by John Verdon
“Good luck.” Gurney went into the den and opened his email. His eye ran down through the two dozen or so items that had arrived since that morning. One item caught his attention. The sender was identified simply as “Jonah.”
The email text appeared to be a personal response to Gurney’s request for a meeting to discuss the status of the investigation.
I would be interested in having the proposed discussion as soon as possible. My location, however, would make a physical meeting at this time impractical. My suggestion is that we meet via Internet video-phone tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. If you would like to proceed this way, please email me your video-phone service name. If you do not already have this in place, you can download the software from Skype. I look forward to your response.
Gurney accepted Jonah’s invitation immediately. They already had the Skype program. At the request of her sister in Ridgewood, Madeleine had installed it on their computer when they’d first moved to the mountains. As he hit SEND, he felt a little rush of adrenaline—a sense that something was about to change.
He needed to prepare. That eight a.m. conversation was less than twelve hours away. And then at nine he, Hardwick, and hopefully Esti would be getting together to bring one another up-to-date.
He went to the Cyberspace Cathedral website and immersed himself for the next forty-five minutes in the bland, smiley-positive philosophy of Jonah Spalter.
He was in the process of concluding that the man was a kind of saccharine genius—a Walt Disney of self-improvement—when Kyle called to him from the other room. “Hey, Dad? I think I’ve got this video stuff about as good as I can get it.”
Gurney went out to the dining table and sat next to his son. Kyle clicked on an icon, and an enhanced version of the cemetery sequence began—enlarged, sharpened, and slowed to half speed. Everything was as Gurney remembered it from his first viewing—just clearer and bigger. Carl was seated at the far right side of the first row of chairs. He rose and turned toward the podium at the other end of the grave. He took a step forward in front of Alyssa, began to take a second step, and lurched forward in the direction he’d been moving, coming to rest face-down just past the last seat at the far end of the row. Jonah, Alyssa, and the Elder Force ladies got to their feet. Paulette rushed forward. The pallbearers and undertaker came around the chairs.
Gurney leaned closer to the screen, asking Kyle to pause the video, trying to discern the expressions on the faces of Jonah and Alyssa, but the detail just wasn’t there. Similarly, even at this enlargement level, Carl’s face against the ground was little more than a generic profile. There was a dark speck along the hairline of the temple that might have been the bullet’s entry wound—or it could have been a bit of dirt, a tiny shadow, or an artifact of the software itself.
He asked Kyle to play the segment through again, hoping for some revelation to emerge.
None did. He asked for it a third time, peering intently at the side of Carl’s head as he turned toward the podium, took a step, began to take another, pitched forward into a rapidly staggering collapse. Either some breeze at the site or Carl’s own jerky movement had disarranged his hair, making it impossible to see that subtle little dark spot until his head hit the ground and stopped moving, just beyond Jonah’s feet.
“I’m sure the FBI has software that could give you an upgraded image,” said Kyle apologetically. “I’ve pushed this program about as far as I can without producing a picture that’s essentially fictional.”
“What you’ve given me is a lot better than what I started with. Let’s take a look at the street scene.”
Kyle closed a few windows, opened a new one, and hit a play icon. Starting with a subject much closer to the camera, filling a larger portion of the frame to begin with, the enlargement in this instance was clearer and more detailed. The likely killer of Mary Spalter, Carl Spalter, Gus Gurikos, and Lex Bincher came walking along Axton Avenue and entered the apartment building. Gurney wished the little man had left more of his face uncovered. But, of course, the obscuration had been intentional.
Apparently Kyle was thinking along the same lines. “Didn’t give us much for a Wanted poster, did he?”
“Not much for a Wanted poster and not much for a facial recognition program either.”
“Because his eyes are hidden by the huge sunglasses?”
“Right. The shape of the eyes, position of the pupils, corners of the eyes. The scarf hides the jawline and the tip of the chin. The headband hides the ears and the position of the hairline. There’s nothing left for the measurement algorithms to work with.”
“Still, if I saw it again, I think I could recognize that face—just by the mouth.”
Gurney nodded. “The mouth, and what I can see of the nose.”
“Yeah, that too. He looks like a fucking little bird—excuse my language.”
They sat back in their chairs and gazed at the screen. At the half-hidden face of one of the world’s strangest killers. Petros Panikos. Peter Pan. The Magician.
And, of course, there was Donny Angel’s final description of him: “very fucking crazy.”
Chapter 45
Out of Harm’s Way
“So what do you think?” Kyle, a questioning look on his face, was holding a mug of hot black coffee in both hands, elbows propped on the breakfast table.
“What do I think about the videos?” Gurney sat on the other side of the round pine table, holding his own mug in a similar way, appreciating the warmth on his palms. The temperature had dropped nearly twenty degrees overnight, from the low seventies to the low fifties, not an unusual thing in the northwestern Catskills, where autumn often arrived in August. The sky was overcast, hiding the sun, which normally would be visible above the eastern ridge at that time—a quarter past seven.
“Do you think they’ll help you achieve … what you want to achieve?”
