previously melted and refrozen, lay in the shadows at the feet of the boxwood and arborvitae plantings. Along the driveway there were patches of black ice filling shallow depressions in the tarred surface.
Affixed to the center of the front door was a more discreet version of the GD Security Systems sign. Next to the door was a small sticker indicating that the house was protected by Axxon Silent Alarms. As he reached the brick steps of the columned entry porch, the door in front of him opened. It was not a welcoming gesture. In fact, the man who opened it stepped out and closed it behind him. He took only peripheral note of Gurney’s presence as he spoke with loud irritation into a cell phone. He was a compact, athletically built man in his late forties, with a hard face and sharp, angry eyes. He wore a black windbreaker with the word police in large yellow letters across the back.
“Can you hear me now?” He moved off the porch onto the faded, frost-wilted lawn. “Can you hear me now?… Good. I said I need another tech on the scene ASAP… No, that’s no good, I mean I need one right now… Now, before it gets dark. The word is spelled n-o-w. What part of that word don’t you understand?… Good. Thank you. I appreciate that.”
He pushed the disconnect button on the phone and shook his head. “Goddamn idiot.” He looked at Gurney. “Who the hell are you?”
Gurney did not react to the aggressive tone. He understood where it was coming from. There was always a sense of heightened emotion at the scene of a cop killing-a kind of barely controlled tribal rage. Besides, he recognized the voice of the man who’d sent the officer to Dermott’s house-John Nardo.
“I’m Dave Gurney, Lieutenant.”
A lot seemed to go through Nardo’s mind very quickly, most of it negative. All he said was, “What are you here for?”
Such a simple question. He wasn’t sure he knew even a fraction of the answer. He decided to opt for brevity. “He says he wants to kill Dermott and me. Well, Dermott’s here. Now I’m here. All the bait the bastard could want. Maybe he’ll make his move and we can wrap this up.”
“You think so?” Nardo’s tone was full of aimless hostility.
“If you’d like,” said Gurney, “I can bring you up to date on our piece of the case, and you can tell me what you’ve discovered here.”
“What I discovered here? I discovered that the cop I sent to this house at your request is dead. Gary Sissek. Two months away from retirement. I discovered that his head was nearly severed by a broken whiskey bottle. I discovered a pair of bloody boots next to a freaking lawn chair behind that hedge.” He waved a little wildly toward the rear of the house. “Dermott never saw the chair before. His neighbor never saw it before. So where did the freaking thing come from? Did this freaking lunatic bring a lawn chair with him?”
Gurney nodded. “As a matter of fact, the answer is probably yes. It seems to be part of a unique MO. Like the whiskey bottle. Was it by any chance Four Roses?”
Nardo stared at him, blankly at first, as if there were a slight tape delay in the transmission. “Jesus,” he said. “You better come inside.”
The door led into a wide, bare center hall. No furniture, no rugs, no pictures on the walls, just a fire extinguisher and a couple of smoke alarms. At the end of the hall was the rear door-beyond which, Gurney assumed, was the porch where Gregory Dermott that morning had discovered the cop’s body. Indistinct voices outside suggested that the scene-of-crime processing team was still busy in the backyard.
“Where’s Dermott?” Gurney asked.
Nardo raised his thumb toward the ceiling. “Bedroom. Gets stress migraines, and the migraines make him nauseous. He’s not in what you’d call a good mood. Bad enough before the phone call saying he was next, but then… Jesus.”
Gurney had questions he wanted to ask, lots of them, but it seemed better to let Nardo set the pace. He looked around at what he could see of the ground floor of the house. Through a doorway on his right was a large room with white walls and a bare wood floor. Half a dozen computers sat side by side on a long table in the center of the room. Phones, fax machines, printers, scanners, auxiliary hard drives, and other peripherals covered another long table placed against the far wall. Also on the far wall was another fire extinguisher. In lieu of a smoke alarm, there was a built-in sprinkler system. There were only two windows, too small for the space, one in the front and one in the rear, giving it a tunnel-like feeling despite the white paint.
“He runs his computer business from down here and lives upstairs. We’ll use the other room,” said Nardo, indicating a doorway across the hall. Similarly uninviting and purely functional, the room was half the length of the other and had a window at only one end, making it more like a cave than a tunnel. Nardo flipped a wall switch as they entered, and four recessed lights in the ceiling turned the cave into a bright white box containing file cabinets against one wall, a table with two desktop computers against another wall, a table with a coffeemaker and a microwave against a third wall, and an empty square table with two chairs in the middle of the room. This room had both a sprinkler system and a smoke alarm. It reminded Gurney of a cleaner version of the cheerless break room at his last precinct. Nardo sat in one of the chairs and gestured for Gurney to sit in the other. He massaged his temples for a long minute, as if trying to squeeze the tension out of his head. From the look in his eyes, it wasn’t working.
“I don’t buy that ‘bait’ shit,” he said, wrinkling his nose as if the word
Gurney smiled. “It’s partly true.”
“What’s the other part?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You come here to be a freaking hero?”
“I don’t think so. I have a feeling my being here may help.”
“Yeah? What if I don’t share that feeling?”
“It’s your show, Lieutenant. You want me to go home, I’ll go home.”
Nardo gave him another long, cynical stare. In the end he appeared to change his mind, at least tentatively. “The Four Roses bottle is part of the MO?”
Gurney nodded.
Nardo took a deep breath. He looked as if his whole body ached. Or as if the whole world ached. “Okay, Detective. Maybe you better tell me everything you haven’t told me.”
Chapter 48
Gurney talked about the backwards snow prints, the poems, the unnatural voice on the phone, the two unsettling number tricks, the alcoholic backgrounds of the victims, their mental torture, the hostile challenges to the police, the “REDRUM” graffiti on the wall and the “Mr. and Mrs. Scylla” sign-in at The Laurels, the high intelligence and hubris of the killer. He continued to provide details from the three killings he was familiar with until Nardo’s attention span looked like it might be reaching its breaking point. Then he concluded with what he considered most important:
“He wants to prove two things. First, that he has the power to control and punish drunks. Second, that the police are impotent fools. His crimes are intentionally constructed like elaborate games, brain teasers. He’s brilliant, obsessive, meticulous. So far he hasn’t left behind a single inadvertent fingerprint, hair, speck of saliva, clothing fiber, or unplanned footprint. He hasn’t made any mistakes that we’ve discovered. The fact is, we know very little about him, his methods, or his motives that he hasn’t chosen to reveal to us. With one possible exception.”
Nardo raised a weary but curious eyebrow.
“A certain Dr. Holdenfield, who wrote the state-of-the-art study of serial murder, believes he’s reached a critical stage in the process and is about to launch some sort of climactic event.”
Nardo’s jaw muscles rippled. He spoke with fierce restraint. “Which would make my slaughtered friend on the back porch a warm-up act?”
It wasn’t the kind of question one could, or should, answer. The two men sat in silence until a slight sound,
