Think of a Number

Chapter 17

It was precisely 10:00 A.M. when Gurney called the Peony police station to give them his name, address, phone number, and a brief summary of his involvement with the victim. The officer he spoke to, Sergeant Burkholtz, told him that the information would be passed along to the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation team that had taken control of the case.

Assuming he might be contacted within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, he was taken aback when the call came in less than ten minutes. The voice was familiar but not instantly placeable, a problem prolonged by the man’s nameless introduction of himself.

“Mr. Gurney, this is the senior investigator at the Peony crime scene. I understand you have some information for us.”

Gurney hesitated. He was about to ask the officer to identify himself-a matter of normal procedure-when the voice’s timbre suddenly generated a recollection of the face and the name that went with it. The Jack Hardwick he remembered from a sensational case they’d worked on together was a loud, obscene, red-faced man with a prematurely white crew cut and pale malamute eyes. He was a relentless banterer, and half an hour with him could seem like half a day-a day you kept wishing would end. But he was also smart, tough, tireless, and politically incorrect with a vengeance.

“Hello, Jack,” said Gurney, hiding his surprise.

“How did you… Fuck! Someone fucking told you! Who told you?”

“You have a memorable voice, Jack.”

“Memorable voice, my ass! It’s been ten fucking years!”

“Nine.” The Peter Possum Piggert arrest had been one of the biggest in Gurney’s career, the one that secured his promotion to the coveted rank of detective first grade, and the date was one he remembered.

“Who told you?”

“Nobody told me.”

“Bullshit!”

Gurney fell silent, recalling Hardwick’s penchant for having the last word and the inane exchanges that would go on indefinitely until he got it.

After a long three seconds, Hardwick continued in a less combative tone. “Nine goddamn years. And all of a sudden you pop up out of nowhere, right in the middle of what might be the most sensational murder case in New York State since you fished the bottom half of Mrs. Piggert out of the river. That’s some goddamn coincidence.”

“Actually, it was the top half, Jack.”

After a short silence, the phone exploded with the long braying laugh that was a Hardwick trademark.

“Ah!” he cried, out of breath at the end of the bray. “Davey, Davey, Davey, always a stickler for details.”

Gurney cleared his throat. “Can you tell me how Mark Mellery died?”

Hardwick hesitated, caught in the awkward space between relationship and regulation where cops lived much of their lives and got most of their ulcers. He opted for the full truth-not because it was required (Gurney had no official standing in the case and was entitled to no information at all) but because it had a harsh edge. “Someone cut his throat with a broken bottle.”

Gurney grunted as though he’d been punched in the heart. This first reaction, however, was quickly replaced by something more professional. Hardwick’s answer had jarred into position one of the loose puzzle pieces in Gurney’s mind.

“Was it by chance a whiskey bottle?”

“How the hell did you know that?” Hardwick’s tone traveled in seven words from amazement to accusation.

“It’s a long story. Would you like me to drop by?”

“I think you better.”

The sun, which that morning was visible as a cool disk behind a gray wash of winter cloud cover, was now entirely obscured by a lumpy, leaden sky. The shadowless light seemed ominous-the face of a cold universe, uncaring as ice.

Finding this train of thought embarrassingly fanciful, Gurney put it aside as he brought his car to a stop behind the line of police vehicles parked jaggedly on the snow-covered roadside in front of the Mellery Institute for Spiritual Renewal. Most bore the blue and yellow New York State Police insignia, including a tech van from the regional forensics lab. Two were white sheriff’s department cars, and two were green Peony police cruisers. Mellery’s crack about its sounding like the name of a gay cabaret act came to mind, along with the expression he’d had on his face when he said it.

The aster beds, crowded between the cars and the stone wall, had been reduced by the hardening winter weather to tangled masses of brown stalks sporting weird cotton-ball blossoms of snow. He got out of the car and headed for the entrance. A crisply uniformed trooper with a paramilitary scowl stood at the open gate. He was probably a year or two younger, Gurney noted with an odd feeling, than his own son.

“Can I help you, sir?”

The words were polite, but the look wasn’t.

“My name is Gurney. I’m here to see Jack Hardwick.”

The young man blinked twice, once at the sound of each name. His expression suggested that at least one of them was giving him acid reflux.

“Hold on a minute,” he said, removing a walkie-talkie from his belt. “You need to be escorted.”

Three minutes later the escort arrived-a BCI investigator who looked like he was trying to look like Tom Cruise. Despite the winter chill, he wore only a black windbreaker hanging open over a black T-shirt and jeans. Knowing the strictness of the state police dress code, Gurney figured attire that informal would mean he’d been called directly to the scene from an off-duty or undercover activity. The edge of a nine-millimeter Glock in a matte black shoulder holster visible under the windbreaker seemed as much a statement of attitude as a tool of the trade.

“Detective Gurney?”

“Retired,” said Gurney, as though appending an asterisk.

“Yeah?” said Tom Cruise without interest. “That must be nice. Follow me.”

As Gurney followed his leader along the path around the main building toward the residence behind it, he was struck by the difference a three-inch snowfall had made in the appearance of the place. It had created a simplified canvas, removing extraneous details. Walking into the minimalism of the white landscape was like stepping onto a newly created planet-a thought at absurd variance with the messy reality at hand. They rounded the old Georgian house where Mellery had lived and stopped short at the edge of the snow-covered patio where he’d died.

The location of his death was obvious. The snow still bore the impression of a body, and spread out around the head-and-shoulders area of that impression was an enormous bloodstain. Gurney had seen that shocking red and white contrast before. The indelible memory was from Christmas morning of his rookie year on the job. An alcoholic cop whose wife had locked him out of their house shot himself in the heart, sitting on a snowbank.

Gurney forced the old image out of his mind and focused his keen professional gaze on the scene before him.

A prints specialist was kneeling by a row of footprints in the snow next to the main bloodstain, spraying them with something. From where he was standing, Gurney couldn’t see the label on the can, but he guessed it was snow-print wax, a chemical used to stabilize snow prints sufficiently for the application of a dental casting compound. Prints in snow were extremely fragile, but when treated with care they provided an extraordinary level of detail. Although he’d witnessed the process often enough before, he couldn’t help but admire the specialist’s steady hand and intense concentration.

Yellow police tape had been strung in an irregular polygon around most of the patio, including the back door of the house. Corridors of the same tape had been established on opposite sides of the patio-to enclose and preserve the arrival and departure routes of a distinct set of footprints that came from the direction of the large barn beside the house, proceeded to the area of the bloodstain, then headed away from the patio over the snow-blanketed lawn toward the woods.

The back door of the house was open. A member of the crime-scene team was standing in the doorway studying the patio from the perspective of the house. Gurney knew exactly what the man was doing. When you were at a crime scene, you tended to spend a lot of time just trying to absorb the feel of it-often trying to see it as the victim might have seen it in his final moments. There were clear, well-understood rules for locating and collecting evidence-blood, weapons, fingerprints, footprints, hairs, fibers, paint chips, out-of-place mineral or plant material, and so forth-but there was also a fundamental focus problem. Simply put, you needed to remain open-minded about what had happened, exactly where it had happened, and how it had happened, because if you jumped to conclusions too quickly, it would be easy to miss evidence that didn’t fall within your view of the situation. At the same time, you had to begin developing at least a loose hypothesis that would guide your evidence search. You can make painful mistakes by getting too sure too fast about the apparent crime scenario, but you can also waste a lot of precious time and manpower fine-tooth-combing a square mile of ground looking for God-knows-what.

What good detectives did-what Gurney was sure the detective in the doorway was doing-was a kind of unconscious flipping back and forth between inductive and deductive mind-sets. What do I see here, and what sequence of events do these data points suggest? And, if that scenario is valid, what additional evidence should I be seeing and where should I be looking for it?

The key to the process, Gurney had become convinced through much trial and error of his own, was maintaining the right balance between observation and intuition. The greatest danger to the process was ego. A supervising detective who remains undecided about the possible explanation for crime-scene data might waste some time by not focusing his team’s efforts in a particular direction soon enough, but the guy who knows, and aggressively announces, at first glance exactly what happened in that blood-spattered room and sets everyone to proving he’s right can end up causing very serious problems-wasted time being the least of them.

Gurney wondered which approach might be prevailing at the moment.

Outside the yellow tape barrier, on the far side of the bloodstain, Jack Hardwick was giving instructions to two serious-looking young men, one of whom was the Tom Cruise wannabe who’d just delivered Gurney to the site, and the other appeared to be his twin. The nine intervening years since they worked together on the infamous Piggert case seemed to have added twice that many years to Hardwick’s age. The face was redder and fatter, the hair thinner, and the voice had developed the kind of roughness that comes from too much tobacco and tequila.

“There are twenty guests,” he was saying to the Top Gun doubles. “Each of you take nine of them. Get preliminary statements, names, addresses, phone numbers. Get verification. Leave Patty Cakes and the chiropractor to me. I’ll also talk to the widow. Check back with me by four P.M.”

More comments went back and forth among them in voices too low for Gurney to hear, punctuated by Hardwick’s grating laugh. The young man who’d escorted Gurney from the front gate said a final word, tilting his head significantly in Gurney’s direction. Then the duo set off toward the main building.

Once they were out of sight, Hardwick turned and offered Gurney a greeting halfway between a grin and a grimace. His strange blue eyes, once brightly skeptical, seemed fraught with a tired cynicism.

“I’ll be damned,” he rasped, walking around the taped area toward Gurney, “if it isn’t Professor Dave.”

“Just a humble instructor,” corrected Gurney, wondering what else Hardwick had taken the trouble to find out about his post-NYPD stint teaching criminology at the state university.

“Don’t give me that humility shit. You’re a star, my boy, and you know it.”

They shook hands without much warmth. It struck Gurney that the bantering attitude of the old Hardwick had curdled into something toxic.

“Not a lot of doubt about the location of death,” said Gurney, nodding at the bloodstain. He was eager to get to the point, brief Hardwick on what he knew, and get out of there.

“There’s doubt about everything,” proclaimed Hardwick. “Death and doubt are the only two certainties in life.” Getting no response from Gurney, he went on, “I’ll grant you there may be less doubt about the location of death than about some other things here. Goddamn loony bin. People here go on about the victim like he was that Deepdick Chopup guy on TV.”

“You mean Deepak Chopra?”

“Yeah, Dipcock or whatever. Christ, gimme a break!”

Despite the uncomfortable reaction building inside him, Gurney said nothing.

“What the hell do people come to places like this for? Listen to some New Age asshole with a Rolls-Royce talk about the meaning of life?” Hardwick shook his head at the foolishness of his fellow man-frowning at the back of the house all the while, as though eighteenth-century architecture might bear a large part of the blame.

Irritation overcame Gurney’s reticence. “As far as I know,” he said evenly, “the victim was not an asshole.”

“I didn’t say he was.”

“I thought you did.”

“I was making a general observation. I’m sure your buddy was an exception.”

Hardwick was getting under Gurney’s skin like a sharp sliver. “He wasn’t my buddy.”

“I got the impression from the message you left with the Peony police, which they kindly passed along to me, that your relationship went way back.”

“I knew him in college, had no contact with him for twenty-five years, and got an e-mail from him two weeks ago.”

“What about?”

“Some letters he got in the mail. He was upset.”

“What kind of letters?”

“Poems, mostly. Poems that sounded like threats.”

This made Hardwick stop and think before going on. “What did he want from you?”

“My advice.”

“What advice did you give him?”

“I advised him to call the police.”

“I gather he didn’t.”

The sarcasm irked Gurney, but he held his temper.

“There was another poem,” said Hardwick.

“What do you mean?”

“A poem, on a single sheet of paper, laid on the body, with a rock on it for a paperweight. All very neat.”

“He’s very precise. A perfectionist.”

“Who?”

“The killer. Possibly very disturbed, definitely a perfectionist.”

Hardwick stared at Gurney with interest. The mocking attitude was gone, at least temporarily. “Before we go any further, I need to know how you knew about the broken bottle.”

“Just a wild guess.”

“Just a wild guess that it was a whiskey bottle?”

“Four Roses, specifically,” said Gurney, smiling with satisfaction when he saw Hardwick’s eyes widen.

“Explain how you know that,” demanded Hardwick.

“It was a bit of a leap, based on references in the poems,” said Gurney. “You’ll see when you read them.” In response to the question forming on the other man’s face, he added, “You’ll find the poems, along with a couple of other messages, in the desk drawer in the den. At least, that’s the last place I saw Mellery put them. It’s the room with the big fireplace off the center hall.”

Hardwick continued staring at him as though doing so would resolve some important issue. “Come with me,” he finally said. “I want to show you something.”

He led the way in uncharacteristic silence to the parking area, situated between the massive barn and the public road, and came to a halt where it was connected to the circular driveway and where a corridor of yellow police tape began.

“This is the nearest place to the road where we can clearly distinguish the footprints we believe belong to the perp. The road and the drive were plowed after the snow stopped around two A.M. We don’t know whether the perp entered the property before or after the plowing. If before, any tracks on the road outside or on the drive would have been obliterated by the plow. If after, no tracks would have been made to begin with. But from this point right here, around the back of the barn, to the patio, across the open area to the woods, through the woods, to a pine thicket by Thornbush Lane, the tracks are perfectly clear and easy to follow.”

“No effort made to conceal them?”

“No,” said Hardwick, sounding bothered by this. “None at all. Unless I’m missing something.”

Gurney gave him a curious glance. “What’s the problem?”

“I’ll let you see for yourself.”

They walked along the yellow-taped corridor, following the tracks to the far side of the barn. The imprints, sharply indented in the otherwise featureless three-inch layer of snow, were of large (Gurney estimated size ten or eleven, D width) hiking boots. Whoever had come this way in the wee hours of the morning hadn’t cared that his route would later be noted.

As they rounded the back of the barn, Gurney saw that a wider area there had been taped off. A police photographer was taking pictures with a high-resolution camera while a crime-scene specialist in a protective white bodysuit and hair enclosure awaited his turn with an evidence-collection kit. Every shot was taken at least twice, with and without a ruler in the frame to establish scale, and objects were photographed at various focal-length settings-wide to establish position relative to other objects in the scene, normal to present the object itself, and close-up to capture detail.

The center of their attention was a folding lawn chair of the flimsy sort that might be sold in a discount store. The footprints led directly to the chair. In front of it, stamped out in the snow, were half a dozen cigarette butts. Gurney squatted to take a closer look and saw they were Marlboros. The footprints then continued from the chair around a thicket of rhododendrons toward the patio where the murder had apparently occurred.

“Jesus,” said Gurney. “He just sat there smoking?”

“Yeah. A little relaxation before cutting the victim’s throat. At least that’s the way it looks. I assume your raised eyebrow is a way of asking where the crappy little lawn chair came from? That was my question, too.”

“And?”

“Victim’s wife claimed she’d never seen it before. Seemed appalled at its low quality.”

“What?” Gurney flicked the word out like a whip. Hardwick’s supercilious comments had become nails on a blackboard.

“Just a little levity.” He shrugged. “Can’t let a cut throat get you down. But seriously, it was probably the first time in her posh life that Caddy Smythe-Westerfield Mellery came that close to a chair that cheap.”

Gurney knew all about cop humor and how necessary it was in coping with the routine horrors of the job, but there were occasions it got on his nerves.

“Are you telling me that the killer brought his own lawn chair with him?”

“Looks that way,” said Hardwick, grimacing at the absurdity.

“And after he finished smoking-what, half a dozen Marlboros?-he walked over to the back door of the house, got Mellery to come out on the patio, and slit his throat with a broken bottle? That’s the reconstruction so far?”

Hardwick nodded reluctantly, as though beginning to feel that the crime scenario suggested by the evidence sounded a bit off the wall. And it only got worse.

“Actually,” he said, “‘slit his throat’ is putting it mildly. Victim was stabbed through the throat at least a dozen times. When the medical examiner’s assistants were transferring the body to the van to take it for autopsy, the fucking head almost fell off.”

Gurney looked in the direction of the patio, and although it was entirely obscured by the rhododendrons, the image of the huge bloodstain came back to his mind as colorfully and sharply as if he were staring at it under arc lights.

Hardwick watched him for a while, chewing thoughtfully on his lip. “As a matter of fact,” he said finally, “that’s not the really weird part. The really weird part comes later, when you follow the footprints.”

Chapter 18

Hardwick led Gurney from the back of the barn around the hedges, past the patio to where the tracks of the presumed assailant left the scene of the attack and proceeded across the snow-covered lawn that extended from the back of the house to the edge of the maple forest several hundred feet away.

Not far from the patio, as they were following the footprints in the direction of the woods, they came upon another evidence tech, dressed in the hermetic plastic jumpsuit, surgical cap, and face mask of his trade-designed to protect DNA or other trace evidence from contamination by the collector.

He was squatting about ten feet from the footprints, lifting what appeared to be a shard of brown glass out of the snow with stainless-steel tongs. He’d already bagged three other pieces of similar glass and one large-enough segment of a quart whiskey bottle to be recognizable as such.

“The murder weapon, most likely,” said Hardwick. “But you, ace detective, already knew that. Even knew it was Four Roses.”

“What’s it doing out on the lawn?” asked Gurney, ignoring Hardwick’s needling tone.

“Jeez, I figured you’d know that, too. If you already knew the fucking brand…”

Gurney waited wearily, like he was waiting for a slow computer program to open, and eventually Hardwick answered, “It looks like he carried it away from the body and dropped it over here on his way to the woods. Why did he do that? That’s an excellent question. Maybe he didn’t realize he still had it in his hand. I mean, he just stabbed the victim in the neck a dozen times. That could have absorbed his attention. Then, as he’s walking away across the lawn, he notices he still has it and tosses it aside. At least that makes some kind of sense.”

Gurney nodded, not wholly convinced but unable to offer a better explanation. “Is that the ‘really weird’ element you mentioned?”

“That?” said Hardwick with a laugh that was more of a bark. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Ten minutes and half a mile later, the two men arrived at a spot in the maple forest just short of a small copse of white pines. The sound of a passing car indicated they were close to a road, but any sight of it was blocked by the low pine branches.

At first he wasn’t sure why Hardwick had brought him there. Then he saw it-and began studying the ground in the vicinity with growing bewilderment. What he saw made no sense. The footprints they had been following simply stopped. The clear progression of prints in the snow, one after another, proceeding for half a mile or more, simply came to an end. There was no sign of what had happened to the individual who’d made the prints. The snow all around was pristine, untouched by a human foot or by anything else. The trail of footprints stopped a good ten feet from the nearest tree, and, if the sound of that passing vehicle was any indication, at least a hundred yards from the nearest road.

“Am I missing something?” asked Gurney.

“Same thing we’re all missing,” said Hardwick, sounding relieved that Gurney had not come up with a simple explanation that had eluded him and his team.

Gurney examined the ground around the final print more carefully. Just beyond this well-defined impression was a small area of multiple overlapping impressions, all appearing to have been made by the same pair of hiking boots that had created the clear tracks they’d been following. It was as if the killer had walked purposefully to this spot, stood about shifting from foot to foot for a few minutes, perhaps waiting for someone or something, and then… evaporated.

The lunatic possibility that Hardwick was playing a practical joke on him flashed through his mind, but he dismissed it. Tampering with a major murder scene for a laugh would be too far over the edge even for an outrageous character like Hardwick.

So what they were looking at was the way it was.

“The tabloids find out about this, they’ll turn it into an alien abduction,” said Hardwick, as though the words tasted like metal in his mouth. “Reporters will be on this like flies on a barrel of cow shit.”

“You have a more presentable theory?”

“My hopes are riding on the razor-sharp mind of the most revered homicide detective in the history of the NYPD.”

“Cut the crap,” said Gurney. “Has the processing team come up with anything?”

“Nothing that makes sense of this. But they took snow samples from that packed-down spot where it looks like he was standing. Didn’t seem to be any visible foreign matter there, but maybe the lab techs can find something. They also checked the trees and the road behind those pines. Tomorrow they’ll grid out everything within a hundred feet of this spot and take a closer look.”

“But so far they’ve come up with zero?”

“You got it.”

“So what are you left with-asking all the institute guests and neighbors if anyone saw a helicopter lowering a rope into the woods?”

“Nobody did.”

“You asked?”

