Let the Devil Sleep (9 page)

“You see some significance in the timing?”

“No, no, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s any connection between the Good Shepherd case and Emilio’s disappearance. How could there be? It’s just that both events happened the same month—March of 2000. Maybe part of the reason Kim feels as strongly as she does about the pain of those families at losing someone is that she lost her own father at the same time.”

Now Gurney understood. “And the shared lack of closure—”

“Yes. The Good Shepherd murders were never fully resolved, because the murderer was never caught. And Kim hasn’t been able to close the door on her father’s disappearance, because she could never find out what really happened to him. When she talks about the families of murder victims suffering from an ongoing misery, I think she’s talking about herself.”

A
fter concluding his conversation with Connie, Gurney sat for a long while at the table, trying to digest the implications of Emilio Corazon’s departure from Kim’s life.

He gradually became aware of Madeleine’s knitting needles clicking softly and steadily. She was sitting in a pool of yellow lamplight,
a ball of sage-colored yarn at her side in the armchair, a sage-colored sweater taking shape in her lap.

He opened the blue folder to the section devoted to the Good Shepherd’s “Memorandum of Intent.” On a page of background information at the beginning of the section, someone, presumably Kim, had indicated that the original document had been delivered by express mail in a nine-by-twelve manila envelope, addressed to “The Director, New York State Police, Bureau of Criminal Investigation.” The delivery date was March 22, 2000—the Wednesday following the weekend of the first two shootings.

Gurney turned the page and began to read the text of the memorandum itself. It began abruptly, with a summary statement consisting of numbered sentences:

The next nineteen pages reiterated these sentiments at length, the manifesto drifting back and forth in its tone from prophetic to academic. The rational aspects of the argument were supported by extensive wealth-distribution data, purporting to demonstrate the unfairness of America’s economic structure—complete with trend
statistics showing the nation’s drift toward a Third World economy of extremes, in which enormous wealth is concentrated at the very top, poverty is expanding, and the middle class is shrinking.

The main body of the document concluded:

The document was signed, “The Good Shepherd.”

In a separate note, clipped to the final page, the writer had included information on the precise times and locations of the two preceding attacks.

Since these facts had not yet been released to the public, they provided support for the writer’s claim to be the killer. A postscript to the note indicated that copies of the entire document had been simultaneously delivered to a long list of national and local news organizations.

G
urney went through it all again. When he put the folder down half an hour later, he understood why the case had achieved its iconic status in criminology—and why it had replaced the earlier Unabomber case as the academic archetype for societal-mission-driven murders.

The document was clearer and less digressive than the Unabomber’s manifesto. The logical nexus between the stated problem and the murderous solution was more direct than Ted Kaczynski’s messy letter bombs to victims whose relevance to the issue was questionable at best.

The Good Shepherd had neatly summed up his approach in the first two numbered statements in his memorandum: “1. If the love of
money, which is greed, is the root of all evil, then it follows that the greatest good will be achieved by its eradication. 2. Since greed does not exist in a vacuum but exists in its human carriers, it follows that the way to eradicate greed is to eradicate its carriers.”

What could be more direct than that?

And the Good Shepherd murder spree was inherently memorable. It had the elements of riveting theater: a simple premise, a concentrated time frame, high suspense, a vivid threat, a dramatic assault on wealth and privilege, easily defined victims, horrific moments of confrontation. It was the stuff of legend, and it occupied a natural place in people’s minds. In fact, it occupied at least two natural places: To those who felt threatened by an attack on wealth, the Good Shepherd was the incarnation of the bomb-throwing revolutionary, intent on bringing down the structure of history’s greatest society. To those who viewed the rich as pigs, the Good Shepherd was an idealist, a Robin Hood, rectifying the worst injustice of an unjust world.

It made sense that the case had over the years become a favorite in psychology and criminology classes. Professors would enjoy presenting it, because it made the points they wanted to make about a certain kind of murderer and—a rare blessing in the soft sciences—it made those points unambiguously. Students would enjoy hearing about it, because, like many simple horrors, it was grotesquely entertaining. Even the killer’s escape into the night became a plus—giving the affair an open-ended
currency
that had a tingly appeal.

As Gurney closed the folder, pondering the visceral power of the case narrative, he found himself with mixed feelings.

“Problem?”

He looked up, saw Madeleine gazing across the room at him, her knitting needles resting in her lap.

He shook his head. “Probably just my constitutional crankiness.”

She was still looking at him. He knew she was waiting for a better answer.

“Kim’s documentary is all about the Good Shepherd case.”

Madeleine frowned. “Hasn’t that been done to death? Back when it happened, it was pretty much the only thing on television.”

“She has her own angle on it. Back then it was all about the manifesto and the hunt for the killer and theories about his hypothetical
background, hypothetical education, where he might be hiding, violence in America, lax gun laws, blah, blah, blah. But Kim is ignoring all that and zeroing in on the permanent damage to the victims’ families—how their lives were changed.”

Madeleine looked interested, then frowned again. “So what’s the problem?”

“Nothing I can put my finger on. Maybe it’s just me. Like I said, I’m not in a great mood.”

T
he next morning, typical of spring in the Catskills, was cold and overcast, with occasional snowflakes blowing sideways past the Gurneys’ French doors.

