Let the Devil Sleep

Chapter 31



The Return of the Shepherd





When Gurney awoke the following morning at seven-thirty, it was raining. It was the kind of light but steady rain that can go on for hours.

As usual, both windows were open a few inches from the top. The air in the bedroom was chilly and damp. Although it was officially almost an hour past sunrise, the skewed rectangle of sky visible from the position of his head on the pillow was the unpromising gray of a wet flagstone.

Madeleine was up before him. He stretched and rubbed his eyes. He had no desire to go back to sleep. His last dream, an uneasy one, had involved a black umbrella. As the umbrella opened, seemingly of its own volition, its unfolding fabric became the wings of an enormous bat. The bat shape-shifted into a black vulture, the curved umbrella handle sharpening into a hooked beak. And then, through the exotic sensory logic of dreams, the vulture was transformed into the cool draft from the open windows—the unpleasant touch of which had been the cause of his awakening.

He pushed himself out of bed, as a way of putting distance between himself and the dream. Then he took a hot shower for its mind-clearing and reality-simplifying benefits, shaved, brushed his teeth, dressed, and went out to the kitchen for coffee.

“Call Jack Hardwick,” said Madeleine from the stove, without looking up, as she added a handful of raisins to something she was simmering in a small pot.

“Why?”

“Because he called here about fifteen minutes ago and wanted to talk to you.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“Said he had a question about your e-mail.”

“Hmm.” He went to the coffeemaker and poured himself a cup. “I was dreaming about a black umbrella.”

“He seemed very eager to talk to you.”

“I’ll call him. But … tell me, how did that movie end?”

Madeleine emptied the little pot into her bowl and brought it to the breakfast table. “I don’t remember.”

“You described that scene in great detail—the guy the snipers were following, how he went into the church, and later, when he came out, they couldn’t tell who he was because everyone else coming out of the church with him was dressed in black and had a black umbrella. What happened after that?”

“I guess he got away. Because the snipers couldn’t shoot everybody.”

“Hmm.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Suppose they did shoot everybody.”

“They didn’t.”

“But suppose they did. Suppose they shot everybody, because that was the only way they could make sure they got the one they were after. And suppose the police arrived later and found all those bodies, all those people who’d been shot dead in the street. What would they think?”

“What would the police think? I have no idea. Maybe that some maniac wanted to kill churchgoers?”

Gurney nodded. “Exactly—especially if they got a letter the same day from someone claiming that religious people were the scum of the earth and he was planning to kill them all.”

“But … wait a minute.” Madeleine looked incredulous. “Are you suggesting that the Good Shepherd killed all those people because he couldn’t tell who his real target was? And that he just kept shooting people in a certain kind of car, until he was sure he got the person he was after?”

“I don’t know. But I intend to figure it out.”

Madeleine shook her head. “I just don’t see how—” She was interrupted by the ring of the landline phone on the countertop next to the refrigerator. “You’d better get that. It’s probably you-know-who.”

He did. And it was.

“You out of that f*cking shower yet?”

“Good morning, Jack.”

“Got your e-mail—your investigatory premise, along with your list of questions.”

“And?”

“You’re making the point that there’s a style conflict between the manifesto’s words and the shooter’s deeds?”

“You could put it that way.”

“You’re saying that the shooter’s MO proves he’s way too practical, way too cool, calm, and collected to think the thoughts presented in the manifesto. My little brain got that right?”

“What I’m saying is, there’s a disconnect.”

“Okay. That’s interesting. But it creates a bigger problem than it solves.”

“How?”

“You’re saying the motive for the murders is something other than what’s spelled out in the manifesto.”

“Right.”

“Therefore the victims were chosen for another reason—not because they were conspicuous displayers of luxury goods, greedy bastards who deserved to die?”

“Right.”

“So this super-practical, super-cool genius had an undisclosed pragmatic reason for killing those people?”

“Right.”

“You see the problem?”

“Tell me.”

“If the shooter’s real motive for choosing each victim was something other than the fact that he—or she—was driving a hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes, then we have to believe that driving a hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes was irrelevant. A f*cking coincidence. You ever run into anything like that, Davey boy? It would be like discovering that every victim of Bernie Madoff just happened to have a leprechaun tattooed on his ass. You get my point here?”

“I get it, Jack. Anything else in my e-mail bothering you?”

