Think of a Number

Gurney remembered the photo of Mellery on the cover of his book. He made a mental note to take a closer look at the eyes when he arrived home. He also remembered that he needed to return the call from Sonya Reynolds-the one Madeleine had mentioned with a touch of ice. A few miles outside Peony, he pulled off onto a patch of weedy gravel separating the road from the Esopus Creek, took out his cell phone, and entered the number for Sonya’s gallery. After four rings her smooth voice invited him to leave as long a message as he wished.

“Sonya, it’s Dave Gurney. I know I promised you a portrait this week, and I hope to bring it to you Saturday, or at least e-mail you a graphics file you can print a sample from. It’s almost finished, but I’m not satisfied yet.” He paused, aware of the fact that his voice had dropped into that softer register triggered by attractive women-a habit Madeleine had once brought to his attention. He cleared his throat and continued, “The essence of this art is character. The face should be consistent with murder, especially the eyes. That’s what I’m working on. That’s what’s taking time.”

There was a click on the line, and Sonya’s voice broke in, breathlessly.

“David, I’m here. I couldn’t make it to the phone, but I heard what you said. And I understand perfectly your need to get it just right. But it would be really great if you could deliver it Saturday. There’s a festival Sunday, lots of gallery traffic.”

“I’ll try. It might be late in the day.”

“Perfect! I’ll be closing at six, but I’ll be here working for another hour. Come then. We’ll have time to talk.”

It struck him that Sonya’s voice could make anything sound like a sexual overture. Of course, he knew he was bringing too damn much receptivity and imagination to the situation. He also knew he was being pretty damn silly.

“Six o’clock sounds good,” he heard himself say-even as he remembered that Sonya’s office, with its large couches and plush rugs, was furnished more like an intimate den than a place of business.

He dropped the phone back into the glove box and sat gazing up the grassy valley. As usual, Sonya’s voice had disrupted his rational thoughts, and his mind was pinballing from object to object: Sonya’s too-cozy office, Madeleine’s uneasiness, the impossibility of anyone knowing in advance the number another person would think of, blood as red as a painted rose, you and I have a date Mr. 658, Charybdis, the wrong post-office box, Mellery’s fear of the police, Peter Piggert the mass-murdering motherfucker, the charming young Justin, the rich aging Caddy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and so on, without rhyme or reason, around and around. He lowered the window on the passenger side of the car by the creek, leaned back, closed his eyes, and tried to focus on the sound of the water tumbling over the rocky streambed.

A knock at the closed window by his ear roused him. He glanced up at an expressionless rectangular face, eyes concealed behind mirrored sunglasses, shaded by the rigid circular brim of a trooper’s gray hat. He lowered the window.

“Everything all right, sir?” The question sounded more threatening than solicitous, the sir more perfunctory than polite.

“Yes, thank you, I just needed to close my eyes for a moment.” He glanced at the dashboard clock. The moment, he saw, had lasted fifteen minutes.

“Where are you heading, sir?”

“Walnut Crossing.”

“I see. Have you had anything to drink today, sir?”

“No, Officer, I haven’t.”

The man nodded and stepped back, looking over the car. His mouth, the only visible feature that might betray his attitude, was contemptuous-as though he considered Gurney’s drink denial a transparent lie and would soon find evidence to that effect. He walked with exaggerated deliberation around to the rear of the car, then up along the passenger side, around the front, and finally back to Gurney’s window. After a long, evaluative silence, he spoke with a contained menace more appropriate to a Harold Pinter play than a routine vehicle check.

“Were you aware that this is not a legal parking area?”

“I didn’t realize that,” said Gurney evenly. “I only intended to stop for a minute or two.”

“May I see your license and registration, please?”

Gurney produced them from his wallet and handed them out the window. It was not his habit in such situations to present evidence of his status as a retired NYPD detective first grade, with the connections that might imply, but he sensed, as the trooper turned to walk back to his patrol car, an arrogance that was off the scale and a hostility that would be expressed in an unjustifiable delay, at the very least. He reluctantly withdrew another card from his wallet.

“Just a moment, Officer, this might be helpful as well.”

The trooper took the card cautiously. Then Gurney saw the flicker of a change at the corners of his mouth, not in the direction of friendliness. It looked like a combination of disappointment and anger. Dismissively, he handed the card, license, and registration back through the window.

“Have a nice day, sir,” he said in a tone that conveyed the opposite sentiment, returned to his vehicle, made a rapid U-turn, and drove off in the direction he’d come from.

No matter how sophisticated the psychological testing had become, thought Gurney, no matter how high the educational requirements, no matter how rigorous the academy training, there would always be cops who shouldn’t be cops. In this case the trooper had committed no specific violation, but there was something hard and hateful in him-Gurney could feel it, see it in the lines in his face-and it was only a matter of time before it collided with its mirror image. Then something terrible would happen. In the meantime a lot of people would be delayed and intimidated to no good end. He was one of those cops who made people dislike cops.

Maybe Mellery had a point.

During the next seven days, winter came to the northern Catskills. Gurney spent most of his time in the den, alternating between the mug-shot project and a painstaking reexamination of the Charybdis communications- stepping deftly back and forth between those two worlds and repeatedly veering away from thoughts of Danny’s drawings and the inner chaos that came with them. The obvious thing would be to talk to Madeleine about it, find out why she’d decided to raise the issue now-literally to bring it up from the basement-and why she was waiting with such peculiar patience for him to say something. But he couldn’t seem to summon the necessary willingness. So he would push it out of his mind and return to the Charybdis matter. At least he could think about that without feeling lost, without his heart racing.

He frequently thought, for example, about the evening after his last visit to the institute. As promised, Mellery had called him at home that night and related the conversation he’d had with Gregory Dermott of GD Security Systems. Dermott had been obliging enough to answer all his questions-the ones Gurney had written out-but the information itself did not amount to much. The man had been renting the box for about a year, ever since he’d moved his consulting business from Hartford to Wycherly; there had never been a problem before, certainly no misaddressed letters or checks; he was the only person with access to the box; the names Arybdis, Charybdis, and Mellery meant nothing to him; he had never heard of the institute. Pressed on the question of whether anyone else in his company could have been using the box in some unauthorized way, Dermott had explained that it was impossible, since there wasn’t anyone else in his company. GD Security Systems and Gregory Dermott were one and the same. He was a security consultant to companies with sensitive databases that required protection against hackers. Nothing he said cast any light on the matter of the misdirected check.

Neither had the Internet background searches Gurney had conducted. The sources concurred on the main points: Gregory Dermott had a science degree from M.I.T., a solid reputation as a computer expert, and a blue-clip client roster. Neither he nor GD Security was linked to any lawsuit, judgment, lien, or bad press, past or present. In short, he was a squeaky-clean presence in a squeaky-clean field. Yet someone had, for some still impenetrable reason, appropriated his post office box number. Gurney kept asking himself the same baffling question: Why demand that a check be sent to someone who would almost certainly return it?

It depressed him to keep thinking about it, to keep walking down that dead-end street as if the tenth time he’d find something there that wasn’t there the ninth time. But it was better than thinking about Danny.

The first measurable snow of the season came the evening of the first Friday in November. From a few flakes drifting here and there at dusk, it increased over the next couple of hours, then tapered off, stopping around midnight.

As Gurney was coming to life over his Saturday-morning coffee, the pale disk of the sun was creeping over a