Think Of a Number (2010) (34 page)

He made an effort to focus on other aspects of the case, but his mind refused to proceed in an orderly way. Instead, he saw the half-dried pool of blood across Kartch’s kitchen floor, the far edge spreading into the shadow of the rickety table. He stared hard at the highway ahead, trying to exorcise the image but succeeding only in
replacing it with the bloodstain of similar size on Mark Mellery’s stone patio—which in turn gave way to an image of Mellery in an Adirondack chair, leaning forward, asking for protection, deliverance.

Leaning forward, asking …

Gurney felt the pressure of tears welling.

He pulled in to a rest stop. There was only one other car in the little parking area, and it looked more abandoned than parked. His face felt hot, his hands cold. Not being able to think straight frightened him, made him feel helpless.

Exhaustion was a lens through which he had a tendency to see his life as a failure—a failure made more painful by the professional accolades heaped upon him. Knowing that this was a trick his tired mind played on him made it no less convincing. After all, he had his litany of proofs. As a detective, he’d failed Mark Mellery. As a husband, he’d failed Karen, and now he was failing Madeleine. As a father, he’d failed Danny, and now he was failing Kyle.

His brain had its limits, and after enduring another quarter hour of this laceration, it shut down. He fell into a brief, restorative sleep.

He wasn’t sure how long it lasted, almost certainly less than an hour, but when he woke up, the emotional upheaval had passed and in its place was an uncluttered clarity. He also had a terribly stiff neck, but it seemed a small price to pay.

Perhaps because there was now room for it, a new vision of the Wycherly post-office box mystery began to form in his mind. The two original hypotheses had never seemed entirely satisfactory: namely, that the victims were directed by mistake to send their checks to the wrong box number (unlikely, given the killer’s attention to detail) or that it was the right box but something had gone awry, allowing Dermott to receive and innocently return the checks before the killer could remove them through whatever method he’d devised.

But now Gurney saw a third explanation. Suppose it was the right box and nothing had gone awry. Suppose the purpose of asking for the checks had been something other than to cash them. Suppose
the killer had managed to gain access to the box, open the envelopes, look at the checks or make copies of them, and then reseal them in their envelopes and replace them in the box before Dermott got to them.

If this new scenario was closer to the truth—if the killer was in fact using Dermott’s post-office box for his own purposes—it opened a fascinating new avenue.
It might be possible for Gurney to communicate with the killer directly
. Despite its wildly hypothetical foundation, and despite the confusion and depression in which he’d just been immersed, this thought so excited him that several minutes passed before he realized that he’d pulled out of the rest stop and was racing homeward at eighty miles an hour.

M
adeleine was out. He put his wallet and keys on the breakfast table and picked up the note lying there. It was in Madeleine’s quick, clean handwriting and, as usual, challengingly concise:
“Went to 9 AM yoga. Back before storm. 5 messages. Was the fish a flounder?”

What storm?

What fish?

He wanted to go into the den and listen to the five phone messages he assumed she was talking about, but there was something else he wanted to do first, something of greater urgency. The notion that he might be able to write to the killer—to send him a note via Dermott’s mailbox—had given him an overwhelming desire to do so.

He could see that the scenario was shaky, with assumptions resting upon assumptions, but it had great appeal. The chance to
do
something was very exciting compared to the frustration of the investigation and that creepy sense that any progress they were making might be part of the enemy’s plan. Impulsive and unreasonable as it was, the chance to toss a grenade over a wall where the enemy might be lurking was irresistible. The only thing remaining was to construct the grenade.

He really should listen to his messages. There could be something urgent, important. He started for the den. But a sentence came
to mind—one he didn’t want to forget, a rhyming couplet, the perfect beginning of a statement to the killer. Excitedly, he picked up the pad and pen Madeleine had left on the table and began to write. Fifteen minutes later he put down the pen and read the eight lines written in an elaborate, decorative script.

Satisfied, he wiped the paper clean of fingerprints. It felt odd doing that—shady, evasive—but he brushed the feeling aside, got an envelope, and addressed it to X. Arybdis at Dermott’s box number in Wycherly, Connecticut.

G
urney just made it down to the mailbox in time to hand the envelope to Rhonda, who filled in for Baxter, the regular mailman, two days a week. By the time he got back up through the pasture to the house, the excitement was already being gnawed at by the remorse that inevitably followed his rare acts of impulse.

He remembered his five messages.

The first was from the gallery in Ithaca.

“David, it’s Sonya. We need to talk about your project. Nothing bad, all good, but we need to talk very, very soon. I’ll be at the gallery until six this evening, or you can call me later at home.”

The second was from Randy Clamm, and he sounded excited.

“Tried you at your cell phone, but it seems to be dead. We found some letters in the Rudden house we’d like you to look at—see if they look familiar. Seems Al was getting some weird little poems in the mail he didn’t want his wife to see. Had them hidden in the bottom of his toolbox. Give me a number, and I’ll fax them. Appreciate it.”

The third was from Jack Hardwick at BCI, his supercilious attitude running amok.

“Hey, Sherlock, word is out that your guy has a couple more notches on his gun. You were probably too busy to give your old buddy a heads-up. I was, for one crazy moment, tempted to think that it was below the dignity of Mr. Sherlock Fucking Gurney to place a call to the humble Jack Hardwick. But of course that’s not
the kind of guy you are, right? Shame on me! Just to show you there’s no hard feelings, I’m calling to give you a heads-up on a get-together being planned for tomorrow—a BCI progress report on the Mellery case, including a discussion of how recent events in the Bronx and in Sotherton should affect the direction of the investigation. Captain Rod will be hosting this clusterfuck. DA Kline is being invited, and he in turn will no doubt invite you. I just thought you’d like to know in advance. After all, what are friends for?”

The fourth message was the predicted call from Kline. It was not especially “invitational.” The energy in his voice had curdled into agitation.

“Gurney, what the hell’s the matter with your cell phone? We tried to reach you directly, then through the Sotherton police. They told me you left Sotherton two and a half hours ago. They also told me we are now dealing with murder number three by the same individual. That’s an important fact, wouldn’t you say? Something you should have called me about? We need to talk ASAP. Decisions have to be made, and we need every available piece of information. There’s a meeting at BCI tomorrow noon. That’s a priority. Call me as soon as you get this!”

The final message was from Mike Gowacki.

“Just wanted you to know, we dug a slug out of that hole in the kitchen wall. A .38 like you said. Also, one more little discovery after you left. We were checking the mailbox for any more of them red-ink love notes, and we found a dead fish. In the mailbox. You didn’t mention a dead fish being part of the MO. Let me know if it means anything. I’m no psychologist, but I’d say our perp is a definite wacko. That’s it for now. I’m going home to get some sleep.”

A fish?

He went back out to the kitchen—to the breakfast table, to take another look at Madeleine’s note.

“Went to 9 AM yoga. Back before storm. 5 messages. Was the fish a flounder?”

Why would she ask that? He checked the time on the old Regulator clock over the sideboard. Nine-thirty. Seemed more like dawn,
the light coming in the French doors was such a chilly gray.
Back before storm
. It did look like it was about to do something, probably snow, hopefully not freezing rain. So she’d be home by ten-thirty, maybe ten if she got to worrying about the roads. Then he could ask about the flounder. Madeleine wasn’t a worrier, but she had a thing about slippery roads.

He was going back to the den to return his calls when it struck him. The location of the first murder was the town of Peony, and the killer left a peony by the body of the second victim. The location of the second murder was the little Bronx enclave of Flounder Beach, making Madeleine’s guess about the fish at the third crime scene characteristically insightful and almost certainly right.

His first callback was to Sotherton. The desk sergeant put him through to Gowacki’s voice mail. He left two requests: for confirmation that the fish was a flounder and for ballistics photos so they could confirm that the slugs in Kartch’s wall and in Mellery’s wall came from the same gun. He didn’t have much doubt on either point, but certainty was a holy thing.