“Matter of fact, yes—another one of your questions. Actually, three questions that all kind of circle around the same issue: Were all the murders equally important? Was the sequence important? Were any of them necessitated by any of the others? You want to tell me, what is it about the case that brings up that issue?”

“Sometimes it’s what’s missing that gets my attention. And because of the nature of the reigning hypothesis in this particular case, there’s a hell of a lot missing—unexplored avenues, unasked questions. The basic assumption from the beginning was that these murders were identical components of a philosophical statement the killer was making. As soon as everyone accepted that, no one looked at them as individual events that could have different purposes. But it’s possible the murders were not all equally important, or even all done for the same reason. You with me, Jack?”

“Hard to say. You got any specifics?”

“You ever see a movie called The Man with the Black Umbrella?”

He’d never seen it, never even heard of it. So Gurney told him the story, ending with the “what if the snipers shot them all?” speculation he’d raised with Madeleine.

After a long silence, Hardwick asked a variant of one of Madeleine’s questions. “You’re saying that the first five attacks were mistakes? And the shooter finally got lucky with the sixth? Help me understand this. I mean, if he was a professional, like the guys in your movie, what target ID was he given? Just that the target drove a top-of-the-line Mercedes? So he ought to drive around at night, shoot through a few Mercedes windows with the biggest f*cking gun on earth, and see who he hits? I’m having trouble with this.”

“Me, too. But you know what? I’m starting to get the feeling that I might be in the right ballpark, even though I’m not sure yet what the game is.”

“Not sure? How about not having a f*cking clue what it is?”

“You need to think more positively.”

“You have any more words of wisdom, Sherlock, before I puke?”

“Just one thing. Special Agent Trout is fixated on the fact that I might have access to privileged information I’m not legally entitled to. Watch your back, Jack.”

“F*ck Trout. Is there any other secret shit you want me to shovel your way?”

“Long as you’re asking, do you have any tracer progress on Emilio Corazon?”

“Not yet. He’s managed to become a surprisingly invisible man.”


At eight forty-five, Madeleine left for her part-time job at the clinic. It was still raining. Gurney went to his computer, brought up a copy of his e-mail to Hardwick, and went over the list of questions he’d included—stopping at the one that read, “Why did the murders occur when they did, in the spring of the year 2000?” The more certain he was that the murders were essentially pragmatic, the more significant the timing element became.

Psycho-mission killings usually took one of two forms: There’s the Big Bang approach, where the shooter walks into the midst of multiple targets in the post office or the mosque and starts shooting, with no plan of escape. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, those guys (and they’re always guys) end up shooting themselves when there’s no one else left to shoot. Then there’s the other type—the guys who dribble out their bile for ten or twenty years. The guys who like to blow off somebody’s head or hand with a letter bomb every year or two but aren’t so eager to kill themselves.

The Good Shepherd murders didn’t seem to fit either category. There was a palpable coolness, a lack of emotion, in their crisp planning and execution. In any event that’s what Gurney was telling himself when the phone rang at nine-fifteen.

Once again it was Hardwick, but his tone was heavier than before.

“Whatever game is being played in whatever ballpark, it just got nastier. Ruthie Blum has turned up dead.”

Gurney’s first thought, one that made him instantly nauseous, was that she’d been shot in the head like her husband ten years earlier. The sickening image that leaped into his mind was of her perky Yorkshire-terrier hairdo blasted into a bloody, brainy mess.

“Oh, God, no. Where? How?”

“In her house. Ice pick to the heart.”

“What?”

“You expressing surprise or bad hearing?”

“An ice pick?”

“Single thrust, upward, under the sternum.”

“Jesus Christ. When?”

“Sometime after eleven last night.”

“How do they know that?”

“She posted a Facebook message at ten fifty-eight. Body was found at three-forty this morning.”

“This is the same house where she lived ten years ago when—”

“Right. Same house. Also the same house where little Kimmy interviewed her for that thing on RAM-TV.”

Gurney’s mind was racing. “Who found her?”

“Troopers out of the Auburn station in Zone E. Long story. Friend of Ruth’s from Ithaca, up late, read her Facebook message. Found it disturbing. Responded to it on Facebook, asking Ruthie if she was all right. Got no answer back. E-mailed her, got no answer to that either. Started phoning her, no answer, only voice mail. So the friend gets panicky, calls the local cops, gets passed on to the sheriff’s office, eventually gets passed on to Auburn. Auburn contacts a cruiser in the vicinity. Trooper comes by the house, everything looks peaceful, no problem, no signs of any disturbance, no—”

“Wait a second. You have any idea what Ruth Blum’s original message said that started all this?”

