Think Of a Number (2010) (36 page)

The house had the empty feeling it always had when Madeleine was out. Her absence was confirmed by the note he found on the countertop: “
Dawn. Sun about to come up. Incredibly beautiful. Snowshoeing to Carlson’s Ledge. Coffee in pot. M.”
He went to the bathroom, washed, brushed his teeth. As he was combing his hair, the
thought occurred to him that he could set out after her. Her reference to the imminent sunrise meant she’d left within the past ten minutes or so. If he used his cross-country skis and followed in her snowshoe tracks, he could probably overtake her in about twenty minutes.

He put ski pants and boots on over his jeans, pulled on a thick wool sweater, snapped on his skis, and stepped out the back door into a foot of powdery snow. The ridge, which offered a long view of the north valley and the rows of hills beyond it, was about a mile distant and reachable by an old logging trail that rose up a gentle incline starting at the back end of their property. It was impassible in summer with its tangles of wild raspberry bushes, but in late fall and winter the thorny undergrowth subsided.

A family of cautious crows, their harsh cries the only sound in the cold air, took flight from bare treetops a hundred yards ahead of him and soon disappeared over the ridge, leaving behind an even deeper silence.

As Gurney emerged from the woods onto the promontory above Carlson’s hillside farm, he saw Madeleine. She was sitting motionless on a stone slab, perhaps fifty feet from him, looking out over the rolling landscape that receded to the horizon with only two distant silos and a meandering road to suggest any human presence. He stopped, transfixed by the stillness of her pose. She seemed so … so absolutely solitary … yet so intensely
connected
to her world. A kind of beacon, beckoning him to a place just beyond his reach.

Without warning, without words to contain the feeling, the sight tore at his heart.

Dear God, was he having some kind of breakdown? For the third time in a week, his eyes filled with tears. He swallowed and wiped his face. Feeling light-headed, he moved his skis farther apart to steady himself.

Perhaps it was this motion at the corner of her vision, or the sound of the skis in the dry snow, that caused her to turn. She watched as he approached her. She smiled a little but said nothing. He had the rather peculiar feeling that she could see his soul as
clearly as his body—peculiar, because “soul” was not a notion he’d ever found meaning in, not a term he ever used. He sat beside her on the flat boulder and stared out, unseeing, at the vista of hills and valleys. She took his arm in hers and held it against her.

He studied her face. He was at a loss for words to capture what he saw. It was as if all the radiance of the snow-covered landscape were reflected in her expression and the radiance of her expression were reflected in the landscape.

After a while—he couldn’t be sure how long it was—they headed back by a roundabout route to the house.

About halfway there he asked, “What are you thinking?”

“Not thinking at all. It gets in the way.”

“Of what?”

“The blue sky, the white snow.”

He didn’t speak again until they were back in the kitchen.

“I never did have that coffee you left for me,” he said.

“I’ll make a fresh pot.”

He watched as she got a bag of coffee beans out of the refrigerator and measured some into the electric grinder.

“Yes?” She regarded him curiously, her finger on the button.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just watching.”

She pressed the button. There was a sharp barrage of noise from the little machine, which grew softer as the beans were pulverized. She looked at him again.

“I’ll check the closet,” he said, feeling a need to do something.

He started upstairs, but before reaching the closet he stopped on the landing at the window that faced the rear field and the woods beyond it and the trail to the ledge. He pictured her sitting on the rock in her solitary peace, and that nameless emotional intensity filled him again, achingly. He struggled to identify the pain.

Loss. Separation. Isolation.

Each rang true, each a facet of the same sensation.

The therapist he’d seen in his late teens as the result of a panic attack—the therapist who’d told him that the panic arose from a deep hostility he carried toward his father and that his complete lack
of any conscious emotion for his father was proof of the hidden strength and negativity of the emotion—that same therapist had one day confided to him what he believed to be the purpose of life.

“The purpose of life is to get as close as we can to other people.” He’d said it in a surprisingly straightforward way, as though he were pointing out that trucks were for transportation.

On another occasion he revealed, in the same matter-of-fact tone, the corollary: “An isolated life is a wasted life.”

