“Huh? Girlfriend of… son of… victim of… senior… freshman…? Who the hell are we talking about?”
“A Dartmouth senior, who happened to be a girlfriend of Larry Sterne, was killed by the strangler while Jimi Brewster was at Dartmouth as a freshman.”
There was another silence. Gurney could almost picture little lights flashing in Hardwick’s mental calculator. Eventually the man cleared his throat. “Am I supposed to find some significance in that? I mean, so fucking what? We’ve got two northeastern families who each lose a family member to a serial shooter in the year 2000. And it so happens that ten years earlier, in 1990, the son of one of those eventual victims was attending a large Ivy League institution when a friend of the son of another eventual victim was murdered by a serial strangler. I’ll admit it has a bizarre ring to it, but I think a lot of simple coincidences can be made to sound bizarre. I just don’t see what it could mean. Are you imagining that Jimi Brewster was the White Mountain Strangler?”
“I have no reason to. But just to get the question out of my mind, can you poke around in your databases- maybe the old CJIS reports, if they can still be accessed-and get the basic facts?”
“Like what?”
“To begin with-more details of the MO, victim profile, open leads, anything that might suggest a connection to Brewster.”
“To begin with?”
“Well, eventually we might want to track down the CIO who ran the case and get into it a little deeper, find out if Brewster’s name ever came up during the investigation.”
This produced the longest silence of all.
“You there, Jack?”
“I’m here. Contemplating what a fucking incredible pain in the ass these little requests of yours are getting to be.”
“I know.”
“Is there any end in sight?”
“Like I said before, it’s obvious that I’m running out of time. So yes, the end is in sight. One way or the other. I have maybe one more day.”
“To do what?”
“To figure it all out. Or get buried under it for good.”
Another silence, not quite as long.
Hardwick sneezed, then blew his nose. “The Good Shepherd case has been around for ten years. You plan to solve it in the next twenty-four hours?”
“I don’t think I have any other options left. By the way, Jimi Brewster told Kim that he had an alibi for the Good Shepherd murders. You happen to know what it was?”
“Hard to forget that one. The Brewster murder was the last next-of-kin notification BCI made in the case. The doctor was shot in Massachusetts, but his son resided here, so we got the notification job-before the FBI took control of what then became an interstate investigation.”
“What made it hard to forget?”
“The fact that Jimi’s alibi sounded more like a motive-at least in the case of his father. Jimi was in county lockup on the dates of the first four attacks because he couldn’t make bail on an LSD-possession charge and his father refused to help-let him sit in a cell for a couple of weeks. Jimi finally got some ex-girlfriend to come up with the bail money, and he was released-seething with anger-about three hours before his father was killed.”
“Was he ever considered a suspect?”
“Not really. The MO on Dr. Brewster was a perfect match with the others. And Jimi couldn’t have copied it, because at that point none of the details had been publicized.”
“So we can forget about Jimi.”
“Seems so. Too bad, in a way. He could have fit nicely into one of those possibilities on that list of yours.”
“What do you mean?”
“That question you had about whether all the Good Shepherd victims were equally important. Well, if there was some way Jimi could have killed them all, his father would have been the one that mattered the most, and the others would have been like some kind of emotional spillover-people who drove his father’s kind of car, which might have made them equally despicable, equally killable in his warped little mind. Duplicate targets. Guilt by association.” He paused. “Oh, fuck that. What am I talking about? That’s all psychobabble.”
Chapter 39
When she got home from her clinic meeting, exhausted and indignant, Madeleine seemed to be on her own wavelength. After a few comments about the miseries built into bureaucracies, she headed for bed,
Shortly after that, Kim said something about wanting to be fresh and rested for the following day’s meeting with Rudy Getz, said good night, and went upstairs.
Then Kyle followed.
When Gurney heard Madeleine click off her reading light, he closed up the woodstove, checked that the doors and windows were locked, washed a few glasses that had been left in the sink, found himself yawning, and decided it was time to go to bed himself.
As weary and overloaded as he felt, however, going to bed was a very different thing from going to sleep. The main effect of lying there in the dark was to create a limitless space in which the elements of the Good Shepherd case could whirl around, untethered to the real world.
His feet were sweating and cold at the same time. He wanted to put on warm socks but couldn’t muster the motivation to get out of bed. As he gazed gloomily out the large, curtainless window nearest him, it struck him that the silver moonlight was covering the high pasture like the phosphorescence of a dead fish.
Restlessness finally forced him to get up and get dressed. He went out and sat in one of the armchairs near the woodstove. The woodstove at least felt pleasantly warm. A scattering of red embers gleamed on the grate. Sitting up seemed to offer a more stable geometry for his thoughts, a firmer position from which he could approach the case.
What did he know for sure?
He knew that the Good Shepherd was intelligent, unflappable under pressure, and risk-averse. Thorough in his planning, meticulous in his execution. He was absolutely indifferent to human life. He was hell-bent on keeping
Risk aversion was the characteristic that Gurney kept coming back to. Could that be the key? It seemed to underlie so many aspects of the case. For example, the patient scouting of ideal locations for his attacks, the exclusive choice of left-hand curves to minimize the chance of post-shot collisions, the costly disposal of each weapon after a single use, the preference for inconspicuousness over convenience in the choice of the parking spot for the Blum murder, and the recurrent investment of time and thought in the creation of elaborate smoke screens- from the manifesto itself to the forged posting on Ruth’s Facebook page.
This was a man determined to shield himself at any cost.
At any cost in time, money, and other people’s lives.
That raised an interesting question. What other safety-ensuring, risk-minimizing tactics might he have employed in addition to those that had already come to light? Or, put another way, what other risks might he have faced in his homicidal endeavors, and how might he have decided to cope with them?
Gurney needed to put himself in the Good Shepherd’s shoes.
He asked himself what possibilities he’d be most concerned about if he were planning to shoot someone in a car at night on a lonely road. One concern came immediately to mind:
