Let the Devil Sleep

Chapter 37



Willing to Kill





“Oh, God!” said Madeleine, wincing. “Who found him like that?”

She was standing at the sink island, a half-drained colander of noodles in her hands. Gurney was sitting on a high stool across from her. He’d been relating the low points, difficulties, and conflicts of his day—something that didn’t come naturally to him. Never had. He blamed it on his genes. His father had never admitted to being disturbed by anything, never admitted to experiencing fear or anger or confusion. “Speech is silver, but silence is golden” was his father’s favorite aphorism. In fact, until Gurney learned different in high school, he thought that was the famous “golden rule.”

His first instinct was still to say nothing about anything he felt. But lately he’d been trying to make small advances against this lifelong habit. His injuries last autumn had diminished his tolerance for stress, and he’d discovered that sharing some of his thoughts and feelings with Madeleine seemed to help, seemed to relieve the pressure.

So he sat on the stool by the sink, feeling awkward, narrating the day’s disturbances, answering her questions as best he could.

“One of his customers found him. Stone made a living as a specialty baker for some local inns and B&Bs. One of the inn owners came by to pick up an order of cookies. Gingersnaps. She noticed that the front door wasn’t completely closed. When Stone didn’t answer her knocking, she opened the door herself. And there he was. Just like Ruth Blum. On his back in the entry hall. With the handle of an ice pick protruding just below his sternum.”

“God, how awful! What did she do?”

“Apparently called the police.”

Madeleine shook her head slowly, then blinked, looking surprised to find herself still holding the colander. She emptied the steaming noodles into a serving platter. “That was the end of your day in Sasparilla?”

“Pretty much.”

She went to the stove and got a pan in which she’d been sautéing asparagus and mushrooms. She tipped the mixture onto the noodles and put the empty pan in the sink. “The confrontation you were telling me about with that Trout person—how concerned are you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“He sounds like an officious ass.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt about that.”

“But you’re worried that he might be a dangerous ass?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

She brought the noodle-asparagus-mushroom platter to the table, then got plates and silverware. “This is all I cooked tonight. If you want to add meat, there are some leftover meatballs in the fridge.”

“This is fine.”

“Because there are plenty of meatballs, and—”

“Really, this is fine. Perfect. By the way, I forgot to mention, I suggested to Kyle that he and Kim come back up here for a couple of days.”

“When?”

“Now. Starting tonight.”

“I mean when did you suggest it?”

“I called them on my way home from Sasparilla. The fact that they got that message in the mail means the sender knows where Kyle lives. So I thought it might be safer—”

Madeleine frowned. “The ‘sender’ also knows where we live.”

“It just … feels better to have them up here. Strength in numbers, maybe?”

They ate in silence for several minutes.

Then Madeleine put down her fork, her food only half finished, and gave her plate a small nudge toward the center of the table.

Gurney looked at her. “Is something wrong?”

“ ‘Is something wrong?’ ” She stared at him incredulously. “Did you really ask me that?”

“No, I mean … Christ, I don’t know what I mean.”

“It seems that all hell’s breaking loose,” she said. “Quite literally.”

“I don’t disagree.”

“So what’s your plan?”

She’d asked him the same question after the barn burned down. It was more unsettling now, because the situation had deteriorated so rapidly. People were dying, with ice picks rammed through their hearts. The FBI team seemed more intent on vilifying him and protecting themselves than discovering the truth. Holdenfield had insidiously undercut him with the “traumatic brain injury” and “psychological impairment” ammunition she’d fed to Trout. Bullard might be a semi-ally at the moment, but Gurney knew how quickly that alliance would evaporate if she decided it was in her interest to make peace with Trout.

