was one year behind with Evie. I suspect he was wanting some character insights.”

“What was his conclusion?”

“He agreed with me,” said Lou in a loud voice. “There wasn’t no murder, because Dick wasn’t no idiot. He sold the farm with them bodies still locked in that old storm cellar. If he’d known they was there, he’d a known they’d be found. Stands to reason. Loomis saw that plain as the nose on your face. He figured if Dick had done it on purpose, he’d have done it a lot smarter.”

“Like hell he agreed with you,” cried the waitress. “All he concluded was that there wasn’t enough proof to cook Dick’s goose. I believe he knew in his heart that murder had been done.”

Gurney was getting restless. “How did Pringle explain the fact that his wife and the hired man weren’t around anymore? I assume someone must have noticed.”

The waitress answered. “He told everyone they’d run off together. He was getting sympathy for being abandoned. What a shit!”

Lou slapped his hand on the counter. “Your mind is bent! He said they ran off together because that’s what he thought they done. It’s what any man would think. You suspect your wife’s getting it on with the hired help, and then they disappear together, what the hell are you supposed to think? It stands to reason.”

“Lou, sometimes I think you wouldn’t know reason if it bit you in the ass.”

They stared at each other in quiet disdain. Phrases from the television’s talking heads intruded into the silence. The thickset man in farm clothes at the end of the counter remained transfixed by the drone of bad news.

“. . . murder rate soaring . . .”

“. . . criminals empowered . . .”

Gurney’s phone rang. The ID told him it was Kline. He headed out into the parking lot, squinting into the bright, broad expanse of the valley, his eyes having just adjusted to the murkiness of the diner.

“Gurney here.”

“Where’s here?” Kline’s voice was rushed.

“On the Route Ten Bypass between Angina and White River. Why?”

“We have a situation. Another cop shooting. No details yet.”

“Where?”

“Bluestone. The high end of White River. Number Twelve Oak Street. Whatever you’re doing, drop it. Put that address in your GPS and go!”

“Will do. But once I get there . . .”

“Once you get there, you observe. No static, no turf wars. WRPD just got there. So you’re my eyes on the scene. I can’t leave the office right now. Keep me informed.”

“You know anything at all about this?”

“Sniper. That’s it. Nothing else.” As he began to repeat the address, the connection was broken.

It occurred to Gurney that he should call Loomis right away, let him know about the emergency, and reschedule their meeting. As he searched his list of recent incoming calls for Loomis’s number, he remembered that it had been blocked, an automatic habit of many cops.

“You never got your coffee.”

The voice behind him in the parking lot belonged to the waitress. He turned and saw that she was holding out a Styrofoam cup. “I put cream in it. Sorry about all that in there. Lou can be such a dunce.”

Gurney took the cup and reached into his pocket for his wallet.

“Forget it. On the house. Least we can do.” She smiled her vague smile.

“Thank you. May I ask for another small favor?”

Her smile showed a spark of interest.

“Detective Rick should be here soon. Could you let him know I had to leave on police business and ask him to call me? He has my number.”

“No problem.” The spark faded.

He got in his car, entered the address Kline had given him into his GPS, and headed for the interstate at twice the speed limit.

Oak Street turned out to be located at the topographically lower side of the Bluestone section that Kline had described as the “high end” of White River. The street ran along the base of a gentle slope that rose from the grim Grinton section up to a plateau that marked the north edge of the city. As far as Gurney could see, the rest of Bluestone looked like Oak Street—a quiet neighborhood of older, well-maintained homes, neatly mowed lawns, and treelined pavements. The afternoon sun was bathing the area in a warm glow.

When Gurney arrived at number twelve, he counted five WRPD cruisers parked at haphazard angles in front of the house, two with their front doors open, all with their light arrays flashing. A Mercy Hospital ambulance was parked in the driveway. Two uniformed officers were unfurling a roll of yellow crime-scene tape.

Gurney parked next to one of the cruisers and walked up the driveway, holding his DA’s office credentials out in front of him.

Several officers and EMTs were gathered on the front lawn around a collapsible rolling stretcher that had been lowered to the ground. A few yards away a woman in a sweatshirt and jeans was sitting on the grass, holding a kitchen spatula, making a sound like a wailing baby. A few feet away on the grass there was a yellow potholder. A female EMT was kneeling next to her, one arm around her. A sergeant was standing over them, his phone to his ear.

The EMTs around the stretcher began to raise it. When it clicked into its upright position the woman on the lawn scrambled to her feet, dropping the spatula. As the EMTs were rolling the stretcher toward the open back doors of the ambulance, Gurney got a passing view of the man lying on it. His face, neck, and one shoulder were covered with blood; a bloody compress was covering the side of his head; the arm nearest Gurney was twitching.

His educated guess, based on the quantity of blood and the position of the compress, was that the temporal artery had been severed. But there was no way of guessing how much damage had been done to the side of the skull and underlying areas of the brain or what the man’s chances were of reaching the hospital alive. Many victims of head wounds didn’t make it that far.

The woman—auburn-haired, round-faced, and noticeably pregnant—was trying to get to the stretcher. She was being held back by the frowning sergeant and the female EMT.

As the stretcher was being lifted into the ambulance the woman’s efforts became wilder. She was screaming repeatedly, “I have to be with my husband!”

The EMT looked distressed and uncertain. The sergeant was grimacing and trying to hold on to her, as she flailed her arms and screamed, “MY HUSBAND!”

Her desperation seized Gurney’s heart.

He went over and faced the sergeant. “What the hell’s going on here?”

The sergeant was struggling to keep his balance. “Who the fuck are you?”

Gurney held up his credentials. “Why are you holding her here?”

“Deputy chief’s orders.” His voice was rising.

“She needs to be with her husband!”

“The deputy chief said—”

“I don’t give a damn about the deputy chief!”

The ambulance was easing out of the driveway onto Oak Street.

The woman was shrieking, “Let me go . . .”

“That’s it,” said Gurney. “We’re going to the hospital now! I’m taking responsibility. I’m Dave Gurney, DA’s office.”

Without agreeing to anything, the sergeant loosened his grip enough to let Gurney free the woman and lead her to the Outback. The WRPD officers on the scene appeared agitated by the dispute but unsure what to do.

Gurney helped the woman into the passenger seat. He was heading around to the driver’s side when a dark-blue Ford Explorer came to an abrupt stop in front of his car.

The rear door opened, and Judd Turlock stepped out. He looked into Gurney’s car.

“What’s she doing in there?” He sounded almost disinterested.

“I’m taking her to the hospital. Her husband may be dying.”

“You can do that right after I talk with her.”

“You’ve got it backward. Get your car out of my way.”

For a split second Turlock looked surprised. Then his expression settled back into a menacing lack of any expression at all. His voice was flat. “You’re making a mistake.”

“Look around you.” Gurney gestured up and down the block, where several residents had come out into the street, holding up their smartphones and other devices. “They’re recording everything that’s happening. Right now they’re recording your car blocking my car. Image is everything, right?” Gurney flashed a humorless smile.

Turlock’s reply was a dead stare.

“Some messages have a huge impact,” said Gurney, glancing at his car windows to make sure they were closed and the woman inside wouldn’t hear him. “So imagine this message on every news site tomorrow morning: ‘Deputy Police Chief Stands between Pregnant Wife and Dying Husband.’ You think that’s the kind of message your boss has in mind? Think fast. Your career is circling the drain.”

Turlock’s mouth twitched into a hint of an ugly smile. “Okay,” he whispered. “We’ll do it your way. For now.”

He gestured to his driver, who moved the Explorer just far enough to allow Gurney room to turn around and head for Mercy Hospital.

With the help of his GPS, Gurney soon had the hospital in sight at the end of a long avenue, which seemed to calm his passenger just a little. He took the opportunity to ask if she’d actually seen what had happened.

Her voice was shaky. “He’d just gone out the front door. I heard a sound, like a rock hitting the house. I looked out . . . I . . .” She bit her lip and fell silent.

He assumed that what sounded like a rock was the impact of the bullet that had passed through the side of her husband’s head. He asked, “Do you know what a gunshot sounds like?”

“Yes.”

“Did you hear anything at all like that?”

“No.”

“When you came out, did you see anyone? A car driving away? Any movement at all?”

She shook her head.

When they arrived at the hospital, the EMTs already had the stretcher out of the ambulance and were rolling it toward the open doors of the emergency entrance.

As Gurney brought the Outback to a halt beside the ambulance, his passenger was already stepping out the door. Abruptly she stopped and turned toward him.

“Thank you for what you did back there,” she said. “Thank you so much. I don’t even know your name.”

“Dave Gurney. I hope your husband will be all right.”

“Oh my God!” Her hand went to her mouth, her eyes widening.

“What? What is it?”

“You’re the person Rick was on his way to meet!”

23

Heather Loomis’s frantic need to follow her husband into the hospital prevented any discussion of the unsettling revelation. Gurney decided that sitting there would be a waste of time and would risk another confrontation with Turlock, who’d likely be coming to the hospital to interview Heather. It would make more sense to return to the crime scene, which Kline had asked him to observe.

He retraced his route and was soon back on Oak Street. Clusters of curious neighbors were still in front of their homes. There was no sign of Turlock or his blue Explorer, and only one of the five police cruisers was still there, its lights no longer flashing. On the far side of the cruiser there was a black Ford Crown Victoria—the most common unmarked police vehicle in America. In the driveway there was a gray van with a WRPD logo on its door. Gurney parked next to the cruiser.

Yellow crime-scene tape extended from one corner of the house to a series of metal stakes about twenty feet out on the lawn and back to the far corner of the house. An evidence tech was standing in a flower bed next to the front door. He was probing a hole in the wood trim with a bright metal tool that looked like a surgeon’s pliers. He was wearing the latex gloves and Tyvek coveralls common to his occupation.

Gurney got out of his car, credentials in hand, and was heading across the lawn toward the taped-off area when he was stopped by a familiar voice.

“Hey! Dave! Over here!”

He turned around and saw Mark Torres gesturing with his phone through the open window of the Crown Vic. He walked over and waited until Torres concluded his call.

Getting out of the car, the young detective looked concerned. “I was afraid I’d missed you. Was there a problem here . . . after the shooting?”

Gurney shrugged. “Nothing major. Heather Loomis wanted to be with her husband. It could have been her last chance to see him alive. So I took her.”

“Ah. That makes sense.” Torres looked relieved, but not entirely so.

“Where’s Turlock?”

“I don’t know. I was at headquarters. He told me to get over here and find the location used by the BDA sniper.”

“The BDA sniper? Those were his words?”

“Those were his words.”

“He was that sure about a BDA connection?”

“Absolutely positive. You have doubts about it?”

“I have doubts about everything connected with this case.”

“We’ll know more as soon as Garrett pulls the bullet out of the woodwork. It’s taking extra time because we’re trying to preserve as much of the entry channel as we can.”

Gurney looked over at the tech in the flower bed, his coveralls hanging loosely on his tall, gangly frame. He was up to his knees in purple alliums and evening primrose—which Gurney recognized as two of Madeleine’s favorites, along with bee balm and foxglove.

Torres went on. “We figure the shot had to have come from up there.” He gestured toward a broad area of houses several blocks up the hill. “I have four of our guys up there now doing door-to-doors, trying to find out if anyone heard or saw anything. Somebody up there must have heard the gunshot, even if it was suppressed—which I guess it was, or some of the neighbors down here would have heard it, and nobody did.”

Gurney recalled that the police canvassing of the Grinton neighborhood for information at the time of the Steele shooting hadn’t produced much cooperation. But Bluestone was a different kind of place, the kind where cops were viewed as allies, not enemies.

“Got it!” With a satisfied smile, the tech in the flower bed was holding up what appeared to be a remarkably intact bullet. Gurney and Torres stepped under the tape and went over for a closer inspection.

“Looks identical to the one you dug out of the tree in Willard Park,” said Torres.

“Yep. Same caliber, same full metal jacket, no significant deformation, nice and clean for ballistics.” He slipped the bullet into a small evidence envelope, already labeled and dated.

“Great work,” said Torres. “Thank you.”

“So that’s the whole deal here, right? Just the bullet recovery? No combing the site?”

“Nothing here to comb for. We’ll be in touch when we find the shooter site.”

The tech got into his van and departed.

