Let the Devil Sleep (24 page)

“David, what do you have against the FBI?”

“Sometimes they get carried away by their way of doing things, their way of making decisions, their obsession with control, their
process
.”

“The simple reality is, they’re excellent at what they do. They’re smart, objective, disciplined, receptive to good ideas.”

“Does that mean they pay your consultancy fees on time without complaining?”

“Is that supposed to be just another observation with no insult intended?”

“It’s an observation that we tend to see the good in people who see the good in us.”

“You know, David, you’re so full of shit you ought to be a lawyer.”

He laughed. “That’s funny. I like that. But I’ll tell you something. If I were a lawyer, I’d like to have the Good Shepherd as a client. Because I have a feeling that the FBI concept of the case is about as solid as smoke in the wind. In fact, I’m getting kind of itchy to prove it.”

“I see. Lots of luck with that.”

The connection was broken.

Gurney slipped his phone back into his pocket, his unusually aggressive tone echoing in his head. Slowly his gaze moved to the far landscape. All that was left of the sunset was a purplish smudge across the gray sky, like a darkening bruise above the line of hills.

“Who was that?” The voice was Kim’s.

He turned around. She, Madeleine, and Kyle were still sitting at the table, their eyes on him. They all looked concerned, Kim more than the others.

“A forensic psychologist who’s written a lot about the Good Shepherd case and consulted with the FBI on other serial-killer issues.”

“What are you … what are you doing?” There was a pressure in her lowered voice, as though she were furious and trying not to show it.

“I want to know everything there is to know about the case.”

“What was all that stuff about everybody’s understanding of it being wrong?”

“Not wrong necessarily, just poorly supported by the facts.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I already told you Rudy Getz is going ahead with my documentary, with the set of test interviews I did. Rudy wants to use the raw footage I shot with my own camera. He says it enhances the reality. I
told
you this—that he’s
going ahead
with the program—nationally, on the RAM News Network. Now you’re telling me it’s all wrong, or it
might
all be wrong? I don’t get where you’re going with this. This isn’t what I asked you to do. You’re turning everything upside down. Why are you doing this?”

“Nothing has been turned upside down. I’m just trying to get a
grip on what’s going on. Some disturbing things have happened, to you and to me, and I don’t want—”

“That’s no reason to go charging headfirst into the project, ripping it up, trying to prove it’s all wrong!”

“The only place I went headfirst was down your stairs. I don’t want either of us to get blindsided like that again.”

“Then just keep an eye on my idiot boyfriend!” She corrected herself. “My idiot ex-boyfriend.”

“Suppose it wasn’t him. Suppose—”

“Don’t be silly! Who else could it be?”

“Someone who knows about the project and doesn’t want you to complete it.”

“Who? Why?”

“Two excellent questions. Let’s start with the first. How many people know what you’re working on?”

“Know about the documentary? Maybe a million?”

“What?”

“A million, at least. Maybe a lot more. The RAM website, Internet news releases, e-mail blasts that go out to all the local stations and local newspapers, RAM Facebook pages, my own Facebook page, Connie’s Facebook page, my Twitter account—God, there’s so much—all the prospective participants, all their contacts …”

“So just about anyone could have access to the information.”

“Of course. Maximum exposure. That’s the goal.”

“Okay. That means we need to come at it from a different direction.”

Kim stared at him with a pained expression. “We don’t need to ‘come at it’ at all—not the way you’re talking about it. God, Dave …” Tears were coming to her eyes. “This is a critical moment. Don’t you see that? I can’t believe this. My first episode is set to run in a couple of days, and you’re on the phone telling people that the whole Good Shepherd case is … is … what? I can’t even follow what you’re telling them.” She shook her head, pressing the tears away from her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “I’m sorry. I don’t … I don’t … Shit! Excuse me.”

She hurried out of the room, and a few seconds later Gurney heard the bathroom door slam shut.

He looked at Kyle, who had pushed his chair a foot or so back from the table and seemed to be studying a spot on the floor. He looked at Madeleine, who was gazing at him with a concern that he found unsettling.

He turned up his palms in a questioning gesture. “What did I do?”

