girls. Or the gunshot on Ashton’s patio. Or the text message Ashton received from Flores’s cell phone.”
Gurney shrugged.
Kline shook his head in frustration. “It sounds to me like you just took everything that was starting to fit together and kicked it off the table.”
“I’m not kicking anything off the table. Personally, I don’t believe Carl is involved. I’m not even sure his wife was involved. I’m just trying to loosen things up a bit. We don’t have as many solid facts as you might think. My point is, we need to keep our minds open.” He weighed the risk of ill will inherent in what he was about to add and decided to add it, anyway. “Getting committed to the wrong hypothesis early on may be the reason the investigation hasn’t gotten anywhere.”
Kline looked at Rodriguez, who was staring at the table surface as if it were a painting of hell. “What do you think, Rod? You think we need to take a new look at it? You think maybe we’ve been trying to solve the puzzle ass backwards?”
Rodriguez just shook his head slowly. “No, that’s not what I think,” he said, his voice hoarse, tense with suppressed emotion.
Judging from the expressions around the table, Gurney wasn’t the only one taken aback when the captain, a man obsessed with projecting an aura of control, rose awkwardly from his chair and left the room as though he couldn’t bear to be in it for another minute.
Chapter 36
After the captain left, the meeting lost focus. Not that it had much focus to begin with, but the strangeness of his departure seemed to underline the incoherence of the investigation, and the discussion disintegrated. Star profiler Rebecca Holdenfield, expressing confusion about her role there, was the next to flee. Anderson and Blatt were restless, caught between the gravitational fields of their boss who was gone and the DA who was still present.
Gurney asked if any progress had been made identifying the significance of the Edward Vallory name, but none had. Anderson looked blank at the question, and Blatt dismissed it with a wave of his hand that conveyed what a useless avenue of inquiry he considered it to be.
The DA mouthed a few meaningless sentences about how profitable the meeting had been in getting everyone on the same page. Gurney didn’t think it had done that. But at least it might have gotten everyone wondering what kind of story they were reading. And it got the question of the disappearing graduates on the table.
Gurney’s final contribution to the meeting was a strong suggestion that BCI dig up some background and contact information on Alessandro and Karnala Fashion, since they constituted a common factor in the lives of the missing girls and a link between them and Jillian. Just as Kline was endorsing this pursuit, Ellen Rackoff came to the door and pointed at her watch. He checked his, looked startled, and announced with stern self-importance that he was late for a conference call with the governor. As he departed, he expressed his confidence that they all could find their own way out. Anderson and Blatt left together, followed by Gurney and Hardwick.
Hardwick had one of the NYSP’s ubiquitous black Ford sedans. In the parking lot, he leaned against the trunk, lit a cigarette, and, without being asked, offered Gurney his take on the captain. “Little fucker is coming apart. You know what they say about control freaks-that they have to control everything outside them because everything inside’s a fucking mess. That’s Captain Rod, except the little fucker can’t keep the craziness hidden anymore.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, grimaced as he blew the smoke out. “His daughter’s a fucking cokehead. You knew that, right?”
Gurney nodded. “You told me that during the Mellery case.”
“I told you she was in Greystone? The nuthouse down in Jersey?”
“Right.” Gurney remembered a damp, bitter day the previous November when Hardwick had told him about the Rodriguez girl’s addiction problem and how it skewed her father’s judgment in cases where drugs might be involved.
“Well, she got booted out of Greystone for smuggling in roxies and for fucking her fellow patients. Latest news is that she was arrested for dealing crack at an NA meeting.”
Gurney wondered where this was going. It didn’t have the tone of a compassionate explanation of the captain’s behavior.
Hardwick took the kind of drag he’d take if he were trying to set a new record for how much smoke he could get into his lungs in three seconds. “I see you looking at me like, so what, what does this have to do with anything? Am I right?”
“The question crossed my mind.”
“The answer is, nothing. It doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with anything. Except that Rodriguez’s decisions aren’t worth shit these days. He’s a liability to the case.” He flung the half-finished cigarette down, put his foot on it, ground it into the asphalt.
Gurney took a shot at changing the subject. “Do me a favor. Follow up on Alessandro and Karnala. I don’t get the impression anyone else in there is particularly interested.”
Hardwick didn’t respond. He stood there for another minute, staring down at the crushed butt next to his foot. “Time to go,” he finally said. He opened his car door and wrinkled his face as though assailed by a sour smell.
“Just watch out, Davey boy. The little fucker’s a time bomb, and he’s gonna go off. They always do.”
Chapter 37
The drive home was miserable in a way Gurney couldn’t at first identify. He was both distracted and seeking distraction, seeking distraction and unable to find it. Every radio station was more intolerable than the one before it. Music that failed to reflect his mood struck him as idiotic, while music that did only made him feel worse. Every human voice carried within it an irritant, a revelation of stupidity or cupidity or both. Every commercial made him want to scream,
Turning off the radio refocused him on the road-refocused him on the shabby villages, the dead and dying farms, and the poisonous economic carrots being dangled in front of poor upstate towns by the gas-drilling industry.
Jesus, he was in a hell of a mood.
Why?
He let his mind drift back over the meeting, see what it would fasten on.
Ellen Rackoff, of course, in cashmere. Zero pretense of innocence. Warm and cozy as a snake. The danger itself a perverse part of the attraction.
The original evidence team’s report on the crime scene, reprised by Lieutenant Anderson, that made the murder sound like a professional assassination:
The facts uniting the missing graduates: their common arguments with their parents, their extravagant demands that were sure to be refused, their prior contacts with Hector and Karnala Fashion and the elusive photographer, Alessandro.
Jack Hardwick’s cold prognosis:
Rodriguez’s personal agony, as the father of a troubled daughter, echoed and magnified by the potential horrors of the case in front of him.
Gurney could hear the hoarseness in the man’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting next to him in the car. It