But that wasn’t all. Beneath and beyond the tangle of ugly specifics and concrete threats, he had a sense of accelerating evil, the feeling of a faceless doom descending on him, on Kim, on Kyle, on Madeleine. Whatever devil that little recording in the basement had warned him to let sleep was awake and abroad in the land. And all Gurney had as a “plan” was his determination to keep studying the puzzle pieces, to keep searching for the hidden picture, to keep poking at the official house of cards until it collapsed—or until its defenders succeeded in dragging him away.

“I have no plan,” he said. “But if you have the time, there’s something I’d like you to look at with me.”

She glanced up at the big Regulator clock on the wall. “I have about an hour, maybe a little less. We have yet another meeting at the clinic. What do you want me to look at?”

He led her into the den, and as he downloaded the Jimi Brewster video file that Kim had sent to him, he explained what little he knew of it.

They settled into their chairs in front of the computer screen.

The video itself began with a segment that appeared to have been shot from the passenger seat of Kim’s car as it approached a roadside sign in a snowbank announcing entry into Turnwell, the virtually nonexistent northern Catskills village where Jimi Brewster picked up his mail.

His actual residence turned out to be far up into the hills, away from the bleak cluster of tumbledown homes and abandoned stores that made up the village itself. The only active establishments appeared to be a bar with a filthy front window, a gas station with one pump, and a post office in a cinder-block building the size of a one-car garage.

Kim’s car—and video—proceeded up a rutted road with snowbanks on either side, separating it from more tumbledown buildings and trees that seemed long dead rather than just seasonably leafless. Absorbing this, Gurney was struck that Turnwell represented a country environment that was as far removed from Williamstown, where Jimi’s father had lived, as the dark side of the moon. He wondered if the cultural and aesthetic distance constituted an intentional statement.

The question was increasingly on his mind as the video proceeded.

Also, the question of who was wielding the camera. Presumably Robby Meese, a fact that would place this visit to Jimi Brewster sometime prior to the breakup.

The car slowed as it approached a small house on the right. The house and the bleak property surrounding it showed an aggressive disregard for appearances. Nothing, from the posts supporting the sagging roof over the tilting porch to the door of the adjoining outhouse, was set at a right angle to anything else. In Gurney’s experience a blatant disregard for the ninety-degree concept was usually an indication of poverty, physical incapacity, depression, or a cognitive disorder.

The man who emerged from the shabby front door onto the porch was slim and nervous-looking, with darting eyes. He was wearing black jeans and a T-shirt of the same orangey color as his short hair and close-cropped beard.

His having been a freshman in college twenty years earlier would make him at least thirty-seven, but he looked a decade younger. The CHALLENGE EVERYTHING aphorism printed in bold letters on the front of his shirt lent support to the image of youthfulness.

“Come in,” he said, waving his guests impatiently toward the door. “It’s f*cking freezing out here.”

The camera followed him inside. The back of his shirt proclaimed, AUTHORITY SUCKS.

The interior of the house was as uninviting as the outside. The furniture in the small front room was minimal and worn-looking. There was a colorless couch against one wall and a small rectangular table pushed against the opposite wall with a folding chair on each of its exposed sides.

There was a closed door on each side of the couch. A door in the rear of the room provided a glimpse of a narrow kitchen. The light was coming primarily from a wide window over the table.

As the camera panned around the cramped space, Kim’s voice could be heard. “Robby, turn that off until we get settled.” The camera continued to run, zooming in slowly on the slight, red-haired man, who was shifting his weight from foot to foot with a twitchy energy. It was hard to tell whether he was smiling or grimacing.

“Robby. The camera. Off. Please.” Despite Kim’s peremptory tone, the video continued for at least ten seconds more before fading to black.

When the picture and sound resumed, Kim and Jimi Brewster were sitting across from each other at the table. The picture angle and framing suggested that Meese was probably operating the camera from somewhere on the couch.

“All right,” said Kim with the kind of enthusiasm Gurney remembered seeing in her the day he met her. “Let’s get right into it. I want to say again, Jimi, how much I appreciate your willingness to take part in this documentary project. By the way, would you prefer that I call you Jimi or Mr. Brewster?”

