John Verdon - Think of a Number

Kline was leaning so far forward he was barely on his chair. “But why that exact dollars-and-cents amount?”

“That’s nagged at me from the beginning, and I’m still not sure, but there’s at least one possible reason: to ensure that the victim would send a check instead of cash.”

“That’s not what the first letter said,” pointed out Rodriguez. “It said the money could be sent either by check or by cash.”

“I know, and this sounds awfully subtle,” said Gurney, “but I think the apparent choice was intended to distract attention from the vital need that it be a check. And the complex amount was intended to discourage payment in cash.”

Rodriguez rolled his eyes. “Look, I know fantasy isn’t a popular word here today, but I don’t know what else to call this.”

“Why was it vital that the payment be sent as a check?” asked Kline.

“The money itself didn’t matter to the killer. Remember, the checks weren’t cashed. I believe he had access to them at some point in the delivery process to Gregory Dermott’s box, and that’s all he wanted.”

“All he wanted-what do you mean?”

“What’s on a check other than the amount and the account number?”

Kline thought for a moment. “The account holder’s name and address?”

“Right,” said Gurney. “Name and address.”

“But why…?”

“He had to make the victim identify himself. After all, he’d sent out thousands of these mailings. But each prospective victim would be convinced that the letter he’d received was uniquely about him, from someone who knew him very well. What if he just sent back an envelope with the requested cash in it? He’d have no reason to include his name and address-and the killer couldn’t ask him specifically to include it, because that would destroy the whole ‘I know your intimate secrets’ premise. Getting those checks was a subtle way to get the respondents’ names and addresses. And maybe, if the surreptitious process of accessing the check information occurred in the post office, the easiest way of disposing of the checks afterward was simply to pass them along in their original envelopes to Dermott’s box.”

“But the killer would have to steam open and reseal the envelopes,” said Kline.

Gurney shrugged. “An alternative would be to get some kind of access after Dermott opened the envelopes himself but before he had a chance to return the checks to their senders. That wouldn’t require steaming and resealing, but it does raise other problems and questions-things we need to look into regarding Dermott’s living arrangements, individuals with possible access to his home, and so forth.”

“Which,” rasped Hardwick loudly, “brings us back to my question-which Sherlock Gurney here characterized a little while ago as the most important question of all. Namely, who the hell is on that list of eleven thousand murder candidates?”

Gurney raised his hand in the familiar traffic-cop gesture. “Before we try to answer that, let me remind everyone that eleven thousand is only a guesstimate. It’s a feasible number of letters from an executional point of view, and it’s a number that statistically supports our six fifty-eight scenario. In other words, it’s a number that works. But as Sergeant Wigg pointed out originally, the actual number could be anywhere from five thousand to fifteen thousand. Any quantity within that range would be small enough to be doable and large enough to produce a handful of people randomly choosing six fifty-eight.”

“Unless, of course, you’re barking up the wrong tree entirely,” pointed out Rodriguez, “and all this speculation is just a colossal waste of time.”

Kline turned to Holdenfield. “What do you think, Becca? Are we onto something? Or just up another tree?”

“I find aspects of the theory absolutely fascinating, but I’d like to reserve my final opinion until I hear the answer to Sergeant Hardwick’s question.”

Gurney smiled, this time genuinely. “He rarely asks a question unless he already has a pretty good idea of the answer. Care to share, Jack?”

Hardwick massaged his face with his hands for several seconds-another of the incomprehensible tics that had irritated Gurney so much when they worked together on the Piggert matricide-patricide case. “If you look at the most significant background characteristic all the victims have in common-the characteristic referred to in the threatening poems-you might conclude that their names were part of a list of people with serious drinking problems.” He paused. “Question is, what list would that be?”

“Alcoholics Anonymous membership list?” suggested Blatt.

Hardwick shook his head. “No such list. They take that anonymity shit seriously.”

“How about a list compiled from public-record data?” said Kline. “Alcohol-related arrests, convictions?”

“A list like that could be put together, but two of the victims wouldn’t appear on it. Mellery has no arrest record. The pederast priest does, but the charge was endangering the morals of a minor-nothing about alcohol in the public record, although the Boston detective I spoke to told me the good father later had that charge dismissed in exchange for pleading to a lesser misdemeanor, blaming his behavior on his alcoholism and agreeing to go to long-term rehab.”

Kline squinted thoughtfully. “Well, then, could it be a list of the patients at that rehab?”

“It’s conceivable,” said Hardwick, screwing up his face in a way that said it wasn’t.

“Maybe we ought to look into it.”

“Sure.” Hardwick’s almost insulting tone created an awkward silence, broken by Gurney.

“In an effort to see if I could establish a location connection among the victims, I started looking into the rehab issue a while ago. Unfortunately, it was a dead end. Albert Rudden spent twenty-eight days in a Bronx rehab five years ago, and Mellery spent twenty-eight days in a Queens rehab fifteen years ago. Neither rehab offers long-term treatment-meaning the priest must have gone to yet another facility. So even if our killer had a job at one of those places and his job gave him access to thousands of patient records, any list he put together that way would include the name of only one of the victims.”

Rodriguez turned in his chair and addressed Gurney directly. “Your theory depends on the existence of a giant list-maybe five thousand names, maybe eleven thousand, I heard Wigg say maybe fifteen thousand-whatever, it seems to keep changing. But there isn’t any source for such a list. So now what?”

“Patience, Captain,” said Gurney softly. “I wouldn’t say there isn’t any source-we just haven’t figured it out yet. I seem to have more faith in your abilities than you do.”

The blood rose in Rodriguez’s face. “Faith? In my abilities? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“At one time or another, did all the victims go to rehab?” asked Wigg, ignoring the captain’s outburst.

“I don’t know about Kartch,” said Gurney, glad to be drawn back to the subject. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Hardwick chimed in. “Sotherton PD faxed us his record. Portrait of a real asshole. Assaults, harassment, public drunkenness, drunk and disorderly, menacing, menacing with a firearm, lewd behavior, three DWIs, two trips upstate, not to mention a dozen visits to county jail. The alcohol-related stuff, especially the DWIs, makes it virtually certain he’s been pushed into rehab at least once. I can ask Sotherton to look into it.”

Rodriguez pushed himself back from the table. “If the victims didn’t meet in rehab or even go to the same rehab at different times, what difference does it make that they were in rehab at all? Half the unemployed bums and bullshit artists in the world go to rehab these days. It’s a goddamn Medicaid-funded racket, a taxpayer rip-off. What the hell does it mean that all these guys went to rehab? That they were likely to be murdered? Hardly. That they were drunks? So what? We already knew that.” Anger, Gurney noted, had become Rodriguez’s ongoing emotion, leaping like a brushfire from issue to issue.