As he walked across the street, Kim got out of her car. She looked jittery and embarrassed.
“I feel so stupid.” She crossed her arms tightly, as though she were trying not to shiver.
“Why?”
“Because it’s like I’m afraid of the dark. Afraid of my own apartment. I feel terrible, making you turn around like that.”
“Turning around was my idea. You want to wait out here while I take a look inside?”
“No! I’m not a complete infant. I’m coming in with you.”
Gurney remembered having this conversation before and decided not to argue.
Both the front door of the house and Kim’s apartment door were unlocked. They went inside, Gurney first, his flashlight illuminating the way. When he came to a set of switches on the hallway wall, he flipped them up and down with no effect. At the living-room door, he swept the flashlight around the space. He did the same at the doors to the bathroom and bedroom before moving on to the last room off the hall—the kitchen.
Moving the beam slowly around the room, he asked, “Did you check the place at all before you went back out to your car?”
“Really quick-like. I hardly looked into the kitchen at all. And I definitely didn’t go near the basement door. I know that the switch for the ceiling light didn’t work. The only other thing I noticed was that the time display on the microwave was off. Which means the problem must be the circuit breaker, right?”
“That would be my guess.”
He stepped into the kitchen with Kim very close behind him, her hand on his back in the semidarkness. The only light came from the shifting reflections of the flashlight beam off the walls and appliances. He heard what sounded like a faint tap. He stopped and listened. He heard it again a few seconds later and realized it was nothing more than a slow drip in the metal sink.
He went forward quietly, in the direction of the rear hallway that led from the kitchen to the basement stairs and the rear door of the house. Kim’s hand moved from his back to his arm, gripping it firmly. When he got to the hallway, he could see that the door to the basement was closed. The exterior door at the end of the hallway appeared secure, with the dead bolt’s twist knob in its locked position. The sound of the water drip from the kitchen behind him seemed to be captured and amplified by the enclosed space.
When he reached the basement door and was about to open it, Kim’s fingers dug into the back of his arm.
“Take it easy,” he said softly.
“Sorry.” She loosened her grip, but not much.
He opened the door, shining the light down the stairs, listening.
Drip … drip …
Nothing else.
He turned back toward Kim. “Stay right here at the door.” She looked terrified.
He searched for something to say—something pedestrian, maybe a distracting question—to calm her down. “The electrical service box … does it have one main circuit breaker in addition to the breakers for all the individual circuits?”
“What?”
“Just wondering what kind of box it is that I’ll be dealing with.”
“What kind? I have no idea. Is that a problem?”
“No, not at all. If I need a screwdriver, I’ll call up to you, okay?” He knew that all this was irrelevant, no doubt confusing to her, but confusion was better at this point than a panic attack.
He descended the stairs carefully, sweeping the light back and forth.
Everything seemed perfectly still.
Then, just as the thought came to mind that a banister would be a wise addition to the rickety staircase structure—just as he was placing his weight on the third stair tread from the bottom—there was a sharp crack, the tread collapsed, and Gurney pitched forward.
It all happened in less than a second.
His right foot descended along with the broken tread into empty space as his body pivoted forward and downward, his arms rising instinctively to protect his face and head.
He crashed onto the concrete floor at the base of the stairs. The lens of the flashlight shattered, the light went out. A sharp pain shot like an electrical shock through the bone of his right forearm.
Kim was screaming. Hysterical. Asking if was he all right. Footsteps retreating, running, stumbling.
Gurney was stunned but conscious.
He was about to try some tentative movements, assess the physical damage.
But before his muscles could respond, he heard a sound that raised the hairs on his neck. It was a whisper, very close to his ear. A whisper harsh and sibilant. A whisper that hissed like the hiss of a furious cat:
“Let the devil sleep.”
Chapter 16
Doubts
When Gurney awoke the next morning at home, he was anxious and exhausted, with a deeply burning sensation in his right forearm and a painful stiffness through his whole body. The bedroom windows were open, and there was a damp chill in the air.
Madeleine was already up, as usual. She liked getting up with the birds. There seemed to be a secret ingredient in the first light of dawn that energized her.
His feet were cold and sweaty. The world outside the windows was gray. It was a long time since he’d had a hangover, but he felt like he had one now. He’d had a miserably restless night. Recollections of the events in Kim’s basement, the discoveries he’d made after his fall, and the hypotheses they suggested kept racing around in his head without coherence or conclusion, twisted and derailed by his multiple aches. He’d finally fallen asleep just before dawn. Now, two hours later, he was awake again. His level of mental agitation told him that further sleep would be impossible.
The urgent imperative was to organize and understand what had happened. He went over it all one more time, reaching into his memory for as much detail as possible.
He recalled stepping cautiously down the stairs, using his flashlight to illuminate not only the staircase but the basement areas to the right and left of it. No hint of any sound or movement. When he was still several steps from the bottom, he’d swept the beam in a wide arc around the walls to locate the electrical panel. It was a gray metal box, mounted on a wall not far from the ominous chest where the bloodstains had led him two days earlier. The darkened stains were still clearly visible on the wooden steps and on the concrete floor.
