“Mail? I… I don’t know. I think… Oh, right, I was about to get it, and then I saw you up on the hill and got distracted.”
“You’ve been distracted for a while.”
“Is that a fact?” He immediately regretted his defensive tone, but not enough to admit it.
“You don’t think so?”
He sighed nervously. “I suppose.” He went to the pot on the stove and ladled out a bowl of soup.
“Is there anything you want to talk about?”
He delayed answering until he was seated across from her with his soup and the other half of the baguette. “There’s a major development in the case. A former Mapleshade girl has turned up dead in Florida. Victim of a sex murderer.”
Madeleine closed her book, stared at him. “So you’re thinking… what?”
“It’s possible that the other girls who’ve disappeared have ended up the same way.”
“Murdered by the same person?”
“It’s possible.”
Madeleine studied his face as if unspoken information were written on it.
“What?” he asked.
“Is that what’s on your mind?”
A rush of unease passed through his stomach. “That’s part of it. Another part is that the police haven’t been able to get a single word out of the man they’ve charged with the murder-nothing beyond a categorical denial. Meanwhile his law firm and PR firm are creating alternative scenarios to feed to the media-lots of innocent reasons that a woman’s raped, tortured, and beheaded body might have been in his freezer.”
“And you’re thinking, if only you could sit down and talk to this monster…”
“I’m not saying that I’d get a confession, but…”
“But you’d do a better job than the locals?”
“That wouldn’t be so difficult.” He winced inwardly at his own arrogance.
Madeleine frowned. “It wouldn’t be the first time the star detective rose to the challenge and deciphered the mystery.”
He stared at her uncomfortably.
Again she seemed to be examining the message encoded in his expression.
“What?” he asked.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“But you’re thinking something. What is it? Tell me.”
She hesitated. “I thought you liked puzzles.”
“I admit that I do. So what?”
“So why do you look so miserable?”
The question jarred him. “Maybe I’m just exhausted. I don’t know.” But he did know. The reason he felt as bad as he did was that he couldn’t bring himself to tell her why he felt bad to begin with. His reluctance to reveal the full chagrin of being duped and the intensity of his worry over what may have happened during his period of amnesia had isolated him in a terrible way.
He shook his head, as if refusing the pleas of his better self, the small voice within that was begging him to lay the facts of the matter before this woman who loved him. His fear was so great that it blocked the very action that would have removed it.
Chapter 57
As strained as it often was, Gurney’s relationship with Madeleine had always been the chief pillar of his stability. But that relationship depended on a degree of openness he felt incapable of at the moment.
With the desperation of a drowning man, he embraced his only other pillar, his detective identity, and attempted to channel all his energies into Solving the Crime.
The most productive next step in that process, he was convinced, would be a conversation with Jordan Ballston. He needed to devise a way to bring that about. Rebecca had insisted that fear would be the key to cracking the shell of the rich psycho, and Gurney had no reason to disagree. Nor did he have any reason to disagree with her warning that it wouldn’t be easy.
Fear.
It was a subject with which Gurney had a raw, current, intimate familiarity. Perhaps that experience could be of some use. What exactly was it that frightened him so much? He retrieved the three alarming text messages and reread them carefully.
SUCH PASSIONS! SUCH SECRETS! SUCH WONDERFUL PHOTOGRAPHS!
ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT MY GIRLS? THEY’RE THINKING ABOUT YOU.
YOU’RE SUCH AN INTERESTING MAN, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN MY DAUGHTERS WOULD ADORE YOU. IT WAS SO GOOD OF YOU TO COME TO THE CITY. NEXT TIME THEY WILL COME TO YOU. WHEN? WHO CAN SAY? THEY WANT IT TO BE A SURPRISE.
The words generated a sick, hollow feeling in his chest.
Such virulent threats wrapped in such airy banalities.
So nonspecific, yet so malignant.
So nonspecific. Yes, that was it. It brought to mind his favorite English professor’s explanation of the emotional power of Harold Pinter:
He remembered it because the truth of it had struck him immediately, and experience had reinforced it over the years. What we’re able to imagine is always worse than what reality places before us. The greatest fear by far is the fear of what we imagine is lurking in the dark.
So perhaps the best way to panic Ballston would be to give him an opportunity to panic himself. A frontal attack would be rebuffed by his legal army. Gurney needed a back door through the fortifications.
Ballston’s current defense strategy was a categorical denial of any knowledge of Melanie Strum dead or alive, plus the creation of an alternative hypothesis, involving the access other individuals had to his home, to explain the presence of her body. Such a strategy would collapse, disastrously for Ballston, if a prior link could be established between him and the girl. In the best possible outcome, the nature of that link would also explain how the murders of Melanie Strum, Jillian Perry, and Kiki Muller, as well as the disappearances of the other Mapleshade graduates, were connected. But whether it did or not, Gurney was sure that discovering Melanie’s route to Ballston’s basement freezer would be a giant step toward the final solution. And the possible exposure of that link would be Ballston’s greatest fear.
The question was how to trigger that fear-how to use it as an entry point into Ballston’s psyche, a way around the battlements manned by his lawyers. Was there a person, place, or thing the mention of which would open the door? Mapleshade? Jillian Perry? Kiki Muller? Hector Flores? Edward Vallory? Alessandro? Karnala Fashion? Giotto Skard?
And as hard as it would be to pick the magic name, the harder part would lie in managing whatever dialogue ensued-the Pinteresque art of implying without specifying, unnerving without providing details. The challenge would be to provide the dark space in which Ballston could imagine the worst, the platform on which he might hang himself.
Madeleine had gone in to bed. Gurney, however, was wide awake, pacing the length of the big kitchen, on fire with possibilities, risk evaluations, logistics. He narrowed the names of his potential door openers to the three he thought most promising: Mapleshade, Flores, Karnala.
Of those he finally put Karnala, by a millimeter, at the top of the list. Because all the Mapleshade girls known to be missing had appeared in near-pornographic Karnala Fashion ads, because Karnala did not seem to be in the
