So on to something else. Or back to something else.
Back to the discomfort he’d felt when Kyle was insisting that no one had followed him and Kim to the city or back to Walnut Crossing. Gurney had seen no point in sharing his discomfort at the time, but now he needed to resolve the question that had been troubling him. He got the three flashlights out of the sideboard drawer, tried each one, and selected the one whose batteries seemed the least drained. Then he went to the mudroom, put on his paint-spattered barn jacket, turned on the light by the side door, and stepped outside.
It was cold now, not merely chilly. He got down on the frozen grass in front of Kim’s car to check the clearance between the undercarriage and the ground. It wasn’t sufficient for what he had in mind, so he went back into the house for her keys.
He found them in her bag on the coffee table by the fireplace.
Back outside, he went to the tractor shed and got the pair of inclined metal ramps that he normally used for elevating the riding mower when the blades needed changing. He placed the ramps in front of the Miata, then drove it gently forward and upward until the front end was an extra eight inches or so off the ground. Then he set the brake and returned to his position on the frozen grass. Lying on his back, he wriggled under the raised car with his flashlight.
It didn’t take long to find what he’d suspected and feared might be there. It was a black metal box not much larger than a pack of cigarettes, held by a magnet to one of the forward frame components. A wire emerging from the box ran upward in the direction of the car’s battery.
He wriggled out from under the car, backed it down off the ramps, went into the house, and replaced Kim’s keys in her bag.
He had some thinking to do. The discovery of a GPS location transmitter on the Miata was not exactly a game changer, but it certainly added a disturbing new dimension. And it demanded a decision: to leave it there or not.
As he began working his way through the implications of each option, a backlog of other issues kept intruding. He decided to get rid of them, at least temporarily, with a phone call.
It was 11:30 P.M., and the chances of Hardwick’s picking up were slim, but leaving a message would serve Gurney’s mind-clearing purposes. As expected, the call went to voice mail.
“Hey, Jack, more pain-in-the-ass questions for you. Is there an easily accessible state database of ten-year-old traffic citations? Specifically, I’m wondering about obscured-plate citations issued in the upstate counties during the period of the Good Shepherd murders. Also, any progress yet with the White Mountain Strangler details?”
After he ended the call, he went back to pondering the GPS-locator situation. The fact that it was hardwired to the car’s electrical system meant that, unlike a battery system with a limited transmission life, it could have been installed quite some time ago and still be operational. The installation questions were when?, why?, and by whom? No doubt it was the same person who was monitoring the bugs in Kim’s apartment. It could be her obsessed ex-boyfriend stalker, but Gurney had a feeling the situation might be more complicated than that.
In fact, it was entirely possible that …
He went to the mudroom, put his barn jacket back on, and went out again to the parking area.
He moved the ramps from the front of the Miata to the front of the Outback. Having forgotten his keys and flashlight, he returned to the house and got them, then started his car and repeated the earlier process.
Half expecting to find a similar tracking device, he searched the front undercarriage thoroughly, but he found nothing. He opened the hood and searched the engine compartment. Still nothing. He traced the battery wiring to its various connections and found nothing out of place.
As a final bit of reassurance, he moved the ramps around from the front to the back and reversed the car up onto them. He slid under the elevated rear end with his flashlight.
And there it was. A second black box, slightly larger than the first to accommodate a battery, was magnetized to the top of one of the rear bumper supports. The brand and general specs printed on the side of the device indicated it was from the same manufacturer and functionally equivalent to the one on Kim’s car, except for the power source.
The reason for the difference could have a number of explanations, but an obvious one was the different installation time required—at least half an hour for the wired version and virtually no time at all for the battery version. All things being equal, wired power was preferable—which suggested that whoever had installed them might have had more extended access to Kim’s car than to the Outback. Which, of course, brought Meese again to mind.
It was after midnight now, but sleep was out of the question. Gurney got a notepad and pen from his desk in the den and spent some cramped time under each car, copying down the information printed on the trackers so he could look up their performance parameters on the manufacturer’s website. GPS-based trackers all worked pretty much the same way, transmitting location coordinates that could be displayed as an icon on a map, viewable through appropriate software on virtually any computer with an Internet connection. The cost variability among the commercially available systems related to range, positional precision, software sophistication, and real-time accuracy. The technology had become, even at high levels of performance, fairly inexpensive—and therefore accessible to just about anyone who wanted it.
As he was pulling himself out from under the Miata for the second time that night, Gurney felt a vibration on his right hip, which startled him. He instinctively linked it to what he was doing, thinking it was somehow caused by the GPS device. A moment later he realized it was his phone, which he’d earlier set on vibrate to avoid waking anyone in the house if and when Hardwick got back to him.
As he scrambled to his feet, he pulled the phone from his pocket and saw Hardwick’s name on the ID screen.
“That was fast,” said Gurney.
