by John Verdon
Thinking about what he’d said, he wished he’d said it differently. It was too ominous, too obscure. It needed context, explanation. He was tempted to call back and leave a longer message, but he was afraid he’d end up making the situation worse.
He called Hardwick’s number and got voice mail. He left a message saying that he was currently en route to Walnut Crossing. He asked if there’d been any casualties in the Cooperstown fires, or any sign of Bincher. And, regarding the crazy shooter, what had he found out? He ended the call, making sure his phone was still on, and went back into the food court for another coffee.
It wasn’t until he was up into the rural hills above Barleyville that Hardwick finally got back to him. “We’ve got some seriously insane shit going on here, ace. Three big houses, three big piles of ashes. Lex’s house, plus one on each side of it. Six people dead—none of them Bincher. Two bodies in the house on his left, four in the house on his right, including two kids. All trapped in the fires. Guys on the scene are saying it happened sometime after midnight, went up real quick. The arson unit guy is saying probable SIDs—small incendiary devices—four of them, one at each corner of Bincher’s house. No effort by the arsonist to make it seem like anything but arson.”
“And the other two houses were just collateral damage? You sure?”
“I’m not sure about anything. I’m outside the yellow tape, blending in with the asshole gawkers—just picking up what the local cops are telling their buddies. But the word is that the gas chromatograph tests were positive for incendiary chemicals at Bincher’s, not at the others.”
“But Bincher’s house was empty? I mean, there were no bodies in that one?”
“None so far. But I can see the techs still crawling around down there in the wet ashes. Quite the fucking mob scene. Fire department, BCI, arson unit, sheriff’s department, troopers, local uniforms.” He paused. “Christ, Davey, if this is supposed to be … to be a way of warning Lex off the case …” His voice trailed off.
Gurney said nothing.
Hardwick coughed, cleared his throat. “You still there?”
“Still here. Just thinking about your ‘warning’ comment.” He paused. “I’d say that cutting your power lines was probably a warning. The mutilation of Gurikos’s head was probably a warning. But this … this Bincher thing … this feels like something more. Like war. With zero concern for who gets killed.”
“I agree. The little fucker has an appetite for serious destruction. And arson seems to be a recurrent theme.”
“Recurrent theme?” Gurney slowed down, pulled onto a grassy bluff overlooking the reservoir, turned off the engine, and opened his windows. “What do you mean, recurrent theme? What did you get from Interpol?”
“Maybe a lot, or maybe a lot of nothing. Hard to say. The thing of it is, the information they’ve pieced together in their database may or may not refer to a single individual. The current stuff, from the past ten years or so, is probably accurate—most of it anyway. But before that—earlier than ten years ago—it gets shakier. Also more bizarre.”
Gurney wondered how much more bizarre it could get than hammering nails into someone’s head.
Hardwick explained. “The guy in Ankara decided to talk to me on the phone rather than create an e-mail trail, so I took notes. What he gave me amounts to two little stories. Depending on how you look at them, they can seem very connected, or maybe not connected at all. The stories go backwards in time, starting with the material assembled in the last decade or so on the assassin who goes by the name Petros Panikos. You ready for this?”
“All ears, Jack.”
“The Panikos name, used as a primary search link, led back to an event that occurred twenty-five years ago in the village of Lykonos in southern Greece. There was a Panikos family there that owned a gift shop. There were four sons in the family, the youngest of whom was believed to have been adopted. The gift shop, along with the family home, was destroyed by a fire that killed both parents and three of the sons. The fourth son, the adopted one, disappeared. Arson was suspected but never proved. No formal birth certificate or adoption papers were ever found for the missing son. The family was very private, had no close relatives, and there was even some disagreement in the village about the missing son’s name. But—get this—the two possible names mentioned were Pero and Petros.”
“How old was he?”
“No one could say for sure. According to the old arson investigation file, his age at the time was estimated to be anywhere from twelve to sixteen.”
