Just like Ashton’s cottage
The BCI investigation team arrived in two installments—Jack Hardwick at midnight and the evidence team an hour later.
The techs in their white anticontamination suits were initially skeptical of a crime scene in which the only “crime” was the unexplained presence of a broken doll. They were accustomed to carnage, to the bloody remnants of mayhem and murder. So perhaps it was understandable that their first reactions were raised eyebrows and sideways glances.
Their initial suggestions—that the doll might have been put there by a visiting child or that it might be a practical joke—were perhaps understandable as well, but that did not make them tolerable to Madeleine, whose blunt question to Hardwick they probably overheard, judging by the expressions on their faces: “Are they drunk or just stupid?”
However, once Hardwick took them aside and explained the uncanny resemblance of the doll’s position to that of Jillian Perry’s body, they did as thorough and professional a job of processing the scene as if it had been riddled with bullets.
The results, unfortunately, didn’t amount to anything. All their fine-combing, print-lifting, and fiber- and soil-vacuuming efforts produced nothing of interest. The room contained the prints of one person, no doubt Madeleine’s. Ditto the few hairs found on the back of the chair by the window where Madeleine worked on her knitting. The inside of the frame of the adjoining window, the one Gurney was called upon to open when it got stuck, bore a second set, no doubt his. There were no prints on the body or head of the doll. The brand of doll was a popular one, sold at every Walmart in America. The downstairs entry doors had multiple prints identical to the prints found in the bedroom. No door or window in the house showed any sign of being forced. There were no prints on the outside of the windows. Luma-Lite examination of the floors showed no clear footprints that didn’t match either Dave’s or Madeleine’s shoe size. Examination of all the doors, banisters, countertops, faucets, and toilet handles for fingerprints produced the same results.
When the techs finally packed up their equipment and departed at around 4:00 A.M. in their van, they took with them the doll, the bedspread, and the throw rugs they had removed from the floor on either side of the bed.
“We’ll run the standard tests,” Gurney overheard them telling Hardwick on their way out, “but ten to one everything’s clean.” They sounded tired and frustrated.
When Hardwick came back into the kitchen and sat at the table across from him and Madeleine, Gurney commented, “Just like the scene in Ashton’s cottage.”
“Yeah,” said Hardwick with a bone-tired disconnectedness.
“What do you mean?” asked Madeleine, sounding antagonistic.
“The antiseptic quality of it all,” said Gurney. “No prints, no nothing.”
She made an almost agonized little sound in her throat. She took several deep breaths. “So … what … what are we supposed to do now? I mean, we can’t just …”
“There’ll be a cruiser here before I leave,” said Hardwick. “You’ll have protection for at least forty-eight hours, no problem.”
“No problem?” Madeleine stared at him, uncomprehending. “How can you …?” She didn’t finish the sentence, just shook her head, stood up, and left the room.
Gurney watched her go, at a loss for any comforting thing to say, as jarred by her emotion as he was by the event that had caused it.
Hardwick’s notebook was on the table in front of him. He opened it, found the page he wanted, and took a pen out of his shirt pocket. He didn’t write anything, just tapped idly with it on the open page. He looked exhausted and vaguely troubled.
“So …” he began. He cleared his throat. He spoke as if he were pushing the words uphill. “According to what I wrote down earlier … you were away all day.”
“Right. In Florida. Extracting a near confession from Jordan Ballston. Which I hope is being followed up as we speak.”
Hardwick laid down his pen, closed his eyes, and massaged them with his thumb and forefinger. When he opened them again, he looked back at his notebook. “And your wife told me she was out of the house all afternoon—from sometime around one till sometime around five-thirty—bike riding, then hiking through the woods. She does that a lot?”
“She does that a lot.”
“It’s a reasonable assumption, then, that the doll was … installed, shall we say, during that time window.”
“I’d say so,” said Gurney, becoming irritated at the reiteration of the obvious.
“Okay, so as soon as the morning shift comes on, I’ll send someone over to talk to your neighbors down the road. A passing car must be a big event up here.”
“Having live neighbors is a big event. There are only six houses on the road, and four of them belong to city people, only here on weekends.”
“Still, you never know. I’ll send someone over.”
“Fine.”
“You don’t sound optimistic.”
“Why the hell should I be optimistic?”
“Good point.” He picked up his pen and started tapping again on his notebook. “She says she’s sure she locked the doors when she went out. That sound right to you?”
“What do you mean, does it sound right?”
“I mean, is that something she normally does, lock the doors?”
“What she normally does is tell the truth. If she says she locked the doors, she locked the doors.”
Hardwick stared at him, seemed as if he were about to respond, and then changed his mind. More tapping. “So … if they were locked and there’s no sign of forced entry, that means someone came in with a key. You give keys to anyone?”
“Any instances you can think of when your keys were out of your possession long enough for someone to make dupes?”
“No.”
“Really? Only takes twenty seconds to make a key.”
“I know how long it takes to make a key.”
Hardwick nodded, as though this were actual information. “Well, chances are, somebody got one somehow. You might want to change your locks.”
