“No, but I can download it. You have any specific questions you’d like me to ask?”
“Yeah. Ask him if he hired the hit on his brother.”
“Great idea. Any other advice?”
“Yeah. Don’t fuck it up. See you at nine.”
Gurney slipped the phone back in his pocket.
Kyle cocked his head curiously. “What do you need to download?”
“A piece of audio-video recording software that’s compatible with Skype. You think you could do that for me?”
“Give me your Skype name and password. I’ll take care of it right now.”
As the young man headed into the den armed with the information he needed, Gurney smiled at his eagerness to help, smiled also at the simple pleasure of his being in the house. It made him wonder, yet again, why their times together were so few and far between.
There was a period when he thought he knew the reason—a period peaking a couple of years earlier when Kyle was making an obscene amount of money on Wall Street, in a job he’d stepped into through a door opened by a college friend. Gurney was convinced that the yellow Porsche accompanying that job was proof positive that the money-mad genes of his real estate broker ex-wife, Kyle’s mother, had taken over. But now he suspected that this had been nothing more than a rationalization that absolved him of a deeper and less explainable failure to reach out to his son. He used to tell himself that it was because Kyle reminded him of his ex-wife in other unpleasant ways as well—certain gestures, intonations, facial expressions. But that too was a questionable excuse. There were many more differences than similarities between mother and son, and even if there weren’t, it would be petulant and unfair to equate one person with the other.
He would sometimes think that the real explanation was nothing more complicated than the defense of his own peculiar comfort zone. That comfort zone did not include other people. That was the point his college girlfriend, Geraldine, had hammered home the day she left him so many years ago. When he viewed the issue in that light, he saw his apparent avoidance of his son as just one more symptom of his innate introversion. Not such a big deal. Case closed. But as soon as he would settle on this, a tiny doubt would begin to nibble at the edge of his certainty. Did simple introversion fully explain how little he saw of Kyle? And the nibble would grow into a gnawing question: Did the presence of one son inevitably remind him that he’d once had two sons and would still have two sons if only …
Kyle reappeared at the kitchen door. “You’re all set up. I left the screen open for you. It’s totally simple.”
“Oh. Great. Thank you.”
Kyle was watching him with a curious smile.
It reminded Gurney of a look he sometimes saw on Madeleine’s face. “What are you thinking?”
“About how you like to figure stuff out. How important it is to you. While that software was downloading, I was thinking … if Madeleine was a detective, she’d want to solve the puzzle so she could catch the bad guy. But I think you want to catch the bad guy so you can solve the puzzle.”
Gurney was pleased, not by his own position in the comparison—which didn’t strike him as especially laudable—but by Kyle’s perception in noting it. The young man had a good mind, a fact that meant a lot to Gurney. He felt a little surge of camaraderie. “You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that you use the word ‘think’ almost as much as I do.”
As he was speaking, the house phone was ringing. He went into the den to answer it. As if summoned by Kyle’s reference to her, it was Madeleine.
“Good morning!” She sounded cheerful. “How are things going?”
“Fine. What are you up to?”
“Deirdre and Dennis and I just finished breakfast. Orange juice, blueberries, French toast, and … bacon!” The final item was voiced with the faux guilt of having committed a faux sin. “We’ll be going out in a few minutes to check on all the animals and get them ready to transport to the fairgrounds. In fact, Dennis is out there by the little corral already, waving to us to come out.”
“Sounds like fun,” he replied in a not very fun-filled voice, marveling once again at her ability to find compartments of pure enjoyment within a larger landscape of serious problems.
“It is fun! How are our little hens this morning?”
“Fine, I assume. I was just about to go down to the barn.”
She paused, then in a more subdued tone stepped tentatively into the larger landscape, the one in which he was so deeply mired. “Any developments?”
“Well, Kyle showed up here at the house.”
“What? Why?”
“I asked him for some computer software advice, and he just decided to come up and do what needed to be done. Actually, it was very helpful.”
“Did you send him home?”
“I’m going to.”
She paused. “Please be careful.”
“I will.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“Okay. Well … Dennis is waving more urgently, so I better go. Love you!”
“Love you too.” He replaced the handset, then sat staring at the phone unseeingly, his mind drifting back to Panikos’s face on the video and the words “very fucking crazy.”
“Did I hear you say your video call was at eight?” Kyle’s voice from the den doorway pulled Gurney back to the moment. He glanced at the time in the corner of his computer screen—7:56 a.m.
“Thanks. Which reminds me—I wanted to ask you to stay out of the camera’s field of view during the call. Okay?”
“No problem. As a matter of fact, what I was thinking of doing, since you’ve got your other meeting here at nine, and it’s an ideal day for it … I thought I’d take a little ride on the bike up to Syracuse.”
“Syracuse?” There was a time when the name of that gray snow-belt city meant little to Gurney, but now it had become a mental repository for all the terrible events of the recent Good Shepherd case.
Obviously, it had a more positive association for Kyle. “Yeah, I thought I’d take a ride up, as long as I was this far upstate, maybe have lunch with Kim.”
“Kim Corazon? You stayed in touch with her?”
“A little. By email mostly. She came down to the city once. I let her know last week that I planned to be up here with you for a few days, halfway to Syracuse, thought it might be a good time to get together with her.” He paused, eyeing his father warily. “You look kind of shocked.”
“ ‘Surprised’ would be the word. You never mentioned Kim after … after the case was wrapped up.”
“I figured you wouldn’t want to be reminded of that whole mess she dragged you into. Not that she meant to. But it ended up being pretty traumatic stuff.”
It was true that it wasn’t a case he enjoyed talking about. Or thinking about. Very few were. In fact, he rarely considered the past at all, unless it was a past case with loose ends that demanded resolution. But the Good Shepherd case wasn’t one of those. The Good Shepherd case was solved. The puzzle pieces, in the end, were all in place. It could be argued, however, that the price had been too high. And his own position in the final act of that drama had become one of Madeleine’s chief exhibits in her argument that he exposed himself too willingly to unreasonable levels of danger.
Kyle was watching him now with a worried look. “Does it bother you that I’m visiting her?”
In other circumstances, the honest answer would have been yes. He’d found Kim to be very ambitious, very emotional, very naive—a combination more troublesome than he would wish for in any girlfriend for his son. But in the current circumstances, Kyle’s plan struck him as a convenient coincidence—in the same category as Madeleine’s plan to help the Winklers.