Peter Pan Must Die (56 page)

Kyle was leaning forward in his chair. “
Carl wasn’t supposed to be killed?
How’d you figure that out?”

“By banging my head against all the other pieces of the case that made no sense with Carl as the bull’s-eye. The prosecution’s wife-shoots-husband scenario fell apart almost as soon as I looked closely at it. It seemed far more likely that Kay, or maybe someone else, had hired a pro to hit Carl. But even that scenario had awkward aspects—like where the shot actually came from and the general complexity of the hit and the peculiarity of bringing in an expensive but uncontrollable pro like Peter Pan for what should have been a fairly straightforward job. It just never felt right. And then there were some old cases that kept coming to mind—a shooting in an alley, an exploding car.”

Kyle’s eyes were widening. “Those cases were connected to Carl’s murder?”

“Not directly. But they both involved faulty assumptions about timing and sequence. Maybe I sensed those same assumptions might be lurking in the Spalter case.”

“What assumptions?”

“In the alley shooting, two big ones. That the shot the officer fired actually struck the suspect and killed him. And that the officer was lying about which way the suspect was facing when he shot him. Both assumptions were quite reasonable. But they were wrong. The bullet wound that ended up killing the suspect had been incurred
before
the officer arrived on the scene. And the officer was telling the truth. With the car, the assumption was that it exploded because the driver lost control of it and drove it into a ravine. In fact, the driver lost control and drove it into a ravine because it exploded.”

Kyle nodded thoughtfully.

Hardwick made one of his distressed faces. “So what’s this got to do with Carl?”

“Everything—sequence, timing, assumptions.”

“How about spelling that out in the simple language of a peasant like me?”

“Everyone assumed that Carl stumbled and fell because he was shot. But suppose he was shot because he stumbled and fell.”

Hardwick blinked, his eyes revealing a rapid rethinking of the
possibilities. “You mean stumbled and fell in front of the intended victim?”

Madeleine looked unconvinced. “Isn’t that a bit of a stretch? That he was
accidentally
shot because he stumbled in front of the person the hit man was actually aiming at?”

“But that’s exactly what everyone
saw
happen, but then they all changed their minds—because their minds immediately reconnected the dots in a more conventional way.”

Kyle looked perplexed. “What do you mean, ‘That’s exactly what everyone saw happen’?”

“Everyone at the funeral who was interviewed claimed they thought at first that Carl had stumbled—maybe tripped over something or turned his ankle and lost his balance. A little while later, when the bullet wound was discovered, they all automatically revised their original perceptions. Essentially, their brains unconsciously were evaluating the relative likelihood of two possible sequences and favoring the one that normally would have had the greater chance of occurring.”

“Isn’t that what our brains are supposed to do?”

“Up to a point. The problem is, once we accept a certain sequence—in this case, ‘was shot, stumbled, and fell’ rather than ‘stumbled, was shot, and fell’—we tend to dismiss and forget the other. Our
new
version becomes the
only
version. The mind is built to resolve ambiguities and move on. In practice this often means leaping from reasonable assumption to assumed truth, and not looking back. Of course, if the reasonable assumption happens to be inaccurate, everything built on it later is nonsense and eventually collapses.”

Madeleine was exhibiting the impatient frown with which she greeted most of Gurney’s psychological theorizing. “So who was Panikos aiming at when Carl got in the way?”

“The answer is easy enough to get to. It would be the person whose role as a victim makes all the other oddities of the case make sense.”

Kyle’s eyes were fastened on his father. “You already know who it is, don’t you?”

“I have a pretty good idea.”

Madeleine spoke up excitedly. “The thing I keep hearing you talk about, the ‘oddity’ that bothers you the most, is the involvement of
Peter Pan—who supposedly only accepted really difficult contracts. So there are just two questions. First, ‘Who at the Mary Spalter funeral would be the most difficult to kill?’ And second, ‘Did Carl pass in front of that person as he was heading for the podium?’ ”

Hardwick’s interjected response sounded certain, despite his speech being somewhat blurred. “Answer to the first is Jonah. Answer to the second is yes.”

