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.”