“No information on his birth name or where he came from originally?”
“Nothing official. However, in the arson investigation file there’s a statement from a priest in the village who thought the boy came from a Bulgarian orphanage.”
“What made him think that?”
“There’s no indication in the file that anyone bothered to ask. But the priest did give the name of the orphanage.”
Gurney let out a short laugh. It had nothing to do with humor. If he had to explain it, he probably would have called it an overflow of energy. There was something about the tracking process, the movement from one bit of information to another, the steps across the stream, that charged the circuits of his brain. “And I’m guessing that the trail to the orphanage takes us to another relevant event?”
“Well, actually, it takes us to a bleak communist-era orphanage for which there are no extant records. Wanna guess why?”
“Another arson?”
“Yep. So all we know about its residents at the time of the fire—in which most of them died—comes from a skimpy old police file, actually from one interview in that file, with a staff nurse who survived the blaze. By the way, there was no problem establishing arson as the cause. Apart from the orphanage’s four buildings going up in flames at the same time—and apart from gas cans being found in all four—the outer doors were jammed shut with wooden wedges.”
“Meaning the goal was mass murder. But it sounds like the fire was the end of the story. What was the beginning?”
“According to the nurse’s statement, a couple of years before the fire, a strange little kid was discovered one winter morning, literally on the front steps. The kid appeared to be mute and illiterate. But then they discovered that he was fluent not only in Bulgarian but also in Russian, German, and English. This nurse got the idea that the kid was some sort of idiot savant with languages—he was that good. So she got him some basic grammar books, and sure enough, during the two years he was there he learned French, Turkish, and God knows what else.”
“Did he ever tell them where he came from?”
“He claimed total amnesia—no memory of anything prior to arriving there. His only link to the past was a chronic nightmare. Something involving a carnival and a clown. They ended up putting him in a separate room at night, away from the other kids, because of how often he’d wake up screaming. For some reason—maybe because of there being a clown in the dream—the nurse got the idea that his original mother had been in some kind of creepy little traveling circus.”
“Sounds like quite the unusual child. Any big red flags pop up before the fire?”
“Oh, yeah. Big one.” Hardwick paused dramatically.
It was one of his habits that Gurney had learned to live with. “You want to tell me about it?”
“A couple of kids made fun of him, something about the nightmares.” Another pause.
“Jack, for Christ’s sake—”
“They disappeared.”
“The kids who made fun of him?”
“Right. Off the face of the earth. Same thing with an aide who didn’t believe his amnesia story, kept taunting him about it. Gone. Zero trace.”
“Anything else?”
“More weird shit. Nobody could tell how old he was, because in the two years he was there he never changed, never grew, never seemed to look any older than the day he arrived.”
“Like Peter Pan.”
“Right.”
“Was he ever called by that nickname at the orphanage?”
“There’s nothing about that in the Bulgarian file.”
Gurney ran the story back through his mind quickly. “I’m missing something. How do we know this orphanage kid is the same kid the Panikos family adopted?”
“We don’t know for sure. The nurse said he was adopted by a Greek family, but she didn’t know the name. That was handled by a different department. But it was the day he left with his new parents that the place burned down and just about everyone else was trapped and killed.”
Gurney was silent.
“What are you thinking, Sherlock?”
“I’m thinking that someone paid a hundred grand to turn this little monster loose on Carl Spalter.”
“And on Mary Spalter and Gus Gurikos and Lex Bincher,” added Hardwick.
“Peter Pan,” mused Gurney. “The kid who never grew up.”
“Very fanciful, ace, but where does this leave us?”
“I’d say it leaves us in the middle of nowhere, drifting into total confusion. We’ve got some colorful stories, but we know almost nothing. We’re looking for a pro hitter whose name might be Petros Panikos or Peter Pan or something else. Birth name unknown. Passport name unknown. Date of birth unknown. Nationality unknown. Birth parents unknown. Current address unknown. Arrests and convictions unknown. In fact, just about everything that could lead us to him is unknown.”