Gurney had come to the same conclusion nearly four hours earlier on the concourse by the Ferris wheel, but it was reassuring to see another mind arrive at the same place. With Jonah as the intended victim, all the twisted pieces of the case straightened out. Jonah was somewhere between difficult and impossible to locate physically, which made him the perfect challenge for Panikos. In fact, his mother’s funeral may well have been the only event that was capable of guaranteeing his presence in a predictable place at a predictable time, which is why Panikos killed her. Jonah’s seated position at graveside solved the line-of-sight problem from the Axton Avenue apartment. Carl couldn’t have been hit as he stepped past Alyssa, but he could easily have been hit by a bullet intended for Jonah as he stumbled to the ground in front of him. That scenario also explained the inconsistency that had troubled Gurney from the outset: How did Carl manage to travel ten or twelve feet
after
a bullet had destroyed the motor center of his brain? The simple answer was that he didn’t. And finally, the absurd outcome—in which “the Magician” shot the wrong man, making a potential laughingstock of himself in the very circles where his reputation mattered—explained his subsequent deadly efforts to keep that ruinous fact a secret.

The next question followed naturally.

Kyle asked it, uneasily. “If Jonah was the real target, who hired Panikos to kill him?”

From a simple cui bono perspective, it seemed to Gurney that the answer was obvious. Only one person would have benefited significantly from Jonah’s death, and he would have benefited
very
significantly indeed.

The expressions on their faces showed that the answer was equally obvious to everyone in the room.

“Slimy piece of shit,” muttered Hardwick.

“Oh, God.” Madeleine looked as if her view of human nature had absorbed a body blow.

They all stared at one another, as if wondering if there could be an alternative explanation.

But it seemed that there was no escaping the loathsome truth.

The man who’d bought the hit that killed Carl Spalter must have been none other than Carl Spalter himself. In his effort to do away with his brother, he’d brought about his own terrible demise—slow death in full knowledge of his full responsibility.

It was both horrifying and ludicrous.

But it had about it a terrible, undeniably satisfying symmetry.

It was karma with a vengeance.

And it finally provided an adequate explanation of that look of dread and despair on the face of the dying man in the courtroom—a man already in hell.

For the next quarter of an hour, the conversation veered between bleak observations on fratricide and efforts to come to terms with the harrowing practicalities of the situation in which they were entangled.

As Hardwick put it slowly but determinedly, “Tragic Cain-and-Abel shit aside, we need to figure out where we stand. A giant law enforcement clusterfuck is about to begin, with every participant doing his best to be a fucker, not a fuckee.”

Gurney nodded his agreement. “Where do you want to start?”

Before Hardwick could answer, Esti appeared at the door—out of breath and looking fearful, relieved, and curious in rapid succession.

“Hey! Peaches!” Hardwick’s rough whisper was accompanied by a soft smile. “How’d you manage to get away down there with all hell breaking loose?”

She ignored the question, just hurried over to the side of his bed and squeezed his hand. “How are you doing?”

He gave her a twisted little smile. “No problem. Slippery bullet. Went right through me without hitting anything that matters.”

“Good!” She sounded alarmed and happy at the same time.

“So tell me, how’d you get away?”

“I didn’t really
get away
—not officially—just took a detour on my way to a traffic assignment. Would you believe it—we have more idiots coming into the area now than trying to get out of it. Disaster lovers, gawkers, jerks!”

“So they’re putting investigators on traffic assignments?”

“They’re putting everybody on everything. You can’t believe what a mess it is down there. And lots of rumors flying around.” She looked significantly over at Gurney, who was sitting at the foot of the bed. “There’s talk about a crazy hit man blowing everything up. There’s talk about an NYPD detective shooting a kid. Or maybe shooting the crazy hit man? Or some unidentified midget?” She looked back at Hardwick. “One of the deputies told me that the midget was Panikos, and that he’s the one who shot you—and somehow he did this after he was already dead. You see what I mean? Everybody’s talking, nobody’s making sense. And on top of all that, there’s a jurisdictional pissing match between the county-level sheriff’s people, the local people, the state people, maybe soon the feds. Why not? More the merrier, right? And this is all happening while crazy people in the parking lot are ramming one another, every asshole trying to get out first. And even crazier assholes trying to get in, maybe take pictures, put them on Facebook. So that’s the way it is down there.” She looked back and forth between Hardwick and Gurney. “You guys were there. What’s with the kid? You shot him? He shot you? What on earth were you doing there to begin with?”