“Jack, who the hell do you think you’re talking to? This isn’t Home Safety Night at the PTA.”
Hardwick smiled, leaned back in his chair. “Right. I’m talking to Sherlock fucking Gurney. So tell me, Mr. Brilliant Fucking Detective, you have any bright ideas about this?”
“About the doll?”
“Yeah. About the doll.”
“Nothing that wouldn’t already be obvious to you.”
“That somebody’s trying to scare you off the case?”
“You have a better idea?”
Hardwick shrugged. He stopped tapping and began studying his pen as though it were a complex piece of evidence. “Anything else odd been happening?”
“Like what?”
“Like … odd. Have there been any other little … oddities in your life?”
Gurney uttered a short, humorless laugh. “Apart from every single aspect of this miserably odd case and all the miserably odd people involved in it, everything’s perfectly normal.” It wasn’t really an answer, and he suspected that Hardwick knew it wasn’t. For all the man’s bluster and vulgarity, he had one of the sharpest minds Gurney had encountered in all his years in law enforcement. He could easily have been a captain at thirty-five if he gave a damn about any of the things that captains need to give a damn about.
Hardwick looked up at the ceiling, his eyes following the crown molding as though it were the subject of what he was saying. “Remember the guy whose fingerprints were on that little cordial glass?”
A bad feeling seized Gurney’s stomach. “Saul Steck, aka Paul Starbuck?”
“Right. You remember what I told you?”
“You told me he was a successful character actor with a nasty interest in young girls. Got a psych commitment, eventually got out. What about him?”
“The guy who helped me lift the prints and run them through the system called me back last night with an interesting little addendum.”
“Yeah?”
Hardwick was squinting across the room at the farthest corner of the molding. “Seems that back before he was arrested, Steck used to have a porno website, and Starbuck wasn’t his only alias. His website, which featured underage girls, was called Sandy’s Den.”
Gurney waited for Hardwick’s gaze to return to him before replying. “You’re struck by the possibility that the name Sandy could be a nickname for Alessandro?”
Hardwick smiled. “Something like that.”
“World is full of meaningless coincidences, Jack.”
Hardwick nodded. He stood up from the table and looked out the window. “Cruiser’s here. Like I said, full coverage for two twenty-fours, minimum. After that, we’ll see. You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“She going to be okay?”
“Yeah.”
“I got to get home and get some sleep. I’ll call you later.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Jack.”
Hardwick hesitated. “You still have your weapon from the job?”
“No. Never liked carrying it. Didn’t even like having it around.”
“Well … considering the situation … you might want to pick up a shotgun.”
For a long while after Hardwick’s taillights receded down the pasture lane, Gurney sat alone at the table—absorbing the shock of the doll, contemplating the shifting landscape of the case.
It was conceivable, of course, that the names Sandy and Alessandro had each popped up with coincidental insignificance, but that was the definition of wishful thinking. A realistic man would have to accept that Sandy, the former photographer of the pornographic website, might very well be Alessandro, the current photographer of the near-pornographic Karnala ads—and that both names were aliases of the sex criminal Saul Steck.
But who was Hector Flores?
And why was Jillian Perry beheaded?
And Kiki Muller?
Had the women discovered something about Karnala? About Steck? About Flores himself?
And why had Steck drugged him? In order to photograph him with his “daughters”? To threaten him with public embarrassment, or worse? To have the leverage to control his input into the investigation? To blackmail him into providing inside information into its progress?
Or was the purpose of the drugging, like that of the decapitated doll, to demonstrate Gurney’s accessibility and vulnerability? To frighten him into backing away?
Or were both events prompted by something even sicker? Were they both part of a control freak’s game, an exciting way of demonstrating power and dominance? Something he did to prove he could do it? Something he did for a thrill?
Gurney’s hands were cold. He rubbed them hard against his thighs in an effort to warm them. It didn’t seem to be working very well. He started to shiver. He stood, tried rubbing his hands on his chest and upper arms, tried walking back and forth. He walked to the far end of the room, where sometimes the iron woodstove held some residual warmth from an earlier fire. But the dusty black metal was colder than his hand, and touching it made him shiver again.
He heard the click of the lamp switch in the bedroom, followed shortly by the squeak of the bathroom door. He’d talk to Madeleine, calm her nerves—after he managed to calm himself. He looked out the window, was reassured by the sight of the police cruiser by the side door.
He took the deepest breath he could, exhaled slowly. Slow, controlled breathing. Deliberation, determination. Positive thoughts. Thoughts of achievement and competence.
He reminded himself that the fingerprint trail that led to Steck existed because of his personal initiative in retrieving the glass under difficult circumstances.
That discovery had also connected the “Jykynstyl” drugging mystery with the Mapleshade murder-and-disappearance mysteries. And since he had a foot planted in each area, he was in a unique position to use one situation to illuminate the other.
His original insights and prodding had pulled the investigation out of the ditch it had been mired in—the search for an insane Mexican laborer—and put it on a new path.
