Let the Devil Sleep

Chapter 5



Into a Tangle of Thorns





Despite Gurney’s efforts to persuade her, Kim refused to call the police.

“I told you, I’ve called before. I’m not doing it again. Nothing happens. Worse than nothing. They come to the apartment, they poke around the doors and windows, and they tell me there’s no sign of any forced entry. Then they ask if anyone was injured, if anything of value was stolen, if anything of value was broken. It’s like if the problem doesn’t fit one of those categories, then it’s not a problem. Last time, when I called about finding the knife in my bathroom, they lost interest when they learned it was mine—even though I kept telling them that the knife had been missing for two weeks before that. They scraped up the little drop of blood that was next to it on the floor, took it with them, never said another word about it. If they’re going to come here and give me this look like I’m some hysterical woman wasting their time, then the hell with them! You know what one of them did the last time? He yawned. He actually, unbelievably, yawned in my face!”

Gurney thought about this, thought about the instinctive triage process every busy urban cop goes through when a new incident is tossed on his plate. It’s all relative—relative to whatever else is on his plate—relative to the other urgencies of that month, that week, that day. He remembered a partner he’d had many years ago in NYPD Homicide, a guy who lived in a sleepy little town in western New Jersey, on the far edge of commutability. One day the guy brought in his local newspaper. The big front-page story was about a bird bath that had gone missing from someone’s backyard. This was at a time when there were an average of twenty murders a week in New York City—most of which barely rated a one-line mention in the city papers. The fact was that everything depended on context. And, although he didn’t say it to Kim, Gurney understood how the discovery of her own knife on her own bathroom floor might not have seemed like the end of the world to a cop dealing with rapes and homicides.

But he also understood how disturbed she was. More than that, there was an obviously sinister quality to the intruder’s actions that he himself found disturbing. He suggested that it might be a good idea for her to get out of Syracuse, maybe stay for a while at her mother’s house.

The suggestion converted her fear into fury. “That f*cking son of a bitch!” she hissed. “If he thinks he’s going to win this battle, he doesn’t know me very well.”

Gurney waited until she was calmer, then asked if she remembered the names of the detectives who’d responded to her previous calls.

“I told you, I’m not calling them again.”

“I understand. But I’d like to talk to them myself. See if they know anything they’re not telling you.”

“About what?”

“Maybe about Robby Meese? Who knows? I won’t know till I talk to them.”

Kim’s dark eyes searched his, her lips tightening. “Elwood Gates and James Schiff. Gates is the short one, Schiff is the tall one. Same jerk, two bodies.”


Detective James Schiff had taken Gurney into a spare interrogation room a couple of corridors away from the reception area. He’d left the door open, hadn’t brought a chair, and hadn’t offered Gurney one either. The man covered his face with his hands, struggled to stifle a yawn and lost the battle.

“Long day?”

“You could say that. Been on for eighteen hours straight, six more to go.”

“Paperwork?”

“You got that right, times ten. You see, my friend, this department is exactly the wrong size. Just large enough to have all the bureaucratic bullshit of the big city and just small enough to have no place to hide. So we had this raid last night on a crack house that turned out to be surprisingly crowded. Result is I’ve got one holding pen full of mopes and another one full of crack whores, plus a mountain of evidence bags that I need to finish processing. So let’s get to it. What exactly is the NYPD’s interest in Kim Corazon?”

“Sorry … maybe I didn’t make my position clear enough on the phone. I’m NYPD, retired. Got out two and half years ago.”

“Retired? No, I kinda missed that. So you’re what? A private investigator?”

“More like a friend of the family. Kim’s mother is a journalist, writes a lot of stuff about cops. We crossed paths while I was still on the job.”

“So how well do you know Kim?”

“Not well. I’m just trying to help her out with a journalism project, something about unsolved murders, but we ran into a bit of a complication today.”

“Look, I don’t have a lot of time here. Maybe you could be a little more specific?”

“The young lady has a stalker in her life, not a very nice one.”

