On Harrow Hill

Back at headquarters, Gurney asked the desk sergeant if there was an empty office he could use. He needed to catch up on the part of the investigation process he liked the least—the paperwork involved in keeping incident reports, witness reports, and progress reports up to date. He had no problem making informal notes on his phone or in his notebook, but he had to push himself to transfer the information to the official case files.

The sergeant pointed him to a small office at the end of the central hallway. He was on his way there when Morgan intercepted him.

He motioned Gurney into his office. “How did it go with Aspern? How did he react when you confronted him with Tate’s text?”

“He said that he saw it, assumed it was sent by mistake, and paid no attention to it. Too busy to be bothered. A credible enough position. No reasonable way to challenge it.”

“Okay. What about Cursen?”

“My impression is that she doesn’t know any more about Tate’s whereabouts than we do. As for the witchcraft business, I think it may be a form of play-­acting—a persona she discovered at some point and got comfortable with. Maybe a way of keeping people at a distance, feeling in control, feeling like she’s connected to something profound. Or at least trying to give that impression. Bottom line, my guess is that she’s a confused girl with an unfortunate attraction to bad boys.”

Morgan looked disappointed. “You don’t think she might be hiding Tate?”

“Not at the moment. She’s obsessed with that Dark-Angel-risen-from-the-dead line in the text he sent her, but I think it’s because she’s afraid he might never come back to her. Underneath the weird getup and otherworldly attitude, I get the impression of sadness, loneliness, maybe fear that her fantasies are collapsing.”

“Jesus, another dead end,” muttered Morgan, sinking down onto one of the couches and rubbing his forehead. “A nutcase kid who was declared dead kills three people, stirs up a media tornado, flushes the image of Larchfield down the toilet, leaves the stinking mess in our laps, and disappears. And tonight Gant stages his ‘revelation tent meeting,’ which is bound to be a rabble-rousing horror show.”

He closed his eyes. Perhaps to make it easier to think. Or not think. When he opened them, he looked pleadingly at Gurney. “We have to find that son of a bitch and put an end to this insanity!”

Gurney ignored Morgan’s overwrought statement of the obvious. “Anything of interest with the lawyer from Angus’s estate?”

“No surprises. The bulk of his wealth—in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty million—goes in roughly equal thirds to Lorinda, Hilda, and Russell College. Plus half a million to Helen Stone and half a million to the Village Square Preservation Society. Montell is pursuing a more precise valuation of the real estate assets, but he’s reasonably confident that the hundred and fifty number will hold up, give or take ten percent. And there’s nothing in the will that benefits Billy Tate—so, whatever his motive was, it wasn’t money. At least not from Angus’s will.”

“Have you heard anything from Brad about the Waterview Drive security cameras?”

“He’d already spoken to the homeowners and gotten the video files for the period you specified. He pulled in a couple of patrol guys to help review them, and he should have a report for us within the hour.”

“Fine. I’ll be updating the Russell, Kane, and Mason case files in the office at the end of the hall.”

Thirty-five minutes later, as Gurney was entering the details of his brief interview with Selena Cursen, Morgan called to tell him that Slovak had arrived with the video file information.

He finished and went to Morgan’s office, where he found the two men already at the conference table. Morgan gave Slovak a nod to proceed.

“We were able to access four security cameras that provide coverage of Waterview Drive. We examined video files for the period from four thirty yesterday afternoon until noon today. Fact number one, no orange Jeep. Fact number two, no driver resembling Billy Tate. Fact number three, none of the vehicles could have stopped at Mary Kane’s cottage.”

Gurney smiled. Maybe Slovak was smarter than he’d given him credit for.

Morgan frowned. “How on earth could you know that none of them stopped?”

Slovak looked eager to explain. “Because one of the cameras is located a mile east of the cottage, and one roughly a mile west of it. There’s an analysis app that measures the speed of objects in the camera’s field of view. And every vehicle that passed the first camera arrived at the second one just about when it should have at its indicated speed. If it stopped anywhere after passing the first camera, the time of its arrival at the second would have been way off.”

Morgan’s frown deepened. “So what are you saying? That Tate, or whoever put the damn message on the wall, came on foot through the woods?”

“Or maybe along the lakeshore, then up through the estate grounds behind the cottage.”