Wolf Lake

PROLOGUE

She stood shivering in the moonlight between the two giant hemlocks at the end of the frozen lake. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so cold, so frightened. The sight of the full moon above the jagged treetops was giving her gooseflesh. The drooping branches were becoming in her mind deformed arms that might reach down and—

No! Stop! She shook her head—her real problem was terrifying enough without letting her imagination run wild.

In the distance she heard the motorcycle approaching—first on the old dirt road, then on the winding trail from the road down to the lake. The closer it came, the tighter the feeling in her chest.

Finally, with a surge of anxiety, she caught sight of the headlight flickering through the woods, then coming across the clearing that separated the pines from the towering black hemlocks.

He stopped in front of her and switched off the engine, planting his feet wide on the ground to balance the heavy bike—his big brother’s, which he rode illegally.

She could just make out a few snowflakes in his wind-tousled hair. She wasn’t sure whether he looked worried or whether she was imagining it because that was the way she’d expected him to look. Her phone call hadn’t been explicit, but she knew her voice had been full of fear and urgency. She was sure, even with his back to the moon, that he was looking at her intently, waiting for her to explain why they were meeting here.

She could hear him breathing, could even hear his heart beating. But that was impossible. Maybe it was her own heart, her own desperate pulse beating in her ears.

She’d prepared what she intended to say, rehearsed it a hundred times that very evening; but now, in this forbidding place, her voice failed her.

“What?” he asked. “What is it?” His voice was sharp, not like she’d ever heard it before.

She bit her lower lip, took a trembling breath, and forced out the words in a barely audible whisper.

She heard him take a deep breath, but he said nothing.

She wondered if he’d heard her—half hoping that he hadn’t.

A slow-moving cloud began to creep across the moon.

Sometime after that—she’d lost her sense of time—he restarted the motorcycle, gave the throttle a sudden twist, and accelerated out onto the ice-covered lake, the shriek of the engine slicing through the frigid air, the chrome tailpipe reflecting what was left of the moonlight.

Then, out on the distant center of the lake, the diminishing howl of the engine was broken by a horrifying crack—then another, and another, like a rapid series of muffled gunshots as the ice gave way under the motorcycle’s weight. There was a sickening splashing impact . . . the hiss of the hot machine sinking . . . and silence.

The cloud now had obliterated every trace of the moon.

All was darkness. No sound. No light. No thought. No hope. No feeling.

And then, the scream. The scream rising with a feral life of its own, going on and on.

The scream that she came to realize only later had been hers.

CHAPTER 1

The porcupine’s behavior was making no sense.

There was something deeply disturbing about its lack of logical purpose—disturbing at least to Dave Gurney.

On that raw morning in early December, he was sitting by the den window, gazing out toward a row of bare trees on the north side of the old pasture. He was fixated on one tree in particular, on one low-lying branch of that tree, as an unusually fat porcupine ambled back and forth along that branch—slowly, repetitively, seemingly pointlessly.

“Which snowshoes are you bringing?” Madeleine was standing in the den doorway, holding a traditional rawhide-on-wood pair in one hand and a contemporary metal-and-plastic pair in the other. Her short dark hair had the especially disarranged look it had when she’d been rooting around in the low-ceilinged attic or the back of a closet.

“I’ll decide later.”

They were planning to spend a few days at an inn in the Green Mountains of Vermont for some snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. Snow had not yet arrived that year in their own Catskill Mountains, and snow was the part of winter that Madeleine loved.

She nodded toward the den window. “Still obsessed with our little visitor?”

He considered several ways of responding to that, rejecting immediately any mention of the porcupine’s resemblance to a shambling, half-senile gangster he’d known in the city. Three years into his retirement from the NYPD he and Madeleine had finally reached a tacit understanding of sorts. Although he was officially no longer the homicide detective he’d been for over twenty years, it had become clear that he wasn’t about to morph into the biking, kayaking, all-out nature lover Madeleine had been hoping for. But some accommodation was called for. On his part, he agreed to stop relating how his current experiences in the rural mountains of upstate New York managed to bring to mind past criminal cases. On her part, she agreed to stop trying to convert him into something he wasn’t. All this, of course, could lead to some fraught silences.

He looked back out the window. “I’m trying to figure out what he’s up to.”

She leaned the snowshoes against the wall, came next to him, peered out for several seconds at the bristly animal meandering along the branch. “He’s probably just doing some normal porcupine thing. Same thing he was doing yesterday. What’s the problem?”

“What he’s doing doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe it makes sense to him.”

“Not unless he’s crazy. Or pretending to be crazy, which is unlikely. Look. Very slowly he makes his way out to the end of that branch. Then, very hesitantly, he turns around. Then he makes his way back the way he came. He’s expending energy . . . for what?”

“Does everything have to be explainable?”

“Everything ultimately is explainable. And in this case I’d like to know that the explanation is something other than rabies.”

“Rabies? Why would you think such a thing?”

“Rabies causes deranged behavior.”

“Do you know for a fact that porcupines get rabies?”

“Yes. I checked. I’m going to put a couple of trail cams out there, find out where he goes, what he does, when he’s not bumbling around on that branch.”

She made a face, maybe confused, maybe incredulous—he wasn’t sure which.

“Trail cams. Outdoor security cameras,” he explained. “Motion-activated.”

“Security cameras? Good Lord, David, the odds are he’s just going about his little porcupine life, and you’re treating him like . . . like he’s committing a crime.” She paused. “Where would you get these cameras anyway?”

“Jack Hardwick. He has a bunch of them.”

He didn’t remind her that they were left over from an aborted plan he and Hardwick had cooked up during the recent Peter Pan murder case, but, judging from her darkening expression, a reminder was unnecessary. He added, in an effort to pull the discussion back from an abyss of bad memories, “Once I can see how that animal behaves on the ground, I’ll have a better idea of what’s going on.”

“You don’t think you’re overreacting, just a little?”

“Not if the damn thing has rabies.”

She gave him one of those long looks that he could never quite decipher. “We’re leaving for Vermont the day after tomorrow.”

“So?”

“So when are you planning on doing whatever you’re going to do with those camera things?”

“As soon as possible. As soon as I can get them from Hardwick. In fact, I should call him right now.”

The indecipherable look changed to obvious concern. “When are you going to pack?”

“Christ, we’re only going away for three days.”

“Four.”

“What’s the difference?”

As Gurney left the den in search of his cell phone, Madeleine’s voice followed him. “Did it occur to you that the porcupine might be totally harmless and that the reason he’s walking back and forth on the branch might be none of your business?”

CHAPTER 2

A half hour later the morning sun was well above the eastern ridge. Its rays slanting through the ice crystals in the dry, frigid air were creating random microscopic sparkles.

Largely oblivious to this phenomenon, Gurney was standing by the French doors in the breakfast nook of their farmhouse kitchen. He was gazing down over the low pasture toward the red barn, the point at which the narrow town road dead-ended into their fifty-acre property—once upon a time a functioning hill farm, a use long since abandoned in the collapse of the upstate dairy industry.

After retiring early from their careers in the city, he and Madeleine had moved to that pastoral part of the western Catskill Mountains because the countryside was breathtakingly beautiful despite its economic depression. Her enthusiasm for the place was obvious from the beginning. Her energetic, unpretentious character; her positive fascination with the natural world; and her visceral delight in simply being outdoors in any season—canoeing, berry-picking, or just wandering along old forest trails—suited her for country life. Adapting to their new environment had been for her an easy, happy process.

He, nearly three years later, was still working on it.

But that sometimes divisive issue was not what was preoccupying him at the moment. He was pondering the disconcerting phone conversation he’d just had with Jack Hardwick.

Hardwick had answered the phone quite pleasantly with none of his customary jibes. He’d sounded so friendly that Gurney had suspected it was a parody of cordiality to be replaced at any moment by some cynical remark. But that didn’t happen. Hardwick had responded to Gurney’s request for the loan of a couple of trail cams with eagerness—not only to provide them but to deliver them. And not only to deliver them, but to do so immediately.

As Gurney stood by the glass doors mulling over this uncharacteristic rush to be helpful, Madeleine came down from an upstairs room carrying two nylon duffel bags—one blue, one green. She set them down on the floor by his feet.

“Do you have a preference?”

He glanced at the bags and shook his head. “Whichever.”

“What’s the matter?”

He told her about the phone call.

Her eyes narrowed. “He’s coming . . . here? Now?”

“Apparently.”

“What’s his big hurry?”

“Good question. I assume we’ll find out when he arrives.”

On cue, from somewhere down the road below the barn, came the throaty rumble of a big V-8 engine. Half a minute later Hardwick’s classic muscle car, a red 1970 Pontiac GTO, was making its way up the snow-covered lane through the overgrown pasture.

“He’s got someone with him,” said Madeleine.

Gurney wasn’t fond of surprises. He went out past the mud room to the side door, opened it and watched while Hardwick parked the loud, angular GTO next to his own dusty, anonymous Outback.

Hardwick got out first, his thin-lipped grin exhibiting, as usual, more determination than warmth—the same message conveyed by his ice-blue eyes and aggressively colorless clothes: black jeans, black sweater, black windbreaker.

Gurney’s attention, however, was on the person emerging from the passenger side. His first impression was of a different kind of colorlessness—a drab anonymity. A large, plain woman, she was wearing a quilted winter coat and shapeless wool ski hat, perhaps in her early forties.

When she arrived at the door, Gurney offered her a pleasant smile and turned an inquisitive glance toward Hardwick—which seemed to make the man’s grin grow brighter.

“You’re asking yourself, ‘Where’s that camera equipment he was supposed to be bringing me?’ Am I right?”

Gurney waited, smiled patiently, said nothing.

“As your trusty guardian angel . . .” Hardwick inserted a dramatic pause before proceeding with relish, “I decided to bring you something of far greater value than a fucking trail cam. May we come in?”

Gurney led them into the kitchen end of the long open room that also included a dining area and, at the far end, a sitting area arranged around a fieldstone fireplace.

Madeleine’s fraught smile seemed to reflect Gurney’s history with his sometime colleague—a difficult man with whom he’d shared a series of near-fatal law enforcement experiences.

Hardwick’s grin widened. “Madeleine. You look fantastic.”

“Can I take your jackets?”

“Absolutely.” He helped the bulky woman beside him remove hers. He did this with a flourish, as if he were unveiling something grand. “Dave, Madeleine, may I introduce . . . Jane Hammond.”

Madeleine smiled and said hello. Gurney extended his hand, but the woman shook her head. “Very happy to meet you, but I won’t shake your hand, I’m full of germs.” She pulled off her knitted cap, revealing a shapeless, low-maintenance hairstyle.

Evidently sensing the absence of any recognition, Hardwick added, “Jane is the sister of Richard Hammond.”

Gurney’s expression suggested nothing but ongoing curiosity.

“Richard Hammond,” repeated Hardwick. “The Richard Hammond—the one in every major newscast for the past month.”

Madeleine showed a twinge of concern. “The hypnotist?”

Jane Hammond’s reaction was emphatic. “Not hypnotist—hypnotherapist. Any charlatan can call himself a hypnotist, dangle a pendulum, and pretend he’s doing something profound. My brother is a Harvard-trained psychologist who utilizes very sophisticated techniques.”

Madeleine nodded sympathetically, as though she were dealing with a touchy client at the mental health clinic where she worked. “But isn’t ‘hypnotist’ what they’re calling him in the news reports?”

“That’s not all they’re calling him. The so-called news programs today are nothing but trash! They don’t care how unfair they are, how full of lies—” She broke off in a brief fit of coughing. “Allergies,” she explained. “I seem to have a different one for every season.”

Hardwick spoke up. “Actually, could we sit down?”

Before Gurney could object, Madeleine offered them seats at the round pine table in the breakfast nook—where Hardwick, with a nod of encouragement from Jane Hammond, launched into the story of Richard Hammond’s bizarre situation.

CHAPTER 3

“You know about the Adirondack Great Camps, right? Thousand-acre compounds, giant lodges, plenty of room for guests and servants, built about a hundred years ago by the richer-than-God robber barons—Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, et cetera. One of the lower-profile fat cats who built a place up there was a guy named Dalton Gall, a nasty bastard who’d made a fortune in tin mining. There’s a peculiar legend involving his untimely death, which I’ll come back to.”

He paused, as if to give “untimely death” extra emphasis. “Some of the Great Camps, with their huge upkeep costs, started collapsing with the stock market crash. Some became museums celebrating the lives of the greedy scumbags who built them. Some got converted into educational centers where nature fanatics could study the ecology of the frilly-frond fern.”

This jab at outdoorsiness provoked a narrow-eyed glance from Madeleine, who was preparing a pot of coffee at the sink island.

Hardwick went on, “Some of the camps continued to be maintained by the descendants of the original owners, usually by turning them into conference centers or upscale inns. Ethan Gall, great-grandson of Dalton, embraced the fancy-inn concept and added a few extras for the bored and restless wealthy. Learn while you’re being pampered—that kind of horseshit. French-Vietnamese cooking secrets. Nepalese serenity secrets. Secrets are always in demand. And since even the most privileged have bad habits they’d rather not have, Ethan hired world-renowned psychologist Richard Hammond to provide unique hypnotic solutions. So the place wasn’t just any old thousand-dollar-a-day Adirondack inn. It was the one where you got to have a therapeutic chat with none other than Richard Hammond—a chat you could regale your friends with at your next dinner party.”

Jane Hammond had been anxiously squeezing her used tissue into a tighter and tighter ball. “I have to say something here. I don’t want Mr. Gurney to get the wrong impression of my brother. I can’t comment on Ethan Gall’s motives. But I can assure you that Richard’s motives were pure. His life is his work, and he takes it very seriously. Which is another reason why these accusations are so . . . so offensive!” She looked down with dismay at the crushed tissue in her hand.

Hardwick resumed his narration. “So. Whatever Ethan Gall’s motives might have been, he gave Dr. Hammond a generous two-year contract, which, among other perks, included the use of a private chalet on the property. All went well until one evening approximately two months ago when Dr. Hammond got a call from a detective in Palm Beach.”

“Florida,” added Jane.

“Right. A twenty-seven-year-old male by the name of Christopher Wenzel had committed suicide a few days earlier. Cut his wrists sitting in his million-dollar condo on the Intracoastal. No indication of anything requiring special police attention. However, after the suicide was reported in the local news, a minister showed up at Palm Beach PD with an interesting story. Wenzel had come to see him a couple of days before he offed himself, complaining he hadn’t been able to sleep right for a whole week. Whenever he’d doze off he’d have this terrible nightmare—same nightmare every time. Said it was making him want to die.”

Hardwick paused, as if to let the implications of this sink in.

Gurney felt he was missing something—beyond the question of why this conversation with Jack Hardwick and Jane Hammond was occurring at all. “This information about the suicide was passed along to Dr. Hammond in a phone call by a Palm Beach detective?”

“Right.”

“Why?”

“Because Wenzel told the minister that his nightmares had started after he’d been hypnotized by Dr. Richard Hammond to help him stop smoking. So the detective called Hammond, asked if he’d treated the deceased. Richard said that was confidential, HIPAA regulations, blah-blah-blah, but what was the problem? The detective explained the situation, asked if suicides or nightmares were ever side effects of hypnosis. Richard said he’d never heard of such a reaction. And that was pretty much the end of that . . . until a week later. That’s when he got another call—this one from a detective in Teaneck, New Jersey.”

Gurney said nothing, just waited.

Madeleine’s eyes widened.

Hardwick went on. “Another wrist-cutting suicide. Leo Balzac, age twenty-eight. When the Teaneck detective checked the deceased’s smartphone calendar, he saw that he’d had an appointment with a local therapist two days before he killed himself. So the detective paid a visit to the therapist, more dancing around the HIPAA bullshit, but eventually he found out Balzac had come to the therapist for a problem he’d been having with nightmares—ever since a certain Dr. Hammond had hypnotized him to help him stop smoking.”

Gurney was intrigued. “This second detective got in touch with Hammond to ask about the hypnosis session, the same as the first one did?”

“Right. And Hammond gave him the same answer.”

Jane looked up from the table. “It wasn’t exactly the same. In addition to insisting that his therapy sessions couldn’t cause nightmares, Richard told the second detective about the call he’d gotten from the first detective. It was clear to him that something strange was going on, and he wanted both detectives to have the whole picture. You see how important that is?”

When neither Gurney nor Hardwick responded, she explained. “If Richard hadn’t done that—if he hadn’t been as helpful as he was—the police in Florida and the police in New Jersey never would have connected the two suicides. It was Richard who innocently volunteered that information. Which proves he had nothing to hide.”

Gurney and Hardwick exchanged skeptical glances.

“But,” interjected Madeleine, “if I remember the news reports, there was more to the story, wasn’t there?”

“A shitload more,” said Hardwick. “The really god-awful mess was yet to come.”

Before Hardwick could proceed, Madeleine went to the sink island and brought back four mugs of coffee on a tray with spoons, milk, and sugar.

Jane took the mug nearest her and thanked Madeleine for it, then looked her over frankly, as if evaluating her slim, athletic figure—still elegantly sexy at forty-seven—concluding with a smile, “You’re so much younger than I’d been picturing on the drive here.”

“Younger?”

“Jack told me that Dave was retired from the police department. The word ‘retired’ conjured up the image of a gray-haired couple puttering in the garden. And you turn out to be . . . well . . . like this. You look about thirty-five, and your husband looks like Daniel Craig.”

Madeleine uttered a small laugh. “He may look a bit like Daniel Craig, but it’s quite a few years since I was anything close to thirty-five. You’re very kind.”

Gurney explained, “Most cops qualify for their pensions after twenty-five years on the job. So it’s a natural time to get out, you know . . . and . . . and move on to something else.” His words trailed off with a descending energy that revealed more about his general feeling of indecision than he’d intended.

“So,” said Hardwick, the short syllable functioning like the tap of a gavel to bring them back to the subject at hand. “After Teaneck PD got talking to Palm Beach PD, it was obvious the next step was to pull the New York State Police into the loop, since the common factor between the two suicides, Richard Hammond, resided on NYSP turf. Which is how this bizarre case ended up on the desk of Senior Investigator Gilbert Fenton.”

“A real son of a bitch,” said Jane.

Hardwick nodded his agreement.

“You know him?” asked Gurney.

“Yeah, I know him. As soon as the situation was dropped in Fenton’s in-box, he took a drive out to the Gall estate to interview Dr. Hammond, find out what he could about this hypnosis business, see if the two suicides were caused by anything that would be of interest to law enforcement.”

Hardwick leaned forward, his muscular forearms resting on the table. “Fenton’s an organization guy, very oriented to hierarchy. So, before talking to Hammond, he wanted to talk to the man in charge—namely, Ethan Gall. But nobody knew where Ethan was. Nobody had seen him for two days. You get where this is going, right?”

Gurney shrugged. “Tell me anyway.”

“Four days after Fenton’s visit, Ethan’s body was found in one of the estate’s cabins, about half a mile from the main house. This particular cabin was not very secure. Some animals had gotten in . . .”

Hardwick paused, letting the visual possibilities register. “The ID process took some time. Dental records, then DNA. Enough of the body was intact to determine that at least one wrist had been cut. There was also a knife present with his blood and fingerprints on it.”

“How do you know this stuff?”

“I know some people who know some people.”

“How did BCI treat the death?”

“The ME’s report was inconclusive—apart from noting that the evidence was consistent with a suicide. A lot of the body had been devoured or dragged off. But the wrist cutting—and the common factor of contact with Richard Hammond—convinced Gil Fenton that this was the third in a series of suspicious suicides.”

“You mean ‘suspicious’ as in possible homicides?”

Hardwick looked like he had acid reflux. “Because of their similarities, the three suicides came to be regarded as ‘suspicious’ in the legally uncharted sense of being brought about by forces other than the independent decisions of self-destructive individuals.”

Gurney frowned. “Meaning what?”

“In Fenton’s public statements, he keeps suggesting that the suicides were not only influenced by Richard Hammond, but may have been orchestrated by him—in effect, that he may have forced these people to kill themselves.”

“Forced them?” Gurney cocked his head incredulously. “How? Through hypnotic suggestion?”

“Hypnotic suggestion . . . and nightmares.”

“Are you serious? Hammond is supposed to have given these people nightmares that made them kill themselves?”

“That’s Fenton’s theory, which he’s pushing every time he talks to the press.” Hardwick paused, eyeing Gurney speculatively. “What do you think of that?”

“I think it’s ridiculous.”

Jane Hammond slapped her hand on the table. “Thank you for saying that! That’s what I’ve been saying myself from the beginning—that it’s ridiculous to even think that Richard would do something like that.”

Gurney asked, “Was Ethan Gall ever hypnotized by your brother?”

“Yes. In fact, Richard helped him break a lifelong smoking habit.”

“And their session was when?”

“Oh, maybe three . . . well, at least two months ago.”

“Do you know if Ethan ever complained about nightmares?”

Jane blinked nervously. “There’s some confusion about that. Fenton has a handwritten document in which Ethan supposedly described a nightmare he’d been having. But Ethan never said a word about any nightmare to Richard.”

“How about the nightmares the other individuals had?” asked Gurney. “Does anyone know the content of those?”

Hardwick shook his head. “The other police departments are keeping whatever details they have under wraps. Which brings me to the final big piece of the puzzle. After a BCI press relations officer disclosed the details surrounding Gall’s death, a detective from Floral Park down on Long Island got in touch with BCI to let them know he had a two-week-old suicide on his hands with the same history—a hypnotherapy session with Dr. Hammond followed by bad dreams and sliced wrists. He hadn’t bothered to contact Hammond, apparently because he didn’t give the hypnosis aspect of the situation much weight. Seems odd he’d overlook that, but odd shit happens all the time. Anyway, his dead guy was a twenty-six-year-old by the name of Steven Pardosa. That’s when Fenton went all out with his hypnosis-nightmare-suicide narrative—big press briefing, lots of nasty innuendo, practically accusing Hammond of murder, sending the media hyenas into a feeding frenzy.”

“Just a second. How did the Long Island detective know about Pardosa’s contact with Hammond, or about his bad dreams?”

“Pardosa told his chiropractor; and when the chiropractor saw Pardosa’s obit in Newsday, he called the cops.”

“So, we’ve got three males in their mid twenties, plus Ethan Gall. How old was he?”

Hardwick looked at Jane.

She shrugged. “Early to mid thirties? His younger brother, Peyton, is in his late twenties, and there was five years between them.”

There was something sour about the way she’d said the brother’s name that caught Gurney’s attention. He was about to ask about it, but Hardwick started speaking first.

“After the Pardosa thing surfaced, everything clicked into place in Fenton’s head. He had four dead people—people he started referring to as ‘victims’—who’d all suffered from bad dreams after being treated by Richard Hammond—a doctor known for his experiments in hypnosis. Fenton made Hammond sound like some kind of mad scientist.”

“Speaking of which,” said Jane, “I have printouts of the horrible news stories that were published after his outrageous press conferences.” She stood up and started toward the door. “They’re in the car.”

Gurney stopped her with a question he felt was overdue. “What does Richard’s lawyer have to say about all this?”

“Richard doesn’t have a lawyer.”

“Even with everything that’s going on?”

“That’s right.” She fell silent for several seconds. “It’s a long story. I’m not sure I know how to tell it.” She shook her head. “I’ll get the file.”

“I’ll join you,” said Madeleine. “I need some air.” As she stood up to follow Jane, she gave Gurney a look in which he read a clear message:

This is your chance to find out from Hardwick what on earth is going on here.

CHAPTER 4

The side door closed with a solid thump.

Hardwick looked across the table at Gurney. His pale Malamute eyes, which usually exuded little warmth, showed signs of amusement. “So what do you think, Sherlock? The case does raise a few interesting questions, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’ve got about ten of them on my mind right now.”

“For instance?”

“Why the hell doesn’t Hammond have a lawyer?”

“He insists the reason he doesn’t want a lawyer is because he doesn’t need a lawyer. He’s so totally innocent that the wild accusations against him will collapse under the weight of their own absurdity.”

“That’s what he told you?”

“That’s what he told the world in his one and only press release. There’s a copy in Jane’s media file.”

“What’s your gut feeling about him?”

“Arrogant, brittle, secretive—with an odd vibe that makes me want to kick him in the balls. He also strikes me as a frightened man trying to sound cool. But I have no fucking idea why he doesn’t want a lawyer.”

“How did you get connected with his sister?”

“She tried to hire a lawyer to represent Richard’s interests without him knowing about it. The law firm turned her down, because that kind of arrangement falls somewhere between unethical and impossible. But they did suggest that she might hire a private investigator to look into the case, strictly on her behalf, and she could then do as she saw fit with whatever information was uncovered. Naturally, they recommended me.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Obviously because I have a hard-earned reputation for upsetting law enforcement’s apple cart, securing justice for the falsely accused, and pissing on authority in general.” Hardwick’s grin flashed for a split second like the ice crystals in the sunlight.

“Why did you bring this woman—?”

Hardwick broke in. “Why did I bring the desperate Jane Hammond to you? A woman who carries a lifetime of worry in her eyes? A woman whose little brother has always been the rose and the thorn in her life, and who is now in a shitstorm of trouble? A woman who I suspect has no sex life, no peace, no interests of her own? Is that what you were about to ask me?”

“Yes.”

He paused, sucked thoughtfully at his teeth before speaking. “There’s something particularly odd about this case, and something disturbingly off-center about the good doctor himself. The whole situation seems . . . foggy . . . to me. Almost eerie. And you’re better at eerie than I am. So I’d like you to sniff around a bit, get the lay of the land, talk to this guy, find out what you can—especially about that guilty vibe he exudes like last night’s garlic—and let me know what you think. Look, nine times out of ten I know what I’m looking at. But this is that one out of ten that I can’t figure.”

“You’re telling me that this is a matter of investigative competence? That you want to pass the baton along to a man with sharper skills than yourself? What kind of bullshit is that?”

“It’s the truth. Honest. But . . . to be completely honest . . . it’s not the only reason.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Do you believe in divine providence?”

“Do I believe in what?”

“Serendipity.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“A grand coincidence. At the very moment that Jane Hammond was sitting in my modest home office describing her brother’s desperate situation, describing her desperate need for help, you called.”

Gurney said nothing.

“So there you are—David Gurney, detective first grade, NYPD Homicide, most decorated officer in the history of the department—planning to surveil a porcupine. A brain fit to confront the greatest criminal minds on earth—focused on a quill ball in a tree. Now tell me, if that isn’t fucked up, what is?”

Gurney said nothing.

“So here we are, with a major opportunity that benefits everyone. I get your help in piercing the fog wrapped around this case. Jane gets the investigatory assistance she so badly needs to help her brother. You get to apply your God-given talent to a worthy challenge.”

Gurney found the logic of this appeal almost convincing.

The problem was, he knew Hardwick too well.

“Very smooth sales presentation, Jack. I’m almost ready to test-drive the car. There’s just one thing missing.”

“Missing?”

“The truth. Give me the real reason, and I’ll tell you whether I’m interested.”

After a few seconds of perfect stillness, Hardwick let out a bark of a laugh.

“Just testing you, Davey. Making sure you still have what it takes. Don’t get me wrong. Everything I said was true. But there is one other factor in the equation.” He leaned forward and extended his hands, palms up, in a gesture of openness. “Here’s the problem. I have a history with Gil Fenton. Seven years ago he did me a favor. Big favor, involving an error on my part. Serious error.” Hardwick paused, grimacing. “So Gil has certain facts at his disposal. Under normal circumstances, this would not be a source of great concern. There are reasons he would want to keep these facts to himself. However, if we were to have a head-on collision . . . if he were to see me leading an attack on his handling of the Hammond case . . .”

Gurney gave him a cool, speculative smile. “You want to work quietly in the background while I take your place in the head-on collision?”

