But there was something familiar about that face. And the muscular bulk of the body. Gurney realized with a start that he was looking at what was left of Judd Turlock.
IV
THE HORROR SHOW
44
Twenty-four hours after the discovery of the gruesome homicide at the cabin, Gurney was heading into the County Office Building for an early-morning meeting with Sheridan Kline.
The ponderous redbrick exterior, coated with a century of soot and grime, dated back to the structure’s original use as a mental facility—the Bumblebee Lunatic Asylum—named after its eccentric founder, George Bumblebee. In the midsixties the interior of the structure had been gutted, redesigned, and repurposed to house the local bureaucracy. Cynics enjoyed pointing out that the building’s history made it an ideal home for its current inhabitants.
The lobby security system had been upgraded since Gurney’s last visit during the harrowing case of the bride who’d been decapitated at her wedding reception. It now involved two separate electronic screenings and the presentation of multiple forms of identification. He was eventually directed to follow a series of signs that brought him to a frosted-glass door bearing the words DISTRICT ATTORNEY.
He wondered which version of Kline he’d be meeting with.
Would it be the baffled, disbelieving, nearly speechless man he’d encountered on the phone the previous morning when he’d called to tell him about the discovery of the rifle, the branding iron, the red motorcycle, and Turlock’s mauled body? Or would it be the man who showed up an hour later at the scene with Mark Torres, Bobby Bascomb, Garrett Felder, Shelby Towns, and Paul Aziz—hell-bent to demonstrate his decisiveness by issuing nonstop orders to people who knew far more about processing crime scenes than he did?
Gurney opened the door and walked into the reception room. Kline’s alluring assistant, who had clearly maintained her fondness for formfitting cashmere sweaters, eyed him with a subtle smile.
“I’ll let him know you’re here,” she said in her memorably soft voice.
As she was about to pick up her phone, a door in the back wall of the reception room opened and Sheridan Kline came striding over to Gurney, hand outstretched with that same semblance of warmth Gurney remembered from their first meeting years earlier.
“David. Right on time. I’m always impressed by punctuality.” He led the way into his office. “Coffee or tea?”
“Coffee.”
He clicked his tongue approvingly. “You a dog man or a cat man?”
“Dog.”
“I thought so. Dog people prefer coffee. Cat people like tea. Herbal tea. Ever notice that?” It wasn’t a question. He turned to the door and called out, “Two coffees, Ellen.”
He pointed Gurney toward the familiar leather sofa, while he sat in the leather armchair across from it, a glass coffee table between them.
Gurney was for the moment absorbed in the déjà vu experience not only of the seating arrangement but of Kline’s comments on punctuality and the dog-coffee cat-tea associations. The man had made exactly the same observations when they’d met during the Mellery case. Perhaps he was trying to reset their relationship to an earlier, more positive status. Or maybe these were things he said so often he had no idea to whom he’d said them before.
He leaned forward with what could be mistaken for companionable intensity. “That was really something yesterday.”
Gurney nodded.
“God-awful homicide.”
“Yes.”
“Plus evidence connected to all the murders. What a shock!”
“Yes.”
“Hope you didn’t mind my asking you to leave the scene after you got us oriented.”
Gurney had seen it as a sign of Kline’s annoyance at the fact that the people reporting to him were addressing their questions to Gurney and Hardwick.
“The thing was,” explained Kline awkwardly, “with Hardwick not having official LEO status, there could have been issues down the road about crime-scene protocol.”
“No problem.”
“Good. We’ve received some more information, amplifying what you’d already found. An overnight ballistics comparison connected the rifle in Beckert’s cellar to the Steele and Loomis shootings as well as to the incident in your backyard.” Kline paused. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, there’s more. Thrasher did a prelim autopsy on Turlock’s remains. Guess what he found.”
“A steel arrow buried in his back?”
“Thrasher told you?”
“No.”
“Then how—?”
“When I was still inside the cabin, I heard the dogs coming. Probably from a point in the woods near the edge of the clearing, about a hundred yards away. Turlock would have heard them, too. But he never fired a shot. In fact, his Glock was still holstered. That makes no sense, unless he was already incapacitated when the dogs started coming. And the Gort brothers seem to be awfully good with those crossbows.”
Kline stared at him. “There’s no doubt in your mind it was them?”
“I don’t know of any other homicidal crossbow experts around here with a large pack of attack dogs and a major murder motive.”
“The motive being revenge for Turlock’s raid on their compound?”
“That, and for publicly blaming them for the BDA murders.” Gurney paused. “That gives us means and motive. Opportunity isn’t quite so obvious. It would depend on the Gorts knowing that Turlock was going to show up at the cabin when he did. That’s a big issue. So you’re not quite to home base.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“You have Beckert in custody yet?”
“We’re working on it. Currently he’s nowhere to be found. Which brings me to the main point of this conversation.” Kline paused, sat back in his chair, and steepled his fingers in front of his chin. “Your discoveries, for which you deserve tremendous credit, have turned the case around a hundred eighty degrees from the way we all saw it.”
Gurney calmly pointed out that from the beginning he’d been uneasy with the way everyone saw it, that he’d raised objections, and that Kline had essentially fired him for not embracing the official version.
Kline looked pained. “That seems a little oversimplified. But the last thing I want to do now is debate what’s behind us—especially considering the challenge in front of us. We’ve had more upheaval in the past twenty-four hours than I’ve ever seen in any case, anytime. So far we’ve managed to keep a lid on what’s going to be an explosive story, but that won’t last. The facts will come out. We’ll have to do our best to present them in a positive way. Keep control of the narrative. Maintain public trust in law enforcement. I assume you agree?”
“More or less.”
Kline blinked at Gurney’s less-than-enthusiastic response but continued along his path. “Handled correctly, this huge mess can be positioned as a law enforcement triumph. The message we have to convey is that nobody is above the law, that we follow without fear or favor wherever the truth leads us.”
“That was Beckert’s message, before he ended up on the wrong end of it.”
“That doesn’t mean it was the wrong message.”
Gurney smiled. “Just the wrong messenger?”
“In hindsight, obviously. But that’s not my point. The problem now is that everything’s upside down. Could be viewed by the media as chaos. We need to convey the opposite. We need to convey stability. The message is that law enforcement is still operating on an even keel. The public needs to see stability, continuity, competence.”