Chapter 22
Getting it straight
He spent two hours that night writing and editing his statement. It recounted simply—without adjectives, emotions, opinions—the facts of his acquaintance with Mark Mellery, including their casual association in college and their recent contacts, beginning with Mellery’s e-mail requesting a meeting and ending with his adamant refusal to take the matter to the police.
He drank two mugs of strong coffee while composing the statement and, as a result, slept poorly. Cold, sweaty, itchy, thirsty, with a transient ache that drifted inexplicably from one leg to the other—the night’s succession of discomforts provided a malignant nursery for troubled thoughts, especially concerning the pain he’d glimpsed in Madeleine’s eyes.
He knew that it came from her sense of his priorities. She was complaining that when the roles in his life collided, Dave the Detective always superseded Dave the Husband. His retirement from the job had made no difference. It was clear she’d hoped it would, maybe believed it would. But how could he stop being what he was? However much he cared for her, however much he wanted to be with her, however much he wanted her to be happy, how could he become someone he wasn’t? His mind worked exceptionally well in a certain way, and the greatest satisfactions in his life had come from applying that intellectual gift. He had a supremely logical brain and a finely tuned antenna for discrepancy. These qualities made him an outstanding detective. They also created the cushion of abstraction that allowed him to maintain a tolerable distance from the horrors of his profession. Other cops had other cushions—alcohol, frat-boy solidarity, heart-deadening cynicism. Gurney’s shield was his ability to grasp situations as intellectual challenges, and crimes as equations to be solved. That was who he was. It was not something he could cease to be, simply by retiring. At least that’s the way he was thinking about it when he finally fell asleep an hour before dawn.
Sixty miles east of Walnut Crossing, ten miles beyond Peony, on a bluff within sight of the Hudson, State Police Regional Headquarters had the look and feel of a newly erected fortress. Its massive gray stone exterior and narrow windows seemed designed to withstand the apocalypse. Gurney wondered if the architecture was influenced by the 9/11 hysteria, which had bred projects even sillier than impregnable trooper stations.
Inside, fluorescent lighting maximized the harsh look of the metal detectors, remote cameras, bulletproof guard booth, and polished concrete floor. There was a microphone for communicating with the guard in the booth—which was really more like a control room, containing a bank of monitors for the security cameras. The lights, which cast a cold glare on all the hard surfaces, gave the guard an exhausted pallor. Even his colorless hair was rendered sickly by the unnatural illumination. He looked like he was about to throw up.
Gurney spoke into the microphone, resisting an urge to ask the guard if he was all right. “David Gurney. I’m here for a meeting with Jack Hardwick.”
The guard pushed a temporary facility pass and a visitor’s sign-in sheet through a narrow slot at the base of the formidable glass wall running from the ceiling down to the counter that separated them. He picked up the phone, consulted a list that was Scotch-taped to his side of the counter, dialed a four-digit extension, said something Gurney couldn’t hear, then replaced the phone on its cradle.
A minute later a gray steel door in the wall next to the booth opened to reveal the same plainclothes trooper who’d escorted him the previous day at the institute. He motioned to Gurney without any indication of recognizing him and led him down a featureless gray corridor to another steel door, which he opened.
They stepped into a large, windowless conference room—windowless no doubt to keep conferees safe from the flying glass of a terrorist attack. Gurney was a bit claustrophobic, hated windowless spaces, hated the architects who thought they were a good idea.
His laconic guide made straight for the coffee urn in the far corner. Most of the seats at the oblong conference table had already been claimed by people not yet in the room. Jackets were hanging over the backs of four of the ten chairs, and three other chairs had been reserved by tilting them forward against the table. Gurney removed the light parka he was wearing and placed it over the back of one of the free chairs.
The door opened, and Hardwick entered, followed by a wonkish red-haired woman in a genderless suit, carrying a laptop and a fat file folder, and the other Tom Cruise look-alike, who headed for his buddy at the coffee urn. The woman proceeded to an unclaimed chair and put her things on the table in front of it. Hardwick approached Gurney, his face stuck in an odd spot between anticipation and disdain.
“You’re in for a treat, my boy,” he whispered gratingly. “Our precocious DA, youngest in the history of the county, is gracing us with his presence.”
