John Verdon - Let the Devil Sleep

Sorry. I have to stop now. Someone just pulled into my driveway. Can you imagine, it’s almost eleven o’clock. Who could it be? One of those big military-looking trucky kind of cars. More later.

Gurney read it again before picking up the phone. “You still there, Jack?”

“Yeah. So her friend in Ithaca is going through her e-mail, around midnight, and discovers that she has a Facebook notification, which she clicks on, and she finds the message that Ruth posted at ten fifty-eight-apparently before she went downstairs to see who was coming to see her in that big military-looking whatever. Could be a Hummer, what do you think?”

“Could be.” Gurney pictured Max Clinter’s combat-ready, camouflage-painted Humvee.

“Well, if it wasn’t a Hummer, what the fuck was it? Anyway, the friend makes all these efforts to get through to Ruth, and, like I said, eventually a trooper comes, checks things out, decides everything looks fine, and he’s about to leave-when the anxious friend shows up in her car, having driven the twenty-five miles up from Ithaca, and insists they break into the house-because she’s afraid something bad has happened. She says if he doesn’t break into the house, she will. Big argument, young trooper almost arrests her, then another trooper comes by, older and wiser, calms everybody down. They start looking around the outside of the house. Eventually they find an open window, more discussion, more debate, et cetera, et cetera. Bottom line, the troopers finally go in and find Ruth Blum’s body.”

“Where?”

“In the entry hall, just inside the front door. Like she opened the door and wham!”

“ME is sure the weapon was an ice pick?”

“Wasn’t much doubt. According to Clegg, fucking thing was still stuck in her.”

“You don’t suppose he could get me into the house, do you?”

“No way. By now it’s been sealed off with a mile of yellow tape by guys for whom you could only be a problem. Their one job right now is to keep the scene pristine till the evidence techs go home and the BCI team hands the whole deal off to the FBI. They’re not about to hang their asses out the window so some retired hotshot from the city can have a walk-through.”

Gurney was itching to see it all for himself. Having a scene described to you was worth maybe 10 percent of being there. But he suspected that Hardwick was right. He couldn’t think of any upside for anyone in BCI, much less the FBI, to get him involved. Which made him wonder again what the upside was for Hardwick. Every time the man passed along information from a confidential file or an internal source, he was putting himself at risk. And he was doing it a lot.

Was he such a pure seeker after truth that its pursuit trumped any concern for rules or his own career? Was he driven by an obsessive desire to embarrass the powerful? Or did the risk itself, the giddy edge of the cliff, attract him with the same power with which it repelled saner men? Gurney had asked himself these questions about the man before. Once again he concluded that the answer was probably yes to all of them.

“So, Davey boy…” Hardwick’s voice jarred him back to the issue at hand. “The plot thickens. Or maybe this makes everything clearer to you. Which is it?”

“I don’t know, Jack. A little of both. It depends on what happens next. In the meantime, is that everything Clegg told you?”

“Almost everything.” Hardwick hesitated. His appetite for dramatic pauses irritated Gurney intensely, but it was a tolerable price to pay for what often followed. “Remember the little plastic animals the Good Shepherd left at the roadside shootings?”

“Yes.” In fact, he’d been thinking about them that morning, wondering about their purpose.

“Well, they found a little plastic animal at the scene-balanced delicately on Ruth Blum’s lips.”

“On her lips?”

“On her lips.”

“What kind of animal?”

“Clegg thinks it was a lion.”

“Wasn’t a lion the first animal in the original sequence of six?”

“Good memory, ace. So what are the odds we can expect five more?”

Gurney had no answer for that.

As soon as he got off the phone with Hardwick, he called Kim. He wondered if she was still at Kyle’s apartment, wondered if they were in bed together, wondered what their plans were for the day, wondered if they knew…

The call went into her voice mail. He left a blunt message. “Hi. I don’t know if it’s on the news yet, but Ruth Blum is dead. She was murdered in her home in Aurora late last night. It’s possible that the Good Shepherd is back, or someone wants us to think so. Call me as soon as you can.”

He tried Kyle’s number, got his voice mail, and left the same message.

He stood staring out the north window of the den at the wet, gray hillside. The rain had stopped, but the eaves continued to drip. The new information from Hardwick was scattering rather than organizing his thoughts. So damn many bits and pieces. It was impossible to see the path through the maze. To take a step forward, one had to know where forward was . He was overcome by a sick feeling that time was running out, that the endgame was rapidly approaching, without even knowing what that might mean.

He had to do something .

For want of a better idea, he found himself in his car, setting out for Aurora.

Two hours later he was turning onto the state road that ran alongside Lake Cayuga, his GPS indicating he was just three miles from Ruth Blum’s address. The lake and its lakefront homes were visible through a border of bare trees on his left. On his right, separated from the road by a deep, grassy drainage swale, a pastoral mix of meadows and thickets sloped gradually up toward a high horizon of stubbled cornfields. Three commercial establishments on the upland side of the road were spaced out among a scattering of well-kept older homes. There was a gas station, a veterinary clinic, and an auto-body shop whose parking area held half a dozen cars in various stages of repair.

Not far past the body shop, Gurney rounded a long bend and saw ahead of him on the left side of the road the first indications of a major crime scene: an assortment of local, county, and state police cruisers. There were also four vans-two, presumably from regional media outlets, with satellite dishes on their roofs; one with the NYSP emblem, which Gurney assumed would contain the evidence team’s equipment; and one that was unmarked, probably the forensic photographer’s. There was no sign of a morgue vehicle, meaning someone from the ME’s office had already come and gone and the body had been transported from the scene.

As he drew closer, Gurney counted six uniformed officers with various jurisdictional insignias, a woman and a man in the conservative business attire favored by detective units, an evidence specialist in the white coveralls and latex gloves required by his occupation, and a fashionably dressed female TV type huddled with two ponytailed male technicians.

A uniformed trooper was standing in the middle of the road, aggressively waving along any car that seemed to be passing too slowly. As Gurney was coming abreast of the trooper and the Blum house behind him, he could see that POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS tape had been wrapped around the entire property from the edge of the lake up to the edge of the road. He reached into his glove box and pulled out a thin leather wallet, flipping it open to reveal a gold NYPD detective’s shield that bore in small letters at the bottom the word “Retired.”

Before the frowning trooper could examine it thoroughly, Gurney tossed it back in his glove box and asked if Senior Investigator Jack Hardwick was on the scene.

The trooper’s hat was tilted forward, its stiff brim shadowing his eyes. “Hardwick, BCI?”