Gurney, followed by Torres, headed for the hole in the woodwork. After giving it a quick examination, he took out his pen and inserted it as far as it would go, about three inches below the surface. The range of vectors created by the angle of the pen substantially reduced the portion of the hillside that Torres had originally indicated as the area from which the shot had come. Even allowing for the imprecision of the method and the possibility of the bullet channel being skewed one way or the other by contact with the victim or by the grain of the wood, it narrowed the area of interest to a couple of dozen hillside houses.

As Gurney was removing his pen from the channel, Torres’s phone rang.

He took the call and mostly listened, eyes widening with excitement.

“Okay, I got it. Thirty-Eight Poulter Street. We’ll be right there.”

He grinned at Gurney. “We may have lucked out. Uniforms found a couple of homeowners who say they heard something that could have been a shot—coming from a vacant house that sits between them. Let’s roll.”

They got into the Crown Vic and three minutes later were parked behind two WRPD cruisers at the Poulter Street address. It was a street of two-story Colonials on modest plots of land with driveways leading to detached garages. Most of the front yards consisted of neatly trimmed lawns with a few azaleas or rhododendrons in mulched planting beds.

The exception was number thirty-eight—where overgrown grass, wilted shrubs, and lowered blinds created an impression of abandonment. The open garage door was the only indication of recent use. Two patrol cops with yellow tape were turning the house, garage, driveway, and backyard into a restricted area. A third officer—a heavy-shouldered, thick-necked young man with a shaved head and a stolid expression—was emerging from the neighboring house on the left.

Gurney and Torres met him in front of the driveway. Gurney learned his name was Bobby Bascomb when Torres introduced them. He pointed back to the house he’d come from. “Lady in that house, Gloria Fenwick, says she heard a car pulling into this driveway earlier this afternoon.”

“She know the time?” asked Torres.

“Not when it pulled in, but she knows it pulled out at exactly thirty-six minutes after three. And she knows it was a black Corolla sedan and the driver was in a hurry.”

“She’s that sure about the time and car model?”

“She’s sure about the car because she has an old Corolla herself. She’s sure about the time because it was unusual for anyone to come to that house, so when she heard a car pulling in she went to her side window, trying to see who it might be. She couldn’t see anyone because the car was already in the garage. But she stayed by the window. A few minutes later she heard a loud ‘bang’—which she thought was a door slamming. Maybe thirty seconds after that, the car came backing out of the garage onto the street and, as she put it, ‘peeled rubber’ and was gone. That got her attention. That’s when she looked at the clock.”

“She get a look at the driver?”

“No. But she said it had to be a man because women don’t drive that fast.”

“Did you call in a description of the car?”

“Yep. They’ve put an APB out on it.”

Torres called headquarters and told them to add the plate number of the car associated with the Steele shooting to the APB on the black Corolla in Bluestone.

He resumed his debriefing of Bascomb. “Does the lady know anything about the people who own this house?”

“She said they moved to Florida six months ago. They weren’t able to sell the house before they left, so they put it up for rent.”

“She know anything about the renters?”

“Just that she’s never seen them, but a friend in the real estate business told her it was someone from down in Grinton.”

“How’d she feel about that?”

Bascomb shrugged. “About like you’d expect. ‘Grinton’ is not a popular word on this side of town.”

“How about the neighbor on the other side?”

“Hollis Vitter. Piece of work. Pissed off at the grass not being mowed, pissed off at ‘the Grinton element’ moving into Bluestone, pissed off at ‘gun-control faggots.’ Lot of things piss him off.”

“Has he ever seen the people who rented the house?”

“No. But he thinks they must be foreigners.”

“Why?”

“Some bullshit about them not cutting the grass. He wasn’t making a lot of sense.”

“Jesus,” muttered Torres. “Did he tell you anything that could be relevant to the case?”

“Actually, yes. And that part’s more interesting. Like the lady on the other side, he heard a sharp ‘bang,’ but he didn’t get to the window right away. Says he was locked in the shitter.”

“Locked?”

“That’s the word he used. The point is, the window was open, and he’s sure what he heard leaving wasn’t a car. He says it was a motorcycle and that the sound didn’t come from the street, it came from the weedy little hill that drops off in back of these houses.”

Torres looked uncertain. “Do we trust what he says about the sound?”

Bascomb sucked at his teeth. “I kinda pushed him on that, and he said he used to be a motocross mechanic down at Dortler’s Speed Sports.”

Torres appeared puzzled by the conflicting vehicle descriptions. “We’ll have to get that sorted out. Right now we need Garrett up here. And we need to get into that house. I’ll call in a request for a search warrant.”

“If you want to, for the record,” said Gurney. “But we have justification to go in immediately. We have reason to believe a shot was fired from the premises, and we have to ensure that the evidence techs aren’t blindsided when they go in, which they need to do ASAP.”

Torres made the warrant call, then a call to Garrett Felder, the head crime-scene tech.

“Okay,” he said, putting away his phone. “Let’s do it. How many doors does that house have?”

“Three,” said Bascomb. “Front, back, and left side.”

Torres looked questioningly at Gurney.

“Your show, Mark. Put us where you want us.”

“Right. Okay. You take the back. Bobby, you take the side. I’ll take the front and give the signal for going in.”

One of the two cops taping off the area looked over. “You want us somewhere?”

Torres thought about it for a moment, then pointed. “Go to diagonal corners of the yard, so you can each see two sides of the house, and keep an eye on the windows.” They nodded and went to their assigned positions. Bascomb, Gurney, and Torres did the same.

As Gurney was passing the side door, he noted that it was slightly ajar. The back door, he discovered a few seconds later, was wide open. He reached down to his ankle holster, pulled out his Beretta, slipped off the safety, and waited for the entry signal.

A moment later he heard Torres’s knocking at the front door, a pause, then more insistent knocking, followed by “Police! Open the door now!” Then several seconds of silence, followed by “Officers going in! Now!” And the sound of glass breaking.

Gurney stepped through the open back doorway into a narrow hall that led past a small bathroom into a stale-smelling kitchen. The layout was similar to that of the Steele house, but everything here was duller, dustier. He passed through the kitchen into a small dining room, separated from the living room by a wide arch.

In the living room there were no rugs, one flimsy-looking floor lamp, and very little furniture—a shabby couch, an armchair, an end table—adding to the uninhabited feeling. In the dim light coming through the partially closed blinds, he could see a stairway to the second floor. A hall behind the stairway led to the side door. He assumed that the door he saw beneath the stairway would lead to the basement.

Torres was at the foot of the stairs to the second floor, his Glock in a two-handed grip close to his chest. Bascomb was in the hall, a similar weapon in a similar position.

Torres called out, “This is the police! Anyone in the house, show yourself now!”

The response was a dead silence. In a low voice he directed Bascomb to check out the basement and asked Gurney to come with him to check out the upstairs.

There was no carpet on the stairs and the creaking of each tread was sufficient to give anyone who might have been lurking up there a step-by-step sense of their approach.

The upstairs turned out to be as bleak and deserted as the downstairs. There were three bedrooms, each containing a double bed. There was a bathroom with a dusty bathtub, a shower stall with no shower curtain, and a towel rack with no towels.

The bedroom that attracted Gurney’s attention was facing the rear of the house. The bed and chair had been pushed out of the way against a side wall. The window was open. Enough afternoon sunlight was slanting in to reveal three dime-sized impressions on the dusty floor. From the doorway Gurney could see through the open window, several blocks away and lower on the hill, a row of modest homes. The front yard of one was cordoned off with yellow tape. A few of the local residents were still gathered in the street—like fans lingering at an athletic field after the players have gone home.

Now that the dismal house at 38 Poulter Street had been identified with reasonable certainty as the second sniper site, the collection and protection of trace evidence became a priority. So it was no surprise that Garrett arrived with help. The surprise was the package the help came in—a short, stout woman he introduced as Shelby Towns, whose head was shaved as clean as Bobby Bascomb’s. She had silver studs in her lips, nostrils, and ears. She was wearing a black tee shirt with the word GENDERBENDER emblazoned in white letters across her ample chest.

Perhaps to defend her getup, Torres told Gurney that Shelby was involved in a long-term undercover assignment, but that her dual college degrees in forensic science and chemistry made her an ideal part-time addition to high-priority crime-scene examinations.

Gurney filled her and Garrett in on the layout of the house and what he’d seen in the upstairs bedroom. Bascomb mentioned Gloria Fenwick’s report of a car and Hollis Vitter’s report of a motorcycle. Torres added that it was strange to find in the bedroom floor dust indications of another rifle-support tripod, apparently like the first. “Why throw the first tripod in the river and keep the rifle?” he mused aloud to no one in particular. “If the shooter was going to get caught with one or the other, it’s the rifle that would nail him.”

Torres directed Bobby Bascomb and the other two cops at the scene to canvass the neighborhood for witnesses to the arrival or departure of a car or motorcycle, and for any information concerning the renters. Then he called headquarters and asked someone to look into city, county, and law-enforcement records concerning ownership, tenancy, tax payments, liens, complaints, or anything else they could uncover relevant to the use of the property.

Meanwhile, Garrett and Shelby donned disposable coveralls, booties, gloves, and caps. They gathered their special lights, chemicals, and evidence-processing paraphernalia from their van and headed into the house.

Torres suggested that while the techs were going about their business, he and Gurney should reinterview the two immediate neighbors to see if they recalled anything beyond what they’d already reported to Bascomb. Gurney agreed, and Torres volunteered to talk to Gloria Fenwick in the house on the left.

Gurney approached the house on the right. He wanted to hear more about the departure of that motorcycle. He hoped that Hollis Vitter’s questionable mental state hadn’t skewed his perceptions to the point of uselessness.

The house was of a size and style similar to number thirty-eight. The front lawn was bisected by a neat slate path that led to the front door. Centered in the square of lawn on each side of the path was a small spruce. The driveway had recently been swept clean. The garage door was open, revealing the back end of a military-style Hummer from the early nineties. A Confederate flag decal covered the rear window.

When Gurney was still a good ten yards from the house, the front door opened and a heavyset, balding man in camo fatigues came out, holding a Rottweiler on a short leash. Gurney figured that the vehicle, the flag, the fatigues, and the dog added up to an exaggerated need to project a don’t mess with me image.

Gurney produced a polite smile. “Mr. Vitter?”

“Who’s asking?”

He held up his credentials. “Dave Gurney, office of the district attorney. I need to speak to you about events in the house next door to you.”

“You ever hear of the broken-window theory of policing?” he asked in an angry voice.

Gurney was thoroughly familiar with it—a highly confrontational approach to minor incidents in high-crime neighborhoods—from his NYPD days. Every cop in America knew something about it, many departments had tried it, and the results remained a subject of controversy and heated debate.

“I know what it is, sir. Does it have some relevance to the situation next door?”

Vitter pointed to the weedy foot-high grass. “You see that?”

“I see it. What about it?”

Vitter’s eyes narrowed. “The broken-window approach says you guys need to address the little signs of big problems. Infringements.” He articulated the word slowly, with drawn-out distaste. “The idea is zero tolerance. Send a message. What’s wrong with the world today is that all the little crap is ignored. Swept under the table. Nobody wants to take on the minority bullcrap, the sensitivities, the political correctness that’s murdering us.”

He waved a finger at Gurney. “You gotta squash the little crap so they understand they can’t get away with the big crap. We ought to do what they do other places. Shoot them. Why not? Shoot the scumbags. Shoot the drug dealers. Leave the bodies where they fall. Same with terrorists. Leave them where they fall. Send a message.”

Gurney waited to be sure the spiel had run its course.

“Mr. Vitter, I have a question for you.”

The man cocked his head to the side. “Yeah?”

“Earlier this afternoon, did you hear a motorcycle leaving the property next door?”

Vitter’s demeanor brightened. “Motocross, small displacement, high compression. Something like a Yamaha Dual Sport. That’s a guess. But I’m a good guesser.”

“You saw it?”

“No need to. I told your fella with the shaved head I was taking a shit, but I have a good ear. Nothing I don’t know about bikes, including how they sound.”

“When you heard it, did you happen to notice the time?”

“I don’t keep a clock in the shitter.”

“Any idea who it might have been?”

He looked from side to side and lowered his voice. “Probably one of them.”

“Them?”

“Infiltrators. They come into our country illegally and disappear. Disappear into ordinary American life. They stay there, lurking around, waiting until they get the word to launch a terrorist attack. You don’t hear about this on regular news. It’s all hushed up.”

