John Verdon - Think of a Number

“So it’s all impossible,” said Gurney lightly.

“What’s impossible?” said Hardwick, ready for a fight.

“Everything,” said Gurney.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Calm down, Jack. We need to find a starting point that makes sense. What seems to have happened can’t have happened. Therefore, what seems to have happened didn’t happen.”

“Are you telling me those aren’t footprints?”

“I’m telling you there’s something wrong with the way we’re looking at them.”

“Is that or is that not a footprint?” said Hardwick, exasperated.

“It looks very much like a footprint to me,” said Gurney agreeably.

“So what are you saying?”

Gurney sighed. “I don’t know, Jack. I just have a feeling we’re asking the wrong questions.”

Something in the softness of his tone took the edge off Hardwick’s attitude. Neither man looked at the other or said anything for several long seconds. Then Hardwick raised his head as though remembering something.

“I almost forgot to show you the icing on the cake.” He reached into the side pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out an evidence-collection envelope.

Through the clear plastic, on a plain sheet of white stationery, Gurney could see neat handwriting in red ink.

“Don’t remove it,” said Hardwick, “just read it.”

Gurney did as he was told. Then he read it again. And a third time, committing it to memory.

I ran through the snow .

Fool, look high and low .

Ask where did I go .

You scum of the earth ,

here witness my birth:

Revenge is reborn

for children who mourn ,

for all the forlorn .

“That’s our boy,” said Gurney, handing the envelope back. “Revenge theme, eight lines, consistent meter, elite vocabulary, perfect punctuation, delicate handwriting. Just like all the others-up to a point.”

“Up to a point?”

“There’s a new element in this one-an indication that the killer hates someone else in addition to the victim.”

Hardwick glanced over the encased note, frowning at the suggestion that he’d missed something significant. “Who?” he asked.

“You,” said Gurney, smiling for the first time that day.

It was unfair, of course, a bit of dramatic license, to say that the killer had set his sights equally on Mark Mellery and Jack Hardwick. What Gurney meant, he explained as they strode back toward the crime scene from the dead-end trail in the woods, was that the killer seemed to be aiming some part of his hostility at the police investigating the murder. Far from disturbing Hardwick, the implied challenge energized him. The combative glint in his eye shouted, “Bring the fucker on!”

Then Gurney asked him if he remembered the case of Jason Strunk.

“Why should I?”

“Does the Satanic Santa ring a bell? Or, as another media genius called him, Cannibal Claus?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, I remember. Wasn’t really a serious cannibal, though. Just chewed off the toes.”

“Right, but that wasn’t all, was it?”

Hardwick grimaced. “I seem to recollect that after he chewed their toes off, he cut the bodies up with a band saw, sealed the pieces in plastic bags-very neat-put them in Christmas-gift boxes, and mailed them. That’s how he got rid of them. No burial problems.”

“You happen to remember who he mailed them to?”

“That was twenty years ago. I wasn’t even on the job then. I read about it in the papers.”

“He mailed them to the home addresses of homicide detectives in the precincts where the victims had lived.”

“Home addresses?” Hardwick shot Gurney an appalled look. Murder, moderate cannibalism, and dissection with a band saw might be forgivable, but not this final twist.

“He hated cops,” Gurney continued. “Loved upsetting them.”

“I can see how getting a foot mailed to you might do that.”

“It’s especially upsetting when your wife opens the box.”

The odd note caught Hardwick’s attention. “Holy shit. That was your case. He sent you a body part, and she opened the box?”

“Yep.”

“Holy shit. Is that why she divorced you?”

Gurney glanced at him curiously. “You remember that my first wife divorced me?”

“Some things I remember. Not so much things I read-but if somebody tells me something about themselves, that kind of stuff I never forget. Like, I know you were an only child, your father was born in Ireland, he hated it, he would never tell you anything about it, and he drank too much.”

Gurney stared at him.

“You told me while we were working on the Piggert case.”

Gurney wasn’t sure whether he was more distressed by having revealed those quirky little family facts, by forgetting that he had, or by Hardwick’s recalling them.

They walked on toward the house through the powdery snow, which had begun eddying in intermittent breezes under a darkening sky. Gurney tried to shake off the chill that was enveloping him and refocus himself on the matter at hand.

“Getting back to my point,” he said, “this killer’s last note is a challenge to the police, and that could be a significant development.”

Hardwick was the sort of man who’d get back to someone else’s point when he damn well felt like it.

“So is that why she divorced you? She got some guy’s dick in a box?”

It was none of his business, but Gurney decided to answer.

“We had plenty of other problems. I could give you a list of my complaints, and a longer list of hers. But I think, bottom line, she was shocked to discover what it’s like to be married to a cop. Some wives discover that slowly. Mine had a revelation.”

They had reached the back patio. Two evidence techs were sifting through the snow around the bloodstain, now more brown than red, and examining the flagstones they were uncovering in the process.

“Well, anyway,” said Hardwick, as though brushing aside an unnecessary complication, “Strunk was a serial killer, and this doesn’t look like that.”

Gurney nodded his tentative agreement. Yes, Jason Strunk was a typical serial killer, and whoever killed Mark Mellery seemed to be anything but that. Strunk had little or no prior acquaintance with his victims. It was safe to say that he didn’t have anything resembling a “relationship” with them. He chose them on the basis of their fitting the parameters of a certain physical type and their availability when the pressure to act overwhelmed him-the coinciding of urge and opportunity. Mellery’s killer, however, knew him well enough to torture him with allusions to his past-even knew him well enough to predict what numbers might come to his mind under certain circumstances. He gave indications of having shared the kind of intimate history with his victim that was not typical of serial killers. Moreover, there were no known reports of similar recent murders-although that would have to be researched more carefully.

“It doesn’t look like a serial case,” agreed Gurney. “I doubt you’ll start finding thumbs in your mailbox. But there is something disconcerting about his addressing you, the chief investigating officer, as ‘scum of the earth.’”

They walked around the house to the front door to avoid disrupting the crime-scene processors on the patio. A uniformed officer from the sheriff’s department was stationed there to control access to the house. The wind was sharper there, and he was stamping his feet and clapping his gloved hands together to generate some warmth. His obvious discomfort twisted the smile with which he greeted Hardwick.