“I don’t disagree. What now?”
“You need to go back to your Interpol guy and beg for whatever crumbs might still be lurking in the corners of their Panikos file—especially anything more about the Panikos family, their neighbors, anyone in that village who might have known anything about little Petros, or whatever the hell they named him—anything that might give us a better handle than we have now. The name of anyone we could talk to …”
“Fuck, man, that was twenty-five years ago. Nobody’s going to remember anything, even if we could find them. Get real.”
“You’re probably right. But get in touch with your Interpol guy anyway. Who knows what he might come up with?”
After ending the call, Gurney sat with his notebook open on his lap, gazing out over the reservoir. The low water level was exposing the rocky slopes that extended from the water’s edge up to the tree line. Driftwood littered the stones. Across a small inlet, in the deep afternoon shadows, a pair of gnarled branches reached up from the water onto the slope in a way that stirred a chilling memory of one of his first murder scenes as a rookie—the body of a naked child washed up against a stony outcropping on the shore of the Hudson River.
It wasn’t a memory he wanted to dwell on. He picked up his notebook, where he’d jotted down most of what Hardwick had told him, and went over it one more time.
He was frustrated with himself. Frustrated with having gotten involved in the case to begin with. Frustrated with not having made more tangible progress. Frustrated with the lack of official standing. Frustrated with all the question marks.
He decided he needed another cup of coffee. He started the car and was about to head into Barleyville when Hardwick called again, sounding more shaken than before. “We’ve got a new situation. If what I just overheard is true, Lex Bincher may no longer be missing.”
“Oh, Jesus. What now?”
“One of the troopers with the BCI boys found a body in the water under Lex’s private dock. Just a body. A body with no head.”
“Are they sure it’s Bincher?”
“I didn’t hang around to find out. I got a bad feeling about the missing head. I backed out of the crowd and came back to my car. I gotta get outta here before I puke, or before some BCI guy recognizes me and puts two and two together—with me and Bincher and the Spalter case—and I end up in an interview room for the next two weeks. I can’t afford that. Not with this kind of shit going down. I got to be able to move, got to be able to do whatever the fuck we have to do. Gotta go. Call you later.”
Gurney sat there by the reservoir for another few minutes, letting the new situation sink in. His gaze drifted back out over the water to the piece of driftwood that had reminded him of the body snagged on the rocks at the edge of the Hudson. As he stared now at the bare, twisted wood, the configuration reminded him not just of a body, but of a headless body.
He shivered, restarted the car, and headed for Walnut Crossing.
Chapter 39
Terrible Creatures
Thinking about Hardwick’s anxious departure from the crime scene—in fear of being recognized and having the reason for his presence questioned—pushed to the front of Gurney’s mind an issue he’d been avoiding: Where did the right to conduct a private investigation in the interest of a client end … and obstruction of justice begin?
At what point did he have an obligation to share with law enforcement what he’d learned about the hit man who called himself Petros Panikos and his probable involvement in the lengthening string of homicides associated with the Spalter case? Did the fact that Panikos’s involvement was only “probable” rather than certain make a difference? Surely, Gurney concluded with a feeling an inch shy of comfort, he had no obligation to share speculative scenarios with the police, who no doubt had plenty of their own. But how honest was that argument, really?
This debate occupied him uneasily as he drove through bleak little Barleyville—finding the little café where he’d hoped to get coffee closed. He continued on over the forested hills that separated it from the village of Walnut Crossing, and on past that to his mountain road. His thoughts culminated in a chilling question: What if the Cooperstown deaths were a sign of things to come? How long could one keep confidential the fruits of a private investigation, if the war that apparently had been declared by Panikos continued to claim casualties?
The sight of his mailbox at the end of the road shifted his focus from Panikos to Klemper. Had the man delivered the requested security video, as his phone message had implied? Or did the mailbox contain a less pleasant surprise?
