Let the Devil Sleep

Chapter 51

Grace


Late the next morning, Gurney was still in an emergency-room bed in a room off the main ER area in Ithaca’s municipal hospital. Although the ER personnel had been relatively sure that his condition was not serious—mostly first-degree and a few second-degree burns—Madeleine had insisted upon her arrival that the on-call dermatologist be summoned.

Now that the dermatologist, who looked to them like a child playing a doctor in a school play, had come and gone, confirming the existing diagnosis, they were waiting for some insurance confusion to be sorted out and paperwork to be completed. Someone’s computer system was down—it wasn’t quite clear whose—and they’d been cheerily advised that the whole process might take a while.

Kyle, who had accompanied Madeleine to the hospital, was roaming between Gurney’s room and the waiting room, the gift shop and the cafeteria, the nurses’ station and the parking lot. It was clear that he wanted to be there, and equally clear that he was frustrated by the lack of anything useful to do. He’d been in and out of Gurney’s little room numerous times that morning. After several awkward beginnings, he finally managed to make a request he said had been on his mind ever since Madeleine had mentioned to him that Gurney’s old motorcycle helmet was stored away in their attic.

“You know, Dad, our heads are about the same size. I wonder … if it would be okay … I mean … I was wondering if could I have your helmet?”

“Sure, absolutely. I’ll give it to you when we get back to the house.” Gurney smiled at the thought that Kyle apparently had inherited his father’s roundabout way of expressing affection. “Thanks, Dad. That’s great. Wow. Thanks.”

Kim had called—twice—to find out how Gurney was, to apologize for not being able to come to the hospital, to thank him profusely for risking his life to confront the Shepherd, and to let him know she’d been interviewed at length the previous day by Detective Schiff in connection with the Robby Meese homicide. She’d explained that she’d been appropriately cooperative. However, when Schiff had been joined that morning by Agent Trout of the FBI to reinterview her in light of the fiery drama at Max Clinter’s, she’d decided it would be wise to have an attorney present—putting that new interview temporarily on hold.

Hardwick strode into Gurney’s room a minute before noon. After giving Madeleine a grin and a reassuring wink, he gave Gurney a frowning once-over and burst into laughter—more of a rhythmic growling than an expression of merriment. “Jesus, man, what the hell did you do to your eyebrows?”

“I decided to burn them off and start over.”

“Did you also decide to turn your face into a f*cking pomegranate?”

“Nice of you to drop by, Jack. I need the encouragement.”

“Christ, on the TV you look like James Bond. Here you look like—”

“What do you mean, on TV?”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t seen it.”

“Seen what?”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The man instigates the Third World War and pleads ignorance. The whole damn thing from last night has been running on RAM News all morning. Sterne coming out of the cabin. That bloody flame-thrower mounted on Maxie’s hood. Sterne being incinerated. Maxie machine-gunning the Ramcopter out of the sky. Your heroic self charging out into the night to risk your life. The Ramcopter crash—followed by what the talking RAM heads keep calling ‘the horrible tragic fireball.’ It’s one hell of a show, Davey boy.”

“Hold on a second, Jack. The helicopter got shot down. So where did the footage of the crash come from?”

“The f*ckers had two choppers out there. One Ramcopter went down, the other Ramcopter just moved into position and kept filming. Tragic fireballs are good for ratings. Especially with two people being burned to death in the process.”

Gurney was grimacing, Max Clinter’s fiery death still painfully vivid. “And this is on television?”

“Damn thing’s been running all morning. Showbiz, my friend, it’s f*cking showbiz!”

“Those helicopters—how did they happen to be there to begin with?”

“Your friend Clinter gave RAM News a heads-up. Called earlier and told them that something really big was about to go down that night with the Good Shepherd, and they should position themselves in the area, ready to come swooping in. He called them again right before he made his move. Max always hated RAM for the nasty way they covered his original debacle with the Shepherd. Seems that shooting down the chopper was part of his plan.”

As Gurney was absorbing this, Hardwick left the room and crossed a large open area to the nurses’ station, where he interrupted a young woman working at a computer.

He returned with a triumphant gleam in his eye. “They’ve got a couple of TVs on rollers. The little peach with the big tits is gonna get us one. You should see this crap for yourself.”

Madeleine sighed and closed her eyes.

“In the meantime, Sherlock, two questions: How the hell did Larry the dentist get so good with a gun?”

“My impression is that he had a passion for precision that was off the charts. People like that have a way of getting good at things.”

