Peter Pan Must Die

by John Verdon

  After directing him out the side door to the far edge of the patio, Gurney returned to Esti, who was still sitting at the table, looking uneasy.

  He sat across from her and recounted the plan they’d spent the previous hour putting together. “The objective is to give Panikos the impression that I’ll be appearing on the Monday evening segment of Criminal Conflict, where I’ll be revealing everything I’ve discovered about the Spalter murder, including the explosive secret Panikos has been trying to keep hidden. Jack is sure he can persuade Brian Bork and RAM-TV to run announcements promoting this revelation all day Sunday.”

  “But what do you do Monday, when you’re supposed to appear on the show? What are you actually going to reveal?”

  Gurney evaded the question. “If we’re lucky, the game will be over by then and we won’t have to deal with the actual show. The whole point is the promotion of our supposed revelation and the threat Panikos will feel—the deadline pressure he’ll feel to silence me before showtime on Monday.”

  Esti did not look reassured. “What are these promotion ads actually going to say?”

  “We’ll work out the wording later, but the key will be making Panikos believe that I know something big about the Spalter case that no one else knows.”

  “Won’t he assume that you’d have shared whatever you discovered with Jack and me?”

  “He probably would assume that.” Gurney smiled. “That’s why I’m thinking that you and Jack might need to be killed in an auto accident. Bork’ll love making that part of the promotion. Tragedy, controversy, drama—all magic words at RAM-TV.”

  “Auto accident? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I just made it up. But I like it. And it definitely narrows Panikos’s target possibilities.”

  She gave him a long skeptical look. “To me, that sounds way over the top. You’re sure the people at RAM-TV will go along with that kind of bullshit?”

  “Like flies on that very substance. You’re forgetting that RAM-TV thrives on bullshit. Bullshit boosts ratings. Bullshit is their business.”

  She nodded. “So all this is like a funnel. Everything is designed to channel Panikos toward one decision, one person, one location.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But it’s a pretty shaky funnel. And the container the funnel goes into—maybe it’s got holes in it?”

  “What holes?”

  “Let’s say your funnel works: Panikos hears the promotion ads on Sunday, believes the bullshit, believes you know his secret, believes Jack and I are out of the picture—auto accident or whatever—believes it would be a good idea to eliminate you, comes here to do it … when? Sunday night? Monday morning?”

  “My bet would be on Sunday night.”

  “Okay. Let’s say he comes after you Sunday night. Maybe sneaking through the woods on foot, maybe on an ATV. Maybe with firebombs, maybe with a gun, maybe both. You with me?”

  Gurney nodded.

  “And our defense against this is what? Cameras in the fields? Cameras in the woods? Transmitters sending images back here to the house? Jack with a Glock, me with a SIG, you with that little Beretta of yours? Am I getting this right?”

  He nodded again.

  “I haven’t left out anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like calling in the cavalry to save our asses! Have you and Jack forgotten what happened in Cooperstown? Three huge houses incinerated, seven people dead, one head missing. You have amnesia?”

  “No need for the cavalry, babe,” interrupted Hardwick, coming back in from the patio, grinning. “Just a good positive attitude and the best infrared surveillance equipment on the market. I just got us a short-term rental contract on everything we need. Plus total cooperation from our buddies at RAM-TV. So Davey boy’s batshit plan to sucker the leopard into attacking the lamb might actually work.”

  She was looking at him like he was crazy.

  He turned to Gurney and went on, as though he’d been asked to elaborate. “Scranton Surveillance and Survival will have everything ready for pickup tomorrow afternoon at four.”

  “Meaning you’ll be getting back here around the time it’s getting dark,” said Gurney. “Not a great time to be setting stuff up in the woods.”

  “No matter. We’ll have early Sunday morning to deploy everything. And then get ourselves in position. Bork’s producer told me they’ll start running the promos during the Sunday-morning talk shows, then all day, right into the late-night news.”

  “They’ll do it?” Esti’s tone was sour. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that, babe.”

  “They really don’t care that it’s all made-up nonsense?”

  Hardwick’s grin became positively incandescent. “Not one goddamn bit. Why should they? Bork loves the feeling of crisis the whole thing generates.”

  Esti nodded slightly—the gesture conveying more resignation than agreement.

  “By the way, Davey,” said Hardwick, “I’d get that dead chicken out of the mudroom sink if I were you. Fucking thing really stinks.”

  “Right. I’ll take care of that. But first—I’m glad you reminded me—we’ve got a little add-on for the RAM-TV announcements. An unfortunate auto accident.”

  Chapter 52

  Florence in Flames

  After Hardwick and Esti were gone—after her agile little Mini and his rumbling GTO had turned past the barn and headed down the mountain road—Gurney sat gazing out at the pile of lumber and pondering the henhouse project it represented.

  Then his mind proceeded from the henhouse to Horace. He forced himself out of his chair and through the side hallway to the mudroom.

  Back in the house a little while later after reburying the rooster, Gurney found that whatever sense of organization and control he’d experienced during the meeting with Hardwick and Esti had evaporated, and he was taken aback by the improvisational sketchiness of what he had boldly been calling a “plan.” Now the whole caroming enterprise felt downright amateurish—driven more by anger, pride, and optimistic assumptions than by facts or real capabilities on the ground.

