John Verdon - Let the Devil Sleep

“Well, if your strategy was to upset people, you can consider yourself a success.” She pointed at his plate, still heaped with shrimp and rice. “Are you going to eat that?”

“No.” He heard the abrupt defensiveness in his own tone and added, “Not right now. I think maybe I’ll step outside for a bit, get some air, clear my head.”

He left the table, went to the mudroom, and put on a light jacket. As he was going out the side door into the deepening dusk, he heard Kyle saying something to Madeleine, his voice low, the tone tentative, the words largely indistinguishable.

The only two he heard clearly were “Dad” and “angry.”

As Gurney sat on the bench by the pond, the evening rapidly descended into darkness. A fragile moon sliver behind a heavy overcast offered only the dimmest, most uncertain sense of the world around him.

The pain in his forearm had returned. It was intermittent, having no apparent relationship with the arm’s angle, position, or muscle tension. The feeling magnified the frustration he felt at Holdenfield’s attitude on the phone, at his own combativeness, at Kim’s severe reaction.

He knew two things-two facts in collision with each other. First, a cool and rigorous objectivity had always been at the root of his success as a detective. Second, his objectivity was now questionable. He suspected that the slowness of his recovery, the feeling of vulnerability, the impression of being sidelined-the fear of irrelevance- had filled him with an agitation and anger that could easily warp his judgment.

He rubbed his forearm with no noticeable effect on the ache. It was as though the source of it were elsewhere, perhaps in a pinched nerve in his spine, and his brain was misreporting the location of the inflammation. It was like the tinnitus situation, in which his brain was misinterpreting a neural disturbance as a tinny, echoey sound.

Still, despite these self-doubts, these termites of uncertainty, if he were forced to wager all he had one way or the other, he’d bet there was something screwy about the Good Shepherd case, something that didn’t fit . His finely tuned sense of discrepancy had never let him down, and he didn’t think…

His train of thought was interrupted by a sound like footsteps that seemed to come from somewhere in the general area of the barn. When he looked in that direction, he saw a small light moving in the pasture between the barn and the house. As he watched, he realized it was a flashlight being held by someone coming down the pasture path.

“Dad?” The voice was Kyle’s.

“I’m over here,” Gurney called back. “By the pond.”

The flashlight beam moved toward him, found him. “Are there any animals out here at night?”

Gurney smiled. “None that would have any interest in meeting you.”

A minute later Kyle arrived at the bench.

“Mind if I sit?”

“Course not.” Gurney moved a bit to make more room.

“Man, this is really dark out here.” There was the sound of something falling in the woods on the other side of the pond. “Oh, shit! What the hell was that?”

“No idea.”

“You sure there are no animals in those woods?”

“The woods are full of animals. Deer, bears, foxes, coyotes, bobcats.”

“Bears?”

“Black bears. Generally harmless. Unless they have cubs.”

“And you really have bobcats?”

“One or two. Sometimes I’ll see one in my headlights as I’m coming up the hill.”

“Wow. That’s pretty wild. I’ve never seen a bobcat, not a real one.” He fell silent for a minute or so. Gurney was about to ask him what was on his mind when he continued. “You really think there’s more to the Shepherd case than people realize?”

“Could be.”

“You sounded pretty sure on the phone. I think that’s why Kim got so bothered.”

“Yeah, well…”

“So what do you think everybody’s missing?”

“How much do you know about the case?”

“Like I told you before dinner-everything. At least everything that was on TV.”

Gurney shook his head in the dark. “It’s funny-I don’t recall you as being that interested at the time.”

“Well, I was. But there’s no reason you’d remember that. I mean, you were never really there.”

“I was around when you came on weekends. Sundays anyway.”

“You were there physically, but you always seemed… I don’t know, like, mentally you were always tied up in something important.”

After a pause Gurney said, a little haltingly, “And… I guess… after you got involved with Stacey Marx… you weren’t coming every weekend.”

“No, I guess not.”

“After you broke up, did you stay in touch with her?”

“Didn’t I ever tell you about that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Stacey got all fucked up. In and out of rehabs. Kinda fried, actually. Saw her at Eddie Burke’s wedding. You remember Eddie Burke, right?”

“Sort of. Redheaded kid?”

“No, that was his brother Jimmy. Anyway, no matter. Basically, Stacey is fried.”

A long silence fell between them. Gurney’s mind felt empty, unfocused, uneasy.

“It’s kind of chilly down here,” said Kyle. “You want to come back up to the house?”

“Yeah. I’ll be up in a minute.”

Neither of them moved.

“So… you never finished saying what it is about the Good Shepherd case that’s getting to you. You seem to be the only person who has a problem with it.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.”

“That’s way too Zen for me.”

Gurney uttered a sharp, one-syllable laugh. “The problem is a gaping lack of critical thinking. The whole goddamn thing is too neatly packaged, too simple, and way too useful to too many people. It hasn’t been challenged, argued, tested, ripped, and kicked, because too many experts in too many positions of power and influence like it the way it is-a textbook crime spree by a textbook psycho.”

After a short silence, Kyle said, “You sound pissed off.”

“You ever see what someone looks like who’s taken a.50-caliber hollow-point round in the side of the head?”

“Pretty bad, I guess.”

“It’s the most dehumanizing thing imaginable. The so-called Good Shepherd did that to six people. He didn’t just kill them. He mangled them, turned them into something pathetic and horrible.” Gurney stared off into the darkness for a long minute before going on. “Those people deserve more than they’ve gotten. They deserve a more serious debate. They deserve questions .”

“So what’s the plan? Find loose ends and yank on them?”

“If I can.”

“Well, that’s what you’re good at, right?”

“I used to be. We’ll see.”

“You’ll succeed. You’ve never failed at anything.”

“Of course I have.”

Again there was a brief silence, broken by Kyle. “What kinds of questions?”

“Hmm?” Gurney’s mind had drifted into the depths of his shortcomings.

“Just wondering-what kinds of questions do you have in mind?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Some big amorphous questions about the sort of personality that could be behind the language in the manifesto, the attack logistics, the choice of weapon. And lots of smaller questions, like why all the cars were the same make-”

“Or why they all came from Sindelfingen?”

“Why they all… what?”

“All six cars were built in the Mercedes plant in Sindelfingen, just outside Stuttgart. Probably doesn’t mean anything. Just an odd little factoid.”

“How on earth would you know a thing like that?”

“I told you I paid a lot of attention.”

“That Sindelfingen thing was in the news?”

“No. The years and models of the cars were in the news. I was… you know… trying to figure things out. I wondered what the cars might have in common beyond what was obvious. Mercedes has a lot of assembly plants, in a lot of countries. But those six cars all came from Sindelfingen. Just a coincidence, right?”