Gurney felt that reflexive antagonism toward Hardwick that he realized was out of proportion to the man’s aimless acidity. Despite his effort not to react, his lips stiffened as he spoke. “Wouldn’t his involvement be expected in something like this?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t expect it,” hissed Hardwick. “I just said you were in for a treat.” He glanced at the three chairs tilted in at the center of the table and, with the curled lip that was becoming part of his face, commented to no one in particular, “Thrones for the Three Wise Men.”
On the heels of his remark, the door opened and three men entered.
Hardwick identified them sotto voce at Gurney’s shoulder. It struck Gurney that Hardwick’s missed vocation was ventriloquism, considering his ability to speak without moving his lips.
“Captain Rod Rodriguez, officious prick,” said the disembodied whisper, as a squat, salon-tanned man with a loose smile and malevolent eyes stepped into the room and held the door for the taller man behind him—a lean, alert type whose gaze swept the room, alighting for no more than a second on each individual. “DA Sheridan Kline,” said the whisper. “Wants to be Governor Kline.”
The third man, sidling in behind Kline, prematurely bald and radiating all the charm of a bowl of cold sauerkraut, was “Stimmel, Kline’s chief assistant.”
Rodriguez ushered them to the tilted chairs, pointedly offering the center one to Kline, who took it as a matter of course. Stimmel sat at his left, Rodriguez at his right. Rodriguez eyed the other faces in the room through glasses with thin wire frames. The immaculately coiffed mass of thick black hair rising from his low forehead was obviously dyed. He gave the table a few sharp raps with his knuckles, looking around to be sure he had everyone’s attention.
“Our agenda says this meeting starts at twelve noon, and twelve noon is what it says on the clock. If you don’t mind taking your seats …?”
Hardwick sat next to Gurney. The coffee-urn group came to the table, and within half a minute all had settled into their chairs. Rodriguez looked around sourly, as if to suggest that true professionals would not have taken so long to accomplish this. Seeing Gurney, his mouth twitched in a way that could have been a quick smile or a wince. His sour expression deepened at the sight of one empty chair. Then he continued.
“I don’t need to tell you that a high-profile homicide has landed in our laps. We’re here to make sure that we’re all here.” He paused, as if checking to see who might appreciate this Zen witticism. Then he translated it for the dull of mind. “We’re here to make sure that we’re all on the same page from day one of this case.”
“Day two,” muttered Hardwick.
The Cruise twins exchanged matching looks of confusion.
“Today is day two, sir. Yesterday was day one, sir, and it was a bitch.”
“Obviously, I was using a figure of speech. My point is that we need to be on the same page from the very beginning of this case. We all need to be marching to the same drum. Am I making myself clear?”
Hardwick nodded innocently. Rodriguez made a show of turning away from him to direct his comments to the more serious people at the table.
“From what little we know at this point, the case promises to be difficult, complex, sensitive, potentially sensational. I am told the victim was a successful author and lecturer. His wife’s family is reputed to be extremely wealthy. The clientele of the Mellery Institute includes some rich, opinionated, troublesome characters. Any one of these factors could create a media circus. Put all three together and you have an enormous challenge. The four keys to success will be organization, discipline, communication, and more communication. What you see, what you hear, what you conclude is all worthless unless it is properly recorded and reported. Communication and more communication.” He glanced around, letting his eyes dwell longest on Hardwick, identifying him not so subtly as a prime violator of the recording and reporting rules. Hardwick was studying a large freckle on the back of his right hand.
“I don’t like people who bend the rules,” Rodriguez went on. “Rule benders cause more trouble in the long run than rule breakers. Rule benders always claim they do it to get things done. The fact is, they do it for their own convenience. They do it because they lack discipline, and the lack of discipline destroys organizations. So hear me, people, loud and clear. We are going to follow the rules on this one. All the rules. We will use our checklists. We will fill out our reports in detail. We will submit them on time. Everything will go through proper channels. Every legal question will be addressed with District Attorney Kline’s office before—I repeat, before—any questionable action is taken. Communication, communication, communication.” He lobbed the words like a succession of artillery shells at an enemy position. Judging all resistance quelled, he turned with saccharine deference to the district attorney, who had been growing restless during the harangue, and said, “Sheridan, I know how personally involved you intend to be in this case. Is there anything you want to say to our team?”
