Peter Pan Must Die

Chapter 1. The Shadow of Death..

In the rural Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, August was an unstable month, lurching back and forth between the bright glories of July and the gray squalls of the long winter to come. It was a month that could erode one’s sense of time and place. It seemed to feed Dave Gurney’s confusion over where he was in his life—a confusion that had begun with his retirement from the NYPD three years earlier, after twenty-five years on the job, and had intensified when he and Madeleine had moved out to the country from the city where they’d both been born, raised, educated, and employed.

At that moment, a cloudy late afternoon in the first week of August, with low thunder grumbling in the distance, they were climbing Barrow Hill, following the remnant of a dirt road that linked three small bluestone quarries, long abandoned and full of wild raspberry brambles. He was trudging along behind Madeleine as she headed for the low boulder where they normally stopped to rest, doing his best to take her frequent advice: Look around you. You’re in a beautiful place. Just relax and absorb it.

“Is that a tarn?” she asked.

Gurney blinked. “What?”

“That.” She inclined her head toward the deep, still pool that filled the broad hollow left years ago by the removal of the bluestone. Roughly round, it stretched from where they sat by the trail to a row of water-loving willow trees on the far side—a glassy expanse perhaps two hundred feet across that mirrored the weeping branches of the trees so precisely, the effect resembled trick photography.

“A tarn?”

“I was reading a wonderful book about hiking in the Scottish Highlands,” she said earnestly, “and the writer was forever coming upon ‘tarns.’ I got the impression that it was some kind of rocky pond.”

“Hmm.”

His nonresponse led to a long silence, broken finally by Madeleine. “See down there? That’s where I was thinking we should build the chicken coop, right by the asparagus patch.”

Gurney had been staring bleakly at the reflection of the willows. Now he followed her line of sight down a gentle slope through an opening in the woods formed by an abandoned logging road.

One reason that the boulder by the old quarry had become their habitual stopping place was that it was the only point on the trail from which their property was visible—the old farmhouse, the garden beds, the overgrown apple trees, the pond, the recently rebuilt barn, the surrounding hillside pastures (long untended and full this time of year with milkweed and black-eyed Susans), the part of the pasture by the house that they mowed and called a lawn, the swath up through the low pasture that they mowed and called a driveway. Madeleine, perched now on the boulder, always seemed pleased at this uniquely framed view of it all.

Gurney didn’t feel the same. Madeleine had discovered the spot herself shortly after they’d moved in, and from the first time she had shown it to him all he could think of was that it was the ideal location for a sniper to target someone entering or leaving their house. (He had the good sense not to mention this to her. She did work three days a week in the local psychiatric clinic, and he didn’t want her thinking he was in need of treatment for paranoia.)

The need to build a chicken coop, its projected size and appearance, and the site where it should be built had become daily topics of conversation—obviously exciting to her, mildly irritating to him. They had acquired four chickens in late May at Madeleine’s urging and had been housing them in the barn—but the idea of moving them up to new quarters by the house had taken hold.

“We could build a nice little coop with an enclosed run between the asparagus patch and the apple tree,” she said brightly, “so on hot days they’d have shade.”

“Right.” The word came out more wearily than he’d intended.

The conversation might have deteriorated from there had Madeleine’s attention not been diverted. She tilted her head.

“What is it?” asked Gurney.

“Listen.”

He waited—not an unusual experience. His hearing was normal, but Madeleine’s was extraordinary. A few seconds later, as the breeze rustling the foliage subsided, he heard something in the distance, somewhere down the hill, perhaps on the town road that dead-ended into the low end of their pasture “driveway.” As it grew louder, he recognized the distinctive growl of an oversized, undermuffled V8.

He knew someone who drove an old muscle car that sounded exactly like that—a partially restored red 1970 Pontiac GTO—someone for whom that brash exhaust note was the perfect introduction.

Jack Hardwick.

He felt his jaw tightening at the prospect of a visit from the detective with whom he had such a bizarre history of near-death experiences, professional successes, and personality clashes. Not that he hadn’t been anticipating the visit. In fact, he’d known it was coming from the moment he’d heard about the man’s forced departure from the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. And he realized that the tension he felt now had a lot to do with what had happened prior to that departure. A serious debt had been incurred, and some kind of payment would have to be made.

A formation of low dark clouds was moving quickly over the far ridge as though retreating from the violent sound of the red car—now visible from where Gurney was sitting—as it made its way up the mowed pasture swath to the farmhouse. He was briefly tempted to stay on the hill until Hardwick left, but he knew that would accomplish nothing—only extend the period of discomfort before the inevitable meeting. With a small grunt of determination he got up from his place on the boulder.

“Were you expecting him?” asked Madeleine.

Gurney glanced down the slope. The GTO came to a stop by his own dusty Outback in the little makeshift parking area by the side of the house. The big Pontiac engine roared louder for a couple of seconds as it was revved prior to being shut down.

“I was expecting him in a general way,” said Gurney, “not necessarily today.”

“Do you want to see him?”

“I’d say he wants to see me, and I’d like to get it over with.”

Madeleine nodded and stood up, pushing her short brown hair back from her forehead.

As they turned to start down the trail, the mirror surface of the quarry pool shivered under a sudden breeze, dissolving the inverted image of the willows and the sky into thousands of unrecognizable splinters of green and gray.

If Gurney were the kind of man who believed in omens, he might have seen the shattered image as a sign of the destruction to come.

Chapter 2. The Scum of the Earth

When he was halfway down Barrow Hill, deeper in the woods, out of sight of the house now, Gurney’s phone rang. He recognized Hardwick’s number.

“Hello, Jack.”

“Both your cars are here, but no one’s coming to the door. You hiding in the basement?”

“I’m very well, thanks. And how are you?”

“Where the hell are you?”

“Coming down through the cherry copse, quarter mile to your west.”

“Hillside with all the yellow leaf blight?”

Hardwick had a way of getting under Gurney’s skin. It wasn’t just the little jabs themselves, or the pleasure the man seemed to take in delivering them; it was the uncanny echo of a voice from Gurney’s childhood—the relentlessly sardonic voice of his father.

“Right, the one with the blight. What can I do for you, Jack?”

Hardwick cleared his throat with disgusting enthusiasm. “Question is, what can we do for each other? Tit for tat, tat for tit. By the way, I noticed your door is unlocked. Mind if I wait for you in the house? Too many fucking flies out here.”

Hardwick, a solidly built man with a ruddy complexion, a prematurely gray crew cut, and the disconcertingly blue eyes of an Alaskan sled dog, was standing in the center of the big open room that composed half of the lower floor. At one end was a country kitchen. A round pine breakfast table was tucked in a nook next to a pair of French doors. At the far end was a sitting area, arranged around a massive fieldstone fireplace and a separate woodstove. In the middle was a plain Shaker-style dining table and half a dozen ladder-back chairs.

The first thing that struck Gurney as he entered the room was that something in Hardwick’s expression was slightly off.

Even the leer in his opening question—“And where might the delectable Madeleine be?”—seemed oddly forced.

“I’m right here,” she said, coming in from the mudroom and heading for the sink island with a half-welcoming, half-anxious smile. She was carrying a handful of asterlike wildflowers she’d picked on their way down from Barrow Hill. She laid them by the dish drainer and looked at Gurney. “I’m leaving these here. I’ll find a vase for them later. I need to go upstairs and practice for a while.”

As her footsteps receded to the upper floor, Hardwick grinned and whispered, “Practice makes perfect. So what’s she practicing?”

“Cello.”

“Ah. Of course. You know why people love the cello so much?”

“Because it has a nice sound?”

“Ah, Davey boy, now there’s the kind of direct no-nonsense insight you’re famous for.” Hardwick licked his lips. “But do you know what it is exactly that makes that particular sound sound nice?”

“Why don’t you just tell me, Jack?”

“And deprive you of a fascinating little puzzle to solve?” He shook his head with theatrical resoluteness. “Wouldn’t dream of it. A genius like you needs challenges. Otherwise he goes to pot.”

As Gurney stared at Hardwick, it dawned on him what was wrong, what was off. Underneath the prickly banter, which was the man’s customary approach to the world, there seemed to be a not-so-customary tension. Edginess was part of Hardwick’s personality, but what Gurney detected in his expression now was more nervousness than edginess. It made him wonder what was coming. The man’s unsettledness was contagious.

It didn’t help that Madeleine had chosen a rather jittery piece for her cello practice.

Hardwick began walking around the long room, touching the backs of chairs, corners of tables, potted plants, decorative bowls and bottles and candlesticks that Madeleine had picked up in the area’s inexpensive antique shops. “Love this place! Just love it! It’s so fucking authentic!” He stopped and ran his hands back through his bristly crew cut. “You know what I mean?”

“That it’s fucking authentic?”

“The whole deal here—it’s pure country. Look at that cast-iron woodstove, made in America, as American as fucking pancakes. Look at you—lean, all-American, Robert Redford kind of guy. Look at them wide floorboards, straight and honest as the trees they came from.”

“Those.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Those wide floorboards. Not them wide floorboards.”

Hardwick stopped pacing. “The fuck are you talking about?”

“Is there a point to this visit?”

Hardwick grimaced. “Ah, Davey, Davey—all business, as usual. You dismiss my attempt at a few pleasantries, my efforts at social lubrication, a few friendly compliments on the puritan simplicity of your home decor—”

“Jack …”

“Right. Fuck the pleasantries. Where do we sit?”

Gurney motioned to the small round table by the French doors.

When they were seated across from each other, Gurney leaned back and waited.

Hardwick closed his eyes, massaging his face roughly with his hands as though trying to eradicate some deep itching under the skin. Then he folded his hands on the table and began speaking. “You ask if there’s a point to my visit. Yes, there is. An opportunity. You know that thing from Julius Caesar about a tide in the affairs of men?”

“What about it?”

Hardwick leaned forward, as though the words contained life’s ultimate secret. The chronic mockery had disappeared from his voice. “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

“You memorized that just for me?”

“Learned it in school. Always stayed with me.”

“Never heard you mention it before.”

“The right situation never came up before.”

“But now …?”

A tic yanked at the corner of Hardwick’s mouth. “Now the right moment has arrived.”

“A tide in your affairs—?”

“In our affairs.”

“Yours and mine?”

“Exactly.”

Gurney said nothing for a while, just gazed at the excited, anxious face across from him. He found himself far more uncomfortable with this suddenly raw and earnest version of Jack Hardwick than he’d ever been with the perennial cynic.

For a few moments the only sound in the house was the sharp-edged melody of an early-twentieth-century cello piece that Madeleine had been struggling with for the past week.

Almost imperceptibly, Hardwick’s mouth twitched again.

Seeing this a second time, and waiting for it to happen a third time, was getting to Gurney. Because, to him, it suggested that the payment about to be demanded for the debt incurred months earlier was going to be substantial.

“You plan on telling me what you’re talking about?”

“What I’m talking about is the Spalter murder case.” Hardwick enunciated those last three words with a peculiar combination of importance and contempt. His eyes were fixed on Gurney’s, as if searching for the appropriate reaction.

Gurney frowned. “The woman who shot her rich politician husband up in Long Falls?” It had been a sensational news item earlier in the year.

“That’s the one.”

“As I recall, that was a slam-dunk conviction. The lady was buried under an avalanche of evidence and prosecution witnesses. Not to mention that special little extra—her husband, Carl, dying during the trial.”

“That’s the one.”

The details began coming back to him. “She shot him in the cemetery as he was standing at his mother’s grave, right? The bullet paralyzed him, turned him into a vegetable.”

Hardwick nodded. “A vegetable in a wheelchair. The vegetable the prosecution wheeled into court every day. God-awful sight. Constant reminder for the jury while his wife was being tried for doing it to him. Until, of course, he died halfway through the trial and they had to stop wheeling him in. They went on with the trial—just switched the charge from attempted murder to murder.”

“Spalter was a wealthy real estate guy, right? Had just announced a third-party run for governor?”

“Yep.”

“Anticrime. Anti-mob. Ballsy slogan. ‘Time to get rid of the scum of the earth.’ Or something like that.”

Hardwick leaned forward. “Those were the precise words, Davey boy. In every speech he managed to talk about ‘the scum of the earth.’ Every goddamn time. ‘The scum of the earth have risen to the top of our nation’s cesspool of political corruption.’ The scum of the earth this, the scum of the earth that. Carl liked to stay on message.”

Gurney nodded. “I seem to recall that the wife was having an affair, and that she was afraid he might divorce her, which would end up costing her millions, unless he should happen to die before he changed his will.”

“You got it.” Hardwick smiled.

“I got it?” Gurney looked incredulous. “This is the high-tide opportunity you were talking about? The Spalter case? In the event you hadn’t noticed, the Spalter case is done, closed, over. If memory serves, Kay Spalter is doing twenty-five to life in max security at Bedford Hills.”

“All true,” said Hardwick.

“So what the hell are we talking about?”

Hardwick indulged in a long, slow, humorless smile—the kind of dramatic pause he was fond of and Gurney hated. “We’re talking about the fact that … the lady was framed. The case against her was total bullshit, start to finish. Pure … unadulterated … bullshit.” Again, at the corner of the smile, the tic. “Bottom line, we’re talking about getting the lady’s conviction overturned.”

“How do you know the case was bullshit?”

“She got screwed by a dirty cop.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know things. Also, people tell me things. The dirty cop has enemies—with good reason. He’s not dirty, he’s filthy. The ultimate piece of shit.” Now there was a new fierceness in Hardwick’s eyes.

“Okay. Let’s say she was framed by a dirty cop. Let’s even go so far as to say she was innocent. What’s that got to do with you? Or me?”

“Besides the minor issue of justice?”

“That look in your eyes has nothing to do with justice.”

“Sure it does. It has everything to do with justice. The organization fucked me. So I’m going to fuck the organization. Honestly, legally, and totally on the side of justice. They forced me out because they always wanted to. I got a little sloppy about a few files on the Good Shepherd case that I passed along to you, bureaucratic bullshit, and that gave the scumbags their excuse.”

Gurney nodded. He’d been wondering if the debt would be mentioned—the benefit delivered to Gurney, the career-ending expense paid by Hardwick. Now he didn’t have to wonder anymore.

Hardwick went on. “So now I’m entering the PI business. Unemployed detective for hire. And my first client is going to be Kay Spalter, through the lawyer who’ll be handling her appeal. So my first victory’s gonna be a very big one.”

Gurney paused, thought about what he’d just heard. “And me?”

“What?”

“You said this was an opportunity for both of us.”

“And that’s exactly what it is. For you, it could be the case of a fucking lifetime. Get into it, and tear it to pieces, put it back together the right way. The Spalter case was the crime of the decade, followed by the frame of the century. You get to figure it out, set it straight, and kick some nasty bastards in the balls along the way.”

“You didn’t drive all the way over here today just to give me an opportunity to kick bad guys in the balls. Why do you want me involved in this?”

Hardwick shrugged, took a deep breath. “Plenty of reasons.”

“And the biggest would be …?”

For the first time it looked like he was having trouble getting the words out. “To help turn the key another quarter inch and lock up the deal.”

“There’s no deal yet? I thought you said Kay Spalter was your client.”

“I said she’s going to be my client. Some legal details need to be signed off on first.”

“Details?”

“Believe me, everything’s lined up. Just a matter of pushing the right buttons.”

Gurney saw the tic again and felt his own jaw muscles tightening.

Hardwick went on quickly. “Kay Spalter was represented by a court-appointed asshole who’s still technically her attorney, which weakens an otherwise powerful set of arguments for having the conviction reversed. One potential bullet in the appeal gun would be incompetent representation, but the current guy can’t really make that argument. You can’t say to the judge, ‘You have to free my client because I’m an asshole.’ Someone else has to call you an asshole. Law of the land. So, bottom line—”

Gurney broke in. “Wait a second. There’s got to be a ton of money in that family. How did she end up with a court-appointed—?”

“There is a ton of money. Problem is, it was all in Carl’s name. He controlled everything. Tells you something about the kind of guy he was. Kay lived like a very rich lady—without actually having a cent to her name. Technically, she’s indigent. And she got assigned the kind of attorney indigents usually get. Not to mention a tight budget for defense out-of-pockets. So, as I was saying: Bottom line, she needs new representation. And I have the perfect man all lined up, sharpening his fangs. Smart, vicious, unprincipled fucker—always hungry. She just needs to sign a couple of things to make the switch official.”

Gurney wondered if he was hearing right. “You expect me to sell her that idea?”

“No. Absolutely not. No selling required. I’d just like you to be part of the equation.”

“What part?”

“Hotshot homicide detective from the big city. Successful murder investigations and decorations up the kazoo. Man who turned the Good Shepherd case inside out and embarrassed the shit out of all the fuckheads.”

“You’re saying you want me to play the role of a bright, shiny front man for you and this ‘vicious, unprincipled fucker’ of yours?”

“He’s not really unprincipled. Just … aggressive. Knows how to use his elbows. And no, you wouldn’t just be a ‘front man’ for anyone. You’d be a player. Part of the team. Part of the reason Kay Spalter should hire us to reinvestigate the case, engineer her appeal, and get her bullshit conviction reversed.”

Gurney shook his head. “I’m not following this at all. If there wasn’t any money for a hotshot attorney to begin with, how come there is now?”

“To begin with, looking at the surface strength of the prosecution’s case, there wasn’t much hope that Kay would prevail. And if she couldn’t prevail, there’d be no way for her to pay a significant legal bill.”

“But now—?”

“But now the situation is different. You, me, and Lex Bincher are going to make sure of that. Believe me, she will prevail, and the bad guys will bite the dust. And once she prevails, she will be entitled to inherit a huge chunk of cash as Carl’s primary beneficiary.”

“Meaning this Bincher guy is working on a contingency fee in a criminal case? Isn’t that semi-illegal, or at least unethical?”

“Don’t sweat it. There’s no actual contingency clause in the agreement she’ll sign. I guess you could say that Lex getting paid will sort of depend on the success of the appeal, but there’s nothing in writing that makes that connection. If the appeal fails, technically Kay will just owe him a lot of money. But forget about all that. That’s Lex’s problem. Besides, the appeal will succeed!”

Gurney sat back, stared out through the door at the asparagus patch at the far side of the old bluestone patio. The asparagus ferns had grown much taller than in either of the previous two summers. He reckoned a tall man could stand in their midst and not be seen. Normally a soft bluish green, now, under an unsettled gray sky, they appeared colorless.

He blinked, rubbed his face roughly with both hands, and tried to refocus his mind on reducing the tacky mess being placed before him to its essentials.

The way he saw it, he was being asked to launch Hardwick in his new PI business—by helping to ensure his first major client commitment. And this was to be the repayment for the regulation-skirting favors Hardwick had done for him in the past, at the cost of Hardwick’s career with the state police. That much was clear, as far as it went. But there was a lot more to consider.

One of Hardwick’s distinctive traits had been a bold independence, the kind of let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may independence that comes from not being too attached to anything or anybody or any predetermined goal. But the man sure as hell was attached to this new project and its intended outcome, and the change didn’t strike Gurney as all that positive. He wondered what it would be like working with Hardwick in this altered state—with all his abrasiveness intact, but now in the service of a resentful obsession.

He turned his attention from the asparagus ferns to Hardwick’s face. “So, what does that mean, Jack—‘part of the team’? What, specifically, would you want me to do, other than look smart and rattle my medals?”

“Whatever the hell you feel like doing. Look, I’m telling you—the prosecution’s case was rotten start to finish. If the chief investigating officer doesn’t end up in Attica at the end of this, I’ll … I’ll become a fucking vegan. I absolutely guarantee you that the underlying facts and narratives will be full of disconnects. Even the trial transcript is full of them. And, Davey boy, whether you admit it or not, you know damn well that no cop ever had a sharper eye and ear for disconnects than you do. So that’s the story. I want you on the team. Will you do this for me?”

Will you do this for me? The plea echoed in Gurney’s head. He didn’t feel capable of saying no. Not right at that moment, anyway. He took a deep breath. “You have the trial transcript?”

“I do.”

“With you?”

“In my car.”

“I’ll … take look at it. We’ll have to see where we go from there.”

Hardwick stood up from the table, his nervousness now looking more like excitement. “I’ll leave you a copy of the official case file, too. Lots of interesting shit. Could be helpful.”

“How’d you get the file?”

“I still have a few friends.”

Gurney smiled uncomfortably. “I’m not promising anything, Jack.”

“Fine. No problem. I’ll get the stuff from the car. You take your time with it. See what you think.” On the way out, he stopped and turned back. “You won’t be sorry, Davey. The Spalter case has everything—horror, gangsters, politics, big money, big lies, and maybe even a little bit of incest. You’re gonna fuckin’ love it!”

Chapter 3. Something in the Woods

Madeleine cooked a simple dinner and they ate with little conversation. Gurney kept expecting her to engage him in an exhaustive discussion of his meeting with Hardwick, but she asked only one question.

