Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  Also by John Verdon

  Think of a Number

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by John Verdon

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are

  registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Verdon, John.

  Shut your eyes tight / by John Verdon.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Detectives—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. I. Title. PS3622.E736S57 2011

  813’.6—dc22 2010053589

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71791-7

  Jacket design by Superfantastic

  v3.1

  For Naomi

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: The Perfect Solution

  Part One: The Mexican Gardener

  Chapter 1: Life in the Country

  Chapter 2: The Butchered Bride

  Chapter 3: Elliptical Orbits

  Chapter 4: The Art of Deception

  Chapter 5: The Eureka Fallacy

  Chapter 6: Home

  Chapter 7: Val Perry

  Chapter 8: The Murder Movie

  Chapter 9: The View from the Doorway

  Chapter 10: The Only Way It Could Have Been Done

  Chapter 11: The Evidence on the Table

  Chapter 12: Peculiar Facts

  Chapter 13: Weirder and Twistier

  Chapter 14: The Lay of the Land

  Chapter 15: Black and White

  Chapter 16: A Sense of Order and Purpose

  Chapter 17: In the Shadow of the Bitch

  Chapter 18: Ashton’s Neighbors

  Chapter 19: Frankenstein

  Chapter 20: Ashton’s Manor

  Chapter 21: A Word to the Wise

  Chapter 22: Spider Man

  Chapter 23: Leverage

  Chapter 24: A Patient Spider

  Chapter 25: Enter Salome, Dancing

  Part Two: Salome’s Executioner

  Chapter 26: The Verisimilitude of Incongruity

  Chapter 27: A Lot to Think About

  Chapter 28: A Different Perspective

  Chapter 29: Among the Missing

  Chapter 30: Alessandro’s Models

  Chapter 31: Scottie Dogs

  Chapter 32: An Intractable Madness

  Chapter 33: A Simple Reversal

  Chapter 34: Ashton Uneasy

  Chapter 35: A Hell of a Lot More

  Chapter 36: Into the Heart of Darkness

  Chapter 37: The Deer

  Chapter 38: The Eyes of Peter Piggert

  Chapter 39: Real, Unreal, Crazy, Not Crazy

  Chapter 40: A Faint Yipping

  Chapter 41: The Big Day

  Chapter 42: The Magic Mr. Jykynstyl

  Part Three: Fatal Oversight

  Chapter 43: Waking Up

  Chapter 44: Déjà Vu

  Chapter 45: A Curious Dog

  Chapter 46: Nothing on Paper

  Chapter 47: An Impossible Situation

  Chapter 48: Perfect Memories

  Chapter 49: Little Boys

  Chapter 50: Loose Cannon

  Chapter 51: Total Confusion

  Chapter 52: The Flores Factor

  Chapter 53: Game Changer

  Chapter 54: Unpleasant Stories

  Chapter 55: Tirana Magdalena Skard

  Chapter 56: A Matter of Control

  Chapter 57: The Plan

  Chapter 58: Into Action

  Chapter 59: Undercover

  Chapter 60: Dancing with the Devil

  Chapter 61: Homeward Bound

  Chapter 62: Tremors

  Chapter 63: Just Like Ashton’s Cottage

  Chapter 64: A Very Strange Day

  Chapter 65: Message from the Monster

  Chapter 66: The Monstrous Truth, According to Ballston

  Chapter 67: A Mother’s Love

  Chapter 68: Buena Vista Trail

  Chapter 69: Blind Alleys

  Chapter 70: In Plain Sight

  Chapter 71: For All the Reasons I Have Written

  Chapter 72: One More Layer

  Chapter 73: Gate of Heaven

  Chapter 74: Beyond All Reason

  Chapter 75: Shut Your Eyes Tight

  Chapter 76: Another Layer

  Chapter 77: The Final Episode

  Chapter 78: All He Had Left

  Chapter 79: The Last Bullet

  Chapter 80: The Light of the World

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  The perfect solution

  He stood in front of the mirror and smiled with deep satisfaction at his own smiling reflection. He could not at that moment have been more pleased with himself, with his life, with his intelligence—no, it was more than that, more than mere intelligence. His mental status could more accurately be described as a profound understanding of everything. That was precisely what it was—a profound understanding of everything, an understanding that went far beyond the normal range of human wisdom. He watched the smile on his face in the mirror stretching wider at the aptness of the phrase, which he had italicized in his mind as he thought it. Internally he could feel—literally feel—the power of his insight into all things human. Externally, the course of events was proof of it.

