Let the Devil Sleep (13 page)

A minute later, after the briefest of conversations, Kim expressed her thanks, and they were on their way.

“That sounded easy,” said Gurney.

“Roberta’s been hot on the documentary idea ever since I first got in touch with her. She’s not shy about her feelings—or her opinions. With the possible exception of Jimi Brewster, she’s the most aggressive participant.”

R
oberta Rotker lived just outside the village of Peacock in a brick house that looked like a fortress. It was set squarely in the middle of a farm field. The field had been rough-mowed to resemble a lawn. There were no trees, no shrubs, no foundation plantings of any kind. The property was surrounded by a six-foot-high chain-link fence. Security cameras were mounted on posts at regular intervals inside the fence. The heavy-duty entrance gate was of the sliding variety on rollers, electrically operated from the house.

As they arrived in front of it, the gate opened. A straight macadam driveway led to a macadam parking area in front of a three-car brick garage. The place had an institutional aura, like some sort of safe house operated by a government agency. Gurney counted four additional security cameras: two on the front corners of the garage, two under the eaves of the house.

The woman who opened the front door looked as businesslike as the building. She wore a plaid work shirt and dark twill pants. The unflattering style of her short, sandy hair emphasized her apparent disinterest in her appearance. The gaze she fixed on Gurney was uninviting and unblinking. She reminded him of a cop—an impression reinforced by the nine-millimeter SIG Sauer pistol in a quick-draw holster affixed to her belt.

She shook hands with Kim in that determinedly firm way often adopted by women working in traditionally male professions. When Kim had introduced Gurney and explained his presence as an “adviser” on the project, Roberta Rotker gave him a short nod, stepped back, and waved them into the house.

Structurally, it was a traditional center-hall Colonial, but the center hall itself was completely bare—an empty passageway that led from the front door to the back door. On the left were two doors and a staircase; on the right were three doors, all closed. This was not a house that divulged information casually.

As Gurney and Kim were led through the first door on the right into a minimally furnished living room, he asked, “Are you in law enforcement?”

Roberta Rotker didn’t answer until she’d closed the door firmly behind them. “Very definitely,” she said.

It was an unusual response. “What I meant was, are you employed by a law-enforcement agency?”

“Why is my employment a matter of interest to you?”

Gurney smiled blandly. “Just curious whether the sidearm is a job requirement or a personal preference.”

“That’s a distinction without a difference. The answer is, all of the above. Make yourself comfortable.” She pointed to a hard-cushioned couch that reminded Gurney of the one in the waiting room at the clinic where Madeleine worked three days a week. When he and Kim were seated, Rotker continued. “It’s a personal preference because it makes me feel better. And it’s also a requirement—required by the state of the world we live in. I believe it’s the job of a responsible citizen to respond to reality. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

“Some of it.”

She stared at him. “We’re at
war
, Detective. At war with creatures who lack our sense of right and wrong. If we don’t get them, they get us. That’s reality.”

Gurney reflected, for maybe the hundredth time in his life, on how emotion created its own logic, how anger was invariably the mother of certainty. It was surely one of the great ironies of human nature that when our passions most severely disorient us, we are most positive that we see things clearly.

“You were a cop,” Rotker went on. “So you know what I’m talking about. We live in a world where glitter is expensive and life is cheap.”

This bleak summation led to a silence, broken by Kim with what sounded like diversionary cheeriness. “Oh, by the way, I meant to tell Dave about your private shooting range. Maybe you could show it to him? I bet he’d love to see it.”

“Why not?” said Rotker with neither hesitation nor enthusiasm. “Come.”

She brought them out through the hallway, through the back door, next to which a fenced kennel ran half the length of the house. Four heavily muscled Rottweilers erupted in a furious din that ceased the instant their master issued a command in German.

Past the kennel, in a field behind the house, a narrow, windowless building extended out toward the rear fence. Rotker unlocked its metal door and switched on the lights. Inside was a basic pistol range with a single firing position and a motorized target placer.

