Chapter 44

Final arguments

Déjà vu.

The sign-in procedure was the same as it had been before. The building’s reception area—ironically designed to repel—was as antiseptic as a morgue but less peaceful. There was a new guard in the security booth, but the lighting gave him the same chemotherapy pallor as it had the last one. And, once again, Gurney’s guide to the claustrophobic conference room was the hair-gelled, charming-as-dirt Investigator Blatt.

He preceded Gurney into the room, which was as Gurney remembered it, except it seemed shabbier. There were stains he hadn’t noticed before on the colorless carpeting. The clock, not quite vertical and too small for the wall, read twelve noon. As usual, Gurney was exactly on time—less a virtue than a neurosis. Earliness and lateness both made him uncomfortable.

Blatt took a seat at the table. Wigg and Hardwick were already there in the same chairs they’d had in the first meeting. A woman with an edgy expression was standing by the coffee urn in the corner, obviously unhappy that Gurney hadn’t been accompanied by whomever she was waiting for. She looked so much like Sigourney Weaver that Gurney wondered if she was making a conscious effort.

The three chairs nearest the center of the oblong table had been tilted against it, as before. As Gurney headed for the coffee, Hardwick grinned like a shark.

“Detective First Class Gurney, I’ve got a question for you.”

“Hello, Jack.”

“Or, better yet, I’ve got an answer for you. Let’s see if you can guess what the question is. The answer is ‘a defrocked priest in Boston.’ To win the grand prize, all you got to do is figure out the question.”

Instead of responding, Gurney picked up a cup, noticed it wasn’t quite clean, put it back, tried another, then a third, then went back to the first.

Sigourney was tapping her foot and checking her Rolex, a parody of impatience.

“Hi,” he said, resignedly filling his stained cup with what he hoped was antiseptically hot coffee. “I’m Dave Gurney.”

“I’m Dr. Holdenfield,” she said, as if she were laying down a straight flush to his pair of deuces. “Is Sheridan on his way?”

Something complex in her tone got his attention. And “Holdenfield” rang a bell.

“I wouldn’t know.” He wondered what sort of relationship might exist between the DA and the doctor. “If you don’t mind my asking, what sort of doctor are you?”

“Forensic psychologist,” she said absently, looking not at him but at the door.

“Like I said, Detective,” said Hardwick, too loudly for the size of the room, “if the answer is a defrocked Boston priest, what’s the question?”

Gurney closed his eyes. “For Christ’s sake, Jack, why don’t you just tell me?”

Hardwick wrinkled his face in distaste. “Then I’d have to explain it twice—for you and for the executive committee.” He tilted his head at the tilted chairs.

The doctor looked again at her watch. Sergeant Wigg looked at whatever was happening on her laptop screen in response to the keys she was tapping. Blatt looked bored. The door opened, and Kline entered, looking preoccupied, followed by Rodriguez, carrying a fat file folder and looking more malevolent than ever, and Stimmel, looking like a pessimistic frog. When they were seated, Rodriguez gave Kline a questioning glance.

“Go ahead,” said Kline.

Rodriguez fixed his gaze on Gurney, his lips tightening into a thin line.

“There’s been a tragic development. A Connecticut police officer, dispatched to the home of Gregory Dermott, reportedly at your insistence, has been killed.”

All eyes in the room, with various degrees of unpleasant curiosity, turned toward Gurney.

“How?” He asked the question calmly, despite a twinge of anxiety.

“Same way as your friend.” There was something sour and insinuating in his tone, which Gurney chose not to respond to.

“Sheridan, what the hell is going on here?” The doctor, who was standing at the far end of the table, sounded so much like the hostile Sigourney of Alien that Gurney decided it must be on purpose.

“Becca! Sorry, didn’t see you there. We got a little tied up. Last-minute complication. Apparently another murder.” He turned to Rodriguez. “Rod, why don’t you bring everyone up to date on this Connecticut cop thing.” He gave his head a quick little shake, like there was water in one of his ears. “Damnedest case I’ve ever seen!”