“What does he want from you?”

Gurney described the nature of the Kay Spalter case, Hardwick’s new PI status, his evidently huge emotional investment in getting Kay’s conviction overturned, his request for assistance.

Madeleine’s only reaction consisted of a small nod and a barely audible “Hmm.” She stood up, cleared the dishes and silverware from the table, and took them to the sink island, where she proceeded to wash them, rinse them, and stack them in the drainer. Then she got a pitcher from the cupboard and watered the plants that stood on the sideboard below the kitchen windows. Each minute that she failed to pursue the subject exerted a stronger tug on Gurney to add a few additional words of explanation, reassurance, justification. Just as he was about to do so, she suggested they take a stroll down to the pond.

“It’s too nice an evening to stay inside,” she said.

Nice was not a word he would have used to describe the uncertain sky with its scuttling clouds, but he resisted the urge to debate the point. He followed her to the mudroom off the kitchen, where she put on one of her tropically bright nylon jackets. He slipped into an olive-drab cardigan he’d had for nearly twenty years.

She squinted at it doubtfully. “Are you trying to look like someone’s grandfather?”

“You mean stable, trustworthy, and lovable?”

She raised an ironic eyebrow.

Nothing else was said until they’d made their way down through the low pasture and were seated on the weathered wooden bench beside the pond. She appeared, as she often did, in a static position, not quite relaxed. It was as if her slim, naturally athletic body craved movement in the way that some bodies crave sugar.

Except for a grassy opening between the bench and the water, the pond was ringed by tall bulrushes, where redwing blackbirds built nests and fended off intruders with aggressive swoops and screeches through late spring and into the summer.

“We have to start pulling out some of those giant reeds,” said Madeleine, “or they’ll take over completely.”

Each year the encircling band of bulrushes had grown thicker, inching farther out into the water. Pulling them out, Gurney had discovered the one time he’d tried it, was a muddy, tiresome, frustrating job. “Right,” he said vaguely.

The crows, settling in the tops of the trees up along the edge of the pasture, were in full voice now—a sharp, continuous chattering that each evening reached a peak at sunset, then diminished into silence as dusk fell.

“And we really have to do something with that thing.” She pointed at the warped and tilting trellis a former owner had erected at the beginning of the path around the pond. “But it’ll have to wait until after we build the coop with a nice big fenced run. The chickens should be able to run around outside, not just sit in that dark little barn all the time.”

Gurney said nothing. The barn had windows—it wasn’t all that dark inside—but that was a line of argument guaranteed to go nowhere. It was smaller than the original building, which had been destroyed in a mysterious fire several months earlier, in the middle of the Good Shepherd case, but surely it was big enough for a rooster and three hens. To Madeleine, however, enclosed places were at best temporary resting areas and the open air was heaven. It was clear that she empathized with what she imagined to be the imprisonment of the chickens, and it would be as easy to convince her that the barn was a reasonable home for them as it would be to persuade her to live in it herself.

Besides, they hadn’t come down to the pond to debate the future of bulrushes or trellises or chickens. Gurney felt certain that she’d return to the matter of Jack Hardwick, and he began to prepare a line of argument defending his potential involvement in the case.

She’d ask if he was planning to take on yet another full-scale murder investigation in his so-called retirement, and if so, why had he bothered to retire?

He’d explain again that Hardwick had been forced out of the NYSP partly as a result of the assistance he’d provided at Gurney’s request on the Good Shepherd case, and providing assistance in return was a simple matter of justice. A debt incurred, a debt paid.

She’d point out that Hardwick had undermined himself—that it wasn’t the passing along of a few restricted files that got him fired; it was his long history of insubordination and disrespect, his adolescent relish in puncturing the egos of authority figures. That kind of behavior carried obvious risks, and the ax had finally fallen.

He’d counter with an argument about the fuzzier demands of friendship.

She’d claim that he and Hardwick had never really been friends, just uneasy colleagues with occasional common interests.

He’d remind her of the unique bond that was formed in their collaboration years earlier on the Peter Piggert case, when on the same day in jurisdictions a hundred miles apart they each found half of Mrs. Piggert’s body.

She’d shake her head and dismiss the “bond” as a grotesque coincidence in the past that was a poor reason for any present action.

Gurney leaned back against the bench slats and looked up at the slate sky. He felt ready, if not entirely eager, for the give-and-take that he expected would begin momentarily. A few small birds, singly and in loose pairs, passed high overhead, flying rapidly, as if late for their roosting commitments.

When Madeleine finally spoke, however, her tone and angle on the subject were not what he’d expected.

“You realize that he’s obsessed,” she said, looking out over the pond. Half a statement, half a question.

“Yes.”

“Obsessed with getting revenge.”

“Possibly.”

“Possibly?”

“Okay. Probably.”

“It’s a horrible motive.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“And you’re also aware that it makes his version of the facts unreliable?”

“I have no intention of accepting his version of anything. I’m not that naive.”

Madeleine looked over at him, then back out in the direction of the pond. They were silent for a while. Gurney felt a chill in the air, a damp, earthy-smelling chill.

“You need to talk to Malcolm Claret,” she said matter-of-factly.

He blinked, turned, and stared at her. “What?”

“Before you get involved in this, you need to talk to him.”

“What the hell for?” His feelings about Claret were mixed—not because he had anything against the man himself or doubted his professional abilities, but the memories of the occasions that prompted their past meetings were still full of pain and confusion.

“He might be able to help you … help you understand why you’re doing this.”

“Understand why I’m doing this? What’s that supposed to mean?”

She didn’t answer immediately. Nor did he press the question—taken aback momentarily by the sudden sharpness in his own voice.

They’d been through this before, more than once—this question of why he did what he did, why he’d become a detective in the first place, why he was drawn to homicide in particular, and why it continued to fascinate him. He wondered at the defensiveness of his reaction, given that this was well-trod ground.

Another pair of small birds, high in the darkening sky, were hurrying to some more familiar, perhaps safer, place—most likely the place they considered home.

He spoke in a softer voice. “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘why you’re doing this.’ ”

“You’ve come too close to being killed too many times.”

He drew back a little. “When you’re dealing with murderers—”

“Please, not now,” she interrupted, raising her hand. “Not the Dangerous Job speech. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Then what—”

“You’re the smartest man I know. The smartest. All the angles, possibilities—nobody can figure it out better or faster than you can. And yet …” Her voice trailed off, suddenly shaky.

He waited a long ten seconds before prompting her gently. “And yet?”

It was another ten seconds before she went on. “And yet … somehow … you’ve ended up face-to-face with an armed lunatic on three separate occasions in the past two years. An inch from death each time.”

He said nothing.

She stared sadly out over the pond. “There’s something wrong with that picture.”

It took him a while to reply. “You think I want to die?”

“Do you?”

“Of course not.”

She continued looking straight ahead.

The hillside pasture and the woods beyond the pond were all growing darker. At the edge of the woods the gold patches of ragweed and lavender sprigs of grape-hyacinth had already faded to shades of gray. Madeleine gave a little shiver, zipped her windbreaker up to her chin, and folded her arms across her chest, pulling her elbows tightly against her.

They sat in silence for a long while. It was as if their conversation had come to a strange stopping place, a slippery declivity from which there was no clear way up and out.

As a quivering spot of silver light appeared in the center of the pond—a reflection of the moon, which had emerged at that moment through a break in the clouds—there was a sound deep in the woods behind the bench that made the hairs stand up on Gurney’s arms. A keening note, a not-quite-human cry of desolation.

“What the …?”

“I’ve heard it before,” said Madeleine. “On different nights it seems to come from different places.”

He listened, waiting. A minute later, it sounded again, weird and plaintive.

“Probably an owl,” he said, without having any reason to believe it.

What he avoided saying was that it sounded to him like a lost child.

Chapter 4. Pure Evil

It was past midnight, and Gurney’s efforts to fall asleep had been as unsuccessful as if he’d had half a dozen cups of coffee.

The moon, glimpsed briefly at the pond, had disappeared behind a thick new blanket of clouds. Both windows were open at the top, letting a humid chill into the room. The darkness and the touch of the damp night air on his skin formed a kind of enclosure, giving him a creeping sense of claustrophobia. In that small, oppressive place he found it impossible to put aside his uneasy thoughts about the suspended but hardly completed death-wish discussion with Madeleine. But the thoughts went nowhere, led to no conclusions. The frustration persuaded him to abandon the bed.

He got up and felt his way to the chair where he’d left his shirt and pants.

“As long as you’re up, you might want to close the upstairs windows.” Madeleine’s voice from the far side of the bed sounded surprisingly wide awake.

“Why?” he asked.

“The storm. Haven’t you heard the thunder getting closer?”

He hadn’t. But he trusted her ears.

“Shall I close these by the bed too?”

“Not yet. The air feels like satin.”

“Wet satin, you mean?”

He heard her sigh, give her pillow a few pats, and resettle herself. “Wet earth, wet grass, wonderful …” She yawned, made a contented little sound, and said no more. He marveled at how she could find such restorative power in the very elements of nature he instinctively fled from.

He put on his pants and shirt, went upstairs, and closed the windows in the two spare bedrooms and in the room that Madeleine devoted to sewing, crocheting, and cello practice. He came back downstairs, went into the den, and got the plastic shopping bag full of the Spalter case materials Hardwick had left for him, and brought it out to the dining room table.

The heaviness of the bag bothered him. It seemed to be a crude warning.

He began spreading its contents out on the table. Then, remembering Madeleine’s unhappy reaction the last time he took over that table to examine the paperwork documenting the progress of a murder case, he picked everything up and carried it to the coffee table in front of the fireplace at the other end of the room.

The individual items included a full printed transcript of State of New York v. Katherine R. Spalter trial proceedings; the NYSP Bureau of Criminal Investigation case file on the Spalter homicide (including the multisection original incident report with photos and drawings, crime scene inventories, forensic lab reports, interview and interrogation reports, investigatory progress reports, the autopsy report and photos, the ballistics report, and scores of miscellaneous memos and phone call reports); a list of pretrial motions (all perfunctory, all cut-and-pasted out of the capital case motions manual) and their dispositions (all denied); a folder with articles, blog printouts, broadcast transcripts, and a list of links to online coverage of the crime, arrest, and trial phases of the story; a manila envelope containing a set of DVDs of the trial itself, provided by the local cable station that apparently had been granted Court TV–style access to the proceedings; and, finally, a note from Jack Hardwick.

It was a kind of road map—Hardwick’s suggested route through the daunting heap of information spread out on the coffee table.

Gurney had good and bad feelings about this. Good, because directions and prioritization could be time-savers. Bad, because they could be manipulative. Often they were both. But they were hard to ignore—as were the opening sentences of Hardwick’s note.

“Follow the sequence I’ve laid out here. If you depart from the path you’ll drown in a data shit-swamp.”

The rest of the two-page note consisted of a series of numbered steps on the route.

“Number one: Get a taste of the case against Kay Spalter. Get the DVD marked ‘A’ from the envelope and check out the prosecutor’s opening statement. It’s a classic.”

Gurney retrieved his laptop from the den and inserted the disk.

Like some other recordings of courtroom proceedings he’d seen, this one began with an image of the prosecutor standing in the open area in front of the judge’s bench, facing the jury box, clearing his throat. He was a small man with close-cropped dark hair, maybe in his mid-forties.

There were background noises of papers rustling, chairs moving, a jumble of indistinguishable voices, someone coughing—most of which subsided after a few sharp raps of the judge’s gavel.

The prosecutor glanced at the judge, a heavyset black man with a dour expression, who gave him a perfunctory nod. He took a deep breath and stared at the floor for several seconds before looking up at the jury.

“Evil,” he finally announced in a strong, formal voice. He waited for absolute silence before continuing. “We all think we know what evil is. History books and news reports are full of evil deeds, evil men, evil women. But the scheme you are about to be exposed to—and the ruthless predator you will convict at the end of this trial—will bring the reality of evil home to you in a way you’ll never forget.”

He glared at the floor, then went on. “This is the true story of a woman and a man, a wife and a husband, a predator and a victim. The story of a marriage poisoned by infidelity. The story of a homicidal plot—an attempted murder that produced a result you may well conclude was worse than murder itself. You heard me right, ladies and gentlemen. Worse than murder.”

After a pause during which he seemed to be trying to make eye contact with as many jurors as possible, he turned and walked to the prosecution table. Directly in back of the table, in front of the area assigned to courtroom spectators, sat a man in a large wheelchair—an elaborate device that reminded Gurney of the kind of thing in which Stephen Hawking, the paralyzed physicist, made his rare public appearances. It seemed to be providing support for all parts of the occupant’s body, including his head. There were oxygen tubes in his nose and no doubt other tubes in other places, out of sight.

Although the angle and lighting left much be desired, the image on the screen conveyed enough of Carl Spalter’s situation to make Gurney grimace. To be paralyzed like that, trapped in a numb, unresponsive body, unable even to blink or to cough, dependent on a machine to keep from drowning in your own saliva … Christ! It was like being buried alive, with your body itself the grave. To be trapped inside a half-dead mass of flesh and bones struck him as the ultimate claustrophobic horror. Shuddering at the thought, he saw that the prosecutor had resumed addressing the jury, with his hand extended toward the man in the wheelchair.

“The tragic story whose terrible climax brought us to this courtroom today began exactly a year ago when Carl Spalter made the bold decision to run for governor—with the idealistic goal of ridding our state of organized crime once and for all. A laudable goal, but one that his wife—the defendant—opposed from the beginning, as the result of corrupt influences you’ll learn about during this trial. From the moment Carl set foot on the path of public service, she not only ridiculed him in public, doing everything she could to discourage him, but she also withdrew from all marital contact with him and began cheating on him with another man—her so-called personal trainer.” He raised an eyebrow at the term, sharing a sour smirk with the jury. “The defendant revealed herself as a woman hell-bent on getting her own way at any cost. When rumors of her infidelity reached Carl, he didn’t want to believe it. But finally he had to confront her. He told her she had to make a choice. Well, ladies and gentlemen, she made a choice, all right. You’ll hear convincing testimony concerning that choice—which was to approach an underworld figure—Giacomo Flatano, or ‘Jimmy Flats’—with an offer of fifty thousand dollars to kill her husband.” He paused, deliberately looking at each member of the jury.

“She decided she wanted out of the marriage, but not at the expense of losing Carl’s money, so she tried to hire a hit man. But the hit man turned down the offer. So what did the defendant do next? She tried to talk her lover, the personal trainer, into doing it in return for a life of leisure with her on a tropical island, financed by the inheritance she’d receive at Carl’s death—because, ladies and gentlemen, Carl still had hopes for the marriage and still hadn’t changed his will.”

He extended his hands forward in a kind of supplication for the jury’s empathy. “He had hopes of saving his marriage. Hopes of being with a wife he still loved. And what was that wife doing? She was conniving—first with a gangster, then with a cheap Romeo—to get him killed. What kind of person—?”

A new voice was heard, out of the video frame, whiny and impatient. “Objection! Your Honor, Mr. Piskin’s emotional conjecture is way beyond anything that—”

The prosecutor calmly interrupted. “Every word I’m saying will be supported by sworn testimony.”

The jowly judge, visible in an upper corner of the screen, muttered, “Denied. Proceed.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. As I was saying, the defendant did everything in her power to persuade her young bedmate to kill her husband. But he refused. Well, guess what the defendant did then. What do you think a determined would-be killer would do?”

He stared inquiringly at the jury for a good five seconds before answering his own question. “The petty gangster was afraid to shoot Carl Spalter. The personal trainer was afraid to shoot Carl Spalter. So Kay Spalter began taking shooting lessons herself!”

The out-of-frame voice was heard again. “Objection! Your Honor, the causal link in the prosecution’s use of the word ‘So’ implies an admission of motive by the defendant. There is no such admission anywhere in—”

The prosecutor broke in. “I’ll restate the narrative, Your Honor, in a way fully supported by testimony. The gangster declined to shoot Carl. The trainer declined to shoot Carl. And at that point the defendant began taking shooting lessons herself.”

The judge shifted his bulk with apparent physical discomfort. “Let the record show Mr. Piskin’s restatement. Proceed.”

The prosecutor turned to the jury. “Not only did the defendant take shooting lessons, but you’ll hear testimony from a certified firearms instructor concerning the remarkable level of skill she acquired. Which brings us to the tragic culmination of our story. Last November, Carl Spalter’s mother, Mary Spalter, passed away. She died alone, in the kind of accident that is all too common—a fall in her bathtub in the senior residential community where she had spent the final years of her life. At the funeral service that was conducted at the Willow Rest cemetery, Carl rose to deliver a eulogy at her grave. You’ll hear how he took a step or two, suddenly pitched forward, and hit the ground face-first. He didn’t move. Everyone thought he had tripped, and that the fall had knocked him unconscious. It took a few moments before anyone saw the trickle of blood on the side of his forehead—a trickle of blood coming from a tiny hole in the temple. A subsequent medical examination confirmed what the initial investigating team suspected—that Carl had been struck by a high-powered small-caliber rifle bullet. You’ll hear from the police experts who reconstructed the shooting that the bullet was fired from an apartment window approximately five hundred yards from the point of impact on the victim. You’ll see maps, photographs, and drawings illustrating exactly how it was done. It will all be abundantly clear,” he said with a reassuring smile. He checked his watch before going on.

As he spoke again, he paced back and forth in front of the jury box. “That apartment house, ladies and gentlemen, was owned by Spalter Realty. The apartment from which the bullet was fired was vacant, awaiting renovation, as were most of the apartments in that building. The defendant had easy access to the keys. But that’s not all. You’ll hear damning testimony that Kay Spalter …” He stopped and pointed toward a woman seated at the defense table with her profile to the camera. “… that Kay Spalter was not only in that building the morning of the shooting, but was in the very apartment from which the bullet was fired at the exact time Carl Spalter was shot. Furthermore, you’ll hear eyewitness testimony that she entered that empty apartment alone and that she left it alone.”

He paused and shrugged, as if the facts of the case and the conviction those facts demanded were so obvious that there was no more to say. But then he continued. “The charge is attempted murder. But what does that legal term really mean? Consider this. The day before Carl was shot, he was full of life, full of wholesome energy and ambition. The day after he was shot … Well, just look. Take a good look at the man stuck in that wheelchair, propped up and held in place with metal braces and Velcro straps because the muscles that should be doing that job for him are now useless. Look into his eyes. What do you see? A man so battered by the hand of evil that he might be wishing he were dead? A man so devastated by the treachery of a loved one that he might be wishing he’d never been born?”

Again the off-screen voice broke in. “Objection!”

The judge cleared his throat. “Sustained.” His voice was a weary rumble. “Mr. Piskin, you’re over the line.”

“I apologize, Your Honor. I got a little carried away.”

“I suggest you carry yourself back.”

“Yes, Your Honor.” After seeming to gather his thoughts for a moment, he turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a sad fact that Carl Spalter can no longer move or speak or communicate with us in any way, but the horror in that fixed expression on his face tells me that he’s fully aware of what happened to him, that he knows who did this to him, and that he has no doubt that there is in this world such a thing as Pure Evil. Remember, when you find Kay Spalter guilty of attempted murder, as I know you will, this—what you see here before you—this is the real meaning of that colorless legal phrase ‘attempted murder.’ This man in this wheelchair. This life crushed beyond hope of repair. Happiness extinguished. This is the reality, dreadful beyond words.”

“Objection!” cried the voice.

“Mr. Piskin …” rumbled the judge.

“I’m finished, Your Honor.”

The judge called for a half-hour recess and summoned the prosecutor and defense attorney to his chambers.

Gurney replayed the video. He’d never seen an opening statement quite like it. It was a lot closer in emotional tone and content to a closing argument. But he knew Piskin by reputation, and the man was no amateur. So what was his purpose? To act as though Kay Spalter’s conviction was inevitable, that the game was over before it began? Was he that sure of himself? And if that was just his opener, how was he going to top an accusation of “Pure Evil”?

Speaking of which, he wanted to see the expression on Carl Spalter’s face that Piskin had focused the jury on but the courtroom video had failed to capture. He wondered if there might be a photograph in the voluminous material delivered by Hardwick. He picked up the sequenced guide, looking for a hint.

Perhaps not accidentally, it was the second item on the list.

“Number two: Check out the damage. BCI case file, third graphics tab. It’s all in those eyes. I never want to see whatever put that look on his face.”

A minute later Gurney was holding a full-page head-and-shoulders photo printout. Even with all the preparation, the horror in Spalter’s eyes was shocking. Piskin’s final rant had not been exaggerated.

There was indeed in those eyes the recognition of a terrible truth—a reality, as Piskin had put it, dreadful beyond words.

Chapter 5. Bloodthirsty Weasels

The scraping squeak of the right-side French door being pulled from its sticking point against the sill woke Gurney from a surreal dream that slipped away as soon as he opened his eyes.

