by John Verdon
As he was about to place the call to her, he discovered that a message from her had arrived while his phone was turned off at Merle Tabor’s request.
“Hi, hon. I may not see you this evening. I’m going to Mercy after work to be with Heather. Apparently Rick’s brother and Heather’s sister both got delayed somewhere by weather conditions, canceled flights, general confusion. Kim Steele plans to come to the hospital too. Comfort in numbers. If it gets late I might stay at that visitors’ inn overnight. I’ll call when I have a better idea what I’m doing. Hope your trip to Pennsylvania was useful. Love you.”
For the rest of his trip to Lockenberry, Gurney entertained his growing suspicions that the shootings and BDA murders were directly linked but not in the way anyone had assumed; that Turlock and Beckert may have been central to both; and that the hospital that hosted the murder of Loomis may also have been the source of the drugs that facilitated the killing of Jordan and Tooker.
If those conjectures were facts, however, what did they add up to? What payoff was big enough to justify all that planning, effort, risk, and grisly violence? What goal required the deaths of those specific victims? Might there be other links to Mercy Hospital?
When his GPS announced that he had arrived at his destination—the iron gateway in the stone wall fronting the Gelter property—he’d made little progress on those questions.
Driving up through the wildflower meadow and on through the astonishing field of daffodils, he refocused himself on the nature of his visit and what he hoped to get from it. He parked in front of the looming cube of a house.
As he approached the huge front door, it slid open without a sound, just as it had on the first occasion. As then, Trish was standing in the doorway. As then, she was smiling, displaying the little Lauren Hutton gap between her front teeth. On that first occasion, however, she was dressed. This time she was wearing only a silky pink robe, and a rather short one at that. Her long shapely legs appeared to be the platonic ideal of female legs, although there was nothing platonic about the impact they made. Nor about the look in her eyes.
“You came quicker than I imagined. I just got out of the shower. Come in. I’ll get us something to drink. What would you like?”
Where she was standing forced him to pass very close to her. The cavernous room was bright, the afternoon sunlight slanting through the glass roof.
“Nothing for me,” he said.
“You don’t drink?”
“Not often.”
She moistened the corners of her mouth with the tip of her tongue. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, you being a detective and all, but I might be able to find a couple joints. If you’re interested.”
“Not right now.”
“Pure of body, pure of mind?”
“Never thought of it that way.”
“Maybe there’s hope for you yet.” She smiled. “Come. Let’s sit by the fire.” She touched his arm and led him through the room’s cubical furniture to the edge of a brown fur rug in front of the wide modernistic hearth. Green flames were rising from an arrangement of realistic-looking logs. The sight brought to mind what she’d said at the party. I love a green fire. I’m like a witch with magic powers. A witch who always gets what she wants.
To one side of the hearth there was a sort of couch made of low cubes and giant pillows. She picked up a small remote device from one of the pillows and pressed a button. The light level in the room dropped to something resembling dusk. Gurney looked up and saw that the glass roof had become less transparent. The color of the sky had changed from blue to deep purple.
“Marv explained it to me,” she said. “How it works. Some kind of electronic something or other. He seemed to find it fascinating. I told him he was putting me to sleep. But I like making it dark. It makes the fire greener. You like the rug?”
“It’s some kind of fur?”
“Beaver. It’s very soft.”
“I never heard of a beaver rug.”
“It was Marv’s idea. So typical of him. There were a bunch of beavers damning up his trout stream. He hired a local trapper to kill the beavers and skin them. Then he had someone make a rug out of them. So he could stand on it, drinking his six-hundred-dollar cognac. On them, really—the beavers who had inconvenienced him. I think the idea is kinda sick, but I love the rug. You sure I can’t get you a drink?”
“Not now.”
“Can I see your hand?”
He turned up his right palm.
She took it in one of her hands, studied it, and slowly ran her forefinger along its longest line. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
“Yes.”
“With this hand?”
“With a gun.”
Her eyes widened. She turned his hand over and touched each of his fingers.
“You wear your wedding ring all the time?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t.”
He said nothing.
“Not that we have a bad marriage or anything. It just feels too wifey. You know, like being someone’s wife is the main thing. I think that’s very . . . limiting.”
He said nothing.
She smiled. “I’m glad you could come.”
“You said you wanted to tell me something. About the case.”
“Maybe we should sit down.” She looked toward the rug.
He stepped back in the direction of the couch.
She slowly let go of his hand and shrugged.
He waited for her to sit at one end, then sat a few feet away from her.
“What did you want to tell me?”
“You should get to know Dell better. He’s going far. Very far.”
“How do you know?”
“Marv has a knack for picking winners.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“It would be nice if you were part of the team.”
Gurney said nothing.
“You just need to get to know Dell a little better.”
“What makes you think I don’t know him well enough already?”
“I hear things.”
“From who?”
