Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  “Bottom line, give people a drug like that and they might act out their fantasies?”

  “They might even do things they’d been afraid to fantasize about.”

  “I see,” he said, feeling sick to his stomach. “Let me change the subject to something completely different. A recent Mapleshade graduate has turned up dead—a sex murder in Florida. Rape, torture, decapitation, body in the suspect’s freezer.”

  “How long?” As usual, Holdenfield was unfazed by gory details—or adept at making it seem that way.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How long was the body in the freezer?”

  “ME thought a couple of days, maybe. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering what he was saving it for. It was a he, right?”

  “Jordan Ballston, hotshot in the financial-derivatives business.”

  “Ballston, the super-rich guy? I remember reading about that. First-degree murder charge. But that was months ago.”

  “Right, but the identity of the victim was originally withheld from the media, and the connection to the other disappearances at Mapleshade was just discovered.”

  “You’re sure there is a connection?”

  “Hell of a coincidence if there isn’t one.”

  “Do you guys get to interview Ballston?”

  “Apparently not. He’s hunkering down behind a thorny hedge of attorneys.”

  “Then what can I do for you?”

  “Suppose I manage to get to him.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet. Just suppose I do.”

  “Okay. I’m supposing. Now what?”

  “What would he be most afraid of?”

  “Surrounded by his thorny attorneys?” She clucked her tongue repeatedly, rapidly, making it sound like a finger-tapping accompaniment to fast thinking. “Not much … unless …”

  “What?”

  “Unless he thinks someone else knows what he’s done, someone who might have an agenda in conflict with his own. That kind of situation would leave a gap in his span of control. Sadistic sex murderers are control freaks to the max, and the one thing that will blow a control freak’s circuits is being at the mercy of someone else.” She paused for a moment. “Do you have a way of contacting Ballston?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why do I have the feeling that you’re about to come up with one?”

  “I appreciate your confidence.”

  “I need to hang up now. Sorry I don’t have more time. Just remember, Dave, the more power he believes you have over him, the more likely he is to come apart.”

  “Thanks, Becca. I appreciate your help.”

  “I hope I didn’t make it sound like it’s going to be easy.”

  “Don’t worry. ‘Easy’ is not what I’m imagining.”

  “Good. Keep me up to date, okay? And good luck!”

  The same mental-overload factor that caused him to neglect that morning’s phone message from Holdenfield kept him, for the rest of his trip home, oblivious to another spectacular mountain sunset. By the time he had turned off the county highway and driven up the winding road to his property, all that was left of it was a subdued wash of faded rose in the western sky, and even that he barely noticed.

  At the transition area in front of his barn, where the town’s dirt road faded into his narrower and grassier driveway, he pulled over to his mailbox, which was cantilevered out from a fence post. As he was about to open it, a little patch of yellow on the hillside ahead caught his eye. The patch of yellow was moving slowly along the arc of the path over the high pasture. He recognized it as Madeleine’s light Windbreaker.

  Because of the intervening ryegrass and milkweed, she was visible only from the waist up, but he imagined he could perceive the gentle rhythm of her steps. He sat and watched her until the trajectory of the path and the rolling contour of the field took her gradually out of sight, a solitary figure moving calmly into an obscuring ocean of tall grass.

  He remained there awhile longer, gazing up at the deserted hillside, until all the color in the sky was gone, replaced by a gray as monotone as the note that registers the absence of a heartbeat. He blinked, found some dampness in his eyes, swiped at it with his knuckles, and drove the rest of the way up to the house.

  He decided to take a shower in the hope that it might restore in him some sense of normalcy. As he stood in the heavy spray of hot water, its tingly massage relaxing his neck and shoulders, he let his mind drift into the sound: the soft roar of a summer downpour. For a strange second or two, his brain was filled with the pure and peaceful scent of rain. He scrubbed himself with soap and a rough sponge, rinsed, got out, and toweled himself dry.

  Too drowsy now to dress, still warm from the shower, he pulled back the quilted cover on their bed and lay down on the cool sheet. For a wonderful minute, the whole world consisted of that cool sheet, grass-scented air wafting over him from an open window, imagined sunlight sparkling through the leaves of giant trees … as he descended the free-associating staircase of dreams into a deep sleep.

  He awoke in the dark with no sense of the time. A pillow had been placed under his head, and the quilt had been drawn up to his chin. He got up, turned on the bedside lamp, and checked the clock. It was 7:49 P.M. He put on the clothes he’d had on before his shower and went out to the kitchen. Something baroque was faintly audible on the stereo. Madeleine was sitting at the smaller of the room’s two tables with a bowl of orange-colored soup and half a baguette, reading a book. She looked up as he entered the room.

  She said, “I thought maybe you’d gone to bed for the night.”

  “Apparently not,” he muttered. Finding his voice hoarse, he coughed to clear it.

  Her eyes returned to her book. “If you feel like eating, there’s carrot soup in the pot and a stir-fried chicken thing in the wok.”

  He yawned. “What are you reading?”

  “The Natural History of Moths.”

  “History of what?”

