Think Of a Number (2010) (28 page)

“Obsessed with our little feathered friends. Had an enormous pair of binoculars—looked like those infrared things you see commandos in the movies creeping around with. Left his mother in the cottage and spent all his time in the woods, searching for grosbeaks—rose-breasted grosbeaks.”

“He told you that?”

“Oh, yes.”

“That’s surprising.”

“Why?”

“There aren’t any rose-breasted grosbeaks in the Catskills in the winter.”

“But he even said … That lying bastard!”

“He even said what?”

“The morning before he left, he came into the main house, and he couldn’t stop raving about the damn grosbeaks. He kept repeating over and over that he had seen four rose-breasted grosbeaks. Four rose-breasted grosbeaks, he kept saying, as though I were doubting him.”

“Maybe he wanted to be sure you’d remember,” said Gurney, half to himself.

“But you’re telling me he couldn’t have seen them, because there aren’t any to be seen. Why would he want me to remember something that didn’t happen?”

“Good question, sir. May I take a quick look at the cottage now?”

From the sitting room, Wellstone led him through an equally Victorian dining room, full of ornate oak chairs and mirrors, out a side door onto a pathway whose spotless cream-colored pavers, while not exactly the yellow brick road of Oz, did bring it to mind. The path ended at a storybook cottage covered with English ivy, bright green despite the season.

Wellstone unlocked the door, swung it open, and stood to the side. Instead of entering, Gurney looked in from the threshold. The front room was partly a living room and partly a shrine to the film—with its collection of posters, a witch hat, a magic wand, Cowardly Lion and Tin Man figurines, and a stuffed replica of Toto.

“Would you like to go in and see the display case the slippers were taken from?”

“I’d rather not,” said Gurney, stepping back onto the path. “If you’re the only person who’s been inside since your guests left, I’d like to keep it that way until we can get an evidence-processing team on site.”

“But you said you weren’t here for—Wait a minute, you said you were here for ‘a different matter’—isn’t that what you said?”

“Yes, sir, that’s correct.”

“What sort of ‘evidence processing’ are you talking about? I mean, what … Oh, no, surely you can’t think that my light-fingered bird-watcher is your Jack the Ripper?”

“Frankly, sir, I have no reason to think he is. But I have to cover every possibility, and it would be prudent for us to have the cottage examined more closely.”

“My, oh, my. I don’t know what to say. If it’s not one crime, it’s another. Well, I suppose I can’t impede police progress—outlandish as it seems. And there’s a silver lining. Even if all this has nothing to do with the horror on the hill, you may end up finding a clue to my missing slippers.”

“Always a possibility,” said Gurney with a polite smile. “You can expect an evidence team here sometime tomorrow. Meanwhile keep the door locked. Now, let me ask you once more—because this is very important—are you sure no one but yourself has been inside the cottage during the past two days, not even your partner?”

“Emerald Cottage was my creation and my exclusive responsibility. Mr. Plumstone is responsible for Honeybee Cottage, including its unfortunate decor.”

“Sorry?”

“The theme of Honeybee Cottage is a bore-you-blind illustrated history of beekeeping. Need I say more?”

“One last question, sir. Do you have the bird-watcher’s name and address in your guest register?”

“I have the name and the address he gave me. Considering the theft, I rather doubt their authenticity.”

“I’d better look at the register and make a note of them, anyway.”

“Oh, there’s no need to look at the register. I can see it now with perfect, painful clarity. Mr. and Mrs.—odd way, don’t you think, for a gentleman to describe himself and his mother?—Mr. and Mrs. Scylla. The address was a post-office box in Wycherly, Connecticut. I can even give you the box number.”

G
urney was sitting in the spotless gravel parking area. He’d completed his call to BCI for an evidence team to be sent to The Laurels ASAP and was just slipping his cell phone into his pocket when it rang. It was Ellen Rackoff again. First he gave her the news about the Scylla couple and the peculiar theft to pass along to Kline. Then he asked why she’d called. She gave him a phone number.

