in her lungs. “That horrible mug-shot art-that was the beginning. Pictures of the most disgusting monsters on earth. But that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough having them in our computer, having them on the screen staring at us.”
“Maddie, I promise you-whoever got into our house, I’ll find them. I’ll put an end to them. This will never happen again.”
She shook her head. “It’s too late. Don’t you see what you’ve done?”
“I see that war has been declared. We’ve been attacked.”
“No!
“What I did is kick a rattlesnake out from under a rock.”
“You brought this into our lives.”
He said nothing, just bowed his head.
“We moved to the country. To a beautiful place. Lilacs and apple blossoms. A pond.”
“Maddie, I promise you, I’ll kill the snake.”
She seemed not to be listening. “Don’t you see what you’ve done?” She gestured slowly with one of her scissors to the dark window beside him. “Those woods, the woods where I take my walks, he was hiding in those woods, watching me.”
“What makes you think you were being watched?”
“God, it’s obvious! He put that hideous thing in the room I work in, the room I read in, the room with my favorite window, the window I sit next to with my knitting. The room overlooking the woods. He knew it was a room I used. If he’d put that thing in the spare bedroom across the hall, I might not have found it for a month. So he
“I’ll kill the snake. It’ll be all right.”
“Until you kick the next one out from under its rock.” She shook her head and sighed. “I can’t believe what you’ve done to the most beautiful place in the world.”
It seemed to Gurney that once in a while, unpredictably, the elements of an otherwise indifferent universe conspired to produce in him an eerie frisson, and so it was that at that very moment behind the farmhouse, beyond the high pasture, out on the northern ridge, the coyotes began to howl.
Madeleine closed her eyes and lowered her knees. She rested her fists on her lap and loosened her grip on the two scissors enough for the blood to flow back into her knuckles. She tilted her head back against the headrest of the chair. Her mouth relaxed. It was as though the howling of the coyotes, weird and unsettling to her at other times, touched her that night in an entirely different way.
As the first gray swath of dawn appeared in the bedroom’s east-facing window, she fell asleep. After a while Gurney took the scissors from her hands and switched off the light.
Chapter 64
As the yellow rays of the rising sun slanted across the pasture, Gurney sat at the breakfast table drinking a second cup of coffee. A few minutes earlier, he’d watched the changing of the guard as the day-shift trooper cruiser arrived to replace the one summoned by Hardwick. He’d gone out to offer the new trooper breakfast, but the young man had declined with crisp, military politeness. “Thank you, sir, but I’ve already had breakfast, sir.”
A dull sciatic ache had settled in Gurney’s left leg, as he grappled with questions whose resolutions were eluding his grasp like slippery fish.
Should he ask Hardwick to get him a copy of the mug shot that must have been taken at the time of Saul Steck’s arrest-so he could be sure there was no mistake about the fingerprints-or might the paper trail generated between BCI and the original prosecuting jurisdiction raise too many questions?
Should he ask Hardwick, or maybe one of his old partners at the NYPD, to check the city tax rolls for ownership information on the brownstone, or might even that simple exercise raise a chain of sticky questions?
Was there any reason to doubt Sonya’s claim to have been as thoroughly duped by the “Jykynstyl” story as he was-apart from the fact that she struck Gurney as the sort of woman not likely to be duped by anyone?
Should he get a shotgun for the house, or would Madeleine be more upset than reassured by its presence?
Should they move out, live in a hotel until the case was resolved? But suppose it wasn’t resolved for weeks, or months, or ever?
Should he follow up with Darryl Becker on the status of the search for Ballston’s boat?
Should he follow up with BCI on the progress of the calls being made to the Mapleshade graduates and their families?
Was everything that had happened-from the arrival of Hector Flores in Tambury through the murders of Jillian and Kiki and the disappearances of all those girls, right up to the complex brownstone deception, the Ballston sex murders, and the beheaded doll-was all that the product of a single mind? And if so, was the driving force of that mind a practical criminal enterprise or a psychotic mania?
Most disturbingly to Gurney, why was he finding these knots so difficult to untangle?
Even the simplest of questions-should he continue weighing alternatives, or return to bed and try to empty his mind, or busy himself physically-had become ensnared in a mental process that conjured an objection to every conclusion. Even the idea of taking a few ibuprofens for his aching sciatic nerve met with an unwillingness to go into the bedroom to get the bottle.
He stared out at the asparagus ferns, motionless in the dead morning calm. He felt disconnected, as though his customary attachments to the world had been broken. It was the same unmoored sense he’d had when his first wife announced her intention to divorce him, and years later when little Danny was killed, and again when his own father died. And now…
And now that Madeleine…
His eyes filled with tears. And as his sight grew blurry, he had the first perfectly clear thought he’d had in a long time. It was so simple. He would quit the case.
The purity and rightness of the decision was reflected in an immediate feeling of freedom, an immediate impulse to action.
He went into the den and called Val Perry.
He got her voice mail, was tempted to leave his resignation message, but felt that doing it that way was too impersonal, too avoidant. So he left a message saying only that he needed to speak to her as soon as possible. Then he got a glass of water, went into the bedroom, and took three ibuprofens.
Madeleine had moved from the rocking chair to the bed. She was still dressed, lying on top of the spread rather than under it, but she was sleeping peacefully. He lay down next to her.
When he awoke at noon, she was no longer there.
He felt a small stab of fear, relieved a moment later by the sound of the kitchen sink running. He went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, brushed his teeth, changed his clothes-did the things that would make it feel as much as possible like a new day.
When he went out to the kitchen, Madeleine was transferring some soup from a large pot to a plastic storage container. She put the container in the refrigerator and the pot in the sink and dried her hands on a dish towel. Her expression told him nothing.
“I’ve made a decision,” he said.
She gave him a look that told him she knew what he was about to say.
“I’m backing out of the case.”
She folded the towel and hung it over the edge of the dish drainer. “Why?”
“Because of everything that’s happened.”
She studied him for a few seconds, turned, and looked thoughtfully out the window nearest the sink.
“I left a message for Val Perry,” he said.
