Let the Devil Sleep (56 page)

So how …?

The answer arrived with a small shiver.

The shot hadn’t come from outside the cabin.

Someone was there, in the room, with him.

The realization came to him by sound rather than sight.

The sound of breathing.

Just a few feet away.

Slow, relaxed breathing.

A
s Gurney looked in the direction from which the sound was coming, he saw, interrupting the strip of silvery light across the cabin floor, a dark rectangle where the trapdoor had been opened. On the far side of the opening, there was just enough faintly reflected moonlight to suggest the presence of a standing figure.

A hoarse whisper confirmed the impression. “Sit at the table, Detective. Put your hands on top of your head.”

Gurney quietly followed the instructions.

“I have some questions. You must answer them quickly. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“If the answer is not quick, I will assume it’s a lie. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. First question: Is Clinter coming here?”

“I don’t know.”

“You just told him on the phone not to come.”

“That’s right.”

“Do you expect him to come anyway?”

“He may. I don’t know. He’s not a predictable man.”

“That’s true. You must keep telling me the truth. The truth will keep you alive. You understand?”

“Yes.” Gurney sounded perfectly calm, as he often did in extreme situations. But inside, at that moment, he was full of fear and fury.
Fear of the situation he’d walked into and fury at the arrogant miscalculation that had put him there.

He’d assumed that the Good Shepherd would conform to the timing he’d spelled out in his scene with Kim and that the man would show up at the cabin two or three hours before Clinter and Gurney’s supposed midnight meeting. In the welter of facts and twists and what-ifs swirling around in his head, he’d failed to consider the obvious possibility that the Shepherd might show up much earlier than that—maybe a good twelve hours earlier.

What the hell had he been thinking? That the Shepherd was a logical man and the logical time to arrive would be a few hours before midnight. And therefore that’s what would happen, issue resolved, on to the next point? Jesus, how fucking stupid! He told himself he was only human, and humans make mistakes. But that didn’t take the bitter edge off his making such a deadly one.

The throaty, half-vocalized whisper grew louder. “It was your hope to trick me into coming here? To somehow take me by surprise?”

The aptness of the question was unnerving. “Yes.”

“The truth. Good. It keeps you alive. So, now, your phone call to Clinter. You believe what you told him?”

“About the killings?”

“Of course about the killings.”

“Yes, I do.”

For several seconds all Gurney heard was the sound of his questioner’s breathing—followed by a question so softly uttered it was barely louder than the breathing itself. “What other thoughts do you have?”

“My only thought right now is, are you going to shoot me?”

“Of course. But the more truth you tell me, the longer you live. Simple. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now tell me all your thoughts about the killings. Your true thoughts.”

“My thoughts are mostly questions.”

“What questions?”

Gurney wondered if the hoarse whisper was a vocal impairment or
a way of concealing the Good Shepherd’s real voice. He suspected the latter. The implications of that were interesting, but he had to focus now on the immediate need to stay alive.

“I wonder how many other people you’ve killed, besides the ones we know about. Possibly quite a few. Am I right about that?”

“Of course.”

Gurney was startled by the frankness of the answer and felt a fleeting moment of hope that the man could be engaged in a kind of dialogue—that his pride might drive him to boast of things he’d done. After all, sociopaths did have egos and enjoyed living in the echo chamber of their own narratives of power and ruthlessness. Perhaps he could get the man talking about himself, and thus stretch the window of opportunity for outside intervention.

But then the coin of hope flipped to its opposite side, and Gurney saw the clear implication of the man’s willingness to speak: It carried no risk, because Gurney would soon be dead.

The whisper became a parody of gentleness. “What else do you wonder about?”

“I wonder about Robby Meese and your relationship with him. I wonder how much he did on his own and how much you encouraged him to do. I wonder why you killed him when you did. I wonder if you thought his so-called suicide would be believed.”

“What else?”

“I wonder if you were really trying to put Max Clinter in the frame for Ruth Blum’s murder or if you were just playing a silly game.”

“What else?”

“I wonder if you thought your message on Ruth’s Facebook page would be believed.”

