Think Of a Number (2010) (41 page)

After the sound of the call disconnecting, there was a restless silence around the table. Then Hardwick cleared his throat so loudly that Holdenfield flinched.

“So, Davey boy,” he growled, “once again you’re the center of attention.
‘It’s Gurney’s turn.’
What are you, a magnet for serial murderers? All we got to do is dangle you on a string and wait for them to bite.”

Was Madeleine dangling on a string as well? Perhaps not yet. Hopefully not yet. After all, he and Dermott were at the head of the line. Assuming the lunatic was telling the truth. If so, it would give him some time—maybe time to get lucky. Time to make up for his oversights. How could he have been so stupid? So unaware of her safety? Idiot!

Kline looked troubled. “How did you get to be a target?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Gurney with a false lightness. His guilt gave him the impression that both Kline and
Rodriguez were eyeing him with unfriendly curiosity. From the beginning he’d had misgivings about writing and mailing that poem, but he’d buried them without defining or articulating them. He was appalled at his ability to ignore danger, including danger to others. What had he felt at the time? Had the risk to Madeleine come anywhere close to his consciousness? Had he had an inkling and dismissed it? Could he have been that callous?
Please, God, no!

In all this angst, he was sure of at least one thing. Sitting there in that conference room discussing the situation any further was not a tolerable option. If Dermott was next on the killer’s list, then that’s where Gurney had the best chance of finding the man they were looking for and ending the risk before it crept any closer. And if he himself was next after Dermott, then that was a battle he wanted to fight as far from Walnut Crossing as possible. He slid his chair back from the table and stood.

“If you’ll excuse me, there’s somewhere I need to be.”

At first this generated only blank looks around the table. Then the meaning registered with Kline.

“Jesus!” he cried. “You’re not thinking of going to Connecticut?”

“I have an invitation, and I’m accepting it.”

“That’s crazy. You don’t know what you’re walking into.”

“Actually,” said Rodriguez with a dismissive glance in Gurney’s direction, “a crime scene crawling with cops is a pretty safe place.”

“That would normally be true,” said Holdenfield. “Unless …” She let the thought dangle, as though she were walking around it to view it from different angles.

“Unless what?” snapped Rodriguez.

“Unless the killer is a cop.”

It seemed almost too easy
.

Killing twenty well-trained police officers in twenty seconds should require more complex planning. A deed of that magnitude should be more difficult. After all, it would be the largest such eradication ever achieved—at least in America, at least in modern times
.

The fact that no one had done it before, despite its apparent simplicity, both stimulated and troubled him. The idea that finally put his mind to rest was this: For a man of weaker intellect or less formidable powers of concentration, the project might indeed be daunting, but not for him, not with his clarity and focus. Everything was relative. A genius could dance through obstacles that would hopelessly entangle ordinary men
.

The chemicals were laughably easy to acquire, quite economical, and 100 percent legal. Even in large quantities, they aroused no suspicion, since they were sold in bulk every day for industrial applications. Even so, he’d prudently purchased each one (there were only two) from a different supplier to avoid any hint of their eventual combination, and he’d acquired the two fifty-gallon pressure tanks from a third supplier
.

Now, as he was putting the finishing touches with a soldering iron on a bit of jerry-rigged piping to combine and deliver the lethal mixture to its recipients, he had a thrilling thought—a possible scenario with a climactic image—that so tickled his imagination a gleaming smile burst across his face. He knew that what he was imagining
wasn’t likely to happen—the chemistry was too unpredictable—but it could happen. It was at least conceivable
.

On the Chemical Hazards website was a warning he had memorized. The warning was in a red box surrounded by red exclamation points. “This mixture of chlorine and ammonia not only produces a fatally toxic gas but in the proportions indicated is highly unstable and with the catalyst of a spark may explode.” The image that delighted him was of the entire Wycherly police department caught in his trap, involuntarily gasping the poison fumes into their lungs just as the catalyzing spark was applied, blowing each of them to pieces from the inside out. As he pictured it, he did something he almost never did. He laughed out loud
.

If only his mother could grasp the humor of it, the beauty of it, the glory of it. But perhaps that was asking too much. And, of course, if the policemen were all blown to pieces—little tiny pieces—he wouldn’t get to cut their throats. And he very much wanted to cut their throats
.

Nothing in this world was perfect. There were always pluses and minuses. One had to make the best of the hand one was dealt. See the glass as half full
.

That was reality
.

A
fter brushing aside the predictable objections and concerns regarding his intended trip, Gurney went to his car and called the Wycherly police department for the address of Gregory Dermott’s home, since all he had up to that point was the P.O. box number on Dermott’s letterhead. It took a while to explain to the officer on duty exactly who he was, and even then he had to wait while the young woman called Nardo and got permission to divulge the location. It turned out that she was the only member of the small force not already at the scene. Gurney entered the address in his GPS and headed for the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge.

Wycherly was located in north-central Connecticut. The trip took a little over two hours, much of which Gurney spent pondering his gross failure to think of his wife’s safety. The lapse so disturbed and depressed him that he became desperate to focus on something else, and he began to examine the main hypothesis developed at the BCI meeting.

The notion that the killer had somehow accessed or compiled a list of several thousand individuals with a history of drinking problems—individuals suffering from the deep-seated fears and guilt arising from an alcoholic past—and then managed to ensnare a handful of them through that simple number trick, and then tormented them with the series of creepy poems, leading up to their ritual murders … that entire process, outlandish as it was, now
seemed to Gurney entirely credible. He remembered discovering that serial murderers, when they were children, often found pleasure in torturing insects and small animals—for example, by burning them with sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass. One of his own famous arrests, Cannibal Claus, had blinded a cat exactly that way at the age of five. Burning with a magnifying glass. It seemed disturbingly similar to focusing a victim on his past and intensifying his fears until he was writhing in pain.

