by John Verdon
Prologue
The Growling of the Tiger
The blackbirds are shrieking.
He looks up from the cell phone into which he has been entering the special list of numbers. He knows that the shrieking of the blackbirds is a territorial defense, a red alert to their kind, a call to arms against the trespasser.
None of his own electronic alarms are flashing, however, meaning that there is no human encroachment. But he peers out anyway through each of the four small windows in the sides of the little cinder-block building, scanning the hummocky beaver pond and boggy woods.
There are crows perching in the tops of three dead, root-drowned trees. The crows, he concludes, are the interlopers who have upset the blackbirds, provoking their high-pitched screeches. He finds the protection they afford comforting. Like the creaking treads on a staircase might alert him to an intruder.
Or like the dismal little structure itself, in the midst of a hundred acres of low-lying forest and swamp, is comforting. Nearly inaccessible, uninviting in the extreme, it is his ideal home away from home. He has many homes away from home. Places to stay while he conducts his business. Fulfills his contracts. This particular place, with no visible trail in from the public road, has always felt more secure than most.
Fat Gus had represented another kind of trail. A trail of sensitive information. Information that could be ruinous. But that had been eradicated at its source. Which made this business with Bincher and Hardwick and Gurney so incomprehensible. So infuriating.
At the thought of Bincher, his gaze drifts to a shadowy corner of the garage-like room. To a blue and white plastic picnic cooler. He smiles. But the smile quickly fades.
The smile fades because the nightmare keeps returning to his mind, more vividly than ever. The nightmare’s images are with him almost continually now—ever since he caught sight of that Ferris wheel at the fairgrounds.
The Ferris wheel has insinuated itself into his nightmare—enmeshed with the merry-go-round music, the terrible laughter. The hideous, stinking, wheezing clown. The low, vibrating growl of the tiger.
And now Hardwick and Gurney.
Swirling around him, closing in.
The spiral tightening, the final confrontation inevitable.
It would be a great risk, but there could be a great reward. A great relief.
The nightmare might at last be extinguished.
He goes to the darkest corner of the room, to a small table. On the table are a large candle and a pack of matches. He picks up the matches and lights the candle.
He lifts the candle and gazes at the flame. He loves its shape, its purity, its power.
He imagines the confrontation—the conflagration.
His smile returns. He goes back to his cell phone—goes back to entering the special numbers.
The blackbirds are shrieking. The crows are perching uneasily on the dead black treetops.
Chapter 54
Cornered
Gurney put no stock in dreams. If he did, that night’s marathon could have occupied a week of nonstop analysis. But he held a solidly pragmatic view—and generally low opinion—of these outlandish processions of images and events.
He’d long believed they were nothing more than by-products of the nightly filing and indexing process the brain employs in the movement of recorded experience from short-term to long-term memory. Bits of visual and aural data are stirred up and mashed together, narrative strings are triggered, vignettes are constructed—but with no more meaning than a suitcase of old photos, love letters, or term papers shredded and reassembled by a monkey.
The one practical effect of a night of discomfiting dreams was a lingering need for more sleep—which resulted in Gurney’s rising an hour later than usual, with a mild headache. When he was finally taking his first sip of coffee, the sun, rendered pallid by a thin overcast, had already risen well above the eastern ridge. The sense he’d had the night before of an unsettling quietness after the eerie sound in the woods was still with him.
He felt cornered. Cornered by his unwillingness to drop out of the game in time. Cornered by his appetite for control, coherence, completion. Cornered by his own “plan” to break the case open by provoking the shooter into taking a foolish and fatal risk. Pulled forward and backward by alternating currents that seemed one minute to lead to success and the next to defeat, Gurney decided to seek the comfort that came with taking action.
Hardwick would be returning that evening from Scranton Surveillance & Survival with the video cameras they needed, and they would have the following morning, Sunday, to install the units in a way to ensure that anyone approaching within half a mile of Gurney’s house would be detected. Strategic placement was a crucial factor, and pre-selection of the sites would save precious time Sunday morning.
He went to the mudroom and pulled on a pair of knee-high rubber boots—protection against thistles, brambles, and wild raspberry thorns. Noticing a remnant of odor from the rooster carcass, he opened the mudroom window to let in fresh air, then went out to the pile of henhouse construction materials, from which he borrowed a metal tape measure, a ball of yellow cord, and a jackknife. With these items in hand he set off for the woods on the far side of the pond to begin identifying and marking key video locations.
The goal was to select the spots from which an array of motion-activated cameras and wireless transmitters could provide full coverage of the woods and fields around his home. According to Hardwick, each camera would generate its own GPS coordinates, displaying this information along with its video on a receiving monitor inside the house, so the location of Peter Pan—or any intruder—would be known immediately.
Contemplating the technical capability of the equipment, Gurney experienced if not quite optimism at least some relief from the fear that the plan was too flimsy to succeed. The logical process of measuring angles and distances also had a positive effect. With a fair degree of discipline and determination, he completed his site-selection project in a little more than four hours.
