Think of a Number

Chapter 32

The young man leaned back into the deliciously soft pillows propped against the headboard and smiled placidly at the screen of his laptop.

“Where’s my little Dickie Duck?” asked the old woman next to him in the bed.

“He’s in his happy beddy-bye, planning how the monsters die.”

“Are you writing a poem?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Read it out loud.”

“It isn’t finished.”

“Read it out loud,” she said again, as though she’d forgotten she’d said it before.

“It’s not very good. It needs something more.” He adjusted the angle of the screen.

“You have such a beautiful voice,” she said as if by rote, absently touching the blond ringlets of her wig.

He closed his eyes for a moment. Then, as though he were about to play a flute, he licked his lips lightly. When he began to speak, it was in a lilting half-whisper.

“These are some of my favorite things:

the magic change a bullet brings,

the blood that spurts out on the floor

until there isn’t any more,

their eyes for an eye, their teeth for a tooth,

the end of it all, their moment of truth,

the good that I’ve done with that drunkard’s gun-

all nothing compared to the cleansing to come.”

He sighed and stared at the screen, wrinkling his nose. “The meter isn’t right.”

The old woman nodded with serene incomprehension and asked in a coy little-girl voice, “What will my little Dickie do?”

He was tempted to describe “the cleansing to come” in all the detail in which he imagined it. The death of all the monsters. It was so colorful, so exciting, so… satisfying! But he also prided himself on his realism, his grasp of his mother’s limitations. He knew that her questions required no specific answers, that she forgot most of them as soon as she uttered them, that his words were mainly sounds, sounds she liked, found soothing. He could say anything-count to ten, recite a nursery rhyme. It really made no difference what he said, so long as he said it with feeling and rhythm. He always strove for a certain richness of inflection. He enjoyed pleasing her.

Chapter 33

Every so often Gurney would have a dream that was achingly sad, a dream that seemed to be the heart of sadness itself. In these dreams he saw with a clarity beyond words that the wellspring of sadness was loss, and the greatest loss was the loss of love.

In the most recent version of the dream, little more than a vignette, his father was dressed as he’d been dressed for work forty years ago and in all respects looked exactly as he had then. The nondescript beige jacket and gray pants, the fading freckles on the backs of his large hands and on his rounded receding forehead, the mocking look in the eyes that seemed focused on a scene occurring somewhere else, the subtle suggestion of a restlessness to be on his way, to be anywhere but where he was, the odd fact that he said so little yet managed to convey with his silence so much dissatisfaction-all these buried images were resurrected in a scene that lasted no more than a minute. And then Gurney was part of the scene as a child, looking at that distant figure pleadingly, pleading with him not to leave, warm tears streaming down his face in the intensity of the dream-as he was sure they’d never done in the actual presence of his father, for he could not remember a single expression of strong emotion ever passing between them-and then awakening suddenly, his face still bathed in tears, his heart hurting.

He was tempted to wake Madeleine, tell her about the dream, let her see his tears. But it had nothing to do with her. She’d barely known his father. And dreams, after all, were only dreams. Ultimately they meant nothing. Instead he asked himself what day it was. It was Thursday. With this thought came that quick, practical transformation of his mental landscape that he’d come to rely on to sweep away the residue of a disturbing night and replace it with the reality of things to be done in the daylight. Thursday. Thursday would be occupied mainly with his trip to the Bronx-to a neighborhood not far from the neighborhood where he’d grown up.

Chapter 34

The three-hour drive was a journey into ugliness, a perception amplified by the cold drizzle that required continual adjustment of the intermittent wiper speed. Gurney was depressed and edgy-partly because of the weather and partly, he suspected, because his dream had left him with a raw, oversensitive perspective.

He hated the Bronx. He hated everything about the Bronx-from the buckled pavements to the burned-out carcasses of stolen cars. He hated the garish billboards touting four-day, three-night escapes to Las Vegas. He hated the smell-a shifting miasma of diesel fumes, mold, tar, and dead fish, with an insinuating undertone of something metallic. Even more than what he saw, he hated the memory from his childhood that invaded his mind whenever he was in the Bronx-hideous, prehistorically armored horseshoe crabs with spearlike tails, lurking in the mudflats of Eastchester Bay.

Having spent half an hour creeping across the clogged “expressway” to the last exit, he was relieved to negotiate the few city blocks to the agreed-upon meeting place-the parking lot of Holy Saints Church. The lot was enclosed by a chain-link fence with a sign warning that parking was reserved for those engaged in church business. The lot was empty except for a nondescript Chevy sedan, beside which a young man with a fashionably gelled crew cut was speaking into a cell phone. As Gurney parked his car on the other side of the Chevy, the man concluded his call and clipped the phone to his belt.

The drizzle that had shrouded most of his drive that morning had diminished to a mist too fine to see, but as Gurney stepped from his car, he could feel its cold pinpricks on his forehead. Perhaps the young man was feeling it, too; perhaps that accounted for his expression of anxious discomfort.

“Detective Gurney?”

“Dave,” said Gurney, extending his hand.

“Randy Clamm. Thanks for making the trip. Hope it’s not a waste of your time. Just trying to cover all the bases, and we’ve got this crazy MO that sounded like what you guys are working on. Could be unrelated-I mean, it doesn’t make much sense that the same guy would want to kill some hotshot guru upstate and an unemployed night watchman in the Bronx-but all those stab wounds in the throat, I couldn’t just let it go. You get a feeling about these things-you think, ‘Christ, if I let it go, it’ll turn out to be the same guy,’ you know what I mean?”

Gurney wondered whether the breathless pace of Clamm’s speech was propelled by caffeine, cocaine, the pressures of the job, or just the way his personal spring happened to be wound.

“I mean, a dozen stab wounds to the throat isn’t all that common. There might be other connections we could find between the cases. Maybe we could have sent reports back and forth between here and upstate, but I thought maybe if you were on the scene and you could talk to the victim’s wife, you might see something or ask something that might not occur to you if you weren’t here. That’s what I was hoping. I mean, I hope there might be something in it. I hope it’s not a waste of your time.”

“Slow down, son. Let me tell you something. I drove here today because it seemed like a reasonable thing to do. You want to check out every possibility. So do I. The worst-case scenario here is that we eliminate one of those possibilities, and eliminating possibilities is not a waste of time, it’s part of the process. So don’t worry about my time.”

“Thank you, sir, I just meant… I mean, I know it was a long drive for you. I do appreciate that.” Clamm’s voice and manner had settled down a notch or two. He still had a revved-up, nervous look, but at least it wasn’t off the charts.

“Speaking of time,” said Gurney, “would now be a good time to take me to the scene?”

“Now would be great. Better leave your car here, come in mine. Victim’s house is in a cramped little area-some of the streets give you like two inches clearance each side of the car.”

“Sounds like Flounder Beach.”

“You know Flounder Beach?”

Gurney nodded. He’d been there once, when he was a teenager, at a girl’s birthday party-a friend of a girl he was going steady with.

“How do you know Flounder Beach?” asked Clamm as he turned out of the parking lot in the opposite direction from the main avenue.

“I grew up not far from here-out by City Island.”

“No shit. I thought you were from upstate.”

“At the moment,” said Gurney. He heard the temporariness of the phrase he’d chosen and realized he wouldn’t have put it that way in front of Madeleine.

“Well, it’s still the same nasty little bungalow colony. At high tide with a blue sky, you could almost think you were at a real beach. Then the tide goes out, the mud stinks, and you remember it’s the Bronx.”

“Right,” said Gurney.

Five minutes later they slowed to a stop on a dusty side street facing an opening in another chain-link fence like the one that enclosed the church parking lot. A painted metal sign on the fence announced that this was the FLOUNDER BEACH CLUB and parking was by permit only. A line of bullet holes had cut the sign nearly in half.

The image of the party three decades earlier came to Gurney’s mind. He wondered if that was the same entrance he’d used then. He could see the face of the girl whose birthday it was-a fat girl with pigtails and braces.

“Better to park here,” said Clamm, commenting again on the grubby enclave’s impossible streets. “Hope you don’t mind the walk.”

“Christ, how old do I look?”

Clamm responded with an awkward laugh and a tangential question as they got out of the car. “How long have you been on the job?”

Having no appetite for discussing his retirement and ad hoc reemployment, he said simply, “Twenty-five years.”

“It’s a weird case,” said Clamm, as though the observation followed naturally. “Not just all the knife wounds. It’s more than that.”

“You’re sure they’re knife wounds?”

“Why do you ask?”

“In our case it was a broken bottle-a broken whiskey bottle. Did you recover any weapon?”

“Nope. Guy from the ME’s office said ‘probable knife wounds’-double-edged, though, like a dagger. Guess a pointed piece of glass could make a cut like that. They were kinda backed up. We don’t have the autopsy report yet. But like I was saying, it’s more than that. The wife… I don’t know, there’s something weird about the wife.”

“Weird like how?”

“Lot of ways. First, she’s some kind of religious nut. In fact, that’s her alibi. She was at some kind of hallelujah prayer meeting.”

Gurney shrugged. “What else?”

“She’s on heavy-duty medication. Has to take some big pills to remember that this is her native planet.”

“I hope she keeps taking them. Anything else troubling you about her?”

“Yeah,” said Clamm, stopping in the middle of the narrow street they were walking along-more of an alley than a street. “She’s lying about something.” He looked like he had a pain in his eyes. “There’s something she isn’t telling us. Or maybe something she is telling us is bullshit. Maybe both. That’s the house.” Clamm pointed to a squat bungalow just ahead on the left, set back about ten feet from the little street. The peeling paint on the siding was a bilious green. The door was a reddish brown that reminded Gurney of dried blood. Yellow crime-scene tape, tied to portable stanchions, encircled the shabby little property. All it needed was a bow in the front, thought Gurney, to make it the gift from hell.

Clamm knocked on the door. “Oh, one other thing,” he said. “She’s big.”

“Big?”

“You’ll see.”

The warning had not fully prepared Gurney for the woman who opened the door. Well over three hundred pounds, with arms like thighs, she seemed misplaced in the little house. Even more misplaced was the face of a child on this very broad body-an off-balance, dazed sort of child. Her short black hair was parted and combed like a little boy’s.

“Can I help you?” she asked, looking as if help were the last thing on earth she was capable of providing.

“Hello, Mrs. Rudden, I’m Detective Clamm. Remember me?”

“Hello.” She said the word like she was reading it from a foreign phrase book.

“I was here yesterday.”

“I remember.”

“We need to ask you a few more questions.”

“You want to know more about Albert?”

“That’s part of it. May we come in?”

Without answering, she turned away from the door, walked across the small living room into which it opened, and sat on a sofa-which seemed to shrink under her great bulk.

“Sit down,” she said.

The two men looked around. There were no chairs. The only other objects in the room were an absurdly ornate coffee table with a cheap vase of pink plastic flowers in the center of it, an empty bookcase, and a television big enough for a ballroom. The bare plywood floor was clean except for a scattering of synthetic fibers-meaning, Gurney assumed, that the carpet on which the body was found had been taken to the lab for forensic examination.

“We don’t need to sit,” said Clamm. “We won’t be long.”

“Albert liked sports,” said Mrs. Rudden, smiling blankly at the gargantuan TV.

An archway on the left side of the little living room led to three doors. From behind one came the sound effects of a combat video game.

“That’s Jonah. Jonah is my son. That’s his bedroom.”

Gurney asked how old he was.

“Twelve. In some ways older, in some ways younger,” she said, as if this were something that had just for the first time occurred to her.

“Was he with you?” asked Gurney.

“What do you mean, was he with me?” she asked, with a weird suggestiveness that gave Gurney a chill.

“I mean,” said Gurney, trying to keep whatever it was he was feeling out of his voice, “was he with you at your religious service the night your husband was killed?”

“He’s accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.”

“Does that mean he was with you?”

“Yes. I told the other policeman.”

Gurney smiled sympathetically. “Sometimes it helps us to go over these things more than once.”

She nodded as if in deep agreement and repeated, “He’s accepted Jesus Christ.”

“Did your husband accept Jesus Christ?”

“I believe he did.”

“You’re not sure?”

She closed her eyes tightly as if searching the insides of her eyelids for the answer. She said, “Satan is powerful, and devious are his ways.”

“Devious indeed, Mrs. Rudden,” said Gurney. He pulled the coffee table with the pink flowers on it back a little from the couch, walked around, and sat on the edge of it, facing her. He’d learned that the best way to talk to someone who talked like that was to talk the same way, even if he had no idea where the conversation was going.

“Devious and terrible,” he said, watching her closely.

“‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” she said. “‘I shall not want.’”

“Amen.”

Clamm cleared his throat and shifted his feet.

“Tell me,” said Gurney, “in what devious way did Satan reach out to Albert?”

“It is the upright man that Satan pursueth!” she cried with sudden insistence. “For the evil man he hath already in his power.”

“And Albert was an upright man?”

“Jonah!” she cried even louder, rising from the couch and moving with surprising speed through the archway on the left to one of the doors beyond it, which she began slapping with the palm of her hand. “Open the door! Now! Open the door!”

“What the fuck…?” said Clamm.

“I said now, Jonah!”

A lock clicked, and the door opened halfway, revealing an obese boy almost as large as the mother he resembled to a disturbing degree-right up to the odd sense of detachment in the eyes, making Gurney wonder whether the cause was genetics or medication or both. His crew cut was bleached pure white.

“I told you not to lock that door when I’m home. Turn down the sound. It sounds like someone being murdered in there.” If either of them had any feeling about the awkwardness of this comment under the circumstances, neither showed it. The boy looked at Gurney and Clamm without interest. No doubt, mused Gurney, this was one of those families so accustomed to social-services interventions that official-looking strangers in the living room didn’t merit a second thought. The boy looked back at his mother.

“Can I have my Popsicle now?”

“You know you can’t have it now. Keep the sound down or you won’t have it at all.”

“I’ll have it,” he said flatly, and shut the door in her face.

She came back into the living room and sat back down on the couch. “He was devastated by Albert’s death.”

“Mrs. Rudden,” said Clamm in his let’s-move-right-along way, “Detective Gurney here needs to ask you some questions.”

“Isn’t that a funny coincidence? I have an Aunt Bernie. I was just thinking about her this morning.”

“Gurney, not Bernie,” said Clamm.

“It’s close, though, isn’t it?” Her eyes seemed to gleam with the significance of the similarity.

“Mrs. Rudden,” said Gurney, “during the past month, did your husband tell you anything he was worried about?”

“Albert never worried.”

“Did he seem in any way different to you?”

“Albert was always the same.”

Gurney suspected that these perceptions could as likely be due to the cushioning and fogging effect of her medication as to any consistency on Albert’s part.

“Did he ever receive any mail with a handwritten address or with any writing in red ink?”

“The mail is all bills and ads. I never look at it.”

“Albert took care of the mail?”

“It was all bills and ads.”

“Do you know if Albert paid any special bills lately or wrote any unusual checks?”

She shook her head emphatically, making her immature face appear shockingly childish.

“One last question. After you found your husband’s body, did you change or move anything in the room before the police arrived?”

Again she shook her head. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he caught a glimpse of something new in her expression. Had there been a ripple of alarm in that blank stare? He decided to take a chance.

“Does the Lord speak to you?” he asked.

There was something else in her expression now, not so much alarm as vindication.

“Yes, He does.”

Vindication and pride, thought Gurney.

“Did the Lord speak to you when you found Albert?”

“‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” she began-and went on to recite the entire Twenty-third Psalm. The impatient tics and blinks that peppered Clamm’s face were visible even in Gurney’s peripheral vision.

“Did the Lord give you specific instructions?”

“I don’t hear voices,” she said. Again that flicker of alarm.

“No, not voices. But the Lord did speak to you, to help you?”

“We are here on earth to do what He would have us do.”

Gurney leaned toward her from his perch on the edge of the coffee table. “And you did as the Lord directed?”

“I did as the Lord directed.”

“When you found Albert, was there something that needed to be changed, something not the way it should be, something the Lord wanted you to do?”

The big woman’s eyes filled with tears, and they ran down her round, girlish cheeks. “I had to save it.”

“Save it?”

“The policemen would have taken it away.”

“Taken what away?”

“They took everything else-the clothes he was wearing, his watch, his wallet, the newspaper he was reading, the chair he was sitting in, the rug, his eyeglasses, the glass he was drinking… I mean, they took everything.”

“Not quite everything-right, Mrs. Rudden? They didn’t take what you saved.”

“I couldn’t let them. It was a gift. It was Albert’s last gift to me.”

“May I see the gift?”

“You already saw it. There-behind you.”

Gurney swiveled around and followed her gaze to the vase of pink flowers in the middle of the table-or what, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a vase with one pink plastic flower whose bloom was so large and showy it gave the initial impression of a bouquet.

“Albert gave you that flower?”

“That was his intention,” she said after a hesitation.

“He didn’t actually give it to you?”

“He couldn’t, could he?”

“Do you mean because he was killed?”

“I know he got it for me.”

“This could be very important, Mrs. Rudden,” said Gurney softly. “Please tell me exactly what you found and what you did.”

“When Jonah and I came home from Revelation Hall, we heard the television, and I didn’t want to disturb Albert. Albert loved television. He didn’t like it if someone walked in front of him. So Jonah and I walked around to the back door that goes into the kitchen, rather than come in the front and have to walk in front of him. We sat in the kitchen, and Jonah had his bedtime Popsicle.”

“How long did you sit in the kitchen?”

“I couldn’t tell you that. We got to talking. Jonah is very deep.”

“Talking about what?”

“Jonah’s favorite subject-the tribulation of the End Times. It says in the Scriptures that in the End Times there will be tribulation. Jonah always asks if I believe that, and how much tribulation I believe there will be, and what kind of tribulation. We talk a lot about that.”

“So you talked about tribulation, and Jonah ate his Popsicle?”

“Like always.”

“Then what?”

“Then it was time for him to go to bed.”

“And?”

“And he went through the kitchen door into the living room to get to his bedroom, but it wasn’t five seconds before he was back in the kitchen, backing up like, and pointing at the living room. I tried to get him to say something, but all he would do was point. So I went in there myself. I mean, I came in here,” she said, looking around the room.

“What did you see?”

“Albert.”

Gurney waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, he prompted, “Albert was dead?”

“There was a lot of blood.”

“And the flower?”

“The flower was on the floor next to him. You see, he must have been holding it in his hand. He must have wanted to give it to me when I got home.”

“What did you do then?”

“Then? Oh. I went next door. We don’t have a phone. I think they called the police. Before the police came, I picked up the flower. It was for me,” she said with the sudden, raw insistence of a child. “It was a gift. I put it in our nicest vase.”

Chapter 35

Although it was time for lunch when they finally left the Rudden house, Gurney was in no mood for it. It wasn’t that he wasn’t hungry, and it wasn’t that Clamm hadn’t suggested a convenient place to eat. He was too frustrated, mostly with himself, to say yes to anything. As Clamm drove him back to the church parking lot where he’d left his car, they made a last halfhearted attempt to align the facts of the cases to see if there was anything at all that might connect them. The attempt led nowhere.

“Well,” said Clamm, straining to give the exercise a positive interpretation, “at least there’s no proof at this point that they’re not connected. The husband could have gotten mail the wife never saw, and it doesn’t look like the kind of marriage where there was much communication, so he might not have told her anything. And with whatever the hell she’s on, she wasn’t likely to notice any subtle emotional changes in him on her own. Might be worth having another talk with the kid. I know he’s as spacey as she is, but it’s possible he might remember something.”

“Sure,” said Gurney with zero conviction. “And you might want to see if Albert had a checking account, and if there’s a stub made out to anyone named Charybdis or Arybdis or Scylla. That’s a long shot, but at this point what the hell.”

On the drive home, the weather deteriorated further in a kind of morbid sympathy with Gurney’s frame of mind. The drizzle of the morning developed into a steady rain, reinforcing his dismal assessment of the trip. If there were any connections between the murders of Mark Mellery and Albert Rudden, beyond the large number and location of the stab wounds, they were not apparent. None of the distinctive features of the Peony crime scene were present at Flounder Beach-no tricky footprints, no lawn chair, no broken whiskey bottle, no poems-no sign of game playing at all. The victims appeared to have nothing in common. That a murderer would choose as his twin targets Mark Mellery and Albert Rudden made no sense.

These thoughts, along with the unpleasantness of driving in an increasing downpour, no doubt contributed to his strained expression as he entered the kitchen door of the old farmhouse, dripping.

“What happened to you?” asked Madeleine, looking up from the onion she was dicing.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She shrugged and made another slice through the onion.

The edginess of his reply hung in the air. After a moment he mumbled apologetically, “I had an exhausting day, a six-hour round-trip in the rain.”

“And?”

“And? And the whole damn thing was probably a dead end.”

“And?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

She shot him a disbelieving little smile.

“To give it an extra twist, it was the Bronx,” he added morosely. “There’s no human experience that the Bronx can’t make a little uglier.”

She began chopping the onion into tiny pieces. She spoke as if she were addressing the cutting board.

“You have two messages on the phone-your friend from Ithaca and your son.”

“Detailed messages, or just asking me to call back?”

“I didn’t pay that much attention.”

“By my ‘friend from Ithaca,’ do you mean Sonya Reynolds?”

“Are there others?”

“Other what?”

“Friends you have in Ithaca, yet to be announced.”

“I have no ‘friends’ at all in Ithaca. Sonya Reynolds is a business associate-and barely that. What did she want, anyway?”

“I told you, the message is on the phone.” Madeleine’s knife, which had been hovering above the pile of onion bits, sliced down through them with particular force.

“Jesus, watch your fingers!” The words erupted from him with more anger than concern.

With the sharp edge of the knife still pressed against the cutting board, she looked at him curiously. “So what really happened today?” she asked, rewinding the conversation to the point before it ran into the ditch.

“Frustration, I guess. I don’t know.” He went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Heineken, opened it, and set it on the table in the breakfast nook by the French doors. Then he took off his jacket, draped it over the back of one of the chairs, and sat down.

“You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you. At the request of an NYPD detective by the ridiculous name of Randy Clamm, I made a three-hour drive to a sad little house in the Bronx where an unemployed man had been stabbed in the throat.”

“Why did he call you?”

“Ah. Good question. Seems that Detective Clamm heard about the murder up here in Peony. The similarity of the method prompted him to call the Peony police, who passed him along to the state police regional HQ, who passed him along to the captain overseeing the case, a nasty little ass-licking moron by the name of Rodriguez, whose brain is just large enough to recognize a lousy lead.”

“So he passed it along to you?”

“To the DA, who he knew would automatically pass it along to me.”

Madeleine said nothing, but the obvious question was in her eyes.

“Yeah, I knew it was an iffy lead. Stabbing in that part of the world is just another form of arguing, but for some reason I thought I might find something to tie the two cases together.”

“Nothing?”

“No. For a while it looked hopeful, though. The widow seemed to be holding something back. Finally she admits tampering with the crime scene. There was a flower on the floor that her husband apparently brought home for her. She was afraid the evidence techs would take it, and she wanted to keep it-understandably. So she picked it up and put it in a vase. End of story.”

“You were hoping she’d admit covering up some footprints in the snow or hiding a white lawn chair?”

“Something like that. But all it turned out to be was a plastic flower.”

“Plastic?”

“Plastic.” He took a long, slow swallow from the Heineken bottle. “Not a very tasteful gift, I guess.”

“Not really a gift at all,” she said with some conviction.

“What do you mean?”

“Real flowers could be gifts-they almost always are, aren’t they? Artificial flowers are something else.”

“What?”

“Items of home decor, I’d say. A man wouldn’t be any more likely to buy a woman a plastic flower than a roll of floral wallpaper.”

“What are you telling me?”

“I’m not sure. But if this woman found a plastic flower at the murder scene and assumed that her husband had bought it for her, I think she’s wrong.”

“Where do you think it came from?”

“I have no idea.”

“She seemed pretty sure he’d gotten it as a gift for her.”

“She would want to think that, wouldn’t she?”

“Maybe so. But if he didn’t bring it into the house, and assuming the son was out all evening with her as she claims, that would leave the murderer as a possible source.”

“I suppose,” said Madeleine with diminishing interest. Gurney knew that she drew a definite line between understanding what a real person would do under certain circumstances and airy hypothesizing about the source of an object in a room. He sensed he’d just crossed that line, but he pressed on, anyway.

“So why might a murderer leave a flower by his victim?”

“What kind of flower?”

He could always trust her to make the question more specific.

“I’m not sure what it was. I know what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a rose, it wasn’t a carnation, it wasn’t a dahlia. But it was sort of similar to all of them.”

“In what way?”

“Well, the first thing I was reminded of was a rose, but it was larger, with a lot more petals, more crowded together. It was almost the size of a big carnation or a dahlia, but the individual petals were broader than dahlia or carnation petals-a bit like crinkly rose petals. It was a very busy, showy sort of flower.”

For the first time since he’d arrived home, Madeleine’s face was alive with real interest.

“Has something occurred to you?” he asked.

“Maybe… hmm…”

“What? You know what kind of flower it is?”

“I think so. It’s quite a coincidence.”

“Jesus! Are you going to tell me?”

“Unless I’m mistaken, the flower you just described sounds very much like a peony.”

The Heineken bottle slipped out of his hand. “Holy Christ!”

After asking Madeleine a few pertinent questions about peonies, he went to the den to make some calls.

Chapter 36

By the time he got off the phone, Gurney had persuaded Detective Clamm that it had to be more than coincidence that the eponymous flower of the first murder’s location had shown up at the second murder.

He also suggested that several actions be taken without delay-conduct an all-out search of the Rudden house for any odd letters or notes, anything in verse, anything handwritten, anything in red ink; alert the medical examiner’s office to the gunshot-and-broken-bottle combination used in Peony, in case they might want to take a second look at Rudden’s body; comb the house for evidence of a gunshot or material that may have been used to muffle one; re-search the property and adjoining properties and roadway between the house and the community fence for broken bottles, especially whiskey bottles; and start compiling a biographical profile of Albert Rudden to mine for potential links to Mark Mellery, conflicts or enemies, legal problems, or trouble involving alcohol.

Eventually becoming aware of the peremptory tone of his “suggestions,” he slowed down and apologized.

“I’m sorry, Randy. I’m getting out of order here. The Rudden case is all yours. You’re the man responsible, which makes the next move entirely your call. I know I’m not in charge, and I’m sorry for behaving like I am.”

“No problem. By the way, I’ve got a Lieutenant Everly down here who says he went through the academy with a Dave Gurney. Would that be you?”

Gurney laughed. He’d forgotten that Bobby Everly had ended up in that precinct. “Yeah, that would be me.”

“Well, sir, in that case I’d welcome any input from you at any time. And anytime you’d like to question Mrs. Rudden again, please be my guest. I thought you were good with her.”

If this was sarcasm, it was well concealed. Gurney decided to take it as a compliment.

“Thank you. I don’t need to talk to her directly, but let me make one small suggestion. If I happened to be face-to-face with her again, I would ask her in a very matter-of-fact way what the Lord told her to do with the whiskey bottle.”

“What whiskey bottle?”

“The one she may have removed from the scene for reasons best known to herself. I’d ask about it in a way that suggests you already know that the bottle was there and that she removed it at the Lord’s urging, and you’re just curious to know where it is. Of course, there may not have been any whiskey bottle at all, and if you get the sense that she really doesn’t have a clue what you’re talking about, just move on to something else.”

“You’re sure this whole deal is going to follow the pattern of the Peony thing-so there ought to be a whiskey bottle somewhere?”

“That’s what I’m thinking. If you don’t feel comfortable approaching her that way, that’s okay. It’s your call.”

“Might be worth a try. Not much to lose. I’ll let you know.”

“Good luck.”

The next person Gurney needed to talk to was Sheridan Kline. The truism that your boss should never find out from someone else what he should have found out from you was true-times-two in law enforcement. He reached Kline as he was en route to a regional conference of district attorneys in Lake Placid, and the frequent interruptions caused by the spotty cell-phone coverage in the upstate mountains made the “peony” connection more difficult to explain than Gurney would have liked. When he was finished, Kline took so long to respond that Gurney was afraid he’d driven into another dead transmission area.

He finally said, “This flower thing-you’re comfortable with that?”

“If it’s just a coincidence,” said Gurney, “it’s a remarkable one.”

“But it’s not really solid. If I were playing devil’s advocate here, I’d have to point out that your wife didn’t actually see the flower-the plastic flower-you were describing to her. Suppose it’s not a peony at all. Where are we then? Even if it is a peony, it’s not exactly proof of anything. God knows it’s not the kind of breakthrough I could stand up and talk about at a press conference. Christ, why couldn’t it be a real flower, so there’d be less doubt about what it was? Why plastic?”

“That bothered me, too,” said Gurney, trying to conceal his irritation at Kline’s reaction. “Why not a real one? A few minutes ago, I asked my wife about it, and she told me that florists don’t like to sell peonies. It has a top-heavy bloom that won’t remain upright on its stem. They’re available in nurseries for planting, but not at this time of year. So a plastic one might be the only way he could send us his little message. I’m thinking it was an opportunistic thing-he saw it in a store and was struck by the idea, by the playfulness of it.”

“Playfulness?”

“He’s taunting us, testing us, playing a game with us. Remember the note he left on Mellery’s body-come and get me if you can. That’s what the backwards footprints were all about. This maniac is dangling messages in front of our faces, and they all say the same thing: ‘Chase me, chase me, betcha can’t catch me!’”

“Okay, I get it, I see what you’re saying. You may be right. But there’s no way I can publicly connect these cases based on one guy’s guess about the meaning of a plastic flower. Get me something real-ASAP.”

After he hung up the phone, Gurney sat by the den window gazing out at the late-afternoon gloom. Suppose, as Kline had conjectured, the flower wasn’t a peony after all. Gurney was shocked to realize how fragile his new “link” was-and how much confidence he’d had in it. Overlooking the glaring flaw in a theory was a sure sign of excessive emotional attachment to it. How many times had he made that point to the criminology students in the course he taught at the state university, and here he was blundering into the same trap. It was depressing.

The dead ends of the day ran around in his head in a fatiguing loop for maybe half an hour, maybe longer.

“Why are you sitting in there in the dark?”

He swiveled in his chair and saw Madeleine silhouetted in the doorway.

“Kline wants connections more tangible than a debatable peony,” he said. “I gave the Bronx guy a few places to look. Hopefully he’ll come up with something.”

“You sound doubtful.”

“Well, on the one hand, we have the peony, or at least what we think is a peony. On the other hand, we have the difficulty of imagining the Ruddens and the Mellerys being connected to each other in any way. If ever there were people who lived in different worlds…”

“What if it’s a serial killer and there are no connections?”

“Even serial killers aren’t random killers. Their victims tend to have something in common-all blondes, all Asians, all gays-some characteristic with special meaning for the killer. So even if Mellery and Rudden were never directly involved in anything together, we’d still be looking for some common ground or similarity between them.”

“What if…” Madeleine began, but the ringing of the phone interrupted her.

It was Randy Clamm.

“Sorry to bother you, sir, but I thought you’d like to know you were right. I took a drive over to see the widow, and I asked that question just like you said I should-sort of matter-of-fact. All I said was, ‘Can I have the whiskey bottle that you found?’ I didn’t even have to bring the Lord into it. I’ll be damned if she didn’t say, just as matter-of-factly as myself, ‘It’s in the garbage.’ So we go out in the kitchen and there it is, sitting there in the garbage pail, a broken Four Roses bottle. I’m staring at it, speechless. Not that I was surprised that you were right-don’t get me wrong-but, Jesus, I didn’t expect it to be so easy. So damn obvious. As soon as I collect my thoughts, I ask her to show me exactly where she’d found it. But then the whole situation suddenly catches up with her-maybe because now I’m not sounding so casual-and she looks very upset. I tell her to relax, don’t worry about it, could she just tell me where it was, because that would be really helpful to us, and maybe, like, you know, would she mind telling me why the hell she moved it. I didn’t put it that way, of course, but that’s what I’m thinking. So she looks at me, and you know what she says? She says Albert’s been so good about the drinking problem, he didn’t have a drink for almost a year. He’s going to AA, he’s doing great-and when she sees the bottle, which was on the floor next to him, next to the plastic flower, the first thing she thinks is that he started drinking again and fell on the bottle, and it cut his throat, and that’s how he died. It doesn’t immediately occur to her that he’s been murdered-it doesn’t even cross her mind until the cops come and they start talking about it. But before they come, she hides the bottle because she’s thinking it’s his bottle, and she doesn’t want anyone to know he had a relapse.”

“And even after it sank into her head that he was killed, she still didn’t want anyone to know about the bottle?”

“No. Because she still thinks it was his bottle and she doesn’t want anyone to know he was drinking, especially his nice new friends from AA.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“So the whole thing turns out to be a pathetic mess. On the other hand, you got your proof that the murders are connected.”

Clamm was upset, full of the conflicted feelings that Gurney was all too familiar with-the feelings that made being a good cop so hard, so ultimately wearying.

“You did a great job there, Randy.”

