Peter Pan Must Die

Chapter 40. The Morning After

Gurney awoke with a heavy emotional hangover.

Mired between thinking and dreaming, his sleep had been too shallow and fitful to perform its vital function of downloading the jumbled experiences of the day into the orderly cabinets of memory. Bits of yesterday’s turmoil were still in the forefront of his mind, obstructing his view of the present moment. It wasn’t until he’d showered, dressed, gotten his coffee, and joined Madeleine at the breakfast table that he finally noticed it was a bright, cloudless day.

But even that positive factor failed to have its normal elevating effect on his outlook.

A piece of music was playing on the NPR station, something orchestral. He hated music in the morning and in his present mood he found it especially grating.

Madeleine eyed him over the top of the book she had propped up in front of her. “What is it?”

“I feel a bit lost.”

She lowered the book a couple of inches. “The Spalter case?”

“Mainly that … I guess.”

“What about it?”

“It’s not coming together. It just gets uglier and more chaotic.” He told her about Hardwick’s two calls from Cooperstown, leaving out the missing head, which he didn’t have the stomach to mention. He concluded, “I’m not sure what the hell is going on. And I don’t feel I have the resources to deal with it.”

She closed the book. “Deal with it?”

“Figure it out—what’s really happening, who’s behind it, why.”

She stared at him. “Haven’t you already succeeded in what you were asked to do?”

“Succeeded?”

“I’d gotten the impression that you’d pretty much shredded the case against Kay Spalter.”

“True.”

“So her conviction will be reversed on appeal. That was the point, wasn’t it?”

“It was, yes.”

“Was?”

“It seems that all hell is breaking loose. These new arson-murders—”

She interrupted. “Which is why we have police departments.”

“They didn’t do such a great job the first time. And I don’t think they have a clue what they’re up against.”

“And you do?”

“Not really.”

“So nobody knows what’s going on. Whose job is it to find out?”

“Officially, it’s BCI’s job.”

She cocked her head challengingly. “Officially, legally, logically, and every other way.”

“You’re right.”

“But?”

After an uncomfortable pause, he said, “But there’s a crazy person loose out there.”

“There are a lot of crazy people out there.”

“This one’s been killing people since he was about eight years old. He likes killing people. The more the better. Someone turned him loose on Carl Spalter, and now he doesn’t seem to want to go back in his box.”

Madeleine held his gaze. “So the danger is increasing. You said the other day there might be a one percent chance of his coming after you. Obviously, this horrible thing in Cooperstown changes all that.”

“To some degree, but I still think—”

“David,” she interrupted, “I have to say this—I know what your answer will be, but I have to say it anyway. You do have the option of backing away.”

“If I back away from the investigation, he’ll still be out there. There’ll just be less chance of getting him.”

“But if you’re not going after him, maybe he won’t go after you.”

“His mind may not work that logically.”

She looked anxious, confused. “From what you’ve told me about him, he sounds like a very logical, precise planner.”

“A precise, logical planner driven by a homicidal rage. Funny thing about contract killers. They can appear cool and practical about actions that horrify most people, but there’s nothing cool or practical about their motivation—and I don’t mean the money they get paid to do what they do. That’s secondary. I’ve met hit men. I’ve interrogated them. I’ve gotten to know a few of them fairly well. And you know what they are, for the most part? They’re rage-driven serial killers who’ve managed to turn their insanity into a paying job. You want to hear something really nuts?”

Her expression was more wary than curious, but he went on anyway. “I used to tell Kyle when he was a kid that one key to a happy life, a happy career, was to find an activity you enjoyed enough that you’d be willing to do it without being paid—then find someone willing to pay you to do it. Well, not many people succeed in doing that. Pilots, musicians, actors, artists, and athletes, mainly. And hit men. I don’t mean that professional killers end up happy. In fact, most of them die violently or die in prison. But they like what they do when they’re doing it. Most of them would end up killing people whether they were paid for it or not.”

As he was speaking, she was becoming more distressed. “David, what on earth is your point?”

He realized he’d worked himself farther out onto a limb than he’d intended. “Only that my withdrawing from the case now wouldn’t accomplish anything positive.”

She was making an apparent effort to remain calm. “Because you’re already on his radar screen?”

“It’s possible.”

Her tone began to fray. “It’s because of that vile Criminal Conflict program. Bincher using your name, tying you to Hardwick. That idiot Brian Bork created the problem. He needs to make it go away. He needs to announce that you’re off the case. Gone.”

“I’m not sure that would make any difference at this point.”

“What are you telling me? That you’ve managed to set yourself up—once again—in front of some lunatic murderer? That there’s nothing to do now but wait for some horrible confrontation?”

“That’s what I’m trying to avoid—by getting to him before he can get to me.”

“How?”

“By finding out everything I can about him. So I can predict his actions better than he can predict mine.”

“That’s the pattern, isn’t it? You and him.”

“Pardon?”

“You and him. One on one. It’s the same life-or-death contest you always seem to get yourself into. It’s the reason I wanted you to see Malcolm.”

He felt numb. “It’s not the same this time. It’s not just me. I have people on my side.”

“Oh, really? Who? Jack Hardwick, who dragged you into this mess to begin with? The state police, whom your investigation is undermining? Those are your friends and allies?” She shook her head in a way that looked like a shudder, then went on. “Even if the whole world was willing to help you, it wouldn’t matter. It would still be just you against him. It always comes down to that. High Noon at the O.K. Corral.”

He said nothing.

Madeleine sat back in her chair, watching him. Gradually, a look of discovery changed her expression. “I just realized something.”

“What?”

“You never really worked for the NYPD, did you? You never saw yourself as their employee, as a tool of the department. You saw the department as your tool—something to be used on your terms, if and when you felt like it, to achieve your goals.”

“My goals were their goals. Catch the bad guys. Get the evidence. Lock ’em up.”

She continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “For you, the department was really just backup. The real contest was always between you and the bad guy. You and the bad guy on the way to the showdown. Sometimes you took advantage of department resources, sometimes you didn’t. But you always saw it as your battle, your call.”

He listened to what she was saying. Maybe she was right. Maybe his approach to things was too limited, too restricted to his own point of view. Maybe that was a big problem, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just the natural product of his brain chemistry, something over which he would never have any control. But whatever it was, he had no desire to keep talking about it. He suddenly found the whole topic exhausting.

He wasn’t sure what to do next.

But he had to do something. Even if it led to nothing.

He decided to call Adonis Angelidis.

Chapter 41. A Cautionary Tale

Gurney’s call to the cell number given him by Angelidis had been answered immediately by the man himself. Gurney’s brief description of a rapidly developing situation that could be of mutual interest resulted in an agreement to get together at the Aegean Odyssey in two hours.

Not wanting to leave before making sure that Madeleine was ready to go to the Winkler farm in Buck Ridge, he was pleased to find her in the bedroom, packing a big nylon duffel bag.

She spoke as she stuffed a pair of socks into a sneaker. “The hens have enough of their regular food and plenty of water, so you don’t have to bother with that. But maybe in the morning you could bring them some chopped strawberries?”

“Sure,” he said vaguely, the request hardly registering. He was caught up in conflicting feelings about her whole involvement in this Winkler business at the fair. He found it both annoying and fortuitous. Annoying because he’d never much liked the Winklers, and liked them less now for their having talked Madeleine into spending a week as an unpaid alpaca wrangler to make their lives easier. But he had to admit it was fortuitous as well, since it provided a safe place for her at the very time it was needed. And, of course, the work with the animals was something she’d enjoy doing. She just plain liked to be helpful, especially if feathered or furry creatures were involved.

In the midst of these thoughts, he found her looking at him with one of her gentler, more impenetrable expressions.

Somehow it relaxed him and made him smile.

“I love you,” she said. “Please be careful.”

She put out her arms, and they embraced—so long and so tightly, it seemed to leave nothing that needed to be put into words.

When he arrived in Long Falls, the restaurant block was deserted. Inside the restaurant there was only one employee in sight, a muscular waiter with expressionless eyes. There were no diners. No one at the unlit bar. Of course, it was barely ten-thirty, and it was highly unlikely that the Aegean Odyssey served breakfast. It occurred to him that the place might be open that morning only as a convenience to Angelidis.

The waiter led Gurney through the bar down a dim hallway, past two restrooms and two unmarked doors, to a heavy steel exit door. He gave it a hard shove with his shoulder, and it swung open with a metallic screech. He stepped to the side and motioned Gurney into a colorful walled garden.

The garden was the same width as the building, forty or fifty feet, and extended out at least twice that distance in length. The only break in the redbrick walls enclosing it was a set of large double doors in the far end. They were wide open, framing a view of the river, the jogging path, and the manicured tranquillity of Willow Rest. The view from here was similar to the view from the problematic apartment three blocks away. Only the angle was different.

The garden itself was a pleasant combination of grass paths, vegetable beds, and herbaceous borders. The waiter pointed to a shaded corner, to a small white café table with two wrought-iron chairs. Adonis Angelidis was sitting in one of them.

When Gurney arrived at the table, Angelidis nodded toward the empty chair. “Please.”

A second waiter materialized and placed a tray in the center of the table. There were two demitasse cups of black coffee, two cordial glasses, and an almost full bottle of ouzo, the anise-flavored Greek liqueur.

“You like strong coffee?” Angelidis’s voice was low and rough—like the purring of a large cat.

“Yes.”

“You might like it with ouzo. Better than sugar.”

“Perhaps I’ll try some.”

“You have an okay drive here, yes?”

“No problem.”

Angelidis nodded. “Beautiful day.”

“Beautiful garden.”

“Yes. Fresh garlic. Mint. Oregano. Very good.” Angelidis shifted slightly in his seat. “What can I do for you?”

Gurney took the cup of coffee closest to him and sipped it thoughtfully. On the drive up from Walnut Crossing he’d concocted an opening gambit that now, as he sat facing this man who might well be one of the cleverest mobsters in America, struck him as rather feeble. But he decided to give it a shot anyway. Sometimes a Hail Mary pass is all you’ve got left.

“Some information came my way that might interest you.”

Angelidis’s gaze was mildly curious.

Gurney went on. “Just a rumor, of course.”

“Of course.”

“About the Organized Crime Task Force.”

“Rotten shits. No principles.”

“What I heard,” said Gurney, taking another sip of his coffee, “is that they’re looking to pin Spalter on you.”

“Carl? You see what I mean? Bunch of shits! Why would I want to lose Carl? I told you before, like a son to me. Why would I think to do such a thing? Disgusting!” Angelidis’s big boxer’s hands had closed into fists.

“The scenario they’re putting together is that you and Carl had a falling-out, and—”

“Bullshit!”

“Like I said, the scenario they’re putting together—”

“What the fuck’s a scenario?”

“The hypothesis, the story they’re making up.”

“Making it up, all right. Slimy shits!”

“Their hypothesis is that you and Carl had a falling-out, you hired a hit on him through Fat Gus, and then you got nervous and decided to cover your tracks by getting rid of Gus—maybe doing that one yourself.”

“Myself? They think I hammered nails into his head?”

“I’m just telling you what I hear.”

Angelidis sat back in his chair, a shrewd look replacing the anger in his eyes. “This is coming from where?”

“The plan to hang the murder on you?”

“Yeah. This coming from the top of OCTF?”

Something about his tone gave Gurney the idea that Angelidis might have a line to someone inside the task force. Someone who would be aware of the major initiatives.

“Not the way I hear it. I get the impression that the move against you is a little off-center. Unofficial. Couple of guys who’ve got a bug up their ass about you. That ring any bells?”

Angelidis didn’t answer. His jaw muscles tightened. He remained quiet for a long minute. When he spoke, his tone was flat. “You drove up here from Walnuts just to bring me this information?”

“Something else, too. I found out who the hitter was.”

Angelidis became very still.

Gurney watched him carefully. “Petros Panikos.”

Something changed in Angelidis’s eyes. If Gurney had to guess, he’d say the man was trying to conceal a stab of fear. “How do you know this?”

Gurney shook his head and smiled. “Better not to say how I know.”

For the first time since Gurney arrived, Angelidis looked around at the garden and its brick walls, his eyes stopping at the doors that were open to the view of the river and cemetery. “Why are you bringing this to me?”

“I thought you might want to help me.”

“Help you do what?”

“I want to find Panikos. I want to bring him in. To cut a deal, he may be willing to tell us who bought the Spalter hit. Since that wasn’t you, OCTF can go fuck themselves. You’d like that, right?”

Angelidis rested his burly forearms on the table and shook his head.

“What’s the problem?”

“The problem?” Angelidis emitted a short, humorless laugh. “The part about you bringing him in. That don’t happen. Trust me. That don’t happen. You got no idea who you’re dealing with.”

Again Gurney shrugged, turning up his palms. “Maybe I need to know a little more.”

“Maybe a lot more.”

“Tell me what I’m missing.”

“Like what?”

“How does Panikos work?”

“He shoots people. Mostly in the head. Mostly in the right eye. Or he blows them up.”

“How about his contracts? How are they set up?”

“Through a fixer. An arranger.”

“A guy like Fat Gus?”

“Like Fat Gus. Top shelf for Panikos. Only a handful of guys in the world he deals with. They do the transaction. They transfer the payment.”

“He gets his instructions from them?”

“Instructions?” Angelidis let out a guttural laugh. “He takes the name, the deadline, the money. The rest is up to him.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Let’s say you want a certain target whacked. Theoretically. For the sake of argument. You pay Peter Pan’s price. The target gets whacked. End of story. How he gets whacked is Peter’s business. He don’t take instructions.”

“Let me get this straight. The nails in Fat Gus’s head—that wouldn’t have been part of the deal?”

The point seemed to interest Angelidis. “No … that would not have been part of the deal. Not if the hitter was Peter.”

“So that would have been his own initiative, not an order from the client?”

“I’m telling you, he don’t take orders—just names and cash.”

“So the nasty shit he did to Gus—that would have been his idea?”

“You hear me? He don’t take orders.”

“So why would he do what he did?”

“I got no idea. That’s the problem here. Knowing Panikos and Gurikos, it makes no sense.”

“No sense that Panikos would worry that Gurikos might know something damaging? Or that he might talk? Or that he might already have talked?”

“You gotta understand something here. Gus did time—a lot of time. Twelve fucking years in that Attica prison shithole, when he could’ve been out in two. All he had to do was give up a name. But he didn’t. And the guy couldn’t have touched him. There wasn’t gonna be no retribution. So it wasn’t fear. You know what it was?”

Gurney had heard stories like this before, and he knew the punch line. “Principles?”

“You bet your fucking ass, principles! Steel balls!”

Gurney nodded. “Which leaves me wondering—why on earth did Panikos do what he did? None of this hangs together.”

“I told you, it don’t make no sense. Gus was like Switzerland. Quiet. Didn’t talk to nobody about nobody. This was a known and respected fact. Secret of his success. Principles.”

“Okay. Gus was a rock. What about Panikos? What’s he all about?”

“Peter? Peter is … special. Only takes jobs that look impossible. Lot of determination. High success rate.”

“And yet …?”

“Yet what?”

“I’m hearing a reservation in your voice.”

“A reservation?” Angelidis paused before going on with evident care. “Peter … is used only in … in very difficult situations.”

“Why?”

