Let the Devil Sleep

Chapter 17



A Simple Initiative





The bedroom ceiling seemed a little brighter now, the sheet covering Gurney a little warmer. He felt satisfied that his sequential reconstruction of the previous evening’s affair was reasonably complete and orderly. Its significance, causes, purposes, motivations were yet to be determined. But at least he was starting to feel that he was on a path.

He closed his eyes.

He was awakened minutes later by the phone, followed by footsteps. It was picked up at the end of the fourth ring. He heard Madeleine’s voice, indistinctly, coming from the den. A few sentences, silence, then footsteps again. He thought she might be bringing the phone to him. Someone asking for him. Huffbarger, the neurologist? He thought back on the testy exchange with the doctor’s office person. Christ, when was that? Two or three days ago? Seemed like forever.

The footsteps passed the bedroom door, went out to the kitchen.

Female voices.

Madeleine and Kim.

Kim had driven him to Walnut Crossing after taking him to the emergency room in Syracuse. He hadn’t been able to grip the gearshift in his Outback without a red-hot stabbing sensation in his elbow—giving him the idea that his arm might be fractured and that trying to shift with it might not be smart—and Kim had seemed more than happy for an excuse to spend the night someplace other than in her apartment.

He recalled how she’d emphasized that it wouldn’t be safe for him to drive himself—even after the X-rays had shown that there was no fracture.

There was something about Kim’s attitude, her way of presenting herself to the world, that made him smile. She could gladly leave her apartment on a mission of mercy, but never because she’d been driven away by fear.

He forced himself out of bed—discovering new muscle aches as he did so. He took four ibuprofens and got into a hot shower.

The shower and pills performed, to some degree, their restorative magic. By the time he was dried off and dressed and out by the kitchen coffeemaker, pouring his vital first cup, he was feeling a bit better. He flexed the fingers of his right hand, found that the pain was tolerable. He squeezed the coffee cup. Despite the wince it produced, he concluded that he could manage his gearshift if he needed to drive. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but he wasn’t helpless.

There was no sign of either Madeleine or Kim in the house. He could hear a low murmur of voices through an open window by the sideboard. He took his cup to the breakfast table by the French doors. Then he saw them, out beyond the bluestone patio, beyond the overgrown apple tree, in the small mowed area of the field that he and Madeleine referred to as “the lawn.”

They were sitting in a pair of matching Adirondack chairs. Madeleine was wearing one of her wildly colorful jackets, and Kim was wearing a similar one—no doubt provided by Madeleine. They were each cradling a coffee mug in a two-handed grip, as though warming their fingers around a pleasant flame. The lavenders and fuchsias and oranges and lime greens of their jackets were radiant in the pale morning sunlight beginning to filter through the overcast. Their expressions suggested that their conversation, like their clothing, was more animated than Gurney’s mood.

He was tempted to open the French doors to see if the sun was taking any of the chill out of the atmosphere. But he knew that as soon as Madeleine saw him, she’d tell him he should come out, tell him what a lovely morning it was turning out to be after all, tell him how sweet everything smelled. And the more she’d rhapsodize about the glory of being out in the open air, the more he’d insist on staying in. It was a ritual battle they often fought, virtually reading their lines from a script. In the end, after making it clear he was too busy to come out, he’d inevitably reconsider, and, once out, inevitably he’d be pleased by the beauty of the day and embarrassed by his childish opposition.

At the moment, however, he had no desire to initiate the ritual. So he chose not to open the door. Instead he decided to get a second cup of coffee, print out a hard copy of the Good Shepherd profile, and try to approach it with an open mind: a mind open to the possible presence of truth, rather than a mind hypervigilant for the presence of bullshit.

He went into the den and opened the Hardwick e-mails on his desktop computer, a welcome improvement over the tiny screen of his cell phone. While the profile was printing out, he opened the first of the incident-report documents that he’d hurried through the previous afternoon.

He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He was still at the stage when the important thing was to look at everything, absorb as much data as he could. The decisions about what was significant, the search for patterns—that would come later.

He realized he’d been in too much of a rush the first time. He needed to slow down. He’d discovered over the years that one of the most destructive errors a detective can make is to leap to a possible pattern with too little data. Because once you think you see a pattern, there’s an inclination to dismiss data that doesn’t fit into it. The brain’s natural affinity for pattern formation devalues dots that don’t contribute to the picture. Add to that a detective’s professional need to grasp the outline of a situation quickly, and the result is a tendency to jump to premature conclusions.