“Just did what you told me to do,” said Clamm in his rapid, agitated way. “After securing the bottle, I called for the evidence team to make a return visit, go over the whole house for letters, notes, anything. I asked Mrs. Rudden for their checkbook. You mentioned that to me this morning. She gave it to me, but she didn’t know anything about it-handled it like it might be radioactive, said Albert took care of all the bills. Said she doesn’t like checks because there are numbers on them, and you got to be careful about numbers, numbers can be evil-some crap about Satan, crazy religious bullshit. Anyway, I took a look through the checkbook, and the bottom line on that is it’s going to take more time to figure it out. Albert might have paid the bills, but he wasn’t much of a record keeper. There was no reference on any of the check stubs to anyone named Arybdis or Charybdis or Scylla-that’s what I looked for first-but that doesn’t mean much, because most of the stubs had no names, just amounts, and some of them didn’t even have that. As for monthly statements, she had no idea if there were any in the house, but we’ll do a thorough search, and we’ll get her permission to get photostats from the bank. In the meantime, now that we know we’re holding two corners of the same triangle, is there anything else you want to share with me about the Mellery murder?”

Gurney thought about it. “The series of threats Mellery received prior to his murder included vague references to things he did when he was drunk. Now it turns out that Rudden had drinking problems, too.”

“You saying we’re looking for a guy who’s running around knocking off drunks?”

“Not exactly. If that’s all he wanted to do, there’d be easier ways to do it.”

“Like toss a bomb into an AA meeting?”

“Something simple. Something that would maximize his opportunity and minimize his risk. But this guy’s approach is complicated and inconvenient. Nothing easy or direct about it. Any part of it you look at raises questions.”

“Like what?”

“To start with, why would he pick victims who are so far apart geographically-and in every other way, for that matter?”

“To keep us from connecting them?”

“But he wants us to connect them. That’s the point of the peony. He wants to be noticed. Wants credit. This is not your average perp on the run. This guy wants to do battle-not just with his victims. With the police, too.”

“Speaking of that, I need to bring my lieutenant up to date. He wouldn’t be happy if he found out I called you first.”

“Where are you?”

“On my way back to the station house.”

“That would put you on Tremont Avenue?”

“How’d you know that?”

“That roar of Bronx traffic in the background. Nothing quite like it.”

“Must be nice to be somewhere else. You got any message you want me to pass along to Lieutenant Everly?”

“Better hold the messages till later. He’s going to be a lot more interested in what you have to tell him.”

Chapter 37

Gurney had an urge to call Sheridan Kline with the decisive new evidence supporting the peony linkage, but he wanted to make one other call first. If the two cases were as parallel as they now seemed to be, it was possible not only that Rudden had been asked for money but that he had been asked to send it to that same post-office box in Wycherly, Connecticut.

Gurney took his slim case folder out of his desk drawer and located his photocopy of the brief note Gregory Dermott had sent along with the check he’d returned to Mellery. The GD Security Systems letterhead-businesslike, conservative, even a little old-fashioned-included a Wycherly-area phone number.

The call was answered on the second ring by a voice consistent with the style of the letterhead.

“Good afternoon. GD Security. May I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Dermott, please. This is Detective Gurney from the district attorney’s office.”

“Finally!” The vehemence that transformed the voice was startling.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re calling about the misaddressed check?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, but…?”

“I reported it six days ago-six days ago!”

“Reported what six days ago?”

“Didn’t you just say you were calling about the check?”

“Let’s start over, Mr. Dermott. It’s my understanding that Mark Mellery spoke to you approximately ten days ago about a check you’d returned to him, a check made out to ‘X. Arybdis’ and sent to your post-office box. Is that true?”

“Of course it’s true. What kind of question is that?” The man sounded furious.

“When you say that you reported it six days ago, I’m afraid I don’t-”

“The second one!”

“You received a second check?”

“Isn’t that why you’re calling?”

“Actually, sir, I was calling to ask you that very question.”

“What question?”

“Whether you’d also received a check from a man by the name of Albert Rudden.”

“Yes, Rudden was the name on the second check. That’s what I called to report. Six days ago.”

“Who did you call?”

Gurney heard a couple of long, deep breaths being taken, as though the man were trying to keep himself from exploding.

“Look, Detective, there’s a level of confusion here that I’m not happy with. I called the police six days ago to report a troubling situation. Three checks had been sent to my post-office box, addressed to an individual I’ve never heard of. Now you call me back, ostensibly regarding these checks, but you don’t seem to know what I’m talking about. What am I missing? What the hell is going on?”

“What police department did you call?”

“Mine, of course-my local Wycherly precinct. How could you not know that if you’re calling me back?”

“The fact is, sir, I’m not calling you back. I’m calling from New York State regarding the original check you returned to Mark Mellery. We weren’t aware of any additional checks. You said there were two more after the first?”

“That’s what I said.”

“One from Albert Rudden and one from someone else?”

“Yes, Detective. Is that clear now?”

“Perfectly clear. But now I’m wondering why three misaddressed checks disturbed you enough to call your local police.”

“I called my local police because the postal police whom I first notified exhibited a colossal lack of interest. Before you ask me why I called the postal police, let me say that for a policeman you have a rather dull sense of security issues.”

“Why do you say that, sir?”

“I’m in the security business, Officer-or Detective, or whatever you are. The computer-data security business. Do you have any idea how common identity theft is-or how often identity theft involves the misappropriation of addresses?”

“I see. And what did the Wycherly police do?”

“Less than the postal police, if that’s possible.”

Gurney could imagine Dermott’s phone calls receiving a lackadaisical response. Three unfamiliar people sending checks to someone’s post-office box might sound like something less than a high-priority peril.

“You did return the second and third checks to their senders, like you returned Mark Mellery’s?”

“I certainly did, and I enclosed notes asking who gave them my box number, but neither individual had the courtesy to reply.”

“Did you keep the name and address from the third check?”

“I certainly did.”

“I need that name and address right now.”

“Why? Is there something going on here I don’t know about?”

“Mark Mellery and Albert Rudden are both dead. Possible homicides.”

“Homicides? What do you mean, homicides?” Dermott’s voice had become shrill.

“They may have been murdered.”

“Oh, my God. You think this is connected with the checks?”

“Whoever gave them your post-office box address would be a person of interest in the case.”

“Oh, my God. Why my address? What connection is there to me?”

“Good question, Mr. Dermott.”

“But I never heard of anyone named Mark Mellery or Albert Rudden.”

“What was the name on the third check?”

“The third check? Oh, my God. I’ve gone completely blank.”

“You said you made a note of the name.”

“Yes, yes, of course I did. Wait. Richard Kartch. Yes, that was it. Richard Kartch. K-a-r-t-c-h. I’ll get the address. Wait, I have it here. It’s 349 Quarry Road, Sotherton, Massachusetts.”

“Got it.”

“Look, Detective, since I seem to be involved in this in some way, I’d appreciate knowing whatever you can tell me. There must be a reason my post-office box was chosen.”

“Are you sure you’re the only one who has access to that box?”

“As sure as I can be. But God knows how many postal workers have access to it. Or who might have a duplicate key that I’m not aware of.”

“The name Richard Kartch means nothing to you?”

“Nothing. I’m quite sure of that. It’s the sort of name I’d remember.”

“Okay, sir. I’d like to give you a couple of phone numbers where you can reach me. I would appreciate hearing from you immediately if anything at all occurs to you about the names of those three people, or about any access anyone else might have to your mail. And one last question. Do you recall the amounts of the second and third checks?”

“That’s easy. The second and third were the same as the first-$289.87.”

Chapter 38

Madeleine turned on one of the den lamps from a switch at the door. During Gurney’s conversation with Dermott, the dusk had deepened and the room was nearly dark.

“Making progress?”

“Major progress. Thanks to you.”

“My Great-Aunt Mimi had peonies,” she said.

“Which one was Mimi?”

“My father’s mother’s sister,” she said, not quite concealing her exasperation at the fact that a man so adept at juggling the details of the most complex investigation couldn’t remember half a dozen family relationships. “Your dinner is ready.”

“Well, actually…”

“It’s on the stove. Don’t forget about it.”

“You’re going out?”

“Yes.”

“Where to?”

“I’ve told you about it twice in the past week.”

“I remember something about Thursday. The details…”

“… escape you at the moment? Nothing new there. See you later.”

“You’re not going to tell me where…?”

Her footsteps were already receding through the kitchen to the back door.

There was no phone listing for Richard Kartch at 349 Quarry Road in Sotherton, but an Internet map search of contiguous addresses turned up names and phone numbers for 329 and 369.

The thick male voice that finally answered the call to 329 monosyllabically denied knowing anyone by the name of Kartch, knowing which house on the street 349 might be, or even knowing how long he himself had lived in the area. He sounded half comatose on alcohol or opiates, was probably lying as a matter of habit, and was clearly not going to be of any help.

The woman at 369 Quarry Road was more talkative.

“You mean the hermit?” Her way of saying it gave the epithet a creepy pathology.

“Mr. Kartch lives alone?”

“Oh, indeed he does, unless you count the rats his garbage attracts. His wife was lucky to escape. I’m not surprised you’re calling-you said you’re a police officer?”

“Special investigator with the district attorney’s office.” He knew that he ought, in the interest of full disclosure, to mention the state and county of jurisdiction, but he rationalized that the details could be filled in later.

“What’s he done now?”

“Nothing that I’m aware of, but he may be able to help with an investigation, and we need to get in touch with him. Would you happen to know where he works or what time he gets home from work?”

“Work? That’s a joke!”

“Is Mr. Kartch unemployed?”

“Try unemployable.” There was venom in her voice.

“You seem to have a real problem with him.”

“He’s a pig, he’s stupid, he’s dirty, he’s dangerous, he’s crazy, he stinks, he’s armed to the teeth, and he’s usually drunk.”

“Sounds like quite a neighbor.”

“The neighbor from hell! Do you have any idea what it’s like trying to show your home to a prospective buyer while the shirtless, beer-swilling ape next door blasts holes in a garbage can with his shotgun?”

Knowing what the answer was likely to be, he decided to ask his next question, anyway. “Would you be willing to give Mr. Kartch a message for me?”

“Are you kidding? All I’d be willing to give him is the sharp end of a stick.”

“When would he be most likely to be at home?”

“Pick a time, any time. I’ve never seen that lunatic leave his property.”

“Is there a visible house number?”

“Hah! You don’t need any number to recognize the house. It wasn’t finished when his wife left-still isn’t. No siding. No lawn. No steps to the front door. The perfect house for a total nutcase. Whoever goes there better bring a gun.”

Gurney thanked her and ended the conversation.

Now what?

Various individuals needed to be brought up to speed. First and foremost, Sheridan Kline. And, of course, Randy Clamm. Not to mention Captain Rodriguez and Jack Hardwick. The question was whom to call first. He decided they could all wait another few minutes. Instead he got the number of the Sotherton, Massachusetts, police department from information.

He spoke to the duty sergeant, a gravelly man by the name of Kalkan, kind of like the dog food. After identifying himself, Gurney explained that a Sotherton man by the name of Richard Kartch was a person of interest in a New York State murder investigation, that he might be in imminent danger, that he apparently had no phone, and that it was important that a phone be brought to him, or he brought to a phone, so that he could be warned about his situation.

“We’re familiar with Richie Kartch,” said Kalkan.

“Sounds like you may have had problems with him.”

Kalkan didn’t answer.

“He has a record?”

“Who did you say you were?”

Gurney told him again, with a little more detail.

“And this is part of your investigation of what?”

“Two murders-one in upstate New York, one in the Bronx-same pattern. Before they were killed, both victims received certain communications from the killer. We have evidence that Kartch has received at least one of those same communications, making him a possible third target.”

“So you want Crazy Richie to get in touch with you?”

“He needs to call me immediately, preferably in the presence of one of your officers. After speaking with him on the phone, we’ll probably want a follow-up interview with him in Sotherton-with the cooperation of your department.”

“We’ll send a car out to his place as soon as we can. Give me a number where you can be reached.”

Gurney gave him his cell number in order to leave the house phone free for the calls he intended to make to Kline, BCI, and Clamm.

Kline was gone for the day, as was Ellen Rackoff, and the call was automatically rerouted to a phone that was answered on the sixth ring as Gurney was about to hang up.

“Stimmel.”

Gurney remembered the man who’d come with Kline to the BCI meeting, the man with the personality of a mute war criminal.

“It’s Dave Gurney. I have a message for your boss.”

There was no response.

“You there?”

“I’m here.”

Gurney figured that was as near an invitation to proceed as he was going to get. So he went ahead and gave Stimmel the evidence confirming the link between murders one and two; the discovery, through Dermott, of a third potential victim; and the steps he was taking through the Sotherton PD to reach him. “You got all that?”

“Got it.”

“After you inform the DA, you want to pass the information along to BCI, or shall I speak with Rodriguez directly?”

There was a short silence during which Gurney assumed that the dour, unforthcoming man was calculating the consequences both ways. Knowing the penchant for control built into most cops, he was about 90 percent sure he’d get the answer he finally got.

“We’ll handle it,” said Stimmel.

Having disposed of the need to call BCI, Gurney was left with Randy Clamm.

As usual, he answered on the first ring.

“Clamm.”

And as usual, he sounded like he was in a hurry and doing three other things as he spoke. “Glad you called. Just making a triple list of gaps in Rudden’s checking account-check stubs with amounts but no names, checks issued but not cashed, check numbers skipped-going from most recent backwards.”

“The amount $289.87 appear on any of your lists?”

“What? How’d you know that? It’s one of the ‘checks issued but not cashed.’ How did you…?”

“It’s the amount he always asks for.”

“Always? You mean more than twice?”

“A third check was sent to the same post-office box. We’re in the process of getting in touch with the sender. That’s why I’m calling-to let you know we have an ongoing pattern here. If the pieces of the pattern hold, the slug you’re looking for in the Rudden bungalow is a.38 Special.”

“Who’s the third guy?”

“Richard Kartch, Sotherton, Mass. Apparently a difficult character.”

“Massachusetts? Jesus, our boy’s all over the place. This third guy’s still alive?”

“We’ll know in a few minutes. Local PD sent a car to his house.”

“Okay. I’d appreciate your letting me know whatever you can whenever you can. I’ll make some more noise about getting our evidence team back to the Ruddens’. I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for the call, sir.”

“Good luck. I’ll talk to you soon.”

Gurney’s respect for the young detective was growing. The more he heard, the more he liked what he was hearing-energy, intelligence, dedication. And something else. Something earnest and unspoiled. Something that touched his heart.

He shook his head like a dog shaking off water and took several deep breaths. The day, he thought, must have been more emotionally draining than he’d realized. Or perhaps some residue of his dream about his father was still with him. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

He was awakened by the phone, mistaking it at first for his alarm clock. He found himself still in his den chair, with a painfully stiff neck. According to his watch, he’d been asleep for nearly two hours. He picked up the phone and cleared his throat.

“Gurney.”

The DA’s voice on the other end burst like a horse from the starting gate.

“Dave, I just got the news. God, this thing just keeps getting bigger. A third potential victim in Massachusetts? This could be the biggest damn murder case since Son of Sam, not to mention your own Jason Strunk. This is big! I just want to hear it from your own lips, before I talk to the media: We do have hard evidence that the same guy whacked the first two victims, is that right?”

“The evidence strongly suggests that, sir.”

“Suggests?”

“Strongly suggests.”

“Could you be more definite?”

“We don’t have fingerprints. We don’t have DNA. I’d say it’s definite that the cases are connected, but we can’t prove yet that the same individual cut both throats.”

“The probability is high?”

“Very high.”

“Your judgment on that is good enough for me.”

Gurney smiled at this transparent pretense of trust. He knew damn well that Sheridan Kline was the sort of man who valued his own judgment far above anyone else’s but would always leave a door open for blame shifting in case a situation went south.

“I’d say it’s time to talk to our friends at Fox News-which means I need to touch base with BCI tonight and put together a statement. Keep me up to the minute on this, Dave, especially any developments on the Massachusetts angle. I want to know everything.” Kline hung up without bothering to say good-bye.

So apparently he was planning to go public in a big way-rev up a media circus with himself as the ringmaster-before it occurred to the Bronx DA, or to the DA in any other jurisdiction where the murder spree might spread, to seize the personal publicity opportunity. Gurney’s lips drew back in distaste as he imagined the press conferences to come.

“Are you all right?”

Startled at the voice so close to him, he looked up and saw Madeleine at the den door.

“Jesus, how the hell…?”

“You were so engrossed in your conversation you didn’t hear me come in.”

“Apparently not.” Blinking, he looked at his watch. “So where did you go?”

“Remember what I said on my way out?”

“You said you wouldn’t tell me where you were going.”

“I said I’d already told you twice.”

“Okay, fine. Well, I have work to do.”

As if it were his ally, the phone rang.

The call was from Sotherton, but it wasn’t from Richard Kartch. It was from a detective by the name of Gowacki.

“We got a situation,” he said. “How soon do you think you can get here?”

Chapter 39

By the time Gurney got off the phone with the flat-voiced Mike Gowacki, it was nine-fifteen. He found Madeleine already in bed, propped against her pillows, with a book. War and Peace. She’d been reading it for three years, shuttling back and forth between it and, incongruously, Thoreau’s Walden.

“I have to head out to a crime scene.”

She looked up at him from the book-curious, worried, lonely.

He felt able to respond only to the curiosity. “Another male victim. Stabbed in the throat, footprints in the snow.”

“How far?”

“What?”

“How far do you have to go?”

“Sotherton, Massachusetts. Three, four hours, maybe.”

“So you won’t be back until sometime tomorrow.”

“For breakfast, I hope.”

She smiled her who-do-you-think-you’re-kidding? smile.

He started to leave, then stopped and sat on the edge of the bed. “This is a strange case,” he said, letting his unsureness about it come through. “Getting stranger by the day.”

She nodded, somehow placated. “You don’t think it’s your standard serial killer?”

“Not the standard version, no.”

“Too much communication with the victims?”

“Yes. And too much diversity among the victims-personally and geographically. Typical serial killer doesn’t bounce around from the Catskills to the East Bronx to the middle of Massachusetts pursuing famous authors, retired night watchmen, and nasty loners.”

“They must have something in common.”

“They all have drinking histories, and the evidence indicates the killer is focused on that issue. But they must have something else in common-otherwise why go to the trouble of choosing victims two hundred miles apart from one another?”

They fell silent. Gurney absently smoothed wrinkles out of the quilt in the space between them. Madeleine watched him for a while, her hands resting on her book.

“I better get going,” he said.

“Be careful.”

“Right.” He rose slowly, almost arthritically. “See you in the morning.”

She looked at him with an expression he could never put into words, couldn’t even say if it was good or bad, but he knew it well. He felt its almost physical touch in the center of his chest.

It was well after midnight when he exited from the Mass. Turnpike and one-thirty when he drove through the deserted main street of Sotherton. Ten minutes later, on the rutted lane called Quarry Road, he arrived at a haphazard assembly of police vehicles, one of which had its strobes flashing. He pulled in alongside it. As he got out of his car, an irritated-looking uniformed cop emerged from the light machine.

“Hold it. Where do you think you’re going?” He sounded not only irritated but exhausted.

“Name is Gurney-here to see Detective Gowacki.”

“About what?”

“He’s expecting me.”

“What’s it about?”

Gurney wondered whether the guy’s edge was coming from a long day or from a naturally lousy attitude. He had a low tolerance for naturally lousy attitudes.

“It’s about him asking me to come here. You want some identification?”

The cop clicked his flashlight on and shined it in Gurney’s face. “Who’d you say you were?”

“Gurney, district attorney’s office, special investigator.”

“The fuck didn’t you say so?”

Gurney smiled without any emotion resembling friendliness. “You going to tell Gowacki I’m here?”

After a final hostile pause, the man turned and walked up the outer edge of a long, rising driveway toward a house that seemed, in the portable arc lights illuminating the property for the crime-scene techs, only half finished. Uninvited, Gurney followed him.

As the driveway neared the house, it made a left cut into the bank of the hill and arrived at the opening to a two-car basement garage, currently housing one car. At first Gurney thought the garage doors were open; then he realized there weren’t any doors. The half inch of snow that coated the driveway continued inside. The cop stopped at the opening, blocked by crime-scene tape, and shouted, “Mike!”

There was no response. The cop shrugged as if an honest effort had been made, had failed, and that was the end of the matter. Then a tired voice came from the yard behind the house. “Back here.”

Without waiting, Gurney headed around the perimeter of the tape in that direction.

“Make sure you stay outside the tape.” The cop’s warning struck Gurney as the final bark of a testy dog.

Rounding the rear corner of the house, he saw that the area, bright as day in the glare of the lights, was not exactly the “yard” he had expected. Like the house, it exhibited an odd blend of incompletion and decrepitude. A heavily built man with thinning hair was standing on a crude set of steps, cobbled together from two-by-tens, at the back door. The man’s eyes scanned the half acre of open ground that separated the house from a thicket of sumac.

The ground was lumpy, as though it had never been graded after the foundation was backfilled. Scraps of framing lumber, heaped here and there, had taken on a weathered grayness. The house was only partially sided, and the plastic moisture barrier over the plywood sheathing was faded from exposure. The impression was not of construction in progress but construction abandoned.

When the stout man’s gaze reached Gurney, he studied him for a few seconds before asking, “You the man from the Catskills?”

“That’s right.”

“Walk another ten feet along the tape, then step under it and come around here to the back door. Make sure you steer clear of that line of footprints from the house to the driveway.”

Presumably this was Gowacki, but Gurney had an aversion to presuming, so he asked the question and got back an affirmative grunt.

As he made his way across the wasteland that should have been a backyard, he came close enough to the footprints to note their similarity to those at the institute.

“Look familiar?” asked Gowacki, eyeing Gurney curiously.

There was nothing thick about the thick-bodied detective’s perception, thought Gurney. He nodded. Now it was his own turn to be perceptive.

“Those footprints bother you?”

“Little bit,” said Gowacki. “Not the footprints, exactly. More the location of the body in relation to the footprints. You know something I don’t?”

“Would the location of the body make more sense if the direction of the footprints were reversed?”

“If the direction were… Wait a minute… Yes, goddamn it, perfect sense!” He stared at Gurney. “What the hell are we dealing with here?”

“First of all, we’re dealing with someone who has killed three people-three that we know of-in the past week. He’s a planner and a perfectionist. He leaves a lot of evidence behind, but only evidence he wants us to see. He’s extremely intelligent, probably well educated, and may hate the police even more than he hates his victims. By the way, is the body still here?”

Gowacki looked like he was making a mental recording of Gurney’s response. Finally he said, “Yeah, the body’s here. I wanted you to see it. Thought something might register, based on what you know about the other two. Ready to take a look?”

The back door of the house led into a small, unfinished area probably intended to be a laundry room, given the position of the roughed-in plumbing, but there was no washing machine and no dryer. There wasn’t even any drywall over the insulation. Illumination was provided by a bare bulb in a cheap white fixture nailed to an exposed ceiling joist.

In the raw, unwelcoming light, the body lay on its back, half in the would-be laundry area and half in the kitchen beyond the untrimmed doorway separating them.

“Can I take a closer look?” asked Gurney, grimacing.

“That’s what you’re here for.”

The closer look revealed a pool of coagulated blood that had spread from multiple throat wounds out across the kitchen floor and under a thrift-shop breakfast table. The victim’s face was full of anger, but the bitter lines etched into the large, hard face were the product of a lifetime and revealed nothing about the terminal assault.

“Unhappy-looking man,” said Gurney.

“Miserable son of a bitch is what he was.”

“I gather you’ve had some past trouble with Mr. Kartch.”

“Nothing but trouble. Every damn bit of it unnecessary.” Gowacki glared at the body as though its violent, bloody end had been insufficient punishment. “Every town has troublemakers-angry drunks, slobs who turn their places into pigsties to piss off the neighbors, creeps whose ex-wives have to get orders of protection, jerks who let their dogs bark all night, weirdos who mothers don’t want their kids within a mile of. Here in Sotherton all those assholes were wrapped up in one guy-Richie Kartch.”

“Sounds like quite a guy.”

“Matter of curiosity, were the other two victims anything like that?”

“The first was the opposite of that. The second I don’t have personal details on yet, but I doubt he was anything like this guy.” Gurney took another look at the face staring up from the floor, as ugly in death as it had apparently been in life.

“Just thought maybe we had a serial killer trying to rid the world of assholes. Anyway, to get back to your comments about the footprints in the snow-how did you know they’d make more sense if they went the other way?”

“That’s the way it was at the first murder.”

Gowacki’s eyes showed interest. “The position of this body is consistent with facing an attacker entering through the back door. But the footprints show someone coming in the front door and exiting by the back door. Doesn’t make sense.”

“Mind if I take a look around the kitchen?”

“Be my guest. Photographer, medical examiner, blood-prints-and-fibers guys were all here. Just don’t move anything. We’re still going through his personal possessions.”

“ME say anything about powder burns?”

“Powder burns? Those are knife wounds.”

“I suspect there’s a bullet wound somewhere in that bloody mess.”

“You see something I missed?”

“I think I see a small round hole in the corner of that ceiling above the refrigerator. Any of your people comment on that?”

Gowacki followed Gurney’s gaze to the spot. “What are you telling me here?”

“That Kartch may have been shot first, then stabbed.”

“And the footprints actually go in the opposite direction?”

“Right.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re saying the killer comes in the back door, shoots Richie in the throat, Richie goes down, then the killer stabs him a dozen times in the throat like he’s tenderizing a fucking steak?”

“That’s pretty much what happened in Peony.”

“But the footprints…”

“The footprints could have been made by attaching a second sole to the boot-backwards-to make it look like he came in the front and went out the back, when in fact he came in the back and went out the front.”

“Shit, that’s ridiculous! What the hell’s he playing at?”

“That’s the word for it.”

“What?”

“Playing. Hell of a game, but that’s what he’s doing, and now he’s done it three times. ‘Not only are you wrong, you’re ass-backwards wrong. I hand you clue after clue, but you still can’t get me. That’s how fucking useless you cops are.’ That’s the message he’s giving us at every crime scene.”

Gowacki gave Gurney a slow, assessing look. “You see this guy pretty vividly.”

Gurney smiled, stepping around the body to get to a heap of papers on the kitchen countertop. “You mean I sound a little intense?”

“Not for me to say. We don’t get a lot of murders in Sotherton. Even those, and we only get one maybe every five years, they’re the kind that plead down to manslaughter. They tend to involve baseball bats and tire irons in the parking lots of bars. Nothing planned. Definitely nothing playful.”

Gurney grunted in sympathy. He’d seen more than his share of unsophisticated mayhem.

“That’s mostly crap,” said Gowacki, nodding toward the pile of junk mail that Gurney was gingerly poking through.

He was about to agree when, at the very bottom of the disorganized heap of Pennysavers, flyers, gun magazines, collection-agency notices, and military-surplus catalogs, he came upon a small, empty envelope, torn open roughly at the flap, addressed to Richard Kartch. The handwriting was beautifully precise. The ink was red.

“You find something?” asked Gowacki.

“You might want to put this in an evidence bag,” said Gurney, taking the envelope by its corner and moving it to a clear space on the countertop. “Our killer likes to communicate with his victims.”

“There’s more upstairs.”

Gurney and Gowacki turned to the source of the new voice-a large young man standing in the doorway on the opposite side of the kitchen.

“Underneath a bunch of porno magazines on the table by his bed-there’s three of them envelopes with red writing on them.”

“Guess I ought to go up, take a look,” said Gowacki with the reluctance of a man stocky enough to think twice about a flight of stairs. “Bobby, this here is Detective Gurney from Delaware County, New York.”

“Bob Muffit,” said the young man, extending his hand nervously to Gurney, keeping his eyes averted from the body on the floor.

The upstairs had the same half-done and half-abandoned appearance as the rest of the house. The landing provided access to four doors. Muffit led the way into the one on the right. Even by the shabby standard already established, it was a wreck. On those portions of the carpet not covered by dirty clothes or empty beer cans, Gurney observed what appeared to be dried vomit stains. The air was sour, sweaty. The blinds were closed. The light came from the sole working bulb in a three-bulb fixture in the middle of the ceiling.

Gowacki made his way to the table by the disarranged bed. Next to a pile of porno magazines were three envelopes with red handwriting, and next to them a personal check. Gowacki did not touch anything directly but slid the four items onto a magazine called Hot Buns, which he used as a tray.

“Let’s go downstairs and see what we have here,” he said.

The three men retraced their steps to the kitchen, where Gowacki deposited the envelopes and the check on the breakfast table. With a pen and a tweezers from his shirt pocket, he lifted back the ripped flap of each envelope and extracted the contents. The three envelopes held poems that looked identical, down to their nun-like penmanship, to the corresponding poems received by Mellery.

Gurney’s first glance fell on the lines “What you took you will give / when you get what you gave… You and I have a date / Mr. 658.”

The item that held his attention the longest, however, was the check. It was made out to “X. Arybdis,” and it was signed “R. Kartch.” It was evidently the check returned by Gregory Dermott to Kartch uncashed. It was made out for the same amount as Mellery’s and Rudden’s-$289.87. The name and address “R. Kartch, 349 Quarry Road, Sotherton, Mass. 01055” appeared in the upper left corner of the check.

R. Kartch. There was something about that name that bothered Gurney.

Perhaps it was just that same peculiar experience he always had when he looked at the printed name of a deceased person. It was as though the name itself had lost the breath of life, had become smaller, cut loose from that which had given it stature. It was strange, he reflected, how you can believe you have come to terms with death, even believe that its presence no longer has much effect on you, that it is just part of your profession. Then it comes at you in such a weird way-in the unsettling, shrunken quality of a dead man’s name. No matter how hard one tries to ignore it, death finds a way to be noticed. It seeps into your feelings like water through a basement wall.

Perhaps that’s why the name R. Kartch seemed odd to him. Or was there another reason?

Chapter 40

Mark Mellery. Albert Rudden. Richard Kartch. Three men. Targeted, mentally tortured, shot, and so forcibly and repeatedly stabbed that their heads were nearly hacked off. What had they done, separately or in concert, to engender such a macabre revenge?

Or was it revenge at all? Might the suggestion of revenge conveyed by the notes be-as Rodriguez had once proposed-a smoke screen to hide a more practical motive?

Anything was still possible.

It was nearly dawn when Gurney began his return drive to Walnut Crossing, and the air was raw with the scent of snow. He’d entered that strained state of consciousness in which a deep weariness struggles with an agitated wakefulness. Thoughts and pictures cascade through the brain without progress or logic.

One such image was the dead man’s check, the name R. Kartch, something lurking beneath an inaccessible trapdoor of memory, something not quite right. Like a faint star, it eluded a direct search and might appear in his peripheral vision once he stopped looking for it.

He made an effort to focus on other aspects of the case, but his mind refused to proceed in an orderly way. Instead, he saw the half-dried pool of blood across Kartch’s kitchen floor, the far edge spreading into the shadow of the rickety table. He stared hard at the highway ahead, trying to exorcise the image but succeeding only in replacing it with the bloodstain of similar size on Mark Mellery’s stone patio-which in turn gave way to an image of Mellery in an Adirondack chair, leaning forward, asking for protection, deliverance.

Leaning forward, asking…

Gurney felt the pressure of tears welling.

He pulled in to a rest stop. There was only one other car in the little parking area, and it looked more abandoned than parked. His face felt hot, his hands cold. Not being able to think straight frightened him, made him feel helpless.

Exhaustion was a lens through which he had a tendency to see his life as a failure-a failure made more painful by the professional accolades heaped upon him. Knowing that this was a trick his tired mind played on him made it no less convincing. After all, he had his litany of proofs. As a detective, he’d failed Mark Mellery. As a husband, he’d failed Karen, and now he was failing Madeleine. As a father, he’d failed Danny, and now he was failing Kyle.

His brain had its limits, and after enduring another quarter hour of this laceration, it shut down. He fell into a brief, restorative sleep.

He wasn’t sure how long it lasted, almost certainly less than an hour, but when he woke up, the emotional upheaval had passed and in its place was an uncluttered clarity. He also had a terribly stiff neck, but it seemed a small price to pay.

Perhaps because there was now room for it, a new vision of the Wycherly post-office box mystery began to form in his mind. The two original hypotheses had never seemed entirely satisfactory: namely, that the victims were directed by mistake to send their checks to the wrong box number (unlikely, given the killer’s attention to detail) or that it was the right box but something had gone awry, allowing Dermott to receive and innocently return the checks before the killer could remove them through whatever method he’d devised.

But now Gurney saw a third explanation. Suppose it was the right box and nothing had gone awry. Suppose the purpose of asking for the checks had been something other than to cash them. Suppose the killer had managed to gain access to the box, open the envelopes, look at the checks or make copies of them, and then reseal them in their envelopes and replace them in the box before Dermott got to them.

If this new scenario was closer to the truth-if the killer was in fact using Dermott’s post-office box for his own purposes-it opened a fascinating new avenue. It might be possible for Gurney to communicate with the killer directly. Despite its wildly hypothetical foundation, and despite the confusion and depression in which he’d just been immersed, this thought so excited him that several minutes passed before he realized that he’d pulled out of the rest stop and was racing homeward at eighty miles an hour.

