John Verdon - Shut Your Eyes Tight

“That mean anything to you?”

“Not a damn thing. Very private kind of community-at least at Ashton’s end of the road. Minimum property size is ten acres, private kind of people, not likely to hang out at the back fence and shoot the shit, probably be considered rude up there to say hello without an invitation.”

“Do we know if anyone saw her anytime after her husband left for Montauk?”

“Seems nobody did, but…” Hardwick shrugged, reiterating that not being seen by your neighbors in Tambury was the rule, not the exception.

“And the guests at the reception, their locations were all accounted for during ‘the critical fourteen minutes’ you referred to?”

“Yep. Day after the murder, I went thorough the video personally, accounted for the whereabouts of every guest for every minute the victim was in that cottage-with our encouraging captain telling me I was wasting time that I should be spending searching the woods for Hector Flores. Who the hell knows, maybe numbnuts was right for once. Of course, if I’d ignored the video and it later turned out… well, you know what the little shithead is like.” He hissed the obscenity through tightened lips. “What are you looking at me like that for?”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m crazy.”

“You are crazy,” said Gurney lightly. He was also thinking that during the ten months since they’d been involved in the Mellery case, Hardwick’s attitude toward Captain Rod Rodriguez had for some reason progressed from contemptuous to venomous.

“Maybe I am,” said Hardwick, as much to himself as to Gurney. “Seems to be the general consensus.” He turned and stared out the den window again. It was darker now, the northern ridge nearly black against a slate sky.

Gurney wondered: Was Hardwick, uncharacteristically, inviting a personal discussion? Did he have a problem that he might actually be willing to talk about?

Whatever personal door might have been ajar was quickly closed. Hardwick pivoted on his heel, the sardonic spark back in his eye. “There’s a question about the fourteen minutes. Might not be exactly fourteen. I’d like to get your omniscient perspective.” He came away from the window, sat on the arm of the couch farthest from Gurney, spoke to the coffee table as though it were a communications channel between them. “No doubt about the point when the clock starts running. When Jillian walked into the cottage, she was alive. Nineteen minutes later, when Ashton opened the door, she was sitting at the table in two pieces.” He wrinkled his nose and added, “Each piece in its own private puddle of blood.”

“Nineteen? Not fourteen?”

“Fourteen takes it back to the point when the catering girl knocked and got no answer. Reasonable assumption would be that the victim didn’t answer because the victim was already dead.”

“But not necessarily?”

“Not necessarily, because at that point she might have been taking orders from Flores with a machete in his hand, telling her to keep her mouth shut.”

Gurney thought about it, pictured it.

“You got a preference?” asked Hardwick.

“Preference?”

“You think she got the big slice before or after the fourteen-minute mark?”

The big slice? Gurney sighed, knowing the routine: Hardwick being outrageous, his audience wincing. Probably been going on all his life, the shock-jock clown-a style reinforced by the prevailing cynicism in the world of law enforcement, deepening and souring as he aged, concentrated by career problems and bad chemistry with his boss.

“So?” Hardwick prodded. “Which is it?”

“Almost certainly before the first knock on the door. Probably quite a bit before. Most likely within a minute or two of her entering the cottage.”

“Why?”

“The sooner he did it, the more time he’d have to escape before her body was discovered. The more time he’d have to get rid of the machete, to do whatever he did to keep the dogs from following the trail any farther, to get to where he was going before the neighborhood was flooded with cops.”

Hardwick looked skeptical, but not more so than usual-it had become the natural set of his features. “You’re assuming this was all conducted according to plan, all premeditated?”

“That would be my take on it. You see it differently?”

“There are problems either way.”

“For instance?”

Hardwick shook his head. “First, give me your argument for premeditation.”

“The position of the head.”

Hardwick’s mouth twitched. “What about it?”

“The way you described it-facing the body, tiara in place. It sounds like a deliberate arrangement that meant something to the killer or was intended to mean something to someone else. Not a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

Hardwick looked like he had a touch of acid reflux. “Problem with premeditation is that going into the cottage was the victim’s idea. How would Flores know she was going to do that?”

“How do you know she hadn’t discussed it with him beforehand?”

“She told Ashton she just wanted to talk Flores into joining the wedding toast.”

Gurney smiled, waited for Hardwick to think about what he was saying.

Hardwick cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You think that was bullshit? That she had some other reason for going into the cottage? That Flores had set her up earlier with some line of shit and she was lying to Ashton about the wedding-toast thing? Those are big assumptions, based on nothing.”

“If the murder was premeditated, something along those lines must have happened.”

“But if it wasn’t premeditated?”

“Nonsense, Jack. This wasn’t an impulse. It was a message. I don’t know who the recipient was or what it meant. But it was definitely a message.”

Hardwick made another acid-reflux face but didn’t argue. “Speaking of messages, we found an odd one on the victim’s cell phone-a text message sent to her an hour before she was killed. It said, ‘For all the reasons I have written.’ According to the phone company, the message came from Flores’s phone, but it was signed ‘Edward Vallory.’ That name mean anything to you?”

“Not a thing.” The room had grown dark, and they could hardly see each other at opposite ends of the couch. Gurney switched on the end-table lamp beside him.

Hardwick rubbed his face again, hard, with the palms of both hands. “Before I forget, I wanted to mention a small oddity I observed at the scene and was reminded of in the ME’s report. Might not mean anything, but… the blood on the body itself, the torso, it was all on the far side.”

“Far side?”

“Yeah, the side away from where Flores would have been standing when he swung the machete.”

“Your point being?”

“Well, you know… you know how you just kind of absorb what you’re seeing at a homicide scene? And you start to picture what it was that someone did that would account for things being the way they are?”

Gurney shrugged. “Sure. It’s automatic. That’s what we do.”

“Well, I’m looking at how the blood from the carotids all went down the far side of her body, despite the fact that the torso was sitting up straight, kind of supported by the chair arms, and I’m wondering why . I mean, there’s an artery on each side, so how come all the blood went one way?”

“And what did you picture happening?”

Hardwick bared his teeth in a quick flinch of distaste. “I pictured Flores grabbing her by the hair with one hand and swinging that machete full force with the other right through her neck-which is pretty much what the ME says must have happened.”

“And?”

“And then… then he holds the severed head at an angle against the pulsing neck. In other words, he uses the head to deflect the blood. To keep it from getting on him.”