by John Verdon
When Gurney looked closer, he saw that it was a manipulated photograph—in fact, two differently posed photographs of the same model positioned and retouched in a way that made them appear to be gazing at each other, adding a dimension of narcissism to the already ample pathology of the scene. It was, in a way, an impressive work of art—a depiction of pure decadence worthy of illustrating Dante’s Inferno. Gurney turned toward Ashton, his curiosity evident in his expression.
“Jillian,” said Ashton flatly. “My late wife.”
Gurney was speechless.
The picture raised so many questions that he didn’t know which to ask first.
He had the feeling that Ashton was not only observing but enjoying his confusion. Which raised more questions. Finally he thought of something to say, something he’d completely forgotten about during their first meeting. “I’m terribly sorry for your tragic loss. And I’m sorry for not saying so yesterday.”
A heaviness, a cloud of depression and weariness, seemed to draw all of Ashton’s features downward. “Thank you.”
“I’m surprised you’ve been able to stay in this house—seeing that cottage out in back every day, knowing what happened there.”
“It will be torn down,” said Ashton, almost brutally. “Torn down, crushed, burned. As soon as the police give their permission. They still have some lingering jurisdiction over it as a crime scene. But the day will come. The cottage will cease to exist.”
Ashton took a deep breath, and the display of emotion slowly faded. “So where shall be begin?” He gestured toward a pair of burgundy velvet wing chairs with a small, square table between them. The tabletop consisted of a hand-carved intarsia chessboard, but there were no chess pieces in sight.
Gurney decided to address the elephant in the room, the sensationally tawdry picture of Jillian, head-on. “I’d never have guessed that the girl in that photo on the wall was the bride I saw in the video.”
“The flowing white gown, demure makeup, et cetera?” Ashton looked almost amused.
“None of that seems consistent with this,” said Gurney, staring at the photo.
“Would it make more sense if you knew that her traditional bridal getup was Jillian’s idea of a joke?”
“A joke?”
“This may strike you as crude and unfeeling, Detective, but we haven’t much time, so let me tell you quickly about Jillian. Some of this you might have heard from her mother and some not. Jillian’s personality was irritable, intensely moody, easily bored, self-centered, intolerant, impatient, and volatile.”
“Quite a profile.”
“That was her brighter side—the relatively harmless Jillian, spoiled and bipolar. Her darker side was something else entirely.” Ashton paused, gazed fixedly at the picture on the wall as if to check the accuracy of his words.
Gurney waited, wondered where this extraordinary commentary was going.
“Jillian …” Ashton began, still looking at the picture, speaking softly now and more slowly. “Jillian was in her childhood a sexual predator, an abuser of other children. That was the chief symptom of the central pathology that brought her to Mapleshade at the age of thirteen. Her more obvious affective and behavioral problems were ripples on the surface.”
He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue, then rubbed them with his thumb and forefinger as if to dry them again. His gaze shifted from the picture to Gurney’s face. “Now, do you want to ask your questions, or shall I ask them for you?”
Gurney was happy to let Ashton keep talking. “What do you think my first question would be?”
“If your mind weren’t spinning with a dozen of them? I think your first question, at least to yourself, would be: Is Ashton crazy? Because, if so, that would explain a lot. But if not, then your second question would be: Why on earth would he want to marry a woman with such a disordered background? To the first question, I have no credible answer. No man is a trustworthy guarantor of his own sanity. To the second question, I would say that it’s unfairly slanted, since Jillian had another quality I failed to mention. Brilliance. Brilliance beyond the normal scope of the term. She had the fastest, most facile mind I’ve ever encountered. I am an exceptionally intelligent man, Detective. I am not being immodest, just truthful. You see the chessboard built into this table? There are no chessmen. I play without them. I find it a stimulating mental challenge to play the game in my mind, imagining and remembering the positions of the pieces. Sometimes I play against myself, visualizing the board alternately from the white side and the black side, back and forth. Most people are impressed by that ability. But believe me when I tell you that Jillian’s mind was more formidable than my own. I find intelligence like that in a woman very attractive—attractive in both the companionable and erotic senses.”
The more Gurney heard, the more questions came to mind. “I’ve heard that sexual abusers are often victims of abuse themselves. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“True in the case of Jillian?”
“Yes.”
“Who was the abuser?”
“It wasn’t just one person.”
“Who were they, then?”
“According to an unverified account, they were Val Perry’s crack-addict friends, and the abuse, by numerous perpetrators, occurred repeatedly between the ages of three and seven.”
“Jesus. Are there any legal intervention records, social-service case files?”
“None of it was reported at the time.”
“But when she was finally sent to Mapleshade, it all came out? What about the records of the treatment she was given, statements she made to her therapists?”
“There are none. I should explain something about Mapleshade. First of all, it’s a school, not a medical facility. A private school for young women with special problems. In recent years we have admitted a growing percentage of students whose problems center on sexual issues, especially abuse.”
