Wolf Lake

CHAPTER 25

Gurney parked under the portico. His mind was shuttling back and forth between Hammond and Madeleine. The precise little man with a disconcerting interest in homicidal voodoo and eyes as bright and chilly as sapphires. Madeleine standing alone on a desolate dirt road gazing at the wreckage of a house where she’d spent Christmas vacations more than three decades ago.

He wanted to talk to Peyton Gall but suspected that getting any useful information from him would likely require more than a knock at his security gate. Figuring out the right approach was one more challenge Gurney added to his list as he entered the suite.

Half-imagining that Madeleine might still be in the tub, he was surprised to see her fully dressed, standing by the windows that looked out over the lake. He was equally surprised to see a fire blazing energetically in the hearth.

She turned toward him. “Steckle was here.”

“To start the fire?”

“And to ask what we wanted for lunch, and when we might be leaving for Vermont.”

“Did he say he wanted us to leave by any particular time?”

“No. But I got the impression he’d like it to be soon.”

“What did you tell him about lunch?”

“There were two choices. A cold salmon plate or a Cobb salad. I ordered one of each. You can have whichever you want. I’m not hungry.”

“He’s bringing it here to the room?”

As if in answer to his question, there was a knock at the door.

He went over and opened it.

Austen Steckle was standing there with a strained smile, holding a room-service tray with a silver dome. “Little late for lunch, folks, but better late than never, right?”

“Thank you.” Gurney reached for the tray.

“No, no, let me do it.” He stepped past Gurney without waiting for an answer, crossed the room, and set the tray down on the coffee table in front of the hearth. “Fire’s going good, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Too bad about the weather. Supposed to get a lot worse. Blizzard coming down from Canada.”

Madeleine gave him a worried look. “When?”

“Hard to say. That’s the thing about these mountains. They’ve got their beauty, their wild appeal, you know, but then there’s the downside, the unknown, you know what I’m saying?”

“I’m not sure we do,” said Gurney.

“When it comes to the weather at Wolf Lake, there’s always some doubt. I know you folks need to get on to other places. Obviously you wouldn’t want to get snowed in for a week.”

What was obvious to Gurney was that the man wanted to be rid of them, and the reason probably had nothing to do with the weather. “I have a feeling that Fenton would like me out of here. You have that feeling, too?”

The interesting thing to Gurney about Steckle’s reaction was that, for a couple of seconds, he had none. When he did speak, it was in an almost confessional tone. “I didn’t want to mention it, since I figured you’d be on your way today, tomorrow at the latest. But I guess I should tell you. Investigator Fenton said that extending the hospitality of the lodge to you at a time when it was closed to regular guests could create the wrong impression.”

“What wrong impression?”

“That the Gall family was supporting your efforts to undermine his investigation.”

“Interesting.”

“He said I should be careful about aiding a person who might be charged with obstruction of justice. He said getting too close to you might not be a good thing for the lodge.”

There was thud in the fireplace as one log rolled off another. Gurney walked over to the hearth, picked up a poker, and started rearranging the logs. He wanted to take a moment to consider the hand he’d just been dealt.

He turned back to Steckle. “Sounds like an uncomfortable spot for you to be in. But the truth is I have no interest at all in undermining his investigation. The more I learn, the more I suspect he’s on the right track.”

That prompted a curious glance from Madeleine and a frown from Steckle. “Pretty big turnaround. I understood Jane hired you to prove Fenton was wrong.”

“That’s not the way I work. I just follow the facts.”

“Wherever they lead?”

“Absolutely.”

Steckle nodded slowly. “And you don’t think the facts favor the Hammonds?”

“Frankly, no. But getting back to the pressure you’re feeling from Fenton, are you saying I should leave the lodge and drop the case?”

Steckle raised his palms in objection. “Not at all. I’m just being honest with you about the pressure. I just want this shit to be over with.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“Good.” He looked at Madeleine. “You understand what I’m saying, right?”

“Oh, yes. Perfectly. We all want this to be over with.”

“Good. Great.” He showed his teeth in something resembling a smile and pointed to the silver dome on the tray. “Enjoy your lunch.”

AFTER STECKLE LEFT, GURNEY LOCKED THE DOOR. MADELEINE stood by the fire, looking uneasy.

“Can we check on the weather?” she asked.

“Steckle may be exaggerating the problem to get rid of us.”

“Can we check on it anyway?”

“Sure.” He took out his phone, went to an Internet weather site, and typed in “Wolf Lake.”

When the forecast data appeared, he stared at it. “This is useless.”

“What does it say?”

“It says we may get terrible weather but probably won’t.”

“It doesn’t say that. Tell me what it actually—”

“It says there’s a 30 percent chance of a major ice storm this evening, with ice-pellet accumulation of two to three inches, resulting in hazardous driving conditions.”

“And tomorrow?”

“A 30 percent chance of heavy snow accumulation, up to eighteen inches. Possible four-foot drifts with winds gusting to forty miles per hour.”

“So after this afternoon driving will be impossible?”

“It’s only 30 percent likely, meaning it’s 70 percent unlikely.”

She turned back to the window. As she stood gazing out toward Devil’s Fang, he could hear her fingernail attacking her cuticle.

He sighed. “If you want, we can leave for Vermont right now.”

She didn’t answer.

“I mean, if you’re worried about bad weather getting in the way—”

She cut him off. “Just . . . wait. I’m trying to make the right decision.”

The right decision? About what?

He picked up the poker and set about the rearrangement of the logs. After a while he gave that up and sat down on the couch. Minutes passed before she spoke again—this time so softly he almost couldn’t make out the words.

“Will you come with me?”

“Where?”

“I’d like to go back to where I was this morning . . . but have you with me . . . if you’d be willing to come.”

He sensed that the important thing was to say yes, which he did, and to put aside the questions that came immediately to mind.

THEY SET OUT IN A FOG THAT THINNED AS THEY DROVE UP TOWARD the ridge that defined the edge of the geological declivity that contained Wolf Lake. Beyond the ridge there was no fog at all, but slippery spots on the road made for slow going.

As they emerged from the Gall Wilderness Preserve, the GPS directed them onto a public road that led even higher into the surrounding mountains.

Twenty-five minutes later, the GPS alerted them to an upcoming turn onto Blackthorn Road. That intersection formed the center of a ghost town consisting of a few unidentifiable wooden structures in various stages of dilapidation.

“We’re almost there,” said Madeleine, sitting up straighter.

A minute later the GPS told them to make a right on Hemlock Lane.

“Don’t make the right,” said Madeleine. “It’s rutted and overgrown. Pull over here.”

He did as she said. They stepped out of the car into a cutting wind. He turned up the collar of his jacket and pulled his woolen ski cap down over his ears. Whatever it had once been, Hemlock Lane now appeared to be nothing but a rough dirt path into the woods.

She took his cold hand in hers and led him into the desolate lane.

They proceeded cautiously on the icy surface with the wind in their faces, climbing over fallen trees. The first structure they came upon was an abandoned cottage, covered with blotches of black mildew. Half hidden in the woods behind it were two smaller ones in total disrepair.

Madeleine stopped. “The Carey twins, Michael and Joseph, lived here with their mother. In the summer she rented out those little cottages in the back, but in the winter it was just them.”

As her gaze moved over the scene, Gurney got the impression she was attempting to see it as it once was.

“Come,” she said after a while, leading him along the lane.

Brittle remnants of the summer brambles were leaning in from both sides, catching at their pants and jacket sleeves. A few hundred yards farther they came to a second property in worse shape than the first. A huge fallen hemlock had obliterated at least a third of the main house. The remains of three small cabins off to the side were covered with years of decaying pine needles.

“This is it,” she said.

“This was the house where you spent your Christmases?”

She tightened her grip on his hand. “It was more than just Christmas week, though. The last year I came up I was here for six weeks.”

“Your holiday vacation was that long?”

“That year it was. My parents had put me in a private school that had longer winter breaks than public schools and shorter summer breaks.”

“What about your sister?”

“When I was fifteen Christine was already twenty-two.” She paused. “They used to call me the surprise baby. That was a euphemism for the shock baby. I’m sure they wished they could wake up one morning and discover I’d just been a bad dream.”

Taken aback by this, he said nothing. Rarely had she talked about her parents when they were alive, and never after they died.

She drew him closer to her as they proceeded along the narrowing path. Soon all resemblance to an actual road disappeared. The wind grew more biting. His face was beginning to ache. Just when he was about to question her destination, they emerged into a clearing. Beyond it was a perfectly flat white expanse, which he guessed was a frozen lake.

She led him across the clearing.

At the edge of the white expanse she stopped and spoke with a forced evenness. “This is Grayson Lake.”

“Is this the lake where that boy drowned?”

“His name was Colin Bantry.” She paused, seemed to reach a painful decision, and took a deep breath. “I was in love with him.”

In love . . . with the kid who drowned? “Jesus, Maddie. What . . . what happened?”

She pointed to two enormous hemlocks at the edge of the frozen lake. “One night I asked him to meet me . . . over there. It was so cold. The coldest night of the year.”

She fell silent, gazing at the trees.

“I told him I was pregnant.”

He waited for her to go on. All he could see, all he could focus on, was the look on her face, a look of desolation he’d never seen there before.

She repeated herself, slowly, as if punishing herself with the words. “I told him I was pregnant.”

Again he waited.

“He raced out onto the ice on his motorcycle. All the way out. In the moonlight. Out there.” She pointed with a trembling hand. “The ice broke.”

“That’s how he drowned?”

She nodded.

“What happened with . . . your pregnancy.”

“I wasn’t pregnant.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t lie. I really believed that I was. I’d missed my period. Maybe I wanted to be pregnant, wanted to be attached to Colin, wanted a new life, a life where someone wanted me more than my parents did. Oh God, I was so desperate! And I loved him so much!”

“Why do you think he did what he did?”

“The awful thing is, I have no idea. I have no idea, but the thought that tortured me was that he was running away, that he couldn’t face me, couldn’t face being with me anymore. He didn’t say a single word, just . . . just raced off across the ice.”

There was a long silence as they stood staring out over the lake.

Eventually Gurney asked, “Was there a police investigation?”

“Of course. Colin’s father was a deputy sheriff.”

“You told him what happened?”

“I didn’t say anything about telling Colin I was pregnant. I said that I didn’t know why he rode out onto the ice . . . that maybe he was just showing off, or just felt like doing it. He believed me. Colin was like that. Everyone knew Colin was wild.”

There was another silence. Her grip on his hand was almost painfully tight.

He looked into her eyes. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because we’re here.”

“You decided to reveal this secret you’ve been keeping from me all this time—because we’re here?”

“I didn’t see it as keeping a secret from you. I saw it as something I shouldn’t inflict on you.”

“Who did you tell? A friend? A therapist? You must have told someone.”

“A therapist, naturally. Around the time we met. When I was doing the training for my clinical certification. I thought therapy would be an ideal way of dealing with it, since in a sense it would allow me to keep it to myself.”

“Did it work?”

“I thought at the time that it did.”

“But . . .?”

“But now I think the process gave me the illusion of having dealt with what happened—and the conviction that I never needed to talk about it to anyone ever again. That’s what I meant when I said that I didn’t think of it as a secret. I just thought of it as a part of the past that belonged in the past, and talking about it in the present would have no purpose.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I don’t know. All I know is what I felt when Jack held up that Adirondack route map on his phone screen at our kitchen table, and I realized how close we’d be to Grayson Lake.”

“You felt some attraction to the place?”

“Oh God, no. The opposite. I felt sick. I almost had to leave the room.”

“But you volunteered to come here. You said yes before I did.”

“Because at that moment I realized I hadn’t dealt with anything. As awful as that moment was, I felt I was being offered an opportunity.”

They stood side by side in silence, looking out over the snow-covered lake.

She sighed. “It happened thirty-two years ago. But it never really ended. Maybe because I could never be sure why he did what he did. Maybe because I never came to terms with my guilt. Maybe because they never found his body. Maybe—”

Gurney interrupted, “They never found his body?”

“No. Which revived all the old talk about the evil in the lake. Which is why the people who used to come every summer stopped coming. Which is why the little town eventually died—why it’s like the way it is now.” She let go of his hand for the first time since they’d gotten out of the car and began rubbing her own hands together.

“What old talk about the evil in the lake?”

“Remember the story Norris Landon told us about the girls in the canoe that capsized long ago—how one of them drowned, and they couldn’t find the body?”

“Right—until the skeleton turned up in Wolf Lake five years later.”

“Well, that girl drowned right here in Grayson Lake. And when Colin drowned here, too, and they couldn’t find his body, it brought the old drowning story back; and people started calling it Graveyard Lake.”

“Because of that, people abandoned their houses?”

“Not right away. Graysonville was a marginal sort of place. Never far from poverty. Most people depended on renting rooms or cabins to summer vacationers. I suppose the idea of children drowning and their bodies disappearing took hold of people’s imaginations, and they stopped coming. The town, never much to begin with, gradually collapsed.”

“The Devil’s Twins. Isn’t that what Landon called the pair of lakes he claimed were linked through some chain of underground caverns?”

“Yes.” A flock of small birds came flying wildly out of the woods and veered out over the lake, swooping and tumbling like autumn leaves in a gale.

She took his hand again in hers. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know. A jumble of things.”

“Do you wish I hadn’t told you?”

“Maddie, I want to know whatever you want to tell me. Anything. Everything. I love you.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

She nodded, still looking into his eyes, still holding his hand. “We should start back. The snow is coming. I can feel it in the air.”

He looked up at the sky. The clouds were thickening and darkening now, and above the frozen lake a hawk was circling unevenly in the rising wind.

CHAPTER 26

When they crested the last ridge before Wolf Lake, the stored-message tone rang on Gurney’s phone. Checking the screen, he discovered two messages—one from Jack Hardwick and one from a caller with a blocked ID.

“Look out!” cried Madeleine as a deer bounded out onto the road ahead.

Gurney jammed on the brakes, missing the deer by inches.

“Pay attention to the road and give that to me.” She extended her hand for the phone. “Do you want me to play the messages?”

He nodded, and she tapped an icon.

As usual, Hardwick didn’t bother to identify himself, but his raspy voice was unmistakable. “Hey, ace, where the fuck are you? We have significant shit to discuss. One—I delivered that letter to the house in Staten Island, slipped it under the front door, with all those contact options. Two—I didn’t have a clue about that twenty-nine mil for Hammond. But there’s some kind of explanation, right? Three—I got a present for you, nice practical gift. I plan to be passing through the Adirondacks tomorrow, so let’s pick a spot to get together. ASAP. Related to that, you know what’s on my mind right now? The Baryshansky case. Think about it.”

The Baryshansky case? For a moment Gurney was baffled by the reference to the big Russian mob investigation a decade earlier. Then the relevant piece of it lit up like an alarm. That was the case in which the mob had managed to hack the cell phones of two senior investigators in the Organized Crime Task Force. The obvious implication was that Hardwick suspected that the security of their phone conversations had been compromised.

“What is it?” asked Madeleine.

“It sounds to me like Jack has surveillance concerns.”

“What does that mean?”

He wanted time to think through the possibilities. “I’ll explain later; let me pay attention to the road. Don’t want any more deer surprises.”

Madeleine asked if he wanted her to play the next message.

“Not right now.”

After they’d arrived at the lodge and were standing under the portico, she handed him back his phone. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“I got the impression that Jack thinks he’s being bugged.”

“That he’s being bugged? Or that both of you are?”

“He wasn’t clear about that. But I’m pretty certain my own phone is safe.”

She gave him an anxious look. “What about our room here at the lodge?”

“It’s possible, but I doubt it.”

“Is there a way of finding out for sure?”

“There are detection devices. I’ll discuss it with Jack.”

“Who would be spying on us?”

“Conceivably Fenton, but I doubt it.”

“Who then?”

“Good question. Hardwick knows more than he told me on the phone. I’ll set up a face-to-face with him to clarify the situation.”

She looked worried. “So what do we do now? Go upstairs to our possibly bugged room? Pretend we’re happy little campers?”

“Actually, yes, that’s exactly what we need to do.”

“What are we supposed to talk about? Or not talk about?”

“The main thing not to talk about is any suspicion that we’re being monitored. If our room or phone is bugged—” He stopped in mid-sentence, remembering that he had a message on his phone he hadn’t listened to yet. He located it and tapped the icon.

The voice was young, female, and frightened. “Hello. I was hoping you’d answer. The letter said you’d be there. Are you there? Can I give you my number? Maybe it would be safer if I called you back. Okay, so that’s what I’ll do. I’ll call you at . . . exactly . . . umm . . . four o’clock. Okay?”

Gurney checked his watch. It was 3:53. The sun, hidden behind the heavy overcast, would be sinking now behind Cemetery Ridge.

“Is that the girl you wanted to get to?” asked Madeleine.

“I think so.”

“Now what?”

“I’m going to stay out here to take her call. You might be more comfortable up in the room.”

She made a face. “You really think our room might be bugged?”

“It’s conceivable. But I really believe that any major surveillance would be aimed at the Hammonds, not us.”

“Why?”

