by John Verdon
The situation touched him in a way that made it difficult for him to speak.
The strong odor of the fuel filled the still air.
“That overflowing-gas thing happens to me all the time,” he said awkwardly.
She said nothing.
“Can I mow the field for you?”
“What?”
“I spend a lot of time mowing at home. I enjoy it. It would be one less thing for you to have to do. I’d be happy to do it.”
She looked at him, blinking as if to clear her vision. “That’s kind of you. But I have to do these things myself.”
A silence fell between them.
He asked, “Have John’s friends from the department been coming by to see you?”
“Some people came. I told them to go away.”
“You didn’t want them here?”
“I can’t bear to even look at them until I know what happened.”
“You don’t trust anyone in the department?”
“No. Only Rick Loomis.”
“He’s different from the others?”
“Rick and John were friends. Allies.”
“Allies suggests they had enemies.”
“Yes. They had enemies.”
“Do you know the names of their enemies?”
“I wish to God I did. But John didn’t believe in bringing the ugly details of his work home. I’m sure he thought he was making my life easier by keeping things to himself.”
“Do you know if Rick Loomis shared your husband’s suspicions about things that were going on in the department?”
“I think so.”
“Was he helping him look into old cases?”
“They were working on something together. I know I sound hopelessly vague.” She sighed, picked up the gas tank cap, and screwed it back on. “If you’d like to come in for a while, I could make some coffee.”
“I’d like that. And I’d like to hear more about your husband—anything you want to tell me. I’d like to understand who he was.” As soon as he said it, he could see in her eyes the impact of that past tense verb, was. He wished he’d found another way of saying it.
She nodded, wiped her hands on her jeans, and led the way across the field to the house.
The back door opened into a narrow hallway that led to an eat-in kitchen. There was a broken dish on the floor by the sink. The khaki jacket she’d worn on her first trip to Gurney’s house was lying across the seat of a chair. The table was covered with a disordered pile of papers. She looked around in dismay. “I didn’t realize . . . what a mess. Let me just . . .” Her voice trailed off.
She gathered the papers together and took them into the next room. She returned, got the jacket, and took that away. She seemed not to notice the broken dish. She gestured toward one of the chairs at the table, and Gurney sat down. Distractedly, she went through the steps of setting up the coffee machine.
While the coffee was brewing, she stood gazing out the window. When it was ready, she poured a mug and brought it to the table.
She sat down across from him and smiled in a way that he found almost unbearably sad. “What do you want to know about John?” she asked.
“What was important to him. His ambitions. How he ended up in the WRPD. When he started getting uncomfortable with it. Any hints of trouble, prior to the text message, that could relate to what happened.”
She gave him a long, thoughtful look. “Interesting questions.”
“In what way?”
“They have nothing to do with the WRPD theory that the attack was a political act by black radicals.”
He smiled at her perceptiveness. “The WRPD theory is being pursued by WRPD people. There’s no point my heading down the same avenue.”
“You mean the same dead end?”
“Too soon to say.” He sipped his coffee. “Tell me about John.”
“He was the nicest, smartest man in the world. We met in college. Ithaca. John was a psych major. Very serious. Very handsome. We got married right after graduation. He’d already taken the state police exam, and a few months later he was inducted. I was pregnant by then. Everything seemed to be going well. He graduated from the academy at the top of his class. Life was perfect. Then, a month after our baby was born, there was an automobile accident. She didn’t survive.” Kim fell silent, biting her lower lip and looking away toward the window. A few moments later she took a deep breath, sat up straight in her chair, and continued.
“He spent the next three years as a state trooper. He got a master’s degree in criminology in his spare time. It was around that time that Dell Beckert was hired to clean up the White River Police Department. He made a big impression—forcing a lot of people out on corruption charges, bringing in fresh faces.”
She paused. When she went on, something rueful, maybe even bitter, entered her voice. “The image Beckert projected—sweeping out the dirt, purifying the place—I think that struck a chord with John. So he moved from the NYSP to the supposedly wonderful new WRPD.”
“When did he realize it might not be as perfect as he’d imagined?”
“It was a gradual thing. His attitude toward the job changed. I remember it getting darker a year ago with the Laxton Jones shooting. After that . . . there was a kind of tension in him that wasn’t there before.”
“How about recently?”
“It was getting worse.”
Gurney took another sip of his coffee. “You said he’d gotten degrees in psychology and criminology?”
She nodded, almost smiled. “Yes. He loved his work and loved learning anything connected with it. In fact, he just started taking some law courses.”
Gurney hesitated. “He was a basic patrol officer, right?”
There was a combative flash in her eyes. “You mean just a basic patrol officer? You’re asking why he wasn’t chasing promotions?”
He shrugged. “Most cops I’ve known who’ve pursued advanced degrees—”
She cut him off. “Pursued them because of career ambitions? The truth is, John has . . . had . . . enormous ambition. But not for promotions. He wanted to be out on the street. That’s what he signed up for. The degrees, all the reading he did, it was to be as good at the job as he could be. His ambition was to lead an honest, useful, positive life. That’s all he ever . . .”
