Peter Pan Must Die (16 page)

Two explanations occurred to him.

One was that the ME was wrong about the extent of the brain tissue trauma, and that the motor center had not been completely destroyed by the fragmenting bullet. The second explanation was that Carl was shot not once but twice. The first bullet sent him staggering to the ground. The second bullet, to the temple, did the severe neural damage found during the autopsy. The obvious problem with that theory was that the ME found only one entry wound. Admittedly, a .220 Swift could make a very neat puncture, or a very narrow grazing line—but surely nothing subtle enough for a pathologist to miss, unless he was seriously rushed. Or distracted. Distracted by what?

As Gurney pondered this, another aspect of Paulette’s mini-reenactment
was eating at him—that the ultimately fatal scenario was played out within arm’s reach of two individuals who could benefit enormously from Carl’s death. Jonah, who would achieve full control of Spalter Realty. And Alyssa, the spoiled druggy in line to inherit her father’s personal estate—assuming Kay could be gotten out of the way, as in fact she had been.

Jonah and Alyssa. He had a growing interest in meeting them both. And Mick Klemper, as well. He needed to get face-to-face with that man soon. And maybe Piskin, the prosecutor, as well—to get a sense of where he stood in this fog of contradictions, shaky evidence, and possible perjury.

There was a crash in the kitchen. He grimaced.

Funny thing about crashes in the kitchen. He once considered them an indicator of Madeleine’s state of mind, until he realized that his interpretation of them was really an indicator of his own state of mind. When he believed he’d given her a reason to be less than delighted with him, he heard the crash of dishes as a symptom of her annoyance. But if he felt that he’d been behaving thoughtfully, the same dropped dishes would seem a harmless accident.

That night he wasn’t comfortable with his having been nearly an hour late for dinner, or with his inability to remember the names of her friends, or with his leaving her in the kitchen and scurrying off to the den as soon as the last set of taillights receded down the hill.

He realized this last offense was still correctable. After making a few final notes from the most extensive of the neurological websites he’d come upon, he shut down the tablet, put the autopsy report away with the case file, and went out to the kitchen.

Madeleine was just closing the dishwasher door. He went to the coffeemaker on the sink island, set it up, and pushed the
BREW
button. Madeleine picked up a sponge and a towel and began wiping the countertops.

“Odd bunch of people,” he said lightly.

“ ‘Interesting’ people might be a nicer way to put it.”

He cleared his throat. “I hope they weren’t taken aback by what I said about the criminal justice system.”

The coffeemaker emitted the whooshing-spitting sound that ended its cycle.

“It’s not so much
what
you said. Your tone has a way of conveying a lot more than your words.”

“More? Like what?”

She didn’t answer right away. She was leaning over the counter, scrubbing a recalcitrant stain. He waited. She straightened up and brushed a few dangling hairs away from her face with the back of her hand. “Sometimes you sound annoyed at having to spend time with people, listen to them, talk to them.”

“It’s not exactly that I’m annoyed. It’s …” He sighed, his voice trailing off. He took his cup from under the dispensing spout of the coffeemaker, added sugar, and stirred the coffee a lot longer than it needed to be stirred before completing his explanation. “When I get involved in something intense, I find it difficult to switch back to ordinary life.”

“It
is
difficult,” she replied. “I
know
. I think sometimes you forget what kind of work I do at the clinic, what kind of problems I deal with.”

He was about to point out that those problems didn’t usually involve murder, but he caught himself in time. She had the look in her eyes that meant an unfinished thought, so he just stood silently, holding his coffee cup, waiting for her to go on—expecting her to describe some of the more appalling realities of a rural crisis center.

But she took a different tack. “Maybe I can disengage more easily than you can because I’m not as good at what I do.”

He blinked. “What do you mean?”

“When someone has a great talent for something, there’s a temptation to focus on it to the exclusion of virtually everything else. Don’t you find that to be true?”

“I suppose,” he replied, wondering where this was going.

