After leaving Peale, Gurney, Morgan, and Slovak went down to the embalming room, where Kyra Barstow was supervising the work of the two Tyvek-clad evidence techs Gurney had observed that morning on the lawn of the Russell estate.
Morgan asked if Barstow could come next door for a meeting at headquarters. She said that she’d join them in a minute; first, she needed to give her team some additional instructions for the examination of the casket.
True to her word, she arrived in the conference room just as Gurney, Morgan, and Slovak were taking their seats. Morgan ran his fingers over the satiny tabletop and gestured at the room’s thick carpeting and mahogany paneling. “Just like our old precinct house,” he said, making an obvious joke.
Gurney forced a smile at the memory of the stained floor tiles, cheap plastic chairs, and scarred tabletop in the detectives’ meeting room in the converted tenement building with its noisy pipes, temperamental heating system, and ubiquitous mice. He might have smiled more easily if he didn’t interpret the comment as an attempt to remind him yet again of their history together, its inescapable debt.
Morgan turned to Barstow. “Anything of interest in Peale’s embalming room?”
She nodded enthusiastically. “Plenty of fingerprints, shoe prints, fibers, hairs, bloodstains. I’ll get the lab to work through the night. By tomorrow morning we should have some results in hand.”
Morgan looked pleased, or at least less worried. “Let’s take a few minutes to assess what we learned from Peale and prioritize next steps. Who wants to start?”
Slovak raised his hand like a schoolboy. “Detective Gurney has been really quiet. I’d love to hear his thoughts.”
“You and me both,” said Morgan. “Dave?”
“You mentioned there’s a video of Tate’s accident, taken by a witness.”
Morgan nodded. “It’s been downloaded to our evidence archive. You want to see it?”
“Very much so.”
Morgan began manipulating an app on his phone. A burnished wood panel in the conference room wall slid open, revealing a large monitor. After a few more swipes and taps on his phone, the big screen came to life, showing a nighttime image of a white church facade, illuminated by a streetlamp at the edge of what Gurney recognized as the village square. The steeple of the church was framed by a black sky.
Gurney’s attention was attracted by a shadowy figure on the sharply pitched roof next to the base of the steeple. The camera began to zoom in slowly. The shadowy figure—in black pants and a gray hooded sweatshirt—moved closer to the edge of the roof and became illuminated by the streetlamps below.
Slovak leaned toward Gurney. “That’s Billy Tate.”
Gurney could see that Tate was holding a can of something in one hand and grasping the corner of the steeple with the other.
Three flashes lit up the sky in rapid succession, followed by a long rumble of thunder.
Tate began moving the can in a curving motion along the side of the steeple.
Two blue-white flashes lit the sky, more brightly this time, followed by louder thunder.
A still-brighter flash created an eerie silhouette of the steeple and the hooded figure next to it. The flash was followed almost immediately by the crashing of thunder, and a few seconds later by another flash and another crash.
Slovak pointed at the screen. “It’s coming now . . . right after this next wind gust.”
Bits of debris, leaves, and dust were roiled up into the air and whirled past the front of the church. Tate stepped in closer to the steeple, bracing his body against it.
“Watch,” said Slovak excitedly. “Here it comes . . .”
A blinding lightning bolt blasted Tate away from the steeple and over the edge of the roof. With a fast downward sweep, the camera followed the body’s fall to the ground.
Gurney flinched, not just at the sight of the impact but at a sound embedded in his memory—as vivid at that moment as the day he heard it, while he was still a probationary officer in the NYPD. An addict had jumped from a sixth-floor apartment window and struck the pavement less than ten feet from where Gurney was standing. The stomach-turning sound of the body hitting the ground had stayed with him for three decades.
While the camera remained on Tate’s inert form, two uniformed officers rushed into the scene, followed by Slovak, followed by Morgan—both in civilian clothes. Slovak knelt next to the body and went through an extended check for vitals. One of the uniformed officers initiated CPR, shouting at the same time for a defibrillator. Slovak could be seen taking out his phone.
Morgan fast-forwarded the video to a later point where a man in chinos and a loose cardigan entered the area with a small leather bag. He squatted by the body and applied a stethoscope to the chest and carotid artery. Because of the position of the camera it was difficult for Gurney to be sure, but the man seemed to be palpating the neck area, then checking the eyes. After a while, he stood up and spoke to Slovak and Morgan and a third officer, all of whom had been closely observing the examination.
Morgan stopped the video and turned to Gurney. “The guy you just saw examining Tate is Dr. Fallow.”
