Peter Pan Must Die

Prologue. The Growling of the Tiger

The blackbirds are shrieking.

He looks up from the cell phone into which he has been entering the special list of numbers. He knows that the shrieking of the blackbirds is a territorial defense, a red alert to their kind, a call to arms against the trespasser.

None of his own electronic alarms are flashing, however, meaning that there is no human encroachment. But he peers out anyway through each of the four small windows in the sides of the little cinder-block building, scanning the hummocky beaver pond and boggy woods.

There are crows perching in the tops of three dead, root-drowned trees. The crows, he concludes, are the interlopers who have upset the blackbirds, provoking their high-pitched screeches. He finds the protection they afford comforting. Like the creaking treads on a staircase might alert him to an intruder.

Or like the dismal little structure itself, in the midst of a hundred acres of low-lying forest and swamp, is comforting. Nearly inaccessible, uninviting in the extreme, it is his ideal home away from home. He has many homes away from home. Places to stay while he conducts his business. Fulfills his contracts. This particular place, with no visible trail in from the public road, has always felt more secure than most.

Fat Gus had represented another kind of trail. A trail of sensitive information. Information that could be ruinous. But that had been eradicated at its source. Which made this business with Bincher and Hardwick and Gurney so incomprehensible. So infuriating.

At the thought of Bincher, his gaze drifts to a shadowy corner of the garage-like room. To a blue and white plastic picnic cooler. He smiles. But the smile quickly fades.

The smile fades because the nightmare keeps returning to his mind, more vividly than ever. The nightmare’s images are with him almost continually now—ever since he caught sight of that Ferris wheel at the fairgrounds.

The Ferris wheel has insinuated itself into his nightmare—enmeshed with the merry-go-round music, the terrible laughter. The hideous, stinking, wheezing clown. The low, vibrating growl of the tiger.

And now Hardwick and Gurney.

Swirling around him, closing in.

The spiral tightening, the final confrontation inevitable.

It would be a great risk, but there could be a great reward. A great relief.

The nightmare might at last be extinguished.

He goes to the darkest corner of the room, to a small table. On the table are a large candle and a pack of matches. He picks up the matches and lights the candle.

He lifts the candle and gazes at the flame. He loves its shape, its purity, its power.

He imagines the confrontation—the conflagration.

His smile returns. He goes back to his cell phone—goes back to entering the special numbers.

The blackbirds are shrieking. The crows are perching uneasily on the dead black treetops.

Chapter 54. Cornered

Gurney put no stock in dreams. If he did, that night’s marathon could have occupied a week of nonstop analysis. But he held a solidly pragmatic view—and generally low opinion—of these outlandish processions of images and events.

He’d long believed they were nothing more than by-products of the nightly filing and indexing process the brain employs in the movement of recorded experience from short-term to long-term memory. Bits of visual and aural data are stirred up and mashed together, narrative strings are triggered, vignettes are constructed—but with no more meaning than a suitcase of old photos, love letters, or term papers shredded and reassembled by a monkey.

The one practical effect of a night of discomfiting dreams was a lingering need for more sleep—which resulted in Gurney’s rising an hour later than usual, with a mild headache. When he was finally taking his first sip of coffee, the sun, rendered pallid by a thin overcast, had already risen well above the eastern ridge. The sense he’d had the night before of an unsettling quietness after the eerie sound in the woods was still with him.

He felt cornered. Cornered by his unwillingness to drop out of the game in time. Cornered by his appetite for control, coherence, completion. Cornered by his own “plan” to break the case open by provoking the shooter into taking a foolish and fatal risk. Pulled forward and backward by alternating currents that seemed one minute to lead to success and the next to defeat, Gurney decided to seek the comfort that came with taking action.

Hardwick would be returning that evening from Scranton Surveillance Survival with the video cameras they needed, and they would have the following morning, Sunday, to install the units in a way to ensure that anyone approaching within half a mile of Gurney’s house would be detected. Strategic placement was a crucial factor, and pre-selection of the sites would save precious time Sunday morning.

He went to the mudroom and pulled on a pair of knee-high rubber boots—protection against thistles, brambles, and wild raspberry thorns. Noticing a remnant of odor from the rooster carcass, he opened the mudroom window to let in fresh air, then went out to the pile of henhouse construction materials, from which he borrowed a metal tape measure, a ball of yellow cord, and a jackknife. With these items in hand he set off for the woods on the far side of the pond to begin identifying and marking key video locations.

The goal was to select the spots from which an array of motion-activated cameras and wireless transmitters could provide full coverage of the woods and fields around his home. According to Hardwick, each camera would generate its own GPS coordinates, displaying this information along with its video on a receiving monitor inside the house, so the location of Peter Pan—or any intruder—would be known immediately.

Contemplating the technical capability of the equipment, Gurney experienced if not quite optimism at least some relief from the fear that the plan was too flimsy to succeed. The logical process of measuring angles and distances also had a positive effect. With a fair degree of discipline and determination, he completed his site-selection project in a little more than four hours.

He’d arranged his progress around his fifty-acre property and the relevant sections of his neighbors’ properties so that he would complete his circuit at the top of Barrow Hill. He was convinced that this was the spot Panikos would choose. Therefore, this was the place, with its various trails and access points, that he wanted to commit most carefully to memory.

When he finally made his way back to the house, it was mid-afternoon and the morning overcast had thickened into a featureless gray sky. There was no movement in the air, but there was no peace in this stillness. As he stopped in the mudroom to remove his boots, the sight of the sink brought to mind the question of how and when to let Madeleine know about the cause of the rooster’s death. Whether to tell her was not the issue. She had an innate preference for candor over evasion, and significant omissions could have a high price. After considering the when and how options, he decided to tell her as soon as possible and in person.

The half-hour drive to the Winkler mini-farm was filled with a low-level foreboding. Although the need to reveal the truth was clear, that reality did not change how he felt.

A quarter mile from his destination, it occurred to him that he should have called ahead. What if they were all at the fairgrounds? Or what if the Winklers were at the house and Madeleine was at the fairgrounds? But as soon as he pulled into their driveway he saw Madeleine. She was standing in a fenced pen, gazing down at a small goat.

He parked next to the house. As he approached the pen, she showed no surprise at his arrival—just gave him a brief smile and a longer assessing gaze.

“Communing with the goat?” he asked.

“They’re supposedly quite intelligent.”

“I’ve heard that rumor.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“You mean, what am I doing here?”

“No, I mean, you look like you have something on your mind. I’m wondering what it is.”

He sighed, tried to relax. “The Spalter case.”

She was petting the goat’s head gently. “Anything in particular about it?”

“Couple of things.” He chose to speak about what seemed a less fraught issue first. “The case keeps bringing to mind an old auto crash investigation.”

“Is there a connection?”

“I don’t know.” He made a face. “Jesus.”

“What’s the matter?”

“This place stinks of manure.”

She nodded. “I kind of like it.”

“You like it?”

“It’s a natural farm smell. Nothing wrong with it.”

“Jesus.”

“So what about this auto crash?”

“Do we have to stand here with the goat?”

She looked around, then gestured in the direction of a weathered picnic table in a grassy area behind the house. “Over there?”

“Fine.”

She gave the goat a few more little strokes on the head, then left the pen, secured the gate, and led the way to the table.

They sat across from each other, and he told her the story of the explosive crash—the initial mistaken impression of what had happened and the subsequent discoveries—just as he had related it all to Esti.

When he’d come to the end, Madeleine gave him a quizzical look. “So?”

“It just keeps coming to mind, and I don’t know why. Any ideas?”

“Ideas?”

“Does anything about the case strike you as especially significant?”

“No, not really. Nothing beyond the obvious.”

“The obvious being …?”

“The sequence.”

“What about it?”

“The assumption that the heart attack came before the crash and the crash came before the explosion, instead of the explosion coming first and causing everything else. It was a reasonable assumption, though. Middle-aged man has heart attack, loses control, drives off the road, car crashes and the gas tank explodes. Makes total sense.”

“Total sense, yes, except that it was all wrong. That was the point I’d make when I talked about the case in one of my academy seminars—that something can make perfect sense and be perfectly wrong. Our brains are so fond of coherence that they confuse ‘making sense’ with the truth.”

She cocked her head curiously. “If you know all this, why are you asking me about it?”

“Just in case you saw something that I was missing.”

“You drove all the way over here to ask me about that story?”

“Not just that.” He hesitated, then forced out the words. “I discovered something about the rooster.”

She blinked. “Horace?”

“I discovered what killed him.”

She sat motionless, waiting.

“It wasn’t another animal.” He hesitated again. “Someone shot him.”

Her eyes widened. “Someone …?”

“I don’t know for sure who it was.”

“David, don’t …” There was an edge of warning in her voice.

“I don’t know for sure who it was, but it’s possible that it was Panikos.”

The rhythm of her breathing changed and her face filled slowly with a barely contained fury. “The crazy assassin you’re after? He … killed Horace?”

“I don’t know that for sure. I said it’s possible.”

“Possible.” She repeated the word as though it were a sound without a meaning. Her eyes were fixed intently on his. “Why did you come here and tell me this?”

“I thought it was the right thing to do.”

“That’s the only reason?”

“What else?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t what you’re getting at. I just thought I should tell you.”

“How did you find out?”

“That he was shot? By examining the body.”

“You dug him up?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because … because something came up in our discussion yesterday that gave me the idea that it could have been a gunshot that killed him.”

“Yesterday?”

“In my meeting with Hardwick and Esti.”

“So you thought I needed to know today? But I didn’t need to know yesterday?”

“I told you as soon as it was clear to me that I should tell you. Maybe I should have told you yesterday. What’s your point?”

“It’s your point I’m wondering about.”

“I don’t get it.”

Her mouth formed a small ironic smile. “What’s next on your agenda?”

“My agenda?” It began to dawn on him what she was getting at—and that, as usual, with relatively little evidence, she had moved quickly to the finish line. “We need to capture Panikos before he slips back into whatever dark hole he inhabits between jobs.”

She nodded, communicating nothing.

“As long as he believes we can damage him, he’ll hang around and … try to stop us. His attempt to do that will make him vulnerable to capture.”

“Vulnerable to capture.” She articulated the phrase slowly, musingly—as though it summed up all the misleading jargon in the world. “And you want me to stay here, so you can risk your life without worrying about me?”

She didn’t really seem to be asking a question, so he offered no response.

“You’ll be the bait in the game once again. Right?”

That wasn’t really a question either.

A long silence fell between them. The overcast sky was heavy now, slatey and dusklike. A phone began ringing inside the house, but Madeleine made no move to answer it. It rang seven times.

“I asked Dennis about that bird,” she said.

“What bird?”

“The strange one we sometimes hear at dusk. Dennis and Deirdre have heard it too. He checked it out with the Mountain Wildlife Council. They told him it’s a rare type of mourning dove that’s found only in upstate New York and parts of New England, and only above certain elevations in the mountains. The local Native Americans considered it sacred. They called it ‘Spirit Who Speaks for the Dead.’ The shaman would interpret its cries. Sometimes they were accusations, sometimes they were messages of forgiveness.”

Gurney wondered about the chain of associations that led Madeleine to her mourning dove story. Sometimes when it would seem to him that she’d changed the subject, he’d discover that she hadn’t changed it at all.

Chapter 55. Ring Around the Rosies

On his drive home from the Winkler farm Gurney felt alternately free and trapped.

Free to proceed according to his plan. And trapped by its limitations, by the rickety assumptions on which it rested, and by his own compulsion to press forward. He suspected that Malcolm Claret and Madeleine were right—that there was something pathological in his appetite for risk. But self-knowledge is not a therapeutic panacea. Knowing who you are doesn’t automatically convey the power to change who you are.

The fact that mattered most to him at the moment was that Madeleine intended to stay at the Winklers’ at least through Tuesday, the final day of the fair, safely out of the way. It was still only Saturday. The promotion ads for his Monday-night Criminal Conflict tell-all revelations would start running the next morning on the Sunday talk shows. The ads would be touting not only the revelation of the shooter’s identity in the Spalter case but also the disclosure of the sensitive secret that the shooter was trying to protect. If Panikos wanted to keep that from happening, he had a very narrow window of opportunity—from Sunday morning to Monday evening—to make his move. And Gurney intended to be ready for him.

Driving up the darkening road to his property, he tried to hang on to a reasonable sense of confidence. But Madeleine’s enigmatic story about that damn spirit-bird kept undermining whatever pragmatic thoughts he was able to muster.

As he passed the barn and the house came into view, he noticed that the light over the side door was on, as well as the light in the mudroom. He felt a quick stab of fight-or-flight adrenaline—which subsided into an uneasy curiosity when he saw a glint of light reflecting off the chrome of Kyle’s BSA. He continued up through the pasture and parked next to the motorcycle.

Inside the house, he heard the shower running upstairs. When he found the hall light on and all the kitchen lights, too, his uneasiness was replaced by a little surge of déjà vu—perhaps arising from memories of how when Kyle was a young teenager living with his mother and visiting Gurney on weekends, he’d seemed incapable of remembering to turn off the lights when he left a room.

He went into the den to check for messages on the landline and on his cell, which he’d neglected to bring with him on his trip to see Madeleine. There was nothing on the landline. There were three messages on his cell. The first was from Esti, but the transmission was too broken up to understand anything.

The second was from Hardwick, who, through a profusion of obscenities, managed to convey that he was stuck on I-81 in a mammoth traffic jam due to roadwork in progress, “except there isn’t any fucking work actually in progress, just miles of fucking orange cones blocking two of the three fucking lanes”—so he wouldn’t be delivering the camera equipment from SSS to Walnut Crossing until “bloody fucking midnight. Or bloody fucking whenever.”

The logistics delay was an inconvenience for Hardwick but not really a problem, since they hadn’t planned to set out the cameras until the following morning anyway. Gurney listened to the third message, another from Esti, broken up and finally fading away altogether, as though her battery was dying.

He was about to call her back when he heard a sound in the hallway. Kyle appeared at the den doorway in jeans and a T-shirt, his hair wet from the shower.

“Hey, Dad, what’s up?”

“I was out for a while. Went to see Madeleine. I was surprised to see your bike outside. I didn’t expect you back here at the house. Did I miss a message?”

“No, sorry about that. My plan was to go straight to the fair. Then, when I was passing through the village, I got the idea to stop for a quick shower and change my clothes. Hope you don’t mind.”

“It was just … unexpected. I’m more focused than usual on anything out of the ordinary.”

“Hey, speaking of that, is your neighbor down the road some kind of hunter or something?”

“Hunter?”

“When I was coming up the road, there was a guy down in the pines by the next house, maybe half a mile down from your barn—with a rifle, I think?”

“When was this?”

“Maybe half an hour ago?” Kyle’s eyes widened as he spoke. “Shit, you don’t think …”

“How big a guy?”

“How big? I don’t know … maybe bigger than average. I mean, he was way back from the road, so I’m not sure. And he was definitely down on your neighbor’s property, not yours.”

“With a rifle?”

“Or maybe a shotgun. I only saw it for a second, as I was riding by.”

“You didn’t notice anything special about the gun? Anything unusual about the barrel?”

“Jesus, Dad, I don’t know. I should have paid more attention. I guess I figured everyone up here in the country is some kind of hunter.” He paused, looking increasingly like he was in pain. “You don’t think it was your neighbor?”

Gurney pointed to the light switch by the doorway. “Turn that off for a second.”

With the light off, Gurney lowered the blinds on both of the den windows. “Okay, you can switch it back on.”

“Jesus. What’s going on?”

“Just another precaution.”

“Against what?”

“Probably nothing tonight. Don’t worry about it.”

