by John Verdon
“Guest lecturer, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, I do it from time to time. A special seminar on undercover work.”
“He teaches a course in lying,” said Madeleine.
The Meekers laughed uneasily. George polished off his Barolo.
“I teach the good guys how to lie to the bad guys so the bad guys tell the good guys what we need to know.”
“That’s a way of putting it,” said Madeleine.
“You must have some great stories,” said Peggy.
“George,” said Madeleine, stepping between Peggy and Gurney, “let me refill your glass.” He handed it to her, and she retreated to the sink island. “It must be a very nice feeling to have your sons following in your footsteps.”
“Well … not entirely in my footsteps. Biology, yes, in a general way, but so far no interest expressed by any of them in entomology, much less my own specialty of arachnology. On the contrary—”
“Now, if I remember rightly,” Peggy interrupted, “you folks have a son?”
“David has a son,” said Madeleine, stepping back to the sink island, pouring herself a pinot grigio.
“Ah. Yes. His name’s on the tip of my tongue—something with an L, or was it a K?”
“Kyle,” said Gurney, as though it were a word he rarely pronounced.
“He’s on Wall Street, right?”
“Was on Wall Street. Now he’s in law school.”
“Casualty of the bursting bubble?” asked George.
“More or less.”
“Classic disaster,” intoned George with intellectual disdain. “House of cards. Million-dollar mortgages being handed out like lollipops to three-year-olds. Moguls and bigwigs leaping from the towers of high finance. Bloody big bankers dug their own graves. Only bad thing is that our government in its infinite wisdom decided to resurrect the idiot bastards—bring them back to life with our tax money. Should have let the scum-of-the-earth CEOs rot in hell!”
“Bravo, George!” said Madeleine, raising her glass.
Peggy shot him an icy glance. “I’m sure he’s not including your son among the evildoers.”
Madeleine smiled at George. “You were starting to say something about your sons’ careers in biology?”
“Oh, yes. Well, no, actually, I was about to say that the oldest not only has no interest in arachnology, he claims to suffer from arachnophobia.” He said this as though it were the equivalent of apple pie–phobia. “And that’s not all, he even—”
“For Godsake, don’t get George talking about spiders,” said Peggy, interrupting him for the second time. “I realize that they’re the most fascinating creatures on earth, endlessly beneficial, and so forth and so on. But right now I would much rather hear about Dave’s murder case than the Peruvian orb weaver.”
“My lonely little vote would be for the orb weaver. But I guess that can wait,” said Madeleine, taking a long sip of her wine. “Why don’t you folks all sit by the fireplace and exhaust the subject of beheadings while I put a few finishing touches on dinner. It’ll just be a few minutes.”
“Can I help?” Peggy asked. She looked liked she was trying to assess Madeleine’s tone.
“No, everything is just about ready. Thanks, anyway.”
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
After another querying look, she retreated with the two men to three overstuffed chairs at the other end of the room. “Okay,” she said to Gurney as soon as they were settled, “tell us the story.”
By the time Madeleine called them to the table for dinner, it was getting close to six o’clock and Gurney had related a reasonably complete history of the case to date, including its twists and open ends. His narrative had been dramatic without being gory, suggestive of possible sexual entanglements without implying that they were the essence of the case, and as coherent as the facts permitted. The Meekers had been attentive, listening with care and saying nothing.
At the table—halfway into the spinach, walnut, and Stilton salad—the comments and questions started coming, mostly from Peggy.
“So if Flores was gay, the motive for killing the bride would be jealousy. But the method sounds psychotic. Is it believable that one of the top psychiatrists in the world wouldn’t have noticed that the man living on his property was stark raving mad—capable of chopping someone’s head off?”
“And if Flores was straight,” said Gurney, “the jealousy motive would disappear, but we’d still have the ‘stark raving mad’ part and the problem of Ashton’s not noticing it.”
