“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?”
“I think I see a small round hole in the corner of that ceiling above the refrigerator. Any of your people comment on that?”
Gowacki followed Gurney’s gaze to the spot. “What are you telling me here?”
“That Kartch may have been shot first, then stabbed.”
“And the footprints actually go in the opposite direction?”
“Right.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re saying the killer comes in the back door, shoots Richie in the throat, Richie goes down, then the killer stabs him a dozen times in the throat like he’s tenderizing a fucking steak?”
“That’s pretty much what happened in Peony.”
“But the footprints…”
“The footprints could have been made by attaching a second sole to the boot-backwards-to make it look like he came in the front and went out the back, when in fact he came in the back and went out the front.”
“Shit, that’s ridiculous! What the hell’s he playing at?”
“That’s the word for it.”
“What?”
“
Gowacki gave Gurney a slow, assessing look. “You see this guy pretty vividly.”
Gurney smiled, stepping around the body to get to a heap of papers on the kitchen countertop. “You mean I sound a little intense?”
“Not for me to say. We don’t get a lot of murders in Sotherton. Even those, and we only get one maybe every five years, they’re the kind that plead down to manslaughter. They tend to involve baseball bats and tire irons in the parking lots of bars. Nothing planned. Definitely nothing playful.”
Gurney grunted in sympathy. He’d seen more than his share of unsophisticated mayhem.
“That’s mostly crap,” said Gowacki, nodding toward the pile of junk mail that Gurney was gingerly poking through.
He was about to agree when, at the very bottom of the disorganized heap of
“You find something?” asked Gowacki.
“You might want to put this in an evidence bag,” said Gurney, taking the envelope by its corner and moving it to a clear space on the countertop. “Our killer likes to communicate with his victims.”
“There’s more upstairs.”
Gurney and Gowacki turned to the source of the new voice-a large young man standing in the doorway on the opposite side of the kitchen.
“Underneath a bunch of porno magazines on the table by his bed-there’s three of them envelopes with red writing on them.”
“Guess I ought to go up, take a look,” said Gowacki with the reluctance of a man stocky enough to think twice about a flight of stairs. “Bobby, this here is Detective Gurney from Delaware County, New York.”
“Bob Muffit,” said the young man, extending his hand nervously to Gurney, keeping his eyes averted from the body on the floor.
The upstairs had the same half-done and half-abandoned appearance as the rest of the house. The landing provided access to four doors. Muffit led the way into the one on the right. Even by the shabby standard already established, it was a wreck. On those portions of the carpet not covered by dirty clothes or empty beer cans, Gurney observed what appeared to be dried vomit stains. The air was sour, sweaty. The blinds were closed. The light came from the sole working bulb in a three-bulb fixture in the middle of the ceiling.
Gowacki made his way to the table by the disarranged bed. Next to a pile of porno magazines were three envelopes with red handwriting, and next to them a personal check. Gowacki did not touch anything directly but slid the four items onto a magazine called
“Let’s go downstairs and see what we have here,” he said.
The three men retraced their steps to the kitchen, where Gowacki deposited the envelopes and the check on the breakfast table. With a pen and a tweezers from his shirt pocket, he lifted back the ripped flap of each envelope and extracted the contents. The three envelopes held poems that looked identical, down to their nun-like penmanship, to the corresponding poems received by Mellery.
Gurney’s first glance fell on the lines
The item that held his attention the longest, however, was the check. It was made out to “X. Arybdis,” and it was signed “R. Kartch.” It was evidently the check returned by Gregory Dermott to Kartch uncashed. It was made out for the same amount as Mellery’s and Rudden’s-$289.87. The name and address “
Perhaps it was just that same peculiar experience he always had when he looked at the printed name of a deceased person. It was as though the name itself had lost the breath of life, had become smaller, cut loose from that which had given it stature. It was strange, he reflected, how you can believe you have come to terms with death, even believe that its presence no longer has much effect on you, that it is just part of your profession. Then it comes at you in such a weird way-in the unsettling, shrunken quality of a dead man’s name. No matter how hard one tries to ignore it, death finds a way to be noticed. It seeps into your feelings like water through a basement wall.
Perhaps that’s why the name R. Kartch seemed odd to him. Or was there another reason?
Chapter 40
Mark Mellery. Albert Rudden. Richard Kartch. Three men. Targeted, mentally tortured, shot, and so forcibly and repeatedly stabbed that their heads were nearly hacked off. What had they done, separately or in concert, to engender such a macabre revenge?
Or was it revenge at all? Might the suggestion of revenge conveyed by the notes be-as Rodriguez had once proposed-a smoke screen to hide a more practical motive?
Anything was still possible.
It was nearly dawn when Gurney began his return drive to Walnut Crossing, and the air was raw with the scent of snow. He’d entered that strained state of consciousness in which a deep weariness struggles with an agitated wakefulness. Thoughts and pictures cascade through the brain without progress or logic.
One such image was the dead man’s check, the name R. Kartch, something lurking beneath an inaccessible trapdoor of memory, something not quite right. Like a faint star, it eluded a direct search and might appear in his peripheral vision once he stopped looking for it.
He made an effort to focus on other aspects of the case, but his mind refused to proceed in an orderly way. Instead, he saw the half-dried pool of blood across Kartch’s kitchen floor, the far edge spreading into the shadow of the rickety table. He stared hard at the highway ahead, trying to exorcise the image but succeeding only in replacing it with the bloodstain of similar size on Mark Mellery’s stone patio-which in turn gave way to an image of Mellery in an Adirondack chair, leaning forward, asking for protection, deliverance.
