“Tell me something, Doctor. Are you ready to provide us with names, or do we get an immediate court order for your records?”
All eyes in the room were on Gurney. Kline’s coffee was inches from his lips, but he seemed to have forgotten he was holding it.
“What names do you want?” said Ashton in a beaten voice.
“Let’s start with the names of the missing girls, plus the names of all the girls who were in the same classes.”
“Fine.”
“One other question: How did Jillian get her modeling job?”
“I don’t know.”
“She never told you? Even though she gave you the photograph as a wedding present?”
“She never told me.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“I did, but… Jillian wasn’t fond of questions.”
Gurney felt an urge to shout, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? IS EVERYONE CONNECTED WITH THIS CASE OUT OF HIS GODDAMN MIND?
Instead he said simply, “Thank you, Doctor. That’s it for now. You’ll be contacted by BCI for the relevant names and addresses.”
As Gurney slipped the phone back into his pocket, Kline barked, “What on earth was that?”
“Two more girls are missing. After having the same argument: One girl demanded that her parents buy her a Suzuki, the other a Mustang.” He turned toward Anderson. “Ashton is ready to provide BCI with the names of the missing girls, plus the names of their classmates. Just let him know what format you want the list in and how to send it to you.”
“Fine, but we’re ignoring the point that nobody is legally missing, which means we can’t devote police resources to finding them. These are eighteen-year-old women, adults, who made apparently free decisions to leave home. The fact that they haven’t told their families how to reach them does not give us a legal basis for tracking them down.”
Gurney got the impression that Lieutenant Anderson was coasting toward a Florida retirement and had a coaster’s fondness for inaction. It was a state of mind for which Gurney, a driven man in his police career, had little patience. “Then find a basis. Declare them all material witnesses to the Perry murder. Invent a basis. Do what you have to do. That’s the least of your problems.”
Anderson looked riled enough to escalate the argument into something unpleasant. But before he could launch his reply, Kline interrupted. “This may seem a small point, Dave, but if you’re implying that these girls were following the directions of some third party-presumably Flores-who rehearsed them in the argument they were supposed to start with their parents, why is the make of car different from case to case?”
“The simplest answer is that different cars might be necessary in order to achieve the same effect on families in different economic circumstances. Assuming that the purpose of the argument was to provide a credible excuse for the girl to storm out-to disappear without the disappearance becoming a police matter-the car demand would need to have two results. One, it would have to involve enough money to guarantee that it would be refused. Two, the parents would have to believe that their daughter was serious. The different makes may not have any significance per se; the key point may be the difference in the prices. Different prices would be necessary in order to achieve the same impact in families of different financial means. In other words, a demand for a twenty-thousand-dollar car in one family might have the same impact as a demand for a forty-thousand-dollar car in another family.”
“Clever,” said Kline, smiling appreciatively. “If you’re right, Flores is a thinker. A maniac, maybe, but definitely a thinker.”
“But he’s also done things that make no sense.” Gurney stood to get himself some more coffee. “That damn bullet in the teacup-what the hell was the point of that? He stole Ashton’s hunting rifle so he could shatter his teacup? Why take a risk like that? By the way,” said Gurney in an aside to Blatt, “were you aware that Withrow Perry had a gun of the same caliber?”
“The hell are you talking about?”
“The bullet that was fired at the teacup came from a.257 Weatherby. Ashton owns one, which he reported stolen, but Perry also owns one. You might want to look into that.”
There was an uncomfortable silence as Rodriguez and Blatt both made hurried notes.
Kline looked accusingly at both of them, then turned his attention to Gurney. “Okay, what else do you know that we don’t?”
“Hard to say,” said Gurney. “How much do you know about Crazy Carl?”
“Who?”
“Husband of Kiki Muller.”
“What’s he got to do with it?”
“Maybe nothing, except for having a credible motive for killing Flores.”
“Flores wasn’t killed.”
“How do we know? He disappeared without a trace. He could be buried in somebody’s backyard.”
“Whoa, whoa, what’s all this?” Anderson was appalled, Gurney guessed, at the prospect of more work. Digging up backyards. “What are we doing here, inventing imaginary murders?”
Kline looked confused. “Where are you going with this?”
“The assumption seems to be that Flores fled the area in the company of Kiki Muller, maybe even hid out at the Muller house for a few days before leaving the area. Suppose Flores was still around when Carl came home from his stint on that ship he worked on? I assume the interview team noticed that Carl is bonkers?”
Kline took a step backward from the table, as if the panorama of the case were too broad to see from where he’d been standing. “Wait a second. If Flores is dead, he can’t be connected to the disappearances of these other girls. Or the gunshot on Ashton’s patio. Or the text message Ashton received from Flores’s cell phone.”
Gurney shrugged.
Kline shook his head in frustration. “It sounds to me like you just took everything that was starting to fit together and kicked it off the table.”
“I’m not kicking anything off the table. Personally, I don’t believe Carl is involved. I’m not even sure his wife was involved. I’m just trying to loosen things up a bit. We don’t have as many solid facts as you might think. My point is, we need to keep our minds open.” He weighed the risk of ill will inherent in what he was about to add and decided to add it, anyway. “Getting committed to the wrong hypothesis early on may be the reason the investigation hasn’t gotten anywhere.”
Kline looked at Rodriguez, who was staring at the table surface as if it were a painting of hell. “What do you think, Rod? You think we need to take a new look at it? You think maybe we’ve been trying to solve the puzzle ass backwards?”
Rodriguez just shook his head slowly. “No, that’s not what I think,” he said, his voice hoarse, tense with suppressed emotion.
Judging from the expressions around the table, Gurney wasn’t the only one taken aback when the captain, a man obsessed with projecting an aura of control, rose awkwardly from his chair and left the room as though he couldn’t bear to be in it for another minute.
Chapter 36
After the captain left, the meeting lost focus. Not that it had much focus to begin with, but the strangeness of his departure seemed to underline the incoherence of the investigation, and the discussion disintegrated. Star profiler Rebecca Holdenfield, expressing confusion about her role there, was the next to flee. Anderson and Blatt were restless, caught between the gravitational fields of their boss who was gone and the DA who was still present.
Gurney asked if any progress had been made identifying the significance of the Edward Vallory name, but none had. Anderson looked blank at the question, and Blatt dismissed it with a wave of his hand that conveyed what a useless avenue of inquiry he considered it to be.
The DA mouthed a few meaningless sentences about how profitable the meeting had been in getting everyone on the same page. Gurney didn’t think it had done that. But at least it might have gotten everyone wondering what kind of story they were reading. And it got the question of the disappearing graduates on the table.