Hardwick let out a harsh bray that turned into a fit of coughing. “Wow! The uptight prick of the century and a psycho drunk. I’m in hot-shit company.”
Gurney took a long swallow from his coffee container. “When do we get to the colorful, significant tidbits?”
Hardwick extended his scarred, muscular legs and leaned far back in his chair. “Stuff the press never got hold of?”
“Right.”
“I guess one thing would be the little animals. You didn’t know about those, did you?”
“Little animals?”
“Little plastic replicas. Part of a set. An elephant. A lion. A giraffe. A zebra. A monkey. A sixth one I can’t remember.”
“And how were these—”
“One was found at the scene of each attack.”
“Where?”
“In the general vicinity of the victim’s car.”
“General vicinity?”
“Yeah, like they’d been tossed there from the shooter’s car.”
“Lab work on these little animals lead anywhere?”
“No prints, nothing like that.”
“But?”
“But they were part of a kid’s play set. Something called Noah’s World. Like one of those diorama things. The kid builds a model of Noah’s Ark, then he puts the animals in it.”
“Any distribution angle, stores, factory variables, ways of tracing that particular set?”
“Dead end. Very popular toy. A Walmart staple. They sold like seventy-eight thousand of them. All identical, all made in one factory in Hung Dick.”
“Where?”
“China. Who the fuck knows? It doesn’t matter. The sets are all the same.”
“Any theories regarding the significance of those individual animals?”
“Lots of them. All bullshit.”
Gurney made a mental note to readdress that issue later.
When later? What the hell was he thinking? The plan was to look over Kim’s shoulder. Not volunteer for a job no one had asked him to do.
“Interesting,” said Gurney. “Any other little oddities that weren’t released for public consumption?”
“I suppose you could call the gun an oddity.”
“My recollection is that the news reports just referred to a large-caliber handgun.”
“It was a Desert Eagle.”
“The .50-caliber monster?”
“The very one.”
“The profilers must have zeroed in on that.”
“Oh, yeah, big-time. But the oddity wasn’t just the size of the weapon. Out of the six shootings, we retrieved two bullets in good enough shape for reliable ballistics and a third that would be marginal for courtroom use but definitely suggestive.”
“Suggestive of what?”
“The three bullets came from three different Desert Eagles.”
“What?”
“That was the reaction everyone had.”
“Did that ever lead to a multiple-shooter hypothesis?”
“For about ten minutes. Arlo Blatt came up with one of his dumber-than-dumb ideas: that the shootings might be some kind of gang-initiation ritual and every gang member had his own Desert Eagle. Of course, that left the little problem of the manifesto, which read like it was written by a college professor, and your average gang member can barely spell the word ‘gang.’ Some other people had less stupid ideas, but ultimately the single-shooter concept won out. Especially after it was blessed by the Behavioral Unit geniuses at the FBI. The attack scenes were essentially identical. The approach, shooting, and escape reconstructions were identical. And after a little psychological tweaking of their model, it made as much sense to the profilers for this guy to be using six Desert Eagles as it made for him to be using one.”
Gurney responded only with a pained expression. He’d had mixed experiences with profilers over the years and tended to regard their achievements as no more than the achievements of common sense and their failures as proof of the vacuity of their profession. The problem with most profilers, especially those with a streak of FBI arrogance in their DNA, was that they thought they actually knew something and that their speculations were scientific.
“In other words,” said Gurney, “using six outrageous guns is no more outrageous than using one outrageous gun, because outrageous is outrageous.”
Hardwick grinned. “There’s one final oddity. All of the victims’ cars were black.”
“A popular Mercedes color, isn’t it?”
“Basic black accounted for about thirty percent of the total production runs of the models involved, plus maybe another three percent for a metallic variant of black. So a third—thirty-three percent. The odds, then, would be that two of the six vehicles attacked would have been black—unless the color black were part of the shooter’s selection criteria.”
“Why would color be a factor?”
