by John Verdon
“But you’re not sure it’s true?”
“All kinds of shit can be logical, but logical doesn’t make it real. How do you propose we get from all this logic to the point of nailing the fucker behind it all?”
“Theoretically, there are two ways. There’s the long, safe, methodical way. And the short, risky way.”
“So we’re going to do it the second way. Am I right?”
“Unfortunately, yes. We lack the resources to do it the right way. We can’t interview every lodge guest and employee who was on site the day Ethan was killed. We can’t go down to West Palm and Teaneck and Floral Park and interview everyone who knew Wenzel and Balzac and Pardosa. We can’t find and interview everyone who attended or worked at Camp Brightwater. We can’t run a fine-tooth comb through—”
“All right, all right, I get it.”
“And the biggest limitation of all is that we lack time. Fenton, and the people pulling his strings, are about to take serious action to get me out of here. And it’s not good for Madeleine to be here. In fact, it’s very bad for her to be here.”
He turned on the couch and looked into the bathroom. She was still in the shower. He tried to tell himself once again that it was a good thing. A restorative thing.
“All right, Davey, I get it. The long, safe way is not an option. So what’s the short, risky way?”
“Tossing a rock into the hornet’s nest to see what flies out.”
“What kind of rock do you have in mind?”
Even as Gurney was listening to the question, the voice on the phone was breaking up.
Hardwick had just driven into another dead zone.
CHAPTER 50
When his mind was full of unanswered questions, Gurney often sought clarity in lists.
As Madeleine was finally emerging from the shower, he got a pad from his duffel bag. He sat down on the couch and started writing down the things he believed he knew about the deaths and the master manipulator behind them.
It included facts provided by Angela Castro, Steven Pardosa’s parents, Moe Blumberg, Kimberly Fallon, Senior Investigator Gilbert Fenton, the Reverend Bowman Cox, Lieutenant Bobby Becker of Palm Beach PD, and the Teaneck PD detective contacted by Jack Hardwick—as well as the conclusions he believed those facts supported. Then he created a list of what he considered the major unanswered questions. The second list was longer than the first.
After reviewing everything he’d written, he decided to share it with Hardwick. He opened his laptop, typed the lists into an email, and hit “Send.”
As he was taking another look at his handwritten sheets, making sure that he hadn’t left out anything important, Madeleine came over to the couch wrapped in a bath towel.
He decided to tell her about his evolving vision of the case—that the reported nightmares weren’t dreams that anyone had actually experienced, but elements in a complex plot, and that Ethan’s written nightmare narrative was probably dictated to him by someone else.
As she listened to his description of how the puzzle pieces might fit together, what started as a skeptical frown slowly changed to an expression of real interest—and finally to a kind of revulsion.
“Do you think I’ve got it all wrong?” he asked.
“No. I think you have it right. I’m just wondering what kind of person could devise something that awful. So much lying. Such cruelty.”
“I agree.” He was momentarily taken aback by the gap between her perception of the situation as something essentially dreadful and his own view of it as a perplexing puzzle to be solved.
She looked down at his two lists on the table. “What’s all that?”
“Preparation.”
“For what?”
“I need to shake things up a bit. I’m organizing all the things I know and don’t know about the case—as a guide for what I can say in a bugged conversation. I want to give whoever is behind all this the impression I know what’s going on. But I want to be on solid ground with what I say. If I screw it up, he’ll feel safe. I want him to feel threatened.”
“But you still have no idea who he is, or what his ultimate motive was.”
“The motive part is complicated. From a cui bono financial point of view, the only victim with a significant estate is Ethan, and the only significant beneficiaries are Peyton and Richard—and Jane, of course, to the extent that she’s involved in Richard’s life.”
“I’d say that the extent of her involvement is total, absolute, and unhealthy.”
Gurney went on. “A financial motive could explain Ethan’s murder, but it doesn’t work for the other three. On the other hand, a Brightwater-related motive could explain those three, but it doesn’t work for Ethan.”
“Maybe whoever killed them had more than one motive.”
He nodded. It was a simple enough conclusion. Obvious, in a way.
Different motives for different victims.
He’d begun to raise that possibility with Hardwick in their last conversation. And the notion was reinforced in his mind now by the memory of a gang-related mass murder he’d been assigned to shortly after his promotion to homicide detective.
At first sight—and a bloody mess of a first sight it was—it appeared to be a typical clash over drug sales territories. A rising gang faction had taken over an abandoned tenement on the border of a rival faction’s turf—a provocative encroachment.
One night in July the gang’s headquarters in the tenement was occupied by four gang members with submachine guns. A three-man crew from the rival faction, similarly armed, invaded the building and crashed through the apartment door. Less than thirty seconds later, six of the seven combatants were dead. One member of the invading faction escaped on foot.
After giving the wrecked bodies, the blood-soaked floors, and the walls full of bullet holes a cursory once-over, Gurney’s partner at the time—a burnt-out detective by the name of Walter Coolidge—decided it was just another lunatic gunfight that everyone lost. Even if somebody had been lucky enough to get away, he’d probably find his sorry ass on the wrong end of an Uzi next time out.
