White River Burning полностью

On the occasions when he’d conducted seminars on criminal investigation, he’d always included a discussion of a subtle investigatorial trap he’d named “The Eureka Fallacy.” Simply stated, it was the tendency to give one’s own discoveries greater weight than discoveries made or reported by others, especially if the things one has discovered had been purposely concealed (hence the term eureka, Greek for “I have found it!”). A manifestation of the basic human tendency to trust one’s own perceptions as objective and accurate and competing points of view as subjective and prone to error, it could derail an investigation and was responsible for an unknown number of wrongful arrests and prosecutions.

Even being fully aware of the phenomenon, Gurney resisted seeing it in himself. The mind has strong defenses against self-doubt. However, since Madeleine raised the question, he forced himself to take a closer look at it. Was he, in fact, applying a double standard of credibility to the evidence against Payne and the evidence against Beckert? He didn’t think so, but that meant little. He would need to look at the evidence piece by piece to make sure he was subjecting all of it to the same level of scrutiny.

He got up from his chair by the fireplace, went to his desk in the den, took out the case files and his own notes, and began what he hoped would be a clear-eyed review.

By the time Madeleine interrupted the process a little after twelve to let him know she was leaving for an afternoon shift at the clinic, he had reached two conclusions.

The first, reassuringly unchanged from what it had been, was that every piece of evidence against Cory Payne could be explained away, and the switched toilet handle was as convincing proof of a frame job as one could imagine.

His second conclusion, somewhat disconcerting, was that the evidence against Beckert and/or Turlock had the same weaknesses as the evidence against Payne. It was all portable and therefore plantable. Even the items bearing fingerprints—the pen he’d found in the grass in back of the Poulter Street house, the plastic bag at Blaze Jackson’s apartment—could have been acquired in an innocent environment for later use in an incriminating one. In short, although there was no proof of it—no equivalent to the switched toilet handle—it was possible that Beckert was also being framed. It was admittedly a rather farfetched scenario. But the evidence in hand against Beckert wasn’t nearly as solid as it seemed at first glance. In fact, a clever trial lawyer might make it appear very shaky indeed.

For some time after Madeleine left, Gurney remained at his desk, staring out the den window, wondering about the advisability of raising the issue with Kline. It would not be a welcome subject. He decided to speak to Torres first.

The call was picked up immediately.

“Hey, Dave, I was just about to call you. Big morning here, lot of stuff coming in at once. Bad news first. There was no CODIS hit on the DNA from that used condom found near the Willard Park playground. So that’s a dead end. But finding an eyewitness to what went down that night was always a long shot anyway. Now the good news. We got a report from the Albany computer lab on the laptop you found under a mattress in the cabin. Key discovery was a series of searches on brain structure, specifically something called the ‘medulla oblongata’ and the extent of protection afforded by adjacent bone structures. The kind of information—and anatomical diagrams—someone might need if they wanted to drive an ice pick into someone’s brain stem. It looks like a solid link between Beckert and the attack on Loomis.”

Gurney wasn’t sure how solid it was, but it certainly was suggestive.

“And that’s not all,” continued Torres. “The lab sent us a report on the phone that was taped to the bottom of one of the footboards. The call record confirms Payne’s explanation for why he was in the Bridge Street area the night Steele was shot. He claimed he’d gotten a series of texts, setting up a meeting behind the apartment building, then moving it to the other side of the bridge, then canceling it. Those texts were sent from that phone you found in the cabin.”

“Interesting,” said Gurney. “Kline have any reaction to that?”

“He’s a happy man. He says it feels like we’re finally tying the bow on the package.”

Gurney’s idea of a bow on the package would be a credible confession from Beckert. Kline’s use of that wrapped-up image to describe the accumulation of a few extra pieces of portable-plantable evidence seemed to make the search for the perp a postscript. That could turn out to be a major mistake.

Gurney ended his call with Torres and entered Kline’s number.

“David. What can I do for you?” The man’s hurried tone suggested that ‘nothing’ would be the only welcome answer.

“I want to share a concern.”

“Oh?” There was more anxiety than curiosity in that single syllable.

“I’ve been thinking about the evidence that appears to incriminate Beckert.”