He found himself slouched down in one of the two armchairs at the fireplace end of the long room, the Spalter documents spread out on the coffee table in front of him. His neck ached when he raised his head. The light coming through the open door had a dawn faintness about it.

Madeleine stood there silhouetted, breathing in the cool, still air.

“Can you hear him?” she asked.

“Hear who?” Gurney rubbed his eyes, sitting up straighter.

“Horace. There he goes again.”

Gurney listened halfheartedly for the crowing of the young rooster but heard nothing.

“Come to the door and you’ll hear him.”

He almost replied that he had no interest in hearing him but realized that would be a poor way to start the day. He pushed himself up from the chair and went to the door.

“There,” said Madeleine. “You heard him that time, right?”

“I think so.”

“He’ll be a lot easier to hear,” Madeleine said brightly, pointing to the expanse of grass between the asparagus patch and the big apple tree, “as soon as we build the coop over there.”

“No doubt.”

“They do it to announce their territory.”

“Hmm.”

“To ward off other roosters, let them know, ‘This is my yard, I was here first.’ I love it, don’t you?”

“Love what?”

“The sound of it, the crow.”

“Oh. Yes. Very … rural.”

“I’m not sure I’d want a lot of roosters. But one is really nice.”

“Right.”

“Horace. At first I wasn’t sure, but now it seems the perfect name for him, doesn’t it?”

“I guess.” The truth was that the name Horace, for no reason that made sense, reminded him of the name Carl. And the name Carl, the instant it came to mind, came complete with the stricken eyes in the photograph, eyes that appeared to be staring at a demon.

“What about the other three? Huffy, Puffy, and Fluffy—do you think those names are too silly?”

It took Gurney a few seconds to refocus his attention. “Too silly for chickens?”

She laughed and shrugged. “As soon as we build their little house, with a nice open-air pen at one end, they can all move up from the stuffy barn.”

“Right.” His lack of enthusiasm was palpable.

“And you’ll make the pen predator-proof?”

“Yes.”

“The director of the clinic lost one of his Rhode Island reds last week. The little thing was there one minute, gone the next.”

“That’s the risk of letting them out.”

“Not if we build the right kind of pen. Then they can be out, running around, pecking in the grass, which they love, and still be safe. And it’ll be fun watching them—right over there.” She pointed again with an emphatic little jab of her forefinger at the area she’d chosen.

“So what does he think happened to his missing chicken?”

“Something grabbed it and carried it off. Most likely a coyote or an eagle. He’s pretty sure an eagle, because when we have the kind of drought we’ve had this summer they start looking for things other than fish.”

“Hmm.”

“He said if we’re going to build a pen we should be sure the wire mesh goes over the top and down at least six inches into the ground. Otherwise things can burrow underneath it.”

“Things?”

“He mentioned weasels. Apparently they’re really awful.”

“Awful?”

Madeleine made a face. “He said if a weasel gets in with the chickens, he’ll … bite their heads off—all of them.”

“Not eat them? Just kill them?”

She nodded, her lips pressed tightly together. More than a wince, it was an expression of empathic misery. “He explained that some kind of frenzy comes over a weasel … once he tastes blood. Once he does, he won’t stop biting until all the chickens are dead.”

Chapter 6. Ants

A little after sunrise, feeling that he’d made a sufficient gesture in the direction of solving the chicken problem—by drawing a construction diagram for a coop and fenced run—Gurney put away his pad and settled down at the breakfast table with a second cup of coffee.

When Madeleine joined him, he decided to show her the photograph of Carl Spalter.

From her triage and counseling work at the local mental health crisis center, she was accustomed to being in the presence of the extremes of negative feelings—panic, rage, anguish, despair. Even so, her eyes widened at the vividness of Spalter’s expression.

She laid the photo on the table, then pushed it a few inches farther away.

“He knows something,” she said. “Something he didn’t know before his wife shot him.”

“Maybe she didn’t. According to Hardwick, the case against her was fabricated.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know.”

“So maybe she did it, and maybe she didn’t. But Hardwick doesn’t really care which, does he?”

Gurney was tempted to argue the point, because he didn’t like the position it put him in. Instead, he just shrugged. “What he cares about is getting her conviction thrown out.”

“What he really cares about is getting even—and watching his former employers twist in the wind.”

“I know.”

She cocked her head and stared at him as if to ask why he’d let himself be drawn into such a fraught and nasty undertaking.

“I haven’t promised anything. But I have to admit,” he said, pointing to the photograph on the table, “I am curious about that.”

She pursed her lips, turned to the open door, and gazed out at the thin, scattered fog illuminated by the sideways rays of the early sun. Then something caught her attention at the edge of the stone patio just beyond the doorsill.

“They’re back,” she said.

“Who? What?”

“The carpenter ants.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.”

“Everywhere?”

She answered in a tone as mild as his was impatient. “Out there. In here. On the windowsills. By the cupboards. Around the sink.”

“Why the hell didn’t you mention it?”

“I just did.”

He was about to ride the argument over a self-righteous cliff, but sanity prevailed and all he said was “I hate those damn things.” And hate them he did. Carpenter ants were the termites of the Catskills and other cold places—gnawing away the inner fiber of beams and joists, in silence and darkness converting the support structures of solid homes to sawdust. An exterminating service sprayed the outside of the foundation every other month, and sometimes they seemed to be winning the battle. But then the scout ants would return, and then … battalions.

For a moment he forgot what he and Madeleine had been talking about before the ant tangent. When he remembered, it was with the sinking feeling that he’d been straining to justify a questionable decision.

He decided to try for as much openness as he could. “Look, I understand the danger, the less-than-virtuous motive driving this thing. But I believe I owe Jack something. Maybe not a lot, but certainly something. And an innocent woman may have been convicted on evidence manufactured by a dirty cop. I don’t like dirty cops.”

Madeleine broke in. “Hardwick doesn’t care whether she’s innocent. To him, that’s irrelevant.”

“I know. But I’m not Hardwick.”

Chapter 7. Mick the Dick

“So everyone thought he tripped, until they found a bullet in his brain?” asked Gurney.

He was sitting in the passenger seat of Hardwick’s roaring GTO—not a traveling option he’d normally choose, but the trip from Walnut Crossing to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility would take close to three hours, according to Google, and it seemed a good opportunity to ask questions.

“The little round entry wound was kind of a hint,” said Hardwick. “But the CAT scan left no doubt. Eventually a surgeon retrieved most of the bullet fragments.”

“It was a .220 Swift?” Gurney had managed to review half the trial transcript and a third of the BCI case file before Hardwick arrived to pick him up, and he wanted to be sure of his facts.

“Yep. Fastest bullet made. Flattest trajectory in the business. Put it in the right rifle with the right scope, you can blow the head off a chipmunk a quarter mile away. Definitely a precision item. Nothing quite like it. Add a silencer to that package, and you’ve got—”

“A silencer?”

“A silencer. Which is why no one heard the shot. That, and the firecrackers.”

“Firecrackers?”

Hardwick shrugged. “Witnesses heard anywhere from five to ten packs of firecrackers go off that morning. Over in the direction of the building where the shot came from. The last pack around the time Spalter was hit.”

“How’d they know which building it was?”

“On-site reconstruction. Witness descriptions of the victim’s position when he was hit. Followed by a door-to-door search of the possible sources.”

“But nobody caught on right away that he was hit, right?”

“They just saw him falling. As he was walking toward a podium at the head of the grave, he was hit in the left temple and fell forward. At the moment he was hit, his left side was exposed to an empty stretch of the cemetery, the river, a busy county highway, and beyond that a row of partially gutted apartment buildings owned by the Spalter family.”

“How’d they identify which apartment the shooter used?”

“Easy enough. She … I mean, the shooter, whoever … left the gun behind, mounted on a nice tripod.”

“With a scope?”

“Top-of-the-line.”

“And the silencer?”

“No. The shooter removed that.”

“Then how do you know—”

“The end of the barrel was custom-threaded for one. And the firecrackers alone couldn’t have covered the report of an unsuppressed .220 Swift. It’s a seriously powerful cartridge.”

“And the silencer alone would only deal with the muzzle blast, which would have left an audible supersonic report, which would explain the need for the firecracker distraction. So—cautious approach, thorough planning. Is that the way it’s being understood?”

“That’s the way it should be understood, but who the fuck knows what they understand? It never came up in the trial. Lot of shit never came up in the trial. Lot of shit that should have come up.”

“But why leave the gun and remove the silencer?”

“No fucking idea. Unless it was one of those super-sophisticated five-thousand-dollar jobs—too good to leave behind?”

Gurney found that hard to digest. “Of all the ways a vindictive wife might kill her husband, the prosecution narrative is that Kay Spalter chose to take the most complicated, expensive, high-tech—”

“Davey boy, you don’t have to convince me that the narrative sucks. I know it sucks. More holes in it than an old junky’s arm. That’s why I picked it for my kickoff case. It’s got major reversal potential.”

“Okay. So there was a silencer, but the silencer was taken. Presumably by the shooter.”

“Correct.”

“No prints left on anything?”

“No prints, no nothing. Latex glove job.”

“This rotten-apple detective—he didn’t plant anything in the apartment to incriminate Spalter’s wife?”

“He didn’t know her then. He didn’t decide to put her in the frame until he met her and decided he hated her and she had to be the shooter.”

“This guy is the CIO named in the case file? Senior Investigator Michael Klemper?”

“Mick the Dick—that’s our boy. Shaved head, small eyes, big chest. Temperament of a rottweiler. Martial arts fanatic. Likes breaking bricks with his fists, especially in public. A very angry man. Which brings us back to the timing issue. Mick the Dick was divorced by his wife a few years back. Super-ugly divorce. Mick … Well, now we get into some … some unsubstantiated hearsay. Libel, slander, lawsuit territory, you get what I mean?”

Gurney sighed. “Go on, Jack.”

“According to rumor, Mick’s wife was doing the deed with a certain influential organized crime figure she happened to meet because Mick happened to be—so the rumor goes—on the take from the aforesaid crime figure.” Hardwick paused. “You see the problem?”

“I see several.”

“Mick found out she was fucking the major wiseguy, but that left him with a dilemma. I mean, that’s not a can of worms you want opened in divorce court, or anywhere else. So he couldn’t take the normal legal steps. However, he used to talk privately about wanting to strangle the bitch, twist her head off, feed it to his dog. Apparently, he would also say this to her from time to time. One of those times, she made a video of him telling her in colorful detail, after a few drinks, how he was going to feed her sensitive body parts to his pit bull. Guess what happened then?”

“Tell me.”

“The next day she threatened to put the video on YouTube and flush his career and pension down the toilet if he didn’t give her a quiet divorce on her terms with a very generous settlement.”

Hardwick’s thin grin conveyed a kind of perverse admiration. “That was when the homicidal hate started oozing out of old Mick the Dick like pus. He would have gladly killed her at that point, wiseguy connection or no wiseguy connection, if she hadn’t ensured that the tape would go viral if anything happened to her. So he was forced to give her the divorce. And the money. And ever since then he’s been taking it out on every woman who even remotely reminds him of his wife. Mick was always a little touchy. But after he got that divorce deal rammed up his ass, he turned into two hundred and fifty pounds of pure vengeance, searching for targets.”

“You’re telling me he framed Kay Spalter just because she was fucking around like his wife?”

“Worse than that. Crazier than that. I think his blind hatred for anyone like his wife made him believe that Kay Spalter actually did murder her husband, and that it was his duty to see that she paid for it. She was guilty in his fucked-up mind, and he was determined to put her away at any cost. He wasn’t going to let another unfaithful bitch get off scot-free. If that meant suborning a little perjury here and there in the interest of justice, so what?”

“You’re telling me he’s a psycho.”

“Mild way of putting it.”

“And you know all this how, exactly?”

“I told you. He has enemies.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“Someone close enough to the man to hear things gave me the details of his bile and bullshit on the job, snippets of phone calls, comments here and there, what he said about women in general, about his ex-wife and Kay Spalter in particular. The Dick got carried away sometimes, wasn’t as careful as he should have been.”

“This ‘someone’ have a name?”

“Can’t reveal that.”

“Yes you can.”

“No way.”

“Listen up, Jack. You keep secrets, and there’s no deal. I get to know everything you know. Every question answered. That’s the deal. Period.”

“Christ, Davey, you’re not making this easy.”

“Neither are you.”

Gurney glanced over at the speedometer and saw that it was creeping toward eighty. Hardwick’s jaw muscle was tight. So were his hands on the wheel. A good minute passed before he said simply, “Esti Moreno.” Another minute passed before he went on. “She worked under Mick the Dick from the time of his divorce right up through the end of the Spalter trial. Finally managed to get reassigned—same barracks, but a different reporting line. Had to accept an office job, all paperwork, which she hates. But she hates the paperwork less than she hates the Dick. Esti’s a good cop. Good brain. Good eyes and ears. And principles. Esti’s got principles. You know what she said about the Dick?”

“No, Jack, what did she say?”

“She said, ‘You do some kind of shit, some kind of karma is coming around to bite your ass.’ I love Esti. She’s a real pisser. Also, did I mention that she’s a Puerto Rican bombshell? But she can be subtle, too. A subtle bombshell. You should see her in one of those trooper hats.” Hardwick was smiling broadly, his fingers tapping out a Latin rhythm on the steering wheel.

Gurney was quiet for long while, trying to absorb what he was being told as objectively as possible. The goal was to take it all in and at the same time to keep it at arm’s length, much as one might absorb crime scene details that could have different interpretations.

He pondered the odd shape the case was beginning to take in his mind, including the ironic parallel between the conviction-at-any-cost pursued by Klemper and the reversal-at-any-cost pursued by Hardwick. Both efforts seemed to provide further evidence that man is not primarily a rational species, and that all our so-called logic is never more than a bright facade for murkier motives.

Thus occupied, Gurney was only half aware of the landscape of hills and valleys they were passing through—rolling fields of overgrown weeds and starved saplings, expanses of drought-faded greens and yellows, the sun coming and going through an intermittent pale haze, the unprofitable farms with their barns and silos unpainted for decades, the sadly weathered villages, old orange tractors, rusted plows and hay rakes, the quaint and quiet rural emptiness that was Delaware County’s pride and curse.

Chapter 8. Coldhearted Bitch

Far from the gritty-beautiful, economically battered, depopulated counties of central New York State, northern Westchester County had the casual charm of country money. In the midst of this postcard landscape, however, the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility seemed as out of place as a porcupine in a petting zoo.

Gurney was reminded once again that the actual security paraphernalia of a maximum-security prison covers a broad spectrum of sophistication and visibility. At one end are state-of-the-art sensors and control systems. At the other end are guard towers, twelve-foot chain-link fences, and razor wire.

Surely technology would one day make razor wire obsolete. But for now it was the thing that made the clearest demarcation between inside and outside. Its message was simple, violent, and visceral. Its presence would easily overwhelm any effort to create an atmosphere of normalcy—not that any serious efforts in that direction were made at correctional facilities. In fact, Gurney suspected, razor wire might very well outlive its practical containment function, purely on the basis of its message value.

Inside, Bedford Hills was fundamentally similar to most places of incarceration he’d visited over the years. It looked as bleakly institutional as its purpose. And despite the thousands and thousands of pages written on the subject of modern penology, that purpose—that essence—came down to one thing.

It was a cage.

It was a cage with many locks, security checkpoints, and procedures aimed at ensuring that no one entered or departed without proper evidence of their right to do so. Lex Bincher’s office had seen to it that Gurney and Hardwick were on Kay Spalter’s approved-visitors list, and they were admitted without difficulty.

The long, windowless visiting room that they were led to for their meeting resembled rooms like it throughout the system. Its primary structural feature was a long counterlike divider separating the room into two sections—the inmate side and the visitor side, with chairs on both sides and a chest-high barrier in the center. Guards stood at either end with a clear view down the length of the barrier, aimed at preventing any unauthorized exchanges. The room was painted, not recently, an institutional noncolor.

Gurney was relieved to see that there were only a few visitors present, allowing for more than adequate space and the possibility of some privacy.

The woman who was brought into the room by a stocky black guard was short and slim with dark hair in a pixie style. She had a fine nose, prominent cheekbones, and full lips. Her eyes were a startling green, and beneath one of them there was a small bluish bruise. There was a hard intensity in her expression that made her face more arresting than beautiful.

Gurney and Hardwick stood up as she approached. Hardwick was the first to speak, eyeing her bruise. “Jesus, Kay, what happened to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Doesn’t look like nothing to me.”

“It’s been taken care of,” she said dismissively. She was talking to Hardwick but looking at Gurney, examining him with a frank curiosity.

“Taken care of how?” persisted Hardwick.

She blinked impatiently. “Crystal Rocks. My protector.” She flashed a quick humorless smile.

“The lesbian meth dealer?”

“Yes.”

“Big fan of yours?”

“A fan of who she thinks I am.”

“She likes women who kill their husbands?”

“Loves ’em.”

“How’s she going to feel when we get your conviction thrown out?”

“Fine—so long as she doesn’t think I’m innocent.”

“Yeah, well … that shouldn’t be a problem. Innocence is not the issue in the appeal. The issue is due process, and we aim to prove, in your case, that the process was in no way due. Speaking of which, I’d like to introduce you to the man who’s going to help us show the judge just how un-due it was. Kay Spalter, meet Dave Gurney.”

“Mr. Supercop.” She said it with a touch of sarcasm, then paused as if to see how he’d react. When he showed no reaction at all, she went on. “I’ve read all about you and your decorations. Very impressive.” She didn’t look impressed.

Gurney wondered if those coolly assessing green eyes ever looked impressed. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Spalter.”

“Kay.” There was nothing cordial in her tone. It sounded more like a pointed correction, a way of conveying distaste for her married name. She continued to look him over, as though he were a piece of merchandise she was considering purchasing. “You married?”

“Yes.”

“Happily?”

“Yes.”

She seemed to be turning this information over in her mind before asking her next question. “Do you believe I’m innocent?”

“I believe that the sun rose this morning.”

Her mouth twitched into something resembling a split-second smile. Or maybe it was just a tremor created by all the energy contained in that compact body. “What’s that supposed to mean? That you only believe what you see? That you’re a no-bullshit guy who bases everything on facts?”

“It means that I just met you, and I don’t know enough to have an opinion, much less a belief.”

Hardwick cleared his throat nervously. “Maybe we ought to sit down?”

As they took their places at the small table, Kay Spalter kept her eyes on Gurney.

“So what do you need to know to have an opinion about whether I’m innocent?”

Hardwick broke in, leaning forward. “Or about whether you got a fair trial, which is the real issue.”

She ignored this, stayed focused on Gurney.

He sat back and studied those remarkable unblinking green eyes. Something told him that the best preamble would be no preamble. “Did you shoot Carl Spalter, or cause him to be shot?”

“No.” The word came out hard and fast.

“Is it true you were having an extramarital affair?”

“Yes.”

“And your husband found out about it?”

“Yes.”

“And he was considering divorcing you?”

“Yes.”

“And a divorce under those circumstances would have had a major negative effect on your economic status?”

“Absolutely.”

“But at the time he was fatally wounded, your husband hadn’t yet made a final decision on the divorce, and hadn’t changed his will—so you were still his chief beneficiary. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ask your lover to kill him?”

“No.” An expression of distaste came and went in an instant.

“So his story at the trial was a complete fabrication?”

“Yes. But it couldn’t have been his fabrication. Darryl was the lifeguard at our club pool and a so-called personal trainer—million-dollar body and a two-cent brain. He was just saying what that piece of shit Klemper told him to say.”

“Did you ask an ex-con by the name of Jimmy Flats to kill your husband?”

“No.”

“So his story at the trial was a fabrication too?”

“Yes.”

“Klemper’s fabrication?”

“I assume so.”

“Were you in that building where the shot came from, either the day of the shooting or any time prior to that?”

“Definitely not on the day of the shooting.”

“So the eyewitness testimony that you were there in the building, in the actual apartment where the murder weapon was found—that’s also a fabrication?”

“Right.”

“If not on that particular day, then how long before?”

“I don’t know. Months? A year? Maybe I was there two or three times altogether—occasions when I was with Carl when he stopped to check on something, work being done, something like that.”

“Most of the apartments were vacant?”

“Yes. Spalter Realty paid next to nothing to buy buildings that needed major renovations.”

“Were the apartments locked?”

“Generally. Squatters would sometimes find ways in.”

“Did you have keys?”

“Not in my possession.”

“Meaning?”

Kay Spalter hesitated for the first time. “There was a master key for each building. I knew where it was.”

“Where was it?”

She seemed to shake her head—or, again, maybe it was just an infinitesimal tremor. “I always thought it was silly. Carl carried his own master key for all the apartments, but he kept an extra one hidden in each building. In the utility room in each basement. On the floor behind the furnace.”

