Think of a Number

by John Verdon

  “Businesses whose client databases entail sensitive privacy issues.”

  “Such as?”

  “Personal information.”

  “What sort of personal information?”

  Dermott looked like he was evaluating the contractual risks he might be incurring by going any further. “The sort of information collected by insurance companies, financial-service companies, HMOs.”

  “Medical data?”

  “A great deal of it, yes.”

  “Treatment data?”

  “To the extent that it is captured in the basic medical coding system. What’s the point of this?”

  “Suppose you were a hacker who wanted to access a very large medical database—how would you go about it?”

  “That’s not an answerable question.”

  “Why is that?”

  Dermott closed his eyes in a way that conveyed frustration. “Too many variables.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what?” Dermott repeated the question as though it were an embodiment of pure stupidity. After a moment he went on with his eyes still closed. “The hacker’s goal, the level of expertise, his familiarity with the data format, the database structure itself, the access protocol, the redundancy of the firewall system, and about a dozen other factors that I doubt you have the technical background to understand.”

  “I’m sure you’re right about that,” said Gurney mildly. “But let’s say, just for example, that a skilled hacker was trying to compile a list of people who’d been treated for a particular illness …”

  Dermott raised his hands in exasperation, but Gurney pressed on. “How difficult would that be?”

  “Again, that’s not answerable. Some databases are so porous they might as well be posted on the Internet. Others could defeat the most sophisticated code-breaking computers in the world. It all depends on the talent of the system designer.”

  Gurney caught a note of pride in that last statement and decided to fertilize it. “I’d be willing to bet my pension there aren’t many people better at it than you are.”

  Dermott smiled. “I’ve built my career on outwitting the sharpest hackers on the planet. No data-protection protocol of mine has ever been breached.”

  The boast raised a new possibility. Might the man’s ability to stymie the killer’s penetration of certain databases have something to do with the killer’s decision to involve him in the case via his post-office box? The idea was certainly worth considering, even though it created more questions than answers.

  “I wish the local police could claim the same degree of competence.”

  The comment brought Gurney back from his speculation. “What do you mean?”

  “What do I mean?” Dermott seemed to be thinking long and hard about the answer. “A murderer is stalking me, and I have no confidence in the ability of the police to protect me. There is a madman loose in this neighborhood, a madman who intends to kill me, then kill you, and you respond to this by asking me hypothetical questions about hypothetical hackers accessing hypothetical databases? I have no idea what you’re trying to do, but if you’re trying to settle my nerves by distracting me, I assure you it’s not helping. Why don’t you concentrate on the real danger? The problem is not some academic software issue. The problem is a lunatic creeping up on us with a bloody knife in his hand. And this morning’s tragedy is proof positive that the police are worse than useless!” The angry tone of this speech had by the end spun out of control. It brought Nardo up the stairs and into the bedroom. He looked first at Dermott, then at Gurney, then back at Dermott.

  “The hell’s going on?”

  Dermott turned away and stared at the wall.

  “Mr. Dermott doesn’t feel adequately protected,” said Gurney.

  “Adequately prot—” Nardo burst out angrily, then stopped and began again in a more reasonable way. “Sir, the chances of any unauthorized person getting into this house—much less ‘a lunatic with a bloody knife’ if I heard you right—are less than zero.”

  Dermott continued staring at the wall.

  “Let me put it this way,” Nardo continued. “If the son of a bitch has the balls to show up here, he’s dead. He tries to get in, I’ll eat the son of a bitch for dinner.”

  “I don’t want to be left alone in this house. Not for a minute.”

  “You’re not hearing me,” growled Nardo. “You’re not alone. There are cops all over the neighborhood. Cops all around the house. Nobody’s getting in.”

  Dermott turned toward Nardo and said challengingly, “Suppose he already got in.”

  “The hell are you talking about?”

  “What if he’s already in the house?”

  “How the hell could he be in the house?”