Gurney took a slow sip from his mug. “The cemetery sequence will do a couple of things. It establishes the point at which Carl was hit, and the obstructed angle from the apartment window to that position will undermine the police scenario for the source of the shot. And the fact that the video was in police hands from the beginning—Klemper’s hands—will support a charge of evidence suppression.” He fell silent, unsettled for a moment by the memory of his conversation with Klemper at Riverside Mall.
He saw Kyle watching him curiously and went on. “The street sequence is useful in a couple of ways—for what it shows and what it doesn’t show. The simple fact that it doesn’t show Kay Spalter entering the building would have made it an important piece of exculpatory evidence for the defense. So, at the very least, it supports serious charges of evidence suppression and police misconduct.”
“So … how come you don’t sound happier?”
“Happier?” Gurney hesitated. “I guess I’ll be happier when we get closer to the end point.”
“What is the end point?”
“I’d like to know what really happened.”
“You mean, find out who killed Carl?”
“Yes. That’s the thing that really matters. If Kay is innocent, then someone else wanted Carl dead, planned it, and hired Panikos to accomplish it. I want to know who that was. And the little assassin who pulled the trigger? So far he’s managed to kill nine other people in the process—not counting the scores of people he’s killed before, always managing to walk away and do it again. I’d rather he didn’t walk away this time.”
“How close do you think you are to stopping him?”
“Hard to say.”
Kyle’s intelligent, inquisitive gaze remained fixed on him, in evident expectation of a better answer. As Gurney was reaching for one and finding it elusive, he was reprieved by the ring of his cell phone.
It was Hardwick. As usual, the man didn’t waste time saying hello. “Got your message about the video-phone thing with Jonah Spalter. Where the hell is he?”
“I have no idea. But his willingness to have a conversation this way i
s better than nothing. You want to come here at eight instead of nine, be part of it?”
“Nine’s the best I can do. Same with Esti. But we both have a deep and abiding faith in your interview skills. You have the software to record the call?”
“No, but I can download it. You have any specific questions you’d like me to ask?”
“Yeah. Ask him if he hired the hit on his brother.”
“Great idea. Any other advice?”
“Yeah. Don’t fuck it up. See you at nine.”
Gurney slipped the phone back in his pocket.
Kyle cocked his head curiously. “What do you need to download?”
“A piece of audio-video recording software that’s compatible with Skype. You think you could do that for me?”
“Give me your Skype name and password. I’ll take care of it right now.”
As the young man headed into the den armed with the information he needed, Gurney smiled at his eagerness to help, smiled also at the simple pleasure of his being in the house. It made him wonder, yet again, why their times together were so few and far between.
There was a period when he thought he knew the reason—a period peaking a couple of years earlier when Kyle was making an obscene amount of money on Wall Street, in a job he’d stepped into through a door opened by a college friend. Gurney was convinced that the yellow Porsche accompanying that job was proof positive that the money-mad genes of his real estate broker ex-wife, Kyle’s mother, had taken over. But now he suspected that this had been nothing more than a rationalization that absolved him of a deeper and less explainable failure to reach out to his son. He used to tell himself that it was because Kyle reminded him of his ex-wife in other unpleasant ways as well—certain gestures, intonations, facial expressions. But that too was a questionable excuse. There were many more differences than similarities between mother and son, and even if there weren’t, it would be petulant and unfair to equate one person with the other.
He would sometimes think that the real explanation was nothing more complicated than the defense of his own peculiar comfort zone. That comfort zone did not include other people. That was the point his college girlfriend, Geraldine, had hammered home the day she left him so many years ago. When he viewed the issue in that light, he saw his apparent avoidance of his son as just one more symptom of his innate introversion. Not such a big deal. Case closed. But as soon as he would settle on this, a tiny doubt would begin to nibble at the edge of his certainty. Did simple introversion fully explain how little he saw of Kyle? And the nibble would grow into a gnawing question: Did the presence of one son inevitably remind him that he’d once had two sons and would still have two sons if only …
Kyle reappeared at the kitchen door. “You’re all set up. I left the screen open for you. It’s totally simple.”
“Oh. Great. Thank you.”
Kyle was watching him with a curious smile.
It reminded Gurney of a look he sometimes saw on Madeleine’s face. “What are you thinking?”
“About how you like to figure stuff out. How important it is to you. While that software was downloading, I was thinking … if Madeleine was a detective, she’d want to solve the puzzle so she could catch the bad guy. But I think you want to catch the bad guy so you can solve the puzzle.”
Gurney was pleased, not by his own position in the comparison—which didn’t strike him as especially laudable—but by Kyle’s perception in noting it. The young man had a good mind, a fact that meant a lot to Gurney. He felt a little surge of camaraderie. “You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that you use the word ‘think’ almost as much as I do.”
As he was speaking, the house phone was ringing. He went into the den to answer it. As if summoned by Kyle’s reference to her, it was Madeleine.
“Good morning!” She sounded cheerful. “How are things going?”
“Fine. What are you up to?”
