Let the Devil Sleep

Chapter 4



Like a Coffin





What she wanted was for Gurney to follow her back to her apartment in Syracuse, where she kept everything related to her project. That way he could see it all firsthand—her correspondence with potential interviewees, the two initial interviews she’d conducted and submitted as part of her proposal, her plans for the interviews yet to come, her contract with Rudy Getz at RAM-TV, the general positioning and promotional copy she was preparing for the series. He could see everything, get a feel for it, tell her what rang true, what didn’t.

He had as little appetite for driving to Syracuse as he’d had for any activity in recent months, which was close to none. But it struck him as the quickest way to discharge whatever obligation he felt toward Connie Clarke. He’d go, he’d look, he’d comment. Duty discharged. “Huge favor” granted. Then back into his cave.

The Google directions to Kim’s address that he’d printed out in the event they got separated estimated a journey of one hour and forty-nine minutes from Walnut Crossing, but there was almost no traffic on the two interstates that constituted most of the trip, and the little Miata ahead of him rarely descended to anywhere near the speed limit.

In a better mood, Gurney might have enjoyed the trip, passing through a rolling landscape of woods and meadows, wide rushing streams, farm fields with black earth newly plowed for spring planting, iconic silos and red barns. But in his state of mind, these bucolic views were reduced to a damp, muddy expanse—a wasteland of agricultural decline and bad weather.

His first sight of the environs of Syracuse reinforced his bleak thoughts. He recalled reading somewhere that the city sat at the foot of Onondaga Lake, whose fame arose from having been one of the most polluted lakes in America. It triggered a memory from his Bronx childhood—a memory of Eastchester Bay, whose murky navigation channel was constantly churned by barges and tugboats. The bay was an oily extension of Long Island Sound, in which nothing seemed to live except filthy seaweed and hideous brown crabs—armored, inedible, primeval, scuttling things—the thought of which could still raise gooseflesh on his arms.

He followed Kim’s Miata off the interstate into a neighborhood that had a worn look and no obvious zoning restrictions. He drove past a haphazard sequence of small single-family houses, spacious older homes now fractured into multiple apartments, shabby convenience stores, dreary commercial buildings, and desolate open areas surrounded by chain-link fences.

At a corner take-out place—Onondaga Princes of Pizza—the Miata turned onto a smaller side street and came to a stop in front of an Archie Bunker house. It was separated by a narrow driveway from an identical house on each side. A patch of rough earth in front—not much larger than a double grave—was in desperate need of flowers or grass. Gurney parked behind Kim and watched as she emerged from the little car, locked and double-checked both doors. She looked up at the house and along the driveway—warily, it seemed to him. As he walked over to her, she gave him a nervous smile.

“Anything wrong?” he asked.

“No, everything … seems fine.” She climbed the three steps to the front door, which was unlocked. That door, however, provided entry only to a tiny vestibule with two more doors. The one on the right had two serious-looking locks, which she opened with separate keys. Before turning the knob, she looked at it suspiciously and gave it a couple of sharp yanks.

That door opened into a hallway. She led him into the first room on the right—a small IKEA-furnished living room with the bare essentials: a futon couch, a coffee table, two low wooden armchairs with loose cushions, two minimalist floor lamps, a bookcase, a two-drawer metal file cabinet, and a table being used as a desk with a straight-backed chair behind it. The floor was covered by a worn-looking earth-tone rug.

He smiled curiously. “What was that yanking on the doorknob all about?”

“There were a couple of times it came off in my hand.”

“You mean it was purposely loosened?”

“Oh, it was purposely loosened all right. Twice. The first time, the police took one look and dismissed it as a practical joke someone played on me. The second time, they didn’t even bother to send someone out. Cop on the phone seemed to think it was funny.”

“Doesn’t sound funny to me.”

“Thank you.”

“I know I already asked you this, but …”

“The answer is yes, I’m sure it’s Robby. And no, I don’t have any proof. But who else could it be?”

As she finished speaking, the doorbell rang—a complex musical chime.

“Oh, God. My mother’s idea. She gave me that when I moved in here. There used to be a buzzer, which she hated. Just a second.” She headed out of the room for the front door.

