“Yep. Fastest bullet made. Flattest trajectory in the business. Put it in the right rifle with the right scope, you can blow the head off a chipmunk a quarter mile away. Definitely a precision item. Nothing quite like it. Add a silencer to that package, and you’ve got—”
“A silencer?”
“A silencer. Which is why no one heard the shot. That, and the firecrackers.”
“Firecrackers?”
Hardwick shrugged. “Witnesses heard anywhere from five to ten packs of firecrackers go off that morning. Over in the direction of the building where the shot came from. The last pack around the time Spalter was hit.”
“How’d they know which building it was?”
“On-site reconstruction. Witness descriptions of the victim’s position when he was hit. Followed by a door-to-door search of the possible sources.”
“But nobody caught on right away that he was hit, right?”
“They just saw him falling. As he was walking toward a podium at the head of the grave, he was hit in the left temple and fell forward. At the moment he was hit, his left side was exposed to an empty stretch of the cemetery, the river, a busy county highway, and beyond that a row of partially gutted apartment buildings owned by the Spalter family.”
“How’d they identify which apartment the shooter used?”
“Easy enough. She … I mean, the shooter, whoever … left the gun behind, mounted on a nice tripod.”
“With a scope?”
“Top-of-the-line.”
“And the silencer?”
“No. The shooter removed that.”
“Then how do you know—”
“The end of the barrel was custom-threaded for one. And the firecrackers alone couldn’t have covered the report of an unsuppressed .220 Swift. It’s a seriously powerful cartridge.”
“And the silencer alone would only deal with the muzzle blast, which would have left an audible supersonic report, which would explain the need for the firecracker distraction. So—cautious approach, thorough planning. Is that the way it’s being understood?”
“That’s the way it should be understood, but who the fuck knows what they understand? It never came up in the trial. Lot of shit never came up in the trial. Lot of shit that should have come up.”
“But why leave the gun and remove the silencer?”
“No fucking idea. Unless it was one of those super-sophisticated five-thousand-dollar jobs—too good to leave behind?”
Gurney found that hard to digest. “Of all the ways a vindictive wife might kill her husband, the prosecution narrative is that Kay Spalter chose to take the most complicated, expensive, high-tech—”
“Davey boy, you don’t have to convince me that the narrative sucks. I know it sucks. More holes in it than an old junky’s arm. That’s why I picked it for my kickoff case. It’s got major reversal potential.”
“Okay. So there was a silencer, but the silencer was taken. Presumably by the shooter.”
“Correct.”
“No prints left on anything?”
“No prints, no nothing. Latex glove job.”
“This rotten-apple detective—he didn’t plant anything in the apartment to incriminate Spalter’s wife?”
“He didn’t know her then. He didn’t decide to put her in the frame until he met her and decided he hated her and she had to be the shooter.”
“This guy is the CIO named in the case file? Senior Investigator Michael Klemper?”
“Mick the Dick—that’s our boy. Shaved head, small eyes, big chest. Temperament of a rottweiler. Martial arts fanatic. Likes breaking bricks with his fists, especially in public. A very angry man. Which brings us back to the timing issue. Mick the Dick was divorced by his wife a few years back. Super-ugly divorce. Mick … Well, now we get into some … some unsubstantiated hearsay. Libel, slander, lawsuit territory, you get what I mean?”
Gurney sighed. “Go on, Jack.”
“According to rumor, Mick’s wife was doing the deed with a certain influential organized crime figure she happened to meet because Mick happened to be—so the rumor goes—on the take from the aforesaid crime figure.” Hardwick paused. “You see the problem?”
“I see several.”
“Mick found out she was fucking the major wiseguy, but that left him with a dilemma. I mean, that’s not a can of worms you want opened in divorce court, or anywhere else. So he couldn’t take the normal legal steps. However, he used to talk privately about wanting to strangle the bitch, twist her head off, feed it to his dog. Apparently, he would also say this to her from time to time. One of those times, she made a video of him telling her in colorful detail, after a few drinks, how he was going to feed her sensitive body parts to his pit bull. Guess what happened then?”
“Tell me.”
“The next day she threatened to put the video on YouTube and flush his career and pension down the toilet if he didn’t give her a quiet divorce on her terms with a very generous settlement.”
Hardwick’s thin grin conveyed a kind of perverse admiration. “That was when the homicidal hate started oozing out of old Mick the Dick like pus. He would have gladly killed her at that point, wiseguy connection or no wiseguy connection, if she hadn’t ensured that the tape would go viral if anything happened to her. So he was forced to give her the divorce. And the money. And ever since then he’s been taking it out on every woman who even remotely reminds him of his wife. Mick was always a little touchy. But after he got that divorce deal rammed up his ass, he turned into two hundred and fifty pounds of pure vengeance, searching for targets.”
“You’re telling me he framed Kay Spalter just because she was fucking around like his wife?”
“Worse than that. Crazier than that. I think his blind hatred for anyone like his wife made him believe that Kay Spalter actually did murder her husband, and that it was his duty to see that she paid for it. She was guilty in his fucked-up mind, and he was determined to put her away at any cost. He wasn’t going to let another unfaithful bitch get off scot-free. If that meant suborning a little perjury here and there in the interest of justice, so what?”
“You’re telling me he’s a psycho.”
“Mild way of putting it.”
“And you know all this how, exactly?”
“I told you. He has enemies.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“Someone close enough to the man to hear things gave me the details of his bile and bullshit on the job, snippets of phone calls, comments here and there, what he said about women in general, about his ex-wife and Kay Spalter in particular. The Dick got carried away sometimes, wasn’t as careful as he should have been.”
“This ‘someone’ have a name?”
“Can’t reveal that.”
“Yes you can.”
“No way.”
“Listen up, Jack. You keep secrets, and there’s no deal. I get to know everything you know. Every question answered. That’s the deal. Period.”
“Christ, Davey, you’re not making this easy.”
“Neither are you.”
Gurney glanced over at the speedometer and saw that it was creeping toward eighty. Hardwick’s jaw muscle was tight. So were his hands on the wheel. A good minute passed before he said simply, “Esti Moreno.” Another minute passed before he went on. “She worked under Mick the Dick from the time of his divorce right up through the end of the Spalter trial. Finally managed to get reassigned—same barracks, but a different reporting line. Had to accept an office job, all paperwork, which she hates. But she hates the paperwork less than she hates the Dick. Esti’s a good cop. Good brain. Good eyes and ears. And principles. Esti’s got principles. You know what she said about the Dick?”