He’d arranged his progress around his fifty-acre property and the relevant sections of his neighbors’ properties so that he would complete his circuit at the top of Barrow Hill. He was convinced that this was the spot Panikos would choose. Therefore, this was the place, with its various trails and access points, that he wanted to commit most carefully to memory.
When he finally made his way back to the house, it was mid-afternoon and the morning overcast had thickened into a featureless gray sky. There was no movement in the air, but there was no peace in this stillness. As he stopped in the mudroom to remove his boots, the sight of the sink brought to mind the question of how and when to let Madeleine know about the cause of the rooster’s death. Whether to tell her was not the issue. She had an innate preference for candor over evasion, and significant omissions could have a high price. After considering the when and how options, he decided to tell her as soon as possible and in person.
The half-hour drive to the Winkler mini-farm was filled with a low-level foreboding. Although the need to reveal the truth was clear, that reality did not change how he felt.
A quarter mile from his destination, it occurred to him that he should have called ahead. What if they were all at the fairgrounds? Or what if the Winklers were at the house and Madeleine was at the fairgrounds? But as soon as he pulled into their driveway he saw Madeleine. She was standing in a fenced pen, gazing down at a small goat.
He parked next to the house. As he approached the pen, she showed no surprise at his arrival—just gave him a brief smile and a longer assessing gaze.
“Communing with the goat?” he asked.
“They’re supposedly quite intelligent.”
“I’ve heard that rumor.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“You mean, what am I doing here?”
“No, I mean, you look like you have something on your mind. I’m wondering what it is.”
He sighed, tried to relax. “The Spalter ca
se.”
She was petting the goat’s head gently. “Anything in particular about it?”
“Couple of things.” He chose to speak about what seemed a less fraught issue first. “The case keeps bringing to mind an old auto crash investigation.”
“Is there a connection?”
“I don’t know.” He made a face. “Jesus.”
“What’s the matter?”
“This place stinks of manure.”
She nodded. “I kind of like it.”
“You like it?”
“It’s a natural farm smell. Nothing wrong with it.”
“Jesus.”
“So what about this auto crash?”
“Do we have to stand here with the goat?”
She looked around, then gestured in the direction of a weathered picnic table in a grassy area behind the house. “Over there?”
“Fine.”
She gave the goat a few more little strokes on the head, then left the pen, secured the gate, and led the way to the table.
They sat across from each other, and he told her the story of the explosive crash—the initial mistaken impression of what had happened and the subsequent discoveries—just as he had related it all to Esti.
When he’d come to the end, Madeleine gave him a quizzical look. “So?”
“It just keeps coming to mind, and I don’t know why. Any ideas?”
“Ideas?”
“Does anything about the case strike you as especially significant?”
“No, not really. Nothing beyond the obvious.”
“The obvious being …?”
“The sequence.”
“What about it?”
“The assumption that the heart attack came before the crash and the crash came before the explosion, instead of the explosion coming first and causing everything else. It was a reasonable assumption, though. Middle-aged man has heart attack, loses control, drives off the road, car crashes and the gas tank explodes. Makes total sense.”
“Total sense, yes, except that it was all wrong. That was the point I’d make when I talked about the case in one of my academy seminars—that something can make perfect sense and be perfectly wrong. Our brains are so fond of coherence that they confuse ‘making sense’ with the truth.”
She cocked her head curiously. “If you know all this, why are you asking me about it?”
“Just in case you saw something that I was missing.”
“You drove all the way over here to ask me about that story?”
“Not just that.” He hesitated, then forced out the words. “I discovered something about the rooster.”
She blinked. “Horace?”
“I discovered what killed him.”
She sat motionless, waiting.
“It wasn’t another animal.” He hesitated again. “Someone shot him.”
Her eyes widened. “Someone …?”
“I don’t know for sure who it was.”
“David, don’t …” There was an edge of warning in her voice.
“I don’t know for sure who it was, but it’s possible that it was Panikos.”
The rhythm of her breathing changed and her face filled slowly with a barely contained fury. “The crazy assassin you’re after? He … killed Horace?”
“I don’t know that for sure. I said it’s possible.”
“Possible.” She repeated the word as though it were a sound without a meaning. Her eyes were fixed intently on his. “Why did you come here and tell me this?”
“I thought it was the right thing to do.”
“That’s the only reason?”
“What else?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t what you’re getting at. I just thought I should tell you.”
“How did you find out?”
“That he was shot? By examining the body.”
“You dug him up?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because … because something came up in our discussion yesterday that gave me the idea that it could have been a gunshot that killed him.”
“Yesterday?”
“In my meeting with Hardwick and Esti.”
“So you thought I needed to know today? But I didn’t need to know yesterday?”
“I told you as soon as it was clear to me that I should tell you. Maybe I should have told you yesterday. What’s your point?”
