Gurney smiled. “So how are we doing on those cameras?”

Schiff gave the impression that he hadn’t heard the question.

Gurney shrugged. “Yesterday would have been a good day to install them.”

There was a flash of anger in Schiff’s eyes. He took a final look around the basement, muttered something about lifting prints the following day from the circuit panel, asked about the chest turned on its side, peered into it.

Eventually he picked up the sawed step and took it upstairs with him, then spent the next ten minutes examining the apartment’s windows and doors. He asked Kim whether she’d had any unusual communications in the past few days, or any communications at all from Meese. Finally he asked how he could gain access to the apartment the following day, if he needed to. Then he left, trailed by the patrol officer.

Chapter 17

A Simple Initiative

The bedroom ceiling seemed a little brighter now, the sheet covering Gurney a little warmer. He felt satisfied that his sequential reconstruction of the previous evening’s affair was reasonably complete and orderly. Its significance, causes, purposes, motivations were yet to be determined. But at least he was starting to feel that he was on a path.

He closed his eyes.

He was awakened minutes later by the phone, followed by footsteps. It was picked up at the end of the fourth ring. He heard Madeleine’s voice, indistinctly, coming from the den. A few sentences, silence, then footsteps again. He thought she might be bringing the phone to him. Someone asking for him. Huffbarger, the neurologist? He thought back on the testy exchange with the doctor’s office person. Christ, when was that? Two or three days ago? Seemed like forever.

The footsteps passed the bedroom door, went out to the kitchen.

Female voices.

Madeleine and Kim.

Kim had driven him to Walnut Crossing after taking him to the emergency room in Syracuse. He hadn’t been able to grip the gearshift in his Outback without a red-hot stabbing sensation in his elbow—giving him the idea that his arm might be fractured and that trying to shift with it might not be smart—and Kim had seemed more than happy for an excuse to spend the night someplace other than in her apartment.

He recalled how she’d emphasized that it wouldn’t be safe for him to drive himself—even after the X-rays had shown that there was no fracture.

There was something about Kim’s attitude, her way of presenting herself to the world, that made him smile. She could gladly leave her apartment on a mission of mercy, but never because she’d been driven away by fear.

He forced himself out of bed—discovering new muscle aches as he did so. He took four ibuprofens and got into a hot shower.