Was it credible that all the recent interferences in her life, the assaults on her peace of mind, had been orchestrated by a pathetic ex-boyfriend? Was he that morbidly bitter at Kim’s ending their relationship? Could everything—the loosened bulbs, missing knives, bloodstains, sawed step, even the demonic whisper—have been motivated by pure jealousy, pure vindictiveness at being cast aside?

On the other hand, maybe the perpetrator was indeed Meese, but maybe the young man was driven by a motivation darker and sicker than spite. Maybe he was warning Kim that unless she took him back, his resentment would grow into something truly awful. Unless she took him back, he’d become a monster, a devil.

Maybe Meese’s inner life was more pathological than Kim realized.

The intensity of that whisper seemed pathological beyond question.

But that raised yet another possibility. It was the possibility that scared Gurney most of all. A possibility he hardly dared consider.

The possibility that there was no whisper.

Suppose what he’d “heard” was the result of his fall, a kind of mini-hallucination? Suppose the “sound” was merely a by-product of the jarring of his barely healed head wound? After all, the low, whistling tinnitus in his ears was not a real whistle; as Dr. Huffbarger had explained, it was a cognitive misinterpretation of a misplaced neural agitation. Suppose the whispered threat—with all its seething fury—had no real-world substance? The idea that sights and sounds might be nothing more than the offspring of bruised tissues and disrupted synapses sent a shiver through him.

Perhaps it was an unconscious insecurity about the whisper that had kept him from mentioning it to the patrol officer who’d come to Kim’s apartment in response to the 911 call he’d made after discovering the tread-sawing evidence. And perhaps that same insecurity had kept him from mentioning the whisper to Schiff when he’d arrived there half an hour later.

It was difficult at the time to decipher Schiff’s expression. One thing was clear: There was no joy in it. He kept looking at Gurney as if he sensed that some part of the story was missing. Then the skeptical detective had turned his attention to Kim, asking her a string of questions designed to pin down a time window in which the vandalism could have occurred.

“That’s what you’re calling this?” Gurney had interjected the second time Schiff used the term. “Vandalism?”

“For now, yeah,” said Schiff blandly. “You have a problem with that?”

“Painful form of vandalism,” said Gurney, slowly rubbing his forearm.

“You want an ambulance?”

Before Gurney could answer, Kim said, “I’m going to drive him to the ER.”

“That so?” asked Schiff, his eyes on Gurney. “Sounds good to me.”

Schiff stared at him for a moment, then said to the patrol officer who was standing in the background, “Make a note that Mr. Gurney declined ambulance transportation.”