“The hell does that mean?”
“Did the killer pick Payne as a convenient framing victim to misdirect the investigation into the cop killings, or were the cops killed for the explicit purpose of framing him?”
“Jesus, don’t you think that’s a little twisted? Why the hell would framing him be important enough to kill two cops?”
“I admit it’s pushing the possibilities a bit.”
“More than a fucking bit.”
“I’d still like to know for sure which end is the dog and which end is the tail. In the meantime, how’s your poking around in Beckert’s past going?”
“Couple of guys are supposed to be getting back to me. I should be able to tell you something later tonight. Or maybe not. Who knows how eager these cocksuckers are to return favors.”
35
At 5:00 PM Gurney was heading up the hillside road to his property, weary from his obsessive analysis of scenarios involving the framing of Cory Payne. From the moment he’d noticed the plier marks where the outside flush handle joined the flushing mechanism inside the tank, he’d been able to think of little else.
When he reached the end of the road, however, and came abreast of his barn, that subject was nudged aside by the presence of Walter Thrasher’s sleek black Audi.
Gurney remembered the phone call in which he’d agreed to let the man search for artifacts that might support whatever notion he’d gotten about the history of the place. He was tempted to go up to the excavation site to see if he’d found what he was looking for. But the prospect of trudging up the hill was discouraging, and he continued on to the house.
Madeleine, in her straw gardening hat, was kneeling at the edge of the asparagus bed, prying out weeds with a trowel. She looked up at him, tilting the brim of her hat to shield her eyes from the afternoon sun.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You look worn out.”
“I feel worn out.”
“Any progress?”
“Mostly uncovering new questions. We’ll see where they lead.”
She shrugged and went back to her weeding. “I assume you know about that man down by the pond?”
“Dr. Walter Thrasher. He asked me if he could poke around in our excavation.”
“You mean your excavation.”
“Apparently he’s an expert on the Colonial history of this area.” He paused. “He’s also the county medical examiner.”
“Is that so?” She stabbed her trowel down around a dandelion root.
He watched for a while in silence before asking, “How’s Heather doing?”
“Last I heard, the contractions stopped—or what they thought were contractions. They’re keeping her in the hospital for at least another twenty-four hours for evaluation.” She yanked a long root out of the ground and tossed it on a pile beside her. She gazed at the trowel for a moment, laid it on top of the weeds, and looked up at him again. “You really do look like you had a difficult day.”
“I did. But I have a recovery plan. A hot shower. I’ll see you in a little while.”
As usual, the shower worked at least some of its hoped-for magic. It struck him as an odd irony of the human animal that the most complex mental tangles could be relieved by the application of warm water.
By the time they sat down to dinner, he felt calm and refreshed. He was even able to appreciate the scent of apple blossoms in the soft spring air coming in through the French doors. They were well into their asparagus soup before Madeleine broke the silence. “Do you want to tell me about your day?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
He began with his morning visit to Saint Thomas the Apostle. He told her about the Reverend Coolidge’s sympathy for the BDA and for Marcel Jordan’s and Virgil Tooker’s supposed efforts to expose police wrongdoing, about the man’s almost violent aversion to Dell Beckert, and about his insistence on the innocence of Cory Payne.
He told her about his subsequent meeting with Payne himself—about Payne’s explanation for his presence at the shooting sites, about his open contempt for his father, about his fear of being next in line for assassination.
He also told her about his phone conversation with Thrasher, about the appearance of propofol in Jordan’s and Tooker’s tox screens, and about the chilling discovery made during the Rick Loomis autopsy.
At Gurney’s mention of the ice pick Madeleine uttered a guttural cry of revulsion. “Are you saying that someone . . . just walked into the ICU . . . and did that?”
“It could have happened in the ICU. Or when he was being brought back from radiology.”
“My God! How? I don’t understand how someone could just . . .”
“It could have been a hospital employee, someone familiar to the nurses. Or someone in uniform. Maybe a security person. Or someone pretending to be a doctor.”
“Or a cop?”
“Or a cop. Someone who wanted to make sure Rick would never come out of that coma.”
“When will Heather be told?”
“Not right away, I’m sure.”
“Won’t she automatically be given a copy of that autopsy report?”
“She’ll have to request it, and the official version probably won’t be available for another thirty days. What Thrasher gave me on the phone was an oral heads-up on the preliminary report, which doesn’t go to anyone except to the police—as an aid to the investigation.”
She started to take a spoonful of her soup, then laid the spoon down as though she’d lost her appetite and pushed the bowl toward the center of the table.
After a while Gurney went on with the story of his day. He talked about his visits to the two apartments, his discovery of the suspicious tool marks on the toilet handles, his growing sense that everything Dell Beckert was saying about the case was either a mistake or a lie, and the unnerving possibility of police involvement in the shootings.
“That isn’t exactly news,” said Madeleine.
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t that what the text on John Steele’s phone said from the beginning?”
“The text didn’t provide any real information. It could have been an intentional misdirection. It still could be. This case is like a buried city. We’re only seeing pieces of it. I need more facts.”
“You need to do something. Two women lost their husbands. An unborn baby lost her father. Something has to be done!”
“What do you think I should be doing that I’m not doing already?”
“I don’t know. You’re good at assembling bits of information and seeing a pattern in them. But I think sometimes you enjoy the intellectual process so much you don’t like to rush it.”
He said nothing. His normal impulse to defend himself seemed to have gone missing.
The list of hospital employees he’d gotten from Abby Marsh was divided into six functional categories: Administration and Technical Support; Physicians and Surgeons; Nursing and Therapy; Laboratory and Pharmacy; Security, Maintenance, and Housekeeping; Kitchen, Cafeteria, and Gift Shop. A seventh cross-functional category was labeled Current Year Resignations and Terminations. It was apparently updated monthly, covering January through the end of April, making it useless for identifying staff members who might have been terminated during the current month.
Going through the six functional lists produced no instant revelations. He came upon several names familiar from his visits. He noted a predictable relationship between job description and home address. Most of the housekeeping staff lived in Grinton. The nursing, lab, and technical support people were more likely to live in Bluestone. Physicians and surgeons preferred Aston Lake and Killburnie Heights.