Think Of a Number (2010) (42 page)

She took a shaky breath and pressed on. “Before Danny was killed, your job was the biggest part of your life. Afterward, it was the only part. The only part. You’ve done nothing but work for the past fifteen years. Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to make up for something, forget something … 
solve
something.” Her strained inflection made the word sound like the symptom of a disease.

He tried to maintain his footing by holding on to the facts at hand. “I’m going to Wycherly to help capture the man who killed Mark Mellery.” He heard his voice as if it belonged to someone
else—someone old, frightened, rigid—someone trying to sound reasonable.

She ignored what he said, following her own train of thought. “I hoped if we opened the box, looked at his little drawings … we could say good-bye to him together. But you don’t say good-bye, do you? You never say good-bye to anything.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he protested. But that wasn’t true. When they’d been about to move from the city up to Walnut Crossing, Madeleine had spent hours saying good-bye. Not only to neighbors but to the place itself, things they were leaving behind, houseplants. It had gotten under his skin. He’d complained about her sentimentality, said talking to inanimate objects was weird, a waste of time, a distraction, that it was only making their departure more difficult. But it was more than that. Her behavior was touching something in him that he didn’t want touched—and now she’d put her finger on it again—the part of him that never wanted to say good-bye, that couldn’t face separation.

“You stuff things out of sight,” she was saying. “But they’re not gone, you haven’t really let go of them. You have to look at them to let go of them. You have to look at Danny’s life to let go of it. But you obviously don’t want to do that. You just want to … what, David? What?
Die?”
There was a long silence.

“You want to die,” she said. “That’s really it, isn’t it?”

He experienced the kind of emptiness he imagined existed at the eye of a hurricane—an emotion that felt like a vacuum.

“I have a job to do.” It was a banal thing to say, stupid, really. He didn’t know why he bothered to say it.

There was a lengthy silence.

“No,” she said softly, swallowing again. “You don’t have to keep doing this.” Then, barely audibly, despairingly, she added, “Or maybe you do. Maybe I was just hoping.”

He was at a loss for words, a loss for thoughts.

He sat for a long while, his mouth slightly open, breathing rapid, shallow breaths. At some point—he wasn’t sure when—the phone
connection was broken. He waited in a kind of vacant chaos for a calming thought, an actionable thought.

What came instead was a sense of absurdity and pathos—the thought that even at the moment when he and Madeleine were emotionally stripped, raw and terrified, they were literally a hundred miles apart, in different states, exposing themselves to empty space, to cell phones.

What also came to mind was what he’d failed to speak about, had failed to reveal to her. He hadn’t said a single word about his postmark stupidity, how it might point the killer to where they lived, how the oversight arose from his own obsessive focus on the investigation. With that thought came a sickening echo, the realization that his similar preoccupation with an investigation fifteen years earlier had been a factor in Danny’s death—maybe the ultimate cause of it. It was remarkable that Madeleine had connected that death with his current obsession. Remarkable and, he had to admit, unnervingly acute.

He felt he had to call her back, admit his mistake—the peril he’d created—warn her. He dialed their number, waited for the welcoming voice. The phone rang, rang, rang, rang. Then the voice he heard was his own recorded message—a little stiff, almost stern, hardly welcoming—then the beep.

“Madeleine? Madeleine are you there? Please pick up if you’re there.” He felt a kind of sinking sickness. He couldn’t think of anything to say that would make sense in a one-minute message, nothing that wouldn’t be likely to cause more damage than it would prevent, nothing that wouldn’t create panic and confusion. All he ended up saying was, “I love you. Be careful. I love you.” Then there was another beep, and once again the connection was broken.

He sat and stared at the dilapidated vegetable stand, aching and confused. He felt like he could sleep for a month, or forever. Forever would be best. But that made no sense. That was the kind of dangerous thinking that caused weary men in the Arctic to lie down in the snow and freeze to death. He must regain his focus. Keep moving. Push himself forward. Bit by bit, his thoughts began to coalesce
around the unfinished task awaiting him. There was work to do in Wycherly. A madman to be apprehended. Lives to be saved. Gregory Dermott’s, his own, perhaps even Madeleine’s. He started the car and drove on.

