The Viper

All at once, coyotes in the high pasture began to howl in eerie unison. Then, as abruptly as they began, they stopped.

Madeleine’s head shifted slightly on her pillow.

“They know where my sister lives.”

Her voice, barely above a whisper, was so unexpected it gave Gurney a little start.

“The people who sent us that hideous thing.”

He had no answer.

“What will it take to make you stop? Will one of us have to end up dead?”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to prevent.”

“Are you?” It was less a question than a weary comment.

The silence was broken only by the rustling of the breeze through the frozen lilac bush outside the bedroom window.

51

MADELEINE EVENTUALLY FELL ASLEEP. GURNEY DIDN’T.

At the first gray hint of dawn, he got up, showered, dressed, picked up his Glock and shoulder holster from the night table, went out to the kitchen, and switched on the coffee machine. While it warmed up, he strapped on the Glock, got his jacket from the mudroom, and stepped outside.

Overnight, the temperature had plummeted again. Frost covered the drooping asparagus ferns, and the briefest Indian summer in memory had come to an end. He took a series of long, slow breaths in the hope that the bracing air might restore some linear logic to his thoughts.

After a while, he began to shiver. The frigid air and deep breathing were only sharpening his headache. He retreated into the house, took off his jacket, and put a pod of dark roast into the coffee machine. When his mug was filled, he took it into the den, opened his laptop, and searched for Northeast Expedited Delivery—the name on the truck that had delivered the snake.

He wasn’t surprised to discover there was no such company—a fact further strengthening his conviction that the enemy was a careful planner with significant resources. He thought for a moment of passing along his discovery to BCI, then decided not to for two good reasons. They surely would make the same discovery on their own, and they wouldn’t appreciate his conducting a parallel investigation.

Instead, he turned his attention to the Lerman-Slade case files. Glancing from one folder to another, he stopped at the one containing the printout Kyra Barstow had sent that showed Lenny’s route from Calliope Springs to Slade’s lodge with GPS time notations. This was the raw material Stryker simplified in graphic form for the trial.

In the same folder he found the printout of the two credit card charges Lenny had incurred—the gas-station one for $14.57 and the one at the auto supply store for $16.19. He checked the time notation next to each and saw that the auto supply transaction occurred six minutes before the one at the gas station.

Recalling the Google Street View image of the station, $14.57 seemed like too much to have been spent on anything in the tiny, seedy-looking store behind the pumps. But it seemed on the low side for a gas purchase. Gurney went to a fuel price website and checked the average upstate gas prices for the previous November. Regular grade, which was what Lerman’s Corolla would have used, was $3.19 a gallon at the pump. At that price, he would have gotten only about four and a half gallons—an oddly small amount for a car, but just about right for a five-gallon gas can.

He went back to the time-coded printout of Lerman’s trip. It seemed entirely consistent with the map Stryker had shown the jury. Then something caught his eye—a stop Lerman made just a mile before he reached Slade’s private road. It was a very brief stop, just one minute, and Stryker hadn’t bothered to highlight it on her map. It was one more oddity in a case increasingly defined by its peculiarities.

He sat back in his chair, gazing out the den window at the high pasture. The dawn light seemed to impart an added chill to the frost on the beige grasses. There was a dead stillness about it all that was adding to his leaden mood. With sudden determination, he decided to do something. Anything would be better than trying to imagine the significance of minor events that had taken place a year ago and a hundred and fifty miles away. He couldn’t do anything about the time that had passed, but he could visit the places where these things occurred. And he had learned long ago that action was the surest path out of a mental cul-de-sac. He checked the Glock in his shoulder holster and put on his jacket.

He was leaving a note for Madeleine when he heard the bedroom door opening. A few seconds later, she came into the kitchen, holding her bathrobe tightly around her, hair uncombed. She frowned at his jacket.

“Where are you going?”

He crumpled up the half-written note and explained that a couple of things about Lenny Lerman’s trip to Slade’s lodge were bothering him and he wanted to check them out. He added, “I know you hate the idea of my pursuing anything connected with the case, but Jesus, Maddie, I don’t know what else to do. I don’t trust Cam Stryker or BCI or the Rexton PD to get to the bottom of this. I just don’t believe—”