Madeleine was gazing at him intently. “Are you saying that you’re done with the Spalter murder case?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“You’re walking away from it?”
“Yes.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“You’ve never walked away from a puzzle with a major piece still missing.”
“That’s right.”
“But you’re doing it now?”
“No, I’m not. Quite the opposite.”
“You mean it’s over because you’ve solved it? You know who hired Peter Pan to kill Carl Spalter?”
“The fact is, nobody hired him to kill Carl.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Carl wasn’t supposed to be killed. This whole case has been a comedy—or tragedy—of errors from the very beginning. It’s going to end up being a great teaching tool. The chapter in the criminal investigation textbook will be titled ‘The Fatal Consequences of Accepting Reasonable Assumptions.’ ”
Kyle was leaning forward in his chair. “Carl wasn’t supposed to be killed? How’d you figure that out?”
“By banging my head against all the other pieces of the case that made no sense with Carl as the bull’s-eye. The prosecution’s wife-shoots-husband scenario fell apart almost as soon as I looked closely at it. It seemed far more likely that Kay, or maybe someone else, had hired a pro to hit Carl. But even that scenario had awkward aspects—like where the shot actually came from and the general complexity of the hit and the peculiarity of bringing in an expensive but uncontrollable pro like Peter Pan for what should have been a fairly straightforward job. It just never felt right. And then there were some old cases that kept coming to mind—a shooting in an alley, an exploding car.”
Kyle’s eyes were widening. “Those cases were connected to Carl’s murder?”
“Not directly. But they both involved faulty assumptions about timing and sequence. Maybe I sensed those same assumptions might be lurking in the Spalter case.”
“What assumptions?”
“In the alley shooting, two big ones. That the shot the officer fired actually struck the suspect and killed him. And that the officer was lying about which way the suspect was facing when he shot him. Both assumptions were quite reasonable. But they were wrong. The bullet wound that ended up killing the suspect had been incurred before the officer arrived on the scene. And the officer was telling the truth. With the car, the assumption was that it exploded because the driver lost control of it and drove it into a ravine. In fact, the driver lost control and drove it into a ravine because it exploded.”
Kyle nodded thoughtfully.
Hardwick made one of his distressed faces. “So what’s this got to do with Carl?”
“Everything—sequence, timing, assumptions.”
“How about spelling that out in the simple language of a peasant like me?”
“Everyone assumed that Carl stumbled and fell because he was shot. But suppose he was shot because he stumbled and fell.”
Hardwick blinked, his eyes revealing a rapid rethinking of the possibilities. “You mean stumbled and fell in front of the intended victim?”
Madeleine looked unconvinced. “Isn’t that a bit of a stretch? That he was accidentally shot because he stumbled in front of the person the hit man was actually aiming at?”
“But that’s exactly what everyone saw happen, but then they all changed their minds—because their minds immediately reconnected the dots in a more conventional way.”
Kyle looked perplexed. “What do you mean, ‘That’s exactly what everyone saw happen’?”
“Everyone at the funeral who was interviewed claimed they thought at first that Carl had stumbled—maybe tripped over something or turned his ankle and lost his balance. A little while later, when the bullet wound was discovered, they all automatically revised their original perceptions. Essentially, their brains unconsciously were evaluating the relative likelihood of two possible sequences and favoring the one that normally would have had the greater chance of occurring.”
“Isn’t that what our brains are supposed to do?”
“Up to a point. The problem is, once we accept a certain sequence—in this case, ‘was shot, stumbled, and fell’ rather than ‘stumbled, was shot, and fell’—we tend to dismiss and forget the other. Our new version becomes the only version. The mind is built to resolve ambiguities and move on. In practice this often means leaping from reasonable assumption to assumed truth, and not looking back. Of course, if the reasonable assumption happens to be inaccurate, everything built on it later is nonsense and eventually collapses.”
Madeleine was exhibiting the impatient frown with which she greeted most of Gurney’s psychological theorizing. “So who was Panikos aiming at when Carl got in the way?”
“The answer is easy enough to get to. It would be the person whose role as a victim makes all the other oddities of the case make sense.”
Kyle’s eyes were fastened on his father. “You already know who it is, don’t you?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
Madeleine spoke up excitedly. “The thing I keep hearing you talk about, the ‘oddity’ that bothers you the most, is the involvement of Peter Pan—who supposedly only accepted really difficult contracts. So there are just two questions. First, ‘Who at the Mary Spalter funeral would be the most difficult to kill?’ And second, ‘Did Carl pass in front of that person as he was heading for the podium?’ ”
Hardwick’s interjected response sounded certain, despite his speech being somewhat blurred. “Answer to the first is Jonah. Answer to the second is yes.”
Gurney had come to the same conclusion nearly four hours earlier on the concourse by the Ferris wheel, but it was reassuring to see another mind arrive at the same place. With Jonah as the intended victim, all the twisted pieces of the case straightened out. Jonah was somewhere between difficult and impossible to locate physically, which made him the perfect challenge for Panikos. In fact, his mother’s funeral may well have been the only event that was capable of guaranteeing his presence in a predictable place at a predictable time, which is why Panikos killed her. Jonah’s seated position at graveside solved the line-of-sight problem from the Axton Avenue apartment. Carl couldn’t have been hit as he stepped past Alyssa, but he could easily have been hit by a bullet intended for Jonah as he stumbled to the ground in front of him. That scenario also explained the inconsistency that had troubled Gurney from the outset: How did Carl manage to travel ten or twelve feet after a bullet had destroyed the motor center of his brain? The simple answer was that he didn’t. And finally, the absurd outcome—in which “the Magician” shot the wrong man, making a potential laughingstock of himself in the very circles where his reputation mattered—explained his subsequent deadly efforts to keep that ruinous fact a secret.
The next question followed naturally.
Kyle asked it, uneasily. “If Jonah was the real target, who hired Panikos to kill him?”
From a simple cui bono perspective, it seemed to Gurney that the answer was obvious. Only one person would have benefited significantly from Jonah’s death, and he would have benefited very significantly indeed.
The expressions on their faces showed that the answer was equally obvious to everyone in the room.