Barstow’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “We found something interesting in his sweatshirt pocket.” She held up a plastic freezer bag.
Gurney leaned forward to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
The bag contained a severed right hand, probably male, judging from the size of it.
PART THREE
INTO THE HEART OF EVIL
41
In the forty-eight hours following the shooting, a new case narrative, complete with ample evidence, had been constructed—with Chandler Aspern, mayor of Larchfield, as its central villain.
Gurney found the new hypothesis more or less satisfactory. On the downside, it left some significant questions unanswered. On the upside, it provided credible explanations for two elements that had been troubling him—the call Tate made to Aspern’s number from the mortuary and the disparity between the fates of Ruby-June Hooper and Mary Kane.
On the morning of the third day after the shooting, the Aspern-centered theory of the Larchfield murders was scheduled to be presented to the county district attorney, with the objective of securing agreement that the new narrative could be released to the media and the case could be closed.
Gurney had agreed to be present at the meeting.
At Morgan’s request, he arrived at headquarters twenty minutes early for a run-through of how Morgan intended to present the evidence of Aspern’s guilt.
When Morgan asked for his comments at the end of the run-through, Gurney said that it all sounded fine. In fact, he did have some lingering concerns, but he knew raising them at this point would only make Morgan more nervous.
“Have you ever met our DA?” Morgan asked.
“No.”
“She’s a fast-talking hotshot being groomed for bigger things by the powers that be.”
“Have you had problems with her?”
“Nothing major, just the static created by the kind of person who wants everything perfect and wants it yesterday.”
“You expecting significant static in this meeting?”
Before Morgan could answer, there was a knock on his open door. It was the desk sergeant.
“Stryker is here,” he said, as if announcing the arrival of the IRS.
Brad Slovak and Kyra Barstow were already at the conference table. They were seated across from Martin Carmody, the PR man, and Greta Vickerz, the mechanical engineering professor who’d concluded that Tate’s casket had been broken open from the inside.
An athletic-looking woman with short brown hair was standing at the end of the table, talking on her phone. She appeared to be in her late twenties, which would make her the youngest of the state’s district attorneys, but there was nothing particularly youthful in her cool, hard expression.
Gurney chose a seat next to Vickerz. Morgan remained standing until Stryker ended her call and took her seat. She laid her phone in front of her, conspicuously checked the time, and said without any greeting or preamble, “Your show, Chief.”
Morgan cleared his throat. “I think you know everyone in the room, Cam, except Dave Gurney—”
“I know who he is. Let’s begin.”
The tic at the corner of Morgan’s mouth was back. “I thought we’d start at the beginning—with the videos that document Billy Tate’s fall from the church roof and his subsequent revival and departure from Peale’s Funeral—”
Stryker cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I’ve already seen them. RAM-News has been running leaked copies day and night.”
“Then I’m sure you saw Tate sending two text messages from the embalming room?”
“That’s what he appeared to be doing.”
“Phone records show that the first was to Selena Cursen, the woman he was living with, letting her know he was alive. The second was to Chandler Aspern, suggesting a mutually beneficial opportunity and his intention to visit him later that night.”
“I saw the texts in the case file. Are you assuming that after Tate left the mortuary he drove to Aspern’s house?”
“Correct.”
“Then what?”
“Then he spelled out for Aspern the mutual opportunity he’d referred to in his text.”
“Do you know what that opportunity was?”
“We have a pretty good idea.”
“You mean an unsupported speculation?” A pen had appeared in Stryker’s hand, and she was tapping it lightly on the table.
Morgan’s tic was accelerating. “I’d prefer to call it a reasonable conjecture, Cam—one that’s supported by what happened afterward. We believe that Tate realized he was in a unique position. He was supposedly dead, and if his body was missing, the natural belief would be that it had been stolen. He could have seen that as an opportunity.”
“To do what?”
“Get even with Angus Russell for having had him arrested and sent to prison. Maybe settle other scores as well. And get away with it, being officially dead.”
“What’s the connection to Aspern?”
“It was known that Aspern and Angus were enemies and that there was an enormous amount of money at stake. I can see Tate approaching Aspern that night with a simple question: What would Angus’s death be worth to you? Maybe they discussed the details, maybe they didn’t, but then something happened that Tate hadn’t anticipated.”
Stryker’s pen stopped tapping. There was a spark of interest in her eyes. “Aspern turned on him?”
“Aspern killed him.”
“Because he didn’t trust him?” Lack of trust appeared to be a feeling she could relate to.
“Right. Why take a chance—when he could do it himself in a way that would incriminate Tate? It seems that Tate came up with the perfect crime and ended up being the victim of his own cleverness.”
“So, you’re suggesting that Aspern killed Tate, and then killed Angus?”
“I think Aspern killed Tate, then cut his hands off, so he could leave his prints at the crime scene. He put on Tate’s clothes, took the scalpels and bone mallet that Tate stole from the mortuary, and set out for the Russell estate in Tate’s Jeep. Incidentally, the fact that it was Aspern in the Jeep gave us the answer to a certain nagging question we had from the beginning.” Morgan turned to Gurney, who picked up the narration.
“We were baffled by the fact that two people had encountered the Jeep and its driver on Waterview Drive that night, but only one of them was killed. Ruby-June Hooper says she recognized Billy Tate and spoke to him, with no consequences. Then, a mile down the road, Mary Kane had an encounter with him and ended up dead. But if the driver of the Jeep was Chandler Aspern, there’s a logical explanation. Because of the hoodie and the only illumination being moonlight, Ruby-June Hooper assumed it was Billy and called him by name. That would have been exactly what Aspern wanted, so he drove on. But suppose Mary Kane saw the driver more clearly under that bright streetlight across from her cottage. Suppose she realized it wasn’t Billy, or even recognized Aspern. That may have been what got her killed. We have a recording of the incident on her phone—which she was using to record birdcalls—that’s consistent with this scenario.”
Stryker nodded slowly, as though she were evaluating how the puzzle pieces were being assembled. “Why the Linda Mason murder two days later?”
“Another guess, but I’d say he wanted to add a finishing touch to his framing of Billy Tate, who was widely known to have threatened Linda Mason, just like he threatened Angus Russell.”
“Aspern had nothing against the Mason woman personally?”
“We can’t be sure of that, but it looks like her murder was mainly a prop to cement our focus on Tate.”