“Because the focus of the BCI investigation is on Richard. And Jane is the person trying to protect him. She’s also the one who got Hardwick involved, and now he suspects he’s being listened in on. I’m thinking it’s her phone that’s been hacked, and that’s how the listener might know about his involvement.”

“And your involvement?”

“Only if she discussed the situation on the phone and used my name in the course of the conversation. But all this is guesswork. I need facts.”

After a long silence she took his hand in hers the same way she’d taken it on the forlorn lane in Graysonville. “Are you sure it’s all right? What I told you earlier?”

“Of course it’s all right . . .” Before he could say anything more, his phone rang. As before, the caller ID had been blocked. He assumed it would be Angela. He looked helplessly at Madeleine and started to apologize.

She cut him off. “Answer it.”

He took the call. “This is Dave Gurney.”

“I left you a message.” It was the same small voice.

“Yes, I got it,” he said as gently as he could. The main thing was to not lose her. “I appreciate your willingness to talk to me.”

“What do you want from me?”

“It would help me a lot to know whatever you can tell me about Steven.”

“Stevie.”

“Stevie. Okay. See how little I know? So just about anything you can tell me will be a big help. Did everyone call him Stevie, or just you?”

“His parents called him Steven, which he hated.” There was a childish vibe in her voice that made her sound about half the age he assumed she must be.

He decided to play to the vibe. “Parents can be a problem.”

“No shit. Especially his parents.”

“How about your own parents?”

“I don’t talk to them.”

“I didn’t talk much to mine, either. Tell me, do people call you Angie or Angela?”

“Everybody calls me Angela. Nobody calls me Angie.”

“Okay, Angela, let me ask you something. Is there someplace where we could meet and talk about Stevie, someplace you’d feel safe?”

“Why do we have to meet?” There was a skittery edge in her voice.

“We don’t have to. I just think it might be safer. But it’s up to you.”

“What do you mean, safer?”

“I don’t mean to frighten you, Angela, but you do understand that your situation is dangerous, right?”

She hesitated so long in answering he was afraid he’d lost her. When she did speak, the skittishness had grown to flat-out fear. “I guess so. But why would it be safer to meet?”

“Because our phones might not be secure. If the bad guys have the right equipment, they can hack into just about anything—calls, text messages, emails. You see stuff like that in the news all the time, right?”

“I guess.”

“You know the most private way for two people to have a conversation?”

“In the bathroom?”

“Actually, bathrooms are pretty easy to bug.”

“Then how?”

“A public area with maybe some background noise or other people talking. That makes it hard for snoopers. That’s the kind of situation I think would be the safest for both of us.”

“Like a big store?”

“A big store would be perfect. That’s good thinking.”

“I know a lot of stores. Where are you?”

“I’m up in the Adirondack Mountains.”

“At the place where Stevie met with the hypnotism guy?”

“That’s exactly where I am. I’m trying to find out what happened to Stevie up here so I can figure out what happened to him later, down at your place in Floral Park.”

There was a silence. He waited, leaving the next move in the conversation up to her.

“You don’t think he committed suicide, do you?” she asked.

“No. Do you?”

“He couldn’t have.”

“How do know that?”

“He just wouldn’t have done that—not after the promises he made to me. We were going to get married, get our own house. He wouldn’t kill himself. That’s impossible!”

Gurney had a dozen questions, but he reminded himself that one wrong one could spook her. The goal was to get her committed to a face-to-face meeting—where he’d have more control, plus the opportunity to read the subtleties of facial expressions and body language.

“I understand what you’re saying, Angela. I really do. That’s why we have to find out what really happened. Or you’ll never be safe.”

“Don’t say that. You’re scaring me.”

“Sometimes fear is good. Fear of the right things can help us get past fear of the wrong things.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re afraid of whoever’s behind what happened to Stevie. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re also afraid of me. Because I’m a detective, and you don’t really want to talk to detectives, do you?”

Her silence at that point was answer enough.

“It’s okay, Angela. I can understand that. But ask yourself this question: Which of those people should you be more afraid of? The person responsible for Stevie’s death? Or the person who’s trying to get to the bottom of it to make sure no one else gets hurt?”

“I hate this. Why do I have to make these horrible decisions?”

Gurney said nothing, just waited.

“Okay. I can meet you tomorrow. I know a place.”

“Tell me where it is and what time you want me to be there.”

“You know Lake George Village?”

“Yes.”

“Can you be there at ten o’clock tomorrow morning?”

“Yes. Where in Lake George Village?”

“Tabitha’s Dollhouse. I’ll be up on the second floor by the Barbie Dolls.”

STILL STANDING WITH MADELEINE OUT IN FRONT OF THE LODGE, HE accessed the Internet on his phone and typed in “Tabitha’s Dollhouse.”

It came up immediately—on Woodpecker Road in Lake George Village. The website showed a building designed as an elaborate fantasy cottage. Above the cottage on the web page, arcing like a rainbow across a pure blue sky, were the words, “Home of Fabulous, Lovable, Collectible Dolls.”

Madeleine frowned at the screen. “A doll store? That’s where she wants to discuss her boyfriend’s death?”

“It does seem an odd choice.”

“You didn’t ask her why?”

“I didn’t want to ask anything that might get her off track. She agreed to meet with me, and that’s the main thing.”

“Do you mind if I come with you?”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I’d rather not stay here alone.”

“You know it’s at least a two-hour drive each way?”

“It’s better than the alternative.”

He shrugged. “I’m going to call Jack from out here, and it may take a while.” He pointed at the lodge. “There’s smoke coming out of the main chimney, meaning there’s a fire in the Hearth Room. Why don’t you go in and warm up?”

“I’ll go in when you go in.”

“Up to you.” He returned to the Dollhouse website and pasted its address into Google Maps. He noted the location of a nearby gas station and copied its address to the message area of a blank email. Then he called Hardwick.

The man picked up on the first ring. “Before you say anything, tell me if you understood my reference to the Baryshansky situation.”

“I think so.”

“Good. Important to keep that in mind. So. How soon can I give you your special gift?”

“Depends on when and how far you’re willing to travel.”

“Anywhere, anytime. Sooner the better.”

“I plan to get together tomorrow with that young lady I’ve been wanting to meet. Maybe we can cross paths in the same neighborhood.”

“Absolutely.”

“I have some address information. I’ll email it to you.”

“I’ll watch for it.”

Gurney went back into his email program and brought up the one he’d begun with the Lake George gas station location in it. Under the station address he typed in the notation, “Here at 9:00 AM.” He addressed the email to Hardwick and sent it.

Madeleine was standing with her arms clutching her body in the frigid air.

He nodded toward the lodge. “Let’s go inside and defrost ourselves by the fire.”

She followed him to the Hearth Room. Once in front of the crackling blaze she slowly unfolded her arms.

Standing beside her, the radiant heat of the fire seeping into his body, Gurney closed his eyes and let his world contract to the warm orange glow on his eyelids and the tingling of his skin as the deep chill dissipated.

The feeling of peace was broken by the rough edge of Austen Steckle’s voice.

“Glad to see you folks finally decided to come in out of the cold. Nasty day, nastier night on the way.” Dressed in a dark plaid shirt and khaki pants, he was standing in the center of the broad archway. “Did you hear the wolves?”

“No,” said Gurney. “When?”

“Little while ago. Up in the woods in back of the lodge. Horrible sound.”

“How often do you see them?”

“Never. Makes it worse. Just hearing them. Monsters creeping around in the forest!”

Steckle’s comment created an uncomfortable silence, broken by Madeleine. “You said something about nastier weather tonight?”

“The edge of a storm coming through. Windy as hell, temperature dropping. But that’s just a taste of what’s around the corner. Weather here jerks you around like a dog killing a rat. Tonight’ll be rotten, tomorrow morning’ll be sunny, can you believe it? Then, later tomorrow, all hell breaks loose—the big one, coming down from the north.”

Madeleine’s eyes widened. “The big one?”

“Arctic air mass. Zero-visibility blizzard. A definite road-closer.”

Gurney suspected these weather warnings were being employed to encourage their departure. But if Steckle was acting under pressure from Fenton to get them away from Wolf Lake, then perhaps a promised departure could be used as a lever to open another door.

Gurney nodded thoughtfully. “Probably be a good idea for us to get out of here before that storm hits. Otherwise we may never get to Vermont.”

Steckle nodded in immediate agreement.

“Problem is,” said Gurney, “there’s one more person I need to talk to before we can leave.”

“Who’s that?”

“Peyton Gall.”

“Why the hell would you want to talk to him?”

“Ethan’s will, and therefore Ethan’s death, directly benefits two individuals—Peyton Gall and Richard Hammond, whose bequest Fenton was happy to tell me about. But since Peyton’s share is as big as Richard’s, he’d have as big a motive. Maybe bigger, since—”

Steckle interrupted. “Yeah, I see how that might look from a distance. But that’s miles from reality. You obviously don’t know Peyton.”

“That’s a hole I’m trying to fill.”

“Let me fill it for you, before you get stuck in the blizzard of the century for nothing.” Steckle joined Gurney and Madeleine in front of the fire. “See, here’s the problem with Peyton. It’s pretty simple. If Hammond wasn’t the brains behind the four deaths—murders, suicides, whatever you want to call them—then somebody else was. But the idea that it could be Peyton is just absurd.”

“Why is that?”

Steckle’s voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “Because Peyton Gall is a lunatic drug addict whose priorities are limited to coke, pussy, more coke, and more pussy.” He glanced at Madeleine. “Excuse my crude language, Mrs. Gurney, but I gotta call a spade a spade. We’re talking about a brain-damaged junkie whose social circle consists of the whores he brings in from wherever. Russia, Thailand, Vegas, crack houses in Newburgh—he’s gotten to the point where it don’t make any difference.”

Gurney could see a sheen of sweat on Steckle’s shaved head. “As the last surviving member of the Gall family, this lunatic is your new boss?”

“Hah! I have no illusions about my future here. I never had a contract. It was all based on mutual trust with Ethan and shared business goals. You know what it’s based on now? Nothing. Be amazed if I’m here in another three months at the rate that fucker is disintegrating.”

“I was told he’d straightened out recently, at least for a while.”

“True, but little periods of being straight have happened before, and they always end the same way—with him wilder and worse than ever.”

“You’re telling me he’s not only too crazy to have masterminded a complicated crime, he’s barely able to function?”

“You got it.”

“Then my interview with him will be very brief.”

Steckle’s frustration was palpable. “He won’t want to talk to you.”

“I’m hoping you can help me there. Ethically, I can’t walk away until I sit down with him and form my own opinion of his capabilities. If what you say about him is true, it shouldn’t take long. Tell him I just need fifteen or twenty minutes of his time.”

“What if he refuses?”

“He might be persuaded to speak to me if he knows I’ll be hanging around until he does—that I’ll be keeping an eye on him, maybe taking a close look at his forms of amusement.”

Steckle took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “Fine. Have it your way. I’ll pass your request along to him.”

“Be great if I could see him tomorrow—before ‘the big one’ snows us in.”

“I’ll give it a try.” He flashed a mechanical smile and left the room.

Madeleine was studying Gurney’s puzzled expression. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that running an Adirondack lodge is a strange job for a man who hates Adirondack weather.”

BACK UPSTAIRS IN THE SUITE GURNEY FELT LIKE HE WAS STUCK IN an area where the signals of two radio stations overlapped. The competing signals were arising from his roles as detective and husband, and the static was growing louder. He couldn’t deny that he felt a certain natural attraction to the baffling aspects of the case. He also felt an acute need to be more supportive of Madeleine, especially now; but he wasn’t at all sure what action would best provide that support. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he was more comfortable dealing with murder than with marriage. In the grip of uncertainty, he decided to leave his further involvement in the case up to her.

“If you want me to walk away from this Hammond business, I will. We could leave in the morning, meet up with Hardwick and Angela at Lake George as promised, then go on to Vermont.”

“What about Peyton Gall?”

“Hardwick can follow up on that—or not. That’s up to him. All I promised Jane was that I’d drop by Wolf Lake for a day or two and take a look. Well, I’ve taken a look.”

“What have you seen?”

“Nothing that isn’t contradicted by something else.”

“For example?”

“We have a suspect accused of a crime that may not even be possible to commit. We have an unsavory brother of the richest victim, with a huge financial motive for murder—who’s not even being considered as a suspect. We have a family legend involving a wolf nightmare that sounds like nonsense—except that a similar nightmare has been involved in four deaths in the past month. And we have a handyman who seems half crazy—except that he also seems to be the only one who believes there’s something evil going on at Wolf Lake.”

“What about Jane?”

“What do you mean?”

“The saintly little seeker of truth essentially lied to you by failing to mention Richard’s position in Ethan’s will, which may be the most important fact of all.”

“Good point—and one more indication that there nothing’s simple about this case. Most of it is bizarre, if not impossible.”

“So you’re hooked.” She produced a fleeting Mona Lisa smile. “Nothing appeals to you more than the bizarre and impossible. You might think you can walk away, but you can’t. And even if you could . . . I’d have to stay here myself.”

“Why?”

“I have to finish what I came here for.”

Before he could respond to that, his phone rang.

The ID on the screen said it was Holdenfield. He looked at Madeleine, and she gestured that he should take the call. He did.

“Rebecca?”

“Hi, David. I’m not sure I have anything of real value for you, but I wanted to get back to you sooner rather than later.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

Madeleine went into the bathroom and closed the door with a distinct firmness.

“For what it’s worth,” said Rebecca, “I did a quick look-through of Hammond’s journal articles, as well as the media coverage he’s gotten from time to time. The general media items were mostly about the controversy over his gay emergence therapy. The antigay crowd may be shrinking these days, but what’s left of it is still as virulent as ever.”

It brought to mind the hatred in Bowman Cox’s eyes. “Any other controversies?”

“Some professional ones. Hammond isn’t shy about attacking the pharmaceutical companies for peddling psychotropic poisons. By contrast, he claims hypnotherapy is perfectly safe, and that his own techniques can achieve results that used to be considered impossible.”

“Does he spell out those techniques?”

“Ah, well, there’s the problem. His clinical success rate has been documented, and it’s astounding. With compulsive disorders, phobias, and PTSD symptoms, his rate of achieving total remission is five times higher than the American Psychiatric Association average.”

“But . . .?”

“But when other therapists try to employ the techniques he describes, they don’t come close to his results.”

“Does that mean he’s faking his success stories?”

“No, that’s been checked and double-checked. If anything, he’s been understating his positive outcomes—a breathtaking fact in itself.”

“Then what’s the explanation?”

“In my opinion, there’s a unique synergy between the method and the man.”

“Meaning?”

“Hammond has a uniquely powerful clinical presence.”

“You mean he has a talent that enables him to do things other therapists can’t do?”

“I’d say that his clinical talent appears to be out of the ballpark. I suspect that other people could learn his techniques, but only by closely observing what he does.”

Gurney thought about this for a few moments. “It sounds like Dr. Hammond could put a very high price tag on himself, if he were so inclined.”

“That’s an understatement.” Holdenfield paused. “The odd thing is, he doesn’t seem interested in money, or in any of the prestige positions in the field that could be his for the asking.”

“One more question before you go. Does the term ‘trance-induced suicide’ mean anything to you? I heard it used recently, and I was wondering if it had any clinical meaning.”

“It’s ringing a distant bell. I’ll let you know if the context comes to mind. Anything else?”

“Has Hammond ever commented on that new area of research you mentioned—separating thoughts from the emotions they generate?”

“Matter of fact, he has. He suggested in a recent article that it could be achieved through hypnotherapy. He even seemed to be hinting that he might already have done it.”

CHAPTER 27

At 6:45 AM the next morning, at the first suggestion of dawn, they were in the Outback, heading for Lake George, heater turned up to the max. By the time they crested the first ridge, Madeleine had fallen asleep.

The secondary roads to the Adirondack Northway were slippery from the night’s flurries, and the going was slow. The Northway itself, however, turned out to be free of both snow and traffic, and Gurney was able to make up for lost time.

At 8:56 he entered Lake George Village and a moment later caught sight of the lake—as gray as the cold sky above it. As the road drew closer to the shore, he passed a deserted marina, a closed restaurant, and a lakefront hotel with a nearly empty parking lot.

At 8:59, he pulled into the Sunoco station on Woodpecker Road. He spotted the red GTO parked by the convenience store in back of the gas pumps. Hardwick was pacing along the edge of the parking area smoking a cigarette. He looked grim. The hard set of his jaw, the evident tension in his muscular body, and those ice-blue sled-dog eyes would keep any sane stranger at a prudent distance.

Madeleine stirred in her seat.

“We’ve arrived,” said Gurney, pulling in next to the GTO. “Did you want to walk around a bit?”

She mumbled something and shook her head.

He got out, felt the wind coming off the lake, and zipped up his jacket. As he approached Hardwick, the man dropped his cigarette to the pavement and crushed it underfoot as though it were a wasp that had just stung him. His grimace morphed into an overly broad smile as he came forward, hand extended.

“Davey! Good to see you!” The exuberance of the greeting was as false as the smile.

