Peter Pan Must Die (30 page)

“So talk.”

“Face-to-face would be better. No intervening technology. Technology can be a problem. A violator of privacy.”

Klemper hesitated—long enough to indicate a significant level of concern. “I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Gurney figured this was a cover-your-ass statement in the event the call was being taped, rather than pure thickheadedness. “What I’m talking about is that we should talk about some issues of mutual concern.”

“Fine. Whatever the fuck that means. Let’s get this bullshit over with. Where do you want to talk?”

“Up to you.”

“I couldn’t care less.”

“How about Riverside Mall?”

Klemper hesitated again, longer this time. “Riverside? When?”

“Sooner the better. Things are happening.”

“Where in the mall?”

“Main concourse? Lots of benches there. Usually empty.”

Another hesitation. “When?”

Gurney knew from Esti that Klemper got off his shift at five. He checked the time on his cell screen—4:01 p.m. “How about five-thirty?”

“Today?”

“Definitely today. Tomorrow might be too late.”

A final pause. “All right. Riverside. Five-thirty, sharp. You better make more sense there than you’re making here. Because right now? Right now, this sounds like a pile of shit.” He disconnected the call.

Gurney found the man’s bravado encouraging. It sounded like fear.

Riverside Mall was a forty-minute drive from Walnut Crossing, giving Gurney about fifty minutes before he had to set out. It didn’t allow him much time to prepare for a meeting that had the potential to give the investigation a dramatic shove in the right direction, if it was handled right. He got a yellow lined pad out of his desk drawer to help organize his thoughts.

He found it surprisingly difficult. His mind was unsettled, moving from one unresolved issue to another. The unreachability of Lex Bincher. The similar unreachability of the three key witnesses. The shots in the night eliminating Hardwick’s lights and phone. The grotesque mutilation of Fat Gus—a warning that the killer’s secret must be kept. But what secret? Was it his or her identity? Or something else?

And, of course, there was the central conundrum of the case from the beginning, the puzzle piece that Gurney felt would eventually make sense of all the others—the contradictory site of the shooting. On the one hand, there was the apartment with the silenced, tripod-fitted rifle and the fresh gunpowder residue with a chemical profile that linked it to a .220 Swift cartridge and the bullet fragments extracted from Carl Spalter’s brain. On the other hand, there was the light pole that made the shot impossible.

It was possible that the killer used a different apartment in that building to make the shot and then transferred the weapon to the apartment where it was found, firing a second shot from that location to produce the powder residue. But that scenario was simpler in the saying than it would have been in the doing. It also involved a much-elevated risk of detection, requiring the shooter to carry the cumbersome combination of rifle, tripod, and suppressor through the public spaces of the building. And why bother? There were, after all, several unoccupied apartments from which the shot could have been fired successfully. So why move the weapon at all? Surely not to create an intellectual puzzle. Murderers are rarely that playful. And professional hitters never are.

That thought brought him full circle to the more immediate matter
of Klemper. Was Mick the Dick the thuggish, horny clown that his nickname and general manner seemed to suggest? Or might the man be a darker, colder operator altogether?

Gurney hoped their meeting in the mall would provide some answers.

He needed to focus now on the broadest range of possibilities, think them through—angles, objectives. He straightened the yellow pad on his desk and picked up his pen. He tried to force his thoughts into a logical structure by drawing a branching diagram, beginning with four possibilities.

One posited Alyssa as the prime mover behind Carl’s murder and Kay’s conviction.

The second substituted Jonah Spalter for Alyssa.

The third posited an Unknown as Carl’s murderer, with Alyssa and Klemper as opportunistic conspirators in Kay’s conviction.

The fourth posited Kay as guilty.

He added a second level of branching possibilities under each of these.

“Hello?”

Gurney blinked.

“Hello?” It was Madeleine’s voice calling from the opposite side of the house. From the mudroom, it sounded like.

Bringing his pad and pen with him, he went out to the kitchen. “I’m here.”

