“In the alley shooting, two big ones. That the shot the officer fired actually struck the suspect and killed him. And that the officer was lying about which way the suspect was facing when he shot him. Both assumptions were quite reasonable. But they were wrong. The bullet wound that ended up killing the suspect had been incurred before the officer arrived on the scene. And the officer was telling the truth. With the car, the assumption was that it exploded because the driver lost control of it and drove it into a ravine. In fact, the driver lost control and drove it into a ravine because it exploded.”

Kyle nodded thoughtfully.

Hardwick made one of his distressed faces. “So what’s this got to do with Carl?”

“Everything—sequence, timing, assumptions.”

“How about spelling that out in the simple language of a peasant like me?”

“Everyone assumed that Carl stumbled and fell because he was shot. But suppose he was shot because he stumbled and fell.”

Hardwick blinked, his eyes revealing a rapid rethinking of the possibilities. “You mean stumbled and fell in front of the intended victim?”

Madeleine looked unconvinced. “Isn’t that a bit of a stretch? That he was accidentally shot because he stumbled in front of the person the hit man was actually aiming at?”

“But that’s exactly what everyone saw happen, but then they all changed their minds—because their minds immediately reconnected the dots in a more conventional way.”

Kyle looked perplexed. “What do you mean, ‘That’s exactly what everyone saw happen’?”

“Everyone at the funeral who was interviewed claimed they thought at first that Carl had stumbled—maybe tripped over something or turned his ankle and lost his balance. A little while later, when the bullet wound was discovered, they all automatically revised their original perceptions. Essentially, their brains unconsciously were evaluating the relative likelihood of two possible sequences and favoring the one that normally would have had the greater chance of occurring.”

“Isn’t that what our brains are supposed to do?”

“Up to a point. The problem is, once we accept a certain sequence—in this case, ‘was shot, stumbled, and fell’ rather than ‘stumbled, was shot, and fell’—we tend to dismiss and forget the other. Our new version becomes the only version. The mind is built to resolve ambiguities and move on. In practice this often means leaping from reasonable assumption to assumed truth, and not looking back. Of course, if the reasonable assumption happens to be inaccurate, everything built on it later is nonsense and eventually collapses.”

Madeleine was exhibiting the impatient frown with which she greeted most of Gurney’s psychological theorizing. “So who was Panikos aiming at when Carl got in the way?”

“The answer is easy enough to get to. It would be the person whose role as a victim makes all the other oddities of the case make sense.”