Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (20 page)

He sat back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling. “A therapist once told me that an expectation is nothing but a resentment waiting to be born.” As soon as he said this, he wished he hadn’t. Jesus, he thought, if he’d been as clumsy in his undercover work as he was in speaking to his own wife, he’d have been sliced and diced a decade ago.

“Nothing but a resentment waiting to be born? Cute,” snapped Madeleine. “Very cute. What about hope? Did he have something equally clever and dismissive to say about hope?” The anger was moving from her eyes into her voice. “What about progress? Did he have anything to say about progress? Or closeness? What did he say about that?”

“Sorry,” Gurney said. “Just another stupid comment on my part. I seem to be full of them. Let me start over. All I wanted to say was that—”

She cut in, “That you’ve decided to sign on for a two-week tour of duty, working for a crazy woman, searching for a psychotic
murderer?” She stared at him, apparently daring him to try restating the proposition in milder terms. “Okay, David. Fine. Two weeks. What can I say? You’re going to do what you’re going to do. And by the way, I know that what you do takes great strength, great courage, great honesty, and a superb mind. I really do know what a remarkable man you are. You truly are one in a million. I’m in awe of you, David. But you know what? I’d like to be a little less in awe of you and a little more
with
you. Do you think that would be possible? That’s all I want to know. Do you think we could be a little bit closer?”

His mind went nearly blank.

Then he muttered softly, “God, Maddie, I hope so.”

I
t started to rain on the way to Tambury. An intermittent-wiper sort of rain, more like a light drizzle. Gurney stopped along the way in Dillweed for a second cup of coffee—not at a gas station but at Abelard’s organic-produce market, where the coffee was freshly ground, freshly made, and very good.

He sat with the coffee in his parked car in front of the market, thumbing through the case notes, finding the page he wanted: a record supplied by the phone company of the dates and times of text-message exchanges between the cell phones of Jillian Perry and Hector Flores during the three weeks leading up to the murder—thirteen from Flores to Perry, twelve from Perry to Flores. On a separate sheet, stapled to the record, was a report from the state police computer lab, indicating that all messages had been deleted from Jillian Perry’s phone, with the exception of the final “Edward Vallory” message, received approximately one hour prior to the fourteen-minute window within which the murder was committed. The report also noted the fact that the phone company retains date, duration, originating and receiving cell numbers, and transmitting-cell-tower data on all calls, but no content data. So once those texts had been erased from Jillian’s phone, there was no method of retrieval, unless Hector had saved the message strings on
his
phone and its memory could be accessed in the future—not possibilities to be optimistic about.

Gurney put the sheets back into their folder, finished his coffee, and continued on through the gray, wet morning to his eight-thirty appointment with Scott Ashton.

T
he door swung open before Gurney had a chance to knock. Ashton was dressed as before in expensively casual clothes, the sort he might have ordered from a catalog with a Cotswold stone house on the cover.

“Come in, let’s get to it,” he said with a perfunctory smile. “We don’t have a great deal of time.” He led the way through a large center hall into a sitting room on the right that seemed to have been furnished in an earlier century. The upholstered chairs and settees were mostly Queen Anne. The tables, the mantel above the fireplace, the chair legs, and other wood surfaces had an ancient, softly lustrous patina.

Among the predictable grace notes one might expect to find in an upper-class English-style country home, there was one startling discordance. On the wall above the dark chestnut mantel hung a very large framed photograph in the horizontal orientation and the approximate size of a two-page spread in the magazine section of the Sunday
Times
.

Then Gurney realized why that particular size comparison came readily to mind: The photograph was one he’d actually seen in that very publication. It fit into that overpriced-fashion-ad genre in which the models gaze at each other or at the world in general with an arrogant, druggy sensuality. Even among its kind, however, this example was striking in its communication of something profoundly unwell. The composition consisted of two very young women, surely not yet out of their teens, sprawled on what appeared to be a bedroom floor, eyeing each other’s body with a combination of exhaustion and insatiable sexual hunger. They were naked except for a couple of adroitly placed silk scarves, presumably the products of the fashion house sponsoring the ad.