“Who knew about the hidden keys, besides you and Carl?”

“I have no idea.”

“Are they still there, behind the furnaces?”

“I assume so.”

Gurney sat quietly for several seconds, letting this curious fact sink in before going on.

“You claimed that you were with your boyfriend at the time of the shooting?”

“Yes. In bed with him.” Her gaze, locked on Gurney, was neutral and unblinking.

“So when he testified he was alone that day—that was one more fabrication?”

“Yes.” Her lips tightened.

“And you believe that Detective Klemper manufactured and directed this elaborate web of perjury … why? Just because you reminded him of his ex-wife?”

“That’s your friend’s theory,” she said, indicating Hardwick. “Not mine. I don’t doubt that Klemper’s a woman-hating asshole, but I’m sure there’s more to it.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe my conviction was convenient for someone beyond Klemper.”

“Who, for example?”

“The mob, for example.”

“You’re saying that organized crime was responsible for—?”

“For the hit on Carl. Yes. I’m saying that it makes sense. More sense than anything else.”

“For the hit on Carl. Isn’t that a pretty cold—”

“A pretty cold way of discussing my husband’s death? You’re absolutely right, Mr. Supercop. I’m not going to shed sweet public tears to prove my innocence to a jury, or to you, or to anyone else.” She eyed him shrewdly. “That makes it a little harder, doesn’t it? Not so easy to prove the innocence of a coldhearted bitch.”

Hardwick drummed his fingers on the table to get her attention. Then he leaned forward and reiterated with slow intensity, “We don’t have to prove you didn’t do it. Innocence is not the issue. All we have to prove is that your trial was seriously, purposely fucked up by the chief investigator on the case. Which is exactly what we will do.”

Again Kay ignored Hardwick and kept her gaze fixed on Gurney. “So? Where do you stand? You have an opinion yet?”

Gurney responded only with another question. “Did you take shooting lessons?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought I might have to shoot someone.”

“Who?”

“Maybe some mob guys. I had a bad feeling about Carl’s relationship with those people. I saw trouble coming and I wanted to be ready.”

Formidable, thought Gurney, searching for a word to describe the small, bold, unflinching creature sitting across from him. And maybe even a little frightening.

“Trouble from the mob because of Carl starting an anticrime political party? And making his ‘These Are the Scum of the Earth’ speeches?”

She gave a little snort of ridicule. “You don’t know a damn thing about Carl, do you?”

Chapter 9. Black Widow

Kay Spalter’s eyes were closed in apparent concentration. Her full mouth was compressed into a narrow line, and her head was lowered, with her hands clasped tightly under her chin. She’d been sitting like that across the table from Gurney and Hardwick without saying a word for a good two minutes. Gurney guessed that she was wrestling with the question of how much to confide in two men she didn’t know, whose real agenda might be hidden—but who, on the other hand, might be her last chance at freedom.

The silence seemed to be getting to Hardwick. The tic reappeared at the corner of his mouth. “Look, Kay, if you have any concerns, let’s get them out on the table so we can—”

She raised her head and glared at him. “Concerns?”

“What I meant was, if you have any questions—”

“If I have any questions, I’ll ask them.” She turned her attention to Gurney, studying his face and eyes. “How old are you?”

“Forty-nine. Why do you ask?”

“Isn’t that early to be retired?”

“Yes and no. Twenty-five years in the NYPD—”

Hardwick broke in. “The thing of it is, he never really retired. Just moved upstate. He’s still doing what he always did. He’s solved three major murder cases since he left the department. Three major murder cases in the past two years. That not what I’d call retired.”

Gurney was finding Hardwick’s sweaty-salesman assurances hard to take. “Look, Jack—”

This time it was Kay who interrupted Gurney. “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Getting involved in my case.”

Gurney had a hard time coming up with an answer he was willing to give. He finally said, “Curiosity.”

Hardwick jumped in again. “Davey is a natural-born onion peeler. Obsessive. Brilliant. Peeling away layer after layer until he gets to the truth. When he says ‘curiosity’ he means a hell of a lot more than—”

“Don’t tell me what he means. He’s here. I’m here. Let him talk. Last time, I heard what you and your lawyer friend had to say.” She shifted in her chair, pointedly focusing her attention on Gurney. “Now I want to hear what you have to say. How much are they paying you to work on this case?”

“Who?”

She pointed at Hardwick. “Him and his lawyer—Lex Bincher of Bincher, Fenn, and Blaskett.” She said it as if it were a vile-tasting but necessary medicine.

“They’re not paying me anything.”

“You’re not getting paid?”

“No.”

“But you expect to get paid sometime in the future, if your effort produces the desired result?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You don’t? So, apart from that crap about onion peeling, why are you doing this?”

“I owe Jack a favor.”

“For what?”

“He helped me with the Good Shepherd case. I’m helping him with this one.”

“Curiosity. Payback. What else?”

What else? Gurney wondered if she knew that there was a third reason. He sat back in his chair, thinking for a moment about what he was going to say. Then he spoke softly. “I saw a photograph of your late husband in his wheelchair, apparently taken a few days before he died. The photograph was mainly of his face.”

Kay finally showed some sign of an emotional reaction. Her green eyes widened, and her skin seemed a shade paler. “What about it?”

“The look in his eyes. I want to know what that was about.”

She bit down on her lower lip. “Maybe it was just … the way a person looks when he knows he’s about to die.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve seen a lot of people die. Shot by drug dealers. By strangers. By relatives. By cops. But never before have I seen that expression on anyone’s face.”

She took a deep breath, let it out shakily.

“You all right?” asked Gurney. He’d observed hundreds, maybe thousands, of examples of faked emotion in his career. But this looked real.

She closed her eyes for a few seconds then opened them. “The prosecutor told the jury that Carl’s face reflected the despair of a man who’d been betrayed by someone he loved. Is that what you’re thinking? That it might be the look of a man whose wife wanted him dead?”

“I think that’s a possibility. But not the only possibility.”

She reacted with a small nod. “One last question. Your buddy here keeps telling me the success of my appeal has nothing to do with whether or not I shot Carl. It just depends on showing ‘a substantive defect in due process.’ So tell me something. Does it matter to you personally whether I’m guilty or innocent?”

“To me, that’s the only thing that matters.”

She held Gurney’s gaze for what seemed like a long time before clearing her throat, turning to Hardwick, and speaking in a changed voice: crisper, lighter. “Okay. We have a deal. Ask Bincher to send me the letter of agreement.”

“Will do,” said Hardwick with a quick, serious nod that barely concealed his elation.

She looked at Gurney suspiciously. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“I’m impressed with the way you make decisions.”

“I make them as soon as my gut and brain agree. What’s the next item on our list?”

“You said earlier that I didn’t know a damn thing about Carl. Educate me.”

“Where shall I start?”

“With whatever seems important. For example, was Carl involved in anything that might have led to his murder?”

She flashed a quick, bitter smile. “It’s no surprise he was murdered. The only surprise was that it didn’t happen sooner. The cause of his death was his life. Carl was ambitious. Crazy with ambition. Sick with ambition. He inherited that gene from his father, a disgusting reptile who’d have swallowed the world whole if he could have.”

“When you say Carl was ‘sick,’ what do you mean?”

“His ambition was destroying him. More, bigger, better. More, more, more. And the how didn’t matter. To get what he wanted, he was dealing with people you wouldn’t want to be in the same room with. You play with rattlesnakes …” She paused, her eyes bright with anger. “It’s so damn absurd that I’m locked up in this zoo. I’m the one who warned him to back away from the predators. I’m the one who told him he was in over his head, that he was going to get himself murdered. Well, he paid no attention to me, and he got himself murdered. And I’m the one convicted for it.” She gave Gurney a look that seemed to say, Is life a fucked-up joke or what?

“You have any idea who shot him?”

“Well, that’s another little irony. The guy without whose approval nothing happens in upstate New York—in other words, the snake who either ordered the hit on Carl or at least okayed it—that snake was in our house on three occasions. I could’ve popped him on any one of those occasions. In fact, I came very close to it the third time. You know what? If I’d done it then, when I had the urge, Carl wouldn’t be dead now, and I wouldn’t be sitting here. You get the picture? I was convicted for a murder I didn’t commit—because of a murder I should have committed but didn’t.”

“What’s his name?”

“Who?”

“The snake you should have killed.”

“Donny Angel. Also known as the Greek. Also known as Adonis Angelidis. Three times I had a chance to take him out. Three times I let it go by.”

This narrative direction, Gurney noted, had illuminated another piece of Kay Spalter. Inside the smart, striking, fine-boned creature, there was something very icy.

“Back up for a minute,” said Gurney, wanting a clearer sense of the world the Spalters lived in. “Tell me more about Carl’s business.”

“I can only tell you what I know. Tip of the iceberg.”

Over the next half hour Kay covered not only Carl’s business and its strange corporate structure, but his strange family as well.

His father, Joe Spalter, had inherited a real estate holding company from his father. Spalter Realty ended up owning a huge chunk of upstate New York’s inventory of rental properties, including half the apartment houses in Long Falls—all of this by the time that Joe, close to death, transferred the company to his two sons, Carl and Jonah.

Carl took after Joe, had his ambition and money-hunger, squared. Jonah took after his mother, Mary, an aggressive pursuer of many hopeless causes. Jonah was a utopian dreamer, a charismatic New Age spiritualist. As Kay put it, “Carl wanted to own the world, and Jonah wanted to save it.”

The way their father saw it, Carl had what it took to “go all the way”—to be the richest man in America, or maybe the world. The problem was, Carl was as uncontrolled as he was ruthless. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to get what he wanted. As a child he’d once set fire to a neighbor’s dog as a distraction so he could steal a video game. And that wasn’t a one-time instance of craziness. Things like that happened regularly.

Joe, as ruthless as he was himself, saw this trait as a potential problem—not that he cared about setting fire to dogs or about stealing. It was the lack of prudence, the lack of an appropriate risk-reward calculus, that bothered him. His ultimate solution was to bind Carl and Jonah together in the family business. Jonah was supposed to be a moderating influence, a source of the caution that Carl lacked.

The vehicle for this supposedly beneficial combining of their personalities was an unbreakable legal agreement that they both signed when Joe handed the corporation over to them. All of its provisions were designed to ensure that no business could be done, no decisions taken, and no changes made to the corporation without Carl and Jonah’s joint approval.

But Joe’s fantasy of merging the opposite inclinations of his sons into a single force for success was never realized. All that came of it was conflict, the stagnation of Spalter Realty, and an ever-growing animosity between the brothers. It pushed Carl in the direction of politics as an alternate route to power and money, with backdoor help from organized crime, while it pushed Jonah in the direction of religion and the establishment of his grand venture, the Cyberspace Cathedral, with backdoor help from his mother, whom Joe had left exceedingly well-off. The mother at whose funeral Carl was fatally wounded.

When Kay finally concluded her recounting of the Spalter family saga, Gurney was the first to speak. “So Carl’s Anticrime Party and his ‘Scum of the Earth’ speeches about smashing organized crime in New York were nothing but—”

She finished his thought. “A lie, a disguise. For a politician secretly in bed with the mob, what better cover could you have than an image as the state’s most aggressive crime fighter?”

Gurney nodded, trying to let the twisty soap opera narrative sink in. “So your theory is that Carl eventually had some kind of falling-out with this Angel character? And that’s the reason he was killed?”

“Angel was always the most dangerous player in the room. Carl wouldn’t have been the first or even the tenth of Angel’s business associates to end up dead. There’s a saying in certain circles that the Greek only puts two offers on the negotiating table: ‘Do it my way. Or I blow your fucking head off.’ I’d bet anything that there was something Carl refused to do Donny’s way. And he did end up getting his head blown off, didn’t he?”

Gurney didn’t answer. He was trying to figure out who the hell this brutally unsentimental woman really was.

“By the way,” she added, “you ought to look at some pictures of Carl taken before this thing happened.”

“Why?”

“So you understand what he had going for him. Carl was made for politics. Sold his soul to the devil—with a smile made in heaven.”

“How come you didn’t leave him when things got ugly?”

“Because I’m a shallow little gold digger, addicted to power and money.”

“Is that true?”

Her answer was a brilliant, enigmatic smile. “You have any more questions?”

Gurney thought about it. “Yeah. What the hell is the Cyberspace Cathedral?”

“Just another God-free religion. Type the words into a search engine, you’ll find out more than you ever wanted to know. Anything else?”

“Did Carl or Jonah have any kids?”

“Not Jonah. Too busy being spiritual. Carl has one daughter, from his first marriage. A demented slut.” Kay’s voice sounded as flatly factual as if she’d been describing the girl as “a college student.”

Gurney blinked at the disconnect. “You want to tell me more about that?”

She looked like she was about to, then shook her head. “Better that you look into it yourself. I’m not objective on that subject.”

After a few more questions and answers and after arranging a time for a follow-up phone call, Hardwick and Gurney stood to leave. Hardwick made a point of looking again at Kay’s bruised cheek. “You sure you’re all right? I know someone here. She could keep an eye on you, maybe separate you from the general population for a while.”

“I told you, I’ve got it covered.”

“Sure you’re not putting too many eggs in Crystal’s basket?”

“Crystal’s got a big, tough basket. And my nickname helps. Did I mention that? Here in the zoo it’s a term of great respect.”

“What nickname?”

She bared her teeth in a quick, chilly smile. “The Black Widow.”

Chapter 10. The Demented Slut

Once they’d put the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility behind them and were heading for the Tappan Zee Bridge, Gurney brought up the subject that was eating at him. “I get the impression you know some significant things about this case that you haven’t told me.”

Hardwick gunned the engine and veered around a slow-moving minivan with an expression of disgust. “Obviously this asshole has no place to get to and doesn’t care when he arrives. Be nice to have a bulldozer, push him into a ditch.”

Gurney waited.

Hardwick eventually responded to his question. “You’ve got the outline, ace—key points, main actors. What more do you want?”

Gurney thought about this, thought about the tone. “You seem more like yourself than you did earlier this morning.”

“Fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“You figure it out. Remember I can still walk away from this, which I will do if I don’t get the feeling that I know everything you know about the Spalter murder case. I’m not playing front man just to get that woman to sign on with your lawyer. What did she say his name was?”

“Take it easy. No sweat. His name is Lex Bincher. You’ll meet him.”

“See, Jack, that’s the problem.”

“What problem?”

“You’re assuming things.”

“Assuming what things?”

“Assuming that I’m on board.”

Hardwick fixed a concentrated frown on the empty road ahead of them. The tic was back. “You’re not?”

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. The point is, I’ll let you know.”

“Right. Good.”

A silence fell between them that lasted until they were across the Hudson and speeding west on I-287. Gurney had spent the time reflecting on what it was that had him so upset, and had come to the conclusion that the problem wasn’t Hardwick. It was his own dishonesty.

In fact, he was on board. There were aspects of the case—beyond the appalling photograph of Carl Spalter—that had him intrigued. But he was pretending to be undecided. And the pretense had more to do with Madeleine than with Hardwick. He was pretending—and letting on to her—that this was a rational process he was conducting according to some objective criteria when, truth be told, it wasn’t anything like that. His involvement was no more a matter of rational choice than the idea that he might choose to be, or not to be, affected by gravity.

The truth was that a complex murder case attracted his attention and curiosity like nothing else on earth. He could make up reasons for it. He could say it was all about justice. About rectifying an imbalance in the scheme of things. About standing up for those who had been struck down. About a quest for truth.

But there were other times when he considered it nothing but high-stakes puzzle-solving, an obsessive-compulsive drive to fit all the loose pieces together. An intellectual game, a contest of mind and will. A playing field on which he could excel.

And then there was Madeleine’s dark suggestion: the possibility that he was somehow attracted by the terrible risk itself, that some self-hating part of his psyche kept drawing him blindly into the orbit of death.

His mind rejected that possibility even as his heart was chilled by it.

But ultimately he had no faith in anything he thought or said about the why of his profession. They were just ideas he had about it, labels he was sometimes comfortable with.

Did any of the labels capture the essence of the gravitational pull?

He couldn’t say.

The bottom line was this:

Rationalize and temporize as he might, he could no more walk away from a challenge like the Spalter case than an alcoholic could walk away from a martini after the first sip.

Suddenly exhausted, he closed his eyes.

When he finally opened them, he caught a glimpse of the Pepacton Reservoir dead ahead. Meaning they’d passed through Cat Hollow and were back in Delaware County, less than twenty minutes from Walnut Crossing. The water in the reservoir was depressingly low, the result of a dry summer, the kind of summer likely to produce a drab autumn.

His mind returned to the meeting at Bedford Hills.

He looked over at Hardwick, who appeared to be lost in his own unpleasant thoughts.

“So tell me, Jack, what do you know about Carl Spalter’s ‘demented slut’ daughter?”

“You obviously skimmed past that page in the trial transcript—where she testified to hearing Kay on the phone with someone the day before Carl got hit, saying that everything was arranged and that in twenty-four hours her problems would be over. The lovely young lady’s name is Alyssa. Think positive thoughts about her. Her demented sluttiness could be the key that springs our client.”

Hardwick was doing sixty-five on a winding stretch of road where the posted limit was forty-five. Gurney checked his seat belt. “You want to tell me why?”

“Alyssa is nineteen, movie-star gorgeous, and pure poison. I’ve been told she has the words ‘No Limits’ tattooed in a special place.” Hardwick’s expression exploded into a manic grin that faded as quickly as it appeared. “She’s also a heroin addict.”

“How does this help Kay?”

“Be patient. Seems Carl was very generous with little Alyssa. He spoiled her rotten, maybe worse than rotten—as long as he was alive. But his will was another matter. Maybe he had a moment of insight into what his junkie daughter could do with a few million bucks at her disposal. So his will provided that everything would go to Kay. And he hadn’t changed the will at the time of the shooting—maybe because he hadn’t made up his mind about the divorce, or just hadn’t gotten around to it—a point the prosecutor kept highlighting as Kay’s main motive for the murder.”

Gurney nodded. “And after the shooting, he wasn’t capable of changing it.”

“Right. But there’s another side to that. Once Kay was convicted, it meant she couldn’t inherit a cent—because the law prevents a beneficiary from receiving the assets of a deceased person whose death the beneficiary has facilitated. The assets that would have gone to the guilty party are distributed instead to the next of kin—in this instance, Alyssa Spalter.”

“She got Carl’s money?”

“Not quite. These things move slowly at best, and the appeal will stop any actual distribution until there’s a final resolution.”

Gurney was starting to feel impatient. “So how is Miss ‘No Limits’ the key to the case?”

“She obviously had a powerful motive to see that Kay was found guilty. You might even say she also had a powerful motive for committing the murder herself, so long as Kay was blamed for it.”

“So what? The case file doesn’t mention any evidence that would connect her to the shooting. Did I miss something?”

“Not a thing.”

“So where are you going with this?”

Hardwick’s grin widened. Wherever he was going, he was obviously getting a kick out of the ride. Gurney glanced at the speedometer needle and saw that it was now hovering around seventy. They were heading downhill past the west end of the reservoir, approaching the tight curve at Barney’s Kayak Rentals. Gurney’s jaw tightened. Old muscle cars had plenty of horsepower, but the handling in fast turns could be unforgiving.

“Where am I going with this?” Hardwick’s eyes were gleaming with delight. “Well, let me ask you a question. Would you say there might be a slight conflict-of-interest issue … a slight due-process issue … a slight tainted-investigation issue … if a potential suspect in a murder case was fucking the chief investigating officer?”

“What—Klemper? And Alyssa Spalter?”

“Mick the Dick and the Demented Slut herself.”

“Jesus. You have proof of that?”

For a moment, the grin grew bigger and brighter than ever. “You know, Davey boy, I think that’s one of those little things you can help us with.”

Chapter 11. The Little Birds

Gurney said nothing. And he continued to say nothing for the next seventeen minutes, which is how long it took them to drive from the reservoir to Walnut Crossing, and then up the winding dirt and gravel road from the county route to his pond, pasture, and farmhouse.

Sitting next to the house in the roughly idling GTO, he knew he had to say something, and he wanted it to be unambiguous. “Jack, I have the feeling we’re on two different paths with this project of yours.”

Hardwick looked as if there were something sour in his mouth. “How so?”

“You keep pushing me toward the tainted-investigation issues, the due-process defects, et cetera.”

“That’s what appeals are all about.”

“I understand that. I’ll get there. But I can’t start there.”

“But if Mick Klemper—”

“I know, Jack, I know. If you can show that the CIO ignored an avenue of investigation because—”

“Because he was fucking a potential suspect, we could get the conviction reversed on that alone. Bingo! What’s wrong with that?”

“There’s nothing wrong with that. My problem is how I’m supposed to get from here to there.”

“A smart first step would be to have a chat with the breathtaking Alyssa, get a sense of who we’re dealing with, the pressure points that could turn her our way, the angles that—”

“You see, that’s exactly what I mean by two different paths.”

