Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (42 page)

“You’re his father.”

“I know.”

“Well, then.” It was a conclusive statement. She began to clear the dishes.

He watched her make two trips to the sink. When she came back with a damp sponge and paper towel to wipe the table, he said, “He’s very focused on money.”

She lifted the tray that held the napkins so she could wipe under it. “So what?”

“He wants to be a trial lawyer.”

“Not necessarily a bad thing.”

“It seems to be all about the big money, big house, big car.”

“Maybe he wants to be noticed.”

“Noticed?”

“Little boys like to be noticed by their fathers,” she said.

“Kyle is hardly a little boy.”

“But that’s exactly what he is,” she insisted. “And if you refuse to notice him, then he’ll have to settle for impressing the rest of the world.”

“I’m not
refusing
to do anything. That’s psychobabble bullshit.”

“Maybe you’re right. Who knows?” Madeleine had perfected the art of sidestepping an attack, of remaining untouched. It left him lurching into empty space.

He continued to sit at the table as she washed the dishes. His eyes began to close. As he’d discovered many times before, the by-product of intense anxiety is exhaustion. He drifted into a kind of half sleep.

“Y
ou should come to bed.” It was Madeleine’s voice.

He opened his eyes. She’d turned off all but one light and was on her way out of the kitchen with a book under her arm. The drooping position of his head on his chest had produced a sharp pain in his collarbone. As he straightened himself, he discovered a matching pain in the back of his neck. Instead of refreshing him, his doze at the table had reconstituted his worries.

His level of agitation would make real sleep impossible. But he had to do something to avoid bouncing from one Saul Steck horror scenario to another.

He could return Sheridan Kline’s phone call. The man had left that vague message for him about the Skard family. He’d already followed up on it with Hardwick, but maybe the DA knew more than Hardwick. Of course, the DA’s office would be closed. It was Sunday night.

He did have Kline’s personal cell number. Because he had it from the days of the Mellery case, it hadn’t seemed appropriate to use it, uninvited, in connection with the current matter. But right now protocol seemed less important than maintaining his sanity.

He went into the den, got the number, and made the call. He was prepared to leave a message and get a return call later, figuring that the odds were in favor of a control freak like Kline wanting phone conversations to occur on his own schedule. So he was surprised when the man answered.

“Gurney?”

“I apologize for calling so late.”

“I thought you’d call me back this afternoon at the office. Chasing down that Karnala thing was your idea.”

“Sorry, I got a little tangled up. In your phone message, you asked if I’d heard of the Skard family.”

“That’s where the Karnala thread led us. Familiar name to you?”

“Yes and no.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“What I meant, Sheridan, is that it struck me as familiar, but I don’t know why. Jack Hardwick filled me in on the fact that the Skards are bad guys with Sardinian roots. But I still can’t place where I know the name from. I do know that I came upon it very recently.”

“That’s all Hardwick told you?”

“He told me that no Skard has ever been convicted of anything. And that whatever business Karnala Fashion may be in, it’s not the fashion business.”

“So you know as much I know. What else did you call me for?”

“I’d like to be involved on a more official basis.”

“Meaning what?”

“Updates, invitations to meetings.”

“Why?”

“I’ve gotten kind of attached to the case. And so far my instincts about it have been pretty good.”

“That’s an open question.”

“Look, Sheridan, all I’m saying is, we can help each other. The more I know and the quicker I know it, the more help I can be.”

There was a long silence. Gurney’s intuition told him it was more technique than indecision on Kline’s part. He waited.

Kline emitted a humorless laugh. Gurney kept waiting.

“You know Rodriguez can’t stand you, right?”

“Sure.”

“And you know Blatt can’t stand you, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“And that even Bill Anderson isn’t very fond of you?”

“Right.”

“So you’ll be about as welcome at BCI as a fart in an elevator. You realize that?”

“I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute.”

There was another silence, followed by another chilly Kline chuckle.