“Felt like an idiot, but yes. The fact is, someone walked out here this morning-almost certainly the killer. He stopped right here. If a helicopter or the world’s largest crane didn’t lift him out, where the fuck is he?”

“So,” Gurney began, “no helicopters, no ropes, no secret tunnels…”

“Right,” said Hardwick, cutting him off. “And no evidence that he hopped away on a pogo stick.”

“Which leaves us with what?”

“Which leaves us with nothing. Zilch, zippo. Not one goddamn real possibility. And don’t tell me that once the killer walked all the way out here, he walked all the way back-stepping backwards, perfectly, into each footprint, without messing up a single one-just to drive us crazy.” Hardwick looked challengingly at Gurney, as though he might propose this very thing. “Even if that were possible, which it isn’t, the killer would have bumped into the two people who were on the scene by that time, Caddy the wife and Patty the gangster.”

“So it’s all impossible,” said Gurney lightly.

“What’s impossible?” said Hardwick, ready for a fight.

“Everything,” said Gurney.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Calm down, Jack. We need to find a starting point that makes sense. What seems to have happened can’t have happened. Therefore, what seems to have happened didn’t happen.”

“Are you telling me those aren’t footprints?”

“I’m telling you there’s something wrong with the way we’re looking at them.”

“Is that or is that not a footprint?” said Hardwick, exasperated.

“It looks very much like a footprint to me,” said Gurney agreeably.

“So what are you saying?”

Gurney sighed. “I don’t know, Jack. I just have a feeling we’re asking the wrong questions.”

Something in the softness of his tone took the edge off Hardwick’s attitude. Neither man looked at the other or said anything for several long seconds. Then Hardwick raised his head as though remembering something.

“I almost forgot to show you the icing on the cake.” He reached into the side pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out an evidence-collection envelope.

Through the clear plastic, on a plain sheet of white stationery, Gurney could see neat handwriting in red ink.

“Don’t remove it,” said Hardwick, “just read it.”

Gurney did as he was told. Then he read it again. And a third time, committing it to memory.

I ran through the snow.

Fool, look high and low.

Ask where did I go.

You scum of the earth,

here witness my birth:

Revenge is reborn

for children who mourn,

for all the forlorn.

“That’s our boy,” said Gurney, handing the envelope back. “Revenge theme, eight lines, consistent meter, elite vocabulary, perfect punctuation, delicate handwriting. Just like all the others-up to a point.”

“Up to a point?”

“There’s a new element in this one-an indication that the killer hates someone else in addition to the victim.”

Hardwick glanced over the encased note, frowning at the suggestion that he’d missed something significant. “Who?” he asked.

“You,” said Gurney, smiling for the first time that day.

Chapter 19

It was unfair, of course, a bit of dramatic license, to say that the killer had set his sights equally on Mark Mellery and Jack Hardwick. What Gurney meant, he explained as they strode back toward the crime scene from the dead-end trail in the woods, was that the killer seemed to be aiming some part of his hostility at the police investigating the murder. Far from disturbing Hardwick, the implied challenge energized him. The combative glint in his eye shouted, “Bring the fucker on!”

Then Gurney asked him if he remembered the case of Jason Strunk.

“Why should I?”

“Does the Satanic Santa ring a bell? Or, as another media genius called him, Cannibal Claus?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, I remember. Wasn’t really a serious cannibal, though. Just chewed off the toes.”

“Right, but that wasn’t all, was it?”

Hardwick grimaced. “I seem to recollect that after he chewed their toes off, he cut the bodies up with a band saw, sealed the pieces in plastic bags-very neat-put them in Christmas-gift boxes, and mailed them. That’s how he got rid of them. No burial problems.”

“You happen to remember who he mailed them to?”

“That was twenty years ago. I wasn’t even on the job then. I read about it in the papers.”

“He mailed them to the home addresses of homicide detectives in the precincts where the victims had lived.”

“Home addresses?” Hardwick shot Gurney an appalled look. Murder, moderate cannibalism, and dissection with a band saw might be forgivable, but not this final twist.

“He hated cops,” Gurney continued. “Loved upsetting them.”

“I can see how getting a foot mailed to you might do that.”

“It’s especially upsetting when your wife opens the box.”

The odd note caught Hardwick’s attention. “Holy shit. That was your case. He sent you a body part, and she opened the box?”

“Yep.”

“Holy shit. Is that why she divorced you?”

Gurney glanced at him curiously. “You remember that my first wife divorced me?”

“Some things I remember. Not so much things I read-but if somebody tells me something about themselves, that kind of stuff I never forget. Like, I know you were an only child, your father was born in Ireland, he hated it, he would never tell you anything about it, and he drank too much.”

Gurney stared at him.

“You told me while we were working on the Piggert case.”

Gurney wasn’t sure whether he was more distressed by having revealed those quirky little family facts, by forgetting that he had, or by Hardwick’s recalling them.

They walked on toward the house through the powdery snow, which had begun eddying in intermittent breezes under a darkening sky. Gurney tried to shake off the chill that was enveloping him and refocus himself on the matter at hand.

“Getting back to my point,” he said, “this killer’s last note is a challenge to the police, and that could be a significant development.”

Hardwick was the sort of man who’d get back to someone else’s point when he damn well felt like it.

“So is that why she divorced you? She got some guy’s dick in a box?”

It was none of his business, but Gurney decided to answer.

“We had plenty of other problems. I could give you a list of my complaints, and a longer list of hers. But I think, bottom line, she was shocked to discover what it’s like to be married to a cop. Some wives discover that slowly. Mine had a revelation.”

They had reached the back patio. Two evidence techs were sifting through the snow around the bloodstain, now more brown than red, and examining the flagstones they were uncovering in the process.

“Well, anyway,” said Hardwick, as though brushing aside an unnecessary complication, “Strunk was a serial killer, and this doesn’t look like that.”

Gurney nodded his tentative agreement. Yes, Jason Strunk was a typical serial killer, and whoever killed Mark Mellery seemed to be anything but that. Strunk had little or no prior acquaintance with his victims. It was safe to say that he didn’t have anything resembling a “relationship” with them. He chose them on the basis of their fitting the parameters of a certain physical type and their availability when the pressure to act overwhelmed him-the coinciding of urge and opportunity. Mellery’s killer, however, knew him well enough to torture him with allusions to his past-even knew him well enough to predict what numbers might come to his mind under certain circumstances. He gave indications of having shared the kind of intimate history with his victim that was not typical of serial killers. Moreover, there were no known reports of similar recent murders-although that would have to be researched more carefully.

“It doesn’t look like a serial case,” agreed Gurney. “I doubt you’ll start finding thumbs in your mailbox. But there is something disconcerting about his addressing you, the chief investigating officer, as ‘scum of the earth.’”

They walked around the house to the front door to avoid disrupting the crime-scene processors on the patio. A uniformed officer from the sheriff’s department was stationed there to control access to the house. The wind was sharper there, and he was stamping his feet and clapping his gloved hands together to generate some warmth. His obvious discomfort twisted the smile with which he greeted Hardwick.

“Any coffee on the way, you think?”

“No idea. But I hope so,” said Hardwick, sniffling loudly to keep his nose from running. He turned to Gurney. “I won’t keep you much longer. I just want you to show me the notes you told me were in the den-and make sure they’re all there.”

Inside the beautiful old chestnut-floored house, all was quiet. More than ever, the place smelled of money.

Chapter 20

A picturesque fire was burning in the stone-and-brick fireplace, and the air in the room was sweetened by grace notes of cherry smoke. A pale but composed Caddy Mellery was sharing the sofa with a well-tailored man in his early seventies.

As Gurney and Hardwick entered, the man rose from his place on the sofa with an ease surprising for his age. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said. The words had a courtly, vaguely southern intonation. “I’m Carl Smale, an old friend of Caddy’s.”

“I’m Senior Investigator Hardwick, and this is Dave Gurney, a friend of Mrs. Mellery’s late husband.”

“Ah, yes, Mark’s friend. Caddy was telling me.”

“We’re sorry to bother you,” said Hardwick, glancing around the room as he spoke. His eyes settled on the small Sheraton desk set against the wall opposite the fireplace. “We need access to some papers, possibly related to the crime, which we have reason to believe may be located in that desk. Mrs. Mellery, I’m sorry to be bothering you with questions like this, but do you mind if I take a look?”

She closed her eyes. It was unclear whether she’d understood the question.

Smale reseated himself on the couch next to her, placing his hand on her forearm. “I’m sure Caddy has no objection to that.”

Hardwick hesitated. “Are you… speaking as Mrs. Mellery’s representative?”

Smale’s reaction was nearly invisible-a slight wrinkling of the nose, like a sensitive woman’s response to a rude word at a dinner party.

The widow opened her eyes and spoke through a sad smile. “I’m sure you can appreciate that this is a difficult time. I’m relying on Carl completely. Whatever he says is wiser than anything I would say.”

Hardwick persisted. “Mr. Smale is your attorney?”

She turned toward Smale with a benevolence Gurney suspected was fueled by Valium and said, “He’s been my attorney, my representative in sickness and in health, in good times and bad, for over thirty years. My God, Carl, isn’t that frightening?”

Smale mirrored her nostalgic smile, then spoke to Hardwick with a new crispness in his tone. “Feel free to examine this room for whatever materials may be related to your investigation. We’d naturally appreciate receiving a list of any materials you wish to remove.”

The pointed reference to “this room” did not escape Gurney. Smale was not granting the police a blanket exemption from a search warrant. Apparently it hadn’t escaped Hardwick, either, judging from the hard look he gave the dapper little man on the sofa.

“All evidence we take possession of is fully inventoried.” Hardwick’s tone conveyed the unspoken part of the message as well: “We don’t give you a list of things we wish to take. We give you a list of things we have actually taken.”

Smale, who obviously had the ability to hear unspoken communication, smiled. He turned to Gurney and asked in his languorous drawl, “Tell me, are you the Dave Gurney?”

“I’m the only one my parents had.”

“Well, well, well. A detective of legend! A pleasure to meet you.”

Gurney, who inevitably found this sort of recognition uncomfortable, said nothing.

The silence was broken by Caddy Mellery. “I must apologize, but I have a blinding headache and must lie down.”

“I sympathize,” said Hardwick. “But I do need your help with a few details.”

Smale regarded his client with concern. “Couldn’t it wait for an hour or two? Mrs. Mellery is in obvious pain.”

“My questions will only take two or three minutes. Believe me, I’d rather not intrude, but a delay could create problems.”

“Caddy?”

“It’s fine, Carl. Now or later makes no difference.” She closed her eyes. “I’m listening.”

“I’m sorry to make you think about these things,” said Hardwick. “Do you mind if I sit here?” He pointed to the wing chair nearest Caddy’s end of the sofa.

“Go right ahead.” Her eyes were still shut.

He perched on the edge of the cushion. Questioning the recently bereaved was uncomfortable for any cop. Hardwick, though, looked like he wasn’t terribly bothered by the task.

“I want to go over something you told me this morning to make sure I’ve got it right. You said the phone rang a little after one A.M.-that you and your husband were asleep at the time?”

“Yes.”

“And you knew the time because…?”

“I looked at the clock. I wondered who would be calling us at that hour.”

“And your husband answered it?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He said hello, hello, hello-three or four times. Then he hung up.”

“Did he tell you if the caller said anything at all?”

“No.”

“And a few minutes later, you heard an animal screaming in the woods?”

“Screeching.”

“Screeching?”

“Yes.”

“What distinction do you make between ‘screeching’ and ‘screaming’?”

“Screaming-” She stopped and bit hard on her lower lip.

“Mrs. Mellery?”

“Will there be much more of this?” asked Smale.

“I just need to know what she heard.”

“Screaming is more human. Screaming is what I did when I…” She blinked as if to force a speck out of her eye, then continued. “This was some kind of animal. But not in the woods. It sounded close to the house.”

“How long did this screaming-screeching-go on?”

“A minute or two, I’m not sure. It stopped after Mark went downstairs.”

“Did he say what he was going to do?”

“He said he was going to see what it was. That’s all. He just-” She stopped speaking and began taking slow, deep breaths.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Mellery. This won’t take much longer.”

“He just wanted to see what it was, that’s all.”

“Did you hear anything else?”

She put her hand over her mouth, holding her cheeks and jaw in an apparent effort to keep control of herself. Red and white splotches appeared under her fingernails from the tightness of her grip.

When she spoke, the words were muffled by her hand.

“I was half asleep, but I did hear something, something like a clap-as though someone had clapped their hands together. That’s all.” She continued holding on to her face as though the pressure were her sole comfort.

“Thank you,” said Hardwick, rising from the wing chair. “We’ll keep our intrusions to a minimum. For now, all I need to do is go through that desk.”

Caddy Mellery raised her head and opened her eyes. Her hand fell to her lap, leaving livid finger marks on her cheeks. “Detective,” she said in a frail but determined voice, “you may take anything relevant, but please respect our privacy. The press is irresponsible. My husband’s legacy is of supreme importance.”

Chapter 21

“Get bogged down in this poetry and we’ll be chasing ourselves up our own asses for the next year,” said Hardwick. He articulated the word poetry as though it were the messiest sort of mire.

The messages from the killer were arrayed on a large table in the middle of the institute’s boardroom, occupied by the BCI team as their on-site location for the intensive start-up phase of the investigation.

There was the initial two-part letter from “X. Arybdis” making the uncanny prediction that the number Mellery would think of would be 658 and asking for $289.87 to cover the expense of having located him. There were the three increasingly menacing poems that had subsequently arrived by mail. (The third of these was the one Mellery had placed in a small plastic food-storage bag, he had told Gurney, to preserve any fingerprints.) Also laid out in sequence were Mellery’s returned $289.87 check along with the note from Gregory Dermott indicating that there was no “X. Arybdis” at that address; the poem dictated by the killer on the phone to Mellery’s assistant; a cassette tape of the killer’s phone conversation later that evening with Mellery, during which Mellery mentioned the number nineteen; the letter found in the institute mailbox predicting that Mellery would pick nineteen; and the final poem found on the corpse. It was a remarkable amount of evidentiary material.

“You know anything about the plastic bag?” Hardwick asked. He sounded as unenthusiastic about plastic as he did about poetry.

“By that point Mellery was seriously frightened,” said Gurney. “He told me he was trying to save possible fingerprints.”

Hardwick shook his head. “It’s that CSI bullshit. Plastic looks higher-tech than paper. Keep evidence in plastic bags, and it rots from trapped moisture. Assholes.”

A uniformed cop with a Peony police badge on his hat and a harried expression on his face was standing at the door.

“Yeah?” Hardwick said, daring the visitor to bring him another problem.

“Your tech team needs access. That okay?”

Hardwick nodded, but his attention had returned to the collection of rhyming threats spread out across the table.

“Neat handwriting,” he said, his face wrinkling up in distaste. “What do you think, Dave? You think maybe we got a homicidal nun on our hands?”

Half a minute later, the techs appeared in the boardroom with their evidence bags, a laptop, and a portable bar-code printer to secure and label all the items temporarily displayed on the table. Hardwick requested that photocopies be made of each of the materials before they were sent to the forensics lab in Albany for latent-fingerprint inspection and for handwriting, paper, and ink analysis-with special attention to the note left on the body.

Gurney kept a low profile, observing Hardwick at work in his crime-scene supervisor role. The way a case turned out months, or even years, down the road often depended on how well the guy in charge of the scene did his job in the early hours of the process. In Gurney’s opinion Hardwick was doing a very good job indeed. He watched him go over the photographer’s documentation of his shots and locations to make sure all relevant areas of the property had been covered, including key parts of the perimeter, entries and exits, all the footprints and visible physical evidence (lawn chair, cigarette butts, broken bottle), the body itself in situ, and the blood-drenched snow around it. Hardwick also asked the photographer to arrange for aerial shots of the entire property and its environs-not a normal part of the process, but under the circumstances, particularly the circumstance of a set of footprints that led nowhere, it made sense.

In addition, Hardwick conferred with the pair of younger detectives to verify that the interviews assigned to them earlier had been conducted. He met with the senior evidence tech to review the trace-evidence collection list, then had one of his detectives arrange for a scent-tracking dog to be brought to the scene the following morning-a sign to Gurney that the footprint problem was very much on Hardwick’s mind. Finally he’d examined the crime-scene arrival and departure log maintained by the trooper at the front gate to make sure there had been no inappropriate personnel on site. Having watched Hardwick absorb and evaluate, prioritize and direct, Gurney concluded that the man was still as competent under pressure as he’d been during their former collaboration. Hardwick might be a bristly bastard, but there was no denying he was efficient.

At a quarter past four, Hardwick said to him, “Long day, and you’re not even getting paid. Why don’t you head home to the farm?” Then he did a little double take, as if a thought had ambushed him, and added, “I mean, we’re not paying you. Were you getting paid by the Mellerys? Shit, I bet you were. Famous talent doesn’t come cheap.”

“I don’t have a license. I couldn’t charge if I wanted to. Besides, working as a paid PI is the last thing on earth I’d want to do.”

Hardwick shot him a disbelieving look.

“In fact, right now I think I’ll take your suggestion and call it a day.”

“Think you could drop by regional headquarters around noon tomorrow?”

“What’s the plan?”

“Two things. First, we need a statement-your history with the victim, the piece from long ago and the current piece. You know the drill. Second, I’d like you to sit in on a meeting-an orientation to get everyone on the same page. Preliminary reports on cause of death, witness interviews, blood, prints, murder weapon, et cetera. Initial theories, priorities, next steps. Guy like you could be a big help, get us on the right track, keep us from wasting taxpayer money. Be a crime not to share your big-city genius with us shitkickers. Noon tomorrow. Be good if you could bring your statement along with you.”

The man needed to be a wise-ass. It defined his place in the world: Wise-Ass Hardwick, Major Crimes Unit, Bureau of Criminal Investigation, New York State Police. But Gurney sensed that underneath the bullshit, Hardwick really did want his help with a case that was growing stranger by the hour.

Gurney drove most of the way home oblivious to his surroundings. Not until he had driven up into the high end of the valley past Abelard’s General Store in Dillweed did he become aware the clouds that had gathered earlier in the day were gone, and in their place a remarkable glow from the setting sun was illuminating the western face of the hills. The snowy cornfields that bordered the meandering river were bathed in a pastel so rich that his eyes widened at the sight. Then, with surprising speed, the coral sun descended below the opposing ridge, and the glow was extinguished. Again the leafless trees were black, the snow a vacant white.

As he slowed approaching his turnoff, his attention was drawn to a crow on the shoulder of the road. The crow was standing on something that elevated it a few inches above the level of the pavement. As he came abreast of it, he looked more closely. The crow was standing on a dead possum. Strangely, considering the normal caution of crows, it neither flew away nor showed any sign of disturbance at the passing car. Motionless, it had about it an expectant air-giving the odd tableau the quality of a dream.

Gurney turned onto his road and downshifted for the slow, winding ascent-his mind full of the image of the black bird atop the dead animal in the fading dusk, watchful, waiting.

It was two miles-and five minutes-from the intersection to Gurney’s property. By the time he came to the narrow farm track that led from the barn to the house, the atmosphere had grown grayer and colder. A ghostlike snow devil reeled across the pasture, almost reaching the dark woods before dissolving.

He pulled in closer to the house than usual, turned up his collar against the chill, and hurried to the back door. As soon as he entered the kitchen, he was aware of the uniquely vacant sound that signaled Madeleine’s absence. It was as if she had about her the faint hum of an electric current, an energy that filled a space when it was present and left a palpable void when it was not.

There was something else in the air as well, the emotional residue of that morning, the dark presence of the box from the basement, the box that still sat on the coffee table at the shadowed end of the room, its delicate white ribbon untouched.

After a brief detour to the bathroom off the pantry, he went directly into the den and checked the phone messages. There was just one. The voice was Sonya’s-satiny, cello-like. “Hello, David. I have a customer who is enthralled by your work. I told him you’re completing another piece, and I’d like to tell him when it will be available. Enthralled is not too strong a term, and money does not seem to be an issue. Give me a call as soon as you can. We need to get our heads together on this one. Thanks, David.”

He was starting to replay the message when he heard the back door opening and shutting. He pressed the “stop” button on the machine to abort the Sonya replay and called out, “Is that you?”

There was no answer, which annoyed him.

