“By the way,” said Gurney, “you happen to have your weapon on you?”
“Always,” said Hardwick. “My ankle would feel naked without its little holster. In my humble opinion, bullets sometimes rank right up there with brains as problem solvers. Why do you ask? You intend to make a dramatic move?”
“No dramatic move just yet. We need to be a lot surer about what’s going on.”
“You sounded damn sure of yourself a minute ago.”
Gurney made a face. “All I’m sure of is that my version of the Perry murder is possible. Or that it’s not impossible. Scott Ashton could have killed Jillian Perry. Could have. But it needs more digging, more facts. Right now there’s zero evidence and zero motive. We’ve got nothing but speculation on my part, a logical exercise.”
“But what if—”
Hardwick’s question was cut short by the sound of the heavy chapel door on the floor below opening and shutting, followed by a sharp metallic click. They both leaned reflexively toward the shadowy stairs beyond the doorway of the office and listened for footsteps.
A minute later Scott Ashton emerged from the top of the stone stairwell and entered the office, moving with the same air of power and control they’d witnessed on the screen. He sank into the plushly upholstered chair behind his desk and removed his Bluetooth earpiece and dropped it in the top drawer. He brought his hands together on the massive black desktop, slowly interlocking the fingers—except for the thumbs which he held parallel to each other as if to facilitate a close comparison between them. It was a comparison that seemed to interest him. After smiling for some time at his private thoughts, he separated his hands, turning up the palms with the fingers loosely splayed in a queerly insouciant gesture.
Then he reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a small-caliber pistol. The action was casual—so similar to taking out a pack of cigarettes that, for a second, Gurney thought that that was what Ashton had done.
With an almost sleepy motion, he pointed the little semiautomatic, a .25-caliber Beretta, at a point somewhere between Gurney and Hardwick, but his eyes were fixed on Hardwick.
“Do me a favor, please. Put your hands on the arms of your chair. Right now, please. Thank you. Now, remaining seated just as you are, raise your feet slowly off the floor. Thank you. I really appreciate your cooperation. Raise them higher. Thank you. Now please extend your legs forward, toward my desk. Keep extending them until you can rest your feet on the desktop. Thank you. That’s very good, very accommodating.”
Hardwick followed all these instructions with the relaxed seriousness of a man listening to a yoga instructor. Once his feet were propped up on the desk, Ashton leaned across from his side of it, reached under Hardwick’s right cuff, and removed a Kel-Tec P-32 from its holster. He looked it over, hefted it in his hand, then placed it in the top desk drawer.
He sat again and smiled. “Ah, yes. Much better. Too many armed people in one room is a tragedy waiting to happen. Please, Detective, feel free to put your feet down. I think we can all relax, now that the order of things is clear.”
Ashton looked at one of them and then at the other in an idle, amused way. “I must say it’s turning into an absolutely fascinating day. So many … developments. And you, Detective Gurney, you’ve really had that little mind of yours in overdrive.” Ashton’s voice was purring with honeyed sarcasm. “Quite a lurid plot you’ve described. Sounds like a movie pitch. Scott Ashton, famous psychiatrist, murdered his wife in the presence of two hundred wedding guests. And all he had to tell her was, ‘Shut your eyes tight.’ There never was a Hector Flores. The bloody machete was a clever ruse. There was a cleaver in his pocket. A pseudo-accidental dive into the roses. A clever switch of suits in the bathroom. And so forth and so on. An ingenious conspiracy uncovered. A sensational murder case solved. Merchants of perversion exposed. The dead get their day of justice. The living live happily ever after. Is that about the size and shape of it?”
If he expected a reaction of shock or fear at his ability to summarize Gurney’s conversation with Hardwick, he was disappointed. One of Gurney’s strengths when blindsided was to react mildly but in a tone that was slightly off, a tone that might be appropriate to more secure circumstances. That’s what he did now.
“That pretty much sums it up,” he said simply. He showed no surprise that while Ashton was downstairs, he’d been listening in on their conversation—probably via a transmission to his earpiece from a hidden microphone. No—it was definitely a transmission to the earpiece. Gurney secretly kicked himself for not having noted the anomaly of Ashton’s speaking on a handheld cell phone earlier on the chapel floor—indicating that his earpiece at that moment was being used for something else. It was painful that something so obvious had escaped his notice, but that kind of pain he would never show.
