Another layer
“The hell’s the matter?” demanded Hardwick.
Gurney just shook his head, not ready to answer, as he followed the logical chain of possibilities in his mind with an animal excitement that brought him to his feet. He began to pace, slowly at first, across the antique carpet in front of Ashton’s desk. The large porcelain lamp on the near corner cast a soft circle of light, illuminating the intricate garden design in the carpet’s fine weave.
If he was right—and it was at least possible that he was right—what would follow from that?
On the screen, Ashton could be seen standing next to one of the dark red drapes that covered portions of the chapel walls, his gaze drifting benignly over the assembly.
“What is it?” demanded Hardwick. “The hell’s on your mind?”
Gurney stopped his pacing long enough to lower the sound slightly on the computer monitor in order to better focus on his own train of thought. “That comment you made a minute ago? That Ashton could have said anything?”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“You may have demolished one of the key assumptions we’ve been making about Jillian’s murder.”
“What assumption?”
“The biggest one of all. The assumption that we know why she went into the cottage.”
“Well, we know why she said she went in. On the video she told Ashton she wanted to persuade Flores to come out for the wedding toast. And Ashton argued with her. Told her not to bother with Flores. But she went right the fuck in, anyway.”
Gurney’s eyes gleamed. “Suppose that conversation never happened.”
“It was on the video.” Hardwick looked as annoyed by Gurney’s excitement as he was confused by what Gurney was saying.
Gurney spoke slowly, as if each word were precious. “That conversation isn’t actually on the reception video.”
“Of course it is.”
“No. What’s recorded on the video is a meeting between Scott Ashton and Jillian Perry on the lawn, at the reception, in the background of the scene—too far in the background for the camera to record their voices. The ‘conversation’ you’re recalling—and that everyone who’s seen that video has been recalling—is Scott Ashton’s description of the conversation to Burt Luntz and his wife, after it occurred. The fact is, we have no way of knowing what Jillian actually said to him or what he said to Jillian. And until now we’ve had no reason to question it. All we really have is what Ashton claims was said. And as you commented a minute ago on his inaudible conversation with that blonde in the chapel, he could have said anything.”
“Okay,” said Hardwick uncertainly. “Ashton could have said anything. I get that. But what do you think he actually said to her? I mean, what’s the point of this? Why would he lie about Jillian’s reason for going into the cottage?”
“I can think of at least one horrible reason. My point is—once again—we don’t know what we thought we knew. All we really know is that they spoke to each other and she went into the cottage.”
Hardwick began tapping impatiently on the carved arm of his thronelike chair. “That’s not all we know. Don’t I remember someone going to get her? Knocking at the cottage door? One of the catering people? And wasn’t she already dead—or at least not able to answer the door? I’m not getting where the hell you’re going with this.”
“Let’s start at the beginning. If you look at the actual visual evidence and forget the narrative we’ve been given, the question is, is there another credible narrative that’s consistent with what we see happening on the screen?”
“On the video it looks like Jillian gets Ashton’s attention and points at her watch. Okay. Suppose he’d asked her to remind him when it was time for the wedding toast. And suppose when he went over to her, he told her that he had a huge surprise for her and he wanted her to go into the cottage, because that’s where he was going to give it to her—just before the toast. She should go into the cottage, lock the door, and be completely quiet. No matter who came to the door, she shouldn’t open it or say a word. It was all part of the big surprise, and she’d understand it all later.”
Hardwick was paying serious attention now. “So you’re saying that she may have been perfectly fine when the catering person knocked on the door?”
“And then when Ashton himself opened the door with his key, suppose he said something like, ‘Shut your eyes tight. Shut your eyes tight—for the biggest surprise of your life.’ ”
“And then what?”
Gurney paused. “You remember Jason Strunk?”
Hardwick frowned. “The serial killer? What’s he got to do with this?”
“Remember how he killed his victims?”
“Wasn’t he the one who chopped them up, then mailed the pieces to the local cops?”
“Right. But it’s the weapon he used that I was thinking about.”
“Meat cleaver, wasn’t it? Razor-sharp Japanese thing.”
“And he carried it in a simple plastic sheath under his jacket.”
“So … what are you saying? Oh, no, come on! You’re not saying that … that Scott Ashton went into the cottage, told his brand-new wife to close her eyes, and then chopped her head off?”
“Based on the visual evidence, it’s just as possible as the story we’ve been given.”
