Think of a Number

by John Verdon

  Gurney smiled, this time genuinely. “He rarely asks a question unless he already has a pretty good idea of the answer. Care to share, Jack?”

  Hardwick massaged his face with his hands for several seconds—another of the incomprehensible tics that had irritated Gurney so much when they worked together on the Piggert matricide-patricide case. “If you look at the most significant background characteristic all the victims have in common—the characteristic referred to in the threatening poems—you might conclude that their names were part of a list of people with serious drinking problems.” He paused. “Question is, what list would that be?”

  “Alcoholics Anonymous membership list?” suggested Blatt.

  Hardwick shook his head. “No such list. They take that anonymity shit seriously.”

  “How about a list compiled from public-record data?” said Kline. “Alcohol-related arrests, convictions?”

  “A list like that could be put together, but two of the victims wouldn’t appear on it. Mellery has no arrest record. The pederast priest does, but the charge was endangering the morals of a minor—nothing about alcohol in the public record, although the Boston detective I spoke to told me the good father later had that charge dismissed in exchange for pleading to a lesser misdemeanor, blaming his behavior on his alcoholism and agreeing to go to long-term rehab.”

  Kline squinted thoughtfully. “Well, then, could it be a list of the patients at that rehab?”

  “It’s conceivable,” said Hardwick, screwing up his face in a way that said it wasn’t.

  “Maybe we ought to look into it.”

  “Sure.” Hardwick’s almost insulting tone created an awkward silence, broken by Gurney.

  “In an effort to see if I could establish a location connection among the victims, I started looking into the rehab issue a while ago. Unfortunately, it was a dead end. Albert Rudden spent twenty-eight days in a Bronx rehab five years ago, and Mellery spent twenty-eight days in a Queens rehab fifteen years ago. Neither rehab offers long-term treatment—meaning the priest must have gone to yet another facility. So even if our killer had a job at one of those places and his job gave him access to thousands of patient records, any list he put together that way would include the name of only one of the victims.”

  Rodriguez turned in his chair and addressed Gurney directly. “Your theory depends on the existence of a giant list—maybe five thousand names, maybe eleven thousand, I heard Wigg say maybe fifteen thousand—whatever, it seems to keep changing. But there isn’t any source for such a list. So now what?”

  “Patience, Captain,” said Gurney softly. “I wouldn’t say there isn’t any source—we just haven’t figured it out yet. I seem to have more faith in your abilities than you do.”

  The blood rose in Rodriguez’s face. “Faith? In my abilities? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “At one time or another, did all the victims go to rehab?” asked Wigg, ignoring the captain’s outburst.

  “I don’t know about Kartch,” said Gurney, glad to be drawn back to the subject. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Hardwick chimed in. “Sotherton PD faxed us his record. Portrait of a real asshole. Assaults, harassment, public drunkenness, drunk and disorderly, menacing, menacing with a firearm, lewd behavior, three DWIs, two trips upstate, not to mention a dozen visits to county jail. The alcohol-related stuff, especially the DWIs, makes it virtually certain he’s been pushed into rehab at least once. I can ask Sotherton to look into it.”

  Rodriguez pushed himself back from the table. “If the victims didn’t meet in rehab or even go to the same rehab at different times, what difference does it make that they were in rehab at all? Half the unemployed bums and bullshit artists in the world go to rehab these days. It’s a goddamn Medicaid-funded racket, a taxpayer rip-off. What the hell does it mean that all these guys went to rehab? That they were likely to be murdered? Hardly. That they were drunks? So what? We already knew that.” Anger, Gurney noted, had become Rodriguez’s ongoing emotion, leaping like a brushfire from issue to issue.

  Wigg, at whom the tirade was directed, seemed unaffected by its nastiness. “Senior Investigator Gurney once said that he believed all the victims were likely to be connected through some common factor beyond drinking. I was thinking rehab attendance could be that factor, or at least be part of it.”

  Rodriguez laughed derisively. “Maybe this, maybe that. I’m hearing a lot of maybes but no real connections.”

  Kline looked frustrated. “Come on, Becca, tell us what you think. How firm is our footing here?”

