by John Verdon
“Yeah?”
Hardwick was squinting across the room at the farthest corner of the molding. “Seems that back before he was arrested, Steck used to have a porno website, and Starbuck wasn’t his only alias. His website, which featured underage girls, was called Sandy’s Den.”
Gurney waited for Hardwick’s gaze to return to him before replying. “You’re struck by the possibility that the name Sandy could be a nickname for Alessandro?”
Hardwick smiled. “Something like that.”
“World is full of meaningless coincidences, Jack.”
Hardwick nodded. He stood up from the table and looked out the window. “Cruiser’s here. Like I said, full coverage for two twenty-fours, minimum. After that, we’ll see. You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“She going to be okay?”
“Yeah.”
“I got to get home and get some sleep. I’ll call you later.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Jack.”
Hardwick hesitated. “You still have your weapon from the job?”
“No. Never liked carrying it. Didn’t even like having it around.”
“Well … considering the situation … you might want to pick up a shotgun.”
For a long while after Hardwick’s taillights receded down the pasture lane, Gurney sat alone at the table—absorbing the shock of the doll, contemplating the shifting landscape of the case.
It was conceivable, of course, that the names Sandy and Alessandro had each popped up with coincidental insignificance, but that was the definition of wishful thinking. A realistic man would have to accept that Sandy, the former photographer of the pornographic website, might very well be Alessandro, the current photographer of the near-pornographic Karnala ads—and that both names were aliases of the sex criminal Saul Steck.
But who was Hector Flores?
And why was Jillian Perry beheaded?
And Kiki Muller?
Had the women discovered something about Karnala? About Steck? About Flores himself?
And why had Steck drugged him? In order to photograph him with his “daughters”? To threaten him with public embarrassment, or worse? To have the leverage to control his input into the investigation? To blackmail him into providing inside information into its progress?
Or was the purpose of the drugging, like that of the decapitated doll, to demonstrate Gurney’s accessibility and vulnerability? To frighten him into backing away?
Or were both events prompted by something even sicker? Were they both part of a control freak’s game, an exciting way of demonstrating power and dominance? Something he did to prove he could do it? Something he did for a thrill?
Gurney’s hands were cold. He rubbed them hard against his thighs in an effort to warm them. It didn’t seem to be working very well. He started to shiver. He stood, tried rubbing his hands on his chest and upper arms, tried walking back and forth. He walked to the far end of the room, where sometimes the iron woodstove held some residual warmth from an earlier fire. But the dusty black metal was colder than his hand, and touching it made him shiver again.
He heard the click of the lamp switch in the bedroom, followed shortly by the squeak of the bathroom door. He’d talk to Madeleine, calm her nerves—after he managed to calm himself. He looked out the window, was reassured by the sight of the police cruiser by the side door.
He took the deepest breath he could, exhaled slowly. Slow, controlled breathing. Deliberation, determination. Positive thoughts. Thoughts of achievement and competence.
He reminded himself that the fingerprint trail that led to Steck existed because of his personal initiative in retrieving the glass under difficult circumstances.
That discovery had also connected the “Jykynstyl” drugging mystery with the Mapleshade murder-and-disappearance mysteries. And since he had a foot planted in each area, he was in a unique position to use one situation to illuminate the other.
His original insights and prodding had pulled the investigation out of the ditch it had been mired in—the search for an insane Mexican laborer—and put it on a new path.
His urging that all former Mapleshade graduates be contacted led not only to the discovery that the whereabouts of an extraordinary number of them were unknown but also to knowledge of the fate of Melanie Strum.
His judgment regarding the likely significance of Karnala had shaken loose a crazed revelation from Jordan Ballston that could well lead to a final solution.
Even the killer’s devotion of time, energy, and resources to the apparent goal of halting his efforts proved that he was on the right track.
He heard the bathroom door hinge squeak again and twenty seconds later the click of the lamp being switched off. Perhaps now that he had his feet on the ground, now that the chill was leaving his fingers, he could talk to Madeleine. But first he took the precaution of locking the side door not only with the knob lock but also with the dead bolt they never used. Then he latched all the ground-floor windows.
He went into the bedroom in what he considered to be a good frame of mind. He approached the bed in the dark. “Maddie?”
“You bastard!”
He’d expected her to be in bed, in front of him, but her voice, shocking in its anger, came from the far corner of the room.
“What?”
“What have you done?” Her voice, hardly above a whisper, was furious.
“Done? What …?”
“This is my home. This is my sanctuary.”
“Yes?”
“Yes? Yes? How could you? How could you bring this horror into my home?”
Gurney was rendered speechless by the question and by its intensity. He felt his way along the edge of the bed and turned on the lamp.
The antique rocker that was usually near the foot of the bed had been pushed into the corner farthest from the windows. Madeleine was sitting in it, still fully dressed, her knees pulled up in front of her body. Gurney was startled first by the raw emotion in her eyes, then by the sharp pair of scissors in each of her clenched fists.
