Think Of a Number (2010) (30 page)

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

“Like always.”

“Then what?”

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

“And?”

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

“What did you see?”

“Albert.”

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

“There was a lot of blood.”

“And the flower?”

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

“What did you do then?”

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She shrugged and made another slice through the onion.

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

“And?”

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

“And?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

She shot him a disbelieving little smile.

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t pay that much attention.”

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

“Are there others?”

“Other what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why did he call you?”

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

“So he passed it along to you?”

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

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

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

“Nothing?”

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

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

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

“Plastic?”

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

“What?”

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

“What are you telling me?”

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

“Where do you think it came from?”

“I have no idea.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What kind of flower?”

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

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

“In what way?”

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

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

“Has something occurred to you?” he asked.

“Maybe … hmm …”

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

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

“Jesus! Are you going to tell me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What whiskey bottle?”

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

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

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

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

“Good luck.”

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

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

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

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

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