“Well, I think you have a great talent for figuring things out, for unraveling deceptions, solving complicated crimes. And maybe you’re so good at it, so comfortable in that particular way of thinking, that the rest of life seems like an uncomfortable interruption.” She searched his face for a reaction.

He knew there was truth in what she was saying, but all he could manage was a noncommittal shrug.

She went on in a soft voice. “I don’t see myself as having a huge talent for my work. I’ve been told I’m good at it, but it’s not the sum and substance of my life. It’s not the only thing that matters. I try to
treat
everything
in my life as though it matters. Because it does. You, most of all.” She looked into his eyes and smiled in that odd way of hers that seemed to have less to do with her mouth than with some internal source of radiance.

“Sometimes when we talk about your absorption in a case, it turns into an argument—maybe because you feel that I’m trying to transform you from a detective into a hiking, biking kayaker. That might have been a hope or fantasy of mine when we first moved up here to the mountains, but it’s not anymore. I understand who you are, and I’m content with that. More than content. I know sometimes it doesn’t seem that way. It seems like I’m pushing, pulling, trying to change you. But that’s not what it is.”

She paused, seeming to read his thoughts and feelings more clearly than he could. “I’m not trying to turn you into someone you’re not. I just feel that you’d be happier if you could let some brightness, some variety, into your life. It looks to me like you keep rolling the same boulder up the same hill again and again, without any lasting relief or reward at the end. It looks like all you want is to keep pushing, keep struggling, keep putting yourself in danger—the more danger, the better.”

He was about to object to her point about danger, but decided instead to hear her out.

She looked at him, sadness filling her eyes. “It looks like you get so deeply into it, into the darkness, that it blots out the sun. It blots out everything. So I go about my life the only way I know how. I do my work at the clinic. I walk in the woods. I go to my concerts. Art shows. I read. Play my cello. Ride my bike. I take care of the garden and the house and the chickens. In the winter I snowshoe. I visit my friends. But I keep thinking—wishing—that we could be doing more of these things together. That we could be out in the sun together.”

He didn’t know how to respond. At some level he recognized the truth in what she was saying, but no words were attaching themselves to the feeling it generated in him.

“That’s it,” she concluded simply. “That’s what’s on my mind.”

The sadness in her eyes was replaced by a smile—warm, open, hopeful.

It seemed to him that she was totally
present
—that
all
of her was
right there in front of him, with no obstructions, no evasions, no artifice of any kind. He put down his cup, which he’d been holding without realizing it all the while she was talking, and stepped toward her. He put his arms around her, feeling all her body warm against his.

Still without words, he picked her up in the clichéd manner of new-bride-over-the-threshold—which made her laugh—and carried her into the bedroom, where they made love with an intensely wonderful combination of urgency and tenderness.

Madeleine was up first the next morning.

After Gurney had showered, shaved, and dressed, he found her at the breakfast table with her coffee, a slice of toast with peanut butter, and an open book. Peanut butter was one of her favorite things. He went over and kissed the top of her head.

“Good morning!” she said cheerily through a mouthful of toast. She was dressed for her work at the clinic.

“Full day today?” he asked. “Or half?”

“Dunno.” She swallowed, took a sip of coffee. “Depends on who else is there. What’s on
your
agenda?”

“Hardwick. Due here at eight-thirty.”

“Oh?”

“We’re getting a phone call from Kay Spalter at nine, or as close to that as she can manage.”

“Problem?”

“Nothing
but
problems. Every fact in this case has a contradiction attached to it.”

“Isn’t that the way you like your facts?”

“Hopelessly tangled up, you mean, so I can untangle them?”

She nodded, took a final bite of her toast, took her plate and cup to the sink, and let the water run on them. Then she came back and kissed him. “Running late. Got to go.”

He made himself some bacon and toast and settled down in a chair by the French doors. Softened by a thin morning fog, the view from his chair was of the old pasture, a tumbledown stone wall along its far side, one of his neighbors’ overgrown fields, and, barely visible beyond that, Barrow Hill.

