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This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the


product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by John Verdon
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Verdon, John.
Let the devil sleep / by John Verdon.—1st ed.
p. cm.
The third novel in the Dave Gurney mystery series.
1. Detectives—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.
2. Serial murderers—Fiction. 3. Criminal behavior, Prediction of—
Fiction. 4. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3622.E736L48 2012
813'.6—dc22 2012018564
ISBN 978-0-307-71792-4
eISBN 978-0-307-71794-8
Printed in the United States of America
Book design: Lynne Amft
Jacket photographs: Ruggero Maramotti/Gallery Stock ( front road);
Martin Barraud/The Image Bank/Getty Images ( front shadow)
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
First Edition

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Prologue

S
he had to be stopped.
Hints had not worked. Subtle nudges had been ignored.
Firmer action was called for. Something dramatic and unmis-
takable, accompanied by a clear explanation.
The clarity of the explanation was crucial. It could leave no room
for doubt, no room for questions. The police, the media, and the naïve
little meddler herself must be made to understand his message, to
agree on its significance.
He stared down thoughtfully at the yellow pad in front of him and
began to write:

You must abandon your ill-conceived project immediately.


What you are proposing to do is intolerable. It glorifies the
most destructive people on earth. It ridicules my pursuit of jus-
tice by exalting the criminals I have executed. It creates unde-
served sympathy for the vilest of the vile. This cannot happen.
This I will not permit. I have slept for ten years in the peace of
my achievement, in the peace of my message to the world, in
the peace of my justice. Force me to take up arms again and the
price will be terrible.

He read what he had written. He shook his head slowly. He was


not satisfied with the tone. He tore the page from the pad and slipped
it into the slot of the document shredder by his chair. He began again
on a fresh page:

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4 JOHN VERDON

Stop what you are doing. Stop now and walk away. Or there
will be blood again, and more blood. Be warned. Do not disturb
my peace.

That was better. But not quite good enough.


He’d have to work on it. Sharpen the point. Leave no doubt. Make
it perfect.
And there was so little time.

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Chapter 1

Spring

T
he French doors were open.
From where Dave Gurney was standing by the breakfast
table, he could see that the last patches of winter snow, like
reluctant glaciers, had receded from the open pasture and survived
now only in the more recessed and shadowed places in the surrounding
woods.
The mixed fragrances of the newly exposed earth and the previous
summer’s unmowed hay drifted into the big farmhouse kitchen. These
were smells that once had the power to enthrall him. Now they barely
touched him.
“You should step outside,” said Madeleine from where she stood at
the sink, washing out her cereal bowl. “Step out into the sun. It’s quite
glorious.”
“Yes, I can see that,” he said, not moving.
“Sit and have your coffee in one of the Adirondack chairs,” she
said, setting the bowl down in the drying rack on the countertop. “You
could use some sun.”
“Hmm.” He nodded meaninglessly and took another sip from the
mug he was holding. “Is this the same coffee we’ve been using?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I didn’t say anything was wrong with it.”
“Yes, it’s the same coffee.”
He sighed. “I think I’m getting a cold. Last couple of days, things
haven’t had much taste.”
She rested her hands on the edge of the sink island and looked at
him. “You need to get out more. You need to do something.”

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6 JOHN VERDON

“Right.”
“I mean it. You can’t just sit in the house and stare at the wall all
day. It will make you sick. It is making you sick. Have you called Con-
nie Clarke back?”
“I will.”
“When?”
“When I feel like it.”
He didn’t think it was a feeling he was likely to have in the fore-
seeable future. That’s just the way he was these days—the way he’d
been for the past six months. It was as though, after the injuries he’d
suffered at the end of the bizarre Jillian Perry murder case, he had
withdrawn from everything connected with normal life—daily tasks,
planning, people, phone calls, commitments of any kind. He’d gotten
to the point where he liked nothing better than a blank calendar page
for the coming month—no appointments, no promises. He’d come to
equate withdrawal with freedom.
At the same time, he had the objectivity to know that what was
happening to him wasn’t good, that there was no peace in his freedom.
He felt hostile, not serene.
To some extent he understood the strange entropy that was
unwinding the fabric of his life and isolating him. Or at least he could
list what he believed to be its causes. Near the top of the list he’d place
the tinnitus he’d been experiencing since he emerged from his coma.
In all likelihood it had actually begun two weeks before that, when
three shots were fired at him in a small room at nearly point-blank
range.
The persistent sound in his ears (which the ear, nose, and throat
specialist had explained wasn’t a “sound” at all but rather a neural
anomaly that the brain misinterpreted as sound) was hard to describe.
The pitch was high, the volume low, the timbre like a softly hissed
musical note. The phenomenon was fairly common among rock musi-
cians and combat veterans, was anatomically mysterious, and, apart
from occasional cases of spontaneous remission, was generally incur-
able. “Frankly, Detective Gurney,” the doctor had concluded, “consid-
ering what you’ve been through, considering the trauma and the coma,
ending up with a mild ringing in your ears is a damn lucky outcome.”