“I have a terrible memory for names. I heard you don’t like him. Is that true?”
“True enough.”
“But you and Dell are so much alike.”
“How?”
“You’re both strong . . . determined . . . attractive.”
Gurney cleared his throat. “What do you think of his son?”
“Cory the Monster? Too bad he didn’t shoot himself instead of those cops.”
“What if he didn’t shoot those cops?”
“What are you talking about? Of course he did.”
“Why?”
“Why? To attack Dell any way he could? To show him how much he hated him? To act out his little power fantasies? Why does any maniac kill anyone?”
Gurney remained silent for a while before asking, “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
She turned halfway toward him on the couch, letting her robe ride up higher on her legs. “I wanted to tell you that you could be on the winning side of this. The farther Dell goes, the farther we all go.” She smiled slowly, holding his gaze. “It could be a fun ride.”
He stood up from the couch. “I’m not really a fun guy.”
“Oh, I’m sure you could be. I can tell a lot from a man’s hands. You just need the right encouragement.”
Halfway between Lockenberry and Walnut Crossing, Gurney stopped at Snook’s Green World Nursery. He knew Madeleine liked the place for its unusual selection of plants and the horticultural tips she got from Tandy Snook. He was thinking he’d pick up something special for one of her flower beds. He was also hoping that the task would dislodge the remarkably vivid thoughts he was having about Trish Gelter.
Those thoughts, of course, were divorced from reality in more ways than one. There was the simple fact that he would never want to destroy the closeness
of his relationship with Madeleine with the secrets and lies required by any affair, however brief. And then there was the matter of Trish herself. Although the woman was quite open about her availability, her motives might not be. It would be no surprise to discover that everything in that peculiar house was being recorded. And a video of certain activities could be employed later to influence one’s actions, even the course of an investigation. Despite Trish’s pointed mention on the phone that her husband was away in the Hamptons, he may have been aware of her intentions—may even have encouraged them. Or he may not have been away at all.
They did not seem to be, in any normal sense of the word, nice people.
As Gurney stepped out of his car in front of the nursery’s greenhouses, he spotted Rob Snook striding in his direction, sporting that golly-gee smile of a particularly annoying sort of churchgoer. He was a short, well-fed man whose eyes sparkled with shallowness.
“Dan Gurney, if I recall, husband of Marlene! A pleasure to see you on this beautiful day the Lord has given us! How can I serve you today? Florals or edibles?”
“Flowers.”
“Annuals or perennials?”
“Perennials.”
“Small, medium, or large?”
“Large.”
Snook squinted thoughtfully for a moment, then thrust a victorious forefinger in the air. “Giant delphiniums! Purple and blue! Absolutely glorious! The perfect thing!”
Once the delphiniums were stowed securely in the back seat of the Outback, Gurney decided to call Mark Torres for an update before resuming his drive home.
The young detective picked up immediately. He sounded agitated.
“Dave? I was just going to call you. I’ve been doing what you suggested, going through the street videos from the night Steele was killed.”
“You found something.”
“I did. I’m about a third of the way through the digital files, and Judd Turlock’s Explorer has popped up twice. Fairly close to the apartment location, and the timing factor is right.”
“What do you mean by ‘fairly close’?”
“The video the Explorer appears on comes from a security camera mounted over the door of a jewelry store two blocks away.”
A beep alerted Gurney that another call was coming in, but he let it go to his voicemail.
“Tell me about the timing.”
“The Explorer passes the camera going in the direction of Bridge Street about forty minutes before the shooting. Then passes in the opposite direction eight minutes after it.”
“Did the camera get a shot of the driver?”
“No. Wrong angle.”
“If I remember correctly, there’s no video available of the apartment building front entrance, just the street shot showing the way into the back alley. Is that right?”
“Right. But if the timing of the Explorer’s coming and going isn’t related to the shooting, that would be a pretty big coincidence.”
“I agree.”
“I’ll go through the rest of the video material we have, and I’ll let you know what I find.”
“Thanks, Mark. You’re doing a great job.”
“One other thing, in case you weren’t aware of it—Carlton Flynn is going to be interviewing Maynard Biggs tonight.”
Gurney almost asked who Maynard Biggs was, then recalled Whittaker Coolidge mentioning him as the man Dell Beckert would be contending with for the state AG position.
That, he realized, could make it a very interesting interview.
41
As Gurney resumed his trip home to Walnut Crossing, it seemed to him there was no end to the odd twists in the entangled White River cases—all reinforcing Cory Payne’s stated suspicion that it was really one case with multiple victims.
Torres’s video discovery of Turlock’s SUV in the vicinity of Bridge Street provided some support for the framing theory, although it fell far short of proving that Turlock was the actual shooter. The lack of video evidence that Turlock himself was in the vehicle that night didn’t help. It could have been Beckert. But Gurney was in no position to demand alibis from the people running the investigation.