Hardwick shrugged, tilting his coffee container and draining the last of it into his mouth. “Another good question.”
They sat quietly for a minute. Gurney was trying to connect the “oddities” in some way that might explain them all, then gave up, realizing he would need to know a lot more before such random details could be arranged into a pattern.
“Tell me what you know about Max Clinter.”
“Maxie is a special kind of guy. A mixed blessing.”
“How mixed?”
“He’s got a history.” Hardwick looked thoughtful, then let out a grating laugh. “I’d love to see you guys get together. Sherlock the Logical Genius meets Ahab the Whale Chaser.”
“The whale in question being …?”
“The whale being the Good Shepherd. Maxie always had a tendency to sink his teeth into something and not let go, but after the little mishap that ended his career, he became a walking definition of demented determination. Catching the Good Shepherd was not the main purpose of his life, it was the only purpose. Made a lot people back away.” Hardwick gave Gurney a sideways look, accompanied by another rough laugh. “Be fun to see you and Ahab shoot the shit.”
“Jack, anybody ever tell you your laugh sounds like someone flushing a toilet?”
“Not anybody who was asking me for a favor.” Hardwick rose from his chair, brandishing his empty coffee container. “It’s a miracle how fast the human body converts this stuff into piss.” He headed out of the room.
He returned a couple of minutes later and perched on the arm of his chair, speaking as though there’d been no interruption. “If you want to know about Maxie, best place to start would be the famous Buffalo mob incident.”
“Famous?”
“Famous in our little upstate world. Important Big Apple dicks like you probably never even heard about it.”
“What happened?”
“There was a mob guy in Buffalo by the name of Frankie Benno, who had organized the resurgence of heroin in western New York. Everyone knew this, but Frankie was smart and careful and protected by a handful of scumbag politicians. The situation started to obsess Maxie. He was determined to bring Frankie in for questioning, even though he couldn’t find anything specific to charge him with. He decided to bring things to a head by ‘harassing the fucker into making a mistake’—that was the last thing Maxie said to his wife before he went to a restaurant that was a known hangout for Frankie’s people, in a building that Frankie owned.”
Gurney’s first thought was that “harassing the fucker into making a mistake” was a tricky objective. His second thought was that he’d done it often enough himself, except he called it “putting the suspect under pressure to observe his reactions.”
Hardwick went on. “Maxie goes into the restaurant dressed and acting like a thug. He goes straight into the back room where Frankie’s crew hung out when they weren’t busy cracking heads. There’s two wiseguys in the room, sucking up linguine in clam sauce. Maxie walks over to them, pulls out a gun and a little disposable camera. He tells the wiseguys they have a choice: They can have their picture taken wit
h their brains blown out or they can have it taken giving each other blow jobs. Up to them. Their choice. They have ten seconds to decide. They can grab each other’s cocks or their brains are on the wall. Ten … nine … eight … seven … six …”
Hardwick leaned toward Gurney, eyes sparkling, seemingly enthralled by the events he was recounting. “But Maxie is standing kinda close to them—too close—and one of the wiseguys reaches out and grabs the gun away from him. Maxie backs away and falls on his ass. The wiseguys are about to stomp the shit out of him, but Maxie suddenly drops the thug routine and starts screaming that he’s not what he was pretending to be, he’s really just an actor. He says somebody put him up to it, and nobody would have gotten hurt anyway, because the gun isn’t even real, it’s a stage prop. He’s practically crying. The wiseguys check the gun. Sure enough, it’s a fake. So now they want to know what the fuck’s going on, who put him up to it, et cetera. Maxie claims he doesn’t know, but that he’s supposed to meet the guy the next day to give him back the camera with the blow-job pictures and get five grand for his trouble. One of the wiseguys goes out to a pay phone on the street—this is before everybody had cell phones. When he comes back in, he tells Maxie they’re going to take him upstairs because Mr. Benno is upset. Maxie looks like he’s about to shit in his pants, begs them please just let him go. But they take him upstairs. Upstairs there’s a fortified office. Steel doors, locks, cameras. Major security. Frankie Benno is up there with two other wiseguys. When they bring Maxie into the inner sanctum, Frankie gives him a long, hard look. Then a nasty smile—like a great idea has just dawned on him. He says, ‘Take off your clothes.’ Maxie starts to whine like a baby. Frankie says, ‘Take off your fucking clothes and give me the fucking camera.’ Maxie gives him the camera, backs up against the wall like he’s trying to get as far away from these guys as he can. He takes off his jacket and shirt, then drops his pants. But his shoes are still on. So he sits down on the floor and starts pushing his pants down, but they’re caught up in a bunch around his ankles. Frankie tells him to hurry up. Frankie’s four wiseguys are grinning. Suddenly Maxie’s hands come up from the pants around his ankles, and in each hand he’s got a neat little SIG .38 pistol.” Hardwick paused dramatically. “What do you think of that?”
