Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (32 page)

Gurney opened her e-mail and scanned down quickly to get to the Vallory quote:

Gurney read it several times, trying to absorb the intended meaning and purpose of it.

It was the prologue to a play about a man who killed his own mother. A prologue written centuries ago by a playwright famous for his hatred of women. The playwright whose name was appended to the text message sent from Hector’s cell phone to Jillian’s the morning she was killed—and sent again, just two days ago, to Ashton. A text message that read simply,
FOR ALL THE REASONS I HAVE WRITTEN
.

And the reasons given in his only extant writing seemed to add up to this: Women are impure, seductive, deceptive, satanic creatures—spewing, like monsters, a
slime
of lies and trickery. The more closely
he read Vallory’s words, the more he sensed in them a twisted sexual nightmare.

Gurney prided himself on his caution, his balance, but it was difficult not to conclude that the quotation constituted a demented justification for Jillian Perry’s murder. And possibly for other murders as well.

Of course there was nothing certain about it. No way of proving that Edward Vallory, the purported seventeenth-century women hater, was the Edward Vallory whose name was appropriated for the text messages. No proof that Edward Vallory was a pseudonym for Hector Flores—although the fact that the messages came from Flores’s cell phone made it a fair assumption.

It did all seem to fit together, did seem to make a kind of awful sense. The Vallory prologue offered the first motive hypothesis that wasn’t based entirely on speculation. For Gurney it was a motive that held the additional attraction of being compatible with his own growing sense that Jillian’s murder was driven by revenge for past sexual offenses—either hers or those of Mapleshade students in general. Moreover, the receipt of the Vallory message by Scott Ashton supported a view of the murder as part of a complex enterprise—an enterprise that seemed to be ongoing.

Maybe Gurney was reading too much into it, but it suddenly occurred to him that the fact that the surviving snippet of Vallory’s play was its
prologue
might have more than accidental significance. Might it, in addition to being the prologue to a lost drama, also be intended as a prologue to future events—a hint of murders yet to come? Exactly how much was Hector Flores telling them?

He clicked “reply” on Peggy Meeker’s e-mail and asked, “What else is known about the play? Plot line? Characters? Any surviving comments from Vallory’s contemporaries?”

For the first time in the case, Gurney felt an undeniable excitement—and an irresistible urge to call Sheridan Kline, hoping he’d still be in the office.

He placed the call.

“He’s in conference.” Ellen Rackoff spoke with the confidence of a powerful gatekeeper.

“There’s been a development in the Perry matter he’d want to know about.”

“Be more specific.”

“It may be turning into a serial-murder case.”

Thirty seconds later Kline was on the phone—edgy, pressured, and intrigued. “Serial murder? What the hell are you talking about?”

Gurney described the Vallory discovery, pointing out the sexual anger in the words of the prologue, explaining how it might relate not only to Jillian but to the missing girls.

“Isn’t all that pretty iffy? I don’t get how anything has really changed. I mean, this afternoon you were saying that Hector Flores might be at the center of everything, or then again he might not be, we didn’t really have any solid facts, we needed to keep an open mind. So what happened to the open mind? How did this suddenly turn into serial murder? And by the way, why are you calling me with this, not the police?”

“Maybe it’s just that the focus got clearer once I read that Vallory thing and felt the hatred in it. Or maybe it’s just that word:
prologue
. A promise of something to come. The fact that Flores sent that text message to Jillian before she was killed and sent it again to Ashton this week. It makes the murder four months ago look like part of something bigger.”

“You honestly think that Flores was persuading girls to leave home under the smoke screen of an argument so he could kill them without anyone bothering to look for them?” Kline’s voice conveyed a mixture of worry and incredulity.

“Until we find them alive, I think it’s a possibility we have to take seriously.”

The defensive reflex in Kline spit back, “I wouldn’t take it any other way.” Then he added earnestly, as though he were being taped for broadcast, “I can’t think of anything more serious than the possibility of a kidnapping-and-murder conspiracy—if, God forbid, that’s what we’re dealing with here.” He paused, his tone turning suspicious. “Returning to the protocol issue, how come I’m getting this call instead of BCI?”

“Because you’re the only decision maker who’s making any sense to me.”

“Why do you say that?” Kline’s fondness for flattery was obvious in his voice.

“The emotional undercurrent in that conference room today was nuts. I know that Rodriguez and Hardwick never cared much for each other, which was obvious on the Mellery case, but whatever the hell’s going on now, it’s becoming dysfunctional. There’s zero objectivity. It’s like a war, and I have the impression that every new development is going to be evaluated by those guys on the basis of which side it helps. You don’t seem to be entangled in that mess, so I’d rather talk to you.”

Kline paused. “You don’t know what happened with your buddy?”

“Buddy?”

“Rodriguez nailed him for an over-the-limit BAC on duty.”

“What!?”

“Suspended him for drinking on the job, hung a possible DWI over his head, threatened his pension, forced him to go to rehab as a condition for ending the suspension. I’m surprised you don’t know about this.”

“When did it happen?”

“Month and a half ago? Twenty-eight-day rehab. Jack’s back on the job maybe ten days.”

“Jesus.” Gurney had figured that part of Hardwick’s reason for setting him up with Val Perry was the hope that some new discovery would put Rodriguez in a bad light, but this news went a long way toward explaining the negative energy bouncing around that conference room.

“I’m surprised you didn’t know about it,” Kline repeated, enough disbelief in his tone to make it an accusation.