Gurney found the effect of his blasé response hard to measure. He hoped it had the jarring effect intended. Any speck of doubt he could toss into Ashton’s grasp of the situation would be a plus.
Ashton shifted his gaze to Hardwick, whose eyes were on the pistol. Ashton shook his head as though admonishing a naughty child. “As they say in the movies, Detective, don’t even think about it. I’d have three bullets in your chest before you got out of your chair.”
Then he addressed Gurney in the same tone. “And you, Detective, you’re like a fly that’s found its way into the house. You buzz around, you walk on the ceiling. Bzzzz. You see what you can see. Bzzzz. But you have no grasp of what you see. Bzzzz. Then SWAT! All that buzzing around—for nothing. All that searching and looking—all of it for nothing. Because you can’t possibly understand what you see. How could you? You’re nothing but a fly.” He began to laugh, soundlessly.
Gurney knew that the strategic imperative was to create delay, to slow things down. If Ashton was the killer he appeared to be, the mind game would be what it usually was in such cases: a contest for the high ground of emotional control. So the practical agenda for Gurney now was to prolong it—to engage his opponent in the game and make it go on until a game-ending opportunity presented itself. He sat back in his chair and smiled. “But in this case, Ashton, the fly got it right, didn’t he? You wouldn’t have that gun in your hand if I hadn’t gotten it right.”
Ashton stopped laughing. “Gotten it right? The deductive mastermind is taking credit for having gotten it right? After I fed you all those little facts? The fact that some of our graduates were missing, the fact of the car arguments, the fact that the young ladies in question had all appeared in Karnala ads? If I hadn’t been tempted to tease you—to make the contest interesting—you wouldn’t have gotten any further than your moronic colleagues.”
Now Gurney laughed. “Making the contest interesting had nothing to do with it. You knew that our next step would be to talk to former students, and all those facts would come to light immediately. So you weren’t giving us a damn thing we wouldn’t have gotten in another day or two ourselves. It was a pathetic effort to buy our trust with information you couldn’t keep hidden.” Gurney’s reading of Ashton’s expression—a frozen attempt at the appearance of equanimity—convinced him that he’d hit the target dead center. But sometimes in the management of a confrontation like this, there was such a thing as being too right, of scoring too direct a hit.
Ashton’s next words gave him the awful feeling that this was one of those cases.
“There’s no point in wasting any more time. I want you to see something. I want you to see how the story ends.” He stood up and with his free hand dragged his heavy chair to a point near the open office door that formed a triangle with the large flat-screen monitor on the table behind his desk and the pair of chairs opposite the desk that were occupied by Gurney and Hardwick—a position with his back to the door from which he could observe the screen and them at the same time.
“Don’t look at me,” said Ashton, pointing at the computer. “Look at the screen. Reality TV. Mapleshade: The Final Episode. It’s not the finale I’d intended to write, but in reality television one has to be flexible. Okay. We’re all in our seats. The camera is running, the action is in progress, but I think we could use a little more light down there.” He took the small lights-and-locks electronic remote from his pocket and pressed a button.
The chapel nave grew brighter, as rows of wall-sconce lamps were illuminated. There was a brief hiatus in the conversational hum as the girls in the discussion groups looked around at the lamps.
“That’s better,” said Ashton, smiling with satisfaction at the screen. “Considering your contribution, Detective, I want to be sure you can see everything clearly.”
What contribution? Gurney wanted to ask. Instead he put his hand over his mouth and stifled a yawn. Then he glanced at his watch.
Ashton gave him a long, cool stare. “You won’t be bored much longer.” A swarm of minuscule tics migrated across his face. “You’re an educated man, Detective. Tell me something: The medieval term condign reparation—do you know what it means?”
Strangely, he did. From a college philosophy class. Condign reparation: Punishment in perfect balance with the offense. Punishment of an ideally appropriate nature.
“Yes, I do,” he answered, triggering a hint of surprise in Ashton’s eyes.
