by John Verdon
“No. As a matter of fact, Jillian was the one who got it. She gave it to me as a wedding present. She gave it to me that morning. The morning of the wedding.”
Chapter 35
A hell of a lot more
The County Office Building had an unusual history. Prior to 1935 it was known as the Bumblebee Lunatic Asylum—named after the eccentric British transplant Sir George Bumblebee, who endowed it with his entire estate in 1899 and who, his disinherited relatives argued, was as insane as any prospective resident. It was a history that provided endless fodder for local wags commenting on the workings of the government agencies that had been located there ever since the county took the place over during the Great Depression.
The dark brick edifice sat like an oppressive paperweight holding down the north side of the town square. The much-needed sandblasting to remove a century of grime was put off each year to the following year, the victim of a perennial budget crisis. In the mid-sixties, the inside had been gutted and redone. Fluorescent lights and plasterboard were installed in place of cracked globes and warped wainscoting. The elaborate lobby security apparatus that Gurney remembered from his visits to the building during the Mellery case was still in place and still frustratingly slow. Once one was past that barrier, however, the rectangular layout of the building was simple, and a minute later he was opening a frosted-glass door on which DISTRICT ATTORNEY appeared in elegant black letters.
He recognized the woman in the cashmere sweater behind the reception desk: Ellen Rackoff, the DA’s intensely sexy, though far from young, personal assistant. The look in her eyes was arrestingly cool and experienced.
“You’re late,” she said in her cashmere voice. The fact that she didn’t ask his name was the only acknowledgment that she remembered him from the Mellery case. “Come with me.” She led him back out through the glass door and down a corridor to a door with a black plastic sign on it that read CONFERENCE ROOM.
“Good luck.”
He opened the door and thought for a moment he’d been brought to the wrong meeting. There were several people in the room, but the one person he’d expected to be there, Sheridan Kline, wasn’t among them. He realized he was probably in the right place after all when he saw Captain Rodriguez of the state police glowering at him from the opposite side of the big round table that filled half the windowless room.
Rodriguez was a short, fleshy man with a closed face and a carefully coiffed mass of thick black hair, obviously dyed. His blue suit was immaculate, his shirt whiter than white, his tie bloodred. Glasses with thin steel frames emphasized dark, resentful eyes. Sitting on his left was Arlo Blatt, who was looking at Gurney with small, unfriendly eyes. The colorless man on Rodriguez’s right showed no emotion beyond a faintly depressed quality that Gurney guessed was more constitutional than situational. He gave Gurney the appraising once-over that cops automatically give strangers, looked at his watch, and yawned. Across from this trio, his chair pushed back a good three feet from the table, Jack Hardwick sat with his eyes closed and his arms folded on his chest, as if being in the same room with these people had put him to sleep.
“Hello, Dave.” The voice was strong, clear, female, and familiar. The source was a tall, auburn-haired woman standing by a separate table in the far corner of the room—a woman with a striking resemblance to the young Sigourney Weaver.
“Rebecca! I didn’t know that … that you …”
“Neither did I. Sheridan called this morning, asked if I could find the time. It worked out, so here I am. Like some coffee?”
“Thank you.”
“Black?”
“Sure.” He preferred it with milk and sugar but for some reason didn’t want to tell her she’d guessed wrong.
Rebecca Holdenfield was a well-known profiler Gurney had met and come to respect, despite his doubts about profilers in general, when they were both working on the Mellery case. He wondered what her presence might signify about the DA’s view of the case.
Just then the door opened, and the DA himself strode into the room. Sheridan Kline was, as usual, radiating a sparky sort of energy. His rapidly moving gaze, like a burglar’s flashlight, took in the room in a couple of seconds. “Becca! Thank you! Appreciate your making the time to be here. Dave! Detective Dave, the man who’s been stirring the pot! Reason we’re all here. And Rod!” He grinned brightly at Rodriguez’s sour face. “Good of you to make it on such short notice. Glad you were able to bring your people along.” He glanced without interest at the bodies flanking the captain, his gladness a transparent lie. Kline liked an audience, Gurney reflected, but he liked it to be composed of people who mattered.