His urging that all former Mapleshade graduates be contacted led not only to the discovery that the whereabouts of an extraordinary number of them were unknown but also to knowledge of the fate of Melanie Strum.
His judgment regarding the likely significance of Karnala had shaken loose a crazed revelation from Jordan Ballston that could well lead to a final solution.
Even the killer’s devotion of time, energy, and resources to the apparent goal of halting his efforts proved that he was on the right track.
He heard the bathroom door hinge squeak again and twenty seconds later the click of the lamp being switched off. Perhaps now that he had his feet on the ground, now that the chill was leaving his fingers, he could talk to Madeleine. But first he took the precaution of locking the side door not only with the knob lock but also with the dead bolt they never used. Then he latched all the ground-floor windows.
He went into the bedroom in what he considered to be a good frame of mind. He approached the bed in the dark. “Maddie?”
“You bastard!”
He’d expected her to be in bed, in front of him, but her voice, shocking in its anger, came from the far corner of the room.
“What?”
“What have you done?” Her voice, hardly above a whisper, was furious.
“Done? What …?”
“This is my home. This is my sanctuary.”
“Yes?”
“Yes? Yes? How could you? How could you bring this horror into my home?”
Gurney was rendered speechless by the question and by its intensity. He felt his way along the edge of the bed and turned on the lamp.
The antique rocker that was usually near the foot of the bed had been pushed into the corner farthest from the windows. Madeleine was sitting in it, still fully dressed, her knees pulled up in front of her body. Gurney was startled first by the raw emotion in her eyes, then by the sharp pair of scissors in each of her clenched fists.
He’d had much training and practice in the technique of talking an overwrought person down into a calmer state of mind, but none of it seemed appropriate at that moment. He sat on the corner of the bed closest to her.
“Someone invaded my home. Why, David? Why did they do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you do! You know exactly what’s happening.”
He watched her, watched the scissors. Her knuckles were white.
“You’re supposed to protect us,” she went on in a trembling whisper. “Protect our home, make it safe. But you’ve done the opposite. The opposite. You’ve let horrible people come into our lives, come into our home. MY HOME!” she shouted at him, her voice breaking. “YOU LET MONSTERS INTO MY HOME!”
Gurney had never seen this kind of rage in her before. He said nothing. He had no words in his mind, not even thoughts. He hardly moved, hardly took a breath. The emotional explosion seemed to clear the room, the world, of all other realities. He waited. No other option occurred to him.
After a while, he wasn’t sure how long, she said, “I can’t believe what you’ve done.”
“This wasn’t my intention.” His voice sounded strange to him. Small.
She made a sound that might have been mistaken for laughter but sounded to him more like a brief convulsion in her lungs. “That horrible mug-shot art—that was the beginning. Pictures of the most disgusting monsters on earth. But that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough having them in our computer, having them on the screen staring at us.”
“Maddie, I promise you—whoever got into our house, I’ll find them. I’ll put an end to them. This will never happen again.”
She shook her head. “It’s too late. Don’t you see what you’ve done?”
“I see that war has been declared. We’ve been attacked.”
“No! You—don’t you see what you’ve done?”
“What I did is kick a rattlesnake out from under a rock.”
“You brought this into our lives.”
He said nothing, just bowed his head.
“We moved to the country. To a beautiful place. Lilacs and apple blossoms. A pond.”
“Maddie, I promise you, I’ll kill the snake.”
She seemed not to be listening. “Don’t you see what you’ve done?” She gestured slowly with one of her scissors to the dark window beside him. “Those woods, the woods where I take my walks, he was hiding in those woods, watching me.”
“What makes you think you were being watched?”
“God, it’s obvious! He put that hideous thing in the room I work in, the room I read in, the room with my favorite window, the window I sit next to with my knitting. The room overlooking the woods. He knew it was a room I used. If he’d put that thing in the spare bedroom across the hall, I might not have found it for a month. So he knew. He saw me in the window. And the only way he could see me in the window was from the woods.” She paused, stared at him accusingly. “You see what I mean, David? You’ve destroyed my woods. How can I ever walk out there again?”
“I’ll kill the snake. It’ll be all right.”
“Until you kick the next one out from under its rock.” She shook her head and sighed. “I can’t believe what you’ve done to the most beautiful place in the world.”
It seemed to Gurney that once in a while, unpredictably, the elements of an otherwise indifferent universe conspired to produce in him an eerie frisson, and so it was that at that very moment behind the farmhouse, beyond the high pasture, out on the northern ridge, the coyotes began to howl.
Madeleine closed her eyes and lowered her knees. She rested her fists on her lap and loosened her grip on the two scissors enough for the blood to flow back into her knuckles. She tilted her head back against the headrest of the chair. Her mouth relaxed. It was as though the howling of the coyotes, weird and unsettling to her at other times, touched her that night in an entirely different way.
As the first gray swath of dawn appeared in the bedroom’s east-facing window, she fell asleep. After a while Gurney took the scissors from her hands and switched off the light.