On Harrow Hill

Stryker produced a cool smile of her own, then stood up from the table, indicating the meeting was over.

As the others rose to leave, she motioned to Gurney to stay.

When they were alone, she closed the conference room door and sat down across from him. “You seemed quite certain that your friend Morgan couldn’t be a blackmailer but could be a homicidal-suicidal maniac. Did I understand that correctly?”

“More or less.”

“What’s the ‘less’ part?”

“You referred to him as my friend. That’s a bit of an exaggeration.”

“Okay. What makes you so sure about the motives of this non-friend?”

“Apart from simple logic and the evidence on the ground?”

“Apart from that.”

After considering the pluses and minuses of revealing the event at the heart of his relationship with Mike Morgan, he decided to go ahead and tell Stryker the story of the apartment house shoot-out.

She paid close attention and at the end nodded slightly, as if she might be agreeing that it was relevant in understanding Morgan’s motives. Then she changed the subject.

“I’ve been in two meetings with you now, and both times I’ve gotten the impression that you know more than you’re saying. Is that true?”

“It’s not anything I know. It’s just a feeling.”

“What kind of feeling?”

“That it’s all too complicated.”

“What do you mean?”

“What we have here is a series of winding narratives that turn one way, then another way, but never seem to straighten out. When you get to the heart of it, there’s a straight line in every crime. But the straight line in what’s happening here is eluding me.”

“Maybe fourteen dead bodies can’t be lined up that neatly.”

Gurney didn’t reply.

“Do you share the doubts Morgan had about Chandler Aspern’s death?”

“I do.”

“Do you believe Lorinda Russell was involved?”

“I do. Along with an accomplice.”

“And who might that be?”

“We suspected Silas Gant, but it couldn’t have been him. He was addressing a religious gun rally hundreds of miles away the night of Aspern’s death.”

Stryker began tapping her pen lightly on the table.

“So, you’re telling me we still have a murderer on the loose?”

“It would seem so.”

55

After sharing with Stryker his other thoughts on the peculiarities of the case—which he still viewed as a single entity, convinced as he was that all the fatalities were connected by a single underlying cause—Gurney headed back to Walnut Crossing.

During the drive, he thought of little else but the open question of Lorinda’s accomplice in the murder of Aspern. If the individual approaching the conservatory wearing Billy Tate’s clothes in the security camera video wasn’t Aspern and wasn’t Gant, it had to be someone else of roughly the same size.

Someone else.

That simple phrase had an odd resonance in Gurney’s mind, the feeling of an elusive recollection that only became more so the harder he tried to identify it. When he turned his attention away from it, the feeling grew stronger. When he pursued it, it faded. It was frustrating—that stubborn trait of memory that refuses to be coerced, allowing access only when one stops beating on the door.

And so it was this time.

As Gurney was parking, his eyes on the half-finished alpaca shed, he recalled for no discernible reason something Clarice Flacco had said about the removal of Hanley Bullock’s body from his apartment. After describing how the “cousin” and the “doctor” had carried the body down the stairs, she had said, “Someone else had arrived in a hearse.”

He was surprised that someone’s use of a phrase as innocuous as “someone else” would create an echo to his own use of the same phrase days later. But what mattered to him now was not the phrase itself, but the far more interesting memory it led to—Clarice Flacco’s description of that individual. To be sure he was recalling it accurately, he took out his phone and checked the note he’d made about it after they spoke.

Thin, balding, forties. About the same age as Bullock.

In his forties, ten years ago.

The implications burst on Gurney like the flood of light from the halogens at a crime scene. He sat perfectly still in the Outback, as if any movement might shatter the picture of the Larchfield murders forming in his mind.

He began to see the straight line he’d been searching for.

It was the line that connected everything—from the ME’s hurried pronouncement of Tate’s death to Peale’s jacked-up Lexus behind the funeral home, from Lorinda’s promiscuity to Morgan’s blaze-of-glory suicide, from the shoelace discrepancy to everything Hilda Russell had told him about the prominent citizens of Larchfield, from the audio anomaly in the embalming room video to Peale’s rage at Fallow.

He grinned at the realization that the only person everyone said was wrong was the only one who was right. And the one who stood to lose the most was the one with the most to gain.