Think of a Number

Madeleine yawned. “I think it’s silly, and the person who did it is crazy.”

“But how did he do it?”

“It’s like the number trick.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what difference does it make how he did it?”

“Tell me more,” said Gurney, his curiosity slightly greater than his irritation.

“How doesn’t matter. The question is why, and the answer is obvious.”

“And the obvious answer is…?”

“He wants to prove that you’re a pack of idiots.”

Her answer put Gurney in two emotional places at once-pleased that she agreed with him that the police were targets in the case, but not so pleased with how much emphasis she put on idiots.

“Maybe he walked backwards,” she suggested with a shrug. “Maybe where you think the footprints went is where they came from, and where you think they came from is where they went.”

It was among the possibilities that Gurney had considered and dismissed. “There are two problems. First, it just moves the question of how the prints could stop in the middle of nowhere to how they could start in the middle of nowhere. Second, the tracks are very evenly spaced. It’s hard to imagine someone walking backwards half a mile through the woods without stumbling even once.”

Then it occurred to him that even the smallest sign of interest from Madeleine was something he’d like to encourage, so he added warmly, “But actually, it’s a pretty interesting thought-so please keep thinking.”

At two o’clock the following morning, gazing at the rectangle of his bedroom window, faintly illuminated by a quarter moon behind a cloud, Gurney was the one who was still thinking-and still pondering Madeleine’s observation that the direction in which the footprints pointed and the direction in which they had actually traveled were separate matters. That was true, but how did it help in the interpretation of the data? Even if someone could walk that far backwards over uneven terrain without a single misstep, which no one could, that hypothesis only served to turn the inexplicable ending of the trail into an inexplicable beginning.

Or did it?

Suppose…

But that would be unlikely. Still, just suppose for the moment…

To quote Sherlock Holmes, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

“Madeleine?”

“Hmm?”

“Sorry to wake you. It’s important.”

Her answer was a long sigh.

“Are you awake?”

“I am now.”

“Listen. Suppose the killer enters the property not from the main road but from the back road. Suppose he arrives several hours before the crime-in fact, just before it starts to snow. Suppose he walks into the little pine grove from the back road with his little lawn chair and other paraphernalia, puts on his Tyvek jumpsuit and his latex gloves, and waits.”

“In the woods?”

“In the pine grove, at the spot where we thought the footprints ended. He sits there and waits until the snow stops-a little after midnight. Then he gets up, takes his chair, whiskey bottle, gun, and mini tape player with the animal screeches, and walks the half mile to the house. On the way he calls Mellery on his cell phone to make sure he’s awake enough to hear the animal noises-”

“Wait a minute. I thought you said he couldn’t walk backwards through the woods.”

“He didn’t. He didn’t have to. You were right to separate the toe-heel orientation of the footprints from their actual direction-but we need to make one more separation. Suppose the soles of the shoes were separated from the uppers.”

“How?”

“All the killer had to do was cut the soles off one pair of boots and glue them on another pair-backwards. Then he could walk forward easily and leave a neat trail of impressions behind him that seemed to be going in the direction he was coming from.”

“And the lawn chair?”

“He takes it to the patio. Maybe lays his various items on it while he wraps the goose-down parka around his gun as a partial silencer. The chair marks could easily be obscured by his own footprints, so no one would see them later. Then he plays his tape of the screeching animals to bring Mellery to the back door. There are variations in exactly how all this could be done, but the bottom line is he gets Mellery out onto the patio at gunpoint and shoots him. When Mellery goes down, the killer takes the broken bottle and stabs him repeatedly. Then he tosses the bottle back toward the footprints he made on his way to the patio-footprints that, of course, point away from the patio.”

“Why not just leave it by the body-or take it with him?”

“He didn’t take it because he wanted us to find it. The whiskey bottle is part of the game, part of what this whole thing is about. And it would be my guess that he threw it alongside the seemingly departing footprints to put the icing on the cake of that particular little deception.”

“That’s a pretty subtle detail.”

“Like the subtle detail of leaving a pair of boots at what seemed to be the end of the trail-but, of course, he left them there as he was starting out.”

“So they weren’t the boots that made the tracks?”

“No, but we already knew that. There’s a tech at the BCI lab who found a tiny difference between the tread of one of the boots and the imprints left in the snow. At first it made no sense. But it fits this revised version of the facts-perfectly.”

Madeleine said nothing for a few moments, but he could almost feel her mind absorbing, evaluating, testing the new scenario for weak points.

“So after he tosses the bottle, what then?”

“Then he goes from the patio to the back of the barn, sets the lawn chair there, and tosses a handful of cigarette butts on the ground in front of it to make it look like he’d been sitting there before the murder. He takes off the Tyvek suit and latex gloves, puts his parka on, walks around the far side of barn-leaving those goddamn backwards footprints-heads out onto Filchers Brook Road, which the town has plowed, so no prints are left there, and walks to his car on Thornbush Lane, or down to the village, or wherever.”

“Did the Peony police see anyone when they were on their way up the road?”

“Apparently not, but he could easily have stepped into the woods, or…” He paused to consider the options.

“Or…?”

“It’s not the most likely possibility, but I’ve been told there’s a bed-and-breakfast place on the mountain that BCI was supposed to be checking. It sounds bizarre after nearly hacking his victim’s head off, but our homicidal maniac may simply have strolled back to a cozy little B &B.”

They lay silently side by side in the dark for several long minutes, Gurney’s mind racing back and forth over his reconstruction of the crime like a man who has just launched a homebuilt boat and is checking it intently for possible leaks. When he was confident there were no major holes, he asked Madeleine what she thought.

“The perfect adversary,” she said.

“What?”

“The perfect adversary.”

“Meaning?”

“You love puzzles. So does he. A marriage made in heaven.”

“Or hell?”

“Whichever. By the way, there’s something wrong with those notes.”

“Wrong with… what?”