She lowered her head slowly and began to sob.
Several minutes later, after that wave of grief had run its course, she sat back in her chair and wiped her eyes. “Do you have any more questions?”
“Do you know if he ever received threats or hints of trouble other than the text message?”
She shook her head.
“If something should come to mind—”
“I’ll call you. I promise.”
“Okay. One last thing. Do you think Rick Loomis would talk to me?”
“I’m sure he’ll talk to you. But if you’re asking how open he’ll be about what he and John were working on, that I don’t know.”
“Would you be willing to call him, tell him who I am and that I’d appreciate sitting down with him?”
She cocked her head curiously. “You want me to tell him that he should trust you?”
“Just tell him whatever you’re comfortable telling him. It’s entirely up to you.”
Her eyes met his, and for a moment he had the same feeling he had on the occasions when Madeleine’s gaze seemed to be looking into his soul.
“Yes,” she said. “I can do that.”
19
Toward the end of Gurney’s visit with Kim Steele, the vibrating mode on his phone had made him aware of receiving a call, but he’d let it go rather than interrupt the emotional flow of their conversation.
Now, on his way back to the interstate, he pulled over onto the grassy verge of Fishers Road and listened to the message. It was from Sheridan Kline. The man didn’t bother to identify himself; his self-important, slightly nasal voice was identification enough
.
“I hope you get this message soon. We have a schedule change. Our meeting has just been moved up to twelve noon. Major progress. Noon sharp. Be there!”
Gurney checked the current time—11:04.
He figured that without traffic he could be in White River by eleven thirty. Despite his earlier decision to avoid conflict with the WRPD by avoiding the crime scene, he was tempted now to do at least a drive-by—to get a visceral sense of the location he’d seen only on video.
As expected, there was no traffic. It was just 11:29 when he turned off the interstate. The White River exit ramp led to a local road that descended from a green landscape of woods and meadows into an area of man-made desolation. He drove past the big rusting conveyors of the defunct Handsome Brothers stone quarry and into the city itself, where the stench of smoke and ashes began to infiltrate the car.
Recalling from the White River map how the main streets were laid out, he made his way onto the avenue that skirted the boarded-up buildings of the Grinton section and led directly to Willard Park.
He turned onto the road adjacent to the park, and soon came to a barricade consisting of yellow sawhorses, each of which bore the warning Police Line Do Not Cross.
Leaving his car there and stepping between the sawhorses, he went ahead on foot to a circular area that was more aggressively cordoned off with a double perimeter of yellow police tape. The protected area encompassed the edge of the field where the demonstration had been held, an enormous pine whose lowest branches were a good twenty feet above the ground, and part of the sidewalk. On the sidewalk was a large, irregularly shaped reddish-brown stain.
Gurney was sure that the crime-scene specialists would have been long finished with their evidence gathering and that his presence posed no danger of contamination. When he entered the taped-off area, however, he did step gingerly around that stain as a gesture of respect.
Looking closely at the tree, he could see the remnants of the channel cut by the bullet as it embedded itself in the relatively soft pine trunk. Some of the channel had been chiseled open to extract the bullet.
He took a pen from his shirt pocket and placed it in the channel against the side that appeared intact. The pen, aligned with the path of the bullet, then became a rough pointer to the source of the shot. He could see immediately that it corroborated the trajectory projection on the map in the case file. Gazing out in the indicated direction, he could see that the likely sources were limited to the upper floors of three or four apartment buildings.
He headed back to the barricade where he’d parked, in the hope of finding the binoculars he sometimes kept in the glove compartment. That goal was put aside, however, when he saw a WRPD cruiser pull up at the same barricade. The cop who emerged from the cruiser had an end-of-shift weariness about him. After looking over the Outback, presumably for any signs of official status, he turned his attention to Gurney.
“How’re we doing today, sir?” If the question was meant to sound friendly, it failed.
“I’m doing okay. How about you?”
The cop’s eyes hardened as if Gurney’s reply were a challenge.
“Are you aware that you’re in a restricted area?”
“I’m on the job. Investigation department, DA’s office.”
“That so?”
Gurney said nothing.
“Never saw you before. You want to show me some ID?”
Gurney took out his wallet and handed him the credentials he’d gotten from Kline.
He regarded them with a skeptical frown. “DA’s office? You know Jimmy Crandell?”
“Only person I know there is Sheridan Kline.”
The cop sucked thoughtfully at his teeth.
“Well, the thing is, this is a restricted area, so I need to ask you to leave.”
“The restriction applies to the DA’s investigators?”
“PIACA applies to everyone.”
“What’s PIACA?”
“Primary Investigative Agency Controls Access.”
“Nice acronym. Local invention?”
The cop began to redden from the neck up. “We’re not having a discussion here. We have a procedure, and the procedure is you leave. Your DA can complain to my chief anytime, if that’s what he wants. You want to cross our perimeters, you get permission first. Now move your car before I have it towed.”