“I just e-mailed it to you.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“Andy Clegg.”

“Who the hell is Andy Clegg?”

“Young guy up in E Zone. You don’t remember him?”

“Should I?”

“The Piggert case.”

“Okay. Now the name rings a bell. But I can’t picture a face.”

“His first assignment out of the academy—in fact, the first job he caught on his first day on the job—was to respond to my call for support when I found my half of Mrs. Piggert’s body. That turned out to be Andy’s first official vomit opportunity. And he took full advantage of it.”

The infamous Peter Piggert incest-murder case was the beginning of the edgy but productive relationship between Hardwick and Gurney. Gurney was at the NYPD then, and Hardwick was with the NYSP. They were each investigating aspects of the Piggert case that fell within their separate jurisdictions, when a grotesque bit of serendipity brought them together. Over a hundred miles apart, on the same day, they each discovered half of the same body.

“Young Andy Clegg met us both at a joint get-together after you nailed the elusive Mr. Piggert, the mother-f*cking mother killer. Andy was mightily impressed with your skills and, to a lesser extent, with my own. We stayed in touch.”

“All this adds up to what?”

“When the basic facts on the Blum ice-pick homicide came in through CJIS this morning, I gave Detective Clegg a friendly call and got the whole story. I figured it was now or never. As soon as Trout gets hold of this and figures out the implications, he’ll move in and declare the homicide to be part of his ongoing Good Shepherd investigation and slam the door.”

“Which brings us back to my question. What did Ruth’s—”

“Check your e-mail.”

“Right.”

Gurney laid down the phone and opened his e-mail. There it was.

Posted by Ruth J. Blum:

What a day! I spent so much time wondering what the first episode of The Orphans of Murder would be like. I kept trying to remember the things Kim had asked me when she came here. And my answers. I couldn’t remember them all. I was hoping that I had managed to express what I really felt. I believe, like Kim says, that TV sometimes misses the point. They pay attention to sensational things too much, not the real things that matter. I was hoping that The Orphans of Murder might be different, because Kim seemed different. But now I don’t know. I was a little disappointed. I think they must have cut out a lot of our interview to make room for their “experts” and the commercials and all the other stuff. I’m going to call Kim in the morning and ask about it.

Sorry. I have to stop now. Someone just pulled into my driveway. Can you imagine, it’s almost eleven o’clock. Who could it be? One of those big military-looking trucky kind of cars. More later.

Gurney read it again before picking up the phone. “You still there, Jack?”

“Yeah. So her friend in Ithaca is going through her e-mail, around midnight, and discovers that she has a Facebook notification, which she clicks on, and she finds the message that Ruth posted at ten fifty-eight—apparently before she went downstairs to see who was coming to see her in that big military-looking whatever. Could be a Hummer, what do you think?”

“Could be.” Gurney pictured Max Clinter’s combat-ready, camouflage-painted Humvee.

“Well, if it wasn’t a Hummer, what the f*ck was it? Anyway, the friend makes all these efforts to get through to Ruth, and, like I said, eventually a trooper comes, checks things out, decides everything looks fine, and he’s about to leave—when the anxious friend shows up in her car, having driven the twenty-five miles up from Ithaca, and insists they break into the house—because she’s afraid something bad has happened. She says if he doesn’t break into the house, she will. Big argument, young trooper almost arrests her, then another trooper comes by, older and wiser, calms everybody down. They start looking around the outside of the house. Eventually they find an open window, more discussion, more debate, et cetera, et cetera. Bottom line, the troopers finally go in and find Ruth Blum’s body.”

“Where?”

“In the entry hall, just inside the front door. Like she opened the door and wham!”

“ME is sure the weapon was an ice pick?”

“Wasn’t much doubt. According to Clegg, f*cking thing was still stuck in her.”

“You don’t suppose he could get me into the house, do you?”

“No way. By now it’s been sealed off with a mile of yellow tape by guys for whom you could only be a problem. Their one job right now is to keep the scene pristine till the evidence techs go home and the BCI team hands the whole deal off to the FBI. They’re not about to hang their asses out the window so some retired hotshot from the city can have a walk-through.”

