Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (21 page)

“How do you know all this?”

“After Jillian’s murder, Val was close to a breakdown, and she still is. Talking about these things was one way of holding herself together.”

“And you?”

“Me?”

“How have you held yourself together?”

“Is that curiosity or sarcasm?”

“Your discussion of the most horrible event of your life, and the people involved in it, seems remarkably detached. I don’t know what to make of that.”

“Don’t you? That’s hard to believe.”

“Meaning what?”

“My impression, Detective, is that you would respond the same way to the death of someone close to you.” He regarded Gurney with the neutrality of the classic therapist. “I suggest the parallel as a way of helping you understand my position. You’re asking yourself, ‘Is he concealing his emotion at the death of his wife, or is there no emotion to conceal?’ Before I give you the answer, think about what you saw on the video.”

“You mean your reaction to what you saw in the cottage?”

Ashton’s voice hardened, and he spoke with a rigidity that seemed to vibrate with the power of a barely contained fury. “I believe that part of Hector’s motive was to inflict pain on me. He succeeded. My pain was recorded on that video. It’s a fact I can’t change. However, I did make a resolution never to show that pain again. Not to anyone. Not ever.”

Gurney’s eyes rested on the chessboard’s delicate intarsia inlay. “You have no doubt at all about the murderer’s identity?”

Ashton blinked, looked like he was having trouble understanding the question. “I beg your pardon?”

“You have no doubt that Hector Flores is the person who killed your wife?”

“No doubt at all. I gave some thought to the suggestion you made yesterday that Carl Muller might be involved, but frankly I don’t see it.”

“Is it possible that Hector was gay, that the motive for the killing—”

“That’s absurd.”

“It’s a theory the police were considering.”

“I know something about sexuality. Trust me. Hector was not gay.” He looked deliberately at his watch.

Gurney sat back, waited for Ashton to make eye contact with him. “It must take a special kind of person—the field you’re in.”

“Meaning?”

“It must be depressing. I’ve heard that sex offenders are almost impossible to cure.”

Ashton sat back like Gurney, held his gaze, steepled his fingers
under his chin. “That’s a media generalization. Half true, half nonsense.”

“Still, it must be a difficult kind of work.”

“What sort of difficulty are you imagining?”

“All the stress. So much at stake. The consequences of failure.”

“Like police work. Like life in general.” Again Ashton looked at his watch.

“So what’s the glue?” asked Gurney.

“The glue?”

“The thing that attaches you to the sexual-abuse field.”

“This is relevant to finding Flores?”

“It may be.”

Ashton closed his eyes and bowed his head so that his steepled fingers assumed a prayerful attitude. “You’re right about the high stakes. Sexual energy in general has tremendous power, the power to concentrate one’s attention like nothing else, to become the sole reality, to warp judgment, to obliterate pain and the perception of risk. The power to make all other considerations irrelevant. There is no force on earth that comes close to it in its power to blind and drive the individual in its grip. When this energy within a person is focused on an inappropriate object—specifically, another person of less-than-equal strength and understanding—the potential for damage is truly endless. Because in the intensity of its power and primitive excitement, its ability to twist reality, inappropriate sexual behavior can be as contagious as the bite of a vampire. In pursuit of the magic power of the abuser, the abused may become an abuser herself. There are simple evolutionary, neurological, and psychological roots for the overwhelming strength of the sex drive. Its diversions into destructive channels can be analyzed, described, diagrammed. But altering those diversions is another matter entirely. To understand the genesis of a tidal wave is one thing; to change its direction is something else.” He opened his eyes, lowered his steepled hands from his face.

“It’s the challenge in it that attracts you?”

“It’s the
leverage
in it.”

“You mean the ability to make a difference?”

“Yes!” Some inner rheostat turned up the light in Ashton’s eyes. “The ability to intervene in what otherwise would be an everlasting chain of misery spreading out from the abuser into everyone he or she touched, and from those to others, and down through future generations. This is not like the removal of a tumor, which may save one life. Success rates in the field are debatable, but even one success can prevent the destruction of a hundred lives.”

