After ending the call Gurney sat for a long moment in troubled silence. Dusk had turned to darkness beyond the den window.
“Well, what did Hardwick have to say?” Madeleine asked.
“About Beckert? That he’s a self-serving, manipulative, deceptive bastard.”
“Do you agree?”
“Oh, he’s at least all of that.”
“At least?”
Gurney nodded slowly. “I have a sick feeling that under those fairly common vices, there may be something much worse.”
III
TRUST NO ONE
29
Gurney arrived at Abelard’s a few minutes before 8:00 AM. He sat at one of the rickety little hand-painted cafe tables. Marika, looking hungover and sleepy, brought him a double espresso without asking. Her ever-changing hair color was a mix of deep violet and metallic green.
As he was savoring his first sip, his phone rang. Expecting it to be Hardwick giving some reason he couldn’t be there, he was surprised to see Mark Torres’s name on the screen.
“Gurney here.”
“I hope I’m not calling too early.”
“Not at all.”
“I heard that you were off the case.”
“Officially, yes.”
“But not completely?”
“That’s one way of putting it. What can I do for you?”
“The thing is, I got the impression you have some doubts about the way things are going.”
“And?”
“And . . . I guess I do, too. I mean, I get it that there’s a ton of evidence—videos, fingerprints, statements from informants—linking Cory Payne to the shootings and to the Corolla and to people in the Black Defense Alliance. So I have no real doubt he’s the shooter. Probably acting on behalf of the BDA.”
“But?”
“What I don’t get is the choice of victims.”
“What do you mean?
“John Steele and Rick Loomis were both loners. As far as I could see, they hung out only with each other. And unlike most guys in the department, they didn’t regard the BDA as the enemy. I got the impression they wanted to establish some kind of dialogue, to look into the accusations of brutality and evidence-planting. You see what I’m getting at?”
“Spell it out.”
“Of all the cops in the White River department—and there are more than a hundred, some of them obviously racist—it seems odd that the BDA would target Steele and Loomis. Why kill the two people who were the most sympathetic to their cause?”
“Maybe the shootings were random—and it’s just a coincidence that the victims felt that way about the BDA.”
“If just one of them was shot, I could buy that. But both?”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I remember something you said in your investigation seminar in Albany a couple of years ago—that it’s important to examine the little discrepancies. You made the point that when something doesn’t seem to fit, it’s often the key to the case. So I’m thinking maybe the odd choice of victims could be the key here.”
“It’s an interesting idea. You have a next step in mind?”
“Not really. For now, maybe I could just sort of keep you in the loop? Let you know what’s happening?”
“No problem. Actually, you’d be doing me a favor. The more I know, the better.”
“Great. Thank you. I’ll be in touch.”
As Gurney ended the call, the old wooden floor creaked behind him.
A raspy voice said, “The boy gets his ass kicked out of the DA’s office and stays on the job. Nose to the grindstone. Hand on the phone. Goddamn impressive.”
“Good morning, Jack.”
Hardwick came around to the other side of the table and sat down on a chair that squeaked ominously under him. “Good fucking morning yourself.”
He called to Marika, “Coffee, strong and black.”
He fixed his pale malamute eyes on Gurney. “All right, tell Uncle Jack what’s troubling your sleep.”
“The Carlton Flynn thing last night . . .”
“Flynn the Fuckwit meets Beckert the Bullshitter. You have a question about that?”
It was part of Hardwick’s nature to believe nothing, ridicule everything, and be generally snarly. But Gurney was willing to put up with it because underneath the cynical needling there was a good intellect and a decent soul.
“According to some articles,” said Gurney, “Flynn built his success on being the hard-nosed questioner—the no-nonsense tough guy who pulls no punches. That about right?”
“Yep. Just a regular fella who happens to get paid thirty million a year. Hugely popular with angry white guys.”
“But last night he was a fawning promoter of Dell Beckert, lobbing him softball questions, looking awestruck. How do you figure that?”
Hardwick shrugged. “Follow the money. Follow the power.”
“You think there’s enough of both behind Beckert to turn Flynn into a pussycat?”
“Flynn’s a survivor. Like Beckert. Or like a giant rat. Always has an eye out for the next advantage. Onward and upward, no matter how much wreckage piles up behind him—dead wife, crazy son, whatever.”
He stopped speaking as Marika placed his coffee in front of him. He picked it up and consumed about a third of it. “So Kline gave you the boot after, what, like two days?”
“Three.”
“How the fuck did you manage that?”
“I had questions about the case he didn’t want to hear.”
“Sniper case or playground case?”
“I have a feeling it may be one case.”
Hardwick showed a flash of real curiosity. “How so?”
“It seems to me that the playground murders were too smoothly executed to have been a spontaneous retaliation for the Steele shooting.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning they must have been in the planning stage before Steele was shot.”
“You’re suggesting there’s no connection?”
“I think there’s a connection, just not the one Beckert’s promoting.”
“You’re not imagining the same people are behind the shootings and the beating deaths, are you?”
“It’s not impossible.”
“For what? To start a fucking race war?”
“It’s not impossible.”
“It’s goddamn doubtful.”
“Okay. Then maybe for some other purpose.” He paused. “I was on the phone with Mark Torres, CIO on the shootings. He’s bothered by the fact that two supposedly BDA-executed attacks targeted the two White River cops who were the most sympathetic to the BDA. Which presumably would have put them at odds with their chief.”
Hardwick blinked, the curiosity back in full force.
Gurney went on. “Combine that with the text message on John Steele’s phone . . . telling him to watch his back.”
“Wait a fucking minute. You’re not suggesting that Beckert, patron saint of law enforcement, put a hit on two of his own men just because he didn’t like their politics?”
“Nothing quite that ridiculous. But there are definite signs that the link between the attacks on Steele and Loomis and the attacks on Jordan and Tooker is more complicated than the way it’s officially being described.”
“What signs?”
Gurney ran through his litany of strange combinations of care and carelessness in the behavior of the killers. His last example was the perplexing difference in the routes of the two vehicles leaving the Poulter Street house. “The driver of the Corolla, Cory Payne, took a direct route through the city on a main avenue full of obvious security and traffic cameras. But the motorcycle rider took a jagged route, turning at least a dozen times and managing to avoid being caught on a single camera. Taking precautions to avoid cameras is understandable. The puzzling question is why Payne didn’t bother to do the same thing.”