“The hell are you talking about?”

“For me, that chat could be a smart tenth or eleventh step, not a first step.”

“You’re making a bigger deal out of this than it needs to be.”

Gurney gazed out the car’s side window. Over the ridge beyond the pond, a hawk was slowly circling. “Apart from getting Kay Spalter to put her name on the dotted line, what am I supposed to be bringing to this party?”

“I told you already.”

“Tell me again.”

“You’re part of the strategy team. Part of the firepower. Part of the ultimate solution.”

“That so?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“If you want me to contribute, you need to let me do it my way.”

“What are you, Frank fucking Sinatra?”

“I can’t help you if you want me to put the tenth step ahead of the first.”

Hardwick uttered what sounded like a bad-tempered sigh of surrender. “Fine. What do you want to do?”

“I need to start at the beginning. In Long Falls. In the cemetery. In the building where the shooter stood. I need to be where it happened. I need to see it.”

“What the fuck? You want to reinvestigate the whole goddamn thing?”

“Doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

He was about to tell Hardwick that there was a bigger issue involved here than the pragmatic appeal goal. An issue of truth. Truth with a capital T. But the pretentious ring of that sentiment kept him from stating it. “I need to get grounded, literally.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Our focus is on Klemper’s fuck-ups, not the fucking graveyard.”

They went back and forth for another ten minutes.

In the end, Hardwick capitulated, shaking his head in exasperation. “Do whatever you want to do. Just don’t waste a shitload of time, okay?”

“I don’t plan to waste any time.”

“Whatever you say, Sherlock.”

Gurney got out of the car. The heavy door closed with a louder impact than he’d heard from a car door in decades.

Hardwick leaned over toward the open passenger-side window. “You’ll keep me informed, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Don’t spend too much time in that graveyard. That is one seriously peculiar place.”

“Meaning what?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.” Scowling, Hardwick revved his obnoxiously loud engine, stirring it up from a bronchial rumble to a full roar. Then he eased out the clutch, turned the old red GTO around on the yellowing grass, and headed down the pasture trail.

Gurney looked up again at the hawk, gliding with elegant ease above the ridge. Then he went into the house, expecting to see Madeleine or to hear the sound of cello practice upstairs. He called her name. The interior of the house, however, communicated only that odd sense of emptiness it always seemed to have when she was out.

He thought about what day of the week it was—whether it was one of the three days she worked at the mental health clinic, but it wasn’t. He searched his memory for any trace of her mentioning one of her local board meetings, or yoga classes, or volunteer weeding sessions at the community garden, or shopping trips to Oneonta. But nothing came to mind.

He went back outside, looked up and down the gently sloping terrain on both sides of the house. Three deer stood watching him from the top of the high pasture. The hawk was still gliding, now in a wide circle, making only small adjustments in the angle of its outstretched wings.

He called out Madeleine’s name, this time loudly, and cupped his ears for a reply. There was none. But as he was listening, something caught his eye—below the low pasture, through the trees, a glimpse of fuchsia by the back corner of the little barn.

There were only two fuchsia objects he could think of that belonged in their secluded end-of-the-road world: Madeleine’s nylon jacket and the seat of the new bicycle he’d bought her for her birthday —to replace the one lost in the fire that had destroyed their original barn.

As he strode down, ever more curious, through the pasture, he called her name once more—sure now that what he was looking at was in fact her jacket. But again there was no reply. He passed through the informal row of saplings that bordered the pasture, and as he entered the open mowed area surrounding the barn, he saw Madeleine sitting on the grass at the far corner of the building. She appeared to be intent on something just out of his line of sight.

“Madeleine, why didn’t you—” he began, his annoyance at her lack of response coming through clearly in his voice. Without looking at him, she raised one of her hands toward him in a gesture that meant he should either stop approaching or stop speaking.

When he stopped both, she motioned him forward. He came up behind her and peered around the corner of the barn. And there he saw them—the four chickens, sitting placidly in the grass, their heads lowered, their feet tucked under their breasts. The rooster sat on one side of Madeleine’s outstretched legs, and the three hens sat on the other side. As Gurney stared down at this odd tableau, he could hear the chickens making the same low, peaceful cooing sounds they made on their roost when they were ready for sleep.

Madeleine looked up at Gurney. “They need a little house and a safe fenced yard to run around in. So they can be out as much as they want in the air and be happy and safe. That’s all they want. So we have to do that for them.”

“Right.” The reminder of the construction project ahead irritated him. He looked down at the chickens on the grass. “How are you going to get them back in the barn?”

“It’s not a problem.” She smiled, more at the chickens than at him. “It’s not a problem,” she repeated in a whisper. “We’ll go into the barn soon. We just want to sit in the grass for a few more minutes.”

Half an hour later, Gurney was sitting in front of his computer in the den, making his way through the website of the Cyberspace Cathedral, “Your Portal to a Joyful Life.” Predictably perhaps, given the name of the organization, he could find no physical address, no picture of any brick-and-mortar headquarters.

The only option offered on the Contact page was email. When Gurney clicked on it, the actual email form that popped up was addressed to Jonah himself.

Gurney thought about that for a while—the disarming, almost intimate suggestion that one’s comment, inquiry, or plea for help would go directly to the founder. That in turn made him wonder what sort of comments, inquiries, or pleas for help the website might be generating; looking for the answer kept him scrolling through the site for another twenty minutes.

The eventual impression he got was that the promised joyful life was a vaguely New Age state of mind, full of soft-focus philosophy, pastel graphics, and sunny weather. The whole enterprise seemed to be proffering the sweetness and protection of baby powder. It was as if Hallmark had decided to start a religion.

The object that held Gurney’s attention longest was a photograph of Jonah Spalter on the Welcome page. High-resolution and seemingly unretouched, it had a kind of directness that contrasted sharply with the surrounding fluff.

There was something of Carl in the shape of Jonah’s face, the full dark hair with a slight wave, the straight nose, the strong jaw. But there all resemblance ended. While Carl’s eyes at the end were full of the most extreme despair, Jonah’s seemed to be fixed on a future of endless success. Like the classic masks of tragedy and comedy, their faces were remarkably similar and totally opposite. If these brothers had been locked in the kind of personal battle that Kay had indicated, and if Jonah’s photograph truly represented his current appearance, there was no doubt which brother had emerged victorious.

In addition to Jonah’s picture, the Welcome page included a long clickable menu of topics. Gurney chose the one at the top of the list: “Only Human.” As a page with a border of entwined daisies came up on the screen, he heard Madeleine’s voice calling to him from the other room.

“Dinner’s on the table.”

She was already seated at the small round table in the nook by the French doors—the one at which they ate all their meals, except when they had guests and used the long Shaker table instead. He sat across from her. On each of their plates were generous portions of sautéed haddock, carrots, and broccoli. He poked at a slice of carrot, speared it with his fork, began chewing it. He discovered he wasn’t very hungry. He continued eating anyway. He didn’t care much for the haddock. It reminded of the tasteless fish his mother used to serve.

“Did you get them back in the barn?” he asked with more irritation than interest.

“Of course.”

He realized he’d lost track of the hour and glanced over at the clock on the far wall. It was six-thirty. He turned his head to look out the glass door and saw the sun glaring back at him from just above the western ridge. Far from any romantic notions of a pastoral sunset, it reminded him of a movie-cliché interrogation lamp.

That association carried him back to the questions he’d posed at Bedford Hills just a few hours earlier, and to those uncannily steady green eyes that seemed more suited to a cat in a painting than a woman in prison.

“You want to tell me about it?” Madeleine was watching him with that knowing look that sometimes made him wonder if he’d been unconsciously whispering his thoughts.

“About …?”

“Your day. The woman you went to see. What Jack wants. Your plan. Whether you believe she’s innocent.”

It hadn’t occurred to him that he wanted to talk about that. But perhaps he did. He laid his fork down. “Bottom line, I don’t know what I believe. If she’s a liar, she’s a good one. Maybe the best I’ve ever seen.”

“But you don’t think she’s a liar?”

“I’m not sure. She seems to want me to believe she’s innocent, but she’s not going out of her way to persuade me. It’s as though she wants to make it difficult.”

“Clever.”

“Clever or … honest.”

“Maybe both.”

“Right.”

“What else?”

“What do you mean?”

“What else did you see in her?”

He thought for a moment. “Pride. Strength. Willfulness.”

“Is she attractive?”

“I don’t think ‘attractive’ is the word I’d choose.”

“What, then?”

“Impressive. Intense. Determined.”

“Ruthless?”

“Ah. That’s a tough one. If you mean ruthless enough to kill her husband for money, I can’t say yet one way or the other.”

Madeleine echoed the word “yet” so softly, he hardly heard her.

“I intend to take at least one more step,” he said, but even as he was saying it he recognized its subtle dishonesty.

If the skeptical glint in Madeleine’s eye was any indication, so did she. “And that step would be …?”

“I want to look at the crime scene.”

“Weren’t there pictures in the file Jack gave you?”

“Crime scene photos and drawings capture maybe ten percent of the reality. You have to stand there, walk around, look around, listen, smell, get a feel for the place, a feel for the possibilities and limitations—the neighborhood, the traffic, a feel for what the victim might have seen, what the killer might have seen, how he might have arrived, where he might have gone, who might have seen him.”

“Or her.”

“Or her.”

“So when are you going to do all this looking, listening, smelling, and feeling?”

“Tomorrow.”

“You do remember our dinner?”

“Tomorrow?”

Madeleine produced a long-suffering smile. “The members of the yoga club. Here. For dinner.”

“Oh, right, sure. That’s fine. No problem.”

“You’re sure? You’ll be here?”

“No problem.”

She gave him a long look, then broke it off as though the subject was closed. She stood, opened the French doors, and took a long deep breath of the cool air.

A moment later, from the woods beyond the pond came that strange lost cry they’d heard before, like an eerie note on a flute.

Gurney rose from his chair and stepped out past Madeleine onto the stone patio. The sun had dipped below the ridge, and the temperature felt like it had dropped fifteen degrees. He stood quite still and listened for a repetition of that unearthly sound.

All he could hear was a silence so deep it sent a shiver through his body.

Chapter 12. Willow Rest

When Gurney came out to the kitchen the next morning, he was ravenously hungry.

Madeleine was at the sink island, shredding bits of bread onto a large paper plate, half of which was already covered with chopped strawberries. Once a week she gave the chickens a plate of something special in addition to the packaged feed from the farm supply store.

Gurney was reminded by her more-conservative-than-usual outfit that it was one of her work days at the clinic. He looked up at the clock. “Aren’t you running late?”

“Hal is picking me up, so … no problem.”

If he remembered rightly, Hal was the clinic director. “Why?”

She stared at him.

“Oh, right, yes, your car, in the shop. But how come Hal—?”

“I mentioned my car problems at work the other day, and Hal said he passes our road anyway. Besides, if I’m late because he’s late, he can hardly complain. And speaking of being late, you won’t be, will you?”

“Late? For what?”

“Tonight. The yoga club.”

“No problem.”

“And you’ll think about calling Malcolm Claret?”

“Today?”

“Good a time as any.”

At the sound of a car coming up the pasture lane, she went to the window. “He’s here,” she said breezily. “Got to go.” She hurried over to Gurney, kissed him, and then picked up her bag from the sideboard with one hand and the plate of bread and strawberries with the other.

“You want me to take care of that chicken stuff for you?” asked Gurney.

“No. Hal can stop at the barn for two seconds. I’ll take care of it. Ta-ta.” She headed through the hallway past the mudroom and out the back door.

Gurney watched through the window as Hal’s gleaming black Audi crept slowly down toward the barn and around to the far side where the door was. He watched until the car reappeared from behind the barn a minute or two later and headed down the road.

It was barely eight-fifteen in the morning, and already his day was congested with thoughts and emotions he’d rather not have.

He knew from experience that the best remedy for dealing with an unsettled state of mind was to take some sort of action, to move forward.

He went to the den, got the Spalter case file and the thick packet of documents describing Kay’s journey through the legal system after her arraignment—the pretrial motions, the trial transcript, copies of the prosecution’s visual aids and items of evidence, and the routine post-conviction appeal filed by the original defense attorney. Gurney carried it all out to his car, because he had no idea which specific items he might need to refer to in the course of the day.

He went back in the house and got a plain gray sport jacket out of his closet, the one he’d worn hundreds of times on the job, but maybe only three times since he’d retired. That jacket with his dark slacks, blue shirt, and simple military style shoes screamed “cop” as loudly as any uniform. He was guessing that the image might prove useful in Long Falls. He made one last glance around, went out to his car again, and entered the address of the Willow Rest cemetery in the portable GPS on the dashboard.

A minute later he was on his way—and feeling better already.

Like so many old cities on rivers and canals of fading commercial utility, Long Falls seemed to be struggling against a persistent current of decline.

There were scattered signs of attempted revitalization. An abandoned fabric mill had been converted into professional offices; a cluster of small shops now occupied a former casket factory; a block-long building of sooty bricks the color of old scabs, with the name CLOVER-SWEET CREAMERY etched on a granite lintel over the entrance door, had been relabeled NORTHERN ART STUDIOS GALLERIES on a wider and brighter sign affixed above the lintel.

As he drove along the main artery, however, Gurney counted at least six derelict buildings from a more prosperous time. There were a lot of empty parking spaces, too few people on the streets. A thin teenager, wearing the loser’s uniform of sagging jeans and an oversized baseball hat worn sideways, stood on an otherwise deserted corner with a muscular dog on a short leash. As Gurney slowed for a red light, he could see that the young man’s anxious eyes were scanning the passing cars with an addict’s characteristic combination of hope and detachment.

It sometimes seemed to Gurney that something in America had gone terribly wrong. A large segment of a generation had become infected with ignorance, laziness, and vulgarity. It no longer seemed unusual for a young woman to have, say, three small children by three different fathers, two of whom were currently in prison. And places like Long Falls, which once may have nurtured a simpler kind of life, were now depressingly similar to everywhere else.

These thoughts were interrupted by his GPS announcing in an authoritative voice, “Arriving at destination on your right.”

The sign, next to a spotless blacktop driveway, said only WILLOW REST—leaving the nature of the enterprise unspecified. Gurney turned in and followed the driveway through an open wrought-iron gate in a yellow brick wall. Well-tended landscape plantings on each side of the entrance conveyed the impression not of a cemetery but of an upscale residential development. The driveway led directly to a small, empty parking area in front of an English-style cottage.

Window boxes overflowing with purple and yellow pansies below old-fashioned small-paned windows reminded him of the weird-cozy esthetic of a wildly popular painter whose name he could never recall. There was a VISITOR INFORMATION sign alongside a flagstone pathway that extended from the parking area to the cottage door.

As Gurney was heading up the path, the door opened and a woman who seemed not to notice him emerged onto a broad stone step. She was casually dressed, as if for some light gardening, a notion underscored by a small pruning scissors in her hand.

Gurney guessed her age to be mid-fifties. Her most noticeable feature was her hair, which was pure white and arranged in a short layered style, ending in choppy little points around her forehead and cheeks. He recalled his mother having that hairdo when it was first fashionable in his childhood. He even recalled its name: the artichoke. That word in turn produced a fleeting feeling of unease.

The woman glanced with surprise at Gurney. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you drive up. I was just coming out to take care of a few things. I’m Paulette Purley. How can I help you?”

During his drive to Long Falls, Gurney had considered various ways of answering questions about his visit and had decided on an approach that he labeled in his own mind “minimal honesty”—which meant telling enough of the truth to avoid being caught in a lie, but telling it in a way to avoid setting off unnecessary alarms.

“I’m not sure yet.” He smiled innocently. “Would it be all right for me to take a stroll around the grounds?”

Her unremarkable hazel eyes seemed to be appraising him. “Have you been here before?”

“This is my first visit. But I do have a satellite map I printed out from Google.”

A cloud of skepticism crossed her face. “Wait just a moment.” She turned and went into the cottage. A few seconds later she returned with a colorful brochure. “Just in case your Google thing isn’t entirely clear, this may be useful.” She paused. “May I direct you to the resting place of a specific friend or relative?”

“No. But thank you. It’s such a lovely day, I think I’d prefer to find my own way.”

She cast a worried look at the sky, which was half blue, half clouds. “They’ve been talking about the possibility of rain. If you’d tell me the name—”

“You’re very kind,” he said, backing away, “but I’ll be fine.” He retreated to the small parking area and saw on the opposite side of it a flagstone pathway passing under a rose-covered trellis beside which a sign read PEDESTRIAN ENTRANCE. As he walked through it, he glanced back. Paulette Purley was still standing in front of the cottage, watching him with a look of anxious curiosity.

It didn’t take Gurney long to realize what Hardwick had meant when he referred to Willow Rest as “seriously peculiar.” The place bore little resemblance to any cemetery he’d ever seen. Yet there also was something familiar about it. Something he couldn’t put his finger on.

The basic layout consisted of a gently curving cobblestone lane that paralleled the low brick wall surrounding the property. Smaller lanes branched from it in toward the center of the cemetery grounds at regular intervals amid a profusion of lush rhododendrons, lilacs, and hemlocks. These lanes had offshoots of still smaller lanes, each of which terminated like a driveway at a mowed grassy area the size of a small backyard, separated from its neighbors by rows of waist-high spireas and beds of daylilies. In each of the grassy areas he entered, there were several marble grave markers, flush with the ground. In addition to the name of the interred, each marker bore only a single date instead of the traditional birth and death dates.

Next to each “driveway” was a plain black mailbox with a family name stenciled on the side. He opened a few of the mailboxes as he made his way along the lanes, but found nothing in any of them. About twenty minutes into his exploration, he came upon a mailbox that bore the name Spalter. It marked the entrance to the largest of the plots he’d encountered so far. The plot occupied what seemed to be one of the higher points in Willow Rest, a gentle rise from which the narrow river was visible beyond the perimeter wall. Beyond the river was the state highway that bisected Long Falls. On the far side of the highway a block of three-story apartment buildings faced the cemetery.

Chapter 13. Death in Long Falls

Gurney was already familiar with the basic topography, structures, angles, and distances. All of that had been documented in the case file. But actually seeing the building, and then pinpointing the window, from which the fatal bullet was fired—fired toward the area where he was now standing—had a jarring effect. It was the effect of reality colliding with preconception. It was an experience he’d had at countless crime scenes. That gap between the mental picture and the actual sensory impact was what made being there so important.

A physical crime scene was concrete and unfiltered in a way that no photo or description ever could be. It held answers you could find if you looked with open eyes and an open mind. If you looked carefully, it could tell you a story. It gave you, quite literally, a place to stand, a place from which you could survey the real possibilities.

After conducting a preliminary 360-degree examination of his general surroundings, Gurney focused on the details of the Spalter plot itself. More than twice the size of the next largest he’d come upon, he estimated the dimensions of the central mowed area as fifty by seventy feet. A low border of well-kept rosebushes surrounded it.

He counted eight flat marble grave markers lying just below the height of the grass, arranged in rows that allocated a space of approximately six feet by twelve feet for each burial. The earliest date, 1899, appeared on marker that bore the name Emmerling Spalter. The most recent date, 1970, was on a marker that bore the name Carl Spalter. The edges of the letters on the glossy surface of the marble were distinctly sharp and freshly carved. But obviously the date was not of his death. His birth, then? Probably.

As Gurney gazed down at the marker he saw that it was next to one for Mary Spalter, the mother at whose funeral Carl had been fatally wounded. On the other side of Mary Spalter’s grave was a marker bearing the name Joseph Spalter. Father and mother and murdered son. A peculiar family gathering, in this thoroughly peculiar cemetery. Father and mother and murdered son—the son who hoped to be governor—all reduced to nothing at all.

As he was pondering the sad smallness of human lives, he heard a low mechanical hum behind him. He turned to see an electric golf cart coming to a silent stop at the rose border of the Spalter plot. The driver was Paulette Purley, smiling inquisitively.

“Hello, again, Mr.…? Sorry, but I don’t know your name.”

“Dave Gurney.”

“Hello, Dave.” She stepped out of the cart. “I was about to make my rounds when I noticed those rain clouds getting closer.” She gestured vaguely toward some gray clouds in the west. “I thought you might need an umbrella. You don’t want to be out here in a downpour without one.” As she was speaking, she took a bright blue umbrella from the floor of the cart and brought it to him. “Getting wet is fine if you’re swimming, but otherwise not so pleasant.”

He took the umbrella, thanked her, and waited for her to segue to her real purpose, which he was sure had nothing to do with keeping him dry.

“Just drop it off at the cottage on your way out.” She started back to the cart, then stopped as though another thought had just occurred to her. “Were you able to find your way all right?”

“Yes, I was. Of course, this particular plot would—”

“Property,” she interjected.

“Beg pardon?”

