Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (57 page)

“Do you think she knew … that she and Jillian both knew …?”

“Knew what was happening to the girls they were helping
Flores recruit? I doubt it. They probably swallowed the basic sales pitch Hector was serving up—just introducing girls with special interests to men with special interests and earning a nice commission for their efforts. Of course, I don’t know any of that for sure. It’s possible that this whole case is one big trapdoor to hell, and I don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on.”

“Shit, Gurney. Your total lack of faith in your own theories is really encouraging. What do you suggest for our next move?”

Gurney was saved from the discomfort of having no answer by the ring of his cell phone.

It was Robin Wigg. She began, as usual, without any preamble. “I have preliminary results from the lab tests on the boots found in the Liston residence. Captain Rodriguez has authorized me to discuss them with you, since they were performed at your suggestion. Is this a convenient time?”

“Absolutely. What have you got?”

“A lot of what you might expect, plus something you wouldn’t expect. Shall I start with that?” There was something about Wigg’s calm, businesslike contralto that Gurney had always liked. Regardless of the content of the words, the tone said that order could prevail over chaos.

“Please. The solutions are usually in the surprises.”

“Yes, I find that to be true. The surprise was the presence on the boots of a particular pheromone: methyl
p
-hydroxybenzoate. How knowledgeable are you in this area?”

“I skipped chemistry in high school. You’d better start at the beginning.”

“Actually, it’s pretty simple. Pheromones are glandular secretions meant to transmit information from one animal to another. Specific pheromones secreted by an individual animal may attract, warn, calm, or excite another individual. Methyl
p
-hydroxybenzoate is a powerful canine-attractant pheromone, and it was identified in high concentrations on both boots.”

“And the effect of that would be …?”

“Any dog, but especially a tracking dog, would easily and eagerly follow a trail created by a person wearing those boots.”

“How would someone get access to this stuff?”

“Some canine pheromones are available commercially for use in animal shelters and behavior-modification regimens. It could have been acquired that way or from direct contact with a bitch in estrus.”

“Interesting. Is there any unintentional way you can think of for a chemical like that to get on someone’s boots?”

“In the concentrations in which it was found? Short of an explosion in a pheromone-bottling facility, no.”

“Very interesting. Thank you, Sergeant. I’m going to put Jack Hardwick on the phone. I’d appreciate your repeating to him what you told me—in case he has questions I can’t answer.”

Hardwick had one question. “When you call it an attractant pheromone secreted by a bitch in estrus, what you mean is a female sex scent no male dog could ignore, right?”

He listened to her brief answer, ended the call, and handed the phone back to Gurney, looking excited. “Holy shit. The irresistible scent of a bitch in heat. What do you make of that, Sherlock?”

“It’s obvious that Flores wanted to be absolutely sure that the K-9 dog would follow that trail like an arrow. He may even have done some Internet research and discovered that the state tracking dogs are all males.”

“Which obviously means that he wanted us to find the machete.”

“No doubt about it,” said Gurney. “And he wanted us to find it fast. Both times.”

“So what’s the scenario? He lops off their heads, puts on his doctored boots, scurries out into the woods, ditches the machete, comes back into the crime scene, takes off the boots, and … then what?”

“In the case of Savannah, he just walks away, drives away, whatever,” said Gurney. “The Jillian situation is the impossible one.”

“Because of the video problem?”

“That, plus the question of where could he have gone after he came back to the cottage?”

“Plus the more basic question: Why would he bother to come back at all?”

Gurney smiled. “That’s the one little piece of it I think I understand. He came back to leave the boots in plain sight so the tracking dog would be excited by that scent in the cottage and immediately follow it out to the murder weapon. He wanted us to find it fast.”

“Which brings us back to the big
why
?”

“It also brings us back one more time to the machete itself. I’m telling you, Jack, figure out how it got to where you found it without anyone being caught on camera and everything else will fall in place.”

“You really think so?”

“You don’t?”

Hardwick shrugged. “Some people say follow the money. You, on the other hand, are big on what you call ‘discrepancies.’ So you say follow the piece that makes no sense.”

“And what do you say?”

“I say follow the thing that keeps coming up again and again. In this case the thing that keeps coming up again and again is sex. In fact, as far as I can see, everything in this weird-ass case, one way or another, is about sex. Edward Vallory. Tirana Zog. Jordan Ballston. Saul Steck. The whole Skard criminal enterprise. Scott Ashton’s psychiatric specialty. The possible photographs that have you scared shitless. Even the fucking trail to the machete turns out to be about sex—the overwhelming sexual power of a bitch in heat. You know what I think, ace? I think it’s time you and I visited the epicenter of this sexual earthquake—the Mapleshade Residential Academy.”

He was unhappy with the details of the final solution, its crude departure from the elegant simplicity of a razor-sharp blade, a carefully discriminating blade. But he could see no clearer way to the end of the road. He was appalled by the imprecision of it all, the abandonment of the fine distinctions that were his forte, but had come to view it as unavoidable. The collateral casualties would simply be a necessary evil. He took what solace he could in reminding himself that his planned action was the very definition—the very heart and soul—of a just war. What he was about to do was undeniably necessary, and if an action was necessary, then its unavoidable consequences were justified. The deaths of innocent children could be regarded as regrettable. But who was to say they were innocent? No one at Mapleshade was truly innocent. One could argue that they weren’t even children. They might not be adults legally, but they weren’t children, either. Not in any normal sense of the term
.

So the day had arrived; the event was upon him; the opportunity, not taken, would not come again. Discipline and objectivity must be his watchwords. It was no time for flinching. He must hang on to the reality of the thing
.

Edward Vallory had seen that reality with perfect clarity
.

