Peter Pan Must Die: A Novel

by John Verdon

  Also by John Verdon

  Think of a Number

  Shut Your Eyes Tight

  Let the Devil Sleep

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by John Verdon

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House LLC,

  a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-385-34840-9

  eBook ISBN 978-0-385-34841-6

  Jacket design: Eric White

  Jacket photograph: Marcia Lippman

  v3.1

  For Naomi

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Long Before the Killing Began

  Part One: An Impossible Murder

  Chapter 1: The Shadow of Death

  Chapter 2: The Scum of the Earth

  Chapter 3: Something in the Woods

  Chapter 4: Pure Evil

  Chapter 5: Bloodthirsty Weasels

  Chapter 6: Ants

  Chapter 7: Mick the Dick

  Chapter 8: Coldhearted Bitch

  Chapter 9: Black Widow

  Chapter 10: The Demented Slut

  Chapter 11: The Little Birds

  Chapter 12: Willow Rest

  Chapter 13: Death in Long Falls

  Chapter 14: The Devil’s Brother

  Chapter 15: A Cynical Suggestion

  Chapter 16: Like the Knife

  Chapter 17: An Impossible Shot

  Chapter 18: A Question of Gender

  Chapter 19: Crime and Punishment

  Part Two: Peter Pan

  Chapter 20: Disturbing Discrepancies

  Chapter 21: An Unsettling Frankness

  Chapter 22: The Second Bouquet

  Chapter 23: Click

  Chapter 24: All the Trouble in the World

  Chapter 25: Fat Gus

  Chapter 26: Not a Fucking Chess Match

  Chapter 27: A Desperate Man

  Chapter 28: Like the Crack of a Whip

  Chapter 29: Game Changers

  Chapter 30: Beautiful Poison

  Chapter 31: Another Black Widow

  Chapter 32: Another Missing Player

  Chapter 33: Major Appointments

  Chapter 34: A Gentlemen’s Agreement

  Chapter 35: A Mysterious Way

  Chapter 36: An Unusual Killer

  Chapter 37: Death Wish

  Chapter 38: A Fondness for Fire

  Chapter 39: Terrible Creatures

  Part Three: All the Evil in the World

  Chapter 40: The Morning After

  Chapter 41: A Cautionary Tale

  Chapter 42: The Missing Head

  Chapter 43: Video Evidence

  Chapter 44: The Thrill of the Chase

  Chapter 45: Out of Harm’s Way

  Chapter 46: The Spalter Brothers

  Chapter 47: Still Missing

  Chapter 48: Montell Jones

  Chapter 49: Positively Satanic

  Chapter 50: Jabbing the Madman

  Chapter 51: The Plan

  Chapter 52: Florence in Flames

  Chapter 53: A Terrible Calm

  Part Four: Perfect Justice

  Prologue: The Growling of the Tiger

  Chapter 54: Cornered

  Chapter 55: Ring Around the Rosies

  Chapter 56: A Fatal Rage

  Chapter 57: Pocket Full of Posies

  Chapter 58: Ashes, Ashes

  Chapter 59: All Fall Down

  Chapter 60: Perfect Little Peter Pan

  Chapter 61: Perfect Chaos

  Chapter 62: A Trick of the Mind

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Long Before the Killing Began

  There was a time when he dreamt of being the head of a great nation. A nuclear power.

  As the president, he would have his finger on the nuclear trigger. With a twitch of that finger he could launch nuclear missiles. He could obliterate huge cities. He could put an end to the human stink. He could wipe the rotten slate clean.

  With maturity, however, had come a more practical perspective, a more realistic sense of what was possible. He knew that the nuclear trigger would never be within his reach.

  But other triggers were available. One day at time, one trigger-pull at a time, much could be accomplished.

  As he thought about it—and through his teenage years he’d thought about little else—a plan for his future slowly took shape. He came to know what his specialty would be—his art, his expertise, his field of excellence. And that was no small thing, since previously he had known almost nothing about himself, had no sense of who or what he was.

  He had so few memories of anything before he was twelve.

  Only the nightmare.

  The nightmare that came again and again.

  The circus. His mother, smaller than the other women. The terrible laughter. The music of the merry-go-round. The deep, constant growling of the animals.

  The clown.

  The huge clown who gave him money and hurt him.

  The wheezing clown whose breath smelled like vomit.

  And the words. So clear in the nightmare that their edges were as jagged as ice smashed against stone. “This is our secret. If you tell anyone, I’ll feed your tongue to the tiger.”

  Chapter 1

  The Shadow of Death

  In the rural Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, August was an unstable month, lurching back and forth between the bright glories of July and the gray squalls of the long winter to come. It was a month that could erode one’s sense of time and place. It seemed to feed Dave Gurney’s confusion over where he was in his life—a confusion that had begun with his retirement from the NYPD three years earlier, after twenty-five years on the job, and had intensified when he and Madeleine had moved out to the country from the city where they’d both been born, raised, educated, and employed.

