White River Burning

by John Verdon

  “I saw her on that RAM Battleground Tonight program. I’d say she’s an angry woman.”

  “Very angry. But also very smart. So there are some damn tricky days ahead for Beckert—sinkholes he needs to avoid to get where he wants to go.”

  “You mean the attorney general’s office?”

  “And beyond. Fucker might even be picturing himself in the White House someday.”

  That seemed a bit of a stretch. But who could say? The man did look the part—more so than a lot of nasty creeps with their eye on the top rung of the ladder. In fact, he had the kind of chiseled face that would be at home on Mount Rushmore.

  “In the meantime,” said Gurney, “we have a sniper on the loose. Were you able to find out anything about Steele?”

  Hardwick shrugged. “Straight arrow. Everything by the book. Smart. College grad. Going to law school in his spare time. You want me to dig deeper?”

  After a thoughtful pause Gurney shook his head. “Not yet.”

  Hardwick regarded him curiously. “So what’s next? You signing up for the sniper hunt?”

  “I don’t think so. If Kline is worried about Beckert’s methods, that’s his problem, not mine.”

  “So you’re going to walk away?”

  “It seems like the sensible option.”

  Hardwick flashed a hard, glittery grin. “You mean you have no appetite for a clusterfuck in a dark closet? Shit, Gurney, you’re saner than I thought.”

  10

  Gurney spent the drive home from Abelard’s pondering what Hardwick had told him about Beckert and convincing himself that backing away was, in fact, the sanest course of action.

  As he was getting out of the car by the side of the house, he could hear the landline phone ringing. He had some difficulty opening the mudroom door, stuck as it often was in warm weather, and by the time he got to the phone a morose female voice was concluding a message with a call-back number.

  He picked up the handset. “Gurney here.”

  “Oh . . . Mr. Gurney?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Kim Steele. John Steele’s wife.”

  He grimaced, picturing the TV image of the cop falling facedown on the sidewalk. “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Steele. Terribly sorry.”

  There was a long moment of silence.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” he asked.

  “Can I come and speak with you? I don’t want to talk on the phone.” There was another silence, followed by what sounded to Gurney like a stifled sob. “I know where you live. I could be there in twenty-five minutes. Would that be okay?”

  He hesitated. “Yes, that’s okay.”

  He ended the call, thinking immediately of three good reasons why no would’ve been a smarter answer.

  Putting aside his inclination to speculate on why the wife of a dead cop might want to talk to him or how she even knew he existed, he decided to use the intervening time to check the internet for any stories on the shooting that provided more than the bare-bones information he’d already seen.

  He went to the table in the breakfast nook where he’d left his laptop. Using the combination of “Steele” and “White River” brought up links to Beckert’s press conference, media reports on the incident, and opinion pieces from every point on the political spectrum—each purporting to explain the true causes of the violence. Nowhere did he find any details on the life of John Steele beyond the fact that he had a wife, now a widow.

  He decided to try entering the names “John Steele” and “Kim Steele” at various social media sites. He went first to Facebook. While he was waiting for the page to load, his attention was drawn to movement out beyond the French doors in the low pasture. He stood up just in time to see three whitetail deer bounding through an opening in the ancient rock wall that separated the pasture from the woods. Assuming something had spooked them, he looked in the direction of the barn and pond. And there, at the end of the town road, another kind of movement—a glint of light, perhaps reflecting off a car or pickup truck—caught his eye. Whatever it was, it was obscured by the big forsythia bush at the corner of the barn.

  He opened the door and stepped out onto the patio. But the situation was no clearer from there. He was about to walk down to the barn to satisfy his curiosity when the landline phone rang. He went back and checked the ID screen. It was Sheridan Kline.

  “Gurney here.”

  “Hi, Dave.” Kline’s voice was full of oily sincerity. “I’m responding to your message. The truth is there are some sensitive details in this situation that wouldn’t be appropriate for me to discuss with someone outside the official law-enforcement circle. I’m sure you can understand that. But if you choose to step inside the tent, on day one I’ll make sure you know everything I know. And you’ll have the best of both worlds here—official status plus independence from the bureaucracy. You’ll be reporting only to me.”

  That last promise was delivered as though it were a precious privilege.

  Gurney said nothing.

  “Dave?”

  “I’m absorbing what you said.”

  “Ah. Well. Good. We’ll leave it at that. The sooner you give me your answer, the better our chances of saving some lives.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  Gurney replaced the handset, aware he’d let pass an opportunity to tell Kline he’d decided not to get involved. He’d hardly begun to rationalize his foot-dragging when he remembered the possible vehicle by the barn.

  He headed out through the French doors and down into the pasture. When he reached the far side of the forsythia, he had two surprises. The first was the car. It was a sleek Audi A7, a rarity in an area where “luxury vehicle” usually meant a crew-cab pickup with big tires. The second was that there was no one in it.

  He looked around. He saw no one.

  “Hello?” he called out.

  There was no response.

