by John Verdon
“Jeez, I figured you’d know that, too. If you already knew the fucking brand …”
Gurney waited wearily, like he was waiting for a slow computer program to open, and eventually Hardwick answered, “It looks like he carried it away from the body and dropped it over here on his way to the woods. Why did he do that? That’s an excellent question. Maybe he didn’t realize he still had it in his hand. I mean, he just stabbed the victim in the neck a dozen times. That could have absorbed his attention. Then, as he’s walking away across the lawn, he notices he still has it and tosses it aside. At least that makes some kind of sense.”
Gurney nodded, not wholly convinced but unable to offer a better explanation. “Is that the ‘really weird’ element you mentioned?”
“That?” said Hardwick with a laugh that was more of a bark. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Ten minutes and half a mile later, the two men arrived at a spot in the maple forest just short of a small copse of white pines. The sound of a passing car indicated they were close to a road, but any sight of it was blocked by the low pine branches.
At first he wasn’t sure why Hardwick had brought him there. Then he saw it—and began studying the ground in the vicinity with growing bewilderment. What he saw made no sense. The footprints they had been following simply stopped. The clear progression of prints in the snow, one after another, proceeding for half a mile or more, simply came to an end. There was no sign of what had happened to the individual who’d made the prints. The snow all around was pristine, untouched by a human foot or by anything else. The trail of footprints stopped a good ten feet from the nearest tree, and, if the sound of that passing vehicle was any indication, at least a hundred yards from the nearest road.
“Am I missing something?” asked Gurney.
“Same thing we’re all missing,” said Hardwick, sounding relieved that Gurney had not come up with a simple explanation that had eluded him and his team.
Gurney examined the ground around the final print more carefully. Just beyond this well-defined impression was a small area of multiple overlapping impressions, all appearing to have been made by the same pair of hiking boots that had created the clear tracks they’d been following. It was as if the killer had walked purposefully to this spot, stood about shifting from foot to foot for a few minutes, perhaps waiting for someone or something, and then … evaporated.
The lunatic possibility that Hardwick was playing a practical joke on him flashed through his mind, but he dismissed it. Tampering with a major murder scene for a laugh would be too far over the edge even for an outrageous character like Hardwick.
So what they were looking at was the way it was.
“The tabloids find out about this, they’ll turn it into an alien abduction,” said Hardwick, as though the words tasted like metal in his mouth. “Reporters will be on this like flies on a barrel of cow shit.”
“You have a more presentable theory?”
“My hopes are riding on the razor-sharp mind of the most revered homicide detective in the history of the NYPD.”
“Cut the crap,” said Gurney. “Has the processing team come up with anything?”
“Nothing that makes sense of this. But they took snow samples from that packed-down spot where it looks like he was standing. Didn’t seem to be any visible foreign matter there, but maybe the lab techs can find something. They also checked the trees and the road behind those pines. Tomorrow they’ll grid out everything within a hundred feet of this spot and take a closer look.”
“But so far they’ve come up with zero?”
“You got it.”
“So what are you left with—asking all the institute guests and neighbors if anyone saw a helicopter lowering a rope into the woods?”
“Nobody did.”
“You asked?”
“Felt like an idiot, but yes. The fact is, someone walked out here this morning—almost certainly the killer. He stopped right here. If a helicopter or the world’s largest crane didn’t lift him out, where the fuck is he?”
“So,” Gurney began, “no helicopters, no ropes, no secret tunnels …”
“Right,” said Hardwick, cutting him off. “And no evidence that he hopped away on a pogo stick.”
“Which leaves us with what?”
“Which leaves us with nothing. Zilch, zippo. Not one goddamn real possibility. And don’t tell me that once the killer walked all the way out here, he walked all the way back—stepping backwards, perfectly, into each footprint, without messing up a single one—just to drive us crazy.” Hardwick looked challengingly at Gurney, as though he might propose this very thing. “Even if that were possible, which it isn’t, the killer would have bumped into the two people who were on the scene by that time, Caddy the wife and Patty the gangster.”
“So it’s all impossible,” said Gurney lightly.
“What’s impossible?” said Hardwick, ready for a fight.
“Everything,” said Gurney.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Calm down, Jack. We need to find a starting point that makes sense. What seems to have happened can’t have happened. Therefore, what seems to have happened didn’t happen.”
“Are you telling me those aren’t footprints?”
“I’m telling you there’s something wrong with the way we’re looking at them.”
“Is that or is that not a footprint?” said Hardwick, exasperated.
“It looks very much like a footprint to me,” said Gurney agreeably.
“So what are you saying?”
Gurney sighed. “I don’t know, Jack. I just have a feeling we’re asking the wrong questions.”
Something in the softness of his tone took the edge off Hardwick’s attitude. Neither man looked at the other or said anything for several long seconds. Then Hardwick raised his head as though remembering something.
“I almost forgot to show you the icing on the cake.” He reached into the side pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out an evidence-collection envelope.
Through the clear plastic, on a plain sheet of white stationery, Gurney could see neat handwriting in red ink.