  “This morning—when I went outside to look for Officer Sissek—suppose when I was walking around the yard … he came in through the unlocked door. He could have, couldn’t he?”

  Nardo stared at him incredulously. “And gone where?”

  “How would I know?”

  “What do you think, he’s hiding under your freaking bed?”

  “That’s quite a question, Lieutenant. But the fact is, you don’t know the answer, do you? Because you didn’t really check the house thoroughly, did you? So he could be under the bed, couldn’t he?”

  “Jesus Christ!” cried Nardo. “Enough of this shit!”

  He took two long strides to the footboard, grabbed the bottom of it, and with a fierce grunt heaved the end of the bed into the air and held it at shoulder height.

  “Okay now?” he snarled. “You see anyone under there?”

  He let the bed down with a thud and a bounce.

  Dermott glared at him. “What I want, Lieutenant, is competence, not childish drama. Is a careful search of the premises too much to ask?”

  Nardo eyed Dermott coldly. “You tell me—where could someone hide in this house?”

  “Where? I don’t know. Basement? Attic? Closets? How should I know?”

  “Just to set the record straight, sir, the first officers on the scene did go through the house. If he was here, they would have found him. Okay?”

  “They went through the house?”

  “Yes, sir, while you were being interviewed in the kitchen.”

  “Including the attic and basement?”

  “Correct.”

  “Including the utility closet?”

  “They checked all the closets.”

  “They couldn’t have checked the utility closet!” cried Dermott defiantly. “It’s padlocked, and I have the key, and nobody asked me for it.”

  “Which means,” countered Nardo, “if it’s still padlocked, nobody could have gotten into it to begin with. Which means it would have been a waste of time to check it.”

  “No—what it means is that you’re a damn liar for claiming that the whole house had been searched!”

  Nardo’s reaction surprised Gurney, who was bracing himself for an explosion. Instead the lieutenant said softly, “Give me the key, sir. I’ll take a look right now.”

  “So,” Dermott concluded, lawyerlike, “you admit that it was overlooked—that the house was not searched the way it should have been!”

  Gurney wondered if this nasty tenacity was the product of Dermott’s migraine, or a bilious streak in his temperament, or the simple conversion of fear into aggression.

  Nardo seemed unnaturally calm. “The key, sir?”

  Dermott muttered something—something offensive, by the look on his face—and pushed himself up out of his chair. He took a key ring out of his nightstand drawer, extricated a key smaller than the rest, and tossed it on the bed. Nardo picked it up with no visible reaction and left the room without another word. His footsteps receded slowly down the stairs. Dermott dropped the remaining keys back in the drawer, started to close it, and stopped.

  “Shit!” he hissed.

  He picked up the keys again and began working a second one off the stiff little ring that held them. On
ce he’d removed it, he started for the door. After taking no more than a step, he tripped on the bedside throw rug and stumbled against the doorjamb, banging his head. A strangled cry of rage and pain emerged from his clenched teeth.

  “You all right, sir?” asked Gurney, stepping toward him.

  “Fine! Perfect!” The words were sputtered out furiously.

  “Can I help you?”

  Dermott seemed to be trying to calm down. “Here,” he said. “Take this key and give it to him. There are two locks. With all the ridiculous confusion …”

  Gurney took the key. “You’re okay?”

  Dermott waved his hand disgustedly. “If they came to me to begin with like they should have …” His voice trailed off.

  Gurney gave the wretched-looking man a final assessing glance and went downstairs.

  As in most suburban houses, the stairs to the basement descended behind and beneath the stairs to the second floor. There was a door leading to them, which Nardo had left open. Gurney could see a light on below.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Yeah?”

  The source of the voice seemed to be located some distance from the foot of the rough wooden stairs, so Gurney went down with the key. The odor—a musty combination of concrete, metal pipes, wood, and dust—kicked up a vivid memory of the apartment-house basement of his childhood—the double-locked storeroom where tenants stored unused bicycles, baby carriages, boxes of junk; the dim light cast by a few cobwebby bulbs; the shadows that never failed to give him a hair-raising chill.

