John Verdon - Let the Devil Sleep

All this had been going through Gurney’s mind at the foot of the stairs, as he held the beam of the flashlight on the chest, trying to decide what to do next.

Rather than deal with whomever or whatever the chest might contain with no light other than what was in his hand, he’d called up to Kim, telling her to flip the light switch at the top of the stairs to the ON position-even though he knew it would make no immediate difference. Shining his little beam alternately on the chest and on the main electrical panel, he made his way to the panel. Tucking the flashlight under his arm, he opened the metal door and saw that the main breaker at the top was in the OFF position. He flipped the stiff plastic switch in the opposite direction.

The bare bulb in the basement ceiling had come on immediately. What sounded like a refrigerator motor upstairs began to hum. He heard Kim say, “Thank God!”

He glanced quickly around the basement, confirming there was indeed nowhere anyone could hide but inside the chest.

He walked over to it, fear and gooseflesh dissipated now by anger and an appetite for confrontation. A touch of caution told him not to lift the lid but to roll the chest over. He stuffed the Maglite in his jacket pocket, gripped the corner of the chest, and yanked it over onto its side, discovering from the ease of doing so that it was empty-a fact he confirmed by kicking the top open.

Kim was halfway down the stairs now and peering around the basement like a scared cat. Her gaze stopped at the broken step. “You could have been killed,” she said, wide-eyed, as though the implications of the accident had only then occurred to her. “It broke, just like that, when you stepped on it?”

“Just like that,” he said.

As she examined with a kind of horror the place where he’d fallen, he was touched by something fundamentally naïve in her expression. This young woman who was putting together an ambitious documentary on the horrific impact of murder seemed startled by the notion that life could be perilous.

Following her gaze, he, too, looked down at the break in the wood-and quickly noticed what she had either failed to see or failed to grasp the meaning of. The stair tread, prior to breaking, had been sawed almost completely through on both ends.

When he pointed this out to her, she’d frowned in apparent confusion. “What do you mean? How could that be?”

All he’d said was, “One more mystery to add to the others.”

• • •

Now, as he lay in his bed, gazing up at the ceiling, massaging his arm without much effect, reconstructing the previous night’s chain of events, he thought that answer through in more detail.

The sabotage was likely the work of the whispering intruder, Kim was likely the intended victim, and perhaps he, Gurney, had simply gotten in the way.

Booby-trapping a staircase by partially sawing through one of the treads was a crime-movie cliché. One that would be hard to miss. The easily detectable saw marks would make it clear that the step hadn’t broken by accident-meaning that the saw marks themselves were almost certainly intended to be discovered. In that sense they would be an integral part of the warning.

Perhaps the choice of a low step was part of the warning also-designed to cause a nasty fall but not as bad a fall, say, as one might have from a higher step. Not a fatal fall. Not yet.

The message might be as explicit as, If you ignore my warnings, they’ll get more violent. More painful. More deadly.

But what, precisely, was Kim being warned away from? The obvious answer was her murder documentary, since it was the biggest thing going on in her life. Maybe the message was, Back away, Kim, stop digging into the past, or the consequences will be terrible. There’s a devil buried in the Good Shepherd case, and you’d better not wake him .

Did that mean that the intruder was someone connected with that famous case? Someone with a serious vested interest in things staying as they were?

Or was it, as Kim had been insisting, only rotten little Robby Meese?

Was it credible that all the recent interferences in her life, the assaults on her peace of mind, had been orchestrated by a pathetic ex-boyfriend? Was he that morbidly bitter at Kim’s ending their relationship? Could everything-the loosened bulbs, missing knives, bloodstains, sawed step, even the demonic whisper-have been motivated by pure jealousy, pure vindictiveness at being cast aside?

On the other hand, maybe the perpetrator was indeed Meese, but maybe the young man was driven by a motivation darker and sicker than spite. Maybe he was warning Kim that unless she took him back, his resentment would grow into something truly awful. Unless she took him back, he’d become a monster, a devil.

Maybe Meese’s inner life was more pathological than Kim realized.

The intensity of that whisper seemed pathological beyond question.

But that raised yet another possibility. It was the possibility that scared Gurney most of all. A possibility he hardly dared consider.

The possibility that there was no whisper.

Suppose what he’d “heard” was the result of his fall, a kind of mini-hallucination? Suppose the “sound” was merely a by-product of the jarring of his barely healed head wound? After all, the low, whistling tinnitus in his ears was not a real whistle; as Dr. Huffbarger had explained, it was a cognitive misinterpretation of a misplaced neural agitation. Suppose the whispered threat-with all its seething fury-had no real-world substance? The idea that sights and sounds might be nothing more than the offspring of bruised tissues and disrupted synapses sent a shiver through him.

Perhaps it was an unconscious insecurity about the whisper that had kept him from mentioning it to the patrol officer who’d come to Kim’s apartment in response to the 911 call he’d made after discovering the tread-sawing evidence. And perhaps that same insecurity had kept him from mentioning the whisper to Schiff when he’d arrived there half an hour later.

It was difficult at the time to decipher Schiff’s expression. One thing was clear: There was no joy in it. He kept looking at Gurney as if he sensed that some part of the story was missing. Then the skeptical detective had turned his attention to Kim, asking her a string of questions designed to pin down a time window in which the vandalism could have occurred.

“That’s what you’re calling this?” Gurney had interjected the second time Schiff used the term. “Vandalism?”

“For now, yeah,” said Schiff blandly. “You have a problem with that?”

“Painful form of vandalism,” said Gurney, slowly rubbing his forearm.

“You want an ambulance?”

Before Gurney could answer, Kim said, “I’m going to drive him to the ER.”

“That so?” asked Schiff, his eyes on Gurney. “Sounds good to me.”

Schiff stared at him for a moment, then said to the patrol officer who was standing in the background, “Make a note that Mr. Gurney declined ambulance transportation.”

Gurney smiled. “So how are we doing on those cameras?”

Schiff gave the impression that he hadn’t heard the question.

Gurney shrugged. “Yesterday would have been a good day to install them.”

There was a flash of anger in Schiff’s eyes. He took a final look around the basement, muttered something about lifting prints the following day from the circuit panel, asked about the chest turned on its side, peered into it.

Eventually he picked up the sawed step and took it upstairs with him, then spent the next ten minutes examining the apartment’s windows and doors. He asked Kim whether she’d had any unusual communications in the past few days, or any communications at all from Meese. Finally he asked how he could gain access to the apartment the following day, if he needed to. Then he left, trailed by the patrol officer.