“Don’t remove it,” said Hardwick, “just read it.”
Gurney did as he was told. Then he read it again. And a third time, committing it to memory.
I ran through the snow.
Fool, look high and low.
Ask where did I go.
You scum of the earth,
here witness my birth:
Revenge is reborn
for children who mourn,
for all the forlorn.
“That’s our boy,” said Gurney, handing the envelope back. “Revenge theme, eight lines, consistent meter, elite vocabulary, perfect punctuation, delicate handwriting. Just like all the others—up to a point.”
“Up to a point?”
“There’s a new element in this one—an indication that the killer hates someone else in addition to the victim.”
Hardwick glanced over the encased note, frowning at the suggestion that he’d missed something significant. “Who?” he asked.
“You,” said Gurney, smiling for the first time that day.
Chapter 19
Scum of the earth
It was unfair, of course, a bit of dramatic license, to say that the killer had set his sights equally on Mark Mellery and Jack Hardwick. What Gurney meant, he explained as they strode back toward the crime scene from the dead-end trail in the woods, was that the killer seemed to be aiming some part of his hostility at the police investigating the murder. Far from disturbing Hardwick, the implied challenge energized him. The combative glint in his eye shouted, “Bring the fucker on!”
Then Gurney asked him if he remembered the case of Jason Strunk.
“Why should I?”
“Does the Satanic Santa ring a bell? Or, as another media genius called him, Cannibal Claus?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure, I remember. Wasn’t really a serious cannib
al, though. Just chewed off the toes.”
“Right, but that wasn’t all, was it?”
Hardwick grimaced. “I seem to recollect that after he chewed their toes off, he cut the bodies up with a band saw, sealed the pieces in plastic bags—very neat—put them in Christmas-gift boxes, and mailed them. That’s how he got rid of them. No burial problems.”
“You happen to remember who he mailed them to?”
“That was twenty years ago. I wasn’t even on the job then. I read about it in the papers.”
“He mailed them to the home addresses of homicide detectives in the precincts where the victims had lived.”
“Home addresses?” Hardwick shot Gurney an appalled look. Murder, moderate cannibalism, and dissection with a band saw might be forgivable, but not this final twist.
“He hated cops,” Gurney continued. “Loved upsetting them.”
“I can see how getting a foot mailed to you might do that.”
“It’s especially upsetting when your wife opens the box.”
The odd note caught Hardwick’s attention. “Holy shit. That was your case. He sent you a body part, and she opened the box?”
“Yep.”
“Holy shit. Is that why she divorced you?”
Gurney glanced at him curiously. “You remember that my first wife divorced me?”
“Some things I remember. Not so much things I read—but if somebody tells me something about themselves, that kind of stuff I never forget. Like, I know you were an only child, your father was born in Ireland, he hated it, he would never tell you anything about it, and he drank too much.”
Gurney stared at him.
“You told me while we were working on the Piggert case.”
Gurney wasn’t sure whether he was more distressed by having revealed those quirky little family facts, by forgetting that he had, or by Hardwick’s recalling them.
They walked on toward the house through the powdery snow, which had begun eddying in intermittent breezes under a darkening sky. Gurney tried to shake off the chill that was enveloping him and refocus himself on the matter at hand.
“Getting back to my point,” he said, “this killer’s last note is a challenge to the police, and that could be a significant development.”
Hardwick was the sort of man who’d get back to someone else’s point when he damn well felt like it.
“So is that why she divorced you? She got some guy’s dick in a box?”
It was none of his business, but Gurney decided to answer.
“We had plenty of other problems. I could give you a list of my complaints, and a longer list of hers. But I think, bottom line, she was shocked to discover what it’s like to be married to a cop. Some wives discover that slowly. Mine had a revelation.”
They had reached the back patio. Two evidence techs were sifting through the snow around the bloodstain, now more brown than red, and examining the flagstones they were uncovering in the process.
“Well, anyway,” said Hardwick, as though brushing aside an unnecessary complication, “Strunk was a serial killer, and this doesn’t look like that.”
Gurney nodded his tentative agreement. Yes, Jason Strunk was a typical serial killer, and whoever killed Mark Mellery seemed to be anything but that. Strunk had little or no prior acquaintance with his victims. It was safe to say that he didn’t have anything resembling a “relationship” with them. He chose them on the basis of their fitting the parameters of a certain physical type and their availability when the pressure to act overwhelmed him—the coinciding of urge and opportunity. Mellery’s killer, however, knew him well enough to torture him with allusions to his past—even knew him well enough to predict what numbers might come to his mind under certain circumstances. He gave indications of having shared the kind of intimate history with his victim that was not typical of serial killers. Moreover, there were no known reports of similar recent murders—although that would have to be researched more carefully.
“It doesn’t look like a serial case,” agreed Gurney. “I doubt you’ll start finding thumbs in your mailbox. But there is something disconcerting about his addressing you, the chief investigating officer, as ‘scum of the earth.’”