The first thing he thought about was his own concealed Beretta.
Then he thought about Clinter. Although the man was definitely a gambler and probably a little nuts, he knew how to create a layered narrative and how to manage it under pressure. He knew how to manipulate vicious and impulsive people, how to make them reach the conclusions he wanted them to reach. For an undercover cop—or a magician—there was no set of skills more valuable than that. But Gurney could sense something lurking in the arc of the story—something that foretold an ugly ending.
Hardwick continued. “Exactly what happened next was the subject of an extensive Bureau investigation. But in the final analysis all they really had was Max’s word for it. He said simply that he’d believed his life was in immediate danger and he’d acted accordingly, with force appropriate to the circumstances. Bottom line, he left five dead mobsters in that office and walked away without a scratch on him. From that day until the night five years later when he flushed it all down the toilet, Max Clinter had an aura of invincibility.”
“Do you know what he’s doing now, how he supports himself?”
Hardwick grinned. “Yeah. He’s a gun dealer. Unusual guns. Collectibles. Crazy military shit. Maybe even Desert Eagles.”
Chapter 8
Kim Corazon’s Complicated Project
When Gurney arrived home from Hardwick’s place in Dillweed at 11:15 A.M., Kim was parked by the side door in her red Miata. As he pulled in next to her, she put away her phone and rolled down her window. “I was just going to call you. I knocked on the door, and no one answered.”
“You’re early.”
“I’m always early. I can’t stand being late. It’s like a phobia. We can head for Rudy Getz’s right now unless there are things you need to do first.”
“I’ll just be a minute.” He went into the house to use the bathroom. He checked for phone messages. There weren’t any. Then he checked the laptop for e-mail. It was all for Madeleine.
When he went back outside, he was struck by the smell of wet earth in the air. The earthy scent in turn conjured up the image of the arrow in the flower bed—red feathers, black shaft, embedded in the dark brown soil. His gaze went to the spot, half expecting …
But there was nothing there.
Of course not. Why would there be? What the hell is the matter with me?
He walked over to the Miata and got into the low-slung passenger seat. Kim drove bumpily through the pasture, past the barn and the pond, to the dirt-and-gravel road that followed the stream down the mountain. Once they were heading east on the county route, Gurney asked, “Any new problems since yesterday?”
She made a face. “I think I’m getting too wound up. I think it’s what psychiatrists call ‘hypervigilance.’ ”
“You mean constantly checking for danger?”
“Constantly checking, and doing it so obsessively that everything looks like a threat. It’s like having a smoke alarm that’s so sensitive it goes off every time you use the toaster. It’s like, Did I really leave my pen on that table? Didn’t I already wash that fork? Wasn’t that plant two inches farther to the left? Stuff like that. Like last night. I went out for an hour, and when I got home, the light was on in the bathroom.”
“You’re sure you turned it off before you left?”
