40
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK THE NEXT MORNING, GURNEY PULLED into the parking area in front of Dick and Della’s Diner. He parked between Hardwick’s gleaming muscle car and a pickup with a faded bumper sticker proclaiming SOCIALISTS SUCK. Hardwick sat at one of the front tables, peering at the window with tight-lipped hostility.
The old-fashioned diner was populated with an old-fashioned clientele. Hardwick—with his black leather jacket, hard-edged features, and disconcerting malamute eyes—seemed out of place in what looked like a convention of retired farmers and their flannel-shirted wives. As Gurney took a seat at the table, Hardwick was still turned toward the window, his baleful gaze fixed on a pair of flies crawling on the window glass.
He spoke without turning. “I hate those fucking things.”
“My mother insisted they carried diseases. What’s your problem with them?”
Hardwick’s voice was stone-cold. “I don’t like what they do to dead bodies. They lay their eggs in the eyes. Then the eggs hatch into fucking maggots.”
Gurney said nothing.
After a while, Hardwick looked away from the window and cleared his throat in a way that sounded like a dog growling. “My father was a violent drunk. He terrorized the family. When I was sixteen, I broke his jaw. We didn’t have much contact after that. A year later, my mother divorced him. After I joined the state police, I got a call from his landlord. He’d been dead on his bathroom floor for four days. Summertime. The maggots were . . . active.” He shook his head in a violent motion as if to dislodge the memory, then waved to a young waitress who was delivering waffles to a nearby table.
She came over with a rosy-cheeked farm-girl smile. “What can I get for you gentlemen on this beautiful morning?”
“A flyswatter,” said Hardwick.
“Excuse me?”
He pointed to the flies on the window.
“I don’t think we have any swatters, but they won’t bother you. They’re just trying to get out.” She was grimacing, clearly disturbed by the subject.
Hardwick eyed her curiously. “You have some special feeling about flies?”
“You’ll think my family is weird.”
“Try me.”
She bent over the table and lowered her voice. “My brother kept them as pets. It drove my father nuts.”
Hardwick responded with an expressionless stare.
“Miss!” A customer’s voice from a few tables away hurried her off without another word.
“Fathers and sons,” muttered Gurney. “It’s becoming a repetitive theme. Every time I start to ignore it, it gets pushed back in my face.”
“The hell are you talking about?”
“I’ve been thinking about Lenny and Sonny Lerman. And Ziko Slade and a young acolyte of his who considers him his father—and who hates his real father so much he won’t even talk about him. Yesterday I went to interview some people up on Blackmore Mountain, and I happened to arrive at their property at the end of a father-son blow-up.”
Gurney fell silent, his mind following a well-traveled groove to his own failings as a father, including the death of his four-year-old son, Danny, which he’d been reliving painfully for over twenty years.
Hardwick stared at him. “Fathers and sons? That’s a theme?”
“It keeps coming up.”
Hardwick shook his head. “Any fucking thing can remind you of any other fucking thing, if you want it to. Facts are facts. Themes are bullshit.”
Gurney was aware of the danger of adopting an overall belief about a case, then cherry-picking facts to support the belief. That trick of the mind was, after all, the basis of every lunatic conspiracy theory. It was time to change the subject.
“On the phone last night you called BCI’s Blackmore Mountain investigation a toxic clusterfuck. Tell me more.”
“It’s a clusterfuck with knives out and colliding agendas.”
“Can’t wait to hear the details.”
Before Hardwick could begin, the rosy-cheeked waitress reappeared. “Sorry, I got pulled away. What would you gentlemen like for breakfast?”
After a quick look at the menu, Hardwick ordered four fried eggs, a double portion of sausages, hash browns, and coffee. Gurney chose a western omelet, toast, and coffee. When the waitress hurried off toward the kitchen, Hardwick began.
“The source of this intel is my contact at BCI, and who the hell knows how objective he is. So bear that in mind. Best to start with Dale Magnussen, CIO on the Blackmore case. He wrote up the incident report—in which he interpreted the circumstances as a road-rage confrontation. Like most incident report writers, he’s more committed to his initial impressions than he ought to be. And your big-deal NYPD reputation rubbed him the wrong way. Bottom line, he’s dug in on his road-rage theory, making you the shooter.”
Gurney had gotten a hostile vibe from Magnussen, so this didn’t surprise him.
Hardwick continued. “Lucky for you, not everyone is on Magnussen’s wavelength. The BCI evidence tech found gunpowder residue on the side of the truck that she says is consistent with the gun being fired from about six feet away, while the truck was standing still, and probably from a position higher than that of a driver seated in another car. So it seems that for you to be the shooter, you would have to have gotten out of your car after it hit the stump, walked over to the truck, shot the victim, returned to your car, and passed out in the driver’s seat. An unlikely scenario.”
“Its unlikelihood didn’t change Magnussen’s mind?”
“Assholes do not have changeable minds. But it wasn’t just the tech who had doubts about the road-rage idea. Based on the angle of the bullet’s path through Lerman’s head, the ME agreed with the evidence tech’s opinion that the shooter was probably standing next to the truck. And finally, the doctor who examined you in the hospital claimed that the location of your head injury seemed inconsistent with a frontal collision. He didn’t say someone must have sandbagged you from the side after you hit the stump, but that would seem to follow from what he did say.”
Gurney was absorbing this with a cautious sense of relief. “That’s consistent with what I learned from two women who live near the scene.” He went on to relate what Nora Rumsten told him about the motorcycle and gunshot sounds and what Tess Larson told him about the visitor who left motorcycle tracks up to the shooting site after sending her off on a phony errand.
“So,” he concluded, “it seems that Stryker’s case against me isn’t all that strong.”
“Not in a logical sense, but that doesn’t mean shit, Sherlock. According to my BCI guy, Stryker’s a wild card—with enough brains and ambition to be dangerous. She’ll view any development in the Blackmore case that could raise questions about the Slade case an existential threat to her career. That conviction was a rare big-time success in a county where crime mostly consists of drunks pissing in public. If she sees you as any threat at all to her hot-shit new rep, she’ll be looking for ways to cut your dick off.”
Gurney’s sense of relief was fading.
Hardwick went on. “Before I forget, I did get answers to a couple of things you asked about. The tow truck that smashed into you was reported stolen that same day. It’s registered to an LLC called Top Star Auto Salvage, owned by a Charlene Vesco. And the call you got to set up the meeting in Harbane came from a prepaid phone—from which no other calls were made, before or since. Plus, there’s an interesting little geographical echo. The salvage company’s address and the phone call’s origination cell tower are both within a mile of a specialty food store owned by Bruno Lanka. And they’re all located in the grimy little town of Garville, just this side of Albany.” He paused. “You don’t look surprised.”