John Verdon - Think of a Number

There was no response. The cop shrugged as if an honest effort had been made, had failed, and that was the end of the matter. Then a tired voice came from the yard behind the house. “Back here.”

Without waiting, Gurney headed around the perimeter of the tape in that direction.

“Make sure you stay outside the tape.” The cop’s warning struck Gurney as the final bark of a testy dog.

Rounding the rear corner of the house, he saw that the area, bright as day in the glare of the lights, was not exactly the “yard” he had expected. Like the house, it exhibited an odd blend of incompletion and decrepitude. A heavily built man with thinning hair was standing on a crude set of steps, cobbled together from two-by-tens, at the back door. The man’s eyes scanned the half acre of open ground that separated the house from a thicket of sumac.

The ground was lumpy, as though it had never been graded after the foundation was backfilled. Scraps of framing lumber, heaped here and there, had taken on a weathered grayness. The house was only partially sided, and the plastic moisture barrier over the plywood sheathing was faded from exposure. The impression was not of construction in progress but construction abandoned.

When the stout man’s gaze reached Gurney, he studied him for a few seconds before asking, “You the man from the Catskills?”

“That’s right.”

“Walk another ten feet along the tape, then step under it and come around here to the back door. Make sure you steer clear of that line of footprints from the house to the driveway.”

Presumably this was Gowacki, but Gurney had an aversion to presuming, so he asked the question and got back an affirmative grunt.

As he made his way across the wasteland that should have been a backyard, he came close enough to the footprints to note their similarity to those at the institute.

“Look familiar?” asked Gowacki, eyeing Gurney curiously.

There was nothing thick about the thick-bodied detective’s perception, thought Gurney. He nodded. Now it was his own turn to be perceptive.

“Those footprints bother you?”

“Little bit,” said Gowacki. “Not the footprints, exactly. More the location of the body in relation to the footprints. You know something I don’t?”

“Would the location of the body make more sense if the direction of the footprints were reversed?”

“If the direction were… Wait a minute… Yes, goddamn it, perfect sense!” He stared at Gurney. “What the hell are we dealing with here?”

“First of all, we’re dealing with someone who has killed three people-three that we know of-in the past week. He’s a planner and a perfectionist. He leaves a lot of evidence behind, but only evidence he wants us to see. He’s extremely intelligent, probably well educated, and may hate the police even more than he hates his victims. By the way, is the body still here?”

Gowacki looked like he was making a mental recording of Gurney’s response. Finally he said, “Yeah, the body’s here. I wanted you to see it. Thought something might register, based on what you know about the other two. Ready to take a look?”

The back door of the house led into a small, unfinished area probably intended to be a laundry room, given the position of the roughed-in plumbing, but there was no washing machine and no dryer. There wasn’t even any drywall over the insulation. Illumination was provided by a bare bulb in a cheap white fixture nailed to an exposed ceiling joist.

In the raw, unwelcoming light, the body lay on its back, half in the would-be laundry area and half in the kitchen beyond the untrimmed doorway separating them.

“Can I take a closer look?” asked Gurney, grimacing.

“That’s what you’re here for.”

The closer look revealed a pool of coagulated blood that had spread from multiple throat wounds out across the kitchen floor and under a thrift-shop breakfast table. The victim’s face was full of anger, but the bitter lines etched into the large, hard face were the product of a lifetime and revealed nothing about the terminal assault.

“Unhappy-looking man,” said Gurney.

“Miserable son of a bitch is what he was.”

“I gather you’ve had some past trouble with Mr. Kartch.”

“Nothing but trouble. Every damn bit of it unnecessary.” Gowacki glared at the body as though its violent, bloody end had been insufficient punishment. “Every town has troublemakers-angry drunks, slobs who turn their places into pigsties to piss off the neighbors, creeps whose ex-wives have to get orders of protection, jerks who let their dogs bark all night, weirdos who mothers don’t want their kids within a mile of. Here in Sotherton all those assholes were wrapped up in one guy-Richie Kartch.”

“Sounds like quite a guy.”

“Matter of curiosity, were the other two victims anything like that?”

“The first was the opposite of that. The second I don’t have personal details on yet, but I doubt he was anything like this guy.” Gurney took another look at the face staring up from the floor, as ugly in death as it had apparently been in life.

“Just thought maybe we had a serial killer trying to rid the world of assholes. Anyway, to get back to your comments about the footprints in the snow-how did you know they’d make more sense if they went the other way?”

“That’s the way it was at the first murder.”

Gowacki’s eyes showed interest. “The position of this body is consistent with facing an attacker entering through the back door. But the footprints show someone coming in the front door and exiting by the back door. Doesn’t make sense.”

“Mind if I take a look around the kitchen?”

“Be my guest. Photographer, medical examiner, blood-prints-and-fibers guys were all here. Just don’t move anything. We’re still going through his personal possessions.”

“ME say anything about powder burns?”

“Powder burns? Those are knife wounds.”

“I suspect there’s a bullet wound somewhere in that bloody mess.”

“You see something I missed?”

“I think I see a small round hole in the corner of that ceiling above the refrigerator. Any of your people comment on that?”

Gowacki followed Gurney’s gaze to the spot. “What are you telling me here?”

“That Kartch may have been shot first, then stabbed.”

“And the footprints actually go in the opposite direction?”

“Right.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re saying the killer comes in the back door, shoots Richie in the throat, Richie goes down, then the killer stabs him a dozen times in the throat like he’s tenderizing a fucking steak?”

“That’s pretty much what happened in Peony.”

“But the footprints…”

“The footprints could have been made by attaching a second sole to the boot-backwards-to make it look like he came in the front and went out the back, when in fact he came in the back and went out the front.”

“Shit, that’s ridiculous! What the hell’s he playing at?”

“That’s the word for it.”

“What?”

“ Playing . Hell of a game, but that’s what he’s doing, and now he’s done it three times. ‘Not only are you wrong, you’re ass-backwards wrong. I hand you clue after clue, but you still can’t get me. That’s how fucking useless you cops are.’ That’s the message he’s giving us at every crime scene.”

Gowacki gave Gurney a slow, assessing look. “You see this guy pretty vividly.”

Gurney smiled, stepping around the body to get to a heap of papers on the kitchen countertop. “You mean I sound a little intense?”

“Not for me to say. We don’t get a lot of murders in Sotherton. Even those, and we only get one maybe every five years, they’re the kind that plead down to manslaughter. They tend to involve baseball bats and tire irons in the parking lots of bars. Nothing planned. Definitely nothing playful.”