“Madeleine,” he called, more loudly than he needed to.

He heard her voice answer, but it was too low to make out what she said. It was a voice level that, in his hostile moments, he labeled “passive-aggressively low.” His first inclination was to stay in the den, but that seemed infantile, so he went out to the kitchen.

Madeleine turned to him from the coat pegs on the far side of the room where she’d hung her orange parka. It still had sprinkles of snow on the shoulders, which meant she’d been walking through the pines.

“It’s so-o-o beautiful out,” she said, running her fingers through her thick brown hair, fluffing it up where the parka hood had pressed it down. She walked into the pantry, came out a minute later, and glanced around at the countertops.

“Where did you put the pecans?”

“What?”

“Didn’t I ask you to get pecans?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe I didn’t. Or maybe you didn’t hear me?”

“I have no idea,” he said. He was having a hard time fitting the subject into the current shape of his mind. “I’ll get some tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“Abelard’s.”

“On Sunday?”

“Sun-Oh, right, they’re closed. What is it you need them for?”

“I’m the one making dessert.”

“What dessert?”

“Elizabeth is making the salad and baking the bread, Jan is making the chili, and I’m making the dessert.” Her eyes darkened. “You forgot?”

“They’re coming here tomorrow?”

“That’s right.”

“What time?”

“Is that an issue?”

“I have to deliver a written statement to the BCI team at noon.”

“On Sunday?”

“It’s a murder investigation,” he said dully, he hoped not sarcastically.

She nodded. “So you’ll be gone all day.”

“Part of the day.”

“How big a part?”

“Christ, you know the nature of these things.”

The sadness and anger that contended with each other in her eyes disturbed Gurney more than a slap would have. “So I guess you’ll get home tomorrow whatever time you get home, and maybe you’ll join us for dinner and maybe not,” she said.

“I have to deliver a signed statement as a witness-before-the-fact in a murder case. That is not something I want to do.” His voice rose abruptly, shockingly, spitting the words at her. “There are some things in life we are required to do. This is a legal obligation-not a matter of preference. I didn’t write the goddamn law!”

She stared at him with a weariness as sudden as his fury. “You still don’t see it, do you?”

“See what?”

“That your brain is so tied up with murder and mayhem and blood and monsters and liars and psychopaths, there’s simply nothing left for anything else.”

Chapter 22

He spent two hours that night writing and editing his statement. It recounted simply-without adjectives, emotions, opinions-the facts of his acquaintance with Mark Mellery, including their casual association in college and their recent contacts, beginning with Mellery’s e-mail requesting a meeting and ending with his adamant refusal to take the matter to the police.

He drank two mugs of strong coffee while composing the statement and, as a result, slept poorly. Cold, sweaty, itchy, thirsty, with a transient ache that drifted inexplicably from one leg to the other-the night’s succession of discomforts provided a malignant nursery for troubled thoughts, especially concerning the pain he’d glimpsed in Madeleine’s eyes.

He knew that it came from her sense of his priorities. She was complaining that when the roles in his life collided, Dave the Detective always superseded Dave the Husband. His retirement from the job had made no difference. It was clear she’d hoped it would, maybe believed it would. But how could he stop being what he was? However much he cared for her, however much he wanted to be with her, however much he wanted her to be happy, how could he become someone he wasn’t? His mind worked exceptionally well in a certain way, and the greatest satisfactions in his life had come from applying that intellectual gift. He had a supremely logical brain and a finely tuned antenna for discrepancy. These qualities made him an outstanding detective. They also created the cushion of abstraction that allowed him to maintain a tolerable distance from the horrors of his profession. Other cops had other cushions-alcohol, frat-boy solidarity, heart-deadening cynicism. Gurney’s shield was his ability to grasp situations as intellectual challenges, and crimes as equations to be solved. That was who he was. It was not something he could cease to be, simply by retiring. At least that’s the way he was thinking about it when he finally fell asleep an hour before dawn.

Sixty miles east of Walnut Crossing, ten miles beyond Peony, on a bluff within sight of the Hudson, State Police Regional Headquarters had the look and feel of a newly erected fortress. Its massive gray stone exterior and narrow windows seemed designed to withstand the apocalypse. Gurney wondered if the architecture was influenced by the 9/11 hysteria, which had bred projects even sillier than impregnable trooper stations.

Inside, fluorescent lighting maximized the harsh look of the metal detectors, remote cameras, bulletproof guard booth, and polished concrete floor. There was a microphone for communicating with the guard in the booth-which was really more like a control room, containing a bank of monitors for the security cameras. The lights, which cast a cold glare on all the hard surfaces, gave the guard an exhausted pallor. Even his colorless hair was rendered sickly by the unnatural illumination. He looked like he was about to throw up.

Gurney spoke into the microphone, resisting an urge to ask the guard if he was all right. “David Gurney. I’m here for a meeting with Jack Hardwick.”

The guard pushed a temporary facility pass and a visitor’s sign-in sheet through a narrow slot at the base of the formidable glass wall running from the ceiling down to the counter that separated them. He picked up the phone, consulted a list that was Scotch-taped to his side of the counter, dialed a four-digit extension, said something Gurney couldn’t hear, then replaced the phone on its cradle.

A minute later a gray steel door in the wall next to the booth opened to reveal the same plainclothes trooper who’d escorted him the previous day at the institute. He motioned to Gurney without any indication of recognizing him and led him down a featureless gray corridor to another steel door, which he opened.

They stepped into a large, windowless conference room-windowless no doubt to keep conferees safe from the flying glass of a terrorist attack. Gurney was a bit claustrophobic, hated windowless spaces, hated the architects who thought they were a good idea.

His laconic guide made straight for the coffee urn in the far corner. Most of the seats at the oblong conference table had already been claimed by people not yet in the room. Jackets were hanging over the backs of four of the ten chairs, and three other chairs had been reserved by tilting them forward against the table. Gurney removed the light parka he was wearing and placed it over the back of one of the free chairs.

The door opened, and Hardwick entered, followed by a wonkish red-haired woman in a genderless suit, carrying a laptop and a fat file folder, and the other Tom Cruise look-alike, who headed for his buddy at the coffee urn. The woman proceeded to an unclaimed chair and put her things on the table in front of it. Hardwick approached Gurney, his face stuck in an odd spot between anticipation and disdain.

“You’re in for a treat, my boy,” he whispered gratingly. “Our precocious DA, youngest in the history of the county, is gracing us with his presence.”

Gurney felt that reflexive antagonism toward Hardwick that he realized was out of proportion to the man’s aimless acidity. Despite his effort not to react, his lips stiffened as he spoke. “Wouldn’t his involvement be expected in something like this?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t expect it,” hissed Hardwick. “I just said you were in for a treat.” He glanced at the three chairs tilted in at the center of the table and, with the curled lip that was becoming part of his face, commented to no one in particular, “Thrones for the Three Wise Men.”

On the heels of his remark, the door opened and three men entered.

Hardwick identified them sotto voce at Gurney’s shoulder. It struck Gurney that Hardwick’s missed vocation was ventriloquism, considering his ability to speak without moving his lips.

“Captain Rod Rodriguez, officious prick,” said the disembodied whisper, as a squat, salon-tanned man with a loose smile and malevolent eyes stepped into the room and held the door for the taller man behind him-a lean, alert type whose gaze swept the room, alighting for no more than a second on each individual. “DA Sheridan Kline,” said the whisper. “Wants to be Governor Kline.”

The third man, sidling in behind Kline, prematurely bald and radiating all the charm of a bowl of cold sauerkraut, was “Stimmel, Kline’s chief assistant.”

Rodriguez ushered them to the tilted chairs, pointedly offering the center one to Kline, who took it as a matter of course. Stimmel sat at his left, Rodriguez at his right. Rodriguez eyed the other faces in the room through glasses with thin wire frames. The immaculately coiffed mass of thick black hair rising from his low forehead was obviously dyed. He gave the table a few sharp raps with his knuckles, looking around to be sure he had everyone’s attention.

“Our agenda says this meeting starts at twelve noon, and twelve noon is what it says on the clock. If you don’t mind taking your seats…?”

Hardwick sat next to Gurney. The coffee-urn group came to the table, and within half a minute all had settled into their chairs. Rodriguez looked around sourly, as if to suggest that true professionals would not have taken so long to accomplish this. Seeing Gurney, his mouth twitched in a way that could have been a quick smile or a wince. His sour expression deepened at the sight of one empty chair. Then he continued.

“I don’t need to tell you that a high-profile homicide has landed in our laps. We’re here to make sure that we’re all here.” He paused, as if checking to see who might appreciate this Zen witticism. Then he translated it for the dull of mind. “We’re here to make sure that we’re all on the same page from day one of this case.”

“Day two,” muttered Hardwick.

“Excuse me?” said Rodriguez.

The Cruise twins exchanged matching looks of confusion.

“Today is day two, sir. Yesterday was day one, sir, and it was a bitch.”

“Obviously, I was using a figure of speech. My point is that we need to be on the same page from the very beginning of this case. We all need to be marching to the same drum. Am I making myself clear?”

Hardwick nodded innocently. Rodriguez made a show of turning away from him to direct his comments to the more serious people at the table.

“From what little we know at this point, the case promises to be difficult, complex, sensitive, potentially sensational. I am told the victim was a successful author and lecturer. His wife’s family is reputed to be extremely wealthy. The clientele of the Mellery Institute includes some rich, opinionated, troublesome characters. Any one of these factors could create a media circus. Put all three together and you have an enormous challenge. The four keys to success will be organization, discipline, communication, and more communication. What you see, what you hear, what you conclude is all worthless unless it is properly recorded and reported. Communication and more communication.” He glanced around, letting his eyes dwell longest on Hardwick, identifying him not so subtly as a prime violator of the recording and reporting rules. Hardwick was studying a large freckle on the back of his right hand.

“I don’t like people who bend the rules,” Rodriguez went on. “Rule benders cause more trouble in the long run than rule breakers. Rule benders always claim they do it to get things done. The fact is, they do it for their own convenience. They do it because they lack discipline, and the lack of discipline destroys organizations. So hear me, people, loud and clear. We are going to follow the rules on this one. All the rules. We will use our checklists. We will fill out our reports in detail. We will submit them on time. Everything will go through proper channels. Every legal question will be addressed with District Attorney Kline’s office before-I repeat, before-any questionable action is taken. Communication, communication, communication.” He lobbed the words like a succession of artillery shells at an enemy position. Judging all resistance quelled, he turned with saccharine deference to the district attorney, who had been growing restless during the harangue, and said, “Sheridan, I know how personally involved you intend to be in this case. Is there anything you want to say to our team?”

Kline smiled broadly with what, at a greater distance, might have been mistaken for warmth. Up close, what came through was the radiant narcissism of a politician.

“The only thing I want to say is that I’m here to help. Help any way I can. You guys are pros. Trained, experienced, talented pros. You know your business. It’s your show.” The hint of a chuckle reached Gurney’s ear. Rodriguez blinked. Might Rodriguez be that attuned to Hardwick’s frequency? “But I agree with Rod. It could be a very big show, a very difficult show to manage. It’s sure as hell going to be on TV, and a lot of people are going to be watching. Get ready for sensational headlines-‘Gory Murder of New Age Guru.’ Like it or not, gentlemen, this one’s a candidate for the tabloids. I do not want us to look like the assholes in Colorado who screwed up the JonBenét case or the assholes in California who screwed up the Simpson case. We’re going to have a lot of balls in the air with this one, and if they start dropping, we’re going to have a mess on our hands. Those balls-”

Gurney’s curiosity regarding their final disposition was left unsatisfied. Kline was silenced by a cell phone’s intrusive chime, which drew everyone’s attention with varying degrees of irritation. Rodriguez glared as Hardwick reached into his pocket, produced the offending instrument, and earnestly recited the captain’s mantra: “Communication, communication, communication.” Then he pressed the “talk” button and spoke into the phone.

“Hardwick here… Go ahead… Where?… They match the footprints?… Any indication how they got there?… Any idea why he did that?… All right, get them to the lab ASAP… No problem.” He pressed the “disconnect” button and stared thoughtfully at the phone.

“Well?” said Rodriguez, his glare warped by curiosity.

Hardwick addressed his answer to the redheaded woman in the genderless suit who had her laptop open on the table and was watching him expectantly.

“News from the crime scene. They found the killer’s boots-or at least some hiking boots that match the boot prints leading away from the body. The boots are in transit to your people in the lab.”

The redhead nodded and began typing on her keyboard.

“I thought you told me the prints went off into the middle of nowhere and stopped,” said Rodriguez, as though he’d caught Hardwick in some sort of lie.

“Yes,” said Hardwick, without looking at him.

“So where were these boots found?”

“In the middle of the same nowhere. In a tree near where the tracks ended. Hanging from a branch.”

“Are you telling me your killer climbed a tree, took his boots off, and left them there?”

“Looks that way.”

“Well… where… I mean, what did he do then?”

“We don’t have the faintest goddamn idea. Maybe the boots will point us in the right direction.”

Rodriguez uttered a harsh bark of a laugh. “Let’s hope something does. In the meantime we need to get back to our agenda. Sheridan, I believe you were interrupted.”

“With his balls in the air,” said the ventriloquist’s whisper.

“Not really interrupted,” said Kline with an I-can-turn-anything-to-my-advantage grin. “The truth is, I’d rather listen-especially to news coming in from the field. The better I understand the problem, the more I can help.”

“As you wish, Sheridan. Hardwick, you seem to have everyone’s attention. You might as well give us the rest of the facts-as briefly as possible. The district attorney is being generous with his time, but he has a lot on his plate. Bear that in mind.”

“Okay, kids, you heard the man. Here’s the compressed-file version, one time only. No daydreaming, no stupid questions. Listen up.”

“Whoa!” Rodriguez raised both hands. “I don’t want anyone to feel they can’t ask questions.”

“Figure of speech, sir. Just don’t want to tie up the district attorney any longer than necessary.” The level of respect with which he articulated Kline’s title was just exaggerated enough to suggest an insult while remaining safely ambiguous.

“Fine, fine,” said Rodriguez with an impatient wave. “Go ahead.”

Hardwick began a flat recitation of the available data. “Over a three- to four-week period prior to the murder, the victim received several written communications of a disturbing or threatening nature, as well as two phone calls, one taken and transcribed by Mellery’s assistant, the other taken and recorded by the victim. Copies of these communications will be distributed. Victim’s wife, Cassandra (aka Caddy), reports that on the night of the murder she and her husband were awakened at one A.M. by a phone call from a caller who hung up.”

As Rodriguez was opening his mouth, Hardwick answered the anticipated question. “We are in touch with the phone company to access landline and cell records for the night of the murder and for the times of the two previous calls. However, given the level of planning involved in the execution of this crime, I would be surprised if the perp left a followable phone trail.”

“We’ll see,” said Rodriguez.

Gurney decided that the captain was a man whose greatest imperative was to appear to be in control of any situation or conversation he might find himself in.

“Yes, sir,” said Hardwick with that touch of exaggerated deference, too subtle to be pounced on, that he was adept at. “In any event, a couple of minutes later they were disturbed by sounds close to the house-sounds she describes as animals screeching. When I went back and asked her about it again, she said she thought it might be raccoons fighting. Her husband went to investigate. A minute later she heard what she describes as a muffled slap, shortly after which she went to investigate. She found her husband lying on the patio just outside the back door. Blood was spreading into the snow from wounds to his throat. She screamed-at least she thinks she screamed-tried to stop the bleeding, wasn’t able to, ran back into the house, called 911.”

“Do you know whether she changed the position of the body when she tried to stop the bleeding?” Rodriguez made it sound like a trick question.

“She says she can’t remember.”

Rodriguez looked skeptical.

“I believe her,” said Hardwick.

Rodriguez shrugged in a way that assigned a low value to other men’s beliefs. Glancing at his notes, Hardwick continued his emotionless narrative.

“Peony police were first on the scene, followed by a sheriff’s department car, followed by Trooper Calvin Maxon from the local barracks. BCI was contacted at one fifty-six A.M. I arrived on the scene at two-twenty A.M., and the ME arrived at three twenty-five A.M.”

“Speaking of Thrasher,” said Rodriguez angrily, “did he call anyone to say he’d be late?”

Gurney glanced along the row of faces at the table. They seemed so inured to the medical examiner’s odd name that no one reacted to it. Nor did anyone show any interest in the question-suggesting that the doctor was one of those people who was perennially late. Rodriguez stared at the conference-room door, through which Thrasher should have entered ten minutes earlier, doing a slow burn at the violation of his schedule.

As if he’d been lurking behind it, waiting for the captain’s temper to boil, the door popped open and a gangly man lurched into the room with a briefcase pinned under his arm, a container of coffee in his hand, and seemingly in the middle of a sentence.

“… construction delays, men working. Hah! So say the signs.” He smiled brightly at several people in succession. “Apparently the word working means standing around scratching your crotch. Lots of that. Not much digging or paving going on. None that I could see. Pack of incompetent louts blocking the road.” He peered at Rodriguez over the top of a pair of reading glasses that were askew. “Don’t suppose the state police could do anything about that, eh, Captain?”

Rodriguez reacted with the weary smile of a serious man forced to deal with fools. “Good afternoon, Dr. Thrasher.”

Thrasher put his briefcase and coffee on the table in front of the one unoccupied chair. His gaze darted around the room, coming to rest on the district attorney.

“Hello, Sheridan,” he said with some surprise. “Getting in early on this one, are you?”

“You have some interesting information for us, Walter?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. At least one small surprise.”

Patently eager to keep his grip on the helm of the meeting, Rodriguez made a show of steering it where it was already going.

“Look, people, I see an opportunity here to turn the doctor’s lateness to our advantage. We’ve been listening to a rundown of the events surrounding the discovery of the body. The last fact I heard concerned the arrival of the medical examiner at the scene. Well, the medical examiner has just arrived here-so why don’t we incorporate his report right now into the narrative?”

“Great idea,” said Kline without taking his eyes off Thrasher.

The ME began speaking as if it had been his intention all along to make his presentation the moment he arrived.

“You get the full written report in one week, gentlemen. Today you get the bare bones.”

If that was a witticism, mused Gurney, it went by unappreciated. Perhaps it was so often repeated that the audience had grown deaf to it.

“Interesting homicide,” Thrasher went on, reaching for his coffee container. He took a long, thoughtful swig and replaced the container on the table. Gurney smiled. This rumpled, sandy-haired stork had a taste for timing and drama. “Things are not exactly as they first appeared.”

He paused until the room was on the verge of exploding with impatience.

“Initial examination of the body in situ led to the hypothesis that cause of death had been the severing of the carotid artery by multiple slash and puncture wounds, inflicted by a broken bottle later discovered at the scene. Initial autopsy results indicate, however, that cause of death was the severing of the carotid artery by a single bullet fired at close range into the victim’s neck. The wounds from the broken bottle were subsequent to the gunshot and were inflicted after the victim had fallen to the ground. There were a minimum of fourteen puncture wounds, perhaps as many as twenty, several of which left shards of glass in the neck tissue and four of which passed completely through the neck muscles and trachea, emerging at the back of the neck.”

There was silence at the table, accompanied by a variety of puzzled and intrigued looks. Rodriguez placed his fingertips together to create a steeple. He was the first to speak.

“Shot, eh?”

“Shot,” said Thrasher, with the relish of a man who loved discovering the unforeseen.

Rodriguez looked accusingly at Hardwick. “How come none of your witnesses heard this gunshot? You told me there were at least twenty guests on the property, and for that matter, how come his wife didn’t hear it?”

“She did.”

“What? How long have you known this? Why wasn’t I told?”

“She heard it, but she didn’t know she heard it,” said Hardwick. “She said she heard something like a muffled slap. The significance of that didn’t occur to her at the time, and it didn’t occur to me until this minute.”

“Muffled?” said Rodriguez incredulously. “Are you telling me the victim was shot with a silencer?”

Sheridan Kline’s attention level shot up a notch.

“That explains it!” cried Thrasher.

“Explains what?” Rodriguez and Hardwick asked in unison.

Thrasher’s eyes glinted triumphantly. “The traces of goose down in the wound.”

“And in the blood samples from the area around the body.” The redhead’s voice was as gender-unspecific as her suit.

Thrasher nodded. “Of course it would be there, too.”