She returned a minute later with a large pizza box and two cans of Diet Coke.

“Pretty good timing. I ordered this stuff on my cell on the way up here. I figured we’d need some lunch. Pizza okay with you?”

“Pizza’s fine.”

She laid the box on the coffee table, opened it, and dragged one of the light armchairs over to the table. Gurney sat on the couch.

After they’d each eaten a slice and washed it down with some soda, she said, “Okay. Where do you want to start?”

“You had this idea about talking to the families of murder victims. So I assume the first thing you had to do was figure out which murders to pick?”

“Right.” She was watching him intently.

“There’s no shortage of homicide cases. Even if you limited yourself to New York State, even to a single year, you’d have hundreds to choose from.”

“Right.”

He leaned forward. “So tell me how you made your choices. What were the criteria?”

“The criteria changed along the way. At first I wanted to include all kinds of victims, all kinds of homicides, all kinds of families, different racial and ethnic backgrounds, different lengths of time between the crime and now. Total variety! But Dr. Wilson kept telling me, ‘Simplify, simplify.’ Minimize the variables, he said. Look for a hook, make it easy for the viewer to understand. ‘The narrower the focus, the sharper the point.’ Like maybe the dozenth time he said that, I got it. Everything started connecting, falling into place. And after that I was like, ‘Yes! This is it! I know exactly what I’m going to do!’ ”

As Gurney listened to her, he felt strangely touched by her enthusiasm. “So what did the final criteria turn out to be?”

“Pretty much everything Dr. Wilson said: Minimize the variables. Narrow the focus. Find a hook. Once I started thinking that way, the answer just sort of materialized. I saw that I could zero the whole project in on the victims of the Good Shepherd.”

“The guy who shot a bunch of Mercedes drivers eight or nine years ago?”

“Ten. Exactly ten years ago. His attacks all occurred in the spring of the year 2000.”

Gurney sat back in his chair, nodding thoughtfully, recalling the infamous series of six shootings that had half the Northeast afraid to drive at night. “Interesting. So the nature of the initiating event is the same in all six instances, elapsed time from the crime to the present is the same, same shooter, same motive, same level of investigative attention.”

“Right! And the same failure to bring the killer to justice—the same lack of closure, the same open wound. It makes the Good Shepherd case a perfect way to examine how different families react over time to the same catastrophe, how they live with the loss, how they deal with the injustice, what it does to them—especially what it does to the children. Different outcomes to the same tragedy.”

She stood and went to the filing cabinet next to the table-desk. She removed a shiny blue folder and handed it to Gurney. On the cover was a label with bold type that read, THE ORPHANS OF MURDER, A DOCUMENTARY PROPOSAL BY KIM CORAZON.

Perhaps because she noticed his gaze settle on “Corazon,” she said, “Did you think my name was Clarke?”

He thought back to the time when Connie had interviewed him for the New York magazine profile. “I think Clarke was the only family name I heard mentioned.”

“Clarke is Connie’s maiden name. She went back to it when she divorced my father, when I was a kid. His name was—is—Corazon. And so is mine.” Under the thin surface of this factual statement, there was an obvious resentment. He wondered if that resentment was the cause of her reluctance to refer to Connie as “Mom” or “Mother.”

Gurney had no desire to probe that area. He opened the folder, saw that it held a thick document, well over fifty pages. The cover page repeated the title. The second page provided a table of contents: “Concept,” “Documentary Overview,” “Style and Methodology,” “Case-Selection Criteria,” “The Good Shepherd Homicide Victims and Circumstances,” “Prospective Interviewees,” “Contact Summaries and Status,” “Initial Interview Transcripts,” “TGSMOI (Appendix).”

He went through the contents list again, more slowly. “You wrote this? Organized it this way?”

“Yes. Is there a problem?”

“Not at all.”

“What, then?”

“The way you spoke about this earlier showed a lot of passion. The organization shows a lot of logic.” What he was thinking was that her passion reminded him of Madeleine and her logic reminded him of himself. “This sounds like something I’d have written.”

