Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (11 page)

“And?”

“And then … then he holds the severed head at an angle against the pulsing neck. In other words, he uses the head to deflect the blood. To keep it from getting on him.”

Gurney began to nod slowly. “The ultimate sociopathic moment …”

Hardwick offered a small grimace of agreement. “Not that hacking her head off had left much doubt about the killer’s mental status. But … there’s something about the … the
practicality
of the gesture that’s kind of disturbing. Talk about having ice water in your veins …”

Gurney continued to nod. He could see and feel what Hardwick was getting at.

The two men were silent for several long, thoughtful seconds. “There’s a small oddity that’s been bothering me, too,” said Gurney. “Nothing macabre, just a bit perplexing.”

“What?”

“The wedding reception’s guest list.”

“You mean the hot-shit who’s who of upstate New York?”

“When you were at the scene, do you recall seeing anybody under the age of thirty-five? Because watching that video just now, I didn’t.”

Hardwick blinked, scowled, looked like he was flipping through files in his head. “Probably not. So what?”

“Definitely no one in their twenties?”

“Apart from the catering staff, definitely no one in their twenties. So what?”

“Just wondering why the bride didn’t have any friends at her own wedding.”

W
hen Hardwick left just before sunset, turning down a halfhearted offer to stay for dinner, he entrusted his copy of the DVD to Gurney, along with a copy of the case file containing records of the initial days when he was chief investigating officer and of the subsequent months during which Arlo Blatt was in charge. It was everything Gurney could have asked for, which he found unsettling. Hardwick was taking a major risk in copying police file material, removing it from headquarters, and giving it to an individual with no authorization to have it.

Why would he do that?

The simple answer—that any substantial progress Gurney might make would embarrass a senior BCI officer for whom Hardwick had no respect—didn’t quite justify the level of risk the man was subjecting himself to. Perhaps the full answer could be discovered in the file material itself. Gurney had spread it out on the main dining table under the chandelier—which, as the light from the windows faded, would be the brightest place in the house.

He’d divided the voluminous reports and other documents into piles according to the type of information they contained. Within each pile he placed the items in chronological order as best he could.

Altogether it was a daunting aggregation of data: incident reports, field notes, investigative progress reports, sixty-two interview summaries and transcripts (from one to fourteen pages each), landline and cell-phone records, crime-scene photos taken by BCI personnel, additional still photos culled from the wedding videographer’s cameras, the minutely detailed thirty-six-page ViCAP crime-description
form, the stolen-object report form, the serial-number database form, an identikit portrait of Hector Flores, the autopsy report, evidence-collection forms, forensic lab reports, DNA blood-sample analyses, the K-9 team report, a master list of wedding guests with contact info and nature of their relationship with the victim and/or Scott Ashton, sketches and aerial photos of the Ashton estate, interior sketches of the cottage with measurements of the front room, biographical data sheets, and, of course, the DVD that Gurney had viewed.

By the time he’d sorted it all into some kind of workable order, it was nearly 7:00
P.M
. At first the lateness of the hour surprised him, and then it didn’t. Time always accelerated when his mind was fully engaged, and it seemed to be fully engaged only when, he realized a little ruefully, a puzzle had been placed before him. Madeleine had once told him that his life had narrowed down to one obsessive pursuit: unraveling the mysteries of other people’s deaths. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.

He reached for the file folder nearest him on the table. It was the set of scene-of-crime reports created by the evidence techs. The top form described the cottage’s immediate surroundings. The next form recorded their initial visual inventory of the interior. It was striking in its brevity. The cottage contained none of the normal objects and materials that a crime lab would subject to analysis for trace evidence. No furniture beyond the table on which the victim’s head was found, the narrow chair with wooden arms in which the body was propped up, and one similar chair across from it. There were no lounging chairs, couches, beds, blankets, or rugs. Equally strange, there were no clothes in the closet, no clothes or footwear of any kind anywhere in the cottage—with one peculiar exception: a pair of light rubber boots, the kind normally worn over regular shoes. These boots were found in the bedroom next to the window through which the killer had evidently exited. No doubt they were the boots the dog got the scent from to follow the trail.

He turned in his chair toward the French doors and gazed out over the pasture, his eyes alive with speculation. The peculiarities and complications of the case—what Sherlock Holmes would have called “its unique features”—were multiplying, generating like an
electrical current the magnetic field that drew Gurney to problems that would naturally repel most men.

His thoughts were interrupted by the loud squeak of the side door opening—a squeak that for the past year he’d been meaning to eliminate with a drop of oil.

“Madeleine?”

“Yes.” She came into the kitchen with three straining plastic bags from the supermarket in each hand, hefted all six of them up onto the sideboard, and headed back out.

“Can I help?” he said.

There was no answer, just the sound of the side door opening and closing. A minute later the sound was repeated, followed by her return to the kitchen with a second load of bags, which she also placed on the sideboard. Only then did she take off the quirky purple, green, and pink Peruvian hat with the dangling ear flaps that always seemed to add an antic dimension to whatever her underlying mood might be.

He felt the transient tic in his left eyelid, a twitch in the nerve so distinct it had taken several trips to the mirror in recent months to convince him that it wasn’t visible. He wanted to ask where she’d been, apart from the supermarket, but he had the feeling she might have mentioned the rest of her plan to him earlier, and his failure to remember it would not be a good thing. Madeleine equated forgetting, as she equated poor hearing, with lack of interest. Maybe she was right. In twenty-five years in the NYPD, he’d never forgotten to show up for a witness interview, never forgotten a court date, never forgotten what a suspect said or how he sounded, never forgotten a single thing of significance to his job.