Holdenfield came to the table with two black coffees, gave Gurney one of them, and sat down next to him.
“Senior Investigator Hardwick here is not currently assigned to the case,” Kline went on to no one in particular, “but he was involved at the beginning, and I thought it would be helpful to have all our relevant resources in the room at the same time.”
Another transparent lie, Gurney thought. What Kline found “helpful” was to throw cats and dogs in together and watch what happened. He was a rabid fan of the adversarial process for getting at the truth and motivating people—the angrier the adversaries, the better. The vibe in the room was hostile, which Gurney figured accounted for the energy level in Kline, which was now approaching the hum of a high-voltage transformer.
“Rod, while I get some coffee here, why don’t you summarize BCI’s approach to the case so far. We’re here to listen and learn.”
Gurney thought he heard Hardwick, slouching in his chair on the far side of Rebecca Holdenfield, groan.
“I’ll keep this brief,” said the captain. “In the matter of the Jillian Perry murder, we know what was done, when it was done, and how it was done. We know who did it, and our efforts have been concentrated on finding that individual and taking him into custody. In pursuit of this objective, we’ve mobilized one of the largest manhunts in the history of the bureau. It is massive, painstaking, and ongoing.”
Another muted sound emanated from Hardwick’s direction.
The captain’s elbows were planted on the table, his left fist buried in his right hand. He shot Hardwick a warning glance. “So far we’ve conducted over three hundred interviews, and we’re continuing to expand the radius of our inquiries. Bill—Lieutenant Anderson—and Arlo here are responsible for guiding and monitoring the day-to-day progress.”
Kline came to the table with his coffee but remained standing. “Maybe Bill could give us a feeling for the current status. What do we know today that we didn’t know, say, a week after the beheading?”
Lieutenant Anderson blinked and cleared his throat. “What we didn’t know …? Well, I’d say we’ve eliminated a lot of possibilities.” When it became apparent from the stares fixed on him that this was not an adequate response, he cleared his throat again. “There were a lot of things that might have happened that we know now didn’t happen. We’ve eliminated a lot of possibilities, and we’ve developed a sharper picture of the suspect. A real nutcase.”
“What possibilities have you eliminated?” asked Kline.
“Well, we know that no one observed Flores leaving the Tambury area. There’s no record of his calling any cab company, no car-rental record, and none of the bus drivers who make local pickups recall anyone like him. In fact, we couldn’t find anyone who saw him at any time after the murder.”
Kline blinked in confusion. “Okay, but I don’t quite understand …”
Anderson continued blandly. “Sometimes what we don’t find is as important as what we do. Lab analyses showed that Flores had scoured the cottage to the point where there was zero trace evidence of himself or anyone other than the victim. He took incredible care in erasing everything that might carry analyzable DNA. Even the traps under the bathroom and kitchen sinks had been scrubbed. We’ve also interviewed every available Latino laborer within a fifty-mile radius of Tambury, and not a single one was a
ble or willing to tell us anything about Flores. Without prints or DNA or a date of entry into the country, Immigration can’t help us. Ditto the authorities in Mexico. The identikit composite is too generic to be of much use. Everyone we interviewed thought it looked like somebody they knew, but no two people identified the same person. As for Kiki Muller, the next-door neighbor who disappeared with Flores, no one has seen her since the murder.”
Kline look exasperated. “Sounds like you’re telling me the investigation has gotten nowhere.”
Anderson glanced at Rodriguez. Rodriguez studied his fist.
Blatt made his first comment of the meeting. “It’s a matter of time.”
Everyone looked at him.
“We have people in that community keeping their eyes and ears open. Eventually Flores will surface, shoot his mouth off to the wrong person. Then we scoop him up.”