He’d had much training and practice in the technique of talking an overwrought person down into a calmer state of mind, but none of it seemed appropriate at that moment. He sat on the corner of the bed closest to her.
“Someone invaded my home. Why, David? Why did they do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you do! You know exactly what’s happening.”
He watched her, watched the scissors. Her knuckles were white.
“You’re supposed to protect us,” she went on in a trembling whisper. “Protect our home, make it safe. But you’ve done the opposite. The opposite. You’ve let horrible people come into our lives, come into our home. MY HOME!” she shouted at him, her voice breaking. “YOU LET MONSTERS INTO MY HOME!”
Gurney had never seen this kind of rage in her before. He said nothing. He had no words in his mind, not even thoughts. He hardly moved, hardly took a breath. The emotional explosion seemed to clear the room, the world, of all other realities. He waited. No other option occurred to him.
After a while, he wasn’t sure how long, she said, “I can’t believe what you’ve done.”
“This wasn’t my intention.” His voice sounded strange to him. Small.
She made a sound that might have been mistaken for laughter but sounded to him more like a brief convulsion in her lungs. “That horrible mug-shot art—that was the beginning. Pictures of the most disgusting monsters on earth. But that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough having them in our computer, having them on the screen staring at us.”
“Maddie, I promise you—whoever got into our house, I’ll find them. I’ll put an end to them. This will never happen again.”
She shook her head. “It’s too late. Don’t you see what you’ve done?”
“I see that war has been declared. We’ve been attacked.”
“No! You—don’t you see what you’ve done?”
“What I did is kick a rattlesnake out fro
m under a rock.”
“You brought this into our lives.”
He said nothing, just bowed his head.
“We moved to the country. To a beautiful place. Lilacs and apple blossoms. A pond.”
“Maddie, I promise you, I’ll kill the snake.”
She seemed not to be listening. “Don’t you see what you’ve done?” She gestured slowly with one of her scissors to the dark window beside him. “Those woods, the woods where I take my walks, he was hiding in those woods, watching me.”
“What makes you think you were being watched?”
“God, it’s obvious! He put that hideous thing in the room I work in, the room I read in, the room with my favorite window, the window I sit next to with my knitting. The room overlooking the woods. He knew it was a room I used. If he’d put that thing in the spare bedroom across the hall, I might not have found it for a month. So he knew. He saw me in the window. And the only way he could see me in the window was from the woods.” She paused, stared at him accusingly. “You see what I mean, David? You’ve destroyed my woods. How can I ever walk out there again?”
“I’ll kill the snake. It’ll be all right.”
“Until you kick the next one out from under its rock.” She shook her head and sighed. “I can’t believe what you’ve done to the most beautiful place in the world.”
It seemed to Gurney that once in a while, unpredictably, the elements of an otherwise indifferent universe conspired to produce in him an eerie frisson, and so it was that at that very moment behind the farmhouse, beyond the high pasture, out on the northern ridge, the coyotes began to howl.
Madeleine closed her eyes and lowered her knees. She rested her fists on her lap and loosened her grip on the two scissors enough for the blood to flow back into her knuckles. She tilted her head back against the headrest of the chair. Her mouth relaxed. It was as though the howling of the coyotes, weird and unsettling to her at other times, touched her that night in an entirely different way.
As the first gray swath of dawn appeared in the bedroom’s east-facing window, she fell asleep. After a while Gurney took the scissors from her hands and switched off the light.
Chapter 64
A very strange day
As the yellow rays of the rising sun slanted across the pasture, Gurney sat at the breakfast table drinking a second cup of coffee. A few minutes earlier, he’d watched the changing of the guard as the day-shift trooper cruiser arrived to replace the one summoned by Hardwick. He’d gone out to offer the new trooper breakfast, but the young man had declined with crisp, military politeness. “Thank you, sir, but I’ve already had breakfast, sir.”
A dull sciatic ache had settled in Gurney’s left leg, as he grappled with questions whose resolutions were eluding his grasp like slippery fish.
Should he ask Hardwick to get him a copy of the mug shot that must have been taken at the time of Saul Steck’s arrest—so he could be sure there was no mistake about the fingerprints—or might the paper trail generated between BCI and the original prosecuting jurisdiction raise too many questions?
Should he ask Hardwick, or maybe one of his old partners at the NYPD, to check the city tax rolls for ownership information on the brownstone, or might even that simple exercise raise a chain of sticky questions?
Was there any reason to doubt Sonya’s claim to have been as thoroughly duped by the “Jykynstyl” story as he was—apart from the fact that she struck Gurney as the sort of woman not likely to be duped by anyone?
Should he get a shotgun for the house, or would Madeleine be more upset than reassured by its presence?
Should they move out, live in a hotel until the case was resolved? But suppose it wasn’t resolved for weeks, or months, or ever?
Should he follow up with Darryl Becker on the status of the search for Ballston’s boat?