And then, at the edge of his field of vision, he detected something else—a quickly moving shadow. Or was it the edge of a dark piece of clothing, a sleeve perhaps? Whatever it was, it had disappeared in the recess of the landing, where there would be barely enough room for a man to stand, just outside the office doorway.
“Then you may be able to appreciate the damage your ignorance has done.”
“Tell me about it,” said Gurney, with a look of increasing interest that he hoped would hide—better than his feigned yawn—the fear he was feeling.
“You have exceptional mental wiring, Detective. Quite an efficient brain. A remarkable calculator of vectors and probabilities.”
This characterization was precisely the opposite of Gurney’s current estimate of his capabilities. He wondered, with a nauseating chill, if Ashton’s perception of his state of mind could be so keen that the observation was intended as a joke.
Gurney’s own sense was that the brain that was responsible for his great professional victories was sliding sideways in the mud, losing traction and direction, as it strained to fit together so many things at once: The unreal Hector. The unreal Jykynstyl. The decapitated Jillian Perry. The decapitated Kiki Muller. The decapitated Melanie Strum. The decapitated Savannah Liston. The decapitated doll in Madeleine’s sewing room.
Where was the center of gravity in all this—the place at which the lines of force converged? Was it here at Mapleshade? Or at the brownstone, tended by Steck’s “daughters”? Or in some obscure Sardinian café where Giotto Skard might at that very moment be sipping bitter espresso—lurking like a wizened spider at the center of his web, where all the threads of his enterprises converged?
Unanswered questions were piling up fast.
And now a very personal one: Why had he, Gurney, failed to consider the possibility that the room might be bugged?
He’d always felt that the “death wish” concept was a grossly facile and overused paradigm, but now he wondered if it might not be the best explanation of his own behavior.
Or was his mental hard drive just too damn full of undigested details?
Undigested details, wobbly theories, and murders.
When all else fails, return to the present.
Madeleine’s persistent advice: Be here, in the here and now. Pay attention.
Awareness of the moment: the holy grail of consciousness.
Ashton was in the middle of a sentence. “… tragicomic clumsiness of the criminal-justice system—which is neither just nor systematic, but surely criminal. When it comes to dealing with sex offenders, the system is inanely political and ludicrously inept. Of the offenders it catches, it helps none and makes the majority worse. It frees all those clever enough to fool the so-called professionals who evaluate them. It publishes public lists of sex offenders that are incomplete and useless. Under cover of this PR scam, it turns snakes loose to devour children!” He glared at Gurney, at Hardwick, at Gurney again. “This is the wretched system all your fine mental wiring, all your logic, all your investigative skill, all your intelligence ultimately serves.”
It was a strange speech, thought Gurney, an elegant diatribe with the practiced ring of one delivered before, perhaps at conferences of his peers, yet it was animated by a palpable fury that was far from artificial. As he gazed into Ashton’s eyes, he recognized this fury as an emotion he had seen before. He had seen it in the eyes of victims of sexual abuse. Most memorably, most vividly, he had seen it in the eyes of a fifty-year-old woman who was confessing to the ax murder of her seventy-five-year-old stepfather who had raped her when she was five.
Her defense in court was that she wanted to be sure her own granddaughter would have nothing to fear from him, that no one’s granddaughter would have anything to fear from him. Her eyes were full of a wild, protective rage, and despite the efforts of her attorney to silence her, she went on to swear that the only desire she had left was to kill them all, every monster, every abuser, kill them all, chop them to pieces. As she was removed from the court, she was shouting, screaming, that she would wait at the doors of prisons and kill every offender who was released, every single one of them who was turned loose on the world. She’d use every last ounce of strength God gave her to “chop them to pieces!”
That’s when Gurney caught a glimpse of the possible connection—the simple equation that might explain everything.
He spoke matter-of-factly, as if they’d been discussing the subject all evening. “There’s no chance of Tirana ever being turned loose on anyone.”
At first the man showed no reaction, seeming not to have heard the words Gurney had uttered, much less the accusations of murder they implied.