“Damn right,” echoed Rodriguez, opening his file folder. “Call was received at eleven twenty-five this morning from Lieutenant John Nardo of the Wycherly, Connecticut, PD regarding a homicide on the property of one Gregory Dermott, known to us as the postal-box holder in the Mark Mellery case. Dermott had been provided with temporary police protection at the insistence of Special Investigator David Gurney. At eight A.M. this morning—”

Kline raised his hand. “Hold on a second, Rod. Becca, have you met Dave?”

“Yes.”

The cool, clipped affirmative seemed designed to ward off any expanded introduction, but Kline went on, anyway.

“You two should have a lot to talk about. The psychologist with the most accurate profiling record in the business and the detective with the most homicide arrests in the history of the NYPD.”

The praise seemed to make everyone uncomfortable. But it also made Holdenfield look at Gurney with some interest for the first time. And although he was no fan of professional profilers, now he knew why her name sounded familiar.

Kline went on, determined, it seemed, to highlight his two stars. “Becca reads their minds, Gurney tracks them down—Cannibal Claus, Jason Strunk, Peter Possum Whatshisname …”

The doctor turned to Gurney, her eyes widening just a little. “Piggert? That was your case?”

Gurney nodded.

“Quite a celebrated arrest,” she said with a hint of admiration.

He managed a small, distracted smile. The situation in Wycherly—and the question of whether his own impulsive intervention with the mailed poem had any bearing on the death of the police officer—was eating at him.

“Keep going, Rod,” said Kline abruptly, as though the captain had caused the interruption.

“At eight A.M. this morning, Gregory Dermott made a trip to the Wycherly post office, accompanied by Officer Gary Sissek. According to Dermott, they returned at eight-thirty, at which time he made some coffee and toast and went through his mail, while Officer Sissek remained outside to check the perimeters of the property and the external security of the house. At nine A.M. Dermott went to look for Officer Sissek and discovered his body on the back porch. He called 911. First responders secured the scene and found a note taped to the back door above the body.”

“Bullet and multiple stab wounds like the others?” asked Holdenfield.

“Stab wounds confirmed, no determination yet regarding the bullet.”

“And the note?”

Rodriguez read from a fax in his folder. “‘Where did I come from? / Where did I go? / How many will die / because you don’t know?’”

“Same weirdo stuff,” said Kline. “What do you think, Becca?”

“The process may be accelerating.”

“The process?”

“Everything up till now was carefully premeditated—the choice of victims, the series of notes, all of it. But this one is different, more reactive than planned.”

Rodriguez looked skeptical. “It’s the same stabbing ritual, same kind of note.”

“But it was an unplanned victim. It looks like your Mr. Dermott was the original target, but this policeman was opportunistically killed instead.”

“But the note—”

“The note may have been brought to the scene to place on Dermott’s body, if all had gone well, or it may have been composed on the spot in response to the altered circumstances. It may be significant that it is only four lines long. Weren’t the others eight lines?” She looked at Gurney for confirmation.

He nodded, still half lost in guilty speculation, then forced himself back into the present. “I agree with Dr. Holdenfield. I hadn’t thought about the possible significance of the four lines versus eight, but that makes sense. One thing I would add is that although it couldn’t have been planned the same way the others were, the element of cop hatred that is part of this killer’s mind-set at least partially integrates this killing into the pattern and may account for the ritual aspects the captain referred to.”

“Becca said something about the pace accelerating,” said Kline. “We already have four victims. Does that mean there are more to come?”

“Five, actually.”

All eyes turned to Hardwick.

The captain held up his fist and extended a finger as he enunciated each name: “Mellery. Rudden. Kartch. Officer Sissek. That makes four.”

“The Reverend Michael McGrath makes five,” said Hardwick.

“Who?” The question erupted in jangled unison from Kline (excited), the captain (vexed), and Blatt (baffled).

“Five years ago a priest in the Boston diocese was relieved of his pastoral duties due to allegations involving a number of altar boys. He made some kind of deal with the bishop, blamed his inappropriate behavior on alcoholism, went to a long-term rehab, dropped out of sight, end of story.”

