While they were finishing their second round of coffee, Gurney played the recording of his Skype conversation with Jonah Spalter.
When it ended, Hardwick was the first to react. “I don’t know who’s the bigger piece of shit—Mick the Dick or this asshole.”
Gurney smiled. “Paulette Purley, resident manager of Willow Rest, is convinced Jonah’s a saint, out to save the world.”
“All those saints out to save the world ought to be ground up for fertilizer. Bullshit is good for the soil.”
“Better for the soil than the soul, right, Jack?”
“You can say that again, brother.”
“He got fifty million dollars as a result of his brother’s death?” asked Esti. “Is that true?”
“He didn’t deny it,” said Gurney.
“Hell of a motive,” said Hardwick.
“In fact,” Gurney went on, “he didn’t seem interested in denying anything. Seemed comfortable admitting that he profited enormously from Carl’s death. No problem admitting that he hated the man. Happy to reel off all the reasons everyone should have hated him.”
Esti nodded. “Called him ‘monster,’ ‘sociopath,’ ‘megalomaniac’…”
“Also called him ‘positively satanic,’ ” added Hardwick. “As opposed to himself, who he’d like us to see as positively angelic.”
Esti continued. “He admitted he’d do anything for that Cathedral thing of his. Anything. Actually sounded like he was bragging.” She paused. “It’s strange. He admitted to all these motives for murder like it didn’t matter. Like he felt we couldn’t touch him.”
“Like a man with powerful connections,” added Hardwick.
“Except at the end,” said Gurney.
Esti frowned. “You mean the thing about his mother?”
“Unless he’s the world’s greatest actor, I believe he was truly disturbed at that point. But I’m not sure whether he was disturbed by the fact that she might have been murdered, or by the fact that we knew about it. I also find it peculiar that he was eager to know what evidence we had but never asked the more basic question: ‘Why would someone kill my mother?’ ”
Hardwick showed his teeth in a humorless grin. “Kinda gives you the impression that the warm and wonderful Jonah in reality might not give a fuck about anyone. Including his mother.”
Esti looked confused. “So where do we go from here?”
Hardwick’s chilly grin widened. He pointed at Gurney’s list of unresolved issues lying on the table next to the open laptop. “That’s easy. We follow the ace detective’s road map of clues and clever questions.”
They each took one of the copies Gurney had printed out. They read through the eight points silently.
The further down the list Esti read, the more worried her expression became. “This list is … depressing.”
Gurney asked what gave her that feeling.
“It makes it painfully clear that we don’t know much at this point. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes and no,” said Gurney. “It enumerates a lot of unanswered questions, but I’m convinced that discovering the answer to any one of them could make all the others fall into place.”
She offered a grudging nod but appeared unconvinced. “I hear what you’re saying, but … where do we start? If we could coordinate the efforts of the relevant agencies—BCI, FBI, OCTF, Interpol, Homeland Security, DMV, et cetera—and throw some major manpower against the case, tracking down this Panikos character might be feasible. But, as it is … what are we supposed to do? Panikos aside, we just don’t have the hands and feet and hours to look into all the other relationships and conflicts in the lives of Carl, Jonah, Kay, Alyssa—not to mention Angelidis and Gurikos and God knows who else.” She shook her head in a gesture of helplessness.
Her comments produced the longest silence of the meeting.
At first, Hardwick showed no reaction at all. He appeared to be comparing his thumbs, studying their relative size and shape.
Esti stared at him. “Jack, you have any feeling about this?”
He looked up and cleared his throat. “Sure. We have two separate situations. One is Kay’s appeal process, which Lex’s partner tells me is in great shape. The other is the effort to answer the ‘Who killed Carl?’ question, which is a trickier deal altogether. But yon crafty Sherlock has an optimistic look in his eye.”
Her anxious gaze moved to Gurney. “Optimism? You feel that?”
“Actually, yes, a bit.”
Even as he was saying this, he was struck by the rapid change in his attitude in the short time since he’d first put his list of issues together and reacted to it with frustration at the complexity of the project and lack of law enforcement resources he’d once taken for granted—exactly what Esti was just complaining about.
Neither the complexity nor the resource problem had gone away. But he’d finally realized that he didn’t need answers to an endless series of perplexing questions to unlock the solution.
