“So his plan was to eliminate his brother, take control of Spalter Realty, liquidate the assets for his own use?”

Gurney nodded. “That’s how I see it.”

Hardwick added his own nod. “Fifty million bucks. Just about right to buy the governor’s mansion.”

“And he figured we’d never get him for the hit? God, what an arrogant bastard!” She glanced curiously at Gurney. “You have a strange look on your face. What’s that about?”

“Just thinking that a hit on his brother could’ve been a major plus in Carl’s campaign. He could’ve positioned it as the mob’s effort to scare him out of politics—their effort to keep a man of integrity from taking over the state government. I wonder if that might have been part of his plan all along—to position his brother’s murder as proof of his own virtue?”

“I like it,” said Hardwick, with a cynical glint in his eyes. “Ride that fucking corpse like a white horse—straight to his inauguration!”

Gurney smiled. He regarded the resurgence of Hardwick’s vulgarity as a positive health indicator.

Esti changed the subject. “So Klemper and Alyssa were just rotten little vultures trying to cash in, after the fact, at Kay’s expense?”

“You could say that,” said Gurney.

“Actually,” added Hardwick with some relish, “more like one rotten little vulture named Alyssa and one idiotic vulture-fucker named Mick the Dick.”

After gazing at him for several long seconds with the pained fondness one might have for a charmingly incorrigible child, Esti took his hand again and squeezed it. “I better get going. I’m supposed to be intercepting and diverting traffic—idiots heading toward the fairgrounds from the interstate.”

“Shoot the bastards,” he suggested helpfully.

There was some more discussion after she left, discussion that drifted into theories of guilt and self-destruction, all of which appeared to be putting Hardwick to sleep.

Kyle brought up something he’d remembered from a college psychology class, Freud’s theory of accidents—the idea that these events may not really be “accidental” at all but have a purpose: to prevent or punish an action about which the person is conflicted. “I wonder, could something like that have been behind Carl’s stumbling the way he did in front of his brother?”

No one seemed inclined to take up the issue.