by John Verdon
Sergeant Wigg, who had been listening with increasing interest, broke in. “Your card trick story reminds me of that private-eye direct-mail scam back in the late nineties.”
Whether it was due to her unusual voice, pitched in the register where male and female overlap, or to the unusual fact that she was speaking at all, she captured everyone’s instant attention.
“The recipient gets a letter, supposedly from a private-investigation company, apologizing for invading the recipient’s privacy. The company ‘confesses’ that in the course of a botched surveillance assignment they mistakenly followed this individual for several weeks and photographed him in various situations. They claim that they are required by privacy legislation to give him all the existing prints of these photos. Then comes the curveball question: Since some of the photos seem to be of a compromising nature, would the recipient like them sent to a post-office box rather than to his home? If so, he will need to send them a fifty-dollar fee to cover the additional record keeping.”
“Anyone stupid enough to fall for that deserves to lose fifty dollars,” sneered Rodriguez.
“Oh, some people lost a lot more than that,” said Wigg placidly. “It wasn’t about getting the fifty-dollar payment. That was only a test. The scammer mailed out over a million of those letters, and the only purpose of the fifty-dollar request was to develop a refined list of people guilty enough about their behavior that they wouldn’t want photos of their activities to fall into the hands of their spouses. Those individuals were then subjected to a series of far more exorbitant requests for payments related to the return of the compromising photographs. Some ended up paying as much as fifteen thousand dollars.”
“For photos that never existed!” exclaimed Kline with an amalgam of indignation and admiration for the scammer’s ingenuity.
“The stupidity of people never ceases to amaze—” began Rodriguez, but Gurney interrupted him.
“Jesus! That’s it! That’s what the two-hundred-eighty-nine-dollar request is. It’s the same thing. It’s a test!”
Rodriguez looked baffled. “A test of what?”
Gurney closed his eyes to help him visualize the letter Mellery had received asking for the money.
Frowning, Kline turned to Wigg. “That con artist—you said he mailed out a million letters?”
“That’s the number I recall from the press reports.”
“Then obviously this is a very different situation. That was basically a fraudulent direct-mail campaign—a big net thrown out to catch a few guilty fish. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about handwritten notes to a handful of people—people for whom the number six fifty-eight must have had some personal meaning.”
Gurney slowly opened his eyes and stared at Kline. “But it didn’t. At first I assumed it did, because why else would it come to mind? So I kept asking Mark Mellery that question—what did the number mean to him, what did it remind him of, had he ever thought of it before, had he ever seen it written, was it the price of something, an address, a safe combination? But he kept insisting the number meant nothing to him, that he never remembered thinking of it before, that it simply popped into his mind—a perfectly random event. And I believe he was telling the truth. So there has to be another explanation.”
“So that means you’re back where you started,” said Rodriguez, rolling his eyes with exaggerated weariness.
“Maybe not. Maybe Sergeant Wigg’s con game is closer to the truth here than we think.”
“Are you trying to tell me that our killer sent out a million letters—a million handwritten letters? That’s ridiculous—not to mention impossible.”
“I agree that a million letters would be impossible, unless he had an awful lot of help, which isn’t likely. But what number would be possible?”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s say our killer had a scheme that involved sending out letters to a lot of people—handwritten, so each recipient would get the impression that his letter was a one-of-a-kind personal communication. How many letters do you think he could write in, say, one year?”
The captain threw up his hands, intimating that the question was not only unanswerable but frivolous. Kline and Hardwick looked more serious—as if they might be attempting some kind of calculation. Stimmel, as always, projected amphibian inscrutability. Rebecca Holdenfield was watching Gurney with growing fascination. Blatt looked like he was trying to determine the source of a foul odor.
Wigg was the only one to speak. “Five thousand,” she said. “Ten, if he were highly motivated. Conceivably fifteen, but that would be difficult.”
Kline squinted at her with lawyerly skepticism. “Sergeant, these numbers are based on what, exactly?”
“To begin with, a couple of reasonable assumptions.”
Rodriguez shook his head—implying that nothing on earth was more fallible than other people’s reasonable assumptions. If Wigg noticed, she didn’t care enough to let it distract her.
“First is the assumption that the model of the private-eye scam is applicable. If it is, it follows that the first communication—the one asking for money—would be sent to the most people and subsequent communications only to people who responded. In our own case, we know that the first communication consisted of two eight-line notes—a total of sixteen fairly short lines, plus a three-line address on the outer envelope. Except for the addresses, the letters would all be the same, making the writing repetitive and rapid. I would estimate that each mailing piece would take about four minutes to complete. That would be fifteen per hour. If he devoted just one hour a day to it, he’d have over five thousand done in a year. Two hours a day would result in close to eleven thousand. Theoretically, he could do a lot more, but there are limits to the diligence of even the most obsessed person.”
“Actually,” said Gurney with the dawning excitement of a scientist who finally sees a pattern in a sea of data, “eleven thousand would be more than enough.”
