John Verdon - Think of a Number

She and Tommy exchanged uneasy looks but left the room with no argument. As Tommy passed Gurney, he said as casually as if he were commenting on a speck of dandruff, “You got a piece of glass sticking out of your head.”

Nardo waited until their footsteps had climbed the stairs and the basement door at the top of the stairs was closed before speaking.

“Back away from the bed.” His voice was a bit jerky.

Gurney knew he was really being told to back away from the weapons-Dermott’s revolver in the now-blasted stuffing of the goose and Nardo’s ankle pistol in Dermott’s pocket and the formidable whiskey bottle on the pillow-but he complied without objection.

“Okay,” said Nardo, struggling, it seemed, to control himself. “I’m giving you a chance to explain.”

“You mind if I sit down?”

“I don’t care if you stand on your fucking head. Talk! Now!”

Gurney sat in the chair by the splintered lamp. “He was about to shoot you. You were two seconds away from a bullet in the throat, or the head, or the heart. There was only one way to stop him.”

“You didn’t tell him to stop. You told him to shoot me.” Nardo’s fists were clenched so tightly that Gurney could see the white spots on the knuckles.

“But he didn’t, did he?”

“But you told him to.”

“Because it was the only way to stop him.”

“The only way to stop… Are you out of your fucking mind?” Nardo was glaring like a killer dog waiting to be loosed.

“The fact is, you’re alive.”

“You’re saying I’m alive because you told him to kill me? What kind of lunatic shit is that?”

“Serial murder is about control. Total control. For crazy Gregory that meant controlling not only the present and the future but also the past. The scene he wanted you to act out was the tragedy that occurred in this house twenty-four years ago-with one crucial difference. Back then little Gregory wasn’t able to stop his father from cutting his mother’s throat. She never really recovered, and neither did he. The grown-up Gregory wanted to rewind the tape and start it over so he could change it. He wanted you to do everything his father did up to the point of raising the bottle. Then he was going to kill you-to get rid of the horrible drunk, to save his mother. That’s what all the other murders were about-attempts to control and kill Jimmy Spinks by controlling and killing other drunks.”

“Gary Sissek wasn’t a drunk.”

“Maybe not. But Gary Sissek was on the force when Jimmy Spinks was, and I bet Gregory recognized him as a friend of his father. Maybe even a casual drinking buddy. And the fact that you were also on the force back then probably in Gregory’s mind made you a perfect stand-in-the perfect way for him to reach back and change history.”

“But you told him to shoot me!” Nardo’s tone was still argumentative, but, to Gurney’s relief, the conviction behind it was weakening.

“I told him to shoot you because the only way to stop a control-freak killer like that when your only weapon is words is to say something that makes him doubt he’s really in control. Part of the control fantasy is that he’s making all the decisions-that he’s the all-powerful one, and no one has power over him. The biggest curveball you can throw at a mind like that is the possibility that he’s doing exactly what you want him to do. Oppose him directly and he’ll kill you. Beg for your life and he’ll kill you. But tell him you want him to do exactly what he’s about to do and it blows the circuit.”

Nardo looked like he was trying hard to find a flaw in the story. “You sounded very… authentic. There was hatred in your voice, like you really wanted me dead.”

“If I hadn’t been convincing, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Nardo switched gears. “What about the shooting in Port Authority?”

“What about it?”

“You shot some bum because he reminded you of your drunk father?”

Gurney smiled.

“What’s funny?”

“Two things. First: I never worked anywhere near Port Authority. Second: In twenty-five years on the job, I never fired my gun, not even once.”

“So that was all bullshit?”

“My father drank too much. It was… a difficult thing. Even when he was there, he wasn’t there. But shooting a stranger wouldn’t have helped much.”

“So what was the point of talking all that shit?”

“The point? The point is what happened.”

“The hell does that mean?”

“Christ, Lieutenant, I was just trying to hold Dermott’s attention long enough to give you a chance to do something with that two-pound bottle in your hand.”

Nardo stared at him a little blankly, as though all this information wasn’t quite fitting into the available spaces in his brain.

“That stuff about the kid being hit by the car… that was all bullshit, too?”

“No. That was true. His name was Danny.” Gurney’s voice became hoarse.

“They never got the driver?”

Gurney shook his head.

“No leads?”

“One witness said that the car that hit my boy, a red BMW, had been parked in front of a bar down the street all afternoon and that the guy who came out of the bar and got into it was obviously drunk.”

Nardo thought about this for a while. “Nobody in the bar could ID him?”

“Claimed they never saw him before.”

“How long ago this happen?”

“Fourteen years and eight months.”

They were quiet for some minutes; then Gurney resumed speaking in a low, hesitant voice. “I was taking him to the playground in the park. There was a pigeon walking in front of him on the sidewalk, and Danny was following it. I was only half there. My mind was on a murder case. The pigeon walked off the sidewalk into the street, and Danny followed it. By the time I saw what was happening, it was too late. It was over.”

“You have other kids?”

Gurney hesitated. “Not with Danny’s mother.”

Then he closed his eyes, and neither man said anything for a long time. Nardo eventually broke the silence.

“So there’s no doubt Dermott’s the guy who killed your friend?”

“No doubt,” said Gurney. He was struck by the exhaustion in both of their voices.

“And the others, too?”

“Looks that way.”

“Why now?”

“Hmm?”

“Why wait so long?”

“Opportunity. Inspiration. Serendipity. My guess is that he found himself designing a security system for a big medical-insurance database. It may have dawned on him that he could write a program to extract all the names of men who’d been treated for alcoholism. That would be the starting point. I suspect he became obsessed with the possibilities, eventually came up with his ingenious scheme for trolling through the list to find men scared and vulnerable enough to send him those checks. Men he could torture with his vicious little poems. Somewhere along the line, he got his mother out of the nursing home where the state had put her after the attack left her incapacitated.”

“Where was he all those years before he showed up here?”

“As a kid, either in a state facility or in foster care. Could’ve been a nasty path. Got involved with computer software at some point, I assume through games, got good at it. Very good-eventually got a degree from MIT.”

“And sometime along the way he changed his name?”

“Probably when he turned eighteen. I bet he couldn’t stand having his father’s name. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dermott was his mother’s maiden name.”

Nardo’s lip curled. “Would’ve been nice if you’d thought to run him through the state’s name-change database at the start of this freaking mess.”

“Realistically, there was no reason to do that. And even if we did, the fact that Dermott’s childhood name was Spinks wouldn’t have meant a damn thing to anyone involved in the Mellery case.”