“Oh. Well. You said so little at the meeting it was hard to know what you were thinking.”
“I learn more from listening than from talking.”
“Absolutely true. A principle we should all live by. And one we so easily forget. Anyway, we just wanted to share that thought with you on the video issue.”
“I appreciate it.”
After he ended the call, Gurney sat for a while in his parked car, picturing the map Mark Torres had displayed, the one showing the route taken by the red motorcycle and its anonymous leather-clad rider—the route painstakingly reconstructed by interviewing people who’d glimpsed or heard the loud bike zipping by—a route that went all the way from Poulter Street to Willard Park, managing to avoid every traffic camera in the city, while Cory Payne in the black Corolla was being recorded by one after another.
Gurney was tempted to drive over to the park yet again—to the last reported location of the motorcycle, before it presumably disappeared into one of several wilderness trails. But he’d been there three times already, and there were two locations critical to the case that he hadn’t yet visited. It was time he did.
Keys would be required. He placed a call to Mark Torres.
While Gurney’s exiled status had not diminished Torres’s willingness to cooperate with him, it had made it inadvisable to do so openly.
They arrived at a plan that would allow Gurney to examine Cory Payne’s apartment and the apartment used for the Steele shooting without necessitating any direct contact. Torres would see to it that the doors of both apartments would be unlocked for one hour that afternoon—from two thirty to three thirty. It would be up to Gurney to conduct his examinations within that time frame, attracting as little attention as possible.
He arrived at the Steele sniper site at 2:31. The five-story building, like many in White River, had seen better days. He recalled from the video shown in one of the CSMT meetings that the apartment number was 5C. Apartment buildings of less than six stories were not legally required to have elevators, and this one didn’t. By the time he reached the fifth floor he was breathing a bit more heavily than he would have liked. It reminded him to add some aerobic exercise to his regimen of push-ups and chin-ups. He’d recently turned fifty, and staying in shape required more effort than it used to.
The apartment door looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in years. The reinforced steel peephole was as clear a statement of urban decline as the stink of urine in the stairwell. As planned, the door was unlocked. If there had been crime-scene tape across it, it had been removed.
The interior layout—a small foyer leading into a large room with a kitchenette and bathroom on the right—was as he remembered it from the video, except that the large window was now closed. The faint tripod marks were still visible on the dusty floor.
Standing in the center of the triangle formed by the three marks and gazing out through the streaky windowpanes, he could see in the distance the spot at the edge of Willard Park where John Steele had been struck down. Looking around the empty room, his gaze fell on the ancient steam radiator under which the brass casing had been found. The bottom of the radiator was at least four inches from the floor, leaving the space beneath it easily visible.
He went into the small kitchen and saw nothing out of the ordinary beyond the residue of fingerprint powder left by the evidence tech on various handles, cabinets, and drawers.
Next he went into the bathroom, the room that most interested him—especially the toilet, and the flushing lever in particular. He inspected it carefully, then opened the water tank and examined the inner workings. His eyes widened. What he was looking at suggested an explanation for Payne’s prints being found on the flushing mechanism, on a greasy food wrapper in the toilet bowl, on the brass casing in the living room, and nowhere else in the apartment.
It had bothered him from the beginning that no fresh prints had been found on any of the doors or on the open window sash. Now he thought he knew why, but he wanted an additional piece of evidence to corroborate the explanation before he shared it with Torres.
He took several photos of the toilet tank with his phone, then took a quick look around the apartment to be sure he was leaving everything as he found it. He hurried down the four flights of stairs, breathing in as little as possible of the sour smell, went out through the lobby onto Bridge Street, and drove to the address Torres had given him for Payne’s apartment.
It was located on the far side of Willard Park. The neighborhood was run down but had not yet been visited by the sporadic fires and looting that had pockmarked the rest of the Grinton section. The air, however, had the ashy odor that seemed to have penetrated every corner of the city.
