Hardwick was staring into his coffee cup as though it contained some unidentifiable substance. “I’ve got a problem with this. According to Gurney’s Greek mob buddy, Carl went to Fat Gus to set up a hit on somebody—nobody knows who. The target finds out about this and, to keep it from happening, hits Carl first. Then he hits Gus, for good measure. I have this right?”

Gurney nodded. “Except for the ‘buddy’ part.”

Hardwick ignored the objection. “Okay, so what this says to me is that Carl and his target were in, like, the ultimate high-stakes race to whack each other. I mean, the guy who makes the first hit wins, right?”

Gurney nodded again.

Hardwick went on. “So why would a guy in that situation pick such a time-consuming, pain-in-the-ass way to set Carl up? I mean, knowing there’s a contract on your life creates some urgency. Wouldn’t it make more sense under the circumstances to just put on a ski mask, walk into the Spalter Realty office, and pop the son of a bitch? Deal with the issue in half a day instead of a week? And the whole idea of hitting the mother first? Just to get Carl into the cemetery? That feels fucking weird to me.”

It didn’t feel right to Gurney either.

“Unless,” said Esti, “the hit on the mother wasn’t just a setup to put Carl in a predictable place at a predictable time. Maybe the mother was a target for another reason. In fact, maybe she was the main target, and Carl was secondary. You ever think of it that way?”

They paused to think about it.

“I have another problem,” said Hardwick. “I get that there’s a connection between the Mary and Carl murders. Got to be. And I get that there’s some other kind of connection between the Carl and Gus murders—maybe what Donny Angel said, maybe not. So I’m okay with a connection between one and two, and between two and three, but somehow the one-two-three sequence all together doesn’t feel so good.”

Gurney felt a similar discomfort. “By the way, do we know for sure that Carl was number two and Gus was number three?”

Esti frowned. “What do you mean?”

“From the way Angelidis talked about it, I’ve been assuming that was the sequence, but there’s no reason it had to be that way. All I really know is that Carl and Gus were hit the same day. I’d like to get the timing confirmed.”

“How?”

“We have a precise time for Carl in the case file. But based on what Angelidis told me, I’m not so sure about Gus. There are two sources I can think of, but it’ll depend on what kind of contacts we have—either with the county ME’s office where the Gurikos autopsy was done, or with whoever in OCTF has access to that file.”