Wolf Lake

CHAPTER 36

When Gurney approached the tub and peered into it, he saw nothing but water and a few wisps of steam. He checked it first in the low lamplight, then switched on the overhead fixture for a better look. He saw nothing out of the ordinary.

He turned his attention back to Madeleine, huddled on the floor, her knees still pulled up against her breasts.

“There’s nothing in the tub, Maddie. Just water.”

“Under the water!” she cried. “Look!”

“I did look. There’s nothing there.”

Her eyes were wide with fear.

He tried to speak calmly. “Do you think you can stand up, if I help you?”

She seemed not to understand.

“Maybe I can lift you, carry you, okay? We’ll get you off the floor and out of here.”

“Look under the water!”

He went to the tub and made a show of inspecting it thoroughly. When he swirled his arm through the water, she uttered a gasp of alarm.

“See, Maddie? Nothing but plain water.”

He came back and knelt down beside her. He slipped his arms under her body. His awkward position made lifting her a challenge, and he almost fell on her. In the end, he managed to carry her to the bed.

He switched on both bedside lamps and checked her body once more for broken bones, abrasions, or any other obvious damage. He found only a reddening area on her hip from the fall.

He squatted by the bed, bringing his face even with hers. “Maddie, can you tell me exactly what happened?”

“Colin. In the water. Swollen.” She half-turned her head toward the wall that separated the bedroom area from the bathroom. “I saw him!”

A tiny muscle in her cheek was quivering.

“It’s all right, Maddie. There’s nothing there. It was some kind of optical illusion. The water, the steam, the dim light . . .”

“His body was in the tub—not steam, not dim light! His bloated face, the scar through his eyebrow! The scar from football! Don’t you hear what I’m saying?”

Her body began to shake.

“I hear you, Maddie. I really do.”

He stood up, reached for the flannel sheet and blanket at the foot of the bed and pulled them over her.

He could see it would be pointless to try to convince her at that moment, petrified and shivering, that imagination, memories, and perhaps the poison of guilt had conspired to create a terrible illusion. She’d dismiss the effort.

He stood watching her until she closed her eyes. There would be an appropriate time, he told himself, to address the experience rationally, perhaps therapeutically. But right now—

His train of thought was broken by a sound coming from the bathroom. A barely audible creaking sound.

Gooseflesh crept up his back.

He slipped into his jeans and a sweater, retrieved the Beretta from the pocket of his jacket, and eased off the safety. After an anxious look at Madeleine, he moved quietly, barefoot, toward the bathroom.

When he got there, he heard the faint creaking again; but now it seemed to be coming from the exterior corridor. In fact, it seemed to be approaching the suite door. He reached the side of the door in a few long strides. The bolt was in its open position. He’d forgotten to slide it shut when he’d come in earlier.

He waited, hardly breathing. He was in the same position he’d been in the night of the power failure—when Barlow Tarr’s face had given him such a start.

He grasped the handle tightly, hesitated for a second, then threw the door open.

Seeing Barlow Tarr standing in the corridor once again was not in itself a shock. But there was something in the man’s intense stare that gave Gurney a chill.

“What do you want?”

Tarr spoke in a raspy half-whisper. “Be warnt.”

“You keep warning me, but I don’t understand what the danger is. Can you tell me?”

“Be warnt of the hawk that swoops down like the wolf. Be warnt of the evil here what killed them all.”

“Did the evil kill Ethan Gall?”

“Aye, and the wolves ate him, like the old man afore him.”

“How did Ethan die?”

“The hawk knows. Into the sun, into the moon—”

“Enough of that! Stop your bloody raving!” An angry voice rang out from the unlit end of the corridor.

Tarr’s face jerked as though it had been slapped. He backed away from the suite door. Glancing back along the corridor like a spooked animal, he scuttled down the main staircase.

The source of the command strode into the light. It was Norris Landon, approaching in quick strides, glaring in the direction of Tarr’s departure. He stopped at the doorway and turned to Gurney. “Are you all right?”

Gurney nodded. “Yes, thank you.”

“Damn fool’s not supposed to be in the lodge. Probably silly of me, going at him like that. God knows what he’s capable of, especially with a storm coming on.”

“Storms agitate him?”

“Oh yes. Well-known phenomenon in psychiatric wards. There’s a definite resonance between the primitive side of nature and the unbalanced mind. Things coming undone, I suppose. Thunder and terror. Extremes of emotion. But it wasn’t his raving out here in the corridor that started me on my way to your room. I thought I heard a scream.” He regarded Gurney questioningly.

“My wife had a bit of a fright. It’s all right now.”

Landon hesitated, noting the gun Gurney was holding half-concealed at the side of his leg. “I see you’re armed.”

“Yes.”

“Is that a reaction to . . . whatever frightened your wife?”

“Just precautionary. A reflex built into my line of work.”

“Ah. And your wife? Is she all right?”

“Perfectly all right.”

“Well. This may seem like a crazy question, but . . .”

“But what?”

“I’m just wondering . . . did your wife by any chance . . . see something?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did she see something . . . something that might not have been real?”

“What makes you ask that?”

Landon looked like he was searching for the right words. “The lodge has . . . a strange history . . . a history of what might be called unsavory sightings.”

“Sightings?”

“Visions? Spectral presences? Visitations? It all sounds rather silly, I admit, but I’ve been told that the individuals involved in these . . . incidents . . . were very sensible people, not the kind who usually report these things.”

“When did these incidents happen?”

“On various occasions, over the years.”

“Did the individuals all report seeing the same thing?”

“No. The way I heard it, each one—”

Gurney broke in. “Heard it from who?”

“From Ethan. It wasn’t something he wanted to advertise. The way he told it to me, each woman’s vision—they were all women, by the way, who had these experiences—each vision was from someone close to her in life who had died. Or, to be more specific, someone close to her who had drowned.”

Gurney showed no reaction beyond normal curiosity. “Did these visions all occur here in the lodge?”

“Well, I did say the lodge, but in the environs as well. In one case, the woman saw a face underwater in the lake. Another claimed she saw her dead brother under a sheet of ice by one of the chalets. The worst incident was an older woman who had a mental breakdown after seeing her first husband—who’d died in a boating accident thirty years earlier—standing in the shower. According to Ethan, she never recovered.”

“Water.”

“Eh?”

“They all involve water. People who drowned. Drowned people who then ‘come back’ in circumstances again involving water.”

Landon nodded thoughtfully. “True. Water was always involved.” He paused. “Well, sorry to take up your time with ghost stories. I’m sure they all have some reasonable explanation. Hearing that scream brought them to mind. Felt I should check on you.”

“I appreciate your concern. But I’m curious about one thing. Why are you still here?”

Landon appeared taken aback.

“I mean here at the lodge. After all that’s happened. Ethan’s death. The deaths of the other guests. The place being essentially shut down. The lurid history and general eeriness of the place. All good reasons not to be here.”

Landon smiled. “It’s all relative, isn’t it? One man’s reason to leave is another man’s reason to stay. I find the absence of other guests a plus, not a minus.”

“And the four unexplained deaths?”

“The fact is, mysteries intrigue me, and those four deaths fascinate me. Which raises an interesting question. I have only myself to be concerned about. But your own situation is more complicated. Another life is involved. You’re not subjecting just yourself to those problems you reeled off. If they apply to me, they apply doubly to you. So the real question is, why are you here?”

“I was invited here to do a job. I feel I should stay until the job is done.”

Landon raised a skeptical eyebrow. “If I had a wife with me, I might not feel that way.”

Gurney produced a polite smile. “I appreciate your perspective. Incidentally, if you have any ideas about the four deaths, I hope you’ll share them with me.” He stepped back, his hand on the door, about to close it.

“What sort of ideas?”

“Ideas about who might be responsible.”

Landon shrugged. “I suppose one does have to remain open to the possibility that Richard orchestrated it. Isn’t the man famous for pushing the boundaries of hypnotic persuasion?”

There was something playful in Landon’s bright, intelligent gaze. And something provocative in his blasé tone. Not to mention the disconnect between his comments and his apparently warm relationship with Jane Hammond.

But Gurney resisted the urge to pursue the issue. He had a more pressing concern.

CHAPTER 37

After locking the door and sliding the bolt in place, he headed for the bedroom to check on Madeleine.

He was startled to find the bed covers thrown back and the bed empty.

His eyes went straight to the balcony, but the door to it was clearly locked. The glass had accumulated a fine layer of snow.

“Maddie,” he called out.

He checked the floor on both sides of the bed, then rushed back out into the main room, frantic now, looking everywhere.

The guitar music playing on her tablet had shifted into a dramatic style with florid Spanish rhythms.

He double-checked the bathroom, even though he was sure she wasn’t there.

But there she was—standing in a shadowed corner, out of his original line of sight.

She’d wrapped herself in a white blanket. Her hair was disarranged. Her gaze was fixed again on the tub.

She was shaking her head slowly. “I don’t understand.”

He stepped closer to the tub and peered into it. “What don’t you understand?”

“How it could have happened.”

“It may be simpler than you think,” he suggested.

Seeing her baffled look as a good sign, one open to a reasonable explanation, he launched into an account of how the human mind can “see” things that aren’t actually there.

She showed little interest in what he was saying, but he pressed on. “Two eyewitnesses to the same event often give contradictory descriptions. They’re both absolutely certain they saw what they saw. The problem is, what they ‘saw’ occurred mainly in their brain circuits, not in the external world.”

“Colin’s body was in the tub.”

“Maddie, everything we ‘see’ is a combination of new data coming in through our eyes and old information stored in our brains. It’s like what happens on the Internet. You type in the first few letters of a word, and it jumps to a word in its data memory that starts with those letters. But when we’re under stress, and our brains are trying to work faster, they sometimes jump to the wrong conclusion. They create the wrong image. We’re positive we’re seeing it. But it’s not really there. We’d swear that it’s out there, but it only exists in our brain.”

Her gaze was moving around the walls of the bathroom. “You’re saying I’m delusional?”

“I’m saying that we’re wired to ‘see’ more than our optic nerves are actually reporting. And sometimes the brain’s image factory races ahead of the optical data and turns the rope on the floor into a snake.”

She pulled the blanket around her like a cloak. “That wasn’t a rope I saw. How could Colin’s body . . . get from Grayson Lake . . . into that tub?”

“Maddie, maybe you should put on some clothes?”

“You know, they never found his body. Did I tell you that?”

“Yes. You told me that.”

“They never found his body,” she repeated slowly, as though that troubling fact could explain what had just happened.

“Maddie? Sweetheart? You had a bad fall. It might be a good idea to lie down.”

“They never found his body. Then it was there.” She pointed at the tub, letting the blanket slip as she did so. It fell from her body to the floor around her feet.

Gurney wrapped his arms around her. He could feel tremors running through her body. The aftershocks of an earthquake.

He held her tightly for a long time.

LATER, AFTER SHE’D FINALLY COLLAPSED INTO A TROUBLED SLEEP, Gurney sat in front of the cold hearth and tried to figure out what to do next.

The wind was keening softly in the chimney, things at Wolf Lake were making less and less sense, and Madeleine’s mental state was undermining his ability to think straight.

Her possible need for psychiatric intervention came to mind, but he pushed the thought aside with a sick feeling. He had no illusions about the dismal state of that art and the practitioners who were too eager to experiment with their mind-altering chemistry sets.

He just wanted her to be all right.

To be herself again.

That train of thought was cut short by the ringing of his phone—and the presence on the screen of an unexpected ID. It was Moe Blumberg, former owner of Camp Brightwater.

“Mr. Gurney?”

“I thought by now you’d be en route to Tel Aviv.”

“We’re sitting on the plane, still at the gate at JFK. A fucking Hamas madman blew himself up at Ben Gurion airport. So here we sit. Nobody knows nothing.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Me too, along with the three hundred other sardines on this plane. But that’s the world we live in now. Get used to it, right?”

“I guess so. What can I do for you?”

“Nothing. Just a thought I had. Your question. Wondering if I recognized any names?”

That got Gurney’s attention and triggered his sense of caution. He wanted to get safely out of range of the room’s surveillance devices.

“Just a second. My wife’s asleep. Let me step into the bathroom so I don’t wake her.”

Gurney shut the bathroom door behind him. “Okay. You were saying?”

“Sometimes a little corner of my brain lights up when I leave it alone for a while. Things pop up when I stop trying to make them pop up.”

“You recall something about the names I mentioned?”

“No, those names don’t mean a thing to me. But I’ll tell you what I did remember. That summer, there was a secret club. There were four boys. Lion, Spider, Wolf, Weasel.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Lion, Spider, Wolf, Weasel. Those were their nicknames. They sprayed those four damn words—in red-paint graffiti—on cabins, tents, trees. Even on my goddamn canoe.”

“Did you ever find out who they were?”

“No. Sneaky little bastards. Maybe some of the other boys knew who they were, but I think they were scared of them. Nobody would say nothing.”

“You think there was some connection between those four boys with the nicknames and the boy who disappeared?”

“Who knows? Your visit just got wheels turning in my head, and that’s what popped up—those animal names. So I was thinking I should call you.”

“Did the police investigating Scott Fallon’s disappearance pursue this ‘secret club’ angle?”

“Not to my knowledge. Like I said before, to them the Fallon incident was just another runaway situation. And boys are always forming secret clubs. So maybe they were right, and this is a waste of your time.”

“Not at all, Mr. Blumberg. This could help a lot. While I have you on the phone, let me ask you something else. Do you recall anything about Scott Fallon’s parents—their first names, where they lived?”

“Hah! How could I ever forget? The mother—there was no father, just the mother—she kept coming up to the camp every weekend. Searching. Walking through the woods. Calling his name, even weeks later.”

“Do you remember the mother’s name?”

“Kimberly. Kimberly Fallon.”

“Do you by any chance have an address for her?”

“Sure. Address, email, phone number, everything. After she stopped coming to Brightwater, she’d call me once a week, then once a month, now maybe once a year. But what can I do? I talk to her.”

Because of the woman’s persistent communication with Blumberg, he had her contact information on his phone. Gurney entered it all on his own phone, thanked Blumberg, and wished him a safe trip. He also made a note of the four nicknames.

Lion. Spider. Wolf. Weasel.

He wondered if the nature of each animal described some characteristic of the boy who chose it. And he couldn’t help thinking that the number of boys in the secret club might be significant.

Four.

Four troublemaking boys who were at the camp when Scott Fallon disappeared.

Now, in this strange case, there were four dead men. And at least one of the four, Steven Pardosa, had been at Brightwater that summer.

Gurney still had his phone in his hand when it rang again.

This time it was Jack Hardwick.

“Good news. My buddy in Teaneck is even more ticked off than I thought.”

“About the order to back away from the Balzac case?”

“About the order coming from so high up he’s not allowed to know where it came from. That really frosted his balls.”

“And this is doing us some good?”

“I’d say so. After I saw him this morning he paid another visit to the therapist Balzac shared his weird-ass dream with. He asked her about the gay angle.”

“And?”

“First she just repeated that the dream was full of homoerotic imagery, which we already knew. But then she added that it was especially upsetting to Balzac because of his strong anti-homosexual feelings.”

Gurney smiled. It was nice to see a corner of the puzzle begin to take shape.

“There’s more,” added Hardwick.

“From the therapist?”

“From my buddy—who’s eager to help in every way he’s not supposed to. He told me that Balzac resigned from his job a few hours before he cut his wrists. Sent the owner of the tobacco shop an email. ‘Effective immediately, I am resigning from my management position at Smokers Happiness. Respectfully, Leo Balzac.’ Short and sweet, eh?”

“That seems an odd gesture.”

“So my detective friend thought.”

“Did he pursue it?”

“He was told that the details of the case were no longer his concern.”

“Because wiser minds up the ladder were taking over?”

“Words to that effect.”

“People on the verge of cutting their wrists don’t usually spend time writing resignation notes.”

“No, they don’t.”

“People usually resign for one of two reasons. They can’t stand what they’re doing. Or they’ve been offered something more attractive.”

“So where does that take us?”

“Maybe nowhere.” Gurney paused a moment to think about it. “I guess, if he wanted to stop smoking, he could have resigned to get away from tobacco. On the other hand, didn’t Steven Pardosa’s parents tell you that Steven was on the brink of turning his life around, that great things were just around the corner, something like that?”

“They did, but I wrote that off as bullshit. Like, if only he’d lived, our wonderful son could’ve cured cancer. Crap like that.”

“But suppose Pardosa actually was looking forward to something. And suppose Leo Balzac resigned because he was looking forward to something, too. Makes me curious whether Christopher Wenzel down in Florida had the same happy feeling about his future. Maybe you could call Bobby Becker at Palm Beach PD and ask him if there was any evidence of that.”

“What are you trying to prove? That the dead guys were all homophobic shitheads with rosy views of happy times ahead?”

“I’m trying to find puzzle pieces that fit together. And speaking of things fitting together—about ten minutes ago I got an interesting call from Moe Blumberg.”

“Anything useful?”

“He remembered four nicknames of the boys who belonged to a secret club at Brightwater the summer Scott Fallon disappeared. They called themselves Lion, Spider, Wolf, and Weasel.”

“So what does this mean to you?”

“The specific animal names don’t mean much to me, apart from the fact that they’re all predators. Of course, there’s the ‘wolf’ echo, but that could be a coincidence. If a kid wanted to pick a vicious nickname, it would be an obvious choice. What strikes me as possibly significant is the fact that there were four of them. And that the other campers were afraid of them. I got the impression from Moe that he wouldn’t be surprised if they had something to do with Scott Fallon’s disappearance. It’s a fact that Steven Pardosa was at Brightwater that summer. We need to find out if our other three ‘suicide’ victims were there at the same time. Given their ages, it’s possible.”

“Wasn’t Ethan a bit older than the other three?”

“A few years. He could have been there as a counselor.”

“Ask Peyton. He ought to know.”

“I’ll give it a try, but I wouldn’t put much faith in anything Peyton says. In the meantime, Blumberg gave me contact information for Scott’s mother. If she’ll talk to me, maybe I can find out if I’m on the right track.”

“Good luck with that, Davey boy. I have a feeling you’ll need it.”

CHAPTER 38

During his phone conversations with Blumberg and Hardwick, Gurney had been pacing back and forth in the bathroom. With the door closed and his voice low, he’d felt safe from the audio bugs in the outer room. He figured it would also be a good place from which to call Kimberly Fallon.

But first he wanted to go and check on Madeleine.

In the light of the bedside lamp he could see that she was sleeping, but not peacefully. There were tiny movements at the corners of her mouth and eyes. Some of her exhalations were accompanied by small, plaintive sounds. He was tempted to wake her, but then he decided that even restless sleep might do her more good than no sleep at all.

He went back to the bathroom to call Kimberly Fallon.

He was surprised when the phone was answered by a live female voice.

“Tashi delek.”

“My name is Dave Gurney. I’m trying to reach Kimberly Fallon.”

“This is Kimberly.”

“I’m sorry, Kimberly, I didn’t understand what you said when you picked up.”

“Tashi delek. Peace and good fortune. It’s a Tibetan greeting.”

“I see. Well, I wish you the same.”

“Thank you.”

There was something odd in her tone, an off-center quality he associated with potheads.

“Kimberly, I’m a detective. I’m calling about your son, Scott.”

There was silence.

“I’m calling about what happened at Camp Brightwater the summer he disappeared. I was wondering if you’d be willing to help me by answering some questions.”

More silence.

“Kimberly?”

“I have to see you.”

“Sorry?”

“I can’t talk about Scott unless I can see you.”

“Are you saying that you want me to come to your home?”

“I just want to see your eyes.”

“My eyes?”

“Your eyes are the windows of your soul. Do you have Skype?”

IT TOOK GURNEY ONLY A FEW MINUTES TO GET HIS NOTEBOOK COMPUTER from his duffle bag, move a pile of towels off a low table in the bathroom, set the computer on it, open the Skype program, and position himself in front of the screen’s built-in camera.

At Kimberly Fallon’s request he’d given her his Skype address. She wanted to place the video call from her end. So he got everything ready and waited.

When he was thinking it wasn’t going to happen after all, the call came through.

On his computer screen he saw a slim woman in her late forties or early fifties with a druggy smile and large blue eyes. Her hair was dark brown with streaks of coppery red. Her white peasant blouse and a string of large colored-glass beads around her neck gave her a retro-hippy look. There was an oversized painting covering most of the wall behind her, a swirl of green leaves against a cerulean sky.

With her head inclined slightly to the side, she appeared to be studying his face.

“You have amazing eyes,” she said.

Having no idea how to respond, he thought it best to say nothing.

“There’s a lot of sadness in your soul.”

Her own eyes had the half-inward look of someone viewing the world through the lens of some secret knowledge, perhaps psychedelically inspired.

“Why do you want to know about Scott?”

It was an obvious question for which he should have prepared a careful answer, but he’d had no time for that. “I think . . . what happened that summer . . . may have had some delayed effects. There’ve been some suspicious deaths . . . of people who I believe may have been at Brightwater thirteen years ago, at the same time as Scott. There may be a connection between what’s happening now and what happened back then. I realize I’m bringing up painful memories. I’m sorry about that.”

She had so little reaction he wondered if she was hearing him.

“Kimberly?”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

Despite the oddness of her comment, he pressed on. “Moe Blumberg told me that after Scott disappeared you kept coming back to Brightwater to look for him. Is that right?”

She nodded almost imperceptibly. “That was foolish of me.”

“Were you able to find any trace of him at all?”

“Of course not.”

“Why do you put it that way?”

“I was looking in the wrong place. He’d already crossed over.”

“You mean you came to the conclusion that . . . that your son was no longer alive?”

“No, that wasn’t it. Life never ends. Scott had simply crossed over to a place of peace and happiness.”

Something in her tone prompted his next question. “A happier place than Brightwater?”

Her smile faded. “Brightwater was nothing but torment. Scott hated every minute of it.”

“Why did you send him there?”

“That was his father’s idea. The sports, having to deal with the roughness and toughness of it—that was supposed to make him a real man. Scott was no good at sports. How does being beaten up and laughed at and called filthy names make you a man? I could have killed him.”

“Scott’s father?”

“I wanted to kill him. But he left. You know why he left? Because I kept going back to Brightwater to look for Scott. He couldn’t stand that. He knew it was all his fault.”

“The boys at camp who bullied Scott—was he afraid of anyone in particular?”

She nodded slowly. “The ones with animal names.”

“Spider, Lion, Wolf, and Weasel?”

“That’s right.”

“Did he know any of their real names?”

She shook her head. “He wasn’t sure. They wore black hoods over their faces.”

“Did he have any guesses?”

“He only told me one name, once, in a phone call home. It was an ugly name. But I can’t remember it now. I stay as far away as I can from all that darkness. My spiritual advisor says that we have to put the darkness behind and move toward the light.”

“I understand, Kimberly. But please try to remember. It could make a huge difference.”

With a reluctant sigh she raised her face toward a light somewhere above her. In its glare the copper highlights in her hair shimmered like little flames. “I think it began with a P . . . or maybe a B.”

She turned her hands up to the light, as though hoping that a fuller answer might alight on her palms. Gurney, impatient, was about to prompt her with the names of the four dead men, when she announced her recollection in a voice suddenly hard with hatred.

“Balzac.”

CHAPTER 39

After concluding his video conversation with Kimberly Fallon, Gurney checked his phone and discovered voicemail messages from Jack Hardwick and Jane Hammond.

The moment he saw Jane’s name he felt a stab of chagrin at what he guessed was the reason for her call.

“Dave? Madeleine? Is everything all right? I was under the impression you were coming here for dinner. Give us a call, okay?”

Another casualty of the evening’s stress and confusion. He’d have to apologize, explain. He was about to listen to the message from Hardwick when he was stopped by an odd sound in the bathroom ceiling directly above him.

A faint creaking.

He looked up and saw, or thought he saw, a few tiny specks of plaster dust descend from the edge of the light fixture over the tub. He focused on the spot, waiting for it to happen again. After a few moments, he stepped up onto the rim of the bathtub to get a closer look, balancing himself with one hand against the tile wall.

From there he could see that the decorative medallion around the fixture was imprecisely aligned over the wiring hole in the ceiling, leaving a gap of a millimeter or two along one edge. From the floor the gap appeared to be nothing more than a shadow line.

His first thought was that the opening might provide access for audio or video surveillance. The scanner, however, should have picked up any electronic activity of that nature, and it hadn’t. And it certainly wasn’t the only poorly centered light-fixture medallion he’d ever seen. He would have dismissed it as a matter of no concern—if it wasn’t for that muted creaking sound he’d heard, and that almost-invisible wisp of falling dust.

He went back to the bedroom alcove and put on his shoes. Then he strapped on his ankle holster and inserted the Beretta into it. Listening to Madeleine’s breathing, he was relieved that it sounded more regular. But the tic was still active in her cheek. As he was wondering if there was something more he could be doing for her, his phone rang.

It was Hardwick again.

He decided to take the call, but the bathroom no longer seemed a secure place to talk. He got the suite key, went out into the corridor, and locked the door behind him.

He kept his voice low. “What’s up?”

“Got some answers back from Palm Beach PD. You asked if there was any evidence that Christopher Wenzel had a bright view of his future. According to Bobby Becker, just before Wenzel headed up to Wolf Lake he put a down payment on a new Audi.”

“How does Becker square that with Wenzel’s suicide a week later?”

“Becker wasn’t the detective who caught the Wenzel case, so this is all kind of secondhand. But it seems that the detective that was on it was taken off it almost immediately. So squaring the purchase with the suicide wasn’t a problem anyone down there wrestled with.”

