As he scrambled through the thick, damp grass toward the nearest corner of the house, he heard an engine suddenly rev up. He rolled over and pulled the Beretta from his ankle holster. But the high-pitched engine sound seemed to be receding. He realized the shooter wasn’t coming down the hill toward him. He was heading in the opposite direction—up through the pines toward the north ridge.
As he listened, the whine of the motorcycle faded away completely into the night.
Torres arrived at the Gurney farmhouse an hour after the attack. He was followed a few minutes later by Garrett Felder and Shelby Towns in the crime-scene van. Gurney could have dug the bullet out of the post himself, but doing it by the book with an official chain of custody from crime scene to ballistics was always best.
He was already doing a minor end run around local law enforcement and didn’t want to add to the irregularities. He’d reported the incident to Torres, not to Walnut Crossing PD, and left it up to Torres to deal later with the turf issues. It would have been a waste of time to involve the locals in the initial response to an incident that could only make sense in the context of an investigation centered in White River.
While the evidence techs were doing their jobs outside, Torres was sitting inside by the fireplace with Gurney, asking questions and taking notes the old-fashioned way with a notepad and pen. The generator, which Gurney had gotten started once the shooter was gone, was humming along reassuringly.
After Torres had recorded the basic facts he closed his notepad and gave Gurney a worried look. “Any idea why you’d be a target?”
“Maybe somebody thinks I know more than I do.”
“You think it could have been Cory Payne?”
“I have no reason to think so.”
Torres paused. “Are you going to make use of that map information I sent you?”
Before he could answer there was a knock at the French doors. Gurney went over and opened them. Felder came in, obviously excited. “Two discoveries. First, the bullet is a thirty-aught-six, full metal jacket, just like the other two. Second, the power failure was caused by the electrical supply line to the house being severed.”
“Severed how?” asked Gurney.
“My guess would be some sort of heavily insulated cable cutter.”
“Where was the cut made?”
“Down by your barn. At the base of the utility company’s last pole on the town road, at the point where the line to your house goes underground.”
Shortly after Torres, Felder, and Towns departed, the utility repair crew arrived. Gurney pointed them to the damage, which he opined was the product of vandalism. This was met with some skepticism, but he saw no point in attempting a more truthful explanation.
Then he called Jack Hardwick, got in his Outback, and headed for the man’s rented farmhouse. He wanted to expose his ideas about the case once again to the man’s skepticism. In addition, he couldn’t imagine getting any sleep that night in his own far-from-secure house.
Hardwick’s place, a nineteenth-century white clapboard structure of no recognizable style, was at the end of a long dirt road high in the hills above the village of Dillweed. When Gurney arrived just before midnight, Hardwick was standing in his open front doorway, a nine-millimeter Sig Sauer in a shoulder holster strapped over his black tee shirt.
“Expecting trouble, Jack?”
“I figure whoever took a shot at you might want to follow you, take a few more. Full moon tonight. Makes crazy people do crazy shit.”
He moved out of the doorway, and Gurney stepped into the small entry foyer. A few jackets were hanging on hooks. Boots were lined up on the floor under them. The sitting room beyond the foyer had a bright, clean look about it, accented by a vase of spring wildflowers, suggesting that Esti Moreno, Hardwick’s state trooper girlfriend, was back in his life.
“You want a beer?”
Gurney shook his head. He sat at a spotless pine table in the corner of the room nearest the kitchen, while Hardwick fetched himself a Grolsch.
After settling himself across the table and taking his first sip from the bottle, he flashed the supercilious grin that always got under Gurney’s skin. “So how come he missed?”
“Possibly because of my fast reaction.”
“To what?”
“The laser dot projected by his scope.”
“Causing you to do what?”
“Hit the ground.”
“So how come he didn’t shoot you on the ground?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the miss was intentional?”
“Kind of a high-risk play just to scare you off, don’t you think?”
Gurney shrugged. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense either way. If he wanted me dead, why only one shot? And if he didn’t, what was the point? Did he really think I was going to drop the case because he put a bullet hole in my back porch?”
“Fucked if I know. So what’s the plan?”
“Did you know Beckert and Turlock share a hunting cabin?”
“I’m not surprised.”
“I want to have a look at it.”
“You trying to prove something?”
“Just gathering information.”
“Open mind, eh?”
“Right.”
“Bullshit.” Hardwick took another sip of his Grolsch.
Gurney paused. “I tracked down Merle Tabor.”
“So?”
“He told me a story.”
“About Turlock’s juvie problem?”
“That’s a mild way of describing it.” Gurney recounted in grim detail what Tabor had told him about the death of George Montgomery.
Hardwick was quiet for a long moment. “You believe Tabor?”
“I do. The event and how it was resolved with no real closure seem to have had a devastating effect on him.”
“So you’ve concluded that Beckert and Turlock are sociopaths?”
“Yes.”
“Sociopaths capable of shooting their own cops, beating and strangling a pair of black activists, and framing innocent people for all four murders?”
“Anyone who did what they did to that retarded man is capable of just about anything.”
“And because they’re capable of committing the White River murders, you think they actually did commit them?”
“I think it’s possible enough that I should take a closer look.”
“A look that involves breaking and entering?”
“There’s a key. At the most, that makes it trespassing.”
“No concerns about security cameras?”
“If they have a camera, they’ll get a picture of a guy in a ski mask.”
“Sounds like your decision’s been made.”
“Unless you can talk me out of it.”
“I said it all at Abelard’s. There’s a hole in your hypothesis the size of an elephant’s anus. It’s called ‘motive.’ You’re claiming that a major law-enforcement figure and his deputy are running around killing people for no goddamn reason. The thing is, they’d need one giant motherfucker of a reason to justify that murder spree. And that vague crap about all the victims being potential threats to Beckert’s political ambitions doesn’t cut it.”
“You’re forgetting the little bit of static that got us involved to begin with.”
“The fuck are you talking about?”
“The text on Steele’s phone. The warning that someone on his side of the fence might want to get rid of him and then blame the BDA. And that’s exactly what Beckert did—the blaming part, anyway.”