“It’s a homicide detective from the Bronx who wants to talk to you about a case he’s working on.”

“He wants to talk to me?”

“He wants to talk to someone on the Mellery case, which he read about in the paper. He called the Peony police, who referred him to BCI, who referred him to Captain Rodriguez, who referred him to the district attorney, who referred him to you. His name is Detective Clamm. Randy Clamm.”

“Is that a joke?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“How much information did he volunteer about his own case?”

“Zero. You know how cops are. Mostly he wanted to know about our case.”

Gurney called the number. It was answered on the first ring.

“Clamm.”

“Dave Gurney, returning your call. I’m with the district attor—”

“Yes, sir, I know. Appreciate the quick response.”

Although he was basing it on next to nothing, Gurney had a vivid impression of the cop on the other end—a fast-thinking, fast-talking multitasker who, with better connections, might have ended up at West Point instead of the police academy.

“I understand you’re on the Mellery homicide,” the crisp young voice raced on.

“Correct.”

“Multiple stab wounds to the victim’s throat?”

“Correct.”

“Reason for my call is a similar homicide down here, and we wanted to rule out the possibility of any connection.”

“By similar, you mean—”

“Multiples to the throat.”

“My recollection of Bronx stabbing statistics is that there are over a thousand reported incidents a year. Have you looked for connections closer to home?”

“We’re looking. But so far your case is the only one with over a dozen wounds, all to the same part of the body.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Depends on what you’re willing to do. I was thinking it might help both of us if you were able to come down here for a day, look at the crime scene, sit in on an interview with the widow, ask questions, see if anything rings a bell.”

It was the definition of a long shot—more far-fetched than many a tenuous lead he’d wasted his time chasing down in his years at the NYPD. But it was a constitutional impossibility for Dave Gurney to ignore a possibility, however flimsy it might be.

He agreed to meet Detective Clamm in the Bronx the following morning.

Back to the

Beginning

The young man leaned back into the deliciously soft pillows propped against the headboard and smiled placidly at the screen of his laptop
.

“Where’s my little Dickie Duck?” asked the old woman next to him in the bed
.

“He’s in his happy beddy-bye, planning how the monsters die.”

“Are you writing a poem?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Read it out loud.”

“It isn’t finished.”

“Read it out loud,” she said again, as though she’d forgotten she’d said it before
.

“It’s not very good. It needs something more.” He adjusted the angle of the screen
.

“You have such a beautiful voice,” she said as if by rote, absently touching the blond ringlets of her wig
.

He closed his eyes for a moment. Then, as though he were about to play a flute, he licked his lips lightly. When he began to speak, it was in a lilting half-whisper
.

“These are some of my favorite things:

the magic change a bullet brings
,

the blood that spurts out on the floor

until there isn’t any more
,

their eyes for an eye, their teeth for a tooth
,

the end of it all, their moment of truth
,

the good that I’ve done with that drunkard’s gun—

all nothing compared to the cleansing to come.”

He sighed and stared at the screen, wrinkling his nose. “The meter isn’t right.”

The old woman nodded with serene incomprehension and asked in a coy little-girl voice, “What will my little Dickie do?”

He was tempted to describe “the cleansing to come” in all the detail in which he imagined it. The death of all the monsters. It was so colorful, so exciting, so … satisfying! But he also prided himself on his realism, his grasp of his mother’s limitations. He knew that her questions required no specific answers, that she forgot most of them as soon as she uttered them, that his words were mainly sounds, sounds she liked, found soothing. He could say anything—count to ten, recite a nursery rhyme. It really made no difference what he said, so long as he said it with feeling and rhythm. He always strove for a certain richness of inflection. He enjoyed pleasing her
.

E
very so often Gurney would have a dream that was achingly sad, a dream that seemed to be the heart of sadness itself. In these dreams he saw with a clarity beyond words that the wellspring of sadness was loss, and the greatest loss was the loss of love.