At the age of seventeen, Gurney hadn’t been sure what the man was talking about. It sounded deep, but its depth was shadowy, and he couldn’t see anything in it. He still didn’t entirely grasp it at the age of forty-seven—at least not the way he grasped the purpose of trucks.

Forgetting about the closet, he went back down to the kitchen. Entering from the darker hallway, he found the room intensely bright. The sun, now well above the trees in a cloudless sky, shone directly through the southeast-facing French doors. The pasture had been transformed by the new snow into a dazzling reflector, throwing light up into corners of the room rarely illuminated.

“Your coffee is ready,” said Madeleine. She was carrying a balled-up sheet of newspaper and a handful of kindling to the woodstove. “The light is so magical. Like music.”

He smiled and nodded. Sometimes he envied her ability to be enthralled by nature’s glittering bits and pieces. Why, he wondered, had such a woman, such an enthusiast, such a natural aesthete in the admirable sense of the word, a woman so in touch with the
glory
of things, married an unspontaneous and cerebral detective? Had she imagined that one day he’d cast aside the gray cocoon of his profession? Had he colluded in that fantasy, imagining that in a pastoral retirement he’d become a different person?

They made an odd couple, he thought, but surely no odder than his parents. His mother with all her artistic inclinations, all her little flight-of-fancy hobbies—papier-mâché sculpture, fantastical watercolor painting, origami—had married his father, a man whose essential drabness was interrupted only by sparks of sarcasm, whose
attention was always elsewhere, whose passions were unknown, and whose departure for work in the morning seemed to please him far more than did his return home in the evening. A man who in his quest for peace was forever
leaving
.

“What time do you have to leave for your meeting?” asked Madeleine, displaying her impossibly precise sensitivity to his passing thoughts.

D
éjà vu.

The sign-in procedure was the same as it had been before. The building’s reception area—ironically designed to repel—was as antiseptic as a morgue but less peaceful. There was a new guard in the security booth, but the lighting gave him the same chemotherapy pallor as it had the last one. And, once again, Gurney’s guide to the claustrophobic conference room was the hair-gelled, charming-as-dirt Investigator Blatt.

He preceded Gurney into the room, which was as Gurney remembered it, except it seemed shabbier. There were stains he hadn’t noticed before on the colorless carpeting. The clock, not quite vertical and too small for the wall, read twelve noon. As usual, Gurney was exactly on time—less a virtue than a neurosis. Earliness and lateness both made him uncomfortable.

Blatt took a seat at the table. Wigg and Hardwick were already there in the same chairs they’d had in the first meeting. A woman with an edgy expression was standing by the coffee urn in the corner, obviously unhappy that Gurney hadn’t been accompanied by whomever she was waiting for. She looked so much like Sigourney Weaver that Gurney wondered if she was making a conscious effort.

The three chairs nearest the center of the oblong table had been tilted against it, as before. As Gurney headed for the coffee, Hardwick grinned like a shark.

“Detective First Class Gurney, I’ve got a question for you.”

“Hello, Jack.”

“Or, better yet, I’ve got an answer for you. Let’s see if you can guess what the question is. The answer is ‘a defrocked priest in Boston.’ To win the grand prize, all you got to do is figure out the question.”

Instead of responding, Gurney picked up a cup, noticed it wasn’t quite clean, put it back, tried another, then a third, then went back to the first.

Sigourney was tapping her foot and checking her Rolex, a parody of impatience.

“Hi,” he said, resignedly filling his stained cup with what he hoped was antiseptically hot coffee. “I’m Dave Gurney.”

“I’m Dr. Holdenfield,” she said, as if she were laying down a straight flush to his pair of deuces. “Is Sheridan on his way?”

Something complex in her tone got his attention. And “Holdenfield” rang a bell.

“I wouldn’t know.” He wondered what sort of relationship might exist between the DA and the doctor. “If you don’t mind my asking, what sort of doctor are you?”

“Forensic psychologist,” she said absently, looking not at him but at the door.

“Like I said, Detective,” said Hardwick, too loudly for the size of the room, “if the answer is a defrocked Boston priest, what’s the question?”

