It was surely the most tenuous of links . . . but it was possible that the motorcycle fleeing from Poulter Street after the shooting of Rick Loomis may have used the same trails as the UTV that brought Jordan and Tooker to the playground. Gurney wasn’t sure what that might mean, but the possibility that it was more than a coincidence produced a definite frisson.
A moment later the forlorn cry of a bird deep in the woods gave him goose bumps of a different sort. The eerie, keening sound was one he sometimes heard at dusk coming from the pine thicket on the far side of his pond. Although he knew his reaction was irrational, the strangely wavering note never failed to put him in an uneasy frame of mind.
He walked back from the lake to the jungle gym. He pictured Marcel Jordan and Virgil Tooker bound tightly to the tubular bars.
He peered at the bars to which the ropes had been tied. He had no idea what he was looking for, but he looked anyway, examining the structure as best he could.
The only minor peculiarities that caught his eye were two shiny spots, each about a half inch in diameter, about four feet apart on the bottom of a horizontal bar that according to the photos at the CSMT meeting would have been somewhere just above or behind the victims’ heads. He had no idea what those spots might mean, if anything at all; but he remembered that among his saved emails was one Torres had sent with a link to all the photos Paul Aziz had taken. He made a mental note to access and review them as soon as he got home.
He still had some time before the two o’clock meeting at police headquarters, so he decided to take a closer look at the statue.
As he crossed the field, he noticed he wasn’t the only one taking an interest in the statue. An African American woman in camo fatigues was approaching it on the opposite side. She appeared to be photographing it with her phone.
She ignored Gurney until they came within speaking distance of each other, and he asked with a smile if she knew anything about the man on the horse.
She stopped and gave him an assessing look. “They send you out here to make sure we don’t tear that evil thing down?”
Gurney shook his head. “Nobody sent me.”
“Honey, I know a cop when I see one, and the cops I know go where they are sent.”
He suddenly recognized her—the voice first, then the face—from her appearance with the white supremacist on RAM-TV. “You may know Dell Beckert’s cops, Ms. Jackson, but you don’t know me.”
Her dark eyes were fixed on his. There was something formidable in her calmness and in the evenness of her tone. “Why are you talking to me?”
Gurney shrugged. “As I said, I was wondering if you could tell me anything about the man on the horse.”
She looked up at the mounted colonel, as if evaluating his pose for the first time. “He’s the Devil,” she said matter-of-factly.
“The Devil?”
“You want me to say it again?”
“Why do you call him that?”
“Man who does the Devil’s work is the Devil in the flesh.”
“Hmm. What about Dell Beckert? What can you tell me about him?”
There was a sharpness now in the gaze she fixed on Gurney—an almost glittery intelligence. “Isn’t that a fascinating fact of life—how people always know the truth without knowing they know it.”
“Meaning?”
“Think about it. Here we are, talking about the Devil. And look whose name came into your mind.”
Gurney smiled. “Interesting observation.”
She started to leave, then stopped. “You want to live, be careful. However well you think you know that law-and-order man, you don’t know him any more than you know Ezra Willard.”
She turned and walked quickly away toward the park exit.
After Gurney had returned to his car and spent some time contemplating the words of Blaze Lovely Jackson, it occurred to him that he should let Madeleine know his meeting at police headquarters had been extended into the afternoon. He’d be heading home later than expected.
As he was about to place the call, his phone rang.
Seeing Madeleine’s name on the screen, he began to explain his situation, but she cut in immediately.
“They took Rick off life support.”
“Oh, Jesus. Is Heather . . . okay?”
“Not really. They took her down to the emergency room. They’re afraid she may be starting premature contractions.” After a pause during which he could hear his wife breathing shakily, she sniffled and cleared her throat. “The doctor said Rick had lost all brain function. There was no chance . . . no chance of any . . . anything.”
“Yes.” He could think of nothing more to say. Nothing that would be both comforting and honest.
“Rick’s brother is flying in from somewhere. And Heather’s sister, too. I’ll let you know what I’m doing when things are clearer.”
As soon as he ended the call, his phone rang again.
When he saw Kline’s name on the screen, he assumed the man was calling with the same bad news and decided to let the call go to voicemail. He hardly noticed that the temperature was dropping and it had begun again to drizzle.
He sat in the Outback for a while, losing track of time. He took out the index card and studied the cryptic message. Again, he got nowhere. He put it back in his pocket.
Feeling the need to do something—anything—he took out his phone and called Jack Hardwick. He got the man’s terse recording: “Leave a message. Be brief.”
“We need to talk. The White River mess is getting stranger and uglier. The second cop who was shot—a young detective by the name of Loomis—just died. Kline wants me out of it. He insists that everything’s coming together, conclusive evidence, done deal. I don’t agree. If you can, meet me tomorrow morning at eight at Abelard’s. Call me if you can’t. Otherwise, I’ll see you there.”
Before putting his phone away, he checked his list of messages. There were only two he hadn’t listened to—the one from Kline and the older one from Thrasher. He had no interest in listening to either.
The phone was halfway into his pocket when it rang. Kline again. His stubborn streak urged him to ignore it again, but something else—perhaps simple logic—told him to talk to the man and get it over with.
“Gurney here.”
“I just wanted to let you know the two o’clock meeting’s been canceled.”
“Problems?”
“Just the opposite. A major coup. Dell’s been invited to appear tonight on A Matter of Concern with Carlton Flynn.”
“The pompous blowhard on RAM-TV?”
“He happens to be the most widely recognized news personality in the world, with one of the highest rated interview shows in America. He is a very big deal.”
“I’m impressed.”
“You should be. It’s the perfect opportunity for Dell to set things straight—the demonstrations, the riots, the shootings—put it all in the right perspective, emphasizing the restoration of law and order. That’s what people need to hear.”
Gurney said nothing.
“You there?”
“I thought you might have been calling to let me know that Rick Loomis died.”
“I assumed you’d have heard that from someone else.”
Again Gurney said nothing.
“Not unexpected, given his condition. But now we know who did it, and the arrest is just a matter of time. You might be interested to know that the prints inside the Corolla and at the sniper sites match the prints in Cory Payne’s apartment. Torres’s guys even found a box of thirty-aught-six cartridges hidden in the back of one of his closets.”