“Yeah. So her friend in Ithaca is going through her e-mail, around midnight, and discovers that she has a Facebook notification, which she clicks on, and she finds the message that Ruth posted at ten fifty-eight—apparently before she went downstairs to see who was coming to see her in that big military-looking whatever. Could be a Hummer, what do you think?”

“Could be.” Gurney pictured Max Clinter’s combat-ready, camouflage-painted Humvee.

“Well, if it wasn’t a Hummer, what the fuck was it? Anyway, the friend makes all these efforts to get through to Ruth, and, like I said, eventually a trooper comes, checks things out, decides everything looks fine, and he’s about to leave—when the anxious friend shows up in her car, having driven the twenty-five miles up from Ithaca, and insists they break into the house—because she’s afraid something bad has happened. She says if he doesn’t break into the house, she will. Big argument, young trooper almost arrests her, then another trooper comes by, older and wiser, calms everybody down. They start looking around the outside of the house. Eventually they find an open window, more discussion, more debate, et cetera, et cetera. Bottom line, the troopers finally go in and find Ruth Blum’s body.”

“Where?”

“In the entry hall, just inside the front door. Like she opened the door and wham!”

“ME is sure the weapon was an ice pick?”

“Wasn’t much doubt. According to Clegg, fucking thing was still stuck in her.”

“You don’t suppose he could get me into the house, do you?”

“No way. By now it’s been sealed off with a mile of yellow tape by guys for whom you could only be a problem. Their one job right now is to keep the scene pristine till the evidence techs go home and the BCI team hands the whole deal off to the FBI. They’re not about to hang their asses out the window so some retired hotshot from the city can have a walk-through.”

Gurney was itching to see it all for himself. Having a scene described to you was worth maybe 10 percent of being there. But he suspected that Hardwick was right. He couldn’t think of any upside for anyone in BCI, much less the FBI, to get him involved. Which made him wonder again what the upside was for Hardwick. Every time the man passed along information from a confidential file or an internal source, he was putting himself at risk. And he was doing it a lot.