“He couldn’t damage you the way he could damage me.”

“You could just drop the case and refer the lady to another private investigator.”

“Sure,” said Hardwick, nodding in an unconvincing imitation of agreement. “I could do that. Maybe I should do that. It would probably be the smartest option. Definitely the safest.”

He hesitated. “Of course, if we send Jane to someone else, they might fuck up the assignment. And if they fuck up the assignment, we might never find out why all those former clients of Richard Hammond killed themselves.”

CHAPTER 5

Gurney heard the side door being opened, followed by the voices of Madeleine and Jane as they hung up their jackets in the mud room.

When the two women entered the kitchen, Madeleine was smiling and shaking ice crystals out of her hair, and Jane was carrying a bulging manila envelope. She brought it to the table and laid it in front of Gurney.

“This is pretty comprehensive. It should give you an idea of what we’re up against. I made copies of everything I could find on the Internet. Local coverage of the four suicides. Obituaries. Talk-show transcripts. Interviews with experts in the field of hypnosis.”

“Has Richard gotten any support from the academic community?”

“That’s a laugh! The so-called ‘academic community’ is teeming with envious little creeps who resent Richard’s success and are probably delighted to see him being attacked.”

Gurney eyed the bulging envelope. “Are Gil Fenton’s press briefings in there?”

“Every misleading word.”

“Did you pull all this together at your brother’s request?”

“Not exactly. He’s . . . confident that the problem will just go away.”

“And you’re not?”

“No . . . yes . . . I mean, yes, of course I know it will eventually be resolved. It has to be. I have faith. But you know the old saying, ‘God will move the mountain, but you have to bring a shovel.’ That’s what I’m doing.”

Gurney smiled. “Apparently Richard believes that God will move the mountain, so long as Jane brings the shovel.”

There was flash of anger in her eyes. “That’s not fair. You don’t know him.”

“So help me understand. Why does he refuse to get a lawyer? Why is it up to you to protect him?”

She gave Gurney a cold stare, then turned away and looked out the window.

“Richard is like no one else on earth. I know people say things like that all the time about people they love, but Richard is truly unique. He always was. I don’t mean he’s perfect. He’s not. But he has a gift.”

There was a well-worn reverence in this statement that made it sound as if she’d been making it all her life—as if everything depended on it.

As he studied her profile, the anxious wrinkles radiating from the corner of her eye, the grim set of her mouth, he realized that at the center of this woman’s psyche was the belief that things would have to turn out well for her brother because the opposite would be unbearable.

Madeleine asked softly, “Richard’s gift—is it for his work as a psychotherapist?”

“Yes. He’s . . . amazing. Which makes this awful attack on him so much worse. He does things no other therapist can do.”

Madeleine shot a glance at Gurney, a suggestion that he pick up the thread.

“Can you give me an example?”

“Richard has an extraordinary power to change people’s behavior virtually overnight. He has an intense sense of empathy. It’s a connection that enables him to motivate his patients at the deepest level. He’s often able in a single session to free a patient from some habit or addiction he’s been struggling with for years. Richard realigns the way people see things. It sounds like magic, but it’s totally real.”

It occurred to Gurney that if her perception of her brother’s talents was anywhere near accurate, the implications could be troubling. If Richard Hammond could so easily persuade people to do things they’d previously been unable or unwilling to do . . .

Perhaps sensing his concern, Jane reiterated her point. “Richard’s talent is totally for the benefit of others. He could never use his gift to harm anyone. Never!”

Gurney changed the subject back to one of his unanswered questions. “Jane, I’m still not clear why the effort to extricate Richard from this situation is all up to you. I get the impression he’s hardly responding to the problem at all. Am I missing something?”

Her reaction was a pained look. She turned back toward the window, shaking her head slowly.

“I hate talking about this,” she said, unfolding a tissue. “It’s hard for ordinary people to understand . . . because of Richard’s uniqueness.” She blew her nose several times, then dabbed at it gingerly. “He has periods of tremendous psychic energy and insight . . . and periods of complete exhaustion. In those periods of achievement, when he does all his best work, he naturally needs someone who can deal with the practical details he doesn’t have time for. And when he slows down, when he has to rest . . . well, then he needs someone to . . . to deal with whatever he doesn’t have the energy for.”

It was beginning to sound to Gurney that Jane Hammond was mired in an unhealthy, enabling relationship with a manic-depressive egomaniac.

Before he could say anything, Madeleine intervened with the sort of understanding smile he imagined was one of her standard tools at the mental health center. “So, you sort of pitch right in and take care of whatever needs to be taken care of?”

“Exactly,” said Jane, turning toward her with the eagerness of someone who felt she was finally being understood. “Richard is a genius. That’s the most important thing. Naturally, there are things he just can’t . . . shouldn’t have to . . . deal with.”

Madeleine nodded. “And now that he’s in some trouble, and also in one of his . . . his low-energy periods . . . it’s up to you to do whatever has to be done to deal with the problem.”

“Yes! Of course! Because it’s so unfair—so unfair that Richard, of all people, is being subjected to this horror!” She looked with a pleading expression from Madeleine to Hardwick to Gurney. “Don’t you see? Something has to be done! That’s why I’m here. I need your help!”

Gurney said nothing.

Her eyes full of anxiety, she glanced over at Hardwick, then back at Gurney. “Jack told me all about you. About how you solved more homicide cases than anyone else in New York City. And that case where you saved a woman who’d been framed for a murder she didn’t commit. You’re the perfect person to help Richard!”

“I’m still not understanding something here. You say your brother won’t agree to your hiring—”

He was interrupted by the chirpy little melody of a cell phone ringing.

Jane headed directly out to the mud room, speaking as she went. “That’s mine. I left it in my jacket pocket.” The ring stopped before she was halfway through the hall.

When she returned she was holding her phone in her hand and frowning at the screen.

“Lost the signal?” asked Madeleine.

“I think so.”

“The service is tricky around here. You have to pick your spots pretty carefully.”

Jane nodded, looking worried, and laid the phone on the sideboard under the window. She watched it expectantly for a few moments before turning her attention back to Gurney. “Sorry. You were saying . . .?”

“I was saying that I’m confused. Richard won’t agree to your hiring a lawyer, but hiring a private investigator would be okay?”

“No, it won’t be okay at all. He’ll hate the idea. But it needs to be done, and he can’t stop me from doing it. I can’t legally hire a lawyer to represent him, but I can hire someone to look into the case for me.”

“I’m still confused. It doesn’t sound to me like he’s simply too exhausted or depressed to deal with this situation. His active objection to receiving outside help gives me the feeling there’s something more going on here.”

Jane came over to the round pine breakfast table and sat down with Madeleine, Hardwick, and Gurney.

“I don’t know if I should be telling you this story. But I don’t know what else to do.” She looked down, addressing herself to her hands folded tightly in her lap.

“Early in his career, which wasn’t all that long ago, Richard published a case history that got a lot of attention. It was about a man who was tortured by exaggerated fears. These fears would sometimes dominate him completely, even though in his clearer moments he understood that these horrible things had no factual basis.” She paused, biting her lip and glancing nervously around the table before going on.

“One day the man discovered a problem with his car. He’d left it in a parking lot at JFK for a three-day business trip, and when he returned he discovered that he couldn’t open the trunk because the key wouldn’t turn in the lock. He thought maybe someone had tried to break into the trunk but only succeeded in breaking the lock. So he put his suitcase in the backseat and drove home. But later that night another idea entered his mind—a very peculiar idea, that someone might have hidden a dead body in his trunk. He knew this wasn’t a very likely scenario—that a murderer would drive his victim’s corpse to an airport parking lot, break into a stranger’s trunk, and transfer the corpse from his own trunk to another. That would be an absurd way to get rid of a dead body. But that didn’t stop the man from dwelling on it, obsessing about it. The more he thought about it, the more credible it became in his own mind. First of all, there was the JFK airport location—an area in which Mafia-connected bodies had actually been found in the past. And he remembered news stories about mob killings in which the victims were found in abandoned cars.”

“Not quite the same thing, is it?” said Hardwick.

“Not at all. But wait—there’s more. He couldn’t open the trunk himself without destroying it with a crowbar, but he was afraid to have a locksmith open it for him. He was afraid to have anyone else see what might be in the trunk. This fixation would come and go, like the seasons of the year. When the time came two years later to trade in the car, not only was the fixation still with him, he was completely paralyzed by it. He’d think, what if the car dealer or the new owner opens the trunk and finds a dead body or something equally horrible?”

She fell silent, took a slow deep breath, and sat motionless, staring down at her clasped hands.

After a moment Hardwick asked, “So how the hell does this story end?”

“One day the man backed into someone’s bumper in a parking lot, and the trunk popped open. Of course, there was nothing in it. He traded the car in, got a new one. That was that. Until the next terror grabbed hold of him.”

Hardwick shifted impatiently in his chair. “The point of this story is . . . what?”

“The point is that the man in the case history that Richard published, the man with the periodic paralyzing fears, was Richard himself.”

At first no one reacted.

This wasn’t, at least in Gurney’s case, because of any shock at the revelation. In fact, he’d suspected that’s where her narrative was heading from the start.

Hardwick frowned. “So what you’re telling us is that your brother is half psychological genius, half nutcase?”

She glared at him. “What I’m telling you is that he has profound ups and downs. The great irony is that this is a man who can help virtually anyone who comes to him, but when it comes to his own demons he’s helpless. I believe that’s why I’ve been put on this planet—to take care of a man who can’t take care of himself, so he can take care of everyone else.”

Gurney couldn’t help wondering in exactly what ways Hammond had taken care of the four patients who were now dead. But there was another issue he wanted to address first.

“Does he have that same fear now—that if more people start investigating the deaths of his patients, they may somehow find evidence that implicates him?”

“I think that’s it exactly. But you have to understand that his fear is based on nothing. It’s just another imaginary body in the trunk.”

“Except now we have four bodies,” said Hardwick. “And these ones are real.”

“What I meant was—”

She was interrupted by her phone chirping on the sideboard where she’d left it. She hurried over to it, looked at the ID screen, then put the phone to her ear. “I’m here,” she said. “What? . . . Wait, your voice is breaking up. . . . Who’s doing what? . . . I’m losing half of what you’re saying. . . . Just a second.” She turned toward Madeleine. “It’s Richard. Where can I get the best reception?”

“Come over here.” Madeleine got up and pointed through the French doors. “Out there, just beyond the patio, between the birdbath and the apple tree.”

Madeleine opened one of the doors for her, and Jane walked quickly out over the snow-covered ground, the phone at her ear, seemingly oblivious to the cold. Madeleine closed the door with a little shiver, went to the mud room, and a minute later was out by the apple tree handing Jane her jacket.

Hardwick flashed a fierce grin. “Love that wild trunk bit. So what do you think, Sherlock? Is the doctor a manic-depressive saint with paranoid delusions? Or is everything we just heard a total crock of shit?”

CHAPTER 6

Jane was still out under the apple tree, engaged in a visibly stressful phone conversation, when Madeleine rejoined the two men at the table.

Hardwick eyed her concerned expression. “The hell’s going on out there?”

“I’m not sure. I may have misheard what Jane was saying, but I got the impression her brother was telling her that he’s being followed.”

Gurney’s face reflected his discomfort. He spoke as much to himself as to Madeleine and Hardwick. “And his solution to all this is not to hire a lawyer or a private security firm, but just dump it all on his big sister?”

The sky was clouding over. Gusts of wind were pressing Jane’s loose-fitting pants against her legs, but she showed no awareness of the cold.

He turned to Hardwick. “What’s her real agenda here?”

“Bottom line? She wants you to come to Wolf Lake and find out why those people committed suicide after visiting the lodge. Naturally, she wants you to discover a reason that has nothing to do with the fact that all four of them were hypnotized by her brother.”

Madeleine, from whom Gurney expected an immediate objection to this proposed Adirondack diversion from their Vermont getaway, said nothing. She was staring, not out at Jane Hammond in the field, but into her own thoughts, with a troubled look in her eyes. It was a look he didn’t immediately recognize. A look that in some subtle way discouraged questioning.

“Problem is, Jack, day after tomorrow Maddie and I are on our way up to northern Vermont. The Tall Pines Inn. It’s not something we’d want to cancel or postpone at this point.”

“Wouldn’t dream of asking you to cancel anything vital to the health and happiness of your marriage.” Hardwick winked at Madeleine, who was still in a world of her own. He was speaking in that jokey way of his that drove Gurney up a wall—it created such a sharp echo of the way his own father viewed everything after a few drinks. “I’m sure there’s another solution, ace. Think positively and the path will reveal itself.”

Gurney was about to tell him to stuff the supercilious tone when he heard the side door open. Jane came through the hallway into the kitchen, still wearing her jacket, her hair windblown. Her obvious distress got Madeleine’s attention.

“Jane? Is your brother all right?”

“He’s talking about people spying on him, hacking into his computer. I think the police are trying to drive him crazy, make him have a mental breakdown.”

Seemingly energized by her brother’s problems, she struck Gurney as the classic codependent. He knew that the irony of that sort of relationship is that the “fixer” would be made redundant by any lasting fix. Only by maintaining the long-term weakness of her dependent can she remain relevant. He wondered how closely Jane Hammond fit the model. “Were you getting the sense that these observations of his were . . . realistic?”

“Realistic?”

“You told us your brother suffers from exaggerated fears.”

“That’s different. That’s about things he sometimes imagines. This is about things he’s actually seeing. He isn’t psychotic, for God’s sake! He doesn’t see things that aren’t there!”

“Of course not,” Madeleine intervened. “David is just curious about the meaning Richard is giving to what he’s seeing.”

Jane looked at Gurney. “The meaning?”

“A car behind you on the road might be following you,” he explained. “On the other hand, it might just be behind you on the road. I’m sure your brother is seeing what he’s seeing, I’m just wondering about his interpretation of it.”

“I can’t answer your question. I don’t know enough about what’s happening. But that’s the whole point, don’t you see? That’s why I need you. You and Jack. I have no idea why those four people committed suicide. I have no idea what the facts are. I just know they’re not what the police say they are. But getting to the truth—that’s what you’re so good at.”

Gurney stole a glance at Madeleine to see how she was reacting to this plea for his involvement, but her expression revealed nothing.

Jane went on. “If you came up to Wolf Lake and met with Richard and asked him the right questions, I bet you could figure out what’s real and what isn’t. That’s what good detectives do, right? And according to Jack, you’re the best. Will you do it?”

He sat back in his chair and studied her expression, the hope enlivening her eyes. He answered with a question of his own: “Who actually runs the lodge?”

“That would be Austen Steckle, the general manager. He’s in charge of everything up there, especially since Ethan’s death, but even before that. Ethan relied on him totally.” She paused. “Austen’s kind of a tough character, but I have to say he’s been very fair to Richard. And he’s gone out of his way to protect him from the media vultures. The minute Fenton went public with his crazy accusations, reporters were besieging the place. Austen brought in private security for the first week, had reporters arrested for trespassing and harassment. Word got around, and they stopped trying to sneak onto the estate.”

“You mentioned that Ethan has a surviving brother? Is he active in the business?”

“Peyton? He’s on the property, but that’s about it. He’s no use to anyone.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Who knows? Even the best family can produce a bad seed.”

Gurney nodded his vague agreement. “You mentioned Peyton is in his late twenties?”

“Twenty-eight or twenty-nine, I think. Around the same age as Austen. But in terms of energy, focus, and smarts, they’re from different planets.”

“Any other siblings?”

“None surviving. Ethan and Peyton were originally the oldest and youngest of five children. The three middle ones were killed along with their father when his private plane went down in a thunderstorm. Their mother had a breakdown that led to her suicide two years later. That happened when Ethan was twenty-one and Peyton was in his mid teens. The tragedy just magnified the differences between them. It didn’t help that Ethan was appointed Peyton’s legal guardian.”

“When you mentioned ‘bad seed’ . . .?”

“Peyton has been a source of endless problems. As a kid it was stealing, lying, bullying. Then it became an endless succession of crazy girlfriends—hookers, to be brutally honest—disgusting behavior, gambling, drugs, you name it.”

“He lives at Wolf Lake?”

“Unfortunately.”

Gurney glanced at Hardwick for his reaction, but the man was flipping through screens on his smartphone.

Jane looked at Gurney pleadingly. “Will you at least come and talk to Richard, maybe have a look around?”

“If he’s opposed to getting outside help, won’t he refuse to see me?”

“Probably, if we ask in advance. But if you’ve already made the trip, he’ll feel compelled to see you.”

“You sound sure of that.”

“It’s part of who he is. When he had his practice in Mill Valley, if someone showed up at his office without an appointment, he could never send them away, no matter how busy he was. If someone was there, he had to meet with them. Let me add, in case you’re getting the wrong idea—it had nothing to do with money, with trying to squeeze in another paying customer. Richard never cared about money, only about people.”

Gurney thought it odd that a man with no interest in money would have chosen to establish his practice in Mill Valley, California, one of the wealthiest communities in America.

Perhaps sensing his skepticism, Jane continued. “Large organizations have approached Richard in the past with lucrative offers—very lucrative offers—if he would work for them exclusively. But he always turned them down.”

“Why?”

“Because Richard has always been devoted to transparency. He would insist on knowing everything about any organization that would want an exclusive right to his research. Not all institutions in the field of psychological research are as independent as they claim to be. No amount of money on earth could persuade Richard to work for any entity whose goals and backing were not 100 percent visible and verifiable. That’s the kind of man he is.” She leaned toward Gurney. “You will help . . . won’t you?”

“We have a timing problem. A short trip we’ve been planning for quite a while.”

She looked wounded. “When?”

“The day after tomorrow. So there’s really nothing I can—”

“How long?”

“How long will we be away? Four or five days. Perhaps sometime after that—”

“But things are happening so fast. Isn’t there any way—?”

“Yes, matter of fact, there is!” interjected Hardwick triumphantly, holding up his phone with the screen turned outward so everyone could see the travel map it displayed. “The purple route line goes from your house all the way to Tall Pines Inn in northeastern Vermont. Between those two points are approximately two hundred miles of Adirondack mountains. I’ve found two ways of going around those mountains and two ways of going through them. One of those ways passes within twenty miles of the Gall Wilderness Preserve. All you have to do is start your vacation a day sooner than you planned and spend the first night at the super-exclusive Wolf Lake Lodge.”

Jane looked from Gurney to Madeleine, her hands clasped like a praying child’s. “You could do that, right? You could stop off there on your way to Vermont, couldn’t you?”

Gurney didn’t know how to respond without knowing what Madeleine was thinking.

His hesitation prompted Jane to address her directly. “You’ll have a beautiful room, and it won’t cost you anything.”

Madeleine’s eyes were still on the map displayed on Hardwick’s phone screen.

After a moment, to Gurney’s surprise, she nodded.

“We can do that.”

CHAPTER 7

After Jane Hammond agreed to meet them the following afternoon at the lodge, she and Hardwick departed.

Madeleine headed for the hallway that led to the bedroom, announcing that she was going to take a shower.

Gurney sensed that she wanted to avoid, at least for the moment, any further discussion of Wolf Lake. He didn’t know what to make of that, but he’d learned over the years that pursuing a subject Madeleine wasn’t ready to talk about led nowhere. Instead, he decided to take a look into the manila envelope Jane Hammond had left for him.

He brought it into the den and sat down at his desk.

In the envelope were two folders, each bearing a handwritten notation: The notation on the top folder said First Reports on the Four Deaths.

Gurney opened it and found the original news items that had appeared on the websites of various local publications. It was odd reading reports written prior to the discovery of all the facts, but he wanted to see how the incidents were initially perceived.

From the Palm Beach Post, October 2:

SUICIDE SUSPECTED IN DEATH OF PALM BEACH MAN.

The body of Christopher Wenzel, age 26, was discovered Monday morning in his condominium overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway. A preliminary autopsy report listed the cause of death as possible suicide, with a fatal loss of blood resulting from deep arterial wounds to the wrists. The body was found by an independent cleaning contractor with access to Mr. Wenzel’s apartment.

Neighbors said that Mr. Wenzel lived alone but had frequent visitors and noisy parties. No information was available on the deceased’s family or employment connections. Building management declined comment.

From the Bergen Record, October 10:

TEANECK MAN FOUND DEAD IN HIS CAR.

The body of Leo Balzac, age 27, manager of the Smokers Happiness tobacco shop on Queen Anne Road, was discovered by a neighbor in the parking garage of their apartment complex on DeGraw Avenue. According to police, the deceased was found in the driver’s seat of his car. Both wrists had been cut. A knife which appeared to have been used to inflict the wounds was found on the seat next to the body. A police spokesman said that suicide was consistent with the known facts but postponed further comment pending a full autopsy and toxicology report.

A next-door neighbor described Mr. Balzac as “An energetic young man who always seemed to be in a hurry—not the kind of guy you’d ever figure to kill himself.”

From Newsday, October 26:

FLORAL PARK MAN DEAD, GIRLFRIEND MISSING.

The body of Steven Pardosa was found this past Wednesday in the apartment he occupied in the basement of his parents’ home in Floral Park. The discovery was made by Arnold Pardosa, Steven’s father, who entered the apartment with a spare key after repeated calls to Steven’s cell phone failed to get any response.

A police spokesman characterized the death as a possible suicide, saying only that there were visible wounds to the deceased’s wrists and a knife had been found at the scene. The deceased’s parents disagreed with the suicide suggestion, insisting that such a possibility was “some kind of cover-up.”

Pardosa was 25 years old and had been self-employed for the past year in a landscape maintenance business. Law enforcement officials expressed interest in speaking with the deceased’s girlfriend, Angela Castro, who had recently been living with him but whose current whereabouts are unknown. Ms. Castro has not appeared for the past two days at the salon where she is employed as a hair stylist. The salon manager, Eric, who declined to give his last name, said that no calls had been received from Ms. Castro to explain her absence.”

Before going on to the articles covering the death of Ethan Gall, Gurney jotted down a few facts that caught his attention.

As he’d already mentioned to Hardwick, the similarity of ages was noteworthy. It could, for example, be the basis for some school-related or other social contact.

And then there was all that wrist cutting. Despite its high profile in fiction, and the sky-high number of self-inflicted cutting incidents propelling young people into ERs each year, successful suicides were rarely accomplished that way. Men had a strong preference for shooting or hanging themselves. If just one of those guys had decided to kill himself by cutting his wrists, that would be unusual enough. All of them making that same decision was peculiar in the extreme.

And then there was the matter of economics. It was possible that Christopher Wenzel, the guy with the Palm Beach condo, could afford a trip to a thousand-dollar-a-day mountain resort to get help with his smoking problem. But the manager of a small cigarette discount store? And a lawn-maintenance guy living in his father’s basement? On the face of it, they did not seem like prime candidates for top-shelf therapy at Wolf Lake Lodge.

And finally, there was the little matter of Steven Pardosa’s missing girlfriend. That could mean nothing. Or it could mean everything. In Gurney’s experience, there usually were relevant reasons for people going missing.

After making a few notes, he picked up the most detailed article on Ethan Gall.

From the Albany Times Union, November 3:

HEIR TO THE GALL FORTUNE

FOUND DEAD IN MOUNTAIN CABIN.

A body believed to be that of Ethan Gall has been discovered in an isolated cabin at the Wolf Lake Lodge resort, located within the Gall family’s 6,000-acre wilderness preserve, one of the largest privately owned tracts of land in the Adirondacks.

Pending a final autopsy report, police would say only that the condition of the body made an initial assessment difficult and that suicide could not be ruled out.

The Wolf Lake compound includes the main guest lodge—which dates back to the property’s origins as a classic Adirondack Great Camp—plus three lakeside chalets and several smaller cabins in the surrounding forest, as well as the Gall family’s private residence. These structures were built in the early 1900s by tin-mining baron Dalton Gall, who suffered an unusual death. After having a vivid premonition that he would be attacked by wolves, he was killed by wolves on the lodge property.

Heir to the substantial fortune created by his great-grandfather, Ethan Gall was the founder, president, and chief benefactor of the Gall New Life Foundation—a nonprofit organization dedicated to the education and reform of prisoners for reentry into community life.

The deceased was 34 years old and is survived by his brother Peyton. Lodge manager and family spokesperson Austen Steckle issued the following statement: “This sudden tragedy has created a sense of shock and disbelief here at Wolf Lake. We will have no further comment until we receive an official report from the medical examiner’s office.”

There were also printouts of similar but shorter articles from the Burlington Free Press, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

Gurney picked up the phone from his desk and entered Hardwick’s number. The man answered immediately. “What’s up, Davey?”

“Couple of things. Austen Steckle was described in a news article as the ‘family spokesperson.’ How many surviving members of the Gall family are there, besides Peyton?”

“Zero.”

“The entire family consists of Peyton?”

“As far as Jane knows. I asked her about that.”

“Okay. Another question. What’s the Gall New Life Foundation all about?”

“Seems legit. Puts parolees through reentry training, education, extensive psych counseling. Actually seems to reduce recidivism. Ethan started it, ran it, put a lot of his own bucks in it.”

Gurney made a note to dig deeper into that. “You mentioned this morning there was something weird about Dalton Gall’s death, and I saw the same thing in one of the newspaper articles. What’s that all about?”

“Who the fuck knows? The story was passed along for a lot of years, maybe got enhanced along the way. Supposedly the old bastard had a dream about getting chewed up and spit out by a pack of wolves, and a few days later that’s pretty much what happened to him. Could be a load of crap.”

“Kind of an interesting coincidence that our four recently deceased folks also had bad dreams before they ended up dead.”

“I agree. But where do you go with that?”

Gurney ignored the question, asked one of his own. “Strike you as odd that a guy who mows lawns for a living would—”

Hardwick finished the thought. “Spring for a grand-a-day stay at an old-fashioned lodge? Beyond odd.”

“And what do you make of all that wrist cutting?”

Hardwick responded with a loud bark of a laugh. “I have no goddamn idea what to make of it. See, Davey, all them unanswered questions are precisely why we need your superior intellect.”

GURNEY HUNG UP THE PHONE AND OPENED THE SECOND FOLDER Jane had left with him. This one was labeled Police Press Briefings, Hammond Statement, General Media Coverage.

The first item was a two-page printout from a media website. Across the top Jane had written, “Sgt. Plant, Bureau of Criminal Investigation, briefing to reporters, November 8.” It consisted of the officer’s introductory statement followed by a QA with unidentified reporters.

Gurney decided to skip that one for the moment and go on to the transcript of the next press briefing.

This briefing was several pages longer than the first. There was, however, a link to the video—an option Gurney preferred. The facial expressions and tones of voice captured on video were a lot more revealing than words on paper. He opened his laptop and entered the link.

As he was waiting for the video to appear, Madeleine came into the den, wearing a bathrobe, her hair wet from her shower.

“Have you decided which pair you want to bring?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Your snowshoes.”

He looked over toward the place by the door where he remembered her leaning them that morning—the rawhide-and-wood ones and the plastic ones with the spikes on the bottom. “I guess the spiked ones?”

Her surface smile seemed to be concealing some less-cheerful preoccupation.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

Her smile broadened unconvincingly. “I was thinking maybe we could get a light for the birds.”

“A what?”

“You know, for the henhouse. It gets dark so early this time of year.”

“That’s what you were thinking about?”

“I just think it would be nice for them.”

He knew something else was on her mind, and patience would be the best approach. “It’s just a matter of running an electrical line out there, installing a fixture. We can get an electrician to do it, or I can do it myself.”

“It will be nice for them to have some light.” She took the snowshoes and left the room.

He sat there, staring out the window, wondering what it was she wasn’t ready to talk about. His gaze wandered to the trees by the pasture.

The hollow sound of multiple voices and of chairs being moved in a miked room drew his attention to the computer screen. The second police press briefing was about to begin.

