Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (31 page)

“Clever,” said Kline, smiling appreciatively. “If you’re right, Flores is a thinker. A maniac, maybe, but definitely a thinker.”

“But he’s also done things that make no sense.” Gurney stood to get himself some more coffee. “That damn bullet in the teacup—what the hell was the point of that? He stole Ashton’s hunting rifle so he could shatter his teacup? Why take a risk like that? By the way,” said Gurney in an aside to Blatt, “were you aware that Withrow Perry had a gun of the same caliber?”

“The hell are you talking about?”

“The bullet that was fired at the teacup came from a .257 Weatherby. Ashton owns one, which he reported stolen, but Perry also owns one. You might want to look into that.”

There was an uncomfortable silence as Rodriguez and Blatt both made hurried notes.

Kline looked accusingly at both of them, then turned his attention to Gurney. “Okay, what else do you know that we don’t?”

“Hard to say,” said Gurney. “How much do you know about Crazy Carl?”

“Who?”

“Husband of Kiki Muller.”

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“Maybe nothing, except for having a credible motive for killing Flores.”

“Flores wasn’t killed.”

“How do we know? He disappeared without a trace. He could be buried in somebody’s backyard.”

“Whoa, whoa, what’s all this?” Anderson was appalled, Gurney guessed, at the prospect of more work. Digging up backyards. “What are we doing here, inventing imaginary murders?”

Kline looked confused. “Where are you going with this?”

“The assumption seems to be that Flores fled the area in the company of Kiki Muller, maybe even hid out at the Muller house for a few days before leaving the area. Suppose Flores was still around when Carl came home from his stint on that ship he worked on? I assume the interview team noticed that Carl is bonkers?”

Kline took a step backward from the table, as if the panorama of the case were too broad to see from where he’d been standing. “Wait a second. If Flores is dead, he can’t be connected to the disappearances of these other girls. Or the gunshot on Ashton’s patio. Or the text message Ashton received from Flores’s cell phone.”

Gurney shrugged.

Kline shook his head in frustration. “It sounds to me like you just took everything that was starting to fit together and kicked it off the table.”

“I’m not kicking anything off the table. Personally, I don’t believe Carl is involved. I’m not even sure his wife was involved. I’m just trying to loosen things up a bit. We don’t have as many solid facts as you might think. My point is, we need to keep our minds open.” He weighed the risk of ill will inherent in what he was about to add and decided to add it, anyway. “Getting committed to the wrong hypothesis early on may be the reason the investigation hasn’t gotten anywhere.”

Kline looked at Rodriguez, who was staring at the table surface as if it were a painting of hell. “What do you think, Rod? You think we need to take a new look at it? You think maybe we’ve been trying to solve the puzzle ass backwards?”

Rodriguez just shook his head slowly. “No, that’s not what I think,” he said, his voice hoarse, tense with suppressed emotion.

Judging from the expressions around the table, Gurney wasn’t the only one taken aback when the captain, a man obsessed with projecting an aura of control, rose awkwardly from his chair and left the room as though he couldn’t bear to be in it for another minute.

A
fter the captain left, the meeting lost focus. Not that it had much focus to begin with, but the strangeness of his departure seemed to underline the incoherence of the investigation, and the discussion disintegrated. Star profiler Rebecca Holdenfield, expressing confusion about her role there, was the next to flee. Anderson and Blatt were restless, caught between the gravitational fields of their boss who was gone and the DA who was still present.

Gurney asked if any progress had been made identifying the significance of the Edward Vallory name, but none had. Anderson looked blank at the question, and Blatt dismissed it with a wave of his hand that conveyed what a useless avenue of inquiry he considered it to be.

The DA mouthed a few meaningless sentences about how profitable the meeting had been in getting everyone on the same page. Gurney didn’t think it had done that. But at least it might have gotten everyone wondering what kind of story they were reading. And it got the question of the disappearing graduates on the table.

Gurney’s final contribution to the meeting was a strong suggestion that BCI dig up some background and contact information on Alessandro and Karnala Fashion, since they constituted a common factor in the lives of the missing girls and a link between them and Jillian. Just as Kline was endorsing this pursuit, Ellen Rackoff came to the door and pointed at her watch. He checked his, looked startled, and announced with stern self-importance that he was late for a conference call with the governor. As he
departed, he expressed his confidence that they all could find their own way out. Anderson and Blatt left together, followed by Gurney and Hardwick.

Hardwick had one of the NYSP’s ubiquitous black Ford sedans. In the parking lot, he leaned against the trunk, lit a cigarette, and, without being asked, offered Gurney his take on the captain. “Little fucker is coming apart. You know what they say about control freaks—that they have to control everything outside them because everything inside’s a fucking mess. That’s Captain Rod, except the little fucker can’t keep the craziness hidden anymore.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, grimaced as he blew the smoke out. “His daughter’s a fucking cokehead. You knew that, right?”

Gurney nodded. “You told me that during the Mellery case.”

“I told you she was in Greystone? The nuthouse down in Jersey?”

“Right.” Gurney remembered a damp, bitter day the previous November when Hardwick had told him about the Rodriguez girl’s addiction problem and how it skewed her father’s judgment in cases where drugs might be involved.

“Well, she got booted out of Greystone for smuggling in roxies and for fucking her fellow patients. Latest news is that she was arrested for dealing crack at an NA meeting.”

Gurney wondered where this was going. It didn’t have the tone of a compassionate explanation of the captain’s behavior.

Hardwick took the kind of drag he’d take if he were trying to set a new record for how much smoke he could get into his lungs in three seconds. “I see you looking at me like, so what, what does this have to do with anything? Am I right?”

“The question crossed my mind.”

