“What do you mean, who took the call?” asked Nardo.
“You said a call was received for Mr. Dermott, not by Mr. Dermott.”
“Oh, yes, I see. Well, Dermott happened to be lying down with a migraine when the phone rang. He’s been kind of incapacitated since finding the body. One of the techs answered the phone in the kitchen. The caller asked for Dermott, said he was a close friend.”
“What name did he give?”
“Odd name. Carbis… Cabberdis… No, wait a second, here, the tech wrote it down-Charybdis.”
“Anything odd about the voice?”
“Funny you should ask. They were just trying to describe it. After Dermott came to the phone, he said he thought it sounded like some foreign accent, but our guy thought it was fake-someone trying to disguise his voice. Or maybe her voice-neither one of them was sure about that. Look, guys, sorry, but I have to get back to our situation here. Just wanted to give you the basic facts. We’ll be back in touch when we have something new.”
After the sound of the call disconnecting, there was a restless silence around the table. Then Hardwick cleared his throat so loudly that Holdenfield flinched.
“So, Davey boy,” he growled, “once again you’re the center of attention. ‘It’s Gurney’s turn.’ What are you, a magnet for serial murderers? All we got to do is dangle you on a string and wait for them to bite.”
Was Madeleine dangling on a string as well? Perhaps not yet. Hopefully not yet. After all, he and Dermott were at the head of the line. Assuming the lunatic was telling the truth. If so, it would give him some time-maybe time to get lucky. Time to make up for his oversights. How could he have been so stupid? So unaware of her safety? Idiot!
Kline looked troubled. “How did you get to be a target?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Gurney with a false lightness. His guilt gave him the impression that both Kline and Rodriguez were eyeing him with unfriendly curiosity. From the beginning he’d had misgivings about writing and mailing that poem, but he’d buried them without defining or articulating them. He was appalled at his ability to ignore danger, including danger to others. What had he felt at the time? Had the risk to Madeleine come anywhere close to his consciousness? Had he had an inkling and dismissed it? Could he have been that callous? Please, God, no!
In all this angst, he was sure of at least one thing. Sitting there in that conference room discussing the situation any further was not a tolerable option. If Dermott was next on the killer’s list, then that’s where Gurney had the best chance of finding the man they were looking for and ending the risk before it crept any closer. And if he himself was next after Dermott, then that was a battle he wanted to fight as far from Walnut Crossing as possible. He slid his chair back from the table and stood.
“If you’ll excuse me, there’s somewhere I need to be.”
At first this generated only blank looks around the table. Then the meaning registered with Kline.
“Jesus!” he cried. “You’re not thinking of going to Connecticut?”
“I have an invitation, and I’m accepting it.”
“That’s crazy. You don’t know what you’re walking into.”
“Actually,” said Rodriguez with a dismissive glance in Gurney’s direction, “a crime scene crawling with cops is a pretty safe place.”
“That would normally be true,” said Holdenfield. “Unless…” She let the thought dangle, as though she were walking around it to view it from different angles.
“Unless what?” snapped Rodriguez.
“Unless the killer is a cop.”
Chapter 46
It seemed almost too easy.
Killing twenty well-trained police officers in twenty seconds should require more complex planning. A deed of that magnitude should be more difficult. After all, it would be the largest such eradication ever achieved-at least in America, at least in modern times.
The fact that no one had done it before, despite its apparent simplicity, both stimulated and troubled him. The idea that finally put his mind to rest was this: For a man of weaker intellect or less formidable powers of concentration, the project might indeed be daunting, but not for him, not with his clarity and focus. Everything was relative. A genius could dance through obstacles that would hopelessly entangle ordinary men.
The chemicals were laughably easy to acquire, quite economical, and 100 percent legal. Even in large quantities, they aroused no suspicion, since they were sold in bulk every day for industrial applications. Even so, he’d prudently purchased each one (there were only two) from a different supplier to avoid any hint of their eventual combination, and he’d acquired the two fifty-gallon pressure tanks from a third supplier.
Now, as he was putting the finishing touches with a soldering iron on a bit of jerry-rigged piping to combine and deliver the lethal mixture to its recipients, he had a thrilling thought-a possible scenario with a climactic image-that so tickled his imagination a gleaming smile burst across his face. He knew that what he was imagining wasn’t likely to happen-the chemistry was too unpredictable-but it could happen. It was at least conceivable.
On the Chemical Hazards website was a warning he had memorized. The warning was in a red box surrounded by red exclamation points. “This mixture of chlorine and ammonia not only produces a fatally toxic gas but in the proportions indicated is highly unstable and with the catalyst of a spark may explode.” The image that delighted him was of the entire Wycherly police department caught in his trap, involuntarily gasping the poison fumes into their lungs just as the catalyzing spark was applied, blowing each of them to pieces from the inside out. As he pictured it, he did something he almost never did. He laughed out loud.
If only his mother could grasp the humor of it, the beauty of it, the glory of it. But perhaps that was asking too much. And, of course, if the policemen were all blown to pieces-little tiny pieces-he wouldn’t get to cut their throats. And he very much wanted to cut their throats.
Nothing in this world was perfect. There were always pluses and minuses. One had to make the best of the hand one was dealt. See the glass as half full.
That was reality.
Chapter 47
After brushing aside the predictable objections and concerns regarding his intended trip, Gurney went to his car and called the Wycherly police department for the address of Gregory Dermott’s home, since all he had up to that point was the P.O. box number on Dermott’s letterhead. It took a while to explain to the officer on duty exactly who he was, and even then he had to wait while the young woman called Nardo and got permission to divulge the location. It turned out that she was the only member of the small force not already at the scene. Gurney entered the address in his GPS and headed for the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge.
Wycherly was located in north-central Connecticut. The trip took a little over two hours, much of which Gurney spent pondering his gross failure to think of his wife’s safety. The lapse so disturbed and depressed him that he became desperate to focus on something else, and he began to examine the main hypothesis developed at the BCI meeting.
The notion that the killer had somehow accessed or compiled a list of several thousand individuals with a history of drinking problems-individuals suffering from the deep-seated fears and guilt arising from an alcoholic past-and then managed to ensnare a handful of them through that simple number trick, and then tormented them with the series of creepy poems, leading up to their ritual murders… that entire process, outlandish as it was, now seemed to Gurney entirely credible. He remembered discovering that serial murderers, when they were children, often found pleasure in torturing insects and small animals-for example, by burning them with sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass. One of his own famous arrests, Cannibal Claus, had blinded a cat exactly that way at the age of five. Burning with a magnifying glass. It seemed disturbingly similar to focusing a victim on his past and intensifying his fears until he was writhing in pain.