When Gurney looked closer, he saw that it was a manipulated photograph—in fact, two differently posed photographs of the same model positioned and retouched in a way that made them appear to
be gazing at each other, adding a dimension of narcissism to the already ample pathology of the scene. It was, in a way, an impressive work of art—a depiction of pure decadence worthy of illustrating Dante’s
Inferno
. Gurney turned toward Ashton, his curiosity evident in his expression.

“Jillian,” said Ashton flatly. “My late wife.”

Gurney was speechless.

The picture raised so many questions that he didn’t know which to ask first.

He had the feeling that Ashton was not only observing but enjoying his confusion. Which raised more questions. Finally he thought of something to say, something he’d completely forgotten about during their first meeting. “I’m terribly sorry for your tragic loss. And I’m sorry for not saying so yesterday.”

A heaviness, a cloud of depression and weariness, seemed to draw all of Ashton’s features downward. “Thank you.”

“I’m surprised you’ve been able to stay in this house—seeing that cottage out in back every day, knowing what happened there.”

“It will be torn down,” said Ashton, almost brutally. “Torn down, crushed, burned. As soon as the police give their permission. They still have some lingering jurisdiction over it as a crime scene. But the day will come. The cottage will cease to exist.”

Ashton took a deep breath, and the display of emotion slowly faded. “So where shall be begin?” He gestured toward a pair of burgundy velvet wing chairs with a small, square table between them. The tabletop consisted of a hand-carved intarsia chessboard, but there were no chess pieces in sight.

Gurney decided to address the elephant in the room, the sensationally tawdry picture of Jillian, head-on. “I’d never have guessed that the girl in that photo on the wall was the bride I saw in the video.”

“The flowing white gown, demure makeup, et cetera?” Ashton looked almost amused.

“None of that seems consistent with this,” said Gurney, staring at the photo.

“Would it make more sense if you knew that her traditional bridal getup was Jillian’s idea of a joke?”

“A joke?”

“This may strike you as crude and unfeeling, Detective, but we haven’t much time, so let me tell you quickly about Jillian. Some of this you might have heard from her mother and some not. Jillian’s personality was irritable, intensely moody, easily bored, self-centered, intolerant, impatient, and volatile.”

“Quite a profile.”

“That was her brighter side—the relatively harmless Jillian, spoiled and bipolar. Her darker side was something else entirely.” Ashton paused, gazed fixedly at the picture on the wall as if to check the accuracy of his words.

Gurney waited, wondered where this extraordinary commentary was going.

“Jillian …” Ashton began, still looking at the picture, speaking softly now and more slowly. “Jillian was in her childhood a sexual predator, an abuser of other children. That was the chief symptom of the central pathology that brought her to Mapleshade at the age of thirteen. Her more obvious affective and behavioral problems were ripples on the surface.”

He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue, then rubbed them with his thumb and forefinger as if to dry them again. His gaze shifted from the picture to Gurney’s face. “Now, do you want to ask your questions, or shall I ask them for you?”

Gurney was happy to let Ashton keep talking. “What do you think my first question would be?”

“If your mind weren’t spinning with a dozen of them? I think your first question, at least to yourself, would be: Is Ashton crazy? Because, if so, that would explain a lot. But if not, then your second question would be: Why on earth would he want to marry a woman with such a disordered background? To the first question, I have no credible answer. No man is a trustworthy guarantor of his own sanity. To the second question, I would say that it’s unfairly slanted, since Jillian had another quality I failed to mention. Brilliance. Brilliance beyond the normal scope of the term. She had the fastest, most facile mind I’ve ever encountered. I am an exceptionally intelligent man, Detective. I am not being immodest, just truthful. You see the chessboard built into this table? There are no chessmen. I
play without them. I find it a stimulating mental challenge to play the game in my mind, imagining and remembering the positions of the pieces. Sometimes I play against myself, visualizing the board alternately from the white side and the black side, back and forth. Most people are impressed by that ability. But believe me when I tell you that Jillian’s mind was more formidable than my own. I find intelligence like that in a woman very attractive—attractive in both the companionable and erotic senses.”