Gurney smiled, looked impressed. “So that’s the mission of Mapleshade?”

Ashton mirrored the smile. “Exactly.” Another glance at his watch. “And now I really do need to leave. You can stay if you wish, have a look around the grounds, a look at the cottage. The key is under the black rock to the right of the doorstep. If you want to see the spot where the machete was found, go around to the rear of the cottage as far as the middle window, then walk straight out into the woods about a hundred and fifty yards, and you’ll find a tall stake in the ground. There was originally a yellow police ribbon tied around the top, but that may be gone by now. Good luck, Detective.”

He showed Gurney out, left him standing on the brick-paved driveway, and drove off in a vintage Jaguar sedan, as evocatively English as the chamomile scent in the damp air.

G
urney felt an urgent need to sort and review, to take the mass of data and possibilities crowding his mind and arrange them in a manageable order. Although the drizzle had finally stopped, there was no place outside Ashton’s house dry enough to sit, so he retreated to his car. He took out the spiral pad with his notes on Calvin Harlen, turned to a new page, closed his eyes, and began rerunning the mental tapes of his meeting with Ashton.

He soon found this disciplined process hopeless. However hard he tried to go over the details in their actual chronology, weigh them, match them like puzzle pieces with similar pieces, one huge fact kept elbowing its way in front of all the others:
Jillian Perry had sexually abused other children. It was not uncommon for a victim of that offense, or a member of a victim’s family, to seek revenge. It was not unheard-of for that revenge to take the form of murder
.

The impact of this possibility filled his mind. It fit the contours of his thinking in a way no other aspect of the case had so far. Finally there was a motive that made sense, that didn’t bring with it an immediate surge of doubt, that didn’t create more problems than it solved. And along with it came certain implications. For example:
The key questions about Hector Flores might not be where did he disappear to and how, but where did he come from and why?
The focus needed to shift from what might have happened in Tambury that drove Flores to commit murder to what might have happened in the past that drove him to Tambury.

Gurney was now too restless to sit still. He got back out of his car,
looked around at the house, the slate-roofed garage, the arched trellis entrance to the rear lawn. Was this the first view Hector Flores had had of Ashton’s manorial property three and a half years earlier? Or had he been looking it over for some time, watching Ashton come and go? When he knocked on the door for the first time, how far along were his plans? Was Jillian his target from the beginning? Was Ashton, director of the school she’d attended, a route to her? Or were his plans more general—perhaps a violent assault on one or more of the offenders that Mapleshade harbored? Or for that matter, might the original target have been Ashton himself—the harborer, the doctor who helped abusers? Might Jillian’s murder have offered a double benefit: her death and Ashton’s pain?

Whatever the specifics, the questions were the same: Who was Hector Flores, really? What awful transgression had brought so determined a killer to Ashton’s doorstep? A killer of such deception and foresight that he’d inveigled an invitation to live in a cottage in his eventual victim’s backyard. A web in which he’d waited. Waited for the ideal moment.

Hector Flores. A patient spider
.

Gurney went to the cottage, unlocked the door.

Inside, the place had the bare look of an apartment for rent. No furniture, no possessions, nothing but a faint odor of detergent or disinfectant. The simplest of floor plans: a wide all-purpose room in front and two smaller rooms behind it—a bedroom and a kitchen, with a tiny bathroom and closet sandwiched between them. He stood in the middle of the front room and let his gaze travel slowly over the floor, walls, ceiling. His brain was not wired to accommodate the notion of a place having an aura, but every homicide scene he’d visited over the years affected him in a way that was both strange and familiar.