She gave him a sly look. “I guess that’s a compliment, right?”

He laughed out loud for the first time that day, maybe the first time that month. After a pause he glanced back at the last item of the contents list. “I assume TGS stands for ‘The Good Shepherd.’ What about the MOI?”

“Oh, that was his actual heading on the twenty-page explanation he sent to the media and the police: ‘Memorandum of Intent.’ ”

Gurney nodded. “Now I remember. The media started calling it a ‘manifesto’—the same label they’d slapped on the Unabomber document five years earlier.”

Now it was Kim’s turn to nod. “Which kind of brings us to one of the questions I wanted to ask you—about the whole serial-killer thing. It seems kind of confusing. I mean, the Unabomber and the Good Shepherd don’t seem to have much in common with Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy—or with those monsters you arrested yourself, like Peter Piggert or that Satanic Santa guy who was mailing pieces of his victims to the local cops. Jeez! That kind of behavior isn’t even human!” A visible tremor passed through her body. She rubbed her upper arms energetically, as if to warm them.

Somewhere outside in the gray Syracuse sky, Gurney could hear the distinctive throbbing of a helicopter grow gradually louder, then fainter, then fade away into silence. “Some social scientists would be annoyed at me for this,” he said, “but the whole ‘serial killer’ concept, like a lot of the terminology in the field, has fuzzy edges. Sometimes I think these ‘scientists’ are just a self-consecrated bunch of labelers who’ve managed to form a moneymaking club. They conduct questionable research, lump similar behaviors or characteristics together into a ‘syndrome,’ give it a scientific-sounding name, then offer degree courses that allow like-minded muddleheads to memorize the labels, pass a test, and join the club.”

He noticed she was staring at him with some surprise.

Aware that he was sounding testy—and that the testiness probably had as much to do with his prevailing mood as with the state of criminology—he changed course. “The short answer to your question is that from the point of view of apparent motive there doesn’t seem to be much common ground between a cannibal turned on by power and control and a guy who claims he’s rectifying societal ills. But there may be more of a connection than you think.”

Kim’s eyes widened. “You mean, they’re both killing people? And you think that’s what it’s all about, regardless of what the motive looks like on the surface?”

Gurney was struck by her energy, her intensity. It made him smile. “The Unabomber said he was trying to eliminate the destructive effects of technology on the world. The Good Shepherd, if I remember correctly, said he was trying to eliminate the destructive effects of greed. And yet despite the intelligence apparent in their written statements, they both chose a counterproductive route to their stated goals. Killing people could never achieve what they said they wanted to achieve. There’s only one way that route makes any sense.”

Her mind seemed to race almost visibly. “You mean, if the route was actually the goal.”

“Right. We often get them reversed—the means and the end. The actions of the Unabomber and the Good Shepherd make perfect sense—if you base them on the assumption that the killing itself was the real goal—the emotional payoff—and the so-called manifestos were the enabling justifications.”

She blinked, looked like she was trying to grasp the implications for her project. “But how much would that mean … from the point of view of the victim?”

“From the point of view of the victim, it wouldn’t mean anything. For the victim, motive is irrelevant. Especially when there’s no prior personal connection between victim and killer. On a dark road, from an anonymous passing car, a bullet in the head is a bullet in the head, regardless of the motive.”

“And the families?”

“Ah, the families. Well …”

Gurney closed his eyes, thinking back slowly over his homicide career to one sad conversation after another. So many of them over the years. Over the decades. Parents. Wives. Lovers. Children. Stunned faces. Refusals to believe the dreadful news. Desperate questions. Screams. Groans. Wails. Rage. Accusations. Wild threats. Fists smashing into walls. Drunken stares. Empty stares. Old people whimpering like children. A man staggering backward as if punched. And worst of all, the ones with no reactions. Frozen faces, dead eyes. Uncomprehending, speechless, emotionless. Turning away, lighting a cigarette.

“Well …” he continued after a while, “I’ve always felt that the truth was the best thing. So I guess having a slightly better understanding of why someone they loved was killed might be a good thing for surviving family members. But remember, I’m not saying I know why the Unabomber and the Good Shepherd did what they did. They probably don’t know the reason themselves. I just know it’s not the reason they said it was.”

