Suppose, suppose, suppose. Gurney was finding the echo irritating and unproductive—and the need for more facts compelling.
The dissonant chords of Madeleine’s cello piece were growing louder.
Chapter 28. Like the Crack of a Whip
After listening to Gurney on the phone recounting the content of his meeting with Adonis Angelidis, including the grotesque aspects of the Gus Gurikos murder, Jack Hardwick was uncharacteristically silent. Then, instead of criticizing him once again for departing from the narrow issues that would drive the appeal process, he asked Gurney to come to his house for a more thorough discussion of the case status.
“Now?” Gurney glanced at the clock. It was nearly seven-thirty, and the sun had already slipped down behind the western ridge.
“Now would be good. This thing is getting way too weird.”
As big a surprise as the invitation was, it wasn’t one Gurney was going to argue with. A thorough, all-issues-on-the-table discussion was definitely needed.
Another surprise greeted him when he arrived thirty-five minutes later at Hardwick’s rented farmhouse—at the lonely end of a dirt road, high in the darkening hills outside the tiny village of Dillweed. In his headlights he could see a second car parked next to the red GTO—a bright blue Mini Cooper. Evidently the man had a visitor.
Gurney was aware that Hardwick had been involved in quite a few relationships in the past, but he hadn’t imagined any of those women looking quite as dramatic as the one who opened the door.
If it wasn’t for her intelligent, aggressive eyes that seemed to be assessing him from the first instant, Gurney would have been easily distracted by the rest of her—a figure somewhere between athletic and voluptuous, boldly displayed in cutoff jeans and a loose scoop-neck T-shirt. She was barefoot with red toenails, caramel-tan skin, and ebony hair cut short in a way that emphasized her full lips and prominent cheekbones. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she had a definite presence—not unlike Hardwick himself.
A moment later the man appeared beside her with a proprietary grin.
“Come in. Thanks for making the trip.”
Gurney stepped through the doorway into the front room. What he remembered from previous visits as a Spartan box of a room had acquired some warmer touches: a colorful carpet, a framed print of orange poppies bending in a breeze, a vase of pussy willow branches, a lush plant in a massive earthenware pot, two new armchairs, a nice pine sideboard, and a round breakfast table with three ladder-back chairs in the corner of the room nearest the kitchen. This woman had evidently inspired some changes.
Gurney surveyed the scene approvingly. “Very nice, Jack. Definite improvement.”
Hardwick nodded. “Yeah, I agree.” Then he laid his hand on the woman’s half-bare shoulder and said, “Dave, I’d like you to meet BCI investigator Esti Moreno.”
The introduction caught Gurney off-balance, and it showed, which prompted a bark of a laugh from Hardwick.
He recovered quickly, putting out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Esti.”
“A pleasure, Dave.” Her grip was strong, the skin on her palm surprisingly callused. He remembered Hardwick mentioning her name as a source of information on the original murder investigation, as well as on the shortcomings of Mick Klemper. He wondered how engaged she was in the Hardwick-Bincher project, and how she viewed it.
As if demonstrating a sense for what he was thinking, she got to the point with a remarkable lack of preamble. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I’ve been trying to convince this man here to look past Kay Spalter’s legal appeal issues and pay some attention to the murder itself. Now murders, yes? At least three? Maybe more?” Her voice was throaty, with a hint of a Spanish accent.
Gurney smiled. “Are you making any progress with him?”
“I’m persistent.” She glanced at Hardwick, then back at Gurney. “I think your phone call earlier this evening about the nails in the eyes finally got to him, yes?”
Hardwick’s lips tightened in an expression of distaste.
“Yes, definitely the nails in the eyes,” she repeated with a conspiratorial wink at Gurney. “Everybody’s got some special sensitivity, something that gets their attention, yes? So now maybe we can let Lex-the-Lawyer deal with the Court of Appeals, and we can deal with the crime—the true thing, not the Klemper bullshit.” She articulated the man’s name with evident disgust. “The issue is digging up what really happened. Putting it all together. That’s what you think needs to be done, right?”
“You seem to know my thoughts pretty well.” He wondered if she knew what kind of thoughts were being generated by that revealing T-shirt.
“Jack told me things about you. And I’m a good listener.”
Hardwick was starting to look restless. “Maybe we ought to make some coffee, sit down, and get to it.”
An hour later, at the table in the corner, their coffee cups refilled, yellow pads scribbled with notes in front of them, they were circling back through the key points.
“So we agree that the three murders must be related to one another?” said Esti, tapping the tip of her pen on her pad.
“Assuming the autopsy on the mother is consistent with murder,” said Hardwick.
Esti looked at Gurney. “Just before you arrived, I reached out to someone in the ME’s office. She’s supposed to get back to me tomorrow. But the fact that the shooter cased the cemetery scene in Long Falls before her ‘accident’ is pretty suggestive. So let’s agree for now we’re talking about three related murders.”
Hardwick was staring into his coffee cup as though it contained some unidentifiable substance. “I’ve got a problem with this. According to Gurney’s Greek mob buddy, Carl went to Fat Gus to set up a hit on somebody—nobody knows who. The target finds out about this and, to keep it from happening, hits Carl first. Then he hits Gus, for good measure. I have this right?”
Gurney nodded. “Except for the ‘buddy’ part.”
Hardwick ignored the objection. “Okay, so what this says to me is that Carl and his target were in, like, the ultimate high-stakes race to whack each other. I mean, the guy who makes the first hit wins, right?”
Gurney nodded again.
Hardwick went on. “So why would a guy in that situation pick such a time-consuming, pain-in-the-ass way to set Carl up? I mean, knowing there’s a contract on your life creates some urgency. Wouldn’t it make more sense under the circumstances to just put on a ski mask, walk into the Spalter Realty office, and pop the son of a bitch? Deal with the issue in half a day instead of a week? And the whole idea of hitting the mother first? Just to get Carl into the cemetery? That feels fucking weird to me.”
It didn’t feel right to Gurney either.
“Unless,” said Esti, “the hit on the mother wasn’t just a setup to put Carl in a predictable place at a predictable time. Maybe the mother was a target for another reason. In fact, maybe she was the main target, and Carl was secondary. You ever think of it that way?”
They paused to think about it.
“I have another problem,” said Hardwick. “I get that there’s a connection between the Mary and Carl murders. Got to be. And I get that there’s some other kind of connection between the Carl and Gus murders—maybe what Donny Angel said, maybe not. So I’m okay with a connection between one and two, and between two and three, but somehow the one-two-three sequence all together doesn’t feel so good.”
Gurney felt a similar discomfort. “By the way, do we know for sure that Carl was number two and Gus was number three?”