ordinary life.
It wasn’t the first time he’d visited the scene of a murder committed long ago. A confession he’d once elicited from a serial killer included the murder of a teenage girl in a wooded area near Orchard Beach in the Bronx-a murder that had occurred twelve years prior to the confession.
Now, as Gurney drove slowly through the gentle leftward curve where Long Swamp Road moved away from the state highway toward Dead Dog Lake, he went through the same process he’d gone through at Orchard Beach-in his mind subtracting years of growth from the trees, erasing saplings and smaller bushes.
He had the incident-report photos to guide his adjustments. There had been no additions or subtractions of man-made structures. No buildings, no billboards, no telephone poles. The road hadn’t had a guardrail in 2000, and it didn’t now. Three tall landmark trees appeared virtually unchanged. The time of year, early spring, was the same then and now, giving the old photos an illusion of currency.
The position of the tall trees, combined with the photo notations and accompanying angle-and-distance measurements, made it possible for Gurney to locate the approximate position of Sharon Stone’s car when the bullet struck her.
He drove back along the road to the point where it was intersected by a road that connected with the state highway. Then he drove from that point to the point of the shot, and from there through two miles of bog and marshland, past Dead Dog Lake, through the Currier & Ives village of Barkham Dell, and another mile to the point where Long Swamp Road teed into a busy county route.
Then he went back to his starting point and did it all again-but this time he did it as he imagined the Good Shepherd might have. First he found an unobtrusive spot to park by the side of the road not far from the connector to the state highway-a reasonable place for someone to lie in wait for a passing Mercedes, a popular vehicle among Barkham Dell’s weekenders.
Then he pulled out behind an imaginary black Mercedes, “followed” it to the beginning of the long curve, accelerated into the curve, swung out into the left lane, lowered his passenger window, and at the approximate point indicated in the accident reconstruction he raised his right arm and pointed it toward the imaginary driver.
“BAM!” shouted Gurney as loud as he could, knowing that no sound he could make could approach even 10 percent of the report of the.50-caliber monster used in the actual shooting. As he faked the shot, he jammed on his brakes, visualizing the victim’s car drifting from the arc of the curve, careening into the swamp, perhaps a hundred yards ahead of him. He pretended to lay the gun down on the seat, to take a tiny toy animal from his shirt pocket, and to toss it onto the shoulder of the road not far from the spot where he pictured the Mercedes embedded in the mud, surrounded by the remnants of the previous season’s brown marsh grass.
Having completed the fantasy attack, he drove on toward Barkham Dell. On the way he considered all the available options for disposing of a Desert Eagle pistol. Three cars passed him going in the opposite direction. One happened to be a black Mercedes-sending a chill up the back of his scalp.
At the traffic light in the village, he made a U-turn-in order to repeat the whole procedure. But just as he was approaching Dead Dog Lake, pondering its pluses and minuses as a pistol depository, his cell phone rang. The caller ID was his own home landline.
“Madeleine?”
“Where are you?”
“On a back road near Barkham Dell. Why?”
“Why?”
He hesitated. “Is there a problem?”
“What time is it?” she asked with disturbing calmness.
“What time? I don’t… Oh, Jesus… Yes, I see. I forgot.”
The clock on his dashboard read 3:15 P.M. He’d promised to be home by three. By three
“You forgot?”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s it? You forgot?” There was real anger in her controlled tone.
“I’m sorry. Forgetting is not something over which I have much control. I don’t purposely choose to forget things.”
“Yes you do.”
“How the hell could I? Forgetting is forgetting. It’s not an intentional thing.”
“You remember what you care about. You forget what you don’t care about.”
“That’s not-”
“Yes it is. You always blame it on your memory. It’s got nothing to do with your memory. You never forgot a court appearance, did you? You never forgot a meeting with the DA. You don’t have a
“Look, I’m sorry.”
“Right. So when will you be home?”
“I’m on my way. Thirty-five, forty minutes?”
“So you’re saying you’ll be here by four?”
“Definitely by four. Maybe sooner.”
“Fine. Four o’clock. Just an hour late. See you then.”
The connection was broken.
At 3:52 P.M. he reached the quiet lane that wound its way up, streamside, through a rising declivity in the hills, to their farmhouse. A mile up the lane, he pulled onto a grassy area in front of a rarely used weekender’s cabin.
He’d spent the first ten minutes of the trip from Barkham Dell wondering why Madeleine had sounded so irritated-more irritated than usual by his forgetfulness, his carelessness, his failure to write down things that might slip his mind. The rest of the trip he’d devoted to pondering the Good Shepherd murders.
He wondered if any progress had been made on the case, once it came under the control of the FBI field office in Albany, that hadn’t been noted in the NYSP files available to Hardwick. He also wondered if there was a way of answering that question without going through Agent Trout. He couldn’t think of any.
However… if Trout was indeed as rigid as everyone seemed to think, then he would also be brittle. Gurney had learned time and again that a man tends to marshal his strongest defenses at his weakest point.
Thus a mania for control often betrays a terror of chaos.
And that suggested a path into the fortress.
He took out his phone and tapped in Holdenfield’s number. The call went into her voice mail.
“Hi, Rebecca. Sorry to bother you again on such a busy day. But there are some things about the Good Shepherd case that don’t quite fit together. In fact, there may be a fatal flaw in the FBI construct. When you have a moment, give me a call.”
He slipped the phone back into his pocket and drove the rest of the way up the hill.
Chapter 20
As he passed between the pond and the barn, and the house came into view at the top end of the pasture, he saw, just visible above the bent and broken tops of the brown pasture grass, the handlebars and gas tank of a motorcycle next to Madeleine’s car.
He reacted to the sight with a mixture of interest and suspicion. When he pulled in next to it, his interest grew. The motorcycle, in pristine condition, was a BSA Cyclone, an increasingly rare machine that hadn’t been manufactured since the 1960s.
It was reminiscent of a bike he’d once owned himself. In 1979, when he was a freshman at Fordham, living in his parents’ Bronx apartment, he commuted to the campus on a twenty-year-old Triumph Bonneville. When it was