“Too bad we can’t bottle that and sell it to sane people. Second question, a bit more personal: Did you have any idea what you were walking into at Clinter’s place?”

Gurney glanced at Madeleine. Her eyes were on him, waiting for his answer.

“I expected to meet the Shepherd. The disaster was unanticipated.”

“You sure about that?”

“The hell does that mean?”

“Did you really believe that Clinter would stay away like you told him to?”

Gurney paused. “How did you know I told him to stay away?”

Hardwick parried the question with another question. “Why do you think he showed up when he did?”

That little mystery had been in the back of Gurney’s own mind. The timing had been too perfect, relative to the nasty turn of events inside the cabin. The explanation now seemed obvious. “He bugged his own house?”

“Of course.”

“And he had the receiver in the Humvee?”

“Yes.”

“So he was listening in on my conversation with Larry Sterne?”

“Naturally.”

“And his receiver recorded everything that was said in the cabin, including my phone call to him. And somewhere along the line, you guys got the recording—which is how you know that I told him to stay away. But the Humvee went up in flames, so how did you get—”

“We got it directly from the man himself. He e-mailed BCI the audio file just before he cranked up that flame-thrower of his. Seems he knew how the dance might end. It also seems that he wanted us to have something concrete that vindicated your view of the case.”

Gurney felt a burst of gratitude to Clinter. Larry Sterne’s comments and admissions would bury the “manifesto” fiction once and for all. “That’s going to make a lot of people very unhappy.”

Hardwick grinned. “F*ck ’em.”

There was a long silence, during which Gurney realized that his involvement in the Good Shepherd case had essentially come to an end. The crime was solved. The danger was over.

A lot of people in law enforcement and forensic psychology would soon be engaged in an orgy of frantic finger-pointing, insisting that OPM—other people’s mistakes—had led them astray. Gurney himself might, at some point after the dust had settled, receive some small recognition for his contribution. But recognition was a mixed blessing. It often had too high a price.

“By the way,” said Hardwick, “Paul Mellani shot himself.”

Gurney blinked. “What?”

“Shot himself with his Desert Eagle. Apparently a few days ago. Woman in the adjoining storefront yesterday afternoon reported getting a bad smell through the ventilation system.”

“No doubt about its being a suicide?”

“None.”

“Jesus.”

Madeleine looked stricken. “Is that the poor man you talked to last week?”

“Yes.” He turned to Hardwick. “Were you able to find out how long he’d owned the gun?”

“Less than a year.”

“Jesus,” said Gurney again, talking more to himself than to Hardwick. “Of all the possible weapons he could have used, why a Desert Eagle?”

Hardwick shrugged. “A Desert Eagle killed his father. Maybe he wanted to go the same way.”

“He hated his father.”

“Maybe that was the sin he had to atone for.”

Gurney stared at Hardwick. Sometimes the man said the damnedest things.

“Speaking of fathers,” said Gurney, “any trace at all of Emilio Corazon?”

“More than a trace.”

“Huh?”

“When you have some time, you might want to think about how to handle this.”

“Handle what?”

“Emilio Corazon is a late-stage alcoholic and heroin addict living in a Salvation Army shelter in Ventura, California. He panhandles to get money for booze and heroin. He’s changed his name half a dozen times. He doesn’t want to be found. He needs a liver transplant to stay alive, but he can’t stay sober long enough to get on the list. He’s getting dementia from the ammonia levels in his blood. The people at the shelter think he’ll be dead in three months. Maybe sooner.”

Gurney felt like he should say something.

But his mind was blank.

He felt empty.

Aching, sad, and empty.

“Mr. Gurney?”

He looked up. Lieutenant Bullard was standing in the doorway.

“Sorry if I’m interrupting something. I just … I just wanted to thank you … and make sure you were all right.”

“Come in.”

“No, no. I just …” She looked at Madeleine. “Are you Mrs. Gurney?”

“Yes, I am. And you …?”

“Georgia Bullard. Your husband is a remarkable man. But of course you know that.” She looked at Gurney. “Maybe, after all this gets sorted out, I was wondering, maybe I could treat you and your wife to lunch? I know a little Italian restaurant in Sasparilla.”

Gurney laughed. “I look forward to it.”

She backed away with a smile and a wave and, as suddenly as she’d appeared, was gone.

Gurney’s mind returned to the fate of Emilio Corazon and the effect the news was likely to have on his daughter. He closed his eyes, leaning his head back against his pillow.

