Kline paused. “You don’t know what happened with your buddy?”
“Buddy?”
“Rodriguez nailed him for an over-the-limit BAC on duty.”
“What!?”
“Suspended him for drinking on the job, hung a possible DWI over his head, threatened his pension, forced him to go to rehab as a condition for ending the suspension. I’m surprised you don’t know about this.”
“When did it happen?”
“Month and a half ago? Twenty-eight-day rehab. Jack’s back on the job maybe ten days.”
“Jesus.” Gurney had figured that part of Hardwick’s reason for setting him up with Val Perry was the hope that some new discovery would put Rodriguez in a bad light, but this news went a long way toward explaining the negative energy bouncing around that conference room.
“I’m surprised you didn’t know about it,” Kline repeated, enough disbelief in his tone to make it an accusation.
“If I’d known, I’d never have gotten involved,” said Gurney. “But it’s all the more reason to keep my exposure limited to my client and to you-assuming that a direct line of contact with me isn’t going to poison your relationship with BCI.”
Kline took so long to mull this over that Gurney imagined the man’s risk-reward calculator starting to smolder from an overload of permutations.
“Okay-with one major caution. It has to be perfectly clear that you’re working for the Perry family, independently of this office. Which means that under no circumstances can you imply that you’re covered by our investigatory authority or by any form of immunity. You proceed as Dave Gurney, private citizen, period. With that understanding, I’d be happy to listen to whatever you have to say. Believe me, I have nothing but respect for you. Based on your NYPD homicide record and your role in solving the Mellery case, how could I not? We just need to be clear about your unofficial position. Any questions?”
Gurney smiled at Kline’s predictability. The man never strayed from the one guiding principle of his life: Get everything you possibly can from other people, while covering your own ass absolutely.
“One question, Sheridan: How do I get in touch with Rebecca Holdenfield?”
Kline’s voice tightened with an attorney’s skepticism. “What do you want from her?”
“I’m starting to get a sense of our killer. Very hypothetical, nothing that firm yet, but it might help me to have someone with her background as a sounding board.”
“There some reason you don’t want to call the killer by his name?”
“Hector Flores?”
“You have a problem with that?”
“Couple of problems. Number one, we don’t know that he was alone in the cottage when Jillian went in, so we don’t know that he’s the killer. Come right down to it, we don’t know that he was in the cottage at all. Suppose someone else was in there instead, waiting for her? I realize it’s unlikely-all I’m saying is, we don’t know. It’s all circumstantial, assumptions, probabilities. Second problem is the name itself. If the Cinderella gardener is really a cool, think-ahead murderer, then ‘Hector Flores’ is almost certainly an alias.”
“Why am I getting the feeling I’m on a merry-go-round-that every damn thing I think is settled comes flying around at me again?”
“Merry-go-round doesn’t sound so bad. To me it feels more like being sucked down a drain.”
“And you want to suck Becca down with you?”
Gurney chose not to react to whatever nasty suggestion Kline was making. “I want her to help me stay realistic-provide boundaries for the image I’m forming of the man I’m after.”
Perhaps jarred by the commitment in those last four words, perhaps reminded of Gurney’s unparalleled record of homicide arrests, Kline’s tone changed.
“I’ll have her call you.”
An hour later Gurney was sitting in front of his computer screen at the desk in his den, staring into the emotionless black eyes of Peter Piggert-a man who might have something in common with the murderer of Jillian Perry and quite a lot in common with the villain in Edward Vallory’s lost play. Gurney wasn’t sure whether he’d been drawn back to the computer-art portrait he’d done of the man a year earlier because of its possible relevance to the psychology of his current quarry or because of its new financial potential.
A hundred thousand dollars? For this? The moneyed art world must be a strange place indeed. A hundred thousand dollars for Peter Piggert’s picture. The price was as absurd as the alliteration. He needed to talk to Sonya. He’d get in touch with her first thing in the morning. Right now he wanted to concentrate not so much on the portrait’s possible value but on the man it depicted.
Piggert at the age of fifteen had murdered his father in order to pursue without obstruction a profoundly sick relationship with his mother. He got her pregnant twice and had two daughters with her. Fifteen years later, at the age of thirty, he murdered his mother in order to pursue without obstruction an equally sick relationship with their daughters, then thirteen and fourteen.
To the average observer, Piggert appeared to be the most ordinary of men. But to Gurney there had seemed from the beginning to be something not quite right about the eyes. Their dark placidity seemed eerily bottomless. Peter Piggert seemed to view the world in a way that justified and encouraged any action that might please him, regardless of its effect on anyone else. Gurney wondered if it was a man like Piggert whom Scott Ashton had in mind when he floated his provocative theory that a sociopath is a creature with “perfect boundaries.”
As he stared into the disconcerting stillness of those eyes, Gurney was more certain than ever that the man’s principal drive was an overwhelming need to control his environment. His vision of the proper order of things was inviolable, his whims absolute. That was what Gurney had endeavored to highlight in his manipulation of the original mug-shot photo. The rigid tyrant behind the bland features. Satan in the skin of Everyman.
Was that what Jay Jykynstyl was fascinated by? The veiled evil? Was that what he prized, what he was offering to pay a small fortune for?
Of course, there was a crucial difference between the reality of the killer and the portrait of the killer. The object on the screen derived its appeal in part from its evocation of the monster and in part, ironically, from its own essential harmlessness. The serpent defanged. The devil paralyzed and laminated.
Gurney leaned back from his desk, away from the computer screen, folded his arms across his chest, and gazed out the west window. His focus initially was inward. When he began to notice the crimson sunset, it seemed at first a smear of blood across the aqua sky. Then he realized he was remembering a bedroom wall in the South Bronx, a turquoise wall against which a shooting victim had leaned, sliding slowly to the floor. Twenty-four years ago, his first murder case.
Flies. It was August, and the body had been there for a week.
Chapter 39
For twenty-four years he’d been up to his armpits in murder and mayhem. Half his life. Even now, in retirement… What was it Madeleine had said to him during the Mellery carnage? That death seemed to call to him more strongly than life?
He’d denied it. And argued the point semantically: It wasn’t death that drew his attention and energy; it was the challenge of unraveling the mystery of murder. It was about justice.
And of course she had given him her wry look. Madeleine was unimpressed by principled motives, or at least by the invocation of principles to win arguments.
Once he had disengaged from the debate, the truth would sneak up on him. The truth was that he was drawn, almost physically, to criminal mysteries and the process of exposing the people behind them. It was a far more primal and powerful force than whatever it was that pushed him toward weeding the asparagus patch. Murder investigations captured the fullness of his attention as nothing else in his life ever had.