Think of a Number

by John Verdon

  “My money’s on the lawn chair,” whispered Hardwick with a wink at Wigg.

  The comment registered on the captain’s face, but before he could speak, the conference-room door opened and a man entered holding a gleaming computer disk. “What is it?” Rodriguez snapped.

  “You told me to bring you any fingerprint results as soon as we had them, sir.”

  “And?”

  “We have them,” he said, holding up the disk. “You’d better have a look. Maybe Sergeant Wigg could …?”

  He extended the disk tentatively toward her laptop. She inserted it and clicked a couple of keys.

  “Interesting,” she said.

  “Prekowski, would you mind telling us what you have there?”

  “Krepowski, sir.”

  “What?”

  “My name is Krepowski.”

  “Fine, good. Now, would you please tell us whether you found any prints.”

  The man cleared his throat. “Well, yes and no,” he said.

  Rodriguez sighed. “You mean they’re too smudged to be useful?”

  “They’re a hell of a lot more than smudged,” said the man. “In fact, they’re not really prints at all.”

  “Well, what are they?”

  “I guess you could call them smears. It looks like the guy used his fingertips to write with—using the skin oil in his fingertips like it was invisible ink.”

  “To write? Write what?”

  “Single-word messages. One on the back of each of the poems he mailed to the victim. Once we made the words chemically visible, we photographed them and copied the images to disk. It shows up pretty clearly on the screen.”

  With a faint touch of amusement playing at her lips, Sergeant Wigg slowly rotated her laptop until the screen directly faced Rodriguez. There were three sheets of paper shown in the photo, side by side—the reverse sides of the sheets on which the three poems had been written arranged in the sequence in which they’d been received. On each of the three sheets, a single four-letter word appeared in smudgy block letters:

  DUMB EVIL COPS

  Chapter 24

  Crime of the year

  “What the fuck …?” said the Cruise boys, aroused in unison.

  Rodriguez frowned.

  “Damn!” cried Kline. “This is getting more interesting by the minute. This guy is declaring war.”

  “An obvious nutcase,” said Cruise One.

  “A smart, ruthless nutcase who wants to do battle with the police.” It was clear that Kline found the implications exciting.

  “So what?” said Cruise Two.

  “I said earlier that this crime was likely to generate some media interest. Scratch that. This could be the crime of the year, maybe the crime of the decade. Every element of this thing is a media magnet.” Kline’s eyes glittered with the possibilities. He was leaning so far forward in his chair that his ribs pressed against the edge of the table. Then, as suddenly as his enthusiasm had flared, he reined it in, sitting back with a pensive expression—as though a private alarm had warned him that murder was a tragic affair and needed to be treated as such. “The anti-police element could be significant,” he said soberly.

  “No doubt about it,” concurred Rodriguez. “I’d like to know if any of the institute’s guests had anti-police attitudes. How about it, Hardwick?”

  The senior investigator uttered a single-syllable bark of a laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Most of the guests we interviewed rank the police somewhere between IRS agents and garden slugs.”

  Somehow, Gurney marveled, Hardwick had managed to convey that this was exactly what he himself thought of the captain.

  “I’d like to see their statements.”

  “They’re in your in-box. But I can save you some time. The statements are useless. Name, rank, and serial number. Everyone was asleep. No one saw anything. No one heard anything—except for Pasquale Cachese, aka Patty Cakes. Says he couldn’t sleep. Opened his window to get some air and heard the so-called muffled slap—and he guessed what it was.” Hardwick riffled through a stack of papers in his file folder and removed one, as Kline again came forward in his seat. “‘It sounded like someone got popped,’ he said. He said it very matter-of-factly, like it was a sound he was familiar with.”

  Kline’s eyes were glittering again. “Are you telling me there was a mob guy present at the time of the murder?”

  “Present on the property, not at the scene,” said Hardwick.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he woke Mellery’s assistant instructor, Justin Bale, a young man who has a room in the same building with the guest rooms. Cachese told him he’d heard a noise from the direction of Mellery’s house, thought it might be an intruder, suggested they take a look. By the time they got some clothes on and got across the gardens to the back of the Mellery house, Caddy Mellery had already discovered her husband’s body and gone back inside to call 911.”

  “Cachese didn’t tell this Bale person that he’d heard a shot?” Kline was starting to sound like he was in a courtroom.

  “No. He told us when we interviewed him the next day. By that time, though, we’d found the bloody bottle and all the obvious stab wounds but no noticeable bullet wounds and no other weapon, so we didn’t pursue the gunshot thing right away. We figured Patty was the kind of guy who might have guns on his mind—that it might be a conclusion he’d jump to.”

  “Why didn’t he tell Bale he thought it was a shot?”

  “He said he didn’t want to scare him.”

  “Very considerate,” said Kline with a sneer. He glanced at the stoic Stimmel seated next to him. Stimmel mirrored the sneer. “If he’d—”

  “But he told you,” Rodriguez broke in. “Too bad you didn’t pay attention.”

  Hardwick stifled a yawn.

  “What the hell was a mob guy doing at a place that sells ‘spiritual renewal’?” asked Kline.

