John Verdon - Think of a Number

“Massachusetts? Jesus, our boy’s all over the place. This third guy’s still alive?”

“We’ll know in a few minutes. Local PD sent a car to his house.”

“Okay. I’d appreciate your letting me know whatever you can whenever you can. I’ll make some more noise about getting our evidence team back to the Ruddens’. I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for the call, sir.”

“Good luck. I’ll talk to you soon.”

Gurney’s respect for the young detective was growing. The more he heard, the more he liked what he was hearing-energy, intelligence, dedication. And something else. Something earnest and unspoiled. Something that touched his heart.

He shook his head like a dog shaking off water and took several deep breaths. The day, he thought, must have been more emotionally draining than he’d realized. Or perhaps some residue of his dream about his father was still with him. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

He was awakened by the phone, mistaking it at first for his alarm clock. He found himself still in his den chair, with a painfully stiff neck. According to his watch, he’d been asleep for nearly two hours. He picked up the phone and cleared his throat.

“Gurney.”

The DA’s voice on the other end burst like a horse from the starting gate.

“Dave, I just got the news. God, this thing just keeps getting bigger. A third potential victim in Massachusetts? This could be the biggest damn murder case since Son of Sam, not to mention your own Jason Strunk. This is big! I just want to hear it from your own lips, before I talk to the media: We do have hard evidence that the same guy whacked the first two victims, is that right?”

“The evidence strongly suggests that, sir.”

“Suggests?”

“Strongly suggests.”

“Could you be more definite?”

“We don’t have fingerprints. We don’t have DNA. I’d say it’s definite that the cases are connected, but we can’t prove yet that the same individual cut both throats.”

“The probability is high?”

“Very high.”

“Your judgment on that is good enough for me.”

Gurney smiled at this transparent pretense of trust. He knew damn well that Sheridan Kline was the sort of man who valued his own judgment far above anyone else’s but would always leave a door open for blame shifting in case a situation went south.

“I’d say it’s time to talk to our friends at Fox News-which means I need to touch base with BCI tonight and put together a statement. Keep me up to the minute on this, Dave, especially any developments on the Massachusetts angle. I want to know everything.” Kline hung up without bothering to say good-bye.

So apparently he was planning to go public in a big way-rev up a media circus with himself as the ringmaster-before it occurred to the Bronx DA, or to the DA in any other jurisdiction where the murder spree might spread, to seize the personal publicity opportunity. Gurney’s lips drew back in distaste as he imagined the press conferences to come.

“Are you all right?”

Startled at the voice so close to him, he looked up and saw Madeleine at the den door.

“Jesus, how the hell…?”

“You were so engrossed in your conversation you didn’t hear me come in.”

“Apparently not.” Blinking, he looked at his watch. “So where did you go?”

“Remember what I said on my way out?”

“You said you wouldn’t tell me where you were going.”

“I said I’d already told you twice.”

“Okay, fine. Well, I have work to do.”

As if it were his ally, the phone rang.

The call was from Sotherton, but it wasn’t from Richard Kartch. It was from a detective by the name of Gowacki.

“We got a situation,” he said. “How soon do you think you can get here?”

By the time Gurney got off the phone with the flat-voiced Mike Gowacki, it was nine-fifteen. He found Madeleine already in bed, propped against her pillows, with a book. War and Peace . She’d been reading it for three years, shuttling back and forth between it and, incongruously, Thoreau’s Walden .

“I have to head out to a crime scene.”

She looked up at him from the book-curious, worried, lonely.

He felt able to respond only to the curiosity. “Another male victim. Stabbed in the throat, footprints in the snow.”

“How far?”

“What?”

“How far do you have to go?”

“Sotherton, Massachusetts. Three, four hours, maybe.”

“So you won’t be back until sometime tomorrow.”

“For breakfast, I hope.”

She smiled her who-do-you-think-you’re-kidding? smile.

He started to leave, then stopped and sat on the edge of the bed. “This is a strange case,” he said, letting his unsureness about it come through. “Getting stranger by the day.”

She nodded, somehow placated. “You don’t think it’s your standard serial killer?”

“Not the standard version, no.”

“Too much communication with the victims?”

“Yes. And too much diversity among the victims-personally and geographically. Typical serial killer doesn’t bounce around from the Catskills to the East Bronx to the middle of Massachusetts pursuing famous authors, retired night watchmen, and nasty loners.”

“They must have something in common.”

“They all have drinking histories, and the evidence indicates the killer is focused on that issue. But they must have something else in common-otherwise why go to the trouble of choosing victims two hundred miles apart from one another?”

They fell silent. Gurney absently smoothed wrinkles out of the quilt in the space between them. Madeleine watched him for a while, her hands resting on her book.

“I better get going,” he said.

“Be careful.”

“Right.” He rose slowly, almost arthritically. “See you in the morning.”

She looked at him with an expression he could never put into words, couldn’t even say if it was good or bad, but he knew it well. He felt its almost physical touch in the center of his chest.

It was well after midnight when he exited from the Mass. Turnpike and one-thirty when he drove through the deserted main street of Sotherton. Ten minutes later, on the rutted lane called Quarry Road, he arrived at a haphazard assembly of police vehicles, one of which had its strobes flashing. He pulled in alongside it. As he got out of his car, an irritated-looking uniformed cop emerged from the light machine.

“Hold it. Where do you think you’re going?” He sounded not only irritated but exhausted.

“Name is Gurney-here to see Detective Gowacki.”

“About what?”

“He’s expecting me.”

“What’s it about?”

Gurney wondered whether the guy’s edge was coming from a long day or from a naturally lousy attitude. He had a low tolerance for naturally lousy attitudes.

“It’s about him asking me to come here. You want some identification?”

The cop clicked his flashlight on and shined it in Gurney’s face. “Who’d you say you were?”

“Gurney, district attorney’s office, special investigator.”

“The fuck didn’t you say so?”

Gurney smiled without any emotion resembling friendliness. “You going to tell Gowacki I’m here?”

After a final hostile pause, the man turned and walked up the outer edge of a long, rising driveway toward a house that seemed, in the portable arc lights illuminating the property for the crime-scene techs, only half finished. Uninvited, Gurney followed him.

As the driveway neared the house, it made a left cut into the bank of the hill and arrived at the opening to a two-car basement garage, currently housing one car. At first Gurney thought the garage doors were open; then he realized there weren’t any doors. The half inch of snow that coated the driveway continued inside. The cop stopped at the opening, blocked by crime-scene tape, and shouted, “Mike!”