John Verdon - Think of a Number

It seemed almost too easy .

Killing twenty well-trained police officers in twenty seconds should require more complex planning. A deed of that magnitude should be more difficult. After all, it would be the largest such eradication ever achieved-at least in America, at least in modern times .

The fact that no one had done it before, despite its apparent simplicity, both stimulated and troubled him. The idea that finally put his mind to rest was this: For a man of weaker intellect or less formidable powers of concentration, the project might indeed be daunting, but not for him, not with his clarity and focus. Everything was relative. A genius could dance through obstacles that would hopelessly entangle ordinary men .

The chemicals were laughably easy to acquire, quite economical, and 100 percent legal. Even in large quantities, they aroused no suspicion, since they were sold in bulk every day for industrial applications. Even so, he’d prudently purchased each one (there were only two) from a different supplier to avoid any hint of their eventual combination, and he’d acquired the two fifty-gallon pressure tanks from a third supplier .

Now, as he was putting the finishing touches with a soldering iron on a bit of jerry-rigged piping to combine and deliver the lethal mixture to its recipients, he had a thrilling thought-a possible scenario with a climactic image-that so tickled his imagination a gleaming smile burst across his face. He knew that what he was imagining wasn’t likely to happen-the chemistry was too unpredictable-but it could happen. It was at least conceivable .

On the Chemical Hazards website was a warning he had memorized. The warning was in a red box surrounded by red exclamation points. “This mixture of chlorine and ammonia not only produces a fatally toxic gas but in the proportions indicated is highly unstable and with the catalyst of a spark may explode.” The image that delighted him was of the entire Wycherly police department caught in his trap, involuntarily gasping the poison fumes into their lungs just as the catalyzing spark was applied, blowing each of them to pieces from the inside out. As he pictured it, he did something he almost never did. He laughed out loud .

If only his mother could grasp the humor of it, the beauty of it, the glory of it. But perhaps that was asking too much. And, of course, if the policemen were all blown to pieces-little tiny pieces-he wouldn’t get to cut their throats. And he very much wanted to cut their throats .

Nothing in this world was perfect. There were always pluses and minuses. One had to make the best of the hand one was dealt. See the glass as half full .

That was reality .

After brushing aside the predictable objections and concerns regarding his intended trip, Gurney went to his car and called the Wycherly police department for the address of Gregory Dermott’s home, since all he had up to that point was the P.O. box number on Dermott’s letterhead. It took a while to explain to the officer on duty exactly who he was, and even then he had to wait while the young woman called Nardo and got permission to divulge the location. It turned out that she was the only member of the small force not already at the scene. Gurney entered the address in his GPS and headed for the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge.

Wycherly was located in north-central Connecticut. The trip took a little over two hours, much of which Gurney spent pondering his gross failure to think of his wife’s safety. The lapse so disturbed and depressed him that he became desperate to focus on something else, and he began to examine the main hypothesis developed at the BCI meeting.

The notion that the killer had somehow accessed or compiled a list of several thousand individuals with a history of drinking problems-individuals suffering from the deep-seated fears and guilt arising from an alcoholic past-and then managed to ensnare a handful of them through that simple number trick, and then tormented them with the series of creepy poems, leading up to their ritual murders… that entire process, outlandish as it was, now seemed to Gurney entirely credible. He remembered discovering that serial murderers, when they were children, often found pleasure in torturing insects and small animals-for example, by burning them with sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass. One of his own famous arrests, Cannibal Claus, had blinded a cat exactly that way at the age of five. Burning with a magnifying glass. It seemed disturbingly similar to focusing a victim on his past and intensifying his fears until he was writhing in pain.

Seeing a pattern, fitting the pieces of the puzzle together-it was a process that normally elated him, but that afternoon in the car it didn’t feel as good as it usually did. Perhaps it was the lingering perception of his inadequacies, his missteps. The thought was acid in his chest.

He concentrated loosely on the road, the hood of his car, his hands on the wheel. Strange. His own hands-he didn’t recognize them. They looked surprisingly old-like his father’s hands. The little splotches had grown in number and size. If just a minute earlier he’d been shown photographs of a dozen hands, he wouldn’t have been able to identify his own among them.

He wondered why. Perhaps changes, if they occur gradually enough, are not regularly noted by the brain until the discrepancy reaches some critical magnitude. Perhaps it even went further than that.

Would it mean that we always see familiar things to some extent the way they used to be? Are we stuck in the past not out of simple nostalgia or wishful thinking but by a data-processing shortcut in our neural wiring? If what one “saw” was supplied partly from the optic nerves and partly from memory-if what one “perceived” at any given moment was actually a composite of current impressions and stored impressions-it gave new meaning to “living in the past.” The past would thus exercise a peculiar tyranny over the present by supplying us with obsolete data in the guise of sensory experience. Might that not relate to the situation of a serial killer driven by a long-ago trauma? How distorted might his vision be?

The theory momentarily excited him. Turning over a new idea, testing its solidity, always made him feel a little more in control, a little more alive, but today those feelings were hard to sustain. His GPS alerted him that it was two-tenths of a mile to the Wycherly exit.

At the end of the exit ramp, he turned right. The area was a hodgepodge of farm fields, tract houses, strip malls, and ghosts of another era’s summer pleasures: a dilapidated drive-in movie, a sign for a lake with an Iroquois name.

It brought to mind another lake with another Indian-sounding name-a lake with an encircling trail that he and Madeleine had hiked one weekend when they were searching for their perfect place in the Catskills. He could picture her animated face as they stood atop a modest cliff, holding hands, smiling, looking out over the breeze-crinkled water. The memory came with a stab of guilt.

He hadn’t called her yet to let her know what he was doing, where he was going, the likely delay in his homecoming. He still wasn’t sure how much he should tell her. Should he even mention the postmark? He decided to call her now, play it by ear. God help me say the right thing .

Considering the level of stress he was already feeling, he thought it wise to pull over to make the call. The first place he could find was a scruffy, gravelly parking area in front of a farm stand shuttered for the winter. The word for his home number in the voice-activated dialing system was, efficiently but unimaginatively, home .