She gazed across the coffee table at him and seemed about to ask another question—was starting to open her mouth—when a light thump somewhere in the upper wall of the house stopped her. She sat stiffly, listening. “What do you think that was?” she asked after several long seconds, pointing toward the source of the sound.

“No idea. Maybe a knock in a hot-water pipe?”

“That’s what that would sound like?”

He shrugged. “What do you think it is?”

When she didn’t answer, he asked, “Who lives upstairs?”

“No one. At least no one is supposed to be living there. They were evicted, then they came back, the cops raided the apartment, shithead drug dealers, so they were all arrested, but they’re probably out by now anyway, so who the hell knows? This city is pretty sucky.”

“So the upstairs is vacant?”

“Yeah. Supposedly.” She looked at the coffee table, focusing on the open pizza box. “Jeez. That’s looking nasty. Should I reheat it?”

“Not for me.” He was about to say that it was time for him to get going, but he realized he hadn’t been there very long at all. It was one of those constitutional tendencies of his that had gotten worse over the past six months—the desire to minimize the amount time he spent with other people.

Holding up the shiny blue folder, he said, “I’m not sure I can go through this whole thing right now. It looks pretty detailed.”

Like a fast-moving cloud on a bright day, her look of disappointment came and went. “Maybe tonight? I mean, you can take that with you and look at it when you have time.”

He was oddly affected by her reaction—“touched” was the only word for it, the same feeling he’d had earlier, when she was telling him how she’d narrowed her focus to the Good Shepherd murders. Now he thought he understood what the feeling was about.

It was her wholehearted commitment, her energy, her hopefulness—her bright, determined youthfulness. And the fact that she was doing this alone. Alone in an unsafe house, in a desolate neighborhood, pursued by a mean-spirited stalker. He suspected that it was this combination of determination and vulnerability that was stirring his atrophied parental instinct.

“I’ll take a look at it tonight,” he said.

“Thank you.”

The throbbing sound of a helicopter again emerged faintly from the distance, grew louder, passed, faded away. She cleared her throat nervously, clasped her hands in her lap, spoke with evident difficulty. “There’s something I wanted ask you. I don’t know why this is so hard.” She shook her head sharply, as if in disapproval of her own confusion.

“What is it?”

She swallowed. “Could I hire you? For maybe like just one day?”

“Hire me? To do what?”

“I’m not making any sense, I know. This is embarrassing, I know shouldn’t be pressuring you like this. But this is so important to me.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Tomorrow … could you maybe sort of come with me? You don’t have to do anything. The thing is, I have two meetings tomorrow. One with a prospective interviewee, the other with Rudy Getz. All I would want you to do is be there—listen to me, listen to them—and afterward just give me your gut reaction, your advice, I don’t know, just … I’m not making any sense at all, am I?”

“Where are these meetings tomorrow?” he asked.

“You’ll do it? You’ll come with me? Oh, God, thank you, thank you! Actually, they’re not too far from you. I mean not really close, but not too far. One is in Turnwell—Jimi Brewster, son of one of the victims. And Rudy Getz’s place is about ten miles from there, on the top of a mountain overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir. We’ll be meeting with Brewster first, at ten, which means that I should pick you up around eight-thirty A.M. Is that okay?”

The reflexive response forming in his mind was to decline the ride and take his own car. But it made more sense to use the drive time with her to ask the questions that were sure to occur to him between now and then. To get a better sense of what he was walking into.

“Sure,” he said. “That’s fine.” Already he was regretting his decision to get involved, even for one day, but he felt unable to refuse.

“There’s a consultancy line item in the preliminary budget I worked out with RAM, so I can pay you seven hundred and fifty dollars for your day. I hope that’s enough.”

He was about to say that she didn’t need to pay him, that wasn’t why he was doing it. But something about her businesslike earnestness made it clear she wanted it this way.

“Sure,” he said again. “That’s fine.”

