by John Verdon
“I started feeling funny at lunch, and later, in the car, I was having trouble remembering the conversation we’d had.” He told himself that this was true, albeit somewhat minimized.
“Sounds like you were drunk.” Her voice was more questioning than assertive.
“Maybe. But … I’m not sure.”
“You think you were drugged?”
“It’s one of the possibilities I’ve been considering. Even though it doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, I’ve been checking the place out, and all I know for sure is that there’s something wrong about the whole situation—and the hundred-thousand-dollar offer is almost certainly baloney. But what I actually called to say is that I’m just leaving Manhattan and I should be home in about two and a half hours. I’m really sorry I didn’t call earlier.”
“Don’t race.”
“See you soon. Love you.”
He nearly missed the last exit from the Harlem River Drive to the GW Bridge. With a quick glance to his right, he swerved into the exit lane and onto the ramp, triggering the blare of an indignant car horn.
It was too late to call Kline. But if Hardwick was indeed back on the case, he might know something about the Karnala inquiry and Kline’s phone-message reference to the Skard family. With a little luck, Hardwick would be awake, would answer the phone, and be willing to talk.
All three turned out to be true.
“What’s up, Sherlock? You couldn’t wait till morning to congratulate me on my reinstatement?”
“Congratulations.”
“Apparently you got everybody believing that Mapleshade grads are dropping like flies and everybody in the world has to be interviewed—which has created this huge manpower crunch that forced Rodriguez to bring me back into it. Almost made his head explode.”
“I’m glad you’re back. I have a couple of questions.”
“About the pooch?”
“Pooch?”
“The one that dug up Kiki.”
“The hell are you talking about, Jack?”
“Marian Eliot’s curious Airedale. You haven’t heard?”
“Tell me.”
“She was out working in her rose garden with Melpomene tied to a tree.”
“Who?”
“The Airedale’s name is Melpomene. Very sophisticated bitch. Somehow Melpomene manages to untie her rope. She wanders over behind the Muller house, starts rooting around in back of the woodshed. By the time Old Lady Eliot gets over there to retrieve her, Melpomene’s got a pretty good hole going. Something catches Old Lady Eliot’s eye. Guess what?”
“Jack, for Christ’s sake, just tell me.”
“She thought it was one of her gardening gloves.”
“For Christ’s sake, Jack …”
“Think about it. What might look like a glove?”
“Jack …”
“It was a decomposed hand.”
“And this hand was attached to Kiki Muller, the woman who supposedly ran off with Hector Flores?”
“The very same.”
Gurney was silent for a good five seconds.
“You got the wheels turning, Sherlock? Deducing, inducing, whatever the hell you do?”
“How did Kiki’s husband react to this?”
“Crazy Carl? Trainman under the tree? No reaction at all. I think his shrink has him so zapped on Xanax he’s beyond reaction. Fucking zombie. Or he’s putting on a hell of an act.”
“Is there any cause or approximate date of death?”
“She only got dug up this morning. But she’d definitely been in the ground awhile. Maybe a few months, which would put it back to the time of Hector’s disappearance.”
“What about the cause?”
“The ME hasn’t put it in writing yet, but based on my observation of the body I’d be willing to take a guess.”
Hardwick paused. Gurney clenched his teeth. He knew what was coming.
“I’d say her death might be related to the fact that her head was chopped off.”
Chapter 46
Nothing on paper
Arriving home well after midnight, Gurney got so little sleep that night that it hardly felt like sleep at all.
The next morning over coffee with Madeleine, he attributed his restlessness to his suspicions regarding “Jykynstyl” and to the growing intensity of the Perry case. Without saying so, he also attributed it to the metabolites of whatever chemical he’d been dosed with.
“You should have gone to the hospital.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Maybe you should go back to bed.”
“Too much going on. Besides, I’m too wound up to sleep.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Work.”
“You know it’s Sunday, right?”
“Right.” But he’d forgotten that it was. His confusion was scaring him. He had to do something to focus his mind on something concrete, a path to clarity, one foot after another.
“Maybe you should call Dichter’s office, ask if he can fit you in today.”
He shook his head. Dichter was their family doctor. Dr. Dichter. The silliness of it almost always made him smile, but not today.
“You said you might have been drugged. Are you taking that seriously enough? What kind of drug are you talking about?”
He wasn’t going to raise the specter of Rohypnol. Its sexual associations would trigger an explosion of questions and concerns he didn’t feel capable of discussing. “I’m not sure. I’m guessing it was something with blackout effects similar to alcohol.”
She gave him that assessing look of hers that made him feel naked.
“Whatever it was,” he said, “it’s wearing off.” He knew he was sounding too casual, or at least too eager to move to another subject.
“Maybe there’s something you should be taking to counteract it.”
He shook his head. “I’m sure my body’s natural detoxing process will take care of it. What I need in the meantime is something to focus on.” That thought led him directly back to the Perry case, which led him to the call he’d made to Hardwick the previous evening, which led him to the sudden realization that their discussion of Melpomene and Kiki Muller’s decomposing hand had caused him to forget why he’d called Hardwick in the first place.