Gurney was conducting the requisite neighborhood interviews that were a routine step at the beginning of every homicide investigation. That night he happened to ring the bell of a wiry little black woman with feisty eyes and sharp ears who insisted she knew exactly what she heard and how she heard it.
She described a burst of machine gun fire that lasted nine or ten seconds—produced, she claimed, by three similar weapons. That was followed by about ten seconds of silence. And that was followed by a second burst, lasting seven or eight seconds. She was certain that the second burst had been produced by a single weapon.
Gurney had been relating all this to Madeleine as she sat on the arm of the couch. Now she blinked in confusion. “How on earth did she know that?”
“I asked her that very question. And she asked me how did I think she could have succeeded as a jazz drummer if she couldn’t distinguish between one and three instruments.”
“She was a drummer in a jazz band?”
“In her past. At the time I spoke to her she was a church organist.”
“But what does this—?”
“Have to do with multiple motives for murder? I’ll get to that. The thing is, the sequence of the shots got me thinking. The three-gun burst to start with. The silence. The second one-gun burst. Everybody except one guy ending up dead. I pushed for a thorough crime-scene analysis, trajectory analysis, ballistics analysis, and medical analysis. And I spent a hell of a lot of time talking to local gangbangers. In the end, a new scenario emerged.”
Madeleine’s eyes lit up. “The guy who escaped at the end shot them all, didn’t he?”
“In a way, yes. When the invading crew broke into the apartment, they took the rival crew by surprise. They opened fire with their three Uzi machine pistols, and in no time at all the official job they came to do was done. But one crew member, Devon Santos, had other concerns. Gang life at a certain l
evel is about competition for a seat at the next higher level. And one of his crew brothers had an eye on the same opening he did. So after they wiped out the opposing personnel, Devon walked over to the nearest dead guy, picked up his AK-47, turned around, and blasted away his competitor as well as the crew brother who witnessed what he’d just done. Then he put the gun back in its dead owner’s hands and got the hell out of there.”
“How could you be sure that’s what happened?”
“Ballistics discovered that the two invading crew members who ended up dead had been shot with an AK-47 that was found on a guy who had no powder residue on his hands. Meaning he couldn’t have fired the gun. The rest came from an analysis of entry and exit wounds. The final convincer was that odd delay between the two bursts of gunfire—the ten seconds during which Devon made sure the other crew was down for good, and went to pick up the AK-47.”
Madeleine gave him a thoughtful look. “So your point is that Devon had more than one motive. He went into the tenement to wipe out the enemy. But also to eliminate the threat of competition from his own side.”
“Right. And he shot one of his gang brothers to keep the fact that he’d shot the other one a secret. So he really had three motives, varying according to victim. To Devon’s way of thinking, they were all good reasons to kill people.”
“And he’d have gotten away with all of it, if it wasn’t for you.”
“If it wasn’t for a sharp witness with an ear for drumbeats.”
Madeleine persisted. “But not every cop would have followed up the way you did.”
He stared down uneasily at his yellow pad.
Praise had a downside. It increased his fear of failure.
CHAPTER 51
“Greetings, ace. I’m back in live cell country.”
“Have you checked your email?”
“If you mean those pithy lists of semi-facts and open questions, I got ’em. I also have a piece of news you might want to add to your fact list.”
“Oh?”
“News item on the radio. Kid in some theme park down in Florida died of a spider bite. Not normally that dangerous a spider, but this kid had some kind of allergic reaction to it. Didn’t help that the spider was on something the kid was eating. Fucking thing bit the kid’s tongue. Throat swelled up. Choked him. Fuck. Don’t even want to think about that.”
“Me neither, Jack. So what’s this got to do with—”
“That nasty little news item gave us an overdue gift from the gods of luck.”
“Meaning?”
“Pardosa.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That was the species. The name of the spider. It was a Pardosa spider.”
Gurney thought about it for a moment. “So you figure that Steven found out that his last name was the name of a spider species, so he adopted ‘Spider’ as a nickname?”
“Or one of his Brightwater buddies knew it and gave him the label. Or some jerk-off in junior high started calling him Stevie Spider. Who the fuck knows? Point is, it’s got to be more than a coincidence.”
“Leo the Lion, Wenzel the Weasel, Pardosa the Spider . . .”
“Just one more shithead to go. The Wolf.”
“Yes.”
“Too bad it’s not Ethan. That would’ve wrapped things up neatly.”
“It would have.”
“With some luck the Wolf’s identity will fall into our lap like the Spider’s.”
“Maybe.”
“Okay, Sherlock, keep your fingers crossed. We might be in line for some more good luck. I’ll get back to you after I see Wigg.”
Gurney was pleased with the Pardosa discovery. Keeping his fingers crossed, however, was not something he ever did. He didn’t like the concept of luck. It was, after all, nothing but a misunderstanding of statistical probability and randomness. Or a silly term one applied to the occurrence of a desired event. And even for the people who believed in it, there was an unpleasant truth about luck.
