Think of a Number

by John Verdon

  “I don’t mean just any men. I mean men like Jimmy Spinks. Guess how many men like him I’ve killed.”

  Dermott blinked. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about killing drunks. Ridding the world of alcoholic animals, exterminating the scum of the earth.”

  Once again there was an almost imperceptible vibration around Dermott’s mouth. He had the man’s attention, no doubt about that. Now what? What else but ride the wave. There was no other transportation in sight. He composed his words as he spoke them.

  “Late one night in the Port Authority bus terminal, when I was a rookie cop, I was told to roust some derelicts from the rear entryway. One wouldn’t leave. I could smell the stink of the whiskey from ten feet off. I told him again to get out of the building, but instead of going out the door, he started coming toward me. He pulled a kitchen knife out of his pocket—a little knife with a serrated blade like you’d use to slice an orange. He brandished the knife in a threatening manner and ignored my order to drop it. Two witnesses who saw the confrontation from the escalator swore that I shot him in self-defense.” He paused and smiled. “But that’s not true. If I’d wanted to, I could have subdued him without even breathing hard. Instead I shot him in the face and blew his brains out the back of his head. You know why I did that, Gregory?”

  “Dickie-Dickie-Dickie Duck,” said the old woman in a rhythm quicker than the clicking of her shoes. Dermott’s mouth opened a fraction of an inch, but he said nothing.

  “I did it because he looked like my father,” said Gurney with an angrily rising voice, “looked like my father looked the night he smashed a teapot on my mother’s head—a fucking stupid teapot with a fucking stupid clown face on it.”

  “Your father wasn’t much of a father,” said Dermott coldly. “But then again, Detective, neither were you.”

  The leering accusation removed any doubt in Gurney’s mind about the extent of Dermott’s knowledge. At that moment he seriously considered the option of absorbing a bullet to get his hands on Dermott’s throat.

  The leer intensified. Perhaps Dermott sensed Gurney’s discomfort. “A good father should protect his four-year-old son, not let him get run over, not let the driver get away.”

  “You piece of shit,” muttered Gurney.

  Dermott giggled, seemingly crazed with delight. “Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar—and I thought you were a fellow poet. I hoped we could keep trading verses. I had a little ditty all ready for our next exchange. Tell me what you think of it. ‘A hit-and-run without a trace, / the star detective fell on his face. / What did the little boy’s mother say / when you came home alone that day?’”

  An eerie animal sound rose from Gurney’s chest, a strangled eruption of rage. Dermott was transfixed.

  Nardo had apparently been waiting for the moment of maximum distraction. His muscular right arm accelerated up and around in a mighty circular overhand motion, hurling the unopened Four Roses bottle with tremendous force at Dermott’s head. As Dermott sensed the movement and began to swivel the gun-in-the-goose toward Nardo, Gurney launched himself in a headlong diving leap at the bed, landing chest-first on the goose, just as the thick glass base of the full whiskey bottle smashed squarely into Dermott’s temple. The revolver discharged beneath Gurney, filling the air around him with an atomized explosion of down stuffing. The bullet passed under Gurney in the direction of the wall where he’d been sitting, shattering the table lamp that had provided the room’s sole illumination. In the darkness he could hear Nardo breathing hard through clenched teeth. The old woman started to make a faint wailing sound, a sound with a quavering pitch, a sound like a half-remembered lullaby. Then there was the sound of a terrific impact, and the heavy metal door of the room flew open, swung around, and hit the wall—followed immediately by the huge hurtling figure of a man and a smaller figure behind him.

  “Freeze!” shouted the giant.

  Chapter 52

  Death before dawn

  The cavalry had finally arrived—a little late, but that was a good thing. Considering Dermott’s history of precise marksmanship and his eagerness to pile up the crows, it was possible that not only the cavalry but Nardo and Gurney would have ended up with bullets in their throats. And then, when the gunshots brought the whole department swarming into the house and Dermott opened the valve, sending the pressurized chlorine and ammonia through the sprinkler system …

  As it was, the only major casualty other than the lamp and the doorframe was Dermott himself. The bottle, propelled by all of Nardo’s combative rage, had struck him with sufficient force to produce what looked like a possible coma. In a related minor injury, a curved shard of glass had splintered from the bottle on impact, embedding itself in Gurney’s head at the hairline.