Gurney shook his hand.

Hardwick maintained the big grin but lowered his voice, “Never know who’s watching. Want the gift idea to look credible.” He opened the passenger door of the GTO, took out a slim gift-wrapped box, and handed it to him. “Unwrap it and look surprised. And happy.”

In the package Gurney found what appeared to be a sleek new smartphone.

“Advanced surveillance scanner,” said Hardwick. “Full instructions on the opening screen. Your password is ‘Sherlock.’ Set it to scan and leave it in your pocket. Automatically maps any space you’re in. Locates and identifies audio and video bugs, geo-trackers, recorders, transmitters. Stores the mapping, location, and frequency spectrum data associated with each device for later retrieval. Questions?”

“Where’d you get this thing?”

“Remember the tough little redhead techie on the Mellery case?”

“Sergeant Robin Wigg?”

“Lieutenant Wigg now. Running technology evaluation for the Anti-Terrorism Unit. We stayed in touch. I happened to mention that I had a hostile-surveillance concern. Things like that get her excited. She said I could have this item for three days. Unofficial field test.”

“What prompted your surveillance concern?”

“An odd little travel brochure.” Hardwick glanced around, up and down the street, then gestured toward the convenience store. “Let’s go inside.”

Except for a tattooed girl with a green crew cut at the register, there were no other people in the store. Hardwick led the way to a wall of refrigerated drinks. “You want anything?”

“Tell me about the brochure.”

He opened one of the glass cooler doors and took out a bottle of springwater. “Chamber of commerce kind of brochure. Harpers Dale. You’ve heard of it?”

“Hot air balloon rides?”

“Plenty of shit like that. Tourist hot spot at the ass end of one of the Finger Lakes.”

“So . . . you got a Harpers Dale travel brochure? And?”

“It came in the mail. Someone had written the word ‘Unforgettable’ across the front of it. They even fucking underlined it.”

“This means what to you?”

“This means a world of shit. You remember why I brought you into this Hammond thing to begin with? I mean, apart from my wanting to save you from wasting your brain on some fucking porcupine.”

“You wanted a front man—so Gil Fenton wouldn’t know you were personally involved in undermining his case.”

“You remember why I didn’t want him to know?”

“Because he had some dirt on you from something that went down the wrong way a long time ago. And if he got pissed off enough, he might drop the dime.”

“That thing that went down the wrong way? It went down in Harpers Dale.”

A teenager with droopy denim pants, an oversized red baseball hat, a fur jacket, and shiny onyx disk earrings came down the aisle, clicking his tongue to a hip-hop beat. He opened the cooler door next to Gurney and took out four cans of a super-caffeinated drink called WHACK.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” growled Hardwick. He paid the green-haired girl for the springwater, and they walked out of the store.

Out by the GTO Hardwick lit a new cigarette and took a couple of fierce drags on it.

“I guess there’s no way that Harpers Dale brochure might have been a coincidence?” Gurney asked.

“No reason anyone else would mail me that kind of brochure. And that little addition—‘Unforgettable’—no way is that a coincidence. It’s a fucking threat. Fenton knows I’m working with the Hammonds. Which means there’s a bug somewhere.”

“At the chalet?”

“Most likely place.”

“Okay. What now?”

Hardwick made an acid-reflux face. “It’s a problem I was trying to avoid. But facts need to be faced. Bottom line, whatever Fenton knows or doesn’t know at this point makes no fucking difference. I’m in for the duration. If he wants to play the Harpers Dale card, that’s his business. But I’ll make fucking sure that fucker goes down with me.”

He took out another cigarette and lit it.

Gurney shrugged. “It may look like Fenton knows, but it’s not a certainty.”

Hardwick coughed up some phlegm and spit it on the pavement. “Nothing’s a fucking certainty, but it’s a good working assumption.”

“I’m just saying, in the event that he doesn’t know, and the brochure came to you by some other route, you shouldn’t advertise your involvement unnecessarily. It’s not like he signed his name to it. If you confront him, he could deny being the sender. You’d just be giving him the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten to you.”

“I shouldn’t stick my middle finger in his eye?”

“I’d resist the temptation if I were you.” Gurney paused, then patted the jacket pocket where he’d stowed the device. “I assume you want me to visit the chalet with this little item to verify your surveillance suspicions?”

“Absolutely. You might want to go over that Presidential Suite of yours, too.”

Gurney nodded his agreement, then glanced at the Outback. “Can it identify the presence of a GPS tracker?”

“According to Wigg, it picks up everything.”

“You checked your own car?”

“Yep. It’s clean.”

“How about we check mine right now—before I meet with Angela?”

Hardwick took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. “Good idea.”

MADELEINE WAS FULLY AWAKE NOW, EYEING THE SMARTPHONE screen with as much curiosity and concern as Gurney and Hardwick.

A device more advanced than any Gurney had ever seen, the scanner was displaying a clear outline of the vehicle they were sitting in.

Hardwick explained that he had set its “primary range perimeter,” one of its breakthrough features, to focus on the area defined by the Outback itself.

Gurney gave him a quizzical look.

Hardwick shrugged from the backseat. “All I can do is repeat what Wigg told me. According to her, this thing incorporates two technologies. One detects and displays transmission frequencies. The other is a new kind of short-range radar—CAM, stands for Close-Area Mapping. It detects and displays the perimeters of any enclosed space. Working together, they give you the precise location of any transmitter.”

On the scanner’s screen, within a graphic representation of the steel shell of the vehicle, two red lights were blinking—one near the front of the engine compartment, the other near a rear wheel well. Next to each red light were three number sequences and the letters GPT.

Madeleine looked at Hardwick. “What does all that mean?”

“The letters indicate the type of device—GPT for geoposition trackers. The large number next to each is its transmitting frequency. The other two numbers pinpoint the location of the device in vertical inches above the ground and horizontal inches from the car’s perimeter.”

Gurney looked skeptical. “Two flashing lights indicate the presence of two trackers?”

“The little wizard doesn’t lie.”

Madeleine’s eyes widened. “Those things are telling someone where we are, right now, sitting here in our car?”

“You got it.”

“Can you get rid of them?”

“We can, but we need to give some thought to when, where, and how.” He looked at Gurney. “Any thoughts on how we should deal with it?”

“That depends on who we think put them there, and why there are two of them.”

“Simple redundancy? Or different performance characteristics for different conditions?”

Gurney looked doubtful. “How many times have you found two trackers on one vehicle?”

“Never.”

“Maybe the two devices have separate sources?”

Now it was Hardwick’s turn to look doubtful. “Like two different investigators? And neither one wants to rely on getting data from the other?”

“Could be separate investigative agencies. And neither one knows about the tracker placed by the other.”

“What two agencies are we talking about?”

“I have no idea, just questions. For example, who authorized electronic surveillance on the personal vehicle of a private investigator? Presumably I’m not suspected of committing a crime. If probable-cause warrants were issued for the placement of those trackers, what was the basis? And if no warrants were issued, who was willing to break the law that way? Why do my movements matter that much?”

“You also gotta ask, what’s being done with the tracking data?”

Madeleine turned in her seat and stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“Location data can be used in a lot of ways. It can be fed directly to an automated drone with hi-res photo capability. Or to the navigation screen of a surveillance team, so they can follow you but stay out of sight.”

Gurney checked his watch. “We’ve got a time issue here. It’s almost 9:25, and I need to be half a mile up the road at ten for my meeting with Angela Castro. I’d rather not have that destination fed to anyone. Problem is, disposing of the trackers here would make it obvious that I found them, which would eliminate future options, so we need a different solution.”

“Easy,” said Hardwick. “Leave the car here, walk to your meeting. No problem.”

“No problem—unless we’re being photographed from one of those programmed drones you just mentioned. You know how many thousands of those things are in operation these days?”

“Jeez!” said Madeleine. “Are you saying something up there in the sky is watching us?”

“I’m saying we should act as though it might be.”

Hardwick’s acid-reflux expression returned. “Meaning what?”

“Nothing complicated. We just need to keep our actions as far out of sight as possible.”

After a pensive silence Madeleine spoke up. “Didn’t the hotel we passed have one of those big overhang things out in front, like the lodge? I’m pretty sure I saw one.”

Gurney nodded slowly. “I think you’re right. And it might solve our problem.”

TEN MINUTES LATER, FOLLOWING A HASTILY DEVISED PLAN, THE GTO was parked in the guest lot next to the hotel, and the Outback was parked in a sheltered spot under the front portico. The Outback’s position there had been secured, and the valet parking attendant warded off, with a display of Hardwick’s PI credentials, a serious-sounding explanation of the need to conduct an emergency vehicle inspection, and an assurance that it would take hardly any time at all.

The plan, such as it was, was that Hardwick would jack up the Outback and undertake an assessment of the planted devices, out of sight of any aerial surveillance, while Gurney would proceed on foot, through the hotel and out a rear entrance, to Tabitha’s Dollhouse.

Madeleine entered the lobby with Gurney. They located the hotel gift shop, where he bought an overpriced souvenir sweatshirt and baseball hat. Back in the sitting area of the lobby, he put on the sweatshirt and hat and left his own jacket with Madeleine.

“I should be back within the hour. Stay within sight of the front door in case Jack needs you.”

She responded with a tense nod, holding his jacket against her body.

“It’ll be okay,” he said, a bit too heartily. “I think this Angela Castro meeting will finally get us on the right track.” He hugged her, then headed across the lobby into a corridor marked with a red “Exit” sign.

The corridor led to a glass door. He passed through it and emerged onto a paving-stone path that curved around a bed of ornamental grasses, drooping and drained of color. The path led to a wider one along the shore of the lake, which he discovered roughly paralleled Woodpecker Road and provided an intermittent view of its shops and restaurants.

Maintaining a steady jog, he passed a few isolated dog walkers bundled up against the raw gusts coming off the lake. Within a few minutes he caught sight of a building he recognized from its photo on the Internet. Tabitha’s Dollhouse looked even stranger now in its mundane surroundings than it had in the soft-focus fantasy of its website.

He walked across a park-like space adjoining the path, and on across Woodpecker Road. He took out his phone, activated the “Record Audio” function, and slipped the phone into the pocket of his sweatshirt. The entrance to the Dollhouse parking lot was through an ornamented archway that bore the legend he recalled from the website: “Home of Fabulous, Lovable, Collectible Dolls.” There were four cars in the parking lot. One, Gurney noted, had dealer plates with a New York City prefix. The door to the Dollhouse itself was bracketed by two waist-high garden gnomes.

When he opened the door he was greeted by a sweet aroma that reminded him of the rectangles of bubblegum he hadn’t seen or smelled since grammar school. Scores of little doll faces stared at him from a pastel nursery world of soft pinks, blues, and yellows.

A young woman standing behind a central display case was smiling at him with a glazed cordiality. “Welcome to Tabitha’s. How can I help you?”

Gurney glanced around at the profusion of dolls on counters, on shelves, in glass cases—all shapes and sizes and styles of dolls, from cherubic infants to weird creatures that might inhabit fairy tales. Or nightmares.

“The stairs to the second floor?” he asked.

She regarded him with increased interest. “Are you here to see Ms. Castro?”

Having a secretive mindset about the meeting, he was surprised to hear her name.

“Yes, I am.”

“She’s with Tabitha.” Her lowered voice suggested that this was in some way special. “I’ll show you the way.” She led Gurney through a maze of doll displays to a staircase with a pink banister. “You can go right up, sir.”

The second floor was much like the first—except that the dolls here were more uniform in appearance, and many were arranged together in social tableaus. Not far from the top of the stairs there was a small sitting area with a bright yellow table and two glossy white chairs. One chair was occupied by a pale, waif-like young woman with a large, overly perfect, blond hairdo. Gurney was struck by its incompatibility with the shy, narrow face it framed—as well as its remarkable similarity to the blond hairdo of a doll in a locked glass cabinet in the corner.

Standing on the other side of the table was a woman different in almost every way from the seated waif. Her large body was draped in a generously pleated maroon maxi dress, embroidered at the neck. Her fingers were covered with shiny rings. Her face was brightly, almost theatrically, made up. And all of this was topped, literally and figuratively, by her hairdo. The seated waif’s was eye-catching, but hers was jaw-dropping. An upswept surge of black and silver-streaked waves collided at dramatic angles, bringing to mind a turbulent Turner seascape. This was a woman, thought Gurney, who was fond of making entrances.

She turned toward him with a sweeping gesture of her heavily ringed hand.

“Mr. Gurney, I presume?”

“Yes. And you are . . .?”

“Tabitha.” She made it sound like an incantation. “I was just about to bring Ms. Castro a nice glass of springwater. May I get you something as well? Herbal tea, perhaps?”

“Nothing. Thank you.”

“If you change your mind, if you need anything at all, if you have any questions, just tap on the bell.” She pointed at a little dome-shaped device in the middle of the table. “It’s pure silver. It makes the purest ding you ever heard.”

“Thank you.”

With a swirl of silky fabric and a waft of flowery perfume, she swept past him down the pink-banistered stairs.

Gurney turned his attention to the young woman at the table.

“Angela?”

She responded with a tiny nod.

“May I sit down?”

“Sure.”

“First of all, I want to thank you for allowing me to talk to you.”

She responded with a wide-eyed stare. “I didn’t know what else to do. The letter the other detective left at my brother’s house was really scary. What you said on the phone was scary.”

“We’re just trying to be honest about a situation we need to find out more about.”

“Okay.”

He looked around at the doll displays. “This is an unusual place you picked for us to get together.”

Her mouth opened in alarm. “I thought you said on the phone that a store would be a good idea.”

“It is a good idea.” He smiled and tried to sound reassuring. “I just meant that I’ve never been in a store like this before.”

“Oh, no. Of course not. It’s totally unique.”

“Tabitha seems very . . . accommodating.”

Angela nodded—at first enthusiastically, then with something that looked like embarrassment. She leaned toward Gurney and spoke in an anxious whisper. “She thinks we’re going to buy another Barbie.”

“Another Barbie?”

“When Stevie and I stayed here, he bought me a Barbie.” She smiled with a childish sweetness. “The special one I always wanted.”

“You and Stevie . . . stayed here?”

“Well, not right here in the store. At the Dollhouse Inn. Down the road. It’s sort of like a motel, but not like any ordinary one. It’s totally fantastic. The rooms have themes.” Her eyes lit up on that word.

“When was this?”

“When he came to see the creepy hypnotist about breaking his smoking habit.”

“Did you meet the hypnotist?”

“No, that was Stevie’s thing. I stayed at the inn.”

“You said the hypnotist was creepy. How did you know that?”

“That’s what Stevie said—that he was a really creepy guy.”

“Did he say anything else about him?”

She frowned, as if from the strain of trying to remember. “That he was disgusting.”

“Did he say what he meant by that?”

She shook her head. “No, he just said it. Creepy and disgusting.”

“Did he say anything to you about having nightmares?”

“Yeah, but that was later. Something about a giant wolf sticking a hot knife in him. Stuff like that. A wolf with hot red eyes, on top of him.” A visible shiver ran through her body. “God, how gross is that!”

“Did he tell you he had the dream more than once?”

“A lot. I think like every night after he saw the hypnotist. He said it was disgusting.”

“The dream was disgusting, like the hypnotist was disgusting?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Did Stevie use that word a lot?”

The question seemed to make her uncomfortable. “Not really a lot. Just sometimes.”

“Can you remember anything about those other times when he used it?”

“No.”

The answer came out too quickly to suit Gurney. But he sensed that pursuing the issue would be a mistake. He’d have to find a way to revisit it later.

For the moment, he wanted to lower the level of tension, not raise it. And that meant moving slowly around obstructions rather than trying to break through them. A meandering style of interviewing felt unnatural to his linear mind, but sometimes it was the best way forward.

“How much of a smoking problem did Stevie have?”

“What do you mean?”

“Had he tried to stop before?”

“I guess.” She shrugged. “I don’t know for sure.”

“Did he talk much about wanting to stop?”

“We never talked about smoking.”

Gurney nodded, smiled. “I guess most people don’t.”

“No. I mean, why would they? It’s a stupid thing to talk about.”

“After his hypnosis session with Dr. Hammond, was Stevie able to stop smoking?”

“No.”

“Was he upset by that?”

“I guess. Maybe. I’m not sure. Maybe he didn’t really want to stop. Mainly he talked about the horrible dream and how disgusting Hammond was.”

“Did he seem angry that the trip had been a waste of time and money?”

“A waste?”

“Well, I’m just wondering, if seeing Hammond didn’t help him stop smoking . . . did that make him angry?”

She looked perplexed, as though this were a subject she’d been revisiting in her own mind. “He said he was angry, when I asked him about it.”

“But . . .?”

“But when Stevie gets really angry . . . I guess I should say when Stevie got really angry . . . his eyes would change, like . . . I don’t know how to describe it, but . . . but even big guys would back away from him.”

“And he didn’t look angry that way when you asked about the time and money?”

“No.” She fell silent, looking sad and uneasy.

Gurney was pondering the best way to ask his next question when he heard a swish of fabric and out of the corner of his eye caught sight of the formidable Tabitha ascending the staircase with a remarkable lightness of foot.

