Peter Pan Must Die (49 page)

Kyle hurried toward the thicket and disappeared out of the wavering firelight into the darkness. Then Gurney made his way around to the corner of the house where the BSA was parked. He was fairly sure that in that position it would be out of sight from the top of Barrow Hill. He hoped Kyle was right about the key. If it wasn’t in the ignition … But it was.

He slipped the Beretta back in his ankle holster and straddled the bike. It had been more than twenty-five years since he’d been on a similar motorcycle—the old Triumph 650 he rode in his college days. He quickly familiarized himself with the positions of brakes, clutch, shift lever. Looking down at the gas tank, the handlebars, the chrome headlight, the front fender, the front tire—it all began to come back to him. Even the physical sensation, the recollection of balance and momentum—it was all there, as though it had been preserved in some airtight container of memory, alive and undiminished.

He grasped the throttle ends of the handlebars and started easing the bike up from its leaning position, when a momentary surge of flame from the burning lumber illuminated something dark and bulky on the ground by the asparagus patch. He let the bike settle back on its kickstand, slowly reached down and got the pistol back in his hand. As best he could tell in the fluctuating light, the object on the
ground wasn’t moving. It was about the right size for a human body. Something on the near side looked like it might be an extended arm.

Gurney raised his weapon, stepped carefully off the bike, and moved forward as far as the corner of the house. He was sure now that he was looking at the prone body of a man, and at the end of that putative outstretched arm he could make out roughly the shape of a rifle.

He got down on his knees and took a quick glance around the side of the house—confirming that his car was blocking the line of sight between Barrow Hill and the space he’d have to cross to reach the figure on the ground. Without any further delay, he crept quickly ahead, Beretta ready, eyes fixed on the rifle. With about three feet to go, his free hand landed on a wet, sticky patch of earth.

By its subtle but distinctive odor, he realized he was crawling into a pool of blood.

“Ach!” His whispered exclamation was as reflexive as his recoiling from the contact. Having begun his NYPD career at the height of the AIDS terror, he’d been indoctrinated to regard blood as a deadly toxin until proven otherwise. That feeling was still with him. Miserably regretting the lack of gloves, but desperately needing to understand the situation, he forced himself forward. On a scale of zero to ten, the dying light from the scattered debris still burning near the asparagus patch was varying from zero to two.

He reached the rifle first, grasping it tightly and pulling it from the hand that held it. It was a common lever-action deer rifle. But deer season was four months away. Sliding the rifle behind him, he moved closer to the body, close enough to see that the source of the blood on the ground was an ugly wound in the side of the neck—a wound so deep, ripping completely through the carotid artery, that death would have occurred within seconds.

The object that had caused it was still embedded there. It looked like two knife blades joined at one end to form a strange U-shaped weapon. Then he recognized what it actually was. It was one of the sharp metal joist hangers that had been delivered with the lumber. The obvious explanation was that the explosion had propelled that nasty piece of hardware with terrific force at the man with the rifle, cutting his throat. But that led to other questions.

Did the man set off the explosion himself, then suffer this unintended
consequence? But it seemed unlikely that he would have detonated the device while he was still within range of the debris. Perhaps he detonated it by accident? Or in ignorance of the strength of the explosive charge? Or was he the unfortunate accomplice of a second individual who acted too soon? But questions like these begged a more fundamental question.

Who the hell was he?

Violating crime scene protocol, Gurney grasped the man’s heavily muscled shoulder and, with some effort, rolled him over for a better view of his face.

His first conclusion was that the man was definitely not his neighbor. His second conclusion, delayed by the lack of light and by the man’s spectacularly broken nose, probably caused by falling on his face, was that he’d seen that face before. It took a few moments for the identity to register.

It was Mick Klemper.

That’s when Gurney noted a second odor, not as subtle as the blood itself. Alcohol. And that led him to a third conclusion—one that was assumption-ridden but plausible.

