Think Of a Number (2010) (38 page)

Rodriguez was too careful to let his disappointment show, but Gurney could feel it. Hardwick went on after a dramatic pause. “They found a word on the outside of the bathroom door. One word.
Redrum.”

“What?” barked Rodriguez, not quite so careful about hiding his disbelief.

“
Redrum
.” Hardwick repeated the word slowly, with a knowing look, as though it were the key to something.

“
Redrum?
Like in the movie?” asked Blatt.

“Wait a second, wait a second,” said Rodriguez, blinking with frustration. “You’re telling me it took your evidence team, what, three, four hours to find a word written in plain sight on a door?”

“Not in plain sight,” said Hardwick. “He wrote it the same way he left the invisible messages for us on the notes to Mark Mellery.
DUMB EVIL COPS
. Remember?”

The captain’s only acknowledgment of the recollection was a silent stare.

“I saw that in the case file,” said Holdenfield. “Something about words he rubbed onto the backs of the notes with his own skin oil. Is that actually feasible?”

“No problem at all,” said Hardwick. “Fingerprints, in fact, are nothing but skin oil. He just utilized that resource for his own purpose. Maybe rubbed his fingers on his forehead to make them a little oilier. But it definitely worked then, and he did it again at The Laurels.”

“But we
are
talking about the
redrum
from the movie, right?” repeated Blatt.

“Movie? What movie? Why are we talking about a movie?” Rodriguez was blinking again.

“The Shining,”
said Holdenfield with growing excitement. “A famous scene. The little boy writes the word
redrum
on a door in his mother’s bedroom.”

“Redrum
is
murder
spelled backwards,” announced Blatt.

“God, it’s all so perfect!” said Holdenfield.

“I assume all this enthusiasm means we’ll have an arrest within the next twenty-four hours?” Rodriguez seemed to be straining for maximum sarcasm.

Gurney ignored him and addressed Holdenfield. “It’s interesting that he wanted to remind us of
redrum
from
The Shining
.”

Her eyes glittered. “The perfect word from the perfect movie.”

Kline, who for a long while had been observing the interplay at the table like a fan at one of his club’s squash matches, finally spoke up. “Okay, guys, it’s time to let me in on the secret. What the hell is so perfect?”

Holdenfield looked at Gurney. “You tell him about the word. I’ll tell him about the movie.”

“The word is backwards. It’s as simple as that. It’s been a theme since the beginning of the case. Just like the backwards trail of footprints in the snow. And, of course, it’s the word
murder
that’s backwards. He’s telling us we’ve got the whole case backwards.
DUMB EVIL COPS
.”

Kline fixed Holdenfield with his cross-examiner’s gaze. “You agree with that?”

“Basically, yes.”

“And the movie?”

“Ah, yes, the movie. I’ll try to be as concise as Detective Gurney.” She thought for a few moments, then spoke as if choosing each word carefully. “The movie is about a family in which a mother and son are terrorized by a crazy father. A father who happens to be an alcoholic with a history of violent binges.”

Rodriguez shook his head. “Are you telling us that some crazy, violent, alcoholic father is our killer?”

“Oh, no, no. Not the father. The son.”

“The son!?” Rodriguez’s expression was twisted into new extremes of incredulity.

As she continued, Holdenfield slipped into something close to her Mister Rogers voice. “I believe that the killer is telling us that he had a father like the father in
The Shining
. I believe he may be explaining himself to us.”

“Explaining himself?” Rodriguez’s voice was close to sputtering.

“Everyone wants to present himself on his own terms, Captain. I’m sure you encounter that all the time in your line of work. I certainly do. We all have a rationale for our own behavior, however bizarre it may be. Everyone wants to be recognized as justified, even the mentally disturbed—perhaps especially the mentally disturbed.”

This observation led to a general silence, which was eventually broken by Blatt.

“I’ve got a question. You’re a psychiatrist, right?”

“A consulting forensic psychologist.” Mister Rogers had morphed back into Sigourney Weaver.

