hour later.
The techs in their white anticontamination suits were initially skeptical of a crime scene in which the only “crime” was the unexplained presence of a broken doll. They were accustomed to carnage, to the bloody remnants of mayhem and murder. So perhaps it was understandable that their first reactions were raised eyebrows and sideways glances.
Their initial suggestions-that the doll might have been put there by a visiting child or that it might be a practical joke-were perhaps understandable as well, but that did not make them tolerable to Madeleine, whose blunt question to Hardwick they probably overheard, judging by the expressions on their faces: “Are they drunk or just stupid?”
However, once Hardwick took them aside and explained the uncanny resemblance of the doll’s position to that of Jillian Perry’s body, they did as thorough and professional a job of processing the scene as if it had been riddled with bullets.
The results, unfortunately, didn’t amount to anything. All their fine-combing, print-lifting, and fiber- and soil- vacuuming efforts produced nothing of interest. The room contained the prints of one person, no doubt Madeleine’s. Ditto the few hairs found on the back of the chair by the window where Madeleine worked on her knitting. The inside of the frame of the adjoining window, the one Gurney was called upon to open when it got stuck, bore a second set, no doubt his. There were no prints on the body or head of the doll. The brand of doll was a popular one, sold at every Walmart in America. The downstairs entry doors had multiple prints identical to the prints found in the bedroom. No door or window in the house showed any sign of being forced. There were no prints on the outside of the windows. Luma-Lite examination of the floors showed no clear footprints that didn’t match either Dave’s or Madeleine’s shoe size. Examination of all the doors, banisters, countertops, faucets, and toilet handles for fingerprints produced the same results.
When the techs finally packed up their equipment and departed at around 4:00 A.M. in their van, they took with them the doll, the bedspread, and the throw rugs they had removed from the floor on either side of the bed.
“We’ll run the standard tests,” Gurney overheard them telling Hardwick on their way out, “but ten to one everything’s clean.” They sounded tired and frustrated.
When Hardwick came back into the kitchen and sat at the table across from him and Madeleine, Gurney commented, “Just like the scene in Ashton’s cottage.”
“Yeah,” said Hardwick with a bone-tired disconnectedness.
“What do you mean?” asked Madeleine, sounding antagonistic.
“The antiseptic quality of it all,” said Gurney. “No prints, no nothing.”
She made an almost agonized little sound in her throat. She took several deep breaths. “So… what… what are we supposed to do now? I mean, we can’t just…”
“There’ll be a cruiser here before I leave,” said Hardwick. “You’ll have protection for at least forty-eight hours, no problem.”
“No problem?” Madeleine stared at him, uncomprehending. “How can you…?” She didn’t finish the sentence, just shook her head, stood up, and left the room.
Gurney watched her go, at a loss for any comforting thing to say, as jarred by her emotion as he was by the event that had caused it.
Hardwick’s notebook was on the table in front of him. He opened it, found the page he wanted, and took a pen out of his shirt pocket. He didn’t write anything, just tapped idly with it on the open page. He looked exhausted and vaguely troubled.
“So…” he began. He cleared his throat. He spoke as if he were pushing the words uphill. “According to what I wrote down earlier… you were away all day.”
“Right. In Florida. Extracting a near confession from Jordan Ballston. Which I hope is being followed up as we speak.”
Hardwick laid down his pen, closed his eyes, and massaged them with his thumb and forefinger. When he opened them again, he looked back at his notebook. “And your wife told me she was out of the house all afternoon- from sometime around one till sometime around five-thirty-bike riding, then hiking through the woods. She does that a lot?”
“She does that a lot.”
“It’s a reasonable assumption, then, that the doll was… installed, shall we say, during that time window.”
“I’d say so,” said Gurney, becoming irritated at the reiteration of the obvious.
“Okay, so as soon as the morning shift comes on, I’ll send someone over to talk to your neighbors down the road. A passing car must be a big event up here.”
“Having live neighbors is a big event. There are only six houses on the road, and four of them belong to city people, only here on weekends.”
“Still, you never know. I’ll send someone over.”
“Fine.”
“You don’t sound optimistic.”
“Why the hell should I be optimistic?”
“Good point.” He picked up his pen and started tapping again on his notebook. “She says she’s sure she locked the doors when she went out. That sound right to you?”
“What do you mean, does it
“I mean, is that something she normally does, lock the doors?”
“What she normally does is tell the truth. If she says she locked the doors, she locked the doors.”
Hardwick stared at him, seemed as if he were about to respond, and then changed his mind. More tapping. “So… if they were locked and there’s no sign of forced entry, that means someone came in with a key. You give keys to anyone?”
“No.”
“Any instances you can think of when your keys were out of your possession long enough for someone to make dupes?”
“No.”
“Really? Only takes twenty seconds to make a key.”
“I know how long it takes to make a key.”
Hardwick nodded, as though this were actual information. “Well, chances are, somebody got one somehow. You might want to change your locks.”
“Jack, who the hell do you think you’re talking to? This isn’t Home Safety Night at the PTA.”
Hardwick smiled, leaned back in his chair. “Right. I’m talking to Sherlock fucking Gurney. So tell me, Mr. Brilliant Fucking Detective, you have any bright ideas about this?”
“About the doll?”
“Yeah. About the doll.”
“Nothing that wouldn’t already be obvious to you.”
“That somebody’s trying to scare you off the case?”
“You have a better idea?”
Hardwick shrugged. He stopped tapping and began studying his pen as though it were a complex piece of evidence. “Anything else odd been happening?”
“Like what?”
“Like… odd. Have there been any other little… oddities in your life?”
Gurney uttered a short, humorless laugh. “Apart from every single aspect of this miserably odd case and all the miserably odd people involved in it, everything’s perfectly normal.” It wasn’t really an answer, and he suspected that Hardwick knew it wasn’t. For all the man’s bluster and vulgarity, he had one of the sharpest minds Gurney had encountered in all his years in law enforcement. He could easily have been a captain at thirty-five if he gave a damn about any of the things that captains need to give a damn about.
Hardwick looked up at the ceiling, his eyes following the crown molding as though it were the subject of what he was saying. “Remember the guy whose fingerprints were on that little cordial glass?”
A bad feeling seized Gurney’s stomach. “Saul Steck, aka Paul Starbuck?”
“Right. You remember what I told you?”
“You told me he was a successful character actor with a nasty interest in young girls. Got a psych commitment,