“That so?”

“You didn’t know?”

Schiff’s gaze darkened. “I’m getting lost. Why are we having this conversation?”

“Good question. Would you be surprised if I told you that right now in Kim Corazon’s apartment there’s fresh evidence of an unauthorized entry and some very freaky vandalism, with a clear intent to intimidate?”

“Surprised? I can’t say that I would be. We’ve been up and down that road with Ms. Corazon quite a few times.”

“And?”

“Lot of potholes.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

Schiff picked some wax out of his ear and flicked it on the floor. “She tell you who she thinks is responsible?”

“Her ex-boyfriend, Robby Meese.”

“You ever talk to Meese?”

“No. How about you?”

“Yeah, I talked to him.” He checked his cell phone again. “Look, I can give you exactly three minutes. Professional courtesy. By the way, you got any ID on you?”

Gurney showed him his PBA card and his driver’s license.

“Okay, Mr. NYPD, quick summary, off the record. Basically, Meese’s story sounds as good as hers. Each one of them claims the other one is angry, unstable, reacting badly to their breakup. She says he got into her apartment three or four times. Bunch of silly crap—loosened doorknobs, moved things, hid things, took the knives, put back the knives—”

Gurney interrupted. “You mean, put a knife on her bathroom floor along with a drop of blood. I wouldn’t call that ‘putting back the knives.’ I don’t see how you could ignore—”

“Whoa! Nobody ignored anything. The initial stuff, doorknobs, crap like that—that was all responded to by uniformed patrol. Did we run out and dust the loose knobs for fingerprints? We’d have to be nuts to do that. We live in a real city here with real problems. But procedures were followed. I’ve got the incident reports in the case file. The later blood complaint was referred to us by patrol. My partner and I took a look, samples to the lab, knife to fingerprints, et cetera. Turned out the only fingerprints on the knife were Ms. Corazon’s. Tiny drop of blood on the floor was beef blood. You know? Like steak.”

“You questioned Meese?”

“Of course we questioned Meese.”

“And?”

“He isn’t admitting to anything, and there’s zero evidence of his involvement. He’s sticking to his story that Corazon’s a vindictive bitch who’s trying to get him in trouble.”

“So what’s the current theory here?” asked Gurney incredulously. “That Kim is crazy enough to be doing this stuff herself? So she can blame her ex-boyfriend for it?”

Schiff’s stare seemed to communicate a willingness to believe exactly that. Then he shrugged. “Or some third party is doing it, for reasons yet to be discovered.” He glanced at his cell phone for the third time. “Got to go. Time flies when you’re having fun.” He started moving toward the open interrogation-room door.

“How come no cameras?” asked Gurney.

“Say again?”

“The obvious response to repeated trespass and vandalism complaints would be to install hidden security cameras on the premises.”

“I made that suggestion strongly to Ms. Corazon. She refused. Characterized it as an intolerable invasion of her privacy.”

“I’m surprised she’d react that way.”

“Unless her complaints are bullshit and a camera would prove it.”

They walked in silence back to the reception area, past the desk sergeant, to the main door. As Gurney was about to exit, Schiff stopped him. “Didn’t you say a few minutes ago that you’d discovered fresh evidence in her apartment that I ought to know about?”

“That’s what I said.”

“So? What was it?”

“You sure you want to know?”

There was a flash of anger in Schiff’s eyes. “Yeah, I’d like to know.”

“There are drops of blood leading from the kitchen to a chest in the basement. There’s a sharp little knife in the chest. But maybe that’s no big deal, right? Maybe Kim just squeezed the juice out of another steak, dripped it down the stairs. Maybe she’s just getting crazier and more vindictive by the minute.”


Gurney’s drive home was an uncomfortable one. He kept hearing the echo of his own sarcastic parting shot at Schiff. The more he turned it over in his mind, the more it appeared to fit a pattern—the pattern of petty combativeness that had dominated his thinking and behavior since his injuries.

