She offered a grudging nod but appeared unconvinced. “I hear what you’re saying, but … where do we start? If we could coordinate the efforts of the relevant agencies—BCI, FBI, OCTF, Interpol, Homeland Security, DMV, et cetera—and throw some major manpower against the case, tracking down this Panikos character might be feasible. But, as it is … what are we supposed to do? Panikos aside, we just don’t have the hands and feet and hours to look into all the other relationships and conflicts in the lives of Carl, Jonah, Kay, Alyssa—not to mention Angelidis and Gurikos and God knows who else.” She shook her head in a gesture of helplessness.

Her comments produced the longest silence of the meeting.

At first, Hardwick showed no reaction at all. He appeared to be comparing his thumbs, studying their relative size and shape.

Esti stared at him. “Jack, you have any feeling about this?”

He looked up and cleared his throat. “Sure. We have two separate situations. One is Kay’s appeal process, which Lex’s partner tells me is in great shape. The other is the effort to answer the ‘Who killed Carl?’ question, which is a trickier deal altogether. But yon crafty Sherlock has an optimistic look in his eye.”

Her anxious gaze moved to Gurney. “Optimism? You feel that?”

“Actually, yes, a bit.”

Even as he was saying this, he was struck by the rapid change in his attitude in the short time since he’d first put his list of issues together and reacted to it with frustration at the complexity of the project and lack of law enforcement resources he’d once taken for granted—exactly what Esti was just complaining about.

Neither the complexity nor the resource problem had gone away. But he’d finally realized that he didn’t need answers to an endless series of perplexing questions to unlock the solution.

Esti looked skeptical. “How can you be optimistic when there are so many things we don’t know?”

“We may not have a lot of answers yet, but … we do have a person.”

“We have a person? What person?”

“Peter Pan.”

“What do you mean, we have him?”

“I mean he’s here. In this area. Something about our investigation is keeping him here.”

“What’s this ‘something’?”

“I think he’s afraid that we’ll discover his secret.”

“The secret behind the nails in Fat Gus’s head?”

“Yes.”

Hardwick began tapping his fingers on the table. “What makes you think it’s Panikos’s secret and not the secret of whoever hired him?”