by John Verdon
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Not your stepmother. She’s fine. In case you were worried.”
Payne showed no reaction. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Can I have my phone now?”
Gurney ignored the request. “So . . . if I open your address book . . . which phone number would I choose . . . to set off the final charge of dynamite?”
“What?”
“The final charge of dynamite. If I wanted to set it off—”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Gurney shrugged. “It worked for the dynamite in the petunia baskets, so I figure it should work for the dynamite in the house.”
Payne stared at him, the emotion in his expression not quite readable.
“You almost got away with it. John Steele . . . Rick Loomis . . . Marcel Jordan . . . Virgil Tooker . . . Judd Turlock . . . Blaze Lovely Jackson . . . Chalise Creel . . . Dwayne Shucker . . . Goodson Cloutz . . . Joe Beltz . . .”
“What are you talking about?” The question was oddly calm, almost perfunctory.
“Ten murders. You almost got away with them all. Such careful planning. Such meticulous execution. Such control. And then you forgot to close your eyes. Such a silly oversight after all that attention to detail. If you hadn’t gotten all that dirt blown into your eyes, you wouldn’t have lost your phone. And if you hadn’t lost your phone, you could have blown your father to pieces by now.”
Payne shook his head. “You’re the one who saved my life. You’re the one who proved I was innocent.”
“I didn’t prove you were innocent. I proved that you were framed.”
“You’re playing with words. They mean the same thing.”
“For a while I thought they did. That was my stupidity. Those toilet handles had me fooled. It never occurred to me that you might have been the one who switched them. It was the proof that someone had tried to frame you. Which made you appear to be an innocent victim of the real killer. And it instantly threw into doubt all the other evidence against you. It may be the cleverest criminal trick I’ve ever run into.”
As Gurney was speaking, he was watching Payne’s eyes. He’d learned long ago that any sudden physical movement is telegraphed first by the eyes. He saw no evidence of anything physical about to happen, but what he did see was more disturbing. Payne’s relatively normal range of expressions had deadened into something not quite human. The word “monster” tended to be overused in descriptions of murderers, but it seemed a conservative description of the unblinking creature returning Gurney’s gaze.
As he tightened his grip on the Beretta in his jacket pocket, an unnerving guttural shriek came from somewhere behind him, and a body hurtled past him, smashing Payne against the side of the car. It took Gurney a moment to realize that Haley Beauville Beckert was wildly punching and kicking Payne in an animal fury, screaming, “You filthy little bastard!”
Gurney drew his weapon, made a fast assessment of the situation, and decided that holding back for the right moment would be a safer option than trying to subdue Payne immediately.
That decision turned out to be a mistake.
After letting Haley exhaust her burst of furious energy, Payne turned her around, threw his arm around her neck, and dragged her backward with startling speed away from the car toward the edge of the clearing—a nine-millimeter Glock appearing simultaneously in his free hand.
Gurney remained where he was, steadying his Beretta on the roof of the Camry, waiting for a clear shot at Payne’s head. “It’s over, Cory. Don’t make it worse.”
Payne said nothing. He seemed well aware of Gurney’s goal. He was doing a good job of keeping his body safely behind Haley’s and repeatedly yanking her head from side to side in jerky movements that made taking a shot at him unacceptably risky.
Gurney called out to him again. “Let her go, Cory, and drop the nine. The longer you wait, the worse it’ll be.”
Astoundingly—or perhaps predictably, given the nature of RAM-TV—the roving camera operator took up a position forming a triangle with Gurney and Payne as the other two points. After a quick shot of Gurney, he panned in slowly on Payne and his hostage.
Gurney tried once more. “The longer you hold on to her, the nastier things will get.”
Payne burst out laughing. “It’s all for the best. All for the best.” He wasn’t talking to Gurney. He was talking to the camera. Which meant he was talking to Beckert via the TV in the house.