  First of all, to put it in the simplest terms, he had not been caught. Almost twenty-four hours had passed, almost to the minute now, and in that nearly complete revolution of the earth he had only grown safer. But that was predictable; he had taken care to ensure that there would be no trail to follow, no logic that could lead anyone to him. And in fact no one had come. No one had found him out. Therefore it was reasonable to conclude that his elimination of the presumptuous bitch had been a success in every way.

  Everything had gone according to plan, smoothly, conclusively—yes, conclusively was an excellent word for it. Everything occurred as anticipated, no stumbles, no surprises … except for that sound. Cartilage? Must have been. What else?

  Such a minor thing, it made no sense that it would create such a lasting sensory impression. But perhaps the strength, the durability of the impression was simply the natural product of his preternatural sensitivity. Acuteness had its price.

  Surely that snickety little crunch would one day be as faint in his memory as the image of all that blood, which was already beginning to fade. It was important to keep things in perspective, to remember that all things pass. Every ripple in the pond eventually subsides.

  Part One

  The Mexican Gardener

  Chapter 1

  Life in the country

  There was a stillness in the September-morning air that was like the stillness in the heart of a gliding submarine, engines extinguished to elude the enemy’s listening devices. The whole landscape was held motionless in the invisible grip of a vast calm, the calm before a storm, a calm as deep and unpredictable as the ocean.

  It had been a strangely subdued summer, the semi-drought slowly draining the life out of the grass and trees. Now the leaves were fading from green to tan and had already begun to drop silently from the branches of the maples and beeches, offering little prospect of a colorful autumn.

  Dave Gurney stood ju
st inside the French doors of his farm-style kitchen, looking out over the garden and the mowed lawn that separated the big house from the overgrown pasture that sloped down to the pond and the old red barn. He was vaguely uncomfortable and unfocused, his attention drifting between the asparagus patch at the end of the garden and the small yellow bulldozer beside the barn. He sipped sourly at his morning coffee, which was losing its warmth in the dry air.

  To manure or not to manure—that was the asparagus question. Or at least it was the first question. If the answer turned out to be yes, that would raise a second question: bulk or bagged? Fertilizer, he had been informed by various websites to which he’d been directed by Madeleine, was the key to success with asparagus, but whether he needed to supplement last spring’s application with a fresh load now was not entirely clear.

  He’d been trying, at least halfheartedly, for their two years in the Catskills to immerse himself in these house-and-garden issues that Madeleine had taken up with instant enthusiasm, but always nibbling at his efforts were the disturbing termites of buyer’s remorse—remorse not so much at the purchase of that specific house on its fifty scenic acres, which he continued to view as a good investment, but at the underlying life-changing decision to leave the NYPD and take his pension at the age of forty-six. The nagging question was, had he traded in his first-class detective’s shield for the horticultural duties of a would-be country squire too soon?

  Certain ominous events suggested that he had. Since relocating to their pastoral paradise, he had developed a transient tic in his left eyelid. To his chagrin and Madeleine’s distress, he had started smoking again sporadically after fifteen years of abstinence. And, of course, there was the elephant in the room—his decision to involve himself the previous autumn, a year into his supposed retirement, in the horrific Mellery murder case.

  He’d barely survived that experience, had even endangered Madeleine in the process, and in the moment of clarity that a close encounter with death often provides, he had for a while felt motivated to devote himself fully to the simple pleasures of their new rural life. But there’s a funny thing about a crystal-clear image of the way you ought to live. If you don’t actively hang on to it every day, the vision rapidly fades. A moment of grace is only a moment of grace. Unembraced, it soon becomes a kind of ghost, a pale retinal image receding out of reach like the memory of a dream, receding until it becomes eventually no more than a discordant note in the undertone of your life.

  Understanding this process, Gurney discovered, does not provide a magic key to reversing it—with the result that a kind of halfheartedness was the best attitude toward the bucolic life that he could muster. It was an attitude that put him out of sync with his wife. It also made him wonder whether anyone could ever really change or, more to the point, whether he could ever change. In his darker moments, he was disheartened by the arthritic rigidity of his own way of thinking, his own way of being.

  The bulldozer situation was a good example. He’d bought a small, old, used one six months earlier, describing it to Madeleine as a practical tool appropriate to their proprietorship of fifty acres of woods and meadows and a quarter-mile-long dirt driveway. He saw it as a means of making necessary landscaping repairs and positive improvements—a good and useful thing. She seemed to see it from the beginning, however, not as a vehicle promising his greater involvement in their new life but as a noisy, diesel-stinking symbol of his discontent—his dissatisfaction with their environment, his unhappiness with their move from the city to the mountains, his control freak’s mania for bulldozing an unacceptable new world into the shape of his own brain. She’d articulated her objection only once, and briefly at that: “Why can’t you just accept all this around us as a gift, an incredibly beautiful gift, and stop trying to fix it?”