Gurney was itching to see it all for himself. Having a scene described to you was worth maybe 10 percent of being there. But he suspected that Hardwick was right. He couldn’t think of any upside for anyone in BCI, much less the FBI, to get him involved. Which made him wonder again what the upside was for Hardwick. Every time the man passed along information from a confidential file or an internal source, he was putting himself at risk. And he was doing it a lot.

Was he such a pure seeker after truth that its pursuit trumped any concern for rules or his own career? Was he driven by an obsessive desire to embarrass the powerful? Or did the risk itself, the giddy edge of the cliff, attract him with the same power with which it repelled saner men? Gurney had asked himself these questions about the man before. Once again he concluded that the answer was probably yes to all of them.

“So, Davey boy …” Hardwick’s voice jarred him back to the issue at hand. “The plot thickens. Or maybe this makes everything clearer to you. Which is it?”

“I don’t know, Jack. A little of both. It depends on what happens next. In the meantime, is that everything Clegg told you?”

“Almost everything.” Hardwick hesitated. His appetite for dramatic pauses irritated Gurney intensely, but it was a tolerable price to pay for what often followed. “Remember the little plastic animals the Good Shepherd left at the roadside shootings?”

“Yes.” In fact, he’d been thinking about them that morning, wondering about their purpose.

“Well, they found a little plastic animal at the scene—balanced delicately on Ruth Blum’s lips.”

“On her lips?”

“On her lips.”

“What kind of animal?”

“Clegg thinks it was a lion.”

“Wasn’t a lion the first animal in the original sequence of six?”

“Good memory, ace. So what are the odds we can expect five more?”

Gurney had no answer for that.

As soon as he got off the phone with Hardwick, he called Kim. He wondered if she was still at Kyle’s apartment, wondered if they were in bed together, wondered what their plans were for the day, wondered if they knew …

The call went into her voice mail. He left a blunt message. “Hi. I don’t know if it’s on the news yet, but Ruth Blum is dead. She was murdered in her home in Aurora late last night. It’s possible that the Good Shepherd is back, or someone wants us to think so. Call me as soon as you can.”

He tried Kyle’s number, got his voice mail, and left the same message.

He stood staring out the north window of the den at the wet, gray hillside. The rain had stopped, but the eaves continued to drip. The new information from Hardwick was scattering rather than organizing his thoughts. So damn many bits and pieces. It was impossible to see the path through the maze. To take a step forward, one had to know where forward was. He was overcome by a sick feeling that time was running out, that the endgame was rapidly approaching, without even knowing what that might mean.

He had to do something.

For want of a better idea, he found himself in his car, setting out for Aurora.

Two hours later he was turning onto the state road that ran alongside Lake Cayuga, his GPS indicating he was just three miles from Ruth Blum’s address. The lake and its lakefront homes were visible through a border of bare trees on his left. On his right, separated from the road by a deep, grassy drainage swale, a pastoral mix of meadows and thickets sloped gradually up toward a high horizon of stubbled cornfields. Three commercial establishments on the upland side of the road were spaced out among a scattering of well-kept older homes. There was a gas station, a veterinary clinic, and an auto-body shop whose parking area held half a dozen cars in various stages of repair.

Not far past the body shop, Gurney rounded a long bend and saw ahead of him on the left side of the road the first indications of a major crime scene: an assortment of local, county, and state police cruisers. There were also four vans—two, presumably from regional media outlets, with satellite dishes on their roofs; one with the NYSP emblem, which Gurney assumed would contain the evidence team’s equipment; and one that was unmarked, probably the forensic photographer’s. There was no sign of a morgue vehicle, meaning someone from the ME’s office had already come and gone and the body had been transported from the scene.

As he drew closer, Gurney counted six uniformed officers with various jurisdictional insignias, a woman and a man in the conservative business attire favored by detective units, an evidence specialist in the white coveralls and latex gloves required by his occupation, and a fashionably dressed female TV type huddled with two ponytailed male technicians.

A uniformed trooper was standing in the middle of the road, aggressively waving along any car that seemed to be passing too slowly. As Gurney was coming abreast of the trooper and the Blum house behind him, he could see that POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape had been wrapped around the entire property from the edge of the lake up to the edge of the road. He reached into his glove box and pulled out a thin leather wallet, flipping it open to reveal a gold NYPD detective’s shield that bore in small letters at the bottom the word “Retired.”

