Peter Pan Must Die (40 page)

Instead of downplaying the threat, which would be his natural inclination, Gurney recounted the attack on Hardwick’s house and the atrocity in Cooperstown in straightforward terms. If he was going to have to persuade Kyle to leave—for home or another safe place, at least by the following morning—it would make no sense to soft-pedal the peril now.

As Gurney spoke, his son listened with silent concern—as well as the visible excitement that a hint of danger often arouses in young men.

After they ate, Kyle set up his laptop on the dining table and Gurney gave him the USB drive with the Axton Avenue video files. They located the two short segments Gurney wanted enhanced. The first was the portion of the cemetery sequence beginning with Carl rising from his chair and ending with him sprawled face-down with a bullet in his brain. The second was the portion of the street sequence that showed the diminutive figure Gurney believed to be Petros Panikos entering the building with the gift-wrapped box that presumably contained the rifle later found upstairs in the apartment.

Kyle was studying the images on his computer screen. “You want these blown up for max detail with minimum software interpolation?”

“Say that again?”

“When you blow stuff up, you spread out the actual digital data. The image gets bigger but also fuzzier, because there’s less hard information per square inch. Software can compensate for that by making assumptions, filling in the data gaps, sharpening, smoothing. But that introduces an element of unreliability in the image because not everything in the enhancement is present in the original pixels. In order to de-fuzz the enlargement, the software makes calculated guesses based more on probability than on hard data.”

“So what are you recommending?”

“I’d recommend picking a point of reasonable compromise between the sharpness of the enlargement and the reliability of the data composing it.”

“Fine. Aim for whatever balance you think is right.” Gurney smiled not only at his son’s grasp of the process but also at the excitement in his voice. He seemed the happy archetype of that under-thirty generation born and bred with a natural affinity for all things digital.

“Just give me a little time to mess around with a few test runs. I’ll let you know when I have something worth looking at.” Kyle opened the program’s toolbar, clicked on one of the zoom icons, then stopped. He looked over at Gurney, who was carrying their omelet dishes to the sink island, and asked a question that seemed to come out of nowhere.

“Apart from dealing with sensational murders and things, how’re you guys doing up here?”

“How are we doing? Okay, I guess. Why do you ask?”

“Seems like you’re involved in
your
stuff, and Madeleine’s involved in
her
stuff.”

Gurney nodded slowly. “I guess you could say that. My stuff and her stuff. Generally separate, but mostly compatible.”

“You like it that way?”

He found the question oddly difficult to answer. He finally said, “It works.” But he was uncomfortable with the mechanical tone of that. “I don’t mean it to sound so gray and pragmatic. We love each other. We still find each other attractive. We enjoy living together. But our minds work differently. I get into something and just sort of
stay
in it. Madeleine has a way of changing her focus, of paying total attention to whatever’s in front of her—adapting to the moment. She’s always
present
, if you know what I mean. And, of course, she’s a hell of a lot more outgoing than I am.”

“Most people are.” Kyle took the negative edge off the comment with a big grin.

“True. So, most of the time, we end up doing different things. Or she ends up doing things and I end up thinking about things.”

“You mean she’s outside feeding the chickens while you’re sitting in here figuring out who chopped up the body in the town dumpster?”

Gurney laughed. “That’s not exactly it. When she’s at the clinic she deals with what’s
there
—some pretty horrific stuff—and when she’s here she deals with what’s
here
. I tend to be inside my head, obsessed with some ongoing problem, regardless of where I am. That’s one difference between us. Also, Madeleine spends a lot of time looking, learning, doing. I spend a lot of time wondering, hypothesizing, analyzing.” He paused, shrugged. “I suppose each of us does what makes us feel most alive.”

Kyle sat for a while with a thoughtful frown, as if trying to align his mind with his father’s to better understand his thoughts. Finally he turned back to his computer screen. “I better get started on this, in case it turns out to be harder than I thought.”

“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.

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.”

“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 is 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.