Think Of a Number (2010) (22 page)

This lecturing response generated an unpleasant silence, broken by Rodriguez.

“Blatt!” he barked at Gurney’s guide, who was staring at his copies of the first two messages as though they’d dropped into his lap from outer space. “You look lost.”

“I don’t get it. The perp sends a letter to the victim, tells him to think of a number and then look in a sealed envelope. He thinks of six fifty-eight, looks in the envelope, and there it is—six fifty-eight. You saying that actually happened?”

Before anyone could answer, his partner broke in, “And two weeks later the perp does it again—this time on the phone. He tells him to think of a number and look in his mailbox. Victim thinks of the number nineteen, looks in his mailbox, and there’s the number nineteen in the middle of a letter from the perp. That’s some pretty weird shit, dude.”

“We have the recording the victim made of the actual phone call,” said Rodriguez, making it sound like a personal achievement. “Play the part about the number, Wigg.”

Without comment the sergeant tapped a few keys, and after a two- or three-second interval the call between Mellery and his stalker—the one Gurney had audited via Mellery’s conference-call gizmo—began at its midpoint. The faces at the table were riveted by the bizarre accent of the caller’s voice, the taut fear in Mellery’s.

After a moment Sergeant Wigg tapped two keys and said, “That’s it.”

The brief playback left Gurney feeling bereaved, angry, sick.

Blatt turned his palms up in a gesture of confusion. “What the hell was that, a man or a woman?”

“Almost certainly a man,” said Wigg.

“How the hell can you tell?”

“We did a voice-pitch analysis this morning, and the printout shows more stress as the frequency rises.”

“So?”

“The pitch varies considerably from phrase to phrase, even word to word, and in every case the voice is measurably less stressed at the lower frequencies.”

“Meaning the caller was straining to speak in a high register and the lower pitches came more naturally?” asked Kline.

“Exactly,” said Wigg in her ambiguous but not unattractive voice. “It’s not conclusive evidence, but it’s strongly suggestive.”

“What about the background noise?” asked Kline. It was a question on Gurney’s mind as well. He’d been aware of a number of vehicle sounds on the recording that placed the source of the call in an open area—perhaps a busy street or an outdoor mall.

“We’ll know more after we do an enhancement, but right now there seem to be three categories of sound—the conversation itself, traffic, and the hum of some sort of engine.”

“How long will the enhancement take?” asked Rodriguez.

“Depends on the complexity of the data captured,” said Wigg. “I’d estimate twelve to twenty-four hours.”

“Make it twelve.”

After an awkward silence, something Rodriguez had a talent for initiating, Kline asked a question of the room in general. “What about that whispering business? Who wasn’t supposed to hear Mellery say the number nineteen?” He turned to Gurney. “You have any ideas?”

“No. But I doubt it has anything to do with not being overheard.”

“Why would you say that?” challenged Rodriguez.

“Because whispering is a lousy way of not being overheard,” whispered Gurney, quite audibly, to underline his point. “It’s like other peculiar elements in the case.”

“Like what?” Rodriguez persisted.

“Well, for example, why the uncertainty in the note referring to November or December? Why a gun and a broken bottle? Why the mystery with the footprints? And one other small matter that no one’s mentioned—why no animal tracks?”

“What?” Rodriguez looked baffled.

“Caddy Mellery said that she and her husband heard the shrieking sounds of animals fighting behind the house—that was why he went downstairs and looked out the back door. But there were no animal tracks anywhere near there—and they would have been quite obvious in the snow.”

“We’re getting bogged down. I don’t see how the presence or absence of raccoon tracks, or whatever the hell we’re talking about, matters.”

“Christ,” said Hardwick, ignoring Rodriguez and shooting Gurney an admiring grin. “You’re right. There wasn’t a single mark in that snow that wasn’t made by the victim or the killer. Why didn’t I notice that?”