  He walked around the barn. The lush spring grass was moist with dew where the old apple trees shaded it, but there were no footprints.

  Back by the car, he scanned the surrounding area—the pastures, the pond, the cleared swath along the edge of the woods. No sign of anyone.

  As he was deciding what to do next, he heard a faint scraping sound. He heard it again—sharper this time and coming, it seemed, from the thicket above the pond. The only thing he could see up there that wasn’t part of the natural flora was the tractor he’d been using to clear his little archaeology site.

  Curious, he headed up the trail that led to the excavation. The scraping became more distinct. He came around a bend in the trail and the broad rectangular hole came into view. But it wasn’t until he reached the excavation’s edge that he discovered the source of the sound.

  A man, intent on his work, was using a hand trowel to probe a crevice between two foundation stones. He was wearing beige slacks, expensive-looking brown loafers, and a tropical sport shirt garishly printed with palm fronds and toucans.

  The man spoke without turning away from the ground. “Seventeen hundred, I’d say. Give or take twenty years or so. Could be as early as sixteen eighty. Interesting rust deposits along here.” He tapped the area in front of him with the point of the trowel, which Gurney recognized as the one he kept at the site. “Four separate deposits, at three-foot intervals.”

  He straightened up now—a lanky, stork-like man with thinning hair the color of his beige slacks. As he gazed at Gurney the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses magnified his eyes. “Those remnants of chain links you mentioned in your message? They were distributed along the base of this wall, am I right?”

  Some people were put off by Dr. Walter Thrasher’s mildly autistic avoidance of the social graces, but Gurney—for whom getting to the point was a virtue—was quite comfortable with the man’s approach.

  “Right. Directly below the rust spots,” Gurney replied with a puzzled frown. “I thoug
ht you said you were coming here tomorrow. Did I lose a day somewhere?”

  “No days lost. Just happened to be passing. Coming from White River, going to Albany, took a chance you might be home. Drove up to your barn, caught sight of your tractor, figured that’d be the site. Interesting. Very interesting.” As he was speaking he put down the trowel and scrambled with surprising agility up the short ladder out of the excavation.

  “Interesting in what way?”

  “Wouldn’t want to answer that prematurely. Depends on the nature of the artifacts. You mentioned baby teeth? And a knife?”

  “As well as some glass, bits of rusted metal, hooks for stretching animal hides.”

  There was a peculiar intensity in Thrasher’s magnified gaze. “No time to examine it all right now. Maybe just the knife and the teeth. A quick look?”

  Gurney shrugged. “No problem.” He thought of asking Thrasher for a ride up to the house, but the chance of the low-slung A7 bottoming out in the pasture ruts was too great. “Wait here. I’ll be back.”

  Thrasher was standing by his car when Gurney returned with the knife and the tinted-glass jar containing the teeth.

  Thrasher gave the knife, especially what appeared to be a fingernail-sized crescent moon carved in the black handle, a close but rapid inspection. Ending with a nod and a grunt of satisfaction, he handed it back to Gurney. He took the tinted jar with greater care, almost a kind of trepidation, at first holding it up to examine the contents through the glass, then removing the top and peering in at the tiny teeth. He slowly tipped the jar, carefully letting just one tooth slide out onto his palm. He tilted his hand this way and that to view it from different angles. Then he tipped it back into the jar and replaced the lid.

  “Would it be all right if I borrowed this for a day or two? Need my microscope to verify what we’ve got here.”

  “You’re not sure they’re baby teeth?”

  “Oh, they’re definitely baby teeth. No doubt about that.”

  “Well, then . . .”

  Thrasher hesitated, looked momentarily troubled. “There could be more than one way they ended up in this jar. Until I take a closer look, let’s leave it at that.”

  11

  There were two paths from the barn up to the house. The more direct one that they used as a driveway went up through the pasture. The roundabout one meandered through the woods below the pasture, then curved up around it to the far side of the henhouse and the bluestone patio.

  Gurney chose the second route. He paid attention to the forest sights, sounds, scents—the rustlings and chirpings, the sweetness in the air, the tiny blue flowers among the lush ferns—trying to dispel a vague sense of uneasiness created by Thrasher’s parting comment.

  As he was heading for the house by this alternate route, he heard a vehicle approaching on the town road. Soon he saw a small white car coming around the barn. It slowed and began to make its way haltingly up through the pasture.

  It came to a stop forty or fifty feet shy of the side door, where Gurney’s Outback was parked. A woman emerged from the car and stood for a moment by its open door. Assuming it must be Kim Steele, Gurney started across the pasture toward her. He was about to call out when she got back in the car and tried to turn it around—an attempt that ended when a rear wheel sank into one of the pasture’s groundhog burrows.

  He found her sobbing, hands gripping the steering wheel. Her dark curly hair was disarranged. Her face was drawn.