“This is all very tantalizing,” said Kline. “Could one of you who understands what’s being said take a moment to fill me in?”

“Goose down!” boomed Thrasher as though Kline were hard of hearing.

Kline’s expression of cordial confusion began to freeze over.

Hardwick spoke as the truth dawned on him. “The muffling of the gunshot, combined with the presence of goose down, suggests that the silencing effect might have been produced by wrapping the gun in some sort of quilted material-maybe a ski jacket or a parka.”

“You’re saying that a gun could be silenced just by holding it inside a ski jacket?”

“Not exactly. What I’m saying is that if I held the gun in my hand and wrapped it around and around-especially around the muzzle-with a thick enough quilted material, it’s possible that the report could be reduced to something that might sound like a slap, if you were listening from inside a well-insulated house with the windows closed.”

The explanation seemed to satisfy everyone except Rodriguez. “I’d want to see the results of some tests before buying into that.”

“You don’t think it was an actual silencer?” Kline sounded disappointed.

“It could have been,” said Thrasher. “But then you’d need to explain all those microscopic down particles some other way.”

“So,” said Kline, “the murderer shoots the victim point-blank-”

“Not point-blank,” interjected Thrasher. “Point-blank implies virtual contact between the muzzle and the victim, and there was no evidence of that.”

“From how far, then?”

“Hard to say. There were a few distinct single-point powder burns on the neck, which would put the gun within five feet, but the burns were not numerous enough to form a pattern. The gun may have been even closer, with the powder burns minimized by the material around the muzzle.”

“I don’t suppose you recovered a bullet.” Rodriguez addressed the criticism to a spot in the air between Thrasher and Hardwick.

Gurney’s jaw tightened. He had worked for men like Rodriguez-men who mistook their control obsession for leadership and their negativity for tough-mindedness.

Thrasher responded first. “The bullet missed the vertebrae. There’s not much in the neck tissue itself that could stop it. We have an entry wound and an exit wound-neither one easy to find, by the way, with all the puncture damage inflicted later.” If he was fishing for compliments, thought Gurney, this was a dead pond. Rodriguez shifted his querying gaze to Hardwick, whose tone was again just short of insubordinate.

“We didn’t look for a bullet. We had no reason to believe there was a bullet.”

“Well, now you do.”

“Excellent point, sir,” said Hardwick with a hint of mockery. He pulled out his cell phone and entered a number, walking away from the table. Despite his lowered voice, it was clear that he was talking to an officer at the crime scene and requesting a search for the bullet on a priority basis. When he returned to the table, Kline asked if there was any hope of recovering a bullet fired outdoors.

“Usually not,” said Hardwick. “But in this case there’s a chance. Considering the position of the body, he was probably shot with his back to the house. If it wasn’t deflected in a major way, we might find it in the wood siding.”

Kline nodded slowly. “Okay, then, as I started to say a minute ago, just to get this straight-the murderer shoots the victim at close range, the victim falls to the ground, carotid artery severed, blood spurting from his neck. Then the murderer produces a broken bottle and squats down next to the body and stabs it fourteen times. Is that the picture?” he asked incredulously.

“At least fourteen, possibly more,” said Thrasher. “When they overlap, an accurate count becomes difficult.”

“I understand, but what I’m really getting at is, why?”

“Motive,” said Thrasher, as though the concept were on a scientific par with dream interpretation, “is not my area of expertise. Ask our friends here from BCI.”

Kline turned to Hardwick. “A broken bottle is a weapon of convenience, a weapon of the moment, a barroom substitute for a knife or a gun. Why would a man who already has a loaded gun feel the need to carry a broken bottle, and why would he use it after he had already killed his victim with the gun?”

“To make sure he was dead?” offered Rodriguez.

“Then why not just shoot him again? Why not shoot him in the head? Why not shoot him in the head to begin with? Why in the neck?”

“Maybe he was a lousy shot.”

“From five feet away?” Kline turned back to Thrasher. “Are we sure about the sequence? Shot, then stabbed?”

“Yes, to a reasonable level of professional certainty, as we say in court. The powder burns, although limited, are clear. If the neck area had already been covered with blood from stab wounds at the time of the shot, it is unlikely that distinct burns could have occurred.”

“And you would have found the bullet.” The redhead said this in such a soft, matter-of-fact way that only a few people heard her. Kline was one of them. Gurney was another. He’d been wondering when this point would occur to someone. Hardwick was unreadable but did not appear surprised.

“What do you mean?” asked Kline.

She answered without taking her eyes off her laptop screen. “If he was stabbed fourteen times in the neck as part of the initial assault, with four of the wounds passing completely through, he could hardly have remained standing. And if he was then shot from above while lying on his back, the bullet would have been on the ground underneath him.”

Kline cast her an assessing glance. Unlike Rodriguez, mused Gurney, he was intelligent enough to respect intelligence.

Rodriguez made an effort to retake the reins. “What caliber bullet are we looking for, Doctor?”

Thrasher glared over the top of the half-glasses that were making their way down his long nose. “What do I have to do to get you people to grasp the simplest facts of pathology?”

“I know, I know,” said Rodriguez peevishly, “the flesh is pliable, it shrinks, it expands, you can’t be exact, et cetera, et cetera. But would you say it was closer to a.22 or a.44? Make an educated guess.”

“I’m not paid to guess. Besides, no one remembers for more than five minutes that it was only a guess. What they remember is that the ME said something about a.22 and he turned out to be wrong.” There was a cold gleam of recollection in his eyes, but all he said was, “When you dig the bullet out of the back of the house and give it to ballistics, then you’ll know-”

“Doctor,” interrupted Kline like a little boy questioning Mr. Wizard, “is it possible to estimate the exact interval between the gunshot and the subsequent stabbings?”

The tone of the question seemed to mollify Thrasher. “If the interval between the two were substantial, and both wounds bled, we would find blood in two different stages of coagulation. In this case I would say that that the two types of wounds occurred in close enough sequence to make that sort of comparison impossible. All we can say is that the interval was relatively short, but whether it was ten seconds or ten minutes would be hard to say. That’s a good pathology question, though,” he concluded, distinguishing it from the captain’s question.

The captain’s mouth twitched. “If that’s all you have for us at the moment, Doctor, we won’t keep you. I’ll get the written report no later than one week from today?”

“I believe that’s what I said.” Thrasher picked up his bulging case from the table, nodded to the district attorney with a thin-lipped smile, and left the room.

Chapter 23

“There goes one pathological pain in the ass,” said Rodriguez, surveying the faces at the table for appreciation of his wit in so describing a pathologist, but only the perennial smirks of the twin Cruises came close to providing it. Kline ended the silence by asking Hardwick to continue the crime-scene narrative he’d been providing when the ME arrived.

“Exactly what I was thinking, Sheridan,” Rodriguez chimed in. “Hardwick, pick up where you left off, and stay with the key facts.” The warning suggested that this was not something Hardwick normally did.

Gurney noted the predictability of the captain’s attitudes-hostile to Hardwick, sycophantic to Kline, self-important in general.

Hardwick spoke rapidly. “The most visible trace of the murderer was a set of footprints, entering the property through the front gate, proceeding through the parking area around to the rear of the barn, where they stopped at a lawn chair-”

“In the snow?” asked Kline.

“Correct. Cigarette butts were found on the ground in front of the chair.”

“Seven,” said the redhead at the laptop.

“Seven,” repeated Hardwick. “The footprints proceed from the chair-”

“Excuse me, Detective, but did the Mellerys normally keep lawn chairs out in the snow?” asked Kline.

“No, sir. It appears that the murderer brought the chair with him.”

“Brought it with him?”

Hardwick shrugged.

Kline shook his head. “Sorry to interrupt you. Go ahead.”

“Don’t be sorry, Sheridan. Ask him anything you want. A lot of this stuff doesn’t make sense to me, either,” said Rodriguez, with a look that attributed the lack of sense to Hardwick.

“The footprints proceed from the chair to the location of the encounter with the victim.”

“The spot where Mellery was killed, you mean?” asked Kline.

“Yes, sir. And from there they proceed through an opening in the hedge, out across the lawn, and into the woods, where they finally terminate half a mile from the house.”

“How do you mean, ‘terminate’?”

“They stop. They go no farther. There is a small area there where the snow is tamped down, as if the individual was standing there for a while-but no more footprints, either coming to or leaving that spot. As you heard a little while ago, the boots that made the prints were found hanging in a nearby tree-with no sign of what happened to the individual who was wearing them.”

Gurney was watching Kline’s face and saw there a combination of bafflement at the puzzle and surprise at his inability to see any solution. Hardwick was opening his mouth to press forward when the redhead spoke again in her quiet, uninflected voice, perfectly pitched halfway between male and female.

“At this point we should say the sole patterns of the boots are consistent with the prints in the snow. Whether, in fact, they made the prints will be determined in the lab.”

“You can be that definite with footprints in snow?” asked Kline.

“Oh, yes,” she said with her first bit of enthusiasm. “Snow prints are the best of all. Compressed snow can capture details too fine to see with the naked eye. Never kill anyone in the snow.”

“I’ll remember that,” said Kline. “Sorry again for the interruption, Detective. Please go on.”

“This might be a good time for a status report on items of evidence collected so far. If that’s all right with you, Captain?” Again Hardwick’s tone struck Gurney as a subtle mockery of respect.

“I’d welcome some hard facts,” said Rodriguez.

“Let me just bring the file up,” said the redhead, stroking a few keys on her computer. “You want the items in any particular order?”

“How about order of importance?”

Showing no reaction to the captain’s patronizing tone, she began reading from her computer screen.

“Evidence item number one-one lawn chair, made of light aluminum tubing and white plastic webbing. Initial examination for foreign material discovered a few square millimeters of Tyvek caught in the folding joint between the seat and the arm support.”

“You mean the stuff they insulate houses with?” asked Kline.

“It’s a moisture barrier used over plywood sheathing, but also used in other products-notably in painters’ coveralls. That was the only foreign material discovered, the only indication that the chair had ever been used.”

“No prints, hair, sweat, saliva, abrasions, nothing at all?” queried Rodriguez, as though he suspected that her people hadn’t been looking hard enough.

“No prints, hair, sweat, saliva, or abrasions-but I wouldn’t say nothing at all,” she said, letting the tone of his question breeze by her like a drunk’s punch. “Half the webbing in the chair had been replaced-all the horizontal strips.”

“But you said it had never been used.”

“There’s no sign of use, but the webbing had definitely been replaced.”

“What possible reason could there be for that?”

Gurney was tempted to offer an explanation, but Hardwick put it into words first. “She said the webbing was all white. That kind of chair commonly has two colors of webbing interlaced to create a pattern-blue and white, green and white, something like that. Maybe he didn’t want any color on it.”

Rodriguez chewed on this like a stale gumdrop. “Proceed, Sergeant Wigg. We have a lot to get through before lunch.”

“Item number two-seven Marlboro cigarette butts, also without human traces.”

Kline leaned forward. “No traces of saliva? No partial fingerprints? Not even a trace of skin oil?”

“Zero.”

“Isn’t that odd?”

“Extremely. Item number three-a broken whiskey bottle, incomplete, brand label Four Roses.”

“Incomplete?”

“Approximately half of the bottle was present in one piece. That and all remaining shards recovered add up to somewhat less than two-thirds of a complete bottle.”

“No prints?” said Rodriguez.

“No prints-not a surprise, really, considering their absence from the chair and cigarettes. There was one substance present, in addition to the victim’s blood-a minuscule trace of detergent in a fissure along the broken edge of the glass.”

“Meaning what?” said Rodriguez.

“The presence of the detergent and the absence of a portion of the bottle suggest that the bottle was broken elsewhere and washed before being brought to the scene.”

“So the frenzied stabbing was as premeditated as the gunshot?”

“So it appears. Shall I continue?”

“Please,” said Rodriguez, making the word sound rude.

“Item number four-the victim’s clothing, including underwear, bathrobe, and moccasins, all stained with his own blood. Three foreign hairs found on the bathrobe, possibly from the victim’s wife, yet to be verified. Item number five-blood samples taken from the ground around the body. Tests in progress-so far all samples match the victim. Item number six-bits of broken glass taken from the flagstone under the back of the victim’s neck. This is consistent with the initial autopsy finding that four puncture wounds from the bottle glass passed through the neck from front to back and that the victim was on the ground at the time of the stabbing.”

Kline had the pained squint of a man driving into the sun. “I’m getting the impression here that someone has committed an extremely violent crime, a crime involving shooting, stabbing-more than a dozen deep stab wounds, some of them delivered with great force-and yet the killer managed to do this without leaving a single unintentional trace of himself.”

One of the Cruise twins spoke up for the first time, in a voice surprisingly high-pitched for the macho look of the body it came from. “How about the lawn chair, the bottle, the footprints, the boots?”

Kline’s face twitched impatiently. “I said unintentional trace. Those things look like they were left behind on purpose.”

The young man shrugged as though this were a tricky bit of sophistry.

“Item number seven is divided into subcategories,” said the genderless Sergeant Wigg (but perhaps not sexless, observed Gurney, noting the interesting eyes and finely sculpted mouth). “Item seven includes communications received by the victim which may be relevant to the crime, including the note found on the body.”

“I’ve had copies made of all that,” announced Rodriguez. “I’ll hand them out at the appropriate time.”

Kline asked Wigg, “What are you looking for in the communications?”

“Fingerprints, paper indentations…”

“Like impressions from a writing pad?”

“Correct. We’re also doing ink-identification tests on the handwritten letters and printer-identification tests on the letter that was generated through a word processor-the last one received prior to the murder.”

“We’ll also have experts look at the handwriting, vocabulary, and syntax,” interjected Hardwick, “and we’re getting a sound-print analysis of the phone conversation the victim taped. Wigg already has a preliminary take on it, and we’ll review that today.”

“We’ll also go over the boots that were found today, as soon as they get to the lab. That’s all for now,” concluded Wigg, tapping a key on her computer. “Any questions?”

“I have one,” said Rodriguez. “Since we discussed presenting these evidence items in order of importance, I was wondering why you placed the lawn chair first.”

“Just a hunch, sir. We can’t know how it all fits together until it all fits together. At this point it’s impossible to say which piece of the puzzle-”

“But you did put the lawn chair first,” interrupted Rodriguez. “Why?”

“It seemed to illustrate the most striking feature of the case.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The planning,” said Wigg softly.

She had the ability, thought Gurney, to respond to the captain’s interrogation as though it were a series of objective questions on paper, devoid of supercilious facial expressions and insulting intonations. There was a curious purity in this lack of emotional entanglement, this immunity to petty provocation. And it got people’s attention. Gurney noticed everyone at the table, except Rodriguez, unconsciously leaning forward.

“Not just the planning,” she went on, “but the weirdness of the planning. Bringing a lawn chair to a murder. Smoking seven cigarettes without touching them with your fingers or your lips. Breaking a bottle, washing it, and bringing it to the scene to stab a dead body with. Not to mention the impossible footprints and how the perp disappeared from the woods. It’s like the guy is some kind of genius hit man. It’s not just a lawn chair, but a lawn chair with half the webbing removed and replaced. Why? Because he wanted it all white? Because it would be less visible in the snow? Because it would be less visible against the white Tyvek painter’s suit he may have been wearing? But if visibility was such a big issue, why would he sit there in a lawn chair, smoking cigarettes? I’m not sure why, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the chair turned out to be the key to unraveling the whole thing.”

Rodriguez shook his head. “The key to solving this crime will be police discipline, procedure, and communication.”

“My money’s on the lawn chair,” whispered Hardwick with a wink at Wigg.

The comment registered on the captain’s face, but before he could speak, the conference-room door opened and a man entered holding a gleaming computer disk. “What is it?” Rodriguez snapped.

“You told me to bring you any fingerprint results as soon as we had them, sir.”

“And?”

“We have them,” he said, holding up the disk. “You’d better have a look. Maybe Sergeant Wigg could…?”

He extended the disk tentatively toward her laptop. She inserted it and clicked a couple of keys.

“Interesting,” she said.

“Prekowski, would you mind telling us what you have there?”

“Krepowski, sir.”

“What?”

“My name is Krepowski.”

“Fine, good. Now, would you please tell us whether you found any prints.”

The man cleared his throat. “Well, yes and no,” he said.

Rodriguez sighed. “You mean they’re too smudged to be useful?”

“They’re a hell of a lot more than smudged,” said the man. “In fact, they’re not really prints at all.”

“Well, what are they?”

“I guess you could call them smears. It looks like the guy used his fingertips to write with-using the skin oil in his fingertips like it was invisible ink.”

“To write? Write what?”

“Single-word messages. One on the back of each of the poems he mailed to the victim. Once we made the words chemically visible, we photographed them and copied the images to disk. It shows up pretty clearly on the screen.”

With a faint touch of amusement playing at her lips, Sergeant Wigg slowly rotated her laptop until the screen directly faced Rodriguez. There were three sheets of paper shown in the photo, side by side-the reverse sides of the sheets on which the three poems had been written arranged in the sequence in which they’d been received. On each of the three sheets, a single four-letter word appeared in smudgy block letters:

DUMB EVIL COPS

Chapter 24

“What the fuck…?” said the Cruise boys, aroused in unison.

Rodriguez frowned.

“Damn!” cried Kline. “This is getting more interesting by the minute. This guy is declaring war.”

“An obvious nutcase,” said Cruise One.

“A smart, ruthless nutcase who wants to do battle with the police.” It was clear that Kline found the implications exciting.

“So what?” said Cruise Two.

“I said earlier that this crime was likely to generate some media interest. Scratch that. This could be the crime of the year, maybe the crime of the decade. Every element of this thing is a media magnet.” Kline’s eyes glittered with the possibilities. He was leaning so far forward in his chair that his ribs pressed against the edge of the table. Then, as suddenly as his enthusiasm had flared, he reined it in, sitting back with a pensive expression-as though a private alarm had warned him that murder was a tragic affair and needed to be treated as such. “The anti-police element could be significant,” he said soberly.

“No doubt about it,” concurred Rodriguez. “I’d like to know if any of the institute’s guests had anti-police attitudes. How about it, Hardwick?”

The senior investigator uttered a single-syllable bark of a laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Most of the guests we interviewed rank the police somewhere between IRS agents and garden slugs.”

Somehow, Gurney marveled, Hardwick had managed to convey that this was exactly what he himself thought of the captain.

“I’d like to see their statements.”

“They’re in your in-box. But I can save you some time. The statements are useless. Name, rank, and serial number. Everyone was asleep. No one saw anything. No one heard anything-except for Pasquale Cachese, aka Patty Cakes. Says he couldn’t sleep. Opened his window to get some air and heard the so-called muffled slap-and he guessed what it was.” Hardwick riffled through a stack of papers in his file folder and removed one, as Kline again came forward in his seat. “‘It sounded like someone got popped,’ he said. He said it very matter-of-factly, like it was a sound he was familiar with.”

Kline’s eyes were glittering again. “Are you telling me there was a mob guy present at the time of the murder?”

“Present on the property, not at the scene,” said Hardwick.

“How do you know that?”

“Because he woke Mellery’s assistant instructor, Justin Bale, a young man who has a room in the same building with the guest rooms. Cachese told him he’d heard a noise from the direction of Mellery’s house, thought it might be an intruder, suggested they take a look. By the time they got some clothes on and got across the gardens to the back of the Mellery house, Caddy Mellery had already discovered her husband’s body and gone back inside to call 911.”

“Cachese didn’t tell this Bale person that he’d heard a shot?” Kline was starting to sound like he was in a courtroom.

“No. He told us when we interviewed him the next day. By that time, though, we’d found the bloody bottle and all the obvious stab wounds but no noticeable bullet wounds and no other weapon, so we didn’t pursue the gunshot thing right away. We figured Patty was the kind of guy who might have guns on his mind-that it might be a conclusion he’d jump to.”

“Why didn’t he tell Bale he thought it was a shot?”

“He said he didn’t want to scare him.”

“Very considerate,” said Kline with a sneer. He glanced at the stoic Stimmel seated next to him. Stimmel mirrored the sneer. “If he’d-”

“But he told you,” Rodriguez broke in. “Too bad you didn’t pay attention.”

Hardwick stifled a yawn.