The setting was one of those depressing institutional conference rooms that Gurney was all too familiar with from his years in the NYPD. The video perspective, equally familiar, was from a single camera mounted in the back of the room, aimed at the front.

A dozen or so cafeteria-style plastic chairs were occupied half by men and half by women, judging from the backs of their heads. Facing them was a thickly built man at a narrow podium. A blank whiteboard covered the wall behind him.

His body had an egg-shaped stockiness about it. He was wearing the standard uniform of an over-forty detective: dark pants, dull pastel shirt, duller tie, and a gray sport jacket a size too small. Dark hair brushed straight back from a broad creased forehead, along with heavy cheeks and a grim mouth, gave him a startling resemblance to old photos of Jimmy Hoffa.

He checked his watch and opened a loose-leaf binder.

“Okay, folks, let’s get started. I’m Senior Investigator Gilbert Fenton, Bureau of Criminal Investigation. There’ve been some major developments in the past few days relative to Ethan Gall’s death. I’ve got a statement here.” As Fenton paused to turn a page in the binder, one of the reporters spoke up.

“You used the general word ‘death.’ Are you implying that it wasn’t suicide?”

“I’m not implying anything. I’m just saying that what we know now leaves the possibility open that his death may not have been ‘suicide’ in the normal sense of the word. But hold on a minute.” He raised his hand in the traffic-cop “stop” gesture. “Let me finish the statement.” He looked back down at the binder.

“Our investigation of the Gall death has revealed certain significant facts. The fact that he was hypnotized in the recent past by Dr. Richard Hammond . . . the fact that he experienced a particular nightmare repeatedly in the week preceding his death . . . the fact that the fatal weapon found with his body was similar to a weapon he reported seeing in his nightmare . . . and the fact that details of that nightmare, which he committed to writing, would appear to have been acted out in the taking of his life. These facts alone would be sufficient to justify a fuller investigation. But it has now become apparent that the case is even more extensive.”

He turned over a page in the binder, cleared his throat, and continued. “We’ve learned that three additional individuals took their own lives the same way as Ethan Gall, with a similar pattern of previous experiences. These individuals were also hypnotized by Richard Hammond. They all developed incapacitating nightmares, and all three killed themselves in a manner seemingly consistent with the content of those nightmares.”

He closed the binder and looked at his audience. “At this time, I’ll take your questions.”

Several of the attendees spoke at once.

Again he raised his hand. “One at a time. You, in the first row.”

A female voice: “What are you accusing Dr. Hammond of doing?”

“We haven’t made any accusations. We’re seeking Dr. Hammond’s cooperation.” He pointed at another reporter.

A male voice: “Are you reclassifying the Gall death as a homicide?”

“It’s being classified simply as a suspicious death.”

Same male voice: “What possibilities other than suicide are you looking at?”

“We’re not currently focused on possibilities other than suicide, but on how and why the suicide occurred.”

A female voice: “What did you mean when you said that it might not have been suicide in the ‘normal sense’ of the term?”

“Well, let’s say, just hypothetically, that a powerful form of hypnotic suggestion influenced a person to do something they would not have done of their own accord. That would not be a normal action. It would not be done in the ‘normal sense’ of that action.”

Several voices were raised at once, competing in volume. One astounded male voice predominated: “Are you claiming that Richard Hammond used hypnosis to bring about Gall’s suicide, as well as the suicides of three other patients?”

Utterances of surprise and skepticism spread around the room.

Fenton raised his hand. “Let’s keep it orderly, okay? I’m not claiming anything. What I’m sharing with you is one hypothesis. There may be others.”

His most recent questioner continued, “Are you planning to arrest Dr. Hammond for . . . for what crime?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We hope to obtain Dr. Hammond’s voluntary cooperation. We need to know what, if anything, happened in those hypnosis sessions that could explain the nightmares his patients later experienced and the ritualistic suicides that ensued.”

Two female voices at once: “Ritualistic?”

A male voice: “What ritualistic elements were involved? Are we talking satanic?”

Another male voice: “Can you give us the identities of the other three victims?”

A female voice: “Is ‘victims’ the right term for suicides?”

Fenton raised his voice. “Hey, please, some order here. As for the term ‘victims’—I think that’s a reasonable term under the circumstances. We’ve got four people who all killed themselves in pretty much the same way with a weapon they dreamt about after they’d been hypnotized. This is obviously more than a coincidence. Regarding the ritualistic aspect, all I can divulge is that the weapon used in each case was unusual and, according to experts we’ve consulted, highly significant.”

A male voice: “If your theory is correct—that these victims were put under some kind of hypnotic spell that resulted in suicide—what would the criminal charge be? Are we talking about some new kind of murder?”

“The answer to that will be determined as we go along.”

The questions went on for half an hour. Fenton showed no impatience with this. If anything, he seemed to be urging the reporters on—an unusual behavior, Gurney thought, for a stolid, conservative-looking cop.

Finally he announced that the briefing was over.

“Okay, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your cooperation. You can pick up copies of my statement on your way out.”

Chairs were pushed back, people began standing, and the video ended.

Gurney sat at his desk for several long minutes, astounded.

He picked up a pen and began jotting down some questions of his own. When he was halfway down the page he remembered that there was still more material in the file Jane had assembled—Richard Hammond’s own statement to the press, plus examples of the media coverage that Fenton’s briefing had generated.

Gurney opened the folder again, took out a handful of news website printouts, and riffled through them. There was no need to read the complete text of any of these more recent articles. The insinuating headlines told the story.

THE DEATH WHISPERER

DID THIS DOCTOR TALK HIS PATIENTS INTO KILLING THEMSELVES?

POLICE LINK CONTROVERSIAL THERAPIST TO RITUAL SUICIDES

COULD A DREAM BE A MURDER WEAPON?

Before he was halfway through the pile of printouts, Gurney put them aside and leaned back in his chair. He found himself fascinated by the underlying facts and baffled by the aggressively public approach being taken by Gil Fenton—which represented not only the embrace of a wild hypothesis but also a departure from NYSP communications policies.

There was one final item in the folder, a single typewritten page with a long heading: Notice to the Press: Statement by Dr. Richard Hammond Regarding the Investigation into the Deaths of Christopher Wenzel, Leo Balzac, Steven Pardosa, and Ethan Gall.

Gurney read with increasing interest:

Serious allegations were made recently to the news media by a representative of New York State law enforcement concerning the deaths of the four individuals named above. These allegations are reckless and misleading.

This statement will be my first, final, and only response. I will not be drawn into the charade being staged by incompetent police investigators. I will not cooperate with them in any way until they cease their malicious campaign of character assassination. Nor will I communicate with representatives of the news media whose embrace of the libelous insinuations of the police are proof of their amoral appetite for sensation.

In short, I will neither participate in, nor publicly debate, nor devote my resources to the obstruction of this farcical investigation and media soap opera. I will hire no attorney, no PR firm, no spokesperson, no defenders of any kind.

Let me be perfectly clear. Suggestions or insinuations that I contributed in any way to the deaths of four individuals are absolutely false. Let me repeat and underscore the simple truth. The deaths of Christopher Wenzel, Leo Balzac, Steven Pardosa, and Ethan Gall were tragic events in which I have played no role whatsoever. They deserve a full and objective investigation, not this degrading circus initiated by malicious police personnel and propagated by a vile news industry.

—Richard Hammond, PhD

Gurney found the statement remarkable for its bravado—especially since it was authored by the same man who had been paralyzed with fear over the highly unlikely possibility of there being a dead body in the trunk of his car.

CHAPTER 8

From Gurney’s point of view, the Palm Beach Police Department was just the right size—big enough to have its own detective bureau, small enough to ensure that his contact there would be aware of the key points of any investigation that was underway. Best of all, Lieutenant Bobby Becker owed him a favor. Less than two years earlier, with Gurney’s considerable assistance, Becker had managed to put away a vicious serial murderer.

Becker took his call immediately, his gentle drawl fully deployed. “Detective Gurney. What a surprise!” The way he inflected that final word made it sound like it wasn’t a surprise at all. “A pleasure to hear from you. I do hope all is well?”

“I’m good. How about you?”

“Can’t complain. Or, I should say, I prefer not to complain. Complainin’ is a waste of the time we could be better usin’ to eliminate the causes of our complaints.”

“Christ, Becker, you sound more good ole boy than ever.”

“I’m happy to hear that. It is, after all, my native tongue. A Floridian born and bred. We are outnumbered now almost to extinction. Rare birds in our own tree. What can I do for you?”

Gurney hesitated for a moment, searching for the right words. “I’ve been asked to get involved in a case that has roots in a number of jurisdictions. One of them is Palm Beach.”

“Let me take a wild guess. Might you be talking about the ‘Deadly Doctor’ case? That’s what they’re calling it down here—when they’re not calling it the ‘Fatal Dreams’ case.

“That’s the one. You’re not by any chance the CIO on the Wenzel piece of it?”

“No, sir, I’m not. Young fellow at the next desk caught that one, thought everything was cool when the ME signed off on probable suicide. Course that all went to hell once the Reverend Bowman Cox dropped by to tell us it was murder, and the killer was Satan.”

“What?”

“You don’t know about that?”

“I was told that Wenzel confided to a local minister that he’d been having nightmares ever since he’d seen a Dr. Hammond up in Wolf Lake. And after Wenzel showed up dead, the minister told you guys about it. Then one of you called Hammond, but nothing really came of that conversation, until Hammond called back a week later to tell you he’d just heard from a detective in New Jersey about a second suicide. That’s the way I was told the story—no reference to any murder committed by Satan.”

“How are you getting your information?”

“In a roundabout way.”

“You’re not a trusted confidant of Senior Investigator Gilbert Fenton?”

“That’s one way of putting it. Tell me more about Satan.”

“Well . . . that’s not an easy thing for me to do. Our chief of detectives has made a request that details not already reported in the press be kept in the house. I did agree to abide by that request, word of honor. However, Reverend Cox is under no such constraint. I understand he can be reached at the Church of Christian Victory down in Coral Dunes. The reverend is a man of strong convictions, with an equally strong desire to share them.”

“Thanks, Bobby. I appreciate this.”

“Glad to help. Now, maybe you can answer a question of mine? Actually, it’s a question on the minds of many down here.”

“Ask it.”

“What in the name of holy magnolia is that hog’s ass, Fenton, up to?”

That launched them into a long discussion of the unconventional aspects of Fenton’s approach to the press. Becker was particularly unhappy with what he perceived to be the BCI investigator’s assumption of the role of law enforcement spokesman on all aspects of the case and his grandstanding with the national media, which resulted in the detectives in the other jurisdictions losing control of the flow of information and finding themselves in awkward positions with local reporters.

And then there was the matter of the criminal hypothesis Fenton was promoting, which Becker considered “unprosecutable and sure-as-hell unprovable.” Which brought Gurney around to a question that troubled him more than Fenton’s actual behavior:

Who in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation—or elsewhere in the New York State Police hierarchy—had signed off on his approach to the case? And why did they?

Someone above him had to be on board. Fenton, after all, exuded the essence of career cop. This dour, close-to-retirement law enforcer would be constitutionally incapable of acting outside a chain of command.

So whose game was this?

And what was the prize for the victor?

For now, all Gurney and Becker had were questions. But the fact that they both were bothered by the same questions provided a measure of reassurance.

Becker ended the call with an afterthought on the Reverend Cox. “To prepare you for any contact you may have with the good minister, I should tell you that he bears a keen resemblance to a large, degenerate bird of prey.”

GURNEY’S CALL TO THE PHONE NUMBER ON THE WEBSITE OF THE Coral Dunes Church of Christian Victory resulted in a trip through an automated answering system that led him eventually to the voicemail of Bowman Cox himself.

He left his name and cell number, explaining that he was one of the detectives looking into the quadruple suicide case and was hoping that the reverend might be able to provide some additional insight into Christopher Wenzel’s state of mind and perhaps share his own theory of the case.

Less than five minutes after he put down his phone, he got a return call. The voice was all Southern-syrupy. “Detective Gurney, this is Bowman Cox. I just received your message. If your area code is any indication, you are located in upstate New York. Am I correct?”

“Yes, sir, you are. Thank you for calling me back.”

“I believe that things happen for a reason. I got your message moments after you left it, because I was about to leave my hotel room and I wanted to check my phone mail first. And where do you think my hotel room is?”

“I have no idea.”

“It’s where you might least expect it. In the belly of the beast.”

“Sir?”

“The belly of the beast—New York City. We are here to defend Christmas from those who hate the very idea of it, who object to its very existence.”

“I see.”

“Are you a Christian, sir?”

It wasn’t a question he would normally answer. But this wasn’t a normal situation.

“I am.” He didn’t add that his own version of Christianity was probably as far from Bowman Cox’s as Walnut Crossing was from Coral Dunes.

“That’s good to hear. Now, what can I do for you?”

“I’d like to talk to you about Christopher Wenzel.”

“And his nightmare?”

“Yes.”

“And how all these deaths have come to be?”

“Yes.”

“Where exactly are you, Detective, right now, as we speak?”

“In my home in Walnut Crossing in upstate New York.”

For several seconds, Cox said nothing. The only sound Gurney could hear over the phone was the soft tapping of fingers on a keyboard. He waited.

“Ah, there you are. Convenient things, these instant maps. Well, now, here’s a proposition for you. My feeling is that this conversation is too important for the phone. Why don’t we meet, you and I, face-to-face?”

“When and where?”

There was another silence, longer this time, with more keyboard tapping.

“Looks to me like Middletown would be a perfect middle point between us. There’s a diner on Route 17 called Halfway There. I feel that the Lord is pointing the way for us. What do you say—shall we accept his suggestion?”

Gurney glanced at his phone screen to check the time. It was 12:13 PM. If he got to the diner at 1:45 and spent an hour with Cox, he could be back home by 4:15. That would leave plenty of time to resolve any open issues regarding the following morning’s trip to Wolf Lake.

“Fine, sir, I can meet you there at 1:45.”

CHAPTER 9

The drive down through the Catskills to Middletown was familiar and uneventful. The sprawling parking lot of the Halfway There diner was equally familiar. He and Madeleine had pulled in there for coffee many times during the year they’d spent searching for a country house.

Fewer than a third of the tables in the dining area were taken. As Gurney scanned the room, a hostess approached with a menu and an overly lipsticked smile.

“I think I see who I’m meeting here,” said Gurney, his eyes on a self-important-looking man sitting by himself in one of the four chairs at a corner table.

She shrugged, handed him the menu, and walked away.

By the time Gurney got to the table, the man was standing, well over six feet tall, with his right hand outstretched. He engaged Gurney in an enthusiastic handshake, while raising his other hand to display an iPad. “I have been doing my research, Detective, and I must tell you that I am mightily impressed.” A broad salesman’s smile revealed a row of expensively capped teeth.

On the screen of the tablet, Gurney’s eye caught part of an old photo of himself next to the word “Supercop”—the pumped-up headline of an article New York magazine had run a number of years earlier, featuring the string of arrests and convictions that by some calculations had made him the most successful homicide detective in the history of the NYPD. He’d found the article embarrassing, but sometimes it served a useful function, and he suspected this might be one of those times.

Gurney guessed the reverend was sixty and doing everything he could to look forty.

“I feel privileged to meet you, Detective. Please have a seat.”

They sat across from each other. A waitress with a weary smile came over. “You gentlemen know what you want, or you need more time?”

“Maybe just a little time for me to get acquainted with this remarkable man, then we’ll be ready to order. That meet with your approval, David? If I may call you David?”

“That’s fine.”

The Reverend Bowman Cox was wearing a navy-blue jogging suit and a stainless steel Rolex—a model Gurney had seen advertised somewhere for $12,000. His skin was a yellowish tan, unnaturally tight and free of any wrinkles, his hair unnaturally brown and free of any gray. A rapacious hawklike nose and a combative glint in the eyes belied the broad smile.

When the waitress had gone, he leaned toward Gurney. “I thank our Lord for this opportunity to share our thoughts—regarding what I have come to believe is a case of extraordinary evil. May I ask how far you’ve progressed in your own understanding of it?”

“Well, Reverend, as you—”

“Please, David, no formal titles. Call me Bowman.”

“Okay, Bowman. As I see it, the problem in understanding the case is that a number of different jurisdictions are involved due to the location of the suicides. Gilbert Fenton up in the Adirondack region of New York seems to have the closest thing to an overall approach.” He was watching the man’s expression for hints of how to proceed to trigger the greatest cooperation. He continued, shifting his vocabulary. “But it’s the evil dimension of these events that really interests me, the presence of certain inexplicable forces.”

“Exactly!”

“The nightmares, for example.”

“Exactly!”

“That’s an area, Bowman, where I’d love to get your personal perspective. Because of the fragmented way the case is being handled, I know about the nightmares. But I don’t know the content of them. The sharing of information among our departments leaves a lot to be desired.”

Cox’s eyes widened. “But the nightmare is the solution to everything! From the very start, I told them that. I told them the answer was in the nightmare! They have eyes, yet they refuse to see!”

“Perhaps you can explain it to me?”

“Of course.” He leaned forward again and spoke with a fevered intensity, his perfect teeth and the surgically tightened skin of his face creating a not-quite-human impression.

“Are you familiar, David, with the phenomenon of men who, having once heard a musical passage, can replay it note for note? Well, I have a similar ability with the spoken word, particularly as it relates to the word of God and man. Do you grasp my meaning?”

“I’m not sure I do.”

Cox leaned closer, his reptilian eyes fixed on Gurney’s. “In matters of Good and Evil, what I hear is imprinted on my memory—note for note, as it were. I regard this as a gift. So, when I say that I am about to repeat Christopher Wenzel’s narration of his nightmare, I mean precisely that. His narration. Note for note. Word for word.”

“Would you mind if I recorded this?”

A flicker of something in those eyes came and went too quickly to read. “I have been prevailed upon by law enforcement authorities not to share this with the press or the public. But you, as a detective, are obviously in a different category.”

Gurney took out his phone, activated the “record” function, and laid it on the table. Cox stared at it for a few seconds as though weighing risks and rewards. Then with the tiniest nod—the gesture of a blackjack player opting to proceed—he closed his eyes and began speaking. His voice was sharper now, presumably imitating the diction of Christopher Wenzel.

“I’m lying in bed. Starting to fall asleep. But it doesn’t feel that good. It doesn’t have that easy, letting-go feeling of falling asleep. I’m partly conscious, but I can’t move or speak. I know that someone, or something, is in the room with me. I hear a deep, rough breathing—like some kind of animal. Like a low growling. I can’t see it, but it’s getting closer. Creeping up on me. Now it’s pressing me down on the bed. I want to scream but I can’t. Then I see hot red eyes. Then I see the animal’s teeth, pointed fangs.” Cox’s own shiny teeth were bared.

“Saliva is dripping from the fangs. Now I know it’s a wolf, a wolf as big as a man. The burning red eyes are just inches away from me now. The saliva from the fangs is dripping on my mouth. I want to scream, but nothing will come out. The body of the wolf is hovering over me, getting longer, stretching into the shape of a dagger. I feel the dagger going into me, burning and piercing, again and again. I’m covered with blood. The wolf’s growl changes into the voice of a man. I see that the wolf has the hands of a man. Then I know that he is a man, but all I can see are his hands. In one hand he has a dagger with a silver wolf’s head on the handle, a wolf’s head with red eyes. In the other hand he has colored pills. He says, ‘Sit up and take these. There’s nothing to fear, nothing to remember.’ I wake up sweating and shivering. My body aches. I sit on the edge of the bed, too exhausted to stand. I bend over and vomit. That’s how it ends. That’s what happens. Every night. The idea that it will happen again makes me want to die.”

Cox opened his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and looked around the room a little strangely—as if, rather than simply reciting another man’s story, he’d been channeling the dead man’s spirit.

“So, there you have it, David—the revolting experience related to me by that poor young man on the very eve of his demise.” He paused, clearly waiting for a reaction that Gurney was not providing. “Do you not find Christopher’s experience utterly appalling?”

“It’s certainly strange. But tell me—other than his dream, what else do you know about him?”

Cox looked surprised. “Forgive me, David, but it is plain to me that Christopher’s dream is precisely the revelation we need to focus on. The dream that dictated the manner of his death. The dream that exposed the role played by the devil Hammond. Look ye, saith the Lord, at the Truth that is shown to thee in these events. The Truth of evil is placed before thine eyes.”

“When you refer to Dr. Hammond as a devil—”

“That term is not idly chosen. I know all about Doctor Hammond, with his Ivy League psychology degree.”

Gurney wondered if Cox’s animus toward Hammond was a routine product of the culture wars, or if there might be more to it. But he had another question to pursue first. “Did you know Wenzel in any context outside of the conversation he had with you regarding his dream?”

Cox shook his head impatiently. “I did not.”

“Your ministry is located in Coral Dunes?”

“Yes. But our broadcast and Internet outreach is unlimited.”

“And Coral Dunes is about an hour’s drive from Palm Beach?”

“What is your point?”

“I was wondering why—”

“Why Christopher came all the way to Coral Dunes to unburden his tortured soul? Have you considered the simplest answer of all—that the Lord led him to me?” A beatific smile pulled his tight lips back to reveal that row of perfect white teeth.

“Can you think of any other reason?”

“Perhaps he’d had the opportunity to hear one of our webcast sermons. It is the mission of our ministry to stand with the Lord in the great war consuming our world.”

“That war being . . .?”

Cox looked surprised at the need for such a question. “The war being waged on the divinely ordained order of things. The war waged on the essence of man, woman, marriage, and family. The war waged with all the devil’s cunning by the homosexual armies of Satan.”

“Are you telling me that Christopher Wenzel drove down to Coral Dunes to tell you about his dream because of your opposition to gay marriage?”

Cox stared at Gurney, his eyes burning with an emotion that might have been fury or a kind of wild excitement. But there was something else in those eyes as well—that special gleam that signals an unshakable belief in a patent absurdity.

His voice rose as he spoke. “What I’m telling you is that he came to me because he was hypnotized, spiritually violated, and about to be murdered by Doctor Richard Hammond. Doctor of degeneracy and debasement.”

AFTER SPENDING ANOTHER FIFTEEN MINUTES LISTENING TO BOWMAN Cox—with absolutely no desire to have anything to eat—Gurney left the diner with more questions than he’d arrived with. Questions about Richard Hammond’s background, Jane Hammond’s honesty and openness, the significance of Wenzel’s elaborate dream, and Cox’s own fierce hatred of Hammond.

Gurney spent most of the Route 17 segment of his homeward drive arranging in his mind the content and sequence of the phone calls he intended to make: to Hardwick, to Jane, and to Rebecca Holdenfield—a brilliant forensic psychologist with whom he had a complicated history of attraction, alliance, and conflict.

Before he called any of them, however, he decided to email them copies of the audio file. He also wanted to listen to it himself—not so much the dream segment, whose details were vivid in his mind, but the portion of his dialogue with Cox that followed the claim of murder. Regarding that exchange, he wanted to be sure his recollection was precise before discussing it with anyone, especially Rebecca.

After pulling off onto the shoulder, he sent the emails—with brief introductions for Hardwick and Jane and a longer explanation for Rebecca. Then he opened the audio file from the diner, found the point where he wanted to begin, and tapped “Play.”

Listening with care to Cox’s every word, he pulled back onto the highway and headed into the rolling foothills.

Cox: What I’m telling you is that he came to me because he was hypnotized, spiritually violated, and about to be murdered by Doctor Richard Hammond. Doctor of degeneracy and debasement.

Gurney: Is that what Wenzel told you? That he expected to be murdered?

Cox: He related his nightmare, and his nightmare revealed what he was unable to say.

(Brief silence)

Gurney: You believe that Hammond murdered Wenzel?

Cox: With all my heart and soul.

Gurney: Let me be sure I have the sequence right. You’re saying that Hammond hypnotized Wenzel—under the guise of a therapy session that was supposed to help him stop smoking. Then a week later . . . what? Hammond flew down to Palm Beach, hypnotized Wenzel in his condo, and cut the arteries in his wrists—causing him to bleed to death, creating the appearance of a suicide? Is that what you’re saying happened?

Cox: You have a blind and dismissive attitude, sir.

Gurney: I want to understand the facts as you see them.

Cox: I see the presence and power of Satan—a reality to which your mind appears closed.

Gurney: My mind can be opened. Just tell me what you believe Richard Hammond actually did to Christopher Wenzel—the specifics, the logistics. Are you saying that Hammond personally traveled to Florida to kill him?

Cox: No, sir, that is not what I’m saying happened. That would be little more than the routine viciousness of mankind, a crime that could have been perpetrated by any common criminal. What actually happened was infinitely worse.

Gurney: I’m confused.

Cox: Hammond had no need to resort to any purely physical action.

Gurney: You’re saying now that Hammond did not murder anyone? You’re losing me.

Cox: We are dealin’ here, sir, with the power of Evil itself.

Gurney: Meaning what, exactly?

Cox: How much do you know about Hammond’s background?

Gurney: Not a great deal. I was told that he was famous in his field and that he helped a lot of people stop smoking.

Cox: (Harsh, humorless laugh) Hammond’s agenda has nothing to do with smoking or not smoking. That’s mere window dressing. Examine his background—his books, his articles. It won’t take you long to discover his true agenda, the agenda that was there from the beginning, plain as the fire of hell in the eyes of that wolf. Hammond’s agenda, sir, is the twisting of natural minds and the creation of homosexuals.

Gurney: The creation of homosexuals? How does he do that?

Cox: How? The only way it could be done. With the help of the devil.

Gurney: What does the devil actually help him do?

Cox: The answer to that is known only to Hammond and to Satan himself. But my personal opinion is that the man sold his soul in exchange for a terrible power over others—the power to enter their minds and to warp their thinking—to give them dreams of perversion, dreams that drive them either to lives of degenerate behavior or to self-destruction because they cannot endure the curse of such dreams.

Gurney: So, when you say that Hammond “murdered” Wenzel, what you mean is—

Cox: What I mean is that he murdered him in the most evil way imaginable—by planting in his mind a nightmare of perversion he could not bear to live with. A nightmare that drove him to his death. Think of it, Detective. What crueler and more wicked way could you kill a man than make him kill himself?

Gurney ended the audio playback as he was exiting the highway and turning onto the road that would take him through a series of hills and valleys to Walnut Crossing.

Apart from sharpening his memory of Cox’s exact words, replaying the conversation hadn’t helped. The man’s unhinged vision of Wenzel’s suicide was more a lightning storm than a source of useful light.

Could Cox be as crazy as he sounded?

Or, if the homophobic ranting was a performance, what was its purpose?

Despite the explanation Cox gave for Wenzel coming to him, Gurney was left wondering if there might have been another reason for that unfortunate man’s long drive to Coral Dunes.

CHAPTER 10

When Gurney reached the west end of the Pepacton Reservoir he pulled off onto a gravel turnaround. In an area of spotty cell reception, it was one place where his phone always worked.

He was hoping to find some thread of coherence in the inconsistent pictures of the case presented by Gilbert Fenton, Bowman Cox, and Jane Hammond.

His first call was to Jane.

“I’ve got a question. Did Richard ever do any work in the area of sexual orientation?”

She hesitated. “Briefly. At the beginning of his career. Why do you ask?”

“I just spoke with a minister who met with one of the young men who committed suicide. He told me your brother provided therapy designed to alter a person’s sexual orientation.”

“That’s ludicrous! It had nothing to do with altering anything.” She paused, as if reluctant to say more.

Gurney waited.

She sighed. “When he was starting out, Richard saw a number of patients who were conflicted over the fact that they were gay but afraid to let their families know. He helped them face reality, helped them embrace their identities. That’s all.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes. Well . . . there was some controversy—a hate-mail campaign aimed at Richard, generated by a network of fundamentalist ministers. But that was nearly ten years ago. Why is this an issue now?”

