Let the Devil Sleep (39 page)

“Wait a second. You have any idea what Ruth Blum’s original message said that started all this?”

“I just e-mailed it to you.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“Andy Clegg.”

“Who the hell is Andy Clegg?”

“Young guy up in E Zone. You don’t remember him?”

“Should I?”

“The Piggert case.”

“Okay. Now the name rings a bell. But I can’t picture a face.”

“His first assignment out of the academy—in fact, the first job he caught on his first day on the job—was to respond to my call for support when I found my half of Mrs. Piggert’s body. That turned out to be Andy’s first official vomit opportunity. And he took full advantage of it.”

The infamous Peter Piggert incest-murder case was the beginning of the edgy but productive relationship between Hardwick and Gurney. Gurney was at the NYPD then, and Hardwick was with the NYSP. They were each investigating aspects of the Piggert case that fell within their separate jurisdictions, when a grotesque bit of serendipity brought them together. Over a hundred miles apart, on the same day, they each discovered half of the same body.

“Young Andy Clegg met us both at a joint get-together after you nailed the elusive Mr. Piggert, the mother-fucking mother killer. Andy was mightily impressed with your skills and, to a lesser extent, with my own. We stayed in touch.”

“All this adds up to what?”

“When the basic facts on the Blum ice-pick homicide came in through CJIS this morning, I gave Detective Clegg a friendly call and got the whole story. I figured it was now or never. As soon as Trout gets hold of this and figures out the implications, he’ll move in and declare the homicide to be part of his ongoing Good Shepherd investigation and slam the door.”

“Which brings us back to my question. What did Ruth’s—”

“Check your e-mail.”

“Right.”

Gurney laid down the phone and opened his e-mail. There it was.

Gurney read it again before picking up the phone. “You still there, Jack?”

“Yeah. So her friend in Ithaca is going through her e-mail, around midnight, and discovers that she has a Facebook notification, which she clicks on, and she finds the message that Ruth posted at ten fifty-eight—apparently before she went downstairs to see who was coming to see her in that big military-looking whatever. Could be a Hummer, what do you think?”

“Could be.” Gurney pictured Max Clinter’s combat-ready, camouflage-painted Humvee.

“Well, if it wasn’t a Hummer, what the fuck was it? Anyway, the friend makes all these efforts to get through to Ruth, and, like I said, eventually a trooper comes, checks things out, decides everything looks fine, and he’s about to leave—when the anxious friend shows up in her car, having driven the twenty-five miles up from Ithaca, and insists they break into the house—because she’s afraid something bad has happened. She says if he doesn’t break into the house, she will. Big argument, young trooper almost arrests her, then another trooper comes by, older and wiser, calms everybody down. They start looking around the outside of the house. Eventually they find an open window, more discussion, more debate, et cetera, et cetera. Bottom line, the troopers finally go in and find Ruth Blum’s body.”

“Where?”

“In the entry hall, just inside the front door. Like she opened the door and wham!”

“ME is sure the weapon was an ice pick?”

“Wasn’t much doubt. According to Clegg, fucking thing was still stuck in her.”

“You don’t suppose he could get me into the house, do you?”

“No way. By now it’s been sealed off with a mile of yellow tape by guys for whom you could only be a problem. Their one job right now is
to keep the scene pristine till the evidence techs go home and the BCI team hands the whole deal off to the FBI. They’re not about to hang their asses out the window so some retired hotshot from the city can have a walk-through.”

Gurney was itching to see it all for himself. Having a scene described to you was worth maybe 10 percent of being there. But he suspected that Hardwick was right. He couldn’t think of any upside for anyone in BCI, much less the FBI, to get him involved. Which made him wonder again what the upside was for Hardwick. Every time the man passed along information from a confidential file or an internal source, he was putting himself at risk. And he was doing it a lot.

Was he such a pure seeker after truth that its pursuit trumped any concern for rules or his own career? Was he driven by an obsessive desire to embarrass the powerful? Or did the risk itself, the giddy edge of the cliff, attract him with the same power with which it repelled saner men? Gurney had asked himself these questions about the man before. Once again he concluded that the answer was probably yes to all of them.

“So, Davey boy …” Hardwick’s voice jarred him back to the issue at hand. “The plot thickens. Or maybe this makes everything clearer to you. Which is it?”

“I don’t know, Jack. A little of both. It depends on what happens next. In the meantime, is that everything Clegg told you?”

“Almost everything.” Hardwick hesitated. His appetite for dramatic pauses irritated Gurney intensely, but it was a tolerable price to pay for what often followed. “Remember the little plastic animals the Good Shepherd left at the roadside shootings?”

“Yes.” In fact, he’d been thinking about them that morning, wondering about their purpose.

“Well, they found a little plastic animal at the scene—balanced delicately on Ruth Blum’s lips.”

“On her lips?”

“On her lips.”

“What kind of animal?”

“Clegg thinks it was a lion.”

“Wasn’t a lion the first animal in the original sequence of six?”

“Good memory, ace. So what are the odds we can expect five more?”

Gurney had no answer for that.

As soon as he got off the phone with Hardwick, he called Kim. He wondered if she was still at Kyle’s apartment, wondered if they were in bed together, wondered what their plans were for the day, wondered if they knew …

The call went into her voice mail. He left a blunt message. “Hi. I don’t know if it’s on the news yet, but Ruth Blum is dead. She was murdered in her home in Aurora late last night. It’s possible that the Good Shepherd is back, or someone wants us to think so. Call me as soon as you can.”

He tried Kyle’s number, got his voice mail, and left the same message.

