Let the Devil Sleep

Chapter 10



A Dramatically Different Point of View





At the end of Sterne’s driveway, even though there was no traffic, Kim stopped the car before turning out onto the road. “Before you ask,” she announced confessionally, “the answer is yes. When I set up our appointment and told him you’d be coming with me, I gave him the website link to Connie’s article.”

Gurney said nothing.

“Are you annoyed at me for doing that?”

“I feel like I’m in the middle of an archaeological dig.”

“What do you mean?”

“Little bits and pieces of the situation keep emerging. I’m wondering what’s next.”

“There’s nothing ‘next.’ Nothing I can think of. Is that what your job was like?”

“Like what?”

“An archaeological dig.”

“In some ways, yes.”

In fact, it was an image that had occurred to him often: uncovering the puzzle pieces, laying them out, studying the shapes and textures, fitting them together tentatively, searching for patterns. Once in a while, you could take your time. More frequently you had to move swiftly—in an ongoing serial-murder case, for example, when delays in finding and interpreting the pieces could mean more murders, more horror.

Kim took out her cell phone, looked at it, looked at Gurney. “You know, I’m thinking, since it’s not even three o’clock yet … Would you possibly be up for one more meeting before I drive you home?” Before he could answer, she added quickly, “It would be on the way, so it wouldn’t take much extra time.”

“I need to be home by six.” This wasn’t entirely true, but he wanted to create a boundary.

“I don’t think that’s a problem.” She tapped in a number, then held the phone to her ear, waiting. “Roberta? It’s Kim Corazon.”

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.”


Roberta 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 “F*ck!”—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.