Читать книгу White River Burning - John Verdon - Страница 18

Gurney spent the drive home from Abelard’s pondering what Hardwick had told him about Beckert and convincing himself that backing away was, in fact, the sanest course of action.

As he was getting out of the car by the side of the house, he could hear the landline phone ringing. He had some difficulty opening the mudroom door, stuck as it often was in warm weather, and by the time he got to the phone a morose female voice was concluding a message with a call-back number.

He picked up the handset. “Gurney here.”

“Oh . . . Mr. Gurney?”

“Yes?”

“This is Kim Steele. John Steele’s wife.”

He grimaced, picturing the TV image of the cop falling facedown on the sidewalk. “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Steele. Terribly sorry.”

There was a long moment of silence.

“Is there something I can do for you?” he asked.

“Can I come and speak with you? I don’t want to talk on the phone.” There was another silence, followed by what sounded to Gurney like a stifled sob. “I know where you live. I could be there in twenty-five minutes. Would that be okay?”

He hesitated. “Yes, that’s okay.”

He ended the call, thinking immediately of three good reasons why no would’ve been a smarter answer.

Putting aside his inclination to speculate on why the wife of a dead cop might want to talk to him or how she even knew he existed, he decided to use the intervening time to check the internet for any stories on the shooting that provided more than the bare-bones information he’d already seen.

He went to the table in the breakfast nook where he’d left his laptop. Using the combination of “Steele” and “White River” brought up links to Beckert’s press conference, media reports on the incident, and opinion pieces from every point on the political spectrum—each purporting to explain the true causes of the violence. Nowhere did he find any details on the life of John Steele beyond the fact that he had a wife, now a widow.

He decided to try entering the names “John Steele” and “Kim Steele” at various social media sites. He went first to Facebook. While he was waiting for the page to load, his attention was drawn to movement out beyond the French doors in the low pasture. He stood up just in time to see three whitetail deer bounding through an opening in the ancient rock wall that separated the pasture from the woods. Assuming something had spooked them, he looked in the direction of the barn and pond. And there, at the end of the town road, another kind of movement—a glint of light, perhaps reflecting off a car or pickup truck—caught his eye. Whatever it was, it was obscured by the big forsythia bush at the corner of the barn.

He opened the door and stepped out onto the patio. But the situation was no clearer from there. He was about to walk down to the barn to satisfy his curiosity when the landline phone rang. He went back and checked the ID screen. It was Sheridan Kline.

“Gurney here.”

“Hi, Dave.” Kline’s voice was full of oily sincerity. “I’m responding to your message. The truth is there are some sensitive details in this situation that wouldn’t be appropriate for me to discuss with someone outside the official law-enforcement circle. I’m sure you can understand that. But if you choose to step inside the tent, on day one I’ll make sure you know everything I know. And you’ll have the best of both worlds here—official status plus independence from the bureaucracy. You’ll be reporting only to me.”

That last promise was delivered as though it were a precious privilege.

Gurney said nothing.

“Dave?”

“I’m absorbing what you said.”

“Ah. Well. Good. We’ll leave it at that. The sooner you give me your answer, the better our chances of saving some lives.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

“I look forward to it.”

Gurney replaced the handset, aware he’d let pass an opportunity to tell Kline he’d decided not to get involved. He’d hardly begun to rationalize his foot-dragging when he remembered the possible vehicle by the barn.

He headed out through the French doors and down into the pasture. When he reached the far side of the forsythia, he had two surprises. The first was the car. It was a sleek Audi A7, a rarity in an area where “luxury vehicle” usually meant a crew-cab pickup with big tires. The second was that there was no one in it.

He looked around. He saw no one.

“Hello?” he called out.

There was no response.

He walked around the barn. The lush spring grass was moist with dew where the old apple trees shaded it, but there were no footprints.

Back by the car, he scanned the surrounding area—the pastures, the pond, the cleared swath along the edge of the woods. No sign of anyone.

As he was deciding what to do next, he heard a faint scraping sound. He heard it again—sharper this time and coming, it seemed, from the thicket above the pond. The only thing he could see up there that wasn’t part of the natural flora was the tractor he’d been using to clear his little archaeology site.

Curious, he headed up the trail that led to the excavation. The scraping became more distinct. He came around a bend in the trail and the broad rectangular hole came into view. But it wasn’t until he reached the excavation’s edge that he discovered the source of the sound.

A man, intent on his work, was using a hand trowel to probe a crevice between two foundation stones. He was wearing beige slacks, expensive-looking brown loafers, and a tropical sport shirt garishly printed with palm fronds and toucans.

The man spoke without turning away from the ground. “Seventeen hundred, I’d say. Give or take twenty years or so. Could be as early as sixteen eighty. Interesting rust deposits along here.” He tapped the area in front of him with the point of the trowel, which Gurney recognized as the one he kept at the site. “Four separate deposits, at three-foot intervals.”

He straightened up now—a lanky, stork-like man with thinning hair the color of his beige slacks. As he gazed at Gurney the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses magnified his eyes. “Those remnants of chain links you mentioned in your message? They were distributed along the base of this wall, am I right?”

Some people were put off by Dr. Walter Thrasher’s mildly autistic avoidance of the social graces, but Gurney—for whom getting to the point was a virtue—was quite comfortable with the man’s approach.

“Right. Directly below the rust spots,” Gurney replied with a puzzled frown. “I thought you said you were coming here tomorrow. Did I lose a day somewhere?”

“No days lost. Just happened to be passing. Coming from White River, going to Albany, took a chance you might be home. Drove up to your barn, caught sight of your tractor, figured that’d be the site. Interesting. Very interesting.” As he was speaking he put down the trowel and scrambled with surprising agility up the short ladder out of the excavation.

“Interesting in what way?”

“Wouldn’t want to answer that prematurely. Depends on the nature of the artifacts. You mentioned baby teeth? And a knife?”

“As well as some glass, bits of rusted metal, hooks for stretching animal hides.”

There was a peculiar intensity in Thrasher’s magnified gaze. “No time to examine it all right now. Maybe just the knife and the teeth. A quick look?”

Gurney shrugged. “No problem.” He thought of asking Thrasher for a ride up to the house, but the chance of the low-slung A7 bottoming out in the pasture ruts was too great. “Wait here. I’ll be back.”

Thrasher was standing by his car when Gurney returned with the knife and the tinted-glass jar containing the teeth.

Thrasher gave the knife, especially what appeared to be a fingernail-sized crescent moon carved in the black handle, a close but rapid inspection. Ending with a nod and a grunt of satisfaction, he handed it back to Gurney. He took the tinted jar with greater care, almost a kind of trepidation, at first holding it up to examine the contents through the glass, then removing the top and peering in at the tiny teeth. He slowly tipped the jar, carefully letting just one tooth slide out onto his palm. He tilted his hand this way and that to view it from different angles. Then he tipped it back into the jar and replaced the lid.

“Would it be all right if I borrowed this for a day or two? Need my microscope to verify what we’ve got here.”

“You’re not sure they’re baby teeth?”

“Oh, they’re definitely baby teeth. No doubt about that.”

“Well, then . . .”

Thrasher hesitated, looked momentarily troubled. “There could be more than one way they ended up in this jar. Until I take a closer look, let’s leave it at that.”