Shut Your Eyes Tight

been so preoccupied that he hadn’t noticed until that very moment what a strangely perfect day it was, one of those autumn days when the altered angle of the sun, the altered color of the leaves, and an absolute stillness in the air conspired to create a world of timeless peace, a world that required nothing of him, a world whose peace took his breath away.

Like all the moments of serenity in Gurney’s life, this one was short-lived. He had come here to focus on a murder, to absorb more fully the nitty-gritty reality of the place in which it happened, the locale in which the murderer went about his business.

He continued around the back of the house to the broad stone patio, to the small round table-the table where four months earlier a bullet from a.257 Weatherby rifle had shattered Ashton’s teacup. He wondered where Hector Flores was at that very moment. He might be anywhere. He might be in the woods watching the house, keeping an eye on Ashton and his father, keeping an eye on Gurney.

Gurney’s attention moved to the cottage, to what had happened the day of the murder, the day of the wedding. From where he was standing, he could see the front and one side, as well as the part of the woods that Flores would have had to pass through in order to deposit the machete where it was found. In May the leaves would have been coming out, as now they were thinning, making the visibility conditions in the thicket roughly the same.

As he’d done many times during the past week, Gurney envisioned an athletic Latino male climbing out the back window of the cottage, running with the evasive steps of a soccer player through the trees and thornbushes to a point approximately 150 yards away, and half concealing the bloodied machete under some leaves. And then… then what? Slipping some sort of plastic bags over his feet? Or spraying them with some chemical to destroy the continuity of the scent trail? So he could proceed tracelessly to some other destination in the copse or on the road beyond it? So he could meet up with Kiki Muller, waiting in her car to drive him safely out of the area before the police arrived? Or take him to her own house? To her own house where he then killed and buried her? But why? What sense did any of that make? Or was that the wrong question, assuming as it did that the scenario had to make practical sense? Suppose a large part of it had been driven by pure pathology, by some warped fantasy? But that was not a useful avenue to explore. Because if nothing made sense, there was no way to make sense of it. And he had the feeling that, under the cloak of fury and lunacy, it all somehow did make sense.

So why was the machete only partially concealed? It seemed senseless to go to the trouble of covering the blade while leaving the handle in plain sight. For some reason that small discrepancy was the one that bothered him the most. Perhaps bothered was the wrong word. He was actually quite fond of discrepancies, because his experience told him that they eventually provided a window into the truth.

He sat down at the table and gazed into the woods, imagining as best he could the path of the running man. The view of those 150 yards from cottage to machete site was almost entirely obscured, not only by the foliage of the copse itself but by the rhododendron border that separated the wild area from the lawn and the flower beds. Gurney tried to estimate how deeply into the woods someone could see, and he concluded that it was not very deeply at all-making it easy for a man to pass where Flores had evidently passed without anyone on the lawn noticing him. In fact, by far the most distant object in the woods Gurney could see through the foliage from where he was sitting was the black trunk of a cherry tree. And he could see only a narrow slice of it through a gap in the bushes no more than a few inches wide.

True, that visible bit of tree trunk was on the far side of the route Flores would have to have taken, and theoretically, if someone had been staring into the woods, focused on that spot at the right moment, he or she might have caught a split-second glimpse of a person passing it. But it would have meant nothing at the time. And the chance of someone’s attention being focused on that precise spot at that time was about as likely as…

Jesus Christ!

Gurney’s eyes widened at the obvious thing he’d almost missed.

He stared through the foliage at the black, scaly bark of the cherry tree. Then, keeping it in sight, he walked toward it-straight across the patio, through the flower bed where Ashton had collapsed, through the rhododendron border of the lawn, and into the copse. His direction was approximately perpendicular to the route he assumed Flores would have traveled from the cottage to the machete site. He wanted to be sure there was no way the man could have avoided passing in front of the cherry tree.

When Gurney reached the edge of the ravine that he remembered from his first examination of the copse a couple of days earlier, his assumption was confirmed. The tree was on the far side of the ravine, which was long and deep with precipitous sides. Any route from the cottage that would pass behind the tree would involve crossing that ravine at least twice-a time-consuming task that would have been impossible to accomplish before the area was swarming with people after the discovery of the body-not to mention the fact that the scent trail ran along the near side of the ravine, not the far side. Which meant that anyone going from the cottage to the machete site had to pass in front of the tree. There was simply no way not to.

Gurney made the trip home from Tambury to Walnut Crossing in fifty-five minutes instead of the normal hour and a quarter. He was in a hurry to take a closer look at the video material from the wedding reception. He also realized that his rush might be arising from a need to stay as involved as possible in the Perry murder-a murder that, however horrendous, caused him far less anxiety than did the Jykynstyl situation.

Madeleine’s car was parked next to the house, and her bicycle was leaning against the garden shed. He guessed she’d be in the kitchen, but when he went in through the side door and called out, “I’m home,” there was no answer.

He went straight to the long table that separated the big kitchen from the sitting area-the table where his copies of the case materials were laid out, much to Madeleine’s annoyance. Amid the folders was a set of DVDs.

The one on top, the one he sat through with Hardwick, bore a label that said “Perry-Ashton Reception, Comprehensive BCI Edit.” But it was another DVD, one of the unedited originals, that Gurney was looking for. There were five to choose from. The first was labeled “Helicopter, General Aerial Views and Descent.” The other four, each containing the video captured by one of the stationary ground cameras at the reception, were labeled according to the compass orientation of each camera’s field of view.

He took the four DVDs into the den, opened his laptop, went to Google Earth, and typed in, “Badger Lane, Tambury, NY.” Thirty seconds later he was looking at a satellite photo of Ashton’s property, complete with altitude and compass points. Even the tea table on the patio was identifiable.

He chose the approximate point in the woods where he figured the visible tree trunk would be. Using the Google compass points, he calculated the heading from the table to the tree. The heading was eighty-five degrees- close to due east.

He shuffled through the DVDs. The last one was labeled “East by Northeast.” He popped it into the player across from the couch, located the point at which Jillian Perry had entered the cottage, and settled down to give the next fourteen minutes of the video his total attention.

He watched it once, twice, with increasing bafflement. Then he watched it again, this third time letting it run to the point when Luntz, the local police chief, had secured the scene and the state cops were arriving.

Something was wrong. More than wrong. Impossible.

He called Hardwick, who, in no hurry, answered on the seventh ring.

“What can I do for you, ace?”

“How sure are you that the input tapes of the wedding reception are complete?”

“What do you mean, ‘complete’?”

“One of the four fixed cameras was set up so that its field of view covered the cottage and a broad stretch of woods to the left of the cottage. That stretch of woods includes all the space that Flores had to pass through in order to ditch the murder weapon where he did.”

“So?”

“So there’s a tree trunk in back of that area that’s visible through gaps in the foliage from the angle of the patio, which was also the angle of one of the cameras.”

“And?”

“That tree trunk, I repeat, is in back of the route Flores would have to have taken to place the machete where it was found. That tree trunk is clearly and continually visible on the high-def video