Think of a Number

by John Verdon

  Gurney grunted as though he’d been punched in the heart. This first reaction, however, was quickly replaced by something more professional. Hardwick’s answer had jarred into position one of the loose puzzle pieces in Gurney’s mind.

  “Was it by chance a whiskey bottle?”

  “How the hell did you know that?” Hardwick’s tone traveled in seven words from amazement to accusation.

  “It’s a long story. Would you like me to drop by?”

  “I think you better.”

  The sun, which that morning was visible as a cool disk behind a gray wash of winter cloud cover, was now entirely obscured by a lumpy, leaden sky. The shadowless light seemed ominous—the face of a cold universe, uncaring as ice.

  Finding this train of thought embarrassingly fanciful, Gurney put it aside as he brought his car to a stop behind the line of police vehicles parked jaggedly on the snow-covered roadside in front of the Mellery Institute for Spiritual Renewal. Most bore the blue and yellow New York State Police insignia, including a tech van from the regional forensics lab. Two were white sheriff’s department cars, and two were green Peony police cruisers. Mellery’s crack about its sounding like the name of a gay cabaret act came to mind, along with the expression he’d had on his face when he said it.

  The aster beds, crowded between the cars and the stone wall, had been reduced by the hardening winter weather to tangled masses of brown stalks sporting weird cotton-ball blossoms of snow. He got out of the car and headed for the entrance. A crisply uniformed trooper with a paramilitary scowl stood at the open gate. He was probably a year or two younger, Gurney noted with an odd feeling, than his own son.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  The words were polite, but the look wasn’t.

  “My name is Gurney. I’m here to see Jack Hardwick.”

  The young man blinked twice, once at the sound of each name. His expression suggested that at least one of them was giving him acid reflux.

  “Hold on a minute,” he said, removing a walkie-talkie from his belt. “You need to be escorted.”

  Three minutes later the escort arrived—a BCI investigator who looked like he was trying to look like Tom Cruise. Despite the winter chill, he wore only a black windbreaker hanging open over a black T-shirt and jeans. Knowing the strictness of the state police dress code, Gurney figured attire that informal would mean he’d been called directly to the scene from an off-duty or undercover activity. The edge of a nine-millimeter Glock in a matte black shoulder holster visible under the windbreaker seemed as much a statement of attitude as a tool of the trade.

  “Detective Gurney?”

  “Retired,” said Gurney, as though appending an asterisk.

  “Yeah?” said Tom Cruise without interest. “That must be nice. Follow me.”

  As Gurney followed his leader along the path around the main building toward the residence behind it, he was struck by the difference a three-inch snowfall had made in the appearance of the place. It had created a simplified canvas, removing extraneous details. Walking into the minimalism of the white landscape was like stepping onto a newly created planet—a thought at absurd variance with the messy reality at hand. They rounded the old Georgian house where Mellery had lived and stopped short at the edge of the snow-covered patio where he’d died.

  The location of his death was obvious. The snow still bore the impression of a body, and spread out around the head-and-shoulders area of that impression was an enormous bloodstain. Gurney had seen that shocking red and white contrast before. The indelible memory was from Christmas morning of his rookie year on the job. An alcoholic cop whose wife had locked him out of their house shot himself in the heart, sitting on a snowbank.

  Gurney forced the old image out of his mind and focused his keen professional gaze on the scene before him.

  A prints specialist was kneeling by a row of footprints in the snow next to the main bloodstain, spraying them with something. From where he was standing, Gurney couldn’t see the label on the can, but he guessed it was snow-print wax, a chemical used to stabilize snow prints sufficiently for the application of a dental casting compound. Prints in snow were extremely fragile, but when treated with care they provided an extraordinary level of detail. Although he’d witnessed the process often enough before, he couldn’t help but admire the specialist’s steady hand and intense concentration.

  Yellow police tape had been strung in an irregular polygon around most of the patio, including the back door of the house. Corridors of the same tape had been established on opposite sides of the patio—to enclose and preserve the arrival and departure routes of a distinct set of footprints that came from the direction of the large barn beside the house, proceeded to the area of the bloodstain, then headed away from the patio over the snow-blanketed lawn toward the woods.

  The back door of the house was open. A member of the crime-scene team was standing in the doorway studying the patio from the perspective of the house. Gurney knew exactly what the man was doing. When you were at a crime scene, you tended to spend a lot of time just trying to absorb the feel of it—often trying to see it as the victim might have seen it in his final moments. There were clear, well-understood rules for locating and collecting evidence—blood, weapons, fingerprints, footprints, hairs, fibers, paint chips, out-of-place mineral or plant material, and so forth—but there was also a fundamental focus problem. Simply put, you needed to remain open-minded about what had happened, exactly where it had happened, and how it had happened, because if you jumped to conclusions too quickly, it would be easy to miss evidence that didn’t fall within your view of the situation. At the same time, you had to begin developing at least a loose hypothesis that would guide your evidence search. You can make painful mistakes by getting too sure too fast about the apparent crime scenario, but you can also waste a lot of precious time and manpower fine-tooth-combing a square mile of ground looking for God-knows-what.