“So, who … who was that guy in the woods?”

“Most likely my neighbor, like you said.”

“But this isn’t hunting season, is it?”

“No, but if someone is having coyote problems, or woodchuck problems, or possum problems, or porcupine problems, the season doesn’t matter.”

“A second ago you said there probably would be nothing to worry about tonight. When are you thinking there will be something to worry about?”

Gurney hadn’t intended to do this, but explaining the whole situation seemed now to be the only honest approach. “It’s a complicated story. Have a seat.”

They sat together on the den couch and Gurney spent the next twenty minutes filling Kyle in on the parts of the Spalter case background he wasn’t yet aware of, the current status of things, and the plan being launched the following day.

As he listened, Kyle’s expression grew confused. “Wait a second. What do you mean when you say that RAM-TV is going to run these program announcements starting tomorrow morning?”

“Just that. Starting with the Sunday-morning talk shows, and running through the day.”

“You mean the announcements saying that you’re going to be making big revelations about the case and about the shooter?”

“Right.”

“They’re supposed to run tomorrow?”

“Yes. Why are you—”

“You don’t know? You don’t know that those announcements started running yesterday afternoon? And that they’ve been running all day today?”

“What?”

“The announcements you’re describing—they’ve been on RAM-TV for at least the past twenty-four hours.”

“How do you know this?”

“Kim has her friggin’ TV on all the time. Jeez, I didn’t realize … I’m sorry … I didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to be happening. I should’ve called you.”

“There’s no way you could have known.” Gurney felt sick, absorbing the shock, thinking his way through the implications.

Then he called Hardwick and told him what he’d just learned.

Hardwick, still stuck in his traffic jam, made a sound between gagging and growling. “Yesterday? They started running the fucking thing yesterday?”

“Yesterday, and last night, and all day today.”

“That fucking Bork! That scum-sucking fuck! That rotten piece of shit! I’ll tear that putrid little fucker’s head off and shove it up his ass!”

“Sounds good to me, Jack, but we need to deal with a few practical issues first.”

“I told that little Bork bastard that the timing of the plan was crucial—that people’s lives were at stake—that the timing was a fucking life-or-death issue! I made that perfectly clear to that shit-eating slimebag!”

“Glad to hear it. But right now we need to make some adjustments in the plan.”

“First thing you need to do is adjust yourself the fuck out of there. Go! Like, now!”

“I agree the situation requires urgent action. But before we jump overboard—”

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE! Or at least do what Esti wanted to do from the start—call in the fucking cavalry!”

“It sounds to me like we’re about to do what we want Panikos to do—panic and make a mistake.”

“Look, I admire all this cool-under-pressure shit, but it’s time to admit that the plan is fucked, toss in the cards, and leave the table.”

“Where are you?”

“What?”

“Where are you, exactly?”

“Where am I? I’m still in Pennsylvania, maybe thirty miles from Hancock. What the hell difference does it make where I am?”

“I don’t know yet. I just want to give this whole thing a little more thought before I go screaming down the hill.”

“Davey, for Christ’s sake, either go down that goddamn hill now, or call in the fucking troops.”

“I appreciate the concern, Jack. I really do. Do me a favor and let Esti know about our new situation. I’ll get back to you in a little while.” Gurney ended the call over a final shouted objection. Thirty seconds later, his phone rang, but he let it go into voice mail.

Kyle was staring at him, wide-eyed. “That was that Hardwick guy on the phone, right?”

“Yes.”

“He was shouting so loud at you, I could hear everything he said.”

Gurney nodded. “He was a little disturbed.”

“You’re not?”

“Of course I am. But going nuts over it is a waste of time. Like most situations in life, there’s only one question that matters: What do we do now?”

Kyle watched him, waiting for him to go on.

“I guess one thing we could do now is turn off as many inside lights as we can, and lower the blinds in any room where we want to keep a light on. I’ll check the bathrooms and bedrooms. You turn off the kitchen and mudroom lights.”

Kyle went out through the kitchen to the mudroom, while Gurney headed for the staircase. Before he got to it, Kyle called to him.

“Hey, Dad, come here a minute.”

“What is it?”

“Come here, look at this.”

Gurney found Kyle in the hallway by the side door, pointing through the glass at something outside.

“You have a flat tire. Did you know that?”

Gurney looked out. Even in the dim light cast by the forty-watt bulb over the door, there was no doubt that the front tire on the driver’s side was dead flat. And there was no doubt in his mind that the tire had been perfectly okay when he drove up to the house half an hour earlier.

“You have a jack and a spare in the trunk?” Kyle asked.

“Yes, but we’re not going to use them.”

“Why not?”

“Why do you think the tire is flat?”

“Because you ran over a nail?”

“That’s possible. Another possibility is that it was punctured by a bullet while it was parked there. And if that’s the case, the question is why?”

Kyle’s eyes widened again. “To keep us from driving away?”

“Maybe. But if I were a sniper and my goal was to keep someone from driving away, I’d shoot out as many tires as I could—not just one.”

“Then why …?”

“Maybe because one flat can be dealt with—with a jack and a spare, like you said.”

“So …?”

“A jack, a spare, and one of us kneeling out there for five or ten minutes to do the job.”

“You mean, like a sitting duck?”

“Yes. Speaking of which, let’s kill the mudroom light and get away from the door.”

Kyle swallowed. “Because that weird little hit man you just told me about might be out there … waiting?”

“It’s possible.”

“The guy I saw with the rifle down in the pine woods—he wasn’t that small. Maybe it was your neighbor after all?”

“I’m not sure. What I do know is that a very provocative message has been running on TV, a message designed to get Peter Pan to come after me. I have to assume that it might have worked. It would also be smart to assume—”

He was interrupted by his cell phone ringing in the den.

It was Esti. She sounded stressed. “Where are you?”

He told her.

“Why are you still there? You better get the hell out before something happens.”

“You sound like Jack.”

“I sound like Jack because he’s right. You have to get out now. I called you twice today after I found out about the screwup on TV. I called to tell you to get out.”

“It might be a little late for that now.”

“Why?”

“Someone may have put a bullet in my front tire.”

“Oh, shit. This is true? If this is true, you got to bring in some help. Right now. You want me to come, I can be there in maybe forty-five minutes.”

“That’s not a good idea.”

“Okay, then call 911.”

“Like I said, you sound like Jack.”

“Who the hell cares what I sound like? The point is, you need help now.”

“I need to think it through.”

“Think? That’s what you’re going to do? Think? While somebody’s shooting at you?”

“At my tire.”

“David, you are a crazy person. Do you know that? Crazy! The man is shooting, and you’re thinking.”

“I have to go, Esti. I’ll call you back in a little while.” He ended the call the same way as he had with Hardwick—breaking the connection in the middle of a cry of protest.

That’s when he remembered the message that had come in right after he’d broken off his conversation with Hardwick. He’d assumed it was the man trying to finish what he had to say, but now, as he checked, he saw that the call’s origin wasn’t Hardwick’s phone but an unknown number.

He played the message back.

As he listened to it, a chill crept up his back, raising the hairs on his neck.

A falsetto voice, shrill and metallic, a voice not quite human, was singing the most bizarre and least-understood of all children’s nursery rhymes—an inanely lilting allusion to the roseate skin sores, the flowers used to stifle the stench of rotting flesh, and the ashes of burnt corpses during one of Europe’s deadliest plagues.

Ring around the rosies,

Pocket full of posies.

Ashes, ashes,

All fall down.

Chapter 56. A Fatal Rage

“Dad?”

Kyle and his father were standing uneasily near the fireplace end of the living room—the end farthest from the kitchen area, and well away from the doors. The blinds were lowered at all the windows. The only light came from a small table lamp.

“Yes?”

“Before the phone rang, you were starting to say that we should assume that the Peter Pan guy might be out there somewhere?” Kyle shot a nervous glance at the glass doors.

Gurney took a long moment to answer. His mind kept going back to the creepy, singsong nursery-rhyme message—and how its words reflected not only its grotesque bubonic plague origins but also the Flowers by Florence and arson elements, Panikos’s own MO.

“He might be out there, yes.”

“You have any idea where out there?”

“If I’m right about the flat tire, he’d be on the west side of us, and Barrow Hill would be his likely choice.”

“You think maybe he’ll sneak down here by the house?”

“I doubt it. If I’m right about the tire, he has a sniper rifle with him. In that game, distance gives him a major advantage. My best guess is that he’ll stay—”

There was a startling flash of light, a sharp explosion, and something came smashing through one of the kitchen windows, flinging shards of glass everywhere.

Kyle cried out, “What the fuck …?”

Gurney grabbed him and pulled him to the floor, then drew the Beretta from his ankle holster, extinguished the lamp by yanking the cord out of the wall socket, and scrambled across the floor to the nearest window. He waited a moment, listening, then parted the bottom two slats of the blinds and peered out. It took him several seconds to comprehend what he was looking at. Scattered over a broad area out beyond the patio were the remains of the henhouse materials, many of the pieces burning.

Kyle’s voice behind him was a rasping whisper. “What the hell …?”

“The lumber pile … it’s … blown up.”

“Blown … what … how?”

“Some kind of … I don’t know … incendiary device?”

“Incendiary? What the hell …?”

Gurney was absorbed in scanning the area as best he could in the near-darkness.

“Dad?”

“Just a minute.” Adrenaline surging, he was squinting out at the perimeter of the area, checking for any movement. Also checking the little fires, many of which now seemed to be dying out in the damp treated lumber almost as quickly as they were ignited.

“Why?” There was a desperation in Kyle’s question that made Gurney respond.

“I don’t know. Same purpose as the flat tire, maybe? He wants me out there? He seems to be in a hurry.”

“Jesus! You mean he was just … just out there himself … planting a bomb?”

“Maybe earlier, while I was at the Winklers’, before you got back from Syracuse.”

“Jesus. A bomb? With a timer?”

“More likely a cell phone detonator. More controllable, more precise.”

“So … what now?”

“Where are the keys to your motorcycle?”

“In the ignition. Why?”

“Follow me.”

Crawling, he led Kyle across the floor and out of the room—now flickeringly illuminated through the glass doors by the burning lumber strewn outside—down the back hallway into the dark den. He felt his way around the furniture to the north window, lifted the blinds, opened it, and, with the Beretta still in his hand, eased himself carefully out onto the ground.

Kyle did the same.

Fifty feet ahead of them, between the house and the high pasture, there was a small hardwood thicket, just barely visible at the outer edge of the faint light cast by the fire, where Gurney sometimes parked his rider mower. He pointed at the black bulk of a giant oak. “Directly behind that tree there are two boulders, with some space between them. Slip into that space and stay there until I call you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to neutralize the problem.”

“What?”

“No time to explain. Just do as I say. Please.” He pointed again, more urgently. “Over there. Behind the tree. Between the boulders. We’re running out of time. Now!”

Kyle hurried toward the thicket and disappeared out of the wavering firelight into the darkness. Then Gurney made his way around to the corner of the house where the BSA was parked. He was fairly sure that in that position it would be out of sight from the top of Barrow Hill. He hoped Kyle was right about the key. If it wasn’t in the ignition … But it was.

He slipped the Beretta back in his ankle holster and straddled the bike. It had been more than twenty-five years since he’d been on a similar motorcycle—the old Triumph 650 he rode in his college days. He quickly familiarized himself with the positions of brakes, clutch, shift lever. Looking down at the gas tank, the handlebars, the chrome headlight, the front fender, the front tire—it all began to come back to him. Even the physical sensation, the recollection of balance and momentum—it was all there, as though it had been preserved in some airtight container of memory, alive and undiminished.

He grasped the throttle ends of the handlebars and started easing the bike up from its leaning position, when a momentary surge of flame from the burning lumber illuminated something dark and bulky on the ground by the asparagus patch. He let the bike settle back on its kickstand, slowly reached down and got the pistol back in his hand. As best he could tell in the fluctuating light, the object on the ground wasn’t moving. It was about the right size for a human body. Something on the near side looked like it might be an extended arm.

Gurney raised his weapon, stepped carefully off the bike, and moved forward as far as the corner of the house. He was sure now that he was looking at the prone body of a man, and at the end of that putative outstretched arm he could make out roughly the shape of a rifle.

He got down on his knees and took a quick glance around the side of the house—confirming that his car was blocking the line of sight between Barrow Hill and the space he’d have to cross to reach the figure on the ground. Without any further delay, he crept quickly ahead, Beretta ready, eyes fixed on the rifle. With about three feet to go, his free hand landed on a wet, sticky patch of earth.

By its subtle but distinctive odor, he realized he was crawling into a pool of blood.

“Ach!” His whispered exclamation was as reflexive as his recoiling from the contact. Having begun his NYPD career at the height of the AIDS terror, he’d been indoctrinated to regard blood as a deadly toxin until proven otherwise. That feeling was still with him. Miserably regretting the lack of gloves, but desperately needing to understand the situation, he forced himself forward. On a scale of zero to ten, the dying light from the scattered debris still burning near the asparagus patch was varying from zero to two.

He reached the rifle first, grasping it tightly and pulling it from the hand that held it. It was a common lever-action deer rifle. But deer season was four months away. Sliding the rifle behind him, he moved closer to the body, close enough to see that the source of the blood on the ground was an ugly wound in the side of the neck—a wound so deep, ripping completely through the carotid artery, that death would have occurred within seconds.

The object that had caused it was still embedded there. It looked like two knife blades joined at one end to form a strange U-shaped weapon. Then he recognized what it actually was. It was one of the sharp metal joist hangers that had been delivered with the lumber. The obvious explanation was that the explosion had propelled that nasty piece of hardware with terrific force at the man with the rifle, cutting his throat. But that led to other questions.

Did the man set off the explosion himself, then suffer this unintended consequence? But it seemed unlikely that he would have detonated the device while he was still within range of the debris. Perhaps he detonated it by accident? Or in ignorance of the strength of the explosive charge? Or was he the unfortunate accomplice of a second individual who acted too soon? But questions like these begged a more fundamental question.

Who the hell was he?

Violating crime scene protocol, Gurney grasped the man’s heavily muscled shoulder and, with some effort, rolled him over for a better view of his face.

His first conclusion was that the man was definitely not his neighbor. His second conclusion, delayed by the lack of light and by the man’s spectacularly broken nose, probably caused by falling on his face, was that he’d seen that face before. It took a few moments for the identity to register.

It was Mick Klemper.

That’s when Gurney noted a second odor, not as subtle as the blood itself. Alcohol. And that led him to a third conclusion—one that was assumption-ridden but plausible.

Klemper, possibly like Panikos, had seen—or been told about—the Criminal Conflict program teaser, with its promises of sensational revelations, and it had provoked him to take action. Drunk and enraged—perhaps in a crazed effort at damage control, or driven by fury at what he surely would have perceived as a broken promise—he’d come after the man who was betraying him, the man who was ending his career and his life as he knew it.

Drunk and enraged, he’d come gunning for Gurney, skulking around the woods, sneaking up to the house as darkness fell. Drunk and enraged, he hadn’t given a second thought to what a dangerous place that might be.

Chapter 57. Pocket Full of Posies

Once again Gurney faced the simple, urgent question: What now?

In a less pressured position, he might have chosen the sanest and safest option—an immediate call to 911. A state police officer, however demented his motive might have been for being on the scene, had been killed. Though perhaps unintended, his death was hardly accidental. Occurring as the direct result of a felony—the reckless detonation of the explosive—it was murder. Failure to report this, along with the pertinent background information, to the appropriate authorities in a timely fashion could be construed as obstruction of justice.

On the other hand, much could be excused by the immediate pursuit of a suspect.