“What else?”

“I wonder about my barn.” Gurney was trying to string out the interchange as long as he could, with as many pauses as he could insert. The longer it lasted, the better—in every way.

“Keep talking, Detective.”

“I wonder about the GPS locators on the cars. I wonder if the one on Kim’s car was your idea or Robby’s. Robby the stalker.”

“What else?”

“Some of the things you’ve done are very clever, and some are very stupid. I wonder if you know which is which.”

“Provocation is pointless, Detective. Have you come to the end of your thoughts?”

“I wonder about the White Mountain Strangler. Such an odd case. Are you familiar with it? It has certain interesting features.”

There was a long silence. Time equaled hope. Time gave Gurney the space to think, perhaps even a chance to get to his gun on the table behind him.

When the Shepherd spoke again, the purr was syrupy. “Any final thoughts?”

“Just one more. How could someone so smart make such a colossal mistake at Lakeside Collision?”

There was a long silence. An alarming silence that could mean anything. Perhaps the Good Shepherd had finally been jarred off balance. Or perhaps his finger was tightening on the trigger. A tremor ran through Gurney’s stomach.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

“I want to know now.” There was a new intensity in the whisper, along with the glint of something moving in the shaft of moonlight.

Gurney caught his first glimpse of the barrel of a huge silver-plated pistol, no more than six feet away.

“Now,” the man repeated. “Tell me about Lakeside Collision.”

“You left some identification there.”

“I don’t carry identification.”

“That night you did.”

“Tell me exactly what it was. Tell me right now.”

The way Gurney saw the situation, there was no good answer, no answer likely to save him. There was certainly no way that revealing the tire-track discovery would result in a reprieve. And begging for his life would be worse than useless. There was only one option that offered him even a glimmer of staying alive for as much as another minute: stonewalling, refusing to divulge anything more.

Gurney tried to keep his voice from shaking as he spoke.
“You left the solution to the puzzle in the parking lot of Lakeside Collision.”

“I don’t like riddles. You have three seconds to answer my question.”

“One.” He raised his pistol slowly toward Gurney’s face.

“Two.” The barrel glinted in the shaft of moonlight.

“Three.” He pulled the trigger.

G
urney’s reflexive jerk away from the flash and the deafening blast would have sent his chair toppling over backward if it weren’t for the edge of the table. For a minute he couldn’t see anything, and all he could hear was the harsh, ringing echo of the gunshot.

He felt some wetness on the left side of his neck, a slight trickle. He put his hand to the side of his face, felt more wetness on his earlobe. As he moved his fingers higher, he discovered a searing, stinging spot at the very top of the ear—the source of the blood.

“Put your hands back on top of your head. Now.” The whispery voice seemed far away, lost in the reverberation in his ears.

But he did his best to comply.

“You hear me, yes?” said the distant, muffled voice.

“Yes,” said Gurney.

“Good. Listen carefully. I will ask you my question again. You must answer it. I am a good judge of what is true and what is not. If I hear truth, we go on, harmlessly. Just a nice conversation, you know? But if I hear a lie, I pull the trigger again. Clear?”

“Yes.”

“Each time I hear a lie, you lose something. Next time not just a little nick from your ear. You lose more important things. You understand?”

“I understand.” Gurney’s eyesight was starting to recover from the muzzle flash, and he could again make out a dim swath of moonlight across the middle of the room.

“Good. I want to know everything about this so-called mistake
at Lakeside Collision. No riddles. Pure truth.” In the moonlight the silver-plated pistol barrel gradually descended until it was aligned with Gurney’s right ankle.

He gritted his teeth to keep from trembling at the thought of what a Desert Eagle slug would do to that joint. The immediate loss of his foot would be bad enough. But the arterial bleeding would be the real problem. And telling the truth or not, in response to this or any subsequent question, was not the lever that would control the outcome. The lever was the Good Shepherd’s sense of personal security. And that lever could now move in only one direction. Because there was no possible scenario in which Gurney alive could pose a lesser risk to the Good Shepherd than Gurney dead.

