Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  “But that’s exactly what he is,” she insisted. “And if you refuse to notice him, then he’ll have to settle for impressing the rest of the world.”

  “I’m not refusing to do anything. That’s psychobabble bullshit.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Who knows?” Madeleine had perfected the art of sidestepping an attack, of remaining untouched. It left him lurching into empty space.

  He continued to sit at the table as she washed the dishes. His eyes began to close. As he’d discovered many times before, the by-product of intense anxiety is exhaustion. He drifted into a kind of half sleep.

  Chapter 50

  Loose cannon

  “You should come to bed.” It was Madeleine’s voice.

  He opened his eyes. She’d turned off all but one light and was on her way out of the kitchen with a book under her arm. The drooping position of his head on his chest had produced a sharp pain in his collarbone. As he straightened himself, he discovered a matching pain in the back of his neck. Instead of refreshing him, his doze at the table had reconstituted his worries.

  His level of agitation would make real sleep impossible. But he had to do something to avoid bouncing from one Saul Steck horror scenario to another.

  He could return Sheridan Kline’s phone call. The man had left that vague message for him about the Skard family. He’d already followed up on it with Hardwick, but maybe the DA knew more than Hardwick. Of course, the DA’s office would be closed. It was Sunday night.

  He did have Kline’s personal cell number. Because he had it from the days of the Mellery case, it hadn’t seemed appropriate to use it, uninvited, in connection with the current matter. But right now protocol seemed less important than maintaining his sanity.

  He went into the den, got the number, and made the call. He was prepared to leave a message and get a return call later, figuring that the odds were in favor of a control freak like Kline wanting phone conversations to occur on his own schedule. So he was surprised when the man answered.

  “Gurney?”

  “I apologize for calling so late.”

  “I thought you’d call me back this afternoon at the office. Chasing down that Karnala thing was your idea.”

  “Sorry, I got a little tangled up. In your phone message, you asked if I’d heard of the Skard family.”

  “That’s where the Karnala thread led us. Familiar name to you?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “What I meant, Sheridan, is that it struck me as familiar, but I don’t know why. Jack Hardwick filled me in on the fact that the Skards are bad guys with Sardinian roots. But I still can’t place where I know the name from. I do know that I came upon it very recently.”

  “That’s all Hardwick told you?”

  “He told me that no Skard has ever been convicted of anything. And that whatever business Karnala Fashion may be in, it’s not the fashion business.”

  “So you know as much I know. What else did you call me for?”

  “I’d like to be involved on a more official basis.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Updates, invitations to meetings.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve gotten kind of attached to the case. And so far my instincts about it have been pretty good.”

  “That’s an open question.”

  “Look, Sheridan, all I’m saying is, we can help each other. The more I know and the quicker I know it, the more help I can be.”

  There was a long silence. Gurney’s intuition told him it was more technique than indecision on Kline’s part. He waited.

  Kline emitted a humorless laugh. Gurney kept waiting.

  “You know Rodriguez can’t stand you, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “And you know Blatt can’t stand you, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And that even Bill Anderson isn’t very fond of you?”

  “Right.”

  “So you’ll be about as welcome at BCI as a fart in an elevator. You realize that?”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute.”

  There was another silence, followed by another chilly Kline chuckle.

  “Here’s what I’ll do: I’m going to tell everyone we have a Gurney problem. Gurney is a loose cannon. And the best way to control a loose cannon is to keep an eye on it, keep it on a short leash, keep it in the corral. And the way I plan to keep an eye on you is to have you over here a lot, sharing your loose-cannon thoughts with us. How does that sound to you?”

  Keeping a loose cannon on a short leash in a corral sounded to Gurney like a symptom of mental disintegration. “Sounds workable, sir.”

  “Good. There’s a meeting at BCI tomorrow morning at ten. Be there.” Kline hung up without saying good-bye.

  Chapter 51

  Total confusion

  For the rest of the evening, Gurney felt both energized and calmed by the conversation and its promise of ongoing involvement.

