by John Verdon
After a few seconds of perfect stillness, Hardwick let out a bark of a laugh.
“Just testing you, Davey. Making sure you still have what it takes. Don’t get me wrong. Everything I said was true. But there is one other factor in the equation.” He leaned forward and extended his hands, palms up, in a gesture of openness. “Here’s the problem. I have a history with Gil Fenton. Seven years ago he did me a favor. Big favor, involving an error on my part. Serious error.” Hardwick paused, grimacing. “So Gil has certain facts at his disposal. Under normal circumstances, this would not be a source of great concern. There are reasons he would want to keep these facts to himself. However, if we were to have a head-on collision . . . if he were to see me leading an attack on his handling of the Hammond case . . .”
Gurney gave him a cool, speculative smile. “You want to work quietly in the background while I take your place in the head-on collision?”
“He couldn’t damage you the way he could damage me.”
“You could just drop the case and refer the lady to another private investigator.”
“Sure,” said Hardwick, nodding in an unconvincing imitation of agreement. “I could do that. Maybe I should do that. It would probably be the smartest option. Definitely the safest.”
He hesitated. “Of course, if we send Jane to someone else, they might fuck up the assignment. And if they fuck up the assignment, we might never find out why all those former clients of Richard Hammond killed themselves.”
CHAPTER 5
Gurney heard the side door being opened, followed by the voices of Madeleine and Jane as they hung up their jackets in the mud room.
When the two women entered the kitchen, Madeleine was smiling and shaking ice crystals out of her hair, and Jane was carrying a bulging manila envelope. She brought it to the table and laid it in front of Gurney.
“This is pretty comprehensive. It should give you an idea of what we’re up against. I made copies of everything I could find on the Internet. Local coverage of the four suicides. Obituaries. Talk-show transcripts. Interviews with experts in the field of hypnosis.”
“Has Richard gotten any support from the academic community?”
“That’s a laugh! The so-called ‘academic community’ is teeming with envious little creeps who resent Richard’s success and are probably delighted to see him being attacked.”
Gurney eyed the bulging envelope. “Are Gil Fenton’s press briefings in there?”
“Every misleading word.”
“Did you pull all this together at your brother’s request?”
“Not exactly. He’s . . . confident that the problem will just go away.”
“And you’re not?”
“No . . . yes . . . I mean, yes, of course I know it will eventually be resolved. It has to be. I have faith. But you know the old saying, ‘God will move the mountain, but you have to bring a shovel.’ That’s what I’m doing.”
Gurney smiled. “Apparently Richard believes that God will move the mountain, so long as Jane brings the shovel.”
There was flash of anger in her eyes. “That’s not fair. You don’t know him.”
“So help me understand. Why does he refuse to get a lawyer? Why is it up to you to protect him?”
She gave Gurney a cold stare, then turned away and looked out the window.
“Richard is like no one else on earth. I know people say things like that all the time about people they love, but Richard is truly unique. He always was. I don’t mean he’s perfect. He’s not. But he has a gift.”
There was a well-worn reverence in this statement that made it sound as if she’d been making it all her life—as if everything depended on it.
As he studied her profile, the anxious wrinkles radiating from the corner of her eye, the grim set of her mouth, he realized that at the center of this woman’s psyche was the belief that things would have to turn out well for her brother because the opposite would be unbearable.
Madeleine asked softly, “Richard’s gift—is it for his work as a psychotherapist?”
“Yes. He’s . . . amazing. Which makes this awful attack on him so much worse. He does things no other therapist can do.”
Madeleine shot a glance at Gurney, a suggestion that he pick up the thread.
“Can you give me an example?”
“Richard has an extraordinary power to change people’s behavior virtually overnight. He has an intense sense of empathy. It’s a connection that enables him to motivate his patients at the deepest level. He’s often able in a single session to free a patient from some habit or addiction he’s been struggling with for years. Richard realigns the way people see things. It sounds like magic, but it’s totally real.”
It occurred to Gurney that if her perception of her brother’s talents was anywhere near accurate, the implications could be troubling. If Richard Hammond could so easily persuade people to do things they’d previously been unable or unwilling to do . . .
Perhaps sensing his concern, Jane reiterated her point. “Richard’s talent is totally for the benefit of others. He could never use his gift to harm anyone. Never!”
Gurney changed the subject back to one of his unanswered questions. “Jane, I’m still not clear why the effort to extricate Richard from this situation is all up to you. I get the impression he’s hardly responding to the problem at all. Am I missing something?”
Her reaction was a pained look. She turned back toward the window, shaking her head slowly.
“I hate talking about this,” she said, unfolding a tissue. “It’s hard for ordinary people to understand . . . because of Richard’s uniqueness.” She blew her nose several times, then dabbed at it gingerly. “He has periods of tremendous psychic energy and insight . . . and periods of complete exhaustion. In those periods of achievement, when he does all his best work, he naturally needs someone who can deal with the practical details he doesn’t have time for. And when he slows down, when he has to rest . . . well, then he needs someone to . . . to deal with whatever he doesn’t have the energy for.”
