“And there’s more. Remember at your house the other night Garrett said your power line had been severed by some sort of cable cutter? We found one under loose floorboards in the shed.”

“Quite a productive evening.”

“And I haven’t even mentioned the most interesting find—a pair of pliers that prove you were right.” Torres inserted a dramatic pause.

Gurney hated dramatic pauses. “What are you talking about?”

“There was a small tool kit under the sink in the cabin. Garrett thinks the pliers in the kit made the marks on the switched toilet handles. He’s having the lab do a comparison to be sure, but he tends to be right about stuff like that.”

Gurney felt the satisfaction of being on the right track. “Anything else?”

“Maybe, maybe not. That notebook computer and the phone you found in the cabin loft—they were password-protected, but we sent them to the forensic computer lab in Albany, and we hope to hear something back from them later this week.”

“This all sounds like a prosecutor’s dream. Do we know yet why Turlock showed up at the cabin when he did?”

“We think so. There were two battery-operated silent alarm systems—motion-activated—one in the cabin, one in the shed. They were programmed to contact certain phone numbers, presumably Turlock’s being one of them, which would explain why he showed up. Garrett was having trouble with a privacy code protecting the numbers, so we sent the devices to Albany along with the phone and computer.”

“Any leads on locating Beckert?”

“Not yet. His cell phone’s apparently been turned off. His wife claims she has no idea where he is. The DA’s getting a search warrant for their house in case she refuses access. Beckert doesn’t seem to have any personal friends, so that’s not a useful avenue. We’ve put a watch on his credit cards. So far no activity. He was seen leaving headquarters around five thirty the night before last. But we haven’t found anyone who saw him after that. His wife was at some three-day spa getaway with a couple of friends and claims she has no idea what time he got home that night or whether he came home at all.”

“He took his car?”

“Probably. All we know for sure is that it’s gone from the headquarters parking lot.”

A silence ensued as Gurney pondered the timing of the man’s disappearance the night before the incident at the gun club.

Torres spoke first. “It’s really pretty amazing.”

“What is?”

“How you’ve been right about everything. I remember in the very first meeting you came to—your uneasiness with the assumptions everyone was making about the case. It was like you knew instantly there was something wrong with the basic hypothesis. I could see how disturbed Beckert and Turlock were by the issues you were raising. Now we know why.”

“We still have a long way to go. A lot of open questions.”

“That reminds me of something you commented on in the video of the Steele shooting—the red laser dot on the back of Steele’s head as he was patrolling the edge of the crowd. You wondered why the dot followed him as long as it did. I think you said it was like two minutes?”

“That’s right.”

“Have you figured it out?”

“Not yet.”

“You still feel it’s significant?”

“Yes.”

“It seems like such a small thing.”

Gurney said nothing. But he was thinking it was the small things that often mattered the most, especially the ones that didn’t seem to make sense.

45

Gurney remained parked in front of the nursery greenhouses after ending his call with Torres. Hoping he wouldn’t be spotted by Rob Snook, he leaned back in his seat and tried to clear his mind and sort out his priorities for the rest of the day.

Clearing his mind, it turned out, wasn’t so easy. Something was bothering him, though he wasn’t sure what. Perhaps Madeleine’s prolonged absence? He always felt odd when she was away from home, and phone conversations didn’t really solve the problem.

He’d filled her in the previous evening on the gun club discoveries and the Turlock homicide, minus its more grotesque details. He’d cautioned her against saying anything yet to Kim or Heather, adding that he’d be meeting with the DA to review the situation. She’d told him she’d be staying at the inn on the Mercy medical campus for at least another twenty-four hours, at which point various Steele and Loomis relatives were expected to arrive. She’d reminded him to refill the feeders and let the chickens into their fenced run. He’d told her he loved her and missed her, and she’d said the same.