  He was pleased and rather surprised to still feel the same way when he awoke at sunrise the following day. In an effort to feed that feeling, to stay within the comparatively safe and solid confines of a world in which he was the hunter and not the quarry, he reviewed the Perry file for the tenth time while he had his morning coffee. Then he called Rebecca Holdenfield’s number and left a message asking if he could drop by her Albany office that afternoon following his meeting at BCI.

  Making calls, returning calls, making appointments—the activity created a sense of momentum. He called Val Perry’s number and was shunted into her voice mail. He’d barely said, “This is Dave Gurney,” when she picked up, surprising him. He hadn’t figured her for an early riser.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  Unprepared for an actual conversation, he replied, “Just wanted to touch base.”

  “Oh? And …?” She sounded edgy, but maybe no edgier than usual.

  “Does the name Skard mean anything to you?”

  “No. Should it?”

  “I was just wondering if Jillian had ever mentioned it.”

  “Jillian never mentioned anything. It wasn’t like she shared things with me. I thought I’d made that clear.”

  “Perfectly clear, several times. But some questions have to be asked, even if I’m ninety-nine percent sure what the answer’s going to be.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “Did Jillian ever ask you or your husband to buy her an expensive car?”

  “There was hardly anything Jillian didn’t demand at some point, so I suppose she must have. On the other hand, she made it clear from the time she was twelve that Withrow and I were irrelevant to her happiness, that she could always find a rich man to give her whatever she wanted, so as far as she was concerned, we could go fuck ourselves.” She paused, perhaps savoring the shock value of her observations. “I’m on my way out. Any more questions?”

  “That’s it for now, Mrs. Perry. Thank you for your time.”

  Like Sheridan Kline the night before, Val Perry hung up without bothering to say good-bye. Whatever it was that Gurney was contributing to the investigation of her daughter’s murder, it clearly wasn’t what she’d been hoping for.

  At 9:50 A.M. he pulled in to the parking lot of the fortresslike state police facility where his 10:00 A.M. meeting was to take place. During the minute or so that he was searching for a space, his phone rang twice. The first was a voice call, the second a text message. He was looking forward to at least one of them being from Rebecca Holdenfield.

  As soon as he’d parked, he took out his phone and checked the text message first. The source was a cell number with a Manhattan area code.

  As he read the message, a flood of fear rose from his gut into his chest.

  ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT MY GIRLS? THEY’RE THINKING ABOUT YOU.

  He reread it, then reread it again. He looked at the originating number. The fact that the sender hadn’t bothered to block it surely mean
t it was assigned to an untraceable prepaid phone. But it also meant he could send a reply message.

  After dismissing the expressions of fury and bravado that came to mind, he decided on three unemotional little words: TELL ME MORE.

  As he pressed “send,” he noted that the time was 9:59. He hurried into the building.

  When he arrived in the bleak institutional conference room, the six chairs at the oblong table were already taken. The closest thing to a greeting he received was Hardwick pointing at a handful of folding chairs leaning against the wall by the coffee urn. Rodriguez, Anderson, and Blatt ignored him. Gurney could imagine their unenthusiastic reactions to the DA’s artful nonsense about controlling the loose cannon by inviting him to their meetings.

  Sergeant Wigg, a wiry redhead familiar to Gurney as the efficient evidence-team coordinator from the Mellery affair, was sitting at the far end of the table studying the screen of her laptop—exactly the way he’d remembered her. Her main agenda would be the pursuit of factual certainty and logical coherence. Gurney opened his folding chair and placed it at the end of the table facing her. It was 10:05 on the wall clock.

  Sheridan Kline frowned at his watch. “Okay, people. We’re running a little late. I’ve got a tight schedule today. Maybe we could start with anything new, significant progress, promising directions?”

  Rodriguez cleared his throat.

  “Dave’s got some news,” interjected Hardwick, “a peculiar thing at the crime scene. Might make a good way to kick off the meeting.”

  Kline’s eyes widened. “What now?”