“What the hell was it with the Boston diocese?” sneered Blatt. “Whole goddamn place was crawling with kid-fuckers.”

Hardwick ignored him. “End of story until a year ago, when McGrath was found dead in his apartment. Multiple stab wounds to the throat. A revenge note was taped to the body. It was an eight-line poem in red ink.”

Rodriguez’s face was flushing. “How long have you known this?”

Hardwick looked at his watch. “Half an hour.”

“What?”

“Yesterday Special Investigator Gurney requested a northeast-states regional inquiry to all departments for MOs similar to the Mellery case. This morning we got a hit—the late Father McGrath.”

“Anyone arrested or prosecuted for his murder?” asked Kline.

“Nope. Boston homicide guy I spoke to wouldn’t come out and say it, but I got the impression they hadn’t exactly prioritized the case.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” The captain sounded petulant.

Hardwick shrugged. “Former pederast gets himself stabbed to death, killer leaves a note referring vaguely to past misdeeds. Looks like someone decided to get even. Maybe the cops figure what the hell, they got other shit on their plates, plenty of other perps to catch with motives less noble than delayed justice. So maybe they don’t pay too much attention.”

Rodriguez looked like he had indigestion. “But he didn’t actually say that.”

“Of course he didn’t say that.”

“So,” said Kline in his summation voice, “whatever the Boston police did or didn’t do, the fact is, Father Michael McGrath is number five.”

“Sí, número cinco,” said Hardwick inanely. “But really número uno—since the priest got himself sliced up a year before the other four.”

“So Mellery, who we thought was the first, was really the second,” said Kline.

“I doubt that very strongly,” said Holdenfield. When she had everyone’s attention, she went on, “There’s no evidence that the priest was the first—he may have been the tenth for all we know—but even if he was the first, there’s another problem. One killing a year ago, then four in less than two weeks, is not a pattern you normally see. I would expect others in between.”

“Unless,” Gurney interjected softly, “some factor other than the killer’s psychopathology is driving the timing and the selection of victims.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I believe it’s something the victims have in common other than alcoholism, something we haven’t found yet.”

Holdenfield rocked her head speculatively from side to side and made a face that said she wasn’t about to agree with Gurney’s supposition but couldn’t find a way to shoot it down, either.

“So we may or may not discover links to some old corpses,” said Kline, looking unsure of how he felt about this.

“Not to mention some new ones,” said Holdenfield.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” It was becoming Rodriguez’s favorite question.

Holdenfield showed no reaction to the testy tone. “The pace of the killings, as I started to say earlier, suggests that the endgame has begun.”

“Endgame?” Kline intoned the word as though he liked the sound of it.

Holdenfield continued, “In this most recent instance, he was driven to act in an unplanned way. The process may be spinning out of his control. My feeling is that he won’t be able to hold it together much longer.”

“Hold what together?” Blatt posed the question, as he posed most of his questions, with a kind of congenital hostility.

Holdenfield regarded him for moment without expression, then looked at Kline. “How much education do I need to provide here?”

“You might want to touch on a few key points. Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, glancing around the table and clearly not expecting to be corrected, “but with the exception of Dave, I don’t think the rest of us have had much practical experience with serial murder.”

Rodriguez looked like he was about to object to something but said nothing.

Holdenfield smiled unhappily. “Is everyone at least familiar in a general way with the Holmes typology of serial murder?”

The assortment of murmurs and nods around the table was generally affirmative. Only Blatt had a question. “Sherlock Holmes?”

Gurney wasn’t sure whether this was a stupid joke or just stupid.

“Ronald M. Holmes—a bit more contemporary, and an actual person,” said Holdenfield in an exaggeratedly benign tone that Gurney couldn’t quite place. Was it possible she was mimicking Mister Rogers addressing a five-year-old?

“Holmes categorized serial killers by their motivations—the type driven by imagined voices; the type on a mission to rid the world of some intolerable group of people—blacks, gays, you name it; the type seeking total domination; the thrill seeker who gets his greatest rush from killing; and the sex murderer. But they all have one thing in common—”

“They’re all fucking nuts,” said Blatt with a smug grin.

