by John Verdon
“I think I see a small round hole in the corner of that ceiling above the refrigerator. Any of your people comment on that?”
Gowacki followed Gurney’s gaze to the spot. “What are you telling me here?”
“That Kartch may have been shot first, then stabbed.”
“And the footprints actually go in the opposite direction?”
“Right.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re saying the killer comes in the back door, shoots Richie in the throat, Richie goes down, then the killer stabs him a dozen times in the throat like he’s tenderizing a fucking steak?”
“That’s pretty much what happened in Peony.”
“But the footprints …”
“The footprints could have been made by attaching a second sole to the boot—backwards—to make it look like he came in the front and went out the back, when in fact he came in the back and went out the front.”
“Shit, that’s ridiculous! What the hell’s he playing at?”
“That’s the word for it.”
“What?”
“Playing. Hell of a game, but that’s what he’s doing, and now he’s done it three times. ‘Not only are you wrong, you’re ass-backwards wrong. I hand you clue after clue, but you still can’t get me. That’s how fucking useless you cops are.’ That’s the message he’s giving us at every crime scene.”
Gowacki gave Gurney a slow, assessing look. “You see this guy pretty vividly.”
Gurney smiled, stepping around the body to get to a heap of papers on the kitchen countertop. “You mean I sound a little intense?”
“Not for me to say. We don’t get a lot of murders in Sotherton. Even those, and we only get one maybe every five years, they’re the kind that plead down to manslaughter. They tend to involve baseball bats and tire irons in the parking lots of bars. Nothing planned. Definitely nothing playful.”
Gurney grunted in sympathy. He’d seen more than his share of unsophisticated mayhem.
“That’s mostly crap,” said Gowacki, nodding toward the pile of junk mail that Gurney was gingerly poking through.
He was about to agree when, at the very bottom of the disorganized heap of Pennysavers, flyers, gun magazines, collection-agency notices, and military-surplus catalogs, he came upon a small, empty envelope, torn open roughly at the flap, addressed to Richard Kartch. The handwriting was beautifully precise. The ink was red.
“You find something?” asked Gowacki.
“You might want to put this in an evidence bag,” said Gurney, taking the envelope by its corner and moving it to a clear space on the countertop. “Our killer likes to communicate with his victims.”
“There’s more upstairs.”
Gurney and Gowacki turned to the source of the new voice—a large young man standing in the doorway on the opposite side of the kitchen.
“Underneath a bunch of porno magazines on the table by his bed—there’s three of them envelopes with red writing on them.”
“Guess I ought to go up, take a look,” said Gowacki with the reluctance of a man stocky enough to think twice about a flight of stairs. “Bobby, this here is Detective Gurney from Delaware County, New York.”
“Bob Muffit,” said the young man, extending his hand nervously to Gurney, keeping his eyes averted from the body on the floor.
The upstairs had the same half-done and half-abandoned appearance as the rest of the house. The landing provided access to four doors. Muffit led the way into the one on the right. Even by the shabby standard already established, it was a wreck. On those portions of the carpet not covered by dirty clothes or empty beer cans, Gurney observed what appeared to be dried vomit stains. The air was sour, sweaty. The blinds were closed. The light came from the sole working bulb in a three-bulb fixture in the middle of the ceiling.
Gowacki made his way to the table by the disarranged bed. Next to a pile of porno magazines were three envelopes with red handwriting, and next to them a personal check. Gowacki did not touch anything directly but slid the four items onto a magazine called Hot Buns, which he used as a tray.
“Let’s go downstairs and see what we have here,” he said.
The three men retraced their steps to the kitchen, where Gowacki deposited the envelopes and the check on the breakfast table. With a pen and a tweezers from his shirt pocket, he lifted back the ripped flap of each envelope and extracted the contents. The three envelopes held poems that looked identical, down to their nun-like penmanship, to the corresponding poems received by Mellery.