Kline turned to Stimmel. “I’ve never seen a case with so many items of evidence and so few that made sense.” He shook his head. “I mean, how on earth did the killer pull off that business with the numbers? And why twice?” He looked at Gurney. “You sure the numbers meant nothing to Mellery?”

“Ninety percent sure—about as sure as I get about anything.”

“Getting back to the big picture,” said Rodriguez, “I was thinking about the issue of motive you mentioned earlier, Sheridan—”

Hardwick’s cell phone rang. He had it out of his pocket and at his ear before Rodriguez could object.

“Shit,” he said, after listening for about ten seconds. “You’re sure?” He looked around the table. “No bullet. They went over every inch of the rear wall of the house. Nothing.”

“Have them check inside the house,” said Gurney.

“But the shot was fired outside.”

“I know, but Mellery probably didn’t close the door behind him. An anxious person in a situation like that would want to leave it open. Tell the techs to consider the possible trajectories and check any interior wall that could have been in the line of fire.”

Hardwick relayed the instructions quickly and ended the call.

“Good idea,” said Kline.

“Very good,” said Wigg.

“About those numbers,” said Blatt, abruptly changing the subject. “It pretty much has to be some kind of hypnosis or ESP, right?”

“I wouldn’t think so,” said Gurney.

“But it’s got to be. What else could it be?”

Hardwick shared Gurney’s sentiments on this subject and responded first. “Christ, Blatt, when was the last time the state police investigated a crime involving mystical mind control?”

“But he knew what the guy was thinking!”

This time Gurney answered first, in his conciliatory way. “It does look like somebody knew exactly what Mellery was thinking, but my bet is we’re missing something, and it will turn out to be a lot simpler than mind-reading.”

“Let me ask you something, Detective Gurney.” Rodriguez was sitting back in his chair, his right fist cupped in the left palm in front of his chest. “There was rapidly accumulating evidence, through a series of threatening letters and phone calls, that Mark Mellery was the target of a homicidal stalker. Why didn’t you bring this evidence to the police prior to the murder?”

The fact that Gurney had anticipated the question and was prepared to answer it did not diminish its sting.

“I appreciate the ‘Detective’ title, Captain, but I retired that title with my shield and weapon two years ago. As for reporting the matter to the police as it was developing, nothing practical could be done without Mark Mellery’s cooperation, and he made it clear that he would provide no cooperation whatsoever.”

“Are you saying you couldn’t bring the situation to the attention of the police without his permission?” Rodriguez’s voice was rising, his attitude stiffening.

“He made it clear to me that he did not want the police involved, that he regarded the idea of police intrusion into the affair as more destructive than helpful, and that he would take whatever steps were necessary to prevent it. If I had reported the matter, he would have stonewalled you and refused any further communication with me.”

“His further communication with you didn’t do him much good, did it?”

“Unfortunately, Captain, you’re right about that.”

The softness, the absence of resistance, in Gurney’s reply left Rodriguez momentarily off balance. Sheridan Kline stepped into the empty space. “Why was he opposed to involving the police?”

“He considered the police too clumsy and incompetent to achieve a positive result. He believed they were unlikely to make him safer but very likely to create a public-relations mess for his institute.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Rodriguez, affronted.

“‘Bulls in a china shop’ is what he kept saying. He was determined there would be no cooperation with the police—no police allowed on his property, no police contact with his guests, no information from him personally. He seemed willing to take legal action at the slightest hint of police interference.”

“Fine, but what I’d like to know—” began Rodriguez, but he was again cut short by the familiar chime of Hardwick’s phone.

“Hardwick here …. Right …. Where?… Fantastic …. Okay, good. Thanks.” He pocketed the phone and announced to Gurney, in a
voice loud enough for all to hear, “They found the bullet. In an inside wall. In fact, in the center hall of the house, on a direct line from the back door, which was apparently open when the shot was fired.”

“Congratulations,” said Sergeant Wigg to Gurney, and then to Hardwick, “Any idea what caliber?”

“They think it’s a .357, but we’ll wait on ballistics for that.”