The address to which his GPS finally delivered him belonged to an unremarkable suburban Colonial set well back on an oversize lot on a secondary road with little traffic and no sidewalks. A tall, dense arborvitae hedge provided privacy along the left, rear, and right sides of the property. A chest-high boxwood hedge ran across the front, except for the driveway opening. Police cars were everywhere—more than a dozen, Gurney estimated—pulled up at all angles to the hedge, partially obstructing the road. Most bore the Wycherly PD insignia. Three were unmarked, with portable red flashers atop their dashboards. Notably missing were any Connecticut state police vehicles—but perhaps not surprisingly so. Although it might not be the smartest or most effective approach, he could understand a local department’s wanting to maintain control when the victim was one of their own. As Gurney nosed into a tight available patch of grass at the edge of the asphalt, an enormous young uniformed cop was pointing to a route around the parked cruisers with one hand and with the other urgently motioning him away from where he was trying to stop. Gurney got out of the car and produced his ID as the mammoth officer approached, tense and tight-lipped. His bulging neck muscles, at war with a collar a size and a half too small, seemed to extend up into his cheeks.

He examined the card in Gurney’s wallet for a long minute with increasing incomprehension, finally announcing, “This says New York State.”

“I’m here to see Lieutenant Nardo,” said Gurney.

The cop gave him a stare as hard as the pecs straining his shirt-front, then shrugged. “Inside.”

At the foot of the long driveway on a post the same height as the mailbox was a beige metal sign with black lettering:
GD SECURITY SYSTEMS.
Gurney ducked under the yellow police tape that seemed to be strung around the entire property. Oddly, it was the coldness of the tape
as it brushed against his neck that for the first time that day diverted his attention from his racing thoughts to the weather. It was raw, gray, windless. Patches of snow, previously melted and refrozen, lay in the shadows at the feet of the boxwood and arborvitae plantings. Along the driveway there were patches of black ice filling shallow depressions in the tarred surface.

Affixed to the center of the front door was a more discreet version of the GD Security Systems sign. Next to the door was a small sticker indicating that the house was protected by Axxon Silent Alarms. As he reached the brick steps of the columned entry porch, the door in front of him opened. It was not a welcoming gesture. In fact, the man who opened it stepped out and closed it behind him. He took only peripheral note of Gurney’s presence as he spoke with loud irritation into a cell phone. He was a compact, athletically built man in his late forties, with a hard face and sharp, angry eyes. He wore a black windbreaker with the word police in large yellow letters across the back.

“Can you hear me now?” He moved off the porch onto the faded, frost-wilted lawn. “Can you hear me now?… Good. I said I need another tech on the scene ASAP …. No, that’s no good, I mean I need one right now …. Now, before it gets dark. The word is spelled n-o-w. What part of that word don’t you understand?… Good. Thank you. I appreciate that.”

He pushed the disconnect button on the phone and shook his head. “Goddamn idiot.” He looked at Gurney. “Who the hell are you?”

Gurney did not react to the aggressive tone. He understood where it was coming from. There was always a sense of heightened emotion at the scene of a cop killing—a kind of barely controlled tribal rage. Besides, he recognized the voice of the man who’d sent the officer to Dermott’s house—John Nardo.

“I’m Dave Gurney, Lieutenant.”

A lot seemed to go through Nardo’s mind very quickly, most of it negative. All he said was, “What are you here for?”

Such a simple question. He wasn’t sure he knew even a fraction
of the answer. He decided to opt for brevity. “He says he wants to kill Dermott and me. Well, Dermott’s here. Now I’m here. All the bait the bastard could want. Maybe he’ll make his move and we can wrap this up.”

“You think so?” Nardo’s tone was full of aimless hostility.

“If you’d like,” said Gurney, “I can bring you up to date on our piece of the case, and you can tell me what you’ve discovered here.”

“What I discovered here? I discovered that the cop I sent to this house at your request is dead. Gary Sissek. Two months away from retirement. I discovered that his head was nearly severed by a broken whiskey bottle. I discovered a pair of bloody boots next to a freaking lawn chair behind that hedge.” He waved a little wildly toward the rear of the house. “Dermott never saw the chair before. His neighbor never saw it before. So where did the freaking thing come from? Did this freaking lunatic bring a lawn chair with him?”

