by John Verdon
“Fact is, they both ended in the middle of nowhere with no explanation.”
“No, Jack,” Gurney snapped, “the fact is, there was a perfectly good explanation for the boot prints—just as there will be a perfectly good, but entirely different, explanation for your scent problem.”
“Ah, Davey boy, that’s what always impressed me about you: your omniscience.”
“You know, I always believed you were smarter than you pretended to be. Now I’m not so sure.”
Hardwick’s smirk conveyed a sense of satisfaction with Gurney’s irritation. He switched to a new tone, all innocence and earnest curiosity. “So what do you think happened? How could Flores’s scent trail just end like that?”
Gurney shrugged. “Changed his shoes? Put plastic bags over his feet?”
“Why the hell would he do that?”
“Maybe to create the problem the dog ended up having? Make it impossible to track him wherever he went next, wherever he went to hide out?”
“Like Kiki Muller’s house?”
“I heard that name on the tape. Isn’t she the one who—”
“Who Flores was supposedly screwing. Right. Lived next door to Ashton. Wife of Carl Muller, marine engineer who was away on a ship half the time. Kiki was never seen after the day Flores disappeared, presumably not a coincidence.”
Gurney leaned back on the couch, mulling this over, having trouble with a piece of it. “I can understand why Flores might take precautions to keep from being tracked to a neighbor’s house or wherever he was actually going, but why wouldn’t he do that before he left the cottage? Why in the woods? Why after he went out and hid the machete and not before?”
“Maybe he wanted to get out of the cottage ASAP?”
“Maybe. Or maybe he wanted us to find the machete?”
“Then why bury it?”
“You mean half bury it. Didn’t you say that only the blade was covered with dirt?”
Hardwick smiled. “Interesting questions. Definitely worth pursuing.”
“And one other thing,” said Gurney. “Has anyone verified where either of the Mullers was at the time of the murder?”
“We know that Carl was chief engineer on a commercial fishing boat about fifty miles off Montauk that whole week. But we couldn’t find anyone who’d seen Kiki the day of the murder, or the day before for that matter.”
“That mean anything to you?”
“Not a damn thing. Very private kind of community—at least at Ashton’s end of the road. Minimum property size is ten acres, private kind of people, not likely to hang out at the back fence and shoot the shit, probably be considered rude up there to say hello without an invitation.”
“Do we know if anyone saw her anytime after her husband left for Montauk?”
“Seems nobody did, but …” Hardwick shrugged, reiterating that not being seen by your neighbors in Tambury was the rule, not the exception.
“And the guests at the reception, their locations were all accounted for during ‘the critical fourteen minutes’ you referred to?”
“Yep. Day after the murder, I went thorough the video personally, accounted for the whereabouts of every guest for every minute the victim was in that cottage—with our encouraging captain telling me I was wasting time that I should be spending searching the woods for Hector Flores. Who the hell knows, maybe numbnuts was right for once. Of course, if I’d ignored the video and it later turned out … well, you know what the little shithead is like.” He hissed the obscenity through tightened lips. “What are you looking at me like that for?”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m crazy.”
“You are crazy,” said Gurney lightly. He was also thinking that during the ten months since they’d been involved in the Mellery case, Hardwick’s attitude toward Captain Rod Rodriguez had for some reason progressed from contemptuous to venomous.
“Maybe I am,” said Hardwick, as much to himself as to Gurney. “Seems to be the general consensus.” He turned and stared out the den window again. It was darker now, the northern ridge nearly black against a slate sky.
Gurney wondered: Was Hardwick, uncharacteristically, inviting a personal discussion? Did he have a problem that he might actually be willing to talk about?
Whatever personal door might have been ajar was quickly closed. Hardwick pivoted on his heel, the sardonic spark back in his eye. “There’s a question about the fourteen minutes. Might not be exactly fourteen. I’d like to get your omniscient perspective.” He came away from the window, sat on the arm of the couch farthest from Gurney, spoke to the coffee table as though it were a communications channel between them. “No doubt about the point when the clock starts running. When Jillian walked into the cottage, she was alive. Nineteen minutes later, when Ashton opened the door, she was sitting at the table in two pieces.” He wrinkled his nose and added, “Each piece in its own private puddle of blood.”
“Nineteen? Not fourteen?”
“Fourteen takes it back to the point when the catering girl knocked and got no answer. Reasonable assumption would be that the victim didn’t answer because the victim was already dead.”
“But not necessarily?”
“Not necessarily, because at that point she might have been taking orders from Flores with a machete in his hand, telling her to keep her mouth shut.”
Gurney thought about it, pictured it.
“You got a preference?” asked Hardwick.
“Preference?”
“You think she got the big slice before or after the fourteen-minute mark?”
The big slice? Gurney sighed, knowing the routine: Hardwick being outrageous, his audience wincing. Probably been going on all his life, the shock-jock clown—a style reinforced by the prevailing cynicism in the world of law enforcement, deepening and souring as he aged, concentrated by career problems and bad chemistry with his boss.
