Madeleine’s impatience was showing. “So what question about the case do you think you’re getting wrong?”
“I wish I knew.”
She stared up at him for a long moment. “What’s your next step?”
“Review the files, look for things that should be done, and do them.”
“And report back to Kline?”
“Eventually. He’d be quite content to have me do nothing—so long as I don’t rock the boat or make him look bad.”
“Because he has political ambitions of his own?”
“Probably. Until yesterday that meant hitching a ride with Beckert. I assume now he’s seeing his future more as a solo act.”
Rising to her feet and brushing the soil off her hands, she produced a less-than-happy smile. “I’m going inside. Do you want some lunch?”
A short while later, as they were silently finishing their meal, it occurred to Gurney that if he didn’t tell her now about the severing of the power line and the subsequent gunshot, he probably never would. So he did, describing the event as unthreateningly as he could—as Beckert or Turlock simply taking a shot at the back of the house when he went out to get the generator started.
She gave him a look. “You don’t think he was aiming at you?”
“If he wanted to hit me, he would have kept shooting.”
“How do you know it was Beckert or Turlock?”
“I found the rifle that fired the shot in their cabin the next morning.”
“And now Turlock is dead.”
“Yes.”
“And Beckert is on the run?”
“So it seems.”
She nodded, frowning. “This shooting incident was . . . the night before last?”
“Yes.”
“What took you so long to tell me?”
He hesitated. “I think I was afraid of bringing up memories of the Jillian Perry case.”
Her expression darkened at the mention of the invasion of their home during that particularly disturbing series of murders.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you right away.”
She gave him one of those long looks that made him feel transparent. Then she picked up their plates and carried them to the sink.
He suppressed an urge to make more excuses for himself. He went into the den and took out the case materials. With the branding iron and propofol needles now linking Beckert and Turlock directly to the BDA deaths, he opened the consolidated file on Jordan and Tooker.
It contained surprisingly little beyond the incident report, notes on the interview with the dog walker who found the bodies, printouts of some of Paul Aziz’s photos, the two autopsy reports, an investigatory progress form with little progress recorded beyond a description of Turlock’s raid on the Gort brothers’ compound and the evidence he supposedly “found” there. There was also some bare-bones data on the victims. Tooker, according to the file, was a loner with no known family connections nor any personal associations outside the BDA. Jordan was married, but there was no record of any interview being conducted with his wife, beyond a note indicating that she had been informed of his death.
It was clear to Gurney that the decision to target the Gorts for the murders of Jordan and Tooker had dramatically narrowed the scope of the investigation, eliminating virtually all activities not directly supportive of that view of the case. The decision had created a yawning information gap that he felt an itch to rectify.
Remembering that the Reverend Coolidge had provided an alibi for Jordan and Tooker after the Steele shooting and had later spoken highly of them, Gurney thought the pastor might have a phone number for Jordan’s wife.
He placed a call to Coolidge. As he was leaving a message, the man picked up, his tone professionally warm. “Good to hear from you, David. How’s your investigation going?”
“We’ve made some interesting discoveries. Which is why I’m calling you. I want to get in touch with Marcel Jordan’s wife. I was hoping you might have a number for her.”
“Ah. Well.” Coolidge hesitated. “I don’t believe Tania is willing to speak to anyone in law enforcement—which is how she’d view you, regardless of how independent your relationship with officialdom might be.”
“Not even if she could be helpful in solving her husband’s murder—and possibly revealing the complicity of people in law enforcement?”
There was a pregnant silence. “Are you serious? That’s . . . a possibility?”
“Yes.”
“Let me get back to you.”
It didn’t take long.
Coolidge called back in less than ten minutes to inform Gurney that Tania declined to speak to him on the phone but that she’d be willing to meet with him at the church.
Forty-five minutes later Gurney was pulling into the lot at Saint Thomas the Apostle. He parked and took the path through the old churchyard.
He was almost to the building’s back door when he saw her, standing very still among the moss-stained gravestones. A tall, brown-skinned thirtysomething woman in a plain gray tee shirt and sweatpants, she had the lean body and wiry arms of a long-distance runner. Her dark, suspicious eyes were fixed on him.
“Tania?”
She didn’t answer.
“I’m Dave Gurney.”
Again she remained silent.
“Would you prefer to talk out here or inside?”
“Maybe I’ve decided not to speak to you at all.”
“Is that true?”
“Suppose it is.”
“Then I’ll get back in my car and go home.”
She cocked her head, first one way then the other, with no discernible meaning. “We’ll talk right here. What did it mean, what you said to the pastor?”
“I told him we’ve made some discoveries concerning your husband’s murder.”
“You told him police might have been involved.”
“I said it looked that way.”
“What facts do you have?”
“I can’t reveal specific evidence. But I suspect that your husband and Virgil Tooker, as well as the two police officers, may all have been killed by the same person.”
“Not by the Payne boy or them Gort lunatics?”
“I don’t believe so.” He studied her impassive face for some reaction but saw none. Behind her loomed the marble angel on whose wing Coolidge a few days earlier had extinguished his cigarette.
“The man you’re calling my husband,” she said after a pause, “was really more my ex, though we never got divorced. We were living in the same house, for the economies of it, but we were separated in our minds. Man was a fool.” Another pause. “What do you want from me?”
“Your help in getting to the truth of what happened.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“You could start with why you say Marcel was a fool.”
“He had a weakness. Women loved him . . . and he loved them back.”
“That’s what ended your marriage?”
“It created situations that were a pain to my heart. But I tried to live with the weakness because there was so much strength in him otherwise. Strength and a true desire for justice—justice for people who have no power. He wanted to stand up for those people—to do what he could to take some of the strife and fear out of their lives. That was his vision for the BDA.”