Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  When Gurney reached the edge of the ravine that he remembered from his first examination of the copse a couple of days earlier, his assumption was confirmed. The tree was on the far side of the ravine, which was long and deep with precipitous sides. Any route from the cottage that would pass behind the tree would involve crossing that ravine at least twice—a time-consuming task that would have been impossible to accomplish before the area was swarming with people after the discovery of the body—not to mention the fact that the scent trail ran along the near side of the ravine, not the far side. Which meant that anyone going from the cottage to the machete site had to pass in front of the tree. There was simply no way not to.

  Gurney made the trip home from Tambury to Walnut Crossing in fifty-five minutes instead of the normal hour and a quarter. He was in a hurry to take a closer look at the video material from the wedding reception. He also realized that his rush might be arising from a need to stay as involved as possible in the Perry murder—a murder that, however horrendous, caused him far less anxiety than did the Jykynstyl situation.

  Madeleine’s car was parked next to the house, and her bicycle was leaning against the garden shed. He guessed she’d be in the kitchen, but when he went in through the side door and called out, “I’m home,” there was no answer.

  He went straight to the long table that separated the big kitchen from the sitting area—the table where his copies of the case materials were laid out, much to Madeleine’s annoyance. Amid the folders was a set of DVDs.

  The one on top, the one he sat through with Hardwick, bore a label that said “Perry-Ashton Reception, Comprehensive BCI Edit.” But it was another DVD, one of the unedited originals, that Gurney was looking for. There were five to choose from. The first was labeled “Helicopter, General Aerial Views and Descent.” The other four, each containing the video captured by one of the stationary ground cameras at the reception, were labeled according to the compass orientation of each camera’s field of view.

  He took the four DVDs into the den, opened his laptop, went to Google Earth, and typed in, “Badger Lane, Tambury, NY.” Thirty seconds later he was looking at a satellite photo of Ashton’s property, complete with altitude and compass points. Even the tea table on the patio was identifiable.

  He chose the approximate point in the woods where he figured the visible tree trunk would be. Using the Google compass points, he calculated the heading from the table to the tree. The heading was eighty-five degrees—close to due east.

  He shuffled through the DVDs. The last one was labeled “East by Northeast.” He popped it into the player across from the couch, located the point at which Jillian Perry had entered the cottage, and settled down to give the next fourteen minutes of the video his total attention.

  He watched it once, twice, with increasing bafflement. Then he watched it again, this third time letting it run to the point when Luntz, the local police chief, had secured the scene and the state cops were arriving.

  Something was wrong. More than wrong. Impossible.

  He called Hardwick, who, in no hurry, answered on the seventh ring.

  “What can I do for you, ace?”

  “How sure are you that the input tapes of the wedding reception are complete?”

  “What do you mean, ‘complete’?”

  “One of the four fixed cameras was set up so that its field of view covered the cottage and a broad stretch of woods to the left of the cottage. That stretch of woods includes all the space that Flores had to pass through in order to ditch the murder weapon where he did.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s a tree trunk in back of that area that’s visible through gaps in the foliage from the angle of the patio, which was also the angle of one of the cameras.”

  “And?”

  “That tree trunk, I repeat, is in back of the route Flores would have to have taken to place the machete where it was found. That tree trunk is clearly and continually visible on the high-def video recorded by that camera.”

  “Your point being what?”

  “I watched the video three times to be absolutely sure. Jack, no one passed in front of that tree.”

  Hardwick sounded subdued. “I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I. Is there any possibility that the machete in the woods wasn’t the murder weapon?”

  “We have a perfect DNA match. The fresh blood on the machete was Jillian Perry’s. Potential error factor is less than one in a million. Not to mention the fact that the ME report refers to a powerful blow from a heavy, sharp blade. And what’s the alternative, anyway? That Flores secretly disposed of a second bloody machete, the real murder weapon, after wiping some of the blood from it onto the first one? But he’d still have to get it to where we found it. I mean, what the hell are we talking about? How could it not be the murder weapon?”

  Gurney sighed. “So what we have, basically, is an impossible situation.”

  Chapter 48

  Perfect memories

  If the facts contradict each other, it means that some of them aren’t facts.

  One of his instructors at the NYPD academy had made that observation in class one day. Gurney never forgot it.

  If he was going to base any conclusions on the content of the video, he needed to test its factualness a little further. On the DVD case, there was a phone number for the company, Perfect Memories, that had handled the videography.

  He called the number, left a message mentioning the names Ashton and Perry, and had barely concluded when his phone rang and Perfect Memories appeared as the caller ID.

  A professionally pleasant and alert female voice asked, “How can I help you?”

  Gurney explained who he was and how he was trying to assist Val Perry, mother of the late bride, and how important he believed the video material produced by Perfect Memories would be in capturing the madman who’d killed Jillian and providing closure for her family. All he needed was an absolutely certain answer to one question, but he needed to hear it from the person who’d supervised the project.

