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Saying this, Gurney realized that he’d grown up in an era when “a break” automatically meant a cigarette break. Now, for virtually everyone, it meant a cell-phoning or texting break. As if to illustrate the thought, most of the officers getting to their feet and heading for the door were reaching for their BlackBerrys.

Gurney took a deep breath, extended his arms above his head, and stretched his back slowly from side to side. His introductory segment had created more muscle tension than he’d realized.

The female Hispanic officer waited for the tide of cell phoners to pass, then approached Gurney as he was removing the videotape from the machine. Her hair was thick and framed her face in a mass of soft, kinky curls. Her full figure was packed into a pair of tight black jeans and a tight gray sweater with a swooping neckline. Her lips glistened. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said with a serious-student frown. “That was really good.”

“The tape, you mean?”

“No, I mean you. I mean… what I mean is”-she was incongruously blushing under her serious demeanor-“your whole presentation, your explanation of why people believe things, why they believe some things more strongly, all of that. Like that eureka fallacy thing-that really made me think. The whole presentation was really good.”

“Your own contributions helped make it good.”

She smiled. “I guess we’re just on the same wavelength.”

Chapter 6

Home

By the time Gurney was nearing the end of his two-hour drive from the academy in Albany to his farmhouse in Walnut Crossing, dusk was settling stealthily into the winding valleys of the western Catskills.

As he turned off the county road onto the dirt-and-gravel lane that led up to his hilltop property, the jazzed illusion of energy he’d received from two large containers of strong coffee during the afternoon seminar break was now sinking deep into its inversion phase. The fading day generated an overwrought image that he assumed was the product of caffeine withdrawal: summer sidling off the stage like an aging actor while autumn, the undertaker, waited in the wings.

Christ, my brain is turning to mush.

He parked the car as usual on the worn patch of weedy grass at the top of the pasture, parallel to the house, facing a deep rose-and-purple swath of sunset clouds beyond the far ridge.

He entered the house through the side door, kicked off his shoes in the room that served as a laundry and pantry, and continued into the kitchen. Madeleine was on her knees in front of the sink, brushing shards of a broken wineglass into a dustpan. He stood watching her for several seconds before speaking. “What happened?”

“What does it look like?”

He let a few more seconds pass. “How are things at the clinic?”

“Okay, I guess.” She stood, smiled gamely, walked over to the pantry, and emptied the dustpan noisily into the plastic trash barrel. He walked to the French doors and stared out at the monochrome landscape, at the large pile of logs by the woodshed waiting to be split and stacked, the grass that needed its final mowing of the season, the ferny asparagus ready to be cut down for the winter-cut and then burned to avoid the risk of asparagus beetles.

Madeleine came back into the kitchen, switched on the recessed lights in the ceiling over the sideboard, replaced the dustpan under the sink. The increased illumination in the room had the effect of further darkening the outside world, turning the glass doors into reflectors.

“I left some salmon on the stove,” she said, “and some rice.”

“Thank you.” He watched her in the glass pane. She seemed to be gazing into the dishwater in the sink. He remembered her saying something about going out that night, and he decided to risk a guess. “Book-club night.”

She smiled. He wasn’t sure whether it was because he’d gotten it right or wrong.

“How was the academy?” she asked.

“Not bad. A mixed bag of attendees-all the basic types. There’s always the cautious group-the ones who wait and watch, who believe in saying as little as possible. The utilitarians, the ones who want to know exactly how they can use every fact you give them. The minimizers who want to know as little as possible, get involved as little as possible, do as little as possible. The cynics who want to prove that any idea that didn’t occur first to them is bullshit. And, of course, the ‘positives’-probably the best name for them-the ones who want to learn as much as they can, see more clearly, become better cops.” He felt comfortable talking, wanted to go on, but she was studying the dishwater again. “So… yeah,” he concluded, “it was an okay day. The ‘positives’ made it… interesting.”

“Men or women?”

“What?”

She lifted the spatula out of the water, frowning at it as though noticing for the first time how dull and scratched it was. “The ‘positives’-were they men or women?”