Gurney closed his eyes. “For Christ’s sake, Jack, why don’t you just tell me?”

Hardwick wrinkled his face in distaste. “Then I’d have to explain it twice—for you and for the executive committee.” He tilted his head at the tilted chairs.

The doctor looked again at her watch. Sergeant Wigg looked at whatever was happening on her laptop screen in response to the keys she was tapping. Blatt looked bored. The door opened, and Kline entered, looking preoccupied, followed by Rodriguez, carrying a fat file folder and looking more malevolent than ever, and Stimmel,
looking like a pessimistic frog. When they were seated, Rodriguez gave Kline a questioning glance.

“Go ahead,” said Kline.

Rodriguez fixed his gaze on Gurney, his lips tightening into a thin line.

“There’s been a tragic development. A Connecticut police officer, dispatched to the home of Gregory Dermott, reportedly at your insistence, has been killed.”

All eyes in the room, with various degrees of unpleasant curiosity, turned toward Gurney.

“How?” He asked the question calmly, despite a twinge of anxiety.

“Same way as your friend.” There was something sour and insinuating in his tone, which Gurney chose not to respond to.

“Sheridan, what the hell is going on here?” The doctor, who was standing at the far end of the table, sounded so much like the hostile Sigourney of
Alien
that Gurney decided it must be on purpose.

“Becca! Sorry, didn’t see you there. We got a little tied up. Last-minute complication. Apparently another murder.” He turned to Rodriguez. “Rod, why don’t you bring everyone up to date on this Connecticut cop thing.” He gave his head a quick little shake, like there was water in one of his ears. “Damnedest case I’ve ever seen!”

“Damn right,” echoed Rodriguez, opening his file folder. “Call was received at eleven twenty-five this morning from Lieutenant John Nardo of the Wycherly, Connecticut, PD regarding a homicide on the property of one Gregory Dermott, known to us as the postal-box holder in the Mark Mellery case. Dermott had been provided with temporary police protection at the insistence of Special Investigator David Gurney. At eight
A.M.
this morning—”

Kline raised his hand. “Hold on a second, Rod. Becca, have you met Dave?”

“Yes.”

The cool, clipped affirmative seemed designed to ward off any expanded introduction, but Kline went on, anyway.

“You two should have a lot to talk about. The psychologist with the most accurate profiling record in the business and the detective with the most homicide arrests in the history of the NYPD.”

The praise seemed to make everyone uncomfortable. But it also made Holdenfield look at Gurney with some interest for the first time. And although he was no fan of professional profilers, now he knew why her name sounded familiar.

Kline went on, determined, it seemed, to highlight his two stars. “Becca reads their minds, Gurney tracks them down—Cannibal Claus, Jason Strunk, Peter Possum Whatshisname …”

The doctor turned to Gurney, her eyes widening just a little. “Piggert? That was your case?”

Gurney nodded.

“Quite a celebrated arrest,” she said with a hint of admiration.

He managed a small, distracted smile. The situation in Wycherly—and the question of whether his own impulsive intervention with the mailed poem had any bearing on the death of the police officer—was eating at him.

“Keep going, Rod,” said Kline abruptly, as though the captain had caused the interruption.

“At eight
A.M.
this morning, Gregory Dermott made a trip to the Wycherly post office, accompanied by Officer Gary Sissek. According to Dermott, they returned at eight-thirty, at which time he made some coffee and toast and went through his mail, while Officer Sissek remained outside to check the perimeters of the property and the external security of the house. At nine
A.M.
Dermott went to look for Officer Sissek and discovered his body on the back porch. He called 911. First responders secured the scene and found a note taped to the back door above the body.”

“Bullet and multiple stab wounds like the others?” asked Holdenfield.

“Stab wounds confirmed, no determination yet regarding the bullet.”

“And the note?”

Rodriguez read from a fax in his folder.
“‘Where did I come
from? / Where did I go? / How many will die / because you don’t know?’”

“Same weirdo stuff,” said Kline. “What do you think, Becca?”

“The process may be accelerating.”

“The process?”

“Everything up till now was carefully premeditated—the choice of victims, the series of notes, all of it. But this one is different, more reactive than planned.”