The apartment where an eyewitness placed Kay Spalter on the morning of the shooting.
The apartment where Gurney now stood, mystified.
Chapter 18. A Question of Gender
Bafflement has the power to bring some men to a dead stop. It had the opposite effect on Gurney. An apparent contradiction—the shot could not have been fired through the window through which it must have been fired—affected him like amphetamine.
There were things he wanted to check immediately in the case file. Rather than stay in the bare apartment, he took the big manila envelope back down to the car, opened it on the front seat, and began flipping through the original incident report. It was structured in two sections, following the split location of the crime scene—the victim site and the shooter site—with separate strings of photos, descriptions, interviews, and evidence-collection reports for each site.
The first thing that struck him was a peculiar omission. There was no mention in the incident report, or in any follow-up report, of the light pole obstruction. There was a telephoto picture of the Spalter gravesite area taken through the apartment window, but in the absence of a scaled reference marker for Carl’s position at the moment he was struck, the line-of-sight problem was not obvious.
Gurney soon found another equally peculiar omission. There was no mention of security videos. Surely someone had checked for their presence in and around the cemetery, as well as on Axton Avenue. It was hard to believe that such a routine procedure could have been overlooked, and even harder to believe that it had been conducted without any record of the outcome being entered in the file.
He slipped the case file under his front seat, got out of the car, and locked the doors. Looking up and down the block, he saw only three storefront businesses that appeared to actually be in business. The former RadioShack, which now seemed to have no name at all; River Kings Pizza; and something called Dizzy Daze, which had a show window full of inflated balloons but no other indication of what they might be selling.
The closest to him was the no-name electronics store. As Gurney approached it, he saw two hand-printed signs in the glass door: “Refurbed Tablet Computers from $199” and “Will Return 2PM.” Gurney glanced at his watch. It was 2:09. He tried the door. It was locked. He was starting toward River Kings, with the added goal of buying a Coke and a couple of slices, when a pristine yellow Corvette pulled up to the curb. The couple who emerged from it were less pristine. The man was in his late forties, thickly built, with more hair on his arms than on his head. The woman was a bit younger, with spiky blue and blond hair, a broad Slavic face, and huge breasts straining against the buttons of a half-open pink sweater. As she struggled revealingly out of the low-slung seat, the man went to the electronics store door, unlocked it, and looked back at Gurney. “You want something?” The guttural, heavily accented question was as much a challenge as an invitation.
“Yes. But it’s kind of complicated.”
The man shrugged and gestured to the woman, who’d finally freed herself from the grip of the car. “Talk to Sophia. Got something I need to do.” He went inside, leaving the door open behind him.
Sophia walked past Gurney into the store. “Always got something needs to do.” The voice was as Slavic as the cheekbones. “What I can be helping you?”
“How long have you had this store?”
“Long? He had it years, years, years. What you want?”
“You have security cameras?”
“Secure?”
“Cameras that photograph people in the store, on the street, coming in, leaving, maybe shoplifting.”
“Shoplifting?”
“Stealing from you.”
“Me?”
“Stealing from the store.”
“From the store. Yes. Fucking bastards try to steal the store.”
“So you have video cameras watching?”
“Video. Yes.”
“Were you here nine months ago when the famous Carl Spalter shooting happened?”
“Sure. Famous. Right here. Fucking bastard wife upstairs shoot him over there.” Sophia gestured broadly in the direction of Willow Rest. “Mother’s funeral. Own mother. You think of that?” She shook her head as if to say that a bad deed done at a mother’s funeral should earn the doer double the pain in hell.
“How long do you keep the security tapes or digital files?”
“Long?”
“How much time? For how many weeks or months? Do you retain any of what’s recorded, or is it all periodically erased?”
“Usually erase. Not fucking bastard wife.”
“You have copies of your security videos from the day Spalter was shot?”
“Cop took all, nothing left. Lot of money could have been. Big fucking bastard cop.”
“A cop took your security videos?”
“Sure.”
Sophia was standing behind a counter display of cell phones that formed a loose U shape around her. Behind the U was a half-open door that Gurney could see led to a messy office. He could hear a man’s voice on the phone but couldn’t make out the words.
“He never brought them back?”
“Never. On video man got bullet in the brain. You know what money TV gives for that?”
“Your video showed the man getting shot in the cemetery across the river?”
“Sure. Camera out front sees everything. Hi-def. Even background. Best quality. All function is automatic. Cost plenty.”
“The cop who took—”
The door behind her opened wider and the hairy man came out into the counter area.
His expression was deepening the lines of suspicion and resentment that shaped his features.
“Nobody took nothing,” he said. “Who are you?”
Gurney gave the man a flat stare. “Special investigator looking into the state police handling of the Spalter case. Did you have any direct contact with a detective by the name of Mick Klemper?”
The man’s expression remained steady. Too steady, too long. Then he shook his head slowly. “Got no memory of that.”
“Was Mick Klemper the ‘big fucking bastard cop’ that the lady here says took your security videos and never returned them?”
He gave her a look of exaggerated confusion. “What the fuck you talking about?”
She returned his look with an exaggerated shrug. “Cops didn’t take nothing?” She smiled innocently at Gurney. “So I guess they didn’t. Wrong again. Very often. Maybe had too much drink. Harry knows, remembers better than me. Right, Harry?”
Hairy Harry grinned at Gurney, his eyes like gleaming black marbles. “See? Like I said: Nobody took nothing. You go now. Unless you want to buy a TV. Big screen. Internet-ready. Good prices.”
Gurney grinned back. “I’ll think about that. What would a good price be?”
Harry turned his palms up. “Depends. Supply and demand. Life so much fucking auction, you know this what I mean? But good price anyways for you. Always good prices for policemans.”
Down the avenue, upon closer inspection, the store with the balloon display didn’t seem to be in business after all. The slanting sun had illuminated the window in a way that made it seem full of bright lights. And the coverage of the single security camera at the River Kings pizzeria was limited to a ten-foot square around the cash register. So unless the killer had been hungry, there wasn’t anything to be learned there.
But the electronics store situation had put Gurney’s brain into overdrive. If he had to pick a best guess, it would be that Klemper had discovered something inconvenient in the security video and decided to make it disappear. If so, there could have been a number of ways of keeping Harry’s mouth shut. Maybe Klemper knew the electronics store was a front for some other activity. Or maybe he knew things about Harry that Harry didn’t want other people to know.