John Verdon - Shut Your Eyes Tight

The chapel nave grew brighter, as rows of wall-sconce lamps were illuminated. There was a brief hiatus in the conversational hum as the girls in the discussion groups looked around at the lamps.

“That’s better,” said Ashton, smiling with satisfaction at the screen. “Considering your contribution, Detective, I want to be sure you can see everything clearly.”

What contribution? Gurney wanted to ask. Instead he put his hand over his mouth and stifled a yawn. Then he glanced at his watch.

Ashton gave him a long, cool stare. “You won’t be bored much longer.” A swarm of minuscule tics migrated across his face. “You’re an educated man, Detective. Tell me something: The medieval term condign reparation -do you know what it means?”

Strangely, he did. From a college philosophy class. Condign reparation: Punishment in perfect balance with the offense. Punishment of an ideally appropriate nature.

“Yes, I do,” he answered, triggering a hint of surprise in Ashton’s eyes.

And then, at the edge of his field of vision, he detected something else-a quickly moving shadow. Or was it the edge of a dark piece of clothing, a sleeve perhaps? Whatever it was, it had disappeared in the recess of the landing, where there would be barely enough room for a man to stand, just outside the office doorway.

“Then you may be able to appreciate the damage your ignorance has done.”

“Tell me about it,” said Gurney, with a look of increasing interest that he hoped would hide-better than his feigned yawn-the fear he was feeling.

“You have exceptional mental wiring, Detective. Quite an efficient brain. A remarkable calculator of vectors and probabilities.”

This characterization was precisely the opposite of Gurney’s current estimate of his capabilities. He wondered, with a nauseating chill, if Ashton’s perception of his state of mind could be so keen that the observation was intended as a joke.

Gurney’s own sense was that the brain that was responsible for his great professional victories was sliding sideways in the mud, losing traction and direction, as it strained to fit together so many things at once: The unreal Hector. The unreal Jykynstyl. The decapitated Jillian Perry. The decapitated Kiki Muller. The decapitated Melanie Strum. The decapitated Savannah Liston. The decapitated doll in Madeleine’s sewing room.

Where was the center of gravity in all this-the place at which the lines of force converged? Was it here at Mapleshade? Or at the brownstone, tended by Steck’s “daughters”? Or in some obscure Sardinian café where Giotto Skard might at that very moment be sipping bitter espresso-lurking like a wizened spider at the center of his web, where all the threads of his enterprises converged?

Unanswered questions were piling up fast.

And now a very personal one: Why had he, Gurney, failed to consider the possibility that the room might be bugged?

He’d always felt that the “death wish” concept was a grossly facile and overused paradigm, but now he wondered if it might not be the best explanation of his own behavior.

Or was his mental hard drive just too damn full of undigested details?

Undigested details, wobbly theories, and murders.

When all else fails, return to the present.

Madeleine’s persistent advice: Be here, in the here and now. Pay attention.

Awareness of the moment: the holy grail of consciousness.

Ashton was in the middle of a sentence. “… tragicomic clumsiness of the criminal-justice system-which is neither just nor systematic, but surely criminal. When it comes to dealing with sex offenders, the system is inanely political and ludicrously inept. Of the offenders it catches, it helps none and makes the majority worse. It frees all those clever enough to fool the so-called professionals who evaluate them. It publishes public lists of sex offenders that are incomplete and useless. Under cover of this PR scam, it turns snakesloose to devour children! ” He glared at Gurney, at Hardwick, at Gurney again. “This is the wretched system all your fine mental wiring, all your logic, all your investigative skill, all your intelligence ultimately serves.”

It was a strange speech, thought Gurney, an elegant diatribe with the practiced ring of one delivered before, perhaps at conferences of his peers, yet it was animated by a palpable fury that was far from artificial. As he gazed into Ashton’s eyes, he recognized this fury as an emotion he had seen before. He had seen it in the eyes of victims of sexual abuse. Most memorably, most vividly, he had seen it in the eyes of a fifty-year-old woman who was confessing to the ax murder of her seventy-five-year-old stepfather who had raped her when she was five.

Her defense in court was that she wanted to be sure her own granddaughter would have nothing to fear from him, that no one’s granddaughter would have anything to fear from him. Her eyes were full of a wild, protective rage, and despite the efforts of her attorney to silence her, she went on to swear that the only desire she had left was to kill them all, every monster, every abuser, kill them all, chop them to pieces. As she was removed from the court, she was shouting, screaming, that she would wait at the doors of prisons and kill every offender who was released, every single one of them who was turned loose on the world. She’d use every last ounce of strength God gave her to “chop them to pieces!”

That’s when Gurney caught a glimpse of the possible connection-the simple equation that might explain everything.

He spoke matter-of-factly, as if they’d been discussing the subject all evening. “There’s no chance of Tirana ever being turned loose on anyone.”

At first the man showed no reaction, seeming not to have heard the words Gurney had uttered, much less the accusations of murder they implied.

Behind Ashton on the dusky landing, however, Gurney detected another movement-more identifiably this time as a brown-clad arm and at the end of it a small reflective glint of something metallic. Then, as before, it was withdrawn into the shallow nook beyond the doorway.

Ashton’s head until then had been tilted a little to the left. Now it pivoted, in the slowest-motion arc imaginable, to the right. He switched the pistol from his right hand to his left, which rested in his lap. He elevated his right hand tentatively to the side of his head, so that his fingertips lightly touched his ear and his temple, remaining there in a gesture that was both delicate and disconcerting. Combined with the angle of his head, it created the peculiar impression of a man listening for some elusive melody.

Eventually his eyes met Gurney’s and he lowered his hand to the arm of his chair, at the same time raising the hand that held the pistol. A smile bloomed and faded on his face like some grotesque, short-lived flower. “You’re such a clever, clever man.”

The background murmur of voices emanating from the speakers in the monitor behind him grew louder, sharper.

Ashton seemed not to notice. “So clever, so perceptive, so eager to impress. Impress whom?, I wonder.”

“Something’s burning,” Hardwick said in a loud, urgent voice.

“You’re a child,” Ashton went on, following his own train of thought. “A child who’s learned a card trick and keeps showing it to the same people over and over, trying to re-create the reaction they had to it the first time.”

“Something’s goddamn burning!” Hardwick repeated, pointing at the screen.

Gurney was alternately watching the gun and the deceptively calm eyes of the man who held it. Whatever was happening on the screen would have to wait. He wanted Ashton to keep talking.

There was another movement on the landing, and a small man in a brown cardigan stepped slowly and quietly into the office doorway. It took Gurney’s mind an extra second to register that it was Hobart Ashton.