Gurney nodded. “As a matter of fact, the answer is probably yes. It seems to be part of a unique MO. Like the whiskey bottle. Was it by any chance Four Roses?”

Nardo stared at him, blankly at first, as if there were a slight tape delay in the transmission. “Jesus,” he said. “You better come inside.”

The door led into a wide, bare center hall. No furniture, no rugs, no pictures on the walls, just a fire extinguisher and a couple of smoke alarms. At the end of the hall was the rear door—beyond which, Gurney assumed, was the porch where Gregory Dermott that morning had discovered the cop’s body. Indistinct voices outside suggested that the scene-of-crime processing team was still busy in the backyard.

“Where’s Dermott?” Gurney asked.

Nardo raised his thumb toward the ceiling. “Bedroom. Gets stress migraines, and the migraines make him nauseous. He’s not in what you’d call a good mood. Bad enough before the phone call saying he was next, but then … Jesus.”

Gurney had questions he wanted to ask, lots of them, but it
seemed better to let Nardo set the pace. He looked around at what he could see of the ground floor of the house. Through a doorway on his right was a large room with white walls and a bare wood floor. Half a dozen computers sat side by side on a long table in the center of the room. Phones, fax machines, printers, scanners, auxiliary hard drives, and other peripherals covered another long table placed against the far wall. Also on the far wall was another fire extinguisher. In lieu of a smoke alarm, there was a built-in sprinkler system. There were only two windows, too small for the space, one in the front and one in the rear, giving it a tunnel-like feeling despite the white paint.

“He runs his computer business from down here and lives upstairs. We’ll use the other room,” said Nardo, indicating a doorway across the hall. Similarly uninviting and purely functional, the room was half the length of the other and had a window at only one end, making it more like a cave than a tunnel. Nardo flipped a wall switch as they entered, and four recessed lights in the ceiling turned the cave into a bright white box containing file cabinets against one wall, a table with two desktop computers against another wall, a table with a coffeemaker and a microwave against a third wall, and an empty square table with two chairs in the middle of the room. This room had both a sprinkler system and a smoke alarm. It reminded Gurney of a cleaner version of the cheerless break room at his last precinct. Nardo sat in one of the chairs and gestured for Gurney to sit in the other. He massaged his temples for a long minute, as if trying to squeeze the tension out of his head. From the look in his eyes, it wasn’t working.

“I don’t buy that ‘bait’ shit,” he said, wrinkling his nose as if the word
bait
smelled bad.

Gurney smiled. “It’s partly true.”

“What’s the other part?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You come here to be a freaking hero?”

“I don’t think so. I have a feeling my being here may help.”

“Yeah? What if I don’t share that feeling?”

“It’s your show, Lieutenant. You want me to go home, I’ll go home.”

Nardo gave him another long, cynical stare. In the end he appeared to change his mind, at least tentatively. “The Four Roses bottle is part of the MO?”

Gurney nodded.

Nardo took a deep breath. He looked as if his whole body ached. Or as if the whole world ached. “Okay, Detective. Maybe you better tell me everything you haven’t told me.”

G
urney talked about the backwards snow prints, the poems, the unnatural voice on the phone, the two unsettling number tricks, the alcoholic backgrounds of the victims, their mental torture, the hostile challenges to the police, the “REDRUM” graffiti on the wall and the “Mr. and Mrs. Scylla” sign-in at The Laurels, the high intelligence and hubris of the killer. He continued to provide details from the three killings he was familiar with until Nardo’s attention span looked like it might be reaching its breaking point. Then he concluded with what he considered most important:

“He wants to prove two things. First, that he has the power to control and punish drunks. Second, that the police are impotent fools. His crimes are intentionally constructed like elaborate games, brain teasers. He’s brilliant, obsessive, meticulous. So far he hasn’t left behind a single inadvertent fingerprint, hair, speck of saliva, clothing fiber, or unplanned footprint. He hasn’t made any mistakes that we’ve discovered. The fact is, we know very little about him, his methods, or his motives that he hasn’t chosen to reveal to us. With one possible exception.”