He grabbed hold of this assertion, using it to steady himself, even as he sensed something excessive in its tone. He felt sure, however, that any level of conviction was better than none. And he realized that if he were to maintain his balance, like a man on a bicycle, he needed momentum. He needed to do something.
He took out his cell phone, accessed his e-mail, and once again opened the series of incident reports Hardwick had sent him.
Scrolling through them, he recalled that the real-estate agent—the one with the movie-star name—had been only a few miles from her home in Barkham Dell when she became the Good Shepherd’s fourth victim.
Barkham Dell was not far from Cooperstown. In the incident report, he found the exact location on Long Swamp Road, with annotated photographs of the point at which half of Sharon Stone’s face had been blown away and her car had plunged off the tarmac into the mire.
He entered the location into his GPS and drove out through the gates of the Otesaga’s parking lot—not with any major expectation of discovery but with a modest sense of getting back to the beginning, of finally getting his feet on the ground.
The first visit to a crime scene, even ten years after the fact, had an effect on Gurney he found hard to label. To call it stimulating sounded perverse, but it definitely intensified his senses. The chemical reactions it catalyzed in his brain had the result of making everything he saw there far more memorable than the sights and events of his ordinary life.
It wasn’t the first time he’d visited the scene of a murder committed long ago. A confession he’d once elicited from a serial killer included the murder of a teenage girl in a wooded area near Orchard Beach in the Bronx—a murder that had occurred twelve years prior to the confession.
Now, as Gurney drove slowly through the gentle leftward curve where Long Swamp Road moved away from the state highway toward Dead Dog Lake, he went through the same process he’d gone through at Orchard Beach—in his mind subtracting years of growth from the trees, erasing saplings and smaller bushes.
He had the incident-report photos to guide his adjustments. There had been no additions or subtractions of man-made structures. No buildings, no billboards, no telephone poles. The road hadn’t had a guardrail in 2000, and it didn’t now. Three tall landmark trees appeared virtually unchanged. The time of year, early spring, was the same then and now, giving the old photos an illusion of currency.
The position of the tall trees, combined with the photo notations and accompanying angle-and-distance measurements, made it possible for Gurney to locate the approximate position of Sharon Stone’s car when the bullet struck her.
He drove back along the road to the point where it was intersected by a road that connected with the state highway. Then he drove from that point to the point of the shot, and from there through two miles of bog and marshland, past Dead Dog Lake, through the Currier & Ives village of Barkham Dell, and another mile to the point where Long Swamp Road teed into a busy county route.
Then he went back to his starting point and did it all again—but this time he did it as he imagined the Good Shepherd might have. First he found an unobtrusive spot to park by the side of the road not far from the connector to the state highway—a reasonable place for someone to lie in wait for a passing Mercedes, a popular vehicle among Barkham Dell’s weekenders.
Then he pulled out behind an imaginary black Mercedes, “followed” it to the beginning of the long curve, accelerated into the curve, swung out into the left lane, lowered his passenger window, and at the approximate point indicated in the accident reconstruction he raised his right arm and pointed it toward the imaginary driver.
“BAM!” shouted Gurney as loud as he could, knowing that no sound he could make could approach even 10 percent of the report of the .50-caliber monster used in the actual shooting. As he faked the shot, he jammed on his brakes, visualizing the victim’s car drifting from the arc of the curve, careening into the swamp, perhaps a hundred yards ahead of him. He pretended to lay the gun down on the seat, to take a tiny toy animal from his shirt pocket, and to toss it onto the shoulder of the road not far from the spot where he pictured the Mercedes embedded in the mud, surrounded by the remnants of the previous season’s brown marsh grass.
Having completed the fantasy attack, he drove on toward Barkham Dell. On the way he considered all the available options for disposing of a Desert Eagle pistol. Three cars passed him going in the opposite direction. One happened to be a black Mercedes—sending a chill up the back of his scalp.
At the traffic light in the village, he made a U-turn—in order to repeat the whole procedure. But just as he was approaching Dead Dog Lake, pondering its pluses and minuses as a pistol depository, his cell phone rang. The caller ID was his own home landline.
“Madeleine?”
“Where are you?”
“On a back road near Barkham Dell. Why?”
“Why?”
He hesitated. “Is there a problem?”
“What time is it?” she asked with disturbing calmness.
“What time? I don’t … Oh, Jesus … Yes, I see. I forgot.”
The clock on his dashboard read 3:15 P.M. He’d promised to be home by three. By three at the latest.
“You forgot?”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s it? You forgot?” There was real anger in her controlled tone.
“I’m sorry. Forgetting is not something over which I have much control. I don’t purposely choose to forget things.”
“Yes you do.”
“How the hell could I? Forgetting is forgetting. It’s not an intentional thing.”
“You remember what you care about. You forget what you don’t care about.”
“That’s not—”
“Yes it is. You always blame it on your memory. It’s got nothing to do with your memory. You never forgot a court appearance, did you? You never forgot a meeting with the DA. You don’t have a memory problem, David, you have a caring problem.”
“Look, I’m sorry.”
“Right. So when will you be home?”
“I’m on my way. Thirty-five, forty minutes?”