  Nardo was standing at a gray steel door at the opposite end of an unfinished concrete room with exposed joists, dampness-stained walls, a water heater, two oil tanks, a furnace, two smoke alarms, two fire extinguishers, and a sprinkler system.

  “The key only fits the padlock,” he said. “There’s also a dead bolt. What’s with this redundant security mania? And where the hell’s the other key?”

  Gurney handed it to him. “Says he forgot. Blames it on you.”

  Nardo took it with a disgusted grunt and stuck it directly into the lock. “Rotten little fucker,” he said, pushing the door open. “I can’t believe I’m actually checking—What the hell …?”

  Nardo, followed by Gurney, walked tentatively through the doorway into the room beyond, which was considerably larger than a utility closet.

  At first, nothing they saw made sense.

  Chapter 51

  Show-and-tell

  Gurney’s immediate reaction was that they’d entered the wrong door. But that didn’t make any sense, either. Apart from the door at the top of the stairs, it was the only door in the basement. But this was no mere storage space.

  They were standing in the corner of a large, softly lighted, traditionally furnished, richly carpeted bedroom. In front of them was a queen-size bed with a flowery quilt and a ruffled skirt extending around the base. Several overstuffed pillows with matching ruffles were propped up against the headboard. At the foot of the bed was a cedar hope chest. On it sat a big stuffed bird made of some sort of patchwork quilting. An odd feature in the wall to Gurney’s left attracted his attention—a window that seemed at first glance to provide a view of an open field, but the view, he quickly realized, was a poster-size color transparency illuminated from the rear, presumably intended to relieve the claustrophobic atmosphere. He simultaneously became aware of the low hum of some sort of air-circulation system.

  “I don’t get it,” said Nardo.

  Gurney was about to agree when he noticed a small table a little farther along the same wall as the fake window. On the table was a low-wattage lamp in whose circle of amber light stood three simple black frames of the sort used to display diplomas. He moved closer for a clearer view. In each frame was a photocopy of a personal check. The checks were all made out to X. Arybdis. They were all in the amount of $289.87. From left to right, they were from Mark Mellery, Albert Rudden, and R. Kartch. These were the checks Gregory Dermott had reported receiving, the originals of which he’d returned uncashed to their senders. But why had he made copies before returning them? And, more troubling, why the hell had he framed them? Gurney picked them up one at a time, as if a closer inspection might provide answers.

  Then, suddenly, while he was peering at the signature on the third check—R. Kartch—the uncomfortable feeling he’d had about that name resurfaced. Except this time not just the feeling came to him, but the reason for it.

  “Damn!” he muttered at his earlier blindness to the now obvious discrepancy.

  Simultaneously, an abrupt little sound came from Nardo. Gurney looked at him, then followed the direction of his startled gaze to the opposite corner of the wide room. There—barely visible in the shadows, beyond the reach of the feeble light cast by the table lamp on the framed checks, partly concealed by the wings of a Queen Anne armchair and camouflaged by a nightgown of the same dusty-rose hue as the upholstery, a frail woman sat with her head bent forward on her chest.

  Nardo unclipped a flashlight from his belt and aimed its beam at her.

  Gurney guessed that her age might be anywhere from fifty to seventy. The skin was deathly pale. The blond hair, done up in a profusion of curls, had to be a wig. Blinking, she raised her head so gradually it hardly seemed to be moving, turning it toward the light with a curiously heliotropic grace.

  Nardo looked at Gurney, then back at the woman in the chair.

  “I have to pee,” she said. Her voice was high, raspy, imperious. The haughty upward tilt of her chin revealed an ugly scar on her neck.

  “Who the hell is this?” whispered Nardo, as though Gurney ought to know.

