John Verdon - Let the Devil Sleep

“Yes,” said Gurney.

“Good. Listen carefully. I will ask you my question again. You must answer it. I am a good judge of what is true and what is not. If I hear truth, we go on, harmlessly. Just a nice conversation, you know? But if I hear a lie, I pull the trigger again. Clear?”

“Yes.”

“Each time I hear a lie, you lose something. Next time not just a little nick from your ear. You lose more important things. You understand?”

“I understand.” Gurney’s eyesight was starting to recover from the muzzle flash, and he could again make out a dim swath of moonlight across the middle of the room.

“Good. I want to know everything about this so-called mistake at Lakeside Collision. No riddles. Pure truth.” In the moonlight the silver-plated pistol barrel gradually descended until it was aligned with Gurney’s right ankle.

He gritted his teeth to keep from trembling at the thought of what a Desert Eagle slug would do to that joint. The immediate loss of his foot would be bad enough. But the arterial bleeding would be the real problem. And telling the truth or not, in response to this or any subsequent question, was not the lever that would control the outcome. The lever was the Good Shepherd’s sense of personal security. And that lever could now move in only one direction. Because there was no possible scenario in which Gurney alive could pose a lesser risk to the Good Shepherd than Gurney dead.

The only variable yet to be determined was how many body parts would be severed before he bled to death. Before he bled to death, alone, on the floor of Max Clinter’s cabin, in the middle of a swamp, in the middle of nowhere.

He closed his eyes and saw Madeleine on the hillside.

In fuchsia, violet, pink, blue, orange, scarlet… all shimmering in the sunlight.

He walked toward her, through grass that was as green as every living thing and smelled as sweet as heaven must smell.

She put her fingers lightly on his lips and smiled.

“You’ll be brilliant,” she said. “Absolutely brilliant.”

And a moment later he was dead.

Or so he thought.

Through his closed eyelids, he sensed a sudden illumination. It was accompanied by the sound of distant music rising through the ringing in his ears, and, above and through it all, the throbbing of a great drum.

And then he heard the voice.

The voice that brought him back to the cabin in the swamp in the middle of nowhere. A voice amplified mightily by a bullhorn.

“POLICE… NEW YORK STATE POLICE… PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS… PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND OPEN THE DOOR… DO IT NOW… PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND OPEN THE DOOR… THIS IS THE NEW YORK STATE POLICE… PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND OPEN THE DOOR.”

Gurney opened his eyes. Instead of moonlight, a spotlight was shining in the window. He looked across the room at where his formidable, invisible captor had been standing ninja-like in the darkness. In his place was a man of average stature in brown slacks and a tan cardigan, with one hand raised to shield his eyes from the glare. It was hard for Gurney to associate this modest figure with the homicidal monster of his imagination. But in the man’s other hand was the undeniable link to the monster: a gleaming.50-caliber Desert Eagle pistol. The pistol responsible for the blood still trickling down the side of Gurney’s neck, the acrid smell of gunpowder in the room, the ringing in his ears.

The gun that had come so close to ending his life.

The man turned a little away from the spotlight and calmly lowered the hand he’d been holding in front of his eyes, revealing an impassive, unlined face. It was a face without distinction, without strong emotions, without any particularly prominent feature. It was a balanced, ordinary face. A face that was essentially forgettable.

Yet Gurney knew he had seen it before.

When he was finally able to place it, when he could finally attach a name to it, his first reaction was to think he must be mistaken. He blinked several times, trying to wrap his mind around the identity of the man facing him. He was having a hard time uniting that inoffensive, quiet identity with the words and actions of the Good Shepherd. Especially one of those actions.

But as his certainty increased and he was sure there was no mistake, he could almost feel the puzzle pieces being jarred into new positions, shifting into more interesting relationships, clicking together.

Larry Sterne gazed back at him, his expression more thoughtful than fearful. Larry Sterne who had reminded him of Mister Rogers. Larry Sterne, the soft-spoken dentist. Larry Sterne, the serene dental-medical entrepreneur. Larry Sterne, the son of Ian Sterne, who’d built a multimillion-dollar beauty-bestowing empire.

Larry Sterne, the son of Ian Sterne, who’d invited a lovely young Russian pianist to share his Woodstock home. And almost certainly his bed. And, potentially, a place in his will.

Dear God, was that what this was all about?

Had Larry Sterne simply been securing his inheritance?

Protecting his financial future from his father’s unpredictable affections?

It was, of course, a substantial inheritance. An inheritance worth worrying about. A money machine, in fact. Not something one would want to lose.

Had the calm and gentle Larry been avoiding, through the simple expedient of killing his father, any risk of that money machine ending up in the hands of the lovely young Russian pianist? And then, by cluttering the landscape with five additional bodies, had he simply been avoiding any risk of the police asking what would have been their first question if Ian Sterne had been the only victim-the damning question that would have led them straight to Larry:

Cui bono?

In the weird combination of moonlight and shifting floodlights shining through the window, Gurney could see that Sterne’s grip on his gun was still firm and steady, but the man’s eyes were unmistakably focused on a world of diminishing options. It was hard to identify the emotion in those eyes. Was it terror? Rage? The fierce determination of the proverbial cornered rat? Or was it just that the icy calculator had gone into overdrive-giving the man’s racing mental processes a frantic appearance?

Gurney concluded that he was in the presence of an essentially heartless, mechanical process. The same heartless, mechanical process that had been responsible for… how many deaths?

How many deaths? That was the question that brought the White Mountain Strangler case into sudden focus. It fit the pattern-the pattern of a case in which one murder mattered, a murder hidden by others that didn’t matter at all-all tied together in a psycho-killer package with a white silk scarf. Gurney wondered, what had Larry’s girlfriend done to make her life an inconvenience to him? Perhaps she’d gotten pregnant? Or perhaps it wasn’t anything that serious. For a man like Larry-the White Mountain Strangler, the Good Shepherd-murder did not require a serious cause. It required only the prospect of producing a benefit greater than its cost.

The words of the RAM evangelist came back to Gurney with a chill: To extinguish life, to blow it away like a wisp of smoke, to trample it like a piece of dirt, that is the essence of evil.

Outside, out past the beaver pond, a pulsing siren was turned on for five seconds, then off. The previous bullhorn announcement was then repeated at full volume.

Gurney turned in his chair and peered out the front window. Powerful spotlights were illuminating the property from the far side of the causeway. He realized that the sound of the siren was what he must have heard earlier. In the intensity of his emotional confusion, with the pistol blast still ringing in his ears, it was the sound he’d taken for music. And then he’d heard what was no doubt the sound he’d imagined to be a great drumbeat-which he now recognized as the thumping rotor of a circling helicopter. A helicopter that was sweeping its airborne searchlight back and forth over the cabin, over the tangled swamp grass, over the stark tree trunks sticking up out of the black water.