by John Verdon
“You drove directly to your own apartment?”
“To a parking spot near it. About a block away.”
“Any further messages from your supposed tipster?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you save the texts?”
“No. I wrote down the number they came from, but I deleted the actual texts.”
“Why?”
“A precaution. I’m always afraid of phone hackers or someone getting hold of private information. And this was a supersensitive thing, the dashboard video. If the wrong people found out I was going to be getting it . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Did you ever call the number the texts came from?”
“I tried maybe five, six times. No answer, just anonymous voicemail. I remember thinking maybe they had been in that house after all, and maybe they got shot. Then this morning RAM-TV runs this story on the places where the sniper shots were fired from. Up till then, all they’d talked about was where the cops were when they got shot, not where the bullets came from. But now they showed the apartment building on Bridge Street and the private house on Poulter Street, with some asshole reporter standing in the street pointing at it. I’m thinking, shit, that’s where I was, I was in both of those places. I’m thinking, what the fuck’s going on? I mean it was obvious that something weird was going on. Put that on top of the Flynn bullshit—with the great police chief pointing his goddamn finger at me—and I’m thinking, What the fuck? What the bloody fuck?”
Payne was sitting on the edge of his seat, rubbing his thighs with the palms of his hands as if he were trying to warm them, shaking his head and staring a little wildly at the floor.
“There are fingerprints,” Gurney said mildly, “in both locations.”
“My fingerprints?”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“That has to be a mistake.”
“Could be.” Gurney shrugged. “If it’s not, do you have any idea how they could have gotten there?”
“The only place my fingerprints could be would be in the car, which I never left, except to open the side door of the house. But I never went inside. And at the apartment building I stayed down in the alley. In the car. I never got out of it.”
“Do you own a gun?”
Payne shook his head, almost violently. “I hate guns.”
“Do you keep any kind of ammunition in your apartment?”
“Bullets? No. Of course not. What would I do with them?” He paused, looking suddenly dumbfounded. “Fuck! Are you saying someone found bullets in my apartment?”
Gurney said nothing.
“Because if someone’s saying they found bullets in my apartment, that’s total bullshit! What the fuck is going on?”
“What do you think is going on?”
Payne closed his eyes and took a long, slow breath. He opened them and met Gurney’s inquisitive gaze with an unblinking Beckert stare. “It would appear that someone is trying to frame me, someone who’s covering up for whoever was actually involved in the shootings.”
“Do you believe your father is trying to frame you?”
He continued staring at Gurney, as if he hadn’t heard the question. Then the hard expression began to break down. There were little tremors around his eyes and mouth. He stood up abruptly, turned away, and walked to the window that looked out on the old graveyard.
Gurney waited.
A long minute passed.
Payne spoke, still facing the window. “I think so, I don’t think so. I’m sure, not sure. I think, sure, of course he’d frame me, why not, he has no feelings other than ambition. Ambition is sacred to him. Success. Sacred to him and his horrible second wife. Haley Beauville Beckert. You know where her money comes from? Tobacco. Her great-great-grandfather Maxwell Beauville owned a huge slave plantation in Virginia. One of the biggest tobacco growers in the state. Jesus. You know how many people tobacco kills every day? Fucking greedy murdering scumbags. And then I think, no. My father? Frame me for murder? That’s impossible, right? Yes, no, yes, no.” He let out a small gasping sound that might have been a stifled sob. “So,” he said finally, taking a deep breath, “I don’t know a single fucking thing.”
Gurney decided to change the subject. “How close are you to Blaze Jackson?”
Payne turned from the window, calmer now. “Blaze Lovely Jackson. She insists on the whole name. We had an affair. On and off. Why?”
“Is she the one who gave you Devalon Jones’s Corolla?”
“She lets me use it whenever I need it.”
“Are you staying with her now?”
“I’m moving around.”
“Probably not a bad idea.”
There was a silence.
Coolidge came back into the room with Gurney’s coffee. He laid the mug on a side table by the arm of Gurney’s chair, then, with a concerned glance in the direction of Payne, retreated behind his desk.
Payne looked at Gurney. “Can I hire you?”
“Hire me?”
“As a private investigator. To find out what the hell is going on.”
“I’m already trying to do that.”
“For the cops’ wives?”
“Yes.”
“Are they paying you?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you’re bound to have expenses. Investigations can be expensive.”
“What’s your point?”
“I’d like to make sure you have the resources to do whatever you have to do.”
“You’re in a position to supply those resources?”
“My grandparents left their money to me, not to my mother. They locked it up in a trust fund that only I could access, and only after I turned twenty-one. Which was last year.”
“Why did they do that?”
Payne paused, gazing at the ashes in the fireplace. “My mom had a serious drug problem. Giving someone with a drug problem a pile of money is like a death sentence.” He paused again. “Besides, they hated my father and wanted to make sure he wouldn’t get his hands on it.”
“They hated him? Why?”
“Because he’s a horrible, heartless, controlling bastard.”
