by John Verdon
“What time was that?”
“What time was what?”
“The screech owl.”
“I have no idea, because they had no idea. Middle of the night was as close as they could get.”
“Lodging facilities?”
“What?”
“Did someone check the lodging facilities in the area?”
“There’s one motel just outside the village—run-down place that caters to hunters. Empty that night. Only other places within a three-mile radius are two bed-and-breakfasts. One is closed for the winter. The other one, if I’m remembering right, had one room booked the night of the murder—some bird-watcher guy and his mother.”
“Bird-watching in November?”
“Seemed odd to me, too, so I checked some bird-watching websites. Turns out the serious ones love the winter—foliage off the trees, better visibility, lots of pheasants, owls, grouse, chickadees, blah-blah-blah.”
“You talked to the people?”
“Blatt spoke to one of the owners—pair of fags, silly names, no useful information.”
“Silly names?”
“Yeah, one of them was Peachpit, something like that.”
“Peachpit?”
“Something like that. No, Plumstone, that was it. Paul Plumstone. You believe that?”
“Anyone speak to the bird-watchers?”
“I think they’d left before Blatt stopped by, but don’t quote me on that.”
“No one followed up?”
“Jesus Christ! What the hell would they know about anything? You want to visit the Peachpits, be my guest. Name of the place is The Laurels, mile and a half down the mountain from the institute. I have a certain amount of manpower assigned to this case, and I can’t goddamn waste it chasing after every warm body that ever passed through Peony.”
“Right.”
The meaning of Gurney’s reply was vague at best, but it seemed to somehow appease Hardwick, who said in a tone that was almost cordial, “Speaking of manpower, I need to get back to work. What did you say you were doing here?”
“I thought if I walked around the grounds again, something might occur to me.”
“That’s the methodology of the NYPD’s ace crime solver? That’s pathetic!”
“I know, Jack, I know. But right now it’s the best I can do.”
Hardwick went back into the house shaking his head in exaggerated disbelief.
Gurney inhaled the moist smell of the snow, and, as always, it displaced for a moment all rational thoughts, stirring a powerful childhood emotion for which he had no words. He set out across the white lawn toward the woods, the snow smell flooding him with memories—memories of stories his father had read to him when he was five or six years old, stories that were more vivid to him than anything in his actual life—stories about pioneers, cabins in the wilderness, trails in the forest, good Indians, bad Indians, snapped twigs, moccasin impressions in the grass, the broken stem of a fern offering crucial evidence of the enemy’s passage, and the cries of the forest birds, some real, some mimicked by the Indians as coded communications—images so concrete, so richly detailed. It was ironic, he thought, how the memories of the stories his father had told him in early childhood had replaced most of his memories of the man himself. Of course, other than telling him those stories, his father had never had much to do with him. Mainly his father worked. Worked and kept to himself.
Worked and kept to himself. This life-summarizing phrase, it struck Gurney, described his own behavior as accurately as it did his father’s. The barriers he’d once erected against recognizing such similarities seemed lately to be developing large leaks. He suspected not just that he was becoming his father but that he had done so long ago. Worked and kept to himself. What a small and chilly sense of his life it conveyed. How humiliating it was to see how much of one’s time on earth could be captured in so short a sentence. What sort of husband was he if his energies were so circumscribed? And what sort of father? What sort of father is so absorbed in his professional priorities that … No, enough of that.
Gurney walked into the woods, following what he recalled to be the route of the footprints, now obscured by the new snow. When he came to the evergreen thicket where the trail had, implausibly, ended, he inhaled the piney fragrance, listened to the deep silence of the place, and waited for inspiration. None came. Chagrined at expecting otherwise, he forced himself to review for the twentieth time what he actually knew about the events of the night of the murder. That the killer had entered the property on foot from the public road? That he was carrying a .38 Police Special, a broken Four Roses bottle, a lawn chair, an extra pair of boots, and a mini tape player with the animal screeches that got Mellery out of bed? That he was wearing Tyvek coveralls, gloves, and a thick goose-down jacket he could use to muffle the gunshot? That he sat behind the barn smoking cigarettes? That he got Mellery to come out onto the patio, shot him dead, then stabbed the body at least fourteen times? That he then walked calmly across the open lawn and half a mile into the woods, hung an extra pair of boots from a tree branch, and disappeared without a trace?
Gurney’s face had worked itself into a grimace—partly because of the damp, darkening chill of the day and partly because now, more clearly than ever, he realized that what he “knew” about the crime didn’t make a damn bit of sense.
Chapter 29
Backwards
November was his least favorite month, a month of waning light, an uncertain month shambling between autumn and winter.
This sense of the season seemed to exacerbate the feeling that he was stumbling around in a fog on the Mellery case, blind to something right in front of him.
When he arrived home from Peony that day, he decided, uncharacteristically, to share his confusion with Madeleine, who was sitting at the pine table over the remains of tea and cranberry cake.
