On Harrow Hill

Gurney was wondering how much longer he could stretch this out. He hardly noticed that it had started to rain, and little rivulets of water were running down his face. “You know, I thought I had everything figured out. Then I walked into that kitchen, saw all that blood, saw the drag marks leading out to the tire impressions in the grass—and I was baffled all over again. I kept asking myself what seemed like the obvious question. Why was the body removed? But that was the wrong question, wasn’t it?”

A flash of lightning revealed teeth in what appeared to be a grin in the shadow of the hood.

“Goodbye, Detective.” The harshness, the raspiness, the effort at disguising the voice had ceased. It was clear, icy, and quite identifiable.

As the muzzle of the AK-47 was aimed at the center of Gurney’s breastbone, a shrill metallic whine arose behind the hooded figure, whose sudden effort to turn toward it ended in a horrific shriek as Madeleine thrust the circular saw forward and the teeth of the spinning blade tore through one of the hands holding the weapon.

A spray of blood whipped across Gurney’s face as a convulsive jerk of his attacker’s arm sent the AK-47 clattering across the patio.

The hooded figure staggered backward.

Madeleine attacked again.

Another shriek, longer and wilder than the first.

This time the spray of blood fell in a line across the patio, a severed hand fell on the grass at Gurney’s feet, and the hooded figure ran with a gagging scream into the darkness of the low pasture.

Madeleine was breathing hard, with a rigid grip on the still-whining saw.

“It’s okay,” said Gurney. “You can put it down.”

The meaning of his words seemed not to register.

It wasn’t until she noticed blood dripping from the blade housing onto her knuckles that she tossed the tool away from her. The sharp clang when it hit the stone patio seemed to bring her back from wherever the intensity of the experience had taken her. Tears welled in her eyes. Gurney tried to step toward her, but the pain that instantly shot up through his leg stopped him. She came to him, and they embraced for a long minute.

Gurney heard the sound of a car starting down by the barn and driving off into the night in a spray of gravel. He figured it was the missing Lexus.

“We have to put out the fire,” she said.

“Turn on the garden hose.”

The spigot was next to the back door. She switched on the patio floodlights, then turned on the spigot, unreeled the hose, and aimed it at the burning siding. The combination of water from the hose and the now-heavy rain extinguished the flames, converting the whole front of the coop and half of the shed siding into a smoldering black wall.

Gurney took out his phone. “Time to call 911.”

“I already did. Before I came out.”

The sound of a distant crash came from somewhere on the town road that led from their barn down the long hill to the county route.

“Help me to the Outback,” he said. “I need to get down to whatever just happened.”

She turned off the hose. “I’m going with you.”

A mile down the road, they came upon the collision. In the headlights of the Outback, it appeared that a silver-gray Lexus had smashed at high speed into the front of a red Pontiac GTO. Jack Hardwick was standing next to the Lexus. His head and face were covered with blood. It was mixing with the rain and running down onto his tee shirt. His nose looked broken.

Gurney struggled out of his car, putting all his weight on one leg and using the open door as a support. “Jack?”

Hardwick pointed at the driver’s-side window of the Lexus. “That bastard in the hoodie better be dead. Who the fuck is he, anyway?”

Gurney was 95 percent sure, about as sure as he ever was about anything.

“William Danforth Peale the Third.”

58

The Walnut Crossing hospital was a modest one-story structure whose services were limited to diagnostic imaging, lab analyses, and crisis medicine. Their emergency room was large for a small town and had recently been updated.

In a roomy private bay with a sliding glass door, Hardwick was propped up into a semi-sitting position on an ER bed. He was wearing a green hospital gown. His head and nose were bandaged, an IV tube ran from a clear plastic bag on a pole down into his forearm, and a set of wires connected him to a device with a vital-signs screen next to the bed.

Gurney, also in a hospital gown, was sitting in a wheelchair a few feet away. The lower half of his left leg was encased in a fiberglass cast. Madeleine was sitting next to him, dressed in the same black slacks and sweatshirt she’d worn in her attack on Peale.

With her back to the closed glass door, Cam Stryker, in a blue business suit, was sitting where she could face them all. She’d lowered one of the ER’s rolling tray tables to desk height in front of her. On it were an attaché case, an iPad, a phone, and a notebook. Detective Lieutenant Derek Hapsburg was standing near her, a small man with thin lips and a stony expression. His arms were folded.