“The answer is, nothing. It doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with anything. Except that Rodriguez’s decisions aren’t worth shit these days. He’s a liability to the case.” He flung the half-finished cigarette down, put his foot on it, ground it into the asphalt.

Gurney took a shot at changing the subject. “Do me a favor. Follow up on Alessandro and Karnala. I don’t get the impression anyone else in there is particularly interested.”

Hardwick didn’t respond. He stood there for another minute,
staring down at the crushed butt next to his foot. “Time to go,” he finally said. He opened his car door and wrinkled his face as though assailed by a sour smell.

“Just watch out, Davey boy. The little fucker’s a time bomb, and he’s gonna go off. They always do.”

T
he drive home was miserable in a way Gurney couldn’t at first identify. He was both distracted and seeking distraction, seeking distraction and unable to find it. Every radio station was more intolerable than the one before it. Music that failed to reflect his mood struck him as idiotic, while music that did only made him feel worse. Every human voice carried within it an irritant, a revelation of stupidity or cupidity or both. Every commercial made him want to scream,
Lying bastards!

Turning off the radio refocused him on the road—refocused him on the shabby villages, the dead and dying farms, and the poisonous economic carrots being dangled in front of poor upstate towns by the gas-drilling industry.

Jesus, he was in a hell of a mood.

Why?

He let his mind drift back over the meeting, see what it would fasten on.

Ellen Rackoff, of course, in cashmere. Zero pretense of innocence. Warm and cozy as a snake. The danger itself a perverse part of the attraction.

The original evidence team’s report on the crime scene, reprised by Lieutenant Anderson, that made the murder sound like a professional assassination:
Even the traps under the bathroom and kitchen sinks had been scrubbed
.

The facts uniting the missing graduates: their common arguments with their parents, their extravagant demands that were sure
to be refused, their prior contacts with Hector and Karnala Fashion and the elusive photographer, Alessandro.

Jack Hardwick’s cold prognosis:
There’s a good a chance they’re all dead by now
.

Rodriguez’s personal agony, as the father of a troubled daughter, echoed and magnified by the potential horrors of the case in front of him.

Gurney could hear the hoarseness in the man’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting next to him in the car. It was the sound of a man being stretched out of shape, stretched like a rubber band too small to encompass everything it was given to hold—a man whose constitution lacks the flexibility to absorb the accidental elements of his own life.

Which set Gurney to wondering: Are there really any
accidental
elements? Don’t we, in some undeniable way, place ourselves in the positions in which we find ourselves? Don’t our choices, our priorities, make all the difference? He felt sick to his stomach, and suddenly he knew the reason. He was identifying with Rodriguez: the career-obsessed cop, the father without a clue.

And then—as though the turmoil of this realization were not enough, as though some malignant god were seeking to contrive the perfect external disaster to match the collision of emotions within him—he hit the deer.

He had just passed the sign that read
ENTERING BROWNVILLE
. There was no village, just the overgrown remnants of a long-abandoned river-valley farm on the left and a forested upslope on the right. A medium-size doe had emerged from the woods, hesitated, then dashed across the road far enough ahead of him that there was hardly any need to brake. But then her fawn followed her, it was too late to brake, and although he swerved as far to the left as he could, he heard and felt the terrible thump.

He pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. He looked into his rearview mirror, hoping to see nothing, hoping that it was one of those fortunate collisions from which the remarkably resilient deer ran off into the woods with only superficial damage. But that was not the case. A hundred feet behind him, a small brown body lay sprawled at the edge of the roadside drainage ditch.

He got out of the car and walked back along the shoulder, holding on to a faint hope that the fawn was only stunned and would at any moment stagger to its feet. As he got closer, the twisted position of the head and the empty stare of the open eyes took that hope away. He stopped and looked around helplessly. He saw the doe standing in the ruined farm field, watching, waiting, motionless.

There was nothing he could do.

He was sitting in his car with no recollection of having walked back to it, his breathing interrupted by small sobs. He was halfway to Walnut Crossing before he thought of checking the damage to the front end, but even then he continued on, pierced by regret, wanting only to get home.

T
he house had that peculiarly empty feeling it had when Madeleine was out. On Fridays she had dinner with three of her friends, to talk about knitting and sewing, things they were making and things they were doing, and everyone’s health, and the books they were reading.

He had the idea, formed at the emotional nadir of the drive from Brownville to Walnut Crossing, that he would follow Madeleine’s prodding and call Kyle—have an actual conversation with his son instead of another exchange of those carefully drafted, antiseptic e-mails that provided them both with the illusion of communication. Reading the edited descriptions of life’s events on the screen of a laptop bore little resemblance to hearing them related in a living voice without the smoothing process of rewrites and deletions.

He went into the den with good intentions but decided to check his voice mail and e-mail before making the call. There was one message in each format. They were both from Peggy Meeker, social-worker wife of the spider man.

On voice mail she sounded excited, almost bouncy.
“Dave, Peggy Meeker. After you mentioned Edward Vallory the other night, the name kept gnawing at me. I knew that I knew it from somewhere. Well, I found it! I remembered it from a college English course. Elizabethan drama. Vallory was a dramatist, but none of his dramas survive, which is why almost no one has ever heard of him. All that exists is the prologue to one play. But get this—his stuff was all supposedly misogynistic. He absolutely hated women! In fact, the play that this prologue was part of was reputedly about a man who killed his own
mother! I e-mailed you the existing prologue. Does this have something to do with the Perry case? I was wondering, because you were talking about that earlier in the evening. I thought about that when I read Vallory’s prologue, and it gave me the chills. Look at the e-mail. Let me know if it helps. And let me know if there’s anything more I can do for you. This is soooo exciting. Talk to you soon. Bye. Oh, and hello to Madeleine.”