A little while later, after some desultory conversation about her life at the university, and about Syracuse’s all-too-typical drug problems, he got up from his chair and reiterated his commitment to see her the following morning.

She saw him to the door, shook his hand firmly, thanked him again. As he descended the steps to the cracked sidewalk, he heard the two heavy door locks clicking into place behind him. He glanced up and down the dismal street. It had a dirty, salty look—the dried residue, he assumed, of whatever had been sprayed on it to melt the last snow accumulation. There was a hint of something acrid in the air.

He got into his car, turned the key, and plugged in his portable GPS for directions home. It took a minute or so for it to acquire its satellite signals. As it was issuing its first instruction, he heard a door bang open. He looked up and saw Kim rushing out of the house. At the bottom of the steps, she fell, sprawling onto the sidewalk. She was pulling herself up with the help of a garbage can as Gurney reached her.

“You all right?”

“I don’t know … My ankle …” She was breathing hard, looked frightened.

He was holding her by the arms, trying to support her. “What happened?”

“Blood … in the kitchen.”

“What?”

“Blood. On the kitchen floor.”

“Is anyone else inside?”

“No. I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone.”

“How much blood?”

“I don’t know. Drops on the floor. Like a trail. To the back hallway. I’m not sure.”

“You didn’t see anyone or hear anyone?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Okay. You’re okay now. You’re safe.”

She started blinking. There were tears in her eyes.

“It’s okay,” he repeated softly. “You’re okay. You’re safe.”

She wiped away the tears, tried to compose her expression. “Okay. I’m okay now.”

When her breathing began to return to normal, he said, “I want you to sit in my car. You can lock the door. I’ll take a look in the apartment.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“It would be better to stay in the car.”

“No!” She looked at him pleadingly. “It’s my apartment. He’s not going to keep me out of my apartment!”

Although it was inconsistent with normal police procedure to allow a civilian to reenter the premises under these conditions before they’d been searched, Gurney was no longer a police officer and procedure was no longer the controlling issue. Given Kim’s state of mind, he decided it would be better to keep her with him than to insist that she remain alone in his car—locked or not.

“Okay,” he said, removing the Beretta from his ankle holster and slipping it into his jacket pocket. “Let’s check it out.”

He led the way the back inside, leaving both doors open behind him. He stopped outside the living room. The hallway continued straight ahead for another twenty feet or so, ending at an archway that opened into a kitchen. Between the living room and the kitchen were two open doorways on the right. “Where do those lead?”

“The first is my bedroom. The second is the bathroom.”

“I’m going to take a look in each one. If you hear anything at all, or if you call my name and I don’t answer immediately, get out through the front door as fast as you can, lock yourself in my car, and call 911. Got that?”

“Yes.”

He moved down the hall, looked inside the first room, then stepped in and switched on the ceiling light. There wasn’t much to see. A bed, a small table, a full-length mirror, a couple of folding chairs, a rickety armoire in place of a closet. He checked the armoire, checked under the bed. He stepped back out into the hall, gave Kim a thumbs-up sign, moved on to the bathroom, and repeated the process.

Next was the kitchen.

“Where did you see the drops of blood?” he asked.

“They start in front of the refrigerator and go into the back hall.”

He entered the kitchen cautiously, glad for the first time in six months that he was armed. The kitchen was a wide room. On the far right was a dinette table and two chairs in front of a window that faced the driveway and the adjoining house. The window brought some light into the room, but not much.

In front of him was a countertop with cabinets under it, a sink, and a refrigerator. Between him and the refrigerator was a small butcher-block island. On the island he saw a meat cleaver. As he stepped around the island, he spotted the blood—a sequence of dark drops on the worn linoleum floor, each about the size of a dime, one every two or three feet, stretching from in front of the refrigerator door over to the rear doorway of the kitchen and out into a shadowy area beyond it.

Without warning he heard the sound of breathing behind him. He spun around in a crouch, pulling the Beretta from his pocket. It was Kim, standing just a few feet away, the cliché deer in the headlights, staring at the muzzle of the little .32, mouth half open.

“Jesus,” he said, taking a breath, lowering the pistol.

