Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (6 page)

She took in her surroundings with a few appraising glances that seemed to absorb everything and reveal nothing.
An ingrained habit of circumspection
, thought Gurney.

She walked toward him with the hint of a grimace—or was it the customary set of her mouth?

“Mr. Gurney, Val Perry. I appreciate your making time for me,” she said, extending her hand. “Or should I call you Detective Gurney?”

“I left the title in the city when I retired. Call me Dave.” They shook hands. The intensity of her gaze and strength of her grip surprised him. “Would you like to come inside?”

She hesitated, glancing around the garden and the small bluestone patio. “Can we sit out here?”

The question surprised him. Even though the sun was now well above the eastern ridge in a cloudless sky and most of the dew was gone from the grass, the morning was still chilly.

“Seasonal affective disorder,” she said with an explanatory smile. “Do you know what that is?”

“Yes.” He returned her smile. “I think I have a mild case of it myself.”

“I have more than a mild case. From this time of year on, I need as much light, preferably sun, as possible. Or I really do want to kill myself. So if you don’t mind, Dave, perhaps we could sit out here?” It wasn’t really a question.

The detective part of his brain, dominant and hardwired, unaffected by the technicality of retirement, wondered about her seasonal-disorder story, wondered if there was another reason.
An eccentric control need, a desire to make others conform to her whims? A desire, for whatever reason, to keep him off balance? Neurotic claustrophobia? An effort to minimize the risk of being recorded? And if being recorded was a worry, did it have a practical or paranoid basis?

He led her to the patio that separated the French doors from the
asparagus bed. He indicated a couple of folding chairs on either side of a small café table Madeleine had purchased at an auction. “Is this all right?”

“It’s fine,” she said, pulling one of the chairs out from the table and sitting on it without bothering to brush off the seat.

No concern about ruining her obviously pricey slacks. Ditto the ecru leather handbag she tossed on the still-damp tabletop
.

She studied his face with interest. “How much information has Investigator Hardwick already given you?”

Hard edge on the voice, hard look in the almond eyes
.

“He gave me the basic facts surrounding the events leading up to and following the … the murder of your daughter. Mrs. Perry, if I may stop for a moment. I need to tell you before we go on how terribly sorry I am for your loss.”

At first she didn’t react at all. Then she nodded, but the movement was so slight it could have been nothing more than a tremor.

“Thank you,” she said abruptly. “I appreciate that.”

Clearly she didn’t
.

“But my loss is not the issue. The issue is Hector Flores.” She articulated the name with tightened lips as though biting down defiantly on a bad tooth. “What did Hardwick tell you about him?”

“He said there was clear and convincing evidence of his guilt … that he was a strange, controversial character … that his background is still undetermined and his motivation uncertain. Current location unknown.”

“Current location unknown!” She repeated the phrase with a kind of ferocity, leaning toward him over the little table, placing her palms on the moist metal surface. Her wedding ring was a simple platinum band, but her engagement ring was crowned with the largest diamond he’d ever seen. “You summed it up perfectly,” she went on, her eyes as wildly bright as the stone. “ ‘Current location unknown.’ That’s not acceptable. Not endurable. I’m hiring you to put an end to it.”

He sighed softly. “I think we may be getting a little ahead of ourselves.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” The pressure of her hands on the tabletop had turned her knuckles white.

He answered almost sleepily, an inverted reaction he’d always had to displays of emotion. “I don’t know yet if it makes any sense for me to get involved in a situation that’s the subject of an active police investigation.”

Her lips twitched into an ugly smile. “How much do you want?”

He shook his head slowly. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“What do you want? Name it.”

“I have no idea what I want, Mrs. Perry. There are a lot of things I don’t know.”

She took her hands off the table and placed them in her lap, interlacing the fingers as though it were a technique to maintain self-control. “I’ll keep it simple. You find Hector Flores. You arrest him or kill him. Whichever you do, I’ll give you whatever you want.
Whatever you want.
”

Gurney leaned back from the table, letting his gaze drift to the asparagus patch. At the far end of it, a red hummingbird feeder hung from a shepherd’s crook. He could hear the rising and falling pitch of the buzzing wings as two of the tiny birds swooped viciously at each other—each claiming sole right to the sugar water, or so it seemed. On the other hand, it might be some strange remnant of a spring mating dance, and what looked like a killer instinct might be another instinct altogether.

