Gurney reversed the video, backing it up a minute or so, and replayed the individual’s progress along the street and entry into the building. Unlike the Emmerling Oaks video, there were no flowers. But there was a package. A narrow package, between three and four feet long, wrapped in red and green Christmas paper with a big decorative bow in the middle. Gurney smiled. It was probably the most innocent-looking way one could transport a sniper rifle on a city street in the holiday shopping season.

He made a note of the actual clock time embedded in the frame as the individual turned into the building. It was 10:03 a.m. Just seventeen minutes before the shot that felled Carl Spalter.

The same individual emerged onto the street at 10:22 a.m.—just two minutes after the shot was fired—turned and walked calmly away, continuing along Axton Avenue until passing out of the camera’s field of view.

Gurney sat back in his chair, contemplating the significance of what he’d just seen.

First, it suggested strongly that the shot was indeed fired from the apartment where the gun was later found. The timing of the likely shooter’s exit would make other scenarios difficult if not impossible—which underscored the light pole problem.

Second, the individual in the video was clearly not Kay Spalter. Gurney felt a welcome surge of anger at Klemper, as well as the evaporation of any bad feeling over breaking their “agreement.” That video alone would have ended the case against Kay Spalter. If nothing else, it would have ensured the presence of reasonable doubt by supporting a credible alternative theory of the case and by showing a credible alternative suspect. It would have prevented her conviction and incarceration. Klemper’s willful suppression of that evidence—apparently in return for the sexual favors of Alyssa Spalter—was not only criminal but unforgivable.

Third, it was time to stop thinking of the individual in the Axton Avenue and the retirement village videos simply as “the individual.” It was time to start calling him by his chosen name: Petros Panikos.

It wasn’t easy. Something in the mind rebelled at connecting the slight, almost dainty figure, carrying bouquets of chrysanthemums in the one instance and a colorful Christmas box in the other, with the violent psychopath described by Interpol and Adonis Angelidis. The psychopath who hammered the nails into Gus Gurikos’s eyes, ears, and throat. The psychopath who firebombed Bincher’s home in Cooperstown, burned six innocent people to death, and cut off a man’s head.

Oh, Jesus, was he singing when he did that, too? That was something Gurney didn’t want to think about. That was the stuff of nightmares. It was time for more practical thoughts. It was time for a meeting of the minds with Hardwick and Esti. Time to agree on next steps.