“Fast? The hell are you talking about?”
“Fast answers to my questions.”
“What questions?”
“The ones I left on your voice mail.”
“I don’t check my voice mail in the middle of the night. That’s not why I’m calling you.”
Gurney had a sickening premonition. Or maybe he just knew the shifting tones of Hardwick’s voice well enough to recognize the sound of death. He waited for the announcement.
“Lila Sterne. Wife of the dentist. On the floor, inside their front door. Ice pick to the heart. That makes three current, plus the six oldies. Total of nine. No end in sight. Thought you’d want to know. Didn’t think anyone else at this point would bother to tell you.”
“Jesus Christ. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. One every night.”
“So who’s next? Any bets on Wednesday’s ice pick?” Hardwick’s tone had shifted again—this time into the cynical register that went through Gurney like nails on a blackboard.
He understood the basic police need for detachment and black humor, but Hardwick always seemed to go beyond the necessary. That excess was the surface reason for Gurney’s reaction, but he knew there was something deeper, something in that tone that reminded him of his father.
“Thanks for the information, Jack.”
“Hey, what are friends for, right?”
Gurney went into the house and stood in the middle of the kitchen, trying to absorb all the data encountered in the past hour. He stood at the sideboard. With the kitchen lights on, he couldn’t see out the window. So he turned them off. The moon was just a fraction shy of full—a ball with one slightly flattened side. The moonlight was bright enough to give the grass a gray sheen and the trees at the edge of the pasture distinct black shadows. Gurney squinted and thought he could just make out the drooping branches of the hemlocks.
Then he thought he saw something moving. He held his breath, leaning over closer to the window. As he leaned forward on the top of the sideboard, he uttered a sharp yelp at a stabbing pain that shot up through his right wrist. He
knew, even before he saw the damage, that he’d carelessly pressed his hand down on the razor-edged head of the arrow that had been lying there for a week, and it had sliced deeply into the flesh. By the time he got the light back on, blood was pooling in his upturned palm and dripping between his fingers onto the floor.
Chapter 40
Facing Facts
Unable to sleep despite his total exhaustion, Gurney was sitting in semidarkness at the breakfast table, gazing out at the eastern ridge. Dawn was spreading like a sick pallor across the sky—a fair reflection of his state of mind.
Earlier, awakened by his cry of pain, Madeleine had driven him to the emergency room of Walnut Crossing’s minimal hospital.
She’d stayed with him through a four-hour process that could have been completed in less than an hour if three ambulances hadn’t arrived with the battered survivors of an unlikely accident in which a drunk driver had knocked down a billboard that acted as a ramp that launched a speeding motorcycle that landed on the hood of a car coming from the opposite direction. At least that was the story the EMS and ER people were telling and retelling each other outside the cubicle where Gurney had waited to be stitched and bandaged.
It had been his second visit to a hospital in less than a week, which in itself was troubling.
He’d been aware of Madeleine’s worried glances in his direction on their way there, in the waiting area, and on the way home, but they’d hardly spoken. When they had, it was mainly about how his hand felt or about the need to either get rid of the damn arrow or at least keep it in a safer place.
There were other things he could have spoken to her about, perhaps that he should have spoken about. The tracker he’d found on Kim’s car. The tracker on his own car. The third ice-pick murder. But he didn’t say a word about any of those things.
The reason for his silence, he told himself, was that telling her would only upset her. But a small voice in the back of his head told him otherwise—that his real reason was to avoid debate, to keep his options open. He told himself that the concealment would be temporary, therefore not a matter of truth, only of timing.
When they got home, half an hour before dawn, she went to bed with the same concerned look that had crossed her face so many times that night.
Too agitated to doze off, he sat at the table, wrestling with the implications of the things he didn’t want to talk about, especially the growing string of murders.
Of all the ways that killers end up being caught, few apply to killers who are intelligent and disciplined. And the Good Shepherd might be the smartest and most disciplined of all.
The only reasonable chance of identifying him would be through a massive coordinated law-enforcement effort. It would require reevaluating every piece of data from the original case. Overwhelming manpower. A mandate to start over with a clean slate. But in the current atmosphere, there was no way that was going to happen. Neither the FBI nor BCI would be able to step far enough outside the box. It was a box they’d built themselves, a box they’d been reinforcing for ten years.
So what was he supposed to do?
Ostracized and demonized, with a possible felony charge hanging over him and a PTSD label slapped on his forehead, what the hell could he do?
Nothing came to mind.
Nothing but an irritatingly simplistic aphorism.
You play the hand you’ve been dealt.
What the hell was in that hand anyway?
He concluded that most of his cards were garbage. Or unplayable with the near-zero resources at his disposal.
But he had to admit that he did have one wild card.
It might be worth something, or it might be worth nothing.