It was beginning to sound to Gurney that Jane Hammond was mired in an unhealthy, enabling relationship with a manic-depressive egomaniac.
Before he could say anything, Madeleine intervened with the sort of understanding smile he imagined was one of her standard tools at the mental health center. “So, you sort of pitch right in and take care of whatever needs to be taken care of?”
“Exactly,” said Jane, turning toward her with the eagerness of someone who felt she was finally being understood. “Richard is a genius. That’s the most important thing. Naturally, there are things he just can’t . . . shouldn’t have to . . . deal with.”
Madeleine nodded. “And now that he’s in some trouble, and also in one of his . . . his low-energy periods . . . it’s up to you to do whatever has to be done to deal with the problem.”
“Yes! Of course! Because it’s so unfair—so unfair that Richard, of all people, is being subjected to this horror!” She looked with a pleading expression from Madeleine to Hardwick to Gurney. “Don’t you see? Something has to be done! That’s why I’m here. I need your help!”
Gurney said nothing.
Her eyes full of anxiety, she glanced over at Hardwick, then back at Gurney. “Jack told me all about you. About how you solved more homicide cases than anyone else in New York City. And that case where you saved a woman who’d been framed for a murder she didn’t commit. You’re the perfect person to help Richard!”
“I’m still not understanding something here. You say your brother won’t agree to your hiring—”
He was interrupted by the chirpy little melody of a cell phone ringing.
Jane headed directly out to the mud room, speaking as she went. “That’s mine. I left it in my jacket pocket.” The ring stopped before she was halfway through the hall.
When she returned she was holding her phone in her hand and frowning at the screen.
“Lost the signal?” asked Madeleine.
<
br /> “I think so.”
“The service is tricky around here. You have to pick your spots pretty carefully.”
Jane nodded, looking worried, and laid the phone on the sideboard under the window. She watched it expectantly for a few moments before turning her attention back to Gurney. “Sorry. You were saying . . .?”
“I was saying that I’m confused. Richard won’t agree to your hiring a lawyer, but hiring a private investigator would be okay?”
“No, it won’t be okay at all. He’ll hate the idea. But it needs to be done, and he can’t stop me from doing it. I can’t legally hire a lawyer to represent him, but I can hire someone to look into the case for me.”
“I’m still confused. It doesn’t sound to me like he’s simply too exhausted or depressed to deal with this situation. His active objection to receiving outside help gives me the feeling there’s something more going on here.”
Jane came over to the round pine breakfast table and sat down with Madeleine, Hardwick, and Gurney.
“I don’t know if I should be telling you this story. But I don’t know what else to do.” She looked down, addressing herself to her hands folded tightly in her lap.
“Early in his career, which wasn’t all that long ago, Richard published a case history that got a lot of attention. It was about a man who was tortured by exaggerated fears. These fears would sometimes dominate him completely, even though in his clearer moments he understood that these horrible things had no factual basis.” She paused, biting her lip and glancing nervously around the table before going on.
“One day the man discovered a problem with his car. He’d left it in a parking lot at JFK for a three-day business trip, and when he returned he discovered that he couldn’t open the trunk because the key wouldn’t turn in the lock. He thought maybe someone had tried to break into the trunk but only succeeded in breaking the lock. So he put his suitcase in the backseat and drove home. But later that night another idea entered his mind—a very peculiar idea, that someone might have hidden a dead body in his trunk. He knew this wasn’t a very likely scenario—that a murderer would drive his victim’s corpse to an airport parking lot, break into a stranger’s trunk, and transfer the corpse from his own trunk to another. That would be an absurd way to get rid of a dead body. But that didn’t stop the man from dwelling on it, obsessing about it. The more he thought about it, the more credible it became in his own mind. First of all, there was the JFK airport location—an area in which Mafia-connected bodies had actually been found in the past. And he remembered news stories about mob killings in which the victims were found in abandoned cars.”
“Not quite the same thing, is it?” said Hardwick.
“Not at all. But wait—there’s more. He couldn’t open the trunk himself without destroying it with a crowbar, but he was afraid to have a locksmith open it for him. He was afraid to have anyone else see what might be in the trunk. This fixation would come and go, like the seasons of the year. When the time came two years later to trade in the car, not only was the fixation still with him, he was completely paralyzed by it. He’d think, what if the car dealer or the new owner opens the trunk and finds a dead body or something equally horrible?”
She fell silent, took a slow deep breath, and sat motionless, staring down at her clasped hands.
After a moment Hardwick asked, “So how the hell does this story end?”
“One day the man backed into someone’s bumper in a parking lot, and the trunk popped open. Of course, there was nothing in it. He traded the car in, got a new one. That was that. Until the next terror grabbed hold of him.”
Hardwick shifted impatiently in his chair. “The point of this story is . . . what?”
“The point is that the man in the case history that Richard published, the man with the periodic paralyzing fears, was Richard himself.”
At first no one reacted.
This wasn’t, at least in Gurney’s case, because of any shock at the revelation. In fact, he’d suspected that’s where her narrative was heading from the start.
Hardwick frowned. “So what you’re telling us is that your brother is half psychological genius, half nutcase?”
