recorded by that camera.”
“Your point being what?”
“I watched the video three times to be absolutely sure. Jack, no one passed in front of that tree.”
Hardwick sounded subdued. “I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I. Is there any possibility that the machete in the woods wasn’t the murder weapon?”
“We have a perfect DNA match. The fresh blood on the machete was Jillian Perry’s. Potential error factor is less than one in a million. Not to mention the fact that the ME report refers to a powerful blow from a heavy, sharp blade. And what’s the alternative, anyway? That Flores secretly disposed of a second bloody machete, the real murder weapon, after wiping some of the blood from it onto the first one? But he’d still have to get it to where we found it. I mean, what the hell are we talking about? How could it not be the murder weapon?”
Gurney sighed. “So what we have, basically, is an impossible situation.”
Chapter 48
I
One of his instructors at the NYPD academy had made that observation in class one day. Gurney never forgot it.
If he was going to base any conclusions on the content of the video, he needed to test its factualness a little further. On the DVD case, there was a phone number for the company, Perfect Memories, that had handled the videography.
He called the number, left a message mentioning the names Ashton and Perry, and had barely concluded when his phone rang and Perfect Memories appeared as the caller ID.
A professionally pleasant and alert female voice asked, “How can I help you?”
Gurney explained who he was and how he was trying to assist Val Perry, mother of the late bride, and how important he believed the video material produced by Perfect Memories would be in capturing the madman who’d killed Jillian and providing closure for her family. All he needed was an absolutely certain answer to one question, but he needed to hear it from the person who’d supervised the project.
“That would be me.”
“And you are…?”
“Jennifer Stillman. I’m the managing director here.”
“Absolutely not.” Her response was crisp and immediate.
“Not even for a fraction of a second?”
“Absolutely not.”
“You seem remarkably sure. Has the question come up before?”
“Not the question, but that specific requirement.”
“Requirement?”
“It was actually written into the production contract that the video had to cover the entire venue during the entire reception, start to finish, with absolutely nothing left out. Apparently the bride wanted literally
Jennifer Stillman’s tone told Gurney this was not exactly a standard request, or at least the client’s emphasis on it was not standard. He asked about it, just to be sure.
“Well…” She hesitated. “I’d say that it was unusually important to them. Or at least to her. When Dr. Ashton passed along the request to us, he seemed a little…” Again she hesitated. “I shouldn’t be saying any of this. I’m not a mind reader.”
“Jennifer, this is important. As you know, it’s a murder case. My main concern is that I can be confident that the DVDs contain an uninterrupted video record-nothing missing, no dropped frames.”
“There were certainly no dropped frames. Holes would create glitches in the time code, and the computer would flag that.”
“Okay. Good to know. Thank you. Just one more thing-you were starting to say something about Dr. Ashton?”
“Not really. Just… it was just that he seemed a little embarrassed talking about his fiancee’s obsession with every instant of the reception being recorded. Like maybe he was embarrassed by the romantic sentimentality of it, or maybe he thought it sounded childish, I really don’t know. It’s not my place to judge why people want what they want. The customer is always right, right?”
“Thank you, Jennifer. You’ve been extremely helpful.”
It might not be Jennifer Stillman’s job to judge why people wanted what they wanted, but it was a big part of Gurney’s job. Understanding motivations could make all the difference, and in this instance a weird one came to mind: One reason a person might want total video coverage of an event was security. Either because they believed that the deterrent effect of multiple cameras in continuous recording mode would keep some feared event from occurring or because they wanted to have an indisputable record of anything that did occur.
And then there was the question of who it was that wanted all those cameras running. It hadn’t escaped Gurney’s notice that the request had been positioned to Ms. Stillman as coming from Jillian, but that Jillian herself hadn’t been present, and the request had been “passed along” by Ashton. So it might have been his idea and he had chosen to present it as hers. But why would he do that? What difference did it make whose idea it was?
The possibility that he or she had been motivated by the security aspect of the cameras-the possibility that at least one of them, maybe both, had reason to be apprehensive about what might happen that day-was intriguing.
Their most likely focus of concern would have been Flores, who reportedly had been acting strangely. Maybe the camera emphasis had come from Jillian, just as Ashton had said. Maybe she had reasons to fear Flores. After all, her cell records for the weeks preceding the murder indicated numerous text messages from Flores’s phone- including the final one, the only one that hadn’t been deleted: FOR ALL THE REASONS I HAVE WRITTEN. EDWARD VALLORY. In light of the prologue to Vallory’s play, that message could certainly be interpreted as a threat. So maybe she went to see him in the cottage to discuss something a lot less pleasant than a wedding toast.
When Gurney was engaged in stitching together the pieces of evidence, interpretation, hearsay, and logical leaps that constituted his understanding of a crime, the process filled his mind completely, obliterating his sense of time and place. Thus, when he looked at the clock on the den bookcase and saw that it was 5:05 P.M., it both surprised him and didn’t surprise him-like the stiffness in his legs when he stood up.
Madeleine was still out. Perhaps he should get something started for dinner, or at least check to see if she’d left anything on the countertop that needed to go into the oven. He was heading in that direction when the phone on his desk rang and brought him back. The caller ID said Jack Hardwick.
“Golly, Supercop, you’ve got one hell of a creepy friend!”
“Meaning?”
“Hope you weren’t near a school yard with this guy.”
Gurney had a sinking feeling about where this was heading. “The hell are you talking about, Jack?”
“Touchy, touchy. This sweetheart a close buddy of yours?”
“Enough bullshit. What’s this about?”
“The gentleman you were drinking with? Whose glass you walked off with? Whose prints you asked me to run? Sound familiar, Sherlock?”
“What did you find out?”
“Quite a bit.”
“Jack…”
“I found out that his name is Saul Steck. Professional name Paul Starbuck.”
“His profession being…?”