Before the frowning trooper could examine it thoroughly, Gurney tossed it back in his glove box and asked if Senior Investigator Jack Hardwick was on the scene.

The trooper’s hat was tilted forward, its stiff brim shadowing his eyes. “Hardwick, BCI?”

“That’s right.”

“There some reason he should be here?”

Gurney sighed wearily. “I’m working on an investigation that could involve Ruth Blum. Hardwick’s aware of it.”

The trooper looked like he was having trouble deciphering that answer. “What’s your name?”

“Dave Gurney.”

The man eyed him with the combination of surface politeness and instinctive distrust with which most cops regard strangers. “Pull in right there.” He pointed to a space on the shoulder between the evidence van and one of the TV vans. “Stay in your car.” He turned away crisply and approached three figures engaged in an intense discussion next to the driveway. The individual to whom he spoke was a heavyset woman with short brown hair. She was wearing a navy blue jacket and matching pants. The gray-haired man on her right was in white coveralls. The younger man on her left wore a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie—the standard outfit shared by detectives, funeral directors, and Mormons. His heavily muscled shoulders, wide neck, and buzz cut made it clear which of those groups he belonged to.

As the traffic trooper was talking to them, the three looked over at Gurney in unison. The young man began grinning and speaking rapidly to the woman while gesturing in Gurney’s direction.

The grin rang a distant bell.

“Detective!” the woman called out, raising her hand to get his attention. “Detective Gurney.”

He got out of his car. As he did, he was greeted by the loud throb of a helicopter overhead. He looked up and through the treetops caught glimpses of the slowly circling craft. Giant white letters, RAM, painted on the bottom of the cabin caught his eye and provoked an involuntary grimace.

“Lieutenant Bullard wants to talk to you.” The trooper had come back over to Gurney and was lifting the police tape for him to enter the enclosed area. His tone made the tape gesture seem more proprietary than courteous.

Gurney bent forward to pass under the tape. As he did so, he couldn’t help noticing a deposit of roadway dirt that had settled into a long expansion crack separating the tarred driveway from the rougher composite pavement of the road shoulder. As he paused for a moment to take a closer look, the trooper let the tape drop on him and returned to his traffic duty.

When Gurney straightened up, the slightly familiar young man in the dark suit was walking toward him.

“Sir, you probably don’t remember me. I’m Andrew Clegg. We met during your investigation of—”

Gurney broke in warmly, “I remember you, Andy. Looks like you’ve been promoted.”

Again the grin. It turned him into a teenager. “Last month. Finally made it into BCI. You were one of my inspirations.” As he spoke, he was leading Gurney to the solidly built woman, who was talking to the departing tech in the white suit.

“If you want to bag the rug and bring it in, that’s fine, too. It’s up to you.” She turned toward Gurney. Her expression was alert and pleasantly businesslike. “Andy tells me that you and Jack Hardwick worked together on Piggert. Is that a fact?”

“That’s a fact.”

“Congrats. Big victory for the good guys.”

“Thank you.”

“His Satanic Santa case was even bigger,” said Clegg.

“Satanic …?” Now it was her turn to look as if a distant memory bell was ringing. “Was that the psycho who was cutting people up and mailing the pieces to the local cops?”

“In gift wrapping! As Christmas presents!” cried Clegg, clearly more captivated than horrified.

She stared at Gurney in amazement. “And you …?”

“Just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

“That’s remarkable.” She extended her hand. “I’m Lieutenant Bullard. And you’re obviously a man who needs no further introduction. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“This situation with Ruth Blum.”

“How so?”

“Did you see the program with her last night on RAM?”

“I’m aware of it. Why do you ask?”

“It might help you to understand what happened here.”

“How?”

“The program was the first of a series, dealing with the aftereffects of the six murders committed by the Good Shepherd back in 2000. What happened here was almost certainly the seventh Good Shepherd murder. And there may be more coming.”

Whatever cordiality had been in her expression had given way to cool assessment. “What exactly are you doing here?”

He began to consider his words carefully—but then thought to hell with that. “I’m here because I believe the FBI got the case backwards from day one, and what happened here may prove it.”

Her expression was hard to read. “Have you told them what you think?”