“It’s your point I’m wondering about.”
“I don’t get it.”
Her mouth formed a small ironic smile. “What’s next on your agenda?”
“My agenda?” It began to dawn on him what she was getting at—and that, as usual, with relatively little evidence, she had moved quickly to the finish line. “We need to capture Panikos before he slips back into whatever dark hole he inhabits between jobs.”
She nodded, communicating nothing.
“As long as he believes we can damage him, he’ll hang around and … try to stop us. His attempt to do that will make him vulnerable to capture.”
“Vulnerable to capture.” She articulated the phrase slowly, musingly—as though it summed up all the misleading jargon in the world. “And you want me to stay here, so you can risk your life without worrying about me?”
She didn’t really seem to be asking a question, so he offered no response.
“You’ll be the bait in the game once again. Right?”
That wasn’t really a question either.
A long silence fell between them. The overcast sky was heavy now, slatey and dusklike. A phone began ringing inside the house, but Madeleine made no move to answer it. It rang seven times.
“I asked Dennis about that bird,” she said.
“What bird?”
“The strange one we sometimes hear at dusk. Dennis and Deirdre have heard it too. He checked it out with the Mountain Wildlife Council. They told him it’s a rare type of mourning dove that’s found only in upstate New York and parts of New England, and only above certain elevations in the mountains. The local Native Americans considered it sacred. They called it ‘Spirit Who Speaks for the Dead.’ The shaman would interpret its cries. Sometimes they were accusations, sometimes they were messages of forgiveness.”
Gurney wondered about the chain of associations that led Madeleine to her mourning dove story. Sometimes when it would seem to him that she’d changed the subject, he’d discover that she hadn’t changed it at all.
Chapter 55
Ring Around the Rosies
On his drive home from the Winkler farm Gurney felt alternately free and trapped.
Free to proceed according to his plan. And trapped by its limitations, by the rickety assumptions on which it rested, and by his own compulsion to press forward. He suspected that Malcolm Claret and Madeleine were right—that there was something pathological in his appetite for risk. But self-knowledge is not a therapeutic panacea. Knowing who you are doesn’t automatically convey the power to change who you are.
The fact that mattered most to him at the moment was that Madeleine intended to stay at the Winklers’ at least through Tuesday, the final day of the fair, safely out of the way. It was still only Saturday. The promotion ads for his Monday-night Criminal Conflict tell-all revelations would start running the next morning on the Sunday talk shows. The ads would be touting not only the revelation of the shooter’s identity in the Spalter case but also the disclosure of the sensitive secret that the shooter was trying to protect. If Panikos wanted to keep that from happening, he had a very narrow window of opportunity—from Sunday morning to Monday evening—to make his move. And Gurney intended to be ready for him.
Driving up the darkening road to his property, he tried to hang on to a reasonable sense of confidence. But Madeleine’s enigmatic story about that damn spirit-bird kept undermining whatever pragmatic thoughts he was able to muster.
As he passed the barn and the house came into view, he noticed that the light over the side door was on, as well as the li
ght in the mudroom. He felt a quick stab of fight-or-flight adrenaline—which subsided into an uneasy curiosity when he saw a glint of light reflecting off the chrome of Kyle’s BSA. He continued up through the pasture and parked next to the motorcycle.
Inside the house, he heard the shower running upstairs. When he found the hall light on and all the kitchen lights, too, his uneasiness was replaced by a little surge of déjà vu—perhaps arising from memories of how when Kyle was a young teenager living with his mother and visiting Gurney on weekends, he’d seemed incapable of remembering to turn off the lights when he left a room.
He went into the den to check for messages on the landline and on his cell, which he’d neglected to bring with him on his trip to see Madeleine. There was nothing on the landline. There were three messages on his cell. The first was from Esti, but the transmission was too broken up to understand anything.
The second was from Hardwick, who, through a profusion of obscenities, managed to convey that he was stuck on I-81 in a mammoth traffic jam due to roadwork in progress, “except there isn’t any fucking work actually in progress, just miles of fucking orange cones blocking two of the three fucking lanes”—so he wouldn’t be delivering the camera equipment from SSS to Walnut Crossing until “bloody fucking midnight. Or bloody fucking whenever.”
The logistics delay was an inconvenience for Hardwick but not really a problem, since they hadn’t planned to set out the cameras until the following morning anyway. Gurney listened to the third message, another from Esti, broken up and finally fading away altogether, as though her battery was dying.
He was about to call her back when he heard a sound in the hallway. Kyle appeared at the den doorway in jeans and a T-shirt, his hair wet from the shower.
“Hey, Dad, what’s up?”
“I was out for a while. Went to see Madeleine. I was surprised to see your bike outside. I didn’t expect you back here at the house. Did I miss a message?”
“No, sorry about that. My plan was to go straight to the fair. Then, when I was passing through the village, I got the idea to stop for a quick shower and change my clothes. Hope you don’t mind.”