Think Of a Number (2010) (46 page)

As Dermott spoke, he raised the revolver to a point at which it was aimed at Nardo’s throat. Whether it was the steadiness of his hand or the calm mockery in Dermott’s voice, something in his manner convinced Nardo he needed to try a different strategy.

“You fire that gun,” he said, “what do you think happens next?”

Dermott shrugged, the thin line of his mouth widening again. “You die.”

Nardo nodded in tentative agreement, as though a student had given him an obvious but incomplete answer. “And? What then?”

“What difference does it make?” Dermott shrugged again, gazing down the barrel at Nardo’s neck.

The lieutenant seemed to be making quite an effort at maintaining control, over either his fury or his fear.

“Not much to me, but a lot to you. You pull that trigger, in less than a minute you’ll have a couple dozen cops up your ass. They’ll fucking rip you to pieces.”

Dermott seemed amused. “How much do you know about crows, Lieutenant?”

Nardo squinted at the non sequitur.

“Crows are incredibly stupid,” said Dermott. “When you shoot one, another one comes. When you shoot that one, another comes, and then another, and another. You keep shooting them, and they keep coming.”

It was something Gurney had heard before—that crows would not let one of their own die alone. If a crow was dying, others would come and stand next to him, so he wouldn’t be alone. When he’d first
heard that story, from his grandmother when he was ten or eleven years old, he had to leave the room because he knew he was going to cry. He went into the bathroom, and his heart ached.

“I saw a picture once of a crow shoot on a farm in Nebraska,” said Dermott with a mixture of amazement and contempt. “A farmer with a shotgun was standing next to a pile of dead crows that came up to his shoulder.” He paused, as if to allow Nardo time to appreciate the suicidal absurdity of crows and the relevance of their fate to the current situation.

Nardo shook his head. “You really think you can sit in here and shoot one cop after another as they come through the door without getting your head blown off? It’s not going to happen that way.”

“Of course it isn’t. Didn’t anyone ever tell you a literal mind is a small mind? I like the crow story, Lieutenant, but there are more efficient ways to exterminate vermin than shooting them one at a time. Gassing, for example. Gassing is very efficient, if you have the right sort of delivery system. Perhaps you’ve noticed that every room in this house is equipped with sprinklers. Every one except this one.” He paused again, his livelier eye sparkling with self-congratulation. “So if I shoot you and all the crows come flying in, I open two little valves on two little pipes, and twenty seconds later …” His smile became cherubic. “Do you have any idea what concentrated chlorine gas does to a human lung? And how rapidly it does it?”

Gurney watched Nardo struggling to assess this frighteningly contained man and his gassing threat. For an unnerving moment, he thought the cop’s pride and rage were about to propel him into a fatal leap forward, but instead Nardo took a few quiet breaths, which seemed to let some of the tension out of the spring, and spoke in a voice that sounded earnest and anxious.

“Chlorine compounds can be tricky. I worked with them in an antiterrorism unit. One guy accidentally produced some nitrogen trichloride as a by-product of another experiment. Didn’t even realize it. Blew his thumb off. Might not be as easy as you think to run your chemicals through a sprinkler system. I’m not sure you could do that.”

“Don’t waste your time trying to trick me, Lieutenant. You sound like you’re trying a technique from the police manual. What does it say—‘Express skepticism regarding the criminal’s plan, question his credibility, provoke him into providing additional details’? If you want to know more, there’s no need to trick me, just ask me. I have no secrets. What I do have, just so you know, are two fifty-gallon high-pressure tanks, filled with chlorine and ammonia, driven by an industrial compressor, linked directly to the main sprinkler pipe that feeds the system throughout the house. There are two valves concealed in this room that will join the combined one hundred gallons, releasing an enormous amount of gas in a highly concentrated form. As for the unlikely peripheral formation of nitrogen trichloride and the resultant explosion, I would regard that as a delightful plus, but I will be content with the simple asphyxiation of the Wycherly PD. It would be great fun to see you all blasted to pieces, but one must be content. The best must not be made the enemy of the good.”

“Mr. Dermott, what on earth is this all about?”

Dermott wrinkled his brow in a parody of someone who might be considering the question seriously.

