Hardwick spoke slowly—as though speaking faster might hurt. “You gotta be fucking kidding.”

“Not really. The pattern is finally clear,” said Gurney. “Your client, Kay, will win her appeal. The shooter is dead. The danger has been neutralized. The case is over.”

“Over? You forget about the corpse on your lawn? And that we have no proof that the midget you shot is really Peter Pan? And that those promotion ads on RAM-TV promising your big Spalter case revelations are going to have every cop involved in it out for your ass?”

Gurney smiled. “I said the case was over. The complications and conflicts will take time to resolve. The resentments will fester. The recriminations will linger. It will take time for the facts to be accepted. But too much of the truth has come out at this point for anyone to rebury it.”

Madeleine was gazing at him intently. “Are you saying that you’re done with the Spalter murder case?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“You’re walking away from it?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“You’ve never walked away from a puzzle with a major piece still missing.”

“That’s right.”

“But you’re doing it now?”

“No, I’m not. Quite the opposite.”

“You mean it’s over because you’ve solved it? You know who hired Peter Pan to kill Carl Spalter?”

“The fact is, nobody hired him to kill Carl.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Carl wasn’t supposed to be killed. This whole case has been a comedy—or tragedy—of errors from the very beginning. It’s going to end up being a great teaching tool. The chapter in the criminal investigation textbook will be titled ‘The Fatal Consequences of Accepting Reasonable Assumptions.’ ”

Kyle was leaning forward in his chair. “Carl wasn’t supposed to be killed? How’d you figure that out?”

“By banging my head against all the other pieces of the case that made no sense with Carl as the bull’s-eye. The prosecution’s wife-shoots-husband scenario fell apart almost as soon as I looked closely at it. It seemed far more likely that Kay, or maybe someone else, had hired a pro to hit Carl. But even that scenario had awkward aspects—like where the shot actually came from and the general complexity of the hit and the peculiarity of bringing in an expensive but uncontrollable pro like Peter Pan for what should have been a fairly straightforward job. It just never felt right. And then there were some old cases that kept coming to mind—a shooting in an alley, an exploding car.”

Kyle’s eyes were widening. “Those cases were connected to Carl’s murder?”

“Not directly. But they both involved faulty assumptions about timing and sequence. Maybe I sensed those same assumptions might be lurking in the Spalter case.”

“What assumptions?”