He remembered stepping down onto the next stair tread, then hearing and feeling the startling snap of it giving way under his foot. The beam of his flashlight had swung in a wild arc as his hands flew out reflexively in front of his face. He knew he was falling, knew he couldn’t stop it, knew it would be bad. Half a second later, his arms, right shoulder, chest, and the side of his head collided brutally with the basement floor.
There was a scream from the top of the stairs. First a pure scream, then two screamed questions: “Are you all right? What happened?”
For a moment he was dazed, unable to answer. Then, somewhere, he couldn’t tell in what direction, he heard what sounded like the scramble of feet running, maybe bumping into a wall, maybe tripping, running again.
He had tried to move. But the whisper, so close by, had stopped him.
It was a feverish sound, more animal than human, the words hissing out under pressure, like steam escaping through clenched teeth.
He’d reached for his ankle holster, pulled out the Beretta, lay there in the silent darkness, listening. The situation was so deeply unnerving that he had little recollection of the time interval that elapsed—thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes or more—before Kim returned with her Mini Maglite, the beam much brighter than it had been when they’d used it to examine the chest at the end of the bloodstain trail.
She’d started down the stairs just as he was getting shakily to his feet, hot pain shooting from his wrist to his elbow, legs unsteady. He told her not to come any further, simply shine the light on the stairs. Then he climbed up to her as quickly as he was able to, almost losing his balance twice from dizziness. He took the flashlight from her, turne
d around, and covered as much of the basement floor as he could see from that position.
He’d moved down two more steps, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, and repeated the back-and-forth searching movement with the narrow beam. Another two steps … and then he was able to sweep the beam around the entire basement space—floors, walls, steel support columns, ceiling beams. Still no sign of the whisperer. Nothing was upset, nothing in disarray, no movement other than the eerie shadows of the support columns moving across the cinder-block walls as he angled the little Maglite.
When he reached the basement floor, steadily sweeping the beam around him, he’d concluded—with as much bafflement as relief—that there were no nooks, no hiding places, no dark corners where a man could hide from the light. With the possible exception of the chest, the basement offered no apparent opportunities for concealment.
He’d asked Kim, hovering in nervous silence at the top of the stairs, if she’d heard anything after he fell.
“Like what?”
“A voice … a whisper … anything like that?”
“No. No, what do you mean?” she’d asked with rising alarm.
“Nothing, I just …” He shook his head. “I was probably just hearing my own breathing.” Then he asked if the running footsteps had been hers.
She said yes, probably yes, she probably ran, at least she thought she had, maybe sort of stumbled, walked fast, maybe—couldn’t actually remember, being in a panic—feeling her way to the bedroom, where she kept her flashlight on her night table. “Why do you ask?”
“Just checking my impressions,” he said vaguely.
He didn’t want to speculate aloud on the alternate possibility that the intruder had bounded up the staircase out of the basement as Kim was on her way to her bedroom, had made use of the dark to conceal himself, was perhaps at some point within inches of her, and when she came back had slipped past her out of the house.
But wherever he’d gone, however he’d gotten out—assuming he had gotten out and wasn’t crouching in the chest—what sense did it make? Why was he in the basement to begin with? Could it conceivably have been Robby Meese? Logistically, it was possible. But what was the purpose?
All this had been going through Gurney’s mind at the foot of the stairs, as he held the beam of the flashlight on the chest, trying to decide what to do next.
Rather than deal with whomever or whatever the chest might contain with no light other than what was in his hand, he’d called up to Kim, telling her to flip the light switch at the top of the stairs to the ON position—even though he knew it would make no immediate difference. Shining his little beam alternately on the chest and on the main electrical panel, he made his way to the panel. Tucking the flashlight under his arm, he opened the metal door and saw that the main breaker at the top was in the OFF position. He flipped the stiff plastic switch in the opposite direction.
The bare bulb in the basement ceiling had come on immediately. What sounded like a refrigerator motor upstairs began to hum. He heard Kim say, “Thank God!”
He glanced quickly around the basement, confirming there was indeed nowhere anyone could hide but inside the chest.
He walked over to it, fear and gooseflesh dissipated now by anger and an appetite for confrontation. A touch of caution told him not to lift the lid but to roll the chest over. He stuffed the Maglite in his jacket pocket, gripped the corner of the chest, and yanked it over onto its side, discovering from the ease of doing so that it was empty—a fact he confirmed by kicking the top open.
Kim was halfway down the stairs now and peering around the basement like a scared cat. Her gaze stopped at the broken step. “You could have been killed,” she said, wide-eyed, as though the implications of the accident had only then occurred to her. “It broke, just like that, when you stepped on it?”
“Just like that,” he said.
As she examined with a kind of horror the place where he’d fallen, he was touched by something fundamentally naïve in her expression. This young woman who was putting together an ambitious documentary on the horrific impact of murder seemed startled by the notion that life could be perilous.