She was just coming in from the side-door hallway, carrying two plastic supermarket bags. “I left the trunk open. Maybe you could bring in the cracked corn?”

“The what?”

“I read that chickens love cracked corn.”

He sighed, then tried to regard this in the positive light of a momentary diversion from his darker duties. “Bring it in and put it where?”

“The mudroom would be fine.”

He went out to Madeleine’s car, hefted the fifty-pound bag out of the trunk, struggled for a few seconds with the side door of the house, came in, and dropped the bag in the nearest corner of the mudroom—the positive light fading quickly to a weak flicker.

“You bought a lifetime supply?” he asked when he returned to the kitchen.

“It’s the only size they had. Sorry about that. Are you okay?”

“Fine. I guess I’m a little preoccupied—getting ready to go and meet with someone.”

“Oh—that reminds me—before I forget …” Her tone was pleasantly even. “You have an appointment tomorrow morning with Malcolm.”

“Malcolm Claret?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I called him before I left the clinic. He said he’d just gotten a cancellation and had an opening tomorrow at eleven.”

“No … What I don’t understand is
why
.”

“Because I’m afraid for you. We’ve discussed that.”

“No, I mean why
you
made the appointment for me.”

“Because you hadn’t made it yet, and it’s important.”

“So … you just … decided it was up to you?”

“It had to be up to somebody.”

He turned his palms up in a pose of bewilderment. “I don’t quite get that.”

“What is there to
get
?”

“
I
wouldn’t make an appointment for
you
—not unless you asked me to.”

“Even if you thought it might save my life?”

He hesitated. “Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic?”

She met his gaze and answered softly. “No, I don’t.”

His voice was suddenly filled with exasperation. “You honestly believe an appointment with Malcolm Claret is going to
save my life
?”

Just as suddenly, her voice was filled with a weary sadness. “If you really don’t want to see him, just cancel the appointment.”

If she’d said that in any other tone, he could imagine himself launching into a grand debate over whose responsibility it was to cancel an appointment she had made, and then he might even segue to the lumber pile she’d ordered for the chicken-house project and how she had a way of starting things that he had to finish and how things always had to happen on her schedule.

But the emotion in her eyes short-circuited all of that.

Besides, it was beginning to dawn on him, strangely, that there might not be any harm in seeing Claret after all.

He was saved from going on with the discussion, however, by the ringing of the phone in his pocket. He pulled it out and checked the ID.
“Kyle Gurney”
was displayed for a second before the signal was lost. He was tempted to call him back, but figured his son was likely on the move somewhere, passing through a dead spot, and it would make more sense to wait a while.

He checked the clock. It was later than he’d guessed—4:44 p.m.

It was time to leave for the mall. For the crucial meeting for which he hadn’t yet managed to prepare.

The parking lot at Riverside was, as usual, half empty.

In the mostly deserted expanse beside the T.J. Maxx that anchored one end of the mall, an incongruous flock of seagulls stood silently on the tarmac.

Entering the lot, Gurney slowed for a better look. He estimated the number of birds at fifty or sixty. From his perspective in the car, they appeared motionless, all standing in the same orientation, their backs to the setting sun.

As he drove past them to a parking spot closer to the main concourse, he couldn’t help wondering about this increasingly commonplace migration of seagulls to inland malls—drawn, no doubt, by the droppings of fast-food gobblers. Were these transposed birds developing clogged arteries like their benefactors, making them sedentary, infrequent fliers? Food for thought. But not now. The urgency of his mission returned him to reality. He locked his car and walked through the entrance arch, an oddly festive structure with the words
RIVERSIDE CENTER
curving over the top in colored lights.

The mall was not a large one. There was one main concourse, with minor offshoots. The bright promise of the entry gave way to a rather bleak interior, which appeared to have been designed decades earlier with little refreshment since. Halfway along one side of the concourse, he sat on a bench in front of an Alpine Sports shop with a window display devoted to shiny, body-clinging cycling attire. A salesperson was lounging in the doorway, frowning at the screen of her cell phone.