“Some people have long memories.”

“Some people are just bigots, looking for someone to hate.”

Gurney couldn’t disagree. On the other hand, he wasn’t ready to ascribe Reverend Cox’s demonic interpretation of the case to something as simple as plain old bigotry.

His second call, to Hardwick, went to voicemail. He left a message, suggesting that he check his email and listen to the attached audio file. And maybe he could try to get a lead on the missing girlfriend of Steven Pardosa, the suicide case in Floral Park.

His third call was to Rebecca Holdenfield. She picked up on the third ring.

“Hello, David. It’s been a long time. What can I do for you?” Her voice, even over the phone, projected a subtle sexuality he’d always found both enticing and cautionary.

“Tell me about Richard Hammond.”

“The Richard Hammond who’s currently at the center of a tornado?”

“Correct.”

“Tremendously bright. Moody. Creative. Likes to work on the cutting edge. You have some specific questions?”

“How much do you know about the tornado?”

“As much as anyone else who listens to the news on their way to work. Four patient suicides in one month.”

“You heard the police theory that he caused the suicides through hypnotic suggestion?”

“Yes, I heard that.”

“You think it’s possible?”

She uttered a derisive little laugh. “Hammond is exceptional, but there are limits.”

“Tell me about the limits.”

“Hypnosis can’t induce behavior that’s inconsistent with an individual’s core values.”

“So hypnotically induced suicide is just flat-out impossible?”

She hesitated before answering. “A hypnotherapist might move a suicidal person closer to suicide, through incompetence or reckless malpractice. But he couldn’t create an irresistible urge to die in a person who wanted to live. Nothing remotely like that has ever been documented.”

Now it was Gurney’s turn to pause for a moment’s reflection. “I keep hearing people say that Hammond is unique in his field. And you mentioned a minute ago that he likes to work on the ‘cutting edge.’ What’s that all about?”

“He pushes the boundaries. I saw an abstract of a paper he presented at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association—all about breaking down the separation between neuropsychology and motivational hypnotherapy. He claimed that intensive hypnotherapy can form new neural pathways, enabling new behavior that was previously difficult or impossible.”

Gurney said nothing. He was waiting for her to catch the dissonance between that statement and what she’d said about hypnotherapy’s limits.

“But don’t get me wrong,” she added quickly. “There’s no evidence that even the most intensive hypnotherapy could turn a desire to live into a desire to die. And, by the way, there’s a whole other aspect to this question of what people are capable or incapable of doing.”

Again Gurney waited for her to go on.

“The aspect of character. Character and personality. From what I’ve seen and heard of Hammond, I’d have to say that morally and temperamentally he’s an unlikely candidate for masterminding suicides. He’s a perpetual wunderkind, he’s neurotic, maybe a bit too much of the tortured genius. But a monster? No.”

“That word reminds me, did you get my email?”

“Not if you sent it in the past hour. Been too busy to check. Why?”

“I just met with a Florida preacher who believes that Hammond is very much a monster. I sent you a recording of our conversation.”

“Sounds outrageous. Can’t listen to it this second, though. I’ve got a client waiting. But I will get to it, and . . . and I will get back to you. Okay?”

An unresolved note in her voice told Gurney there was something more she wanted to say. So, once more, he waited.

“You know,” she added, “just theoretically speaking . . . if someone could figure out how to do that . . .”

“You mean figure out how to make people kill themselves?”

“Yes. If someone . . . if someone could actually do that . . .” The implications seemed to leave her at a loss for words.

GURNEY SAT GAZING OUT OVER THE RESERVOIR. THE LONGER Rebecca Holdenfield’s unfinished comment lingered in his mind, the more convinced he was that he’d heard in it a touch of fear.

He glanced at the dashboard clock. It read 3:23 PM. In a shadowed mountain valley in December, slipping down toward the shortest day of the year, it was nearly dusk.

Gurney’s attention began to drift to a series of images. The images were both familiar and disconcerting. Familiar because they’d come to him from time to time—perhaps a dozen times in all, always unexpectedly—ever since he’d had the dream in which they first appeared, shortly after he and Madeleine had moved to the western Catskills and heard the stories about the old farm villages that had been dammed and flooded to create the reservoir.

The villagers had been forced from their homes, dispossessed by eminent domain and New York City’s need for water. All the houses and barns, the churches and schools and general stores, everything had been burned to the ground, the charred timbers and stone foundations bulldozed into the earth, and all the bodies exhumed from the valley cemeteries. It was as if the place had never been home to anyone—as if communities that had existed for over a century had never existed at all. The vast reservoir was now the great presence in the valley, the bulldozed relics of human habitation having been long since absorbed into its silty bottom.

But these hard facts, although they seemed to initiate it, were not the final substance of the dream’s recurrent images. In his mind’s eye he was standing in the dim, blue-green, deadly silent depths of the reservoir. All around him were abandoned homes, bereft of doors and windows. Incongruously, among the inundated farm buildings stood the Bronx apartment house where he’d spent his childhood. It, too, was eerily vacant, its windows nothing but rectangular openings in the murky brick facade. Eellike creatures undulated in and out of the openings. In the lightless interior venomous sea snakes lurked, waiting for their prey to venture in. A slow, freezing current pushed at his back, moving him ever closer to the looming structure with its hideous contents.

So vivid were these images that Gurney’s lips drew back in revulsion. He shook his head, took a deep breath, started the car, pulled back onto the county road, and headed for home—resolving never to dwell on that dream again.

The dozen miles of hills and hollows between the reservoir and Walnut Crossing formed a dead zone for his phone. But as he turned onto the narrow road up to his property, he entered the service area of the Walnut Crossing cell tower and his phone rang.

It was Jane Hammond.

“Did you hear?” Her voice was alive with anger.

“Hear what?”

“About Fenton’s latest press briefing.”

“What happened?”

“He’s making everything worse.”

“What did he do?”

“He claimed Richard is now his ‘primary suspect’ in what he’s calling four cases of ‘intentional homicide.’”

“‘Intentional homicide’? That’s the term he used?”

“Yes. And when a reporter asked him if that meant that Richard would be arrested and charged with first-degree murder, he didn’t say no.”

“What did he say?”

“That it was being considered, and that the investigation was ongoing.”

“Did he say what new evidence prompted this?”

“The same crazy stuff. Richard’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation. Of course he refuses to cooperate! You don’t cooperate with a lynch mob!”

“His noncooperation is hardly new evidence. Was anything else mentioned?”

“More nonsense about the dreams. Now he’s saying that all four victims had exactly the same nightmare. Which makes no sense at all.”

Gurney pulled over to the edge of the road. One person having the same dream night after night was strange. Four different people having the same dream was beyond strange.

“You’re sure you heard him right?”

“Oh, I heard him right. He said that they’d each provided a detailed account of the nightmare they’d been suffering from. Wenzel told his minister. Balzac told a therapist. Pardosa told his chiropractor. Ethan wrote his out in a longhand letter to someone. Fenton says the four accounts are substantially the same.”

“What point was he trying to make?”

“He said that the fact that they all had the same dream after being hypnotized by Richard indicated that Richard was responsible—not only for the dream but for the suicides. And then he added, ‘the four suicides we know of so far’—like Richard might be a serial killer.”

“But Fenton hasn’t formally charged him with anything?”

“Formally charged him? No. Viciously slandered him? Yes. Destroyed his reputation? Yes. Ruined his career? Yes. Turned his life completely upside down? Yes.”

She went on a bit longer, venting her fury and frustration. Although he normally was uncomfortable with displays of intense emotion, Gurney could sympathize with her reaction to a case that only became more bizarre with each new development.

Four people having the same dream?

How could that be possible?

He continued driving up the road, past his barn, past the pond, up along the pasture lane. As he parked by the mud room door, he caught sight of a red-tailed hawk. It was circling over the field that separated the barn from the house. Its loosely formed circles appeared to be centered over the pen attached to the chicken coop. He got out of the car and watched the unhurried predator make another slow circuit before straightening its flight path and gliding out of sight over the maple thicket that bordered the pasture.

He went into the house and called out to Madeleine, but there was no answer. It was just four o’clock. He was pleased to see that he’d arrived precisely when he said he would and disappointed that Madeleine wasn’t present for his rare on-time homecoming.

Where could she be?

She wasn’t scheduled to work her shift at the mental health clinic that afternoon. Besides, her car was in its normal spot by the house, so she couldn’t be far. It was cold and within an hour it would be dark, so it was unlikely she’d be out on one of the old quarry trails that ran along the bluestone ridges. The cold wouldn’t stop her, but the fading light would.

He called her cell number and was startled to hear her phone ring on the sideboard just a few feet from his elbow—where it was serving as a paperweight on a pile of unopened mail.

He went into the den on the off chance that she’d left a note for him on his desk.

There wasn’t any note.

The message light on the landline phone was blinking. He pressed the “Play” button.

“Hi, David. Rebecca Holdenfield. I listened to the audio file of your conversation with Cox. ‘Bizarre’ is too mild a word for it. I have questions. Can we get together? Maybe meet halfway between Walnut Crossing and my office in Albany? Let me know.”

He called her back, got her voicemail, and left a message.

“Hi, Rebecca. Dave Gurney. Getting together may be tough. I’m leaving early tomorrow for Wolf Lake in the Adirondacks—to see Hammond, if I can. The following day I go on to northern Vermont for snowshoeing, et cetera. Earliest I’ll be back will be five, six days from now. But I do want to hear your opinion of the dream. By the way, the BCI investigator just added an impossible twist to the dream element at a press briefing. Check the story updates on the Internet and get back to me when you can. Thanks.”

As he ended the call, the phone rang in his hand. It was Hardwick, who was already speaking when Gurney put the phone to his ear.

“. . . fuck is going on?”

“Excellent question, Jack.”

“Are Cox and Fenton competing for Craziest Man on the Planet?”

“You listened to Cox reciting Wenzel’s dream?”

“I did. The dream which Fenton now claims all the victims had.”

“A claim you find hard to swallow?”

“Horseshit of that magnitude is very hard to swallow.”

“Which put us, Jack, in the uncomfortable spot of having to accept either that Fenton is lying with the approval of BCI brass, as part of some grand conspiracy, or that four people did, in fact, have the same dream, and it drove them all to suicide.”

“You don’t think that’s possible, do you?”

“Nothing I’ve been told about this case seems possible.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“We need to search for potential connections. Places where the paths of the four victims may have crossed. Also, any prior contacts they may have had with Richard Hammond. Or with Jane Hammond. Or with Peyton Gall, who Jane mentioned was in his twenties, just like three of the four victims, which may or may not be significant.”

“Hell of a job, but I’ll start the process.”

For some minutes after the call ended Gurney stood at the den window—until the deepening dusk reminded him of Madeleine. He thought he should go out and look for her before it got any darker. But where should he start? It was unlike her to—

“I was down by the pond.”

Her voice made him jump, so quietly had she entered the house and come to the den doorway. Once upon a time her comment’s uncanny responsiveness to the question on his mind would have disconcerted him, but he’d grown accustomed to the phenomenon.

“The pond? Wasn’t it kind of a raw evening for that?”

“Not really. It was just good to be out in the air. Did you see the hawk?”

“You think we ought to do something about it?”

“Other than admire the beauty of it?”

He shrugged, and a silence fell between them.

Madeleine was the first to speak. “Are you going to meet with her?”

He knew instantly that she was talking about Rebecca, that she must have heard the phone message. The question, asked in too casual a tone, put him on edge. “I don’t see how. At least not until we get back from Vermont, and even then . . .”

“She’ll find a way.”

“What does that mean?”

“You must realize she’s interested in you.”

“Rebecca is interested in her career and in maintaining whatever contacts she thinks might someday be useful.”

The half-truth led to another silence—broken this time by Gurney.

“Is something wrong?”

“Wrong?”

“Ever since Jack and Jane were here, seems like you’ve been in another world.”

“I’m sorry. I guess I’m . . . just a little out of sorts.” She turned away and headed for the kitchen.

DINNER ENDED UP BEING A BRIEF AFFAIR CONSISTING OF BOILED potatoes, microwaved peas, haddock, and minimal conversation. As they were clearing the table he asked, “Did you let Sara know we’d be leaving a day early?”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“Yes.”

“If we open the chicken coop door in the morning to let them into the pen, someone will have to close it at night.”

“Right. I’ll call her.”

A long silence ensued with her washing and rinsing their dinner plates, the silverware, the haddock pan, and the potato pot, and setting everything in the drainer to dry. This ritual activity at the sink was a task she’d claimed as her own years earlier.

Gurney’s peripheral role in the ritual was to sit and watch.

When she was finished, she dried her hands; but instead of getting one of her books and settling into her regular armchair by the woodstove at the far end of the room, she remained at the sink island, staring into some private mental landscape.

“Maddie, what on earth’s the matter?” Even as he was asking the question he knew it was a mistake, driven by irritation rather than concern.

“I told you. I just seem to have a lot on my mind. What time do we have to leave?”

“In the morning? Eight? Eight thirty? Is that all right?”

“I suppose. Are you all packed?”

“I’m not bringing much.”

She gazed at him for several long seconds, then turned off the light over the sink island and left the kitchen through the hallway that led to their bedroom.

He looked out through the French doors and saw nothing at all. Dusk had long since turned to solid night, a night with neither moon nor stars.

CHAPTER 11

Sometime after midnight there was a dramatic shift in the weather, with strong winds blowing away the overcast and flooding the maple copse outside their bedroom window with moonlight.

Awakened by the sound of the wind, Gurney got up and went to the bathroom, drank a glass of water, and stood for a while at the window. The moonlight illuminating the winter-faded pasture grass looked like a coating of frost.

He returned to bed, closed his eyes, and tried to empty his mind, hoping to slide naturally back into a comfortable sleep. Instead he found himself helplessly playing host to a succession of unsettling images, bits of the day, baffling questions and half-formed hypotheses—a needle stuck in a groove that went nowhere.

His thoughts were interrupted by a sound—something high-pitched above the wind. Then it stopped. He waited, listening. The sound came again, more distinctly now. The shrill yipping of coyotes. He could picture them, like small wolves, closing in on their prey on the rocky moonlit ridge above the high pasture.

Gurney awoke the next morning exhausted. He forced himself out of bed and into the shower. The hot pelting water worked its customary magic—clearing his mind, bringing him back to life.

Returning to the bedroom, he found the two duffel bags Madeleine had shown him the previous morning. They were resting on the bench at the foot of the bed. Madeleine’s was full and zipped shut, his was open and waiting for whatever he intended to bring.

He disliked packing for trips, probably because he disliked taking trips, especially ones he was supposed to enjoy. But he managed to gather and pack what he might need. He carried both bags out through the kitchen to the side door where Madeleine had stacked up their ski pants and jackets, snowshoes and skis. The sight fed his discomfort, as he realized that the only part of the planned excursion that held any interest for him was the brief segment they’d be spending at Wolf Lake.

He took everything out to the car. While he was fitting the bags into the hatchback space, he caught sight of Madeleine, bundled in a heavy coat against the cold morning, making her way up through the pasture from the direction of the pond.

He was back in the kitchen, brewing his coffee, by the time she’d circled back down to the house. When he heard her in the mud room, he called out. “Coffee’s on, you want a cup?”

He couldn’t make out her muttered answer. He repeated the question when she appeared in the kitchen doorway.

She shook her head.

“Are you okay.”

“Sure. Is everything in the car?”

“As far as I know. Duffel bags, ski stuff . . .”

“The GPS?”

“Of course. Why?”

“The detour we’re taking. I wouldn’t want us to get lost.”

“There aren’t that many roads up there to get lost on.”

She nodded with a touch of that same preoccupation he’d sensed in her the night before. As she was leaving the room, she added with a certain coolness, “There was a phone message while you were in the shower. It’s on the landline.”

He went into the den to check it, suspecting that it might be Rebecca.

He was right. “Hi, Dave. Four people with the same dream? Meaning what? Generally similar elements? Or precisely identical images? First meaning is a stretch. Second is nuts. Love to delve deeper into this. Listen, I’ve got a gig every Friday in the psych department at SUNY Plattsburgh. So I’ll be there tomorrow. Google says that’s just twenty-seven miles from Wolf Lake. Could that work for you? We could meet where I’m staying—the Cold Brook Inn. Coming from Wolf Lake, the inn is just before the campus. Call me.”

Gurney stood by his desk trying to sort out the timing and logistics of the proposed meeting, as well as the position it would put him in with Madeleine. Before he called Rebecca back, he’d need to give those issues more thought.

THE FIVE-HOUR DRIVE FROM WALNUT CROSSING INTO THE NORTHERN reaches of the Adirondack wilderness offered an alternately beautiful and bleak exposure to the rural landscape of upstate New York. Many of the little towns were dead or dying—patches of commercial decay that clung to the state roads like disease growths on tree trunks. There were whole valleys where the tumble-down condition of everything was so pervasive it seemed the product of a toxic contamination seeping up out of the earth.

As they traveled farther north, the patches of snow on the sepia farm fields grew larger, the overcast gradually thickened, and the temperature dropped.

Coming to a village with more signs of life than most, Gurney pulled into a gas station across from something called the Latte Heaven Deli-Cafe. After filling the tank, he pulled out of the station and parked in the first space he found.

He asked if Madeleine wanted coffee. Or maybe something to eat?

“I just want to get out of the car, stretch my legs, get some air.”

He crossed the street by himself, entered the little establishment, and discovered that it wasn’t exactly what the name suggested.

The “Deli’” component was a cooler displaying in the light of a dim bulb the bleak cold cuts of Gurney’s Bronx childhood—bologna, boiled ham, and an orangey American cheese—alongside trays of thickly mayonnaised potato salad and macaroni salad. The “Cafe” component consisted of two oilcloth-covered tables, each with four folding chairs.

At one table a pair of wizened women were inclined toward each other in silence, as though they’d been in the midst of a conversation during which someone had hit the “Pause” button.

The “Latte Heaven” component consisted of a small espresso machine that showed no signs of life. There was an intermittent sound of steam pipes banging and wheezing somewhere beneath the floor. A fluorescent light fixture on the ceiling was buzzing.

One of the wizened women turned toward Gurney. “You knowin’ what you want?”

“Do you have regular coffee?”

“Coffee we got. Can’t say how reg’lar it is. You wantin’ somethin’ in it?”

“Black’ll be fine.”

“Be a minute.” She stood slowly, went around behind the cooler, and disappeared.

A few minutes later she reappeared and laid a steaming Styrofoam cup on the counter.

“Dollar fer the coffee, eight cents fer the governor, who ain’t worth no eight cents. Damn fool made a law to bring wolves back into the park. Wolves! Can you beat that fer stupid craziness? Park’s fer families, kids. Damn fool! You wantin’ a top fer that?”

Gurney declined the top, put a dollar fifty on the counter, thanked her, and left.

He spotted Madeleine about two blocks away on the main street, walking toward him. He took a few sips of his coffee to keep it from spilling and went to meet her. As they were ambling together toward their car, a young couple came out of a two-story office building half a block ahead of them. The woman was holding a baby wrapped in a blanket. The man went around to the driver’s door of car that was parked in front of the building, then stopped. He was looking over the roof of the car at the woman. Then he started back toward her, moving unsurely.

Gurney was close enough now to see the woman’s face—her mouth drawn down in terrible desolation, tears streaming down her cheeks. The man went to her, stood in front of her for a moment with a helpless look, then put his arms around her and the baby.

Gurney and Madeleine noticed the sign on the building and were hit by its significance at the same time. Above the names of three doctors, it read “Pediatric Medical Specialties.”

“Oh, God . . .” The words came out of Madeleine like a soft groan.

Gurney would be the first to admit that he had a serious deficiency in the empathy area, that the suffering of others often failed to touch him; but on occasion, as now, without any warning, he was blindsided by a feeling of shared sadness so great his own eyes filled with tears and his heart literally ached.

He took Madeleine’s hand and they walked the final block to the car in silence.

CHAPTER 12

Barely a mile out of the village a roadside sign informed them that they were entering the Adirondack Park. “Park” struck Gurney as a term far too modest for this vast tract of forests, lakes, bogs, and pristine wilderness that was larger than the entire state of Vermont.

The terrain around them changed from a succession of down-at-the-heels agricultural communities to something far wilder. Instead of weedy meadows and hilltop thickets, the landscape was dominated by a dark expanse of conifers.

As the road rose mile after mile, tall pines gave way to stunted firs that appeared to have been bent into angry submission by the harsh winter winds. Even open spaces here seemed forlorn and forbidding.

Gurney noted that Madeleine was sharply focused now on everything around her.

“Where are we?” asked Madeleine.

“What do you mean?”

“What are we near?”

“We’re not near very much at all. I’m guessing we’re seventy or eighty miles from the High Peaks. Maybe a hundred, hundred and twenty miles from Wolf Lake.”

There was a frozen mist in the air now, so fine it was drifting sideways rather than falling to the ground. Through this icy filter the wild landscape of hunched trees and gaunt granite outcroppings seemed wrapped in a deepening gloom.

After another two hours, during which he encountered only a handful of other vehicles, all heading in the opposite direction, their GPS announced that they had arrived at their destination. There was, however, no lodge in sight. There was simply a dirt road that met the state route at a right angle, marked by a discreet bronze sign on an iron post:

GALL WILDERNESS PRESERVE

WOLF LAKE LODGE

PRIVATE ROAD—GUESTS ONLY

Gurney drove in. About half a mile into the property he sensed the pitch of the road steepening. The crouching trees began to take on a sinister aspect in the sleety fog, materializing out of nowhere only to disappear seconds later.

Madeleine turned her head suddenly in the direction of something on her side of the car.

Gurney glanced over. “What’s the matter?”

“I thought I saw someone.”

“Where?”

She pointed. “Back that way. By the trees.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I saw someone standing by one of those trees with the twisted branches.”

Gurney slowed to a stop.

Madeleine looked alarmed. “What are you doing?”

He backed cautiously down the sloping road. “Let me know when we get to the spot.”

She turned back to the window. “There it is, that’s the tree. And right there, see, there’s the . . . oh . . . I thought the broken-off tree trunk next to the bent one was a person. Sorry.” The discovery that it had only been a tree trunk and not a human being lurking in that inhospitable place did little to allay the tension in her voice.

They drove on and soon came to a break in the procession of gnarled firs. The opening provided a passing glimpse of a rugged cabin, as somber and uninviting as the outcropping of icy granite on which it stood. A moment later the cabin disappeared behind the army of misshapen trees closing in again on the road.

The ring of Gurney’s phone on the console between them triggered a reflexive jerk of Madeleine’s arm away from the sound.

He picked up the phone and saw that it was Hardwick.

“Yes, Jack?”

“Good mawnin’ to you, too, Detective Guhney. Just thought I’d call, find out how y’all are doin’ on this glorious day the Lawd has provided.”

“Is there a point to the Southern accent?”

“Jus’ been on the phone with our loo-tenant friend in Palm Beach, and that way o’ talkin’—like you was amblin’ through molasses—is contagious.”

“Bobby Becker?”

Hardwick dropped the drawl. “Right. I wanted to find out if they knew anything down there about Christopher Wenzel, where he came from, how he happened to own that condo.”

“And?”

“They don’t know much. Except that the driver’s license he traded in a couple of years ago for a Florida one put his former residence in Fort Lee, New Jersey.”

“Which puts three of our victims in the same metro geography in the not-too-distant past.”

“Right.”

“From what Jane said about Peyton, he doesn’t sound like a guy who’d choose to live in the mountains if his alternative was a townhouse in the big city—unless he’s hiding from somebody.”

“I raised that point on our way back from your house. Jane thinks he can buy people upstate easier than he can in the city.”

“She have any idea who he’s buying, or why?”

“No names. But Peyton has a habit of creating trouble. And purchasing the necessary influence to keep consequences to a minimum would require a more modest outlay up in the backwoods than in a city. It’s Jane’s theory that he’s importing his pleasures to the country to keep his misbehaviors in a relatively safe playground.”

“Peyton the slimebag.”

“You could say that.”

“A slimebag who may be about to inherit a fortune.”

“Yep.”

“From a brother who just died in peculiar circumstances.”

“Yep again.”

“But, as far as you know, Peyton’s not on Fenton’s radar?”

“Not even near it.” Hardwick’s voice broke up into a scattering of unintelligible syllables, ending in silence.

Gurney glanced at his phone screen and saw that the signal strength was zero. Madeleine was watching. “You lost the call?”

“Dead zone.”

All his attention was now on the road ahead. The superfine sleet was sticking to the surface, obscuring the position of the road’s edges.

“How much farther do we have to go?”

“No idea.” He glanced over at her.

Her hands were clenched into fists, her fingers wrapped around her thumbs.

He was focusing now on a ravine about ten feet to the left of where he estimated the left side of the road to be. Then and there, at the worst point for it to occur, the pitch of the road increased by a few degrees. A moment later the tires lost traction.

Gurney dropped down into first gear and tried inching forward, but the rear of the car began slipping sideways toward the ravine. He took his foot off the gas, applied the brake gently. After an unnerving lateral slide, the car came to stop. He put the gear lever in reverse and crept backward down the road and away from the ravine. When he was well below the point at which the pitch steepened, he braked as lightly as he could. Gradually the car came to a halt.

Madeleine was peering out into the surrounding woods. “What do we do now?”

Gurney looked up the road as far as he could see. “I think the crest is about a hundred yards ahead of us. If I can get some momentum . . .”

He eased the car forward. As he tried to accelerate through the spot where the trouble had begun, the rear of the car swung out suddenly, pointing the front end at the ravine. He turned the steering wheel rapidly in the opposite direction—an overcompensation that ended with a jarring thud as the passenger-side tires entered a drainage ditch at the edge of the road.

The engine stalled. In the ensuing silence he could hear the wind picking up and the rapid tick-tick-tick-tick of ice pellets blowing against the windshield.

CHAPTER 13

When his attempts to extricate the car succeeded only in getting it more deeply entrenched, Gurney decided to venture on foot up to the crest of the hill where he hoped he might be able to get either a cell signal or a sense of how much farther it was to the lodge.

He put on his ski cap, turned up his collar, and headed up the road. He’d hardly started when a sound stopped him dead—an eerie howling that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere in particular. He’d grown used to the yips and howls of coyotes in the hills around Walnut Crossing, but this was different—deeper, with a quavering pitch that produced instant gooseflesh. Then it stopped as suddenly as it began.

He considered moving the Beretta from his ankle holster to his jacket pocket, but he didn’t want to ratchet up Madeleine’s anxiety; so he just resumed his trudge up the hill.

He’d proceeded no more than a dozen yards when he was stopped again—this time by a cry from the car.

“David!”

He spun around, slipped, and fell hard on his side.

As he scrambled to his feet he caught sight of the cause of her alarm.

A looming gray figure was standing in the icy mist no more than ten feet from the car.

As Gurney moved forward cautiously, he could see more clearly that it was a tall, gaunt man in a long canvas barn coat. A hat of matted fur, seemingly stitched together from parts of animals pelts, covered his head. A sheathed hatchet hung from a rough leather strap around his waist.

With the car between them, Gurney raised his right leg and slipped the Beretta out of its ankle holster and into his jacket pocket, gripping it firmly, thumb on the safety.

There was something almost feral in the man’s amber eyes. His discolored teeth had either been broken or filed to jagged points.

“Be warnt.” His voice was harsh as a rusted hinge.

Gurney responded evenly. “About what?”

“Evil here.”

“Here at Wolf Lake?”

“Aye. Lake’s got no bottom.”

“No bottom?”

“Nay, none, never was.”

“What kind of evil is here?”

“The hawk knows.”

“The hawk?”

