Think of a Number

by John Verdon

  He examined the card in Gurney’s wallet for a long minute with increasing incomprehension, finally announcing, “This says New York State.”

  “I’m here to see Lieutenant Nardo,” said Gurney.

  The cop gave him a stare as hard as the pecs straining his shirt-front, then shrugged. “Inside.”

  At the foot of the long driveway on a post the same height as the mailbox was a beige metal sign with black lettering: GD SECURITY SYSTEMS. Gurney ducked under the yellow police tape that seemed to be strung around the entire property. Oddly, it was the coldness of the tape as it brushed against his neck that for the first time that day diverted his attention from his racing thoughts to the weather. It was raw, gray, windless. Patches of snow, previously melted and refrozen, lay in the shadows at the feet of the boxwood and arborvitae plantings. Along the driveway there were patches of black ice filling shallow depressions in the tarred surface.

  Affixed to the center of the front door was a more discreet version of the GD Security Systems sign. Next to the door was a small sticker indicating that the house was protected by Axxon Silent Alarms. As he reached the brick steps of the columned entry porch, the door in front of him opened. It was not a welcoming gesture. In fact, the man who opened it stepped out and closed it behind him. He took only peripheral note of Gurney’s presence as he spoke with loud irritation into a cell phone. He was a compact, athletically built man in his late forties, with a hard face and sharp, angry eyes. He wore a black windbreaker with the word police in large yellow letters across the back.

  “Can you hear me now?” He moved off the porch onto the faded, frost-wilted lawn. “Can you hear me now?… Good. I said I need another tech on the scene ASAP …. No, that’s no good, I mean I need one right now …. Now, before it gets dark. The word is spelled n-o-w. What part of that word don’t you understand?… Good. Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  He pushed the disconnect button on the phone and shook his head. “Goddamn idiot.” He looked at Gurney. “Who the hell are you?”

  Gurney did not react to the aggressive tone. He understood where it was coming from. There was always a sense of heightened emotion at the scene of a cop killing—a kind of barely controlled tribal rage. Besides, he recognized the voice of the man who’d sent the officer to Dermott’s house—John Nardo.

  “I’m Dave Gurney, Lieutenant.”

  A lot seemed to go through Nardo’s mind very quickly, most of it negative. All he said was, “What are you here for?”

  Such a simple question. He wasn’t sure he knew even a fraction of the answer. He decided to opt for brevity. “He says he wants to kill Dermott and me. Well, Dermott’s here. Now I’m here. All the bait the bastard could want. Maybe he’ll make his move and we can wrap this up.”

  “You think so?” Nardo’s tone was full of aimless hostility.

  “If you’d like,” said Gurney, “I can bring you up to date on our piece of the case, and you can tell me what you’ve discovered here.”

  “What I discovered here? I discovered that the cop I sent to this house at your request is dead. Gary Sissek. Two months away from retirement. I discovered that his head was nearly severed by a broken whiskey bottle. I discovered a pair of bloody boots next to a freaking lawn chair behind that hedge.” He waved a little wildly toward the rear of the house. “Dermott never saw the chair before. His neighbor never saw it before. So where did the freaking thing come from? Did this freaking lunatic bring a lawn chair with him?”

  Gurney nodded. “As a matter of fact, the answer is probably yes. It seems to be part of a unique MO. Like the whiskey bottle. Was it by any chance Four Roses?”

  Nardo stared at him, blankly at first, as if there were a slight tape delay in the transmission. “Jesus,” he said. “You better come inside.”

  The door led into a wide, bare center hall. No furniture, no rugs, no pictures on the walls, just a fire extinguisher and a couple of smoke alarms. At the end of the hall was the rear door—beyond which, Gurney assumed, was the porch where Gregory Dermott that morning had discovered the cop’s body. Indistinct voices outside suggested that the scene-of-crime processing team was still busy in the backyard.

  “Where’s Dermott?” Gurney asked.

  Nardo raised his thumb toward the ceiling. “Bedroom. Gets stress migraines, and the migraines make him nauseous. He’s not in what you’d call a good mood. Bad enough before the phone call saying he was next, but then … Jesus.”

  Gurney had questions he wanted to ask, lots of them, but it seemed better to let Nardo set the pace. He looked around at what he could see of the ground floor of the house. Through a doorway on his right was a large room with white walls and a bare wood floor. Half a dozen computers sat side by side on a long table in the center of the room. Phones, fax machines, printers, scanners, auxiliary hard drives, and other peripherals covered another long table placed against the far wall. Also on the far wall was another fire extinguisher. In lieu of a smoke alarm, there was a built-in sprinkler system. There were only two windows, too small for the space, one in the front and one in the rear, giving it a tunnel-like feeling despite the white paint.