It was curious how guilty he could feel when, really, there was nothing to feel guilty about. “Men and women,” he replied.

She held the spatula up closer to the light, wrinkled her nose in disapproval, and tossed it into the garbage receptacle under the sink.

“Look,” he said. “About this morning. This business with Jack Hardwick. I think we need to start that discussion over again.”

“You’re meeting with the victim’s mother. What is there to discuss?”

“There are good reasons to meet with her,” he pressed on blindly. “And there may be some good reasons not to.”

“A very intelligent way of looking at it.” She seemed coolly amused. Or, at least, in an ironical mood. “Can’t talk about it right now, though. Don’t want to be late. For my book club.”

He heard a subtle emphasis on that last phrase-just enough, perhaps, to let him know she knew that he’d guessed. A remarkable woman, he thought. And despite his anxiety and exhaustion, he couldn’t help smiling.

Chapter 7

Val Perry

As usual, Madeleine was first up the next morning.

Gurney awoke to the hiss and gurgle of the coffeemaker-along with the sinking realization that he’d forgotten to fix her bicycle brakes.

Hard upon that pang came a sense of uneasiness about his plan to meet later that morning with Val Perry. Although he’d emphasized to Jack Hardwick that his willingness to talk to her did not imply any further commitment-that the meeting was primarily a gesture of courtesy and condolence to someone who’d suffered a dreadful loss-a cloud of second thoughts was descending on him. Pushing them aside as best he could, he showered, dressed, and strode purposefully out through the kitchen to the pantry, mumbling good morning to Madeleine, who was sitting in her customary position at the breakfast table with a slice of toast in her hand and a book propped open in front of her. Slipping into his canvas barn jacket that he removed from its hook in the pantry, he went out the side door and headed for the tractor shed that housed their bicycles and kayaks. The sun had not yet appeared, and the morning was surprisingly raw for early September.

He rolled Madeleine’s bicycle out from behind the tractor into the light at the front of the open shed. The aluminum frame was shockingly cold. The two small wrenches he chose from the set on the shed wall were just as cold.

Cursing, twice banging his knuckles against the sharp edges of the front forks, the second time drawing blood, he adjusted the cables that controlled the position of the brake pads. Creating the proper clearance-allowing the wheel to move freely when the brake was disengaged, yet providing adequate pressure against the rim when the brake was applied-was a trial-and-error process that he had to repeat four times to get right. Finally, with more relief than satisfaction, he declared the job done, replaced the wrenches, and headed back to the house, one hand numb and the other aching.

Passing the woodshed and the adjacent pile of logs made him wonder for the tenth time in as many days, should he rent a wood-splitter or buy one? There were disadvantages either way. The sun was still not up, but the squirrels were already engaged in their morning attack on the bird feeders, raising another question that seemed to have no happy answer. And, of course, there was the matter of the manure for the asparagus.

He went into the kitchen and ran warm water over his hands.

As the stinging subsided, he announced, “Your brakes are fixed.”

“Thank you,” said Madeleine cheerily without looking up from her book.

Half an hour later-resembling a paint-by-numbers sunset in her lavender fleece pants, pink Windbreaker, red gloves, and an orange wool hat pulled down over her ears-she went out to the shed, mounted her bike, rode slowly and bumpily down the pasture path, and disappeared onto the town road beyond the barn.

Gurney spent the next hour on a mental review of the facts of the crime as they had been related to him by Hardwick. Each time he went over the scenario, he was increasingly troubled by its theatricality, its almost-operatic excess.

At 9:00 A.M. exactly, the time appointed for his meeting with Val Perry, he went to the window to see if she might be coming up the road.

Think of the devil and the devil arrives. In this case at the wheel of a Turbo Porsche in racing green-a model Gurney thought sold for around $160,000. The sleek vehicle crept past the barn, past the pond, slowly up the pasture hillside, to the small parking area next to the house, its hugely powerful engine purring softly. With a mixture of cautious curiosity and a bit more excitement than he’d want to admit, Gurney went out to greet his guest.

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