Still, there were steps that could be taken. The relationship between Turlock and Beckert suggested their shared hunting cabin might be a place worth visiting.
He had a general idea where the gun club preserve was located. He decided to get in touch with Torres for directions to the cabin. He parked in his usual spot by the mudroom door. The call went to voicemail, and he left a message explaining what he needed.
He got out of the car and was stopped for a moment by the sweetness of the spring air. He took a few slow, deep breaths, stretched his back, and looked around at all the shades of green in the high pasture. The scene seemed to drain the tension out of his muscles. It also reminded him of the delphiniums in the Outback. He got them out of the back seat and placed them, still in their plastic pots, alongside Madeleine’s main flower bed.
He went into the house, took a quick shower, fixed himself a plate of scrambled eggs and ham, and washed it down with a large glass of orange juice.
By the time he’d washed his dishes it was a quarter past seven, the sun was just setting behind the western ridge, and the air coming in through the open French doors had become noticeably cooler.
He retrieved his laptop from the den, along with the USB drive containing the Mercy Hospital personnel list, and settled into an armchair by the fireplace.
Before getting into the list he decided to check his email. The server had been troublesome lately, and the items were downloading with painful slowness. He put his head back, closed his eyes, and waited.
He opened them with a start nearly an hour later. His phone was ringing. The time was 8:03 PM. The caller was Cory Payne.
“Maynard Biggs is on RAM-TV. Being interviewed by that scumbag Flynn. You have to watch.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“From a safe place in White River. Look, you need to listen to him now. He’s on. I’ll talk to you later.”
Gurney went to the “Live Stream” page of the RAM website, found A Matter of Concern with Carlton Flynn, and selected it.
A moment later the video box on the website page came to life. Flynn, in his signature white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, sat opposite an athletic-looking brown-skinned man with gray eyes wearing a tan crewneck sweater. In contrast with Flynn’s projection of aggressive energy, he radiated stillness.
Flynn was in the middle of a sentence. “. . . feel about the uphill battle you’ll be waging against a man who’s come to symbolize law and order in a time of chaos, a man whose poll numbers have now passed yours and keep going up.”
“I believe that waging this battle, if you wish to call it that, is the right thing to do.” The man’s voice was as calm as his demeanor.
“Right thing to do? To try to defeat one of today’s greatest champions of law and order? A man who puts the law above all other considerations?”
“Lawfulness and orderly public behavior are desirable characteristics of a civilized society. They are natural signs of health. But making orderliness our top priority makes its achievement impossible. Like many good things in life, good order is the byproduct of something else.”
Flynn raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You’re a professor, am I right?” He made the title sound like an indictment.
“That’s correct.”
“Of psychology?”
“Yes.”
“Neuroses. Complexes. Theories. I’m sure there’s a place for all that. But we’re in the middle of a crisis. Let me read you something. This is a statement by Dell Beckert that lays out in simple terms the nature of the crisis we’re in right now.” Flynn took a pair of reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. He picked up a sheet of paper from the table and read:
“‘Our nation is afflicted with a cancer. This cancer has infiltrated our society in many ways over m
any years. The burning of a flag. The abandonment of dress codes in our schools. Hollywood’s vilification of our military, our government, our corporations. The popularization of casual obscenity. The demeaning of religious leaders. The glorification of crime in rap music. The war on Christmas. The terrible erosion of authority. The infantile mindset of entitlement. These trends are the termites devouring the foundation of America. Our civilization is at a tipping point. Shall we encourage our society’s fatal descent into the jungle of violence? Or shall we opt for order, sanity, and survival?’”
Flynn waved the paper at Biggs. “That’s what your likely opponent in the race for attorney general has to say about the state of our nation. What’s your response?”
Biggs sighed. “Lack of order isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom. Suppressing a symptom doesn’t cure the disease. You don’t cure an infection by suppressing the fever.”
Flynn responded with a dismissive little snort. “In your public statements, you sound like a messiah. A savior. Is that how you see yourself?”
“I see myself as the most fortunate of men. All my life I have been surrounded by the fires of racism and hatred, crime and addiction, rage and despair. Yet by the grace of God I remain standing. I believe that those of us who know the fire, yet have not been consumed by it, owe a life of service to those the fire has crippled.”
Flynn grinned unpleasantly. “So your real goal as attorney general would be to serve the crippled black ghettos, rather than the broad population of our state and our nation?”
“No. That’s not my goal at all. When I say I owe service to those the fire has crippled, I mean all those crippled by racism. Black and white alike. Racism is a razor with no handle. It cuts the wielder as deeply as the victim. We must heal both or we are doomed to endless violence.”
“You want to talk about violence? Let’s talk about your supporters in the Black Defense Alliance, the violence they’ve stirred up, the fires, the looting—and this Blaze Lovely Jackson person who spews out hatred for the police every time she speaks! How can you justify accepting support from people like that?”