Peter Pan Must Die (46 page)

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?”

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 right 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.

The blackbirds are shrieking
.

He looks up from the cell phone into which he has been entering the special list of numbers. He knows that the shrieking of the blackbirds is a territorial defense, a red alert to their kind, a call to arms against the trespasser
.

None of his own electronic alarms are flashing, however, meaning that there is no human encroachment. But he peers out anyway through each of the four small windows in the sides of the little cinder-block building, scanning the hummocky beaver pond and boggy woods
.

There are crows perching in the tops of three dead, root-drowned trees. The crows, he concludes, are the interlopers who have upset the blackbirds, provoking their high-pitched screeches. He finds the protection they afford comforting. Like the creaking treads on a staircase might alert him to an intruder
.

Or like the dismal little structure itself, in the midst of a hundred acres of low-lying forest and swamp, is comforting. Nearly inaccessible, uninviting in the extreme, it is his ideal home away from home. He has many homes away from home. Places to stay while he conducts his business. Fulfills his contracts. This particular place, with no visible trail in from the public road, has always felt more secure than most
.

Fat Gus had represented another kind of trail. A trail of sensitive information. Information that could be ruinous. But that had been eradicated at its source. Which made this business with Bincher and Hardwick and Gurney so incomprehensible. So infuriating
.

At the thought of Bincher, his gaze drifts to a shadowy corner of the garage-like room. To a blue and white plastic picnic cooler. He smiles. But the smile quickly fades
.

The smile fades because the nightmare keeps returning to his mind, more vividly than ever. The nightmare’s images are with him almost continually now—ever since he caught sight of that Ferris wheel at the fairgrounds
.

The Ferris wheel has insinuated itself into his nightmare—enmeshed with the merry-go-round music, the terrible laughter. The hideous, stinking, wheezing clown. The low, vibrating growl of the tiger
.

And now Hardwick and Gurney
.

Swirling around him, closing in
.

The spiral tightening, the final confrontation inevitable
.

It would be a great risk, but there could be a great reward. A great relief
.

The nightmare might at last be extinguished
.

He goes to the darkest corner of the room, to a small table. On the table are a large candle and a pack of matches. He picks up the matches and lights the candle
.

He lifts the candle and gazes at the flame. He loves its shape, its purity, its power
.

He imagines the confrontation—the conflagration
.

His smile returns. He goes back to his cell phone—goes back to entering the special numbers
.

The blackbirds are shrieking. The crows are perching uneasily on the dead black treetops
.

Gurney put no stock in dreams. If he did, that night’s marathon could have occupied a week of nonstop analysis. But he held a solidly pragmatic view—and generally low opinion—of these outlandish processions of images and events.

He’d long believed they were nothing more than by-products of the nightly filing and indexing process the brain employs in the movement of recorded experience from short-term to long-term memory. Bits of visual and aural data are stirred up and mashed together, narrative strings are triggered, vignettes are constructed—but with no more meaning than a suitcase of old photos, love letters, or term papers shredded and reassembled by a monkey.

The one practical effect of a night of discomfiting dreams was a lingering need for more sleep—which resulted in Gurney’s rising an hour later than usual, with a mild headache. When he was finally taking his first sip of coffee, the sun, rendered pallid by a thin overcast, had already risen well above the eastern ridge. The sense he’d had the night before of an unsettling quietness after the eerie sound in the woods was still with him.

He felt cornered. Cornered by his unwillingness to drop out of the game in time. Cornered by his appetite for control, coherence, completion. Cornered by his own “plan” to break the case open by provoking the shooter into taking a foolish and fatal risk. Pulled forward and backward by alternating currents that seemed one minute to lead to success and the next to defeat, Gurney decided to seek the comfort that came with taking action.