by John Verdon
“Mrs. Mellery?”
“Will there be much more of this?” asked Smale.
“I just need to know what she heard.”
“Screaming is more human. Screaming is what I did when I …” She blinked as if to force a speck out of her eye, then continued. “This was some kind of animal. But not in the woods. It sounded close to the house.”
“How long did this screaming—screeching—go on?”
“A minute or two, I’m not sure. It stopped after Mark went downstairs.”
“Did he say what he was going to do?”
“He said he was going to see what it was. That’s all. He just—” She stopped speaking and began taking slow, deep breaths.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Mellery. This won’t take much longer.”
“He just wanted to see what it was, that’s all.”
“Did you hear anything else?”
She put her hand over her mouth, holding her cheeks and jaw in an apparent effort to keep control of herself. Red and white splotches appeared under her fingernails from the tightness of her grip.
When she spoke, the words were muffled by her hand.
“I was half asleep, but I did hear something, something like a clap—as though someone had clapped their hands together. That’s all.” She continued holding on to her face as though the pressure were her sole comfort.
“Thank you,” said Hardwick, rising from the wing chair. “We’ll keep our intrusions to a minimum. For now, all I need to do is go through that desk.”
Caddy Mellery raised her head and opened her eyes. Her hand fell to her lap, leaving livid finger marks on her cheeks. “Detective,” she said in a frail but determined voice, “you may take anything relevant, but please respect our privacy. The press is irresponsible. My husband’s legacy is of supreme importance.”
Chapter 21
Priorities
“Get bogged down in this poetry and we’ll be chasing ourselves up our own asses for the next year,” said Hardwick. He articulated the word poetry as though it were the messiest sort of mire.
The messages from the killer were arrayed on a large table in the middle of the institute’s boardroom, occupied by the BCI team as their on-site location for the intensive start-up phase of the investigation.
There was the initial two-part letter from “X. Arybdis” making the uncanny prediction that the number Mellery would think of would be 658 and asking for $289.87 to cover the expense of having located him. There were the three increasingly menacing poems that had subsequently arrived by mail. (The third of these was the one Mellery had placed in a small plastic food-storage bag, he had told Gurney, to preserve any fingerprints.) Also laid out in sequence were Mellery’s returned $289.87 check along with the note from Gregory Dermott indicating that there was no “X. Arybdis” at that address; the poem dictated by the killer on the phone to Mellery’s assistant; a cassette tape of the killer’s phone conversation later that evening with Mellery, during which Mellery mentioned the number nineteen; the letter found in the institute mailbox predicting that Mellery would pick nineteen; and the final poem found on the corpse. It was a remarkable amount of evidentiary material.
“You know anything about the plastic bag?” Hardwick asked. He sounded as unenthusiastic about plastic as he did about poetry.
“By that point Mellery was seriously frightened,” said Gurney. “He told me he was trying to save possible fingerprints.”
Hardwick shook his head. “It’s that CSI bullshit. Plastic looks higher-tech than paper. Keep evidence in plastic bags, and it rots from trapped moisture. Assholes.”
A uniformed cop with a Peony police badge on his hat and a harried expression on his face was standing at the door.
“Yeah?” Hardwick said, daring the visitor to bring him another problem.
“Your tech team needs access. That okay?”
Hardwick nodded, but his attention had returned to the collection of rhyming threats spread out across the table.
“Neat handwriting,” he said, his face wrinkling up in distaste. “What do you think, Dave? You think maybe we got a homicidal nun on our hands?”
Half a minute later, the techs appeared in the boardroom with their evidence bags, a laptop, and a portable bar-code printer to secure and label all the items temporarily displayed on the table. Hardwick requested that photocopies be made of each of the materials before they were sent to the forensics lab in Albany for latent-fingerprint inspection and for handwriting, paper, and ink analysis—with special attention to the note left on the body.