“Right, whatever. You know how the mind works. So here’s the question. This guy knew what number someone would think of before they thought of it. How did he do that?”

“He didn’t.”

“He sure as hell did.”

“He appeared to do it. I assume you’re referring to the incidents I read about in the case file involving the numbers six fifty-eight and nineteen. But he didn’t actually do what you’re saying. It’s simply not possible to know in advance what number would occur to another individual in uncontrolled circumstances. Therefore he didn’t.”

“But the fact is that he did,” Blatt persisted.

“There’s at least one explanation,” said Gurney. He went on to outline the scenario that had occurred to him when Madeleine was calling him on her cell phone from their mailbox—namely, how the killer could have used a portable printer in his car to create the letter with the number nineteen in it after Mark Mellery had mentioned it on the phone.

Holdenfield looked impressed.

Blatt looked deflated—a sure sign, thought Gurney, that lurking somewhere in that crude brain and overexercised body was a romantic in love with the weird and impossible. But the deflation was only momentary.

“What about the six fifty-eight?” Blatt asked, his combative gaze flicking back and forth between Gurney and Holdenfield. “There was no phone call that time, just a letter. So how did he know Mellery would think of that number?”

“I don’t have an answer for that,” said Gurney, “but I have an odd little story that might help someone think of an answer.”

Rodriguez showed some impatience, but Kline leaned forward, and this demonstration of interest seemed to hold the captain in check.

“The other day I had a dream about my father,” Gurney began. He hesitated, involuntarily. His own voice sounded different to him. He heard in it an echo of the profound sadness the dream had generated in him. He saw Holdenfield looking at him curiously but not unpleasantly. He forced himself to continue. “After I woke up, I found myself thinking about a card trick my father used to do when we had people to the house for New Year’s and he’d had a few drinks,
which always used to energize him. He’d fan out a deck and go around the room, asking three or four people to each pick a card. Then he’d narrow the focus down to one of those people and tell him to take a good look at the card he’d picked and put it back in the deck. Then he’d hand him the deck and tell him to shuffle it. After that he’d go into his mumbo-jumbo ‘mind-reading’ act, which could go on for another ten minutes, and it would finally end with him dramatically revealing the name of the card—which, of course, he knew from the moment it was picked.”

“How?” asked Blatt, mystified.

“When he was getting the deck ready in the beginning, just before he fanned the cards out, he’d manage to identify at least one card and then control its position in the fan.”

“Suppose no one picked it?” asked Holdenfield, intrigued.

“If no one picked it, he’d find a reason to discontinue the trick by creating some sort of distraction—suddenly remembering he had the kettle on for tea or something like that—so no one would realize there was a problem with the trick itself. But he almost never had to do that. The way he presented the fan-out, the first or second or third person he offered it to almost always picked the card he wanted them to. And if not, he’d just do his little kitchen routine, then come back and start the trick over. And of course he always had some perfectly plausible way of eliminating the people who’d picked the wrong cards, so no one would realize what was actually going on.”

Rodriguez yawned. “Is this somehow related to the six fifty-eight business?”

“I’m not sure,” said Gurney, “but the idea of someone thinking he’s picking a card at random, while the randomness is actually being controlled—”

Sergeant Wigg, who had been listening with increasing interest, broke in. “Your card trick story reminds me of that private-eye direct-mail scam back in the late nineties.”

Whether it was due to her unusual voice, pitched in the register
where male and female overlap, or to the unusual fact that she was speaking at all, she captured everyone’s instant attention.

“The recipient gets a letter, supposedly from a private-investigation company, apologizing for invading the recipient’s privacy. The company ‘confesses’ that in the course of a botched surveillance assignment they mistakenly followed this individual for several weeks and photographed him in various situations. They claim that they are required by privacy legislation to give him all the existing prints of these photos. Then comes the curveball question: Since some of the photos seem to be of a compromising nature, would the recipient like them sent to a post-office box rather than to his home? If so, he will need to send them a fifty-dollar fee to cover the additional record keeping.”

“Anyone stupid enough to fall for that deserves to lose fifty dollars,” sneered Rodriguez.

