the words through his teeth. ‘Let the devil sleep.’ I swear I almost pissed in my pants. I think I actually did piss in my pants.”
“How obvious was this slot in the board?”
“Not obvious at all. It was like the guy had taken a plane and made a tiny wood shaving to cover the hole.”
“So how did you—”
“You said it would be within a few feet of where you fell. Not a big area. I just kept looking till I found it.”
“Did you ask Kim who else knows about the bedtime story?”
“She insists the only person she ever told was her crazy ex. Of course, the crazy ex could have told other people.”
There was a silence, during which Gurney tried once again to draw together the disparate pieces of the case, which kept flying off in as many directions as there were pieces. And what case was he talking about anyway? The cold case of the six roadway murders, tied together by the manifesto of the Good Shepherd? The case of Kim Corazon’s alleged harassment by Robby Meese, escalating into vandalism and reckless endangerment? The arson case? Or some hypothetical master case in which all these events were intertwined—perhaps even connected to the falling arrow in the garden?
“Dad, you still there?”
“Sure.”
“There’s more. I haven’t told you the nastiest news,” said Kyle.
“Jesus. What is it?”
“Every room in Kim’s apartment is bugged, even the bathroom.”
Gurney felt a small frisson rise up the back of his neck. “What did you find?”
“In your phone message you mentioned the obvious places to look? The first place I checked was the smoke alarm in the living room, because I know what the inside of a smoke alarm is supposed to look like. And I found something that clearly doesn’t belong there. Not much bigger than a pack of matches with a fine wire sticking out of the end. Figured it was some kind of aerial.”
“Was there anything resembling a lens?”
“No.”
“It could be as small as half a grain of—”
“No, believe me, no lens. I thought about that, and I checked.”
“Okay,” said Gurney, absorbing the significance of this. The absence of video capability meant that the device wasn’t part of the police’s promised surveillance equipment. To identify an intruder, you planted a camera, not an audio bug. “Then you checked the other smoke alarms?”
“One in every room, and every one of them has one of those things in it.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“Outside. On the sidewalk.”
“Good thinking. Am I getting the impression you have more to tell me?”
“Did you know there’s an access panel that leads to the apartment upstairs?”
“No. But I’m not surprised. Where is it?”
“In the laundry alcove off the kitchen.”
Gurney recalled the kitchen and the laundry area as both having a ceiling pattern of large squares formed by intersecting strips of decorative molding—ideal for concealing a movable panel.
“What on earth prompted you to—”
“Check the ceilings? Kim told me sometimes she hears noises at night, creaking, other creepy little sounds. And she told me about all that other odd shit—things being moved, things missing and reappearing, the bloodstains—even though she’d had her locks changed. Plus the fact that the apartment upstairs is supposed to be vacant. So when you put all that together …”
“Very good,” said Gurney, impressed. “You figured the most likely access to her apartment would be through the ceiling?”
“And the most likely ceiling would be the one with the panel moldings.”
“Then what?”
“Then I got a ladder from the basement and started pressing on each square until I found one that felt a little different, had a different kind of give. I got a knife and loosened the molding around it, enough to see that there were cut lines underneath. I didn’t go any further. If you didn’t want me to move the bugs, I didn’t think you’d want me to move the panel. Besides, it was secured from the other side, and I’d have to break it to get through it, which I didn’t want to do, not knowing what might be up there.”
Gurney noted the eagerness of the chase in his son’s voice, tempered with barely enough caution. “You’ve had a busy afternoon.”
“Got to catch the bad guys. What’s the next step?”
“Your next step should be to get the hell out of there and come back here—both of you. My next step is to let these new facts sink in for a while. Sometimes when I go to bed with questions, I wake up with answers.”
“Is that true?”
“No, but it sounds