They walked around the house to the front door to avoid disrupting the crime-scene processors on the patio. A uniformed officer from the sheriff’s department was stationed there to control access to the house. The wind was sharper there, and he was stamping his feet and clapping his gloved hands together to generate some warmth. His obvious discomfort twisted the smile with which he greeted Hardwick.
“Any coffee on the way, you think?”
“No idea. But I hope so,” said Hardwick, sniffling loudly to keep his nose from running. He turned to Gurney. “I won’t keep you much longer. I just want you to show me the notes you told me were in the den—and make sure they’re all there.”
Inside the beautiful old chestnut-floored house, all was quiet. More than ever, the place smelled of money.
Chapter 20
A family friend
A picturesque fire was burning in the stone-and-brick fireplace, and the air in the room was sweetened by grace notes of cherry smoke. A pale but composed Caddy Mellery was sharing the sofa with a well-tailored man in his early seventies.
As Gurney and Hardwick entered, the man rose from his place on the sofa with an ease surprising for his age. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said. The words had a courtly, vaguely southern intonation. “I’m Carl Smale, an old friend of Caddy’s.”
“I’m Senior Investigator Hardwick, and this is Dave Gurney, a friend of Mrs. Mellery’s late husband.”
“Ah, yes, Mark’s friend. Caddy was telling me.”
“We’re sorry to bother you,” said Hardwick, glancing around the room as he spoke. His eyes settled on the small Sheraton desk set against the wall opposite the fireplace. “We need access to some papers, possibly related to the crime, which we have reason to believe may be located in that desk. Mrs. Mellery, I’m sorry to be bothering you with questions like this, but do you mind if I take a look?”
She closed her eyes. It was unclear whether she’d understood the question.
Smale reseated himself on the couch next to her, placing his hand on her forearm. “I’m sure Caddy has no objection to that.”
Hardwick hesitated. “Are you … speaking as Mrs. Mellery’s representative?”
Smale’s reaction was nearly invisible—a slight wrinkling of the nose, like a sensitive woman’s response to a rude word at a dinner party.
The widow opened her eyes and spoke through a sad smile. “I’m sure you can appreciate that this is a difficult time. I’m relying on Carl completely. Whatever he says is wiser than anything I would say.”
Hardwick persisted. “Mr. Smale is your attorney?”
She turned toward Smale with a benevolence Gurney suspected was fueled by Valium and said, “He’s been my attorney, my representative in sickness and in health, in good times and bad, for over thirty years. My God, Carl, isn’t that frightening?”
Smale mirrored her nostalgic smile, then spoke to Hardwick with a new crispness in his tone. “Feel free to examine this room for whatever materials may be related to your investigation. We’d naturally appreciate receiving a list of any materials you wish to remove.”
The pointed reference to “this room” did not escape Gurney. Smale was not granting the police a blanket exemption from a search warrant. Apparently it hadn’t escaped Hardwick, either, judging from the hard look he gave the dapper little man on the sofa.
“All evidence we take possession of is fully inventoried.” Hardwick’s tone conveyed the unspoken part of the message as well: “We don’t give you a list of things we wish to take. We give you a list of things we have actually taken.”
Smale, who obviously had the ability to hear unspoken communication, smiled. He turned to Gurney and asked in his languorous drawl, “Tell me, are you the Dave Gurney?”
“I’m the only one my par
ents had.”
“Well, well, well. A detective of legend! A pleasure to meet you.”
Gurney, who inevitably found this sort of recognition uncomfortable, said nothing.
The silence was broken by Caddy Mellery. “I must apologize, but I have a blinding headache and must lie down.”
“I sympathize,” said Hardwick. “But I do need your help with a few details.”
Smale regarded his client with concern. “Couldn’t it wait for an hour or two? Mrs. Mellery is in obvious pain.”
“My questions will only take two or three minutes. Believe me, I’d rather not intrude, but a delay could create problems.”
“Caddy?”
“It’s fine, Carl. Now or later makes no difference.” She closed her eyes. “I’m listening.”
“I’m sorry to make you think about these things,” said Hardwick. “Do you mind if I sit here?” He pointed to the wing chair nearest Caddy’s end of the sofa.
“Go right ahead.” Her eyes were still shut.
He perched on the edge of the cushion. Questioning the recently bereaved was uncomfortable for any cop. Hardwick, though, looked like he wasn’t terribly bothered by the task.
“I want to go over something you told me this morning to make sure I’ve got it right. You said the phone rang a little after one A.M.—that you and your husband were asleep at the time?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew the time because …?”
“I looked at the clock. I wondered who would be calling us at that hour.”
“And your husband answered it?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He said hello, hello, hello—three or four times. Then he hung up.”
“Did he tell you if the caller said anything at all?”
“No.”
“And a few minutes later, you heard an animal screaming in the woods?”
“Screeching.”
“Screeching?”
“Yes.”
“What distinction do you make between ‘screeching’ and ‘screaming’?”
“Screaming—” She stopped and bit hard on her lower lip.