Gurney detected a not-quite-hidden distaste in the guard’s voice, waited for Hardwick to follow it up. When he didn’t, Gurney asked, “What kind of a guy is Lazarus?”
The guard hesitated, seemed to be looking for a way to say something without saying something that could get him in trouble.
“I hear he’s not a smiley-face kind of guy,” said Gurney, recalling Simon Kale’s unflattering description.
Gurney’s mild encouragement was enough to put a crack in the wall.
“Smiley-face? Jeez no. I mean, he’s okay, I guess, but…”
“But not too pleasant?” Gurney prompted.
“It’s just, I don’t know, like he’s kind of in his own world. Like sometimes you’ll be talking to him and you get the feeling that ninety percent of him is somewhere else. I remember once-” He broke off the sentence at the sound of tires rolling slowly on gravel.
They all looked toward the little parking area-and the dark blue minivan that was coming to a stop next to Gurney’s car.
“The man himself,” said the guard under his breath.
The man who emerged from the van was ageless but far from young, with even features that made his face look more artificial than handsome. His hair was as black as only dye could make it, and the contrast with his pale skin was striking. He pointed to the back door of the van.
“Please get in, Officers,” he said as he slipped back into the driver’s seat and waited. His attempted smile, if that’s what it was, resembled the strained expression of a man who found daylight unpleasant.
Gurney and Hardwick got in behind him.
Lazarus drove slowly, gazing intently at the road ahead. After a few hundred yards, they rounded a bend and the dark pine woods yielded to a parklike area of mowed grass and widely spaced maples. The driveway straightened into a classical allee, at the end of which stood a neo-Gothic Victorian mansion with several smaller structures of similar design on either side of it. In front of the mansion, the road split. Lazarus took the right fork, which brought them around beds of ornamental shrubs to the rear of the building. There the split road came back together in a second allee that proceeded on, surprisingly, to a large chapel of dark granite. Its narrow stained- glass windows might on a cheerier day have given the impression of ten-foot-high red pencils, but at that moment they looked to Gurney like bloody gashes in the stone.
“The school has its own church?” asked Hardwick.
“No. Not a church anymore. Deconsecrated a long time ago. Too bad, in a sense,” he added, with a touch of that disconnection the guard had described.
“How so?” asked Hardwick.
Lazarus answered slowly. “Churches are about good and evil. About guilt and punishment.” He shrugged, pulling up in front of the chapel and switching off the ignition. “But church or no church, we all pay for our sins one way or another, don’t we?”
“Where is everyone?” asked Hardwick.
“Inside.”
Gurney looked up at the imposing edifice, its stone face the color of dark shadows.
“Is Dr. Ashton in there?” Gurney pointed at the arched chapel door.
“I’ll show you.” Lazarus got out of the van.
They followed him up the granite steps and through the door into a wide, dimly lit vestibule that smelled to Gurney like the parish church of his Bronx childhood: a combination of masonry, old wood, the age-old soot of burned candle wicks. It was a scent with a strangely dislocating power, making him feel a need to whisper, to step quietly. From beyond a pair of heavy oak doors that would lead presumably into the main space of the chapel came the low murmur of many voices.
Above the doors, carved boldly into a wide stone lintel, were the words GATE OF HEAVEN.
Gurney gestured toward the doors. “Dr. Ashton is in there?”
“No. The girls are in there. Settling down. All a bit volatile today-shaken up by the news about the Liston girl. Dr. Ashton’s in the organ loft.”
“Organ loft?”
“That’s what it used to be. Converted now, of course. Converted into an office.” He pointed to a narrow doorway at the far end of the vestibule, leading to the foot of a dark staircase. “It’s the door at the top of those stairs.”
Gurney felt a chill. He wasn’t sure whether it was the natural temperature of the granite or something in Lazarus’s eyes, which he was sure were fixed on them as they climbed the shadowy stone steps.
Chapter 74
At the top of the cramped stairwell was a small landing, weirdly illuminated by one of the building’s narrow scarlet windows. Gurney knocked on the landing’s only door. Like the doors off the vestibule, it looked heavy, gloomy, uninviting.
“Come in.” Ashton’s mellifluous voice was strained.
Despite its weight and promise of creakiness, the door swung open fluidly, silently, into a comfortably proportioned room that might have passed for a bishop’s private study. Chestnut brown bookcases lined two of the windowless walls. There was a small fireplace of sooty fieldstone with old brass andirons. An ancient Persian rug covered the floor, except for a satin-polished border of cherrywood two feet wide all the way around the room. A few large lamps, set atop occasional tables, gave the dark, woody tones of the room an amber glow.
Scott Ashton sat wearing a troubled frown at an ornate black-oak desk, placed at a ninety-degree angle to the door. Behind him, on an oak sideboard with carved lion-head legs, was the room’s major concession to the current century-a large flat-screen computer monitor. He motioned Gurney and Hardwick vaguely to a pair of red velvet high-backed chairs across from him-the sort of chairs one might find in the sacristy of a cathedral.
“It just keeps getting worse and worse,” Ashton said.
Gurney assumed he was referring to the murder the previous evening of Savannah Liston and was about to offer some vague words of agreement and condolence.
“Frankly,” Ashton went on, turning away, “I find this organized-crime angle almost incomprehensible.” At that point the sight of his Bluetooth earpiece, along with the oddness of his comments, told Gurney that the man was in fact in the middle of a phone call. “Yes, I understand… I understand… My point is simply that every step forward makes the case more bizarre… Yes, Lieutenant. Tomorrow morning… Yes… Yes, I understand. Thank you for letting me know.”
Ashton turned toward his guests but seemed for a moment to be lost in contemplation of the conversation just ended.
“News?” asked Gurney.
“Are you aware of this… criminal-conspiracy theory? This… grand scheme that may involve Sardinian gangsters?” Ashton’s expression seemed strained by a combination of anxiety and disbelief.
“I’ve heard it discussed,” said Gurney.
“Do you think there’s any chance of it being true?”
“A chance, yes.”
Ashton shook his head, stared confusedly at his desk, then back up at the two detectives. “May I ask why you’re here?”
“Just a gut feeling,” said Hardwick.
“Gut feeling? What do you mean?”
“In every case there’s some common point where everything converges. So the place itself becomes a key. It could be a big help for us just to take a walk around, see what we can see.”
“I’m not sure that I-”
“Everything that’s happened seems to have some link back to Mapleshade. Would you agree with that?”