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LET THE DEVIL SLEEP 7

It wasn’t a conclusion Dave could argue with. But it hadn’t made


it any easier for him to adjust to the faint whine that enveloped him
when all else was silent. It was a particular problem at night. What in
daylight might resemble the harmless whistling of a teakettle in a dis-
tant room became in the darkness a sinister presence, a cold, metallic
atmosphere that encased him.
Then there were the dreams—claustrophobic dreams that recalled
his hospital experiences, memories of the constricting cast that had
held his arm immobile, the difficulty he’d had in breathing—dreams
that left him feeling panicky for long minutes after awakening.
He still had a numb spot on his right forearm close to where the
first of his assailant’s bullets had shattered the wrist bone. He checked
the spot regularly, sometimes hourly, in hopes that its numbness was
receding—or, on bleaker days, in fear that it was spreading. There
were occasional, unpredictable, stabbing pains in his side where the
second bullet had passed through him. There was also an intermittent
tingling—like an itch impervious to scratching—at the center of his
hairline where the third bullet had fractured his skull.
Perhaps the most distressing effect of being wounded was the
constant need he now felt to be armed. He’d carried a gun on the job
because regulations had required it. Unlike most cops, he had no fond-
ness for firearms. And when he left the department after twenty-five
years, he left behind, along with his gold detective’s shield, the need to
carry a weapon.
Until he was shot.
And now, each morning as he got dressed, the inevitable final item
he put on was a small ankle holster holding a .32 Beretta. He hated
the emotional need for it. Hated the change in him that required the
damn thing to always be with him. He’d hoped the need would gradu-
ally diminish, but so far that wasn’t happening.
On top of everything else, it seemed to him that Madeleine had
been watching him in recent weeks with a new kind of worry in her
eyes—not the fleeting looks of pain and panic he’d seen in the hospi-
tal, or the alternating expressions of hopefulness and anxiety that had
accompanied his early recovery, but something quieter and deeper—a
half-hidden chronic dread, as if she were witnessing something terrible.

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8 JOHN VERDON

Still standing by the breakfast table, he finished his coffee in two


large swallows. Then he carried the mug to the sink and let the hot
water run into it. He could hear Madeleine down the hall in the mud-
room, cleaning out the cat’s litter box. The cat had recently been added
to the household at Madeleine’s initiative. Gurney wondered why.
Was it to cheer him up? Engage him in the life of a creature other than
himself? If so, it wasn’t working. He had no more interest in the cat
than in anything else.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he announced.
He heard Madeleine say something in the mudroom that sounded
like “Good.” He wasn’t sure that’s what she said, but he didn’t see any
point in asking. He went into the bathroom and turned on the hot
water.
A long, steamy shower—the energetic spray pelting his back minute
after minute from the base of his neck down to the base of his spine, relax-
ing muscles, opening capillaries, clearing mind and sinuses—produced
in him a feeling of well-being that was both wonderful and fleeting.
By the time he’d dressed again and returned to the French doors, a
jangled sense of unease was already beginning to reassert itself. Mad-
eleine was outside now on the bluestone patio. Beyond the patio was
the small section of the pasture that had, through two years of fre-
quent mowings, come to resemble a lawn. Clad in a rough barn jacket,
orange sweatpants, and green rubber boots, she was working her way
along the edge of the flagstones, stamping enthusiastically down on a
spade every six inches, creating a clear demarcation, digging out the
encroaching roots of the wild grasses. She gave him a look that seemed
at first to convey an invitation for him to join in the project, then dis-
appointment at his obvious reluctance to do so.
Irritated, he purposely looked away, his gaze drifting down the
hillside to his green tractor parked by the barn.
She followed his line of sight. “I was wondering, could you use the
tractor to smooth out the ruts?”
“Ruts?”
“Where we park the cars.”
“Sure . . .” he said hesitantly. “I guess.”
“It doesn’t have to be done right this minute.”
“Hmm.” All traces of equanimity from his shower were now gone,

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LET THE DEVIL SLEEP 9

as his train of thought shifted to the peculiar tractor problem he’d dis-
covered a month ago and had largely put out of his mind—except for
those paranoid moments when it drove him crazy.
Madeleine appeared to be studying him. She smiled, put down her
spade, and walked around to the side door, evidently so she could take
off her boots in the mudroom before coming into the kitchen.
He took a deep breath and stared at the tractor, wondering for the
twentieth time about the mysteriously jammed brake. As if acting in
malignant harmony, a dark cloud slowly obliterated the sun. Spring, it
seemed, had come and gone.

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