| 30 |
After he showered and dressed, David made the bed and stood staring at it. For a decade, his love life, such as it was, had been exclusively in New York. This bed had remained his and Emily’s. Now his and Maddison’s. The passion that seemed so right the previous night began to feel like disloyalty if not infidelity, which made little sense, considering that Emily had been gone for ten years. Yet he felt a simmering mortification.
Moving briskly, he stripped the bed and then dressed it with fresh sheets and pillowcases, a new blanket. He returned the spread and smoothed it and made everything just right.
For a minute, two minutes, he could not stop staring at his handiwork.
Then, as if he were a hotel maid, he doubled back the spread, doubled it again, draped it on the footboard bench, and he folded back the sheets, as if turning the bed down for the night. He could have laid the sheets back at one side, but he laid them back at both, on the left and right.
It was 7:08 a.m., and he had much to do.
| 31 |
At his computer in the study, he visited the countywide law-enforcement site that offered a public-access police blotter for every community as well as for the territories in the sheriff’s jurisdiction.
The murder rate among the more than three and a half million residents of Orange County was low, averaging just six per month. The previous year, there had been seventy-one homicides.
If a murder—or call it an execution—had been committed in the past twenty-four hours, it had not been reported yet. But somewhere a body might be lying in coagulated gore, its former resident having been awakened from the dream of life. A door might at any moment be opened, a discovery made.
He didn’t bother to check the missing-persons report. Except in the cases involving children, those were usually not filed until the subject had been out of contact for a minimum of twenty-four hours.
Was that blood?
What—the dress? No, no, no. Wine. Just wine.
Most likely, it had been wine. The truth of her would not prove to be as dark as it sometimes seemed. She didn’t merely look like Emily, but was also good at heart, as Emily Carlino had been. That was what he believed. Needed to believe.
The business I had to take care of was so terrible, depressing, this awful man of such wicked character.
In the night, she hadn’t come into his bed with the scent or substance of another man clinging to her. She had been fresh, clean, and wholesome in her passion. Whatever “business” she conducted with that wicked individual had not involved intimacy. But that didn’t mean the only alternative explanation to sex was murder.
After exiting the Orange County police blotter, he accessed that for Santa Barbara County, where Maddison lived, which also had a low homicide rate. He scrolled backward day by day. On the rare occasion when he found a murder, he retreated from the site to review media reports regarding the case. If the murder had been public and witnesses had identified the perpetrator, or if the victim was from society’s most powerless class—a homeless person, an illegal immigrant living in one room above someone’s garage—he had no further interest in the case. The word assassination implied that the victim must be in a position of power, either in government or the private sector.
He found what he hoped not to find. Four months earlier, in November of the previous year, a husband and wife—Ephraim and Renata Zabdi, high-tech entrepreneurs and generous philanthropists—were murdered in their home in the exclusive community of Montecito, under mysterious circumstances. Since the event, police had never mentioned a suspect, and press stories indicated that the FBI was involved in the case because the Zabdis’ company, Quicksilver, had research contracts related to national security and defense. One story quoted the Zabdis’ personal attorney, Gilbert Gurion, who said they were “two of the finest people” he had ever known. He suggested that they were the victims of “ignorant people who fear the future,” though he apparently never explained what he meant by that.
Before backing out of the internet, David found an address and office phone number for Gurion, in Santa Barbara. Intuition warned that even if the day remained sunny and cloudless, darkness would settle through it long before nightfall.
| 32 |
The mortuary office might almost have been the study in a minister’s residence: dark wood paneling; heavy furniture; deep-pile carpet and rubescent-velvet draperies to assist in the creation of a reverential quiet, to suppress the sounds of grief and confession; paintings of serene parklands receding into the distance; but no cross or Star of David, because this was an age when certain secular clients often took quick offense at the sight of symbols that they considered to be primitive, regressive influences on a new world aborning.