34
The meeting ended with Gurney declining to be “hired” but leaving open the possibility of billing Payne for any extraordinary expenses—if they happened to result in the discovery of facts that exonerated him. With Payne leery of providing Gurney with his cell number—a new one, anonymous and prepaid—for fear of the police getting hold of the number and tracking his location, Coolidge had nervously agreed to act as a middleman.
Now, thirty-five minutes later, Gurney was finishing a quick lunch in an empty coffee shop on one of White River’s main commercial avenues, playing back in his mind everything he remembered Payne saying, how he said it, his expressions, gestures, apparent emotions. The more he thought about it, the more inclined he was to accept the feasibility of Payne’s narrative. He wondered how Jack Hardwick, ultimate skeptic, would react to it. He was sure of one thing. If it was all just a performance by a clever murderer, it was one of the best—maybe the best—he’d ever witnessed.
He took a final bite of his ham-and-cheese sandwich and went to the cash register to pay. The apparent owner, a middle-aged man with a sad Slavic face, stood up from a nearby booth and came over to take his money.
“Nuts, huh?”
“Excuse me?”
The man gestured toward the street. “Lunatics. Wild. Smash. Burn.”
“Even in this part of town?”
“Every part. Maybe not burning yet. But could be. Just as bad, almost. How can you sleep, thinking how crazy? Burning, shooting, crazy shit.” He shook his head. “No waitresses today. Afraid, you know. Okay. I understand. No matter, maybe. No customers. They afraid, too, so everybody stay home. Hide in closet maybe. What good is this shit? They burn down their fucking house, right? For what? For what? What we supposed to do now?
Buy guns, all of us, we shoot each other? Stupid. Stupid.”
Gurney nodded, took his change, and headed for his car on the nearly deserted street.
By the time he got to it his phone was ringing.
“Gurney here.”
“This is Whit Coolidge. After you left, Cory was thinking about something you said—about video footage of him driving to and from the places where the shots were fired?”
“Yes?”
“He says—and I agree—the traffic cameras along those routes are pretty obvious. Anyone who’d ever driven around White River would know they were there.”
“So?”
“If the killer knew they were there, wouldn’t he avoid them?”
“It’s a reasonable question.”
“So what we’re thinking is, maybe it would make more sense to be looking for someone who doesn’t appear on those videos.”
“That did occur to me.”
“Oh. Well. You said so little at the meeting it was hard to know what you were thinking.”
“I learn more from listening than from talking.”
“Absolutely true. A principle we should all live by. And one we so easily forget. Anyway, we just wanted to share that thought with you on the video issue.”
“I appreciate it.”
After he ended the call, Gurney sat for a while in his parked car, picturing the map Mark Torres had displayed, the one showing the route taken by the red motorcycle and its anonymous leather-clad rider—the route painstakingly reconstructed by interviewing people who’d glimpsed or heard the loud bike zipping by—a route that went all the way from Poulter Street to Willard Park, managing to avoid every traffic camera in the city, while Cory Payne in the black Corolla was being recorded by one after another.
Gurney was tempted to drive over to the park yet again—to the last reported location of the motorcycle, before it presumably disappeared into one of several wilderness trails. But he’d been there three times already, and there were two locations critical to the case that he hadn’t yet visited. It was time he did.
Keys would be required. He placed a call to Mark Torres.
While Gurney’s exiled status had not diminished Torres’s willingness to cooperate with him, it had made it inadvisable to do so openly.
They arrived at a plan that would allow Gurney to examine Cory Payne’s apartment and the apartment used for the Steele shooting without necessitating any direct contact. Torres would see to it that the doors of both apartments would be unlocked for one hour that afternoon—from two thirty to three thirty. It would be up to Gurney to conduct his examinations within that time frame, attracting as little attention as possible.
He arrived at the Steele sniper site at 2:31. The five-story building, like many in White River, had seen better days. He recalled from the video shown in one of the CSMT meetings that the apartment number was 5C. Apartment buildings of less than six stories were not legally required to have elevators, and this one didn’t. By the time he reached the fifth floor he was breathing a bit more heavily than he would have liked. It reminded him to add some aerobic exercise to his regimen of push-ups and chin-ups. He’d recently turned fifty, and staying in shape required more effort than it used to.
The apartment door looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in years. The reinforced steel peephole was as clear a statement of urban decline as the stink of urine in the stairwell. As planned, the door was unlocked. If there had been crime-scene tape across it, it had been removed.
The interior layout—a small foyer leading into a large room with a kitchenette and bathroom on the right—was as he remembered it from the video, except that the large window was now closed. The faint tripod marks were still visible on the dusty floor.
Standing in the center of the triangle formed by the three marks and gazing out through the streaky windowpanes, he could see in the distance the spot at the edge of Willard Park where John Steele had been struck down. Looking around the empty room, his gaze fell on the ancient steam radiator under which the brass casing had been found. The bottom of the radiator was at least four inches from the floor, leaving the space beneath it easily visible.
He went into the small kitchen and saw nothing out of the ordinary beyond the residue of fingerprint powder left by the evidence tech on various handles, cabinets, and drawers.
