He spoke to the duty sergeant, a gravelly man by the name of Kalkan, kind of like the dog food. After identifying himself, Gurney explained that a Sotherton man by the name of Richard Kartch was a person of interest in a New York State murder investigation, that he might be in imminent danger, that he apparently had no phone, and that it was important that a phone be brought to him, or he brought to a phone, so that he could be warned about his situation.
“We’re familiar with Richie Kartch,” said Kalkan.
“Sounds like you may have had problems with him.”
Kalkan didn’t answer.
“He has a record?”
“Who did you say you were?”
Gurney told him again, with a little more detail.
“And this is part of your investigation of what?”
“Two murders—one in upstate New York, one in the Bronx—same pattern. Before they were killed, both victims received certain communications from the killer. We have evidence that Kartch has received at least one of those same communications, making him a possible third target.”
“So you want Crazy Richie to get in touch with you?”
“He needs to call me immediately, preferably in the presence of one of your officers. After speaking with him on the phone, we’ll probably want a follow-up interview with him in Sotherton—with the cooperation of your department.”
“We’ll send a car out to his place as soon as we can. Give me a number where you can be reached.”
Gurney gave him his cell number in order to leave the house phone free for the calls he intended to make to Kline, BCI, and Clamm.
Kline was gone for the day, as was Ellen Rackoff, and the call was automatically rerouted to a phone that was answered on the sixth ring as Gurney was about to hang up.
“Stimmel.”
Gurney remembered the man who’d come with Kline to the BCI meeting, the man with the personality of a mute war criminal.
“It’s Dave Gurney. I have a message for your boss.”
There was no response.
“You there?”
“I’m here.”
Gurney figured that was as near an invitation to proceed as he was going to get. So he went ahead and gave Stimmel the evidence confirming the link between murders one and two; the discovery, through Dermott, of a third potential victim; and the steps he was taking through the Sotherton PD to reach him. “You got all that?”
“Got it.”
“After you inform the DA, you want to pass the information along to BCI, or shall I speak with Rodriguez directly?”
There was a short silence during which Gurney assumed that the dour, unforthcoming man was calculating the consequences both ways. Knowing the penchant for control built into most cops, he was about 90 percent sure he’d get the answer he finally got.
“We’ll handle it,” said Stimmel.
Having disposed of the need to call BCI, Gurney was left with Randy Clamm.
As usual, he answered on the first ring.
“Clamm.”
And as usual, he sounded like he was in a hurry and doing three other things as he spoke. “Glad you called. Just making a triple list of gaps in Rudden’s checking account—check stubs with amounts but no names, checks issued but not cashed, check numbers skipped—going from most recent backwards.”
“The amount $289.87 appear on any of your lists?”
“What? How’d you know that? It’s one of the ‘checks issued but not cashed.’ How did you …?”
“It’s the amount he always asks for.”
“Always? You mean more than twice?”
“A third check was sent to the same post-office box. We’re in the process of getting in touch with the sender. That’s why I’m calling—to let you know we have an ongoing pattern here. If the pieces of the pattern hold, the slug you’re looking for in the Rudden bungalow is a .38 Special.”
“Who’s the third guy?”
“Richard Kartch, Sotherton, Mass. Apparently a difficult character.”
“Massachusetts? Jesus, our boy’s all over the place. This third guy’s still alive?”
“We’ll know in a few minutes. Local PD sent a car to his house.”
“Okay. I’d appreciate your letting me know whatever you can whenever you can. I’ll make some more noise about getting our evidence team back to the Ruddens’. I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for the call, sir.”
“Good luck. I’ll talk to you soon.”
Gurney’s respect for the young detective was growing. The more he heard, the more he liked what he was hearing—energy, intelligence, dedication. And something else. Something earnest and unspoiled. Something that touched his heart.
He shook his head like a dog shaking off water and took several deep breaths. The day, he thought, must have been more emotionally draining than he’d realized. Or perhaps some residue of his dream about his father was still with him. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
He was awakened by the phone, mistaking it at first for his alarm clock. He found himself still in his den chair, with a painfully stiff neck. According to his watch, he’d been asleep for nearly two hours. He picked up the phone and cleared his throat.
“Gurney.”
The DA’s voice on the other end burst like a horse from the starting gate.
“Dave, I just got the news. God, this thing just keeps getting bigger. A third potential victim in Massachusetts? This could be the biggest damn murder case since Son of Sam, not to mention your own Jason Strunk. This is big! I just want to hear it from your own lips, before I talk to the media: We do have hard evidence that the same guy whacked the first two victims, is that right?”
“The evidence strongly suggests that, sir.”
“Suggests?”
“Strongly suggests.”
“Could you be more definite?”
“We don’t have fingerprints. We don’t have DNA. I’d say it’s definite that the cases are connected, but we can’t prove yet that the same individual cut both throats.”
“The probability is high?”
“Very high.”
“Your judgment on that is good enough for me.”
