The Viper

Gurney had listened to a lot of addicts over the years, and Slade’s description of the low-bottom life rang true. Of course, where he came from was never in dispute. The more interesting questions centered around his post-conversion life—if that’s what it really was—and how that life related to the murder of Lenny Lerman.

“Are you still married to the woman who stabbed you?”

“No. She was too addicted to the insanity. When I got out of the hospital and backed away from the old life, she convinced herself I was either a total phony or a religious bore. She was done with me.”

“Why did she stab you?”

“We were arguing, she picked up an ice pick, and . . . it happened.”

“And since then you’ve been leading a straight life?”

“Yes.”

“A life that means a great deal to you?”

“It means everything to me.” His steady gaze met Gurney’s. “So, if someone threatened my new life with proof of an old crime, I would have a powerful motive for killing him. Is that what you’re thinking?”

“I think that’s what Cam Stryker wanted the jury to think.”

“It sounds reasonable. But it actually makes no sense.”

“Why not?”

“If I killed Mr. Lerman, I would have been trying to preserve the appearance of my new life at the cost of destroying the reality of it. That would be insane, wouldn’t it?”

14

THAT WOULD BE INSANE, WOULDN’T IT?

Even though his meeting with Slade continued for another twenty-five minutes, that was the comment most vivid in Gurney’s mind during his drive home. Viewed one way, it could be seen as the straightforward observation of an innocent man. Viewed another way, it might be the smirking humor of a psychopath.

He felt a similar uncertainty about Slade’s post-stabbing life of virtue. Perhaps it was all true, a legitimate road-to-Damascus awakening. Or it could be a long-term con job, aimed at some yet-to-be-revealed payoff.

Gurney went back over the final questions he had asked Slade.

Did he receive the threatening phone calls from Lerman that Stryker had referred to?

No, he hadn’t.

How did he explain the three calls made from Lerman’s number to his, and Lerman’s description of them in his diary?

He couldn’t explain them because they never happened.

If he was in the lodge the evening of the murder as he claimed, how could Lerman have been knocked unconscious a few feet from the front porch, dragged to a grave in the woods, beheaded, and buried without his noticing anything at all?

He’d been making preparations for the following day’s Thanksgiving dinner. The kitchen was in a rear corner of the building, and he had a Mahler symphony on the stereo, parts of which could have drowned out a machine gun.

How did his DNA get on the camos Lerman was found wearing?

It must have been stolen from a closet in the lodge. He never bothered to lock the upstairs windows. Getting in would have been a cinch when he wasn’t there, which was most days.

Slade’s answers sounded reasonable, but if true, it would mean that Cam Stryker’s persuasive courtroom narrative was a total fiction.

That thought produced a small frisson—and a new realization, not so much about Slade as about himself. He recalled his inclination after the Harrow Hill horrors to avoid active involvement in future criminal investigations—an easy enough boundary to maintain in the absence of temptation—but now he could feel the familiar pull of a closed case that just possibly should not have ended the way it did.

Under the influence of that magnetic pull, he might talk himself into something best avoided. He decided to share his thoughts with Jack Hardwick, the former New York State Police detective with whom he had an often contentious but ultimately productive working relationship.