“By the way,” he said, the question popping back into his mind, coming out more aggressively than he intended, “why are you home?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Isn’t this knitting night?”
She nodded. “We decided to end a bit early.”
He thought he heard something odd in her voice.
“How come?”
“There was a little problem.”
“Oh?”
“Well… actually… Marjorie Ann puked.”
Gurney blinked. “What?”
“She puked.”
“Marjorie Ann Highsmith?”
“That’s right.”
He blinked again. “What do you mean, puked?”
“What the hell do you think I mean?”
“I mean, where? Right there at the table?”
“No, not at the table. She got up from the table and ran for the bathroom and…”
“And?”
“And she didn’t quite make it.”
Gurney noted that a certain almost imperceptible light had come back into Madeleine’s eyes, a flicker of the subtle humor with which she viewed almost everything, a humor that balanced her sadness-a light that had lately been missing. He wanted so much, right then, at that moment, to fan the flame of that light but knew that if he tried too hard, he’d only succeed in blowing it out.
“I guess there was a bit of a mess?”
“Oh, yes. A bit of a mess. And it… uh… it didn’t stay in one place.”
“Didn’t… what?”
“Well, she didn’t just throw up on the floor. Actually, she threw up on the cats.”
“Cats?”
“We met tonight at Bonnie’s house. You remember Bonnie has two cats?”
“Yes, sort of.”
“The cats were lying down together in a cat bed that Bonnie keeps in the hall outside the bathroom.”
Gurney started to laugh-a sudden giddiness taking hold of him.
“Yes, well, Marjorie Ann made it as far as the cats.”
“Oh, Jesus…” He was doubled over now.
“And she threw up quite a bit. I mean, it was… substantial. Well, the cats sort of exploded out of the cat bed and came flying out into the living room.”
“Covered…”
“Oh, yes, covered with it. Racing around the room, over couches, chairs. It was… really something.”
“Good God…” Gurney couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed so hard.
“And of course,” Madeleine concluded, “after that no one could eat. And we couldn’t stay in the living room. Naturally, we wanted to help Bonnie clean up, but she wouldn’t let us.”
After a short silence he asked, “Would you like to eat something now?”
“No!” She shuddered. “Don’t mention food.”
The image of the cats got him laughing again.
His food suggestion, however, had seemed to trigger in Madeleine’s mind a delayed association that extinguished the sparkle in her eyes.
When his laughter finally subsided, she asked, “So is it just you, Sonya, and the mad collector at dinner tomorrow night?”
“No,” he said, glad for the first time that Sonya wasn’t going to be present. “Just the mad collector and me.”
Madeleine raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I would’ve thought she’d kill to be at that dinner.”
“Actually, dinner’s been switched to lunch.”
“Lunch? Are you being downgraded already?”
Gurney showed no reaction, but, absurdly, the comment stung.
Chapter 40
Once Madeleine had finished with the pots and pans and dishes, she made herself a cup of herbal tea and settled with her knitting bag into one of the overstuffed armchairs at the far end of the room. Gurney, with one of the Perry case folders in hand, soon followed to the armchair’s twin on the opposite side of the fireplace. They sat in companionable isolation, each in a separate pool of lamplight.
He opened the folder and extracted the ViCAP crime report. Curious thing about that acronym. At the FBI it stood for the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. At New York’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation, it stood for the Violent Crime Analysis Program. But it was the same form, processed by the same computers and distributed to the same recipients. Gurney liked New York’s version better. It said what it was, made no promises.
The thirty-six-page form itself was comprehensive, to say the least, but useful only to the extent that the officer filling it out had been accurate and thorough. One of its purposes was to uncover MO similarities to other crimes on file, but in this case there was no notation of any subsequent hits by the comparative-analysis program. Gurney was poring over the thirty-six pages to make sure he hadn’t overlooked anything significant the first time around.
He was having a hard time focusing, kept thinking he should call Kyle, kept looking for excuses to put it off. The time difference between New York and Seattle had provided a convenient obstruction for the past three years, but now Kyle was back in Manhattan, enrolled at Columbia Law School, and Gurney’s procrastination had lost its enabler. Which is not to say that the procrastination had ceased, or even that its true causes had become transparent to him.
Sometimes he dismissed it as the natural product of his cold Celtic genes. That was the most comfortable way of looking at it. Hardly any personal responsibility at all. Other times he was convinced it was related to one of his downward spirals of guilt: the guilt that was created by not calling, creating in turn an increasing resistance to calling, and more guilt. For as long as he could remember, he’d had an abundance of that gnawing rat of an emotion-an only child’s feeling of responsibility for his parents’ strained and staggering marriage. At still other times, he suspected that the problem was that he saw too much of his first wife in Kyle-too many reminders of too many ugly disagreements.
And then there was the disappointment factor. In the midst of the stock-market meltdown, when Kyle announced he was leaving investment banking for law school, Gurney had entertained for a delusional moment the belief that the young man might have an interest in following him into law enforcement. But it soon became clear that Kyle was simply taking a new route to the old goal of material success.
“Why don’t you just call him?” Madeleine was watching him, her knitting needles resting in her lap atop a half-finished orange scarf.
He stared at her, a little startled but not so utterly amazed as he once would have been at this uncanny sensitivity.
“It’s a certain look you get when you’re thinking about him,” she said, as if explaining something obvious. “Not a happy look.”
“I will. I’ll call.”
He began scanning the ViCAP form with a fresh urgency, like a man in a locked room searching for a hidden exit. Nothing emerged that seemed new or different from what he’d remembered. He shuffled through the other reports in the folder.
One of several analyses of the wedding-reception DVD material concluded with this summary: “Locations of all persons present on the Ashton property during the time frame of the homicide have been verified through time-coded video imagery.” Gurney had a pretty good idea what this meant, recalling what Hardwick had told him the evening they watched the video, but given its critical significance, he wanted to be sure.
He got his cell phone from the sideboard and called Hardwick’s number. He was shunted immediately into voice maiclass="underline" “Hardwick. Leave a message.”
“It’s Gurney. I have a question about the video.”
Less than a minute after he left the message, his phone rang. He didn’t bother to check the caller ID. “Jack?”
“Dave?” It was a woman’s voice-familiar, but he couldn’t immediately place it.
“Sorry, I was expecting someone else. This is Dave.”