The plan
As strained as it often was, Gurney’s relationship with Madeleine had always been the chief pillar of his stability. But that relationship depended on a degree of openness he felt incapable of at the moment.
With the desperation of a drowning man, he embraced his only other pillar, his detective identity, and attempted to channel all his energies into Solving the Crime.
The most productive next step in that process, he was convinced, would be a conversation with Jordan Ballston. He needed to devise a way to bring that about. Rebecca had insisted that fear would be the key to cracking the shell of the rich psycho, and Gurney had no reason to disagree. Nor did he have any reason to disagree with her warning that it wouldn’t be easy.
Fear.
It was a subject with which Gurney had a raw, current, intimate familiarity. Perhaps that experience could be of some use. What exactly was it that frightened him so much? He retrieved the three alarming text messages and reread them carefully.
SUCH PASSIONS! SUCH SECRETS! SUCH WONDERFUL PHOTOGRAPHS!
ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT MY GIRLS? THEY’RE THINKING ABOUT YOU.
YOU’RE SUCH AN INTERESTING MAN, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN MY DAUGHTERS WOULD ADORE YOU. IT WAS SO GOOD OF YOU TO COME TO THE CITY. NEXT TIME THEY WILL COME TO YOU. WHEN? WHO CAN SAY? THEY WANT IT TO BE A SURPRISE.
The words generated a sick, hollow feeling in his chest.
Such virulent threats wrapped in such airy banalities.
So nonspecific, yet so malignant.
So nonspecific. Yes, that was it. It brought to mind his favorite English professor’s explanation of the emotional power of Harold Pinter: The perils that strike the greatest terror in us are not those which have been spelled out but those that our imaginations conjure. We are chilled to the bone not by the lengthy rants of an angry man but by the menace in a placid voice.
He remembered it because the truth of it had struck him immediately, and experience had reinforced it over the years. What we’re able to imagine is always worse than what reality places before us. The greatest fear by far is the fear of what we imagine is lurking in the dark.
So perhaps the best way to panic Ballston would be to give him an opportunity to panic himself. A frontal attack would be rebuffed by his legal army. Gurney needed a back door through the fortifications.
Ballston’s current defense strategy was a categorical denial of any knowledge of Melanie Strum dead or alive, plus the creation of an alternative hypothesis, involving the access other individuals had to his home, to explain the presence of her body. Such a strategy would collapse, disastrously for Ballston, if a prior link could be established between him and the girl. In the best possible outcome, the nature of that link would also explain how the murders of Melanie Strum, Jillian Perry, and Kiki Muller, as well as the disappearances of the other Mapleshade graduates, were connected. But whether it did or not, Gurney was sure that discovering Melanie’s route to Ballston’s basement freezer would be a giant step toward the final solution. And the possible exposure of that link would be Ballston’s greatest fear.
The question was how to trigger that fear—how to use it as an entry point into Ballston’s psyche, a way around the battlements manned by his lawyers. Was there a person, place, or thing the mention of which would open the door? Mapleshade? Jillian Perry? Kiki Muller? Hector Flores? Edward Vallory? Alessandro? Karnala Fashion? Giotto Skard?
And as hard as it would be to pick the magic name, the harder part would lie in managing whatever dialogue ensued—the Pinteresque art of implying without specifying, unnerving without providing details. The challenge would be to provide the dark space in which Ballston could imagine the worst, the platform on which he might hang himself.
Madeleine had gone in to bed. Gurney, however, was wide awake, pacing the length of the big kitchen, on fire with possibilities, risk evaluations, logistics. He narrowed the names of his potential door openers to the three he thought most promising: Mapleshade, Flores, Karnala.
Of those he finally put Karnala, by a millimeter, at the top of the list. Because all the Mapleshade girls known to be missing had appeared in near-pornographic Karnala Fashion ads, because Karnala did not seem to be in the business it pretended to be in, because Karnala was connected to the Skards, and the Skards were rumored to be involved in a criminal sex enterprise, and Melanie Strum’s murder was a sex crime. In fact, the Edward Vallory dimension and Mapleshade’s admissions policy suggested that everything connected with the case so far was in some way a sex crime or the result of a sex crime.
Gurney was aware that the logical chain back to Karnala was less than perfect, but demanding perfect logic (much as the concept appealed to him) did not lead to solutions, it led to paralysis. He’d learned that the key question in police work, as in life, was not “Am I absolutely sure of what I believe?” The question that mattered was “Am I sure enough to act on that belief?”
In this case Gurney’s answer was yes. He was willing to bet that there was something about Karnala that would unnerve Jordan Ballston. According to the old clock over the sideboard, it was just after ten when he placed a call to the Palm Beach Police Department to get Ballston’s unlisted number.
No one assigned to the Strum case was on duty that night, but the desk sergeant was able to give him Darryl Becker’s cell number.
Surprisingly, Becker picked up on the first ring.
Gurney explained what he wanted.
“Ballston’s not talking to anybody,” said Becker testily. “Communications go in and out through Markham, Mull & Sternberg, his main law firm. Thought I’d made that clear.”
“I may have a way of getting through to him.”
“How?”
“I’m going to toss a bomb through his window.”
“What kind of bomb?”
“The kind he’ll want to talk to me about.”
“This some kind of game, Gurney? I had a long day. I’d like some facts.”
“You sure about that?”
Becker was silent.
“Look, if I can knock this scumbag off balance, that’s a plus for everyone. Worst case, we’re maybe back where we started. All you’re giving me is a phone number, no official authorization to do anything, so if there’s any fallout at all, which I don’t think there will be, it doesn’t land on you. In fact, I’ve already forgotten in advance where I got the number from.”
There was another short silence, followed by a few clicks on a keypad, followed by Becker’s voice reading off a number that began with a Palm Beach area code. Then the connection was broken.
Gurney spent the next several minutes picturing and then immersing himself in a simple version of the kind of layered undercover persona he advocated in his academy lectures—in this case a reptilian ice man, lurking under a thin veneer of civilized manners.
Once he was satisfied with his sense of the attitude and tone, he activated the ID blocker on his phone and made the call to the Palm Beach number. It went straight into voice mail.
A spoiled, imperious voice announced, “This is Jordan. If you wish to receive a response, please leave a substantive message regarding the subject of your call.” He managed to imbue the please with a grating condescension that reversed its normal meaning.
Gurney spoke deliberately and a little awkwardly, as though he found the intricacies of polite speech a strange and difficult dance. He also added the subtlest hint of a Southern European accent. “The subject of my call is your relationship with Karnala Fashion, which I need to discuss with you as soon as possible. I’ll call you back in approximately thirty minutes. Please be available to answer the phone, and I’ll be more … substantive … at that time.”
Gurney was making some major assumptions: that Ballston was at home, as the stipulations of his bail arrangement required, that a man in his perilous position would be screening his calls and checking his messages obsessively, and that how he chose to handle the promised call thirty minutes later would reveal the nature of his involvement with Karnala.
Making one assumption was risky. Making three was crazy.