The period of simple looking, listening, absorbing had tremendous value. Giving that period its full due was always the best way to begin an investigation.

Begin an investigation?

Begin an investigation of what, exactly? At whose request? With what legal authorization? In potential collision with Schiff and who else?

He decided to simplify the matter—or at least detoxify the terminology—by thinking of it as nothing more than a private fact-finding initiative, a modest effort to answer a few questions. Questions such as:

Who was behind the original “pranks” that had disturbed Kim?

Which was closer to the truth—Kim’s characterization of Meese or his characterization of her?

Who set the vicious little trap that had thrown him to the basement floor? Was he the intended victim or was Kim?

If the whisper had been real, who was the whisperer? Why was he lurking in the basement? How and when had he gotten into the house, and how had he gotten away?

What was the meaning of the warning “Let the devil sleep”?

And what, if anything, did these present events have to do with a ten-year-old series of roadway murders?

Gurney envisioned his fact-finding initiative beginning with a review of everything in the incident reports, the report annexes, the ViCAP reports, the FBI profile, the status reports in Kim’s project folder, and the notes he’d taken while listening to Hardwick’s acerbic summaries of the victims’ personalities.

All of that he could address by himself. But he also felt a growing urge to sit down with Rebecca Holdenfield and delve more deeply into the Good Shepherd profile and the case hypothesis—how the primary data was gathered, analyzed, prioritized; how theoretical alternatives had been tested; how consensus had emerged; and whether any beliefs she had about the case had changed over the years. He was also curious to know whether she’d ever spoken to Max Clinter.

Gurney still had Holdenfield’s number in his cell phone. (They’d collaborated briefly on the Mark Mellery and Jillian Perry cases, and he’d imagined they might cross paths again.) He brought the number up on the screen and placed the call. It went into her voice mail.

He listened to a lengthy introductory message regarding her office hours and location, website, and the e-mail address to which inquiries could be sent. The sound of her voice conjured up an image of the woman. Tough, brainy, athletic, and ambitious. Her facial features were perfect without being pretty. Her eyes were striking, intense, but lacked the warmth that might have made them beautiful. She was a driven professional whose therapy practice filled whatever time was left over from her primary career in forensic psychology.

He left a terse message that he hoped would intrigue her. “Hi, Rebecca. This is Dave Gurney. Hope all is well. I’m involved in an unusual situation that I’d like to discuss with you, get your insight and advice. It involves the Good Shepherd case. I know how incredibly busy you are. Get to me when you can.” He ended the call with his cell number.

For anyone else he hadn’t spoken to for six months, that message might have been too lean and impersonal, but for Holdenfield he knew there was no such thing as too lean or too impersonal. Which is not to say that he didn’t like her. In fact, he could recall moments in the past when he’d found her sharp edges disturbingly attractive.

Making the call gave him a satisfying sense of having set something in motion. He went back to the open incident report on his desktop screen and started working through it. He was halfway through the fifth report an hour later when the phone rang. He glanced at the ID: ALBANY FORENSIC CONSULTANTS.

“Rebecca?”

“Hello, David. Just pulled over for gas. What can I do for you?” Her voice underscored her odd combination of brusqueness and availability.

“I understand you’re a bit of an expert on the Good Shepherd case.”

“A bit.”

“Any chance we could get together for a quick chat?”

“Why?”

“Strange things have been happening that may be related to it, and I need some insight from someone who knows what she’s talking about.”

“There’s a ton of stuff on the Internet.”

“I need a point of view I can trust.”

“When does this need to happen?”

“Sooner the better.”

“I’m on my way to the Otesaga.”

“Beg pardon?”

“The Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown. If you can meet me there, I can set aside forty-five minutes—from one-fifteen to two.”

“Perfect. Where shall I—”

“Come to the Fenimore Room. I’m presenting a paper there at twelve-thirty, followed by a brief question session, followed by schmoozing around the buffet. The schmoozing I can skip. Can you be there at one-fifteen?”

He opened and closed his right hand, convincing himself again that he could manage the shift knob. “Yes.”

“See you then.” She broke the connection.

Gurney smiled. He felt an affinity with anyone who was willing to skip the schmoozing. Maybe that’s what he liked best about Holdenfield—the minimalism of her sociability. For a moment his mind wandered into musing about what form that characteristic might take in her sex life. Then he shook his head, banishing the thought.

