Total confusion

For the rest of the evening, Gurney felt both energized and calmed by the conversation and its promise of ongoing involvement.

He was pleased and rather surprised to still feel the same way when he awoke at sunrise the following day. In an effort to feed that feeling, to stay within the comparatively safe and solid confines of a world in which he was the hunter and not the quarry, he reviewed the Perry file for the tenth time while he had his morning coffee. Then he called Rebecca Holdenfield’s number and left a message asking if he could drop by her Albany office that afternoon following his meeting at BCI.

Making calls, returning calls, making appointments—the activity created a sense of momentum. He called Val Perry’s number and was shunted into her voice mail. He’d barely said, “This is Dave Gurney,” when she picked up, surprising him. He hadn’t figured her for an early riser.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

Unprepared for an actual conversation, he replied, “Just wanted to touch base.”

“Oh? And …?” She sounded edgy, but maybe no edgier than usual.

“Does the name Skard mean anything to you?”

“No. Should it?”

“I was just wondering if Jillian had ever mentioned it.”

“Jillian never mentioned anything. It wasn’t like she shared things with me. I thought I’d made that clear.”

“Perfectly clear, several times. But some questions have to be asked, even if I’m ninety-nine percent sure what the answer’s going to be.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Did Jillian ever ask you or your husband to buy her an expensive car?”

“There was hardly anything Jillian didn’t demand at some point, so I suppose she must have. On the other hand, she made it clear from the time she was twelve that Withrow and I were irrelevant to her happiness, that she could always find a rich man to give her whatever she wanted, so as far as she was concerned, we could go fuck ourselves.” She paused, perhaps savoring the shock value of her observations. “I’m on my way out. Any more questions?”

“That’s it for now, Mrs. Perry. Thank you for your time.”

Like Sheridan Kline the night before, Val Perry hung up without bothering to say good-bye. Whatever it was that Gurney was contributing to the investigation of her daughter’s murder, it clearly wasn’t what she’d been hoping for.

At 9:50 A.M. he pulled in to the parking lot of the fortresslike state police facility where his 10:00 A.M. meeting was to take place. During the minute or so that he was searching for a space, his phone rang twice. The first was a voice call, the second a text message. He was looking forward to at least one of them being from Rebecca Holdenfield.

As soon as he’d parked, he took out his phone and checked the text message first. The source was a cell number with a Manhattan area code.

As he read the message, a flood of fear rose from his gut into his chest.

ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT MY GIRLS? THEY’RE THINKING ABOUT YOU.

He reread it, then reread it again. He looked at the originating number. The fact that the sender hadn’t bothered to block it surely meant it was assigned to an untraceable prepaid phone. But it also meant he could send a reply message.

After dismissing the expressions of fury and bravado that came to mind, he decided on three unemotional little words: TELL ME MORE.

As he pressed “send,” he noted that the time was 9:59. He hurried into the building.

When he arrived in the bleak institutional conference room, the six chairs at the oblong table were already taken. The closest thing to a greeting he received was Hardwick pointing at a handful of folding chairs leaning against the wall by the coffee urn. Rodriguez, Anderson, and Blatt ignored him. Gurney could imagine their unenthusiastic reactions to the DA’s artful nonsense about controlling the loose cannon by inviting him to their meetings.

Sergeant Wigg, a wiry redhead familiar to Gurney as the efficient evidence-team coordinator from the Mellery affair, was sitting at the far end of the table studying the screen of her laptop—exactly the way he’d remembered her. Her main agenda would be the pursuit of factual certainty and logical coherence. Gurney opened his folding chair and placed it at the end of the table facing her. It was 10:05 on the wall clock.

Sheridan Kline frowned at his watch. “Okay, people. We’re running a little late. I’ve got a tight schedule today. Maybe we could start with anything new, significant progress, promising directions?”

Rodriguez cleared his throat.

“Dave’s got some news,” interjected Hardwick, “a peculiar thing at the crime scene. Might make a good way to kick off the meeting.”

Kline’s eyes widened. “What now?”

Gurney had intended to wait until later in the meeting to bring up the problem, in the hope that some piece of information along the way might cast light on it. But now that Hardwick was forcing the issue, it would be awkward to delay it.

“We’re imagining that after killing Jillian, Flores went out through the woods to the spot where we found the machete, is that right?” said Gurney.

Rodriguez adjusted his steel-rimmed glasses. “Imagining? I’d say we have conclusive evidence to that effect.”

Gurney sighed. “Problem is, we have some video data that doesn’t support that hypothesis.”

Kline went into rapid-blinking mode. “Video data?”

Gurney painstakingly explained how the continuous visibility of the tree trunk in the reception video proved that Flores could not have taken the necessary route through the woods, since anyone taking such a route would have to pass between the camera in that corner of the property and the tree, and he would have to appear, albeit fleetingly, in the picture.

Rodriguez was frowning like a man who suspected he was being tricked but didn’t know how. Anderson was frowning like a man trying to stay awake. Wigg looked up from her laptop screen, which Gurney interpreted as a sign of high interest.

“So he went around the long way, in back of the tree,” said Blatt. “I don’t see the problem.”

“The problem, Arlo, is the terrain. I’m sure you’ve checked it out?”

“What terrain problem are you talking about?”

“The ravine. In order to get from the cottage to the place the machete was found without walking in front of that tree would require someone to go straight back from the cottage, then slide down a long, steep slope with a lot of loose stones, then travel another five hundred feet on the rocky, uneven bottom of the ravine to get to the first place where there’s any possibility of climbing back out. And even there the loose stones and dirt make it no easy thing. Not to mention that the point at which you get back on level ground is nowhere near the place where the machete was found.”

Blatt sighed as though he were already aware of all this and it made no difference. “Just because it wasn’t easy doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”

“Another problem is the time it would take.”

“Meaning?” asked Kline.

“I checked out that area pretty carefully. Going via the ravine route to the machete site would just take too damn long. I don’t think he’d want to be scrambling around back there when the body was discovered and people started swarming all over the place. Plus, there are two bigger problems. One: Why make it so god-awfully difficult, when he could have ditched the machete anywhere? Two—and this is pretty much the clincher: The scent trail follows the route in front of the tree, not behind it.”

“Wait a second,” said Rodriguez. “Aren’t you contradicting yourself? You’re saying that all those factors prove that Flores took the route in front of the tree, but the video proves he didn’t. What on earth does that add up to?”

“An equation with a serious flaw,” said Gurney, “but I’ll be damned if I can see what it is.”

For the next hour and a half, the group questioned him about the reliability of the video’s time code, the potential for dropped frames, the position of the cherry tree in relation to the cottage and the machete and the ravine. They retrieved the crime-scene sketches from the master case file, passed them around the room, studied them. They went off on brief tangents about the fabled talents and accomplishments of K-9 teams. They debated the alternative scenarios for Flores’s disappearance after depositing the murder weapon, for Kiki Muller’s possible involvement as an accessory after the fact, and when and why she’d been killed. They pursued a few speculative notions concerning the psychopathology of cutting off a victim’s head. At the end of it all, however, the basic puzzle seemed no closer to solution.

“So,” said Rodriguez, summing up the central conundrum as simply as anyone could, “according to Dave Gurney, we can be absolutely certain of two things. First, Hector Flores had to pass in front of the cherry tree. Second, he couldn’t have.”

“A very interesting situation,” said Gurney, feeling the electricity in the contradiction.

“This might be a good time to take a short lunch break,” said the captain, who seemed to be feeling more frustration than electricity.