“I always turn it off. But that’s not all. I thought I could smell Robby’s horrible cologne. Just the tiniest trace of it. So I start running around the apartment sniffing everywhere, and for a second I’d think maybe I could smell it again.” She sighed in exasperation. “You see what I mean? I’m losing it. Some people start seeing things. I’m smelling things.” She drove for several miles in silence. The mist had begun again, and she turned on her wipers. At the end of each arc, they made a sharp squeaking sound. She seemed oblivious to it.
Gurney was studying her. Her clothes were neat, subdued. Her features were regular, her eyes dark, her mouth quite lovely. Her hair was a lustrous brown. Her clear skin had a hint of Mediterranean tan. She was a beautiful young woman—full of ideas, full of ambition, without being full of herself. And she was smart. That was the part Gurney liked best. But he was curious how someone so smart had gotten tangled up with someone as troubled as Robby.
“Tell me a little more about this Meese guy.”
He began to think she hadn’t heard him, it took her so long to answer. “I told you he was removed from some kind of sick family situation and put in a series of foster homes. Maybe some people come out of that okay, but most don’t. I never knew any of the details. I just knew he seemed different. Deep. Maybe even a little dangerous.” She hesitated. “I think the other thing that made him attractive was that Connie hated him.”
“That made you like him?”
“I think she hated him and I liked him for the same reason—he reminded us both of my dad. My dad was kind of erratic, and he had a crazy background.”
My dad. From time to time, those words had the power to trigger a wave of sadness in Gurney. His feelings about his father were conflicted and largely repressed. So were his feelings about himself as a father—the father of two sons, one living and one dead. As the emotion began to subside, he tried to hasten its exit by pushing his attention toward some other aspect of Kim’s project, some other point of interest.
“You started to tell me on the phone about your contact with Max Clinter, that you found him strange. I think that was the word you used.”
“Very intense. Actually, beyond intense.”
“How far beyond?”
“Pretty far. He sounded paranoid.”
“What made you think that?”
“The look in his eyes. That I-know-terrible-secrets look. He kept saying that I didn?
??t know what I was getting into, that I was risking my life, that the Good Shepherd was pure evil.”
“He seems to have gotten under your skin.”
“He did. ‘Pure evil’ sounds like such a cliché. But he made it sound real.”
After another few miles, Kim’s GPS directed them off Route 28 at the Boiceville exit. They drove alongside a cascading white-water stream, swollen from snowmelt, until they came to Mountainside Drive, an ascending switchback road through a steep evergreen forest. That brought them to Falcon’s Nest Lane. The addresses on the lane were posted next to driveways that led back to homes shielded from view by thick evergreens or high stone walls. Each driveway occurred at an interval Gurney estimated to be no less than a quarter mile from its nearest neighbor. The final address on the lane was Twelve—etched in cursive script on a brass plaque affixed to one of the two fieldstone pillars that bracketed the entrance to the driveway. Atop each of the pillars was a round stone the size of a basketball, and atop each of these was perched a sculpted stone eagle with wings spread aggressively and talons extended.
Kim turned in to the elegant Belgian-block driveway and drove slowly ahead through a virtual tunnel of massive rhododendrons. Then the tunnel opened, the driveway widened, and they were in front of Rudy Getz’s home—an angular glass-and-concrete affair, hardly homey.
“This is it,” said Kim with nervous excitement as she came to a stop in front of cantilevered concrete steps leading up to a metal door.
They got out of the car, climbed the steps, and were about to knock when the door opened. The man who greeted them was short and stocky, with pale skin, thinning gray hair, and hooded eyes. He was dressed in black jeans, black T-shirt, and an off-white linen sport jacket. He held a colorless drink in a short, fat glass. He reminded Gurney of a porno-film producer.
“Hey, nice to see you,” he said to Kim with the cordiality of a drowsy Gila monster. He eyed Gurney, his mouth stretching into an emotionless grin. “You must be her famous detective adviser. Pleasure. Come in.” He stepped back, gesturing them into the house with his glass. He squinted at the gray sky. “Fucking inclement weather, you know?”