Think Of a Number (2010) (16 page)

“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 bottle? 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.”

H
ardwick 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.

“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.

“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.

I
t 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 cannibal, 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.