“I suppose. Perhaps. I don’t know.”
“You telling me you haven’t thought about it?” There was an edge in Hardwick’s voice.
“Of course I’ve thought about it.” Ashton looked perplexed. “I just can’t… see it that clearly. Maybe I’m too close to everything.”
“Does the name Skard mean anything to you?” asked Gurney.
“The detective on the phone just asked me the same question-something about some horrible Sardinian gang family. The answer is no.”
“You’re sure Jillian never mentioned it?”
“Jillian? No. Why would she?”
Gurney shrugged. “It’s possible that Skard may be Hector Flores’s real name.”
“Skard? How would Jillian know that?”
“I don’t know, but she apparently did an Internet search to find out more about it.”
Ashton shook his head again, the gesture resembling an involuntary shudder. “How awful does this have to get before it ends?” It was more a wail of protest than a question.
“You said something on the phone just now about tomorrow morning?”
“What? Oh, yes. Another twist. Your lieutenant feels that this conspiracy angle makes everything more urgent, so he’s pushing up the schedule for interviewing our students to tomorrow morning.”
“So where are they all?”
“What?”
“Your students. Where are they?”
“Oh. Forgive my distractedness, but that’s part of the reason for it. They’re downstairs in the main area of the chapel. It’s a calming environment. It’s been a wild day. Officially, Mapleshade students have no communication with the outside world. No TV, radio, computers, iPods, cell phones, nothing. But there are always leaks, always someone who’s managed to sneak in some device or other, and so of course they’ve heard about Savannah’s death, and… well, you can imagine. So we went into what a sterner facility might call ‘lockdown mode.’ Of course, we don’t call it that. Everything here is designed to have a softer edge.”
“Except for the razor wire,” said Hardwick.
“The fence is aimed at keeping problems out, not people in.”
“We were wondering about that.”
“I can assure you it’s for security, not captivity.”
“So right now they’re all downstairs in the chapel?” asked Hardwick.
“Correct. As I said, they find it calming.”
“I wouldn’t have thought they’d be religious,” said Gurney.
“Religious?” Ashton smiled humorlessly. “Hardly. There’s just something about stone churches, Gothic windows, the muted light. They calm the soul in a way that has nothing to do with theology.”
“The students don’t feel like they’re being punished?” asked Hardwick. “What about the ones who weren’t acting out?”
“The agitated ones settle down, feel better. The ones who were okay to begin with are given to understand that they are the main source of peace for the others. Bottom line, the agitated don’t feel singled out and the calm feel valuable.”
Gurney smiled. “You must have put a lot of thought and effort into engineering that view of the experience.”
“That’s part of my job.”
“You give them a framework for understanding what’s happening?”
“You could put it like that.”
“Like what a magician does,” said Gurney. “Or a politician.”
“Or any competent preacher or teacher or doctor,” said Ashton mildly.
“Incidentally,” said Gurney, deciding to test the effect of a hairpin turn in the conversation, “was Jillian injured in any way in the days leading up to the wedding-anything that would have caused bleeding?”
“Bleeding? Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”
“There’s a question about how the blood got on the bloody machete.”
“Question? How could that be a question? What do you mean?”
“I mean the machete might not have been the murder weapon after all.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It might have been placed in the woods prior to your wife’s murder, not after it.”
“But… I was told… her blood…”
“Some conclusions could have been premature. But here’s the thing: If the machete was put in the woods before the murder, then the blood on it must have come from Jillian before the murder. The question is, do you have any idea how that could have happened?”
Ashton looked stunned. His mouth opened. He seemed about to speak, didn’t, then finally did. “Well… yes, I do… at least theoretically. As you may know, Jillian was being treated for a bipolar disorder. She took a medication that required periodic blood tests to assure that it remained within the therapeutic range. Her blood was drawn once a month.”
“Who drew the blood?”
“A local phlebotomist. I believe she worked for a medical-services provider out of Cooperstown.”
“And what did she do with the blood sample?”
“She transported it to the lab where the lithium-level test was performed and the report was generated.”
“She transported it immediately?”
“I imagine she made a number of stops, her assigned client route, whatever that might be, and at the end of each day she’d deliver her samples to the lab.”
“You have her name and the names of the provider and the lab?”
“Yes, I do. I review-reviewed, I should say-a copy of the lab report every month.”
“Would you have a record of when the last blood sample was drawn?”
“No specific record, but it was always the second Friday of the month.”
Gurney thought for a moment. “That would have been two days before Jillian was killed.”
“You’re thinking that Flores somehow intervened at some point in that process and got hold of her blood? But why? I’m afraid I’m not really understanding what you’re saying about the machete. What would be the point of it?”
“I’m not sure, Doctor. But I have a feeling that the answer to that question is the missing piece at the center of the case.”
Ashton raised his eyebrows in a way that looked more baffled than skeptical. His eyes seemed to be moving across the disturbing points of some inner landscape. Eventually he closed them and sat back in his tall chair, his hands clasped over the ends of the elaborately carved armrests, his breathing deep and deliberate, as though he might be engaged in some tranquilizing mental exercise. But when he opened them again, he only looked worse.
“What a nightmare,” he said. He cleared his throat, but it sounded more like a whimper than a cough. “Tell me something, gentlemen. Have you ever felt like a complete failure? That’s how I feel right now. Every new horror… every death… every discovery about Flores or Skard or whatever his name is… every bizarre revelation about what’s really been happening here at the school-everything proves my total failure. What a brainless idiot I’ve been!” He shook his head-or rather moved it back and forth in slow motion, as if it were caught in some oscillating underwater current. “Such foolish, fatal pride. To think that I could cure a plague of such incredible, primitive power.”
“Plague?”
“Not the term my profession commonly applies to incest and the damage it does, but I think it’s quite accurate. The longer I’ve worked in this field, the more I’ve come to believe that of all the crimes human beings commit against one another, the most destructive by far is the sexual abuse of a child by an adult-especially a parent.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Why? It’s simple. The two primal human relationship modes are parenting and mating. Incest destroys the distinct patterns of these two relationships by smashing them together, essentially polluting them both. I believe that there is traumatic damage to the neural structures that support the behaviors natural to each of these
