Think Of a Number (2010) (18 page)

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.”

H
e 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.

S
ixty 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?”