Let the Devil Sleep

Chapter 3



The Impact of Murder





Routes 17, 81, and 88 converge in the neighborhood of Binghamton, which is a good hour from Walnut Crossing. Gurney wondered if Kim’s optimistic time estimate had arisen from a lack of information or an abundance of enthusiasm. But that was the least of the questions on his mind as he watched the perky little red Miata making its way up the pasture trail to the house.

He opened the side door and stepped out onto the matted grass and gravel where his Outback was parked. The Miata pulled in next to it, and a young woman emerged, holding a slim briefcase. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a stylish blazer with the sleeves turned up.

“Would you recognize me,” she asked with a grin, “if I hadn’t told you I was coming?”

“Maybe if I had time to study your face,” he said, studying it now in its soft frame of shining brown hair, parted loosely in the middle. “It’s the same face, but it’s brighter and happier than it was that day I had lunch with you and your mother.”

She frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then laughed. “It wasn’t just that day, it was those years. I was definitely not very happy back then. It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.”

“You seem to have figured it out quicker than most people.”

She shrugged, looking around at the fields and woods. “This is beautiful. You must love it here. The air feels so clean and cool.”

“Maybe a little too cool for the first week of spring.”

“My God, you’re right! I have so much going on I can’t remember anything. It’s already spring. How could I forget that?”

“It’s easy,” he said. “Come on in. It’s warmer in the house.”

• • •

Half an hour later, Kim and Dave were sitting across from each other at the small pine breakfast table in the nook by the French doors. They were finishing the omelets, toast, and coffee that Madeleine had insisted on making when she learned that Kim had been traveling all morning with nothing to eat. Madeleine had finished first and was cleaning off the stove. Kim was telling her story from the beginning, the story behind her visit.

“It’s an idea I’ve had for years—examining the horror of murder by examining its impact on the victim’s family—I just never knew what to do with it. Sometimes I wouldn’t think about it for a while, but it would always come back, stronger than ever. I became obsessed with it—I had to do something with it. At first I thought it could be like a scholarly thing—maybe a sociology or psychology monograph. So I sent query letters out to a lot of the university presses, but I didn’t have the right academic degrees, so they had no interest in me. So I thought maybe a regular nonfiction book. But for a book you need an agent, which meant more query letters. And guess what? Zero interest. Like I’m twenty-one, twenty-two, who the hell am I? What have I written before? What are my credentials? Basically I’m just a kid. All I have is an idea. Then it finally dawns on me. Duh! This is not a book, this is television! From that point on, things started to fall into place. I saw it as a series of intimate interviews—‘reality television’ in the best sense of that term, which I realize has a pretty scuzzy sound these days, but it doesn’t have to be that way—not if it’s done with emotional truth!”

She stopped, as though suddenly affected by her own words, flashed an embarrassed smile, cleared her throat, and went on. “So anyway, I put it all together in the form of a detailed outline for my master’s thesis and submitted it to Dr. Wilson, my adviser. He told me it was a great idea, that it had real potential. He helped me put it in a commercial proposal format, made sure my legal bases were covered to give me some protection in the real world, and then he did something he said he never does: He passed it along to a production executive he knows personally at RAM-TV—a guy by the name of Rudy Getz. And Getz got back to us like a week later and said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’ ”

“Just like that?” asked Gurney.

“I was surprised, too. But Getz said that’s the way RAM operates. I’m not going to question it. The fact that I can make this idea real, that I can explore this subject …” She shook her head, as if trying to ward off some volatile emotion.

Madeleine came to the table, sat down, and said what Gurney was thinking. “This is important to you, isn’t it? I mean, really important, beyond being a career booster.”

“Oh, God, yes!”

Madeleine smiled softly. “And the heart of the idea … the part that matters so much to you …?”

“The families, the children …” Again she stopped for a second or two, evidently overcome by some image that her own speech was evoking. She slid her chair back from the table, stood, and walked around the table to the French doors that looked out over the patio, the garden, the pasture, and the forest beyond.

“It’s sort of silly, I can’t explain it,” she said, speaking with her back to them, “but I find it easier to talk about this standing up.” She cleared her throat twice before beginning in a barely audible voice. “I believe that murder changes everything forever. It steals something that can never be replaced. It has consequences that go way beyond what happens to the victim. The victim loses his life, which is a terrible thing, an unfair thing, but for him it’s over, the end. He’s lost everything that might have been, but he doesn’t know it. He doesn’t go on feeling the loss, imagining what might have been.” She raised her hands and placed her palms against the glass panes in front of her, a gesture that conveyed both great feeling and great effort at control.