  What good detectives did—what Gurney was sure the detective in the doorway was doing—was a kind of unconscious flipping back and forth between inductive and deductive mind-sets. What do I see here, and what sequence of events do these data points suggest? And, if that scenario is valid, what additional evidence should I be seeing and where should I be looking for it?

  The key to the process, Gurney had become convinced through much trial and error of his own, was maintaining the right balance between observation and intuition. The greatest danger to the process was ego. A supervising detective who remains undecided about the possible explanation for crime-scene data might waste some time by not focusing his team’s efforts in a particular direction soon enough, but the guy who knows, and aggressively announces, at first glance exactly what happened in that blood-spattered room and sets everyone to proving he’s right can end up causing very serious problems—wasted time being the least of them.

  Gurney wondered which approach might be prevailing at the moment.

  Outside the yellow tape barrier, on the far side of the bloodstain, Jack Hardwick was giving instructions to two serious-looking young men, one of whom was the Tom Cruise wannabe who’d just delivered Gurney to the site, and the other appeared to be his twin. The nine intervening years since they worked together on the infamous Piggert case seemed to have added twice that many years to Hardwick’s age. The face was redder and fatter, the hair thinner, and the voice had developed the kind of roughness that comes from too much tobacco and tequila.

  “There are twenty guests,” he was saying to the Top Gun doubles. “Each of you take nine of them. Get preliminary statements, names, addresses, phone numbers. Get verification. Leave Patty Cakes and the chiropractor to me. I’ll also talk to the widow. Check back with me by four P.M.”

  More comments went back and forth among them in voices too low for Gurney to hear, punctuated by Hardwick’s grating laugh. The young man who’d escorted Gurney from the front gate said a final word, tilting his head significantly in Gurney’s direction. Then the duo set off toward the
main building.

  Once they were out of sight, Hardwick turned and offered Gurney a greeting halfway between a grin and a grimace. His strange blue eyes, once brightly skeptical, seemed fraught with a tired cynicism.

  “I’ll be damned,” he rasped, walking around the taped area toward Gurney, “if it isn’t Professor Dave.”

  “Just a humble instructor,” corrected Gurney, wondering what else Hardwick had taken the trouble to find out about his post-NYPD stint teaching criminology at the state university.

  “Don’t give me that humility shit. You’re a star, my boy, and you know it.”

  They shook hands without much warmth. It struck Gurney that the bantering attitude of the old Hardwick had curdled into something toxic.

  “Not a lot of doubt about the location of death,” said Gurney, nodding at the bloodstain. He was eager to get to the point, brief Hardwick on what he knew, and get out of there.

  “There’s doubt about everything,” proclaimed Hardwick. “Death and doubt are the only two certainties in life.” Getting no response from Gurney, he went on, “I’ll grant you there may be less doubt about the location of death than about some other things here. Goddamn loony bin. People here go on about the victim like he was that Deepdick Chopup guy on TV.”

  “You mean Deepak Chopra?”

  “Yeah, Dipcock or whatever. Christ, gimme a break!”

  Despite the uncomfortable reaction building inside him, Gurney said nothing.

  “What the hell do people come to places like this for? Listen to some New Age asshole with a Rolls-Royce talk about the meaning of life?” Hardwick shook his head at the foolishness of his fellow man—frowning at the back of the house all the while, as though eighteenth-century architecture might bear a large part of the blame.

  Irritation overcame Gurney’s reticence. “As far as I know,” he said evenly, “the victim was not an asshole.”

  “I didn’t say he was.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “I was making a general observation. I’m sure your buddy was an exception.”

  Hardwick was getting under Gurney’s skin like a sharp sliver. “He wasn’t my buddy.”

  “I got the impression from the message you left with the Peony police, which they kindly passed along to me, that your relationship went way back.”

  “I knew him in college, had no contact with him for twenty-five years, and got an e-mail from him two weeks ago.”

  “What about?”

  “Some letters he got in the mail. He was upset.”

  “What kind of letters?”

  “Poems, mostly. Poems that sounded like threats.”

  This made Hardwick stop and think before going on. “What did he want from you?”

  “My advice.”

  “What advice did you give him?”

  “I advised him to call the police.”

  “I gather he didn’t.”

  The sarcasm irked Gurney, but he held his temper.

  “There was another poem,” said Hardwick.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A poem, on a single sheet of paper, laid on the body, with a rock on it for a paperweight. All very neat.”

  “He’s very precise. A perfectionist.”

  “Who?”

  “The killer. Possibly very disturbed, definitely a perfectionist.”

  Hardwick stared at Gurney with interest. The mocking attitude was gone, at least temporarily. “Before we go any further, I need to know how you knew about the broken bottle.”

  “Just a wild guess.”

  “Just a wild guess that it was a whiskey bottle?”

  “Four Roses, specifically,” said Gurney, smiling with satisfaction when he saw Hardwick’s eyes widen.

  “Explain how you know that,” demanded Hardwick.

  “It was a bit of a leap, based on references in the poems,” said Gurney. “You’ll see when you read them.” In response to the question forming on the other man’s face, he added, “You’ll find the poems, along with a couple of other messages, in the desk drawer in the den. At least, that’s the last place I saw Mellery put them. It’s the room with the big fireplace off the center hall.”