Kline smiled broadly with what, at a greater distance, might have been mistaken for warmth. Up close, what came through was the radiant narcissism of a politician.
“The only thing I want to say is that I’m here to help. Help any way I can. You guys are pros. Trained, experienced, talented pros. You know your business. It’s your show.” The hint of a chuckle reached Gurney’s ear. Rodriguez blinked. Might Rodriguez be that attuned to Hardwick’s frequency? “But I agree with Rod. It could be a very big show, a very difficult show to manage. It’s sure as hell going to be on TV, and a lot of people are going to be watching. Get ready for sensational headlines—‘Gory Murder of New Age Guru.’ Like it or not, gentlemen, this one’s a candidate for the tabloids. I do not want us to look like the assholes in Colorado who screwed up the JonBenét case or the assholes in California who screwed up the Simpson case. We’re going to have a lot of balls in the air with this one, and if they start dropping, we’re going to have a mess on our hands. Those balls—”
Gurney’s curiosity regarding their final disposition was left unsatisfied. Kline was silenced by a cell phone’s intrusive chime, which drew everyone’s attention with varying degrees of irritation. Rodriguez glared as Hardwick reached into his pocket, produced the offending instrument, and earnestly recited the captain’s mantra: “Communication, communication, communication.” Then he pressed the “talk” button and spoke into the phone.
“Hardwick here …. Go ahead …. Where?… They match the footprints?… Any indication how they got there?… Any idea why he did that?… All right, get them to the lab ASAP …. No problem.” He pressed the “disconnect” button and stared thoughtfully at the phone.
“Well?” said Rodriguez, his glare warped by curiosity.
Hardwick addressed his answer to the redheaded woman in the genderless suit who had her laptop open on the table and was watching him expectantly.
“News from the crime scene. They found the killer’s boots—or at least some hiking boots that match the boot prints leading away from the body. The boots are in transit to your people in the lab.”
The redhead nodded and began typing on her keyboard.
“I thought you told me the prints went off into the middle of nowhere and stopped,” said Rodriguez, as though he’d caught Hardwick in some sort of lie.
“Yes,” said Hardwick, without looking at him.
“So where were these boots found?”
“In the middle of the same nowhere. In a tree near where the tracks ended. Hanging from a branch.”
“Are you telling me your killer climbed a tree, took his boots off, and left them there?”
“Looks that way.”
“Well … where … I mean, what did he do then?”
“We don’t have the faintest goddamn idea. Maybe the boots will point us in the right direction.”
Rodriguez uttered a harsh bark of a laugh. “Let’s hope something does. In the meantime we need to get back to our agenda. Sheridan, I believe you were interrupted.”
“With his balls in the air,” said the ventriloquist’s whisper.
“Not really interrupted,” said Kline with an I-can-turn-anything-to-my-advantage grin. “The truth is, I’d rather listen—especially to news coming in from the field. The better I understand the problem, the more I can help.”
“As you wish, Sheridan. Hardwick, you seem to have everyone’s attention. You might as well give us the rest of the facts—as briefly as possible. The district attorney is being generous with his time, but he has a lot on his plate. Bear that in mind.”
“Okay, kids, you heard the man. Here’s the compressed-file version, one time only. No daydreaming, no stupid questions. Listen up.”
“Whoa!” Rodriguez raised both hands. “I don’t want anyone to feel they can’t ask questions.”
“Figure of speech, sir. Just don’t want to tie up the district attorney any longer than necessary.” The level of respect with which he articulated Kline’s title was just exaggerated enough to suggest an insult while remaining safely ambiguous.
“Fine, fine,” said Rodriguez with an impatient wave. “Go ahead.”
Hardwick began a flat recitation of the available data. “Over a three- to four-week period prior to the murder, the victim received several written communications of a disturbing or threatening nature, as well as two phone calls, one taken and transcribed by Mellery’s assistant, the other taken and recorded by the victim. Copies of these communications will be distributed. Victim’s wife, Cassandra (aka Caddy), reports that on the night of the murder she and her husband were awakened at one A.M. by a phone call from a caller who hung up.”
