Gurney made the trip home from Tambury to Walnut Crossing in fifty-five minutes instead of the normal hour and a quarter. He was in a hurry to take a closer look at the video material from the wedding reception. He also realized that his rush might be arising from a need to stay as involved as possible in the Perry murder-a murder that, however horrendous, caused him far less anxiety than did the Jykynstyl situation.
Madeleine’s car was parked next to the house, and her bicycle was leaning against the garden shed. He guessed she’d be in the kitchen, but when he went in through the side door and called out, “I’m home,” there was no answer.
He went straight to the long table that separated the big kitchen from the sitting area-the table where his copies of the case materials were laid out, much to Madeleine’s annoyance. Amid the folders was a set of DVDs.
The one on top, the one he sat through with Hardwick, bore a label that said “Perry-Ashton Reception, Comprehensive BCI Edit.” But it was another DVD, one of the unedited originals, that Gurney was looking for. There were five to choose from. The first was labeled “Helicopter, General Aerial Views and Descent.” The other four, each containing the video captured by one of the stationary ground cameras at the reception, were labeled according to the compass orientation of each camera’s field of view.
He took the four DVDs into the den, opened his laptop, went to Google Earth, and typed in, “Badger Lane, Tambury, NY.” Thirty seconds later he was looking at a satellite photo of Ashton’s property, complete with altitude and compass points. Even the tea table on the patio was identifiable.
He chose the approximate point in the woods where he figured the visible tree trunk would be. Using the Google compass points, he calculated the heading from the table to the tree. The heading was eighty-five degrees-close to due east.
He shuffled through the DVDs. The last one was labeled “East by Northeast.” He popped it into the player across from the couch, located the point at which Jillian Perry had entered the cottage, and settled down to give the next fourteen minutes of the video his total attention.
He watched it once, twice, with increasing bafflement. Then he watched it again, this third time letting it run to the point when Luntz, the local police chief, had secured the scene and the state cops were arriving.
Something was wrong. More than wrong. Impossible.
He called Hardwick, who, in no hurry, answered on the seventh ring.
“What can I do for you, ace?”
“How sure are you that the input tapes of the wedding reception are complete?”
“What do you mean, ‘complete’?”
“One of the four fixed cameras was set up so that its field of view covered the cottage and a broad stretch of woods to the left of the cottage. That stretch of woods includes all the space that Flores had to pass through in order to ditch the murder weapon where he did.”
“So?”
“So there’s a tree trunk in back of that area that’s visible through gaps in the foliage from the angle of the patio, which was also the angle of one of the cameras.”
“And?”
“That tree trunk, I repeat, is in back of the route Flores would have to have taken to place the machete where it was found. That tree trunk is clearly and continually visible on the high-def video recorded by that camera.”
“Your point being what?”
“I watched the video three times to be absolutely sure. Jack, no one passed in front of that tree.”
Hardwick sounded subdued. “I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I. Is there any possibility that the machete in the woods wasn’t the murder weapon?”
“We have a perfect DNA match. The fresh blood on the machete was Jillian Perry’s. Potential error factor is less than one in a million. Not to mention the fact that the ME report refers to a powerful blow from a heavy, sharp blade. And what’s the alternative, anyway? That Flores secretly disposed of a second bloody machete, the real murder weapon, after wiping some of the blood from it onto the first one? But he’d still have to get it to where we found it. I mean, what the hell are we talking about? How could it not be the murder weapon?”
Gurney sighed. “So what we have, basically, is an impossible situation.”
Chapter 48
If the facts contradict each other, it means that some of them aren’t facts.
One of his instructors at the NYPD academy had made that observation in class one day. Gurney never forgot it.
If he was going to base any conclusions on the content of the video, he needed to test its factualness a little further. On the DVD case, there was a phone number for the company, Perfect Memories, that had handled the videography.
He called the number, left a message mentioning the names Ashton and Perry, and had barely concluded when his phone rang and Perfect Memories appeared as the caller ID.
A professionally pleasant and alert female voice asked, “How can I help you?”
Gurney explained who he was and how he was trying to assist Val Perry, mother of the late bride, and how important he believed the video material produced by Perfect Memories would be in capturing the madman who’d killed Jillian and providing closure for her family. All he needed was an absolutely certain answer to one question, but he needed to hear it from the person who’d supervised the project.
“That would be me.”
“And you are…?”
“Jennifer Stillman. I’m the managing director here.”
Managing director. British-sounding title. Nice touch for the upscale market. “What I need to know, Jennifer, is whether there were any time breaks in any of the original recordings.”
“Absolutely not.” Her response was crisp and immediate.
“Not even for a fraction of a second?”
“Absolutely not.”
“You seem remarkably sure. Has the question come up before?”
“Not the question, but that specific requirement.”
“Requirement?”
“It was actually written into the production contract that the video had to cover the entire venue during the entire reception, start to finish, with absolutely nothing left out. Apparently the bride wanted literally all of it recorded-every inch of that reception, for every second it lasted.”
Jennifer Stillman’s tone told Gurney this was not exactly a standard request, or at least the client’s emphasis on it was not standard. He asked about it, just to be sure.
“Well…” She hesitated. “I’d say that it was unusually important to them. Or at least to her. When Dr. Ashton passed along the request to us, he seemed a little…” Again she hesitated. “I shouldn’t be saying any of this. I’m not a mind reader.”
“Jennifer, this is important. As you know, it’s a murder case. My main concern is that I can be confident that the DVDs contain an uninterrupted video record-nothing missing, no dropped frames.”
“There were certainly no dropped frames. Holes would create glitches in the time code, and the computer would flag that.”
“Okay. Good to know. Thank you. Just one more thing-you were starting to say something about Dr. Ashton?”
“Not really. Just… it was just that he seemed a little embarrassed talking about his fiancée’s obsession with every instant of the reception being recorded. Like maybe he was embarrassed by the romantic sentimentality of it, or maybe he thought it sounded childish, I really don’t know. It’s not my place to judge why people want what they want. The customer is always right, right?”