  Gurney had intended to wait until later in the meeting to bring up the problem, in the hope that some piece of information along the way might cast light on it. But now that Hardwick was forcing the issue, it would be awkward to delay it.

  “We’re imagining that after killing Jillian, Flores went out through the woods to the spot where we found the machete, is that right?” said Gurney.

  Rodriguez adjusted his steel-rimmed glasses. “Imagining? I’d say we have conclusive evidence to that effect.”

  Gurney sighed. “Problem is, we have some video data that doesn’t support that hypothesis.”

  Kline went into rapid-blinking mode. “Video data?”

  Gurney painstakingly explained how the continuous visibility of the tree trunk in the reception video proved that Flores could not have taken the necessary route through the woods, since anyone taking such a route would have to pass between the camera in that corner of the property and the tree, and he would have to appear, albeit fleetingly, in the picture.

  Rodriguez was frowning like a man who suspected he was being tricked but didn’t know how. Anderson was frowning like a man trying to stay awake. Wigg looked up from her laptop screen, which Gurney interpreted as a sign of high interest.

  “So he went around the long way, in back of the tree,” said Blatt. “I don’t see the problem.”

  “The problem, Arlo, is the terrain. I’m sure you’ve checked it out?”

  “What terrain problem are you talking about?”

  “The ravine. In order to get from the cottage to the place the machete was found without walking in front of that tree would require someone to go straight back from the cottage, then slide down a long, steep slope with a lot of loose stones, then travel another five hundred feet on the rocky, uneven bottom of the ravine to get to the first place where there’s any possibility of climbing back out. And even there the loose stones and dirt make it no easy thing. Not to mention that the point at which you get back on level ground is nowhere near the place where the machete was found.”

  Blatt sighed as though he were already aware of all this and it made no difference. “Just because it wasn’t easy doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”

  “Another problem is the time it would take.”

  “Meaning?” asked Kline.

  “I checked out that area pretty carefully. Going via the ravine route to the machete site would just take too damn long. I don’t think he’d want to be scrambling around back there when the body was discovered and people started swarming all over the place. Plus, there are two bigger problems. One: Why make it so god-awfully difficult, when he could have ditched the machete anywhere? Two—and this is pretty much the clincher: The scent trail follows the route in front of the tree, not behind it.”

  “Wait a second,” said Rodriguez. “Aren’t you contradicting yourself? You’re saying that all those factors prove that Flores took the route in front of the tree, but the video proves he didn’t. What on earth does that add up to?”

  “An equation with a serious flaw,” said Gurney, “but I’ll be damned if I can see what it is.”

  For the next hour and a half, the group questioned him about the reliability of the video’s time code, the potential for dropped frames, the position of the cherry tree in relation to the cottage and the machete and the ravine. They retrieved the crime-scene sketches from the master case file, passed them around the room, studied them. They went off on brief tangents about the fabled talents and accomplishments of K-9 teams. They debated the alternative scenarios for Flores’s disappearance after depositing the murder weapon, for Kiki Muller’s possible involvement as an accessory after the fact, and when and why she’d been killed. They pursued a few speculative notions concerning the psychopathology of cutting off a victim’s head. At the end of it all, however, the basic puzzle seemed no closer to solution.

  “So,” said Rodriguez, summing up the central conundrum as simply as anyone could, “according to Dave Gurney, we can be absolutely certain of two things. First, Hector Flores had to pass in front of the cherry tree. Second, he couldn’t have.”

  “A very interesting situation,” said Gurney, feeling the electricity in the contradiction.

  “This might be a good time to take a short lunch break,” said the captain, who seemed to be feeling more frustration than electricity.

  Chapter 52

  The Flores factor

  Lunch was not a social occasion, which was fine with Gurney, who was about as far from being a social animal as a man could be and still be married. Instead of gravitating to the cafeteria, everyone scattered for the allotted half hour to commune with BlackBerrys and laptops.