“I was told that your treatment emphasis is on abusers rather than the abused.”
“Yes—although treatment is not the right word, since we are not, as I said, a medical facility. And the line between abuser and abused is not always as clear as you might think. The point I’m making is that Mapleshade is effective because it is discreet. We accept no court or social-service referrals, no insurance, no state aid, provide no medical or psychiatric diagnoses or treatment, and—this is vitally important—we keep no ‘patient’ records.”
“Yet the school apparently has a reputation for offering state-of-the-art treatment, or whatever you choose to call it, directed by the renowned Dr. Scott Ashton.” Gurney’s voice had taken on a sharper edge, to which Ashton showed no reaction.
“A greater stigma attaches to these disorders than to any other. Knowing that everything here is absolutely confidential, that there are no case files or insurance forms or therapy notes that can be purloined or subpoenaed, is a priceless benefit to our clientele. Legally we’re just a private secondary school with a knowledgeable staff available for informal chats on a variety of sensitive issues.”
Gurney sat back, pondering Mapleshade’s unusual structure and the implications of that structure. Perhaps sensing his uneasiness, Ashton added, “Consider this: The feeling of security that our system offers makes it possible for our students and their families to tell us things that they would never dream of divulging if the information were going into a file. There’s no source of guilt and shame and fear deeper than the disorders we deal with here.”
“Why didn’t you reveal Jillian’s horrendous background to the investigation team?”
“There was no reason to.”
“No reason?”
“My wife was killed by my psychotic gardener, who then escaped. The task of the police is to track him down. What should I have said? Oh, by the way, when my wife was three years old, she was raped by her mother’s crazed crackhead friends? How would that help them apprehend Hector Flores?”
“How old was she when sh
e made the transition from victim to abuser?”
“Five.”
“Five?”
“This area of dysfunction always shocks people outside the field. The behavior is so inconsistent with what we like to think of as the innocence of childhood. Unfortunately, five-year-old abusers of even younger children are not as rare as you might think.”
“Jesus.” Gurney looked with growing concern at the picture on the wall. “Who were her victims?”
“I don’t know.”
“Val Perry is aware of all this?”
“Yes. She’s still not comfortable talking about it in any detail, in case you’re wondering why she didn’t tell you. But it’s why she came to you.”
“I don’t follow you.”
Ashton took a deep breath. “Val is driven by guilt. To make a complicated story simple, in her twenties she was part of a drug scene and not much of a mother. She surrounded herself with addicts even crazier than she was, which led to the abuse situation I described, which led to Jillian’s ensuing sexual aggression and other behavior disorders, which Val was unable to deal with. Her guilt tore her apart—a colorful cliché, but accurate. She felt responsible for every problem in her daughter’s life, and now she feels responsible for her death. She’s frustrated by the official police investigation—no leads, no progress, no closure. I believe she came to you in one final attempt to do something right for Jillian. Certainly too little too late, but it’s the only thing she could think of doing. She heard about you from one of the officers at BCI, about your reputation as a homicide detective in the city, read some article about you in New York magazine, and decided you represented her best and last chance to make up for being a terrible mother. It’s pathetic, but there it is.”
“How do you know all this?”
“After Jillian’s murder, Val was close to a breakdown, and she still is. Talking about these things was one way of holding herself together.”
“And you?”
“Me?”
“How have you held yourself together?”
“Is that curiosity or sarcasm?”
“Your discussion of the most horrible event of your life, and the people involved in it, seems remarkably detached. I don’t know what to make of that.”
“Don’t you? That’s hard to believe.”
“Meaning what?”
“My impression, Detective, is that you would respond the same way to the death of someone close to you.” He regarded Gurney with the neutrality of the classic therapist. “I suggest the parallel as a way of helping you understand my position. You’re asking yourself, ‘Is he concealing his emotion at the death of his wife, or is there no emotion to conceal?’ Before I give you the answer, think about what you saw on the video.”
“You mean your reaction to what you saw in the cottage?”
Ashton’s voice hardened, and he spoke with a rigidity that seemed to vibrate with the power of a barely contained fury. “I believe that part of Hector’s motive was to inflict pain on me. He succeeded. My pain was recorded on that video. It’s a fact I can’t change. However, I did make a resolution never to show that pain again. Not to anyone. Not ever.”
Gurney’s eyes rested on the chessboard’s delicate intarsia inlay. “You have no doubt at all about the murderer’s identity?”
Ashton blinked, looked like he was having trouble understanding the question. “I beg your pardon?”
“You have no doubt that Hector Flores is the person who killed your wife?”
“No doubt at all. I gave some thought to the suggestion you made yesterday that Carl Muller might be involved, but frankly I don’t see it.”
“Is it possible that Hector was gay, that the motive for the killing—”
“That’s absurd.”
“It’s a theory the police were considering.”
“I know something about sexuality. Trust me. Hector was not gay.” He looked deliberately at his watch.