“Good point, Investigator,” said Holdenfield with a deadly sweetness, “but what they really have in common is a terrible inner tension. Killing someone provides them with temporary relief from that tension.”

“Sort of like getting laid?”

“Investigator Blatt,” said Kline angrily, “it might be a good idea to keep your questions to yourself until Rebecca finishes her comments.”

“His question is actually quite apt. An orgasm does relieve sexual tension. However, it does not in a normal person create a dysfunctional downward spiral demanding increasingly frequent orgasms at greater and greater cost. In that respect I believe serial killing has more in common with drug dependency.”

“Murder addiction,” said Kline slowly, speculatively, as though he were trying out a headline for a press release.

“Dramatic phrase,” said Holdenfield, “and there’s some truth in it. More than most people, the serial killer lives in his own fantasy world. He may appear to function normally in society. But he derives no satisfaction from his public life, and he has no interest in the real lives of other people. He lives only for his fantasies—fantasies of control, domination, punishment. For him these fantasies constitute a superreality—a world in which he feels important, omnipotent, alive. Any questions at this point?”

“I have one,” said Kline. “Do you have an opinion yet on which of the serial-killer types we’re looking for?”

“I do, but I’d love to hear what Detective Gurney has to say about that.”

Gurney suspected that her earnest, collegial expression was as phony as her smile.

“A man on a mission,” he said.

“Ridding the world of alcoholics?” Kline sounded half curious, half skeptical.

“I think ‘alcoholic’ would be part of the target-victim definition, but there may be more to it—to account for his specific choice of victims.”

Kline responded with a noncommittal grunt. “In terms of a more expanded profile, something more than ‘a man on a mission,’ how would you describe our perp?”

Gurney decided to play tit for tat. “I have a few ideas, but I’d love to hear what Dr. Holdenfield has to say about that.”

She shrugged, then spoke quickly and matter-of-factly. “Thirty-year-old white male, high IQ, no friendships, no normal sexual relationships. Polite but distant. He almost certainly had a troubled childhood, with a central trauma that influences his choice of victims. Since his victims are middle-aged men, it’s possible the trauma involved his father and an oedipal relationship with his mother—”

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.”

Kline fixed Holdenfield with his cross-examiner’s gaze. “You agree with that?”

“Basically, yes.”

“And the movie?”

“Ah, yes, the movie. I’ll try to be as concise as Detective Gurney.” She thought for a few moments, then spoke as if choosing each word carefully. “The movie is about a family in which a mother and son are terrorized by a crazy father. A father who happens to be an alcoholic with a history of violent binges.”

Rodriguez shook his head. “Are you telling us that some crazy, violent, alcoholic father is our killer?”

“Oh, no, no. Not the father. The son.”

“The son!?” Rodriguez’s expression was twisted into new extremes of incredulity.

As she continued, Holdenfield slipped into something close to her Mister Rogers voice. “I believe that the killer is telling us that he had a father like the father in The Shining. I believe he may be explaining himself to us.”

“Explaining himself?” Rodriguez’s voice was close to sputtering.

“Everyone wants to present himself on his own terms, Captain. I’m sure you encounter that all the time in your line of work. I certainly do. We all have a rationale for our own behavior, however bizarre it may be. Everyone wants to be recognized as justified, even the mentally disturbed—perhaps especially the mentally disturbed.”

This observation led to a general silence, which was eventually broken by Blatt.

“I’ve got a question. You’re a psychiatrist, right?”

“A consulting forensic psychologist.” Mister Rogers had morphed back into Sigourney Weaver.

“Right, whatever. You know how the mind works. So here’s the question. This guy knew what number someone would think of before they thought of it. How did he do that?”

“He didn’t.”

“He sure as hell did.”

“He appeared to do it. I assume you’re referring to the incidents I read about in the case file involving the numbers six fifty-eight and nineteen. But he didn’t actually do what you’re saying. It’s simply not possible to know in advance what number would occur to another individual in uncontrolled circumstances. Therefore he didn’t.”