“Deirdre and Dennis and I just finished breakfast. Orange juice, blueberries, French toast, and … bacon!” The final item was voiced with the faux guilt of having committed a faux sin. “We’ll be going out in a few minutes to check on all the animals and get them ready to transport to the fairgrounds. In fact, Dennis is out there by the little corral already, waving to us to come out.”
“Sounds like fun,” he replied in a not very fun-filled voice, marveling once again at her ability to find compartments of pure enjoyment within a larger landscape of serious problems.
“It is fun! How are our little hens this morning?”
“Fine, I assume. I was just about to go down to the barn.”
She paused, then in a more subdued tone stepped tentatively into the larger landscape, the one in which he was so deeply mired. “Any developments?”
“Well, Kyle showed up here at the house.”
“What? Why?”
“I asked him for some computer software advice, and he just decided to come up and do what needed to be done. Actually, it was very helpful.”
“Did you send him home?”
“I’m going to.”
She paused. “Please be careful.”
“I will.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“Okay. Well … Dennis is waving more urgently, so I better go. Love you!”
“Love you too.” He replaced the handset, then sat staring at the phone unseeingly, his mind drifting back to Panikos’s face on the video and the words “very fucking crazy.”
“Did I hear you say your video call was at eight?” Kyle’s voice from the den doorway pulled Gurney back to the moment. He glanced at the time in the corner of his computer screen—7:56 a.m.
“Thanks. Which reminds me—I wanted to ask you to stay out of the camera’s field of view during the call. Okay?”
“No problem. As a matter of fact, what I was thinking of doing, since you’ve got your other meeting here at nine, and it’s an ideal day for it … I thought I’d take a little ride on the bike up to Syracuse.”
“Syracuse?” There was a time when the name of that gray snow-belt city meant little to Gurney, but now it had become a mental repository for all the terrible events of the recent Good Shepherd case.
Obviously, it had a more positive association for Kyle. “Yeah, I thought I’d take a ride up, as long as I was this far upstate, maybe have lunch with Kim.”
“Kim Corazon? You stayed in touch with her?”
“A little. By email mostly. She came down to the city once. I let her know last week that I planned to be up here with you for a few days, halfway to Syracuse, thought it might be a good time to get together with her.” He paused, eyeing his father warily. “You look kind of shocked.”
“ ‘Surprised’ would be the word. You never mentioned Kim after … after the case was wrapped up.”
“I figured you wouldn’t want to be reminded of that whole mess she dragged you into. Not that she meant to. But it ended up being pretty traumatic stuff.”
It was true that it wasn’t a case he enjoyed talking about. Or thinking about. Very few were. In fact, he rarely considered the past at all, unless it was a past case with loose ends that demanded resolution. But the Good Shepherd case wasn’t one of those. The Good Shepherd case was solved. The puzzle pieces, in the end, were all in place. It could be argued, however, that the price had been too high. And his own position in the final act of that drama had become one of Madeleine’s chief exhibits in her argument that he exposed himself too willingly to unreasonable levels of danger.
Kyle was watching him now with a worried look. “Does it bother you that I’m visiting her?”
In other circumstances, the honest answer would have been yes. He’d found Kim to be very ambitious, very emotional, very naive—a combination more troublesome than he would wish for in any girlfriend for his son. But in the current circumstances, Kyle’s plan struck him as a convenient coincidence—in the same category as Madeleine’s plan to help the Winklers.
“Actually,
” said Gurney, “it seems like a pretty good idea at the moment—a bit safer, anyway.”
“Jeez, Dad, you really think something bad’s going to happen here?”
“I think the chance is very, very slight. But I wouldn’t want you to be exposed to it.”
“What about you?” It was Madeleine’s question, repeated in the same tone.
“It’s part of the job—part of what I signed on for when I agreed to help with the case.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No, son, there isn’t anything right now. But thank you.”
“Okay,” he said doubtfully. For a minute he looked lost, as if hoping for some other option, some other plan of action, to occur to him.
Gurney said nothing, just waited.
“Okay,” Kyle repeated. “Let me get some of my things and I’ll be on my way. When I get to Syracuse I’ll check in with you.” He retreated from the den with a worried frown.
A musical computer tone announced the start of Gurney’s eight a.m. video call.
Chapter 46
The Spalter Brothers
A medium shot of a man sitting in a comfortable-looking armchair filled most of the laptop screen. Gurney recognized Jonah Spalter from his photograph on the Cyberspace Cathedral website. He was illuminated clearly, expertly, with no extraneous elements in the video framing to distract from the strong bone structure of his face. His expression was one of practiced calm seasoned with mild concern. He was gazing directly into the camera with the effect of gazing directly into Gurney’s eyes.
“Hello, David. I’m Jonah.” If his voice were a color, it would have been a pastel. “Is it all right if I call you David? Or would you prefer Detective Gurney?”
“David is fine. Thank you for getting in touch with me.”
There was a tiny nod, a tiny smile, the hint of a social worker’s concern in the eyes. “Your email had an urgent tone, along with some rather alarming phrases. How can I help you?”
“How much do you know about the effort to get your sister-in-law’s conviction overturned?”