“So?” Hardwick prodded. “Which is it?”
“Almost certainly before the first knock on the door. Probably quite a bit before. Most likely within a minute or two of her entering the cottage.”
“Why?”
“The sooner he did it, the more time he’d have to escape before her body was discovered. The more time he’d have to get rid of the machete, to do whatever he did to keep the dogs from following the trail any farther, to get to where he was going before the neighborhood was flooded with cops.”
Hardwick looked skeptical, but not more so than usual—it had become the natural set of his features. “You’re assuming this was all conducted according to plan, all premeditated?”
“That would be my take on it. You see it differently?”
“There are problems either way.”
“For instance?”
Hardwick shook his head. “First, give me your argument for premeditation.”
“The position of the head.”
Hardwick’s mouth twitched. “What about it?”
“The way you described it—facing the body, tiara in place. It sounds like a deliberate arrangement that meant something to the killer or was intended to mean something to someone else. Not a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
Hardwick looked like he had a touch of acid reflux. “Problem with premeditation is that going into the cottage was the victim’s idea. How would Flores know she was going to do that?”
“How do you know she hadn’t discussed it with him beforehand?”
“She told Ashton she just wanted to talk Flores into joining the wedding toast.”
Gurney smiled, waited for Hardwick to think about what he was saying.
Hardwick cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You think that was bullshit? That she had some other reason for going into the cottage? That Flores had set her up earlier with some line of shit and she was lying to Ashton about the wedding-toast thing? Those are big assumptions, based on nothing.”
“If the murder was premeditated, something along those lines must have happened.”
“But if it
wasn’t premeditated?”
“Nonsense, Jack. This wasn’t an impulse. It was a message. I don’t know who the recipient was or what it meant. But it was definitely a message.”
Hardwick made another acid-reflux face but didn’t argue. “Speaking of messages, we found an odd one on the victim’s cell phone—a text message sent to her an hour before she was killed. It said, ‘For all the reasons I have written.’ According to the phone company, the message came from Flores’s phone, but it was signed ‘Edward Vallory.’ That name mean anything to you?”
“Not a thing.” The room had grown dark, and they could hardly see each other at opposite ends of the couch. Gurney switched on the end-table lamp beside him.
Hardwick rubbed his face again, hard, with the palms of both hands. “Before I forget, I wanted to mention a small oddity I observed at the scene and was reminded of in the ME’s report. Might not mean anything, but … the blood on the body itself, the torso, it was all on the far side.”
“Far side?”
“Yeah, the side away from where Flores would have been standing when he swung the machete.”
“Your point being?”
“Well, you know … you know how you just kind of absorb what you’re seeing at a homicide scene? And you start to picture what it was that someone did that would account for things being the way they are?”
Gurney shrugged. “Sure. It’s automatic. That’s what we do.”
“Well, I’m looking at how the blood from the carotids all went down the far side of her body, despite the fact that the torso was sitting up straight, kind of supported by the chair arms, and I’m wondering why. I mean, there’s an artery on each side, so how come all the blood went one way?”
“And what did you picture happening?”
Hardwick bared his teeth in a quick flinch of distaste. “I pictured Flores grabbing her by the hair with one hand and swinging that machete full force with the other right through her neck—which is pretty much what the ME says must have happened.”
“And?”
“And then … then he holds the severed head at an angle against the pulsing neck. In other words, he uses the head to deflect the blood. To keep it from getting on him.”
Gurney began to nod slowly. “The ultimate sociopathic moment …”
Hardwick offered a small grimace of agreement. “Not that hacking her head off had left much doubt about the killer’s mental status. But … there’s something about the … the practicality of the gesture that’s kind of disturbing. Talk about having ice water in your veins …”
Gurney continued to nod. He could see and feel what Hardwick was getting at.
The two men were silent for several long, thoughtful seconds. “There’s a small oddity that’s been bothering me, too,” said Gurney. “Nothing macabre, just a bit perplexing.”
“What?”
“The wedding reception’s guest list.”
“You mean the hot-shit who’s who of upstate New York?”
“When you were at the scene, do you recall seeing anybody under the age of thirty-five? Because watching that video just now, I didn’t.”
Hardwick blinked, scowled, looked like he was flipping through files in his head. “Probably not. So what?”
“Definitely no one in their twenties?”
“Apart from the catering staff, definitely no one in their twenties. So what?”
“Just wondering why the bride didn’t have any friends at her own wedding.”
Chapter 11
The evidence on the table
When Hardwick left just before sunset, turning down a halfhearted offer to stay for dinner, he entrusted his copy of the DVD to Gurney, along with a copy of the case file containing records of the initial days when he was chief investigating officer and of the subsequent months during which Arlo Blatt was in charge. It was everything Gurney could have asked for, which he found unsettling. Hardwick was taking a major risk in copying police file material, removing it from headquarters, and giving it to an individual with no authorization to have it.
Why would he do that?
