“What?” he asked.
“Is that what’s on your mind?”
A rush of unease passed through his stomach. “That’s part of it. Another part is that the police haven’t been able to get a single word out of the man they’ve charged with the murder-nothing beyond a categorical denial. Meanwhile his law firm and PR firm are creating alternative scenarios to feed to the media-lots of innocent reasons that a woman’s raped, tortured, and beheaded body might have been in his freezer.”
“And you’re thinking, if only you could sit down and talk to this monster…”
“I’m not saying that I’d get a confession, but…”
“But you’d do a better job than the locals?”
“That wouldn’t be so difficult.” He winced inwardly at his own arrogance.
Madeleine frowned. “It wouldn’t be the first time the star detective rose to the challenge and deciphered the mystery.”
He stared at her uncomfortably.
Again she seemed to be examining the message encoded in his expression.
“What?” he asked.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“But you’re thinking something. What is it? Tell me.”
She hesitated. “I thought you liked puzzles.”
“I admit that I do. So what?”
“So why do you look so miserable?”
The question jarred him. “Maybe I’m just exhausted. I don’t know.” But he did know. The reason he felt as bad as he did was that he couldn’t bring himself to tell her why he felt bad to begin with. His reluctance to reveal the full chagrin of being duped and the intensity of his worry over what may have happened during his period of amnesia had isolated him in a terrible way.
He shook his head, as if refusing the pleas of his better self, the small voice within that was begging him to lay the facts of the matter before this woman who loved him. His fear was so great that it blocked the very action that would have removed it.
Chapter 57
As strained as it often was, Gurney’s relationship with Madeleine had always been the chief pillar of his stability. But that relationship depended on a degree of openness he felt incapable of at the moment.
With the desperation of a drowning man, he embraced his only other pillar, his detective identity, and attempted to channel all his energies into Solving the Crime.
The most productive next step in that process, he was convinced, would be a conversation with Jordan Ballston. He needed to devise a way to bring that about. Rebecca had insisted that fear would be the key to cracking the shell of the rich psycho, and Gurney had no reason to disagree. Nor did he have any reason to disagree with her warning that it wouldn’t be easy.
Fear.
It was a subject with which Gurney had a raw, current, intimate familiarity. Perhaps that experience could be of some use. What exactly was it that frightened him so much? He retrieved the three alarming text messages and reread them carefully.
SUCH PASSIONS! SUCH SECRETS! SUCH WONDERFUL PHOTOGRAPHS!
ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT MY GIRLS? THEY’RE THINKING ABOUT YOU.
YOU’RE SUCH AN INTERESTING MAN, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN MY DAUGHTERS WOULD ADORE YOU. IT WAS SO GOOD OF YOU TO COME TO THE CITY. NEXT TIME THEY WILL COME TO YOU. WHEN? WHO CAN SAY? THEY WANT IT TO BE A SURPRISE.
The words generated a sick, hollow feeling in his chest.
Such virulent threats wrapped in such airy banalities.
So nonspecific, yet so malignant.
So nonspecific. Yes, that was it. It brought to mind his favorite English professor’s explanation of the emotional power of Harold Pinter: The perils that strike the greatest terror in us are not those which have been spelled out but those that our imaginations conjure. We are chilled to the bone not by the lengthy rants of an angry man but by the menace in a placid voice.
He remembered it because the truth of it had struck him immediately, and experience had reinforced it over the years. What we’re able to imagine is always worse than what reality places before us. The greatest fear by far is the fear of what we imagine is lurking in the dark.
So perhaps the best way to panic Ballston would be to give him an opportunity to panic himself. A frontal attack would be rebuffed by his legal army. Gurney needed a back door through the fortifications.
Ballston’s current defense strategy was a categorical denial of any knowledge of Melanie Strum dead or alive, plus the creation of an alternative hypothesis, involving the access other individuals had to his home, to explain the presence of her body. Such a strategy would collapse, disastrously for Ballston, if a prior link could be established between him and the girl. In the best possible outcome, the nature of that link would also explain how the murders of Melanie Strum, Jillian Perry, and Kiki Muller, as well as the disappearances of the other Mapleshade graduates, were connected. But whether it did or not, Gurney was sure that discovering Melanie’s route to Ballston’s basement freezer would be a giant step toward the final solution. And the possible exposure of that link would be Ballston’s greatest fear.
The question was how to trigger that fear-how to use it as an entry point into Ballston’s psyche, a way around the battlements manned by his lawyers. Was there a person, place, or thing the mention of which would open the door? Mapleshade? Jillian Perry? Kiki Muller? Hector Flores? Edward Vallory? Alessandro? Karnala Fashion? Giotto Skard?
And as hard as it would be to pick the magic name, the harder part would lie in managing whatever dialogue ensued-the Pinteresque art of implying without specifying, unnerving without providing details. The challenge would be to provide the dark space in which Ballston could imagine the worst, the platform on which he might hang himself.
Madeleine had gone in to bed. Gurney, however, was wide awake, pacing the length of the big kitchen, on fire with possibilities, risk evaluations, logistics. He narrowed the names of his potential door openers to the three he thought most promising: Mapleshade, Flores, Karnala.
Of those he finally put Karnala, by a millimeter, at the top of the list. Because all the Mapleshade girls known to be missing had appeared in near-pornographic Karnala Fashion ads, because Karnala did not seem to be in the business it pretended to be in, because Karnala was connected to the Skards, and the Skards were rumored to be involved in a criminal sex enterprise, and Melanie Strum’s murder was a sex crime. In fact, the Edward Vallory dimension and Mapleshade’s admissions policy suggested that everything connected with the case so far was in some way a sex crime or the result of a sex crime.
Gurney was aware that the logical chain back to Karnala was less than perfect, but demanding perfect logic (much as the concept appealed to him) did not lead to solutions, it led to paralysis. He’d learned that the key question in police work, as in life, was not “Am I absolutely sure of what I believe?” The question that mattered was “Am I sure enough to act on that belief?”
In this case Gurney’s answer was yes. He was willing to bet that there was something about Karnala that would unnerve Jordan Ballston. According to the old clock over the sideboard, it was just after ten when he placed a call to the Palm Beach Police Department to get Ballston’s unlisted number.
No one assigned to the Strum case was on duty that night, but the desk sergeant was able to give him Darryl Becker’s cell number.
Surprisingly, Becker picked up on the first ring.
Gurney explained what he wanted.
“Ballston’s not talking to anybody,” said Becker testily. “Communications go in and out through Markham, Mull & Sternberg, his main law firm. Thought I’d made that clear.”
“I may have a way of getting through to him.”
“How?”
“I’m going to toss a bomb through his window.”