“Sorry. I was trying to be quiet. You want me to turn on the light?”

He nodded. The switch was on the wall over the sink. It operated two long fluorescent bulbs mounted on the ceiling. In the brighter light, the blood drops on the floor looked redder. “Is there a light switch for that back hall?”

“On the wall to the right of the fridge.”

He found it, turned it on, and the darkness beyond the doorway was replaced by the buzzing, flickering, cold light of a cheap fluorescent fixture at the end of its life. He moved slowly toward the doorway, the Beretta pointed downward.

Except for a green plastic garbage barrel, the short rear hallway was empty. At its far end, a solid-looking exterior door was secured by a substantial dead-bolt lock. There was a second door in the right wall of this cramped space. It was to this one that the trail of blood drops led.

Gurney glanced quickly at Kim. “What’s behind that door?”

“Stairs. The stairs … to the basement.” Fear was creeping back into her voice.

“When was the last time you were down there?”

“Down … oh, God, I don’t know. Maybe … maybe a year ago? A circuit breaker cut out, and the landlord’s maintenance guy was showing me how to reset it.”

“Is there any other access?”

“No.”

“Any windows?”

“Little ones at ground level, but they have bars on them.”

“Where’s the light switch?”

“Right inside the door, I think.”

There was a drop of blood in front of the door. Gurney stepped over it. Standing flat against the wall, he turned the knob and pulled the door open quickly. The smell of dead, musty air filled the little hallway. He waited, listened, then looked down the stairs. They were dimly illuminated by the flickering fixture in the hall behind him. There was a switch on the wall. He flipped it, and a faint yellowish light came on somewhere in the basement.

He told Kim to turn off the hall fluorescent, to stop the buzzing noise.

When it was off, he listened again for at least a minute. Silence. He looked down the stairs. On every second or third step, he saw a dark spot.

“What is it? What do you see?” If Kim’s voice got any more brittle, it was going to crack.

“A few more drops,” he said evenly. “I’m going to take a closer look. Stay where you are. You hear anything at all, run like hell out the front door, go to my car—”

She cut him off. “No way! I’m staying with you!”

Gurney had a talent for projecting a calmness that increased in direct proportion to the agitation of those around him. “Okay. But here’s the deal: You’ve got to stay at least six feet behind me.” He tightened his grip on the Beretta. “If I have to move quickly, I’ll need some room. Okay?”

She nodded.

He began to make his way slowly down the steps. The staircase was a creaky structure with no handrails. When he reached the bottom, he could see that the trail of dark spots continued across the dusty basement floor toward what appeared to be a long, low chest in the far corner. On one wall a furnace stood alongside two oil tanks. On the adjacent wall, there was an electrical-service breaker box, and above it, almost touching the exposed joists, there was a row of small horizontal windows. External bars on each were dimly visible through filthy glass. The low light was emanating from a single bare bulb as begrimed as the windows.

Gurney’s attention returned to the chest.

“I have a flashlight.” Kim’s voice came from the stairs. “Do you want it?”

He looked up at her. She switched it on and handed it to him. It was a Mini Maglite. Its little batteries were about due for replacement, but it was better than nothing.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. Last time you were down here, do you remember a box or a chest against the wall?”

“Oh, God, I have no idea. He was showing me the circuit things, the switches, I don’t know what. What do you see?”

“I’ll let you know in a minute.” He moved forward uneasily, following the trail of blood to the long, low box.

On the one hand, it appeared to be nothing more than a very old blanket chest. On the other hand, he couldn’t get the melodramatic notion out of his head that it was about the right size for a coffin.

“Oh, my God. What’s that?” Kim had followed him and was now standing just a few feet behind him. Her voice had dropped to a whisper.

Gurney put the flashlight between his teeth, pointed down at the box. With the Beretta in his right hand, he lifted the lid gingerly with his left.

For a second he thought there was nothing there.

Then, gleaming softly in the flashlight’s little pool of yellow light, he saw the knife.

A kitchen paring knife. Even in the weak, dirty light, he could see that the blade had been honed until it was unusually thin and sharp. On the point was a tiny drop of blood.