And perhaps there was a way to bring the local police to the scene without entrapping himself in the prolonged questioning that was sure to occur and thus losing what might be his last real chance to catch Panikos and untangle the Spalter knot.

After turning Klemper’s body back over to its original position—hoping that the techs summoned to the scene wouldn’t be sharp enough to discern any evidence of the interference—Gurney scrambled back behind the corner of the house and called out in a low voice to Kyle.

Less than half a minute later the young man was standing next to him. “Jeez, is that … is that … somebody … over there on the ground?”

“Yes. But forget about it for now. You didn’t see it. Do you have your phone?”

“Yes, sure. But what—?”

“Call 911. Tell them everything that happened here up to the point when we climbed out the window—the flat tire, the explosion, my belief that the tire had been shot out. Tell them that I’m ex-NYPD, that after the explosion I saw some movement on Barrow Hill, that I told you to hide in the thicket, that I took your motorcycle and went in pursuit of whoever I thought was up there. And that’s all you know.”

Kyle’s gaze was still on Klemper’s body. “But … what about …?”

“Our lights were out, it’s dark, your father sent you up to that thicket to hide. You never saw the body. Let the 911 responders find it themselves. You can be as surprised and disturbed by it as they’ll be.”

“Surprised and disturbed—that should be easy enough.”

“Stay in the thicket until you see the first cruiser coming up through the pasture. Then come out slowly and let them see you. Let them see your hands.”

“You still haven’t told me what happened … to him.”

“The less you know, the less you’ll need to forget, and the easier it’ll be to be surprised and confused.”

“What are you going to do?”

“That depends on the situation on the hill. I’ll give it some thought on my way up there. But whatever it is, it needs to happen now.” He got back on the bike, started it as quietly as he could, turned it around, and headed slowly around the back of the house. Confident that the structure was providing sufficient cover, he switched the headlight on and guided the softly rumbling bike slowly toward the old cow path that led to the large field separating his property from Barrow Hill.

He was pretty sure that the roundabout arc he was taking would prevent anyone on the top of the hill from seeing the headlight of the bike approaching. Then he could make his way up the north-side trail, a switchback with no direct visibility from the top.

All this sounded fine, as far as it went. But it didn’t go far enough. Too much was unknown. Gurney couldn’t escape the feeling that he was heading into a situation where the guy on the other side of the table had not only higher cards, but a better seat and a bigger gun. Not to mention a history of winning.

Gurney was tempted to blame everything on the cynical, duplicitous creeps at RAM-TV whose timing “mistake” with the Criminal Conflict promotion announcements was almost certainly a deliberate decision. More promotional exposure meant a bigger audience, and a bigger audience was their number one goal. In fact, it was their only goal. If someone should die as a result of that decision, well … that could create the biggest ratings boost of all.

But the difficulty with blaming it all on them, vile and venal as they were, was that he knew that he owned a piece of the problem. His piece had been his pretending, mostly to himself, that the plan made sense. It was hard to maintain that illusion now—as he struggled to keep the BSA upright, negotiating a tortuous route through clumps of briars, waist-high aspen saplings, and groundhog burrows that would have made the outer edge of the unmowed field a challenge even with perfect visibility. On a murky night it was a nightmare.

As he neared the foot of the hill, the terrain grew rougher and the jouncing movements of the headlight beam through the bushy weeds filled the area out in front of him with erratic shadows. Gurney had faced tough conditions before in the endgame of a battle with a dangerous opponent, but this was worse. Without time to think, to evaluate pros and cons and levels of risk, he felt forced to act.

Forced was not too strong a word for it. Now that he was within striking distance of Panikos, letting him get away was unthinkable. When he was this near his quarry, the gravitational field of the chase grew stronger and the rational assessment of risk began to fade.

And there was something else. Something very specific.

The echo of the past—stirring a force within him far stronger than reason.

That searing memory of an escaping car, Danny sprawled dead on the pavement. A memory that gave birth to an iron conviction that never again—never again, no matter the danger—would a killer so close get away from him.

This was something far beyond the niceties of rationality. This was something burned by unbearable loss into the circuits of his brain.

Having reached the opening to the north trail, he needed to make an immediate decision, and none of the options was encouraging. Since Panikos would probably be equipped with an infrared scope and infrared binoculars, any effort to get to the top of the hill would likely be fatal long before Gurney could get within Beretta range. The only way he could think of to neutralize the man’s technological advantage was to put him on the run. And the only way he could think of to make him run was to give him the impression that he was outnumbered and outgunned—not an easy impression to create in the absence of backup. For a few moments, Gurney considered roaring full throttle up the switchback trail, shouting orders to imaginary cohorts, shouting replies in other voices. But he dismissed it as too transparent a ploy.

Then it occurred to him that a solution was at hand. Although he’d have no actual backup, the appearance of backup might be enough—and a very solid appearance of backup would soon be on the scene. A police cruiser or two, maybe three, hopefully with all their lights flashing, should be driving up any minute now through the pasture in response to Kyle’s 911 call. Their arrival would be clearly visible from Panikos’s likely position up by the tarn—and the sight of them should create a sufficient impression of manpower to dislodge Panikos and persuade him to retreat down the back trail to Beaver Cross Road.

That would all be for nothing, however, if Panikos established a large enough lead on Gurney to slip away into the night—or, worse, to pull off the trail unobserved and wait in ambush. To avoid that possibility Gurney decided to maneuver the BSA as quietly as he could to a location about three quarters of the way up the switchback, wait for the arrival of the cruisers in the pasture, and then play it by ear, depending on Panikos’s reaction.

He didn’t have to wait long. No more than a minute or two after he’d reached his intended position on the trail—within striking distance of the hilltop—he saw the oscillating colored lights through the trees at the far side of the field. And almost immediately he heard the sound he was hoping for—an ATV, loud at first, then beginning to recede—meaning that Panikos was, at least for the moment, behaving as anticipated.

Gurney revved up the idling BSA and maneuvered as fast as he dared through the remaining switchback segments. When he reached the small open area by the tarn, he turned the throttle back to idle for a moment to listen for the ATV and judge its position and speed. He guessed it was no more than a hundred yards down the back trail.

As he turned toward the trailhead and his headlight swept across the clearing, his eye caught first one oddity and then another. Resting on the flat rock that offered the best view of Gurney’s house was a bouquet of flowers. The stems were wrapped in yellow tissue. The blossoms were a deep brownish red, a color typical of dried blood—and also the most common color of the local August mums.

He couldn’t help wondering if the bouquet—or “posies” in the words of the nursery rhyme—had been intended for delivery to him, perhaps as a final message to be left on his dead body.

The second oddity was a black metal object, half the size of a carton of cigarettes, on the ground between Gurney and the bouquet. His reaction to that was sudden and physical, yanking the handlebars to the right and twisting the throttle. The bike pivoted sharply, propelling a shower of dirt and pebbles into the darkness and accelerating along the edge of the tarn.

Had he failed to get out of the way as quickly as he did, the explosion that followed would have killed him. As it was, the only negative effect was a painful blast of dirt and small stones against his back.

In response to this attempt on his life, he called out in his best team-leader voice. “All units converge, back slope, Barrow Hill. Remote explosive. No casualties.” The idea was to increase the pressure. Make Panikos get reckless, make mistakes, lose control. Maybe hit a tree, flip into a ditch. The goal was to stop him, one way or another.

The unforgivable thing would be to let him get away.

To let the red BMW race off into the distance and disappear forever.

No. That wasn’t going to happen. No matter what, that wasn’t going to happen again.

He couldn’t let Panikos get too far ahead. At two hundred yards, for example, he might have the space and time he’d need to come to a sudden stop, turn, steady his weapon, and get off a good shot while Gurney was still too far away to have a chance with the Beretta.

With his attention alternating rapidly now between the ATV taillights and the rutted trail, Gurney was neither gaining nor losing ground. But with every passing second on the bike, he could feel his physical motorcycle memory returning. Like skiing after a long layoff, heading down that trail was bringing back his timing and coordination. By the time they emerged onto the paved surface of Beaver Cross, the ATV still about a hundred yards ahead of him, Gurney felt confident enough to open up the throttle all the way.

The ATV seemed unusually fast—apparently built or modified for racing—but the BSA was faster. Within a mile, Gurney had reduced the gap between them to fifty, maybe forty yards—still too far for a pistol shot from a motorcycle. He figured he’d be close enough in another half mile or so.

Perhaps sensing the same possibility from the opposing point of view, Panikos veered off the paved road onto a roughly parallel farm track that ran along the verge of a long cornfield. Gurney did the same, in case the little man decided to head off into the cornfield itself.

Even more rutted than the Barrow Hill trail, the farm track imposed its own speed limit of twenty to thirty miles per hour, taking away the BSA’s open-road advantage and preserving Panikos’s lead—even widening it a bit, since the forks and shocks of his machine were more suited to the surface than Gurney’s.

The track and its adjacent cornfield sloped down to the relatively flatter but still severely uneven terrain of the river valley. At the end of the track, Panikos continued on into the abandoned pasture of what Gurney had been told was once the region’s largest dairy farm. Now a patchwork of large grassy hummocks and muddy rivulets, it gave the ATV a distinct advantage over the BSA, widening Panikos’s lead to the original hundred yards and then some, impelling Gurney to push the BSA at insane speeds through the equivalent of an unlit slalom course. There was a primal simplicity in hot pursuit that anesthetized fear and suppressed any reasonable calculation of risk.

In addition to the red taillights that he was zeroing in on, he began catching glimpses of other lights farther down the valley. Colored lights, white lights, some seemingly fixed in place, some moving. These at first had a disorienting effect on him. Where the hell was he? Bright arrays of lights were as uncommon in Walnut Crossing as meadowlarks in Manhattan. Then, when he saw an arc of orange lights slowly rotating, it came to him.

It was the Ferris wheel at the Summer Mountain Fair.

Panikos was still widening his lead through a wet depression of boggy land that separated the former pasture from the higher and drier square-mile field that was home to the fair and its parking areas. For a few desperate seconds, Gurney thought he’d lost Panikos in the sea of vehicles surrounding the perimeter fence of the fair itself. But then he caught sight of the familiar taillights moving along an outer parking lane in the direction of the exhibitors’ entrance.

By the time he reached that entrance himself, the ATV had already passed through it. Three young women wearing FAIR SECURITY armbands, evidently in charge of controlling that admission point, looked disconcerted. One was on a walkie-talkie, the other on a cell phone. Gurney pulled up next to the third. Straddling the bike, he flashed his NYPD-Retired credentials at her as he spoke. “Did an ATV just run this gate?”

“Damn right! Kid on a camo four-by-four. You after him?”

He hesitated for half a second at the word “kid” before realizing that, seen fleetingly, Panikos would give that exact impression.

“Yes, I am. What was he wearing?”

“Wearing? Jeez … I … maybe some kind of shiny black jacket? Like one of those nylon windbreaker things? I’m not really sure.”

“Okay. Did you see which way he went?”

“Yeah, freakin’ little creep! Right through there.” She pointed at a makeshift alleyway between one of the main tents and a long row of RVs and motor homes.

Gurney passed through the gate, headed into narrow passage, and proceeded to the far end of it, where it connected with one of the fair’s main concourses. The carefree look of the ambling crowd seemed to preclude any recent encounter with a speeding ATV—meaning that Panikos had probably slipped through one of the many spaces between the motor homes and could now be anywhere in the fairgrounds.

Gurney pivoted the BSA and sped back up the alley to the gate area, where he saw that the three young women had now been joined in their consternation by a sour-faced cop—no doubt one of the locals moonlighting in the security detail.

Gray-haired and paunchy, stretching a uniform that might have fit him ten years earlier, he eyed the BSA with a blatant combination of envy and contempt.

“What’s the problem here?”

Gurney showed his ID. “The guy who ran your gate a couple of minutes ago is armed and dangerous. I have reason to believe he shot out a tire on my car.”

The cop was eyeing the ID like it was a North Korean passport. “You carrying?”

“Yes.”

“That card says you’re retired. You got your carry permit on you?”

Gurney flipped quickly to the section of his wallet that displayed the permit. “There’s a time factor here, Officer. The guy on the ATV is a serious—”

The cop cut him off. “Remove that from your wallet and hand it to me.”

Gurney did so, his voice rising. “Listen to me. The guy on the ATV is a fugitive murder suspect. Losing him now would not be a good thing.”

The cop examined the permit. “Slow down … Detective. You’re a long way from the Rotten Apple.” He wrinkled his nose unpleasantly. “This fugitive of yours have a name?”

This was not a can of worms Gurney had planned to open, but now he saw no alternative. “His name is Petros Panikos. He’s a professional killer.”

“He’s a what?”

The three young women assigned to mind the gate were standing in a row behind the cop, wide-eyed.

Gurney was straining to maintain his patience. “Petros Panikos killed seven people in Cooperstown this week. He may have caused the death of a police officer half an hour ago. He’s in your fairgrounds right now. Is this getting through to you?”

The cop put his hand on the butt of his holstered gun. “Who the hell are you?”

“My ID told you exactly who I am—David Gurney, Detective First Grade, NYPD-Retired. I also told you I’m in pursuit of a murder suspect. Now I’m going to tell you something else. You’re creating an unnecessary obstruction to his capture. If your obstruction results in his escape, your career is over. You hear what I’m saying, Officer?”

The muddy hostility in the cop’s eyes was sharpening into something more dangerous. His lips drew back, revealing the tips of clenched yellow teeth. He took a slow step backward. With his hand tightening on his gun, the movement was far more threatening than a step forward. “That’s it. Get off the bike.”

Gurney looked past him and spoke to the row of gaping young women in a loud, deliberate voice. “Call your head of security! Get him out here to this gate—NOW!”

The cop turned around, raising his free hand in a stop gesture. “You don’t need to call anybody. Nobody. No call. I’m taking care of this myself.”

It struck Gurney that this might be his only chance. Risk be damned—losing Panikos was not an acceptable option. He gave the throttle a quick twist, pulled the handlebars down to the right, spun the machine in a one-eighty, and, with the rear tire smoking, shot back down into the alleyway behind the motor homes. Halfway to the main concourse, he made a sharp turn in between two of the big vehicles and found himself threading his way through a maze of RVs of all shapes and sizes. He soon emerged onto one of the fair’s narrower concourses, along which exhibitor tents displayed everything from wildly colored Peruvian hats to chain-sawed bear sculptures. He abandoned the BSA in a half-hidden space between two of the tents, one selling Walnut Crossing sweatshirts and the other straw cowboy hats.

On an impulse, he bought one of each, then stopped in a restroom farther along on the same concourse to cover the dark, short-sleeved shirt he was wearing with the light gray sweatshirt. He moved the Beretta from his ankle holster to the sweatshirt pocket, and checked his appearance in the restroom mirror. The change, along with the brim of the cowboy hat shielding his eyes, convinced him he’d be less recognizable, at least at a distance, either by Panikos or the troublesome cop.

It occurred to him then that Panikos might be taking similar steps to blend in with his surroundings—and that raised an obvious question. As Gurney began searching the crowd for the little man, what characteristics was he looking for?

His height—which had been estimated at between four-ten and five-two—would put him in the range of most middle-schoolers. Unfortunately, middle-schoolers probably comprised at least several hundred of the approximately ten thousand visitors at the fair. Were there other criteria that could narrow the profile? The security videos had been useful in establishing certain facts, but for the purpose of generating a likeness independent of the original context, their value was limited—since so much of Panikos’s hair and face had been covered with sunglasses, headband, scarf. His nose had been visible and distinctive, as well as his mouth, but little else—little that would facilitate the quick scanning of faces in a moving crowd.