“Any explanation for his removal from the case?”

“He was told national security issues were involved. End of story.”

“So we have a pattern.”

“Of optimistic guys ending up dead?”

“And local investigations being preempted. Anything else from Becker?”

“One big item. You asked if anyone besides Pardosa got an odd phone call before they made their Wolf Lake arrangements. Well, according to Becker, there’s a phone record of Wenzel receiving a call from a prepaid cell phone a week before he went up to Wolf Lake. And a record of him calling the lodge reservations number that same day.”

“How do we know there’s a causal link between the two calls?”

“Let me finish. He got two calls from that prepaid cell number. One on the day he made his reservation, and the second on the day he cut his wrists. The origination point of both calls was the Wolf Lake cell tower. I’d be willing to bet that Balzac and Pardosa got the same pair of calls from that same untraceable phone.”

Gurney was quiet for a long moment. “I’m not sure what this particular convergence means. It seems to mean that someone at the lodge—or at least within range of the lodge cell tower—may have persuaded three of the four victims to come and meet with Hammond.”

“Right. And called again on the day each of them died.”

“That would be the call Fenton claims was a post-hypnotic triggering device—whatever the hell that means.” As he was speaking, Gurney was pacing along the corridor outside the suite. The light fixtures on the wall had been turned down, and in the gloom the crimson of the carpet was as dull as dried blood. “This phone call angle could be hugely important, Jack, but I need to let it sink in. Meantime, let me tell you what I found out from Scott Fallon’s mother.”

“She actually spoke to you?”

“Yes. Definitely on the flakey side, but she gave me some facts and confirmed some assumptions. Her son was gay, constantly bullied, and terrified. But here’s the big news. There was a boy her son was especially afraid of. His name was Balzac.”

“Goddamn!”

“So now we know that at least two of our current victims were at Brightwater at the same time. Steven Pardosa and Leo Balzac.”

“If two of them were there, then I bet all four were. That could be the connection we’ve been looking for. And that antigay shit sure does keep popping up.”

“Yes,” said Gurney. “And it keeps getting uglier.”

“Are we thinking our four dead guys might have been behind Scott Fallon’s disappearance?”

“It’s a workable hypothesis.”

“In the interest of calling a spade a spade, can we agree that disappearance in this case means death—even though the kid’s body was never found?”

The question jarred Gurney back into the world of Madeleine’s bathroom breakdown—her traumatic vision of another body that was never found.

Hardwick cleared his throat. “You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“When we say Scott Fallon disappeared, we’re saying he was killed, right?”

“That’s the most likely scenario.”

“You all right, ace? You sound a little off.”

As Gurney was weighing the pros and cons of discussing Madeleine’s experience, his train of thought was derailed by a sound from the attic.

A barely perceptible creaking.

“Sorry, Jack, got to cut this short. I’ll get back to you soon as I can.”

He ended the call and began searching for a back staircase or other access to the upper floor. Heading along the corridor, he passed eight widely spaced doors that presumably led to guest rooms, four on each side. At the bottom of the last door on the right, a thin line of light was visible, and he heard music playing—something baroque.

With no other guests in residence, he figured it had to be Norris Landon’s room.

When he reached what he expected to be the end of the corridor, it made a right-angle turn into an unlit cul-de-sac. This claustrophobic extension terminated in a metal door of the sort one might find on a janitor’s closet.

Surprised to find the door unlocked, he opened it to discover the bottom steps of a narrow staircase that lead up to the attic.

He noted odors of dust and mold and something faintly rotten. He located a light switch and flipped it up. A low-wattage bulb came on in a bare porcelain fixture at the top of the stairs.

When he reached the top landing he found that it led to another door.

The door was slightly ajar.

He called out in a loud voice, “Is anyone there?”

Surely it was his imagination, but the silence behind the door seemed to deepen.

He called out again in the authoritarian police cadence that was etched into the circuits of his brain. “If anyone is there, speak up and identify yourself.”

There was no response.

He nudged the door open with his foot.

The musty smell grew stronger. The weak bulb in the landing illuminated very little of the attic room in front of him. He groped along the inside wall until he found a switch. The light fixture that came on was attached to a ridge beam high in the peaked ceiling of what appeared to be a vast storage room. A number of large angular objects, perhaps unused pieces of furniture, were draped with sheets. A corroded drip bucket was positioned under a rafter that was glistening with moisture. The air in the room was cold and damp.

Gurney paused to get his bearings. He began to form a picture of how the attic space related to the floor below. He had good spatial instincts and was confident that he’d soon be able to locate the portion of the attic that was above the suite bathroom.

After a few more angle and distance estimations, he made his way cautiously to a door on the far side of the extensive storage space.

Like the previous door, this one was an inch or two ajar. The overall surface bore a thick coating of dust, but the knob was clean.

“Is anyone there?”

The responding silence was so absolute it gave him a touch of gooseflesh—a feeling that was intensified by the high-pitched squeak of a hinge as he pushed the door open.

Reaching around the door jamb to grope for another light switch, he failed to find one. But he heard something that caused him to freeze. A soft sound. The sound of a single exhaled breath.

He stepped forward quickly into the dark room, then sidestepped a few yards along the inside wall. He dropped to one knee and pulled the Beretta from its ankle holster.

Peering fruitlessly into the near-total darkness, he thought he heard another breath, not as close to him as the first.

He remained perfectly still and waited.

A hint of movement caught his eye, so slight he wondered if he’d seen anything at all. Then he felt a movement of air and heard the sound of a door some distance away being eased shut.

Quietly he rose to his feet, holding the Beretta with its muzzle pointing up. After listening intently for at least another minute, he began moving tentatively in the general direction of the door he imagined to be on the opposite side of the room.

He’d taken no more than three or four steps forward when something touched his face. Startled, he jumped back, his free arm rising automatically into a defensive combat position.

As the seconds passed and his rational mind caught up with his reflexes, it dawned on him that what had touched his face was probably just another form of the switch he’d been looking for.

He reached out and wrapped his hand around a dangling pull cord.

He gave it a gentle yank. A pale light came on high in the timbered ceiling, drawing his attention upward—and delaying for a brief moment the paralyzing impact of what awaited him on the shadowy attic floor.

CHAPTER 40

With gleaming white fangs and glaring amber eyes, rough gray fur bristling and legs flexed for attack, a huge wolf was crouched less than ten feet from Gurney—a distance he knew could be erased instantly in a single leap.

Even with his gaze fixed on the beast, his hand tightening on the Beretta, he realized that the wolf was not alone.

There were four more, spread out in a loose semicircle behind the first, all with bared teeth and malevolent eyes, motionless, as if waiting for a signal.

Gurney absorbed all this as he was lowering his weapon to a firm and steady firing position. And then, as he was sighting down the barrel at the head of the feral monster in front of the pack, his finger settling into position on the trigger, he suddenly understood why the wolves confronting him were motionless.

They were all dead.

Dead, gutted, and preserved.

Their taxidermied bodies set in shockingly vivid attitudes of attack.

Their ferocity strangely undiminished by death.

Whoever had assembled this savage diorama was plainly a master of his peculiar art. But what was the diorama’s purpose? And for whom was it arranged?

Weren’t wolves a protected species in this part of the world? How long ago had they been killed? Who killed them? And why were they here in the lodge?

Engrossed in the questions raised by the presence of these . . . stuffed cadavers . . . Gurney was brought back to the moment and reminded of his purpose in the attic by the sight of a door on the far side of the room. Surely that was the door he’d sensed opening and closing in the darkness before he found the light pull.

With his weapon still in his hand, but with the safety back on, he stepped gingerly around the wolf pack, its fierce realism keeping him on edge, and headed for the door.

Before he got to it he was stopped by the sound of heavy footsteps approaching.

A moment later the door opened, and Austen Steckle stepped forward wielding a powerful LED flashlight.

The intense beam of light swept back and forth across the room, projecting shadows of the wolves across the floor and attic walls, coming finally to rest on the pistol in Gurney’s hand.

“Christ!” He raised the beam to Gurney’s face. “What the fuck’s happening here?”

Gurney blinked. “Get that out of my eyes!”

He held it in place until Gurney began to move toward him, then quickly lowered it. “Sorry. What’s the problem?”

“Did you pass anyone?”

“What?” He seemed honestly confused.

“Someone was in this room and left by that door less than a minute ago. Did you see or hear anyone?”

“Not as I was coming up.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I heard from all the way downstairs was someone calling out, ‘Is anyone there?’ A couple of times. Really loud. Sounded like something was wrong. Nobody’s supposed to be up here. This is not a public area.”

“That’s why I thought it was odd to be hearing footsteps up here.”

“What footsteps?”

“Footsteps over our bathroom. Slow, quiet, as though someone was trying not to be heard. You have any idea why someone would be creeping around up here?”

He shook his head, seeming to find the notion outlandish.

“Whoever it was, was just in this room. And left by that door less than a minute before you walked through it. You’re sure you didn’t see or hear anyone?”

“Not a soul, not a sound. Nothing.”

“This area is the part of the attic that would be directly over our suite, is that right?”

Steckle ran his free hand over his shaved scalp, which was sweating as usual, despite the attic chill. “It could be.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I got no reason to know what’s directly over what.”

“That door you came through—where does it lead?”

“Back stairwell, fire escape, ground floor, exit door, basement. Lot of places.” He paused. “If someone went out that way, that could be why I didn’t see him.”

Gurney slipped the Beretta into the back pocket of his jeans and gestured toward the crouching wolves, whose shadows continued to shift eerily on the wall with each movement of Steckle’s flashlight. “What’s the story with the private zoo?”

Steckle produced a harsh, guttural sound—one of the most unpleasant laughs Gurney had ever heard. “It’s a joke, is what it is.” He aimed his light beam at each of the wolves in a curiously deliberate way. “You heard about the crazy Gall legend?”

“You mean Dalton Gall being killed by wolves after dreaming about them?”

“Right. So Dalton’s son inherits the place. Elliman Gall. Big-game hunter. Mountain climber. All that shit. Wolves killed his father, so Elliman sees this as an opportunity to prove something. He kills a shit-load of wolves.”

There was a glint in Steckle’s eyes that suggested he wouldn’t mind killing a shitload of wolves himself. “He has a few of them stuffed. Puts the fucking wolves in the Hearth Room, for everyone to admire. Elliman Gall. Man in control.”

“I get the feeling this story has an unhappy ending.”

Again Steckle let out that eruptive hacksaw sound that passed for a laugh. “He gets the idea to plant the Gall family crest on the peak of Devil’s Fang. Big mountain climber, Elliman tries this in the middle of winter, horrible day like today, slips on the ice, falls eight hundred feet down the rock face, bounces off an outcropping on the way. They never found his head. Actually got ripped off on the way down.” Steckle grinned radiantly. “Shit happens, right?”

“Sounds like the man craved admiration.”

“He was dying for it.” Once more, the awful laugh.

“How did the wolves end up here in the attic?”

“That was my first suggestion to Ethan, when I started working here—to get the goddamn creepy things out of the Hearth Room. There’s enough wild shit outdoors; we don’t need to have it in our faces indoors.”

“You don’t sound like much of a nature guy.”

“I’m a numbers guy. Nice, predictable numbers. Nature, in my humble opinion, is a fucking horror story.”

“An Adirondack lodge seems like an odd place for you to be working.”

“You focus on the work, not where you do it.”

Gurney realized that Steckle’s philosophy wasn’t that far from his own way of seeing things. His years in NYPD homicide had repeatedly put him in horrendous places. The thought made him want to change the subject.

“That family crest you mentioned—what was on it?”

“See for yourself.” Steckle turned the cold white beam of his flashlight to the far end of the long room. High on the rough pine wall, hanging in the triangular area outlined by the dark rafters, there was a shield-shaped plaque. It bore a relief carving of a man’s fist, raised in what could have been a symbol of power or defiance or both. Under the carving were three Latin words:

Virtus. Perseverantia. Dominatus.

Calling on his memory of his high school Latin, Gurney pondered the qualities chosen to represent the family’s guiding lights:

Manliness. Determination. Mastery.

He looked at Steckle. “Interesting motto.”

“If you say so.”

“Those ideals don’t impress you?”

“They’re just words.”

“And words don’t mean much?”

“Words don’t mean a goddamn thing.”

The deeply hostile tone of this seemed rooted in a dangerous part of Steckle’s psyche—not an area to be probed when one was alone with the man in a dark attic.

“No matter what anyone tells you, all you got is yourself.” His gaze went back to the Gall family crest, high on the far wall. “Everything else is bullshit.”

“Like Elliman Gall seeking admiration?” suggested Gurney.

Steckle nodded. “Seeking admiration is the stupidest fucking thing a man could do.”

CHAPTER 41

Steckle led Gurney two flights down the dark stairwell to a door that opened into a wide corridor. “This leads out to the reception floor. You’ll have to use the main stairs to get back up to your suite.”

Gurney replied matter-of-factly, “I may check out the attic one more time tonight before I turn in. Set my mind at rest about those footsteps.”

“Didn’t you just do that?”

“Is there a problem with my taking another look?”

Steckle hesitated. “It’s got nothing to do with me. It’s a matter of legal liability.”

“Liability for what?”

“Building code problems. It’s not a public area. Could be weak floorboards. Exposed wires. Bad lighting. You shouldn’t be up there.”

“Don’t worry about it. You’ve told me twice now that it’s not a public area. If I sprain my ankle, it’ll be my problem for breaking the rules, not yours.”

Steckle’s expression soured but he said nothing more. When they reached the reception area, he went into his office and closed the door.

Gurney headed for his car.

A bitter wind was blowing snow sideways under the portico. He sprinted from the lodge to the Outback, got his big Maglite out of the glove box and a second smaller flashlight from the emergency kit, and sprinted back inside.

Upstairs in the suite, he was surprised to find Madeleine sitting on the couch in front of the hearth with a small fire burning. Classical guitar music was playing on her tablet. She was wearing one of the lodge’s oversized white bathrobes and heavy wool socks. Her hair had been neatened a bit. On the low table between the couch and the hearth were two dinner plates covered by aluminum foil.

She gave him an anxious look. “Where were you?”

He didn’t want to unsettle her. “Just having a look around. I’m surprised to see you up. How are you feeling?”

“We forgot about the Hammonds. We were supposed to go there for dinner tonight. Jane came over to see if we were all right. She brought us two plates. She made the fire.”

“Caretaker Jane to the rescue.” As soon as the words were out, he regretted them.

“She went out of her way to be helpful.” Her gaze moved to the two flashlights in his hands. “What are those for?”

“There’s a small crack in the plaster in the bathroom. I want to make sure it’s not being used for another bug.”

Her expression shifted from skeptical to concerned. “Where in the bathroom?”

“The ceiling. A crack by the light fixture.”

Her eyes widened. “Check the whole room. There has to be an explanation.”

He realized she was talking about Colin’s body in the tub. But he knew that no reasonable explanation involving her imagination would be acceptable in her current state of mind.

“Maddie, why don’t we get out of here?”

She said nothing, just stared at him.

He persisted. “If I’d seen a ghost . . . this is the last place I’d want to stay. It can’t be good for you. Why don’t we just go home?”

“That’s not true.”

“What’s not true?”

“That you’d walk away from something like this, if it happened to you.”

He tried again. “You know, it’s possible to be too close to something to see it for what it is—”

She cut him off. “I saw his body here, not at home. The explanation is here.”

He sat down on the couch next to her. He found himself staring at the two foil-covered plates on the coffee table. The guitar music from her tablet was building to another crescendo. His gaze shifted to the dying fire.

“Would you like me to add a couple more logs?”

“No. I’m going back to bed. Do we need to keep the music on?”

“I’ll turn it off. Then I’ll do a quick little check of the attic over the bathroom.”

She pulled the bathrobe more snugly around her and closed her eyes.

ON HIS SECOND VISIT THE ATTIC FELT LESS THREATENING. EVEN now, in the same room with those crouching wolves, his sense of purpose seemed to be warding off any eerie imaginings.

Before coming up to the attic he’d set the more powerful of his two flashlights upright on the flat rim of the tub in the bathroom, it’s beam aimed at the fissure in the ceiling.

Now he switched off the smaller flashlight he’d used to find his way. For several seconds the darkness was absolute. He became aware of the wind gusting against the angled roof above him, straining against the century-old timbers.

Then, as his eyes adjusted, he caught a glimpse of what he’d hoped to see—a thin line of light between two floorboards perhaps twenty feet from where he was standing. He switched his flashlight back on and made his way around the wolves to where he’d spotted that thin line.

The floor was made of wide pine boards, some of which were loose under his feet, especially at the source of the light. Sticking the back of the flashlight in his mouth, he knelt down and pressed his fingernails into the crack between the boards and slowly tilted one of them up from the joists it rested on. When it was tilted enough to grip it, he lifted it out and put it aside. The next one came up with equal ease.

He’d laid bare a portion of the rough-sawn joist structure that separated the floorboards of the attic from the plaster ceiling of the area below it. Most significantly, he’d laid bare the wiring and support hardware of a light fixture in the ceiling of the room below. He could see that the round medallion designed to cover the opening in the plaster for the fixture wiring didn’t quite cover all of it. There was a narrow gap, just a few millimeters wide. A thin line of light from the bathroom below was shining up through it.

He examined the area around the top of the fixture as well as the joist to which it was fastened. He concluded there were no surveillance devices present. There were, however, clear signs that two devices of some sort had been installed and later removed, probably in a hurry.

It appeared that one may have been a fiber-optic video camera with its associated transmitter. There were several short pieces of fresh, sticky duct tape hanging from the side of the joist closest to the opening in the ceiling. There was a small spring clamp taped just above the opening. Gurney guessed it would have held the lens end of the optic cable in place. He figured the pieces of tape would have secured the rest of the cable to the joist to keep it from moving or creating any torquing pressure at the clamp. Cable-like imprints on the tape supported this idea. Two larger pieces of tape at what would have been the far end of the cable had probably supported the camera and transmitter components.

That raised a question. Why hadn’t the transmitter come to light when he conducted the surveillance scan of the suite the previous day? Had it been removed by then? Or not yet installed at the time of the scan? If the latter, why was it removed so quickly?

The evidence for the recent presence of a second device was convincing but unenlightening. A small pair of clamps were affixed to the joist above the opening in the plaster, but there was no way of knowing what sort of device they’d held in place.

He checked the widths at which the clamps were set to guesstimate the size of the device they’d held. He concluded it was something roughly the diameter of a lipstick, of unknown length.

Satisfied that he’d discovered as much as there was to be discovered, he eased the floorboards back into place. He stood up and took another look around the cavernous room. In the sweeping beam of his flashlight, the shadows of the wolves lunged wildly across the wall.

He turned his flashlight up toward the Gall crest on the wall.

Virtus. Perseverantia. Dominatus.

He was struck by the coincidence of those stern sentiments being set above the ferocious beasts on the floor. His attention was drawn especially to the culminating term in the series: Dominatus.

He recalled that it could be translated in many ways. But common to all those translations was one central concept: Control.

As he thought about it in the context of the case, he began to see it as a recurring theme—from Elliman Gall’s obsession with wolf killing, to Ethan Gall’s focus on reforming the world by rehabilitating criminal personalities, to Peyton Gall’s unbridled self-will.

And it went beyond the Gall family. According to Gilbert Fenton, the essence of the case involved Richard Hammond’s total control over his four victims.

Fenton’s own media strategy, of course, was all about controlling the public perception of the case, controlling its future prosecutorial direction, controlling the fate of Richard Hammond.

The shadowy forces above Fenton were controlling investigatory decisions in four separate jurisdictions.

Going back thirteen years to that infamous summer at Camp Brightwater, Gurney wondered about the anonymous four—Lion, Spider, Wolf, Weasel. Moe Blumberg said their fellow campers were afraid of them. What kind of control had they exercised over those kids? What kind of control had they exercised over Scott Fallon?

That train of thought brought Gurney around to the four recent murders. He was convinced that ‘murder’ was the only realistic term for what had happened to the four men who bled to death from their severed wrist arteries. Whatever obscure steps had been taken to bring about their deaths, the process must have been orchestrated with their deaths as the goal. In his book, that was the definition of murder.

And murder was the ultimate act of control.

CHAPTER 42

“So what the hell are you saying?” asked Hardwick. “That it was a power struggle? And the dead guys lost? Who the fuck won?”

Gurney was sitting in the Hearth Room. Rather than going directly back to the suite from the attic, he’d stopped there to call Hardwick and bring him up to date on his discoveries and his suspicion that the element of control might be central to the case.

It was that last notion that Hardwick had challenged. He loved the concrete, hated the conceptual, and reacted predictably. “Whatever it’s about, Sherlock, I have total faith that you’ll figure it out and reveal it to us lesser mortals in your own time. Meanwhile, you want to hear my own Camp Brightwater brainstorm?”

“Nothing I’d like better.”

“Okay, then. Leo the Lion.”

Gurney thought about it for a moment. “You’re saying that Leo Balzac was one of the anonymous four? Because Leo means Lion?”

“It’s a direct connection, right? And I’m thinking that Wolf was probably Ethan Gall.”

“Because of the family estate at Wolf Lake?”

“Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Except we have no evidence Ethan was at Brightwater. You have any other linkups?”

“How about Wenzel the Weasel?”

“That’s conceivable. There’s one more victim and one more nickname. Pardosa and Spider. You see some way they connect?”

“Not yet. But three out of four has to mean something.”

“It might mean we’re getting desperate for connections. But let’s say for argument’s sake that our four victims were the four bad seeds at Brightwater. And that they were responsible for Scott Fallon’s death. Is that where you’re going with this?”

“Why not? It makes sense.” Hardwick sounded excited.

“All right,” said Gurney calmly. “But even if that’s true, it happened thirteen years ago. What’s the connection to the present events?”

“Maybe someone else knew what happened. Or found out about it later. Suppose Richard Hammond found out what happened at Brightwater that summer. Suppose he found out that a gay teenage boy had been beaten to death by Gall, Balzac, Wenzel, and Pardosa.” He paused. “Suppose he decided to do something about it.”

“Other than pass along what he knew to law enforcement?”

“Seeing how useless law enforcement was the first time around, suppose he decided to avenge Fallon’s death himself. Hammond devoted his early career to gay men and boys. How might he react if he discovered the identities of four people who killed a boy just because he was gay? Maybe Hammond took the position at Wolf Lake for easy access to Ethan. Maybe he was the one who made those phone calls that enticed the other three into coming to the lodge. Maybe he even concocted some kind of financial carrot to draw them into the trap.”

That struck a chord. It fit with the stories of Wenzel, Balzac, and Pardosa seeming to have improved financial prospects around the time of their meetings with Hammond. But Gurney wasn’t convinced.

Hardwick seemed to sense his skepticism. “Look, I’m not trying to sell you this scenario. Truth be told, I hope I’m wrong.”

“Why is that?”

“Because if I’m right, Fenton is right. And that’s a revolting thought.”

“But you aren’t pushing the scenario as far as Fenton is. I mean, you aren’t buying into the notion of people being hypnotized into committing suicide, right?”

Hardwick didn’t answer.

Like a sound effect in a ghost movie, a moan came from the empty hearth at the far end of the room. Gurney told himself it was just the wind passing over the chimney.

CHAPTER 43

He found Madeleine in bed, with one of the bedside lamps still on. He looked to see if the tic in her cheek had subsided, but that side of her face was against the pillow.

To ward off his feeling of helplessness, he tried to focus on Hardwick’s theory that Hammond had persuaded Wenzel, Balzac, and Pardosa to come to the lodge. There was some evidence that their financial situations had improved around the time of their visits, but it seemed a leap too far to assume that Hammond was responsible for that.

Thinking about the financial angle brought to mind Angela Castro’s comment at the Dollhouse that Tabitha’s solicitousness might have arisen from her assumption that they were going to buy another doll. It had never made much sense to Gurney, but he’d never pursued it.

He took his phone into the bathroom, where he found the flashlight still upright on the rim of the tub, still illuminating the ceiling. He switched it off and closed the door quietly.

He called Angela’s number.

When she picked up, the first thing he heard was a TV—that same rhythm of voices, laughter, and applause he’d heard in the background of their last phone conversation. He wondered if she ever turned it off.

“Detective Gurney?” Her small voice sounded sleepy.

“Hello, Angela. Sorry if I woke you.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Nothing new. Are you still in the same place?”

“What? Oh, yes, the same place.”

“When we first met, you mentioned that Tabitha might have been thinking we were going to buy a Barbie. Remember that?”

“Sure.”

“Because Stevie had bought you one?”

“I told you that.”

“What I’m wondering is . . . do you know how much he paid for it?”

“How could I forget? It was like ten thousand dollars. Plus tax.”

“For a Barbie doll?”

“An original Barbie doll. From when they first made them. With the original clothes.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“That’s what I told Stevie. But he said he knew it was something I’d always wanted, so I should have it. He said we could have a lot of nice things.”

“Did he say where the money was coming from?”

“He said that I shouldn’t worry about that, that it was none of my business.”

“Like the phone call he got before he went to Wolf Lake was none of your business?”

“I guess.”

“So he never told you anything at all about the source of the money?”

“No. But he said the Barbie was just the beginning.”

Gurney was stopped by a loud knocking at the suite door. “Angela, I have to go, but I’ll call you again soon.”

As he left the bathroom, the pounding was repeated, more aggressively.

He adjusted the Beretta in his back pocket to make the grip easily reachable and approached the door.

“Who is it?”

“Police!”