“The hawk knows the evil. Hawk man knows what the hawk knows. Sets the hawk loose. Into the sun, into the moon.”

“What do you do here?”

“Fix what’s broke.”

“Around the lodge?”

“Aye.”

While keeping a close eye on the hatchet, Gurney decided to proceed with the conversation as if it were perfectly normal, to see if it might start to make sense. “My name is Dave Gurney. What’s yours?”

There was a flash of something in those strange eyes, a moment of keen attention.

Gurney thought that his name had been recognized. But when the man turned his sharp gaze up the road, it became clear something else had grabbed his attention. Seconds later Gurney heard it—the sound of a vehicle approaching in low gear. He was able to make out a pair of headlights, white disks in the frozen mist, coming over the crest and down the road.

He glanced over to check his visitor’s reaction. But he was nowhere in sight.

Getting out of the car, Madeleine pointed. “He ran off into those trees.” Gurney listened for footfalls, rustling branches; but all he heard was the wind.

Madeleine looked toward the approaching vehicle. “Thank God for whoever this is.”

A vintage Land Rover, the sort in old safari films, came to a stop a little way up the incline from the Outback. The tall, lean man who emerged from it in a country-chic Barbour rain jacket and knee-high Wellington boots created the impression of an English gentleman out for a pheasant shoot on an inclement day. He pulled the jacket hood over his closely cropped gray hair. “Damn rotten weather, eh?”

Gurney agreed.

Madeleine was shivering, burying her hands in her jacket pockets. “Are you from the lodge?”

“From it, yes. But of it, no.

“Excuse me?”

“I did drive here from the lodge. But I’m not an employee of it. Merely a guest. Norris Landon’s the name.”

Instead of walking across the ice to shake the man’s hand, Gurney simply introduced himself. As he was about to introduce Madeleine, Landon spoke first.

“And this would be your lovely wife, Madeleine—am I right?”

Madeleine responded with a surprised smile. “You must be the welcoming committee.”

“I’m not exactly that. But I am a man with a winch—which I expect you’ll find more useful.”

Madeleine looked hopeful. “Do you think it’ll get us out of the ditch?”

“It’s done the trick before. Wouldn’t want to be without it up here. I was talking to Jane Hammond earlier today, and she was anxious about your arrival in this wretched weather. Lodge is short-staffed at the moment. I volunteered to put Jane’s mind at ease—check the condition of the road, make sure no trees were down, that sort of thing. Things have a way of changing fast here. Streams turning into whitewater floods, roads collapsing into ravines, rock slides, instant icing—risky on the best of days.”

Not quite British or American, his accent was Mid-Atlantic, the diction once adopted by the cultured wealthy in the Northeast and actively nurtured in the Ivy League—until those institutions began to overflow with would-be hedge funders who didn’t care how cultured they sounded as long as they got rich fast.

“Do you know where your tow hook is, and can you reach it with the undercarriage in that awkward position?”

Gurney peered under the tilted front end before answering.

“Yes, I think, to both your questions.”

“In that case, we’ll have you back on the road in no time.”

Madeleine looked worried. “Before you arrived on the scene, someone approached us out of the woods.”

Landon blinked, appeared disconcerted.

She added, “A strange man with a hatchet strapped to his waist.”

“Crazy talk and amber eyes?”

“You know him?” Gurney asked.

“Barlow Tarr. Lives in a cabin out here. Nothing but trouble, in my opinion.”

“Is he dangerous?” asked Madeleine, still shivering.

“Some say he’s harmless. I’m not so sure. I’ve seen him sharpening that hatchet of his with a damn wild look in his eye. Hunts with it, too. Saw him cut a rabbit in half at thirty feet.”

Madeleine looked appalled.

“What else do you know about him?” asked Gurney.

“Works around the lodge, sort of a handyman. His father worked here, too. Grandfather before him. All a bit unbalanced, the Tarrs, to put it gently. Mountain people here from the time of Genesis. Related to each other in odd ways, if you know what I mean.” His mouth curled in distaste. “Did he say anything intelligible?”

“Depends what you mean by intelligible.” Gurney brushed a buildup of sleet pellets off the shoulders of his jacket. “Perhaps we could hook up that winch, and talk about the Tarr family later?”

IT TOOK A QUARTER OF AN HOUR TO GET THE LAND ROVER POSITIONED at the best angle and the cable set properly on the tow hook. After that, the winch did its simple work and the trapped car was gradually freed from the drainage ditch and pulled up to a drivable position on the road, well above the point at which it had lost traction. Landon then rewound his winch cable into its housing, turned the Land Rover around, and proceeded back up the hill with Gurney following.

Once over the crest, the visibility improved considerably and some of the tension went out of Madeleine’s expression.

“Quite a character,” she said.

“The country squire or the weird handyman?”

“The country squire. He seems to know a lot.”

Madeleine’s attention was then drawn to the stark vista appearing before them.

A series of jagged peaks and ridges the color of wine dregs stretched out toward a fog-shrouded horizon. Distance created the illusion of sharp edges—as though those peaks and ridges had been hacked with tin snips out of sheet metal.

The closest peak—perhaps two miles away—was distinctive enough that Gurney recognized it from his quick Internet search of the area before setting out. It was known as Devil’s Fang, no doubt because it gave the impression of a monstrous eyetooth turned up against the heavens. Joined to it was Cemetery Ridge. Huge granite blocks arrayed upon it ages ago bore some resemblance to gravestones silhouetted against the sky.

The steep two-mile-long face of Cemetery Ridge formed the west side of Wolf Lake. At the lake’s northern extremity, in the long shadow of Devil’s Fang, stood the old Adirondack Great Camp known as Wolf Lake Lodge.

CHAPTER 14

As the road descended toward the lake, the forest reverted to fuller and taller pines, temporarily hiding the surrounding mountains from view.

When a final curve of the road brought them abreast of the lake and heading directly toward the imposing stone and timber structure standing at the lake’s end, with Cemetery Ridge and Devil’s Fang looming over all, the primeval essence of the place struck Gurney again with surprising force.

Ahead of them a massive log-and-shingle portico extended from the front of the lodge. Landon had already parked the Land Rover under it and was waving to Gurney to park behind him. As he and Madeleine emerged from their car, Landon was pocketing his cell phone.

“I was just letting Austen know you’re here.” He gestured toward the glass-and-timber entrance doors, one of which was being pushed open as he spoke.

Out came a short, solid-looking man with a shaved head and small sharp eyes. As he came toward Gurney he emitted a raw energy, which seemed to be seeping through his bare scalp in the form of sweat.

“Detective Gurney, Mrs. Gurney, welcome to Wolf Lake Lodge. I’m Austen Steckle.”

His handshake had the hardness of a professional athlete’s. The fingernails, Gurney noticed, were bitten to the quick. His sandpapery voice and urban intonation were as far as they could be from Landon’s vaguely upper-class purr of entitlement.

“Can I help with your luggage?”

“Thanks, but there isn’t that much.” Gurney went around and retrieved the two duffel bags. “Can I leave the car where it is?”

“Sure, no problem. We also have a couple of nice new Jeeps available for the use of our guests. Good off-roaders. If that’s your pleasure. Just let me know if you want to use one.”

“Okay, Dave,” interjected Landon, “looks like you’re in good hands.” He took a quick look at his watch. “Two forty-two. What say we regroup in the Hearth Room at three for a drink?”

“Fine. See you then.”

Landon ambled in through the lodge doors, followed by Steckle, who moved with a quickness and lightness of foot unusual in a stocky man. Gurney and Madeleine entered last.

Inside the big double doors was a pine-paneled, cathedral-ceilinged reception area illuminated by an immense chandelier fashioned from deer antlers. There were sets of antlers mounted on the walls, along with antique guns, swords, knives, fur pelts, and Native American feathered shields.

A stuffed black bear stood erect in a shadowed corner, teeth and claws bared.

When Gurney got to the reception desk, Steckle held up a large, old-fashioned key. “For you, Detective. The Presidential Suite. On the house.”

When this produced a questioning look from Gurney, Steckle went on. “Jane told me why you’re here—the favor you’re doing, looking into the case, and all that. So the least we could do is make you as comfortable as possible. The Presidential Suite used to be the owner’s suite, the founder of the lodge, name of Dalton Gall. Very successful man. Owned mines, minerals. Made money like trees make leaves. A few years after the lodge opened, President Warren G. Harding arrived. Of course they gave him the owner’s suite. The president loved it so much he stayed for a whole month. After that it became known as the Presidential Suite. I hope you like it. Shall we go up now?”

Gurney picked up the two duffel bags, and Steckle led the way out of the reception area, up a broad pine staircase, and into a corridor with an elaborately figured red rug. It reminded Gurney of the rug in the hotel corridor in The Shining.

Steckle stopped at a large wooden door and inserted the big metal key through an old-fashioned keyhole. He turned the tarnished knob and pushed the door open. He went in first, and few seconds later lights came on, revealing a large room furnished in a country-masculine style with leather couches and armchairs, Native American rugs, and rustic floor and table lamps.

Madeleine hung back, letting Gurney go in ahead of her.

“There are no dead animals in there, are there, like that huge thing in the lobby?”

“No, nothing like that.”

She came in tentatively. “I hate those things.”

Steckle opened the drapes, exposing a row of windows overlooking the lake. A glass door led to a balcony. The wall to Gurney’s left was broken by a doorway and a broad archway. The archway led to a room-sized sleeping area with a four-poster bed. The doorway led to a bathroom larger than his den at home—with a separate toilet area, a corner shower stall, an oversized basin, a huge claw-foot tub, and a table piled with bath towels.

The wall to his right was dominated by a portrait of Warren Harding, who presided over America’s slide into the lawlessness of the Prohibition era. The portrait was hanging above a stocked bar. Further along the wall was a stone fireplace and an iron rack of split logs.

Steckle pointed to the view through the windows. “Welcome to the wilderness.”

NAMED FOR ITS GIGANTIC STONE FIREPLACE, THE HEARTH ROOM was furnished in the same rustic-luxury style as the Gurneys’ suite—with leather furniture, tribal art and weaponry, and a bar topped with the scotches, bourbons, gins, ports, sherries, vermouths, crystal glasses, and silver ice buckets of a past generation.

As Gurney and Madeleine entered the room, Norris Landon called to them with a welcoming wave from one of the leather club chairs. “Make yourselves a couple of stiff drinks and come sit by the fire.”

Gurney went to the bar and chose a plain club soda. He was surprised to see Madeleine make herself a gin and orange juice.

They took their drinks to the fireplace end of the room and sat on a couch facing Landon, who looked very much at home in the clothes he’d changed into: a yellow cashmere sweater, tan corduroy pants, and shearling-lined moccasins. With a languid smile he raised his glass of what looked like scotch on the rocks. “Here’s to the success of your visit.”

“Thank you,” said Gurney.

Madeleine offered a smile and a nod.

Landon sipped his drink. “Always nice to sit by a fire, eh?”

“Very nice,” said Gurney. “Are there any other guests?”

“At present we have the place to ourselves. Mixed blessing that, since staff’s been reduced. The Hammonds, of course, are still in residence—bit separate though, over in Richard’s chalet. Austen cancelled all the winter reservations after the tragedy. Understandable decision, that. Considering the event itself and then the media explosion. Wise to shut the place down until a satisfactory conclusion is achieved. At least that’s my understanding of Austen’s decision. Austen and Peyton’s decision, I should say.”

Gurney nodded, sipped his soda water. “With all the reservations cancelled, your presence must mean you’re more than an ordinary guest.”

Landon produced an embarrassed laugh. “I’d never claim to be more than ordinary. But I do come here quite often. And since I was already here when it all happened . . . I suppose Austen deemed it fit to let me stay on.”

“How long have you been coming here?” asked Madeleine.

“Not all that long, just discovered the place a couple of years ago. But once I discovered it . . . well, there’s upland bird season, spring turkey season, fall turkey season, deer season, bear season, small game season, fishing season. And, to be perfectly honest, I simply fell in love with the place. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the current mess doesn’t put an end to it all.” He raised his glass again. “Here’s to a speedy resolution. For everyone’s sake.”

The silence that ensued was broken by Gurney. “All those game seasons you mentioned must require quite an arsenal of weapons.”

“I would admit to having a nice variety of sporting arms.”

“You said something about the lodge having a reduced staff these days. Are there employees besides Austen on site?”

“There’s a chef who commutes from Plattsburgh. A kitchen assistant. A housemaid to keep things tidy. Other workers who can be called in when Austen sees the need.” He shrugged, almost apologetically. “And then, of course, there’s Barlow Tarr.”

“Not the typical employee of a thousand-dollar-a-night inn.”

“No, certainly not. It was a notion of Ethan’s, you see, that all human beings are redeemable. Crock of manure, in my opinion. Whole Tarr clan a perfect case in point. Even Ethan, with all his bloody optimism, was getting close to throwing in the towel with Barlow. Very difficult thing for Ethan to admit that someone was beyond his help. Thing is, Barlow’s like the mountain weather. Turn your back for a minute, and you never know what it might turn into. Ethan told him he could stay on, live in his cabin out in the woods—on the condition that he kept away from the guests. But apparently he approached you—a definite violation of the agreement.” Landon paused again, apparently weighing the implications.

“Was Ethan in the habit of employing . . . people with problems?”

“Indeed he was. His greatest virtue and greatest flaw.”

Gurney paused to consider this pattern, before taking a small sidestep. “How much do you know about the Gall New Life Foundation?”

Landon studied his drink. “Only that it seems to be exactly what one would expect Ethan to have put together. He was a complex man. Determined, stubborn, controlling. An iron will. Absolute faith that his way was the right way. A bulldozer of a businessman. Single-handedly resurrected this place.”

“You sound like you see a problem in that.”

“Ah. Well. At the heart of the bulldozer there was a missionary. A zealot. A zealot with a belief that anyone can be elevated. Hence the Gall New Life Foundation—dedicated to the reeducation and reentry of serious felons into productive society.”

“I’ve heard that it produced some success stories.”

“Indeed it did. Big success stories. Perfect example is Austen himself.”

“Austen Steckle is a paroled felon?”

Landon screwed up his face in an expression of chagrin. “May have overstepped myself there, although he’s never made a secret of it. . . . Still, not my place. It’s his story to tell, not mine.” There was a brief silence. “If you have questions about anything else here at Wolf Lake, I’ll be happy to share my modest knowledge.”

Madeleine spoke up, sounding anxious. “Before, out the road, that Tarr person said something about the lake having no bottom. Do you have any idea what he meant by that?”

“Ah, yes. The bottomless lake. One of the Devil’s Twins.”

“The what?”

“The Devil’s Twins. A peculiarity of the local geology, dramatically enhanced by local superstition. It seems that two lakes in this area, quite a few miles apart on opposite sides of a major ridge line, are actually connected through a series of underground channels and caverns. Wolf Lake is one of the two.”

“That’s what he meant by ‘no bottom’?”

“Yes and no. There’s a bit more to the story—the way the connection between the lakes was discovered. Back in the mid nineteen hundreds, two young girls were in a canoe on the other lake. The canoe capsized. One girl made it to shore, the other drowned. They dragged the lake, sent down divers, searched for days, weeks, but couldn’t find the body. Great mystery at the time. Lots of theories flying around. Criminal conspiracies, supernatural explanations. Total circus. Journalistic inanity has been with us for a long time.”

Madeleine was blinking impatiently. “But then what?”

“Ah. Well. Then. Five years later, a fellow fishing for bullheads snagged his line on what remained of the long-missing body—mostly a skeleton, with some of her clothes still on it. Thing of it is, he was fishing here on Wolf Lake, not on the lake where the girl drowned.”

Gurney looked skeptical. “Is there some solid evidence beyond that for the underground connections?”

“Yes. Repeated simultaneous measurements of both lake surfaces show that they always rise and fall precisely in unison, even when a heavy rain storm only impacts one of them directly. So there’s no doubt about the existence of the connection, although it’s never been adequately explored or mapped.” He took another sip from his glass and smiled. “Situations like that can take hold of the ignorant imagination, ever ready to concoct outrageous explanations, especially ones involving evil forces.”

Although Gurney couldn’t disagree, he found Landon’s manner irritating. He decided to change the subject. “You seem able to come and go as you please. Either you’re retired or you have a pretty flexible job.”

“I’m mostly retired. Bit of consulting here and there. Love being out and about. Love the wilderness. Living the outdoorsman’s dream. Time passes, you know. Only live once. You know the old saying: No one on his deathbed ever wishes he’d spent more time in the office. How about you, Dave? Jane tells me that you’re partly retired, partly not.”

Gurney still found it difficult to describe his status. Madeleine would often comment that the term ‘retired’ hardly fit a man who’d immersed himself in four major murder cases since his official departure from the job.

“I’m occasionally asked for my opinion of a situation,” said Gurney. “And occasionally that leads to some deeper involvements.”

Landon smiled, perhaps at the intentional vagueness. “My own feeling regarding careers, particularly ones involving risk, is that there’s a time to walk away. Let others do their jobs, grow into their responsibilities. Be a tragedy for a man to lose his life for no reason beyond the desire to keep risking it.”

“There could be other reasons for not walking away.”

“Ah. Well. Then it becomes more complicated.” He studied his drink. “Ego, pride, who we believe we are, satisfactions that give meaning to our lives . . .” His voice trailed off.

After a silence Gurney asked casually, “What sort of consulting work do you do?”

“I advise clients on international business matters. Legal and cultural issues, security concerns. Much rather be in the woods.” He turned toward Madeleine. “What about you? You an outdoor sort of woman? I bet you are.”

The question appeared to jar her out of a different train of thought. “I do enjoy being outdoors. If I can’t get outside, I start to feel—”

Before she could finish, Jane Hammond walked in from the reception area, radiating a mixture of relief and anxiety. Her short, badly dyed hair was sticking out at odd angles. “Dave! Madeleine! You made it! I was afraid with the horrible weather . . . but here you are! So good to see you!” Her voice was hoarse.

“Norris came to our rescue,” said Madeleine.

“Rescue? My God! What happened?”

Madeleine glanced over at Gurney.

He shrugged. “Difficult spot on the road, bad maneuver on my part, a slippery ditch . . .”

“Oh no! I was afraid of something like that happening—which is why I asked Norris to check the road. I’m so glad now that I did.”

“Everything’s fine.”

“We did have a scary encounter,” added Madeleine.

Jane’s eyes widened. “What happened?”

“A strange man came out of the woods.”

“Tarr,” said Landon.

“Oh. Barlow. He can be scary. Did he say anything . . . threatening?”

“He said something about the evil here at Wolf Lake.”

“My God!” Jane looked at Landon, her face a caricature of distress.

“Ah. Well. There’s the Tarr family history. Not pretty. Ending up in the local madhouse was a Tarr tradition.”

Madeleine’s eyes widened. “When you say ‘local madhouse,’ what exactly—”

Landon answered before she finished. “State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Not far from here. But not the sort of local attraction the lodge would advertise. When people know about it, it has a way of preying on their minds. You ever heard an Adirondack loon? Even when you know it’s just a bird you’re hearing, that mournful cry can still give you chills. And if you start thinking that what you’re hearing might really be the wailing of a madman wandering in the woods, well . . . that’s not conducive to easy sleeping.”

Jane stared at him for a moment, then turned to Gurney and Madeleine, who were occupying the end seats on the couch. “I told Richard I invited you for dinner. He wasn’t totally thrilled, but he didn’t suddenly announce he had to be somewhere else. So we’re past the first hurdle. I thought that dinner would be—”

A single, soft musical note, very close by, stopped her in mid-sentence.

Landon shifted in his chair, took a cell phone from his pocket, and peered down at the screen. “Sorry,” he said, rising to his feet. Putting the phone to his ear, he left the room.

Jane picked up where she left off. “I thought that dinner would be a natural, relaxed way for you get a feeling for the situation . . . and get to know Richard . . . so you can see for yourself how crazy, how completely crazy, it is for anyone to imagine that he . . .” She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes.

Gurney tended to greet displays of emotion with skepticism, watching for the overly dramatic gesture, listening for the false note. But he concluded that if Jane Hammond was faking her concern for her brother, she was damn good at it.

“So you changed your mind about how to handle this? I thought the idea was that I’d just show up unannounced, and your brother would feel compelled to see me because I’d traveled all this way just to talk to him.”

“Yes, but then I thought dinner would be even better—more casual, especially with Madeleine present, a good way for you to get to know who Richard really is.”

“He had no objection to that?”

Jane dabbed at her nose with a tissue. “Well . . . I did tell him a small fib.”

“How small?”

She took a step closer to the couch and leaned forward in a conspiratorial attitude. “I told him that I’d asked for your help but that you had major reservations about the case, and that you were reluctant to get involved. Since Richard doesn’t want you—or anyone else—involved, then naturally he’d be more relaxed with you if he thought you were backing away.”

“Then why would I be here now?”

“I told him that you and your wife would be passing through the Adirondacks within a few miles of Wolf Lake on your way to a Vermont ski vacation, and I invited you to stop and have dinner with us.”

“So your brother will be happy to have me in his house as long as I’m not interested in the case?”

“As long as you’re not involved in the case. Some degree of interest would be normal, right?”

“These major reservations I’m supposed to have about getting involved—did he ask you what they were?”

“I said I didn’t know. If he asks you, you can just make something up.”

This woman wasn’t just a caretaker and a fixer, thought Gurney. This was someone with an appetite for manipulation. An arranger of other people’s lives who saw herself as a selfless helper.

His natural curiosity about the case was starting to be outweighed by these awkward twists in the process of his involvement. Reluctantly, however, he accepted the new plan—telling himself there would be exit doors if he later changed his mind.

“Dinner—where and what time?”

“At Richard’s chalet. Five thirty—is that okay? We eat early in the winter.”

He looked at Madeleine.

She nodded. “Fine.”

Jane’s eyes brightened. “I’ll let the chef know. He’s limited these days, but I’m sure he’ll manage something nice.” She sneezed, applied her now-crumpled tissue to her nose. “Richard’s chalet is easy to get to. Stay on the lake road. It’s just a half mile or so around the tip of the lake, on the forest side of the road. There are three chalets. The first two are unoccupied. Richard’s is the third. If you come to the boathouse or to Gall House, where the road ends, you’ll know you’ve gone too far.”

“Gall House?”

“The Gall family residence. Of course, the only one living there now is Peyton. Peyton and . . . his guests.”

“Guests?”

“His lady friends—although they’re not really ladies and not really friends. No matter. None of my business.” She sniffled. “It’s a huge, depressing stone house, looming up out of the woods, right at the base of Devil’s Fang—with a big ugly fence around it. But I really don’t think you’ll get that far. You can’t miss the chalet. I’ll make sure the outside lights are on.”

“Good,” said Gurney, starting to feel restless. Questions were accumulating in his mind that he wasn’t comfortable asking just yet.

CHAPTER 15

The drab winter light coming through the suite windows didn’t so much illuminate the space as cast an ashen pall over it. Madeleine stood, her arms crossed over her breasts, while Gurney moved from lamp to lamp, switching them on.

“Does that fireplace work?” she asked.

“I imagine so. Would you like me to get a fire going?”

“It would help.”

At the hearth Gurney found a neat pile of firewood, some kindling, half a dozen waxy fire-starter bricks, and a long-stemmed butane lighter. He began to arrange the materials on the iron grate in the firebox. He found the task a simple respite from the issues on his mind, which were not simple at all. As he was about to apply the lighter to the kindling, his phone rang. The screen told him it was Rebecca Holdenfield.

To take the call or not to take it—that was the question. He still hadn’t reached a decision about their proposed meeting at the Cold Brook Inn; but maybe she had information that could nudge the decision one way or the other.

He took the call.

She told him that she now planned to be in Plattsburgh for at least two days that week—from the following morning until the evening of the day after that.

He promised to get back to her as soon as his schedule became clearer—which could happen later that evening, once he’d met with Hammond—and ended the call.

Madeleine frowned. “What does she want?”

He was taken aback by her tone. He felt his own frustration rising. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Madeleine said nothing, just shook her head.

He paused. “Ever since yesterday morning, there’s been something going on with you. Do you want to tell me about it?”

She began rubbing her upper arms with her hands. “I just need to get warm.” She turned and walked to the bathroom doorway. “I’m going to soak the cold out of my bones.” She went in and closed the door behind her.

After several long seconds, Gurney went to the hearth and lit the kindling. He watched for a few restless minutes as the flames flickered and grew.

When the fire was well established, he went to the bathroom door, knocked and listened, but heard only a heavy stream of water. He knocked again, and again there was no response. He opened the door and saw Madeleine reclining in the huge claw-foot tub as the water gushed down between her feet from a pair of oversized silver faucets. Wisps of steam rose from the surface of the water. A film of condensation was forming on the tile wall next to the tub.

“Did you hear me knock?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t answer.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She closed her eyes. “Go out and close the door. Please. The cold air is coming in.”

He hesitated, then shut the door, perhaps a bit more firmly than was necessary.

He put on his ski jacket and hat, picked up the big key to the suite, went downstairs through the reception area and out under the portico into the frigid air.

He thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and started walking along the narrow lake road with no destination or purpose in mind beyond a desire to be out of the lodge. Wolf Lake, now the color of deeply tarnished silver in the deepening dusk, stretched into the distance on his left. The spruce forest on his right appeared impenetrable. The lower spaces between the trees were filled with interlocking tangles of spiky branches.

He inhaled long, deep, cold breaths as he walked, in an effort to clear out the toxic jumble. But it wasn’t working. There were too many details, too many eccentric personalities, too much emotional confusion. Barely thirty-two hours ago his only concern was an oddly behaving porcupine. Now he was grappling with mysteries buried under impossibilities.

Never had Gurney felt so completely stymied by the basic questions in a case. And he couldn’t get Bowman Cox out of his mind—the man leaning forward over the Formica table in the diner, flecks of spittle at the corners of his mouth, insisting on Hammond’s responsibility for the death of Christopher Wenzel.

Gurney passed by an extended clearing in the forest with three impressive log-and-glass chalets set comfortably apart from each other. He walked on and soon came to a large structure occupying the space on his left between the road and the water. In the dusky light it took him a minute to identify it as a cedar-shingle boathouse. Given the moneyed history of the estate, he imagined the boathouse might be sheltering a fleet of vintage Chris-Craft runabouts.

As his attention shifted to the jagged prominence of Devil’s Fang, black against the gunmetal clouds, a slight movement caught his eye, little more than a speck in the sky. A bird was slowly circling above the desolate peak—perhaps a hawk, but at that distance in the failing light it could as easily have been a vulture or an eagle. He regretted leaving his binoculars in his duffel bag.

Thinking of things he wished he had with him, the flashlight in the glove box—

His train of thought was broken by the sound of an approaching car. It was coming from somewhere on the road behind him, and it was moving fast, faster than made sense on a narrow dirt and gravel surface. He stepped quickly away from the road toward the spruces.

Seconds later a gleaming black Mercedes hurtled past. A hundred yards or so farther along the road it slowed, its headlights illuminating a tall chain-link fence. A motorized gate was in the process of sliding open.

One or more windows of the car must have been rolled down, because Gurney could now hear shrieks of female laughter. A burly man emerged from a small security booth by the gate and waved the car through. He returned to the booth and the gate slid shut. There was a final shriek from the receding car, then nothing.

Nothing but the absolute silence of the wilderness.

CHAPTER 16

By the time he got back to the lodge the grandfather clock in the reception area indicated it was a quarter past five. When he went upstairs to the suite, he half expected that Madeleine would still be soaking in the tub, immersed in the preoccupation she was unwilling to discuss. But he found the bathroom empty, a wet towel draped over the end of the tub.

The lights were on in the main room, just as he’d left them. The fire he’d started was still burning. Warren Harding was still projecting an image of scowling respectability.