Gurney paused. “Have you ever seen anyone next door?”

“Never,” he said, giving the word a fraught significance.

Gurney recognized that familiar quirk of the mind that can transform a lack of evidence into the most convincing evidence of all. In a computer program that logic circuit would be a disabling flaw. In people, however, it was amazingly common.

Gurney thanked the man for his time and headed back to the Crown Vic to wait for Torres and the techs to reappear. He checked the time on his phone and saw that more than an hour had passed since he dropped Heather off at the emergency room. He assumed that Rick Loomis, if he were still alive, would likely be in one of the operating rooms. If he were a very lucky man, he might be having the side of his head reassembled in a way that would make his life livable. Heather would probably be in one of the waiting rooms—sitting, standing, pacing—besieging every passing nurse and doctor for news about what was happening. Gurney had questions he needed to ask her but was hesitant to ask, since none of them could compare in weight to the unknowns facing her at that moment.

Still, on countless occasions in his homicide career, the need for timely information had forced him to interview people in emotional pain. He’d always hesitated before plunging in. But in the end he always came to the same conclusion—that the need for information trumped the potential disturbance his questions might cause.

He got the hospital’s number from the internet, called it, explained who he needed to reach, was transferred three times, was put on hold for several minutes, and was about to give up when Heather was finally brought to the phone.

“Hello?” Her voice sounded thin and exhausted.

“This is Dave Gurney. How is Rick?”

“He’s in surgery. They can’t tell me anything yet.”

In the background Gurney could hear a series of little dings, a sound that brought back memories of ICU monitors, injured cops, long vigils in hospital corridors. “I need to ask you a couple of questions. Is that all right?”

“Go ahead.”

“When I went to the diner to meet Rick, they told me he’d called to say he’d be late. Do you know why?”

“I think . . . I think he checked with someone. Maybe to ask about meeting with you? Something like that?”

“Do you have any idea who it was?”

“No. But I think whoever Rick was talking to wanted to come with him to your meeting . . . but he had to take care of something first, and then Rick was going to pick him up? I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying much attention—” Her voice was stifled by a little sob.

“It’s okay, Heather.”

“I don’t know what else I can tell you about that.”

“What you’ve told me is very helpful. I was just wondering . . . you referred to the person Rick was talking to as ‘him.’ Are you sure that the person Rick talked to was a man?”

“I don’t really know. It never occurred to me that it might not be a man.”

“Do you know if the person was a police officer?”

She hesitated. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Rick’s voice. There’s a certain way he talks to other cops. I think this sounded different.”

“That’s a good observation, Heather. I know this is a frightening time for you, and I appreciate your willingness to talk to me.”

“I want to help you. I appreciate what you did. The risk you took. Getting in Judd Turlock’s face like that to bring me here . . . when you didn’t even know my name.” Her voice was starting to quaver. “Most people . . . wouldn’t do that. Something like that . . . takes more than courage. It takes . . . goodness.”

A brief silence fell between them. It was broken by Gurney, clearing his throat and trying to speak in a matter-of-fact way. “Turlock and other WRPD people will be questioning you about what happened today. Not just about the shooting itself, but—”

“I know how the process works.”

“Are you going to tell them that Rick was on his way to meet me when he was shot?”

“No.”

“Or that he and I had spoken on the phone?”

“No.”

He paused. “You really don’t trust the department, do you?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Do you know if Rick or John Steele had uncovered any evidence of criminal actions?”

“I think . . . they were getting close.”

“Was anyone helping them?”

“Rick didn’t like to bring those details home. But I did have the impression that someone was giving them information, telling them which cases they should look into.”

“Someone inside the department?”

“Rick never said.”

“Do you know if it was information about individuals who’d been framed?”

“I think so.”

“Framed by Turlock?”

“Probably. He seems like an awful man.”

“And Beckert?”

She hesitated. “Probably not directly. According to Rick, he’s the sort of person who makes everything turn out the way he wants it, without leaving his fingerprints on anything.”

“I was told he has political ambitions. Do you know anything about that?”

“No, but I’m not surprised. He has that kind of—” She let out a sharp little cry. “Have to go. The doctor’s here.”

He felt a sudden tightness in his chest, perhaps a contagious germ of her fear. He hoped with all his heart she’d be able to handle whatever the doctor was about to tell her.

He was just slipping the phone back in his pocket when a call arrived from Sheridan Kline. He was tempted to let it go to voicemail; but he knew that delaying the conversation would accomplish nothing—that procrastination only increased the weight of things that needed to be done.

“Gurney here.”

“What on earth is going on?”

“Is there a problem?”

“I was told that you barged into the Loomis crime scene and removed a key witness before she could be interviewed by a senior WRPD officer.”

“That’s an interesting arrangement of the facts. Let me give you another one. I narrowly averted a public relations disaster that would have had Beckert stumbling all over himself at his next press conference.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that the desperate wife of a downed police officer was being detained—kept from her possibly dying husband—for the interviewing convenience of a deputy police chief with the sensitivity of a stone. How do you think Beckert’s precious media would react to that?”

Kline took so long to reply Gurney began to wonder if they were still connected.

“That’s not the way I heard it,” he finally said, the energy gone from his voice. “And according to the hospital, Loomis is still alive. I understand the shooter site has been located and Garrett Felder’s going over it. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And the Loomis shooter used the same black Corolla used in the Steele case?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“One neighbor saw the Corolla. Another neighbor claims there was another vehicle present, an off-road motorcycle. Hard to say at this point which one the shooter used.”

“What difference does it make? He obviously used one of them. From what you’re saying, it appears that he had some kind of BDA backup.”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t see as how there’s any maybe about it. Two vehicles. One shooter plus one backup.”

Gurney remained silent. There were other possibilities, but he didn’t feel like discussing them with Kline. At least not until he had a chance to think them through.

“Did you observe the site yourself?” asked Kline.

“I did.”

“And?”

“Similar to the first. Some indication that a rifle-support tripod was used. I’m waiting to see what else Garrett and his assistant come up with.”

“Good. With that same Corolla involved, any prints they find ought to corroborate the evidence we’ve gathered on the Steele shooting—which is already a prosecutor’s dream.”

“As long as you don’t think about it too much. Or start wondering why.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why that laser dot followed the back of Steele’s head as long as it did. Why he was shot while he was moving, rather than while he was standing still. Why the shooter used a full metal jacket, rather than a hollow-point. Things like that keep me awake at night. They ought to keep you awake, too.”

“Nonsense. You’re overcomplicating everything.”

“I thought you wanted my objective view of the case.”

“I do. Of course I do. But right now the case is coming together in an ideal way. I don’t want your obsession with tiny loose ends derailing your thinking or creating problems with White River PD. Stay with the big picture, is all I’m saying. Avoid unnecessary disputes. Let’s move this investigation to a smooth conclusion.”

24

When Torres came out of Gloria Fenwick’s house he filled Gurney in on the few bits of additional information he’d gotten from her.

The Corolla that backed out of the driveway and sped away was, in her words, “shamefully dirty.”

During that year’s March and early April snowfalls, the driveway had not been plowed.

In the months since the owners had moved away and consigned the place to its current renters, she’d never seen a window open or a light on.

Apparently all of the owners’ mail was being forwarded, and the renters were receiving none, since the postman, a very nice man, never stopped there.

The failure to maintain the property, particularly the failure to mow the grass, was, in her opinion, an insult to the residents of Bluestone and typical of the slovenly ways of “the Grinton element.”

“And,” Torres concluded, “she’s absolutely certain about the presence of that car. How sure was the guy on the other side of the house about the motorcycle?”

“Totally.”

“So they’re each positive about one vehicle, and neither was aware of the second. Strange.”

Gurney thought about that. “Not really. In the sniper house, there’s a bathroom by the back door and a living room in the front. The Fenwick and Vitter houses have the same basic design. Vitter says he heard the motorcycle—which was in back of the sniper house—through his bathroom window. Gloria Fenwick was at her living room window. The driveway the car used is on her side of the sniper house. They each noticed what they were closest to.”

Torres looked unconvinced. “I get why Vitter might not have heard the car. But motorcycles can be pretty loud. Shouldn’t she have heard it?”

“Theoretically. But suppose there was a delay of a minute or two between the car leaving and the motorcycle leaving. I doubt she stayed by her window after the car left. She may even have closed it. If there was another engine sound a couple of minutes later down by that back slope, there’s no reason it would have meant anything to her.”

“Wouldn’t she have at least heard it?”

“We hear sounds constantly, but unless they have some significance to us, our brains discard them. Like a spam filter on email. You probably heard hundreds of sounds earlier today—at home, on your way here, down on Oak Street—but I bet you’d have trouble remembering more than a few of them.”

“That may be true, but—”

He was interrupted by a contralto voice. “Either of you have a little spare time?”

It was Shelby Towns, the female half of the evidence-collection team, speaking as she emerged from the front door of the sniper house, facial studs shining in the afternoon sun, white coveralls concealing her GENDERBENDER tee shirt.

“Garrett figures he’ll be tied up inside for another hour or so,” she continued as she approached them, “and I need to lay out a search grid in back. Two people working together can do that four times faster than one. How about it?”

Checking his watch, Torres explained that he was late for a follow-up with the men he’d assigned to canvass the neighborhood.

Gurney offered to give her a hand, motivated less by a spirit of helpfulness than by the curiosity he always felt at crime scenes.

She pointed to the evidence van. “Suit, gloves, booties—right inside the door. You’ve done this before, right?”

Before Gurney could answer, Torres said, “Jesus, Shel, you’re talking to the man who holds the NYPD record for solved homicides. He’s probably been at more major crime scenes than everyone in our department put together.” He got into the Crown Vic, pulled away from the curb, and was gone.

Shelby Towns gave Gurney a look. “Is that true—the record for solved homicides?”

“They gave me a medal with those words on it. I have no idea whether it’s true.”

Something about her wide-eyed look made him burst out laughing. Before she could ask what he found so funny, he asked how she wanted to set up the grid.

The backyard was only about twice the width of the house, but it was over a hundred feet deep, extending back behind both the house and the detached garage. The downward slope beyond that added about fifty feet of weeds and briars between the overgrown lawn and the street below.

Working together, they’d managed in half an hour to lay out a string grid composed of nearly two hundred six-foot squares covering the lawn and most of the slope. A careful eyes-to-the-ground walk-through took another half hour.

Their discoveries, photographed by Shelby on her tablet, included tire tracks that indicated a motorcycle with knobby motocross tires had been standing on a patch of grassless soil behind the garage and had subsequently crossed the lawn, descended the slope, and turned onto the lower street—confirming Hollis Vitter’s claim. Also behind the garage were boot prints next to the tire marks—and similar prints in the soil at the base of the slope, suggesting that the rider had stopped there, perhaps for passing traffic, before turning onto the street.

At the edge of the lawn by the slope, Gurney spotted a Bic pen. Shelby photographed it in situ before he picked it up, careful not to smudge any prints, and placed it in an evidence bag. As he was filling out the required item-location-date information, his phone was ringing. By the time he got to it, the message was already in voicemail.

On playback it was so broken up it was barely understandable. After listening to it three times, he could be sure only that the caller was Heather Loomis and she wanted him to come to the hospital. The reason was indecipherable, but the urgency was clear.

He called back but just got voicemail. He considered trying to reach her through the hospital number but changed his mind when he recalled the time-consuming runaround involved in his earlier effort. Assuming he’d end up driving there anyway, he decided to just go.

After explaining the situation to Shelby, he jogged the four blocks down the hill to where he’d left his car in front of the Loomis house on Oak Street. The groups of neighbors had dispersed. The yellow police tape and the darkened red stain on the grass were the only signs that something unnatural had occurred.

He got in the Outback and followed the route he’d taken to the hospital with Heather. The traffic was moving more slowly now with people coming home from work. It gave him time to think, a mixed blessing at that time of day, nearing dusk, when his concerns seemed to intensify.

Near the top of his present list was his worrisome position in the investigation of the Loomis shooting. Revealing that Loomis was shot as he set out to discuss his and John Steele’s efforts to probe corruption in the department would likely abort any progress in that direction and perhaps even expose other individuals to retaliation. On the other hand, the phone company would have records of Loomis’s call to Gurney to set up their meeting and his subsequent call to the diner to change the meeting time. If those records were discovered, and if the waitress identified Gurney, he could be charged with withholding evidence in the investigation of a felony—itself a felony.