The ugly truth that Gurney had assembled from a number of observations, including the brand-new satellite dish on the corner of the house, was that while Payne was holding Beckert captive on Rapture Hill, he was forcing him to watch RAM-TV and witness the spectacle of his own ruination.
“All for the best!” Payne repeated, his mouth in a rictus of a grin aimed at the camera, his gaze as dead and cold as a shark’s. “All for the best. That’s what you said after you killed my mother. You called her a worthless addict. You said that her death from the drugs you gave her was all for the best. Then you replaced her with this vile, stinking bitch. You dared to replace her with this—this rotten, cancerous whore. All for the best!”
He gave Haley’s head a vicious jerk before going on with his speech to the camera. “You framed weak, frightened people to get them off the streets. Your streets. You sent helpless people to die in prison. All for the best. You put the girlfriend I loved in a hellhole where she was raped and killed. All for the best. You had nickel-and-dime drug dealers shot on the street for ‘resisting arrest.’ All for the best.”
He looked into the camera with those inhuman eyes. “So I’m thinking that I’ll do the same. Like father, like son. I’ll put a bullet in this whore’s head. All for the best. Happy Mother’s Day, bitch!”
Gurney jumped out from behind the Camry, firing his Beretta in the air and shouting, “Over here, scumbag!”
As the Glock swung away from Haley’s temple toward Gurney, a hard metallic impact rang out almost simultaneously with the sharp report of a rifle shot from the woods across the clearing, and the Glock flew out of Payne’s hand. After an instant of surprise, he shoved Haley toward Gurney and with a sprinter’s speed disappeared among the dark hemlocks. Less than a minute later that sector of the forest was filled with an eerie howling that increased steadily in volume and ferocity, then devolved suddenly into deep savage growls—until a high-pitched whistle produced an absolute silence.
It was then that the SWAT team emerged from the house with a drawn, hollow-eyed Dell Beckert. He had three sticks of dynamite with a cell phone detonator duct-taped to his stomach. The team leader placed a call to the NYSP to make sure an explosives expert was among the troops on the way. In the meantime, Beckert’s semireunion with his wife was conducted at a distance with desperately fraught expressions on both faces.
Hardwick stepped into the clearing from the nearby woods, cradling his AK-47. When he got close enough, Gurney asked casually, “So what was that Western-movie show-off shit all about?”
Hardwick looked offended. “Beg pardon?”
“Shooting the gun out of Payne’s hand. Nobody does that.”
“I know.”
“So how come you tried it?”
“I didn’t. I was aiming for his head and I missed.”
Soon the sound of approaching sirens reached the clearing. They seemed to be coming from all directions. Hardwick grimaced. “The classic clusterfuck is about to begin.”
The sun had long since been blotted out by a lowering bank of clouds. There was a gust of cold air across the clearing, and then the rain began to fall, turning the pulverized petunia blossoms that covered the ground into a million crimson specks—as though the rain itself was turning to blood.
EPILOGUE
The classic clusterfuck predicted by Hardwick did indeed take place. In the narrative that subsequently took hold in the media, the White River case and its messy denouement had no clear
heroes. “Colossal Law Enforcement Fiasco” was a typical headline. One of the punchier news blogs called it a “Fatal Fuckup.” Focusing on the bloody final events, the RAM-TV news shows spoke of “the Rapture Hill massacre.”
District Attorney Kline came out of it badly. He was widely portrayed as the man whose repeated mistakes led to the catastrophe. Uniformly negative press coverage, rumors that he’d suffered a breakdown at the crime scene, and a growing public outcry led to abandonment by his political allies and soon thereafter to his resignation.
Cory Payne’s ill-advised alliance with the Gort twins ended badly. His scattered remains, torn apart by the Gort pit bulls, were found in a pine thicket at the foot of Rapture Hill. In his manipulation of the twins to kill Turlock—and to provide him with the dynamite for his plan to blow his father and all his father’s enablers to kingdom come—he’d evidently overestimated the Gorts’ trust in him. Daytime TV psychologists opined for weeks on Payne’s wounded life and dark motivations. A book titled Blind Revenge was written about him. It was optioned for a film.