Then he called Kline.

Kline was in court that morning. Ellen Rackoff reiterated the DA’s complaints, scolding Gurney about the difficulty they’d had reaching him and his failure to keep them informed. She told him he’d better not miss the big meeting the following noon at BCI. But even into this lecture she managed to breathe an erotic undertone. Gurney wondered if his lack of sleep might be making him a little crazy.

He called Randy Clamm, thanked him for the update, and gave him a number at the DA’s office to fax Rudden’s letters, plus a number at BCI so a set could go to Rodriguez. Then he filled him in on the Richard Kartch situation, including the flounder connection and the fact that an alcohol element was now obvious in all three cases.

As for Sonya’s call, that could wait. He was in no great rush to call Hardwick, either. His mind kept jumping to the following day’s meeting at BCI. Not jumping there with joy—far from it. He hated meetings in general. His mind worked best alone. Groupthink made
him want to leave the room. And his hasty poetic grenade tossing was making him uncomfortable about this meeting in particular. He didn’t like having secrets.

He sank down in the soft leather armchair in the corner of the den to organize the key facts of the three cases, figure out what overall hypothesis they best supported, and how to test it. But his sleep-deprived brain would not cooperate. He closed his eyes, and all semblance of linear thought dissolved. How long he sat there he wasn’t sure, but when he opened his eyes, heavily falling snow had begun whitening the landscape, and in the singular stillness he could hear a car far down the road, coming closer. He pushed himself up out of the chair and went to the kitchen, arriving at the window in time to see Madeleine’s car disappearing behind the barn at the end of the public road, presumably to check their mailbox. A minute later the phone rang. He picked up the extension on the kitchen counter.

“Good—you’re there. Do you know if the mailman has been here yet?”

“Madeleine?”

“I’m down by the box. I have something to mail, but if he’s been here already, I’ll drop it off in town.”

“Actually, it was Rhonda, and she was here a while ago.”

“Damn. All right, no matter, I’ll deal with it later.”

Slowly her car emerged from behind the barn and turned up the pasture road to the house.

She entered through the side door of the kitchen with the strained look that driving in snow put on her face. Then she noted the very different look on his face.

“What’s up?”

Engrossed in a thought that had occurred to him during her call from the mailbox, it wasn’t until she’d taken off her coat and shoes that he answered.

“I think I just figured something out.”

“Good!” She smiled and awaited the details, shaking snowflakes out of her hair.

“The number mystery—the second one. I know how he did it—or how he could have done it.”

“The second one was?”

“The one with the number nineteen, the one Mellery recorded. I showed you the letter.”

“I remember.”

“The killer asked Mellery to think of a number and then to whisper it to him.”

“Why did he ask him to whisper? By the way, that clock is wrong,” she said, looking up at the Regulator.

He stared at her.

“Sorry,” she said lightly. “Go on.”

“I think he asked him to whisper because it added an odd element to the request that would lead him further from the truth than a simple ‘Tell me the number.’”

“I don’t follow you.”

“The killer had no idea what number Mellery had in mind. The only way to find out was to ask him. He was just trying to blow some smoke around that issue.”

“But wasn’t the number mentioned in a letter the killer had already left in Mellery’s mailbox?”

“Yes and no. Yes, the number was mentioned in the letter Mellery found in the box a few minutes later, but no, it wasn’t
already
in the box. In fact, the letter hadn’t been printed yet.”

“You lost me.”

“Suppose the killer had one of those mini printers attached to his laptop, with the text of the letter to Mellery complete except for the right number. And suppose the killer was sitting in his car by Mellery’s mailbox on that dark country road that runs past the institute. He calls Mellery on his cell phone—like you just called me from our mailbox—persuades him to think of a number and then ‘whisper’ it, and the instant Mellery says the number, the killer enters it in the letter text and hits the print button. Half a minute later, he sticks the letter in an envelope, pops it in the mailbox, and drives off—creating the impression that he’s a diabolical mind reader.”