“What the hell was a mob guy doing at a place that sells ‘spiritual renewal’?” asked Kline.

Hardwick shrugged. “Says he loves the place. Comes once a year to calm his nerves. Says it’s a little piece of heaven. Says Mellery was a saint.”

“He actually said that?”

“He actually said that.”

“This case is amazing! Any other interesting guests on the grounds?”

That ironic glint Gurney found so inexplicably distasteful came into Hardwick’s eyes. “If you mean arrogant, infantile, drug-addled nutcases, yeah, there are a fair number of ‘interesting guests’-plus the richer-than-God widow.”

As he pondered, perhaps, the media ramifications of so sensational a crime scene, Kline’s gaze settled on Gurney, who happened to be sitting diagonally across the table from him. At first his expression remained as disconnected as if he were regarding an empty chair. Then he cocked his head curiously.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Dave Gurney, NYPD. Rod told me who’d be attending this meeting, but the name just registered. Aren’t you the guy New York magazine did the article on a few years back?”

Hardwick answered first. “That’s our boy. Headline was ‘Super Detective.’”

“I remember now,” exclaimed Kline. “You solved those big serial-killer cases-the Christmas lunatic with the body parts, and Porky Pig or whatever the hell his name was.”

“Peter Possum Piggert,” said Gurney mildly.

Kline stared at him with open awe. “So this Mellery guy who got murdered just happens to be the best friend of the NYPD’s serial-murder star?” The media ramifications were obviously getting richer by the minute.

“I was involved to some extent in both cases,” Gurney said in a voice as devoid of hype as Kline’s was full of it. “So were a lot of other people. As for Mellery being my best friend, that would be sad if it were true, considering we hadn’t spoken to each other in twenty-five years, and even back then-”

“But,” Kline interrupted, “when he found himself in trouble, you were the man he turned to.”

Gurney took in the faces at the table, displaying various shades of respect and envy, and marveled at the seductive power of an oversimplified narrative. BLOODY MURDER OF TOP COP’S BUDDY instantly appealed to that part of the brain that loves cartoons and hates complexity.

“I suspect he came to me because I was the only cop he knew.”

Kline looked like he was not ready to let the point go, might revisit it later, but for now was willing to move on. “Whatever your exact relationship was, your contact with the victim gives you a window on the affair no one else has.”

“That’s why I wanted him here today,” said Rodriguez in his I’m-in-charge-here style.

A short hack of a laugh came out of Hardwick’s throat, followed by a whisper that just reached Gurney’s ear: “He hated the idea until Kline liked it.”

Rodriguez went on, “I have him scheduled to give us his statement next and answer whatever questions it raises-which could be quite a few. To avoid interruptions, let’s take five minutes now for a restroom break.”

“Piss on you, Gurney,” said the disembodied whisper, lost amid the sounds of chairs being pushed back from the table.

Chapter 25

Gurney had a theory that men behaved in bathrooms as if they were either locker rooms or elevators-which is to say, with either rowdy familiarity or uneasy aloofness. This was an elevator crowd. It was not until they all returned to the conference room that anyone spoke.

“So how did such a modest guy get to be so famous?” asked Kline, grinning with a practiced charm that both concealed and revealed the ice behind it.

“I’m not that modest, and I’m sure as hell not that famous,” said Gurney.

“If everyone will have a seat,” said Rodriguez brusquely, “you’ll each find in front of you a set of the messages received by the victim. As our witness presents his account of his communications with the victim, you can refer to the messages they were discussing.” With a curt nod toward Gurney, he concluded, “Whenever you’re ready.”

Gurney was no longer surprised at the man’s officiousness, but it still rankled. He glanced around the table, achieving eye contact with all but his guide at the murder site, who was flipping noisily through his packet of papers, and Stimmel, the DA’s chief assistant, who sat gazing into space like a contemplative toad.

“As the captain indicated, there’s a lot to cover. It might be best to let me give you a summary of the events in the order in which they occurred, and to hold your questions until you have the whole story.” He saw Rodriguez’s head rising to object, then subsiding the instant Kline nodded approvingly at the proposed procedure.

In his clear, concise way (he’d been told more than once that he could have been a professor of logic) Gurney gave a twenty-minute summary of the affair-beginning with Mellery’s e-mail asking to see him, proceeding through the series of disconcerting communications and Mellery’s reactions, concluding with the phone call from the killer and the note in the mailbox (the one mentioning the number nineteen).

Kline was a rapt listener throughout and the first to speak when it ended. “It’s an epic revenge story! The killer was obsessed with getting even with Mellery for something horrible he did years ago when he was drunk.”

“Why wait so long?” asked Sergeant Wigg, whom Gurney was finding more interesting each time she spoke.

Kline’s eyes were bright with possibilities. “Maybe Mellery revealed something in one of his books. Maybe that’s how the killer discovered he was responsible for some tragic event he hadn’t connected with him before. Or maybe Mellery’s success was the last straw, the thing the killer couldn’t stand. Or maybe, like the first note said, the killer just happened to see him on the street one day. A smoldering resentment comes back to life. The enemy steps into the crosshairs and… bang!”

“Bang, my ass,” said Hardwick.

“You have a different opinion, Senior Investigator Hardwick?” inquired Kline with an edgy smile.

“Carefully composed letters, number mysteries, directions to send a check to the wrong address, a series of increasingly threatening poems, hidden messages to the police that could only be discovered through latent-prints chemistry, surgically clean cigarette butts, a concealed gunshot wound, an impossible trail of footprints, and a fucking lawn chair for Chrissake! That’s a hell of a dragged-out bang.”

“My sketch of the situation was not meant to exclude premeditation,” said Kline. “But at this point I’m more interested in the basic motive than in details. I want to understand the connection between the murderer and his victim. Understanding the connection is usually the key to a conviction.”

This lecturing response generated an unpleasant silence, broken by Rodriguez.

“Blatt!” he barked at Gurney’s guide, who was staring at his copies of the first two messages as though they’d dropped into his lap from outer space. “You look lost.”

“I don’t get it. The perp sends a letter to the victim, tells him to think of a number and then look in a sealed envelope. He thinks of six fifty-eight, looks in the envelope, and there it is-six fifty-eight. You saying that actually happened?”

Before anyone could answer, his partner broke in, “And two weeks later the perp does it again-this time on the phone. He tells him to think of a number and look in his mailbox. Victim thinks of the number nineteen, looks in his mailbox, and there’s the number nineteen in the middle of a letter from the perp. That’s some pretty weird shit, dude.”

“We have the recording the victim made of the actual phone call,” said Rodriguez, making it sound like a personal achievement. “Play the part about the number, Wigg.”

Without comment the sergeant tapped a few keys, and after a two- or three-second interval the call between Mellery and his stalker-the one Gurney had audited via Mellery’s conference-call gizmo-began at its midpoint. The faces at the table were riveted by the bizarre accent of the caller’s voice, the taut fear in Mellery’s.

“Now, whisper the number.”

“Whisper it?”

“Yes.”

“Nineteen.”

“Good, very good.”

“Who are you?”

“You still don’t know? So much pain, and you have no idea. I thought this might happen. I left something for you earlier. A little note. You sure you don’t have it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Ah, but you knew that the number was nineteen.”

“You said to think of a number.”

“But it was the right number, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t understand.”

After a moment Sergeant Wigg tapped two keys and said, “That’s it.”

The brief playback left Gurney feeling bereaved, angry, sick.

Blatt turned his palms up in a gesture of confusion. “What the hell was that, a man or a woman?”

“Almost certainly a man,” said Wigg.

“How the hell can you tell?”

“We did a voice-pitch analysis this morning, and the printout shows more stress as the frequency rises.”

“So?”

“The pitch varies considerably from phrase to phrase, even word to word, and in every case the voice is measurably less stressed at the lower frequencies.”

“Meaning the caller was straining to speak in a high register and the lower pitches came more naturally?” asked Kline.

“Exactly,” said Wigg in her ambiguous but not unattractive voice. “It’s not conclusive evidence, but it’s strongly suggestive.”

“What about the background noise?” asked Kline. It was a question on Gurney’s mind as well. He’d been aware of a number of vehicle sounds on the recording that placed the source of the call in an open area-perhaps a busy street or an outdoor mall.

“We’ll know more after we do an enhancement, but right now there seem to be three categories of sound-the conversation itself, traffic, and the hum of some sort of engine.”

“How long will the enhancement take?” asked Rodriguez.

“Depends on the complexity of the data captured,” said Wigg. “I’d estimate twelve to twenty-four hours.”

“Make it twelve.”

After an awkward silence, something Rodriguez had a talent for initiating, Kline asked a question of the room in general. “What about that whispering business? Who wasn’t supposed to hear Mellery say the number nineteen?” He turned to Gurney. “You have any ideas?”

“No. But I doubt it has anything to do with not being overheard.”

“Why would you say that?” challenged Rodriguez.

“Because whispering is a lousy way of not being overheard,” whispered Gurney, quite audibly, to underline his point. “It’s like other peculiar elements in the case.”

“Like what?” Rodriguez persisted.

“Well, for example, why the uncertainty in the note referring to November or December? Why a gun and a broken bottle? Why the mystery with the footprints? And one other small matter that no one’s mentioned-why no animal tracks?”

“What?” Rodriguez looked baffled.

“Caddy Mellery said that she and her husband heard the shrieking sounds of animals fighting behind the house-that was why he went downstairs and looked out the back door. But there were no animal tracks anywhere near there-and they would have been quite obvious in the snow.”

“We’re getting bogged down. I don’t see how the presence or absence of raccoon tracks, or whatever the hell we’re talking about, matters.”

“Christ,” said Hardwick, ignoring Rodriguez and shooting Gurney an admiring grin. “You’re right. There wasn’t a single mark in that snow that wasn’t made by the victim or the killer. Why didn’t I notice that?”

Kline turned to Stimmel. “I’ve never seen a case with so many items of evidence and so few that made sense.” He shook his head. “I mean, how on earth did the killer pull off that business with the numbers? And why twice?” He looked at Gurney. “You sure the numbers meant nothing to Mellery?”

“Ninety percent sure-about as sure as I get about anything.”

“Getting back to the big picture,” said Rodriguez, “I was thinking about the issue of motive you mentioned earlier, Sheridan-”

Hardwick’s cell phone rang. He had it out of his pocket and at his ear before Rodriguez could object.

“Shit,” he said, after listening for about ten seconds. “You’re sure?” He looked around the table. “No bullet. They went over every inch of the rear wall of the house. Nothing.”

“Have them check inside the house,” said Gurney.

“But the shot was fired outside.”

“I know, but Mellery probably didn’t close the door behind him. An anxious person in a situation like that would want to leave it open. Tell the techs to consider the possible trajectories and check any interior wall that could have been in the line of fire.”

Hardwick relayed the instructions quickly and ended the call.

“Good idea,” said Kline.

“Very good,” said Wigg.

“About those numbers,” said Blatt, abruptly changing the subject. “It pretty much has to be some kind of hypnosis or ESP, right?”

“I wouldn’t think so,” said Gurney.

“But it’s got to be. What else could it be?”

Hardwick shared Gurney’s sentiments on this subject and responded first. “Christ, Blatt, when was the last time the state police investigated a crime involving mystical mind control?”

“But he knew what the guy was thinking!”

This time Gurney answered first, in his conciliatory way. “It does look like somebody knew exactly what Mellery was thinking, but my bet is we’re missing something, and it will turn out to be a lot simpler than mind-reading.”

“Let me ask you something, Detective Gurney.” Rodriguez was sitting back in his chair, his right fist cupped in the left palm in front of his chest. “There was rapidly accumulating evidence, through a series of threatening letters and phone calls, that Mark Mellery was the target of a homicidal stalker. Why didn’t you bring this evidence to the police prior to the murder?”

The fact that Gurney had anticipated the question and was prepared to answer it did not diminish its sting.

“I appreciate the ‘Detective’ title, Captain, but I retired that title with my shield and weapon two years ago. As for reporting the matter to the police as it was developing, nothing practical could be done without Mark Mellery’s cooperation, and he made it clear that he would provide no cooperation whatsoever.”

“Are you saying you couldn’t bring the situation to the attention of the police without his permission?” Rodriguez’s voice was rising, his attitude stiffening.

“He made it clear to me that he did not want the police involved, that he regarded the idea of police intrusion into the affair as more destructive than helpful, and that he would take whatever steps were necessary to prevent it. If I had reported the matter, he would have stonewalled you and refused any further communication with me.”

“His further communication with you didn’t do him much good, did it?”

“Unfortunately, Captain, you’re right about that.”

The softness, the absence of resistance, in Gurney’s reply left Rodriguez momentarily off balance. Sheridan Kline stepped into the empty space. “Why was he opposed to involving the police?”

“He considered the police too clumsy and incompetent to achieve a positive result. He believed they were unlikely to make him safer but very likely to create a public-relations mess for his institute.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Rodriguez, affronted.

“‘Bulls in a china shop’ is what he kept saying. He was determined there would be no cooperation with the police-no police allowed on his property, no police contact with his guests, no information from him personally. He seemed willing to take legal action at the slightest hint of police interference.”

“Fine, but what I’d like to know-” began Rodriguez, but he was again cut short by the familiar chime of Hardwick’s phone.

“Hardwick here… Right… Where?… Fantastic… Okay, good. Thanks.” He pocketed the phone and announced to Gurney, in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “They found the bullet. In an inside wall. In fact, in the center hall of the house, on a direct line from the back door, which was apparently open when the shot was fired.”

“Congratulations,” said Sergeant Wigg to Gurney, and then to Hardwick, “Any idea what caliber?”

“They think it’s a.357, but we’ll wait on ballistics for that.”

Kline looked preoccupied. He addressed a question to no one in particular. “Could Mellery have had other reasons for not wanting the police around?”

Blatt, his face screwed up in befuddlement, added his own question: “What the hell are ‘balls in a china shop’?”

Chapter 26

By the time Gurney had driven the width of the Catskill Mountains and arrived at his farmstead outside Walnut Crossing, exhaustion had enveloped him-an emotional fog that muddled together hunger, thirst, frustration, sadness, and self-doubt. November’s progress toward winter was making days distressingly shorter-especially in the valleys, where the enclosing mountains made for early dusks. Madeleine’s car was gone from its place by the garden shed. The snow, partly melted by the midday sun and refrozen by the evening chill, crunched underfoot.

The house was deadly silent. Gurney switched on the hanging fixture over the butcher-block island. He remembered Madeleine saying something that morning about their planned dinner party’s being canceled because of some sort of meeting the women all wanted to attend, but the details eluded him. So there was no need for the goddamn pecans after all. He put a Darjeeling tea bag in a cup, filled it at the tap, and put it in the microwave. Moved by habit, he headed for his armchair on the far side of the country kitchen. He sank into it and propped his feet on a wooden stool. Two minutes later the beep of the microwave was absorbed into the texture of a shadowy dream.

He awoke at the sound of Madeleine’s footsteps.

It was an oversensitive perception, perhaps, but something in the footsteps sounded angry. It seemed to him that their direction and proximity indicated that she must have seen him in the chair yet had chosen not to speak to him.

He opened his eyes in time to see her leaving the kitchen, heading for their bedroom. He stretched, pushed himself up from the depths of the chair, went to the sideboard for a tissue, and blew his nose. He heard a closet door close, a bit too affirmatively, and a minute later she returned to the kitchen. She had replaced her silk blouse with a shapeless sweatshirt.

“You’re awake,” she said.

He heard it as a criticism of the fact that he’d been asleep.

She switched on a row of track lights over the main countertop and opened the refrigerator. “Have you eaten?” It sounded like an accusation.

“No, I had a very tiring day, and when I got home, I just made a cup of-Oh, damn, I forgot about it.” He went to the microwave, removed a cup of dark, cold tea and emptied it, bag and all, into the sink.

Madeleine went to the sink, picked his tea bag out of it, and pointedly dropped it into the garbage container.

“I’m pretty tired myself.” She shook her head silently for a moment. “I don’t understand why these local morons believe that building a hideous prison, surrounded by razor wire, in the middle of the most beautiful county in the state is a good idea.”

Now he remembered. She’d told him that morning she planned to attend a town meeting at which the controversial proposal was slated to be discussed yet again. At issue was whether the town should compete to become the location of a facility its opponents referred to as a prison and its supporters called a treatment center. The nomenclature battle arose from the ambiguous bureaucratic language authorizing this pilot project for a new class of institution. It was to be known as a SCATE-State Correctional and Therapeutic Environment-and its dual purpose was the incarceration and rehabilitation of felony drug offenders. In fact, the bureaucratic language was quite impenetrable and left a lot of room for interpretation and argument.

It was a touchy subject between them-not because he didn’t share her desire to keep the SCATE out of Walnut Crossing but because he wasn’t joining the battle as sharply as she thought he should. “There are probably half a dozen people who’ll make out like bandits,” she said grimly, “and everyone else in the valley-and everyone who has to drive through the valley-will be stuck with a wretched eyesore for the rest of their lives. And for what? For the so-called rehabilitation of a pack of drug-dealing creeps? Give me a break!”

“Other towns are competing for it. With any luck, one will win.”

She smiled bleakly. “Sure, if their town boards are even more corrupt than ours, that might happen.”

Feeling the heat of her indignation as a form of pressure on himself, he decided to try changing the subject.

“Shall I make us a couple of omelets?” He watched her hunger vying briefly with her residual anger. Her hunger won.

“No green peppers,” she warned. “I don’t like them.”

“Why do you buy them?”

“I don’t know. Certainly not for omelets.”

“You want any scallions?”

“No scallions.”

She set the table while he beat the eggs and heated the pans.

“You want anything to drink?” he asked.

She shook her head. He knew she never drank anything with her meals, but he asked anyway. Peculiar little quirk, he thought, to keep asking that question.

Neither of them spoke more than a few words until they’d finished eating and both had given their empty plates a ritual nudge toward the center of the table.

“Tell me about your day,” she said.

“My day? You mean my meeting with the ace homicide team?”

“You weren’t impressed?”

“Oh, I was impressed. If you wanted to write a book about dysfunctional team dynamics, run by the Captain from Hell, you could set up a tape recorder in that place and transcribe it word for word.”

“Worse than what you retired from?”

He was slow in answering, not because he was unsure of the answer but because of the fraught intonation he detected in the word retired. He decided to respond to the words instead of the tone.

“There were some difficult people in the city, but the Captain from Hell operates on a whole other level of arrogance and insecurity. He’s desperate to impress the DA, has no respect for his own people, no real feeling for the case. Every question, every comment, was either hostile or off the point, usually both.”

She eyed him speculatively. “I’m not surprised.”

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged lightly. It looked like she was trying to compose her expression to convey as little as possible. “Just that I’m not surprised. I think if you came home and said you’d spent the day with the best homicide team you’d ever met, that would have surprised me. That’s all.”

He knew damn well that wasn’t all. But he was smart enough to know that Madeleine was smarter than he was and there was no way he was going to cajole her into talking about something she wasn’t inclined to talk about.

“Well,” he said, “the fact is, it was exhausting and unencouraging. Right now I intend to put it out of my mind and do something completely different.”

It was a statement made without forethought and followed by a mental blank. Moving on to something completely different was not as easy as it sounded. The difficulties of the day continued to swirl before him, along with Madeleine’s enigmatic reaction. At that moment the option which for the past week had been tugging at the edges of his resistance, the option he’d desperately kept out of sight but not entirely out of mind, again intruded. This time, unexpectedly, along with it came a surge of determination to take the action he’d been avoiding.

“The box…” he said. His throat was constricted, his voice raspy, as he forced the subject into the open before his fear of it could recapture him, before he even knew how he would finish the sentence.

She looked up at him from her empty plate-calm, curious, attentive-waiting for him to go on.

“His drawings… What… I mean, why…?” He struggled to coax from the conflict and confusion in his heart a rational question.

The effort was unnecessary. Madeleine’s ability to see his thoughts in his eyes always exceeded his ability to articulate them.

“We need to say good-bye.” Her voice was gentle, relaxed.

He stared down at the table. Nothing in his mind was forming into words.

“It’s been a long time,” she said. “Danny is gone, and we never said good-bye to him.”

He nodded, almost imperceptibly. His sense of time was dissolving, his mind strangely empty.

