Think Of a Number (2010) (44 page)

“Before we go down memory lane, you mind addressing the relevance issue?”

“The woman who was attacked was stabbed in the throat.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?” There was a twitch at the corner of Nardo’s mouth.

“Two people have been attacked in this house. Of all the ways that someone could be attacked, it strikes me as a notable coincidence that both of those people were stabbed in the throat.”

“You’re making these things sound the same by the way you say it, but they got zip in common. What the hell does a police officer murdered on a protection assignment today have to do with a domestic disturbance twenty-four freaking years ago?”

Gurney shrugged. “If I knew more about the ‘disturbance,’ maybe I could tell you.”

“Fine. Okay. I’ll tell you what I can tell you, but it’s not much.” Nardo paused, staring down at the table, or more likely into the past. “I wasn’t on duty that night.”

An obvious disclaimer
, thought Gurney.
Why does the story demand a disclaimer?

“So this is pretty much secondhand,” Nardo went on. “As in most domestics, the husband was drunk out of his mind, got into an altercation with his wife, apparently picked up a bottle, whacked her with it, I guess it broke, she got cut, that’s about it.”

Gurney knew damn well that wasn’t
it
. The only question was how to jar the rest of the story loose. One of the unwritten rules of the job was to say as little as possible, and Nardo was carefully obeying the rule. Feeling that there was no time for a subtle approach, Gurney decided to plunge head-on into the barrier.

“Lieutenant, that’s a crock of shit!” he said, looking away with disgust.

“Crock of shit?” Nardo’s voice was pitched menacingly just above a whisper.

“I’m sure what you told me is true. The problem is what’s missing.”

“Maybe what’s missing is none of your freaking business.” Nardo was still sounding tough, but some of the confidence had gone out of the belligerence.

“Look, I’m not just some nosy asshole from another jurisdiction. Gregory Dermott got a phone call this morning threatening my life.
My
life. If there’s any possible way what’s going on here could be
connected to your so-called domestic disturbance, I goddamn well have a right to know about it.”

Nardo cleared his throat and gazed up at the ceiling as if the right words—or an emergency exit—might suddenly appear there.

Gurney added in a softer tone, “You could start by telling me the names of the people involved.”

Nardo gave a little nod, pulled out the chair he’d been standing behind, and sat down. “Jimmy and Felicity Spinks.” He sounded resigned to an unpleasant truth.

“You say the names like you knew them pretty well.”

“Yeah. Well. Anyway …” Somewhere in the house, a phone rang once. Nardo seemed not to hear it. “Anyway, Jimmy used to drink a bit. More than a bit, I guess. Came home drunk one night, got into a fight with Felicity. Like I said, he ended up cutting her pretty bad with a broken bottle. She lost a lot of blood. I didn’t see it, I was off that night, but the guys who were on the call talked about the blood for a week.” Nardo was staring at the table again.

“She survived?”

“What? Yeah, yeah, she survived, but just barely. Brain damage.”

“What happened to her?”

“Happened? I think she was put in some kind of nursing home.”

“What about the husband?”

Nardo hesitated. Gurney couldn’t tell whether he was having a hard time remembering or just didn’t want to talk about it. “Claimed self-defense,” he said with evident distaste. “Ended up getting a plea deal. Sentence reduced to time served. Lost his job. Left town. Social services took their kid. End of story.”

Gurney’s antenna, sensitized by a thousand interrogations, told him there was still something missing. He waited, observing Nardo’s discomfort. In the background he could hear an intermittent voice—probably the voice of whoever had answered the phone—but couldn’t make out the words.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s the big deal about that story, that you didn’t just tell me the whole thing to begin with?”

Nardo looked squarely at Gurney. “Jimmy Spinks was a cop.”

The frisson that swept through Gurney’s body brought with it half a dozen urgent questions, but before he could ask any, a square-jawed woman with a sandy crew cut appeared suddenly at the doorway. She wore jeans and a dark polo shirt. A Glock in a quick-draw holster was strapped under her left arm.

“Sir, we just got a call you need to know about.” An unspoken
immediately
flashed in her eyes.