  She articulated the word as one might to a lip-reader. “Moths.” She turned the page. “Was there any mail?”

  “Mail? I … I don’t know. I think … Oh, right, I was about to get it, and then I saw you up on the hill and got distracted.”

  “You’ve been distracted for a while.”

  “Is that a fact?” He immediately regretted his defensive tone, but not enough to admit it.

  “You don’t think so?”

  He sighed nervously. “I suppose.” He went to the pot on the stove and ladled out a bowl of soup.

  “Is there anything you want to talk about?”

  He delayed answering until he was seated across from her with his soup and the other half of the baguette. “There’s a major development in the case. A former Mapleshade girl has turned up dead in Florida. Victim of a sex murderer.”

  Madeleine closed her book, stared at him. “So you’re thinking … what?”

  “It’s possible that the other girls who’ve disappeared have ended up the same way.”

  “Murdered by the same person?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Madeleine studied his face as if unspoken information were written on it.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Is that what’s on your mind?”

  A rush of unease passed through his stomach. “That’s part of it. Another part is that the police haven’t been able to get a single word out of the man they’ve charged with the murder—nothing beyond a categorical denial. Meanwhile his law firm and PR firm are creating alternative scenarios to feed to the media—lots of innocent reasons that a woman’s raped, tortured, and beheaded body might have been in his freezer.”

  “And you’re thinking, if only you could sit down and talk to this monster …”

  “I’m not saying that I’d get a confession, but …”

  “But you’d do a better job than the locals?”

  “That wouldn’t be so difficult.” He winced inwardly at his own arrogance. />
  Madeleine frowned. “It wouldn’t be the first time the star detective rose to the challenge and deciphered the mystery.”

  He stared at her uncomfortably.

  Again she seemed to be examining the message encoded in his expression.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “But you’re thinking something. What is it? Tell me.”

  She hesitated. “I thought you liked puzzles.”

  “I admit that I do. So what?”

  “So why do you look so miserable?”

  The question jarred him. “Maybe I’m just exhausted. I don’t know.” But he did know. The reason he felt as bad as he did was that he couldn’t bring himself to tell her why he felt bad to begin with. His reluctance to reveal the full chagrin of being duped and the intensity of his worry over what may have happened during his period of amnesia had isolated him in a terrible way.

  He shook his head, as if refusing the pleas of his better self, the small voice within that was begging him to lay the facts of the matter before this woman who loved him. His fear was so great that it blocked the very action that would have removed it.

  Chapter 57

  The plan

  As strained as it often was, Gurney’s relationship with Madeleine had always been the chief pillar of his stability. But that relationship depended on a degree of openness he felt incapable of at the moment.

  With the desperation of a drowning man, he embraced his only other pillar, his detective identity, and attempted to channel all his energies into Solving the Crime.

  The most productive next step in that process, he was convinced, would be a conversation with Jordan Ballston. He needed to devise a way to bring that about. Rebecca had insisted that fear would be the key to cracking the shell of the rich psycho, and Gurney had no reason to disagree. Nor did he have any reason to disagree with her warning that it wouldn’t be easy.

  Fear.

  It was a subject with which Gurney had a raw, current, intimate familiarity. Perhaps that experience could be of some use. What exactly was it that frightened him so much? He retrieved the three alarming text messages and reread them carefully.

  SUCH PASSIONS! SUCH SECRETS! SUCH WONDERFUL PHOTOGRAPHS!

  ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT MY GIRLS? THEY’RE THINKING ABOUT YOU.

  YOU’RE SUCH AN INTERESTING MAN, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN MY DAUGHTERS WOULD ADORE YOU. IT WAS SO GOOD OF YOU TO COME TO THE CITY. NEXT TIME THEY WILL COME TO YOU. WHEN? WHO CAN SAY? THEY WANT IT TO BE A SURPRISE.

  The words generated a sick, hollow feeling in his chest.

  Such virulent threats wrapped in such airy banalities.

  So nonspecific, yet so malignant.

  So nonspecific. Yes, that was it. It brought to mind his favorite English professor’s explanation of the emotional power of Harold Pinter: The perils that strike the greatest terror in us are not those which have been spelled out but those that our imaginations conjure. We are chilled to the bone not by the lengthy rants of an angry man but by the menace in a placid voice.

  He remembered it because the truth of it had struck him immediately, and experience had reinforced it over the years. What we’re able to imagine is always worse than what reality places before us. The greatest fear by far is the fear of what we imagine is lurking in the dark.

  So perhaps the best way to panic Ballston would be to give him an opportunity to panic himself. A frontal attack would be rebuffed by his legal army. Gurney needed a back door through the fortifications.

  Ballston’s current defense strategy was a categorical denial of any knowledge of Melanie Strum dead or alive, plus the creation of an alternative hypothesis, involving the access other individuals had to his home, to explain the presence of her body. Such a strategy would collapse, disastrously for Ballston, if a prior link could be established between him and the girl. In the best possible outcome, the nature of that link would also explain how the murders of Melanie Strum, Jillian Perry, and Kiki Muller, as well as the disappearances of the other Mapleshade graduates, were connected. But whether it did or not, Gurney was sure that discovering Melanie’s route to Ballston’s basement freezer would be a giant step toward the final solution. And the possible exposure of that link would be Ballston’s greatest fear.

  The question was how to trigger that fear—how to use it as an entry point into Ballston’s psyche, a way around the battlements manned by his lawyers. Was there a person, place, or thing the mention of which would open the door? Mapleshade? Jillian Perry? Kiki Muller? Hector Flores? Edward Vallory? Alessandro? Karnala Fashion? Giotto Skard?

  And as hard as it would be to pick the magic name, the harder part would lie in managing whatever dialogue ensued—the Pinteresque art of implying without specifying, unnerving without providing details. The challenge would be to provide the dark space in which Ballston could imagine the worst, the platform on which he might hang himself.

  Madeleine had gone in to bed. Gurney, however, was wide awake, pacing the length of the big kitchen, on fire with possibilities, risk evaluations, logistics. He narrowed the names of his potential door openers to the three he thought most promising: Mapleshade, Flores, Karnala.

  Of those he finally put Karnala, by a millimeter, at the top of the list. Because all the Mapleshade girls known to be missing had appeared in near-pornographic Karnala Fashion ads, because Karnala did not seem to be in the business it pretended to be in, because Karnala was connected to the Skards, and the Skards were rumored to be involved in a criminal sex enterprise, and Melanie Strum’s murder was a sex crime. In fact, the Edward Vallory dimension and Mapleshade’s admissions policy suggested that everything connected with the case so far was in some way a sex crime or the result of a sex crime.

  Gurney was aware that the logical chain back to Karnala was less than perfect, but demanding perfect logic (much as the concept appealed to him) did not lead to solutions, it led to paralysis. He’d learned that the key question in police work, as in life, was not “Am I absolutely sure of what I believe?” The question that mattered was “Am I sure enough to act on that belief?”

  In this case Gurney’s answer was yes. He was willing to bet that there was something about Karnala that would unnerve Jordan Ballston. According to the old clock over the sideboard, it was just after ten when he placed a call to the Palm Beach Police Department to get Ballston’s unlisted number.

  No one assigned to the Strum case was on duty that night, but the desk sergeant was able to give him Darryl Becker’s cell number.

  Surprisingly, Becker picked up on the first ring.

  Gurney explained what he wanted.

  “Ballston’s not talking to anybody,” said Becker testily. “Communications go in and out through Markham, Mull & Sternberg, his main law firm. Thought I’d made that clear.”

  “I may have a way of getting through to him.”

  “How?”

  “I’m going to toss a bomb through his window.”

  “What kind of bomb?”

  “The kind he’ll want to talk to me about.”

  “This some kind of game, Gurney? I had a long day. I’d like some facts.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Becker was silent.

  “Look, if I can knock this scumbag off balance, that’s a plus for everyone. Worst case, we’re maybe back where we started. All you’re giving me is a phone number, no official authorization to do anything, so if there’s any fallout at all, which I don’t think there will be, it doesn’t land on you. In fact, I’ve already forgotten in advance where I got the number from.”

  There was another short silence, followed by a few clicks on a keypad, followed by Becker’s voice reading off a number that began with a Palm Beach area code. Then the connection was broken.

  Gurney spent the next several minutes picturing and then immersing himself in a simple version of the kind of layered undercover persona he advocated in his academy lectures—in this case a reptilian ice man, lurking
under a thin veneer of civilized manners.

  Once he was satisfied with his sense of the attitude and tone, he activated the ID blocker on his phone and made the call to the Palm Beach number. It went straight into voice mail.

  A spoiled, imperious voice announced, “This is Jordan. If you wish to receive a response, please leave a substantive message regarding the subject of your call.” He managed to imbue the please with a grating condescension that reversed its normal meaning.

  Gurney spoke deliberately and a little awkwardly, as though he found the intricacies of polite speech a strange and difficult dance. He also added the subtlest hint of a Southern European accent. “The subject of my call is your relationship with Karnala Fashion, which I need to discuss with you as soon as possible. I’ll call you back in approximately thirty minutes. Please be available to answer the phone, and I’ll be more … substantive … at that time.”

  Gurney was making some major assumptions: that Ballston was at home, as the stipulations of his bail arrangement required, that a man in his perilous position would be screening his calls and checking his messages obsessively, and that how he chose to handle the promised call thirty minutes later would reveal the nature of his involvement with Karnala.

  Making one assumption was risky. Making three was crazy.

  Chapter 58

  Into action

  At 10:58 P.M., Gurney made his second call. It was picked up after the third ring.

  “This is Jordan.” The live voice sounded stiffer, older than the one on the recorded greeting.

  Gurney grinned. It appeared that Karnala was indeed the magic word. Having hit it on the first shot gave him a burst of adrenaline. He felt like he’d gained entry to a high-stakes tournament in which the challenge was to deduce the rules of the game from the behavior of your opponent. He closed his eyes and stepped into his snake-pretending-to-be-harmless persona.