Christ!
What was that sentence in the second poem sent to Mellery?
Gurney almost ran from the kitchen into the den, grabbed his case file, and riffled through it. There it was! For the second time that day, he felt the thrill of touching a part of the truth.
I know what you think,
when you blink,
where you’ve been,
where you’ll be.
What was it Madeleine had said that night in bed? Was that last night or the night before? Something about the messages being peculiarly nonspecific-having no facts in them, no names, no places, nothing real?
In Gurney’s excitement he could feel major pieces of the puzzle clicking into place. The central piece was one he’d been holding upside down all along. The killer’s intimate knowledge of his victims and their pasts was, it now seemed clear, a pretense. Again Gurney read through his file of the notes and phone calls Mellery and the others had received, and he wasn’t able to find a scrap of evidence that the killer had any specific knowledge of them beyond their names and addresses. He did seem to know that at one time they all drank too much, but even there, there was no detail-no incident, person, place, time. It was all consistent with a killer trying to give his victims the impression that he knew them intimately when in fact he didn’t know them at all.
This raised a new question. Why kill strangers? If the answer was that he had a pathological hatred for everyone with a drinking problem, then why not (as Randy Clamm had said to Gurney in the Bronx) just toss a bomb into the nearest AA meeting?
Again his thoughts began running in a circle, as weariness flooded his mind and body. With weariness came self-doubt. The elation of realizing how the number trick was done and what that meant about the relationship between the killer and his victims was replaced by that old self-critical feeling that he should have realized it sooner-and then by the fear that even this would turn out to be another dead end.
“What’s wrong now?”
Madeleine was standing in the den doorway, holding a bulging black plastic garbage bag, her hair disarranged by her closet-clearing mission.
“Nothing.”
She gave him an I-don’t-believe-you look and deposited the garbage bag at the door. “This stuff was on your side of the closet.”
He stared at the bag.
She went back upstairs.
The wind made a thin whistling sound at a window that needed new weather stripping. Damn. He’d meant to fix that. Every time the wind hit the house at that angle…
The phone rang.
It was Gowacki from Sotherton.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, it’s a flounder,” he said without bothering to say hello. “How the hell did you know that?”
The fish confirmation gave Gurney’s sleep-deprived psyche a quick lift out of the pit. It gave him enough energy to call the irritating Jack Hardwick about a point that had been bothering him all along. It was the first line of the third poem-which he extricated from his file as he dialed Hardwick’s number.
I do what I’ve done
not for money or fun
but for debts to be paid,
amends to be made.
For blood that’s as red
as a painted rose.
So every man knows
he reaps what he sows.
As usual, he had to endure a long minute of random abuse before he could get the BCI detective to listen to his concern and respond to it. The response was typical Hardwick.
“You figure the past tense means the perp already left a few severed heads behind him by the time he knocked off your buddy?”
“That would be the obvious meaning,” said Gurney, “since the three victims we know of were alive when that was written.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Might be a good idea to send out an MO inquiry for similars.”
“How detailed you want the modus operandi spelled out?” Hardwick’s arch intonation made the Latin term sound like a joke. His chauvinistic tendency to find foreign languages laughable always got under Gurney’s skin.
“Up to you. In my opinion the throat wounds are the key piece.”
“Hmm. You thinking this inquiry goes out to Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, maybe New Hampshire and Vermont?”
“I don’t know, Jack. You decide.”
“Time frame?”
“Last five years? Whatever you think.”
“Last five years is as good as anything else.” He made it sound as bad as anything else. “You all set for Captain R’s get-together?”
“Tomorrow? Sure, I’ll be there.”
There was a pause. “So you think this fucking lunatic has been at this for a while?”
“Looks like a possibility, doesn’t it?”
Another pause. “You getting anywhere on your end?”
Gurney gave Hardwick a summary of the facts and his new interpretation of them, ending with a suggestion. “I know that Mellery was in rehab fifteen years ago. You might want to check for any criminal or public-record data on him-anything involving alcohol. Ditto for Albert Rudden, ditto Richard Kartch. The homicide guys on the Rudden and Kartch cases are working on victim bios. They may have dug up something relevant. While you’re at it, it wouldn’t hurt to poke a little further into the background of Gregory Dermott. He’s entangled in this mess somehow. The killer chose that Wycherly post-office box for some reason, and now he’s threatening Dermott himself.”
“He’s what?”
Gurney told Hardwick about the “Come one, come all. / Now all fools die” note taped to Dermott’s window and about his conversation with Lieutenant Nardo.
“What are you thinking we’ll find in the background checks?”
“Something that makes sense out of three facts. First, the killer is focused on victims with drinking histories. Second, there is no evidence that he knew any of them personally. Third, he selected victims who lived far apart geographically, which suggests some factor in their selection other than just excessive alcohol consumption-a factor that connects them to each other, to the killer, and probably to Dermott. I have no idea what it is, but I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Is that a fact?”
“See you tomorrow, Jack.”
Chapter 43
Tomorrow came with a peculiar suddenness. After his conversation with Hardwick, Gurney had taken off his shoes and sprawled on the den couch. He slept deeply, without interruption, through the remainder of the afternoon and on through the night. When he opened his eyes, it was morning.
He stood, stretched, looked out the window. The sun was creeping up over the brown ridge on the eastern side of the valley, which he figured would make it about 7:00 A.M. He didn’t have to leave for his BCI meeting until 10:30. The sky was perfectly blue, and the snow glittered as though it had been mixed with shattered glass. The beauty and peace of the scene mingled with the aroma of fresh coffee to make life for the moment seem simple and fundamentally good. His long rest had been thoroughly restorative. He felt ready to make the phone calls he’d been postponing-to Sonya and to Kyle-and was stopped only by the realization that they’d both still be asleep. He lingered for a few seconds over the image of Sonya in bed, then went out to the kitchen, resolving to make the calls right after nine.
The house had the empty feeling it always had when Madeleine was out. Her absence was confirmed by the note he found on the countertop: “Dawn. Sun about to come up. Incredibly beautiful. Snowshoeing to Carlson’s Ledge. Coffee in pot. M.” He went to the bathroom, washed, brushed his teeth. As he was combing his hair, the thought occurred to him that he could set out after her. Her reference to the imminent sunrise meant she’d left within the past ten minutes or so. If he used his cross-country skis and followed in her snowshoe tracks, he could probably overtake her in about twenty minutes.