Kline looked preoccupied. He addressed a question to no one in particular. “Could Mellery have had other reasons for not wanting the police around?”

Blatt, his face screwed up in befuddlement, added his own question: “What the hell are ‘balls in a china shop’?”

B
y the time Gurney had driven the width of the Catskill Mountains and arrived at his farmstead outside Walnut Crossing, exhaustion had enveloped him—an emotional fog that muddled together hunger, thirst, frustration, sadness, and self-doubt. November’s progress toward winter was making days distressingly shorter—especially in the valleys, where the enclosing mountains made for early dusks. Madeleine’s car was gone from its place by the garden shed. The snow, partly melted by the midday sun and refrozen by the evening chill, crunched underfoot.

The house was deadly silent. Gurney switched on the hanging fixture over the butcher-block island. He remembered Madeleine saying something that morning about their planned dinner party’s being canceled because of some sort of meeting the women all wanted to attend, but the details eluded him.
So there was no need for the goddamn pecans after all
. He put a Darjeeling tea bag in a cup, filled it at the tap, and put it in the microwave. Moved by habit, he headed for his armchair on the far side of the country kitchen. He sank into it and propped his feet on a wooden stool. Two minutes later the beep of the microwave was absorbed into the texture of a shadowy dream.

H
e awoke at the sound of Madeleine’s footsteps.

It was an oversensitive perception, perhaps, but something
in the footsteps sounded angry. It seemed to him that their direction and proximity indicated that she must have seen him in the chair yet had chosen not to speak to him.

He opened his eyes in time to see her leaving the kitchen, heading for their bedroom. He stretched, pushed himself up from the depths of the chair, went to the sideboard for a tissue, and blew his nose. He heard a closet door close, a bit too affirmatively, and a minute later she returned to the kitchen. She had replaced her silk blouse with a shapeless sweatshirt.

“You’re awake,” she said.

He heard it as a criticism of the fact that he’d been asleep.

She switched on a row of track lights over the main countertop and opened the refrigerator. “Have you eaten?” It sounded like an accusation.

“No, I had a very tiring day, and when I got home, I just made a cup of—Oh, damn, I forgot about it.” He went to the microwave, removed a cup of dark, cold tea and emptied it, bag and all, into the sink.

Madeleine went to the sink, picked his tea bag out of it, and pointedly dropped it into the garbage container.

“I’m pretty tired myself.” She shook her head silently for a moment. “I don’t understand why these local morons believe that building a hideous prison, surrounded by razor wire, in the middle of the most beautiful county in the state is a good idea.”

Now he remembered. She’d told him that morning she planned to attend a town meeting at which the controversial proposal was slated to be discussed yet again. At issue was whether the town should compete to become the location of a facility its opponents referred to as a prison and its supporters called a treatment center. The nomenclature battle arose from the ambiguous bureaucratic language authorizing this pilot project for a new class of institution. It was to be known as a SCATE—State Correctional and Therapeutic Environment—and its dual purpose was the incarceration and rehabilitation of felony drug offenders. In fact, the bureaucratic language was quite impenetrable and left a lot of room for interpretation and argument.

It was a touchy subject between them—not because he didn’t share her desire to keep the SCATE out of Walnut Crossing but because he wasn’t joining the battle as sharply as she thought he should. “There are probably half a dozen people who’ll make out like bandits,” she said grimly, “and everyone else in the valley—and everyone who has to drive through the valley—will be stuck with a wretched eyesore for the rest of their lives. And for what? For the so-called rehabilitation of a pack of drug-dealing creeps? Give me a break!”

“Other towns are competing for it. With any luck, one will win.”

She smiled bleakly. “Sure, if their town boards are even more corrupt than ours, that might happen.”

Feeling the heat of her indignation as a form of pressure on himself, he decided to try changing the subject.

“Shall I make us a couple of omelets?” He watched her hunger vying briefly with her residual anger. Her hunger won.