Red-faced and narrow-eyed, the cop watched as Gurney turned his car around and headed back toward the center of White River.
Five minutes later he arrived at the bleak, colorless police headquarters and parked next to Kline’s big black SUV. As he was getting out of the car, his phone rang. There was no caller ID.
“Gurney here.”
“This is Rick Loomis. Kim Steele said you wanted to talk. She gave me your number.” The voice was young and serious, the accent definitely upstate.
“Did she explain who I am and how I’m involved in the case?”
“She did.”
“And you’re willing to discuss the . . . events . . . that you and John were looking into?”
“To some extent. But not on the phone.”
“I understand. How soon can we get together?”
“I’m off today, but I need to take care of a few things. Getting the garden ready for planting. How about three thirty at the Lucky Larvaton Diner? It’s in Angina. On the old Route Ten Bypass.”
“I’ll find it.”
“Okay. See you at three thirty.”
“Rick, one more thing. Is there anyone else I should be talking to . . . about the situation?”
He hesitated. “Maybe. But I’ll have to check with them first.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
He slipped the phone back in his pocket and headed into the headquarters building.
In the dreary conference room, he took his customary seat next to the DA at the long table. He noted an intermittent buzz in the room’s fluorescent light fixture—a sound so common in his old NYPD precinct house it made him feel for a moment that he was back there.
Kline gave him a nod. Torres entered the room with his laptop a moment later, looking tense but purposeful. At the end of the table, Sheriff Cloutz was moving his fingers in little undulations as though he were conducting a miniature orchestra. The expression in Beckert’s hard eyes was difficult to read.
Two seats were empty, Judd Turlock’s and Dwayne Shucker’s.
The sheriff licked his already moist lips. “Must be about time to begin.”
“We’re missing the mayor and the deputy chief,” said Kline.
“Today’s Rotary day for old Shucks,” said the sheriff. “Free lunch and a chance to talk up the importance of his reelection. We still expecting Judd?”
“We’ll be hearing from him momentarily,” said Beckert. He glanced at his phone on the table, moving it a fraction of an inch. “It’s a minute past twelve. Let’s begin. Detective Torres, tell us where we stand on the Steele shooting—progress made and progress anticipated.”
Torres sat up a little straighter in his chair. “Yes, sir. Since our last meeting we’ve acquired significant physical and video evidence. We located and examined the apartment from which the shot was fired. We found gunpowder residues there, along with a cartridge casing consistent with the bullet extracted from the tree in Willard Park. We have excellent fingerprints on several objects, including the cartridge, plus likely DNA residues on other objects. We even—”
Cloutz broke in. “What kind of residues?”
“Mucus with a trace of blood in a tissue, a Band-Aid with a trace of blood on it, and several hairs with enough follicle material for analysis.”
“That all?”
“We even recovered the tripod used to steady the rifle. We found it in the river by the Grinton Bridge, and there are clear fingerprints on it. We also have videos of a vehicle approaching the sniper site, parking behind the building shortly before the shot was fired, and leaving immediate
ly afterward. We have additional video of the same vehicle heading for the bridge and then returning from it. Although the street lighting was poor, we were able to sharpen and read the plate number.”
“You sayin’ we have an ID on the shooter?”
“We have an ID on the car, a black 2007 Toyota Corolla, and the name and address on the registration—Devalon Jones of Thirty-Four Simone Street in Grinton.”
Kline leaned forward. “Related to the Laxton Jones who was killed a year ago?”
“His brother. Devalon was one of the founding members of the BDA—along with Jordan, Tooker, and Blaze Lovely Jackson.”
Kline grinned. “That does move the situation in an encouraging direction. Do we have this Devalon person in custody?”
“That’s the problem, sir. He’s been in custody for over a month now—in Dannemora, starting a three-to-five sentence for aggravated assault. Fractured a security guard’s skull at an Indian casino up north.”
Kline’s grin faded. “So his car was being used by someone else. Maybe another BDA member? I assume you’re checking that out?”
“We’ve started that process.”
Beckert turned to the sheriff. “Goodson, if this Devalon Jones passed his car along, one of your more cooperative guests at the jail might know something about that. Meanwhile, I’ll call the warden at Dannemora and see if Jones can be persuaded to part with the information himself.”
Cloutz licked his lips again before speaking. “Someone could explain to Devalon that the registration bein’ in his name makes him the presumptive provider of the vehicle to the shooter and accessory to the murder of a police officer. So he has an opportunity to use the free will with which his creator endowed him and give us the name, or . . . we can fry his ass.” He began to move his fingers again, ever so slightly, to some imagined music.
Beckert turned to Torres, who was glaring at Cloutz. “You said we have street videos of the car approaching and leaving the sniper location. Can you show them now?” It was a directive, not a question.
Torres turned his attention back to his laptop, clicked a few icons, and the monitor on the wall showed a grungy, poorly lit street with garbage bags piled along the curbs. A car appeared, passed through the camera’s field of view, and turned out of sight at the next intersection.