He gave her a quick smile. “It didn’t go over very well.”

She shook her head. “I’m not quite getting what you’re telling me. I don’t know on whose behalf or on whose authority you’ve come here.” She glanced at Clegg, who shifted uneasily from foot to foot. “Andy told me you were retired. We’re in the crucial first hours of a murder investigation. Unless you can make your presence and purpose plain to me, you’re going to have to leave. I hope I’m being clear without being rude.”

“I understand.” He took a deep breath. “I was hired as a consultant to the woman who interviewed Ruth Blum, and I’ve been taking a close look at the Good Shepherd case. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a major flaw in the prevailing view. I’m hoping the investigation of this murder won’t get screwed up like the first six. But, unfortunately, there already seems to be a problem.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He didn’t park in the driveway.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The man who killed Ruth Blum didn’t park in this driveway. If you believe he did, you’ll never understand what happened here.”

She shot a glance in Clegg’s direction, perhaps to see if he knew more about this unexpected challenge than she did, but his eyes showed only surprise and confusion. She looked back at Gurney, then at her watch. “Come inside. I’ll give you exactly five minutes to make some sense. Meanwhile, Andy, you stay here and keep an eye on the TV vultures. They are not to put one toe on our side of the tape.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She led Gurney down a sloping lawn by the side of the house and up the steps of the rear deck—which he recognized as the location of Kim’s outdoor interview with Ruth Blum. He followed her through a back door that connected the deck with a large eat-in kitchen. A photographer was sitting at a table in a breakfast nook, downloading pictures from a digital SLR onto a laptop.

She looked around the kitchen, but it didn’t offer much opportunity for privacy. “Excuse me, Chuck, can you give us a few minutes here?”

“No problem, Lieutenant. I can finish this in the van.” He picked up his equipment and a moment later was gone.

The lieutenant sat in one of the chairs at the vacated table and motioned Gurney to the one directly opposite. “Okay,” she said evenly. “I’ve had a long day so far, and it’s nowhere near over. I have no time to waste. I’d appreciate some clarity and brevity. Speak.”

“What makes you think he parked in the driveway?”

Her eyes narrowed. “What makes you think I do?”

“The way the three of you were standing carefully to the side of it when I arrived. The way everybody avoided walking on it, even though your tech crew must have already gone over it. So I figure it’s being saved for a more thorough microscopic analysis. How come you’re convinced he parked there?”

She studied him for a while before a cynical little smile appeared on her lips. “You already know something, don’t you? Where’s the leak?”

“No point in going down that path. That’s the FBI path. Confrontational waste of time.”

She continued to study him, not so long this time, then seemed to arrive at a decision. “The victim posted a message on her Facebook page late last night. After some comments about the RAM program, she described a car that was pulling into her driveway as she was sitting there at her computer. Why do I have a feeling that you already know all this?”

Gurney ignored her question. “What kind of car?”

“Big. Military-looking. No make or model mentioned.”

“Jeep? Land Rover? Hummer? Something like that?” She nodded.

“So the theory is that he parks out in the driveway, walks up to the front door, knocks … and then what? He kills her in the doorway? She lets him in? She knows him? She doesn’t know him?”

“Slow down. You asked me why we believe that the killer—or someone who coincidentally visited her at approximately the time she was killed—parked in the driveway. And I gave you the answer. We believe it because the victim herself told us that’s what happened. It’s the victim’s eyewitness account, posted on her Facebook page, before she was killed.” Lieutenant Bullard’s expression of triumph was diluted with a pinch of worry. “So now you owe me a brief, clear explanation of why you think Ruth Blum would say those things if they weren’t true.”

“She didn’t.”

“Beg pardon?”

“None of it happened that way. The scenario you’re presenting doesn’t make any sense. First of all, before we get into the logical problem, you’ve got a physical-evidence problem at the end of the driveway.”

“What physical-evidence problem?”

“The ground is fairly dry. How long has it been since the last rain?” He knew when it had rained in Walnut Crossing, but the weather system around the Finger Lakes was often quite different.

She thought for a moment. “It rained yesterday morning. It was over by noon. Why?”

“There’s a strip of dirt in a crevice out there at the edge of the road, maybe an inch wide. Anyone coming into the driveway would have to cross it, unless they drove through the woods and across the lawn. But that little strip of dirt doesn’t seem to have been disturbed, at least not since the last rain.”

