Gurney found the effect of his blasé response hard to measure. He hoped it had the jarring effect intended. Any speck of doubt he could toss into Ashton’s grasp of the situation would be a plus.
Ashton shifted his gaze to Hardwick, whose eyes were on the pistol. Ashton shook his head as though admonishing a naughty child. “As they say in the movies, Detective, don’t even think about it. I’d have three bullets in your chest before you got out of your chair.”
Then he addressed Gurney in the same tone. “And you, Detective, you’re like a fly that’s found its way into the house. You buzz around, you walk on the ceiling. Bzzzz. You see what you can see. Bzzzz. But you have no grasp of what you see. Bzzzz. Then SWAT! All that buzzing around-for nothing. All that searching and looking-all of it for nothing. Because you can’t possibly understand what you see. How could you? You’re nothing but a fly.” He began to laugh, soundlessly.
Gurney knew that the strategic imperative was to create delay, to slow things down. If Ashton was the killer he appeared to be, the mind game would be what it usually was in such cases: a contest for the high ground of emotional control. So the practical agenda for Gurney now was to prolong it-to engage his opponent in the game and make it go on until a game-ending opportunity presented itself. He sat back in his chair and smiled. “But in this case, Ashton, the fly got it right, didn’t he? You wouldn’t have that gun in your hand if I hadn’t gotten it right.”
Ashton stopped laughing. “Gotten it right? The deductive mastermind is taking credit for having gotten it right? After I fed you all those little facts? The fact that some of our graduates were missing, the fact of the car arguments, the fact that the young ladies in question had all appeared in Karnala ads? If I hadn’t been tempted to tease you-to make the contest interesting-you wouldn’t have gotten any further than your moronic colleagues.”
Now Gurney laughed. “Making the contest interesting had nothing to do with it. You knew that our next step would be to talk to former students, and all those facts would come to light immediately. So you weren’t giving us a damn thing we wouldn’t have gotten in another day or two ourselves. It was a pathetic effort to buy our trust with information you couldn’t keep hidden.” Gurney’s reading of Ashton’s expression-a frozen attempt at the appearance of equanimity-convinced him that he’d hit the target dead center. But sometimes in the management of a confrontation like this, there was such a thing as being too right, of scoring too direct a hit.
Ashton’s next words gave him the awful feeling that this was one of those cases.
“There’s no point in wasting any more time. I want you to see something. I want you to see how the story ends.” He stood up and with his free hand dragged his heavy chair to a point near the open office door that formed a triangle with the large flat-screen monitor on the table behind his desk and the pair of chairs opposite the desk that were occupied by Gurney and Hardwick-a position with his back to the door from which he could observe the screen and them at the same time.
“Don’t look at me,” said Ashton, pointing at the computer. “Look at the screen. Reality TV. Mapleshade: The Final Episode. It’s not the finale I’d intended to write, but in reality television one has to be flexible. Okay. We’re all in our seats. The camera is running, the action is in progress, but I think we could use a little more light down there.” He took the small lights-and-locks electronic remote from his pocket and pressed a button.
The chapel nave grew brighter, as rows of wall-sconce lamps were illuminated. There was a brief hiatus in the conversational hum as the girls in the discussion groups looked around at the lamps.
“That’s better,” said Ashton, smiling with satisfaction at the screen. “Considering your contribution, Detective, I want to be sure you can see everything clearly.”
What contribution? Gurney wanted to ask. Instead he put his hand over his mouth and stifled a yawn. Then he glanced at his watch.
Ashton gave him a long, cool stare. “You won’t be bored much longer.” A swarm of minuscule tics migrated across his face. “You’re an educated man, Detective. Tell me something: The medieval term condign reparation-do you know what it means?”
Strangely, he did. From a college philosophy class. Condign reparation: Punishment in perfect balance with the offense. Punishment of an ideally appropriate nature.
“Yes, I do,” he answered, triggering a hint of surprise in Ashton’s eyes.
And then, at the edge of his field of vision, he detected something else-a quickly moving shadow. Or was it the edge of a dark piece of clothing, a sleeve perhaps? Whatever it was, it had disappeared in the recess of the landing, where there would be barely enough room for a man to stand, just outside the office doorway.
“Then you may be able to appreciate the damage your ignorance has done.”
“Tell me about it,” said Gurney, with a look of increasing interest that he hoped would hide-better than his feigned yawn-the fear he was feeling.
“You have exceptional mental wiring, Detective. Quite an efficient brain. A remarkable calculator of vectors and probabilities.”
This characterization was precisely the opposite of Gurney’s current estimate of his capabilities. He wondered, with a nauseating chill, if Ashton’s perception of his state of mind could be so keen that the observation was intended as a joke.
Gurney’s own sense was that the brain that was responsible for his great professional victories was sliding sideways in the mud, losing traction and direction, as it strained to fit together so many things at once: The unreal Hector. The unreal Jykynstyl. The decapitated Jillian Perry. The decapitated Kiki Muller. The decapitated Melanie Strum. The decapitated Savannah Liston. The decapitated doll in Madeleine’s sewing room.
Where was the center of gravity in all this-the place at which the lines of force converged? Was it here at Mapleshade? Or at the brownstone, tended by Steck’s “daughters”? Or in some obscure Sardinian café where Giotto Skard might at that very moment be sipping bitter espresso-lurking like a wizened spider at the center of his web, where all the threads of his enterprises converged?
Unanswered questions were piling up fast.
And now a very personal one: Why had he, Gurney, failed to consider the possibility that the room might be bugged?
He’d always felt that the “death wish” concept was a grossly facile and overused paradigm, but now he wondered if it might not be the best explanation of his own behavior.
Or was his mental hard drive just too damn full of undigested details?
Undigested details, wobbly theories, and murders.
When all else fails, return to the present.
Madeleine’s persistent advice: Be here, in the here and now. Pay attention.
Awareness of the moment: the holy grail of consciousness.
Ashton was in the middle of a sentence. “… tragicomic clumsiness of the criminal-justice system-which is neither just nor systematic, but surely criminal. When it comes to dealing with sex offenders, the system is inanely political and ludicrously inept. Of the offenders it catches, it helps none and makes the majority worse. It frees all those clever enough to fool the so-called professionals who evaluate them. It publishes public lists of sex offenders that are incomplete and useless. Under cover of this PR scam, it turns snakesloose to devour children!” He glared at Gurney, at Hardwick, at Gurney again. “This is the wretched system all your fine mental wiring, all your logic, all your investigative skill, all your intelligence ultimately serves.”