Wolf Lake

by John Verdon

  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.”