Think of a Number

“Why the hell can’t you understand that?”

“No, David,” she responded evenly. “You were a cop. You’re not a cop now. You don’t have to be there.”

“I’m already here.” In the ensuing silence, his temper subsided like a retreating wave. “It’s all right. I know what I’m doing. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

“David, what is the matter with you? Do you just keep running at the bullets? Running at the bullets? Until one goes through your head? Is that it? Is that the pathetic plan for the rest of our lives together? I just wait, and wait, and wait for you to get killed?” Her voice cracked with such raw emotion on the word killed that he found himself speechless.

It was Madeleine who eventually spoke-so softly he could just make out the words. “What is this really about?”

“What’s it about?” The question hit him from an odd angle. He felt off balance. “I don’t understand the question.”

Her intense silence from a hundred miles away seemed to surround him, press in against him.

“What do you mean?” he asked. He could feel his heart rate rising.

He thought he heard her swallow. He sensed, somehow knew, she was trying to make a decision. When she did answer him, it was with another question, again spoken so softly he barely heard it.

“Is this about Danny?”

He could feel the pounding of his heart in his neck, his head, his hands.

“What? What would it have to do with Danny?” He didn’t want an answer, not now, not when he had so much to do.

“Oh, David,” she said. He could picture her, shaking her head sadly, determined to pursue this most difficult of all subjects. Once Madeleine opened a door, she invariably walked through it.

She took a shaky breath and pressed on. “Before Danny was killed, your job was the biggest part of your life. Afterward, it was the only part. The only part. You’ve done nothing but work for the past fifteen years. Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to make up for something, forget something… solve something.” Her strained inflection made the word sound like the symptom of a disease.

He tried to maintain his footing by holding on to the facts at hand. “I’m going to Wycherly to help capture the man who killed Mark Mellery.” He heard his voice as if it belonged to someone else-someone old, frightened, rigid- someone trying to sound reasonable.

She ignored what he said, following her own train of thought. “I hoped if we opened the box, looked at his little drawings… we could say good-bye to him together. But you don’t say good-bye, do you? You never say good-bye to anything.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he protested. But that wasn’t true. When they’d been about to move from the city up to Walnut Crossing, Madeleine had spent hours saying good-bye. Not only to neighbors but to the place itself, things they were leaving behind, houseplants. It had gotten under his skin. He’d complained about her sentimentality, said talking to inanimate objects was weird, a waste of time, a distraction, that it was only making their departure more difficult. But it was more than that. Her behavior was touching something in him that he didn’t want touched-and now she’d put her finger on it again-the part of him that never wanted to say good-bye, that couldn’t face separation.

“You stuff things out of sight,” she was saying. “But they’re not gone, you haven’t really let go of them. You have to look at them to let go of them. You have to look at Danny’s life to let go of it. But you obviously don’t want to do that. You just want to… what, David? What? Die?” There was a long silence.

“You want to die,” she said. “That’s really it, isn’t it?”

He experienced the kind of emptiness he imagined existed at the eye of a hurricane-an emotion that felt like a vacuum.

“I have a job to do.” It was a banal thing to say, stupid, really. He didn’t know why he bothered to say it.

There was a lengthy silence.

“No,” she said softly, swallowing again. “You don’t have to keep doing this.” Then, barely audibly, despairingly, she added, “Or maybe you do. Maybe I was just hoping.”

He was at a loss for words, a loss for thoughts.

He sat for a long while, his mouth slightly open, breathing rapid, shallow breaths. At some point-he wasn’t sure when-the phone connection was broken. He waited in a kind of vacant chaos for a calming thought, an actionable thought.

What came instead was a sense of absurdity and pathos-the thought that even at the moment when he and Madeleine were emotionally stripped, raw and terrified, they were literally a hundred miles apart, in different states, exposing themselves to empty space, to cell phones.

What also came to mind was what he’d failed to speak about, had failed to reveal to her. He hadn’t said a single word about his postmark stupidity, how it might point the killer to where they lived, how the oversight arose from his own obsessive focus on the investigation. With that thought came a sickening echo, the realization that his similar preoccupation with an investigation fifteen years earlier had been a factor in Danny’s death-maybe the ultimate cause of it. It was remarkable that Madeleine had connected that death with his current obsession. Remarkable and, he had to admit, unnervingly acute.

He felt he had to call her back, admit his mistake-the peril he’d created-warn her. He dialed their number, waited for the welcoming voice. The phone rang, rang, rang, rang. Then the voice he heard was his own recorded message-a little stiff, almost stern, hardly welcoming-then the beep.

“Madeleine? Madeleine are you there? Please pick up if you’re there.” He felt a kind of sinking sickness. He couldn’t think of anything to say that would make sense in a one-minute message, nothing that wouldn’t be likely to cause more damage than it would prevent, nothing that wouldn’t create panic and confusion. All he ended up saying was, “I love you. Be careful. I love you.” Then there was another beep, and once again the connection was broken.

He sat and stared at the dilapidated vegetable stand, aching and confused. He felt like he could sleep for a month, or forever. Forever would be best. But that made no sense. That was the kind of dangerous thinking that caused weary men in the Arctic to lie down in the snow and freeze to death. He must regain his focus. Keep moving. Push himself forward. Bit by bit, his thoughts began to coalesce around the unfinished task awaiting him. There was work to do in Wycherly. A madman to be apprehended. Lives to be saved. Gregory Dermott’s, his own, perhaps even Madeleine’s. He started the car and drove on.

The address to which his GPS finally delivered him belonged to an unremarkable suburban Colonial set well back on an oversize lot on a secondary road with little traffic and no sidewalks. A tall, dense arborvitae hedge provided privacy along the left, rear, and right sides of the property. A chest-high boxwood hedge ran across the front, except for the driveway opening. Police cars were everywhere-more than a dozen, Gurney estimated-pulled up at all angles to the hedge, partially obstructing the road. Most bore the Wycherly PD insignia. Three were unmarked, with portable red flashers atop their dashboards. Notably missing were any Connecticut state police vehicles-but perhaps not surprisingly so. Although it might not be the smartest or most effective approach, he could understand a local department’s wanting to maintain control when the victim was one of their own. As Gurney nosed into a tight available patch of grass at the edge of the asphalt, an enormous young uniformed cop was pointing to a route around the parked cruisers with one hand and with the other urgently motioning him away from where he was trying to stop. Gurney got out of the car and produced his ID as the mammoth officer approached, tense and tight-lipped. His bulging neck muscles, at war with a collar a size and a half too small, seemed to extend up into his cheeks.

He examined the card in Gurney’s wallet for a long minute with increasing incomprehension, finally announcing, “This says New York State.”

“I’m here to see Lieutenant Nardo,” said Gurney.

The cop gave him a stare as hard as the pecs straining his shirt-front, then shrugged. “Inside.”

At the foot of the long driveway on a post the same height as the mailbox was a beige metal sign with black lettering: GD SECURITY SYSTEMS. Gurney ducked under the yellow police tape that seemed to be strung around the entire property. Oddly, it was the coldness of the tape as it brushed against his neck that for the first time that day diverted his attention from his racing thoughts to the weather. It was raw, gray, windless. Patches of snow,