On Harrow Hill

A digital clock on the wall behind Hardwick’s bed said it was 4:05 a.m.

Stryker activated her iPad. After announcing the time, the fact that the meeting was being recorded, and the names of the people present, she asked Gurney to recount the events of the night in detail, from the moment he suspected the presence of a trespasser on his property up to his arrival at the fatal collision site.

He went through it all—beginning with Madeleine’s initial glimpse of the flickering orange glow, and proceeding in vivid detail through the exchange of gunfire, at which point Stryker interrupted to ask if he’d identified himself as a police officer. He said that he had, loud and clear, and that his announcement was ignored. All true enough. He went on to describe the injury that had rendered him helpless, Madeleine’s weaponizing of the battery-driven circular saw, the mutilation of Peale, and his shrieking flight into the night—the “escape” that ended in a fatal collision a mile down the road.

Stryker asked why he’d called Hardwick at the outset rather than 911. He gave her the same answer he’d given Madeleine. She frowned but said nothing.

She asked Madeleine to describe her thoughts, movements, reason for choosing the saw, what options she had considered, and what her intention was as she approached Peale.

Madeleine stared at her in disbelief. “A homicidal lunatic with an assault rifle was about to kill my husband. My intention was to save his life. I did what occurred to me. There was no time for options. If I’d stopped to consider options, my husband would be dead.”

Stryker nodded without conveying an iota of sympathy. She turned her attention back to Gurney.

“I understand that you told Jack Hardwick that the man who had just fled from your property and crashed into him was Danforth Peale. How did you know that?”

“I wasn’t absolutely certain until the very end—when he pointed that damn AK-47 at my heart and was about to pull the trigger. At that moment he abandoned the effort to disguise his voice. I recognized it. His intonations were quite distinctive.”

“You say that’s when you were absolutely certain. Does that mean at some earlier point you were moderately certain?”

Gurney wondered whether she was making a special effort to be grating, or if it was a natural gift. Either way, he decided to ignore the tone and respond to the content of the question.

“By yesterday morning I’d seen enough arrows pointing toward Peale to convince me that they weren’t all coincidental and that he was, in fact, Lorinda’s accomplice. But then—”

Stryker interrupted him.

“Why on earth did you keep this to yourself? You were right there with me at Peale’s house, but you didn’t say a single word. I’d like to know why.”

“What I thought I knew was rendered meaningless by what appeared to be Peale’s murder. It suddenly seemed more likely that Lorinda’s accomplice was someone else, and Peale was just his latest victim.”

Stryker began tapping her pen on the table. “And this confusion didn’t get cleared up until the moment you recognized his voice?”

“It started getting cleared up before that. My confusion when I saw that bloody kitchen and the drag marks outside was caused by my asking myself why the body had been removed. That stymied me. But when I asked instead why it was missing, the answer occurred to me. It was missing for the simple reason that it didn’t exist. There was no body—because there was no murder.”

Stryker’s pen stopped moving. “Then whose blood was it? Who got dragged out to the car?”

“The whole scene was a setup. Peale probably used his own blood. You’ll know for sure when you get the DNA results. As for the drag marks, he could have made those with anything. I suspect the moment he heard what had happened on Harrow Hill he realized his grand plan had collapsed and it was time to get the hell out of Larchfield. The ‘murder’ scene was an effort to cover his tracks.”

“Grand plan? What grand plan?”

“The plan he’d worked out with Lorinda from day one.”

“Day one? Are you suggesting that he killed everyone—Angus Russell, Mary Kane, Linda Mason, Chandler Aspern, Billy Tate?”

“Russell, Kane, Mason, Aspern—all of those, but not Tate. Definitely not Tate.”

“Then who—”

He cut her off. “There are some things you need to know about Larchfield. Some are a matter of public record, some I got from Hilda Russell, and some through my own investigation.”

Stryker laid her pen down, steepled her fingers, and gave Gurney her expressionless attention.