Let the Devil Sleep

“Wondering?” Trout was agitated. “Wondering what?”

“Wondering if he had the same appetite for deception back then. What do you think, Agent Trout?”

Bullard, in her way, had dropped a small bombshell. It wasn’t a new bombshell, of course. It was what Gurney had been muttering for a week and Clinter for the past ten years. But now, for the first time, it had been tossed onto the table not by an outsider but by a ranking investigator with an arguable right to pursue the case to its conclusion.

She appeared to be inviting Trout to soften his insistence that the essence of the case was summed up by the manifesto and the offender profile.

Unsurprisingly, he stalled and sniped. “You spoke earlier about the importance of facts. I’d like a lot more of those before offering any opinion. I’m in no rush to rethink the most analyzed case in modern criminology, just because someone tried to fool us about where he parked his car.”

The sarcasm was a mistake. Gurney could see it in the set of Bullard’s jaw and in the extra two seconds she held the man’s gaze before she went on. She picked up her e-mail printout of Gurney’s questions.

“Since you folks at the FBI have been at the center of all that analyzing, I’m hoping you can illuminate a few points for me. This business with the little animals? I’m sure you saw in our CJIS report that a two-inch plastic lion had been placed on the victim’s mouth. What’s your take on that?”

Trout turned toward Holdenfield. “Becca?”

Holdenfield smiled meaninglessly. “That’s a speculative area. The source of the original animals-a Noah’s Ark play set-suggests a religious significance. The Bible describes the flood as God’s judgment on an evil world, just as the Good Shepherd’s actions represent his own judgment on that world. Also, the Good Shepherd used only one of each pair of animals at each attack site. There may be an unconscious significance for him in breaking up the pairs that way. His way of ‘culling the flock.’ From a Freudian perspective, it might reflect a childhood desire to break up his parents’ marriage, perhaps by killing one of them. I would emphasize again that this is speculative.”

Bullard nodded slowly, as if absorbing a profound insight. “And the very big gun? From the Freudian perspective, that would be a very big penis?”

Holdenfield’s expression became wary. “It’s not quite that simple.”

“Ah,” said Bullard, “I was afraid of that. Just when I think I’m catching on…” She turned to Gurney. “What’s your read on the big gun and the little animals?”

“I believe their purpose was to generate this conversation.”

“Say that again?”

“My read on the gun and the animals is that they’re purposeful distractions.”

“Distractions from what?”

“From the essential pragmatism of the whole enterprise. They’re designed to suggest an underlying layer of neurotic motivation, or even derangement.”

“The Good Shepherd wants us to believe that he’s deranged?”

“Under the surface rationale of a typical mission-driven killer, there’s always a layer of neurotic or psychotic motivation. It’s the unconscious source of the homicidal energy that drives the conscious ‘mission.’ Right, Rebecca?”

She ignored the question.

Gurney continued. “I believe that the killer is fully aware of all that. I believe that the gun and the animals were the final touches of a master manipulator. The profilers would expect to find things like that, so he provided them. They helped make the ‘mission’ concept believable. The one hypothesis the killer didn’t want anyone to propose or pursue was that he was perfectly sane and that his crimes might have a purely practical motive. A traditional murder motive. Because that would have led the investigation in a completely different direction and probably would have exposed him fairly quickly.”

Trout sighed impatiently, addressing himself to Bullard. “We’ve been through all this with Mr. Gurney before. And his assertions are still nothing more than assertions. They have no evidentiary basis. Frankly, the repetition is tiresome. The accepted hypothesis represents a totally coherent view of the case-the only rational, coherent view of the case that’s ever been put forward.” He picked up his copy of the new Good Shepherd message, gesturing with it. “Plus-this new communication is one hundred percent consistent with the original manifesto and offers a perfectly credible explanation for his attack on Harold Blum’s widow.”

“What do you think of it, Rebecca?” said Gurney, pointing to the paper in Trout’s hand.

“I’d like some more time to study it, but right now I’d say with a reasonable level of professional certainty that it was composed by the same individual who composed the original document.”

“What else?”

She pursed her lips, seemed to be weighing different ways of answering. “He’s articulating the same obsessive resentment, which has now been aggravated by the TV airing of The Orphans of Murder. His new complaint, the motivating factor that triggered his attack on Ruth Blum, is that Orphans is an intolerable glorification of despicable people.”

“All of which makes sense,” interjected Trout. “It reinforces everything we’ve been saying about the case from the very beginning.”

Gurney ignored the interruption, remaining focused on Holdenfield. “How angry would you say he was?”

“What?”

“How angry was the man who wrote that?”

The question seemed to surprise her. She picked up her copy and reread it. “Well… he employs frequent emotional language and images-‘blood… evil… stain… guilt… punishment… death… poison… monsters’-expressing a kind of biblical rage.”

“Is it rage we’re seeing in that document. Or a depiction of rage?”

There was a tiny twitch at the corner of her mouth. “The distinction being…?”

“I’m wondering if this is a furious man expressing his fury or a calm man writing what he imagines a furious man would write under these circumstances.”

Trout broke in again. “What’s the point of this?”

“It’s pretty basic,” said Gurney. “I’m wondering if Dr. Holdenfield, a very insightful psychotherapist, feels that the writer of this message was expressing an authentic emotion of his own, or was he, in a way, putting words in the mouth of a fictional character he’d invented-the so-called Good Shepherd.”

Trout looked at Bullard. “Lieutenant, we can’t spend the whole day on this kind of eccentric theorizing. This is your meeting. I’d urge you to exert some control over the agenda.”

Gurney continued to hold the psychologist’s gaze. “Simple question, Rebecca. What do you think?”

She took a long time before replying. “I’m not sure.”

Gurney sensed, finally, some honesty in Holdenfield’s eyes and in her answer.

Bullard looked troubled. “David, a couple of minutes ago, you used the phrase ‘purely practical’ in relation to the Good Shepherd. What kind of purely practical motive could prompt a killer to choose six victims whose main connection with one another is that they were driving extravagant cars?”

“Extravagant black Mercedes cars,” corrected Gurney, more to himself than to her-The Man with the Black Umbrella coming once again to mind. Referring to the plot of a movie during the discussion of a real crime was risky, especially in unfriendly company, but Gurney decided to go ahead. He recounted how the snipers were stymied in their pursuit of the man with the umbrella when he was immersed in a crowd of people with similar umbrellas.

“What the hell’s the connection between that story and what we’re here to talk about?” It was Daker’s first comment at the table.

Gurney smiled. “I don’t know. I just have the feeling that there is one. I was hoping someone in the room might be perceptive enough to see it.”

Trout rolled his eyes.

Bullard picked up the e-mail in which Gurney had listed his questions about the murders. Her eyes stopped halfway down the page, and she read aloud. “ ‘Were they all equally important?’ ” She looked around the table. “That strikes me as an interesting question in the context of the umbrella story.”

“I don’t see the relevance,” said Daker.