Looking relieved at the distraction, he gave the newcomer his full attention and waited for her to go on. Instead she glanced uncertainly toward Gurney.

“He’s with us,” said Nardo without pleasure. “Go ahead.”

She gave Gurney a second glance, no friendlier than the first, then advanced to the table and laid a miniature digital phone recorder down in front of Nardo. It was about the size of an iPod.

“It’s all on there, sir.”

He hesitated for a moment, squinting at the device, then pushed a button. The playback began immediately. The quality was excellent.

Gurney recognized the first voice as that of the woman standing in front of him.

“GD Security Systems.”
Apparently she’d been instructed to answer Dermott’s phone as though she were an employee.

The second voice was bizarre—and thoroughly familiar to Gurney from the call he’d listened in on at Mark Mellery’s request. It seemed so long ago. Four deaths had intervened between that call and this one—deaths that had shaken his sense of time. Mark in Peony, Albert Rudden in the Bronx, Richard Kartch in Sotherton
(Richard Kartch
—why did that name always bring with it an uneasy feeling, a feeling of discrepancy?), and Officer Gary Sissek in Wycherly.

There was no mistaking that weirdly shifting pitch and accent.

“If I could hear God, what would He tell me?”
the voice asked with the menacing lilt of a horror-movie villain.

“Excuse me?”
The female cop on the recording sounded as taken aback as any real receptionist might have been.

The voice repeated, more insistently,
“If I could hear God, what would He tell me?”

“I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I think we may have a bad connection. Are you using a cell phone?”

Speaking quickly to Nardo, she interjected some live commentary. “I was just trying to prolong the call, like you said, to keep him talking as long as possible.”

Nardo nodded. The recording went on.

“If I could hear God, what would He tell me?”

“I don’t really understand that, sir. Could you explain what you mean?”

The voice, suddenly booming, announced,
“God would tell me to kill them all!”

“Sir? I’m pretty confused here. Did you want me to write this message down and pass it along to someone?”

There was a sharp laugh, like cellophane crumpling.

“It’s Judgment Day, no more to say. / Dermott be nimble, Gurney be quick. / The cleanser is coming. Tick-tock-tick.”

T
he first to speak was Nardo “That was the whole call?”

“Yes, sir.”

He leaned back in his chair and massaged his temples. “No word yet from Chief Meyers?”

“We keep leaving messages at his hotel desk, sir, and on his cell phone. No word yet.”

“I assume the caller’s number was blocked?”

“Yes, sir.”

“‘Kill them all,’ huh?”

“Yes, sir, those were his words. Do you want to hear the recording again?”

Nardo shook his head. “Who do you think he’s referring to?”

“Sir?”

“‘Kill them all.’ All who?”

The female cop seemed to be at a loss. Nardo looked at Gurney.

“Just a guess, Lieutenant, but I’d say it’s either all the remaining people on his hit list—assuming there are any—or all of us here in the house.”

“And what about ‘the cleanser is coming,’” said Nardo. “Why ‘the cleanser’?”

Gurney shrugged. “I have no idea. Maybe he just likes the word—fits his pathological notion of what he’s doing.”

Nardo’s features wrinkled in an involuntary expression of distaste.
Turning to the female cop, he addressed her for the first time by name. “Pat, I want you outside the house with Big Tommy. Take diagonal corners opposite each other, so together you’ll have every door and window under surveillance. Also, get the word around—I want every officer prepared to converge on this house within one minute of hearing a shot or any kind of disturbance at all. Questions?”

“Are we expecting an armed attack, sir?” She sounded hopeful.

“I wouldn’t say ‘expecting,’ but it’s sure as hell possible.”

“You really think that crazy bastard is still in the area?” There was acetylene fire in her eyes.

“It’s possible. Let Big Tommy know about the perp’s latest call. Stay super alert.”

She nodded and was gone.

Nardo turned grimly to Gurney. “What do you think? Think I ought to call in the cavalry, tell the state cops we got an emergency situation? Or was that phone call a bunch of bullshit?”

“Considering the body count so far, it would be risky to assume it was bullshit.”

