He decided to try for as much openness as he could. “Look, I understand the danger, the less-than-virtuous motive driving this thing. But I believe I owe Jack something. Maybe not a lot, but certainly something. And an innocent woman may have been convicted on evidence manufactured by a dirty cop. I don’t like dirty cops.”

Madeleine broke in. “Hardwick doesn’t care whether she’s innocent. To him, that’s irrelevant.”

“I know. But I’m not Hardwick.”

Chapter 7

Mick the Dick

“So everyone thought he tripped, until they found a bullet in his brain?” asked Gurney.

He was sitting in the passenger seat of Hardwick’s roaring GTO—not a traveling option he’d normally choose, but the trip from Walnut Crossing to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility would take close to three hours, according to Google, and it seemed a good opportunity to ask questions.

“The little round entry wound was kind of a hint,” said Hardwick. “But the CAT scan left no doubt. Eventually a surgeon retrieved most of the bullet fragments.”

“It was a .220 Swift?” Gurney had managed to review half the trial transcript and a third of the BCI case file before Hardwick arrived to pick him up, and he wanted to be sure of his facts.

“Yep. Fastest bullet made. Flattest trajectory in the business. Put it in the right rifle with the right scope, you can blow the head off a chipmunk a quarter mile away. Definitely a precision item. Nothing quite like it. Add a silencer to that package, and you’ve got—”

“A silencer?”

“A silencer. Which is why no one heard the shot. That, and the firecrackers.”

“Firecrackers?”

Hardwick shrugged. “Witnesses heard anywhere from five to ten packs of firecrackers go off that morning. Over in the direction of the building where the shot came from. The last pack around the time Spalter was hit.”

“How’d they know which building it was?”

“On-site reconstruction. Witness descriptions of the victim’s position when he was hit. Followed by a door-to-door search of the possible sources.”

“But nobody caught on right away that he was hit, right?”

“They just saw him falling. As he was walking toward a podium at the head of the grave, he was hit in the left temple and fell forward. At the moment he was hit, his left side was exposed to an empty stretch of the cemetery, the river, a busy county highway, and beyond that a row of partially gutted apartment buildings owned by the Spalter family.”

“How’d they identify which apartment the shooter used?”

“Easy enough. She … I mean, the shooter, whoever … left the gun behind, mounted on a nice tripod.”

“With a scope?”

“Top-of-the-line.”

“And the silencer?”

“No. The shooter removed that.”

“Then how do you know—”

“The end of the barrel was custom-threaded for one. And the firecrackers alone couldn’t have covered the report of an unsuppressed .220 Swift. It’s a seriously powerful cartridge.”