Complicating his decision was the larger question of whether the attempt on Loomis’s life was a calculated effort to keep that meeting from happening or a mindless shoot-a-cop retaliation for the playground murders. He was pretty sure it was the former.

As Gurney got out of the car at the hospital parking lot he felt, for the first time that day, a chill in the air.

The building’s entrance was sheltered under a broad portico. A RAM van was parked next to it, and a small crowd had gathered. A media crew was adjusting TV lights around two central figures. One, in a short red skirt and white blouse, was the news personality he’d seen on Battleground Tonight. The other, in a crisply tailored blue uniform with gleaming brass buttons, was Dell Beckert.

A crew member by the open rear doors of the van called out, “Light and sound levels good. Recording and transmitting. You’re on!”

The reporter’s expression switched from bitchy boredom to the standard RAM-TV expression of concern with the worrisome state of the world. She was holding a wireless microphone. “I’m Stacey Kilbrick at Mercy Hospital in White River, New York, where Detective Rick Loomis is barely hanging on to life after being shot by a sniper in his own front yard—raising the tension in this upstate city to the breaking point. I’m talking to Chief Dell Beckert, who just emerged from the hospital. What can you tell us, Chief?”

Beckert’s face was a picture of rock-solid determination. “First, let me assure everyone that we have the tense situation in White River under control. Second, we’re making rapid progress toward the identification and apprehension of the coward who tried to kill this fine officer, a servant of our community, a man with a spotless record. Third, you have my personal assurance that law and order will prevail. To the tiny deluded minority who incite violence for their own selfish ends, I say this: you will be brought to justice. Finally, I ask for your prayers for the full recovery of Detective Rick Loomis. Thank you.”

Kilbrick stepped forward to ask a question, but Beckert was already striding away toward a dark-blue Ford Explorer idling in the circular drive just beyond the portico. She turned to the camera. “I’m Stacey Kilbrick at Mercy Hospital. I’ll be keeping you up to date with developments as they occur. Please, folks, remember to say those prayers.”

The video lights went out and the bitch face returned.

Gurney headed into the hospital lobby.

Although the exterior of the building came from the same 1960s manual of bleak design as the police headquarters, the interior had been renovated in accordance with more recent ideas about reducing stress in medical settings through the use of soft lighting, colors, and textures. A gently curved cherrywood welcome desk was staffed by three smiling senior citizens.

Gurney’s welcomer was an elegantly dressed woman with a snow-white permanent and light-blue eyes. He told her he’d come to see a patient in the ICU. She regarded him with interest and spoke in a lowered voice. “Are you a police officer?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. They’re restricting access, but you probably know that. The media people are just so . . .” Her voice trailed off in disgust, as though media people were sewage that might seep into the building. She told him that the ICU was on the second floor and gave him directions to the elevator bank, adding with a frown, “Such an awful thing.”

Stepping out of the elevator on the second floor, he found himself in front of a waist-high partition enclosing an administrative island. On the partition was a sign telling him to turn off his cell phone and other electronic devices before entering the ICU. Behind the island was a nursing station with computer monitors, resuscitation equipment, and rolling IV stands. In a far corner of the station a grinning cop was chatting up an attractive nurse’s aide.

At a desk inside the island, a slim young man with short, gelled hair looked up at Gurney. His teal name tag said he was Bailey Laker. “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Rick Loomis. Or Mrs. Loomis.”

“And you are . . .”

“Dave Gurney. Mrs. Loomis asked me to come.”

The cop left the nurse’s aide, his grin fading, and came around to Gurney’s side of the island. His shiny brass name tag said he was C. J. Mazurk. “Hello, sir,” he said with that assessing look common to cops everywhere. “Who did you say you were?”

Gurney presented his ID.

He took it, studied it for a long moment, and handed it back. “DA’s office?”

“Right. Mrs. Loomis is expecting me.”

“She’s down that hall. Visitors area. Turn off your phone.”

Gurney complied. Halfway along the corridor there was a room with couches, chairs, and a wall-mounted TV tuned to a weather channel. When he stepped inside he saw at the far end of the room a sideboard with a coffee machine and next to it three women sitting at a small table. Heather Loomis, Kim Steele, and Madeleine.

His surprise at seeing Kim and his wife faded as he recognized a phenomenon he’d witnessed many times—the instinctive support police wives give each other in difficult circumstances. Heather and Kim were already well acquainted, of course, through their husbands. And it had been Madeleine’s sense of identification with Kim that had solidified his own involvement in the case.

He greeted them, then sat in the fourth chair at the table.

“There’s coffee,” said Heather, pointing to the sideboard.

“Maybe later. Is there any news about Rick?”

“They say he’s in stable condition.”

“Barbiturate-induced coma,” said Madeleine evenly. “To relieve the pressure on his brain. So it can heal. Like after my friend Elaine’s car accident. She was put in a therapeutic coma for a couple of weeks. And she’s perfectly fine today.”

Heather blinked and managed a small smile. Kim took her hand and held it.

A cleaning woman with striking almond-shaped eyes, a dust-mask over her mouth and nose, and a name tag identifying her as Chalise Creel came into the room pushing a janitorial cart. She steered it through the obstacle course of couches and chairs to the sideboard, emptied its waste container into one in the base of the cart, and steered her cart back out into the corridor.

Heather turned to Gurney. “You got my message?”

“It was patchy, but I got enough of it to know you wanted to see me.”

She reached into her sweatshirt pocket, pulled out an index card, and handed it to him.

Scribbled across the middle of the card were some unevenly spaced letters and numbers:

He examined it for a moment. “What is this?”

“It’s a message from Rick. When they brought him in from the ambulance and were attaching the monitor things to him, he was trying to speak. They wanted me to see if I could understand what he was saying, but he couldn’t get it out. I asked the nurse to get something for him to write on, and she came back with a pen and that index card. I put the pen in his hand and the card under it on the stretcher. It took him a long time to print those letters, lying on his back, barely conscious. But that’s what he wrote.”

After studying the sequence of characters, Gurney tried one way of grouping them, reading aloud, “‘To LDC thirteen thousand one hundred eleven.’” He looked at Heather. “Do the initials ‘LDC’ mean anything to you? Or that number? Possibly as an amount of money?”

She shook her head.

“Suppose we grouped the opening letters differently: ‘Told C thirteen thousand one hundred eleven.’”

She shook her head again.

“Maybe we should read the number as individual digits, like a zip code.”

“It still doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“It has to mean something,” said Kim. “Something he wanted you to know.”

It occurred to Gurney that the “message” might be nothing more than the product of a delirious brain; but it was clear that Heather and Kim wanted it to be important, and he wasn’t going to deflate that hope.

“May I take this with me?” he asked Heather.

She nodded. “I think Rick may have intended it for you.”

“I pray to God you get the bastard who shot him,” said Kim. Her eyes were welling with angry tears.

Her emotion led to a silence.

Finally Heather spoke up in a controlled voice. “Dell Beckert was here.”

“What did he want?” asked Gurney.

“At first? To pretend that he cared about Rick.”

“And then?”

“He wanted to know how many phones Rick had.”

Gurney had a sinking feeling. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him Rick had a department-issued BlackBerry, an iPhone, and our house phone.”

“Did he want to know anything else?”

“He asked if Rick had any contact with individuals from the Black Defense Alliance or from that other one, whatever it’s called. White Men for Black Justice? Their spokesman keeps popping up on those programs where everybody yells at each other. Cory Payne? I think that’s his name. He hates the police.”

“And you said?”

“I said Rick kept his police work to himself. Then Beckert told me the . . . the other shot . . .” She hesitated, glancing at Kim.

“It’s all right. Go ahead.”

“He told me the shot that hit John Steele came from an apartment linked to a BDA member. And the one that hit Rick may also have come from a house with a BDA link.”

Gurney paused, taking this in, before returning to an earlier point. “Those phones you told Beckert about—do you know which of them Rick used for the calls he made to me, or to the diner, or to the person who wanted to come to the meeting we were supposed to have?”

“None of them. Rick has a fourth phone I didn’t mention, an anonymous prepaid one he used for calls about the project he and John were working on.”

“Where’s that fourth phone now?”

“Rick keeps it hidden. All I know is that it never leaves our house. And that he’d never want Beckert to get hold of it.”

Gurney felt a sense of selfish relief. That hidden phone was the only hard evidence of his conversation with Loomis. As long as it remained hidden there was little chance of his being charged with failing to report that conversation. As he was wondering how well hidden it was, a short brown-skinned man in green hospital scrubs entered the room. A white plastic name tag identified him as P. W. Patel, MD.

“Mrs. Loomis?”

She turned toward him, her eyes full of fear.

“I don’t bring you any bad news,” he said in a softly accented voice. “I came only to tell you that in a few minutes we will take your husband to radiology for another brain-imaging procedure. The neurosurgeon has requested this. It is a normal request, not a cause for worry. If you and your companions wish to see the patient before he is taken to radiology, this must be done now. You understand?”

Heather nodded. “Can you tell if there’s been any change in his condition?”

“No change, but this is not bad. With TBI we must wait and see.”

“TBI?”

“Traumatic brain injury. We wait and monitor intracranial pressure. Because of damage to the temporal bone structure. Perhaps this will not be a problem, since the bullet did not perforate major brain areas. But we wait and watch.”

Heather nodded uncertainly. “Thank you.”

“You are welcome, Mrs. Loomis. Perhaps not too far away there can be good news. But now, if you wish to see your husband for a few minutes . . .”

“Yes, I understand.”

After he left the room, Madeleine asked Heather, “Do you want us to come with you?”

She blinked in confusion. “Yes. I don’t know. Yes, come.” She stood up and headed out of the room, seemingly unaware of banging her shin on the corner of a low coffee table.

They followed her—Kim, Madeleine, and Gurney in that order—into the corridor and past the nursing station, where the cop and the nurse’s aide had resumed their conversation. Behind the nursing station they came to a row of patient enclosures with sliding glass doors. At the center of each enclosure was a high-tech hospital bed surrounded by monitoring equipment.

Only one enclosure was occupied. The four visitors gathered outside it in the single-file order in which they’d come down the hall. From where Gurney stood, all he could see of the patient in the bed was a massive bandage covering his head, an oxygen mask covering most of his face, and a web of wires and tubes connecting him to the bedside machines. He looked vulnerable and anonymous.

A tall nurse approached Heather. “You know the routine here, but I’ll repeat it for your friends. Please do not touch anything beyond those glass doors. Especially do not touch the patient or the devices connected to him. The sensors are sensitive. The alarms go off easily. Are we all okay with this?”

Heather answered for everyone. “Of course. Thank you.”

Leaning toward her, the nurse spoke softly. “I’ve seen folks in worse shape than your husband come through just fine.”

Heather opened the sliding glass door and went to her husband’s side. Kim followed part of the way, stopping inside the doorway. Madeleine remained outside. Gurney stood behind her.

The intensity of Heather’s focus on Rick began to make Gurney feel out of place. It soon appeared to have the same effect on Kim, who backed out of the enclosure. She whispered to Madeleine, “Maybe we should let her be alone with him?”

Madeleine nodded her agreement. Just then they saw Heather bending over the bed, the tip of her forefinger touching the back of Rick’s hand.

“I’m here with you,” she said gently. “I’m right here beside you.”

As Gurney was leaving the ICU, he noted that the cop and the nurse’s aide were still very much involved with each other. He stopped by the corner of the nursing station.

“Excuse me, Officer? Over here, please.”

The cop stared at him.

“Now. Please.”

The nurse’s aide raised an eyebrow and stepped away, saying something about making her rounds.

The cop’s stare got chillier as he approached Gurney. “What’s up?”

“I assume you’re here to protect Rick Loomis. Do you have any idea what you’re protecting him from?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You think you’re here to prevent unauthorized media intrusions, make sure no reporters get in, or try to take pictures, or try to talk to Loomis. That about right?”

His eyes narrowed. “What’s your point?”

“My point is that the media idiots are the least of your problems. There’s something about the shooting you need to know. The public version is that Loomis was shot by black radicals because he’s a cop. But the fact is he may have been shot for another reason. By someone who wanted him dead—not just any cop, but him in particular. If that’s true, there may be another attempt on his life. It could happen soon, and it could happen here.”

“Where the hell are you getting this from?”

“That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you understand what’s at stake here.”

