“I have a question.”
“We already have a shitload of questions.”
“Maybe not the right ones. We just wasted five days asking ourselves how four people could have had the same dream. Wrong question. The right question would have been, ‘Why did three people say they had the same dream, and why did one person write down the details of that dream?’ Because, beyond their own claims, and Gilbert Fenton’s endorsement of those claims, there was never any evidence that they actually dreamt anything. We assumed the reports of the nightmares were truthful, and since the men who reported having them were killed, they appeared to be victims, not predators. It never occurred to us that they might be both. I don’t want to make a mistake like that again.”
“I get your point. We screwed up. So what’s your question?”
“My question is . . . are we observing failure or success?”
Over the phone Gurney heard a car horn blowing—followed by Hardwick’s truculent, growling voice: “Move it, asshole!”
A moment later, he was back on the phone. “Failure or success? Fuck does that mean?”
“Simple. Your own ‘Killer Jane’ hypothesis is a failure hypothesis. It assumes that the sessions with Richard, along with the subsequent nightmare claims, were the planned elements of a blackmail conspiracy—but that the deaths weren’t part of the plan. In your hypothesis Richard being blamed for the murders was an unintended consequence of Jane killing the bad guys. Bottom line, you’re describing a failed conspiracy—with an ironic finale in which the intended victim of the blackmailers becomes the victim of the police. Everyone loses.”
“So what?”
“Just for argument’s sake—instead of a failure, let’s assume we’re observing a success. Suppose the staged suicides were the point of the plan from day one.”
“Whose plan?”
“The plan of the person who called Wenzel, Balzac, and Pardosa and talked them into meeting with Richard in the first place.”
“By selling them the fantasy of a blackmail plan that would make them all rich?”
“Yes.”
“While actually setting them up to be killed?”
“Yes.”
“But what about the involvement of high-level spook types? The advanced surveillance devices? The warnings from Wigg to back off? What the hell’s all that about?”
“I need to understand the four deaths better before I can grapple with that.”
“I have my own new idea about those deaths. It still assumes the blackmail plot. But the blackmailers don’t approach Jane. They go straight to Richard.”
“And?”
“And he kills them.”
“Ethan too?”
“Ethan too.”
“Why?”
“For the money. To get the twenty-nine million bucks before Ethan could change the will back in Peyton’s favor. That’s one piece I think Fenton might be right about.”
Gurney thought about it. “It does seem a little more feasible than your Jane version.”
“But?”
“But it contradicts the gut feelings we both had about Richard’s innocence, and it leaves big questions unanswered. Who concocted the blackmail scheme? How does Ethan’s written dream narrative fit in? Who did he write it for, and why?”
“Far as I can see, your theory doesn’t answer those questions, either.”
“I think it will—if we pursue it a little further.”
“Lead the way, ace. My mind is open.”
“First of all, if we view what happened as a well-planned enterprise that turned out exactly as intended, it would mean that Ethan and the other three men were all targets from the start. Targets of the same killer—but probably for different reasons.”
“How do you get to that?”
“Wenzel, Balzac, and Pardosa appear to have been accomplices of the planner—passing along that nightmare story—until they became victims of the planner. Ethan, on the other hand, appears to have been manipulated by someone into hand-writing the nightmare story—probably to make it appear that he was more connected with the other three than he really was, and that he died for the same reason they did.”
“I’ve been thinking about this dictation idea of yours, and there’s a problem with it. You gave Madeleine the email she dictated to you, so she could send it to her sister, right? That’s what would normally be done. So why would Ethan keep what he wrote?”
“I was wondering about that myself. I came up with two answers.”
“Typical of you.”
Gurney ignored the comment. “One possibility is that it was dictated over the phone. The other is that Ethan did give it to the person who dictated it—who then put it back in his office after killing him.”
“Hmm.”
“You see a flaw in the logic?”
“No flaw in the logic. You seem to have arranged an impossible pile of shit into a credible sequence of motives and actions. Very logical.”
“But you’re not sure it’s true?”
“All kinds of shit can be logical, but logical doesn’t make it real. How do you propose we get from all this logic to the point of nailing the fucker behind it all?”
“Theoretically, there are two ways. There’s the long, safe, methodical way. And the short, risky way.”
“So we’re going to do it the second way. Am I right?”
“Unfortunately, yes. We lack the resources to do it the right way. We can’t interview every lodge guest and employee who was on site the day Ethan was killed. We can’t go down to West Palm and Teaneck and Floral Park and interview everyone who knew Wenzel and Balzac and Pardosa. We can’t find and interview everyone who attended or worked at Camp Brightwater. We can’t run a fine-tooth comb through—”
“All right, all right, I get it.”
“And the biggest limitation of all is that we lack time. Fenton, and the people pulling his strings, are about to take serious action to get me out of here. And it’s not good for Madeleine to be here. In fact, it’s very bad for her to be here.”
He turned on the couch and looked into the bathroom. She was still in the shower. He tried to tell himself once again that it was a good thing. A restorative thing.
“All right, Davey, I get it. The long, safe way is not an option. So what’s the short, risky way?”
“Tossing a rock into the hornet’s nest to see what flies out.”
“What kind of rock do you have in mind?”
Even as Gurney was listening to the question, the voice on the phone was breaking up.
Hardwick had just driven into another dead zone.
CHAPTER 50
When his mind was full of unanswered questions, Gurney often sought clarity in lists.
As Madeleine was finally emerging from the shower, he got a pad from his duffel bag. He sat down on the couch and started writing down the things he believed he knew about the deaths and the master manipulator behind them.
It included facts provided by Angela Castro, Steven Pardosa’s parents, Moe Blumberg, Kimberly Fallon, Senior Investigator Gilbert Fenton, the Reverend Bowman Cox, Lieutenant Bobby Becker of Palm Beach PD, and the Teaneck PD detective contacted by Jack Hardwick—as well as the conclusions he believed those facts supported. Then he created a list of what he considered the major unanswered questions. The second list was longer than the first.
After reviewing everything he’d written, he decided to share it with Hardwick. He opened his laptop, typed the lists into an email, and hit “Send.”
As he was taking another look at his handwritten sheets, making sure that he hadn’t left out anything important, Madeleine came over to the couch wrapped in a bath towel.
He decided to tell her about his evolving vision of the case—that the reported nightmares weren’t dreams that anyone had actually experienced, but elements in a complex plot, and that Ethan’s written nightmare narrative was probably dictated to him by someone else.