Responding to a call from the uniformed 911 responders, stepping into a violent crime scene with its blood and gristle, splintered bones and splattered brains, never failed to ignite in him a certain set of feelings: revulsion, pity, anger. But visiting the site at a later date—after the inevitable scouring, all tangible evidence of butchery removed—was just as deeply affecting, but in a different way. A blood-soaked room would slam him in the face. Later, stripped
and sanitized, the same room would lay a cold hand on his heart, reminding him that at the center of the universe there was a boundless emptiness. A vacuum with a temperature of absolute zero.

He cleared his throat loudly, as if relying on the noise to transport him from these morbid musings to a more practical frame of mind. He went into the little kitchen, examined the empty drawers and cabinets. Then he went into the bedroom, straight to the window through which the killer had exited. He opened it, looked out, then climbed out through it.

The ground outside was only about a foot lower than the floor inside. He stood with his back to the cottage, peering out into the dreary copse. The atmosphere was humid, silent, the herbal redolence of the gardens yielding here to a woodsier scent. He made his way forward with long, deliberate steps, counting his paces. At 140 he caught sight of a yellow ribbon atop a plastic stake driven like a thin broomstick into the ground.

He went to the spot, looking around in all directions. His route was circumscribed on his right by a steep-sided ravine. The cottage behind him was hidden by the intervening foliage, as was the road that he knew from the Google satellite photos to lie fifty yards ahead. He examined the ground, the area of leafy soil where the machete had been partly concealed, wondering what might explain the inability of the K-9 team to follow the trail any farther. The idea that Flores had changed his shoes at this point, or covered them with plastic, and proceeded on through the woods to the road, or through the woods to another house on the lane (Kiki Muller’s?) seemed unlikely. The question that had bothered Gurney before still had no answer: What would the point be of leaving half a trail, a trail to the weapon? And if the goal was for the weapon to be found, why half bury it? And then there was the little mystery of the boots—the one personal item Flores had left behind, the boots that the scent-tracking dog had keyed on. How did they fit into Flores’s escape scenario?

S
ince the boots were found in the house, did that suggest that the trail to the machete could have been one leg of a round trip?
Might Flores have come out here from the cottage, disposed of the machete, and returned the way he came—back through the window? That solved part of the scent-trail conundrum. But it created a new and greater difficulty: It put Flores back in the cottage at the point when the body was discovered, with no way of leaving it again unobserved prior to the arrival of the police. On top of that, the out-and-back hypothesis didn’t answer the other question: Why would Flores leave a trail out to the machete to begin with? Unless the whole idea was to create the impression that he’d left the area, when really he hadn’t … to create the impression that he’d run off through the woods, hurriedly hiding the machete on his way, when he was actually back in the cottage. But back in the cottage where? Where could a man hide in such a tiny building—a building fine-combed for six hours by a team of evidence techs whose whole expertise lay in missing nothing?

Gurney made his way back through the woods, climbed through the cottage window, and reexplored the three rooms, looking for access points to spaces above the ceiling or below the floor. The roof pitch was low, likely a truss structure that would have a limited area toward the middle where a man could sit or crouch. However, as with most such useless spaces, there was no entry point. The floor also appeared seamless, with no way down into whatever space might exist beneath it. He went from room to room, checking the position of each wall from each side of it to make sure there were no unaccounted-for interior spaces.

The notion that Flores had returned from the woods in those boots and secreted himself and remained undetected in this little twenty-four-by-twenty-four building was unraveling as rapidly as it had been conceived. Gurney locked the door, put the key back under the black rock, and returned to his car. He rummaged through his case folder and located Scott Ashton’s cell number.

The soft baritone recording, the essence of tranquillity, invited him to leave a message that would be returned as soon as possible, conveying through its chocolate tone the feeling that all the troubles in a person’s life were ultimately manageable. Gurney identified himself and said he had a few more questions about Flores.

He checked the dashboard clock. It was 10:31. Might be a good
time to check in with Val Perry, share his initial thoughts on the case, see if she was still eager for him to pursue it. As he was about to place the call, the phone rang in his hand.