“I think it does. If there was a record in your visitors’ log of a delivery being made to Mary Spalter shortly before her death, the whole affair might have been looked into more carefully. It was evidently important to the killer that Mary’s death appear to be accidental. And it worked. I suspect there wasn’t even a thorough autopsy.”

Her mouth was open. “So … you’re saying … we really did have a murderer here … in my office … and in Marjorie’s house … and …”

Suddenly she looked vulnerable, frightened. And just as suddenly, Gurney was filled with a fear that he was doing what he’d warned himself against: He was moving much too fast. He was making assumptions on top of assumptions and mistaking them for rational conclusions. And another troubling question came to mind. Why was he spelling out his murder hypothesis to this woman? Was he trying to scare her? Observe her reaction? Or did he just want to have someone ratify the way he was connecting the dots—as if that would prove he was right?

But what if he was connecting the wrong dots, creating the wrong picture entirely? What if the so-called dots were just random isolated events? At times like this he always recalled, uneasily, that everyone on earth at a particular latitude sees the same stars in the sky. But no two cultures see the same constellations. He’d seen evidence of the phenomenon again and again: The patterns we perceive are determined by the stories we want to believe.

Chapter 23

Click

In an uncertain and uncomfortable frame of mind, Gurney pulled into the first convenience store parking lot he reached after leaving Emmerling Oaks.

He bought a large strong coffee, plus a couple of granola bars to compensate for the lunch he hadn’t had, and retreated to his car. He ate one of the granola bars—which turned out to be hard, tasteless, and sticky. He tossed the other one in his glove compartment for some moment of more desperate hunger and took a few swallows of lukewarm coffee.

Then he got down to business.

Before he left Carol Blissy’s office, he’d downloaded the floral delivery video files to his phone, and now he sent the office segment to Bolo’s cell number with a cover text message: “Does the little person with the flowers remind you of anyone?”

He sent the same video material to Hardwick with a message saying: “Individual carrying the flowers may be a person of interest in the Spalter case—a possible link between the deaths of Mary and Carl. More to come.”