George Stark’s call to the Beaumont home comes under police and federal surveillance, but it does not make him easier to explain. He announces that his killings are over and denies, in effect, the identity Thad already recognizes. The exchange leaves the authorities with a technically successful recording and Thad with the conviction that the caller is Stark—an unresolved collision between forensic evidence and lived knowledge.

Background and setting

The call follows a week of violence and arrives shortly after state police technicians finish installing monitoring equipment on the Beaumonts’ telephones. The agents and investigators are still at the house; Alan Pangborn has stepped away to speak with George Hume. The surveillance itself is less modern than its exterior suggests: beneath the Beaumonts’ Merlin phones, the technicians find Ludlow’s rotary-dial system. Stark calls less than five minutes after they declare the equipment ready, making the first monitored conversation an immediate test of what the machinery can establish.

The call also lands in a home where the official investigation has not caught up with Thad’s understanding. Federal agents have been questioning the household, and police protection remains in place, but Thad expects Stark to wait because he knows the family is home. When Thad takes the telephone and challenges the caller, the other people in the room turn toward him. For the investigators, the call is an unexpected intrusion into a police operation; for Thad and Liz, it confirms the danger they have been living with.

The call and Stark’s claim

Stark says that the matter is over and claims to have killed his last victim that day. He identifies her as a young woman who had worked at Darwin Press for the head of the accounting department and says she had first set Clawson’s coffee percolating. He predicts that police will find her at a place on Second Avenue in downtown New York, and describes leaving part of her on the floor and the rest on the kitchen table. His announcement does not offer a confession to the investigators in any useful, straightforward form; instead, Stark uses the call to report another killing, claim the spree has ended, and unsettle Thad by speaking as though he has acted on Thad’s behalf.

Stark presents himself as having taken revenge for Thad, casting Thad as too timid to do it himself. Thad rejects that framing. He knows Stark is lying about not being the caller, and understands that Stark is exploiting the authorities’ likely interpretation: they can hear the call, but they are predisposed to think Thad is delusional if he says the voice belongs to a separate, embodied George Stark. In Thad’s calculation, a claim that he has finally understood the situation could reassure the authorities and eventually weaken the protection around his family. The threat therefore operates on two levels: Stark taunts Thad directly while manipulating how the people listening will interpret Thad’s response.

Thad’s response and the unresolved identity

Thad tells the caller that he hears the birds, though he does not yet know what they mean. He begins to threaten that he will understand them, but cannot say what will follow. Stark cuts off that unfinished challenge by insisting that, whatever Thad means, it no longer matters because the matter is over. The abrupt ending leaves Thad without an answer or a plan, and the narrative renders the separation from the caller as a return from their imagined meeting place to his own body.

Once the call ends, the technicians celebrate that their equipment worked. Thad tells Liz that the caller was Stark, despite the caller’s denial. She embraces him and says she knows. Their exchange establishes a private recognition that the monitored conversation has not secured publicly: the equipment has captured a voice, but Thad and Liz understand the call as contact with the same adversary who has been threatening them.

Consequences and significance

The call makes the contrast between technical success and interpretive certainty central to the scene. The wiremen can confirm that the monitoring system functioned, yet that result alone cannot establish the caller’s identity as Thad understands it. The federal agents are present as witnesses, but their presence does not immediately make them allies in his account. The event thus extends the story’s recurring conflict between physical evidence and an explanation that conventional investigation cannot comfortably accept.

The wider investigation has already placed Thad under suspicion through fingerprints connected with Homer Gamache’s murder. Thad had challenged the logic of that evidence by asking whether the prints met Maine’s six-point admissibility rule, while his sarcastic reconstruction of an imagined twin exposed how strained an ordinary explanation could become. Against that background, Stark’s telephone denial is another contest over which account will be believed: the recorded voice and official assumptions, or Thad’s recognition of a real adversary. Later, the voiceprint results are described as astonishing, further complicating the evidence without resolving the meaning of the call in the moment.

Stark’s claim that the killings are over proves an unstable reprieve rather than a settled resolution. The conversation gives Thad and Liz a moment of mutual recognition, but leaves the danger, the investigation, and the question of how Stark can be heard yet denied by those around Thad intact. The call matters not because it ends the conflict, but because it exposes the gap between recording a threat and understanding what is making it.