Think of a Number

by John Verdon

  Holdenfield rocked her head speculatively from side to side and made a face that said she wasn’t about to agree with Gurney’s supposition but couldn’t find a way to shoot it down, either.

  “So we may or may not discover links to some old corpses,” said Kline, looking unsure of how he felt about this.

  “Not to mention some new ones,” said Holdenfield.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” It was becoming Rodriguez’s favorite question.

  Holdenfield showed no reaction to the testy tone. “The pace of the killings, as I started to say earlier, suggests that the endgame has begun.”

  “Endgame?” Kline intoned the word as though he liked the sound of it.

  Holdenfield continued, “In this most recent instance, he was driven to act in an unplanned way. The process may be spinning out of his control. My feeling is that he won’t be able to hold it together much longer.”

  “Hold what together?” Blatt posed the question, as he posed most of his questions, with a kind of congenital hostility.

  Holdenfield regarded him for moment without expression, then looked at Kline. “How much education do I need to provide here?”

  “You might want to touch on a few key points. Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, glancing around the table and clearly not expecting to be corrected, “but with the exception of Dave, I don’t think the rest of us have had much practical experience with serial murder.”

  Rodriguez looked like he was about to object to something but said nothing.

  Holdenfield smiled unhappily. “Is everyone at least familiar in a general way with the Holmes typology of serial murder?”

  The assortment of murmurs and nods around the table was generally affirmative. Only Blatt had a question. “Sherlock Holmes?”

  Gurney wasn’t sure whether this was a stupid joke or just stupid.

  “Ronald M. Holmes—a bit more contemporary, and an actual person,” said Holdenfield in an exaggeratedly benign tone that Gurney couldn’t quite place. Was it possible she was mimicking Mister Rogers addressing a five-year-old?

  “Holmes categorized serial killers by their motivations—the type driven by imagined voices; the type on a mission to rid the world of some intolerable group of people—blacks, gays, you name it; the type seeking total domination; the thrill seeker who gets his greatest rush from killing; and the sex murderer. But they all have one thing in common—”

  “They’re all fucking nuts,” said Blatt with a smug grin.

  “Good point, Investigator,” said Holdenfield with a deadly sweetness, “but what they really have in common is a terrible inner tension. Killing someone provides them with temporary relief from that tension.”

  “Sort of like getting laid?”

  “Investigator Blatt,” said Kline angrily, “it might be a good idea to keep your questions to yourself until Rebecca finishes her comments.”

  “His question is actually quite apt. An orgasm does relieve sexual tension. However, it does not in a normal person create a dysfunctional downward spiral demanding increasingly frequent orgasms at greater and greater cost. In that respect I believe serial killing has more in common with drug dependency.”

  “Murder addiction,” said Kline slowly, speculatively, as though he were trying out a headline for a press release.

  “Dramatic phrase,” said Holdenfield, “and there’s some truth in it. More than most people, the serial killer lives in his own fantasy world. He may appear to function normally in society. But he derives no satisfaction from his public life, and he has no interest in the real lives of other people. He lives only for his fantasies—fantasies of control, domination, punishment. For him these fantasies constitute a superreality—a world in which he feels important, omnipotent, alive. Any questions at this point?”

  “I have one,” said Kline. “Do you have an opinion yet on which of the serial-killer types we’re looking for?”

  “I do, but I’d love to hear what Detective Gurney has to say about that.”

  Gurney suspected that her earnest, collegial expression was as phony as her smile.

  “A man on a mission,” he said.

  “Ridding the world of alcoholics?” Kline sounded half curious, half skeptical.

  “I think ‘alcoholic’ would be part of the target-victim definition, but there may be more to it—to account for his specific choice of victims.”

  Kline responded with a noncommittal grunt. “In terms of a more expanded profile, something more than ‘a man on a mission,’ how would you describe our perp?”

  Gurney decided to play tit for tat. “I have a few ideas, but I’d love to hear what Dr. Holdenfield has to say about that.”

