“I understand that you told Jack Hardwick that the man who had just fled from your property and crashed into him was Danforth Peale. How did you know that?”
“I wasn’t absolutely certain until the very end—when he pointed that damn AK-47 at my heart and was about to pull the trigger. At that moment he abandoned the effort to disguise his voice. I recognized it. His intonations were quite distinctive.”
“You say that’s when you were absolutely certain. Does that mean at some earlier point you were moderately certain?”
Gurney wondered whether she was making a special effort to be grating, or if it was a natural gift. Either way, he decided to ignore the tone and respond to the content of the question.
“By yesterday morning I’d seen enough arrows pointing toward Peale to convince me that they weren’t all coincidental and that he was, in fact, Lorinda’s accomplice. But then—”
Stryker interrupted him.
“Why on earth did you keep this to yourself? You were right there with me at Peale’s house, but you didn’t say a single word. I’d like to know why.”
“What I thought I knew was rendered meaningless by what appeared to be Peale’s murder. It suddenly seemed more likely that Lorinda’s accomplice was someone else, and Peale was just his latest victim.”
Stryker began tapping her pen on the table. “And this confusion didn’t get cleared up until the moment you recognized his voice?”
“It started getting cleared up before that. My confusion when I saw that bloody kitchen and the drag marks outside was caused by my asking myself why the body had been removed. That stymied me. But when I asked instead why it was missing, the answer occurred to me. It was missing for the simple reason that it didn’t exist. There was no body—because there was no murder.”
Stryker’s pen stopped moving. “Then whose blood was it? Who got dragged out to the car?”
“The whole scene was a setup. Peale probably used his own blood. You’ll know for sure when you get the DNA results. As for the drag marks, he could have made those with anything. I suspect the moment he heard what had happened on Harrow Hill he realized his grand plan had collapsed and it was time to get the hell out of Larchfield. The ‘murder’ scene was an effort to cover his tracks.”
“Grand plan? What grand plan?”
“The plan he’d worked out with Lorinda from day one.”
“Day one? Are you suggesting that he killed everyone—Angus Russell, Mary Kane, Linda Mason, Chandler Aspern, Billy Tate?”
“Russell, Kane, Mason, Aspern—all of those, but not Tate. Definitely not Tate.”
“Then who—”
He cut her off. “There are some things you need to know about Larchfield. Some are a matter of public record, some I got from Hilda Russell, and some through my own investigation.”
Stryker laid her pen down, steepled her fingers, and gave Gurney her expressionless attention.
He told her about the past disappearances of people in conflict with Angus, Angus’s financial relationship with Silas Gant, Lorinda’s blood relationship with Otis Strane, and—according to Hilda—the existence of a long-standing shady relationship between the Russell and Peale families. He then described the suggestive circumstances of Hanley Bullock’s death, and how that death seemed to involve those relationships. Surely the neat man with the silver-gray pompadour was Gant and the man with “OTIS” tattooed on his knuckles was Otis Strane.
“I can’t prove it,” Gurney continued, “but I’d be willing to bet my pension that the hearse driver in Crickton that day, the man who drove off with Bullock’s body, was Danforth Peale’s father, who Hilda Russell described as the coldest man she’d ever met—a man whose ownership of hearses and cemeteries would put him in an ideal position for getting rid of bodies.”
Stryker opened her palms in a gesture of impatience. “That was ten years ago. What’s it got to do with—”
He cut her off again. “I got to thinking about the people Lorinda might be relying on. The first one who came to mind was Gant. But the night Aspern was killed, Gant was speaking at that gun rally in West Virginia. So it had to be someone else. And that’s when Peale came to mind, along with a simple thought: like father, like son.”
Stryker screwed up her face in disbelief. “Like father, like son? That’s it? That was your basis for zeroing in on Peale?”
Detective Lieutenant Hapsburg uttered a small snort of derision.
Hardwick eyed him as though he might be measuring him for a body bag.
“It wasn’t just that,” said Gurney mildly. “There was also that oddity in the audio portion of the mortuary video that I’ve already mentioned to you. The idea that something in that video might have been tampered with struck me as a red flag. And it turns out part of the audio may have been faked. In fact, I’m now sure that Peale’s security camera was recording a prerecorded sound of the casket being broken open, rather than the actual event.”
Stryker folded her arms. “Anything else?”
“Yes. One of the lab experts discovered a small hole that had been drilled in the bottom of the casket—which made no sense to me, until I remembered seeing Peale with an automobile jack. When I checked the specs on that model, they were consistent with my suspicion that Peale had been Lorinda’s accomplice from the beginning. They also explained how the first big trick in the case was pulled off.”
Stryker unfolded her arms, then folded them again. “You’re saying Peale was involved from the beginning, but you said a minute ago that he’s not the one who killed Tate. If he didn’t, who did?”
“That was the simplest piece of the puzzle,” said Gurney. “It was right in front of our faces all the time. In fact, we’d been told what the answer was. If only we’d been willing to believe it. If only—”
The detective lieutenant interrupted him. “We don’t need the big lead-in. How about you just answer the question.”
Gurney smiled. “Billy Tate was killed by a combination of a direct lightning strike and a devastating fall. Dr. Ronald Fallow declared him dead, correctly so. Fallow, the one person everyone came to believe was wrong, was the only one who was right. Tate was dead. But the circumstances surrounding his death very quickly captivated Danforth Peale. In fact, those circumstances were the irresistible gift placed in his hands—the golden opportunity of a lifetime.”
“Opportunity to do what?”
“What Lorinda Russell had made clear she wanted him to do: get rid of her husband. And now he had the perfect way to do it. The body that had been rolled into his mortuary that night belonged to a young man who had publicly threatened Angus Russell, who was known to be interested in witchcraft and Satanism—a loose cannon if there ever was one. And best of all, no one wanted the body. His stepmother wanted absolutely nothing of his; wouldn’t even touch his phone or car keys; wanted no memorial service, no visiting hours, nothing. All she asked was for Peale to store the body until she could decide how to dispose of it.”
“But the video . . .” began Stryker.
“The video was Peale’s stroke of genius. He was close enough to Tate’s size that he could fit into his clothes. He had mortician’s makeup he could use to make his face look convincingly burned and disfigured, at least from a distance. And he borrowed that auto jack from his neighbor as a way of breaking open the casket from the inside. I mentioned a minute ago that I checked the specs on that model. What I discovered was that it was electric and could be operated with a remote. That hole Peale drilled in the bottom of the casket was just right for the power cord. He put the jack in the casket, closed and latched the lid, then used the jack to push it open from the inside, ripping the latches out of the wood. He recorded that ripping, breaking sound. That evening, before the security camera was automatically switched on, he pushed the casket into the cadaver storage unit and stayed in there with it, with the door closed.