He suspected there was a better explanation for Kiki Muller’s murder than the rage of a jealous husband, something that would attach it more directly to the larger mystery at Mapleshade. As he turned into Badger Lane from Higgles Road, he was starting to feel like himself again. He was far from whistling a happy tune, but at least he felt like a detective. And he didn’t feel like throwing up.
Two tattooed clones of Calvin Harlen were standing with the man himself next to the manure pile that separated the wreck of a house from the wreck of a barn. Their dull eyes followed Gurney’s car into the lane with a lazy malevolence.
Driving up toward Ashton’s house, he half expected to see Marian Eliot and Melpomene, exposer of buried sins, striking a dour pose on their front porch, but there was no sign of either. Nor was there any sign of life at the Muller house.
When he got out of his car in Ashton’s brick-paved driveway, he was struck again by the English ambience of the place-its subtle communication of wealth and quiet exclusivity. Rather than proceeding straight to the front door, he walked over to the arched trellis that served as an entryway to the broad lawn extending far behind the house. Although the surrounding shrubs were still primarily green, scattered tinges of yellow and red were beginning to appear in the trees.
“Detective Gurney?”
He turned toward the house. Scott Ashton was standing at the open side door.
Gurney smiled. “Sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning.”
Ashton mirrored his smile. “I wouldn’t expect any distinction between weekday and weekend in a murder investigation. Is there anything specific…?”
“Actually, I was wondering if I could take a closer look at the area around the cottage.”
“A closer look?”
“That’s right. If you don’t mind?”
“Anything in particular you’re interested in?”
“I’m hoping I’ll know it when I see it.”
Ashton’s even smile was as measured as his voice. “Let me know if you need any help. I’ll be with my father in the library.”
Some people have “dens,” thought Gurney, and some people have “libraries.” Who said America was a classless society? Certainly no one whose home was built of Cotswold stone and whose father was named Hobart Ashton.
He walked from the driveway across the side lawn through the trellis to the main area of the rear lawn. He’d been so preoccupied that he hadn’t noticed until that very moment what a strangely perfect day it was, one of those autumn days when the altered angle of the sun, the altered color of the leaves, and an absolute stillness in the air conspired to create a world of timeless peace, a world that required nothing of him, a world whose peace took his breath away.
Like all the moments of serenity in Gurney’s life, this one was short-lived. He had come here to focus on a murder, to absorb more fully the nitty-gritty reality of the place in which it happened, the locale in which the murderer went about his business.
He continued around the back of the house to the broad stone patio, to the small round table-the table where four months earlier a bullet from a.257 Weatherby rifle had shattered Ashton’s teacup. He wondered where Hector Flores was at that very moment. He might be anywhere. He might be in the woods watching the house, keeping an eye on Ashton and his father, keeping an eye on Gurney.
Gurney’s attention moved to the cottage, to what had happened the day of the murder, the day of the wedding. From where he was standing, he could see the front and one side, as well as the part of the woods that Flores would have had to pass through in order to deposit the machete where it was found. In May the leaves would have been coming out, as now they were thinning, making the visibility conditions in the thicket roughly the same.
As he’d done many times during the past week, Gurney envisioned an athletic Latino male climbing out the back window of the cottage, running with the evasive steps of a soccer player through the trees and thornbushes to a point approximately 150 yards away, and half concealing the bloodied machete under some leaves. And then… then what? Slipping some sort of plastic bags over his feet? Or spraying them with some chemical to destroy the continuity of the scent trail? So he could proceed tracelessly to some other destination in the copse or on the road beyond it? So he could meet up with Kiki Muller, waiting in her car to drive him safely out of the area before the police arrived? Or take him to her own house? To her own house where he then killed and buried her? But why? What sense did any of that make? Or was that the wrong question, assuming as it did that the scenario had to make practical sense? Suppose a large part of it had been driven by pure pathology, by some warped fantasy? But that was not a useful avenue to explore. Because if nothing made sense, there was no way to make sense of it. And he had the feeling that, under the cloak of fury and lunacy, it all somehow did make sense.
So why was the machete only partially concealed? It seemed senseless to go to the trouble of covering the blade while leaving the handle in plain sight. For some reason that small discrepancy was the one that bothered him the most. Perhaps bothered was the wrong word. He was actually quite fond of discrepancies, because his experience told him that they eventually provided a window into the truth.
He sat down at the table and gazed into the woods, imagining as best he could the path of the running man. The view of those 150 yards from cottage to machete site was almost entirely obscured, not only by the foliage of the copse itself but by the rhododendron border that separated the wild area from the lawn and the flower beds. Gurney tried to estimate how deeply into the woods someone could see, and he concluded that it was not very deeply at all-making it easy for a man to pass where Flores had evidently passed without anyone on the lawn noticing him. In fact, by far the most distant object in the woods Gurney could see through the foliage from where he was sitting was the black trunk of a cherry tree. And he could see only a narrow slice of it through a gap in the bushes no more than a few inches wide.
True, that visible bit of tree trunk was on the far side of the route Flores would have to have taken, and theoretically, if someone had been staring into the woods, focused on that spot at the right moment, he or she might have caught a split-second glimpse of a person passing it. But it would have meant nothing at the time. And the chance of someone’s attention being focused on that precise spot at that time was about as likely as…
Jesus Christ!
Gurney’s eyes widened at the obvious thing he’d almost missed.
He stared through the foliage at the black, scaly bark of the cherry tree. Then, keeping it in sight, he walked toward it-straight across the patio, through the flower bed where Ashton had collapsed, through the rhododendron border of the lawn, and into the copse. His direction was approximately perpendicular to the route he assumed Flores would have traveled from the cottage to the machete site. He wanted to be sure there was no way the man could have avoided passing in front of the cherry tree.
When Gurney reached the edge of the ravine that he remembered from his first examination of the copse a couple of days earlier, his assumption was confirmed. The tree was on the far side of the ravine, which was long and deep with precipitous sides. Any route from the cottage that would pass behind the tree would involve crossing that ravine at least twice-a time-consuming task that would have been impossible to accomplish before the area was swarming with people after the discovery of the body-not to mention the fact that the scent trail ran along the near side of the ravine, not the far side. Which meant that anyone going from the cottage to the machete site had to pass in front of the tree. There was simply no way not to.