Gurney’s first glance fell on the lines “What you took you will give / when you get what you gave …. You and I have a date / Mr. 658.”
The item that held his attention the longest, however, was the check. It was made out to “X. Arybdis,” and it was signed “R. Kartch.” It was evidently the check returned by Gregory Dermott to Kartch uncashed. It was made out for the same amount as Mellery’s and Rudden’s—$289.87. The name and address “R. Kartch, 349 Quarry Road, Sotherton, Mass. 01055” appeared in the upper left corner of the check.
R. Kartch. There was something about that name that bothered Gurney.
Perhaps it was just that same peculiar experience he always had when he looked at the printed name of a deceased person. It was as though the name itself had lost the breath of life, had become smaller, cut loose from that which had given it stature. It was strange, he reflected, how you can believe you have come to terms with death, even believe that its presence no longer has much effect on you, that it is just part of your profession. Then it comes at you in such a weird way—in the unsettling, shrunken quality of a dead man’s name. No matter how hard one tries to ignore it, death finds a way to be noticed. It seeps into your feelings like water through a basement wall.
Perhaps that’s why the name R. Kartch seemed odd to him. Or was there another reason?
Chapter 40
A shot in the dark
Mark Mellery. Albert Rudden. Richard Kartch. Three men. Targeted, mentally tortured, shot, and so forcibly and repeatedly stabbed that their heads were nearly hacked off. What had they done, separately or in concert, to engender such a macabre revenge?
Or was it revenge at all? Might the suggestion of revenge conveyed by the notes be—as Rodriguez had once proposed—a smoke screen to hide a more practical motive?
Anything was still possible.
It was nearly dawn when Gurney began his return drive to Walnut Crossing, and the air was raw with the scent of snow. He’d entered that strained state of consciousness in which a deep weariness struggles with an agitated wakefulness. Thoughts and pictures cascade through the brain without progress or logic.
One such image was the dead man’s check, the name R. Kartch, something lurking beneath an inaccessible trapdoor of memory, something not quite right. Like a faint star, it eluded a direct search and might appear in his peripheral vision once he stopped looking for it.
He made an effort to focus on other aspects of the case, but his mind refused to proceed in an orderly way. Instead, he saw the half-dried pool of blood across Kartch’s kitchen floor, the far edge spreading into the shadow of the rickety table. He stared hard at the highway ahead, trying to exorcise the image but succeeding only in replacing it with the bloodstain of similar size on Mark Mellery’s stone patio—which in turn gave way to an image of Mellery in an Adirondack chair, leaning forward, asking for protection, deliverance.
Leaning forward, asking …
Gurney felt the pressure of tears welling.
He pulled in to a rest stop. There was only one other car in the little parking area, and it looked more abandoned than parked. His face felt hot, his hands cold. Not being able to think straight frightened him, made him feel helpless.
Exhaustion was a lens through which he had a tendency to see his life as a failure—a failure made more painful by the professional accolades heaped upon him. Knowing that this was a trick his tired mind played on him made it no less convincing. After all, he had his litany
of proofs. As a detective, he’d failed Mark Mellery. As a husband, he’d failed Karen, and now he was failing Madeleine. As a father, he’d failed Danny, and now he was failing Kyle.
His brain had its limits, and after enduring another quarter hour of this laceration, it shut down. He fell into a brief, restorative sleep.
He wasn’t sure how long it lasted, almost certainly less than an hour, but when he woke up, the emotional upheaval had passed and in its place was an uncluttered clarity. He also had a terribly stiff neck, but it seemed a small price to pay.
Perhaps because there was now room for it, a new vision of the Wycherly post-office box mystery began to form in his mind. The two original hypotheses had never seemed entirely satisfactory: namely, that the victims were directed by mistake to send their checks to the wrong box number (unlikely, given the killer’s attention to detail) or that it was the right box but something had gone awry, allowing Dermott to receive and innocently return the checks before the killer could remove them through whatever method he’d devised.