Following her gaze, he, too, looked down at the break in the wood—and quickly noticed what she had either failed to see or failed to grasp the meaning of. The stair tread, prior to breaking, had been sawed almost completely through on both ends.
When he pointed this out to her, she’d frowned in apparent confusion. “What do you mean? How could that be?”
All he’d said was, “One more mystery to add to the others.”
• • •
Now, as he lay in his bed, gazing up at the ceiling, massaging his arm without much effect, reconstructing the previous night’s chain of events, he thought that answer through in more detail.
The sabotage was likely the work of the whispering intruder, Kim was likely the intended victim, and perhaps he, Gurney, had simply gotten in the way.
Booby-trapping a staircase by partially sawing through one of the treads was a crime-movie cliché. One that would be hard to miss. The easily detectable saw marks would make it clear that the step hadn’t broken by accident—meaning that the saw marks themselves were almost certainly intended to be discovered. In that sense they would be an integral part of the warning.
Perhaps the choice of a low step was part of the warning also—designed to cause a nasty fall but not as bad a fall, say, as one might have from a higher step. Not a fatal fall. Not yet.
The message might be as explicit as, If you ignore my warnings, they’ll get more violent. More painful. More deadly.
But what, precisely, was Kim being warned away from? The obvious answer was her murder documentary, since it was the biggest thing going on in her life. Maybe the message was, Back away, Kim, stop digging into the past, or the consequences will be terrible. There’s a devil buried in the Good Shepherd case, and you’d better not wake him.
Did that mean that the intruder was someone connected with that famous case? Someone with a serious vested interest in things staying as they were?
Or was it, as Kim had been insisting, only rotten little Robby Meese?
Was it credible that all the recent interferences in her life, the assaults on her peace of mind, had been orchestrated by a pathetic ex-boyfriend? Was he that morbidly bitter at Kim’s ending their relationship? Could everything—the loosened bulbs, missing knives, bloodstains, sawed step, even the demonic whisper—have been motivated by pure jealousy, pure vindictiveness at being cast aside?
On the other hand, maybe the perpetrator was indeed Meese, but maybe the young man was driven by a motivation darker and sicker than spite. Maybe he was warning Kim that unless she took him back, his resentment would grow into something truly awful. Unless she took him back, he’d become a monster, a devil.
Maybe Meese’s inner life was more pathological than Kim realized.
The intensity of that whisper seemed pathological beyond question.
But that raised yet another possibility. It was the possibility that scared Gurney most of all. A possibility he hardly dared consider.
The possibility that there was no whisper.
Suppose what he’d “heard” was the result of his fall, a kind of mini-hallucination? Suppose the “sound” was merely a by-product of the jarring of his barely healed head wound? After all, the low, whistling tinnitus in his ears was not a real whistle; as Dr. Huffbarger had explained, it was a cognitive misinterpretation of a misplaced neural agitation. Suppose the whispered threat—with all its seething fury—had no real-world substance? The idea that sights and sounds might be nothing more than the offspring of bruised tissues and disrupted synapses sent a shiver through him.
Perhaps it was an unconscious insecurity about the whisper that had kept him from mentioning it to the patrol officer who’d come to Kim’s apartment in response to the 911 call he’d made after discovering the tread-sawing evidence. And perhaps that same insecurity had kept him from mentioni
ng the whisper to Schiff when he’d arrived there half an hour later.
It was difficult at the time to decipher Schiff’s expression. One thing was clear: There was no joy in it. He kept looking at Gurney as if he sensed that some part of the story was missing. Then the skeptical detective had turned his attention to Kim, asking her a string of questions designed to pin down a time window in which the vandalism could have occurred.
“That’s what you’re calling this?” Gurney had interjected the second time Schiff used the term. “Vandalism?”
“For now, yeah,” said Schiff blandly. “You have a problem with that?”
“Painful form of vandalism,” said Gurney, slowly rubbing his forearm.
“You want an ambulance?”
Before Gurney could answer, Kim said, “I’m going to drive him to the ER.”
“That so?” asked Schiff, his eyes on Gurney. “Sounds good to me.”
Schiff stared at him for a moment, then said to the patrol officer who was standing in the background, “Make a note that Mr. Gurney declined ambulance transportation.”
Gurney smiled. “So how are we doing on those cameras?”
Schiff gave the impression that he hadn’t heard the question.
Gurney shrugged. “Yesterday would have been a good day to install them.”
There was a flash of anger in Schiff’s eyes. He took a final look around the basement, muttered something about lifting prints the following day from the circuit panel, asked about the chest turned on its side, peered into it.
Eventually he picked up the sawed step and took it upstairs with him, then spent the next ten minutes examining the apartment’s windows and doors. He asked Kim whether she’d had any unusual communications in the past few days, or any communications at all from Meese. Finally he asked how he could gain access to the apartment the following day, if he needed to. Then he left, trailed by the patrol officer.
Chapter 17
A Simple Initiative