Madeleine was out. He put his wallet and keys on the breakfast table and picked up the note lying there. It was in Madeleine’s quick, clean handwriting and, as usual, challengingly concise: “Went to 9 AM yoga. Back before storm. 5 messages. Was the fish a flounder?”

What storm?

What fish?

He wanted to go into the den and listen to the five phone messages he assumed she was talking about, but there was something else he wanted to do first, something of greater urgency. The notion that he might be able to write to the killer-to send him a note via Dermott’s mailbox-had given him an overwhelming desire to do so.

He could see that the scenario was shaky, with assumptions resting upon assumptions, but it had great appeal. The chance to do something was very exciting compared to the frustration of the investigation and that creepy sense that any progress they were making might be part of the enemy’s plan. Impulsive and unreasonable as it was, the chance to toss a grenade over a wall where the enemy might be lurking was irresistible. The only thing remaining was to construct the grenade.

He really should listen to his messages. There could be something urgent, important. He started for the den. But a sentence came to mind-one he didn’t want to forget, a rhyming couplet, the perfect beginning of a statement to the killer. Excitedly, he picked up the pad and pen Madeleine had left on the table and began to write. Fifteen minutes later he put down the pen and read the eight lines written in an elaborate, decorative script.

I see how all you did was done,

from backwards boots to muffled gun.

The game you started soon will end,

your throat cut by a dead man’s friend.

Beware the snow, beware the sun,

the night, the day, nowhere to run.

With sorrow first his grave I’ll tend

and then to hell his killer send.

Satisfied, he wiped the paper clean of fingerprints. It felt odd doing that-shady, evasive-but he brushed the feeling aside, got an envelope, and addressed it to X. Arybdis at Dermott’s box number in Wycherly, Connecticut.

Chapter 41

Gurney just made it down to the mailbox in time to hand the envelope to Rhonda, who filled in for Baxter, the regular mailman, two days a week. By the time he got back up through the pasture to the house, the excitement was already being gnawed at by the remorse that inevitably followed his rare acts of impulse.

He remembered his five messages.

The first was from the gallery in Ithaca.

“David, it’s Sonya. We need to talk about your project. Nothing bad, all good, but we need to talk very, very soon. I’ll be at the gallery until six this evening, or you can call me later at home.”

The second was from Randy Clamm, and he sounded excited.

“Tried you at your cell phone, but it seems to be dead. We found some letters in the Rudden house we’d like you to look at-see if they look familiar. Seems Al was getting some weird little poems in the mail he didn’t want his wife to see. Had them hidden in the bottom of his toolbox. Give me a number, and I’ll fax them. Appreciate it.”

The third was from Jack Hardwick at BCI, his supercilious attitude running amok.

“Hey, Sherlock, word is out that your guy has a couple more notches on his gun. You were probably too busy to give your old buddy a heads-up. I was, for one crazy moment, tempted to think that it was below the dignity of Mr. Sherlock Fucking Gurney to place a call to the humble Jack Hardwick. But of course that’s not the kind of guy you are, right? Shame on me! Just to show you there’s no hard feelings, I’m calling to give you a heads-up on a get-together being planned for tomorrow-a BCI progress report on the Mellery case, including a discussion of how recent events in the Bronx and in Sotherton should affect the direction of the investigation. Captain Rod will be hosting this clusterfuck. DA Kline is being invited, and he in turn will no doubt invite you. I just thought you’d like to know in advance. After all, what are friends for?”

The fourth message was the predicted call from Kline. It was not especially “invitational.” The energy in his voice had curdled into agitation.

“Gurney, what the hell’s the matter with your cell phone? We tried to reach you directly, then through the Sotherton police. They told me you left Sotherton two and a half hours ago. They also told me we are now dealing with murder number three by the same individual. That’s an important fact, wouldn’t you say? Something you should have called me about? We need to talk ASAP. Decisions have to be made, and we need every available piece of information. There’s a meeting at BCI tomorrow noon. That’s a priority. Call me as soon as you get this!”

The final message was from Mike Gowacki.

“Just wanted you to know, we dug a slug out of that hole in the kitchen wall. A.38 like you said. Also, one more little discovery after you left. We were checking the mailbox for any more of them red-ink love notes, and we found a dead fish. In the mailbox. You didn’t mention a dead fish being part of the MO. Let me know if it means anything. I’m no psychologist, but I’d say our perp is a definite wacko. That’s it for now. I’m going home to get some sleep.”

A fish?

He went back out to the kitchen-to the breakfast table, to take another look at Madeleine’s note.

“Went to 9 AM yoga. Back before storm. 5 messages. Was the fish a flounder?”

Why would she ask that? He checked the time on the old Regulator clock over the sideboard. Nine-thirty. Seemed more like dawn, the light coming in the French doors was such a chilly gray. Back before storm. It did look like it was about to do something, probably snow, hopefully not freezing rain. So she’d be home by ten-thirty, maybe ten if she got to worrying about the roads. Then he could ask about the flounder. Madeleine wasn’t a worrier, but she had a thing about slippery roads.

He was going back to the den to return his calls when it struck him. The location of the first murder was the town of Peony, and the killer left a peony by the body of the second victim. The location of the second murder was the little Bronx enclave of Flounder Beach, making Madeleine’s guess about the fish at the third crime scene characteristically insightful and almost certainly right.

His first callback was to Sotherton. The desk sergeant put him through to Gowacki’s voice mail. He left two requests: for confirmation that the fish was a flounder and for ballistics photos so they could confirm that the slugs in Kartch’s wall and in Mellery’s wall came from the same gun. He didn’t have much doubt on either point, but certainty was a holy thing.

Then he called Kline.

Kline was in court that morning. Ellen Rackoff reiterated the DA’s complaints, scolding Gurney about the difficulty they’d had reaching him and his failure to keep them informed. She told him he’d better not miss the big meeting the following noon at BCI. But even into this lecture she managed to breathe an erotic undertone. Gurney wondered if his lack of sleep might be making him a little crazy.

He called Randy Clamm, thanked him for the update, and gave him a number at the DA’s office to fax Rudden’s letters, plus a number at BCI so a set could go to Rodriguez. Then he filled him in on the Richard Kartch situation, including the flounder connection and the fact that an alcohol element was now obvious in all three cases.

As for Sonya’s call, that could wait. He was in no great rush to call Hardwick, either. His mind kept jumping to the following day’s meeting at BCI. Not jumping there with joy-far from it. He hated meetings in general. His mind worked best alone. Groupthink made him want to leave the room. And his hasty poetic grenade tossing was making him uncomfortable about this meeting in particular. He didn’t like having secrets.

He sank down in the soft leather armchair in the corner of the den to organize the key facts of the three cases, figure out what overall hypothesis they best supported, and how to test it. But his sleep-deprived brain would not cooperate. He closed his eyes, and all semblance of linear thought dissolved. How long he sat there he wasn’t sure, but when he opened his eyes, heavily falling snow had begun whitening the landscape, and in the singular stillness he could hear a car far down the road, coming closer. He pushed himself up out of the chair and went to the kitchen, arriving at the window in time to see Madeleine’s car disappearing behind the barn at the end of the public road, presumably to check their mailbox. A minute later the phone rang. He picked up the extension on the kitchen counter.

“Good-you’re there. Do you know if the mailman has been here yet?”

“Madeleine?”

“I’m down by the box. I have something to mail, but if he’s been here already, I’ll drop it off in town.”

“Actually, it was Rhonda, and she was here a while ago.”

“Damn. All right, no matter, I’ll deal with it later.”

Slowly her car emerged from behind the barn and turned up the pasture road to the house.

She entered through the side door of the kitchen with the strained look that driving in snow put on her face. Then she noted the very different look on his face.

“What’s up?”

Engrossed in a thought that had occurred to him during her call from the mailbox, it wasn’t until she’d taken off her coat and shoes that he answered.

“I think I just figured something out.”

“Good!” She smiled and awaited the details, shaking snowflakes out of her hair.

“The number mystery-the second one. I know how he did it-or how he could have done it.”

“The second one was?”

“The one with the number nineteen, the one Mellery recorded. I showed you the letter.”

“I remember.”

“The killer asked Mellery to think of a number and then to whisper it to him.”

“Why did he ask him to whisper? By the way, that clock is wrong,” she said, looking up at the Regulator.

He stared at her.

“Sorry,” she said lightly. “Go on.”

“I think he asked him to whisper because it added an odd element to the request that would lead him further from the truth than a simple ‘Tell me the number.’”

“I don’t follow you.”

“The killer had no idea what number Mellery had in mind. The only way to find out was to ask him. He was just trying to blow some smoke around that issue.”

“But wasn’t the number mentioned in a letter the killer had already left in Mellery’s mailbox?”

“Yes and no. Yes, the number was mentioned in the letter Mellery found in the box a few minutes later, but no, it wasn’t already in the box. In fact, the letter hadn’t been printed yet.”

“You lost me.”

“Suppose the killer had one of those mini printers attached to his laptop, with the text of the letter to Mellery complete except for the right number. And suppose the killer was sitting in his car by Mellery’s mailbox on that dark country road that runs past the institute. He calls Mellery on his cell phone-like you just called me from our mailbox-persuades him to think of a number and then ‘whisper’ it, and the instant Mellery says the number, the killer enters it in the letter text and hits the print button. Half a minute later, he sticks the letter in an envelope, pops it in the mailbox, and drives off-creating the impression that he’s a diabolical mind reader.”

“Very clever,” said Madeleine.

“Him or me?”

“Obviously both of you.”

“I think it makes sense. And it makes sense that he recorded traffic noise-to give the impression that he was somewhere other than a quiet country road.”

“Traffic noise?”

“Recorded traffic noise. Smart lab tech at BCI ran a sound-analysis program on the tape Mellery made of the phone call and discovered that there were two background sounds behind the killer’s voice-a car engine and traffic. The engine was first generation-that is, the sound was actually occurring at the same time as the sound of the voice-but the traffic was second generation, meaning that a tape of traffic sounds was being played behind the live voice. Didn’t make sense at first.”

“Now it does,” said Madeleine, “now that you’ve figured it out. Very good.”

He looked closely at her, searching for the sarcasm that so often underlay her comments on his involvement in the case but finding none. She was regarding him with real admiration.

“I mean it,” she said, as if detecting his doubt. “I’m impressed.”

A recollection came to him with surprising poignancy: how frequently she’d once looked at him that way in the early years of their marriage, how wonderful it had been to receive so often in so many ways the loving approval of such a fiercely intelligent woman, how priceless was the bond between them. And there it was again, or at least a delightful hint of it, alive in her eyes. And then she turned a little sideways toward the window, and the gray light dimmed her expression. She cleared her throat.

“By the way, did we ever get a new roof rake? They’re talking about ten to twelve inches of snow before midnight, and I’m not looking forward to another leak in the upstairs closet.”

“Ten to twelve inches?”

He seemed to remember there was an old roof rake in the barn, maybe repairable with enough duct tape…

She uttered a small sigh and headed for the stairs. “I’ll just empty the closet.”

He couldn’t think of anything sensible to say. The phone ringing on the countertop saved him from saying something stupid. He picked it up on the third ring. “Gurney.”

“Detective Gurney, this is Gregory Dermott.” The voice was polite but fraught.

“Yes, Mr. Dermott?”

“Something happened. I want to make sure I’m alerting the proper authorities.”

“Happened?”

“I received a peculiar communication. I think it may be connected to the letters you told me were received by the crime victims. Can I read it to you?”

“First tell me how you got it.”

“How I got it is more disturbing than what it says. God, it makes my skin crawl! It was taped to the outside of my window-my kitchen window next to the little table where I have my breakfast every morning. Do you see what that means?”

“What?”

“It means he was there, right there touching the house, no more than fifty feet from where I was sleeping. And he knew what window to tape it to. That’s what makes it so creepy.”

“What do you mean, what window to tape it to?”

“The window where I sit every morning. That’s no accident-he must know that I have breakfast at that table, which means he’s been watching me.”

“Have you called the police?”

“That’s why I’m calling you now.”

“I mean your local police.”

“I know what you mean. Yes, I did call them-they’re just not taking the situation seriously. I was hoping a call from you might help. Can you do that for me?”

“Tell me what the note says.”

“Just a second. Here it is. Just two lines, written in red ink. ‘Come one, come all. / Now all fools die.’”

“You read this to the police?”

“Yes. I explained there might be a connection to two murders, and they said a detective would be out to see me tomorrow morning, which doesn’t sound to me like they think it’s urgent.”

Gurney weighed the pros and cons of telling him that there were now three murders but decided that the news wouldn’t add anything except more fear, and Dermott sounded like he already had plenty of that.

“What does the message mean to you?”

“Mean?” Dermott’s voice was panicky. “Just what it says. It says that someone is going to die. Now, it says. And the message was delivered to me. That’s what it means, for Godsake! What’s the matter with you people? How many dead bodies does it take to get your attention?”

“Try to stay calm, sir. Do you have the name of the police officer you spoke to?”

Chapter 42

By the time Gurney finished a tough phone conversation with Lieutenant John Nardo, Wycherly PD, he’d received grudging assurance that an officer would be dispatched that afternoon to provide Gregory Dermott with protection, at least temporarily, subject to a final decision by the chief.

The snowstorm, meanwhile, had grown into a swirling blizzard. Gurney had been up for nearly thirty hours and knew that he needed to sleep, but he decided to push himself a little further and put on a pot of coffee. He called upstairs to ask Madeleine if she wanted any. He couldn’t decipher her monosyllabic answer, although he should have known what it would be. He asked again. This time the “No!” was loud and clear-louder and clearer than necessary, he thought.

The snow wasn’t having its customary tranquilizing effect on him. The events in the case were piling up too rapidly, and launching his own poetic missive at the Wycherly post-office box in the hope of it reaching the killer was starting to feel like a mistake. He’d been given a degree of investigative autonomy, but it might not cover such “creative” interventions. As he waited for his coffee to brew, images of the Sotherton crime scene, including the flounder-which he pictured as vividly as if he’d seen it-competed with the note on Dermott’s window for space in his mind. Come one, come all. / Now all fools die.

Searching for a route out of his emotional morass, it occurred to him that he could either repair the fractured roof rake or take a closer look at the “nineteen” business to see if it could lead him anywhere. He chose the latter.

Assuming that the deception had worked the way he believed it had, what conclusions could be drawn? That the killer was clever, imaginative, cool under pressure, playfully sadistic? That he was a control freak, obsessed with making his victims feel helpless? All of the above, but those qualities were already obvious. What wasn’t obvious was why he’d chosen to go about it in that particular way. It dawned on Gurney that the outstanding fact about the “nineteen” trick was that it was a trick. And the effect of the trick was to create an impression that the perpetrator knew the victim well enough to know what he was thinking-without requiring any knowledge of him at all.

Christ!

What was that sentence in the second poem sent to Mellery?

Gurney almost ran from the kitchen into the den, grabbed his case file, and riffled through it. There it was! For the second time that day, he felt the thrill of touching a part of the truth.

I know what you think,

when you blink,

where you’ve been,

where you’ll be.

What was it Madeleine had said that night in bed? Was that last night or the night before? Something about the messages being peculiarly nonspecific-having no facts in them, no names, no places, nothing real?

In Gurney’s excitement he could feel major pieces of the puzzle clicking into place. The central piece was one he’d been holding upside down all along. The killer’s intimate knowledge of his victims and their pasts was, it now seemed clear, a pretense. Again Gurney read through his file of the notes and phone calls Mellery and the others had received, and he wasn’t able to find a scrap of evidence that the killer had any specific knowledge of them beyond their names and addresses. He did seem to know that at one time they all drank too much, but even there, there was no detail-no incident, person, place, time. It was all consistent with a killer trying to give his victims the impression that he knew them intimately when in fact he didn’t know them at all.

This raised a new question. Why kill strangers? If the answer was that he had a pathological hatred for everyone with a drinking problem, then why not (as Randy Clamm had said to Gurney in the Bronx) just toss a bomb into the nearest AA meeting?

Again his thoughts began running in a circle, as weariness flooded his mind and body. With weariness came self-doubt. The elation of realizing how the number trick was done and what that meant about the relationship between the killer and his victims was replaced by that old self-critical feeling that he should have realized it sooner-and then by the fear that even this would turn out to be another dead end.

“What’s wrong now?”

Madeleine was standing in the den doorway, holding a bulging black plastic garbage bag, her hair disarranged by her closet-clearing mission.

“Nothing.”

She gave him an I-don’t-believe-you look and deposited the garbage bag at the door. “This stuff was on your side of the closet.”

He stared at the bag.

She went back upstairs.

The wind made a thin whistling sound at a window that needed new weather stripping. Damn. He’d meant to fix that. Every time the wind hit the house at that angle…

The phone rang.

It was Gowacki from Sotherton.

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, it’s a flounder,” he said without bothering to say hello. “How the hell did you know that?”

The fish confirmation gave Gurney’s sleep-deprived psyche a quick lift out of the pit. It gave him enough energy to call the irritating Jack Hardwick about a point that had been bothering him all along. It was the first line of the third poem-which he extricated from his file as he dialed Hardwick’s number.

I do what I’ve done

not for money or fun

but for debts to be paid,

amends to be made.

For blood that’s as red

as a painted rose.

So every man knows

he reaps what he sows.

As usual, he had to endure a long minute of random abuse before he could get the BCI detective to listen to his concern and respond to it. The response was typical Hardwick.

“You figure the past tense means the perp already left a few severed heads behind him by the time he knocked off your buddy?”

“That would be the obvious meaning,” said Gurney, “since the three victims we know of were alive when that was written.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Might be a good idea to send out an MO inquiry for similars.”

“How detailed you want the modus operandi spelled out?” Hardwick’s arch intonation made the Latin term sound like a joke. His chauvinistic tendency to find foreign languages laughable always got under Gurney’s skin.

“Up to you. In my opinion the throat wounds are the key piece.”

“Hmm. You thinking this inquiry goes out to Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, maybe New Hampshire and Vermont?”

“I don’t know, Jack. You decide.”

“Time frame?”

“Last five years? Whatever you think.”

“Last five years is as good as anything else.” He made it sound as bad as anything else. “You all set for Captain R’s get-together?”

“Tomorrow? Sure, I’ll be there.”

There was a pause. “So you think this fucking lunatic has been at this for a while?”

“Looks like a possibility, doesn’t it?”

Another pause. “You getting anywhere on your end?”

Gurney gave Hardwick a summary of the facts and his new interpretation of them, ending with a suggestion. “I know that Mellery was in rehab fifteen years ago. You might want to check for any criminal or public-record data on him-anything involving alcohol. Ditto for Albert Rudden, ditto Richard Kartch. The homicide guys on the Rudden and Kartch cases are working on victim bios. They may have dug up something relevant. While you’re at it, it wouldn’t hurt to poke a little further into the background of Gregory Dermott. He’s entangled in this mess somehow. The killer chose that Wycherly post-office box for some reason, and now he’s threatening Dermott himself.”

“He’s what?”

Gurney told Hardwick about the “Come one, come all. / Now all fools die” note taped to Dermott’s window and about his conversation with Lieutenant Nardo.

“What are you thinking we’ll find in the background checks?”

“Something that makes sense out of three facts. First, the killer is focused on victims with drinking histories. Second, there is no evidence that he knew any of them personally. Third, he selected victims who lived far apart geographically, which suggests some factor in their selection other than just excessive alcohol consumption-a factor that connects them to each other, to the killer, and probably to Dermott. I have no idea what it is, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Is that a fact?”

“See you tomorrow, Jack.”

Chapter 43

Tomorrow came with a peculiar suddenness. After his conversation with Hardwick, Gurney had taken off his shoes and sprawled on the den couch. He slept deeply, without interruption, through the remainder of the afternoon and on through the night. When he opened his eyes, it was morning.

He stood, stretched, looked out the window. The sun was creeping up over the brown ridge on the eastern side of the valley, which he figured would make it about 7:00 A.M. He didn’t have to leave for his BCI meeting until 10:30. The sky was perfectly blue, and the snow glittered as though it had been mixed with shattered glass. The beauty and peace of the scene mingled with the aroma of fresh coffee to make life for the moment seem simple and fundamentally good. His long rest had been thoroughly restorative. He felt ready to make the phone calls he’d been postponing-to Sonya and to Kyle-and was stopped only by the realization that they’d both still be asleep. He lingered for a few seconds over the image of Sonya in bed, then went out to the kitchen, resolving to make the calls right after nine.

The house had the empty feeling it always had when Madeleine was out. Her absence was confirmed by the note he found on the countertop: “Dawn. Sun about to come up. Incredibly beautiful. Snowshoeing to Carlson’s Ledge. Coffee in pot. M.” He went to the bathroom, washed, brushed his teeth. As he was combing his hair, the thought occurred to him that he could set out after her. Her reference to the imminent sunrise meant she’d left within the past ten minutes or so. If he used his cross-country skis and followed in her snowshoe tracks, he could probably overtake her in about twenty minutes.

He put ski pants and boots on over his jeans, pulled on a thick wool sweater, snapped on his skis, and stepped out the back door into a foot of powdery snow. The ridge, which offered a long view of the north valley and the rows of hills beyond it, was about a mile distant and reachable by an old logging trail that rose up a gentle incline starting at the back end of their property. It was impassible in summer with its tangles of wild raspberry bushes, but in late fall and winter the thorny undergrowth subsided.

A family of cautious crows, their harsh cries the only sound in the cold air, took flight from bare treetops a hundred yards ahead of him and soon disappeared over the ridge, leaving behind an even deeper silence.

As Gurney emerged from the woods onto the promontory above Carlson’s hillside farm, he saw Madeleine. She was sitting motionless on a stone slab, perhaps fifty feet from him, looking out over the rolling landscape that receded to the horizon with only two distant silos and a meandering road to suggest any human presence. He stopped, transfixed by the stillness of her pose. She seemed so… so absolutely solitary… yet so intensely connected to her world. A kind of beacon, beckoning him to a place just beyond his reach.

Without warning, without words to contain the feeling, the sight tore at his heart.

Dear God, was he having some kind of breakdown? For the third time in a week, his eyes filled with tears. He swallowed and wiped his face. Feeling light-headed, he moved his skis farther apart to steady himself.

Perhaps it was this motion at the corner of her vision, or the sound of the skis in the dry snow, that caused her to turn. She watched as he approached her. She smiled a little but said nothing. He had the rather peculiar feeling that she could see his soul as clearly as his body-peculiar, because “soul” was not a notion he’d ever found meaning in, not a term he ever used. He sat beside her on the flat boulder and stared out, unseeing, at the vista of hills and valleys. She took his arm in hers and held it against her.

He studied her face. He was at a loss for words to capture what he saw. It was as if all the radiance of the snow-covered landscape were reflected in her expression and the radiance of her expression were reflected in the landscape.

After a while-he couldn’t be sure how long it was-they headed back by a roundabout route to the house.

About halfway there he asked, “What are you thinking?”

“Not thinking at all. It gets in the way.”

“Of what?”

“The blue sky, the white snow.”

He didn’t speak again until they were back in the kitchen.

“I never did have that coffee you left for me,” he said.

“I’ll make a fresh pot.”

He watched as she got a bag of coffee beans out of the refrigerator and measured some into the electric grinder.

“Yes?” She regarded him curiously, her finger on the button.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just watching.”

She pressed the button. There was a sharp barrage of noise from the little machine, which grew softer as the beans were pulverized. She looked at him again.

“I’ll check the closet,” he said, feeling a need to do something.

He started upstairs, but before reaching the closet he stopped on the landing at the window that faced the rear field and the woods beyond it and the trail to the ledge. He pictured her sitting on the rock in her solitary peace, and that nameless emotional intensity filled him again, achingly. He struggled to identify the pain.

Loss. Separation. Isolation.

Each rang true, each a facet of the same sensation.

The therapist he’d seen in his late teens as the result of a panic attack-the therapist who’d told him that the panic arose from a deep hostility he carried toward his father and that his complete lack of any conscious emotion for his father was proof of the hidden strength and negativity of the emotion-that same therapist had one day confided to him what he believed to be the purpose of life.

“The purpose of life is to get as close as we can to other people.” He’d said it in a surprisingly straightforward way, as though he were pointing out that trucks were for transportation.

On another occasion he revealed, in the same matter-of-fact tone, the corollary: “An isolated life is a wasted life.”

At the age of seventeen, Gurney hadn’t been sure what the man was talking about. It sounded deep, but its depth was shadowy, and he couldn’t see anything in it. He still didn’t entirely grasp it at the age of forty-seven-at least not the way he grasped the purpose of trucks.

Forgetting about the closet, he went back down to the kitchen. Entering from the darker hallway, he found the room intensely bright. The sun, now well above the trees in a cloudless sky, shone directly through the southeast-facing French doors. The pasture had been transformed by the new snow into a dazzling reflector, throwing light up into corners of the room rarely illuminated.

“Your coffee is ready,” said Madeleine. She was carrying a balled-up sheet of newspaper and a handful of kindling to the woodstove. “The light is so magical. Like music.”

He smiled and nodded. Sometimes he envied her ability to be enthralled by nature’s glittering bits and pieces. Why, he wondered, had such a woman, such an enthusiast, such a natural aesthete in the admirable sense of the word, a woman so in touch with the glory of things, married an unspontaneous and cerebral detective? Had she imagined that one day he’d cast aside the gray cocoon of his profession? Had he colluded in that fantasy, imagining that in a pastoral retirement he’d become a different person?

They made an odd couple, he thought, but surely no odder than his parents. His mother with all her artistic inclinations, all her little flight-of-fancy hobbies-papier-mâché sculpture, fantastical watercolor painting, origami-had married his father, a man whose essential drabness was interrupted only by sparks of sarcasm, whose attention was always elsewhere, whose passions were unknown, and whose departure for work in the morning seemed to please him far more than did his return home in the evening. A man who in his quest for peace was forever leaving.

“What time do you have to leave for your meeting?” asked Madeleine, displaying her impossibly precise sensitivity to his passing thoughts.

Chapter 44

Déjà vu.

The sign-in procedure was the same as it had been before. The building’s reception area-ironically designed to repel-was as antiseptic as a morgue but less peaceful. There was a new guard in the security booth, but the lighting gave him the same chemotherapy pallor as it had the last one. And, once again, Gurney’s guide to the claustrophobic conference room was the hair-gelled, charming-as-dirt Investigator Blatt.

He preceded Gurney into the room, which was as Gurney remembered it, except it seemed shabbier. There were stains he hadn’t noticed before on the colorless carpeting. The clock, not quite vertical and too small for the wall, read twelve noon. As usual, Gurney was exactly on time-less a virtue than a neurosis. Earliness and lateness both made him uncomfortable.

Blatt took a seat at the table. Wigg and Hardwick were already there in the same chairs they’d had in the first meeting. A woman with an edgy expression was standing by the coffee urn in the corner, obviously unhappy that Gurney hadn’t been accompanied by whomever she was waiting for. She looked so much like Sigourney Weaver that Gurney wondered if she was making a conscious effort.

The three chairs nearest the center of the oblong table had been tilted against it, as before. As Gurney headed for the coffee, Hardwick grinned like a shark.

“Detective First Class Gurney, I’ve got a question for you.”

“Hello, Jack.”

“Or, better yet, I’ve got an answer for you. Let’s see if you can guess what the question is. The answer is ‘a defrocked priest in Boston.’ To win the grand prize, all you got to do is figure out the question.”

Instead of responding, Gurney picked up a cup, noticed it wasn’t quite clean, put it back, tried another, then a third, then went back to the first.

Sigourney was tapping her foot and checking her Rolex, a parody of impatience.

“Hi,” he said, resignedly filling his stained cup with what he hoped was antiseptically hot coffee. “I’m Dave Gurney.”

“I’m Dr. Holdenfield,” she said, as if she were laying down a straight flush to his pair of deuces. “Is Sheridan on his way?”

Something complex in her tone got his attention. And “Holdenfield” rang a bell.

“I wouldn’t know.” He wondered what sort of relationship might exist between the DA and the doctor. “If you don’t mind my asking, what sort of doctor are you?”

“Forensic psychologist,” she said absently, looking not at him but at the door.

“Like I said, Detective,” said Hardwick, too loudly for the size of the room, “if the answer is a defrocked Boston priest, what’s the question?”

Gurney closed his eyes. “For Christ’s sake, Jack, why don’t you just tell me?”

Hardwick wrinkled his face in distaste. “Then I’d have to explain it twice-for you and for the executive committee.” He tilted his head at the tilted chairs.

The doctor looked again at her watch. Sergeant Wigg looked at whatever was happening on her laptop screen in response to the keys she was tapping. Blatt looked bored. The door opened, and Kline entered, looking preoccupied, followed by Rodriguez, carrying a fat file folder and looking more malevolent than ever, and Stimmel, looking like a pessimistic frog. When they were seated, Rodriguez gave Kline a questioning glance.

“Go ahead,” said Kline.

Rodriguez fixed his gaze on Gurney, his lips tightening into a thin line.

“There’s been a tragic development. A Connecticut police officer, dispatched to the home of Gregory Dermott, reportedly at your insistence, has been killed.”

All eyes in the room, with various degrees of unpleasant curiosity, turned toward Gurney.

“How?” He asked the question calmly, despite a twinge of anxiety.

“Same way as your friend.” There was something sour and insinuating in his tone, which Gurney chose not to respond to.

“Sheridan, what the hell is going on here?” The doctor, who was standing at the far end of the table, sounded so much like the hostile Sigourney of Alien that Gurney decided it must be on purpose.

“Becca! Sorry, didn’t see you there. We got a little tied up. Last-minute complication. Apparently another murder.” He turned to Rodriguez. “Rod, why don’t you bring everyone up to date on this Connecticut cop thing.” He gave his head a quick little shake, like there was water in one of his ears. “Damnedest case I’ve ever seen!”

“Damn right,” echoed Rodriguez, opening his file folder. “Call was received at eleven twenty-five this morning from Lieutenant John Nardo of the Wycherly, Connecticut, PD regarding a homicide on the property of one Gregory Dermott, known to us as the postal-box holder in the Mark Mellery case. Dermott had been provided with temporary police protection at the insistence of Special Investigator David Gurney. At eight A.M. this morning-”

Kline raised his hand. “Hold on a second, Rod. Becca, have you met Dave?”

“Yes.”

The cool, clipped affirmative seemed designed to ward off any expanded introduction, but Kline went on, anyway.

“You two should have a lot to talk about. The psychologist with the most accurate profiling record in the business and the detective with the most homicide arrests in the history of the NYPD.”

The praise seemed to make everyone uncomfortable. But it also made Holdenfield look at Gurney with some interest for the first time. And although he was no fan of professional profilers, now he knew why her name sounded familiar.

Kline went on, determined, it seemed, to highlight his two stars. “Becca reads their minds, Gurney tracks them down-Cannibal Claus, Jason Strunk, Peter Possum Whatshisname…”

The doctor turned to Gurney, her eyes widening just a little. “Piggert? That was your case?”

Gurney nodded.

“Quite a celebrated arrest,” she said with a hint of admiration.

He managed a small, distracted smile. The situation in Wycherly-and the question of whether his own impulsive intervention with the mailed poem had any bearing on the death of the police officer-was eating at him.

“Keep going, Rod,” said Kline abruptly, as though the captain had caused the interruption.

“At eight A.M. this morning, Gregory Dermott made a trip to the Wycherly post office, accompanied by Officer Gary Sissek. According to Dermott, they returned at eight-thirty, at which time he made some coffee and toast and went through his mail, while Officer Sissek remained outside to check the perimeters of the property and the external security of the house. At nine A.M. Dermott went to look for Officer Sissek and discovered his body on the back porch. He called 911. First responders secured the scene and found a note taped to the back door above the body.”

“Bullet and multiple stab wounds like the others?” asked Holdenfield.

“Stab wounds confirmed, no determination yet regarding the bullet.”

“And the note?”

Rodriguez read from a fax in his folder. “‘Where did I come from? / Where did I go? / How many will die / because you don’t know?’”

“Same weirdo stuff,” said Kline. “What do you think, Becca?”

“The process may be accelerating.”

“The process?”

“Everything up till now was carefully premeditated-the choice of victims, the series of notes, all of it. But this one is different, more reactive than planned.”

Rodriguez looked skeptical. “It’s the same stabbing ritual, same kind of note.”

“But it was an unplanned victim. It looks like your Mr. Dermott was the original target, but this policeman was opportunistically killed instead.”

“But the note-”

“The note may have been brought to the scene to place on Dermott’s body, if all had gone well, or it may have been composed on the spot in response to the altered circumstances. It may be significant that it is only four lines long. Weren’t the others eight lines?” She looked at Gurney for confirmation.

He nodded, still half lost in guilty speculation, then forced himself back into the present. “I agree with Dr. Holdenfield. I hadn’t thought about the possible significance of the four lines versus eight, but that makes sense. One thing I would add is that although it couldn’t have been planned the same way the others were, the element of cop hatred that is part of this killer’s mind-set at least partially integrates this killing into the pattern and may account for the ritual aspects the captain referred to.”

“Becca said something about the pace accelerating,” said Kline. “We already have four victims. Does that mean there are more to come?”

“Five, actually.”

All eyes turned to Hardwick.

The captain held up his fist and extended a finger as he enunciated each name: “Mellery. Rudden. Kartch. Officer Sissek. That makes four.”

