by John Verdon
Biggs smiled sadly. “Should we reject someone because of their rage at injustice? Should we reject them for the damage that has been done to their heart, for their feelings of fear, for their marginalization, their frustration? Should we reject them because their rage frightens us? Do you tell your angry white listeners to stop listening to you? Do you tell every white man who condemns black men to go away and never turn on your program again? Of course you don’t.”
“So what’s your answer? To embrace the hate-spewing Blaze Lovely Jacksons of the world? To overlook the fact that she thinks killing police officers is no big deal?”
Biggs turned his sad eyes on Flynn. “Rodney King asked, ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ It sounded like a naïve question. But if you take that question—”
Flynn interrupted, rolling his eyes. “Here we go with the Saint Rodney baloney!”
“If you take King’s question literally, it leads us into a morass of historical reasons why white America and black America do not get along as well as we might like. But I prefer to interpret his question in a different way—as a plaintive cry for a solution. The question I hear is this: What would it take for us to come together? And the answer to that can be summed up in one word. Respect.”
“Fine! No problem!” cried Flynn. “I’ll happily show my respect for anyone who shows their respect for our country, our values, our police!”
Biggs shook his head. “I’m talking about unconditional respect. The gift of respect. To withhold respect until we feel that it has been earned is the formula for an endless downward spiral—the spiral that has brought us to where we are today. Respect is not a bargaining chip. It’s the gift a good man gives to every other man. If it is given only after certain conditions have been met, it will achieve nothing. Respect is not a negotiating tactic. It is a form of goodness. May God grant us the humility to embrace what is good, simply because it is good. May God grant us the sanity to realize that respect is its own reward, that respect—”
Flynn, who’d been nodding condescendingly as Biggs was speaking, cut him off. “That’s a lovely speech, Maynard. A nice sermon. But the reality we’re facing won’t—”
Gurney’s attention was diverted abruptly by a sound he associated with a small-displacement motorcycle. As he listened, it seemed to grow louder. It brought to mind the elusive red motocross bike.
He put his computer down on the hassock in front of his chair and went quickly to the side of the house that provided a view of the high pasture where the sound seemed to be coming from. By the time he got to the den window it had stopped. In the less-than-ideal dusk light he saw nothing unusual. He opened the window quietly and listened.
He heard only the distant cawing of crows. Then nothing at all.
Even though he suspected he was overreacting, he went to the bedroom where he’d left his Beretta in its ankle holster. When he sat on the bed to strap it on, he saw something he’d missed earlier—a note under the alarm clock on the bedside table. It was from Madeleine.
“Hi, sweetheart. I decided to stay over at the hospital inn tonight. So I came home to get a few overnight things and fresh clothes for tomorrow. In the morning I’ll go straight from White River to work. Love you.”
He made a mental note to call her later that evening. Then he left the bedroom and made a circuit of the ground-floor windows, peering out into the adjacent fields and woods. He repeated the circuit. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, he returned to his chair by the hearth, and picked up his computer.
Carlton Flynn was in the midst of giving his wrap-up statement directly to the camera and his millions of faithful viewers.
“. . . up to each of you to consider the sentiments expressed here tonight by Dr. Maynard Biggs and to compare them with the positions laid out by Dell Beckert. In my opinion, it boils down to one question: Do we keep extending, again and again, the respect that Biggs claims will solve all our problems, or do we draw the line and say, loud and clear, enough is enough! How many times are we supposed to turn the other cheek before we admit it isn’t working? My personal belief—and this is just me, folks—my belief is that peace is a two-way street. I’m Carlton Flynn, and that’s how I see it. I’ll be back after these important messages.”
As Gurney was closing the RAM-TV website, his phone was ringing. It was Torres.
“Gurney here.”
“You asked how to get to the gun club? And how to identify Beckert’s cabin?”
“Right.”
“The most direct access is from Clapp Hollow, which you get to off County Route Twenty, also called Tillis Road. About three miles into Clapp Hollow there’s a bridge over a stream, and right after that there are two trailheads across from each other. The one on the right leads up to the old quarries. The one on the left leads to the gun club preserve. I just emailed you a marked-up satellite map showing the route to the preserve, along with the GPS coordinates of the cabin.”
“You think my Outback can get through those trails?”
“It would depend on how much mud there is. And whether any trees are down.”
“You said one of the trails leads up to the old quarries—is that the area where the Gorts are holed up?”
“Yes. But it’s not just old stone quarries up there. There are interconnecting caves and abandoned mining tunnels that don’t appear on any maps. It’s a wild area. Dense forest and thorn bushes and no roads. The Gorts were born and raised in those hills. They could hide up there forever.”
“An interesting situation.”
As he was ending the call, Gurney heard the bing of an email arriving on his computer. It was the satellite trail map Torres had mentioned. As he adjusted the laptop screen for a closer look, his phone rang again.
It was Cory Payne, his voice sharp with excitement.
“Did you watch it?”
“I did.”
“What did you think?”
“Biggs seems to be a decent man. More decent than most politicians.”
