Cazo shrugged. “So?”
“Could you describe that in more detail? How exactly did Lerman change?”
“I don’t get the point. Trial’s over. Slade’s in the can. End of story, right?”
“Slade may be appealing the conviction. So we’re double-checking everything—especially what Lerman knew about Slade and how it affected him. Those changes you saw in him could be important. Can you describe them?”
Cazo picked up a paper clip and began examining it. “He got quiet.”
“Quiet?”
“Lerman liked to talk. Liked to make people think he had some juice, always saying he knew this guy, knew that guy. You’d see in the news that the feds pulled some major sting, all of a sudden Lerman knows the guy, could even be a relative. Uncle Vinnie, Uncle Joey, whatever. You listen to him, you’d think every wiseguy was his fuckin uncle.”
“Then he stopped doing that?”
“Like somebody turned off his switch. Not a fuckin word for like four, five weeks. Then, all of a sudden, he comes back to life, like he’d been storing up all his bullshit, talking for the next week or two like he was connected to some guy so big he can’t even say how big the guy is. Tells me he’s got this hot-shit idea to shake some celebrity down for who the fuck knows how much, enough that he don’t have to bust his balls here no more. So I can take the job and shove it up my ass.” Cazo paused, shaking his head in amusement at such foolishness. “Big idea got the little fucker iced, right?”
“Were you surprised that it turned out that way?”
Cazo let out a whispery laugh. “Only a fuckin moron woulda been surprised.”
The dead-cold look in his eyes brought to mind Marcus Thorne’s interjection of the man’s nickname into Slade’s trial—Tommy Hooks—and its ugly meaning.
38
IN HIS CAR, GURNEY SWITCHED ON THE WIPERS TO BRUSH away the snow that had accumulated during his meeting with Cazo. He was thinking about the changes in Lenny Lerman, and the timing of those changes in relation to the dated entries in Lerman’s diary. Three dates seemed significant. October 24 was the date of the diary’s first entry, and it referred to the conversation between Lerman and someone named Jingo, during which he learned of an event in Slade’s past that struck him as an opportunity for a blackmail scheme. The November 2 entry referred to the dinner with Sonny and Adrienne at which Lenny described the plan he intended to implement. The November 6 entry described his resignation from the Beer Monster.
That two-week stretch—beginning with his October 24 discovery of Slade’s secret and ending with his November 6 resignation—aligned closely with Cazo’s description of the period in which Lerman came “back to life.”
However, it was the three or four weeks prior to Lerman’s discovery of Slade’s secret—the period during which Lerman, according to Cazo, had been uncharacteristically quiet—that now interested Gurney. Since there were no diary entries for those weeks, discovering the reason for Lerman’s odd behavior at that time would require additional digging.
Remembering that he’d silenced his phone for his meeting with Cazo, he turned it back on and found two new messages. The first was from an unfamiliar name, Samantha Smollett.
The fake friendliness in her voice was like frosting on a knife. “Hello, Mr. Gurney. I hope you get this message in time. I’m Sam Smollett, producer on the top-rated RAM-TV show, Controversial Perspectives. Our lead segment tonight will be an examination of the Blackmore Mountain shooting, and we want our audience to hear your side of the story. This could be your best chance to confront the troubling speculations swirling around your involvement. I need to hear from you by 7:00 p.m. today at the latest. It may be the most important call you ever make. We want to hear from you. America wants to hear from you.”
She ended her message with her personal phone number, repeating it three times. He didn’t bother making a note of it.
The second message was from Madeleine, her tone more upbeat than it had been for a long while.
“I’ll be leaving the clinic in a few minutes. Gerry Mirkle is going to drop me off at the Winklers’. They have a pair of alpacas that have just been weaned. They’re six months old—the perfect age for us to adopt them. Of course, I won’t do anything until we talk about it, but it sounds perfect, doesn’t it? We just need to put a door on the shed and install some fencing. Dennis Winkler said we only need to enclose half an acre, maybe an acre at the most if we wanted to get a couple more after the first two. The low pasture would be perfect. There are some fence posts in the barn from when we were planning to put in a big vegetable garden. You could check and see how many we have. If you get home before I do—Deirdre Winkler said she’d drive me—take the scallops out of the freezer and get the rice cooker going. See you later.”
Early in his law-enforcement career he’d become familiar with the gap between his work life and home life. Now, with the Lerman murders on one side and Madeleine’s pastoral plans on the other, the gap seemed more like a canyon.
IT WAS NEARLY six when he reached the point where the town road ended and their property began. The dim light of the November dusk had faded into darkness. He parked beside the black mass of the barn, got out, and switched on his phone’s flashlight app.
A spare key to the barn door was located under one of the flat rocks placed there to keep the weeds down. Inside, he was greeted by the familiar barn smell—a combination of sawn wood and faint remnants of the gasoline he had spilled the previous week, getting the snowblower ready for winter.
As he turned his phone light toward the stack of lumber where he dimly recalled storing the fence posts, another light caught his eye—a thin line of it at the base of the closed door to his tool room—the same room where a few days earlier he had found the light on and one of the windows ajar. He remembered turning the light off the last time he was in there. There was no reason for Madeleine to have been in there since, and even if she had been, she was religious about turning off lights.
He opened the door and took a good look around the room. Seeing nothing unusual or out of place, he switched off the light, locked up the barn, and returned to the car. Instead of driving immediately up to the house, he sat there for a while, pondering the peculiarity of the light. Three possible explanations occurred to him. The first was a loose wire in the fixture or in the switch. He made a mental note to check that out. The second was someone getting in through one of the barn windows, not all of which were lockable, and turning on the light as part of a nasty game aimed at disconcerting him. The third, equally troubling, was that his memory of having turned the light off the last time he was in the barn was a false memory.
He could learn to live with certain physical limitations, even episodes of pain, but mental limitations were a different matter. If he couldn’t trust his perceptions and recollections . . . the very thought of that sent a shiver through him.
39
AFTER PUTTING THE RICE ON AND TAKING THE SCALLOPS out of the freezer, Gurney was at his laptop in the den. He heard the side door out by the mudroom opening and shutting.
A minute later, Madeleine came into the den, smiling.
“Thanks for getting the rice going. I’ll run some water over the scallops to hurry the defrosting along. But first, I have to tell you about the alpacas. Actually, when they’re young, they’re called crias. They’re amazing. You should see their—” She stopped, noting the expression on his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Have you been in the barn recently?”