“Because along with his skills … there’s some risks.”

“Like what?”

Angelidis made a face as if he were regurgitating yesterday’s ouzo. “The KGB used to assassinate people by putting radioactive poison in their food. Tremendously effective. But you got to be very, very, careful using that shit. That’s like Peter.”

“Panikos is that scary?”

“Get on his wrong side, could maybe be a problem.”

Gurney thought about that. The notion that getting on the wrong side of a determined, crazy killer could be a problem made him want to laugh out loud. “Did you ever hear that he liked to set fires?”

“I might’ve heard that. Part of the package you’re dealing with. Which I don’t think you really understand.”

“I’ve faced some difficult people over the years.”

“Difficult? That’s pretty funny. Let me tell you a story about Peter—so you know about difficult.” Angelidis leaned forward, extending his palms on the tabletop. “There were these two towns, not far apart. A strong man in each town. This created problems—mainly, who had rights to various things between the two towns. As the towns got bigger, closer together, the problems got bigger. Lot of shit happened. Escalation.” He articulated the word carefully. “Escalation, back and forth. Finally, there is no possibility of peace. No possibility of agreement. So one of these men decides that the other one has to go. He decides to hire little Peter to take care of it. Peter at that time is just getting into the business.”

“The hit business?” asked Gurney blandly.

“Yeah. His profession. Anyway, he does the job. Clean, quick, no problems. Then he shows up at the man’s place of business to get paid. The man he did the job for. The man tells him he has to wait—a cash-flow problem. Peter says, ‘No, you pay me now.’ Man says, ‘No, you gotta wait.’ Peter says this makes him unhappy. Man laughs at him. So Peter shoots him. Bang. Just like that.”

Gurney shrugged. “Never a good idea to stiff a hitter.”

Angelidis’s mouth twitched into what might have been a split-second grin. “Never a good idea. True. But the story don’t end there. Peter goes to the man’s house and shoots his wife and two kids. Then he goes around town, shoots the man’s brother and five cousins, wives, kills the whole fucking family. Twenty-one people. Twenty-one shots to the head.”

“That’s quite a reaction.”

Angelidis’s mouth widened, showing a row of glistening capped teeth. Then he uttered an eruptive growling sound that Gurney thought was probably the most unnerving laugh he’d ever heard.

“Yeah. ‘Quite a reaction.’ You’re a funny guy, Gurney. ‘Quite a reaction.’ I got to remember that.”

“Seems like a chancy thing to do, though—from a business point of view.”

“What do you mean, ‘chancy’?”

“I would think, after that—after killing twenty-one people because of an overdue payment—potential customers might worry about dealing with him. They might want to deal with someone less … touchy.”

“ ‘Touchy’? I’m telling you, Gurney, you’re a fucking riot. ‘Touchy’—that’s good! But what you don’t understand is that Peter has a special advantage. Peter is unique.”

“How so?”

“Peter takes the impossible jobs. The ones other guys say can’t be done—too risky, the target is too protected, shit like that. That’s where Peter comes in. Likes to prove he’s better than anyone else. You see what I mean? Peter is a unique resource. Highly motivated. High determination. Nine times out of ten he gets the job done. But the thing is … there’s always the possibility of some collateral damage.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“Example? Like maybe the time he was hired to hit a target on one of them high-speed Greek island ferries, but he didn’t know what the guy looked like, only that he was going to be on the boat at a particular time. So what did he do? He blew the fucking thing out of the water, killed about a hundred people. But I’ll tell you something else. It ain’t just that he produces collateral damage—the word is he likes it. Fires. Explosions. Bigger the better.”

That started Gurney wondering about a lot of things. But he kept coming back to one central question: Exactly what was it that made Panikos seem like the right choice for the Spalter hit? What made that job seem impossible?

Angelidis interrupted his train of thought. “Hey, I almost forgot, one more thing—the thing everyone who was there still talks about. The thing that really got to them. You ready for this?” It wasn’t really a question. “While little Peter was going around the town, wiping that whole fucking family off the face of the earth—guess what he was doing.” He paused, real excitement in his eyes. “Guess.”

Gurney shook his head. “I don’t guess.”

“Don’t matter. You couldn’t guess it anyway.” He leaned forward another inch. “He was singing.”

Before Gurney left the restaurant garden, he looked out again through the open doors in the back wall. He could see the Spalter plot clearly—all of it, with no light pole obstructing any part of it.

He heard Angelidis’s fingers tapping restlessly on the tabletop.

Gurney turned toward him and asked, “Do you ever think about Carl when you look over at Willow Rest?”

“Sure. I think about him.”

Watching Angelidis’s fingers drumming on the metal surface, Gurney asked, “Does knowing that Panikos was the paid hitter tell you anything about the buyer?”

“Sure.” The drumming stopped. “It tells me that he knew his way around. You don’t go to your phone book, look up ‘Panikos,’ and say, ‘Hey, I got a job for you.’ It don’t work that way.”

Gurney nodded. “Very few people would know how to get in touch with him,” he said, sounding like he was talking to himself.

“Peter accepts contracts through maybe half a dozen guys in the world. You have to be well placed to know who those guys are.”

Gurney let a silence build between them before asking, “Would you say that Kay Spalter was well placed?”

Angelidis stared at him. He appeared to find the suggestion surprising, but his only answer was a shrug.

Turning to leave, Gurney had a final question.

“What was he singing?”

Angelidis looked confused.

“Panikos, while he was shooting everybody.”

“Oh, yeah. Some little kid song. Whaddya call ’em—nursery rhymes?”

“Do you know which one?”

“How would I know that? Something about roses, flowers, some shit like that.”

“He was singing a nursery rhyme about flowers? While he was walking around shooting people in the head?”

“You got it. Smiling like an angel and singing his little song in a little-girl voice. The people who heard that—they never forgot it.” Angelidis paused. “The thing you got to know about him—most important thing—I’ll tell you what it is. He’s two people. One—precise, exact, everything a certain way. The other—very fucking crazy.”

Chapter 42. The Missing Head

Gurney stopped at the first gas station he came to on the route from Long Falls to Walnut Crossing—for gas, for coffee (having barely touched the cup at the Aegean Odyssey), and to send another email to Jonah Spalter. He decided to take care of the last item first.

He checked the wording and tone of his previous message and purposely made this one more jagged, definitely unsettling, less clear, with an amped-up level of urgency—more like a harried text message than an email:

Increasing flow of new data, obvious corruption. Conviction reversal and aggressive new investigation to come. Family dynamics key issue? Could it be as simple as FOLLOW THE MONEY? How might CyberCath financial stress play into the investigation? Should meet ASAP for frank discussion of new facts.

He read it over twice. If its edginess and ambiguity didn’t provoke some communication from Jonah, he had no idea what would. Then he went into the shabby little convenience store for his coffee and a plain bagel, which turned out to be stale and hard. He was hungry enough to eat it anyway. The coffee, however, was surprisingly fresh, giving him a fleeting sense of okayness.

He was about to pull over to the gas pumps when he realized that he still hadn’t told Hardwick about his meeting with Mick Klemper at Riverside Mall and the subsequent arrival in his mailbox of the Long Falls security video. He decided to take care of that immediately.

The call went into voice mail, and he left a message. “Jack, I need to fill you in on some developments with Klemper. We had a little discussion about the various ways the story could end, some less painful for him than others, and, magically, the missing video turned up in my mailbox. The man may be trying to cushion his fall, and we need to talk about the implications. Also, you’ll want to see the video. No obvious inconsistencies with the witness reports, but it’s sure as hell worth a look. Get back to me as soon as you can.”

This reminded him of another urgent task that had been side-lined—viewing the video segments from the other three cameras in the four-camera array, particularly the two labeled EAST and WEST, since they would have captured images of individuals approaching or leaving the building. Pondering the potential boost such evidence might give the investigation pushed Gurney’s driving speed well above the posted limits for the rest of the trip home.

He was surprised, then confused, then worried to find Madeleine’s car still parked where it was when he’d left that morning for Long Falls, expecting that she would be leaving moments after him for the Winkler farm.

Entering the house with an anxious frown, he found her at the kitchen sink, washing dishes.

“What are you still doing here?” There was an edge of accusation in his voice, which she ignored.

“Right after you left, as I was getting in my car, Mena arrived in her minivan.”

“Mena?”

“From Yoga Club? Remember? You just had dinner with her.”

“Ah. That Mena.”

“Yes, that Mena—not any of the multitude of other Menas we know.”

“Right. So she arrived in her minivan? For what?”

“Well, ostensibly to bring us the bounty of her garden. Take a look in the mudroom—yellow squash, garlic, tomatoes, peppers.”

“I’ll take your word for it. But that was hours ago. And you’re still—”

“It was hours ago when she arrived, but only forty-five minutes ago when she departed.”

“Jesus.”

“Mena likes to talk. You might have noticed that at dinner. But, to be fair, she has some serious difficulties in her life, family problems, things she had to get off her chest. She needed someone to talk to. I didn’t feel I could cut her off.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Oh, Lord, everything from parents with Alzheimer’s, to a brother in prison for drug dealing, to nieces and nephews with every known psychiatric disorder—I don’t know … do you really want to hear about this?”

“Maybe not.”

“Anyway, I made her some lunch, tea, more tea. I didn’t want to leave the dirty dishes for you, so that’s what I’m doing now. And you? You look like you’re in a hurry to do something.”

“I was planning on reviewing the Long Falls security videos.”

“Security videos? Oh, God, I almost forgot! Did you know Jack Hardwick was on RAM-TV last night?”

“He was where?”

“RAM-TV. On that dreadful Criminal Conflict thing with Brian Bork.”

“How did you—?”

“Kyle called an hour ago to find out if you’d seen it.”

“Last time Hardwick spoke to me was from Cooperstown … midday yesterday? He didn’t tell me he had any plan to—”

She cut him off. “You’d better take a look at it. It’s in the current archive section of their website.”

“You watched it?”

“I took a quick look at it after Mena left. Kyle said we needed to see it ASAP.”

“It’s … a problem?”

She pointed to the den. “The RAM website is open on the computer. You watch it, then you tell me if it’s a problem.” Her troubled expression told him she’d already reached her own conclusion.

A minute later he was at his desk, gazing at the practiced concern and gelled hair of Brian Bork. The Criminal Conflict host occupied one of two chairs positioned on opposite sides of a small table. He was leaning forward as though the importance of what he was about to say made it impossible to relax. The second chair was empty.

He addressed the camera directly. “Good evening, my friends. Welcome to the real-life drama of Criminal Conflict. Tonight, we had intended to bring you a follow-up visit with Lex Bincher, the controversial attorney who stunned us just a few days ago with his no-holds-barred attack on the Bureau of Criminal Investigation—an attack designed to dismantle what he characterized as the fatally flawed conviction of Kay Spalter for the murder of her husband. Since then there have been some shocking new developments in this already sensational case. The latest is the breaking story of mayhem and tragedy in the idyllic village of Cooperstown, New York. It involves arson, multiple homicides, and the ominous disappearance of Lex Bincher himself, who was scheduled to be with us this evening. Instead, we’ll be hearing from Jack Hardwick—a private investigator who’s been working with Bincher. Investigator Hardwick is joining us from our RAM-TV affiliate in Albany.”

A split-screen visual appeared, with Bork on the left and Hardwick, in a similar studio set, on the right. Hardwick, in one of his ubiquitous black polo shirts, appeared relaxed, which Gurney recognized as the oddly inverse public face the man sometimes put on his anger. The likely fury he felt at what had happened at Cooperstown and his personal contempt for Bork and RAM-TV were well concealed.

Gurney had one question in mind: Why had Hardwick agreed to appear on a media outlet he hated?

Bork continued, “First of all, thank you for accepting my invitation to join us on such short notice at such a stressful time. I understand you just came from that terrible scene by Otsego Lake.”

“That’s correct.”

“Can you describe it to us?”

“Three lakeside homes burned to the ground. Six people burned to death, including two small children. A seventh victim was found in the lake under a small dock.”

“Has that final victim been identified?”

“That may take some time,” said Hardwick evenly. “His head is missing.”

“Did you say his head is missing?”

“That’s what I said.”

“The killer cut off the victim’s head? And then what? Is there any indication what might have happened to it?”

“Maybe he hid it somewhere. Or dumped it somewhere. Or took it with him. Investigation is under way.”

Bork shook his head—the gesture of a man who just can’t understand what the world is coming to. “That’s really appalling. Investigator Hardwick, I have to ask the obvious question. Are you thinking the mutilated body could belong to Lex Bincher?”

“It could, yes.”

“The obvious next question: What on earth is going on? Do you have an explanation you can share with our viewers?”

“It’s pretty simple, Brian. Kay Spalter was framed for her husband’s murder by a thoroughly corrupt detective. She’s the victim of gross evidence tampering, gross witness tampering, and a grossly incompetent defense. Her conviction, of course, delighted the real murderer. It left him free to go about his deadly business.”

Bork started to ask another question, but Hardwick cut him off. “The people involved in this case—not only the dishonest detective who railroaded an innocent woman into prison, but the whole team who condoned that farcical trial and conviction—they’re the ones who are ultimately responsible for the massacre today in Cooperstown.”

Bork paused, as though taken aback by what he’d just heard. “That’s a very serious accusation. In fact, it’s the kind of accusation that’s likely to spark outrage in the law enforcement community. Are you concerned about that?”

“I’m not accusing the general law enforcement community of anything. I’m calling out the specific members of that community who falsified evidence and colluded in the wrongful arrest and prosecution of Kay Spalter.”

“Do you have the evidence you need to prove those charges?”

Hardwick’s answer was immediate, calm, and unblinking. “Yes.”

“Can you share that evidence with us?”

“We’ll share it when the time comes.”

Bork directed several more questions to Hardwick, trying without success to get him to be more specific. Then he suddenly switched gears and raised what he obviously considered the most provocative question of all. “What if you prevail? What if you thoroughly embarrass everyone who you claim was in the wrong? What if you win and succeed in setting Kay Spalter free—and later discover that she was guilty of murder after all? How would you feel about that?”

For the first time in the interview, Hardwick’s contempt for Bork began to seep into his expression. “How would I feel about it? Feeling has nothing to do with it. What I would know would be exactly the same as what I know now: that the legal process was rotten. Rotten from start to finish. And the people responsible know who they are.”

Bork looked up as if checking the time, then gazed into the camera. “Okay, my friends, you heard it here.” The half of the split screen devoted to him expanded to the full screen. Putting on the face of a brave witness to dire events, he invited his viewers to pay close attention to some important messages from his sponsors. He concluded, “Stay with us. We’ll be back in two minutes with news of a nasty new reproductive rights clash headed for a Supreme Court showdown. In the meantime, this is Brian Bork for Criminal Conflict, your nightly ringside seat at today’s most explosive legal battles.”

Gurney closed the video window, shut down the computer, and sat back in his chair.

“So what do you think of that?” Madeleine’s voice, close behind his chair, startled him.

He turned to face her. “I’m trying to figure it out.”

“Figure what out?”

“Why he appeared on that program.”

“You mean, apart from the fact that it offered him a big platform to take a free swing at his enemies—the folks who bounced him out of his job?”

“Yes, apart from that.”