She came to the table beaming, placing between them a black lacquer tray with a liter of designer water, a fancy bowl of ice cubes, and two glasses. She gave Gurney a coyly apologetic wink. “I brought an extra glass, just in case you change your mind.”

“Thank you.”

She paused a second or two, then whirled away and down the stairs with a panache that Gurney assumed was her default style.

He noted Angela watching Tabitha’s departure with a mixture of anxiety and awe. He waited until she was well out of sight before commenting. “Interesting woman.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told her we might be interested in buying a doll.”

“Why did you tell her that?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell the truth, right? I couldn’t say that I was meeting someone here to talk about my boyfriend’s horrible death.”

“Who did you say you were meeting?”

“You.”

“Right. But who did you say I was?”

“Oh. I just said your name and that you were a friend—not that you were a detective or anything like that. I hope it’s okay that I said you were a friend?”

“Of course. That was a good idea.” He paused. “Was there a special reason you wanted to meet here?”

“I love it here.”

He glanced around, trying to put himself in the mind of someone who’d feel at home in such an exotic, fantasy-based environment. “You love it because of all the dolls?”

“Of course. But mainly because this is where Stevie got me my all-time-favorite Barbie.”

“Was it a special occasion?”

“No. He just did it. Which made it even more special, you know what I mean?”

“It sounds like he wanted to make you happy.”

Her eyes started to well up.

He continued, “So this is a very special place for you. I can understand that.”

“And I couldn’t stay at my brother’s. If Detective Hardwick found me there, then other people could. So my brother lent me some money and a car from one of his used car lots, and I came up here last night. My brother said if I was really afraid of being found, I should pay cash, because cops and other people can track you down through your credit card. Is that true, or is that just on TV?”

“It’s true.”

“Jeez, it’s like someone’s always watching you. But that’s what I did—paid cash like my brother said. I’m staying in the same room that Stevie and I stayed in.”

“Do you plan to stay here for a while?”

“Unless you think that’s a bad idea?”

He couldn’t think of a better one. And he was doubly glad he’d taken the precaution of leaving his geo-tracked car at the hotel. He reassured her that it might be the best place for her under the circumstances.

“When I’m here, I feel like Stevie is with me.” She dabbed at her eyes, making a sad mess of her mascara.

Gurney moved on to a question that had been troubling him from the beginning. “I’ve been wondering, Angela, did it seem odd to you that Stevie was willing to travel all the way to Wolf Lake Lodge, just to see a hypnotist?”

She sniffled. “Kind of.”

“There must be places closer to Floral Park that offer hypnosis sessions.”

“I guess.”

“Did you ever ask him what he thought was so special about Dr. Hammond?”

She hesitated. “I think maybe he was recommended.”

“By who?”

Angela’s eyes widened. She seemed to be searching for a way out of a room she’d entered by mistake. “I don’t know.”

Gurney proceeded gently. He softened his voice. “It’s a scary situation for you, isn’t it?”

She nodded silently, biting her lip.

“I’m sure Stevie wanted to keep you out of danger.”

She continued nodding.

“Are you afraid now because of what happened to him?”

She closed her eyes. “Please don’t talk about that.”

“Okay. I understand.” He waited until she opened her eyes before he continued. “I think you’re being very brave.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. You’re here. You’re talking to me. You’re trying to be honest.”

She blinked on that last word. “It’s because I’m afraid, not because I’m brave.”

“You’re trying to do the right thing. You’re helping me figure out what really happened.” He smiled gently. “Now, about that person who recommended Doctor Hammond—”

She interrupted, “I don’t know who that was. I can’t even say for sure that that’s what the call was about.” She hesitated, her eyes on the silver bell in the middle of the table.

The call? What call? Gurney sat back in his chair and waited. He had a feeling that she was trying to get up her courage to go on, and that patience would draw out the facts.

After much hesitation she continued. “All I know is that Stevie got a call from someone; and when I asked him who it was, he got all weirded out and said it was no one. But that was a crazy thing to say, because he was on the phone for a long time. I told him it couldn’t be no one, why was he saying that to me? Then he got real quiet. But later that same night he started talking about a special doctor he’d heard about that could help him stop smoking.”

“And you put two and two together and figured it was the person on the phone who told him about the doctor?”

“Yeah. That’s right. It felt kind of obvious. So I asked him about it. I asked him to his face, was that who told you?”

“What did he say?”

“He just shook his head, sort of like he was denying it. Then he got like pissed off—like nervous pissed off, not really angry pissed off—and said whoever told him about the doctor, that wasn’t something I needed to know, it wasn’t important who told him, and I had no right to bug him about things like that.”

“And after he said that, what did you say?”

“I said he should at least tell me who was on the phone.”

“And what did he say?”

“At first, nothing. Stevie could get real quiet sometimes. But I kept asking him—because he was being so weird about the whole thing. Finally he said that the call came from someone he knew from way back, that the guy’s name wouldn’t mean anything to me, it was just someone he’d been at camp with when they were kids.”

“Did he say anything else at all about him? Think hard.”

“No, nothing.” She was biting her lip more intensely now, and her eyes were fixed on the silver bell with what looked to Gurney like incipient panic.

“Take it easy, Angela, it’s all right. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you. Remember what we talked about on the phone?”

She blinked confusedly.

“Remember what I said about fear? Sometimes we have to do something we’re afraid of doing—to protect ourselves from a bigger danger. I can see you’re afraid to talk about this, but if you tell me everything you know, everything that Stevie said, it will make you safer. Because the more I know, the more I can protect you.”

She closed her eyes again and seemed to force out the words. “Okay, so the thing is, it was totally weird. That evening, the way he talked about the phone call was like he was pretending it was nothing, a silly little call that didn’t matter, I shouldn’t ask about it because it wasn’t worth talking about.” She paused and took a deep breath.

“Then, at like five o’clock in the morning, like he’d been awake all night thinking about it, he woke me up. He asked me three times am I really awake and am I really listening. And then he told me, real serious like, that I should forget about the call. He said I should never mention it again and I should never never never tell anyone else about it—that if anyone else ever found out about it, we could both end up dead.”

When she opened her eyes, tears came down her cheeks. “And I never did. I swear. I never said anything about it to anyone. Not one word.”

CHAPTER 28

During his jog back to the hotel Gurney was analyzing his meeting with Angela Castro—trying to separate the facts that mattered from the distractions surrounding them.

He wasn’t sure in which category to place Tabitha. There was something odd about that physically dominating woman showing such deference to the anxious little Angela.

Then there was the complicated persona projected by Angela herself, with her rigid hairdo and near-anorectic physique. She appeared frightened, childishly romantic, desperate to lose herself in a make-believe world. Yet she was pragmatic enough to have obtained a loan and a car from her brother.

And there was Steven Pardosa’s dream, with its now-familiar elements—the wolf, the knife. And his contempt for Richard Hammond, expressed in emotionally charged words like “creepy” and “disgusting.”

Gurney felt that the meeting’s key element had been Angela’s recounting of the mysterious phone call—the effect it had on Pardosa, its possible connection to Hammond, and the extreme demand for secrecy that it generated. Gurney wondered if the potentially fatal result of disclosure had been an explicit threat made by the caller or if that was a conclusion reached by Pardosa as he pondered the implications of the call in the wee hours of the night. The latter version seemed more likely given the way Angela told the story.

And there was something else, an element he couldn’t put his finger on. He had a feeling that something Angela had told him wasn’t quite right. He tried playing back their encounter in his mind. But the out-of-place piece remained elusive.

When he got back to the hotel, he found Madeleine and Hardwick at opposite ends of a three-cushion couch in the lobby. Madeleine’s eyes were closed, but the erect position of her head suggested concentration rather than sleep. Hardwick was talking in a low voice on his phone.

Gurney sat in a chair across from them, separated from the couch by a low glass table.

Madeleine opened her eyes. “Did the young lady show up?”

“As promised.”

“What was she like?”

“Odd little creature. Obsessed with dolls. Looks like one herself. Any problems while I was gone?”

She nodded in the direction of Hardwick, who sounded like he was wrapping up his conversation. “He’ll tell you.”

Hardwick ended his call, tapped a series of icons, scrolled through several graphic images, made some adjustments to the final one, and slid the phone across the table to Gurney. “Take a look at that.”

On the screen was a photo of what appeared to be some sort of mechanical framework—which Gurney recognized as the front undercarriage of an automobile.

“My Outback?”

Hardwick nodded. “Zoom in.”

Gurney made the motion, and the center portion of the photo expanded to fill the screen.

“Again,” said Hardwick.

Gurney repeated the motion. Now the screen was filled by a single structural bar and a man’s hand intruding from a shadowy corner of the photo—with the thumb next to what appeared to be the protruding top of a bolt.

“Again.”

The final enlargement showed only the thumb and the protruding object. The scale reference of the thumb indicated the object was the size of a stack of four or five nickels.

Gurney shot Hardwick an incredulous glance, not quite able to believe what he suspected he was seeing on the screen.

“Believe it,” said Hardwick.

Gurney examined the photo more carefully. “That’s maybe one tenth the size of the smallest tracker I’ve ever seen.”

“Agreed.”

“You left it in place?”

“Yes. No point in announcing our discovery until we know what we’re dealing with.”

“The one near the back bumper is the same?”

“Not at all. That’s where the situation gets interesting. The other one is a common off-the-shelf item. Not even worth taking a picture of. Same old shit used by BCI. Same old shit that anyone with a few hundred bucks can order from their favorite Internet spy store. So what the fuck’s going on here? Any ideas, Sherlock?”

“I’d like to send the photo of the small one to Wigg.”

“I already did.”

“Good. She knows this stuff inside out. And her new position can only help.”

“Agreed. Any thoughts in the meantime?”

“Sure, but that’s all they are—thoughts. The two devices being that different from each other suggests that they were placed by separate entities.”

Madeleine gave him a look. “Entities?”

“I don’t know what else to call them at this point. We may be dealing with two agencies, two units within one agency, sanctioned or unsanctioned investigators, et cetera. The only thing that’s clear is that there’s a technology gap between them.”

“In the meantime,” said Hardwick, “you want to fill us in on your get-together with Pardosa’s girlfriend?”

Gurney spent the next quarter hour recounting the details of the meeting.

Hardwick zeroed in on the phone call Pardosa had received. “Seems like that set the whole thing in motion, or at least set him in motion.”

Gurney nodded his agreement. “We need to pursue the ‘someone he knew from camp’ angle. His parents ought to be able to tell us what camp he attended as a kid and when. They might even know the names of campers he was friendly with. You think you can look into that?”

Hardwick coughed and spit into his handkerchief. “Giant pain in the ass and probably a dead end. But what the fuck else am I—?” He was interrupted by his own phone.

He glanced at the screen, looked surprised. “Christ, that was fast. It’s Wigg.”

He thanked her for getting back to him, then listened for a minute or so before speaking up again. “Hold on a second, Robin. I’ve got Gurney here. Let us get to a more private spot so I can put this on speakerphone.” He turned to Gurney and Madeleine. “How about we move outside to your car?”

Madeleine looked skeptical. “Our bugged car?”

Hardwick assured her that the scanner had detected no audio bugs, just the trackers. They headed out to the car, still parked under the overhang, and took the same seats they’d occupied earlier. Hardwick switched on his phone’s speaker. “Okay, Robin. You want to repeat what you started saying a minute ago?”

“I was asking if you’re certain the photographed device was gathering geopositioning information and then transmitting it.”

Although Gurney hadn’t seen Robin Wigg for well over a year, her distinctive contralto voice brought her vividly to mind. A wiry, athletic redhead with an androgynous look and manner, her age might have been anywhere from thirty to forty. She was smart, laconic, professional.

Hardwick answered her question. “According to the scanner you lent me, there’s no doubt about it.”

“Dave, the device is still affixed your car?”

“Correct. We don’t want to remove it yet.”

“You just want to know more about it?”

“Right. How advanced it is, et cetera.”

“And what that might tell you about the people who placed it?”

“Right. I’m also wondering, have you ever seen anything like it before?”

The question generated a pregnant silence. Sensing that he’d crossed a subtle line, he added, “Whatever you’re comfortable telling us would be helpful.”

“How much detail do you want on the technical issues involved in this level of miniaturization?”

“Only as much as will help us understand what and who we’re dealing with.”

“Okay. What you have there is two generations beyond what most law enforcement agencies would consider state of the art. Ninety-nine percent of the surveillance operatives in the world wouldn’t even know that such a device exists.” She paused. “You getting the picture?”

“Jesus,” said Gurney. “What’s something like that doing attached to my car?”

“I’m not trying to sound dramatic, but it’s pretty clear you’ve gotten yourself on the radar screen of an adversary with serious resources.”

“How much would that little item cost?” asked Hardwick.

“A lot,” said Wigg. “But the real barrier isn’t money. It’s access.”

“We’re talking about some kind of high-level spook shit?”

There was another silence, as pregnant as the first.

Gurney sensed that Wigg had told them all she was going to, and that pushing it further would be counterproductive. “Thanks, Robin. This has been very helpful. I appreciate it.”

“Let me say one last thing. Be extremely careful. Anyone deploying that kind of technology is playing in a league way beyond what you’re used to.”

Wigg’s parting comment led Gurney back to the question of who was responsible for BCI’s fixation on Richard Hammond—a question he’d been relying on Hardwick to pursue. “Just wondering, Jack . . . any progress in discovering who upstairs might be guiding the way Fenton is handling the case?”

Hardwick leaned forward from his position in the backseat. “That’s an amazingly timely question. Fenton’s chain of command was the subject of that phone call I was in the middle of when you came into the hotel lobby.”

“What did you find out?”

“That Gilbert Fenton’s reporting line has become a tad obscure. He’s been on ‘special assignment’ ever since the discovery of Hammond’s connection to the apparent suicides.”

“Is this ‘special assignment’ just outside his regular unit, or outside BCI entirely?”

“Nobody seems to know for sure what’s going on, even the people who always know everything.”

“But . . .?”

“There’s a rumor that he’s been taken under the wing of the interagency liaison for national security issues.”

Madeleine turned in her seat to face Hardwick. “National security? What does that mean?”

“Ever since 9/11 its meaning has been expanded to mean whatever the nasty little storm troopers in charge of it want it to mean.”

“But in this case . . .?”

“In this case, who the fuck knows what it means?”

Madeleine made a face. “Are you saying that someone concerned with national security thinks that Richard Hammond is some kind of terrorist? Or spy? That makes no sense!”

Hardwick let out a humorless laugh. “Very little of what they think or do makes sense—until you see it as a way of inflating their own importance. Then it all makes perfect sense.”

She stared at him. “You’re completely serious, aren’t you?”

“Don’t get me started. I’ve run into too many of these self-important, power-mad fuckheads with their self-serving bullshit. The so-called Patriot Act, Homeland Security, and all the corporate pigs sucking on that giant tit have done more damage to this country than Osama bin Laden could ever have dreamt of doing. Bottom line? America has fucked itself up, down, and sideways. Spooks are running the show now—with unlimited access to your personal life.”

Gurney waited to let the momentum of Hardwick’s anger abate. “Apart from Fenton’s reporting-line change, were you able to find out anything else?”

Once again Hardwick hacked up a wad of phlegm and spat it into his soiled handkerchief. “I picked up a few tidbits that might be relevant. For example, prior to joining the state police Fenton did three tours of duty in the army—the final one in army intelligence.”

Madeleine appeared incredulous. “Is this turning into a spy drama?”

Hardwick shrugged. “With its hypnotism and behavior-control angles, it’s starting to look a lot like The Manchurian Candidate.”

“That was a movie,” said Gurney, “not something that actually happened.”

Hardwick came farther forward in his seat. “There’s no reason to believe it couldn’t happen. I’d bet anything there are devious little fuckers in the intelligence agencies right now trying to figure out how to exert that kind of mind control.”

Gurney felt the need to reel the conversation back into a fact-based framework. “Fenton’s tour in army intelligence might be connected to his new reporting line. But we just don’t know enough about it yet. Any other discoveries?”

“That’s it for now.”

“Nothing else on the gay angle?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. But it’s come up in ways that are hard to ignore—Hammond’s gay emergence therapy, Bowman’s Cox’s demonization of it. I’d like to know if there’s any evidence of homosexuality or homophobia in the backgrounds of Wenzel and Balzac.”

“Bobby Becker down in Palm Beach may be able to give us something on Wenzel. I have no direct line to Teaneck PD, so getting an answer about Balzac is a different deal. I know some people who know some people. But that route can take time. Any more questions?”

“Same ones I’ve asked before. Are there any red flags in Norris Landon’s background? Or in Austen Steckle’s—apart from his being a reformed lowlife, drug dealer, and embezzler? And I have one new question. Since Pardosa got a peculiar phone call that apparently directed him to Wolf Lake Lodge, I’m wondering if Wenzel and Balzac got similar calls.”

Hardwick sighed. “Be easier to get those questions answered if we had badges to wave around. Full fucking weight of the law can be an advantage.”