  Hardwick continued staring at him as though doing so would resolve some important issue. “Come with me,” he finally said. “I want to show you something.”

  He led the way in uncharacteristic silence to the parking area, situated between the massive barn and the public road, and came to a halt where it was connected to the circular driveway and where a corridor of yellow police tape began.

  “This is the nearest place to the road where we can clearly distinguish the footprints we believe belong to the perp. The road and the drive were plowed after the snow stopped around two A.M. We don’t know whether the perp entered the property before or after the plowing. If before, any tracks on the road outside or on the drive would have been obliterated by the plow. If after, no tracks would have been made to begin with. But from this point right here, around the back of the barn, to the patio, across the open area to the woods, through the woods, to a pine thicket by Thornbush Lane, the tracks are perfectly clear and easy to follow.”

  “No effort made to conceal them?”

  “No,” said Hardwick, sounding bothered by this. “None at all. Unless I’m missing something.”

  Gurney gave him a curious glance. “What’s the problem?”

  “I’ll let you see for yourself.”

  They walked along the yellow-taped corridor, following the tracks to the far side of the barn. The imprints, sharply indented in the otherwise featureless three-inch layer of snow, were of large (Gurney estimated size ten or eleven, D width) hiking boots. Whoever had come this way in the wee hours of the morning hadn’t cared that his route would later be noted.

  As they rounded the back of the barn, Gurney saw that a wider area there had been taped off. A police photographer was taking pictures with a high-resolution camera while a crime-scene specialist in a protective white bodysuit and hair enclosure awaited his turn with an evidence-collection kit. Every shot was taken at least twice, with and without a ruler in the frame to establish scale, and objects were photographed at various focal-length settings—wide to establish position relative to other objects in the scene, normal to present the object itself, and close-up to capture detail.

  The center of their attention was a folding lawn chair of the flimsy sort that might be sold in a discount store. The footprints led directly to the chair. In front of it, stamped out in the snow, were half a dozen cigarette butts. Gurney squatted to take a closer look and saw they were Marlboros. The footprints then continued from the chair around a thicket of rhododendrons toward the patio where the murder had apparently occurred.

  “Jesus,” said Gurney. “He just sat there smoking?”

  “Yeah. A little relaxation before cutting the victim’s throat. At least that’s the way it looks. I assume your raised eyebrow is a way of asking where the crappy little lawn chair came from? That was my question, too.”

  “And?”

  “Victim’s wife claimed she’d never seen it before. Seemed appalled at its low quality.”

  “What?” Gurney flicked the word out like a whip. Hardwick’s supercilious comments had become nails on a blackboard.

  “Just a little levity.” He shrugged. “Can’t let a cut throat get you down. But seriously, it was probably the first time in her posh life that Caddy Smythe-Westerfield Mellery came that close to a chair that cheap.”

  Gurney knew all about cop humor and how necessary it was in coping with the routine horrors of the job, but there were occasions it got on his nerves.

  “Are you telling me that the killer brought his own lawn chair with him?”

  “Looks that way,” said Hardwick, grimacing at the absurdity.

  “And after he finished smoking—what, half a dozen Marlboros?—he walked over to the back door of the house, got Mellery to come out on the patio, and slit his throat with a broken bottl
e? That’s the reconstruction so far?”

  Hardwick nodded reluctantly, as though beginning to feel that the crime scenario suggested by the evidence sounded a bit off the wall. And it only got worse.

  “Actually,” he said, “‘slit his throat’ is putting it mildly. Victim was stabbed through the throat at least a dozen times. When the medical examiner’s assistants were transferring the body to the van to take it for autopsy, the fucking head almost fell off.”

  Gurney looked in the direction of the patio, and although it was entirely obscured by the rhododendrons, the image of the huge bloodstain came back to his mind as colorfully and sharply as if he were staring at it under arc lights.

  Hardwick watched him for a while, chewing thoughtfully on his lip. “As a matter of fact,” he said finally, “that’s not the really weird part. The really weird part comes later, when you follow the footprints.”

  Chapter 18

  Footprints to nowhere

  Hardwick led Gurney from the back of the barn around the hedges, past the patio to where the tracks of the presumed assailant left the scene of the attack and proceeded across the snow-covered lawn that extended from the back of the house to the edge of the maple forest several hundred feet away.

  Not far from the patio, as they were following the footprints in the direction of the woods, they came upon another evidence tech, dressed in the hermetic plastic jumpsuit, surgical cap, and face mask of his trade—designed to protect DNA or other trace evidence from contamination by the collector.

  He was squatting about ten feet from the footprints, lifting what appeared to be a shard of brown glass out of the snow with stainless-steel tongs. He’d already bagged three other pieces of similar glass and one large-enough segment of a quart whiskey bottle to be recognizable as such.

  “The murder weapon, most likely,” said Hardwick. “But you, ace detective, already knew that. Even knew it was Four Roses.”

  “What’s it doing out on the lawn?” asked Gurney, ignoring Hardwick’s needling tone.