On Harrow Hill

“I’m not sure I do, either. I do know that Aspern got a call from Lorinda a few hours before she shot him, and his phone is missing. I’m thinking he might have recorded the call, and that’s the reason it’s missing.”

“Lorinda? You’re saying . . . what? That she set Aspern up? That she . . . murdered him?”

“I’m saying it’s possible. With an accomplice. She couldn’t have done it alone.”

Morgan picked up his bottle again. This time he opened it and took a long wincing swallow before putting it back. “You have any idea who this accomplice could be?”

“Nothing solid. But I did make an interesting discovery. It looks like Hanley Bullock, the principal who was involved with fifteen-year-old Lorinda, was murdered ten years ago—I suspect at the request of either Angus Russell or Lorinda herself. It was right around the time of their marriage.”

Morgan looked like he was trying to see through a fog. “What’s that . . . got to do with . . . anything?”

“The hit man was either Otis Strane or Silas Gant. I believe they were both present, and there’s reason to believe there was a long-standing relationship between the Russells and Gant.”

There was a panicky edge on Morgan’s voice. “I don’t . . . I mean . . . so what?”

“You asked me who Lorinda’s accomplice might be.”

“Silas Gant?”

“If he provided that kind of service before, why not again?”

Morgan picked up his bottle and held it on the arm of his chair without opening it. He appeared to be gazing into it as if it might hold the answer to a question. He cleared his throat. “You think Lorinda could be . . . that deeply involved . . . with Gant?”

“Why not? It could be a mutually beneficial relationship. She’d get an iceman to remove inconvenient people from her world, and he’d get sex, money, or whatever else she might be willing to offer.”

A long minute passed before Morgan spoke again. Gurney had the strange sense that something inside the man was collapsing.

“You know all about the mess I created in the NYPD. Maybe Carol knew, too. I’m not sure. Even if she did, she was still willing to come up to Larchfield with me. Let the past be the past. New life. Everything was good. Then, about a year ago . . . the addiction came back. The obsession. Full force. Crazier than ever.”

“Crazier in what way?”

“The woman I got involved with. The choice I made. A god-awful choice. The worst. Absolutely the worst.”

“Lorinda Russell?”

Morgan’s jaw went slack. He stared at Gurney. “How did you know?”

“Just a guess.”

“Now you’re telling me she’s in bed with Silas Gant, and they murdered Aspern.”

“I can’t prove that, Mike. I’m just filling you in on how it looks.”

“Gant is the evil piece of shit Carol was at war with.”

Gurney said nothing.

“You always get to the ugly truth. You dig it up and drag it into the daylight.”

Gurney waited a moment, then asked, “Who initiated the affair?”

Morgan blinked, refocusing. “I thought I did. Now I don’t know.”

“What do you think she wanted from you?”

He managed a weak shrug. “I thought it was about sex.”

“But now you’re not so sure?”

“I’m not sure of anything.”

“What else might she have wanted from you?”

“I have no idea,” said Morgan, a bit too quickly.

“I’ll put it another way. Did she ever talk to you about wanting anything in her life to be different from the way it was?”

Morgan stared into his bottle of half-finished bourbon as if looking for any answer other than the one that he couldn’t evade. “Yes,” he finally said, almost inaudibly. “She talked about how much brighter things would be . . . if it weren’t for Angus.”

Gurney let Morgan sit with the echo and implication of his own words.

“You think she was asking me . . . to make that happen?”

“What do you think?”

49

As Gurney drove home to Walnut Crossing, he pondered the likely result of Lorinda’s view of what would make her life brighter—namely, that she’d finally found someone more willing than Morgan to grasp what she was asking for and to make it happen.

Someone like Silas Gant.

Gurney recognized that he was on dangerous ground with this idea—in no small part because of his eagerness to embrace it. He wanted the multiple murderer to be Gant. It was time to sit down again with Jack Hardwick, ultimate skeptic.

The man answered his call and agreed to meet him at Abelard’s in forty-five minutes.

Along the way Gurney called Slovak to find out if Aspern’s phone or his three-hundred-dollar bottle of wine had been located. Slovak reported that they hadn’t, despite a careful search of Aspern’s house, garage, and three cars. Although Gurney knew their absence proved nothing, it was encouragingly consistent with the case narrative coming together in his mind.

When he arrived at Abelard’s, Hardwick was sitting at their regular table and had already secured a large black coffee for himself and a double espresso for Gurney.

“Thanks, Jack. I appreciate your coming.”

“Did I correctly intuit from what you said on the phone that the status of Mayor Turd-Eyes has been officially changed from villain to victim?”