“Here’s what I’ll do: I’m going to tell everyone we have a Gurney problem. Gurney is a loose cannon. And the best way to control a loose cannon is to keep an eye on it, keep it on a short leash, keep it in the corral. And the way I plan to keep an eye on you is to have you over here a lot, sharing your loose-cannon thoughts with us. How does that sound to you?”

Keeping a loose cannon on a short leash in a corral sounded to Gurney like a symptom of mental disintegration. “Sounds workable, sir.”

“Good. There’s a meeting at BCI tomorrow morning at ten. Be there.” Kline hung up without saying good-bye.

F
or the rest of the evening, Gurney felt both energized and calmed by the conversation and its promise of ongoing involvement.

He was pleased and rather surprised to still feel the same way when he awoke at sunrise the following day. In an effort to feed that feeling, to stay within the comparatively safe and solid confines of a world in which he was the hunter and not the quarry, he reviewed the Perry file for the tenth time while he had his morning coffee. Then he called Rebecca Holdenfield’s number and left a message asking if he could drop by her Albany office that afternoon following his meeting at BCI.

Making calls, returning calls, making appointments—the activity created a sense of momentum. He called Val Perry’s number and was shunted into her voice mail. He’d barely said, “This is Dave Gurney,” when she picked up, surprising him. He hadn’t figured her for an early riser.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

Unprepared for an actual conversation, he replied, “Just wanted to touch base.”

“Oh? And …?” She sounded edgy, but maybe no edgier than usual.

“Does the name Skard mean anything to you?”

“No. Should it?”

“I was just wondering if Jillian had ever mentioned it.”

“Jillian never mentioned anything. It wasn’t like she
shared
things with me. I thought I’d made that clear.”

“Perfectly clear, several times. But some questions have to be asked, even if I’m ninety-nine percent sure what the answer’s going to be.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Did Jillian ever ask you or your husband to buy her an expensive car?”

“There was hardly anything Jillian didn’t demand at some point, so I suppose she must have. On the other hand, she made it clear from the time she was twelve that Withrow and I were irrelevant to her happiness, that she could always find a rich man to give her whatever she wanted, so as far as she was concerned, we could go fuck ourselves.” She paused, perhaps savoring the shock value of her observations. “I’m on my way out. Any more questions?”

“That’s it for now, Mrs. Perry. Thank you for your time.”

Like Sheridan Kline the night before, Val Perry hung up without bothering to say good-bye. Whatever it was that Gurney was contributing to the investigation of her daughter’s murder, it clearly wasn’t what she’d been hoping for.

A
t 9:50
A.M
. he pulled in to the parking lot of the fortresslike state police facility where his 10:00
A.M
. meeting was to take place. During the minute or so that he was searching for a space, his phone rang twice. The first was a voice call, the second a text message. He was looking forward to at least one of them being from Rebecca Holdenfield.

As soon as he’d parked, he took out his phone and checked the text message first. The source was a cell number with a Manhattan area code.

As he read the message, a flood of fear rose from his gut into his chest.

ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT MY GIRLS? THEY’RE THINKING ABOUT YOU
.

He reread it, then reread it again. He looked at the originating number. The fact that the sender hadn’t bothered to block it surely meant it was assigned to an untraceable prepaid phone. But it also meant he could send a reply message.

After dismissing the expressions of fury and bravado that came
to mind, he decided on three unemotional little words:
TELL ME MORE
.

As he pressed “send,” he noted that the time was 9:59. He hurried into the building.

When he arrived in the bleak institutional conference room, the six chairs at the oblong table were already taken. The closest thing to a greeting he received was Hardwick pointing at a handful of folding chairs leaning against the wall by the coffee urn. Rodriguez, Anderson, and Blatt ignored him. Gurney could imagine their unenthusiastic reactions to the DA’s artful nonsense about controlling the loose cannon by inviting him to their meetings.