She glared at him. “What I’m telling you is that he has profound ups and downs. The great irony is that this is a man who can help virtually anyone who comes to him, but when it comes to his own demons he’s helpless. I believe that’s why I’ve been put on this planet—to take care of a man who can’t take care of himself, so he can take care of everyone else.”
Gurney couldn’t help wondering in exactly what ways Hammond had taken care of the four patients who were now dead. But there was another issue he wanted to address first.
“Does he have that same fear now—that if more people start investigating the deaths of his patients, they may somehow find evidence that implicates him?”
“I think that’s it exactly. But you have to understand that his fear is based on nothing. It’s just another imaginary body in the trunk.”
“Except now we have four bodies,” said Hardwick. “And these ones are real.”
“What I meant was—”
She was interrupted by her phone chirping on the sideboard where she’d left it. She hurried over to it, looked at the ID screen, then put the phone to her ear. “I’m here,” she said. “What? . . . Wait, your voice is breaking up. . . . Who’s doing what? . . . I’m losing half of what you’re saying. . . . Just a second.” She turned toward Madeleine. “It’s Richard. Where can I get the best reception?”
“Come over here.” Madeleine got up and pointed through the French doors. “Out there, just beyond the patio, between the birdbath and the apple tree.”
Madeleine opened one of the doors for her, and Jane walked quickly out over the snow-covered ground, the phone at her ear, seemingly oblivious to the cold. Madeleine closed the door with a little shiver, went to the mud room, and a minute later was out by the apple tree handing Jane her jacket.
Hardwick flashed a fierce grin. “Love that wild trunk bit. So what do you think, Sherlock? Is the doctor a manic-depressive saint with paranoid delusions? Or is everything we just heard a total crock of shit?”
CHAPTER 6
Jane was still out under the apple tree, engaged in a visibly stressful phone conversation, when Madeleine rejoined the two men at the table.
Hardwick eyed her concerned expression. “The hell’s going on out there?”
“I’m not sure. I may have misheard what Jane was saying, but I got the impression her brother was telling her that he’s being followed.”
Gurney’s face reflected his discomfort. He spoke as much to himself as to Madeleine and Hardwick. “And his solution to all this is not to hire a lawyer or a private security firm, but just dump it all on his big sister?”
The sky was clouding over. Gusts of wind were pressing Jane’s loose-fitting pants against her legs, but she showed no awareness of the cold.
He turned to Hardwick. “What’s her real agenda here?”
“Bottom line? She wants you to come to Wolf Lake and find out why those people committed suicide after visiting the lodge. Naturally, she wants you to discover a reason that has nothing to do with the fact that all four of them were hypnotized by her brother.”
Madeleine, from whom Gurney expected an immediate objection to this proposed Adirondack diversion from their Vermont getaway, said nothing. She was staring, not out at Jane Hammond in the field, but into her own thoughts, with a troubled look in her eyes. It was a look he didn’t immediately recognize. A look that in some subtle way discouraged questioning.
“Problem is, Jack, day after tomorrow Maddie and I are on our way up to northern Vermont. The Tall Pines Inn. It’s not something we’d want to cancel or postpone at this point.”
“Wouldn’t dream of asking you to cancel anything vital to the health and happiness of your marriage.” Hardwick winked at Madeleine, who was still in a world of her own. He was speaking in that jokey way of his that drove Gu
rney up a wall—it created such a sharp echo of the way his own father viewed everything after a few drinks. “I’m sure there’s another solution, ace. Think positively and the path will reveal itself.”
Gurney was about to tell him to stuff the supercilious tone when he heard the side door open. Jane came through the hallway into the kitchen, still wearing her jacket, her hair windblown. Her obvious distress got Madeleine’s attention.
“Jane? Is your brother all right?”
“He’s talking about people spying on him, hacking into his computer. I think the police are trying to drive him crazy, make him have a mental breakdown.”
Seemingly energized by her brother’s problems, she struck Gurney as the classic codependent. He knew that the irony of that sort of relationship is that the “fixer” would be made redundant by any lasting fix. Only by maintaining the long-term weakness of her dependent can she remain relevant. He wondered how closely Jane Hammond fit the model. “Were you getting the sense that these observations of his were . . . realistic?”
“Realistic?”
“You told us your brother suffers from exaggerated fears.”
“That’s different. That’s about things he sometimes imagines. This is about things he’s actually seeing. He isn’t psychotic, for God’s sake! He doesn’t see things that aren’t there!”
“Of course not,” Madeleine intervened. “David is just curious about the meaning Richard is giving to what he’s seeing.”
Jane looked at Gurney. “The meaning?”
“A car behind you on the road might be following you,” he explained. “On the other hand, it might just be behind you on the road. I’m sure your brother is seeing what he’s seeing, I’m just wondering about his interpretation of it.”
“I can’t answer your question. I don’t know enough about what’s happening. But that’s the whole point, don’t you see? That’s why I need you. You and Jack. I have no idea why those four people committed suicide. I have no idea what the facts are. I just know they’re not what the police say they are. But getting to the truth—that’s what you’re so good at.”