The cop pursed his lips and nodded with obvious skepticism. “What was your name again?”

Gurney repeated his name. “Pass along what I told you to whomever relieves you. They need to understand what they’re here for.”

The expression on the cop’s face gave Gurney the feeling that his comments might or might not get passed along to the next shift, but they’d surely get to Judd Turlock.

Gurney left the ICU and headed for the visitors’ lounge. When he got there he found Madeleine waiting for him in the corridor. Kim was inside sitting on one of the couches. Madeleine led him away from the open doorway and spoke in a low voice.

“Is there anything else you need to do here?”

He shrugged. “I’ve done all I can for the moment. Which isn’t much. How about you?”

“Heather wants to stay here overnight. Kim wants to stay with her. I think that’s what I should do too.”

“Stay here in the ICU?”

“There’s a facility here on the grounds. The Mercy Visitors Inn, for family and friends of patients. It just feels right to be with them.”

“Do you want me to stay?”

“I’d like that. But I think Heather and Kim would rather you were off somewhere investigating—discovering the meaning of Rick’s note.”

“Isn’t tomorrow one of your days at the clinic?”

“I’ll call Gerry tonight. If she can’t cover for me herself, she’ll get someone.” She touched his cheek. “Drive safely. I’ll call you if anything changes.”

He made no move to leave.

She cocked her head and gave him a long sideways look. “There’s something you’re not saying. What is it?”

“I’d rather you weren’t staying here.”

“Why?”

“I think there’s a possibility of a second attempt on Loomis’s life.”

“Here?”

“It’s possible.”

“Is it likely?”

“I don’t know. The possibility scares me. It’s not a situation I want you to be in.”

She uttered a little one-syllable laugh and shook her head. “God knows I’ve been in worse situations. More than a few times. When we were running the abused women’s shelter at the clinic, we were getting horrendous threats all the time. And then there was that other little matter of the firebombing, when someone thought we were resettling refugees. Remember that?”

“Still . . .”

“The possibility you’re talking about isn’t going to convince Heather or Kim to leave. I feel strongly that staying with them is the right thing for me to do.”

“Then I really should—”

She cut him off. “Don’t even think about staying here for something that iffy. You’ve committed yourself to the investigation. Go do your job, and I’ll do mine. I’m serious. People are relying on you. We’ll be fine here. I’ll make sure that Romeo out there keeps his eyes open for strangers and off the nurses.”

He reluctantly agreed, wishing he felt better about it.

She kissed him on the cheek.

25

A nearly invisible drizzle began shortly after he pulled out of the hospital parking lot, requiring only a single swipe of the wiper blades every minute or two. The blades needed replacing, having developed a stuttering squeak that kept intruding into his thoughts. On the section of the interstate between White River and Gurney’s exit, there was virtually no traffic. On the winding road from there to Walnut Crossing, there was none.

For most of the drive he’d been turning Rick’s message over in his mind, with the assumption that it meant something and wasn’t just the equivalent of someone talking in his sleep. But whatever that sequence—T O L D C 1 3 1 1 1—might signify, it continued to elude him. It had the appearance of a coded communication, but it seemed a far reach to imagine that a barely conscious man who’d just taken a bullet in the head would have the presence of mind required to encode something. And even if he did, for whom would it be intended? John Steele was dead; and the code meant nothing to Heather.

But if it wasn’t a code, what was it? An abbreviation would be one possibility. If he were having a hard time writing, shortening the message as much as he could would make sense. But an abbreviation of what? And which letters were attached to which? Did the message begin, “To LDC”? Or was it “Told C”? Did the following number represent a dollar amount? An address? A quantity of something?

Gurney was getting nowhere as he turned onto the road that led to his property, so he decided to put the issue aside. Perhaps later he’d be able to see whatever he was missing now.

He parked next to the old farmhouse. He went inside, got some carrot soup and salmon out of the refrigerator, and put the soup in a pot to warm it. He went into the bedroom to exchange his sport jacket, button-down shirt, and slacks for a well-worn flannel shirt and faded jeans. Then he donned his old rain slicker and headed out to the chicken coop.

The hens were already up on their perch. He checked the nesting boxes for eggs, checked the levels of chicken feed and water, and redistributed some straw that had gotten pushed into a corner. On his return to the house he stopped at the asparagus patch. Using the miniature jackknife attached to his key ring, he harvested a handful of spears, brought them in, and stood them in a mug with some water in the bottom to keep them fresh. After hanging his slicker to dry, he put his soup in a bowl and his salmon on a plate and brought them both to the table.

As he was eating, his mind returned to the cryptic jottings on the index card. This time, instead of asking which letters and numbers might belong together, he asked himself what sort of information the man might have been trying to convey.

If Loomis believed he was dying, he might have wanted to leave a love note for Heather. Gurney imagined that if he himself were dying, letting Madeleine know he loved her would be the only thing that mattered. But if Loomis’s sense of his condition was less than fatal, what might he want the people close to him to know?

Perhaps the identity of the individual who shot him.

Perhaps the identity of the person he was going to bring to his meeting with Gurney.

Perhaps both of the above—especially if they were one and the same.

In that context, “Told C13111” might be a shortened version of “I told C13111 about my planned meeting with Dave Gurney.”

But how could those characters be read as someone’s name?

The thought occurred to him that they might be an ID number, perhaps belonging to a White River police officer. But then he recalled that Mark Torres’s badge number had three digits followed by three letters. So, if it was an ID number, what organization did it belong to? Gurney had no answer. In fact, he had the feeling it was the wrong question.

As for the possibility that the initial C might refer to the individual and 13111 be his zip code . . . that seemed such an unlikely way to describe a person he would have dismissed it without another thought, except that the number did fall within the range of zips for upstate New York. He recalled that he was about to check its location when he was at the ICU but couldn’t because of the cell phone prohibition. He realized his phone had been turned off ever since. He picked it up and turned it on.

It told him he’d received three voice messages in the past twenty-eight minutes. The first was from Sheridan Kline, the second from Madeleine, and the third from Dr. Walter Thrasher. He decided to listen to Madeleine’s first.

“Hi, hon. Kim and I just checked in to the Visitors Inn. Heather is still over at the ICU waiting for them to bring Rick back from radiology. We’re going to pick her up in a little while and get something to eat. There’s not much to report. A new cop replaced the other one. This one is a bit more alert than Romeo. I guess that’s it for now. Get some sleep. You were looking exhausted. Talk to you in the morning. Love you.”

He listened to Kline’s message next.

“Where are you? I expected to hear from you by now. When I finally got in touch with someone at the crime scene, I was told you left before the evidence search was completed. Because you got a call from Heather Loomis? Is that right? Christ, David, you’re working for me, not Heather Loomis. The point of your involvement was to give me your real-time perspective. Things are moving fast. We have data from the scene, from Beckert’s informants, from the traffic and security cameras, from the computer lab in Albany. It’s pouring in. And you decide to run off to the hospital and not answer your phone? Jesus!”

He paused and let out an audible sigh before going on in a less agitated tone. “There’s a team meeting tomorrow morning at nine sharp to review everything we’ve got—which may include a clear photo of the Corolla driver. And there’s new evidence implicating the Gort brothers in the Willard Park homicides. Please be at the meeting.” His tone became more confidential. “The elements of both cases are coming together beautifully. I’d like your concurrence that it all makes sense. I want our ducks lined up. Get back to me as soon as you can.”

People who talked about wanting their ducks lined up made Gurney uneasy. The phrase suggested a greater desire for order than for truth.

He postponed listening to the message from Thrasher. He assumed it would be related to the artifacts the man had borrowed for closer examination, and he had no appetite at that moment for discussing the archaeology of Colonial America.

He brought his empty bowl and plate to the sink, washed them, and put them in the dish drainer. By the time he was finished, the pasture, the coop, the barn, and the pond were disappearing into darkness.

He didn’t know if it was the suggestive power of Madeleine’s commenting on how tired he looked, but he did feel like closing his eyes for a while. He went into the den first to see if there were any messages on the landline answering machine.

There were three. The first was from a strident female voice offering big savings on his electric bill. The second was from a folksy male voice offering a preapproved loan for his nonexistent poultry company. The third was from the Walnut Crossing library informing Madeleine that a book she’d reserved was now available: Beetles of North America.

He went from the den to their downstairs bedroom, thinking a quick nap might take the edge off his drowsiness. He removed his shoes and lay down on the soft quilt they used as a bedspread. He could hear the faint yipping of coyotes above the high pasture. Then he fell into a deep dreamless sleep.

He was awakened at 6:40 the next morning by the ringing of the den phone.

He got to it just as Madeleine was starting to leave a message.

“I’m here,” he said, picking up the receiver.

“Oh, good! I’m glad I got you.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Rick has apparently suffered some kind of respiratory failure. He’s on full life support. Heather is falling apart.”

“Oh, Christ. Did anything specific happen?”

“I don’t really know anything. Just what the doctor told Heather. They’re doing some tests. They’re trying to figure it out. Maybe there was more brain damage than they realized at first? I don’t know.”

“I’m just trying get a sense of whether there was any outside interference.”

“David, nobody knows anything more than what I’ve just told you.”

“Okay. All right. Are you staying there with Heather?”

“With Heather and Kim, yes.”

“Okay. I have a meeting at police headquarters at nine o’clock. I’ll stop by the hospital on my way.”

After a shower and a change of clothes, he set out for White River. It was a heavily overcast morning, with patches of thick fog adding twenty minutes to his normal driving time. He pulled into the Mercy Hospital parking lot at 8:30 AM.

On his way into the building he noted a pair of WRPD patrol cars by the portico.

Madeleine was waiting for him just inside the main door. They hugged, holding each other longer and more tightly than usual. When they let go and stepped back she smiled, which somehow underscored the sadness in her eyes.

“Any news?” he asked.

“Nothing substantial. More tests, more scans. Another specialist on his way from somewhere. They’ve temporarily closed the ICU to visitors.”

“How’s Heather?”

“A complete wreck. Understandably.”

“Did they let her stay upstairs?”

“No. She’s down in the cafeteria with Kim. She won’t eat, but . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Oh God, this is so awful.”

A huge man with a neck brace and a bulging bandage covering one eye was making his way past them on a walker. Madeleine watched as he lumbered on, limping and grunting. Then she turned to Gurney. “You better get to your meeting. There’s nothing you can do here. If anything changes, I’m sure word will get to Beckert as soon as it gets to us.”

Maybe sooner, he thought.

Sheridan Kline, Mark Torres, Dwayne Shucker, and Goodson Cloutz were in their seats at the conference table when Gurney arrived. He sat, as usual, next to Kline, who gave him an icy nod—which reminded him that he hadn’t returned the man’s phone call.

With the back of his hand Shucker was wiping what appeared to be powdered sugar from the corners of his mouth. There was a container of coffee and an open paper bag in front of him. The printing on the bag said DELILAH’S DONUTS.

Cloutz, in his blind man’s glasses, was running the tips of his fingers slowly along the length of his white cane, which was lying crosswise on the table, as though he were stroking a pet snake. His well-tended nails had a higher-than-usual gloss.

Torres was absorbed in some work on his laptop.

At precisely nine o’clock Beckert entered the room and took his central seat opposite Kline, his back to the broad window. The jail was a dim presence in the fog. He laid a file folder down, casually aligning its edge to the edge of the table.

He cleared his throat. “Good morning, gentlemen.”

There was a general murmuring of similar greetings around the table.

“I’m pleased to report,” Beckert began in an emotionless tone, “that our investigations into the shootings of our officers and the murder of the BDA members are on the verge of completion. Detective Torres will review where we stand on the Steele and Loomis cases, but first I want to pass along some good news from Deputy Chief Turlock. Lab analysis has confirmed an exact match between the rope we recovered from the Gort twins’ compound and the ropes used to tie up Jordan and Tooker. A warrant has been issued for their arrest. We have reason to believe they may be hiding up in one of the old quarries above the reservoir. A K9 tracking dog and handler, plus an assault team, have been dispatched to that area.”

“The reason being what?” said Gurney.

“Excuse me?”

“The reason you think they’re hiding in the quarries—what is it?”

Beckert’s expression showed nothing. “Reliable informants.”

“Whose identities you can’t share with us?”

“Correct.” He held Gurney’s gaze for a moment before continuing. “The K9 team has an impressive record of success. We hope to bring the Gorts in quickly and have Sheridan launch an aggressive prosecution—to minimize the racial leverage available to the riot inciters.”

