Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (43 page)

“So,” said Rodriguez, summing up the central conundrum as simply as anyone could, “according to Dave Gurney, we can be absolutely certain of two things. First, Hector Flores had to pass in front of the cherry tree. Second, he couldn’t have.”

“A very interesting situation,” said Gurney, feeling the electricity in the contradiction.

“This might be a good time to take a short lunch break,” said the captain, who seemed to be feeling more frustration than electricity.

L
unch was not a social occasion, which was fine with Gurney, who was about as far from being a social animal as a man could be and still be married. Instead of gravitating to the cafeteria, everyone scattered for the allotted half hour to commune with BlackBerrys and laptops.

He might have been happier, however, with thirty minutes of macho camaraderie than he was sitting alone on a chilly bench outside the state police fortress, absorbing the latest text message he found on his phone—evidently a response to his “Tell me more” request.

It said,
YOU’RE SUCH AN INTERESTING MAN, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN MY DAUGHTERS WOULD ADORE YOU. IT WAS SO GOOD OF YOU TO COME TO THE CITY. NEXT TIME THEY WILL COME TO YOU. WHEN? WHO CAN SAY? THEY WANT IT TO BE A SURPRISE
.

Gurney stared at the words, even as they slammed his mind back to the unsettling smiles of those young women, back to the pale Montrachet lifted in a toast, back to the looming black wall of his amnesia.

He toyed with the idea of sending a message that began, “Dear Saul …” But he decided to keep his knowledge of the identity of Jykynstyl’s impersonator to himself, at least for now. He didn’t know how much that card might be worth, and he didn’t want to play it before he understood the game. Besides, holding on to it gave him, in a minuscule way, a feeling of power. Like carrying a penknife in a bad neighborhood.

•  •  •

B
y the time he reentered the conference room, he was desperate to get his mind back on the Perry case. Kline, Rodriguez, and Wigg were already seated. Anderson was approaching the table, focused fiercely on a coffee cup so full that it made walking a challenge. Blatt was at the urn, tilting it forward to extract a final black trickle. Hardwick was missing.

Rodriguez looked at his watch. “It’s time, people. Some of us are here, some of us aren’t, but that’s their problem. Time for a status report on the family interviews. Bill, you’re up.”

Anderson set his coffee on the table with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb. “Okay,” he said. He sat, opened a file folder, and began examining and rearranging its contents. “Okay. Here’s where we are. We started with a master list of all graduates for all twenty years Mapleshade has been in operation, and then we narrowed that to a list of graduates from the past five years. Five years ago is when the focus of the place changed from a general adolescent population with behavioral problems to female adolescent sex abusers.”

“Convicted offenders?” asked Kline.

“No. All private interventions through family members, therapists, doctors. Mapleshade’s population is basically warped sicko kids whose families are trying to keep them out of the juvie court system or just get them the hell out of town, out of the house, before they get caught doing what they’re doing. The parents send them to Mapleshade, pay the tuition, and hope that Ashton solves the problem.”

“And does he?”

“Hard to say. The families won’t talk about it, so all we have to go by is a cross-check of graduate names against the national sex-offender database to see if any of them got tangled up with the legal system as adults since leaving Mapleshade. So far that isn’t turning up much. A couple from the graduating classes of four and five years ago, none from the past three years. Hard to say what that means.”

Kline shrugged. “Could mean that Ashton knows what he’s doing. Or it could just reflect the fact that abuse perpetrated by females is grossly underreported to the police and tends not to be prosecuted.”

“How grossly?” asked Blatt.

“Excuse me?”

“How grossly underreported and underprosecuted do you think it is?”