“God, lots of things are possible, but …” Hardwick shook his head. “Then what? After he chops off his bride’s head, he lays it neatly on the table, starts screaming, slips his bloody cleaver back into his plastic-lined pocket, comes stumbling out of the cottage, and collapses?”
Gurney went on. “Exactly. That last bit is recorded on the video—him screaming, stumbling out, collapsing in the flower bed. Everyone comes rushing over, everyone looks in the cottage, and everyone reaches what under the circumstances is the obvious conclusion. Exactly the conclusion Ashton would want them to reach. So there was no reason for anyone to search him. If he did have a cleaver or a similar weapon hidden inside his jacket, no one would ever have known. And as soon as the K-9 team found the bloody machete in the woods, everything seemed perfectly clear. The Hector Flores narrative was set in stone, just waiting for Rod Rodriguez to put his stamp of approval on it.”
“The machete … with Jillian’s blood … but how …?”
“That blood could easily have come from the sample taken for her lithium-level blood test two days earlier. Ashton could have canceled the regular phlebotomy appointment and drawn that sample himself. Or he could have gotten it some other way, pulled some kind of switch—just like we were starting to think Flores might have done. And he could have planted the machete in the woods that morning, before the reception. Could have smeared the blood on it, carried it out through the back window of the cottage, left a drop or two on the back windowsill, left that sex-pheromone trail with the boots for the dogs to follow, then came back in through the cottage. At that point, there wouldn’t have been any cameras running, which would explain how the machete got from the cottage to where it was found with no video record of anyone passing that goddamn tree.”
“Wait a second, you forgot something. How the hell did he swing a cleaver through her neck—through the carotids—without getting sprayed with blood? I mean, I know about that thing in the ME’s report about the blood all running down the far side of her body and my own idea of how the killer could have used the head itself to deflect the flow. But there’d still be some splatter, wouldn’t there?”
“Maybe there was.”
“And nobody noticed?”
“Think about it, Jack—the scene on the video. Ashton was wearing a dark suit. He falls in a muddy flower bed. A bed of rosebushes. With thorns. He was a muddy mess. And as I recall, some helpful guests took him into the house. I’d bet my pension he went to a bathroom. Which would offer an easy opportunity to ditch the cleaver, maybe even switch into a matching suit with some mud already on it. So when he came out, he’d still be a muddy mess, but a mess with no trace of the victim’s blood.”
“Fuck,” murmured Hardwick thoughtfully. “You really believe all that?”
“To be honest, Jack, I have no reason to believe any of it. But I do think it’s possible.”
“There are some problems with it, don’t you think?”
“Like the credibility problem of a famous psychiatrist being a stone-cold assassin?”
“Actually, that’s the part I like best,” said Hardwick.
Gurney grinned for the first time that day. “Any other problems?” he asked.
“Yeah. If Flores wasn’t in the cottage when Jillian was killed, where the hell was he?”
“Maybe he was already dead,” said Gurney. “Maybe Ashton killed him to make it look like he was guilty and ran away. Or maybe the whole scenario I just cooked up is as full of holes as every other theory of this case.”
“So this guy is either a world-class criminal or the innocent victim of one.” Hardwick glanced over at the monitor behind Ashton’s desk. “For a man whose whole world is supposedly collapsing, he looks pretty damn calm. Where did all the despair and hopelessness go?”
“They seem to have evaporated.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Emotional resilience? Putting up a good front?”
Hardwick looked increasingly baffled. “Why did he want us to watch this?”
Ashton was making his way slowly around the chapel, almost imperiously, like a guru among his disciples. Proprietary. Confident. Imperturbable. Radiating more pleasure and satisfaction by the minute. A man of power and respect. A Renaissance cardinal. An American president. A rock star.
“Scott Ashton seems to be a jewel of many facets,” said Gurney, fascinated.
“Or a murdering bastard,” countered Hardwick.
“We need to decide which.”
“How?”
“By reducing the equation to its bare essentials.”
“Which are?”
“Suppose that Ashton did in fact kill Jillian.”
“And that Hector wasn’t involved?”
“Right,” said Gurney. “What would follow from that starting point?”
“That Ashton is a very good liar.”
“So maybe he’s been telling a lot of other lies, and we haven’t noticed.”
“Lies about Hector Flores?”
“Right,” said Gurney again, frowning thoughtfully. “About … Hector … Flores.”
“What is it?”
“Just … thinking.”
“What?”
“Is it … possible that …?”
“What is it?” asked Hardwick.
“Just a minute. I just want to …” Gurney’s voice trailed off into the electricity of his racing thoughts.