“I guess, if all those accusations had a purpose beyond venting, it might be to attract maximum media attention—drag in as many investigative reporters as he can, get them all digging into the Spalter case and keeping it in the headlines as long as possible. You think that’s what it was all about?”

“Or he might want to provoke a lawsuit for slander, defamation, libel—a lawsuit he’s confident he could win. Or put the NYSP in a corner—knowing the individuals involved can’t sue him because he would win—and his real goal is to force the organization to toss Klemper to the wolves to cut their losses.”

Madeleine looked skeptical. “I wouldn’t have thought his motives would be that subtle. You’re sure it’s not just plain old anger looking for something to smash?”

Gurney shook his head. “Jack likes presenting himself as a blunt instrument. But there’s nothing blunt about the mind wielding the baseball bat.”

Madeleine still looked skeptical.

Gurney went on. “I’m not saying that he isn’t motivated by resentment. He is, clearly. He can’t stand the idea that he was forced out of a career he loved by people he despised. Now he despises them even more. He’s mad as hell, he wants revenge—that’s all true. I’m just saying that he isn’t stupid, and his tactics can be smarter than they appear to be.”

That comment produced a brief silence, broken by Madeleine. “By the way, you didn’t tell me about … that … final little horror.”

He looked at her quizzically.

She mimicked the look. “I think you know what I’m talking about.”

“Oh. The thing about the missing head? No … I didn’t tell you about that.”

“Why not?”

“It seemed … too grisly.”

“You were afraid I might find it upsetting?”

“Something like that.”

“Information management?”

“Pardon?”

“I remember an oily politician once explaining that he never engaged in deception; he merely managed the flow of information in an orderly manner to avoid confusing the public.”

Gurney was tempted to argue that this was a different situation altogether, that his motive was truly noble and caring, but she upset his balance with a surprising little wink, as if to let him off the hook—and immediately another temptation took its place.

Smart women tended to have an erotic effect on him, and Madeleine was a very smart woman indeed.

Chapter 43. Video Evidence

Every so often in his life as a detective, Gurney got the feeling that he was juggling hand grenades.

He knew he had no one to blame but himself for his current situation. From the beginning, it was evident that the mission was likely to be warped in unpredictable ways by Hardwick’s personal agenda. But he’d signed on anyway, driven by his own obsessive motives—motives that Madeleine had seen clearly enough, while he had chosen to insist he was only returning a favor owed. Having tricked himself into participating in a three-ring circus with no ringmaster, he was now experiencing the inevitable disarray built into that arrangement.

He tried telling himself that his unwillingness to walk away from it—now that the reversal of Kay’s conviction was all but certain and thus his ostensible duty to Hardwick was done—arose from a noble truth-seeking trait. But he couldn’t make himself believe it. He knew his addiction to his profession had roots deeper than anything noble.

He also tried telling himself that the discomfort he was feeling over Hardwick’s excoriation of Mick Klemper (not named but easily identified) on Criminal Conflict arose from another high-minded notion—that all agreements, even with conniving creeps, are sacred. He suspected, however, that his unease actually arose from his belated realization that he had promised Klemper more than he could deliver. The idea that he’d be able to cushion the man’s fall by characterizing his lapses as the products of foolish error rather than felonious intent now seemed like little more than a convenient fantasy.

He saw that he had unconsciously maneuvered himself once again into a dangerous and untenable position with no direction out—except forward. Madeleine was right. The pattern was undeniable. Clearly, there was something wrong with him. Simply understanding that, however, opened no new doors. The only path he could see was still straight ahead, hand grenades and all.

He woke up his computer and went to the video files from the Long Falls security cameras.

It took him almost an hour to find what he’d hoped would be there—an image of a rather diminutive individual coming along Axton Avenue toward the camera. As Gurney watched, he, or conceivably she, disappeared into the building entrance. Gender identification was stymied by a puffy winter jacket; a wide skier’s headband that covered ears, forehead, and hairline; oversized sunglasses; and a thick winter scarf that concealed not only the neck but much of the chin and jawline. What remained of the face to be seen—a sharp, slightly hooked nose and a smallish mouth—appeared consistent with the face of the Flowers by Florence delivery person Gurney had seen on the security video at Emmerling Oaks. In fact, the headband, sunglasses, and scarf appeared identical to those in the earlier video.

Gurney reversed the video, backing it up a minute or so, and replayed the individual’s progress along the street and entry into the building. Unlike the Emmerling Oaks video, there were no flowers. But there was a package. A narrow package, between three and four feet long, wrapped in red and green Christmas paper with a big decorative bow in the middle. Gurney smiled. It was probably the most innocent-looking way one could transport a sniper rifle on a city street in the holiday shopping season.

He made a note of the actual clock time embedded in the frame as the individual turned into the building. It was 10:03 a.m. Just seventeen minutes before the shot that felled Carl Spalter.

The same individual emerged onto the street at 10:22 a.m.—just two minutes after the shot was fired—turned and walked calmly away, continuing along Axton Avenue until passing out of the camera’s field of view.

Gurney sat back in his chair, contemplating the significance of what he’d just seen.

First, it suggested strongly that the shot was indeed fired from the apartment where the gun was later found. The timing of the likely shooter’s exit would make other scenarios difficult if not impossible—which underscored the light pole problem.

Second, the individual in the video was clearly not Kay Spalter. Gurney felt a welcome surge of anger at Klemper, as well as the evaporation of any bad feeling over breaking their “agreement.” That video alone would have ended the case against Kay Spalter. If nothing else, it would have ensured the presence of reasonable doubt by supporting a credible alternative theory of the case and by showing a credible alternative suspect. It would have prevented her conviction and incarceration. Klemper’s willful suppression of that evidence—apparently in return for the sexual favors of Alyssa Spalter—was not only criminal but unforgivable.

Third, it was time to stop thinking of the individual in the Axton Avenue and the retirement village videos simply as “the individual.” It was time to start calling him by his chosen name: Petros Panikos.

It wasn’t easy. Something in the mind rebelled at connecting the slight, almost dainty figure, carrying bouquets of chrysanthemums in the one instance and a colorful Christmas box in the other, with the violent psychopath described by Interpol and Adonis Angelidis. The psychopath who hammered the nails into Gus Gurikos’s eyes, ears, and throat. The psychopath who firebombed Bincher’s home in Cooperstown, burned six innocent people to death, and cut off a man’s head.

Oh, Jesus, was he singing when he did that, too? That was something Gurney didn’t want to think about. That was the stuff of nightmares. It was time for more practical thoughts. It was time for a meeting of the minds with Hardwick and Esti. Time to agree on next steps.

He took out his phone and called Hardwick first. He was intending to leave a message and was surprised when the phone was answered immediately—and defensively.

“You calling to give me some shit about my bit with Bork?”

Gurney decided to postpone that discussion for another time. “I’m thinking we need to get together.”

“For what?”

“Planning? Coordination? Cooperation?”

There was a short pause. “Sure. No problem. When?”

“Soon as possible. Like tomorrow morning. You, me, Esti if she can make it. We need to put the facts, questions, hypotheses on the table. With everything we have in one place, we may be able to see what’s missing.”

“Okay.” Hardwick sounded skeptical, as usual. “Where do you want to do this?”

“My house.”

“Any reason for that?”

The honest reason was that Gurney wanted to recapture some semblance of control, some sense of his hand being on the tiller. But what he said was “Your house has bullet holes in it. Mine doesn’t.”

After agreeing, with little enthusiasm, to meet at nine the following morning at Gurney’s, Hardwick volunteered to pass the word to Esti, since he was about to talk to her about something else anyway. Something personal. Gurney would have preferred to call her himself—again, for that elusive hand-on-tiller feeling—but he could think of no reasonable way to insist on it.

They ended the call without either of them bringing up the matter of the “deal” with Mick Klemper or Gurney’s allusion to it in his last phone message.

As Gurney emerged from the den, Madeleine emerged from the bedroom. She took the duffel bag she’d packed that morning out to her car, then came back in to remind him once again about the strawberries for the hens.

“You know,” he replied, “Ozzie Baggott down the road just tosses his chickens a pail of table scraps once a day, and they seem to survive quite nicely.”

“Ozzie Baggott is a disgusting lunatic. He’d be tossing garbage out into his backyard whether he had chickens there or not.”

Upon reflection, he found he couldn’t honestly argue with that.

They hugged and kissed, and she was on her way.

As her car passed out of sight below the barn, the last sliver of the setting sun disappeared behind the western ridge.

Chapter 44. The Thrill of the Chase

Gurney retreated again into the den. The deepening dusk had changed the color of the forested ridge above it from a dozen shades of green and gold to a monochromatic greenish gray. It made him think of the hillside opposite Jack Hardwick’s house, the hillside the shots had come from that had severed the power and phone lines.

Soon his thoughts began to coalesce around the bits and pieces of the Spalter case, especially its incongruous elements. That made him think of a maxim one of his academy instructors had emphasized in an advanced course on the interpretation of crime scene evidence: The pieces that don’t seem to fit are the ones that end up revealing the most.

He took a yellow legal pad out of his desk drawer and started writing. Twenty minutes later he reviewed the results, which he’d organized into a list of eight issues:

1. Eyewitnesses placed the victim at the moment he was shot in a position that would have made it impossible for a bullet to reach him from the apartment where the murder weapon and gunpowder residue were found.

2. Killing the victim’s mother to ensure the presence of the victim at the cemetery plot seems needlessly elaborate. Might the mother have been killed for another reason?

3. The pro who executed the hit was known to accept only the most difficult assignments. What might have put the Carl Spalter hit in that category?

4. If Kay Spalter herself was not the shooter, could she have hired the shooter?

5. Could Jonah have hired the shooter to gain control of Spalter Realty assets?

6. Could Alyssa have hired the shooter—in addition to conspiring with Klemper after the shooting to frame Kay—in order to inherit her father’s estate?

7. What secret was Gurikos killed and maimed to protect?

8. Was Carl killed in retaliation for trying to have someone else killed?

Going through the eight items, pondering each in turn, Gurney was disgusted with his lack of progress.

One positive aspect, however, of a case with multiple peculiarities was that once you had a theory that was consistent with all the peculiarities you could be sure that the theory was right. A single oddity in an investigation could often be explained in a variety of ways. But it was unlikely that there could be more than one theory that could explain the line-of-sight problem with the apartment and the grotesque mutilation of Gus Gurikos and Mary Spalter’s oddly timed death.

When he looked out through the north window of the den some minutes later, the high forest appeared devoid of any green at all. The trees and the ridge they covered were now a uniformly dark mass against the gray slate of the sky. The night descending on the hillside brought to mind the attack on Hardwick’s house and the escape of the motorized shooter through the forest paths.

At that moment he heard the sound of a motorcycle engine, which for a second he interpreted as the product of his imagination. Then the sound grew louder and its direction clearer. He went from the den to the kitchen to look out the window, sure now that he was hearing a very real motorcycle coming up the road. Half a minute later the machine’s single headlight rounded the barn and began ascending the rough pasture path.

He went to the bedroom, got his .32 Beretta from the night table, chambered a round, slipped the gun in his pocket, and went to the side door. He waited until the motorcycle came to a stop by his car, then switched on the outside lights.

An athletic-looking figure in black riding leathers and a black helmet with a full face visor dismounted, removed a slim black briefcase from one of the saddlebags, and approached the door. He knocked firmly with a black-gloved hand.

That was when Gurney, about to ease the gun from his pocket, recognized the helmet.

It was his own, from his motorcycling days nearly three decades earlier. It was the helmet he’d given to Kyle a few months ago.

He flipped on the inside lights and opened the door.

“Hey, Dad!” Kyle handed him the briefcase, lifted off the helmet with one hand, and ran the other back through the short dark hair that was a mirror image of his father’s.

They exchanged matching smiles, although in Gurney’s there was a touch of bafflement. “Did I miss an email or a phone message?”

“About my coming up? No. It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. Thought I could take care of your video enhancement easier up here than at home—so you can see what I’m doing and we can get it the way you want it. That’s the main reason I came. But there’s a second reason, too.”

“Oh?”

“Cow-shit bingo.”

“Excuse me?”

“Cow-shit bingo—at your Summer Mountain Fair. Did you know that was an actual thing? And deep-fried cheese. And on Sunday afternoon, a ladies-only demolition derby event. And a giant zucchini hurling contest.”

“A what?”

“I made that last one up. But what the hell, it’s not as weird as the real stuff. I’ve never been to a real country fair. With real cow shit. Figured it was time. Where’s Madeleine?”

“Long story. She’s staying with a couple of her friends. Involves the fair and … sort of a precaution. I’ll tell you all about it later.” He stepped back, holding the door open. “Come in, come in, take off the bike suit and get comfortable. Have you had any dinner?”

“A burger and a yogurt at the Sloatsburg rest stop.”

“That was over a hundred miles ago. You want to have an omelet with me?”

“Cool. Thanks. I’ll get my other bag and change.”

“So, what’s this ‘precaution’ thing you mentioned?” No surprise to Gurney, that was the first question Kyle asked when they sat down to eat twenty minutes later.

Instead of downplaying the threat, which would be his natural inclination, Gurney recounted the attack on Hardwick’s house and the atrocity in Cooperstown in straightforward terms. If he was going to have to persuade Kyle to leave—for home or another safe place, at least by the following morning—it would make no sense to soft-pedal the peril now.

As Gurney spoke, his son listened with silent concern—as well as the visible excitement that a hint of danger often arouses in young men.

After they ate, Kyle set up his laptop on the dining table and Gurney gave him the USB drive with the Axton Avenue video files. They located the two short segments Gurney wanted enhanced. The first was the portion of the cemetery sequence beginning with Carl rising from his chair and ending with him sprawled face-down with a bullet in his brain. The second was the portion of the street sequence that showed the diminutive figure Gurney believed to be Petros Panikos entering the building with the gift-wrapped box that presumably contained the rifle later found upstairs in the apartment.

Kyle was studying the images on his computer screen. “You want these blown up for max detail with minimum software interpolation?”

“Say that again?”

“When you blow stuff up, you spread out the actual digital data. The image gets bigger but also fuzzier, because there’s less hard information per square inch. Software can compensate for that by making assumptions, filling in the data gaps, sharpening, smoothing. But that introduces an element of unreliability in the image because not everything in the enhancement is present in the original pixels. In order to de-fuzz the enlargement, the software makes calculated guesses based more on probability than on hard data.”

“So what are you recommending?”

“I’d recommend picking a point of reasonable compromise between the sharpness of the enlargement and the reliability of the data composing it.”

“Fine. Aim for whatever balance you think is right.” Gurney smiled not only at his son’s grasp of the process but also at the excitement in his voice. He seemed the happy archetype of that under-thirty generation born and bred with a natural affinity for all things digital.

“Just give me a little time to mess around with a few test runs. I’ll let you know when I have something worth looking at.” Kyle opened the program’s toolbar, clicked on one of the zoom icons, then stopped. He looked over at Gurney, who was carrying their omelet dishes to the sink island, and asked a question that seemed to come out of nowhere.

“Apart from dealing with sensational murders and things, how’re you guys doing up here?”

“How are we doing? Okay, I guess. Why do you ask?”

“Seems like you’re involved in your stuff, and Madeleine’s involved in her stuff.”

