by John Verdon
Chapter 43
Video Evidence
Every so often in his life as a detective, Gurney got the feeling that he was juggling hand grenades.
He knew he had no one to blame but himself for his current situation. From the beginning, it was evident that the mission was likely to be warped in unpredictable ways by Hardwick’s personal agenda. But he’d signed on anyway, driven by his own obsessive motives—motives that Madeleine had seen clearly enough, while he had chosen to insist he was only returning a favor owed. Having tricked himself into participating in a three-ring circus with no ringmaster, he was now experiencing the inevitable disarray built into that arrangement.
He tried telling himself that his unwillingness to walk away from it—now that the reversal of Kay’s conviction was all but certain and thus his ostensible duty to Hardwick was done—arose from a noble truth-seeking trait. But he couldn’t make himself believe it. He knew his addiction to his profession had roots deeper than anything noble.
He also tried telling himself that the discomfort he was feeling over Hardwick’s excoriation of Mick Klemper (not named but easily identified) on Criminal Conflict arose from another high-minded notion—that all agreements, even with conniving creeps, are sacred. He suspected, however, that his unease actually arose from his belated realization that he had promised Klemper more than he could deliver. The idea that he’d be able to cushion the man’s fall by characterizing his lapses as the products of foolish error rather than felonious intent now seemed like little more than a convenient fantasy.
He saw that he had unconsciously maneuvered himself once again into a dangerous and untenable position with no direction out—except forward. Madeleine was right. The pattern was undeniable. Clearly, there was something wrong with him. Simply understanding that, however, opened no new doors. The only path he could see was still straight ahead, hand grenades and all.
He woke up his computer and went to the video files from the Long Falls security cameras.
It took him almost an hour to find what he’d hoped would be there—an image of a rather diminutive individual coming along Axton Avenue toward the camera. As Gurney watched, he, or conceivably she, disappeared into the building entrance. Gender identification was stymied by a puffy winter jacket; a wide skier’s headband that covered ears, forehead, and hairline; oversized sunglasses; and a thick winter scarf that concealed not only the neck but much of the chin and jawline. What remained of the face to be seen—a sharp, slightly hooked nose and a smallish mouth—appeared consistent with the face of the Flowers by Florence delivery person Gurney had seen on the security video at Emmerling Oaks. In fact, the headband, sunglasses, and scarf appeared identical to those in the earlier video.
Gurney reversed the video, backing it up a minute or so, and replayed the individual’s progress along the street and entry into the building. Unlike the Emmerling Oaks video, there were no flowers. But there was a package. A narrow package, between three and four feet long, wrapped in red and green Christmas paper with a big decorative bow in the middle. Gurney smiled. It was probably the most innocent-looking way one could transport a sniper rifle on a city street in the holiday shopping season.
He made a note of the actual clock time embedded in the frame as the individual turned into the building. It was 10:03 a.m. Just seventeen minutes before the shot that felled Carl Spalter.
The same individual emerged onto the street at 10:22 a.m.—just two minutes after the shot was fired—turned and walked calmly away, continuing along Axton Avenue until passing out of the camera’s field of view.
Gurney sat back in his chair, contemplating the significance of what he’d just seen.
First, it suggested strongly that the shot was indeed fired from the apartment where the gun was later found. The timing of the likely shooter’s exit would make other scenarios difficult if not impossible—which underscored the light pole problem.
Second, the individual in the video was clearly not Kay Spalter. Gurney felt a welcome surge of anger at Klemper, as well as the evaporation of any bad feeling over breaking their “agreement.” That video alone would have ended the case against Kay Spalter. If nothing else, it would have ensured the presence of reasonable doubt by supporting a credible alternative theory of the case and by showing a credible alternative suspect. It would have prevented her conviction and incarceration. Klemper’s willful suppression of that evidence—apparently in return for the sexual favors of Alyssa Spalter—was not only criminal but unforgivable.
Third, it was time to stop thinking of the individual in the Axton Avenue and the retirement village videos simply as “the individual.” It was time to start calling him by his chosen name: Petros Panikos.
It wasn’t easy. Something in the mind rebelled at connecting the slight, almost dainty figure, carrying bouquets of chrysanthemums in the one instance and a colorful Christmas box in the other, with the violent psychopath described by Interpol and Adonis Angelidis. The psychopath who hammered the nails into Gus Gurikos’s eyes, ears, and throat. The psychopath who firebombed Bincher’s home in Cooperstown, burned six innocent people to death, and cut off a man’s head.
Oh, Jesus, was he singing when he did that, too? That was something Gurney didn’t want to think about. That was the stuff of nightmares. It was time for more practical thoughts. It was time for a meeting of the minds with Hardwick and Esti. Time to agree on next steps.
He took out his phone and called Hardwick first. He was intending to leave a message and was surprised when the phone was answered immediately—and defensively.
“You calling to give me some shit about my bit with Bork?”
Gurney decided to postpone that discussion for another time. “I’m thinking we need to get together.”
“For what?”
“Planning? Coordination? Cooperation?”
There was a short pause. “Sure. No problem. When?”
“Soon as possible. Like tomorrow morning. You, me, Esti if she can make it. We need to put the facts, questions, hypotheses on the table. With everything we have in one place, we may be able to see what’s missing.”
“Okay.” Hardwick sounded skeptical, as usual. “Where do you want to do this?”
“My house.”
“Any reason for that?”
The honest reason was that Gurney wanted to recapture some semblance of control, some sense of his hand being on the tiller. But what he said was “Your house has bullet holes in it. Mine doesn’t.”
