Let the Devil Sleep

Chapter 34



Allies and Enemies





They were finishing an early dinner of salmon, peas, and rice, with a sweet-pepper sauce. They’d been discussing the meeting that Madeleine would be attending that evening at the clinic for further exploration of the recent suicide and the procedures in place for identifying danger signals in the clients. She was noticeably edgy and preoccupied.

“With that horrible phone message and everything else going on today, I forgot to tell you that the insurance adjuster was here.”

“He was here to examine the barn?”

“And ask questions.”

“Like Kramden?”

“He covered the same ground. List of contents, who did what when, details of any other insurance policies we have, et cetera.”

“I assume you gave him copies of the same stuff we gave Kramden?”

“Her.”

“Sorry?”

“It was a woman. She wanted sales receipts for the bicycle and the kayaks.” In Madeleine’s voice there was sadness and anger. “You have any idea where they are?”

He shook his head.

She paused. “I asked her how soon we could demolish it.”

“The part of the barn that’s still standing?”

“She said the company would let us know.”

“No hint of when?”

“No. They need written permission from the arson squad before they can okay anything.” Her hands had closed into fists. “I can’t stand looking at it.”

He gave her a long look. “Are you mad at me?”

“I’m mad at the evil bastard who destroyed our barn. I’m mad at the creep who left that disgusting message on our phone.”

Her anger created a silence between them, which lasted until she left for the clinic. In the interim he thought of things he might say, then reasons not to say them.

After watching her car head down the pasture path, Gurney carried their used dishes to the sink, squirted a bit of detergent on them, and turned on the hot water.

The cell phone in his pocket rang.

ID said G. B. BULLARD.

“Mr. Gurney?”

“I’m here.”

“I wanted to fill you in on something, since it concerns a point you raised earlier today.”

“Yes?”

“The matter of the tire tracks …?”

“Yes?”

“I wanted you to know that we did find a set of tread marks, where you suggested they might be, at the auto-body shop.”

“Indicating a car was parked in a space that the shop owner says was unoccupied?”

“Essentially that’s correct—although he isn’t absolutely sure about it.”

“And the dirt strip at the end of Ruth Blum’s driveway?”

“Inconclusive.”

“Meaning not enough soil surface to be certain one way or the other, but no positive evidence of any vehicle entering or leaving?”

“Correct.”

Gurney was getting curious about the purpose of her call. It was not common practice for an investigating officer to give a progress report outside the immediate chain of command, much less to someone outside the department.

“But there’s a little twist,” she went on. “I’d like your opinion. Our door-to-doors turned up two eyewitness reports of a Humvee in the area late yesterday afternoon. One witness insisted it was the original military model, not the later GM version. They both saw it passing back and forth two or three times along the stretch of road that includes the Blum residence.”

“You’re thinking someone was scouting out the area?”

“Possibly, but like I said, there’s a twist. According to the tire tracks, the vehicle that was parked last night at the body shop was not a Humvee.” She paused. “Any thoughts on that?”

Two scenarios came to mind. “The killer might have a helper. Or …” Gurney hesitated, working his way through his second option, weighing its plausibility.

“Or what?” prompted Bullard.

“Well, let’s say I’m right about the Facebook message—that it was posted by the killer, not the victim. The message refers to some kind of military vehicle. So maybe the purpose of the message was to plant the Humvee idea. And maybe driving one up and down that road was designed to get it noticed, get it reported, make us sure it was the killer’s vehicle.”

“Why go to all that trouble if he was going to park a different car where it wouldn’t be noticed anyway?”

“Maybe the Humvee idea is supposed to lead us somewhere.”

Maybe it’s supposed to lead us to Max Clinter? But why?

Bullard remained silent so long that Gurney was about to ask if she was still there.

“You have a serious interest in this, don’t you?” she said finally.

“I tried to make that clear earlier today.”

“Okay. Let me get to the point. I have a meeting tomorrow morning with Matt Trout to discuss the case and the jurisdictional issues. How would you like to come along?”

Gurney was momentarily speechless. The invitation made no sense. Or maybe it did. “How well do you know Agent Daker?” he asked.

“I met him for the first time today.” There was a chill in her voice. “Why do you ask?”

Her reaction encouraged him to take a chance. “Because I think he and his boss are arrogant, controlling little bastards.”

“My impression is that they hold you in equally high regard.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way. Did Daker fill you in on the original case?”

“Filling me in was the stated purpose of the visit. The reality was a disorganized data dump.”

“They probably want to overwhelm you, make you see the case as an impossible tangle of complications—so you fade away quietly and cede jurisdiction without an argument.”