When the phone rang, he felt as if he were being awakened, yanked back into the world-a world of familiar, measurable, describable problems. Madeleine was still at the table with him, but he wasn’t sure how long they’d been sitting there.

“Do you want me to answer it?” she asked.

“That’s all right. I’ll get it.” He hesitated, like a computer reloading information, then stood up, a little unsteadily, and went to the den.

“Gurney.” Answering the phone that way-the way he’d answered it for so many years in homicide-was a habit he’d found difficult to break.

The voice that greeted him was bright, aggressive, artificially warm. It brought to mind that old rule of salesmanship: Always smile when you’re speaking on the phone, because it makes you sound friendlier.

“Dave, I’m glad you’re there! This is Sheridan Kline. I hope I didn’t interrupt your dinner.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’ll get right to the point. I believe you’re the kind of man I can be perfectly frank with. I know your reputation. This afternoon I had a glimpse of the reason for it. I was impressed. I hope I’m not embarrassing you.”

Gurney was wondering where this was leading. “You’re being very kind.”

“Not kind. Truthful. I’m calling because this case cries out for someone of your ability, and I’d love to find a way to take advantage of your talent.”

“You know I’m retired, right?”

“So I was told. And I’m sure that going back to the old routine is the last thing you’d want to do. I’m not suggesting anything like that. I have a feeling this case is going to be very big, and I’d love to have access to your thinking.”

“I’m not sure what you’re asking me to do.”

“Ideally,” said Kline, “I’d like you to find out who killed Mark Mellery.”

“Isn’t that what the BCI Major Crimes Unit is for?”

“Sure. And with some luck they may eventually succeed.”

“But?”

“But I want to improve my odds. This case is too important to leave to the mercy of our usual procedures. I want an ace up my sleeve.”

“I don’t see how I’d fit in.”

“You don’t see yourself working for BCI? Don’t worry. I figured Rod wasn’t your kind of guy. No, you’d report to me personally. We could set you up as some kind of adjunct investigator or consultant to my office, whatever would work for you.”

“How much of my time are we talking about?”

“That’s up to you.” When Gurney did not respond, he went on, “Mark Mellery must have admired and trusted you. He asked you to help him deal with a predator. I’m asking you to help me deal with that same predator. Whatever you can give me I’d be grateful for.”

This guy is good, thought Gurney. He’s got the sincerity thing down pat. He said, “I’ll talk to my wife about it. I’ll get back to you in the morning. Give me a number where I can reach you.”

The smile in the voice was huge. “I’ll give you my home number. I have a feeling you’re an early riser like me. Call anytime after six A.M.”

When he returned to the kitchen, Madeleine was at the table, but her mood had changed. She was reading the Times. He sat opposite her at a right angle so he was facing the old Franklin woodstove. He looked toward it without really seeing it and began massaging his forehead as if the decision confronting him were a muscle kink to be worked out.

“It’s not that difficult, is it?” said Madeleine without looking up from her paper.

“What?”

“What you’re thinking about.”

“The DA seems eager for my help.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“An outsider wouldn’t normally be brought into something like this.”

“But you’re not just any outsider, are you?”

“I guess my connection with Mellery makes a difference.”

She cocked her head, peering at him with her X-ray vision.

“He was very flattering,” said Gurney, trying not to sound flattered.

“Probably just describing your talents accurately.”

“Compared to Captain Rodriguez, anyone would look good.”

She smiled at his awkward humility. “What did he offer you?”

“A blank check, really. I’d operate through his office. Have to be very careful not to step on toes, though. I told him I’d decide by tomorrow morning.”

“Decide what?”

“Whether or not I want to do this.”

“Are you joking?”

“You think it’s that bad an idea?”

“I mean, are you joking about not having decided yet?”

“There’s a lot involved.”

“More than you may think, but it’s obvious you’re going to do it.”

She went back to reading her paper.

“What do you mean, more than I may think?” he asked after a long minute.

“Choices sometimes have consequences we don’t anticipate.”

“Like what?”

Her sad stare told him it was a stupid question.

After a pause he said, “I feel I owe something to Mark.”

A flicker of irony was added to the stare.

“Why the funny look?”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you call him by his first name.”

Chapter 27

The County Office Building, which had carried that bland designation since 1935, had formerly been called the Bumblebee Lunatic Asylum-founded in 1899 through the generosity (and temporary insanity, his disowned heirs argued to no avail) of the eponymous British transplant, Sir George Bumblebee. The murky redbrick edifice, infused with a century of soot, loomed darkly over the town square. It was about a mile from state police headquarters and the same hour-and-a-quarter drive from Walnut Crossing.

The inside was even less appealing than the outside, for the opposite reason. In the 1960s it had been gutted and modernized. Begrimed chandeliers and oak wainscoting were replaced by glaring fluorescent fixtures and white drywall. The thought crossed Gurney’s mind that the harsh modern light might serve to keep at bay the mad ghosts of its former residents-an odd thing for a man to be thinking on his way to negotiate the details of an employment contract, so he focused instead on what Madeleine had said that morning on his way out: “He needs you more than you need him.” He pondered that as he waited to pass through the elaborate lobby security apparatus. Once past that barrier, he followed a series of arrows to a door whose frosted-glass panel bore the words DISTRICT ATTORNEY in elegant black lettering.

Inside, a woman at a reception desk met his eyes as he entered. It was Gurney’s observation that a man’s choice of a female assistant is based on competence, sex, or prestige. The woman at the desk seemed to offer all three. Despite a possible age of fifty or so, her hair, skin, makeup, clothes, and figure were so well tended they suggested a focus on things physical that was almost electric. The assessing look in her eyes was cool as well as sensual. A little brass rectangle propped up on her desk announced that her name was Ellen Rackoff.

Before either of them spoke, a door to the right of her desk opened and Sheridan Kline stepped into the reception room. He grinned with an approximation of warmth.

“Nine o’clock on the dot! I’m not surprised. You strike me as a person who does exactly what he says he’s going to do.”

“It’s easier than the alternative.”

“What? Oh, yes, yes, of course.” Bigger grin, but less warmth. “Do you prefer coffee or tea?”

“Coffee.”

“Me, too. Never understood tea. You a dog man or a cat man?”

“Dog, I guess.”

“Ever notice that dog people prefer coffee? Tea is for cat people?”

Gurney didn’t think that was worth thinking about. Kline gestured for him to follow him into his office, then extended the gesture in the direction of a contemporary leather sofa, settling himself into a matching armchair on the other side of a low glass table and replacing his grin with a look of almost comical earnestness.

“Dave, let me say how happy I am that you’re willing to help us.”

“Assuming there’s an appropriate role for me.”

Kline blinked.

“Turf is a touchy issue,” said Gurney.

“Couldn’t agree more. Let me be frank-speak with an open kimono, as the saying goes.”

Gurney hid a grimace under a polite smile.

“People I know at the NYPD tell me impressive things about you. You were the lead investigator on some very big cases, the key man, the man who put it all together, but when the time came for congratulations, you always gave the credit to someone else. Word is, you had the biggest talent and smallest ego in the department.”

Gurney smiled, not at the compliment, which he knew was calculated, but at Kline’s expression, which seemed truly baffled by the notion of reluctance to take credit.

“I like the work. I don’t like being the center of attention.”

Kline looked for a long moment as if he were trying to identify an elusive flavor in his food, then gave it up.

He leaned forward. “Tell me how you think you can have an impact on this case.”

This was the critical question. Anticipating how it might be answered had occupied much of Gurney’s drive from Walnut Crossing.

“As a consulting analyst.”

“What does that mean?”

“The investigation team at BCI is responsible for gathering, inspecting, and preserving evidence, interviewing witnesses, following up leads, checking alibis, and formulating a working hypothesis regarding the identity, movements, and motives of the killer. That last piece is crucial, and it’s the one I believe I can help with.”

“How?”

“Looking at the facts in a complex situation and developing a reasonable narrative is the only part of my job I was any good at.”

“I doubt that.”

“Other people are better at questioning suspects, discovering evidence at the scene-”

“Like bullets no one else knew where to look for?”

“That was a lucky guess. There’s usually someone better than I am at each little piece of an investigation. But when it comes to fitting the pieces together, seeing what matters and what doesn’t, I can do that. On the job I wasn’t always right, but I was right often enough to make a difference.”

“So you have an ego after all.”

“If you want to call it that. I know my limitations, and I know my strengths.”

He also knew from his years of interrogations how certain personalities would respond to certain attitudes, and he wasn’t wrong about Kline. The man’s gaze reflected a more comfortable understanding of that exotic flavor he’d been trying to label.

“We should discuss compensation,” said Kline. “What I have in mind is an hourly rate that we’ve established for certain consultant categories in the past. I can offer you seventy-five dollars an hour, plus expenses-expenses within reason-starting now.”

“That’s fine.”

Kline extended his politician’s hand. “I look forward to working with you. Ellen has put together a packet of forms, releases, affidavits, confidentiality agreements. It may take you some time if you want to read what you’re signing. She’ll give you an office you can use. There are details we’ll need to work out as we go along. I’ll personally bring you up to date on any new information I receive from BCI or from my own people, and I’ll include you in general briefings like the one yesterday. If you need to talk to investigative staff, arrange that through my office. To talk to witnesses, suspects, persons of interest-ditto, though my office. That okay with you?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t waste words. I don’t, either. Now that we’re working together, let me ask you something.” Kline sat back and steepled his fingers, lending his question added weight. “Why would you shoot someone first, then stab them fourteen times?”

“That large a number would normally suggest an act of rage or a cold-blooded effort to create an appearance of rage. The exact number may be meaningless.”

“But shooting him first…”

“It suggests that the purpose of the stabbing was something other than homicide.”

“I don’t follow you,” said Kline, cocking his head like a curious bird.

“Mellery was shot at very close range. The bullet severed the carotid artery. There was no sign in the snow that the gun was dropped or thrown to the ground. Therefore the killer must have taken the time to remove the material he’d wrapped around it to deaden the sound and then replace the gun in a pocket or holster before switching to the broken bottle and getting in position to stab the victim-now lying in the snow unconscious. The arterial wound would have been spurting blood dramatically at that point. So why bother with the stabbing? It wasn’t to kill the victim-who was, for all practical purposes, already dead. No, the perpetrator’s objective must have been either to obliterate the evidence of the gunshot-”

“Why?” asked Kline, moving forward in his chair.

“I don’t know why. It’s just a possibility. But it’s more likely, given the content of the notes preceding the attack and the trouble he took to bring the broken bottle, the stabbing has some ritual significance.”

“Satanic?” Kline’s expression of conventional horror poorly concealed his appetite for the media potential of such a motive.

“I doubt it. As crazy as the notes seem, they don’t strike me as being crazy in that particular way. No, I mean ‘ritual’ in the sense that doing the murder in a specific way was important to him.”

“A revenge fantasy?”

“Could be,” said Gurney. “He wouldn’t be the first killer to have spent months or years imagining how he was going to get even with someone.”

Kline looked troubled. “If the key part of the attack was the stabbing, why bother with the gun?”

“Instant incapacity. He wanted it to be a sure thing, and a gun is a surer way than a broken bottle to incapacitate a victim. After all the planning that went into this business, he didn’t want anything to go wrong.”

Kline nodded, then jumped to another piece of the puzzle.

“Rodriguez insists the murderer is one of the guests.”

Gurney smiled. “Which one?”

“He’s not ready to say, but that’s where he’s putting his money. You don’t agree?”

“The idea is not completely crazy. The guests are housed on the institute grounds, which puts them all, if not at the scene, at least conveniently close to the scene. They’re definitely an odd lot-druggy, emotionally erratic, at least one with major-league criminal connections.”

“But?”

“There are practical problems.”

“Like what?”

“Footprints and alibis, to begin with. Everyone agrees the snow began around dusk and continued until after midnight. The murderer’s footprints entered the property from the public road after the snow had stopped completely.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“The prints are in the snow, but there’s no new snow in the prints. For one of the guests to have made those prints, he would have to have left the main house before the snow fell, since there are no prints in the snow leading away from the house.”

“In other words…”

“In other words, someone would have to have been missing from dusk to midnight. But no one was.”

“How do you know that?”

“Officially, I don’t. Let’s just say I heard a rumor from Jack Hardwick. According to the interview summaries, every individual was seen by at least six other individuals at various times in the evening. So unless everyone is lying, everyone was present.”

Kline looked reluctant to brush aside the possibility that everyone might be lying.

“Maybe someone in the house had help,” he said.

“You mean maybe someone in the house hired a hit man?”

“Something like that.”

“Then why be there at all?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“The only reason the current guests are under any suspicion at all is their physical proximity to the murder. If you were hiring an outsider to come in and do the murder, why put yourself in that proximity to begin with?”

“Excitement?”

“I guess that’s conceivable,” said Gurney with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.

“All right, let’s forget about the guests for the moment,” said Kline. “How about a mob hit set up by someone other than one of the guests?”

“Is that Rodriguez’s backup theory?”

“He thinks it’s a possibility. I gather from your expression that you don’t.”

“I don’t see the logic of it. I don’t think it would even come to mind if Patty Cakes didn’t happen to be one of the guests. First, there’s nothing currently known about Mark Mellery that could make him a mob target-”

“Wait a minute. Suppose the persuasive guru got one of his guests-someone like Patty Cakes-to confess something to him, you know, in the interest of inner harmony or spiritual peace or whatever bullshit Mellery was selling these people.”

“And?”

“And maybe later, when he’s home, the bad guy gets to thinking that he might have been a little rash with all that honesty and openness. Harmony with the universe might be a swell thing, but maybe not worth the risk of someone’s having information that could cause you serious problems. Maybe when he’s away from the charm of the guru, the bad guy reverts to thinking in more practical terms. Maybe he hires someone to eliminate the risk he’s concerned about.”

“Interesting hypothesis.”

“But?”

“But there isn’t a contract guy on earth who’d bother with the kind of mind games involved in this particular murder. Men who kill for money don’t hang their boots from tree limbs and leave poems on corpses.”

Kline looked like he might debate this but stopped when the door opened after a perfunctory knock. The sleek creature from the reception desk entered with a lacquered tray on which there were two china cups and saucers, an elegantly spouted pot, a delicate sugar bowl and creamer, and a Wedgwood plate bearing four biscotti. She set the tray on the coffee table.

“Rodriguez called,” she said, glancing at Kline, then added, as if answering a telepathic question, “He’s on his way, said he’d be here in a few minutes.”

Kline looked at Gurney as if he were trying to read his reaction. “Rod called me earlier,” he explained. “He seemed eager to express some opinions on the case. I suggested he drop by while you were here. I like everyone to know everything at the same time. The more we all know, the better. No secrets.”

“Good idea,” said Gurney, suspecting that Kline’s motivation for having them both there at the same time had nothing to do with openness and everything to do with a penchant for managing by conflict and confrontation.

Kline’s assistant left the room, but not before Gurney caught the knowing Mona Lisa smile on her face that confirmed his own view of the situation.

Kline poured both coffees. The china looked antique and expensive, yet he handled it with neither pride nor concern, reinforcing Gurney’s impression that the wunderkind DA had been to the manner born, and law enforcement was a step toward something more consistent with patrician birth. What was it Hardwick had whispered to him at yesterday’s meeting? Something about a desire to be governor? Maybe cynical old Hardwick was right again. Or maybe Gurney was reading too much into how a man held a cup.

“By the way,” said Kline, leaning back in his chair, “that bullet in the wall, the one they thought was a.357-it wasn’t. That was just a guess based on the size of the hole in the wall before they dug it out. Ballistics says it’s actually a.38 Special.”

“That’s odd.”

“Pretty common, actually. Standard sidearm in most police departments until the 1980s.”

“Common caliber, but an odd choice.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The killer went to some trouble to muffle the sound of the shot, make it as quiet as possible. If noise was a major concern, a.38 Special was an odd weapon to choose. A.22 pistol would have made a lot more sense.”

“Maybe it’s the only weapon he had.”

“Maybe.”

“But you don’t think so?”

“He’s a perfectionist. He’d make absolutely sure he had the right gun.”

Kline gave Gurney a cross-examiner’s stare. “You’re contradicting yourself. First you said that the evidence shows he wanted to keep the shot as quiet as possible. Then you said he picked the wrong gun to do that. Now you’re saying he’s not the kind of guy who’d pick the wrong gun.”

“Keeping the shot quiet was important. But maybe something else was more important.”

“Like what?”

“If there’s a ritual aspect to this affair, then the choice of gun could be part of that. The obsession with carrying out the murder in a certain way could take precedence over the sound problem. He’d do it the way he felt compelled to do it and deal with the noise as best he could.”

“When you say ritual, I hear psycho. Just how crazy do you think this guy is?”

“Crazy is not a term I find useful,” said Gurney. “Jeffrey Dahmer was judged legally sane, and he ate his victims. David Berkowitz was judged legally sane, and he killed people because a satanic dog told him to.”

“Is that what you think we’re dealing with here?”

“Not exactly. Our killer is vengeful and obsessed-obsessed to the point of emotional derangement, but probably not to the point of eating body parts or taking orders from a dog. He’s obviously very sick, but there’s nothing in the notes that reflect the DSM criteria for psychosis.”

There was a knock on the door.

Kline frowned thoughtfully, pursed his lips, seemed to be weighing Gurney’s assessment-or perhaps he was just trying to look like a man not easily distracted by a mere knock on the door.

“Come in,” he finally said in a loud voice.

The door opened, and Rodriguez entered. He couldn’t entirely conceal his displeasure at seeing Gurney.

“Rod!” boomed Kline. “Good of you to come over. Have a seat.”

Conspicuously avoiding the couch on which Gurney sat, he chose an armchair facing Kline.

The DA smiled heartily. Gurney guessed it was at the prospect of witnessing a clash of viewpoints.

“Rod wanted to drop by to share his current perspective on the case.” He sounded like a referee introducing one fighter to another.

“I look forward to hearing it,” said Gurney mildly.

Not mildly enough to keep Rodriguez from interpreting it as a provocation in disguise. He required no further urging to share his perspective.

“Everybody’s focused on the trees,” he said, loudly enough to be heard in a much larger room than Kline’s office. “We’re forgetting the forest!”

“The forest being…?” asked Kline.

“The forest being the huge issue of opportunity. Everybody’s getting tangled up in motive speculation and the crazy little details of the method. We’re being distracted from Issue Number One-a houseful of drug addicts and other criminal slimebags with easy access to the victim.”

Gurney wondered if this reaction was the result of the captain’s feeling his control of the case threatened or if there was more to it.

“What are you suggesting should be done?” Kline asked.

“I’m having all the guests reinterviewed, and I’m having deeper background checks done. We’re going to turn over some rocks in the lives of these cokehead creeps. I’m telling you right now-one of them did it, and it’s only a matter of time until we find out which one.”

“What do you think, Dave?” Kline’s tone was almost too casual, as though he were trying to hide the pleasure he derived from provoking a battle.

“Reinterviews and background checks could be helpful,” said Gurney blandly.

“Helpful but not necessary?”

“We won’t know until they’re done. It could also be helpful to address the question of opportunity, or access to the victim, in a broader context-for example, inns or bed-and-breakfasts in the immediate vicinity that might be almost as convenient as the guest quarters of the institute.”

“I’ll lay odds it was a guest,” said Rodriguez. “When a swimmer disappears in shark-infested waters, it isn’t because he was kidnapped by a passing water-skier.” He glared at Gurney, whose smile he interpreted as a challenge. “Let’s get real about this!”

“Are we looking into the bed-and-breakfasts, Rod?” asked Kline.

“We’re looking into everything.”

“Good. Dave, is there anything else that would be on your priority list?”

“Nothing that’s not already in the pipeline. Lab work on the blood; foreign fibers on and around the victim; brand, availability, and any peculiarities of the boots; ballistics matches on the bullet; analysis of the audio recording of the perp’s call to Mellery, with enhancements of the background sounds, and originating transmission-tower ID if it was a cell call; landline and cell records of the current guests; handwriting analysis of the notes, with paper and ink IDs; psych profile based on communications and murder MO; cross-check of the FBI’s threatening-letters database. I think that would cover it. Am I forgetting anything, Captain?”

Before Rodriguez could answer, which he seemed in no rush to do, Kline’s assistant opened the door and stepped into the office. “Excuse me, sir,” she said with a deference that seemed designed for public consumption. “There is a Sergeant Wigg here to see the captain.”