She went on, a little louder. “It’s not the victim who wakes up to a half-empty bed, a half-empty house. He isn’t the one who dreams that he’s still alive, only to wake up to the pain of realizing that he’s not. He doesn’t feel the sickening rage, the heartache his death causes. He doesn’t keep seeing the empty chair at the table, hearing sounds that sound like his voice. He doesn’t keep seeing the closet full of his clothes …” Her voice was growing hoarse. She cleared her throat. “He doesn’t feel the agony—the agony of having the heart of your life torn out.”

She leaned against the glass for several long seconds, then pushed herself slowly away from it. When she turned around toward the table, her face was streaked with tears. “You know about phantom pain? The amputation phenomenon? Feeling pain in the place where your arm or your leg used to be? That’s how murder is for the family left behind. Like the aching in a phantom limb—an unbearable pain in an empty place.”

She stood perfectly still for a little while, staring at some inner landscape. Then she wiped her face roughly with her hands, emerging from behind them with a matter-of-fact determination in her eyes and voice. “To understand what murder really is, you have to talk to the families. That’s my theory, that’s my project, that’s my plan. And that’s what Rudy Getz is excited about.” She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “If it’s not too much trouble, could I have another cup of coffee?”

“I think we can manage that.” Madeleine smiled pleasantly, went to the sink island, and refilled the coffeemaker.

Gurney was leaning back in his chair, his hands steepled reflectively under his chin. No one said anything for a minute or two. The coffeemaker made its initial sputtering sounds.

Kim looked around the big farmhouse kitchen. “This is very nice,” she said. “Very homey, warm. Perfect, really. It looks like everyone’s dream of a house in the country.”

After Madeleine brought Kim’s coffee to the table, Gurney was the first to speak. “It’s clear that you have a lot of passion about this subject, that it means a great deal to you. I wish I were as clear about how I can help you.”

“What did Connie ask you to do?”

“ ‘Look over your shoulder’—I think that’s one of the phrases she used.”

“No mention of … any other problems?” It sounded to Gurney like she was making a childishly transparent effort to have the question sound casual.

“Does your ex-boyfriend qualify as a ‘problem’?”

“She brought up Robby?”

“She mentioned a Robert Meese … or Montague?”

“Meese. The Montague thing is …” She trailed off, shaking her head. “Connie thinks I need protection. I don’t. Robby is pathetic and extremely annoying, nothing I can’t handle.”

“Is he connected to your TV project?”

“Not anymore. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious.”

Just curious about what? What the hell am I getting involved in? Why am I bothering to sit here listening to some overwrought graduate student with nutty-boyfriend problems expound on her sentimental ideas about murder and her big chance at glory on America’s trashiest cable network? Time to start backing away from the quicksand.

Kim was staring at him as though she had Madeleine’s gift for reading his mind. “It’s not all that complicated. And since you’ve been generous enough to offer to help me, I should be more forthright.”

“We keep coming back to that part about my helping you, but I don’t see—”

Madeleine, who was squeezing out a sponge at the sink after washing off their omelet plates, interjected gently, “Why don’t we just listen to what Kim has to say?”

Gurney nodded. “Good idea.”

“I met Robby in the drama club a little less than a year ago. He was easily the handsomest guy on campus. Like a young Johnny Depp. About six months ago, we moved in together. For a while I felt like the luckiest person in the world. When I got totally into my murder project, he seemed supportive. In fact, when I picked the families I wanted to start interviewing, he came with me, joined in, was totally part of everything. And that … that’s when … the monster emerged.” She paused and took a sip of her coffee.

“As Robby got more involved, he started taking over. He wasn’t helping me with my project anymore—it became our project, and then he started acting like it was his project. After we’d meet with one of the families, he’d give them his card with his contact information, tell them they could get in touch with him anytime. In fact, that’s when this ridiculous Montague thing started, when he had those cards printed up: ‘Robert Montague, Documentary Productions and Creative Consultancy.’ ”

Gurney looked skeptical. “He was trying to elbow you out, steal the project?”

“It was sicker than that. Robby Meese looks like a god, but he came from a screwed-up home where bad things happened, and he spent most of his childhood in equally messed-up foster homes. Deep down he’s the most pathetically insecure person you’ll ever meet. Some of the families we were talking to, trying to sign up for official interviews—Robby was desperate to impress them. I think he’d have done anything for their approval, anything to be accepted by them. To make them like him. It was kind of disgusting.”

“What did you do about it?”