  Hardwick shrugged. “Says he loves the place. Comes once a year to calm his nerves. Says it’s a little piece of heaven. Says Mellery was a saint.”

  “He actually said that?”

  “He actually said that.”

  “This case is amazing! Any other interesting guests on the grounds?”

  That ironic glint Gurney found so inexplicably distasteful came into Hardwick’s eyes. “If you mean arrogant, infantile, drug-addled nutcases, yeah, there are a fair number of ‘interesting guests’—plus the richer-than-God widow.”

  As he pondered, perhaps, the media ramifications of so sensational a crime scene, Kline’s gaze settled on Gurney, who happened to be sitting diagonally across the table from him. At first his expression remained as disconnected as if he were regarding an empty chair. Then he cocked his head curiously.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Dave Gurney, NYPD. Rod told me who’d be attending this meeting, but the name just registered. Aren’t you the guy New York magazine did the article on a few years back?”

  Hardwick answered first. “That’s our boy. Headline was ‘Super Detective.’”

  “I remember now,” exclaimed Kline. “You solved those big serial-killer cases—the Christmas lunatic with the body parts, and Porky Pig or whatever the hell his name was.”

  “Peter Possum Piggert,” said Gurney mildly.

  Kline stared at him with open awe. “So this Mellery guy who got murdered just happens to be the best friend of the NYPD’s serial-murder star?” The media ramifications were obviously getting richer by the minute.

  “I was involved to some extent in both cases,” Gurney said in a voice as devoid of hype as Kline’s was full of it. “So were a lot of other people. As for Mellery being my best friend, that would be sad if it were true, considering we hadn’t spoken to each other in twenty-five years, and even back then—”

  “But,” Kline interrupted, “when he found himself in trouble, you were the man he turned to.”

  Gurney took in the faces at the table, displayi
ng various shades of respect and envy, and marveled at the seductive power of an oversimplified narrative. BLOODY MURDER OF TOP COP’S BUDDY instantly appealed to that part of the brain that loves cartoons and hates complexity.

  “I suspect he came to me because I was the only cop he knew.”

  Kline looked like he was not ready to let the point go, might revisit it later, but for now was willing to move on. “Whatever your exact relationship was, your contact with the victim gives you a window on the affair no one else has.”

  “That’s why I wanted him here today,” said Rodriguez in his I’m-in-charge-here style.

  A short hack of a laugh came out of Hardwick’s throat, followed by a whisper that just reached Gurney’s ear: “He hated the idea until Kline liked it.”

  Rodriguez went on, “I have him scheduled to give us his statement next and answer whatever questions it raises—which could be quite a few. To avoid interruptions, let’s take five minutes now for a restroom break.”

  “Piss on you, Gurney,” said the disembodied whisper, lost amid the sounds of chairs being pushed back from the table.

  Chapter 25

  Questioning Gurney

  Gurney had a theory that men behaved in bathrooms as if they were either locker rooms or elevators—which is to say, with either rowdy familiarity or uneasy aloofness. This was an elevator crowd. It was not until they all returned to the conference room that anyone spoke.

  “So how did such a modest guy get to be so famous?” asked Kline, grinning with a practiced charm that both concealed and revealed the ice behind it.

  “I’m not that modest, and I’m sure as hell not that famous,” said Gurney.

  “If everyone will have a seat,” said Rodriguez brusquely, “you’ll each find in front of you a set of the messages received by the victim. As our witness presents his account of his communications with the victim, you can refer to the messages they were discussing.” With a curt nod toward Gurney, he concluded, “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Gurney was no longer surprised at the man’s officiousness, but it still rankled. He glanced around the table, achieving eye contact with all but his guide at the murder site, who was flipping noisily through his packet of papers, and Stimmel, the DA’s chief assistant, who sat gazing into space like a contemplative toad.

  “As the captain indicated, there’s a lot to cover. It might be best to let me give you a summary of the events in the order in which they occurred, and to hold your questions until you have the whole story.” He saw Rodriguez’s head rising to object, then subsiding the instant Kline nodded approvingly at the proposed procedure.

  In his clear, concise way (he’d been told more than once that he could have been a professor of logic) Gurney gave a twenty-minute summary of the affair—beginning with Mellery’s e-mail asking to see him, proceeding through the series of disconcerting communications and Mellery’s reactions, concluding with the phone call from the killer and the note in the mailbox (the one mentioning the number nineteen).

  Kline was a rapt listener throughout and the first to speak when it ended. “It’s an epic revenge story! The killer was obsessed with getting even with Mellery for something horrible he did years ago when he was drunk.”

  “Why wait so long?” asked Sergeant Wigg, whom Gurney was finding more interesting each time she spoke.

  Kline’s eyes were bright with possibilities. “Maybe Mellery revealed something in one of his books. Maybe that’s how the killer discovered he was responsible for some tragic event he hadn’t connected with him before. Or maybe Mellery’s success was the last straw, the thing the killer couldn’t stand. Or maybe, like the first note said, the killer just happened to see him on the street one day. A smoldering resentment comes back to life. The enemy steps into the crosshairs and … bang!”

  “Bang, my ass,” said Hardwick.

