Gurney sat back in his chair, contemplating the significance of what he’d just seen.
First, it suggested strongly that the shot was indeed fired from the apartment where the gun was later found. The timing of the likely shooter’s exit would make other scenarios difficult if not impossible—which underscored the light pole problem.
Second, the individual in the video was clearly not Kay Spalter. Gurney felt a welcome surge of anger at Klemper, as well as the evaporation of any bad feeling over breaking their “agreement.” That video alone would have ended the case against Kay Spalter. If nothing else, it would have ensured the presence of reasonable doubt by supporting a credible alternative theory of the case and by showing a credible alternative suspect. It would have prevented her conviction and incarceration. Klemper’s willful suppression of that evidence—apparently in return for the sexual favors of Alyssa Spalter—was not only criminal but unforgivable.
Third, it was time to stop thinking of the individual in the Axton Avenue and the retirement village videos simply as “the individual.” It was time to start calling him by his chosen name: Petros Panikos.
It wasn’t easy. Something in the mind rebelled at connecting the slight, almost dainty figure, carrying bouquets of chrysanthemums in the one instance and a colorful Christmas box in the other, with the violent psychopath described by Interpol and Adonis Angelidis. The psychopath who hammered the nails into Gus Gurikos’s eyes, ears, and throat. The psychopath who firebombed Bincher’s home in Cooperstown, burned six innocent people to death, and cut off a man’s head.
Oh, Jesus, was he singing when he did that, too? That was something Gurney didn’t want to think about. That was the stuff of nightmares. It was time for more practical thoughts. It was time for a meeting of the minds with Hardwick and Esti. Time to agree on next steps.
He took out his phone and called Hardwick first. He was intending to leave a message and was surprised when the phone was answered immediately—and defensively.
“You calling to give me some shit about my bit with Bork?”
Gurney decided to postpone that discussion for another time. “I’m thinking we need to get together.”
“For what?”
“Planning? Coordination? Cooperation?”
There was a short pause. “Sure. No problem. When?”
“Soon as possible. Like tomorrow morning. You, me, Esti if she can make it. We need to put the facts, questions, hypotheses on the table. With everything we have in one place, we may be able to see what’s missing.”
“Okay.” Hardwick sounded skeptical, as usual. “Where do you want to do this?”
“My house.”
“Any reason for that?”
The honest reason was that Gurney wanted to recapture some semblance of control, some sense of his hand being on the tiller. But what he said was “Your house has bullet holes in it. Mine doesn’t.”
After agreeing, with little enthusiasm, to meet at nine the following morning at Gurney’s, Hardwick volunteered to pass the word to Esti, since he was about to talk to her about something else anyway. Something personal. Gurney would have preferred to call her himself—again, for that elusive hand-on-tiller feeling—but he could think of no reasonable way to insist on it.
They ended the call without either of them bringing up the matter of the “deal” with Mick Klemper or Gurney’s allusion to it in his last phone message.
As Gurney emerged from the den, Madeleine emerged from the bedroom. She took the duffel bag she’d packed that morning out to her car, then came back in to remind him once again about the strawberries for the hens.
“You know,” he replied, “Ozzie Baggott down the road just tosses his chickens a pail of table scraps once a day, and they seem to survive quite nicely.”
“Ozzie Baggott is a disgusting lunatic. He’d be tossing garbage out into his backyard whether he had chickens there or not.”
Upon reflection, he found he couldn’t honestly argue with that.
They hugged and kissed, and she was on her way.
As her car passed out of sight below the barn, the last sliver of the setting sun disappeared behind the western ridge.
Chapter 44. The Thrill of the Chase
Gurney retreated again into the den. The deepening dusk had changed the color of the forested ridge above it from a dozen shades of green and gold to a monochromatic greenish gray. It made him think of the hillside opposite Jack Hardwick’s house, the hillside the shots had come from that had severed the power and phone lines.
Soon his thoughts began to coalesce around the bits and pieces of the Spalter case, especially its incongruous elements. That made him think of a maxim one of his academy instructors had emphasized in an advanced course on the interpretation of crime scene evidence: The pieces that don’t seem to fit are the ones that end up revealing the most.
He took a yellow legal pad out of his desk drawer and started writing. Twenty minutes later he reviewed the results, which he’d organized into a list of eight issues:
1. Eyewitnesses placed the victim at the moment he was shot in a position that would have made it impossible for a bullet to reach him from the apartment where the murder weapon and gunpowder residue were found.
2. Killing the victim’s mother to ensure the presence of the victim at the cemetery plot seems needlessly elaborate. Might the mother have been killed for another reason?
3. The pro who executed the hit was known to accept only the most difficult assignments. What might have put the Carl Spalter hit in that category?
4. If Kay Spalter herself was not the shooter, could she have hired the shooter?
5. Could Jonah have hired the shooter to gain control of Spalter Realty assets?
6. Could Alyssa have hired the shooter—in addition to conspiring with Klemper after the shooting to frame Kay—in order to inherit her father’s estate?
7. What secret was Gurikos killed and maimed to protect?
8. Was Carl killed in retaliation for trying to have someone else killed?
Going through the eight items, pondering each in turn, Gurney was disgusted with his lack of progress.
One positive aspect, however, of a case with multiple peculiarities was that once you had a theory that was consistent with all the peculiarities you could be sure that the theory was right. A single oddity in an investigation could often be explained in a variety of ways. But it was unlikely that there could be more than one theory that could explain the line-of-sight problem with the apartment and the grotesque mutilation of Gus Gurikos and Mary Spalter’s oddly timed death.
When he looked out through the north window of the den some minutes later, the high forest appeared devoid of any green at all. The trees and the ridge they covered were now a uniformly dark mass against the gray slate of the sky. The night descending on the hillside brought to mind the attack on Hardwick’s house and the escape of the motorized shooter through the forest paths.
At that moment he heard the sound of a motorcycle engine, which for a second he interpreted as the product of his imagination. Then the sound grew louder and its direction clearer. He went from the den to the kitchen to look out the window, sure now that he was hearing a very real motorcycle coming up the road. Half a minute later the machine’s single headlight rounded the barn and began ascending the rough pasture path.
He went to the bedroom, got his .32 Beretta from the night table, chambered a round, slipped the gun in his pocket, and went to the side door. He waited until the motorcycle came to a stop by his car, then switched on the outside lights.