After another fast-forwarding, the video showed a rolling stretcher being guided toward the body. Gurney recognized the man pushing it as Peale. There was some discussion between him and the doctor, after which Peale, Morgan, Slovak, and one of the uniformed officers lifted the body onto the stretcher. With Peale leading the way, Morgan rolled the stretcher out of the frame.
At that point he stopped the video again.
“Any questions?”
“From the point at which the video begins, until the body is removed, how much time elapses?” asked Gurney. “With the fast-forwarding, I couldn’t tell.”
“There’s an embedded time code, which I disabled for this viewing, since it’s a bit of a distraction. The total time from start to finish is a little less than an hour. The first twenty minutes or so is devoted to Tate on the roof. What I showed you starts at the end of that portion. The full version includes the defibrillation efforts, the arrival of the EMTs in an ambulance, along with two police cars from Bastenburg.”
“How did Tate get up on the roof?”
“There’s an interior ladder that goes up into the steeple, and a door in the back of the steeple that opens onto the roof.”
Gurney turned to Slovak. “Is graffiti the reason Tate was up there?”
“Reason doesn’t mean much when you’re talking about Billy Tate.”
“Tate hated Angus, and the pastor of St. Giles is Angus’s sister,” said Morgan. “So, it could have been a way of lashing out at him.”
Barstow was frowning. “There’s something I’d like to see again. Could you take the video back to the point just before the final lightning bolt?”
Morgan did as she asked.
“There!” she said, peering intently at the screen. “On the side of the steeple, about waist-high where Tate is standing. Can you enlarge that area?”
Morgan went through a series of taps and swipes on his phone, and that portion of the scene expanded to fill the frame.
“It’s not very clear,” said Barstow, “because of the angle of the camera and the limited lighting from the streetlamp, but you can make out the graffiti. See the curving, intersecting lines?”
They all leaned forward, studying the area she was pointing at.
“Now look at this,” she said, holding up her own phone.
On the screen was the photo she’d taken in the embalming room of the figure scratched into the wall paint—a horizontal number eight with a rough line bisecting it.
The murky graffiti on the steeple had the same shape.
Morgan’s worry lines deepened. “Any idea what that thing is supposed to be?”
“While you guys were up in Peale’s office, I checked the internet to see if I could find anything like the figure on the wall,” said Barstow. “It might be just a coincidence, but it resembles the ancient alchemy symbol for sulfur.”
“Sulfur?” Slovak uttered a dismissive grunt. “What’s sulfur got to do with anything?”
“Maybe nothing,” said Barstow. “Except that the site where I found it said that sulfur was once believed to be the main ingredient in hellfire. Because of that connection, some people who called themselves Satanists adopted the symbol as their emblem.”
Her explanation produced a fraught silence.
“Am I missing something here?” asked Gurney.
Morgan shifted uneasily in his chair. “Billy Tate’s girlfriend, a woman by the name of Selena Cursen, is supposedly involved in witchcraft—whatever that means.”
“The Rich Witch,” said Barstow.
Gurney stared at her. “The what?”
“The Rich Witch. Her parents set her up with a fat trust fund, probably because they knew she was unemployable. Dabbles in all sorts of occult nonsense. Big spooky house in the woods. Soulmate of Billy Tate, ever since he got out of prison. Dresses in black. Silver studs in her lips. Very intense gaze—like she’s imagining a plan she has for you. Makes a lot of people uncomfortable.”
“She’s a loner?” asked Gurney. “Or is there a local group she’s part of?”
“I’ve never heard of any group,” said Barstow. “You, Chief?”
Morgan shook his head. “Far as I know, the only creepy group around here consisted of her and Tate.” He paused for moment, then spoke to Slovak. “Brad, you need to pay Selena Cursen a visit. The symbol scratched on Peale’s wall is enough to make her a person of interest in the theft of the body. But go easy. Offer your condolences. Tell her you’re just following up on the accident. Try to get a sense of how she reacts to questions about Tate. Don’t say anything that might trigger her to clam up or call a lawyer.”
Slovak looked less than happy. He rotated his shoulders like a weightlifter working out a cramp. “If that figure eight thing suggests she’s involved, how about we get a search warrant for her house, go in there and tear it apart?”
Morgan shook his head. “The figure eight may not mean what we think it does. Too loose a connection for a judge to issue a warrant. We need more.”
“I have a question,” said Gurney. “The video of the accident shows you and Brad helping to lift Tate onto the stretcher. Did you get a clear view of his face?”
Morgan nodded. “Perfectly clear.”
“So, you have no doubt that the person who fell off that roof was, in fact, Billy Tate?”
“No doubt at all. You, Brad?”
Slovak shook his head emphatically. “Zero doubt.”
“Even with the lightning damage to his face?” asked Gurney.
