The Viper

“But,” said Gurney, “he probably considered Sonny at least as troublesome as me, so he tried to get rid of us both by framing me for Sonny’s murder, just like he framed Ziko for Lenny’s. I’m less sure about the murder of Charlene Vesco. My guess is that she was so shaken by the shooting of her cousin, Dominick, that he doubted her reliability and killed her to avoid further worry.”

AS THE DAY wore on, Gurney commented on the strange absence of anything in the news about the previous evening’s bloodbath. “With deadly snakes, dead bodies, and bullet casings all over the place, it has to be the most sensational upstate crime scene in years.”

Valdez shook his head. “It will not be in the news. Nothing will be known about it.”

“How is that possible? I mean, the gunshots alone . . .”

“The shots were not heard. My father had the house soundproofed many years ago. There were many sounds he wanted no one outside to hear.”

The images that came to mind caused Gurney to fall silent for a long moment.

“And the bodies, the bloody mess—all of that just stays there?”

Valdez shrugged. “When they can’t get in touch with him, the people who rely on my father’s services will realize something has happened. Cleaners will come. Professionals who deal with special situations. Everything troublesome will disappear. Someday the house will be sold. There will be no connection to him.”

“The woman in the black dress,” said Gurney. “Who was that?”

“Serena. His sister.” Valdez’s strained tone implied that there was something sick in the relationship.

Gurney saw no reason to pursue it.

“What do you know about that violet snake she threw at you?”

“That was her favorite. The rarest and most deadly of all. She used to let it crawl all over her body. It was not a comfortable thing to see.”

THAT NIGHT, GURNEY sat with his computer at the dining room table and put together a detailed narrative description of the case, omitting only the bloody finale, and emailed it to Cam Stryker. He felt that he owed her at least that much of the truth.

He believed that his relationship with her had reached an uneasy balance, based on the concept of mutually assured destruction. He might be able to win the battle of the Slade case, perhaps even end Stryker’s career, if he revealed the full story, including its violent ending. But his own participation in that bloodletting would drag him into a costly and perilous legal nightmare, and he wasn’t ready to sacrifice his own life just to destroy Stryker’s.

He also sent the case narrative to Kyra Barstow at her private email account, along with a cover note thanking her for her help.

He received no response from either woman, nor did he expect any.

VALDEZ OFFERED GURNEY the use of the lodge indefinitely.

“Stay as long as you wish—a week, a month, a year. Make it your home. I must return to Emma. I’m disappointed in myself. The killing was too easy for me. I found it too easy to be the person I once was.”

“You did what was necessary. You saved us both.”

“It is not what I did that bothers me. It’s how it made me feel. It gave me the excitement of revenge. Emma says to be excited by the blood of an enemy is a sickness.”

VALDEZ’S COMMENTS PRODDED Gurney to examine his own feelings about the way things turned out—feelings that were oddly mixed. He had, on the one hand, arrived at a full understanding of the case. He’d managed to fit all the pieces together. The mystery had been solved. As he’d done hundreds of times in his career, he’d figured it out.

But another kind of question remained.

Why had he put the final solution in Valdez’s lap?

If the faultless narrative was truly his goal, why hadn’t he gone public with it, exposed it to every relevant law-enforcement agency, as well as the media? Why had he taken it quietly to the one person who might be motivated to give him direct access to the man behind it all?

Sometimes confrontation could fill in the missing pieces of a puzzle, but that was not the case here. He’d already put the pieces together before revealing them to Valdez—knowing that Valdez was a route to the Viper. There could be only one motive for confrontation under those circumstances.

A desire for mortal combat.

Had he been fooling himself about who he was? Had he been telling himself that he was a descendant of Sherlock Holmes, applying logic to the messy world of passionate crime—a rational mind in pursuit of the truth—when in fact it wasn’t the truth that he was after, but victory? Victory, it would seem, at any cost. At the cost of other people’s lives. At the cost of his own marriage. Was there anything he wouldn’t sacrifice for victory?

Perhaps he wasn’t the Holmes of cerebral solutions, after all, but the Holmes who engaged archenemy Moriarty in a fight to the death at the Reichenbach Falls.