“At Willow Rest we prefer not to use the vocabulary of cemeteries. We offer ‘properties’ to families, not depressing little ‘plots.’ I take it you’re not a member of the family?”

“No, I’m not.”

“A family friend, perhaps?”

“In a way, yes. But may I ask why you’re asking?”

She appeared to be searching his face for a clue on how she should proceed. Then something in his expression seemed to reassure her. Her voice dropped into a confidential register. “I’m sorry. I certainly didn’t mean any offense. But the Spalter property, you can understand I’m sure, is a special case. We sometimes have a problem with … what shall I call them? Sensation seekers, I suppose. Ghouls, when you come right down to it.” She curled her lips in an expression of distaste. “When something tragic occurs, people come to gawk, take pictures. It’s disgusting, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a tragedy. A horrible family tragedy. Can you imagine? A man is shot at his own mother’s funeral? Shot in the brain! Crippled! A completely paralyzed cripple! A vegetable! Then he dies! And his own wife turns out to be the murderer! That’s a terrible, terrible tragedy! And what do people do? They show up here with cameras. Cameras. Some of them even tried to steal our rosebushes. As souvenirs! Can you imagine that? Of course, as resident manager, it all ends up being my responsibility. It makes me sick talking about it. Sick to my stomach! I can’t even …” She waved her hand in a gesture of helplessness.

The lady doth protest too much, thought Gurney. She sounds every bit as enlivened by the “tragedy” as the people she’s condemning. But, he reflected, that wasn’t unusual. Few behaviors of other people are more irritating than those that display our own faults in an unattractive way.

His next thought was that her apparent appetite for drama might give him a useful opening. He looked into her eyes as if he and she were having a deep meeting of the minds. “You really care about this, don’t you?”

She blinked. “Care? Of course I do. Isn’t that obvious?”

Instead of answering, he turned away thoughtfully, walked toward the rose border, and poked absently in the mulch with the tip of the umbrella she’d handed him.

“Who are you?” she finally asked. He thought he heard a touch of excitement in the question.

He continued prodding the mulch. “I told you, my name is Dave Gurney.”

“Why are you here?”

Again he spoke without turning. “I’ll tell you in a minute. But first let me ask you a question. What was your reaction—the very first thing you felt—when you found out that Carl Spalter had been shot?”

She hesitated. “Are you a reporter?”

He turned toward her, took out his wallet, and held it up, displaying his gold NYPD detective’s shield. She was standing far enough away that the word “Retired” at the bottom of the shield would not be legible, and she didn’t come any closer to examine it. He closed his wallet and put it back in his pocket.

“You’re a detective?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh …” She looked alternately confused, curious, excited. “What … what would you want here?”

“I need to get a better understanding of what happened.”

She blinked rapidly several times. “What is there to understand? I thought everything was … resolved.”

He took a few steps closer to her, spoke as if he were sharing privileged information. “The conviction is being appealed. There are some open questions, possible gaps in the evidence.”

She wrinkled her brow. “Aren’t all murder convictions appealed automatically?”

“Yes. And the vast majority of the convictions are upheld. But this case may be different.”

“Different?”

“Let me ask you again. What was your reaction—the very first thing you felt—when you found out that Carl had been shot?”

“Found out? You mean, when I noticed it.”

“Noticed it?”

“I was the first one to see it.”

“See what?”

“The little hole in his temple. At first I wasn’t sure it was a hole. It just looked like a round red spot. But then a tiny red trickle started down the side of his forehead. And I knew, I just knew.”

“You pointed it out to the first responders?”

“Of course.”

“Fascinating. Tell me more.”

She pointed at the ground a few feet from where Gurney was standing. “That’s where it was, right there—where the first drop of blood from the side of his forehead fell onto the snow. I can almost see it now. Have you ever seen blood on snow?” Her eyes seemed to widen at the memory. “It’s the reddest red you can imagine.”

“What makes you so sure it was in that precise—”

She answered before he could finish. “Because of that.” She indicated another point on the ground, a foot or so farther away.

It wasn’t until Gurney took a step toward it that he saw a small green disc below the grass level. It had pinhole perforations around its circumference. “A watering system?”

“His head was face down just a few inches short of it.” She stepped over to the spot and placed her foot next to the watering head. “Right there.”

Gurney was struck by the coldness, the hostility, of the gesture.

“Do you attend all the funerals here?”

“Yes and no. As the resident manager, I’m never far away. But I always maintain a discreet distance. Funerals, I believe, are for invited family and friends. Of course, in the case of the Spalter funeral, I was more present.”

“More present?”

“Well, I didn’t feel it was appropriate to sit with Mr. Spalter’s family and personal associates, so I remained a bit to the side—but I was certainly more present than at other interments.”

“Why was that?”

She looked surprised at the question. “Because of my relationship.”

“Which was what?”

“Spalter Realty is my employer.”

“The Spalters own Willow Rest?”

“I thought that was common knowledge. Willow Rest was founded by Emmerling Spalter, the grandfather of … the recently deceased. Didn’t you know that?”

“You’ll have to be patient with me. I’m new to the case, and I’m new to Long Falls.” He saw something critical in her expression, and he added with the hint of a conspiratorial tone, “You see, I was brought here for a completely fresh perspective.” He gave her a moment or two to absorb the implications of that statement, then went on. “Now let’s go back to my question about the feeling you had when you realized—noticed—what had happened.”

She hesitated, her lips tightening. “Why is that important?”

“I’ll explain in a minute. In the meantime, let me ask you another question. What did you feel when you learned that Kay Spalter had been arrested?”

“Oh, God. Disbelief. Shock. Complete shock.”

“How well did you know Kay?”

“Obviously not as well as I thought I did. Something like this makes you wonder how well you know anyone.” After a pause, her expression morphed into a kind of shrewd curiosity. “What’s this all about? These questions—what’s going on here?”

Gurney gave her a long, hard look, as if he were assessing her trustworthiness. Then he took a deep breath and spoke in what he hoped would come across as a confessional tone. “There’s a funny thing about cops, Paulette. We expect people to tell us everything, but we don’t like to reveal anything ourselves. I understand the reasons for it, but there are times …” He paused, then took a deep breath and spoke slowly, looking her in the eye. “I have the impression that Kay was a much nicer person than Carl. Not the sort of person who’d be capable of murder. I’m trying to find out if I’m right or wrong. I can’t do that alone. I need the insight of other people. I have a strong feeling you may be able to help me.”

She stared at him for several seconds, then gave a little shiver and wrapped her arms around her body. “I think you should come back to the house with me. I’m sure it’s going to rain any minute now.”

Chapter 14. The Devil’s Brother

The cottage wasn’t nearly as kitschy as Gurney had expected. Despite its storybook facade, the interior was rather restrained. The front door opened onto a modest entry hall. On the left he saw a sitting room with a fireplace and several traditional landscape prints on the walls. Through a doorway on the right, he glimpsed what appeared to be an office with a mahogany desk and a large painting of Willow Rest behind it. It reminded him of one of those sprawling nineteenth-century macroviews of a working farm or village. Straight ahead on the left was a staircase to an upper floor and on the right a door that presumably led to another room or two at the back of the house. It was where Paulette Purley had gone to make coffee after taking Gurney into the sitting room and steering him to a wing chair by the fireplace. On the mantel was a framed photograph of a lanky man with his arm around a younger Paulette. Her hair was a bit longer then, fluffed up as though caught in a breeze, and honey blond.

She reappeared with a tray on which there were two cups of black coffee, a small pitcher of milk, a sugar bowl, and two spoons. She placed the tray on a low table in front of the hearth and sat in a matching chair facing Gurney’s. Neither spoke as they added milk and sugar, took a first sip, then sat back in their chairs.

Paulette, he noted, was holding her cup in both hands, perhaps to steady it, perhaps to take a chill out of her fingers. Her lips were pressed together but making tiny nervous movements. “Now it can rain all it wants,” she said with a sudden smile, as though trying to dispel the tension with the sound of her own voice.

“I’m curious about this place,” said Gurney. “Willow Rest must have an interesting history.” It wasn’t a history he cared about. But he thought that getting her talking about something easy might provide a bridge to something more difficult.

For the next fifteen minutes she explained Emmerling Spalter’s philosophy, which struck Gurney as escapist nonsense, cannily packaged. Willow Rest was one’s final home, not a cemetery. Only the date of birth, not the date of death, was engraved on a marker, because once we are born we live forever. Willow Rest provided not gravesites but homesites, a piece of nature with grass and trees and flowers. Every property was scaled to accommodate a multigenerational family rather than an individual. The mailbox at each property was an encouragement to family members to leave cards and letters for their loved ones. (These were gathered once a week, burned in a little portable brazier at each site, and raked into the soil.) Paulette explained earnestly that Willow Rest was all about life, continuity, beauty, peace, and privacy. As far as Gurney could see, it was about everything except death. But he was not about to say that. He wanted her to keep talking.

Emmerling and Agnes Spalter had three children, two of whom died of pneumonia before they were out of their cribs. The survivor was Joseph. He married a woman named Mary Croake.

Joseph and Mary had two sons, Carl and Jonah.

The mention of these names, Gurney noticed, had an immediate effect on Paulette’s tone and expression, bringing back to her lips an almost imperceptible twitching.

“I’ve been told they were as different as two brothers could be,” he said encouragingly.

“Oh, yes! Black and white! Cain and Abel!” She fell silent, her eyes fixed in anger on some memory.

Gurney prompted her. “I imagine Carl could be a difficult person to work for.”

“Difficult?” A bitter one-syllable laugh erupted from her throat. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, seemed to reach a decision, and then the words came rushing out.

“Difficult? Let me explain something to you. Emmerling Spalter became a very wealthy man buying and selling large tracts of land in upstate New York. He passed his business, his money, and his talent for making it along to his son. Joe Spalter was a bigger, tougher version of his father. He wasn’t someone you’d want for an enemy. But he was rational. You could talk to him. In his hard-as-nails way, he was fair. Not nice, not generous. But fair. It was Joe who hired my husband as the Willow Rest resident manager. That was …” She looked lost for a moment or two. “Oh, my, time is becoming so difficult. That was fifteen years ago. Fifteen.” She looked at her coffee cup, seemed surprised that it was still in her hands, and laid it down carefully on the table.

“And Joe was Carl and Jonah’s father?” prompted Gurney.

She nodded. “Joe’s dark side all went to Carl, and everything that was decent and reasonable went to Jonah. They say there’s some good and bad in all of us, but not in the case of the Spalter brothers. Jonah and Carl. An angel and a devil. I believe Joe saw that, and the way he tied them together as a condition for inheriting the business was his attempt at solving the problem. Maybe hoping for some kind of balance. Of course, it didn’t work.”

Gurney sipped his coffee. “What happened?”

“After Joe passed away, they went from being opposites to being enemies. They couldn’t agree on anything. All Carl was interested in was money, money, money—and he didn’t care how they made it. Jonah found the situation unbearable, and that’s when he set up the Cyberspace Cathedral and disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Pretty much. You could reach him through the Cathedral website, but he had no real address. There was a rumor that he was always on the move, living in a motor home, managing the Cathedral project and everything else in his life by computer. When he made an appearance here in Long Falls for his mother’s funeral, that was the first time anyone had seen him in three years. And even then, we didn’t know he was coming. I believe he wanted to make a total break from everything connected with Carl.” She paused. “He might even have been afraid of Carl.”

“Afraid?”

Paulette leaned forward and picked up her coffee, holding it again in both hands. She cleared her throat. “I don’t say this lightly. Carl Spalter had no conscience. If he wanted something, I don’t think there would be any limit to what he might do.”

“What’s the worst thing—”

“The worst thing he ever did? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. But I do know what he did to me—or what he tried to do to me.” Her eyes brightened with anger.

“Tell me.”

“My husband, Bob, and I had lived in this house for fifteen years, ever since he accepted his position here. The downstairs always served as the Willow Rest business office, and the little upstairs apartment went with the job. We moved in right after Bob was hired. It was our home. And, in a way, we both did his job. We did it together. We felt that it was more than a job; it was a commitment. A way of helping people through terrible times in their lives. It wasn’t just a way of making a living—it was our life.”

Tears were welling in her eyes. She blinked hard and went on. “Ten months ago, Bob had a massive coronary. In that hallway.” As she looked toward the doorway, she closed her eyes for a moment. “He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.” She took a deep breath. “The day after his funeral, I received an email from Carl’s assistant at Spalter Realty. An email. Telling me that a cemetery management company—can you image such a thing?—a cemetery management company would be taking over responsibility for Willow Rest. And, for an efficient transition, it would be necessary for me to vacate the cottage within sixty days.”

She stared at Gurney, erect in her chair, full of fury. “What do you think of that? After fifteen years! The day after my husband’s funeral! An email! A goddamn, wretched, disgusting, insulting email! Your husband’s dead, now get out of here. Tell me, Detective Gurney—what kind of man does something like that?”

When it appeared that her emotion had subsided, he said softly, “That was ten months ago. I’m glad to see you’re still here.”

“I’m here because Kay Spalter did me—and everyone else in the world—a giant favor.”

“You mean Carl was shot before your sixty days were up?”

“That’s right. Which proves there’s some good in the world after all.”

“So you still work for Spalter Realty?”

“For Jonah, really. When Carl was incapacitated, full control of Spalter Realty passed to Jonah.”

“Carl’s fifty percent ownership didn’t become part of his own estate?”

“No. Believe me, Carl’s estate was big enough without it—he was involved in so many other things. But when it came to the holdings of Spalter Realty, the corporate agreement Joe made them sign included a provision that transferred everything to the surviving brother at the death of either one.”

That certainly seemed to Gurney like a fact significant enough to have made its way into the case file, but he hadn’t seen any mention of it. He made a mental note to ask Hardwick if he was aware of it.

“How do you know about this, Paulette?”

“Jonah explained it to me the day he took over. Jonah is very open. You get the impression that he really and truly has no secrets.”

Gurney nodded, tried not to look skeptical. He’d never met a man with no secrets. “I gather, then, that Jonah canceled Carl’s plan to outsource the management of Willow Rest?”

“Absolutely. Immediately. In fact, he stepped right in and offered me the same job Bob had, at the same salary. He even told me that the job and the house would be mine to keep as long as I wanted either one of them.”

“He sounds like a generous man.”

“You know those empty apartments over there across the river? He told the Spalter Realty security guard to stop chasing the homeless people out of them. He even got the electricity turned back on for them—the electricity that Carl had turned off.”

“He sounds like he cares about people.”

“Cares?” An otherworldly smile changed her expression completely. “Jonah doesn’t just care. Jonah is a saint.”

Chapter 15. A Cynical Suggestion

Less than five hundred yards from the manicured enclave of Willow Rest, Axton Avenue provided a dose of upstate economic reality. Half the street-level shops were run-down, the other half boarded up. The apartment windows above them looked forlorn if not entirely abandoned.

Gurney parked in front of a dusty-looking electronics store that, according to the case file, occupied the ground floor of the building from which the bullet had been fired. A logo showing through a poorly overpainted sign above the display window indicated it had once been a RadioShack franchise.

Next to the store, the entry door for the residential floors was a few inches ajar. Gurney pushed it open and entered a small, dingy lobby. What little light there was came from a single bulb in a caged ceiling fixture. He was greeted by the standard odor of derelict urban buildings: urine enhanced with touches of alcohol, vomit, cigarette smoke, garbage, and feces. And there were the familiar auditory inputs. Somewhere above him two male voices were arguing, hip-hop music was playing, a dog was barking, and a small child was screaming. All that was missing to turn it into a clichéd movie scene was the slam of a door and the clatter of feet on the stairs. Just then Gurney heard a shouted “Fuck you, you stupid fuck!” from an upper floor, followed by the sound of someone actually coming down the stairs. The coincidence would have made him smile if the stench of the urine wasn’t making him nauseous.

The descending footsteps grew louder, and soon a young man appeared at the top of the shadowy flight that led down into the lobby. Spotting Gurney, he hesitated for a second, then hurried down past him and out onto the street, where he stopped abruptly to light a cigarette. He was scrawny with a narrow face, sharp features, and stringy shoulder-length hair. He took two deep, desperate drags on his cigarette, then walked quickly away.

Gurney considered going down into the basement for the master key that Kay had told him was secreted behind the furnace. But he decided instead to give the building a once-over and get the key later if he needed it. For all he knew, the apartment he was most interested in might be unlocked. Or occupied by drug dealers. He was no longer routinely carrying the gun he’d kept with him during the Good Shepherd case—and he didn’t want to burst in, uninvited and unarmed, on a jumpy meth-head with an AK-47.

He climbed the two flights of stairs to the top floor quickly and quietly. Each floor had four apartments—two at the front of the building, two at the rear. On the third floor, gangsta rap was playing behind one door and a child was crying behind another. He knocked at each of the two silent doors and got no response beyond a hint of muffled voices behind one of them. When he knocked at the other two, the rap volume dropped a bit, the child continued to cry, but no one came to either door. He considered pounding on them, but quickly dismissed the notion. Gentler approaches tended to lead to a wider range of options down the road. Gurney was fond of options and wanted to keep them as numerous as possible.

He descended a flight to the second-floor hallway, which, like the others, was illuminated only by a single-bulb fixture in the middle of the ceiling. He oriented himself according to his recollection of the photo in the case file and approached the apartment from which the fatal shot had been fired. As he was putting his ear to the door, he heard a soft footstep—not in the apartment, but behind him. He turned quickly.

At the top of the flight of stairs that came up from the lobby stood a stocky, gray-haired man, motionless and alert. In one hand he carried a black metal flashlight. It was switched off—and being gripped as a weapon. Gurney recognized it as the grip taught in police academies. The man’s other hand rested on something affixed to his belt in the shadow of a dark nylon jacket. Gurney was willing to bet that SECURITY would be stenciled across the back.

There was a look in the man’s small eyes verging on hatred. However, as he scrutinized Gurney more closely—taking in the detective-on-the-job ensemble of cheap sport jacket, blue shirt, and dark pants—the look morphed into a kind of resentful curiosity. “You looking for somebody?”

Gurney had heard that exact voice—meanness and suspicion as much a part of it as the smell of urine was part of the building—from so many cops who’d gone sour over the years, he felt he knew the man personally. It wasn’t a good feeling.

“Yes, I am. Trouble is, I don’t have a name. Meantime, I’d like to get a look inside this apartment.”

“That so? ‘A look inside this apartment’? You mind telling me who the hell you are?”

“Dave Gurney. Ex-NYPD. Just like you.”

“What the hell do you know about me?”

“Doesn’t take a genius to recognize an Irish cop from New York.”

“That so?” The man was giving him a flat stare.

Gurney added, “There was a time when the force was full of people like us.”

That was the right button.

“People like us? That’s ancient history, my friend! Ancient fucking history!”

“Yeah, I know.” Gurney nodded sympathetically. “That was a better time—a much better time, in my humble opinion. When did you get out?”

“When do you think?”

“Tell me.”

“When they got heavy into all that diversity bullshit. Diversity. Can you believe it? Couldn’t get promoted unless you were a Nigerian lesbian with a Navajo grandmother. Time for the smart white guys to get the hell out. Goddamn shame what this country is turning into. Goddamn joke is what it is. America. That’s a word that used to mean something. Pride. Strength. What is it now? Tell me. What is it now?”

Gurney shook his head sadly. “I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not what it used to be.”

“I’ll tell you what it is. Affirmative fucking action. That’s what it is. Welfare bullshit. Dope addicts, pill addicts, coke addicts, crack addicts. And you want to know why? I’ll tell you why. Affirmative fucking action.”

Gurney grunted, hoping to convey morose agreement. “Looks to me like some of the people in this building might be part of the problem.”

“You got that right.”

“You got a hell of a tough job here, Mr.… Sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“McGrath. Frank McGrath.”

Gurney stepped toward him, put his hand out. “Nice to meet you, Frank. What precinct were you assigned to?”

They shook hands.

“Fort Apache. The one they made the movie about.”

“Tough neighborhood.”

“It was fucking nuts. Nobody would believe how fucking nuts it was. But that was nothing compared to the diversity bullshit. Fort Apache I could take. For a two-month period back in the eighties I remember we were averaging a murder a day. One day we had five. It was us against them. But once that diversity bullshit started, there was no more us. Department turned into a muddled-up bunch of crap. You know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, Frank, I know exactly what you’re saying.”

“Crying goddamn shame.”

Gurney looked around the little hallway where they were standing. “So what are you supposed to do here?”

“Do? Nothing. Not a fucking thing. Ain’t that a fucker?”

A door on the floor above them opened, and the hip-hop racket tripled in volume. The door slammed, and it dropped back down.

“Shit, Frank, how do you stand it?”

The man shrugged. “Money’s okay. I make my own schedule. No lezzy bitch looking over my shoulder.”

“You had one of them on the job?”

“Yeah. Captain Pussy-Licker.”

