“Five.”
“Five?”
“This area of dysfunction always shocks people outside the field. The behavior is so inconsistent with what we like to think of as the innocence of childhood. Unfortunately, five-year-old abusers of even younger children are not as rare as you might think.”
“Jesus.” Gurney looked with growing concern at the picture on the wall. “Who were her victims?”
“I don’t know.”
“Val Perry is aware of all this?”
“Yes. She’s still not comfortable talking about it in any detail, in case you’re wondering why she didn’t tell you. But it’s why she came to you.”
“I don’t follow you.”
Ashton took a deep breath. “Val is driven by guilt. To make a complicated story simple, in her twenties she was part of a drug scene and not much of a mother. She surrounded herself with addicts even crazier than she was, which led to the abuse situation I described, which led to Jillian’s ensuing sexual aggression and other behavior disorders, which Val was unable to deal with. Her guilt tore her apart-a colorful cliché, but accurate. She felt responsible for every problem in her daughter’s life, and now she feels responsible for her death. She’s frustrated by the official police investigation-no leads, no progress, no closure. I believe she came to you in one final attempt to do something right for Jillian. Certainly too little too late, but it’s the only thing she could think of doing. She heard about you from one of the officers at BCI, about your reputation as a homicide detective in the city, read some article about you in New York magazine, and decided you represented her best and last chance to make up for being a terrible mother. It’s pathetic, but there it is.”
“How do you know all this?”
“After Jillian’s murder, Val was close to a breakdown, and she still is. Talking about these things was one way of holding herself together.”
“And you?”
“Me?”
“How have you held yourself together?”
“Is that curiosity or sarcasm?”
“Your discussion of the most horrible event of your life, and the people involved in it, seems remarkably detached. I don’t know what to make of that.”
“Don’t you? That’s hard to believe.”
“Meaning what?”
“My impression, Detective, is that you would respond the same way to the death of someone close to you.” He regarded Gurney with the neutrality of the classic therapist. “I suggest the parallel as a way of helping you understand my position. You’re asking yourself, ‘Is he concealing his emotion at the death of his wife, or is there no emotion to conceal?’ Before I give you the answer, think about what you saw on the video.”
“You mean your reaction to what you saw in the cottage?”
Ashton’s voice hardened, and he spoke with a rigidity that seemed to vibrate with the power of a barely contained fury. “I believe that part of Hector’s motive was to inflict pain on me. He succeeded. My pain was recorded on that video. It’s a fact I can’t change. However, I did make a resolution never to show that pain again. Not to anyone. Not ever.”
Gurney’s eyes rested on the chessboard’s delicate intarsia inlay. “You have no doubt at all about the murderer’s identity?”
Ashton blinked, looked like he was having trouble understanding the question. “I beg your pardon?”
“You have no doubt that Hector Flores is the person who killed your wife?”
“No doubt at all. I gave some thought to the suggestion you made yesterday that Carl Muller might be involved, but frankly I don’t see it.”
“Is it possible that Hector was gay, that the motive for the killing-”
“That’s absurd.”
“It’s a theory the police were considering.”
“I know something about sexuality. Trust me. Hector was not gay.” He looked deliberately at his watch.
Gurney sat back, waited for Ashton to make eye contact with him. “It must take a special kind of person-the field you’re in.”
“Meaning?”
“It must be depressing. I’ve heard that sex offenders are almost impossible to cure.”
Ashton sat back like Gurney, held his gaze, steepled his fingers under his chin. “That’s a media generalization. Half true, half nonsense.”
“Still, it must be a difficult kind of work.”
“What sort of difficulty are you imagining?”
“All the stress. So much at stake. The consequences of failure.”
“Like police work. Like life in general.” Again Ashton looked at his watch.
“So what’s the glue?” asked Gurney.
“The glue?”
“The thing that attaches you to the sexual-abuse field.”
“This is relevant to finding Flores?”
“It may be.”
Ashton closed his eyes and bowed his head so that his steepled fingers assumed a prayerful attitude. “You’re right about the high stakes. Sexual energy in general has tremendous power, the power to concentrate one’s attention like nothing else, to become the sole reality, to warp judgment, to obliterate pain and the perception of risk. The power to make all other considerations irrelevant. There is no force on earth that comes close to it in its power to blind and drive the individual in its grip. When this energy within a person is focused on an inappropriate object-specifically, another person of less-than-equal strength and understanding-the potential for damage is truly endless. Because in the intensity of its power and primitive excitement, its ability to twist reality, inappropriate sexual behavior can be as contagious as the bite of a vampire. In pursuit of the magic power of the abuser, the abused may become an abuser herself. There are simple evolutionary, neurological, and psychological roots for the overwhelming strength of the sex drive. Its diversions into destructive channels can be analyzed, described, diagrammed. But altering those diversions is another matter entirely. To understand the genesis of a tidal wave is one thing; to change its direction is something else.” He opened his eyes, lowered his steepled hands from his face.
“It’s the challenge in it that attracts you?”
“It’s the leverage in it.”
“You mean the ability to make a difference?”
“Yes!” Some inner rheostat turned up the light in Ashton’s eyes. “The ability to intervene in what otherwise would be an everlasting chain of misery spreading out from the abuser into everyone he or she touched, and from those to others, and down through future generations. This is not like the removal of a tumor, which may save one life. Success rates in the field are debatable, but even one success can prevent the destruction of a hundred lives.”
Gurney smiled, looked impressed. “So that’s the mission of Mapleshade?”
Ashton mirrored the smile. “Exactly.” Another glance at his watch. “And now I really do need to leave. You can stay if you wish, have a look around the grounds, a look at the cottage. The key is under the black rock to the right of the doorstep. If you want to see the spot where the machete was found, go around to the rear of the cottage as far as the middle window, then walk straight out into the woods about a hundred and fifty yards, and you’ll find a tall stake in the ground. There was originally a yellow police ribbon tied around the top, but that may be gone by now. Good luck, Detective.”
He showed Gurney out, left him standing on the brick-paved driveway, and drove off in a vintage Jaguar sedan, as evocatively English as the chamomile scent in the damp air.
Chapter 24
Gurney felt an urgent need to sort and review, to take the mass of data and possibilities crowding his mind and arrange them in a manageable order. Although the drizzle had finally stopped, there was no place outside Ashton’s house dry enough to sit, so he retreated to his car. He took out the spiral pad with his notes on Calvin Harlen, turned to a new page, closed his eyes, and began rerunning the mental tapes of his meeting with Ashton.