Peggy leaned forward in her chair, gesturing with her fork. “Of course, his being straight works with the scenario that he was having an affair with the Muller woman, and their running off together, but then we’re left with the ‘stark raving mad’ thing as the only explanation for killing the bride.”
“Plus,” said Gurney, “you’d have both Scott Ashton and Kiki Muller both failing to notice that Flores is bonkers. And there’s another problem. What woman would willingly run off with a man who’d just cut off another woman’s head?”
Peggy gave a little shudder. “I can’t imagine that.”
Madeleine spoke with a bored sigh. “Didn’t seem to bother the wives of Henry VIII.”
There was a momentary silence, broken by another of George’s guffaws.
“I guess there might be a difference,” ventured Peggy, “between the king of England and a Mexican gardener.”
Madeleine, studying one of the walnuts in her salad, didn’t reply.
George stepped into the open space in the conversation. “What about the fellow you were telling us about with the toy trains, ‘Adeste Fideles,’ and so on? Suppose he killed them all.”
Peggy screwed up her face. “What are you talking about, George? All who?”
“It’s a possibility, isn’t it? Suppose his wife was a bit of a slut and jumped into bed with the Mexican. And maybe the bride was a bit of a slut, and she’d jumped in bed with the Mexican, too. Maybe Mr. Muller just decided to kill them all—good riddance to bad rubbish, two sluts and their cheap little Romeo.”
“My God, George!” cried Peggy. “You sound pleased with what happened to the victims.”
“All victims are not necessarily innocent.”
“George—”
“Why did he leave the machete in the woods?” Madeleine cut in.
After a pause during which everyone looked at her, Gurney asked, “Is it the trail that bothers you? The scent trail going only so far, then stopping?”
“It bothers me that the machete was left in the woods for no apparent reason. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Actually,” said Gurney, “that’s a hell of a good point. Let’s look closer at that.”
“Actually, let’s not.” Madeleine’s voice was controlled but rising. “I’m sorry I even mentioned it. In fact, this whole discussion is giving me indigestion. Can we please talk about something else?” There was an awkward silence around the table. “George, tell us about your favorite spider. I bet you have a favorite.”
“Oh … I couldn’t say.” He looked a bit disoriented, not quite here or there.
“Come on, George.”
“You heard—I’ve been warned off that subject.”
Peggy glanced around nervously. “Go ahead, George. It’s perfectly all right.”
Now everyone was looking at George. The attention seemed to please him. It was easy to imagine the man at the front of a college lecture hall—Professor Meeker, respected entomologist, font of wisdom and pertinent anecdotes.
Careful, Gurney, any judgment of him may apply to you. What are you doing at that police academy, anyway?
George raised his chin proudly. “Jumpers,” he said.
Madeleine’s eyes widened. “Jumping … spiders?”
“Yes.”
“Do they really jump?”
“Indeed they do. They can jump fifty times their body length. That’s the same as a six-foot man jumping the length of
a football field, and the amazing thing is, they have practically no leg muscles. So how, you may ask, do they manage so prodigious a leap? With hydraulic pumps! Valves in their legs release spurts of pressurized blood, causing the legs to extend and propel them into the air. Imagine a deadly predator dropping out of nowhere onto its prey without warning. No hope of escape.” Meeker’s eyes sparkled. Not unlike a proud parent.
The parent thought made Gurney queasy.
“And then, of course,” Meeker went on excitedly, “there’s the black widow—a truly elegant killing machine. A creature lethal to adversaries a thousand times its size.”
“A creature,” said Peggy, coming to life, “that fits Scott Ashton’s definition of perfection.”
Madeleine gave her a quizzical look.
“I’m referring to Scott Ashton’s infamous book that treats empathy—concern for the welfare and feelings of others—as a defect, an imperfection in the human boundary system. The black widow spider, with its nasty habit of killing and eating its mate after intercourse, would probably be his idea of perfection. The perfection of the sociopath.”