As Rodriguez was opening his mouth, Hardwick answered the anticipated question. “We are in touch with the phone company to access landline and cell records for the night of the murder and for the times of the two previous calls. However, given the level of planning involved in the execution of this crime, I would be surprised if the perp left a followable phone trail.”
“We’ll see,” said Rodriguez.
Gurney decided that the captain was a man whose greatest imperative was to appear to be in control of any situation or conversation he might find himself in.
“Yes, sir,” said Hardwick with that touch of exaggerated deference, too subtle to be pounced on, that he was adept at. “In any event, a couple of minutes later they were disturbed by sounds close to the house—sounds she describes as animals screeching. When I went back and asked her about it again, she said she thought it might be raccoons fighting. Her husband went to investigate. A minute later she heard what she describes as a muffled slap, shortly after which she went to investigate. She found her husband lying on the patio just outside the back door. Blood was spreading into the snow from wounds to his throat. She screamed—at least she thinks she screamed—tried to stop the bleeding, wasn’t able to, ran back into the house, called 911.”
“Do you know whether she changed the position of the body when she tried to stop the bleeding?” Rodriguez made it sound like a trick question.
“She says she can’t remember.”
Rodriguez looked skeptical.
“I believe her,” said Hardwick.
Rodriguez shrugged in a way that assigned a low value to other men’s beliefs. Glancing at his notes, Hardwick continued his emotionless narrative.
“Peony police were first on the scene, followed by a sheriff’s department car, followed by Trooper Calvin Maxon from the local barracks. BCI was contacted at one fifty-six A.M. I arrived on the scene at two-twenty A.M., and the ME arrived at three twenty-five A.M.”
“Speaking of Thrasher,” said Rodriguez angrily, “did he call anyone to say he’d be late?”
Gurney glanced along the row of faces at the table. They seemed so inured to the medical examiner’s odd name that no one reacted to it. Nor did anyone show any interest in the question—suggesting that the doctor was one of those people who was perennially late. Rodriguez stared at the conference-room door, through which Thrasher should have entered ten minutes earlier, doing a slow burn at the violation of his schedule.
As if he’d been lurking behind it, waiting for the captain’s temper to boil, the door popped open and a gangly man lurched into the room with a briefcase pinned under his arm, a container of coffee in his hand, and seemingly in the middle of a sentence.
“ … construction delays, men working. Hah! So say the signs.” He smiled brightly at several people in succession. “Apparently the word working means standing around scratching your crotch. Lots of that. Not much digging or paving going on. None that I could see. Pack of incompetent louts blocking the road.” He peered at Rodriguez over the top of a pair of reading glasses that were askew. “Don’t suppose the state police could do anything about that, eh, Captain?”
Rodriguez reacted with the weary smile of a serious man forced to deal with fools. “Good afternoon, Dr. Thrasher.”
Thrasher put his briefcase and coffee on the table in front of the one unoccupied chair. His gaze darted around the room, coming to rest on the district attorney.
“Hello, Sheridan,” he said with some surprise. “Getting in early on this one, are you?”
“You have some interesting information for us, Walter?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. At least one small surprise.”
Patently eager to keep his grip on the helm of the meeting, Rodriguez made a show of steering it where it was already going.
“Look, people, I see an opportunity here to turn the doctor’s lateness to our advantage. We’ve been listening to a rundown of the events surrounding the discovery of the body. The last fact I heard concerned the arrival of the medical examiner at the scene. Well, the medical examiner has just arrived here—so why don’t we incorporate his report right now into the narrative?”
“Great idea,” said Kline without taking his eyes off Thrasher.
The ME began speaking as if it had been his intention all along to make his presentation the moment he arrived.
“You get the full written report in one week, gentlemen. Today you get the bare bones.”
If that was a witticism, mused Gurney, it went by unappreciated. Perhaps it was so often repeated that the audience had grown deaf to it.
“Interesting homicide,” Thrasher went on, reaching for his coffee container. He took a long, thoughtful swig and replaced the container on the table. Gurney smiled. This rumpled, sandy-haired stork had a taste for timing and drama. “Things are not exactly as they first appeared.”
