The Viper

“She said you were a good man. She told me to have patience . . . to pay attention . . . to trust you . . . and our life together would be good.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. But that smile . . . that voice . . . it was like she was speaking to a part of me that had never been spoken to before.”

Gurney was at a loss for words.

“So,” Madeleine went on, “based on what she’d done—pulling me out of the mental hell I was in, essentially saving our marriage—I felt that helping her, at least in some limited way, would only be right.”

He remained silent, trying to absorb what he’d just heard—a bomb detonating in slow motion.

AN HOUR LATER, alone at his desk in the den, he remained locked in that dislocated state of mind. The sudden rearrangement of the narrative of his past wasn’t exactly a house of cards collapsing, but the ground had definitely shifted. Madeleine had been on the verge of leaving him. The realization disturbed him. Equally disturbing was the fact that he’d been so insensitive to the depth of her distress that the possibility of her ending their marriage never occurred to him.

Gazing out the den window at the hillside, he caught sight of her in her fuchsia ski jacket, making her way along the mown swath that separated the overgrown pasture from the surrounding forest. She found solace in the outdoors, in pacifying her mind through physical movement, through immersing herself in the natural beauty of the countryside. He found peace and purpose in filling his mind with a puzzle, in turning it this way and that, until it surrendered its secret. Even now he sensed that some part of his brain was viewing his marriage and his own ignorance of its fragility as a puzzle to be solved. Uttering a sharp little laugh at the intractability of his thinking, he pushed himself up out of his chair. Maybe there was something worth considering in Madeleine’s preference for getting out in the open air—

His phone interrupted his train of thought. The caller was, by one of those unnerving coincidences, Emma Martin.

“Emma. I’m glad you called. I was just thinking we need to talk.”

“Because Madeleine wants you to drop the case?”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“No. It’s just a position I could imagine her arriving at.”

“There’s a tangible reason for it. The Harrow Hill case ended up making both of us targets of a homicidal maniac—who came within seconds of adding us to his body count. It’s had a powerful effect. The possibility that I might put us in that position again—”

“Is the last thing on earth Madeleine would want,” Emma said. “It’s also the last thing I want. This is not about you becoming a front-line combatant. It’s about you taking a calm, safe look at the available facts and detecting the flaw in the prosecutor’s narrative. I’m talking about the sort of intellectual challenge your brain was built for, not a gunfight.”

Gurney said nothing.

Emma added, “If even that limited prospect would be disturbing to Madeleine, we can part company right now. Your call.”

Again, Gurney said nothing.

“Let me make a suggestion,” Emma said. “Talk to Ziko. He may hold the key to the truth and not even know it, because he hasn’t been asked the right questions by the right person.” Those last words were delivered in a way that conveyed an absolute conviction that Gurney was the right person.

“You’re suggesting I visit him in Attica?”

“It will occupy one day in your life. I was planning on visiting him tomorrow, but you are welcome to take my place. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

GURNEY SET OUT at nine the following morning for what Google Maps told him would be a four-hour drive from Walnut Crossing to the maximum-security prison in the village of Attica.

For the first hour, his route took him through the frost-covered western Catskill foothills and on through a series of bucolic valleys, pockmarked by the occasional abandoned commercial enterprise. Small herds of cows stood motionless in muddy pastures or rummaged through hay piles on open hillsides. Farmhouses and outbuildings in need of repainting, ancient tractors, and tilting silos bore witness to the region’s battered agricultural heritage. His route took him past some relatively prosperous places, suburbs of university towns, areas with well-kept homes and landscaped lawns, but mile after mile, the landscape revealed its two primary characteristics—natural beauty and economic pain.

To Gurney the saddest things were the abandoned farmsteads. As he slowly rounded a curve, he noticed on a row of fence posts several bluebird houses in the same state of dilapidation as the old house beyond the fence. These abandoned birdhouses, once the lively embellishments of a beautiful place, had become symbols of a lost world.

Whatever it passed through, the road always returned to a rolling panorama of fields and forests, placid lakes, and winding rivers. Every so often a small thicket of larches, whose amber needles were yet to fall, gave a burst of color to a wooded hillside.