“I don’t think anything. I just have questions. Lots of questions. Was the manifesto just the wrapping on a different sort of bomb—a Christmas present in an Easter box? Did our Clyde have a Bonnie in his car? Is the key to it all the set of six little animals from Noah’s Ark? Are there secret links among the victims no one’s looked at yet? Was it wealth itself that painted targets on their backs or was it how they got the wealth? Now, that’s an interesting question, don’t you think?” He winked at Gurney. It was clear he wasn’t interested in an answer. He was on a rhetorical roll all his own. “So many questions. Might the shepherd be a shepherdess—a Bonnie by herself—a crazy bitch with a grudge against the rich?”

He fell silent. The sole sound in the eerie stillness was the repetitive squeaking of the springs in his exercisers.

“You must be developing very strong hands,” said Gurney.

Clinter flashed a fierce grin. “The last time I met the Good Shepherd, I was terribly, shamefully, tragically underprepared. That won’t be the case next time.”

Gurney had a momentary vision of the climactic scene in Moby-Dick. Ahab with his hands gripping the harpoon, driving it into the back of the whale. Ahab and the whale, the entangled pair, disappearing into the depths of the sea forever.

Chapter 13

Serial Massacre

Once Gurney had departed from Clinter’s outlandish compound—from its real or imagined vipers, its swampy moat, its skeleton sentinel—and had put a few miles behind him, he pulled over into a roadside turnaround. It was near the top of a gentle rise that gave him a view of the northern end of Lake Cayuga, as brilliantly blue as the sky above it.

He took out his phone, entered Jack Hardwick’s number, and got voice mail.

“Hey, Jack, I have questions. Just had a talk with Mr. Clinter. Need your perspective on a couple of things. Call me. Sooner the better. Thanks.”

Then he called Kim.

“Dave?”

“Hi. I’m up in your general neighborhood, looking into a few things. Thought it might make sense to have a word with Robby Meese. You have an address and phone number for him?”

“What … Why do you want to talk to him?”

“Is there a reason you don’t want me to?”

“No. It’s just that … I don’t know … Sure, okay, just a second.” In less than a minute, she picked up again. “He has an apartment in the Tipperary Hill neighborhood, 3003 South Lowell.” Then she read off a cell number, which Dave copied down. “Remember, he’s using the name Montague, not Meese. But … what are you going to do?”

“Just ask questions, see if I can find out anything that makes sense.”

“Sense?”