“I’d love to get your input on something,” he said, immediately regretting his word choice. Madeleine was not fond of terms like input.
She tilted her head curiously, which he took as an invitation.
“The Mellery Institute sits on a hundred acres between Filchers Brook Road and Thornbush Lane in the hills above the village. There are about ninety acres of woods, maybe ten acres of lawns, flower beds, a parking area, and three buildings—the main lecture center, which also includes the offices and guest rooms, the private Mellery residence, and a barn for maintenance equipment.”
Madeleine raised her eyes to the clock on the kitchen wall, and he hurried on. “The responding officers found a set of footprints that entered the property from Filchers Brook Road and led to a chair behind the barn. From the chair they led to the spot where Mellery was killed and from there to a location half a mile away in the woods, where they stopped. No more footprints. No hint of how the individual who left the prints up to that point could have gotten away without leaving any further prints.”
“Is this a joke?”
“I’m describing the actual evidence at the scene.”
“What about the other road you mentioned?”
“Thornbush Lane is over a hundred feet from the last footprint.”
“The bear came back,” said Madeleine after a short silence.
“What?” Gurney stared at her, uncomprehending.
“The bear.” She nodded toward the side window.
Between the window and their dormant, rime-encrusted garden beds, a steel shepherd’s-crook support for a finch feeder had been bent to the ground, and the feeder itself had been broken in half.
“I’ll take care of it later,” said Gurney, annoyed at the irrelevant comment. “Do you have any reaction to the footprint problem?”
Madeleine yawned. “I think it’s silly, and the person who did it is crazy.”
“But how did he do it?”
“It’s like the number trick.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what difference does it make how he did it?”
“Tell
me more,” said Gurney, his curiosity slightly greater than his irritation.
“How doesn’t matter. The question is why, and the answer is obvious.”
“And the obvious answer is …?”
“He wants to prove that you’re a pack of idiots.”
Her answer put Gurney in two emotional places at once—pleased that she agreed with him that the police were targets in the case, but not so pleased with how much emphasis she put on idiots.
“Maybe he walked backwards,” she suggested with a shrug. “Maybe where you think the footprints went is where they came from, and where you think they came from is where they went.”
It was among the possibilities that Gurney had considered and dismissed. “There are two problems. First, it just moves the question of how the prints could stop in the middle of nowhere to how they could start in the middle of nowhere. Second, the tracks are very evenly spaced. It’s hard to imagine someone walking backwards half a mile through the woods without stumbling even once.”
Then it occurred to him that even the smallest sign of interest from Madeleine was something he’d like to encourage, so he added warmly, “But actually, it’s a pretty interesting thought—so please keep thinking.”
At two o’clock the following morning, gazing at the rectangle of his bedroom window, faintly illuminated by a quarter moon behind a cloud, Gurney was the one who was still thinking—and still pondering Madeleine’s observation that the direction in which the footprints pointed and the direction in which they had actually traveled were separate matters. That was true, but how did it help in the interpretation of the data? Even if someone could walk that far backwards over uneven terrain without a single misstep, which no one could, that hypothesis only served to turn the inexplicable ending of the trail into an inexplicable beginning.
Or did it?
Suppose …
But that would be unlikely. Still, just suppose for the moment …
To quote Sherlock Holmes, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“Madeleine?”
“Hmm?”
“Sorry to wake you. It’s important.”
Her answer was a long sigh.
“Are you awake?”
“I am now.”
“Listen. Suppose the killer enters the property not from the main road but from the back road. Suppose he arrives several hours before the crime—in fact, just before it starts to snow. Suppose he walks into the little pine grove from the back road with his little lawn chair and other paraphernalia, puts on his Tyvek jumpsuit and his latex gloves, and waits.”
“In the woods?”
“In the pine grove, at the spot where we thought the footprints ended. He sits there and waits until the snow stops—a little after midnight. Then he gets up, takes his chair, whiskey bottle, gun, and mini tape player with the animal screeches, and walks the half mile to the house. On the way he calls Mellery on his cell phone to make sure he’s awake enough to hear the animal noises—”
“Wait a minute. I thought you said he couldn’t walk backwards through the woods.”
“He didn’t. He didn’t have to. You were right to separate the toe-heel orientation of the footprints from their actual direction—but we need to make one more separation. Suppose the soles of the shoes were separated from the uppers.”
“How?”
“All the killer had to do was cut the soles off one pair of boots and glue them on another pair—backwards. Then he could walk forward easily and leave a neat trail of impressions behind him that seemed to be going in the direction he was coming from.”
“And the lawn chair?”
“He takes it to the patio. Maybe lays his various items on it while he wraps the goose-down parka around his gun as a partial silencer. The chair marks could easily be obscured by his own footprints, so no one would see them later. Then he plays his tape of the screeching animals to bring Mellery to the back door. There are variations in exactly how all this could be done, but the bottom line is he gets Mellery out onto the patio at gunpoint and shoots him. When Mellery goes down, the killer takes the broken bottle and stabs him repeatedly. Then he tosses the bottle back toward the footprints he made on his way to the patio—footprints that, of course, point away from the patio.”