Gurney nodded slowly. “I guess you could say that. My stuff and her stuff. Generally separate, but mostly compatible.”

“You like it that way?”

He found the question oddly difficult to answer. He finally said, “It works.” But he was uncomfortable with the mechanical tone of that. “I don’t mean it to sound so gray and pragmatic. We love each other. We still find each other attractive. We enjoy living together. But our minds work differently. I get into something and just sort of stay in it. Madeleine has a way of changing her focus, of paying total attention to whatever’s in front of her—adapting to the moment. She’s always present, if you know what I mean. And, of course, she’s a hell of a lot more outgoing than I am.”

“Most people are.” Kyle took the negative edge off the comment with a big grin.

“True. So, most of the time, we end up doing different things. Or she ends up doing things and I end up thinking about things.”

“You mean she’s outside feeding the chickens while you’re sitting in here figuring out who chopped up the body in the town dumpster?”

Gurney laughed. “That’s not exactly it. When she’s at the clinic she deals with what’s there—some pretty horrific stuff—and when she’s here she deals with what’s here. I tend to be inside my head, obsessed with some ongoing problem, regardless of where I am. That’s one difference between us. Also, Madeleine spends a lot of time looking, learning, doing. I spend a lot of time wondering, hypothesizing, analyzing.” He paused, shrugged. “I suppose each of us does what makes us feel most alive.”

Kyle sat for a while with a thoughtful frown, as if trying to align his mind with his father’s to better understand his thoughts. Finally he turned back to his computer screen. “I better get started on this, in case it turns out to be harder than I thought.”

“Good luck.” Gurney went into the den and opened his email. His eye ran down through the two dozen or so items that had arrived since that morning. One item caught his attention. The sender was identified simply as “Jonah.”

The email text appeared to be a personal response to Gurney’s request for a meeting to discuss the status of the investigation.

I would be interested in having the proposed discussion as soon as possible. My location, however, would make a physical meeting at this time impractical. My suggestion is that we meet via Internet video-phone tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. If you would like to proceed this way, please email me your video-phone service name. If you do not already have this in place, you can download the software from Skype. I look forward to your response.

Gurney accepted Jonah’s invitation immediately. They already had the Skype program. At the request of her sister in Ridgewood, Madeleine had installed it on their computer when they’d first moved to the mountains. As he hit SEND, he felt a little rush of adrenaline—a sense that something was about to change.

He needed to prepare. That eight a.m. conversation was less than twelve hours away. And then at nine he, Hardwick, and hopefully Esti would be getting together to bring one another up-to-date.

He went to the Cyberspace Cathedral website and immersed himself for the next forty-five minutes in the bland, smiley-positive philosophy of Jonah Spalter.

He was in the process of concluding that the man was a kind of saccharine genius—a Walt Disney of self-improvement—when Kyle called to him from the other room. “Hey, Dad? I think I’ve got this video stuff about as good as I can get it.”

Gurney went out to the dining table and sat next to his son. Kyle clicked on an icon, and an enhanced version of the cemetery sequence began—enlarged, sharpened, and slowed to half speed. Everything was as Gurney remembered it from his first viewing—just clearer and bigger. Carl was seated at the far right side of the first row of chairs. He rose and turned toward the podium at the other end of the grave. He took a step forward in front of Alyssa, began to take a second step, and lurched forward in the direction he’d been moving, coming to rest face-down just past the last seat at the far end of the row. Jonah, Alyssa, and the Elder Force ladies got to their feet. Paulette rushed forward. The pallbearers and undertaker came around the chairs.

Gurney leaned closer to the screen, asking Kyle to pause the video, trying to discern the expressions on the faces of Jonah and Alyssa, but the detail just wasn’t there. Similarly, even at this enlargement level, Carl’s face against the ground was little more than a generic profile. There was a dark speck along the hairline of the temple that might have been the bullet’s entry wound—or it could have been a bit of dirt, a tiny shadow, or an artifact of the software itself.

He asked Kyle to play the segment through again, hoping for some revelation to emerge.

None did. He asked for it a third time, peering intently at the side of Carl’s head as he turned toward the podium, took a step, began to take another, pitched forward into a rapidly staggering collapse. Either some breeze at the site or Carl’s own jerky movement had disarranged his hair, making it impossible to see that subtle little dark spot until his head hit the ground and stopped moving, just beyond Jonah’s feet.

“I’m sure the FBI has software that could give you an upgraded image,” said Kyle apologetically. “I’ve pushed this program about as far as I can without producing a picture that’s essentially fictional.”

“What you’ve given me is a lot better than what I started with. Let’s take a look at the street scene.”

Kyle closed a few windows, opened a new one, and hit a play icon. Starting with a subject much closer to the camera, filling a larger portion of the frame to begin with, the enlargement in this instance was clearer and more detailed. The likely killer of Mary Spalter, Carl Spalter, Gus Gurikos, and Lex Bincher came walking along Axton Avenue and entered the apartment building. Gurney wished the little man had left more of his face uncovered. But, of course, the obscuration had been intentional.

Apparently Kyle was thinking along the same lines. “Didn’t give us much for a Wanted poster, did he?”

“Not much for a Wanted poster and not much for a facial recognition program either.”

“Because his eyes are hidden by the huge sunglasses?”

“Right. The shape of the eyes, position of the pupils, corners of the eyes. The scarf hides the jawline and the tip of the chin. The headband hides the ears and the position of the hairline. There’s nothing left for the measurement algorithms to work with.”

“Still, if I saw it again, I think I could recognize that face—just by the mouth.”

Gurney nodded. “The mouth, and what I can see of the nose.”

“Yeah, that too. He looks like a fucking little bird—excuse my language.”

They sat back in their chairs and gazed at the screen. At the half-hidden face of one of the world’s strangest killers. Petros Panikos. Peter Pan. The Magician.

And, of course, there was Donny Angel’s final description of him: “very fucking crazy.”

Chapter 45. Out of Harm’s Way

“So what do you think?” Kyle, a questioning look on his face, was holding a mug of hot black coffee in both hands, elbows propped on the breakfast table.

“What do I think about the videos?” Gurney sat on the other side of the round pine table, holding his own mug in a similar way, appreciating the warmth on his palms. The temperature had dropped nearly twenty degrees overnight, from the low seventies to the low fifties, not an unusual thing in the northwestern Catskills, where autumn often arrived in August. The sky was overcast, hiding the sun, which normally would be visible above the eastern ridge at that time—a quarter past seven.

“Do you think they’ll help you achieve … what you want to achieve?”

Gurney took a slow sip from his mug. “The cemetery sequence will do a couple of things. It establishes the point at which Carl was hit, and the obstructed angle from the apartment window to that position will undermine the police scenario for the source of the shot. And the fact that the video was in police hands from the beginning—Klemper’s hands—will support a charge of evidence suppression.” He fell silent, unsettled for a moment by the memory of his conversation with Klemper at Riverside Mall.

He saw Kyle watching him curiously and went on. “The street sequence is useful in a couple of ways—for what it shows and what it doesn’t show. The simple fact that it doesn’t show Kay Spalter entering the building would have made it an important piece of exculpatory evidence for the defense. So, at the very least, it supports serious charges of evidence suppression and police misconduct.”

“So … how come you don’t sound happier?”

“Happier?” Gurney hesitated. “I guess I’ll be happier when we get closer to the end point.”

“What is the end point?”

“I’d like to know what really happened.”

“You mean, find out who killed Carl?”

“Yes. That’s the thing that really matters. If Kay is innocent, then someone else wanted Carl dead, planned it, and hired Panikos to accomplish it. I want to know who that was. And the little assassin who pulled the trigger? So far he’s managed to kill nine other people in the process—not counting the scores of people he’s killed before, always managing to walk away and do it again. I’d rather he didn’t walk away this time.”

“How close do you think you are to stopping him?”

“Hard to say.”

Kyle’s intelligent, inquisitive gaze remained fixed on him, in evident expectation of a better answer. As Gurney was reaching for one and finding it elusive, he was reprieved by the ring of his cell phone.

It was Hardwick. As usual, the man didn’t waste time saying hello. “Got your message about the video-phone thing with Jonah Spalter. Where the hell is he?”

“I have no idea. But his willingness to have a conversation this way is better than nothing. You want to come here at eight instead of nine, be part of it?”

“Nine’s the best I can do. Same with Esti. But we both have a deep and abiding faith in your interview skills. You have the software to record the call?”

“No, but I can download it. You have any specific questions you’d like me to ask?”

“Yeah. Ask him if he hired the hit on his brother.”

“Great idea. Any other advice?”

“Yeah. Don’t fuck it up. See you at nine.”

Gurney slipped the phone back in his pocket.

Kyle cocked his head curiously. “What do you need to download?”

“A piece of audio-video recording software that’s compatible with Skype. You think you could do that for me?”

“Give me your Skype name and password. I’ll take care of it right now.”

As the young man headed into the den armed with the information he needed, Gurney smiled at his eagerness to help, smiled also at the simple pleasure of his being in the house. It made him wonder, yet again, why their times together were so few and far between.

There was a period when he thought he knew the reason—a period peaking a couple of years earlier when Kyle was making an obscene amount of money on Wall Street, in a job he’d stepped into through a door opened by a college friend. Gurney was convinced that the yellow Porsche accompanying that job was proof positive that the money-mad genes of his real estate broker ex-wife, Kyle’s mother, had taken over. But now he suspected that this had been nothing more than a rationalization that absolved him of a deeper and less explainable failure to reach out to his son. He used to tell himself that it was because Kyle reminded him of his ex-wife in other unpleasant ways as well—certain gestures, intonations, facial expressions. But that too was a questionable excuse. There were many more differences than similarities between mother and son, and even if there weren’t, it would be petulant and unfair to equate one person with the other.

He would sometimes think that the real explanation was nothing more complicated than the defense of his own peculiar comfort zone. That comfort zone did not include other people. That was the point his college girlfriend, Geraldine, had hammered home the day she left him so many years ago. When he viewed the issue in that light, he saw his apparent avoidance of his son as just one more symptom of his innate introversion. Not such a big deal. Case closed. But as soon as he would settle on this, a tiny doubt would begin to nibble at the edge of his certainty. Did simple introversion fully explain how little he saw of Kyle? And the nibble would grow into a gnawing question: Did the presence of one son inevitably remind him that he’d once had two sons and would still have two sons if only …

Kyle reappeared at the kitchen door. “You’re all set up. I left the screen open for you. It’s totally simple.”

“Oh. Great. Thank you.”

Kyle was watching him with a curious smile.

It reminded Gurney of a look he sometimes saw on Madeleine’s face. “What are you thinking?”

“About how you like to figure stuff out. How important it is to you. While that software was downloading, I was thinking … if Madeleine was a detective, she’d want to solve the puzzle so she could catch the bad guy. But I think you want to catch the bad guy so you can solve the puzzle.”

Gurney was pleased, not by his own position in the comparison—which didn’t strike him as especially laudable—but by Kyle’s perception in noting it. The young man had a good mind, a fact that meant a lot to Gurney. He felt a little surge of camaraderie. “You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that you use the word ‘think’ almost as much as I do.”

As he was speaking, the house phone was ringing. He went into the den to answer it. As if summoned by Kyle’s reference to her, it was Madeleine.

“Good morning!” She sounded cheerful. “How are things going?”

“Fine. What are you up to?”

“Deirdre and Dennis and I just finished breakfast. Orange juice, blueberries, French toast, and … bacon!” The final item was voiced with the faux guilt of having committed a faux sin. “We’ll be going out in a few minutes to check on all the animals and get them ready to transport to the fairgrounds. In fact, Dennis is out there by the little corral already, waving to us to come out.”

“Sounds like fun,” he replied in a not very fun-filled voice, marveling once again at her ability to find compartments of pure enjoyment within a larger landscape of serious problems.

“It is fun! How are our little hens this morning?”

“Fine, I assume. I was just about to go down to the barn.”

She paused, then in a more subdued tone stepped tentatively into the larger landscape, the one in which he was so deeply mired. “Any developments?”

“Well, Kyle showed up here at the house.”

“What? Why?”

“I asked him for some computer software advice, and he just decided to come up and do what needed to be done. Actually, it was very helpful.”

“Did you send him home?”

“I’m going to.”

She paused. “Please be careful.”

“I will.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

“Okay. Well … Dennis is waving more urgently, so I better go. Love you!”

“Love you too.” He replaced the handset, then sat staring at the phone unseeingly, his mind drifting back to Panikos’s face on the video and the words “very fucking crazy.”

“Did I hear you say your video call was at eight?” Kyle’s voice from the den doorway pulled Gurney back to the moment. He glanced at the time in the corner of his computer screen—7:56 a.m.

“Thanks. Which reminds me—I wanted to ask you to stay out of the camera’s field of view during the call. Okay?”

“No problem. As a matter of fact, what I was thinking of doing, since you’ve got your other meeting here at nine, and it’s an ideal day for it … I thought I’d take a little ride on the bike up to Syracuse.”

“Syracuse?” There was a time when the name of that gray snow-belt city meant little to Gurney, but now it had become a mental repository for all the terrible events of the recent Good Shepherd case.

Obviously, it had a more positive association for Kyle. “Yeah, I thought I’d take a ride up, as long as I was this far upstate, maybe have lunch with Kim.”

“Kim Corazon? You stayed in touch with her?”

“A little. By email mostly. She came down to the city once. I let her know last week that I planned to be up here with you for a few days, halfway to Syracuse, thought it might be a good time to get together with her.” He paused, eyeing his father warily. “You look kind of shocked.”

“ ‘Surprised’ would be the word. You never mentioned Kim after … after the case was wrapped up.”

“I figured you wouldn’t want to be reminded of that whole mess she dragged you into. Not that she meant to. But it ended up being pretty traumatic stuff.”

It was true that it wasn’t a case he enjoyed talking about. Or thinking about. Very few were. In fact, he rarely considered the past at all, unless it was a past case with loose ends that demanded resolution. But the Good Shepherd case wasn’t one of those. The Good Shepherd case was solved. The puzzle pieces, in the end, were all in place. It could be argued, however, that the price had been too high. And his own position in the final act of that drama had become one of Madeleine’s chief exhibits in her argument that he exposed himself too willingly to unreasonable levels of danger.

Kyle was watching him now with a worried look. “Does it bother you that I’m visiting her?”

In other circumstances, the honest answer would have been yes. He’d found Kim to be very ambitious, very emotional, very naive—a combination more troublesome than he would wish for in any girlfriend for his son. But in the current circumstances, Kyle’s plan struck him as a convenient coincidence—in the same category as Madeleine’s plan to help the Winklers.

“Actually,” said Gurney, “it seems like a pretty good idea at the moment—a bit safer, anyway.”

“Jeez, Dad, you really think something bad’s going to happen here?”

“I think the chance is very, very slight. But I wouldn’t want you to be exposed to it.”

“What about you?” It was Madeleine’s question, repeated in the same tone.

“It’s part of the job—part of what I signed on for when I agreed to help with the case.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No, son, there isn’t anything right now. But thank you.”

“Okay,” he said doubtfully. For a minute he looked lost, as if hoping for some other option, some other plan of action, to occur to him.

Gurney said nothing, just waited.