  At that moment, a cloudy late afternoon in the first week of August, with low thunder grumbling in the distance, they were climbing Barrow Hill, following the remnant of a dirt road that linked three small bluestone quarries, long abandoned and full of wild raspberry brambles. He was trudging along behind Madeleine as she headed for the low boulder where they normally stopped to rest, doing his best to take her frequent advice: Look around you. You’re in a beautiful place. Just relax and absorb it.

  “Is that a tarn?” she asked.

  Gurney blinked. “What?”

  “That.” She inclined her head toward the deep, still pool that filled the broad hollow left years ago by the removal of the bluestone. Roughly round, it stretched from where they sat by the trail to a row of water-loving willow trees on the far side—a glassy expanse perhaps two hundred feet across that mirrored the weeping branches of the trees so precisely, the effect resembled trick photography.

  “A tarn?”

  “I was reading a wonderful book about hiking in the Scottish Highlands,” she said earnestly, “and the writer was forever coming upon ‘tarns.’ I got the impression that it was some kind of rocky pond.”

  “Hmm.”

  His nonres
ponse led to a long silence, broken finally by Madeleine. “See down there? That’s where I was thinking we should build the chicken coop, right by the asparagus patch.”

  Gurney had been staring bleakly at the reflection of the willows. Now he followed her line of sight down a gentle slope through an opening in the woods formed by an abandoned logging road.

  One reason that the boulder by the old quarry had become their habitual stopping place was that it was the only point on the trail from which their property was visible—the old farmhouse, the garden beds, the overgrown apple trees, the pond, the recently rebuilt barn, the surrounding hillside pastures (long untended and full this time of year with milkweed and black-eyed Susans), the part of the pasture by the house that they mowed and called a lawn, the swath up through the low pasture that they mowed and called a driveway. Madeleine, perched now on the boulder, always seemed pleased at this uniquely framed view of it all.

  Gurney didn’t feel the same. Madeleine had discovered the spot herself shortly after they’d moved in, and from the first time she had shown it to him all he could think of was that it was the ideal location for a sniper to target someone entering or leaving their house. (He had the good sense not to mention this to her. She did work three days a week in the local psychiatric clinic, and he didn’t want her thinking he was in need of treatment for paranoia.)

  The need to build a chicken coop, its projected size and appearance, and the site where it should be built had become daily topics of conversation—obviously exciting to her, mildly irritating to him. They had acquired four chickens in late May at Madeleine’s urging and had been housing them in the barn—but the idea of moving them up to new quarters by the house had taken hold.

  “We could build a nice little coop with an enclosed run between the asparagus patch and the apple tree,” she said brightly, “so on hot days they’d have shade.”

  “Right.” The word came out more wearily than he’d intended.

  The conversation might have deteriorated from there had Madeleine’s attention not been diverted. She tilted her head.

  “What is it?” asked Gurney.

  “Listen.”

  He waited—not an unusual experience. His hearing was normal, but Madeleine’s was extraordinary. A few seconds later, as the breeze rustling the foliage subsided, he heard something in the distance, somewhere down the hill, perhaps on the town road that dead-ended into the low end of their pasture “driveway.” As it grew louder, he recognized the distinctive growl of an oversized, undermuffled V8.

  He knew someone who drove an old muscle car that sounded exactly like that—a partially restored red 1970 Pontiac GTO—someone for whom that brash exhaust note was the perfect introduction.

  Jack Hardwick.

  He felt his jaw tightening at the prospect of a visit from the detective with whom he had such a bizarre history of near-death experiences, professional successes, and personality clashes. Not that he hadn’t been anticipating the visit. In fact, he’d known it was coming from the moment he’d heard about the man’s forced departure from the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. And he realized that the tension he felt now had a lot to do with what had happened prior to that departure. A serious debt had been incurred, and some kind of payment would have to be made.

  A formation of low dark clouds was moving quickly over the far ridge as though retreating from the violent sound of the red car—now visible from where Gurney was sitting—as it made its way up the mowed pasture swath to the farmhouse. He was briefly tempted to stay on the hill until Hardwick left, but he knew that would accomplish nothing—only extend the period of discomfort before the inevitable meeting. With a small grunt of determination he got up from his place on the boulder.

  “Were you expecting him?” asked Madeleine.

  Gurney glanced down the slope. The GTO came to a stop by his own dusty Outback in the little makeshift parking area by the side of the house. The big Pontiac engine roared louder for a couple of seconds as it was revved prior to being shut down.

  “I was expecting him in a general way,” said Gurney, “not necessarily today.”

  “Do you want to see him?”

  “I’d say he wants to see me, and I’d like to get it over with.”

  Madeleine nodded and stood up, pushing her short brown hair back from her forehead.

  As they turned to start down the trail, the mirror surface of the quarry pool shivered under a sudden breeze, dissolving the inverted image of the willows and the sky into thousands of unrecognizable splinters of green and gray.