He recognized Fenton’s voice and opened the door.

The flat-faced, heavy-shouldered man facing him looked like a worn and wrinkled copy of the Fenton who had visited him less than forty-eight hours earlier. His sport jacket hung open, revealing a shoulder-holstered Glock. He eyed Gurney coldly. “We need to talk.”

“You want to come in?”

“No. You need to come downstairs.”

“Why is that?”

“You come downstairs or I arrest you right here, now, for obstruction.”

“I’ll be with you in a minute.” Leaving Fenton in the doorway, Gurney went back to the alcove. Madeleine was still in bed, but now her eyes were open.

“Maddie, I have to go downstairs—”

“I heard. Be careful.”

He forced a smile. “This shouldn’t take long.”

THEY SAT IN THE FRONT SEATS OF A WEATHERED FJ CRUISER, PARKED under the outer edge of the lodge portico. Its headlights were reaching out into the snowstorm. Its engine was running, and the heater was on.

Gurney figured it was Fenton’s personal vehicle, which meant he was probably off duty.

After a fraught silence during which Fenton stared out at the snow in his headlight beams, he turned to Gurney. “You got your phone on you?”

“Yes.”

“Turn it off. Completely off. Then lay it on the console where I can see it.”

He did as he was asked. In the dim light cast by the illuminated dashboard gauges, he could see Fenton’s jaw muscle tighten.

“I’m confused,” said Fenton, but there was more accusation in his tone than confusion. “We just had a nice conversation the other day. I thought I explained that your involvement here was not helpful. In fact, quite harmful. I thought I’d made that clear.”

He paused, as if searching for the right words. “Your interference is giving the suspect false hopes. Your interference is prolonging the process by fostering the illusion in the suspect’s mind that there’s a way out of his difficulties—a way other than an honest, detailed confession. Fostering this illusion is a destructive thing for you to be doing. Extremely destructive. Perhaps I wasn’t clear on this point in our last conversation. I hope I’m being clear now.”

“Very clear.”

“Good. I’m glad to hear you say that.” He stared out at the snow. “There’s a lot at stake in the outcome of this case. It’s not something to be screwing around with.”

Gurney knew that provoking this man could be dangerous, but it could also be instructive. “The orders you’re getting on how the case should be handled are coming from so high up you figure they must be right? The people who want Hammond to be guilty are so important you figure he must be guilty?”

“Richard Hammond is a homicidal liar. That’s a fact. It’s not a goddamn order from anybody.”

“I heard that he took a polygraph test. And passed it.”

“That means absolutely nothing.”

“It does seem to be a small point in his favor.”

“You don’t know your client very well, do you?” Fenton reached down behind the passenger seat and retrieved an open briefcase. He pulled out some papers that were stapled together and tossed them in Gurney’s lap. “Reading material, to bring you up to speed.”

In the dim dashboard light all he could see was the boldface headline on what appeared to be a copy of a scientific article: “Neuropsychology of Polygraphy: Exploitable Parameters.”

Fenton pointed at it. “Lie-detector tests don’t mean a thing when the subject is an expert on exploiting their weaknesses.”

It struck Gurney that Hammond seemed to be an expert on just about every subject that made him look bad.

Like a trial attorney driving home the final point in his summation, Fenton reached into his briefcase and pulled out a single sheet of paper. “This is a copy of Ethan Gall’s handwritten description of his dream, the same dream every one of the victims started having after being hypnotized by Hammond.” He handed the sheet to Gurney. “Take it home with you. Read it every morning—to remind yourself of the worst client choice you ever made.”

Gurney took it. “Any chance of it being a forgery?”

“Not a snowball’s chance in hell. It’s been analyzed and reanalyzed. Pressure patterns, accelerations and decelerations over certain letter combinations, things no forger could duplicate. Besides, who the hell is this hypothetical forger with access to Gall’s office? Peyton’s generally so fucked up he can barely walk. Hammond himself would just be putting another nail in his own coffin. Ditto his adoring sister. Austen Steckle had his hand in a cast at the time, some carpal tunnel crap. Who else is there who could have access? Barlow Tarr? I doubt that nutcase can even write. The plain fact is that it’s Gall’s own description of his own dream in his own writing. And every disgusting thing in it is consistent with the dreams of the other three victims.”

He gave Gurney a hard stare. “I’m done explaining this to you. You’re one millimeter away from an obstruction charge. You hear what I’m saying?”

“Are we finished here?”

“You better be finished here.” Fenton gazed out in silence at the growing storm, then began shaking his head slowly. “I don’t get you, Gurney. What are you, some kind of egomaniac who always thinks he’s right and the rest of the team is wrong?”

“That would depend on the track record of the team.”

Fenton’s eyes were fixed on the swirling snow. He was gripping the steering wheel with both hands. “Let me ask you something. Where were you on 9/11?”

Gurney blinked at the abrupt segue. “My wife and I were away when the towers went down, but I got to ground zero that night. Why do you ask?”

“I was in Lower Manhattan that morning. At a joint NYPD-NYSP training session. We got sent to the towers as soon as the first plane hit.” The man’s knuckles were whitening from the force of his grip on the wheel. “So many years ago, and I still get nightmares. I can still hear the sound.”

Gurney knew what “the sound” was. He’d heard versions of this experience from other cops and firemen. While the fires were spreading from floor to floor, people were jumping from the high windows.

“The sound” was the sound of the bodies hitting the pavement.

Gurney said nothing.

Eventually Fenton broke the silence. “You get my point, Gurney? That’s what the world is now. That’s the new reality. Nobody gets to sit on the fence anymore. It’s about the survival of America. This is a war, not a game. You got to be on one side or the other.”

Gurney nodded in a vague show of agreement. “Tell me something, Gilbert. Those important, powerful, anonymous people who’ve taken a special interest in the Hammond case—you sure they’re on the side of the angels?”

Fenton turned in his seat, his expression incredulous and furious.

CHAPTER 44

On his way back to the suite, Gurney stopped in the Hearth Room to call Hardwick.

“Things are getting tense. I got another visit from Fenton. The man is under severe pressure to get rid of me.”

“Any idea what it is you’re doing that’s getting them so agitated?”

“They’re desperate for Hammond to confess, and they think I’m preventing that.”

“These bastards actually believe he hypnotized four men into killing themselves?”

“That would seem to be the case.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Stay close in case all hell should break loose.”

“Anything else I should know about?”

Madeleine’s mental state came to mind. But he wasn’t ready to discuss that with anyone. “Not right now.” He ended the call and went up to the suite. Tucked under his arm were Hammond’s article on polygraphy and Gall’s description of his nightmare.

He found Madeleine asleep with the bedside lamp on. In the sitting area the foil-covered plates Jane Hammond had brought over remained unopened on the coffee table. He settled down on the couch. The article, he noted, was eleven pages. The dream description was only half a page, so he started with that.

Per your request, these are the principal details of the dream I’ve been having since our last session. It begins with the illusion that I am awake, in my own bed. I develop an awareness of another presence in the room. I feel frightened and want to get up, but I discover I’m paralyzed. I want to call for help, but no words will come out. Then I see, emerging from the darkness, a thing covered with bristling fur. Somehow I know it’s a wolf. I hear it growling. I see its eyes shining, bright red, in the darkness. Then I feel its weight on me and its hot breath. The breath has a rotten smell. There’s a viscous fluid dripping from its mouth. Then the wolf is transformed into a dagger. On the handle there’s a wolf’s head with glittering ruby eyes. I feel something going into me. I’m soaked with blood. Then I see a man holding the dagger, offering me bright little pills. When I wake up I feel terrible. So terrible that I wish I were dead.

Gurney turned the copy over and discovered on the back a notation written with a different kind of pen in a rougher hand, presumably Fenton’s: “Daggers similar to the one described here found at all four suicide sites.”

He went back to the front of the page and read the dream narrative again.

So many lurid particulars.

Was it conceivable that Hammond had planted this dream in the minds of four people?

Was it conceivable that the dream had literally killed them?

The concept was astonishing.

So astonishing, Gurney couldn’t believe it.

He put the dream description aside and went on to Hammond’s polygraph article.

He started off reading it carefully, then began skimming, seeing no major revelations. Written years ago when Hammond was a doctoral candidate, it examined factors that contribute to polygraph errors, both accidental and induced. Simple factors included tricks such as using a thumbtack concealed in one’s clothing to produce pain at chosen points in the process to throw off the machine’s physiological response readings. At the more complex end of the spectrum were certain mental states, both meditative and disordered, that blurred the difference between a subject’s honest and deceptive responses.

“What time is it?”

Startled by the sound of Madeleine’s voice, Gurney turned to find her standing by the couch, gazing at him with the look of someone emerging from a bad dream.

He checked his phone. “It’s a little after nine.”

She blinked, hesitated. “David?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think I’m losing my mind?”

“Of course not.”

“I saw Colin in the tub. I’m sure of it. But it doesn’t make any sense.”

“It just means we haven’t found the explanation yet. But we will.”

“You really think everything is explainable?”

“I don’t think it is. I know it is.”

“Is seeing a ghost explainable?”

“You’re thinking now that you saw a ghost? Not a physical body?”

“I don’t know. I only know it was Colin. But there was something spirit-like about him. A kind of glow, as though I were looking not only at his body but at his soul. Do you believe we continue to exist after our bodies die?”

“I can’t answer that, Maddie. I’m not even sure what the question means.”

There was a lost look in her eyes. “Nothing like this has ever happened to you, has it?”

“No.”

His phone rang.

He let it ring three more times before glancing at the ID screen.

It was Rebecca Holdenfield.

As urgently as he craved any input that might move the Hammond case forward, he didn’t feel able to turn away from the look on Madeleine’s face. He let the call go to voicemail.

She shivered. “I’m cold. I should go back to bed.” She started to turn away from the couch, then stopped. “I forgot to tell you. Jane invited us to breakfast.”

Given the situation with Fenton, visiting the Hammonds seemed like a bad idea. On the other hand, he felt it would be good for Madeleine to be out of the lodge, even for an hour.

“That’s fine.”

She nodded and went into the alcove.

He remained on the couch, trying to calm his racing thoughts. Then, remembering that simple actions often had calming effects, he decided to get up and make a fire.

As he reached the fireplace, he was startled by a thud at the balcony door.

His first thought was that a bird had flown into it. His second thought was that birds don’t fly at night in snowstorms.

He went to the door and peered out through the glass panel. A coating of ice made it difficult to see anything. Cautiously, he opened the door.

He saw something lying on the snow that had blown onto the balcony.

He stepped out for a closer look.

It appeared to be an irregularly shaped package, about a foot long and three inches in diameter, clumsily wrapped with newspaper and duct tape.

He took another step to the balcony railing, looking as far as he could see in both directions along the lake road.

He saw no one—heard nothing but the wind.

He picked up the package, judging that it weighed less than a pound.

He took it inside to the coffee table. He pushed the two foil-covered plates out of the way and removed the duct tape that held the package together. Most of the newspaper wrapping came off with the tape.

Two devices lay exposed on the table in front of him.

One he recognized instantly as a fiber-optic surveillance camera.

The other device wasn’t familiar at all. It was a matte-black object about the size of a roll of dimes. Along the side was something that appeared to be a serial number. On one end there were eight very small holes, and in each hole a shiny bit of curved glass.

Some sort of lenses? He’d never seen lenses that small. But what else could they be? There was one fact, however, about which Gurney became increasingly certain as he studied the dimensions of both devices. These were almost certainly the objects that had been installed in, and then removed from, the joist space he’d inspected in the attic—the space above the bathroom light fixture.

He suddenly noticed what he’d missed in his hurry to examine the devices.

Two words were roughly scribbled in block letters on the inside of one of the newspaper sheets that had been used as wrapping paper.

BE WARNT

CHAPTER 45

The language of the message obviously pointed to Barlow Tarr.

But if it was Tarr, why had he put himself at risk? And what exactly was the evil Gurney was being “warnt” about—yet again?

And if it wasn’t Tarr, why might someone want him to think it was?

Those questions kept him awake till the wee hours of the morning. Then, after sleeping fitfully for a couple of hours, he was awake again before dawn. Finding himself slipping back into the same loop of evidence-starved speculation, he decided to get up, take a shower, and get dressed.

He went to the balcony door to evaluate the weather conditions. Snow crystals passing through the reach of the lodge floodlights were sparkling in the dry air. The thermometer mounted on the balcony railing, half-encrusted with ice, looked like it was registering eight below zero. Gurney took a step out to make sure he was seeing it right.

As he turned to go back inside, something caught his eye. Something on the road that led down from the ridge to the lodge.

A glint of light.

As he strained his eyes into the darkness he saw a second glint, a few feet from the first. The two were moving in tandem, like headlights, only smaller and weaker.

Parking lights, he realized.

He waited, watched, listened.

The lights came closer. Eventually they came close enough that he could see that they were the parking lights of a pickup truck.

The truck turned onto the lake road, moved slowly past the outer reach of the lodge floodlights, and on toward . . . toward what?

The boathouse?

One of the chalets?

The Gall mansion?

As the truck faded into the storm, Gurney noted that its disappearance was aided by the absence of any visible taillights.

He went inside and locked the door.

He spent the next half hour on his laptop, scanning through the products offered by suppliers of surveillance and anti-surveillance equipment, hoping to find something that resembled the strange little tubular device that had him baffled.

What he found was a thriving industry. Hundreds of companies, many with the word “Spy” in their names, were marketing sophisticated hardware at affordable prices.

The items fell into two main categories. Devices that purportedly enabled the user to observe and record anything that anyone did or said, just about anywhere. And devices designed to defeat all the capabilities of the first category. The underlying sales pitch seemed to be, “Spy on everyone. Be spied on by no one.”

The perfect industry for a paranoid world.

He failed to find anything that looked like the little black gadget with the eight minuscule lenses—if that’s what they were.

He examined it again. There seemed to be no way of opening it. He could detect no battery warmth in it. The number etched on the side offered no clue. It did, however, prompt him to try a long shot. He entered the serial number in his Internet search engine.

It produced one result, a website with the obscure address, “www.a1z2b3y4c5x.net.”

He went to the site and found nothing there but an otherwise blank page with four data-entry boxes asking for a current ID, previous ID, current password, and previous password.

In a way, it was a dead end. But the wall of security it presented was noteworthy. At the very least, it was a reinforcement of Robin Wigg’s warning. And Gilbert Fenton’s warning. Not to mention the scribbled warning that arrived in the package.

Thinking of Wigg prompted him to get his phone, take photos of the device from several angles, and email them to her along with the serial number and website URL.

He received a reply less than two minutes later: “Pics inadequate. Site locked. Send item.” He was pleased by her interest but saw no timely way to comply with her request.

“How long have you been up?” Madeleine’s voice startled him.

He turned and saw her standing by the bathroom door in her tee shirt and pajama bottoms.

“Maybe an hour or so?”

“We’re due at the Hammonds at eight.”

She went into the bathroom, leaving the door wide open. She stayed well away from the tub and went straight to the shower stall in the far corner.

Her willingness to use the room at all struck him as a positive sign.

While she was showering, he began thinking about the breakfast they’d be having with Richard and Jane, and how, despite his misgivings about the visit, he might make use of it. There were questions he could ask, reactions he could assess. He could bring up the theory of the four deaths being a form of revenge for a long-ago tragedy. A tragedy involving the disappearance of a gay teenager. It would be interesting to see what Richard had to say about that.

THE WIND GUSTING OVER THE SNOW-COVERED ROAD HAD ONLY partly obscured the tire tracks of the pickup truck that had traveled the same way earlier. Gurney’s curiosity was intensified when he saw that the tracks turned off the road toward Richard’s chalet and curved around the back of it. The vehicle that made those tracks must still be there. He was tempted to investigate on the spot but changed his mind when he saw how cold Madeleine looked.

Jane, as usual, welcomed them at the front door with an anxious smile. After they hung up their jackets, she led them into the big cathedral-ceilinged living area. “I had the chef at the lodge prepare a few different breakfast items for us—scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, toast, oatmeal, mixed fruits. He delivered it all himself. The kitchen helper and housemaid stayed home in Bearston today, with the terrible weather, and he’s leaving for home himself before it gets any worse. I asked him to put everything downstairs in the rec room, at your friend’s suggestion.”

“Excuse me?”

A familiar voice intervened. “I said you’d understand, because you’re an understanding guy.”

Jack Hardwick, grinning brightly, got up from the chair by the hearth. “Actually,” he said, glancing significantly at the lamp with the bloodstone finial that Gurney had told him housed one of the bugs, “I thought you might prefer to be downstairs. Closer to the furnace. Feels warmer.”

Jane added, “Richard was taking a quick shower. Let me see if he’s ready.”

As soon as she left the room, Hardwick lowered his voice. “With both of us here, maybe we can double our progress.”

“You’re not worried about Fenton finding out you’re here?”

“I’m done worrying about Fenton. As soon as we get to the truth of this case, his ship sinks. And if he tries to swim, I’ll piss in his face.”

“Assuming our truth is different from his truth.”

“It has to be—”

He was interrupted by Jane calling to them from a doorway on the far side of the stone hearth. “Richard’s on his way. Let’s go downstairs before the breakfast things get cold.”

Once Jane was again out of sight, Madeleine turned to Hardwick. She spoke softly, calmly. “Richard Hammond isn’t guilty of anything.”

He stared at her for a long moment. “You look pale. You okay?”

“No, I’m not okay. Not at all. But that has nothing to do with Richard.”

“Are you sick?”

“Maybe.”

Hardwick seemed bewildered by her. He paused. “What makes you say that about Hammond?”

“I just know.”

He looked at Gurney, as if seeking a translation.

THE SO-CALLED “REC ROOM” WAS A BIG SQUARE SPACE. THERE WAS an exercise area with a weight machine and a pair of treadmills; a media area with plush seats in front of a wide screen; a conversation area with a couch and armchairs; and an eating area with a sideboard, a dining table, and half a dozen Windsor chairs.

Richard and Jane were sitting across the table from Dave and Madeleine, and Jack was sitting at the end. They’d all gotten what they wanted from the sideboard and had briefly discussed the weather and the dreadful blizzard to come. It quickly became apparent that no one really wanted to talk about it, and the group fell into an edgy silence.

Finally, with her throat sounding painfully raw, Jane spoke up. “I was wondering . . . with all you’ve been looking into . . . if you might possibly have some good news for us?”

“We do have some ‘news,’” said Gurney. “We’ve discovered that the four deaths may be related to the disappearance of a teenage boy in upstate New York thirteen years ago.”

Richard appeared curious, Jane puzzled.

Gurney recounted the story of the tragic summer at Camp Brightwater—in all the detail provided by Moe Blumberg and Kimberly Fallon.

At the mention of Scott Fallon’s almost-certain death, Jane’s hand went to her heart. “How awful!”

Richard’s expression was hard to read. “You’re saying that Wenzel, Balzac, and Pardosa were all at Brightwater that summer?”

“It looks that way.”

“So what’s the connection to Ethan?”

“We’re thinking he may have been there as well.”

“You must be joking.”

“Why is that?”

“Ethan spent his summers from age twelve to twenty-one in Switzerland. Then, when his mother died and he inherited the Wolf Lake estate, he worked here day and night, fifty-two weeks a year, turning the lodge into the going concern it is today.”

“What was he doing in Switzerland?”

“Equestrian school, French and German language schools, trap shooting, fly fishing, et cetera. Opportunities to mingle with other young people of good breeding. The notion that Ethan Gall would have been sent to a blue-collar camp in the Catskills is ludicrous.” Hammond paused, his faint smile fading. “Wait a second, your question about Brightwater—were you thinking that Ethan could have been involved with those other three in something that rotten, that despicable?”

“It was a possibility I had to consider.”

Richard looked accusingly at Hardwick. “You too?”

“My own experience is that any kind of person can be the kind of person you never thought they could be.” There was something cold and assessing in Hardwick’s eyes.

“I agree, theoretically. But the idea that he could be part of a band of gay-bashing bullies is just so . . . so . . .” His voice trailed off, and he began again. “A couple of years ago, around the time Ethan persuaded me to come to Wolf Lake, he was about to give away everything, all his assets. He intended to transfer ownership of everything to the Gall New Life Foundation in the form of an irrevocable trust—with only a modest annual income from the investment proceeds to continue for himself and Peyton during their lifetimes.”

Hardwick reacted with a raised eyebrow.

Gurney smiled encouragingly. “That sounds very generous.”

“That’s my point. That’s who Ethan was. A wealthy man with no love of wealth, except for what good it could accomplish in the world.”

Hardwick barked out a loud cough. “You said he was ‘about to’ do that. Which means he didn’t actually do it, right?”

“Austen persuaded him that he could do more good if he retained control of the assets.”

Gurney stepped in again. “What sort of ‘good’ are we talking about?”

“If everything went into an irrevocable trust for the foundation, Ethan would lose what little power he had over Peyton’s behavior.”

“He couldn’t threaten to disinherit him if there was nothing left to be inherited?”

“Exactly. And Austen’s final point, the one that really tipped the scales with Ethan, was that the foundation’s primary support shouldn’t come from the generosity of its founder. It should come from the contributions of the successful ‘graduates’ of its rehabilitation program. Austen made a strong case for the ‘giving back’ concept.”

“Why was Austen involved?” asked Gurney.

“Austen was involved because money was involved. Of course, Ethan made his own decision. But he always respected Austen’s input.”

Jane was twisting her napkin. “The three young men you say were at that camp together . . . and came up to see Richard? Were you able to find out anything else about them?”

“Odd things. All three despised gay men. And at least one was informed that you were gay—before he made his appointment to see you. It’s possible all three had the same information—since they all got calls from the same cell number before coming here.”

Hammond and Jane looked at each other, perplexed.

Jane voiced the obvious question. “Why would someone like that want to see Richard?”

“There’s evidence that all three experienced dramatic financial improvements in their lives right around the time of their sessions with Richard.”

Hammond looked baffled. “Are you implying someone paid them to meet with me?”

Gurney shrugged. “I’m just telling you what we discovered.”

Hardwick gave Hammond an assessing look. “Suppose you learned the identity of three shit-bags who’d beaten a boy to death for the crime of being gay. Suppose you had no doubt about their guilt. But the proof, because of some technicality, would not be allowed in court; so you believed they would escape punishment. What would you do?”

Hammond gazed sadly at Hardwick. “You may have intended that as a trick question. But it’s a very painful question.”

“And the answer is . . .?”

“Nothing. I wouldn’t do anything. I’d want to kill them, but I wouldn’t be able to.”

“Why not?”

Tears welled in Hammond’s extraordinary blue-green eyes. “I simply wouldn’t have the courage.”

A silence enveloped the table.

Hardwick nodded thoughtfully, as if the answer made sense to him, as if he now trusted Hammond a little more than he had before.

Gurney felt the same way. He felt that Hammond was probably innocent.

If he wasn’t innocent, he was just about the best liar on earth.

CHAPTER 46

Half an hour later, sitting in the Outback in front of the chalet with Madeleine and Hardwick, Gurney pointedly emphasized the need for objectivity.

Hardwick agreed. “I got the impression he was being straight with us. Your gut telling you anything different?”

“My gut is delivering pretty much the same message as yours,” said Gurney. “But my brain is telling me my gut shouldn’t be the final authority.”

Gurney reached into the glove box and took out the small cylindrical device that had arrived in the package on the balcony. He explained his near-certainty that it had been one of two pieces of electronic equipment installed over the bathroom in their suite. He concluded by asking Hardwick if he’d ever seen anything like it.

Hardwick switched on the dome light and studied the device. “Never. You send a photo of it to Wigg?”

“I did. But the thing is, she wants to see the object itself.”

Hardwick grimaced. “You suggesting I should hand-deliver it?”

“It’s just a quick run down to Albany.”

Hardwick put it in his jacket pocket. “Goddamn pain in the ass. You realize this contradicts your request that I hang close by?”

“Your not being here makes me nervous. But not knowing what that thing is makes me more nervous.”

“Better not turn out to be a fucking flashlight.”

“By the way, that pickup truck in back of the chalet is yours, right?”

“Actually belongs to Esti Moreno, love of my life.”

“She’s still living with you?”

“You doubt my ability to maintain a stable relationship?”

“Yes.”

“I gave her a list of all the key players we know of. She’s digging up whatever she can. In fact, she’s the one who dug up Steckle’s drug-dealing background. She lent me her truck. Hate to leave the GTO at home, but my favorite machine is shit in the snow. Forecast says a ton of that’s on the way. Which reminds me of Moe Blumberg.”

“Excuse me?”

“The timing. Shouldn’t we be worried that a man with a Brightwater background, who probably knows more than he’s telling us, just happens to be leaving the country?”

“I hadn’t thought to worry about that; but now that you mention it, I probably will.”

“And how about the dead kid’s mother? When you think about possible motives, wouldn’t she have the strongest one of all—to kill the fuckheads who killed her son?”

“From a pure motive point of view, I guess we can keep her in the picture. Problem is, she’d have a credible motive to kill the three who were at Brightwater. But why kill Ethan? And why now? Why not thirteen years ago?”

“That question would apply not just to Kimberly Fallon but to anyone who wanted to get even. The more I think about the old saying, ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold,’ the less credible it seems as a practical reason to put something off that long. Which makes the revenge motive pretty damn doubtful.”

“I don’t disagree, Jack. But if revenge has nothing to do with it, then what’s the Brightwater connection all about?”

“Fucked if I know. Too many questions in this case. And I’ll give you one more. How come Ethan’s dream description, which he wrote in the form of a letter, was never mailed?”

