“No.” He was tempted to ask the reason for the question but assumed he’d soon enough discover it.
“No one at all, present or past?”
“No one.” Seeing something in Dermott’s eyes that seemed to demand further assurance, he added, “Before I saw the check-mailing instructions in the letter to Mark Mellery, I didn’t even know Wycherly existed.”
“And no one ever told you about anything happening in this house?”
“Happening?”
“In this house. A long time ago.”
“No,” said Gurney, intrigued.
Dermott’s discomfort seemed to exceed the effects of a headache.
“What was it that happened?”
“It’s all secondhand information,” said Dermott, “but right after I bought this place, one of the neighbors told me that twenty-some-odd years ago there was a horrible fight here—apparently a husband and wife, and the wife was stabbed.”
“And you see some connection …?”
“It may be a coincidence, but …”
“Yes?”
“I’d pretty much forgotten about it. Until today. This morning when I found—” His lips stretched in a kind of nauseous spasm.
“Take your time,” said Gurney.
Dermott placed both his hands to his temples. “Do you have a gun?”
“I own one.”
“I mean with you.”
“No. I haven’t carried a gun since I left the NYPD. If you’re worried about security, there are more than a dozen armed cops within a hundred yards of this house,” said Gurney.
He didn’t look particularly reassured.
“You were saying you remembered something.”
Dermott nodded. “I’d forgotten all about it, but it came back to me when I saw … all that blood.”
“What came back to you?”
“The woman who was stabbed in this house—she was stabbed in the throat.”
Chapter 49
Kill them all
Dermott’s recollection that the neighbor (now deceased) had placed the event “twenty-some-odd years ago” meant that the number could easily be less than twenty-five—and that, in turn, would mean that both John Nardo and Gary Sissek would have been on the force at the time of the attack. Although the picture was far from clear, Gurney could feel another piece of the puzzle starting to rotate into position. He had more questions for Dermott, but they could wait until he got some answers from the lieutenant.
He left Dermott sitting stiffly in his chair by the drawn blinds, looking stressed and uncomfortable. As he started down the staircase, a female officer in scene-of-crime coveralls and latex gloves in the hallway below was asking Nardo what to do next with the areas outside the house that had been examined for trace evidence.
“Keep it taped and off-limits, in case we have to go over it again. Transport the chair, bottle, anything else you’ve got to the station. Set up the back end of the file room as a dedicated area.”
“What about all the junk on the table?”
“Shove it in Colbert’s office for now.”
“He’s not going to like it.”
“I don’t give a flying—Look, just take care of it!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Before you leave, tell Big Tommy to stay in front of the house, tell Pat to stay by the phone. I want everyone else out knocking on doors. I want to know if anyone in the neighborhood saw or heard anything out of the ordinary the past couple of days, especially late last night or early this morning—strangers, cars parked where they aren’t normally parked, anyone hanging around, anyone in a hurry, anything at all.”
“How large a radius you want them to cover?”
Nardo looked at his watch. “Whatever they can cover in the next six hours. Then we’ll decide where to go from there. Anything of interest turns up, I want to be informed immediately.”
As she went off on her mission, Nardo turned to Gurney, who was standing at the foot of the stairs. “Find out anything useful?”
“I’m not sure,” said Gurney in a low voice, motioning Nardo to follow him back into the room they’d been sitting in earlier. “Maybe you can help me figure it out.”
Gurney sat in the chair facing the doorway. Nardo stood behind the chair on the opposite side of the square table. His expression was a combination of curiosity and something Gurney couldn’t decipher.
“Are you aware that someone was once stabbed in this house?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Shortly after Dermott bought the place, he was told by a neighbor that a woman who’d lived here years ago had been attacked by her husband.”
“How many years ago?”
Gurney was sure he saw a flicker of recognition in Nardo’s eyes.
“Maybe twenty, maybe twenty-five. Somewhere in there.”
It seemed to be the answer Nardo expected. He sighed and shook his head. “I hadn’t thought about that for a long time. Yeah, there was a domestic assault—about twenty-four years ago. Not too long after I joined the force. What about it?”
“Do you remember any of the details?”
“Before we go down memory lane, you mind addressing the relevance issue?”
“The woman who was attacked was stabbed in the throat.”
“Is that supposed to mean something?” There was a twitch at the corner of Nardo’s mouth.
“Two people have been attacked in this house. Of all the ways that someone could be attacked, it strikes me as a notable coincidence that both of those people were stabbed in the throat.”
“You’re making these things sound the same by the way you say it, but they got zip in common. What the hell does a police officer murdered on a protection assignment today have to do with a domestic disturbance twenty-four freaking years ago?”
Gurney shrugged. “If I knew more about the ‘disturbance,’ maybe I could tell you.”
“Fine. Okay. I’ll tell you what I can tell you, but it’s not much.” Nardo paused, staring down at the table, or more likely into the past. “I wasn’t on duty that night.”
An obvious disclaimer, thought Gurney. Why does the story demand a disclaimer?