“An inch is not necessarily enough to register—”

“Maybe not, but it’s suggestive. Plus, there’s the psychological factor. If the Good Shepherd is back, if this is his seventh victim, then what we already know about him has to figure into it.”

“Like what?”

“One thing we know is that he is extremely cautious, extremely risk-averse. And that short driveway is too exposed. Any vehicle sitting out there—especially anything the size of a Hummer—would have its rear bumper practically on the road. Way too eye-catching, way too identifiable. A local cop cruising by might zero in on a strange car like that, might stop to check it out, might run the plate number.”

Bullard frowned. “But the fact is, Ruth Blum was killed, and if the killer came in a vehicle, he had to park it somewhere. So what are you saying? Where did he park it? On the shoulder of the road? That would be even more exposed.”

“My guess would be at the body shop.”

“The what?”

“Half mile down the state route, back in the direction of Ithaca, there’s an auto-body shop. There are some cars and trucks in a scruffy little parking area beside it, either waiting to be worked on or waiting to be picked up. It’s the one place in the neighborhood where a strange vehicle wouldn’t raise a question—wouldn’t even be noticed. If I were going to kill someone in this house in the middle of the night, I’d park there, and then I’d walk the rest of the way here in that deep swale by the side of the road to avoid being seen by passing drivers.”

She stared down at the tabletop, as though trying to see the possibilities in an imaginary set of scrabble letters. She made a face. “Theoretically, that might make sense. Problem is, her Facebook posting specifically refers to a vehicle pulling in—”

“You mean the Facebook posting.”

“I don’t get what—”

“You’re assuming it was her posting.”

“It was her account, her page, her computer, her password.”

“Couldn’t her murderer have extracted the password from her before he killed her, opened the page, and composed the message himself?”

Bullard redoubled her scrutiny of the tabletop. She shook her head uncertainly. “That’s conceivable. But like your body-shop theory, there’s no evidence to support it.”

Gurney smiled at the opening. “After your boys in the white suits confirm that the dirt in the crack at the end of the driveway hasn’t been disturbed, ask them to pay a visit to the body shop. It would be interesting to see if they can find a relatively fresh set of tire tracks that don’t match up with any of the vehicles there.”

“But … why would the killer take the time and trouble to leave a message like that on Facebook?”

“Sand in our eyes. A twist in the maze. He’s very good at that.”

Something in her expression told him she was open to every speck of information she could lay her hands on.

“How much do you know about the original case?” he asked.

“Not as much as I need to,” she admitted. “Someone from the FBI field office is on his way here to give me a briefing. Speaking of which, I’ll need your address, e-mail, phone numbers where you can be reached twenty-four hours a day. You have any problem with that?”

“No problem at all.”

“I’ll give you my e-mail and cell number. I assume you’ll pass along any relevant facts that come your way?”

“Be happy to.”

“Okay. I’m totally out of time here. We’ll talk again.”

As Gurney left the house, the RAM helicopter was still circling noisily, its thumping rotor wash loosening the few dead leaves that were still clinging to the topmost branches of the trees, sending them swirling downward. Before he could reach his car, he was intercepted by the fluffy-coiffed, brightly made-up reporter with a mike in her hand and a video man behind her. “I’m Jill McCoy, Eye on the News, Syracuse!” she cried, her face showing the expression of alarmed curiosity that was a standard feature of her breed. “I’ve been told that you’re Detective Dave Gurney, the man New York magazine called the Supercop. Dave, is it true that the Good Shepherd, the infamous mass murderer, has struck again?”

“Excuse me,” said Gurney, forcing his way by her.

She extended the mike toward him, shouting a string of questions at his back as he opened his car door, got in, closed it, turned on the ignition. “Was she killed because of her TV appearance? Something she said? Is this horrible case too big for our local police? Is that why they brought you in? How are you involved? Is it true you have a problem with the FBI? What’s that problem all about, Detective Gurney?”

As he edged out of his parking spot, the video camera was just inches from his side window. The traffic trooper was doing nothing to alleviate the problem. In fact, he was totally absorbed in a conversation with a new arrival on the scene. Pulling out onto the state road, Gurney caught a glimpse of the man—compact, dark-haired, unsmiling. It was just enough of a glimpse for Gurney to recognize him.

It was Daker.