Gurney kept a low profile, observing Hardwick at work in his crime-scene supervisor role. The way a case turned out months, or even years, down the road often depended on how well the guy in charge of the scene did his job in the early hours of the process. In Gurney’s opinion Hardwick was doing a very good job indeed. He watched him go over the photographer’s documentation of his shots and locations to make sure all relevant areas of the property had been covered, including key parts of the perimeter, entries and exits, all the footprints and visible physical evidence (lawn chair, cigarette butts, broken bottle), the body itself in situ, and the blood-drenched snow around it. Hardwick also asked the photographer to arrange for aerial shots of the entire property and its environs—not a normal part of the process, but under the circumstances, particularly the circumstance of a set of footprints that led nowhere, it made sense.
In addition, Hardwick conferred with the pair of younger detectives to verify that the interviews assigned to them earlier had been conducted. He met with the senior evidence tech to review the trace-evidence collection list, then had one of his detectives arrange for a scent-tracking dog to be brought to the scene the following morning—a sign to Gurney that the footprint problem was very much on Hardwick’s mind. Finally he’d examined the crime-scene arrival and departure log maintained by the trooper at the front gate to make sure there had been no inappropriate personnel on site. Having watched Hardwick absorb and evaluate, prioritize and direct, Gurney concluded that the man was still as competent under pressure as he’d been during their former collaboration. Hardwick might be a bristly bastard, but there was no denying he was efficient.
At a quarter past four, Hardwick said to him, “Long day, and you’re not even getting paid. Why don’t you head home to the farm?” Then he did a little double take, as if a thought had ambushed him, and added, “I mean, we’re not paying you. Were you getting paid by the Mellerys? Shit, I bet you were. Famous talent doesn’t come cheap.”
“I don’t have a license. I couldn’t charge if I wanted to. Besides, working as a paid PI is the last thing on earth I’d want to do.”
Hardwick shot him a disbelieving look.
“In fact, right now I think I’ll take your suggestion and call it a day.”
“Think you could drop by regional headquarters around noon tomorrow?”
“What’s the plan?”
“Two things. First, we need a statement—your history with the victim, the piece from long ago and the current piece. You know the drill. Second, I’d like you to sit in on a meeting—an orientation to get everyone on the same page. Preliminary reports on cause of death, witness interviews, blood, prints, murder weapon, et cetera. Initial theories, priorities, next steps. Guy like you could be a big help, get us on the right track, keep us from wasting taxpayer money. Be a crime not to share your big-city genius with us shitkickers. Noon tomorrow. Be good if you could bring your statement along with you.”
The man needed to be a wise-ass. It defined his place in the world: Wise-Ass Hardwick, Major Crimes Unit, Bureau of Criminal Investigation, New York State Police. But Gurney sensed that underneath the bullshit, Hardwick really did want his help with a case that was growing stranger by the hour.
Gurney drove most of the way home oblivious to his surroundings. Not until he had driven up into the high end of the valley past Abelard’s General Store in Dillweed did he become aware the clouds that had gathered earlier i
n the day were gone, and in their place a remarkable glow from the setting sun was illuminating the western face of the hills. The snowy cornfields that bordered the meandering river were bathed in a pastel so rich that his eyes widened at the sight. Then, with surprising speed, the coral sun descended below the opposing ridge, and the glow was extinguished. Again the leafless trees were black, the snow a vacant white.
As he slowed approaching his turnoff, his attention was drawn to a crow on the shoulder of the road. The crow was standing on something that elevated it a few inches above the level of the pavement. As he came abreast of it, he looked more closely. The crow was standing on a dead possum. Strangely, considering the normal caution of crows, it neither flew away nor showed any sign of disturbance at the passing car. Motionless, it had about it an expectant air—giving the odd tableau the quality of a dream.
Gurney turned onto his road and downshifted for the slow, winding ascent—his mind full of the image of the black bird atop the dead animal in the fading dusk, watchful, waiting.
