“Two reasons. First, the Facebook message indicates that it wasn’t a vehicle she recognized. Second, the misleading position of the body conveys the false message that she never let him into the house—when in fact we know that she did.”
“Pretty thin evidence for any of that,” said Trout.
“We have evidence that he was in the house and that he made an effort to mislead us on that point. There are several reasons he might want to do that, but a big one could be to conceal the fact that the victim knew him and invited him in.”
That seemed to take Trout by surprise. “You’re claiming that Ruth Blum knew the Good Shepherd personally?”
“I’m claiming that certain elements of the crime scene demand we take that possibility seriously.”
Trout looked at Daker, who shrugged as though he didn’t think it mattered one way or the other. Then he looked at Holdenfield, who appeared to be thinking that it mattered a great deal.
Bullard leaned back in her chair and let the silence build before adding, “The false narrative constructed by the Good Shepherd around the Ruth Blum murder has me wondering about his original murders.”
“Wondering?” Trout was agitated. “Wondering what?”
“Wondering if he had the same appetite for deception back then. What do you think, Agent Trout?”
Bullard, in her way, had dropped a small bombshell. It wasn’t a new bombshell, of course. It was what Gurney had been muttering for a week and Clinter for the past ten years. But now, for the first time, it had been tossed onto the table not by an outsider but by a ranking investigator with an arguable right to pursue the case to its conclusion.
She appeared to be inviting Trout to soften his insistence that the essence of the case was summed up by the manifesto and the offender profile.
Unsurprisingly, he stalled and sniped. “You spoke earlier about the importance of facts. I’d like a lot more of those before offering any opinion. I’m in no rush to rethink the most analyzed case in modern criminology, just because someone tried to fool us about where he parked his car.”
The sarcasm was a mistake. Gurney could see it in the set of Bullard’s jaw and in the extra two seconds she held the man’s gaze before she went on. She picked up her e-mail printout of Gurney’s questions.
“Since you folks at the FBI have been at the center of all that analyzing, I’m hoping you can illuminate a few points for me. This business with the little animals? I’m sure you saw in our CJIS report that a two-inch plastic lion had been placed on the victim’s mouth. What’s your take on that?”
Trout turned toward Holdenfield. “Becca?”
Holdenfield smiled meaninglessly. “That’s a speculative area. The source of the original animals—a Noah’s Ark play set—suggests a religious significance. The Bible describes the flood as God’s judgment on an evil world, just as the Good Shepherd’s actions represent his own judgment on that world. Also, the Good Shepherd used only one of each pair of animals at each attack site. There may be an unconscious significance for him in breaking up the pairs that way. His way of ‘culling the flock.’ From a Freudian perspective, it might reflect a childhood desire to break up his parents’ marriage, perhaps by killing one of them. I would emphasize again that this is speculative.”
Bullard nodded slowly, as if absorbing a profound insight. “And the very big gun? From the Freudian perspective, that would be a very big penis?”
Holdenfield’s expression became wary. “It’s not quite that simple.”
“Ah,” said Bullard, “I was afraid of that. Just when I think I’m catching on …” She turned to Gurney. “What’s your read on the big gun and the little animals?”
“I believe their purpose was to generate this conversation.”
“Say that again?”
“My read on the gun and the animals is that they’re purposeful distractions.”
“Distractions from what?”
“From the essential pragmatism of the whole enterprise. They’re designed to suggest an underlying layer of neurotic motivation, or even derangement.”
“The Good Shepherd wants us to believe that he’s deranged?”
“Under the surface rationale of a typical mission-driven killer, there’s always a layer of neurotic or psychotic motivation. It’s the unconscious source of the homicidal energy that drives the conscious ‘mission.’ Right, Rebecca?”
She ignored the question.
Gurney continued. “I believe that the killer is fully aware of all that. I believe that the gun and the animals were the final touches of a master manipulator. The profilers would expect to find things like that, so he provided them. They helped make the ‘mission’ concept believable. The one hypothesis the killer didn’t want anyone to propose or pursue was that he was perfectly sane and that his crimes might have a purely practical motive. A traditional murder motive. Because that would have led the investigation in a completely different direction and probably would have exposed him fairly quickly.”
Trout sighed impatiently, addressing himself to Bullard. “We’ve been through all this with Mr. Gurney before. And his assertions are still nothing more than assertions. They have no evidentiary basis. Frankly, the repetition is tiresome. The accepted hypothesis represents a totally coherent view of the case—the only rational, coherent view of the case that’s ever been put forward.” He picked up his copy of the new Good Shepherd message, gesturing with it. “Plus—this new communication is one hundred percent consistent with the original manifesto and offers a perfectly credible explanation for his attack on Harold Blum’s widow.”
“What do you think of it, Rebecca?” said Gurney, pointing to the paper in Trout’s hand.
“I’d like some more time to study it, but right now I’d say with a reasonable level of professional certainty that it was composed by the same individual who composed the original document.”
“What else?”