Shucker pointed an enthusiastic forefinger at Beckert. “To what you just said about bringing them lunatics in, I would personally add dead or alive. In fact, dead, in my humble opinion, would be a damn sight preferable.”

Again Beckert showed no reaction. He simply moved on to the Steele-Loomis shootings. “Mark, your turn now. My impression is that the evidence you’ve amassed against the BDA ‘third man’ is pretty conclusive. Take us through it.”

Torres reopened his computer.

Gurney cast a glance at Kline, whose anxious frown might reflect some concern with the political impact on himself of an ‘aggressive’ prosecution of the popular Gorts.

Torres began in his typically earnest manner. “These are the key discoveries we’ve made since our last meeting. First of all, the rush ballistics report on the bullet used in the Loomis shooting indicates that it was fired from the same rifle used in the Steele shooting. In addition, prints on the cartridge casing recovered at the site used for the Loomis shooting match prints on the one recovered at the Steele site. And the extractor marks indicate both cartridges came from the same rifle.”

“Were there any other fingerprints at the Poulter Street house matching the ones on the casing?” asked Gurney.

“There was a matching print on the knob of the side door.”

“Not on the back door? The door to the room? The window sash?”

“No, sir. Just on the cartridge casing and the side door.”

“Were there any other fresh fingerprints anywhere in the house?”

“None that Garrett found. There was a partial print on a pen, which I believe you discovered in the backyard. And there were footprints. Boot prints, actually. Several in the backyard, some by the side door of the house, partials on the stairs, and a couple in the room where the shot was fired.”

Torres then summarized the accounts given by Gloria Fenwick and Hollis Vitter, the neighbors on opposite sides of the Poulter Street house.

“This would be a good time to show the mapping graphic you described to me earlier,” said Beckert.

“Yes, sir.” A few mouse clicks later the monitor over the sheriff’s head came to life, displaying a street map of White River and the adjacent section of Willard Park. Two colored lines, a blue one and a red one, beginning at the same point on Poulter Street, diverged into separate routes through the city streets. Torres explained that the blue line represented the route taken by the Corolla from the sniper house after the shooting and the red line the route taken by the motorcycle.

The blue line proceeded directly along one of White River’s main avenues to a point where the city’s business section abutted the fire-damaged Grinton neighborhood. The red line, however, zigzagged here and there through the side streets of Bluestone and Grinton to the edge of Willard Park, where it ended.

Shucker removed a powdery doughnut from the bag in front of him and took a thoughtful bite, which turned his lips white. “Looks to me like the Corolla driver knew where he was going, and the motorcycle rider didn’t have a clue.”

“There’s a termination point shown for each route,” said Kline. “Were the vehicles found at those locations?”

“Correct, sir, in the case of the Corolla. It was discovered at the corner of Sliwak Avenue and North Street by WRPD patrol officers at approximately six ten this morning. Garrett Felder and Shelby Towns are going over it now for latents and trace evidence.”

“You said ‘in the case of the Corolla’—meaning the motorcycle wasn’t found?”

“Correct, sir. I should explain that the two lines we’re showing on the map were constructed differently. Once it left Poulter Street, the Corolla followed a thoroughfare that’s covered by traffic department cameras—which gave us a video record of the car’s route. But the motorcycle’s route had to be reconstructed with the help of witnesses along the way. Starting with Hollis Vitter, we found a sequence of individuals who heard or saw a motocross bike at the time in question. Lucky for us, it was a nice afternoon and a lot of people were outside.”

“You got a description of the bike?”

“Red motocross with a loud engine.”

“Plate number?”

“Nobody noticed.”

“Any description of the rider?”

“Full leather riding suit, full-coverage helmet and visor, no identifying elements.”

“And you say the bike wasn’t found at the end of the route?”

“The end point shown on the map is just the last place where we have witness observation. It may have cut into the park at that point and taken one of the wilderness trails to just about anywhere.”

“Okay,” said Kline, with prosecutor-like intensity. “If I’ve got this right, we have a load of video on the Corolla and no video at all on the motorcycle, even though its roundabout route covered a lot more ground?”

“That’s correct, sir.”

Shucker took another huge bite out of his doughnut. As he spoke, specks of sugar flew onto the table. “Any of them Corolla videos give us a picture of the driver?”

“I was coming to that, sir. We have partials that were captured under different angle, shadow, and glare conditions. No single video frame provides a usable likeness, but the Albany lab has a composite process that may give us what we need. They can combine the best parts of multiple shots and resolve them into one high-definition image. At least that’s the theory.”

“When?” asked Kline.

“We emailed them the digital files last night, and I spoke to them this morning. If we’re lucky, we may get something back by the end of this meeting.”

Kline looked skeptical. “That’s amazingly fast for Albany.”

The sheriff uttered an unpleasant little laugh. “Upside of an impending race war is we get attention.”

Beckert glanced at his watch. “Let’s keep this moving along, Mark. Where do we stand on tracking down the rental information?”

“Interesting news there, sir. This morning we finally got hold of the records for the locations used as the sniper sites. Both leases are in the name of Marcel Jordan.”

Beckert exhibited a rare fleeting smile. “That eliminates all doubt about BDA involvement.”

Something in Gurney’s expression caught his eye. “You don’t agree?”

“I agree that it provides support for a certain view of the case. As for eliminating all doubt, that’s a leap I wouldn’t make.”

Beckert held his gaze for a moment, then turned mildly to Torres. “Do you have anything else for us?”

“That’s it for now, sir, until we get the enhanced photo from Albany and the report on the Corolla from Garrett.”

“Speaking of Albany,” said Beckert, looking at Kline, “have the computer people gotten back to you regarding Steele’s phone?”

“Not with a full report, which is why I haven’t mentioned it. But I spoke to a tech yesterday, and he told me their initial analysis uncovered nothing of immediate interest. He emailed me a printout of numbers called and received during the past three months. Steele used that phone to call his wife, his sister in Hawaii, local movie theaters, his dentist, an electrician, restaurants around the area, a takeout pizza joint in Angina, a gym in Larvaton, Home Depot, a few other places like that. Apart from his sister, nothing really personal. And apart from that one strange text the night he was killed, no calls or texts from anonymous prepaids or even from blocked numbers. Really not much to follow up on. They’ll be sending us their final report in a day or two.”

Beckert’s fleeting smile made a second appearance. “So. Much ado about nothing.”

“Strange,” said Gurney.

Kline gave him a sharply inquisitive look.

“What’s strange about it?” asked Beckert.

“No mention of calls to or from Rick Loomis.”

“Why is that strange?”

“I got the impression they were in frequent contact.”

“Maybe they preferred email.”

“That must be the answer,” said Gurney, sure that it wasn’t the answer at all.

“Right,” said Beckert with the finality of a slammed door. “If no one else has anything to contribute at this time—”

“I do,” said the sheriff. “Having let certain guests at my facility know I was curious what arrangements Devalon Jones had made for his Corolla during his rehabilitation in Dannemora, I was told he had entrusted said vehicle to Blaze Lovely Jackson. Which makes her the keeper of the shooter’s car, which is a hell of a thing to consider.”

Kline cast an amazed look down the table. “Christ, Goodson, in our last meeting you suggested she might be responsible for the murders of Jordan and Tooker. Now you’re adding Steele and Loomis?”

“Ain’t addin’ nobody on my own wisdom, counselor. Just sayin’ what was said to me by a man with some knowledge of the street.”

Cloutz had gone back to lightly stroking his white cane, a gesture Gurney was finding increasingly repellent. He tried to keep his reaction out of his voice.

“What did he get in return for telling you this?”

“Not a damn thing. I told him we’d assess the value of his information to the investigation, and his reward would be contingent. I always say that with a smile—contingent—like it is a particularly good kind of reward. Works like a charm with the less educated. Worked so good this time, the man wanted to keep tellin’ me things. For instance, he volunteered that Ms. Jackson was fuckin’ someone in secret—which I thought was of considerable interest.”

Kline looked puzzled. “The relevance of her sexual activity is . . .”

“The relevance of her fuckin’ has got no relevance at all. What’s of interest is that she’s tryin’ to keep it a secret. Makes you wonder why.”

Beckert pondered this for a few seconds, then shook his head. “The point that matters here is the expanding evidence of BDA involvement. Making threatening antipolice speeches. Renting the sites from which the shots were fired. Providing the vehicle used by the shooter. Beyond that let’s not complicate things with extraneous details. Complication makes the public dizzy. Are we clear on this?”

“Simpler the better,” said Shucker.

“I prefer my simplicity with a twist,” said Cloutz, making his preference sound lascivious. “But I get your point,” he added. “A simple tale of the law versus the lawless.”

Beckert’s gaze moved on to Gurney.

Gurney said nothing.

In the silence there was a sense of imminent confrontation.

Whatever might have occurred was aborted by the surprisingly loud bing of an email arriving on Torres’s computer.

His eyes widened with excitement. “It’s from the Albany computer lab. There’s an attachment. I think it’s the enhanced Corolla shot we’ve been waiting for.” Two clicks later the screen of the wall monitor was filled by a medium close-up of a young man in the driver’s seat. The photo had been taken through the windshield, but whatever glare may have compromised the raw footage had been removed. The sharpness of the image was impressive. The facial details were clear.

The young man’s reddish-blond hair was pulled back from his forehead into a loose ponytail, emphasizing his deep-set eyes and angular features.

Shucker’s hand stopped halfway to his mouth with the last bit of his doughnut. “That boy looks mighty familiar.”

Kline nodded. “Yes. I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere before.”

Gurney had also seen the face before—on the giant screen at Marv and Trish Gelter’s house—but the name was eluding him. He remembered it just as Beckert announced it—in a voice as icy as the look in his eyes. “Cory Payne.”

“Cory Payne.” The sheriff articulated the name as though it had a foul taste. “Ain’t he the one behind White Morons Spoutin’ Black Bullshit?”

“White Men for Black Justice,” offered Torres mildly.

The sheriff let out a harsh one-syllable laugh.

“Cory Payne,” repeated Kline slowly. “I’ve seen him on those RAM debate shows.”

“Nazi storm troopers,” said Shucker.

Kline blinked. “How’s that, Dwayne?”

“That’s what he calls the police,” said Shucker. “Boy’s got a hair up his ass about law enforcement.”

“That strident tone of his always sounded to me like grandstanding,” said Kline. “Adolescent nonsense. That’s all I thought it was. Talk.”

“Have to admit I thought that myself,” said the sheriff. “That boy’s voice on the TV sounded like a little dog barkin’ at big dogs. I never would’ve thought he had the balls to be a shooter.”

“Goes to show you never know before you know,” said Shucker, eyeing the piece of doughnut in his hand. “Sometimes the evilest ones are the last ones you’d ever think to look at. Like that sweet little Doris at the Zippy-Mart that chopped up her husband and kept him in the freezer for ten years.”

“Twelve,” said the sheriff. “Goin’ by the dates of the newspapers the pieces was wrapped in.”

Beckert stood up abruptly, his voice like a tight fist. “Enough, gentlemen. The fact is we were all deceived by Payne’s sophomoric gibberish. The situation is critical and the time element is crucial. Detective Torres, put out an immediate APB on Cory Payne.”

“Suspicion of murder?”

“Yes, in the case of John Steele. Attempted murder in the Loomis case. I’ll have Baylor Puckett issue the warrant. Judd Turlock maintains a file of local agitators. He can give you Payne’s address. Get there ASAP, backed up by an assault team in the event that Payne resists. Seal off the apartment. Seize everything. Get Payne’s prints from his personal items and match them to whatever Garrett and Shelby were able to get from the car and the sniper sites. Any questions from the media, refer them to my office. Keep me informed on an hourly basis. Or immediately with any significant development. Questions?”

“No, sir. “

“Then go!” Beckert had the look of a man whose mind was racing to assess an array of unpleasant possibilities.

Torres picked up his laptop and hurried out of the conference room.

“There some reason you don’t want to arrest the bitch that gave him the car?” asked the sheriff. There was something vaguely insinuating in his tone.

“I’d rather have her watched. We’ll learn more from her movements than from anything she’d be willing to tell us.”

Kline’s eyes lit up. “You don’t suppose that Cory Payne—”

Beckert cut him off. “That Payne might be her secret lover? The rumor that Goodson’s snitch told him about? I think it’s one of the possibilities we need to look into.”