When he opened them, he wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Hardwick was gone. Madeleine had moved her chair from the corner of the room to the side of his bed and was watching him. The scene reminded him of the all-too-similar end of the Perry case, when he had come so close to being killed, when he had suffered the physical damage that in some ways was still with him. And when he had emerged from the coma at the end of that experience, Madeleine was by his bed, waiting, watching.

For a moment, meeting her gaze, he was tempted to repeat that jokey cliché, We have to stop meeting like this. But somehow it didn’t feel right, not really funny, not a joke he had a right to make.

An impish smile appeared on Madeleine’s face. “Were you going to say something?”

He shook his head. Really just rocked it slightly from side to side on the pillow.

“Yes you were,” she said. “Something silly. I could see it in your eyes.” He laughed, then winced at the pain of the skin stretching around his mouth.

She put her hand on his. “Are you upset about Paul Mellani?”

“Yes.”

“Because you’re thinking you should have done something?”

“Maybe.”

She nodded, gently rubbing the backs of his fingers. “It’s too bad that the search for Kim’s father didn’t have a happier ending.”

“Yes.”

She pointed to his other hand, the bandaged one. “How’s the arrowhead wound?”

He raised the hand from the bed and looked at it. “I’d forgotten about it.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“I don’t mean the injured hand. I mean the arrow. The great arrow mystery.”

“You don’t think it’s a mystery?” he asked.

“Not a solvable one.”

“So we should ignore it?”

“Yes.” When he didn’t appear convinced, she went on. “Isn’t that just the way life is?”

“Full of inexplicable arrows falling out of the sky?”

“I mean, there’ll always be things we don’t have the time to understand perfectly.”

It was the sort of statement that bothered Gurney. Not that it wasn’t true. Of course it was true. But he felt that the tenor of it constituted an attack on the rational process. An attack on the way his own mind worked. Yet if ever there was an argument not worth getting into with Madeleine, that was it.

A young nurse came to the door, pushing ahead of her a TV on a rolling stand, but Gurney just shook his head and waved her away. RAM’s “horrible tragic fireball” could wait.

“Did you understand Larry Sterne?” Madeleine asked.

“Maybe part of him. Not all of him. Sterne was … an unusual creature.”

“It’s nice to know there aren’t a whole lot of them running around.”

“He thought of himself as a thoroughly rational man. Thoroughly practical. A paragon of reason.”

“Do you think he ever cared about anyone else?”

“No. Not a bit.”

“Or trusted anyone?”

Gurney shook his head. “ ‘Trust’ would not have been a meaningful concept to him. Not in the normal sense. He would have seen the willingness to trust as a form of weakness, an irrational flaw in others, a flaw that he could exploit. His relationships would have been based on exploitation and manipulation. He would have viewed other people as tools.”

“So he was all alone, then.”

“Yes. Completely alone.”

“How dreadful.”

Gurney almost said, There but for the grace of God go I. He knew how isolated he could become and hardly notice that it was happening. How relationships could slip away like smoke in the breeze. How easily he could sink into himself. How natural and benign his isolating obsessions could seem.

He wanted to explain this to her, explain this peculiarity of his being. But then he got that feeling he sometimes got when he was near her—the feeling that she already knew what he was thinking without his having to say the words.

She looked into his eyes, squeezing his hand and holding it that way.

Then, for the first time ever, he got that same peculiar feeling, but in the opposite direction. He got the feeling that he already knew what she was thinking, without her having to say the words.

He could feel the words in her hand, see the words in her eyes.

She was telling him not to be afraid.

She was telling him to trust her, to believe in her love for him.

She was telling him that the grace on which he depended would always be with him.

In the profound peace that followed her silent words, he felt relieved of every care in the world. All was well. All was quiet. And then, somewhere in the far distance, there was a sound. It was so faint, so delicate, he wasn’t sure whether he was hearing it or feeling it or imagining it. But he knew exactly what it was.

It was the distinctive lilting rhythm of Vivaldi’s “Spring.”



Acknowledgments

Continuity itself is usually a good thing in business and professional relationships. And when that continuity involves truly talented, dedicated people it can be a delightful thing.

From the publication of my first novel, Think of a Number, through the second, Shut Your Eyes Tight, to the third, Let the Devil Sleep, I have had the privilege of working with the same extraordinary people—a superb agent, Molly Friedrich, her wonderful associate, Lucy Carson, and an unfailingly insightful editor, Rick Horgan.

Thank you, Rick. Thank you, Molly. Thank you, Lucy.