At 8:00
A.M
. Kim Corazon called with a revised plan. Instead of meeting with Jimi Brewster in Turnwell in the morning and then going on to a lunch meeting with Rudy Getz in Ashokan Heights, the first meeting was being scrapped in favor of an afternoon meeting with Larry Sterne at his Stone Ridge home, about twenty minutes south of the Ashokan Reservoir. The Getz lunch would remain in place.

“Any special reason for the change?” Gurney asked.

“Sort of. I set up the original schedule before I knew you’d be available. But Larry is more standoffish than Jimi, so I’d rather you were present for that. Jimi is a very opinionated leftist. So he’ll definitely participate—gives him a soapbox to attack materialism. But Larry’s not so easy. He seems disillusioned with media in general, because of the sensationalism surrounding a friend’s death years ago.”

“You understand I’m not helping you make a sales pitch, right?”

“Of course not! I just want you to listen, get a feel, tell me what you think. So I’ll be picking you up at eleven-thirty this morning instead of eight-thirty. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, without enthusiasm. He had no specific objection to the new schedule, just a passing sense that something was off center.

As he was about to slip his cell phone into his pocket, it occurred to him that Jack Hardwick hadn’t returned his call, so he tapped in the number.

After just one ring, a raspy voice said, “Patience, Gurney, patience. I was about to call you.”

“Hello, Jack.”

“My hand is just barely healed, ace. You setting up another opportunity to get me shot?”

It was a reminder that six months earlier, at the climax of the Perry case, one of the three bullets that had struck Gurney passed through his side and lodged in Hardwick’s hand.

“Hello, Jack.”

“Hello your fucking self.”

Such was the routine of beginning any conversation with New York State Police Senior Investigator Hardwick. That combative man with pale blue malamute eyes, a razor-keen mind, and a sour wit seemed determined to make every communication with him an ordeal.

“I’m calling about Kim Corazon.”

“Little Kimmy? The kid with the school project?”

“I guess you could call it that. She has your name listed as a background source for information on the Good Shepherd case.”

“No shit. How’d you cross paths with her?”

“Long story. I thought maybe you could give me some information.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Anything I’m not likely to find on the Internet.”

“Colorful case tidbits?”

“If you think they’re significant.”

There was a wheezing sound on the phone. “I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

Gurney said nothing, knowing what was coming.

“So here’s the deal,” growled Hardwick. “You deliver a nice big Sumatra from Abelard’s and maybe I’ll be motivated to deliver significant tidbits.”

“Are there any?”

“Who knows? If I can’t remember any, I’ll make some up. Of course, one man’s significance is another man’s horseshit. I’ll take my Sumatra black with three sugars.”

• • •

F
orty minutes later, with two large coffees in the car, Gurney was driving up the twisty dirt road that led from Abelard’s General Store in Dillweed to an even twistier dirt road, hardly a road at all—more like an abandoned cattle path—at the end of which Jack Hardwick lived in a small rented farmhouse. Gurney parked next to Hardwick’s attitude car—a partially restored red 1970 Pontiac GTO.

The sparse, intermittent snowflakes had been replaced by a pin-pricky mist. As Gurney stepped up onto the creaking porch, one coffee container in each hand, the door swung open to reveal Hardwick in a T-shirt and cutoff sweatpants, his shaggy gray crew cut uncombed. They’d seen each other face-to-face only once since Gurney’s hospitalization six months earlier, at a state-police inquiry into the shooting, but Hardwick’s opening line was characteristic.

“So tell me—how the fuck do you know little Kimmy?”

Gurney extended one of the coffees. “Through her mother. You want this?”

Hardwick took it, opened the flap on the lid, tasted it. “Is the mom as hot as the kid?”

“For Christ’s sake, Jack …”

“That a yes or a no?” Hardwick stepped back to let Gurney in.

The outer doorway led directly into a large front room that Gurney would have expected to be furnished as a living room, but it was hardly furnished at all. The pair of leather armchairs with a stack of books between them on a bare pine floor looked more like things about to be moved than a planned seating arrangement.

Hardwick was watching him. “Marcy and I broke up,” he said, as if explaining the emptiness of the place.

“Sorry to hear that. Who’s Marcy?”

“Good question. Thought I knew. Apparently not.” He took a longer sip of his coffee. “I must have a big blind spot when it comes to evaluating loony women with nice tits.” Another sip, even longer. “But so what? We’ve all got our blind spots, right, Davey?”

Gurney had figured out long ago that the part of Hardwick that went through him like a needle was the part that reminded him of his father—this despite the fact that Gurney was currently forty-eight
and Hardwick, although gray-haired and roughly weathered, was not quite forty.

Every so often Hardwick would hit the precise note of cynicism, the perfect echo, that would transport Gurney back into the apartment from whose high window he’d shot that inexplicable arrow, the apartment from which his first marriage had provided an escape.

The image that came to him now: He was standing in their cramped apartment’s living room, his father dispensing drunken wisdom, telling him his mother was loony, telling him all women were loony, couldn’t be trusted. Best not to tell them anything. “You and I are men, Davey, we understand each other. Your mother’s a little … a little
off
, you know what I mean? No need for her to know I was drinking today, right? Only cause trouble. We’re men. We can talk to each other.” Gurney was eight years old.