He drove past the mailbox, parked the car by the barn, and walked back.
He’d have bet a thousand dollars against the possibility of a bomb, but he wasn’t ready to bet his life. He eyed the mailbox and decided on a relatively low-risk way of opening it. He first needed to find a fallen branch long enough to reach the drop-lid from a spot shielded by the trunk of a hemlock several feet from the box.
After a five-minute search and a number of awkward thrusts with a less-than-ideal branch, he managed to jar the drop-lid loose. It swung open with a clank. He waited a few seconds, then circled around to the front of the box and peered inside. All it contained was a single white envelope. He removed it, brushing off a tiny ant.
The envelope was addressed to him in rough block printing. It had no stamp or postmark. He could feel a small rectangular object through the paper, which he thought might be a USB drive. He opened the envelope cautiously and saw that he was right. He put the drive in his pocket, walked back to the car, and drove up to the house.
The clock on the dashboard read 4:18 p.m. Madeleine’s car was in its regular spot, which reminded him that she’d been on her early shift that day and had likely gotten home around two. He expected she’d be inside reading—perhaps engaged in her Sisyphean assault on War and Peace. He went in through the side door and called out, “I’m home.”
There was no answer.
Passing through the kitchen on his way to the den, he called out again, and again there was no answer. His next thought was that she was out on one of her walks.
In the den he tapped a key on his open laptop to bring it to life. He took the USB drive out of his pocket and stuck it in the appropriate slot. The icon that appeared was titled “02 DEC 2011 08:00AM–11:59AM”—the time window within which the Spalter shooting had occurred. He went to the GET INFO menu and discovered that the little thumb drive had a 64GB capacity, far more than enough to cover the specified hours, even at a high resolution.
He
clicked on the drive icon, and a window opened immediately with four video file icons—titled “CAM A (INT),” “CAM B (EAST),” “CAM C (WEST),” and “CAM D (SOUTH).”
Interesting. A four-camera array was an unusual level of video security for a small electronics store in a small city. Gurney figured the array was either an active display for the purpose of selling security cameras—like having a wall of televisions, all on—or, a possibility that had crossed his mind earlier, Hairy Harry and his girlfriend were in a riskier business than consumer electronics.
Since the south-facing camera would have been the one facing the Willow Rest cemetery, that was the file Gurney chose first. When he clicked on the icon, a video window appeared with controls for PLAY, PAUSE, REVERSE, and CLOSE, plus a sliding bar linked to the file time code, for getting to specific points in the video. He clicked on PLAY.
What he saw then was what he’d hoped for. It was almost too good to be true. Not only was the file resolution superb, but the camera that had produced the file evidently included the latest motion-tracking and zoom-to-action technology. And, of course, like most security cameras, it was motion-activated—recording video only when something was happening—and had a real-time indicator at the bottom of the frame.
The motion-activation feature meant that the nominal four-hour period of coverage would occupy far less recorded time in the file, since intervals of inactivity in the camera’s field of view would not be represented. So it was that the first hour of the period had produced less than ten minutes of digital footage—triggered mainly by hardy dog walkers and winter-suited joggers performing their morning rituals on a path that paralleled the low cemetery wall. The scene was brightened by pale winter sunlight and a light, patchy coating of snow.
It wasn’t until a little after nine that the camera responded to activity inside Willow Rest. A panel truck was moving slowly across the frame. It came to a stop in front of what Gurney recognized as the Spalter family plot (or, to use Paulette Purley’s term, “property”). Two men in bulky overalls emerged from the truck, opened its rear doors, and began unloading a number of dark, flat, rectangular objects. These were soon revealed to be folding chairs, which the men set up with evident care in two rows facing an elongated area of dark earth—the open grave intended for Mary Spalter. After making some adjustments in the position of the chairs, one of the men erected a portable podium at the end of the grave, while the other retrieved a large broom from the truck and began sweeping some of the snow away from the grassy space between the chairs and the grave.