“The Reverend Michael McGrath makes five,” said Hardwick.

“Who?” The question erupted in jangled unison from Kline (excited), the captain (vexed), and Blatt (baffled).

“Five years ago a priest in the Boston diocese was relieved of his pastoral duties due to allegations involving a number of altar boys. He made some kind of deal with the bishop, blamed his inappropriate behavior on alcoholism, went to a long-term rehab, dropped out of sight, end of story.”

“What the hell was it with the Boston diocese?” sneered Blatt. “Whole goddamn place was crawling with kid-fuckers.”

Hardwick ignored him. “End of story until a year ago, when McGrath was found dead in his apartment. Multiple stab wounds to the throat. A revenge note was taped to the body. It was an eight-line poem in red ink.”

Rodriguez’s face was flushing. “How long have you known this?”

Hardwick looked at his watch. “Half an hour.”

“What?”

“Yesterday Special Investigator Gurney requested a northeast-states regional inquiry to all departments for MOs similar to the Mellery case. This morning we got a hit-the late Father McGrath.”

“Anyone arrested or prosecuted for his murder?” asked Kline.

“Nope. Boston homicide guy I spoke to wouldn’t come out and say it, but I got the impression they hadn’t exactly prioritized the case.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” The captain sounded petulant.

Hardwick shrugged. “Former pederast gets himself stabbed to death, killer leaves a note referring vaguely to past misdeeds. Looks like someone decided to get even. Maybe the cops figure what the hell, they got other shit on their plates, plenty of other perps to catch with motives less noble than delayed justice. So maybe they don’t pay too much attention.”

Rodriguez looked like he had indigestion. “But he didn’t actually say that.”

“Of course he didn’t say that.”

“So,” said Kline in his summation voice, “whatever the Boston police did or didn’t do, the fact is, Father Michael McGrath is number five.”

“Sí, número cinco,” said Hardwick inanely. “But really número uno-since the priest got himself sliced up a year before the other four.”

“So Mellery, who we thought was the first, was really the second,” said Kline.

“I doubt that very strongly,” said Holdenfield. When she had everyone’s attention, she went on, “There’s no evidence that the priest was the first-he may have been the tenth for all we know-but even if he was the first, there’s another problem. One killing a year ago, then four in less than two weeks, is not a pattern you normally see. I would expect others in between.”

“Unless,” Gurney interjected softly, “some factor other than the killer’s psychopathology is driving the timing and the selection of victims.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I believe it’s something the victims have in common other than alcoholism, something we haven’t found yet.”

Holdenfield rocked her head speculatively from side to side and made a face that said she wasn’t about to agree with Gurney’s supposition but couldn’t find a way to shoot it down, either.

“So we may or may not discover links to some old corpses,” said Kline, looking unsure of how he felt about this.

“Not to mention some new ones,” said Holdenfield.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” It was becoming Rodriguez’s favorite question.

Holdenfield showed no reaction to the testy tone. “The pace of the killings, as I started to say earlier, suggests that the endgame has begun.”

“Endgame?” Kline intoned the word as though he liked the sound of it.

Holdenfield continued, “In this most recent instance, he was driven to act in an unplanned way. The process may be spinning out of his control. My feeling is that he won’t be able to hold it together much longer.”

“Hold what together?” Blatt posed the question, as he posed most of his questions, with a kind of congenital hostility.

Holdenfield regarded him for moment without expression, then looked at Kline. “How much education do I need to provide here?”

“You might want to touch on a few key points. Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, glancing around the table and clearly not expecting to be corrected, “but with the exception of Dave, I don’t think the rest of us have had much practical experience with serial murder.”

Rodriguez looked like he was about to object to something but said nothing.

Holdenfield smiled unhappily. “Is everyone at least familiar in a general way with the Holmes typology of serial murder?”

The assortment of murmurs and nods around the table was generally affirmative. Only Blatt had a question. “Sherlock Holmes?”

Gurney wasn’t sure whether this was a stupid joke or just stupid.

“Ronald M. Holmes-a bit more contemporary, and an actual person,” said Holdenfield in an exaggeratedly benign tone that Gurney couldn’t quite place. Was it possible she was mimicking Mister Rogers addressing a five-year-old?

“Holmes categorized serial killers by their motivations-the type driven by imagined voices; the type on a mission to rid the world of some intolerable group of people-blacks, gays, you name it; the type seeking total domination; the thrill seeker who gets his greatest rush from killing; and the sex murderer. But they all have one thing in common-”

“They’re all fucking nuts,” said Blatt with a smug grin.

“Good point, Investigator,” said Holdenfield with a deadly sweetness, “but what they really have in common is a terrible inner tension. Killing someone provides them with temporary relief from that tension.”

“Sort of like getting laid?”

“Investigator Blatt,” said Kline angrily, “it might be a good idea to keep your questions to yourself until Rebecca finishes her comments.”

“His question is actually quite apt. An orgasm does relieve sexual tension. However, it does not in a normal person create a dysfunctional downward spiral demanding increasingly frequent orgasms at greater and greater cost. In that respect I believe serial killing has more in common with drug dependency.”

“Murder addiction,” said Kline slowly, speculatively, as though he were trying out a headline for a press release.

“Dramatic phrase,” said Holdenfield, “and there’s some truth in it. More than most people, the serial killer lives in his own fantasy world. He may appear to function normally in society. But he derives no satisfaction from his public life, and he has no interest in the real lives of other people. He lives only for his fantasies-fantasies of control, domination, punishment. For him these fantasies constitute a superreality-a world in which he feels important, omnipotent, alive. Any questions at this point?”

“I have one,” said Kline. “Do you have an opinion yet on which of the serial-killer types we’re looking for?”

“I do, but I’d love to hear what Detective Gurney has to say about that.”

Gurney suspected that her earnest, collegial expression was as phony as her smile.

“A man on a mission,” he said.

“Ridding the world of alcoholics?” Kline sounded half curious, half skeptical.

“I think ‘alcoholic’ would be part of the target-victim definition, but there may be more to it-to account for his specific choice of victims.”

Kline responded with a noncommittal grunt. “In terms of a more expanded profile, something more than ‘a man on a mission,’ how would you describe our perp?”

Gurney decided to play tit for tat. “I have a few ideas, but I’d love to hear what Dr. Holdenfield has to say about that.”

She shrugged, then spoke quickly and matter-of-factly. “Thirty-year-old white male, high IQ, no friendships, no normal sexual relationships. Polite but distant. He almost certainly had a troubled childhood, with a central trauma that influences his choice of victims. Since his victims are middle-aged men, it’s possible the trauma involved his father and an oedipal relationship with his mother-”

Blatt broke in. “You’re not saying that this guy was literally… I mean, are you saying… with his mother?”

“Not necessarily. This is all about fantasy. He lives in and for his fantasy life.”

Rodriguez’s voice was jagged with impatience. “I’m having a real problem with that word, Doctor. Five dead bodies are not fantasies!”

“You’re right, Captain. To you and me, they’re not fantasies at all. They’re real people, individuals with unique lives, worthy of respect, worthy of justice, but that’s not what they are to a serial murderer. To him they’re merely actors in his play-not human beings as you and I understand the term. They are only the two-dimensional stage props he imagines them to be-pieces of his fantasy, like the ritual elements found at the crime scenes.”

Rodriguez shook his head. “What you’re saying may make some kind of sense in the case of a lunatic serial murderer, but so what? I mean, I have other problems with this whole approach. I mean, who decided this was a serial-murder case? You’re racing down that road without the slightest…” He hesitated, seeming suddenly aware of the stridency of his voice and the impolitic nature of attacking one of Sheridan Kline’s favorite consultants. He went on in a softer register. “I mean, sequential murders are not always the work of a serial murderer. There are other ways to look at this.”

Holdenfield looked honestly baffled. “You have alternative hypotheses?”

Rodriguez sighed. “Gurney keeps talking about some factor in addition to drinking that accounts for the choice of victims. An obvious factor might be their common involvement in some past action, accidental or intentional, which injured the killer, and all we’re seeing now is revenge on the group responsible for the injury. It could be as simple as that.”

“I can’t say a scenario like that is impossible,” said Holdenfield, “but the planning, the poems, the details, the ritual all seem too pathological for simple revenge.”

“Speaking of pathological,” rasped Jack Hardwick like a man enthusiastically dying of throat cancer, “this might be the perfect time to bring everyone up to date on the latest piece of batshit evidence.”

Rodriguez glared at him. “Another little surprise?”

Hardwick continued without reaction, “At Gurney’s request, a team of techs was sent out to the B &B where he thought the killer might have stayed the night before the Mellery murder.”

“Who approved that?”

“I did, sir,” said Hardwick. He sounded proud of his transgression.

“Why didn’t I see any paperwork on that?”

“Gurney didn’t think there was time,” lied Hardwick. Then he raised his hand to his chest with a curiously stricken I-think-I’m-having-a-heart-attack look and let loose with an explosive belch. Blatt, startled out of a private reverie, jerked back from the table so energetically his chair nearly toppled backwards.

Before Rodriguez, jangled by the interruption, could refocus on his paperwork concern, Gurney took the ball from Hardwick and launched into an explanation of why he’d wanted an evidence team at The Laurels.

“The first letter the killer sent to Mellery used the name X. Arybdis. In Greek, an x is equivalent to a ch, and Charybdis is the name of a murderous whirlpool in Greek mythology, linked to another fatal peril named Scylla. The night before the morning of Mellery’s murder, a man and an older woman using the name Scylla stayed at that B &B. I would be very surprised if that were a coincidence.”

“A man and an older woman?” Holdenfield looked intrigued.

“Possibly the killer and his mother, although the register, oddly enough, was signed ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ Maybe that supports the oedipal piece of your profile?”

Holdenfield smiled. “It’s almost too perfect.”

Again the captain’s frustration seemed about to burst open, but Hardwick spoke first, picking up where Gurney had left off.

“So we sent the evidence team out there to this weird-ass little cottage that’s decorated like a shrine to The Wizard of Oz. They go over it-inside, outside, upside down-and what do they find? Zip. Nada. Not a goddamn thing. Not a hair, not a smudge, not one iota that would tell you a human being had ever been in the room. Team leader couldn’t believe it. She called me, told me there wasn’t a hint of a fingerprint in places where there are always fingerprints-desktops, countertops, doorknobs, drawer pulls, window sashes, phones, shower handles, sink faucets, TV remotes, lamp switches, a dozen other places where you always find prints. Zilch. Not even one. Not even a partial. So I told her to dust everything-everything-walls, floors, the fucking ceiling. The conversation got a little testy, but I was persuasive. Then she starts calling me every half hour to tell me how she’s still not finding anything and how much of her precious time I’m wasting. But the third time she calls, there’s something different about her voice-it’s a little quieter. She tells me they found something.”

Rodriguez was too careful to let his disappointment show, but Gurney could feel it. Hardwick went on after a dramatic pause. “They found a word on the outside of the bathroom door. One word. Redrum.”

“What?” barked Rodriguez, not quite so careful about hiding his disbelief.

“Redrum.” Hardwick repeated the word slowly, with a knowing look, as though it were the key to something.

“Redrum? Like in the movie?” asked Blatt.

“Wait a second, wait a second,” said Rodriguez, blinking with frustration. “You’re telling me it took your evidence team, what, three, four hours to find a word written in plain sight on a door?”

“Not in plain sight,” said Hardwick. “He wrote it the same way he left the invisible messages for us on the notes to Mark Mellery. DUMB EVIL COPS. Remember?”

The captain’s only acknowledgment of the recollection was a silent stare.

“I saw that in the case file,” said Holdenfield. “Something about words he rubbed onto the backs of the notes with his own skin oil. Is that actually feasible?”

“No problem at all,” said Hardwick. “Fingerprints, in fact, are nothing but skin oil. He just utilized that resource for his own purpose. Maybe rubbed his fingers on his forehead to make them a little oilier. But it definitely worked then, and he did it again at The Laurels.”

“But we are talking about the redrum from the movie, right?” repeated Blatt.

“Movie? What movie? Why are we talking about a movie?” Rodriguez was blinking again.

“The Shining,” said Holdenfield with growing excitement. “A famous scene. The little boy writes the word redrum on a door in his mother’s bedroom.”

“Redrum is murder spelled backwards,” announced Blatt.

“God, it’s all so perfect!” said Holdenfield.

“I assume all this enthusiasm means we’ll have an arrest within the next twenty-four hours?” Rodriguez seemed to be straining for maximum sarcasm.

Gurney ignored him and addressed Holdenfield. “It’s interesting that he wanted to remind us of redrum from The Shining.”

Her eyes glittered. “The perfect word from the perfect movie.”

Kline, who for a long while had been observing the interplay at the table like a fan at one of his club’s squash matches, finally spoke up. “Okay, guys, it’s time to let me in on the secret. What the hell is so perfect?”

Holdenfield looked at Gurney. “You tell him about the word. I’ll tell him about the movie.”

“The word is backwards. It’s as simple as that. It’s been a theme since the beginning of the case. Just like the backwards trail of footprints in the snow. And, of course, it’s the word murder that’s backwards. He’s telling us we’ve got the whole case backwards. DUMB EVIL COPS.”

Kline fixed Holdenfield with his cross-examiner’s gaze. “You agree with that?”

“Basically, yes.”

“And the movie?”

“Ah, yes, the movie. I’ll try to be as concise as Detective Gurney.” She thought for a few moments, then spoke as if choosing each word carefully. “The movie is about a family in which a mother and son are terrorized by a crazy father. A father who happens to be an alcoholic with a history of violent binges.”

Rodriguez shook his head. “Are you telling us that some crazy, violent, alcoholic father is our killer?”

“Oh, no, no. Not the father. The son.”

“The son!?” Rodriguez’s expression was twisted into new extremes of incredulity.

As she continued, Holdenfield slipped into something close to her Mister Rogers voice. “I believe that the killer is telling us that he had a father like the father in The Shining. I believe he may be explaining himself to us.”

“Explaining himself?” Rodriguez’s voice was close to sputtering.

“Everyone wants to present himself on his own terms, Captain. I’m sure you encounter that all the time in your line of work. I certainly do. We all have a rationale for our own behavior, however bizarre it may be. Everyone wants to be recognized as justified, even the mentally disturbed-perhaps especially the mentally disturbed.”

This observation led to a general silence, which was eventually broken by Blatt.

“I’ve got a question. You’re a psychiatrist, right?”

“A consulting forensic psychologist.” Mister Rogers had morphed back into Sigourney Weaver.

“Right, whatever. You know how the mind works. So here’s the question. This guy knew what number someone would think of before they thought of it. How did he do that?”

“He didn’t.”

“He sure as hell did.”

“He appeared to do it. I assume you’re referring to the incidents I read about in the case file involving the numbers six fifty-eight and nineteen. But he didn’t actually do what you’re saying. It’s simply not possible to know in advance what number would occur to another individual in uncontrolled circumstances. Therefore he didn’t.”

“But the fact is that he did,” Blatt persisted.

“There’s at least one explanation,” said Gurney. He went on to outline the scenario that had occurred to him when Madeleine was calling him on her cell phone from their mailbox-namely, how the killer could have used a portable printer in his car to create the letter with the number nineteen in it after Mark Mellery had mentioned it on the phone.

Holdenfield looked impressed.

Blatt looked deflated-a sure sign, thought Gurney, that lurking somewhere in that crude brain and overexercised body was a romantic in love with the weird and impossible. But the deflation was only momentary.

“What about the six fifty-eight?” Blatt asked, his combative gaze flicking back and forth between Gurney and Holdenfield. “There was no phone call that time, just a letter. So how did he know Mellery would think of that number?”

“I don’t have an answer for that,” said Gurney, “but I have an odd little story that might help someone think of an answer.”

Rodriguez showed some impatience, but Kline leaned forward, and this demonstration of interest seemed to hold the captain in check.

“The other day I had a dream about my father,” Gurney began. He hesitated, involuntarily. His own voice sounded different to him. He heard in it an echo of the profound sadness the dream had generated in him. He saw Holdenfield looking at him curiously but not unpleasantly. He forced himself to continue. “After I woke up, I found myself thinking about a card trick my father used to do when we had people to the house for New Year’s and he’d had a few drinks, which always used to energize him. He’d fan out a deck and go around the room, asking three or four people to each pick a card. Then he’d narrow the focus down to one of those people and tell him to take a good look at the card he’d picked and put it back in the deck. Then he’d hand him the deck and tell him to shuffle it. After that he’d go into his mumbo-jumbo ‘mind-reading’ act, which could go on for another ten minutes, and it would finally end with him dramatically revealing the name of the card-which, of course, he knew from the moment it was picked.”

“How?” asked Blatt, mystified.

“When he was getting the deck ready in the beginning, just before he fanned the cards out, he’d manage to identify at least one card and then control its position in the fan.”

“Suppose no one picked it?” asked Holdenfield, intrigued.

“If no one picked it, he’d find a reason to discontinue the trick by creating some sort of distraction-suddenly remembering he had the kettle on for tea or something like that-so no one would realize there was a problem with the trick itself. But he almost never had to do that. The way he presented the fan-out, the first or second or third person he offered it to almost always picked the card he wanted them to. And if not, he’d just do his little kitchen routine, then come back and start the trick over. And of course he always had some perfectly plausible way of eliminating the people who’d picked the wrong cards, so no one would realize what was actually going on.”

Rodriguez yawned. “Is this somehow related to the six fifty-eight business?”

“I’m not sure,” said Gurney, “but the idea of someone thinking he’s picking a card at random, while the randomness is actually being controlled-”

Sergeant Wigg, who had been listening with increasing interest, broke in. “Your card trick story reminds me of that private-eye direct-mail scam back in the late nineties.”

Whether it was due to her unusual voice, pitched in the register where male and female overlap, or to the unusual fact that she was speaking at all, she captured everyone’s instant attention.

“The recipient gets a letter, supposedly from a private-investigation company, apologizing for invading the recipient’s privacy. The company ‘confesses’ that in the course of a botched surveillance assignment they mistakenly followed this individual for several weeks and photographed him in various situations. They claim that they are required by privacy legislation to give him all the existing prints of these photos. Then comes the curveball question: Since some of the photos seem to be of a compromising nature, would the recipient like them sent to a post-office box rather than to his home? If so, he will need to send them a fifty-dollar fee to cover the additional record keeping.”

“Anyone stupid enough to fall for that deserves to lose fifty dollars,” sneered Rodriguez.

“Oh, some people lost a lot more than that,” said Wigg placidly. “It wasn’t about getting the fifty-dollar payment. That was only a test. The scammer mailed out over a million of those letters, and the only purpose of the fifty-dollar request was to develop a refined list of people guilty enough about their behavior that they wouldn’t want photos of their activities to fall into the hands of their spouses. Those individuals were then subjected to a series of far more exorbitant requests for payments related to the return of the compromising photographs. Some ended up paying as much as fifteen thousand dollars.”

“For photos that never existed!” exclaimed Kline with an amalgam of indignation and admiration for the scammer’s ingenuity.

“The stupidity of people never ceases to amaze-” began Rodriguez, but Gurney interrupted him.

“Jesus! That’s it! That’s what the two-hundred-eighty-nine-dollar request is. It’s the same thing. It’s a test!”

Rodriguez looked baffled. “A test of what?”

Gurney closed his eyes to help him visualize the letter Mellery had received asking for the money.

Frowning, Kline turned to Wigg. “That con artist-you said he mailed out a million letters?”

“That’s the number I recall from the press reports.”

“Then obviously this is a very different situation. That was basically a fraudulent direct-mail campaign-a big net thrown out to catch a few guilty fish. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about handwritten notes to a handful of people-people for whom the number six fifty-eight must have had some personal meaning.”

Gurney slowly opened his eyes and stared at Kline. “But it didn’t. At first I assumed it did, because why else would it come to mind? So I kept asking Mark Mellery that question-what did the number mean to him, what did it remind him of, had he ever thought of it before, had he ever seen it written, was it the price of something, an address, a safe combination? But he kept insisting the number meant nothing to him, that he never remembered thinking of it before, that it simply popped into his mind-a perfectly random event. And I believe he was telling the truth. So there has to be another explanation.”

“So that means you’re back where you started,” said Rodriguez, rolling his eyes with exaggerated weariness.

“Maybe not. Maybe Sergeant Wigg’s con game is closer to the truth here than we think.”

“Are you trying to tell me that our killer sent out a million letters-a million handwritten letters? That’s ridiculous-not to mention impossible.”

“I agree that a million letters would be impossible, unless he had an awful lot of help, which isn’t likely. But what number would be possible?”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s say our killer had a scheme that involved sending out letters to a lot of people-handwritten, so each recipient would get the impression that his letter was a one-of-a-kind personal communication. How many letters do you think he could write in, say, one year?”

The captain threw up his hands, intimating that the question was not only unanswerable but frivolous. Kline and Hardwick looked more serious-as if they might be attempting some kind of calculation. Stimmel, as always, projected amphibian inscrutability. Rebecca Holdenfield was watching Gurney with growing fascination. Blatt looked like he was trying to determine the source of a foul odor.

Wigg was the only one to speak. “Five thousand,” she said. “Ten, if he were highly motivated. Conceivably fifteen, but that would be difficult.”

Kline squinted at her with lawyerly skepticism. “Sergeant, these numbers are based on what, exactly?”

“To begin with, a couple of reasonable assumptions.”

Rodriguez shook his head-implying that nothing on earth was more fallible than other people’s reasonable assumptions. If Wigg noticed, she didn’t care enough to let it distract her.

“First is the assumption that the model of the private-eye scam is applicable. If it is, it follows that the first communication-the one asking for money-would be sent to the most people and subsequent communications only to people who responded. In our own case, we know that the first communication consisted of two eight-line notes-a total of sixteen fairly short lines, plus a three-line address on the outer envelope. Except for the addresses, the letters would all be the same, making the writing repetitive and rapid. I would estimate that each mailing piece would take about four minutes to complete. That would be fifteen per hour. If he devoted just one hour a day to it, he’d have over five thousand done in a year. Two hours a day would result in close to eleven thousand. Theoretically, he could do a lot more, but there are limits to the diligence of even the most obsessed person.”

“Actually,” said Gurney with the dawning excitement of a scientist who finally sees a pattern in a sea of data, “eleven thousand would be more than enough.”

“Enough to do what?” asked Kline.

“Enough to pull off the six fifty-eight trick, for one thing,” said Gurney. “And that little trick, if it was done the way I’m thinking it was done, would also explain the $289.87 request in the first letter to each of the victims.”

“Whoa,” said Kline, raising his hand. “Slow down. You’re going around the corners a little too fast.”

Chapter 45

Gurney thought it through one more time. It was almost too simple, and he wanted to be sure he hadn’t overlooked some obvious problem that would blow a hole in his elegant hypothesis. He noted a variety of facial expressions around the table-mixtures of excitement, impatience, and curiosity-as everyone waited for him to speak. He took a long, deep breath.

“I can’t say for certain that this is exactly how it was done. However, it’s the only credible scenario that’s occurred to me in all the time I’ve been wrestling with those numbers-which goes back to the day Mark Mellery came to my home and showed me the first letter. He was so baffled and frightened by the idea that the letter writer knew him so well he could predict what number he’d think of when asked to think of any number from one to a thousand. I could feel the panic in him, the sense of doom. No doubt it was the same with the other victims. That panic was the whole point of the game that was being played. How could he know what number I’d think of? How could he know something so intimate, so personal, so private as a thought? What else does he know? I could see those questions torturing him-literally driving him crazy.”

“Frankly, Dave,” said Kline with ill-concealed agitation, “they’re driving me crazy, too, and the sooner you can answer them, the better.”

“Damn right,” agreed Rodriguez. “Let’s get to the point.”

“If I may express a slightly contrary opinion,” said Holdenfield anxiously, “I’d like to hear the detective explain this in his own way at his own pace.”

“It’s embarrassingly simple,” said Gurney. “Embarrassing to me, because the longer I stared at the problem, the more impenetrable it seemed to be. And figuring out how he pulled off his trick with the number nineteen didn’t cast any light on how the six fifty-eight business worked. The obvious solution never occurred to me-not until Sergeant Wigg told her story.”

It was not clear whether the grimace on Blatt’s face resulted from an effort to pinpoint the revelatory element or from stomach gas.

Gurney offered Wigg a nod of acknowledgment before going on. “Suppose, as the sergeant has suggested, our obsessed killer devoted two hours a day to writing letters and at the end of a year had completed eleven thousand-which he then mailed out to a list of eleven thousand people.”

“What list?” Jack Hardwick’s voice had the intrusive rasp of a rusty gate.

“That’s a good question-maybe the most important question of all. I’ll come back to it in a minute. For the moment let’s just assume that the original letter-the same identical letter-was sent out to eleven thousand people, asking them to think of a number between one and a thousand. Probability theory would predict that approximately eleven people would choose each of the one thousand available numbers. In other words, there is a statistical likelihood that eleven of those eleven thousand people, picking a number entirely at random, would pick the number six fifty-eight.”

Blatt’s grimace grew to comical proportions.

Rodriguez shook his head in disbelief. “Aren’t we crossing the line here from hypothesis to fantasy?”

“What fantasy are you referring to?” Gurney sounded more bemused than offended.

“Well, these numbers you’re throwing around, they don’t have any evidentiary basis. They’re all imaginary.”

Gurney smiled patiently, although patience was not what he felt. For a moment he was distracted by the awareness of his own dissembling presentation of his emotional reaction. It was a lifelong habit-this reflexive concealment of irritation, frustration, anger, fear, doubt. It served him well in thousands of interrogations-so well he’d come to believe it was a talent, a professional technique, but of course at root it wasn’t that at all. It was a way of dealing with life that had been part of him for as long as he could remember.

“So your father never paid attention to you, David. Did that make you feel bad?”

“Bad? No, not bad. No feelings about it at all, really.”

And yet, in a dream, one could drown in sadness.

Good Lord, no time for introspection now.

Gurney refocused in time to hear Rebecca Holdenfield say in that no-nonsense Sigourney Weaver voice of hers, “I personally find Detective Gurney’s hypothesis far from imaginary. In fact, I find it compelling-and I would ask again that he be allowed to complete his explanation.”

She addressed this request to Kline, who turned up his palms as if to say that this was everyone’s obvious intention.

“I’m not saying,” said Gurney, “that exactly eleven of the eleven thousand people picked the number six fifty-eight-only that eleven is the most likely number. I don’t know enough about statistics to quote probability formulas, but maybe someone can help me out with that.”

Wigg cleared her throat. “The probability attaching to a range would be far higher than for any specific number within the range. For example, I wouldn’t bet the house that a particular number between one and a thousand would be picked by exactly eleven people out of eleven thousand-but if we added a plus-or-minus range of, say, seven in either direction, I might be tempted to bet that the number of people picking it would fall within that range-in this case that six fifty-eight would be picked by at least four people and no more than eighteen people.”

Blatt squinted at Gurney. “Are you saying that this guy sent out mailings to eleven thousand people and the same secret number was hidden inside all those little sealed envelopes?”

“That’s the general idea.”

Holdenfield’s eyes widened in amazement as she spoke her thoughts aloud to no one in particular. “And each person, however many there were, who happened to pick six fifty-eight for whatever reason, and then opened that little envelope inside, and found the note saying that the writer knew him well enough to know he’d pick six fifty-eight… My God, what an impact that would have!”

“Because,” added Wigg, “it would never occur to him that he wasn’t the only one getting that letter. It would never occur to him that he was just the one out of every thousand who happened to pick that number. The handwriting was the icing on the cake. It made it all seem totally personal.”

“Jesus F. Christ,” croaked Hardwick, “what you’re telling us is that we’ve got a serial killer using a direct-mail campaign to prospect for victims!”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” said Gurney.

“That just might be the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Kline, more stunned than disbelieving.

“Nobody writes eleven thousand letters by hand,” declared Rodriguez flatly.

“Nobody writes eleven thousand letters by hand,” repeated Gurney. “That’s exactly the reaction he was banking on. And if it wasn’t for Sergeant Wigg’s story, I don’t think the possibility would ever have occurred to me.”

“And if you hadn’t described your father’s card trick,” said Wigg, “I wouldn’t have thought of the story.”

“You can congratulate each other later,” said Kline. “I still have questions. Like why did the killer ask for $289.87, and why did he ask that it be sent to someone else’s post-office box?”

“He asked for money for the same reason the sergeant’s con man asked for money-to get the right prospects to identify themselves. The con man wanted to know which people on his list were seriously worried about what they might have been photographed doing. Our killer wanted to know which people on his list had picked six fifty-eight and were sufficiently unnerved by the experience to pay money to find out who knew them well enough to predict it. I think the amount was as large as it was to separate the terrified-and Mellery was one of those-from the merely curious.”

Kline was leaning so far forward he was barely on his chair. “But why that exact dollars-and-cents amount?”

“That’s nagged at me from the beginning, and I’m still not sure, but there’s at least one possible reason: to ensure that the victim would send a check instead of cash.”

“That’s not what the first letter said,” pointed out Rodriguez. “It said the money could be sent either by check or by cash.”

“I know, and this sounds awfully subtle,” said Gurney, “but I think the apparent choice was intended to distract attention from the vital need that it be a check. And the complex amount was intended to discourage payment in cash.”

Rodriguez rolled his eyes. “Look, I know fantasy isn’t a popular word here today, but I don’t know what else to call this.”

“Why was it vital that the payment be sent as a check?” asked Kline.

“The money itself didn’t matter to the killer. Remember, the checks weren’t cashed. I believe he had access to them at some point in the delivery process to Gregory Dermott’s box, and that’s all he wanted.”

“All he wanted-what do you mean?”

“What’s on a check other than the amount and the account number?”

Kline thought for a moment. “The account holder’s name and address?”

“Right,” said Gurney. “Name and address.”

“But why…?”

“He had to make the victim identify himself. After all, he’d sent out thousands of these mailings. But each prospective victim would be convinced that the letter he’d received was uniquely about him, from someone who knew him very well. What if he just sent back an envelope with the requested cash in it? He’d have no reason to include his name and address-and the killer couldn’t ask him specifically to include it, because that would destroy the whole ‘I know your intimate secrets’ premise. Getting those checks was a subtle way to get the respondents’ names and addresses. And maybe, if the surreptitious process of accessing the check information occurred in the post office, the easiest way of disposing of the checks afterward was simply to pass them along in their original envelopes to Dermott’s box.”

“But the killer would have to steam open and reseal the envelopes,” said Kline.

Gurney shrugged. “An alternative would be to get some kind of access after Dermott opened the envelopes himself but before he had a chance to return the checks to their senders. That wouldn’t require steaming and resealing, but it does raise other problems and questions-things we need to look into regarding Dermott’s living arrangements, individuals with possible access to his home, and so forth.”

“Which,” rasped Hardwick loudly, “brings us back to my question-which Sherlock Gurney here characterized a little while ago as the most important question of all. Namely, who the hell is on that list of eleven thousand murder candidates?”

Gurney raised his hand in the familiar traffic-cop gesture. “Before we try to answer that, let me remind everyone that eleven thousand is only a guesstimate. It’s a feasible number of letters from an executional point of view, and it’s a number that statistically supports our six fifty-eight scenario. In other words, it’s a number that works. But as Sergeant Wigg pointed out originally, the actual number could be anywhere from five thousand to fifteen thousand. Any quantity within that range would be small enough to be doable and large enough to produce a handful of people randomly choosing six fifty-eight.”

“Unless, of course, you’re barking up the wrong tree entirely,” pointed out Rodriguez, “and all this speculation is just a colossal waste of time.”

Kline turned to Holdenfield. “What do you think, Becca? Are we onto something? Or just up another tree?”

“I find aspects of the theory absolutely fascinating, but I’d like to reserve my final opinion until I hear the answer to Sergeant Hardwick’s question.”

Gurney smiled, this time genuinely. “He rarely asks a question unless he already has a pretty good idea of the answer. Care to share, Jack?”

Hardwick massaged his face with his hands for several seconds-another of the incomprehensible tics that had irritated Gurney so much when they worked together on the Piggert matricide-patricide case. “If you look at the most significant background characteristic all the victims have in common-the characteristic referred to in the threatening poems-you might conclude that their names were part of a list of people with serious drinking problems.” He paused. “Question is, what list would that be?”

“Alcoholics Anonymous membership list?” suggested Blatt.

Hardwick shook his head. “No such list. They take that anonymity shit seriously.”

“How about a list compiled from public-record data?” said Kline. “Alcohol-related arrests, convictions?”

“A list like that could be put together, but two of the victims wouldn’t appear on it. Mellery has no arrest record. The pederast priest does, but the charge was endangering the morals of a minor-nothing about alcohol in the public record, although the Boston detective I spoke to told me the good father later had that charge dismissed in exchange for pleading to a lesser misdemeanor, blaming his behavior on his alcoholism and agreeing to go to long-term rehab.”

Kline squinted thoughtfully. “Well, then, could it be a list of the patients at that rehab?”

“It’s conceivable,” said Hardwick, screwing up his face in a way that said it wasn’t.

“Maybe we ought to look into it.”

“Sure.” Hardwick’s almost insulting tone created an awkward silence, broken by Gurney.