  “That’s a difficult question to answer. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “I’ll simplify it. Do you buy Gurney’s theory of the case—yes or no?”

  “Yes, I do. The picture he painted of Mark Mellery’s being mentally tortured by the notes he was receiving—I can see that as a plausible part of a certain kind of murder ritual.”

  “But you look like you’re not entirely convinced.”

  “It’s not that, it’s just … the uniqueness of the approach. Torturing the victim is a common enough part of serial-murder pathology, but I’ve never seen an instance of its being carried out from such a distance in such a cool, methodical manner. The torture component of such murders generally relies on the direct infliction of physical agony in order to terrorize the victim and give the killer the feeling of ultimate power and control that he craves. In this case, however, the infliction of pain was entirely cerebral.”

  Rodriguez leaned toward her. “So you’re saying it doesn’t fit the serial-murder pattern?” He sounded like an attorney attacking a hostile witness.

  “No. The pattern is there. I’m saying that he has a uniquely cool and calculated way of executing it. Most serial killers are above average in intelligence. Some, like Ted Bundy, are far above average. This individual may be in a class by himself.”

  “Too smart for us—is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s not what I said,” replied Holdenfield innocently, “but you’re probably right.”

  “Really? Let me get this on the record,” said Rodriguez, his voice as brittle as thin ice. “Your professional opinion is that BCI is incapable of apprehending this maniac?”

  “Once again, that’s not what I said.” Holdenfield smiled. “But once again you’re probably right.”

  Once again Rodriguez’s sallow skin reddened with anger, but Kline intervened. “Surely, Becca, you’re not implying that there’s nothing we can do.”

  She sighed with the resignation of a teacher saddled with the dullest students in the school. “The facts of the case so far support three conclusions. First, the man you’re chasing is playing games with you, and he’s very good at it. Second, he is intensely motivated, prepared, focused, and thorough. Third, he knows who’s next on his list, and you don’t.”

  Kline looked pained. “But getting back to my question …”

  “If you’re looking for a light at the end of the tunnel, there’s one small possibility in your favor. As rigidly organized as he is, there’s a chance he may fall apart.”

  “How? Why? What do you mean, ‘fall apart?’”

  As Kline asked the question, Gurney felt a tightening in his chest. The raw feeling of anxiety arrived with a cinematically sharp scene in his imagination—the killer’s hand gripping the sheet of paper with the eight lines Gurney had so impulsively put in the mail the previous day:

  I see how all you did was done,

  from backwards boots to muffled gun.

  The game you started soon will end,

  your throat cut by a dead man’s friend.

  Beware the snow, beware the sun,

  the night, the day, nowhere to run.

  With sorrow first his grave I’ll tend

  and then to hell his killer send.

  Methodically, seemingly contemptuously, the hand crumpled the paper into a diminishing ball, and when the ball was improbably small, no larger than a nugget of chewed gum,
the hand slowly opened and let it fall to the floor. Gurney tried to force the disturbing image from his mind, but the scenario had not quite run its course. Now the killer’s hand held the envelope in which the poem had been mailed—with the address side up, the postmark clearly visible, the Walnut Crossing postmark.

  The Walnut Crossing … Oh, God! A draining chill spread from the pit of Gurney’s stomach down through his legs. How could he have overlooked such an obvious problem? God, calm down. Think. What could the killer do with that information? Could it lead him to the actual address, to their home, to Madeleine? Gurney felt his eyes widening, his face growing pale. How could he have been so obsessively focused on launching his pathetic little missive? How could he not have anticipated the postmark problem? What danger had he exposed Madeleine to? His mind careened around that last question like a man racing around a burning house. How real was the danger? How imminent? Should he call her, alert her? Alert her to what, exactly? And frighten her half to death? God, what else? What else had he overlooked in his tunnel-vision focus on the adversary, the battle, the puzzle? Who else’s safety—who else’s life—was he ignoring in his headstrong determination to win the game? The questions were dizzying.

  A voice intruded into his near panic. He tried to fasten on to it, use it to regain his balance.