“Think about it,” she said. “You’ll figure it out.”

“Kyle?”

The young man looked up, gave a small shrug. “I think you scared the shit out of her.”

Gurney frowned. “By suggesting to someone on the phone that the FBI concept of the case might be flawed?”

When Kyle didn’t answer, Madeleine said softly, “You did more than that.”

“Like what?”

She ignored the question and began moving some of the dinner dishes from the table to the sink.

Gurney persisted, addressing his question to a midpoint in the space between her and Kyle. “What did I do that’s so awful?”

This time Kyle answered. “You didn’t do anything
awful
, not intentionally, but … I think Kim got the impression that you were bringing her project to a screeching halt.”

“You didn’t just say there might be a little flaw somewhere,” added Madeleine. “You implied that the whole thing was completely wrong, and not only that, you were going the prove it. In other words, you planned to tear the whole case apart.”

Gurney took a deep breath. “There was a reason for that.”

“A reason?” Madeleine looked amused. “Of course. You always have a reason.”

He closed his eyes for a moment as if patience were more easily found in darkness. “I wanted to upset Holdenfield enough that she’d get in touch with the FBI agent in charge, a cold fish by the name of Trout, and upset
him
enough that
he’d
want to get in touch with
me
.”

“Why would he want to do that?”

“To find out if I really know something about the case that might embarrass him. And that would give me an opportunity to find out if he knows things about the case that haven’t been made public.”

“Well, if your strategy was to upset people, you can consider
yourself a success.” She pointed at his plate, still heaped with shrimp and rice. “Are you going to eat that?”

“No.” He heard the abrupt defensiveness in his own tone and added, “Not right now. I think maybe I’ll step outside for a bit, get some air, clear my head.”

He left the table, went to the mudroom, and put on a light jacket. As he was going out the side door into the deepening dusk, he heard Kyle saying something to Madeleine, his voice low, the tone tentative, the words largely indistinguishable.

The only two he heard clearly were “Dad” and “angry.”

A
s Gurney sat on the bench by the pond, the evening rapidly descended into darkness. A fragile moon sliver behind a heavy overcast offered only the dimmest, most uncertain sense of the world around him.

The pain in his forearm had returned. It was intermittent, having no apparent relationship with the arm’s angle, position, or muscle tension. The feeling magnified the frustration he felt at Holdenfield’s attitude on the phone, at his own combativeness, at Kim’s severe reaction.

He knew two things—two facts in collision with each other. First, a cool and rigorous objectivity had always been at the root of his success as a detective. Second, his objectivity was now questionable. He suspected that the slowness of his recovery, the feeling of vulnerability, the impression of being sidelined—the fear of
irrelevance—
had filled him with an agitation and anger that could easily warp his judgment.

He rubbed his forearm with no noticeable effect on the ache. It was as though the source of it were elsewhere, perhaps in a pinched nerve in his spine, and his brain was misreporting the location of the inflammation. It was like the tinnitus situation, in which his brain was misinterpreting a neural disturbance as a tinny, echoey sound.

Still, despite these self-doubts, these termites of uncertainty, if he were forced to wager all he had one way or the other, he’d bet there was something screwy about the Good Shepherd case, something that didn’t
fit
. His finely tuned sense of discrepancy had never let him down, and he didn’t think …

His train of thought was interrupted by a sound like footsteps that seemed to come from somewhere in the general area of the barn. When he looked in that direction, he saw a small light moving in the pasture between the barn and the house. As he watched, he realized it was a flashlight being held by someone coming down the pasture path.

“Dad?” The voice was Kyle’s.

“I’m over here,” Gurney called back. “By the pond.”

The flashlight beam moved toward him, found him. “Are there any animals out here at night?”

Gurney smiled. “None that would have any interest in meeting you.”

A minute later Kyle arrived at the bench.

“Mind if I sit?”

“Course not.” Gurney moved a bit to make more room.

“Man, this is really dark out here.” There was the sound of something falling in the woods on the other side of the pond. “Oh, shit! What the hell was that?”

“No idea.”

“You sure there are no animals in those woods?”

