Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  “Interesting questions. Keep going.”

  “The beheading itself seems to have been methodical and well planned, but also spontaneous and opportunistic.”

  “I don’t follow that.”

  “The arrangement—of the body—was precise. The cottage had very recently, perhaps that same morning, been scoured to eliminate any traces of the man who’d lived there. The escape route had been planned, and some way had been devised to create the scent-trail problem for the K-9 team. However it was that Flores managed to disappear, it had been carefully thought through. It has the feeling of a Mission: Impossible scheme that relies on split-second timing. But the actual circumstances would appear to defy any attempt at planning at all, much less perfect timing.”

  Kline cocked his head curiously. “How so?”

  “The video indicates that Jillian made her visit to the cottage on a kind of whim. A little bit before the scheduled wedding toast, she told Ashton she wanted to persuade Hector to join them. As I recall, Ashton told the Luntz couple—the police chief and his wife—about Jillian’s intentions. No one else seemed to be crazy about the idea, but I got the impression that Jillian pretty much did whatever she felt like doing. So on the one hand we have a meticulously premeditated murder that depended on perfect timing, and on the other hand, we have a set of circumstances completely beyond the murderer’s control. There’s something wrong with that picture.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Blatt, his rat nose twitching. “Flores could have set up everything ahead of time, had everything ready, then waited for his opportunity like a snake in a hole. Waited for the victim to come by, and … bam!”

  Gurney looked doubtful. “Problem is, Arlo, that would require Flores to get the cottage perfectly clean, almost sterile, prepare himself and his escape route, wear the clothes he intended to wear, have whatever he was taking with him at hand, have Kiki Muller equally prepared, and then … and then what? Sit in the cottage with a machete in his hand hoping that Jillian would pop in to invite him to the reception?”

  “You’re making it sound stupid, like it couldn’t happen,” said Blatt with hatred in his eyes. “But I think that’s exactly what happened.”

  Anderson pursed his lips. Rodriguez narrowed his eyes. Neither seemed willing to endorse their colleague’s view.

  Kline broke the awkward silence. “Anything else?”

  “Well,” said Gurney, “there’s the matter of the new elephant in the room—the missing graduates.”

  “Which,” said Blatt, “may not even be true. Maybe they just don’t want to be found. These girls are not what you’d call stable. And even if they’re, like, really missing, there’s no proof of any connection to the Perry case.”

  There was another silence, this time broken by Hardwick. “Arlo might be right. But if they are missing and there is a connection, there’s a good chance they’re all dead by now.”

  No one said anything. It was well known that, when young females went missing under suspicious circumstances with no further contact, the odds of their safe return were not high. And the fact that the girls in question had all started the same peculiar argument before disappearing definitely qualified as suspicious.

  Rodriguez looked pained and angry, looked like he was about to offer an objection, but before any words came out, Gurney’s cell phone rang. Gurney glanced at the ID on the screen and decided to answer it.

  It was Scott Ashton. “Since we last spoke, I made six more calls and got through to two more families. I’m continuing the calls, but … I wanted to let you know that both girls in the families I got through to left home after the same outrageous argument. One demanded a twenty-thousand-dollar Suzuki, the other a thirty-five-thousand-dollar Mustang. The parents said no. Both girls refused to say where they were going and insisted that nobody should try to contact them. I have no idea what it means, but obviously something strange is going on. And another distressing coincidence: They’d both posed for those Karnala Fashion ads.”

  “How long have they been missing?”

  “One for six months, one for nine months.”

  “Tell me something, Doctor. Are you ready to provide us with names, or do we get an immediate court order for your records?”

  All eyes in the room were on Gurney. Kline’s coffee was inches from his lips, but he seemed to have forgotten he was holding it.

  “What names do you want?” said Ashton in a beaten voice.

  “Let’s start with the names of the missing girls, plus the names of all the girls who were in the same classes.”

  “Fine.”

  “One other question: How did Jillian get her modeling job?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She never told you? Even though she gave you the photograph as a wedding present?”

  “She never told me.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “I did, but … Jillian wasn’t fond of questions.”

  Gurney felt an urge to shout, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? IS EVERYONE CONNECTED WITH THIS CASE OUT OF HIS GODDAMN MIND?

  Instead he said simply, “Thank you, Doctor. That’s it for now. You’ll be contacted by BCI for the relevant names and addresses.”

  As Gurney slipped the phone back into his pocket, Kline barked, “What on earth was that?”

  “Two more girls are missing. After having the same argument: One girl demanded that her parents buy her a Suzuki, the other a Mustang.” He turned toward Anderson. “Ashton is ready to provide BCI with the names of the missing girls, plus the names of their classmates. Just let him know what format you want the list in and how to send it to you.”

  “Fine, but we’re ignoring the point that nobody is legally missing, which means we can’t devote police resources to finding them. These are eighteen-year-old women, adults, who made apparently free decisions to leave home. The fact that they haven’t told their families how to reach them does not give us a legal basis for tracking them down.”

