Blatt broke in. “You’re not saying that this guy was literally… I mean, are you saying… with his mother?”
“Not necessarily. This is all about fantasy. He lives in and for his fantasy life.”
Rodriguez’s voice was jagged with impatience. “I’m having a real problem with that word, Doctor. Five dead bodies are not fantasies!”
“You’re right, Captain. To you and me, they’re not fantasies at all. They’re real people, individuals with unique lives, worthy of respect, worthy of justice, but that’s not what they are to a serial murderer. To him they’re merely actors in his play-not human beings as you and I understand the term. They are only the two-dimensional stage props he imagines them to be-pieces of his fantasy, like the ritual elements found at the crime scenes.”
Rodriguez shook his head. “What you’re saying may make some kind of sense in the case of a lunatic serial murderer, but so what? I mean, I have other problems with this whole approach. I mean, who decided this was a serial-murder case? You’re racing down that road without the slightest…” He hesitated, seeming suddenly aware of the stridency of his voice and the impolitic nature of attacking one of Sheridan Kline’s favorite consultants. He went on in a softer register. “I mean, sequential murders are not always the work of a serial murderer. There are other ways to look at this.”
Holdenfield looked honestly baffled. “You have alternative hypotheses?”
Rodriguez sighed. “Gurney keeps talking about some factor in addition to drinking that accounts for the choice of victims. An obvious factor might be their common involvement in some past action, accidental or intentional, which injured the killer, and all we’re seeing now is revenge on the group responsible for the injury. It could be as simple as that.”
“I can’t say a scenario like that is impossible,” said Holdenfield, “but the planning, the poems, the details, the ritual all seem too pathological for simple revenge.”
“Speaking of pathological,” rasped Jack Hardwick like a man enthusiastically dying of throat cancer, “this might be the perfect time to bring everyone up to date on the latest piece of batshit evidence.”
Rodriguez glared at him. “Another little surprise?”
Hardwick continued without reaction, “At Gurney’s request, a team of techs was sent out to the B &B where he thought the killer might have stayed the night before the Mellery murder.”
“Who approved that?”
“I did, sir,” said Hardwick. He sounded proud of his transgression.
“Why didn’t I see any paperwork on that?”
“Gurney didn’t think there was time,” lied Hardwick. Then he raised his hand to his chest with a curiously stricken I-think-I’m-having-a-heart-attack look and let loose with an explosive belch. Blatt, startled out of a private reverie, jerked back from the table so energetically his chair nearly toppled backwards.
Before Rodriguez, jangled by the interruption, could refocus on his paperwork concern, Gurney took the ball from Hardwick and launched into an explanation of why he’d wanted an evidence team at The Laurels.
“The first letter the killer sent to Mellery used the name X. Arybdis. In Greek, an x is equivalent to a ch, and Charybdis is the name of a murderous whirlpool in Greek mythology, linked to another fatal peril named Scylla. The night before the morning of Mellery’s murder, a man and an older woman using the name Scylla stayed at that B &B. I would be very surprised if that were a coincidence.”
“A man and an older woman?” Holdenfield looked intrigued.
“Possibly the killer and his mother, although the register, oddly enough, was signed ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ Maybe that supports the oedipal piece of your profile?”
Holdenfield smiled. “It’s almost too perfect.”
Again the captain’s frustration seemed about to burst open, but Hardwick spoke first, picking up where Gurney had left off.
“So we sent the evidence team out there to this weird-ass little cottage that’s decorated like a shrine to The Wizard of Oz. They go over it-inside, outside, upside down-and what do they find? Zip. Nada. Not a goddamn thing. Not a hair, not a smudge, not one iota that would tell you a human being had ever been in the room. Team leader couldn’t believe it. She called me, told me there wasn’t a hint of a fingerprint in places where there are always fingerprints-desktops, countertops, doorknobs, drawer pulls, window sashes, phones, shower handles, sink faucets, TV remotes, lamp switches, a dozen other places where you always find prints. Zilch. Not even one. Not even a partial. So I told her to dust everything-everything-walls, floors, the fucking ceiling. The conversation got a little testy, but I was persuasive. Then she starts calling me every half hour to tell me how she’s still not finding anything and how much of her precious time I’m wasting. But the third time she calls, there’s something different about her voice-it’s a little quieter. She tells me they found something.”
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.”