Klemper, possibly like Panikos, had seen—or been told about—the
Criminal Conflict
program teaser, with its promises of sensational revelations, and it had provoked him to take action. Drunk and enraged—perhaps in a crazed effort at damage control, or driven by fury at what he surely would have perceived as a broken promise—he’d come after the man who was betraying him, the man who was ending his career and his life as he knew it.

Drunk and enraged, he’d come gunning for Gurney, skulking around the woods, sneaking up to the house as darkness fell. Drunk and enraged, he hadn’t given a second thought to what a dangerous place that might be.

Once again Gurney faced the simple, urgent question:
What now?

In a less pressured position, he might have chosen the sanest and safest option—an immediate call to 911. A state police officer, however demented his motive might have been for being on the scene, had been killed. Though perhaps unintended, his death was hardly accidental. Occurring as the direct result of a felony—the reckless detonation of the explosive—it was murder. Failure to report this, along with the pertinent background information, to the appropriate authorities in a timely fashion could be construed as obstruction of justice.

On the other hand, much could be excused by the immediate pursuit of a suspect.

And perhaps there was a way to bring the local police to the scene without entrapping himself in the prolonged questioning that was sure to occur and thus losing what might be his last real chance to catch Panikos and untangle the Spalter knot.

After turning Klemper’s body back over to its original position—hoping that the techs summoned to the scene wouldn’t be sharp enough to discern any evidence of the interference—Gurney scrambled back behind the corner of the house and called out in a low voice to Kyle.

Less than half a minute later the young man was standing next to him. “Jeez, is that … is that … somebody … over there on the ground?”

“Yes. But forget about it for now. You didn’t see it. Do you have your phone?”

“Yes, sure. But what—?”

“Call 911. Tell them everything that happened here up to the point when we climbed out the window—the flat tire, the explosion, my belief that the tire had been shot out. Tell them that I’m ex-NYPD, that after the explosion I saw some movement on Barrow Hill, that I told you to hide in the thicket, that I took your motorcycle and went in pursuit of whoever I thought was up there. And that’s all you know.”

Kyle’s gaze was still on Klemper’s body. “But … what about …?”

“Our lights were out, it’s dark, your father sent you up to that thicket to hide. You never saw the body. Let the 911 responders find it themselves. You can be as surprised and disturbed by it as they’ll be.”

“Surprised and disturbed—that should be easy enough.”

“Stay in the thicket until you see the first cruiser coming up through the pasture. Then come out slowly and let them see you. Let them see your hands.”

“You still haven’t told me what happened … to him.”

“The less you know, the less you’ll need to forget, and the easier it’ll be to be surprised and confused.”

“What are
you
going to do?”

“That depends on the situation on the hill. I’ll give it some thought on my way up there. But whatever it is, it needs to happen now.” He got back on the bike, started it as quietly as he could, turned it around, and headed slowly around the back of the house. Confident that the structure was providing sufficient cover, he switched the headlight on and guided the softly rumbling bike slowly toward the old cow path that led to the large field separating his property from Barrow Hill.

He was pretty sure that the roundabout arc he was taking would prevent anyone on the top of the hill from seeing the headlight of the bike approaching. Then he could make his way up the north-side trail, a switchback with no direct visibility from the top.

All this sounded fine, as far as it went. But it didn’t go far enough. Too much was unknown. Gurney couldn’t escape the feeling that he was heading into a situation where the guy on the other side of the table had not only higher cards, but a better seat and a bigger gun. Not to mention a history of winning.

Gurney was tempted to blame everything on the cynical, duplicitous creeps at RAM-TV whose timing “mistake” with the
Criminal
Conflict
promotion announcements was almost certainly a deliberate decision. More promotional exposure meant a bigger audience, and a bigger audience was their number one goal. In fact, it was their only goal. If someone should die as a result of that decision, well … that could create the biggest ratings boost of all.