“The thing is,” said Bullard, “I have this contrary streak in me. I have a hard time walking away from a potential fight. I especially don’t like being underestimated by … what did you call them? ‘Arrogant, controlling little bastards’? I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I don’t really know you or your allegiances. I must be a little bit nuts, talking like this.”

Gurney figured she knew exactly what she was doing. “You know that Trout and Daker can’t stand me,” he said. “Isn’t that enough reassurance?”

“I suppose it’ll have to be. You know where our zone headquarters is in Sasparilla?”

“I do.”

“Can you make it at nine forty-five tomorrow morning?”

“I can.”

“Good. I’ll meet you in the parking lot. One last thing: Our lab people took a close look at the victim’s computer keyboard. They discovered something. Her fingerprints—”

Gurney broke in. “Let me guess. Her fingerprints on the specific keys necessary to compose the Facebook message were slightly smudged in a way that her fingerprints on the other keys weren’t. And your lab techs consider the smudging consistent with someone tapping those keys with his fingers in latex gloves.”

There was a second of silence. “Not necessarily latex, but how—”

“It’s the most likely scenario. Because the only other way for the killer to have gone about it would have been to force Ruth to type the message herself as he dictated it. But she’d have been so terrified it would have created difficulties. He’d have felt exposed enough just extracting the password from her. The longer she was alive, the more risk he would have faced. She might have a breakdown and start screaming. Not a prospect he’d be comfortable with. This guy would want her dead as soon as possible. Less chance of uncontrollable outcomes.”

“You’re not shy about your opinions, are you, Mr. Gurney? Anything else you’d care to share?”

He thought of his summary sheet of comments and questions, the one he’d sent to Hardwick and Holdenfield. “I have some unpopular thoughts about the original case that you might find helpful.”

“I’m getting the impression you consider unpopularity a virtue.”

“Not a virtue. Just irrelevant.”

“Really? I thought I might have detected an appetite for debate. Sleep well. Tomorrow morning should be interesting.”


He hardly slept at all.

His attempt to get to bed early was disrupted by Madeleine’s return from her clinic meeting—eager to voice the perennial complaint of social workers: “If the energy devoted to ass covering and bureaucratic baloney were devoted to helping people, it could change the world in a week!”

Three cups of herbal tea later, they finally made their way into the bedroom. Madeleine settled down on her side of the bed with War and Peace, the soporific masterpiece that she seemed determined to conquer by persistently biting off small chunks.

After setting his alarm, Gurney lay there pondering Bullard’s motives and how they might play out in the Sasparilla meeting. She seemed to view him as an ally, or at least a useful tool, in her anticipated conflict with Trout and company. He didn’t mind being used, so long as it didn’t obstruct his own purposes. He knew that his alliance with her was very ad hoc, with no roots, so he’d need to be sensitive to any shifting winds at the meeting. Hardly a new experience. At the NYPD the winds were always shifting.

An hour later, as his mind was drifting into a state of pleasantly numb emptiness, Madeleine put her book aside and asked, “Were you ever able to get back in contact with that depressed accountant you were worried about—the one with the big gun?”

“Not yet.”

The question refilled his mind with a tangle of questions and anxieties, and all hope of a restful night vanished. His thoughts and fitful dreams were infested with repetitive images of guns, ice picks, burning buildings, black umbrellas, smashed heads.

At sunrise he fell into a deep sleep, from which the sharp trill of his alarm roused him an hour later.

By the time he’d showered, dressed, and had his wake-up coffee in hand, Madeleine was already outside, loosening the soil in one of the garden beds.

He recalled she’d said something recently about getting the sugar-snap peas planted.

How bland the morning felt—in the way that mornings often felt bland, unthreatening, uncomplicated. Each morning—assuming that some minimal intervention of sleep had demarcated it from the day before—created the illusion of a new beginning, a kind of freedom from the past. Humans, it seemed, were truly diurnal creatures, not simply in the sense of being non-nocturnal but in the sense of being designed for living one day at a time—one separated day at a time. Uninterrupted consciousness could tear a man to pieces. No wonder the CIA used sleep deprivation as a torture. A mere seventy-two hours of uninterrupted living—seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking—could make a man wish he were dead.

The sun sets and we sleep. The sun rises and we wake. We wake and, ever so briefly, ever so blindly, we enjoy the fantasy of beginning anew. Then, without fail, reality reasserts its presence.

That morning, as he stood at the kitchen window with his coffee, gazing contemplatively down over the stubbly pasture, reality reasserted itself in the form of a dark figure astride a dark motorcycle, motionless, between the pond and the burned timbers of the barn.