Gurney flashed a smile to hide his impatience. “I believe we agreed that the next item on your agenda would be a visit to Pardosa’s parents?”

“Right. In the hope that they memorized the details of little Stevie’s letters from summer camp, including the names of everyone he met there.”

“If I didn’t know you better, Jack, I’d think you resented the need for a little footwork.”

“Fuck you, too, Sherlock.”

CHAPTER 29

After Hardwick revved up the GTO and headed south on his long-shot mission to Floral Park, Gurney and Madeleine sat quietly for a while in the parked Outback.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“No.”

“What’s wrong?”

“This whole thing is getting darker and more complicated.” A gust of wind blew particles of sleet under the hotel portico and they bounced off the windshield. “We better get back to Wolf Lake before the weather gets worse.”

He nodded, started the car, and headed onto Woodpecker road in the direction of the Northway. “Maddie, are you absolutely positive we shouldn’t just put this situation behind us?”

“I’m positive. And it’s not because I like Hammond. I don’t. He’s a spoiled genius with a sick dependency on his caretaker sister. Judging from that body-in-the-trunk story, he’s also a little crazy. But I don’t believe he’s a mind-controlling murderer. And I know now that walking away from a mess doesn’t solve it.”

He had the sense that one of the tectonic plates of his life was shifting. Ever since he’d left the NYPD, Madeleine had been predictable in one respect. She’d consistently pressed him to turn his attention away from the world of murder and mayhem and focus on their new life in the country. Never before would she have advised him to stick with a homicide investigation.

The shift was radical and unsettling.

AFTER STOPPING AT A THAI RESTAURANT IN LAKE PLACID FOR A quiet lunch, for which neither of them had much appetite, they arrived back at Wolf Lake a little after four. The dusk was deepening and the temperature was dropping.

As they entered the lodge reception area, Austen Steckle was coming out of the Hearth Room. Past him, Gurney could see the tentative flames of a new fire.

Steckle’s smile looked tense and his scalp looked sweaty.

“Hey, just the people I wanted to see.” After a nod to Madeleine, he addressed Gurney. “I got you set up like you asked. But the thing is, Peyton’s got plans for the evening. For tomorrow, too. And after that, it’s hard to tell, you know what I mean?” He pushed back his cuff and glanced down at his gleaming Rolex. “So the thing is, if you want to talk to the man—it’s pretty much got to be now.”

Gurney looked at Madeleine.

She shrugged.

He looked back at Steckle. “Now is fine. Actually, fifteen minutes from now would be better. I need to go up to our room first. Does he expect me?”

“Yeah, more or less. I’ll call and confirm it with him. You know the way, right?”

“I know the way.”

“Conversations with Peyton can be difficult. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I’m used to difficult conversations.”

Steckle went into his office.

The Gurneys went up to the suite.

The main room lay mostly in darkness. The wind was whining at the balcony door. He switched on the ceiling fixture in the entry area, then crossed the room and switched on the lamp at the near end of the couch. He thought about lighting the kerosene lamp at the far end, the one with the wolf etching on its base, but decided against it. Better to keep that one in reserve in the event of another power failure.

He took the broad-spectrum surveillance scanner Hardwick had given him out of his jacket pocket and turned it on. The start-up screen mimicked a high-end smartphone.

Madeleine, still bundled up in her jacket, scarf, and ski hat, was watching him. “Are you going to check our room?”

He shot her a warning glance—a reminder that he didn’t want anyone who might be bugging the space to discover that they were aware of it.

Following Hardwick’s earlier instructions, he navigated through a series of setup options. Less than a minute later the device was fully operational, displaying a schematic diagram of the room he was standing in.

As he walked around, one red dot appeared on the screen, and then a second. Given the graphic delineation of the suite’s walls on the screen, the location of each dot and the RF transmitter it represented was clear. The visual indication was supplemented by data on the distance of each transmitter from the nearest horizontal and vertical surfaces (in this case the room’s floor and walls), its type, frequency, and signal strength. A line at the bottom of the screen summarized: “DETECTED DEVICES WITHIN SCAN AREA: 2 AUDIO, 0 VIDEO.”

He made another circuit of the room to check the consistency of the data. He also wanted to see if any additional bugs might appear, but the scanner found only those two. He switched it off and slipped it back in his pocket. Turning to Madeleine, who’d been observing the process with concern, he pointed silently at the two locations.

The first was the life-size portrait of Warren Harding hanging over the suite’s bar. The second was her cell phone on the end table by the couch.

Her expression shifted from concern to anger.

Gurney was eager to inspect the two locations more closely to confirm what the scanner had shown. And, since the two transmission patterns were very different, he was curious to see if the bugs represented the same gap in sophistication as the two trackers on his car. In order to conduct this inspection without passing along the telltale sounds of the transmitters being handled, he’d need to conceal what he was doing with some kind of noise.

He’d been in situations before where a bug needed to be surreptitiously examined. The basic rule was that the audio camouflage needed to be appropriate to the environment. A blender or food processor could mask just about any other sound, but there were very few situations in which they could be employed with any credibility. Ordinary conversation lacked the necessary volume. Percussive music, bursts of laughter, running water—any of those could work in the right setting, but none seemed quite right in the current circumstances.

He was surveying the room for inspiration when a solution was provided by Madeleine in the form of a startling sneeze.

After a moment’s consideration he went to his duffle bag, pulled out a small notebook, and opened it to a blank page. He wrote as Madeleine watched: “Follow along with whatever I suggest. Respond naturally. Whenever I nod to you, make a sneezing sound or clear your throat or cough a few times. Start now by sniffling and coughing.”

She sniffled loudly and cleared her throat.

He affected a worried tone. “Jesus, sweetheart, I was afraid of that, earlier in the car. That you were coming down with something. Or maybe that your allergies were kicking in.”

“It could be an allergy. It feels like that.”

“You have any idea what might be causing it?”

“I don’t know. Something in the room? The car? The air? All I know is my nose and throat have that itchy feeling.”

She spoke with such conviction he almost believed her. “Did you bring anything you can take for it?”

“No.”

“Maybe we can find something tomorrow.” He waved her closer to him as he approached the Harding portrait. He reached up over the row of bottles on the bar and gave her a nod as he gripped the frame.

When she burst into a fit of sneezing, he lifted the bottom of the frame up and away from the wall and checked under it, paying particular attention to the cable from which the portrait hung. He noted immediately that the ends of the cable were encased in tubular housings, either of which could easily accommodate a device as large as a disposable lighter. The cable itself would be an ideal disguise for an aerial. Nothing about the nature of the hiding place suggested anything but a standard, easily available audio bug. Under cover of another fit of sneezing, he eased the frame back against the wall.

Inspecting Madeleine’s phone would be a trickier challenge.

He gestured for her to move toward the end of the couch by her phone. He attempted a worried tone. “Sweetheart, why don’t you just settle down for a while and try to relax? Maybe cozy yourself up in a blanket?”

“I’m not really tired. It’s just that scratchy, uncomfortable feeling in the back of my throat. You know, kind of raw? Maybe I’m getting a cold after all.”

“At least have a seat. You can put your feet up on the hassock. Relaxing can’t hurt.”

“Okay, fine. It can’t make me feel any worse.”

She sounded cranky and authentic. In Gurney’s experience, an irritated tone always made a faked conversation sound more real.

She sat on the couch, sniffling and repeatedly clearing her throat.

He went to the end table and placed his hand on her phone to check its temperature. It was quite cool, which was not what he’d expected.

The most common violation of a cell phone’s integrity was accomplished through hacking into its software in a way that allowed the hacker to remotely manipulate the phone’s functions—for example, to turn on its microphone and transmission capabilities, converting the device into an audio bug under the control of the hacker.

But this approach did leave concrete signs—the simplest being the generation of battery heat. Since the scanner had indicated an active transmission from the phone, Gurney had expected it to feel warm. The fact that it didn’t meant something odd was happening.

Finding out more would require getting inside the phone itself.

He and Madeleine had the same make and model, so he took his out to make a preliminary assessment of the process. Studying the back panel, it appeared that the first item he’d need would be a very small screwdriver.

Fortunately, among the items that Madeleine packed automatically whenever they went away was a repair kit for her glasses—a kit that included a supply of the tiny screws that hold frames together and the tiny screwdriver needed to tighten them.

The screwdriver appeared to be about the right size.

In order to maintain an appropriate-sounding conversation, he said, “There have to be some differences in the head-cold feeling and the allergy feeling. Can you put your finger on which feeling you’re closer to?”

She responded with a rambling, sniffly description of the discomforts associated with each problem. He busied himself meanwhile opening his own phone—so he’d have a visual reference with which to compare hers and note any anomalies.

Once he had his open, he set it on the end table and gingerly picked up Madeleine’s. Giving her the signal for more sniffling and coughing, he removed the back panel, then laid the phone with its inner components exposed on the table next to his.

At first glance they appeared identical. As he looked closer, however, he noticed a difference between them in the corner where the microphone was located.

He got their camera out of his duffel bag and took close-up photos from several angles. Then, with Madeleine alternately coughing and complaining hoarsely about the raw feeling in her throat, he replaced the backs of both phones and tightened the screws.

“You might feel better if you took a nap?” he suggested.

“If I sleep now I won’t be able to sleep tonight.” She sounded so miserable he had to remind himself that it was a performance.

He checked the time. He was due for his appointment with Peyton in less than five minutes. He hurriedly addressed an email to Robin Wigg and attached his photos of the interior of Madeleine’s phone. He included the make, model, and serial number; indicated the transmission frequency that had been detected; and added a brief message: “Scanner indicates active transmission. But there’s no discernible battery heat or power drain. Possible implanted device in mic area? Need guidance.” Then he hit “Send.”

CHAPTER 30

At the end of the lake road the security gate at the imposing Gall residence was already open. A guard, dimly visible in the failing light, pointed to a curving driveway that led toward a looming gray structure.

He followed the driveway several hundred feet to a paved floodlit area in front of a stone porch and a huge wooden door. He got out of the car into a whirling wind.

As he reached the door it swung open into a broad, high-ceilinged, polished-pine entry hall. The design was a grander version of the ubiquitous Adirondack style. The illumination came from a series of three enormous wagon-wheel chandeliers.

From where he stood in the doorway Gurney could see, high on the far wall of the entry hall, a framed portrait of an imperious man in a dark suit—perhaps, he thought, the ill-fated subject of the Gall legend. There was an off-putting chilliness in the cerebral forehead and wide-set eyes. An iron-willed jaw created the impression of a man dedicated to getting his own way.

“You come in, please,” called a heavily accented female voice.

Gurney stepped inside.

The door swung slowly shut behind him, revealing to his startled gaze a blonde woman wearing nothing but the bottom half of a thong bikini. She was holding a small remote controller in her hand, perhaps to operate the massive door. Her body, too sumptuous to be entirely the product of nature, was dripping wet. Her gray eyes were as cold as any Gurney had ever seen.

“You follow me now.” She turned her glistening, essentially naked back to him and led him along a corridor that branched off the entry hall. At the end of the corridor she opened a glass door into what was evidently an add-on to the original house.

From her attire, or lack of it, Gurney wouldn’t have been surprised to find a room with an indoor pool. Instead, he was engulfed in the warm, fragrant air of a tropical conservatory. An undertone of rhythmic, primitive-sounding music created an atmosphere as far removed from the Adirondacks as one could imagine.

Thick leafy plants rose toward a high glass ceiling. Beds of ferns, bordered by mossy logs with orchids sprouting out of them, surrounded a circular area with a floor of polished mahogany. Curving paths of the same mahogany radiated out from it, disappearing behind beds of jungle foliage. Somewhere amid the lush leafy things Gurney could hear the gurgling of a fountain or a small waterfall.

In the center of the open area two high-backed rattan armchairs faced each other with a low rattan table between them. One of the chairs was occupied by a dark-haired man in a luxurious-looking white bathrobe.

The mostly naked woman approached the man and said something to him, the words lost to Gurney in the rhythmic background music.

Responding to her with a loose smile, the man slid his hand slowly between her legs.

Gurney wondered if he was about to witness a live sex show. But a moment later the woman half-laughed, half-purred at something the man said and casually walked away on one of the mahogany paths through the planting beds. Just before she disappeared into the mini jungle she glanced back at Gurney, the pink tip of her tongue moving between her full lips, an image as reptilian as it was seductive.

Once she was out of sight, the man in the bathrobe waved Gurney toward the empty rattan chair. “Have a seat. Have a drink.” The voice was a rich baritone, the articulation slow and lazy, as if the man might be drunk or sedated. He pointed invitingly toward the coffee table, on which Gurney noted a bottle of Grey Goose vodka, an ice bucket, and two glasses.

Gurney remained standing where he was. “Mr. Gall?”

The man smiled slowly, then laughed. “Austen told me that a detective by the name of Gurney wanted to talk to me. He said you were Jane Hammond’s private dick.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“So your job is to prove that her fucking brother didn’t kill my fucking brother?”

“Not really.”

“If that’s your secret mission here, you don’t have to deny it, because I don’t give a flying fuck one way or the other. Sit down and have a drink.”

Gurney accepted the seat offer, which put him close enough now to discern in the languorous, self-indulgent face across from him the same underlying bone structure he’d noted in the fiercely determined face in the entry-hall portrait. It confirmed both the power and the limitations of shared genes.

He sat back in his chair and looked around the big glass-enclosed space. Outside it was dark now, and the interior light—coming from upward-angled halogen spotlights secreted among the plantings—cast queer shadows everywhere. When his gaze reached Peyton Gall, he found the man’s dark eyes fixed on him.

Gurney leaned forward. “I’ll tell you why I’m here. I want to find out why four people died after seeing Richard Hammond.”

“You have doubts about the official version?” Gall said this in an arch tone, as if ridiculing a cliché.

“Of course I have doubts about it. Don’t you?”

Gall yawned, refilled his glass with vodka, and took a slow sip. Then he held the glass in front of his face, peering over the top of it. “So you don’t think the witch doctor did it?”

“If you mean Dr. Hammond, no, I don’t—at least not in any way suggested by the police hypothesis. And frankly, Mr. Gall, you don’t seem to think so, either.”

Gall was squinting over the top of his glass at Gurney with one eye closed, creating the impression of a man lining up a rifle sight. “Call me Peyton. My sainted brother was Mister Gall. I have no aspiration to assume that mantle.”

His tone struck Gurney as haughty, sour, and ridiculous. It was the tone of a selfish, imperious drunk—a dangerous child in the body of an adult. This was not a man he’d choose to be in the same room with if he could help it, but there were questions that needed to be asked.

“Tell me something, Peyton. If Richard Hammond wasn’t responsible for Ethan’s death, who do you think was?”

Gall lowered his vodka glass a few inches and studied it as if it might contain a list of suspects. “I’d advise you to focus on the people who knew him well.”

“Why?”

“Because to know Ethan was to hate him.”

Despite the theatrical nature of the statement, Gurney sensed real feeling behind it. “What was the most hateful thing about him?”

Anger seemed to cut through Gall’s alcoholic fog. “The illusion he created.”

“He wasn’t what he seemed to be?”

Gall let out a short, bitter laugh. “At a distance, he was fucking godlike. Up close, not so much. So goddamn full of himself in the worst way—the bursting-with-virtue way, the I-know-best way. Fucking control-freak bastard!”

“It must have pissed you off that he changed the terms of his will at your expense.”

He was silent for a long moment. “Is that what this is about?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, is that what this conversation is about? You thinking that the police have it all wrong . . . that Richard, the faggot hypnotist, is innocent . . . and that I made those fucking people kill themselves? Is that what the fuck you think?”

“I don’t think you made anyone kill themselves. That seems impossible.”

“Then what the fuck are you getting at?”

“I was wondering if Ethan changed his will just to make you angry.”

“Of course he did. Saint Ethan was a puritanical prick who hated the way I enjoyed my life and was always looking for ways to punish me. ‘Do what I say, or you’ll end up with nothing. Do what I say, or I’ll take it all away. Do what I say or I’ll give your inheritance to the first little creep who comes along.’ Fucking control-freak bastard scumbag! Who put him in charge of the world?”

Gurney nodded. “Life should be easier for you now that he’s gone.”

Gall smiled. “Yes.”

“Even with the change in his will, you still end up with a ton of money. And if the police can prove Hammond was involved in Ethan’s death, the bequest to him will revert to you. You’d get fifty-eight million dollars altogether.”

Gall yawned for the second time.

Yawning, Gurney knew, was an ambiguous bit of body language, produced as often by anxiety as by boredom. He wondered which feeling was at play. “You have any plans for all that money?”

“Plans bore me. Money bores me. Money has to be watched, managed, massaged. It has to be invested, balanced, leveraged. You have to think about it, talk about it, worry about it. It’s a gigantic bore. Life’s too fucking short for all that crap. All that planning.”

“Thank God for Austen, eh?”

“Absolutely. Austen’s a boring little fucker himself, but he’s a natural planner. Pays attention to money. Takes good care of money. So, yeah, thank God for boring little fuckers like Austen.”

“You plan to keep him on, then, managing the Gall assets?”