Kline leaned back in his chair, looking annoyed at what he obviously considered a distraction. His tone was stiff, academic, impatient. “Some data suggests that approximately twenty percent of all women and ten percent of all men were sexually abused as children, and that the perpetrator was female in about ten percent of the total cases. Bottom line, we’re talking about millions of instances of sexual abuse and hundreds of thousands of instances in which the perp was female. But you know as well as I do, there’s always been a double standard—a reluctance by families to report mothers, sisters, and baby-sitters to the police, a reluctance by law enforcement to take abuse accusations against young women seriously, a reluctance by courts to convict them. Society can’t quite seem to accept the reality of female sexual predators like we accept the reality of male predators. But some studies suggest that a lot of men convicted of rape were sexually abused by females when they were children.” Kline shook his head, hesitated. “Jesus, I could tell you stories from right here in this county—cases that come into family court through social services. You know about this stuff—mothers pimping out their own kids, selling porno videos of them having sex with each other. Jesus. And what finally works its way into the legal system is just a fraction of what’s going on. But you get my point. Enough said, okay? We should get back to the agenda.”

Blatt shrugged.

Rodriguez nodded in agreement. “Okay, Bill, let’s move on with the phone-call report.”

Anderson shuffled once more through his papers, which were spreading out over a larger area of the table. “The addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information we used were the most recent on file. The number of graduates within the five-year target period is a hundred and fifty-two. Average is about thirty per year. Of the hundred and fifty-two, we think we have currently valid contact information for a hundred and twenty-six. Initial calls have been placed to all hundred and twenty-six. Of those calls, forty resulted
in immediate contact, with either the graduate herself or a family member. Of the remaining eighty-six for whom we left messages, twelve had gotten back to us as of nine forty-five this morning.”

“That makes fifty-two live contacts,” said Kline quickly. “What’s the bottom line?”

“Hard to say.” Anderson sounded like everything in his life was hard.

“Jesus, Lieutenant …”

“What I mean is, the results are mixed.” He fished another sheet of paper out of his pile. “Out of the fifty-two, we spoke directly to the graduate herself in eleven instances. No problem there, right? I mean, if we spoke to them, they’re not missing.”

“How about the other forty-one?”

“In twenty-nine instances, the individual we spoke to—parent, spouse, sibling, roommate, significant other—claimed to know the location of the graduate and to be in contact with her.”

Kline was keeping a running tally on a pad. “And the other twelve?”

“One told us her daughter had died in an automobile accident. One was extremely vague, probably high on something, didn’t seem to know much of anything. One other claimed to know the exact whereabouts of the subject but refused to provide any further information.”

Kline scribbled something on his pad. “And the other nine?”

“The other nine—all parents or stepparents—said they had no idea where their daughter was.”

There was a speculative silence in the room, broken by Gurney. “How many of those disappearances began with an argument about a car?”

Anderson consulted his notes, frowning at them as though they were the cause of his weariness. “Six.”

“Wow,” said Kline with a soft little whistle. “And that’s in addition to the ones Ashton and the Liston girl already told Gurney about?”

“Right.”

“Jesus. So the total is close to a dozen. And there are still a hell
of a lot of families we haven’t spoken to yet. Wow. Anyone want to comment on this?”

“I think we owe a thank-you to Dave Gurney!” said Hardwick, who had slipped into the room unnoticed. He glanced at Rodriguez. “If he hadn’t nudged us in this direction …”

“Nice you could find time to join us,” said the captain.

“Let’s not get carried away with crazy theories,” said Anderson glumly. “There’s still no evidence of abduction and no evidence of any other related crime. We could be overreacting. All this might be nothing more than a few rebellious kids cooking up a little scheme together.”

“Dave?” said Kline, ignoring Anderson. “You want to say anything at this juncture?”

“One question for Bill. What’s the pattern of distribution of the missing girls over the five graduating classes you looked at?”

Anderson gave his head a little shake as if he hadn’t heard right. “Excuse me?”

“The girls who disappeared—which graduating classes were they in?”

Anderson sighed, went back to flipping through his pile of papers. “Whatever you need,” he muttered, generalizing to no one in particular, “it’s always on the bottom.” He poked through at least a dozen pieces of paper before he fastened on one of them. “Okay … looks like … 2009 … 2008 … 2007 … 2006. And that’s it. None from 2005. Earliest disappearances, if you want to call them that, were from the May 2006 graduating class.”