He made an effort to focus his attention on Val Perry’s eyes, trying to discern the reality behind the beauty—the actual contents of this perfect vessel. There was rage in her, no doubt of that. Desperation. A difficult past—he would bet on that. Regret. Loneliness, though she would not admit to the vulnerability that word implied. Intelligence. Impulsiveness and stubbornness—the impulsiveness to grab hold of something without thinking, the stubbornness to never let it go. And something darker. A hatred of her own life?

Enough
, he said to himself. Too easy to confuse speculation with insight. Too easy to fall in love with a wild guess and follow it over a cliff.

“Tell me about your daughter,” he said.

Something in her expression shifted, as if she, too, were putting aside a certain train of thought.

“Jillian was difficult.” Her announcement had the dramatic
tone of the opening sentence of a story read aloud. He suspected that whatever followed would be something she’d said many times before. “More than difficult,” she continued. “Jillian was dependent on medication to remain merely
difficult
and not utterly impossible. She was wild, narcissistic, promiscuous, conniving, vicious. Addicted to oxies, roxies, Ecstasy, and crack cocaine. A world-class liar. Dangerously precocious. Horribly attuned to the weaknesses of other people. Unpredictably violent. With an unhealthy passion for unhealthy men. And that’s with the benefit of the finest therapy money could buy.” Oddly excited by this litany of abuse, she sounded more like a sadist hacking at a stranger with a razor than a mother describing the emotional disorders of her child. “Did Hardwick tell you what I’m telling you about Jillian?” she asked.

“I don’t recall those specific details.”

“What
did
he tell you?”

“He mentioned that she came from a family with a lot of money.”

She made a loud, grating sound—a sound he was surprised to hear coming from so delicate a mouth. He was even more surprised to realize that it was a burst of laughter.

“Oh, yes!” she cried, the harshness of the laugh still in her voice. “We’re definitely a family with a lot of money. You might say we have a
shitload
of it.” She articulated the vulgarity with a contemptuous relish. “Does it shock you that I don’t sound the way a bereaved parent is supposed to sound?”

The chilling specter of his own loss limited his response, making speech difficult. He finally said, “I’ve seen stranger reactions to death than yours, Mrs. Perry. I’m not sure how we’re … how someone in your circumstances … is supposed to sound.”

She seemed to be considering this. “You say you’ve seen stranger
reactions
to death, but have you ever seen a stranger death? A stranger death than Jillian’s?”

He didn’t answer. The question sounded histrionic. The more Gurney looked into those intense eyes, the harder it became to assemble what he saw into one personality. Had she always been so fragmented, or was there something about her daughter’s murder that broke her into these incompatible pieces?

“Tell me more about Jillian,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Apart from the personal characteristics you mentioned, do you know anything about your daughter’s life that might have given this Flores a motive for killing her?”

“You’re asking me why Hector Flores did what he did? I have no idea. Neither do the police. They’ve spent the past four months bouncing back and forth between two theories, both idiotic. One is that Hector was gay, secretly in love with Scott Ashton, resentful of Jillian’s relationship with him, and driven by jealousy to kill her. And the opportunity to kill her in her wedding dress would be irresistible to his drama-queen sensibility. Makes a nice story. Their other theory contradicts the first. A marine engineer and his wife lived next door to Scott. The engineer was away a lot on ships. The wife disappeared the same time Hector did. So the police geniuses conclude that they were having an affair, which Jillian found out about and threatened to reveal to get back at Hector, with whom she was also having an affair, and one thing led to another, and—”

“And he cut off her head at the wedding reception to keep her quiet?” Gurney broke in, incredulous. Hearing himself, he immediately regretted the brutality of the comment and was about to apologize.