“Why not? He can watch the bottom line, while I live the way I want to live.” He winked at Gurney. A lazy, sly, lascivious wink. “That way everybody gets to be happy.”

“Except for the four dead people.”

“That’s your department, Detective. Austen invests the Gall millions. I fuck the world’s most beautiful women. You spend your life worrying about dead people.” He winked again. “Everybody’s got a specialty. Makes the world go round.”

As if on cue, the wet blonde reappeared. The only noticeable difference was that now she was entirely naked.

CHAPTER 31

Gurney found Madeleine in the Hearth Room in an armchair by the fire. Her eyes were closed, but she opened them as he settled into the chair next to hers.

“Your meeting go well?”

“I can’t decide whether Peyton is the world’s most self-absorbed brat, or just pretending to be.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I’m not sure. But I got the impression of someone playing a role in a movie.”

“A man who can do whatever he wants?”

“Whatever and whenever.”

“Was he alone?”

“Not exactly.”

She gazed into the fire. “So what did you learn?”

“That he hated Ethan. That he considered him an intolerable control freak. That he couldn’t care less how he died or who might have killed him. That money bores him. That he relies totally on Steckle to deal with the tiresome burden of the Gall fortune. And that all he wants to do with his life is fuck his brains out with a breast-enhanced hooker in a hothouse.”

“But you’re not sure if you believe him?”

“I don’t know if he’s as undisciplined as he lets on—a hedonistic leaf in the wind. I think there’s a side to him I’m not seeing.”

“So . . . what do you do next?”

“Next? We need to check out Hammond’s place. Jack thinks it’s bugged. He thinks that’s how Fenton discovered his involvement. But he wants to be sure.”

“You mean now?”

He glanced at his watch. “Good a time as any, unless you want me to do something about getting us some dinner first.”

“I’m not hungry.” She hesitated. “But I want to come with you. Is that a problem?”

“Not at all.” He took out his phone and brought up Jane’s cell number.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER HE AND MADELEINE WERE STANDING IN the foyer of the chalet, brushing ice pellets off their clothes.

Wide-eyed with worry, Jane took their jackets and hats and hung them on coat hooks by the door. “Is something wrong?”

“I just want to give you a progress report and ask a few questions, if that’s okay.”

They followed her into the chalet’s main living area, where Richard was tending a modest fire. His expression was as bland as Jane’s was apprehensive.

“Sorry to intrude with so little notice,” said Gurney, “but I thought it would be useful to bring you up to date.”

With a notable lack of enthusiasm, he motioned Gurney and Madeleine toward the couch. When they were seated, he and Jane took chairs opposite them. On the table next to Hammond’s chair were two laptop computers, both open.

“So,” said Hammond. His unblinking aquamarine eyes were as unsettling as ever.

Gurney gestured toward the computers. “I hope we’re not interrupting anything.”

“Just a bit of voodoo.”

“Beg pardon?”

“On your last visit you questioned my interest in the curses employed by African witch doctors. It reminded me of my last paper on the subject, one I never completed. I decided to finish it now. With my new reputation for magical murder, interest should be high.”

“I’d love to hear more about it,” said Gurney, “assuming it’s not too academic.”

“It’s a practical description of how the power of a curse can be broken. The key is understanding how the voodoo curse works—how it brings about the victim’s death.”

Madeleine raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying those curses actually kill people?”

“Yes. In fact, the voodoo curse may be the world’s most elegant murder weapon.”

“How does it work?” asked Gurney.

“It begins with belief. You grow up in a society where everyone believes the witch doctor has extraordinary powers. You’re told that his curses are fatal, and you hear stories that prove it.

“You trust the people who tell you these stories. And eventually you see the proof for yourself. You see a man who has been cursed. You see him wither and die.”

Madeleine looked frightened. “But how does that happen?”

“It happens because the victim believes it’s happening.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s not that complicated. Our minds search constantly for cause-and-effect relationships. It’s necessary for survival. But sometimes we get it wrong. The man who knows he has been cursed, who believes in the power of the curse, is terrified because he believes the curse has doomed him. In his terror, his appetite decreases. He begins to lose weight. He sees the loss of weight as proof that the process of dying has begun. His terror increases. He loses more weight, gradually weakens, becomes physically ill. This illness—the product of his own fear—he sees as the result of the witch doctor’s curse. The more terrified he becomes, the worse the symptoms become that feed his terror. In time, this downward spiral kills him. He dies because he believes he is dying. And his eventual death solidifies the community’s belief in the power of the curse.”

“I’m impressed,” said Gurney. “The killer never touches the victim, the murder mechanism is psychological, and death would essentially be self-inflicted.”

“Yes.”

“Rather like Fenton’s theory of the four suicides.”

“Yes.”

That led to a fraught silence, broken by Madeleine. “Didn’t you start by saying there was a way to break the power of the curse?”

“Yes, but it isn’t the way you might imagine. A scientifically minded person might try to persuade the victim that voodoo is nonsense, that it has no real power. The problem with that approach is that it usually fails, and the victim dies.”

“Why?” asked Madeleine.

“It underestimates the power of belief. Whenever they collide, facts are no match for beliefs. We may think our beliefs are based on facts, but the truth is that the facts we embrace are based on our beliefs. The great conceit of the rational mind is that facts are ultimately persuasive. But that’s a fantasy. People don’t die to defend the facts, they die to defend their beliefs.”

“So what’s the answer? If you see the victim of a curse suffering, actually withering away, what do you do?”

He regarded her for a moment with those unearthly eyes. “The trick is to accept the power, not challenge it.”

“Accept it . . . how?”

“When I was in Africa I was once asked to speak to a man who’d been cursed by the local witch doctor and who was, predictably, wasting away. A Western psychiatrist had taken the logical debunking approach, with no positive effect. I took a different route into the man’s mind. To make a long story short, I told him that the local witch doctor had in the past so misused the tremendous power of voodoo for his own enrichment that the spirits had taken the power away from him. I explained that to maintain his position, to keep the tribe from realizing he’d been stripped of his magic, the witch doctor had resorted to poisoning his victims. I invented a full narrative, including the details of a recent victim’s death. I described a credible process for the poisoning—exactly how it was done, how its symptoms imitated the effects of a legitimate curse. As I was speaking I could see the specifics of the new narrative taking root in his mind. In the end, it worked. It worked because the man could accept it without abandoning his fundamental belief in the power of voodoo.”

Madeleine appeared to be struggling with the implications of this.

Gurney asked, “What happened to the witch doctor?”

“Shortly after the rumor spread that he’d lost his mojo, a deadly snake ended up in his hammock.” He shrugged. “Witch doctors make so many enemies. And there are so many perils in Africa. So many avenues of revenge.”

“Do you feel responsible for his death?”

“Not as responsible as I feel for saving the life of the man he was trying to kill.”

As Gurney mulled over the story, he was struck by aspects of Hammond’s nature he hadn’t seen before—formidability, pragmatic cleverness, willingness to get his hands dirty in a dangerous situation. As he was considering ways to probe these qualities further, his phone rang.

He glanced at the screen. The text message, from a number he didn’t recognize, was terse, disquieting, and, for a moment, incomprehensible.

“RESTRICTED TECHNOLOGY. IMMEDIATE RETREAT ADVISED. W.”

Then he realized it was a response to the photos he’d sent Wigg of the inside of Madeleine’s phone. She was telling him, once again, that the nature of the device indicated the involvement of people he shouldn’t be messing with.

He wanted to talk to her, was tempted to call her, but was held back by the message’s cryptic tone. However, it occurred to him that he could use the arrival of the message as a natural cover for the bug-scanning procedure that was the real purpose of his visit to the chalet.

He stood up from the couch, looking embarrassed. “Sorry, but something’s been dropped in my lap that I need to deal with.” As he stepped away, he exchanged his phone for the look-alike scanner in his pocket. He walked slowly toward a far corner of the room, as if for privacy. He turned on the scanner, made his way through the setup steps, and began meandering around the room, his eyes on the screen, as if waiting for an elusive Internet connection.

Jane rose from her chair, meanwhile, to take care of something in the kitchen.

Gurney saw the room’s outline take shape on the screen, followed shortly by the appearance of three red dots—dots representing three distinct transmission sources, each operating at its own frequency.

At the same time, he couldn’t help overhearing Madeleine’s conversation with Hammond.

“So you’re saying that you saved the victim’s life by making up a story?”

“By giving him an alternative way of understanding his pain.”

“But it was a lie.”

“And that bothers you? Perhaps you’re too much of an idealist.”

“Because I value the truth?”

“Perhaps you value it too highly.”

“What’s the alternative? Believing lies?”

“If I told that obsessed man the truth—that voodoo has no inherent power, that it’s nothing but a trick of the mind that suckers the victim into a slow suicide—he wouldn’t have believed me. Given his background and culture, he couldn’t have believed me. He’d have dismissed my truth as heretical nonsense. And he’d have died as a result.”

“So the truth is irrelevant?”

“It’s not irrelevant. But it’s not the most important thing. At best, it helps us function. At worst, it devastates us.” Hammond, still in his armchair by the fire, leaned toward Madeleine. “Truth is overrated. What we really need is a way of seeing things that makes life livable.”

There was a prolonged silence. When Madeleine eventually spoke, her words remained challenging, but the combative edge was gone from her tone. “Is that what you do as a therapist? Come up with credible falsehoods your clients can live with?”

“Credible stories. Ways of understanding the events in their lives, particularly traumatic events. Isn’t a narrative that supports a happier life better than a truth you can’t live with?”

After another silence she replied softly, “You may be right.”

With part of his brain Gurney was struggling to digest what Hammond had said and Madeleine’s reaction to it, which he found bewilderingly upsetting. With the other part he was trying to focus on the data the scanner was displaying. That latter effort was interrupted by Hammond’s next comment.

“Perhaps there’s an event in your own life that you’ve never managed to integrate into a narrative you can live comfortably with. That’s not an uncommon source of pain. But it’s a pain that can be relieved.”

In the silence that followed, Gurney forced his attention back to the scanner. He made another loose circuit of the space to pinpoint the exact locations of the bugs. He found that they had all been placed more or less centrally—within range of the places where conversations were most likely to occur: the seating area around the hearth, the dining table, and a desk with a landline phone.

The scanner’s red dot pattern showed one bug in the base structure of a wooden planter full of philodendrons. It located another, with a similar frequency signature, less than ten feet from the first, in a rustic chandelier. But it was the third that got Gurney’s attention. With a transmission frequency in the same super-high range as the micro device in Madeleine’s phone, it seemed to be situated inside the delicate finial of an antique floor lamp.

He turned off the scanner and slipped it back in his pocket. He stepped closer to the lamp to examine the little finial, which appeared to have been carved from an opaque gemstone into the shape of a minuscule vase. It was deep green, flecked with irregular bits of bright crimson.

Jane returned from the kitchen. “Were you able to deal with whatever you had to deal with?”

Gurney moved away from the lamp. “That’s all taken care of. Sorry about the interruption. I do need to bring you up to date on a few things. And ask you a few questions.”

She glanced at her brother. “Did you hear that, Richard?”

He was leaning back in his chair, fingers steepled under his chin. He turned his attention, reluctantly it seemed, from Madeleine to Gurney. “I’m listening.”

With active audio surveillance now a certainty, Gurney was calculating how much he should say. One thing was clear—he didn’t want to compromise Angela Castro’s safety. The rest he’d have to play by ear. It occurred to him that it might be interesting to get Hammond’s perspective on the surveillance issue itself.

“Has it ever crossed your mind that your house or car might be bugged?”

Hammond shrugged. “I’d be shocked if they weren’t.”

“Have you taken any precautions?”

“No. I have nothing to hide.”

“Okay. New topic. How crazy is Peyton Gall?”

Hammond produced a fleeting smile. “You’ve made his acquaintance?”

“Earlier this evening. In his greenhouse. In the company of a naked woman.”

“Only one?”

“That sort of thing is common?”

“Oh, yes, quite routine.”

“So he wasn’t just putting on an act for my benefit?”

“You mean, was he pretending to be a fool so you’d take him off your list of suspects?”

“Something like that.”

“I’d say that what you saw is what he is.”

“He claimed that money bores him, that he has no interest in it. Truth or bullshit?”

“Truth, to the extent that managing money requires a level of attention and patience he simply doesn’t have. Bullshit, to the extent that he has an enormous interest in what it can buy.”

“So Peyton gets the coke and hookers, and Austen gets the investment reports?”

“Something like that.”

“Okay, on to another subject. I was told by a reliable source that at least one of the victims received a strange phone call a couple of weeks before coming up to Wolf Lake Lodge. The caller may have been advising him to see you.”

“What was ‘strange’ about it?”

“He got the impression he was supposed to keep the call a secret—that he might even be killed if he talked about it.”

Hammond looked bewildered. “Killed? If he talked about getting a recommendation to see me?”

“So he said at the time. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Did you ever go to summer camp?”

“What?”

“Summer camp. Did you ever go to one? As a kid, as a counselor? In any capacity at all?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“It’s a long story. But if you’ve never been to camp, it’s irrelevant.”

“If you say so.” His tone conveyed the petulance of a man accustomed to being the one who decided what was relevant. “Any more questions?”

“Just a comment. I think the case is beginning to open up. I can’t say the end is in sight, but I don’t think it will look like the picture being painted by Gil Fenton.”

Jane, who’d been silently observing the conversation, spoke up. “Thank you! I’ve never had any doubt about your ability to uncover the truth, but it’s good to hear you say it.”

“I have a question.” Madeleine was addressing Hammond in a tone clearly arising from a private train of thought. “It’s about a memory I have of something that happened long ago, not far from here. I thought that coming here would help me deal with it. But it’s not working. In fact, it’s gotten worse. The memory is out of its box. But I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t get rid of it. And I can’t tolerate it. I don’t know what to do.”

“And your question is . . .?” Hammond was smiling, his voice soft.

“Have you ever helped someone with a problem like this?”

“As I started to explain before, I often help people come to terms with past events.”

“And you think you could help me?”

Gurney was barely able to restrain an impulse to interrupt, to derail her request.

But he said nothing, fearing the rawness of his emotion. He stood there in stony silence, astounded at her desire to bare her soul to a man who might be implicated in four murders.

Madeleine and Hammond arranged to meet at the chalet at 9:00 AM the following day, and some minutes later they all said their good-nights. Hammond wandered over to the hearth, picked up a poker, and began stirring the crumbling coals. Jane walked with Gurney and Madeleine out onto the chalet’s deck-like porch.

The sleet had stopped, but the air was frigid.

“Are you all right?”

So caught up was Gurney in his own rattled thoughts, it took a few seconds for him to realize Jane’s question was directed to him.

“Oh . . . yes . . . fine.”

Noting disbelief in her eyes, but unwilling to discuss what was really bothering him, Madeleine’s proposed meeting with Richard, he searched for another explanation.

“This may seem like a strange question, Jane, but I was intrigued by that green finial on one of your lamps. Do you know the one I mean?”

“The bloodstone? Green with red specks?”

“Yes. That one. Did it come with the lamp, or was it something special you got somewhere else?”

“It was always part of the lamp, as far as I know. Some things here are Richard’s, but the lamps and furniture belong to the lodge. Do you have a reason for asking?”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

“It is unusual.” She hesitated. “It’s funny you should ask about that particular item.”

“Why?”

“About a year ago it disappeared. A couple of days later it reappeared.”

“You never discovered the reason?”

“No. I asked around, of course. The maintenance people, the cleaning people, no one knew anything. I even mentioned it to Austen. No one had any idea how or why something like that could happen.” She looked at Gurney expectantly, as if he might offer a solution.

When he said nothing, she went on. “And now it’s happened again.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just a month or so ago. I noticed because it’s my favorite lamp. I use it every night.”

“The same thing happened? The same way?”

“Yes. I noticed one evening it was gone. Two days later it was back.”

“This was around the time of the first suicide?”

“Before any of that. Before our world turned upside down.”

“You’re sure about the timing? That it was before the date of the first suicide?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“Around the beginning of November, then?”

“Yes.”

“And when it happened the first time? You said it was about a year ago. Also at the beginning of November?”

“Yes. It must have been. I remember Austen making some silly joke about poltergeists being stirred up by Halloween.”

CHAPTER 32

During their drive back to the lodge, instead of immediately challenging her plan to meet with Hammond, Gurney tried to focus on why it bothered him so much.

Perhaps it was his sense that she was changing. Or the more disturbing possibility that she wasn’t changing at all—that the Madeleine in his brain was a fiction, and he was only now seeing the real person. He’d imagined her to be a tower of strength and good judgment. Now she seemed frightened and erratic, willing to put her trust in a therapist who might be a murderer.

As he was parking the Outback under the lodge portico, his bleak musings were cut short by the ringing of his phone.

Jack Hardwick started speaking the instant Gurney picked up.

“Got a hot lead for you—a man you need to meet tomorrow morning. Just down the road in Otterville.”

It took Gurney a moment to refocus. “Otterville’s a good three hours ‘down the road’ from here. Who’s this man and why does he matter?”