The simple answer—that any substantial progress Gurney might make would embarrass a senior BCI officer for whom Hardwick had no respect—didn’t quite justify the level of risk the man was subjecting himself to. Perhaps the full answer could be discovered in the file material itself. Gurney had spread it out on the main dining table under the chandelier—which, as the light from the windows faded, would be the brightest place in the house.
He’d divided the voluminous reports and other documents into piles according to the type of information they contained. Within each pile he placed the items in chronological order as best he could.
Altogether it was a daunting aggregation of data: incident reports, field notes, investigative progress reports, sixty-two interview summaries and transcripts (from one to fourteen pages each), landline and cell-phone records, crime-scene photos taken by BCI personnel, additional still photos culled from the wedding videographer’s cameras, the minutely detailed thirty-six-page ViCAP crime-description form, the stolen-object report form, the serial-number database form, an identikit portrait of Hector Flores, the autopsy report, evidence-collection forms, forensic lab reports, DNA blood-sample analyses, the K-9 team report, a master list of wedding guests with contact info and nature of their relationship with the victim and/or Scott Ashton, sketches and aerial photos of the Ashton estate, interior sketches of the cottage with measurements of the front room, biographical data sheets, and, of course, the DVD that Gurney had viewed.
By the time he’d sorted it all into some kind of workable order, it was nearly 7:00 P.M. At first the lateness of the hour surprised him, and then it didn’t. Time always accelerated when his mind was fully engaged, and it seemed to be fully engaged only when, he realized a little ruefully, a puzzle had been placed before him. Madeleine had once told him that his life had narrowed down to one obsessive pursuit: unraveling the mysteries of other people’s deaths. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.
He reached for the file folder nearest him on the table. It was the set of scene-of-crime reports created by the evidence techs. The top form described the cottage’s immediate surroundings. The next form recorded their initial visual inventory of the interior. It was striking in its brevity. The cottage contained none of the normal objects and materials that a crime lab would subject to analysis for trace evidence. No furniture beyond the table on which the victim’s head was found, the narrow chair with wooden arms in which the body was propped up, and one similar chair across from it. There were no lounging chairs, couches, beds, blankets, or rugs. Equally strange, there were no clothes in the closet, no clothes or footwear of any kind anywhere in the cottage—with one peculiar exception: a pair of light rubber boots, the kind normally worn over regular shoes. These boots were found in the bedroom next to the window through which the killer had evidently exited. No doubt they were the boots the dog got the scent from to follow the trail.
He turned in his chair toward the French doors and gazed out over the pasture, his eyes alive with speculation. The peculiarities and complications of the case—what Sherlock Holmes would have called “its unique features”—were multiplying, generating like an electrical current the magnetic field that drew Gurney to problems that would naturally repel most men.
His thoughts were interrupted by the loud squeak of the side door opening—a squeak that for the past year he’d been meaning to eliminate with a drop of oil.
“Madeleine?”
“Yes.” She came into the kitchen with three straining plastic bags from the supermarket in each hand, hefted all six of them up onto the sideboard, and headed back out.
“Can I help?” he said.
There was no answer, just the sound of the side door opening and closing. A minute later the sound was repeated, followed by her return to the kitchen with a second load of bags, which she also placed on the sideboard. Only then did she take off the quirky purple, g
reen, and pink Peruvian hat with the dangling ear flaps that always seemed to add an antic dimension to whatever her underlying mood might be.
He felt the transient tic in his left eyelid, a twitch in the nerve so distinct it had taken several trips to the mirror in recent months to convince him that it wasn’t visible. He wanted to ask where she’d been, apart from the supermarket, but he had the feeling she might have mentioned the rest of her plan to him earlier, and his failure to remember it would not be a good thing. Madeleine equated forgetting, as she equated poor hearing, with lack of interest. Maybe she was right. In twenty-five years in the NYPD, he’d never forgotten to show up for a witness interview, never forgotten a court date, never forgotten what a suspect said or how he sounded, never forgotten a single thing of significance to his job.
Had anything else ever come close in importance to his job? Even made it into the same ballpark? Parents? Wives? Children?
When his mother died, he’d felt almost nothing. No, it was worse than that. Colder and more self-centered than that. He’d felt a sense of relief, the removal of a burden, a simplification of his life. When his first wife left him, another complication was removed. Another impediment out of the way, relief from the pressure of having to respond to the needs of a difficult person. Freedom.
Madeleine went to the refrigerator, started taking out glass containers of food left over from the night before and from the night before that. She laid them in a row on the countertop next to the microwave, five of them, removed the tops. He watched her from the other side of the sink island.
“Have you eaten yet?” she asked.
“No, I was waiting for you to come home,” he replied, not quite truthfully.
She glanced past him at the papers spread out on the dining table, raised an eyebrow.
“Bunch of stuff from Jack Hardwick,” he said, too casually. “He asked me to look it over.” He imagined her level gaze examining his thoughts. He added, “It’s stuff from the Jillian Perry case file.” He paused. “I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to do, or why anyone thinks my observations would be helpful under the existing circumstances, but … I’ll take a look at what’s here and give him my reactions.”