• • •
The sun rose behind a morning haze. It was still low in the sky when the house phone rang. Gurney got up from the table and went into the den to answer it. It was someone from the clinic, asking for Madeleine.
As he was about to take the handset to her in the bedroom, she appeared at the den door in her pajamas, extending her hand for it as though it were a call she’d been expecting.
She glanced at the ID screen before she spoke—in a pleasantly professional tone that contrasted with the sleepy look on her face. “Good morning, this is Madeleine.”
She then listened quietly to what was evidently a long explanation of something—during which Gurney returned to the kitchen and put on a fresh pot of coffee.
He heard her voice again only briefly toward the end of the call, and only a few of her words clearly. It sounded to him as if she was agreeing to do something. A few moments later, she appeared at the kitchen doorway, regarding him with the previous night’s worry back in her eyes.
“How’s your hand?”
The lidocaine nerve block they’d given him prior to his nine stitches had worn off, and the lower half of his palm was throbbing.
“Not too bad,” he said. “What are they asking you to do now?”
She ignored the question. “You should be keeping it elevated. Like the doctor said.”
“Right.” He raised his hand a few inches above the sink island, where he was waiting for the coffee to brew. “Did they have another suicide?” he asked, rather too jokily.
“Carol Quilty resigned last night. They need someone to fill in today.”
“What time?”
“As soon as I can get there. I’m going to take a shower, have a piece of toast, and off I go. Will you be all right here alone?”
“Of course.”
She frowned and pointed at his hand. “Higher.”
He raised it to eye level.
She sighed, gave him a silly little “attaboy” wink, and headed for the shower.
He marveled for the thousandth time at her innate cheerfulness, her perennial ability to accept the reality of whatever had been placed in front of her and address it with an attitude far more positive than his own.
She faced life as it was and did the best she could.
She played the hand she’d been dealt.
Which made him think again about his wild card.
Whatever it might be worth, he needed to do something with it soon. He had to play it before the game was over.
He had the sinking feeling that it might not be worth a damn thing. But there was only one way to find out.
His “wild card” was his access to the eavesdropping equipment that had been installed in Kim’s apartment. Perhaps by the Good Shepherd, who perhaps was still monitoring its transmissions. If both of those assumptions were valid—and both were big ifs—that equipment could provide a channel of communication. A way of talking to the killer. An opportunity to send a message.
But what kind of message should it be?
It was a simple question—with an unlimited number of answers.
All he had to do was figure out the right one.
Shortly after Madeleine left for the clinic, the den phone rang again. The ID announced it was Hardwick. The raspy voice said, “Check the Manchester Union Leader’s online archives. They did a series on the White Mountain Strangler case back in ’91. Betcha find a shitload of what you want. Gotta go piss. Take care.”
The man certainly had his ways of saying good-bye.
Gurney went to his computer and spent an hour wading through the online archives not only of the Union Leader but of other New England papers that had reported extensively on the Strangler’s crimes.
There had been five attacks in two months, all fatal. All the victims were women, and all had been strangled with white silk scarves, which were left knotted around their necks. The common factors among the victims were more circumstantial than personal. Three of the women had lived alone, and they had been killed in their homes. The two others worked late in isolated environments. One had been killed in an unlit parking area behind a crafts store she managed, the other in a similar area behind her own small flower shop. All five attacks occurred within a ten-mile radius of Hanover, home of Dartmouth College.
Although a sexual motive is often present in the serial strangulation of women, there were no signs of rape or other abuse. And the “victim profile” struck Gurney as odd. In fact, there really wasn’t any. The only physical factor the women appeared to have in common was that they were all fairly small. But they looked nothing alike. Their hairstyles and clothing styles were quite diverse. They represented a curious socioeconomic mix—a Dartmouth student (Larry Sterne’s girlfriend at the time), two shopkeepers, a part-time cafeteria aide in a local grammar school, and a psychiatrist. They ranged in age from twenty-one to seventy-one. The Dartmouth student was a blond WASP. The retired psychiatrist was a gray-haired African-American. Gurney had rarely seen such variation among the victims of a serial killer. It was hard to discern in these women the killer’s fixation—the obsession that had motivated him.
As he was pondering the peculiarities of the case, he heard the upstairs shower running. A little while after that, Kim appeared at the den doorway with a terribly anxious expression.
“Good morning,” said Gurney, closing down his computer search.
“I’m so sorry for getting you into this,” she said, close to tears.
“It’s what I used to do for a living.”
“When you did it for a living, no one burned down your barn.”
“We don’t know for sure that the barn has anything to do with the case. It might have been some—”
“Oh, my God,” she broke in, “what happened to your hand?”
“The arrow that I left on the sideboard—I leaned my hand on it in the dark last night.”
“Oh, my God,” she repeated, wincing.
Kyle appeared in the hallway behind her. “Morning, Dad, how are—” He stopped when he saw the bandage. “What happened?”