  “He runs his computer business from down here and lives upstairs. We’ll use the other room,” said Nardo, indicating a doorway across the hall. Similarly uninviting and purely functional, the room was half the length of the other and had a window at only one end, making it more like a cave than a tunnel. Nardo flipped a wall switch as they entered, and four recessed lights in the ceiling turned the cave into a bright white box containing file cabinets against one wall, a table with two desktop computers against another wall, a table with a coffeemaker and a microwave against a third wall, and an empty square table with two chairs in the middle of the room. This room had both a sprinkler system and a smoke alarm. It reminded Gurney of a cleaner version of the cheerless break room at his last precinct. Nardo sat in one of the chairs and gestured for Gurney to sit in the other. He massaged his temples for a long minute, as if trying to squeeze the tension out of his head. From the look in his eyes, it wasn’t working.

  “I don’t buy that ‘bait’ shit,” he said, wrinkling his nose as if the word bait smelled bad.

  Gurney smiled. “It’s partly true.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You come here to be a freaking hero?”

  “I don’t think so. I have a feeling my being here may help.”

  “Yeah? What if I don’t share that feeling?”

  “It’s your show, Lieutenant. You want me to go home, I’ll go home.”

  Nardo gave him another long, cynical stare. In the end he appeared to change his mind, at least tentatively. “The Four Roses bottle is part of the MO?”

  Gurney nodded.

  Nardo took a deep breath. He looked as if his whole body ached. Or as if the whole world ached. “Okay, Detective. Maybe you better tell me everything you haven’t told me.”

  Chapter 48

  A house with a history

  Gurney talked about the backwards snow prints, the poems, the unnatural voice on the phone, the two unsettling number tricks, the alcoholic backgrounds of the victims, their mental torture, the hostile challenges to the police, the “REDRUM” graffiti on the wall and the “Mr. and Mrs. Scylla” sign-in at The Laurels, the high intelligence and hubris of the killer. He continued to provide details from the three killings he was familiar with until Nardo’s attention span looked like it might be reaching its breaking point. Then he concluded with what he considered most important:

  “He wants to prove two things. First, that he has the power to control and punish drunks. Second, that the police are impotent fools. His crimes are intentionally constructed like elaborate games, brain teasers. He’s brilliant, obsessive, meticulous. So far he hasn’t left behind a single inadvertent fingerprint, hair, speck of saliva, clothing fiber, or unplanned footprint. He hasn’t made any mistakes that we’ve discovered. The fact is, we know very litt
le about him, his methods, or his motives that he hasn’t chosen to reveal to us. With one possible exception.”

  Nardo raised a weary but curious eyebrow.

  “A certain Dr. Holdenfield, who wrote the state-of-the-art study of serial murder, believes he’s reached a critical stage in the process and is about to launch some sort of climactic event.”

  Nardo’s jaw muscles rippled. He spoke with fierce restraint. “Which would make my slaughtered friend on the back porch a warm-up act?”

  It wasn’t the kind of question one could, or should, answer. The two men sat in silence until a slight sound, perhaps the sound of an irregular breath, drew their attention simultaneously to the doorway. Incongruously for such a surreptitious arrival, it was the NFL-size hulk who’d earlier been guarding the driveway. He looked like he was having a tooth drilled.

  Nardo could see what was coming. “What, Tommy?”

  “They’ve located Gary’s wife.”

  “Oh, Christ. Okay. Where is she?”

  “On her way home from the town garage. She drives the Head Start school bus.”

  “Right. Right. Oh, fuck. I should go myself, but I can’t leave here now. Where the fuck is the chief? Anybody find him yet?”

  “He’s in Cancún.”

  “I know he’s in freaking Cancún. I mean, why the fuck doesn’t he check his messages?” Nardo took a long breath and closed his eyes. “Hacker and Picardo—they were probably closest to the family. Isn’t Picardo the wife’s cousin or something? Send Hacker and Picardo. Christ. But tell Hacker to come see me first.”

  The gigantic young cop went as quietly as he’d come.

  Nardo took another long breath. He began speaking as though he’d been kicked in the head and hoped that speaking would help him clear his mind. “So you’re telling me they were all alcoholics. Well, Gary Sissek wasn’t an alcoholic, so what does that mean?”

  “He was a cop. Maybe that was enough. Or maybe he got in the way of a planned attack on Dermott. Or maybe there’s some other connection.”

  “What other connection?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The back door slammed, sharp footsteps approached, and a wiry man in plainclothes appeared at the door. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Sorry to do this to you, but I need you and Picardo to—”

  “I know.”

  “Right. Well. Keep the information simple. Simple as you can. ‘Fatally stabbed while protecting the intended victim of an attack. Died a hero.’ Something like that. Jesus fucking Christ! What I mean is, no awful details, no pool of blood. You understand what I’m trying to say? The details can come later if they have to. But for now …”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Right. Look, I’m sorry I can’t do it myself. I really can’t leave. Tell her I’ll come by the house tonight.”

  “Yes, sir.” The man paused at the doorway until it was clear that Nardo had nothing more to say, then marched back the way he came and closed the rear door behind him, this time more quietly.

  Again Nardo forced his attention back to his conversation with Gurney. “Am I missing something, or is your understanding of this case pretty much theoretical? I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but I didn’t hear anything about a list of suspects—in fact, no concrete leads to pursue at all, is that right?”

  “More or less.”