The Gorts and their dogs vanished. The unanswered questions surrounding their disappearance and their ill-fated relationship with Payne provided fodder for many tabloid articles. There were claims of occasional sightings by backwoods hikers, and stories about them could give overnight campers gooseflesh, but there was no tangible evidence of their presence. It was as though they had melded like a malignant force of nature into the wilderness that had always seemed so much a part of them.
The Rapture Hill death toll rose to four when Marvin Gelter died in the hospital a week later of a massive infection.
Members of the Black Defense Alliance, temporarily leaderless, declined to make any public statement. So did Carlton Flynn, who apparently couldn’t come up with a sufficiently provocative political slant on the case.
Gurney’s role in the affair was treated in a muted but generally positive way. His accurate final assessment of the situation and his fearless confrontation of Cory Payne were acknowledged. Haley Beckert in particular lauded his attempts to warn Kline of the truth of what was happening at Rapture Hill.
As Gurney was falling asleep one night, the déjà vu experience he’d had when he looked at Beckert’s CBIIWRPD license plate suddenly became clear. The CBII part, standing for Cordell Beckert II, had prompted the half-conscious recollection that Cory Payne’s real name was Cordell Beckert III. Which would make his equivalent initials CBIII. Which looked very much like “C13111.” A severely injured person on a stretcher trying to scribble a note might very well end up making a B that looked like 13. So Rick Loomis’s note, which said in its entirety “T O L D C 1 3 1 1 1,” was an effort to let Gurney know that he’d told Cory Payne something. It raised questions that Gurney knew he’d never get the answers to. But that wasn’t unusual in a murder case. Too often the only people who knew the entire truth were dead.
Lines of grief became a permanent part of Kim Steele’s face. The weight of sadness in her was palpable. But she kept functioning.
Heather Loomis, on the other hand, seemed more deeply damaged. After learning of her husband’s death, her condition declined from a depressed state to a near-catatonic one. She was transferred to a major New England mental hospital for long-term treatment. She gave birth prematurely, and the baby was put in the care of her brother and sister-in-law. She showed no interest in the baby or the arrangements made for it.
Mark Torres confided to Gurney that he intended to resign from the WRPD to pursue a degree in social work. Gurney suggested he give the department another year. He believed it was cops like Torres who could brighten the future of policing.
Tania Jordan left White River without a word to anyone.
Dell Beckert, for the first time in his adult life, persistently refused all contact with the media. He appeared to have aged years in the days of his captivity—and the stress promised to continue as investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice and the New York State Attorney General’s office launched an extensive review of his personal involvement in alleged civil rights violations, evidence tampering, and obstructions of justice.
Within a month of replacing the late Goodson Cloutz, acting sheriff Fred Kittiny was arrested and charged with seven counts of suborning perjury.
A specialist in turning out instant books on sensational crimes, disasters, and celebrities created one titled Lovely that focused on Blaze Lovely Jackson’s fatal alliance with Cory Payne. The cover depicted a helmeted leather-clad figure on a red motorcycle—just like the one belonging to Judd Turlock that Jackson rode away from the Poulter Street sniper site as part of Payne’s elaborate framing scheme.
The statue of Colonel Ezra Willard was quietly transported from the public park to the private estate of a self-described Civil War buff. The man made no secret of his sympathies for the Confederate cause, which left a lingering discomfort in the minds of many about the solution to the controversy. There were those who would have been far happier had the thing been pulverized and dumped in the county landfill. But the majority of the city council was content to approve the less dramatic transfer and be rid of at least one racial flash point.
Maynard Biggs was appointed by the governor to serve as acting attorney general until the upcoming special election, which he was now favored to win.
