crazy bitch with a grudge against the rich?”
He fell silent. The sole sound in the eerie stillness was the repetitive squeaking of the springs in his exercisers.
“You must be developing very strong hands,” said Gurney.
Clinter flashed a fierce grin. “The last time I met the Good Shepherd, I was terribly, shamefully, tragically underprepared. That won’t be the case next time.”
Gurney had a momentary vision of the climactic scene in
Chapter 13
Once Gurney had departed from Clinter’s outlandish compound-from its real or imagined vipers, its swampy moat, its skeleton sentinel-and had put a few miles behind him, he pulled over into a roadside turnaround. It was near the top of a gentle rise that gave him a view of the northern end of Lake Cayuga, as brilliantly blue as the sky above it.
He took out his phone, entered Jack Hardwick’s number, and got voice mail.
“Hey, Jack, I have questions. Just had a talk with Mr. Clinter. Need your perspective on a couple of things. Call me. Sooner the better. Thanks.”
Then he called Kim.
“Dave?”
“Hi. I’m up in your general neighborhood, looking into a few things. Thought it might make sense to have a word with Robby Meese. You have an address and phone number for him?”
“What… Why do you want to talk to him?”
“Is there a reason you don’t want me to?”
“No. It’s just that… I don’t know… Sure, okay, just a second.” In less than a minute, she picked up again. “He has an apartment in the Tipperary Hill neighborhood, 3003 South Lowell.” Then she read off a cell number, which Dave copied down. “Remember, he’s using the name Montague, not Meese. But… what are you going to do?”
“Just ask questions, see if I can find out anything that makes sense.”
“Sense?”
“The more I learn about this project of yours-or the case it’s based on-the fuzzier it gets. I’m hungry for a little clarity.”
“Clarity? You think you’re going to get that from
“Maybe not directly, but he seems to be a player in our little drama, and I don’t really know who the hell he is. That makes me uncomfortable.”
“I told you everything I know about him.” She sounded hurt, defensive.
“I’m sure you did.”
“Then why-”
“If you want my help, Kim, you need to give me some room.”
She hesitated. “Okay… I guess. Be careful. He’s… weird.”
“Guys with more than one last name often are.”
He ended the call. The phone rang as he was putting it in his pocket. The ID said it was J. Hardwick.
“Hello, Jack, thanks for getting back.”
“I’m just a humble public servant, Sherlock. What can I do for the famous detective today?”
“I’m not sure. What kind of Good Shepherd file stuff can you lay your hands on?”
“Oh, I see.” His voice had the arch tone Gurney hated.
“See what?”
“I sense that some of Sherlock’s retired brain cells are coming back to life.”
Gurney ignored this. “So what do you have access to?”
Hardwick cleared his throat with stomach-turning thoroughness. “Original incident reports, victim ID and background data, photographs of large-caliber bullet damage to faces and skulls-Speaking of which, a colorful anecdote comes to mind. One of the victims, a fancy real-estate lady, lost major portions of her jaw and head to that Desert Eagle cannonball. Young fella on the evidence team, combing the crime scene, made a discovery he’ll never forget. A dime-size piece of the lady’s earlobe was hanging on the branch of a roadside sumac bush, with her big diamond-stud earring still in it. Can you picture it, ace? That’s the kind of thing tends to stick in the memory.” He paused for a moment, as if to permit full appreciation of the image. “So anyway, we got lots of details like that, plus ME findings, evidence-team reports, lab reports up the ass, investigative reports, FBI Behavioral Unit’s profile of the shooter, yadda, yadda, yadda, tons of other shit-some accessible, some not. What are you looking for?”
“How about whatever you can send me without too much trouble?”
Hardwick responded with his sandpaper laugh. “Everything the FBI is involved in is potential trouble. Pack of arrogant, political, control-freak assholes.” He paused. “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll send you a couple of things right away, more later. Keep checking your e-mail.” Hardwick was always most obliging when regulations were likely to be broken and sensitive toes stepped on.
“By the way,” said Gurney, “I just came from a meeting with Mr. Clinter.”
The Hardwick laugh erupted again, louder. “Maxie made an impression on you?”
“You ever seen that place of his?”
“Bones, snakes, Hummers, and horseshit. That the place you’re talking about?”
“Sounds like you don’t give Mr. Clinter’s ramblings a lot of weight.”
“You do?”
“I haven’t decided yet what to make of him. There’s a psycho component in the package, but there’s also a performer-pretending-to-be-a-psycho component. It’s hard to pin down the line between them. He said something about PTSD. You happen to know if that came from the drunken crash that got him fired?”
“No. The First Gulf War. Friendly fire from a helicopter blew up a guy next to him. Back then Maxie toughed it out, stuffed it, whatever. But it probably set him up for his big collapse after the Good Shepherd mess. Who knows? Maybe he thought he was shooting at a fucking helicopter that night.”
“Anyone pay attention to his theories about the case?”
“He didn’t have theories. He had wild-ass ideas, based on whatever shit popped into his head. You ever listen to a nutcase explain how the number of legs on a chair multiplied by the mystical number seven gives you the number of days in a lunar month? Maxie was loaded to the eyeballs with that kind of crap.”
“So you don’t think he has anything real to contribute?”
Hardwick grunted thoughtfully. “The only real things Maxie brings to the table are hatred, obsession, and a crazy kind of smarts.”
It was a combination Gurney had run into before. It was a recipe for disaster.
A quarter of an hour later, just outside Auburn, having cruised through the pastoral hills that separated Cayuga Lake from Owasco Lake, Gurney pulled into a combination gas station/mini-mart to refill his tank with gas and recharge his brain with a large coffee. According to his dashboard clock, it was 1:05 P.M.
After getting his gas receipt, he pulled away from the pump to a corner of the parking area to sip his coffee and plan his interview with Meese-Montague.
His cell phone rang. It was a text message: CHECK YOUR E-MAIL.
When he did, he discovered one from Hardwick. The covering message said, “See attached documents: Incident Reports (6), Prior Movements Supplement, ViCAP Reports, Common Elements Summary, Pre-Autopsy Victim Pics.”
The title of each of the incident documents was composed of a number between one and six, which apparently denoted its place in the series, plus the victim’s surname. Gurney selected the document 1-MELLANI and began scrolling through its fifty-two pages.