The more Gurney heard, the more questions came to mind. “I’ve heard that sexual abusers are often victims of abuse themselves. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“True in the case of Jillian?”

“Yes.”

“Who was the abuser?”

“It wasn’t just one person.”

“Who were
they
, then?”

“According to an unverified account, they were Val Perry’s crack-addict friends, and the abuse, by numerous perpetrators, occurred repeatedly between the ages of three and seven.”

“Jesus. Are there any legal intervention records, social-service case files?”

“None of it was reported at the time.”

“But when she was finally sent to Mapleshade, it all came out? What about the records of the treatment she was given, statements she made to her therapists?”

“There are none. I should explain something about Mapleshade. First of all, it’s a school, not a medical facility. A private school for young women with special problems. In recent years we have admitted a growing percentage of students whose problems center on sexual issues, especially abuse.”

“I was told that your treatment emphasis is on abusers rather than the abused.”

“Yes—although
treatment
is not the right word, since we are not, as I said, a medical facility. And the line between abuser and abused is not always as clear as you might think. The point I’m making is that Mapleshade is effective because it is discreet. We accept
no court or social-service referrals, no insurance, no state aid, provide no medical or psychiatric diagnoses or treatment, and—this is vitally important—we keep no ‘patient’ records.”

“Yet the school apparently has a reputation for offering state-of-the-art treatment, or whatever you choose to call it, directed by the renowned Dr. Scott Ashton.” Gurney’s voice had taken on a sharper edge, to which Ashton showed no reaction.

“A greater stigma attaches to these disorders than to any other. Knowing that everything here is absolutely confidential, that there are no case files or insurance forms or therapy notes that can be purloined or subpoenaed, is a priceless benefit to our clientele. Legally we’re just a private secondary school with a knowledgeable staff available for informal chats on a variety of sensitive issues.”

Gurney sat back, pondering Mapleshade’s unusual structure and the implications of that structure. Perhaps sensing his uneasiness, Ashton added, “Consider this: The feeling of security that our system offers makes it possible for our students and their families to tell us things that they would never dream of divulging if the information were going into a file. There’s no source of guilt and shame and fear deeper than the disorders we deal with here.”

“Why didn’t you reveal Jillian’s horrendous background to the investigation team?”

“There was no reason to.”

“No reason?”

“My wife was killed by my psychotic gardener, who then escaped. The task of the police is to track him down. What should I have said? Oh, by the way, when my wife was three years old, she was raped by her mother’s crazed crackhead friends? How would that help them apprehend Hector Flores?”

“How old was she when she made the transition from victim to abuser?”

“Five.”

“Five?”

“This area of dysfunction always shocks people outside the field. The behavior is so inconsistent with what we like to think of as the innocence of childhood. Unfortunately, five-year-old abusers of even younger children are not as rare as you might think.”

“Jesus.” Gurney looked with growing concern at the picture on the wall. “Who were her victims?”

“I don’t know.”

“Val Perry is aware of all this?”

“Yes. She’s still not comfortable talking about it in any detail, in case you’re wondering why she didn’t tell you. But it’s why she came to you.”

“I don’t follow you.”

Ashton took a deep breath. “Val is driven by guilt. To make a complicated story simple, in her twenties she was part of a drug scene and not much of a mother. She surrounded herself with addicts even crazier than she was, which led to the abuse situation I described, which led to Jillian’s ensuing sexual aggression and other behavior disorders, which Val was unable to deal with. Her guilt tore her apart—a colorful cliché, but accurate. She felt responsible for every problem in her daughter’s life, and now she feels responsible for her death. She’s frustrated by the official police investigation—no leads, no progress, no closure. I believe she came to you in one final attempt to do something right for Jillian. Certainly too little too late, but it’s the only thing she could think of doing. She heard about you from one of the officers at BCI, about your reputation as a homicide detective in the city, read some article about you in
New York
magazine, and decided you represented her best and last chance to make up for being a terrible mother. It’s pathetic, but there it is.”