“Oh, some people lost a lot more than that,” said Wigg placidly. “It wasn’t about getting the fifty-dollar payment. That was only a test. The scammer mailed out over a million of those letters, and the only purpose of the fifty-dollar request was to develop a refined list of people guilty enough about their behavior that they wouldn’t want photos of their activities to fall into the hands of their spouses. Those individuals were then subjected to a series of far more exorbitant requests for payments related to the return of the compromising photographs. Some ended up paying as much as fifteen thousand dollars.”

“For photos that never existed!” exclaimed Kline with an amalgam of indignation and admiration for the scammer’s ingenuity.

“The stupidity of people never ceases to amaze—” began Rodriguez, but Gurney interrupted him.

“Jesus! That’s it! That’s what the two-hundred-eighty-nine-dollar request is. It’s the same thing. It’s a test!”

Rodriguez looked baffled. “A test of what?”

Gurney closed his eyes to help him visualize the letter Mellery had received asking for the money.

Frowning, Kline turned to Wigg. “That con artist—you said he mailed out a million letters?”

“That’s the number I recall from the press reports.”

“Then obviously this is a very different situation. That was basically a fraudulent direct-mail campaign—a big net thrown out to catch a few guilty fish. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about handwritten notes to a handful of people—people for whom the number six fifty-eight must have had some personal meaning.”

Gurney slowly opened his eyes and stared at Kline. “But it didn’t. At first I assumed it did, because why else would it come to mind? So I kept asking Mark Mellery that question—what did the number mean to him, what did it remind him of, had he ever thought of it before, had he ever seen it written, was it the price of something, an address, a safe combination? But he kept insisting the number meant nothing to him, that he never remembered thinking of it before, that it simply popped into his mind—a perfectly random event. And I believe he was telling the truth. So there has to be another explanation.”

“So that means you’re back where you started,” said Rodriguez, rolling his eyes with exaggerated weariness.

“Maybe not. Maybe Sergeant Wigg’s con game is closer to the truth here than we think.”

“Are you trying to tell me that our killer sent out a million letters—a million handwritten letters? That’s ridiculous—not to mention impossible.”

“I agree that a million letters would be impossible, unless he had an awful lot of help, which isn’t likely. But what number would be possible?”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s say our killer had a scheme that involved sending out letters to a lot of people—handwritten, so each recipient would get the impression that his letter was a one-of-a-kind personal communication. How many letters do you think he could write in, say, one year?”

The captain threw up his hands, intimating that the question was not only unanswerable but frivolous. Kline and Hardwick looked more serious—as if they might be attempting some kind of calculation. Stimmel, as always, projected amphibian inscrutability. Rebecca Holdenfield was watching Gurney with growing fascination. Blatt looked like he was trying to determine the source of a foul odor.

Wigg was the only one to speak. “Five thousand,” she said. “Ten, if he were highly motivated. Conceivably fifteen, but that would be difficult.”

Kline squinted at her with lawyerly skepticism. “Sergeant, these numbers are based on what, exactly?”

“To begin with, a couple of reasonable assumptions.”

Rodriguez shook his head—implying that nothing on earth was more fallible than other people’s reasonable assumptions. If Wigg noticed, she didn’t care enough to let it distract her.

“First is the assumption that the model of the private-eye scam is applicable. If it is, it follows that the first communication—the one asking for money—would be sent to the most people and subsequent communications only to people who responded. In our own case, we know that the first communication consisted of two eight-line notes—a total of sixteen fairly short lines, plus a three-line address on the outer envelope. Except for the addresses, the letters would all be the same, making the writing repetitive and rapid. I would estimate that each mailing piece would take about four minutes to complete. That would be fifteen per hour. If he devoted just one hour a day to it, he’d have over five thousand done in a year. Two hours a day would result in close to eleven thousand. Theoretically, he could do a lot more, but there are limits to the diligence of even the most obsessed person.”

“Actually,” said Gurney with the dawning excitement of a scientist who finally sees a pattern in a sea of data, “eleven thousand would be more than enough.”