FOR SEVERAL MINUTES, I SAT AT MY DESK, SHAKEN BY DR. GARdener’s notation. Had the finger been dropped in front of my house deliberately? Was my doorstep a “significant” location to the killer? If so, why? Who was he?
The faces of local men stampeded through my mind. Victor. Charlie. Joe. Gene. Stop it, I told myself. Calm down. Think. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, made the faces stand in an orderly line. Victor was first. He was the right age, somewhere in his thirties. I didn’t know much else about him, beyond rumors. supposedly, he’d lived with his mother all his life, until her death. Maybe something unnatural had been going on. Had he been abused? Victor was a loner, dysfunctional at everything, probably at sex, too. But Victor was so afraid of violence that he holed up in his house. Unless that was just an act. Maybe Victor wasn’t phobic at all. Maybe he actually snuck out his back door, grabbed nannies, and chopped their fingers off in his spare room. Who would know? Agoraphobia would be a great cover.
What about Charlie? He insisted that he knew all about the evil around us. He said the evil guy was “in his head,” controlling, monitoring his thoughts; that sounded like a “superior power.” Oh Lord. Was the dangerous person Charlie’d warned me about none other than Charlie himself? Had Charlie left the grisly clue at our door as a warning? He had a carpentry background. And skill with tools. And he’d inserted himself into the investigation, promising to protect me. He fit the profile in many ways. But that was ridiculous. Charlie had bad knees. He was no killer. Was he?
Then there was Phillip Woods. He’d seemed almost obsessed with Dr. Gardener. Here was a thought: He’d followed Dr. Gardener’s career and read her books; he knew she was a forensic consultant for the police. Could he have killed women just to get her attention? To be the subject of one of her chapters? How infatuated was he? He was almost forty, a little old for the profile, but he fit it in other ways. He was a loner. A planner. Precise with details. Able to wire an electronic santa—maybe he’d studied engineering.
There were others, too. Coach Gene, for example. Rejected by both Tamara and Claudia, maybe by others. He was physically strong. Lived alone.
Damn, the profile fit both nobody and everybody I knew in the neighborhood. Of course, there were a lot more men I didn’t know. And hundreds of pedestrians who passed by each day. And friends or relatives of people in the neighborhood. The de-liveryman who brought Victor his food. Joe, Angela’s jealous boyfriend. Jake and his construction crews—a dozen guys, all strong and young and good with tools. Who knew if any of them had been bed wetters or abused as kids? And if they had, what would that mean? Nothing by itself. The report, as far as I was concerned, had been useless.
If someone had singled out my doorstep as a place to drop a finger, I had no idea who he was or why he’d picked my house. Besides, Beverly Gardener might be mistaken; the finger might not have been left there deliberately. Another, after all, had been found in Washington square. The killer might have dropped them accidentally, might just have been passing by.
Within half an hour, I’d decided that my insights were useless, that I didn’t know the killer. I’d finished “consulting.” It hadn’t been worth my anxiety over it, hadn’t required any risk or even much time. I would write Nick a brief, professionally worded note, offering my thoughts. I’d even be generous and praise the work of his “friend” Beverly Gardener. And then, I’d be done.