He’d always had a habit of challenging the prevailing wisdom in any situation, as well as a talent for detecting discrepancies. But slowly he was becoming aware of something else going on inside him, something less objective. His intellectual bent for testing the logic of every opinion, every conclusion, had been infused with hostility—a hostility that ranged from a cranky contrariness to something verging on rage. He’d become increasingly isolated, increasingly defensive, increasingly resistant to any idea not his own. And he was convinced it had all begun six months earlier with the three bullets that had nearly killed him. Objectivity, once an asset he took for granted, was now a quality he needed to strive for. But he knew it was worth the effort. Without objectivity he had nothing.

A therapist had told him long ago, “Whenever you’re disturbed, try to identify the fear beneath the disturbance. The root is always fear, and unless we face it, we tend to act badly.” Now, taking a cool step back, Gurney asked himself what he was afraid of. The question occupied him for most of the remaining trip home. The clearest answer he could come up with was also the most embarrassing.

He was afraid of being wrong.


He parked next to Madeleine’s car by the side door of the farmhouse. The mountain air felt chilly. He went into the house, hung up his jacket in the mudroom, continued on into the kitchen, and called out, “I’m home.” There was no response. The place had an indescribable deadness about it—a peculiar sort of emptiness it had only when Madeleine was out.

He had to go to the bathroom, started in that direction, then remembered that he’d forgotten to bring in Kim’s blue folder from the car. He went back out for it, but before he got to the car, something bright and red to the right of the parking area caught his eye. It was in the middle of the raised garden bed where Madeleine had planted flowers the previous year—a fact that was responsible for his first impression: that it was some sort of red blossom atop a straight stem. A second later it occurred to him that the time of year would make any blossom unlikely. However, when he reached the bed and realized what he was actually looking at, the truth didn’t make any more sense than a rose in full bloom would have.

The straight stem was the shaft of an arrow. The arrow was sticking point-down into the soft wet earth, and the “blossom” was the fletching on the notched end—three scarlet half feathers, shining brilliantly in the angled sun.

Gurney gazed at it wonderingly. Had Madeleine put it there? If so, where had she gotten it? Was she using it as some sort of marker? It looked new, unweathered, so it couldn’t have been under the snow the whole winter. If Madeleine hadn’t put it there, who could have? Was it possible it wasn’t “put” there at all but shot there by someone with a bow? To have ended up embedded like this at a nearly vertical angle, though, it would have to have been shot nearly vertically into the air. When? Why? By whom? Standing where?

He stepped up onto the low bed, grasped the shaft close to the ground, and slowly extracted it. It was tipped with a four-pronged razor broadhead—making it the kind of arrow that a hunter with a serious bow can propel clear through a deer. As he studied the deadly projectile, he was struck by the improbable coincidence of coming upon two sharp weapons surrounded by troubling questions on the same day.

Of course, Madeleine might have a simple explanation for the arrow. He took it into the house, to the kitchen sink, and rinsed it clean under the running water. The broadhead appeared to be carbon steel, keen enough to shave with. Which brought his mind back to the knife in Kim’s basement, which reminded him that her folder was still in the car. He laid the arrow gently on the pine sideboard and headed out through the little hallway past the mudroom.

As he opened the side door, he came face-to-face with Madeleine, dressed in one of her startling color combinations—rose sweatpants, a lavender fleece jacket, and an orange baseball cap. She had that pleasantly exercised, slightly-out-of-breath look she always had when she returned from a hill walk. He stepped back to let her in.

She smiled. “It’s soooo beautiful! Did you see that amazing light on the hillside? With that blush in the buds—did you notice that?”

“What buds?”

“You didn’t see it? Oh, come here, come.” She led him outside by the arm, pointing happily to the trees beyond the upper pasture. “You only see it in the early spring—that hint of pink in the maples.”

