“So why was he hit?” asked Hardwick. “Your task force buddy got any clue?”
“None. According to OCTF, Gurikos kept everybody happy. Smooth as silk. A resource.”
“Yeah, well, somebody didn’t agree.”
She nodded. “It could have happened the way Angelidis told Dave: Carl went to Gurikos to set up a hit on someone, then that someone found out about it and hired Panikos to kill them both. Makes sense, no?”
Hardwick turned his palms up in a gesture of uncertainty.
Esti looked at Gurney. “Dave?”
“In a way, I’d like the Angelidis version to be true. But it doesn’t feel quite right. Like it almost makes sense. The problem is, it doesn’t account for the nails in Gus’s head. A practical, preemptive hit on Carl and Gus is one thing. A gruesome warning about keeping secrets is something else. The two don’t fit together.”
“I’ve got the same problem with the mother,” said Esti. “I don’t get why she had to be killed.”
Hardwick sounded restless. “It’s not that big a mystery. To put Carl at the funeral, exposed, delivering a eulogy.”
“So why didn’t Panikos wait until he was actually standing at the podium? Why shoot him before he got there?”
“Who the hell knows? Maybe to stop him from revealing something.”
Gurney couldn’t see the logic in that. Why go to elaborate lengths to set up a situation in which someone would be scheduled to make a speech if you were afraid of what they might say?
“I’ve got one last thing,” said Esti. “About the Cooperstown fires? I found out something interesting, but strange. The four incendiary devices used on Bincher’s house were all different types and sizes.” She looked from Hardwick to Gurney and back again. “Does that say anything to you?”
Hardwick sucked at his teeth and shrugged. “Maybe that’s what little Peter happened to have in his toy box at the time.”
“Or maybe what his supplier had available? Any ideas, Dave?”
“Just an off-the-wall possibility: that he was experimenting.”
“Experimenting? For what purpose?”
“I don’t know. Maybe evaluating different devices with some future use in mind?”
She made a face. “Let’s hope that’s not the reason.”
Hardwick shifted in his chair. “You got anything else, sweetheart?”
“Yes. The headless body recovered at the scene has been positively ID’d.” She paused for one dramatic beat. “Lex Bincher. For sure.”
Hardwick was staring warily at her.
She went on slowly, “The head … is still missing.”
Hardwick’s jaw muscle twitched. “Christ! This is like some shit in a horror movie.”
Esti screwed up her face. “I don’t understand how this gets to you so much. That story about how you and Dave met—that incident involved a woman who got cut in half, right? I heard you laugh about that, tell sick jokes, right?”
“Right.”
“So how come when this head thing comes up, you get all disturbed-like?”
“Look, for Christ’s sake …” He raised his hands in surrender, shaking his head. “It’s one thing to find a chopped-up body. A body in ten pieces. You’re a cop long enough, you work the inner city long enough, that kind of thing is going to happen. It just is. But there’s a big difference between finding a cut-off head and not finding it. You get what I mean? The fucking thing is missing! Which means somebody is keeping it somewhere. For some reason. For some God-awful use he has for it. Believe me, that fucking thing is going to turn up when we least expect it.”
“ ‘When we least expect it’? I think you see too much Netflix.” She gave him one of her affectionate little winks. “Anyway, that’s all the new stuff I have for now. How about you? You have anything?”
Hardwick rubbed his face hard with his palms, as though he were erasing a bad dream, trying to give his day a fresh start. “I managed to locate one of the missing witnesses—Freddie, the one whose testimony put Kay in the Axton Avenue apartment house at the time of the shooting. Officially, Frederico Javier Rosales.” He shot a glance at Gurney. “Any chance of getting some coffee?”
“No problem.” Gurney went to the machine on the sink island to get a fresh pot going.
Hardwick continued. “We had a friendly talk, me and Freddie. We focused on the interesting little gap between what he actually saw and what Mick the Dick told him he saw.”
Esti’s eyes widened. “He admitted that Klemper told him what to say on the stand?”
“Not only did Klemper tell him what to say, but he told him he damn well better say it.”
“Or else what?”
“Freddie had a drug problem. Small dealer supporting a big addiction. One more conviction would give him an automatic hard twenty, no parole. When a skell’s in that kind of spot, a prick like Mick has a lot of leverage.”
“So why’d he open up to you?”
Hardwick grinned unpleasantly. “Boy like Freddie has a short attention span. Always sees the biggest threat as the one that’s standing in front of him, and that was me. But don’t get the wrong idea. I was very civilized. I explained that the only way for him to avoid the substantial penalties for having committed perjury in a murder case would be for him to un-perjure himself.”
Esti looked incredulous. “Un-perjure himself?”
“Nice concept, don’t you think? I told him he could get out from under the avalanche of shit that was about to come down on him if he described how his original testimony was concocted entirely by Mick the Dick.”
“He spelled all that out on paper?”
“And signed it. I even got his fucking thumbprint on it.”
Esti looked cautiously pleased. “Does Freddie think you’re with BCI?”
“It’s possible he may have formed the impression that my connection with the bureau is more current than it actually is. I don’t really give a shit what he thinks. Do you?”
She shook her head. “Not if it helps put Klemper away. You have any leads on the other two witnesses who dropped out of sight—Jimmy Flats and Kay’s boyfriend, Darryl?”
“Not yet. But Freddie’s statement, along with the recording of Dave’s conversation with Alyssa, should absolutely seal the deal on the police misconduct issue—which in turn should seal the deal on Kay’s appeal.”
Hardwick’s happy little rhyme scraped Gurney’s brain like nails on a blackboard. But then it occurred to him that his edginess might be coming from another direction—from the unresolved question of Kay’s guilt, an issue quite apart from the fairness or unfairness of her trial. There was little doubt about the evidence tampering and witness tampering. But none of those illegalities made Kay Spalter innocent. As long as the identity of the person who hired Petros Panikos to kill Carl Spalter remained a mystery, Kay Spalter remained a viable suspect.
Esti’s voice broke into Gurney’s train of thought. “You said something about showing us some videos?”
“Yes. Right. In addition to my Skype conversation with Jonah, I have a couple of security camera sequences from Axton Avenue—a close-up view of someone entering the apartment building before the shooting, and a long-distance view of Carl getting hit and going down.” He looked at Hardwick. “Did you fill Esti in on how I got the videos?”
“Things were moving a little too fast. And there wasn’t much information in that thirty-second voice mail you left me.”
“And what information there was you decided to ignore, right?”
“The hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“My message to you was clear on the key point. I had told Klemper things would go better for him if the missing video material was to end up in my hands. Well, it did. But then you made your no-holds-barred appearance on Criminal Conflict—and bashed the ‘thoroughly corrupt’ detective on the case for framing Kay with perjured testimony. Everyone in the criminal justice system up here knows that the detective on the case was Mick Klemper—so you essentially named him and blamed him, and totally ignored my situation with him.”