He checked his watch. It was 5:33.

He waited.

Klemper appeared at 5:45.

The world of law enforcement, like prison, changes the people who spend time in it. It does this by nourishing certain traits: skepticism, calculation, insularity, toughness. Those traits may develop along lines that are benign or malignant, depending on the character of the individual—on the fundamental orientation of his soul. One cop might end up street-smart, loyal to his fellows, and courageous—determined to do a good job in difficult circumstances. Another might end up poisonously cynical, judgmental, and cruel—determined to screw the world that was screwing him. Gurney figured that the look in Mick Klemper’s eyes as he approached the bench put him squarely in the second category.

He sat at the far end of the bench, several feet from Gurney. He said nothing, just opened a small attaché case on his lap, angling the top to obstruct any view of the contents, and began fiddling with something.

Gurney assumed it was a scanner, probably the multi-function type that could indicate the presence of any transmitting or recording device.

After a minute or so, Klemper closed the case. He did a quick three-sixty visual check of the concourse, then spoke in a rough voice, half through his teeth, his gaze fixed on the floor. “So what the hell kind of game is this?” The man’s truculence seemed a shield for raw nerves, and his massive physique nothing more than excess baggage, a burden responsible for the sheen of sweat on his face. But it would be a mistake to go the extra yard and consider him harmless.

“You can do something for me, and I can do something for you,” said Gurney.

Klemper looked up from the floor with a little snort of a laugh, as if recognizing an interrogation trick.

The young woman in the doorway of Alpine Sports was still frowning at her phone.

“How’s Alyssa?” asked Gurney casually—knowing he was taking a chance playing that card so quickly.

Klemper shot him a sideways glance. “What?”

“The suspect you got tangled up with in a way you shouldn’t have.” He paused. “You still friends?”

“What kind of bullshit is this?” The man’s raw tone told him he’d hit a nerve.

“For you, very expensive bullshit.”

Klemper shook his head, as if trying to convey incomprehension.

Gurney went on. “It’s amazing what ends up getting recorded these days. Can be very embarrassing. But sometimes you get lucky and there’s a way to control the damage. That’s what I want to talk to you about—damage control.”

“I don’t get any of this.” His denial was loud and clear, seemingly for the benefit of a recording device his briefcase scanner might have missed.

“I just wanted to bring you up-to-date on the Kay Spalter appeal.” Gurney was speaking in a flat, matter-of-fact tone. “First, we have enough evidence of … let’s call them flaws … in the original investigation to guarantee a reversal of her conviction. Second, we’re now at a fork in the road, meaning we have a choice in how those flaws are presented to the appellate court. For example, the trial witness who ID’d Kay as a person present at the shooting site could have been coerced into perjury … or he could have been innocently mistaken, as eyewitnesses often are. The con who claimed at the trial that Kay tried to hire him as a hit man could have been coerced … or he could have made up that story on his own, as men in his position often do. Kay’s lover could have been told that the only way to avoid being the prime suspect was to make sure Kay ended up in that position … or he could have arrived at that conclusion on his own. The CIO on the case could have concealed key video evidence and ignored other avenues of inquiry because of an improper relationship with the victim’s daughter … or he could simply have zeroed in on the wrong suspect too soon, as detectives often do.”

Klemper was again staring grimly at the floor. “This is all hypothetical nonsense.”

“The thing of it is, Mick, every flaw in the investigation could be described in either criminal or innocent terms—so long as no definitive proof of that improper relationship falls into the wrong hands.”

“Hypothetical bullshit.”

“Okay. Hypothetically, let’s say I have the definitive proof of that improper relationship—in a very persuasive digital form. And let’s say I wanted something in return for keeping it to myself?”

“Why ask me?”

“Because it’s your career, your pension, your freedom that are on the line.”

“What the fuck are you saying?”

“I want the security video from the electronics store on Axton Avenue.”