grin. “Despite your opinion of me, I am an excellent judge of character. You don’t get as rich as I am by misreading people. So let me tell you something. The odds of you being a cop are about the same as the odds of the cops ever finding those headless cunts. I’m not going to lose sleep over either possibility.”
Gurney mirrored Ballston’s grin. “Confidence. Good. Very good. I like confidence.” Gurney stood suddenly. Ballston flinched. “Good luck, Mr. Ballston. We’ll be in touch if there are any unforeseen developments.”
As Gurney was passing through the front door, Ballston added a little twist. “You know, if I did think you were a cop, everything I told you would have been bullshit.”
Chapter 61
“Maybe that’s exactly what it was,” drawled Becker.
As Gurney emerged from the cool indulgence of the chauffeured Mercedes onto the broiling pavement in front of the airport terminal, he was on the phone to Darryl Becker, giving him as detailed a verbatim report as he could on his meeting with Jordan Ballston.
“I don’t think it was bullshit,” said Gurney. “I’ve had some experience with decompensating psychos. And I’d be willing to bet that some real energy was starting to come loose in that loony laugh and the image of decapitated women that went with it. But the bottom line is, we don’t have time to debate it. I strongly recommend you take what he said at face value and take immediate appropriate action.”
“I assume you’re not suggesting we search the Atlantic Ocean, so what are you suggesting?”
“The son of a bitch has a boat, right? He has to have a boat. Find the goddamn boat, put every tech you’ve got on it. Assume that he transported at least two bodies on that boat. Assume there’s still trace evidence somewhere on that boat-in some crack, crevice, corner-and don’t stop looking till you find it.”
“I hear what you’re saying. However, just to introduce a tiny speck of rational perspective here, let me point out that we don’t even know for a fact that Ballston has a boat. We don’t-”
Gurney broke in, “I’m telling you he has a boat. If anyone in this whole goddamn state owns a boat, he does.”
“As I was saying,” Becker drawled, “we have no evidence that he owns a boat, much less what kind of boat it might be, or where it might be, or when these alleged transportations of bodies took place, or whose bodies they were, or even if there were any bodies to begin with. You see my point?”
“Darryl, I have other calls to make. I’ll say this one last time. He has a boat. He’s had the bodies of at least two victims on it. Find the boat. Find the evidence. Do it now. We have to make this creep talk. We have to find out what the hell is going on. This thing is a lot bigger than Ballston, and I have a very bad feeling about it. A very urgent very bad feeling.” There was a silence too long for Gurney’s comfort. “You there, Darryl?”
“I promise nothing. We’ll do what we can do.”
As he made his way down an endless concourse to his flight gate, he placed a call to Sheridan Kline. He got Ellen Rackoff.
“He’s in court all afternoon,” she said. “Absolutely not interruptible.”
“How about Stimmel?”
“I think he’s in his office. You’d rather talk to him than to me?”
“It’s a practical need, not a personal preference.” Gurney couldn’t imagine
“Okay, just call this number again. If I don’t pick up, it’ll bounce over to him.”
He did what she said, and thirty seconds later Stimmel was on the line, his voice radiating all the charm of a swamp.
Gurney related enough of the story to convey his current view of the case: that it was potentially huge, that it combined elements of ruthless efficiency with sexual insanity, that Hector Flores and Jordan Ballston and the known deaths so far were just the visible pieces of an underground monster-and that if it turned out that as many as fifteen or twenty Mapleshade graduates were missing, then it was likely that all fifteen or twenty were going to end up raped, tortured, and decapitated.
He concluded, “Either you or Kline needs to get on the phone with the Palm Beach County district attorney within the next hour to accomplish two things. Number one, make sure that the PBPD is allocating sufficient resources to find Ballston’s boat and put it under a microscope ASAP. Number two, you guys need to convince the Palm Beach DA that full cooperation is the way to go here. You need to be very persuasive on the point that New York is holding the bigger end of the stick on this one-and that some kind of deal may have to be worked out with Ballston in order for us to get to Karnala Fashion, or whatever organization is at the root of whatever the hell is going on.”
“You think the DA in Florida is going to give Ballston a pass to make Sheridan’s life easier?” His tone made it plain he considered this idea absurd.
“I’m not talking about a pass. I’m talking about Ballston being made to understand that lethal injection is an absolute certainty for him unless he cooperates fully. And immediately.”
“And if he cooperates?”
“If he does-fully, truthfully, with no reservations-then maybe other outcomes could be considered.”
“That’s a tough sell.” Stimmel sounded like if he were the Florida DA, it would be an impossible sell.
“The fact is,” said Gurney, “getting Ballston to talk may be our only shot.”
“Our only shot at what?”
“A bunch of girls are missing. Unless we crack Ballston, I doubt we’ll ever find a single one of them alive.”
The rapid-fire pressures of the day caught up with Gurney on the second leg of the flight home, and his brain began shutting down. With the jet engines droning in his ears like a formless white noise, loosening his grip on the present, he drifted through unpleasant scenes and disjointed moments that hadn’t come to mind in over a decade: the visits he made to Florida after his parents moved from the Bronx to a rented bungalow in Magnolia, a little town that seemed to be the mother lode of bleakness and decay; a brown palmetto bug the size of a mouse, scuttling under the leafy detritus on the bungalow porch; tap water that tasted like recycled sewage but that his parents insisted had no taste at all; the times when his mother drew him aside to complain with tearful bitterness about her marriage, about his father, about his father’s selfishness, about her migraines, about her lack of sexual satisfaction.
Disturbing dreams, dark memories, and increasing dehydration through the remainder of the flight put Gurney in a state of anxious depression. As soon as he got off the plane in Albany, he bought a liter bottle of water at the inflated airport price and drank half of it on the way to the bathroom. In the relatively roomy wheelchair-accessible stall, he removed his chic jeans, polo shirt, and moccasins. He opened the Giacomo Emporium box he’d been carrying that contained his own original clothes and put them on. Then he put the new clothes into the box, and when he left the stall, he tossed the box into the garbage bin. He went to the basin and rinsed the gel out of his hair. He dried it roughly with a paper towel and looked at himself in the mirror, reassuring himself that he was again himself.
It was exactly 6:00 P.M., according to the parking booth’s clock, as he paid the twelve-dollar fee and the striped yellow barrier arm rose to let him pass. He headed for I-88 West with the late sun glaring through his windshield.
By the time he got to the exit for the county route that led from the interstate down through the northern Catskills to Walnut Crossing, an hour had passed; he’d finished his liter of water and was feeling better. It always surprised him that such a simple thing-you couldn’t get much simpler than water-could have such power to calm his thoughts. His emotional restoration gradually continued, and by the time he reached the little road that meandered up through the hills to his farmhouse, he was feeling close to normal.
He walked into the kitchen just as Madeleine was removing a roasting pan from the oven. She laid it on top of the stove, glanced at him with raised eyebrows, and said with a bit more sarcasm than surprise, “This is a shock.”