“The man is Moe Blumberg. Former owner and director of Camp Brightwater, which no longer exists. He converted it into some kind of bungalow colony, which he named Brightwater Cabins. But back when it was Camp Brightwater, it was the camp Steven Pardosa attended. Moe’s leaving tomorrow afternoon for Israel, where he spends his winters, so it’s got to be tomorrow morning, unless you want to track him down in Tel Aviv.”

“You don’t want to follow up on it yourself?”

“I’d do it with pleasure—but tomorrow morning I’ll be down in Teaneck, New Jersey. Friend of a friend set me up with the detective who caught the Leo Balzac suicide case. Man won’t talk to me on the phone, so I gotta make the trip. I figure I do him, you do Moe. Fair’s fair. What do you say, Sherlock?”

Before he could answer, his attention was diverted by Madeleine getting out of the car.

“I’m freezing,” she said. “I’m going inside.”

The air coming into the car through the open door was bitterly cold.

She closed the door and walked quickly into the lodge.

Her tone of voice brought back all the negative thoughts he’d been stewing in before Hardwick’s call. He got back on the phone and tried to force his mind to the matter at hand. “Have you actually spoken to this Blumberg guy?”

“Briefly. But first I spoke to the Pardosas. Face-to-face in Floral Park. Lot of grief. Lot of fantasy. They’re telling themselves that their Steven was finally turning things around. Embarking on a new life. Big prospects for the future. Can’t fathom that he’d kill himself. So much to look forward to. Et cetera. I think telling me that was their way of making it seem true. You keep saying something, it starts to sound real. They kept talking, and I kept nodding and shaking my head sadly and smiling at the right moments—all that empathic bullshit.”

“Jesus, Jack . . .”

“Anyway, the more I nodded the more they talked. The whole thing took a funny turn, though, when I asked if Steven had ever gone away to summer camp. Conversation got chilly. Obviously not their favorite topic. Seems he only went one year. Thirteen years ago. Some weird shit happened that summer, which they refused to discuss. But with a little nudging—actually, more than a little—they gave me Moe Blumberg’s phone number and address, which turned out to be his bungalow colony, which used to be his camp. You following?”

“I’m trying. Keep talking.”

“So I called Blumberg, who sounds kinda geriatric on the phone. I told him we were investigating the recent death of one of his former campers and needed some information about the summer he spent at Brightwater. He told me a big fire there a long time ago destroyed the office and all their records—handwritten on index cards in shoeboxes. But when I mentioned the specific year—thirteen years ago—that Steve was there, I got a funny reaction from him, like I got from Stevie’s parents. Didn’t want to talk about anyone or anything connected with that summer—at least not on the phone. Had to be face-to-face. So I made an appointment for you. Eleven AM. Tomorrow morning. Man leaves at two sharp for JFK.”

“What did you tell him about me?”

“That you’re a New York detective working on the case.”

“A private New York detective?”

“I may not have emphasized that specific adjective.”

“You told him I’m NYPD?”

“I believe I mentioned that connection.”

“In the present or past tense?”

“That’s a tough one. Easy to get confused about tenses. Like Bill Clinton said, it all depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

“If he asks about it, I’m not going to lie to him.”

“Naturally. The truth is our friend.”

Gurney sighed. “You want to give me his address?”

“Twenty-seven ninety-nine Brightwater Lane, Otterville.” He paused, presumably to give Gurney time to write it down, before switching gears. “Let me ask you something. You pretty sure you’re speaking from a bug-free environment?”

“Pretty sure, apart from the position trackers. I’m in my car, and my phone is clean, far as I can tell. But Hammond’s chalet is another story.”

“What did you find?”

“Three audio transmitters.”

“No shit! I knew it!”

Taking out the scanner and retrieving the archived scan of the chalet, Gurney gave Hardwick the location, frequency, and signal-strength data that had been gathered. He then recounted Jane’s peculiar story regarding the consecutive November disappearances and reappearances of the bloodstone finial that contained one of the bugs.

“Holy fuck.” Hardwick whistled softly and zeroed in on the timing issue. “Someone was bugging Hammond at least a year before the shit hit the fan? Why?”

“That’s an interesting question. If we can answer it, we’ll be halfway home.”

Gurney ended the call, locked the car, and headed into the lodge.

He spotted Madeleine hunkered down by the fire in the Hearth Room.

Austen Steckle came out of his office. “Mr. Gurney, I need to talk to you.” He was glancing around, almost furtively, as if to emphasize the sensitivity of the subject matter. His shaved head was again glistening with sweat.

“Fenton came by looking for you. I gotta say, he didn’t look happy. In fact, he looked seriously pissed off. More pissed off than you’d want a man in his position to be. Just letting you know.”

“Did he say what his problem was?”

“He was throwing legal terms around. ‘Obstruction of justice’ was one of them. ‘Interfering in the investigation of a felony’ was another one. Boil it down, I got the feeling he expected you to be gone by now, and he’s pissed off at you still being here. All I’m doing is passing that along. Word to the wise. Man’s got the power to throw a hornet’s nest at you.”

Gurney blinked, almost laughed, at the image. “I appreciate the heads-up. By the way, did Peyton fill you in on our little get-together?”

“Yeah, little while ago. He said it was all cool. No problems. That true?”

Gurney shrugged. “I guess everything is relative. Do you happen to know who the naked woman with him might be?”

Steckle grinned. “Which naked woman? Peyton’s got a lot of naked women.”

“Then I guess it doesn’t matter much.”

It was Steckle’s turn to shrug. “So, basically, you’re saying your interview went okay?”

“I suppose you could say that.”

“So, you got any idea when you folks are moving on? When Fenton comes back, I’d like to know what to tell him.”

“Soon. Tell him we’ll be moving on soon.”

They held each other’s gaze for a moment. Then Steckle nodded, turned away, and went back to his office.

Gurney went to join Madeleine in the Hearth Room.

He took the chair next to hers, facing the fire. He closed his eyes, searching for the right way to raise the issue that was gnawing at him—when she raised it herself.

“Do you really think it’s a bad idea for me to talk to Richard?”

“I certainly think it’s a questionable idea.”

“At the chalet you looked like you were about to explode.”

“To be honest, I was shocked. Your desire to share something intensely private with someone in his situation baffles me. Isn’t this the same guy you were furious at yesterday? The guy you told me was a liar because he claimed to have no insight into himself? The guy you told me was trying to manipulate us, make fools of us?”

Madeleine sighed. “I was angry because he hit a raw nerve. I was actually the one who had no insight. I was the one who thought the past had been dealt with. He wasn’t the dishonest one, I was.” She uttered an ironic little laugh. “Nothing leaves you more vulnerable to your past than the illusion that you’ve dealt with it.”

It struck him that there was a great deal of truth in that. But he still didn’t think that her plan to discuss her past with Hammond was a good idea.

As if in response to this silent objection, she looked pleadingly into his eyes. “I have to do something. Now. Coming here has brought up memories. I can’t get them out of my mind.”

He wanted to know exactly what memories she was talking about. But he was afraid to ask. He was afraid he might discover that the part of Madeleine he’d never known was the part that mattered the most.

She turned toward him, her hands gripping the padded leather arm of her chair. “If I don’t do something I’ll fall apart. I can feel it. Please understand. I have no other options. At least seeing Hammond tomorrow morning is something.”

CHAPTER 33

There was a ringing sound in his dream. The sound morphed into an image of something glittering. The glittering blue-green eyes of Richard Hammond. Glittering. Ringing.

“David, it’s your phone.” Madeleine was standing next to the bed in a white terry-cloth robe. Her hair was wet. She was extending the phone toward him.

He took it, blinked to focus his vision, saw that the ID had been blocked. The time on the phone was 6:46 AM. He pushed himself up into a sitting position on the side of the bed.

“Gurney here.”

“Sorry to wake you, David. It’s Robin Wigg.”

“No problem. I should have been up already.”

“Ever since I sent you that text, I’ve been debating the need for a follow-up call.”

“I gathered from the wording that it’s a sensitive area.”

“An understatement. By the way, I’m calling unofficially, from out of the office. I’ll get to the point. First, regarding that photo of an open phone. The transmitter inserted in the place of the normal microphone is a highly restricted device. I don’t mean restricted to the feds in general. I mean restricted to the inner sanctum of national security. Are you hearing what I’m telling you?”

“That I’m on the radar of some dangerous people?”

“Another understatement. Let me be clear, and brief. What’s generally known about the FBI, CIA, NSA, and military intelligence operations doesn’t scratch the surface of what’s really happening. The kind of people who are taking an interest in you have access to records of every website you’ve ever visited, every phone number you’ve ever called, every purchase you’ve ever made with a credit card, every book you’ve taken out of a library. Unless you’ve disabled your cell phone GPS, they know every route you’ve ever driven, every address you’ve ever stopped at, every friend, every doctor, every lawyer, every therapist. And that’s just for starters. If they decide that you might impede an operation that has a national security dimension, they can record your phone calls, bug your home. They can review your bank statements, your tax returns, your high school and college records, your medical history. And they can make you disappear for extended interrogations with no statutory limits, simply by concocting a link between you and some terrorist organization that may not even exist. ‘Protecting the homeland’ has become a blank check in the hands of some very ruthless people. Any questions?”

“About a hundred. But I don’t think I want to hear the answers.”

“Good luck, David. And be very, very careful.”

He thanked her for taking the personal risk involved in speaking to him. But she’d already ended the call.

Given the picture she’d painted of a shadowy governmental nemesis, it would be easy to construct paranoid scenarios. On the other hand, given the nature of the government’s massive intrusion into private lives, could any scenario really be dismissed as paranoid? The advances in data gathering and manipulation were racing far ahead of any ethical consensus regarding their use. Putting such powerful tools in the hands of ambitious, self-righteous bureaucrats was like giving weapons of mass destruction to class bullies.

He realized this ongoing societal train wreck was beyond his control. But he did have control over where to invest his time and effort. Maintaining his focus—or dividing it appropriately between the case issues and Madeleine’s issues—would be his main challenge. He could sometimes forget, in his immersion in an investigation, that he was someone’s husband.

“Shouldn’t you be getting ready to leave?” Madeleine had come back into the bedroom alcove, carrying her iPad, with a loud piece of music playing on it—one of the surveillance-defeating techniques he’d suggested.

“I’ll be okay,” he said, getting up from the bed. “If I’m out by eight, I can make it to Otterville by eleven. By the way, how were you planning to get to Hammond’s place?”

“I could take one of the lodge Jeeps, or even walk, so long as it’s not sleeting or snowing. It’s less than a mile.”

“You’re supposed to be there at nine?”

“Richard said I could come earlier and have breakfast with them. Actually, he said we both could come, but I didn’t think you’d want to.”

The best response he could muster was a tight-lipped nod. He muttered something about showering and shaving, went into the bathroom, and closed the door.

He knew the anger he felt was absurd. But he couldn’t deny its reality.

AS HE WAS PREPARING TO DEPART FOR OTTERVILLE, HE EXPLAINED to Madeleine where the scanner had pinpointed the three audio bugs in the chalet, and where she should try to sit with Hammond to limit their effectiveness.

“Keep your back to those transmitter locations, and speak as softly as you can. You could even bring your iPad and have that music playing. You could tell Hammond it helps you relax.”

She extended her arms toward him, her eyes filling with tears. She held him tightly—desperately, it seemed.

“What is it?” he asked.

“My decision to come here was a terrible mistake.”

“We can leave anytime you want.”

“No. The problem is inside me. Running away now won’t help.” She was silent for a long moment. “You should be on your way. Maybe Mr. Blumberg will have the answer to your Wolf Lake mystery.”

BEING ALONE IN HIS CAR MADE IT EASIER TO FOCUS ON THE CASE. HE decided to concentrate on identifying the discrepancy he sensed in Angela Castro’s answers to his questions at Tabitha’s Dollhouse. He took out his phone, located his recording of the interview, and tapped the “Play” icon.

It immediately brought the Dollhouse scene vividly to mind. When he heard Tabitha’s voice he was struck again by her strange combination of formidability and deference—and by Angela’s explanation that she might be hoping they’d “buy another Barbie.”

He wasn’t able, however, to pinpoint the discontinuity he was looking for.

So he played the recording again.

It was during the second playing that he heard it. Just one odd word.

The word was “later.”

It wasn’t even the word itself, but the meaning it was given by the way Angela said it.

Gurney asked her what Pardosa had said about Hammond, and she replied that he’d said he was disgusting.

Then Gurney asked if Pardosa had told her about his nightmares.

She replied, “Yeah, but that was later.”

What struck Gurney was the way she said “later”—making it sound as though a relatively long interval had elapsed. But she’d also said that Pardosa told her about the nightmare the first time he had it, the night after he met with Hammond.

Presumably the earliest Pardosa could have told her that Hammond was “disgusting” was the afternoon of the day of the hypnosis session. And later that night, or first thing next morning, he told her about his nightmare. So, a gap of perhaps twelve to eighteen hours would have elapsed—hardly a long interval.

Gurney realized that he was getting pretty far out on a speculative branch, based on nothing more than the way a single word struck his ear. Before he proceeded further he needed to know exactly what Angela meant by “later.” He knew only one way to find out. He pulled off onto the shoulder of the road, found Angela’s cell number in his phone list, and pressed “Call.”

She answered in a small frightened voice. “Hello?”

In the background he could hear TV voices, laughter, applause.

“It’s Dave Gurney, Angela. Are you all right?”

“I think so. Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just curious about something you said, and I thought maybe you could help me. Are you free to talk?”

“What do you mean?”

“Can you speak freely? Are you alone?”

“Who else would be here? I’m in my room.”

“At the Dollhouse Inn?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Let me explain what it is that I need help with.” He recounted the exchange that had occurred between them, leading up to her use of the word “later” to separate Pardosa’s description of his nightmare from his earlier comment that Hammond was disgusting. “I’m wondering how much time passed between those two conversations.”

“I don’t understand.”

“At some point, Stevie told you the hypnotist was disgusting. And then, later, he told you about the nightmare he had. How much later was that?”

“God, I don’t know. I mean, I wasn’t like counting days or anything.”

“It was a number of days, not hours?”

“Oh, no, not hours. Days.”

“Okay. Am I remembering right that Stevie told you about the nightmare right after he had it the first time, the night of the same day he had his session with Hammond?”

“Definitely. I know that for sure. Because we were here when he told me.”

“At the Dollhouse Inn?”

“Right.”

“So that means he must have told you that Hammond was disgusting at least a couple of days before that. You said days, right? So that would be before you made the trip to Wolf Lake. He must have told you while you were still down in Floral Park. Is that right?”

There was a silence—except for the sound of the TV.

“Angela?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Did you hear my question?”

“I heard it.”

Another long moment passed.

“Angela, this is important. How did Stevie know the hypnotist was disgusting before he met him?”

“I guess someone told him.”

“The person who called him?”

“I can’t say anything about that.”

“Because Stevie warned you that you could end up dead if you said anything about it?”

“Why do you keep asking about it?” Her objection came out like a desperate whine.

“Angela, we could all end up dead unless you start trusting me and telling me what you know.”

Another silence.

“Angela, when Stevie used the word ‘disgusting’ to describe a person, what did he usually mean?”

“How could I know that?” She sounded panicky.

“But you do know, don’t you, Angela? I can hear it in your voice.”

Her silence at that point confirmed the truth, so Gurney continued. “You knew what he meant by that word, but it upset you, right?”

Her silence was broken by a sniffle. Then another. Then a swallow. Gurney waited. The dam was breaking.

“Stevie . . . was prejudiced about some things. Some people. You have to understand, he was a good person. But sometimes . . . well, he kind of had a problem sometimes with gay people. Sometimes he would say what they did was disgusting.”

“And that they themselves were disgusting?”

“Sometimes he would say that.”

“Thank you, Angela. I know it was hard for you to tell me that. Just to make sure I’m not making a mistake, let me ask you one more question. The person who called Stevie on the phone—the person who you figured told him he should go up to Wolf Lake to see Hammond—is that the person who told him that Hammond was gay?”

There was a long silence.

“This is terribly important, Angela. Is that who told Stevie that Hammond was gay?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ask Stevie why he was willing to meet with a therapist he knew was gay?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What did he say?”

“That I should stop asking questions, that it was dangerous to keep asking questions.”

“Did he tell you why it was dangerous?”

“He repeated what he said the night he got the phone call—that we could end up dead.”

CHAPTER 34

By the time Gurney reached the exit sign for Otterville, the cloud cover had thinned and pale winter sunlight was illuminating the landscape.

He debated whether to take the kind of steps he’d taken at Lake George to obscure his destination but decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. If the trackers on his car revealed that he was visiting an Otterville bungalow colony, so be it. There were good reasons to keep the whereabouts of Angela Castro a secret, but none of them applied to Moe Blumberg.

He drove through the “hamlet” of Otterville, which consisted of a derelict auto repair shop, a shuttered hot dog stand, and a two-pump gas station. A mile later his GPS directed him onto Brightwater Lane, a dirt road that brought him through the woods to an open area where a dozen or so cabins were spread out along the side of a small lake. In the middle of the clearing was a stone foundation and a few fire-blackened timbers of a building it had once supported. Parked next to it was a well-used Toyota Camry.