Hardwick was peering at his fingernails as though they were suspicious growths. “What ‘community’ would that be, Arlo?”
“Illegal aliens, who else?”
“Suppose he’s not Mexican.”
“So he’s Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, whatever. We’ve got people poking around in all those communities. Eventually …” He shrugged.
Kline’s antenna tuned in to the conflict. “What are you getting at, Jack?”
Rodriguez stepped in stiffly. “Hardwick has been out of the loop for some time. Bill and Arlo are your best sources for current information.”
Kline acted like he didn’t hear him. “Jack?”
Hardwick smiled. “Tell you what. Why don’t you listen to what Ace Detective Gurney here has uncovered in less than four days, which is a shitload more than we’ve come up with in four months.”
Kline’s voltage was rising. “Dave? What have you got?”
“What I’ve uncovered,” began Gurney slowly, “are mostly questions—questions that suggest new directions for the investigation.” He placed his forearms on the table and leaned forward. “One key element that deserves more attention is the victim’s background. Jillian was sexually abused as a child and became an abuser of other children. She was aggressive, manipulative, and reportedly had sociopathic traits. The possibility of a revenge motive arising out of that kind of behavior is significant.”
Blatt’s expression was screwed up in a knot. “You’re trying to tell us that Jillian Perry sexually abused Hector Flores when he was a little kid and that’s why he killed her? That sounds nuts.”
“I agree. Especially since Flores was probably at least ten years older than Jillian. But suppose he was taking revenge for something done to someone else. Or suppose he himself had been so severely abused, so traumatically, that it affected the balance of his mind, and he decided to take out his rage on all abusers. Suppose Flores found out about Mapleshade, about the nature of its clientele, about Dr. Ashton’s work. Is it possible that he might show up at Ashton’s house, try to get odd jobs, ingratiate himself, wait for an opportunity to make a dramatic gesture?”
Kline spoke up excitedly. “What do you think, Becca? Is that possible?”
Her eyes widened. “It’s possible, yes. Jillian could have been chosen as a specific revenge target based on her actions against some individual Flores knew, or as a proxy target representing abusers in general. Do you have any evidence pointing in one direction or the other?”
Kline looked to Gurney.
“The dramatic details of the murder—the beheading, the placement of the head, the choice of the wedding day—have a ritual feeling. That would be consistent with a revenge motive. But we sure as hell don’t know enough yet to say whether she was an individual target or a proxy target.”
Kline finished his coffee and headed for a refill, speaking to the room in general as he went. “If we take this revenge angle seriously, what investigatory actions would that require? Dave?”
What Gurney believed it would require—to start with—was a much more detailed disclosure of Jillian’s past problems and childhood contacts than her mother or Simon Kale had so far been willing to provide, and he needed to figure out how to make that happen. “I can give you a written recommendation on that within the next couple of days.”
Kline seemed satisfied with that and moved on. “So what else? Senior Investigator Hardwick gave you credit for what he called a ‘shitload’ of discoveries.”
“We may be a couple short of a shitload, but there’s one thing I’d put at the top of the list. A number of girls from Mapleshade seem to be missing.”
The three BCI detectives came to attention, more or less in unison, like men awakened by a loud noise.
Gurney continued. “Both Scott Ashton and another person connected with the school have tried to contact certain recent graduates and haven’t been able to.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean—” began Lieutenant Anderson.
But Gurney cut him off. “By itself it wouldn’t mean much, but there’s an odd similarity among the individual instances. All the girls in question started the same argument with their parents—demanding an expensive new car, then using their parents’ refusal as a pretext for leaving home.”
“How many girls are we talking about?” asked Blatt.
“A former student who was trying to reach some of her fellow graduates told me about two instances in which the parents had no idea where their daughter was. Then Scott Ashton told me about three more girls he was trying to reach, who he discovered had left home after an argument with their parents—the same kind of car argument in all three instances.”
Kline shook his head. “I don’t get it. What’s it all about? And what’s it got to do with finding Jillian Perry’s killer?”
