“Right. Same house. Also the same house where little Kimmy interviewed her for that thing on RAM-TV.”
Gurney’s mind was racing. “Who found her?”
“Troopers out of the Auburn station in Zone E. Long story. Friend of Ruth’s from Ithaca, up late, read her Facebook message. Found it disturbing. Responded to it on Facebook, asking Ruthie if she was all right. Got no answer back. E-mailed her, got no answer to that either. Started phoning her, no answer, only voice mail. So the friend gets panicky, calls the local cops, gets passed on to the sheriff’s office, eventually gets passed on to Auburn. Auburn contacts a cruiser in the vicinity. Trooper comes by the house, everything looks peaceful, no problem, no signs of any disturbance, no-”
“Wait a second. You have any idea what Ruth Blum’s original message said that started all this?”
“I just e-mailed it to you.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“Andy Clegg.”
“Who the hell is Andy Clegg?”
“Young guy up in E Zone. You don’t remember him?”
“Should I?”
“The Piggert case.”
“Okay. Now the name rings a bell. But I can’t picture a face.”
“His first assignment out of the academy-in fact, the first job he caught on his first day on the job-was to respond to my call for support when I found my half of Mrs. Piggert’s body. That turned out to be Andy’s first official vomit opportunity. And he took full advantage of it.”
The infamous Peter Piggert incest-murder case was the beginning of the edgy but productive relationship between Hardwick and Gurney. Gurney was at the NYPD then, and Hardwick was with the NYSP. They were each investigating aspects of the Piggert case that fell within their separate jurisdictions, when a grotesque bit of serendipity brought them together. Over a hundred miles apart, on the same day, they each discovered half of the same body.
“Young Andy Clegg met us both at a joint get-together after you nailed the elusive Mr. Piggert, the mother- fucking mother killer. Andy was mightily impressed with your skills and, to a lesser extent, with my own. We stayed in touch.”
“All this adds up to what?”
“When the basic facts on the Blum ice-pick homicide came in through CJIS this morning, I gave Detective Clegg a friendly call and got the whole story. I figured it was now or never. As soon as Trout gets hold of this and figures out the implications, he’ll move in and declare the homicide to be part of his ongoing Good Shepherd investigation and slam the door.”
“Which brings us back to my question. What did Ruth’s-”
“Check your e-mail.”
“Right.”
Gurney laid down the phone and opened his e-mail. There it was.
Posted by Ruth J. Blum:
What a day! I spent so much time wondering what the first episode of The Orphans of Murder would be like. I kept trying to remember the things Kim had asked me when she came here. And my answers. I couldn’t remember them all. I was hoping that I had managed to express what I really felt. I believe, like Kim says, that TV sometimes misses the point. They pay attention to sensational things too much, not the real things that matter. I was hoping that The Orphans of Murder might be different, because Kim seemed different. But now I don’t know. I was a little disappointed. I think they must have cut out a lot of our interview to make room for their “experts” and the commercials and all the other stuff. I’m going to call Kim in the morning and ask about it.
Sorry. I have to stop now. Someone just pulled into my driveway. Can you imagine, it’s almost eleven o’clock. Who could it be? One of those big military-looking trucky kind of cars. More later.
Gurney read it again before picking up the phone. “You still there, Jack?”
“Yeah. So her friend in Ithaca is going through her e-mail, around midnight, and discovers that she has a Facebook notification, which she clicks on, and she finds the message that Ruth posted at ten fifty-eight-apparently before she went downstairs to see who was coming to see her in that big military-looking whatever. Could be a Hummer, what do you think?”
“Could be.” Gurney pictured Max Clinter’s combat-ready, camouflage-painted Humvee.
“Well, if it wasn’t a Hummer, what the fuck was it? Anyway, the friend makes all these efforts to get through to Ruth, and, like I said, eventually a trooper comes, checks things out, decides everything looks fine, and he’s about to leave-when the anxious friend shows up in her car, having driven the twenty-five miles up from Ithaca, and insists they break into the house-because she’s afraid something bad has happened. She says if he doesn’t break into the house, she will. Big argument, young trooper almost arrests her, then another trooper comes by, older and wiser, calms everybody down. They start looking around the outside of the house. Eventually they find an open window, more discussion, more debate, et cetera, et cetera. Bottom line, the troopers finally go in and find Ruth Blum’s body.”
“Where?”
“In the entry hall, just inside the front door. Like she opened the door and wham!”
“ME is sure the weapon was an ice pick?”
“Wasn’t much doubt. According to Clegg, fucking thing was still stuck in her.”
“You don’t suppose he could get me into the house, do you?”
“No way. By now it’s been sealed off with a mile of yellow tape by guys for whom you could only be a problem. Their one job right now is to keep the scene pristine till the evidence techs go home and the BCI team hands the whole deal off to the FBI. They’re not about to hang their asses out the window so some retired hotshot from the city can have a walk-through.”
Gurney was itching to see it all for himself. Having a scene described to you was worth maybe 10 percent of being there. But he suspected that Hardwick was right. He couldn’t think of any upside for anyone in BCI, much less the FBI, to get him involved. Which made him wonder again what the upside was for Hardwick. Every time the man passed along information from a confidential file or an internal source, he was putting himself at risk. And he was doing it a lot.
Was he such a pure seeker after truth that its pursuit trumped any concern for rules or his own career? Was he driven by an obsessive desire to embarrass the powerful? Or did the risk itself, the giddy edge of the cliff, attract him with the same power with which it repelled saner men? Gurney had asked himself these questions about the man before. Once again he concluded that the answer was probably yes to all of them.
“So, Davey boy…” Hardwick’s voice jarred him back to the issue at hand. “The plot thickens. Or maybe this makes everything clearer to you. Which is it?”
“I don’t know, Jack. A little of both. It depends on what happens next. In the meantime, is that everything Clegg told you?”
“Almost everything.” Hardwick hesitated. His appetite for dramatic pauses irritated Gurney intensely, but it was a tolerable price to pay for what often followed. “Remember the little plastic animals the Good Shepherd left at the roadside shootings?”
“Yes.” In fact, he’d been thinking about them that morning, wondering about their purpose.
“Well, they found a little plastic animal at the scene-balanced delicately on Ruth Blum’s lips.”
“On her lips?”
“On her lips.”
“What kind of animal?”
“Clegg thinks it was a lion.”
“Wasn’t a lion the first animal in the original sequence of six?”
“Good memory, ace. So what are the odds we can expect five more?”
Gurney had no answer for that.
As soon as he got off the phone with Hardwick, he called Kim. He wondered if she was still at Kyle’s apartment, wondered if they were in bed together, wondered what their plans were for the day, wondered if they knew…
The call went into her voice mail. He left a blunt message. “Hi. I don’t know if it’s on the news yet, but Ruth Blum is dead. She was murdered in her home in Aurora late last night. It’s possible that the Good Shepherd is back,
