by John Verdon
“You think the DA in Florida is going to give Ballston a pass to make Sheridan’s life easier?” His tone made it plain he considered this idea absurd.
“I’m not talking about a pass. I’m talking about Ballston being made to understand that lethal injection is an absolute certainty for him unless he cooperates fully. And immediately.”
“And if he cooperates?”
“If he does—fully, truthfully, with no reservations—then maybe other outcomes could be considered.”
“That’s a tough sell.” Stimmel sounded like if he were the Florida DA, it would be an impossible sell.
“The fact is,” said Gurney, “getting Ballston to talk may be our only shot.”
“Our only shot at what?”
“A bunch of girls are missing. Unless we crack Ballston, I doubt we’ll ever find a single one of them alive.”
The rapid-fire pressures of the day caught up with Gurney on the second leg of the flight home, and his brain began shutting down. With the jet engines droning in his ears like a formless white noise, loosening his grip on the present, he drifted through unpleasant scenes and disjointed moments that hadn’t come to mind in over a decade: the visits he made to Florida after his parents moved from the Bronx to a rented bungalow in Magnolia, a little town that seemed to be the mother lode of bleakness and decay; a brown palmetto bug the size of a mouse, scuttling under the leafy detritus on the bungalow porch; tap water that tasted like recycled sewage but that his parents insisted had no taste at all; the times when his mother drew him aside to complain with tearful bitterness about her marriage, about his father, about his father’s selfishness, about her migraines, about her lack of sexual satisfaction.
Disturbing dreams, dark memories, and increasing dehydration through the remainder of the flight put Gurney in a state of anxious depression. As soon as he got off the plane in Albany, he bought a liter bottle of water at the inflated airport price and drank half of it on the way to the bathroom. In the relatively roomy wheelchair-accessible stall, he removed his chic jeans, polo shirt, and moccasins. He opened the Giacomo Emporium box he’d been carrying that contained his own original clothes and put them on. Then he put the new clothes into the box, and when he left the stall, he tossed the box into the garbage bin. He went to the basin and rinsed the gel out of his hair. He dried it roughly with a paper towel and looked at himself in the mirror, reassuring himself that he was again himself.
It was exactly 6:00 P.M., according to the parking booth’s clock, as he paid the twelve-dollar fee and the striped yellow barrier arm rose to let him pass. He headed for I-88 West with the late sun glaring through his windshield.
By the time he got to the exit for the county route that led from the interstate down through the northern Catskills to Walnut Crossing, an hour had passed; he’d finished his liter of water and was feeling better. It always surprised him that such a simple thing—you couldn’t get much simpler than water—could have such power to calm his thoughts. His emotional restoration gradually continued, and by the time he reached the little road that meandered up through the hills to his farmhouse, he was feeling close to normal.
He walked into the kitchen just as Madeleine was removing a roasting pan from the oven. She laid it on top of the stove, glanced at him with raised eyebrows, and said with a bit more sarcasm than surprise, “This is a shock.”
“Nice to see you, too.”
“Are you interested in having dinner?”
“I told you in the note I left for you this morning that I’d be home for dinner, and here I am.”
“Congratulations,” she said, getting a second dinner plate out of an overhead cabinet and laying it next to the one already on the countertop.
He gave her a narrow-eyed look. “Maybe we ought to try this again? Should I go out and come back in?”
She returned an extended parody of his look, then softened. “No. You’re right. You’re here. Get out another knife and fork, and let’s eat. I’m hungry.”
They filled their plates from the pan of roasted vegetables and chicken thighs and carried them to the round table by the French doors.
“I think it’s warm enough to open them,” she said—which he did.
As they sat down, a bath of sweetly fragrant air washed over them. Madeleine closed her eyes, a slow-motion smile wrinkling her cheeks. In the stillness Gurney thought he could hear the faint, soft cooing of mourning doves from the trees beyond the pasture.
“Lovely, lovely, lovely,” Madeleine half whispered. Then she sighed happily, opened her eyes, and began to eat.
At least a minute passed before she spoke again. “So tell me about your day,” she said, eyeing a parsnip on the tip of her fork.
He thought about it, frowning.
She waited, watching him.
He placed his elbows on the table, interlocking his fingers in front of his chin. “My day. Well. The highlight was the point at which the psychopath dissolved into giggles. A funny image occurred to him. An image involving two women he had raped, tortured, and decapitated.”
She studied his face, her lips tightening.
After a while he added, “So that’s the kind of day it was.”
“Did you accomplish what you set out to accomplish?”
He rubbed the knuckle of his forefinger slowly across his lips. “I think so.”
“Does that mean you’ve solved the Perry case?”
“I think I have part of the solution.”
“Good for you.”
A long silence passed between them.
Madeleine stood, picked up their plates, then the knives and forks. “She called today.”
“Who?”