After agreeing, with little enthusiasm, to meet at nine the following morning at Gurney’s, Hardwick volunteered to pass the word to Esti, since he was about to talk to her about something else anyway. Something personal. Gurney would have preferred to call her himself—again, for that elusive hand-on-tiller feeling—but he could think of no reasonable way to insist on it.
They ended the call without either of them bringing up the matter of the “deal” with Mick Klemper or Gurney’s allusion to it in his last phone message.
As Gurney emerged from the den, Madeleine emerged from the bedroom. She took the duffel bag she’d packed that morning out to her car, then came back in to remind him once again about the strawberries for the hens.
“You know,” he replied, “Ozzie Baggott down the road just tosses his chickens a pail of table scraps once a day, and they seem to survive quite nicely.”
“Ozzie Baggott is a disgusting lunatic. He’d be tossing garbage out into his backyard whether he had chickens there or not.”
Upon reflection, he found he couldn’t honestly argue with that.
They hugged and kissed, and she was on her way.
As her car passed out of sight below the barn, the last sliver of the setting sun disappeared behind the western ridge.
Chapter 44
The Thrill of the Chase
Gurney retreated again into the den. The deepening dusk had changed the color of the forested ridge above it from a dozen shades of green and gold to a monochromatic greenish g
ray. It made him think of the hillside opposite Jack Hardwick’s house, the hillside the shots had come from that had severed the power and phone lines.
Soon his thoughts began to coalesce around the bits and pieces of the Spalter case, especially its incongruous elements. That made him think of a maxim one of his academy instructors had emphasized in an advanced course on the interpretation of crime scene evidence: The pieces that don’t seem to fit are the ones that end up revealing the most.
He took a yellow legal pad out of his desk drawer and started writing. Twenty minutes later he reviewed the results, which he’d organized into a list of eight issues:
1. Eyewitnesses placed the victim at the moment he was shot in a position that would have made it impossible for a bullet to reach him from the apartment where the murder weapon and gunpowder residue were found.
2. Killing the victim’s mother to ensure the presence of the victim at the cemetery plot seems needlessly elaborate. Might the mother have been killed for another reason?
3. The pro who executed the hit was known to accept only the most difficult assignments. What might have put the Carl Spalter hit in that category?
4. If Kay Spalter herself was not the shooter, could she have hired the shooter?
5. Could Jonah have hired the shooter to gain control of Spalter Realty assets?
6. Could Alyssa have hired the shooter—in addition to conspiring with Klemper after the shooting to frame Kay—in order to inherit her father’s estate?
7. What secret was Gurikos killed and maimed to protect?
8. Was Carl killed in retaliation for trying to have someone else killed?
Going through the eight items, pondering each in turn, Gurney was disgusted with his lack of progress.
One positive aspect, however, of a case with multiple peculiarities was that once you had a theory that was consistent with all the peculiarities you could be sure that the theory was right. A single oddity in an investigation could often be explained in a variety of ways. But it was unlikely that there could be more than one theory that could explain the line-of-sight problem with the apartment and the grotesque mutilation of Gus Gurikos and Mary Spalter’s oddly timed death.
When he looked out through the north window of the den some minutes later, the high forest appeared devoid of any green at all. The trees and the ridge they covered were now a uniformly dark mass against the gray slate of the sky. The night descending on the hillside brought to mind the attack on Hardwick’s house and the escape of the motorized shooter through the forest paths.
At that moment he heard the sound of a motorcycle engine, which for a second he interpreted as the product of his imagination. Then the sound grew louder and its direction clearer. He went from the den to the kitchen to look out the window, sure now that he was hearing a very real motorcycle coming up the road. Half a minute later the machine’s single headlight rounded the barn and began ascending the rough pasture path.
He went to the bedroom, got his .32 Beretta from the night table, chambered a round, slipped the gun in his pocket, and went to the side door. He waited until the motorcycle came to a stop by his car, then switched on the outside lights.
An athletic-looking figure in black riding leathers and a black helmet with a full face visor dismounted, removed a slim black briefcase from one of the saddlebags, and approached the door. He knocked firmly with a black-gloved hand.
That was when Gurney, about to ease the gun from his pocket, recognized the helmet.
It was his own, from his motorcycling days nearly three decades earlier. It was the helmet he’d given to Kyle a few months ago.
He flipped on the inside lights and opened the door.
“Hey, Dad!” Kyle handed him the briefcase, lifted off the helmet with one hand, and ran the other back through the short dark hair that was a mirror image of his father’s.
They exchanged matching smiles, although in Gurney’s there was a touch of bafflement. “Did I miss an email or a phone message?”
“About my coming up? No. It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. Thought I could take care of your video enhancement easier up here than at home—so you can see what I’m doing and we can get it the way you want it. That’s the main reason I came. But there’s a second reason, too.”
“Oh?”
“Cow-shit bingo.”
“Excuse me?”
“Cow-shit bingo—at your Summer Mountain Fair. Did you know that was an actual thing? And deep-fried cheese. And on Sunday afternoon, a ladies-only demolition derby event. And a giant zucchini hurling contest.”
“A what?”
“I made that last one up. But what the hell, it’s not as weird as the real stuff. I’ve never been to a real country fair. With real cow shit. Figured it was time. Where’s Madeleine?”
“Long story. She’s staying with a couple of her friends. Involves the fair and … sort of a precaution. I’ll tell you all about it later.” He stepped back, holding the door open. “Come in, come in, take off the bike suit and get comfortable. Have you had any dinner?”
“A burger and a yogurt at the Sloatsburg rest stop.”
“That was over a hundred miles ago. You want to have an omelet with me?”
“Cool. Thanks. I’ll get my other bag and change.”
“So, what’s this ‘precaution’ thing you mentioned?” No surprise to Gurney, that was the first question Kyle asked when they sat down to eat twenty minutes later.
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.”