  “You have a different opinion, Senior Investigator Hardwick?” inquired Kline with an edgy smile.

  “Carefully composed letters, number mysteries, directions to send a check to the wrong address, a series of increasingly threatening poems, hidden messages to the police that could only be discovered through latent-prints chemistry, surgically clean cigarette butts, a concealed gunshot wound, an impossible trail of footprints, and a fucking lawn chair for Chrissake! That’s a hell of a dragged-out bang.”

  “My sketch of the situation was not meant to exclude premeditation,” said Kline. “But at this point I’m more interested in the basic motive than in details. I want to understand the connection between the murderer and his victim. Understanding the connection is usually the key to a conviction.”

  This lecturing response generated an unpleasant silence, broken by Rodriguez.

  “Blatt!” he barked at Gurney’s guide, who was staring at his copies of the first two messages as though they’d dropped into his lap from outer space. “You look lost.”

  “I don’t get it. The perp sends a letter to the victim, tells him to think of a number and then look in a sealed envelope. He thinks of six fifty-eight, looks in the envelope, and there it is—six fifty-eight. You saying that actually happened?”

  Before anyone could answer, his partner broke in, “And two weeks later the perp does it again—this time on the phone. He tells him to think of a number and look in his mailbox. Victim thinks of the number nineteen, looks in his mailbox, and there’s the number nineteen in the middle of a letter from the perp. That’s some pretty weird shit, dude.”

  “We have the recording the victim made of the actual phone call,” said Rodriguez, making it sound like a personal achievement. “Play the part about the number, Wigg.”

  Without comment the sergeant tapped a few keys, and after a two- or three-second interval the call between Mellery and his stalker—the one Gurney had audited via Mellery’s conference-call gizmo—began at its midpoint. The faces at the table were riveted by the bizarre accent of the caller’s voice, the taut fear in Mellery’s.

  “Now, whisper the number.”

  “Whisper it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Good, very good.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You still don’t know? So much pain, and you have no idea. I thought this might happen. I left something for you earlier. A little note. You sure you don’t have it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Ah, but you knew that the number was nineteen.”

  “You said to think of a number.”

  “But it was the right number, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  After a moment Sergeant Wigg tapped two keys and said, “That’s it.”

  The brief playback left Gurney feeling bereaved, angry, sick.

  Blatt turned his palms up in a gesture of confusion. “What the hell was that, a man or a woman?”

  “Almost certainly a man,” said Wigg.

  “How the hell can you tell?”

  “We did a voice-pitch analysis this morning, and the printout shows more stress as the frequency rises.”

  “So?”

  “The pitch varies considerably from phrase to phrase, even word to word, and in every case the voice is measurably less stressed at the lower frequencies.”

  “Meaning the caller was straining to speak in a high register and the lower pitches came more naturally?” asked Kline.

  “Exactly,” said Wigg in her ambiguous but not unattractive voice. “It’s not conclusive evidence, but it’s strongly suggestive.”

  “What about the background noise?” asked Kline. It was a question on Gurney’s mind as well. He’d been aware of a number of vehicle sounds on the recording that placed the source of the call in an open area—perhaps a busy street or an outdoor mall.

  “We’ll know more after we do an enhancement, but right now there seem to be three categories of sound—the conversation itself, traffic, and the hum of some sort of engine.”

  “How long will the
enhancement take?” asked Rodriguez.

  “Depends on the complexity of the data captured,” said Wigg. “I’d estimate twelve to twenty-four hours.”

  “Make it twelve.”

  After an awkward silence, something Rodriguez had a talent for initiating, Kline asked a question of the room in general. “What about that whispering business? Who wasn’t supposed to hear Mellery say the number nineteen?” He turned to Gurney. “You have any ideas?”

  “No. But I doubt it has anything to do with not being overheard.”

  “Why would you say that?” challenged Rodriguez.

  “Because whispering is a lousy way of not being overheard,” whispered Gurney, quite audibly, to underline his point. “It’s like other peculiar elements in the case.”

  “Like what?” Rodriguez persisted.

  “Well, for example, why the uncertainty in the note referring to November or December? Why a gun and a broken bottle? Why the mystery with the footprints? And one other small matter that no one’s mentioned—why no animal tracks?”

  “What?” Rodriguez looked baffled.

  “Caddy Mellery said that she and her husband heard the shrieking sounds of animals fighting behind the house—that was why he went downstairs and looked out the back door. But there were no animal tracks anywhere near there—and they would have been quite obvious in the snow.”

  “We’re getting bogged down. I don’t see how the presence or absence of raccoon tracks, or whatever the hell we’re talking about, matters.”

  “Christ,” said Hardwick, ignoring Rodriguez and shooting Gurney an admiring grin. “You’re right. There wasn’t a single mark in that snow that wasn’t made by the victim or the killer. Why didn’t I notice that?”

  Kline turned to Stimmel. “I’ve never seen a case with so many items of evidence and so few that made sense.” He shook his head. “I mean, how on earth did the killer pull off that business with the numbers? And why twice?” He looked at Gurney. “You sure the numbers meant nothing to Mellery?”

  “Ninety percent sure—about as sure as I get about anything.”