“In an effort to see if I could establish a location connection among the victims, I started looking into the rehab issue a while ago. Unfortunately, it was a dead end. Albert Rudden spent twenty-eight days in a Bronx rehab five years ago, and Mellery spent twenty-eight days in a Queens rehab fifteen years ago. Neither rehab offers long-term treatment-meaning the priest must have gone to yet another facility. So even if our killer had a job at one of those places and his job gave him access to thousands of patient records, any list he put together that way would include the name of only one of the victims.”

Rodriguez turned in his chair and addressed Gurney directly. “Your theory depends on the existence of a giant list-maybe five thousand names, maybe eleven thousand, I heard Wigg say maybe fifteen thousand-whatever, it seems to keep changing. But there isn’t any source for such a list. So now what?”

“Patience, Captain,” said Gurney softly. “I wouldn’t say there isn’t any source-we just haven’t figured it out yet. I seem to have more faith in your abilities than you do.”

The blood rose in Rodriguez’s face. “Faith? In my abilities? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“At one time or another, did all the victims go to rehab?” asked Wigg, ignoring the captain’s outburst.

“I don’t know about Kartch,” said Gurney, glad to be drawn back to the subject. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Hardwick chimed in. “Sotherton PD faxed us his record. Portrait of a real asshole. Assaults, harassment, public drunkenness, drunk and disorderly, menacing, menacing with a firearm, lewd behavior, three DWIs, two trips upstate, not to mention a dozen visits to county jail. The alcohol-related stuff, especially the DWIs, makes it virtually certain he’s been pushed into rehab at least once. I can ask Sotherton to look into it.”

Rodriguez pushed himself back from the table. “If the victims didn’t meet in rehab or even go to the same rehab at different times, what difference does it make that they were in rehab at all? Half the unemployed bums and bullshit artists in the world go to rehab these days. It’s a goddamn Medicaid-funded racket, a taxpayer rip-off. What the hell does it mean that all these guys went to rehab? That they were likely to be murdered? Hardly. That they were drunks? So what? We already knew that.” Anger, Gurney noted, had become Rodriguez’s ongoing emotion, leaping like a brushfire from issue to issue.

Wigg, at whom the tirade was directed, seemed unaffected by its nastiness. “Senior Investigator Gurney once said that he believed all the victims were likely to be connected through some common factor beyond drinking. I was thinking rehab attendance could be that factor, or at least be part of it.”

Rodriguez laughed derisively. “Maybe this, maybe that. I’m hearing a lot of maybes but no real connections.”

Kline looked frustrated. “Come on, Becca, tell us what you think. How firm is our footing here?”

“That’s a difficult question to answer. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“I’ll simplify it. Do you buy Gurney’s theory of the case-yes or no?”

“Yes, I do. The picture he painted of Mark Mellery’s being mentally tortured by the notes he was receiving-I can see that as a plausible part of a certain kind of murder ritual.”

“But you look like you’re not entirely convinced.”

“It’s not that, it’s just… the uniqueness of the approach. Torturing the victim is a common enough part of serial-murder pathology, but I’ve never seen an instance of its being carried out from such a distance in such a cool, methodical manner. The torture component of such murders generally relies on the direct infliction of physical agony in order to terrorize the victim and give the killer the feeling of ultimate power and control that he craves. In this case, however, the infliction of pain was entirely cerebral.”

Rodriguez leaned toward her. “So you’re saying it doesn’t fit the serial-murder pattern?” He sounded like an attorney attacking a hostile witness.

“No. The pattern is there. I’m saying that he has a uniquely cool and calculated way of executing it. Most serial killers are above average in intelligence. Some, like Ted Bundy, are far above average. This individual may be in a class by himself.”

“Too smart for us-is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s not what I said,” replied Holdenfield innocently, “but you’re probably right.”

“Really? Let me get this on the record,” said Rodriguez, his voice as brittle as thin ice. “Your professional opinion is that BCI is incapable of apprehending this maniac?”

“Once again, that’s not what I said.” Holdenfield smiled. “But once again you’re probably right.”

Once again Rodriguez’s sallow skin reddened with anger, but Kline intervened. “Surely, Becca, you’re not implying that there’s nothing we can do.”

She sighed with the resignation of a teacher saddled with the dullest students in the school. “The facts of the case so far support three conclusions. First, the man you’re chasing is playing games with you, and he’s very good at it. Second, he is intensely motivated, prepared, focused, and thorough. Third, he knows who’s next on his list, and you don’t.”

Kline looked pained. “But getting back to my question…”

“If you’re looking for a light at the end of the tunnel, there’s one small possibility in your favor. As rigidly organized as he is, there’s a chance he may fall apart.”

“How? Why? What do you mean, ‘fall apart?’”

As Kline asked the question, Gurney felt a tightening in his chest. The raw feeling of anxiety arrived with a cinematically sharp scene in his imagination-the killer’s hand gripping the sheet of paper with the eight lines Gurney had so impulsively put in the mail the previous day:

I see how all you did was done,

from backwards boots to muffled gun.

The game you started soon will end,

your throat cut by a dead man’s friend.

Beware the snow, beware the sun,

the night, the day, nowhere to run.

With sorrow first his grave I’ll tend

and then to hell his killer send.

Methodically, seemingly contemptuously, the hand crumpled the paper into a diminishing ball, and when the ball was improbably small, no larger than a nugget of chewed gum, the hand slowly opened and let it fall to the floor. Gurney tried to force the disturbing image from his mind, but the scenario had not quite run its course. Now the killer’s hand held the envelope in which the poem had been mailed-with the address side up, the postmark clearly visible, the Walnut Crossing postmark.

The Walnut Crossing… Oh, God! A draining chill spread from the pit of Gurney’s stomach down through his legs. How could he have overlooked such an obvious problem? God, calm down. Think. What could the killer do with that information? Could it lead him to the actual address, to their home, to Madeleine? Gurney felt his eyes widening, his face growing pale. How could he have been so obsessively focused on launching his pathetic little missive? How could he not have anticipated the postmark problem? What danger had he exposed Madeleine to? His mind careened around that last question like a man racing around a burning house. How real was the danger? How imminent? Should he call her, alert her? Alert her to what, exactly? And frighten her half to death? God, what else? What else had he overlooked in his tunnel-vision focus on the adversary, the battle, the puzzle? Who else’s safety-who else’s life-was he ignoring in his headstrong determination to win the game? The questions were dizzying.

A voice intruded into his near panic. He tried to fasten on to it, use it to regain his balance.

Holdenfield was speaking. “… an obsessive-compulsive planner with a pathological need to make reality conform to his plans. The goal that controls him absolutely is to be in absolute control of others.”

“Of everyone?” asked Kline.

“His focus is actually very narrow. He feels he must completely dominate through terror and murder the members of his target-victim group, who seem to represent some subset of middle-aged male alcoholics. Other people are irrelevant to him. They’re of no interest or importance.”

“So where does the ‘falling apart’ business come in?”

“Well, it so happens that committing murder to create and maintain a sense of omnipotence is a fatally flawed process-no pun intended. As a solution to the craving for control, serial killing is profoundly dysfunctional, the equivalent of pursuing happiness by smoking crack.”

“They need more and more of it?”

“More and more to achieve less and less. The emotional cycle becomes increasingly compressed and unmanageable. Things that weren’t supposed to happen do happen. I suspect something of that nature occurred this morning, resulting in that police officer’s being killed instead of your Mr. Dermott. These unforeseen events create serious emotional tremors in a killer obsessed with control, and these distractions lead to more mistakes. It’s like a machine with an unbalanced drive shaft. When it reaches a certain speed, the vibration takes over and tears the machine apart.”

“Meaning what, in this specific case?”

“The killer becomes increasingly frantic and unpredictable.”

Frantic. Unpredictable. Again the cold dread spread out from the pit of Gurney’s stomach, this time up into his chest, his throat.

“Meaning the situation is going to get worse?” asked Kline.

“In a way better, in a way worse. If a murderer who used to lurk in a dark alley and occasionally kill someone with an ice pick suddenly bursts out into Times Square swinging a machete, he’s likely to get caught. But in that final mayhem, a lot of people might lose their heads.”

“You figure our boy might be entering his machete stage?” Kline looked more excited than revolted.

Gurney felt sick. The macho-bullshit tone that people in law enforcement used to shield themselves from horror didn’t work in certain situations. This was one of them.

“Yes.” The flat simplicity of Holdenfield’s response created a silence in the room. After a while the captain spoke with his predictable antagonism.

“So what are we supposed to do? Issue an APB for a polite thirty-year-old with a vibrating drive shaft and a machete in his hand?”

Hardwick reacted to this with a twisted smile and Blatt with an explosive laugh.

Stimmel said, “Sometimes a grand finale is part of the plan.” He got the attention of everyone except Blatt, who kept laughing. When Blatt quieted down, Stimmel continued, “Anybody remember the Duane Merkly case?”

No one did.

“Vietnam vet,” said Stimmel. “Had problems with the VA. Problems with authority. Had a nasty Akita guard dog that ate one of his neighbor’s ducks. Neighbor called the cops. Duane hated cops. Next month the Akita ate the neighbor’s beagle. Neighbor shot the Akita. Conflict escalates, and more shit happens. One day the Vietnam vet takes the neighbor hostage. Says he wants five thousand dollars for the Akita or he’s going to kill the guy. Local cops arrive, SWAT team arrives. They take up positions around the perimeter of the property. Thing is, nobody looked into Duane’s service record. So nobody knew he was a demolitions specialist. Duane specialized in rigging remote-detonation land mines.” Stimmel fell silent, letting his audience imagine the outcome.

“You mean the fucker blew everybody up?” asked Blatt, impressed.

“Not everybody. Six dead, six permanently disabled.”

Rodriguez looked frustrated. “What’s the point of this?”

“Point is, he’d purchased the components for the mines two years earlier. The grand finale was always the plan.”

Rodriguez shook his head. “I don’t get the relevance.”

Gurney did, and it made him uneasy.

Kline looked at Holdenfield. “What do you think, Becca?”

“Do I think our man has big plans? It’s possible. I do know one thing…”

She was interrupted by a perfunctory knock at the door. The door opened, and a uniformed sergeant stepped halfway into the room and addressed Rodriguez.

“Sir? Sorry to interrupt. You’ve got a call from a Lieutenant Nardo in Connecticut. I told him you were in a meeting. He says it’s an emergency, has to talk to you now.”

Rodriguez sighed the sigh of a man unfairly burdened. “I’ll take it on the one here,” he said, tilting his head toward the phone on the low filing cabinet against the wall behind him.

The sergeant retreated. Two minutes later the phone rang.

“Captain Rodriguez here.” For another two minutes, he held the phone to his ear in tense concentration. “That’s bizarre,” he said finally. “In fact, it’s so bizarre, Lieutenant, I’d like you to repeat it word for word to our case team here. I’m putting you on speakerphone now. Please go ahead-tell them exactly what you told me.”

The voice that came from the phone a moment later was tense and hard. “This is John Nardo, Wycherly PD. Can you hear me?” Rodriguez said yes, and Nardo continued, “As you know, one of our officers was killed on duty this morning at the home of Gregory Dermott. We are presently on site with a crime-scene team. Twenty minutes ago a phone call was received for Mr. Dermott. He was told by the caller, quote, ‘You’re next in line, and after you it’s Gurney’s turn.’”

What? Gurney wondered if he could possibly have heard right.

Kline asked Nardo to repeat the phone message, and he did.

“Have you gotten anything yet from the phone company on the source?” asked Hardwick.

“Cell phone within this general area. No GPS data, just the location of the transmitting tower. Obviously, no caller ID.”

“Who took the call?” asked Gurney. Surprisingly, the direct threat was having a calming effect on him. Perhaps because anything specific, anything with names attached to it, was more limited and therefore more manageable than an infinite range of possibilities. And perhaps because neither of the names was Madeleine.

“What do you mean, who took the call?” asked Nardo.

“You said a call was received for Mr. Dermott, not by Mr. Dermott.”

“Oh, yes, I see. Well, Dermott happened to be lying down with a migraine when the phone rang. He’s been kind of incapacitated since finding the body. One of the techs answered the phone in the kitchen. The caller asked for Dermott, said he was a close friend.”

“What name did he give?”

“Odd name. Carbis… Cabberdis… No, wait a second, here, the tech wrote it down-Charybdis.”

“Anything odd about the voice?”

“Funny you should ask. They were just trying to describe it. After Dermott came to the phone, he said he thought it sounded like some foreign accent, but our guy thought it was fake-someone trying to disguise his voice. Or maybe her voice-neither one of them was sure about that. Look, guys, sorry, but I have to get back to our situation here. Just wanted to give you the basic facts. We’ll be back in touch when we have something new.”

After the sound of the call disconnecting, there was a restless silence around the table. Then Hardwick cleared his throat so loudly that Holdenfield flinched.

“So, Davey boy,” he growled, “once again you’re the center of attention. ‘It’s Gurney’s turn.’ What are you, a magnet for serial murderers? All we got to do is dangle you on a string and wait for them to bite.”

Was Madeleine dangling on a string as well? Perhaps not yet. Hopefully not yet. After all, he and Dermott were at the head of the line. Assuming the lunatic was telling the truth. If so, it would give him some time-maybe time to get lucky. Time to make up for his oversights. How could he have been so stupid? So unaware of her safety? Idiot!

Kline looked troubled. “How did you get to be a target?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Gurney with a false lightness. His guilt gave him the impression that both Kline and Rodriguez were eyeing him with unfriendly curiosity. From the beginning he’d had misgivings about writing and mailing that poem, but he’d buried them without defining or articulating them. He was appalled at his ability to ignore danger, including danger to others. What had he felt at the time? Had the risk to Madeleine come anywhere close to his consciousness? Had he had an inkling and dismissed it? Could he have been that callous? Please, God, no!

In all this angst, he was sure of at least one thing. Sitting there in that conference room discussing the situation any further was not a tolerable option. If Dermott was next on the killer’s list, then that’s where Gurney had the best chance of finding the man they were looking for and ending the risk before it crept any closer. And if he himself was next after Dermott, then that was a battle he wanted to fight as far from Walnut Crossing as possible. He slid his chair back from the table and stood.

“If you’ll excuse me, there’s somewhere I need to be.”

At first this generated only blank looks around the table. Then the meaning registered with Kline.

“Jesus!” he cried. “You’re not thinking of going to Connecticut?”

“I have an invitation, and I’m accepting it.”

“That’s crazy. You don’t know what you’re walking into.”

“Actually,” said Rodriguez with a dismissive glance in Gurney’s direction, “a crime scene crawling with cops is a pretty safe place.”

“That would normally be true,” said Holdenfield. “Unless…” She let the thought dangle, as though she were walking around it to view it from different angles.

“Unless what?” snapped Rodriguez.

“Unless the killer is a cop.”

Chapter 46

It seemed almost too easy.

Killing twenty well-trained police officers in twenty seconds should require more complex planning. A deed of that magnitude should be more difficult. After all, it would be the largest such eradication ever achieved-at least in America, at least in modern times.

The fact that no one had done it before, despite its apparent simplicity, both stimulated and troubled him. The idea that finally put his mind to rest was this: For a man of weaker intellect or less formidable powers of concentration, the project might indeed be daunting, but not for him, not with his clarity and focus. Everything was relative. A genius could dance through obstacles that would hopelessly entangle ordinary men.

The chemicals were laughably easy to acquire, quite economical, and 100 percent legal. Even in large quantities, they aroused no suspicion, since they were sold in bulk every day for industrial applications. Even so, he’d prudently purchased each one (there were only two) from a different supplier to avoid any hint of their eventual combination, and he’d acquired the two fifty-gallon pressure tanks from a third supplier.

Now, as he was putting the finishing touches with a soldering iron on a bit of jerry-rigged piping to combine and deliver the lethal mixture to its recipients, he had a thrilling thought-a possible scenario with a climactic image-that so tickled his imagination a gleaming smile burst across his face. He knew that what he was imagining wasn’t likely to happen-the chemistry was too unpredictable-but it could happen. It was at least conceivable.

On the Chemical Hazards website was a warning he had memorized. The warning was in a red box surrounded by red exclamation points. “This mixture of chlorine and ammonia not only produces a fatally toxic gas but in the proportions indicated is highly unstable and with the catalyst of a spark may explode.” The image that delighted him was of the entire Wycherly police department caught in his trap, involuntarily gasping the poison fumes into their lungs just as the catalyzing spark was applied, blowing each of them to pieces from the inside out. As he pictured it, he did something he almost never did. He laughed out loud.

If only his mother could grasp the humor of it, the beauty of it, the glory of it. But perhaps that was asking too much. And, of course, if the policemen were all blown to pieces-little tiny pieces-he wouldn’t get to cut their throats. And he very much wanted to cut their throats.

Nothing in this world was perfect. There were always pluses and minuses. One had to make the best of the hand one was dealt. See the glass as half full.

That was reality.

Chapter 47

After brushing aside the predictable objections and concerns regarding his intended trip, Gurney went to his car and called the Wycherly police department for the address of Gregory Dermott’s home, since all he had up to that point was the P.O. box number on Dermott’s letterhead. It took a while to explain to the officer on duty exactly who he was, and even then he had to wait while the young woman called Nardo and got permission to divulge the location. It turned out that she was the only member of the small force not already at the scene. Gurney entered the address in his GPS and headed for the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge.

Wycherly was located in north-central Connecticut. The trip took a little over two hours, much of which Gurney spent pondering his gross failure to think of his wife’s safety. The lapse so disturbed and depressed him that he became desperate to focus on something else, and he began to examine the main hypothesis developed at the BCI meeting.

The notion that the killer had somehow accessed or compiled a list of several thousand individuals with a history of drinking problems-individuals suffering from the deep-seated fears and guilt arising from an alcoholic past-and then managed to ensnare a handful of them through that simple number trick, and then tormented them with the series of creepy poems, leading up to their ritual murders… that entire process, outlandish as it was, now seemed to Gurney entirely credible. He remembered discovering that serial murderers, when they were children, often found pleasure in torturing insects and small animals-for example, by burning them with sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass. One of his own famous arrests, Cannibal Claus, had blinded a cat exactly that way at the age of five. Burning with a magnifying glass. It seemed disturbingly similar to focusing a victim on his past and intensifying his fears until he was writhing in pain.

Seeing a pattern, fitting the pieces of the puzzle together-it was a process that normally elated him, but that afternoon in the car it didn’t feel as good as it usually did. Perhaps it was the lingering perception of his inadequacies, his missteps. The thought was acid in his chest.

He concentrated loosely on the road, the hood of his car, his hands on the wheel. Strange. His own hands-he didn’t recognize them. They looked surprisingly old-like his father’s hands. The little splotches had grown in number and size. If just a minute earlier he’d been shown photographs of a dozen hands, he wouldn’t have been able to identify his own among them.

He wondered why. Perhaps changes, if they occur gradually enough, are not regularly noted by the brain until the discrepancy reaches some critical magnitude. Perhaps it even went further than that.

Would it mean that we always see familiar things to some extent the way they used to be? Are we stuck in the past not out of simple nostalgia or wishful thinking but by a data-processing shortcut in our neural wiring? If what one “saw” was supplied partly from the optic nerves and partly from memory-if what one “perceived” at any given moment was actually a composite of current impressions and stored impressions-it gave new meaning to “living in the past.” The past would thus exercise a peculiar tyranny over the present by supplying us with obsolete data in the guise of sensory experience. Might that not relate to the situation of a serial killer driven by a long-ago trauma? How distorted might his vision be?

The theory momentarily excited him. Turning over a new idea, testing its solidity, always made him feel a little more in control, a little more alive, but today those feelings were hard to sustain. His GPS alerted him that it was two-tenths of a mile to the Wycherly exit.

At the end of the exit ramp, he turned right. The area was a hodgepodge of farm fields, tract houses, strip malls, and ghosts of another era’s summer pleasures: a dilapidated drive-in movie, a sign for a lake with an Iroquois name.

It brought to mind another lake with another Indian-sounding name-a lake with an encircling trail that he and Madeleine had hiked one weekend when they were searching for their perfect place in the Catskills. He could picture her animated face as they stood atop a modest cliff, holding hands, smiling, looking out over the breeze-crinkled water. The memory came with a stab of guilt.

He hadn’t called her yet to let her know what he was doing, where he was going, the likely delay in his homecoming. He still wasn’t sure how much he should tell her. Should he even mention the postmark? He decided to call her now, play it by ear. God help me say the right thing.

Considering the level of stress he was already feeling, he thought it wise to pull over to make the call. The first place he could find was a scruffy, gravelly parking area in front of a farm stand shuttered for the winter. The word for his home number in the voice-activated dialing system was, efficiently but unimaginatively, home.

Madeleine answered on the second ring with that optimistic, welcoming voice phone calls always elicited from her.

“It’s me,” he said, his own voice reflecting only a fraction of the light in hers.

There was a one-beat pause. “Where are you?”

“That’s what I’m calling to tell you. I’m in Connecticut, near a town called Wycherly.”

The obvious question would have been, “Why?” But Madeleine didn’t ask obvious questions. She waited.

“There’s been a development in the case,” he said. “Things may be coming to a head.”

“I see.”

He heard a slow, controlled breath.

“Are you going to tell me anything more than that?” she asked.

He gazed out the car window at the lifeless vegetable stand. More than closed for the season, it looked abandoned. “The man we’re after is getting reckless,” he said. “There may be an opportunity to stop him.”

“The man we’re after?” Now her voice was thin ice, fissuring.

He said nothing, jarred by her response.

She went on, openly angry. “Don’t you mean the bloody murderer, the serial killer, the man who never misses-who shoots people in their neck arteries and cuts their throats? Isn’t that who you’re talking about?”

“That’s… the man we’re after, yes.”

“There aren’t enough cops in Connecticut to handle this?”

“He seems to be focused on me.”

“What?”

“He seems to have identified me as someone working on the case, and he may try to do something stupid-which will give us the opportunity we need. It’s our chance to take the fight to him rather than just mopping up one murder after another.”

“What?” This time the word was less a question than a pained exclamation.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said unconvincingly. “He’s starting to fall apart. He’s going to self-destruct. We just have to be there when it happens.”

“When it was your job, you had to be there. You don’t have to be there now.”

“Madeleine, for Chrissake, I’m a cop!” The words exploded from him like an obstructed object blown loose. “Why the hell can’t you understand that?”

“No, David,” she responded evenly. “You were a cop. You’re not a cop now. You don’t have to be there.”

“I’m already here.” In the ensuing silence, his temper subsided like a retreating wave. “It’s all right. I know what I’m doing. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

“David, what is the matter with you? Do you just keep running at the bullets? Running at the bullets? Until one goes through your head? Is that it? Is that the pathetic plan for the rest of our lives together? I just wait, and wait, and wait for you to get killed?” Her voice cracked with such raw emotion on the word killed that he found himself speechless.

It was Madeleine who eventually spoke-so softly he could just make out the words. “What is this really about?”

“What’s it about?” The question hit him from an odd angle. He felt off balance. “I don’t understand the question.”

Her intense silence from a hundred miles away seemed to surround him, press in against him.

“What do you mean?” he asked. He could feel his heart rate rising.

He thought he heard her swallow. He sensed, somehow knew, she was trying to make a decision. When she did answer him, it was with another question, again spoken so softly he barely heard it.

“Is this about Danny?”

He could feel the pounding of his heart in his neck, his head, his hands.

“What? What would it have to do with Danny?” He didn’t want an answer, not now, not when he had so much to do.

“Oh, David,” she said. He could picture her, shaking her head sadly, determined to pursue this most difficult of all subjects. Once Madeleine opened a door, she invariably walked through it.

She took a shaky breath and pressed on. “Before Danny was killed, your job was the biggest part of your life. Afterward, it was the only part. The only part. You’ve done nothing but work for the past fifteen years. Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to make up for something, forget something… solve something.” Her strained inflection made the word sound like the symptom of a disease.

He tried to maintain his footing by holding on to the facts at hand. “I’m going to Wycherly to help capture the man who killed Mark Mellery.” He heard his voice as if it belonged to someone else-someone old, frightened, rigid-someone trying to sound reasonable.

She ignored what he said, following her own train of thought. “I hoped if we opened the box, looked at his little drawings… we could say good-bye to him together. But you don’t say good-bye, do you? You never say good-bye to anything.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he protested. But that wasn’t true. When they’d been about to move from the city up to Walnut Crossing, Madeleine had spent hours saying good-bye. Not only to neighbors but to the place itself, things they were leaving behind, houseplants. It had gotten under his skin. He’d complained about her sentimentality, said talking to inanimate objects was weird, a waste of time, a distraction, that it was only making their departure more difficult. But it was more than that. Her behavior was touching something in him that he didn’t want touched-and now she’d put her finger on it again-the part of him that never wanted to say good-bye, that couldn’t face separation.

“You stuff things out of sight,” she was saying. “But they’re not gone, you haven’t really let go of them. You have to look at them to let go of them. You have to look at Danny’s life to let go of it. But you obviously don’t want to do that. You just want to… what, David? What? Die?” There was a long silence.

“You want to die,” she said. “That’s really it, isn’t it?”

He experienced the kind of emptiness he imagined existed at the eye of a hurricane-an emotion that felt like a vacuum.

“I have a job to do.” It was a banal thing to say, stupid, really. He didn’t know why he bothered to say it.

There was a lengthy silence.

“No,” she said softly, swallowing again. “You don’t have to keep doing this.” Then, barely audibly, despairingly, she added, “Or maybe you do. Maybe I was just hoping.”

He was at a loss for words, a loss for thoughts.

He sat for a long while, his mouth slightly open, breathing rapid, shallow breaths. At some point-he wasn’t sure when-the phone connection was broken. He waited in a kind of vacant chaos for a calming thought, an actionable thought.

What came instead was a sense of absurdity and pathos-the thought that even at the moment when he and Madeleine were emotionally stripped, raw and terrified, they were literally a hundred miles apart, in different states, exposing themselves to empty space, to cell phones.

What also came to mind was what he’d failed to speak about, had failed to reveal to her. He hadn’t said a single word about his postmark stupidity, how it might point the killer to where they lived, how the oversight arose from his own obsessive focus on the investigation. With that thought came a sickening echo, the realization that his similar preoccupation with an investigation fifteen years earlier had been a factor in Danny’s death-maybe the ultimate cause of it. It was remarkable that Madeleine had connected that death with his current obsession. Remarkable and, he had to admit, unnervingly acute.

He felt he had to call her back, admit his mistake-the peril he’d created-warn her. He dialed their number, waited for the welcoming voice. The phone rang, rang, rang, rang. Then the voice he heard was his own recorded message-a little stiff, almost stern, hardly welcoming-then the beep.

“Madeleine? Madeleine are you there? Please pick up if you’re there.” He felt a kind of sinking sickness. He couldn’t think of anything to say that would make sense in a one-minute message, nothing that wouldn’t be likely to cause more damage than it would prevent, nothing that wouldn’t create panic and confusion. All he ended up saying was, “I love you. Be careful. I love you.” Then there was another beep, and once again the connection was broken.

He sat and stared at the dilapidated vegetable stand, aching and confused. He felt like he could sleep for a month, or forever. Forever would be best. But that made no sense. That was the kind of dangerous thinking that caused weary men in the Arctic to lie down in the snow and freeze to death. He must regain his focus. Keep moving. Push himself forward. Bit by bit, his thoughts began to coalesce around the unfinished task awaiting him. There was work to do in Wycherly. A madman to be apprehended. Lives to be saved. Gregory Dermott’s, his own, perhaps even Madeleine’s. He started the car and drove on.

The address to which his GPS finally delivered him belonged to an unremarkable suburban Colonial set well back on an oversize lot on a secondary road with little traffic and no sidewalks. A tall, dense arborvitae hedge provided privacy along the left, rear, and right sides of the property. A chest-high boxwood hedge ran across the front, except for the driveway opening. Police cars were everywhere-more than a dozen, Gurney estimated-pulled up at all angles to the hedge, partially obstructing the road. Most bore the Wycherly PD insignia. Three were unmarked, with portable red flashers atop their dashboards. Notably missing were any Connecticut state police vehicles-but perhaps not surprisingly so. Although it might not be the smartest or most effective approach, he could understand a local department’s wanting to maintain control when the victim was one of their own. As Gurney nosed into a tight available patch of grass at the edge of the asphalt, an enormous young uniformed cop was pointing to a route around the parked cruisers with one hand and with the other urgently motioning him away from where he was trying to stop. Gurney got out of the car and produced his ID as the mammoth officer approached, tense and tight-lipped. His bulging neck muscles, at war with a collar a size and a half too small, seemed to extend up into his cheeks.

He examined the card in Gurney’s wallet for a long minute with increasing incomprehension, finally announcing, “This says New York State.”

“I’m here to see Lieutenant Nardo,” said Gurney.

The cop gave him a stare as hard as the pecs straining his shirt-front, then shrugged. “Inside.”

At the foot of the long driveway on a post the same height as the mailbox was a beige metal sign with black lettering: GD SECURITY SYSTEMS. Gurney ducked under the yellow police tape that seemed to be strung around the entire property. Oddly, it was the coldness of the tape as it brushed against his neck that for the first time that day diverted his attention from his racing thoughts to the weather. It was raw, gray, windless. Patches of snow, previously melted and refrozen, lay in the shadows at the feet of the boxwood and arborvitae plantings. Along the driveway there were patches of black ice filling shallow depressions in the tarred surface.

Affixed to the center of the front door was a more discreet version of the GD Security Systems sign. Next to the door was a small sticker indicating that the house was protected by Axxon Silent Alarms. As he reached the brick steps of the columned entry porch, the door in front of him opened. It was not a welcoming gesture. In fact, the man who opened it stepped out and closed it behind him. He took only peripheral note of Gurney’s presence as he spoke with loud irritation into a cell phone. He was a compact, athletically built man in his late forties, with a hard face and sharp, angry eyes. He wore a black windbreaker with the word police in large yellow letters across the back.

“Can you hear me now?” He moved off the porch onto the faded, frost-wilted lawn. “Can you hear me now?… Good. I said I need another tech on the scene ASAP… No, that’s no good, I mean I need one right now… Now, before it gets dark. The word is spelled n-o-w. What part of that word don’t you understand?… Good. Thank you. I appreciate that.”

He pushed the disconnect button on the phone and shook his head. “Goddamn idiot.” He looked at Gurney. “Who the hell are you?”

Gurney did not react to the aggressive tone. He understood where it was coming from. There was always a sense of heightened emotion at the scene of a cop killing-a kind of barely controlled tribal rage. Besides, he recognized the voice of the man who’d sent the officer to Dermott’s house-John Nardo.

“I’m Dave Gurney, Lieutenant.”

A lot seemed to go through Nardo’s mind very quickly, most of it negative. All he said was, “What are you here for?”

Such a simple question. He wasn’t sure he knew even a fraction of the answer. He decided to opt for brevity. “He says he wants to kill Dermott and me. Well, Dermott’s here. Now I’m here. All the bait the bastard could want. Maybe he’ll make his move and we can wrap this up.”

“You think so?” Nardo’s tone was full of aimless hostility.

“If you’d like,” said Gurney, “I can bring you up to date on our piece of the case, and you can tell me what you’ve discovered here.”

“What I discovered here? I discovered that the cop I sent to this house at your request is dead. Gary Sissek. Two months away from retirement. I discovered that his head was nearly severed by a broken whiskey bottle. I discovered a pair of bloody boots next to a freaking lawn chair behind that hedge.” He waved a little wildly toward the rear of the house. “Dermott never saw the chair before. His neighbor never saw it before. So where did the freaking thing come from? Did this freaking lunatic bring a lawn chair with him?”

Gurney nodded. “As a matter of fact, the answer is probably yes. It seems to be part of a unique MO. Like the whiskey bottle. Was it by any chance Four Roses?”

Nardo stared at him, blankly at first, as if there were a slight tape delay in the transmission. “Jesus,” he said. “You better come inside.”

The door led into a wide, bare center hall. No furniture, no rugs, no pictures on the walls, just a fire extinguisher and a couple of smoke alarms. At the end of the hall was the rear door-beyond which, Gurney assumed, was the porch where Gregory Dermott that morning had discovered the cop’s body. Indistinct voices outside suggested that the scene-of-crime processing team was still busy in the backyard.

“Where’s Dermott?” Gurney asked.

Nardo raised his thumb toward the ceiling. “Bedroom. Gets stress migraines, and the migraines make him nauseous. He’s not in what you’d call a good mood. Bad enough before the phone call saying he was next, but then… Jesus.”

Gurney had questions he wanted to ask, lots of them, but it seemed better to let Nardo set the pace. He looked around at what he could see of the ground floor of the house. Through a doorway on his right was a large room with white walls and a bare wood floor. Half a dozen computers sat side by side on a long table in the center of the room. Phones, fax machines, printers, scanners, auxiliary hard drives, and other peripherals covered another long table placed against the far wall. Also on the far wall was another fire extinguisher. In lieu of a smoke alarm, there was a built-in sprinkler system. There were only two windows, too small for the space, one in the front and one in the rear, giving it a tunnel-like feeling despite the white paint.