“But the fact is that he did,” Blatt persisted.

“There’s at least one explanation,” said Gurney. He went on to outline the scenario that had occurred to him when Madeleine was calling him on her cell phone from their mailbox—namely, how the killer could have used a portable printer in his car to create the letter with the number nineteen in it after Mark Mellery had mentioned it on the phone.

Holdenfield looked impressed.

Blatt looked deflated—a sure sign, thought Gurney, that lurking somewhere in that crude brain and overexercised body was a romantic in love with the weird and impossible. But the deflation was only momentary.

“What about the six fifty-eight?” Blatt asked, his combative gaze flicking back and forth between Gurney and Holdenfield. “There was no phone call that time, just a letter. So how did he know Mellery would think of that number?”

“I don’t have an answer for that,” said Gurney, “but I have an odd little story that might help someone think of an answer.”

Rodriguez showed some impatience, but Kline leaned forward, and this demonstration of interest seemed to hold the captain in check.

“The other day I had a dream about my father,” Gurney began. He hesitated, involuntarily. His own voice sounded different to him. He heard in it an echo of the profound sadness the dream had generated in him. He saw Holdenfield looking at him curiously but not unpleasantly. He forced himself to continue. “After I woke up, I found myself thinking about a card trick my father used to do when we had people to the house for New Year’s and he’d had a few drinks, which always used to energize him. He’d fan out a deck and go around the room, asking three or four people to each pick a card. Then he’d narrow the focus down to one of those people and tell him to take a good look at the card he’d picked and put it back in the deck. Then he’d hand him the deck and tell him to shuffle it. After that he’d go into his mumbo-jumbo ‘mind-reading’ act, which could go on for another ten minutes, and it would finally end with him dramatically revealing the name of the card—which, of course, he knew from the moment it was picked.”

“How?” asked Blatt, mystified.

“When he was getting the deck ready in the beginning, just before he fanned the cards out, he’d manage to identify at least one card and then control its position in the fan.”

“Suppose no one picked it?” asked Holdenfield, intrigued.

“If no one picked it, he’d find a reason to discontinue the trick by creating some sort of distraction—suddenly remembering he had the kettle on for tea or something like that—so no one would realize there was a problem with the trick itself. But he almost never had to do that. The way he presented the fan-out, the first or second or third person he offered it to almost always picked the card he wanted them to. And if not, he’d just do his little kitchen routine, then come back and start the trick over. And of course he always had some perfectly plausible way of eliminating the people who’d picked the wrong cards, so no one would realize what was actually going on.”

Rodriguez yawned. “Is this somehow related to the six fifty-eight business?”

“I’m not sure,” said Gurney, “but the idea of someone thinking he’s picking a card at random, while the randomness is actually being controlled—”

Sergeant Wigg, who had been listening with increasing interest, broke in. “Your card trick story reminds me of that private-eye direct-mail scam back in the late nineties.”

Whether it was due to her unusual voice, pitched in the register where male and female overlap, or to the unusual fact that she was speaking at all, she captured everyone’s instant attention.

“The recipient gets a letter, supposedly from a private-investigation company, apologizing for invading the recipient’s privacy. The company ‘confesses’ that in the course of a botched surveillance assignment they mistakenly followed this individual for several weeks and photographed him in various situations. They claim that they are required by privacy legislation to give him all the existing prints of these photos. Then comes the curveball question: Since some of the photos seem to be of a compromising nature, would the recipient like them sent to a post-office box rather than to his home? If so, he will need to send them a fifty-dollar fee to cover the additional record keeping.”

“Anyone stupid enough to fall for that deserves to lose fifty dollars,” sneered Rodriguez.

“Oh, some people lost a lot more than that,” said Wigg placidly. “It wasn’t about getting the fifty-dollar payment. That was only a test. The scammer mailed out over a million of those letters, and the only purpose of the fifty-dollar request was to develop a refined list of people guilty enough about their behavior that they wouldn’t want photos of their activities to fall into the hands of their spouses. Those individuals were then subjected to a series of far more exorbitant requests for payments related to the return of the compromising photographs. Some ended up paying as much as fifteen thousand dollars.”