“Why not just leave it by the body—or take it with him?”
“He didn’t take it because he wanted us to find it. The whiskey bottle is part of the game, part of what this whole thing is about. And it would be my guess that he threw it alongside the seemingly departing footprints to put the icing on the cake of that particular little deception.”
“That’s a pretty subtle detail.”
“Like the subtle detail of leaving a pair of boots at what seemed to be the end of the trail—but, of course, he left them there as he was starting out.”
“So they weren’t the boots that made the tracks?”
“No, but we already knew that. There’s a tech at the BCI lab who found a tiny difference between the tread of one of the boots and the imprints left in the snow. At first it made no sense. But it fits this revised version of the facts—perfectly.”
Madeleine said nothing for a few moments, but he could almost feel her mind absorbing, evaluating, testing the new scenario for weak points.
“So after he tosses the bottle, what then?”
“Then he goes from the patio to the back of the barn, sets the lawn chair there, and tosses a handful of cigarette butts on the ground in front of it to make it look like he’d been sitting there before the murder. He takes off the Tyvek suit and latex gloves, puts his parka on, walks around the far side of barn—leaving those goddamn backwards footprints—heads out onto Filchers Brook Road, which the town has plowed, so no prints are left there, and walks to his car on Thornbush Lane, or down to the village, or wherever.”
“Did the Peony police see anyone when they were on their way up the road?”
“Apparently not, but he could easily have stepped into the woods, or …” He paused to consider the options.
“Or …?”
“It’s not the most likely possibility, but I’ve been told there’s a bed-and-breakfast place on the mountain that BCI was supposed to be checking. It sounds bizarre after nearly hacking his victim’s head off, but our homicidal maniac may simply have strolled back to a cozy little B&B.”
They lay silently side by side in the dark for several long minutes, Gurney’s mind racing back and forth over his reconstruction of the crime like a man who has just launched a homebuilt boat and is checking it intently for possible leaks. When he was confident there were no major holes, he asked Madeleine what she thought.
“The perfect adversary,” she said.
“What?”
“The perfect adversary.”
“Meaning?”
“You love puzzles. So does he. A marriage made in heaven.”
“Or hell?”
“Whichever. By the way, there’s something wrong with those notes.”
“Wrong with … what?”
Madeleine had a way of skipping through a chain of associations that sometimes left him a long step behind.
“The notes you showed me, from the killer to Mellery—the first two, and then the poems. I was trying to remember exactly what was in each one.”
“And?”
“And I was having a hard time, even though I have a good memory. Then I realized why. There’s nothing real in them.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are no specifics. No mention of what Mellery actually did or who was hurt. Why so vague? No names, dates, places, no concrete references to anything. Peculiar, isn’t it?”
“The numbers six fifty-eight and nineteen were pretty specific.”
“But they didn’t mean anything to Mellery, other than the fact that he’d thought of them. And that had to be a trick.”
“If it was, I haven’t been able to figure it out.”
“Ah, but you will. You’re very good at connecting the dots.” She yawned. “No one’s better at it than you.” There was no detectable irony in her voice.
He lay there in the dark next to her, relaxing ever so briefly in the comfort of her praise. Then his mind began combing restlessly through the killer’s notes, reviewing their language in the light of her observation.
“They were specific enough to scare the shit out of Mellery,” he said.
She sighed sleepily. “Or unspecific enough.”
“Meaning what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there was no specific event to be specific about.”
“But if Mellery didn’t do anything, why was he killed?”
She made a little sound in her throat that was the equivalent of a shrug. “I don’t know. I just know there’s something wrong with those notes. Time to go back to sleep.”
Chapter 30
Emerald cottage
He awoke at dawn feeling better than he had for weeks, maybe months. It might be an exaggeration to say that his explanation of the boot mystery meant that the first domino had fallen, but that was the way it felt as he drove across the county, eastward into the rising sun, on his way to the B&B on Filchers Brook Road in Peony.
It occurred to him that interviewing “the fags” without clearing it with Kline’s office or with BCI might be stretching the rules. But what the hell—if someone wanted to slap his wrist later, he’d survive. Besides, he had a feeling that things were starting to go his way. “There is a tide in the affairs of men …”
With less than a mile to go to the Filchers Brook intersection, his phone rang. It was Ellen Rackoff.
“District Attorney Kline got some news he wanted you to know about. He said to tell you that Sergeant Wigg from the BCI lab did an enhancement of the tape Mark Mellery made of the phone call he got from the killer. Are you familiar with the call?”
“Yes,” said Gurney, recalling the disguised voice and Mellery thinking of the number nineteen, then finding that number in the letter the killer had left in his mailbox.