“Okay,” Kyle repeated. “Let me get some of my things and I’ll be on my way. When I get to Syracuse I’ll check in with you.” He retreated from the den with a worried frown.

A musical computer tone announced the start of Gurney’s eight a.m. video call.

Chapter 46. The Spalter Brothers

A medium shot of a man sitting in a comfortable-looking armchair filled most of the laptop screen. Gurney recognized Jonah Spalter from his photograph on the Cyberspace Cathedral website. He was illuminated clearly, expertly, with no extraneous elements in the video framing to distract from the strong bone structure of his face. His expression was one of practiced calm seasoned with mild concern. He was gazing directly into the camera with the effect of gazing directly into Gurney’s eyes.

“Hello, David. I’m Jonah.” If his voice were a color, it would have been a pastel. “Is it all right if I call you David? Or would you prefer Detective Gurney?”

“David is fine. Thank you for getting in touch with me.”

There was a tiny nod, a tiny smile, the hint of a social worker’s concern in the eyes. “Your email had an urgent tone, along with some rather alarming phrases. How can I help you?”

“How much do you know about the effort to get your sister-in-law’s conviction overturned?”

“I know that the effort resulted in her lead attorney being killed, along with six of his neighbors.”

“Anything else?”

“I know that Mr. Bincher had made some serious allegations of police corruption. Your email to me also referred to corruption, as well as ‘family dynamics.’ That could mean just about anything. Perhaps you could explain it.”

“It’s an area that the official investigation is likely to pursue.”

“Official investigation?”

“Lex Bincher’s murder will force BCI to take a new look at your brother’s murder. Not only BCI, but probably the AG’s office as well, since the corruption charges in Kay’s appeal are aimed at BCI. At that point, we’ll be turning over the new evidence we’ve uncovered—evidence indicating that Kay was framed. So, whichever agencies are involved, they’ll be asking who, besides Kay, stood to benefit from Carl’s death.”

“Well,” said Jonah, with wide-eyed chagrin, “that would certainly include me.”

“Is it true that you and your brother didn’t get along?”

“Didn’t get along?” He laughed softly, ruefully. “That would be an understatement.” He closed his eyes for a moment, shaking his head, as though overwhelmed by the thoughts this subject raised. When he spoke again his tone was sharper. “Do you know where I am right now?”

“I have no idea.”

“No one does. That’s the point.”

“What point?”

“Carl and I never did get along. When we were younger it didn’t matter that much. He had his friends and I had mine. We went our own ways. Then, as you may know—it’s no secret—our father yoked us together in the monstrosity known as Spalter Realty. That’s when ‘not getting along’ turned into something poisonous. When I was forced to work with Carl on a daily basis … I realized I was dealing with something more than a difficult brother. I was dealing with a monster.” Jonah paused, as if to give that term room to expand in Gurney’s imagination.

It sounded to Gurney like a speech Jonah might have delivered before—an oft-repeated explanation of a terrible relationship.

“I watched Carl evolve from a selfish, aggressive businessman into a complete sociopath. As his political ambition grew, on the outside he became more charming, more magnetic, more charismatic. On the inside, he was rotting away to nothing—a black hole of greed and ambition. In biblical terms, he was the ultimate ‘whitewashed sepulchre.’ He got in bed with like-minded people. Ruthless people. Major criminals. Mob figures like Donny Angel. Murderers. Carl wanted to pull enormous amounts of money out of Spalter Realty to finance his megalomaniac schemes with those people, as well as his supremely hypocritical gubernatorial candidacy. He kept pressuring me to agree to unethical transactions that I wouldn’t—couldn’t—agree to. ‘Ethics,’ ‘morality,’ ‘legality’—none of those words meant anything to him. He began to frighten me. Actually, that’s not a strong enough word. The truth is, he terrified me. I came to believe there was nothing—nothing—he wouldn’t do to get what he wanted. Sometimes … the look in his eyes … it was positively satanic. As though all the evil in the world were concentrated in that gaze.”

“How did you deal with it?”

“Deal with it?” Again, the small smile and rueful laugh, followed by a lowered voice, almost confessional. “I ran away.”

“How?”

“I kept moving. Literally moving. One of the blessings of current technology is that you can do just about anything from anywhere. I bought a motor home, outfitted it with the appropriate communications equipment, and made it the rolling headquarters of the Cyberspace Cathedral. A process in which I have come to see the hand of Providence. Good can come out of evil, if good is our objective.”

“The good in this case being …?”

“Having no fixed geographical location, of being in a sense nowhere. My sole location has become the Internet, and the Internet is everywhere. Which has turned out to be the ideal ‘place’ for the Cathedral. The ubiquitous, worldwide Cyberspace Cathedral. Do you see what I mean, David? The need to get away from my brother and his deadly associates has been transformed into a gift. God does indeed work in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform. This is a truth we encounter again and again. All that is required is an open mind and an open heart.” Jonah was looking increasingly radiant.

Gurney wondered if a delicate shift had been made in the lighting. He felt the urge to dull the glow. “Then you got a second gift, a large one, with Carl’s death.”

Jonah’s smile grew cooler. “That’s true. Once more, out of evil came good.”

“Apparently, quite a lot of good. I’ve heard that Spalter Realty’s assets are worth over fifty million dollars. Is that true?”

The man’s forehead frowned while his mouth continued to smile. “In today’s market, it’s impossible to say.” He paused, shrugged. “But I suppose, give or take a significant amount, it’s as good as any other guess.”

“Is it true that before Carl’s death you couldn’t touch that money, but now it all goes to you?”

“Nominally to me, but ultimately to the Cathedral. I’m merely a conduit. The Cathedral is of supreme importance. It’s far more important than any individual. The work of the Cathedral is the only thing that matters. The only thing.”

Gurney wondered if he was hearing a not-so-subtle threat in this emphatic priority. Rather than take that issue head-on, however, he decided to change direction. “Were you surprised by Carl’s murder?”

That question triggered Jonah’s first noticeable hesitation. He steepled his fingers in front of his chest. “Yes and no. Yes, because one is always initially startled by that ultimate form of violence. No, because murder was not a surprising end to the kind of life Carl led. And I could easily imagine someone close to him being driven to that extreme.”

“Even someone like Kay?”

“Even someone like Kay.”

“Or someone like yourself?”

Jonah wrapped his answer in an earnest frown. “Or someone like myself.” Then he glanced, not quite surreptitiously, at his watch.

Gurney smiled. “Just a couple more questions.”

“I do have a live webcast scheduled in ten minutes, but go ahead, please.”

“What did you think of Mick Klemper?”

“Who?”

“The chief investigator at Carl’s shooting.”

“Ah. Yes. What did I think of him? I thought he might have a drinking problem.”

“Did he interview you?”

“I wouldn’t call it an interview. He asked a few basic questions at the cemetery that day. He took down my contact information, but he never followed up. He didn’t strike me as particularly thorough … or trustworthy.”

“Would you be surprised if you heard that he was guilty of evidence tampering?”

“I can’t say it would be a shock.” He cocked his head curiously. “Are you saying that he used illegal means to get Kay convicted? Why?”

“Again, that’s confidential within the appeal process at this point. But it does raise an important point. Assuming that Kay didn’t kill Carl, obviously someone else did. Does the fact that the real killer is out there roaming around free worry you?”

“For my own safety? Not at all. Carl and I were on the opposite sides of every business decision, every proposed action of Spalter Realty—as well as every personal matter that ever came up between us. We never had the same friends, the same goals, the same anything. It’s highly unlikely that we’d have the same enemy.”

“One last question.” Gurney paused, more for dramatic effect than because of any indecision. “What would you say if I told you that your mother’s death may not have been accidental?”

“What do you mean?” He blinked, appeared stunned.

“Evidence has come to light that connects her death with Carl’s.”

“What evidence?”

“I can’t go into that. But it seems persuasive. Can you think of any reason that the person who targeted Carl would also have targeted your mother?”

Jonah’s expression was a frozen mix of emotions. The most recognizable one was fear. But was it the fear of the unknown? Or was it fear of the unknown becoming known? He shook his head. “I … I don’t know what to say. Look, I need to know what … I mean, what kind of evidence are you talking about?”

“Right now that’s a confidential part of the appeals case. I’ll see that you’re informed as soon as possible.”

“What you’re saying is … absolutely bizarre.”

“It must seem that way. But if any explanation occurs to you, any scenario that you think might connect the two deaths, please let me know right away.”

The man’s only visible response was a small nod.

Gurney decided on another abrupt change of direction. “What do you think of Carl’s daughter?”

Jonah swallowed, shifted in his chair. “Are you asking me if she could … could have killed her father? And her grandmother too?” He looked lost. “I have no idea. Alyssa is … not a healthy person, but … her father? Her grandmother?”

“Not healthy in what way? Can you be more specific?”

“No. Not now.” He looked at his watch, as if baffled by the data it conveyed. “I really have to go. Really. Sorry.”

“Last question. Who else might have wanted to kill Carl?”

He turned up his palms in a gesture that conveyed frustration with the question. “Anyone. Anyone who got close enough to see the rot behind the smile.”

“Thank you for your help, Jonah. I hope we can speak again. By the way, what’s the topic of your webcast?”

“Sorry, my what?”

“Your webcast.”

“Oh.” He looked sick. “Today’s topic is ‘Our Path to Joy.’ ”

Chapter 47. Still Missing

Gurney used the quarter hour prior to Hardwick’s and Esti’s scheduled arrival at nine o’clock to type and print out three copies of what he’d jotted down the day before on a legal pad—the case’s key points.

Esti was the first to arrive but only by a minute. As she was parking her hot blue Mini Cooper by the asparagus bed, Hardwick’s red GTO was rumbling up past the barn.

She stepped out of the little car, and her T-shirt, cutoff jeans, and relaxed smile all proclaimed a day off from the job. Her caramel skin glowed in the morning sunlight. As she approached the side door, she cast a curious glance at the flat stones marking the rooster’s grave.

Gurney opened the screen door and shook hands with her.

“Hey,” she said, “it’s so gorgeous today, we should stay out here.”

Gurney returned the smile. “That’d be nice. Problem is, I have some videos inside I want you and Jack to see.”

“Just a thought. The sun feels good on my skin.”

Hardwick pulled his car in next to hers, got out, and swung the heavy door shut. Without bothering to acknowledge her or Gurney, he shaded his eyes with his hand and began scanning the surrounding fields and wooded hillsides.

She gave him a sideways glance. “You looking for somebody?”

He didn’t answer, just continued what he was doing.

Gurney followed his gaze until it reached Barrow Hill, realizing then what was on the man’s mind. “That’s the most likely spot,” said Gurney.

Hardwick nodded. “At the top of that narrow trail?”

“It’s actually an overgrown quarry road.”

Hardwick stayed focused on the hill. “Pretty good distance from here. He’d need to be really good. Maybe twelve hundred feet?”

“Maybe a little more. Not too different from Long Falls.”

Esti looked alarmed. “You guys talking about a sniper?”

“A possible location for one,” said Gurney. “There’s a place near the top of that hill that would be my choice if I were targeting someone who lived in this house. Clear view of the side door, clear view of the cars.”

She turned to Hardwick. “Every place you go now, that’s what you’re checking out? Sniper spots?”

“With two rounds in the side of my house, it’s on my mind these days. Areas surrounded by good cover concern me.”

Her eyes widened. “So maybe instead of standing here like sitting ducks, staring at a place we could be shot from, we should go inside, yes?”

Hardwick looked like he was about to make a wiseass comment about her standing/sitting remark, but he just grinned and followed her into the house. After another glance up the hill, Gurney joined them.

He got his laptop and list of issues from the den, and they all settled down at the dining table. “Why don’t we start by getting up-to-date?” suggested Gurney. “You and Esti were going to make some calls. Do we have any new facts?”

Esti went first. “This Greek mob guy, Adonis Angelidis? According to my friend at OCTF, he’s a big deal. Low profile, compared to the Italians and the Russians, but a lot of influence. Works with all the families. It was the same with Gurikos, the guy who got his head nailed. He arranged big hits for big players. Major connections. Very trusted.”

“So why was he hit?” asked Hardwick. “Your task force buddy got any clue?”

“None. According to OCTF, Gurikos kept everybody happy. Smooth as silk. A resource.”

“Yeah, well, somebody didn’t agree.”

She nodded. “It could have happened the way Angelidis told Dave: Carl went to Gurikos to set up a hit on someone, then that someone found out about it and hired Panikos to kill them both. Makes sense, no?”

Hardwick turned his palms up in a gesture of uncertainty.

Esti looked at Gurney. “Dave?”

“In a way, I’d like the Angelidis version to be true. But it doesn’t feel quite right. Like it almost makes sense. The problem is, it doesn’t account for the nails in Gus’s head. A practical, preemptive hit on Carl and Gus is one thing. A gruesome warning about keeping secrets is something else. The two don’t fit together.”

“I’ve got the same problem with the mother,” said Esti. “I don’t get why she had to be killed.”

Hardwick sounded restless. “It’s not that big a mystery. To put Carl at the funeral, exposed, delivering a eulogy.”

“So why didn’t Panikos wait until he was actually standing at the podium? Why shoot him before he got there?”

“Who the hell knows? Maybe to stop him from revealing something.”

Gurney couldn’t see the logic in that. Why go to elaborate lengths to set up a situation in which someone would be scheduled to make a speech if you were afraid of what they might say?

“I’ve got one last thing,” said Esti. “About the Cooperstown fires? I found out something interesting, but strange. The four incendiary devices used on Bincher’s house were all different types and sizes.” She looked from Hardwick to Gurney and back again. “Does that say anything to you?”

Hardwick sucked at his teeth and shrugged. “Maybe that’s what little Peter happened to have in his toy box at the time.”

“Or maybe what his supplier had available? Any ideas, Dave?”

“Just an off-the-wall possibility: that he was experimenting.”

“Experimenting? For what purpose?”

“I don’t know. Maybe evaluating different devices with some future use in mind?”

She made a face. “Let’s hope that’s not the reason.”

Hardwick shifted in his chair. “You got anything else, sweetheart?”

“Yes. The headless body recovered at the scene has been positively ID’d.” She paused for one dramatic beat. “Lex Bincher. For sure.”

Hardwick was staring warily at her.

She went on slowly, “The head … is still missing.”

Hardwick’s jaw muscle twitched. “Christ! This is like some shit in a horror movie.”

Esti screwed up her face. “I don’t understand how this gets to you so much. That story about how you and Dave met—that incident involved a woman who got cut in half, right? I heard you laugh about that, tell sick jokes, right?”

“Right.”

“So how come when this head thing comes up, you get all disturbed-like?”

“Look, for Christ’s sake …” He raised his hands in surrender, shaking his head. “It’s one thing to find a chopped-up body. A body in ten pieces. You’re a cop long enough, you work the inner city long enough, that kind of thing is going to happen. It just is. But there’s a big difference between finding a cut-off head and not finding it. You get what I mean? The fucking thing is missing! Which means somebody is keeping it somewhere. For some reason. For some God-awful use he has for it. Believe me, that fucking thing is going to turn up when we least expect it.”

“ ‘When we least expect it’? I think you see too much Netflix.” She gave him one of her affectionate little winks. “Anyway, that’s all the new stuff I have for now. How about you? You have anything?”