  Gurney blinked, confused for a second or two by the fact that the woman in the car was part African American, which didn’t jibe with the mental image he’d constructed from the fact of her being married to an upstate white cop. Feeling some chagrin at the narrowness of his expectation—and the not-so-subtle prejudice lurking under it—he cleared his throat.

  “Mrs. Steele?”

  Her eyes had the exhausted red puffiness that comes from hours of crying.

  “Mrs. Steele?”

  She sniffled, her gaze fastened on the steering wheel. “Damn . . . stupid . . . car.”

  “I can pull your car out of that hole with my tractor. Come up to the house. I’ll take care of your car for you. Okay?”

  He was about to repeat his suggestion when she suddenly opened the door and stepped out. He noticed that her shirt was unevenly buttoned. She pulled a loose khaki jacket tightly around her despite the warmth of the day.

  He led the way to the patio and gestured toward one of the chairs at a small metal cafe table. “Would you like something to drink? Water or coffee?”

  She sat at the table and shook her head.

  He sat in the chair opposite her. He saw grief, exhaustion, indecision, anxiety.

  He spoke softly. “It’s hard to know who to trust, isn’t it?”

  She blinked, looking at him now in a more focused way. “You’re a retired police officer?”

  “I was a homicide detective with the NYPD. I took my pension after twenty-five years. My wife and I have been up here in Walnut Crossing for three years now.” He paused. “Do you want to tell me why you wanted to see me?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything.”

  He smiled. “That may be a good thing.”

  “Why?”

  “I think doubt is a realistic approach to situations where there’s a lot at stake.”

  He was thinking of the times he had felt baffled and how only by talking something out with Madeleine had he been able to decide what to do. He wondered if that was the kind of relationship Kim Steele had enjoyed with her husband. Maybe she’d always relied on their conversations to help resolve her doubts.

  Tears began to make their way down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I shouldn’t be wasting your time.”

  “You’re not wasting my time.”

  She stared at him.

  He could see in her eyes the battle in her mind—and its sudden resolution.

  She reached into the pocket of her big khaki jacket—which he realized was probably her husband’s, adding a poignant note to the way she wrapped herself in it. She pulled out a smartphone. After tapping a few icons, she extended it across the table so he could see the screen. When he reached for it, she pulled back.

  “I’ll hold it,” she said. “Just read what it says.”

  It was a text message. “Watch ur back. EZ nite for mfs to ice ur ass n blame the BDA.”

  Gurney read it three times. He noted the date and time—the evening John Steele was killed, about an hour prior to the shooting.

  “What is this?”

  “John’s phone. I found that message on it.”

  “How come you still have it? Didn’t the crime-scene team want it?”

  “It wasn’t at the crime scene. On duty they use BlackBerrys. This is John’s personal phone. It was at home.”

  “When did you find the message?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “Have you shown it to the police?”

  She shook her head.

  “Because . . .”

  “The message. What it says.”

  “What does it mean to you?”

  Although she was sitting in the direct sunlight, she wrapped herself more tightly in the jacket. “He was being warned to watch his back. Doesn’t that suggest someone who was supposed to be on his side really wasn’t?”

  “You’re thinking someone in the department?”

  “I don’t know what I’m thinking.”

  “Your husband wouldn’t be the first cop to have enemies. Sometimes the best cops have the worst enemies.”

  She met his gaze, nodding with conviction. “That’s who John was. The best. The best person on earth. Totally honest.”

  “Do you know if he was doing anything that less honest people in the department might have found threatening?”

  She took a deep breath. “John didn’t like to talk about work at home. Once in a while I’d overhear something wh
en he was on the phone. Comments about past cases with questionable evidence, deaths in custody, throwdowns. You know what they are, right?”

  He nodded. Some cops wouldn’t go anywhere without one—an easily concealed, unregistered, untraceable pistol that could be dropped next to the body of someone the cop had shot, as “evidence” that the victim had been armed.

  “How did he know which cases to look into?”

  She hesitated, appeared uncomfortable. “Maybe he had some contacts?”

  “People who pointed him in the direction of specific cases?”

  “Maybe.”

  “People in the Black Defense Alliance?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  She was a lousy liar. That was okay. It was the good liars he worried about.

  “Did he ever tell you how high up in the department the problems might go?”

  She said nothing. Her deer-in-the-headlights expression was answer enough.

  “What made you come to me?”

  “I read about that Peter Pan murder case you solved last year, how you exposed the police corruption behind it.”

  The explanation sounded real, as far as it went.

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  The deer-in-the-headlights look was back. It told him that she couldn’t tell the truth but wouldn’t tell a lie. It was, he thought, the reaction of an honest person in a difficult spot.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll let that go for now. What would you like me to do for you?”

  She answered without hesitation. “I want you to find out who killed my husband.”

  12

  While Kim Steele waited on the patio, Gurney got his tractor from the excavation site, pulled her car from the collapsed groundhog burrow, and got it oriented in the right direction. He promised to look into the White River situation. As she was leaving, she shook hands with him, and for a couple of seconds a smile relieved the desolation in her eyes.