On Harrow Hill

Despite Hardwick’s compulsive vulgarity and combative personality—a combination that had finally ended his state police career—Gurney had always felt that the man’s fearlessness and no-nonsense intellect more than made up for his outrageous manners and attitude.

He decided to give him a call to see if he knew anything useful about Larchfield. The call went to voicemail, and he left a message.

Since no immediate next step came to mind, he decided to relax in one of the chairs out on the patio. Although the sun had disappeared below the western ridge, the chair was still warm. He settled into it and watched the hues of the clouds changing from peaches and corals to pinks and purples. From inside the house the strains of a Bach cello piece drifted out, lulling him into a rare state of peace.

When, sometime later, Madeleine came out and perched on the arm of the Adirondack chair across from him, he opened his eyes. The air was cooler now, and the color was gone from the sky.

“So,” she said, “while I was trying to focus on my music, I kept feeling there are things you haven’t told me.”

“About Larchfield?”

“About your willingness to help Morgan.”

He was about to say there wasn’t anything he hadn’t told her, but that wasn’t true.

He sighed. “This is going to sound ridiculous.”

“So?”

“I mean, really ridiculous. In addition to the rational issues giving me pause, there’s the fact that Morgan reminds me of my mother.”

“Why?”

“There’s a plaintiveness in his attitude that I have a hard-wired resistance to. My mother was always trying to get me to pay attention to her, solve her problems with my father, fix the sad mess of her life. When she praised me, it was always for something I’d done for her. When she criticized me, it was always for something I hadn’t done for her. The constant message was that I owed her something.”

“You hear that in Morgan’s voice?”

“I do. I’m sane enough not to let an echo make my decisions. But I hear it.”

“We all deal with echoes.”

“Maybe so. But that’s one of the things that makes me want to back away. But one of the things that makes me want to help him is even more ridiculous.” He hesitated.

She smiled. “I like ridiculous motives.”

“We had mice in our precinct house. A contract exterminator would come in every three months, but what he did would only last a couple of weeks. Then the mice would come back. Morgan started bringing in traps. Catch-and-release traps. He went to a lot of trouble to do this. Setting them every night with peanut butter. Gathering them up every morning. Taking them to a local park on his lunch break. Letting the mice go. Enduring a hell of a lot of abuse.”

“So you figure there’s some good in him? An adulterer who likes mice can’t be all bad?”

Gurney shrugged.

Madeleine smiled. “Maybe all your pros and cons have nothing to do with your decision. Maybe it’s the challenge of the case itself.”

They stayed on the patio, listening in silence to the chirping of the birds returning to their roosts, until the deepening dusk and the chill in the air persuaded them to go into the house.

The wearying effect of Gurney’s long day soon overtook him and he decided to go to bed. His sleep, however, was troubled by weird dreams that persisted through the night. In the last one, he found himself in a cavernous building, standing in a long line of Black Angus cattle. The air smelled of raw hamburger. Blue and green balls were floating down from the ceiling. A voice on a loudspeaker demanded that he guess what color the balls were. A bell was tolling for a funeral he was supposed to attend. There was an elegant sign on the wall in italic lettering: MORGAN’S SLAUGHTERHOUSE.

The bell became the ringing of his phone on the bedside table. Half-awake, he picked it up.

“Gurney here.”

“Dave?” It was Morgan’s voice, its stress level ratcheted up a few notches.

He blinked a few times to clear his vision and peered at the time on his phone. “It’s six o’clock in the morning. What’s wrong?”

“The case just got turned upside down. Nobody stole Tate’s body. The son of a bitch got up and walked out of there.”

“What?!” Gurney sat up, instantly awake.

“He’s not dead. He walked out of that embalming room. Nobody put his fingerprints in Russell’s bedroom. He left them there himself.”

“How do you know this?”

“The casket. The lab did a microanalysis of the splintered edge. The casket wasn’t broken into. It was broken out of.”

PART TWO THE WALKING DEAD

14

During the drive to Larchfield, Gurney was only minimally aware of his ­surroundings—the sparkling of the dew in the early-morning sunlight, the pure green of the fields, the swaths of yellow wildflowers. The Larchfield scenarios forming in his mind were collapsing one after another under the weight of improbability.