deeper, something in that tone that reminded him of his father.
“Thanks for the information, Jack.”
“Hey, what are friends for, right?”
Gurney went into the house and stood in the middle of the kitchen, trying to absorb all the data encountered in the past hour. He stood at the sideboard. With the kitchen lights on, he couldn’t see out the window. So he turned them off. The moon was just a fraction shy of full-a ball with one slightly flattened side. The moonlight was bright enough to give the grass a gray sheen and the trees at the edge of the pasture distinct black shadows. Gurney squinted and thought he could just make out the drooping branches of the hemlocks.
Then he thought he saw something moving. He held his breath, leaning over closer to the window. As he leaned forward on the top of the sideboard, he uttered a sharp yelp at a stabbing pain that shot up through his right wrist. He knew, even before he saw the damage, that he’d carelessly pressed his hand down on the razor-edged head of the arrow that had been lying there for a week, and it had sliced deeply into the flesh. By the time he got the light back on, blood was pooling in his upturned palm and dripping between his fingers onto the floor.
Chapter 40
Unable to sleep despite his total exhaustion, Gurney was sitting in semidarkness at the breakfast table, gazing out at the eastern ridge. Dawn was spreading like a sick pallor across the sky-a fair reflection of his state of mind.
Earlier, awakened by his cry of pain, Madeleine had driven him to the emergency room of Walnut Crossing’s minimal hospital.
She’d stayed with him through a four-hour process that could have been completed in less than an hour if three ambulances hadn’t arrived with the battered survivors of an unlikely accident in which a drunk driver had knocked down a billboard that acted as a ramp that launched a speeding motorcycle that landed on the hood of a car coming from the opposite direction. At least that was the story the EMS and ER people were telling and retelling each other outside the cubicle where Gurney had waited to be stitched and bandaged.
It had been his second visit to a hospital in less than a week, which in itself was troubling.
He’d been aware of Madeleine’s worried glances in his direction on their way there, in the waiting area, and on the way home, but they’d hardly spoken. When they had, it was mainly about how his hand felt or about the need to either get rid of the damn arrow or at least keep it in a safer place.
There were other things he could have spoken to her about, perhaps that he should have spoken about. The tracker he’d found on Kim’s car. The tracker on his own car. The third ice-pick murder. But he didn’t say a word about any of those things.
The reason for his silence, he told himself, was that telling her would only upset her. But a small voice in the back of his head told him otherwise-that his real reason was to avoid debate, to keep his options open. He told himself that the concealment would be temporary, therefore not a matter of truth, only of timing.
When they got home, half an hour before dawn, she went to bed with the same concerned look that had crossed her face so many times that night.
Too agitated to doze off, he sat at the table, wrestling with the implications of the things he didn’t want to talk about, especially the growing string of murders.
Of all the ways that killers end up being caught, few apply to killers who are intelligent and disciplined. And the Good Shepherd might be the smartest and most disciplined of all.
The only reasonable chance of identifying him would be through a massive coordinated law-enforcement effort. It would require reevaluating every piece of data from the original case. Overwhelming manpower. A mandate to start over with a clean slate. But in the current atmosphere, there was no way that was going to happen. Neither the FBI nor BCI would be able to step far enough outside the box. It was a box they’d built themselves, a box they’d been reinforcing for ten years.
So what was he supposed to do?
Ostracized and demonized, with a possible felony charge hanging over him and a PTSD label slapped on his forehead, what the hell
Nothing came to mind.
Nothing but an irritatingly simplistic aphorism.
You play the hand you’ve been dealt.
What the hell was in that hand anyway?
He concluded that most of his cards were garbage. Or unplayable with the near-zero resources at his disposal.
But he had to admit that he did have one wild card.
It might be worth something, or it might be worth nothing.
• • •
The sun rose behind a morning haze. It was still low in the sky when the house phone rang. Gurney got up from the table and went into the den to answer it. It was someone from the clinic, asking for Madeleine.
As he was about to take the handset to her in the bedroom, she appeared at the den door in her pajamas, extending her hand for it as though it were a call she’d been expecting.
She glanced at the ID screen before she spoke-in a pleasantly professional tone that contrasted with the sleepy look on her face. “Good morning, this is Madeleine.”
She then listened quietly to what was evidently a long explanation of something-during which Gurney returned to the kitchen and put on a fresh pot of coffee.
He heard her voice again only briefly toward the end of the call, and only a few of her words clearly. It sounded to him as if she was agreeing to do something. A few moments later, she appeared at the kitchen doorway, regarding him with the previous night’s worry back in her eyes.
“How’s your hand?”
The lidocaine nerve block they’d given him prior to his nine stitches had worn off, and the lower half of his palm was throbbing.
“Not too bad,” he said. “What are they asking you to do now?”
She ignored the question. “You should be keeping it elevated. Like the doctor said.”
“Right.” He raised his hand a few inches above the sink island, where he was waiting for the coffee to brew. “Did they have another suicide?” he asked, rather too jokily.
“Carol Quilty resigned last night. They need someone to fill in today.”
“What time?”
“As soon as I can get there. I’m going to take a shower, have a piece of toast, and off I go. Will you be all right here alone?”
“Of course.”
She frowned and pointed at his hand. “Higher.”
He raised it to eye level.
She sighed, gave him a silly little “attaboy” wink, and headed for the shower.
He marveled for the thousandth time at her innate cheerfulness, her perennial ability to accept the reality of whatever had been placed in front of her and address it with an attitude far more positive than his own.
She faced life as it was and did the best she could.
She played the hand she’d been dealt.
Which made him think again about his wild card.
Whatever it might be worth, he needed to do something with it soon. He had to play it before the game was over.
He had the sinking feeling that it might not be worth a damn thing. But there was only one way to find out.
His “wild card” was his access to the eavesdropping equipment that had been installed in Kim’s apartment.