“Your client.”
“Val Perry? You spoke to her?”
“She said that she was returning your call, that she had your home phone number with her but not your cell number.”
“And?”
“And she wanted you to know that three thousand dollars is not an amount of money you need to bother her about. ‘He should spend whatever the hell he needs to spend to find Hector Flores.’ That’s a quote. Sounds like an ideal client.” She let the dishes clatter into the sink. “What more could you ask for? Oh, by the way, speaking of decapitation …”
“Speaking of what?”
“The man in Florida you mentioned who decapitates people—it just reminded me to ask you about that doll.”
“Doll?”
“The one upstairs.”
“Upstairs?”
“What is this, the echo game?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m asking you about the doll on the bed in my sewing room.”
He shook his head, turned up his palms in bafflement.
There was a flicker of concern in her eyes. “The doll. The broken doll. On the bed. You don’t know anything about it?”
“You mean like a little girl’s doll?”
Her voice rose in alarm. “Yes, David! A little girl’s doll!”
He stood and walked quickly to the hall stairs, took two at a time, and in a matter of seconds was standing in the doorway of the spare bedroom Madeleine used for her needlework. The dying dusk threw only a dim gray light across the double bed. He flipped the wall switch, and a bright bedside lamp provided all the illumination he needed.
Propped against one of the pillows was an ordinary doll in a sitting position, unclothed—ordinary except for the fact that the head had been removed and was placed on the bedspread a few feet from the body, facing it.
Chapter 62
Tremors
The dream was coming apart, cracking like the compartments of a brittle carton, no longer able to keep its unruly contents firmly in place.
Each night his scimitar victory over Salome was less clear, less certain. It was like an old-time television transmission being interrupted by a program on an adjoining frequency. Competing voices broke back and forth across each other. Images of Salome dancing were rep
laced in vivid flashes by those of another dancer.
In place of the strong and reassuring Vision of His Mission and His Method—the courage and conviction of John the Baptist—there were shards of memories, sudden sharp pieces he recoiled from, moments overwhelmingly familiar, nauseatingly familiar.
A woman dancing, her silky dress rising, showing her long legs, showing the little girls how to dance like Salome, how to dance in front of the little boys.
Salome doing the samba on a peach rug amid tropical plants, huge moist leaves, dripping. Showing the boys how to do the samba. How to hold her.
The peach rug and tropical plants were in her bedroom. She was showing him and his best friend from school how to do the samba. How to hold her.
The serpent moving from her mouth into his, searching, slithering.
Later he threw up, and she laughed. Threw up on the peach rug under the giant tropical plants, sweating, gasping. The world spinning, his stomach heaving.
She took him into the shower, her legs pressing against him.
She was crawling on the peach rug toward a boy and a girl, exhausted and inexhaustible. “Wait in the hall, darling.” Gasping. “I’ll be with you in a minute.” Her face gleaming with sweat, flushed. Biting her lip. Wild eyes.
Chapter 63
Just like Ashton’s cottage
The BCI investigation team arrived in two installments—Jack Hardwick at midnight and the evidence team an hour later.
The techs in their white anticontamination suits were initially skeptical of a crime scene in which the only “crime” was the unexplained presence of a broken doll. They were accustomed to carnage, to the bloody remnants of mayhem and murder. So perhaps it was understandable that their first reactions were raised eyebrows and sideways glances.
Their initial suggestions—that the doll might have been put there by a visiting child or that it might be a practical joke—were perhaps understandable as well, but that did not make them tolerable to Madeleine, whose blunt question to Hardwick they probably overheard, judging by the expressions on their faces: “Are they drunk or just stupid?”
However, once Hardwick took them aside and explained the uncanny resemblance of the doll’s position to that of Jillian Perry’s body, they did as thorough and professional a job of processing the scene as if it had been riddled with bullets.
The results, unfortunately, didn’t amount to anything. All their fine-combing, print-lifting, and fiber- and soil-vacuuming efforts produced nothing of interest. The room contained the prints of one person, no doubt Madeleine’s. Ditto the few hairs found on the back of the chair by the window where Madeleine worked on her knitting. The inside of the frame of the adjoining window, the one Gurney was called upon to open when it got stuck, bore a second set, no doubt his. There were no prints on the body or head of the doll. The brand of doll was a popular one, sold at every Walmart in America. The downstairs entry doors had multiple prints identical to the prints found in the bedroom. No door or window in the house showed any sign of being forced. There were no prints on the outside of the windows. Luma-Lite examination of the floors showed no clear footprints that didn’t match either Dave’s or Madeleine’s shoe size. Examination of all the doors, banisters, countertops, faucets, and toilet handles for fingerprints produced the same results.
When the techs finally packed up their equipment and departed at around 4:00 A.M. in their van, they took with them the doll, the bedspread, and the throw rugs they had removed from the floor on either side of the bed.