He paused until the room was on the verge of exploding with impatience.
“Initial examination of the body in situ led to the hypothesis that cause of death had been the severing of the carotid artery by multiple slash and puncture wounds, inflicted by a broken bottle later discovered at the scene. Initial autopsy results indicate, however, that cause of death was the severing of the carotid artery by a single bullet fired at close range into the victim’s neck. The wounds from the broken bottle were subsequent to the gunshot and were inflicted after the victim had fallen to the ground. There were a minimum of fourteen puncture wounds, perhaps as many as twenty, several of which left shards of glass in the neck tissue and four of which passed completely through the neck muscles and trachea, emerging at the back of the neck.”
There was silence at the table, accompanied by a variety of puzzled and intrigued looks. Rodriguez placed his fingertips together to create a steeple. He was the first to speak.
“Shot, eh?”
“Shot,” said Thrasher, with the relish of a man who loved discovering the unforeseen.
Rodriguez looked accusingly at Hardwick. “How come none of your witnesses heard this gunshot? You told me there were at least twenty guests on the property, and for that matter, how come his wife didn’t hear it?”
“She did.”
“What? How long have you known this? Why wasn’t I told?”
“She heard it, but she didn’t know she heard it,” said Hardwick. “She said she heard something like a muffled slap. The significance of that didn’t occur to her at the time, and it didn’t occur to me until this minute.”
“Muffled?” said Rodriguez incredulously. “Are you telling me the victim was shot with a silencer?”
Sheridan Kline’s attention level shot up a notch.
“That explains it!” cried Thrasher.
“Explains what?” Rodriguez and Hardwick asked in unison.
Thrasher’s eyes glinted triumphantly. “The traces of goose down in the wound.”
“And in the blood samples from the area around the body.” The redhead’s voice was as gender-unspecific as her suit.
Thrasher nodded. “Of course it would be there, too.”
“This is all very tantalizing,” said Kline. “Could one of you who understands what’s being said take a moment to fill me in?”
“Goose down!” boomed Thrasher as though Kline were hard of hearing.
Kline’s expression of cordial confusion began to freeze over.
Hardwick spoke as the truth dawned on him. “The muffling of the gunshot, combined with the presence of goose down, suggests that the silencing effect might have been produced by wrapping the gun in some sort of quilted material—maybe a ski jacket or a parka.”
“You’re saying that a gun could be silenced just by holding it inside a ski jacket?”
“Not exactly. What I’m saying is that if I held the gun in my hand and wrapped it around and around—especially around the muzzle—with a thick enough quilted material, it’s possible that the report could be reduced to something that might sound like a slap, if you were listening from inside a well-insulated house with the windows closed.”
The explanation seemed to satisfy everyone except Rodriguez. “I’d want to see the results of some tests before buying into that.”
“You don’t think it was an actual silencer?” Kline sounded disappointed.
“It could have been,” said Thrasher. “But then you’d need to explain all those microscopic down particles some other way.”
“So,” said Kline, “the murderer shoots the victim point-blank—”
“Not point-blank,” interjected Thrasher. “Point-blank implies virtual contact between the muzzle and the victim, and there was no evidence of that.”
“From how far, then?”
“Hard to say. There were a few distinct single-point powder burns on the neck, which would put the gun within five feet, but the burns were not numerous enough to form a pattern. The gun may have been even closer, with the powder burns minimized by the material around the muzzle.”
“I don’t suppose you recovered a bullet.” Rodriguez addressed the criticism to a spot in the air between Thrasher and Hardwick.
Gurney’s jaw tightened. He had worked for men like Rodriguez—men who mistook their control obsession for leadership and their negativity for tough-mindedness.
Thrasher responded first. “The bullet missed the vertebrae. There’s not much in the neck tissue itself that could stop it. We have an entry wound and an exit wound—neither one easy to find, by the way, with all the puncture damage inflicted later.” If he was fishing for compliments, thought Gurney, this was a dead pond. Rodriguez shifted his querying gaze to Hardwick, whose tone was again just short of insubordinate.
“We didn’t look for a bullet. We had no reason to believe there was a bullet.”
“Well, now you do.”