The stressed security girl at the gate said she thought he was wearing a black jacket, but Gurney gave that little weight. She hadn’t sounded sure, and even if she had, pressured eyewitness reports like that were more often dead wrong than anywhere near right. And whatever he might have been wearing when he ran the gate, Panikos could have altered his appearance as quickly and easily as Gurney just had. So, for the moment at least, he was looking for a short, thin person with a sharp nose and a childlike mouth.

As if to underscore the insufficiency of that description, an excited cluster of at least a dozen kids—ten-year-olds, eleven-year-olds, maybe twelve-year-olds—crossed the concourse just ahead of him. Perhaps half of them would fall outside the size parameters either because of their height or pudginess, but Panikos could easily blend in with the other half.

In fact, suppose he had blended in. Suppose Panikos was among them, right there in front of him. How could Gurney pick him out?

It was a discouraging challenge—particularly since the whole group had evidently visited one of the fair’s face painters, obscuring their features under the visages of what Gurney assumed were comic-book superheroes. And how many similar little groups might there be—all circulating through the fairgrounds at that moment, with Panikos as a potential hanger-on?

It was then that he noticed what the members of this particular group were doing. They were approaching other fairgoers, adults primarily, with bunches of flowers. He picked up his pace and followed them onto the larger concourse to observe more closely what was happening.

They were selling the flowers—or, more accurately, giving a free bunch to anyone who would make a minimum ten-dollar donation to the Walnut Crossing Flood Relief Fund. But the thing that captured his attention—one hundred percent of his attention—was the appearance of these bouquets.

The flowers were rust-red mums, and the stems were wrapped in yellow tissue—seemingly identical to those left by Panikos on the rock by the tarn.

What did this mean? Processing the implications, Gurney came quickly to the conclusion that the flowers by the tarn had most likely come from the fair, which meant that Panikos had been there prior to his visit to Barrow Hill, which raised an interesting question:

Why?

Surely he hadn’t gone to the fair originally for the purpose of acquiring a bouquet to bring to Gurney’s property—since he would’ve had no way of knowing such a thing would be available there and a local florist would have been a more obvious source in any event. No, he’d gone to the fair for some other reason, and the mums had been secondary.

So what was the primary reason? It sure as hell wasn’t for the rustic amusement, cotton candy, and cow-flop bingo. Then why on earth …?

The ringing of his phone interrupted his train of thought.

It was Hardwick, highly agitated. “Shit, man! Are you all right?”

“I think so. What’s going on?”

“That’s what I want to know! Where the fuck are you?”

“I’m at the fair. So is Panikos.”

“Then what the hell’s happening at your place?”

“How do you know—?”

“I’m out on the county route, approaching your turnoff, and there’s a fucking convoy—two trooper cruisers, a sheriff’s car, and a BCI SUV—all heading up your road. Fuck’s going on?”

“Klemper’s up there by my house. Dead. Long story. Looks like the first responders found the body and called for help. The convoy you see would be the second wave.”

“Dead? Mick the Dick? Dead how?”

Gurney gave him the fastest run-through he could—from the flat tire to the lumber explosion to the fatal joist hanger in Klemper’s neck to the flowers on Barrow Hill to the flowers at the fair.

Reviewing it all underscored in his own mind his need to call Kyle ASAP.

Hardwick listened in complete silence to the narration of events.

“What you need to do,” said Gurney, “is get over here to the fairgrounds. You’ve seen the same videos I have, so your chance of recognizing Panikos is as good as mine.”

“Which is close to zero.”

“I know that. But we’re got to try. He’s here, somewhere. He came here for a reason.”

“What reason?”

“I have no idea. But he was here earlier today, and now he’s here again. It’s not a coincidence.”

“Look, I know you think that getting Panikos is the key to everything, but don’t forget that somebody hired him, and I’m thinking it’s Jonah.”

“You find out something new?”

“Just what my gut tells me, that’s all. There’s something off about that slimy bastard.”

“Something beyond a fifty-million-dollar motive?”

“Yeah. I think so. I think he’s way too smiley, way too cool.”

“Maybe it’s just the charming Spalter gene pool.”

Hardwick produced a phlegmy laugh. “Not a pool I’d want to swim in.”

Gurney was getting antsy to check in with Kyle, antsy to start looking for Panikos. “Okay, Jack. Hurry up. Call me when you get here.”

As he was ending the call, he heard the first explosion.

Chapter 58. Ashes, Ashes

He’d recognized the sound as the muffled whump of a small incendiary device.

As soon as he reached the scene, two concourses over, his impression was confirmed. A small booth was engulfed in flames and smoke, but already two men with FAIR SECURITY armbands were hurrying toward it with fire extinguishers and shouting at the onlookers to step back out of the way. Two female security people arrived and began working their way around to the rear of the booth, repeatedly calling out, “Anyone inside? Anyone inside?” An emergency vehicle with lights flashing and siren blaring was making its way down the middle of the concourse.

Seeing there was no immediate contribution he could make to the effort, Gurney focused instead on the crowd within sight of the fire. Arsonists have a well-known proclivity for observing their handiwork, but whatever hope he might have had of spotting someone matching even the most general description of Peter Pan soon evaporated. But then he noticed something else. The half-burnt sign above the booth said WALNUT CROSSING FLOOD RELIEF. And amid the debris the explosion had scattered onto the concourse were charred bouquets of rust-red mums.

It seemed that Panikos had a love-hate relationship with chrysanthemums, or maybe with all flowers, or with anything that reminded him of Florencia. But that alone couldn’t explain his presence at the fair. There was another possibility, of course. A more frightening one. Major public events were attractive venues for the making of memorable statements.

Was it conceivable that the purpose of Panikos’s earlier visit to the fair that day was to lay the groundwork for such a statement? Specifically, might he have mined the place with explosives? Was the destruction of the flower stand only the opening sentence of his message?

Was this possible scenario something Gurney needed to share immediately with Fair Security? With the Walnut Crossing PD? With BCI? Or would an attempt to explain such a scenario take more time than it was worth? After all, if it was true, if that was the reality they were facing, by the time the story was told and believed, it would be too late to stop the event.

As crazy as the conclusion seemed, Gurney decided that going it alone was the only feasible route. It was a route that depended on the successful identification of Peter Pan—a task that he realized was close to impossible. But there were no other options on the table.

So he started doing the only thing he could do. He started making his way through the crowd, using height as the first screen, weight as the second, facial structure as the third.

As he made his way through the next concourse, checking not only the individuals in the flowing crowd but also the customers at each booth and each exhibitor’s tent, an ironic thought came to mind: The upside of the worst-case scenario—that Peter Pan had come to the fair to blow it up piece by piece—was that he’d be there for a while. And as long as he was there, it was possible to catch him. Before Gurney could wrestle with the edgy moral question of how much human and material destruction he’d be willing to trade to get his hands on Peter Pan, Hardwick called—announcing that he’d arrived at the main gate and asking where they should get together.

“We don’t need to get together,” said Gurney. “We can cover more ground separately.”

“Fine. So what do I do—just start searching for the midget?”

“As best you can, based on your memory of the images on the security videos. You might want to pay special attention to groups of kids.”

“The purpose being …?”

“He’d want to be as inconspicuous as possible. A five-foot-tall male adult is attention-getting, but a kid that size isn’t, so there’s a good chance he’s made himself look like a kid. Facial skin can be an age giveaway, so I’d expect he’d find a way to obscure that. A lot of kids tonight have their faces painted, and that would be an obvious solution.”

“I get that, but why would he be in a group?”

“Again, inconspicuousness. A kid alone attracts more attention than one with other kids.”

Hardwick uttered a sigh, making it sound like the ultimate expression of skepticism. “Sounds like a lot of guesswork to me.”

“I won’t argue with that. One more thing. Assume that he’s armed, and don’t underestimate him. Remember, he’s alive and well, and a hell of a lot of people who crossed paths with him are dead.”

“What’s the drill if I think I have him ID’d?”

“Keep him in sight and call me. I’ll do the same. That’s the point when we need to back each other up. By the way, he blew up a flower stand here right after your last call.”

“Blew it up?”

“Sounded like a low-impact incendiary. Probably like the ones at Cooperstown.”

“Why a flower stand?”

“I’m not a psychoanalyst, Jack, but flowers—especially mums—seem to mean something to him.”

“You know ‘mum’ is the Brit word for ‘mom,’ right?”

“Sure, but—”

A series of rapid-fire explosions cut off his reply—propelling him down into an instinctive crouch. He sensed that the blasts had come from somewhere above him.

Quickly scanning the area around him, he got the phone back up to his ear in time to hear Hardwick yell, “Christ! What did he blow up now?”

The answer came in a second series of similar explosions—with geometric lines of light and bursts of colored sparks streaking across the night sky. Gurney’s tension was released in a sharp single-syllable laugh. “Fireworks! It’s just the summer-fair fireworks.”

“Fireworks? What the fuck for? Fourth of July was a month ago.”

“Who the hell knows? It’s a tradition at the fair. They do it every year.”

A third series went off—louder and gaudier.

“Assholes,” muttered Hardwick.

“Right. Anyway. We have work to do.”

Hardwick was silent for a few seconds, then switched directions abruptly. “So what do you think about Jonah? You didn’t react when I brought it up. You think I’m right?”

“Right about him being the mastermind behind Carl’s murder?”

“It’s all to his advantage. All of it. And you gotta admit, he’s one oily operator.”

“Where does Esti come out on this? She agree with you?”

“Hell, no. She’s all zeroed in on Alyssa. She’s convinced the whole thing was payback for Carl raping her—even though there was no real evidence for that. It was all hearsay, through Klemper. Which reminds me, I have to let her know about Mick the Dick’s demise. I guarantee she’ll do a happy dance.”

It took Gurney a few seconds to get that image out of his mind. “Okay, Jack, we need to get to the job at hand. Panikos is here. With us. Within reach. Let’s go find him.” As he ended the call, a final deafening display of fireworks lit up the sky. It made him think, for the twelfth time in the past two days, of the case of the exploding car. That made him think of the events in the alley shooting described by Esti. Which made him wonder yet again what revealing element they might have in common with the Spalter case. As important as that question seemed, however, he couldn’t let it divert his attention now.

He resumed his progress through the fairgrounds, fixating on the face of every short, thin person he came upon. Better to study too many than too few. If someone of the right size happened to be looking away, or if their features were obscured by glasses, a beard, the brim of a hat, he followed them discreetly, angling for a better view.

With a rising sense of possibility, he followed one tiny, ageless, genderless creature in loose black jeans and a baggy sweater until a wiry, sunburned man in a John Deere hat greeted her warmly in a tent sponsored by the Evangelical Church of the Risen Christ, called her Eleanor, and asked about the condition of her cows.

Two more such “possibilities”—discovered in the next two concourses and collapsing in similar absurdities—were draining the hope out of his search, while the nasal country lyrics blaring from the giant four-sided screen at the fair’s central intersection were saturating the atmosphere with a disorienting sentimentality. There was a similarly disorienting combination of odors, dominated by popcorn, French fries, and manure.

As Gurney rounded the corner where a room-sized refrigeration unit with a glass front was displaying a huge bovine butter sculpture, he caught sight of the same roving band of a dozen or so face-painted kids he’d seen before. He picked up his pace to get closer.

Apparently they’d been successful in their flowers-for-donations pitches. Only two members of the group were still carrying bouquets, and they seemed in no hurry to give them away. As he was watching them, he spotted the cop from the exhibitors’ gate coming along the concourse from the opposite direction with what looked like two plainclothes colleagues.

Gurney ducked through a doorway and found himself in the 4-H Club exhibit hall, surrounded by displays of large, shiny vegetables.

As soon as the search party had passed, he stepped back outside. He was closing in again on the face-painted kids when he was startled by another explosion, not far away. It was a powerful whump—incendiary style—with maybe twice the force of the one that had destroyed the flower stand. But it had little immediate effect on the meandering mass of fairgoers, probably because the fireworks had been louder.

It did, however, get the attention of the face-painted kids. They stopped and gaped at one another—as if the explosion had awakened their appetite for disaster—then turned and hurried back along the concourse toward the origin of the sound.

Gurney caught up with them two concourses later. They had drawn together at the edge of a larger crowd, staring. Smoke was billowing from the arena that was home to the nightly demolition-derby events. Some people were running toward the arena. Some were backing away from it, clutching small children. Some were questioning one another, wide-eyed with anxiety. Some were pulling out cell phones, tapping in numbers. A siren began wailing in the background.

And then, barely discernible above the general din, there was another whump.

Only a few members of the little posse Gurney was focused on showed any immediate reaction, but the ones who did then appeared to be passing the news of it to their companions. It also appeared that this was breaking the group apart—that there were those who’d heard the latest explosion and those who hadn’t (or who had, but considered the commotion in front of them more interesting). In any event, three individuals separated themselves from the larger group and headed off in the direction of the latest scene of destruction.

Curious himself about the pattern of Panikos’s attack, Gurney decided to follow the splinter group. As he passed those who were remaining at the periphery of the unsettled crowd of onlookers, he tried to get a good enough look at each little face to judge its compatibility with the mental images he carried from the videos.

Failing to see any resemblance convincing enough to demand a closer examination, he continued after the departing threesome.

His progress was slowed by people beginning to flow out of the arena. From what he overheard of their comments to one another, he concluded that the audience in the stands hadn’t come close to grasping the significance of what they’d just witnessed—the massive, fiery explosion of one of the cars in the final event of the derby, the horrifying immolation of the driver, and multiple injuries to other drivers. They seemed to be attributing all this to some sort of gas-tank malfunction or the use of a prohibited fuel. The darkest suggestion was that there might have been some sort of sabotage arising from a family feud.

So, two firebombs within a twenty-minute period, and still no panic. That was the good news. The bad news was that the only reason there was no panic was that no one understood what was happening. Gurney wondered if that third whump he’d heard would change things.

A couple of hundred yards ahead of him, a fire engine was trying to clear a right-of-way through the throng with repeated blasts of its air horn. Overhead, smoke was blowing in the wind—coming from the area toward which the fire engine was heading. It was a cloudy, moonless night, and the smoke was weirdly illuminated by the concourse lights below it.

People were starting to show signs of unease. Many were proceeding in the same direction as the fire engine—some walking fast beside it, some running ahead of it. The expressions on faces ran the gamut from apprehension to excitement. The three small figures he’d been following had been swallowed up in the moving mass of bodies.

Turning the corner into the intersecting concourse about a hundred yards behind the engine, he could see flames against the black sky. They were coming from the roof of a long, single-story wooden structure, which he recognized as the main shelter for the animals entered in the various demonstrations and competitions. As he drew closer, he saw a few cows and horses being led out of the building’s main doors by their young handlers.

Then others, unattended and skittish, began coming out through other doors—some hesitating uncertainly and stamping on the ground, some bolting into the crowd, generating cries of alarm.

One overwrought individual with an unfortunate sense of drama shouted “Stampede!” A sense of panic, the absence of which Gurney had noted minutes earlier, now appeared to be infecting pockets of the crowd. People were jostling one another to get to what they probably imagined were positions of greater safety. The noise level was rising. So was the wind. The flames on the barn roof were being lashed sideways. Loose canvas panels on the exhibition tents along the concourse were flapping sharply.

It appeared that a sudden summer storm might be blowing in. A flash of light in the clouds and a rumble in the hills confirmed it. Moments later the lightning flashed more brightly, and the rumble grew louder.

Chapter 59. All Fall Down

More security people were rushing to the scene now. Some were trying to get the fairgoers away from the barn and the engine, out of the way of the fire crew deploying the hoses. Others were struggling to regain control of escaping horses, cows, hogs, sheep, as well as a pair of giant oxen.