“The damage was awful,” explained Morgan, “but only to the left side. The right side was untouched. No one at the scene had any doubt about his identity. It’s one of the few things about the case I am sure of.” He gave Gurney a questioning look. “You seem puzzled.”
“I’m trying to understand the connection between the theft of Tate’s body and the murder of Angus Russell. I don’t see the purpose of putting a dead man’s fingerprints on the murder weapon. Stealing the body involved a major risk, but I don’t see a payoff that would justify it. If Tate was dead before Russell was killed, we’re obviously not going to believe he was the perp. So what was the point of leaving that phony evidence in Russell’s house?”
“Maybe the killer has a really twisted sense of humor,” suggested Slovak.
Gurney shook his head. “If it was just the killer’s macabre idea of a joke, the trouble he took to pull it off seems way out of proportion. And as a form of misdirection, it makes no sense. It makes me wonder what I’m missing.”
Morgan flashed a rare smile. “That gives me hope. Back in the city, every time you zeroed in on an odd fact in a case, it led to the solution.”
“Speaking of oddities,” said Gurney, “that meeting Peale described with Darlene Tate was hardly normal. Did something happen between her and her stepson that explains it?”
Slovak spoke first. “Billy Tate and I were in high school at the same time, a year apart. There was a rumor circulating about him and his stepmother. Pretty X-rated stuff.”
“They were having sex?”
“It was just a rumor at first, but when his father shot him, that seemed to seal the deal.”
“His father shot him?”
“Five times. EMTs thought at first he was dead. But he recovered. His father’s doing a minimum twenty in Attica for attempted murder.”
“When did this happen?”
“Ten, twelve years ago. Billy was a junior at Larchfield Academy.”
“The relationship between Billy and Darlene—did that situation continue after high school?”
“I don’t know. For a while, people got tired of talking about it. But it came back to life when Billy got involved with Selena Cursen. When that started up, somebody fired a few shotgun blasts into Selena’s house. We got an anonymous call that it was Darlene, but there was no way to make the case.” Slovak looked at Morgan for confirmation.
Morgan shrugged. “No witnesses. No evidence. But plenty of bad feelings all around.”
“Your idyllic part of the world sounds remarkably messy,” said Gurney.
Slovak nodded. “The thing is, the guys on the village board made sure the media reported that the Tates lived in Bastenburg, not Larchfield. I bet they’d love to say Angus got killed in Bastenburg, if they could.”
Morgan’s fingers were tapping restlessly on the table. “Okay. Time for next steps. Dave, any thoughts on priorities?”
“Only the obvious ones. The body theft probably required more than one person. A vehicle must have been used to transport it. Someone may have seen it being loaded in back of the funeral home, or unloaded at its destination—possibly the Cursen property? Assuming this happened after dark, the body theft would have occurred after eight the evening following the accident, and it, or parts of it, would have been brought to the Russell house in the time window the ME estimated for Angus’s death—3:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. It would make sense to focus your door-to-door inquiries on what people may have seen roughly between nightfall and dawn.”
Morgan nodded his agreement. “Brad, I want you to get on that ASAP.”
Slovak grimaced. “I have all the guys doing door-to-doors around Harrow Hill. I don’t have anyone left to do the same thing around the funeral home or out by Selena’s place.”
“Split your people up. Or borrow officers from Bastenburg. Your choice.”
Morgan turned to Barstow. “Kyra, you stay on top of the crime-scene processing at Peale’s and the overnight lab work. Call me as soon as you get results. Is there anything I’m missing?”
She smiled. “You heard Peale’s description of his stolen bone mallet?”
He nodded. “It sounded like your description of the sort of hammer used to break into the conservatory.”
“And to kill the dog.”
“Right. The hammer does seem to link the body thief directly to the Russell break-in. Brad, when the scalpel comes back from the lab, show it to Peale. See if he can confirm it’s one of the five taken from the embalming room. Dave, any other ideas?”
“Peale said he left Tate’s phone in the casket. The body thief may have taken it. If it’s turned on and the battery is still alive, it can be pinged and located. You should also get a warrant for Tate’s recent call records and text messages.”
Morgan asked Slovak to follow up immediately on both suggestions. Then he took the sort of deep breath that precedes a difficult topic.
“There’s one final issue. The media situation. So far, it’s been manageable. Tate’s death was covered as a freak accident, with no mention of the lurid stories surrounding his background or his hostility toward Russell. Angus’s murder received broader attention in the upstate media markets—Albany, Syracuse, Rochester—and we’re getting some pressure from reporters for updates. But that’s nothing compared to the tornado that’s going to hit us when word gets out that there may be a connection between the two deaths. What I’m saying is, be ready for a god-awful storm. Give out no information. Refer all questions to me.”