Sergeant Wigg, a wiry redhead familiar to Gurney as the efficient evidence-team coordinator from the Mellery affair, was sitting at the far end of the table studying the screen of her laptop—exactly the way he’d remembered her. Her main agenda would be the pursuit of factual certainty and logical coherence. Gurney opened his folding chair and placed it at the end of the table facing her. It was 10:05 on the wall clock.

Sheridan Kline frowned at his watch. “Okay, people. We’re running a little late. I’ve got a tight schedule today. Maybe we could start with anything new, significant progress, promising directions?”

Rodriguez cleared his throat.

“Dave’s got some news,” interjected Hardwick, “a peculiar thing at the crime scene. Might make a good way to kick off the meeting.”

Kline’s eyes widened. “What now?”

Gurney had intended to wait until later in the meeting to bring up the problem, in the hope that some piece of information along the way might cast light on it. But now that Hardwick was forcing the issue, it would be awkward to delay it.

“We’re imagining that after killing Jillian, Flores went out through the woods to the spot where we found the machete, is that right?” said Gurney.

Rodriguez adjusted his steel-rimmed glasses. “
Imagining?
I’d say we have conclusive evidence to that effect.”

Gurney sighed. “Problem is, we have some video data that doesn’t support that hypothesis.”

Kline went into rapid-blinking mode. “Video data?”

Gurney painstakingly explained how the continuous visibility of the tree trunk in the reception video proved that Flores could not have taken the necessary route through the woods, since anyone taking such a route would have to pass between the camera in that corner of the property and the tree, and he would have to appear, albeit fleetingly, in the picture.

Rodriguez was frowning like a man who suspected he was being tricked but didn’t know how. Anderson was frowning like a man trying to stay awake. Wigg looked up from her laptop screen, which Gurney interpreted as a sign of high interest.

“So he went around the long way, in back of the tree,” said Blatt. “I don’t see the problem.”

“The problem, Arlo, is the terrain. I’m sure you’ve checked it out?”

“What terrain problem are you talking about?”

“The ravine. In order to get from the cottage to the place the machete was found without walking in front of that tree would require someone to go straight back from the cottage, then slide down a long, steep slope with a lot of loose stones, then travel another five hundred feet on the rocky, uneven bottom of the ravine to get to the first place where there’s any possibility of climbing back out. And even there the loose stones and dirt make it no easy thing. Not to mention that the point at which you get back on level ground is nowhere near the place where the machete was found.”

Blatt sighed as though he were already aware of all this and it made no difference. “Just because it wasn’t easy doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”

“Another problem is the time it would take.”

“Meaning?” asked Kline.

“I checked out that area pretty carefully. Going via the ravine route to the machete site would just take too damn long. I don’t think he’d want to be scrambling around back there when the body was discovered and people started swarming all over the place. Plus, there are two bigger problems. One: Why make it so god-awfully difficult, when he could have ditched the machete anywhere? Two—and this is pretty much the clincher: The scent trail follows the route in front of the tree, not behind it.”

“Wait a second,” said Rodriguez. “Aren’t you contradicting yourself? You’re saying that all those factors prove that Flores took the route in front of the tree, but the video proves he didn’t. What on earth does that add up to?”

“An equation with a serious flaw,” said Gurney, “but I’ll be damned if I can see what it is.”

For the next hour and a half, the group questioned him about the reliability of the video’s time code, the potential for dropped frames, the position of the cherry tree in relation to the cottage and the machete and the ravine. They retrieved the crime-scene sketches from the master case file, passed them around the room, studied them. They went off on brief tangents about the fabled talents and accomplishments of K-9 teams. They debated the alternative scenarios for Flores’s disappearance after depositing the murder weapon, for Kiki Muller’s possible involvement as an accessory after the fact, and when and why she’d been killed. They pursued a few speculative notions concerning the psychopathology of cutting off a victim’s head. At the end of it all, however, the basic puzzle seemed no closer to solution.