Gurney smiled, this time genuinely. “He rarely asks a question unless he already has a pretty good idea of the answer. Care to share, Jack?”
Hardwick massaged his face with his hands for several seconds-another of the incomprehensible tics that had irritated Gurney so much when they worked together on the Piggert matricide-patricide case. “If you look at the most significant background characteristic all the victims have in common-the characteristic referred to in the threatening poems-you might conclude that their names were part of a list of people with serious drinking problems.” He paused. “Question is, what list would that be?”
“Alcoholics Anonymous membership list?” suggested Blatt.
Hardwick shook his head. “No such list. They take that anonymity shit seriously.”
“How about a list compiled from public-record data?” said Kline. “Alcohol-related arrests, convictions?”
“A list like that could be put together, but two of the victims wouldn’t appear on it. Mellery has no arrest record. The pederast priest does, but the charge was endangering the morals of a minor-nothing about alcohol in the public record, although the Boston detective I spoke to told me the good father later had that charge dismissed in exchange for pleading to a lesser misdemeanor, blaming his behavior on his alcoholism and agreeing to go to long-term rehab.”
Kline squinted thoughtfully. “Well, then, could it be a list of the patients at that rehab?”
“It’s conceivable,” said Hardwick, screwing up his face in a way that said it wasn’t.
“Maybe we ought to look into it.”
“Sure.” Hardwick’s almost insulting tone created an awkward silence, broken by Gurney.
“In an effort to see if I could establish a location connection among the victims, I started looking into the rehab issue a while ago. Unfortunately, it was a dead end. Albert Rudden spent twenty-eight days in a Bronx rehab five years ago, and Mellery spent twenty-eight days in a Queens rehab fifteen years ago. Neither rehab offers long-term treatment-meaning the priest must have gone to yet another facility. So even if our killer had a job at one of those places and his job gave him access to thousands of patient records, any list he put together that way would include the name of only one of the victims.”
Rodriguez turned in his chair and addressed Gurney directly. “Your theory depends on the existence of a giant list-maybe five thousand names, maybe eleven thousand, I heard Wigg say maybe fifteen thousand-whatever, it seems to keep changing. But there isn’t any source for such a list. So now what?”
“Patience, Captain,” said Gurney softly. “I wouldn’t say there isn’t any source-we just haven’t figured it out yet. I seem to have more faith in your abilities than you do.”
The blood rose in Rodriguez’s face. “Faith? In my abilities? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“At one time or another, did all the victims go to rehab?” asked Wigg, ignoring the captain’s outburst.
“I don’t know about Kartch,” said Gurney, glad to be drawn back to the subject. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Hardwick chimed in. “Sotherton PD faxed us his record. Portrait of a real asshole. Assaults, harassment, public drunkenness, drunk and disorderly, menacing, menacing with a firearm, lewd behavior, three DWIs, two trips upstate, not to mention a dozen visits to county jail. The alcohol-related stuff, especially the DWIs, makes it virtually certain he’s been pushed into rehab at least once. I can ask Sotherton to look into it.”
Rodriguez pushed himself back from the table. “If the victims didn’t meet in rehab or even go to the same rehab at different times, what difference does it make that they were in rehab at all? Half the unemployed bums and bullshit artists in the world go to rehab these days. It’s a goddamn Medicaid-funded racket, a taxpayer rip-off. What the hell does it mean that all these guys went to rehab? That they were likely to be murdered? Hardly. That they were drunks? So what? We already knew that.” Anger, Gurney noted, had become Rodriguez’s ongoing emotion, leaping like a brushfire from issue to issue.
Wigg, at whom the tirade was directed, seemed unaffected by its nastiness. “Senior Investigator Gurney once said that he believed all the victims were likely to be connected through some common factor beyond drinking. I was thinking rehab attendance could be that factor, or at least be part of it.”
Rodriguez laughed derisively. “Maybe this, maybe that. I’m hearing a lot of maybes but no real connections.”
Kline looked frustrated. “Come on, Becca, tell us what you think. How firm is our footing here?”
“That’s a difficult question to answer. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“I’ll simplify it. Do you buy Gurney’s theory of the case-yes or no?”
“Yes, I do. The picture he painted of Mark Mellery’s being mentally tortured by the notes he was receiving-I can see that as a plausible part of a certain kind of murder ritual.”
“But you look like you’re not entirely convinced.”
“It’s not that, it’s just… the uniqueness of the approach. Torturing the victim is a common enough part of serial-murder pathology, but I’ve never seen an instance of its being carried out from such a distance in such a cool, methodical manner. The torture component of such murders generally relies on the direct infliction of physical agony in order to terrorize the victim and give the killer the feeling of ultimate power and control that he craves. In this case, however, the infliction of pain was entirely cerebral.”
Rodriguez leaned toward her. “So you’re saying it doesn’t fit the serial-murder pattern?” He sounded like an attorney attacking a hostile witness.
“No. The pattern is there. I’m saying that he has a uniquely cool and calculated way of executing it. Most serial killers are above average in intelligence. Some, like Ted Bundy, are far above average. This individual may be in a class by himself.”
“Too smart for us-is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s not what I said,” replied Holdenfield innocently, “but you’re probably right.”
“Really? Let me get this on the record,” said Rodriguez, his voice as brittle as thin ice. “Your professional opinion is that BCI is incapable of apprehending this maniac?”
“Once again, that’s not what I said.” Holdenfield smiled. “But once again you’re probably right.”
Once again Rodriguez’s sallow skin reddened with anger, but Kline intervened. “Surely, Becca, you’re not implying that there’s nothing we can do.”
She sighed with the resignation of a teacher saddled with the dullest students in the school. “The facts of the case so far support three conclusions. First, the man you’re chasing is playing games with you, and he’s very good at it. Second, he is intensely motivated, prepared, focused, and thorough. Third, he knows who’s next on his list, and you don’t.”
Kline looked pained. “But getting back to my question…”
“If you’re looking for a light at the end of the tunnel, there’s one small possibility in your favor. As rigidly organized as he is, there’s a chance he may fall apart.”
“How? Why? What do you mean, ‘fall apart?’”
As Kline asked the question, Gurney felt a tightening in his chest. The raw feeling of anxiety arrived with a cinematically sharp scene in his imagination-the killer’s hand gripping the sheet of paper with the eight lines Gurney had so impulsively put in the mail the previous day:
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.