“So this is pretty much secondhand,” Nardo went on. “As in most domestics, the husband was drunk out of his mind, got into an altercation with his wife, apparently picked up a bottle, whacked her with it, I guess it broke, she got cut, that’s about it.”
Gurney knew damn well that wasn’t it. The only question was how to jar the rest of the story loose. One of the unwritten rules of the job was to say as little as possible, and Nardo was carefully obeying the rule. Feeling that there was no time for a subtle approach, Gurney decided to plunge head-on into the barrier.
“Lieutenant, that’s a crock of shit!” he said, looking away with disgust.
“Crock of shit?” Nardo’s voice was pitched menacingly just above a whisper.
“I’m sure what you told me is true. The problem is what’s missing.”
“Maybe what’s missing is none of your freaking business.” Nardo was still sounding tough, but some of the confidence had gone out of the belligerence.
“Look, I’m not just some nosy asshole from another jurisdiction. Gregory Dermott got a phone call this morning threatening my life. My life. If there’s any possible way what’s going on here could be connected to your so-called domestic disturbance, I goddamn well have a right to know about it.”
Nardo cleared his throat and gazed up at the ceiling as if the right words—or an emergency exit—might suddenly appear there.
Gurney added in a softer tone, “You could start by telling me the names of the people involved.”
Nardo gave a little nod, pulled out the chair he’d been standing behind, and sat down. “Jimmy and Felicity Spinks.” He sounded resigned to an unpleasant truth.
“You say the names like you knew them pretty well.”
“Yeah. Well. Anyway …” Somewhere in the house, a phone
rang once. Nardo seemed not to hear it. “Anyway, Jimmy used to drink a bit. More than a bit, I guess. Came home drunk one night, got into a fight with Felicity. Like I said, he ended up cutting her pretty bad with a broken bottle. She lost a lot of blood. I didn’t see it, I was off that night, but the guys who were on the call talked about the blood for a week.” Nardo was staring at the table again.
“She survived?”
“What? Yeah, yeah, she survived, but just barely. Brain damage.”
“What happened to her?”
“Happened? I think she was put in some kind of nursing home.”
“What about the husband?”
Nardo hesitated. Gurney couldn’t tell whether he was having a hard time remembering or just didn’t want to talk about it. “Claimed self-defense,” he said with evident distaste. “Ended up getting a plea deal. Sentence reduced to time served. Lost his job. Left town. Social services took their kid. End of story.”
Gurney’s antenna, sensitized by a thousand interrogations, told him there was still something missing. He waited, observing Nardo’s discomfort. In the background he could hear an intermittent voice—probably the voice of whoever had answered the phone—but couldn’t make out the words.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s the big deal about that story, that you didn’t just tell me the whole thing to begin with?”
Nardo looked squarely at Gurney. “Jimmy Spinks was a cop.”
The frisson that swept through Gurney’s body brought with it half a dozen urgent questions, but before he could ask any, a square-jawed woman with a sandy crew cut appeared suddenly at the doorway. She wore jeans and a dark polo shirt. A Glock in a quick-draw holster was strapped under her left arm.
“Sir, we just got a call you need to know about.” An unspoken immediately flashed in her eyes.
Looking relieved at the distraction, he gave the newcomer his full attention and waited for her to go on. Instead she glanced uncertainly toward Gurney.
“He’s with us,” said Nardo without pleasure. “Go ahead.”
She gave Gurney a second glance, no friendlier than the first, then advanced to the table and laid a miniature digital phone recorder down in front of Nardo. It was about the size of an iPod.
“It’s all on there, sir.”
He hesitated for a moment, squinting at the device, then pushed a button. The playback began immediately. The quality was excellent.
Gurney recognized the first voice as that of the woman standing in front of him.
“GD Security Systems.” Apparently she’d been instructed to answer Dermott’s phone as though she were an employee.
The second voice was bizarre—and thoroughly familiar to Gurney from the call he’d listened in on at Mark Mellery’s request. It seemed so long ago. Four deaths had intervened between that call and this one—deaths that had shaken his sense of time. Mark in Peony, Albert Rudden in the Bronx, Richard Kartch in Sotherton (Richard Kartch—why did that name always bring with it an uneasy feeling, a feeling of discrepancy?), and Officer Gary Sissek in Wycherly.
There was no mistaking that weirdly shifting pitch and accent.
“If I could hear God, what would He tell me?” the voice asked with the menacing lilt of a horror-movie villain.
“Excuse me?” The female cop on the recording sounded as taken aback as any real receptionist might have been.
The voice repeated, more insistently, “If I could hear God, what would He tell me?”
“I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I think we may have a bad connection. Are you using a cell phone?”
Speaking quickly to Nardo, she interjected some live commentary. “I was just trying to prolong the call, like you said, to keep him talking as long as possible.”
Nardo nodded. The recording went on.
“If I could hear God, what would He tell me?”
“I don’t really understand that, sir. Could you explain what you mean?”
The voice, suddenly booming, announced, “God would tell me to kill them all!”
“Sir? I’m pretty confused here. Did you want me to write this message down and pass it along to someone?”
