Wolf Lake

by John Verdon

  “Thank God for Austen, eh?”

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

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

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

  “Except for the four dead people.”

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

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

  CHAPTER 31

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

  “Your meeting go well?”

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

  “Why would he do that?”

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

  “A man who can do whatever he wants?”

  “Whatever and whenever.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Not exactly.”

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

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

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

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

  “So . . . what do you do next?”

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

  “You mean now?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Just a bit of voodoo.”

  “Beg pardon?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “How does it work?” asked Gurney.

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

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

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

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

  “I don’t understand.”

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

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

  “Yes.”

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

  “Yes.”

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

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

  “Why?” asked Madeleine.

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

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

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

  “Accept it . . . how?”

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

  Madeleine appeared to be struggling with the implications of this.

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

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

  “Do you feel responsible for his death?”

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

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

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

  “RESTRICTED TECHNOLOGY. IMMEDIATE RETREAT ADVISED. W.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “But it was a lie.”

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

  “Because I value the truth?”

  “Perhaps you value it too highly.”

  “What’s the alternative? Believing lies?”

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

  “So the truth is irrelevant?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Have you taken any precautions?”

  “No. I have nothing to hide.”

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

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

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

  “Only one?”

  “That sort of thing is common?”

  “Oh, yes, quite routine.”

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

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

  “Something like that.”

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

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

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

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

  “Something like that.”

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

  “What was ‘strange’ about it?”

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

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

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

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Did you ever go to summer camp?”

  “What?”

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

  “No. Why do you ask?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “And you think you could help me?”

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