“Jack, for Christ’s sake—”
“They disappeared.”
“The kids who made fun of him?”
“Right. Off the face of the earth. Same thing with an aide who didn’t believe his amnesia story, kept taunting him about it. Gone. Zero trace.”
“Anything else?”
“More weird shit. Nobody could tell how old he was, because in the two years he was there he never changed, never grew, never seemed to look any older than the day he arrived.”
“Like Peter Pan.”
“Right.”
“Was he ever called by that nickname at the orphanage?”
“There’s nothing about that in the Bulgarian file.”
Gurney ran the story back through his mind quickly. “I’m missing something. How do we know this orphanage kid is the same kid the Panikos family adopted?”
“We don’t know for sure. The nurse said he was adopted by a Greek family, but she didn’t know the name. That was handled by a different department. But it was the day he left with his new parents that the place burned down and just about everyone else was trapped and killed.”
Gurney was silent.
“What are you thinking, Sherlock?”
“I’m thinking that someone paid a hundred grand to turn this little monster loose on Carl Spalter.”
“And on Mary Spalter and Gus Gurikos and Lex Bincher,” added Hardwick.
“Peter Pan,” mused Gurney. “The kid who never grew up.”
“Very fanciful, ace, but where does this leave us?”
“I’d say it leaves us in the middle of nowhere, drifting into total confusion. We’ve got some colorful stories, but we know almost nothing. We’re looking for a pro hitter whose name might be Petros Panikos or Peter Pan or something else. Birth name unknown. Passport name unknown. Date of birth unknown. Nationality unknown. Birth parents unknown. Current address unknown. Arrests and convictions unknown. In fact, just about everything that could lead us to him is unknown.”
“I don’t disagree. What now?”
“You need to go back to your Interpol guy and beg for whatever crumbs might still be lurking in the corners of their Panikos file—especially anything more about the Panikos family, their neighbors, anyone in that village who might have known anything about little Petros, or whatever the hell they named him—anything that might give us a better handle than we have now. The name of anyone we could talk to …”
“Fuck, man, that was twenty-five years ago. Nobody’s going to remember anything, even if we could find them. Get real.”
“You’re probably right. But get in touch with your Interpol guy anyway. Who knows what he might come up with?”
After ending the call, Gurney sat with his notebook open on his lap, gazing out over the reservoir. The low water level was exposing the rocky slopes that extended from the water’s edge up to the tree line. Driftwood littered the stones. Across a small inlet, in the deep afternoon shadows, a pair of gnarled branches reached up from the water onto the slope in a way that stirred a chilling memory of one of his first murder scenes as a rookie—the body of a naked child washed up against a stony outcropping on the shore of the Hudson River.
It wasn’t a memory he wanted to dwell on. He picked up his notebook, where he’d jotted down most of what Hardwick had told him, and went over it one more time.
He was frustrated with himself. Frustrated with having gotten involved in the case to begin with. Frustrated with not having made more tangible progress. Frustrated with the lack of official standing. Frustrated with all the question marks.
He decided he needed another cup of coffee. He started the car and was about to head into Barleyville when Hardwick called again, sounding more shaken than before. “We’ve got a new situation. If what I just overheard is true, Lex Bincher may no longer be missing.”
“Oh, Jesus. What now?”
“One of the troopers with the BCI boys found a body in the water under Lex’s private dock. Just a body. A body with no head.”
“Are they sure it’s Bincher?”
“I didn’t hang around to find out. I got a bad feeling about the missing head. I backed out of the crowd and came back to my car. I gotta get outta here before I puke, or before some BCI guy recognizes me and puts two and two together—with me and Bincher and the Spalter case—and I end up in an interview room for the next two weeks. I can’t afford that. Not with this kind of shit going down. I got to be able to move, got to be able to do whatever the fuck we have to do. Gotta go. Call you later.”
Gurney sat there by the reservoir for another few minutes, letting the new situation sink in. His gaze drifted back out over the water to the piece of driftwood that had reminded him of the body snagged on the rocks at the edge of the Hudson. As he stared now at the bare, twisted wood, the configuration reminded him not just of a body, but of a headless body.
He shivered, restarted the car, and headed for Walnut Crossing.
Chapter 39. Terrible Creatures
Thinking about Hardwick’s anxious departure from the crime scene—in fear of being recognized and having the reason for his presence questioned—pushed to the front of Gurney’s mind an issue he’d been avoiding: Where did the right to conduct a private investigation in the interest of a client end … and obstruction of justice begin?
At what point did he have an obligation to share with law enforcement what he’d learned about the hit man who called himself Petros Panikos and his probable involvement in the lengthening string of homicides associated with the Spalter case? Did the fact that Panikos’s involvement was only “probable” rather than certain make a difference? Surely, Gurney concluded with a feeling an inch shy of comfort, he had no obligation to share speculative scenarios with the police, who no doubt had plenty of their own. But how honest was that argument, really?
This debate occupied him uneasily as he drove through bleak little Barleyville—finding the little café where he’d hoped to get coffee closed. He continued on over the forested hills that separated it from the village of Walnut Crossing, and on past that to his mountain road. His thoughts culminated in a chilling question: What if the Cooperstown deaths were a sign of things to come? How long could one keep confidential the fruits of a private investigation, if the war that apparently had been declared by Panikos continued to claim casualties?
The sight of his mailbox at the end of the road shifted his focus from Panikos to Klemper. Had the man delivered the requested security video, as his phone message had implied? Or did the mailbox contain a less pleasant surprise?
He drove past the mailbox, parked the car by the barn, and walked back.
He’d have bet a thousand dollars against the possibility of a bomb, but he wasn’t ready to bet his life. He eyed the mailbox and decided on a relatively low-risk way of opening it. He first needed to find a fallen branch long enough to reach the drop-lid from a spot shielded by the trunk of a hemlock several feet from the box.
After a five-minute search and a number of awkward thrusts with a less-than-ideal branch, he managed to jar the drop-lid loose. It swung open with a clank. He waited a few seconds, then circled around to the front of the box and peered inside. All it contained was a single white envelope. He removed it, brushing off a tiny ant.
The envelope was addressed to him in rough block printing. It had no stamp or postmark. He could feel a small rectangular object through the paper, which he thought might be a USB drive. He opened the envelope cautiously and saw that he was right. He put the drive in his pocket, walked back to the car, and drove up to the house.