Suddenly she looked vulnerable, frightened. And just as suddenly, Gurney was filled with a fear that he was doing what he’d warned himself against: He was moving much too fast. He was making assumptions on top of assumptions and mistaking them for rational conclusions. And another troubling question came to mind. Why was he spelling out his murder hypothesis to this woman? Was he trying to scare her? Observe her reaction? Or did he just want to have someone ratify the way he was connecting the dots—as if that would prove he was right?
But what if he was connecting the wrong dots, creating the wrong picture entirely? What if the so-called dots were just random isolated events? At times like this he always recalled, uneasily, that everyone on earth at a particular latitude sees the same stars in the sky. But no two cultures see the same constellations. He’d seen evidence of the phenomenon again and again: The patterns we perceive are determined by the stories we want to believe.
Chapter 23. Click
In an uncertain and uncomfortable frame of mind, Gurney pulled into the first convenience store parking lot he reached after leaving Emmerling Oaks.
He bought a large strong coffee, plus a couple of granola bars to compensate for the lunch he hadn’t had, and retreated to his car. He ate one of the granola bars—which turned out to be hard, tasteless, and sticky. He tossed the other one in his glove compartment for some moment of more desperate hunger and took a few swallows of lukewarm coffee.
Then he got down to business.
Before he left Carol Blissy’s office, he’d downloaded the floral delivery video files to his phone, and now he sent the office segment to Bolo’s cell number with a cover text message: “Does the little person with the flowers remind you of anyone?”
He sent the same video material to Hardwick with a message saying: “Individual carrying the flowers may be a person of interest in the Spalter case—a possible link between the deaths of Mary and Carl. More to come.”
He watched the parking area segment of the video again, confirming his impression of the sign on the minivan door: that it wasn’t painted directly on the vehicle but was the removable magnetic kind. Also, that there was only one sign and that it was on the driver’s-side door rather than the passenger’s-side door—an odd choice, since under most circumstances it is the passenger door that is more visible to the public. It was a choice that made sense, however, if the driver wanted to be able to remove it quickly, without having to stop.
There was no phone number on the sign. He did an Internet search for “Flowers by Florence” and found several businesses by that name, but none within a hundred miles of Emmerling Oaks. Neither fact surprised him.
He finished his coffee, now less than lukewarm, and headed for Walnut Crossing—feeling both energized and frustrated by what he viewed as the case’s two main oddities: the light pole obstruction that seemed to turn the shooter’s supposed location into an impossibility, and a relatively simple murder objective combined with an MO that seemed way too complicated.
Someone shot Carl the way Oswald shot Kennedy. Not the way wives shoot their husbands. Not the way mob guys settle their disputes. It seemed to Gurney that the objective could have been accomplished in a dozen easier ways—ways that would have involved a hell of a lot less planning, coordination, and precision than a five-hundred-yard sniper shot fired at a funeral ceremony across a river with a silenced rifle from inside a building full of squatters. Assuming, of course, that the shot came from somewhere in that building to begin with. From a window with a clean line of sight to Carl Spalter’s temple. And speaking of complications, why kill Carl’s mother first? The most obvious reason, given the outcome, would be to get Carl into the cemetery. But what if that murder was for another reason entirely?
Turning these tangled questions over in his mind on the way home made the hour-long trip disappear. Immersed in possible explanations and linkages, he was barely aware of where he was, until, at the top of the mountain road that dead-ended into his property, the text message ring of his phone brought his attention back to his surroundings. He continued up through the sloping pasture to the house before checking the screen. It was the reply from Bolo that he’d been hoping for: “yes yes. same shades. funny noze. the pisser man.”
As questionable as the witness might be—Hardwick would surely make that point again—this confirmation (of sorts) that the odd little character had been present at both events gave Gurney his first sense of solidity about the case. It was little more than the clicking together of the first two pieces of a five-hundred-piece puzzle, but it felt good.
A click was a click. And the first click had a special power.
Chapter 24. All the Trouble in the World
Entering the kitchen, Gurney saw a plastic shopping bag, bulging with angular objects, and a note from Madeleine on the sideboard.
Tomorrow is supposed to be a nice day. I picked up some things from the hardware store so we could get started on the house for the chickens. Okay? My schedule got moved around today, so I came home for a couple of hours, now have to return to the clinic. Won’t be home tonight till around seven. You should go ahead and eat first. There’s stuff in the fridge. Love—M.
He looked into the bag, saw a retractable metal tape measure, a large ball of yellow nylon string, two canvas carpenter’s aprons, two carpenter’s pencils, a yellow legal pad, two pairs of work gloves, two bubble levels, and a handful of metal spikes for laying out corner positions.
Whenever Madeleine took a concrete step toward a project that would require his participation, his first reaction was always dismay. But due to their recent discussion of his relentless focus on blood and mayhem—or perhaps due to the intimacy they shared following that discussion—he tried to view the coop project more positively.
Perhaps a shower would put him in the right frame of mind.
Half an hour later he returned to the kitchen—refreshed, hungry, and feeling a bit better about Madeleine’s eagerness to get the chicken coop started. In fact, he felt revitalized enough to take the first step. He took the hardware store items from the sideboard, got a hammer from the mudroom, and went out onto the patio. He eyed the area where Madeleine had indicated she wanted the coop and fenced-in run to be located—an area between the asparagus and the big apple tree, where Horace and his little flock of hens would be visible from the breakfast table. Where Horace could crow happily and establish his territory.
Gurney went over to the asparagus patch—a raised planting bed enclosed by four-by-four timbers—and laid Madeleine’s purchases out on the grass next to it. He took the yellow pad and a pencil and roughed in the positions of the raised bed, the patio, and the apple tree. Then he paced off the approximate dimensions of the coop and run.
As he was getting the metal tape measure so he could be more precise about the distances, he heard the house phone ringing. He left his pad and pencil on the patio and went inside to the den. It was Hardwick.
“So who’s the fucking midget?”
“Good question. All I can tell you is that he—I’ve been told it’s a he—was in Mary Spalter’s retirement community the day she died, and in that Long Falls apartment house five days before Carl Spalter was shot and again on the day he was shot.”
“Is this something Klemper should have known?”
“Estavio Bolocco says he told Klemper that he saw him in the apartment on both occasions. That should have alerted Klemper to something—at least raised a question about the timing of the mother’s death.”