R. Kartch. There was something about that name that bothered Gurney.
Perhaps it was just that same peculiar experience he always had when he looked at the printed name of a deceased person. It was as though the name itself had lost the breath of life, had become smaller, cut loose from that which had given it stature. It was strange, he reflected, how you can believe you have come to terms with death, even believe that its presence no longer has much effect on you, that it is just part of your profession. Then it comes at you in such a weird way-in the unsettling, shrunken quality of a dead man’s name. No matter how hard one tries to ignore it, death finds a way to be noticed. It seeps into your feelings like water through a basement wall.
Perhaps that’s why the name R. Kartch seemed odd to him. Or was there another reason?
Chapter 40
Mark Mellery. Albert Rudden. Richard Kartch. Three men. Targeted, mentally tortured, shot, and so forcibly and repeatedly stabbed that their heads were nearly hacked off. What had they done, separately or in concert, to engender such a macabre revenge?
Or was it revenge at all? Might the suggestion of revenge conveyed by the notes be-as Rodriguez had once proposed-a smoke screen to hide a more practical motive?
Anything was still possible.
It was nearly dawn when Gurney began his return drive to Walnut Crossing, and the air was raw with the scent of snow. He’d entered that strained state of consciousness in which a deep weariness struggles with an agitated wakefulness. Thoughts and pictures cascade through the brain without progress or logic.
One such image was the dead man’s check, the name R. Kartch, something lurking beneath an inaccessible trapdoor of memory, something not quite right. Like a faint star, it eluded a direct search and might appear in his peripheral vision once he stopped looking for it.
He made an effort to focus on other aspects of the case, but his mind refused to proceed in an orderly way. Instead, he saw the half-dried pool of blood across Kartch’s kitchen floor, the far edge spreading into the shadow of the rickety table. He stared hard at the highway ahead, trying to exorcise the image but succeeding only in replacing it with the bloodstain of similar size on Mark Mellery’s stone patio-which in turn gave way to an image of Mellery in an Adirondack chair, leaning forward, asking for protection, deliverance.
Leaning forward, asking…
Gurney felt the pressure of tears welling.
He pulled in to a rest stop. There was only one other car in the little parking area, and it looked more abandoned than parked. His face felt hot, his hands cold. Not being able to think straight frightened him, made him feel helpless.
Exhaustion was a lens through which he had a tendency to see his life as a failure-a failure made more painful by the professional accolades heaped upon him. Knowing that this was a trick his tired mind played on him made it no less convincing. After all, he had his litany of proofs. As a detective, he’d failed Mark Mellery. As a husband, he’d failed Karen, and now he was failing Madeleine. As a father, he’d failed Danny, and now he was failing Kyle.
His brain had its limits, and after enduring another quarter hour of this laceration, it shut down. He fell into a brief, restorative sleep.
He wasn’t sure how long it lasted, almost certainly less than an hour, but when he woke up, the emotional upheaval had passed and in its place was an uncluttered clarity. He also had a terribly stiff neck, but it seemed a small price to pay.
Perhaps because there was now room for it, a new vision of the Wycherly post-office box mystery began to form in his mind. The two original hypotheses had never seemed entirely satisfactory: namely, that the victims were directed by mistake to send their checks to the wrong box number (unlikely, given the killer’s attention to detail) or that it was the right box but something had gone awry, allowing Dermott to receive and innocently return the checks before the killer could remove them through whatever method he’d devised.
But now Gurney saw a third explanation. Suppose it was the right box and nothing had gone awry. Suppose the purpose of asking for the checks had been something other than to cash them. Suppose the killer had managed to gain access to the box, open the envelopes, look at the checks or make copies of them, and then reseal them in their envelopes and replace them in the box before Dermott got to them.
If this new scenario was closer to the truth-if the killer was in fact using Dermott’s post-office box for his own purposes-it opened a fascinating new avenue. It might be possible for Gurney to communicate with the killer directly. Despite its wildly hypothetical foundation, and despite the confusion and depression in which he’d just been immersed, this thought so excited him that several minutes passed before he realized that he’d pulled out of the rest stop and was racing homeward at eighty miles an hour.
Madeleine was out. He put his wallet and keys on the breakfast table and picked up the note lying there. It was in Madeleine’s quick, clean handwriting and, as usual, challengingly concise: “Went to 9 AM yoga. Back before storm. 5 messages. Was the fish a flounder?”
What storm?
What fish?
He wanted to go into the den and listen to the five phone messages he assumed she was talking about, but there was something else he wanted to do first, something of greater urgency. The notion that he might be able to write to the killer-to send him a note via Dermott’s mailbox-had given him an overwhelming desire to do so.
He could see that the scenario was shaky, with assumptions resting upon assumptions, but it had great appeal. The chance to do something was very exciting compared to the frustration of the investigation and that creepy sense that any progress they were making might be part of the enemy’s plan. Impulsive and unreasonable as it was, the chance to toss a grenade over a wall where the enemy might be lurking was irresistible. The only thing remaining was to construct the grenade.
He really should listen to his messages. There could be something urgent, important. He started for the den. But a sentence came to mind-one he didn’t want to forget, a rhyming couplet, the perfect beginning of a statement to the killer. Excitedly, he picked up the pad and pen Madeleine had left on the table and began to write. Fifteen minutes later he put down the pen and read the eight lines written in an elaborate, decorative script.
I see how all you did was done,
from backwards boots to muffled gun.
The game you started soon will end,
your throat cut by a dead man’s friend.
Beware the snow, beware the sun,
the night, the day, nowhere to run.
With sorrow first his grave I’ll tend
and then to hell his killer send.
Satisfied, he wiped the paper clean of fingerprints. It felt odd doing that-shady, evasive-but he brushed the feeling aside, got an envelope, and addressed it to X. Arybdis at Dermott’s box number in Wycherly, Connecticut.
Chapter 41
Gurney just made it down to the mailbox in time to hand the envelope to Rhonda, who filled in for Baxter, the regular mailman, two days a week. By the time he got back up through the pasture to the house, the excitement was already being gnawed at by the remorse that inevitably followed his rare acts of impulse.