  In fact, Gurney was sure he knew exactly who it was. He also knew that bringing the key down to Nardo in the basement had been a terrible mistake.

  He turned quickly toward the open doorway. But Gregory Dermott was already standing in it, with a quart bottle of Four Roses whiskey in one hand and a .38 Special revolver in the other. There was no trace of the angry, volatile man with a migraine. The eyes, no longer screwed up into an imitation of pain and accusation, had reverted to what, Gurney assumed, was their normal state—the right keen and determined, the left dark and unfeeling as lead.

  Nardo also turned. “Wha …?” he began, then let the question die in his throat. He stood very still, eyeing Dermott’s face and gun alternately.

  Dermott took a full step into the room, adroitly reached back with his foot, and hooked his toe around the edge of the door, slamming it shut behind him. There was a heavy metallic click as the lock snapped into place. A small, unsettling smile lengthened the thin line of his mouth.

  “Alone at last,” he said, mocking the tone of a man looking forward to a pleasant chat. “So much to do,” he added. “So little time.” He apparently found this amusing. The cold smile widened for a moment like a stretching worm, then contracted. “I want you to know in advance how much I appreciate your participation in my little project. Your cooperation will make everything so much better. First, a minor detail. Lieutenant, may I ask you to lie facedown on the floor?” It wasn’t really a question.

  Gurney could read in Nardo’s eyes a kind of rapid calculation, but he couldn’t tell what options the man was considering. Or even if he had any idea what was really going on.

  To the degree that he could read anything in Dermott’s eyes, it looked like the patience of a cat watching a mouse with nowhere to run.

  “Sir,” said Nardo, affecting a kind of pained concern, “it would be a real good idea to put the gun down.”

  Dermott shook his head. “Not as good as you think.”

  Nardo looked baffled. “Just put it down, sir.”

  “That’s an option. But there’s a complication. Nothing in life is simple, is it?”

  “Complication?” Nardo was speaking to Dermott as though he were an otherwise harmless citizen temporarily off his medication.

  “I plan to put down the gun after I shoot you. If you want me to put it down right away, then I’ll have to
shoot you right away. I don’t want to do that, and I’m sure you don’t want that, either. You see the problem?”

  As Dermott spoke, he raised the revolver to a point at which it was aimed at Nardo’s throat. Whether it was the steadiness of his hand or the calm mockery in Dermott’s voice, something in his manner convinced Nardo he needed to try a different strategy.

  “You fire that gun,” he said, “what do you think happens next?”

  Dermott shrugged, the thin line of his mouth widening again. “You die.”

  Nardo nodded in tentative agreement, as though a student had given him an obvious but incomplete answer. “And? What then?”

  “What difference does it make?” Dermott shrugged again, gazing down the barrel at Nardo’s neck.

  The lieutenant seemed to be making quite an effort at maintaining control, over either his fury or his fear.

  “Not much to me, but a lot to you. You pull that trigger, in less than a minute you’ll have a couple dozen cops up your ass. They’ll fucking rip you to pieces.”

  Dermott seemed amused. “How much do you know about crows, Lieutenant?”

  Nardo squinted at the non sequitur.

  “Crows are incredibly stupid,” said Dermott. “When you shoot one, another one comes. When you shoot that one, another comes, and then another, and another. You keep shooting them, and they keep coming.”

  It was something Gurney had heard before—that crows would not let one of their own die alone. If a crow was dying, others would come and stand next to him, so he wouldn’t be alone. When he’d first heard that story, from his grandmother when he was ten or eleven years old, he had to leave the room because he knew he was going to cry. He went into the bathroom, and his heart ached.

  “I saw a picture once of a crow shoot on a farm in Nebraska,” said Dermott with a mixture of amazement and contempt. “A farmer with a shotgun was standing next to a pile of dead crows that came up to his shoulder.” He paused, as if to allow Nardo time to appreciate the suicidal absurdity of crows and the relevance of their fate to the current situation.