Everything at the campsite seemed in order. He opened the tent flap, got the propane heater going, then went over to the place in the trees that offered a view of the house and the surrounding property. He could see the watchers’ car down by the barn and Madeleine’s rented red Crosstrek by the asparagus bed. An old blue pickup truck was parked by the chicken coop, and a man in rough-looking farm clothes was setting a four-by-four wooden post in a hole not far from the coop. A dozen or so similar posts had already been set in the pasture below the coop. Additional post holes had been dug every eight feet or so in a loose curve around the far side of the coop. The sight of the work in progress gave Gurney a complicated feeling he had a hard time identifying. Loneliness and resentment were part of it.
He returned to the tent, went inside, and sat in the folding chair—half of him trying to understand his emotional reaction, half of him trying to ignore it. In support of the second half, he opened his laptop and began reviewing his lists and notes, trying to extract a coherent picture from that blizzard of facts and suppositions. But as before, the puzzle pieces refused to coalesce. In his frustration, a radical though occurred to him.
Suppose none of the “facts” were true.
Suppose Ziko Slade had no dark secret, no past encounter with someone called Sally Bones. Suppose Lenny Lerman was never told anything by someone called Jingo. Suppose the calls Lerman made to Slade had nothing to do with blackmail. Suppose they took the form of fake spam calls, calls that Slade would have quickly forgotten. That would finally explain the discrepancy between the phone company’s records and Slade’s insistence that he’d never received any blackmail calls. Suppose there’d never been any extortion plot at all. Suppose the diary was a pack of lies. Suppose the reason no coherent picture was emerging from the facts was that most of them weren’t “facts” at all.
It was a startling notion. But if it was true, what solid ground was left to stand on?
Well, thought Gurney, if one was faced with lies, perhaps the best approach would be to ask, what did the lies have in common? In other words, what underlying truth would they have been designed to conceal?
That notion took him back to Marcus Thorne’s story of the gem courier—his lies about recognizing one of the stickup men, about being followed by him, about having taken his picture, about the plate number of the getaway car. One thing they all had in common was that they been dictated to him by a confederate as the price of his cooperation in the phony heist—a confederate with his own agenda.
I’ll do what you want me to do, if you say what I want you to say.
If that arrangement were the skeleton of the Lerman case, then the confederate’s private agenda was the framing of Slade for a grisly murder by fabricating a motive: the elimination of a blackmailer in order to preserve his whitewashed image. The very motive that Stryker had used so effectively to win a conviction.
The result was not only Slade’s incarceration but the demolition of his image as a reformed sinner. Was it possible that both of those outcomes were equally intended? Or even that the latter was more important than the first?
If so, it put the mystery of Slade’s prison murder in an interesting new light and took Gurney back once again to Emma’s question: Why, after all the effort of framing Slade for murder, did the perp have him killed?
All he could think of at the time was the prevention of Slade’s release from prison or the possibility that the framing had failed to accomplish the framer’s goal. But suppose the goal had been the tarring of Slade’s shiny image?
Then the question would become, where exactly was the failure?
Certainly not in the media coverage of the affair, which put Slade in the ugliest light possible, nor in the general public’s perception. Media and public alike were more than ready to see Slade as a murdering hypocrite. So, if the goal of image destruction had in some way failed, it must have failed with a much narrower audience—but an audience of enormous importance to the framer.
It was clear that it had failed utterly with at least one person, Emma Martin—whose unshakable faith in Ziko Slade was responsible for Gurney’s own involvement. In that context, Slade’s prison murder could be seen as a final attempt to defame the man in her mind with a narrative of guilt-driven suicide.
This new way of understanding the case excited Gurney, but it raised a big question. Why would destroying the image of Slade in the mind of Emma Martin be that important? Why would a therapist’s opinion of her client matter to anyone else? Under what conceivable circumstances would changing that opinion be worth killing for?
Then, quite suddenly, he realized he’d gotten it all wrong, and the simple truth came to him like a flash of sunlight.
71
HOW COULD HE HAVE MISSED IT? IT HAD BEEN STARING him in the face from the beginning. Maybe that was the problem. It was too obvious.
On the drive from the campsite hill back to the lodge, he went over the details of the case once again—to be sure that his solution could explain everything, from Lenny’s beheading to Sonny’s shooting to the repeated assaults on his own sanity and security. By the time he turned into the lodge driveway, he was 90 percent sure all the pieces of the puzzle were in place. He realized, however, that understanding what had happened was different from being able to prove it. And it didn’t provide a roadmap for what to do next.
He parked next to Valdez’s pickup, checked the time—4:05 p.m.—and went into the lodge. There was a fire blazing in the front room fireplace and the scent of cherrywood smoke in the air. Hearing a vacuum upstairs, he went to the kitchen to make coffee. While it was brewing, he returned to the front room, settled down in one of the armchairs by the fire, and tried to figure out the best path forward.
The first decision facing him was with whom to share his new understanding of the case. As he weighed the options, he found himself once again sorely missing Hardwick’s aggressive input. It was easy to be seduced by one’s own ego-driven preferences when no one was there to point out their weaknesses.
At least he knew better than to visit Stryker and, without proof, present a narrative that undermined her greatest prosecutorial success. Same applied to the Rexton PD and the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation, both of which had a stake in the status quo.
There were other interested parties who had a right to know the truth—Howard Manx at the insurance company, Kyra Barstow, Adrienne Lerman, Emma Martin, and Ian Valdez. They also had a right to see the proof. But there was a catch. To get the proof, he’d need to tell the story.
“Lost in your thoughts?”
He looked up and saw Valdez in the doorway. He hadn’t heard him coming downstairs, hadn’t even noticed when the vacuum had been turned off. Lost, indeed.
“Good way of putting it.”
“Something you want to talk about?”
He made a quick, if not altogether comfortable, decision.
“Something I need to talk about. And you need to hear.”
His expression as impassive as ever, Valdez sat in the armchair facing Gurney.
Beset with misgivings, Gurney nevertheless pressed forward. “I think I understand what this case has been about from the beginning.”
Valdez watched him intently. “From the murder of Lenny Lerman?”
“Starting at least a month before that. It all began when Lerman discovered he was about to die from brain cancer. He had no money, no life insurance, no relationship with a son whose respect he was desperate for, and no time left to gain that respect. He had reached the lowest point of a sad life. In the midst of his depression, something occurred to him—a way that he might still win that son’s respect, even perhaps his love. But he wouldn’t be able to do it alone. He’d need help—a special favor, the kind of favor a certain distant relative might be willing to provide. The relative was a much-feared man, but desperation emboldened Lenny, and he approached him. The relative agreed to do what Lenny asked, perhaps in part because Lenny was part of the family, however distant, but more importantly, because he saw a way to use the situation to destroy the reputation of someone he hated—Ziko Slade.”