Seeing a pattern, fitting the pieces of the puzzle together—it was a process that normally elated him, but that afternoon in the car it didn’t feel as good as it usually did. Perhaps it was the lingering perception of his inadequacies, his missteps. The thought was acid in his chest.

He concentrated loosely on the road, the hood of his car, his hands on the wheel. Strange. His own hands—he didn’t recognize them. They looked surprisingly old—like his father’s hands. The little splotches had grown in number and size. If just a minute earlier he’d been shown photographs of a dozen hands, he wouldn’t have been able to identify his own among them.

He wondered why. Perhaps changes, if they occur gradually enough, are not regularly noted by the brain until the discrepancy reaches some critical magnitude. Perhaps it even went further than that.

Would it mean that we always see familiar things to some extent the way they used to be? Are we stuck in the past not out of simple nostalgia or wishful thinking but by a data-processing shortcut in our neural wiring? If what one “saw” was supplied partly from the optic nerves and partly from memory—if what one “perceived” at any given moment was actually a composite of current impressions and stored impressions—it gave new meaning to “living in the past.” The past would thus exercise a peculiar tyranny over the present by supplying us with obsolete data in the guise of sensory experience. Might that not relate to the situation of a serial killer driven by a long-ago trauma? How distorted might his vision be?

The theory momentarily excited him. Turning over a new idea,
testing its solidity, always made him feel a little more in control, a little more alive, but today those feelings were hard to sustain. His GPS alerted him that it was two-tenths of a mile to the Wycherly exit.

At the end of the exit ramp, he turned right. The area was a hodgepodge of farm fields, tract houses, strip malls, and ghosts of another era’s summer pleasures: a dilapidated drive-in movie, a sign for a lake with an Iroquois name.

It brought to mind another lake with another Indian-sounding name—a lake with an encircling trail that he and Madeleine had hiked one weekend when they were searching for their perfect place in the Catskills. He could picture her animated face as they stood atop a modest cliff, holding hands, smiling, looking out over the breeze-crinkled water. The memory came with a stab of guilt.

He hadn’t called her yet to let her know what he was doing, where he was going, the likely delay in his homecoming. He still wasn’t sure how much he should tell her. Should he even mention the postmark? He decided to call her now, play it by ear.
God help me say the right thing
.

Considering the level of stress he was already feeling, he thought it wise to pull over to make the call. The first place he could find was a scruffy, gravelly parking area in front of a farm stand shuttered for the winter. The word for his home number in the voice-activated dialing system was, efficiently but unimaginatively,
home
.

Madeleine answered on the second ring with that optimistic, welcoming voice phone calls always elicited from her.

“It’s me,” he said, his own voice reflecting only a fraction of the light in hers.

There was a one-beat pause. “Where are you?”

“That’s what I’m calling to tell you. I’m in Connecticut, near a town called Wycherly.”

The obvious question would have been, “Why?” But Madeleine didn’t ask obvious questions. She waited.

“There’s been a development in the case,” he said. “Things may be coming to a head.”

“I see.”

He heard a slow, controlled breath.

“Are you going to tell me anything more than that?” she asked.

He gazed out the car window at the lifeless vegetable stand. More than closed for the season, it looked abandoned. “The man we’re after is getting reckless,” he said. “There may be an opportunity to stop him.”

“The man we’re after?”
Now her voice was thin ice, fissuring.

He said nothing, jarred by her response.

She went on, openly angry. “Don’t you mean the bloody murderer, the serial killer, the man who never misses—who shoots people in their neck arteries and cuts their throats? Isn’t that who you’re talking about?”

“That’s … the man we’re after, yes.”

“There aren’t enough cops in Connecticut to handle this?”

“He seems to be focused on me.”

“What?”

“He seems to have identified me as someone working on the case, and he may try to do something stupid—which will give us the opportunity we need. It’s our chance to take the fight to him rather than just mopping up one murder after another.”

“What?”
This time the word was less a question than a pained exclamation.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said unconvincingly. “He’s starting to fall apart. He’s going to self-destruct. We just have to be there when it happens.”

“When it was your job, you had to be there. You don’t have to be there now.”

“Madeleine, for Chrissake, I’m a cop!” The words exploded from him like an obstructed object blown loose. “Why the hell can’t you understand that?”

“No, David,” she responded evenly. “You
were
a cop. You’re not a cop now. You don’t have to be there.”

“I’m already here.” In the ensuing silence, his temper subsided like a retreating wave. “It’s all right. I know what I’m doing. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

“David, what is the matter with you? Do you just keep running at the bullets? Running at the bullets? Until one goes through your head? Is that it? Is that the pathetic plan for the rest of our lives together? I just wait, and wait, and wait for you to get killed?” Her voice cracked with such raw emotion on the word
killed
that he found himself speechless.

It was Madeleine who eventually spoke—so softly he could just make out the words. “What is this really about?”

“What’s it about?” The question hit him from an odd angle. He felt off balance. “I don’t understand the question.”

Her intense silence from a hundred miles away seemed to surround him, press in against him.

“What do you mean?” he asked. He could feel his heart rate rising.

He thought he heard her swallow. He sensed, somehow
knew
, she was trying to make a decision. When she did answer him, it was with another question, again spoken so softly he barely heard it.

“Is this about Danny?”

He could feel the pounding of his heart in his neck, his head, his hands.

“What? What would it have to do with Danny?” He didn’t want an answer, not now, not when he had so much to do.

“Oh, David,” she said. He could picture her, shaking her head sadly, determined to pursue this most difficult of all subjects. Once Madeleine opened a door, she invariably walked through it.