As she listened to his description of how the puzzle pieces might fit together, what started as a skeptical frown slowly changed to an expression of real interest—and finally to a kind of revulsion.
“Do you think I’ve got it all wrong?” he asked.
“No. I think you have it right. I’m just wondering what kind of person could devise something that awful. So much lying. Such cruelty.”
“I agree.” He was momentarily taken aback by the gap between her perception of the situation as something essentially dreadful and his own view of it as a perplexing puzzle to be solved.
She looked down at his two lists on the table. “What’s all that?”
“Preparation.”
“For what?”
“I need to shake things up a bit. I’m organizing all the things I know and don’t know about the case—as a guide for what I can say in a bugged conversation. I want to give whoever is behind all this the impression I know what’s going on. But I want to be on solid ground with what I say. If I screw it up, he’ll feel safe. I want him to feel threatened.”
“But you still have no idea who he is, or what his ultimate motive was.”
“The motive part is complicated. From a cui bono financial point of view, the only victim with a significant estate is Ethan, and the only significant beneficiaries are Peyton and Richard—and Jane, of course, to the extent that she’s involved in Richard’s life.”
“I’d say that the extent of her involvement is total, absolute, and unhealthy.”
Gurney went on. “A financial motive could explain Ethan’s murder, but it doesn’t work for the other three. On the other hand, a Brightwater-related motive could explain those three, but it doesn’t work for Ethan.”
“Maybe whoever killed them had more than one motive.”
He nodded. It was a simple enough conclusion. Obvious, in a way.
Different motives for different victims.
He’d begun to raise that possibility with Hardwick in their last conversation. And the notion was reinforced in his mind now by the memory of a gang-related mass murder he’d been assigned to shortly after his promotion to homicide detective.
At first sight—and a bloody mess of a first sight it was—it appeared to be a typical clash over drug sales territories. A rising gang faction had taken over an abandoned tenement on the border of a rival faction’s turf—a provocative encroachment.
One night in July the gang’s headquarters in the tenement was occupied by four gang members with submachine guns. A three-man crew from the rival faction, similarly armed, invaded the building and crashed through the apartment door. Less than thirty seconds later, six of the seven combatants were dead. One member of the invading faction escaped on foot.
After giving the wrecked bodies, the blood-soaked floors, and the walls full of bullet holes a cursory once-over, Gurney’s partner at the time—a burnt-out detective by the name of Walter Coolidge—decided it was just another lunatic gunfight that everyone lost. Even if somebody had been lucky enough to get away, he’d probably find his sorry ass on the wrong end of an Uzi next time out.
Gurney was conducting the requisite neighborhood interviews that were a routine step at the beginning of every homicide investigation. That night he happened to ring the bell of a wiry little black woman with feisty eyes and sharp ears who insisted she knew exactly what she heard and how she heard it.
She described a burst of machine gun fire that lasted nine or ten seconds—produced, she claimed, by three similar weapons. That was followed by about ten seconds of silence. And that was followed by a second burst, lasting seven or eight seconds. She was certain that the second burst had been produced by a single weapon.
Gurney had been relating all this to Madeleine as she sat on the arm of the couch. Now she blinked in confusion. “How on earth did she know that?”
“I asked her that very question. And she asked me how did I think she could have succeeded as a jazz drummer if she couldn’t distinguish between one and three instruments.”
“She was a drummer in a jazz band?”
“In her past. At the time I spoke to her she was a church organist.”
“But what does this—?”
“Have to do with multiple motives for murder? I’ll get to that. The thing is, the sequence of the shots got me thinking. The three-gun burst to start with. The silence. The second one-gun burst. Everybody except one guy ending up dead. I pushed for a thorough crime-scene analysis, trajectory analysis, ballistics analysis, and medical analysis. And I spent a hell of a lot of time talking to local gangbangers. In the end, a new scenario emerged.”
Madeleine’s eyes lit up. “The guy who escaped at the end shot them all, didn’t he?”
“In a way, yes. When the invading crew broke into the apartment, they took the rival crew by surprise. They opened fire with their three Uzi machine pistols, and in no time at all the official job they came to do was done. But one crew member, Devon Santos, had other concerns. Gang life at a certain level is about competition for a seat at the next higher level. And one of his crew brothers had an eye on the same opening he did. So after they wiped out the opposing personnel, Devon walked over to the nearest dead guy, picked up his AK-47, turned around, and blasted away his competitor as well as the crew brother who witnessed what he’d just done. Then he put the gun back in its dead owner’s hands and got the hell out of there.”
“How could you be sure that’s what happened?”
“Ballistics discovered that the two invading crew members who ended up dead had been shot with an AK-47 that was found on a guy who had no powder residue on his hands. Meaning he couldn’t have fired the gun. The rest came from an analysis of entry and exit wounds. The final convincer was that odd delay between the two bursts of gunfire—the ten seconds during which Devon made sure the other crew was down for good, and went to pick up the AK-47.”
Madeleine gave him a thoughtful look. “So your point is that Devon had more than one motive. He went into the tenement to wipe out the enemy. But also to eliminate the threat of competition from his own side.”
“Right. And he shot one of his gang brothers to keep the fact that he’d shot the other one a secret. So he really had three motives, varying according to victim. To Devon’s way of thinking, they were all good reasons to kill people.”
“And he’d have gotten away with all of it, if it wasn’t for you.”
“If it wasn’t for a sharp witness with an ear for drumbeats.”
Madeleine persisted. “But not every cop would have followed up the way you did.”
He stared down uneasily at his yellow pad.
Praise had a downside. It increased his fear of failure.
CHAPTER 51
“Greetings, ace. I’m back in live cell country.”
“Have you checked your email?”
“If you mean those pithy lists of semi-facts and open questions, I got ’em. I also have a piece of news you might want to add to your fact list.”
“Oh?”
“News item on the radio. Kid in some theme park down in Florida died of a spider bite. Not normally that dangerous a spider, but this kid had some kind of allergic reaction to it. Didn’t help that the spider was on something the kid was eating. Fucking thing bit the kid’s tongue. Throat swelled up. Choked him. Fuck. Don’t even want to think about that.”
“Me neither, Jack. So what’s this got to do with—”
“That nasty little news item gave us an overdue gift from the gods of luck.”