Shut Your Eyes Tight by John Verdon

Author:John Verdon [Verdon, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, General
ISBN: 9780307717917
Google: njYja3TWdBIC
Amazon: 0718156714
Publisher: Michael Joseph Ltd
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 40

A faint yipping

Once Madeleine had finished with the pots and pans and dishes, she made herself a cup of herbal tea and settled with her knitting bag into one of the overstuffed armchairs at the far end of the room. Gurney, with one of the Perry case folders in hand, soon followed to the armchair’s twin on the opposite side of the fireplace. They sat in companionable isolation, each in a separate pool of lamplight.

He opened the folder and extracted the ViCAP crime report. Curious thing about that acronym. At the FBI it stood for the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. At New York’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation, it stood for the Violent Crime Analysis Program. But it was the same form, processed by the same computers and distributed to the same recipients. Gurney liked New York’s version better. It said what it was, made no promises.

The thirty-six-page form itself was comprehensive, to say the least, but useful only to the extent that the officer filling it out had been accurate and thorough. One of its purposes was to uncover MO similarities to other crimes on file, but in this case there was no notation of any subsequent hits by the comparative-analysis program. Gurney was poring over the thirty-six pages to make sure he hadn’t overlooked anything significant the first time around.

He was having a hard time focusing, kept thinking he should call Kyle, kept looking for excuses to put it off. The time difference between New York and Seattle had provided a convenient obstruction for the past three years, but now Kyle was back in Manhattan, enrolled at Columbia Law School, and Gurney’s procrastination had lost its enabler. Which is not to say that the procrastination had ceased, or even that its true causes had become transparent to him.

Sometimes he dismissed it as the natural product of his cold Celtic genes. That was the most comfortable way of looking at it. Hardly any personal responsibility at all. Other times he was convinced it was related to one of his downward spirals of guilt: the guilt that was created by not calling, creating in turn an increasing resistance to calling, and more guilt. For as long as he could remember, he’d had an abundance of that gnawing rat of an emotion—an only child’s feeling of responsibility for his parents’ strained and staggering marriage. At still other times, he suspected that the problem was that he saw too much of his first wife in Kyle—too many reminders of too many ugly disagreements.

And then there was the disappointment factor. In the midst of the stock-market meltdown, when Kyle announced he was leaving investment banking for law school, Gurney had entertained for a delusional moment the belief that the young man might have an interest in following him into law enforcement. But it soon became clear that Kyle was simply taking a new route to the old goal of material success.

“Why don’t you just call him?” Madeleine was watching him, her knitting needles resting in her lap atop a half-finished orange scarf.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.