  She shrugged, then spoke quickly and matter-of-factly. “Thirty-year-old white male, high IQ, no friendships, no normal sexual relationships. Polite but distant. He almost certainly had a troubled childhood, with a central trauma that influences his choice of victims. Since his victims are middle-aged men, it’s possible the trauma involved his father and an oedipal relationship with his mother—”

  Blatt broke in. “You’re not saying that this guy was literally … I mean, are you saying … with his mother?”

  “Not necessarily. This is all about fantasy. He lives in and for his fantasy life.”

  Rodriguez’s voice was jagged with impatience. “I’m having a real problem with that word, Doctor. Five dead bodies are not fantasies!”

  “You’re right, Captain. To you and me, they’re not fantasies at all. They’re real people, individuals with unique lives, worthy of respect, worthy of justice, but that’s not what they are to a serial murderer. To him they’re merely actors in his play—not human beings as you and I understand the term. They are only the two-dimensional stage props he imagines them to be—pieces of his fantasy, like the ritual elements found at the crime scenes.”

  Rodriguez shook his head. “What you’re saying may make some kind of sense in the case of a lunatic serial murderer, but so what? I mean, I have other problems with this whole approach. I mean, who decided this was a serial-murder case? You’re racing down that road without the slightest …” He hesitated, seeming suddenly aware of the stridency of his voice and the impolitic nature of attacking one of Sheridan Kline’s favorite consultants. He went on in a softer register. “I mean, sequential murders are not always the work of a serial murderer. There are other ways to look at this.”

  Holdenfield looked honestly baffled. “You have alternative hypotheses?”

  Rodriguez sighed. “Gurney keeps talking about some factor in addition to drinking that accounts for the choice of victims. An obvious factor might be their common involvement in some past action, accidental or intentional, which injured the killer, and all we’re seeing now is revenge on the group responsible for the injury. It could be as simple as that.”

  “I can’t say a scenario like that is impossible,” said Holdenfield, “but the planning, the poems, the details, the ritual all seem too pathological for simple revenge.”

  “Speaking of pathological,” rasped Jack Hardwick like a man enthusiastically dying of throat cancer, “this might be the perfect time to bring everyone up to date on the latest piece of batshit evidence.”

  Rodriguez glared at him. “Another little surprise?”

  Hardwick continued without reaction, “At Gurney’s request, a team of techs was sent out to the B&B where he thought the killer might have stayed the night before the Mellery murder.”

  “Who approved that?”

  “I did, sir,” said Hardwick. He sounded proud of his transgression.

  “Why didn’t I see any paperwork on that?”

  “Gurney didn’t think there was time,” lied Hardwick. Then he raised his hand to his chest with a curiously stricken I-think-I’m-having-a-heart-attack look and let loose with an explosive belch. Blatt, startled out of a private reverie, jerked back from the table so energetically his chair nearly toppled backwards.

  Before Rodriguez, jangled by the i
nterruption, could refocus on his paperwork concern, Gurney took the ball from Hardwick and launched into an explanation of why he’d wanted an evidence team at The Laurels.

  “The first letter the killer sent to Mellery used the name X. Arybdis. In Greek, an x is equivalent to a ch, and Charybdis is the name of a murderous whirlpool in Greek mythology, linked to another fatal peril named Scylla. The night before the morning of Mellery’s murder, a man and an older woman using the name Scylla stayed at that B&B. I would be very surprised if that were a coincidence.”

  “A man and an older woman?” Holdenfield looked intrigued.

  “Possibly the killer and his mother, although the register, oddly enough, was signed ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ Maybe that supports the oedipal piece of your profile?”

  Holdenfield smiled. “It’s almost too perfect.”

  Again the captain’s frustration seemed about to burst open, but Hardwick spoke first, picking up where Gurney had left off.

