Toward the end of Gurney’s visit with Kim Steele, the vibrating mode on his phone had made him aware of receiving a call, but he’d let it go rather than interrupt the emotional flow of their conversation.
Now, on his way back to the interstate, he pulled over onto the grassy verge of Fishers Road and listened to the message. It was from Sheridan Kline. The man didn’t bother to identify himself; his self-important, slightly nasal voice was identification enough.
“I hope you get this message soon. We have a schedule change. Our meeting has just been moved up to twelve noon. Major progress. Noon sharp. Be there!”
Gurney checked the current time—11:04.
He figured that without traffic he could be in White River by eleven thirty. Despite his earlier decision to avoid conflict with the WRPD by avoiding the crime scene, he was tempted now to do at least a drive-by—to get a visceral sense of the location he’d seen only on video.
As expected, there was no traffic. It was just 11:29 when he turned off the interstate. The White River exit ramp led to a local road that descended from a green landscape of woods and meadows into an area of man-made desolation. He drove past the big rusting conveyors of the defunct Handsome Brothers stone quarry and into the city itself, where the stench of smoke and ashes began to infiltrate the car.
Recalling from the White River map how the main streets were laid out, he made his way onto the avenue that skirted the boarded-up buildings of the Grinton section and led directly to Willard Park.
He turned onto the road adjacent to the park, and soon came to a barricade consisting of yellow sawhorses, each of which bore the warning Police Line Do Not Cross.
Leaving his car there and stepping between the sawhorses, he went ahead on foot to a circular area that was more aggressively cordoned off with a double perimeter of yellow police tape. The protected area encompassed the edge of the field where the demonstration had been held, an enormous pine whose lowest branches were a good twenty feet above the ground, and part of the sidewalk. On the sidewalk was a large, irregularly shaped reddish-brown stain.
Gurney was sure that the crime-scene specialists would have been long finished with their evidence gathering and that his presence posed no danger of contamination. When he entered the taped-off area, however, he did step gingerly around that stain as a gesture of respect.
Looking closely at the tree, he could see the remnants of the channel cut by the bullet as it embedded itself in the relatively soft pine trunk. Some of the channel had been chiseled open to extract the bullet.
He took a pen from his shirt pocket and placed it in the channel against the side that appeared intact. The pen, aligned with the path of the bullet, then became a rough pointer to the source of the shot. He could see immediately that it corroborated the trajectory projection on the map in the case file. Gazing out in the indicated direction, he could see that the likely sources were limited to the upper floors of three or four apartment buildings.
He headed back to the barricade where he’d parked, in the hope of finding the binoculars he sometimes kept in the glove compartment. That goal was put aside, however, when he saw a WRPD cruiser pull up at the same barricade. The cop who emerged from the cruiser had an end-of-shift weariness about him. After looking over the Outback, presumably for any signs of official status, he turned his attention to Gurney.
“How’re we doing today, sir?” If the question was meant to sound friendly, it failed.
“I’m doing okay. How about you?”
The cop’s eyes hardened as if Gurney’s reply were a challenge.
“Are you aware that you’re in a restricted area?”
“I’m on the job. Investigation department, DA’s office.”
“That so?”
Gurney said nothing.
“Never saw you before. You want to show me some ID?”
Gurney took out his wallet and handed him the credentials he’d gotten from Kline.
He regarded them with a skeptical frown. “DA’s office? You know Jimmy Crandell?”
“Only person I know there is Sheridan Kline.”
The cop sucked thoughtfully at his teeth.
“Well, the thing is, this is a restricted area, so I need to ask you to leave.”
“The restriction applies to the DA’s investigators?”
“PIACA applies to everyone.”
“What’s PIACA?”
“Primary Investigative Agency Controls Access.”
“Nice acronym. Local invention?”
The cop began to redden from the neck up. “We’re not having a discussion here. We have a procedure, and the procedure is you leave. Your DA can complain to my chief anytime, if that’s what he wants. You want to cross our perimeters, you get permission first. Now move your car before I have it towed.”
Red-faced and narrow-eyed, the cop watched as Gurney turned his car around and headed back toward the center of White River.
Five minutes later he arrived at the bleak, colorless police headquarters and parked next to Kline’s big black SUV. As he was getting out of the car, his phone rang. There was no caller ID.
“Gurney here.”