“If I’d known, I’d never have gotten involved,” said Gurney. “But it’s all the more reason to keep my exposure limited to my client and to you—assuming that a direct line of contact with me isn’t going to poison your relationship with BCI.”

Kline took so long to mull this over that Gurney imagined the man’s risk-reward calculator starting to smolder from an overload of permutations.

“Okay—with one major caution. It has to be perfectly clear
that you’re working for the Perry family, independently of this office. Which means that under no circumstances can you imply that you’re covered by our investigatory authority or by any form of immunity. You proceed as Dave Gurney, private citizen, period. With that understanding, I’d be happy to listen to whatever you have to say. Believe me, I have nothing but respect for you. Based on your NYPD homicide record and your role in solving the Mellery case, how could I not? We just need to be clear about your
unofficial
position. Any questions?”

Gurney smiled at Kline’s predictability. The man never strayed from the one guiding principle of his life:
Get everything you possibly can from other people, while covering your own ass absolutely
.

“One question, Sheridan: How do I get in touch with Rebecca Holdenfield?”

Kline’s voice tightened with an attorney’s skepticism. “What do you want from her?”

“I’m starting to get a sense of our killer. Very hypothetical, nothing that firm yet, but it might help me to have someone with her background as a sounding board.”

“There some reason you don’t want to call the killer by his name?”

“Hector Flores?”

“You have a problem with that?”

“Couple of problems. Number one, we don’t know that he was alone in the cottage when Jillian went in, so we don’t know that he’s the killer. Come right down to it, we don’t know that he was in the cottage at all. Suppose someone else was in there instead, waiting for her? I realize it’s unlikely—all I’m saying is, we don’t
know
. It’s all circumstantial, assumptions, probabilities. Second problem is the name itself. If the Cinderella gardener is really a cool, think-ahead murderer, then ‘Hector Flores’ is almost certainly an alias.”

“Why am I getting the feeling I’m on a merry-go-round—that every damn thing I think is settled comes flying around at me again?”

“Merry-go-round doesn’t sound so bad. To me it feels more like being sucked down a drain.”

“And you want to suck Becca down with you?”

Gurney chose not to react to whatever nasty suggestion Kline was making. “I want her to help me stay realistic—provide boundaries for the image I’m forming of the man I’m after.”

Perhaps jarred by the commitment in those last four words, perhaps reminded of Gurney’s unparalleled record of homicide arrests, Kline’s tone changed.

“I’ll have her call you.”

A
n hour later Gurney was sitting in front of his computer screen at the desk in his den, staring into the emotionless black eyes of Peter Piggert—a man who might have something in common with the murderer of Jillian Perry and quite a lot in common with the villain in Edward Vallory’s lost play. Gurney wasn’t sure whether he’d been drawn back to the computer-art portrait he’d done of the man a year earlier because of its possible relevance to the psychology of his current quarry or because of its new financial potential.

A hundred thousand dollars? For this?
The moneyed art world must be a strange place indeed. A hundred thousand dollars for Peter Piggert’s picture. The price was as absurd as the alliteration. He needed to talk to Sonya. He’d get in touch with her first thing in the morning. Right now he wanted to concentrate not so much on the portrait’s possible value but on the man it depicted.

Piggert at the age of fifteen had murdered his father in order to pursue without obstruction a profoundly sick relationship with his mother. He got her pregnant twice and had two daughters with her. Fifteen years later, at the age of thirty, he murdered his mother in order to pursue without obstruction an equally sick relationship with their daughters, then thirteen and fourteen.

To the average observer, Piggert appeared to be the most ordinary of men. But to Gurney there had seemed from the beginning to be something not quite right about the eyes. Their dark placidity seemed eerily bottomless. Peter Piggert seemed to view the world in a way that justified and encouraged any action that might please him, regardless of its effect on anyone else. Gurney wondered if
it was a man like Piggert whom Scott Ashton had in mind when he floated his provocative theory that a sociopath is a creature with “perfect boundaries.”

As he stared into the disconcerting stillness of those eyes, Gurney was more certain than ever that the man’s principal drive was an overwhelming need to control his environment. His vision of the proper order of things was inviolable, his whims absolute. That was what Gurney had endeavored to highlight in his manipulation of the original mug-shot photo. The rigid tyrant behind the bland features. Satan in the skin of Everyman.

Was that what Jay Jykynstyl was fascinated by? The veiled evil? Was that what he prized, what he was offering to pay a small fortune for?

Of course, there was a crucial difference between the reality of the killer and the portrait of the killer. The object on the screen derived its appeal in part from its evocation of the monster and in part, ironically, from its own essential harmlessness. The serpent defanged. The devil paralyzed and laminated.

Gurney leaned back from his desk, away from the computer screen, folded his arms across his chest, and gazed out the west window. His focus initially was inward. When he began to notice the crimson sunset, it seemed at first a smear of blood across the aqua sky. Then he realized he was remembering a bedroom wall in the South Bronx, a turquoise wall against which a shooting victim had leaned, sliding slowly to the floor. Twenty-four years ago, his first murder case.

Flies. It was August, and the body had been there for a week.

F
or twenty-four years he’d been up to his armpits in murder and mayhem. Half his life. Even now, in retirement … What was it Madeleine had said to him during the Mellery carnage? That death seemed to call to him more strongly than life?

He’d denied it. And argued the point semantically: It wasn’t
death
that drew his attention and energy; it was the challenge of unraveling the mystery of murder. It was about justice.