John Verdon

Should he get a shotgun for the house, or would Madeleine be more upset than reassured by its presence?

Should they move out, live in a hotel until the case was resolved? But suppose it wasn’t resolved for weeks, or months, or ever?

Should he follow up with Darryl Becker on the status of the search for Ballston’s boat?

Should he follow up with BCI on the progress of the calls being made to the Mapleshade graduates and their families?

Was everything that had happened—from the arrival of Hector Flores in Tambury through the murders of Jillian and Kiki and the disappearances of all those girls, right up to the complex brownstone deception, the Ballston sex murders, and the beheaded doll—was all that the product of a single mind? And if so, was the driving force of that mind a practical criminal enterprise or a psychotic mania?

Most disturbingly to Gurney, why was he finding these knots so difficult to untangle?

Even the simplest of questions—should he continue weighing alternatives, or return to bed and try to empty his mind, or busy himself physically—had become ensnared in a mental process that conjured an objection to every conclusion. Even the idea of taking a few ibuprofens for his aching sciatic nerve met with an unwillingness to go into the bedroom to get the bottle.

He felt disconnected, as though his customary attachments to the world had been broken. It was the same unmoored sense he’d had when his first wife announced her intention to divorce him, and years later when little Danny was killed, and again when his own father died. And now …

And now that Madeleine …

His eyes filled with tears. And as his sight grew blurry, he had the first perfectly clear thought he’d had in a long time. It was so simple. He would quit the case.

The purity and rightness of the decision was reflected in an immediate feeling of freedom, an immediate impulse to action.