Gurney stopped behind the Camry. As he was getting out of his car, he heard a voice calling out. “Over here.”

It took him a moment to locate the source—a figure at a window of one of the cabins.

“Come around to the far side. The front door faces the lake.”

As Gurney reached the lake side of the cabin and was stepping up onto the covered porch, the door was opened by an old but sturdy-looking white-haired man wearing tan slacks and a blue blazer. The clothes, along with the two suitcases just inside the door, were consistent with the imminent departure Hardwick had mentioned.

“Mr. Blumberg?”

“You see, the lake’s the whole point,” the man said, as though Gurney had questioned the orientation of the porch. “So it makes sense for the cabins to face that way. You’re Detective Gorney, is that right?”

“Gurney.”

“Like the cow?”

“I believe that’s a Guernsey.”

“Right. Come in, come in. You understand I don’t have much time?”

“I understand you’re off to a warmer climate.”

“Fifties, sixties this time of year. Plenty of sun. Beats freezing my tuchus off here. Time was when the winters didn’t bother me, seemed silly all these old folks running off to Florida, places like that. Doesn’t take more than a few years of arthritis, though, before you see the sense in it. If your joints ache here, but they don’t ache there, hell, that makes the decision pretty easy, doesn’t it? To answer your question, yes, I’m Moe Blumberg. Might be confused about some things but still pretty sure about that.”

As they shook hands, Gurney took in the cabin in a few quick glances. The main room, which was all he could see from where he stood, was set up partly as an office, partly as a sitting area centered on an antique iron woodstove. The furnishings were a bit threadbare.

“Have a seat. The other detective wasn’t clear on the phone. What’s this all about?”

Blumberg made no move to sit, so neither did Gurney.

“A young man by the name of Steven Pardosa died recently in suspicious circumstances. You might have seen something about it on TV?”

“You see a TV here?”

Gurney glanced around again. “You don’t have one?”

“Nothing on TV worth the time of anyone with at least half a brain. Noise and nonsense.”

“So Detective Hardwick’s call was the first you heard of Steven Pardosa’s death?”

“He mentioned that name. But I still don’t get what this is all about.”

“Did he tell you that Steven Pardosa attended your camp thirteen years ago?”

“Something like that.”

“But you don’t remember the name, or the person?”

“I ran the camp for thirty-eight years, hundred and twenty boys every summer. The last summer was twelve years ago. You think I should remember every camper who came here? You know how old I am, Detective?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“Eighty-two next month. I have trouble remembering my own name. Or what day it is. Or what I came into the kitchen for.”

Gurney smiled sympathetically. “You said that the last year the camp was in operation was twelve years ago?”

“That I know for sure.”

“And Steven Pardosa was here thirteen years ago. That would be a year before you shut down?”

“That’s plain arithmetic.”

“It sounds like the camp was successful for many years.”

“That’s a fact.”

“How did you come to the decision to shut it down?”

Blumberg shook his head, sighed. “We lost our customers.”

“Why?”

“There was a tragedy. A terrible event. Everything snowballed out of control. Stories, rumors, craziness. Like that phrase—a perfect storm. That’s what it was. One year we were pure gold. The next year we were shit.”

“What happened?”

Blumberg let out an abrupt, bitter laugh. “Answer that and you get the prize.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Nobody knows what happened.”

“You called it ‘a perfect storm.’ What did you mean?”

“Everything that could go wrong went wrong.”

“Can you tell me about it? It could be important.”

“It could be important? It was important enough to destroy Camp Brightwater—a camp that had been in business, for your information, for fifty years before the thirty-eight years I ran it. An institution. A tradition. All destroyed.”

Gurney said nothing. He waited, knowing Blumberg would tell the story.

“There was always variability—better years, worse years. I don’t mean the business, the financial aspect. That was always solid. I’m talking about the personality mix. The emotional chemistry. The spirit of the group. How the bad apples would affect the rest of the barrel. Some years the spirit was cleaner, brighter, better than other years. To be expected, right? But then, thirteen years ago, that one year everything fell off the wrong end of the chart. The feeling in the air that summer was different. Uglier. Nastier. You could feel the fear. Counselors quit. Some kids wrote to their parents to come and get them. There’s a phrase people use nowadays: ‘toxic environment.’ That’s what it was. And all that was before the event itself.” Blumberg shook his head again and seemed to get lost in his recollections.

“The event?” prompted Gurney.

“One of the boys disappeared.”

“Disappeared . . . permanently?”

“He was present at dinner. He was missing at breakfast. Never seen again.”

“Did the police get involved?”

“Sure, they got involved. For a while. They lost interest when it started looking like the kid just ran away. Oh, they searched the woods, put out those missing-person notices, checked the bus stops, put his picture in the local papers. But nothing came out of any of that.”

“Why did they think he ran away?”

“Homesick? Hated being here? Maybe was being pushed around a little? You got to understand something. This was thirteen years ago—before all the uproar started about the bullying thing. Don’t get me wrong. We discouraged it. But the thing is, bullying was part of growing up back then. A fact of life.”

A fact of life, thought Gurney. And, occasionally, a fact of death. “So once the police adopted the theory that he ran away, was that the end of it?”

Blumberg laughed again, more bitterly than before. “I wish to God that was the end of it. That was far from the end of it. A boy disappearing, possibly running away—that was the reality. The camp could have survived that. What the camp couldn’t survive was all the crazy bullshit.”

“Meaning?”

“The rumors. The whispers.”

“Rumors of what?”

“Every kind of evil thing you could imagine. I told you the spirit of the place that summer was nasty even before the disappearance, and it only got worse afterward. The stories some of the boys were spreading, even some of the parents—beyond belief.”

“For example?”

“Anything you could imagine, the more horrible the better. That the missing kid had actually been murdered. That he’d been used as a human sacrifice in a satanic ritual. That he was drowned and his body was chopped up and fed to the coyotes. Incredible shit like that. There was even a story that some of the boys, some of the bad apples, got it into their heads that he was a little fagelah, and they beat him to death and buried him in the woods.”

“Just because he was gay?”

“Gay?” Blumberg shook his head. “What a word for it, eh? Like it was some kind of happy way to be. Better they should call it ‘fucking warped’—be more accurate.”

Gurney couldn’t help feeling a little sick at the thought of the boy’s experience at a camp where the ultimate authority viewed him that way.

“Did the police follow up on any of the ugly stories?”

“Nothing came of any of that. So many wild ideas going around that none of them seemed real. Teenage boys have grotesque imaginations. My opinion? I’d have to agree with the police—that he ran away. No real evidence of anything else. Just crazy talk. Unfortunately, crazy talk is like electricity. Lots of dangerous energy.”

“The crazy talk killed the camp?”

“Killed it dead. Next summer we filled less than a third of our bunks, and half of those kids left before the season was over. The crazy talk came back, like an infection. The life of the place was dead and gone. Goddamn shame.”

“The bad apples—do you remember any names?”

Blumberg shook his head. “Faces, I recognize. Names, I’m not so good. I’m thinking some of them had nicknames. But I can’t remember them, either.”

“Can you recall the name of the boy who disappeared?”

“That’s easy. It came up a thousand times. Scott Fallon.”

Gurney made a note of it. “The fire that destroyed the main building with all the records of your campers’ names and addresses—was there an investigation?”

“An investigation that went nowhere.”

“But despite everything, you stayed here. And reinvented the camp as a bungalow colony. You must be very attached to the location.”

“Camp Brightwater was once a magical place. A happy place. I try to remember that.”

“Sounds like a good idea. How’s the bungalow colony business?”

“It’s shit. But it pays the bills.”

Gurney smiled and handed Blumberg a card with his cell number on it. “Thank you for your time. If you think of anything else about that bad year, anything that happened, any names, any nicknames, please give me a call.”

Blumberg frowned at the card. “Your name is Gurney.”

“Right.”

“Not like the cow.”

“No, not like the cow.”

CHAPTER 35

On the drive back to Wolf Lake, Gurney tried to relate what he’d learned from Moe Blumberg to everything else he knew about the case.

Homophobia seemed to be a common factor—which made him curious to find out if it had surfaced in Hardwick’s meeting with the Teaneck detective regarding Leo Balzac’s suicide.

He pulled off onto the shoulder, took out his phone, and called Hardwick’s number.

The man picked up on the first ring—a good sign.

“What’s up, ace?”

“Just wondering if you managed to get to your guy in Teaneck.”

“Got to him, sat with him, listened to him. Bottom line, the man is highly pissed off at the politics of the case.”

“The politics?”

“Unexplained orders from above. Orders serious enough that they damn well better be followed, but ambiguous enough to be deniable. Only clear thing is that they’re descending from the stratosphere where the flick of a finger can send your career into the toilet like a dead fly.”

“What does your new detective friend have to do to avoid the fatal flick?”

“Hang back, stay off the minefield, and trust that the situation is in good hands.”

“There’s that minefield again.”

“Huh?”

“Fenton told me I was stumbling around in a minefield.”

“Nice when everyone’s on the same page.”

“Did you ask him if he knew in whose ‘good hands’ the case now resided?”

“He said he’d been given a hint that their identities couldn’t even be hinted at.”

“Echoes of Robin Wigg warning us to back away. What do you think’s going on?”

“Fuck if I know. Fuck if the guy in Teaneck knows. All he knows is that he’s not supposed to know anything, say anything, or do anything. And he finds that very irritating.”

“His irritation could make him helpful to us.”

“I was thinking the same thing. I mentioned that we’d love to know if Leo Balzac had ever been to Camp Brightwater; or if he’d been known to harbor strong opinions regarding gay men; or if he might have had any past contacts with Gall, Wenzel, or Pardosa.”

“And?”

“He said he’d be glad to find out what he could, as long as his involvement would remain a secret. I told him it would—that I’d be delighted to take full personal credit for blasting the case right up the asses of the boys in the stratosphere.”

“That must have warmed his heart.”

“We’ll see what kind of information he actually comes up with. In the meantime, how’d your sit-down go with Moe?”

“He told me that the summer Pardosa was there was pretty awful. One of the campers disappeared. And a nasty rumor circulated afterward was that he might have been killed because he was gay. Problem is, there’s no real evidence for it.”

“But it does ring that same damn bell one more time.”

“Yes. It does.”

“Anything else?”

“He kept talking about the ‘bad apples’ in the barrel. Couldn’t remember any names, though. Claimed Pardosa’s name meant nothing to him. Maybe I’ll give him a call before he gets on his Tel Aviv flight, see if the names Balzac, Wenzel, and Gall stir up any memories.”

“Anything else happening? How’s Madeleine doing?”

“She’s pretty stressed right now. Which reminds me, I need to get going. I’ve been told there’s a record blizzard closing in.”

THE FARTHER NORTH GURNEY DROVE, THE DARKER IT GOT. WHEN he reached the crest of the last ridge before Wolf Lake, he stopped at the side of the road. Finally within the coverage area of the lodge cell tower, he called Moe Blumberg’s number.

The call went into voicemail. He left a message that included the names of the victims he hadn’t mentioned during their Otterville meeting, plus Richard Hammond’s for good measure, asking if any of the names triggered memories from that terrible summer thirteen years ago.

As he pulled back onto the road, the sky ahead was the sullen blackish-blue of a bruise, and a few scattered snowflakes were drifting down through the beams of his headlights.

Halfway down the winding road from the ridge to the lake, his headlights swept across a large pine thicket, and he saw something moving. He braked to a stop and switched on his high beams just as the creature, whatever it was, disappeared into the deep woods. He lowered his windows a couple of inches and listened. But the silence was deep and unbroken. He drove on.

By the time he arrived at his parking spot under the lodge portico, Wolf Lake and its surrounding ridges were engulfed in an unnatural darkness, and the snow was falling steadily.

It was 4:30 PM by the grandfather clock in the reception area. He checked the Hearth Room to see if Madeleine might be there, then hurried up the stairs.

Entering the suite he found the main room illuminated only by the kerosene lamp by the couch. His first thought was that there was a problem with the electricity—until Madeleine called out to him. “Don’t turn on the lights.”

He found her in the bedroom alcove, sitting very still in the center of the four-poster bed with her eyes closed and her pajamaed legs crossed in a lotus position. A second kerosene lamp on the bureau bathed the alcove in an amber glow. A classical guitar piece was playing on her tablet, which was placed on the arm of a chair out near the bugged Harding portrait.

She held up three fingers, which he assumed represented the number of minutes she intended to remain in her yoga pose before speaking to him. He sat in a chair between the bed and bureau and waited. Eventually she opened her eyes.

“Is it all right for us to talk in here?” Her voice sounded less tense than it had for days.

“Yes, here in the alcove, with your music playing out there.” He studied her face. “You look . . . relaxed.”

“I feel relaxed.”

“Why the kerosene lamps?”

“The soft light is calming.”

“How did your meeting go with Hammond?”

“Very well.”

He stared at her, waiting for more. “That’s it?”

“He’s good.”

“At what?”

“Reducing anxiety.”

“How does he do that?”

“It’s hard to put it into words.”

“You sound like you’re on Valium.”

She shrugged.

“You’re not, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“So what did you talk about?”

“Colin Bantry’s craziness.”

Again he stared at her, waiting for more. “And?”

“My own guilt trip—blaming myself for what he did.”

A silence fell between them. Madeleine’s gaze seemed to be focused on the lamp.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m thinking that Richard is innocent, and you have to help him.”

“What about our trip to Vermont?”

“I called this afternoon and cancelled.”

“You did what?”

“Don’t pretend to be irate. You never wanted to go there anyway.” She straightened out her legs slowly from her yoga position and got off the bed. “Maybe you should try to relax. Maybe have a quick nap? I’m going to take a bath before we go to dinner at Richard and Jane’s.”

“Another bath?”

“You should try it.”

She took a small bottle of shampoo out of her duffle bag, went out to the sitting area, took the other kerosene lamp from the end table, and went into the bathroom. He heard her turning on the bath taps and heard the water gushing into the tub.

He took a few deep breaths and tried massaging his neck and shoulders to loosen the tightness in his muscles. He asked himself where his tension was coming from. He didn’t like the first explanation that came to mind—that he was jealous and resentful that another man was helping Madeleine in a way he himself had been unable to.

He heard the tub water being turned off. A minute or two later Madeleine returned to the alcove. Standing in the soft light cast by the lamp on the bureau, to all appearances in no hurry, she removed her pajamas and laid them on the bed.

As it always did, the beauty of her body had a powerful effect on him.

She seemed to sense the change in the nature of his attention.

Turning to the bureau, she opened a drawer and took out a bra and panties she’d transferred there from her bag. She laid them on a bench at the foot of the bed. Then she opened a second drawer and took out a sweater and jeans. She laid them on the bench also, moving casually closer to him as she did so.

He reached out, lightly touching the smooth curve of her hip with his fingertips.

She met his gaze with a look that was challenging and irresistible.

Neither of them said a word. She moved her pajamas from the bed, pulled back the covers, and lay down on the sheet. She watched him taking off his clothes.

Their lovemaking was intense, creating for a while a separate world where nothing mattered except what they were doing at that moment.

As he lay next to her in a daze, she leaned over and kissed him on the mouth one more time. Then she got up and left the alcove. A few seconds later he heard the bathroom door close.

Feeling deeply at peace for the first time in days, he let his eyes drift shut.

In retrospect, as he carefully reviewed later what happened, in a search for details that might explain it, he found it hard to recall how much time had elapsed between the closing of the bathroom door and the traumatic horror that changed everything.

Five seconds? Ten seconds? Possibly even thirty seconds?

The high-pitched sound pierced him viscerally, chillingly, struck some primitive part of his brain, before his conscious mind identified it as a scream. It was an excruciating sound of terror, followed by the sound of stumbling and the hard impact of a body hitting the floor.

He jumped from the bed and dashed toward the bathroom, barely noticing that his bare shin collided with a chair along the way, toppling it over backward.

“Madeleine!” he shouted, grabbing the knob of the bathroom door and turning it. “Madeleine!” The door wouldn’t open. Something was blocking it. He lowered his shoulder, heaving his weight against the door, pushing as hard as he could.

It slowly gave way, and he squeezed past it.

Inside, he looked around frantically in the dim light of the kerosene lamp. He found Madeleine naked on the floor. She was lying on her side, her arms wrapped around her knees.

“What is it?” he cried, dropping to his knees next to her. “What is it? What happened?”

She tried to say something, but it was lost in a stifled wail.

He held her face between his hands. “Maddie. Tell me. What happened?”

She wasn’t looking at him. Her terrified gaze was fastened on something else in the room. He followed her line of sight—to the big claw-foot bathtub. The tub she’d just filled with water.

“What is it? What happened?”

Her response sounded more like a moan than a word.

Only it wasn’t just a word. It was a name.

“Colin.”

“Colin? Colin Bantry? What about him?”

She answered with a half-stifled cry. “His body.”

“What about his body?”

“Look.”

“Look?”

“In the tub.”