“He runs his computer business from down here and lives upstairs. We’ll use the other room,” said Nardo, indicating a doorway across the hall. Similarly uninviting and purely functional, the room was half the length of the other and had a window at only one end, making it more like a cave than a tunnel. Nardo flipped a wall switch as they entered, and four recessed lights in the ceiling turned the cave into a bright white box containing file cabinets against one wall, a table with two desktop computers against another wall, a table with a coffeemaker and a microwave against a third wall, and an empty square table with two chairs in the middle of the room. This room had both a sprinkler system and a smoke alarm. It reminded Gurney of a cleaner version of the cheerless break room at his last precinct. Nardo sat in one of the chairs and gestured for Gurney to sit in the other. He massaged his temples for a long minute, as if trying to squeeze the tension out of his head. From the look in his eyes, it wasn’t working.

“I don’t buy that ‘bait’ shit,” he said, wrinkling his nose as if the word bait smelled bad.

Gurney smiled. “It’s partly true.”

“What’s the other part?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You come here to be a freaking hero?”

“I don’t think so. I have a feeling my being here may help.”

“Yeah? What if I don’t share that feeling?”

“It’s your show, Lieutenant. You want me to go home, I’ll go home.”

Nardo gave him another long, cynical stare. In the end he appeared to change his mind, at least tentatively. “The Four Roses bottle is part of the MO?”

Gurney nodded.

Nardo took a deep breath. He looked as if his whole body ached. Or as if the whole world ached. “Okay, Detective. Maybe you better tell me everything you haven’t told me.”

Chapter 48

Gurney talked about the backwards snow prints, the poems, the unnatural voice on the phone, the two unsettling number tricks, the alcoholic backgrounds of the victims, their mental torture, the hostile challenges to the police, the “REDRUM” graffiti on the wall and the “Mr. and Mrs. Scylla” sign-in at The Laurels, the high intelligence and hubris of the killer. He continued to provide details from the three killings he was familiar with until Nardo’s attention span looked like it might be reaching its breaking point. Then he concluded with what he considered most important:

“He wants to prove two things. First, that he has the power to control and punish drunks. Second, that the police are impotent fools. His crimes are intentionally constructed like elaborate games, brain teasers. He’s brilliant, obsessive, meticulous. So far he hasn’t left behind a single inadvertent fingerprint, hair, speck of saliva, clothing fiber, or unplanned footprint. He hasn’t made any mistakes that we’ve discovered. The fact is, we know very little about him, his methods, or his motives that he hasn’t chosen to reveal to us. With one possible exception.”

Nardo raised a weary but curious eyebrow.

“A certain Dr. Holdenfield, who wrote the state-of-the-art study of serial murder, believes he’s reached a critical stage in the process and is about to launch some sort of climactic event.”

Nardo’s jaw muscles rippled. He spoke with fierce restraint. “Which would make my slaughtered friend on the back porch a warm-up act?”

It wasn’t the kind of question one could, or should, answer. The two men sat in silence until a slight sound, perhaps the sound of an irregular breath, drew their attention simultaneously to the doorway. Incongruously for such a surreptitious arrival, it was the NFL-size hulk who’d earlier been guarding the driveway. He looked like he was having a tooth drilled.

Nardo could see what was coming. “What, Tommy?”

“They’ve located Gary’s wife.”

“Oh, Christ. Okay. Where is she?”

“On her way home from the town garage. She drives the Head Start school bus.”

“Right. Right. Oh, fuck. I should go myself, but I can’t leave here now. Where the fuck is the chief? Anybody find him yet?”

“He’s in Cancún.”

“I know he’s in freaking Cancún. I mean, why the fuck doesn’t he check his messages?” Nardo took a long breath and closed his eyes. “Hacker and Picardo-they were probably closest to the family. Isn’t Picardo the wife’s cousin or something? Send Hacker and Picardo. Christ. But tell Hacker to come see me first.”

The gigantic young cop went as quietly as he’d come.

Nardo took another long breath. He began speaking as though he’d been kicked in the head and hoped that speaking would help him clear his mind. “So you’re telling me they were all alcoholics. Well, Gary Sissek wasn’t an alcoholic, so what does that mean?”

“He was a cop. Maybe that was enough. Or maybe he got in the way of a planned attack on Dermott. Or maybe there’s some other connection.”

“What other connection?”

“I don’t know.”

The back door slammed, sharp footsteps approached, and a wiry man in plainclothes appeared at the door. “You wanted to see me?”

“Sorry to do this to you, but I need you and Picardo to-”

“I know.”

“Right. Well. Keep the information simple. Simple as you can. ‘Fatally stabbed while protecting the intended victim of an attack. Died a hero.’ Something like that. Jesus fucking Christ! What I mean is, no awful details, no pool of blood. You understand what I’m trying to say? The details can come later if they have to. But for now…”

“I understand, sir.”

“Right. Look, I’m sorry I can’t do it myself. I really can’t leave. Tell her I’ll come by the house tonight.”

“Yes, sir.” The man paused at the doorway until it was clear that Nardo had nothing more to say, then marched back the way he came and closed the rear door behind him, this time more quietly.

Again Nardo forced his attention back to his conversation with Gurney. “Am I missing something, or is your understanding of this case pretty much theoretical? I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but I didn’t hear anything about a list of suspects-in fact, no concrete leads to pursue at all, is that right?”

“More or less.”

“And that shitload of physical evidence-envelopes, notepaper, red ink, boots, broken bottles, footprints, taped phone calls, cell-tower transmission records, returned checks, even messages written in skin oil from this freaking lunatic’s fingertips-none of that led anywhere?”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

Nardo shook his head in a manner that was getting to be a habit. “Bottom line, you don’t know who you’re looking for or how to find him.”

Gurney smiled. “So maybe that’s why I’m here.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I have no idea where else to go.”

It was a simple admission of a simple fact. The intellectual satisfaction of figuring out the tactical details of the killer’s MO was little more than a distraction from the lack of progress on the central issue so plainly articulated by Nardo. Gurney had to face the fact that despite his eureka insights into the peripheral mysteries of the case, he was almost as far from identifying and capturing his man as he’d been on the morning Mark Mellery brought him those first baffling notes and asked for his help.

There was a small shift in Nardo’s expression, a relaxation of its sharp edge.

“We’ve never had a murder in Wycherly,” he said. “Not a real one, anyway. Couple of manslaughter plead-outs, couple of vehicular homicides, one questionable hunting accident. Never had a killing here that didn’t involve at least one completely intoxicated asshole. At least not in the past twenty-four years.”

“That how long you’ve been on the job?”

“Yep. Only guy in the department longer than me is… was… Gary. He was just shy of twenty-five. His wife wanted him out at twenty, but he figured if he stayed another five… Damn!” Nardo wiped his eyes. “We don’t lose many guys in the line of duty,” he said, as though his tears needed a rational explanation.

Gurney was tempted to say he knew what it was like to lose a colleague. He’d lost two in one bust gone bad. Instead he just nodded in sympathy.

After a minute or so, Nardo cleared his throat. “You have any interest in talking to Dermott?”

“Matter of fact, yes. I just don’t want to get in your way.”

“You won’t,” said Nardo roughly-making up, Gurney supposed, for his moment of weakness. Then he added in a more normal tone, “You’ve spoken to this guy on the phone, right?”

“Right.”

“So he knows who you are.”

“Right.”

“So you don’t need me in the room. Just fill me in when you’re through.”

“Whatever you say, Lieutenant.”

“Door on the right at the top of the stairs. Good luck.”

As he ascended the plain oak staircase, Gurney wondered if the second floor would be any more revealing of the occupant’s personality than the first, which had no more warmth or flair than the computer equipment it housed. The landing at the top of the stairs echoed the redundant security motif established downstairs: a fire extinguisher on the wall, a smoke alarm and sprinklers in the ceiling. Gurney was getting the impression that Gregory Dermott was definitely a belt-and-suspenders guy. He knocked at the door Nardo had indicated.

“Yes?” The response was pained, hoarse, impatient.

“Special Investigator Gurney, Mr. Dermott. May I see you for a minute?”

There was a pause. “Gurney?”

“Dave Gurney. We’ve spoken on the phone.”

“Come in.”

Gurney opened the door into a room darkened by partly closed blinds. It was furnished with a bed, a nightstand, a bureau, an armchair, and a tablelike desk against the wall with a folding chair in front of it. All the wood was dark. The style was contemporary, superficially upscale. The bedspread and carpet were gray, tan, essentially colorless. The room’s occupant sat in the armchair facing the door. He sat tilted a little to one side, as though he’d found an odd position that mitigated his discomfort. To the extent that the underlying personality was visible, it struck Gurney as the techie type one might expect in the computer business. In the low light, his age was less definable. Thirty something would be a reasonable guess.

After studying Gurney’s features as if trying to discern in them the answer to a question, he asked in a low voice, “Did they tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“About the phone call… from the crazy murderer.”

“I heard about that. Who answered the phone?”

“Answered it? I assume one of the police officers. One came to get me.”

“The caller asked for you by name?”

“I guess… I don’t know… I mean, he must have. The officer said the call was for me.”

“Was there anything familiar about the caller’s voice?”

“It wasn’t normal.”

“How do you mean that?”

“Crazy. Up and down, high like a woman’s voice, then low. Crazy accents. Like it was some kind of creepy joke, but serious, too.” He pressed his fingertips against his temples. “He said that I was next, then you.” He seemed more exasperated than frightened.

“Were there any background sounds?”

“Any what?”

“Did you hear anything other than the caller’s voice-music, traffic, other voices?”

“No. Nothing.”

Gurney nodded, looking around the room. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

“What? No, go ahead.” Dermott gestured broadly to the room as though it were full of chairs.

Gurney sat on the edge of the bed. He had a strong feeling that Gregory Dermott held the key to the case. Now, if only he could think of the right question to ask. The right subject to raise. On the other hand, sometimes the right thing to say was nothing. Create a silence, an empty space, and see how the other guy would choose to fill it. He sat for a long while staring down at the carpet. It was an approach that took patience. It also took good judgment to know when any more empty silence would just be a waste of time. He was approaching that point when Dermott spoke.

“Why me?” The tone was edgy, annoyed-a complaint, not a question-and Gurney chose not to respond.

After a few seconds, Dermott went on, “I think it might have something to do with this house.” He paused. “Let me ask you something, Detective. Do you personally know anyone in the Wycherly police department?”

“No.” He was tempted to ask the reason for the question but assumed he’d soon enough discover it.

“No one at all, present or past?”

“No one.” Seeing something in Dermott’s eyes that seemed to demand further assurance, he added, “Before I saw the check-mailing instructions in the letter to Mark Mellery, I didn’t even know Wycherly existed.”

“And no one ever told you about anything happening in this house?”

“Happening?”

“In this house. A long time ago.”

“No,” said Gurney, intrigued.

Dermott’s discomfort seemed to exceed the effects of a headache.

“What was it that happened?”

“It’s all secondhand information,” said Dermott, “but right after I bought this place, one of the neighbors told me that twenty-some-odd years ago there was a horrible fight here-apparently a husband and wife, and the wife was stabbed.”

“And you see some connection…?”

“It may be a coincidence, but…”

“Yes?”

“I’d pretty much forgotten about it. Until today. This morning when I found-” His lips stretched in a kind of nauseous spasm.

“Take your time,” said Gurney.

Dermott placed both his hands to his temples. “Do you have a gun?”

“I own one.”

“I mean with you.”

“No. I haven’t carried a gun since I left the NYPD. If you’re worried about security, there are more than a dozen armed cops within a hundred yards of this house,” said Gurney.

He didn’t look particularly reassured.

“You were saying you remembered something.”

Dermott nodded. “I’d forgotten all about it, but it came back to me when I saw… all that blood.”

“What came back to you?”

“The woman who was stabbed in this house-she was stabbed in the throat.”

Chapter 49

Dermott’s recollection that the neighbor (now deceased) had placed the event “twenty-some-odd years ago” meant that the number could easily be less than twenty-five-and that, in turn, would mean that both John Nardo and Gary Sissek would have been on the force at the time of the attack. Although the picture was far from clear, Gurney could feel another piece of the puzzle starting to rotate into position. He had more questions for Dermott, but they could wait until he got some answers from the lieutenant.

He left Dermott sitting stiffly in his chair by the drawn blinds, looking stressed and uncomfortable. As he started down the staircase, a female officer in scene-of-crime coveralls and latex gloves in the hallway below was asking Nardo what to do next with the areas outside the house that had been examined for trace evidence.

“Keep it taped and off-limits, in case we have to go over it again. Transport the chair, bottle, anything else you’ve got to the station. Set up the back end of the file room as a dedicated area.”

“What about all the junk on the table?”

“Shove it in Colbert’s office for now.”

“He’s not going to like it.”

“I don’t give a flying-Look, just take care of it!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Before you leave, tell Big Tommy to stay in front of the house, tell Pat to stay by the phone. I want everyone else out knocking on doors. I want to know if anyone in the neighborhood saw or heard anything out of the ordinary the past couple of days, especially late last night or early this morning-strangers, cars parked where they aren’t normally parked, anyone hanging around, anyone in a hurry, anything at all.”

“How large a radius you want them to cover?”

Nardo looked at his watch. “Whatever they can cover in the next six hours. Then we’ll decide where to go from there. Anything of interest turns up, I want to be informed immediately.”

As she went off on her mission, Nardo turned to Gurney, who was standing at the foot of the stairs. “Find out anything useful?”

“I’m not sure,” said Gurney in a low voice, motioning Nardo to follow him back into the room they’d been sitting in earlier. “Maybe you can help me figure it out.”

Gurney sat in the chair facing the doorway. Nardo stood behind the chair on the opposite side of the square table. His expression was a combination of curiosity and something Gurney couldn’t decipher.

“Are you aware that someone was once stabbed in this house?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Shortly after Dermott bought the place, he was told by a neighbor that a woman who’d lived here years ago had been attacked by her husband.”

“How many years ago?”

Gurney was sure he saw a flicker of recognition in Nardo’s eyes.

“Maybe twenty, maybe twenty-five. Somewhere in there.”

It seemed to be the answer Nardo expected. He sighed and shook his head. “I hadn’t thought about that for a long time. Yeah, there was a domestic assault-about twenty-four years ago. Not too long after I joined the force. What about it?”

“Do you remember any of the details?”

“Before we go down memory lane, you mind addressing the relevance issue?”

“The woman who was attacked was stabbed in the throat.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?” There was a twitch at the corner of Nardo’s mouth.

“Two people have been attacked in this house. Of all the ways that someone could be attacked, it strikes me as a notable coincidence that both of those people were stabbed in the throat.”

“You’re making these things sound the same by the way you say it, but they got zip in common. What the hell does a police officer murdered on a protection assignment today have to do with a domestic disturbance twenty-four freaking years ago?”

Gurney shrugged. “If I knew more about the ‘disturbance,’ maybe I could tell you.”

“Fine. Okay. I’ll tell you what I can tell you, but it’s not much.” Nardo paused, staring down at the table, or more likely into the past. “I wasn’t on duty that night.”

An obvious disclaimer, thought Gurney. Why does the story demand a disclaimer?

“So this is pretty much secondhand,” Nardo went on. “As in most domestics, the husband was drunk out of his mind, got into an altercation with his wife, apparently picked up a bottle, whacked her with it, I guess it broke, she got cut, that’s about it.”

Gurney knew damn well that wasn’t it. The only question was how to jar the rest of the story loose. One of the unwritten rules of the job was to say as little as possible, and Nardo was carefully obeying the rule. Feeling that there was no time for a subtle approach, Gurney decided to plunge head-on into the barrier.

“Lieutenant, that’s a crock of shit!” he said, looking away with disgust.

“Crock of shit?” Nardo’s voice was pitched menacingly just above a whisper.

“I’m sure what you told me is true. The problem is what’s missing.”

“Maybe what’s missing is none of your freaking business.” Nardo was still sounding tough, but some of the confidence had gone out of the belligerence.

“Look, I’m not just some nosy asshole from another jurisdiction. Gregory Dermott got a phone call this morning threatening my life. My life. If there’s any possible way what’s going on here could be connected to your so-called domestic disturbance, I goddamn well have a right to know about it.”

Nardo cleared his throat and gazed up at the ceiling as if the right words-or an emergency exit-might suddenly appear there.

Gurney added in a softer tone, “You could start by telling me the names of the people involved.”

Nardo gave a little nod, pulled out the chair he’d been standing behind, and sat down. “Jimmy and Felicity Spinks.” He sounded resigned to an unpleasant truth.

“You say the names like you knew them pretty well.”

“Yeah. Well. Anyway…” Somewhere in the house, a phone rang once. Nardo seemed not to hear it. “Anyway, Jimmy used to drink a bit. More than a bit, I guess. Came home drunk one night, got into a fight with Felicity. Like I said, he ended up cutting her pretty bad with a broken bottle. She lost a lot of blood. I didn’t see it, I was off that night, but the guys who were on the call talked about the blood for a week.” Nardo was staring at the table again.

“She survived?”

“What? Yeah, yeah, she survived, but just barely. Brain damage.”

“What happened to her?”

“Happened? I think she was put in some kind of nursing home.”

“What about the husband?”

Nardo hesitated. Gurney couldn’t tell whether he was having a hard time remembering or just didn’t want to talk about it. “Claimed self-defense,” he said with evident distaste. “Ended up getting a plea deal. Sentence reduced to time served. Lost his job. Left town. Social services took their kid. End of story.”

Gurney’s antenna, sensitized by a thousand interrogations, told him there was still something missing. He waited, observing Nardo’s discomfort. In the background he could hear an intermittent voice-probably the voice of whoever had answered the phone-but couldn’t make out the words.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s the big deal about that story, that you didn’t just tell me the whole thing to begin with?”

Nardo looked squarely at Gurney. “Jimmy Spinks was a cop.”

The frisson that swept through Gurney’s body brought with it half a dozen urgent questions, but before he could ask any, a square-jawed woman with a sandy crew cut appeared suddenly at the doorway. She wore jeans and a dark polo shirt. A Glock in a quick-draw holster was strapped under her left arm.

“Sir, we just got a call you need to know about.” An unspoken immediately flashed in her eyes.

Looking relieved at the distraction, he gave the newcomer his full attention and waited for her to go on. Instead she glanced uncertainly toward Gurney.

“He’s with us,” said Nardo without pleasure. “Go ahead.”

She gave Gurney a second glance, no friendlier than the first, then advanced to the table and laid a miniature digital phone recorder down in front of Nardo. It was about the size of an iPod.

“It’s all on there, sir.”

He hesitated for a moment, squinting at the device, then pushed a button. The playback began immediately. The quality was excellent.

Gurney recognized the first voice as that of the woman standing in front of him.

“GD Security Systems.” Apparently she’d been instructed to answer Dermott’s phone as though she were an employee.

The second voice was bizarre-and thoroughly familiar to Gurney from the call he’d listened in on at Mark Mellery’s request. It seemed so long ago. Four deaths had intervened between that call and this one-deaths that had shaken his sense of time. Mark in Peony, Albert Rudden in the Bronx, Richard Kartch in Sotherton (Richard Kartch-why did that name always bring with it an uneasy feeling, a feeling of discrepancy?), and Officer Gary Sissek in Wycherly.

There was no mistaking that weirdly shifting pitch and accent.

“If I could hear God, what would He tell me?” the voice asked with the menacing lilt of a horror-movie villain.

“Excuse me?” The female cop on the recording sounded as taken aback as any real receptionist might have been.

The voice repeated, more insistently, “If I could hear God, what would He tell me?”

“I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I think we may have a bad connection. Are you using a cell phone?”

Speaking quickly to Nardo, she interjected some live commentary. “I was just trying to prolong the call, like you said, to keep him talking as long as possible.”

Nardo nodded. The recording went on.

“If I could hear God, what would He tell me?”

“I don’t really understand that, sir. Could you explain what you mean?”

The voice, suddenly booming, announced, “God would tell me to kill them all!”

“Sir? I’m pretty confused here. Did you want me to write this message down and pass it along to someone?”

There was a sharp laugh, like cellophane crumpling.

“It’s Judgment Day, no more to say. / Dermott be nimble, Gurney be quick. / The cleanser is coming. Tick-tock-tick.”

Chapter 50

The first to speak was Nardo “That was the whole call?”

“Yes, sir.”

He leaned back in his chair and massaged his temples. “No word yet from Chief Meyers?”

“We keep leaving messages at his hotel desk, sir, and on his cell phone. No word yet.”

“I assume the caller’s number was blocked?”

“Yes, sir.”

“‘Kill them all,’ huh?”

“Yes, sir, those were his words. Do you want to hear the recording again?”

Nardo shook his head. “Who do you think he’s referring to?”

“Sir?”

“‘Kill them all.’ All who?”

The female cop seemed to be at a loss. Nardo looked at Gurney.

“Just a guess, Lieutenant, but I’d say it’s either all the remaining people on his hit list-assuming there are any-or all of us here in the house.”

“And what about ‘the cleanser is coming,’” said Nardo. “Why ‘the cleanser’?”

Gurney shrugged. “I have no idea. Maybe he just likes the word-fits his pathological notion of what he’s doing.”

Nardo’s features wrinkled in an involuntary expression of distaste. Turning to the female cop, he addressed her for the first time by name. “Pat, I want you outside the house with Big Tommy. Take diagonal corners opposite each other, so together you’ll have every door and window under surveillance. Also, get the word around-I want every officer prepared to converge on this house within one minute of hearing a shot or any kind of disturbance at all. Questions?”

“Are we expecting an armed attack, sir?” She sounded hopeful.

“I wouldn’t say ‘expecting,’ but it’s sure as hell possible.”

“You really think that crazy bastard is still in the area?” There was acetylene fire in her eyes.

“It’s possible. Let Big Tommy know about the perp’s latest call. Stay super alert.”

She nodded and was gone.

Nardo turned grimly to Gurney. “What do you think? Think I ought to call in the cavalry, tell the state cops we got an emergency situation? Or was that phone call a bunch of bullshit?”

“Considering the body count so far, it would be risky to assume it was bullshit.”

“I’m not assuming a freaking thing,” said Nardo, tight-lipped.

The tension in the exchange led to a silence.

It was broken by a hoarse voice calling from upstairs.

“Lieutenant Nardo? Gurney?”

Nardo grimaced as if something were turning sour in his stomach. “Maybe Dermott’s got another recollection he wants to share.” He sank deeper into his chair.

“I’ll look into it,” said Gurney.

He stepped from the room into the hallway. Dermott was standing at his bedroom door at the top of the staircase. He looked impatient, angry, exhausted.

“Could I speak to you… please?” The “please” was not said pleasantly.

Dermott looked too shaky to negotiate the staircase, so Gurney went up. As he did, the thought came to him that this wasn’t really a home, just a place of business with sleeping quarters appended to it. In the city neighborhood where he was raised, it was a common arrangement-shopkeepers living above their shops, like the wretched deli man whose hatred of life seemed to increase with each new customer, or the mob-connected undertaker with his fat wife and four fat children. Just thinking about it made him queasy.

At the bedroom door, he shoved the feeling aside and tried to decipher the portrait of unease on Dermott’s face.

The man glanced around Gurney and down the stairs. “Is Lieutenant Nardo gone?”

“He’s downstairs. What can I do for you?”

“I heard cars driving away,” said Dermott accusingly.

“They’re not going far.”

Dermott nodded in an unsatisfied way. He obviously had something on his mind but seemed in no rush to get to the point. Gurney took the opportunity to pursue a few questions of his own.

“Mr. Dermott, what do you do for a living?”

“What?” He sounded both baffled and annoyed.

“Exactly what sort of work do you do?”

“My work? Security. I believe we had this conversation before.”

“In a general way,” said Gurney, smiling. “Perhaps you could give me some details.”

Dermott’s expressive sigh suggested that he viewed the request as an irritating waste of his time. “Look,” he said, “I need to sit down.” He returned to his armchair, settling into it gingerly. “What kind of details?”

“The name of your company is GD Security Systems. What sort of ‘security’ do these ‘systems’ provide, and for whom?”

After another loud sigh, he said, “I help companies protect confidential information.”

“And this help comes in what form?”

“Database-protection applications, firewalls, limited-access protocols, ID-verification systems-those categories would cover most projects we handle.”

“We?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You referred to projects ‘we’ handle.”

“That’s not meant literally,” said Dermott dismissively. “It’s just a corporate expression.”

“Makes GD Security Systems seem a bit bigger than it is?”

“That’s not the intention, I assure you. My clients love the fact that I do the work myself.”

Gurney nodded as though he were impressed. “I can see how that would be a plus. Who are these clients?”

“Clients for whom confidentiality is a major issue.”

Gurney smiled innocently at Dermott’s curt tone. “I’m not asking you to reveal any secrets. I’m just wondering what sort of businesses they’re in.”

“Businesses whose client databases entail sensitive privacy issues.”

“Such as?”

“Personal information.”

“What sort of personal information?”

Dermott looked like he was evaluating the contractual risks he might be incurring by going any further. “The sort of information collected by insurance companies, financial-service companies, HMOs.”

“Medical data?”

“A great deal of it, yes.”

“Treatment data?”

“To the extent that it is captured in the basic medical coding system. What’s the point of this?”

“Suppose you were a hacker who wanted to access a very large medical database-how would you go about it?”

“That’s not an answerable question.”

“Why is that?”

Dermott closed his eyes in a way that conveyed frustration. “Too many variables.”

“Like what?”

“Like what?” Dermott repeated the question as though it were an embodiment of pure stupidity. After a moment he went on with his eyes still closed. “The hacker’s goal, the level of expertise, his familiarity with the data format, the database structure itself, the access protocol, the redundancy of the firewall system, and about a dozen other factors that I doubt you have the technical background to understand.”

“I’m sure you’re right about that,” said Gurney mildly. “But let’s say, just for example, that a skilled hacker was trying to compile a list of people who’d been treated for a particular illness…”

Dermott raised his hands in exasperation, but Gurney pressed on. “How difficult would that be?”

“Again, that’s not answerable. Some databases are so porous they might as well be posted on the Internet. Others could defeat the most sophisticated code-breaking computers in the world. It all depends on the talent of the system designer.”

Gurney caught a note of pride in that last statement and decided to fertilize it. “I’d be willing to bet my pension there aren’t many people better at it than you are.”

Dermott smiled. “I’ve built my career on outwitting the sharpest hackers on the planet. No data-protection protocol of mine has ever been breached.”

The boast raised a new possibility. Might the man’s ability to stymie the killer’s penetration of certain databases have something to do with the killer’s decision to involve him in the case via his post-office box? The idea was certainly worth considering, even though it created more questions than answers.

“I wish the local police could claim the same degree of competence.”

The comment brought Gurney back from his speculation. “What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” Dermott seemed to be thinking long and hard about the answer. “A murderer is stalking me, and I have no confidence in the ability of the police to protect me. There is a madman loose in this neighborhood, a madman who intends to kill me, then kill you, and you respond to this by asking me hypothetical questions about hypothetical hackers accessing hypothetical databases? I have no idea what you’re trying to do, but if you’re trying to settle my nerves by distracting me, I assure you it’s not helping. Why don’t you concentrate on the real danger? The problem is not some academic software issue. The problem is a lunatic creeping up on us with a bloody knife in his hand. And this morning’s tragedy is proof positive that the police are worse than useless!” The angry tone of this speech had by the end spun out of control. It brought Nardo up the stairs and into the bedroom. He looked first at Dermott, then at Gurney, then back at Dermott.

“The hell’s going on?”

Dermott turned away and stared at the wall.

“Mr. Dermott doesn’t feel adequately protected,” said Gurney.

“Adequately prot-” Nardo burst out angrily, then stopped and began again in a more reasonable way. “Sir, the chances of any unauthorized person getting into this house-much less ‘a lunatic with a bloody knife’ if I heard you right-are less than zero.”

Dermott continued staring at the wall.

“Let me put it this way,” Nardo continued. “If the son of a bitch has the balls to show up here, he’s dead. He tries to get in, I’ll eat the son of a bitch for dinner.”

“I don’t want to be left alone in this house. Not for a minute.”

“You’re not hearing me,” growled Nardo. “You’re not alone. There are cops all over the neighborhood. Cops all around the house. Nobody’s getting in.”

Dermott turned toward Nardo and said challengingly, “Suppose he already got in.”

“The hell are you talking about?”

“What if he’s already in the house?”

“How the hell could he be in the house?”

“This morning-when I went outside to look for Officer Sissek-suppose when I was walking around the yard… he came in through the unlocked door. He could have, couldn’t he?”

Nardo stared at him incredulously. “And gone where?”

“How would I know?”

“What do you think, he’s hiding under your freaking bed?”

“That’s quite a question, Lieutenant. But the fact is, you don’t know the answer, do you? Because you didn’t really check the house thoroughly, did you? So he could be under the bed, couldn’t he?”

“Jesus Christ!” cried Nardo. “Enough of this shit!”

He took two long strides to the footboard, grabbed the bottom of it, and with a fierce grunt heaved the end of the bed into the air and held it at shoulder height.

“Okay now?” he snarled. “You see anyone under there?”

He let the bed down with a thud and a bounce.

Dermott glared at him. “What I want, Lieutenant, is competence, not childish drama. Is a careful search of the premises too much to ask?”

Nardo eyed Dermott coldly. “You tell me-where could someone hide in this house?”

“Where? I don’t know. Basement? Attic? Closets? How should I know?”

“Just to set the record straight, sir, the first officers on the scene did go through the house. If he was here, they would have found him. Okay?”

“They went through the house?”

“Yes, sir, while you were being interviewed in the kitchen.”

“Including the attic and basement?”

“Correct.”

“Including the utility closet?”

“They checked all the closets.”

“They couldn’t have checked the utility closet!” cried Dermott defiantly. “It’s padlocked, and I have the key, and nobody asked me for it.”

“Which means,” countered Nardo, “if it’s still padlocked, nobody could have gotten into it to begin with. Which means it would have been a waste of time to check it.”

“No-what it means is that you’re a damn liar for claiming that the whole house had been searched!”

Nardo’s reaction surprised Gurney, who was bracing himself for an explosion. Instead the lieutenant said softly, “Give me the key, sir. I’ll take a look right now.”

“So,” Dermott concluded, lawyerlike, “you admit that it was overlooked-that the house was not searched the way it should have been!”

Gurney wondered if this nasty tenacity was the product of Dermott’s migraine, or a bilious streak in his temperament, or the simple conversion of fear into aggression.

Nardo seemed unnaturally calm. “The key, sir?”

Dermott muttered something-something offensive, by the look on his face-and pushed himself up out of his chair. He took a key ring out of his nightstand drawer, extricated a key smaller than the rest, and tossed it on the bed. Nardo picked it up with no visible reaction and left the room without another word. His footsteps receded slowly down the stairs. Dermott dropped the remaining keys back in the drawer, started to close it, and stopped.

“Shit!” he hissed.

He picked up the keys again and began working a second one off the stiff little ring that held them. Once he’d removed it, he started for the door. After taking no more than a step, he tripped on the bedside throw rug and stumbled against the doorjamb, banging his head. A strangled cry of rage and pain emerged from his clenched teeth.

“You all right, sir?” asked Gurney, stepping toward him.

“Fine! Perfect!” The words were sputtered out furiously.

“Can I help you?”

Dermott seemed to be trying to calm down. “Here,” he said. “Take this key and give it to him. There are two locks. With all the ridiculous confusion…”

Gurney took the key. “You’re okay?”

Dermott waved his hand disgustedly. “If they came to me to begin with like they should have…” His voice trailed off.

Gurney gave the wretched-looking man a final assessing glance and went downstairs.

As in most suburban houses, the stairs to the basement descended behind and beneath the stairs to the second floor. There was a door leading to them, which Nardo had left open. Gurney could see a light on below.

“Lieutenant?”

“Yeah?”

The source of the voice seemed to be located some distance from the foot of the rough wooden stairs, so Gurney went down with the key. The odor-a musty combination of concrete, metal pipes, wood, and dust-kicked up a vivid memory of the apartment-house basement of his childhood-the double-locked storeroom where tenants stored unused bicycles, baby carriages, boxes of junk; the dim light cast by a few cobwebby bulbs; the shadows that never failed to give him a hair-raising chill.

Nardo was standing at a gray steel door at the opposite end of an unfinished concrete room with exposed joists, dampness-stained walls, a water heater, two oil tanks, a furnace, two smoke alarms, two fire extinguishers, and a sprinkler system.

“The key only fits the padlock,” he said. “There’s also a dead bolt. What’s with this redundant security mania? And where the hell’s the other key?”

Gurney handed it to him. “Says he forgot. Blames it on you.”

Nardo took it with a disgusted grunt and stuck it directly into the lock. “Rotten little fucker,” he said, pushing the door open. “I can’t believe I’m actually checking-What the hell…?”

Nardo, followed by Gurney, walked tentatively through the doorway into the room beyond, which was considerably larger than a utility closet.

At first, nothing they saw made sense.

Chapter 51

Gurney’s immediate reaction was that they’d entered the wrong door. But that didn’t make any sense, either. Apart from the door at the top of the stairs, it was the only door in the basement. But this was no mere storage space.