Rodriguez frowned.

“Send her in,” said Kline, whose appetite for confrontation seemed boundless.

The genderless redhead from the BCI headquarters meeting entered, wearing the same plain blue suit and carrying the same laptop.

“What do you want, Wigg?” asked Rodriguez, more annoyed than curious.

“We discovered something, sir, that I thought was important enough to bring to your attention.”

“Well?”

“It’s about the boots, sir.”

“Boots?”

“The boots in the tree, sir.”

“What about them?”

“May I place this on the coffee table?” asked Wigg, indicating her laptop.

Rodriguez looked at Kline. Kline nodded.

Thirty seconds and a few keystrokes later, the three men were looking at a split-screen pair of photos of apparently identical boot prints.

“The ones on the left are actual prints from the scene. The ones on the right are prints we made in the same snow with the boots recovered from the tree.”

“So the boots that made the trail are the boots we found at the end of the trail. You didn’t need to come all the way to this meeting to tell us that.”

Gurney couldn’t resist interrupting. “I think Sergeant Wigg came to tell us just the opposite.”

“Are you saying the boots in the tree weren’t the boots the killer wore?” asked Kline.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Rodriguez

“Very little in this case does,” said Kline. “Sergeant?”

“The boots are the same brand, same style, same size. Both pairs are brand new. But they are definitely two separate pairs. Snow, especially snow within ten degrees of the freezing point, provides an excellent medium for registering detail. The relevant detail in this instance is this tiny deformity in this portion of the tread.” She pointed with a sharp pencil to an almost invisible raised speck on the heel of the boot on the right, the one from the tree. “That deformity, which probably occurred during the manufacturing process, shows up on every print we made with this boot, but not on any of the prints at the scene. The only plausible explanation is that they were made by different boots.”

“Surely there could be other explanations,” said Rodriguez.

“What did you have in mind, sir?”

“I’m just pointing out the likelihood that something is being overlooked.”

Kline cleared his throat. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume Sergeant Wigg is right and we’re dealing with two pairs-one worn by the perp and one left hanging in the tree at the end of the trail. What on earth does that mean? What does it tell us?”

Rodriguez eyed the computer screen resentfully. “Not a damn thing of any use in catching the killer.”

“How about you, Dave?”

“It tells me the same thing as the note left on the body. It’s just another kind of note. It says, ‘Catch me if you can, but you can’t, because I’m too smart for you.’”

“How the hell does a second pair of boots tell you that?” There was anger in Rodriguez’s voice.

Gurney replied with an almost sleepy calmness-his characteristic reaction to anger as long as he could remember. “Alone, they wouldn’t tell me anything. But add them to the other peculiar details and the whole picture looks more and more like an elaborate game.”

“If it’s a game, the goal is to distract us, and it’s succeeding,” sneered Rodriguez.

When Gurney did not respond, Kline prodded him. “You look like you might not agree with that.”

“I think the game is more than a distraction. I think it’s the whole point.”

Rodriguez rose from his chair in disgust. “Unless you need me for anything else, Sheridan, I have to get back to my office.”

After giving Kline a grim handshake, he left, followed after a short pause by Wigg. Kline concealed whatever reaction he had to the departure.

“So tell me,” he said after a moment, leaning toward Gurney, “what should we be doing that we’re not doing? Clearly you don’t see the situation the way Rod does.”

Gurney shrugged. “There’s no harm in taking a closer look at the guests. It would need to be done at some point. But the captain has higher hopes than I do that it will lead to an arrest.”

“You’re saying it’s essentially a waste of time?”

“It’s a necessary process of elimination. I just don’t think the murderer is one of the guests. The captain keeps emphasizing the importance of opportunity-the supposed convenience of the killer’s being on the property. But I see it as an inconvenience-too great a chance of being seen leaving or returning to his room, too much stuff to be concealed. Where would he keep the lawn chair, boots, bottle, gun? The risks and complications would be unacceptable to this kind of individual.”

Kline raised a curious eyebrow, and Gurney went on.

“On a disorganized-to-organized personality axis, this guy is off the scale on the organized end. His attention to detail is extraordinary.”

“You mean like reweaving the webbing on the lawn chair to make it all white and reduce its visibility in the snow?”

“Yes. He’s also very cool under pressure. He didn’t run from the crime scene, he walked. The footprints from the patio to the woods are so unhurried you’d think he was out for a stroll.”

“That frenzy of stabbing the victim with a shattered whiskey bottle doesn’t sound cool to me.”

“If it happened in a bar, you’d be right. But remember that the bottle was carefully prepared beforehand, even washed and wiped clean of fingerprints. I’d say the appearance of frenzy was as planned as everything else.”

“Okay,” agreed Kline slowly. “Cool, calm, organized. What else?”

“A perfectionist in the way he communicates. Well read-with a feeling for language and meter. Just between us, I’ll go way out on a limb and say that the poems have an odd formality that feels to me like the affected gentility you sometimes see in first-generation sophistication.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“The educated child of uneducated parents, desperate to set himself apart. But as I said, I’m out on a limb with that-way past any solid evidence.”

“Anything else?”

“Mild-mannered on the outside, full of hate on the inside.”

“And you don’t think he’s one of the guests?”

“No. From his point of view, the advantage of increased proximity would be trumped by the disadvantage of increased risk.”

“You’re a very logical man, Detective Gurney. Do you think the killer is that logical?”

“Oh, yes. As logical as he is pathological. Off the scale on both counts.”

Chapter 28

Gurney’s route home from Kline’s office passed through Peony, so he decided to make a stop at the institute.

The temporary ID Kline’s assistant had provided him with got him past the cop at the gate, no questions asked. As Gurney breathed in the chilly air, he reflected that the day was eerily similar to the morning after the murder. The layer of snow, which in the intervening days had partly melted away, was now restored. Nighttime flurries, common in the higher elevations of the Catskills, had freshened and whitened the landscape.

Gurney decided to rewalk the killer’s route, thinking he might notice something about the surroundings he’d missed. He proceeded along the driveway, through the parking area, around to the back of the barn where the lawn chair was found. He looked about him, trying to understand why the killer chose that spot to sit. His concentration was broken by the sounds of a door opening and slamming and a harsh, familiar voice.

“Jesus Christ! We ought to call in an airstrike and level the fucking place.”

Thinking it best to make his presence known, Gurney stepped through the high hedge that separated the barn area from the rear patio of the house. Sergeant Hardwick and Investigator Tom Cruise Blatt greeted him with unwelcoming stares.

“What the hell are you doing here?” asked Hardwick.

“Temporary arrangement with the DA. Just wanted to take another look at the scene. Sorry to interrupt, but I thought you might want to know I was here.”

“In the bushes?”

“Behind the barn. I was standing where the killer was sitting.”

“What for?”

“Better question would be what was he there for?”

Hardwick shrugged. “Lurking in the shadows? Taking a smoke break in his fucking lawn chair? Waiting for the right moment?”

“What would make the moment right?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I’m not sure. But why wait here? And why arrive at the scene so early you have to bring a chair with you?”

“Maybe he wanted to wait until the Mellerys went to sleep. Maybe he wanted to watch until all the lights went out.”

“According to Caddy Mellery, they went to bed and turned out the lights hours earlier. And the phone call that woke them was almost certainly from the murderer-meaning that he wanted them awake, not asleep. And if he wanted to know whether the lights were out, why station himself in one of the few spots where he couldn’t see the upstairs windows? In fact, from the position of that chair, he could barely have seen the house at all.”

“What the hell is all that supposed to mean?” blustered Hardwick, his tone belied by an uneasy look in his eyes.

“It means either that a very smart, very careful perp went to great lengths to do something senseless or that our reconstruction of what happened here is wrong.”

Blatt, who’d been following the conversation as if it were a tennis game, stared at Hardwick.

Hardwick looked like he was tasting something unpleasant. “Any chance you could track down some coffee?”

Blatt pursed his lips by way of complaint but retreated into the house, presumably to do what he was told.

Hardwick took his time lighting a cigarette. “There’s something else that doesn’t make sense. I was looking at a report on the footprint data. The spacing between the prints coming from the public road to the chair location behind the barn averages three inches greater than between the prints going from the body to the woods.”

“Meaning that the perp was walking faster when he arrived than when he left?”

“Meaning exactly that.”

“So he was in a bigger hurry to get to the barn and sit and wait than to get away from the scene after the murder?”

“That’s Wigg’s interpretation of the data, and I can’t come up with another one.”

Gurney shook his head. “I’m telling you, Jack, our lens is out of focus. And by the way, there’s another odd bit of data bothering me. Where exactly was that whiskey bottle found?”

“About a hundred feet from the body, alongside the departing prints.”

“Why there?”

“Because that’s where he dropped it. What’s the problem?”

“Why carry it there? Why not leave it by the body?”

“An oversight. In the heat of the moment, he didn’t realize he still had it in his hand. When he noticed it, he tossed it. I don’t see the problem.”

“Maybe there isn’t any. But the footprints are very regular, relaxed, unhurried-like everything was proceeding according to plan.”

“What the hell are you getting at?” Hardwick was showing the frustration of a man trying to hold his groceries inside a ripped bag.

“Everything about the case feels super cool, super planned-very cerebral. My gut tells me that everything is where it is for a reason.”

“You’re telling me he carried the weapon a hundred feet away and dropped it there for a premeditated reason?”

“That would be my guess.”

“What goddamn reason could he have?”

“What effect did it have on us?”

“What are you talking about?”

“This guy is as much focused on the police as he was on Mark Mellery. Has it occurred to you that the oddities of the crime scene might be part of a game he’s playing with us?”

“No, that did not occur to me. Frankly, it’s kind of far out.”

Gurney restrained an urge to argue the point and said instead, “I gather Captain Rod still thinks our man is one of the guests.”

“Yeah, ‘one of the lunatics in the asylum’ is how he puts it.”

“You agree?”

“That they’re lunatics? Absolutely. That one of them is the murderer? Maybe.”

“And maybe not?”

“I’m not sure. But don’t tell Rodriguez that.”

“Does he have any favorite candidates?”

“Any of the drug addicts would be okay with him. He was going on yesterday about the Mellery Institute for Spiritual Renewal being nothing but a pricey spa for rich scumbags.”

“I don’t get the connection.”

“Between what?”

“What exactly does drug addiction have to do with Mark Mellery’s murder?”

Hardwick took a final thoughtful drag from his cigarette, then flicked the butt into the damp earth beneath the holly hedge. Gurney reflected that this was not the sort of thing one was supposed to do at a crime scene, even after it had been fine-combed, but it was exactly the sort of thing he’d gotten used to during their former collaboration. Nor was he surprised when Hardwick walked over to the hedge to extinguish the smoldering butt with the toe of his shoe. That was the way the man gave himself time to think about what he was going to say, or not say, next. When the butt was thoroughly extinguished and buried a good three inches in the soil, Hardwick spoke.

“Probably not much to do with the murder, but a lot to do with Rodriguez.”

“Anything you can talk about?”

“He has a daughter in Greystone.”

“The mental hospital down in New Jersey?”

“Yeah. She did some permanent damage. Club drugs, crystal meth, crack. Fried a few brain circuits, tried to kill her mother. The way Rodriguez sees it, every other drug addict in the world is responsible for what happened to her. It’s not a subject he’s rational about.”

“So he thinks an addict killed Mellery?”

“That’s the way he wants it to be, so that’s what he thinks.”

A damp, isolated gust of wind swept across the patio from the direction of the snow-covered lawn. Gurney shivered and stuck his hands deep into his jacket pockets. “I thought he just wanted to impress Kline.”

“That, too. For a dickhead he’s pretty complicated. Control freak. Nasty little bundle of ambition. Totally insecure. Obsessed with punishing addicts. Not too happy about you, by the way.”

“Any specific reason?”

“Doesn’t like deviations from standard procedure. Doesn’t like smart guys. Doesn’t like anyone closer to Kline than he is. Who the fuck knows what else?”

“Doesn’t sound like the ideal frame of mind for leading an investigation.”

“Yeah, well, what else is new in the wonderful world of criminal justice? But just because a guy is a fucked-up asshole doesn’t mean he’s always wrong.”

Gurney contemplated this bit of Hardwickian wisdom without comment, then changed the subject. “Does the focus on the guests mean other avenues are being ignored?”

“Like what?”

“Like talking to people in the area. Motels, inns, B &Bs…”

“Nothing is being ignored,” said Hardwick with sudden defensiveness. “The households in the vicinity-there aren’t that many, less than a dozen on the road from the village up to the institute-were contacted within the first twenty-four hours, an effort that produced zero information. Nobody heard anything, saw anything, remembered anything. No strangers, no noises, no vehicles at odd hours, nothing out of the ordinary. Couple of people thought they heard coyotes. Couple more thought they heard a screech owl.”

“What time was that?”

“What time was what?”

“The screech owl.”

“I have no idea, because they had no idea. Middle of the night was as close as they could get.”

“Lodging facilities?”

“What?”

“Did someone check the lodging facilities in the area?”

“There’s one motel just outside the village-run-down place that caters to hunters. Empty that night. Only other places within a three-mile radius are two bed-and-breakfasts. One is closed for the winter. The other one, if I’m remembering right, had one room booked the night of the murder-some bird-watcher guy and his mother.”

“Bird-watching in November?”

“Seemed odd to me, too, so I checked some bird-watching websites. Turns out the serious ones love the winter-foliage off the trees, better visibility, lots of pheasants, owls, grouse, chickadees, blah-blah-blah.”

“You talked to the people?”

“Blatt spoke to one of the owners-pair of fags, silly names, no useful information.”

“Silly names?”

“Yeah, one of them was Peachpit, something like that.”

“Peachpit?”

“Something like that. No, Plumstone, that was it. Paul Plumstone. You believe that?”

“Anyone speak to the bird-watchers?”

“I think they’d left before Blatt stopped by, but don’t quote me on that.”

“No one followed up?”

“Jesus Christ! What the hell would they know about anything? You want to visit the Peachpits, be my guest. Name of the place is The Laurels, mile and a half down the mountain from the institute. I have a certain amount of manpower assigned to this case, and I can’t goddamn waste it chasing after every warm body that ever passed through Peony.”

“Right.”

The meaning of Gurney’s reply was vague at best, but it seemed to somehow appease Hardwick, who said in a tone that was almost cordial, “Speaking of manpower, I need to get back to work. What did you say you were doing here?”

“I thought if I walked around the grounds again, something might occur to me.”

“That’s the methodology of the NYPD’s ace crime solver? That’s pathetic!”

“I know, Jack, I know. But right now it’s the best I can do.”

Hardwick went back into the house shaking his head in exaggerated disbelief.

Gurney inhaled the moist smell of the snow, and, as always, it displaced for a moment all rational thoughts, stirring a powerful childhood emotion for which he had no words. He set out across the white lawn toward the woods, the snow smell flooding him with memories-memories of stories his father had read to him when he was five or six years old, stories that were more vivid to him than anything in his actual life-stories about pioneers, cabins in the wilderness, trails in the forest, good Indians, bad Indians, snapped twigs, moccasin impressions in the grass, the broken stem of a fern offering crucial evidence of the enemy’s passage, and the cries of the forest birds, some real, some mimicked by the Indians as coded communications-images so concrete, so richly detailed. It was ironic, he thought, how the memories of the stories his father had told him in early childhood had replaced most of his memories of the man himself. Of course, other than telling him those stories, his father had never had much to do with him. Mainly his father worked. Worked and kept to himself.

Worked and kept to himself. This life-summarizing phrase, it struck Gurney, described his own behavior as accurately as it did his father’s. The barriers he’d once erected against recognizing such similarities seemed lately to be developing large leaks. He suspected not just that he was becoming his father but that he had done so long ago. Worked and kept to himself. What a small and chilly sense of his life it conveyed. How humiliating it was to see how much of one’s time on earth could be captured in so short a sentence. What sort of husband was he if his energies were so circumscribed? And what sort of father? What sort of father is so absorbed in his professional priorities that… No, enough of that.

Gurney walked into the woods, following what he recalled to be the route of the footprints, now obscured by the new snow. When he came to the evergreen thicket where the trail had, implausibly, ended, he inhaled the piney fragrance, listened to the deep silence of the place, and waited for inspiration. None came. Chagrined at expecting otherwise, he forced himself to review for the twentieth time what he actually knew about the events of the night of the murder. That the killer had entered the property on foot from the public road? That he was carrying a.38 Police Special, a broken Four Roses bottle, a lawn chair, an extra pair of boots, and a mini tape player with the animal screeches that got Mellery out of bed? That he was wearing Tyvek coveralls, gloves, and a thick goose-down jacket he could use to muffle the gunshot? That he sat behind the barn smoking cigarettes? That he got Mellery to come out onto the patio, shot him dead, then stabbed the body at least fourteen times? That he then walked calmly across the open lawn and half a mile into the woods, hung an extra pair of boots from a tree branch, and disappeared without a trace?

Gurney’s face had worked itself into a grimace-partly because of the damp, darkening chill of the day and partly because now, more clearly than ever, he realized that what he “knew” about the crime didn’t make a damn bit of sense.

Chapter 29

November was his least favorite month, a month of waning light, an uncertain month shambling between autumn and winter.

This sense of the season seemed to exacerbate the feeling that he was stumbling around in a fog on the Mellery case, blind to something right in front of him.

When he arrived home from Peony that day, he decided, uncharacteristically, to share his confusion with Madeleine, who was sitting at the pine table over the remains of tea and cranberry cake.

“I’d love to get your input on something,” he said, immediately regretting his word choice. Madeleine was not fond of terms like input.

She tilted her head curiously, which he took as an invitation.

“The Mellery Institute sits on a hundred acres between Filchers Brook Road and Thornbush Lane in the hills above the village. There are about ninety acres of woods, maybe ten acres of lawns, flower beds, a parking area, and three buildings-the main lecture center, which also includes the offices and guest rooms, the private Mellery residence, and a barn for maintenance equipment.”

Madeleine raised her eyes to the clock on the kitchen wall, and he hurried on. “The responding officers found a set of footprints that entered the property from Filchers Brook Road and led to a chair behind the barn. From the chair they led to the spot where Mellery was killed and from there to a location half a mile away in the woods, where they stopped. No more footprints. No hint of how the individual who left the prints up to that point could have gotten away without leaving any further prints.”

“Is this a joke?”

“I’m describing the actual evidence at the scene.”

“What about the other road you mentioned?”

“Thornbush Lane is over a hundred feet from the last footprint.”

“The bear came back,” said Madeleine after a short silence.

“What?” Gurney stared at her, uncomprehending.

“The bear.” She nodded toward the side window.

Between the window and their dormant, rime-encrusted garden beds, a steel shepherd’s-crook support for a finch feeder had been bent to the ground, and the feeder itself had been broken in half.

“I’ll take care of it later,” said Gurney, annoyed at the irrelevant comment. “Do you have any reaction to the footprint problem?”

Madeleine yawned. “I think it’s silly, and the person who did it is crazy.”

“But how did he do it?”

“It’s like the number trick.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what difference does it make how he did it?”

“Tell me more,” said Gurney, his curiosity slightly greater than his irritation.

“How doesn’t matter. The question is why, and the answer is obvious.”

“And the obvious answer is…?”

“He wants to prove that you’re a pack of idiots.”

Her answer put Gurney in two emotional places at once-pleased that she agreed with him that the police were targets in the case, but not so pleased with how much emphasis she put on idiots.

“Maybe he walked backwards,” she suggested with a shrug. “Maybe where you think the footprints went is where they came from, and where you think they came from is where they went.”

It was among the possibilities that Gurney had considered and dismissed. “There are two problems. First, it just moves the question of how the prints could stop in the middle of nowhere to how they could start in the middle of nowhere. Second, the tracks are very evenly spaced. It’s hard to imagine someone walking backwards half a mile through the woods without stumbling even once.”

Then it occurred to him that even the smallest sign of interest from Madeleine was something he’d like to encourage, so he added warmly, “But actually, it’s a pretty interesting thought-so please keep thinking.”