“But since he wrote a second book attacking his first book,” said Gurney, “it’s hard to know what he really thinks of sociopaths or black widows—or anything, for that matter.”
Madeleine’s quizzical look at Peggy sharpened. “This is the man you said is a big authority on treating sexual-abuse victims?”
“Yes, but … not exactly. He doesn’t treat the victims. He treats the abusers.”
Madeleine’s expression shifted, as though she considered this bit of information of great significance.
For Gurney all it did was add to the list of questions he wanted to ask Ashton in the morning. And that reminded him of another open question, one he decided to ask his guests: “Does the name Edward Vallory ring a bell with either of you?”
At 10:45 P.M., just as Gurney finally dozed off, his cell phone rang on the night table on Madeleine’s side of the bed. He heard it ring, heard her answering it, heard her say, “I’ll see if he’s awake.” Then she tapped him on the arm and held the phone toward him until he sat up and took it.
It was Ashton’s smooth baritone, tightened slightly by anxiety. “Sorry to bother you, but this may be important. I received a text message a little while ago. The caller ID number indicates it came from Hector’s phone—one of those prepaid things. He got it about a year ago and gave me the number. But this text message—I believe it’s exactly the same as the one Jillian received on our wedding day: ‘For all the reasons I have written. Edward Vallory.’ I called the BCI office and reported it, and I wanted you to know about it as well.” He paused, cleared his throat nervously. “Do you think it means that Hector might be coming back?”
Gurney was not a man who revered the mystique of coincidence. In this case, however, the intrusion of the name Edward Vallory so soon after his bringing it up himself gave him an unpleasant chill.
It took over an hour for him to get back to sleep.
Chapter 23
Leverage
“Just two weeks,” said Gurney as he brought his coffee to the breakfast table.
“Hmm.” Madeleine was very articulate with her little sounds. This one conveyed that she understood what he was saying but had no desire to discuss the subject at the moment. In the early-morning light, she was somehow managing to read Crime and Punishment for an upcoming meeting of her book club.
“Just two weeks. That’s what I’m giving it.”
“That’s what you’ve decided?” she asked, without looking up.
“I don’t see why it should be such a huge problem.”
She partially closed the book, leaving her finger between the pages she was reading, tilted her head a little to the side, and gazed at him. “Exactly how huge a problem do you think it is?”
“Jesus, I’m not a mind reader. Forget it, erase that, that was a stupid comment. What I’m saying is, I’m limiting my involvement in this Perry business to a two-week window. No matter what happens, that’s it.” He put his coffee cup on the table, sat down across from her. “Look, I’m probably not making much sense here. But I really do understand your concern. I know what you went through last year.”
“Do you?”
He closed his eyes. “I think so. I really do. And it won’t happen again.”
The fact was, he’d almost been killed at the end of the last investigation he’d volunteered his way into. A full year into his retirement, he’d come closer to his own death than he ever had in over twenty years as an NYPD homicide detective. He thought it was probably that aspect of it that had hit Madeleine the hardest—not just the danger, but that it had actually increased at the very point in their lives when she’d imagined that it would go away.
A long silence passed between them.
She finally sighed, withdrew the finger she was using as a bookmark, and pushed the book away from her. “You know, Dave, what I want is not all that complicated. Or maybe it is. I’d thought when we left our careers behind we’d discover a different kind of life together.”
He smiled weakly. “All that damn asparagus is pretty different.”
“And your bulldozer is different. And my flower garden is different. But we seem to have trouble with the ‘life together’ part.”
“Don’t you think we’re together more now than when we were in the city?”
“I think we’re in the same house at the same time more often. But it’s obvious now that I was more willing to leave that other life behind us than you were. So that’s my mistake, thinking we were on the same page. My mistake,” she repeated, speaking softly with anger and sadness in her eyes.
He sat back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling. “A therapist once told me that an expectation is nothing but a resentment waiting to be born.” As soon as he said this, he wished he hadn’t. Jesus, he thought, if he’d been as clumsy in his undercover work as he was in speaking to his own wife, he’d have been sliced and diced a decade ago.