Gurney observed that word of the two earlier fire explosions was spreading, producing a rising level of fear and confusion. At least a third of the people were now glued to their phones—talking, texting, and photographing the fire and the turmoil around them.

Scanning the shifting mass of faces for the trio who’d slipped out of sight, or for anyone else who might resemble Panikos, Gurney was taken aback to catch a glimpse of Madeleine emerging from the barn. Angling for a less obstructed view, he saw that she was leading two alpacas by their halters, one in each hand. And Dennis Winkler was right behind her, leading two more the same way.

As soon as they were out of the immediate area occupied by the fire crew, they stopped to confer about something—Winkler doing most of the talking, Madeleine nodding earnestly. Then they continued on, Winkler now in front, following a kind of passageway through the crowd opened by some security people for the evacuation of the animals.

This brought them within a few feet of Gurney.

Winkler noticed him first. “Hey, David—you want to make yourself useful?”

“Sorry. I can’t help you right now.”

Winkler looked offended. “I’ve got a significant emergency here.”

“We all do.”

Winkler stared at him, then moved on with a muttered comment that got lost under a peal of thunder.

Madeleine stopped and eyed Gurney curiously. “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” Even as he was speaking, the harshness in his voice was warning him to be quiet.

“Helping Dennis and Deirdre. As I told you I would be.”

“You need to get out of here. Now.”

“What? What’s the matter with you?” The wind was blowing her hair forward, around her face. With both hands on the halters, she was shaking her head to keep the hair out of her eyes.

“It’s not safe here.”

She blinked uncomprehendingly. “Because of the fire in the barn?”

“The fire in the barn, the fire in the arena, the fire in the flower booth …”

“What are you talking about?”

“The man I’m chasing … the man who burned down the houses in Cooperstown …”

There was flash of lightning and the loudest thunderclap yet. She flinched and raised her voice. “What are you telling me?”

“He’s here. Petros Panikos. Here, tonight, now. I think he may have seeded the whole fairgrounds with explosives.”

Her hair was still blowing in her face, but now she was making no effort to control it. “How do you know he’s here?”

“I followed him here.”

“From where?”

Another lightning flash, another thunderclap.

“Barrow Hill. I chased him here on Kyle’s motorcycle.”

“What happened? Why—”

“He killed Mick Klemper.”

“Madeleine!” Dennis Winkler’s impatient voice reached them from the place where he was standing, waiting, about thirty feet away. “Madeleine! Come on! We need to keep moving along.”

“Klemper? Where?”

“By our house. I don’t have time to explain it. Panikos is here. He’s blowing things up, he’s burning things down, I need you to get the hell out of here.”

“What about the animals?”

“Maddie, for Godsake …”

“They’re terrified of fire.” She glanced back in distress at her oddly thoughtful-looking pair of alpacas.

“Maddie …”

“All right, all right … let me just get these two to a safe place. Then I’ll leave.” She was obviously finding the decision a difficult one. “What about you? What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to find him and stop him.”

Outright fear finally filled her eyes, and she started to object, but he cut her off.

“I have to do this! And you have to get the hell out of here—please—now!”

She appeared for a moment immobilized by her own frightening thoughts, then she dropped the halters, stepped toward him, hugged him with something like desperation, turned away without another word, and led her charges along the concourse to where Winkler was waiting for her. They exchanged a few words, then moved on quickly, side by side, through the corridor that had been cleared through the crowd.

Watching them for the few seconds until they were out of sight, Gurney felt the stab of an emotion he couldn’t name. They looked so goddamn domestic, so bloody compatible, like caring parents of little children, hurrying to find shelter from the storm.

He closed his eyes, hoping for a way up and out of the acid pit.

When he opened them a moment later, the strange little face-painted threesome had reappeared, seemingly out of nowhere. They were walking past him in the same direction taken by Madeleine and Winkler. Gurney had the unsettling impression—it could have been his imagination—that one of the painted faces was smiling.

He let them get about fifty feet farther along before he set out after them. The concourse ahead was a jumble of conflicting currents. Curiosity was pulling droves of the mindless toward the burning barn, while the security staff were doing their utmost to turn them back and to keep a channel open for the displaced animals and their handlers moving in the opposite direction to a series of corrals on the far side of the fairgrounds.

Beyond the radius of the fire’s visibility and primitive power of attraction, the threat of a downpour was persuading swarms of fairgoers to abandon the pedestrian concourses in favor of the exhibitor tents or their own cars. The reduced density was making it easier for Gurney to keep the trio in sight.

At the end of a massive thunderclap that reverberated through the valley, he realized his phone was ringing.

It was Hardwick. “You spot the fucker yet?”

“Maybe a possibility or two, nothing firm. What area have you covered so far?”

There was no answer.

“Jack?”

“Hold on a sec.”

As the seconds passed, Gurney found himself dividing his attention between the trio he was following and the giant video cube that dominated the center of the fairgrounds and provided an incessant country-music accompaniment to the nightmare in progress. As he listened for Hardwick’s return to the phone, he couldn’t quite tune out the Oedipal-creepy chorus of a song called “Mother’s Day”—about a hard-workin’, hard-drinkin’, pickup-drivin’ guy who’d never met a lady as lovin’ as his mama.

“I’m back.” It was Hardwick’s voice on the phone.

“What’s happening?”

“I’ve been tailing a rat pack, didn’t want to lose them. Dressed in scumbag couture. Couple of them got that paint shit on their faces.”

“Anything special about them?”

“There seems to be a core group, and then there’s sort of an outlier.”

“An outlier?”

“Yeah. Like he’s with the pack but not really part of them.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Right, but don’t get carried away. There’s always some kid in a group who’s a little out of the group. Don’t necessarily mean shit.”

“Can you see what’s painted on his face?”

“Got to wait till he turns around.”

“Where are you?”

“Passing in front of a booth selling taxidermied squirrels.”

“Jesus. Any bigger landmarks?”

“There’s a building down the concourse with a picture of a humongous pumpkin on the door, next to a video arcade. In fact, the mini-scumbags just went into the arcade.”

“What about the outlier?”

“Yeah, him too. They’re all inside. You want me to go in?”

“I don’t think so. Not yet. Just make sure there’s only one door, so you don’t lose them.”

“Hold on, they just came back out. On the move again.”

“All of them? The outlier, too?”

“Yeah. Just counting … eight, nine … yeah, all of them.”

“Which way are they heading?”

“Past the pumpkin building toward the end of the concourse.”

“That means we’re going to converge. I’m one concourse over from you, moving in the same direction—following a procession of animals and a face-painted troupe of my own.”

“Animals?”

“The animals that were in the barn are being moved to the corrals behind the Ferris wheel. The barn is on fire.”

“Shit! I heard someone talking about a burning barn. I thought they were just confused about the fire in the arena. Okay, let me hang up. I got to pay attention here—but wait! You got any news on what’s happening up at your house?”

“I need to call my son and find out.”

“Let me know.”

As he ended the call, Madeleine and Winkler were turning onto a kind of rotary concourse that encircled the carnival rides and the corrals. A minute later Gurney’s target threesome went the same way, and by the time he reached the intersection, they were meeting up with the group of nine Hardwick had been following.

Moving among the animals and those clutches of fairgoers who remained ignorant of the unfolding disaster and undaunted by the threatening storm, the dozen little bodies defied Gurney’s efforts to identify any conspicuous outsider—any monstrous mini-adult in the guise of a child. As he watched, they gravitated toward the waist-high railing that separated the curving concourse from the rides.

Madeleine and Dennis and the alpacas were moving along past the rides toward the corrals. Gurney placed himself where he could see as far as possible in the direction of the corrals while still maintaining a clear view of the group gathering at the railing. He spotted Hardwick taking up a position where the second straight concourse fed into the circular one. Rather than reveal their connection by walking over and conferring with Hardwick directly, he took out his phone and called him.

When he answered, Hardwick was looking over at Gurney. “What’s with the redneck hat?”

“Ad hoc camouflage. Long story for another time. Tell me—have you spotted anyone else of interest, or are our prime candidates right here in front of us?”

“That’s them. And you can knock out about half on the basis of the pudge factor.”

“What factor?”

“Some of these kids are way too fat. From what I could see on the videos, our little Peter has a lean and hungry look.”

“So that leaves us with maybe six possibles?”

“I’d say more like two or three. In addition to the pudge factor, there’s the height factor, and the basic facial structure factor. Which leaves maybe one of your group, two of mine. And even those seem a bit of a stretch.”

“Which three are you talking about?”

“The one closest to you—idiot baseball hat, hand on the railing. The one next to him, in the black hoodie, hands in his pockets. And the one closest to me, wearing the blue satin basketball uniform three sizes too big. You got any better choices?”

“Let me take a closer look. I’ll call you back.”

He slipped the phone in his pocket, studying the twelve little bodies at the railing, with particular attention to the three highlighted by Hardwick. But there was a phrase the man had used that hit a nerve: a bit of a stretch.

A bit of a stretch, indeed. In fact, Gurney had a sick, sinking feeling that there was something preposterous about the whole notion—the notion that one of these restless, absurdly dressed middle-schoolers might actually be Peter Pan. As he changed his position in order to see more of their faces, he was tempted to abandon the whole endeavor, to accept the probability that Peter Pan had escaped the fairgrounds and was at that moment bound for places unknown, far from Walnut Crossing. Surely that was a saner position than believing that one of the little people at that railing—seemingly enthralled by the roar and clatter of the “amusements”—was a ruthless executioner.

Was it conceivable that the man whom Interpol credited with more than fifty hits, who cracked Mary Spalter’s skull on the edge of her bathtub, who hammered nails into Gus Gurikos’s eyes, who burned seven people to death in Cooperstown, who cut off Lex Bincher’s head, was now passing himself off as one of these children? As Gurney ambled past them as if he were trying to get a better view of the huge Ferris wheel, he found it mind-boggling to imagine any of them as a professional murderer—and not only a murderer but also a man who specialized in contracts others considered impossible.

That final thought pulled Gurney sideways to an issue he’d wondered about several times in the last few days but had spent no real time examining. It was probably the most perplexing question of all:

What was so hard about the hit on Carl Spalter?

What was the “impossible” aspect? What made it a job for Panikos in the first place?

Perhaps the answer to that one question would unravel all the other secrets in the case. Gurney decided then and there to think his way through it until the truth emerged. The simplicity of the question persuaded him that it was the right question. It even restored in him a modest sense of optimism. He felt that he was on the right track.

Then something startling happened.

An answer occurred to him that was as simple as the question.

At first he was afraid to breathe—as though the solution were as fragile as smoke and breathing might blow it away. But the more he examined it, the more he tested its solidity, the more convinced he became that it was right. And if it was right, then the Spalter murder case was finally solved.

As he stared at the staggeringly simple explanation taking shape in his mind, he felt the tingling excitement that always accompanied a dawning truth.

He repeated the key question to himself. What was so hard about the hit on Carl Spalter? What had made it seem so impossible?

Then he laughed out loud.

Because the answer was, quite simply, nothing.

Nothing at all had made it seem impossible.

As he walked back past the figures at the railing, he double-checked the validity of his insight and all its implications by asking himself what light it cast into the remaining dark corners of the case. His feeling of excitement intensified as one mystery after another dissolved.

Now he understood why Mary Spalter had to die.

He knew who had ordered the shot that ended Carl Spalter’s life. The motive was as plain as day. And darker than a night in hell.

He knew what the terrible secret was, what the nails in Gus’s head were all about, and what the slaughter in Cooperstown was supposed to accomplish.

He could see how Alyssa and Klemper and Jonah all fit in the puzzle.

The mystery of the shot that came from a place it couldn’t have come from was no longer a mystery.

In fact, everything about the Spalter murder case was suddenly simple. Nauseatingly simple.

And it all underscored one inescapable truth. Peter Pan had to be stopped.

As Gurney pondered that final challenge, his accelerating thoughts were interrupted by another whump.

Chapter 60. Perfect Little Peter Pan

Some of the fairgoers who were wandering by stopped, cocked their heads, looked at one another with anxious frowns. But no one at the railing gave any sign of noticing anything out of the ordinary. Perhaps, Gurney thought, they were too wrapped up in the racket of the amusements and the happy cries of the amused. And if someone at the railing was responsible for this latest in the series of muffled explosions—if he’d rigged the incendiary with a timer or had sent an electronic signal with a remote detonator—he was certainly doing nothing to advertise the fact.

Recognizing that this was likely his best, and maybe last, opportunity to decide for himself if any of these individuals merited further attention—or if he’d hit a dead end in his “hot pursuit” of Panikos—Gurney moved to the railing, to a position that afforded a reasonably good view of their profiles.

Putting Hardwick’s stated selections and exclusions aside, he studied each partial face and body shape in turn. Of the twelve, he was able to see nine clearly enough to make a confident judgment, and all those judgments were for exclusion. Among the nine were the three he himself had been following earlier, which gave him a brief feeling of regret for time wasted—even though he well knew that investigative work was as much about exclusion as inclusion.

In any event, only three individuals remained to be assessed. They happened to be the three closest to him, but all were turned away from him. All three were wearing the wretched uniform of the rebellious young.

Like many other little upstate towns that for years had lingered in a kind of Leave It to Beaver time warp of old-fashioned manners and appearances, Walnut Crossing was slowly being infiltrated—as Long Falls already had been—by the toxic culture of rap crap, gangsta clothes, and cheap heroin. The three young men that Gurney was watching seemed to exemplify the trend. He was hoping, however, that two of them were merely idiots and that the third …

Bizarre as the thought might seem, he was hoping that the third was evil incarnate.

He was also hoping that he’d have no doubt about it. It would be nice if it was all in the eyes—if he could with one good look identify evil as easily as he could exclude it. But he feared that would not be the case, that more than simple observation would be required to verify so crucial a judgment. He would almost certainly have to rely on some form of interview, some way of generating a series of challenges demanding a series of responses. Responses come in many forms—words, tones, expressions, body language. The truth is cumulative.

The question before him now, of course, was how to get from here to there.

The options were simplified when one of the three individuals who’d been looking away turned sufficiently in Gurney’s direction to reveal a facial structure quite inconsistent with the one appearing on the security videos. He said something to the other two about the Ferris wheel, at first seemed to be cajoling, then taunting them to come with him. In fact, it seemed, he was taunting them to come with him and the other nine, who were now pouring excitedly through the opening in the railing that led directly to the Ferris wheel line. Eventually he abandoned the two holdouts, after shouting that they were fucking pussies, and joined the line.

That’s when one of the two, the one nearest Gurney, finally turned his head in Gurney’s direction. He was wearing a black hoodie that concealed his hair and much of his forehead and shadowed his eyes. His face was painted a bilious yellow. A painted rust-colored smile obscured the contours of his mouth. Only one feature was plainly discernible. But that one riveted Gurney’s attention.

It was the nose—small, sharp, slightly hooked.

He couldn’t swear it was a perfect match with what he’d seen on the videos, but he felt the similarity was close enough to qualify this individual as a definite possible. More would be needed, however, to move the needle to probable. And he still hadn’t had gotten a decent view of Black Hoodie’s companion at the rail.

As Gurney was about to shift his position, that young man simplified the situation by turning his head sufficiently to eliminate himself (and his broad, flat face) from further consideration. He was saying something to Black Hoodie, which Gurney only partially overheard. He wasn’t sure, but it sounded like “You got any more shit?”

Black Hoodie’s response was inaudible, but there was nothing ambiguous about the disappointment on the other’s face. “You got any more coming?”

