relative strengths. You don’t think my purpose was achieved?”
“It’s been a waste of time.”
“Trout’s going to be famous,” said Gurney with a chilly grin. Everyone looked at him. “He’s going to go down in FBI history as the only supervising agent who ever took control of the same case twice and managed to screw it up twice.”
There were no farewells, no handshakes.
Thirty seconds later Gurney and Bullard were alone in the room. “How sure are you?” she asked.
“How sure are you that you’re right and everybody else is wrong?”
“About ninety-five percent.”
No sooner did he hear his own words than a profound doubt swept through him. To be that sure of anything in these shadowy circumstances suddenly seemed like manic overconfidence.
He was about to ask her how soon she expected actual control of the process to move to the FBI regional office when Clegg appeared in the doorway. His eyes were wide with the kind of distressed urgency you saw only on the faces of young cops.
Bullard looked up. “Yes, Andy?”
“Another murder. Eric Stone. Just inside his front door. Ice pick to the heart. A little plastic zebra on his lips.”
Chapter 37
“Oh, God!” said Madeleine, wincing. “Who found him like that?”
She was standing at the sink island, a half-drained colander of noodles in her hands. Gurney was sitting on a high stool across from her. He’d been relating the low points, difficulties, and conflicts of his day-something that didn’t come naturally to him. Never had. He blamed it on his genes. His father had never admitted to being disturbed by anything, never admitted to experiencing fear or anger or confusion. “Speech is silver, but silence is golden” was his father’s favorite aphorism. In fact, until Gurney learned different in high school, he thought that was the famous “golden rule.”
His first instinct was still to say nothing about anything he felt. But lately he’d been trying to make small advances against this lifelong habit. His injuries last autumn had diminished his tolerance for stress, and he’d discovered that sharing some of his thoughts and feelings with Madeleine seemed to help, seemed to relieve the pressure.
So he sat on the stool by the sink, feeling awkward, narrating the day’s disturbances, answering her questions as best he could.
“One of his customers found him. Stone made a living as a specialty baker for some local inns and B &Bs. One of the inn owners came by to pick up an order of cookies. Gingersnaps. She noticed that the front door wasn’t completely closed. When Stone didn’t answer her knocking, she opened the door herself. And there he was. Just like Ruth Blum. On his back in the entry hall. With the handle of an ice pick protruding just below his sternum.”
“God, how awful! What did she do?”
“Apparently called the police.”
Madeleine shook her head slowly, then blinked, looking surprised to find herself still holding the colander. She emptied the steaming noodles into a serving platter. “That was the end of your day in Sasparilla?”
“Pretty much.”
She went to the stove and got a pan in which she’d been sauteing asparagus and mushrooms. She tipped the mixture onto the noodles and put the empty pan in the sink. “The confrontation you were telling me about with that Trout person-how concerned are you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“He sounds like an officious ass.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt about that.”
“But you’re worried that he might be a dangerous ass?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
She brought the noodle-asparagus-mushroom platter to the table, then got plates and silverware. “This is all I cooked tonight. If you want to add meat, there are some leftover meatballs in the fridge.”
“This is fine.”
“Because there are plenty of meatballs, and-”
“Really, this is fine. Perfect. By the way, I forgot to mention, I suggested to Kyle that he and Kim come back up here for a couple of days.”
“When?”
“Now. Starting tonight.”
“I mean when did you suggest it?”
“I called them on my way home from Sasparilla. The fact that they got that message in the mail means the sender knows where Kyle lives. So I thought it might be safer-”
Madeleine frowned. “The ‘sender’ also knows where
“It just… feels better to have them up here. Strength in numbers, maybe?”
They ate in silence for several minutes.
Then Madeleine put down her fork, her food only half finished, and gave her plate a small nudge toward the center of the table.
Gurney looked at her. “Is something wrong?”
“ ‘Is something wrong?’ ” She stared at him incredulously. “Did you really ask me that?”
“No, I mean… Christ, I don’t know what I mean.”
“It seems that all hell’s breaking loose,” she said. “Quite literally.”
“I don’t disagree.”
“So what’s your plan?”
She’d asked him the same question after the barn burned down. It was more unsettling now, because the situation had deteriorated so rapidly. People were dying, with ice picks rammed through their hearts. The FBI team seemed more intent on vilifying him and protecting themselves than discovering the truth. Holdenfield had insidiously undercut him with the “traumatic brain injury” and “psychological impairment” ammunition she’d fed to Trout. Bullard might be a semi-ally at the moment, but Gurney knew how quickly that alliance would evaporate if she decided it was in her interest to make peace with Trout.
But that wasn’t all. Beneath and beyond the tangle of ugly specifics and concrete threats, he had a sense of accelerating evil, the feeling of a faceless doom descending on him, on Kim, on Kyle, on Madeleine. Whatever devil that little recording in the basement had warned him to let sleep was awake and abroad in the land. And all Gurney had as a “plan” was his determination to keep studying the puzzle pieces, to keep searching for the hidden picture, to keep poking at the official house of cards until it collapsed-or until its defenders succeeded in dragging him away.
“I have no plan,” he said. “But if you have the time, there’s something I’d like you to look at with me.”
She glanced up at the big Regulator clock on the wall. “I have about an hour, maybe a little less. We have yet another meeting at the clinic. What do you want me to look at?”
He led her into the den, and as he downloaded the Jimi Brewster video file that Kim had sent to him, he explained what little he knew of it.
They settled into their chairs in front of the computer screen.
The video itself began with a segment that appeared to have been shot from the passenger seat of Kim’s car as it approached a roadside sign in a snowbank announcing entry into Turnwell, the virtually nonexistent northern Catskills village where Jimi Brewster picked up his mail.
His actual residence turned out to be far up into the hills, away from the bleak cluster of tumbledown homes and abandoned stores that made up the village itself. The only active establishments appeared to be a bar with a