But the difficulty with blaming it all on them, vile and venal as they were, was that he knew that he owned a piece of the problem. His piece had been his pretending, mostly to himself, that the plan made sense. It was hard to maintain that illusion now—as he struggled to keep the BSA upright, negotiating a tortuous route through clumps of briars, waist-high aspen saplings, and groundhog burrows that would have made the outer edge of the unmowed field a challenge even with perfect visibility. On a murky night it was a nightmare.

As he neared the foot of the hill, the terrain grew rougher and the jouncing movements of the headlight beam through the bushy weeds filled the area out in front of him with erratic shadows. Gurney had faced tough conditions before in the endgame of a battle with a dangerous opponent, but this was worse. Without time to think, to evaluate pros and cons and levels of risk, he felt forced to act.

Forced
was not too strong a word for it. Now that he was within striking distance of Panikos, letting him get away was unthinkable. When he was this near his quarry, the gravitational field of the chase grew stronger and the rational assessment of risk began to fade.

And there was something else. Something very specific.

The echo of the past—stirring a force within him far stronger than reason.

That searing memory of an escaping car, Danny sprawled dead on the pavement. A memory that gave birth to an iron conviction that never again—
never again, no matter the danger
—would a killer so close get away from him.

This was something far beyond the niceties of rationality. This was something burned by unbearable loss into the circuits of his brain.

Having reached the opening to the north trail, he needed to make an immediate decision, and none of the options was encouraging. Since Panikos would probably be equipped with an infrared scope and infrared binoculars, any effort to get to the top of the hill would likely be fatal long before Gurney could get within Beretta range. The only
way he could think of to neutralize the man’s technological advantage was to put him on the run. And the only way he could think of to make him run was to give him the impression that he was outnumbered and outgunned—not an easy impression to create in the absence of backup. For a few moments, Gurney considered roaring full throttle up the switchback trail, shouting orders to imaginary cohorts, shouting replies in other voices. But he dismissed it as too transparent a ploy.

Then it occurred to him that a solution was at hand. Although he’d have no actual backup, the
appearance
of backup might be enough—and a very solid appearance of backup would soon be on the scene. A police cruiser or two, maybe three, hopefully with all their lights flashing, should be driving up any minute now through the pasture in response to Kyle’s 911 call. Their arrival would be clearly visible from Panikos’s likely position up by the tarn—and the sight of them should create a sufficient impression of manpower to dislodge Panikos and persuade him to retreat down the back trail to Beaver Cross Road.

That would all be for nothing, however, if Panikos established a large enough lead on Gurney to slip away into the night—or, worse, to pull off the trail unobserved and wait in ambush. To avoid that possibility Gurney decided to maneuver the BSA as quietly as he could to a location about three quarters of the way up the switchback, wait for the arrival of the cruisers in the pasture, and then play it by ear, depending on Panikos’s reaction.

He didn’t have to wait long. No more than a minute or two after he’d reached his intended position on the trail—within striking distance of the hilltop—he saw the oscillating colored lights through the trees at the far side of the field. And almost immediately he heard the sound he was hoping for—an ATV, loud at first, then beginning to recede—meaning that Panikos was, at least for the moment, behaving as anticipated.

Gurney revved up the idling BSA and maneuvered as fast as he dared through the remaining switchback segments. When he reached the small open area by the tarn, he turned the throttle back to idle for a moment to listen for the ATV and judge its position and speed. He guessed it was no more than a hundred yards down the back trail.

As he turned toward the trailhead and his headlight swept across the clearing, his eye caught first one oddity and then another. Resting
on the flat rock that offered the best view of Gurney’s house was a bouquet of flowers. The stems were wrapped in yellow tissue. The blossoms were a deep brownish red, a color typical of dried blood—and also the most common color of the local August mums.

He couldn’t help wondering if the bouquet—or “posies” in the words of the nursery rhyme—had been intended for delivery to him, perhaps as a final message to be left on his dead body.