The only variable yet to be determined was how many body parts would be severed before he bled to death. Before he bled to death, alone, on the floor of Max Clinter’s cabin, in the middle of a swamp, in the middle of nowhere.

He closed his eyes and saw Madeleine on the hillside.

In fuchsia, violet, pink, blue, orange, scarlet … all shimmering in the sunlight.

He walked toward her, through grass that was as green as every living thing and smelled as sweet as heaven must smell.

She put her fingers lightly on his lips and smiled.

“You’ll be brilliant,” she said. “Absolutely brilliant.”

And a moment later he was dead.

O
r so he thought.

Through his closed eyelids, he sensed a sudden illumination. It was accompanied by the sound of distant music rising through the ringing in his ears, and, above and through it all, the throbbing of a great drum.

And then he heard the voice.

The voice that brought him back to the cabin in the swamp in the middle of nowhere. A voice amplified mightily by a bullhorn.

“POLICE … NEW YORK STATE POLICE … PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS … PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND OPEN THE DOOR … DO IT NOW … PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS
AND OPEN THE DOOR … THIS IS THE NEW YORK STATE POLICE … PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND OPEN THE DOOR.”

Gurney opened his eyes. Instead of moonlight, a spotlight was shining in the window. He looked across the room at where his formidable, invisible captor had been standing ninja-like in the darkness. In his place was a man of average stature in brown slacks and a tan cardigan, with one hand raised to shield his eyes from the glare. It was hard for Gurney to associate this modest figure with the homicidal monster of his imagination. But in the man’s other hand was the undeniable link to the monster: a gleaming .50-caliber Desert Eagle pistol. The pistol responsible for the blood still trickling down the side of Gurney’s neck, the acrid smell of gunpowder in the room, the ringing in his ears.

The gun that had come so close to ending his life.

The man turned a little away from the spotlight and calmly lowered the hand he’d been holding in front of his eyes, revealing an impassive, unlined face. It was a face without distinction, without strong emotions, without any particularly prominent feature. It was a balanced, ordinary face. A face that was essentially forgettable.

Yet Gurney knew he had seen it before.

When he was finally able to place it, when he could finally attach a name to it, his first reaction was to think he must be mistaken. He blinked several times, trying to wrap his mind around the identity of the man facing him. He was having a hard time uniting that inoffensive, quiet identity with the words and actions of the Good Shepherd. Especially one of those actions.

But as his certainty increased and he was sure there was no mistake, he could almost feel the puzzle pieces being jarred into new positions, shifting into more interesting relationships, clicking together.

Larry Sterne gazed back at him, his expression more thoughtful than fearful. Larry Sterne who had reminded him of Mister Rogers. Larry Sterne, the soft-spoken dentist. Larry Sterne, the serene dental-medical entrepreneur. Larry Sterne, the son of Ian Sterne, who’d built a multimillion-dollar beauty-bestowing empire.

Larry Sterne, the son of Ian Sterne, who’d invited a lovely young Russian pianist to share his Woodstock home. And almost certainly his bed. And, potentially, a place in his will.

Dear God, was that what this was all about?

Had Larry Sterne simply been securing his inheritance?

Protecting his financial future from his father’s unpredictable affections?

It was, of course, a substantial inheritance. An inheritance worth worrying about. A money machine, in fact. Not something one would want to lose.

Had the calm and gentle Larry been avoiding, through the simple expedient of killing his father, any risk of that money machine ending up in the hands of the lovely young Russian pianist? And then, by cluttering the landscape with five additional bodies, had he simply been avoiding any risk of the police asking what would have been their first question if Ian Sterne had been the only victim—the damning question that would have led them straight to Larry:

Cui bono?

In the weird combination of moonlight and shifting floodlights shining through the window, Gurney could see that Sterne’s grip on his gun was still firm and steady, but the man’s eyes were unmistakably focused on a world of diminishing options. It was hard to identify the emotion in those eyes. Was it terror? Rage? The fierce determination of the proverbial cornered rat? Or was it just that the icy calculator had gone into overdrive—giving the man’s racing mental processes a frantic appearance?