  As he stood at the glass doors, uncomfortably recalling her comment, hearing its gently exasperated tone in his mind’s ear, her actual voice intruded from somewhere behind him.

  “Any chance you’ll get to my bike brakes before tomorrow?”

  “I said I would.” He took another sip of his coffee and winced. It was unpleasantly cold. He glanced at the old regulator clock over the pine sideboard. He had nearly an hour free before he had to leave to deliver one of his occasional guest lectures at the state police academy in Albany.

  “You should come with me one of these days,” she said, as though the idea had just occurred to her.

  “I will,” he said—his usual reply to her periodic suggestions that he join her on one of her bike rides through the rolling farmland and forest that constituted most of the western Catskills. He turned toward her. She was standing in the doorway of the dining area in worn tights, a baggy sweatshirt, and a paint-stained baseball hat. Suddenly he couldn’t help smiling.

  “What?” she said, cocking her head.

  “Nothing.” Sometimes her presence was so instantly charming that it emptied his mind of every tangled, negative thought. She was that rare creature: a very beautiful woman who seemed to care very little about how she looked. She came over and stood next to him, surveying the outdoors.

  “The deer have been at the birdseed,” she said, sounding more amused than annoyed.

  Across the lawn three shepherd’s-crook finch feeders had been tugged far out of plumb. Gazing at them, he realized that he shared, at least to some extent, Madeleine’s benign feelings toward the deer and whatever minor damage they caused—which seemed peculiar, since his feelings were entirely different from hers concerning the depredations of the squirrels who even now were consuming the seed the deer had been unable to extract from the bottoms of the feeders. Twitchy, quick, aggressive in their movements, they seemed motivated by an obsessive rodent hunger, an avariciously concentrated desire to consume every available speck of food.

  His smile evaporating, Gurney watched them with a low-level edginess that in his more objective moments he suspected was becoming his reflexive reaction to too many things—an edginess that arose from and highlighted the fault lines in his marriage. Madeleine would describe the squirrels as fascinating, clever, resourceful, awe-inspiring in their energy and determination. She seemed to love them as she loved most things in life. He, on the other hand, wanted to shoot them.

  Well, not shoot them, exactly, not actually kill or maim them, but maybe thwack them with an air pistol hard enough to knock them off the finch feeders and send them fleeing into the woods where they belonged. Killing was not a solution that ever appealed to him. In all his years in the NYPD, in all his years as a homicide detective, in twenty-five years of dealing with violent men in a violent city, he had never drawn his gun, had hardly touched it outside a firing range, and he had no desire to start now. Whatever it was that had drawn him to police work, that had wed him to the job for so many years, it surely wasn’t the appeal of a gun or the deceptively simple solution it offers.

  He became aware that Madeleine was watching him with that curious, appraising look of hers—probably guessing from the tightness in his jaw his thoughts about the squirrels. In response to her apparent clairvoyance, he wanted to say something that would justify his hostility to the fluffy-tailed rats, but the ringing of the phone intervened—in fact, the ringing of two phones intervened simultaneously, the wired phone in the den and his own cell phone on the kitchen sideboard. Madeleine headed for the den. Gurney picked up the cell.

  Chapter 2

  The butchered bride

  Jack Hardwick was a nasty, abrasive, watery-eyed cynic who drank too much and viewed just about everything in life as a sour joke. He had few enthusiastic admirers and did not readily inspire trust. Gurney was convinced that if all of Hardwick’s questionable motives were removed, he wouldn’t have any motives left.

  But Gurney also considered him one of the smartest, most insightful detectives he’d ever worked with. So when he put the phone to his ear and heard that unmistakable sandpaper voice, it generated some mixed feelings.

  “Davey boy!”

  Gurney
winced. He was not a Davey-boyish kind of guy, never would be, which he assumed was the precise reason Hardwick had chosen that particular sobriquet.

  “What can I do for you, Jack?”

  The man’s braying laugh was as annoying and irrelevant as ever. “When we were working on the Mellery case, you used to brag about getting up with the chickens. Just thought I’d call and see if it was true.”

  There was a certain amount of banter one always had to endure before Hardwick would deign to get to the issue at hand.

  “What do you want, Jack?”

  “You got any actual live chickens on that farm of yours, running around clucking and shitting, or is that ‘up with the chickens’ just some kind of folksy saying?”