White River Burning. John Verdon

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СКАЧАТЬ crime, and we’d have pretty much no crime in America at all.”

      He concluded with an emphatic little nod and fell silent. The emotional momentum that had been increasing through his speech left little tics tugging at the corners of his mouth.

      Kilbrick limited her reaction to a thoughtful pursing of her lips. “Ms. Jackson? We have about a minute left, if you’d care to offer a brief response.”

      Blaze Lovely Jackson’s gaze had hardened. “Yeah, I’ll be brief. That Pike babble’s the same fascist crap you RAM folks been feeding all these years to your trailer-trash fans. I’ll tell you what it really is—what you’re doing is disrespectful. The white man is always making the black man feel small, feel like he’s got no power at all, feel like he’s no kind of man. You don’t give him any decent job, then you tell him he’s worthless cause he ain’t got a decent job. I tell you what that is. That’s the sin of disrespect. Hear me now, even if you don’t hear another thing. Disrespect is the mother of rage, and rage is the fire that’s going to burn this country down. Laxton Jones had no drug, no gun, no warrant. Hadn’t broken any law. Hadn’t done any crime. The man hadn’t done nothing to nobody. But he got shot anyway. Got shot dead in the face. How often do police do that to a white face? How often do they kill a white man who hasn’t done a crime? You want to understand the true place we’re at, you want to understand what BDA is all about, you think on that.”

      Kilbrick’s eyes were alive with excitement. “Well, there you have it! Two sides of the White River crisis. In head-on collision. On Battleground Tonight. We move now to our cameras on location—your eyes on the tense streets of White River. I’m Stacey Kilbrick, on the watch for breaking news. Stay with us.”

      The studio scene was replaced by an aerial shot of the city. Gurney could see smoke pouring from the roofs of three buildings. Orange flames shot up from one of them. On the main boulevard he noted a procession of police cars, a fire engine, and an ambulance. The aerial camera was picking up the sounds of sirens and bullhorns.

      Gurney eased his chair back from the table, as if to distance himself from what he was seeing on his computer screen. The cynical conversion of misery, anger, and destruction into a kind of reality TV show sickened him. And it wasn’t just RAM. Media enterprises everywhere were engaged in the continual promotion and exaggeration of conflict, a business model based on a poisonous insight: dissension sells. Especially dissension along the fault line of race. It was an insight with an equally poisonous corollary: nothing builds loyalty like shared hatreds. It was clear RAM and its host of vile imitators had no qualms about nurturing those hatreds to build loyal audiences.

      He realized, however, that it was time to put aside grievances about which he could do nothing and focus on questions that might have answers. For example, might Blaze Lovely Jackson’s rage at the police have been sufficient to involve her in actions beyond staging protests? Actions such as planning, abetting, or executing the sniper attack? And why hadn’t Kline gotten back to him? Had the query he’d left on the man’s voicemail concerning the missing ingredient in their conversation scared him off? Or was the potential answer sensitive enough to demand long consideration or perhaps even discussion with another player in the game?

      That thought led by a crooked route to another question that had been in the back of his mind ever since Marv Gelter had abandoned his party to take a call from Dell Beckert. What sort of relationship did the racist billionaire have with the White River police chief?

      “Do you know if the upstairs windows are closed?”

      Madeleine’s voice startled him. He turned and saw her standing in her pajamas in the hallway that led to the bedroom.

      “The windows?”

      “It’s raining.”

      “I’ll take a look.”

      As he was about to shut down his computer, an announcement appeared on the screen in bold type:

      CRISIS UPDATE

      LIVE-STREAMING PRESS CONFERENCE—9:00 AM TOMORROW

      WITH CHIEF BECKERT, MAYOR SHUCKER, DISTRICT ATTORNEY KLINE

      He made a mental note of the time, hoping the event would be concluded before he had to leave for his meeting with Hardwick.

      Upstairs he found only one window open, but it was enough to fill the room with the flowery aroma of the spring night. He stood there for a while breathing in the soft, sweet air.

      His racing thoughts were replaced by a primitive sense of peace. A phrase came to mind, something he’d once read—just the phrase, emerging from an unrecalled context and attaching itself to the moment: a healing tranquility.

      Once again, as so often in the past, a pleasant and totally unanticipated consequence had followed from his doing a simple thing Madeleine had asked him to do. He was sufficiently logic-driven to avoid attributing any mystical significance to these experiences. But their occurrence was a fact he couldn’t ignore.

      When the wind shifted and the rain began to spatter lightly on the sill, he closed the window and went downstairs to bed.

      8

      Tranquility, unfortunately, was not his natural state of mind. During several hours of fitful sleep his innate brain chemistry reasserted itself, bringing with it the low-level anxiety and uneasy dreams to which he was accustomed.

      At some point during those hours he awoke briefly, discovering that the rain had stopped, a full moon had appeared behind the thinning clouds, and the coyotes had begun to howl. He went back to sleep.

      Another round of howling, closer to the house, woke him once more—from a dream in which Trish Gelter was ambling around a white cube in a field of daffodils. Each time she circled the cube she announced, “I’m the fun one.” A blood-covered man was following her.

      Gurney tried to clear the image from his mind and doze off again, but the persistent howling and the need to go to the bathroom finally got him out of bed. He showered, shaved, put on his jeans and an old NYPD tee shirt, and went to the kitchen to make himself some breakfast.

      By the time he’d finished his eggs, toast, and two cups of coffee, the sun was rising above the pine-topped eastern ridge. When he opened the French doors to let in the morning air, he could hear the chickens making their morning clucking noises out in the coop by the apple tree. He stepped onto the patio and for a while watched the goldfinches and chickadees visiting the feeders that Madeleine had set up next to the asparagus patch. His gaze moved across the low pasture to the barn, the pond, and the site of his exploratory dig.

      When he’d discovered the buried foundation—accidentally, while clearing large rocks from the trail above the pond—and had exposed enough of it to get a sense of its antiquity, it had occurred to him that he might invite Dr. Walter Thrasher to have a look. In addition to being county medical examiner, Thrasher was an avid historian and collector of Colonial artifacts. At the time, Gurney had wavered on whether to involve him, but now he was inclined to do so. The man’s insights into the remains of the old house could be interesting, and having a personal avenue of access to him might prove useful if Gurney decided to accept Kline’s invitation to step into the White River investigation.

      He went back into the house, got his phone, and returned to the patio. He scrolled through his list of numbers, found Thrasher’s, and tapped on it. The call went to voicemail. The recorded announcement was nearly as short as Hardwick’s. Rather than gruff, though, the tone was refined. СКАЧАТЬ