“Excellent point, sir,” said Hardwick with a hint of mockery. He pulled out his cell phone and entered a number, walking away from the table. Despite his lowered voice, it was clear that he was talking to an officer at the crime scene and requesting a search for the bullet on a priority basis. When he returned to the table, Kline asked if there was any hope of recovering a bullet fired outdoors.
“Usually not,” said Hardwick. “But in this case there’s a chance. Considering the position of the body, he was probably shot with his back to the house. If it wasn’t deflected in a major way, we might find it in the wood siding.”
Kline nodded slowly. “Okay, then, as I started to say a minute ago, just to get this straight—the murderer shoots the victim at close range, the victim falls to the ground, carotid artery severed, blood spurting from his neck. Then the murderer produces a broken bottle and squats down next to the body and stabs it fourteen times. Is that the picture?” he asked incredulously.
“At least fourteen, possibly more,” said Thrasher. “When they overlap, an accurate count becomes difficult.”
“I understand, but what I’m really getting at is, why?”
“Motive,” said Thrasher, as though the concept were on a scientific par with dream interpretation, “is not my area of expertise. Ask our friends here from BCI.”
Kline turned to Hardwick. “A broken bottle is a weapon of convenience, a weapon of the moment, a barroom substitute for a knife or a gun. Why would a man who already has a loaded gun feel the need to carry a broken bottle, and why would he use it after he had already killed his victim with the gun?”
“To make sure he was dead?” offered Rodriguez.
“Then why not just shoot him again? Why not shoot him in the head? Why not shoot him in the head to begin with? Why in the neck?”
“Maybe he was a lousy shot.”
“From five feet away?” Kline turned back to Thrasher. “Are we sure about the sequence? Shot, then stabbed?”
“Yes, to a reasonable level of professional certainty, as we say in court. The powder burns, although limited, are clear. If the neck area had already been covered with blood from stab wounds at the time of the shot, it is unlikely that distinct burns could have occurred.”
“And you would have found the bullet.” The redhead said this in such a soft, matter-of-fact way that only a few people heard her. Kline was one of them. Gurney was another. He’d been wondering when this point would occur to someone. Hardwick was unreadable but did not appear surprised.
“What do you mean?” asked Kline.
She answered without taking her eyes off her laptop screen. “If he was stabbed fourteen times in the neck as part of the initial assault, with four of the wounds passing completely through, he could hardly have remained standing. And if he was then shot from above while lying on his back, the bullet would have been on the ground underneath him.”
Kline cast her an assessing glance. Unlike Rodriguez, mused Gurney, he was intelligent enough to respect intelligence.
Rodriguez made an effort to retake the reins. “What caliber bullet are we looking for, Doctor?”
Thrasher glared over the top of the half-glasses that were making their way down his long nose. “What do I have to do to get you people to grasp the simplest facts of pathology?”
“I know, I know,” said Rodriguez peevishly, “the flesh is pliable, it shrinks, it expands, you can’t be exact, et cetera, et cetera. But would you say it was closer to a .22 or a .44? Make an educated guess.”
“I’m not paid to guess. Besides, no one remembers for more than five minutes that it was only a guess. What they remember is that the ME said something about a .22 and he turned out to be wrong.” There was a cold gleam of recollection in his eyes, but all he said was, “When you dig the bullet out of the back of the house and give it to ballistics, then you’ll know—”
“Doctor,” interrupted Kline like a little boy questioning Mr. Wizard, “is it possible to estimate the exact interval between the gunshot and the subsequent stabbings?”
The tone of the question seemed to mollify Thrasher. “If the interval between the two were substantial, and both wounds bled, we would find blood in two different stages of coagulation. In this case I would say that that the two types of wounds occurred in close enough sequence to make that sort of comparison impossible. All we can say is that the interval was relatively short, but whether it was ten seconds or ten minutes would be hard to say. That’s a good pathology question, though,” he concluded, distinguishing it from the captain’s question.
The captain’s mouth twitched. “If that’s all you have for us at the moment, Doctor, we won’t keep you. I’ll get the written report no later than one week from today?”
“I believe that’s what I said.” Thrasher picked up his bulging case from the table, nodded to the district attorney with a thin-lipped smile, and left the room.