“If it were true, it would give us a damn good motive.”

“We already have a damn good motive,” interjected the sheriff. “Boy hates cops. Boy shoots cops. Simple.”

“This one’s better,” said Kline. “Love-sick white boy shoots cops to impress black-activist girlfriend. Juries love romantic motives. The more depraved the better.”

Beckert was radiating tension. “Gentlemen, we need to get a grip on where we are. I don’t want people whose support could be helpful blindsided by sensational news reports.” He looked at his watch. “Let’s get back together at two o’clock to discuss next steps. I’m sorry if the four-hour gap is inconvenient, but this situation takes priority. Sheridan, you’re the farthest from your regular office. If you wish, you can use the one at the end of the hall.”

Kline thanked him, and, without another word, Beckert left the room.

26

Gurney was eager to get out of the building, which he was finding increasingly oppressive. He walked out into the parking lot. The sky was still overcast. The air’s acrid, smoky edge was as noticeable as ever, but he found it preferable to the atmosphere in the conference room. He couldn’t quite sort out the primary source of his discomfort—the repugnant people, the bleak fluorescent-lit room, the surreal view from the window, or his persistent feeling that the official approach to the intertwined attacks on the police and the BDA leaders was profoundly wrong.

As Gurney was thinking about how to utilize the long meeting break, Kline came out into the parking lot after him, looking more anxious than usual.

“Come,” he said, gesturing peremptorily toward his SUV.

They got into the front seats. The man seemed to be looking for a place to put his hands, beginning with his lap and ending finally on the steering wheel.

“So,” he said after a fraught silence. “What’s your problem?”

Gurney found the aggressive tone oddly relaxing. “Be more specific.”

Kline’s hands opened and closed on the wheel. He was staring straight ahead. “I listen to what you say in these meetings. The kind of questions you ask. How you ask them. The disbelief, the disrespect. If I’m wrong, tell me.” There was a tic at the corner of his mouth.

“I’m trying to recall a disrespectful question. Give me an example.”

“It’s not any one thing. It’s the pattern of nitpicking negativity. How come the red laser dot followed Steele as long as it did? How come he was shot moving instead of standing still? When we find fingerprints, you want to know why we didn’t find more fingerprints. You make a big deal out of there being an odd message on Steele’s phone, then you make a big deal out of there not being more odd messages. You focus on every minuscule detail that isn’t instantly explainable. You totally ignore the big picture.”

“The big picture?”

“Perfectly credible narratives for the Steele-Loomis shootings and the Jordan-Tooker beating and strangling deaths. Overwhelming evidence against Cory Payne for the first. Overwhelming evidence against the Gort twins for the second. Slam-dunk cases. But for some reason you can’t accept that we’ve won. I don’t get it.”

“You’re overestimating the slam-dunk potential. I’ve been pointing out some troubling facts that could undermine—”

Kline interrupted. “The flyspecks you’re pointing out won’t undermine anything, except your own credibility. I mean it, David. The big picture is what matters, and you’re refusing to accept it.”

“I’m sorry you see it that way.”

Kline finally turned to face him. “This is all about Beckert, isn’t it?”

“Beckert?”

“I’ve seen the expression on your face whenever he has anything to say. Is that what this is all about? A personality conflict? You just want him to be wrong? It’s the only explanation.”

Gurney quietly considered what he was about to say.

“If that’s what you think, Sheridan, there’s no way I can be of any further use to you.”

Kline went back to staring straight ahead, hands on the wheel. “Unfortunately, I have to agree.”

Gurney realized that the sense of relaxation he had felt at Kline’s initial aggressiveness came from his anticipation of this moment. What he felt now was pure, unmistakable relief. Relief from a strange burden, never clearly defined, always more or less disquieting. It wasn’t that he had any intention of abandoning the case or the responsibility he felt toward Kim and Heather or those who were killed. He would simply be abandoning his murky relationship with Kline.

“Would you like me to withdraw now?” he asked. “Or shall I stay on board until after the two o’clock meeting?”

“It might be better for you to come to the meeting. Smoother. And the investigation will be that much closer to being concluded. Just a matter of making the final arrests. That’s the way your exit should be positioned. Not an abrupt decision. A natural event at the end of a process. Better for everyone, don’t you think?”

“Sounds very sensible, Sheridan. I’ll see you at two o’clock.”

Neither offered to shake hands.

Gurney got out of the big black Navigator and headed for his modest Outback.

27

The Willard Park playground was deserted. There was a faint smell of lake water in the still air. The blackbirds in the bulrushes were silent. Under the steel skeleton of the jungle gym the sandy soil was dark and wet from the recent drizzle. Water had beaded on the pipelike crossbars and hung there, ready to drip.

Gurney was using the time available before the afternoon meeting to gain a more visceral sense of the place. He was intrigued by the fact that Willard Park was the location not only where the two BDA victims were found but also where the motorcycle from Poulter Street was last seen. It was the sort of odd little resonance or coincidence that Kline would dismiss as meaningless. But Kline’s opinion had become irrelevant.

Standing with his back to the jungle gym, he looked over toward the field where the demonstration and the Steele shooting had taken place. The intervening space was dominated by Colonel Willard on his martial horse. In Gurney’s mind the statue’s presence—a concrete link to the dark legacy of the Willard slave catchers and the prison itself—cast a pall over the park.

He walked from the playground down to the edge of the lake and gazed out over the glassy gray surface. A trail on his right led into the woods that bordered the lake. He assumed it was the main one shown in the satellite photo Torres had presented—part of a web of trails connecting the park to the wilderness beyond it and to the private preserve of the White River Gun Club, where most of the hunting cabins were owned by White River cops.

It was surely the most tenuous of links . . . but it was possible that the motorcycle fleeing from Poulter Street after the shooting of Rick Loomis may have used the same trails as the UTV that brought Jordan and Tooker to the playground. Gurney wasn’t sure what that might mean, but the possibility that it was more than a coincidence produced a definite frisson.

A moment later the forlorn cry of a bird deep in the woods gave him goose bumps of a different sort. The eerie, keening sound was one he sometimes heard at dusk coming from the pine thicket on the far side of his pond. Although he knew his reaction was irrational, the strangely wavering note never failed to put him in an uneasy frame of mind.

He walked back from the lake to the jungle gym. He pictured Marcel Jordan and Virgil Tooker bound tightly to the tubular bars.

He peered at the bars to which the ropes had been tied. He had no idea what he was looking for, but he looked anyway, examining the structure as best he could.

The only minor peculiarities that caught his eye were two shiny spots, each about a half inch in diameter, about four feet apart on the bottom of a horizontal bar that according to the photos at the CSMT meeting would have been somewhere just above or behind the victims’ heads. He had no idea what those spots might mean, if anything at all; but he remembered that among his saved emails was one Torres had sent with a link to all the photos Paul Aziz had taken. He made a mental note to access and review them as soon as he got home.

He still had some time before the two o’clock meeting at police headquarters, so he decided to take a closer look at the statue.

As he crossed the field, he noticed he wasn’t the only one taking an interest in the statue. An African American woman in camo fatigues was approaching it on the opposite side. She appeared to be photographing it with her phone.

She ignored Gurney until they came within speaking distance of each other, and he asked with a smile if she knew anything about the man on the horse.

She stopped and gave him an assessing look. “They send you out here to make sure we don’t tear that evil thing down?”

Gurney shook his head. “Nobody sent me.”

“Honey, I know a cop when I see one, and the cops I know go where they are sent.”

He suddenly recognized her—the voice first, then the face—from her appearance with the white supremacist on RAM-TV. “You may know Dell Beckert’s cops, Ms. Jackson, but you don’t know me.”

Her dark eyes were fixed on his. There was something formidable in her calmness and in the evenness of her tone. “Why are you talking to me?”

Gurney shrugged. “As I said, I was wondering if you could tell me anything about the man on the horse.”

She looked up at the mounted colonel, as if evaluating his pose for the first time. “He’s the Devil,” she said matter-of-factly.

“The Devil?”

“You want me to say it again?”

“Why do you call him that?”

“Man who does the Devil’s work is the Devil in the flesh.”

“Hmm. What about Dell Beckert? What can you tell me about him?”

There was a sharpness now in the gaze she fixed on Gurney—an almost glittery intelligence. “Isn’t that a fascinating fact of life—how people always know the truth without knowing they know it.”

“Meaning?”

“Think about it. Here we are, talking about the Devil. And look whose name came into your mind.”

Gurney smiled. “Interesting observation.”

She started to leave, then stopped. “You want to live, be careful. However well you think you know that law-and-order man, you don’t know him any more than you know Ezra Willard.”

She turned and walked quickly away toward the park exit.

After Gurney had returned to his car and spent some time contemplating the words of Blaze Lovely Jackson, it occurred to him that he should let Madeleine know his meeting at police headquarters had been extended into the afternoon. He’d be heading home later than expected.

As he was about to place the call, his phone rang.

Seeing Madeleine’s name on the screen, he began to explain his situation, but she cut in immediately.

“They took Rick off life support.”

“Oh, Jesus. Is Heather . . . okay?”

“Not really. They took her down to the emergency room. They’re afraid she may be starting premature contractions.” After a pause during which he could hear his wife breathing shakily, she sniffled and cleared her throat. “The doctor said Rick had lost all brain function. There was no chance . . . no chance of any . . . anything.”

“Yes.” He could think of nothing more to say. Nothing that would be both comforting and honest.

“Rick’s brother is flying in from somewhere. And Heather’s sister, too. I’ll let you know what I’m doing when things are clearer.”

As soon as he ended the call, his phone rang again.

When he saw Kline’s name on the screen, he assumed the man was calling with the same bad news and decided to let the call go to voicemail. He hardly noticed that the temperature was dropping and it had begun again to drizzle.

He sat in the Outback for a while, losing track of time. He took out the index card and studied the cryptic message. Again, he got nowhere. He put it back in his pocket.

Feeling the need to do something—anything—he took out his phone and called Jack Hardwick. He got the man’s terse recording: “Leave a message. Be brief.”

“We need to talk. The White River mess is getting stranger and uglier. The second cop who was shot—a young detective by the name of Loomis—just died. Kline wants me out of it. He insists that everything’s coming together, conclusive evidence, done deal. I don’t agree. If you can, meet me tomorrow morning at eight at Abelard’s. Call me if you can’t. Otherwise, I’ll see you there.”

Before putting his phone away, he checked his list of messages. There were only two he hadn’t listened to—the one from Kline and the older one from Thrasher. He had no interest in listening to either.

The phone was halfway into his pocket when it rang. Kline again. His stubborn streak urged him to ignore it again, but something else—perhaps simple logic—told him to talk to the man and get it over with.

“Gurney here.”

“I just wanted to let you know the two o’clock meeting’s been canceled.”

“Problems?”

“Just the opposite. A major coup. Dell’s been invited to appear tonight on A Matter of Concern with Carlton Flynn.”

“The pompous blowhard on RAM-TV?”

“He happens to be the most widely recognized news personality in the world, with one of the highest rated interview shows in America. He is a very big deal.”

“I’m impressed.”

“You should be. It’s the perfect opportunity for Dell to set things straight—the demonstrations, the riots, the shootings—put it all in the right perspective, emphasizing the restoration of law and order. That’s what people need to hear.”

Gurney said nothing.

“You there?”

“I thought you might have been calling to let me know that Rick Loomis died.”

“I assumed you’d have heard that from someone else.”

Again Gurney said nothing.

“Not unexpected, given his condition. But now we know who did it, and the arrest is just a matter of time. You might be interested to know that the prints inside the Corolla and at the sniper sites match the prints in Cory Payne’s apartment. Torres’s guys even found a box of thirty-aught-six cartridges hidden in the back of one of his closets.”

“I’m impressed.”

“There’s more good news. Our information on the Gort twins was right. The K9 team and an assault team are closing in on them up by the quarry ridge. Backup is on the way, and it should all be over within the hour.”

“Good to know.”

Gurney’s tone seemed to finally get through.

“Look,” said Kline, “I know we’ve had some unfortunate events. No one’s denying that. Those things can’t be undone. But the right steps have been taken. The right results are being achieved. That’s the message. And Dell’s the perfect messenger.”

Gurney paused. “Do you plan to call Rick Loomis’s wife?”