“I’m not assuming a freaking thing,” said Nardo, tight-lipped.

The tension in the exchange led to a silence.

It was broken by a hoarse voice calling from upstairs.

“Lieutenant Nardo? Gurney?”

Nardo grimaced as if something were turning sour in his stomach. “Maybe Dermott’s got another recollection he wants to share.” He sank deeper into his chair.

“I’ll look into it,” said Gurney.

He stepped from the room into the hallway. Dermott was standing at his bedroom door at the top of the staircase. He looked impatient, angry, exhausted.

“Could I speak to you … please?” The “please” was not said pleasantly.

Dermott looked too shaky to negotiate the staircase, so Gurney went up. As he did, the thought came to him that this wasn’t really a home, just a place of business with sleeping quarters appended to it. In the city neighborhood where he was raised, it was a common
arrangement—shopkeepers living above their shops, like the wretched deli man whose hatred of life seemed to increase with each new customer, or the mob-connected undertaker with his fat wife and four fat children. Just thinking about it made him queasy.

At the bedroom door, he shoved the feeling aside and tried to decipher the portrait of unease on Dermott’s face.

The man glanced around Gurney and down the stairs. “Is Lieutenant Nardo gone?”

“He’s downstairs. What can I do for you?”

“I heard cars driving away,” said Dermott accusingly.

“They’re not going far.”

Dermott nodded in an unsatisfied way. He obviously had something on his mind but seemed in no rush to get to the point. Gurney took the opportunity to pursue a few questions of his own.

“Mr. Dermott, what do you do for a living?”

“What?” He sounded both baffled and annoyed.

“Exactly what sort of work do you do?”

“My work? Security. I believe we had this conversation before.”

“In a general way,” said Gurney, smiling. “Perhaps you could give me some details.”

Dermott’s expressive sigh suggested that he viewed the request as an irritating waste of his time. “Look,” he said, “I need to sit down.” He returned to his armchair, settling into it gingerly. “What kind of details?”

“The name of your company is GD Security Systems. What sort of ‘security’ do these ‘systems’ provide, and for whom?”

After another loud sigh, he said, “I help companies protect confidential information.”

“And this help comes in what form?”

“Database-protection applications, firewalls, limited-access protocols, ID-verification systems—those categories would cover most projects we handle.”

“We?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You referred to projects ‘we’ handle.”

“That’s not meant
literally,”
said Dermott dismissively. “It’s just a corporate expression.”

“Makes GD Security Systems seem a bit bigger than it is?”

“That’s not the intention, I assure you. My clients love the fact that I do the work myself.”

Gurney nodded as though he were impressed. “I can see how that would be a plus. Who are these clients?”

“Clients for whom confidentiality is a major issue.”

Gurney smiled innocently at Dermott’s curt tone. “I’m not asking you to reveal any secrets. I’m just wondering what sort of businesses they’re in.”

“Businesses whose client databases entail sensitive privacy issues.”

“Such as?”

“Personal information.”

“What sort of personal information?”

Dermott looked like he was evaluating the contractual risks he might be incurring by going any further. “The sort of information collected by insurance companies, financial-service companies, HMOs.”

“Medical data?”

“A great deal of it, yes.”

“Treatment data?”

“To the extent that it is captured in the basic medical coding system. What’s the point of this?”

“Suppose you were a hacker who wanted to access a very large medical database—how would you go about it?”

“That’s not an answerable question.”

“Why is that?”

Dermott closed his eyes in a way that conveyed frustration. “Too many variables.”

“Like what?”

“Like what?” Dermott repeated the question as though it were an embodiment of pure stupidity. After a moment he went on with his eyes still closed. “The hacker’s goal, the level of expertise, his
familiarity with the data format, the database structure itself, the access protocol, the redundancy of the firewall system, and about a dozen other factors that I doubt you have the technical background to understand.”

“I’m sure you’re right about that,” said Gurney mildly. “But let’s say, just for example, that a skilled hacker was trying to compile a list of people who’d been treated for a particular illness …”

Dermott raised his hands in exasperation, but Gurney pressed on. “How difficult would that be?”