Gurney waited.
A long minute passed.
Payne spoke, still facing the window. “I think so, I don’t think so. I’m sure, not sure. I think, sure, of course he’d frame me, why not, he has no feelings other than ambition. Ambition is sacred to him. Success. Sacred to him and his horrible second wife. Haley Beauville Beckert. You know where her money comes from? Tobacco. Her great-great-grandfather Maxwell Beauville owned a huge slave plantation in Virginia. One of the biggest tobacco growers in the state. Jesus. You know how many people tobacco kills every day? Fucking greedy murdering scumbags. And then I think, no. My father? Frame me for murder? That’s impossible, right? Yes, no, yes, no.” He let out a small gasping sound that might have been a stifled sob. “So,” he said finally, taking a deep breath, “I don’t know a single fucking thing.”
Gurney decided to change the subject. “How close are you to Blaze Jackson?”
Payne turned from the window, calmer now. “Blaze Lovely Jackson. She insists on the whole name. We had an affair. On and off. Why?”
“Is she the one who gave you Devalon Jones’s Corolla?”
“She lets me use it whenever I need it.”
“Are you staying with her now?”
“I’m moving around.”
“Probably not a bad idea.”
There was a silence.
Coolidge came back into the room with Gurney’s coffee. He laid the mug on a side table by the arm of Gurney’s chair, then, with a concerned glance in the direction of Payne, retreated behind his desk.
Payne looked at Gurney. “Can I hire you?”
“Hire me?”
“As a private investigator. To find out what the hell is going on.”
“I’m already trying to do that.”
“For the cops’ wives?”
“Yes.”
“Are they paying you?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you’re bound to have expenses. Investigations can be expensive.”
“What’s your point?”
“I’d like to make sure you have the resources to do whatever you have to do.”
“You’re in a position to supply those resources?”
“My grandparents left their money to me, not to my mother. They locked it up in a trust fund that only I could access, and only after I turned twenty-one. Which was last year.”
“Why did they do that?”
Payne paused, gazing at the ashes in the fireplace. “My mom had a serious drug problem. Giving someone with a drug problem a pile of money is like a death sentence.” He paused again. “Besides, they hated my father and wanted to make sure he wouldn’t get his hands on it.”
“They hated him? Why?”
“Because he’s a horrible, heartless, controlling bastard.”
34
The meeting ended with Gurney declining to be “hired” but leaving open the possibility of billing Payne for any extraordinary expenses—if they happened to result in the discovery of facts that exonerated him. With Payne leery of providing Gurney with his cell number—a new one, anonymous and prepaid—for fear of the police getting hold of the number and tracking his location, Coolidge had nervously agreed to act as a middleman.
Now, thirty-five minutes later, Gurney was finishing a quick lunch in an empty coffee shop on one of White River’s main commercial avenues, playing back in his mind everything he remembered Payne saying, how he said it, his expressions, gestures, apparent emotions. The more he thought about it, the more inclined he was to accept the feasibility of Payne’s narrative. He wondered how Jack Hardwick, ultimate skeptic, would react to it. He was sure of one thing. If it was all just a performance by a clever murderer, it was one of the best—maybe the best—he’d ever witnessed.
He took a final bite of his ham-and-cheese sandwich and went to the cash register to pay. The apparent owner, a middle-aged man with a sad Slavic face, stood up from a nearby booth and came over to take his money.
“Nuts, huh?”
“Excuse me?”
The man gestured toward the street. “Lunatics. Wild. Smash. Burn.”
“Even in this part of town?”
“Every part. Maybe not burning yet. But could be. Just as bad, almost. How can you sleep, thinking how crazy? Burning, shooting, crazy shit.” He shook his head. “No waitresses today. Afraid, you know. Okay. I understand. No matter, maybe. No customers. They afraid, too, so everybody stay home. Hide in closet maybe. What good is this shit? They burn down their fucking house, right? For what? For what? What we supposed to do now? Buy guns, all of us, we shoot each other? Stupid. Stupid.”
Gurney nodded, took his change, and headed for his car on the nearly deserted street.
By the time he got to it his phone was ringing.
“Gurney here.”
“This is Whit Coolidge. After you left, Cory was thinking about something you said—about video footage of him driving to and from the places where the shots were fired?”
“Yes?”
“He says—and I agree—the traffic cameras along those routes are pretty obvious. Anyone who’d ever driven around White River would know they were there.”
“So?”
“If the killer knew they were there, wouldn’t he avoid them?”
“It’s a reasonable question.”
“So what we’re thinking is, maybe it would make more sense to be looking for someone who doesn’t appear on those videos.”
“That did occur to me.”
“Oh. Well. You said so little at the meeting it was hard to know what you were thinking.”
“I learn more from listening than from talking.”
“Absolutely true. A principle we should all live by. And one we so easily forget. Anyway, we just wanted to share that thought with you on the video issue.”
“I appreciate it.”
After he ended the call, Gurney sat for a while in his parked car, picturing the map Mark Torres had displayed, the one showing the route taken by the red motorcycle and its anonymous leather-clad rider—the route painstakingly reconstructed by interviewing people who’d glimpsed or heard the loud bike zipping by—a route that went all the way from Poulter Street to Willard Park, managing to avoid every traffic camera in the city, while Cory Payne in the black Corolla was being recorded by one after another.
Gurney was tempted to drive over to the park yet again—to the last reported location of the motorcycle, before it presumably disappeared into one of several wilderness trails. But he’d been there three times already, and there were two locations critical to the case that he hadn’t yet visited. It was time he did.
Keys would be required. He placed a call to Mark Torres.
While Gurney’s exiled status had not diminished Torres’s willingness to cooperate with him, it had made it inadvisable to do so openly.
They arrived at a plan that would allow Gurney to examine Cory Payne’s apartment and the apartment used for the Steele shooting without necessitating any direct contact. Torres would see to it that the doors of both apartments would be unlocked for one hour that afternoon—from two thirty to three thirty. It would be up to Gurney to conduct his examinations within that time frame, attracting as little attention as possible.
He arrived at the Steele sniper site at 2:31. The five-story building, like many in White River, had seen better days. He recalled from the video shown in one of the CSMT meetings that the apartment number was 5C. Apartment buildings of less than six stories were not legally required to have elevators, and this one didn’t. By the time he reached the fifth floor he was breathing a bit more heavily than he would have liked. It reminded him to add some aerobic exercise to his regimen of push-ups and chin-ups. He’d recently turned fifty, and staying in shape required more effort than it used to.