  He might have been happier, however, with thirty minutes of macho camaraderie than he was sitting alone on a chilly bench outside the state police fortress, absorbing the latest text message he found on his phone—evidently a response to his “Tell me more” request.

  It said, YOU’RE SUCH AN INTERESTING MAN, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN MY DAUGHTERS WOULD ADORE YOU. IT WAS SO GOOD OF YOU TO COME TO THE CITY. NEXT TIME THEY WILL COME TO YOU. WHEN? WHO CAN SAY? THEY WANT IT TO BE A SURPRISE.

  Gurney stared at the words, even as they slammed his mind back to the unsettling smiles of those young women, back to the pale Montrachet lifted in a toast, back to the looming black wall of his amnesia.

  He toyed with the idea of sending a message that began, “Dear Saul …” But he decided to keep his knowledge of the identity of Jykynstyl’s impersonator to himself, at least for now. He didn’t know how much that card might be worth, and he didn’t want to play it before he understood the game. Besides, holding on to it gave him, in a minuscule way, a feeling of power. Like carrying a penknife in a bad neighborhood.

  • • •

  By the time he reentered the conference room, he was desperate to get his mind back on the Perry case. Kline, Rodriguez, and Wigg were already seated. Anderson was approaching the table, focused fiercely on a coffee cup so full that it made walking a challenge. Blatt was at the urn, tilting it forward to extract a final black trickle. Hardwick was missing.

  Rodriguez looked at his watch. “It’s time, people. Some of us are here, some of us aren’t, but that’s their problem. Time for a status report on the family interviews. Bill, you’re up.”

  Anderson set his coffee on the table with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb. “Okay,” he said. He sat, opened a file folder
, and began examining and rearranging its contents. “Okay. Here’s where we are. We started with a master list of all graduates for all twenty years Mapleshade has been in operation, and then we narrowed that to a list of graduates from the past five years. Five years ago is when the focus of the place changed from a general adolescent population with behavioral problems to female adolescent sex abusers.”

  “Convicted offenders?” asked Kline.

  “No. All private interventions through family members, therapists, doctors. Mapleshade’s population is basically warped sicko kids whose families are trying to keep them out of the juvie court system or just get them the hell out of town, out of the house, before they get caught doing what they’re doing. The parents send them to Mapleshade, pay the tuition, and hope that Ashton solves the problem.”

  “And does he?”

  “Hard to say. The families won’t talk about it, so all we have to go by is a cross-check of graduate names against the national sex-offender database to see if any of them got tangled up with the legal system as adults since leaving Mapleshade. So far that isn’t turning up much. A couple from the graduating classes of four and five years ago, none from the past three years. Hard to say what that means.”

  Kline shrugged. “Could mean that Ashton knows what he’s doing. Or it could just reflect the fact that abuse perpetrated by females is grossly underreported to the police and tends not to be prosecuted.”

  “How grossly?” asked Blatt.

  “Excuse me?”

  “How grossly underreported and underprosecuted do you think it is?”

  Kline leaned back in his chair, looking annoyed at what he obviously considered a distraction. His tone was stiff, academic, impatient. “Some data suggests that approximately twenty percent of all women and ten percent of all men were sexually abused as children, and that the perpetrator was female in about ten percent of the total cases. Bottom line, we’re talking about millions of instances of sexual abuse and hundreds of thousands of instances in which the perp was female. But you know as well as I do, there’s always been a double standard—a reluctance by families to report mothers, sisters, and baby-sitters to the police, a reluctance by law enforcement to take abuse accusations against young women seriously, a reluctance by courts to convict them. Society can’t quite seem to accept the reality of female sexual predators like we accept the reality of male predators. But some studies suggest that a lot of men convicted of rape were sexually abused by females when they were children.” Kline shook his head, hesitated. “Jesus, I could tell you stories from right here in this county—cases that come into family court through social services. You know about this stuff—mothers pimping out their own kids, selling porno videos of them having sex with each other. Jesus. And what finally works its way into the legal system is just a fraction of what’s going on. But you get my point. Enough said, okay? We should get back to the agenda.”