“Maybe he intended to deliver it personally to whoever asked him for it.”

“You mean, like to some therapist he was secretly seeing in Plattsburgh?”

“Or to Richard—a possibility we seem to be minimizing.”

“This conversation is nothing but question marks. If I’m going to get to Albany and back before everything is snowed in, I better leave. I’ll let the Hammonds know I’m going.”

“Stay in touch.”

Hardwick nodded, got out of the car, and headed into the chalet. Gurney pulled out onto the lake road.

WHEN THEY ARRIVED BACK AT THE LODGE, THE GRANDFATHER clock in the reception area was striking the final note of 10:00 AM. There was a deep stillness about the place, an empty feeling. They headed up the stairs. Madeleine’s arms were hugging her body tightly. “What are you going to do about the bathroom?”

“There’s not a lot to be done.”

“You said there was an opening by the light.”

“Just a narrow gap between the fixture medallion and the ceiling.”

“Can you close it up?”

It was the first thing he did after they went into the suite. All he had to do was nudge the medallion a quarter inch sideways, which he did with a few sharp taps with the handle of his toothbrush.

When he came out of the bathroom he found Madeleine at one of the windows, gazing out toward Devil’s Fang. The angle of the light against her cheek was making the tic more noticeable. She was still wearing her jacket and gloves.

“Could you do me a favor and type an email for me to my sister? I don’t want to take my gloves off. My fingers are aching with the cold as it is.”

“No problem. I’ll use my laptop. I hate using the screen keyboard on your tablet.”

When he was ready, she dictated the message while still facing the window.

It’s been a while since we’ve spoken. For that I apologize. This may seem a strange way to begin, after so long a silence, but I have a huge request. I need you to look back to the time when I was a teenager—when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. What do you remember about me in those years? What kind of person was I? Were you worried about me? What did I seem to want from you, from Mom and Dad, from my friends . . . from boys? Do you remember what made me angry? Or happy? Or sad? I need to know these things. Please think about them. Please tell me as much as you can. I need to know who I was back then.

She took a deep breath and let out a slow sigh. She wiped her face—seemed to be wiping away tears—with her still-gloved hands.

He felt helpless. After a few moments he asked, “Is there a particular way you want me to sign this for you?”

“No. Just save it, and I’ll take care of it before I send it. I had to get those questions written down while they were clear in my mind.” She finally turned away from the window. “I’m going to take a hot shower to get the chill out of my bones.”

She went into the bathroom, leaving the door open, and turned on the shower taps. She went to the corner of the room farthest from the tub and began taking off her clothes.

He saved the email to her sister and put his laptop to sleep.

He remembered that he’d gotten a call from Rebecca, the call he’d chosen not to take the previous evening in the middle of his conversation with Madeleine. He decided to listen to it now.

“David, when you asked me the other day if I knew anything about the term ‘trance-induced suicide,’ I said it sounded familiar. I just remembered why. And I looked it up in the New York Times online archive to refresh my memory. There was a report in the paper almost four years ago concerning one of those government leaker cases.

“A former CIA employee claimed that a secret directorate with the agency’s Field Operations Psychological Research and Support Unit was conducting unauthorized experiments in hypnotic mind control. No big surprise there. However, the purpose of the experiments was to see if an otherwise normal subject could be rendered suicidal. According to the leaker, whose name was Sylvan Marschalk, considerable resources were being applied to the project. I guess the notion of magically persuading people to kill themselves had a lot of appeal. It sounds ridiculous, but probably no more ridiculous than their plot to assassinate Castro with an exploding cigar. Apparently the project was taken seriously enough to generate its own clandestine budget and its own acronym—TIS, for trance-induced suicide.

“A week after he made his revelations he was found dead in Central Park of a massive drug overdose. Naturally, the official line was that there was no secret directorate and no experiments, and Marschalk’s claims were the unfortunate ravings of a paranoid drug addict.

“So that’s the story, David. If by any chance you’re crossing swords with those same folks . . . God help you. Call when you can. Let me know that you’re alive. No joke.”

Gurney went to his laptop and typed ‘Sylvan Marschalk’ into his search site. The New York Times article popped up first. Actually, a pair of articles. The first focused on “the allegations of a former CIA analyst.” The second, dated a week later, focused on the drug overdose. He read both carefully and found nothing in either Rebecca hadn’t already mentioned. He checked the other news items that came up in the search, all briefer than the ones in the Times. There were no follow-ups.

The story was jarring—not only because of the way it ended, but because the leaker’s accusations regarding “induced suicide” research gave more credibility to the concept.

He was still sitting on the couch pondering the implications when Madeleine emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel.

“Can you transfer that email for my sister from your computer to mine?”

“You don’t want to send it from mine?”

“No, because when she replies to it, I’d like the reply to come to my own tablet.”

He went to the saved email document, entered Madeleine’s email address at the top, and hit “Send.” Once he saw that the process was completed, he closed down his laptop.

That’s when it hit him.

He sat motionless, almost breathless, for several long seconds, considering a startling possibility.

If someone had found the unaddressed document while it was still in his unsent email file, wouldn’t they have assumed that he was writing about himself, his own emotional turmoil?

Suppose that was the same incorrect assumption being made about Ethan Gall’s handwritten document? Might it not be, in fact, a description of someone else’s nightmare—someone who, for reasons yet unknown, dictated their experience in the form of a letter they planned to send to a third party—exactly as Madeleine had done?

This hypothetical scenario took hold of Gurney’s mind. Soon he became convinced it was the truth. Someone had gone to Ethan and asked him to write out a letter for him—a letter to the therapist with whom he’d had the “session” that began his series of nightmares. He dictated what he wanted written, and Ethan wrote it down for him.

Ironically, Gurney was so certain that this was the way it must have happened that he began to suspect his own objectivity. He’d learned on a number of occasions that the best way to test an idea he might be loving too much was to expose it to Hardwick’s skepticism.

But that was a call he’d want to make with more privacy than the bugged suite permitted. The option of using Madeleine’s tablet to drown out his conversation with music—at the same time as she was using it to review the emotionally fraught email she’d be sending to her sister—did not seem feasible. And the speaker volume in his own aging laptop simply wasn’t adequate.

He went over to the alcove.

Madeleine was siting on the edge of the bed, studying the wording of her email on her tablet screen, her mouth a tight line of anxiety.

“Maddie?”

“What?”

“I have to go downstairs.”

She nodded vaguely.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She didn’t reply. He took the key, went out, and locked the door behind him.

The Hearth Room still had the cold, empty feeling it had earlier. He settled into a leather armchair against the far wall, a spot from which he could keep an eye on the reception area. Hoping Hardwick would be within range of a cell tower, he made the call.

The man answered immediately, apparently eager to complain.

“Road out of the Wolf Lake estate was a horror. Right now I’m creeping along on the county route behind a monster plow-sander-salter. Impossible to get past him. What’s up with you?”

“I wanted to get your opinion on a certain aspect of the case.”

“You mean like the totally fucked-up impossibility of the whole thing?”

“Just Ethan’s handwritten dream narrative.”

There was a pause. Gurney could hear through the phone the heavy rumbling of the plow. When Hardwick spoke again his tone was calmer. “Definitely an odd little item. What are you thinking?”

Gurney explained his new theory of how the written nightmare description could have come to be, and how Madeleine’s email dictation had led him to that conclusion.

Hardwick cleared his throat. “It’s . . . possible.”

Gurney wasn’t put off by his apparent lack of enthusiasm. He interpreted it as a sign that he was giving the idea serious thought.

“It’s possible,” Hardwick repeated. “But if Ethan wasn’t writing down his own dream, then whose dream was it? And why were the details later reflected in the way he died?”

“Like the wolf dagger Fenton claims he cut his wrists with? I don’t know. I’m not saying the dictation hypothesis is the final answer, but it fits with the idea that Ethan’s part in the affair was different from that of the other three victims. He always struck me as the odd man out.”

“You’re saying we’ve got three people who had nightmares and ended up dead, and one person who transcribed someone’s else’s nightmare and ended up dead. But I’m still stuck at the basic question. Could a hypnotist—Richard or anyone else—have caused those nightmares and suicides?”

“Interesting you should bring that up. I just listened to a message from Rebecca Holdenfield about a CIA leaker who claimed that the agency was actively researching that very subject—obviously in the belief that it could be done.”

“Of course, they denied it?”

“Of course. But I have to say that all the hints of national security interest in this case could be connected to that kind of program.”

Hardwick sighed impatiently. “The problem I have with the fatal-hypnosis thing is that it turns the whole thing back on Hammond and makes Fenton right. As I said before, that is not an acceptable outcome. Hold on a second, ace. Let me put down the phone. I have a chance here to get around the monster plow.”

When Hardwick came back on the phone half a minute later, Gurney could hear the rumble of the plow fading into the distance. “So what do you think we actually know, Sherlock?”

“Taking Ethan out of the equation for the moment, we know that three gay-hating men were offered some kind of financial incentive to visit a gay hypnotherapist. We know they all later reported having nightmares, and shortly afterward each one was found dead. And we know that the investigating officer has zeroed in on Richard Hammond as the orchestrator of all this.”

“A decision about which we have our doubts?”

“Correct.”

“Okay,” said Hardwick, beginning to sound exasperated. “Once again we circle back to the key question. If Hammond didn’t give them their nightmares, who did? That’s the only question that matters. Am I right?”

If Hammond didn’t give them their nightmares, who did?

If Hammond didn’t give . . .

Holy Christ!

For the second time that morning, Gurney almost stopped breathing. He stared straight ahead but saw nothing. His focus was entirely on the significance of what Hardwick had just said. He repeated it to himself.

If Hammond didn’t give them their nightmares, who did?

“Hey, Sherlock, you still there?”

He began to laugh.

“What the hell’s so funny?”

“Your question. It only sounds like a question. It’s really an answer. In fact, it may be the key to the whole damn case.”

CHAPTER 47

Hardwick drove into a cell-service dead zone before Gurney could elaborate on his sudden insight. It gave him an opportunity to test it from different angles to be sure it felt solid.

Twenty minutes later Hardwick called back. “Glad you think I’m so fucking brilliant. But what exactly is this ‘key’ I gave you?”

“The wording of your original question. You asked, if it wasn’t Hammond, then who gave the victims their nightmares.”

“So?”

“So that’s the solution to the problem we’ve been banging our heads against from the beginning. The victims were given those nightmares. I mean, they were literally handed to them.” Gurney paused, waiting for a reaction.

“Keep talking.”

“Okay. Let’s leave Ethan out of it for the moment, because something different was going on with him. As for the other three, I believe each one was given a description of the nightmare. They never had the nightmares they complained about, never actually dreamt those things. They just memorized the details they were given and recounted them later as if they’d experienced them.”

“Why the hell would they do that?”

“Because that’s what they were being paid to do. We already saw evidence that there was some financial benefit connected with their coming to Wolf Lake—that things suddenly appeared to be looking up for all three of them. We didn’t know why. But this would explain it. I’m pretty sure that they were paid for coming to the lodge, having a session with Hammond, and then complaining about bizarre dreams. Not only complaining, but reporting the inflammatory details to reliable witnesses—Wenzel to a high-profile evangelical minister, Balzac to a therapist, Pardosa to his chiropractor.”

“Sounds like a hell of a scheme. But what was the end game?”

“It could have been a number of things. Maybe they were setting up the basis for taking some kind of bogus legal action against Hammond? A malpractice suit? Phony sexual assault charges? Maybe the whole thing was a plot to destroy his therapy practice? If Bowman Cox’s comments were any indication, Hammond stirred up enough animosity in certain circles to make something like that credible. In fact, as I think about it now, I wonder if the Reverend Cox might have played a bigger role than he admits to.”

“Christ, Davey, I need a minute to get my head around this. I mean, if nobody dreamt anything, then—”

“Wait—hold on second.”

Madeleine, bundled up in ski pants, jacket, scarf, and hat, was heading out through the reception area.

“Jack, I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

He caught up with Madeleine at the lodge door.

“What’s up?”

“I want to get some air. It stopped snowing.”

“You could just step out on our balcony.”

She shook her head. “I want to be outside. Really outside. I’m sure the snow is going to start again, so this is my chance.”

“Want me to come with you?”

“No. You do what you’re doing. I know it’s important. And stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m going to fall apart. I’ll be fine.”

He nodded. “I’ll be here . . . if you need anything.”

“Good.” She pushed the heavy door open and stepped out into the frigid air.

With some reluctance Gurney returned to his leather chair by the hearth. He got Hardwick back on the phone. “Sorry for the interruption. So what do you think of the new theory?”

“Part of it I like a lot. I love getting rid of the idea that somebody made somebody else dream something, and the dream made them kill themselves.”

“What part don’t you like?”

“You’re saying there was a carefully worked-out plan involving three gay-hating creeps, possibly the same gay-hating creeps who killed the kid at Brightwater. And they came to Wolf Lake to meet with Hammond so they could later claim that he fucked with their minds, giving them horrible, sickening dreams. And their secret goal was to destroy Hammond’s reputation . . . or sue him . . . or build a criminal case against him . . . or maybe blackmail him into paying them to shut up and go away. Am I on track?”

“Better than that, Jack. I think you just hit the bull’s-eye. Blackmail. I think that’s what it was all about. It’s a perfect fit. They’d love the idea of extorting big bucks from a gay doctor, a known aider and a better of perverts. They could even view their get-rich plan as the work of the Lord. I bet just thinking about it would have given them a power rush.”

Hardwick was silent for a long moment. “But here’s what I don’t get. How come these ruthless, gay-hating bastards are now all dead, while their intended victim is alive and well?”

“An interesting question. Almost as interesting as . . .” Gurney’s voice trailed off.

Austen Steckle, in an arctic fur hat and heavy coat, was coming in through the lodge door, pulling a two-wheeled cart full of split logs. He pulled it across the reception area, into the Hearth Room, and over to the log rack near Gurney’s chair.

He sniffled and wiped his nose with the back of a heavily gloved hand. “My friend, you need to talk to your wife out there.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your wife. I warned her about that ice.”

Gurney didn’t wait to hear the rest. Coatless, he hurried out of the lodge and across the lake road. Although no snow was falling at that moment, gusts of wind were kicking up powdery whirlwinds from the lake surface, making it hard to see very far.

“Maddie!” he called, listening for a reply.

All he heard was the wind.

He shouted her name.

Again there was no reply.

Feeling a touch of panic, he was about to shout her name again when the snowy gusts abated and he saw her—standing still, her back to him, about a hundred yards out on the snow-covered ice.

He called to her again.

She neither moved nor answered.

He stepped out onto the lake surface.

He’d taken only a few steps when a movement in the sky caught his eye.

It was a hawk—presumably the same hawk he’d seen on several occasions circling above the lake, over the sharp peak of Devil’s Fang, along the length of Cemetery Ridge. But this time it was circling lower—at an altitude of perhaps two hundred feet.

As he watched, the next circle appeared to be lower.

And the next still lower.

Her face tilted upward, Madeleine was evidently watching it as well.

Gurney was sure now that the bird was gliding in a gradually tightening spiral—the radius shrinking with each successive orbit. It was a behavior he’d observed in raptors above the fields back in Walnut Crossing. In those cases, the purpose of the behavior seemed to be the closer evaluation of prey in preparation for an attack. The iced-over lake, however, seemed an unlikely hunting ground. In fact, with the exception of Madeleine herself, there was nothing visible to Gurney anywhere on the smooth white surface.

Still the hawk circled lower.

It had descended to no more than forty feet above the lake.

Gurney was moving quickly now.

The hawk seemed to hesitate for a moment on its flight path, rocking on its broad wings from side to side, as if assessing the significance of a second figure entering the scene.

Just as Gurney was concluding that his presence had scared it off, it wheeled sharply toward Madeleine, diving at her with startling acceleration.

In an effort to break into a flat-out sprint, Gurney slipped and fell. He scrambled to his knees, pulled out his Beretta, and shouted, “GET DOWN!”

As Madeleine turned in his direction, the plummeting hawk extended its razor talons, and Gurney fired.

The gunshot caused Madeleine to flinch, ducking just enough that the talons flashed by harmlessly over her head.

Amazingly, the hawk came around again in a wide circle, rising thirty or forty feet above her before beginning a second dive.

This time Madeleine ran, sliding, half-falling, out toward the center of the lake. Again the hawk swooped down past her head in a near miss—with Gurney clambering to his feet, running after her, shouting to her to stop, to not go any farther on the ice.

As the hawk, at the far end of yet another circle, turned in toward Madeleine, Gurney spread his feet in a solid shooting stance and steadied his weapon in a two-handed grip. As the bird streaked past him he fired. He caught a glimpse of a tail feather breaking off and twirling around in a passing gust before settling on the ice.

The hawk passed only a few inches over Madeleine’s head. Then, instead of circling again, it rose gradually up and away, disappearing finally over the treetops at the end of the lake.

Madeleine had stopped running. She was about fifty feet ahead of him. She looked to be out of breath, or crying, or both.

He called to her. “Are you all right?”

She turned toward him and nodded.

“Come back this way. We need to get off the ice.”

She began walking toward him, slowly. When she was ten or twelve feet away, he heard a sound that stopped his breath.

CHAPTER 48

As she shifted her weight onto her forward foot, from directly beneath it came the strained creaking of ice about to break apart.

“Stop! Don’t move!” cried Gurney.

She halted like a freeze-frame in a video.

“You’ll be all right. Just try not to move.”

Gurney searched for solutions, but the only thing that came to mind was a sequence in an action-adventure movie he’d seen as a kid. A Canadian Mountie had pursued a bank robber onto a frozen river. The ice began to crack around the fugitive. The Mountie told him to lie down on the ice to spread his weight. Then he threw him a rope and pulled him to safety.

The scene was silly, but the weight distribution part made sense to Gurney. He persuaded Madeleine to lower herself carefully to the ice, lie flat, and spread out her arms and legs.

Needing something to take the place of a rope, he retreated to the shore, hoping to find a fallen pine branch long enough to do the job. He grabbed the longest one he could find, dragged it out onto the lake, and extended the end of it to Madeleine.

“Grip it with both hands. Don’t let go.”

It was a painfully slow process. Sitting on the ice to give himself better traction and pushing himself backward with his heels, inch by inch he pulled her out of harm’s way.

As they were finally approaching the security of solid ground and getting to their feet, Austen Steckle and Norris Landon came running from the lodge.

Landon had a long tow chain coiled around his arm. “You’re safe. Thank God! Sorry it took me so long. Damn door latch was frozen on the Rover.”

Steckle looked grim. “What the hell happened out there?”

“Did you see that damn hawk attacking my wife?”

Landon’s eyes widened. “Hawk?”

“A big one,” said Gurney. “Swooped down on her. She was trying to get away from it. Ended up out there on the middle of the lake. I didn’t think hawks attacked humans.”

“Normally they don’t,” said Landon.

“Nothing normal about Wolf Lake,” muttered Steckle. “Last summer a goddamn owl attacked a little girl on the shore, ripped her face. And the summer before that a black bear did a pretty good job on a hiker—”

“Those shots we heard?” said Landon. “Was that you shooting at the hawk?”

“That’s what scared it off.”

Landon turned to Madeleine. “You must be a wreck after all that. Was the ice under you actually starting to give way?”

“I thought I was going to die.”

Gurney took Madeleine’s arm. With shoulders hunched against the wind, they walked back across the lake road, into the lodge, and on into the Hearth Room, where a fresh fire was blazing. It wasn’t until they were standing in front of it that Gurney realized his teeth were chattering.

Landon went straight to the self-service bar. A minute later he joined them at the fire, handing them each a small crystal tumbler half full of an amber liquid. “Cognac. Best medicine for thawing out the bones.”

He and Gurney drank. Madeleine sniffed at hers, took a tiny sip, winced at the strength of it, then took another.

Landon downed the last of his drink. “This cognac’s not bad at all.” He studied the bottom of his empty glass for a long moment. “Making any progress on the crime front?”

“Things are becoming a little clearer.”

“That’s good to hear. If there’s anything at all I can do to help . . .”

“I appreciate that. I’ll let you know.”

“How’s it looking for Richard?”

“Better than it was.”

Landon looked surprised. “Care for another cognac?”

“Not now, thanks.”

“Right. Well. Stay warm if you can.” Raising his hand in a mock salute, he left the room.

Madeleine was holding her palms out toward the fire. Gurney moved closer to her. His tone was gentler than his words. “Maddie, what the hell were you doing out there on the ice?”

“I don’t think I can explain it.”

“Tell me whatever you can.”

“I really did just go out to get some air, like I told you.”

“But then you walked out on the ice.”

“Yes.”

“What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that in my mind, my memory, I’m always on the shore.”

“On the shore of Grayson Lake?”

“Yes.”

“So you decided to go walk out on the ice?”

“Yes.”

“Was this something Hammond suggested you do?”

“No. There was no plan. I was standing in front of the lodge. I happened to look out at the lake. And suddenly I wanted to be out there.”

“Out there like Colin?”

“Maybe. Maybe I wanted to feel what he felt.”

CHAPTER 49

Despite the blazing fire, the moaning of the wind in the chimney was creating a mournful atmosphere in the Hearth Room. It made the prospect of retreating to their bugged suite attractive by comparison.

As they were passing through the reception area, Madeleine stopped by the big glass-paneled door. Gurney stopped with her.

Thinking of the two shots he’d fired at the hawk brought to mind the image of the dislodged feather twirling down. “Wait just a minute,” he said. “I want to get something.”

He opened the door to a blast of frigid air and ran across the road and out onto the lake to the place where he remembered seeing the feather fall. It was still there, sticking up through the new snow just enough to be visible. He grabbed it and hurried back to the lodge, where he examined it briefly—a segment of a russet tail feather with a shattered quill. Then he stuffed it in his pocket, and he and Madeleine headed upstairs.

Just before they entered the suite, he asked her to use the tablet to find an energetic musical selection on YouTube, explaining that he owed Hardwick a callback to finish their interrupted conversation, and he wanted some audio camouflage that would enable him to speak freely.

She chose an atonal piano concerto whose agitato movement could have drowned out a gunfight. Gurney settled down on the couch, switched on the table lamp to brighten the gray light coming in from the windows, and made the call.

Hardwick picked up on the first ring.

“Hey, Jack, how are the roads?”

“Like greased pig shit. Didn’t you say you were going to get back to me in a few minutes? You must have some fucking odd concept of the word ‘few.’”

Gurney ignored the ritual abuse. “The last thing we were talking about was the odd circumstance of all those bad guys biting the dust while their intended victim remained alive and well. You have any ideas about that?”

“I do. It kinda falls into the counterintuitive box, but it makes sense.”

“Okay. So what is it?”

“I’m thinking Jane Hammond may have whacked all four vics. Or at least three of them.”

Gurney waited.

“You still there?”

“I’m waiting for the part that makes sense.”

“Let’s say there was a conspiracy to concoct a creepy-dirty case against Richard—for the purpose of blackmailing him. And suppose Jane found out about it. Or maybe the blackmailers got in touch with her directly. Told her about a big malpractice suit they were planning. Hinted that a generous out-of-court settlement could be in everyone’s best interest.”

“And then what?”

“And then sweet little Jane went into protective Grizzly Bear mode and decided the only good blackmailers were dead blackmailers. And no crime, no matter how bloody, would really be a crime if it involved saving her precious brother from evil predators.”

“You really see Jane doing those murders?”

“Grizzly Bear knows no limits.”

Gurney tried to work his way through the scenario. “Theoretically, I get the possible motive. But I’m tripping over issues of means and opportunity. Are you saying that she thought Ethan was part of the conspiracy and killed him, too?”

“I can’t say that yet. Ethan’s role is still a mystery.”

“Why set up the murders to look like the dreams they’d been claiming to have? If she was trying to protect Richard, why do it in a way that would pull him further into it?”

“Maybe she was just trying to create credible suicide scenes. Maybe she was thinking, as long as these guys were dreaming about daggers, it would make sense to have it look like they cut their wrists with daggers?”

“Are you hearing yourself, Jack? Can you really picture Jane Hammond running around the country—New Jersey, Long Island, Florida—drugging these guys and slicing up their wrists? And if she did all that, why would she be so eager to have you and me rooting around, trying to figure it all out?”

“That last question’s easy. She wouldn’t have anticipated the way the official investigation would go. Who the fuck would expect a BCI investigator to become obsessed with some exotic trance-induced suicide scenario? So when Fenton turned everything against Richard with that cockamamie concept, what the hell was she going to do? I think she brought us in to dig him out of the hole she put him in. She accepted the risk that she might end up paying the price. It would be better than seeing her brother prosecuted for what she did. That would completely blow her circuits.”

“You’re making an enthusiastic case, Jack, but—” He was stopped in mid-sentence by the sound, barely audible behind the music, of the shower being turned on.

Again? Jesus! First, an endless succession of baths. Now, showers.

“You there, ace?”

“What? Sure. Just thinking. Going over what you were saying.”

“I know it’s not all nailed down. Bits and pieces are still bouncing around. The idea just came to me twenty minutes ago. It needs more thought. But my point is, Janie the cuddly caretaker should not be getting a free pass. Just because she talks like a social worker doesn’t mean she couldn’t slice a few wrists, given the right circumstances.”

Gurney had other problems with the Jane-as-killer hypothesis, but he left them unstated. While he had Hardwick on the phone, he wanted to move on to aspects of the case he deemed more promising. But before he had a chance to, the man hit him with an unnervingly timely question:

“How come your wife’s so freaked out by all this?”