She pursed her lips, seemed to be weighing different ways of answering. “He’s articulating the same obsessive resentment, which has now been aggravated by the TV airing of The Orphans of Murder. His new complaint, the motivating factor that triggered his attack on Ruth Blum, is that Orphans is an intolerable glorification of despicable people.”
“All of which makes sense,” interjected Trout. “It reinforces everything we’ve been saying about the case from the very beginning.”
Gurney ignored the interruption, remaining focused on Holdenfield. “How angry would you say he was?”
“What?”
“How angry was the man who wrote that?”
The question seemed to surprise her. She picked up her copy and reread it. “Well … he employs frequent emotional language and images—‘blood … evil … stain … guilt … punishment … death … poison … monsters’—expressing a kind of biblical rage.”
“Is it rage we’re seeing in that document. Or a depiction of rage?”
There was a tiny twitch at the corner of her mouth. “The distinction being …?”
“I’m wondering if this is a furious man expressing his fury or a calm man writing what he imagines a furious man would write under these circumstances.”
Trout broke in again. “What’s the point of this?”
“It’s pretty basic,” said Gurney. “I’m wondering if Dr. Holdenfield, a very insightful psychotherapist, feels that the writer of this message was expressing an authentic emotion of his own, or was he, in a way, putting words in the mouth of a fictional character he’d invented—the so-called Good Shepherd.”
Trout looked at Bullard. “Lieutenant, we can’t spend the whole day on this kind of eccentric theorizing. This is your meeting. I’d urge you to exert some control over the agenda.”
Gurney continued to hold the psychologist’s gaze. “Simple question, Rebecca. What do you think?”
She took a long time before replying. “I’m not sure.”
Gurney sensed, finally, some honesty in Holdenfield’s eyes and in her answer.
Bullard looked troubled. “David, a couple of minutes ago, you used the phrase ‘purely practical’ in relation to the Good Shepherd. What kind of purely practical motive could prompt a killer to choose six victims whose main connection with one another is that they were driving extravagant cars?”
“Extravagant black Mercedes cars,” corrected Gurney, more to himself than to her—The Man with the Black Umbrella coming once again to mind. Referring to the plot of a movie during the discussion of a real crime was risky, especially in unfriendly company, but Gurney decided to go ahead. He recounted how the snipers were stymied in their pursuit of the man with the umbrella when he was immersed in a crowd of people with similar umbrellas.
“What the hell’s the connection between that story and what we’re here to talk about?” It was Daker’s first comment at the table.
Gurney smiled. “I don’t know. I just have the feeling that there is one. I was hoping someone in the room might be perceptive enough to see it.”
Trout rolled his eyes.
Bullard picked up the e-mail in which Gurney had listed his questions about the murders. Her eyes stopped halfway down the page, and she read aloud. “ ‘Were they all equally important?’ ” She looked around the table. “That strikes me as an interesting question in the context of the umbrella story.”
“I don’t see the relevance,” said Daker.
Bullard’s eyes were blinking again, as though clicking off possibilities. “Suppose not all the victims were primary targets.”
“And the ones that weren’t—what were they? Mistakes?” Trout’s expression was incredulous.
Gurney had already explored that avenue with Hardwick, and it had led to scenarios too unlikely to take seriously. “Not mistakes,” said Gurney. “But secondary, in some way.”
“Secondary?” repeated Daker. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know yet. It’s still just a question.”
Trout let his hands fall on the table with a bang. “I’ll only say this once. There comes a time in every investigation when we have to stop questioning the basics and concentrate on the pursuit of the perpetrator.”
“The problem here,” responded Gurney, “is that no serious questioning process ever got started.”
“Okay, okay,” said Bullard, raising her hands in a double “Stop” gesture. “I want to talk about action steps.”
She turned to Clegg, who was seated on her left. “Andy, give us a quick review of what’s happening.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He pulled a slim digital device out of his jacket pocket, tapped a few keys, and studied the screen. “Tech team has released the crime scene for general access. Physical evidence bagged, tagged, and entered in the system. Computer transported to computer forensics. Latent prints processed through IAFIS. Prelim ME report in hand. Autopsy report and full tox screens in seventy-two hours. Site and victim photos entered in the system, ditto incident report. CJIS report, third update, in the system. Status of door-to-doors: forty-eight completed, projected total sixty-six by end of day. Initial verbatims available, summaries to come. Based on two eyewitness observations of a Humvee or a Hummer-style vehicle in the vicinity, DMV is compiling ownership lists of all similar vehicles registered in central New York State.”
“Planned utilization of these lists being what?” asked Trout.
“A database against which we can run the names of any ID’d suspects, as they become available,” said Clegg.
Trout looked skeptical but said nothing more.
Gurney was uncomfortable with the fact that he already had the answer Clegg was chasing. Normally he favored maximum openness. But in this instance he feared that disclosure would only create a distraction and waste valuable time by diverting attention toward Clinter. And Clinter, after all, couldn’t be the Good Shepherd. He was peculiar. Possibly crazy. But evil? No, almost certainly not evil.
