On Harrow Hill

That made no sense—unless Aspern had retied his laces in the time between his walking across the lawn and his breaking into the conservatory. But why would he do that? This was a man on his way to cut a woman’s throat. A man carrying another man’s severed hand in his sweatshirt pocket. Would he stop in the midst of this grotesque mission to retie his shoelaces?

But he either retied them or he didn’t. And if he didn’t, who did? And why?

The ringing of his phone interrupted his train of thought.

It was Slovak.

“Sorry to bother you, sir. I just wanted to make sure you knew about Carol Morgan. She passed, sir, early this morning.”

“Jesus. How’s Mike doing?”

“I don’t really know. I think he’s at home.”

“Okay. Thanks for letting me know.”

Gurney laid his phone down next to his laptop on the table and sat gazing out over the pasture. As a homicide detective, death was part of his life. Approaching it objectively was the essence of his job. But this sort of death was different. It came at him from an angle that bypassed his professionalism. It touched that mostly hidden part of him that responded to the world with emotion rather than analysis.

He picked up his phone and placed a call to Morgan.

“Yeah?” His voice was ragged.

“Mike, I just heard about Carol. I’m so sorry.”

“Who is this?”

“Dave Gurney.”

“Oh.”

“Are you all right?”

“What? No. No. Not really.”

“Is there anything I can do for you? Anything you need?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

He didn’t answer.

“Mike?”

There was a sound that might have been a stifled sob. Or a cough.

Gurney waited.

“She didn’t know who I was, Dave. I was there, standing next to the bed. She was awake, looking right at me. ‘Who are you?’ That’s what she said, looking right at me. I said, ‘It’s Mike. Your husband. It’s me. Mike.’ She said, ‘I don’t have a husband.’ I didn’t know what to say. I tried to hold her hand. She pulled it away. Then she closed her eyes. That was it. She stopped breathing. That was the end.”

Gurney heard that stifled sound again. This time he was certain it was a sob.

46

Gurney wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting there on the patio. The phone call with Mike Morgan had broken his sense of time.

Finding himself gazing blankly at the rectangle of yellow string Madeleine had set up next to the chicken coop, he got up and walked over for a closer look.

Picturing as best he could the alpaca shelter diagram she’d gotten from Dennis Winkler, he paced along the edges of the rectangle to get an idea of the dimensions. He went back to his laptop and spent the next half hour figuring out the lumber and hardware needs and putting together a materials list. Having done that, he felt less adrift. Over the years he’d come to rely on the grounding effect of small practical actions.

Now, in the hope of maintaining that effect and perhaps solving the shoelace conundrum, he returned to his examination of the photo and video files. An attentive pass through all the material took another hour. He was in the middle of a second pass at five thirty when Madeleine called to tell him that she and Gerry were going to dinner in Oneonta and then to a movie, so she wouldn’t be home until sometime after ten.

He brought his laptop inside to the table by the French doors and once again gave his attention to all the pictures documenting the movements of Billy Tate and Chandler Aspern. He was convinced that in one of images he would find an explanation for the inconsistent sizes of the bow loops on the sneakers.

Three hours later he still had not succeeded. He suspected the answer was staring him in the face and he just wasn’t recognizing it. Perhaps he should take a break. His need for sleep was undeniable, and he knew that pushing himself any further at that point would not be productive. He decided to lie down without setting his alarm, letting his brain determine how much rest it required.

Too tired to fall into a natural sleep, he slipped into a state of uneasy, semi-­wakeful dreaming. Even that was interrupted—by Madeleine’s arriving home and opening the bedroom windows, then by a cramp in his leg, and still later by the yipping of coyotes in the high pasture.

A little after four in the morning he gave up hope of sleeping comfortably—the result of a fretful dream that featured Tate with his spray can, applying figure eight hellfire symbols on the church steeple. The dream kept repeating, with the variation that Tate sometimes held the spray can in his right hand and sometimes in his left hand.

Gurney was made so restless by the contradictory images that he felt a need to resolve the confusion then and there. He got up and went out to the table where he’d left his laptop and opened the two video files.

What he saw on the screen provided the resolution, but at the cost of more confusion. On the church roof Tate sprayed the symbol on the steeple with his left hand, but in the embalming room he scraped it on the wall with his right.