  “That would be me.”

  “And you are …?”

  “Jennifer Stillman. I’m the managing director here.”

  Managing director. British-sounding title. Nice touch for the upscale market. “What I need to know, Jennifer, is whether there were any time breaks in any of the original recordings.”

  “Absolutely not.” Her response was crisp and immediate.

  “Not even for a fraction of a second?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You seem remarkably sure. Has the question come up before?”

  “Not the question, but that specific requirement.”

  “Requirement?”

  “It was actually written into the production contract that the video had to cover the entire venue during the entire reception, start to finish, with absolutely nothing left out. Apparently the bride wanted literally all of it recorded—every inch of that reception, for every second it lasted.”

  Jennifer Stillman’s tone told Gurney this was not exactly a standard request, or at least the client’s emphasis on it was not standard. He asked about it, just to be sure.

  “Well …” She hesitated. “I’d say that it was unusually important to them. Or at least to her. When Dr. Ashton passed along the request to us, he seemed a little …” Again she hesitated. “I shouldn’t be saying any of this. I’m not a mind reader.”

  “Jennifer, this is important. As you know, it’s a murder case. My main concern is that I can be confident that the DVDs contain an uninterrupted video record—nothing missing, no dropped frames.”

  “There were certainly no dropped frames. Holes would create glitches in the time code, and the computer would flag that.”

  “Okay. Good to know. Thank you. Just one more thing—you were starting to say something about Dr. Ashton?”

  “Not really. Just … it was just that he seemed a little embarrassed talking about his fiancée’s obsession with every instant of
the reception being recorded. Like maybe he was embarrassed by the romantic sentimentality of it, or maybe he thought it sounded childish, I really don’t know. It’s not my place to judge why people want what they want. The customer is always right, right?”

  “Thank you, Jennifer. You’ve been extremely helpful.”

  It might not be Jennifer Stillman’s job to judge why people wanted what they wanted, but it was a big part of Gurney’s job. Understanding motivations could make all the difference, and in this instance a weird one came to mind: One reason a person might want total video coverage of an event was security. Either because they believed that the deterrent effect of multiple cameras in continuous recording mode would keep some feared event from occurring or because they wanted to have an indisputable record of anything that did occur.

  And then there was the question of who it was that wanted all those cameras running. It hadn’t escaped Gurney’s notice that the request had been positioned to Ms. Stillman as coming from Jillian, but that Jillian herself hadn’t been present, and the request had been “passed along” by Ashton. So it might have been his idea and he had chosen to present it as hers. But why would he do that? What difference did it make whose idea it was?

  The possibility that he or she had been motivated by the security aspect of the cameras—the possibility that at least one of them, maybe both, had reason to be apprehensive about what might happen that day—was intriguing.

  Their most likely focus of concern would have been Flores, who reportedly had been acting strangely. Maybe the camera emphasis had come from Jillian, just as Ashton had said. Maybe she had reasons to fear Flores. After all, her cell records for the weeks preceding the murder indicated numerous text messages from Flores’s phone—including the final one, the only one that hadn’t been deleted: FOR ALL THE REASONS I HAVE WRITTEN. EDWARD VALLORY. In light of the prologue to Vallory’s play, that message could certainly be interpreted as a threat. So maybe she went to see him in the cottage to discuss something a lot less pleasant than a wedding toast.

  When Gurney was engaged in stitching together the pieces of evidence, interpretation, hearsay, and logical leaps that constituted his understanding of a crime, the process filled his mind completely, obliterating his sense of time and place. Thus, when he looked at the clock on the den bookcase and saw that it was 5:05 P.M., it both surprised him and didn’t surprise him—like the stiffness in his legs when he stood up.

  Madeleine was still out. Perhaps he should get something started for dinner, or at least check to see if she’d left anything on the countertop that needed to go into the oven. He was heading in that direction when the phone on his desk rang and brought him back. The caller ID said Jack Hardwick.

  “Golly, Supercop, you’ve got one hell of a creepy friend!”

  “Meaning?”

  “Hope you weren’t near a school yard with this guy.”

  Gurney had a sinking feeling about where this was heading. “The hell are you talking about, Jack?”

  “Touchy, touchy. This sweetheart a close buddy of yours?”

  “Enough bullshit. What’s this about?”

  “The gentleman you were drinking with? Whose glass you walked off with? Whose prints you asked me to run? Sound familiar, Sherlock?”

  “What did you find out?”

  “Quite a bit.”

  “Jack …”

  “I found out that his name is Saul Steck. Professional name Paul Starbuck.”

  “His profession being …?”

  “Nothing currently. At least nothing on record. Until fifteen years ago he was a Hollywood actor on the come. TV commercials, couple of movies.” Hardwick was in arch storyteller mode, with a dramatic pause after each sentence. “Then he had a little problem.”

  “Jack, can we move this along? What little problem?”

