“He took his car?”
“Probably. All we know for sure is that it’s gone from the headquarters parking lot.”
A silence ensued as Gurney pondered the timing of the man’s disappearance the night before the incident at the gun club.
Torres spoke first. “It’s really pretty amazing.”
“What is?”
“How you’ve been right about everything. I remember in the very first meeting you came to—your uneasiness with the assumptions everyone was making about the case. It was like you knew instantly there was something wrong with the basic hypothesis. I could see how disturbed Beckert and Turlock were by the issues you were raising. Now we know why.”
“We still have a long way to go. A lot of open questions.”
“That reminds me of something you commented on in the video of the Steele shooting—the red laser dot on the back of Steele’s head as he was patrolling the edge of the crowd. You wondered why the dot followed him as long as it did. I think you said it was like two minutes?”
“That’s right.”
“Have you figured it out?”
“Not yet.”
“You still feel it’s significant?”
“Yes.”
“It seems like such a small thing.”
Gurney said nothing. But he was thinking it was the small things that often mattered the most, especially the ones that didn’t seem to make sense.
45
Gurney remained parked in front of the nursery greenhouses after ending his call with Torres. Hoping he wouldn’t be spotted by Rob Snook, he leaned back in his seat and tried to clear his mind and sort out his priorities for the rest of the day.
Clearing his mind, it turned out, wasn’t so easy. Something was bothering him, though he wasn’t sure what. Perhaps Madeleine’s prolonged absence? He always felt odd when she was away from home, and phone conversations didn’t really solve the problem.
He’d filled her in the previous evening on the gun club discoveries and the Turlock homicide, minus its more grotesque details. He’d cautioned her against saying anything yet to Kim or Heather, adding that he’d be meeting with the DA to review the situation. She’d told him she’d be staying at the inn on the Mercy medical campus for at least another twenty-four hours, at which point various Steele and Loomis relatives were expected to arrive. She’d reminded him to refill the feeders and let the chickens into their fenced run. He’d told her he loved her and missed her, and she’d said the same.
What he hadn’t mentioned was that someone had taken a shot at him. He told himself at first it was because he didn’t want to alarm her with the specter of a possibly ongoing danger. A day later—with the rifle recovered, Turlock dead, and Beckert apparently on the run—he told himself it was because there was no longer any danger, and therefore no urgency in discussing the matter. But he had to admit now, sitting there in front of Snook’s greenhouses, that he always found it suspicious when someone offered shifting reasons for the same conclusion. A wise friend once commented that the more reasons someone gave you for their behavior, the less likely any of them was the real reason.
Perhaps that was what was bothering him—not so much Madeleine’s absence as his own evasiveness. He resolved to be more open with her in their next conversation. That simple resolution, as resolutions often do, lightened his mood. He pulled out of the parking lot—focused now on getting home, reviewing the case files, and trying to make sense of the inconsistent details.
Twenty-five minutes later, as he was driving up through the low pasture to the house, deciding which file to tackle first, he was surprised to catch a glimpse of Madeleine in her straw gardening hat by one of the flower beds.
When he got out of the car, he found her kneeling by the bed next to the asparagus patch. She was planting the delphiniums he’d brought home two days earlier. She looked pale and exhausted.
“Did something happen?” he asked. “I thought you were staying over at the hospital.”
“The relatives arrived sooner than expected. And I was more worn out than I realized.” She laid her trowel down by the flowers, shaking her head. “It’s awful. Kim is full of such a terrible anger. At first it was all inside. Now it’s coming out. Heather is worse. Completely shut down. Like she’s not there at all.” Madeleine paused. “Is there anything we can tell them about the progress you’re making? What you told me on the phone last night sounded huge. It might offer them some kind of relief. . . or distraction.”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“The current status of an investigation is not something that can be—”
She cut him off. “Yes, yes, I know all that. It’s just . . . there’s so much misery, not knowing anything. I was just hoping . . .” She picked up her trowel, then put it down again and got to her feet. “Did you have your meeting with Kline?”
“That’s where I’m coming from.”
“Did anything get resolved?”
“Not really.”
“What did he want?”
“On the surface, my help in wrapping things up. In reality, my silence. The last thing he wants is for the media to find out he fired me three days ago for suggesting he had the case all wrong.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I’d see the case through to the end.”
She looked confused. “Isn’t it essentially over?”
“Yes and no. There’s a lot of evidence implicating Beckert and Turlock—the things I told you about on the phone, plus a lot more that was discovered overnight and this morning, including the fact that Beckert seems to have disappeared.”
“Disappeared? Does that make him a fugitive?”
“I don’t know what language Kline will be using publicly, but it sounds like a reasonable label to me. The new evidence doesn’t leave much doubt about his involvement in the playground murders as well as the shootings. So everything’s turned around, with Cory for all practical purposes exonerated.”
She laid her trowel down and regarded him closely. “Do I hear a reservation in your voice?”
“Just a feeling that I’m still missing something. I’m having trouble matching the risk and brutality of the murders with the supposed reward.”
“Doesn’t that happen? What about the people who get shot for a pair of sneakers?”
“That happens. But not as part of a well-thought-out plan. Cory is convinced that it’s all about Beckert’s political future—eliminating people who might create problems for him.”
“You think the man is capable of that?”
“He’s cold enough. But it still seems out of proportion. There’s something in the payoff that I’m not seeing clearly. Maybe I’m asking the wrong questions.”
“What do you mean?”
“Years ago in the academy I attended a class on investigatory techniques. One morning the instructor asked us, ‘Why do those deer always run out in front of cars at night?’ He got a bunch of answers. Panic, disorientation caused by the headlights, evolutionary dysfunction. Then he pointed out that there was a flawed assumption in the wording of the question itself. How did we know deer always did that at night? Maybe most of them didn’t run out in the road, but we didn’t realize it, because we could only see the ones that did. And he pointed out that there was a subtle misdirection lurking in the phrase run out in front of cars—making it sound as though the activity were something clearly dysfunctional. Suppose the question were reworded this way: ‘Why do some deer attempt to cross the road when a car is approaching?’ That way of asking points toward a different set of possible explanations. Since deer are very territorial, perhaps their first instinct in a moment of danger is to head for the part of their territory in which they feel most secure. Perhaps they’re just moving instinctively toward a place of safety. Other deer in the immediate area may be running in the opposite direction—away from the road—to get to their places of safety, but those deer are less likely to be seen, especially at night. Anyway, his point was simple. Ask the wrong question, and you never get to the truth.”