“So you’re saying you’ll be here by four?”
“Definitely by four. Maybe sooner.”
“Fine. Four o’clock. Just an hour late. See you then.”
The connection was broken.
At 3:52 P.M. he reached the quiet lane that wound its way up, streamside, through a rising declivity in the hills, to their farmhouse. A mile up the lane, he pulled onto a grassy area in front of a rarely used weekender’s cabin.
He’d spent the first ten minutes of the trip from Barkham Dell wondering why Madeleine had sounded so irritated—more irritated than usual by his forgetfulness, his carelessness, his failure to write down things that might slip his mind. The rest of the trip he’d devoted to pondering the Good Shepherd murders.
He wondered if any progress had been made on the case, once it came under the control of the FBI field office in Albany, that hadn’t been noted in the NYSP files available to Hardwick. He also wondered if there was a way of answering that question without going through Agent Trout. He couldn’t think of any.
However … if Trout was indeed as rigid as everyone seemed to think, then he would also be brittle. Gurney had learned time and again that a man tends to marshal his strongest defenses at his weakest point.
Thus a mania for control often betrays a terror of chaos.
And that suggested a path into the fortress.
He took out his phone and tapped in Holdenfield’s number. The call went into her voice mail.
“Hi, Rebecca. Sorry to bother you again on such a busy day. But there are some things about the Good Shepherd case that don’t quite fit together. In fact, there may be a fatal flaw in the FBI construct. When you have a moment, give me a call.”
He slipped the phone back into his pocket and drove the rest of the way up the hill.
Chapter 20
Surprise
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As he passed between the pond and the barn, and the house came into view at the top end of the pasture, he saw, just visible above the bent and broken tops of the brown pasture grass, the handlebars and gas tank of a motorcycle next to Madeleine’s car.
He reacted to the sight with a mixture of interest and suspicion. When he pulled in next to it, his interest grew. The motorcycle, in pristine condition, was a BSA Cyclone, an increasingly rare machine that hadn’t been manufactured since the 1960s.
It was reminiscent of a bike he’d once owned himself. In 1979, when he was a freshman at Fordham, living in his parents’ Bronx apartment, he commuted to the campus on a twenty-year-old Triumph Bonneville. When it was stolen during the summer between his freshman and sophomore years, he’d already been through enough stinging rainstorms and near accidents on the Cross Bronx Expressway to make the boredom of the bus acceptable.
He went into the house through the side door, which led via a short hallway to the big kitchen. He expected to hear voices, perhaps the voice of the visiting biker, but all he heard was something sizzling on the stove. When he entered the room, it was full of the aroma of the onions Madeleine was sautéing in a wok. She didn’t look up.
“Whose motorcycle is that?” he asked.
“Was it in your way?”
“I didn’t say it was in my way.” He waited, staring at her back. “So?”
“So?”
“So whose is it?”
“I’m not supposed to say.”
“What?”
She sighed. “I’m not supposed to say.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because … someone wants his visit to be a surprise.”
“Who? Where is he?”
“It’s a surprise.” She sounded unhappy with the position she’d been put in.
“Someone is here to see me?”
“Right.” She turned off the burner, picked up the wok, and scraped the onions out over a layer of rice in a baking dish next to the stove. “Where’s Kim?”
“She and your visitor went for a walk.” She went to the refrigerator, took out a bowl of raw peeled shrimp, a second bowl of chopped peppers and celery, and a jar of minced garlic.
“You know,” said Gurney, “I’m not very fond of surprises.”
“Neither am I.” She turned up the gas under the wok, dumped the vegetables into it, and began stirring vigorously with a spatula.
Neither one said anything for a long minute. Gurney found the silence uncomfortable. “I assume it’s someone I know?” He immediately regretted the inanity of the question.
Madeleine looked directly at him for the first time since he came in. “I hope so.”
He took a deep breath. “This is impossibly silly. Tell me who came on that motorcycle and why he’s here.”
Madeleine shrugged. “Kyle. To see you.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Your tinnitus isn’t that bad.”
“My son, Kyle? Came from the city on a motorcycle? To see me?”
“To surprise you. He originally planned to be here at three. Because that’s when you said you’d be back. Three at the latest. Then he decided to arrive at two. So in case you got home earlier than three, he’d have more time with you.”
“You set this up?” It came out as half question, half accusation.
“No, I didn’t ‘set it up.’ It was Kyle’s idea to come up and see you. He hasn’t seen you since you were in the hospital. All I did was tell him what time you’d be here—the time you said you’d be here. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Seems like quite a coincidence that yesterday you were suggesting that Kyle and Kim would make an interesting couple and now here they are, out for a walk together.”
“Coincidences do occur, David. That’s why the word exists.” She turned her attention back to the wok.
Gurney felt more disturbed than he wanted to admit. He decided it was a symptom of his deep dislike of having his plans changed, the challenge to his illusion of control. That and the fact that his relationship with Kyle, his twenty-six-year-old son from his first marriage, had long been fraught with conflicting emotions and rationalizations. And the ibuprofens he’d taken for the pinched nerve in his arm were wearing off, and the overall achiness from his fall in the basement was getting worse. And, and, and …
He tried to keep the hostility and self-pity out of his voice. “Do you know where they went on their walk?”