But now Gurney saw a third explanation. Suppose it was the right box and nothing had gone awry. Suppose the purpose of asking for the checks had been something other than to cash them. Suppose the killer had managed to gain access to the box, open the envelopes, look at the checks or make copies of them, and then reseal them in their envelopes and replace them in the box before Dermott got to them.
If this new scenario was closer to the truth—if the killer was in fact using Dermott’s post-office box for his own purposes—it opened a fascinating new avenue. It might be possible for Gurney to communicate with the killer directly. Despite its wildly hypothetical foundation, and despite the confusion and depression in which he’d just been immersed, this thought so excited him that several minutes passed before he realized that he’d pulled out of the rest stop and was racing homeward at eighty miles an hour.
Madeleine was out. He put his wallet and keys on the breakfast table and picked up the note lying there. It was in Madeleine’s quick, clean handwriting and, as usual, challengingly concise: “Went to 9 AM yoga. Back before storm. 5 messages. Was the fish a flounder?”
What storm?
What fish?
He wanted to go into the den and listen to the five phone messages he assumed she was talking about, but there was something else he wanted to do first, something of greater urgency. The notion that he might be able to write to the killer—to send him a note via Dermott’s mailbox—had given him an overwhelming desire to do so.
He could see that the scenario was shaky, with assumptions resting upon assumptions, but it had great appeal. The chance to do something was very exciting compared to the frustration of the investigation and that creepy sense that any progress they were making might be part of the enemy’s plan. Impulsive and unreasonable as it was, the chance to toss a grenade over a wall where the enemy might be lurking was irresistible. The only thing remaining was to construct the grenade.
He really should listen to his messages. There could be something urgent, important. He started for the den. But a sentence came to mind—one he didn’t want to forget, a rhyming couplet, the perfect beginning of a statement to the killer. Excitedly, he picked up the pad and pen Madeleine had left on the table and began to write. Fifteen minutes later he put down the pen and read the eight lines written in an elaborate, decorative script.
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.
Satisfied, he wiped the paper clean of fingerprints. It felt odd doing that—shady, evasive—but he brushed the feeling aside, got an envelope, and addressed it to X. Arybdis at Dermott’s box number in Wycherly, Connecticut.
Chapter 41
Back to the real world
Gurney just made it down to the mailbox in time to hand the envelope to Rhonda, who filled in for Baxter, the regular mailman, two days a week. By the time he got back up through the pasture to the house, the excitement was already being gnawed at by the remorse that inevitably followed his rare acts of impulse.
He remembered his five messages.
The first was from the gallery in Ithaca.
“David, it’s Sonya. We need to talk about your project. Nothing bad, all good, but we need to talk very, very soon. I’ll be at the gallery until six this evening, or you can call me later at home.”
The second was from Randy Clamm, and he sounded excited.
“Tried you at your cell phone, but it seems to be dead. We found some letters in the Rudden house we’d like you to look at—see if they look familiar. Seems Al was getting some weird little poems in the mail he didn’t want his wife to see. Had them hidden in the bottom of his toolbox. Give me a number, and I’ll fax them. Appreciate it.”
The third was from Jack Hardwick at BCI, his supercilious attitude running amok.
“Hey, Sherlock, word is out that your guy has a couple more notches on his gun. You were probably too busy to give your old buddy a heads-up. I was, for one crazy moment, tempted to think that it was below the dignity of Mr. Sherlock Fucking Gurney to place a call to the humble Jack Hardwick. But of course that’s not the kind of guy you are, right? Shame on me! Just to show you there’s no hard feelings, I’m calling to give you a heads-up on a get-together being planned for tomorrow—a BCI progress report on the Mellery case, including a discussion of how recent events in the Bronx and in Sotherton should affect the direction of the investigation. Captain Rod will be hosting this clusterfuck. DA Kline is being invited, and he in turn will no doubt invite you. I just thought you’d like to know in advance. After all, what are friends for?”
