“Be careful.”
“Right.” He rose slowly, almost arthritically. “See you in the morning.”
She looked at him with an expression he could never put into words, couldn’t even say if it was good or bad, but he knew it well. He felt its almost physical touch in the center of his chest.
It was well after midnight when he exited from the Mass. Turnpike and one-thirty when he drove through the deserted main street of Sotherton. Ten minutes later, on the rutted lane called Quarry Road, he arrived at a haphazard assembly of police vehicles, one of which had its strobes flashing. He pulled in alongside it. As he got out of his car, an irritated-looking uniformed cop emerged from the light machine.
“Hold it. Where do you think you’re going?” He sounded not only irritated but exhausted.
“Name is Gurney-here to see Detective Gowacki.”
“About what?”
“He’s expecting me.”
“What’s it about?”
Gurney wondered whether the guy’s edge was coming from a long day or from a naturally lousy attitude. He had a low tolerance for naturally lousy attitudes.
“It’s about him asking me to come here. You want some identification?”
The cop clicked his flashlight on and shined it in Gurney’s face. “Who’d you say you were?”
“Gurney, district attorney’s office, special investigator.”
“The fuck didn’t you say so?”
Gurney smiled without any emotion resembling friendliness. “You going to tell Gowacki I’m here?”
After a final hostile pause, the man turned and walked up the outer edge of a long, rising driveway toward a house that seemed, in the portable arc lights illuminating the property for the crime-scene techs, only half finished. Uninvited, Gurney followed him.
As the driveway neared the house, it made a left cut into the bank of the hill and arrived at the opening to a two-car basement garage, currently housing one car. At first Gurney thought the garage doors were open; then he realized there weren’t any doors. The half inch of snow that coated the driveway continued inside. The cop stopped at the opening, blocked by crime-scene tape, and shouted, “Mike!”
There was no response. The cop shrugged as if an honest effort had been made, had failed, and that was the end of the matter. Then a tired voice came from the yard behind the house. “Back here.”
Without waiting, Gurney headed around the perimeter of the tape in that direction.
“Make sure you stay outside the tape.” The cop’s warning struck Gurney as the final bark of a testy dog.
Rounding the rear corner of the house, he saw that the area, bright as day in the glare of the lights, was not exactly the “yard” he had expected. Like the house, it exhibited an odd blend of incompletion and decrepitude. A heavily built man with thinning hair was standing on a crude set of steps, cobbled together from two-by-tens, at the back door. The man’s eyes scanned the half acre of open ground that separated the house from a thicket of sumac.
The ground was lumpy, as though it had never been graded after the foundation was backfilled. Scraps of framing lumber, heaped here and there, had taken on a weathered grayness. The house was only partially sided, and the plastic moisture barrier over the plywood sheathing was faded from exposure. The impression was not of construction in progress but construction abandoned.
When the stout man’s gaze reached Gurney, he studied him for a few seconds before asking, “You the man from the Catskills?”
“That’s right.”
“Walk another ten feet along the tape, then step under it and come around here to the back door. Make sure you steer clear of that line of footprints from the house to the driveway.”
Presumably this was Gowacki, but Gurney had an aversion to presuming, so he asked the question and got back an affirmative grunt.
As he made his way across the wasteland that should have been a backyard, he came close enough to the footprints to note their similarity to those at the institute.
“Look familiar?” asked Gowacki, eyeing Gurney curiously.
There was nothing thick about the thick-bodied detective’s perception, thought Gurney. He nodded. Now it was his own turn to be perceptive.
“Those footprints bother you?”
“Little bit,” said Gowacki. “Not the footprints, exactly. More the location of the body in relation to the footprints. You know something I don’t?”
“Would the location of the body make more sense if the direction of the footprints were reversed?”
“If the direction were… Wait a minute… Yes, goddamn it, perfect sense!” He stared at Gurney. “What the hell are we dealing with here?”
“First of all, we’re dealing with someone who has killed three people-three that we know of-in the past week. He’s a planner and a perfectionist. He leaves a lot of evidence behind, but only evidence he wants us to see. He’s extremely intelligent, probably well educated, and may hate the police even more than he hates his victims. By the way, is the body still here?”
Gowacki looked like he was making a mental recording of Gurney’s response. Finally he said, “Yeah, the body’s here. I wanted you to see it. Thought something might register, based on what you know about the other two. Ready to take a look?”
The back door of the house led into a small, unfinished area probably intended to be a laundry room, given the position of the roughed-in plumbing, but there was no washing machine and no dryer. There wasn’t even any drywall over the insulation. Illumination was provided by a bare bulb in a cheap white fixture nailed to an exposed ceiling joist.
In the raw, unwelcoming light, the body lay on its back, half in the would-be laundry area and half in the kitchen beyond the untrimmed doorway separating them.
“Can I take a closer look?” asked Gurney, grimacing.
“That’s what you’re here for.”
The closer look revealed a pool of coagulated blood that had spread from multiple throat wounds out across the kitchen floor and under a thrift-shop breakfast table. The victim’s face was full of anger, but the bitter lines etched into the large, hard face were the product of a lifetime and revealed nothing about the terminal assault.
“Unhappy-looking man,” said Gurney.
“Miserable son of a bitch is what he was.”
“I gather you’ve had some past trouble with Mr. Kartch.”
“Nothing but trouble. Every damn bit of it unnecessary.” Gowacki glared at the body as though its violent, bloody end had been insufficient punishment. “Every town has troublemakers-angry drunks, slobs who turn their places into pigsties to piss off the neighbors, creeps whose ex-wives have to get orders of protection, jerks who let their dogs bark all night, weirdos who mothers don’t want their kids within a mile of. Here in Sotherton all those assholes were wrapped up in one guy-Richie Kartch.”
“Sounds like quite a guy.”
“Matter of curiosity, were the other two victims anything like that?”
“The first was the opposite of that. The second I don’t have personal details on yet, but I doubt he was anything like this guy.” Gurney took another look at the face staring up from the floor, as ugly in death as it had apparently been in life.
“Just thought maybe we had a serial killer trying to rid the world of assholes. Anyway, to get back to your comments about the footprints in the snow-how did you know they’d make more sense if they went the other way?”
“That’s the way it was at the first murder.”
Gowacki’s eyes showed interest. “The position of this body is consistent with facing an attacker entering through the back door. But the footprints show someone coming in the front door and exiting by the back door. Doesn’t make sense.”
“Mind if I take a look around the kitchen?”
“Be my guest. Photographer, medical examiner, blood-prints-and-fibers guys were all here. Just don’t move anything. We’re still going through his personal possessions.”