“He understands the problem. He’s the only one who does.”
“The problem of disrespect?”
“Disrespect is another word for belittling. The literal belittling of the black man by the white man. The belittling of the powerless by the powerful. The belittling of the weak by the control freaks who want everything their own way. They beat their victims into the ground, into the dirt. Every so often those beatings—that endless belittling provokes rage. The control freaks call that rage the breakdown of civilization. You know what it really is?
“Tell me.”
“It’s the natural human reaction to unbearable disrespect. The assault on the heart, on the soul. Disrespect that makes me less than you. Before the Nazis killed the Jews, they made them less than equal, less than citizens, less than human. You see the horror in those words? The horror of making one man less than another?”
“Is that what your father does?”
Payne’s voice was pure acid. “You’ve been in the same room with him? You’ve watched him? You’ve listened to him? You’ve seen him on TV in a lovefest with that thug Flynn? You’ve heard him call his own son a murderer? What kind of man do you think he is?”
“That’s too big a question for me to answer.”
“I’ll make it simple. Do you think he’s a good man or a bad man?”
“That’s not a simple question at all. But I have a simple one for you—about that cabin where you helped him with those cartridges.”
“What about it?”
“Is it locked?”
“Yes. But you can get in if you know where the spare key is.” Curiosity seemed to be diluting the acid. “You think something there will tell you what you want to know?”
“Possibly. Where’s that key?”
“You’ll need to use the compass app on your phone. Stand at the northeast corner of his cabin. Walk due east, maybe thirty or forty feet, until you come to a small square piece of bluestone
in the grass. The key is under it. Or at least it was the day he took me out there.”
“Do you know if any other club members use the property this time of year?”
“It’s only used in the hunting season. Do you know what you’re looking for?”
“I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Watch your back. If he thinks you’re a danger to him, he’ll have Turlock kill you. Then he’ll frame someone for it. Probably me.”
42
After ending the call, Gurney remained in his chair by the fireplace, musing over Payne’s comments and the intensity with which he’d embraced Maynard Biggs’s analysis of the problem.
As for the actual interview, Gurney couldn’t help feeling a visceral revulsion to Carlton Flynn—as it occurred to him once again that a sure sign of a man’s dishonesty was his characterization of himself as a truth teller. Self-described “straight talk” usually amounted to nothing but mean-spirited self-righteousness.
Gurney turned his attention back to his computer and the satellite map Torres had emailed him showing the trail route from Clapp Hollow to the gun club. The two-mile route he’d highlighted passed through a succession of three forks, taking right turns at the first and second and a left at the third before arriving at a series of linked clearings next to a long, narrow lake. The image of the cabin in the first of those clearings had been labeled with GPS coordinates.
Gurney memorized the coordinates as well as the approximate distances from Clapp Hollow to each of the trail forks. It seemed simple enough, assuming the trails were passable.
His thoughts were interrupted by the shrill beep of the house smoke alarms, indicating a power outage. The only light he’d turned on in the room, the lamp next to his armchair, went out.
At first he did nothing. Momentary electrical interruptions had become common as the local utility company cut back on routine maintenance operations. After several minutes had passed with no restoration of power, however, he called the company’s emergency number. The automated answering system informed him that there was no known outage in his area but his report would be forwarded to the service division and that a representative would be responding shortly. Rather than wait in the dark for the power to come back on, or to discover what “shortly” might mean, he decided to get his generator going—a gas-powered unit that sat out on the tiny back porch and was wired into the circuit panel in the basement.
He went out the side door and around to the back of the house. It was a couple of minutes past nine. Dusk had become night, but a full moon made a flashlight unnecessary.
The generator had a pull-cord starter. He grasped the handle and gave it a few energetic yanks. When the engine didn’t start, he bent over to be sure that the choke and gas-line levers were in their proper positions. Then he took hold again of the cord handle.
As he was adjusting his stance for the best leverage, he caught just at the edge of his vision a moving speck of light. He glanced up and spotted it on the corner post of the porch, just above his head. It was tiny, round, and bright red. He dived off the porch step into a patch of unmowed grass. He heard, almost simultaneously, the thwack of the bullet hitting the post and the sharper crack of the gunshot from somewhere at the top of the high pasture.
As he scrambled through the thick, damp grass toward the nearest corner of the house, he heard an engine suddenly rev up. He rolled over and pulled the Beretta from his ankle holster. But the high-pitched engine sound seemed to be receding. He realized the shooter wasn’t coming down the hill toward him. He was heading in the opposite direction—up through the pines toward the north ridge.
As he listened, the whine of the motorcycle faded away completely into the night.
Torres arrived at the Gurney farmhouse an hour after the attack. He was followed a few minutes later by Garrett Felder and Shelby Towns in the crime-scene van. Gurney could have dug the bullet out of the post himself, but doing it by the book with an official chain of custody from crime scene to ballistics was always best.
He was already doing a minor end run around local law enforcement and didn’t want to add to the irregularities. He’d reported the incident to Torres, not to Walnut Crossing PD, and left it up to Torres to deal later with the turf issues. It would have been a waste of time to involve the locals in the initial response to an incident that could only make sense in the context of an investigation centered in White River.