  “Accused of raping an underage girl. Once that hit the media, other victims started coming out of the woodwork. Saul-Paul was indicted on a bunch of rape and molestation charges. Fond of drugging fourteen-year-old girls. Took a lot of very explicit pictures. Ended his acting career. Could have gone to prison for the rest of his life. Too bad he didn’t. Best place for the little scumbag. However, family money bought enough expert medical testimony to get him committed to a psych hospital, from which he was quietly released five years ago. Dropped off the radar screen. Current address unknown. Except maybe by you? I mean, you got that cute little glass somewhere, right?”

  Chapter 49

  Little boys

  Gurney stood at the French doors facing the lavender remnants of a spectacular sunset that he hadn’t really noticed, trying to assimilate the latest aftershock of the Jykynstyl earthquake.

  Information. He needed information. What did he need to find out first? He should grab a pad and start listing the questions, prioritizing. An obvious one came immediately to mind: Who owned the brownstone?

  How to pursue the question was not so obvious.

  The old catch-22 again. To disentangle himself from the snare, he needed to know whose snare it was. But pursuing that question naïvely, without any idea what the answer might be, could get him more deeply entangled. Unanswered questions were threatening to make other questions unanswerable.

  “Hello!”

  It was Madeleine’s voice. Like a voice that awakens you in the morning, jarring you into the room, into the specific day of the week.

  He turned toward the little hall that led from the kitchen to the mudroom. “Is that you?” he asked. Of course it was. An inane question. When she didn’t answer, he asked it again, louder.

  She responded by appearing in the kitchen doorway, frowning at him.

  “Did you just come in?” he asked.

  “No, I’ve been standing in the mudroom all afternoon. What kind of question is that?”

  “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “And yet,” she said cheerily, “here I am.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Here you are.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m fine. Maybe a little hungry.”

  She glanced at a bowl on the sideboard. “The scallops should be defrosted by now. Do you want to sauté them while I get the water on for the rice?”

  “Sure.” He was hoping that the simple task might provide at least a partial escape from the Saul-Paul whirlpool that was engulfing his mind.

  He sautéed the scallops in olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, and capers. Madeleine boiled some basmati rice and made a salad of oranges, avocados, and diced red onions. He was having a hell of a time staying focused, staying in the room, staying in the present. Fond of drugging fourteen-year-old girls. Took a lot of very explicit pictures.

  Halfway through dinner he realized that Madeleine had been describing a hike she’d taken that afternoon through the meandering trails that linked their 50 acres with their neighbor’s 350. Hardly a word had registered with him. He smiled gamely and made a belated effort to listen.

  “… amazingly intense green, even in the shade. And underneath the blanket of ferns there were the smallest purple flowers you can imagine.” As she spoke, there was a light in her eyes brighter than any light in the room. “Almost microscopic. Like the teeniest blue-and-purple snowflakes.”

  Blue-and-purple snowflakes? Mother of God! The tension, the incongruity, the gap he felt between her elation and his anxiety brought him close to groaning aloud. Her field of perfect emerald ferns and his own nightmare of poisonous thorns. Her lively honesty and his … his what?

  His encounter with the devil?

  Get a grip, Gurney. Get a grip. What the hell are you so afraid of?

  The answer only darkened the pit and greased the walls.

  You’re afraid of yourself. Afraid of what you might have done.

  He sat in a kind of emotional paralysis through the rest of dinner, trying to eat enough to conceal the fact that he wasn’t really eating, pretending to appreciate Ma
deleine’s descriptions of her outing. But the more she enthused over the beauty of the black-eyed Susans, the perfume in the air, the azure of the wild asters, the more isolated, dislocated, and crazy he felt. He became aware that Madeleine had stopped talking. She was watching him with concern. He wondered if she’d asked him something and was waiting for an answer. He didn’t want to admit how distracted he was, or why.

  “Have you spoken to Kyle?” Her question seemed to arise out of nothing. Or had she already asked it? Or segued to it while he was immersed in himself?

  “Kyle?”

  “Your son.”

  He hadn’t actually been asking a question, just repeating the word, the name, as a way of stepping ashore, of being present. Too tangled a thing to explain. “I’ve tried. We’ve traded calls, left messages. A few times.”

  “You should try harder. Keep at it until you get him.”

  He nodded, didn’t want to argue, didn’t know what to say.

  She smiled. “It would be good for him. Good for both of you.”

  He nodded again.

  “You’re his father.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, then.” It was a conclusive statement. She began to clear the dishes.

  He watched her make two trips to the sink. When she came back with a damp sponge and paper towel to wipe the table, he said, “He’s very focused on money.”

  She lifted the tray that held the napkins so she could wipe under it. “So what?”

  “He wants to be a trial lawyer.”

  “Not necessarily a bad thing.”

  “It seems to be all about the big money, big house, big car.”

  “Maybe he wants to be noticed.”

  “Noticed?”

  “Little boys like to be noticed by their fathers,” she said.

  “Kyle is hardly a little boy.”