Had anything else ever come close in importance to his job? Even made it into the same ballpark? Parents? Wives? Children?

When his mother died, he’d felt almost nothing. No, it was worse than that. Colder and more self-centered than that. He’d felt a sense of relief, the removal of a burden, a simplification of his life. When his first wife left him, another complication was removed. Another impediment out of the way, relief from the pressure of having to respond to the needs of a difficult person. Freedom.

Madeleine went to the refrigerator, started taking out glass
containers of food left over from the night before and from the night before that. She laid them in a row on the countertop next to the microwave, five of them, removed the tops. He watched her from the other side of the sink island.

“Have you eaten yet?” she asked.

“No, I was waiting for you to come home,” he replied, not quite truthfully.

She glanced past him at the papers spread out on the dining table, raised an eyebrow.

“Bunch of stuff from Jack Hardwick,” he said, too casually. “He asked me to look it over.” He imagined her level gaze examining his thoughts. He added, “It’s stuff from the Jillian Perry case file.” He paused. “I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to do, or why anyone thinks my observations would be helpful under the existing circumstances, but … I’ll take a look at what’s here and give him my reactions.”

“And her?”

“Her?”

“Val Perry. Will you be giving her your reactions, too?” Madeleine’s voice had taken on a light, airy quality that communicated rather than concealed her concern.

Gurney stared down into the fruit bowl on the granite top of the sink island, resting his hands on the cold surface. Several fruit flies, disturbed by his presence, rose from a bunch of bananas, flew in asymmetric zigzags above the bowl, then settled again on the fruit, becoming invisible against the speckled skin.

He tried to speak softly, but the effect was condescending. “I think you’re disturbed by the assumptions you’re making, not by what’s actually happening.”

“You mean my assumption that you’ve already decided to jump on the roller coaster?”

“Maddie, how many times do I have to say it? I haven’t made any commitment to anyone to do anything. I’ve made absolutely no decision to get involved in any way beyond reading the case file.”

She gave him a look he couldn’t quite understand, a look that went
into
him—a look that was knowing and gentle and strangely sad.

She began placing the tops back on the glass storage containers. He watched her without comment until she started putting the containers back into the refrigerator.

“Aren’t you going to eat anything?” he asked.

“I’m not that hungry right now. I think I’ll take a shower. If it wakes me up, then I’ll eat. If it makes me drowsy, I’ll go to bed early.” As she passed the table with its burden of paperwork, she said, “Before our guests arrive tomorrow, you’ll put all that away where we won’t have to look at it, right?” She left the room, and half a minute later he heard the bathroom door closing.

Guests? Tomorrow? Christ!

A dim recollection, something Madeleine had mentioned to him about someone coming for dinner—the shadow of a memory, stored in an inaccessible storage bin, a bin containing objects of little importance.

What the hell is going on with you? Isn’t there any room left in your head for ordinary life? For a simple life, shared in good and simple ways, with ordinary people? Or maybe there was never any room for that. Maybe you always were the way you are right now. Maybe life here on a secluded mountaintop—cut loose from the demands of the job, deprived of convenient excuses for never being present in the lives of people you claim to love—is making the truth harder to hide. Could the simple truth be that you don’t really care about anybody?

He walked around to the far side of the sink island and switched on the coffeemaker. Like Madeleine, he’d lost his appetite for dinner. But the idea of coffee was appealing. It was going to be a long night.

I
t made sense to begin at the beginning by examining the identikit portrait of Hector Flores.

Gurney had mixed feelings about computer-generated facial composites. Constructed from the input of eyewitnesses, they mirrored the strengths and weaknesses of all eyewitness testimony.

In the case of Hector Flores, however, there was good reason to trust the likeness. The descriptive details had been provided by a man with the observational skills of a psychiatrist and who was said to have been in daily contact with the subject for nearly three years. A computer rendering with input of that quality could rival a good photograph.

The image was of a man, probably in his mid-thirties, good-looking in an unremarkable way. The facial bone structure was regular, with no feature predominating. The skin was relatively free of lines, the eyes dark and emotionless. The hair was black, fairly neat, casually parted. There was only one distinguishing mark Gurney could discern, oddly shocking in the midst of such an otherwise ordinary appearance: The man’s right earlobe was missing.

Appended to the composite portrait was the inventory of physical statistics. (Again Gurney’s assumption was that these would have been provided primarily by Ashton and would therefore have a high likelihood of accuracy.) Hector Flores’s height was listed as five feet nine inches; weight 140–150; race/nationality Hispanic; eyes dark brown; hair black, straight; complexion tan, clear; teeth uneven, with one gold incisor, upper left. In the “Scars and Other
Identifying Marks” section, there were two entries: the missing earlobe and severe scarring on the right knee.

Gurney looked again at the picture, searched for some spark of madness, a glimpse of the mind of the ice man who beheaded a woman, used the head to deflect the body’s spurting blood away from himself, then placed her head on the table, facing the body from which it came. In the eyes of some killers—Charlie Manson, for instance—there was a demonic intensity, urgent and unconcealed, but most of the murderers Gurney had brought to justice during his career as a homicide detective were driven by a less obvious madness. Hector Flores’s bland, uncommunicative face—in which Gurney could see no hint of the hideous violence of the crime itself—put him in this category.

Stapled to the physical-statistics form was a typed page with the heading “Supplementary Statement Provided by Dr. Scott Ashton on May 11, 2009.” It was signed by Ashton and witnessed by Hardwick, as chief investigating officer. The statement was brief, considering the time period and events it covered.