At two o’clock the following morning, gazing at the rectangle of his bedroom window, faintly illuminated by a quarter moon behind a cloud, Gurney was the one who was still thinking-and still pondering Madeleine’s observation that the direction in which the footprints pointed and the direction in which they had actually traveled were separate matters. That was true, but how did it help in the interpretation of the data? Even if someone could walk that far backwards over uneven terrain without a single misstep, which no one could, that hypothesis only served to turn the inexplicable ending of the trail into an inexplicable beginning.

Or did it?

Suppose…

But that would be unlikely. Still, just suppose for the moment…

To quote Sherlock Holmes, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

“Madeleine?”

“Hmm?”

“Sorry to wake you. It’s important.”

Her answer was a long sigh.

“Are you awake?”

“I am now.”

“Listen. Suppose the killer enters the property not from the main road but from the back road. Suppose he arrives several hours before the crime-in fact, just before it starts to snow. Suppose he walks into the little pine grove from the back road with his little lawn chair and other paraphernalia, puts on his Tyvek jumpsuit and his latex gloves, and waits.”

“In the woods?”

“In the pine grove, at the spot where we thought the footprints ended. He sits there and waits until the snow stops-a little after midnight. Then he gets up, takes his chair, whiskey bottle, gun, and mini tape player with the animal screeches, and walks the half mile to the house. On the way he calls Mellery on his cell phone to make sure he’s awake enough to hear the animal noises-”

“Wait a minute. I thought you said he couldn’t walk backwards through the woods.”

“He didn’t. He didn’t have to. You were right to separate the toe-heel orientation of the footprints from their actual direction-but we need to make one more separation. Suppose the soles of the shoes were separated from the uppers.”

“How?”

“All the killer had to do was cut the soles off one pair of boots and glue them on another pair-backwards. Then he could walk forward easily and leave a neat trail of impressions behind him that seemed to be going in the direction he was coming from.”

“And the lawn chair?”

“He takes it to the patio. Maybe lays his various items on it while he wraps the goose-down parka around his gun as a partial silencer. The chair marks could easily be obscured by his own footprints, so no one would see them later. Then he plays his tape of the screeching animals to bring Mellery to the back door. There are variations in exactly how all this could be done, but the bottom line is he gets Mellery out onto the patio at gunpoint and shoots him. When Mellery goes down, the killer takes the broken bottle and stabs him repeatedly. Then he tosses the bottle back toward the footprints he made on his way to the patio-footprints that, of course, point away from the patio.”

“Why not just leave it by the body-or take it with him?”

“He didn’t take it because he wanted us to find it. The whiskey bottle is part of the game, part of what this whole thing is about. And it would be my guess that he threw it alongside the seemingly departing footprints to put the icing on the cake of that particular little deception.”

“That’s a pretty subtle detail.”

“Like the subtle detail of leaving a pair of boots at what seemed to be the end of the trail-but, of course, he left them there as he was starting out.”

“So they weren’t the boots that made the tracks?”

“No, but we already knew that. There’s a tech at the BCI lab who found a tiny difference between the tread of one of the boots and the imprints left in the snow. At first it made no sense. But it fits this revised version of the facts-perfectly.”

Madeleine said nothing for a few moments, but he could almost feel her mind absorbing, evaluating, testing the new scenario for weak points.

“So after he tosses the bottle, what then?”

“Then he goes from the patio to the back of the barn, sets the lawn chair there, and tosses a handful of cigarette butts on the ground in front of it to make it look like he’d been sitting there before the murder. He takes off the Tyvek suit and latex gloves, puts his parka on, walks around the far side of barn-leaving those goddamn backwards footprints-heads out onto Filchers Brook Road, which the town has plowed, so no prints are left there, and walks to his car on Thornbush Lane, or down to the village, or wherever.”

“Did the Peony police see anyone when they were on their way up the road?”

“Apparently not, but he could easily have stepped into the woods, or…” He paused to consider the options.

“Or…?”

“It’s not the most likely possibility, but I’ve been told there’s a bed-and-breakfast place on the mountain that BCI was supposed to be checking. It sounds bizarre after nearly hacking his victim’s head off, but our homicidal maniac may simply have strolled back to a cozy little B &B.”

They lay silently side by side in the dark for several long minutes, Gurney’s mind racing back and forth over his reconstruction of the crime like a man who has just launched a homebuilt boat and is checking it intently for possible leaks. When he was confident there were no major holes, he asked Madeleine what she thought.

“The perfect adversary,” she said.

“What?”

“The perfect adversary.”

“Meaning?”

“You love puzzles. So does he. A marriage made in heaven.”

“Or hell?”

“Whichever. By the way, there’s something wrong with those notes.”

“Wrong with… what?”

Madeleine had a way of skipping through a chain of associations that sometimes left him a long step behind.

“The notes you showed me, from the killer to Mellery-the first two, and then the poems. I was trying to remember exactly what was in each one.”

“And?”

“And I was having a hard time, even though I have a good memory. Then I realized why. There’s nothing real in them.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are no specifics. No mention of what Mellery actually did or who was hurt. Why so vague? No names, dates, places, no concrete references to anything. Peculiar, isn’t it?”

“The numbers six fifty-eight and nineteen were pretty specific.”

“But they didn’t mean anything to Mellery, other than the fact that he’d thought of them. And that had to be a trick.”

“If it was, I haven’t been able to figure it out.”

“Ah, but you will. You’re very good at connecting the dots.” She yawned. “No one’s better at it than you.” There was no detectable irony in her voice.

He lay there in the dark next to her, relaxing ever so briefly in the comfort of her praise. Then his mind began combing restlessly through the killer’s notes, reviewing their language in the light of her observation.

“They were specific enough to scare the shit out of Mellery,” he said.

She sighed sleepily. “Or unspecific enough.”

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe there was no specific event to be specific about.”

“But if Mellery didn’t do anything, why was he killed?”

She made a little sound in her throat that was the equivalent of a shrug. “I don’t know. I just know there’s something wrong with those notes. Time to go back to sleep.”

Chapter 30

He awoke at dawn feeling better than he had for weeks, maybe months. It might be an exaggeration to say that his explanation of the boot mystery meant that the first domino had fallen, but that was the way it felt as he drove across the county, eastward into the rising sun, on his way to the B &B on Filchers Brook Road in Peony.

It occurred to him that interviewing “the fags” without clearing it with Kline’s office or with BCI might be stretching the rules. But what the hell-if someone wanted to slap his wrist later, he’d survive. Besides, he had a feeling that things were starting to go his way. “There is a tide in the affairs of men…”

With less than a mile to go to the Filchers Brook intersection, his phone rang. It was Ellen Rackoff.

“District Attorney Kline got some news he wanted you to know about. He said to tell you that Sergeant Wigg from the BCI lab did an enhancement of the tape Mark Mellery made of the phone call he got from the killer. Are you familiar with the call?”

“Yes,” said Gurney, recalling the disguised voice and Mellery thinking of the number nineteen, then finding that number in the letter the killer had left in his mailbox.

“Sergeant Wigg’s report says that the sound-wave analysis shows that the background traffic noises on the tape were prerecorded.”

“Say that again?”

“According to Wigg, the tape contains two generations of sounds. The caller’s voice and the background sound of a motor, which she says was definitely an automobile engine, were first generation. That is, they were live sounds at the time of the call transmission. But the other background sounds, primarily of passing traffic, were second generation. That is, they were being played on a tape machine during the live call. Are you there, Detective?”

“Yes, yes, I was just… trying to make some sense out of that.”

“Would you like me to repeat it?”

“No, I heard you. It’s… very interesting.”

“District Attorney Kline thought you might think so. He’d like you to give him a call when you figure out what it means.”

“I’ll be sure to do that.”

He turned up Filchers Brook Road and a mile later spotted a sign on his left proclaiming the manicured property behind it to be the laurels. The sign was a graceful oval plaque, with the lettering in a delicate calligraphy. A little past the sign, there was an arched trellis set in a row of high mountain laurels. A narrow driveway passed through the trellis. Although the blossoms had been gone for months, as Gurney drove through the opening, some trick of the mind conjured up a flowery scent, and a further leap brought to mind King Duncan’s comment on Macbeth’s estate, where that night he would be murdered: “This castle hath a pleasant seat…”

Beyond the trellis there was a small parking area of gravel raked as cleanly as a Zen garden. A path of the same pristine gravel led from the parking area to the front door of a spotless, cedar-shingled Cape. In place of a doorbell, there was an antique iron knocker. As Gurney reached for it, the door opened to reveal a small man with alert, assessing eyes. Everything about him looked freshly laundered, from his lime polo shirt to his pink skin to the hair a shade too blond for his middle-aged face.

“Ahh!” he said with the edgy satisfaction of a man whose pizza order, twenty minutes late, has finally arrived.

“Mr. Plumstone?”

“No, I’m not Mr. Plumstone,” said the small man. “I’m Bruce Wellstone. The apparent harmony between the names is purely coincidental.”

“I see,” said Gurney, baffled.

“And you, I assume, are the policeman?”

“Special Investigator Gurney, district attorney’s office. Who told you I was coming?”

“The policeman on the phone. I have absolutely no memory for names. But why are we standing in the doorway? Do come in.”

Gurney followed him through a short hallway into a sitting room furnished with fussy Victoriana. Wondering who the policeman on the phone might have been put a quizzical look in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” said Wellstone, evidently misinterpreting Gurney’s expression. “I’m not familiar with the procedure in cases like this. Would you prefer to go directly to Emerald Cottage?”

“Excuse me?”

“Emerald Cottage.”

“What emerald cottage?”

“The scene of the crime.”

“What crime?”

“Didn’t they tell you anything?”

“About what?”

“About why you’re here.”

“Mr. Wellstone, I don’t mean to be rude, but perhaps you should start at the beginning and tell me what you’re talking about.”

“This is exasperating! I told everything to the sergeant on the phone. In fact, I told him everything twice, since he didn’t seem to grasp what I was saying.”

“I see your frustration, sir, but perhaps you could tell me what you told him?”

“That my ruby slippers were stolen. Do you have any idea what they’re worth?”

“Your ruby slippers?”

“My God, they didn’t tell you a blessed thing, did they?” Wellstone began taking deep breaths as though he might be trying to ward off some kind of fit. Then he closed his eyes. When he reopened them, he seemed reconciled to the ineptitude of the police and spoke to Gurney in the voice of an elementary-school teacher.

“My ruby slippers, which are worth a great deal of money, were stolen from Emerald Cottage. Although I have no proof, I have no doubt they were stolen by the last guest who occupied it.”

“This Emerald Cottage is part of this establishment?”

“Of course it is. The entire property is called ‘The Laurels,’ for obvious reasons. There are three buildings-the main house in which we stand, plus two cottages: Emerald Cottage and Honeybee Cottage. The decor of Emerald Cottage is based on The Wizard of Oz-the greatest film ever made.” A glint in his eyes seemed to dare Gurney to disagree. “The focal point of the decor was a remarkable reproduction pair of Dorothy’s magic slippers. I discovered this morning that they were missing.”

“And you reported this to…?”

“To you people, obviously, because here you are.”

“You called the Peony police department?”

“Well, I certainly didn’t call the Chicago police department.”

“We have two separate problems here, Mr. Wellstone. The Peony police will no doubt get back to you regarding the theft. That’s not why I’m here. I’m investigating a different matter, and I need to ask you some questions. A state police detective who came by the other day was told-by a Mr. Plumstone, I believe-that three nights ago you had a pair of bird-watchers as guests here-a man and his mother.”

“That’s the one!”

“What one?”

“The one who stole my ruby slippers!”

“The bird-watcher stole your slippers?”

“The bird-watcher, the burglar, the pilfering little bastard-yes, him!”

“And the reason this was not mentioned to the detective from the state police…?”

“It wasn’t mentioned because it wasn’t known. I told you I only discovered the theft this morning.”

“So you weren’t in the cottage since the man and his mother checked out?”

“‘Checked out’ is a rather too-formal way of saying it. They simply departed at some point during the day. They’d paid in advance, so there was no need, you see, for any ‘checking-out’ procedure. We strive for a certain civilized informality here, which of course makes the betrayal of our trust all the more galling.” Talking about it had brought Wellstone close to gagging on the gall.

“Was it normal to wait so long before…?”

“Before making up a room? Normal at this time of year. November is our slowest month. The next booking for Emerald Cottage is Christmas week.”

“The BCI man didn’t go through the cottage?”

“BCI man?”

“The detective who was here two days ago was from the Bureau of Criminal Investigation.”

“Ah. Well, he spoke to Mr. Plumstone, not to me.”

“Who exactly is Mr. Plumstone?”

“That’s an awfully good question. That’s a question I’ve been asking myself.” He said this with an arch bitterness, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, I mustn’t let extraneous emotional issues intrude into official police business. Paul Plumstone is my business partner. We are joint owners of The Laurels. At least we are partners as of this moment.”

“I see,” said Gurney. “Getting back to my question-did the BCI man go through the cottage?”

“Why would he? I mean, he was apparently here about that ghastly business up the mountain at the institute, wanting to know if we’d seen any suspicious characters lurking about. Paul-Mr. Plumstone-told him that we hadn’t, and the detective left.”

“He didn’t press you for any specific information on your guests?”

“The bird-watchers? No, of course not.”

“Of course not?”

“The mother was a semi-invalid, and the son, although he turned out to be a thief, was hardly a mayhem-and-carnage sort of person.”

“What sort of person would you say he was?”

“I would have said he was on the frail side. Definitely on the frail side. Shy.”

“Would you say he was gay?”

Wellstone looked thoughtful. “Interesting question. I’m almost always sure, one way or the other, but in this case I’m not. I got the impression that he wanted to give me the impression he was gay. But that doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

Not unless the whole persona was an act, thought Gurney. “Other than frail and shy, how else would you describe him?”

“Larcenous.”

“I mean from a physical point of view.”

Wellstone frowned. “A mustache. Tinted glasses.”

“Tinted?”

“Like sunglasses, dark enough so you couldn’t really see his eyes-I hate talking to someone when I can’t see their eyes, don’t you?-but light enough so he could wear them indoors.”

“Anything else?”

“Woolly hat-one of those Peruvian things pulled down around his face-scarf, bulky coat.”

“How did you get the impression he was frail?”

Wellstone’s frown tightened into a kind of consternation. “His voice? His manner? You know, I’m not really sure. All I remember seeing-actually seeing-was a big puffy coat and hat, sunglasses, and a mustache.” His eyes widened with sudden umbrage. “Do you think it was a disguise?”

Sunglasses and a mustache? To Gurney it sounded more like a parody of a disguise. But even that little extra twist could fit the weirdness of the pattern. Or was he over-thinking it? Either way, if it was a disguise, it was an effective one, leaving them with no useful physical description. “Can you recall anything else about him? Anything at all?”

“Obsessed with our little feathered friends. Had an enormous pair of binoculars-looked like those infrared things you see commandos in the movies creeping around with. Left his mother in the cottage and spent all his time in the woods, searching for grosbeaks-rose-breasted grosbeaks.”

“He told you that?”

“Oh, yes.”

“That’s surprising.”

“Why?”

“There aren’t any rose-breasted grosbeaks in the Catskills in the winter.”

“But he even said… That lying bastard!”

“He even said what?”

“The morning before he left, he came into the main house, and he couldn’t stop raving about the damn grosbeaks. He kept repeating over and over that he had seen four rose-breasted grosbeaks. Four rose-breasted grosbeaks, he kept saying, as though I were doubting him.”

“Maybe he wanted to be sure you’d remember,” said Gurney, half to himself.

“But you’re telling me he couldn’t have seen them, because there aren’t any to be seen. Why would he want me to remember something that didn’t happen?”

“Good question, sir. May I take a quick look at the cottage now?”

From the sitting room, Wellstone led him through an equally Victorian dining room, full of ornate oak chairs and mirrors, out a side door onto a pathway whose spotless cream-colored pavers, while not exactly the yellow brick road of Oz, did bring it to mind. The path ended at a storybook cottage covered with English ivy, bright green despite the season.

Wellstone unlocked the door, swung it open, and stood to the side. Instead of entering, Gurney looked in from the threshold. The front room was partly a living room and partly a shrine to the film-with its collection of posters, a witch hat, a magic wand, Cowardly Lion and Tin Man figurines, and a stuffed replica of Toto.

“Would you like to go in and see the display case the slippers were taken from?”

“I’d rather not,” said Gurney, stepping back onto the path. “If you’re the only person who’s been inside since your guests left, I’d like to keep it that way until we can get an evidence-processing team on site.”

“But you said you weren’t here for-Wait a minute, you said you were here for ‘a different matter’-isn’t that what you said?”

“Yes, sir, that’s correct.”

“What sort of ‘evidence processing’ are you talking about? I mean, what… Oh, no, surely you can’t think that my light-fingered bird-watcher is your Jack the Ripper?”

“Frankly, sir, I have no reason to think he is. But I have to cover every possibility, and it would be prudent for us to have the cottage examined more closely.”

“My, oh, my. I don’t know what to say. If it’s not one crime, it’s another. Well, I suppose I can’t impede police progress-outlandish as it seems. And there’s a silver lining. Even if all this has nothing to do with the horror on the hill, you may end up finding a clue to my missing slippers.”

“Always a possibility,” said Gurney with a polite smile. “You can expect an evidence team here sometime tomorrow. Meanwhile keep the door locked. Now, let me ask you once more-because this is very important-are you sure no one but yourself has been inside the cottage during the past two days, not even your partner?”

“Emerald Cottage was my creation and my exclusive responsibility. Mr. Plumstone is responsible for Honeybee Cottage, including its unfortunate decor.”

“Sorry?”

“The theme of Honeybee Cottage is a bore-you-blind illustrated history of beekeeping. Need I say more?”

“One last question, sir. Do you have the bird-watcher’s name and address in your guest register?”

“I have the name and the address he gave me. Considering the theft, I rather doubt their authenticity.”

“I’d better look at the register and make a note of them, anyway.”

“Oh, there’s no need to look at the register. I can see it now with perfect, painful clarity. Mr. and Mrs.-odd way, don’t you think, for a gentleman to describe himself and his mother?-Mr. and Mrs. Scylla. The address was a post-office box in Wycherly, Connecticut. I can even give you the box number.”

Chapter 31

Gurney was sitting in the spotless gravel parking area. He’d completed his call to BCI for an evidence team to be sent to The Laurels ASAP and was just slipping his cell phone into his pocket when it rang. It was Ellen Rackoff again. First he gave her the news about the Scylla couple and the peculiar theft to pass along to Kline. Then he asked why she’d called. She gave him a phone number.

“It’s a homicide detective from the Bronx who wants to talk to you about a case he’s working on.”

“He wants to talk to me?”

“He wants to talk to someone on the Mellery case, which he read about in the paper. He called the Peony police, who referred him to BCI, who referred him to Captain Rodriguez, who referred him to the district attorney, who referred him to you. His name is Detective Clamm. Randy Clamm.”

“Is that a joke?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“How much information did he volunteer about his own case?”

“Zero. You know how cops are. Mostly he wanted to know about our case.”

Gurney called the number. It was answered on the first ring.

“Clamm.”

“Dave Gurney, returning your call. I’m with the district attor-”

“Yes, sir, I know. Appreciate the quick response.”

Although he was basing it on next to nothing, Gurney had a vivid impression of the cop on the other end-a fast-thinking, fast-talking multitasker who, with better connections, might have ended up at West Point instead of the police academy.

“I understand you’re on the Mellery homicide,” the crisp young voice raced on.

“Correct.”

“Multiple stab wounds to the victim’s throat?”

“Correct.”

“Reason for my call is a similar homicide down here, and we wanted to rule out the possibility of any connection.”

“By similar, you mean-”

“Multiples to the throat.”

“My recollection of Bronx stabbing statistics is that there are over a thousand reported incidents a year. Have you looked for connections closer to home?”

“We’re looking. But so far your case is the only one with over a dozen wounds, all to the same part of the body.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Depends on what you’re willing to do. I was thinking it might help both of us if you were able to come down here for a day, look at the crime scene, sit in on an interview with the widow, ask questions, see if anything rings a bell.”

It was the definition of a long shot-more far-fetched than many a tenuous lead he’d wasted his time chasing down in his years at the NYPD. But it was a constitutional impossibility for Dave Gurney to ignore a possibility, however flimsy it might be.

He agreed to meet Detective Clamm in the Bronx the following morning.