Let the Devil Sleep

Chapter 39



Blood and Shadows





When she got home from her clinic meeting, exhausted and indignant, Madeleine seemed to be on her own wavelength. After a few comments about the miseries built into bureaucracies, she headed for bed, War and Peace tucked under her arm.

Shortly after that, Kim said something about wanting to be fresh and rested for the following day’s meeting with Rudy Getz, said good night, and went upstairs.

Then Kyle followed.

When Gurney heard Madeleine click off her reading light, he closed up the woodstove, checked that the doors and windows were locked, washed a few glasses that had been left in the sink, found himself yawning, and decided it was time to go to bed himself.

As weary and overloaded as he felt, however, going to bed was a very different thing from going to sleep. The main effect of lying there in the dark was to create a limitless space in which the elements of the Good Shepherd case could whirl around, untethered to the real world.

His feet were sweating and cold at the same time. He wanted to put on warm socks but couldn’t muster the motivation to get out of bed. As he gazed gloomily out the large, curtainless window nearest him, it struck him that the silver moonlight was covering the high pasture like the phosphorescence of a dead fish.

Restlessness finally forced him to get up and get dressed. He went out and sat in one of the armchairs near the woodstove. The woodstove at least felt pleasantly warm. A scattering of red embers gleamed on the grate. Sitting up seemed to offer a more stable geometry for his thoughts, a firmer position from which he could approach the case.

What did he know for sure?

He knew that the Good Shepherd was intelligent, unflappable under pressure, and risk-averse. Thorough in his planning, meticulous in his execution. He was absolutely indifferent to human life. He was hell-bent on keeping The Orphans of Murder from proceeding. He was equally adept with a cannon-size handgun and an intimate ice pick.

Risk aversion was the characteristic that Gurney kept coming back to. Could that be the key? It seemed to underlie so many aspects of the case. For example, the patient scouting of ideal locations for his attacks, the exclusive choice of left-hand curves to minimize the chance of post-shot collisions, the costly disposal of each weapon after a single use, the preference for inconspicuousness over convenience in the choice of the parking spot for the Blum murder, and the recurrent investment of time and thought in the creation of elaborate smoke screens—from the manifesto itself to the forged posting on Ruth’s Facebook page.

This was a man determined to shield himself at any cost.

At any cost in time, money, and other people’s lives.

That raised an interesting question. What other safety-ensuring, risk-minimizing tactics might he have employed in addition to those that had already come to light? Or, put another way, what other risks might he have faced in his homicidal endeavors, and how might he have decided to cope with them?

Gurney needed to put himself in the Good Shepherd’s shoes.

He asked himself what possibilities he’d be most concerned about if he were planning to shoot someone in a car at night on a lonely road. One concern came immediately to mind: What if he missed? And what if the intended victim caught a glimpse of his license plate? It probably wouldn’t happen, but it was a realistic enough possibility to worry a serious risk avoider.

Professional criminals often used stolen cars on their jobs, but the danger of keeping and driving a stolen car for three weeks, long after it would have been reported and entered in law-enforcement databases, seemed an unlikely strategy for minimizing risk. Alternatively, stealing a fresh car for each attack would create another kind of exposure. Not a scenario that the Good Shepherd would be comfortable with.

So what would he do?

Perhaps partially obscure the plate number with the application of a bit of mud? True, an obscured plate was a ticketable infraction, but so what? That risk was inconsequential in comparison to the risk that would be eliminated.

What else might the Good Shepherd worry about?

Gurney found himself staring at the embers on the woodstove grate, his mind refusing to focus. He rose from his chair, switched on the floor lamp, and went over to the sink island to make himself a cup of coffee. He’d long ago discovered that one way to get to a solution was to step away from the problem and go on to something else. The brain, relieved of the pressure to move in a particular channel, often finds its own way. As one of his born-and-bred Delaware County neighbors had once said, “The beagle can’t catch the rabbit till you let him off the leash.”

So on to something else. Or back to something else.

Back to the discomfort he’d felt when Kyle was insisting that no one had followed him and Kim to the city or back to Walnut Crossing. Gurney had seen no point in sharing his discomfort at the time, but now he needed to resolve the question that had been troubling him. He got the three flashlights out of the sideboard drawer, tried each one, and selected the one whose batteries seemed the least drained. Then he went to the mudroom, put on his paint-spattered barn jacket, turned on the light by the side door, and stepped outside.

It was cold now, not merely chilly. He got down on the frozen grass in front of Kim’s car to check the clearance between the undercarriage and the ground. It wasn’t sufficient for what he had in mind, so he went back into the house for her keys.

He found them in her bag on the coffee table by the fireplace.

Back outside, he went to the tractor shed and got the pair of inclined metal ramps that he normally used for elevating the riding mower when the blades needed changing. He placed the ramps in front of the Miata, then drove it gently forward and upward until the front end was an extra eight inches or so off the ground. Then he set the brake and returned to his position on the frozen grass. Lying on his back, he wriggled under the raised car with his flashlight.

It didn’t take long to find what he’d suspected and feared might be there. It was a black metal box not much larger than a pack of cigarettes, held by a magnet to one of the forward frame components. A wire emerging from the box ran upward in the direction of the car’s battery.

He wriggled out from under the car, backed it down off the ramps, went into the house, and replaced Kim’s keys in her bag.