“We’ll run the standard tests,” Gurney overheard them telling Hardwick on their way out, “but ten to one everything’s clean.” They sounded tired and frustrated.
When Hardwick came back into the kitchen and sat at the table across from him and Madeleine, Gurney commented, “Just like the scene in Ashton’s cottage.”
“Yeah,” said Hardwick with a bone-tired disconnectedness.
“What do you mean?” asked Madeleine, sounding antagonistic.
“The antiseptic quality of it all,” said Gurney. “No prints, no nothing.”
She made an almost agonized little sound in her throat. She took several deep breaths. “So … what … what are we supposed to do now? I mean, we can’t just …”
“There’ll be a cruiser here before I leave,” said Hardwick. “You’ll have protection for at least forty-eight hours, no problem.”
“No problem?” Madeleine stared at him, uncomprehending. “How can you …?” She didn’t finish the sentence, just shook her head, stood up, and left the room.
Gurney watched her go, at a loss for any comforting thing to say, as jarred by her emotion as he was by the event that had caused it.
Hardwick’s notebook was on the table in front of him. He opened it, found the page he wanted, and took a pen out of his shirt pocket. He didn’t write anything, just tapped idly with it on the open page. He looked exhausted and vaguely troubled.
“So …” he began. He cleared his throat. He spoke as if he were pushing the words uphill. “According to what I wrote down earlier … you were away all day.”
“Right. In Florida. Extracting a near confession from Jordan Ballston. Which I hope is being followed up as we speak.”
Hardwick laid down his pen, closed his eyes, and massaged them with his thumb and forefinger. When he opened them again, he looked back at his notebook. “And your wife told me she was out of the house all afternoon—from sometime around one till sometime around five-thirty—bike riding, then hiking through the woods. She does that a lot?”
“She does that a lot.”
“It’s a reasonable assumption, then, that the doll was … installed, shall we say, during that time window.”
“I’d say so,” said Gurney, becoming irritated at the reiteration of the obvious.
“Okay, so as soon as the morning shift comes on, I’ll send someone over to talk to your neighbors down the road. A passing car must be a big event up here.”
“Having live neighbors is a big event. There are only six houses on the road, and four of them belong to city people, only here on weekends.”
“Still, you never know. I’ll send someone over.”
“Fine.”
“You don’t sound optimistic.”
“Why the hell should I be optimistic?”
“Good point.” He picked up his pen and started tapping again on his notebook. “She says she’s sure she locked the doors when she went out. That sound right to you?”
“What do you mean, does it sound right?”
“I mean, is that something she normally does, lock the doors?”
“What she normally does is tell the truth. If she says she locked the doors, she locked the doors.”
Hardwick stared at him, seemed as if he were about to respond, and then changed his mind. More tapping. “So … if they were locked and there’s no sign of forced entry, that means someone came in with a key. You give keys to anyone?”
“No.”
“Any instances you can think of when your keys were out of your possession long enough for someone to make dupes?”
“No.”
“Really? Only takes twenty seconds to make a key.”
“I know how long it takes to make a key.”
Hardwick nodded, as though this were actual information. “Well, chances are, somebody got one somehow. You might want to change your locks.”
“Jack, who the hell do you think you’re talking to? This isn’t Home Safety Night at the PTA.”
Hardwick smiled, leaned back in his chair. “Right. I’m talking to Sherlock fucking Gurney. So tell me, Mr. Brilliant Fucking Detective, you have any bright ideas about this?”
“About the doll?”
“Yeah. About the doll.”
“Nothing that wouldn’t already be obvious to you.”
“That somebody’s trying to scare you off the case?”
“You have a better idea?”
Hardwick shrugged. He stopped tapping and be
gan studying his pen as though it were a complex piece of evidence. “Anything else odd been happening?”
“Like what?”
“Like … odd. Have there been any other little … oddities in your life?”
Gurney uttered a short, humorless laugh. “Apart from every single aspect of this miserably odd case and all the miserably odd people involved in it, everything’s perfectly normal.” It wasn’t really an answer, and he suspected that Hardwick knew it wasn’t. For all the man’s bluster and vulgarity, he had one of the sharpest minds Gurney had encountered in all his years in law enforcement. He could easily have been a captain at thirty-five if he gave a damn about any of the things that captains need to give a damn about.
Hardwick looked up at the ceiling, his eyes following the crown molding as though it were the subject of what he was saying. “Remember the guy whose fingerprints were on that little cordial glass?”
A bad feeling seized Gurney’s stomach. “Saul Steck, aka Paul Starbuck?”
“Right. You remember what I told you?”
“You told me he was a successful character actor with a nasty interest in young girls. Got a psych commitment, eventually got out. What about him?”
“The guy who helped me lift the prints and run them through the system called me back last night with an interesting little addendum.”
“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.”