  “So we sent the evidence team out there to this weird-ass little cottage that’s decorated like a shrine to The Wizard of Oz. They go over it—inside, outside, upside down—and what do they find? Zip. Nada. Not a goddamn thing. Not a hair, not a smudge, not one iota that would tell you a human being had ever been in the room. Team leader couldn’t believe it. She called me, told me there wasn’t a hint of a fingerprint in places where there are always fingerprints—desktops, countertops, doorknobs, drawer pulls, window sashes, phones, shower handles, sink faucets, TV remotes, lamp switches, a dozen other places where you always find prints. Zilch. Not even one. Not even a partial. So I told her to dust everything—everything—walls, floors, the fucking ceiling. The conversation got a little testy, but I was persuasive. Then she starts calling me every half hour to tell me how she’s still not finding anything and how much of her precious time I’m wasting. But the third time she calls, there’s something different about her voice—it’s a little quieter. She tells me they found something.”

  Rodriguez was too careful to let his disappointment show, but Gurney could feel it. Hardwick went on after a dramatic pause. “They found a word on the outside of the bathroom door. One word. Redrum.”

  “What?” barked Rodriguez, not quite so careful about hiding his disbelief.

  “Redrum.” Hardwick repeated the word slowly, with a knowing look, as though it were the key to something.

  “Redrum? Like in the movie?” asked Blatt.

  “Wait a second, wait a second,” said Rodriguez, blinking with frustration. “You’re telling me it took your evidence team, what, three, four hours to find a word written in plain sight on a door?”

  “Not in plain sight,” said Hardwick. “He wrote it the same way he left the invisible messages for us on the notes to Mark Mellery. DUMB EVIL COPS. Remember?”

  The captain’s only acknowledgment of the recollection was a silent stare.

  “I saw that in the case file,” said Holdenfield. “Something about words he rubbed onto the backs of the notes with his own skin oil. Is that actually feasible?”

  “No problem at all,” said Hardwick. “Fingerprints, in fact, are nothing but skin oil. He just utilized that resource for his own purpose. Maybe rubbed his fingers on his forehead to make them a little oilier. But it definitely worked then, and he did it again at The Laurels.”

  “But we are talking about the redrum from the movie, right?” repeated Blatt.

  “Movie? What movie? Why are we talking about a movie?” Rodriguez was blinking again.

  “The Shining,” said Holdenfield with growing excitement. “A famous scene. The little boy writes the word redrum on a door in his mother’s bedroom.”

  “Redrum is murder spelled backwards,” announced Blatt.

  “God, it’s all so perfect!” said Holdenfield.

  “I assume all this enthusiasm means we’ll have an arrest within the next twenty-four hours?” Rodriguez seemed to be straining for maximum sarcasm.

  Gurney ignored him and addressed Holdenfield. “It’s interesting that he wanted to remind us of redrum from The Shining.”

  Her eyes glittered. “The perfect word from the perfect movie.”

  Kline, who for a long while had been observing the interplay at the table like a fan at one of his club’s squash matches, finally spoke up. “Okay, guys, it’s time to let me in on the secret. What the hell is so perfect?”

  Holdenfield looked at Gurney. “You tell him about the word. I’ll tell him about the movie.”

  “The word is backwards. It’s as simple as that. It’s been a theme since the beginning of the case. Just like the backwards trail of footprints in the snow. And, of course, it’s the word murder that’s backwards. He’s telling us we’ve got the whole case backwards. DUMB EVIL COPS.”

  Kline fixed Holdenfield with his cross-examiner’s gaze. “You agree with that?”

  “Basically, yes.”

  “And the movie?”

  “Ah, yes, the movie. I’ll try to be as concise as Detective Gurney.” She thought for a few moments, then spoke as if choosing each word carefully. “The movie is about a family in which a mother and son are terrorized by a crazy father. A father who happens to be an alcoholic with a history of violent binges.”

  Rodriguez shook his head. “Are you telling us that some crazy, violent, alcoholic father is our killer?”

  “Oh, no, no. Not the father. The son.”

  “The son!?” Rodriguez’s expression was twisted into new extremes of incredulity.