He checked the sleeping alcove and its four-poster bed, but the bed was untouched. Madeleine’s duffel bag was open on a bench at the foot of it, but there was no sign of Madeleine.

Then the glass door leading out to the balcony opened, and she stepped into the room. She was wearing black jeans, a cream silk blouse, and her ski jacket. She’d even put on a trace of makeup, a rarity for her.

“Time to go?” she asked.

“What were you doing out there?”

She didn’t answer. They went downstairs in silence and got in the Outback. They didn’t speak again until they arrived at the chalet.

JANE HAMMOND MET THEM AT THE DOOR AND USHERED THEM IN, taking their jackets.

The entrance area of the chalet was formed by three partitions of lustrously varnished honey-colored wood. In addition to creating a kind of foyer, the partitions served as display surfaces for stone tomahawks, deerskin pouches, and other primitive tools. Eyeing the tomahawks, Gurney couldn’t help thinking of Barlow Tarr’s hatchet.

Jane leaned toward him. “Were you aware of anyone following you?”

“No. But I wasn’t checking. Why do you ask?”

“Sometimes there’s a big SUV lurking out there on the lake road. Richard is sure he’s being followed every time he leaves the house. I think they want him to fall apart. By putting all this pressure on him. Do you think that’s what it is?”

He shrugged. “At this point, there’s no way of—”

He was interrupted by his phone. He glanced at the screen, saw that the call was from Rebecca Holdenfield, and, despite a strong desire to speak to her, let it go into voicemail.

“Come,” said Jane nervously. “We can talk about this later. Let me introduce you.”

She led them into the chalet’s cathedral-ceilinged great room. A small, slim man with his back to them was fiddling with the logs in a massive fieldstone fireplace. His delicate physique was a surprise. Gurney had been imagining someone larger.

“Richard,” said Jane. “These are the people I’ve been telling you about.”

Hammond turned toward them. With a wan smile that could have been an expression of lukewarm welcome or plain weariness, he extended his hand first to Madeleine, then to Gurney. It was small and smooth, a bit on the cool side, the grip unenthusiastic.

His silky blond hair, almost platinum, was parted on the side. In the front it had fallen down in wispy bangs over his forehead, like a little boy’s. But there was nothing childlike about his eyes. A disconcertingly luminous aquamarine, they were riveting, almost unnerving.

By contrast, the man’s voice was soft and nondescript. Gurney wondered if it was a form of compensation for the uniquely startling eyes. Or a way of reinforcing their dominance.

“My sister told me a lot about you.”

“Nothing disturbing, I hope.”

“She told me you were the detective who managed to capture Peter Piggert, the incestuous murderer who cut his mother in half. And Jorge Kunzman, who kept his victims’ heads in his refrigerator. And the Satanic Santa, who mailed out body parts as Christmas presents. And the demented psychiatrist who sent his patients to a sadist who raped and skinned them before tossing them off the back of his yacht into the ocean. That’s quite an accomplished career you’ve had. Quite a few madmen you’ve managed to vanquish. And here you are at Wolf Lake. Just passing through. On your way to a romantic inn. Am I right?”

“Yes, that’s where we’re heading.”

“But, for the moment, here you are. In the deep wilderness. Miles from nowhere. Tell me—how do you like it so far?”

“The weather could be better.”

Hammond produced a forced little laugh, while his gaze remained steady and observant. “It’s more likely to get worse before it gets better.”

“Worse?” asked Madeleine.

“Rising winds, falling temperatures, snow squalls, ice pellets.”

“When is this supposed to happen?”

“Sometime tomorrow. Or the next day. Forecasts here are always changing. The mountains have unpredictable moods. Our weather is like the mind of a manic-depressive.” He smiled slightly at what he seemed to regard as a joke. “Do you know the Adirondacks?”

She hesitated. “Not really.”

“These mountains are different from your Catskills. Far more primitive.”

“I’m just concerned about getting snowed in.”

He gave her a long curious look. “That concerns you?”

“You don’t think it should?”

“Jane told me you were driving to Vermont to find snow. Walk in it, ski in it. But perhaps the snow will find you first.”

Madeleine said nothing. Gurney noticed a tiny involuntary shudder go through her body.

Hammond licked his lips in a rapid little snakelike movement, his gaze shifting to Gurney. “Wolf Lake has become such an interesting place lately, hasn’t it? Irresistible, I would think, for a detective.”

Jane, perhaps concerned at her brother’s ironic tone, intervened brightly. “Dinner is laid out on the sideboard—salmon canapés, salad, bread, chicken with apricot sauce, wild rice, asparagus, and some nice blueberry tarts for dessert. Plates at the near end of the sideboard; silverware and glasses on the table, along with bottles of chardonnay, merlot, and springwater. Shall we?”

Her tone was as bubbly as her brother’s was edgy. But it served the purpose of getting everyone to the food and then to the table. She and Richard seated themselves across from Dave and Madeleine.

Before anyone could say another word the lights went out.

In the sudden near-darkness only the dying fire provided glimmers of illumination.

“It’s just the generator,” said Jane. “It’ll be back on in a few seconds.”

When the lights came back on, her hand was on Richard’s arm. She withdrew it and turned her attention to Gurney and Madeleine. “We’re twenty miles from any kind of civilization, so the lodge compound has its own pair of generators. They switch from one to the other every so often, and we get short blackouts. Austen says it’s perfectly normal, nothing to worry about.”

“You do have phone service here, right?” asked Madeleine.

“The lodge compound has its own cell tower. But once you pass over the high ridge, there’s a dead zone with no reception until you get to Plattsburgh. Of course, the cell tower depends on the generators, so if they go out . . .” Then she quickly added, “But there’s virtually no chance of both generators failing at the same time.”

Gurney changed the subject. “I gather Ethan Gall was quite a presence in the world.”

Richard answered. “Indeed he was. A remarkable man—dynamic, generous, supportive. My work here was his idea.”

“Now that he’s gone,” said Madeleine, “will you be going back to California?”

“My two-year contract was up last month, but shortly before his death Ethan offered to renew it for another year, and I accepted the offer.” He hesitated, as if considering how much he wanted to disclose. “Ethan died before the agreement was signed, but Austen was aware of it, and he assured me it would be honored.”

Gurney saw an opening for a question he’d been wanting to ask. “I gather that Austen Steckle, despite his background, has become a man of some integrity?”

“Austen has rough edges, but I have no complaints.”

“What was his conviction for?”

“I’d prefer that you asked him.” He paused. “But I have a question for you. Why did you tell Jane you didn’t want to get involved in my situation here?”

Gurney decided to answer as truthfully as he could. “Jane told me that you refused to hire professional help, but that she’d like me to help her gather facts and figure out what’s behind these apparent suicides. She certainly has a right to explore the affair for her own peace of mind. But frankly, I’m not comfortable being involved in that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re the key to it all. Somehow, you’re at the heart of what’s been happening. You may not be at the heart of it the way Gilbert Fenton says you are. But in some way, you’ve been pulled into the center of it. It would be foolish for me to get involved without your cooperation.”

Jane’s eyes widened in alarm. This was plainly not the casual approach she wanted him to take.

A silence ensued during which Richard appeared to be imagining dark possibilities.

Gurney decided to take a risk. “Remember, Richard, at the end of the day . . . there was no dead body in the trunk.”

If Hammond was shocked that Gurney was aware of the incident, he concealed it well. His only reaction came after a delay of several seconds.

It was an almost imperceptible nod of acknowledgment.

THE RELEVANCE OF THE TRUNK EPISODE SEEMED TO CREATE A SHIFT in Hammond’s perspective. It also brought the edgy momentum of the gathering to a kind of resting place.

At Jane’s suggestion, they moved from the table to a half circle of armchairs facing the hearth. The glowing coals created a soothing focal point that made the lull in the conversation feel comfortable. Jane served coffee and brought them each a slice of blueberry tart from the sideboard.

The relaxed mood, however, was fragile.

Gurney sensed it ebbing away as they were finishing their coffee and Hammond asked him if he’d read the statement he’d issued to the press.

“I did.”

“Then you know that I was absolutely clear on certain points?”

“Yes.”

“I said that I would hire no defenders or representatives of any kind.”

“True.”

“I didn’t mean that I myself would hire no defenders, but I’d have my sister do it for me. I wasn’t being devious. I meant what I said.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“But now you want me to reverse that position and bless your employment by my sister.”

“Your agreeing to my involvement won’t reverse anything. I have no intention of being your defender or representative.”

Hammond appeared bewildered, Jane alarmed.

Gurney continued. “The only purpose of my involvement—if I choose to get involved at all—would be to discover how and why those four people died.”

“So you’re not interested in proving my innocence?”

“Only to the extent that the truth itself proves your innocence. My job is uncovering the facts. I’m a detective, not a lawyer. If I were to get involved in this case, I wouldn’t be representing you or your sister. I’d be representing Ethan Gall, Christopher Wenzel, Leo Balzac, and Steven Pardosa. Discovering the truth behind their deaths is something I’d be doing for them. If the truth should end up benefiting you, that would be fine with me. But I’d be representing their interests, not yours.”

Throughout this speech Jane looked like she was in a panic to jump in.

Richard’s only hint of emotion was a flicker of sadness at the mention of Ethan Gall.

He regarded Gurney for a long moment before asking, “What do you want from me?”

“Any thoughts or suspicions you may have about the four deaths. Anything that could help me make sense of a case that right now makes no sense at all.”

“It makes sense to Gilbert Fenton.”

“And to Reverend Bowman Cox,” Gurney added, wondering what impact the name might have on Hammond.

Judging from his blank look, it had none.

Gurney explained, “Bowman Cox is the Florida minister Wenzel confided his nightmare to. I was curious about the nightmare, so I got in touch with him. He can recite it by heart.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He says the nightmare is the key to understanding Wenzel’s death, and your role in it.”

“My role being . . .?”

“He told me your therapeutic specialty is the manufacture of homosexuals.”

“Not that old nonsense all over again! Did he mention how I do it?”

“You put people in a deep trance. You go through some lurid mumbo jumbo to convince them that they’re really homosexual. And when they emerge from the trance, they either dive headfirst into their new lifestyle or become suicidal at the very thought of it.”

“That must be a hell of a trance I’m putting them in.”

“Yes. Literally. A hell of a trance. Cox claims that your power to destroy people’s lives comes from a secret partnership with Satan.”

Hammond sighed. “Isn’t it remarkable that here in America we treat the mentally ill like dirt—except when they make a religion out of their craziness and hatred, and claim it’s Christianity? Then we flock to their churches.”

A valid enough observation, thought Gurney, but he didn’t want to get off on a tangent. “Let me ask you a clinical question. Could a hypnotherapist implant the details of a dream in a patient’s mind and actually cause him to have that dream?”

“Absolutely not. It’s a neurological impossibility.”

“Okay. Could a hypnotherapist talk a client into committing suicide?”

“Not unless the client was already suffering from a depression severe enough to incline him that way to begin with.”

“Did you note that kind of depression in any of the four men who ended up dead?”

“No. They all had positive feelings about the future. That’s not a suicidal state of mind.”

“Does that lead you to any conclusion?”

“My conclusion is that they were victims of murders staged to resemble suicides.”

“Yet Fenton is ignoring that possibility. He’s claiming that the unlikelihood of their committing suicide indicates that you caused it. Do you have any idea why he’d take such a strange position?”

Jane broke in, “Because he’s a dishonest, lying bastard!” Her fragile china plate with its half-eaten slice of blueberry tart slipped from her lap and shattered on the floor. She stared down at it, muttered a frustrated “Shit!” and began cleaning it up. Madeleine got a sponge and some paper towels from the sink to help.

Hammond answered Gurney’s question. “There are two puzzling things about Fenton’s position. First, it’s based on a clinical impossibility. Secondly, he believes what he’s saying.”

“How do you know that?”

“That’s what I’m good at. Nine times out of ten, I can hear in a person’s voice the sound of the truth, the sound of a lie. The way I practice therapy is based a little on technique and a lot on insight into what people really believe and want, regardless of what they tell me.”

“And you’re convinced that Fenton believes the wild scenario he’s hyping to the press?”

“He has no doubt about it. It’s in his voice, his eyes, his body language.”

“Just when I thought I couldn’t be more confused, you’ve added another twist. A homicide investigator might briefly consider the possibility that a hypnotist was behind a string of suicides. But to embrace it as the only possible answer seems crazy.” He glanced over at Madeleine to see if she had any reaction; but her eyes were on the dying red coals, her mind plainly somewhere else.

Another question occurred to him. “You said you were good at sensing what a person really wants. What do you think Fenton wants?”

“He wants me to confess my involvement in the four deaths. He told me that it’s the only way out, and if I don’t confess, my life will be over.”

“And if you do confess to some yet unnamed felony, what then?”

“He said if I confessed to my part in causing all four suicides, then everything would be all right.”

That was the way some investigators talked mentally challenged suspects into confessing, often to crimes they hadn’t committed. If you keep denying it, we’ll get mad, and then you’ll really be in trouble. Just admit you did it, then everything will be cleared up, and everyone can go home.

That’s the way crimes were hung on people with IQs of eighty.

Why on earth was Fenton taking that approach with a brilliant psychologist?

What goddamn twilight zone was this happening in?

CHAPTER 17

As they sat around the hearth nursing their coffees, Gurney took the opportunity to ask a very basic question. “Richard, I may be assuming I understand hypnosis better than I actually do. Can you give me a simple definition of it?”

Hammond lowered his coffee to the arm of his chair. “A quick story might make it clearer than a definition. When I was in high school in Mill Valley, I played some baseball. I wasn’t very good, barely good enough to stay on the team. Then one day I came up to bat five times, and I hit five home runs. I’d never hit a home run before that day. The most remarkable thing was how it felt. The effortlessness of it. I wasn’t even swinging that hard. I wasn’t trying to concentrate. I wasn’t trying to hit a home run. I wasn’t trying to do anything. I was completely relaxed. It seemed that the bat just kept finding the ball and striking it at the perfect angle. Five times in a row.”

“And the connection between that and hypnosis is . . .?”

“Achieving a goal depends less on overcoming external obstacles than on removing internal ones—dysfunctional beliefs, emotional static. Hypnotherapy, as I practice it, is devoted to clearing that internal path.”

“How?” That single, sharp word came from Madeleine—who, up to that point, had said almost nothing.

“By uncovering what’s in the way. Freeing you from it. Letting you move toward what you really want without being stuck in the underbrush of guilt, confusion, and self-sabotage.”

“Isn’t that overly dramatic?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. We really do get tangled up in some nasty internal thornbushes.”

“I thought hypnosis was about concentration.”

“Concentrated focus is the aim, but trying to concentrate is the worst way to get there. That’s like trying to levitate by pulling up on your ankles. Or like chasing happiness. You can’t catch it by chasing it.”

She looked unconvinced.

Gurney pursued the issue. “What sort of internal obstacles do you need to clear away with people who want to stop smoking?”

Hammond continued to observe Madeleine for a moment before turning to Gurney. “Two big ones—memories of anxiety being relieved by smoking, and a faulty risk calculation.”

“I understand the first. What’s the second?”

“The rational individual tends to avoid activities whose costs outweigh their pleasures. The addict tends to avoid activities whose costs precede their pleasures. In a clearly operating mind, the ultimate balance decides the matter. Immediate and future effects are both seen as real. In a mind warped by addiction, sequence is the crucial factor. Immediate effects are seen as real; future effects are seen as hypothetical.”

“So you bring some clarity to that?” asked Gurney.

“I don’t bring anything. I simply help the person see what they know in their heart to be true. I help them focus on what they really want.”

“You believe you have a reliable instinct for sensing what people want?”

“Yes.”

“Did all four of the victims want to stop smoking?”

Hammond blinked noticeably for the first time. “The desire was strong in Ethan, moderate in Wenzel. In Balzac and Pardosa it was between weak and nonexistent.”

“Why would you bother treating someone like that?”

“The truth about the nature and depth of a person’s desire becomes clear to me only during the course of the session. They all claimed to have a strong desire at the start.”

Gurney looked perplexed.

Hammond went on. “People frequently come at the urging of someone else. Their real desire is to get someone off their back by being compliant. And some people come in the belief that hypnosis will create a desire to stop, even though they have no such desire themselves. Pardosa was the worst—anxious, unfocused, completely scattered—the one who most obviously was doing it at someone else’s request. But he wouldn’t admit it.”

“What about their other desires?”

“Meaning?”

“Did your instinct for sensing people’s motives lead you to any other conclusions?”

“Some general ones.”

“About Ethan?”

Hammond hesitated, as though considering confidentiality issues. “Ethan wanted everyone in the world to behave better. He wanted to find a proper role for each person and put them in it. A place for everyone, and everyone in their place. He was certain that he knew best. He didn’t want recognition. Just obedience.”

“I assume he didn’t always get the kind of obedience he wanted?”

“He had his successes and his failures.”

“How about your sense of Christopher Wenzel? What did he want out of life?”

“Christopher wanted to win. In the worst way, literally. He saw life as a zero-sum game. Not only did he want to win, he wanted someone else to lose.”

“What about Leo Balzac?”

“Angry God of the Old Testament. He wanted all the bad guys to be punished. He would have enjoyed standing at a porthole in Noah’s ark, watching the sinners drowning.”

“And Steven Pardosa?”

“He was the one who lived in his parents’ basement. He was desperate for respect. More than anything else, he wanted to be seen as an adult—which is, of course, the universal desire of people who never grow up.”

“How about Peyton Gall?”

“Ah, Peyton. Peyton wants to feel good all the time, regardless of the cost to himself or others. Like most drug addicts, he has infantile ideas of happiness. He wants to do whatever he feels like doing, whenever he feels like doing it. He’s the prisoner of his own concept of freedom. The enormous inheritance he receives from Ethan’s estate will probably kill him.”

“How?”

“Unlimited financial resources will remove whatever slight restraint may have been modifying his behavior till now. His disregard of future consequences will take over completely. In Freudian terms, Peyton is pure, 100 percent rampaging id.”

All Gurney could think of was the car flying past him on the narrow dirt road and the wild shrieks of laughter. “How did he get along with his brother?”

“There was no ‘getting along’ at all. They lived in separate wings of the house and had as little to do with each other as possible, apart from Ethan’s sporadic efforts to apply whatever pressure he could. If Austen was Ethan’s greatest success, Peyton was his greatest failure.”

“Do you think Peyton would have been capable of killing Ethan?”

“Morally, yes. Emotionally, yes. Practically, no. I can’t see Peyton handling anything that would demand complex thinking, precise logistics, or steadiness under pressure.”

“Those are the qualities you believe were required to . . . to engineer the four deaths?”

“They may not have been the only ones, but they’re definitely the ones Peyton lacks.”

Another question came to mind—a bit of a wild tangent. “Getting back to your ability to sense what people want . . . what about me? What do you think I really want?”

Hammond flashed a chilly smile. “Are you testing me?”

“I’m curious to see how far your instincts take you.”

“Fair enough. What does Dave Gurney really want? It’s an interesting question.” He glanced at Madeleine, who was watching him intently, before turning back to Gurney.

“This is only the barest of first impressions, but I’d guess that you have one great imperative in your life. You want to understand. You want to connect the dots. Your personality is built around that central desire, a desire you perceive as a need. You claimed earlier that you want to represent the victims, to stand up for Ethan Gall, to achieve justice for him and the others. That may or may not be true, but I can see that you believe it. I can see that you’re being as open and honest with me as you can be. But you also appear to have a great deal on your mind, issues you’re not talking about.”

His gaze moved to Madeleine. “You have a great deal on your mind, too.”

“Oh?” She reflexively crossed her arms.

“You have something on your mind that’s making you uncomfortable. Most of that discomfort comes from keeping it a secret. Your husband knows something is troubling you. He senses that you’re afraid to tell him about it. That adds to his own burden. And you can see how your secret is affecting him, but you don’t see any simple way out of it, and it’s making your situation very painful.”

“You can tell all that . . . how? By the way I eat my blueberry tart?”

Hammond smiled softly. “Actually, by the way you don’t eat it. When Jane first mentioned blueberries, there was a positive flash of anticipation in your eyes, which was quickly overtaken by other thoughts. Your anxiety stole your appetite. You never touched your dessert.”

“Amazing. Who knew that failing to eat a tart could be so revealing?”

Her anger had no visible effect on Hammond, whose gentle smile persisted. “A lot is revealed by the way a husband and wife look at each other, particularly the way one looks at the other when the other isn’t looking back. So much is written on their faces.”

Madeleine returned his smile, but hers was cold. “Do you look in the mirror much?”

“It doesn’t work that way, if I understand what you’re getting at.”

“A man with your insight into facial expressions must gather all sorts of information from his own reflection.”

“I wish that were true. In my case, it’s not.”

“So your psychological dissection skills can only be applied to other people?”

He nodded ruefully. “Sometimes I think of it as my deal with the devil.”

Madeleine fell silent, perhaps surprised by the odd reply.

“What do you mean?” asked Gurney.

“I mean I’ve been given something of value, but there’s a related price.”

“The thing of value being your insight?”

“My insight into others. The price seems to be a lack of insight into myself. Clarity looking outward, blindness looking inward. I can see your motives plainly. Mine are a mystery to me. The better I get at understanding the actions of others, the less I seem able to understand my own. So there are questions whose answers I can only guess at. You wonder why I don’t hire a lawyer, why I don’t sue the police for defamation, why I don’t sue the tabloids and bloggers for libel, why I don’t hire a team of investigators to discredit Gilbert Fenton, why I don’t conduct an aggressive public relations campaign in my own defense. You wonder why the hell don’t I stand up and fight, launch an all-out war, and bury these bastards in their own lies?”

“It’s an excellent question. Is there an answer?”

“Of course there’s an answer. But I don’t know what it is.”

“No idea at all?”

“Oh, I can give you a list of ideas. How about a crushing fear of confrontation in general? Or the fear that greater confrontation would bring some dark moment of my past to light? Or a depressive conviction that struggling will only pull me deeper into the quicksand? Or outright paranoia, like my famous fixation on the imaginary body in the trunk of my car? Maybe I’m afraid of hiring an attorney who I’d never be free of, who’d somehow gain control of my life, that I’d be at his mercy forever. Perhaps it’s a sublimated terror of my mother, who taught me one thing above all else—never dare to deny whatever she was accusing me of at the moment. Accept the punishment being offered, or face one of her uncontrollable rages.”

He let out a sharp, humorless laugh—seemingly at his own speculations. “See what I mean? So many crazy fears to pick and choose from. On the other hand, perhaps I’m motivated by a manic conviction that nothing Fenton says can touch me. Maybe I have a Pollyanna conviction that the truth will prevail and my innocence will speak for itself. Or a foolish pride that tells me not to lower myself to the level of the fools attacking me. Could it be that I crave the satisfaction of seeing Gilbert Fenton’s whole case, his whole world, come crashing down without my having to lift a finger?”

He paused, the tip of his tongue darting across his lips. “Perhaps some of these possibilities have occurred to you. They occur to me every day. But I haven’t a clue which one is driving my decisions. All I know is that I want to proceed the way I’m proceeding.” This was addressed to Madeleine. Now he turned to Gurney. “If you want to seek justice for Ethan and the others, as a matter separate from my defense, that’s your business. I won’t stand in your way. But let me reiterate: you are not my advocate. Understood?”

“Understood.”

No one said anything for a while. The only sound was the faint tick-tick-tick-tick of sleet on the windowpanes.

Then, somewhere out in the forest, the howling began. The same howling that Gurney had heard when their car was stuck in the ditch.

It started with a low wail, like the moaning of wind at an ill-fitting door.

CHAPTER 18

By the time they were getting in their car to head back to the lodge, the howling, distant and mournful, seemed to be coming from every direction—from Cemetery Ridge, from the deep forest in back of Hammond’s chalet—even, it seemed, from the dark expanse of the lake itself.

Then it faded into the wind.

As they drove away from the chalet Gurney’s thoughts went back to Madeleine’s hostile response to Hammond’s observations. He felt some resentment that she had hijacked his conversation with Hammond. Admittedly, her approach had generated some revealing responses. But it might not have. It might have shut him down completely.

“You were pretty aggressive back there.”

“Was I?”

“The expression on your face seemed to be suggesting that Hammond was lying.”

“Only suggesting? I should have been clearer.”

“You’re sure he’s not telling the truth?”

“As sure as you are that he is.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He has X-ray vision when it comes to other people? But he pays for it with total blindness to his own motives? How convenient! What a perfect way to deflect questions about his decisions. Question: So, Richard, why did you do such and such? Answer: Golly, gee, I don’t know. I’m a genius, but I have no idea why I do anything. Don’t you see that he’s making a fool of you?”

“How?”

“By tossing out all those ‘maybe’ reasons for his not hiring a lawyer—making you believe he doesn’t have a clue which reason is the real one.”

“He didn’t make me believe anything. I told you I have an open mind.”

“Did your open mind notice that he left out the most likely reason of all?”

“Which is?”

“That a smart lawyer poking around in the case might discover things he doesn’t want discovered. Maybe those deaths are just the tip of an iceberg.”

“Christ, Maddie, anything is possible. But I still don’t see how he’s making a fool of me.”

“Why are you taking his side?”

“How am I taking his side?”

“Whatever I say, you defend him. You believe everything he says.”

“I don’t believe anything. I’m a homicide detective, not a gullible idiot.”

“Then why are you confusing his cleverness with real insight?”

Gurney was at a loss for words. He felt that Madeleine’s animus toward Hammond was coming from a vulnerable place in herself, not from an appraisal of the facts.

But what if she was right? What if she was seeing something he was missing? What if his own supposed objectivity wasn’t so objective after all?

They arrived back in their suite in a state of strained silence. Madeleine went into the bathroom and turned on the tub water.

He followed her. “Didn’t you just take a bath? Like three hours ago?”

“Is there a limit on the number of baths I’m allowed to take?”

“Maddie, what the hell is going on? You’ve been edgy ever since we agreed to come here. Shouldn’t we talk about whatever’s bothering you?”

“I’m sorry. I’m just not . . . very comfortable right now.” She shut the bathroom door.

All of this was new and unsettling. Madeleine with secrets. Madeleine hunkering down behind a closed door. He went over and sat on the couch. It was several minutes before he noticed that the fire had burned itself out. Only a few small coals remained, glowing weakly through the ashes. His first thought was that he should revive it, give the room some warmth. But his second thought was that he should go to bed. It had been a stressful day, and the following day promised to be the same.

Thinking of the next day reminded him of the call from Holdenfield he’d let go into voicemail. He took out his phone and listened to the message.

“Hi David, Rebecca here. They’ve added some stuff to my schedule, so I’m going to be tied up most of tomorrow. But I have a suggestion. Breakfast. You don’t have to get back to me, because I’ll be in the Cold Brook Inn dining room at eight tomorrow morning one way or the other. So come if you can. You can even come earlier if that’s better for you. I’ll be up at five, working in my room on a paper that’s overdue. Okay? Love to hear more about the Hammond case. Drive safely. Hope to see you.”

From a practical point of view, the timing, although unusual, might be doable. He recalled that she’d said in her earlier message that it was just twenty-seven miles from Wolf Lake to Plattsburgh. That should take well under an hour, even in bad weather, plus an hour or so with Rebecca. So a total of three hours, max. If he left at seven, he’d be back by ten at the latest. He closed his eyes and began to compile a mental list of questions to ask Rebecca about hypnotism, about Hammond’s controversial reputation, and about Wenzel’s dream.

His exhaustion overtook him so quickly he was asleep within minutes.

As always happened when he dozed off sitting up, physical discomfort eventually intruded, dragging with it the concerns he’d temporarily anesthetized. He opened his eyes, checked the time on his phone, and discovered he’d slept for almost an hour. He was about to see if Madeleine was still in her bath when he saw her standing at the window. She was wearing one of the lodge’s plush white bathrobes.

