Think Of a Number (2010) (17 page)

“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.

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.”

“G
et 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?”

H
alf 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.

G
urney 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.