There was a sharp laugh, like cellophane crumpling.
“It’s Judgment Day, no more to say. / Dermott be nimble, Gurney be quick. / The cleanser is coming. Tick-tock-tick.”
Chapter 50
Re-search
The first to speak was Nardo “That was the whole call?”
“Yes, sir.”
He leaned back in his chair and massaged his temples. “No word yet from Chief Meyers?”
“We keep leaving messages at his hotel desk, sir, and on his cell phone. No word yet.”
“I assume the caller’s number was blocked?”
“Yes, sir.”
“‘Kill them all,’ huh?”
“Yes, sir, those were his words. Do you want to hear the recording again?”
Nardo shook his head. “Who do you think he’s referring to?”
“Sir?”
“‘Kill them all.’ All who?”
The female cop seemed to be at a loss. Nardo looked at Gurney.
“Just a guess, Lieutenant, but I’d say it’s either all the remaining people on his hit list—assuming there are any—or all of us here in the house.”
“And what about ‘the cleanser is coming,’” said Nardo. “Why ‘the cleanser’?”
Gurney shrugged. “I have no idea. Maybe he just likes the word—fits his pathological notion of what he’s doing.”
Nardo’s features wrinkled in an involuntary expression of distaste. Turning to the female cop, he addressed her for the first time by name. “Pat, I want you outside the house with Big Tommy. Take diagonal corners opposite each other, so together you’ll have every door and window under surveillance. Also, get the word around—I want every officer prepared to converge on this house within one minute of hearing a shot or any kind of disturbance at all. Questions?”
“Are we expecting an armed attack, sir?” She sounded hopeful.
“I wouldn’t say ‘expecting,’ but it’s sure as hell possible.”
“You really think that crazy bastard is still in the area?” There was acetylene fire in her eyes.
“It’s possible. Let Big Tommy know about the perp’s latest call. Stay super alert.”
She nodded and was gone.
Nardo turned grimly to Gurney. “What do you think? Think I ought to call in the cavalry, tell the state cops we got an emergency situation? Or was that phone call a bunch of bullshit?”
“Considering the body count so far, it would be risky to assume it was bullshit.”
“I’m not assuming a freaking thing,” said Nardo, tight-lipped.
The tension in the exchange led to a silence.
It was broken by a hoarse voice calling from upstairs.
“Lieutenant Nardo? Gurney?”
Nardo grimaced as if something were turning sour in his stomach. “Maybe Dermott’s got another recollection he wants to share.” He sank deeper into his chair.
“I’ll look into it,” said Gurney.
He stepped from the room into the hallway. Dermott was standing at his bedroom door at the top of the staircase. He looked impatient, angry, exhausted.
“Could I speak to you … please?” The “please” was not said pleasantly.
Dermott looked too shaky to negotiate the staircase, so Gurney went up. As he did, the thought came to him that this wasn’t really a home, just a place of business with sleeping quarters appended to it. In the city neighborhood where he was raised, it was a common arrangement—shopkeepers living above their shops, like the wretched deli man whose hatred of life seemed to increase with each new customer, or the mob-connected undertaker with his fat wife and four fat children. Just thinking about it made him queasy.
At the bedroom door, he shoved the feeling aside and tried to decipher the portrait of unease on Dermott’s face.
The man g
lanced around Gurney and down the stairs. “Is Lieutenant Nardo gone?”
“He’s downstairs. What can I do for you?”
“I heard cars driving away,” said Dermott accusingly.
“They’re not going far.”
Dermott nodded in an unsatisfied way. He obviously had something on his mind but seemed in no rush to get to the point. Gurney took the opportunity to pursue a few questions of his own.
“Mr. Dermott, what do you do for a living?”
“What?” He sounded both baffled and annoyed.
“Exactly what sort of work do you do?”
“My work? Security. I believe we had this conversation before.”
“In a general way,” said Gurney, smiling. “Perhaps you could give me some details.”
Dermott’s expressive sigh suggested that he viewed the request as an irritating waste of his time. “Look,” he said, “I need to sit down.” He returned to his armchair, settling into it gingerly. “What kind of details?”
“The name of your company is GD Security Systems. What sort of ‘security’ do these ‘systems’ provide, and for whom?”
After another loud sigh, he said, “I help companies protect confidential information.”
“And this help comes in what form?”
“Database-protection applications, firewalls, limited-access protocols, ID-verification systems—those categories would cover most projects we handle.”
“We?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You referred to projects ‘we’ handle.”
“That’s not meant literally,” said Dermott dismissively. “It’s just a corporate expression.”
“Makes GD Security Systems seem a bit bigger than it is?”
“That’s not the intention, I assure you. My clients love the fact that I do the work myself.”
Gurney nodded as though he were impressed. “I can see how that would be a plus. Who are these clients?”
“Clients for whom confidentiality is a major issue.”
Gurney smiled innocently at Dermott’s curt tone. “I’m not asking you to reveal any secrets. I’m just wondering what sort of businesses they’re in.”