Gurney put down his coffee, slipped on a jacket and a pair of low boots, and stepped outside. The figure on the motorcycle remained still. The air smelled more like winter than like spring. Four days after the fire, it still carried a hint of ashiness.

Gurney began walking slowly down the pasture path. The rider kick-started his machine—a big, muddy motocross bike—and began creeping erratically up the path from the low end, moving no faster than Gurney was walking. The result was that they met approximately in the middle of the field. It wasn’t until the man flipped up his visor that Gurney recognized the intense eyes of Max Clinter.

“You should have told me you were coming,” said Gurney in his unruffled way. “I have a meeting this morning. You might have missed me.”

“Didn’t know I was coming till I was coming,” said Clinter—as edgy as Gurney was calm. “Awful lot of items on my list, hard to decide on the right order. Right order is the key. You understand that things are coming to a head?” His engine was still running.

“I understand the Good Shepherd is back, or someone wants us to think so.”

“Oh, he’s back. I feel it in my bones—the bones that got broken ten years ago. The evil f*cker is definitely back.”

“What can I do for you, Max?”

“I came to ask you a question.” His eyes sparkled.

“If you’d left a number when you called me, I’d have called you back.”

“When you didn’t pick up, I took it as a sign.”

“A sign of what?”

“That it’s always better to ask a question face-to-face. Better to see a man’s eyes, not just hear the voice. So here’s my question: Where do you stand on this Ram-shit business?”

“Say that again?”

“World is full of evil, Mr. Gurney. Evil and its mirror. Murder and the media. Need to know where you stand on that.”

“You’re asking how I feel about news coverage of violence? How do you feel about it?”

A rough laugh burst from Clinter’s throat. “Drama for idiots! Orchestrated by maggots! Exaggeration, garbage, and lies! That’s what ‘news coverage’ is, Mr. Gurney. The glorification of ignorance! The manufacture of conflict for profit! The sale of anger and resentment as entertainment! RAM News, the vilest of all. Spewing bile and shit for the profit of pigs!”

Patches of white spittle had accumulated at the corners of Clinter’s mouth.

“You seem pretty full of anger yourself,” said Gurney placidly.

“Full of anger? Oh, yes! Full of it, you might even say consumed by it, driven by it. But I’m not selling it. I’m not a fat mouth selling anger on RAM News. My anger is not for sale.”

Clinter’s engine was still idling, more roughly now. He gave the throttle a twist, revving it up to a screaming roar.

“So you’re not a salesman,” said Gurney when the roar subsided. “But what are you, Max? I can’t quite figure you out.”

“I’m what that evil f*cker made me. I’m the wrath of God.”

“Where’s the Humvee?”

“Funny you should ask.”

“Any chance you were in the vicinity of Cayuga Lake the day before yesterday?”

Clinter stared at him long and hard. “There’s a chance, yes.”

“Mind if I ask why?”

Another appraising stare. “I was there by special invitation.”

“Sorry?”

“His opening move.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Got a text message from the Shepherd—an invitation to meet him on the road, finish what we left unfinished. Foolish of me to take his words at face value. I wondered why he didn’t show, couldn’t figure it out, till I heard the morning news. The Blum murder. He set me up, don’t you see? Had me driving by her house, back and forth, full of hate and hunger. Hunger to get even. He knew I’d show up. Okay, then. One point for him. Next one’s for me.”

“I don’t suppose the source of the message could be traced?”

“To a prepaid anonymous cell phone? Not worth the effort. But tell me something. How’d you know I was out by the lake?”

“Door-to-door interviews the day after the murder. Apparently a couple of people remembered the vehicle. They told the cops, and a cop told me.”

Clinter’s eyes flashed with vindication. “See? A f*cking setup! Designed to produce the result it produced.”

“So you decided to get out of your house and hide the Humvee?”

“Until it’s needed.” He paused, licked his lips, wiped his mouth with the back of a black-gloved hand. “Thing of it is, I don’t know how deep the setup goes, and if they were to pull me in for questioning or hold me on suspicion, I’d be in no position to deal with the enemy. You understand my difficulty?”

“I think so.”

“Could you be clearer whose side you stand on?”

“I stand where I am, Max. I’m on no one’s side but my own.”

“Fair enough.” Clinter revved his engine to the redline once again, holding it there for at least five deafening seconds before letting it fall back to idle. He reached into an inside pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out what appeared to be a business card. It had no name or address on it, however, just a phone number. He handed it to Gurney. “My cell. Always with me. Let me know anything you think I might need to know. Secrets create collisions. Here’s hoping we don’t collide.”

Gurney slipped the card into his pocket. “A question before you go, Max. I have the impression you took a longer look than anyone else at the personal lives of the victims. I’m wondering what stuck in your mind.”