Hardwick looked at Gurney. “Be my guest. Talking’s getting rough for me right now.”

“Okay. I’ll make it fast, but I need to start at the beginning.”

Esti listened in anxious amazement to Gurney’s rapid recounting of the key events of the evening—from the lumber pile explosion and death of Klemper by the asparagus patch right up to the motorcycle chase and the death of Peter Pan in the midst of the rampant destruction at the fair.

After a stunned silence, her first question was a big one. “Can you prove that the person you shot is actually Panikos?”

“Yes and no. We can definitely prove that the person I shot is the same person who set off the series of explosions—and whose concealed gun discharged and shot Jack. The sheriff’s people have custody of his
body, his gun, and his cell phone—which he was using as a remote detonator. The nearest cell tower records will show that he called a series of numbers in that same location. And I have no doubt that the times of those calls will relate precisely to the times of the explosions—which can be verified through fairgrounds security recordings. If we have any luck, the bomb fragments at the fair will include bits of cell phone detonation systems, and the systems will match those that were used at Bincher’s house. And we’ll almost certainly get a match between the incendiary chemical formulas used at the fair and at Bincher’s. If the concealed weapon on Panikos’s body was used elsewhere, that could open another door. Linking the body and its DNA back to the Panikos identity in Europe will be a job for Interpol and their interested partners. In the meantime, pre-autopsy photos of his face, which was intact at last sight, can be compared to the features captured on the security videos from Axton Avenue and Emmerling Oaks.”

As Esti was nodding slowly in an evident effort to absorb and remember all of this, Gurney concluded, “I’m one hundred percent convinced that the body belongs to Panikos. But from a purely practical cover-my-ass legal perspective, it doesn’t matter. We can prove that the body belongs to an individual who was willfully responsible for the deaths of God only knows how many people in just the past couple of hours.”

“Actually, it’s not only God who knows. The latest count is between fifty and a hundred.”

“What?”

“That’s the latest as I was leaving for my traffic assignment. The number is expected to rise. Severe burns, two collapsed buildings, a fatal dispute in the parking lot, kids who got trampled. And the big one was the collapsing Ferris wheel.”

“Fifty to a hundred?”
whispered Madeleine, horrified.

“Christ.” Gurney leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. He could see the Ferris wheel tipping, slowly falling, disappearing behind the tent. He could hear the shocking crash, the screams piercing the awful din.

There was a prolonged silence in the room, broken by Hardwick. “Could have been even worse, maybe a lot worse,” he growled, coming back to life, “if Dave didn’t stop the little bastard when he did.”

To this observation there were somber nods of agreement.

“Plus,” added Hardwick, “in the middle of all that horrible shit, he managed to solve the Spalter murder case.”

Esti looked startled. “Solved … how?”

“Tell her, Sherlock.”

Gurney ran through the scenario with Carl as the tragic villain who initiated the plot that fatally backfired.

“So his plan was to eliminate his brother, take control of Spalter Realty, liquidate the assets for his own use?”

Gurney nodded. “That’s how I see it.”

Hardwick added his own nod. “Fifty million bucks. Just about right to buy the governor’s mansion.”

“And he figured we’d never get him for the hit? God, what an arrogant bastard!” She glanced curiously at Gurney. “You have a strange look on your face. What’s that about?”

“Just thinking that a hit on his brother could’ve been a major plus in Carl’s campaign. He could’ve positioned it as the mob’s effort to scare him out of politics—their effort to keep a man of integrity from taking over the state government. I wonder if that might have been part of his plan all along—to position his brother’s murder as proof of his own virtue?”

“I like it,” said Hardwick, with a cynical glint in his eyes. “Ride that fucking corpse like a white horse—straight to his inauguration!”