  “We heard a shot. What the fuck’s going on here?” snarled the hulking man, peering around the mostly dark room.

  “Everything’s under control, Tommy,” said Nardo, his jagged voice suggesting he wasn’t yet part of the everything. In the dim light coming in from the other part of the basement, Gurney recognized the smaller officer who’d rushed in on Big Tommy’s heels as the crew-cut Pat with the acetylene-blue eyes. Holding a heavy nine-millimeter pistol at the ready and keeping a close watch on the ugly scene in the bed, she edged around to the far corner of the room and switched on the lamp that stood next to the wing chair where the old woman had been sitting.

  “You mind if I get up?” said Gurney, who was still lying across the goose on Dermott’s lap.

  Big Tommy glanced at Nardo.

  “Sure,” said Nardo, his teeth still partly clenched. “Let him get up.”

  As he rose carefully from the bed, blood began flowing freely down his face—the sight of which was probably what restrained Nardo from immediately assaulting the man who had minutes earlier encouraged a demented serial killer to shoot him.

  “Jesus,” said Big Tommy, staring at the blood.

  An overload of adrenaline had kept Gurney unaware of the wound. He touched his face and found it surprisingly wet; then he examined his hand and found it surprisingly red.

  Acetylene Pat looked at Gurney’s face without emotion. “You want an ambulance here?” she said to Nardo.

  “Yeah. Sure. Make the call,” he said without conviction.

  “For them, too?” she asked with a quick nod toward the odd couple in the bed. The red glass shoes caught her eye. She squinted as if trying to banish an optical illusion.

  After a long pause, he muttered a disgusted, “Yeah.”

  “You want the cars called in?” she asked, frowning at the shoes that seemed to be disconcertingly real after all.

  “What?” he said after another pause. He was staring at the remains of the smashed lamp and the bullet hole in the drywall behind it.

  “We’ve got cars on patrol and guys out there on door-to-door inquiries. You want them called in?”

  The decision seemed harder for him than it should have been. Finally he said, “Yeah, call them in.”

  “Right,” she said, and strode out of the room.

  Big Tommy was observing with evident distaste the damage to Dermott’s temple. The Four Roses bottle had come to rest upside down on the pillow between Dermott and the old woman, whose curly blond wig had shifted in a way that made the top of her head look like it had been unscrewed a quarter of a turn.

  As Gurney gazed at the bottle’s floral label, the answer came to him that had eluded him earlier. He remembered what Bruce Wellstone had said. He said that Dermott (aka Mr. Scylla) had claimed he’d seen four rose-breasted grosbeaks and that he had made a particular point of the number four. The “translation” of four rose-breasted grosbeaks struck Gurney almost as quickly as the words. Four Roses! Like signing the register “Mr. and Mrs. Scylla,” the message was just another little dance step advertising his cleverness—Gregory Dermott showing how easily he could toy with the dumb evil cops. Catch me if you can.

  A minute later Pat returned, grimly eff
icient. “Ambulance on the way. Cars recalled. Door-to-doors canceled.” She regarded the bed coldly. The old woman was making sporadic sounds somewhere between keening and humming. Dermott was morbidly still and pale. “You sure he’s alive?” she asked without evident concern.

  “I have no idea,” said Nardo. “Maybe you ought to check.”

  She pursed her lips as she walked over and probed for a neck pulse.

  “Uh-huh, he’s alive. What’s the matter with her?”

  “That’s Jimmy Spinks’s wife. You ever hear about Jimmy Spinks?”

  She shook her head. “Who’s Jimmy Spinks?”

  He considered this for a while. “Forget it.”