“So, all within the past four years,” concluded Kline. “Or, actually, the past three and a half years.”

“So what?” said Blatt, shrugging. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“For one thing,” suggested Gurney, “it means that the disappearances began occurring shortly after Hector Flores arrived on the scene.”

K
line turned toward Gurney. “That ties in with what Ashton’s assistant told you. Didn’t she say that the two graduates she couldn’t get in touch with had gotten interested in Flores when he was working on the grounds at Mapleshade?”

“Yes.”

“This is the damnedest thing,” Kline went on excitedly. “Let’s assume for a minute that Flores is the key to everything—that once we figure out what brought him here, we’ll understand everything else. We’ll understand Jillian Perry’s murder, Kiki Muller’s murder, how and why he hid the machete where he did, why the camera didn’t pick him up, the disappearance of God only knows how many Mapleshade graduates …”

“That last thing could be a harem thing,” said Blatt.

“A what?” said Kline.

“Like Charlie Manson.”

“You’re saying he might have been looking for followers? For impressionable young women?”

“For female sex maniacs. That’s what Mapleshade’s all about, right?”

Gurney looked at Rodriguez to see how he might react to Blatt’s comment in light of the situation with his daughter, but if he felt anything, he was hiding it under a thoughtful scowl.

Kline’s mental computer seemed to be back in high gear, as he presumably weighed the media benefits of trying and convicting his very own Manson. He tried to build on Blatt’s idea. “So you’re
imagining that Flores had a little commune tucked away somewhere, and he talked these women into leaving home, covering their tracks, and going there?”

He turned to the captain, seemed deterred by the scowl, and addressed Hardwick instead. “You have any thoughts on that?”

Hardwick responded with the ironic leer. “I was thinking Jim Jones myself. Charismatic leader with a congregation of nubile acolytes.”

“The hell is Jim Jones?” asked Blatt.

Kline answered. “Jonestown. The massacre-suicide thing. Cyanide in the Kool-Aid. Wiped out nine hundred people.”

“Oh, yeah, the Kool-Aid.” Blatt grinned. “Right, Jonestown. Totally fucked up.”

Hardwick raised a cautionary finger. “Beware of men who invite you to places in the jungle they’ve named after themselves.”

The captain’s scowl was reaching thunderstorm intensity.

“Dave?” said Kline. “You have any ideas about Flores’s grand plan?”

“The problem with the commune thing is that Flores lived on Ashton’s property. If he was gathering these women and stashing them somewhere, it would have to be nearby. I don’t think that’s what it was about.”

“What, then?”

“I think it’s about what he told us it’s about. ‘For all the reasons I have written.’ ”

“And those reasons add up to what?”

“Revenge.”

“For?”

“If we take the Edward Vallory prologue seriously, for some major sexual offense.”

It was clear that Kline loved conflict. So it didn’t surprise Gurney that the next opinion he solicited was from Anderson.

“Bill?”

The man shook his head. “Revenge usually takes the form of a physical attack, broken bones, murder. In all these so-called disappearances there isn’t even a hint of that.” He leaned back in
his chair. “Not a single
hint
of it. I think we need to take a more evidence-based approach.” He smiled, seemingly pleased with this neat summation.

Kline’s gaze settled on Sergeant Wigg, whose own gaze was, as always, on her computer screen. “Robin, anything you want to add?”

She answered immediately, without looking up. “Too many things don’t make sense. There’s bad data somewhere in the equation.”

“What kind of bad data?”

Before she could respond, the conference room’s door opened and a lean woman who could have inspired a Grant Wood painting stepped into the room. Her gray eyes settled on the captain.

“Sorry to interrupt, sir.” Her voice sounded like it was sharpened by the same cold winds as her face. “There’s been a significant development.”

“Come in,” commanded Rodriguez. “And close the door.”

She closed it, then stood as rigidly as an army private awaiting permission to speak.