“What?”
“Just … reducing … the equation. Reducing it to the simplest … possible …”
“God, don’t keep stopping in the middle of sentences! Spit it out!”
Christ it couldn’t be that simple, could it?
But maybe it was! Maybe it was perfectly, ridiculously simple!
Why hadn’t he seen it sooner?
He laughed.
“For Godsake, Gurney …”
He hadn’t seen it sooner because he’d been searching for a missing piece. And he hadn’t been able to find it. Of course he hadn’t been able to find it. Because there was no missing piece. There never was a MISSING piece. There was an EXTRA piece. The piece that kept getting in the way of everything else. The piece that had been getting in the way of the truth from the beginning. The piece that had been designed specifically to get in the way of the truth.
Hardwick was glaring at him in frustration.
Gurney turned toward him with a wild smile. “Do you know why no one could find Hector Flores after the murder?”
“Because he was dead?”
“I don’t think so. There are three possible explanations. One, he escaped from the area like everyone thought he did. Two, he’s dead, killed by the real murderer of Jillian Perry. Or three … he was never alive to begin with.”
“The fuck are you talking about?”
“It’s possible that Hector Flores never existed, that there never was any such person as Hector Flores, that Hector Flores was a myth created by Scott Ashton.”
“But all the stories …”
“They could all have come from Ashton himself.”
“What!?”
“Why not? Stories get started, they spread, take on a life of their own—a point you’ve made many times. Why couldn’t the stories all have had the same starting point?”
“But people saw Flores in Ashton’s car.”
“They saw a Mexican day laborer in a straw cowboy hat with sunglasses. The man they saw could have been anyone Ashton might have hired on that particular day.”
“But I don’t get how …”
“Don’t you see? Ashton could have created all the stories himself, all the rumors. Perfect food for gossip. The special new gardener. The wonderfully industrious Mexican. The man who learned everything amazingly quickly. The man of tremendous potential. The Cinderella man. The protégé. The trusted personal assistant. The genius who began to develop little quirks. The man who stood naked on one foot in the garden pavilion. So many stories, so interesting, so colorful, so shocking, so delicious, so repeatable. The perfect food for gossip. God, don’t you see? He fed his neighbors an irresistible saga, and they ran with it, told it to one another, embellished it, told it to strangers. He created Hector Flores out of nothing and turned him into a legend, one chapter after another. A legend that Tambury couldn’t stop talking about. The man became bigger than life, realer than real.”
“What about the bullet in the teacup?”
“Easiest thing in the world. Ashton could have fired the bullet himself, hid the gun, reported it stolen. Perfectly believable that the crazy, ungrateful Mexican would have stolen the doctor’s expensive rifle.”
“Hold on a second. On that videotape, at the very beginning, before the reception starts, Ashton went to the cottage to talk to Flores. When he knocked on the door, the audio picked up a very low ‘Esta abierto.’ If there was no Hector Flores in there, who said that?”
“Obviously Ashton could have said it himself in a muffled voice. His back was to the camera.”
“But the girls Hector spoke to at Mapleshade …”
“The girls he supposedly spoke to are all conveniently dead or missing. So how do we know he ever spoke to anyone? There’s no one available who can actually say she saw him face-to-face. Isn’t that a pretty goddamn strange thing all by itself?”
They looked at each other, then at the computer screen, where Ashton could be seen speaking briefly to two of the girls, pointing instructively to various parts of the chapel area. He looked as relaxed and commanding as the winning general on the day the enemy surrendered.
Hardwick shook his head. “You really believe that Ashton came up with this incredibly elaborate scheme—that he invented this mythical person and managed to nurture the fiction for three years—just so he’d have someone to blame in case he decided someday to get married and murder his wife? Doesn’t that sound a little ridiculous?”
“Put that way, it sounds totally ridiculous. But suppose he had another reason for inventing Hector?”
“What reason?”
“I don’t know. A bigger reason. A more practical reason.”
“Seems awfully shaky. And what about the Skard business? Wasn’t that all based on the theory that one of the Skard brothers, probably Leonardo, was masquerading as Hector and talking unrepentant Mapleshade girls into leaving home for money and thrills after graduation? If there was no Hector, what happens to that whole sex-slavery scenario?”
“I don’t know.” It was a crucial question, thought Gurney. What sense did any of their theories make if they depended on the idea that Leonardo Skard was operating in the guise of Hector Flores—if no one called Hector Flores had ever existed?