John Verdon - Let the Devil Sleep

“Kim, I’m looking at the background sources listed on the final page of your document-in particular a detective by the name of Hardwick. How does he happen to be involved in this?”

“You know him?” Her voice sounded wary.

“Yes, I do.”

“Well… when I started researching the Good Shepherd case a few months ago, I gathered the names of the law-enforcement people who were mentioned in news reports back when it happened. One of the earlier shootings took place in Hardwick’s jurisdiction, and he was one of the state police investigators who was temporarily involved.”

“Temporarily?”

“Everything changed after the third weekend, I think it was, when one of the shootings occurred over the state line in Massachusetts. At that point the FBI took over.”

“Special Agent in Charge Matthew Trout?”

“Yeah, Trout. Control-freak asshole.”

“You’ve spoken to him?”

“He told me to go back and read the press releases issued by the FBI at the time. Then he instructed me to submit my questions in writing. Then he refused to answer any of them. If you call that speaking to him, then I guess I did. Officious jerk!”

Gurney smiled to himself. Welcome to the FBI .

“But Hardwick was willing to talk to you?”

“Not so much at first-not until he discovered that Trout was trying to control the information flow. Then he seemed happy to do whatever would make Trout unhappy.”

“That’s Jack. Used to say that FBI stood for Fucking Blithering Idiots.”

“He’s still saying it.”

“So why is Trout on your information list if he refuses to provide any?”

“That’s more for the RAM people. Trout might not talk to me, but Rudy Getz is different. You’d be amazed at who returns his calls. And how fast.”

“Interesting. And what about the third name-Max Clinter?”

“Max Clinter. Well. Where to start? Do you know anything about him at all?”

“The name rings a distant bell, that’s about it.”

“Clinter was the off-duty detective who got entangled in the final Good Shepherd attack.”

The memory of the tabloid accounts came back. “Was he the guy with the art student in his car… drunk out of his mind… firing his gun out the window… sideswiped a guy on a motorcycle… got blamed for the Good Shepherd escaping?”

“Yep.”

“He’s one of your sources?”

Kim’s voice was defensive. “I’m taking whatever and whoever I can get. The problem is that just about everyone involved in the case refers all questions to Trout-which is like dropping them into a black hole.”

“So what have you managed to find out from Clinter?”

“That’s not easy to answer. He’s a strange man. With a lot on his mind. I’m not sure I understand all of it. Maybe we could talk about it tomorrow in the car? I didn’t realize how late it was getting, and I need to take a shower.”

Although Gurney didn’t believe her, he didn’t object. He was eager to talk to Jack Hardwick.

The call went into voice mail. He left a message.

Dusk was rapidly darkening into night. Rather than turn on the light in the den, he took Kim’s project folder out to the kitchen table. Madeleine was still sitting in her armchair by the flickering woodstove at the far end of the room. War and Peace had moved from her lap to the coffee table in front of her, and she was knitting.

“So have you figured out where that arrow came from?” she asked, without looking up.

He glanced over at the sideboard, at the black graphite shaft and its red fletching. Something about it made him feel almost queasy.

Then, as though the feeling had been the herald of a rising memory, he recalled an incident in the apartment house of his Bronx childhood. He was thirteen. It was dark out. His father was either working late or out drinking. His mother was at one of her ballroom-dancing lessons at a studio in Manhattan-a consuming mania that had displaced her former obsession with finger painting. His grandmother was in her bedroom, muttering over her rosary beads. He was in his mother’s bedroom-hers exclusively, ever since his father had begun sleeping on the living-room couch and keeping his clothes in a closet in the hallway.

He’d opened one of the two windows from the top. The air was cold and smelled of snow. He had a wooden bow-a real one, not a toy. He’d purchased it with money saved from two years of allowances. He dreamed one day of hunting with it in a forest far from the Bronx. He stood in front of the wide-open sash with the cold air flowing over him. He notched one scarlet-fletched arrow on his bowstring and, driven by a strange sense of excitement, raised the bow toward the black sky outside that sixth-floor bedroom window, drew back the bowstring, and let the arrow fly out into the night. With sudden fear gripping his heart, he listened for the sound of its impact-its thwack on the roof of one of the lower buildings in the neighborhood, or its metallic clunk on the roof of a parked car, or its sharp bang on a sidewalk-but he heard nothing. Nothing at all.

The unexpected silence began to terrify him.

He imagined how silent the impact of a sharp arrow on a person might be.

For the rest of the night, he considered the possible consequences. The possible consequences scared him to death. But the lasting disturbance, the piece of the experience that was indigestible, the piece that plagued him even now, thirty-five years later, was the question he was never able to answer: Why?

Why had he done it? What had possessed him to do something so patently reckless, so lacking in any rational reward, so full of pointless danger?

Gurney looked again at the sideboard and was struck by the bizarre symmetry between the two mysteries: the arrow he’d shot from his mother’s window, with motive and landing place unknown, and the arrow that had landed in his wife’s garden, with motive and starting place unknown. He shook his head, as if to clear it of some internal fog. It was time to move on to another subject.

Conveniently, his cell phone rang. It was Connie Clarke.

“There’s something that I wanted to add-something I didn’t mention this morning.”

“Oh?”

“I didn’t purposely leave it out. It’s just one of those vague things that sometimes seems related to the situation and sometimes not.”

“Yes?”

“I guess it’s more like a coincidence than anything else. The Good Shepherd murders all happened exactly ten years ago, right? Well, that’s also the same time that Kim’s father dropped out of sight. We’d been divorced for two years at that point, and he’d been talking all that time about wanting to travel around the world. I never thought he’d actually do it-although he could be amazingly impulsive and irresponsible, which is part of the reason I divorced him-and then one day he left a phone message for us saying that the moment had come, it was now or never, and he was going. I mean, it was absurd. But that was it. The first week of spring, ten years ago. We never heard another word from him. Can you believe it? Selfish, thoughtless bastard! Kim was devastated. More so than she’d been by the divorce two years earlier. Completely devastated .”

“You see some significance in the timing?”

“No, no, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s any connection between the Good Shepherd case and Emilio’s disappearance. How could there be? It’s just that both events happened the same month-March of 2000. Maybe part of the reason Kim feels as strongly as she does about the pain of those families at losing someone is that she lost her own father at the same time.”

Now Gurney understood. “And the shared lack of closure-”

“Yes. The Good Shepherd murders were never fully resolved, because the murderer was never caught. And Kim hasn’t been able to close the door on her father’s disappearance, because she could never find out what really happened to him. When she talks about the families of murder victims suffering from an ongoing misery, I think she’s talking about herself.”