He stood staring out the north window of the den at the wet, gray hillside. The rain had stopped, but the eaves continued to drip. The new information from Hardwick was scattering rather than organizing his thoughts. So damn many bits and pieces. It was impossible to see the path through the maze. To take a step forward, one had to know where forward
was
. He was overcome by a sick feeling that time was running out, that the endgame was rapidly approaching, without even knowing what that might mean.

He had to do
something
.

For want of a better idea, he found himself in his car, setting out for Aurora.

Two hours later he was turning onto the state road that ran alongside Lake Cayuga, his GPS indicating he was just three miles from Ruth Blum’s address. The lake and its lakefront homes were visible through a border of bare trees on his left. On his right, separated from the road by a deep, grassy drainage swale, a pastoral mix of meadows and thickets sloped gradually up toward a high horizon of stubbled cornfields. Three commercial establishments on the upland side of the road were spaced out among a scattering of well-kept older homes. There was a gas station, a veterinary clinic, and an auto-body shop whose parking area held half a dozen cars in various stages of repair.

Not far past the body shop, Gurney rounded a long bend and saw ahead of him on the left side of the road the first indications of a major
crime scene: an assortment of local, county, and state police cruisers. There were also four vans—two, presumably from regional media outlets, with satellite dishes on their roofs; one with the NYSP emblem, which Gurney assumed would contain the evidence team’s equipment; and one that was unmarked, probably the forensic photographer’s. There was no sign of a morgue vehicle, meaning someone from the ME’s office had already come and gone and the body had been transported from the scene.

As he drew closer, Gurney counted six uniformed officers with various jurisdictional insignias, a woman and a man in the conservative business attire favored by detective units, an evidence specialist in the white coveralls and latex gloves required by his occupation, and a fashionably dressed female TV type huddled with two ponytailed male technicians.

A uniformed trooper was standing in the middle of the road, aggressively waving along any car that seemed to be passing too slowly. As Gurney was coming abreast of the trooper and the Blum house behind him, he could see that
POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS
tape had been wrapped around the entire property from the edge of the lake up to the edge of the road. He reached into his glove box and pulled out a thin leather wallet, flipping it open to reveal a gold NYPD detective’s shield that bore in small letters at the bottom the word “Retired.”

Before the frowning trooper could examine it thoroughly, Gurney tossed it back in his glove box and asked if Senior Investigator Jack Hardwick was on the scene.

The trooper’s hat was tilted forward, its stiff brim shadowing his eyes. “Hardwick, BCI?”

“That’s right.”

“There some reason he should be here?”

Gurney sighed wearily. “I’m working on an investigation that could involve Ruth Blum. Hardwick’s aware of it.”

The trooper looked like he was having trouble deciphering that answer. “What’s your name?”

“Dave Gurney.”

The man eyed him with the combination of surface politeness and instinctive distrust with which most cops regard strangers. “Pull in
right there.” He pointed to a space on the shoulder between the evidence van and one of the TV vans. “Stay in your car.” He turned away crisply and approached three figures engaged in an intense discussion next to the driveway. The individual to whom he spoke was a heavyset woman with short brown hair. She was wearing a navy blue jacket and matching pants. The gray-haired man on her right was in white coveralls. The younger man on her left wore a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie—the standard outfit shared by detectives, funeral directors, and Mormons. His heavily muscled shoulders, wide neck, and buzz cut made it clear which of those groups he belonged to.

As the traffic trooper was talking to them, the three looked over at Gurney in unison. The young man began grinning and speaking rapidly to the woman while gesturing in Gurney’s direction.

The grin rang a distant bell.

“Detective!” the woman called out, raising her hand to get his attention. “Detective Gurney.”

He got out of his car. As he did, he was greeted by the loud throb of a helicopter overhead. He looked up and through the treetops caught glimpses of the slowly circling craft. Giant white letters, RAM, painted on the bottom of the cabin caught his eye and provoked an involuntary grimace.

“Lieutenant Bullard wants to talk to you.” The trooper had come back over to Gurney and was lifting the police tape for him to enter the enclosed area. His tone made the tape gesture seem more proprietary than courteous.

Gurney bent forward to pass under the tape. As he did so, he couldn’t help noticing a deposit of roadway dirt that had settled into a long expansion crack separating the tarred driveway from the rougher composite pavement of the road shoulder. As he paused for a moment to take a closer look, the trooper let the tape drop on him and returned to his traffic duty.

When Gurney straightened up, the slightly familiar young man in the dark suit was walking toward him.

“Sir, you probably don’t remember me. I’m Andrew Clegg. We met during your investigation of—”

Gurney broke in warmly, “I remember you, Andy. Looks like you’ve been promoted.”

Again the grin. It turned him into a teenager. “Last month. Finally made it into BCI. You were one of my inspirations.” As he spoke, he was leading Gurney to the solidly built woman, who was talking to the departing tech in the white suit.

“If you want to bag the rug and bring it in, that’s fine, too. It’s up to you.” She turned toward Gurney. Her expression was alert and pleasantly businesslike. “Andy tells me that you and Jack Hardwick worked together on Piggert. Is that a fact?”

“That’s a fact.”

“Congrats. Big victory for the good guys.”

“Thank you.”

“His Satanic Santa case was even bigger,” said Clegg.

“Satanic …?” Now it was her turn to look as if a distant memory bell was ringing. “Was that the psycho who was cutting people up and mailing the pieces to the local cops?”

“In gift wrapping! As Christmas presents!” cried Clegg, clearly more captivated than horrified.

She stared at Gurney in amazement. “And you …?”

“Just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

“That’s remarkable.” She extended her hand. “I’m Lieutenant Bullard. And you’re obviously a man who needs no further introduction. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“This situation with Ruth Blum.”