“Do we have to stand here with the goat?”
She looked around, then gestured in the direction of a weathered picnic table in a grassy area behind the house. “Over there?”
“Fine.”
She gave the goat a few more little strokes on the head, then left the pen, secured the gate, and led the way to the table.
They sat across from each other, and he told her the story of the explosive crash—the initial mistaken impression of what had happened and the subsequent discoveries—just as he had related it all to Esti.
When he’d come to the end, Madeleine gave him a quizzical look. “So?”
“It just keeps coming to mind, and I don’t know why. Any ideas?”
“Ideas?”
“Does anything about the case strike you as especially significant?”
“No, not really. Nothing beyond the obvious.”
“The obvious being …?”
“The sequence.”
“What about it?”
“The assumption that the heart attack came before the crash and the crash came before the explosion, instead of the explosion coming first and causing everything else. It was a reasonable assumption, though. Middle-aged man has heart attack, loses control, drives off the road, car crashes and the gas tank explodes. Makes total sense.”
“Total sense, yes, except that it was all wrong. That was the point I’d make when I talked about the case in one of my academy seminars—that something can make perfect sense and be perfectly wrong. Our brains are so fond of coherence that they confuse ‘making sense’ with the truth.”
She cocked her head curiously. “If you know all this, why are you asking me about it?”
“Just in case you saw something that I was missing.”
“You drove all the way over here to ask me about that story?”
“Not just that.” He hesitated, then forced out the words. “I discovered something about the rooster.”
She blinked. “Horace?”
“I discovered what killed him.”
She sat motionless, waiting.
“It wasn’t another animal.” He hesitated again. “Someone shot him.”
Her eyes widened. “Someone …?”
“I don’t know for sure who it was.”
“David, don’t …” There was an edge of warning in her voice.
“I don’t know for sure who it was, but it’s possible that it was Panikos.”
The rhythm of her breathing changed and her face filled slowly with a barely contained fury. “The crazy assassin you’re after? He … killed Horace?”
“I don’t know that for sure. I said it’s possible.”
“Possible.” She repeated the word as though it were a sound without a meaning. Her eyes were fixed intently on his. “Why did you come here and tell me this?”
“I thought it was the right thing to do.”
“That’s the only reason?”
“What else?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t what you’re getting at. I just thought I should tell you.”
“How did you find out?”
“That he was shot? By examining the body.”
“You dug him up?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because … because something came up in our discussion yesterday that gave me the idea that it could have been a gunshot that killed him.”
“Yesterday?”
“In my meeting with Hardwick and Esti.”
“So you thought I needed to know today? But I didn’t need to know yesterday?”
“I told you as soon as it was clear to me that I should tell you. Maybe I should have told you yesterday. What’s your point?”
“It’s your point I’m wondering about.”
“I don’t get it.”
Her mouth formed a small ironic smile. “What’s next on your agenda?”
“My agenda?” It began to dawn on him what she was getting at—and that, as usual, with relatively little evidence, she had moved quickly to the finish line. “We need to capture Panikos before he slips back into whatever dark hole he inhabits between jobs.”
She nodded, communicating nothing.
“As long as he believes we can damage him, he’ll hang around and … try to stop us. His attempt to do that will make him vulnerable to capture.”
“Vulnerable to capture.” She articulated the phrase slowly, musingly—as though it summed up all the misleading jargon in the world. “And you want me to stay here, so you can risk your life without worrying about me?”
She didn’t really seem to be asking a question, so he offered no response.
“You’ll be the bait in the game once again. Right?”
That wasn’t really a question either.
A long silence fell between them. The overcast sky was heavy now, slatey and dusklike. A phone began ringing inside the house, but Madeleine made no move to answer it. It rang seven times.
“I asked Dennis about that bird,” she said.
“What bird?”
“The strange one we sometimes hear at dusk. Dennis and Deirdre have heard it too. He checked it out with the Mountain Wildlife Council. They told him it’s a rare type of mourning dove that’s found only in upstate New York and parts of New England, and only above certain elevations in the mountains. The local Native Americans considered it sacred. They called it ‘Spirit Who Speaks for the Dead.’ The shaman would interpret its cries. Sometimes they were accusations, sometimes they were messages of forgiveness.”
Gurney wondered about the chain of associations that led Madeleine to her mourning dove story. Sometimes when it would seem to him that she’d changed the subject, he’d discover that she hadn’t changed it at all.
Chapter 55. Ring Around the Rosies
On his drive home from the Winkler farm Gurney felt alternately free and trapped.
Free to proceed according to his plan. And trapped by its limitations, by the rickety assumptions on which it rested, and by his own compulsion to press forward. He suspected that Malcolm Claret and Madeleine were right—that there was something pathological in his appetite for risk. But self-knowledge is not a therapeutic panacea. Knowing who you are doesn’t automatically convey the power to change who you are.
The fact that mattered most to him at the moment was that Madeleine intended to stay at the Winklers’ at least through Tuesday, the final day of the fair, safely out of the way. It was still only Saturday. The promotion ads for his Monday-night Criminal Conflict tell-all revelations would start running the next morning on the Sunday talk shows. The ads would be touting not only the revelation of the shooter’s identity in the Spalter case but also the disclosure of the sensitive secret that the shooter was trying to protect. If Panikos wanted to keep that from happening, he had a very narrow window of opportunity—from Sunday morning to Monday evening—to make his move. And Gurney intended to be ready for him.
Driving up the darkening road to his property, he tried to hang on to a reasonable sense of confidence. But Madeleine’s enigmatic story about that damn spirit-bird kept undermining whatever pragmatic thoughts he was able to muster.
As he passed the barn and the house came into view, he noticed that the light over the side door was on, as well as the light in the mudroom. He felt a quick stab of fight-or-flight adrenaline—which subsided into an uneasy curiosity when he saw a glint of light reflecting off the chrome of Kyle’s BSA. He continued up through the pasture and parked next to the motorcycle.
Inside the house, he heard the shower running upstairs. When he found the hall light on and all the kitchen lights, too, his uneasiness was replaced by a little surge of déjà vu—perhaps arising from memories of how when Kyle was a young teenager living with his mother and visiting Gurney on weekends, he’d seemed incapable of remembering to turn off the lights when he left a room.