She walked to the waist-high table at the near end and held her finger against the wall switch beside it. A fresh paper target with a stylized man-size image on it, already suspended from the wire carrier, began moving down the range. It stopped at the twenty-five-foot mark. “Any interest, Detective?”

“I’d rather watch you,” he said with a smile. “I have a feeling that you’re good.”

She returned the smile, coldly. “Good enough for most situations.”

She put her finger back on the wall switch, and the target began to move farther away. It stopped at the range’s fifty-foot end point. She took hearing protectors and safety glasses off a hook by the switch and put them on, glancing back at Gurney and Kim. “Sorry I don’t have extras. I don’t usually have an audience.” She unholstered her SIG, checked the magazine, flipped off the safety, and for a moment stood perfectly still, her head bowed like an Olympic diver’s before the crucial moment. Then she did something that Gurney knew would be with him for the rest of his life.

She screamed—an enraged, bestial sound that made the word that initiated it more like lightning tearing through the room than like anything verbal. What she screamed was “FUCK!”—and as she screamed it, she raised the pistol in a sudden movement and, without
any visible act of aiming, fired off every round in the fifteen-round magazine in what Gurney guessed was less than four seconds.

Then she lowered the gun slowly and laid it on the table, removed her safety glasses and hearing protectors and hung them neatly on the wall. She raised her hand to the switch, and the target glided from the end of the range up to the table. She detached it carefully and turned around, smiling placidly, seemingly in full possession of herself.

She held the target up for Gurney’s inspection. The normal aiming area—the center of the body mass—was untouched. In fact, there were no bullet holes anywhere in the human-shaped outline, except in one place.

The center of the forehead had been obliterated.

K
im and Gurney were in the Miata, passing through the almost nonexistent village of Peacock, heading for the county road that would eventually bring them, through a succession of hills and dales, to Walnut Crossing. It was just past five, the overcast was thinning, and the mist had finally ended.

“I was a hell of a lot more startled by that business than you were,” said Gurney.

Kim shot him an appraising glance. “Making you conclude I’d seen it before? You’re right.”

“Which is why you suggested that she show me the shooting range? So I could see her little performance for myself?”

“Yep.”

“Well, it made an impression.”

“I want you to see everything. Or at least as much as you have time to see.”

They both fell silent. It seemed to Gurney that he’d already seen a lot. It was hard to believe that he’d gotten the call from Connie Clarke only the previous morning. He closed his eyes and tried to arrange the flood of observations, conversations. It was dizzying. The project was bizarre. His involvement in it was bizarre.

H
e awoke as Kim was turning onto the narrow lane that wound its way up the mountain to his home. “Jesus. Didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“Sleep is good,” she said, looking tired and serious.

Three deer ran up an embankment just ahead of them.

“You ever hit one?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Something about the way he said it made her look at him curiously.

It had happened six months earlier. A doe had crossed Route 10 from the woods on the left side of the road, well in front of him, to an open field on the right. Just as he was passing the place she’d crossed, her fawn dashed out in front of his car.

He winced now at the still-vivid memory of the thump.

Pulling over. Stopping. Walking back. The small, twisted body. The eyes open and lifeless. The doe standing in the field, looking back. Waiting. He was filled with sadness and horror, could feel it now.

Kim drove past a scruffy hill farm with a dozen scruffy cows and half a dozen rusted cars. “You friendly with your neighbors?” she asked.

Gurney made a sound halfway between a grunt and a laugh. “Some yes, some no.”

Half a mile farther on, they came within sight of his red barn at the end of the lane, next to the pond. “Stop and let me out,” he said. “I want to walk up through the pasture. It’ll wake me up, clear my head.”

She frowned. “The grass looks wet.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll be taking my shoes off when I get to the house.”

She pulled up in front of the barn door and turned off the engine, leaving her hand on the ignition key in an oddly preoccupied way.