“For photos that never existed!” exclaimed Kline with an amalgam of indignation and admiration for the scammer’s ingenuity.

“The stupidity of people never ceases to amaze—” began Rodriguez, but Gurney interrupted him.

“Jesus! That’s it! That’s what the two-hundred-eighty-nine-dollar request is. It’s the same thing. It’s a test!”

Rodriguez looked baffled. “A test of what?”

Gurney closed his eyes to help him visualize the letter Mellery had received asking for the money.

Frowning, Kline turned to Wigg. “That con artist—you said he mailed out a million letters?”

“That’s the number I recall from the press reports.”

“Then obviously this is a very different situation. That was basically a fraudulent direct-mail campaign—a big net thrown out to catch a few guilty fish. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about handwritten notes to a handful of people—people for whom the number six fifty-eight must have had some personal meaning.”

Gurney slowly opened his eyes and stared at Kline. “But it didn’t. At first I assumed it did, because why else would it come to mind? So I kept asking Mark Mellery that question—what did the number mean to him, what did it remind him of, had he ever thought of it before, had he ever seen it written, was it the price of something, an address, a safe combination? But he kept insisting the number meant nothing to him, that he never remembered thinking of it before, that it simply popped into his mind—a perfectly random event. And I believe he was telling the truth. So there has to be another explanation.”

“So that means you’re back where you started,” said Rodriguez, rolling his eyes with exaggerated weariness.

“Maybe not. Maybe Sergeant Wigg’s con game is closer to the truth here than we think.”

“Are you trying to tell me that our killer sent out a million letters—a million handwritten letters? That’s ridiculous—not to mention impossible.”

“I agree that a million letters would be impossible, unless he had an awful lot of help, which isn’t likely. But what number would be possible?”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s say our killer had a scheme that involved sending out letters to a lot of people—handwritten, so each recipient would get the impression that his letter was a one-of-a-kind personal communication. How many letters do you think he could write in, say, one year?”

The captain threw up his hands, intimating that the question was not only unanswerable but frivolous. Kline and Hardwick looked more serious—as if they might be attempting some kind of calculation. Stimmel, as always, projected amphibian inscrutability. Rebecca Holdenfield was watching Gurney with growing fascination. Blatt looked like he was trying to determine the source of a foul odor.

Wigg was the only one to speak. “Five thousand,” she said. “Ten, if he were highly motivated. Conceivably fifteen, but that would be difficult.”

Kline squinted at her with lawyerly skepticism. “Sergeant, these numbers are based on what, exactly?”

“To begin with, a couple of reasonable assumptions.”

Rodriguez shook his head—implying that nothing on earth was more fallible than other people’s reasonable assumptions. If Wigg noticed, she didn’t care enough to let it distract her.

“First is the assumption that the model of the private-eye scam is applicable. If it is, it follows that the first communication—the one asking for money—would be sent to the most people and subsequent communications only to people who responded. In our own case, we know that the first communication consisted of two eight-line notes—a total of sixteen fairly short lines, plus a three-line address on the outer envelope. Except for the addresses, the letters would all be the same, making the writing repetitive and rapid. I would estimate that each mailing piece would take about four minutes to complete. That would be fifteen per hour. If he devoted just one hour a day to it, he’d have over five thousand done in a year. Two hours a day would result in close to eleven thousand. Theoretically, he could do a lot more, but there are limits to the diligence of even the most obsessed person.”

“Actually,” said Gurney with the dawning excitement of a scientist who finally sees a pattern in a sea of data, “eleven thousand would be more than enough.”

“Enough to do what?” asked Kline.

“Enough to pull off the six fifty-eight trick, for one thing,” said Gurney. “And that little trick, if it was done the way I’m thinking it was done, would also explain the $289.87 request in the first letter to each of the victims.”

“Whoa,” said Kline, raising his hand. “Slow down. You’re going around the corners a little too fast.”