“Turn off the lights,” she said without looking at him.

He switched off the lamps and joined her at the window.

The storm had departed, and the dense overcast had been replaced with a patchwork of clouds making their way across the face of a full moon. He followed Madeleine’s line of sight to discover why she’d called him to the window. And then he saw it.

As a cloud moved slowly out of the way of the moon, the effect on the landscape was like a theatrical light coming up on a dark stage. The stage in this case was dominated by an overwhelming presence—Devil’s Fang, fierce and gigantic, its jagged edges thrown into dramatic relief. Then another cloud moved in, the moonlight faded, and Devil’s Fang disappeared into the night.

Gurney turned away from the window, but Madeleine continued to stare out into the darkness.

“I used to come here.” She said it so softly he wondered if he’d heard right.

“You came up here? When?”

“Christmas vacations. I’m sure I mentioned it.”

That jogged his memory. Something she’d told him when they were first married. Something about spending a few Christmases with elderly relatives in upstate New York when she was in high school. “With a distant aunt and uncle, or something like that, wasn’t it?”

“Uncle George and Aunt Maureen,” she said vaguely, still gazing in the direction of Devil’s Fang. The second cloud obscuring the moon began to pass, letting the silver light shine down again on that sharp pinnacle.

“You never said much about it.”

She didn’t respond.

“Maddie?”

“One winter there was a tragic death. A local boy. A drowning.”

“At this lake?”

“No, another one.”

“And?”

She shook her head.

He waited, thinking she might go on.

But all she finally said was, “I have to get some sleep.”

“DAVID!”

There was a frantic tightness in her whisper that woke him immediately.

“There’s something in the sitting room.”

“Where?” As he whispered the question, he was calculating from memory the rough angle and number of steps to the bag that held his Beretta.

“I saw something pass the window. Could a bat have gotten into the room?”

“Is that what you saw—something flying?”

“I think so.”

He relaxed just a little and reached out to the lamp on the night table. He pressed the toggle switch. Nothing happened. He pressed it again. Still nothing.

“Can you reach the lamp on your side of the bed?” he asked.

He heard the futile clicks as she tried it.

He felt around on the night table for his phone. He found it and checked the status icons. There was no cell signal, meaning the lodge’s private cell tower was out, meaning there’d been a power interruption.

In the windowless bedroom alcove it was too dark to see anything, but a pale wash of moonlight was faintly illuminating part of the main room, visible through the alcove’s broad arch. Gurney lay motionless, searching the darkness for any hint of movement. He saw nothing and heard nothing. Some minutes went by without any return of power.

Then the silence was broken by a slow creaking in the ceiling.

Madeleine grabbed his arm.

They listened together for a long minute.

A small shadow shot past a window in the main room, forcing a cry from Madeleine.

“It’s just a bat,” he said, as her fingers tightened on his arm. “I’ll open the balcony door and let it fly out.”

His assurances were cut off by another creak in the ceiling—like a careful footstep on a weak floorboard.

“Someone’s up there,” whispered Madeleine.

Bringing to mind what he remembered of the front of the lodge, he pictured two regular floors—the ground floor and the floor they were on—plus an attic level. He thought it unlikely that any guest rooms would be in the attic. As he was considering this, there was a faint scraping sound in the ceiling directly above them.

Then nothing. They listened for a long while. But all they heard was the droning of the wind at the balcony door.

What was it about Wolf Lake Lodge, wondered Gurney, that made the sound of a slow footstep, if that’s what it was, so disturbing? Was it the power outage that was creating a sense of threat? Surely the same sound in daylight, or even lamplight, would not have the same impact.

Madeleine spoke again in a whisper. “Who do you think is up there?”

“Maybe no one. Maybe it’s just the wood contracting with the dropping temperature.”

Her concern shifted to the bat. “Will it really fly out if you open the door?”

“I think so.”

She relaxed her grip on his arm. He slipped out of bed and felt his way from the alcove to the balcony door and opened it. He guessed the cold front that blew the sleet storm away had lowered the temperature at least fifteen degrees. Unless the bat flew out quickly, the whole suite would soon be freezing.

It occurred to him that a fire would be a good idea—for warmth, light, reassurance.

He stepped away from the open door and began to feel his way toward the fireplace. Shivering in his shorts and tee shirt, he stopped at the chair where his clothes were and put on his pants and shirt. As he turned back toward the fireplace, a sound in the outer corridor stopped him. He stood still and listened. A few seconds later he heard it again.

He got his Beretta out of the bag on the chair. He couldn’t help feeling he was overreacting, influenced more by the spooky atmosphere than by any real threat.

“What is it?” whispered Madeleine from the alcove.

“Just someone in the corridor.”

He heard a soft thump from the direction of the suite door.

He eased off the Beretta’s safety and began moving forward. The moonlight was limited to the area near the windows. In this part of the room the visibility was zero.

There was a second thump, stronger than the first—the sort of dull impact that might be produced by someone bumping a knee, or some other blunt object, against the door.

He felt his way into a position by the side of the door, eased the dead bolt into its open position, then stopped and listened. He heard something that might have been the sound of someone breathing, or maybe it was just the movement of air through the crack under the door.

He grasped the doorknob. He turned it slowly as far as it went, steadied his stance, checked his grip on the Beretta . . . then yanked the door open.

CHAPTER 19

The grotesque apparition in front of him was a shock.

A weirdly illuminated face seemed to be suspended in the darkness of the corridor, its features distorted by elongated shadows cast upward by a small yellow flame beneath it.

As Gurney’s mind raced to make sense of what he was seeing, he realized that the flame was in a kerosene lamp, that the lamp was being held by a dirty hand with cracked fingernails, and that the jaundiced face in the angled lamplight was one he’d seen before—at the side of the road when his car was stuck in the ditch. The matted fur hat confirmed the identification.

“Tree come down,” said Barlow Tarr.

“Yes . . . and . . .?”

“Smashed the electrics.”

“The generators are out?”

“Aye.”

Gurney lowered his Beretta. “That’s what you came to tell us?”

“Be warnt.”

“About what?”

“The evil here.”

“What evil?”

“The evil what killed them all.”

“Tell me more about the evil.”

“The hawk knows. The hawk in the sun, the hawk in the moon.”

“What does the hawk know?”

Even as Gurney was asking the question, Tarr was stepping away from the doorway, turning down the wick of the lamp until the flame was extinguished.

A second later he disappeared into the unlit corridor.

Gurney called out, “Barlow? Barlow?”

There was no response. The only sound he could hear was coming from the open balcony door on the far side of the room.

It was the rising and falling rush of the wind in the trees.

AFTER THAT EXPERIENCE, SLEEP SEEMED UNLIKELY.

Convincing himself that the flying bat had departed, Gurney closed the balcony door. He built a large fire in the hearth. He and Madeleine settled down on the couch in front of the blaze.

After speculating about the meaning of Tarr’s visit, they agreed the only clear aspect was that the man wanted them to know that Wolf Lake was a dangerous place. Beyond that, his spooky ramblings could mean anything or nothing.

In the end, they fell into a prolonged silence, succumbing to the undulations of the fire.

After a while Gurney found his thoughts returning to Madeleine’s connection to the area.

He turned toward her and asked softly, “Are you awake?”

Her eyes were closed, but she nodded yes.

“When you stayed here in the Adirondacks with your aunt and uncle, how old were you?”

She opened her eyes and stared into the fire. “Early teens.” She paused. “It’s so strange to think that it was me.”

“What was so different about you . . . back then?”

“Everything.” She blinked, cleared her throat, looked around the room. Her gaze stopped at the kerosene lamp on the small table at Gurney’s end of the couch. “What’s that?”

“The lamp?”

“The etching on the base.”

Gurney looked more closely. He hadn’t noticed it before, having set the lamp down on the table before starting the fire, but on the glass base there was a fine-line etching showing an animal crouching, as if preparing to leap at the viewer. Its teeth were bared.

“It appears to be a wolf,” he said.

She responded with a shiver. “Too many wolves.”

“It’s the theme of the place.”

“And part of the nightmares those people died from.”

“They didn’t die from their nightmares. That doesn’t happen.”

“No? What did happen?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then you don’t know that their dreams didn’t kill them.”

He was convinced that dreams couldn’t kill people, but equally convinced that arguing the point would be fruitless. All he could think was: None of this makes any sense at all.

HIGH STRESS AND AN UNSETTLING ENVIRONMENT, FOLLOWED BY THE mesmerizing effects of the fire, left Gurney with no sense of how long they’d been sitting on the couch. He was brought back to the moment by Madeleine’s voice.

“What time are you leaving for Plattsburgh?”

“Who said I was going to Plattsburgh?”

“Isn’t that what Rebecca’s message was about?”

He recalled playing it while Madeleine was in the bathtub. “You heard that?”

“You should turn down the volume if you don’t want people hearing your messages.”

He hesitated. “She suggested getting together. She’s there for an academic commitment.”

Madeleine’s silence was as questioning as her voice had been.

He shrugged. “I haven’t decided.”

“Whether to go? Or what time to go?”

“Both.”

“You should go.”

“Why?”

“Because you want to.”

He hesitated. “I think it might be helpful to talk to her. But I’m not comfortable leaving you here alone.”

“I’ve been alone in worse places.”

“You could come with me.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Now it was her turn to hesitate. “Why do you think I was willing to come here?”

“I have no idea. Your decision surprised me. Shocked me, to be honest. Given a choice between going straight to a snowshoeing weekend or stopping to look into a case of multiple suicides, I never expected you to choose the suicides.”

“The suicides had nothing to do with it.” She took a deep breath. “When I was in school, going to the Adirondacks for Christmas vacation was absolutely the last thing I wanted to do. The aunt and uncle I mentioned weren’t really my aunt and uncle, just distant cousins of my mother. They were isolated, ignorant people. George was depressive. Maureen was manic.”

“Why would your parents send you to people like that?”

“Sending me to the Adirondacks in the winter and to music camp in the summer was their strategy for getting closer to each other. One-on-one. Simplify. Communicate. Solve their marriage problems. Of course, it never worked. Like most people, they secretly liked their problems. And liked getting rid of me.”

“Are your aunt and uncle, or whatever they are, still alive?”

“George eventually shot himself.”

“Jesus.”

“Maureen moved to Florida. I have no idea whether she’s dead or alive.”

“Where up here did they live?”

“In the middle of nowhere. Devil’s Fang was actually visible from the end of their road. The nearest real town was Dannemora.”

“The town with the prison.”

“Yes.”

“I still don’t think I’m understanding why—”

“Why I wanted to come here? Maybe to see these mountains in a different way . . . in a different period of my life . . . make the memories go away.”

“What memories?”

“There was something wrong with George. He’d sit on the porch for hours, staring out into the woods, like he was already dead. Maureen was as sick as George, in the other direction. Always dancing around. She was wild for collecting rocks—triangular rocks. She insisted they were Iroquois arrowheads. Ear-a-kwah arrowheads. She loved the French pronunciation. She said a lot things with a French accent. Other times she’d pretend that she and I were Indian princesses lost in the forest, waiting to be rescued by Hiawatha. When he’d come for us we’d give him our collection of Ear-a-kwah arrowheads, and he’d give us furs to keep us warm, and we’d live happily ever after.”

“How old was she?”

“Maureen? Maybe fifty. She seemed ancient to me when I was fifteen. She might as well have been ninety.”

“Were there any other kids around?”

She blinked and stared at him. “You never answered my question.”

“What question?”

“What time are you going to Plattsburgh?”

CHAPTER 20

Gurney placed certain restrictions on his tentative plan to meet Rebecca at the Cold Brook Inn.

If the power failure continued, he wouldn’t go.

If the lodge’s cell reception wasn’t restored, he wouldn’t go.

If the sleet storm started again, he wouldn’t go.

But none of those conditions prevailed. The power was restored at 6:22 AM. Cell reception was restored at 6:24 AM. The predawn sky was spectacularly clear. The air was crisp and still and full of a piney fragrance. The lodge heating system had come back to life. All in all, everything was the opposite of the way it had been a few hours earlier.

By 6:55 AM Gurney had washed, shaved, dressed, and was ready to leave. He entered the still-dark bedroom. He could sense that Madeleine was awake.

“Be careful,” she said.

“I will.”

What being careful meant in his own mind was keeping a safe emotional distance from Rebecca, with whom there always seemed to be possibilities. He wondered if that might have been what Madeleine meant by it as well.

“When will you be back?”

“I should get to the inn by eight. If I leave there an hour or so later, I should be back before ten.”

“Don’t rush. Not on these roads. With the sleet last night, they’ll be slippery.”

“You’re sure you’ll be all right here by yourself?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Okay, then. I’m off.” He bent down and kissed her.

The crimson-carpeted corridor was now brightly lit, a startling transformation from the previous night’s creepy backdrop for Barlow Tarr’s lamplit face. As he descended the broad staircase to the reception floor, an aroma of fresh coffee mingled with a woodsy evergreen scent.

Austen Steckle was standing in the doorway of an office behind the reception counter, speaking with some intensity on the phone. He was wearing the kind of chinos that cost five times as much as the Walmart variety. His woodsman’s plaid shirt fit his barrel physique so faultlessly Gurney guessed it had been custom tailored.

When Steckle caught Gurney’s eye, he ended his call with a statement plainly loud enough for Gurney to hear. “I’ll get back to you later. I have an important guest here.”

He came out from behind the counter with a toothy smile. “Hey, Detective, beautiful morning, eh? Smell that? That’s balsam. From the balsam fir. Aroma of the Adirondacks.”

“Very nice.”

“So, everything okay with you folks? Suite to your liking?”

“It’s fine. Got a bit chilly last night with the power outage.”

“Ah, yeah. Part of the wilderness experience.”

“We did have a midnight visit from Barlow Tarr.”

Steckle’s grin faded. “What could he want that time of night?”

“He warned us about the evil here at the lodge.”

“What evil?”

“‘The evil that killed them all.’”

Steckle’s mouth twisted into an expression between disgust and fury. “What else did he say?”

“More of the same. Is this all news to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is what I’m telling you new information—this kind of thing with Tarr?”

Steckle rubbed the stubble on his shaved head. “You better come into my office.”

Gurney followed him around the reception counter into a room furnished in the same “Adirondack” style as every other space in the lodge. Steckle’s desk was a varnished pine slab standing on four upright logs, bark intact. His chair was a rustic bentwood affair with trimmed branches for legs. He motioned Gurney to a similar chair on the opposite side of the desk. When they were both seated, he leaned his thick forearms on the pine slab.

“Hope you don’t mind a little privacy, but we may get into some areas here that are not for general consumption. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I’m not sure that I do.”

“We got a difficult situation here. You asked me about Barlow. Between you and me? Barlow is a crazy pain in the ass. Delusional. Scares the shit out of people. Talking all the time about wolves, evil, death, all kinds of crap. Delusional crap.” He paused. “So you’re maybe thinking, why the hell do we put up with crap like that? Why not just kick the fucker out and be done? Or maybe you’re thinking the bigger question, why was this crazy fucker Barlow ever allowed to be here to begin with?”

“I was told that someone or other from the Tarr family has been working at the lodge ever since it was built a century ago by Dalton Gall.”

“Well, it’s true. But that’s still no reason to put up with crap. The real problem was Ethan. A great man, Ethan, don’t get me wrong. But that greatness—and the determination that came along with it? That could be a problem.”

“His determination to turn every loser into a productive citizen?”

If that characterization hit a sore spot with Steckle due to his own past, he concealed it well. “Like the Good Book says, every virtue has its vice. But, hey, how can I complain, right? Maybe you heard what Ethan did for me?”

“Tell me.”

“I was a thief. An embezzler. I did some time. Luck of the draw, I got chosen for Ethan’s rehabilitation program. Suffice it to say, the program worked. Turned me into a new person. I even changed my name. My name for most of my fucked-up life was Alfonz Volk. That was the name of the guy my mother married when she got pregnant. But I found out later he wasn’t really my father. My mother had got pregnant by another guy who got killed in a car accident. Guy by the name of Austen Steckle. So she lied to Alfonz Volk so he’d marry her. A very fucked-up situation. My name should’ve always been Steckle. That was my genes. So to change my name to Steckle was the perfect new beginning. When I graduated from Ethan’s program, he hired me to work on the books up here. Incredible, right? I’ll have gratitude to that man till the day I die.”

“You’re an accountant?”

“I got no credentials, no titles, just a thing about numbers. I’m like one of them idiot savants, without the idiot part.”

“You appear to be a lot more than the lodge’s bookkeeper.”

“Yeah, well. Time passed. Things changed. Ethan saw that my head for numbers could be used in a lot of ways. So I progressed to general manager of Wolf Lake Lodge and financial advisor to the Gall family. Pretty amazing ride for a small-time thief, right?”

“I’m impressed.”

“Right. So how the hell can I criticize Ethan’s determination and faith in people? Yeah, sometimes it means that a Looney Tune like Barlow Tarr lasts here way beyond the point when he shoulda got the boot, but it also means that this particular small-time thief you’re looking at right here in this chair got lifted out of the gutter and got trusted to manage not only a thousand-dollar-a-night enterprise but the whole fucking Gall fortune. Which is like a fairy tale.”

“With Ethan gone, what’s keeping you from getting rid of Tarr?”

“I ask myself the same thing. Maybe it’s superstition.”

“Superstition?”

“You know, like I’m only here because of Ethan’s decision to put me here and keep me here. And that’s why Tarr’s here, too. Maybe I’m afraid that if I get rid of him, somebody’ll get rid of me. Some karma shit. But that don’t really make practical sense. And I’m a practical guy. So I’m thinking one of these days pretty soon Mr. Loon is out on his crazy ass.”

“Speaking of which, I gather you’ve decided to honor Richard Hammond’s contract for another year.”

“What’s fair is fair, right?”

“You’re keeping an open mind about him?”

“Presumed innocent, right?”

“Even with all that negative media coverage?”

“That’s nasty shit, but sometimes we got to live with that kind of shit, right?”

“So, despite all the bad publicity, you decided to stand by Hammond because of a legal presumption of innocence and a sense of fairness?”

Steckle shrugged. “Also out of respect for Ethan. Before all this shit went down, he agreed to renew Hammond’s contract. I want to abide by that decision. Maybe that’s just my superstition again, but that’s the way it is. Who am I gonna respect if I don’t respect Ethan?”

“So you have a presumption of innocence and an oral promise on the one hand. On the other hand, there’s the possibility that Hammond might be implicated in the death of Gall himself, as well as three lodge guests. Puts you pretty far out on a limb if Hammond is convicted.”

Steckle’s eyes narrowed again. “Convicted of what?”

“Some form of felony involvement in all four deaths.”

“You avoid the word ‘suicide.’ There a reason for that?”

Gurney smiled. “It doesn’t make sense to me. How about you?”

Steckle didn’t answer. He leaned back in his chair and began rubbing his scalp as though his thoughts were giving him a headache.

Gurney continued. “So I’m thinking, considering the big downside possibilities and you being a practical guy, maybe there’s another reason you decided to keep Hammond around?”

Steckle stared at him, his mouth slowly stretching into a hard smile. “You want a practical reason? Okay. Simple. If we got rid of Hammond now . . . yeah, that could look like we were dumping garbage overboard, sending a message to the media that we’re on the side of the angels. But you gotta consider all the outcomes. And one of them outcomes would be the kind of message it would send to all those people who came here over the past two years to be treated by that man. We dump him now, the message to those guests is that all the shit in the media is true and we put them at the mercy of a monster. Believe me, that’s no kinda message to give your paying guests, some of whom are very wealthy people. But if we keep Hammond here, the message is that we have confidence in him and the media stories are horseshit. That practical enough for you?”

“It does help me understand your decision.”

Steckle appeared to relax, sinking more comfortably into his chair. “I guess I sound a little cynical. But what can I say? I got to protect the Gall interests here. That’s what Ethan trusted me to do. And I owe everything to that man.”

GURNEY HAD MORE QUESTIONS FOR AUSTEN STECKLE—QUESTIONS about Ethan and Peyton, about the Gall New Life Foundation, about the three guests who ended up dead.

If he pursued any of that now, though, he’d miss his chance to meet with Rebecca—whose knowledge of Hammond, hypnosis, and dreams could be very helpful.

His solution was to secure Austen’s agreement to meet with him again when he returned from Plattsburgh later that morning.

He thanked the man for his time and candor and hurried out to his car.

The air was bracing, the visibility extraordinary. A glass-smooth sheet of ice had formed overnight on the surface of the lake, reflecting an inverted image of Cemetery Ridge.

As Gurney was pulling out from under the timbered portico onto the lake road, his phone was ringing. Seeing that it was Jack Hardwick, he took the call.

“Hey, Sherlock, how’s life in the grand lodge so far?”

“It’s . . . unusual.”

“You sound like you’re in your car. Where the hell are you?”

“On my way to Plattsburgh to meet with Holdenfield. She seems to have an interest in the case.”

Hardwick uttered his bark of a laugh. “Becky Baby’s interest is mainly in you, ace. Where does she want to meet you?”

“I told you—Plattsburgh.”

“That’s the name of the city. But what I’m asking is—”

Gurney cut him off. “Jack, in a little while I’ll be driving out of the range of the lodge’s cell tower. Could we cut the crap and get to whatever you called about?”

“Okay, I might have a line on Angela Castro, missing girlfriend of the Floral Park corpse. She has a married brother who lives in Staten Island. I called his number. Young, nervous female voice answered the phone. I told her I was taking a survey for the utility company about appliance usage. She said she couldn’t tell me anything because it wasn’t her house, I should call back later. I figure I’ll pay her a visit. Something tells me this is our Angela. Assuming I’m right, is there anything special you want to know?”

“Beyond the obvious questions about Steven Pardosa’s death—what did she see, what did she hear, what does she think, why did she disappear—I’d like to know what he was like before and after his trip to Wolf Lake, his moods, his comments, his nightmares. Why did he go so far away to deal with his smoking habit. How did he know about Richard Hammond?”

“That it?”

“Ask her how Pardosa felt about homosexuals.”

“Why?”

“Just a shot in the dark. It was an area of Hammond’s practice years ago. There was some controversy about his approach at the time. And this minister, Bowman Cox, is obsessed with the subject, claiming Hammond’s focus on it was the cause of Christopher Wenzel’s suicide. Speaking of which, I’d like to know whether Wenzel himself had any strong feelings on the subject. Maybe that’s what drew him to Cox, what made Cox the man he wanted to discuss his nightmare with. I know this is pretty vague, but we’ve got to start somewhere.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“You have anything else for me?”

“Some background on Austen Steckle. He’s a reformed bad boy, formerly known as Alfonz Volk.”

“He told me that himself. One-time embezzler, magically transformed by Ethan’s program into the Gall family’s financial advisor and lodge manager.”

“Did he mention the drug-dealer chapter in the drama?”

“Steckle—or Volk—was a dealer?”

“Sold coke and other shit to a fancy clientele. A customer who ran an ethically challenged stock brokerage liked his style. Hired him to push crap stocks like he pushed white powder. Turned out he had a talent for it. Made more money on stock scams than he made on coke. But it wasn’t enough. That’s when the embezzlement started—scumbag employee robbing his scumbag employer. The feds, who had their eye on the firm, pressured yet another scumbag to testify against him. Volk got banged up, did some time, came up for early parole. Enter the Gall New Life Foundation. Alfonz Volk is magically transformed into Austen Steckle, the rest is history. So what’s your bottom line on him?”

“I’m not sure. He has a hard edge, which he doesn’t try to hide. I need to spend more time with him, maybe ask why he dropped the drug-dealer bit off the resume he shared with me.” Gurney checked his phone. “I think I’m about to lose my cell signal, so let me mention a few more issues you might want to look into.”

“Pile the shit on, boss. I live to serve.”

“Couple of things I’m curious about. These three dead guys who came to Hammond for stop-smoking hypnotherapy—did it work? In that week or so after they went home and before they ended up with sliced wrists, had they stopped smoking or not?”

“You suggesting I drive around Jersey, Queens, and Florida looking for folks who may have checked the dead guys’ ashtrays?”

“You worked your magic in the hunt for Angela. I have infinite confidence in you.”

“That makes everything so much better.”

“Speaking of Angela, maybe we should think twice about making a surprise visit. If you’ve actually found her, the last thing we want to do is spook her. If she runs you might not find her again, and she’s the closest thing we’ve got to an eyewitness.”

“Okay, what’s the alternative?”

“Hang back a little. Give her options. Let her feel in control of the situation.”

“The fuck are you talking about?”

“You could leave an envelope addressed to her in her brother’s mailbox. Include a note explaining who we are, that we have a client who doesn’t believe the official suicide theory of Steven’s death, that it would be very helpful to us in discovering what really happened—and thus ensuring her own safety—if we could meet with her, or just speak with her, whichever she’s comfortable with. Include our cell numbers, our landline numbers, our email addresses, our home addresses. Very important, that last one. The home address thing makes us seem not only reachable on her terms but, in a way, vulnerable. Emphasize that how and when she chooses to get in touch with us—and how much she wants to tell us—is all up to her.”

Hardwick was silent for several long seconds. “Sounds like overkill—all those numbers and contact options.”

“It’s overkill with a purpose. Give someone a bunch of open doors, they feel like they’re making a real choice. They may not notice that all the doors lead to the same room.”

“Or the same chute into the shitter.”

“That’s another way of looking at it.”

More silence, followed by Hardwick’s grunt of agreement. “I’ll do it your way. But remember, if it goes south, I piss all over you. Any other requests?”

“I’d very much like to know who in BCI brass approved Fenton’s press strategy. Had to be someone high up. It’s so far out of the conservative box those guys live in, Fenton would need to have his ass covered. Sooner or later, I’d like to know why it was approved—but to begin with I’d be happy knowing the who part. And find out what you can about a guy by the name of Norris Landon. Country gentleman type. Partridge hunter, et cetera. Spent a lot of time at Wolf Lake Lodge over the past couple of years.”

“Like Hammond.”

“Exactly. Be nice to know if there’s a connection.” Gurney paused. “And one more question in case you find yourself with time on your hands. The big one: What benefit would Hammond get from inducing the deaths of those four people?”

Hardwick was silent so long Gurney thought they’d lost their cell connection. “Jack?”

“I’m thinking about the benefit.”

“And?”

“I’m thinking that if some fucker could really do that . . . if he could concoct and implant a fatal nightmare in another person . . . then he might do it . . . just to prove he could do it.”

“For the feeling of power?”

“Yeah. For the feeling of absolute godlike power.”

CHAPTER 21

By the time Gurney reached the state route that wound down out of the mountains toward Plattsburgh, the sun was up and the color of the sky was shifting from pinkish gray to pure blue.

He was organizing the various conundrums of the case in the order in which he imagined they’d need to be explored and solved. This mental process so thoroughly absorbed him that forty minutes later he nearly drove past the sign for the Cold Brook Inn.

At the front desk a pudgy woman with a welcoming innkeeper’s smile answered his inquiry about the location of the dining room with a graceful sweep of her hand in the direction of an open archway at the side of the reception area.

“Black-current scones with clotted cream today,” she said in a lowered voice, as though sharing a valuable confidence.

He spotted Rebecca at a table next to a window overlooking Lake Champlain. Next to her coffee cup was a laptop on which she was typing rapidly. Her auburn hair had that look of casual beauty that comes from good genes and good taste. Good genes had also given her a sharp, linear intellect—a quality he found dangerously attractive.

She flipped the laptop shut and smiled a bright, businesslike smile. The warm, sculpted appearance of her lips looked like it had been enhanced with a subtle lipstick, but he knew from interested observation on past occasions that she never wore makeup.