Gurney wasn’t sure how much he should reveal to Hardwick. Or if he wanted to reveal anything at all.

“You think she looks troubled?”

“Looks, sounds, acts. It just seems odd—for a homicide guy’s wife who’s been through this kind of shit before. So I’m wondering what the deer-in-the-headlights look is all about.”

Gurney paused. He hated thinking about it. He looked around the room—maybe for a way out, maybe for an inspiration. He ended up staring at the portrait of Harding. A man who never wanted to deal with anything.

He sighed. “Long story.”

Hardwick belched. “Everything’s a long story. But every story has a short version, right?”

“Problem is, it’s not my story to tell.”

“So you’re telling me she’s not only fucked up, she’s fucked up with a secret?”

“Something like that.” He looked over his shoulder through the open bathroom door and saw that Madeleine was still in the shower.

“This secret of hers affecting what we’re trying to do here?”

Gurney hesitated, then decided to reveal what he could without getting too explicit. “She used to spend her Christmas vacations with relatives here in the Adirondacks. Something bad happened the last year she was here. She’s dealing with difficult memories.”

“Maybe you should take her home?”

“She wants to get some kind of closure here. And she wants us to ‘save’ Hammond.”

“Why?”

“I think to make up for someone in her life a long time ago who wasn’t saved.”

“That sounds fucked up.”

Gurney hesitated. “She’s seeing things.”

“What kind of things?”

“A dead body. Or maybe a ghost. She’s not sure.”

“Where did she see it?”

“In the bathtub.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Any particular dead body?”

“Someone from her past. Her Adirondack past.”

“Someone connected with the bad thing that happened?”

“Yes.”

“And she thinks saving Hammond now will make up for what happened then?”

“I think so.”

“Shit. That doesn’t sound like the Madeleine I know.”

“No. It’s not like her at all. She’s in the grip of . . . I don’t know what.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to figure out what’s going on. Expose the truth. Get her the hell out of here.”

He glanced over into the bathroom, saw her still standing in the shower behind the steamy glass door. He told himself this was a good thing. The primal, curative power of warm water.

“So,” said Hardwick in an abrupt change of tone, “apart from my delivering the little black tube thing to Wigg, you have a next step in mind?”

“I have a question.”

“We already have a shitload of questions.”

“Maybe not the right ones. We just wasted five days asking ourselves how four people could have had the same dream. Wrong question. The right question would have been, ‘Why did three people say they had the same dream, and why did one person write down the details of that dream?’ Because, beyond their own claims, and Gilbert Fenton’s endorsement of those claims, there was never any evidence that they actually dreamt anything. We assumed the reports of the nightmares were truthful, and since the men who reported having them were killed, they appeared to be victims, not predators. It never occurred to us that they might be both. I don’t want to make a mistake like that again.”

“I get your point. We screwed up. So what’s your question?”

“My question is . . . are we observing failure or success?”

Over the phone Gurney heard a car horn blowing—followed by Hardwick’s truculent, growling voice: “Move it, asshole!”

A moment later, he was back on the phone. “Failure or success? Fuck does that mean?”

“Simple. Your own ‘Killer Jane’ hypothesis is a failure hypothesis. It assumes that the sessions with Richard, along with the subsequent nightmare claims, were the planned elements of a blackmail conspiracy—but that the deaths weren’t part of the plan. In your hypothesis Richard being blamed for the murders was an unintended consequence of Jane killing the bad guys. Bottom line, you’re describing a failed conspiracy—with an ironic finale in which the intended victim of the blackmailers becomes the victim of the police. Everyone loses.”

“So what?”

“Just for argument’s sake—instead of a failure, let’s assume we’re observing a success. Suppose the staged suicides were the point of the plan from day one.”

“Whose plan?”

“The plan of the person who called Wenzel, Balzac, and Pardosa and talked them into meeting with Richard in the first place.”

“By selling them the fantasy of a blackmail plan that would make them all rich?”

“Yes.”

“While actually setting them up to be killed?”

“Yes.”

“But what about the involvement of high-level spook types? The advanced surveillance devices? The warnings from Wigg to back off? What the hell’s all that about?”

“I need to understand the four deaths better before I can grapple with that.”

“I have my own new idea about those deaths. It still assumes the blackmail plot. But the blackmailers don’t approach Jane. They go straight to Richard.”

“And?”

“And he kills them.”

“Ethan too?”

“Ethan too.”

“Why?”

“For the money. To get the twenty-nine million bucks before Ethan could change the will back in Peyton’s favor. That’s one piece I think Fenton might be right about.”

Gurney thought about it. “It does seem a little more feasible than your Jane version.”

“But?”

“But it contradicts the gut feelings we both had about Richard’s innocence, and it leaves big questions unanswered. Who concocted the blackmail scheme? How does Ethan’s written dream narrative fit in? Who did he write it for, and why?”

“Far as I can see, your theory doesn’t answer those questions, either.”

“I think it will—if we pursue it a little further.”

“Lead the way, ace. My mind is open.”

“First of all, if we view what happened as a well-planned enterprise that turned out exactly as intended, it would mean that Ethan and the other three men were all targets from the start. Targets of the same killer—but probably for different reasons.”

“How do you get to that?”

“Wenzel, Balzac, and Pardosa appear to have been accomplices of the planner—passing along that nightmare story—until they became victims of the planner. Ethan, on the other hand, appears to have been manipulated by someone into hand-writing the nightmare story—probably to make it appear that he was more connected with the other three than he really was, and that he died for the same reason they did.”

“I’ve been thinking about this dictation idea of yours, and there’s a problem with it. You gave Madeleine the email she dictated to you, so she could send it to her sister, right? That’s what would normally be done. So why would Ethan keep what he wrote?”

“I was wondering about that myself. I came up with two answers.”

“Typical of you.”

Gurney ignored the comment. “One possibility is that it was dictated over the phone. The other is that Ethan did give it to the person who dictated it—who then put it back in his office after killing him.”

“Hmm.”

“You see a flaw in the logic?”

“No flaw in the logic. You seem to have arranged an impossible pile of shit into a credible sequence of motives and actions. Very logical.”

“But you’re not sure it’s true?”

“All kinds of shit can be logical, but logical doesn’t make it real. How do you propose we get from all this logic to the point of nailing the fucker behind it all?”

“Theoretically, there are two ways. There’s the long, safe, methodical way. And the short, risky way.”

“So we’re going to do it the second way. Am I right?”

“Unfortunately, yes. We lack the resources to do it the right way. We can’t interview every lodge guest and employee who was on site the day Ethan was killed. We can’t go down to West Palm and Teaneck and Floral Park and interview everyone who knew Wenzel and Balzac and Pardosa. We can’t find and interview everyone who attended or worked at Camp Brightwater. We can’t run a fine-tooth comb through—”

“All right, all right, I get it.”

“And the biggest limitation of all is that we lack time. Fenton, and the people pulling his strings, are about to take serious action to get me out of here. And it’s not good for Madeleine to be here. In fact, it’s very bad for her to be here.”

He turned on the couch and looked into the bathroom. She was still in the shower. He tried to tell himself once again that it was a good thing. A restorative thing.

“All right, Davey, I get it. The long, safe way is not an option. So what’s the short, risky way?”

“Tossing a rock into the hornet’s nest to see what flies out.”

“What kind of rock do you have in mind?”

Even as Gurney was listening to the question, the voice on the phone was breaking up.

Hardwick had just driven into another dead zone.

CHAPTER 50

When his mind was full of unanswered questions, Gurney often sought clarity in lists.

As Madeleine was finally emerging from the shower, he got a pad from his duffel bag. He sat down on the couch and started writing down the things he believed he knew about the deaths and the master manipulator behind them.

It included facts provided by Angela Castro, Steven Pardosa’s parents, Moe Blumberg, Kimberly Fallon, Senior Investigator Gilbert Fenton, the Reverend Bowman Cox, Lieutenant Bobby Becker of Palm Beach PD, and the Teaneck PD detective contacted by Jack Hardwick—as well as the conclusions he believed those facts supported. Then he created a list of what he considered the major unanswered questions. The second list was longer than the first.

After reviewing everything he’d written, he decided to share it with Hardwick. He opened his laptop, typed the lists into an email, and hit “Send.”

As he was taking another look at his handwritten sheets, making sure that he hadn’t left out anything important, Madeleine came over to the couch wrapped in a bath towel.

He decided to tell her about his evolving vision of the case—that the reported nightmares weren’t dreams that anyone had actually experienced, but elements in a complex plot, and that Ethan’s written nightmare narrative was probably dictated to him by someone else.

As she listened to his description of how the puzzle pieces might fit together, what started as a skeptical frown slowly changed to an expression of real interest—and finally to a kind of revulsion.

“Do you think I’ve got it all wrong?” he asked.

“No. I think you have it right. I’m just wondering what kind of person could devise something that awful. So much lying. Such cruelty.”

“I agree.” He was momentarily taken aback by the gap between her perception of the situation as something essentially dreadful and his own view of it as a perplexing puzzle to be solved.

She looked down at his two lists on the table. “What’s all that?”

“Preparation.”

“For what?”

“I need to shake things up a bit. I’m organizing all the things I know and don’t know about the case—as a guide for what I can say in a bugged conversation. I want to give whoever is behind all this the impression I know what’s going on. But I want to be on solid ground with what I say. If I screw it up, he’ll feel safe. I want him to feel threatened.”

“But you still have no idea who he is, or what his ultimate motive was.”

“The motive part is complicated. From a cui bono financial point of view, the only victim with a significant estate is Ethan, and the only significant beneficiaries are Peyton and Richard—and Jane, of course, to the extent that she’s involved in Richard’s life.”

“I’d say that the extent of her involvement is total, absolute, and unhealthy.”

Gurney went on. “A financial motive could explain Ethan’s murder, but it doesn’t work for the other three. On the other hand, a Brightwater-related motive could explain those three, but it doesn’t work for Ethan.”

“Maybe whoever killed them had more than one motive.”

He nodded. It was a simple enough conclusion. Obvious, in a way.

Different motives for different victims.

He’d begun to raise that possibility with Hardwick in their last conversation. And the notion was reinforced in his mind now by the memory of a gang-related mass murder he’d been assigned to shortly after his promotion to homicide detective.

At first sight—and a bloody mess of a first sight it was—it appeared to be a typical clash over drug sales territories. A rising gang faction had taken over an abandoned tenement on the border of a rival faction’s turf—a provocative encroachment.

One night in July the gang’s headquarters in the tenement was occupied by four gang members with submachine guns. A three-man crew from the rival faction, similarly armed, invaded the building and crashed through the apartment door. Less than thirty seconds later, six of the seven combatants were dead. One member of the invading faction escaped on foot.

After giving the wrecked bodies, the blood-soaked floors, and the walls full of bullet holes a cursory once-over, Gurney’s partner at the time—a burnt-out detective by the name of Walter Coolidge—decided it was just another lunatic gunfight that everyone lost. Even if somebody had been lucky enough to get away, he’d probably find his sorry ass on the wrong end of an Uzi next time out.

Gurney was conducting the requisite neighborhood interviews that were a routine step at the beginning of every homicide investigation. That night he happened to ring the bell of a wiry little black woman with feisty eyes and sharp ears who insisted she knew exactly what she heard and how she heard it.

She described a burst of machine gun fire that lasted nine or ten seconds—produced, she claimed, by three similar weapons. That was followed by about ten seconds of silence. And that was followed by a second burst, lasting seven or eight seconds. She was certain that the second burst had been produced by a single weapon.

Gurney had been relating all this to Madeleine as she sat on the arm of the couch. Now she blinked in confusion. “How on earth did she know that?”

“I asked her that very question. And she asked me how did I think she could have succeeded as a jazz drummer if she couldn’t distinguish between one and three instruments.”

“She was a drummer in a jazz band?”

“In her past. At the time I spoke to her she was a church organist.”

“But what does this—?”

“Have to do with multiple motives for murder? I’ll get to that. The thing is, the sequence of the shots got me thinking. The three-gun burst to start with. The silence. The second one-gun burst. Everybody except one guy ending up dead. I pushed for a thorough crime-scene analysis, trajectory analysis, ballistics analysis, and medical analysis. And I spent a hell of a lot of time talking to local gangbangers. In the end, a new scenario emerged.”

Madeleine’s eyes lit up. “The guy who escaped at the end shot them all, didn’t he?”

“In a way, yes. When the invading crew broke into the apartment, they took the rival crew by surprise. They opened fire with their three Uzi machine pistols, and in no time at all the official job they came to do was done. But one crew member, Devon Santos, had other concerns. Gang life at a certain level is about competition for a seat at the next higher level. And one of his crew brothers had an eye on the same opening he did. So after they wiped out the opposing personnel, Devon walked over to the nearest dead guy, picked up his AK-47, turned around, and blasted away his competitor as well as the crew brother who witnessed what he’d just done. Then he put the gun back in its dead owner’s hands and got the hell out of there.”

“How could you be sure that’s what happened?”

“Ballistics discovered that the two invading crew members who ended up dead had been shot with an AK-47 that was found on a guy who had no powder residue on his hands. Meaning he couldn’t have fired the gun. The rest came from an analysis of entry and exit wounds. The final convincer was that odd delay between the two bursts of gunfire—the ten seconds during which Devon made sure the other crew was down for good, and went to pick up the AK-47.”

Madeleine gave him a thoughtful look. “So your point is that Devon had more than one motive. He went into the tenement to wipe out the enemy. But also to eliminate the threat of competition from his own side.”

“Right. And he shot one of his gang brothers to keep the fact that he’d shot the other one a secret. So he really had three motives, varying according to victim. To Devon’s way of thinking, they were all good reasons to kill people.”

“And he’d have gotten away with all of it, if it wasn’t for you.”

“If it wasn’t for a sharp witness with an ear for drumbeats.”

Madeleine persisted. “But not every cop would have followed up the way you did.”

He stared down uneasily at his yellow pad.

Praise had a downside. It increased his fear of failure.

CHAPTER 51

“Greetings, ace. I’m back in live cell country.”

“Have you checked your email?”

“If you mean those pithy lists of semi-facts and open questions, I got ’em. I also have a piece of news you might want to add to your fact list.”

“Oh?”

“News item on the radio. Kid in some theme park down in Florida died of a spider bite. Not normally that dangerous a spider, but this kid had some kind of allergic reaction to it. Didn’t help that the spider was on something the kid was eating. Fucking thing bit the kid’s tongue. Throat swelled up. Choked him. Fuck. Don’t even want to think about that.”

“Me neither, Jack. So what’s this got to do with—”

“That nasty little news item gave us an overdue gift from the gods of luck.”

“Meaning?”

“Pardosa.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That was the species. The name of the spider. It was a Pardosa spider.”

Gurney thought about it for a moment. “So you figure that Steven found out that his last name was the name of a spider species, so he adopted ‘Spider’ as a nickname?”

“Or one of his Brightwater buddies knew it and gave him the label. Or some jerk-off in junior high started calling him Stevie Spider. Who the fuck knows? Point is, it’s got to be more than a coincidence.”

“Leo the Lion, Wenzel the Weasel, Pardosa the Spider . . .”

“Just one more shithead to go. The Wolf.”

“Yes.”

“Too bad it’s not Ethan. That would’ve wrapped things up neatly.”

“It would have.”

“With some luck the Wolf’s identity will fall into our lap like the Spider’s.”

“Maybe.”

“Okay, Sherlock, keep your fingers crossed. We might be in line for some more good luck. I’ll get back to you after I see Wigg.”

Gurney was pleased with the Pardosa discovery. Keeping his fingers crossed, however, was not something he ever did. He didn’t like the concept of luck. It was, after all, nothing but a misunderstanding of statistical probability and randomness. Or a silly term one applied to the occurrence of a desired event. And even for the people who believed in it, there was an unpleasant truth about luck.

It inevitably ran out.

DURING GURNEY’S CALL WITH HARDWICK, MADELEINE HAD GOTTEN dressed. Now she came back to the couch so he could hear what she was saying under the music.

“It sounds like you’re making real progress.”

“We may be getting closer.”

“You’re not happy about that?”

“I need it to happen faster.”

“You said before you want to make the killer feel . . . what, threatened?”

“Yes. By giving him the idea that I know his secrets. That’s why I made my lists—to help me decide how much I can say without risking a mistake. A mistake would let him know I’m on the wrong path and kill the whole effect.”

She frowned. “Instead of wondering how much you can say, maybe you should be figuring out how little you can say.”

“Why?”

“Fear grows in the dark. Why not just open the door a crack? Let him imagine what might be on the other side.”

Gurney was no stranger to the what-ifs that thrive in darkness. “I like that.”

“Your plan is to let him overhear something through one of the bugs—something that will disturb him?”

“Yes. If someone thinks they’re overhearing something you wouldn’t want them to hear, it carries enormous credibility. A trick of the mind tells us that anything someone is trying to keep secret from us must be true. That’s why I’ve left the bugs in place. They’re the best weapons in the world to use against the bug planter.”

“When are you going to do this?”

“As soon as I can. I have a feeling that Fenton is on the verge of arresting me for obstruction of justice.”

The tic in her cheek was now plainly visible. “Can he do that?”

“He can. It wouldn’t stick, but it would be a giant inconvenience. The only way I can neutralize him now is to prove that his ‘fatal nightmare’ theory is nonsense. And the only way I can do that is to ID the real killer and his real motive. Or, I should say, motives, plural.”

“Like Devon Santos?”

“Very much like Devon Santos.”

CHAPTER 52

Gurney was no fan of rapid decisions. He generally preferred to sleep on his ideas and see if they made sense in the light of a new day.

But there was no time for that now.

With the music on Madeleine’s tablet playing loudly in the background, he outlined his plan to her, putting it together as he spoke.

Half an hour later they were sitting, bundled in their ski clothes, in the front seats of the Outback—ready to act out and record a prepared scene for later playback in their suite. Gurney put his smartphone in “Record” mode and placed it on the console.

Sounding tired and stressed (at Gurney’s suggestion), Madeleine was the first to speak. “Do you want a fire?”

“What?” Gurney sounded preoccupied, annoyed to have his thoughts interrupted.

“A fire.”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well, then. Do you want to get one started?”

“Yes. All right. I will. Just not this second.”

“When?”

“For Christ’s sake, I’ve got something else on my mind.”

There was a silence. Madeleine again spoke first.

“Do you want me to start the fire?”

“I’ll do it, okay? I’m just going over something in my mind . . . making sure I’m right.”

“Right about what?”

“The whole motive thing.”

“You think you know why they were killed? And who killed them?”

“They were all killed by the same person, but not all for the same reason.”

“You know now who’s behind it all?”

“I’m pretty sure I do.”

“Who?”

“Before I tell you, or anyone else, I need to do one more thing.”

“I don’t understand. If you know who the killer is, tell me.”

“I need to run my logic by Hardwick. Tonight. When he gets back from Albany.”

There was another silence.

“David, it’s absurd that you’re not telling me who it is.”

“I need to bounce it off Jack first. I have to be sure the links in my head make sense to him. I’ll tell you tonight. Another four or five hours, that’s all.”

“THIS IS STUPID! IF YOU KNOW, TELL ME NOW!”

“For God’s sake, Maddie. Be patient. A few more hours.”

“Shouldn’t you call the police?”

“That’s the last thing I’d want to do. Anything related to the murders would be funneled directly to Fenton. And that’s a complicated situation.”

“I hate when you do things like this.” Her voice was full of quiet anger. “Don’t you know how it makes me feel?” She paused. “So what if it’s ‘a complicated situation’? I think you should call BCI headquarters in Albany right now and tell them everything you know.” She paused. “Why don’t you do that? Why do these things have to end up with you facing off against the bad guy? We’ve been through this before, David. God knows we’ve been through it before. Too damn many times. You always have to turn an investigation into the Gunfight at the OK Corral.”

“I don’t want the BCI cavalry rolling in here with a fleet of cruisers and helicopters. The truth is I want to take this scumbag down by myself.”

Gurney was afraid he might have stepped too far out of character with that last comment, but then he decided it was just right—the sort of braggadocio the argument they were supposedly having might provoke. And it might in turn nudge his opponent into reacting with more emotion than intelligence.

He wondered for a moment if he should mention Brightwater or the Lion, Spider, Wolf, and Weasel nicknames; but he decided to follow Madeleine’s advice and minimize the content of their conversation. To leave whoever might be listening with more questions than answers. To let fear grow in the dark.

As he began thinking about the best way to end their exchange, Madeleine added in an angry voice, “Same old story, again and again. It’s always what you want—your goals, your commitments, your priorities. It’s never about us. What about our life? Does our life occupy any space in your mind at all?”

He was nonplussed for a moment by her tone and choice of words, perhaps because they expressed so harshly the issue that existed in their real lives. The “detective versus husband” dichotomy in his own life. He hoped to God that the fury he just heard was mostly playacting. If it was, it was exactly that kind of spontaneous-sounding emotion that would make their conversation instantly credible to any listener. And it gave him an idea for a good way to conclude the recording.

He sighed, quite audibly. “I don’t think I can handle that kind of question . . . that kind of emotion . . . right now.”

“No,” she said sourly. “Of course not.”

After a short pause he concluded. “My nerves are shot, and I didn’t get much sleep last night. I’m going to take a couple of your Valiums and close my eyes for a while.”

She didn’t answer.

He yawned aloud, then switched off the “Record” function.

CHAPTER 53

Back in the suite they worked quickly. Madeleine’s lively cooperation convinced him that the feelings she’d presented during their recording session in the Outback were at least partially manufactured for the task at hand. Of course, that might be wishful thinking—but there was no time to dwell on it now.

She took her bugged phone out of the bottom of her shoulder bag, where it had been lying, effectively muffled, under a thick wool scarf in a corner of the suite. At Gurney’s suggestion, she placed it on one of the end tables by the couch. It was his belief that the device in it that had been substituted for its original microphone functioned as a transmitter not only of phone calls but of all nearby audio whether or not the phone was in use.

He’d decided to expose their prerecorded conversation to the phone bug as well as the Harding portrait bug. His guess was that one of them had been planted by the bad guy and the other by Fenton or someone in the shadowy hierarchy above him. He saw no downside in “tossing the rock” at both nests. The more hornets making themselves visible the better.

He reloaded the Beretta, replacing the two rounds he’d fired at the hawk, and put the gun in his right-hand jacket pocket. In the left pocket he put the smaller of their two flashlights. He gave the larger one to Madeleine. As he was explaining how it could be employed as a weapon, he was interrupted by his phone’s text ring.

The message came from a blocked ID:

xBb770Ae

TellurideMichaelSeventeen

MccC919

LimerickFrancisFifty

It made no sense to him. Beyond the fact that there were certain repeated structural elements, whatever significance the sequences of characters and words might have eluded him. But at least the ring reminded him to put his phone on vibrate.

He emailed the audio file of their Outback conversation to Madeleine’s tablet. When it arrived a minute later, he placed the tablet on the coffee table.

He selected the newly arrived audio file and tapped the “Play” icon. He waited until he heard her initial comment, “Do you want a fire?”

He made a small volume adjustment, then gestured to her, and they left the suite. He locked the door as quietly as he could.

He led the way to the far end of the dimly lit corridor and into the dark little cul-de-sac where the door to the attic stairs was located. He opened it.

“We’ll stay here by the stairs, out of sight. If and when someone shows up at the suite, I’ll deal with it. All you’ll need to do is wait here until I’ve taken care of the situation. I’ll come and get you as soon as everything is under control.”

After a fraught moment she asked, “That’s it?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s it? What you just said? Us hiding in the dark. Waiting for God knows who to approach the suite. Then you go there and . . . what? Confront them? Question them? Arrest them? Play it by ear? That’s the plan?”

He didn’t immediately reply. As long as he’d been describing the stratagem calmly, it had seemed sensible enough. But the illusion of sensibleness was starting to crumble. He realized there was a desperate, improvised quality to what they were doing—which he was trying to excuse to himself as necessary in the face of diminishing options.

He was saved from the need to respond by the vibration of his phone.

He looked at the screen. It was a message from Hardwick.

“Take a look at this unsigned text I got a few minutes ago—presumably from our techie friend in Albany. ‘BAD TIME TO MEET. ASK G FOR KEYS TO THE HOUSE.’ Any idea what she’s talking about, apart from not being able to meet with me? What keys? What house? What the fuck? I’m on my way back. Hellacious storm rolling in.”

For a minute Gurney was as baffled by the text Hardwick had received as by the one he’d received himself.

Then he saw a possible connection—and possible meaning.

He guessed that both texts had come, unsigned for reasons he could easily imagine, from Robin Wigg—the first to him, the second to Hardwick. And the second was probably referring to the first. The “house” would be the locked website he’d asked her about. The “keys” would be the site’s IDs and passwords—the alphabetic and numerical character and word sequences she’d sent him.

He opened the text he’d received earlier and looked again at the four lines.

xBb770Ae

TellurideMichaelSeventeen

MccC919

LimerickFrancisFifty

Madeleine, peering at his phone screen, spoke up. “What are you doing?”

Half whispering, he explained his Internet quest to discover what sort of device had been planted above the bathroom ceiling.

She pointed at the message on the screen. “Does that tell you?”

“I think it’s the entry data for a website that can tell us.”

He brought up a copy of his own email to Wigg with the device serial number and the website address it had led him to. Then he went to the website page with the four data-entry boxes and entered the two alphanumerical IDs and the two passwords. A few seconds later a new page opened on the site, consisting of nothing but a data entry box and three words: ENTER INSTRUMENT CODE.

