John Verdon - Let the Devil Sleep

“I was a hell of a lot more startled by that business than you were,” said Gurney.

Kim shot him an appraising glance. “Making you conclude I’d seen it before? You’re right.”

“Which is why you suggested that she show me the shooting range? So I could see her little performance for myself?”

“Yep.”

“Well, it made an impression.”

“I want you to see everything. Or at least as much as you have time to see.”

They both fell silent. It seemed to Gurney that he’d already seen a lot. It was hard to believe that he’d gotten the call from Connie Clarke only the previous morning. He closed his eyes and tried to arrange the flood of observations, conversations. It was dizzying. The project was bizarre. His involvement in it was bizarre.

He awoke as Kim was turning onto the narrow lane that wound its way up the mountain to his home. “Jesus. Didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“Sleep is good,” she said, looking tired and serious.

Three deer ran up an embankment just ahead of them.

“You ever hit one?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Something about the way he said it made her look at him curiously.

It had happened six months earlier. A doe had crossed Route 10 from the woods on the left side of the road, well in front of him, to an open field on the right. Just as he was passing the place she’d crossed, her fawn dashed out in front of his car.

He winced now at the still-vivid memory of the thump.

Pulling over. Stopping. Walking back. The small, twisted body. The eyes open and lifeless. The doe standing in the field, looking back. Waiting. He was filled with sadness and horror, could feel it now.

Kim drove past a scruffy hill farm with a dozen scruffy cows and half a dozen rusted cars. “You friendly with your neighbors?” she asked.

Gurney made a sound halfway between a grunt and a laugh. “Some yes, some no.”

Half a mile farther on, they came within sight of his red barn at the end of the lane, next to the pond. “Stop and let me out,” he said. “I want to walk up through the pasture. It’ll wake me up, clear my head.”

She frowned. “The grass looks wet.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll be taking my shoes off when I get to the house.”

She pulled up in front of the barn door and turned off the engine, leaving her hand on the ignition key in an oddly preoccupied way.

Instead of getting out of the car, he sat and waited, sensing that she had something to say.

“So…” she began, stopped, and began again. “So… where do we go from here?”

Gurney shrugged. “You hired me for one day. The day is over.”

“Any chance of one more?”

“To do what?”

“Talk to Max Clinter?”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t figure him out. It’s like he knows something about the Good Shepherd case. Something terrible. But I don’t know whether he really knows something or if it’s just some crazy thing in his mind, some kind of delusion. I thought maybe with your shared backgrounds as detectives, maybe he’d be more straight-up with you-especially if I wasn’t there, if it was just the two of you, talking cop to cop.”

“Where does he live?”

“You’ll do it? You’ll talk to him?”

“I didn’t say that. I asked you where he lives.”

“Not far from Cayuga Lake. Pretty close to his disastrous car chase. That’s part of what makes me worry that he’s a little off the wall.”

“Because he wants to live there?”

“Because of why he wants to live there. He says that’s the place he and the Good Shepherd crossed paths and that’s where karma will bring them together again.”

“And this is the guy you want me to talk to?”

“Nuts, right?”

He told her he’d think about it.

“I guarantee you’ll find him… interesting.”

“We’ll see. I’ll let you know.” He got out of the little car, watched her turn around and head back down the narrow road.

His short walk up through the pasture provided a powerful break from the day, flooding his consciousness with the aromas of nature in early spring: the complex sweetness of the moist earth, air that smelled clean enough to purify one’s soul-to wash away the obstructions that stood between one’s mind and the truth of things.

Or so it seemed-until he was in the house five minutes, had gone to the bathroom, washed his face, and Madeleine had asked about his day.

He recounted as comprehensively as he could the details of the three peculiar meetings he’d had with Kim and the people with whom she was involved-Rudy Getz with his Rollerblader, Larry Sterne with his Mister Rogers cardigan, Roberta Rotker with her unhinged exhibition of marksmanship. And he told her everything he knew about Max Clinter-the peculiar, tragic character whose life was forever changed by the Good Shepherd.

He was sitting at the table by the French doors, and Madeleine was chopping vegetables on a cutting board by the sink.

“Kim wants me to stay involved in this thing for another day. I’ll be damned if I know what to do.”

Madeleine sliced the end off a large red onion. “How’s your arm?”

“What?”

“Your arm. The numb spot. How is it?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t…” His voice trailed off as he rubbed his forearm and wrist. “Okay… the same, I guess. Why do you ask?”

She turned the onion around in her hand, peeling off a couple of layers of the tough outer skin.

“How about the pain in your side?”

“Fine, at the moment. It’s an intermittent thing, comes and goes.”

“Every ten minutes or so, I think you told me?”

“More or less.”

“How often did you feel it today?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Not sure if you felt it at all?”

“I couldn’t say.”

She nodded, sliced a large zucchini down the middle, laid the halves on the board, and began chopping them into bite-size half-moons.

He blinked, stared at her, cleared his throat. “So what you’re saying is that I should let Kim hire me for another day?”

“Did I say that?”

“I think you did.”

There was a long silence. Madeleine cut up an eggplant, a yellow squash, and a sweet red pepper, then put everything into a large bowl that she carried to the stove, tilting the contents into a sizzling wok. “She’s an interesting young woman.”

“In what way?”

“Smart, attractive, ambitious, subtle, energetic-don’t you think?”

“Hmm. She definitely has some depth.”

“Maybe you should introduce her to Kyle.”

“My son?”

“I don’t know any other Kyle.”

“What is it about them that makes you think…?”

“I can see them together, that’s all. Different personalities, but on the same wavelength.”

He tried to imagine the hypothetical relationship chemistry. In less than a minute, he gave up the effort. Too many possibilities, too little data. He envied the efficiency of Madeleine’s intuition. It enabled her to leap over unknowns that stopped him dead.

“Arriving at destination, on the right.”

Gurney’s GPS had just delivered him to an unmarked intersection at which a narrow dirt road teed into the paved road-a road he’d been following for two miles without seeing a single house that didn’t look like it was falling down.

On one side of the dirt road was an open steel gate. On the other side was a dead oak tree, the scar of a lightning bolt etched in its bark. Nailed to the trunk was a human skeleton-or, Gurney assumed, a remarkably convincing replica. Hanging from the skeleton’s neck was a hand-painted sign: THE LAST TRESPASSER.