Gurney forced out a loud laugh. “Working for Jonah must be a big improvement.”

“It’s different.” He paused. “You said you wanted to get into that apartment. You mind telling me what—”

Gurney’s phone rang, stopping the man in midsentence.

He checked the ID screen. It was Paulette Purley. He’d exchanged cell numbers with her, but he hadn’t expected to hear from her so soon. “Sorry, Frank, I need to take this. Be with you in two seconds.” He pressed TALK. “Gurney here.”

Paulette’s voice sounded troubled. “I should have asked you this before, but I got so angry thinking about Carl, it slipped my mind. What I was wondering is, can I talk about this?”

“Talk about what?”

“Your investigation, the fact that you’re looking for a ‘fresh perspective.’ Is that confidential? Can I discuss any of this with Jonah?”

Gurney realized that whatever he would say needed to serve his purposes with both Paulette and Frank. It made choosing the right words tricky, but it also presented an opportunity. “I’ll put it this way. Caution is always a virtue. In a murder investigation it can save your life.”

“What are you telling me?”

“If Kay didn’t do it, someone else did. It could even be someone you know. You won’t end up saying the wrong thing to the wrong person if you don’t say anything to anyone.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“That’s my goal.”

She hesitated. “Okay. I understand. Not a word to anyone. Thanks.” She hung up.

Gurney continued speaking as though she hadn’t. “Right … but I need to take a look at the apartment … No, that’s okay, I can get a key from the local cops or from the Spalter Realty office … Sure … no problem.” Gurney burst into laughter. “Yeah, right.” More laughter. “It’s not funny, I know, but what the hell. You gotta laugh.”

Long ago he’d learned that nothing makes a fake conversation sound more authentic than unexplained laughter. And nothing makes a person more willing to give you something than his believing that you can get it just as easily somewhere else.

Gurney made a show of ending the call and announced, almost apologetically, as he headed purposefully for the stairs, “Got to go to the police station. They have an extra key for me. Be back in a little while.” Gurney went to the stairs and started down them in a hurry. When he was almost to the bottom, he heard Frank say the magic words:

“Hey, you don’t need to do that. I got a key right here. I’ll let you in. Just tell me what the hell’s going on.”

Gurney climbed back up to the gloomy little hallway. “You can let me in? You’re sure that’s not a problem? You need to check with anyone?”

“Like who?”

“Jonah?”

He unclipped a heavy set of keys from his belt and opened the apartment door. “Why would he care? As long as all the freeloading scumbags in Long Falls are happy, he’s happy.”

“He’s got a very generous reputation.”

“Yeah, another Mother fucking Teresa.”

“You don’t think he’s an improvement over Carl?”

“Don’t get me wrong. Carl was a grade-A prick. All he cared about was money, business, politics. A prick all the way. But he was the kind of prick you could understand. You could always understand what Carl wanted. Predictable.”

“A predictable prick?”

“Right. But Jonah, he’s a whole other animal. No way to predict Jonah. Jonah’s a fucking fruitcake. Like here. Perfect example. Carl wanted all the scumbags kicked out, kept out. Makes sense, right? Jonah comes in, says no. Gotta give ’em shelter. Gotta bring the scumbags in out of the rain. Some kind of new spiritual principle, right? Honor the scumbags. Let ’em piss on the floor.”

“You don’t really buy the angel-and-devil view of the Spalter brothers, do you?”

He gave Gurney a shrewd look. “What I heard you say on the phone—is that true?”

“Is what true?”

“That maybe Kay didn’t whack Carl after all?”

“Jesus, Frank, I didn’t realize I was talking that loud. I need you to keep that stuff to yourself.”

“No problem, but I’m just asking—is that a true possibility?”

“A true possibility? Yeah, it is.”

“So that opens things up for a second look?”

“A second look?”

“At everything that went down.”

Gurney lowered his voice. “You could say that.”

A speculative, humorless little smile revealed Frank’s yellow teeth. “Well, well, well. So maybe Kay wasn’t the shooter. Ain’t that something.”

“You know, Frank, it sounds like maybe you have something to tell me.”

“Maybe I do.”

“I’d be very grateful for any ideas you might have on the subject.”

Frank took a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, lit one, and took a long, thoughtful drag. Something mean and small crept into his smile. “You ever think Mr. Perfect might be a little too perfect?”

“Jonah?”

“Right. Mister Generosity. Mister Be-Nice-to-the-Scumbags. Mister Cyber-Fucking-Cathedral.”

“Sounds like you saw another side of him.”

“Maybe I saw the same side his mother saw.”

“His mother? You knew Mary Spalter?”

“She used to visit the main office once in a while. When Carl was in charge.”

“And she had a problem with Jonah?”

“Yeah. She never much liked him. You didn’t know that, huh?”

“No, but I’d love to hear more about it.”

“It’s simple. She knew Carl was a prick, and she was okay with that. She understood tough men. Jonah was way too sweet for her taste. I don’t think the old lady trusted all that niceness. You know what I think? I think she thought he was full of shit.”

Chapter 16. Like the Knife

After unlocking the apartment and being assured that Gurney would still be there when he returned an hour later, rancorous Frank continued on his rounds—which he claimed included all of Spalter Realty’s holdings in Long Falls.

The apartment was small but relatively bright compared to the dreary hallway. The front door opened into a cramped foyer with water-stained wood flooring. On the right was a galley-style kitchen, on the left an empty closet and a bathroom. Straight ahead was a medium-sized room with two windows.

Gurney opened both windows to let in some fresh air. He looked out across Axton Avenue, across the narrow river that ran beside it, and over the low brick wall of Willow Rest. There, on a gentle rise bordered by trees, rhododendrons, lilacs, and rosebushes, was the place where Carl Spalter had been shot and later buried. Wrapped by foliage on three sides, it reminded Gurney of a stage. There was even a kind of proscenium arch, an illusion created by the horizontal member of a light pole that stood on the river side of the avenue and seemed from Gurney’s line of sight to curve over the top of the scene.

The stage image underscored the other theatrical aspects of the case. There was something operatic about a man’s life ending at his mother’s grave, a man falling wounded on the very ground where he himself would soon be buried. And something soap-operatic in the accompanying tale of adultery and greed.

Gurney was transfixed by the setting, feeling that odd tingle of excitement he always felt when he believed he was standing where a murderer had stood, seeing much of what the murderer had seen. There had been, however, a light coating of snow on the ground that fateful day, and, according to the case-file photos, two rows of folding chairs, sixteen in all, had been set up for the mourners on the far side of Mary Spalter’s open grave. To be sure that he was picturing the setting accurately, he’d need to know the position of those chairs. And the position of the portable podium. And Carl’s position. Paulette had been very precise about the position of Carl’s body when it struck the ground, but Gurney needed to envision everything together, everything where it was at the moment the shot was fired. He decided to go down and get the crime scene photos from his car.

As he was about to leave the apartment, his phone stopped him.

It was Paulette again, more agitated than before. “Look, Detective Gurney, maybe I’m misunderstanding this, but it’s really bothering me. I have to ask you … Were you suggesting that somehow Jonah …? I mean, what were you really saying?”

“I’m saying that the case may not be as closed as everyone thinks. Maybe Kay did shoot Carl. But if she didn’t—”

“But how could you believe that Jonah, of all people—” Paulette’s voice was rising.

“Hold on. All I know now is that I need to know more. In the meantime, I want you to be careful. I want you to be safe. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Okay. I understand. Sorry.” The sound of her breathing grew calmer. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I’m over here in the apartment where the shot came from. I want to envision what the shooter saw from this window. It would be a huge help if you could go back to where we were standing before, when you showed me the position of Carl’s head on the ground.”

“And the drop of blood on the snow.”

“Yes. The drop of blood on the snow. Could you go there now?”

“I guess so. Sure.”

“Great, Paulette. Thank you. Take that bright blue umbrella with you. It’ll make a good marker. And your phone, so you can call me when you get there. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Energized by this bit of progress, he hurried out to get the case file from his car. He returned minutes later with a large manila envelope under his arm—just in time to catch sight of someone stepping into the neighboring apartment.

Gurney moved quickly to the door, inserting his foot in the jamb before it could be closed.

A short, wiry man with a long black ponytail stared out at him. After a moment he began to smile a little crazily, displaying several gold teeth, like a Mexican bandit in a politically incorrect Western. There was an intensity in his gaze that Gurney figured could come from drugs, a naturally tight spring, or a mental disorder.

“Something I can do for you?” The man’s voice was hoarse but not unfriendly.

“Sorry to be in your face like this,” said Gurney. “This has nothing to do with you. I just need some information about the apartment next to yours.”

The man looked down at the foot pressed against his door.

Gurney smiled and stepped back. “Sorry again. I’m in kind of a hurry and having a hard time finding anyone to talk to.”

“About what?”

“Simple stuff. Like who’s been living in this building the longest?”

“Why?”

“I’m looking for people who were here eight, nine months ago.”

“Eight, nine months. Hmm.” He blinked for the first time. “That’d be round about the time of the Big Bang, wouldn’t it?”

“If you mean the shooting, yes.”

The man stroked his chin as if he had a goatee. “You looking for Freddie?”

At first the name meant nothing. Then Gurney remembered seeing the name Frederico something-or-other in the trial transcript. “You mean the Freddie who said he saw Kay Spalter in this building on the morning of the shooting?”

“Only Freddie that ever sat his ass here.”

“Why would I be looking for him?”

“ ’Cause of the fact he’s missing. Why else?”

“Missing since when?”

“Like, you don’t know that? That a joke? Man, who the fuck are you, anyway?”

“Just a guy who’s taking a second look at everything.”

“Sounds like a big job for ‘just a guy.’ ”

“Big pain-in-the-ass job, actually.”

“That’s funny.” He didn’t smile.

“So when did Freddie go missing?”

“After he got the call.” He cocked his head and gave Gurney a sideways look. “Man, I’m thinking you know this shit already.”

“Tell me about the call.”

“I don’t know nothing about the call. Just that Freddie got it. Made it sound like it was from one of your guys.”

“From a cop?”

“Right.”

“And then he disappeared?”

“Yeah.”

“And this was when?”

“Right after the lady got sent up.”

Gurney’s phone rang. He let it ring. “Did Freddie say the call was from a cop by the name of Klemper?”

“Could be.”

Gurney’s phone kept ringing. The ID said it was Paulette Purley. He put it back in his pocket.

“You live in this apartment?”

“Mostly.”

“You going to be around later?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe we could talk again?”

“Maybe.”

“My name’s Dave Gurney. Can you tell me yours?”

“Bolo.”

“Like the string tie?”

“No, man, not like the tie.” He grinned, showing off the gold teeth again. “Like the knife.”

Chapter 17. An Impossible Shot

Gurney stood at the window, phone in hand, gazing over the avenue and river at the Spalter crime scene and burial ground. He could see Paulette standing roughly in the middle of it, a blue umbrella in one hand, a phone in the other.

He backed away from the window several paces to the spot in the room where, according to the forensic photo, the rifle had been found on its tripod. He knelt down to lower his line of sight to the approximate height of the rifle scope, and spoke into his phone.

“Okay, Paulette, open the umbrella and place it where you remember Carl’s body lying.”

He watched as she did it, wishing he’d brought his binoculars. Then he looked down at the police sketch of the scene that he had on the floor in front of him. It showed two positions for Carl: the spot where he was standing when he was hit and the spot where he fell to the ground. Both positions were between his mother’s open grave in front and two rows of folding chairs in back. There was a number written on the sketch by each of the sixteen chairs, presumably keying them to a separate list of the mourners who had occupied them.

“Paulette, can you recall by any chance who was sitting where?”

“Of course. I can still see it like it happened this morning. Every detail. Like that trickle of blood on the side of his head. That drop of blood on the snow. God, will that ever go away?”

Gurney had memories like that. Every cop did. “Maybe not completely. But it’ll come to you less frequently.” He neglected to mention that the reason some memories like that had faded in his own mind was because they’d been pushed aside by more terrible ones. “But tell me about the people sitting in the chairs, especially those in the first row.”

“Before he stood up, Carl was on the end. That would be on the right side of the row, looking from where you are now. Next to him, his daughter, Alyssa. Next to her, an empty chair. Next to that, Mary Spalter’s three female cousins from Saratoga, all in their seventies. Actually triplets, and still dressing alike. Cute, or weird, depending on your point of view. Then another empty chair. And in the eighth chair, Jonah—as far from Carl as he could get. No surprise there.”

“And the second row?”

“The second row was taken by eight ladies from Mary Spalter’s retirement community. I believe they were all members of some organization there. Oh … what was it? Something odd. Elder something … Elder Force—that was it.”

“Elder Force? What kind of organization is that?”

“I’m not sure. I spoke to one of the ladies briefly. Something about … give me a second. Yes. They have a motto, or saying, as I recall. ‘Elder Force: It’s Never Too Late to Do Good.’ Or words to that effect. I got the impression that they were involved in some sort of charitable activities. Mary Spalter had been a member.”

He made a mental note to look up Elder Force on the Internet. “Do you know if anyone had expected Kay to be at the funeral, or expressed surprise that she wasn’t?”

“I didn’t hear anyone ask about it. Most people who knew the Spalters were aware there was a problem—that Kay and Carl were separated.”

“Okay. So Carl was at one end of the row, Jonah at the other?”

“Yes.”

“How long after Carl got up from his chair was he hit?”

“I don’t know. Four or five seconds? I can picture him standing up … turning to walk to the podium … taking one, two steps … and that’s when it happened. As I said, everyone thought he tripped. But that’s what you would think, isn’t it? Unless you heard a gunshot, but nobody did.”

“Because of the firecrackers?”

“Oh, God, yes, the firecrackers. Some idiot had been setting them off all morning. It was such a distraction.”

“Okay. So you remember Carl taking one or two steps. Could you go to the spot you recall Carl reaching at the moment he started to collapse?”

“That’s easy enough. He was passing directly in front of Alyssa.”

Gurney could see her moving maybe eight or ten feet to the right of the umbrella on the ground.

“Here,” she said.

He squinted, making sure he was seeing her position clearly. “Are you positive?”

“Positive this is the spot? Absolutely!”

“You have that much faith in your memory?”

“I do, but it’s not just that. It’s the way we always arrange the chairs. They’re set up in rows the same length as the grave itself, so everyone can face it without turning. We add as many rows as we need, but the orientation of the chairs to the grave is always the same.”

Gurney said nothing, was just trying to absorb what he was hearing and seeing. Then a question occurred to him that had been at the back of his mind ever since his first reading of the incident report. “I was wondering about something. The Spalter family had a high profile. I assume they were socially well connected. So—”

“Why was the funeral so modest? Is that what you’re wondering?”

“Fourteen mourners, if I’m counting right, aren’t many under the circumstances.”

“That was the decedent’s choice. I was told that Mary Spalter had added a codicil to her will naming the individuals she wanted with her at the end.”

“You mean at her interment?”

“Yes. Her three cousins, two sons, granddaughter, and the eight women from Elder Force. I think the family—Carl, actually—was planning a much larger memorial event to occur sometime later, but … well …” Her voice trailed off. After a moment’s silence, she asked, “Is there anything else?”

“One last question. How tall was Carl?”

“How tall? Six-one, maybe six-two. Carl could look intimidating. Why do you ask?”

“Just trying to picture the scene as accurately as I can.”

“Okay. Is that it, then?”

“I think so, but … if you don’t mind, just stand where you are for a minute. I want to check something.” Keeping his eyes fixed on Paulette as best he could, Gurney rose from his kneeling position—where the rifle had been found on its tripod. He moved slowly to his left as far as he could go and still manage to maintain a line of sight to Paulette through one of the apartment’s two windows. He repeated this, moving as far as he could to the right. After that he went to the windows, stepping up on each windowsill in turn, to see as much as he could see.

When he got down, he thanked Paulette for her help, told her he’d be talking to her again soon, ended the call, and put the phone back in his pocket. Then he stood for a long while in the middle of the room, trying to make sense of a situation that suddenly made no sense at all.

There was a problem with the light pole on the far side of Axton Avenue. The horizontal cross-member was in the way. If Carl Spalter was anywhere near six feet tall and had been standing anywhere near the spot Paulette had indicated, there was no way the fatal shot to his head could have come from that apartment.

The apartment where the murder weapon was found.

The apartment where the BCI evidence team found gunpowder residues that matched the factory loading of a .220 Swift cartridge—which was consistent with the recovered rifle and consistent with the bullet fragments extracted from Carl Spalter’s brain.

The apartment where an eyewitness placed Kay Spalter on the morning of the shooting.

The apartment where Gurney now stood, mystified.

Chapter 18. A Question of Gender

Bafflement has the power to bring some men to a dead stop. It had the opposite effect on Gurney. An apparent contradiction—the shot could not have been fired through the window through which it must have been fired—affected him like amphetamine.

There were things he wanted to check immediately in the case file. Rather than stay in the bare apartment, he took the big manila envelope back down to the car, opened it on the front seat, and began flipping through the original incident report. It was structured in two sections, following the split location of the crime scene—the victim site and the shooter site—with separate strings of photos, descriptions, interviews, and evidence-collection reports for each site.

The first thing that struck him was a peculiar omission. There was no mention in the incident report, or in any follow-up report, of the light pole obstruction. There was a telephoto picture of the Spalter gravesite area taken through the apartment window, but in the absence of a scaled reference marker for Carl’s position at the moment he was struck, the line-of-sight problem was not obvious.

Gurney soon found another equally peculiar omission. There was no mention of security videos. Surely someone had checked for their presence in and around the cemetery, as well as on Axton Avenue. It was hard to believe that such a routine procedure could have been overlooked, and even harder to believe that it had been conducted without any record of the outcome being entered in the file.

He slipped the case file under his front seat, got out of the car, and locked the doors. Looking up and down the block, he saw only three storefront businesses that appeared to actually be in business. The former RadioShack, which now seemed to have no name at all; River Kings Pizza; and something called Dizzy Daze, which had a show window full of inflated balloons but no other indication of what they might be selling.

The closest to him was the no-name electronics store. As Gurney approached it, he saw two hand-printed signs in the glass door: “Refurbed Tablet Computers from $199” and “Will Return 2PM.” Gurney glanced at his watch. It was 2:09. He tried the door. It was locked. He was starting toward River Kings, with the added goal of buying a Coke and a couple of slices, when a pristine yellow Corvette pulled up to the curb. The couple who emerged from it were less pristine. The man was in his late forties, thickly built, with more hair on his arms than on his head. The woman was a bit younger, with spiky blue and blond hair, a broad Slavic face, and huge breasts straining against the buttons of a half-open pink sweater. As she struggled revealingly out of the low-slung seat, the man went to the electronics store door, unlocked it, and looked back at Gurney. “You want something?” The guttural, heavily accented question was as much a challenge as an invitation.

“Yes. But it’s kind of complicated.”

The man shrugged and gestured to the woman, who’d finally freed herself from the grip of the car. “Talk to Sophia. Got something I need to do.” He went inside, leaving the door open behind him.

Sophia walked past Gurney into the store. “Always got something needs to do.” The voice was as Slavic as the cheekbones. “What I can be helping you?”

“How long have you had this store?”

“Long? He had it years, years, years. What you want?”

“You have security cameras?”

“Secure?”

“Cameras that photograph people in the store, on the street, coming in, leaving, maybe shoplifting.”

“Shoplifting?”

“Stealing from you.”

“Me?”

“Stealing from the store.”

“From the store. Yes. Fucking bastards try to steal the store.”

“So you have video cameras watching?”

“Video. Yes.”

“Were you here nine months ago when the famous Carl Spalter shooting happened?”

“Sure. Famous. Right here. Fucking bastard wife upstairs shoot him over there.” Sophia gestured broadly in the direction of Willow Rest. “Mother’s funeral. Own mother. You think of that?” She shook her head as if to say that a bad deed done at a mother’s funeral should earn the doer double the pain in hell.

“How long do you keep the security tapes or digital files?”

“Long?”

“How much time? For how many weeks or months? Do you retain any of what’s recorded, or is it all periodically erased?”

“Usually erase. Not fucking bastard wife.”

“You have copies of your security videos from the day Spalter was shot?”

“Cop took all, nothing left. Lot of money could have been. Big fucking bastard cop.”

“A cop took your security videos?”

“Sure.”

Sophia was standing behind a counter display of cell phones that formed a loose U shape around her. Behind the U was a half-open door that Gurney could see led to a messy office. He could hear a man’s voice on the phone but couldn’t make out the words.

“He never brought them back?”

“Never. On video man got bullet in the brain. You know what money TV gives for that?”

“Your video showed the man getting shot in the cemetery across the river?”

“Sure. Camera out front sees everything. Hi-def. Even background. Best quality. All function is automatic. Cost plenty.”

“The cop who took—”

The door behind her opened wider and the hairy man came out into the counter area.

