Getting no response from Gurney, he went on, “I’ll grant you there may be less doubt about the location of death than about some other things here. Goddamn loony bin. People here go on about the victim like he was that Deepdick Chopup guy on TV.”
“You mean Deepak Chopra?”
“Yeah, Dipcock or whatever. Christ, gimme a break!”
Despite the uncomfortable reaction building inside him, Gurney said nothing.
“What the hell do people come to places like this for? Listen to some New Age asshole with a Rolls-Royce talk about the meaning of life?” Hardwick shook his head at the foolishness of his fellow man-frowning at the back of the house all the while, as though eighteenth-century architecture might bear a large part of the blame.
Irritation overcame Gurney’s reticence. “As far as I know,” he said evenly, “the victim was not an asshole.”
“I didn’t say he was.”
“I thought you did.”
“I was making a general observation. I’m sure your buddy was an exception.”
Hardwick was getting under Gurney’s skin like a sharp sliver. “He wasn’t my buddy.”
“I got the impression from the message you left with the Peony police, which they kindly passed along to me, that your relationship went way back.”
“I knew him in college, had no contact with him for twenty-five years, and got an e-mail from him two weeks ago.”
“What about?”
“Some letters he got in the mail. He was upset.”
“What kind of letters?”
“Poems, mostly. Poems that sounded like threats.”
This made Hardwick stop and think before going on. “What did he want from you?”
“My advice.”
“What advice did you give him?”
“I advised him to call the police.”
“I gather he didn’t.”
The sarcasm irked Gurney, but he held his temper.
“There was another poem,” said Hardwick.
“What do you mean?”
“A poem, on a single sheet of paper, laid on the body, with a rock on it for a paperweight. All very neat.”
“He’s very precise. A perfectionist.”
“Who?”
“The killer. Possibly very disturbed, definitely a perfectionist.”
Hardwick stared at Gurney with interest. The mocking attitude was gone, at least temporarily. “Before we go any further, I need to know how you knew about the broken bottle.”
“Just a wild guess.”
“Just a wild guess that it was a whiskey bottle?”
“Four Roses, specifically,” said Gurney, smiling with satisfaction when he saw Hardwick’s eyes widen.
“Explain how you know that,” demanded Hardwick.
“It was a bit of a leap, based on references in the poems,” said Gurney. “You’ll see when you read them.” In response to the question forming on the other man’s face, he added, “You’ll find the poems, along with a couple of other messages, in the desk drawer in the den. At least, that’s the last place I saw Mellery put them. It’s the room with the big fireplace off the center hall.”
Hardwick continued staring at him as though doing so would resolve some important issue. “Come with me,” he finally said. “I want to show you something.”
He led the way in uncharacteristic silence to the parking area, situated between the massive barn and the public road, and came to a halt where it was connected to the circular driveway and where a corridor of yellow police tape began.
“This is the nearest place to the road where we can clearly distinguish the footprints we believe belong to the perp. The road and the drive were plowed after the snow stopped around two A.M. We don’t know whether the perp entered the property before or after the plowing. If before, any tracks on the road outside or on the drive would have been obliterated by the plow. If after, no tracks would have been made to begin with. But from this point right here, around the back of the barn, to the patio, across the open area to the woods, through the woods, to a pine thicket by Thornbush Lane, the tracks are perfectly clear and easy to follow.”
“No effort made to conceal them?”
“No,” said Hardwick, sounding bothered by this. “None at all. Unless I’m missing something.”
Gurney gave him a curious glance. “What’s the problem?”
“I’ll let you see for yourself.”
They walked along the yellow-taped corridor, following the tracks to the far side of the barn. The imprints, sharply indented in the otherwise featureless three-inch layer of snow, were of large (Gurney estimated size ten or eleven, D width) hiking boots. Whoever had come this way in the wee hours of the morning hadn’t cared that his route would later be noted.
As they rounded the back of the barn, Gurney saw that a wider area there had been taped off. A police photographer was taking pictures with a high-resolution camera while a crime-scene specialist in a protective white bodysuit and hair enclosure awaited his turn with an evidence-collection kit. Every shot was taken at least twice, with and without a ruler in the frame to establish scale, and objects were photographed at various focal-length settings-wide to establish position relative to other objects in the scene, normal to present the object itself, and close-up to capture detail.
The center of their attention was a folding lawn chair of the flimsy sort that might be sold in a discount store. The footprints led directly to the chair. In front of it, stamped out in the snow, were half a dozen cigarette butts. Gurney squatted to take a closer look and saw they were Marlboros. The footprints then continued from the chair around a thicket of rhododendrons toward the patio where the murder had apparently occurred.
“Jesus,” said Gurney. “He just sat there smoking?”
“Yeah. A little relaxation before cutting the victim’s throat. At least that’s the way it looks. I assume your raised eyebrow is a way of asking where the crappy little lawn chair came from? That was my question, too.”
“And?”
“Victim’s wife claimed she’d never seen it before. Seemed appalled at its low quality.”
“What?” Gurney flicked the word out like a whip. Hardwick’s supercilious comments had become nails on a blackboard.
“Just a little levity.” He shrugged. “Can’t let a cut throat get you down. But seriously, it was probably the first time in her posh life that Caddy Smythe-Westerfield Mellery came that close to a chair that cheap.”
Gurney knew all about cop humor and how necessary it was in coping with the routine horrors of the job, but there were occasions it got on his nerves.
“Are you telling me that the killer brought his own lawn chair with him?”
“Looks that way,” said Hardwick, grimacing at the absurdity.
“And after he finished smoking-what, half a dozen Marlboros?-he walked over to the back door of the house, got Mellery to come out on the patio, and slit his throat with a broken bottle? That’s the reconstruction so far?”
Hardwick nodded reluctantly, as though beginning to feel that the crime scenario suggested by the evidence sounded a bit off the wall. And it only got worse.
“Actually,” he said, “‘slit his throat’ is putting it mildly. Victim was stabbed through the throat at least a dozen times. When the medical examiner’s assistants were transferring the body to the van to take it for autopsy, the fucking head almost fell off.”
Gurney looked in the direction of the patio, and although it was entirely obscured by the rhododendrons, the image of the huge bloodstain came back to his mind as colorfully and sharply as if he were staring at it under arc lights.
Hardwick watched him for a while, chewing thoughtfully on his lip. “As a matter of fact,” he said finally, “that’s
