Now, on his way back to the interstate, he pulled over onto the grassy verge of Fishers Road and listened to the message. It was from Sheridan Kline. The man didn’t bother to identify himself; his self-important, slightly nasal voice was identification enough.
“I hope you get this message soon. We have a schedule change. Our meeting has just been moved up to twelve noon. Major progress. Noon sharp. Be there!”
Gurney checked the current time—11:04.
He figured that without traffic he could be in White River by eleven thirty. Despite his earlier decision to avoid conflict with the WRPD by avoiding the crime scene, he was tempted now to do at least a drive-by—to get a visceral sense of the location he’d seen only on video.
As expected, there was no traffic. It was just 11:29 when he turned off the interstate. The White River exit ramp led to a local road that descended from a green landscape of woods and meadows into an area of man-made desolation. He drove past the big rusting conveyors of the defunct Handsome Brothers stone quarry and into the city itself, where the stench of smoke and ashes began to infiltrate the car.
Recalling from the White River map how the main streets were laid out, he made his way onto the avenue that skirted the boarded-up buildings of the Grinton section and led directly to Willard Park.
He turned onto the road adjacent to the park, and soon came to a barricade consisting of yellow sawhorses, each of which bore the warning Police Line Do Not Cross.
Leaving his car there and stepping between the sawhorses, he went ahead on foot to a circular area that was more aggressively cordoned off with a double perimeter of yellow police tape. The protected area encompassed the edge of the field where the demonstration had been held, an enormous pine whose lowest branches were a good twenty feet above the ground, and part of the sidewalk. On the sidewalk was a large, irregularly shaped reddish-brown stain.
Gurney was sure that the crime-scene specialists would have been long finished with their evidence gathering and that his presence posed no danger of contamination. When he entered the taped-off area, however, he did step gingerly around that stain as a gesture of respect.
Looking closely at the tree, he could see the remnants of the channel cut by the bullet as it embedded itself in the relatively soft pine trunk. Some of the channel had been chiseled open to extract the bullet.
He took a pen from his shirt pocket and placed it in the channel against the side that appeared intact. The pen, aligned with the path of the bullet, then became a rough pointer to the source of the shot. He could see immediately that it corroborated the trajectory projection on the map in the case file. Gazing out in the indicated direction, he could see that the likely sources were limited to the upper floors of three or four apartment buildings.
He headed back to the barricade where he’d parked, in the hope of finding the binoculars he sometimes kept in the glove compartment. That goal was put aside, however, when he saw a WRPD cruiser pull up at the same barricade. The cop who emerged from the cruiser had an end-of-shift weariness about him. After looking over the Outback, presumably for any signs of official status, he turned his attention to Gurney.
“How’re we doing today, sir?” If the question was meant to sound friendly, it failed.
“I’m doing okay. How about you?”
The cop’s eyes hardened as if Gurney’s reply were a challenge.
“Are you aware that you’re in a restricted area?”
“I’m on the job. Investigation department, DA’s office.”
“That so?”
Gurney said nothing.
“Never saw you before. You want to show me some ID?”
Gurney took out his wallet and handed him the credentials he’d gotten from Kline.
He regarded them with a skeptical frown. “DA’s office? You know Jimmy Crandell?”
“Only person I know there is Sheridan Kline.”
The cop sucked thoughtfully at his teeth.
“Well, the thing is, this is a restricted area, so I need to ask you to leave.”
“The restriction applies to the DA’s investigators?”
“PIACA applies to everyone.”
“What’s PIACA?”
“Primary Investigative Agency Controls Access.”
“Nice acronym. Local invention?”
The cop began to redden from the neck up. “We’re not having a discussion here. We have a procedure, and the procedure is you leave. Your DA can complain to my chief anytime, if that’s what he wants. You want to cross our perimeters, you get permission first. Now move your car before I have it towed.”
Red-faced and narrow-eyed, the cop watched as Gurney turned his car around and headed back toward the center of White River.
Five minutes later he arrived at the bleak, colorless police headquarters and parked next to Kline’s big black SUV. As he was getting out of the car, his phone rang. There was no caller ID.
“Gurney here.”
“This is Rick Loomis. Kim Steele said you wanted to talk. She gave me your number.” The voice was young and serious, the accent definitely upstate.
“Did she explain who I am and how I’m involved in the case?”
“She did.”
“And you’re willing to discuss the . . . events . . . that you and John were looking into?”
“To some extent. But not on the phone.”
“I understand. How soon can we get together?”
“I’m off today, but I need to take care of a few things. Getting the garden ready for planting. How about three thirty at the Lucky Larvaton Diner? It’s in Angina. On the old Route Ten Bypass.”
“I’ll find it.”
“Okay. See you at three thirty.”
“Rick, one more thing. Is there anyone else I should be talking to . . . about the situation?”
He hesitated. “Maybe. But I’ll have to check with them first.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
He slipped the phone back in his pocket and headed into the headquarters building.
In the dreary conference room, he took his customary seat next to the DA at the long table. He noted an intermittent buzz in the room’s fluorescent light fixture—a sound so common in his old NYPD precinct house it made him feel for a moment that he was back there.
Kline gave him a nod. Torres entered the room with his laptop a moment later, looking tense but purposeful. At the end of the table, Sheriff Cloutz was moving his fingers in little undulations as though he were conducting a miniature orchestra. The expression in Beckert’s hard eyes was difficult to read.
Two seats were empty, Judd Turlock’s and Dwayne Shucker’s.
The sheriff licked his already moist lips. “Must be about time to begin.”
“We’re missing the mayor and the deputy chief,” said Kline.
“Today’s Rotary day for old Shucks,” said the sheriff. “Free lunch and a chance to talk up the importance of his reelection. We still expecting Judd?”
“We’ll be hearing from him momentarily,” said Beckert. He glanced at his phone on the table, moving it a fraction of an inch. “It’s a minute past twelve. Let’s begin. Detective Torres, tell us where we stand on the Steele shooting—progress made and progress anticipated.”
Torres sat up a little straighter in his chair. “Yes, sir. Since our last meeting we’ve acquired significant physical and video evidence. We located and examined the apartment from which the shot was fired. We found gunpowder residues there, along with a cartridge casing consistent with the bullet extracted from the tree in Willard Park. We have excellent fingerprints on several objects, including the cartridge, plus likely DNA residues on other objects. We even—”