“Stuck in my mind? Like what?”

“When you think of the victims or their families, is there any little oddity that bubbles to the surface—anything that might connect them all together?”

Clinter looked thoughtful, then recited the names in a kind of rapid rhythmic litany: “Mellani, Rotker, Sterne, Stone, Brewster, Blum.” The thoughtful look deepened into a frown. “Plenty of oddities. Connections are more elusive. I spent weeks, years on the Internet. Followed names to news stories, news stories to more names, organizations, companies, back and forth, one thing leading to ten other things. Bruno Mellani and Harold Blum went to the same high school in Brooklyn, different years. Ian Sterne’s son had a girlfriend who was one of the victims of the White Mountain Strangler. She was a senior at Dartmouth at the very same time that Jimi Brewster was there as a freshman. Sharon Stone may once have shown a house to Roberta Rotker, whose Rottweilers came from a kennel in Williamstown two miles down the road from Dr. Brewster’s estate. I could go on. But you get my point? Connections of a sort, with significance yet to be determined.”

A cold gust swept across the pasture, bending the stiff, dry weeds.

Gurney stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. “You never found a thread that connected them all?”

“Not a thing, except the f*cking cars. Of course, I was the only one looking. I know what my colleagues were thinking: The cars are the obvious connection, so why look for a second connection?”

“But you think there is one, don’t you?”

“I don’t think there is. I’m sure there is. A bigger scheme that no one’s figured out. But we’re past that now.”

“Past it?”

“The Shepherd’s on the move. Setting me up. To finish me off. All coming to a head. So much for thinking and weighing and figuring. The time for thinking’s behind us. It’s time for combat. Got to go. Time’s running out.”

“One last question, Max: Does the statement ‘Let the devil sleep’ mean anything to you?”

“Not a thing.” His eyes widened. “It’s an eerie kind of saying, though, isn’t it? Pushes one’s mind in a peculiar direction. Where’d you hear it?”

“In a dark basement.”

Clinter stared at Gurney for a long moment. “Sounds like a good place for it.” He adjusted his black helmet, revved his engine, gave a small military salute, pivoted the bike in a rapid one-eighty, and made his way down the hill.

When bike and rider were out of sight, Gurney trudged back up to the house, mulling over the odd little “links” Clinter had found among the families. It brought to mind the six-degrees-of-separation concept and the related likelihood that any significant probing of people’s lives might turn up a surprising number of places where their paths had crossed.

The elephant in the room continued to be, as Clinter had put it, “the f*cking cars.”

Back in the kitchen, Gurney had another cup of coffee. Madeleine came into the house through the mudroom and asked mildly, “Friend of yours?”

“Max Clinter.” He began to relate what the man had told him, but he noticed the time on the clock. “Sorry, it’s later than I thought. I need to be in Sasparilla at nine forty-five.”

“And I’m on my way to the bathroom.”

A few minutes later, he called in to her that he was leaving. She called out for him to be careful.

“Love you,” he said.

“Love you,” she said.

Five minutes after that, when he was about a mile down the mountain road, he saw a Priority Mail truck coming up toward him. There were only two other houses between that point and his own, both occupied mainly on weekends, meaning that the delivery was probably for him or for Madeleine. He pulled over and waved as he got out of his car.

The driver stopped, recognized him, retrieved a Priority envelope from the back of the truck, and handed it to him. After the exchange of a few commiserating words about the too-chilly spring, the driver departed and Gurney opened the envelope, which was addressed to him.

Inside the outer envelope was a plain manila envelope, which he also opened, extracting a single sheet of paper. He read:

Greed spreads in a family like septic blood in bathwater. It infects everyone it touches. Therefore the wives and children you hold up as objects of sorrow and pity shall also be cut down. The children of greed are evil, and evil are those whom they embrace. Therefore they, too, shall be cut down. Whomsoever you hold up for the fools of the world to console, they all shall be cut down, whether related by blood or by marriage to the children of greed.

To consume the product of greed is to consume its stain. The fruit leaves its mark. The beneficiaries of greed bear the guilt of greed, and they must bear its punishment. They will die in the spotlight of your praise. Your praise shall be their undoing. Your pity is a poison. Your sympathy condemns them to death.

Can you not see the truth? Have you gone blind?

The world has gone mad. Greed masquerades as laudable ambition. Wealth pretends to be proof of talent and worth. The channels of communication have fallen into the hands of monsters. The worst of the worst are exalted.

With devils in pulpits and angels ignored, it falls to the honest to punish what the mad world rewards.

These are the true and final words of the Good Shepherd.