Gurney saw what she was talking about but failed to share her blissful reaction. Instead the faint wash of color over the brownish gray background of the landscape jogged loose an old memory—one that sickened him: brownish gray water in a ditch next to an abandoned service road behind La Guardia Airport, a faint reddish tint in the fetid water. The tint was oozing from a machine-gunned body just below the surface.

She looked at him with concern. “Are you okay?”

“Tired, that’s all.”

“You want some coffee?”

“No.” He said it sharply, didn’t know why.

“Come inside,” she said, taking off her jacket and hat and hanging them in the mudroom. He followed her into the kitchen. She went to the sink and turned on the tap. “How did your trip to Syracuse work out?”

It occurred to him that the damn blue folder was still in his car. “I can’t hear you with the water running,” he said. That made … what? Three times he’d forgotten to bring it in? Three times in the past ten minutes? Jesus.

She filled a glass and turned off the water. “I asked about your trip to Syracuse.”

He sighed. “The trip was peculiar. Syracuse is pretty bleak. Hold on … I’ll tell you about it in a minute.” He went out to the car and this time returned with the object in hand.

Madeleine looked perplexed. “I’d heard that there were some very nice old neighborhoods. Maybe not in the part of town you were in?”

“Yes and no. Nice old neighborhoods interspersed with neighborhoods from hell.”

She glanced at the folder in his hand. “Is that Kim’s project?”

“What? Oh. Yes.” He looked around for a place to put it and noticed the arrow where he’d left it on the sideboard. He pointed to it. “What do you know about that?”

“That?” She stepped closer, examined it without touching it. “Is that the thing I saw outside?”

“When did you see it?”

“I don’t know. When I went out. Maybe an hour ago?”

“You don’t know anything about it?”

“Only that it was sticking in the flower bed. I thought you’d put it there.” There was a long silence as he stared at the arrow and she stared at him. “You think someone is hunting up here?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.

“It’s not hunting season.”

“Maybe some drunk thinks it is.”

“Pleasant thought.”

She glared at the arrow, then shrugged. “You look exhausted. Come, sit down.” She gestured toward the table by the French doors. “Tell me about your day.”

When he had recounted everything he could remember, including Kim’s request to hire him to accompany her to two meetings the following day, he searched Madeleine’s face for a reaction. But instead of commenting on his narrative, she changed the subject.

“I had kind of a weighty day, too.” She leaned forward as she spoke, her elbows on the table, and pressed her palms together in front of her face, resting her chin on her thumbs. She closed her eyes and, for what seemed like a very long time, said nothing.

Then she opened her eyes, put her hands in her lap, straightened her back. “Do you remember me mentioning the mathematician?”

“Vaguely.”

“The math professor who was a client at the clinic?”

“Oh. Right.”

“He was originally referred to us as the result of a second DWI. Had career problems leading to no career at all, nasty divorce, alienation from his children, problems with the neighbors. Dark outlook, trouble sleeping, obsessed with the negative aspects of every situation he was involved in. Brilliant mind, but trapped in a downward spiral of depression. He came to three group sessions a week, plus one individual session. He was generally willing to talk. Or maybe I should say he was willing to complain, willing to blame everyone for everything. But never willing to do anything. Not even willing to leave the house, unless it was court-mandated. Wouldn’t take antidepressant medication, because that would mean accepting the fact that his own mental chemistry might be part of all his other problems. It’s almost funny. He was determined to do everything his way, and his way was to do nothing.” She smiled sadly and gazed out the window.

“What happened?”

“Last night he shot himself.”

They sat quietly at the table for a long while, looking out over the hills from the crossed angles of their individual chairs. Gurney felt strangely unhooked from time and place.

“So,” she said, turning back to him, “the little lady wants to hire you. And all you have to do is follow her around and tell her how you think she’s handling herself?”

“That’s what she says.”

“You’re wondering if there might be more to it?”

“If today was any indication, there might be a few hidden twists.”

She gave him one of those long, thoughtful looks of hers that felt like explorations of his soul. Then, with evident effort, she constructed a bright smile. “With you on the job, I don’t imagine they’ll stay hidden long.”