Behind Ashton on the dusky landing, however, Gurney detected another movement—more identifiably this time as a brown-clad arm and at the end of it a small reflective glint of something metallic. Then, as before, it was withdrawn into the shallow nook beyond the doorway.
Ashton’s head until then had been tilted a little to the left. Now it pivoted, in the slowest-motion arc imaginable, to the right. He switched the pistol from his right hand to his left, which rested in his lap. He elevated his right hand tentatively to the side of his head, so that his fingertips lightly touched his ear and his temple, remaining there in a gesture that was both delicate and disconcerting. Combined with the angle of his head, it created the peculiar impression of a man listening for some elusive melody.
Eventually his eyes met Gurney’s and he lowered his hand to the arm of his chair, at the same time raising the hand that held the pistol. A smile bloomed and faded on his face like some grotesque, short-lived flower. “You’re such a clever, clever man.”
The background murmur of voices emanating from the speakers in the monitor behind him grew louder, sharper.
Ashton seemed not to notice. “So clever, so perceptive, so eager to impress. Impress whom?, I wonder.”
“Something’s burning,” Hardwick said in a loud, urgent voice.
“You’re a child,” Ashton went on, following his own train of thought. “A child who’s learned a card trick and keeps showing it to the same people over and over, trying to re-create the reaction they had to it the first time.”
“Something’s goddamn burning!” Hardwick repeated, pointing at the screen.
Gurney was alternately watching the gun and the deceptively calm eyes of the man who held it. Whatever was happening on the screen would have to wait. He wanted Ashton to keep talking.
There was another movement on the landing, and a small man in a brown cardigan stepped slowly and quietly into the office doorway. It took Gurney’s mind an extra second to register that it was Hobart Ashton.
Gurney purposely kept his eyes on Scott Ashton’s gun. He wondered how much of what was happening, if anything, the father understood. What, if anything, did he intend to do? What accounted for the stealth of his approach? What knowledge or suspicion accounted for the caution with which he’d climbed the stairs and concealed himself on the landing? More urgently, could he see his son’s gun from where he stood? Would he even understand what it meant? How delusional was he? And perhaps most urgently, if the old man were to create, purposely or inadvertently, some momentary distraction, would it afford an opportunity for Gurney to launch himself across the room and get to the gun before Ashton could use it on him?
These desperate musings were interrupted by a sudden outburst.
“Shit! The chapel is on fire!” shouted Hardwick.
Gurney looked at the screen while staying peripherally aware of the positions of Scott Ashton and his father. On the screen, the video transmission clearly showed smoke coming from the sconce lamps on the chapel walls. The girls had either exited their seating areas or were in a hasty scramble to do so, congregating in the center aisle and on the raised platform nearest the camera position.
Gurney rose reflexively to his feet, followed by Hardwick.
“Careful, Detective,” said Ashton, switching the pistol to his right hand and pointing it at Gurney’s chest.
“Unlock the doors,” commanded Gurney.
“Not right now.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
From the monitor came an eruption of screams. Gurney glanced back at it just in time to see one of the girls operating a fire extinguisher that had turned into a flame thrower, laying a stream of burning liquid along the length of one of the wooden pews. Another girl came running to the spot with another extinguisher—with the same result, a stream of liquid that ignited the moment it touched the existing fire. It was clear that the extinguishers had been tampered with to reverse their effect. It reminded Gurney of an arson murder in the Bronx twenty years earlier, where it was discovered later that one of the fire extinguishers in a small hardware store had been emptied and recharged with jellied gasoline—homemade napalm.
The chapel was now in a state of panic.
“Unlock those fucking doors, you fucking asshole!” Hardwick shouted at Ashton.
Ashton’s father reached into the pocket of his sweater and withdrew something with a shiny end. As he unfolded a small blade from its handle, Gurney realized what it was—a simple pocketknife, the kind a Boy Scout might whittle a stick with. He held it at his side and stood, expressionlessly, his eyes on the high back of his son’s chair.
Scott Ashton’s gaze was fixed on Gurney. “This is not the finale I would have preferred, but it’s the one your brilliant interference requires. It’s the second-best solution.”
“God, let them out of that room, you fucking maniac!” shouted Hardwick.