It inevitably ran out.
DURING GURNEY’S CALL WITH HARDWICK, MADELEINE HAD GOTTEN dressed. Now she came back to the couch so he could hear what she was saying under the music.
“It sounds like you’re making real progress.”
“We may be getting closer.”
“You’re not happy about that?”
“I need it to happen faster.”
“You said before you want to make the killer feel . . . what, threatened?”
“Yes. By giving him the idea that I know his secrets. That’s why I made my lists—to help me decide how much I can say without risking a mistake. A mistake would let him know I’m on the wrong path and kill the whole effect.”
She frowned. “Instead of wondering how much you can say, maybe you should be figuring out how little you can say.”
“Why?”
“Fear grows in the dark. Why not just open the door a crack? Let him imagine what might be on the other side.”
Gurney was no stranger to the what-ifs that thrive in darkness. “I like that.”
“Your plan is to let him overhear something through one of the bugs—something that will disturb him?”
“Yes. If someone thinks they’re overhearing something you wouldn’t want them to hear, it carries enormous credibility. A trick of the mind tells us that anything someone is trying to keep secret from us must be true. That’s why I’ve left the bugs in place. They’re the best weapons in the world to use against the bug planter.”
“When are you going to do this?”
“As soon as I can. I have a feeling that Fenton is on the verge of arresting me for obstruction of justice.”
The tic in her cheek was now plainly visible. “Can he do that?”
“He can. It wouldn’t stick, but it would be a giant inconvenience. The only way I can neutralize him now is to prove that his ‘fatal nightmare’ theory is nonsense. And the only way I can do that is to ID the real killer and his real motive. Or, I should say, motives, plural.”
“Like Devon Santos?”
“Very much like Devon Santos.”
CHAPTER 52
Gurney was no fan of rapid decisions. He generally preferred to sleep on his ideas and see if they made sense in the light of a new day.
But there was no time for that now.
With the music on Madeleine’s tablet playing loudly in the background, he outlined his plan to her, putting it together as he spoke.
Half an hour later they were sitting, bundled in their ski clothes, in the front seats of the Outback—ready to act out and record a prepared scene for later playback in their suite. Gurney put his smartphone in “Record” mode and placed it on the console.
Sounding tired and stressed (at Gurney’s suggestion), Madeleine was the first to speak. “Do you want a fire?”
“What?” Gurney sounded preoccupied, annoyed to have his thoughts interrupted.
“A fire.”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Well, then. Do you want to get one started?”
“Yes. All right. I will. Just not this second.”
“When?”
“For Christ’s sake, I’ve got something else on my mind.”
There was a silence. Madeleine again spoke first.
“Do you want me to start the fire?”
“I’ll do it, okay? I’m just going over something in my mind . . . making sure I’m right.”
“Right about what?”
“The whole motive thing.”
“You think you know why they were killed? And who killed them?”
“They were all killed by the same person, but not all for the same reason.”
“You know now who’s behind it all?”
“I’m pretty sure I do.”
“Who?”
“Before I tell you, or anyone else, I need to do one more thing.”
“I don’t understand. If you know who the killer is, tell me.”
“I need to run my logic by Hardwick. Tonight
. When he gets back from Albany.”
There was another silence.
“David, it’s absurd that you’re not telling me who it is.”
“I need to bounce it off Jack first. I have to be sure the links in my head make sense to him. I’ll tell you tonight. Another four or five hours, that’s all.”
“THIS IS STUPID! IF YOU KNOW, TELL ME NOW!”
“For God’s sake, Maddie. Be patient. A few more hours.”
“Shouldn’t you call the police?”
“That’s the last thing I’d want to do. Anything related to the murders would be funneled directly to Fenton. And that’s a complicated situation.”
“I hate when you do things like this.” Her voice was full of quiet anger. “Don’t you know how it makes me feel?” She paused. “So what if it’s ‘a complicated situation’? I think you should call BCI headquarters in Albany right now and tell them everything you know.” She paused. “Why don’t you do that? Why do these things have to end up with you facing off against the bad guy? We’ve been through this before, David. God knows we’ve been through it before. Too damn many times. You always have to turn an investigation into the Gunfight at the OK Corral.”
“I don’t want the BCI cavalry rolling in here with a fleet of cruisers and helicopters. The truth is I want to take this scumbag down by myself.”
Gurney was afraid he might have stepped too far out of character with that last comment, but then he decided it was just right—the sort of braggadocio the argument they were supposedly having might provoke. And it might in turn nudge his opponent into reacting with more emotion than intelligence.
He wondered for a moment if he should mention Brightwater or the Lion, Spider, Wolf, and Weasel nicknames; but he decided to follow Madeleine’s advice and minimize the content of their conversation. To leave whoever might be listening with more questions than answers. To let fear grow in the dark.
As he began thinking about the best way to end their exchange, Madeleine added in an angry voice, “Same old story, again and again. It’s always what you want—your goals, your commitments, your priorities. It’s never about us. What about our life? Does our life occupy any space in your mind at all?”