Just as he popped the last bit of bacon in his mouth, the rumble of Hardwick’s GTO became audible from the road below the barn. Two minutes later, the angular red beast was parked by the asparagus patch and Hardwick was standing at the French doors, wearing a black T-shirt and dirty gray sweatpants. The doors were open wide, but the sliding screens were latched.

Gurney leaned over and unlatched one.

Hardwick stepped inside. “You know there’s a giant fucking pig strolling up your road?”

Gurney nodded. “It’s a fairly frequent occurrence.”

“A good three hundred pounds, I’d say.”

“Tried to lift it, did you?”

Hardwick ignored the question, just looked around the room appraisingly. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You’ve got a shitload of country charm here.”

“Thank you, Jack. Care to sit down?”

Hardwick picked thoughtfully at his front teeth with his fingernail, then plopped down in the chair across the table from Gurney and eyed him suspiciously. “Before we speak to the bereaved Mrs. Spalter, ace, you have anything on your mind we need to discuss?”

“Not really—apart from the fact that nothing in the case makes a damn bit of sense.”

Hardwick’s eyes narrowed. “These things that don’t make sense … do they work
for
us or
against
us?”

“ ‘Us’?”

“You know what I mean. For or against our objective of securing a reversal.”

“Probably
for
the objective. But I’m not positive. Too many things are screwy.”

“Screwy? Like how?”

“Like the apartment ID’d as the source of the fatal shot.”

“What about it?”

“It wasn’t. It couldn’t have been.”

“Why not?”

Gurney explained his use of Paulette to set up the informal reenactment, and his discovery of the light pole obstruction.

Hardwick looked confused but not worried. “Anything else?”

“A witness, who claims he saw the shooter.”

“Freddie? The guy who fingered Kay in the lineup?”

“No. Man by the name of Estavio Bolocco. No record of his having been interviewed, although he claims he was. He also claims he saw the shooter, but it was a man, not a woman.”

“Saw the shooter where?”

“That’s another problem. Says he saw him in the apartment—the apartment where the shot was supposed to have come from but couldn’t have.”

Hardwick made his acid-reflux face. “This is adding up to a mixed pile of good stuff and pure shit. I like the idea that your guy says the shooter was a man, not a woman. I especially like the idea that Klemper failed to keep a record of the interview. That speaks to police misconduct, possible tampering, or at least major sloppiness, all of which helps. But that crap about the apartment itself, that crap makes everything else useless. We can’t present a witness who claims the shooter used a location that we then turn around and say couldn’t have been used. I mean, where the fuck are we going with this?”

“Good question. And here’s another little oddity. Estavio Bolocco says he saw the shooter
twice
. Once on the day of the event itself, which was a Friday. But also five days earlier. On Sunday. He says he’s positive it was Sunday, because that was his only day off.”

“He saw the shooter where?”

“In the apartment.”

Hardwick’s indigestion appeared to be increasing. “Doing what? Casing it?”

“That would be my guess. But that raises another question. Let’s assume that the shooter had learned about Mary Spalter’s death, discovered the location of the Spalter family plot, and figured that Carl would be front and center at the burial service. Next step would be to scout out the vicinity, see if it offered a reasonably secure shooting position.”

“So what’s the question?”

“Timing. If the shooter was scouting the location on Sunday, presumably Mary Spalter’s death occurred Saturday or earlier, depending on whether the shooter was close enough to the family to have gotten the information directly, or had to wait for a published obit a day or
two later. My question is, if the burial didn’t take place until, at the earliest, seven days after her death … what caused the delay?”

“Who knows? Maybe some relative couldn’t arrive for it any sooner? Why do you care?”

“It’s unusual to delay a funeral for a whole week.
Unusual
makes me curious, that’s all.”

“Right. Sure. Okay.” Hardwick waved his hand like he was shooing away a fly. “We can ask Kay when she calls. I just don’t think her mother-in-law’s funeral arrangements sound like Court of Appeals material.”

“Maybe not. But speaking of that conviction, did you know that Freddie—the guy who fingered Kay at the trial—has disappeared?”