Again the answer was inaudible, but its tone was not pleasant. The questioner was obviously taken aback, and after an awkward hesitation, he backed away, then turned and hurried into the concourse nearest Hardwick. After a brief hesitation, Hardwick followed him, and they were soon both out of sight.

Black Hoodie was alone at the railing. He had turned back toward the carnival rides and was gazing now, with a kind of dreamy speculation, at the gaudy array of Ferris wheel lights. There had been a measured smoothness in his movement, and now there was a stillness about him that Gurney deemed far more adult than childlike.

Black Hoodie (as Gurney mentally called him, unwilling to give him the assassin’s name prematurely) was keeping his hands in the front pockets of his sweatshirt—which could be a convenient way for him to keep his hands hidden, as the skin on one’s hands is a powerful revealer of age, without the oddity of wearing gloves in August. His height—no more than five feet—was consistent with Peter Pan’s, and he appeared to have the same sort of slim body that left its gender an open question. There were specks of mud on his black sweatpants and sneakers, consistent with racing an ATV down Barrow Hill and across the soggy pasture bordering the fairgrounds. The suggestion in that snippet of overheard conversation with his companion at the rail that he may have been supplying drugs that evening would explain how a stranger might have been accepted instantly into the shabby little circle.

As Gurney was eyeing the black-clad figure and weighing this circumstantial evidence, the background strumming and twanging of country music that had filled the fairgrounds abruptly ceased—and was followed by several seconds of loud static and finally an announcement:

Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please. This is an emergency announcement. Please remain calm. This is an emergency announcement. We are currently responding to several fires of unknown origin. For everyone’s safety, we are discontinuing this evening’s scheduled events. We will be evacuating the fairgrounds in a safe and orderly fashion. Any rides now in progress will be the last ones this evening. We ask that all exhibitors begin closing down their booths and displays. We ask that everyone follow the instructions of security, fire, medical, and safety personnel. This is an emergency announcement. All fair visitors should begin proceeding in an orderly fashion toward the exits and the parking areas. I repeat, we are responding to several fires of unknown origin. For everyone’s safety at this time we must begin an orderly evacuation of the—

The announcement was truncated by the loudest explosion yet.

Panic was spreading widely. Shouts. Mothers screaming for their children. People looking around wildly, some struck motionless, some moving erratically.

Black Hoodie, standing at the rail, gazing up at the colossal Ferris wheel, showed no reaction at all. No shock, no curiosity. This, in Gurney’s estimation, was the most damning evidence so far. How could this person not react—unless what was happening was no surprise to him?

As was often the case in Gurney’s mental life, though, growing conviction brought with it a growing caution. He was all too aware of how one’s perceptions can start lining up to support a particular conclusion. Once a pattern begins to take shape, however erroneous it might be, the mind unconsciously favors any data points that support it and discounts any that don’t. The results can be disastrous and, particularly in law enforcement, fatal.

Suppose Black Hoodie was just another pathetic waster, stoned out of his mind, more absorbed by the carnival lights than by any real danger. Suppose he was just another one of a million people on the planet with a small hooked nose. Suppose the spattered mud on his pants had been there for the past week?

Suppose what seemed like an increasingly obvious pattern wasn’t a pattern at all?

Gurney had to do something, anything, to resolve the issue. And he had to do it alone. And quickly. There was no time left for subtlety. Or teamwork. God only knew where Hardwick had gotten to at that point. And there was no chance of gaining the cooperation of the local police, who were probably already in over their heads trying to deal with the incipient pandemonium—not to mention the obstacle of his having made an enemy of one of their own. If he approached them now, he’d be more likely to get himself arrested than to get their help in settling the Black Hoodie question.

The amusement rides were still roaring and screeching around their mechanical confinements. The Ferris wheel was slowly rotating, its size and the relative silence of its motion endowing it with a peculiar majesty among the lesser and noisier carnival contraptions. People were still moving in both directions on the circular concourse. Anxious parents were beginning to congregate at the railing, presumably to gather up their children as soon as they disembarked from the rides.

Gurney couldn’t wait any longer.

He gripped the Beretta in his loose sweatshirt pocket, released the safety, and made his way along the railing to a position a few feet behind Black Hoodie. Running now on little more than instinct and impulse, he began to sing softly.

Ring around the rosies,

Pocket full of posies.

Ashes, ashes,

All fall down.

A man and woman standing together near Gurney gave him a couple of odd glances. Black Hoodie didn’t move.

A ride called Wild Spinner rolled to a halt with the sound of gigantic nails on a blackboard. It disgorged a few dozen giddy kids, many of whom were hustled away by waiting adults—with the effect of clearing the area around Gurney.

With his hidden Beretta aimed at the back of the figure in front of him, he resumed his barely audible singing, maintaining the inanely lilting tune of the nursery rhyme as best he could, while adding his own words.

Perfect little Peter Pan

had the perfect murder plan—

till it all turned upside down.

Peter, Peter, perfect clown.

Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

Black Hoodie turned his head slightly, enough perhaps to get a peripheral glimpse of the size and position of whoever was behind him, but said nothing.

Gurney could now see several dark red circular marks about the diameter of small peas painted on the side of his cheekbone in a way that reminded him of the tear-shaped tattoos gang members often displayed in that same place—sometimes as memorials to murdered friends, sometimes as advertisements of murders they themselves had committed.

Then he felt a small frisson—as he realized that they weren’t just little red marks, or even red tears.

They were tiny red flowers.

Black Hoodie’s hands moved slightly inside his garment’s bulky front pockets.

In his own pocket, Gurney’s right forefinger slipped over the trigger of the Beretta.

In the concourse behind him, at a distance he estimated at no more than a hundred yards, there was another explosion—followed by shouts, screams, curses, the sharp clamor of several fire alarms going off at once, more screams, someone wailing the name “Joseph,” the sound of many running feet.

Black Hoodie stood perfectly still.

Gurney felt a rising anger as he imagined the scene behind him, the scene that was provoking those cries of pain and terror. He let that anger drive his next words. “You’re a dead man, Panikos.”

“You talking to me?” The tone of the question was conspicuous for its lack of concern. The accent was vaguely urban, with a scruffy attitude. The voice was ageless—childlike in an odd way—its gender no more certain than that of the body it came from.

Gurney studied what little he could see of the yellow painted face in the black cowl. The garish carnival ride lights, the cries of dismay and confusion welling up from the explosion sites, and the acrid odor of smoke blowing in the wind were transforming the creature before him into something unearthly. A miniature image of the Grim Reaper. A child actor playing the role of a demon.

Gurney replied evenly. “I’m talking to perfect Peter Pan, who shot the wrong man.”

The face in the cowl turned slowly toward him. Then the body began to follow.

“Stop where you are,” said Gurney. “Don’t move.”

“Gotta move, man.” A whiny distress had entered Black Hoodie’s voice. “How can I not move?”

“Stop now!”

The movement stopped. The unblinking eyes in the yellow face were focused now on the pocket where Gurney held the Beretta, ready to fire. “What are you gonna do, man?”

Gurney said nothing.

“You gonna shoot me?” The style of his speech, its cadence, its accent, all sounded about right for a tough street kid.

But, somehow, thought Gurney, not quite right enough. For a moment he couldn’t identify the problem. Then he realized what it was. It sounded to him like the intonation of some sort of generic street kid, not specific to any particular part of any particular city. It was like the deficiency in the speech of British actors playing New Yorkers. Their accents wandered from borough to borough. Ultimately, they were from nowhere.

“Am I going to shoot you?” Gurney frowned thoughtfully. “I’m going to shoot you if you don’t do exactly as I say.”

“Like what, man?” As he spoke, he began turning again as if to face Gurney head-on.

“Stop!” Gurney thrust the Beretta forward in his sweatshirt pocket, making its presence more obvious.

“I don’t know who you are, man, but you are fucking nuts.” He turned another few degrees.

“One more inch, Panikos, and I pull the trigger.”

“Who the hell is Panikos?” The tone was suddenly full of bafflement and indignation. Perhaps too full.

“You want to know who Panikos is?” Gurney smiled. “He’s the biggest fuck-up in the business.”

At that moment he noted a fleeting change in those cold eyes—something that appeared and disappeared in less than a second. If he had to label it, he’d say it was a glint of pure hatred.

It was replaced by a display of disgust. “You’re gone, man. You’re completely gone.”

“Maybe,” said Gurney calmly. “Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe, like you, I’m going to shoot the wrong man too. Maybe you’re going to catch a bullet just because you ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. That kind of thing happens, right?”

“This is bullshit, man! You’re not going to shoot me in cold blood in front of a thousand people at this fucking fair. You do that, that’s the end of your life, man. No escape. Picture the fucking headline, man—‘Crazy Cop Shoots Defenseless Kid.’ That’s what you want your family to see in the paper, man?”

Gurney’s smile broadened. “I see what you mean. That’s very interesting. Tell me something. How’d you know I was a cop?”

For the second time something happened in those eyes. Not hatred this time, more like a one-second hiccough in a video before normal play resumed. “You gotta be a cop, right? You gotta be a cop. Obvious, right?”

“What makes it obvious?”

Black Hoodie shook his head. “It’s just obvious, man.” He laughed humorlessly, revealing small, sharp teeth. “You want to know something? I’ll tell you something. This conversation is bullshit. You’re too fucking nuts, man. This conversation is over.” In a quick sweeping movement, he turned the rest of the way toward Gurney, his elbows rising at the same time like the wings of a bird, his eyes wide and wild, both hands still hidden in the folds of his oversized black shirt.

Gurney pulled out his Beretta and fired.

Chapter 61. Perfect Chaos

After the pistol’s sharp report, as the slight black-clad figure fell to the ground, the first sound Gurney was aware of was Madeleine’s cry of anguish.

She was standing no more than twenty feet away, evidently on her way back from the corrals. Her expression reflected not only the natural shock of witnessing a shooting, but the dreadful incomprehensibility of her husband being the shooter and the victim being, to all appearances, a child. Hand to her mouth, she seemed frozen in place, as if the effort to make sense of what she was seeing occupied her so completely that no motion was possible.

Other people on the concourse were in a state of confusion, some backing away, some angling for a better view, asking one another what had happened.

Shouting “Police!” several times, Gurney pulled out his wallet and flipped it open with his free hand, raising it over his head to display his NYPD credentials and reduce the possibility of an armed citizen intervening.

As he was approaching the body on the ground to confirm the neutralization of any danger and to check vital signs, a harsh voice behind him broke through the anxious jabbering of the onlookers. “Hold it right there!”

He stopped immediately. That tone was one he’d heard too many times on the job—a brittle layer of anger enclosing a jittery attitude. The safest path was to do absolutely nothing except comply with all instructions quickly and accurately.

An obvious cop in plain clothes came up on Gurney’s right side, gripped his right forearm tightly, and removed the pistol from his hand. At the same time, someone behind him took the wallet from his raised left hand.

A few moments later, presumably after examining the ID, the edgy voice announced, “Goddamn—the man we’ve been looking for.” Gurney recognized it now as the voice of the uniformed cop moonlighting in the fair security operation.

He walked around in front of Gurney, looked at him, looked down at the body on the ground, looked back at Gurney. “What the hell is this? You shot this kid?”

“He’s not a kid. He’s the fugitive I told you about at the gate.” He was speaking loudly and clearly, wanting as many witnesses to his description of the situation as possible. “You better check his vitals. The wound should be between the right shoulder and right pleural cavity. Have the EMT check ASAP for arterial bleeding.”

“Who the fuck are you?” The cop looked down at the body again. Bewilderment was creeping into his hostility without diminishing it. “He’s a kid. No weapon. Why’d you shoot him?”

“He’s not a kid. His name is Petros Panikos. You need to contact BCI in Sasparilla and FBI Regional in Albany. He was the hit man in the Carl Spalter murder.”

“Hit man? Him? You fucking kidding me? Why’d you shoot him?”

Gurney gave him the only acceptable legal answer. It also happened to be true. “Because I believed my life was in imminent danger.”

“From who? From what?”

“If you take his hands out of his pockets, you’ll find a weapon in one of them.”

“Is that a fact?” He looked around for the plainclothes guy, who seemed to be concluding a triage dispute with someone on his walkie-talkie. “Dwayne? Hey, Dwayne! You want to pull the boy’s hands out of his pockets? So we can see what he’s got? Man here says you’re gonna find a gun.”

Dwayne said a few final words into the walkie-talkie, clipped it back on his belt. “Yes, sir. No problem.” He knelt by the body. Black Hoodie’s eyes were still open. He appeared to be conscious. “You got a gun, boy?”

There was no response.

“We don’t want nobody to get hurt now, right? So I’m just going to check here, see if maybe you have a gun here you might’ve forgot.” As he patted the front pocket area of the thick black sweatshirt, he frowned. “Feels like you might have something in there, boy. You want to tell me what it is, so nobody gets hurt?”

Black Hoodie’s eyes were on Dwayne’s face now, but he said nothing. Dwayne reached into both pockets simultaneously, grasped the concealed hands, and slowly pulled them both out into the light.

The left hand was empty. The right hand held an incongruously girlish pink cell phone.

The uniformed cop gave Gurney an exaggerated look of mock sympathy. “Oooh, that’s not good. You went and shot that little boy because he had a phone in his pocket. A harmless little phone. That’s not good at all. We got a serious ‘imminent danger’ question here. Hey, Dwayne, check the kid’s vitals, get a call in for the EMTs.” He looked back at Gurney, shaking his head. “Not good, mister, not good at all.”

“He’s carrying. I’m sure of it. You need to do a closer check.”

“Sure of it? How the hell could you be sure of it?”

“You work inner-city homicide for twenty-plus years, you get a good sense for who’s carrying.”

“That a fact? I’m impressed. Well, I guess he was carrying, all right. Just wasn’t carrying a gun,” he added with an ugly grin. “Which kinda changes the lay of the land in an unfavorable way for you. Be hard to call this shooting righteous, even if you were still a police officer—which, of course, you’re not. I’m afraid you’re going to need to come with us, Mr. Gurney.”

Gurney noticed that Hardwick had returned and positioned himself at the inside edge of the growing circle of gawkers, not far from Madeleine, who now appeared less frozen but no less fearful. Hardwick’s eyes had taken on an icy malamute stillness that signaled danger—the particular danger that arises from indifference to danger. Gurney got the feeling that if he were to give a small nod in the direction of the antagonistic cop, Hardwick would calmly put a nine-millimeter round in the man’s sternum.

It was then that a sound of humming caught Gurney’s attention—a humming barely audible amid the growing clamor of the fire and medical equipment moving in all directions through the fairgrounds. As he strained to make out the source of this incongruous sound, it grew stronger, with a more noticeable pattern. And then the pattern became recognizable.

It was “Ring Around the Rosies.”

Gurney recognized the melody first, its source second. It was coming from the slightly parted lips of the wounded person on the ground—the slightly parted lips in the center of the painted rust-red smile. Blood, just a bit redder than the smile, was beginning to soak through the shoulder area of the black hooded sweatshirt and stain the dusty pavement. As everyone who could hear it stood staring, the humming was gradually transformed into the actual words:

Ring around the rosies,

Pocket full of posies,

Ashes, ashes,

All fall down.

As he sang, he slowly raised the pink cell phone that had been left in his hand.

“Jesus!” cried Gurney to the two cops as the truth hit him. “The phone! Grab it! That’s the detonator! Grab it!”

When neither of them seemed to understand what he was saying, he hurled himself forward, taking a wild kick at the phone—as the two cops launched themselves at him. His foot reached the phone, sending it skittering across the concrete, just as he was tackled.

But Peter Pan had already pushed the SEND button.

Three seconds later there was a rapid-fire series of six powerful explosions—sharp, near-deafening blasts—not the muffled reports of the earlier incendiaries.

