Bruce tapped his fingertips impatiently on the table. “For Godsake, Iona, get to the point.”
“Okay. Sorry. Here it is. Suppose you had to choose. Would you rather be a murderer … or his victim?”
Bruce’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you asking me?”
“No, dear, of course not. I already know what your answer would be.”
Part Two. Peter Pan
Chapter 20. Disturbing Discrepancies
After the dinner guests departed—Bruce and Iona in their massive Range Rover, the others in their silent Priuses—Madeleine began cleaning up and straightening up, and Gurney went into the den with the Spalter case file. He extracted the autopsy report, then turned on the slick retina-display tablet that his son, Kyle, had given him for Father’s Day.
He spent the next half hour on a succession of neurological websites, trying to make sense of the disconnect between the nature of Carl Spalter’s head wound and the ten or twelve feet that Paulette claimed he staggered before collapsing.
Gurney had the unhappy advantage of having witnessed, more closely than he would have liked, two similar head shots during his years in NYPD Homicide; in both instances the victims had fallen like axed trees. Why hadn’t Carl?
Two explanations occurred to him.
One was that the ME was wrong about the extent of the brain tissue trauma, and that the motor center had not been completely destroyed by the fragmenting bullet. The second explanation was that Carl was shot not once but twice. The first bullet sent him staggering to the ground. The second bullet, to the temple, did the severe neural damage found during the autopsy. The obvious problem with that theory was that the ME found only one entry wound. Admittedly, a .220 Swift could make a very neat puncture, or a very narrow grazing line—but surely nothing subtle enough for a pathologist to miss, unless he was seriously rushed. Or distracted. Distracted by what?
As Gurney pondered this, another aspect of Paulette’s mini-reenactment was eating at him—that the ultimately fatal scenario was played out within arm’s reach of two individuals who could benefit enormously from Carl’s death. Jonah, who would achieve full control of Spalter Realty. And Alyssa, the spoiled druggy in line to inherit her father’s personal estate—assuming Kay could be gotten out of the way, as in fact she had been.
Jonah and Alyssa. He had a growing interest in meeting them both. And Mick Klemper, as well. He needed to get face-to-face with that man soon. And maybe Piskin, the prosecutor, as well—to get a sense of where he stood in this fog of contradictions, shaky evidence, and possible perjury.
There was a crash in the kitchen. He grimaced.
Funny thing about crashes in the kitchen. He once considered them an indicator of Madeleine’s state of mind, until he realized that his interpretation of them was really an indicator of his own state of mind. When he believed he’d given her a reason to be less than delighted with him, he heard the crash of dishes as a symptom of her annoyance. But if he felt that he’d been behaving thoughtfully, the same dropped dishes would seem a harmless accident.
That night he wasn’t comfortable with his having been nearly an hour late for dinner, or with his inability to remember the names of her friends, or with his leaving her in the kitchen and scurrying off to the den as soon as the last set of taillights receded down the hill.
He realized this last offense was still correctable. After making a few final notes from the most extensive of the neurological websites he’d come upon, he shut down the tablet, put the autopsy report away with the case file, and went out to the kitchen.
Madeleine was just closing the dishwasher door. He went to the coffeemaker on the sink island, set it up, and pushed the BREW button. Madeleine picked up a sponge and a towel and began wiping the countertops.
“Odd bunch of people,” he said lightly.
“ ‘Interesting’ people might be a nicer way to put it.”
He cleared his throat. “I hope they weren’t taken aback by what I said about the criminal justice system.”
The coffeemaker emitted the whooshing-spitting sound that ended its cycle.
“It’s not so much what you said. Your tone has a way of conveying a lot more than your words.”
“More? Like what?”
She didn’t answer right away. She was leaning over the counter, scrubbing a recalcitrant stain. He waited. She straightened up and brushed a few dangling hairs away from her face with the back of her hand. “Sometimes you sound annoyed at having to spend time with people, listen to them, talk to them.”
“It’s not exactly that I’m annoyed. It’s …” He sighed, his voice trailing off. He took his cup from under the dispensing spout of the coffeemaker, added sugar, and stirred the coffee a lot longer than it needed to be stirred before completing his explanation. “When I get involved in something intense, I find it difficult to switch back to ordinary life.”
“It is difficult,” she replied. “I know. I think sometimes you forget what kind of work I do at the clinic, what kind of problems I deal with.”
He was about to point out that those problems didn’t usually involve murder, but he caught himself in time. She had the look in her eyes that meant an unfinished thought, so he just stood silently, holding his coffee cup, waiting for her to go on—expecting her to describe some of the more appalling realities of a rural crisis center.
But she took a different tack. “Maybe I can disengage more easily than you can because I’m not as good at what I do.”
He blinked. “What do you mean?”
“When someone has a great talent for something, there’s a temptation to focus on it to the exclusion of virtually everything else. Don’t you find that to be true?”
“I suppose,” he replied, wondering where this was going.
“Well, I think you have a great talent for figuring things out, for unraveling deceptions, solving complicated crimes. And maybe you’re so good at it, so comfortable in that particular way of thinking, that the rest of life seems like an uncomfortable interruption.” She searched his face for a reaction.
He knew there was truth in what she was saying, but all he could manage was a noncommittal shrug.
She went on in a soft voice. “I don’t see myself as having a huge talent for my work. I’ve been told I’m good at it, but it’s not the sum and substance of my life. It’s not the only thing that matters. I try to treat everything in my life as though it matters. Because it does. You, most of all.” She looked into his eyes and smiled in that odd way of hers that seemed to have less to do with her mouth than with some internal source of radiance.
“Sometimes when we talk about your absorption in a case, it turns into an argument—maybe because you feel that I’m trying to transform you from a detective into a hiking, biking kayaker. That might have been a hope or fantasy of mine when we first moved up here to the mountains, but it’s not anymore. I understand who you are, and I’m content with that. More than content. I know sometimes it doesn’t seem that way. It seems like I’m pushing, pulling, trying to change you. But that’s not what it is.”
She paused, seeming to read his thoughts and feelings more clearly than he could. “I’m not trying to turn you into someone you’re not. I just feel that you’d be happier if you could let some brightness, some variety, into your life. It looks to me like you keep rolling the same boulder up the same hill again and again, without any lasting relief or reward at the end. It looks like all you want is to keep pushing, keep struggling, keep putting yourself in danger—the more danger, the better.”