He returned to the middle of the fifth incident report—the section consisting of captioned crime-scene and vehicle photographs—with renewed concentration. Dr. James Brewster’s Mercedes was shown from multiple angles, compacted to half its length against a roadside tree trunk. Like most of the other target vehicles, the doctor’s hundred-thousand-dollar prestige capsule had been shattered into something unrecognizable, nameless, worthless.

Gurney wondered if that was part of the Shepherd’s goal, part of his thrill—not only to kill the presumably wealthy owners but to reduce the symbols of their wealth to meaningless piles of junk. The final humiliation of the high-and-mighty. Dust to dust.

“Are we interrupting something?” It was Madeleine’s voice.

Gurney looked up, startled. She was standing in the den doorway with Kim behind her. He hadn’t heard them come into the house. They were still wearing their explosively colorful jackets. “Interrupting?”

“You had a look of great concentration.”

“Just trying to absorb some information. What are you two up to?”

“Sun’s out. It’s turning into a beautiful day. I’m taking Kim on the ridge hike.”

“Won’t it be muddy?” He could hear the crankiness in his own voice.

“She can borrow a pair of my boots.”

“You’re going now?”

“Is there a problem with that?”

“No, of course not. Matter of fact, I need to go out for a couple of hours myself.”

She looked at him with alarm. “In the car? With your arm the way it is?”

“Ibuprofen is a great thing.”

“Ibuprofen? Twelve hours ago you fell down a flight of stairs, ended up in an emergency room, had to be driven home. Now a couple of pills and you’re good as new?”

“Not good as new. But not so crippled I can’t function.”

Her eyes widened in exasperation. “Where do you have to go that’s so important?”

“You remember a Dr. Holdenfield?”

“I remember the name. Rebecca, wasn’t it?”

“Right. Rebecca. A forensic psychologist.”

“Where is she?”

“Her office is in Albany.”

Madeleine raised an eyebrow. “Albany? That’s where you’re going?”

“No. She’s going to be in Cooperstown today for some kind of professional symposium.”

“At the Otesaga?”

“How did you know that?”

“Where else in Cooperstown could they hold a symposium?” She looked at him curiously. “Did something urgent come up?”

“No, nothing came up. But I have some questions about the Good Shepherd case. A book of hers on serial murder was footnoted in the FBI profile. And I think she may have written some articles about the case later on.”

“You couldn’t ask your questions on the phone?”

“Too many. Too complicated.”

“What time will you be home?”

“She’s giving me forty-five minutes, ending at two o’clock, so I should be home by three at the latest.”

“Three at the latest. Remember that.”

“Why?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you asking why you should remember it?”

“What I mean is, is something happening at precisely three o’clock that I don’t know about?”

“When you tell me you’re going to do something, I think it would be nice if you actually did it. If you tell me you’re going to be home at three o’clock, then I’d like to be able to rely on the fact that you’ll be home at three o’clock. That’s all. Is that okay?”

“Definitely.” If Kim weren’t standing there, he might have been less immediately agreeable, more tenacious in asking why the issue was of particular importance that particular day. But he’d grown up in a home where even the slightest disagreement would never be aired in front of an outsider. That stiff Irish-English reticence was still in the marrow of his bones.

Kim looked worried. “Shouldn’t I be coming with you?”

“It barely makes sense for me to go. There’s certainly no need for two of us.”

“Come on,” said Madeleine, turning to Kim. “I’ll get you some boots. While the sun is out, let’s head for the ridge.”

Two minutes later Gurney, still in the den, heard the side door being opened and then being shut firmly, and the house became very quiet. He turned to his computer screen, closed the document with the photos of Dr. Brewster’s crushed Mercedes, and entered a Google search for the terms “Holdenfield” and “Shepherd.”

The top result referring to Rebecca’s work on the case was a journal article with a daunting academic title. “Pattern Resonance: inferences for personality formation, as applied to an unknown shooter (aka The Good Shepherd), employing bivalent inductive-deductive modeling protocols. R. Holdenfield et al.”

Gurney scrolled down through the results—skipping over hits in which the search terms had brought up everything from a news article about a man in Holdenfield, Nebraska, who had been bitten by a German shepherd to an obituary for Shepherd Holdenfield, a black trombonist. In the end he counted a dozen relevant entries that linked Rebecca to the murder case, all citing professional articles.

He went through these but found in most instances that the articles could be accessed only by subscribing to the journals that published them. The subscription costs were greater than his curiosity, and if the language describing her article on pattern resonance was any indication, wading through the full texts would be migraine-inducing.