He and Hardwick reached for their weapons in unison, flicked off the safeties, and moved to the open edge of the loft where they had clear lines of sight down to the windows and door.
A high-pitched whistling sound pierced the din, and as suddenly as the savage uproar began, it stopped.
Cautiously they descended the ladder, Gurney first. He moved quietly to the front of the cabin and peered out through one of the windows. At first he saw nothing but the dark, drooping shapes of the hemlocks surrounding the clearing. The grass, which in the beam of his phone light had been a deep green, was in the dawn mist a featureless gray.
But not entirely featureless. He noted a patch of darker gray, perhaps thirty feet out from the window. He switched his phone back to Flashlight mode, but its beam only created a glare in the fog.
He gradually eased the front door open.
All he could hear was the slow dripping of water from the roof.
“The fuck are you doing?” whispered Hardwick.
“Cover me. And hold the door open in case I need to come back in a hurry.”
He stepped quietly out of the cabin, Beretta in a ready-to-fire two-handed grip, and advanced toward the dark shape on the ground.
As he drew nearer, he realized he was looking at a body . . . a body that was somehow contorted, twisted into an odd position, as if it had been thrown there by a violent gust of wind. After moving a few steps closer, he stopped, amazed by the amount of blood glistening in the wet grass. Still closer, he could see that much of the clothing on the body was shredded, exposing ripped and gouged flesh. The left hand was mangled, the fingers crushed together. The right hand was missing, the wrist a grisly red stump with splintered bones sticking out of it. The victim’s throat had been lacerated, the carotid arteries and windpipe literally torn to pieces. Less than half of the face was intact, giving it a hideous expression.
But there was something familiar about that face. And the muscular bulk of the body. Gurney realized with a start that he was looking at what was left of Judd Turlock.
Twenty-four hours after the discovery of the gruesome homicide at the cabin, Gurney was heading into the County Office Building for an early-morning meeting with Sheridan Kline.
The ponderous redbrick exterior, coated with a century of soot and grime, dated back to the structure’s original use as a mental facility—the Bumblebee Lunatic Asylum—named after its eccentric founder, George Bumblebee. In the midsixties the interior of the structure had been gutted, redesigned, and repurposed to house the local bureaucracy. Cynics enjoyed pointing out that the building’s history made it an ideal home for its current inhabitants.
The lobby security system had been upgraded since Gurney’s last visit during the harrowing case of the bride who’d been decapitated at her wedding reception. It now involved two separate electronic screenings and the presentation of multiple forms of identification. He was eventually directed to follow a series of signs that brought him to a frosted-glass door bearing the words DISTRICT ATTORNEY.
He wondered which version of Kline he’d be meeting with.
Would it be the baffled, disbelieving, nearly speechless man he’d encountered on the phone the previous morning when he’d called to tell him about the discovery of the rifle, the branding iron, the red motorcycle, and Turlock’s mauled body? Or would it be the man who showed up an hour later at the scene with Mark Torres, Bobby Bascomb, Garrett Felder, Shelby Towns, and Paul Aziz—hell-bent to demonstrate his decisiveness by issuing nonstop orders to people who knew far more about processing crime scenes than he did?
Gurney opened the door and walked into the reception room. Kline’s alluring assistant, who had clearly maintained her fondness for formfitting cashmere sweaters, eyed him with a subtle smile.
“I’ll let him know you’re here,” she said in her memorably soft voice.
As she was about to pick up her phone, a door in the back wall of the reception room opened and Sheridan Kline came striding over to Gurney, hand outstretched with that same semblance of warmth Gurney remembered from their first meeting years earlier.
“David. Right on time. I’m always impressed by punctuality.” He led the way into his office. “Coffee or tea?”
“Coffee.”
He clicked his tongue approvingly. “You a dog man or a cat man?”
“Dog.”
“I thought so. Dog people prefer coffee. Cat people like tea. Herbal tea. Ever notice that?” It wasn’t a question. He turned to the door and called out, “Two coffees, Ellen.”
He pointed Gurney toward the familiar leather sofa, while he sat in the leather armchair across from it, a glass coffee table between them.