  She shrugged—as if forgetting things like that were a normal part of the job.

  Nardo took a few slow, deep breaths. “I need you and Tommy upstairs to keep the place secured. Now that we know this is the little fucker who killed everyone, the forensics team will have to come back and run the house through a sieve.”

  She and Tommy exchanged uneasy looks but left the room with no argument. As Tommy passed Gurney, he said as casually as if he were commenting on a speck of dandruff, “You got a piece of glass sticking out of your head.”

  Nardo waited until their footsteps had climbed the stairs and the basement door at the top of the stairs was closed before speaking.

  “Back away from the bed.” His voice was a bit jerky.

  Gurney knew he was really being told to back away from the weapons—Dermott’s revolver in the now-blasted stuffing of the goose and Nardo’s ankle pistol in Dermott’s pocket and the formidable whiskey bottle on the pillow—but he complied without objection.

  “Okay,” said Nardo, struggling, it seemed, to control himself. “I’m giving you a chance to explain.”

  “You mind if I sit down?”

  “I don’t care if you stand on your fucking head. Talk! Now!”

  Gurney sat in the chair by the splintered lamp. “He was about to shoot you. You were two seconds away from a bullet in the throat, or the head, or the heart. There was only one way to stop him.”

  “You didn’t tell him to stop. You told him to shoot me.” Nardo’s fists were clenched so tightly that Gurney could see the white spots on the knuckles.

  “But he didn’t, did he?”

  “But you told him to.”

  “Because it was the only way to stop him.”

  “The only way to stop … Are you out of your fucking mind?” Nardo was glaring like a killer dog waiting to be loosed.

  “The fact is, you’re alive.”

  “You’re saying I’m alive because you told him to kill me? What kind of lunatic shit is that?”

  “Serial murder is about control. Total control. For crazy Gregory that meant controlling not only the present and the future but also the past. The scene he wanted you to act out was the tragedy that occurred in this house twenty-four years ago—with one crucial difference. Back then little Gregory wasn’t able to stop his father from cutting his mother’s throat. She never really recovered, and neither did he. The grown-up Gregory wanted to rewind the tape and start it over so he could change it. He wanted you to do everything his father did up to the point of raising the bottle. Then he was going to kill you—to get rid of the horrible drunk, to save his mother. That’s what all the other murders were about—attempts to control and kill Jimmy Spinks by controlling and killing other drunks.”

  “Gary Sissek wasn’t a drunk.”

  “Maybe not. But Gary Sissek was on the force when Jimmy Spinks was, and I bet Gregory recognized him as a friend of his father. Maybe even a casual drinking buddy. And the fact that you were also on the force back then probably in Gregory’s mind made you a perfect stand-in—the perfect way for him to reach back and change history.”

  “But you told him to shoot me!” Nardo’s tone was still argumentative, but, to Gurney’s relief, the conviction behind it was weakening.

  “I told him to shoot you because the only way to stop a control-freak killer like that when your only weapon is words is to say something that makes him doubt he’s really in control. Part of the control fantasy is that he’s making all the decisions—that he’s the all-powerful one, and no one has power over him. The biggest curveball you can throw at a mind like that is the possibility that he’s doing exactly what you want him to do. Oppose him directly and he’ll kill you. Beg for your life and he’ll kill you. But tell him you want him to do exactly what he’s about to do and it blows the circuit.”

  Nardo looked like he was trying hard to find a flaw in the story. “You sounded very … authentic. There was hatred in your voice, like you really wanted me dead.”

  “If I hadn’t been convincing, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  Nardo switched gears. “What about the shooting in Port Authority?”

  “What about it?”

  “You shot some bum because he reminded you of your drunk father?”

  Gurney smiled.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Two things. First: I never worked anywhere near Port Authority. Second: In twenty-five years on the job, I never fired my gun, not even once.”

  “So that was all bullshit?”

  “My father drank too much. It was … a difficult thing. Even when he was there, he wasn’t there. But shooting a stranger wouldn’t have helped much.”