The hero of
The Spanish Gardener
didn’t flinch
.

Now it was his turn to deliver the final blow to the whores and liars, the bits and pieces of the devil
.

“She’s a nice little piece.” A revealing phrase. Think of the question it raises. A piece of what?

Voice of the snake. Slithering mouth. Sweat on the lips
.

“Onto the heads of these serpents I shall bring down my sword of fire, and not one will slither away
.

“Into the slime of their hearts I shall drive my stake of fire, and not one will continue to beat
.

“Thus shall the sickening offspring of Eve be slain, and their abominations put to an end
.

“For all the reasons I have written.”

“W
hat about that Zen thing you’re always saying about how the problem isn’t coming up with the wrong answers, it’s coming up with the wrong questions?”

Gurney and Hardwick were driving through the northern Catskill foothills toward Tambury, and Hardwick had been quiet for a while. But now there was something in his tone that implied he had more to say. “Maybe we shouldn’t be asking how Hector got the murder weapon from the cottage into the woods. Because, according to the video, he didn’t. So maybe that’s, like, Fact Number One that we need to accept.”

Gurney felt an odd tingle of anticipation on the back of his neck. “What do you think the right question is?”

“Suppose we just asked, how could the machete have gotten to where it was found?”

“Okay. That’s a more open-minded version of it, but I don’t see—”

“And how did her blood get on it?”

“What?”

Hardwick paused to blow his nose with his customary enthusiasm. He didn’t speak until he’d replaced his handkerchief in his pocket. “We’re assuming it’s the murder weapon because Jillian’s blood is on it. Is that a safe assumption? If there was some other way …”

“I went down that road already with you, and we got nowhere.”

Hardwick shrugged, unconvinced.

Gurney looked across at him. “How else could her blood get on
it? And if the machete didn’t come from the cottage, where did it come from?”

“And when?”

“When?”

Hardwick sniffled, pulled out his handkerchief again, and wiped his nose. “Do you trust the video?”

“I spoke to the video company, and I spoke to the lab people who analyzed it. They tell me the video is accurate.”

“If that’s true, the machete couldn’t have come from the cottage between the murder and the time it was found. Period. So it wasn’t the murder weapon. Period. And the goddamn blood must have gotten on it another way.”

Gurney could feel an almost physical rearrangement of his thoughts taking place. He knew that Hardwick was right. “If the killer went to the trouble of
putting
the blood on it,” he said, half to himself, “that would create a new set of questions—not just how and when, but more important,
why
?”

Why indeed would the killer bother to construct so complex a deception? Theoretically, the purpose of any past action, if it proceeded according to plan, can be deciphered from its results. So what exactly, Gurney asked himself, were the results of the machete being placed where it was with Jillian’s blood on it?

He answered his own question aloud. “To begin with, it was found quickly and easily. And everyone jumped to the immediate conclusion that it was the murder weapon. Which aborted any further search for a possible weapon. The scent trail connecting the cottage to the machete seemed conclusive and seemed to prove that Flores had escaped by that route. The disappearance of Kiki Muller reinforced the idea that Flores had left the area, presumably in her company.”

“And now …?” asked Hardwick.

“And now there’s no reason to believe any of it. In fact, the whole crime scenario adopted by BCI seems to have been crafted by Flores.” He paused, thinking through a final implication. “Jesus.”

“What is it?”

“The reason Flores murdered Kiki and buried her in her own backyard …”

“So it would look like she’d run off with him?”

“Yes. And in that light it makes Kiki’s murder look like the coldest, most pragmatic execution imaginable.”

Hardwick appeared troubled. “If it was so fucking pragmatic, why such a grizzly method?”

“Maybe it’s another example of the killer’s dual motivation: practical advantage plus raging pathology.”

“Plus a talent for creating bullshit for people to spread around the neighborhood.”

“What kind of bullshit?”

Hardwick was obviously excited. “Think about it. This whole case has been full of juicy stories, from the very beginning. You remember the old-lady neighbor—Miriam, Marian, whatever, with the Airedale?”

“Marian Eliot.”

“Right, Marian Eliot, with all her Hector stories—Hector the star of the Cinderella story, Hector the star of the Frankenstein story. And if you read the neighborhood interview transcripts, you saw the Hector the Latin Lover story and Hector the Jealous Fag story. Along the way you even added your own: Hector the Avenger of Past Wrongs story.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying. I’m asking.”

“Asking what?”

“Where the fuck are all these stories coming from? They’re fascinating stories, but …”

“But what?”

“But zero solid evidence for any of them.”

Hardwick fell silent, but Gurney sensed that the man had more to say.

“And …?” he prompted.

Hardwick shook his head, as if unwilling to say more, then spoke anyway. “I used to believe that my first wife was a fucking saint.” He fell into a distant silence for a long minute or two, staring out at the passing landscape of wet fields and old farmhouses. “We tell ourselves stories. We miss the real evidence. That’s the problem. That’s the way our minds work. We love stories way too much. We need to believe them. And you know what? The need to believe can suck you right down the fucking drain.”

O
nce they’d passed the exit for Higgles Road, Gurney’s GPS indicated that they’d be arriving at Mapleshade in another fourteen minutes. They’d taken Gurney’s conservative green Outback, which seemed more appropriate than Hardwick’s red GTO with its rumbling exhaust and hot-rod attitude. The mist had increased to a heavier drizzle, and Gurney upped the wiper speed. Weeks earlier an irritating squeak had developed in one of the wiper blades, which was overdue for replacement.

“How do you picture this guy we’ve been calling Hector Flores?” asked Hardwick.

“You mean his face?”

“All of him. What do you picture him doing?”

“I picture him standing naked in a yoga pose in Scott Ashton’s garden pavilion.”