Gurney smiled at this transparent pretense of trust. He knew damn well that Sheridan Kline was the sort of man who valued his own judgment far above anyone else’s but would always leave a door open for blame shifting in case a situation went south.
“I’d say it’s time to talk to our friends at Fox News—which means I need to touch base with BCI tonight and put together a statement. Keep me up to the minute on this, Dave, especially any developments on the Massachusetts angle. I want to know everything.” Kline hung up without bothering to say good-bye.
So apparently he was planning to go public in a big way—rev up a media circus with himself as the ringmaster—before it occurred to the Bronx DA, or to the DA in any other jurisdiction where the murder spree might spread, to seize the personal publicity opportunity. Gurney’s lips drew back in distaste as he imagined the press conferences to come.
“Are you all right?”
Startled at the voice so close to him, he looked up and saw Madeleine at the den door.
“Jesus, how the hell …?”
“You were so engrossed in your conversation you didn’t hear me come in.”
“Apparently not.” Blinking, he looked at his watch. “So where did you go?”
“Remember what I said on my way out?”
“You said you wouldn’t tell me where you were going.”
“I said I’d already told you twice.”
“Okay, fine. Well, I have work to do.”
As if it were his ally, the phone rang.
The call was from Sotherton, but it wasn’t from Richard Kartch. It was from a detective by the name of Gowacki.
“We got a situation,” he said. “How soon do you think you can get here?”
Chapter 39
You and I have a date, Mr. 658
By the time Gurney got
off the phone with the flat-voiced Mike Gowacki, it was nine-fifteen. He found Madeleine already in bed, propped against her pillows, with a book. War and Peace. She’d been reading it for three years, shuttling back and forth between it and, incongruously, Thoreau’s Walden.
“I have to head out to a crime scene.”
She looked up at him from the book—curious, worried, lonely.
He felt able to respond only to the curiosity. “Another male victim. Stabbed in the throat, footprints in the snow.”
“How far?”
“What?”
“How far do you have to go?”
“Sotherton, Massachusetts. Three, four hours, maybe.”
“So you won’t be back until sometime tomorrow.”
“For breakfast, I hope.”
She smiled her who-do-you-think-you’re-kidding? smile.
He started to leave, then stopped and sat on the edge of the bed. “This is a strange case,” he said, letting his unsureness about it come through. “Getting stranger by the day.”
She nodded, somehow placated. “You don’t think it’s your standard serial killer?”
“Not the standard version, no.”
“Too much communication with the victims?”
“Yes. And too much diversity among the victims—personally and geographically. Typical serial killer doesn’t bounce around from the Catskills to the East Bronx to the middle of Massachusetts pursuing famous authors, retired night watchmen, and nasty loners.”
“They must have something in common.”
“They all have drinking histories, and the evidence indicates the killer is focused on that issue. But they must have something else in common—otherwise why go to the trouble of choosing victims two hundred miles apart from one another?”
They fell silent. Gurney absently smoothed wrinkles out of the quilt in the space between them. Madeleine watched him for a while, her hands resting on her book.
“I better get going,” he said.
“Be careful.”
“Right.” He rose slowly, almost arthritically. “See you in the morning.”
She looked at him with an expression he could never put into words, couldn’t even say if it was good or bad, but he knew it well. He felt its almost physical touch in the center of his chest.
It was well after midnight when he exited from the Mass. Turnpike and one-thirty when he drove through the deserted main street of Sotherton. Ten minutes later, on the rutted lane called Quarry Road, he arrived at a haphazard assembly of police vehicles, one of which had its strobes flashing. He pulled in alongside it. As he got out of his car, an irritated-looking uniformed cop emerged from the light machine.
“Hold it. Where do you think you’re going?” He sounded not only irritated but exhausted.
“Name is Gurney—here to see Detective Gowacki.”
“About what?”
“He’s expecting me.”
“What’s it about?”
Gurney wondered whether the guy’s edge was coming from a long day or from a naturally lousy attitude. He had a low tolerance for naturally lousy attitudes.
“It’s about him asking me to come here. You want some identification?”
The cop clicked his flashlight on and shined it in Gurney’s face. “Who’d you say you were?”
“Gurney, district attorney’s office, special investigator.”
“The fuck didn’t you say so?”
Gurney smiled without any emotion resembling friendliness. “You going to tell Gowacki I’m here?”
After a final hostile pause, the man turned and walked up the outer edge of a long, rising driveway toward a house that seemed, in the portable arc lights illuminating the property for the crime-scene techs, only half finished. Uninvited, Gurney followed him.
As the driveway neared the house, it made a left cut into the bank of the hill and arrived at the opening to a two-car basement garage, currently housing one car. At first Gurney thought the garage doors were open; then he realized there weren’t any doors. The half inch of snow that coated the driveway continued inside. The cop stopped at the opening, blocked by crime-scene tape, and shouted, “Mike!”