Gurney’s ears were ringing—to the exclusion of all other sounds. As the cops who’d tackled him were struggling to their feet, there was a tremendous impact on the ground very close by. Gurney looked around wildly for Madeleine, saw her grasping the railing, evidently stunned. He ran toward her, extending his arms. Just as he reached her, she screamed, pointing over his shoulder to something behind him.

He turned, stared, blinking, not registering for a moment what his eyes were seeing.

The Ferris wheel was unmoored from its supports.

But it was still turning.

Still turning. Not rotating in place on its axle—the steel supports of which appeared to have been blasted away—but rolling ponderously forward in a cloud of gagging dust, away from its cracked concrete base.

Then the lights went out—everywhere—and the sudden darkness immediately amplified and multiplied the screams of terror all around, near and far.

Gurney and Madeleine grabbed each other as the monstrous wheel rolled by, smashing the railing that had enclosed it, silhouetted by a lightning flash in the low clouds, its wobbling structure emitting not only the shrieks of its riders but also the awful sounds of metal twisting against metal, scraping, snapping like steel whips.

The only illumination Gurney could see in the fairgrounds now was being provided by the intermittent lightning and the scattered fires, fanned and spread by the wind. In a Fellini-esque scene of hell on earth, the untethered Ferris wheel was rolling in a kind of nightmarish slow motion toward the central concourse—mostly in darkness, except when it was caught in the blue-white strobe of a lightning flash.

Madeleine’s fingers were digging into Gurney’s arm. Her voice was breaking. “What in the name of God is happening?”

“It’s a power failure,” he said.

The absurdity of the understatement struck them both at the same instant, provoking a shared burst of crazy laughter.

“Panikos … he … he mined the place with explosives,” Gurney managed to add, looking around wildly. The darkness was filled with acrid smoke and screams.

“You killed him?” cried Madeleine, as one might ask in desperation if the rattlesnake in front of them was safely dead.

“I shot him.” He looked toward the place where it happened. He waited for a flash of lightning to direct him to the black form on the ground, realizing as he did so that the spot was in the path the Ferris wheel had followed. The thought of what he might see gave him a surge of nausea. The first flash got him fairly close, with Madeleine still glued to his arm. The second flash revealed what he didn’t want to see.

“My God!” cried Madeleine. “Oh my God!”

Evidently, one of the Ferris wheel’s huge structural circles of steel had rolled over the middle of the body—essentially cutting it in half.

As they stood there in the darkness between the split-second flashes of light and blasts of thunder, the rain started, and soon it was a downpour. The lightning strobes showed a shifting, stumbling mass of people. It was probable that only the darkness and the deluge were keeping them from stampeding and trampling one another.

Dwayne and the uniformed cop had apparently been driven back from Panikos’s body by the progress of the rolling Ferris wheel—which they were now following into the main concourse, seemingly drawn helplessly along after it by the terrible screams of its trapped riders.

It was a measure of the staggering hellishness of the scene—with all its sensory, mental, and emotional overload—that they could abandon a fresh homicide like that with hardly a backward glance.

Madeleine sounded like she was straining desperately to speak calmly. “My God, David, what should we do?”

Gurney didn’t answer. He was looking down, waiting for the next flash to show him the face in the black cowl. By the time the flash came, the pelting rain had washed much of the yellow paint away.

He saw what he was waiting to see. All doubt was erased. He was certain that the delicate heart-shaped mouth was the same mouth he’d seen in the security videos.

The mangled body at his feet was indeed that of Petros Panikos.

The fabled executioner no longer existed.

Peter Pan was now nothing but a pathetic bag of broken bones.

Madeleine pulled Gurney back out of the pool of spreading blood and rainwater he was standing in, kept pulling him back until they reached the crushed railing. The flashes of lightning and thunder—punctuating the terrifying thumps and rattles and metallic screeches and human wails from the still-rolling Ferris wheel—were making rational thought nearly impossible.

Madeleine’s efforts at self-control were collapsing, her voice starting to break. “God, David, God, people are dying—they’re dying—what can we do?”

“Christ only knows—whatever we can—but first—right now—I need to get ahold of that phone—that phone Panikos used—the detonator—before it gets lost—before it sets off something else.”

A familiar voice, raised almost in a shout amid the din, caught Gurney off-balance. “Stay with her. I’ll get it.”

Behind him, behind the remains of the railing, back where the Ferris wheel had been mounted, the wooden platform riders used for entering and exiting their seats suddenly burst into flames. In the uneven orangey light cast by the new fire, he caught sight of Hardwick making his way through the slanting rain toward the body on the ground.

When he got to it, he hesitated before bending down to reach for the gleaming pink phone, which was still in Panikos’s hand. It was too soon for rigor mortis to have stiffened the finger joints, so extricating the phone should have posed no problem. But when Hardwick tried to lift it away, Panikos’s hand and arm rose up with it.

Even in the dim firelight, Gurney could see why. One end of a short lanyard was attached to the phone, and the other end was looped around Panikos’s wrist. Hardwick grasped the phone firmly, pulling the lanyard loose. The motion raised Panikos’s arm higher. The instant the arm was fully extended, there was a loud pistol report.

Gurney heard a sharp grunt from Hardwick—as he toppled face-down onto the little corpse.

A sheriff’s deputy had been half running with the help of a flashlight along the curved concourse in the direction of the ponderously rolling Ferris wheel. At the sound of the shot he stopped abruptly, his free hand on the butt of his holstered gun, his gaze moving in a dangerously overloaded state from Gurney to the crossed bodies on the ground and back again.

“What the hell is this?”

The answer came from Hardwick himself, straining to push himself up off Panikos, his voice a hissing mix of agony and fury, forced out through clenched teeth. “This dead fucker just shot me.”

The deputy stared in understandable bewilderment. Then, as he stepped closer, the emotion went beyond simple bewilderment. “Jack?”

The answer was an indecipherable growl.

He looked over at Gurney. “Is that … is that Jack Hardwick?”

Chapter 62. A Trick of the Mind

Sometimes in the midst of a battlefield apocalypse, when the assault on Gurney’s mental resources seemed most devastating, a possible path to safety would suddenly present itself. This time it appeared in the form of Deputy J. Olzewski.

Olzewski recognized Hardwick from a multiagency law enforcement seminar on special provisions of the Patriot Act. He was unaware of Hardwick’s separation from BCI, which made gaining his cooperation easier than it might have been otherwise.

In a highly abbreviated manner appropriate to the emergency, Gurney gave the deputy an outline of the situation and got his agreement to secure the immediate area around Panikos’s body, to take official custody of Panikos’s cell phone, to summon his own department’s supervisory personnel rather than the local police, to personally conduct the search for the concealed weapon that had discharged when Panikos’s arm had been raised, and to ensure that the weapon passed into the custody of the Sheriff’s Department.

Although moving Hardwick would be risky, they all agreed that waiting for an ambulance to reach him under the circumstances would be riskier.

Despite the bleeding bullet wound in his side, Hardwick himself was hell-bent to get back on his feet—which he managed to accomplish with the help of Gurney and Olzewski and an explosion of curses—and head for the gate where the emergency vehicles would be entering. As if to endorse this decision, a generator kicked in and some of the concourse lights came back on—although only at a small fraction of their normal brightness. At least the change made movement possible beyond the illumination limits of fires and lightning flashes.

Hardwick was hobbling and grimacing, supported by Gurney on one side and Madeleine on the other, when the Ferris wheel—its upper half visible over the top of the main tent in the next concourse—began to shudder and wobble with the sounds of snapping metal and heavy objects smashing against the pavement. Then, in a kind of surreal slow motion, the huge circular structure tilted away out of sight beyond the tent—followed a second later by an earth-shaking crash.

Gurney felt nauseous. Madeleine began to cry. Hardwick uttered a guttural sound that might have been expressing emotional horror or physical pain. It was hard to tell how much of the surrounding calamity he was absorbing.

As they pressed on toward the vehicle gate, however, something changed his mind about finding a place in an ambulance. “Too many people here hurt, too much pressure on the medics, don’t want to take anybody’s place, keep anyone from getting help, don’t want to do that.” His voice was low, no more than a rough whisper.

Gurney leaned in to make sure he was hearing right. “What do you want to do, Jack?”

“Hospital. Out of the radius. Everything here’ll be swamped. Can’t handle it. Cooperstown. Cooperstown’ll be better. Straight to the ER. How about it, ace? Think you can drive my car?”

It struck Gurney as a terrible idea—transporting a man with a bullet wound fifty-five miles over winding two-lane country roads in a vehicle with no first-aid equipment. But he agreed to do it. Because entrusting Hardwick to the mercies of a crushingly overburdened emergency system in the middle of a cataclysm unlike anything the local EMTs had ever faced before seemed like an even more terrible idea. God only knew how many mangled, barely alive Ferris wheel victims, not to mention victims of the several previous explosions and fires, would have to be treated before him.

So they plodded on through the vehicle gate—which also functioned as the exhibitor’s gate—outside of which, at the edge of the entry road, Hardwick had parked his old Pontiac muscle car. Before they got into it, Gurney took off the shirt he was wearing under his sweatshirt and tore it in three pieces. Two he folded into bulky wads and placed over the front entry wound and the rear exit wound in Hardwick’s side. He tied the third tightly around Hardwick’s waist to hold the wads in place. He and Madeleine eased him into the front passenger seat, reclining it as far as it would go.

As soon as Hardwick recovered sufficiently from the pain of the process, he took his cell phone from his belt, pressed a speed dial number, waited, and left a message in an utterly exhausted but smiling voice, presumably for Esti. “Hi, babe. Little problem. Got sloppy, got shot. Embarrassing. Got shot by a dead guy. Hard to explain. On my way to Cooperstown ER. Sherlock’s the chauffeur. I love you, Peaches. Talk later.”

It reminded Gurney to call Kyle. That call also went into voice mail. “Hey, son. Checking in. I followed our man to the fair. All hell broke loose. Jack Hardwick got shot. I’m about to drive him to the hospital in Cooperstown. Hope everything there is okay. Give me a call and fill me in as soon as you can. Love you.”

As soon as he ended the call, Madeleine got into the back seat, he got into the driver’s seat, and they were on their way.

The mass of vehicles fleeing the immediate area of the fairgrounds created a kind of high-pressure traffic that felt surreal in a place where cows as a rule far outnumbered cars, and the rare moments of obstruction were caused by slow-moving hay wagons.

By the time they reached the county route, the line of thunderstorms had passed to the east in the direction of Albany, and media helicopters were moving in, raking the valley with their searchlights—evidently hunting for the most photogenic bits of catastrophe they could find. Gurney could almost hear the breathlessly creative RAM-TV news report on “the panicky flight into the night from what some suspect may have been a terrorist attack.”

Once free of the temporary congestion, Gurney drove as fast as he dared, and then some. With the speedometer reading between fifty and a hundred most of the way, he made it to the Cooperstown ER in about forty-five minutes. Amazingly, along the way not one word was spoken. The harrowing combination of the excessive speed, Gurney’s aggressive approach to curves, and the barely muffled roar of the big V8 seemed to freeze out any possibility of conversation en route—no matter how large and urgent the open issues and unanswered questions.

Two hours later, the situation was quite different.

Hardwick had been examined, probed, scanned, needled, stitched, bandaged, and transfused; put on an IV drip of antibiotics, painkillers, and electrolytes; and admitted to the general hospital for further observation. Kyle had arrived unexpectedly and had joined Gurney and Madeleine in Hardwick’s room. The three of them were sitting in chairs by Hardwick’s bed.

Kyle filled everyone in on everything that had occurred from the arrival of the police at the house up to the removal of Klemper’s body and the abrupt suspension of the initial investigatory process when they, along with all other police and emergency personnel in a fifty-mile radius, had been called to the fairgrounds—leaving a large area outside the house taped off as a designated crime scene. At that point, having overheard enough of the police communications to have a sense of the disaster in progress, Kyle had replaced the flat on the car with the spare and headed for the fairgrounds himself. It was then that he checked his phone and found his father’s message about driving to the Cooperstown hospital.

When he finished his narrative, Madeleine let out a nervous laugh. “I guess you figured if a madman was blowing up the fair, that’s where your father would be?”

Kyle looked uncomfortable, glanced at Gurney, said nothing.

Madeleine smiled and shrugged. “I’d have made the same assumption.” Then she asked a question of no one in particular in a deceptively casual tone. “First it was Lex Bincher. Then Horace. Then Mick Klemper. Who was supposed to be next?”

Kyle looked again at his father.

Hardwick was lying back against a pile of pillows, restful but alert.

Gurney finally offered a reply so oblique, it was hardly a reply at all. “Well, the main thing, the important thing, the only thing that matters, is that it’s all over.”

Now they all stared at him—Kyle curious, Hardwick skeptical, Madeleine baffled.

Hardwick spoke slowly—as though speaking faster might hurt. “You gotta be fucking kidding.”

“Not really. The pattern is finally clear,” said Gurney. “Your client, Kay, will win her appeal. The shooter is dead. The danger has been neutralized. The case is over.”

“Over? You forget about the corpse on your lawn? And that we have no proof that the midget you shot is really Peter Pan? And that those promotion ads on RAM-TV promising your big Spalter case revelations are going to have every cop involved in it out for your ass?”

Gurney smiled. “I said the case was over. The complications and conflicts will take time to resolve. The resentments will fester. The recriminations will linger. It will take time for the facts to be accepted. But too much of the truth has come out at this point for anyone to rebury it.”

Madeleine was gazing at him intently. “Are you saying that you’re done with the Spalter murder case?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“You’re walking away from it?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“You’ve never walked away from a puzzle with a major piece still missing.”

“That’s right.”

“But you’re doing it now?”

“No, I’m not. Quite the opposite.”

“You mean it’s over because you’ve solved it? You know who hired Peter Pan to kill Carl Spalter?”

“The fact is, nobody hired him to kill Carl.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Carl wasn’t supposed to be killed. This whole case has been a comedy—or tragedy—of errors from the very beginning. It’s going to end up being a great teaching tool. The chapter in the criminal investigation textbook will be titled ‘The Fatal Consequences of Accepting Reasonable Assumptions.’ ”

Kyle was leaning forward in his chair. “Carl wasn’t supposed to be killed? How’d you figure that out?”

“By banging my head against all the other pieces of the case that made no sense with Carl as the bull’s-eye. The prosecution’s wife-shoots-husband scenario fell apart almost as soon as I looked closely at it. It seemed far more likely that Kay, or maybe someone else, had hired a pro to hit Carl. But even that scenario had awkward aspects—like where the shot actually came from and the general complexity of the hit and the peculiarity of bringing in an expensive but uncontrollable pro like Peter Pan for what should have been a fairly straightforward job. It just never felt right. And then there were some old cases that kept coming to mind—a shooting in an alley, an exploding car.”

Kyle’s eyes were widening. “Those cases were connected to Carl’s murder?”

“Not directly. But they both involved faulty assumptions about timing and sequence. Maybe I sensed those same assumptions might be lurking in the Spalter case.”

“What assumptions?”

“In the alley shooting, two big ones. That the shot the officer fired actually struck the suspect and killed him. And that the officer was lying about which way the suspect was facing when he shot him. Both assumptions were quite reasonable. But they were wrong. The bullet wound that ended up killing the suspect had been incurred before the officer arrived on the scene. And the officer was telling the truth. With the car, the assumption was that it exploded because the driver lost control of it and drove it into a ravine. In fact, the driver lost control and drove it into a ravine because it exploded.”

Kyle nodded thoughtfully.

Hardwick made one of his distressed faces. “So what’s this got to do with Carl?”