  What they “knew” about Petros Panikos, after all, was little more than a hodgepodge of rumors and anecdotes from sources of widely varying credibility. The uncertain provenance of the data opened the door to an unsettling range of possibilities.

  What, he asked himself, was he sure of?

  In truth, very little. Very little beyond the implacable nature of the enemy—his proven willingness to do anything to achieve a goal or make a point. If evil was, as one of Gurney’s philosophy professors had once insisted, “intellect in the service of appetite, unrestrained by empathy,” then Peter Pan was evil incarnate.

  What else was he sure of?

  Well, there could be no doubt about the risk to Esti’s career. She’d put everything at stake to join the crew of what was feeling increasingly like a runaway train.

  And there was at least one other undeniable fact. He was again putting himself in the crosshairs of a killer. He was tempted to believe that this occasion was different—that the circumstances demanded it, that their precautions permitted it—but he knew he wouldn’t be able to convince anyone else of that. Certainly not Madeleine. Certainly not Malcolm Claret.

  There is nothing in life that matters but love.

  That’s what Claret had said as Gurney was leaving his little sun porch office.

  As he reflected on the statement now, he realized two things. It was absolutely true. And it was absolutely impossible to keep it in the forefront of his mind. The contradiction struck him as yet another nasty trick played on human beings by human nature.

  He was saved from sliding further into a pit of pointless speculation and depression by the ringing of the landline in the den.

  The ID screen announced it was Hardwick.

  “Yes, Jack?”

  “Ten minutes after leaving your house I got a call from my Interpol guy, probably the last one we’re going to ge
t, from the tone of his voice. I’ve been pushing him pretty hard for every damn detail he could find in their old files on the Panikos family. Made a real pain in the ass of myself—which isn’t my true nature—but you wanted more information, and I live to be of service to my betters.”

  “A very positive quality. And you found out what?”

  “Remember the fire that destroyed the family gift shop in the village of Lykonos? Burned everyone to death, except the adopted firebug? Well, turns out it wasn’t just a gift shop. It had a little annex, a second business, run by the mother.” He paused. “Need I say more?”

  “Let me guess. The annex was a flower shop. And the mother’s name was Florence.”

  “Florencia, to be precise.”

  “She died with the rest of the family, right?”

  “Up in flames, one and all. And now little Peter likes riding around in a van with a sign that says FLOWERS BY FLORENCE. Any ideas about that, ace? You figure he just likes thinking about his mom while he’s killing people?”

  Gurney didn’t answer right away. For the second time that day, someone’s use of a short phrase—earlier it was Esti’s comment on “those shots from the hill”—sent him off on a mental tangent. This time it was Hardwick’s “up in flames.”

  The words brought to mind an old case involving a flaming auto wreck. It was one of the instructive examples he’d used in an academy seminar called “The Investigative Mind-set.” The odd thing was that this was the third time in as many days that something had brought that case to mind. In this instance, hearing “up in flames” seemed a simple enough trigger, but nothing so obvious had occurred on the two previous occasions.

  Gurney considered himself as far from superstitious as a man could be, but when something like that—a specific case—kept intruding into his consciousness, he’d learned not to ignore it. The question was, what was he supposed to make of it?

  “Hey, you still there, ace?”

  “I’m here. Just got caught up thinking about something you said.”

  “You thinking like me that our little maniac might have some mommy problems?”

  “A lot of serial killers do.”

  “That’s a fact. Maternal magic. Anyway, that’s it for now. Just thought you’d want to know about Florencia.”

  Hardwick broke the connection, which was fine with Gurney, whose mind had been taken over by the flaming auto wreck case. He recalled that the previous event triggering the same memory had been Esti’s story about the shooting in the alley. Was there some similarity between the incidents? Was it possible that they both related in some way to the Spalter case? He couldn’t see any connection at all. But maybe Esti could.

  He called her cell number, got her voice mail, and left a brief message.

  Three minutes later, she called him back. “Hi. Something wrong?” Her voice still carried some of the anxiety she’d expressed at their morning meeting.

  “Nothing wrong. I may be just wasting your time. But my mind seems to be making some kind of connection between two cases—your alley case and an old NYPD case—and maybe between them and the Spalter case.”

  “What kind of connection?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe if I told you the NYPD story you’d see something I’m missing.”

  “Sure. Why not? I don’t know if I can help, but go ahead.”

  Half apologetically, he told her the story.

  “The accident scene at first seemed easy enough to explain. A middle-aged man on his way home from work one night was driving down a hill. At the bottom of the hill, the road made a turn. His car, however, proceeded straight ahead through the guardrail, coming to rest nose-down in a ravine. The gas tank exploded. There was an intense fire, but enough remained of the driver to perform an autopsy and conclude that he had suffered a massive coronary. This was listed as the precipitating cause of his loss of control and the subsequent fatal accident. That would have been the end of the story, if it weren’t for the fact that the investigating officer had an uncomfortable feeling about it that wouldn’t go away. He went to the location where the vehicle had been towed, and went over it one more time. That’s when he noticed that the areas of the most severe impact and fire damage inside the car didn’t quite coincide with those outside. At that point, he ordered a complete forensic workup on the vehicle.”