They were standing in the corner of a large, softly lighted, traditionally furnished, richly carpeted bedroom. In front of them was a queen-size bed with a flowery quilt and a ruffled skirt extending around the base. Several overstuffed pillows with matching ruffles were propped up against the headboard. At the foot of the bed was a cedar hope chest. On it sat a big stuffed bird made of some sort of patchwork quilting. An odd feature in the wall to Gurney’s left attracted his attention-a window that seemed at first glance to provide a view of an open field, but the view, he quickly realized, was a poster-size color transparency illuminated from the rear, presumably intended to relieve the claustrophobic atmosphere. He simultaneously became aware of the low hum of some sort of air-circulation system.

“I don’t get it,” said Nardo.

Gurney was about to agree when he noticed a small table a little farther along the same wall as the fake window. On the table was a low-wattage lamp in whose circle of amber light stood three simple black frames of the sort used to display diplomas. He moved closer for a clearer view. In each frame was a photocopy of a personal check. The checks were all made out to X. Arybdis. They were all in the amount of $289.87. From left to right, they were from Mark Mellery, Albert Rudden, and R. Kartch. These were the checks Gregory Dermott had reported receiving, the originals of which he’d returned uncashed to their senders. But why had he made copies before returning them? And, more troubling, why the hell had he framed them? Gurney picked them up one at a time, as if a closer inspection might provide answers.

Then, suddenly, while he was peering at the signature on the third check-R. Kartch-the uncomfortable feeling he’d had about that name resurfaced. Except this time not just the feeling came to him, but the reason for it.

“Damn!” he muttered at his earlier blindness to the now obvious discrepancy.

Simultaneously, an abrupt little sound came from Nardo. Gurney looked at him, then followed the direction of his startled gaze to the opposite corner of the wide room. There-barely visible in the shadows, beyond the reach of the feeble light cast by the table lamp on the framed checks, partly concealed by the wings of a Queen Anne armchair and camouflaged by a nightgown of the same dusty-rose hue as the upholstery, a frail woman sat with her head bent forward on her chest.

Nardo unclipped a flashlight from his belt and aimed its beam at her.

Gurney guessed that her age might be anywhere from fifty to seventy. The skin was deathly pale. The blond hair, done up in a profusion of curls, had to be a wig. Blinking, she raised her head so gradually it hardly seemed to be moving, turning it toward the light with a curiously heliotropic grace.

Nardo looked at Gurney, then back at the woman in the chair.

“I have to pee,” she said. Her voice was high, raspy, imperious. The haughty upward tilt of her chin revealed an ugly scar on her neck.

“Who the hell is this?” whispered Nardo, as though Gurney ought to know.

In fact, Gurney was sure he knew exactly who it was. He also knew that bringing the key down to Nardo in the basement had been a terrible mistake.

He turned quickly toward the open doorway. But Gregory Dermott was already standing in it, with a quart bottle of Four Roses whiskey in one hand and a.38 Special revolver in the other. There was no trace of the angry, volatile man with a migraine. The eyes, no longer screwed up into an imitation of pain and accusation, had reverted to what, Gurney assumed, was their normal state-the right keen and determined, the left dark and unfeeling as lead.

Nardo also turned. “Wha…?” he began, then let the question die in his throat. He stood very still, eyeing Dermott’s face and gun alternately.

Dermott took a full step into the room, adroitly reached back with his foot, and hooked his toe around the edge of the door, slamming it shut behind him. There was a heavy metallic click as the lock snapped into place. A small, unsettling smile lengthened the thin line of his mouth.

“Alone at last,” he said, mocking the tone of a man looking forward to a pleasant chat. “So much to do,” he added. “So little time.” He apparently found this amusing. The cold smile widened for a moment like a stretching worm, then contracted. “I want you to know in advance how much I appreciate your participation in my little project. Your cooperation will make everything so much better. First, a minor detail. Lieutenant, may I ask you to lie facedown on the floor?” It wasn’t really a question.

Gurney could read in Nardo’s eyes a kind of rapid calculation, but he couldn’t tell what options the man was considering. Or even if he had any idea what was really going on.

To the degree that he could read anything in Dermott’s eyes, it looked like the patience of a cat watching a mouse with nowhere to run.

“Sir,” said Nardo, affecting a kind of pained concern, “it would be a real good idea to put the gun down.”

Dermott shook his head. “Not as good as you think.”

Nardo looked baffled. “Just put it down, sir.”

“That’s an option. But there’s a complication. Nothing in life is simple, is it?”

“Complication?” Nardo was speaking to Dermott as though he were an otherwise harmless citizen temporarily off his medication.

“I plan to put down the gun after I shoot you. If you want me to put it down right away, then I’ll have to shoot you right away. I don’t want to do that, and I’m sure you don’t want that, either. You see the problem?”

As Dermott spoke, he raised the revolver to a point at which it was aimed at Nardo’s throat. Whether it was the steadiness of his hand or the calm mockery in Dermott’s voice, something in his manner convinced Nardo he needed to try a different strategy.

“You fire that gun,” he said, “what do you think happens next?”

Dermott shrugged, the thin line of his mouth widening again. “You die.”

Nardo nodded in tentative agreement, as though a student had given him an obvious but incomplete answer. “And? What then?”

“What difference does it make?” Dermott shrugged again, gazing down the barrel at Nardo’s neck.

The lieutenant seemed to be making quite an effort at maintaining control, over either his fury or his fear.

“Not much to me, but a lot to you. You pull that trigger, in less than a minute you’ll have a couple dozen cops up your ass. They’ll fucking rip you to pieces.”

Dermott seemed amused. “How much do you know about crows, Lieutenant?”

Nardo squinted at the non sequitur.

“Crows are incredibly stupid,” said Dermott. “When you shoot one, another one comes. When you shoot that one, another comes, and then another, and another. You keep shooting them, and they keep coming.”

It was something Gurney had heard before-that crows would not let one of their own die alone. If a crow was dying, others would come and stand next to him, so he wouldn’t be alone. When he’d first heard that story, from his grandmother when he was ten or eleven years old, he had to leave the room because he knew he was going to cry. He went into the bathroom, and his heart ached.

“I saw a picture once of a crow shoot on a farm in Nebraska,” said Dermott with a mixture of amazement and contempt. “A farmer with a shotgun was standing next to a pile of dead crows that came up to his shoulder.” He paused, as if to allow Nardo time to appreciate the suicidal absurdity of crows and the relevance of their fate to the current situation.

Nardo shook his head. “You really think you can sit in here and shoot one cop after another as they come through the door without getting your head blown off? It’s not going to happen that way.”

“Of course it isn’t. Didn’t anyone ever tell you a literal mind is a small mind? I like the crow story, Lieutenant, but there are more efficient ways to exterminate vermin than shooting them one at a time. Gassing, for example. Gassing is very efficient, if you have the right sort of delivery system. Perhaps you’ve noticed that every room in this house is equipped with sprinklers. Every one except this one.” He paused again, his livelier eye sparkling with self-congratulation. “So if I shoot you and all the crows come flying in, I open two little valves on two little pipes, and twenty seconds later…” His smile became cherubic. “Do you have any idea what concentrated chlorine gas does to a human lung? And how rapidly it does it?”

Gurney watched Nardo struggling to assess this frighteningly contained man and his gassing threat. For an unnerving moment, he thought the cop’s pride and rage were about to propel him into a fatal leap forward, but instead Nardo took a few quiet breaths, which seemed to let some of the tension out of the spring, and spoke in a voice that sounded earnest and anxious.

“Chlorine compounds can be tricky. I worked with them in an antiterrorism unit. One guy accidentally produced some nitrogen trichloride as a by-product of another experiment. Didn’t even realize it. Blew his thumb off. Might not be as easy as you think to run your chemicals through a sprinkler system. I’m not sure you could do that.”

“Don’t waste your time trying to trick me, Lieutenant. You sound like you’re trying a technique from the police manual. What does it say-‘Express skepticism regarding the criminal’s plan, question his credibility, provoke him into providing additional details’? If you want to know more, there’s no need to trick me, just ask me. I have no secrets. What I do have, just so you know, are two fifty-gallon high-pressure tanks, filled with chlorine and ammonia, driven by an industrial compressor, linked directly to the main sprinkler pipe that feeds the system throughout the house. There are two valves concealed in this room that will join the combined one hundred gallons, releasing an enormous amount of gas in a highly concentrated form. As for the unlikely peripheral formation of nitrogen trichloride and the resultant explosion, I would regard that as a delightful plus, but I will be content with the simple asphyxiation of the Wycherly PD. It would be great fun to see you all blasted to pieces, but one must be content. The best must not be made the enemy of the good.”

“Mr. Dermott, what on earth is this all about?”

Dermott wrinkled his brow in a parody of someone who might be considering the question seriously.

“I received a note in the mail this morning. ‘Beware the snow, beware the sun, / the night, the day, nowhere to run.’” He quoted the words from Gurney’s poem with sarcastic histrionics, shooting him an inquisitive glance as he did so. “Empty threats, but I must thank whoever sent it. It reminded me how short life can be, that I should never put off till tomorrow what I can do today.”

“I don’t really get what you mean,” said Nardo, still in his earnest mode.

“Just do what I say, and you’ll end up understanding perfectly.”

“Fine, no problem. I just don’t want anyone to get hurt unnecessarily.”

“No, of course not.” The stretchy, wormlike smile came and went. “Nobody wants that. In fact, to avoid unnecessary hurt, I really do need you to lie down on the floor right now.”

They had come full circle. The question was, what now? Gurney was watching Nardo’s face for readable signs. How much had the man put together? Had it dawned on him yet who the woman in the chair might be, or the smiley psychopath with the whiskey bottle and the gun?

At least he must have finally realized, if nothing else, that Dermott was the murderer of Officer Sissek. That would account for the hatred he couldn’t quite conceal in his eyes. Suddenly the tension was back in the spring. Nardo looked wild with adrenaline, with a primitive, consequences-be-damned emotion far more powerful than reason. Dermott saw it, too, but far from cowing him, it seemed to elate him, to energize him. His hand tightened just a little on the handle of the revolver, and for the first time the slithery smile revealed a lively glimmer of teeth.

Less than a second before a.38 slug would surely have ended Nardo’s life, and less than two seconds before a second slug would have ended his own, Gurney broke the circuit with a furious, guttural shout.

“Do what the man said! Get down on the fucking floor! Get down on the fucking floor NOW!”

The effect was stunning. The antagonists were frozen in place, the insidious momentum of the confrontation shattered by Gurney’s raw outburst.

The fact that no one was dead persuaded him that he was on the right track, but he wasn’t sure exactly what that track was. To the extent that he could read Nardo, the man looked betrayed. Beneath his more opaque exterior, Dermott seemed disconcerted but was striving, Gurney suspected, not to let the interruption undermine his control.

“Very wise advice from your friend,” Dermott said to Nardo. “I’d follow it at once if I were you. Detective Gurney has such a good mind. Such an interesting man. A famous man. You can learn so much about a person from a simple Internet search. You’d be amazed at what sort of information pops up with a name and a zip code. So little privacy anymore.” Dermott’s sly tone sent a wave of nausea through Gurney’s chest. He tried to remind himself that Dermott’s specialty was persuading people that he knew more about them than he really did. But the idea that his own failure to think ahead regarding the postmark problem could in any way have put Madeleine in jeopardy was intrusive and nearly unbearable.

Nardo reluctantly lowered himself to the floor, eventually lying on his stomach in the position of a man about to do a push-up. Dermott directed him to clasp his hands behind his head, “if it’s not too much to ask.” For a terrible moment, Gurney thought it might be the setup for an immediate execution. Instead, after gazing down with satisfaction at the prone lieutenant, Dermott carefully put the whiskey bottle he’d been carrying on the cedar hope chest next to the big stuffed bird-or, as Gurney now realized, the big stuffed goose. With a sickening chill, he recalled a detail from the lab reports. Goose down. Then Dermott reached down to Nardo’s right ankle, pulled a small automatic pistol out of a holster strapped there, and placed it in his own pocket. Again the humorless grin waxed and waned.

“Knowing where all the firearms are located,” he explained with a creepy earnestness, “is the key to avoiding tragedy. So many guns. So many guns in the wrong hands. Of course, an argument is often made that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And you have to admit that there’s some truth in that. People do kill people. But who would know that better than men in your profession?”

Gurney added to the short list of things he knew to be true the fact that these archly delivered speeches to Dermott’s captive audience-the polite posing, the menacing gentility, the same elements that characterized his notes to his victims-had one vital purpose: to fuel his own fantasy of omnipotence.

Proving Gurney right, Dermott turned to him and like an obsequious usher whispered, “Would you mind sitting over there against that wall?” He indicated a ladder-back chair on the left side of the bed next to the lamp table with the framed checks. Gurney went to the chair and sat without hesitation.

Dermott looked back down at Nardo, his icy gaze at odds with his encouraging tone. “We’ll have you up and around in no time at all. We just need to get one more participant in place. I appreciate your patience.”

On the side of Nardo’s face visible to Gurney, the jaw muscle tightened and a red flush rose from the neck into the cheek.

Dermott moved quickly across the room to the far corner and, leaning over the side of the wing chair, whispered something to the seated woman.

“I have to pee,” she said, raising her head.

“She really doesn’t, you know,” said Dermott looking back toward Gurney and Nardo. “It’s an irritation created by the catheter. She’s had a catheter for years and years. A discomfort on the one hand, but a real convenience, too. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Heads and tails. Can’t have one without the other. Wasn’t that a song?” He stopped as though trying to place something, hummed a familiar tune with a perky lilt, then, still holding the gun in his right hand, helped the old woman up from the chair with his left. “Come along, dear, it’s beddy-bye time.”

As he led her in small, halting steps across the room to the bed and assisted her into a semireclining position against the upright pillows, he kept repeating in a little boy’s voice, “Beddy-bye, beddy-bye, beddy-bye, beddy-bye.”

Pointing the gun at a rough midpoint between Nardo on the floor and Gurney in the chair, he looked unhurriedly around the room, but not at anything in particular. It was hard to tell whether he was seeing what was there or overlaying on it another scene from another time or place. Then he looked at the woman on the bed in the same way and said with a kind of fey Peter Pan conviction, “Everything’s going to be perfect. Everything’s going to be the way it always should have been.” He began humming very softly a few disconnected notes. As he went on, Gurney recognized the tune of a nursery rhyme, “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.” Perhaps it was the uncomfortable reaction he’d always had to the antilogic of nursery rhymes; perhaps it was this one’s dizzying imagery; perhaps it was the colossal inappropriateness of the music to the moment; but whatever it was, hearing that melody in that room made him want to puke.

Then Dermott added words, but not the right words. He sang like a child, “Here we get into the bed again, the bed again, the bed again. Here we get into the bed again, so early in the morning.”

“I have to pee,” the woman said.

Dermott continued singing his weird ditty as though it were a lullaby. Gurney wondered how distracted the man actually was-sufficiently to permit a leaping tackle across the bed? He thought not. Would a more vulnerable moment come later? If Dermott’s chlorine-gas story was an action plan, not just a scary fantasy, how much time did they have left? He guessed not much.

The house above was deadly still. There was no indication that any of the other Wycherly cops had yet discovered their lieutenant’s absence or, if they had, realized its significance. There were no raised voices, no scuttling feet, no hint of any outside activity at all-which meant that saving Nardo’s life and his own would probably depend on what Gurney himself could come up with in the next five or ten minutes to derail the psychopath who was fluffing up the pillows on the bed.

Dermott stopped singing. Then he stepped sideways along the edge of the bed to a point at which he could aim his revolver with equal ease at either Nardo or Gurney. He began moving it back and forth like a baton, rhythmically, aiming it at one and then the other and back again. Gurney got the idea, perhaps from the movement of the man’s lips, that he was waving the gun in time to eeny meeny miney mo, catch a tiger by the toe. The possibility that this silent recitation might in a few seconds be punctuated with a bullet in one of their heads seemed overwhelmingly real-real enough to jar Gurney right then into taking a wild verbal swing.

In the softest, most casual voice he could muster he asked, “Does she ever wear the ruby slippers?”

Dermott’s lips stopped moving, and his facial expression reverted to a deep, dangerous emptiness. His gun lost its rhythm. The direction of its muzzle settled slowly on Gurney like a roulette wheel winding down to a losing number.

It wasn’t the first time he’d been at the wrong end of a gun barrel, but never in all the forty-seven years of his life had he felt closer to death. There was a draining sensation in his skin, as though the blood were retreating to some safer place. Then, bizarrely, he felt calm. It made him think of the accounts he’d read of men overboard in an icy sea, of the hallucinatory tranquillity they felt before losing consciousness. He gazed across the bed at Dermott, into those emotionally asymmetric eyes-one corpselike from a long-ago battlefield, the other alive with hatred. In that second, more purposeful eye, he sensed a rapid calculation under way. Perhaps Gurney’s reference to the pilfered slippers from The Laurels had served its purpose-raising questions that needed resolution. Perhaps Dermott was wondering how much he knew and how such knowledge might affect the consummation of his endgame.

If so, Dermott resolved these matters to his satisfaction with disheartening speed. He grinned, showing for the second time a glimpse of small, pearly teeth.

“Did you get my messages?” he asked playfully.

The peace that had enveloped Gurney was fading. He knew that answering the question the wrong way would create a major problem. So would not answering it. He hoped that Dermott was referring to the only two things resembling “messages” that had been found at The Laurels.

“You mean your little quote from The Shining?”

“That’s one,” said Dermott.

“Obviously, signing in as Mr. and Mrs. Scylla.” Gurney sounded bored.

“That’s two. But the third was the best, don’t you think?”

“I thought the third was stupid,” said Gurney, desperately stalling, racing back through his recollections of the eccentric little inn and its half owner, Bruce Wellstone.

His comment produced a quick flash of anger in Dermott, followed by a kind of caginess. “I wonder if you really know what I’m talking about, Detective.”

Gurney suppressed his urge to protest. He’d discovered that often the best bluff was silence. And it was easier to think when you weren’t talking.

The only peculiar thing he could remember Wellstone saying was something about birds, or bird-watching, and that something about it didn’t make sense at that time of year. What the hell kind of birds were they? And what was it about the number? Something about the number of birds…

Dermott was getting restless. It was time for another wild swing.

“The birds,” said Gurney slyly. At least he hoped he sounded sly and not inane. Something in Dermott’s eyes told him the wild swing may have connected. But how? And what now? What was it about the birds that mattered? What was the message? The wrong time of year for what? Rose-breasted grosbeaks! That’s what they were! But so what? What did rose-breasted grosbeaks have to do with anything?

He decided to push the bluff and see where it led. “Rose-breasted grosbeaks,” he said with an enigmatic wink.

Dermott tried to hide a flicker of surprise under a patronizing smile. Gurney wished to God he knew what it was all about, wished he knew what he was pretending to know. What the hell was the number Wellstone had mentioned? He had no idea what to say next, how to parry a direct question should it come. None came.

“I was right about you,” said Dermott smugly. “From our first phone call, I knew you were smarter than most members of your tribe of baboons.”

He paused, nodding to himself with apparent pleasure.

“That’s good,” he said. “An intelligent ape. You’ll be able to appreciate what you’re about to see. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll follow your advice. After all, this is a very special night-a perfect night for magic slippers.” As he was speaking, he was backing up toward a chest of drawers against the wall on the far side of the room. Without taking his eyes off Gurney, he opened the top drawer of the chest and removed, with conspicuous care, a pair of shoes. The style reminded Gurney of the open-toe, medium-heel dress shoes his mother used to wear to church-except that these shoes were made of ruby-colored glass, glass that glistened like translucent blood in the subdued light.

Dermott nudged the drawer shut with his elbow and returned to the bed with the shoes in one hand and the gun in the other, still leveled at Gurney.

“I appreciate your input, Detective. If you hadn’t mentioned the slippers, I wouldn’t have thought of them. Most men in your position wouldn’t be so helpful.” The unsubtle ridicule in the comment was meant to convey, Gurney assumed, the message that Dermott was so completely in control that he could easily turn to his own advantage anything anyone else might say or do. He leaned over the bed and removed the old woman’s worn corduroy bedroom slippers and replaced them with the glowing red ones. Her feet were small, and the shoes slipped on smoothly.

“Is Dickie Duck coming to bed?” the old woman asked, like a child reciting her favorite part of a fairy tale.

“He’ll kill the snake and cut off its head. / Then Dickie Duck will come to bed,” he replied in a singsong voice.

“Where’s my little Dickie been?”

“Killing the cock to save the hen.”

“Why does Dickie do what Dickie does?”

“For blood that’s as red / as a painted rose. / So every man knows / he reaps what he sows.”

Dermott looked at the old woman expectantly, as though the ritual exchange was not finished. He leaned toward her, prompting her in a loud whisper, “What will Dickie do tonight?”

“What will Dickie do tonight?” she asked in the same whisper.

“He’ll call the crows till the crows are all dead. / Then Dickie Duck will come to bed.”

She moved her fingertips dreamily over her Goldilocks wig, as though she imagined she were arranging it in some ethereal style. The smile on her face reminded Gurney of a junkie’s rush.

Dermott was watching her, too. His gaze was revoltingly unfilial, the tip of his tongue moving back and forth between his lips like a small, slithering parasite. Then he blinked and looked around the room.

“I think we’re ready to begin,” he said brightly. He got up on the bed and crawled over the old woman’s legs to the opposite side-taking the goose from the hope chest as he did so. He settled himself against the pillows beside her and placed the goose in his lap. “Almost ready now.” The cheeriness of this assurance would have been appropriate for someone placing a candle on a birthday cake. What he was doing, however, was inserting his revolver, finger still on the trigger, into a deep pocket cut into the back of the goose.

Jesus bloody Christ, thought Gurney. Is that the way he shot Mark Mellery? Is that how the residue of down stuffing ended up in the neck wound and in the blood on the ground? Is that possible-that at the moment of his death Mellery was staring at a fucking goose? The picture was so grotesque he had to choke back a crazed urge to laugh. Or was it a spasm of terror? Whatever the emotion was, it was sudden and powerful. He’d faced his share of lunatics-sadists, sex murderers of every persuasion, sociopaths with ice picks, even cannibals-but never before had he been forced to devise a solution to such a complex nightmare while just a finger twitch away from a bullet in the brain.

“Lieutenant Nardo, please stand. It’s time for your entrance.” Dermott’s tone was ominous, theatrical, ironic.

In a whisper so low that Gurney wasn’t sure at first whether he was hearing it or imagining it, the old woman began muttering, “Dickie-Dickie-Dickie Duck. Dickie-Dickie-Dickie Duck. Dickie-Dickie-Dickie Duck.” It was more like a clock ticking than a human voice.

Gurney watched as Nardo unclasped his hands, stretching and clenching his fingers. He rose from his position on the floor at the foot of the bed with the resilient spring of a man in very good condition. His hard glance shifted from the odd couple on the bed to Gurney and back again. If anything in that scene surprised him, his stony face didn’t show it. The only obvious thing, from the way he eyed the goose and Dermott’s arm behind it, was that he’d figured out where the gun was.

In response, Dermott began stroking the back of the goose with his free hand. “One last question, Lieutenant, regarding your intentions before we begin. Do you plan to do as I say?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll take that answer at face value. I’m going to give you a series of directions. You must follow them precisely. Is that clear?”

“Yeah.”

“If I were a less trusting man, I might question your seriousness. I do hope you appreciate the situation. Let me put all my cards on the table to prevent any lingering misunderstanding. I’ve decided to kill you. That issue is no longer open for discussion. The only question that remains is when I will kill you. That piece of the equation is up to you. Do you follow me so far?”

“You kill me. But I decide when.” Nardo spoke with a kind of bored contempt that seemed to amuse Dermott.

“That’s right, Lieutenant. You decide when. But only up to a point, of course-because, ultimately, everything will come to an appropriate end. Until then you can remain alive by saying what I tell you to say and doing what I tell you to do. Still following me?”

“Yeah.”

“Please remember that at any point you have the option of dying instantly through the simple expedient of not following my instructions. Compliance will add precious moments to your life. Resistance will subtract them. What could be simpler?”

Nardo stared at him unblinkingly.

Gurney slid his feet a few inches back toward the legs of his chair to put himself in the best possible position to propel himself at the bed, expecting the emotional dynamic between the two men to explode within seconds.

Dermott stopped stroking the goose. “Please put your feet back where they were,” he said without taking his eyes off Nardo. Gurney did as he was told, with a new respect for Dermott’s peripheral vision. “If you move again, I’ll kill you both without saying another word. Now, Lieutenant,” Dermott continued placidly, “listen carefully to your assignment. You are an actor in a play. Your name is Jim. The play is about Jim and his wife and her son. The play is short and simple, but it has a powerful ending.”

“I have to pee,” said the woman in a pixilated voice, her fingertips again drifting back over her blond curls.

“It’s all right, dear,” he answered without looking at her. “Everything will be all right. Everything will be the way it always should have been.” Dermott adjusted the position of the goose slightly in his lap, refining, Gurney supposed, the aim of the revolver inside it at Nardo. “All set?”

If Nardo’s steady gaze were poison, Dermott would have been dead three times over. Instead there was only a flicker around his mouth, which might have been a smile or a twitch or a touch of excitement.

“I’ll take your silence for a yes this time. But a friendly word of warning. Any further ambiguity in your responses will result in the immediate termination of the play and your life. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. The curtain rises. The play begins. The time of year is late autumn. The time of day is late evening, already dark. It’s rather bleak, some snow on the ground outside, some ice. In fact, the night is very much like tonight. It’s your day off. You’ve spent the day in a local bar, drinking all day, with your drunken friends. That’s the way you spend all your days off. You arrive home as the play begins. You stagger into your wife’s bedroom. Your face is red and angry. Your eyes are dull and stupid. You have a bottle of whiskey in your hand.” Dermott pointed to the Four Roses on the hope chest. “You can use that bottle there. Pick it up now.”

Nardo stepped forward and picked it up. Dermott nodded approvingly. “You instinctively evaluate it as a potential weapon. That’s very good, very appropriate. You have a natural sympathy with the mind-set of your character. Now, with that bottle in your hand, you stand, swaying from side to side, at the foot of your wife’s bed. You glare with a stupid rage at her and her little boy and his little stuffed goose in the bed. You bare your teeth like a stupid rabid dog.” Dermott paused and studied Nardo’s face. “Let me see you bare your teeth.”

Nardo’s lips tightened and parted. Gurney could see that there was nothing artificial about the rage in that expression.

“That’s right!” enthused Dermott. “Perfect! You have a real talent for this. Now you stand there with bloodshot eyes, with spittle on your lips, and you shout at your wife in the bed, ‘What the fuck is he doing in here?’ You point at me. My mother says, ‘Calm down, Jim, he’s been showing me and Dickie Duck his little storybook.’ You say, ‘I don’t see any fucking book.’ My mother tells you, ‘Look, it’s right there on the bedside table.’ But you have a filthy mind, and it shows in your filthy face. Your filthy thoughts are oozing like the oily sweat through your stinking skin. My mother tells you that you’re drunk and you should go to sleep in the other room. But you start taking your clothes off. I scream at you to get out. But you take off all your clothes, and you stand there naked, leering at us. You make me feel like I’m going to vomit. My mother screams at you, screams at you not to be so disgusting, to get out of the room. You say, ‘Who the fuck are you calling disgusting, you slut bitch?’ Then you smash the whiskey bottle on the footboard, and you jump up on the bed like a naked ape with the broken bottle in your hand. The nauseating stink of whiskey is all over the room. Your body stinks. You call my mother a slut. You-”

“What’s her name?” interrupted Nardo.

Dermott blinked twice. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Sure it does.”

“I said it doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

Dermott seemed taken aback by the question, if only a little. “It doesn’t matter what her name is because you never use her name. You call her things, ugly things, but you never use her name. You never show her any respect. Maybe it’s so long since you’ve used her name you don’t even know what it is anymore.”

“But you know her name, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. She’s my mother. Of course I know my mother’s name.”

“So what is it?”

“It doesn’t matter to you. You don’t care.”

“Still, I’d like to know what it is.”

“I don’t want her name in your filthy brain.”

“If I’m going to pretend to be her husband, I have to know her name.”

“You have to know what I want you to know.”

“I can’t do this if I don’t know who that woman is. I don’t care what you say-it makes absolutely no goddamn sense for me not to know my own wife’s name.”

It wasn’t clear to Gurney where Nardo was going with this.

Had he finally realized that he was being directed to reenact the drunken assault by Jimmy Spinks on Felicity Spinks that had occurred twenty-four years ago in this same house? Had it dawned on him that this Gregory Dermott who a year earlier had purchased this house might very well be Jimmy and Felicity’s child-the eight-year-old Spinks boy whom social services had taken into their care in the aftermath of that family disaster? Had it occurred to him that the old woman in the bed with the scar on her throat was almost certainly Felicity Spinks-reclaimed by her grown son from whatever long-term nursing facility the trauma had consigned her to?

Was Nardo hoping to change the homicidal dynamic of the little “play” in progress by revealing what it was all about? Was he trying to create a psychological distraction, in the hope of finding some way out? Or was he just fumbling around in the dark-trying to delay as long as he could, however he could, whatever Dermott had in mind?

Of course, there was another possibility. What Nardo was doing, and how Dermott was reacting to it, might not make any rational sense at all. It could be the sort of ridiculously trivial sidetrack issue over which small boys beat each other with plastic shovels in sandboxes and angry men beat each other to death in bar fights. With a sinking heart, Gurney suspected that this last guess was as good as any.

“Whether you think it makes sense is of no importance,” said Dermott, again adjusting by a quarter inch the angle of the goose, his gaze fixed on Nardo’s throat. “Nothing you think is of any importance. It’s time for you to take your clothes off.”

“First tell me her name.”

“It’s time for you to take your clothes off and smash the bottle and jump up on the bed like a naked ape. Like a stupid, drooling, hideous monster.”

“What’s her name?”

“It’s time.”

Gurney saw a slight movement in the muscle in Dermott’s forearm-meaning that his finger was tightening on the trigger.

“Just tell me her name.”

Any doubt Gurney had about what was happening was now gone. Nardo had drawn his line in the sand, and all his manhood-indeed his life-was invested in making his adversary answer his question. Dermott, likewise, was invested 100 percent in maintaining control. Gurney wondered whether Nardo had any idea how important this matter of control was to the man he was trying to face down. According to Rebecca Holdenfield-in fact, according to everyone who knew anything about serial killers-control was the goal worth any price, any risk. Absolute control-with the feeling of omniscience and omnipotence it engendered-was the ultimate euphoria. To threaten that goal head-on without a gun in your hand was suicidal.

It seemed that blindness to that fact had put Nardo once again an inch from death, and this time Gurney couldn’t save him by shouting him into submission. That tactic wouldn’t work a second time.

Murder was moving now like a racing storm cloud into Dermott’s eyes. Gurney had never felt so helpless. He couldn’t think of any way to stop that finger on the trigger.

It was then he heard the voice, clean and cool as pure silver. It was, without a doubt, Madeleine’s voice, saying something she’d said to him years ago on an occasion when he felt stymied by a seemingly hopeless case.

“There’s only one way out of a dead end.”

Of course, he thought. How absurdly obvious. Just walk in the opposite direction.

Stopping a man who has an overwhelming need to be in total control-who has an overwhelming need to kill to achieve that control-required that you do exactly the opposite of what all your instincts told you. And with Madeleine’s sentence clear as spring-water in his mind, he saw what he needed to do. It was outrageous, patently irresponsible, and legally indefensible if it didn’t work. But he knew it would.

“Now! Now, Gregory!” he hissed. “Shoot him!”

There was a shared moment of incomprehension as both men seemed to struggle to absorb what they had just heard, as they might struggle to understand a thunderclap on a cloudless day. Dermott’s deadly focus on Nardo wavered, and the direction of the gun-in-the-goose moved a little toward Gurney in the chair against the wall.

Dermott’s mouth stretched sideways in his morbid imitation of a grin. “I beg your pardon?” In the affected nonchalance, Gurney sensed a tremor of unease.

“You heard me, Gregory,” he said. “I told you to shoot him.”

“You… told… me?”

Gurney sighed with elaborate impatience. “You’re wasting my time.”

“Wasting…? What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The gun-in-the-goose moved farther in Gurney’s direction. The nonchalance was gone.

Nardo’s eyes were widening. It was hard for Gurney to gauge the mix of emotions behind the amazement. As though it were Nardo who’d demanded to know what was going on, Gurney turned toward him and said, as offhandedly as he could manage, “Gregory likes to kill people who remind him of his father.” There was a stifled sound from Dermott’s throat, like the beginning of a word or cry that got stuck there. Gurney remained determinedly focused on Nardo and went on in the same bland tone. “Problem is, he needs a little nudge from time to time. Gets bogged down in the process. And, unfortunately, he makes mistakes. He’s not as smart as he thinks. Oh, my goodness!” He paused and smiled speculatively at Dermott, whose jaw muscles were now visible. “That has possibilities, doesn’t it? Little Gregory Spinks-not as smart as he thinks. How about it, Gregory? Do you think that could be a new poem?” He almost winked at the rattled murderer but decided that might be a step too far.