  “And that shitload of physical evidence—envelopes, notepaper, red ink, boots, broken bottles, footprints, taped phone calls, cell-tower transmission records, returned checks, even messages written in skin oil from this freaking lunatic’s fingertips—none of that led anywhere?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  Nardo shook his head in a manner that was getting to be a habit. “Bottom line, you don’t know who you’re looking for or how to find him.”

  Gurney smiled. “So maybe that’s why I’m here.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I have no idea where else to go.”

  It was a simple admission of a simple fact. The intellectual satisfaction of figuring out the tactical details of the killer’s MO was little more than a distraction from the lack of progress on the central issue so plainly articulated by Nardo. Gurney had to face the fact that despite his eureka insights into the peripheral mysteries of the case, he was almost as far from identifying and capturing his man as he’d been on the morning Mark Mellery brought him those first baffling notes and asked for his help.

  There was a small shift in Nardo’s expression, a relaxation of its sharp edge.

  “We’ve never had a murder in Wycherly,” he said. “Not a real one, anyway. Couple of manslaughter plead-outs, couple of vehicular homicides, one questionable hunting accident. Never had a killing here that didn’t involve at least one completely intoxicated asshole. At least not in the past twenty-four years.”

  “That how long you’ve been on the job?”

  “Yep. Only guy in the department longer than me is … was … Gary. He was just shy of twenty-five. His wife wanted him out at twenty, but he figured if he stayed another five … Damn!” Nardo wiped his eyes. “We don’t lose many guys in the line of duty,” he said, as though his tears needed a rational explanation.

  Gurney was tempted to say he knew what it was like to lose a colleague. He’d lost two in one bust gone bad. Instead he just nodded in sympathy.

  After a minute or so, Nardo cleared his throat. “You have any interest in talking to Dermott?”

  “Matter of fact, yes. I just don’t want to get in your way.”

  “You won’t,” said Nardo roughly—making up, Gurney supposed, for his moment of weakness. Then he added in a more normal tone, “You’ve spoken to this guy on the phone, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So he knows who you are.”

  “Right.”

  “So you don’t need me in the room. Just fill me in when you’re through.”

  “Whatever you say, Lieutenant.”

  “Door on the right at the top of the stairs. Good luck.”

  As he ascended the plain oak staircase, Gurney wondered if the second floor would be any more revealing of the occupant’s personality than the first, which had no more warmth or flair than the computer equipment it housed. The landing at the top of the stairs echoed the redundant security motif established downstairs: a fire extinguisher on the wall, a smoke alarm and sprinklers in the ceiling. Gurney was getting the impression that Gregory Dermott was definitely a belt-and-suspenders guy. He knocked at the door Nardo had indicated.

  “Yes?” The response was pained, hoarse, impatient.

  “Special Investigator Gurney, Mr. Dermott. May I see you for a minute?”

  There was a pause. “Gurney?”

  “Dave Gurney. We’ve spoken on the phone.”

  “Come in.”

  Gurney opened the door into a room darkened by partly closed blinds. It was furnished with a bed, a nightstand, a bureau, an armchair, and a tablelike desk against the wall with a folding chair in front of it. All the wood was dark. The style was contemporary, superficially upscale. The bedspread and carpet were gray, tan, essentially colorless. The room’s occupant sat in the armchair facing the door. He sat tilted a little to one side, as though he’d found an odd position that mitigated his discomfort. To the extent that the underlying personality was visible, it struck Gurney as the techie type one might expect in the computer business. In the low light, his age was less definable. Thirty something would be a reasonable guess.

  After studying Gurney’s features as if trying to discern in them the answer to a question, he asked in a low voice, “Did they tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “About the phone call … from the crazy murderer.”

  “I heard about that. Who answered the phone?”

  “Answered it? I assume one of the police officers. One came to get me.”

  “The caller asked for you by name?”

  “I guess …. I don’t
know …. I mean, he must have. The officer said the call was for me.”

  “Was there anything familiar about the caller’s voice?”

  “It wasn’t normal.”

  “How do you mean that?”

  “Crazy. Up and down, high like a woman’s voice, then low. Crazy accents. Like it was some kind of creepy joke, but serious, too.” He pressed his fingertips against his temples. “He said that I was next, then you.” He seemed more exasperated than frightened.

  “Were there any background sounds?”

  “Any what?”

  “Did you hear anything other than the caller’s voice—music, traffic, other voices?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  Gurney nodded, looking around the room. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  “What? No, go ahead.” Dermott gestured broadly to the room as though it were full of chairs.

  Gurney sat on the edge of the bed. He had a strong feeling that Gregory Dermott held the key to the case. Now, if only he could think of the right question to ask. The right subject to raise. On the other hand, sometimes the right thing to say was nothing. Create a silence, an empty space, and see how the other guy would choose to fill it. He sat for a long while staring down at the carpet. It was an approach that took patience. It also took good judgment to know when any more empty silence would just be a waste of time. He was approaching that point when Dermott spoke.

  “Why me?” The tone was edgy, annoyed—a complaint, not a question—and Gurney chose not to respond.

  After a few seconds, Dermott went on, “I think it might have something to do with this house.” He paused. “Let me ask you something, Detective. Do you personally know anyone in the Wycherly police department?”