Free Let the Devil Sleep by John Verdon Page B

it? Selfish, thoughtless bastard! Kim was devastated. More so than she’d been by the divorce two years earlier.
Completely devastated
.”
    “You see some significance in the timing?”
    “No, no, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s any connection between the Good Shepherd case and Emilio’s disappearance. How could there be? It’s just that both events happened the same month—March of 2000. Maybe part of the reason Kim feels as strongly as she does about the pain of those families at losing someone is that she lost her own father at the same time.”
    Now Gurney understood. “And the shared lack of closure—”
    “Yes. The Good Shepherd murders were never fully resolved, because the murderer was never caught. And Kim hasn’t been able to close the door on her father’s disappearance, because she could never find out what really happened to him. When she talks about the families of murder victims suffering from an ongoing misery, I think she’s talking about herself.”
    A fter concluding his conversation with Connie, Gurney sat for a long while at the table, trying to digest the implications of Emilio Corazon’s departure from Kim’s life.
    He gradually became aware of Madeleine’s knitting needles clicking softly and steadily. She was sitting in a pool of yellow lamplight,a ball of sage-colored yarn at her side in the armchair, a sage-colored sweater taking shape in her lap.
    He opened the blue folder to the section devoted to the Good Shepherd’s “Memorandum of Intent.” On a page of background information at the beginning of the section, someone, presumably Kim, had indicated that the original document had been delivered by express mail in a nine-by-twelve manila envelope, addressed to “The Director, New York State Police, Bureau of Criminal Investigation.” The delivery date was March 22, 2000—the Wednesday following the weekend of the first two shootings.
    Gurney turned the page and began to read the text of the memorandum itself. It began abruptly, with a summary statement consisting of numbered sentences:
    1. If the love of money, which is greed, is the root of all evil, then it follows that the greatest good will be achieved by its eradication. 2. Since greed does not exist in a vacuum but exists in its human carriers, it follows that the way to eradicate greed is to eradicate its carriers. 3. The good shepherd culls the flock, removing the diseased sheep from the healthy sheep, because it is good to stop the spread of infection. It is good to protect the good animals from the bad. 4. Although patience is a virtue, it is no sin to lose patience with greed. It is no sin to take up arms against wolves who devour children. 5. This is our declaration of war on the vain carriers of greed, the pickpockets who call themselves bankers, the limousine lice, the Mercedes maggots. 6. We will free the earth of this ultimate contagion, carrier by carrier, replacing the silence of passivity with the shattering of skulls until the earth is clean, the shattering of skulls until the flock is culled, the shattering of skulls until the root of all evil is dead and gone from the earth
.
    The next nineteen pages reiterated these sentiments at length, the manifesto drifting back and forth in its tone from prophetic to academic. The rational aspects of the argument were supported by extensive wealth-distribution data, purporting to demonstrate the unfairness of America’s economic structure—complete with trendstatistics showing the nation’s drift toward a Third World economy of extremes, in which enormous wealth is concentrated at the very top, poverty is expanding, and the middle class is shrinking.
    The main body of the document concluded:
    This gross and growing injustice is driven by the greed of the powerful and the power of the greedy. Moreover, the control exerted by this vile and devouring class over the media—society’s primary engine of influence—is virtually absolute. The channels of