  Holdenfield was speaking. “ … an obsessive-compulsive planner with a pathological need to make reality conform to his plans. The goal that controls him absolutely is to be in absolute control of others.”

  “Of everyone?” asked Kline.

  “His focus is actually very narrow. He feels he must completely dominate through terror and murder the members of his target-victim group, who seem to represent some subset of middle-aged male alcoholics. Other people are irrelevant to him. They’re of no interest or importance.”

  “So where does the ‘falling apart’ business come in?”

  “Well, it so happens that committing murder to create and maintain a sense of omnipotence is a fatally flawed process—no pun intended. As a solution to the craving for control, serial killing is profoundly dysfunctional, the equivalent of pursuing happiness by smoking crack.”

  “They need more and more of it?”

  “More and more to achieve less and less. The emotional cycle becomes increasingly compressed and unmanageable. Things that weren’t supposed to happen do happen. I suspect something of that nature occurred this morning, resulting in that police officer’s being killed instead of your Mr. Dermott. These unforeseen events create serious emotional tremors in a killer obsessed with control, and these distractions lead to more mistakes. It’s like a machine with an unbalanced drive shaft. When it reaches a certain speed, the vibration takes over and tears the machine apart.”

  “Meaning what, in this specific case?”

  “The killer becomes increasingly frantic and unpredictable.”

  Frantic. Unpredictable. Again the cold dread spread out from the pit of Gurney’s stomach, this time up into his chest, his throat.

  “Meaning the situation is going to get worse?” asked Kline.

  “In a way better, in a way worse. If a murderer who used to lurk in a dark alley and occasionally kill someone with an ice pick suddenly bursts out into Times Square swinging a machete, he’s likely to get caught. But in that final mayhem, a lot of people might lose their heads.”

  “You figure our boy might be entering his machete stage?” Kline looked more excited than revolted.

  Gurney felt sick. The macho-bullshit tone that people in law enforcement used to shield themselves from horror didn’t work in certain situations. This was one of them.

  “Yes.” The flat simplicity of Holdenfield’s response created a silence in the room. After a while the captain spoke with his predictable antagonism.

  “So what are we supposed to do? Issue an APB for a polite thirty-year-old with a vibrating drive shaft and a machete in his hand?”

  Hardwick reacted to this with a twisted smile and Blatt with an explosive laugh.

  Stimmel said, “Sometimes a grand finale is part of the plan.” He got the attention of everyone except Blatt, who kept laughing. When Blatt quieted down, Stimmel continued, “Anybody remember the Duane Merkly case?”

  No one did.

  “Vietnam vet,” said Stimmel. “Had problems with the VA. Problems with authority. Had a nasty Akita guard dog that ate one of his neighbor’s ducks. Neighbor called the cops. Duane hated cops. Next month the Akita ate the neighbor’s beagle. Neighbor shot the Akita. Conflict escalates, and more shit happens. One day the Vietnam vet takes the neighbor hostage. Says he wants five thousand dollars for the Akita or he’s going to kill the guy. Local cops arrive, SWAT team arrives. They take up positions around the perimeter of the property. Thing is, nobody looked into Duane’s service record. So nobody knew he was a demolitions specialist. Duane specialized in rigging remote-detonation land mines.” Stimmel fell silent, letting his audience imagine the outcome.

  “You mean the fucker blew everybody up?” asked Blatt, impressed.

  “Not everybody. Six dead, six permanently disabled.”

  Rodriguez looked frustrated. “What’s the point of this?”

  “Point is, he’d purchased the components for the mines two years earlier. The grand finale was always the plan.”

  Rodriguez shook his head. “I don’t get the relevance.”

  Gurney did, and it made him uneasy.

  Kline looked at Holdenfield. “What do you think, Becca?”

  “Do I think our man has big plans? It’s possible. I do know one thing ….”

  She was interrupted by a perfunctory knock at the door. The door opened, and a uniformed sergeant stepped halfway into the room and addressed Rodriguez.

  “Sir? Sorry to interrupt. You’ve got a call from a Lieutenant Nardo in Connecticut. I told him you were in a meeting. He says it’s an emergency, has to talk to you now.”

