“About what?”
“The case! It started with RAM News announcing that you guys are focused on my father—who’s disappeared. The DA gave an interview about it, and all the other news sites are picking it up. Wild headlines are popping up. ‘Son Innocent, Father Guilty’—stuff like that. It’s all turned around. I’m not the target anymore. You must know all this, right?”
“I know some significant discoveries have been made.”
“That’s a mild way of putting it. I feel like I owe you my life!”
“It’s not over yet.”
“But it sounds like everything’s finally going in the right direction. Jesus, God, what a relief!” He paused. “Is this because of stuff you found at his cabin?”
“I can’t talk about that. Evidence disclosures would need to come from the DA. But that reminds me—why didn’t you tell me about the second key?”
“What?”
“You told me about the key for the cabin, but not the other one for the shed.”
“You just lost me.”
“The shed behind the cabin.”
“I don’t know anything about a shed. I’ve only been to his cabin.” Payne sounded mystified.
“Did he show you the cabin basement?”
“No. I didn’t realize it had one.”
“Where did he set up his reloading equipment?”
“On a dinner table in the middle of the room.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Maybe a flannel shirt. I don’t know about his pants. Maybe chinos? He never wore jeans. Oh, and some kind of disposable gloves, like doctors wear. I think to keep the gunpowder off his hands.”
“Since you came to live in White River, how much contact have you had with Judd Turlock?”
“I’ve seen him with my father. He wasn’t the sort of person you’d want to get to know. Even making eye contact with him was scary. One of the news stories said that he was found murdered at the gun club. Are you the one who found him?”
“I was there.”
“How was he killed?”
“Sorry, that’s another one for the DA to answer.”
“I understand.” He paused. “Well, the main reason I called was to thank you. Thank you for giving me back my life.”
Now Gurney paused. “I have another question. When you were a kid, before you got sent to that boarding school, did your father try to interest you in guns or hunting or anything like that?”
There was a long silence. When Payne finally replied, the excitement had drained from his voice.
“My father never tried to interest me in anything. The only concern he had was that I never do anything that might embarrass him.”
Gurney felt an unpleasant tremor of recognition. There was a time when he had a similar resentment toward his own father.
48
He wasn’t sure what to do next. He had the feeling that things were coming to a head and he needed to press forward. While the next step was eluding him, he decided to check his phone to make sure he was up to date with his messages.
There was just one, the call from Thrasher that had come in while he was watching Battleground Tonight. He pressed the Play icon.
“Detective Gurney, Walter Thrasher here. No doubt the nonstop horrors of White River are absorbing your attention. But I feel the need to fill you in on the even more gruesome history of your own idyllic hillside. Call when you can. In the meantime, I’d strongly advise you not to do any more excavating—not until I prepare you for what you’re likely to find.”
Gurney felt a surge of curiosity and alarm.
He called Thrasher back immediately, got his voicemail, and left a message.
Then he forced his attention back to the White River affair and what unresolved aspect he should address first. The ice-pick murder of Rick Loomis came to mind, which in turn reminded him of the hospital personnel list and the fact that he still hadn’t examined the section covering employees who had resigned or been terminated.
He went to his desk, got out the USB drive containing the list, and inserted it in his laptop. A few moments later he was opening the Res-Term section of the Mercy Hospital Consolidated Personnel File. As he went through the columns of names and addresses, he recognized only one name. But it definitely got his attention:
JACKSON, BLAZE L., 115 BORDEN STREET, WHITE RIVER, NY
Her resignation or termination—the file didn’t indicate which—had occurred on February 12, just three months earlier. The remaining data was limited to her landline and cell phone numbers.
As he was entering this information in his address book, the Borden Street location was ringing a faint bell. He was sure he’d seen that address before, but he couldn’t place where. He opened Google Street View and entered the address, but what he saw wasn’t familiar. He returned to the personnel list and looked again at the address. That’s when it occurred to him that it wasn’t the physical location that was ringing a bell, it was the typed address on the file page. He’d seen that address somewhere else in the same document.
He went to the main part of the list that was devoted to active employees and began scrolling slowly through the names and addresses. Finally, there it was—in the section covering security, maintenance, and housekeeping:
CREEL, CHALISE J., 115 BORDEN STREET, WHITE RIVER, NY
The landline number given for her was the same as the one listed for Blaze Jackson, but she had a different cell number. So, thought Gurney, they were roommates at least. And possibly more than that.
Just as interesting was the fact that Chalise Creel was a name he’d seen before, and not just in the personnel list. It had appeared on the name tag of the cleaning woman on the ICU floor at the hospital—the woman with the almond-shaped eyes who’d emptied the trash basket in the visitors’ lounge the day he was there with Kim, Heather, and Madeleine. A woman who would have had easy access to Rick Loomis. A woman whose routine presence the nursing staff would have had no reason to question.
The insertion of the ice pick, however, into Loomis’s brain stem would have required specific medical knowledge. Which raised questions about Creel’s background, as well as Jackson’s. Gurney needed to find out what Jackson’s job at the hospital had been, and the reason she was no longer there. Could the Jackson-Creel relationship be connected directly to the murder of Rick Loomis? Might one of them have been the source of the drugs used on Jordan and Tooker? And perhaps the biggest question of all—were Jackson and Creel entangled with Judd Turlock and Dell Beckert?
The hospital seemed the logical place to start searching for answers. Gurney’s call was answered by an automated branching system that connected him eventually to Abby Marsh in the HR department. She was still in her office at a quarter past eight. She sounded as harried as she was the day Gurney had gotten the file from her.
“Yes?”
“Abby, this is Dave Gurney. I was wondering if—”
She broke in. “The man of the hour.”
“Sorry?”
“We have a TV in our cafeteria. I was grabbing a quick dinner, and saw the interview with the district attorney. What can I do for you?”
“I need some information on two of your employees—one past, one present. Blaze Jackson and Chalise Creel. Are you familiar with them?”
“Jackson, definitely. Creel, slightly. Is there a problem?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Is Creel working now?”
“Hold on. I’ll check . . . Okay, here it is. According to the schedule, she’s on the four-to-twelve shift. So, yes, she’d be working now.”
“Sorry, what I meant was, do you know for a fact that she’s actually there?”