On Harrow Hill

Morgan took a few moments to absorb this. “I’m pretty sure we can get permission.”

“So, I’ll wait to hear from you.”

As soon as the young man departed, Morgan picked up his phone.

“I’ll give Peale a call.”

“Might be better to drop in on him,” Gurney suggested. “Face-to-face is always a plus.”

Morgan nodded.

They found Peale in the rear parking area, looking as preppy as the day before in a teal sweater, yellow Bermuda shorts, and tan moccasins. He was coiling a power cord attached to a tire jack that was no longer supporting the rear wheel of the Lexus.

“Returning this to my neighbor. Convenient having someone next door who’s a car enthusiast and tool junkie. Something I can do for you?”

Morgan smiled. “We may have a breakthrough in the missing-body case. We need the ID and password for your security camera software, so we can access its backup storage.”

“Am I hearing you right? Are you saying there’s a video of the break-in and theft of the body?”

“A video of what actually occurred that night.”

Morgan’s answer struck Gurney as a truthful evasion of the issue.

If Peale noted the equivocation, he didn’t react to it. Looking excited at the prospect of the video, he gave Morgan his ID and password.

Morgan phoned the information to Ronan Ives, then he and Gurney headed back to headquarters. After asking Gurney to wait in the conference room, Morgan went to his office to get the agreement formalizing Gurney’s temporary role in the department.

Sitting at the conference room table reminded Gurney that he’d turned off his phone to avoid any distraction during the earlier meeting. Now he turned it back on and checked his voicemail. He found three new messages.

The first was from Madeleine.

“Hi. Just a reminder that the Winklers are coming for dinner at six. Love you.”

The second was from Jack Hardwick.

“Larchfield? Why the fuck do you want to know about Larchfield? Rich lizards living next door to other rich lizards. Medieval fiefdom, lorded over by Angus the Scottish Scumbag. Classy veneer over rotten wood. You want to know more, buy me a coffee tomorrow morning at Abelard’s. Eight sharp. Call if you can’t make it.”

The third was another from Madeleine.

“Hi, again. Could you pick up some flowers for the table? Maybe tulips from Snook’s Nursery? See you later.”

A moment later Morgan appeared with some papers tucked under his arm and a mug of coffee in each hand. He placed one in front of Gurney, took the seat across from him, and laid the papers in the middle of the table.

“You won’t find any surprises there,” said Morgan. “I just spelled out what we talked about yesterday afternoon. The terms of your involvement. One copy for you, two copies for the department. Before you leave today, we’ll take your photo, laminate it into an official ID.” Morgan was sounding breezy, but his tic was working overtime.

“So long as we understand that I’ll be taking my own path. I’ll keep you and your people informed. But I need to follow my instincts.”

“Wouldn’t want it any other way. I’ll send out a memo to the department, so there’s no confusion about your authority.”

Morgan’s phone rang. He took the call. After listening for half a minute, he said, “Got it. Thank you.” He put the phone down on the table.

“That was Ives at forensics. He accessed the last seven days of Peale’s camera data and downloaded it to our internal system. He coded the segments separately, so we can go directly to the night in question. You want to see it now?”

15

Once Morgan had located the downloaded video segments in the system, he proceeded to the one tagged with the date of Tate’s disappearance from the mortuary and tapped the PLAY icon.

A sound, nearly inaudible at first, took the form of a muffled groan, and the screen came to life with a shot of the embalming room. Gurney assumed that it was this sound that had activated the camera, as well as one of the room’s lighting circuits. As the groan was repeated, building in intensity to a kind of teeth-clenched roar, the camera’s field of view moved to the right, toward the cadaver storage unit. Seemingly responding to a series of dull thumps from the unit, the panning motion was followed by a slow zoom in, until the side of the unit nearly filled the frame. The time code in the corner of the screen was changing from 9:03 p.m. to 9:04 p.m.

The next sounds were more frantic—a combination of growling shouts, grunts, and dull scraping sounds. Gurney pictured, with a twinge of claustrophobia, the scratches and fingernail residues Kyra Barstow had found on the inside of the casket lid.

Pounding continued intermittently for the next quarter of an hour. Then, a different sound—the straining, tearing, and snapping of wood fibers. The time-code display read 9:29 p.m.