Hardwick rubbed his face hard with his palms, as though he were erasing a bad dream, trying to give his day a fresh start. “I managed to locate one of the missing witnesses—Freddie, the one whose testimony put Kay in the Axton Avenue apartment house at the time of the shooting. Officially, Frederico Javier Rosales.” He shot a glance at Gurney. “Any chance of getting some coffee?”

“No problem.” Gurney went to the machine on the sink island to get a fresh pot going.

Hardwick continued. “We had a friendly talk, me and Freddie. We focused on the interesting little gap between what he actually saw and what Mick the Dick told him he saw.”

Esti’s eyes widened. “He admitted that Klemper told him what to say on the stand?”

“Not only did Klemper tell him what to say, but he told him he damn well better say it.”

“Or else what?”

“Freddie had a drug problem. Small dealer supporting a big addiction. One more conviction would give him an automatic hard twenty, no parole. When a skell’s in that kind of spot, a prick like Mick has a lot of leverage.”

“So why’d he open up to you?”

Hardwick grinned unpleasantly. “Boy like Freddie has a short attention span. Always sees the biggest threat as the one that’s standing in front of him, and that was me. But don’t get the wrong idea. I was very civilized. I explained that the only way for him to avoid the substantial penalties for having committed perjury in a murder case would be for him to un-perjure himself.”

Esti looked incredulous. “Un-perjure himself?”

“Nice concept, don’t you think? I told him he could get out from under the avalanche of shit that was about to come down on him if he described how his original testimony was concocted entirely by Mick the Dick.”

“He spelled all that out on paper?”

“And signed it. I even got his fucking thumbprint on it.”

Esti looked cautiously pleased. “Does Freddie think you’re with BCI?”

“It’s possible he may have formed the impression that my connection with the bureau is more current than it actually is. I don’t really give a shit what he thinks. Do you?”

She shook her head. “Not if it helps put Klemper away. You have any leads on the other two witnesses who dropped out of sight—Jimmy Flats and Kay’s boyfriend, Darryl?”

“Not yet. But Freddie’s statement, along with the recording of Dave’s conversation with Alyssa, should absolutely seal the deal on the police misconduct issue—which in turn should seal the deal on Kay’s appeal.”

Hardwick’s happy little rhyme scraped Gurney’s brain like nails on a blackboard. But then it occurred to him that his edginess might be coming from another direction—from the unresolved question of Kay’s guilt, an issue quite apart from the fairness or unfairness of her trial. There was little doubt about the evidence tampering and witness tampering. But none of those illegalities made Kay Spalter innocent. As long as the identity of the person who hired Petros Panikos to kill Carl Spalter remained a mystery, Kay Spalter remained a viable suspect.

Esti’s voice broke into Gurney’s train of thought. “You said something about showing us some videos?”

“Yes. Right. In addition to my Skype conversation with Jonah, I have a couple of security camera sequences from Axton Avenue—a close-up view of someone entering the apartment building before the shooting, and a long-distance view of Carl getting hit and going down.” He looked at Hardwick. “Did you fill Esti in on how I got the videos?”

“Things were moving a little too fast. And there wasn’t much information in that thirty-second voice mail you left me.”

“And what information there was you decided to ignore, right?”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“My message to you was clear on the key point. I had told Klemper things would go better for him if the missing video material was to end up in my hands. Well, it did. But then you made your no-holds-barred appearance on Criminal Conflict—and bashed the ‘thoroughly corrupt’ detective on the case for framing Kay with perjured testimony. Everyone in the criminal justice system up here knows that the detective on the case was Mick Klemper—so you essentially named him and blamed him, and totally ignored my situation with him.”

Hardwick’s expression was darkening. “Like I said, things were moving fast. I’d just come from the arson by the lake—seven dead people, Davey, seven—and I was a fuckload more focused on the main battle than with the niceties of your tête-à-tête with Mick the Dick.” Hardwick went on, reminding Gurney that ambiguous promises and expedient lies were the hidden foundation stones of the criminal justice system. He wound up with a semi-rhetorical question. “Why the hell would you worry about a piece of shit like Klemper?”

Gurney opted for a practical and simplistic response, prompted by his memory of the odor of alcohol on the man and the almost incoherent message he left on Gurney’s voice mail the next day. “My concern is that Mick Klemper is an angry drunk being backed into a corner, and that he might be desperate enough to do something stupid.”

When Hardwick said nothing, Gurney continued. “So I’m keeping my Beretta a little closer than usual, just in case. In the meantime, Esti asked about the videos. So let’s take a look. I’ll run the street-view sequence first, then the long shot of the cemetery.”

Chapter 48. Montell Jones

After they watched the security camera videos twice, Hardwick asked, “Can we prove that Klemper had these in his possession at the time of the trial?”

“I’m not sure we can prove he ever had them. The electronics store owner might be talked into providing an affidavit, saying he turned the videos over, but he’s shadier than Klemper. And besides—”

Esti broke in. “But you asked Klemper for the recordings and he gave them to you.”

“I told him if I got the recordings, things might go better for him. And the next day they appeared in my mailbox. You and I know what that means. But legally, it’s a yard or two short of proving possession. In any event, who had the recordings or when they had them isn’t the important thing. What’s important is what’s on them.”

Hardwick looked ready to object, but Gurney pressed on. “The importance of the long-distance cemetery sequence is that it shows Carl being shot in the exact spot where everyone said he was shot—which essentially confirms the impossibility of the shot having come from the window that Klemper’s team claims it came from.”

Esti looked troubled. “This is like the fourth time I’ve heard you talk about the bullet thing—the contradiction in where it came from. What do you think is the answer?”

“Honestly, Esti? I’m going around in circles on that one. The physical and chemical evidence in the apartment where the murder weapon was found says that’s where the bullet must have been fired. The line of sight to the victim says it couldn’t have been.”

“This reminds me of the Montell Jones mess over in Schenectady. You remember that one, Jack? Five, six years ago?”

“Drug dealer? Big controversy over whether it was a righteous kill?”

“Right.” She turned to Gurney. “Young officer in a cruiser is making his rounds in a druggy neighborhood—bright, sunny day—when he gets a ‘shots fired’ call, location about two blocks from where he is. Ten seconds, he’s there, out of the car. People on the street point him to a broad alley between two warehouses, say that’s where they heard two shots a couple of minutes earlier. He’s first on the scene, should wait for backup, but he doesn’t. Instead, he pulls out his nine-millimeter, steps into the alley. Facing him, about fifty feet away, is Montell Jones, local bad guy, violent drug dealer, super-long rap sheet. The way the officer tells it, he sees that Montell’s got his own nine. In his hand. He raises it slowly in the officer’s direction. Officer shouts at him to drop it. The nine keeps coming up. Officer fires one round. Montell goes down. Other cruisers start arriving. Montell’s bleeding out through a hole in his stomach. Ambulance comes, takes him away, he’s pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. Everything seems totally righteous. Young officer is a hero for about twenty-four hours. Then everything goes to hell. Internal Affairs calls him in and gets his account of the shooting. He has no doubt about anything. All crystal-clear—facing Montell, sunny, perfect visibility, Montell’s nine rising toward him. Officer fires, Montell goes down. End of story. The IA interviewer asks him again. He goes through it again. And again. They have it all on tape. They have the whole thing transcribed, printed out, he signs it. Then they drop the bombshell. ‘We have a problem here. The ME says the stomach wound was an exit wound, not an entry wound.’ The officer is speechless, he can’t grasp what he just heard. He asks them what the hell they’re talking about. They tell him it’s simple. He shot Montell in the back. And now they’d like to know why.”

“Sounds like every cop’s worst nightmare,” said Gurney. “But at least this Montell guy had a loaded weapon, right?”

“He did. That much was okay. But the bullet in the back was a big problem.”

“Did the cop try to use the old ‘He turned away just as I pulled the trigger’ explanation?”

“No. He kept saying that the shooting went down exactly the way he described it. He even insisted that Montell absolutely did not turn away, that he was facing him straight on from start to finish.”

“Interesting,” said Gurney, a thoughtful light in his eyes. “What’s the punch line?”

“Montell had actually been shot in the back a couple of minutes earlier by an unknown assailant—hence the original report of shots fired to which the officer was responding. After being left to die in the alley, Montell managed to get back up on his feet—just in time for our hero to arrive. Montell was probably in a state of shock, didn’t know what the hell he was doing with his gun. Officer fires—misses Montell completely—and Montell collapses again.”

“How did IA finally put it all together?”

“A thorough second search of the area turned up a slug in the gutter outside the alley with a trace of Montell’s DNA on it—the gutter behind where the officer had been standing, meaning the original round had come from the opposite direction.”

“Lucky find,” said Gurney. “Could have turned out differently.”

“Don’t knock it,” said Esti. “Sometimes luck is all you got.”

Hardwick was drumming his fingertips on the table. “How does this alley thing relate to the Spalter shooting?”

“I don’t know. But for some reason it came to mind. So maybe it does relate somehow,” Esti said.

“How? You think Carl was shot from a different direction? Not from the apartment house?”

“I don’t know, Jack. The story happened to come to mind. I can’t explain it. What do you think, Dave?”

Gurney answered hesitatingly. “It’s an interesting example of two things occurring in a way that everyone assumes are connected but aren’t.”

“What two things?”

“The officer shooting at Montell, and Montell getting shot.”

Chapter 49. Positively Satanic

While they were finishing their second round of coffee, Gurney played the recording of his Skype conversation with Jonah Spalter.

When it ended, Hardwick was the first to react. “I don’t know who’s the bigger piece of shit—Mick the Dick or this asshole.”

Gurney smiled. “Paulette Purley, resident manager of Willow Rest, is convinced Jonah’s a saint, out to save the world.”

“All those saints out to save the world ought to be ground up for fertilizer. Bullshit is good for the soil.”

“Better for the soil than the soul, right, Jack?”

“You can say that again, brother.”

“He got fifty million dollars as a result of his brother’s death?” asked Esti. “Is that true?”

“He didn’t deny it,” said Gurney.

“Hell of a motive,” said Hardwick.

“In fact,” Gurney went on, “he didn’t seem interested in denying anything. Seemed comfortable admitting that he profited enormously from Carl’s death. No problem admitting that he hated the man. Happy to reel off all the reasons everyone should have hated him.”

Esti nodded. “Called him ‘monster,’ ‘sociopath,’ ‘megalomaniac’…”

“Also called him ‘positively satanic,’ ” added Hardwick. “As opposed to himself, who he’d like us to see as positively angelic.”

Esti continued. “He admitted he’d do anything for that Cathedral thing of his. Anything. Actually sounded like he was bragging.” She paused. “It’s strange. He admitted to all these motives for murder like it didn’t matter. Like he felt we couldn’t touch him.”

“Like a man with powerful connections,” added Hardwick.

“Except at the end,” said Gurney.

Esti frowned. “You mean the thing about his mother?”

“Unless he’s the world’s greatest actor, I believe he was truly disturbed at that point. But I’m not sure whether he was disturbed by the fact that she might have been murdered, or by the fact that we knew about it. I also find it peculiar that he was eager to know what evidence we had but never asked the more basic question: ‘Why would someone kill my mother?’ ”

Hardwick showed his teeth in a humorless grin. “Kinda gives you the impression that the warm and wonderful Jonah in reality might not give a fuck about anyone. Including his mother.”

Esti looked confused. “So where do we go from here?”

Hardwick’s chilly grin widened. He pointed at Gurney’s list of unresolved issues lying on the table next to the open laptop. “That’s easy. We follow the ace detective’s road map of clues and clever questions.”

They each took one of the copies Gurney had printed out. They read through the eight points silently.

The further down the list Esti read, the more worried her expression became. “This list is … depressing.”

Gurney asked what gave her that feeling.

“It makes it painfully clear that we don’t know much at this point. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes and no,” said Gurney. “It enumerates a lot of unanswered questions, but I’m convinced that discovering the answer to any one of them could make all the others fall into place.”

She offered a grudging nod but appeared unconvinced. “I hear what you’re saying, but … where do we start? If we could coordinate the efforts of the relevant agencies—BCI, FBI, OCTF, Interpol, Homeland Security, DMV, et cetera—and throw some major manpower against the case, tracking down this Panikos character might be feasible. But, as it is … what are we supposed to do? Panikos aside, we just don’t have the hands and feet and hours to look into all the other relationships and conflicts in the lives of Carl, Jonah, Kay, Alyssa—not to mention Angelidis and Gurikos and God knows who else.” She shook her head in a gesture of helplessness.

Her comments produced the longest silence of the meeting.

At first, Hardwick showed no reaction at all. He appeared to be comparing his thumbs, studying their relative size and shape.

Esti stared at him. “Jack, you have any feeling about this?”

He looked up and cleared his throat. “Sure. We have two separate situations. One is Kay’s appeal process, which Lex’s partner tells me is in great shape. The other is the effort to answer the ‘Who killed Carl?’ question, which is a trickier deal altogether. But yon crafty Sherlock has an optimistic look in his eye.”

Her anxious gaze moved to Gurney. “Optimism? You feel that?”

“Actually, yes, a bit.”

Even as he was saying this, he was struck by the rapid change in his attitude in the short time since he’d first put his list of issues together and reacted to it with frustration at the complexity of the project and lack of law enforcement resources he’d once taken for granted—exactly what Esti was just complaining about.

Neither the complexity nor the resource problem had gone away. But he’d finally realized that he didn’t need answers to an endless series of perplexing questions to unlock the solution.

Esti looked skeptical. “How can you be optimistic when there are so many things we don’t know?”

“We may not have a lot of answers yet, but … we do have a person.”

“We have a person? What person?”

“Peter Pan.”

“What do you mean, we have him?”

“I mean he’s here. In this area. Something about our investigation is keeping him here.”

“What’s this ‘something’?”

“I think he’s afraid that we’ll discover his secret.”

“The secret behind the nails in Fat Gus’s head?”

“Yes.”

Hardwick began tapping his fingers on the table. “What makes you think it’s Panikos’s secret and not the secret of whoever hired him?”

“Something Angelidis told me. He said Panikos only accepts pure hit contracts. No restrictions. No special instructions. You want somebody dead, you give him the money and chances are they end up dead. But he handles all the details his own way. So if a message was being sent with the nails in Fat Gus’s head, it was Panikos’s message—something that mattered to him.”

Hardwick produced his acid-reflux grimace. “Sounds like you’re putting a shitload of trust in what Angelidis told you—a mobster who lies, cheats, and steals for a living.”

“There’d be no advantage to him in lying about the way Panikos does business. And everything else we’ve learned about Panikos, especially from your friend at Interpol, supports what Angelidis said. Peter Pan operates by his own rules. Nobody gets to tell him what to do.”

“You’re suggesting the boy may be a bit of a control freak?”

Gurney smiled at the understatement. “No one ordered him to shoot out the lights in your house, Jack. He doesn’t take orders like that. I don’t believe anyone ordered him to burn down those houses in Cooperstown, or to walk away with Lex Bincher’s head in a tote bag.”

“You suddenly sound awful goddamn sure about this shit.”

“I’ve been thinking about it long enough. It’s about time I started to see at least one piece of it clearly.”