He shook his head—a small, jerky movement. “Doesn’t matter. Whatever.” He began drumming his fingernails lightly in a staccato rhythm on the tabletop.

“Okay. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll call you Jimi. As I explained while we had the camera turned off, this conversation we’re having now is a preliminary run-through of some questions I’ll be asking you at a future date in a more formal—”

He stopped his drumming abruptly and broke in. “Do you think I killed him?”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what everyone secretly wonders.”

“I’m sorry, Jimi, but I’m not following—”

Again he interrupted her. “But if I killed him, then I must have killed them all. Which is why they couldn’t arrest me, because I have an alibi for the first four.”

“I’m lost here, Jimi. I never thought that you killed—”

“I wish I had.”

Kim paused, looked stunned. “You wish … that you’d killed your father?”

“And all the others. Do you think I look like the Good Shepherd?”

“What?”

“I mean, like the way you imagine the Good Shepherd would look?”

“I never … I never really pictured him.”

Brewster started drumming his fingernails again. “Because he did everything in the dark?”

“The dark? No, I just … I just never pictured him, I don’t know why.”

“Do you think he’s a monster?”

“Physically … a monster?”

“Physically, mentally, spiritually—any way, every way, whatever way. Do you think he’s a monster?”

“He did kill six people.”

“Six monsters. Which makes him a hero, right?”

“Why do you think that all his victims were monsters?”

During this dialogue the camera had been zooming in very gradually, like an intruder on tiptoes, as if to explore the slightest tic or wrinkle in their faces.

Jimi Brewster’s eyelids were quivering without quite blinking. “Easy. You piss away a hundred thousand dollars for a car—a f*cking car—you are, de facto, an evil piece of shit.” His voice was intense and accusatory and seemed, like everything else about him, less mature than his chronological years. He looked and sounded more like a troubled member of a high-school chess club than a man in his late thirties.

“An evil piece of shit? Is that the way you felt about your father?”

“The great surgeon? The f*ckface money-grubbing piece-of-shit surgeon?”

“Your father. You still hate him as much now as you did back then?”

“Is my mother still as dead now as she was back then?”

“Sorry?”

“My mother killed herself with sleeping pills he prescribed for her. The great genius surgeon. Who got his genius head blown off. You want to hear a secret? When they called me to tell me, I made them repeat it three times. They thought I was in a state of shock. I wasn’t. I was in a state of such pure joy that I wanted to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I wanted to hear the news again and again. It was the happiest day of my life.” Brewster paused, radiating excitement, fixated on Kim’s face.

“Aha!” he cried. “There it is! I can see it in your eyes!”

“See what?”

“The big question.”

“What big question?”

“Everybody’s big question: Could Jimi Brewster be the Good Shepherd?”

“As I said before, that idea never occurred to me.”

“But it’s there now. Don’t lie. You’re thinking, ‘All that hate. Was it enough hate to blow away six pieces of shit?’ ”

“You said you had an alibi. If you had an alibi—”

He interrupted her. “Do you believe that some people can be physically in one place and spiritually someplace else?”

“I … I’m not sure what that means.”

“There are Indian yogis that people have reported seeing in two different places at the same time. Time and space may not be what we think they are. I seem to be here, but I might also be somewhere else.”

“Sorry, Jimi, I don’t really—”

“Every night, in my mind, I drive around on dark roads, looking for genius doctors—pill pushers, robotic shits—and when I see one in his shiny shit car, I aim my gun at him, leveling the gun sight midway between his temple and his ear. I squeeze the trigger. There’s a blast of light from heaven—the white light of truth and death—and half his f*cking head is gone!”

The pace and loudness of the fingernail drumming increased.

The camera zoomed in on Brewster’s face. He was staring wildly across at Kim, seemingly awaiting her reaction, gnawing at his lower lip. The camera zoomed out again to include them both in the frame.