The Reverend Whittaker Coolidge delivered a series of well-received public lectures on the destructive power of hatred. He described hatred with a phrase that Maynard Biggs had used to describe racism: a razor with no handle that cuts the wielder as deeply as the victim. His other description of it: a suicidal weapon of mass destruction. And he always managed to work into his lectures an eight-word summary of Cory Payne’s life and death: His hatred drove him. His hatred killed him.
• • •
For some time after the bloody culmination on Rapture Hill, followed by Gurney’s extensive debriefing by the state and federal investigators who descended on White River, he and Madeleine seemed to have little appetite for discussing the case.
There was often a preoccupied look on her face; but he knew from long experience it was best not to ask about it, that she’d share what was on her mind in her own time.
It happened one evening in early June. They’d just finished a quiet dinner. The French doors were open, and the warm summer air carried the scent of the season’s fading lilacs. After a period of silence, she spoke.
“Do you think anything will change?”
“You mean the racial situation in White River?”
She nodded.
“Well . . . things are happening that weren’t happening before. The rotten apples are being removed from the police department. Old cases are being scrutinized, particularly the Laxton Jones incident. A more transparent citizen complaint process is being installed. The statue is gone. Discussions are under way to create an interracial commission that would—”
She stopped him. “I know all that. The announcements. The press conferences. I mean . . . doesn’t it sound like just another example of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?”
Gurney shrugged. “That’s what deckhands do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t that what most of the people we elect to solve our problems really do? They don’t solve anything; they just rearrange the details to relieve the political pressure and make it look like something significant is being done. Real change doesn’t happen that way. It’s less manageable, less predictable. It only happens when people see something they never saw before—when the truth, for whatever reason, hits them hard enough, shockingly enough, to open their eyes.”
Madeleine nodded, seemingly more to herself than to him. After a while she got up from the table and stood in the open doorway, looking down over the low pasture toward the barn and the pond. “Do you think that’s what Walter Thrasher wants to do?”
The question surprised him.
He thought about it for a moment. “Yes, I think so. He
has a natural fondness for bringing things to light, for discovering the truth, even when it’s ugly—maybe especially when it’s ugly.”
She took a deep breath. “If we let him do what he wants to do . . . he might not find anything at all.”
“That’s true.”
“Or he might find dreadful things.”
“Yes.”
“And then he would write about those dreadful things.”
“Yes.”
“And people would read what he wrote . . . and some of them would be horrified.”
“I would think so.”
She gazed down toward the area of the excavation for a long minute or two before saying, almost inaudibly, “Maybe we should let him go ahead with it.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As the Dave Gurney series of mystery-thrillers grows, so does my gratitude to the people responsible for its success.
My thanks first to my wonderful agent, Molly Friedrich, and her superb associates, Lucy Carson and Kent Wolf. Their keen insights, close reading of my manuscripts, creative suggestions, and wholehearted support have been invaluable.
My thanks also to my remarkable editor, Dan Smetanka, whose fine instincts for dramatic structure, character, and pacing—along with a talent for deft pruning—have made my stories better, leaner, stronger. And my thanks to my copy editor, Megan Gendell, whose eye for the crucial details of language, tone, and consistency resulted in countless improvements.
My thanks to my wife, Naomi, who makes everything possible.
And finally, my thanks to all the readers of the Dave Gurney novels. Your enthusiasm for these books is one of the brightest elements in my life as a writer.
JOHN VERDON is the author of the Dave Gurney series of thrillers, international bestsellers published in more than two dozen languages: Think of a Number, Shut Your Eyes Tight, Let the Devil Sleep, Peter Pan Must Die, and Wolf Lake. Before becoming a crime fiction writer, Verdon had two previous careers: as an advertising creative director and as a custom furniture maker. He currently lives with his wife, Naomi, in the rural mountains of upstate New York—raising chickens, tending the garden, mowing the fields, and devising the intricate plots of the Gurney novels. Find more at johnverdon.net.