A moment later he was back on the phone to him.
“Skard?” rasped Hardwick unhappily. “Yeah, that name came up in connection with Karnala Fashion. By the way, it’s Sunday fucking morning. How urgent is this?”
Nothing with Hardwick was easy. But if you played the game, you could make it less difficult. One way to play was to escalate the vulgarity.
“How about a shotgun-to-your-balls level of urgency?”
For a couple of seconds, Hardwick was quiet, as if considering the number of points to award for artfulness of expression. “Karnala Fashion turns out to be a complicated outfit, hard to pin down. It’s owned by another corporation, which is owned by another corporation, which is owned by another corporation in the Cayman Islands. Very hard to say what business they’re actually in. But there seems to be a Sardinian connection, and the Sardinian connection seems to be connected to the Skard family. The Skards are reputed to be very bad people.”
“Reputed to be?”
“I don’t mean to suggest there’s any doubt about it. There’s just no legal proof of it. According to our friends at Interpol, no member of the Skard family has ever been convicted of anything. Potential witnesses always change their minds. Or they disappear.”
“The Skards own Karnala Fashion?”
“Probably. Everything about them is probably this, probably that. They don’t put much on paper.”
“So what the hell is Karnala Fashion all about?”
“Nobody knows. We can’t find a single fabric supplier or clothing retailer who’s ever done business with them. They run ads for incredibly expensive women’s clothes, but we can’t find evidence that they actually sell them.”
“What do t
heir representatives say about that?”
“We can’t find any representatives.”
“Jesus, Jack, who places the ads? Who pays for them?”
“It’s all done by e-mail.”
“E-mail from where?”
“Sometimes from the Cayman Islands. Sometimes from Sardinia.”
“But …”
“I know. It doesn’t make sense. It’s being pursued. We’re waiting for more stuff from Interpol. Also from the Italian police. Also from the Cayman Islands. It’s tricky, since nobody’s been convicted of anything and the missing girls aren’t officially missing. Even if they were, their connection to Karnala wouldn’t prove anything, and there’s nothing on paper connecting Karnala to the Skards. Reputed is as good as it gets. Legally, we’re in a minefield in a fog. Plus, thanks to the observations you shared with the DA, the whole case is now being run like a cover-your-ass panic attack.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that instead of a couple of guys in that minefield, we’ve got a dozen tripping over one another.”
“Admit it, Jack, you love it.”
“Fuck you.”
“Right. So I guess this wouldn’t be a good time to ask you for a favor.”
“Like what?” He was suddenly placid. Hardwick was strange that way. His reactions were backward, like a hyperactive kid being calmed by an upper. The best time to ask him for a favor was the exact time you’d think would be the worst, and vice versa. The same upside-down principle governed his response to risk. He tended to view it as a positive factor in any equation. Unlike most cops, who tend by nature to be hierarchical and conservative, Hardwick had the true maverick gene. He was lucky to be alive.
“It’s a rule breaker,” said Gurney, feeling for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours that he was on solid ground. Why hadn’t he thought of Hardwick sooner? “It might involve a little deviousness.”
“What is it?” The man sounded like he’d just been offered a surprise dessert.
“I need to get some prints lifted off a small glass and run against the FBI database.”
“Let me guess—you don’t want anyone to know why, you don’t want a case file opened, and you don’t want the inquiry to be traced back to you.”
“Something like that.”
“Where and when do I get this glass?”
“How about at Abelard’s in ten minutes?”
“Gurney, you’re a presumptuous dick.”
Chapter 47
An impossible situation
After entrusting the glass to Hardwick in the tiny parking area in front of Abelard’s, Gurney was struck by the idea of continuing on to Tambury. Abelard’s, after all, was nearly halfway there, and the scene of the crime might have more to reveal to him. He also wanted to keep moving, keep the anxiety of the Jykynstyl business from enveloping him.
He thought about those outdoorsy aristocrats Marian Eliot and Melpomene, Melpomene rooting up the dirt behind the Muller shed, Kiki’s hand sticking out of the ground like a grungy garden glove. And Carl. Christmas Carl. Carl who might very well end up in the frame for his wife’s murder. Of course, the fact that her head was cut off would point the finger at Hector. But if Carl were clever …
Had he discovered her affair with Hector? And decided to kill her the way Hector had killed Jillian Perry? Conceivable but unlikely. If Carl were guilty, that would make Kiki’s murder a tangent off the main course of the Mapleshade business. It would also mean that Carl had been furious enough to kill his wife, rational enough to mimic Hector’s MO, and foolish enough to bury her in a shallow grave in his own backyard. Gurney had seen stranger sequences of events, but that didn’t make this scenario feel any more credible.
He suspected there was a better explanation for Kiki Muller’s murder than the rage of a jealous husband, something that would attach it more directly to the larger mystery at Mapleshade. As he turned into Badger Lane from Higgles Road, he was starting to feel like himself again. He was far from whistling a happy tune, but at least he felt like a detective. And he didn’t feel like throwing up.
Two tattooed clones of Calvin Harlen were standing with the man himself next to the manure pile that separated the wreck of a house from the wreck of a barn. Their dull eyes followed Gurney’s car into the lane with a lazy malevolence.
Driving up toward Ashton’s house, he half expected to see Marian Eliot and Melpomene, exposer of buried sins, striking a dour pose on their front porch, but there was no sign of either. Nor was there any sign of life at the Muller house.
When he got out of his car in Ashton’s brick-paved driveway, he was struck again by the English ambience of the place—its subtle communication of wealth and quiet exclusivity. Rather than proceeding straight to the front door, he walked over to the arched trellis that served as an entryway to the broad lawn extending far behind the house. Although the surrounding shrubs were still primarily green, scattered tinges of yellow and red were beginning to appear in the trees.
“Detective Gurney?”
He turned toward the house. Scott Ashton was standing at the open side door.
Gurney smiled. “Sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning.”
Ashton mirrored his smile. “I wouldn’t expect any distinction between weekday and weekend in a murder investigation. Is there anything specific …?”
“Actually, I was wondering if I could take a closer look at the area around the cottage.”
“A closer look?”
“That’s right. If you don’t mind?”
“Anything in particular you’re interested in?”
“I’m hoping I’ll know it when I see it.”
Ashton’s even smile was as measured as his voice. “Let me know if you need any help. I’ll be with my father in the library.”
Some people have “dens,” thought Gurney, and some people have “libraries.” Who said America was a classless society? Certainly no one whose home was built of Cotswold stone and whose father was named Hobart Ashton.
He walked from the driveway across the side lawn through the trellis to the main area of the rear lawn. He’d been so preoccupied that he hadn’t noticed until that very moment what a strangely perfect day it was, one of those autumn days when the altered angle of the sun, the altered color of the leaves, and an absolute stillness in the air conspired to create a world of timeless peace, a world that required nothing of him, a world whose peace took his breath away.
Like all the moments of serenity in Gurney’s life, this one was short-lived. He had come here to focus on a murder, to absorb more fully the nitty-gritty reality of the place in which it happened, the locale in which the murderer went about his business.
He continued around the back of the house to the broad stone patio, to the small round table—the table where four months earlier a bullet from a .257 Weatherby rifle had shattered Ashton’s teacup. He wondered where Hector Flores was at that very moment. He might be anywhere. He might be in the woods watching the house, keeping an eye on Ashton and his father, keeping an eye on Gurney.
Gurney’s attention moved to the cottage, to what had happened the day of the murder, the day of the wedding. From where he was standing, he could see the front and one side, as well as the part of the woods that Flores would have had to pass through in order to deposit the machete where it was found. In May the leaves would have been coming out, as now they were thinning, making the visibility conditions in the thicket roughly the same.
As he’d done many times during the past week, Gurney envisioned an athletic Latino male climbing out the back window of the cottage, running with the evasive steps of a soccer player through the trees and thornbushes to a point approximately 150 yards away, and half concealing the bloodied machete under some leaves. And then … then what? Slipping some sort of plastic bags over his feet? Or spraying them with some chemical to destroy the continuity of the scent trail? So he could proceed tracelessly to some other destination in the copse or on the road beyond it? So he
could meet up with Kiki Muller, waiting in her car to drive him safely out of the area before the police arrived? Or take him to her own house? To her own house where he then killed and buried her? But why? What sense did any of that make? Or was that the wrong question, assuming as it did that the scenario had to make practical sense? Suppose a large part of it had been driven by pure pathology, by some warped fantasy? But that was not a useful avenue to explore. Because if nothing made sense, there was no way to make sense of it. And he had the feeling that, under the cloak of fury and lunacy, it all somehow did make sense.
So why was the machete only partially concealed? It seemed senseless to go to the trouble of covering the blade while leaving the handle in plain sight. For some reason that small discrepancy was the one that bothered him the most. Perhaps bothered was the wrong word. He was actually quite fond of discrepancies, because his experience told him that they eventually provided a window into the truth.
He sat down at the table and gazed into the woods, imagining as best he could the path of the running man. The view of those 150 yards from cottage to machete site was almost entirely obscured, not only by the foliage of the copse itself but by the rhododendron border that separated the wild area from the lawn and the flower beds. Gurney tried to estimate how deeply into the woods someone could see, and he concluded that it was not very deeply at all—making it easy for a man to pass where Flores had evidently passed without anyone on the lawn noticing him. In fact, by far the most distant object in the woods Gurney could see through the foliage from where he was sitting was the black trunk of a cherry tree. And he could see only a narrow slice of it through a gap in the bushes no more than a few inches wide.
True, that visible bit of tree trunk was on the far side of the route Flores would have to have taken, and theoretically, if someone had been staring into the woods, focused on that spot at the right moment, he or she might have caught a split-second glimpse of a person passing it. But it would have meant nothing at the time. And the chance of someone’s attention being focused on that precise spot at that time was about as likely as …