Esti threw up her hands in bafflement. “I’m sorry, maybe I’m being dense here, but what is it you see so clearly?”

“The open door that’s been right there in front of us all along.”

“What open door?”

“Peter Pan himself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s responding to our actions, to our investigation of Carl’s murder. A response equals a connection. A connection equals an open door.”

“Responding to our actions?” Esti appeared incredulous, almost angry. “You mean by shooting at Jack’s house? By killing Lex and his neighbors in Cooperstown?”

“He’s trying to stop what we’re doing.”

“So we investigate, and his response is to shoot and burn and kill. That’s what you’re calling an open door?”

“It proves he’s paying attention. It proves he’s still here. He hasn’t left the country. He hasn’t slipped back into his hole in the ground. It proves we can reach him. We just have to figure out how to reach him in a way that provokes a reaction we can work with.”

Esti’s eyes narrowed, her expression shifting from disbelief to speculation. “You mean, like, use the media—maybe that asshole Bork—to offer Panikos some kind of deal to reveal who hired him?”

“Bork could play a role, but not to offer that kind of deal. I think our little Peter Pan operates on a different wavelength.”

“What wavelength?”

“Well … just look at what we know about him.”

Esti shrugged. “We know he’s a professional killer.”

Gurney nodded. “What else?”

“He’s an expensive one, specializing in difficult contracts.”

“Impossible jobs that no one else will take—that’s the way Donny Angel put it. What else?”

“A psychopath, yes?”

Hardwick chimed in. “The psychopath from hell. With bad dreams. The way I see it, this wee fucker is one highly motivated murder machine—angry, crazy, bloodthirsty, and not about to change his ways any time soon. How about you, Sherlock? You got any other insights for us?”

Gurney swallowed the last mouthful of his lukewarm coffee. “I’ve just been trying to put all this together to see what it adds up to. His absolute insistence on doing everything his own way, his high intelligence combined with a total lack of empathy, his pathological rage, his killing skills, his appetite for mass murder—all that combined would seem to make little Peter the ultimate control freak from hell. Then there’s the final explosive element—the loose end, the secret, whatever it is that he’s desperate to conceal and afraid we may discover. Oh, and one more thing Angelidis told me—I almost forgot to mention it—little Peter likes to sing while he’s shooting people. Put all that together and it looks like a recipe for an interesting endgame.”

“Or a fucking world-class disaster,” said Hardwick.

“I guess that would be the downside.”

Chapter 50. Jabbing the Madman

“Is there an upside?” Hope and apprehension were vying with each other in Esti’s expression. Apprehension was winning.

“I think so.” Gurney’s tone was matter of fact. “My sense of Panikos is that his ultimate motivation is hatred, probably directed at every human being on earth. But his tactics, his planning—those aspects are steady and well thought out. His success in his profession depends on maintaining a delicate balance between his hot appetite for killing and his cold planning process. It’s evident in the behavior we’re seeing, and Donny Angel told me as much. On the outside Panikos is a reliable businessman who accepts difficult assignments with equanimity. And inside there’s a fierce little monster whose main pleasure—maybe only pleasure—is murder.”

Hardwick let out his harsh bark of a laugh. “The wee Peter could be quite the eye-opening experience for an ‘inner child’ therapist.”

Gurney uttered a small laugh, despite himself.

Esti turned to him. “So he’s part planner, part psycho. The motive is crazy, but the method is rational. Let’s say you’re right. Where does it take us?”

“Since that delicate balance between madness and logic seems to work well for him, we need to upset it.”

“How?”

“By attacking its most accessible weak point.”

“Which is?”

“The secret he’s trying to protect. That’s our way in. Our way into his thinking. And our way into understanding Carl’s murder, and who ordered it.”

“Be nice if we knew what the precious fucking secret was,” interjected Hardwick.

Gurney shrugged. “All we have to do is make him think we know, or that we’re about to find out. It’s a game we need to play—inside his head.”

“And the point of this game?” asked Esti.

“To disrupt the careful calculation he relies on for his success and survival. We need to hammer a wedge between the core lunatic and his rational support system.”

“You’re losing me.”

“We apply pressure in a way that threatens his sense of control. If control is his most intense obsession, it’s also his greatest weakness. Take away a control freak’s feeling of control, and the result is panic-driven decisions.”

“You hear what the man is saying?” interjected Hardwick. “He plans to poke a mass murderer in the eye with a sharp stick to see what might happen.”

It was a way of putting it that seemed to resonate with Esti’s growing anxiety. She turned to Gurney. “Suppose what happens after we apply this ‘pressure’ is that Panikos kills another six or seven people. What then? We apply more pressure? And if he slaughters another dozen victims at random? What then?”

“I’m not saying there’s no risk. But the alternative is to let him fade back into the shadows. Right now we’ve pulled him up close to the surface. Almost within reach. I want to keep him there, stir up his fear, make him do something stupid. As for his potential slaughter of innocent people, we can take the random factor out of his decision. We’ll feed him a specific target and use it to trap him.”

“Target?” Esti’s chocolate-brown eyes widened.

“We have to get him focused where we want him. It’s not enough to just ratchet up the threat level and push him over the edge. We have to be able to contain the response we provoke—keep it aimed in a manageable direction, within a manageable time frame.”

She looked unconvinced.

Gurney went on. “We set him up, generate the reaction we want, then reel him in—at a time and place of our choosing.”

“You say it so easily. But it’s very risky, no?”

“Yes—but not as risky as the alternative. Jack described Peter Pan as a murder machine. I agree. That’s what he does. Always has. Ever since he was a child. Always will, if he gets his way. He’s like a fatal disease that no one has figured out how to stop. I don’t see any risk-free options. We either let the murder machine keep running, keep converting people into corpses, or we do what we can to jam it up.”

“Or,” Esti offered hesitantly, “we could turn over everything we have to BCI right now and let them deal with it. They’ve got the resources. We don’t. And those resources could—”

“Fuck BCI!” growled Hardwick.

Esti emitted a small sigh and turned to Gurney. “Dave? What do you say?”

Gurney said nothing. His mind had been ambushed by too vivid a memory. A sickening thump. A red BMW speeding away from the scene … down a long city street … turning a corner with squealing tires … disappearing … forever. Except in his memory. The victim of the hit-and-run lying twisted in the gutter. The little four-year-old boy. His own Danny. And the pigeon Danny had followed, unthinking, into the street—the pigeon rising on a flurry of wings, alarmed but untouched, flying away.

Why hadn’t he commandeered a car right there on the street?

Why hadn’t he pursued the killer, right then and there, to the gates of hell?

Sometimes the memory triggered tears. Sometimes just an aching in his throat. And sometimes a terrible anger.

The anger was what he felt now.

“Dave?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think it might be time to hand the case over to BCI?”

“Hand it over? And stop doing what we’re doing?”

She nodded. “It’s really within their—”

He cut her off. “No. Not yet.”

“What do you mean, not yet?”

“I don’t think we should let Panikos escape. And if we stop, that’s what will happen.”

Whatever remaining desire she might have had to argue the point seemed to melt away. Perhaps it was the granite in Gurney’s voice. Or the determination in his eyes. The message was clear. He wasn’t about to hand anything over to anyone.

Not while the killer was still within reach.

Not while the red BMW was still within sight.

After they took a break to check and respond to texts and voice mail, Gurney put on a third pot of coffee and opened the double doors to let in the balmy August air. As usual, he was surprised by the fragrances of warm earth, grass, wildflowers. It was as if he were incapable of remembering what nature smelled like.

When they were all resettled at the big table, Esti’s gaze met Gurney’s. “You’re the one who seems sure about how we should proceed. You have some specific steps in mind?”

“First we need to decide on the content of our message to Panikos. Then the channel of communication, the identity of the target we want him to zero in on, timing, necessary preparation, and—”

“Slow down, please, one thing at a time. The content of the message? You mean telling him we know something about this secret he’s protecting?”

“Right. And that we’re about to reveal it at some specific time.”

“And the channel? You mean how we actually get this message to him?”

“You said it yourself this morning. Criminal Conflict. Brian Bork. I’d bet that Panikos saw Bork’s interview with Lex, and he probably also saw Bork’s interview with Jack after the Cooperstown fires.”

Esti made a face. “I know I mentioned Bork—but now when I think about it, I can’t imagine our psycho assassin sitting around watching TV.”

“He may have a search engine alert set for certain names—Spalter, Gurikos, Bincher—so if there’s a promotion for an upcoming news program or anything else related to the case in the media, he’d be aware of it.”

She responded with an uneasy little nod.

There was a glint of excitement in Hardwick’s eyes. “I have an open invite from Asshole Bork to provide updates on the case. So I can plant whatever message we want.”

Esti turned toward Gurney. “Which brings us to the part of what you said that I don’t like the sound of. ‘The target.’ What did you mean by that?”

Hardwick interrupted. “Simple, babe. He wants to sic the wee Peter on us.”

She blinked. “Dave? That’s what you meant?”

“Only if we’re confident that we can maintain control of the situation—and that he’d be falling into our trap, not us into his.”

Her expression was a picture of worry.

“But,” Gurney added quickly, “I’m not really making ‘us’ the target.”

She stared at him. “Who, then?”

He smiled. “Me.”

Hardwick shook his head. “It would make more sense for me to be the target. I was the one who appeared on Criminal Conflict. He’ll see me as enemy number one.”

“More like an enemy of the state police, if I recall your rant.”

Hardwick ignored the criticism and leaned forward, raising a forefinger to emphasize what he was about to say. “You know, there’s another angle here. I’ve been thinking about the shots that cut my power and phone lines. In addition to the possible warning—‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’—there might have been a second purpose. Something more practical.” He paused, making sure he had their full attention.

Gurney had a feeling he knew what was coming.

“That Bolo guy you talked to claimed that Panikos visited the Axton Avenue apartment building almost a week before he whacked Carl. The question is, Why? Well, one reason occurred to me. An obsessive-compulsive hit man might want to zero in his rifle scope ahead of time—at the actual location. What do you think?”

Gurney nodded admiringly. He liked being reassured from time to time that beneath Hardwick’s irritating shell there lurked a solid, insightful detective.

Esti frowned. “What’s that got to do with the shots at your house?”

“If he could put my power lines in the crosshairs of his infrared scope and cut them cleanly, he’d know he could put a bullet between my eyes at that same range any time I stepped onto my front porch.”

Esti looked like she was trying not to appear shaken. “On-site practice? Preparation? You think that was the purpose of those shots from the hill?”

It was clear from the speculative excitement in Hardwick’s eyes that that’s exactly what he thought.

Then Esti said something.

And Hardwick answered her.

Then she said something else.

And he responded to that as well.

But none of their words registered in Gurney’s consciousness—not a single syllable after Esti’s use of the phrase “those shots from the hill.”

Because his mind had made a leap from Hardwick’s property to his own. And all he could think about now was what one possible shot from Barrow Hill might have done.

Twenty minutes later, his freshly soiled garden shovel propped in the corner, Gurney stood at the utility sink in the mudroom. He was gazing down in tense concentration at the roughly washed carcass of the rooster he’d just unearthed from its stone-covered grave. On the muddy drain board next to the sink lay one of Madeleine’s silk scarves, now dirty and bloodstained, which she’d used to wrap Horace’s body.

Esti and Hardwick, having received no answers to their repeated questions, stood at the doorway, watching with growing concern. Gurney, holding his breath intermittently to avoid the rotten odor, bent over the dead bird, studying as closely as he could the damage that had ended its life. When he was satisfied that his informal postmortem had told him as much as it was going to, he straightened up and turned around, explaining.

“Madeleine had four chickens. One was a rooster. She named him Horace.” He felt a little stab of sadness at saying the name. “When she found him out on the grass the other day, she thought a weasel had gotten him and bitten his head off. Someone told us weasels will do that.” He felt his lips growing stiff with anger as he spoke. “She was right, in a way. It was a weasel with a sniper rifle.”

At first, Esti’s expression showed only bafflement. Then the significance of Gurney’s comment struck her. “Oh, dear Jesus!”

“Fuck!” said Hardwick.

“I don’t know whether this was about sighting-in his scope for future reference or just sending me a back-off message,” said Gurney. “But whichever it was, I’m apparently on the little bastard’s mind.”

Chapter 51. The Plan

The dead rooster, the apparent method of its execution, and the possible motives behind it had further darkened the mood of the meeting.

Even Hardwick seemed subdued, standing now at the open French doors, gazing across the western field at Barrow Hill. He glanced back at Gurney, who was at the table with Esti. “You figure the shot came from that spot you pointed out before, at the top of the trail?”

“That’d be my guess.”

“The position of things—house, hill, woods, trails—is kind of similar to the situation at my place. Only difference is that he hit my house at night, your rooster in the daylight.”

“Right.”

“Can you think of any reason for that?”

Gurney shrugged. “Only the obvious one. Night’s the most dramatic time to cut a power line. But if you want to shoot one of our chickens, you need to do it in the daytime. They’re locked up in the barn at night.”

As Hardwick appeared to be mulling this over, a silence fell—broken by Esti.

“So you guys are figuring Panikos has given you both the same warning—to get off the case because he’s got you in his sights?”

“Something like that,” said Gurney.

“Well, let me ask the big question. How long before he moves from shooting your chickens to …?” She let her voice trail off meaningfully.

“If he really wants us to back off, then our backing off might prevent any further action. If we don’t back off, then further action might come quickly.”

She took a couple of seconds to absorb this. “Okay. What do we do? Or not do?”

“We proceed.” Had Gurney been expressing his intention to refill the saltshaker, his tone could not have been more matter of fact. “We proceed by giving him a compelling reason to kill me. Plus an urgent deadline. We don’t have to pick a location—he’s already picked it.”

“You mean … here, at your house?”

“Yes.”

“How do you imagine he would …?”

“There are lots of possibilities. Best guess? He’ll try to set fire to the house, with me in it. Probably with a remotely detonated incendiary device, like the ones he used at Cooperstown. Then shoot me when I come out.”

She was getting wide-eyed again. “How do you know he’ll go after you first and not Jack? Or even me?”

“With the help of Brian Bork, we can point him in the right direction.”

As Gurney expected, Hardwick objected—reiterating his argument that he’d already established himself as a threat to Panikos, so it would be easy to set himself up as a credible target—but the argument now seemed to lack both foundation and conviction.

The rooster, it seemed, had tilted the game toward Gurney.

All that remained to be discussed were details, responsibilities, and logistics.

An hour later, with a mix of determination and misgiving, they’d agreed on a plan.

Esti, who’d been jotting down notes during the discussion, appeared the least comfortable at its conclusion. When Gurney asked about her concerns, she hesitated. “Maybe … you could just run through the thing one more time? If you wouldn’t mind?”

“Mind, hell,” growled Hardwick. “Sherlock loves this strategic shit.” He stood up from the table. “While you’re running through it one more time, I’ll be doing something useful, like making the necessary phone calls. We need to get Bork on board ASAP, and we need to make sure SSS has the stuff we need in stock.”

Scranton Surveillance Survival was a kind of technology and weaponry supermarket catering to a mixed clientele of security firms, survivalists, serious militia guys, and garden-variety gun lovers. Its “SSS” logo was composed of three rattlesnakes, fangs bared. The sales-clerks wore commando-style berets and fatigues. Gurney had visited the place once out of curiosity and gotten an uncomfortable feeling about it. It was, however, the most convenient source for the kind of electronic equipment they needed.