“Initially I didn’t know what to do. Then it came to a head when I discovered he’d been having discussions on his own with one of the key family members, a guy I really wanted to get to. When I confronted Robby about it, the whole thing blew up into a screaming match. That’s when I threw him out of our apartment—my apartment. And I got Connie’s lawyer to draft a nice threatening letter to keep him away from the project—my project.”

“How did he take it?”

“At first he got very nice, slimy-nice. I told him to f*ck off. Then he started telling me that messing around with old murder cases could be risky and I should be careful—that maybe I didn’t know what I was getting into. He’d call me late at night, leave messages on my phone about how he could protect me and how a lot of the people I was dealing with—including my thesis adviser—weren’t what they seemed to be.”

Gurney sat up a bit straighter in his chair. “What next?”

“Next? I told him if he didn’t leave me alone, I’d get a restraining order and have him arrested as a stalker.”

“That have any effect?”

“Depends what you mean. The calls stopped. But then the weird stuff started happening.”

Madeleine stopped what she was doing at the sink and came to the table. “Sounds like this is getting intense. Mind if I join you?”

“No problem,” said Kim. Madeleine sat down, and Kim continued. “Kitchen knives started disappearing. One day I got home from a class and I couldn’t find my cat. Eventually I heard this little meow. The cat was in one of the closets with the door closed—a closet I never used. And there was one time I overslept because the time on my alarm clock had been changed.”

“Aggravating, but fairly harmless,” said Gurney. The look on Madeleine’s face suggested strong disagreement, so he added, “I don’t mean to downplay the emotional impact that nasty pranks can have. I’m just thinking about the legally actionable degrees of harassment.”

Kim nodded. “Right. Well, the ‘pranks’ got nastier. One night I got home late and there was a drop of blood on the bathroom floor—like the size of a dime. And one of my missing kitchen knives was lying next to it.”

“My God,” said Madeleine.

“A few nights later, I started hearing these eerie sounds. Something would wake me up—I wasn’t sure what—and then I’d hear a board creaking, then nothing, then something that sounded like breathing, then nothing.”

Madeleine looked horrified.

“This is an apartment?” asked Gurney.

“It’s a small house, divided into one upstairs and one downstairs apartment, plus a basement. There are a lot of crummy houses like it outside the campus, broken up into cheap apartments for students. Right now I’m the only tenant.”

“You’re alone there?” said Madeleine, wide-eyed. “You’re a lot braver than I am. I’d get out of there so fast—”

There was a flash of anger in Kim’s eyes. “I’m not running away from that little jerk!”

“You’ve reported these incidents to the police?”

She uttered a bitter little laugh. “Sure. The blood, the knife, the sounds in the night. The cops come to the house, they poke around, they check the windows, they look bored to death. When I call and give them my name and address, I can picture them rolling their eyes. It’s pretty clear they think I’m a paranoid pain in the ass. An attention seeker. The crazy little bitch with the exaggerated boyfriend problems.”

“I assume you’ve had the locks changed?” said Gurney mildly.

“Twice. It hasn’t made any difference.”

“You think Robby Meese is responsible for all this … intimidation?”

“I don’t think it. I know it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“If you heard his voice—the calls he made to me after I threw him out? Or saw the looks on his face when we’d pass each other on campus? Then you’d know. It was the same weirdness. I don’t know how to explain it, but the stuff that’s been happening? It’s creepy, the same way Robby is creepy.”

In the ensuing silence, Kim wrapped her hands tightly around her coffee cup. It reminded Gurney of the way she was standing at the door earlier, her palms pressed against the glass. Emotion and control.

He thought about her program idea, her slant on the pain created by murder. There was truth in what she said. In some cases the wound inflicted by a killer tore a hole through a family—left spouse, children, parents desolate—filled their lives with sadness and rage.

In other cases, though, there was little grief, little emotion of any kind. Gurney had seen too many of those cases. Men who lived ugly lives and died ugly deaths. Drug dealers, pimps, career criminals, teenage gangbangers playing video games with real guns. The human devastation was breathtaking. Sometimes he had a dream, always the same, with an image from the concentration camps. A bulldozer pushing half-skeletonized bodies into a broad trench. Pushing them in like mannequins. Like rubble.

He sat gazing at the intense, dark-eyed young woman who was still grasping her lukewarm mug, leaning toward it, her shining hair hiding most of her face.

Then he glanced over at Madeleine with a question in his eyes.

She gave a tiny shrug, a hint of a smile. It felt like a nudge in the direction of action.

He looked back at Kim. “Okay. Let’s return to the basic issue. How can I help you?”