While the evidence techs were doing their jobs outside, Torres was sitting inside by the fireplace with Gurney, asking questions and taking notes the old-fashioned way with a notepad and pen. The generator, which Gurney had gotten started once the shooter was gone, was humming along reassuringly.
After Torres had recorded the basic facts he closed his notepad and gave Gurney a worried look. “Any idea why you’d be a target?”
“Maybe somebody thinks I know more than I do.”
“You think it could have been Cory Payne?”
“I have no reason to think so.”
Torres paused. “Are you going to make use of that map information I sent you?”
Before he could answer there was a knock at the French doors. Gurney went over and opened them. Felder came in, obviously excited. “Two discoveries. First, the bullet is a thirty-aught-six, full metal jacket, just like the other two. Second, the power failure was caused by the electrical supply line to the house being severed.”
“Severed how?” asked Gurney.
“My guess would be some sort of heavily insulated cable cutter.”
“Where was the cut made?”
“Down by your barn. At the base of the utility company’s last pole on the town road, at the point where the line to your house goes underground.”
Shortly after Torres, Felder, and Towns departed, the utility repair crew arrived. Gurney pointed them to the damage, which he opined was the product of vandalism. This was met with some skepticism, but he saw no point in attempting a more truthful explanation.
Then he called Jack Hardwick, got in his Outback, and headed for the man’s rented farmhouse. He wanted to expose his ideas about the case once again to the man’s skepticism. In addition, he couldn’t imagine getting any sleep that night in his own far-from-secure house.
Hardwick’s place, a nineteenth-century white clapboard structure of no recognizable style, was at the end of a long dirt road high in the hills above the village of Dillweed. When Gurney arrived just before midnight, Hardwick was standing in his open front doorway, a nine-millimeter Sig Sauer in a shoulder holster strapped over his black tee shirt.
“Expecting trouble, Jack?”
“I figure whoever took a shot at you might want to follow you, take a few more. Full moon tonight. Makes crazy people do crazy shit.”
He moved out of the doorway, and Gurney stepped into the small entry foyer. A few jackets were hanging on hooks. Boots were lined up on the floor under them. The sitting room beyond the foyer had a bright, clean look about it, accented by a vase of spring wildflowers, suggesting that Esti Moreno, Hardwick’s state trooper girlfriend, was back in his life.
“You want a beer?”
Gurney shook his head. He sat at a spotless pine table in the corner of the room nearest the kitchen, while Hardwick fetched himself a Grolsch.
After settling himself across the table and taking his first sip from the bottle, he flashed the supercilious grin that always got under Gurney’s skin. “So how come he missed?”
“Possibly because of my fast reaction.”
“To what?”
“The laser dot projected by his scope.”
“Causing you to do what?”
“Hit the ground.”
“So how come he didn’t shoot you on the ground?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the miss was intentional?”
“Kind of a high-risk play just to scare you off, don’t you think?”
Gurney shrugged. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense eithe
r way. If he wanted me dead, why only one shot? And if he didn’t, what was the point? Did he really think I was going to drop the case because he put a bullet hole in my back porch?”
“Fucked if I know. So what’s the plan?”
“Did you know Beckert and Turlock share a hunting cabin?”
“I’m not surprised.”
“I want to have a look at it.”
“You trying to prove something?”
“Just gathering information.”
“Open mind, eh?”
“Right.”
“Bullshit.” Hardwick took another sip of his Grolsch.
Gurney paused. “I tracked down Merle Tabor.”
“So?”
“He told me a story.”
“About Turlock’s juvie problem?”
“That’s a mild way of describing it.” Gurney recounted in grim detail what Tabor had told him about the death of George Montgomery.
Hardwick was quiet for a long moment. “You believe Tabor?”
“I do. The event and how it was resolved with no real closure seem to have had a devastating effect on him.”
“So you’ve concluded that Beckert and Turlock are sociopaths?”
“Yes.”
“Sociopaths capable of shooting their own cops, beating and strangling a pair of black activists, and framing innocent people for all four murders?”
“Anyone who did what they did to that retarded man is capable of just about anything.”
“And because they’re capable of committing the White River murders, you think they actually did commit them?”
“I think it’s possible enough that I should take a closer look.”
“A look that involves breaking and entering?”
“There’s a key. At the most, that makes it trespassing.”
“No concerns about security cameras?”
“If they have a camera, they’ll get a picture of a guy in a ski mask.”
“Sounds like your decision’s been made.”
“Unless you can talk me out of it.”
“I said it all at Abelard’s. There’s a hole in your hypothesis the size of an elephant’s anus. It’s called ‘motive.’ You’re claiming that a major law-enforcement figure and his deputy are running around killing people for no goddamn reason. The thing is, they’d need one giant motherfucker of a reason to justify that murder spree. And that vague crap about all the victims being potential threats to Beckert’s political ambitions doesn’t cut it.”