“Nothing but a resentment waiting to be born? Cute,” snapped Madeleine. “Very cute. What about hope? Did he have something equally clever and dismissive to say about hope?” The anger was moving from her eyes into her voice. “What about progress? Did he have anything to say about progress? Or closeness? What did he say about that?”
“Sorry,” Gurney said. “Just another stupid comment on my part. I seem to be full of them. Let me start over. All I wanted to say was that—”
She cut in, “That you’ve decided to sign on for a two-week tour of duty, working for a crazy woman, searching for a psychotic murderer?” She stared at him, apparently daring him to try restating the proposition in milder terms. “Okay, David. Fine. Two weeks. What can I say? You’re going to do what you’re going to do. And by the way, I know that what you do takes great strength, great courage, great honesty, and a superb mind. I really do know what a remarkable man you are. You truly are one in a million. I’m in awe of you, David. But you know what? I’d like to be a little less in awe of you and a little more with you. Do you think that would be possible? That’s all I want to know. Do you think we could be a little bit closer?”
His mind went nearly blank.
Then he muttered softly, “God, Maddie, I hope so.”
It started to rain on the way to Tambury. An intermittent-wiper sort of rain, more like a light drizzle. Gurney stopped along the way in Dillweed for a second cup of coffee—not at a gas station but at Abelard’s organic-produce market, where the coffee was freshly ground, freshly made, and very good.
He sat with the coffee in his parked car in front of the market, thumbing through the case notes, finding the page he wanted: a record supplied by the phone company of the dates and times of text-message exchanges between the cell phones of Jillian Perry and Hector Flores during the three weeks leading up to the murder—thirteen from Flores to Perry, twelve from Perry to Flores. On a separate sheet, stapled to the record, was a report from the state police com
puter lab, indicating that all messages had been deleted from Jillian Perry’s phone, with the exception of the final “Edward Vallory” message, received approximately one hour prior to the fourteen-minute window within which the murder was committed. The report also noted the fact that the phone company retains date, duration, originating and receiving cell numbers, and transmitting-cell-tower data on all calls, but no content data. So once those texts had been erased from Jillian’s phone, there was no method of retrieval, unless Hector had saved the message strings on his phone and its memory could be accessed in the future—not possibilities to be optimistic about.
Gurney put the sheets back into their folder, finished his coffee, and continued on through the gray, wet morning to his eight-thirty appointment with Scott Ashton.
The door swung open before Gurney had a chance to knock. Ashton was dressed as before in expensively casual clothes, the sort he might have ordered from a catalog with a Cotswold stone house on the cover.
“Come in, let’s get to it,” he said with a perfunctory smile. “We don’t have a great deal of time.” He led the way through a large center hall into a sitting room on the right that seemed to have been furnished in an earlier century. The upholstered chairs and settees were mostly Queen Anne. The tables, the mantel above the fireplace, the chair legs, and other wood surfaces had an ancient, softly lustrous patina.
Among the predictable grace notes one might expect to find in an upper-class English-style country home, there was one startling discordance. On the wall above the dark chestnut mantel hung a very large framed photograph in the horizontal orientation and the approximate size of a two-page spread in the magazine section of the Sunday Times.
Then Gurney realized why that particular size comparison came readily to mind: The photograph was one he’d actually seen in that very publication. It fit into that overpriced-fashion-ad genre in which the models gaze at each other or at the world in general with an arrogant, druggy sensuality. Even among its kind, however, this example was striking in its communication of something profoundly unwell. The composition consisted of two very young women, surely not yet out of their teens, sprawled on what appeared to be a bedroom floor, eyeing each other’s body with a combination of exhaustion and insatiable sexual hunger. They were naked except for a couple of adroitly placed silk scarves, presumably the products of the fashion house sponsoring the ad.