“Everything—sequence, timing, assumptions.”

“How about spelling that out in the simple language of a peasant like me?”

“Everyone assumed that Carl stumbled and fell because he was shot. But suppose he was shot because he stumbled and fell.”

Hardwick blinked, his eyes revealing a rapid rethinking of the possibilities. “You mean stumbled and fell in front of the intended victim?”

Madeleine looked unconvinced. “Isn’t that a bit of a stretch? That he was accidentally shot because he stumbled in front of the person the hit man was actually aiming at?”

“But that’s exactly what everyone saw happen, but then they all changed their minds—because their minds immediately reconnected the dots in a more conventional way.”

Kyle looked perplexed. “What do you mean, ‘That’s exactly what everyone saw happen’?”

“Everyone at the funeral who was interviewed claimed they thought at first that Carl had stumbled—maybe tripped over something or turned his ankle and lost his balance. A little while later, when the bullet wound was discovered, they all automatically revised their original perceptions. Essentially, their brains unconsciously were evaluating the relative likelihood of two possible sequences and favoring the one that normally would have had the greater chance of occurring.”

“Isn’t that what our brains are supposed to do?”

“Up to a point. The problem is, once we accept a certain sequence—in this case, ‘was shot, stumbled, and fell’ rather than ‘stumbled, was shot, and fell’—we tend to dismiss and forget the other. Our new version becomes the only version. The mind is built to resolve ambiguities and move on. In practice this often means leaping from reasonable assumption to assumed truth, and not looking back. Of course, if the reasonable assumption happens to be inaccurate, everything built on it later is nonsense and eventually collapses.”

Madeleine was exhibiting the impatient frown with which she greeted most of Gurney’s psychological theorizing. “So who was Panikos aiming at when Carl got in the way?”

“The answer is easy enough to get to. It would be the person whose role as a victim makes all the other oddities of the case make sense.”

Kyle’s eyes were fastened on his father. “You already know who it is, don’t you?”

“I have a pretty good idea.”

Madeleine spoke up excitedly. “The thing I keep hearing you talk about, the ‘oddity’ that bothers you the most, is the involvement of Peter Pan—who supposedly only accepted really difficult contracts. So there are just two questions. First, ‘Who at the Mary Spalter funeral would be the most difficult to kill?’ And second, ‘Did Carl pass in front of that person as he was heading for the podium?’ ”

Hardwick’s interjected response sounded certain, despite his speech being somewhat blurred. “Answer to the first is Jonah. Answer to the second is yes.”

Gurney had come to the same conclusion nearly four hours earlier on the concourse by the Ferris wheel, but it was reassuring to see another mind arrive at the same place. With Jonah as the intended victim, all the twisted pieces of the case straightened out. Jonah was somewhere between difficult and impossible to locate physically, which made him the perfect challenge for Panikos. In fact, his mother’s funeral may well have been the only event that was capable of guaranteeing his presence in a predictable place at a predictable time, which is why Panikos killed her. Jonah’s seated position at graveside solved the line-of-sight problem from the Axton Avenue apartment. Carl couldn’t have been hit as he stepped past Alyssa, but he could easily have been hit by a bullet intended for Jonah as he stumbled to the ground in front of him. That scenario also explained the inconsistency that had troubled Gurney from the outset: How did Carl manage to travel ten or twelve feet after a bullet had destroyed the motor center of his brain? The simple answer was that he didn’t. And finally, the absurd outcome—in which “the Magician” shot the wrong man, making a potential laughingstock of himself in the very circles where his reputation mattered—explained his subsequent deadly efforts to keep that ruinous fact a secret.

The next question followed naturally.

Kyle asked it, uneasily. “If Jonah was the real target, who hired Panikos to kill him?”

From a simple cui bono perspective, it seemed to Gurney that the answer was obvious. Only one person would have benefited significantly from Jonah’s death, and he would have benefited very significantly indeed.

The expressions on their faces showed that the answer was equally obvious to everyone in the room.

“Slimy piece of shit,” muttered Hardwick.

“Oh, God.” Madeleine looked as if her view of human nature had absorbed a body blow.

They all stared at one another, as if wondering if there could be an alternative explanation.

But it seemed that there was no escaping the loathsome truth.

The man who’d bought the hit that killed Carl Spalter must have been none other than Carl Spalter himself. In his effort to do away with his brother, he’d brought about his own terrible demise—slow death in full knowledge of his full responsibility.

It was both horrifying and ludicrous.

But it had about it a terrible, undeniably satisfying symmetry.

It was karma with a vengeance.

And it finally provided an adequate explanation of that look of dread and despair on the face of the dying man in the courtroom—a man already in hell.

For the next quarter of an hour, the conversation veered between bleak observations on fratricide and efforts to come to terms with the harrowing practicalities of the situation in which they were entangled.

As Hardwick put it slowly but determinedly, “Tragic Cain-and-Abel shit aside, we need to figure out where we stand. A giant law enforcement clusterfuck is about to begin, with every participant doing his best to be a fucker, not a fuckee.”

Gurney nodded his agreement. “Where do you want to start?”

Before Hardwick could answer, Esti appeared at the door—out of breath and looking fearful, relieved, and curious in rapid succession.

“Hey! Peaches!” Hardwick’s rough whisper was accompanied by a soft smile. “How’d you manage to get away down there with all hell breaking loose?”

She ignored the question, just hurried over to the side of his bed and squeezed his hand. “How are you doing?”

He gave her a twisted little smile. “No problem. Slippery bullet. Went right through me without hitting anything that matters.”

“Good!” She sounded alarmed and happy at the same time.

“So tell me, how’d you get away?”

“I didn’t really get away—not officially—just took a detour on my way to a traffic assignment. Would you believe it—we have more idiots coming into the area now than trying to get out of it. Disaster lovers, gawkers, jerks!”

“So they’re putting investigators on traffic assignments?”

“They’re putting everybody on everything. You can’t believe what a mess it is down there. And lots of rumors flying around.” She looked significantly over at Gurney, who was sitting at the foot of the bed. “There’s talk about a crazy hit man blowing everything up. There’s talk about an NYPD detective shooting a kid. Or maybe shooting the crazy hit man? Or some unidentified midget?” She looked back at Hardwick. “One of the deputies told me that the midget was Panikos, and that he’s the one who shot you—and somehow he did this after he was already dead. You see what I mean? Everybody’s talking, nobody’s making sense. And on top of all that, there’s a jurisdictional pissing match between the county-level sheriff’s people, the local people, the state people, maybe soon the feds. Why not? More the merrier, right? And this is all happening while crazy people in the parking lot are ramming one another, every asshole trying to get out first. And even crazier assholes trying to get in, maybe take pictures, put them on Facebook. So that’s the way it is down there.” She looked back and forth between Hardwick and Gurney. “You guys were there. What’s with the kid? You shot him? He shot you? What on earth were you doing there to begin with?”

Hardwick looked at Gurney. “Be my guest. Talking’s getting rough for me right now.”

“Okay. I’ll make it fast, but I need to start at the beginning.”

Esti listened in anxious amazement to Gurney’s rapid recounting of the key events of the evening—from the lumber pile explosion and death of Klemper by the asparagus patch right up to the motorcycle chase and the death of Peter Pan in the midst of the rampant destruction at the fair.

After a stunned silence, her first question was a big one. “Can you prove that the person you shot is actually Panikos?”

“Yes and no. We can definitely prove that the person I shot is the same person who set off the series of explosions—and whose concealed gun discharged and shot Jack. The sheriff’s people have custody of his body, his gun, and his cell phone—which he was using as a remote detonator. The nearest cell tower records will show that he called a series of numbers in that same location. And I have no doubt that the times of those calls will relate precisely to the times of the explosions—which can be verified through fairgrounds security recordings. If we have any luck, the bomb fragments at the fair will include bits of cell phone detonation systems, and the systems will match those that were used at Bincher’s house. And we’ll almost certainly get a match between the incendiary chemical formulas used at the fair and at Bincher’s. If the concealed weapon on Panikos’s body was used elsewhere, that could open another door. Linking the body and its DNA back to the Panikos identity in Europe will be a job for Interpol and their interested partners. In the meantime, pre-autopsy photos of his face, which was intact at last sight, can be compared to the features captured on the security videos from Axton Avenue and Emmerling Oaks.”

As Esti was nodding slowly in an evident effort to absorb and remember all of this, Gurney concluded, “I’m one hundred percent convinced that the body belongs to Panikos. But from a purely practical cover-my-ass legal perspective, it doesn’t matter. We can prove that the body belongs to an individual who was willfully responsible for the deaths of God only knows how many people in just the past couple of hours.”

“Actually, it’s not only God who knows. The latest count is between fifty and a hundred.”

“What?”

“That’s the latest as I was leaving for my traffic assignment. The number is expected to rise. Severe burns, two collapsed buildings, a fatal dispute in the parking lot, kids who got trampled. And the big one was the collapsing Ferris wheel.”

“Fifty to a hundred?” whispered Madeleine, horrified.

“Christ.” Gurney leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. He could see the Ferris wheel tipping, slowly falling, disappearing behind the tent. He could hear the shocking crash, the screams piercing the awful din.

There was a prolonged silence in the room, broken by Hardwick. “Could have been even worse, maybe a lot worse,” he growled, coming back to life, “if Dave didn’t stop the little bastard when he did.”

To this observation there were somber nods of agreement.

“Plus,” added Hardwick, “in the middle of all that horrible shit, he managed to solve the Spalter murder case.”

Esti looked startled. “Solved … how?”

“Tell her, Sherlock.”

Gurney ran through the scenario with Carl as the tragic villain who initiated the plot that fatally backfired.

“So his plan was to eliminate his brother, take control of Spalter Realty, liquidate the assets for his own use?”

Gurney nodded. “That’s how I see it.”

Hardwick added his own nod. “Fifty million bucks. Just about right to buy the governor’s mansion.”

“And he figured we’d never get him for the hit? God, what an arrogant bastard!” She glanced curiously at Gurney. “You have a strange look on your face. What’s that about?”

“Just thinking that a hit on his brother could’ve been a major plus in Carl’s campaign. He could’ve positioned it as the mob’s effort to scare him out of politics—their effort to keep a man of integrity from taking over the state government. I wonder if that might have been part of his plan all along—to position his brother’s murder as proof of his own virtue?”

“I like it,” said Hardwick, with a cynical glint in his eyes. “Ride that fucking corpse like a white horse—straight to his inauguration!”

Gurney smiled. He regarded the resurgence of Hardwick’s vulgarity as a positive health indicator.

Esti changed the subject. “So Klemper and Alyssa were just rotten little vultures trying to cash in, after the fact, at Kay’s expense?”

“You could say that,” said Gurney.

“Actually,” added Hardwick with some relish, “more like one rotten little vulture named Alyssa and one idiotic vulture-fucker named Mick the Dick.”

After gazing at him for several long seconds with the pained fondness one might have for a charmingly incorrigible child, Esti took his hand again and squeezed it. “I better get going. I’m supposed to be intercepting and diverting traffic—idiots heading toward the fairgrounds from the interstate.”

“Shoot the bastards,” he suggested helpfully.

There was some more discussion after she left, discussion that drifted into theories of guilt and self-destruction, all of which appeared to be putting Hardwick to sleep.

Kyle brought up something he’d remembered from a college psychology class, Freud’s theory of accidents—the idea that these events may not really be “accidental” at all but have a purpose: to prevent or punish an action about which the person is conflicted. “I wonder, could something like that have been behind Carl’s stumbling the way he did in front of his brother?”

No one seemed inclined to take up the issue.

As if groping for some organizing structure into which he could fit the chaotic events, he raised the subject of karma. “It wasn’t just Carl whose evil actions came flying back at him. I mean, think about it. The same thing happened to Panikos when he was crushed by the Ferris wheel that he blew up. And look what happened to Mick Klemper when he came after Dad. Even Lex Bincher—he kind of went wild with that big ego trip on RAM-TV, claiming credit for the whole investigation, and it got him killed. Man, like, this karma thing is real.”

Kyle sounded so earnest, so excited by this idea, so young—sounding and looking so much like he did in his enthusiastic moments as a teenager—that Gurney felt an urge to hug him. But to act on so spontaneous an impulse, especially in public, wasn’t in his nature.

A short while later two aides came to take Hardwick back to Radiology for some additional scans. As they settled him on the rolling stretcher, he turned to Gurney. “Thanks, Davey. I’m … I’m thinking you might have saved my life … getting me here so quickly.” A rare thing for Hardwick, he said it without any ironic twist.

“Well …” Gurney muttered awkwardly, never comfortable with being thanked, “you’ve got a fast car.”

Hardwick uttered a small laugh—which ended in a stifled yelp at the pain it produced—and they wheeled him out.

Madeleine, Kyle, and Gurney were left in the room, standing around the vacated bed. All perhaps finally on the verge of collapse, all with nothing to say.

The silence was broken by the ringing of a phone, which turned out to be Kyle’s. He glanced at the ID screen. “Jeez,” he said to no one in particular, then looked at his father. “It’s Kim. I told her I’d call her, but with everything …” After a moment of indecision, he added, “I should talk to her.” He stepped out into the corridor and, speaking softly, moved out of sight and hearing.

Madeleine was gazing at Gurney with an expression that was at once full of great relief and great weariness—the same qualities that were in her voice. “You came through it all right,” she said. Then added, “That’s the main thing.”

“Yes.”

“And you figured it all out. Once again.”

“Yes. At least, I think so.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt about it.” On her face was a gentle, indecipherable smile.

A silence fell between them.

In addition to a deep wave of emotional and physical exhaustion, Gurney began to feel a widespread soreness and stiffness setting in—which, after some puzzlement, he attributed to being tackled by the two cops during his efforts to knock the pink cell phone out of Panikos’s hands.

He was suddenly too tired to think, too tired to stand.

For a moment, standing there in the hospital room, Gurney closes his eyes. When he does, he sees Peter Pan—all in black, with his back to him. The little man begins turning. His face is a bilious yellow, his smile blood red. Turning. Turning toward him, raising his arms like the wings of a predatory bird.

The eyes in the bilious face are the eyes of Carl Spalter. Full of horror and hate and despair. The eyes of a man who wished he’d never been born.

Gurney recoils at the vision, tries to focus on Madeleine.

She suggests that he lie down on the hospital bed. She offers to massage his neck and shoulders and back.

He agrees and soon finds himself in a drifting state of consciousness, feeling only the warmth and gentle pressure of her hands.

Her voice, soft and soothing, is the only other reality he is aware of.

In the place between exhaustion and sleep there is a locale of deep disengagement, simplicity, and clarity where he often found a kind of serenity he found nowhere else. He imagined it might be similar to the heroin addict’s rush—a surge of pure, impervious peace.

It normally was a state of isolation from all sensory stimuli—bringing with it a blessed inability to tell where his body ended and the rest of the world began—but tonight it is different. Tonight the sound of Madeleine’s voice and the penetrating warmth of her hands has been incorporated into the cocoon.

She is talking about walking on the coast of Cornwall, about the sloping green fields, the stone walls, the cliffs high above the sea …

Kayaking on a turquoise lake in Canada …

Cycling in Catskill valleys …

Picking blueberries …

Erecting bluebird houses along the border of the high pasture …

Crossing a stile on a footpath through a Scottish Highlands farm …

Her voice is as gentle and warm as the touch of her hands on his shoulders.

He can see her on a bicycle in white sneakers, yellow socks, fuchsia shorts, and a lavender nylon jacket shimmering in the sun.

Her smile is the smile of Malcolm Claret. Her voice and his voice are one.

“There is nothing in life that matters but love. Nothing but love.”