“The woods are full of animals. Deer, bears, foxes, coyotes, bobcats.”

“Bears?”

“Black bears. Generally harmless. Unless they have cubs.”

“And you really have bobcats?”

“One or two. Sometimes I’ll see one in my headlights as I’m coming up the hill.”

“Wow. That’s pretty wild. I’ve never seen a bobcat, not a real one.” He fell silent for a minute or so. Gurney was about to ask him what was on his mind when he continued. “You really think there’s more to the Shepherd case than people realize?”

“Could be.”

“You sounded pretty sure on the phone. I think that’s why Kim got so bothered.”

“Yeah, well …”

“So what do you think everybody’s missing?”

“How much do you know about the case?”

“Like I told you before dinner—everything. At least everything that was on TV.”

Gurney shook his head in the dark. “It’s funny—I don’t recall you as being that interested at the time.”

“Well, I was. But there’s no reason you’d remember that. I mean, you were never really there.”

“I was around when you came on weekends. Sundays anyway.”

“You were there physically, but you always seemed … I don’t know, like, mentally you were always tied up in something important.”

After a pause Gurney said, a little haltingly, “And … I guess … after you got involved with Stacey Marx … you weren’t coming every weekend.”

“No, I guess not.”

“After you broke up, did you stay in touch with her?”

“Didn’t I ever tell you about that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Stacey got all fucked up. In and out of rehabs. Kinda fried, actually. Saw her at Eddie Burke’s wedding. You remember Eddie Burke, right?”

“Sort of. Redheaded kid?”

“No, that was his brother Jimmy. Anyway, no matter. Basically, Stacey is fried.”

A long silence fell between them. Gurney’s mind felt empty, unfocused, uneasy.

“It’s kind of chilly down here,” said Kyle. “You want to come back up to the house?”

“Yeah. I’ll be up in a minute.”

Neither of them moved.

“So … you never finished saying what it is about the Good Shepherd case that’s getting to you. You seem to be the only person who has a problem with it.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.”

“That’s way too Zen for me.”

Gurney uttered a sharp, one-syllable laugh. “The problem is a gaping lack of critical thinking. The whole goddamn thing is too neatly packaged, too simple, and way too useful to too many people. It hasn’t been challenged, argued, tested, ripped, and kicked, because too many experts in too many positions of power and influence like it the way it is—a textbook crime spree by a textbook psycho.”

After a short silence, Kyle said, “You sound pissed off.”

“You ever see what someone looks like who’s taken a .50-caliber hollow-point round in the side of the head?”

“Pretty bad, I guess.”

“It’s the most dehumanizing thing imaginable. The so-called Good Shepherd did that to six people. He didn’t just kill them. He mangled them, turned them into something pathetic and horrible.” Gurney stared off into the darkness for a long minute before going on. “Those people deserve more than they’ve gotten. They deserve a more serious debate. They deserve
questions
.”

“So what’s the plan? Find loose ends and yank on them?”

“If I can.”

“Well, that’s what you’re good at, right?”

“I used to be. We’ll see.”

“You’ll succeed. You’ve never failed at anything.”

“Of course I have.”

Again there was a brief silence, broken by Kyle. “What kinds of questions?”

“Hmm?” Gurney’s mind had drifted into the depths of his shortcomings.

“Just wondering—what kinds of questions do you have in mind?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Some big amorphous questions about the sort of personality that could be behind the language in the manifesto, the attack logistics, the choice of weapon. And lots of smaller questions, like why all the cars were the same make—”

“Or why they all came from Sindelfingen?”

“Why they all … what?”

“All six cars were built in the Mercedes plant in Sindelfingen, just outside Stuttgart. Probably doesn’t mean anything. Just an odd little factoid.”

“How on earth would you know a thing like that?”

“I told you I paid a lot of attention.”

“That Sindelfingen thing was in the news?”

“No. The years and models of the cars were in the news. I was … you know … trying to figure things out. I wondered what the cars might have in common beyond what was obvious. Mercedes has a
lot of assembly plants, in a lot of countries. But those six cars all came from Sindelfingen. Just a coincidence, right?”