Hackett spoke first. “In just a moment we’ll be moving along to tonight’s other high-octane story, scalp cancer—the secret killer. Why is the medical establishment refusing to talk about it? But now, a final comment on the Blackmore shooting from our renowned legal and political analyst, Maldon Albright.”
The video cut to a split-screen view of Hackett on one side and a fleshy-faced man who struck Gurney as an aging Ivy League frat boy on the other.
Hackett was sporting the envious smile of a climber gazing up the corporate ladder. “We appreciate your joining us, Maldon. Any insights into this baffling affair?”
Albright spoke with aristocratic disdain. “The stench of a cover-up is overwhelming. This Gurney character appears to be the missing link between the two Lerman murders, but his exact role is yet to be determined. We can safely predict that the mainstream media will prove worse than blind, and it will be up to RAM-TV to ferret out the facts and present them to America, without fear or favor. It promises to be an exciting ride.”
Albright disappeared, and the video cut back Hackett and Lake at their angled desks.
“
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK THE NEXT MORNING, GURNEY PULLED into the parking area in front of Dick and Della’s Diner. He parked between Hardwick’s gleaming muscle car and a pickup with a faded bumper sticker proclaiming SOCIALISTS SUCK. Hardwick sat at one of the front tables, peering at the window with tight-lipped hostility.
The old-fashioned diner was populated with an old-fashioned clientele. Hardwick—with his black leather jacket, hard-edged features, and disconcerting malamute eyes—seemed out of place in what looked like a convention of retired farmers and their flannel-shirted wives. As Gurney took a seat at the table, Hardwick was still turned toward the window, his baleful gaze fixed on a pair of flies crawling on the window glass.
He spoke without turning. “I hate those fucking things.”
“My mother insisted they carried diseases. What’s your problem with them?”
Hardwick’s voice was stone-cold. “I don’t like what they do to dead bodies. They lay their eggs in the eyes. Then the eggs hatch into fucking maggots.”
Gurney said nothing.
After a while, Hardwick looked away from the window and cleared his throat in a way that sounded like a dog growling. “My father was a violent drunk. He terrorized the family. When I was sixteen, I broke his jaw. We didn’t have much contact after that. A year later, my mother divorced him. After I joined the state police, I got a call from his landlord. He’d been dead on his bathroom floor for four days. Summertime. The maggots were . . . active.” He shook his head in a violent motion as if to dislodge the memory, then waved to a young waitress who was delivering waffles to a nearby table.
She came over with a rosy-cheeked farm-girl smile. “What can I get for you gentlemen on this beautiful morning?”
“A flyswatter,” said Hardwick.
“Excuse me?”
He pointed to the flies on the window.
“I don’t think we have any swatters, but they won’t bother you. They’re just trying to get out.” She was grimacing, clearly disturbed by the subject.
Hardwick eyed her curiously. “You have some special feeling about flies?”
“You’ll think my family is weird.”
“Try me.”
She bent over the table and lowered her voice. “My brother kept them as pets. It drove my father nuts.”
Hardwick responded with an expressionless stare.
“Miss!” A customer’s voice from a few tables away hurried her off without another word.
“Fathers and sons,” muttered Gurney. “It’s becoming a repetitive theme. Every time I start to ignore it, it gets pushed back in my face.”
“The hell are you talking about?”
“I’ve been thinking about Lenny and Sonny Lerman. And Ziko Slade and a young acolyte of his who considers him his father—and who hates his real father so much he won’t even talk about him. Yesterday I went to interview some people up on Blackmore Mountain, and I happened to arrive at their property at the end of a father-son blow-up.”
Gurney fell silent, his mind following a well-traveled groove to his own failings as a father, including the death of his four-year-old son, Danny, which he’d been reliving painfully for over twenty years.
Hardwick stared at him. “Fathers and sons? That’s a
“It keeps coming up.”
Hardwick shook his head. “Any fucking thing can remind you of any other fucking thing, if you want it to. Facts are facts.
Gurney was aware of the danger of adopting an overall belief about a case, then cherry-picking facts to support the belief. That trick of the mind was, after all, the basis of every lunatic conspiracy theory. It was time to change the subject.
“On the phone last night you called BCI’s Blackmore Mountain investigation a toxic clusterfuck. Tell me more.”
“It’s a clusterfuck with knives out and colliding agendas.”
“Can’t wait to hear the details.”
