When, sometime later, Madeleine came out and perched on the arm of the Adirondack chair across from him, he opened his eyes. The air was cooler now, and the color was gone from the sky.
“So,” she said, “while I was trying to focus on my music, I kept feeling there are things you haven’t told me.”
“About Larchfield?”
“About your willingness to help Morgan.”
He was about to say there wasn’t anything he hadn’t told her, but that wasn’t true.
He sighed. “This is going to sound ridiculous.”
“So?”
“I mean, really ridiculous. In addition to the rational issues giving me pause, there’s the fact that Morgan reminds me of my mother.”
“Why?”
“There’s a plaintiveness in his attitude that I have a hard-wired resistance to. My mother was always trying to get me to pay attention to her, solve her problems with my father, fix the sad mess of her life. When she praised me, it was always for something I’d done for her. When she criticized me, it was always for something I hadn’t done for her. The constant message was that I owed her something.”
“You hear that in Morgan’s voice?”
“I do. I’m sane enough not to let an echo make my decisions. But I hear it.”
“We all deal with echoes.”
“Maybe so. But that’s one of the things that makes me want to back away. But one of the things that makes me want to help him is even more ridiculous.” He hesitated.
She smiled. “I like ridiculous motives.”
“We had mice in our precinct house. A contract exterminator would come in every three months, but what he did would only last a couple of weeks. Then the mice would come back. Morgan started bringing in traps. Catch-and-release traps. He went to a lot of trouble to do this. Setting them every night with peanut butter. Gathering them up every morning. Taking them to a local park on his lunch break. Letting the mice go. Enduring a hell of a lot of abuse.”
“So you figure there’s some good in him? An adulterer who likes mice can’t be all bad?”
Gurney shrugged.
Madeleine smiled. “Maybe all your pros and cons have nothing to do with your decision. Maybe it’s the challenge of the case itself.”
They stayed on the patio, listening in silence to the chirping of the birds returning to their roosts, until the deepening dusk and the chill in the air persuaded them to go into the house.
The wearying effect of Gurney’s long day soon overtook him and he decided to go to bed. His sleep, however, was troubled by weird dreams that persisted through the night. In the last one, he found himself in a cavernous building, standing in a long line of Black Angus cattle. The air smelled of raw hamburger. Blue and green balls were floating down from the ceiling. A voice on a loudspeaker demanded that he guess what color the balls were. A bell was tolling for a funeral he was supposed to attend. There was an elegant sign on the wall in italic lettering: MORGAN’S SLAUGHTERHOUSE.
The bell became the ringing of his phone on the bedside table. Half-awake, he picked it up.
“Gurney here.”
“Dave?” It was Morgan’s voice, its stress level ratcheted up a few notches.
He blinked a few times to clear his vision and peered at the time on his phone. “It’s six o’clock in the morning. What’s wrong?”
“The case just got turned upside down. Nobody stole Tate’s body. The son of a bitch got up and walked out of there.”
“What?!” Gurney sat up, instantly awake.
“He’s not dead. He walked out of that embalming room. Nobody put his fingerprints in Russell’s bedroom. He left them there himself.”
“How do you know this?”
“The casket. The lab did a microanalysis of the splintered edge. The casket wasn’t broken into. It was broken out of.”
PART TWO
THE WALKING DEAD
14
During the drive to Larchfield, Gurney was only minimally aware of his surroundings—the sparkling of the dew in the early-morning sunlight, the pure green of the fields, the swaths of yellow wildflowers. The Larchfield scenarios forming in his mind were collapsing one after another under the weight of improbability.
More disturbing were his visualizations of Billy Tate in that tightly closed casket. Having miraculously survived that dreadful fall, he was surely in great physical pain as he regained consciousness. And the terror of finding himself in that dark, constricted place—it was awful even to imagine it. Gurney felt the grip of fear in his own stomach as he pictured Tate desperately struggling in the panic of his confinement before the latch screws finally gave way.
Immersed in this horror, Gurney came within inches of hitting a cow that had escaped from its pasture. It was the nudge he needed to keep his mind on the road.
He arrived in Larchfield at 7:55 a.m. He parked, switched off his phone to avoid interruptions, and headed into the incongruously genteel police headquarters. The classic Victorian building appeared more suited to tea parties than criminal investigations.
A uniformed officer met him inside the front door and led him along a carpeted hall to the conference room. Brad Slovak was standing in front of an urn with a coffee mug in one hand and a large donut in the other. Several paces away, Kyra Barstow was speaking to a wiry woman with a knifelike nose and vigilant eyes. Morgan was standing by himself at the head of the long table, an anxious frown creasing his forehead, a phone to his ear.
When he saw Gurney he ended his call and lowered the phone. He turned to the others. “We’re all here. Let’s get started.”
He took the chair at the head of the table. Barstow and the wiry woman sat on one side of the table, Gurney on the opposite side. Slovak brought the remainder of his donut over on a napkin and took the chair next to Gurney.
“We obviously have a monster of a case on our hands,” said Morgan.
Morgan sounded so tense that Gurney expected to see beads of sweat on his forehead at any moment. He took a deep breath and continued, “Because Tate’s survival comes as such a shock, especially to those of us who saw him fall, I’ve asked Kyra to present the forensic data—to remove any doubt about the facts. We can’t afford any more false starts.” He gestured toward Barstow. “Lay it out for us.”
She glanced around the table, her gaze settling on Gurney.
“The evidence is consistent with Tate’s revival inside the casket, followed by his emergence from it,” she began. “So, it makes sense to look first at the evidence of what happened inside the casket, prior to its being broken open; then the evidence of his emergence from the casket and from the storage unit; then the evidence of his movements around the embalming room and his departure from the building.”
With obvious confidence in the logic of this approach, she continued. “Beginning inside the casket, we found ample blood and print evidence of Tate’s being placed there, as Peale reported. The inside of the casket lid has scratch marks and microscopic residues of his fingernails, as well as complete handprints consistent with an effort to push up against the closed lid—an effort that succeeded, due in part to the casket’s cheap construction. Greta here will describe the evidence of that success.”
She gestured toward the woman seated next to her. “A word of explanation for Detective Gurney. Dr. Greta Vickerz is a professor of mechanical engineering at Russell College and a consultant to the forensic sciences department. She has particular expertise in stress fractures in wood.”