He got the device serial number from his email to Wigg and entered it.

A new page opened. At the top was a recognizable photo of the device. Below the photo was a dense table of scientific abbreviations, mathematical symbols, and figures that he guessed represented electronic specs and performance parameters. The terms heading the rows and columns were so unfamiliar he couldn’t even tell what branch of technology they came from.

He was about to give up any attempt to understand what he was looking at when he spotted a simple word at the lower right corner of the incomprehensible table: “Compare.”

He tapped on it.

Another page opened with another dense table. This one appeared to be a comparison of the specifications of several devices. This page had a headline: “Micro-Laser-Enhanced Pseudo Volume Visualization.”

Madeleine was staring at the screen as intently as he was. “What does that mean?”

“I have no idea.” He copied the headline and pasted it into a new search window.

Nothing came up that matched all the headline terms. Over a million hits matched at least one of the terms—a useless pile of data under the pressure of the moment.

He saved the web page’s headline and began composing a reply to Hardwick’s text. He included the website address, the IDs and passwords, and the headline—along with a request for Hardwick to do some research on it. He concluded with a brief description of the activity he and Madeleine were engaged in at the moment.

He read through the message and sent it.

Madeleine put her hand on his arm. “Are you sure . . . this is the way we should be handling this?”

Her question amplified his uncertainty. “Right now, it may be the only way.”

He opened the door to the attic stairs and checked the dusty stairwell once again with his flashlight. He saw nothing unusual and heard nothing but an eerie, empty silence. They sat down gingerly on one of the lower steps—and waited, side by side, in the dark, listening.

CHAPTER 54

In darkness and silence, Gurney’s mind often drifted toward unanswered questions.

That afternoon, sitting next to Madeleine in the silent gloom of the attic staircase, he was considering a question that had been lurking at the edge of his consciousness ever since he’d examined the joist space over the bathroom.

Might the unidentified little device that had been installed there, and was now in Hardwick’s possession, be some sort of miniaturized projector?

Discounting the significant size problem, it would make sense. The reflective inner surface of the tub would make a serviceable screen. The subtle distortion created by the concavity of the tub bottom, by the water itself, and by the rising wisps of steam might actually enhance the “reality” of a projected image. More credibility would be added by the specific physical environment—i.e., people were accustomed to seeing bodies (live ones) in tubs. The mind would tend to accept such an illusion as real.

But what would be the purpose of such a cruel trick? To push Madeleine into an emotional breakdown? Gurney wondered if Fenton could be that obsessively determined to get rid of him. Who besides Fenton might find it worth the trouble? The killer? One of Fenton’s anonymous overlords? How would they know about Colin Bantry? How would they know that Madeleine would be so vulnerable to that issue at that time?

Then a truly uncomfortable personal question occurred to Gurney: Which explanation would he prefer to be true? That Madeleine’s experience had been assembled in the smoke and mirrors of her own mind? Or that it had been the product of sophisticated technology?

He wondered if he’d been focusing on the first possibility because the second had about it such a strong whiff of paranoia. Or perhaps because it brought so many additional complications to a case that he feared might be already be beyond his abilities.

He felt anger rising in him.

Anger at his own apparent inadequacy.

Anger at the endless accumulation of questions.

Anger at the possibility of someone damaging Madeleine’s mental balance.

Her voice broke into his private purgatory. “Are you okay?”

“I was thinking about what you saw in the tub. I was thinking it might—”

His comment was cut short by the sound of heavy footsteps hurrying up the front staircase from the reception area.

“This could be what we’ve been waiting for. Stay here. Don’t make a sound.” Gurney quietly left the stairwell, moving out to a point from which he could see down the length of the corridor. He checked his watch. He could barely make out the time, but he judged that the recording he’d set to play back in the suite would have ended just a few minutes earlier.

A short, thickset figure, breathing heavily, approached the suite door and knocked. “Mr. Gurney?” The voice was Steckle’s. He knocked a second time.

Gurney waited and watched.

Steckle knocked a third time, waited, then opened the door with a key. He called out, “Hello? Anybody here?” After a brief hesitation, he went inside and closed the door behind him.

Gurney returned to Madeleine. “It’s Austen Steckle. In our suite.”

“What’s he doing in there?”

“I’ll find out. But I’d like you to be a little further out of sight. Maybe at the top of these stairs? He took out his flashlight and pointed at the attic door on the top landing. “See that? If you hear any commotion down here, just step into the attic and shut the door behind you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Find out if Steckle is one of our hornets.” He pointed up the stairwell again with his flashlight.

She headed up the stairs. When she reached the top, he went out into the corridor and moved quickly to the suite door.

It wasn’t locked. He eased it open and stepped inside.

In the cold, gray light Steckle was moving across the sitting room. There was something in his hand.

Gurney gripped the Beretta in his jacket pocket. “You looking for me?”

Steckle spun around, his eyes widening. “Mr. Gurney. I thought . . . I mean . . . are you all right?”

“Fine. What are you doing?”

“I came to warn you.” He held out the object in his hand. “Look at this.”

“Do me a favor. Turn on that lamp by the couch.”

“Right. Sure.”

The lamplight illuminated a brightly honed hatchet.

“Tarr was chopping the battery cables on your Outback. Just finished doing the same to the Jeeps. And Norris’s Land Rover. When I went out to stop him, he threw this damn thing at me. Could have taken my head off. Son of a bitch ran off into the storm. Christ! I wanted to make sure you and Mrs. Gurney were all right.”

“We’re fine.”

Steckle glanced toward the alcove. “I knew we shouldn’t have kept that son of a bitch around.”

“Any idea where he went?”

“Who the hell knows? He ran into the snow, into the woods, like an animal.” He held up the hatchet.

“Lay it on the coffee table.”

“Why?”

“I want to look at it, but I don’t want to touch it.”

He laid it next to Madeleine’s tablet. “That’s some goddamn weapon, eh?”

Gurney took a few steps closer, his hand still on the Beretta in his pocket. “You said he was chopping my battery cables?”

“Was giving them a whack just as I came out.”

“Why on earth would he do that?”

“How the hell would I know what goes on in that lunatic’s head?”

More interesting to Gurney than Steckle’s story about the severing of the battery cables was the unlikelihood of it having occurred the way he claimed. And it seemed inconceivable that Barlow Tarr was the hornet aroused by the bugged conversation, much less the mastermind of the most complex murder plot Gurney had ever encountered.

“You’re the detective. What do you think’s going on?” asked Steckle.

“Let’s take a minute and talk about that. Maybe we can figure it out together. I have some questions I think you can help me with. Have a seat.”

Steckle hesitated, seemed about to object, then sat down with obvious reluctance.

Gurney perched on the arm of the couch opposite him. “First, before I forget . . . what kind of name is Alfonz Volk?”

“That’s not my name. Volk was the guy my mother married.”

“So you told me. But what nationality was he?”

“I don’t know. Slovenian maybe. Something like that. Why do you want to know?”

“Just curiosity.” In Gurney’s long experience with interrogation, jarring changes of subject often produced good results. “So what do you really think that business with Tarr was all about—assuming he’s not just a lunatic doing things that make no sense at all.”

“I don’t know. You cut battery cables, cars don’t run. Maybe he doesn’t want any of us to leave.”

“What do you think his reason would be for keeping us here?”

Steckle shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“You think he might have killed Ethan?”

“I guess it’s possible, right?”

“Why would he have done it?”

“Maybe he figured Ethan was finally going to get rid of him.”

“You think he killed him to keep from being fired?”

“It’s possible.”

“Except Tarr was never at Camp Brightwater. And the killer was.”

For a split second Steckle’s expression froze.

“Where Scott Fallon was killed. Where this whole mess began.”

Steckle shifted his weight closer to the edge of the chair. “You lost me.”

Gurney took the minute to consider how Steckle could fit into the shoes of the killer. He could have been the fourth bully at Brightwater, the boy known as Wolf. He could have invited his three old camp pals to the lodge. He could have sold them on the notion of the blackmail scheme. He could have killed them after they’d carried out their instructions to spread the nightmare fiction. And, of course, he could have killed Ethan. Means and opportunity would be available.

The big question would be motive.

Gurney recalled the conversation he’d had with Steckle in the attic, the conversation about the Gall crest and the Gall history. The conversation about power and control. And he considered the practical consequences of the four deaths.

The more he thought about it, the clearer the puzzle became. And there was this final, simple convincer. He’d tossed the rock into the hornet’s nest, and Austen Steckle had flown out.

Every fact was now explainable.

But not a single thing was provable.

As he was pondering the best way forward, he heard the soft buzzing sound his phone made on a wooden surface in vibrate mode. He reached from his chair over to the end table and, keeping a careful eye on Steckle, picked it up.

It was a text from Hardwick.

“Shitty roads. Pulled off and researched the tech terms on the mystery site. That thing may be a micro version of a classified hi-def image projector used by the military.”

Steckle moved uneasily on the edge of his chair.

Gurney looked up from his phone. “What made you so sure we were in our room?”

“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t you be?”

“Because most of the time we haven’t been. We’ve been in and out, downstairs, out by the lake, in the Hearth Room, the Hammonds’ chalet, other places. And you knocked. Three times. You even called out to us. And you got no response. None at all. I’m surprised you didn’t conclude we were out.”

“Why are you making a big deal out of this?”

“You looked so surprised to see me coming into the room behind you—more than surprised, absolutely baffled—as if you couldn’t understand how it could be happening.”

“The hell are you talking about?”

Gurney withdrew the Beretta from his pocket and made a point of confirming the presence of a round in the chamber.

Steckle’s eyes widened. “What the fuck . . .?”

Gurney smiled. “It’s almost funny, isn’t it? All that planning, all that elaborate deception. Then you trip over a pebble. The wrong look at the wrong moment. And it all collapses. You were positive we were here in our suite, because our conversation came to you through the bug that you planted here. Audio surveillance is such a reliable tool. Except when it isn’t. Problem is, it has a big limitation. It can’t distinguish between live voices and recorded voices.”

Steckle’s face was as pale as the gray light from the windows. “This is completely nuts.”

“Save your breath, Alfonz.”

“Austen. My name is Austen.”

“No it isn’t. Austen was the name of the rehabilitated man, the good man. But that man never existed. Inside, you were always Alfonz Volk. Embezzler, manipulator, and general piece of shit. You’re a bad man who killed good people. And that’s a real problem.” Gurney rose from the arm of the couch.

He stepped over to the row of windows and ripped the cords out of two venetian blinds, then picked up an iron poker from the hearth. He tossed one of the long cords in Steckle’s lap.

“What’s this?”

Gurney adopted an attitude of creepy calmness. “The cord? The cord is the easy way.”

“Easy way . . . to do what?”

“The easy way to make sure you don’t run away.” He glanced vaguely at the poker but said nothing about it. The hard way was easy enough to imagine—and more frightening in the imagination than words could make it.

Gurney smiled. “Please tie your ankles together—nice and tight.”

Steckle stared at the cord. “I don’t know what you think I did, but I guarantee you got it wrong.”

“You need to tie your ankles together right now.” Gurney’s hand tightened visibly on the poker.

Steckle was shaking his head but did as he was told.

“Tighter,” said Gurney.

Again he did as he was told. His scalp was glistening with sweat.

When his ankles were firmly bound together, Gurney told him to put his hands behind him. When he complied, Gurney used the second venetian blind cord to tie his wrists, running the end of the long cord under the seat of the chair and knotting it to the ankle cord.

Steckle was breathing heavily. “This is all a bad dream, right?”

Gurney came around in front of the chair to face Steckle. “Like the dream you dictated to Ethan?”

“What? Why the hell would I do that?”

“Why is obvious. What I didn’t understand at first was why Ethan would do it for you. Then I remembered something Fenton told me—to prove you couldn’t have forged the letter. He told me that up until last week you had a cast on your hand. He figured that exonerated you. But that turned out to be the answer to my question. You got Ethan to write out the dream narrative for you because of that cast.”

“Gurney, this is crazy talk. Where’s the evidence?”

Gurney smiled. “Evidence is only required by courts.”

Steckle’s jaw muscles tightened.

Gurney’s voice now was hard as ice. “The legal system doesn’t work. It’s a game. Smart guys win, dumb guys lose. Harmless idiots get jammed up for having a few street pills in their pockets, and really bad guys—the guys who kill good people—dance through the system with fancy lawyers.”

He pointed the Beretta at Steckle’s right eye, then at his left eye, then at his throat, his heart, his stomach, his groin. Steckle flinched. Gurney continued. “The bad guys who kill good people—those are the ones who really bother me. Those are the ones I can’t ignore, the ones I can’t trust the courts to punish.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Nothing, Alfonz. You have nothing to trade. You have nothing I want.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s simple. It’s not a negotiation. It’s an execution.”

“I didn’t kill anybody.”

Gurney appeared not to hear him. “When bad people kill good people, I have to step in and do what the courts fail to do. Bad people don’t get to kill good people and walk away. Not on my watch. That’s my purpose in life. Do you have a purpose in your life?”

Gurney raised the Beretta in a sudden movement, aiming it between Steckle’s eyes.

“Wait! Christ! Wait a second! Who the hell are these good people you’re talking about?”

Gurney did his best to conceal a sense of victory. He had Steckle believing he might be able to escape vigilante justice by proving his victims unworthy of any justice at all. It was a path on which the man was likely to incriminate himself in the belief that he was saving himself.

“The good people I’m talking about are Ethan Gall and your buddies from Brightwater. But especially Ethan. That man was a saint.”

“Okay, just a second. You want to know the truth?”

Gurney said nothing.

“Let me tell you about Ethan, the fucking saint.”

Steckle launched into an excoriation of Gall as a maniacal control freak, obsessed with manipulating the lives of everyone around him—a tyrant who used the Gall New Life Foundation as a prison where his whims were law.

“Every day, every minute, he tried to humiliate us, rip us into little pieces that he could glue back together, whatever way he wanted to—like we were goddamn toys. The great god Ethan. The great god Ethan was a disgusting monster. The whole world should be grateful he’s dead!”

Gurney frowned as if absorbing significant new information. He lowered the gun, just a little. It was a tiny gesture with great meaning. It suggested that he could be persuaded. “What about Wenzel, Balzac, and Pardosa? You going to tell me they were control freaks, too?”

Now Steckle’s eyes were full of calculation—the process of deciding how much to say without irrevocably incriminating himself. “No. I wouldn’t say that. My honest impression of them? From what I saw of them here at the lodge? Ants at the picnic. Petty criminal types. No loss to anyone. Trust me.”

Gurney nodded slightly. A man learning sad truths. “No one would miss them?”

Steckle produced an approving little click with his tongue. “In a nutshell.”

“What about Hammond?”

“What about him?”

“A lot of damage has been done to him with that nightmare nonsense.”

“Yeah? Well, how about all the damage that bright-eyed little faggot did—screwing up people’s lives with his great-to-be-gay crap?”

“So you’re saying he deserved to be framed for four murders you committed?”

“Whoa! All I’m saying is what goes around comes around. You’re saying good people got killed. I’m just setting you straight. Those people were scumbags.”

Gurney lowered the gun a little further, creating the impression that Steckle’s argument might indeed be softening his determination to execute him. Then he frowned and steadied the gun, as though he’d come upon a final decision point.

“What about Scott Fallon? You telling me he was a scumbag, too?” He aimed the Beretta directly at Steckle’s heart.

“I had nothing to do with that!” The denial came out in a burst of panic—the denial and, in its wording, the implicit admission of his presence at Brightwater.

Gurney raised a skeptical eyebrow. “The Lion, the Spider, and the Weasel . . . but not the Wolf?”

Steckle seemed to realize that he was stepping into quicksand to escape from the fire.

Steckle shook his head. “They were crazy. All three of them.”

“Your buddies in the secret club were crazy?”

“I didn’t realize how crazy. Fucking horrible. Horrible pointless shit they would do.”

“Like what they did to Scott?”

Steckle was staring at the floor. Maybe wondering how deep the quicksand was.

Gurney repeated his question.

Steckle took a deep breath.

“They dragged him out to the lake one night.”

“And?”

“They said they were going to teach him to swim.”

Gurney felt himself recoiling inwardly from the scenario that was unfolding in his mind. He forced himself back to the moment. “I heard that the police dragged the lake but never found a body.”

“They fished him out and buried him in the woods.”

“They being Wenzel, Pardosa, and Balzac?”

Steckle nodded. “Crazy fucking bastards. Hated homos. I mean really hated them.”

“Which made them the ideal recruits for . . . your project.”

“What I’m saying is that they were worthless fucking brain-dead assholes.”

Now Gurney nodded. “Not good people. So killing them wouldn’t—”

He was stopped by something that sounded like a faint scream. It seemed to have come from another part of the lodge—somewhere above him.

He left Steckle tied to the chair and ran out of the suite, down the corridor, and into the dark attic staircase where he’d left Madeleine.

CHAPTER 55

She wasn’t on the stairs where he’d last seen her.

He called to her. There was no answer. He remembered there was a switch on the wall of the stairwell. He felt for it, flipped it up, and the bare-bulb light came on in the ceiling over the top landing. He bounded up the stairs, two at a time, the Beretta still in his hand.

He opened the attic door and felt for the wall switch he knew was there. The fixture high in the peaked roof came on. In the dusty light, the sheet-covered objects in the room—excess furniture, he assumed—appeared as before.

He made his way quickly through this large storage area toward the door at the opposite end.

He called out Madeleine’s name again.

A strained voice came from somewhere beyond the far door. “In here.”

He ran to the door and pushed it open.

At first all he could see were the wolves—crouching in the unsteady beam of a flashlight—and their distorted shadows moving jerkily on the wall behind them.

Then he saw Madeleine, backed into a corner, flashlight in hand, and he immediately regretted his decision not to mention the wolf tableau when he told her about his attic exploration—for fear that it would only raise her already high anxiety level.

He located the cord dangling down from the roof-beam fixture and gave it a yank. The huge cave-like space was filled with a dim, dirty-looking light.

He went to Madeleine. “Are you okay?”

She pointed with the flashlight. “What are they?”

“Wolves. Killed by Ethan’s grandfather. Part of the weird family history.” He paused. “How did you end up in here?”

“I was at the top of the stairs. I thought I heard someone in the corridor near the foot of the stairs, so I went into that first room, the one with the sheets over everything. Then I was sure I heard the stairs creaking, so I came over into this room. At first I didn’t see the wolves. But then—my God, what a shock! But what about you? What happened in the suite?”

Gurney related the key points of the confrontation as quickly as he could—everything from Tarr’s alleged chopping of the battery cables to Steckle’s panicked admission of prior contact with Wenzel, Balzac, and Pardosa; his knowledge of Scott Fallon’s death; and his hatred of Ethan Gall—all to Madeleine’s increasing astonishment.

“Steckle’s down there now? In our room? My God, what do we do now?”

“I don’t know. The main thing is, he’s out of commission. But I am curious about those battery cables. Let’s go down and take a look.”

THE SCENE THAT GREETED THEM IN FRONT OF THE LODGE WAS exactly as Steckle had described it. The hoods of the Outback, the Land Rover, and the three Jeeps were raised, the cables on all five batteries had been severed, and the battery casings had been penetrated by powerful blows from a very sharp hatchet or other axe-like implement.

“Looks like he was telling the truth,” said Madeleine, zipping her jacket up to her chin against the sleety wind.

“About what was done, yes. But who did it is still an open question.”

“And you’re thinking Steckle did it to implicate Tarr?”

“He could have.”

“But . . .?”

“But he might have had another reason, too. To keep us here.”

“You mean, to keep us from getting away from him?”

“Yes.”

He realized that they might be able to snowshoe out, but the nearest civilization was at least fifteen miles away—and in sub-zero storm conditions that were getting worse by the hour such an endeavor could be extremely dangerous, if not fatal.

“God, I’m freezing to death,” said Madeleine. “Can we go back inside?”

Before Gurney could answer, all the lights in the lodge went out.

The background hum of the generator died.

And the only sound was the icy wind gusting through the pines.

CHAPTER 56

With the help of their flashlights they made their way back into the lodge.

In the reception area, Gurney went behind the main desk to the old-fashioned pigeonhole compartments built into the wall and took the key from the compartment labeled “Universal”—which he hoped would open all the guest-room doors. The idea of keeping Steckle in their suite with them overnight did not appeal to him. He was thinking the best solution would be to keep the man securely immobilized in a neighboring room.

In the upstairs corridor, instead of going directly to the suite, Gurney stopped at the door next to it and tried the key. It worked. He explained his plan to Madeleine, and they went into the room to look it over.

In the beam of his flashlight Gurney spotted two kerosene lamps on the fireplace mantle along with a propane igniter—which he used to light both lamps, turning up the wicks for as much brightness as they could offer. Although the room was smaller than the suite, it had similar features and furnishings.

With the central heating out of commission with the failed generator system, there was already a noticeable chill in the room—which prompted Gurney to set about building a fire. He wasn’t particularly concerned about Steckle’s comfort, but letting the man freeze to death overnight would create unnecessary problems.

Madeleine watched anxiously as he bent over the hearth, arranging a pyramid of split logs over a bed of kindling. “Shouldn’t you be calling someone? The state police? The sheriff’s department?”

“I can’t. The generator powers the cell tower.”

“Aren’t there any landlines?”

“The nearest would be in Bearston. Might as well be on the moon.”

“What are you going to do about Tarr?”

“There’s not much I can do—not at the moment.”

“What about everyone else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Norris? Richard? Jane? Shouldn’t you tell them about Steckle? And warn them to be on the lookout for Tarr—in case he’s the one who wants to trap us all here?”

The overload was starting to get the best of him. “I should. Of course. He straightened up from his fire-making and took a deep breath. “But there’s something important I need to tell you first. Something we discovered with the help of Robin Wigg. I got a text from Jack while I was with Steckle. It’s about what you saw in the tub.”

She stood very still.

“What you saw may have been a projected image—projected into the tub from the space above the ceiling.”

She blinked in bewilderment.

“Wigg gave us access to a password-protected website. There was a picture there of one of the devices that I believe was in the attic, over our bathroom—a very high-tech projector.”

Madeleine blinked, looked stunned.

“There’s a good chance that what appeared to be an actual body was a manipulated image. Probably an old photograph of Colin Bantry that had been digitized, sharpened, colorized . . . then altered in ways consistent with the effects of drowning.”

“But what I saw didn’t look anything like a photograph.”

“It wouldn’t have. It would have looked very real. Very convincing.”

Her appalled gaze seemed fixed not on him but on her memory of what she’d seen. “My God, who would do such a thing?”

“Someone hell-bent to get what he wants at any cost.”

“Someone? You mean someone other than Austen Steckle?”

“Steckle is certainly clever and ruthless and willing to kill to get what he wants—but this projection thing has a different feel to it. Maybe it’s the restricted technology angle, maybe it’s the fact that it doesn’t quite fit with the other things he’s done. Steckle is a practical man, and I don’t see a practical relationship between the trouble he’d have setting that up and any benefit to him. And there’s the knowledge question—how could he possibly know about you and Colin Bantry?”

Madeleine nodded. “Okay. I see that. But where does that take you?”

“In the direction of a hidden manipulator. One with unlimited resources. Someone willing to use those resources to get us to leave Wolf Lake immediately.”

“By terrorizing me?”

“Yes. By creating that godawful bathtub illusion.”

She shook her head, seemingly at a loss for words.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to the truth of it sooner.”

“But you’re sure now? You’re sure that’s what it was?”

“Yes.”

“My God, I’m so . . . so . . . I don’t know what. Confused? Furious? Relieved?” She let out a small nervous laugh. “So I’m not crazy after all, am I?”

“No, Maddie, you’re perfectly sane.”

“We have to get him. We have to get that rotten bastard.”

“We have to. And we will.”

She nodded, her eyes alive with a new focus.

WITH THE BLAZE IN THE FIREPLACE WELL ESTABLISHED AND BANKED with enough logs to keep it going through the night, Gurney decided it was time to move Steckle in there from the suite.

He was stopped by the slam of a door at the far end of the corridor, followed by the sound of approaching footsteps. The footsteps came to a halt some distance away, and there was a sharp rapping at what he guessed to be the suite door.

Gurney stepped out into the corridor. In the rising beam of his flashlight, he registered a now-familiar pair of Wellington boots, Barbour storm coat, and tartan scarf.

Norris Landon had a flashlight in one hand and a rifle in the other. “Gurney? What the hell?”

“Long story. What are you doing?”

“Our vehicles were sabotaged. Batteries whacked out of commission with an axe or some such thing. I tried to find Austen, but he’s nowhere to be found. I did find some footprints leading away from the destruction—which I intend to follow to get some answers. I figured a bit of armament might be in order.” He nodded toward his rifle. “Thought I’d knock on your door before I headed out, see what you knew about the state of things.”

Gurney saw no reason to conceal the facts. He gave Landon a somewhat abbreviated but largely accurate version of the interview in which Steckle had all but admitted his guilt. He included Steckle’s own account of his encounter with Barlow Tarr and the hatchet. He added that, while Tarr may indeed have been the culprit, it was possible that Steckle himself had done the damage. He concluded by explaining that Steckle was currently under restraint in the suite, in a kind of emergency custody, and would remain so until appropriate authorities could be brought into the picture.

Landon appeared dumbfounded. “Bloody hell. Austen. The whole nightmare business was just a ploy, then?”

“It would seem so.”

“Christ, you’re saying he took Fenton in completely? Made an absolute fool of him? The press conferences, news reports—they were all wrong?”

