The Viper

IT WAS MIDMORNING when he arrived at his secluded parking spot. The sky was clear, the sun was strong, and ice-melt was dripping from the branches of the evergreens as he made his way up the steep slope, carrying only his laptop.

Everything at the campsite seemed in order. He opened the tent flap, got the propane heater going, then went over to the place in the trees that offered a view of the house and the surrounding property. He could see the watchers’ car down by the barn and Madeleine’s rented red Crosstrek by the asparagus bed. An old blue pickup truck was parked by the chicken coop, and a man in rough-looking farm clothes was setting a four-by-four wooden post in a hole not far from the coop. A dozen or so similar posts had already been set in the pasture below the coop. Additional post holes had been dug every eight feet or so in a loose curve around the far side of the coop. The sight of the work in progress gave Gurney a complicated feeling he had a hard time identifying. Loneliness and resentment were part of it.

He returned to the tent, went inside, and sat in the folding chair—half of him trying to understand his emotional reaction, half of him trying to ignore it. In support of the second half, he opened his laptop and began reviewing his lists and notes, trying to extract a coherent picture from that blizzard of facts and suppositions. But as before, the puzzle pieces refused to coalesce. In his frustration, a radical though occurred to him.

Suppose none of the “facts” were true.

Suppose Ziko Slade had no dark secret, no past encounter with someone called Sally Bones. Suppose Lenny Lerman was never told anything by someone called Jingo. Suppose the calls Lerman made to Slade had nothing to do with blackmail. Suppose they took the form of fake spam calls, calls that Slade would have quickly forgotten. That would finally explain the discrepancy between the phone company’s records and Slade’s insistence that he’d never received any blackmail calls. Suppose there’d never been any extortion plot at all. Suppose the diary was a pack of lies. Suppose the reason no coherent picture was emerging from the facts was that most of them weren’t “facts” at all.

It was a startling notion. But if it was true, what solid ground was left to stand on?

Well, thought Gurney, if one was faced with lies, perhaps the best approach would be to ask, what did the lies have in common? In other words, what underlying truth would they have been designed to conceal?

That notion took him back to Marcus Thorne’s story of the gem courier—his lies about recognizing one of the stickup men, about being followed by him, about having taken his picture, about the plate number of the getaway car. One thing they all had in common was that they been dictated to him by a confederate as the price of his cooperation in the phony heist—a confederate with his own agenda.

I’ll do what you want me to do, if you say what I want you to say.

If that arrangement were the skeleton of the Lerman case, then the confederate’s private agenda was the framing of Slade for a grisly murder by fabricating a motive: the elimination of a blackmailer in order to preserve his whitewashed image. The very motive that Stryker had used so effectively to win a conviction.

The result was not only Slade’s incarceration but the demolition of his image as a reformed sinner. Was it possible that both of those outcomes were equally intended? Or even that the latter was more important than the first?

If so, it put the mystery of Slade’s prison murder in an interesting new light and took Gurney back once again to Emma’s question: Why, after all the effort of framing Slade for murder, did the perp have him killed?

All he could think of at the time was the prevention of Slade’s release from prison or the possibility that the framing had failed to accomplish the framer’s goal. But suppose the goal had been the tarring of Slade’s shiny image?

Then the question would become, where exactly was the failure?

Certainly not in the media coverage of the affair, which put Slade in the ugliest light possible, nor in the general public’s perception. Media and public alike were more than ready to see Slade as a murdering hypocrite. So, if the goal of image destruction had in some way failed, it must have failed with a much narrower audience—but an audience of enormous importance to the framer.

It was clear that it had failed utterly with at least one person, Emma Martin—whose unshakable faith in Ziko Slade was responsible for Gurney’s own involvement. In that context, Slade’s prison murder could be seen as a final attempt to defame the man in her mind with a narrative of guilt-driven suicide.