Hardwick had volunteered to make the trip. But first he wanted to make sure the stuff was in stock. He turned to Gurney. “Where do you get your strongest cell signal up here?”

After directing him out the side door to the far edge of the patio, Gurney returned to Esti, who was still sitting at the table, looking uneasy.

He sat across from her and recounted the plan they’d spent the previous hour putting together. “The objective is to give Panikos the impression that I’ll be appearing on the Monday evening segment of Criminal Conflict, where I’ll be revealing everything I’ve discovered about the Spalter murder, including the explosive secret Panikos has been trying to keep hidden. Jack is sure he can persuade Brian Bork and RAM-TV to run announcements promoting this revelation all day Sunday.”

“But what do you do Monday, when you’re supposed to appear on the show? What are you actually going to reveal?”

Gurney evaded the question. “If we’re lucky, the game will be over by then and we won’t have to deal with the actual show. The whole point is the promotion of our supposed revelation and the threat Panikos will feel—the deadline pressure he’ll feel to silence me before showtime on Monday.”

Esti did not look reassured. “What are these promotion ads actually going to say?”

“We’ll work out the wording later, but the key will be making Panikos believe that I know something big about the Spalter case that no one else knows.”

“Won’t he assume that you’d have shared whatever you discovered with Jack and me?”

“He probably would assume that.” Gurney smiled. “That’s why I’m thinking that you and Jack might need to be killed in an auto accident. Bork’ll love making that part of the promotion. Tragedy, controversy, drama—all magic words at RAM-TV.”

“Auto accident? What the hell are you talking about?”

“I just made it up. But I like it. And it definitely narrows Panikos’s target possibilities.”

She gave him a long skeptical look. “To me, that sounds way over the top. You’re sure the people at RAM-TV will go along with that kind of bullshit?”

“Like flies on that very substance. You’re forgetting that RAM-TV thrives on bullshit. Bullshit boosts ratings. Bullshit is their business.”

She nodded. “So all this is like a funnel. Everything is designed to channel Panikos toward one decision, one person, one location.”

“Exactly.”

“But it’s a pretty shaky funnel. And the container the funnel goes into—maybe it’s got holes in it?”

“What holes?”

“Let’s say your funnel works: Panikos hears the promotion ads on Sunday, believes the bullshit, believes you know his secret, believes Jack and I are out of the picture—auto accident or whatever—believes it would be a good idea to eliminate you, comes here to do it … when? Sunday night? Monday morning?”

“My bet would be on Sunday night.”

“Okay. Let’s say he comes after you Sunday night. Maybe sneaking through the woods on foot, maybe on an ATV. Maybe with firebombs, maybe with a gun, maybe both. You with me?”

Gurney nodded.

“And our defense against this is what? Cameras in the fields? Cameras in the woods? Transmitters sending images back here to the house? Jack with a Glock, me with a SIG, you with that little Beretta of yours? Am I getting this right?”

He nodded again.

“I haven’t left out anything?”

“Like what?”

“Like calling in the cavalry to save our asses! Have you and Jack forgotten what happened in Cooperstown? Three huge houses incinerated, seven people dead, one head missing. You have amnesia?”

“No need for the cavalry, babe,” interrupted Hardwick, coming back in from the patio, grinning. “Just a good positive attitude and the best infrared surveillance equipment on the market. I just got us a short-term rental contract on everything we need. Plus total cooperation from our buddies at RAM-TV. So Davey boy’s batshit plan to sucker the leopard into attacking the lamb might actually work.”

She was looking at him like he was crazy.

He turned to Gurney and went on, as though he’d been asked to elaborate. “Scranton Surveillance and Survival will have everything ready for pickup tomorrow afternoon at four.”

“Meaning you’ll be getting back here around the time it’s getting dark,” said Gurney. “Not a great time to be setting stuff up in the woods.”

“No matter. We’ll have early Sunday morning to deploy everything. And then get ourselves in position. Bork’s producer told me they’ll start running the promos during the Sunday-morning talk shows, then all day, right into the late-night news.”

“They’ll do it?” Esti’s tone was sour. “Just like that?”

“Just like that, babe.”

“They really don’t care that it’s all made-up nonsense?”

Hardwick’s grin became positively incandescent. “Not one goddamn bit. Why should they? Bork loves the feeling of crisis the whole thing generates.”

Esti nodded slightly—the gesture conveying more resignation than agreement.

“By the way, Davey,” said Hardwick, “I’d get that dead chicken out of the mudroom sink if I were you. Fucking thing really stinks.”

“Right. I’ll take care of that. But first—I’m glad you reminded me—we’ve got a little add-on for the RAM-TV announcements. An unfortunate auto accident.”

Chapter 52. Florence in Flames

After Hardwick and Esti were gone—after her agile little Mini and his rumbling GTO had turned past the barn and headed down the mountain road—Gurney sat gazing out at the pile of lumber and pondering the henhouse project it represented.

Then his mind proceeded from the henhouse to Horace. He forced himself out of his chair and through the side hallway to the mudroom.

Back in the house a little while later after reburying the rooster, Gurney found that whatever sense of organization and control he’d experienced during the meeting with Hardwick and Esti had evaporated, and he was taken aback by the improvisational sketchiness of what he had boldly been calling a “plan.” Now the whole caroming enterprise felt downright amateurish—driven more by anger, pride, and optimistic assumptions than by facts or real capabilities on the ground.

What they “knew” about Petros Panikos, after all, was little more than a hodgepodge of rumors and anecdotes from sources of widely varying credibility. The uncertain provenance of the data opened the door to an unsettling range of possibilities.

What, he asked himself, was he sure of?

In truth, very little. Very little beyond the implacable nature of the enemy—his proven willingness to do anything to achieve a goal or make a point. If evil was, as one of Gurney’s philosophy professors had once insisted, “intellect in the service of appetite, unrestrained by empathy,” then Peter Pan was evil incarnate.

What else was he sure of?

Well, there could be no doubt about the risk to Esti’s career. She’d put everything at stake to join the crew of what was feeling increasingly like a runaway train.

And there was at least one other undeniable fact. He was again putting himself in the crosshairs of a killer. He was tempted to believe that this occasion was different—that the circumstances demanded it, that their precautions permitted it—but he knew he wouldn’t be able to convince anyone else of that. Certainly not Madeleine. Certainly not Malcolm Claret.

There is nothing in life that matters but love.

That’s what Claret had said as Gurney was leaving his little sun porch office.

As he reflected on the statement now, he realized two things. It was absolutely true. And it was absolutely impossible to keep it in the forefront of his mind. The contradiction struck him as yet another nasty trick played on human beings by human nature.

He was saved from sliding further into a pit of pointless speculation and depression by the ringing of the landline in the den.

The ID screen announced it was Hardwick.

“Yes, Jack?”

“Ten minutes after leaving your house I got a call from my Interpol guy, probably the last one we’re going to get, from the tone of his voice. I’ve been pushing him pretty hard for every damn detail he could find in their old files on the Panikos family. Made a real pain in the ass of myself—which isn’t my true nature—but you wanted more information, and I live to be of service to my betters.”

“A very positive quality. And you found out what?”

“Remember the fire that destroyed the family gift shop in the village of Lykonos? Burned everyone to death, except the adopted firebug? Well, turns out it wasn’t just a gift shop. It had a little annex, a second business, run by the mother.” He paused. “Need I say more?”

“Let me guess. The annex was a flower shop. And the mother’s name was Florence.”

“Florencia, to be precise.”

“She died with the rest of the family, right?”

“Up in flames, one and all. And now little Peter likes riding around in a van with a sign that says FLOWERS BY FLORENCE. Any ideas about that, ace? You figure he just likes thinking about his mom while he’s killing people?”

Gurney didn’t answer right away. For the second time that day, someone’s use of a short phrase—earlier it was Esti’s comment on “those shots from the hill”—sent him off on a mental tangent. This time it was Hardwick’s “up in flames.”

The words brought to mind an old case involving a flaming auto wreck. It was one of the instructive examples he’d used in an academy seminar called “The Investigative Mind-set.” The odd thing was that this was the third time in as many days that something had brought that case to mind. In this instance, hearing “up in flames” seemed a simple enough trigger, but nothing so obvious had occurred on the two previous occasions.

Gurney considered himself as far from superstitious as a man could be, but when something like that—a specific case—kept intruding into his consciousness, he’d learned not to ignore it. The question was, what was he supposed to make of it?

“Hey, you still there, ace?”

“I’m here. Just got caught up thinking about something you said.”

“You thinking like me that our little maniac might have some mommy problems?”

“A lot of serial killers do.”

“That’s a fact. Maternal magic. Anyway, that’s it for now. Just thought you’d want to know about Florencia.”

Hardwick broke the connection, which was fine with Gurney, whose mind had been taken over by the flaming auto wreck case. He recalled that the previous event triggering the same memory had been Esti’s story about the shooting in the alley. Was there some similarity between the incidents? Was it possible that they both related in some way to the Spalter case? He couldn’t see any connection at all. But maybe Esti could.

He called her cell number, got her voice mail, and left a brief message.

Three minutes later, she called him back. “Hi. Something wrong?” Her voice still carried some of the anxiety she’d expressed at their morning meeting.

“Nothing wrong. I may be just wasting your time. But my mind seems to be making some kind of connection between two cases—your alley case and an old NYPD case—and maybe between them and the Spalter case.”

“What kind of connection?”

“I don’t know. Maybe if I told you the NYPD story you’d see something I’m missing.”

“Sure. Why not? I don’t know if I can help, but go ahead.”

Half apologetically, he told her the story.

“The accident scene at first seemed easy enough to explain. A middle-aged man on his way home from work one night was driving down a hill. At the bottom of the hill, the road made a turn. His car, however, proceeded straight ahead through the guardrail, coming to rest nose-down in a ravine. The gas tank exploded. There was an intense fire, but enough remained of the driver to perform an autopsy and conclude that he had suffered a massive coronary. This was listed as the precipitating cause of his loss of control and the subsequent fatal accident. That would have been the end of the story, if it weren’t for the fact that the investigating officer had an uncomfortable feeling about it that wouldn’t go away. He went to the location where the vehicle had been towed, and went over it one more time. That’s when he noticed that the areas of the most severe impact and fire damage inside the car didn’t quite coincide with those outside. At that point, he ordered a complete forensic workup on the vehicle.”

“Wait a second,” said Esti. “The inside and outside didn’t coincide?”

“He noticed that there was heat and concussive damage inside the passenger compartment that didn’t seem to line up directly with similar points of damage to the exterior. The explanation, discovered by the forensic lab, was that there’d been two explosions. Before the gas tank blew up, there was a smaller explosion inside the vehicle—under the driver’s seat. It was that first explosion that resulted in the driver’s loss of control, as well as his coronary. Further chemical tests revealed that both the initial blast and the gas tank blast had been remotely detonated.”

“From where?”

“Possibly from a vehicle following the target vehicle.”

“Hmm. Interesting. But what point are you making?”

“I don’t know. Maybe none. But the case keeps coming to mind. It came to mind immediately when you told your story about the shooting in the alley. I know a psychologist who talks about something called pattern resonance—how things remind us of other things because they share a structural similarity. And this can occur without our conscious knowledge of what the similarity is.”

Beyond a barely audible “Hmm,” she didn’t respond.

He felt uneasy, even a bit embarrassed. He didn’t mind sharing his ideas, concerns, hypotheses. He was a lot less comfortable sharing his confusion, his failure to grasp some connection he hoped might be present.

When she finally did speak, her voice was tentative. “I guess I can see what you’re saying. Let me sleep on it, okay?”

Chapter 53. A Terrible Calm

The feeling that he’d dumped his quandary unfairly in Esti’s lap was still with him that evening. Finding significant patterns in situations and relating one to another was supposedly his strength.

The sun had set, and colors were fading from the hills and fields around the house. It was past dinnertime, but he had no appetite. He made himself a cup of coffee and drank it black, his only concession to his need for nourishment being the addition of an extra spoonful of sugar.

Perhaps he’d been staring too hard, too directly, at the problem. Perhaps it was another example of the dim-star phenomenon, which he’d discovered one night lying in a hammock gazing up at the sky. There are some stars so distant that their faint pinpricks of light will not register at the center of the retina, which by some slight measure is less sensitive than the rest of the retinal surface. The only way to see one of these stars is to look several degrees to one side of it or the other. To direct scrutiny the star is invisible. But look away, and there it is.

A frustrating puzzle was often like that. Let go of it for a bit and the answer might suddenly appear. A name or a word one was struggling to remember might surface only when the struggle had been abandoned. He knew all this, but his tenacity—Madeleine called it stubbornness—made it difficult for him to put anything aside.

Sometimes the decision was made for him by simple exhaustion. Or by an external intervention, like getting a phone call—which is what happened now.

The call was from Kyle.

“Hey, Dad, how’s everything?”

“Fine. Are you still up in Syracuse?”

“Yeah, still here. In fact, I think I’m going to stay over. There’s a giant art show at the university this weekend and Kim has some stuff in it, some art videos. So I figured I’d stay up here, like maybe through lunch, then … then I’m not sure what. Originally, on my trip up to see you, I’d been thinking of going to the fair, but now … with your situation …”

“There’s no reason for you not to go to the fair. I was only concerned about your being right here at the house—and even that concern is probably way out of proportion to the chance of any real problem. If you want to go to the fair, go.”

Kyle sighed—a sound of uncertainty.

“Really. Go. There’s no reason not to.”

There was another sigh, followed by a pause. “Saturday night is the big night, right? With all the main events?”

“Far as I know.”

“Well, maybe I’ll drop by for a quick look on my way back to the city. Maybe for the demolition derby. I’ll check in with you again when I figure out what I’m doing.”

“Great. And don’t worry about anything here. Everything’ll be fine.”

“Okay, Dad. Just be careful.”

Although the call had lasted less than two minutes, it rearranged Gurney’s thoughts for the next half hour—overlaying his murder case concerns with paternal worries.

Telling himself finally that Kyle’s possible involvement with Kim Corazon was none of his business, he tried to steer his mind back to the conundrums surrounding the Spalter case and Peter Pan.

This time, rather than the phone, it was exhaustion that intervened—the kind of exhaustion that made linear thought impossible.

It was then, sitting by the still open double doors, watching the dusk darken into night, that he heard that familiar eerie sound in the woods—that quavering wail—followed by a profound silence that was stranger than the sound itself. To his deeply weary state of mind, it was the silence of emptiness and isolation.

The silence was interrupted by a low, directionless rumble that seemed to come from the earth itself. Or was it from the sky? Surely it must be thunder from some miles distant, echoed and muffled by the surrounding hills and valleys. When it faded away like the growl of an old dog, it left behind a disquieting stillness, a terrible calm that by some errant-crosscurrent in the brain brought to mind a childhood memory of the desolate no-man’s-land between his parents.

It was that disconcerting twist in his stream of consciousness that finally convinced him of his dire need for sleep and sent him to bed—but not before locking the doors and windows, cleaning and loading his .32 Beretta, and placing the reliable little pistol within easy reach on the night table.