It was two miles—and five minutes—from the intersection to Gurney’s property. By the time he came to the narrow farm track that led from the barn to the house, the atmosphere had grown grayer and colder. A ghostlike snow devil reeled across the pasture, almost reaching the dark woods before dissolving.
He pulled in closer to the house than usual, turned up his collar against the chill, and hurried to the back door. As soon as he entered the kitchen, he was aware of the uniquely vacant sound that signaled Madeleine’s absence. It was as if she had about her the faint hum of an electric current, an energy that filled a space when it was present and left a palpable void when it was not.
There was something else in the air as well, the emotional residue of that morning, the dark presence of the box from the basement, the box that still sat on the coffee table at the shadowed end of the room, its delicate white ribbon untouched.
After a brief detour to the bathroom off the pantry, he went directly into the den and checked the phone messages. There was just one. The voice was Sonya’s—satiny, cello-like. “Hello, David. I have a customer who is enthralled by your work. I told him you’re completing another piece, and I’d like to tell him when it will be available. Enthralled is not too strong a term, and money does not seem to be an issue. Give me a call as soon as you can. We need to get our heads together on this one. Thanks, David.”
He was starting to replay the message when he heard the back door opening and shutting. He pressed the “stop” button on the machine to abort the Sonya replay and called out, “Is that you?”
There was no answer, which annoyed him.
“Madeleine,” he called, more loudly than he needed to.
He heard her voice answer, but it was too low to make out what she said. It was a voice level that, in his hostile moments, he labeled “passive-aggressively low.” His first inclination was to stay in the den, but that seemed infantile, so he went out to the kitchen.
Madeleine turned to him from the coat pegs on the far side of the room where she’d hung her orange parka. It still had sprinkles of snow on the shoulders, which meant she’d been walking through the pines.
“It’s so-o-o beautiful out,” she said, running her fingers through her thick brown hair, fluffing it up where the parka hood had pressed it down. She walked into the pantry, came out a minute later, and glanced around at the countertops.
“Where did you put the pecans?”
“What?”
“Didn’t I ask you to get pecans?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe I didn’t. Or maybe you didn’t hear me?”
“I have no idea,” he said. He was having a hard time fitting the subject into the current shape of his mind. “I’ll get some tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“Abelard’s.”
“On Sunday?”
“Sun—Oh, right, they’re closed. What is it you need them for?”
“I’m the one making dessert.”
“What dessert?”
“Elizabeth is making the salad and baking the bread, Jan is making the chili, and I’m making the dessert.” Her eyes darkened. “You forgot?”
“They’re coming here tomorrow?”
“That’s right.”
“What time?”
“Is that an issue?”
“I have to deliver a written statement to the BCI team at noon.”
“On Sunday?”
“It’s a murder investigation,” he said dully, he hoped not sarcastically.
She nodded. “So you’ll be gone all day.”
“Part of the day.”
“How big a part?”
“Christ, you know the nature of these things.”
The sadness and anger that contended with each other in her eyes disturbed Gurney more than a slap would have. “So I guess you’ll get home tomorrow whatever time you get home, and maybe you’ll join us for dinner and maybe not,” she said.
“I have to deliver a signed statement as a witness-before-the-fact in a murder case. That is not something I want to do.” His voice rose abruptly, shockingly, spitting the words at her. “There are some things in life we are required to do. This is a legal obligation—not a matter of preference. I didn’t write the goddamn law!”
She stared at him with a weariness as sudden as his fury. “You still don’t see it, do you?”
“See what?”
“That your brain is so tied up with murder and mayhem and blood and monsters and liars and psychopaths, there’s simply nothing left for anything else.”
Chapter 22
Getting it straight
He spent two hours that night writing and editing his statement. It recounted simply—without adjectives, emotions, opinions—the facts of his acquaintance with Mark Mellery, including their casual association in college and their recent contacts, beginning with Mellery’s e-mail requesting a meeting and ending with his adamant refusal to take the matter to the police.