  If Gurney were the kind of man who believed in omens, he might have seen the shattered image as a sign of the destruction to come.

  Chapter 2

  The Scum of the Earth

  When he was halfway down Barrow Hill, deeper in the woods, out of sight of the house now, Gurney’s phone rang. He recognized Hardwick’s number.

  “Hello, Jack.”

  “Both your cars are here, but no one’s coming to the door. You hiding in the basement?”

  “I’m very well, thanks. And how are you?”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Coming down through the cherry copse, quarter mile to your west.”

  “Hillside with all the yellow leaf blight?”

  Hardwick had a way of getting under Gurney’s skin. It wasn’t just the little jabs themselves, or the pleasure the man seemed to take in delivering them; it was the uncanny echo of a voice from Gurney’s childhood—the relentlessly sardonic voice of his father.

  “Right, the one with the blight. What can I do for you, Jack?”

  Hardwick cleared his throat with disgusting enthusiasm. “Question is, what can we do for each other? Tit for tat, tat for tit. By the way, I noticed your door is unlocked. Mind if I wait for you in the house? Too many fucking flies out here.”

  Hardwick, a solidly built man with a ruddy complexion, a prematurely gray crew cut, and the disconcertingly blue eyes of an Alaskan sled dog, was standing in the center of the big open room that composed half of the lower floor. At one end was a country kitchen. A round pine breakfast table was tucked in a nook next to a pair of French doors. At the far end was a sitting area, arranged around a massive fieldstone fireplace and a separate woodstove. In the middle was a plain Shaker-style dining table and half a dozen ladder-back chairs.

  The first thing that struck Gurney as he entered the room was that something in Hardwick’s expression was slightly off.

  Even the leer in his opening question—“And where might the delectable Madeleine be?”—seemed oddly forced.

  “I’m right here,” she said, coming in from the mudroom and heading for the sink island with a half-welcoming, half-anxious smile. She was carrying a handful of asterlike wildflowers she’d picked on their way down from Barrow Hill. She laid them by the dish drainer and looked at Gurney. “I’m leaving these here. I’ll find a vase for them later. I need to go upstairs and practice for a while.”

  As her footsteps receded to the upper floor, Hardwick grinned and whispered, “Practice makes perfect. So what’s she practicing?”

  “Cello.”

  “Ah. Of course. You know why people love the cello so much?”

  “Because it has a nice sound?”

  “Ah, Davey boy, now there’s the kind of direct no-nonsense insight you’re famous for.” Hardwick licked his lips. “But do you know what it is exactly that makes that particular sound sound nice?”

  “Why don’t you just tell me, Jack?”

  “And deprive you of a fascinating little puzzle to solve?” He shook his head with theatrical resoluteness. “Wouldn’t dream of it. A genius like you needs challenges. Otherwise he goes to pot.”

  As Gurney stared at Hardwick, it dawned on him what was wrong, what was off. Underneath the prickly banter, which was the man’s customary approach to the world, there seemed to be a not-so-customary tension. Edginess was part of Hardwick’s personality, but what Gurney detected in his expression
now was more nervousness than edginess. It made him wonder what was coming. The man’s unsettledness was contagious.

  It didn’t help that Madeleine had chosen a rather jittery piece for her cello practice.

  Hardwick began walking around the long room, touching the backs of chairs, corners of tables, potted plants, decorative bowls and bottles and candlesticks that Madeleine had picked up in the area’s inexpensive antique shops. “Love this place! Just love it! It’s so fucking authentic!” He stopped and ran his hands back through his bristly crew cut. “You know what I mean?”

  “That it’s fucking authentic?”

  “The whole deal here—it’s pure country. Look at that cast-iron woodstove, made in America, as American as fucking pancakes. Look at you—lean, all-American, Robert Redford kind of guy. Look at them wide floorboards, straight and honest as the trees they came from.”

  “Those.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Those wide floorboards. Not them wide floorboards.”

  Hardwick stopped pacing. “The fuck are you talking about?”

  “Is there a point to this visit?”

  Hardwick grimaced. “Ah, Davey, Davey—all business, as usual. You dismiss my attempt at a few pleasantries, my efforts at social lubrication, a few friendly compliments on the puritan simplicity of your home decor—”

  “Jack …”

  “Right. Fuck the pleasantries. Where do we sit?”

  Gurney motioned to the small round table by the French doors.

  When they were seated across from each other, Gurney leaned back and waited.

  Hardwick closed his eyes, massaging his face roughly with his hands as though trying to eradicate some deep itching under the skin. Then he folded his hands on the table and began speaking. “You ask if there’s a point to my visit. Yes, there is. An opportunity. You know that thing from Julius Caesar about a tide in the affairs of men?”

  “What about it?”

  Hardwick leaned forward, as though the words contained life’s ultimate secret. The chronic mockery had disappeared from his voice. “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / is bound in shallows and in miseries.”