In the most recent version of the dream, little more than a vignette, his father was dressed as he’d been dressed for work forty years ago and in all respects looked exactly as he had then. The nondescript beige jacket and gray pants, the fading freckles on the backs of his large hands and on his rounded receding forehead, the mocking look in the eyes that seemed focused on a scene occurring somewhere else, the subtle suggestion of a restlessness to be on his way, to be anywhere but where he was, the odd fact that he said so little yet managed to convey with his silence so much dissatisfaction—all these buried images were resurrected in a scene that lasted no more than a minute. And then Gurney was part of the scene as a child, looking at that distant figure pleadingly, pleading with him not to leave, warm tears streaming down his face in the intensity of the dream—as he was sure they’d never done in the actual presence of his father, for he could not remember a single expression of strong emotion ever passing between them—and then awakening suddenly, his face still bathed in tears, his heart hurting.

He was tempted to wake Madeleine, tell her about the dream, let her see his tears. But it had nothing to do with her. She’d barely
known his father. And dreams, after all, were only dreams. Ultimately they meant nothing. Instead he asked himself what day it was. It was Thursday. With this thought came that quick, practical transformation of his mental landscape that he’d come to rely on to sweep away the residue of a disturbing night and replace it with the reality of things to be done in the daylight. Thursday. Thursday would be occupied mainly with his trip to the Bronx—to a neighborhood not far from the neighborhood where he’d grown up.

T
he three-hour drive was a journey into ugliness, a perception amplified by the cold drizzle that required continual adjustment of the intermittent wiper speed. Gurney was depressed and edgy—partly because of the weather and partly, he suspected, because his dream had left him with a raw, oversensitive perspective.

He hated the Bronx. He hated everything about the Bronx—from the buckled pavements to the burned-out carcasses of stolen cars. He hated the garish billboards touting four-day, three-night escapes to Las Vegas. He hated the smell—a shifting miasma of diesel fumes, mold, tar, and dead fish, with an insinuating undertone of something metallic. Even more than what he saw, he hated the memory from his childhood that invaded his mind whenever he was in the Bronx—hideous, prehistorically armored horseshoe crabs with spearlike tails, lurking in the mudflats of Eastchester Bay.

Having spent half an hour creeping across the clogged “expressway” to the last exit, he was relieved to negotiate the few city blocks to the agreed-upon meeting place—the parking lot of Holy Saints Church. The lot was enclosed by a chain-link fence with a sign warning that parking was reserved for those engaged in church business. The lot was empty except for a nondescript Chevy sedan, beside which a young man with a fashionably gelled crew cut was speaking into a cell phone. As Gurney parked his car on the other side of the Chevy, the man concluded his call and clipped the phone to his belt.

The drizzle that had shrouded most of his drive that morning had diminished to a mist too fine to see, but as Gurney stepped from his car, he could feel its cold pinpricks on his forehead. Perhaps the young man was feeling it, too; perhaps that accounted for his expression of anxious discomfort.

“Detective Gurney?”

“Dave,” said Gurney, extending his hand.

“Randy Clamm. Thanks for making the trip. Hope it’s not a waste of your time. Just trying to cover all the bases, and we’ve got this crazy MO that sounded like what you guys are working on. Could be unrelated—I mean, it doesn’t make much sense that the same guy would want to kill some hotshot guru upstate and an unemployed night watchman in the Bronx—but all those stab wounds in the throat, I couldn’t just let it go. You get a feeling about these things—you think, ‘Christ, if I let it go, it’ll turn out to be the same guy,’ you know what I mean?”

Gurney wondered whether the breathless pace of Clamm’s speech was propelled by caffeine, cocaine, the pressures of the job, or just the way his personal spring happened to be wound.

“I mean, a dozen stab wounds to the throat isn’t all that common. There might be other connections we could find between the cases. Maybe we could have sent reports back and forth between here and upstate, but I thought maybe if you were on the scene and you could talk to the victim’s wife, you might see something or ask something that might not occur to you if you weren’t here. That’s what I was hoping. I mean, I hope there might be something in it. I hope it’s not a waste of your time.”