Dermott stared at him with hatred, confusion, and something else. What Gurney hoped it was was a swirl of questions that a control freak would be compelled to pursue before killing the only man capable of answering them. Dermott’s next word, with its strained intonation, gave him hope.

“Mistakes?”

Gurney nodded ruefully. “Quite a few, I’m afraid.”

“You’re a liar, Detective. I don’t make mistakes.”

“No? What do you call them, then, if you don’t call them mistakes? Little Dickie Duck’s fuckups?”

Even as he said it, he wondered whether he had now taken that fatal step. If so, depending on where the bullet struck him, he might never know. In any event, there was no safe retreat route left. A wave of the tiniest vibrations unsettled the corners of Dermott’s mouth. Reclining incongruously on that bed, he seemed to be gazing at Gurney from a perch in hell.

Gurney actually knew of only one mistake Dermott had made-a mistake involving the Kartch check, which had finally gotten through to him only a quarter of an hour earlier when he’d looked at the framed copy of that check on the lamp table. But suppose he were to claim that he’d recognized the mistake and its significance from the beginning. What effect would that have on the man who was so desperate to believe he was in complete control?

Again Madeleine’s maxim came to mind, but in reverse. If you can’t back up, then full speed ahead. He turned toward Nardo, as if the serial killer in the room could safely be ignored.

“One of his silliest fuckups was when he gave me the names of the men who’d sent checks to him. One of the names was Richard Kartch. The thing is, Kartch sent the check in a plain envelope with no cover note. The only identification was the name printed on the check itself. The name on the check was R. Kartch, and that’s also the way it was signed. The R could have stood for Robert, Ralph, Randolph, Rupert, or a dozen other names. But Gregory knew it stood for Richard-yet at the same time he claimed no other familiarity or contact with the sender than the name and address on the check itself-which I saw in the mail at Kartch’s house in Sotherton. So I knew right away from the discrepancy that he was lying. And the reason was obvious.”

This was too much for Nardo. “You knew? Then why the hell didn’t you tell us so we could pick him up?”

“Because I knew what he was doing and why he was doing it, and I had no interest in stopping him.”

Nardo looked like he’d stepped into an alternate universe where the flies were swatting the people.

A sharp clicking noise drew Gurney’s attention back to the bed. The old woman was tapping her red glass shoes together like Dorothy leaving Oz on her way home to Kansas. The gun-in-the-goose on Dermott’s lap was now pointed directly at Gurney. Dermott was making an effort-at least Gurney hoped it required an effort-to appear unfazed by the Kartch revelation. He articulated his words with a peculiar precision.

“Whatever game you’re playing, Detective, I’m the one who’s going to end it.”

Gurney, with all the undercover acting experience he could bring to the moment, tried to speak with the confidence of a man who had a concealed Uzi zeroed in on his enemy’s chest. “Before you make a threat,” he said softly, “be sure you understand the situation.”

“Situation? I fire, you die. I fire again, he dies. The baboons come through the door, they die. That’s the situation.”

Gurney closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, uttering a deep sigh. “Do you have any idea… any idea at all…?” he began, then shook his head wearily. “No. No, of course you don’t. How could you?”

“Any idea of what, Detective?” Dermott used the title with exaggerated sarcasm.

Gurney laughed. It was an unhinged sort of laugh, meant to raise new questions in Dermott’s mind, but actually energized by a rising tide of emotional chaos in himself.

“Guess how many men I’ve killed,” he whispered, glaring at Dermott with a wild intensity-praying that the man wouldn’t recognize the time-consuming purpose of his desperate ad-libbing, praying that the Wycherly cops would soon take note that Nardo was missing. Why the hell hadn’t they noticed already? Or had they? The glass shoes continued to click.

“Stupid cops kill people all the time,” said Dermott. “I couldn’t care less.”

“I don’t mean just any men. I mean men like Jimmy Spinks. Guess how many men like him I’ve killed.”

Dermott blinked. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about killing drunks. Ridding the world of alcoholic animals, exterminating the scum of the earth.”

Once again there was an almost imperceptible vibration around Dermott’s mouth. He had the man’s attention, no doubt about that. Now what? What else but ride the wave. There was no other transportation in sight. He composed his words as he spoke them.

“Late one night in the Port Authority bus terminal, when I was a rookie cop, I was told to roust some derelicts from the rear entryway. One wouldn’t leave. I could smell the stink of the whiskey from ten feet off. I told him again to get out of the building, but instead of going out the door, he started coming toward me. He pulled a kitchen knife out of his pocket-a little knife with a serrated blade like you’d use to slice an orange. He brandished the knife in a threatening manner and ignored my order to drop it. Two witnesses who saw the confrontation from the escalator swore that I shot him in self-defense.” He paused and smiled. “But that’s not true. If I’d wanted to, I could have subdued him without even breathing hard. Instead I shot him in the face and blew his brains out the back of his head. You know why I did that, Gregory?”

“Dickie-Dickie-Dickie Duck,” said the old woman in a rhythm quicker than the clicking of her shoes. Dermott’s mouth opened a fraction of an inch, but he said nothing.

“I did it because he looked like my father,” said Gurney with an angrily rising voice, “looked like my father looked the night he smashed a teapot on my mother’s head-a fucking stupid teapot with a fucking stupid clown face on it.”

“Your father wasn’t much of a father,” said Dermott coldly. “But then again, Detective, neither were you.”

The leering accusation removed any doubt in Gurney’s mind about the extent of Dermott’s knowledge. At that moment he seriously considered the option of absorbing a bullet to get his hands on Dermott’s throat.

The leer intensified. Perhaps Dermott sensed Gurney’s discomfort. “A good father should protect his four-year-old son, not let him get run over, not let the driver get away.”

“You piece of shit,” muttered Gurney.

Dermott giggled, seemingly crazed with delight. “Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar-and I thought you were a fellow poet. I hoped we could keep trading verses. I had a little ditty all ready for our next exchange. Tell me what you think of it. ‘A hit-and-run without a trace, / the star detective fell on his face. / What did the little boy’s mother say / when you came home alone that day?’”

An eerie animal sound rose from Gurney’s chest, a strangled eruption of rage. Dermott was transfixed.

Nardo had apparently been waiting for the moment of maximum distraction. His muscular right arm accelerated up and around in a mighty circular overhand motion, hurling the unopened Four Roses bottle with tremendous force at Dermott’s head. As Dermott sensed the movement and began to swivel the gun-in-the-goose toward Nardo, Gurney launched himself in a headlong diving leap at the bed, landing chest-first on the goose, just as the thick glass base of the full whiskey bottle smashed squarely into Dermott’s temple. The revolver discharged beneath Gurney, filling the air around him with an atomized explosion of down stuffing. The bullet passed under Gurney in the direction of the wall where he’d been sitting, shattering the table lamp that had provided the room’s sole illumination. In the darkness he could hear Nardo breathing hard through clenched teeth. The old woman started to make a faint wailing sound, a sound with a quavering pitch, a sound like a half-remembered lullaby. Then there was the sound of a terrific impact, and the heavy metal door of the room flew open, swung around, and hit the wall-followed immediately by the huge hurtling figure of a man and a smaller figure behind him.

“Freeze!” shouted the giant.

Chapter 52

The cavalry had finally arrived-a little late, but that was a good thing. Considering Dermott’s history of precise marksmanship and his eagerness to pile up the crows, it was possible that not only the cavalry but Nardo and Gurney would have ended up with bullets in their throats. And then, when the gunshots brought the whole department swarming into the house and Dermott opened the valve, sending the pressurized chlorine and ammonia through the sprinkler system…

As it was, the only major casualty other than the lamp and the doorframe was Dermott himself. The bottle, propelled by all of Nardo’s combative rage, had struck him with sufficient force to produce what looked like a possible coma. In a related minor injury, a curved shard of glass had splintered from the bottle on impact, embedding itself in Gurney’s head at the hairline.

“We heard a shot. What the fuck’s going on here?” snarled the hulking man, peering around the mostly dark room.

“Everything’s under control, Tommy,” said Nardo, his jagged voice suggesting he wasn’t yet part of the everything. In the dim light coming in from the other part of the basement, Gurney recognized the smaller officer who’d rushed in on Big Tommy’s heels as the crew-cut Pat with the acetylene-blue eyes. Holding a heavy nine-millimeter pistol at the ready and keeping a close watch on the ugly scene in the bed, she edged around to the far corner of the room and switched on the lamp that stood next to the wing chair where the old woman had been sitting.

“You mind if I get up?” said Gurney, who was still lying across the goose on Dermott’s lap.

Big Tommy glanced at Nardo.

“Sure,” said Nardo, his teeth still partly clenched. “Let him get up.”

As he rose carefully from the bed, blood began flowing freely down his face-the sight of which was probably what restrained Nardo from immediately assaulting the man who had minutes earlier encouraged a demented serial killer to shoot him.

“Jesus,” said Big Tommy, staring at the blood.

An overload of adrenaline had kept Gurney unaware of the wound. He touched his face and found it surprisingly wet; then he examined his hand and found it surprisingly red.

Acetylene Pat looked at Gurney’s face without emotion. “You want an ambulance here?” she said to Nardo.

“Yeah. Sure. Make the call,” he said without conviction.

“For them, too?” she asked with a quick nod toward the odd couple in the bed. The red glass shoes caught her eye. She squinted as if trying to banish an optical illusion.

After a long pause, he muttered a disgusted, “Yeah.”

“You want the cars called in?” she asked, frowning at the shoes that seemed to be disconcertingly real after all.

“What?” he said after another pause. He was staring at the remains of the smashed lamp and the bullet hole in the drywall behind it.

“We’ve got cars on patrol and guys out there on door-to-door inquiries. You want them called in?”

The decision seemed harder for him than it should have been. Finally he said, “Yeah, call them in.”

“Right,” she said, and strode out of the room.

Big Tommy was observing with evident distaste the damage to Dermott’s temple. The Four Roses bottle had come to rest upside down on the pillow between Dermott and the old woman, whose curly blond wig had shifted in a way that made the top of her head look like it had been unscrewed a quarter of a turn.

As Gurney gazed at the bottle’s floral label, the answer came to him that had eluded him earlier. He remembered what Bruce Wellstone had said. He said that Dermott (aka Mr. Scylla) had claimed he’d seen four rose-breasted grosbeaks and that he had made a particular point of the number four. The “translation” of four rose-breasted grosbeaks struck Gurney almost as quickly as the words. Four Roses! Like signing the register “Mr. and Mrs. Scylla,” the message was just another little dance step advertising his cleverness-Gregory Dermott showing how easily he could toy with the dumb evil cops. Catch me if you can.

A minute later Pat returned, grimly efficient. “Ambulance on the way. Cars recalled. Door-to-doors canceled.” She regarded the bed coldly. The old woman was making sporadic sounds somewhere between keening and humming. Dermott was morbidly still and pale. “You sure he’s alive?” she asked without evident concern.

“I have no idea,” said Nardo. “Maybe you ought to check.”

She pursed her lips as she walked over and probed for a neck pulse.

“Uh-huh, he’s alive. What’s the matter with her?”

“That’s Jimmy Spinks’s wife. You ever hear about Jimmy Spinks?”

She shook her head. “Who’s Jimmy Spinks?”

He considered this for a while. “Forget it.”

She shrugged-as if forgetting things like that were a normal part of the job.

Nardo took a few slow, deep breaths. “I need you and Tommy upstairs to keep the place secured. Now that we know this is the little fucker who killed everyone, the forensics team will have to come back and run the house through a sieve.”

She and Tommy exchanged uneasy looks but left the room with no argument. As Tommy passed Gurney, he said as casually as if he were commenting on a speck of dandruff, “You got a piece of glass sticking out of your head.”

Nardo waited until their footsteps had climbed the stairs and the basement door at the top of the stairs was closed before speaking.

“Back away from the bed.” His voice was a bit jerky.

Gurney knew he was really being told to back away from the weapons-Dermott’s revolver in the now-blasted stuffing of the goose and Nardo’s ankle pistol in Dermott’s pocket and the formidable whiskey bottle on the pillow-but he complied without objection.

“Okay,” said Nardo, struggling, it seemed, to control himself. “I’m giving you a chance to explain.”

“You mind if I sit down?”

“I don’t care if you stand on your fucking head. Talk! Now!”

Gurney sat in the chair by the splintered lamp. “He was about to shoot you. You were two seconds away from a bullet in the throat, or the head, or the heart. There was only one way to stop him.”

“You didn’t tell him to stop. You told him to shoot me.” Nardo’s fists were clenched so tightly that Gurney could see the white spots on the knuckles.

“But he didn’t, did he?”

“But you told him to.”

“Because it was the only way to stop him.”

“The only way to stop… Are you out of your fucking mind?” Nardo was glaring like a killer dog waiting to be loosed.

“The fact is, you’re alive.”

“You’re saying I’m alive because you told him to kill me? What kind of lunatic shit is that?”

“Serial murder is about control. Total control. For crazy Gregory that meant controlling not only the present and the future but also the past. The scene he wanted you to act out was the tragedy that occurred in this house twenty-four years ago-with one crucial difference. Back then little Gregory wasn’t able to stop his father from cutting his mother’s throat. She never really recovered, and neither did he. The grown-up Gregory wanted to rewind the tape and start it over so he could change it. He wanted you to do everything his father did up to the point of raising the bottle. Then he was going to kill you-to get rid of the horrible drunk, to save his mother. That’s what all the other murders were about-attempts to control and kill Jimmy Spinks by controlling and killing other drunks.”

“Gary Sissek wasn’t a drunk.”

“Maybe not. But Gary Sissek was on the force when Jimmy Spinks was, and I bet Gregory recognized him as a friend of his father. Maybe even a casual drinking buddy. And the fact that you were also on the force back then probably in Gregory’s mind made you a perfect stand-in-the perfect way for him to reach back and change history.”

“But you told him to shoot me!” Nardo’s tone was still argumentative, but, to Gurney’s relief, the conviction behind it was weakening.

“I told him to shoot you because the only way to stop a control-freak killer like that when your only weapon is words is to say something that makes him doubt he’s really in control. Part of the control fantasy is that he’s making all the decisions-that he’s the all-powerful one, and no one has power over him. The biggest curveball you can throw at a mind like that is the possibility that he’s doing exactly what you want him to do. Oppose him directly and he’ll kill you. Beg for your life and he’ll kill you. But tell him you want him to do exactly what he’s about to do and it blows the circuit.”

Nardo looked like he was trying hard to find a flaw in the story. “You sounded very… authentic. There was hatred in your voice, like you really wanted me dead.”

“If I hadn’t been convincing, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Nardo switched gears. “What about the shooting in Port Authority?”

“What about it?”

“You shot some bum because he reminded you of your drunk father?”

Gurney smiled.

“What’s funny?”

“Two things. First: I never worked anywhere near Port Authority. Second: In twenty-five years on the job, I never fired my gun, not even once.”

“So that was all bullshit?”

“My father drank too much. It was… a difficult thing. Even when he was there, he wasn’t there. But shooting a stranger wouldn’t have helped much.”

“So what was the point of talking all that shit?”

“The point? The point is what happened.”

“The hell does that mean?”

“Christ, Lieutenant, I was just trying to hold Dermott’s attention long enough to give you a chance to do something with that two-pound bottle in your hand.”

Nardo stared at him a little blankly, as though all this information wasn’t quite fitting into the available spaces in his brain.

“That stuff about the kid being hit by the car… that was all bullshit, too?”

“No. That was true. His name was Danny.” Gurney’s voice became hoarse.

“They never got the driver?”

Gurney shook his head.

“No leads?”

“One witness said that the car that hit my boy, a red BMW, had been parked in front of a bar down the street all afternoon and that the guy who came out of the bar and got into it was obviously drunk.”

Nardo thought about this for a while. “Nobody in the bar could ID him?”

“Claimed they never saw him before.”

“How long ago this happen?”

“Fourteen years and eight months.”

They were quiet for some minutes; then Gurney resumed speaking in a low, hesitant voice. “I was taking him to the playground in the park. There was a pigeon walking in front of him on the sidewalk, and Danny was following it. I was only half there. My mind was on a murder case. The pigeon walked off the sidewalk into the street, and Danny followed it. By the time I saw what was happening, it was too late. It was over.”

“You have other kids?”

Gurney hesitated. “Not with Danny’s mother.”

Then he closed his eyes, and neither man said anything for a long time. Nardo eventually broke the silence.

“So there’s no doubt Dermott’s the guy who killed your friend?”

“No doubt,” said Gurney. He was struck by the exhaustion in both of their voices.

“And the others, too?”

“Looks that way.”

“Why now?”

“Hmm?”

“Why wait so long?”

“Opportunity. Inspiration. Serendipity. My guess is that he found himself designing a security system for a big medical-insurance database. It may have dawned on him that he could write a program to extract all the names of men who’d been treated for alcoholism. That would be the starting point. I suspect he became obsessed with the possibilities, eventually came up with his ingenious scheme for trolling through the list to find men scared and vulnerable enough to send him those checks. Men he could torture with his vicious little poems. Somewhere along the line, he got his mother out of the nursing home where the state had put her after the attack left her incapacitated.”

“Where was he all those years before he showed up here?”

“As a kid, either in a state facility or in foster care. Could’ve been a nasty path. Got involved with computer software at some point, I assume through games, got good at it. Very good-eventually got a degree from MIT.”

“And sometime along the way he changed his name?”

“Probably when he turned eighteen. I bet he couldn’t stand having his father’s name. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dermott was his mother’s maiden name.”

Nardo’s lip curled. “Would’ve been nice if you’d thought to run him through the state’s name-change database at the start of this freaking mess.”

“Realistically, there was no reason to do that. And even if we did, the fact that Dermott’s childhood name was Spinks wouldn’t have meant a damn thing to anyone involved in the Mellery case.”

Nardo looked like he was trying to store all this away for reflection when his head was clearer. “Why did the crazy son of a bitch come back to Wycherly at all?”

“Because it was the scene of the attack on his mother twenty-four years ago? Maybe because the weird notion of rewriting the past was taking hold of him? Maybe he heard the old house was for sale and couldn’t resist it? Maybe it offered an opportunity for getting even not only with drunks but with the Wycherly police department? Unless he chooses to tell us the whole story, we’ll never know for sure. I don’t think Felicity is likely to be much help.”

“Not much,” agreed Nardo, but he had something else on his mind. He looked troubled.

“What is it?” asked Gurney.

“What? Nothing. Nothing, really. Just wondering… how much it really bothered you that someone was killing drunks.”

He didn’t know what to say. The proper answer might have something to do with not sitting in judgment on the worthiness of the victim. The cynical answer might be that he cared more about the challenge of the game than the moral equation, more about the game than the people. Either way, he had no appetite for discussing the issue with Nardo. But he felt he ought to say something.

“If what you’re asking me is whether I was enjoying the pleasures of vicarious vengeance on the drunk driver who killed my son, the answer is no.”

“You sure about that?”

“I’m sure.”

Nardo eyed him skeptically, then shrugged. Gurney’s reply didn’t seem to convince him, but neither did he seem inclined to pursue the matter.

The explosive lieutenant had apparently been defused. The rest of the evening was occupied with the triage process of sorting through the immediate priorities and routine details of concluding a major murder investigation.

Gurney was taken to Wycherly General Hospital along with Felicity Spinks (née Dermott) and Gregory Dermott (né Spinks). While Dermott’s incoherent mother, with her ruby glass slippers still on her feet, was examined by a blandly upbeat PA, Dermott was rushed off, still unconscious, to radiology.

Meanwhile the gash in Gurney’s head was being cleaned, stitched, and bandaged by a nurse whose manner seemed unusually intimate-an impression fostered in part by the breathiness of her voice and by how close to him she stood as she worked gently on his wound. It was an impression of immediate availability that he found incongruously exciting under the circumstances. Although that was clearly a perilous path, not to mention insane, not to mention pathetic, he did decide to take advantage of her friendliness in another way. He gave her his cell number and asked her to call him directly if there was any significant change in Dermott’s condition. He didn’t want to be out of the loop, and he didn’t trust Nardo to keep him in it. She agreed with a smile-after which he was driven by a taciturn young Wycherly cop back to Dermott’s house.

En route he called Sheridan Kline’s emergency night line and got a recording. He left a compact message covering the essential points. Then he called home, got his own recording, and left a message for Madeleine, referring to the same events-minus the bullet, the bottle, the blood, and the stitches. He wondered if she was out somewhere or actually standing there, listening to him leaving the message, unwilling to speak to him. Lacking her uncanny insight into such matters, he had no feeling for the right answer.

By the time they arrived back at Dermott’s house, over an hour had passed and the street was full of Wycherly, county, and state police vehicles. Big Tommy and square-jawed Pat were standing sentry on the porch. Gurney was directed into the small room off the center hallway where he’d had his introductory conversation with Nardo. Nardo was there again, sitting at the same table. Two crime-scene specialists in white coveralls, booties, and latex gloves were just leaving the room on their way to the basement stairs.

Nardo pushed a yellow pad and a cheap pen across the table toward Gurney. If there was any dangerous emotion left in the man, it was well hidden under a thick layer of bureaucratic rigmarole.

“Have a seat. We need a statement. Start at your point of arrival at this site this afternoon, with the reason for your presence. Include all relevant actions by you and direct observations by you of the actions of others. Include a timeline, indicating at which points it is based on specific information and at which points it is estimated. You may conclude the statement at the time you were escorted to the hospital, unless during your treatment at the hospital additional relevant information came to light. Any questions?”

Gurney spent the next forty-five minutes following these directions, with Nardo mostly out of the room, filling four lined pages with small, precise handwriting. There was a copying machine on the table against the far wall of the room, and Gurney used it to make two copies of the signed and dated statement for himself before submitting the original to Nardo.

All the man said was, “We’ll be in touch.” His voice was professionally neutral. He didn’t offer a handshake.

Chapter 53

By the time Gurney had crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge and begun the long Route 17 leg of his journey, the snow was falling more heavily, effectively shrinking the visible world. Every few minutes he’d open his side window for a blast of cold air to keep his mind in the moment.

A few miles from Goshen, he nearly drove off the road. It was his tires vibrating loudly against the ribbed surface of the shoulder that kept him from heading over an embankment.

He tried to think of nothing but the car, the steering wheel, and the road, but it was impossible. He began instead to imagine the potential media coverage to come, beginning with a press conference at which Sheridan Kline would surely congratulate himself for the role of his investigatory staff in making America safer by ending the bloody career of a devilish criminal. The media, in general, got on Gurney’s nerves. Their moronic coverage of crime was a crime in itself. They made a game of it. Of course, in his own way, so did he. He generally viewed a homicide as a puzzle to be solved, a murderer as an opponent to be outmaneuvered. He studied the facts, figured the angles, tripped the snare, and delivered his quarry into the maw of the justice machine. Then on to the next death from unnatural causes that demanded a clever mind to sort out. But sometimes he saw things in quite a different way-when he was overcome by the weariness of the chase, when darkness made all the puzzle pieces look alike or not like puzzle pieces at all, when his harried brain wandered from its geometric grid and followed more primitive paths, giving him glimpses of the true horror of the subject matter in which he’d chosen to immerse himself.

On the one hand, there was the logic of the law, the science of criminology, the processes of adjudication. On the other, there was Jason Strunk, Peter Possum Piggert, Gregory Dermott, pain, murderous rage, death. And between these two worlds there was the sharp, unsettling question-what had one to do with the other?

He opened the side window again and let the hard-blown snow sting the side of his face.

Profound and pointless questions, inner dialogues leading nowhere, were as familiar in his inner landscape as estimating the chances of a Red Sox win might be in another man’s. It was a bad habit, this sort of thinking, and it brought him nothing good. On the occasions when he’d insist on exposing it to Madeleine, it would be met with boredom or impatience.

“What’s really on your mind?” she’d sometimes ask, putting down her knitting and looking him in the eye.

“What do you mean?” he’d ask in reply, dishonestly, knowing exactly what she meant.

“You can’t possibly care about that nonsense. Figure out what’s actually bothering you.”

Figure out what’s actually bothering you.

Easier said than done.

What was bothering him? The vast inadequacies of reason in the face of feral passions? The fact that the justice system is a cage that can no more keep the devil contained than a weather vane can stop the wind? All he knew was that something was there, in the back of his mind, chewing at his other thoughts and feelings like a rat.

When he tried to identify the most corrosive problem amid the day’s chaos, he found himself lost in a sea of unmoored images.

When he tried to clear his mind-to relax and think of nothing-two images would not disappear.

One was the cruel delight in Dermott’s eyes when he recited his hideous rhyme about Danny’s death. The other was the echo of the accusatory fury with which he himself had slandered his own father in the fictional account of the attack on his mother. That was no mere acting. Rising up from somewhere beneath it, saturating it, was a terrible anger. Did its authenticity mean he actually hated his father? Was the rage that exploded in the telling of that ugly tale the suppressed rage of abandonment-the fierce resentment of a child toward a father who did nothing but work and sleep and drink, a father who was forever receding into the distance, forever unreachable? Gurney was startled at how much, and how little, he had in common with Dermott.

Or was it the reverse-a smoke screen covering the guilt he felt for abandoning that chilly, insular man in his old age, for having as little to do with him as possible?

Or was it a displaced self-hatred arising out of his own double failure as a father-his fatal lack of attention toward one son and his active avoidance of the other?

Madeleine would probably say that the answer could be any of the above, all of the above, or none of the above; but whatever it was wasn’t important. What was important was to do what one believed in one’s heart to be the right thing to do, right here and now. And lest he find that concept daunting, she might suggest that he begin by returning Kyle’s phone call. Not that she was particularly fond of Kyle-in fact, she didn’t seem to like him at all, found his Porsche silly, his wife pretentious-but for Madeleine personal chemistry was always secondary to doing the right thing. Gurney marveled at how a person so spontaneous could also lead such a principled life. It was what made her who she was. It was what made her a beacon in the murkiness of his own existence.

The right thing, right now.

Inspired, he pulled over at the broad, scruffy entrance area of an old farm and took out his wallet to get Kyle’s number. (He’d never bothered to enter Kyle’s name in his phone’s voice-recognition system, an omission that gave his conscience a twinge.) Calling him at 3:00 A.M.-midnight in Seattle-seemed a little crazy, but the alternative was worse: He would put it off, and put it off again, and then rationalize not calling at all.

“Dad?”

“Did I wake you?”

“Actually, no. I was up. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I, uh… I just wanted to talk to you, return your call. I wasn’t being very good about that, seemed like you’d been trying to reach me for a long time.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“I know it’s an odd time to call, but don’t worry, I’m fine.”

“Good.”

“I did have a difficult day, but it turned out okay. The reason I didn’t return your calls sooner… I’ve been in the middle of a complicated mess. But that’s no excuse. Was there anything you needed?”

“What kind of mess?”

“What? Oh-usual kind, homicide investigation.”

“I thought you were retired.”

“I was. I mean, I am. But I got involved because I knew one of the victims. Long story. Next time I see you, I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Wow. You did it again!”

“Did what?”

“You caught another mass murderer, right?”

“How’d you know that?”

“Victims. You said victims, plural. How many were there?”

“Five that we know of, plans for twenty more.”

“And you got him. Damn! Mass murderers don’t have a chance against you. You’re like Batman.”

Gurney laughed. He hadn’t done much of that lately. And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d done so in a conversation with Kyle. Come to think of it, this was an unusual conversation in other ways as well-considering that they’d been talking for at least two minutes without Kyle’s mentioning something he’d just bought or was about to buy.

“In this case Batman had a lot of help,” said Gurney. “But that’s not why I called. I wanted to return your calls, find out what was happening with you. Anything new?”

“Not much,” said Kyle drily. “I lost my job. Kate and I broke up. I may change careers, go to law school. What do you think?”

After a second of shocked silence, Gurney laughed even louder. “Jesus Christ!” he said. “What the hell happened?”

“The financial industry collapsed-as you may have heard-along with my job and my marriage and my two condos and my three cars. Funny, though, how quickly you can adjust to unimaginable catastrophe. Anyway, what I’m really wondering about now is whether I should go to law school. That’s what I wanted to ask you. You think I have the right kind of mind for that?”

Gurney suggested that Kyle come up from the city that weekend, and they could talk about the whole situation in as much detail as he wanted for as long as he wanted. Kyle agreed-even seemed happy about it. When the call ended, Gurney sat for a good ten minutes, amazed.

There were other calls he had to make. In the morning he’d call Mark Mellery’s widow and tell her that it was finally over-that Gregory Dermott Spinks was in custody and that the evidence of his guilt was clear, concrete, and overwhelming. She’d probably already have gotten a personal call from Sheridan Kline and maybe from Rodriguez as well. But he’d call her anyway because of his relationship with Mark.

Then there was Sonya Reynolds. According to their arrangement, he owed her at least one more of his special mug-shot portraits. It seemed so unimportant now, such a trivial waste of time. Still, he’d call her and at least talk about it and would end up doing whatever he’d originally agreed to do. But nothing else. Sonya’s attention was pleasing, ego-gratifying, maybe even a little thrilling, but it came with too high a price, too great a danger to things that mattered more.

The 160-mile trip from Wycherly to Walnut Crossing took five hours instead of three because of the snow. By the time Gurney turned off the county highway onto the lane that meandered up the mountain to his farmhouse, he’d fallen into a kind of autopilot numbness. The window, open a crack for the last hour, had kept enough of a chill on his face and oxygen in his lungs to make driving possible. As he reached the gently sloping pasture that separated the big barn from the house, he noted that the snowflakes that had earlier been racing horizontally across the roads were now floating straight down. He drove slowly up through the pasture, turning eastward at the house before stopping, so that the warmth of the sun, later in the day when the storm had passed, could keep the windshield free of ice. He sat back, almost unable to move.

He was so deeply exhausted that when his phone rang, it took him several seconds to recognize the sound.

“Yes?” His greeting could have been mistaken for a wheeze.

“Is David there?” The female voice sounded familiar.

“This is David.”

“Oh, you sounded… odd. This is Laura. From the hospital. You wanted me to call… if anything happened,” she added with enough of a pause to suggest a hope that his desire for the call might have deeper roots than the reason he’d given.

“That’s right. Thank you for remembering.”

“My pleasure.”

“Did something happen?”

“Mr. Dermott passed away.”

“Excuse me? Could you say that again?”

“Gregory Dermott, the man you wanted to know about-he died ten minutes ago.”

“Cause of death?”

“Nothing official yet, but the MRI they did on admission showed a skull fracture with a massive hemorrhage.”

“Right. I guess it’s not a surprise, with that kind of damage.” It seemed to him that he was feeling something, but the feeling was far away and had no label.

“No, not with that kind of damage.”

The feeling was faint but disturbing, like a small cry in a loud wind.

“No. Well, thank you, Laura. It was good of you to call.”

“Sure. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“You better get some sleep.”

“Yeah. Good night. And thanks again.”

First he switched off the phone, then he switched off the headlights of the car and sank back against the seat, too drained to move. In the sudden absence of the headlights, everything around him was impenetrably dark.

Slowly, as his eyes adjusted, the absolute blackness of the sky and the woods shifted to a deep gray and the snow-covered pasture to a softer gray. Out where he imagined he could just discern the eastern ridge, where the sun would rise in another hour, there seemed to be a faint aura. The snow had stopped falling. The house beside the car was massive, cold, and still.

He tried to see what had happened in the simplest terms. The child in the bedroom with his lonely mother and demented drunk of a father… the screams and the blood and the helplessness… the terrible lifelong physical and mental damage… the homicidal delusions of revenge and redemption. So the little Spinks boy grew into the Dermott madman who murdered at least five men and was on the verge of murdering twenty more. Gregory Spinks whose father had cut his mother’s throat. Gregory Dermott who had his skull fatally smashed in the house where it all began.

Gurney gazed out at the barely visible outline of the hills, knowing there was a second story to consider, a story he needed to understand better-the story of his own life, the father who’d ignored him, the grown son he in turn had ignored, the obsessive career that had brought him so much praise and so little peace, the little boy who’d died when he wasn’t looking, and Madeleine who seemed to understand it all. Madeleine, the light he’d almost lost. The light he’d endangered.

He was too tired now to move even a finger, too far toward sleep to feel a thing, and into his mind came a merciful emptiness. For a while-he wasn’t sure how long-it was as though he didn’t exist, as though everything in him had been reduced to a dimensionless point of consciousness, a pinprick of awareness and nothing more.

He came to suddenly, opening his eyes just as the burning rim of the sun began to glare through the bare trees atop the ridge. He watched the radiant fingernail of light slowly swell into a great white arc. Then he became aware of another presence.

Madeleine, in her bright orange parka-the same one she’d worn the day he’d followed her to the overlook-was standing by the side window of the car looking at him. He wondered how long she’d been there. Tiny ice crystals glimmered on the fleecy edge of her hood. He lowered the window.

At first she said nothing, but in her face he saw-saw, sensed, felt, he didn’t know by what route her emotion reached him-an amalgam of acceptance and love. Acceptance, love, and a deep relief that once again he’d come home alive.

She asked with a touching matter-of-factness whether he’d like some breakfast.

With the vitality of a leaping flame, her orange parka captured the rising sun. He got out of the car and put his arms around her, holding her as though she were life itself.