“Enough to do what?” asked Kline.
“Enough to pull off the six fifty-eight trick, for one thing,” said Gurney. “And that little trick, if it was done the way I’m thinking it was done, would also explain the $289.87 request in the first letter to each of the victims.”
“Whoa,” said Kline, raising his hand. “Slow down. You’re going around the corners a little too fast.”
Chapter 45
To rest in peace, act now
Gurney thought it through one more time. It was almost too simple, and he wanted to be sure he hadn’t overlooked some obvious problem that would blow a hole in his elegant hypothesis. He noted a variety of facial expressions around the table—mixtures of excitement, impatience, and curiosity—as everyone waited for him to speak. He took a long, deep breath.
“I can’t say for certain that this is exactly how it was done. However, it’s the only credible scenario that’s occurred to me in all the time I’ve been wrestling with those numbers—which goes back to the day Mark Mellery came to my home and showed me the first letter. He was so baffled and frightened by the idea that the letter writer knew him so well he could predict what number he’d think of when asked to think of any number from one to a thousand. I could feel the panic in him, the sense of doom. No doubt it was the same with the other victims. That panic was the whole point of the game that was being played. How could he know what number I’d think of? How could he know something so intimate, so personal, so private as a thought? What else does he know? I could see those questions torturing him—literally driving him crazy.”
“Frankly, Dave,” said Kline with ill-concealed agitation, “they’re driving me crazy, too, and the sooner you can answer them, the better.”
“Damn right,” agreed Rodriguez. “Let’s get to the point.”
“If I may express a slightly contrary opinion,” said Holdenfield anxiously, “I’d like to hear the detective explain this in his own way at his own pace.”
“It’s embarrassingly
simple,” said Gurney. “Embarrassing to me, because the longer I stared at the problem, the more impenetrable it seemed to be. And figuring out how he pulled off his trick with the number nineteen didn’t cast any light on how the six fifty-eight business worked. The obvious solution never occurred to me—not until Sergeant Wigg told her story.”
It was not clear whether the grimace on Blatt’s face resulted from an effort to pinpoint the revelatory element or from stomach gas.
Gurney offered Wigg a nod of acknowledgment before going on. “Suppose, as the sergeant has suggested, our obsessed killer devoted two hours a day to writing letters and at the end of a year had completed eleven thousand—which he then mailed out to a list of eleven thousand people.”
“What list?” Jack Hardwick’s voice had the intrusive rasp of a rusty gate.
“That’s a good question—maybe the most important question of all. I’ll come back to it in a minute. For the moment let’s just assume that the original letter—the same identical letter—was sent out to eleven thousand people, asking them to think of a number between one and a thousand. Probability theory would predict that approximately eleven people would choose each of the one thousand available numbers. In other words, there is a statistical likelihood that eleven of those eleven thousand people, picking a number entirely at random, would pick the number six fifty-eight.”
Blatt’s grimace grew to comical proportions.
Rodriguez shook his head in disbelief. “Aren’t we crossing the line here from hypothesis to fantasy?”
“What fantasy are you referring to?” Gurney sounded more bemused than offended.
“Well, these numbers you’re throwing around, they don’t have any evidentiary basis. They’re all imaginary.”
Gurney smiled patiently, although patience was not what he felt. For a moment he was distracted by the awareness of his own dissembling presentation of his emotional reaction. It was a lifelong habit—this reflexive concealment of irritation, frustration, anger, fear, doubt. It served him well in thousands of interrogations—so well he’d come to believe it was a talent, a professional technique, but of course at root it wasn’t that at all. It was a way of dealing with life that had been part of him for as long as he could remember.
“So your father never paid attention to you, David. Did that make you feel bad?”
“Bad? No, not bad. No feelings about it at all, really.”
And yet, in a dream, one could drown in sadness.
Good Lord, no time for introspection now.
Gurney refocused in time to hear Rebecca Holdenfield say in that no-nonsense Sigourney Weaver voice of hers, “I personally find Detective Gurney’s hypothesis far from imaginary. In fact, I find it compelling—and I would ask again that he be allowed to complete his explanation.”
She addressed this request to Kline, who turned up his palms as if to say that this was everyone’s obvious intention.
“I’m not saying,” said Gurney, “that exactly eleven of the eleven thousand people picked the number six fifty-eight—only that eleven is the most likely number. I don’t know enough about statistics to quote probability formulas, but maybe someone can help me out with that.”
Wigg cleared her throat. “The probability attaching to a range would be far higher than for any specific number within the range. For example, I wouldn’t bet the house that a particular number between one and a thousand would be picked by exactly eleven people out of eleven thousand—but if we added a plus-or-minus range of, say, seven in either direction, I might be tempted to bet that the number of people picking it would fall within that range—in this case that six fifty-eight would be picked by at least four people and no more than eighteen people.”
Blatt squinted at Gurney. “Are you saying that this guy sent out mailings to eleven thousand people and the same secret number was hidden inside all those little sealed envelopes?”
