“Any chance you might have a cold bottle of beer in the house?”
“Not at the moment,” said Gurney.
“Not at the moment? Fuck does that mean? Not at the moment, but maybe in a minute or two an icy Heineken might materialize in front of me?”
Gurney noted that whatever fleeting vulnerability the man had just experienced at his recollection of what he’d seen four months ago was now gone.
“So,” Gurney went on, ignoring the beer diversion, “the body was observable from the doorway?”
Hardwick walked over to the den window that looked out on the back pasture. The northern sky was dusky gray. As he spoke, he gazed out in the direction of the high ridge that led to the old bluestone quarry.
“The body was sitting in a chair at a small square table in the front room, six feet from the entry door.” He grimaced, as one might at the smell of a skunk. “As I said, the body was sitting at the table. But the head was not on the body. The head was on the table in a pool of blood. On the table, facing the body, still wearing the tiara you saw in the video.”
He paused, as if to ensure the accurate ordering of details. “The cottage had three rooms-the front room and, behind it, a small kitchen and a small bedroom-plus a tiny bathroom and a closet off the bedroom. Wood floors, no rugs, nothing on the walls. Apart from the substantial amount of blood on and around the body, there were a few drops of blood toward the back of the room near the bedroom doorway and a few more drops near the bedroom window, which was wide open.”
“Escape route?” asked Gurney.
“No doubt about that. Partial footprint in the soil outside the window.” Hardwick turned from the den window and gave Gurney one of his obnoxiously sly looks. “That’s where it gets interesting.”
“The facts, Jack, just the facts. Spare me the coy bullshit.”
“Luntz had called the sheriff’s department because they had the nearest K-9 team, and they got to Ashton’s estate about five minutes after I did. The dog picks up a scent from a pair of Flores’s boots and races straight out through the woods like the trail is red hot. But he stops all of a sudden a hundred and fifty yards from the cottage-sniffing, sniffing, sniffing around in a pretty tight circle, and he stops and barks right on top of the weapon, which turned out to be a razor-sharp machete. But here’s the thing-after he found the machete, he couldn’t pick up any scent leading away from it. Handler led him around in a small circle, then a wider circle-kept at it for half an hour-but it was no good. The only trail the dog could find led from the back window of the cottage to the machete, nowhere else.”
“This machete was just lying out there on the ground?” asked Gurney.
“It had some leaves and loose dirt kicked over the blade, like a half-assed attempt had been made to conceal it.”
Gurney pondered this for a few seconds. “No doubt about it being the murder weapon?”
Hardwick looked surprised by the question. “Zero doubt. Victim’s blood still on it. Perfect DNA match. Also supported by the ME’s report.” Hardwick’s tone switched to one of rote repetition of something he’d said many times before. “Death caused by the severing of both carotid arteries and the spinal column between the cervical vertebrae C1 and C2 as the result of a chopping blow by a sharp, heavy blade, delivered with great force. Damage to neck tissues and vertebrae consistent with the machete discovered in the wooded area adjacent to the crime scene. So,” said Hardwick, switching back to his normal tone, “zero doubt. DNA is DNA.”
Gurney nodded slowly, absorbing this.
Hardwick continued, adding a familiar touch of provocation. “The only open question about that particular spot in the woods is why the trail stopped there, kind of like the trail at the Mellery crime scene that just-”
“Hold on a second, Jack. There’s a big difference between the visible boot prints we found at Mellery’s place and an invisible scent trail.”
“Fact is, they both ended in the middle of nowhere with no explanation.”
“No, Jack,” Gurney snapped, “the fact is, there was a perfectly good explanation for the boot prints-just as there will be a perfectly good, but entirely different, explanation for your scent problem.”
“Ah, Davey boy, that’s what always impressed me about you: your omniscience.”
“You know, I always believed you were smarter than you pretended to be. Now I’m not so sure.”
Hardwick’s smirk conveyed a sense of satisfaction with Gurney’s irritation. He switched to a new tone, all innocence and earnest curiosity. “So what do you think happened? How could Flores’s scent trail just end like that?”
Gurney shrugged. “Changed his shoes? Put plastic bags over his feet?”
“Why the hell would he do that?”
“Maybe to create the problem the dog ended up having? Make it impossible to track him wherever he went next, wherever he went to hide out?”
“Like Kiki Muller’s house?”
“I heard that name on the tape. Isn’t she the one who-”
“Who Flores was supposedly screwing. Right. Lived next door to Ashton. Wife of Carl Muller, marine engineer who was away on a ship half the time. Kiki was never seen after the day Flores disappeared, presumably not a coincidence.”
Gurney leaned back on the couch, mulling this over, having trouble with a piece of it. “I can understand why Flores might take precautions to keep from being tracked to a neighbor’s house or wherever he was actually going, but why wouldn’t he do that before he left the cottage? Why in the woods? Why after he went out and hid the machete and not before?”
“Maybe he wanted to get out of the cottage ASAP?”
“Maybe. Or maybe he wanted us to find the machete?”
“Then why bury it?”
“You mean half bury it. Didn’t you say that only the blade was covered with dirt?”
Hardwick smiled. “Interesting questions. Definitely worth pursuing.”
“And one other thing,” said Gurney. “Has anyone verified where either of the Mullers was at the time of the murder?”
“We know that Carl was chief engineer on a commercial fishing boat about fifty miles off Montauk that whole week. But we couldn’t find anyone who’d seen Kiki the day of the murder, or the day before for that matter.”
“That mean anything to you?”
“Not a damn thing. Very private kind of community-at least at Ashton’s end of the road. Minimum property size is ten acres, private kind of people, not likely to hang out at the back fence and shoot the shit, probably be considered rude up there to say hello without an invitation.”
“Do we know if anyone saw her anytime after her husband left for Montauk?”
“Seems nobody did, but…” Hardwick shrugged, reiterating that not being seen by your neighbors in Tambury was the rule, not the exception.
“And the guests at the reception, their locations were all accounted for during ‘the critical fourteen minutes’ you referred to?”
“Yep. Day after the murder, I went thorough the video personally, accounted for the whereabouts of every guest for every minute the victim was in that cottage-with our encouraging captain telling me I was wasting time that I should be spending searching the woods for Hector Flores. Who the hell knows, maybe numbnuts was right for once. Of course, if I’d ignored the video and it later turned out… well, you know what the little shithead is like.” He hissed the obscenity through tightened lips. “What are you looking at me like that for?”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m crazy.”
“You are crazy,” said Gurney lightly. He was also thinking that during the ten months since they’d been involved in the Mellery case, Hardwick’s attitude toward Captain Rod Rodriguez had for some reason progressed from contemptuous to venomous.
“Maybe I am,” said Hardwick, as much to himself as to Gurney. “Seems to be the general consensus.” He turned and stared out the den window again. It was darker now, the northern ridge nearly black against a slate sky.