He drank two mugs of strong coffee while composing the statement and, as a result, slept poorly. Cold, sweaty, itchy, thirsty, with a transient ache that drifted inexplicably from one leg to the other—the night’s succession of discomforts provided a malignant nursery for troubled thoughts, especially concerning the pain he’d glimpsed in Madeleine’s eyes.
He knew that it came from her sense of his priorities. She was complaining that when the roles in his life collided, Dave the Detective always superseded Dave the Husband. His retirement from the job had made no difference. It was clear she’d hoped it would, maybe believed it would. But how could he stop being what he was? However much he cared for her, however much he wanted to be with her, however much he wanted her to be happy, how could he become someone he wasn’t? His mind worked exceptionally well in a certain way, and the greatest satisfactions in his life had come from applying that intellectual gift. He had a supremely logical brain and a finely tuned antenna for discrepancy. These qualities made him an outstanding detective. They also created the cushion of abstraction that allowed him to maintain a tolerable distance from the horrors of his profession. Other cops had other cushions—alcohol, frat-boy solidarity, heart-deadening cynicism. Gurney’s shield was his ability to grasp situations as intellectual challenges, and crimes as equations to be solved. That was who he was. It was not something he could cease to be, simply by retiring. At least that’s the way he was thinking about it when he finally fell asleep an hour before dawn.
Sixty miles east of Walnut Crossing, ten miles beyond Peony, on a bluff within sight of the Hudson, State Police Regional Headquarters had the look and feel of a newly erected fortress. Its massive gray stone exterior and narrow windows seemed designed to withstand the apocalypse. Gurney wondered if the architecture was influenced by the 9/11 hysteria, which had bred projects even sillier than impregnable trooper stations.
Inside, fluorescent lighting maximized the harsh look of the metal detectors, remote cameras, bulletproof
guard booth, and polished concrete floor. There was a microphone for communicating with the guard in the booth—which was really more like a control room, containing a bank of monitors for the security cameras. The lights, which cast a cold glare on all the hard surfaces, gave the guard an exhausted pallor. Even his colorless hair was rendered sickly by the unnatural illumination. He looked like he was about to throw up.
Gurney spoke into the microphone, resisting an urge to ask the guard if he was all right. “David Gurney. I’m here for a meeting with Jack Hardwick.”
The guard pushed a temporary facility pass and a visitor’s sign-in sheet through a narrow slot at the base of the formidable glass wall running from the ceiling down to the counter that separated them. He picked up the phone, consulted a list that was Scotch-taped to his side of the counter, dialed a four-digit extension, said something Gurney couldn’t hear, then replaced the phone on its cradle.
A minute later a gray steel door in the wall next to the booth opened to reveal the same plainclothes trooper who’d escorted him the previous day at the institute. He motioned to Gurney without any indication of recognizing him and led him down a featureless gray corridor to another steel door, which he opened.
They stepped into a large, windowless conference room—windowless no doubt to keep conferees safe from the flying glass of a terrorist attack. Gurney was a bit claustrophobic, hated windowless spaces, hated the architects who thought they were a good idea.
His laconic guide made straight for the coffee urn in the far corner. Most of the seats at the oblong conference table had already been claimed by people not yet in the room. Jackets were hanging over the backs of four of the ten chairs, and three other chairs had been reserved by tilting them forward against the table. Gurney removed the light parka he was wearing and placed it over the back of one of the free chairs.
The door opened, and Hardwick entered, followed by a wonkish red-haired woman in a genderless suit, carrying a laptop and a fat file folder, and the other Tom Cruise look-alike, who headed for his buddy at the coffee urn. The woman proceeded to an unclaimed chair and put her things on the table in front of it. Hardwick approached Gurney, his face stuck in an odd spot between anticipation and disdain.