Esti looked skeptical. “How can you be optimistic when there are so many things we don’t know?”
“We may not have a lot of answers yet, but … we do have a person.”
“We have a person? What person?”
“Peter Pan.”
“What do you mean, we have him?”
“I mean he’s here. In this area. Something about our investigation is keeping him here.”
“What’s this ‘something’?”
“I think he’s afraid that we’ll discover his secret.”
“The secret behind the nails in Fat Gus’s head?”
“Yes.”
Hardwick began tapping his fingers on the table. “What makes you think it’s Panikos’s secret and not the secret of whoever hired him?”
“Something Angelidis told me. He said Panikos only accepts pure hit contracts. No restrictions. No special instructions. You want somebody dead, you give him the money and chances are they end up dead. But he handles all the details his own way. So if a message was being sent with the nails in Fat Gus’s head, it was Panikos’s message—something that mattered to him.”
Hardwick produced his acid-reflux grimace. “Sounds like you’re putting a shitload of trust in what Angelidis told you—a mobster who lies, cheats, and steals for a living.”
“There’d be no advantage to him in lying about the way Panikos does business. And everything else we’ve learned about Panikos, especially from your friend at Interpol, supports what Angelidis said. Peter Pan operates by his own rules. Nobody gets to tell him what to do.”
“You’re suggesting the boy may be a bit of a control freak?”
Gurney smiled at the understatement. “No one ordered him to shoot out the lights in your house, Jack. He doesn’t take orders like that. I don’t believe anyone ordered him to burn down those houses in Cooperstown, or to walk away with Lex Bincher’s head in a tote bag.”
“You suddenly sound awful goddamn sure about this shit.”
“I’ve been thinking about it long enough. It’s about time I started to see at least one piece of it clearly.”
Esti threw up her hands in bafflement. “I’m sorry, maybe I’m being dense here, but what is it you see so clearly?”
“The open door that’s been right there in front of us all along.”
“What open door?”
“Peter Pan himself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s responding to our actions, to our investigation of Carl’s murder. A response equals a connection. A connection equals an open door.”
“Responding to our actions?” Esti appeared incredulous, almost angry. “You mean by shooting at Jack’s house? By killing Lex and his neighbors in Cooperstown?”
“He’s trying to stop what we’re doing.”
“So we investigate, and his response is to shoot and burn and kill. That’s what you’re calling an open door?”
“It proves he’s paying attention. It proves he’s still here. He hasn’t left the country. He hasn’t slipped back into his hole in the ground. It proves we can reach him. We just have to figure out how to reach him in a way that provokes a reaction we can work with.”
Esti’s eyes narrowed, her expression shifting from disbelief to speculation. “You mean, like, use the media—maybe that asshole Bork—to offer Panikos some kind of deal to reveal who hired him?”
“Bork could play a role, but not to offer that kind of deal. I think our little Peter Pan operates on a different wavelength.”
“What wavelength?”
“Well … just look at what we know about him.”
Esti shrugged. “We know he’s a professional killer.”
Gurney nodded. “What else?”
“He’s an expensive one, specializing in difficult contracts.”
“Impossible jobs that no one else will take—that’s the way Donny Angel put it. What else?”
“A psychopath, yes?”
Hardwick chimed in. “The psychopath from hell. With bad dreams. The way I see it, this wee fucker is one highly motivated murder machine—angry, crazy, bloodthirsty, and not about to change his ways any time soon. How about you, Sherlock? You got any other insights for us?”
Gurney swallowed the last mouthful of his lukewarm coffee. “I’ve just been trying to put all this together to see what it adds up to. His absolute insistence on doing everything his own way, his high intelligence combined with a total lack of empathy, his pathological rage, his killing skills, his appetite for mass murder—all that combined would seem to make little Peter the ultimate control freak from hell. Then there’s the final explosive element—the loose end, the secret, whatever it is that he’s desperate to conceal and afraid we may discover. Oh, and one more thing Angelidis told me—I almost forgot to mention it—little Peter likes to sing while he’s shooting people. Put all that together and it looks like a recipe for an interesting endgame.”
“Or a fucking world-class disaster,” said Hardwick.
“I guess that would be the downside.”