  Gurney got the impression that Lieutenant Anderson was coasting toward a Florida retirement and had a coaster’s fondness for inaction. It was a state of mind for which Gurney, a driven man in his police career, had little patience. “Then find a basis. Declare them all material witnesses to the Perry murder. Invent a basis. Do what you have to do. That’s the least of your problems.”

  Anderson looked riled enough to escalate the argument into something unpleasant. But before he could launch his reply, Kline interrupted. “This may seem a small point, Dave, but if you’re implying that these girls were following the directions of some third party—presumably Flores—who rehearsed them in the argument they were supposed to start with their parents, why is the make of car different from case to case?”

  “The simplest answer is that different cars might be necessary in order to achieve the same effect on families in different economic circumstances. Assuming that the purpose of the argument was to provide a credible excuse for the girl to storm out—to disappear without the disappearance becoming a police matter—the car demand would need to have two results. One, it would have to involve enough money to guarantee that it would be refused. Two, the parents would have to believe that their daughter was serious. The different makes may not have any significance per se; the key point may be the difference in the prices. Different prices would be necessary in order to achieve the same impact in families of different financial means. In other words, a demand for a twenty-thousand-dollar car in one family might have the same impact as a demand for a forty-thousand-dollar car in another family.”

  “Clever,” said Kline, smiling appreciatively. “If you’re right, Flores is a thinker. A maniac, maybe, but definitely a thinker.”

  “But he’s also done things that make no sense.” Gurney stood to get himself some more coffee. “That damn bullet in the teacup—what the hell was the point of that? He stole Ashton’s hunting rifle so he could shatter his teacup? Why take a risk like that? By the way,” said Gurney in an aside to Blatt, “were
you aware that Withrow Perry had a gun of the same caliber?”

  “The hell are you talking about?”

  “The bullet that was fired at the teacup came from a .257 Weatherby. Ashton owns one, which he reported stolen, but Perry also owns one. You might want to look into that.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence as Rodriguez and Blatt both made hurried notes.

  Kline looked accusingly at both of them, then turned his attention to Gurney. “Okay, what else do you know that we don’t?”

  “Hard to say,” said Gurney. “How much do you know about Crazy Carl?”

  “Who?”

  “Husband of Kiki Muller.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “Maybe nothing, except for having a credible motive for killing Flores.”

  “Flores wasn’t killed.”

  “How do we know? He disappeared without a trace. He could be buried in somebody’s backyard.”

  “Whoa, whoa, what’s all this?” Anderson was appalled, Gurney guessed, at the prospect of more work. Digging up backyards. “What are we doing here, inventing imaginary murders?”

  Kline looked confused. “Where are you going with this?”

  “The assumption seems to be that Flores fled the area in the company of Kiki Muller, maybe even hid out at the Muller house for a few days before leaving the area. Suppose Flores was still around when Carl came home from his stint on that ship he worked on? I assume the interview team noticed that Carl is bonkers?”

  Kline took a step backward from the table, as if the panorama of the case were too broad to see from where he’d been standing. “Wait a second. If Flores is dead, he can’t be connected to the disappearances of these other girls. Or the gunshot on Ashton’s patio. Or the text message Ashton received from Flores’s cell phone.”

  Gurney shrugged.

  Kline shook his head in frustration. “It sounds to me like you just took everything that was starting to fit together and kicked it off the table.”

  “I’m not kicking anything off the table. Personally, I don’t believe Carl is involved. I’m not even sure his wife was involved. I’m just trying to loosen things up a bit. We don’t have as many solid facts as you might think. My point is, we need to keep our minds open.” He weighed the risk of ill will inherent in what he was about to add and decided to add it, anyway. “Getting committed to the wrong hypothesis early on may be the reason the investigation hasn’t gotten anywhere.”

  Kline looked at Rodriguez, who was staring at the table surface as if it were a painting of hell. “What do you think, Rod? You think we need to take a new look at it? You think maybe we’ve been trying to solve the puzzle ass backwards?”

  Rodriguez just shook his head slowly. “No, that’s not what I think,” he said, his voice hoarse, tense with suppressed emotion.

  Judging from the expressions around the table, Gurney wasn’t the only one taken aback when the captain, a man obsessed with projecting an aura of control, rose awkwardly from his chair and left the room as though he couldn’t bear to be in it for another minute.

  Chapter 36

  Into the heart of darkness

  After the captain left, the meeting lost focus. Not that it had much focus to begin with, but the strangeness of his departure seemed to underline the incoherence of the investigation, and the discussion disintegrated. Star profiler Rebecca Holdenfield, expressing confusion about her role there, was the next to flee. Anderson and Blatt were restless, caught between the gravitational fields of their boss who was gone and the DA who was still present.

  Gurney asked if any progress had been made identifying the significance of the Edward Vallory name, but none had. Anderson looked blank at the question, and Blatt dismissed it with a wave of his hand that conveyed what a useless avenue of inquiry he considered it to be.

  The DA mouthed a few meaningless sentences about how profitable the meeting had been in getting everyone on the same page. Gurney didn’t think it had done that. But at least it might have gotten everyone wondering what kind of story they were reading. And it got the question of the disappearing graduates on the table.