  “So what was the point of talking all that shit?”

  “The point? The point is what happened.”

  “The hell does that mean?”

  “Christ, Lieutenant, I was just trying to hold Dermott’s attention long enough to give you a chance to do something with that two-pound bottle in your hand.”

  Nardo stared at him a little blankly, as though all this information wasn’t quite fitting into the available spaces in his brain.

  “That stuff about the kid being hit by the car … that was all bullshit, too?”

  “No. That was true. His name was Danny.” Gurney’s voice became hoarse.

  “They never got the driver?”

  Gurney shook his head.

  “No leads?”

  “One witness said that the car that hit my boy, a red BMW, had been parked in front of a bar down the street all afternoon and that the guy who came out of the bar and got into it was obviously drunk.”

  Nardo thought about this for a while. “Nobody in the bar could ID him?”

  “Claimed they never saw him before.”

  “How long ago this happen?”

  “Fourteen years and eight months.”

  They were quiet for some minutes; then Gurney resumed speaking in a low, hesitant voice. “I was taking him to the playground in the park. There was a pigeon walking in front of him on the sidewalk, and Danny was following it. I was only half there. My mind was on a murder case. The pigeon walked off the sidewalk into the street, and Danny followed it. By the time I saw what was happening, it was too late. It was over.”

  “You have other kids?”

  Gurney hesitated. “Not with Danny’s mother.”

  Then he closed his eyes, and neither man said anything for a long time. Nardo eventually broke the silence.

  “So there’s no doubt Dermott’s the guy who killed your friend?”

  “No doubt,” said Gurney. He was struck by the exhaustion in both of their voices.

  “And the others, too?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Why now?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Why wait so long?”

  “Opportunity. Inspiration. Serendipity. My guess is that he found himself designing a security system for a big medical-insurance database. It may have dawned on him that he could write a program to extract all the names of men who’d been treated for alcoholism. That would be the starting point. I suspect he became obsessed with the possibilities, eventually came up with his ingenious scheme for trolling through the list to find men scared and vulnerable enough to send him those checks. Men he could torture with h
is vicious little poems. Somewhere along the line, he got his mother out of the nursing home where the state had put her after the attack left her incapacitated.”

  “Where was he all those years before he showed up here?”

  “As a kid, either in a state facility or in foster care. Could’ve been a nasty path. Got involved with computer software at some point, I assume through games, got good at it. Very good—eventually got a degree from MIT.”

  “And sometime along the way he changed his name?”

  “Probably when he turned eighteen. I bet he couldn’t stand having his father’s name. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dermott was his mother’s maiden name.”

  Nardo’s lip curled. “Would’ve been nice if you’d thought to run him through the state’s name-change database at the start of this freaking mess.”

  “Realistically, there was no reason to do that. And even if we did, the fact that Dermott’s childhood name was Spinks wouldn’t have meant a damn thing to anyone involved in the Mellery case.”

  Nardo looked like he was trying to store all this away for reflection when his head was clearer. “Why did the crazy son of a bitch come back to Wycherly at all?”

  “Because it was the scene of the attack on his mother twenty-four years ago? Maybe because the weird notion of rewriting the past was taking hold of him? Maybe he heard the old house was for sale and couldn’t resist it? Maybe it offered an opportunity for getting even not only with drunks but with the Wycherly police department? Unless he chooses to tell us the whole story, we’ll never know for sure. I don’t think Felicity is likely to be much help.”

  “Not much,” agreed Nardo, but he had something else on his mind. He looked troubled.

  “What is it?” asked Gurney.

  “What? Nothing. Nothing, really. Just wondering … how much it really bothered you that someone was killing drunks.”

  He didn’t know what to say. The proper answer might have something to do with not sitting in judgment on the worthiness of the victim. The cynical answer might be that he cared more about the challenge of the game than the moral equation, more about the game than the people. Either way, he had no appetite for discussing the issue with Nardo. But he felt he ought to say something.