“You’re right on time.” Her voice was on the low side of the female register.

He nodded at the computer. “Did I interrupt something?”

“Nothing important. Just dashing off a scathing review of an article on the survival value of guilt. The research design was flawed, the conclusions inconclusive, and the interpretation pathetic.” Her eyes flashed with the competitive spark that made her such a formidable presence in her field. “So you’re working on an incredible case. Everything you’ve told me about it is nuts. Sit down and tell me more.”

He sat across from her, her contagious energy making him feel like he’d had three cups of coffee. “Not a lot more to tell. I met a local lunatic, connected with the lodge, eager to offer me a supernatural view of things.”

“Like Dalton Gall’s wolf dream and its supposed fulfillment?”

“Did I tell you about that?”

“Found it in an online historical blog—‘Strange Tales of the Mountains’—popped up in a ‘Gall’ Internet search. It’s the kind of story stupid people love. Even some smart people.”

“Speaking of wolf dreams—”

“What do I think about Wenzel’s, as narrated by Cox?” She uttered a derisive little laugh. “A candy store for a Freudian analyst. But I’m not a Freudian analyst. Dreams are useless vehicles for getting to the truth about anything. Dreams are the dust kicked up by the brain as it catalogs the experiences of the day.”

“Then why—”

“Why do dreams seem like narrative scenes in weird movies? Because in addition to being a cataloger the brain is a coherence seeker. It’s always trying to connect the dots, even when the dots have no natural connection. The brain takes those random dust specks it’s stirring up with its right hand, and tries to arrange them in order with its left hand. That’s why ‘dream interpretation’ is total nonsense. You might as well throw a handful of goulash at the wall and pretend it’s a map of Hungary.”

A young waitress arrived at their table. “Can I get you folks some breakfast?”

“Oatmeal, coffee, whole wheat toast,” said Rebecca.

“Same,” said Gurney.

The waitress jotted a few words on her order pad and hurried off.

Rebecca continued. “Dreams are as random as raindrops. So, you ask, how could four people have the same one? The answer is, I have no idea. Everything I know tells me it’s impossible.”

When their breakfasts arrived they ate briefly in silence. At one point, they held each other’s gaze long enough that if they’d held it any longer it would have taken on an inescapable significance. Gurney broke the mood with a question.

“You told me on the phone that some of Hammond’s work was ‘on the cutting edge’—something about his using hypnotherapy to form new neural pathways, changing people’s behavior in radical ways?”

“I don’t honestly know that much about it. But I’ve seen the abstracts of technical papers he’s published recently that suggest he’s exploring areas of behavior modification that are beyond the generally accepted limits of hypnotherapy. It struck me that he wasn’t being completely open about his latest achievements.”

“That’s interesting. Look, I know how busy you are, but—”

She grinned unexpectedly. “If you want to get something done, ask a busy person.”

“It’s a huge favor, actually. Could you take a closer look at Hammond’s published work and see if anything pops out at you?”

“What am I looking for?”

“Anything that might relate to the police theory of the four deaths. Anything that . . . Jesus, Rebecca, I don’t even know what questions to ask. I have no idea what’s new and scary in that field.”

“I love a helpless man.” Her grin widened briefly, then disappeared. “There’s some potentially disturbing work being done these days in the area of manipulating memories, especially manipulating the emotional tags on certain memories.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that a person’s feelings about past events can be changed by altering the neurochemical components of their stored emotions.”

“Christ. That’s really—”

“Weird-ass, brave-new-world stuff? I agree. But it’s happening. Of course, it’s positioned in the most positive therapeutic language you can imagine. Ideal way to cure PTSD panic, and so forth. Just separate the specific event from the feeling it generates.”

Gurney was quiet for long while.

Rebecca was watching him. “What are you thinking?”

“If the emotional charge on the memory of a past event could be altered, could the same technique be used to change how a person might feel about a hypothetical future event?”

“I have no idea. Why?”

“I’m wondering whether someone who normally would be appalled by the idea of suicide . . . could be made more receptive to it.”

CHAPTER 22

Within the first few miles of Gurney’s drive back up into the Adirondack wilderness, the possibility of artificially altering something as basic as the value a person put on life itself began to seem unlikely, even absurd. On the other hand, it wasn’t any more unlikely or absurd than the so-called “facts” of the case.

As he drove farther into the mountains, the excitement he’d felt in his meeting with Rebecca morphed into a kind of uneasiness, which he attributed in part to the overcast that was diluting the blue of the sky and hinting at the approach of another winter storm.

When he arrived at the lodge, Austen Steckle was on the phone behind the reception counter. He ended his call quietly this time.

“Good to see you back. There’s a storm warning in effect. Do you know where Mrs. Gurney went?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your wife—she took one of the lodge Jeeps we have for our guests. Said she planned to do some sightseeing.”

“Sightseeing?”

“Yeah. Lot of people do that. See the mountains. She left right after you.”

“Did she say anything about any specific area? Ask you for any directions?”

“Nope. Nothing like that.”

Gurney checked his watch. “Did she say when she’d be back?”

Steckle shook his head. “She didn’t say much at all.”

“Does the vehicle she took have a GPS?”

“Of course. So there’s nothing to worry about, right?”

“Right.” In fact, he felt he had all sorts of things to worry about. But he made an effort to fasten his attention on something he could actually do. Seeing Steckle standing there on front of him brought a possibility to mind.

“If you have a few minutes, I’d like to finish the conversation we were having this morning.”

Steckle glanced around quickly. “Okay.”

They took the same seats in Steckle’s office on opposite sides of the pine-slab desk. “So. What’s on your mind?”

Gurney smiled. “I’m confused. About the relationships here.”

“What relationships?”

“To start with, the relationship between Ethan and Peyton. I’ve been told there were problems between them. Can you tell me what kind of problems?”

Steckle leaned back in his chair and rubbed his head thoughtfully. “The kind of problems you’d expect between a super-achiever and a wild-ass addict.”

“Ethan didn’t approve of Peyton’s lifestyle?”

“He sure as hell didn’t. Ethan threatened to disinherit him. Tough love.”

“Ethan had control of the Gall fortune?”

“Essentially, yeah. Ethan had a lock on the money. Their parents always saw him as the responsible one, so the bulk of the fortune went to him, with the understanding that he’d do the right thing by Peyton. And a little while back he figured the right thing would be to use the threat of disinheritance to get Peyton straight.”

“Did he plan to go through with the threat?”

“I think so. The thing is, he gave Peyton a taste of what could happen. In Ethan’s original will, the Gall New Life Foundation was supposed to get one third of the estate and Peyton two thirds. Then Ethan revised it, so Peyton would only get one third. He told him he’d change it back if he got off drugs for ninety days.”

“How did Peyton react?”

“He actually stayed clean for something like sixty, sixty-one days.”

“Then he picked up drugs again?”

“No. Then Ethan committed suicide, or whatever the hell you want to call it.”

“While Peyton was still clean?”

“Yeah. He did pick up the shit again, but that was like a few days after Ethan . . . after he ended up dead.”

“So even though Peyton was staying clean, Ethan didn’t live long enough to change the will back in his favor?”

“Life’s unfair, right?”

“So who gets that other third? The foundation?”

“I don’t think I have the right to tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“All I can say is I’d rather not disclose that information. It could be misinterpreted. I wouldn’t want to be the cause of any wrong impression, you understand?”

“But you do know for sure what was specified in the altered will?”

“The Gall family has relied on me, and continues to rely on me, in many ways. Because of that trust, I know a lot. That’s all I can say.”

Gurney thought it best not to pursue the point. There’d be other ways to get the information. In the meantime, he had more questions.

“Wenzel, Balzac, Pardosa—how well do you remember them?”

Steckle shrugged. “In what way?”

“When you hear each name, what comes to mind?”

“The face. The voice. Clothes. Things like that. What do you want to know?”

“Had any of them been to the lodge before?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“That’s something I’d be aware of.”

“How did they know about Richard Hammond?”

“He’s famous, right? People know about him.”

“Did they strike you as the kind of people who normally come to Wolf Lake Lodge?”

“We get all kinds of people.”

“Not many people of limited financial means visit thousand-dollar-a-day resorts.”

“I don’t think Mr. Wenzel’s means were that limited.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read about him in the paper—you know, afterward—something about a million-dollar condo in Florida.”

“What about the other two?”

“Our guests’ private finances are none of my business. They could have money without looking like it. It’s not something I ask about.”

“What if they can’t pay you?”

“We run their credit cards when they arrive. We make sure the full amount is approved. If not, they’re required to pay cash up front.”

“Did Wenzel, Balzac, and Pardosa pay by cash or credit card?”

“I have no memory of that kind of detail.”

“Easy enough to check.”

“Now?”

“It could be very helpful.”

Steckle appeared to be considering just how cooperative he wanted to be. He turned his chair around to face a computer on a second desk against the wall. After a minute or two he turned back to Gurney looking like he had a bad taste in his mouth. “Wenzel paid with Amex. Balzac paid with a debit card. Pardosa paid cash.”

“How unusual is it for someone to pay cash?”

“Cash is unusual, but no big deal. I mean, some people don’t like plastic.”

Or the trail it leaves, thought Gurney. “How long did they stay?”

With noticeable impatience Steckle consulted his computer again. “Wenzel, two nights. Balzac, one night. Pardosa, one night.”

“And Hammond’s stop-smoking treatment consisted of just one session?”

“Right. An intensive three-hour session.” He pulled back his neatly pressed flannel cuff and frowned at his Rolex. “Are we done?”

“Yes . . . unless you know of anything that happened here that could have resulted in those four deaths.”

Steckle shook his head slowly and turned up his empty palms. “I wish I could be more helpful, but . . .” He fell silent, still shaking his head.

“Actually, you’ve been very helpful.” Gurney stood up to leave. “One last thing. Kind of a crazy question. Did any of them make any negative remarks about homosexuals, or gay marriage, or anything like that?”

Steckle looked bewildered and annoyed. “What the hell are you getting at?”

“Just a crazy angle on the case. Probably doesn’t mean anything. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.”

CHAPTER 23

Gurney went upstairs, hoping to find a note from Madeleine explaining the nature of her sightseeing excursion—perhaps its route and when he could expect her back.

There was no note.

Although he guessed she’d be somewhere in the large dead zone outside the immediate area of Wolf Lake, he tried calling her anyway.

He was surprised to hear her phone ringing seconds later right there in the suite. He looked around and spotted it on the small table next to the couch.

It wasn’t like Madeleine to go out without it, especially if she was driving. Had she been in such a hurry or so preoccupied that she forgot it? But that state of mind was hardly consistent with a sightseeing excursion.

He tried to construct a hypothesis that would explain these facts, as well as her secretive demeanor for the past forty-eight hours, but he couldn’t seem to apply the same logical analysis to Madeleine’s behavior as he could to a stranger’s.

He found himself pacing slowly around the room, a movement that often helped him organize his thoughts. It occurred to him to check for any calls or text messages she might have received before leaving. As he was trying to navigate through the functions of her phone, there was a knock at the door.

It was a louder-than-necessary knock of a type familiar to Gurney. He crossed the room, opened the door, and recognized the flat-faced, heavy-shouldered man standing in front of him as the Jimmy Hoffa look-alike from the press conference video. There was an American flag lapel pin on his ill-fitting sport jacket. He held up his state police credentials.

“Senior Investigator Fenton, BCI. Are you David Gurney?”

“Yes.” For a moment he had a terrible thought. “Has something happened to my wife?”

“I don’t know anything about your wife. Can I come in?”

Gurney nodded, his anxiety replaced by curiosity. He stepped back from the doorway.

Fenton entered with a cop’s watchfulness, glancing around to take everything in, moving to a position from which he could see into the bedroom alcove as well as the bathroom. His gaze lingered for a while on the Warren Harding portrait.

“Very nice,” he said in a sour way that implied the opposite. “The Presidential Suite.”

“What can I do for you?”

“You like being retired?”

“How do you know I’m retired?”

Fenton produced a smile that was less than friendly. “If someone took an aggressive interest in a major case of yours, showed up on your turf, spent time with a prime suspect, you’d get to know something about them, right?”

Gurney answered with his own question. “To have a prime suspect you must have a definable crime, right?”

“A definable crime. Nice term. Plus means, motive, and opportunity. Right out of the textbook.” The man walked over to the balcony door and stood with his back to Gurney. “That’s why I’m here. Somehow you got yourself pulled into this thing. So we’d like to fill you in on some facts, as a simple courtesy, since you clearly don’t know what it is you got yourself pulled into.”

“That’s very accommodating.”

“There’s nothing like the facts to get everyone on the same page. Simple courtesy.”

“Can’t argue with that. But since when do BCI senior investigators fill in outsiders as a simple courtesy?”

Fenton turned back from the window and gave Gurney an appraising look. “You’re not just any outsider, are you? You have a reputation. Big one. Very positive career history. Lot of success. So we figured you deserved the courtesy of being fully informed. Could save you time and trouble.” He flashed a cold smile.

“What kind of trouble will it save me?”

“The trouble that comes from being on the wrong side of a situation.”

“How do you know which side I’m on?”

“An educated guess.”

“Based on what?”

There was a tiny twitch at the corner of the man’s thin-lipped mouth. “Based on what we know from various sources. What I’m telling you is that this is a serious situation. Involving serious people with serious resources.” He paused. “Look, I’m trying to do you a favor here. Put our cards on the table. You got a problem with that?”

“No problem. Just curiosity.”

Fenton cocked his head speculatively, as though turning a difficult concept around in his mind. “Curiosity can be a problem when the stuff you don’t know is stuff you shouldn’t know.” He hesitated, his jaw muscles tensing. “If you knew even half the story, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be stepping into something over your head. You wouldn’t be sitting across a dinner table from Richard Hammond. You wouldn’t be anywhere near Wolf Lake.”

“But now that I’m here, you want to fill me in on the facts.”

“That’s what I’m saying.” But the distaste with which he said it hinted at some conflict in his mission. Perhaps a career-long antipathy for sharing information outside the boundaries of his law enforcement unit was colliding with an order to do exactly that.

“I’m listening.” Gurney sank down into one of the leather chairs by the hearth, gesturing toward another near it. “You want to have a seat?”

Fenton glanced around, selected instead the simplest wooden chair in the room, and brought it to a spot facing Gurney, but not too close. He perched on the edge of the seat as if it were a stool, his hands on his knees. His jaw muscles started moving again. He was staring down at the rug. Whatever was going on in his head narrowed the eyes that were already too small for his slab of a face.

He looked up, met Gurney’s inquisitive gaze, and cleared his throat. “Motive, means, opportunity. That what you want to hear about?”

“Good place to start.”

“Okay. Motive. Would twenty-nine million dollars qualify?”

Gurney frowned, said nothing.

Fenton flashed an ugly smile. “They didn’t tell you about that, huh? Little Dick and Jane. They neglected to mention Ethan Gall’s will?”

“Tell me about it.”

The ugly smile widened. “Ethan had a very simple will—especially for a guy with eighty-seven million dollars, give or take a few million for variations in investment values.” He paused, studying Gurney’s expression. “One third for the Gall New Life Foundation; one third for little brother Peyton; and one third—that’s twenty-nine million bucks—for Doctor Dick.”

So that’s what Steckle had been talking about. Richard was the legatee whose name he wouldn’t disclose.

“Why would Gall leave Hammond that much? Were they that close?”

Fenton made a face between a leer and a sneer. “Maybe closer than anyone knew. But the main reason was to piss off Peyton. Peyton hated the fact that Doctor Dick was Ethan’s pet. The whole point was to threaten Peyton. Scare him into being a good boy.”

“How recent was this version of Ethan’s will?”

“Very recent. And the thing that puts the nail in Doctor Dick’s coffin is that he knew Ethan was about to change it again—give it all back to his little brother. Your dinner companion had a twenty-nine-million-dollar window of opportunity that was about to close. You think that might be a powerful motive for timely action?”

Gurney shrugged. “Maybe a little too powerful and a little too timely.”

Fenton stared at him. “Meaning what?”

“Seems too obvious and too neat. But the bigger question is, what action are you claiming it motivated?” When Fenton didn’t answer right away, Gurney went on. “If you’re claiming that Hammond killed Gall in order to grab that twenty-nine million before it disappeared, the real question is how did he kill him?”

Fenton looked like he had a mouthful of stomach acid. “I’m not at liberty to discuss the specifics. I’ll just say that Hammond developed some motivational techniques that go beyond anything normal, therapeutic, or ethical.”

“You’re saying that he persuaded Ethan Gall to commit suicide?”

“You find that hard to believe?”

“Very hard.”

“His goddamn ‘gay emergence therapy’ seemed like quite a stretch, too! Think about it.” Fenton’s eyes flashed with anger. “This is the same son of a bitch who invented a so-called ‘therapy’ to make normal men believe they were gay!”

“So you figure if Hammond could convince a man he was gay, he could convince him to kill himself?” The logic of that struck Gurney as absurd.

“The technical term for what we’re talking about is ‘trance-induced suicide.’”

“Whose term is that?”

Fenton blinked, rubbed his hand across his mouth. He seemed to be considering how much more he ought to say. “The people we’ve consulted. Experts. Best in the world.”

If Fenton wanted to identify his experts, he’d volunteer their names. If he didn’t want to, there was no point in asking. Gurney sat back in his armchair and steepled his fingers thoughtfully under his chin. “Trance-induced suicide. Interesting. And this can be achieved through a single hypnotherapy session?”

“An intensive three-hour session with a follow-up session on the final day.”

“The final day?”

“The suicide day.”

“Where did that follow-up meeting occur?”

“With Mr. Gall, right here at Wolf Lake. With the other three, it was done by phone.”

“And of course you have a record of Hammond calling each of those three victims on—”

Fenton cut in. “On the day each one cut his wrists.” He paused, studying Gurney’s face. “You didn’t know any of this shit, right? You have no goddamn idea what you’re stumbling around in. Blind man in a minefield.” He shook his head. “Do you happen to know what subject the famous Doctor Hammond wrote his PhD thesis on?”

“Tell me.”

“Long title, but maybe you ought to memorize it. ‘Hypnotic Elements in the Mechanism of Fatality in Voodoo: How Witch Doctors Make Their Victims Die.’ That’s a pretty interesting area of expertise, wouldn’t you say?”

Fenton radiated the triumph of a poker player showing a full house, aces high. “Think about it, Gurney. This guy hypnotized four people. They all ended up with the same nightmare. They all talked to him on the last day of their lives. And they all cut their wrists in exactly the same way.”

He paused before adding, “Is this really a guy you want to be having dinner with?”

CHAPTER 24

Having written a doctoral thesis examining the psychological levers underlying the practice of voodoo was, at least, suggestive of a past academic interest. It was certainly a provocative coincidence and the sort of thing that would capture the imagination of a jury, but it was hardly, as the lawyers say, dispositive.

The will, however, was another matter. The will nailed down the first third of the motive-means-opportunity triad. The will was a big deal. So big a deal that Gurney felt he had to get to the bottom of it—the precise nature of the provision favoring Hammond to the tune of twenty-nine million dollars, as well as the reason that neither Jane nor Richard had seen fit to mention it—before he could put his mind to any other task.

He took out his phone, called Jack Hardwick, and left a message. “Tell me you didn’t know about the twenty-nine-million-dollar motive lurking in the middle of this case. Because if you knew about that little item and chose not to tell me, you and I have a serious problem. Call me ASAP.”

He considered calling Jane Hammond next, then decided a personal visit to the chalet, unannounced, to confront Jane and Richard together would be more revealing. He went to his duffle bag, found his notebook, tore out a blank page, and wrote a quick message to Madeleine:

“It’s almost 11:00 AM. I got back from Plattsburgh a while ago. Had a visit from Gilbert Fenton. Going over to the Hammonds’ place now to sort out a problem. I’ll have my phone with me—please call as soon as you get in.”

He placed the note next to her phone on the end table. He put on his ski jacket and was already heading for the door when he heard a key turning in the lock. The door swung open, and Madeleine entered the room, her thick wool ski hat pulled down over her forehead and ears, her down jacket zipped up to her chin. She looked cold and tense. She swung the door shut behind her and greeted him with a small “Hi.”

“Where were you?” The sharpness in his own voice surprised him.

“I went out for a while.”

“Why didn’t you leave me a note?”

“I didn’t know where I’d be. I didn’t expect to be gone that long. The fog and the ice . . .” A visible shiver ran through her body. “I need to take a hot bath.”

“Where were you?”

She looked as though she were thinking about a difficult question, then answered. “Someplace that doesn’t really exist anymore.”

He stared at her.

“I went to the house where George and Maureen used to live. If I didn’t know what it was, I wouldn’t have recognized it. It was crushed by a tree. Must have been a long time ago. Moss, pine needles, things growing out of it.”

“So . . . what did you do?”

“Nothing. Everything was different. The dirt road . . . the old fence . . . everything seemed so much smaller and shabbier.”

“How did you find the house?”

“The GPS.”

“You remembered the address after all those years?”

“Just the name of the road. But there were only four or five houses.” She paused, looked forlorn. “Now there’s not much of anything.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“No.” Another sudden shiver shook her. She clasped her arms tightly to her body. “I’m chilled. I need a hot bath.”

The lost look on her face gave him a terrible feeling. Surely it was reflecting something real inside her, yet it was a look utterly alien to the Madeleine he knew. Or believed he knew.

She appeared to notice for the first time that he was wearing his ski jacket. “Where are you going?”

“To see the Hammonds, to get something straight.”

“You’re driving there?”

“Yes.”

“Be careful. The ice . . .”

“I know.”

“I have to get into that bath.” She turned and walked into the bathroom. He followed her to the door.

“Maddie, you borrowed one of the Jeeps, followed a GPS to some dirt road in the middle of nowhere, stared at an old wrecked house, saw no one, then drove back here in the fog, freezing to death. That’s it? That’s what you did this morning?”

“Are you interrogating me?”

That’s exactly what he was doing, he thought. It was a bad habit, triggered by worry.

She started closing the door. He stopped her with a question. “Does all this have something to do with that kid who drowned?”

“All what?”

“All this. This weirdness. This sightseeing trip. That dirt road.”

“David, I really do want to take my bath.”

“What’s the big secret? I asked you if it has something to do with the kid who drowned. How did he drown, anyway?”

“He fell through the ice.”

“You knew him?”

“Yes. There weren’t many kids up here my age, not in the winter, anyway.”

“Are any of them still here?”

“Thirty years later? I have no idea. I doubt I’d recognize any of them if they were.”

He caught himself nodding understandingly—another ingrained interrogation technique, designed to create the impression of agreement, even empathy. He stopped it immediately, embarrassed by the essential dishonesty of the gesture. Keeping his behavior as a detective and his behavior as a husband separate seemed to require endless vigilance. He tried one more question as she was easing the door shut.

“How did he fall through the ice?”

She held the door a few inches ajar. “He raced his motorcycle out onto the frozen lake. The ice cracked.”

“How old was he?”

“He told everyone he was sixteen. I heard later that he was barely fifteen.”

“Who was there when it happened?”

“Just his girlfriend.”

“How well did you know him?”

“Not that well.” A sad smile appeared and disappeared.

HER STORY LEFT HIM FEELING UNCOMFORTABLE AND DISTRACTED ON his drive to the chalet. Halfway there a large gray animal darted across the foggy road ahead of him. He jammed on the brakes as it bounded into the darkness of the pine woods and disappeared.

When he arrived it was Jane who came to the door. She greeted him with a high-anxiety smile. “David? Is something wrong?”

“May I come in?”

“Of course.” She stepped back, motioning him into the entry area.

“Is Richard here?”

“He’s talking a nap. Is there something I can help you with?”

“It might be better if I could speak to both of you.”

“If you feel it’s important.” She hesitated for a moment, then went to get Richard.

She returned a minute later and led Gurney to a seat by the hearth. She perched nervously on the arm of a nearby chair and tugged at a strand of hair by her ear. “Richard will be out in a moment. Has something come up?”

“A couple of questions.”

“Such as?”

Before Gurney could answer, Richard entered the room and took a chair. He smiled a bland therapist’s smile.

Gurney decided to get right to the point. “Fenton came to see me this morning. He told me something that surprised me.”

Jane frowned. “I wouldn’t trust anything that man said.”

Gurney addressed Hammond. “Fenton told me you’re in line for a huge inheritance.”

He showed no reaction.

“Is it true?” asked Gurney.

“Yes, it’s true.”

Anticipating the obvious question, Jane spoke up. “I didn’t mention it because I was afraid it would give you the wrong impression.”

“How?”

“You’re used to dealing with criminals—people who do terrible things for financial gain. I was afraid that Ethan’s will would convey the opposite of what it really meant.”

“The opposite?”

“Because of the crazy things Fenton has been saying, I was afraid you might see it as something Richard had hypnotized Ethan into doing—even though that’s impossible. It was totally Ethan’s idea—a nudge to Peyton to straighten out his life.”

“A threat, to be honest about it,” said Hammond softly. “An attempt to extort improved behavior. The message was simple: ‘Shape up, or end up with nothing.’ Ethan was determined to reform his brother any way he could.”

“The money was never truly intended for Richard,” added Jane. “In fact, once the will is probated and the bequest comes to him, he intends to refuse it.”

Gurney turned toward Hammond. “Twenty-nine million is a lot to refuse.”

Those unblinking blue-green eyes met his gaze. “I’ve had enough money in my life to understand what it is and what it isn’t. When you don’t have it, you tend to believe that having it will make a far greater difference than it actually does. It’s only by having it that you discover its limitations. My father made a great deal of money, and he never ceased to be a miserable man.”

Gurney leaned back in his leather chair and let his gaze settle on the fireless hearth. “Are there any other facts you’re keeping from me because they might give me the wrong idea?”

“No,” said Jane quickly. “There’s nothing else.”

“How about the phone calls to the victims?”

“You mean the calls supposedly made to them on the days they died?”

“Yes.”

Her lips tightened in anger. “That’s all Fenton.”

“What do you mean?”

“He claims to have found one of those prepaid phones in the drawer of Richard’s night table. But it’s a drawer Richard never used, and a phone he’d never seen before.”

“You’re suggesting that Fenton planted it?”

“He must have, mustn’t he?”

“It’s one possibility.”

“I don’t suppose he told you that Richard took a lie detector test—and passed?”

“No, he didn’t mention that.”

“Of course he didn’t! You see what he does? He only mentions things that look bad for Richard, and nothing that proves he’s innocent!”

Hammond looked like he’d been through all this before and was getting worn down by it. “Was there anything else you wanted to ask about?”

“He also brought up the subject matter of your doctoral thesis on voodoo.”

“Good Lord. What did he have to say about that?”

“He suggested it demonstrated your interest in using mind control to kill people.”

Jane threw her hands up in exasperation.

Gurney looked at Hammond. “Is it true your thesis related voodoo curses to hypnotism?”

“It was an objective analysis of the self-destructive mental states witch doctors create in their victims. I can give you a copy of the thesis, but I don’t see how it would help you.”

“Let’s leave the door open on that, in case it might be useful.”

“Fine. Anything else for now?”

“Just one last question. Was Ethan Gall gay?”

Hammond hesitated. “How is that relevant?”

“There seems to be a sexuality-related element buried somewhere in this case. I can’t say yet whether it’s relevant.”

“Ethan was too busy for the distractions of love. His energies were devoted entirely to the reformation of the world’s misbehaving souls.”

There was an edge in his tone that raised a question. Before Gurney had a chance to ask it, Hammond answered it.

“I admit I was interested in Ethan. But he wasn’t interested in me. Not in that way.”

There was a silence, broken by Jane. “Professionally, Ethan adored Richard. Absolutely adored him.”

“Professionally.” Hammond’s emphasis on the term pointedly underscored its boundaries.