  Gurney’s final contribution to the meeting was a strong suggestion that BCI dig up some background and contact information on Alessandro and Karnala Fashion, since they constituted a common factor in the lives of the missing girls and a link between them and Jillian. Just as Kline was endorsing this pursuit, Ellen Rackoff came to the door and pointed at her watch. He checked his, looked startled, and announced with stern self-importance that he was late for a conference call with the governor. As he departed, he expressed his confidence that they all could find their own way out. Anderson and Blatt left together, followed by Gurney and Hardwick.

  Hardwick had one of the NYSP’s ubiquitous black Ford sedans. In the parking lot, he leaned against the trunk, lit a cigarette, and, without being asked, offered Gurney his take on the captain. “Little fucker is coming apart. You know what they say about control freaks—that they have to control everything outside them because everything inside’s a fucking mess. That’s Captain Rod, except the little fucker can’t keep the craziness hidden anymore.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, grimaced as he blew the smoke out. “His daughter’s a fucking cokehead. You knew that, right?”

  Gurney nodded. “You told me that during the Mellery case.”

  “I told you she was in Greystone? The nuthouse down in Jersey?”

  “Right.” Gurney remembered a damp, bitter day the previous November when Hardwick had told him about the Rodriguez girl’s addiction problem and how it skewed her father’s judgment in cases where drugs might be involved.

  “Well, she got booted out of Greystone for smuggling in roxies and for fucking her fellow patients. Latest news is that she was arrested for dealing crack at an NA meeting.”

  Gurney wondered where this was going. It didn’t have the tone of a compassionate explanation of the captain’s behavior.

  Hardwick took the kind of drag he’d take if he were trying to set a new record for how much smoke he could get into his lungs in three seconds. “I see you looking at me like, so what, what does this have to do with anything? Am I right?”

  “The question crossed my mind.”

  “The answer is, nothing. It doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with anything. Except that Rodriguez’s decisions aren’t worth shit these days. He’s a liability to the case.” He flung the half-finished cigarette down, put his foot on it, ground it into the asphalt.

  Gurney took a shot at changing the subject. “Do me a favor. Follow up on Alessandro and Karnala. I don’t get the impression anyone else in there is particularly interested.”

  Hardwick didn’t respond. He stood there for another minute, staring down at the crushed butt next to his foot. “Time to go,” he finally said. He opened his car door and wrinkled his face as though assailed by a sour smell.

  “Just watch out, Davey boy. The little fucker’s a time bomb, and he’s gonna go off. They always do.”

  Chapter 37

  The deer

  The drive home was miserable in a way Gurney couldn’t at first identify. He was both distracted and seeking distraction, seeking distraction and unable to find it. Every radio station was more intolerable than the one before it. Music that failed to reflect his mood struck him as idiotic, while music that did only made him feel worse. Every human voice carried within it an irritant, a revelation of stupidity or cupidity or both. Every commercial made him want to scream, Lying bastards!

  Turning off the radio refocused him on the road—refocused him on the shabby villages, the dead and dying farms, and the poisonous economic carrots being dangled in front of poor upstate towns by the gas-drilling industry.

  Jesus, he was in a hell of a mood.

  Why?

  He let his mind drift back over the meeting, see what it would fasten on.

  Ellen Rackoff, of course, in cashmere. Zero pretense of innocence. Warm and cozy as a snake. The danger its
elf a perverse part of the attraction.

  The original evidence team’s report on the crime scene, reprised by Lieutenant Anderson, that made the murder sound like a professional assassination: Even the traps under the bathroom and kitchen sinks had been scrubbed.

  The facts uniting the missing graduates: their common arguments with their parents, their extravagant demands that were sure to be refused, their prior contacts with Hector and Karnala Fashion and the elusive photographer, Alessandro.

  Jack Hardwick’s cold prognosis: There’s a good a chance they’re all dead by now.

  Rodriguez’s personal agony, as the father of a troubled daughter, echoed and magnified by the potential horrors of the case in front of him.

  Gurney could hear the hoarseness in the man’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting next to him in the car. It was the sound of a man being stretched out of shape, stretched like a rubber band too small to encompass everything it was given to hold—a man whose constitution lacks the flexibility to absorb the accidental elements of his own life.

  Which set Gurney to wondering: Are there really any accidental elements? Don’t we, in some undeniable way, place ourselves in the positions in which we find ourselves? Don’t our choices, our priorities, make all the difference? He felt sick to his stomach, and suddenly he knew the reason. He was identifying with Rodriguez: the career-obsessed cop, the father without a clue.

  And then—as though the turmoil of this realization were not enough, as though some malignant god were seeking to contrive the perfect external disaster to match the collision of emotions within him—he hit the deer.

  He had just passed the sign that read ENTERING BROWNVILLE. There was no village, just the overgrown remnants of a long-abandoned river-valley farm on the left and a forested upslope on the right. A medium-size doe had emerged from the woods, hesitated, then dashed across the road far enough ahead of him that there was hardly any need to brake. But then her fawn followed her, it was too late to brake, and although he swerved as far to the left as he could, he heard and felt the terrible thump.