Instead of reacting directly, she took a deep breath and changed the subject. “You went to college?”

He seemed taken aback, disappointed. “Yes.”

“Where?”

“Dartmouth.”

“What was your major?”

His mouth widened in a little spasm that may have been a one-second smile. “Pre-med.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Why?”

“From what you’ve said about your feelings toward your father, I didn’t think you’d want to follow in his footsteps.”

“I didn’t.” This time his mouth spasm was more recognizably a smile, though hardly a warm one. “I quit a month before graduation.”

Kim frowned. “Just to disappoint him?”

“Just to see if he knew I existed.”

“Did he?”

“Not really. All he said was that it was stupid of me to quit. Like he might have said it was stupid of me to have left my car window open in the rain. He wasn’t even angry. He didn’t care enough to be angry. He was so f*cking calm about everything. You should have seen how f*cking calm he was at my mother’s funeral.”

“That was a lot of his money you wasted by not graduating. Did he care about that?”

“He spent eight hours a day in the operating room, five days a week. The son of a bitch could make enough money in two weeks to pay for my four years at Dartmouth. My room, board, and tuition was a f*cking flyspeck in his life. Like my mother was. Like I was. He drove cars that meant more to him than we did.”

Kim said nothing. She raised her interlocked fingers and pressed them against her lips, closing her eyes, as though trying to stifle some unruly emotion. The silence went on for a long time. She cleared her throat before speaking again. “How do you live?”

He burst out in a harsh laugh. “How does anyone live?”

“I mean, how do you earn a living?”

“Is that some kind of ironic point you’re trying to make?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re thinking that I live off the money he left me. You’re thinking that his money, which I pretend to hate, is actually supporting me. You’re thinking, ‘What a creepy little hypocrite!’ You’re thinking I’m exactly like him, that all I ever wanted was the f*cking money.”

“I wasn’t thinking any of those things. It was just an innocent question.”

He let out another harsh laugh. “A TV reporter with an innocent question? That’s like a f*cking devil with a heart of gold. Or a surgeon with a soul. Yeah. Right. An innocent question.”

“You can believe what you want about it, Jimi. Does it have an answer?”

“Ah. Now I see what this is about. You want to know how we all made out. Our inheritances. How much we got. Is that what you want to know?”

“I want to know whatever you want to tell me.”

“You mean, whatever I want to tell you about the money. Because that’s what your f*cking TV audience would want to know about. Financial pornography. Okay. Fine. The f*cking money. The majorly screwed one was the pathetic accountant, whose sister got everything because of her f*cked-up kids. Then there was the flaming baker, who mainly inherited his big blond mama’s debts. The sweet little lawyer’s wife did okay, ended up with two or three mil, mainly because her husband had a shitload of term insurance. This is the kind of crap they shared in their f*cking support group. This is the kind of crap you want to know about?”

“Whatever you want to tell me.”

“Right. Sure. Fine. Larry Sterne ended up with his father’s medical-dental beauty factory, which I’m sure is worth millions. Roberta, the scary lady with the scary dogs, got her whore-f*cking father’s multimillion-dollar toilet business. And of course there’s me. My greedy shit of a father had a brokerage account at Fidelity that was worth a little over twelve million dollars when he bit the bullet. And in case your truth-seeking TV audience wants the latest update, that brokerage account, now in my name, is worth around seventeen million. Which obviously raises a question in your mind: ‘If little Jimi Brewster has such a f*cking pile of money, why’s he living in this f*cking dump?’ The answer is simple. Can you guess what it is?”

“No, Jimi, I can’t.”

“Oh, I think you could if you tried, but I’ll tell you. I’m saving every cent of it to give to the Good Shepherd, if they ever catch him.”

“You want to give your father’s money to the man who killed him?”

“Every bloody cent. It should make a nice legal defense fund, don’t you think?”