His expression was deepening the lines of suspicion and resentment that shaped his features.

“Nobody took nothing,” he said. “Who are you?”

Gurney gave the man a flat stare. “Special investigator looking into the state police handling of the Spalter case. Did you have any direct contact with a detective by the name of Mick Klemper?”

The man’s expression remained steady. Too steady, too long. Then he shook his head slowly. “Got no memory of that.”

“Was Mick Klemper the ‘big fucking bastard cop’ that the lady here says took your security videos and never returned them?”

He gave her a look of exaggerated confusion. “What the fuck you talking about?”

She returned his look with an exaggerated shrug. “Cops didn’t take nothing?” She smiled innocently at Gurney. “So I guess they didn’t. Wrong again. Very often. Maybe had too much drink. Harry knows, remembers better than me. Right, Harry?”

Hairy Harry grinned at Gurney, his eyes like gleaming black marbles. “See? Like I said: Nobody took nothing. You go now. Unless you want to buy a TV. Big screen. Internet-ready. Good prices.”

Gurney grinned back. “I’ll think about that. What would a good price be?”

Harry turned his palms up. “Depends. Supply and demand. Life so much fucking auction, you know this what I mean? But good price anyways for you. Always good prices for policemans.”

Down the avenue, upon closer inspection, the store with the balloon display didn’t seem to be in business after all. The slanting sun had illuminated the window in a way that made it seem full of bright lights. And the coverage of the single security camera at the River Kings pizzeria was limited to a ten-foot square around the cash register. So unless the killer had been hungry, there wasn’t anything to be learned there.

But the electronics store situation had put Gurney’s brain into overdrive. If he had to pick a best guess, it would be that Klemper had discovered something inconvenient in the security video and decided to make it disappear. If so, there could have been a number of ways of keeping Harry’s mouth shut. Maybe Klemper knew the electronics store was a front for some other activity. Or maybe he knew things about Harry that Harry didn’t want other people to know.

Gurney reminded himself, however, that best guesses were still only guesses. He decided to move on to the next question. If the bullet couldn’t have come from that particular apartment, where might it have come from? He looked across the little river to Paulette’s blue umbrella, still open to mark the spot where Carl had fallen.

Examining the facades of the buildings along the avenue, he saw that the bullet might have been fired from virtually any one of forty or fifty windows facing in the direction of Willow Rest. Without a way of prioritizing them, they’d pose quite an investigative challenge. But what was the point? If gunpowder residue consistent with a .220 Swift cartridge had been found in the first apartment, then the .220 rifle had to have been fired there. Was he to believe that it had been fired at Carl Spalter from another apartment, then brought to the “impossible” apartment, fired again, and left there on its tripod? If so, the other apartment would have to be very close by.

The closest, of course, would be the one next door. The apartment occupied by the little man who called himself Bolo. Gurney entered the building lobby, took the stairs two at a time, went directly to Bolo’s door, and knocked softly.

There was a sound of feet moving quickly, something sliding—maybe a drawer opening, closing—a door being shut, then feet moving again just inside the door where Gurney stood. Instinctively he stepped to the side, standard procedure when there was reason to suspect an unfriendly welcome. For the first time since arriving in Long Falls he questioned the wisdom of coming unarmed.

He reached over and knocked again, very gently. “Hey, Bolo, it’s me.”

He heard the sharp clicks of two deadbolts, and the door opened about three inches—only as far as its two chains permitted.

Bolo’s face appeared behind the opening. “Holy shit. You’re back. Guy who came to take a look at everything. Everything is one big lot of shit, man. What now?”

“Long story. Can I take a look out your window?”

“That’s funny.”

“Can I?”

“True? No shit? You want to look out my window?”

“It’s important.”

“I heard a lot of hot-shit lines, man, but that’s a good one.” He closed the door, undid the chains, opened it again, wider. He was wearing a yellow basketball jersey that came down to his knees and maybe nothing else. “ ‘Can I look out your window?’ I got to remember that one.” He stepped back to let Gurney in.

The apartment appeared to be the twin of the one next to it. Gurney looked into the kitchen, then down the short opposite hall where the bathroom was. The door was closed.

“You have visitors?” asked Gurney.

The gold teeth appeared once more. “One visitor. She don’t want nobody to see her.” He pointed to the windows on the far side of the main room. “You want to look out? Go look.”

Gurney was uncomfortable with the closed bathroom door, didn’t want that kind of an unknown behind him. “Maybe later.” He stepped back into the open doorway, positioning himself at an angle that allowed him to be equally aware of any movement in the apartment or on the landing.

Bolo nodded with an appreciative wink. “Sure. Got to be careful. No dark alley for you, man. Smart.”

“Tell me about Freddie.”

“Told you. He disappeared. You lie down with a fucker, you gonna get fucked. Bigger the fucker, worse you get fucked.”

“Freddie testified at Kay Spalter’s trial that she was in the apartment next to yours on the day her husband was shot. You knew he said that, right?”

“Everybody knew.”

“But you didn’t see Kay yourself?”

“Thought maybe I saw her, somebody like her.”

“What does that mean?”

“What I told the other cop.”

“I want to know it from you.”

“I saw a small … small person, looked pretty much like a woman. Small, thin. Like a dancer. There’s a word for that. Petite. You know that word? Some hot-shit word. You surprised I know that word?”

“You say ‘looked like a woman’? But you’re not sure it was a woman?”

“The first time, I thought it was. But hard to tell. Sunglasses. Big headband. Big scarf.”

“The first time? How many times—”

“Twice. I told the other cop.”

“She was here twice? When was the first time?”

“Sunday. The Sunday before the funeral.”

“You’re sure about the day?”

“Had to be Sunday. Was my only day off. From the fucking car wash. I am going out to Quik-Buy for cigarettes, going down the stairs. This petite person coming up the stairs, passes me, right? At the bottom of the stairs I think I don’t have my money. I come back up to get it. Now she’s standing there, outside the door, behind where you stand now. I go straight into my place for my money.”

“You didn’t ask her what she was doing here, who she was looking for?”

A sharp little laugh burst out of him. “Shit, man, no. Here you don’t better bother nobody. Everybody got their own business. Don’t like questions.”

“She went into that apartment? How? With a key?”

“Yeah. A key. Of course.”

“How do you know she had a key?”

“I heard it. Thin walls. Cheap. Key opening the door. Easy sound to know. Hey, that reminds me, definitely had to be Sunday. Ding-dong. Church down the river, twelve o’clock every Sunday. Ding-dong, ding-dong. Twelve fucking ding-dongs.”

“You saw this small person again?”

“Yeah. Not that day. Not until shooting day.”

“What did you see?”

“This time it’s Friday. Morning. Ten o’clock. Before I go to the car wash. I’m out, coming back with pizza.”

“At ten in the morning?”

“Yeah, good breakfast. I’m coming back, I see this little person go into this building. Same little person. Petite. Goes in very fast, with a box, or something bright, wrapped up. When I come in, little person is at top of the stairs, pretty sure now it’s a wrapped-up box, like for Christmas. Long box—three, four feet long. Christmas paper. When I get to the top of the stairs, the little person is already inside the apartment, but the door is still open.”

“And?”

“Little person is in the bathroom, I am thinking. That’s why this big rush, maybe why the outside door is still open.”

“And?”

“And it’s true, little person is in the bathroom taking a big leak. Then I know for sure.”

“Know what?”

“The sound.”

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t right.”

“What wasn’t right?”

“Men and women, the sound is different when they piss. You know this.”

“And what you heard was …?”

“Absolutely sound of pissing man. Little man, maybe. But absolutely man.”

Chapter 19. Crime and Punishment

After getting from Bolo his legal name (Estavio Bolocco), as well as his cell number and a more detailed description of the petite he-she-whatever creature, Gurney went back down to his car and spent another half hour searching the case file for any record of an Estavio Bolocco having been interviewed, for any note regarding the appearance in the apartment of a possible suspect on the Sunday prior to the shooting, or for any question being raised regarding the shooter’s gender.

He came up with zero on all three searches.

His eyelids were starting to feel heavy, and the burst of energy he’d felt earlier was just about expended. It had been a long day in Long Falls, and it was time to head for Walnut Crossing. As he was about to pull away from the curb, a black Ford Explorer pulled in just in front of him. Chunky Frank McGrath stepped out and walked back to Gurney’s car window.

“You all done here?”

“For today, anyway. I need to get home before I fall asleep. By the way, do you recall back around the time of the shooting a guy by the name of Freddie living here?”

“Squatting here, you mean?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.”

“Fre-de-ri-co.” McGrath’s dragged-out Spanish accent reeked of contempt. “What about him?”

“Did you know he disappeared?”

“Maybe I did. Long time ago.”

“You ever hear anything about it?”

“Like what?”

“Like why he disappeared.”

“Why the hell would I care about that? They come and go. One less sack of shit for me to deal with. Nice if they all disappeared. Make that happen, I’ll owe you one.”

Gurney tore half a sheet of paper out of his notebook, wrote his cell number on it, and handed it to McGrath. “If you hear anything about Freddie, any rumor of where he might be, I’d appreciate a call. In the meantime, Frank, take it easy. Life is short.”

“Thank Christ for small favors!”

For most of his drive home, Gurney felt as though he’d opened a puzzle box and discovered that several large pieces were missing. The one thing he was sure of was that no round fired from the apartment in question could have struck Carl Spalter in the temple without first passing through the metal arm of that light pole. And that was inconceivable. No doubt the missing puzzle pieces would eventually resolve the apparent contradiction. If only he knew what sort of pieces he was looking for, and how many.

The two-hour drive home to Walnut Crossing was mostly over secondary roads, through the rolling patchwork landscape of fields and woods that Gurney liked and Madeleine loved. But he noticed very little of it.

He was immersed in the world of the murder.

Immersed—until, at the end of the gravelly town road, he passed his pond and turned up his pasture lane. That’s when he was jarred into the present by the sight of four visiting cars—three Priuses and one Range Rover—parked in the grassy area alongside the house. It looked like a mini convention of the environmentally responsible and extravagantly countrified.

Oh, Jesus. The damn yoga club dinner!

He glanced at the time—6:49 p.m.—on the dashboard clock. Forty-nine minutes late. He shook his head, frustrated at his forgetfulness.

When he entered the big ground-floor space that served as kitchen, dining room, and sitting area, there was an energetic conversation in progress at the dining table. The six guests were familiar—they were people he’d been introduced to at local concerts and art shows—but he wasn’t sure of any of their names. (Madeleine had once pointed out, however, that he never forgot the names of murderers.)

Everyone looked up from the conversation and their food, most of them smiling or looking pleasantly curious.

“Sorry I’m late. I ran into a little difficulty.”

Madeleine smiled apologetically. “Dave runs into difficulty more often than most people stop for gas.”

“Actually, he arrived at exactly the right time!” The speaker was an ebullient, heavyset woman whom Gurney recognized as one of Madeleine’s fellow counselors at the crisis center. All he could remember about her name was that it was peculiar. She went on enthusiastically, “We were talking about crime and punishment. And in walks a man whose life is all about that very subject. What could be more timely?” She pointed to an empty chair at the table with the air of a hostess welcoming the guest of honor to her party. “Join us! Madeleine told us you were off on one of your adventures, but she was pretty stingy with the details. Might it have something to do with crime and/or punishment?”

One of the male guests jogged his chair a few inches to the side to give Gurney more room to get to the empty one.

“Thanks, Scott.”

“Skip.”

“Skip. Right. When I see you, the name Scott always pops into my mind. I worked for years with a Scott who looked a lot like you.”

Gurney chose to think of this little lie as a gesture of social kindness. It was surely preferable to the truth, which was that he had no interest in the man and less than none in remembering his name. The problem with the excuse, to which Gurney had given no thought, was that Skip was seventy-five and emaciated, with an Einstein-like explosion of unruly white hair. In what way this cadaverous member of the Three Stooges might resemble an active homicide detective was an interesting question.

Before anyone could ask it, the heavyset woman bulldozed forward. “While Dave’s getting some food on his plate, shall we fill him in on our discussion?”

Gurney glanced around, concluding that a vote on that proposition might fail, but—Bingo! Her name came to him. Filomena, Mena for short—was clearly a leader, not a follower. She went on. “Skip made the point that the only purpose of prison is punishment, since rehabilitation … How did you put it, Skip?”

He looked pained, as if being called on by Mena to speak brought back some dreadful embarrassment from his school years. “I don’t remember at the moment.”

“Ah. Now I remember! You said that the only point of prison is punishment, since rehabilitation is nothing but a liberal fantasy. But then Margo said that properly focused punishment is indispensable to rehabilitation. But I’m not sure Madeleine agreed with that. And then Bruce said—”

A stern-looking gray-haired woman interrupted. “I didn’t say ‘punishment.’ I said ‘clear negative consequences.’ The connotations are quite different.”

“All right, then, Margo is all for clear negative consequences. But then Bruce said … Oh, my goodness, Bruce, what did you say?”

A fellow at the head of the table with a dark mustache and a tweed jacket produced a condescending smirk. “Nothing profound. I just made a minor observation that our prison system is a wretched waste of tax revenue—an absurd revolving-door institution that breeds more crime than it prevents.” He sounded like a very polite, very angry man whose preferred alternative to incarceration would be execution. It was difficult to picture him immersed in yoga meditation, breathing deeply, unified with all creation.

Gurney smiled at the thought as he spooned some of the remaining vegetarian lasagna onto his plate from a serving dish in the middle of the table. “You part of the yoga club, Bruce?”

“My wife is one of the instructors, which I suppose makes me an honorary member.” His tone was more sarcastic than amiable.

Two seats away, a pale ash blonde, whose only cosmetic seemed to be a shiny, transparent face cream, spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. “I wouldn’t say I’m an instructor, just a member of the group.” She licked her colorless lips discreetly, as if to remove invisible crumbs. “Getting back to our topic, isn’t all crime really a form of mental illness?”

Her husband rolled his eyes.

“Actually, Iona, there’s some fascinating new research on that,” said a sweet-looking woman with a soft round face, sitting across from Gurney. “Did anyone else read the journal article about the tumors? It seems there was a middle-aged man, quite normal, no unusual problems—until he began getting overpowering urges to have sex with small children, quite out of control, with no prior history. To make a long story short, medical tests revealed a fast-growing brain tumor. The tumor was removed, and the destructive sexual obsession disappeared with it. Interesting, isn’t it?”

Skip looked annoyed. “Are you saying that crime is a by-product of brain cancer?”

“I’m just saying what I read. But the article did provide references to other examples of horrendous behavior directly linked to brain abnormalities. And it does make sense, doesn’t it?”

Bruce cleared his throat. “So we should assume that Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was hatched in a nasty little cyst in his cerebral cortex?”

“Bruce, for goodness’ sake,” interjected Mena. “Patty isn’t saying that at all.”

He shook his head grimly. “Strikes me as a slippery path, folks. Leads to zero responsibility, doesn’t it? First it was ‘Satan made me do it.’ Then it was ‘My deprived childhood made me do it.’ Now we’ve got this new one: ‘My tumor made me do it.’ Where does the excuse-making stop?”

His vehemence created an awkward silence. Mena, in what Gurney guessed was her habitual role of social director and peacemaker, tried to divert everyone’s attention to a less fraught topic. “Madeleine, I heard a rumor that you were getting chickens. Is that true?”

“It’s more than a rumor. There are three lovely little hens and a charmingly arrogant young rooster living temporarily in our barn. Crowing and clucking and making all sorts of wonderful little chicken sounds. They really are amazing to watch.”

Mena cocked her head curiously. “Living temporarily in your barn?”

“They’re waiting down there for their permanent home to be built—out in back of our patio.” She pointed at the area outside the French doors.

“Make sure the coop is secure,” said Patty with worried smile. “Because all sorts of creatures prey on chickens, and the poor things are nearly defenseless.”

Bruce leaned forward in his chair. “You know about the weasel problem?”

“Yes, we know all about that,” said Madeleine quickly, as if to ward off any description of how weasels kill chickens.

He lowered his voice, seemingly for dramatic effect. “Possums are worse.”

Madeleine blinked. “Possums?”

Iona stood up abruptly, excused herself, and headed for the restroom in the hallway.

“Possums,” he repeated ominously. “They look like bumbling little creatures with a tendency to end up as roadkill. But let one into a chicken coop? You’ll see a completely different animal—crazed by the taste of blood.” He looked around the table as if he were telling a horror story to children around a midnight campfire. “That harmless little possum will tear every chicken in that coop to pieces. As though his true purpose in life was to rip every living thing around him to bloody shreds.”

There was a stunned silence, broken finally by Skip. “Of course, possums aren’t the only problem.” This, perhaps due to its timing or tone, provoked bursts of laughter. But Skip went on earnestly. “You have to watch out for coyotes, foxes, hawks, eagles, raccoons. Lots of things out there like to eat chickens.”

“Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to all those problems,” said Bruce with peculiar relish. “A nice twelve-gauge shotgun!”

Apparently sensing that her diversion of the conversation into the world of chickens was a mistake, Mena attempted a U-turn. “I’d like to get back to where we were when Dave walked into the room. I’d love to hear his perspective on crime and punishment in our society today.”

“Me too,” enthused Patty. “I’d especially like to hear what he has to say about evil.”

Gurney swallowed a bite of lasagna and stared at her cherubic face. “Evil?”

“Do you believe there is such a thing?” she asked. “Or is it a fictional concept like witches and dragons?”

He found the question irritating. “I think ‘evil’ can be a useful word.”

“So you do believe in it,” interjected Margo from the other end of the table, sounding like a debater scoring a hostile point.

“I’m aware of a common human experience for which ‘evil’ is a useful word.”

“What experience would that be?”

“Doing what you know in your heart to be wrong.”

“Ah,” said Patty with an approving light in her eyes. “There was a famous yogi who said, ‘The handle on the razor of evil cuts more deeply than its blade.’ ”

“Sounds like a fortune cookie to me,” said Bruce. “Try telling it to the victims of the Mexican drug lords.”

Iona looked at him with no discernible emotion. “It’s like a lot of those sayings. ‘The harm I do to you, twice that much I do to me.’ There are so many ways of talking about karma.”

Bruce shook his head. “Far as I’m concerned, karma’s a crock. If a murderer has already done twice as much damage to himself as to the one he’s murdered—which seems like a pretty neat trick—does that mean that you shouldn’t bother to convict and execute him? That puts you in a ridiculous position. If you believe in karma, there’s no point in bothering to arrest and punish murderers. But if you want murderers arrested and punished, then you have to agree that karma’s a crock.”

Mena jumped in happily. “So we’re back to the issue of crime and punishment. Here’s my question for Dave. In America we seem to be losing faith in our criminal justice system. You worked in that world for over twenty years, right?”

He nodded.

“You know its weak points and strong points, what works and what doesn’t. So you must have some pretty good ideas about what needs to change. I’d love to hear your thoughts.”

The question was about as appealing to him as an invitation to do a jig on the table. “I don’t think change is possible.”

“But there’s so much wrong,” said Skip, leaning forward. “So many opportunities for improvement.”

Patty, on a different wavelength, said pleasantly, “Swami Shishnapushna used to say that detectives and yogis were brothers in different garments, equal seekers after the truth.”

Gurney looked doubtful. “I’d like to think of myself as a seeker of truth, but I’m probably just an exposer of lies.”

Patty’s eyes widened, appearing to find something more profound in this than Gurney had intended.

Mena tried to get things back on point. “So, if you could take over the system tomorrow, Dave, what would you change?”

“Nothing.”

“I can’t believe that. It’s such an obvious mess.”

“Of course it’s a mess. But every piece of the mess benefits someone in power. And it’s a mess nobody wants to think about.”

Bruce waved his hand dismissively. “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Simple! Thinking’s not the solution, it’s the problem.”

“A kick in the balls for a kick in the balls!” cried Skip with an addled grin.

Mena pursued her point with Gurney. “You said you wouldn’t change anything. Why not?”

He hated conversations like this. “You know what I really think about our wretched criminal justice system? I think the terrible truth is that it’s as good as it’s going to get.”

That created the longest silence of the evening. Gurney focused on his lasagna.

The pale Iona, a frown contending with her Mona Lisa smile, was the first to speak. “I have a question. One that bothers me. It’s been on my mind a lot lately, and I haven’t been able to decide on an answer.” She was gazing down at her nearly empty plate, slowly guiding a single pea across the center of it with the tip of her knife.

“This may sound silly, but it’s serious. Because I think a totally honest answer would reveal a lot about a person. So it bothers me that I can’t decide. What does that kind of indecision say about me?”

Bruce tapped his fingertips impatiently on the table. “For Godsake, Iona, get to the point.”

“Okay. Sorry. Here it is. Suppose you had to choose. Would you rather be a murderer … or his victim?”

Bruce’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you asking me?”

“No, dear, of course not. I already know what your answer would be.”