“I did my best,” said Ashton calmly. “I had hopes. Each year a few were helped, but after a time I had to admit that most were not. Most left here as poisonous as the day they arrived, left us to go out into the world, poisoning and destroying others.”
“There was nothing you could do about that,” said Gurney.
“I didn’t think so, either … until I was given my Mission and my Method. If someone chose to lead a poisonous life, then at least I could limit her exposure, limit the period of her toxicity to others.”
The shouts and shrieks from the monitor speakers were growing more chaotic. Hardwick started moving toward Ashton with a black look on his face. Gurney put out his hand to hold him back, as Ashton raised his gun calmly, centering his aim on Hardwick’s chest.
“For Christ’s sake, Jack,” said Gurney, “let’s not provoke the bullet solution when we don’t have any.”
Hardwick stopped, his jaw muscles bulging.
Gurney offered Ashton an admiring smile. “Hence the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’?”
“Ah. Mr. Ballston has been talking.”
“About Karnala, yes. I’d like to know more.”
“You already know so much.”
“Tell me the rest.”
“It’s a simple story, Detective. I came from a dysfunctional family.” He grinned hideously, managing to convey the nightmares buried in that most overused of all pop-psych terms. Tics moved through his lips like insects under the skin. “I was finally extricated, adopted, given an education. I was drawn to a certain kind of work. Mostly I failed. My patients continued to rape children. I didn’t know what to do—until it occurred to me that my family connections provided a way to funnel the worst girls in the world to the worst men in the world.” He grinned again. “Condign reparation. A perfect solution.” The grin faded. “Clever young woman that she was, Jillian found out just a hair more than she should have, overheard a few words of a phone conversation she shouldn’t have, pursued her unfortunate curiosity, became a possible threat to the entire process. Of course, she never grasped the whole picture. But she imagined she could leverage her morsel of knowledge into some personal advantage. Marriage was her first demand. I knew it wouldn’t be her last. I addressed the situation in a way that I found particularly satisfying. Condignly satisfying. For a time all was well. Then you came along.” He aimed the pistol at Gurney’s face.
On the screen, two pews were in flames, flames were rising from half the lamps, some of the drapes were smoldering. Most of the girls were on the floor, some covering their faces, some trying to breathe through torn pieces of their clothing, some crying, some coughing, a few vomiting.
Hardwick appeared to be on the verge of an explosion.
“Then you came along,” Ashton repeated. “Clever, clever David Gurney. And this is the result.” He waved his gun at the screen. “Why didn’t your cleverness tell you that this is the way it would end? How else could it end? Did you really think I’d let them go? Is clever, clever David Gurney really that stupid?”
Hobart Ashton took a few short steps to the back of his son’s chair.
Hardwick screamed, “This is your solution, Ashton? This is it, you crazy fucker? Burn a hundred and twenty teenage girls to death? This is your fucking solution?”
“Oh, yes, yes, yes, it is! You really thought when I was finally trapped, I’d let them go?” Ashton’s voice was rising now, out of control, hurtling at Gurney and Hardwick like a wild thing with a life of its own. “You thought I’d turn a nest of snakes loose on all the little babies of the world? These toxic things, these slimy, venomous things! Demented, rotten, sucking, slimy things! These slither—”
It happened so quickly that Gurney almost thought he hadn’t seen it. The sudden flash of an arm around from the back of the chair, a quick curving movement, and that was all—Ashton’s rant cut off in the middle of a word. Then the old man stepping quickly, athletically to the side of the chair, grasping the barrel of Ashton’s gun, pulling it away with a twisting yank and the disturbingly sharp crack of a finger bone. Ashton’s head lolled forward on his chest, and his body began to tilt forward, curling downward, toppling onto the floor, collapsing sideways into a fetal position. It was then that the actual method of killing was made obvious by all the blood that began to pool around his throat.
Hardwick’s jaw muscles bulged.
The little man in the brown cardigan wiped his pocketknife on the back cushion of the chair in which Ashton had been sitting, folded it deftly with one hand, and replaced it in his pocket.
Then he looked down at Ashton and, as if in benediction to his son’s passing soul, said softly, “You’re a piece of shit.”