“Apparently.”

“Devilishly clever.”

“Yes.”

He paused, shaking his head. “What now?”

“Depends on how soon there’s a break in the weather. Speaking of which, are you really serious about going out to follow footprints? In the dark? In a snowstorm?”

“I’m a hunter, Mr. Gurney. I’d like to get to the bottom of the mess someone made of those vehicles. You say it might’ve been Steckle. But my money’d be on Tarr—just from the appearance of things. Gut feeling. The chaos down there. The wreckage. Work of a madman.” He paused. “I’d also like to take a look at the generators. Might just’ve been snow in the ventilation intakes that triggered a shutdown.”

“Be careful. You might be running into a man with a very sharp hatchet.”

Landon smiled. “Have you ever hunted wild boar in the underbrush at dusk?”

Gurney said nothing, waited for the punch line.

“I have. So, believe me, I can handle Barlow Tarr.” The smile disappeared, and the man turned away into the dark corridor.

Gurney left the door ajar until he’d heard Landon descend the staircase to the reception area and go out into the storm.

“Quite a character,” said Madeleine.

Gurney went to the room’s row of windows that looked out over a balcony similar to the suite’s. Through the swirling snow he soon caught sight of Landon’s flashlight beam emerging from under the portico, then dimly moving away from the lodge, presumably as the man followed whatever footprints the wind had not yet erased.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s get back to the job at hand.”

Flashlight in hand, he led the way out of the room and through the dark corridor to the suite door. He unlocked it and went in, followed by Madeleine. The air inside was cold.

He swept the beam of light around. Everything seemed in order. Although a large floor lamp was partially blocking his view of Steckle, he could see enough of the man’s arms tied behind the back of the narrow wooden chair he’d left him in to be reassured that no progress had been made toward escaping.

“It’s freezing in here,” said Madeleine.

The room, Gurney realized, was colder than it should have been, even considering the lack of central heating for the past half hour.

He pointed the flashlight at each of the windows. They were all closed, as was the door to the balcony. But then he noticed with instant concern the source of the frigid air. In the balcony door’s large glass panel there was a jagged hole next to the locking mechanism.

Someone had broken in, or tried to break in. He swept the light around the room again.

With a sick feeling he stepped around the obstructing floor lamp and started moving toward the figure bound in the chair, not sure if he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.

“Steckle!” he cried.

There was no answer.

As what he was looking at became clearer, a sick feeling nearly overwhelmed him. He tried to turn Madeleine away as she came up beside him. But it was too late.

She saw exactly what he saw. Half gagging, half groaning, she grabbed his arm.

The bulky physique and the recognizable clothes made it fairly certain that the body in the chair was Austen Steckle’s.

The lack of absolute certainty arose from the fact that the head had been severed from the torso and lay on the floor, chopped into pieces.

CHAPTER 57

Gurney tried to persuade Madeleine to return to the room next door, but she refused.

Trembling and tight-lipped, she insisted on staying right there with him—watching as he checked the sitting area, bedroom alcove, bathroom, and balcony to ensure that the killer was no longer present. She continued to watch—although with evident difficulty and revulsion—as he proceeded with a general inspection of the disfigured corpse.

The sight was as awful as any he’d encountered in all his years as a homicide detective.

He took out his smartphone and made a photographic record of the body, particularly the grotesque damage done to it, from multiple angles. Although there was no cell service and no access to the Internet, the phone’s batteries could still power its other functions.

He also photographed the area around the body, the broken glass panel in the balcony door, and as much of the balcony itself as he could without stepping outside and compromising any footprints or other trace evidence.

There was no point in trying to check the body for lividity, temperature decrease, or the signs of rigor mortis that could establish an approximate time of death. The murder had obviously occurred during Gurney’s relatively brief absence from the suite.

With the help of his flashlight, he took a closer look at the remnants of the head. The final opinion would, of course, be the medical examiner’s, but he had no doubt that he was looking at the result of multiple blows from something with a sharp, heavy, axe-like blade.

Something like Barlow Tarr’s hatchet.

The hatchet that Austen Steckle had brought to the suite with him.

The hatchet that was now gone.

In the interest of crime-scene preservation, they left the body in place exactly as they’d found it—and left everything else as undisturbed as possible. They weren’t about to occupy the room any longer than necessary, so they did have to remove their things.

Gurney took a fresh blanket from one of the bureaus and laid it on the bed. He put their bags, loose clothing, bathroom articles, laptop, and tablet on the sheet. He gathered up the corners, creating a kind of catch-all sack with which they could take what they needed in a single trip; and they moved it all to the room where they’d been planning to take Steckle. The solution wasn’t in perfect compliance with crime-scene protocol, but he felt it was the best they could do under the circumstances.

AS THE SHOCK AND HORROR OF THEIR DISCOVERY BEGAN TO ABATE, and they guardedly occupied their new quarters, Gurney felt increasingly pressured—and stymied. It seemed that none of the things that cried out for immediate action could be acted on.

A madman with a hatchet had to be corralled. Law enforcement had to be alerted to the radically changed situation. The Hammonds had to be warned. Yet none of these things seemed possible with phone service dead, night falling, roads obstructed by snowdrifts, vehicles crippled.

He felt obligated to get word to Richard and Jane, but how? He wasn’t going to leave Madeleine alone in the lodge with an axe murderer loose. And he wasn’t about to ask her to come with him on a mile-long trek through a sub-zero blizzard.

As frustrating as it was, he knew he had to resign himself to the limitations of the situation—and focus on what he could do.

At least the fire he’d started was gaining strength and beginning to warm the room. He checked the supply of kerosene for the lamps and judged that it would be adequate for a few days. He went into the bathroom, turned on the tub taps, and managed to capture a few gallons of water before the residual tank pressure was exhausted.

He pulled the heavy drapes across the row of icy windows to conserve heat, locked the doors to the balcony and to the outer corridor, and tipped chairbacks under the knobs as makeshift braces.

As he was adjusting the draft in the fireplace flue to maximize the burn time of the logs, Madeleine was standing by the bed, looking down at the blanket full of things he’d brought in from the suite. She picked up what he’d retrieved earlier from the lake—what he’d assumed at the time was one of the hawk’s tail feathers.

“Is this what flew off that thing when you shot at it?”

He glanced over from the fireplace. “Yes. Tail feather, I think.”

“It may have come from the tail, but it doesn’t feel like a feather.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. Feel it.”

The texture was hard and rather plastic-like. But he knew nothing about feathers. Madeleine, on the other hand, knew a great deal. Every time she found a new one on their property in Walnut Crossing, she brought it back to the house and researched it on the Internet. She’d accumulated a collection of turkey, grouse, crow, blue jay, and cardinal feathers; even a few hawk and owl feathers.

“How’s it supposed to feel?”

“Not like that. And there’s another thing. What happened to me out there on the lake? I really don’t think that’s something a hawk would do, unless its nest was being threatened.”

He recalled something Barlow Tarr had said. Something about “the hawk man” setting the hawk loose. Setting it loose “into the sun, into the moon.” It sounded like gibberish at the time. Since hawks didn’t fly at night, setting one loose “into the moon” made no sense.

Unless, as Madeleine was now suggesting, it wasn’t a hawk at all.

Configuring a miniature drone to look and move like a bird would be an enormous technical challenge. For clandestine operations, however, a drone that passed for a bird would offer huge advantages—advantages that might be worth the development cost, especially if no one else believed such a device was feasible.

Madeleine frowned. “There was a hawk circling over us at Grayson Lake.”

“I know. And over that little lane down to the lake. And here, every day, over this lake.”

“Watching us?”

“Possibly.”

“So we’re being observed from the air, listened to in our room, and tracked in our car.”

“Apparently.”

“By the same person who . . . who projected that image of Colin?”

“Probably.”

“Good God, David, who’s doing this to us?”

“Someone who’s extremely worried about us being here. Someone with tremendous resources. Someone Gilbert Fenton is willing to take orders from.”

“Someone who wants Richard to be tried and convicted for those four deaths?”

He almost agreed. But then he remembered the strange thing that Hammond told them during their dinner at the chalet. He told them that what Fenton wanted more than anything was for him to confess—and Fenton had promised that once he confessed, everything would be all right.

It had struck Gurney at the time as the sort of deceptive inducement to confession that anyone with half a brain could see through, and he was surprised that Fenton would try to pull a ruse like that on a man as sophisticated as Hammond; but the really strange part was that Hammond was positive that Fenton was being honest and that he actually believed a confession would be the end of Hammond’s problems.

What would it mean if confession was the real goal, not conviction?

“David?”

“Sorry?”

“I was asking who you thought was behind all this spooky surveillance stuff.”

“I may get to the answer when I figure out why a confession is so important to them.”

She looked confused.

He reminded her what Hammond had told them at dinner. He added something else he remembered as he was speaking—Fenton’s angry complaint that Gurney’s efforts were giving Hammond false hope, essentially prolonging the agony, and that the man’s only way out was a complete confession.

“So that’s why they want us out of here? Because you’re standing in the way of a confession?”

“I think so. But to get to the bottom of the whole case, I need to figure out the significance of that confession.”

“In the meantime,” she said, “we really need to warn the Hammonds.”

“I wish we could. But the only way would be to make the trek there. And I can’t leave you alone here. Not after what happened to Steckle.”

“Then I’ll come with you.”

“In that blizzard?”

“We did bring our ski clothes. And ski masks. And snowshoes.”

“It’s dark.”

“We have flashlights.”

He recognized in her tone a depth of determination that would make further argument a waste of time. Ten minutes later, against his better judgment, they were down in the reception area, strapping their snowshoes onto their insulated boots. With their ski pants over their jeans and their hooded down jackets over their sweaters and their ski masks over their faces, they headed out onto the lake road.

In the pools of light formed by their flashlights Gurney could see the windblown outlines of footprints. As they progressed along the snow-covered road and passed the far end of the lodge itself, the faint suggestion of footprints veered off toward the side of the building in the direction of the generators. It reminded him that Landon had said something about checking them as he headed out in his pursuit of Tarr.

On the off chance that the man might be there now, perhaps attempting some repair, Gurney persuaded Madeleine to take the short detour with him.

They made their way around the building through the drifts. At the edge of a clearing that separated the lodge from the surrounding forest, the beam of his flashlight revealed two large rectangular objects. Approaching closer, he could see the ventilation slots, heavy-duty cables, and propane tanks that identified the rectangular objects as generators. He could also see that a carport-like structure—a slanted metal roof on high posts—intended to keep the generators from being buried in snow, had been partially crushed, apparently from the tree that had fallen on it during the earlier blackout.

Madeleine uttered a gasp at the sharp crack of a branch giving way under the pressure of snow and wind somewhere in the nearby forest.

Seeing no sign of Landon and realizing that closer examination of the generators was unlikely to give him any useful information, Gurney made one last sweep of the area with his flashlight.

“What’s that?” asked Madeleine.

He looked where she was pointing.

At first he saw nothing.

Then he saw something dark on the ground, sticking out from behind the nearer of the two generators.

It looked like a gloved hand.

“Stay here.” He made a cautiously wide approach for a better perspective on the generator’s hidden side.

As his angle of view changed, the situation became clearer.

There was indeed a gloved hand in the snow. The hand was attached to an arm attached to a body that was lying facedown. Snow had blown against one side of the body, half covering it. But the parts that were exposed were familiar. In particular, the knee-high Wellington boots. The chic Barbour storm coat. The tartan scarf.

As he got closer, he moved the beam of his flashlight along the body, up past the scarf.

Then he flinched.

The head had been chopped into at least half a dozen bloody pieces.

“What is it?” called Madeleine, starting toward him.

“Stay back.” It was his reflexive cop’s voice, a voice of command. Then he added in a more human tone, “You don’t want to see this.”

“What is it?”

“A repeat of what we saw in the suite.”

“Oh God. Who . . .?”

“It looks like Tarr found Landon before Landon found Tarr.”

He forced himself to make a closer inspection of the butchered head. It appeared to have been hacked apart in the same manner as Steckle’s, likely with the same weapon. A ring of blood had spread out into the snow around the gruesome mess, forming an outlandish halo of red ice.

As he swept his flashlight back and forth over the body, he saw on the side covered with snow part of a rifle barrel. He bent over and brushed the snow away. It was a custom Weatherby with a hand-tooled claro-walnut stock. He tried to pick it up to see if it had been fired, but it was frozen to the ground.

It occurred to him that the body itself, including the dismembered head, would almost certainly be frozen to the ground as well.

Whatever sharp-toothed scavengers might be abroad in the forest that night, and however helpful it might be to the medical examiner to keep the remains intact, moving that body indoors by himself was not an option he was willing to consider.

He went back to Madeleine. “We need to get inside.”

“We still have to warn Richard and Jane.”

He shook his head. “Not after what I just saw. I’m not going to risk something happening to you, just to lower the risk of something happening to them. Before we can help anyone else, we need to establish a secure position for ourselves.”

“A secure position . . .” She repeated the words as though she were trying to absorb a measure of confidence from them. She nodded, gazing over at Landon’s rifle—frozen to the ground and now barely visible through the swirling snow. “Do you think he might have some other guns in his room?”

“There’s a good chance he does. I ought to get hold of them for our own defense—and to keep Tarr or anyone else from getting them.”

“Anyone else?”

“It seems pretty likely that Tarr killed Landon and Steckle, but we don’t know that for sure. There’s always Peyton, or someone working for Peyton. These two new murders aren’t making much sense to me yet.”

CHAPTER 58

In addition to locating and retrieving any other guns Landon may have brought to the lodge, Gurney was hoping he might find among the man’s things some clue to the reason for his death—and possibly for Steckle’s death as well.

The timing of the murders suggested that the killer may have had access to the transmissions of one of the audio bugs and was aware not only of what Steckle had admitted to, but of Gurney’s temporary absence from the suite. That made Gurney wonder if they’d been grossly underestimating Tarr all along.

To his surprise, Madeleine insisted on remaining in their new room while he conducted the search of Landon’s possessions.

Before going down the hall, he made a final security check of their windows and balcony. Two differences from the suite—positive differences, under the circumstances—were that the balcony door in this room was solid wood with no glass panel, and the windows were significantly smaller. Breaking in here would be a lot more difficult.

He checked the Beretta to confirm there was a round in the chamber and that the magazine was filled to its fifteen-round capacity. He considered putting the pistol down in his ankle holster, then decided to keep it in his jacket pocket—a bit closer to hand.

He picked up the large Maglite and the master room key and stepped out into the dark corridor. He waited until he heard Madeleine double-lock the door behind him, then proceeded to Landon’s room.

He tried the door. It was locked, as he expected it would be. He inserted the key, turned it, and the door opened.

He stepped inside and swept his flashlight beam around the space, which appeared to be a smaller version of the suite, similar to the room they were now occupying. The same kinds of furnishings were arranged in the same way. He saw a kerosene lamp at each end of the fireplace mantle. There was a propane igniter on the log rack, and he used it to light the lamps.

On the coffee table between the couch and the hearth there were three laptops, three smartphones, a scanner, and a locked metal file box—unusual equipment for a vacationing hunter.

He explored the bedroom alcove. The bed was neatly made. There was a closet full of expensive-looking sports clothes. Behind the hanging shirts and jackets was a portable walnut gun cabinet with a combination lock. The overall impression was very refined, very upscale.

Except for the smell.

It was faint but repulsive.

Like sour sweat. With a hint of decay.

Mindful of his reason for being there, he removed the gun cabinet from the closet and brought it out into the main room. He laid it on the floor and got an iron poker from the hearth. As he was about to pry the lock off, one of the laptops on the coffee table caught his eye. A small pulsing light indicated it hadn’t been shut down, only closed and put to sleep.

He lifted the lid. The screen lit up. There were twenty or so folders as well as dozens of document icons—mostly photo and video files.

Before clicking on any of them, he opened the other two laptops and pressed their power buttons. After a few seconds each displayed a screen asking for an ID and a password. Within a few seconds of his failure to enter anything, both screens went blank and both computers shut down completely. He was unable to restart them.

That level of security was interesting, to say the least.

He went back to the first laptop. He wondered if it was more accessible than the other two because its files didn’t matter, or because Landon had left the room in such a hurry he’d neglected to shut it down properly. Hoping it was the latter reason, he began opening the photo files.

The first nine were aerial images of rural roads. Examining the images closely, he saw that there was a common factor among them. The presence of his Outback.

The next half dozen showed the Outback in various locations at Wolf Lake: emerging from under the lodge portico, on the lake road going toward the chalet, parked at the chalet, returning from the chalet.

As he was about to go to the next image, the date on one of the other folders caught his eye. It was that very day. He opened the folder and in it was one audio file. He opened it and clicked on the “Play” icon. He immediately recognized his own voice and Steckle’s—the confrontation they’d had in the suite. Steckle’s self-incriminating statements. His Brightwater admissions. His history with Wenzel, Pardosa, and Balzac. All bugged and recorded by Landon.

Gurney went back to the remaining icons on the screen and began opening them. There were three aerial videos he could see were taken at Grayson Lake: he and Madeleine emerging from the Outback, then standing in front of a tumbledown house, then standing by the lake itself.

Next was an aerial video that appeared to have been taken from the perspective of a rapidly moving, swooping camera—a video of Madeleine, turning, running, terrified out on the middle of Wolf Lake. Plus a quick passing shot of himself, Beretta pointing at the camera.

Lastly, there was a folder containing a series of Photoshopped images of a young man with a crooked smile and a scar through one eyebrow, wearing a leather jacket. The series started with an image that might have appeared in a school yearbook and, step by digital step, ended with an image that looked very much like a bloated corpse.

Gurney’s jaw muscles tightened as he gazed in quiet anger at this final proof.

Proof that it was Norris Landon who was responsible for the sophisticated surveillance. Proof that it was Norris Landon who had inflicted all that pain on Madeleine. He wished that the man could be brought back to life—so he could have the pleasure of killing him.

So he could wield that fatal hatchet himself.

Then, when his visceral reaction to what Landon had done subsided sufficiently for him to think clearly, a more complicated thought process took over. He began to wonder about Landon’s overall role in the affair.

What was his relationship with the other players? With Steckle? With Fenton? With Hammond? With the four dead men?

What, ultimately, was the game that involved them all?

And then a more immediate question intruded into Gurney’s consciousness: What the hell was that odor?

Its source was proving elusive. It seemed to be everywhere. He checked the closet, the drawers in the bureau, the bed, the chairs, the couch, the end tables, the wet bar, the bathroom, the shower stall—even the floors, the walls, the windows.

He looked under the bed, under the armchairs, under the couch, under the coffee table, under the throw rugs. Unable to locate the source, he focused on trying to identify the smell itself. It was acrid, faintly rotten . . . and slightly familiar. Like an elusive word or name, it was more likely to come to him once he stopped chasing it. To change his focus, he sat on the couch in front of Landon’s laptops and once again went through the accessible photo and video files.

They only confirmed Gurney’s growing certainty that Landon was a representative of the anonymous “national security” interests that Fenton and Wigg had alluded to. If so, then he may well have been the force endorsing Fenton’s view of the case and promoting the importance of securing a confession from Hammond.

It reminded Gurney of the New York Times story about the CIA leaker, Sylvan Marschalk, and his claim that a clandestine group at the agency was researching ways of inducing suicide through hypnosis. Marschalk’s nasty demise within days of making his allegations gave them a disturbing credibility.

Other bits of information began stirring in Gurney’s memory. The fact that Richard had been at Wolf Lake Lodge for two years, and that Landon had been making visits to the lodge for the same two years. The fact that Richard had written papers that pushed the boundaries of hypnotic technique. The fact of his expertise in the fatal psychology of voodoo. Jane’s mention that Richard had been approached several times by research entities whose structure and goals were less than transparent.

Those little dots were certainly not conclusive individually, but they could be connected in a way that suggested Richard’s expertise had for some time been on the radar screen of a clandestine group not unlike the one Sylvan Marschalk had tried to expose. Landon would fit into that scenario as their undercover representative on the scene, the man whose original purpose would have been to monitor Richard’s “cutting edge” progress in hypnotherapy and ultimately to draw him into their orbit.

As Gurney sat there on Landon’s couch, his mind racing through the possibilities, he began to see how the case elements arose from two wholly separate interests. Steckle’s interest in the Gall fortune. And the government’s interest in Richard Hammond.

Those interests might never have intersected—if only Austen Steckle hadn’t made it seem that Hammond was responsible for four suicides, and if only Norris Landon had been less eager to believe it.

Gurney was confident that he understood what Steckle had done, and why. The man had been remarkably clever and successful, up to a point. What he couldn’t have anticipated, however, was the intense interest the “fatal nightmare” aspect of the case would attract in that shadowy corner of the government represented by Landon. And how that interest would influence the investigation.

Something else occurred to him there on the couch with the coffee table and laptops in front of him. The room’s unpleasant odor seemed to be the strongest in that very area.

He stood up and removed the cushions. As he was examining them individually, he heard something behind him that sounded like a drop of water striking a hard surface. He turned toward the fireplace.

When he was about to attribute it to his imagination, he heard it again.

He stepped over to the hearth, aiming his flashlight into the big sooty firebox, then down at the iron grate designed to support the logs. There was a dark shiny spot on one of the dusty bars in the grate. As he bent over for a better look, another drop descended onto that same spot.

He assumed the chimney was leaking. A bit of melting ice, perhaps.

But when he moved the flashlight closer to the dark spot for a final check, he discovered that the liquid on the grate was actually dark red. He touched it lightly with his forefinger.

It had the unmistakable stickiness of blood.

He lowered himself to his knees, and, with gritted teeth, pointed the beam of the Maglite up into the flue.

It was hard to tell what he looking at. It appeared to be something with matted hair. In the midst of the hair there was an irregular splotch of wet blood.

The first chilling thought that came to mind was that he was looking at the top of a human head—which would mean that someone’s head or, improbably, their entire body had been jammed upside down into the chimney.

That seemed impossible.

As he leaned in for a closer examination, the odor became more repellant.

Reluctantly he lay down on the hearthstone in front of the firebox for the best viewing angle and aimed the flashlight directly up at the hairy, bloody thing.

It was plainly larger than a human head. Perhaps it was an animal. If so, it was a large one. The matted hair was gray.

Could it be a gray timber wolf?

Wolves had been circling around the case from the beginning.

He retrieved a pair of tongs from the iron stand by the log rack and used them to get a solid grip on the object.

When he pulled down sharply, it came loose, dropping down into the firebox and seeming for a moment to be alive and expanding. Gurney recoiled, then realized what he was staring at was a rolled-up pile of rough winter clothing—a stained fur hat, a dirty canvas coat, battered leather boots. With the help of the tongs he dragged the fur hat from the ashy firebox out onto the floor. The back half of the hat was saturated with half-congealed blood.

Next he pulled out the canvas coat and the boots.

It didn’t take long for him to conclude that these were the garments worn by Barlow Tarr.

So why the hell were they hidden in Norris Landon’s fireplace?

And where was Tarr?

Had he been killed, too?

The amount of blood on the hat would make it more than a possibility.

But who could have killed him?

Gurney recalled his own comment to Madeleine: I think Tarr found Landon before Landon found Tarr.

But suppose it was the other way around.

Suppose that bloody scene by the generator wasn’t what it appeared to be.

As the new scenario dawned on Gurney, bringing with it a surge of fear for Madeleine’s safety, there was a small sound behind him—the tiniest squeaking of a hinge. Gurney stood quickly, turning toward the suite door.

Half in the darkness of the corridor, half in the low amber light cast by the kerosene lamps, the face of Norris Landon was just barely discernible.

The man took a step forward into the doorway. He had a sleek small-caliber pistol in his hand with a miniature suppressor, an up-close assassin’s gun—light, quiet, easily concealable. His gaze moved slowly from Gurney to the open laptop on the coffee table, then to the bloodied coyote-pelt hat on the floor, then back to Gurney.

His eyes were full of cold hatred.

Gurney met his gaze. He said nothing. He needed to get a clearer sense of the moment before deciding on the best approach to save his life.

Landon spoke. “In an ideal world, I’d have you prosecuted for treason.”

“For solving four murders and saving an innocent man?”

“Hell, Gurney, you have no idea what problems you’re causing—the wreckage I’m trying to fix. You have no idea what’s at stake. You’re worse than that lunatic, Tarr.”

“The lunatic who gave me your projector?”

Landon paused, giving Gurney a long appraising look. “People like Tarr are sand in the gears. It’s people like you that create real problems.”

Gurney picked that moment to cast a split-second glance down at his right ankle, then blinked a few times as if in an effort to hide the movement of his eyes. He wanted to convey the impression of a man thinking about a gun in his ankle holster.

The Beretta was at that moment in Gurney’s jacket pocket, a fact he didn’t want Landon to suspect. He hoped the slight downward glance had been seen as something not intended to be seen. It was a subtle game.

“What do you mean, people like me?”

“People wearing blinders,” said Landon. “People who refuse to see the reality of the world we live in.”

Echoes of Fenton, thought Gurney. Or Fenton echoing Landon.

“It’s a war, Gurney, the largest and deadliest war of all time. Our enemy is determined, obsessed, driven by the hope of destroying us. We need every advantage we can lay our hands on.”

“Like TIS?” As Gurney spoke, he moved his right ankle ever so slightly forward. He saw the movement register in Landon’s eyes just before he blinked at the mention of the acronym for the CIA’s suicide-research program.

Landon raised his pistol, pointing it at the center of Gurney’s chest. “Sit down.”

“Where?”

