“Something Angelidis told me. He said Panikos only accepts pure hit contracts. No restrictions. No special instructions. You want somebody dead, you give him the money and chances are they end up dead. But he handles all the details his own way. So if a message was being sent with the nails in Fat Gus’s head, it was Panikos’s message—something that mattered to him.”

Hardwick produced his acid-reflux grimace. “Sounds like you’re putting a shitload of trust in what Angelidis told you—a mobster who lies, cheats, and steals for a living.”

“There’d be no advantage to him in lying about the way Panikos does business. And everything else we’ve learned about Panikos, especially from your friend at Interpol, supports what Angelidis said. Peter Pan operates by his own rules. Nobody gets to tell him what to do.”

“You’re suggesting the boy may be a bit of a control freak?”

Gurney smiled at the understatement. “No one ordered him to shoot out the lights in your house, Jack. He doesn’t take orders like that. I don’t believe anyone ordered him to burn down those houses in Cooperstown, or to walk away with Lex Bincher’s head in a tote bag.”

“You suddenly sound awful goddamn sure about this shit.”

“I’ve been thinking about it long enough. It’s about time I started to see at least one piece of it clearly.”

Esti threw up her hands in bafflement. “I’m sorry, maybe I’m being dense here, but what is it you see so clearly?”

“The open door that’s been right there in front of us all along.”

“What open door?”

“Peter Pan himself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s responding to our actions, to our investigation of Carl’s murder. A response equals a connection. A connection equals an open door.”

“Responding to our actions?” Esti appeared incredulous, almost angry. “You mean by shooting at Jack’s house? By killing Lex and his neighbors in Cooperstown?”

“He’s trying to stop what we’re doing.”

“So we investigate, and his response is to shoot and burn and kill. That’s what you’re calling an open door?”

“It proves he’s paying attention. It proves he’s still here. He hasn’t left the country. He hasn’t slipped back into his hole in the ground. It proves we can reach him. We just have to figure out how to reach him in a way that provokes a reaction we can work with.”

Esti’s eyes narrowed, her expression shifting from disbelief to speculation. “You mean, like, use the media—maybe that asshole Bork—to offer Panikos some kind of deal to reveal who hired him?”

“Bork could play a role, but not to offer that kind of deal. I think our little Peter Pan operates on a different wavelength.”

“What wavelength?”

“Well … just look at what we know about him.”