There, in a level shaded area scuffed free of any grass, a wiry young girl in gym shorts and a tee shirt was delivering a series of hard right and left hooks to a leather heavy bag suspended from the branch of an oak tree.
“Used to be where her swing was hung.”
Gurney watched the flurry of punches. “You teach her how to do that?”
There was pride in Tabor’s eyes. “I pointed out a few things.”
The girl, apparently in her early teens, clearly had a mixed racial background. Her natural Afro had in it a hint of Tabor’s red-hair gene. Her skin was a deep caramel, and her eyes were green. Except for a brief assessing glance at Gurney, her attention was centered on the bag.
“She has power,” said Gurney. “She get that from you?”
“She’s better now than I ever was. Straight-A student, too, which I never was.” He paused. “So maybe she’ll survive this world. What do you think her chances are?”
“With that kind of concentration and determination, better than most.”
“You mean better than most black girls?” There was a sudden combativeness in his voice.
“I mean better than most black, white, tan . . . girls, boys, you name it.”
Tabor shook his head. “Might be that way in the right kind of world. But we’re not there. Real world is still the kind of world that killed George Montgomery.”
Gurney’s conversation with Merle Tabor gave him a lot to think about during the long drive to the Gelter house in well-tended Lockenberry.
The hanged black man in Judd Turlock’s past set up a disturbing echo with the two men strangled by the ropes tying them to the jungle gym in the Willard Park playground. Gurney couldn’t help thinking that a man who thirty years earlier had been responsible for one such horror might well be capable of two more. This hypothetical link received some support from one fact—the web of trails that made the Willard Park site easily reachable from the hunting cabin Turlock shared with Beckert. If one or both of them had seized Jordan and Tooker, or tricked them into meeting on some pretext, the cabin would have been an ideal location for the administration of the benzos and propofol, the beatings, the branding.
His mind leapfrogged to the shootings—specifically to the fact that the red motocross bike racing away from Poulter Street was last seen at the edge of Willard Park, within a short distance of those same trails leading to the Beckert-Turlock cabin.
Might Turlock have been the second man at Poulter Street, the one who actually shot Loomis? Wasn’t it at least conceivable that Turlock had engineered and carried out, for reasons yet to be determined, both the police and the BDA murders? It had seemed to Gurney all along that the Jordan-Tooker executions were too smoothly organized to have been a spur-of-the-moment response to the first shooting. The planning required for the acquisition of the propofol alone would preclude that.
Thinking about the propofol angle gave Gurney a little jolt. He pulled over onto the shoulder of the road and used his phone to access the internet. He wanted to check on the shelf life of propofol. The first pharmaceutical database he came upon provided the answer: two years in an unopened vial, one year in a preloaded hypodermic.
He felt like a fool, realizing he’d been overlooking something obvious. He’d been focusing on Mercy Hospital for its connection to the ice-pick murder of Rick Loomis and ignoring its possible connection to the murders of Jordan and Tooker. And because of his focus on the ice-pick wielder as a possible member of the current staff, he hadn’t bothered looking through the personnel list section containing employees who’d resigned or been terminated prior to Loomis’s hospitalization. But given the likelihood that the Jordan-Tooker murders were planned well in advance of their execution—and given the long shelf life of propofol—the list of former employees could be as relevant as the current list.
In his eagerness to rectify his oversight, he was tempted to postpone his meeting with Trish Gelter. But his desire to find out what she wanted to tell him, and to learn something about her husband’s connection to Dell Beckert, won out. The list research would have to wait. He decided to call Madeleine and let her know about his detour to Lockenberry and that he’d be home later than planned.
As he was about to place the call to her, he discovered that a message from her had arrived while his phone was turned off at Merle Tabor’s request.
“Hi, hon. I may not see you this evening. I’m going to Mercy after work to be with Heather. Apparently Rick’s brother and Heather’s sister both got delayed somewhere by weather conditions, canceled flights, general confusion. Kim Steele plans to come to the hospital too. Comfort in numbers. If it gets late I might stay at that visitors’ inn overnight. I’ll call when I have a better idea what I’m doing. Hope your trip to Pennsylvania was useful. Love you.”