“I received a note in the mail this morning.
‘Beware the snow, beware the sun, / the night, the day, nowhere to run.’”
He quoted the words from Gurney’s poem with sarcastic histrionics, shooting him an inquisitive glance as he did so. “Empty threats, but I must thank whoever sent it. It reminded me how short life can be, that I should never put off till tomorrow what I can do today.”

“I don’t really get what you mean,” said Nardo, still in his earnest mode.

“Just do what I say, and you’ll end up understanding perfectly.”

“Fine, no problem. I just don’t want anyone to get hurt unnecessarily.”

“No, of course not.” The stretchy, wormlike smile came and went. “Nobody wants that. In fact, to avoid unnecessary hurt, I really do need you to lie down on the floor right now.”

They had come full circle. The question was, what now? Gurney was watching Nardo’s face for readable signs. How much had the
man put together? Had it dawned on him yet who the woman in the chair might be, or the smiley psychopath with the whiskey bottle and the gun?

At least he must have finally realized, if nothing else, that Dermott was the murderer of Officer Sissek. That would account for the hatred he couldn’t quite conceal in his eyes. Suddenly the tension was back in the spring. Nardo looked wild with adrenaline, with a primitive, consequences-be-damned emotion far more powerful than reason. Dermott saw it, too, but far from cowing him, it seemed to elate him, to energize him. His hand tightened just a little on the handle of the revolver, and for the first time the slithery smile revealed a lively glimmer of teeth.

Less than a second before a .38 slug would surely have ended Nardo’s life, and less than two seconds before a second slug would have ended his own, Gurney broke the circuit with a furious, guttural shout.

“Do what the man said! Get down on the fucking floor! Get down on the fucking floor NOW!”

The effect was stunning. The antagonists were frozen in place, the insidious momentum of the confrontation shattered by Gurney’s raw outburst.

The fact that no one was dead persuaded him that he was on the right track, but he wasn’t sure exactly what that track was. To the extent that he could read Nardo, the man looked betrayed. Beneath his more opaque exterior, Dermott seemed disconcerted but was striving, Gurney suspected, not to let the interruption undermine his control.

“Very wise advice from your friend,” Dermott said to Nardo. “I’d follow it at once if I were you. Detective Gurney has such a good mind. Such an interesting man. A famous man. You can learn so much about a person from a simple Internet search. You’d be amazed at what sort of information pops up with a name and a zip code. So little privacy anymore.” Dermott’s sly tone sent a wave of nausea through Gurney’s chest. He tried to remind himself that Dermott’s specialty was persuading people that he knew more about
them than he really did. But the idea that his own failure to think ahead regarding the postmark problem could in any way have put Madeleine in jeopardy was intrusive and nearly unbearable.

Nardo reluctantly lowered himself to the floor, eventually lying on his stomach in the position of a man about to do a push-up. Dermott directed him to clasp his hands behind his head, “if it’s not too much to ask.” For a terrible moment, Gurney thought it might be the setup for an immediate execution. Instead, after gazing down with satisfaction at the prone lieutenant, Dermott carefully put the whiskey bottle he’d been carrying on the cedar hope chest next to the big stuffed bird—or, as Gurney now realized, the big stuffed
goose
. With a sickening chill, he recalled a detail from the lab reports.
Goose down
. Then Dermott reached down to Nardo’s right ankle, pulled a small automatic pistol out of a holster strapped there, and placed it in his own pocket. Again the humorless grin waxed and waned.

“Knowing where all the firearms are located,” he explained with a creepy earnestness, “is the key to avoiding tragedy. So many guns. So many guns in the wrong hands. Of course, an argument is often made that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And you have to admit that there’s some truth in that. People do kill people. But who would know that better than men in your profession?”

Gurney added to the short list of things he knew to be true the fact that these archly delivered speeches to Dermott’s captive audience—the polite posing, the menacing gentility, the same elements that characterized his notes to his victims—had one vital purpose: to fuel his own fantasy of omnipotence.

Proving Gurney right, Dermott turned to him and like an obsequious usher whispered, “Would you mind sitting over there against that wall?” He indicated a ladder-back chair on the left side of the bed next to the lamp table with the framed checks. Gurney went to the chair and sat without hesitation.

Dermott looked back down at Nardo, his icy gaze at odds with his encouraging tone. “We’ll have you up and around in no time at all. We just need to get one more participant in place. I appreciate your patience.”