“That’s the general idea.”
Holdenfield’s eyes widened in amazement as she spoke her thoughts aloud to no one in particular. “And each person, however many there were, who happened to pick six fifty-eight for whatever reason, and then opened that little envelope inside, and found the note saying that the writer knew him well enough to know he’d pick six fifty-eight … My God, what an impact that would have!”
“Because,” added Wigg, “it would never occur to him that he wasn’t the only one getting that letter. It would never occur to him that he was just the one out of every thousand who happened to pick that number. The handwriting was the icing on the cake. It made it all seem totally personal.”
“Jesus F. Christ,” croaked Hardwick, “what you’re telling us is that we’ve got a serial killer using a direct-mail campaign to prospect for victims!”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” said Gurney.
“That just might be the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Kline, more stunned than disbelieving.
“Nobody writes eleven thousand letters by hand,” declared Rodriguez flatly.
“Nobody writes eleven thousand letters by hand,” repeated Gurney. “That’s exactly the reaction he was banking on. And if it wasn’t for Sergeant Wigg’s story, I don’t think the possibility would ever have occurred to me.”
“And if you hadn’t described your father’s card trick,” said Wigg, “I wouldn’t have thought of the story.”
“You can congratulate each other later,” said Kline. “I still have questions. Like why did the killer ask for $289.87, and why did he ask that it be sent to someone else’s post-office box?”
“He asked for money for the same reason the sergeant’s con man asked for money—to get the right prospects to identify themselves. The con man wanted to know which people on his list were seriously worried about what they might have been photographed doing. Our killer wanted to know which people on his list had picked six fifty-eight and were sufficiently unnerved by the experience to pay money to find out who knew them well enough to predict it. I think the amount was as large as it was to separate the terrified—and Mellery was one of those—from the merely curious.”
Kline was leaning so far forward he was barely on his chair. “But why that exact dollars-and-cents amount?”
“That’s nagged at me from the beginning, and I’m still not sure, but there’s at least one possible reason: to ensure that the victim would send a check instead of cash.”
“That’s not what the first letter said,” pointed out Rodriguez. “It said the money could be sent either by check or by cash.”
“I know, and this sounds awfully subtle,” said Gurney, “but I think the apparent choice was intended to distract attention from the vital need that it be a check. And the complex amount was intended to discourage payment in cash.”
Rodriguez rolled his eyes. “Look, I know fantasy isn’t a popular word here today, but I don’t know what else to call this.”
“Why was it vital that the payment be sent as a check?” asked Kline.
“The money itself didn’t matter to the killer. Remember, the checks weren’t cashed. I believe he had access to them at some point in the delivery process to Gregory Dermott’s box, and that’s all he wanted.”
“All he wanted—what do you mean?”
“What’s on a check other than the amount and the account number?”
Kline thought for a moment. “The account holder’s name and address?”
“Right,” said Gurney. “Name and address.”
“But why …?”
“He had to make the victim identify himself. After all, he’d sent out thousands of these mailings. But each prospective victim would be convinced that the letter he’d received was uniquely about him, from someone who knew him very well. What if he just sent back an envelope with the requested cash in it? He’d have no reason to include his name and address—and the killer couldn’t ask him specifically to include it, because that would destroy the whole ‘I know your intimate secrets’ premise. Getting those checks was a
subtle way to get the respondents’ names and addresses. And maybe, if the surreptitious process of accessing the check information occurred in the post office, the easiest way of disposing of the checks afterward was simply to pass them along in their original envelopes to Dermott’s box.”
“But the killer would have to steam open and reseal the envelopes,” said Kline.
Gurney shrugged. “An alternative would be to get some kind of access after Dermott opened the envelopes himself but before he had a chance to return the checks to their senders. That wouldn’t require steaming and resealing, but it does raise other problems and questions—things we need to look into regarding Dermott’s living arrangements, individuals with possible access to his home, and so forth.”
“Which,” rasped Hardwick loudly, “brings us back to my question—which Sherlock Gurney here characterized a little while ago as the most important question of all. Namely, who the hell is on that list of eleven thousand murder candidates?”
Gurney raised his hand in the familiar traffic-cop gesture. “Before we try to answer that, let me remind everyone that eleven thousand is only a guesstimate. It’s a feasible number of letters from an executional point of view, and it’s a number that statistically supports our six fifty-eight scenario. In other words, it’s a number that works. But as Sergeant Wigg pointed out originally, the actual number could be anywhere from five thousand to fifteen thousand. Any quantity within that range would be small enough to be doable and large enough to produce a handful of people randomly choosing six fifty-eight.”
“Unless, of course, you’re barking up the wrong tree entirely,” pointed out Rodriguez, “and all this speculation is just a colossal waste of time.”
Kline turned to Holdenfield. “What do you think, Becca? Are we onto something? Or just up another tree?”
“I find aspects of the theory absolutely fascinating, but I’d like to reserve my final opinion until I hear the answer to Sergeant Hardwick’s question.”
