The Viper

He was reminded of a question a therapist had asked him decades earlier, at the brink of his divorce from his first wife: “What do you think is the key ingredient of a good marriage?”

He’d responded with a list of possibilities: love, patience, tolerance, kindness, generosity, forgiveness. The therapist agreed that those were desirable attributes, but the essential one was missing, one without which a marriage would always be flawed: partnership. He went on to say that most people weren’t really looking for a partner. They were looking for an assistant, or a parent, or a possession.

As Gurney lay there in the darkness, uneasily pondering the nature of partnership, coyotes began howling in the woods above the high pasture.

45

GURNEY PULLED INTO THE PARKING LOT OF THE COUNTY office building at 9:55 the following morning.

The structure was a product of 1960s institutional architecture—relentlessly rectangular, joyless, and cheap. The Office of the District Attorney occupied a prime corner of the main floor. At 9:59 he opened the frosted-glass door and stepped into a reception area whose gray carpet, beige walls, and overly bright lighting echoed the building’s aggressive plainness.

Along the left wall there was a row of uncomfortable-looking Danish-modern chairs. Along the right wall there were two partially enclosed cubicles. In the rear wall there were three frosted-glass doors. On the center one were the words DISTRICT ATTORNEY. There was a desk next to it, occupied by a woman with the etched frown of a gatekeeper vigilant for the arrival of trouble.

“Can I help you?”

“David Gurney for Cam Stryker.”

She gestured toward the chairs against the wall. “Wait there.”

Several minutes later, her phone rang. She picked it up, listened for a moment, and looked over at Gurney. “The district attorney will see you now.”

Stryker’s office was no more welcoming than the reception room. The perfunctory smile on her face was equally chilly.

“Have a seat.” It was more a command than an invitation.

He settled into one of the two chairs facing her nearly bare desk.

“So,” she said, steepling her fingers in front of her chin, “what did you think of RAM’s treatment of the Blackmore affair?”

He shrugged. “Irresponsible and unsurprising. What did you think of it?”

“I thought it was devastating to you personally. The pressure on me to have you arrested is growing by the minute. Albright’s reference to ‘the stench of a cover-up’ is being quoted in all the upstate news sites. It’s political poison!”

Gurney was tempted to point out that arresting the wrong person could be even more poisonous, but he said nothing.

“As bad as the cover-up claim is, even worse was his suggestion that the two Lerman murders are connected. That’s something RAM will be pursuing with a vengeance. And they’ll be pressuring you to help them create that connection.”

“Don’t worry about my cooperating with RAM. That’s not going to happen. But you do need to look into the relationship between those murders. They’re definitely linked.”

“Goddamnit, David! There’s no evidence for that! None! Lenny Lerman tried to blackmail Slade, and Slade killed him. End of story. As for Sonny Lerman, he was killed in a totally unrelated confrontation, for which you are the prime suspect—a fact you seem to be ignoring.”

Gurney sighed. “Cam, you know damn well there’s evidence that points away from me in the direction of a third party.” He went on to add what he’d learned during his trip to Blackmore Mountain—beginning with Nora Rumsten’s recollection of hearing a motorcycle before and after two shots being fired.

“The first shot was the one that killed Sonny. The second was fired into the air with someone holding the gun in my hand to get my prints on it and the powder residue on my skin.”

Stryker waved her hand. “That’s wild conjecture, based on easily misinterpreted sounds some woman in the woods claims she heard.”

“Except that a second woman had a visitor that day with a motorcycle, and its tire tracks show that it was ridden from her campground to the crime scene.”

Stryker frowned, leafing through a file folder on her desk until she found the page she was looking for. “This campground woman you’re talking about—would that be Tess Larson?”

“Yes.”

“The trooper’s report I have here says that he questioned her at a roadblock regarding what she might have seen or heard in connection with the incident that occurred half an hour earlier on Blackmore Mountain Road. He ended the interview when he determined that she had no knowledge of the incident, being down in Harbane at the time it occurred.”

Stryker closed the folder and gave Gurney a questioning look.

“The fact is, she has more knowledge of the situation than she realized at the time. If the trooper had mentioned there’d been a shooting, she might have put two and two together.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”