He had some thinking to do. The discovery of a GPS location transmitter on the Miata was not exactly a game changer, but it certainly added a disturbing new dimension. And it demanded a decision: to leave it there or not.

As he began working his way through the implications of each option, a backlog of other issues kept intruding. He decided to get rid of them, at least temporarily, with a phone call.

It was 11:30 P.M., and the chances of Hardwick’s picking up were slim, but leaving a message would serve Gurney’s mind-clearing purposes. As expected, the call went to voice mail.

“Hey, Jack, more pain-in-the-ass questions for you. Is there an easily accessible state database of ten-year-old traffic citations? Specifically, I’m wondering about obscured-plate citations issued in the upstate counties during the period of the Good Shepherd murders. Also, any progress yet with the White Mountain Strangler details?”

After he ended the call, he went back to pondering the GPS-locator situation. The fact that it was hardwired to the car’s electrical system meant that, unlike a battery system with a limited transmission life, it could have been installed quite some time ago and still be operational. The installation questions were when?, why?, and by whom? No doubt it was the same person who was monitoring the bugs in Kim’s apartment. It could be her obsessed ex-boyfriend stalker, but Gurney had a feeling the situation might be more complicated than that.

In fact, it was entirely possible that …

He went to the mudroom, put his barn jacket back on, and went out again to the parking area.

He moved the ramps from the front of the Miata to the front of the Outback. Having forgotten his keys and flashlight, he returned to the house and got them, then started his car and repeated the earlier process.

Half expecting to find a similar tracking device, he searched the front undercarriage thoroughly, but he found nothing. He opened the hood and searched the engine compartment. Still nothing. He traced the battery wiring to its various connections and found nothing out of place.

As a final bit of reassurance, he moved the ramps around from the front to the back and reversed the car up onto them. He slid under the elevated rear end with his flashlight.

And there it was. A second black box, slightly larger than the first to accommodate a battery, was magnetized to the top of one of the rear bumper supports. The brand and general specs printed on the side of the device indicated it was from the same manufacturer and functionally equivalent to the one on Kim’s car, except for the power source.

The reason for the difference could have a number of explanations, but an obvious one was the different installation time required—at least half an hour for the wired version and virtually no time at all for the battery version. All things being equal, wired power was preferable—which suggested that whoever had installed them might have had more extended access to Kim’s car than to the Outback. Which, of course, brought Meese again to mind.

It was after midnight now, but sleep was out of the question. Gurney got a notepad and pen from his desk in the den and spent some cramped time under each car, copying down the information printed on the trackers so he could look up their performance parameters on the manufacturer’s website. GPS-based trackers all worked pretty much the same way, transmitting location coordinates that could be displayed as an icon on a map, viewable through appropriate software on virtually any computer with an Internet connection. The cost variability among the commercially available systems related to range, positional precision, software sophistication, and real-time accuracy. The technology had become, even at high levels of performance, fairly inexpensive—and therefore accessible to just about anyone who wanted it.

As he was pulling himself out from under the Miata for the second time that night, Gurney felt a vibration on his right hip, which startled him. He instinctively linked it to what he was doing, thinking it was somehow caused by the GPS device. A moment later he realized it was his phone, which he’d earlier set on vibrate to avoid waking anyone in the house if and when Hardwick got back to him.

As he scrambled to his feet, he pulled the phone from his pocket and saw Hardwick’s name on the ID screen.

“That was fast,” said Gurney.

“Fast? The hell are you talking about?”

“Fast answers to my questions.”

“What questions?”

“The ones I left on your voice mail.”

“I don’t check my voice mail in the middle of the night. That’s not why I’m calling you.”

Gurney had a sickening premonition. Or maybe he just knew the shifting tones of Hardwick’s voice well enough to recognize the sound of death. He waited for the announcement.

“Lila Sterne. Wife of the dentist. On the floor, inside their front door. Ice pick to the heart. That makes three current, plus the six oldies. Total of nine. No end in sight. Thought you’d want to know. Didn’t think anyone else at this point would bother to tell you.”

“Jesus Christ. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. One every night.”

“So who’s next? Any bets on Wednesday’s ice pick?” Hardwick’s tone had shifted again—this time into the cynical register that went through Gurney like nails on a blackboard.

He understood the basic police need for detachment and black humor, but Hardwick always seemed to go beyond the necessary. That excess was the surface reason for Gurney’s reaction, but he knew there was something deeper, something in that tone that reminded him of his father.

“Thanks for the information, Jack.”

“Hey, what are friends for, right?”

Gurney went into the house and stood in the middle of the kitchen, trying to absorb all the data encountered in the past hour. He stood at the sideboard. With the kitchen lights on, he couldn’t see out the window. So he turned them off. The moon was just a fraction shy of full—a ball with one slightly flattened side. The moonlight was bright enough to give the grass a gray sheen and the trees at the edge of the pasture distinct black shadows. Gurney squinted and thought he could just make out the drooping branches of the hemlocks.

Then he thought he saw something moving. He held his breath, leaning over closer to the window. As he leaned forward on the top of the sideboard, he uttered a sharp yelp at a stabbing pain that shot up through his right wrist. He knew, even before he saw the damage, that he’d carelessly pressed his hand down on the razor-edged head of the arrow that had been lying there for a week, and it had sliced deeply into the flesh. By the time he got the light back on, blood was pooling in his upturned palm and dripping between his fingers onto the floor.