Instead of getting out of the car, he sat and waited, sensing that she had something to say.

“So …” she began, stopped, and began again. “So … where do we go from here?”

Gurney shrugged. “You hired me for one day. The day is over.”

“Any chance of one more?”

“To do what?”

“Talk to Max Clinter?”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t figure him out. It’s like he
knows
something
about the Good Shepherd case. Something terrible. But I don’t know whether he really knows something or if it’s just some crazy thing in his mind, some kind of delusion. I thought maybe with your shared backgrounds as detectives, maybe he’d be more straight-up with you—especially if I wasn’t there, if it was just the two of you, talking cop to cop.”

“Where does he live?”

“You’ll do it? You’ll talk to him?”

“I didn’t say that. I asked you where he lives.”

“Not far from Cayuga Lake. Pretty close to his disastrous car chase. That’s part of what makes me worry that he’s a little off the wall.”

“Because he wants to live there?”

“Because of
why
he wants to live there. He says that’s the place he and the Good Shepherd crossed paths and that’s where karma will bring them together again.”

“And this is the guy you want me to talk to?”

“Nuts, right?”

He told her he’d think about it.

“I guarantee you’ll find him … interesting.”

“We’ll see. I’ll let you know.” He got out of the little car, watched her turn around and head back down the narrow road.

His short walk up through the pasture provided a powerful break from the day, flooding his consciousness with the aromas of nature in early spring: the complex sweetness of the moist earth, air that smelled clean enough to purify one’s soul—to wash away the obstructions that stood between one’s mind and the truth of things.

Or so it seemed—until he was in the house five minutes, had gone to the bathroom, washed his face, and Madeleine had asked about his day.

He recounted as comprehensively as he could the details of the three peculiar meetings he’d had with Kim and the people with whom she was involved—Rudy Getz with his Rollerblader, Larry Sterne with his Mister Rogers cardigan, Roberta Rotker with her unhinged exhibition of marksmanship. And he told her everything he knew about Max Clinter—the peculiar, tragic character whose life was forever changed by the Good Shepherd.

He was sitting at the table by the French doors, and Madeleine was chopping vegetables on a cutting board by the sink.

“Kim wants me to stay involved in this thing for another day. I’ll be damned if I know what to do.”

Madeleine sliced the end off a large red onion. “How’s your arm?”

“What?”

“Your arm. The numb spot. How is it?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t …” His voice trailed off as he rubbed his forearm and wrist. “Okay … the same, I guess. Why do you ask?”

She turned the onion around in her hand, peeling off a couple of layers of the tough outer skin.

“How about the pain in your side?”

“Fine, at the moment. It’s an intermittent thing, comes and goes.”

“Every ten minutes or so, I think you told me?”

“More or less.”

“How often did you feel it today?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Not sure if you felt it at all?”

“I couldn’t say.”

She nodded, sliced a large zucchini down the middle, laid the halves on the board, and began chopping them into bite-size half-moons.

He blinked, stared at her, cleared his throat. “So what you’re saying is that I should let Kim hire me for another day?”

“Did I say that?”

“I think you did.”

There was a long silence. Madeleine cut up an eggplant, a yellow squash, and a sweet red pepper, then put everything into a large bowl that she carried to the stove, tilting the contents into a sizzling wok. “She’s an interesting young woman.”

“In what way?”

“Smart, attractive, ambitious, subtle, energetic—don’t you think?”

“Hmm. She definitely has some depth.”

“Maybe you should introduce her to Kyle.”

“My son?”

“I don’t know any other Kyle.”

“What is it about them that makes you think …?”

“I can see them together, that’s all. Different personalities, but on the same wavelength.”

He tried to imagine the hypothetical relationship chemistry. In less than a minute, he gave up the effort. Too many possibilities, too little data. He envied the efficiency of Madeleine’s intuition. It enabled her to leap over unknowns that stopped him dead.