But Val Perry showed no reaction to it. “I told you, they’re morons. According to them, Hector Flores was either a closeted homosexual pining madly for the love of his employer or a macho Latino screwing every woman in sight and using his machete on anyone who objected. Maybe they’ll flip a coin to decide which fairy tale they believe.”

“How much contact did you personally have with Flores?”

“None. I never had the pleasure of meeting him. Unfortunately, I have a very vivid picture of him in my mind. He lives there in my mind, with no other address. As you said, ‘current location unknown.’ I have a feeling he’ll live there until he’s captured or dead. With your help I look forward to solving that problem.”

“Mrs. Perry, you used the word ‘dead’ a few times, so I need to make something clear, so there’s no misunderstanding. I’m not a hit
man. If that’s part of the assignment, spoken or unspoken, you need to look elsewhere—starting now.”

She studied his face. “The assignment is to find Hector Flores … and bring him to justice. That’s it. That’s the assignment.”

“Then I need to ask you …” he began, then stopped as a grayish brown movement in the pasture caught his attention. A coyote—likely the one he’d seen the day before—was crossing the field. He followed its progress until it disappeared into the maple copse on the far side of the pond.

“What is it?” she asked, turning in her chair.

“Maybe a loose dog. Sorry for the distraction. What I want to know is, why me? If the money supply is as unlimited as you say, you could hire a small army. Or you could hire people who would be, shall we say, less careful about the fugitive’s availability for trial. So why me?”

“Jack Hardwick recommended you. He said you were the best. The very best. He said if anyone could get to the bottom of it—resolve it, end it—you could.”

“And you believed him?”

“Shouldn’t I have?”

“Why did you?”

She considered this for a while, as though a great deal depended on the answer. “He was the initial officer on the case. The chief investigator. I found him rude, obscene, cynical, jabbing people with the sharp end of a stick whenever he could. Horrible. But almost always right. This may not make much sense to you, but I understand dreadful people like Jack Hardwick. I even trust them. So here we are, Detective Gurney.”

He stared at the asparagus ferns, calculating, for no reason he was aware of, the compass point to which they were leaning en masse. Presumably, it would be 180 degrees away from the prevailing winds on the mountain, into the lee of the storms. Val Perry seemed content with his silence. He could still hear the modulated buzzing of the hummingbirds’ wings as they continued their ritual combat—if that’s what it was. It sometimes went on for an hour or more. It was hard to understand how such a prolonged confrontation, or seduction, could be an efficient use of energy.

“You mentioned a few minutes ago that Jillian had an unhealthy interest in unhealthy men. Were you including Scott Ashton in that description?”

“God, no, of course not. Scott was the best thing that ever happened to Jillian.”

“You approved of their marriage decision?”

“
Approved?
How quaint!”

“I’ll put it another way. Were you pleased?”

Her mouth smiled while her eyes regarded him coolly. “Jillian had certain significant
 … deficits
, shall we say? Deficits that demanded professional intervention for the foreseeable future. Being married to a psychiatrist, one of the best in the field, could certainly be an advantage. I know that sounds … wrong, somehow. Exploitative, perhaps? But Jillian was unique in many ways. And uniquely in need of help.”

Gurney raised a quizzical eyebrow.

She sighed. “Are you aware that Dr. Ashton is the director of the special high school Jillian attended?”

“Wouldn’t that create a conflict of—”

“No,” she interrupted, sounding like she was accustomed to arguing the point. “He’s a psychiatrist, but when she was enrolled at the school, he was never
her
psychiatrist. So there was no ethical issue, no doctor-patient thing. Naturally, people talked. Gossip-gossip-gossip. ‘He’s a doctor, she was a patient, blah, blah, blah.’ But the legal, ethical reality was more like a former student marrying the president of her college. She left that place when she was seventeen. She and Scott didn’t become personally involved for another year and a half. End of story. Of course, it wasn’t the end of the gossip.” Defiance flashed in her eyes.

“Seems like skating close to the edge,” commented Gurney, as much to himself as to Val Perry.

Again she burst into her shocking laugh. “If Jillian thought they were skating close to the edge, for her that would have been the best thing about it. The edge was where she always wanted to be.”