  As she continued, Holdenfield slipped into something close to her Mister Rogers voice. “I believe that the killer is telling us that he had a father like the father in The Shining. I believe he may be explaining himself to us.”

  “Explaining himself?” Rodriguez’s voice was close to sputtering.

  “Everyone wants to present himself on his own terms, Captain. I’m sure you encounter that all the time in your line of work. I certainly do. We all have a rationale for our own behavior, however bizarre it may be. Everyone wants to be recognized as justified, even the mentally disturbed—perhaps especially the mentally disturbed.”

  This observation led to a general silence, which was eventually broken by Blatt.

  “I’ve got a question. You’re a psychiatrist, right?”

  “A consulting forensic psychologist.” Mister Rogers had morphed back into Sigourney Weaver.

  “Right, whatever. You know how the mind works. So here’s the question. This guy knew what number someone would think of before they thought of it. How did he do that?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “He sure as hell did.”

  “He appeared to do it. I assume you’re referring to the incidents I read about in the case file involving the numbers six fifty-eight and nineteen. But he didn’t actually do what you’re saying. It’s simply not possible to know in advance what number would occur to another individual in uncontrolled circumstances. Therefore he didn’t.”

  “But the fact is that he did,” Blatt persisted.

  “There’s at least one explanation,” said Gurney. He went on to outline the scenario that had occurred to him when Madeleine was calling him on her cell phone from their mailbox—namely, how the killer could have used a portable printer in his car to create the letter with the number nineteen in it after Mark Mellery had mentioned it on the phone.

  Holdenfield looked impressed.

  Blatt looked deflated—a sure sign, thought Gurney, that lurking somewhere in that crude brain and overexercised body was a romantic in love with the weird and impossible. But the deflation was only momentary.

  “What about the six fifty-eight?” Blatt asked, his combative gaze flicking back and forth between Gurney and Holdenfield. “There was no phone call that time, just a letter. So how did he know Mellery would think of that number?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that,” said Gurney, “but I have an odd little story that might help someone think of an answer.”

  Rodriguez showed some impatience,
but Kline leaned forward, and this demonstration of interest seemed to hold the captain in check.

  “The other day I had a dream about my father,” Gurney began. He hesitated, involuntarily. His own voice sounded different to him. He heard in it an echo of the profound sadness the dream had generated in him. He saw Holdenfield looking at him curiously but not unpleasantly. He forced himself to continue. “After I woke up, I found myself thinking about a card trick my father used to do when we had people to the house for New Year’s and he’d had a few drinks, which always used to energize him. He’d fan out a deck and go around the room, asking three or four people to each pick a card. Then he’d narrow the focus down to one of those people and tell him to take a good look at the card he’d picked and put it back in the deck. Then he’d hand him the deck and tell him to shuffle it. After that he’d go into his mumbo-jumbo ‘mind-reading’ act, which could go on for another ten minutes, and it would finally end with him dramatically revealing the name of the card—which, of course, he knew from the moment it was picked.”

  “How?” asked Blatt, mystified.

  “When he was getting the deck ready in the beginning, just before he fanned the cards out, he’d manage to identify at least one card and then control its position in the fan.”

  “Suppose no one picked it?” asked Holdenfield, intrigued.

  “If no one picked it, he’d find a reason to discontinue the trick by creating some sort of distraction—suddenly remembering he had the kettle on for tea or something like that—so no one would realize there was a problem with the trick itself. But he almost never had to do that. The way he presented the fan-out, the first or second or third person he offered it to almost always picked the card he wanted them to. And if not, he’d just do his little kitchen routine, then come back and start the trick over. And of course he always had some perfectly plausible way of eliminating the people who’d picked the wrong cards, so no one would realize what was actually going on.”

  Rodriguez yawned. “Is this somehow related to the six fifty-eight business?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Gurney, “but the idea of someone thinking he’s picking a card at random, while the randomness is actually being controlled—”