Think Of a Number (2010) (33 page)

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

“About what?”

“He’s expecting me.”

“What’s it about?”

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

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

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

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

“The fuck didn’t you say so?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s right.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Those footprints bother you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s what you’re here for.”

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

“Unhappy-looking man,” said Gurney.

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

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

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

“Sounds like quite a guy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ME say anything about powder burns?”

“Powder burns? Those are knife wounds.”

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

“You see something I missed?”

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

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

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

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

“Right.”

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

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

“But the footprints …”

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

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

“That’s the word for it.”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You find something?” asked Gowacki.

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

“There’s more upstairs.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anything was still possible.

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

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