“Of course. At the appropriate time. Oh, one more thing. Housekeeping issue. We need you to turn in your credentials—along with an hourly tally of your time on the case.”

“I’ll do that.”

They ended the call. They had ended their earlier conversation in the parking lot without shaking hands. They ended this one without saying good-bye.

Before putting his phone away, Gurney called Hardwick and left an additional message on his voicemail, suggesting that he watch Carlton Flynn’s show that evening. Then he deleted the earlier message from Kline on his own phone. He had no appetite for listening to the man twice.

His own plan was to drive home, review Paul Aziz’s photos, eat dinner, and then settle down for what promised to be a Dell Beckert master class in message control.

Getting Aziz’s photos from the file-sharing service Torres had used to transmit them was easy enough. Sitting at the desk in his den, he began opening them, one after another, on his laptop.

Once he was past the harrowing views of the bodies, there was little that caught Gurney’s attention until he was surprised to find closeups of the same two shiny spots he’d noted on the jungle gym crossbar.

Even more interesting were the next photos—close-ups of two separate sections of rope, showing a small, round depression in each. The sequence of the photos suggested a connection between the shiny spots and the depressions in the ropes.

He put an immediate call in to Torres and left a message describing the photos and asking for Aziz’s contact information—hoping that word hadn’t already gotten from Kline to Torres that he was off the official roster.

He was surprised to get a response less than ten minutes later—and equally surprised that the call came from Aziz himself.

“Mark gave me your number. He told me you had questions about some of the crime-scene shots.” The voice on the phone was young and earnest, not unlike Torres’s, and with no trace of the Middle East.

“Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I’m curious about the two shiny spots on the jungle gym crossbar and the flat spots on the ropes—obviously photographed after the bodies were taken down. Do you recall how they were originally positioned in relation to each other?”

“The flat spots on the ropes were located where they went over top of the crossbar. The shiny spots were aligned below them, on the bottom of the bar. If Mark just showed you closeup photos of the bodies in situ, you wouldn’t have noticed what I’m talking about, because those ropes were behind the victims’ heads, tying their necks to the structure.”

“Did any scenario occur to you that would explain the apparent connection between the shiny spots and the flat spots?”

“Not at the time. I just automatically photograph anything that seems odd.” He hesitated. “But . . . maybe some kind of clamp?”

Gurney tried to picture it. “You mean . . . as if someone had pulled a rope over the bar to hoist each victim into a standing position . . . then clamped the rope against the bar to hold him in place while they tied ropes around his stomach and legs?”

“I guess it could have been done that way. The way you describe it would be consistent with the markings.”

“Very interesting. Thank you, Paul. Thank you for your time. And thank you for your close observation of details.”

“I hope it helps.”

After ending the call, Gurney sat back in his chair and gazed thoughtfully out the den window, trying to reconstruct the scene in his mind—to imagine circumstances that would necessitate the use of clamps. When he soon found himself thinking in circles, and even beginning to wonder if clamps were really the cause of the marks, he decided to take a shower—in the hope that it might clear his mind and help him relax.

In a way, it ended up doing both—although the “clearing” seemed to bring about more emptying than clarifying. Still, a clean mental slate was not a bad thing. And a reduction in tension was always good.

As he was finishing dressing in clean jeans and a comfortable polo shirt, his sense of peace was interrupted by the sound of a door opening and closing. Curious, he went out to the kitchen and met Madeleine coming in from the mudroom.

She said nothing, just walked to the far end of the long open area that served as their kitchen, dining room, and sitting room. She sat down on the couch by the fireplace. He followed and sat in an armchair facing her.

Not since the death of their four-year-old son more than twenty years ago had he seen her look so drained, so hopeless. She closed her eyes.

“Are you okay?” he asked, the question immediately striking him as absurd.

She opened her eyes. “Remember Carrie Lopez?”

“Of course.”

It was the kind of situation a cop never wants to think about, but can never forget. Carrie was the wife, then widow, of Henry Lopez, an idealistic young narcotics detective who was pushed off the roof of a Harlem crack house one winter night shortly after Gurney had been assigned to the same precinct. The next night three local gang members were killed in a shootout with two members of the narcotics squad and subsequently blamed for the Lopez homicide. But Carrie never believed the story. She was sure her husband’s murder was an inside job, that the guys in narcotics were on the take and Henry’s honesty was becoming a problem for them. But she got nowhere with her requests for an internal affairs investigation. She gradually fell apart. A year to the day after Henry’s death she committed suicide—by jumping from the roof of the same building.

Gurney moved next to Madeleine. “Do you think that’s the state of mind Heather is in?”

“I think it could go that way.”

“What about Kim?”

“Right now her anger is holding her together. But . . . I don’t know.” She shook her head.

28

At eight o’clock that evening, as they both sat in front of his desk in the den, Gurney went to the “Live Stream” section of the RAM-TV website and clicked on the icon for A Matter of Concern with Carlton Flynn.

In a modest departure from the flashing colors and exploding graphics that introduced most RAM-TV programs, the Carlton Flynn show began with a staccato drumbeat under a barrage of black-and-white photos of Flynn. In rapid sequence they showed the man in various moods, all of them intense: Pensive. Amused. Outraged. Appraising. Alarmed. Tough. Skeptical. Disgusted. Delighted.

With a final sharp drumbeat, the scene transitioned to the live face of the man himself looking directly into the camera.

“Good evening. I’m Carlton Flynn. With a matter of concern.” He showed his teeth in a way that was not quite a smile.

The camera pulled back to reveal him sitting beside a small round table. Dell Beckert was on the other side of the table. Beckert was wearing a dark suit with an American flag lapel pin. Flynn was wearing a white shirt, open at the collar, sleeves rolled up to the elbow.

“My friends,” said Flynn, “tonight’s show will be one for the history books. Earlier today I was given some news that absolutely amazed me. It made me do something I’ve never done before. I canceled my scheduled guest—to make room for the man sitting here with me. His name is Dell Beckert. He’s chief of police in White River, New York—a city where two white police officers have been murdered in just the past few days. With his city on the verge of a race war—with lawlessness in the streets—this man’s toughness is turning back the tide of chaos. His pursuit of justice and order is prevailing. He is doing this at a staggering personal cost—a fact we’ll return to in a moment. But first, Chief Beckert, can you bring us up to date on your investigation of those fatal police shootings?”

Beckert nodded grimly. “Since the cowardly sniper attacks on our brave officers, our department has made rapid progress. The sniper has been identified as Cory Payne, a twenty-two-year-old white supporter of radical black causes. Late this morning I received conclusive evidence linking him to both shootings. At one fifteen this afternoon I issued a formal order for his arrest. At one thirty I submitted my resignation.”

Flynn leaned toward him. “You submitted your resignation?”

“Yes.” Beckert’s voice was hard and clear.

“Why did you do that?”

“To ensure the integrity of the system and the impartial application of the law.”

Madeleine looked at Gurney. “What’s he talking about?”

“I think I know, but let’s wait and see.”

Flynn, who obviously knew all about it—it was why Beckert was there—affected a puzzled look. “Why would that require your resignation?”

“Cory Payne is my son.” The bombshell was dropped with jarring calmness.

“Cory Payne . . . is your son?” Flynn’s question seemed designed to extend the dramatic impact of the revelation.

“Yes.”

Madeleine stared at the screen in disbelief. “Cory Payne killed John Steele and Rick Loomis? And Cory Payne is the police chief’s son? Can that be true?”

“Maybe half true.”

Flynn placed his hands flat on the table. “Let me ask you the obvious question.”

Before he could ask it, Beckert put it in his own words. “How could I have been so deceived? How could a trained police officer have missed the signs that must have been there? Is that what you want to know?”

“I think that’s what we all want to know.”

“I’ll give you the best answer I can. Cory Payne is my son, but we’ve been estranged for many years. When he was barely a teenager, he began acting out. He broke the law more than once. As an alternative to the juvenile detention system, I arranged for him to be sent to a strict boarding school. When he graduated at eighteen I had hopes for him. When he changed his name to Payne, his mother’s maiden name, I hoped it was just another example of the rebellion he’d eventually grow out of. When he came to live in White River last year, I thought we might be able to forge a relationship after all. In retrospect, that hope was foolish. The desperate delusion of a parent. It temporarily blinded me to the depth of his hostility to anything connected with law, order, discipline.”

Flynn nodded understandingly. “Did anyone in White River know that Cory Payne’s real name was Beckert?”

“He told me he didn’t want anyone to know we were related, and I respected that. If he revealed it to anyone for reasons of his own, I was never aware of it.”

“How much contact did you have with him?”

“I left that up to him. He’d visit me from time to time. We had an occasional lunch together, usually someplace where neither of us would be recognized.”

“What did you think of his racial politics, his criticisms of the police?”

“I told myself it was just a lot of words. Adolescent playacting. A warped search for attention. The feeling of power that comes from criticizing powerful people. I imagined he’d eventually come to his senses. Obviously, he went in the opposite direction.”

Flynn sat back in his chair and gave Beckert a long, sympathetic look.

“This must be incredibly painful for you.”

Beckert produced a brief, thin-lipped smile. “Pain is part of life. The main thing is not to run from it. Or let it motivate you to do the wrong thing.”

“The wrong thing?” Flynn produced his pensive expression. “In this case, what would that be?”

“Bury evidence. Call in favors. Twist arms. Influence the outcome. Conceal the fact that we’re father and son. All those actions would be wrong. They’d undermine the law—the ideal of justice that I’ve devoted my life to preserving.”

“Is that why you’re resigning—why you’re voluntarily ending one of the most distinguished law-enforcement careers in America?”

“Respect for the law is built on public trust. The case against Cory Payne must be pursued vigorously and transparently without the slightest suspicion of interference. If giving up my position supports that goal, it’s well worth whatever sacrifice it entails.”

“Wow.” Flynn nodded appreciatively. “Well said. Now that you’ve submitted your resignation, what’s the path forward?”

“With the approval of the White River city council, Mayor Dwayne Shucker will appoint a new chief of police. Life will go on.”

“Any final words of wisdom?”

“May justice be served. May the families of the victims find peace. And may the sanctity of the law always rise above every other consideration—however powerful, however personal, however painful. God bless White River. God bless America.”

The camera slowly moved in on Flynn, looking tough-but-touched. “Well, my friends, didn’t I tell you this would be one for the history books? In my not-so-humble opinion, we just witnessed one of the most principled and heartfelt resignation speeches ever made. Godspeed, Dell Beckert!”

Concluding with a combination wave and salute in Beckert’s direction, Flynn turned back to the camera and addressed with his trademark intensity his millions of loyal fans. “I’m Carlton Flynn, and that’s how I see it. I’ll be back after these important messages.”

Gurney left the RAM-TV website and closed his laptop.

Madeleine shook her head in bewilderment. “What did you mean when you said it might only be half true that Payne was Beckert’s son and that he was the sniper?”

“I have no doubt about the son part. But I think the sniper part is less certain.”

“The slimy Mr. Flynn sure did love that resignation speech.”

“Did seem that way. Of course, it wasn’t really a resignation speech.”

“You don’t think he’s resigning?”

“Oh, he’s resigning all right. He’s resigning from the White River Police Department to run for New York State Attorney General. If I’m not mistaken, what we just witnessed was his kickoff campaign speech.”

“Are you serious? On the same day that Rick—”

The ringing of Gurney’s phone interrupted her.

He glanced at the screen. “It’s Hardwick. I suggested he listen to the Flynn show.”

He pressed Talk. “So, Jack, what do you think?”

“The fucking manipulative bastard is doing it again.”

He figured he knew what Hardwick meant, but he asked anyway. “Doing what again?”

“Riding a disaster to victory. First it was his son’s juvenile delinquency. Then his wife’s drug OD. Now a goddamn double murder by the same crazy son. Somehow in Dell’s magic hands all this crap ends up illustrating what a prince he is. Selfless defender of high ideals. This guy manages to turn every new family horror into a platform for promoting his high-minded horseshit. Give me a fucking break!”

After ending the call Gurney sat for a long moment in troubled silence. Dusk had turned to darkness beyond the den window.

“Well, what did Hardwick have to say?” Madeleine asked.

“About Beckert? That he’s a self-serving, manipulative, deceptive bastard.”

“Do you agree?”

“Oh, he’s at least all of that.”

“At least?”

Gurney nodded slowly. “I have a sick feeling that under those fairly common vices, there may be something much worse.”