Madeleine took the wok from the burner and added its contents to the rice and onions in the baking dish. She didn’t answer until she’d scraped the wok clean, returned it to the stove, and added more oil. “I suggested the ridge path around to the trail that leads down to the pond.”
“When did they leave?”
“When they discovered you’d be an hour late.”
“I wish you’d told me about this.”
“Would it have made a difference?”
“Of course it would have made a difference.”
“That’s interesting.”
The oil in the wok was beginning to smoke. Madeleine went to the spice cabinet, came back with powdered ginger, cardamom, coriander, and a bag of cashews. She turned the stove exhaust fan to high, put a handful of the nuts into the wok, a teaspoon of each of the spices, and began stirring it all together.
She nodded toward the window next to the stove. “They’re coming up the hill.”
He stepped over to it and looked out. Ambling up the grassy path through the pasture were Kim in Madeleine’s wildly hued Windbreaker and Kyle in faded jeans and a black leather jacket. They appeared to be laughing.
As Gurney was watching them, Madeleine was watching him. “Before they get to the door,” she said, “you might want to put a more welcoming expression on your face.”
“I was just thinking about the motorcycle.”
She tipped the nuts-and-spices mixture from the wok onto the other ingredients in the baking dish. “What about it?”
“A fifty-year-old classic restored to mint condition isn’t cheap.”
“Hah!” She put the wok in the sink and let the water run on it. “Since when has Kyle ever owned anything that was cheap?”
He nodded vaguely. “The only other time he came up to this house was two years ago to show off that goddamn yellow Porsche he’d gotten with his Wall Street bonus. Now it’s a pricey BSA. Jesus.”
“You’re his father.”
“Meaning what?”
Madeleine sighed, looking at him with an odd combination of exasperation and sympathy. “Isn’t it obvious? He wants you to be proud of him. Granted, he goes about it in a way that doesn’t work. You two don’t know each other very well, do you?”
“I guess not.” He watched her put the baking dish into the oven. “This glittery, luxury stuff … all this brand-name crap … it just brings back too many memories of that materialistic gene he inherited from his real-estate-broker mother. She was great at making money, even better at spending it. Kept telling me I was wasting my time as a cop, I should go to law school, because there was a lot more money in defending criminals than in catching them. So now Kyle’s in law school. Ought to make her happy.”
“Are you angry because you think he wants to defend criminals?”
“I’m not angry.”
She shot him a disbelieving glance.
“Maybe I am angry. I don’t know what I am. Seems like everything is getting on my nerves lately.”
Madeleine shrugged. “Make sure you remember it’s your son who came to see you today, not your ex-wife.”
“Right. I just wish that—”
He was interrupted by the sound of the side door opening, followed by Kim’s excited voice in the hallway. “No way, that’s much too weird! I mean, that’s like the single sickest thing I ever heard!”
Kyle came into the kitchen first, smiling broadly. “Hey, Dad! Good to see you!”
They greeted each other with awkward hugs.
“Good to see you, too, son. Kind of a long trip up here on that bike, wasn’t it?”
“It was perfect, actually. Traffic was light on 17, and from 17 to here the roads are ideal for a bike. How do you like it?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that looked that good.”
“Me neither. I love it. You used to have a bike like that, right?”
“Not that sharp.”
“I hope I can keep it like that. I just got it two weeks ago at the Atlantic City Classic Motorcycle Show. Hadn’t planned on buying anything, but I couldn’t resist. Never saw one that nice—not even the one my boss has.”
“Your boss?”
“Yeah, I’m kind of half back on the Street, working part-time for some guys from the old firm that went under.”
“But you’re still at Columbia?”
“Sure, absolutely. First-year crunch. Tons of reading. Designed to weed out the unmotivated. I’m so busy I’m nuts, but what the hell.”
Kim came through the doorway into the kitchen with a cheery smile for Madeleine. “Thanks again for the jacket. I hung it up in the mudroom. Is that okay?”
“Fine. But I’m dying of curiosity.”
“About what?”
“I’m trying to imagine ‘the single sickest thing’ you ever heard.”
“What? Oh! You heard me say that? Kyle was telling me something. Yuck.” She looked at him. “You tell her. I don’t even want to say it.”
“It, uh … it’s about a peculiar disorder some people have. This might not be the best time to go into it. It takes some explanation. Maybe later might be better?”
“Okay, I’ll ask you again later. Now I’m really curious. In the meantime would you like a drink or a snack? Cheese, crackers, olives, fruit, anything?”
Kyle and Kim looked at each other, shook their heads.
“Not for me,” said Kyle.
“No thanks,” said Kim.
“Then just make yourselves comfortable.” Madeleine gestured toward the armchairs around the stone fireplace at the far end of the room. “I have to finish up a few things. We’ll be having dinner around six.”
Kim asked if she could help with anything, and when Madeleine said no, she excused herself and headed for the bathroom. Gurney and Kyle settled into a pair of wing chairs that faced each other over a low cherry coffee table in front of the hearth.