But he had another motive for silence, a less objective one. He didn’t want to appear too familiar with Clinter, too allied with him, too much on his wavelength. He didn’t want to be tarred by the association. Holdenfield had tossed that PTSD diagnosis into his lap during their lunch in Branville. At some point Max Clinter had also gotten a PTSD diagnosis. Gurney didn’t like the echo effect.
Clegg was winding up his report. “Tire-tread impressions made in the parking lot of Lakeside Collision are being processed, photos have been sent to vehicle forensics for original equipment and aftermarket matches. We got a decent side-to-side double impression. Crossing our fingers for a unique axle-width measurement.” He looked up from the screen of the device from which he’d been reading. “That’s as much as I’m aware of at the moment, Lieutenant.”
“Any promised callback time on the physical analysis of the Shepherd message—ink, paper, printer data, latents on the address form, inner envelope, et cetera?”
“They said they’d have a better idea within the next hour.”
Bullard nodded. “And the outgoing notifications?”
“Just starting that process. We have a preliminary list of family members in the background materials provided by Agent Daker. I believe Ms. Corazon is being contacted now for her own list of current phone numbers, per Mr. Gurney’s suggestion. Carly Madden in Public Information is helping to formulate an appropriate message.”
“She understands the communications objective—serious alert without panic—and the importance of getting it just right?”
“She’s been made aware of that.”
“Good. I’d like to see the draft before the live calls. Let’s move on that front ASAP.”
Gurney’s sense of the woman was firming up. She devoured stress like vitamins. Her job was probably her sole addiction. “ASAP” was almost certainly the way she wanted everything to happen. And adversaries should take care.
She looked around the table. “Questions?”
“You seem to have your fingers on a lot of buttons at the same time,” said Trout.
“So what else is new?”
“What I’m saying is that there’s a point beyond which we all need some help.”
“No doubt. Feel free to call me if you ever find yourself in that position.”
Trout laughed—a sound as warm and musical as a car starter with a dying battery. “I just wanted to remind you that we have some resources at the federal level that you may not have in Auburn or Sasparilla. And the fact is, the clearer the linkage between this new homicide and the old case becomes, the greater the institutional pressure will be on both of us to bring federal resources to the table.”
“That might happen tomorrow. But today is today. One day at a time.”
Trout smiled—a mechanical expression consistent with his laugh. “I’m not a philosopher, Lieutenant. Just a realist pointing out how things are and where this case is bound to end up. I suppose you can choose to ignore that, until the moment it occurs. But we do need to spell out some ground rules and lines of communication, starting now.”
Bullard glanced at her watch. “Actually, what’s starting now is a brief lunch break. Twelve noon on the dot. I suggest we reconvene at twelve forty-five to discuss those ground rules and lines of communication—and then do some actual work, ground rules permitting.” Her sarcasm was softened by a smile. “The coffee and the snack machines in this building are pretty awful. Would you Albany folks like a recommendation for a local lunch place?”
“No need for that. We’ll be fine,” Trout answered.
Holdenfield looked pensive, restless, far from fine.
Daker looked like he felt nothing at all—beyond a general desire to liquidate all the troublemakers in the world, painfully, one by one.
Bullard and Gurney were seated in a horseshoe-shaped booth in a small Italian restaurant with a bar and three inescapable television screens.
They each had a small antipasto and were sharing a pizza. Clegg had remained at the unit to monitor progress on the multiple initiatives that had been put in motion
. Bullard had been quiet since they’d arrived. She was segregating the hot peppers on the rim of her salad plate. Once she’d uncovered and moved the last of them, her gaze rose to Gurney’s eyes. “So, Dave, tell me. What the hell are you up to?”
“Put a finer point on that question and I’ll be happy to answer it.”
She looked down at her salad, speared one of the hot peppers with her fork, popped it into her mouth, chewed it and swallowed it without a hint of discomfort. “I sense a lot of energy in your involvement. A lot. This is more than just a favor you’re doing for some kid with a hot idea. So what is it? I need to know.”
He smiled. “Did Daker by any chance tell you that RAM wants me to do a program of critical commentaries on failed police investigations?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, I have no intention of doing it.”
She gave him a long, appraising look. “Okay. Do you have any other financial or career interests in the current situation that you haven’t told me about?”
“None.”
“Okay. What is it, then? What’s the attraction?”
“There’s a hole in the case big enough to drive a truck through. Also big enough to keep me awake nights. And peculiar things have happened that I believe were designed to discourage Kim’s pursuit of her project and to discourage my participation. I have a perverse reaction to efforts like that. Pushing me toward the door makes me want to stay in the room.”
“I told you something similar about myself.” She said this so evenly that it was hard to tell if it was meant as a token of comradeship or as a warning not to try to manipulate her. Before he could decide which it was, she continued. “But I have a feeling there’s something else. Am I right?”
He was wondering how open he should be. “There’s more. I’m reluctant to tell you what it is, because it makes me look silly, small, and resentful.”
Bullard shrugged. “One of life’s basic choices, isn’t it? We can look hip, slick, and cool. Or we can tell the truth.”
“When I first started looking into the Good Shepherd case for Kim Corazon, I asked Holdenfield if she thought Agent Trout would be willing to listen to my views on the case.”