There was no response. The cop shrugged as if an honest effort had been made, had failed, and that was the end of the matter. Then a tired voice came from the yard behind the house. “Back here.”
Without waiting, Gurney headed around the perimeter of the tape in that direction.
“Make sure you stay outside the tape.” The cop’s warning struck Gurney as the final bark of a testy dog.
Rounding the rear corner of the house, he saw that the area, bright as day in the glare of the lights, was not exactly the “yard” he had expected. Like the house, it exhibited an odd blend of incompletion and decrepitude. A heavily built man with thinning hair was standing on a crude set of steps, cobbled together from two-by-tens, at the back door. The man’s eyes scanned the half acre of open ground that separated the house from a thicket of sumac.
The ground was lumpy, as though it had never been graded after the foundation was backfilled. Scraps of framing lumber, heaped here and there, had taken on a weathered grayness. The house was only partially sided, and the plastic moisture barrier over the plywood sheathing was faded from exposure. The impression was not of construction in progress but construction abandoned.
When the stout man’s gaze reached Gurney, he studied him for a few seconds before asking, “You the man from the Catskills?”
“That’s right.”
“Walk another ten feet along the tape, then step under it and come around here to the back door. Make sure you steer clear of that line of footprints from the house to the driveway.”
Presumably this was Gowacki, but Gurney had an aversion to presuming, so he asked the question and got back an affirmative grunt.
As he made his way across the wasteland that should have been a backyard, he came close enough to the footprints to note their similarity to those at the institute.
“Look familiar?” asked Gowacki, eyeing Gurney curiously.
There was nothing thick about the thick-bodied detective’s perception, thought Gurney. He nodded. Now it was his own turn to be perceptive.
“Those footprints bother you?”
“Little bit,” said Gowacki. “Not the footprints, exactly. More the location of the body in relation to the footprints. You know something I don’t?”
“Would the location of the body make more sense if the direction of the footprints were reversed?”
“If the direction were … Wait a minute …. Yes, goddamn it, perfect sense!” He stared at Gurney. “What the hell are we dealing with here?”
“First of all, we’re dealing with someone who has killed three people—three that we know of—in the past week. He’s a planner and a perfectionist. He leaves a lot of evidence behind, but only evidence he wants us to see. He’s extremely intelligent, probably well educated, and may hate the police even more than he hates his victims. By the way, is the body still here?”
Gowacki looked like he was making a mental recording of Gurney’s response. Finally he said, “Yeah, the body’s here. I wanted you to see it. Thought something might register, based on what you know about the other two. Ready to take a look?”
The back door of the house led into a small, unfinished area probably intended to be a laundry room, given the position of the roughed-in plumbing, but there was no washing machine and no dryer. There wasn’t even any drywall over the insulation. Illumination was provided by a bare bulb in a cheap white fixture nailed to an exposed ceiling joist.
In the raw, unwelcoming light, the body lay on its back, half in the would-be laundry area and half in the kitchen beyond the untrimmed doorway separating them.
“Can I take a closer look?” asked Gurney, grimacing.
“That’s what you’re here for.”
The closer look revealed a pool of coagulated blood that had spread from multiple throat wounds out across the kitche
n floor and under a thrift-shop breakfast table. The victim’s face was full of anger, but the bitter lines etched into the large, hard face were the product of a lifetime and revealed nothing about the terminal assault.
“Unhappy-looking man,” said Gurney.
“Miserable son of a bitch is what he was.”
“I gather you’ve had some past trouble with Mr. Kartch.”
“Nothing but trouble. Every damn bit of it unnecessary.” Gowacki glared at the body as though its violent, bloody end had been insufficient punishment. “Every town has troublemakers—angry drunks, slobs who turn their places into pigsties to piss off the neighbors, creeps whose ex-wives have to get orders of protection, jerks who let their dogs bark all night, weirdos who mothers don’t want their kids within a mile of. Here in Sotherton all those assholes were wrapped up in one guy—Richie Kartch.”
“Sounds like quite a guy.”
“Matter of curiosity, were the other two victims anything like that?”
“The first was the opposite of that. The second I don’t have personal details on yet, but I doubt he was anything like this guy.” Gurney took another look at the face staring up from the floor, as ugly in death as it had apparently been in life.
“Just thought maybe we had a serial killer trying to rid the world of assholes. Anyway, to get back to your comments about the footprints in the snow—how did you know they’d make more sense if they went the other way?”
“That’s the way it was at the first murder.”
Gowacki’s eyes showed interest. “The position of this body is consistent with facing an attacker entering through the back door. But the footprints show someone coming in the front door and exiting by the back door. Doesn’t make sense.”
“Mind if I take a look around the kitchen?”
“Be my guest. Photographer, medical examiner, blood-prints-and-fibers guys were all here. Just don’t move anything. We’re still going through his personal possessions.”
“ME say anything about powder burns?”
“Powder burns? Those are knife wounds.”
“I suspect there’s a bullet wound somewhere in that bloody mess.”
“You see something I missed?”