According to the old regulator clock on the kitchen wall, it was a minute past five. He called Madeleine’s name. There was no response. He knew it wasn’t one of her workdays at the clinic; and if she’d been called in, she’d have left a note for him on the door.
He went back outside and checked the areas where she enjoyed busying herself—the garden beds, the asparagus patch, and the prefab greenhouse they’d erected earlier that spring to get a head start on the short upstate growing season.
He called her name again. He went around to the rear of the house, looking across the high pasture to the edge of the encircling forest. The only living creatures he saw were the distant vultures riding the updrafts over the ridge.
He decided to go back inside and call her cell phone. But just then he caught sight of her, making her way up through the low pasture from the direction of the pond. He noted something different about the way she was walking, something less spirited than usual in her step. When she came closer he could see that her expression was almost grim. And when she was closer still, he could see in her eyes the signs of recent tears.
“What is it?” he asked.
She looked around uncertainly until her eyes came to rest on the pair of Adirondack chairs facing each other in the middle of the stone patio. “Can we sit out here for a while?”
“Sure. Is something wrong?”
When they were both seated, their knees almost touching, she closed her eyes for a long moment, as though trying to arrange her thoughts.
“Maddie? Did something happen?”
“Kim Steele was here.”
“What did she want?”
“She brought her husband’s cell phone.”
“She left it with you?”
“Yes.”
He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. “Her visit was . . . upsetting?”
“Yes.”
“Because of what happened to her husband?”
“Because of the kind of person he was.” She swallowed. “He was like you.”
“And you’re thinking . . . what happened to him could have happened to me?”
“Yes.” After a few moments she continued. “The way she described him . . . was exactly how I would describe you. Believing that being a cop was a good way of life, a way of being useful. Believing that doing what’s right was the most important thing.”
They sat there for a long while in silence.
“There’s something else,” she said, wiping away a tear. “They lost a child.”
He felt a chill rising into his chest.
“An infant. A car accident.”
“Jesus.”
“They’re us, David, twenty years ago. The only difference is that you’re alive, and her husband isn’t.”
Looking into her eyes, he could see that the power of her identification with another woman’s pain had upended yesterday’s reality.
“I didn’t want you getting into this thing, getting tangled up with Sheridan Kline. But now, I can’t help thinking that if this had happened to you . . .”
“You would have wanted someone to do something about it.”
“Yes. Someone good and honest and determined enough to get to the bottom of it.” She paused, then added emphatically, “Yes. I would have wanted that.”
The shift in Madeleine’s view had a profound effect on Gurney. Her change of heart felt to him like a kind of liberation. What was clear to her was now clear to him. His job was simply to solve the murder of Kim Steele’s husband.
The rest—Kline’s shadowy motives for pulling him in, the putative political connections and ambitions of Dell Beckert, White River’s potential race war—were important but secondary issues. They would become relevant only if they helped explain the death of John Steele.
After dinner, Gurney retreated to the den with the case file Kline had given him in the parking lot and the cell phone Kim had left with Madeleine. The first thing he did—after checking for the phone’s call records and text chains and discovering they’d all been deleted except for the final warning—was to call the district attorney’s personal number.
Kline picked up immediately, his voice anxious. “Yes?”
“I have Steele’s cell phone.”
“His wife gave it to you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you . . . find anything in it? Anything relevant?”
“Nothing but the last message.”
“How quickly can you get the phone to me?”
Gurney was struck by the wording of Kline’s question, the
When Kline responded with silence, he went on. “Or, since time is a critical factor, you might want to send one of your people to my house for it, and they could drive it directly to computer forensics in Albany. And in the meantime you could get a warrant for the service provider’s call records.”
“Hmm . . . so . . . you’re suggesting that in the interest of saving time we bypass White River PD and go directly to the state lab?”
Gurney almost laughed out loud. Instinctive ass-coverer that he was, Kline was making it clear that this route, which he obviously preferred, was Gurney’s suggestion.
“It would be a reasonable way to proceed,” said Gurney.