  Rodriguez sighed the sigh of a man unfairly burdened. “I’ll take it on the one here,” he said, tilting his head toward the phone on the low filing cabinet against the wall behind him.

  The sergeant retreated. Two minutes later the phone rang.

  “Captain Rodriguez here.” For another two minutes, he held the phone to his ear in tense concentration. “That’s bizarre,” he said finally. “In fact, it’s so bizarre, Lieutenant, I’d like you to repeat it word for word to our case team here. I’m putting you on speakerphone now. Please go ahead—tell them exactly what you told me.”

  The voice that came from the phone a moment later was tense and hard. “This is John Nardo, Wycherly PD. Can you hear me?” Rodriguez said yes, and Nardo continued, “As you know, one of our officers was killed on duty this morning at the home of Gregory Dermott. We are presently on site with a crime-scene team. Twenty minutes ago a phone call was received for Mr. Dermott. He was told by the caller, quote, ‘You’re next in line, and after you it’s Gurney’s turn.’”

  What? Gurney wondered if he could possibly have heard right.

  Kline asked Nardo to repeat the phone message, and he did.

  “Have you gotten anything yet from the phone company on the source?” asked Hardwick.

  “Cell phone within this general area. No GPS data, just the location of the transmitting tower. Obviously, no caller ID.”

  “Who took the call?” asked Gurney. Surprisingly, the direct threat was having a calming effect on him. Perhaps because anything specific, anything with names attached to it, was more limited and therefore more manageable than an infinite range of possibilities. And perhaps because neither of the names was Madeleine.

  “What do you mean, who took the call?” asked Nardo.

  “You said a call was received for Mr. Dermott, not by Mr. Dermott.”

  “Oh, yes, I see. Well, Dermott happened to be lying down with a migraine when the phone rang. He’s been kind of incapacitated since finding the body. One of the techs answered the phone in the kitchen. The caller asked for Dermott, said
he was a close friend.”

  “What name did he give?”

  “Odd name. Carbis … Cabberdis … No, wait a second, here, the tech wrote it down—Charybdis.”

  “Anything odd about the voice?”

  “Funny you should ask. They were just trying to describe it. After Dermott came to the phone, he said he thought it sounded like some foreign accent, but our guy thought it was fake—someone trying to disguise his voice. Or maybe her voice—neither one of them was sure about that. Look, guys, sorry, but I have to get back to our situation here. Just wanted to give you the basic facts. We’ll be back in touch when we have something new.”

  After the sound of the call disconnecting, there was a restless silence around the table. Then Hardwick cleared his throat so loudly that Holdenfield flinched.

  “So, Davey boy,” he growled, “once again you’re the center of attention. ‘It’s Gurney’s turn.’ What are you, a magnet for serial murderers? All we got to do is dangle you on a string and wait for them to bite.”

  Was Madeleine dangling on a string as well? Perhaps not yet. Hopefully not yet. After all, he and Dermott were at the head of the line. Assuming the lunatic was telling the truth. If so, it would give him some time—maybe time to get lucky. Time to make up for his oversights. How could he have been so stupid? So unaware of her safety? Idiot!

  Kline looked troubled. “How did you get to be a target?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” said Gurney with a false lightness. His guilt gave him the impression that both Kline and Rodriguez were eyeing him with unfriendly curiosity. From the beginning he’d had misgivings about writing and mailing that poem, but he’d buried them without defining or articulating them. He was appalled at his ability to ignore danger, including danger to others. What had he felt at the time? Had the risk to Madeleine come anywhere close to his consciousness? Had he had an inkling and dismissed it? Could he have been that callous? Please, God, no!

  In all this angst, he was sure of at least one thing. Sitting there in that conference room discussing the situation any further was not a tolerable option. If Dermott was next on the killer’s list, then that’s where Gurney had the best chance of finding the man they were looking for and ending the risk before it crept any closer. And if he himself was next after Dermott, then that was a battle he wanted to fight as far from Walnut Crossing as possible. He slid his chair back from the table and stood.