On the side of Nardo’s face visible to Gurney, the jaw muscle tightened and a red flush rose from the neck into the cheek.

Dermott moved quickly across the room to the far corner and, leaning over the side of the wing chair, whispered something to the seated woman.

“I have to pee,” she said, raising her head.

“She really doesn’t, you know,” said Dermott looking back toward Gurney and Nardo. “It’s an irritation created by the catheter. She’s had a catheter for years and years. A discomfort on the one hand, but a real convenience, too. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Heads and tails. Can’t have one without the other. Wasn’t that a song?” He stopped as though trying to place something, hummed a familiar tune with a perky lilt, then, still holding the gun in his right hand, helped the old woman up from the chair with his left. “Come along, dear, it’s beddy-bye time.”

As he led her in small, halting steps across the room to the bed and assisted her into a semireclining position against the upright pillows, he kept repeating in a little boy’s voice, “Beddy-bye, beddy-bye, beddy-bye, beddy-bye.”

Pointing the gun at a rough midpoint between Nardo on the floor and Gurney in the chair, he looked unhurriedly around the room, but not
at
anything in particular. It was hard to tell whether he was seeing what was there or overlaying on it another scene from another time or place. Then he looked at the woman on the bed in the same way and said with a kind of fey Peter Pan conviction, “Everything’s going to be perfect. Everything’s going to be the way it always should have been.” He began humming very softly a few disconnected notes. As he went on, Gurney recognized the tune of a nursery rhyme, “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.” Perhaps it was the uncomfortable reaction he’d always had to the antilogic of nursery rhymes; perhaps it was this one’s dizzying imagery; perhaps it was the colossal inappropriateness of the music to the moment; but whatever it was, hearing that melody in that room made him want to puke.

Then Dermott added words, but not the right words. He sang
like a child, “Here we get into the bed again, the bed again, the bed again. Here we get into the bed again, so early in the morning.”

“I have to pee,” the woman said.

Dermott continued singing his weird ditty as though it were a lullaby. Gurney wondered how distracted the man actually was—sufficiently to permit a leaping tackle across the bed? He thought not. Would a more vulnerable moment come later? If Dermott’s chlorine-gas story was an action plan, not just a scary fantasy, how much time did they have left? He guessed not much.

The house above was deadly still. There was no indication that any of the other Wycherly cops had yet discovered their lieutenant’s absence or, if they had, realized its significance. There were no raised voices, no scuttling feet, no hint of any outside activity at all—which meant that saving Nardo’s life and his own would probably depend on what Gurney himself could come up with in the next five or ten minutes to derail the psychopath who was fluffing up the pillows on the bed.

Dermott stopped singing. Then he stepped sideways along the edge of the bed to a point at which he could aim his revolver with equal ease at either Nardo or Gurney. He began moving it back and forth like a baton, rhythmically, aiming it at one and then the other and back again. Gurney got the idea, perhaps from the movement of the man’s lips, that he was waving the gun in time to
eeny meeny miney mo, catch a tiger by the toe
. The possibility that this silent recitation might in a few seconds be punctuated with a bullet in one of their heads seemed overwhelmingly real—real enough to jar Gurney right then into taking a wild verbal swing.

In the softest, most casual voice he could muster he asked, “Does she ever wear the ruby slippers?”

Dermott’s lips stopped moving, and his facial expression reverted to a deep, dangerous emptiness. His gun lost its rhythm. The direction of its muzzle settled slowly on Gurney like a roulette wheel winding down to a losing number.

It wasn’t the first time he’d been at the wrong end of a gun barrel, but never in all the forty-seven years of his life had he felt closer
to death. There was a draining sensation in his skin, as though the blood were retreating to some safer place. Then, bizarrely, he felt calm. It made him think of the accounts he’d read of men overboard in an icy sea, of the hallucinatory tranquillity they felt before losing consciousness. He gazed across the bed at Dermott, into those emotionally asymmetric eyes—one corpselike from a long-ago battlefield, the other alive with hatred. In that second, more purposeful eye, he sensed a rapid calculation under way. Perhaps Gurney’s reference to the pilfered slippers from The Laurels had served its purpose—raising questions that needed resolution. Perhaps Dermott was wondering how much he knew and how such knowledge might affect the consummation of his endgame.