Next he went into the bathroom, the room that most interested him—especially the toilet, and the flushing lever in particular. He inspected it carefully, then opened the water tank and examined the inner workings. His eyes widened. What he was looking at suggested an explanation for Payne’s prints being found on the flushing mechanism, on a greasy food wrapper in the toilet bowl, on the brass casing in the living room, and nowhere else in the apartment.
It had bothered him from the beginning that no fresh prints had been found on any of the doors or on the open window sash. Now he thought he knew why, but he wanted an additional piece of evidence to corroborate the explanation before he shared it with Torres.
He took several photos of the toilet tank with his phone, then took a quick look around the apartment to be sure he was leaving everything as he found it. He hurried down the four flights of stairs, breathing in as little as possible of the sour smell, went out through the lobby onto Bridge Street, and drove to the address Torres had given him for Payne’s apartment.
It was located on the far side of Willard Park. The neighborhood was run down but had not yet been visited by the sporadic fires and looting that had pockmarked the rest of the Grinton section. The air, however, had the ashy odor that seemed to have penetrated every corner of the city.
The building was a narrow three-story brick structure with a weedy vacant lot on either side. There were two apartment floors above a storefront. Steel security shades were pulled down over the store windows. A hand-printed sign on the door said Closed. A more professional sign over the barricaded window said Computer Repairs. The building had two front entrances, one to the store, the other to a stairwell providing access to the apartments.
Payne’s was on the second floor. The door, unlocked as promised, opened into a dark foyer that led to a living room with a partial view of the forested area of the park. There was a faint sewer-like smell in the room. The furniture was disarranged. The rug had been rolled back to one side of the room, the couch and chair pillows heaped on the floor. Chairs had been turned over, desk drawers removed, bookcase shelves emptied. A power strip and a tangle of wires on the floor indicated the former presence of a computer. Light fixtures had been opened, blinds taken down from the windows. The place had evidently been subjected to a thorough police search.
A doorway on the left side of the living room led to a bedroom, with what appeared to be the apartment’s only closet. The bureau drawers had been removed and emptied. The mattress had been removed from the box spring and the clothes from the closet. In the corners of the room there were random piles of underwear, socks, shirts, pants.
If Gurney had more time he would have gone through all of it, but he had a more urgent interest. He left the bedroom and crossed the living room to a pair of open doorways. One led to the kitchen, where he found fingerprint dust everywhere, ransacked cabinets and drawers, an open refrigerator. The sewer-like odor was stronger here than in the living room.
The doorway next to the kitchen led to a hallway at the end of which he could see the bathroom, the room he was most interested in—and the source of the foul odor. The drainage trap under the sink had been removed, opening the room to the effluvia of the building’s sewer lines. The medicine cabinet was empty. There were no towels. The toilet seat had been removed.
Gurney lifted the top off the toilet tank and peered down at the flushing mechanism and at the flushing lever on the outside of the tank. With a feeling of satisfaction, he took out his phone and photographed both.
He checked the time. There were still fifteen minutes remaining of the hour Torres had given him. His init
ial thought was to use every minute of it sifting through whatever the police had left behind. His second thought was to be satisfied with what he’d discovered and get the hell out of there.
That was the thought he acted on. He was out of the building, in his car, and heading for Walnut Crossing with thirteen minutes to spare. He didn’t stop until he reached the interstate rest area where he’d had his initial conversation with Torres. It seemed an appropriate place to pull over, thank him for his assistance, and fill him in on the progress it had made possible.
As he placed the call, he wrestled with the question of how much to reveal—not only about his new view of the fingerprint issue but about his shifting sense of the whole case.
He opted to be fairly open, omitting only his direct contact with Payne.
Torres answered on the first ring. “How’d it go?”
“Smoothly,” said Gurney. “I hope you didn’t run into any problems on your end.”
“None. I just finished relocking the apartment doors. Did you discover anything useful?”
“I think so. If I’m right, it raises some major questions.”
“Like what?”
“Like how sure are you that Payne is the shooter?”
“As sure as I could be without a confession.”
“Sell it to me.”
“Okay. Number one, we know he was in the right places at the right times. We have time-coded videos to prove it. Number two, we have his fingerprints on the side door at Poulter Street and on the toilet and a fast-food wrapper in the Bridge Street apartment. Number three, we have his fingerprints on the cartridge casings found at both shooting sites. We know the prints are his because they match almost all the prints found in his apartment. Number four, a box of thirty-aught-six cartridges—with two missing—was found hidden under some shirts in his bedroom closet. Number five, we just got a DNA report showing a match between the Band-Aid recovered from the toilet at the Bridge Street apartment and hair follicles recovered from the sink drain in Payne’s apartment. Number six, we have a confidential tip from a BDA informant naming him as the shooter. Number seven, his own public statements reveal an obsessive hatred for the police. So there it is. A hate-filled kid, aided and abetted by an organization with some hate-filled members. It’s a convincing case with a ton of incriminating evidence—a lot more than we usually have.”