Should he follow up with BCI on the progress of the calls being made to the Mapleshade graduates and their families?
Was everything that had happened—from the arrival of Hector Flores in Tambury through the murders of Jillian and Kiki and the disappearances of all those girls, right up to the complex brownstone deception, the Ballston sex murders, and the beheaded doll—was all that the product of a single mind? And if so, was the driving force of that mind a practical criminal enterprise or a psychotic mania?
Most disturbingly to Gurney, why was he finding these knots so difficult to untangle?
Even the simplest of questions—should he continue weighing alternatives, or return to bed and try to empty his mind, or busy himself physically—had become ensnared in a mental process that conjured an objection to every conclusion. Even the idea of taking a few ibuprofens for his aching sciatic nerve met with an unwillingness to go into the bedroom to get the bottle.
He stared out at the asparagus ferns, motionless in the dead morning calm. He felt disconnected, as though his customary attachments to the world had been broken. It was the same unmoored sense he’d had when his first wife announced her intention to divorce him, and years later when little Danny was killed, and again when his own father died. And now …
And now that Madeleine …
His eyes filled with tears. And as his sight grew blurry, he had the first perfectly clear thought he’d had in a long time. It was so simple. He would quit the case.
The purity and rightness of the decision was reflected in an immediate feeling of freedom, an immediate impulse to action.
He went into the den and called Val Perry.
He got her voice mail, was tempted to leave his resignation message, but felt that doing it that way was too impersonal, too avoidant. So he left a message saying only that he needed to speak to her as soon as possible. Then he got a glass of water, went into the bedroom, and took three ibuprofens.
Madeleine had moved from the rocking chair to the bed. She was still dressed, lying on top of the spread rather than under it, but she was sleeping peacefully. He lay down next to her.
When he awoke at noon, she was no longer there.
He felt a small stab of fear, relieved a moment later by the sound of the kitchen sink running. He went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, brushed his teeth, changed his clothes—did the things that would make it feel as much as possible like a new day.
When he went out to the kitchen, Madeleine was transferring some soup from a large pot to a plastic storage container. She put the container in the refrigerator and the pot in the sink and dried her hands on a dish towel. Her expression told him nothing.
“I’ve made a decision,” he said.
She gave him a look that told him she knew what he was about to say.
“I’m backing out of the case.”
She folded the towel and hung it over the edge of the dish drainer. “Why?”
“Because of everything that’s happened.”
She studied him for a few seconds, turned, and looked thoughtfully out the window nearest the sink.
“I left a message for Val Perry,” he said.
She turned back toward him. Her Mona Lisa smile came and went like a flicker of light. “It’s a beautiful day,” she said. “Do you want to come for a little walk?”
“Sure.” Normally he would have resisted the suggestion or, at best, accompanied her reluctantly, but at that moment he had no resistance in him.
It had turned into one of those soft September days when the temperature outside was the same as inside, and the only difference he sensed as they stepped out onto the little side porch was the leafy smell of the autumn air. The trooper sitting in his cruiser by the asparagus patch lowered his window and looked questioningly at them.
“Just stretching our legs,” said Gurney. “We’ll stay in sight.”
The young man nodded.
They followed the swath they kept mowed along the edge of the woods to prevent saplings from encroaching on the field. They circled slowly down to the bench by the pond, where they sat in silence.
It was quiet around the pond in S
eptember—unlike May and June, when the croaking frogs and screeching blackbirds maintained a constant territorial ruckus.
Madeleine took his hand in hers.
He lost track of time, a casualty of emotion.
At some point Madeleine said softly, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“My expectation … that everything should always be exactly the way I want it.”
“Maybe that’s the way everything should be. Maybe the way you want things is right.”
“I’d like to think so. But … I doubt that it’s true. And I don’t think you should give up the job you agreed to do.”
“I’ve already made up my mind.”
“Then you should change your mind.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a detective, and I have no right to demand that you should magically turn into something else.”
“I don’t know much about magic, but you have every right in the world to ask me to see things another way. And God knows I have no right at all to put anything ahead of your safety and happiness. Sometimes … I look at things I’ve done … situations I’ve created … dangers I didn’t pay enough attention to—and I think I must be insane.”
“Maybe sometimes,” she said. “Maybe just a little.” She looked out over the pond with a sad smile and squeezed his hand. The air was perfectly still. Even the tops of the tall cattail rushes were as motionless as a photograph. She closed her eyes, but the expression on her face grew more poignant. “I shouldn’t have attacked you the way I did, shouldn’t have said what I did, shouldn’t have called you a bastard. That’s the last thing on earth anyone should ever call you.” She opened her eyes and looked directly at him. “You’re a good man, David Gurney. An honest man. A brilliant man. An amazingly talented man. Maybe the best detective in the whole world.”
A nervous laugh burst from his throat. “God save us all!”
“I’m serious. Maybe the best detective in the whole world. So how can I tell you to stop being that, to be something else? It’s not fair. It’s not right.”