The fourth message was the predicted call from Kline. It was not especially “invitational.” The energy in his voice had curdled into agitation.
“Gurney, what the hell’s the matter with your cell phone? We tried to reach you directly, then through the Sotherton police. They told me you left Sotherton two and a half hours ago. They also told me we are now dealing with murder number three by the same individual. That’s an important fact, wouldn’t you say? Something you should have called me about? We need to talk ASAP. Decisions have to be made, and we need every available piece of information. There’s a meeting at BCI tomorrow noon. That’s a priority. Call me as soon as you get this!”
The final message was from Mike Gowacki.
“Just wanted you to know, we dug a slug out of that hole in the kitchen wall. A .38 like you said. Also, one more little discovery after you left. We were checking the mailbox for any more of them red-ink love notes, and we found a dead fish. In the mailbox. You didn’t mention a dead fish being part of the MO. Let me know if it means anything. I’m no psychologist, but I’d say our perp is a definite wacko. That’s it for now. I’m going home to get some sleep.”
A fish?
He went back out to the kitchen—to the breakfast table, to take another look at Madeleine’s note.
“Went to 9 AM yoga. Back before storm. 5 messages. Was the fish a flounder?”
Why would she ask that? He checked the time on the old Regulator clock over the sideboard. Nine-thirty. Seemed more like dawn, the light coming in the French doors was such a chilly gray. Back before storm. It did look like it was about to do something, probably snow, hopefully not freezing rain. So she’d be home by ten-thirty, maybe ten if she got to worrying about the roads. Then he could ask about the flounder. Madeleine wasn’t a worrier, but she had a thing about slippery roads.
He was going back to the den to return his calls when it struck him. The location of the first murder was the town of Peony, and the killer left a peony by the body of the second victim. The location of the second murder was the little Bronx enclave of Flounde
r Beach, making Madeleine’s guess about the fish at the third crime scene characteristically insightful and almost certainly right.
His first callback was to Sotherton. The desk sergeant put him through to Gowacki’s voice mail. He left two requests: for confirmation that the fish was a flounder and for ballistics photos so they could confirm that the slugs in Kartch’s wall and in Mellery’s wall came from the same gun. He didn’t have much doubt on either point, but certainty was a holy thing.
Then he called Kline.
Kline was in court that morning. Ellen Rackoff reiterated the DA’s complaints, scolding Gurney about the difficulty they’d had reaching him and his failure to keep them informed. She told him he’d better not miss the big meeting the following noon at BCI. But even into this lecture she managed to breathe an erotic undertone. Gurney wondered if his lack of sleep might be making him a little crazy.
He called Randy Clamm, thanked him for the update, and gave him a number at the DA’s office to fax Rudden’s letters, plus a number at BCI so a set could go to Rodriguez. Then he filled him in on the Richard Kartch situation, including the flounder connection and the fact that an alcohol element was now obvious in all three cases.
As for Sonya’s call, that could wait. He was in no great rush to call Hardwick, either. His mind kept jumping to the following day’s meeting at BCI. Not jumping there with joy—far from it. He hated meetings in general. His mind worked best alone. Groupthink made him want to leave the room. And his hasty poetic grenade tossing was making him uncomfortable about this meeting in particular. He didn’t like having secrets.
He sank down in the soft leather armchair in the corner of the den to organize the key facts of the three cases, figure out what overall hypothesis they best supported, and how to test it. But his sleep-deprived brain would not cooperate. He closed his eyes, and all semblance of linear thought dissolved. How long he sat there he wasn’t sure, but when he opened his eyes, heavily falling snow had begun whitening the landscape, and in the singular stillness he could hear a car far down the road, coming closer. He pushed himself up out of the chair and went to the kitchen, arriving at the window in time to see Madeleine’s car disappearing behind the barn at the end of the public road, presumably to check their mailbox. A minute later the phone rang. He picked up the extension on the kitchen counter.