“On the floor. Facing me. Next to the coffee table. Keep your hands above your waist. Well above your waist. I hate firing a gun in an enclosed space. It leaves a ringing in my ears.”

Gurney complied.

“Now extend your legs straight out in front of you.”

Again Gurney complied. The movement revealed the bottom half inch of the ankle holster. He expected Landon to approach him to remove the gun he would believe was there. Instead, Landon told him to drag the heavy coffee table across his extended legs and place his hands on top of the table. He did so, discovering that the position was an effective way of making it impossible for him to reach the holster.

Landon looked pleased, then adopted a quizzical expression. “What were those initials you mentioned?”

“TIS. Trance-induced suicide. The program Sylvan Marschalk leaked to the press. The leak that got him assassinated.”

“That druggie traitor a hero of yours?”

“Never met the man.”

“But you think his death was a great loss to the world? Let me set you straight. When a little shit like Sylvan Marschalk imperils a program that could save thousands of American lives, he forfeits his own. There’s no right under God or the Constitution to recklessly weaken our defenses in a time of war. Let me make this perfectly clear. We are at war.”

“And Barlow Tarr was the enemy?”

“Tarr was a distraction.”

“And my wife? Is she the enemy?”

“You and your wife chose to support the wrong side.”

“You mean we were delaying Richard Hammond’s confession?”

“You were getting between your country and an individual who was a potential strategic asset. You were warned. More than once.”

“I assume Hammond was identified as a potential strategic asset because you believed he could induce suicide, a technique you and your friends would kill for.”

Landon said nothing. His expression was distant and emotionless.

“So when you heard that someone hypnotized by Hammond later complained about nightmares that made him want to kill himself, and then he actually did kill himself—and when that happened not once but four times—you assumed the TIS problem had been solved. Now, if only you could get Hammond to explain how he’d done it. You didn’t give a damn about getting him to confess that he’d done it. It was all about getting him to confess how he’d done it. Too bad he had nothing to confess. Too bad you were wrong. Too bad you have to clean up the mess. You wouldn’t want anyone back at the agency to find out what a godawful error you’d made—that you’d mistaken Steckle’s con job for the real thing.”

Gurney made this speech in a relaxed, confident, almost amused voice. He knew he was treading a perilous line between provoking rage and planting a seed of uncertainty. But perilous lines were part of the game.

Landon’s expression betrayed nothing.

Gurney extemporized. “Speaking of con jobs—you might want to look at some photos I have.”

Madeleine’s advice came to mind. Just open the door a crack.

“Where are these photos?”

“On a USB drive.”

“Where?”

“In my pocket.”

Gurney pointed to his right jacket pocket, which, in his seated position on the floor, was just above the edge of the coffee table.

Landon gave him a long appraising look.

“Shall I toss it to you?” asked Gurney. “Or do you want to come and get it yourself?”

Landon hesitated. Then he took a step closer and aimed his pistol at Gurney’s throat. “Slowly remove the drive from your pocket. Very slowly.”

Looking as anxious and defenseless as he could, Gurney reached slowly into his pocket.

In a single smooth movement he gripped the Beretta and, without removing it from his jacket, pointed it in the direction of Landon and began firing.

He wasn’t sure which round hit the man or where it hit him; but in the midst of the six-shot burst the man emitted a feral yowl and lurched backward into the corridor. By the time Gurney managed to heave the weighty coffee table off his legs, get to his feet, and stumble to the door with the Beretta in one hand and the Maglite in the other, the dark corridor was silent. He swept the light back and forth, but there was no sign of Landon.

He switched off the flashlight to avoid becoming an easy target and felt his way along the corridor to his own door. He unlocked and opened it.

Just inside, in the faint kerosene lamplight, he found Madeleine—wide-eyed, teeth clenched, with an iron poker drawn back like a baseball bat, ready to swing. She stared at him for a good five seconds before taking a breath and relaxing enough to lower the poker.

After telling her as quickly as he could what had happened, he went back to Landon’s room and retrieved the man’s laptops, smartphones, and gun cabinet.

Then he reloaded the Beretta’s magazine, barricaded their door, and rebuilt the fire.

The wind was howling fiercely now, the blizzard had finally arrived in full force, and there was nothing more they could do until daylight came.

CHAPTER 59

Sleep was impossible. There was too much to worry about, think about, plan for.

In a way, from an intellectual point of view, the case was over. The most perplexing questions had been answered, the major deceptions had been exposed. The puzzle had been solved. But a god-awful mess had been created along the way.

Bureaucratic and career imperatives were likely to make the mess bigger before it got smaller. The likelihood of obtaining any clarity or accountability from the forces associated with Norris Landon was in the neighborhood of zero. If those forces were indeed part of the CIA, zero would be an optimistic estimate. And BCI’s appetite would be minimal for any re-investigation that would make their first approach to the case appear fanciful at best.

From an emotional point of view, things were perhaps the least settled.

Through the whole restless night he and Madeleine huddled together on the couch in their ski clothes facing the fire. The groaning and creaking of the old building kept Gurney on edge, kept him speculating on the condition, whereabouts, and intentions of Landon.

The speculation was circular and endless. As were his thoughts about Colin Bantry’s place in Madeleine’s life, about her ability to recover from the shock of the things she’d seen, about the greed and ruthlessness of Austen Steckle, about the twisted history of the Galls, and about the delusional obsessions of those who hated America and those who claimed to love it.

A thought he’d had many times before came to him now with renewed power: God save us from our saviors.

From time to time he added a log to the fire. From time to time Madeleine sat up and stretched into one of her yoga positions.

Oddly, with so much to discuss, they spoke hardly at all.

At the first light of dawn they both began to doze.

Moments later they were awakened by a heavy mechanical rumbling.

Trying to place it, Gurney realized it was coming from outside the lodge. He slipped into his boots, removed the chair he’d jammed under the knob of the balcony door, and stepped out into the icy wind.

The sound was getting louder. The source, he discovered, was a big yellow truck that was just turning onto the lake road in the direction of the lodge. Mounted on the front of the truck was the largest industrial snow blower he’d ever seen—with an intake opening at least ten feet wide and five feet high. The massive rotating blades that pulled the ice and snow into that giant maw were rotating fast enough to create a blur. The secondary impeller blades must have been operating at an even greater speed judging from the energy with which the expelled material, converted to a powder, was rising from the disposal chute.

At a height of forty or fifty feet a strong crosswind was catching that geyser of finely pulverized ice and snow and blowing it far into the pine forest. When the roaring machine came abreast of the clearing in front of the lodge where the wind was strongest, the frozen output was carried hundreds of feet out over the lake.

As Gurney watched, the truck moved on past the lodge in the direction of the chalet and Gall House, effortlessly clearing four-foot-high ice-impacted drifts from the road surface.

Madeleine came out onto the balcony next to him. “Shouldn’t you stop him and give him a message for the police?”

“That road dead-ends at the Gall mansion. He has to come back the same way. I’ll stop him then.”

She looked toward the brightening eastern ridge. “Thank God the snow stopped. But it’s freezing out here. We should go back inside.”

“Right.”

They went in, shut the door tight, and stood at the window.

Madeleine produced a fragile smile. “It looks like the sky might actually be blue today.”

“Right.”

She gave him a curious look. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m wondering why a county truck is clearing a private road.”

She stared at him. “Isn’t that something to be happy about?”

“You can be happy. I’ll do the worrying.”

“That seems to be your regular job.” She paused. “I think I’m ready to leave this place. What about you?”

“I’m ready. But once we get word to the police, we’ll need to make statements. About everything that’s happened here. That could take some time. Then we’ll be able to leave.”

She looked anxiously out at the road. “Maybe you should go downstairs now so you don’t miss him on his way by.”

“Lock the door after me.”

As a precaution against being caught off guard by Landon, he removed the Beretta from his pocket and held it in his hand, muzzle down.

He went downstairs and waited outside the main door, turning up his collar against the cutting wind. Within a couple of minutes the huge machine reappeared. To Gurney’s puzzlement, it turned off the road and in toward the lodge. With its snow blower shut down, it proceeded toward him, moved slowly under the portico, and stopped. The big diesel engine idled noisily for a few seconds before falling silent.

The operator stepped down out of the high cab, removing the wool hat and thick scarf that together had been covering most of his face.

“Jesus, it’s cold. How the fuck do people live here?”

“Jack?”

“No, your fairy godmother.”

Gurney pointed at the truck. “Where . . . how . . . did you . . .?”

“Borrowed it. Couldn’t get in here without it. Adirondacks, my ass. This is fucking Siberia.”

“You borrowed that thing?”

“Kinda borrowed, kinda commandeered. You know, police emergency, et cetera.”

“But you’re not the police.”

“No time to split hairs. Is there any special reason you have that gun in your hand?”

“Long story. The short version is that Austen Steckle is dead, Barlow Tarr is dead, and I shot a CIA agent, who may or may not be dead.”

Gurney filled Hardwick in on Steckle’s plot to gain control of the Gall fortune—and the toxic interaction between his fatal-nightmare stratagem and the mind-control ambitions of Landon’s group at the CIA.

“So you figure at the end Landon was trying to save his career by wiping out the evidence of his mistake?”

“Something like that.”

“Including you and Madeleine?”

“Most likely.”

“Holy fuck. Hard to tell who was worse, Steckle or Landon.”

Gurney responded without hesitation. “Landon.”

“How so?”

“Steckle was a devil. Landon was a devil who thought he was an angel. The ones who think they’re angels are the worst of all.”

“You might have a point there.”

“So what’s this very interesting news you have for me?”

“Hardly seems to matter now, considering the fact that Steckle’s dead. But Esti looked a little deeper into Steckle’s earlier life as Alfonz Volk. Any idea what Volk means in Slovenian?”

Gurney smiled. The news was a little too late to be useful. But it was pleasant to have one’s suspicions confirmed. “Wolf?”

“Precisely. Now, can we please go inside before my balls turn into ice cubes?”

HAVING CHOSEN THE HEARTH ROOM—WITH ITS SINGLE DOORWAY, lack of windows, and open view of the reception area—as the best place for them to sit down and work out their next steps, Hardwick went about building a fire.

Gurney went upstairs to get Madeleine.

He found her standing at the basin, wearing jeans and a sweater, brushing her teeth. She stopped and gave him an odd little smile. “I’m just trying to feel normal.”

Her told her about Hardwick’s appropriation of the monster snow blower and about Esti Moreno’s discovery linking Steckle to Brightwater.

Neither event seemed to surprise her. “What do we do now?”

“We need to find Landon, check on the Hammonds, check on Peyton, check on the status of the generators, get word out to the county sheriff’s department and to BCI. There’s a hell of a lot more that’ll have to be taken care of after that, but not by us.”

She smiled and nodded. “You did it.”

“Did what?”

“You saved Richard.”

He knew it was pointless to repeat that saving Richard hadn’t been the goal. And there was also the small matter of not knowing for sure if the man was still alive.

“Right now we need to sit down with Jack, figure out who’s going to do what.”

They made their way along the dark corridor to the main staircase, illuminated now by the morning light coming up from the reception-area windows and glass-paneled doors. As they were descending the stairs, Gurney heard voices in the Hearth Room.

“Sounds like Richard and Jane,” said Madeleine with a relieved smile.

The Hammonds were plainly alive and well. Jane was engaged in an intense conversation with Hardwick while Richard stood a bit to the side, listening.

When Jane saw Gurney coming into the room with Madeleine, she stopped in mid-sentence and turned to him, her eyes widening with hope. “Is it true? Is it really all over?”

“As far as the case against Richard is concerned, I’d say that’s over. It’s clear that he was just the fifth victim of a complicated plot. There were no trances, no suicides. The deaths were all murders. The crime was complex, but the motives were simple—greed and control.”

For her benefit and Richard’s, he repeated the summary of the situation that he’d already given to Hardwick.

Jane’s mouth fell open. “My God! We didn’t know anything. Nothing at all. When the snow blower came by the chalet, and we could finally use the car, we thought we should come over to the lodge—to make sure you and Madeleine were all right, and to ask Austen about the generators. When we walked in, we found Jack and, well, here we all are.”

Richard stepped forward and extended his hand. “Thank you, David.” That was all he said, but he said it with such a palpable sincerity that nothing more seemed necessary.

Jane nodded enthusiastically. “Thank you. Thank you so much.” She came over to Gurney and hugged him, tears welling in her eyes. She went over to Hardwick and hugged him. “Thank you both. You’ve saved our lives.”

Hardwick looked eager to shift the conversation in a less emotional direction. “If you have any interest in pursuing a lawsuit against the state police or against Fenton personally—”

Richard cut him off. “No. To have it over and done with is good enough for me. From what you’re telling me, Fenton’s case has completely collapsed. Let that be the end of it.”

He’d hardly finished when the lodge door opened and Fenton himself walked into the reception area, followed by a uniformed trooper. The trooper took up a position at the door as Fenton strode over to the Hearth Room, stopping in the archway entrance.

His gaze moved from face to face, then came to rest on Hardwick’s. His mouth twisted into a smirk. “Well, well. I’d heard a nasty rumor that my old buddy Jack was trying to screw up an important case of mine. And then, just this morning, I get a call from the Highway Department about someone who claimed to be from BCI commandeering a major piece of highway equipment. I thought I ought to look into it myself. And look who I find in possession of that stolen equipment. Sorry to say, it appears to me that everyone in this room may be implicated.”

The smirk stretched into a sadistic grin. “This is a serious matter. I’m afraid I can’t let a past friendship get in the way of my present duty.”

Hardwick smiled. His voice was cordial. “You know, Gil, you never did have much of a brain. But right now you’re setting a new record for shitheadedness.”

Perhaps because of the disconnect between the tone and the words, it took a moment for the comment to register. When it did, Fenton started moving toward Hardwick, and the trooper by the outer door started moving toward the Hearth Room with his hand on his holstered Glock.

Seeing disaster seconds away, Gurney intervened the only way he was sure would work. He said, loud and clear, “Austen Steckle is dead. Norris Landon killed him.”

Fenton’s forward movement ceased.

The trooper came to a halt in the middle of the reception area.

Both looked as bewildered as if Gurney had announced the arrival of space aliens.

FOR THE NEXT TEN MINUTES FENTON LISTENED STONE-FACED—except for an occasional twitch at the corner of his eye—to a detailed narrative of Austen Steckle’s diabolical plot with its core illusion of induced suicides; the reverberations of that notion in a dark corner of the national security world; and Landon’s desperate cover-up attempt.

At length Fenton muttered a single-word question. “Steckle?”

Gurney nodded. “A very intelligent man. Maybe the only murderer in history clever enough to persuade his intended victims to publicly announce they were feeling suicidal.”

“And you shot Landon?”

“I had to. He was in the process of trying to kill everyone here, including me, who could reveal his misinterpretation of the suicides. In his world, gullibility is an unforgivable sin.”

Fenton nodded like a man suffering from a concussion. The silence ended a few seconds later with a commotion in the reception area—which he seemed hardly to notice.

A burly man in a leather jacket had burst in through the front door and was speaking to the trooper in a loud voice—demanding a police escort to the regional hospital in Plattsburgh.

Gurney’s first thought was that it might have something to do with Landon. But when the trooper questioned the man further, he explained that he had Peyton Gall “and a lady” in Gall’s Mercedes, and that Peyton and the lady might or might not be frozen to death, having “dozed off after a few drinks” in a hot tub that turned into a container of ice water during the blackout. That, in Gurney’s opinion, was just outlandish enough to be true.

When the trooper came to ask how Fenton wanted it handled, he stared at him uncomprehendingly and muttered, “Do whatever you want.”

The trooper went back and told the man—who Gurney now recognized as the unfriendly guard at Peyton’s gate—to get his frozen passengers to Plattsburgh as best he could. The man complained loudly, swore, and left.

Gurney suggested to the trooper that he call for reinforcements to begin the search for Landon, for a crime-scene team to deal with the body out by the generators and the one tied to a chair upstairs in the suite, for an electrician to restore power, and for another BCI senior investigator to provide whatever assistance might be needed under the circumstances. He made these suggestions clearly enough for everyone to hear them—so the trooper could interpret the lack of objection from Fenton as approval to proceed.

Explaining that his radio was more reliable on the ridge than in the lodge, the trooper headed out on his communications mission. Fenton followed him from the lodge to the cruiser, but didn’t get in. When the cruiser departed, Fenton remained under the portico, gazing after it.

“He’s completely fucked,” said Hardwick.

“Yes.”

Hardwick coughed into a filthy handkerchief. “I better return the borrowed snow blower to the Highway Department yard and put that bullshit stolen-equipment issue to rest.”

“Good idea.”

“I left Esti’s truck there when I took the snow blower, so I’ll get that and come back.”

“When you’re out there passing through live cell country, get the word to our contacts in Palm Beach, Teaneck, and New Jersey. Tell Esti. Tell Robin Wigg. Tell anyone you feel like telling. I want to be sure there’s no way anyone can roll this up and make it disappear.”

Hardwick zipped up his jacket and headed out to the giant machine.

Neither he nor Fenton acknowledged the other.

CHAPTER 60

Shortly after Hardwick departed, the Hammonds announced their intention to return to the chalet and begin the process of sorting and packing their belongings. Although nothing was certain and the timing was yet to be determined, they imagined they would be returning soon to Mill Valley.

In addition to his share of the estate’s liquid assets, Peyton’s inheritance would include the lodge, the lake, and a few thousand acres of Adirondack wilderness. There was no way of knowing what his plans for it might be; but if Richard was sure of anything, it would be that he personally would have no place—nor would he want one—under the new regime.

By the time the Hammonds were pulling out onto the lake road, the sun had risen well above the eastern ridge, turning the ice crystals in the air into shimmering points of light. Madeleine was eager to get out of the gloom of the lodge into the brightness of the day. Gurney got their heavy jackets, scarves, gloves, and hats from the room. They bundled themselves up and stepped outside into the cold, clear air.

Evidently wanting to avoid any personal contact, Fenton moved away from the portico and began trudging slowly along the lake road in the direction opposite the one the Hammonds had taken.

“I suppose I should feel sorry for him,” said Madeleine. “But when I think of what he did to Richard . . .” She shook her head. “What a horror it all was.”

“It was all wishful thinking.”

“On Fenton’s part?”

“On everyone’s part. Ethan wanted to believe that his rehabilitation program had transformed the sociopathic Alfonz Volk into the straight-arrow Austen Steckle. Landon wanted to believe that the secret mind-control technique he’d been pursuing for years was finally within his grasp, if only he could force Hammond to divulge it. Fenton wanted to believe that he was a good soldier on the right side of a just war.”

“And Steckle?”

“Steckle wanted to believe that achieving total control of everything, and eliminating anyone who might take it away, would finally make him perfectly happy.”

“And what about me?”

“You?”

“I was no slouch at wishful thinking. I really did believe that I’d dealt with that terrible teenage mess—just because I’d told a therapist about it. I wanted to believe I’d put it all aside. And I think she wanted to believe that her therapeutic skills had worked wonders. God, it’s not the lies people tell us that do the real damage. It’s the lies we tell ourselves—the ones we’re desperate to believe.”

“It’s amazing how we can be so wrong about so many things.”

She smiled at him. “Can we walk over by the lake?”

“Sure.”

As they were crossing the road, a speck of color on the thin layer of packed snow the snow blower had left behind caught Gurney’s eye.

It was the color of blood.

A few feet farther on, there was a similar red speck.

They reached the far side of the road without his seeing any more.

Madeleine turned in the direction of the ridge road—the same way Fenton had gone. As she and Gurney ambled along, she took his arm. “Why did Landon have to kill Barlow Tarr?”

Gurney was thinking about those spots in the snow—almost certainly blood. It took a moment for her question to register.

“Maybe he was afraid Tarr knew something. Or maybe he just hated Tarr’s interference, hated that he had the temerity to remove those devices from the attic. I remember him complaining about Tarr’s fondness for chaos. That could have been motive enough for a control freak like Landon.”

“Why go to the trouble of putting his own coat and boots on the body?”

“Improvisation. Might have seemed like a useful idea at the time—create confusion, keep us off balance. I’m not sure he had time to think it through. Landon was under tremendous pressure at the end. His life, his career—everything was on the line. He did not work for a forgiving agency. He was trying to dodge the consequences of his own mistakes. I think he was making up his exit plan as he went along.”

“What an awful way to live.”

“Yes.”

As they walked on in silence, with no sight of Fenton on the road ahead, an unnerving thought occurred to Gurney—perhaps the result of his own mention of an exit plan—the thought that Fenton, in the light of his huge miscalculation, might be desperate enough to shoot himself.

He shared that fear with Madeleine.

She shook her head. “I doubt it. He strikes me as the kind of man who makes a lot of mistakes, creates trouble and pain in the lives of other people, but always finds a way to rationalize what he’s done and blame it on someone else. He’s not a nice man.”

Gurney couldn’t disagree with that.

“I’m starting to get cold,” she said. “Can we go back to the lodge?”

“Of course.”

“I’m looking forward to going home.”

He paused. “Do you feel that coming here has been of any help in dealing with the past?”

“I think so. I’m not hoping for a magic eraser anymore. And I seem to be able to think about Colin now without being chewed up by what happened. How about you?”

“Me?”

“Your murder case—how do you feel about the way it ended?”

He thought about the drops of blood in the snow and wondered if it had ended.

She looked at him curiously.

He was searching for a way to answer her question without frightening her all over again—when he was distracted by a vehicle coming down the ridge road.

It turned out to be Jack Hardwick in Esti Moreno’s pickup.

When he came abreast of them, he stopped and pointed backward with his thumb. “Saw Gilbert Asshole back there. Looked like he was pondering the prospect of a totally fucked-up career. You know what I say? I say fuck him.” He produced a glittering grin. “I made some calls. So did that trooper who came with Fenton. Cavalry’s on the way. Any sign of Norris?”

“Not at the moment,” said Gurney.

“Shoot the fucker on sight,” said Hardwick cheerily. “See you at the lodge.” He rolled up his window and proceeded the final hundred yards or so to the portico. He got out of the truck, lit a cigarette, and leaned against the rear fender.

When Gurney and Madeleine got to the area where he’d seen the red stains in the snow, he told her he wanted to take a quick look around before the police vehicles started rolling in, which was not entirely untrue. After giving him that appraising look of hers that said she knew he was leaving something out, she walked over and waited by the truck with Hardwick.

Gurney meanwhile laid out a mental grid, roughly forty feet by forty feet, surrounding the red spots. Then he paced slowly back and forth within the grid, moving gradually in the direction of the lake.

When he’d progressed almost to the road’s edge, he saw an exposed bit of something black and metallic embedded in the snow that had been packed down against the road surface by the weight of the snow blower. He scraped just enough of the snow aside with the tip of his boot to recognize the object. It was a compact suppressor, and it was attached to the barrel of a small-caliber pistol. He’d last seen that pistol in Landon’s hand.

His next realization brought him close to vomiting.

He recalled looking out the window that morning in the early dawn light . . . hearing the mammoth snow blower approaching . . . watching it rip effortlessly through the waist-high drifts that buried much of the road. He could picture the tower of pulverized ice and snow erupting from the spinning impeller blades, shooting up into the wind and swirling out over the lake.

Gritting his teeth now against the sickness rising in his throat, he forced himself to walk out on the frozen surface. At first he saw nothing but snow—snow gusting and eddying over the ice. He walked farther out, almost to the middle of the lake. Then he saw what he was looking for—what he’d hoped he wouldn’t see. There, in the blowing snow, was a tiny shred of fabric. And then another. As he walked on, he glimpsed a scrap of something that might be flesh. And farther on, a sliver of something that might be bone.

He turned back, moving with all the calmness he could muster, eventually joining Madeleine and Hardwick by the truck.

She regarded him questioningly at first, then with concern. “Should we go inside?”

He nodded.

As they were starting toward the lodge door, Hardwick looked down the road, cupping his hand to his ear. He began humming the theme from The Lone Ranger as a stream of police vehicles came into sight.

FOR A WHILE, GURNEY AND MADELEINE HAD THE HEARTH ROOM to themselves. He got a bottle of springwater from the cabinet under the guest bar and drank it down.

After a long silence Madeleine said, “Do you want to tell me about it?”

He stalled, giving his stomach more time to settle. And his mind to clear. He could think of no gentle way to say it. “I saw what’s left of Norris Landon.”

Her eyes widened in dawning horror.

“Apparently he didn’t get very far after I shot him. It looks like he collapsed on the road. And the snow covered him.”

“Covered him . . . and then this morning . . . Jack . . . Oh God.”

After all he’d seen in his homicide career, even after the horrors he’d seen just the night before, he was shocked by Landon’s fate—the grinding of his body into thousands of little fragments. Maybe there was a deep and bleak reminder in the man’s utter obliteration.

Dust to dust. With a vengeance.

A numb exhaustion began to overtake him.

Madeleine took his hand. “Come, sit on the couch.”

He allowed himself to be led to it. She sat next to him, holding his arm tightly against her.

He lost track of time.

After a while she said, “At least now it’s over.”

“Yes.”

“What will you tell them?”

“Only what I know for sure. That I shot Norris Landon and he disappeared in the dark corridor.” He paused. “The rest is up to them.”

He was thinking that winter had just begun.

The snow would fall, and keep falling.

The wind would blow down from Cemetery Ridge and Devil’s Fang.

And in the end Wolf Lake would keep its final gory secret to itself.

He put his head on Madeleine’s shoulder.

The warmth of her body flowed into him.

As he drifted out of consciousness, he wondered idly where the hawk had gone.

And where it would circle next.