Free Shut Your Eyes Tight by John Verdon Page B

so.”
    “Why would she want to bother with … with
 … him
?” She stumbled at the end, as though grabbing for a nasty epithet and finding none within reach.
    “Good question, Carol, but not one I can answer.”
    His comment was followed by a cut to the view from anothercamera, a camera positioned to cover a quadrant of the property that included the cottage, the rose garden, and half of the main house. Jillian, the picture-book bride, was knocking on the cottage door.
    Again Hardwick stopped the video, causing the three figures to break down into a mosaic pattern on the screen. “All right,” he said. “Here we are. Starting now. The critical fourteen minutes. The fourteen minutes during which Hector Flores kills Jillian Perry Ashton. The fourteen minutes during which he cuts her head off with a machete, slips out the back window, and escapes without a trace. Those fourteen minutes start when she steps inside and closes the door.”
    Hardwick released the “pause” button, and the action resumed. Jillian opened the cottage door, stepped inside, and closed it behind her.
    “That’s it,” said Hardwick, pointing at the screen, “the last sight of her alive.”
    The camera remained on the cottage while Gurney imagined the murder about to occur behind the floral-curtained windows.
    “You said Flores ‘slips out the back window and escapes without a trace’ after killing her. You mean that literally?”
    “Well,” said Hardwick, pausing dramatically, “I’d have to say … yes and no.”
    Gurney sighed and waited.
    “The thing is,” said Hardwick, “Flores’s disappearance has a familiar echo about it.” Another pause, accented by a sly smile. “There was a trail from the back window of the cottage that went out into the woods.”
    “What’s your point, Jack?”
    “That trail out into the woods? It just stopped dead a hundred and fifty yards from the house.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “It doesn’t remind you of anything?”
    Gurney stared at him incredulously. “You mean the Mellery case?”
    “Don’t know of a whole lot of other murder cases with trails stopping in the middle of the woods with no obvious explanation.”
    “So you’re saying … what?”
    “Nothing definite. Just wondering if you might have missed a loose end when you wrapped up the Mellery lunacy.”
    “What kind of loose end?”
    “Possibility of an accomplice?”
    “
Accomplice?
Are you nuts? You know as well as I do there was nothing about the Mellery case that suggested even the remote possibility of more than one perp.”
    “You a little touchy on that subject?”
    “
Touchy?
I’m touchy about time-wasting suggestions based on nothing more than your demented sense of humor.”
    “So it’s all a coincidence?” Hardwick was striking the precise supercilious note that went through Gurney like nails on a blackboard.
    “
All what
, Jack?”
    “The MO similarities.”
    “You better tell me pretty damn quick what you’re talking about.”
    Hardwick’s mouth stretched sideways—maybe a grin, maybe a grimace. “Watch the movie,” he said. “Only a few minutes to go.”
    A few minutes passed. Nothing of significance was happening on the screen. Several guests wandered over to the flower beds that bordered the cottage, and one of the women in the group, the one Hardwick had earlier identified as the lieutenant governor’s wife, seemed to be conducting a kind of botanical tour, speaking energetically as she pointed at various blooms. Her group moved gradually out of the frame as though attached by invisible threads to its leader. The camera remained focused on the cottage. The curtained windows revealed nothing.
    Just as Gurney was about to question the purpose of this segment of the video, the view switched back to one showing Scott Ashton and the Luntzes in the foreground and the cottage in the background.
    “Time for the toast,” Ashton was saying. All three were looking toward the cottage.