Think of a Number

John Verdon Think of a Number

The first book in the Dave Gurney series, 2010

For Naomi

Prologue

“Where were you?” said the old woman in the bed. “I had to pee, and no one came.”

Unruffled by her nasty tone, the young man stood at the foot of the bed, beaming.

“I had to pee,” she repeated, more vaguely, as if she were now unsure what the words meant.

“I have good news, Mother,” said the man. “Soon everything will be all right. Everything will be taken care of.”

“Where do you go when you leave me?” Her voice again was sharp, querulous.

“Not far, Mother. You know very well I never go far.”

“I don’t like to be alone.”

His smile broadened, was almost beatific. “Very soon everything will be all right. Everything will be the way it was supposed to be. You can trust me, Mother. I found a way to fix everything. What he took he will give, when he gets what he gave.”

“You write such beautiful poetry.”

There were no windows in the room. The sideways light from the bedside lamp-the sole source of illumination-emphasized the thick scar on the woman’s throat and the shadows in her son’s eyes.

“Will we go dancing?” she asked, staring past him and past the dark wall behind him to a brighter vision.

“Of course, Mother. Everything will be perfect.”

“Where’s my little Dickie Duck?”

“Right here, Mother.”

“Will Dickie Duck come to bed?”

“To beddy-bye, to beddy-bye, to beddy-bye.”

“I have to pee,” she said, almost coquettishly.

Part One

Fatal Memories

Chapter 1

Cop art

Jason Strunk was by all accounts an inconsequential fellow, a bland thirty-something, nearly invisible to his neighbors-and apparently inaudible as well, since none could recall a single specific thing he’d ever said. They couldn’t even be certain that he’d ever spoken. Perhaps he’d nodded, perhaps said hello, perhaps muttered a word or two. It was hard to say.

All expressed a conventional initial amazement, even a temporary disbelief, at the revelation of Mr. Strunk’s obsessive devotion to killing middle-aged men with mustaches and his uniquely disturbing way of disposing of the bodies: cutting them into manageable segments, wrapping them colorfully, and mailing them to local police officers as Christmas presents.

Dave Gurney gazed intently at the colorless, placid face of Jason Strunk-actually, the original Central Booking mug shot of Jason Strunk-that stared back at him from his computer screen. The mug shot had been enlarged to make the face life-size, and it was surrounded at the borders of the screen by the tool icons of a creative photo- retouching program that Gurney was just starting to get the hang of.

He moved one of the brightness-control tools on the screen to the iris of Strunk’s right eye, clicked his mouse, and then examined the small highlight he’d created.

Better, but still not right.

The eyes were always the hardest-the eyes and the mouth-but they were the key. Sometimes he had to experiment with the position and intensity of one tiny highlight for hours, and even then he’d end up with something not quite what it should be, not good enough to show to Sonya, and definitely not Madeleine.

The thing about the eyes was that they, more than anything else, captured the tension, the contradiction-the uncommunicative blandness spiked with a hint of cruelty that Gurney had often discerned in the faces of murderers with whom he’d had the opportunity to spend quality time.

He’d gotten the look right with his patient manipulation of the mug shot of Jorge Kunzman (the Walmart stock clerk who always kept the head of his last date in his refrigerator until he could replace it with one more recent). He’d been pleased with the result, which conveyed with disturbing immediacy the deep black emptiness lurking in Mr. Kunzman’s bored expression, and Sonya’s excited reaction, her gush of praise, had solidified his opinion. It was that reception, plus the unexpected sale of the piece to one of Sonya’s collector friends, that motivated him to produce the series of creatively doctored photographs now being featured in a show headlined Portraits of Murderers by the Man Who Caught Them, in Sonya’s small but pricey gallery in Ithaca.

How a recently retired NYPD homicide detective with a yawning uninterest in art in general and trendy art in particular, and a deep distaste for personal notoriety, could have ended up as the focus of a chic university-town art show described by local critics as “a cutting-edge blend of brutally raw photographs, unflinching psychological insights, and masterful graphic manipulations” was a question with two very different answers: his own and his wife’s.

As far as he was concerned, it all began with Madeleine’s cajoling him into taking an art-appreciation course with her at the museum in Cooperstown. She was forever trying to get him out-out of his den, out of the house, out of himself, just out. He’d learned that the best way to stay in control of his own time was through the strategy of periodic capitulations. The art-appreciation course was one of these strategic moves, and although he dreaded the prospect of sitting through it, he expected it to immunize him against further pressures for at least a month or two. It wasn’t that he was a couch potato-far from it. At the age of forty-seven, he could still do fifty push-ups, fifty chin-ups, and fifty sit-ups. He just wasn’t very fond of going places.