  “Wait a second,” said Esti. “The inside and outside didn’t coincide?”

  “He noticed that there was heat and concussive damage inside the passenger compartment that didn’t seem to line up directly with similar points of damage to the exterior. The explanation, discovered by the forensic lab, was that there’d been two explosions. Before the gas tank blew up, there was a smaller explosion inside the vehicle—under the driver’s seat. It was that first explosion that resulted in the driver’s loss of control, as well as his coronary. Further chemical tests revealed that both the initial blast and the gas tank blast had been remotely detonated.”

  “From where?”

  “Possibly from a vehicle following the target vehicle.”

  “Hmm. Interesting. But what point are you making?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe none. But the case keeps coming to mind. It came to mind immediately when you told your story about the shooting in the alley. I know a psychologist who talks about something called pattern resonance—how things remind us of other things because they share a structural similarity. And this can occur without our conscious knowledge of what the similarity is.”

  Beyond a barely audible “Hmm,” she didn’t respond.

  He felt uneasy, even a bit embarrassed. He didn’t mind sharing his ideas, concerns, hypotheses. He was a lot less comfortable sharing his confusion, his failure to grasp some connection he hoped might be present.

  When she finally did speak, her voice was tentative. “I guess I can see what you’re saying. Let me sleep on it, okay?”

  Chapter 53

  A Terrible Calm

  The feeling that he’d dumped his quandary unfairly in Esti’s lap was still with him that evening. Finding significant patterns in situations and relating one to another was supposedly his strength.

  The sun had set, and colors were fading from the hills and fields around the house. It was past dinnertime, but he had no appetite. He made himself a cup of coffee and drank it black, his only concession to his need for nourishment being the addition of an extra spoonful of sugar.

  Perhaps he’d been staring too hard, too directly, at the problem. Perhaps it was another example of the dim-star phenomenon, which he’d discovered one night lying in a hammock gazing up at the sky. There are some stars so distant that their faint pinpricks of light will not register at the center of the retina, which by some slight measure is less sensitive than the rest of the retinal surface. The only way to see one of these stars is to look several degrees to one side of it or the other. To direct scrutiny the star is invisible. But look away, and there it is.

  A frustrating puzzle was often like that. Let go of it for a bit and the answer might suddenly appear. A name or a word one was struggling to remember might surface only when the struggle had been abandoned. He knew all this, but his tenacity—Madeleine called it stubbornness—made it difficult for him to put anything aside.

  Sometimes the decision was made for him by simple exhaustion. Or by an external intervention, like getting a phone call—which is what happened now.

  The call was from Kyle.

  “Hey, Dad, how’s everything?”

  “Fine. Are you still up in Syracuse?”

  “Yeah, still here. In fact, I think I’m going to stay over. There’s a giant art show at the university this weekend and Kim has some stuff in it, some art videos. So I figured I’d stay up here, like maybe through lunch, then … then I’m not sure what. Originally, on my trip up to see you, I’d been thinking of going to the fair, but now … with your situation …”

  “There’s no reason for you not to go to the fair. I was only concerned about your being r
ight here at the house—and even that concern is probably way out of proportion to the chance of any real problem. If you want to go to the fair, go.”

  Kyle sighed—a sound of uncertainty.

  “Really. Go. There’s no reason not to.”

  There was another sigh, followed by a pause. “Saturday night is the big night, right? With all the main events?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll drop by for a quick look on my way back to the city. Maybe for the demolition derby. I’ll check in with you again when I figure out what I’m doing.”

  “Great. And don’t worry about anything here. Everything’ll be fine.”

  “Okay, Dad. Just be careful.”

  Although the call had lasted less than two minutes, it rearranged Gurney’s thoughts for the next half hour—overlaying his murder case concerns with paternal worries.

  Telling himself finally that Kyle’s possible involvement with Kim Corazon was none of his business, he tried to steer his mind back to the conundrums surrounding the Spalter case and Peter Pan.

  This time, rather than the phone, it was exhaustion that intervened—the kind of exhaustion that made linear thought impossible.

  It was then, sitting by the still open double doors, watching the dusk darken into night, that he heard that familiar eerie sound in the woods—that quavering wail—followed by a profound silence that was stranger than the sound itself. To his deeply weary state of mind, it was the silence of emptiness and isolation.

  The silence was interrupted by a low, directionless rumble that seemed to come from the earth itself. Or was it from the sky? Surely it must be thunder from some miles distant, echoed and muffled by the surrounding hills and valleys. When it faded away like the growl of an old dog, it left behind a disquieting stillness, a terrible calm that by some errant-crosscurrent in the brain brought to mind a childhood memory of the desolate no-man’s-land between his parents.

  It was that disconcerting twist in his stream of consciousness that finally convinced him of his dire need for sleep and sent him to bed—but not before locking the doors and windows, cleaning and loading his .32 Beretta, and placing the reliable little pistol within easy reach on the night table.