police campus, Gurney headed home to Walnut Crossing, with the day’s wild bits and pieces swirling through his head.
Ballston’s surreal confession, the genteel voice emanating from a hellish mind, describing his compliance with Karnala’s beheading request as a
The call he got from Sheridan Kline as he was finishing a bowl of leftover spaghetti added facts without adding progress. In addition to repeating everything Rodriguez had passed along from Luntz, Kline revealed that a bloodstained machete had been discovered by the K-9 team in a wooded area behind the bungalow and that the ME estimated the time of death to be roughly within a three-hour window of the cryptic predawn call Luntz had received.
There were many times in his career when Gurney had felt challenged. There were occasionally cases, such as the recent Mellery horror, in which he believed that the challenger might win. But never had he felt so broadly outmaneuvered. Sure, he had a general theory for what might be going on and who might be behind it-the whole Skard operation, with “Hector Flores” recruiting “bad girls” for the murderous pleasure of the sickest men on earth- but it was just a theory. And even if it were valid, it still didn’t come close to explaining the twisty mechanics of the murders themselves. It didn’t explain the impossible placement of the machete behind Ashton’s cottage. It didn’t explain the function of the boots. It didn’t explain the choice of the local victims.
Why, exactly, did Jillian Perry, Kiki Muller, and Savannah Liston all have to die?
Worst of all, without knowing why those three were killed, how would it be possible to protect whoever else might be in danger?
After exhausting himself by exploring the same blind alleys over and over, Gurney fell asleep around midnight.
When he awoke seven hours later, a gusty wind was heaving waves of gray rain against the bedroom windows. The window next to his bed-the only one in the house he’d left unlocked-was open two inches at the top, not enough to let the rain blow in but more than enough to admit a damp draft that made his sheets and pillow feel clammy.
The dismal atmosphere, the lack of light and color in the world, tempted him to stay in bed, uncomfortable as it was, but he knew that would be an emotional mistake, so he forced himself up and into the bathroom. His feet were cold. He turned on the shower.
Thank God, he thought once again, for the primal magic of water.
Cleanser, restorer, simplifier. As the tingling hot spray massaged his back, the muscles in his neck and shoulders relaxed. His knotted, hyperactive thoughts began to dissolve in the water’s soothing rush. Like surf hissing over sand… like a benign opiate… the pelting of the water on his skin made life seem simple and good.
Chapter 70
After a modest breakfast of two eggs and two slices of plain toast, Gurney decided to reground himself, as tedious as that might be, in the original facts of the case.
He spread out the segments of the file on the dining table and, with a spark of contrariness, reached for the document he’d had the most difficulty concentrating on when he’d gone through everything originally. It was a fifty-seven-page printout listing all the hundreds of sites Jillian had visited on the Internet and the hundreds of search terms she had entered in the browsers on her cell phone and her laptop during the last six months of her life-mostly related to chic travel destinations, super-expensive hotels, cars, jewelry.
After this personal computer and Web-usage data had been acquired by BCI, however, no analysis had been performed. Gurney suspected that it was just another piece of the investigation that had disappeared into the crevasse separating Hardwick’s stewardship from Blatt’s. The only indication that anyone other than himself had even seen it was a handwritten comment on a sticky note affixed to the first page:
Perversely, Gurney’s suspicion that the comment was the captain’s had intensified his attention to every line of those fifty-seven pages. And without that attention boost, he might very well have missed one little five-letter word halfway down page thirty-seven.
It appeared again on the following page, and twice more a few pages later.
The discovery propelled Gurney through the rest of the document, then back through all fifty-seven pages one more time. It was during this second pass that he made his second discovery.
The car makes that were scattered among the search terms-makes that at first had blended in his mind with the names of resorts, boutiques, and jewelers into a general image of material comfort-now formed a special pattern of their own.
He realized that they were the very same makes that had been the subjects of the missing girls’ arguments with their parents.
Could that be a coincidence?
What the hell had Jillian been up to?
What was it she needed to know about those cars? And why?
More important, what was she trying to find out about the Skard family?
How had she come to know they existed?
And what kind of relationship did she have with the man she’d known as Hector Flores?
Was it business? Or pleasure? Or something much sicker?
A closer look at the automobile URLs revealed that they were the proprietary advertising websites maintained by the companies to provide model, feature, and pricing information.
The search term
Gurney went back to the master list and noted the dates of her car and Skard searches. He discovered that she’d visited the car sites months before searching the Skard name. In fact, the car searches went back to the beginning of the six-month time window that had been documented, and he wondered how long she’d been pursuing that kind of data. He made a note to suggest to BCI that they get an expanded warrant for her search records going back at least two years.
Gurney stared out at the wet landscape. An intriguing, if highly speculative, scenario was beginning to take shape-a scenario in which Jillian may have played a much more active…
A low rumble from the road below the barn interrupted his train of thought. He went to the kitchen window, which offered the longest view in that direction, and noticed that the police cruiser was gone. He looked at the clock and realized that the promised forty-eight-hour protection window had expired. However, another vehicle, the source of the throaty engine rumble, now distinctly louder, came into view down at the point where the town road blended into the Gurney driveway.
It was a red Pontiac GTO, a seventies classic, and Gurney knew only one person who owned one-Jack Hardwick. The fact that he was driving the GTO instead of a black Crown Victoria meant he was off duty.
Gurney went to the side door and waited. Hardwick emerged from the car in old blue jeans and a white T-shirt under a well-worn motorcycle jacket-a retro tough guy stepping out of a time machine.
“This is quite a surprise,” said Gurney.
“Just thought I’d drop by, make sure you weren’t getting any more doll gifts.”
“Very thoughtful. Come on in.”
Inside, Hardwick said nothing, just let his gaze wander around the room.