Gurney sat back, waited for Ashton to make eye contact with him. “It must take a special kind of person—the field you’re in.”
“Meaning?”
“It must be depressing. I’ve heard that sex offenders are almost impossible to cure.”
Ashton sat back like Gurney, held his gaze, steepled his fingers under his chin. “That’s a media generalization. Half true, half nonsense.”
“Still, it must be a difficult kind of work.”
“What sort of difficulty are you imagining?”
“All the stress. So much at stake. The consequences of failure.”
“Like police work. Like life in general.” Again Ashton looked at his watch.
“So what’s the glue?” asked Gurney.
“The glue?”
“The thing that attaches you to the sexual-abuse field.”
“This is relevant to finding Flores?”
“It may be.”
Ashton closed his eyes and bowed his head so that his steepled fingers assumed a prayerful attitude. “You’re right about the high stakes. Sexual energy in general has tremendous power, the power to concentrate one’s attention like nothing else, to become the sole reality, to warp judgment, to obliterate pain and the perception of risk. The power to make all other considerations irrelevant. There is no force on earth that comes close to it in its power to blind and drive the individual in its grip. When this energy within a person is focused on an inappropriate object—specifically, another person of less-than-equal strength and understanding—the potential for damage is truly endless. Because in the intensity of its power and primitive excitement, its ability to twist reality, inappropriate sexual behavior can be as contagious as the bite of a vampire. In pursuit of the magic power of the abuser, the abused may become an abuser herself. There are simple evolutionary, neurological, and psychological roots for the overwhelming strength of the sex drive. Its diversions into destructive channels can be analyzed, described, diagrammed. But altering those diversions is another matter entirely. To understand the genesis of a tidal wave is one thing; to change its direction is something else.” He opened his eyes, lowered his steepled hands from his face.
“It’s the challenge in it that attracts you?”
“It’s the leverage in it.”
“You mean the ability to make a difference?”
“Yes!” Some inner rheostat turned up the light in Ashton’s eyes. “The ability to intervene in what otherwise would be an everlasting chain of misery spreading out from the abuser into everyone he or she touched, and from those to others, and down through future generations. This is not like the removal of a tumor, which may save one life. Success rates in the field are debatable, but even one success can prevent the destruction of a hundred lives.”
Gurney smiled, looked impressed. “So that’s the mission of Mapleshade?”
Ashton mirrored the smile. “Exactly.” Another glance at his watch. “And now I really do need to leave. You can stay if you wish, have a look around the grounds, a look at the cottage. The key is under the black rock to the right of the doorstep. If you want to see the spot where the machete was found, go around to the rear of the cottage as far as the middle window, then walk straight out into the woods about a hundred and fifty yards, and you’ll find a tall stake in the ground. There was originally a yellow police ribbon tied around the top, but that may be gone by now. Good luck, Detective.”
He showed Gurney out, left him standing on the brick-paved driveway, and drove off in a vintage Jaguar sedan, as evocatively English as the chamomile scent in the damp air.
Chapter 24
A patient spider
Gurney felt an urgent need to sort and review, to take the mass of data and possibilities crowding his mind and arrange them in a manageable order. Although the drizzle had finally stopped, there was no place outside Ashton’s house dry enough to sit, so he retreated to his car. He took out the spiral pad with his notes on Calvin Harlen, turned to a new page, closed his eyes, and began rerunning the mental tapes of his m
eeting with Ashton.
He soon found this disciplined process hopeless. However hard he tried to go over the details in their actual chronology, weigh them, match them like puzzle pieces with similar pieces, one huge fact kept elbowing its way in front of all the others: Jillian Perry had sexually abused other children. It was not uncommon for a victim of that offense, or a member of a victim’s family, to seek revenge. It was not unheard-of for that revenge to take the form of murder.
The impact of this possibility filled his mind. It fit the contours of his thinking in a way no other aspect of the case had so far. Finally there was a motive that made sense, that didn’t bring with it an immediate surge of doubt, that didn’t create more problems than it solved. And along with it came certain implications. For example: The key questions about Hector Flores might not be where did he disappear to and how, but where did he come from and why? The focus needed to shift from what might have happened in Tambury that drove Flores to commit murder to what might have happened in the past that drove him to Tambury.
Gurney was now too restless to sit still. He got back out of his car, looked around at the house, the slate-roofed garage, the arched trellis entrance to the rear lawn. Was this the first view Hector Flores had had of Ashton’s manorial property three and a half years earlier? Or had he been looking it over for some time, watching Ashton come and go? When he knocked on the door for the first time, how far along were his plans? Was Jillian his target from the beginning? Was Ashton, director of the school she’d attended, a route to her? Or were his plans more general—perhaps a violent assault on one or more of the offenders that Mapleshade harbored? Or for that matter, might the original target have been Ashton himself—the harborer, the doctor who helped abusers? Might Jillian’s murder have offered a double benefit: her death and Ashton’s pain?