“The missing girls had at least one thing in common, besides the argument they started with their parents. They all knew Flores.”
Anderson was looking more dyspeptic by the minute. “How?”
“Flores volunteered to do some work for Ashton at Mapleshade. Good-looking man, apparently. Attracted the attention of some Mapleshade girls. Turns out that the ones who showed interest, the ones who were seen speaking to him, are the ones who’ve gone missing.”
“Have they been put on the NCIC missing-persons list?” asked Anderson, in the hopeful tone of a man trying to shift a problem onto another lap.
“None of them,” said Gurney. “Problem is, they’re all over eighteen, free to come and go as they wish. Each one announced her plan to leave home, her intention to keep her whereabouts a secret, her desire to be left alone. All of which is contrary to the entry criteria for mis-pers databases.”
Kline was pacing back and forth. “This gives the case a new slant. What do you think, Rod?”
The captain looked grim. “I’d like to know what the hell Gurney is really telling us.”
Kline answered. “I think he’s telling us that there might be more to the Jillian Perry case than Jillian Perry.”
“And that Hector Flores might be more than a Mexican gardener,” added Hardwick, staring pointedly at Rodriguez. “A possibility I recall mentioning some time ago.”
This had the effect of raising Kline’s eyebrows. “When?”
“When I was still assigned to the case. The original Flores narrative felt wrong to me.”
If Rodriguez’s jaws were clenched any tighter, Gurney mused, his teeth would start disintegrating.
“Wrong how?” asked Kline.
“Wrong in the sense that it was all too fucking right.”
Gurney knew that Rodriguez would be feeling Hardwick’s delight like an ice pick in the ribs—never mind the touchy issue of airing an internal disagreement in front of the district attorney.
“Meaning?” asked Kline.
“I mean too fucking smooth. The illiterate laborer, too rapidly educated by the arrogant doctor, too much advancement too soon, affair with the rich neighbor’s wife, maybe an affair with Jillian Perry, feelings he couldn’t handle, cracking under the strain. It plays like a soap opera, like complete fucking bullshit
.” He delivered this judgment with such a steady focus on Rodriguez that there could be no doubt about the source of the scenario he was attacking.
From what Gurney knew of Kline from the Mellery case, he was sure the man was loving the confrontation while he was hiding the feeling under a thoughtful frown.
“What was your own theory of the Flores business?” prompted Kline.
Hardwick settled back in his chair like a wind dying down. “It’s easier to say what isn’t logical here than what is. When you combine all the known facts, it’s hard to make any sense at all out of Flores’s behavior.”
Kline turned to Gurney. “That the way you see it, too?”
Gurney took a deep breath. “Some facts seem contradictory. But facts don’t contradict each other—which means there’s a big piece of the puzzle missing, the piece that’ll eventually make the others make sense. I don’t expect it to be a simple narrative. As Jack once said, there are definitely hidden layers in this case.” He was concerned for a moment that this comment might reveal Hardwick’s role in Val’s decision to hire him, but no one seemed to pick it up. Blatt looked like a rat trying to identify something by sniffing it, but Blatt always looked like that.
Kline sipped his coffee thoughtfully. “Which facts are bothering you, Dave?”
“To start with, the rapid Flores transition from leaf raker to household manager.”
“You think Ashton is lying about that?”
“Lying to himself, maybe. He explains it as a kind of wishful thinking, something that supported the concept of a book he was writing.”
“Becca, that make sense to you?”
She smiled noncommittally, more of a facial shrug than a real smile. “Never underestimate the power of self-deception, especially in a man trying to prove a point.”
Kline nodded sagely, turned back to Gurney. “So your basic idea is that Flores was working a con?”
“That he was playing a role for some reason, yes.”
“What else bothers you?”
“Motivation. If Flores came to Tambury for the purpose of killing Jillian, why did he wait so long to do it? But if he came for another purpose, what was it?”